U.N. Assembly, in Blow to U.S., Elevates Status of Palestine

More than 130 countries voted on Thursday to upgrade Palestine to a nonmember observer state of the United Nations, a triumph for Palestinian diplomacy and a sharp rebuke to the United States and Israel.

But the vote, at least for now, did little to bring either the Palestinians or the Israelis closer to the goal they claim to seek: two states living side by side, or increased Palestinian unity. Israel and the militant group Hamas both responded critically to the day’s events, though for different reasons.

The new status will give the Palestinians more tools to challenge Israel in international legal forums for its occupation activities in the West Bank, including settlement-building, and it helped bolster the Palestinian Authority, weakened after eight days of battle between its rival Hamas and Israel.

But even as a small but determined crowd of 2,000 celebrated in central Ramallah in the West Bank, waving flags and dancing, there was an underlying sense of concerned resignation.

“I hope this is good,” said Munir Shafie, 36, an electrical engineer who was there. “But how are we going to benefit?”

Still, the General Assembly vote — 138 countries in favor, 9 opposed and 41 abstaining — showed impressive backing for the Palestinians at a difficult time. It was taken on the 65th anniversary of the vote to divide the former British mandate of Palestine into two states, one Jewish and one Arab, a vote Israel considers the international seal of approval for its birth.

The past two years of Arab uprisings have marginalized the Palestinian cause to some extent as nations that focused their political aspirations on the Palestinian struggle have turned inward. The vote on Thursday, coming so soon after the Gaza fighting, put the Palestinians again — if briefly, perhaps — at the center of international discussion.

“The question is, where do we go from here and what does it mean?” Salam Fayyad, the Palestinian prime minister, who was in New York for the vote, said in an interview. “The sooner the tough rhetoric of this can subside and the more this is viewed as a logical consequence of many years of failure to move the process forward, the better.” He said nothing would change without deep American involvement.

President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority, speaking to the assembly’s member nations, said, “The General Assembly is called upon today to issue a birth certificate of the reality of the state of Palestine,” and he condemned what he called Israeli racism and colonialism. His remarks seemed aimed in part at Israel and in part at Hamas. But both quickly attacked him for the parts they found offensive.

“The world watched a defamatory and venomous speech that was full of mendacious propaganda against the Israel Defense Forces and the citizens of Israel,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel responded. “Someone who wants peace does not talk in such a manner.”

While Hamas had officially backed the United Nations bid of Mr. Abbas, it quickly criticized his speech because the group does not recognize Israel.

“There are controversial issues in the points that Abbas raised, and Hamas has the right to preserve its position over them,” said Salah al-Bardaweel, a spokesman for Hamas in Gaza, on Thursday.

“We do not recognize Israel, nor the partition of Palestine, and Israel has no right in Palestine,” he added. “Getting our membership in the U.N. bodies is our natural right, but without giving up any inch of Palestine’s soil.”

Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, Ron Prosor, spoke after Mr. Abbas and said he was concerned that the Palestinian Authority failed to recognize Israel for what it is.

“Three months ago, Israel’s prime minister stood in this very hall and extended his hand in peace to President Abbas,” Mr. Prosor said. “He reiterated that his goal was to create a solution of two states for two peoples, where a demilitarized Palestinian state will recognize Israel as a Jewish state.

“That’s right. Two states for two peoples. In fact, President Abbas, I did not hear you use the phrase ‘two states for two peoples’ this afternoon. In fact, I have never heard you say the phrase ‘two states for two peoples’ because the Palestinian leadership has never recognized that Israel is the nation-state of the Jewish people.”

The Israelis also say that the fact that Mr. Abbas is not welcome in Gaza, the Palestinian coastal enclave run by Hamas, from which he was ejected five years ago, shows that there is no viable Palestinian leadership living up to its obligations now.

As expected, the vote won backing from a number of European countries, and was a rebuff to intense American and Israeli diplomacy. France, Spain, Italy and Switzerland all voted yes. Britain and Germany abstained. Apart from Canada, no major country joined the United States and Israel in voting no. The other opponents included Palau, Panama and Micronesia.

Susan E. Rice, the American ambassador to the United Nations, was dismissive of the entire exercise. “Today’s grand pronouncements will soon fade,” she said. “And the Palestinian people will wake up tomorrow and find that little about their lives has changed, save that the prospects of a durable peace have only receded.”

A major concern for the Americans is that the Palestinians may use their new status to try to join the International Criminal Court. That prospect particularly worries the Israelis, who fear that the Palestinians may press for an investigation of their practices in the occupied territories widely viewed as violations of international law.

Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian negotiator, said that after the vote “life will not be the same” because “Palestine will become a country under occupation.”

“The terms of reference for any negotiations become withdrawal,” Mr. Erekat said.

Another worry is that the Palestinians may use the vote to seek membership in specialized agencies of the United Nations, a move that could have consequences for the financing of the international organizations as well as the Palestinian Authority itself. Congress cut off financing to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, known as Unesco, in 2011 after it accepted Palestine as a member. The United States is a major contributor to many of these agencies and is active on their governing boards.

In response to the Palestinian bid, a bipartisan group of senators said Thursday that they would introduce legislation that would cut off foreign aid to the authority if it tried to use the International Criminal Court against Israel, and close the Palestine Liberation Organization’s office in Washington if Palestinians refused to negotiate with Israel.

