Naftali Bennett

Fadi Samir Alloun in an undated image posted on Facebook.

News coming out of the occupied Palestine on 8 August 2015 said that Saad Dawabsheh, the father of a Palestinian toddler Ali who was killed in a firebombing of his home a week ago, has died from wounds he sustained in the incident.
Early in the morning of July 31, Israeli settlers hurled a Molotov cocktail into a window of Dawabsheh’s home in the Duma village in occupied West Bank. His 18-month-old son, Ali was burned to death in the arson attack, while his four-year-old son Ahmad, and his wife, Riham were seriously injured and remain in critical condition.

Images: Courtesy Veterans News Now

They should have been arrested as soon as they landed in Paris, clapped in irons and dragged to The Hague

The United Nations Human Rights Council has said in January that “Israeli” settlements amount to “creeping annexation” of Palestinian territories by “Israel” and have taken a “heavy toll” on the rights and sovereignty of Palestinians.

 
 
 
 

The Israeli election’s one certain outcome is that, whoever wins, the next coalition will, actively or passively, allow more of the same: a slow, creeping annexation of what is left of a possible Palestinian state, as the US and Europe bicker.

 

The floodgates have begun to open across Europe on recognition of Palestinian statehood. On Friday the Portuguese parliament became the latest European legislature to call on its government to back statehood, joining Sweden, Britain, Ireland, France and Spain.

The collapse of Binyamin Netanyahu’s less than two-year-old government this week indicates the increasingly volatile nature of Israeli politics – and a trend towards ever greater extremism. Those who will pay the highest price are almost certainly Israel’s large minority of Palestinian citizens.
The changes are a direct result of a strengthening consensus among the Jewish public over the past five years that no resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is possible.

Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu held a press conference late on Tuesday at which he launched into a tirade against two centre-right ministers he had fired from his government earlier that day. Israel is almost certainly now heading into elections, expected in March, two years after Netanyahu formed his third government, widely seen as the most right wing in Israel’s history.

Image credit: (Reuters/Ronen Zvulun)
 
 

Israel’s economy minister Naftali Bennett, the leader of the right-wing party “The Jewish Home”, published an article in the New York Times in which he buried the concept of a “two-state solution” as a way out of the Israeli Palestinian conflict. Bennett does not belong to the radical Zionist fringe. Although he is an advocate of extremist colonial Zionist ideas, he is considered to be the successor of Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu.

When the bodies of three Israeli settlers – Aftali Frenkel and Gilad Shaar, both 16, and Eyal Yifrach, 19 – were found on June 30 near Hebron in the southern West Bank, Israel went into a state of mourning and a wave of sympathy flowed in from around the world. The three had disappeared 18 days earlier in circumstances that remain unclear.