Calling the Palestinian bid “an unhealthy step that could undermine the peace process,” Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, said that he and the other senators, including Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, would be closely monitoring the situation.

The vote came shortly after an eight-day Israeli military assault on Gaza that Israel described as a response to stepped-up rocket fire into Israel. The operation killed scores of Palestinians and was aimed at reducing the arsenal of Hamas in Gaza, part of the territory that the United Nations resolution expects to make up a future state of Palestine.

The Palestinian Authority, based in Ramallah, was politically weakened by the Gaza fighting, with its rivals in Hamas seen by many Palestinians as more willing to stand up to Israel and fight back. That shift in sentiment is one reason that some Western countries gave for backing the United Nations resolution, to strengthen Mr. Abbas and his more moderate colleagues in their contest with Hamas.

Source: New York Times

Land of Israel

The notion of the "Land of Israel", known in Hebrew as Eretz Yisrael (or Eretz Yisroel), has been important and sacred to the Jewish people since Biblical times. According to the Torah, God promised the land to the three Patriarchs of the Jewish people.^[33][34] On the basis of scripture, the period of the three Patriarchs has been placed somewhere in the early 2nd millennium BCE,^[35] and the first Kingdom of Israel was established around the 11th century BCE. Subsequent Israelite kingdoms and states ruled intermittently over the next four hundred years, and are known from various extra-biblical sources.^{[36][37][38][39]}

In 635 CE, the region, including Jerusalem, was conquered by the Arabs and was to remain under Muslim control for the next 1300 years.^[44] Control of the region transferred between the Umayyads,^[44] Abbasids,^[44] and Crusaders throughout the next six centuries,^[44] before being conquered by the Mamluk Sultanate, in 1260.^[45] In 1516, the region was conquered by the Ottoman Empire, and remained under Turkish rule until the 20th century.^[45]

The State of Israel, is a parliamentary republic in the Middle East, along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea. It borders Lebanon in the north, Syria in the northeast, Jordan and the West Bank in the east, Egypt and the Gaza Strip on the southwest, and the Gulf of Aqaba in the Red Sea to the south, and it contains geographically diverse features within its relatively small area.^[1][6] Israel is defined as a Jewish and Democratic State in its Basic Laws and is the world's only Jewish-majority state.^[7]
 
Following the adoption of a resolution by the General Assembly of the United Nations on 29 November 1947, recommending the adoption and implementation of the United Nations partition plan of Mandatory Palestine, on 14 May 1948 David Ben-Gurion, the Executive Head of the World Zionist Organization^[8] and president of the Jewish Agency for Palestine, declared the establishment of a Jewish state in Eretz Israel, to be known as the State of Israel, a state independent upon the termination of the British Mandate for Palestine, 15th May, 1948.^[9][10][11] Neighboring Arab states invaded the next day in support of the Palestinian Arabs. Israel has since fought several wars with neighboring Arab states,^[12] in the course of which it has occupied the West Bank, Sinai Peninsula (between 1967-1982), Gaza Strip and the Golan Heights. Portions of these territories, including east Jerusalem, have been annexed by Israel, but the border with the neighboring West Bank has not yet been permanently defined.^{[neutrality is disputed][13][14][15][16][17]} Israel has signed peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan, but efforts to resolve the Israeli–Palestinian conflict have so far not resulted in peace.

Israel's financial centre is Tel Aviv,^[18] while Jerusalem is the country's most populous city and its capital (although not recognized internationally as such). The population of Israel, as defined by the Israel Central Bureau of Statistics, was estimated in 2012 to be 7,900,600 people, of whom 5,955,200 are Jewish. Arabs form the country's second-largest ethnic group with 1,627,900 people.^[3] The great majority of Israeli Arabs are settled-Muslims, with smaller but significant numbers of semi-settled Negev Bedouins and Arab Christians. Other minorities include various ethnic and ethno-religious denominations such as Druze, Circassians, Black Hebrew Israelites,^[19] Samaritans, Maronites and others.

Israel is a representative democracy with a parliamentary system, proportional representation and universal suffrage.^[20][21] The Prime Minister serves as head of government and the Knesset serves as Israel's unicameral legislative body. Israel has one of the highest life expectancies in the world.^[22] It is a developed country, an OECD member,^[23] and its economy, based on the nominal gross domestic product, was the 40th-largest in the world in 2011.^[24] Israel has the highest standard of living in the Middle East.^[25]

Upon independence in 1948, the new Jewish state was formally named Medinat Yisrael, or the State of Israel, after other proposed historical and religious names including Eretz Israel ("the Land of Israel"), Zion, and Judea, were considered and rejected.^[26] In the early weeks of independence, the government chose the term "Israeli" to denote a citizen of Israel, with the formal announcement made by Minister of Foreign Affairs Moshe Sharett.^[27]

The name Israel has historically been used, in common and religious usage, to refer to the biblical Kingdom of Israel or the entire Jewish nation.^[28] According to the Hebrew Bible the name "Israel" was given to the patriarch Jacob (Standard Yisraʾel, Isrāʾīl; Septuagint Greek: Ἰσραήλ Israēl; "struggle with God"^[29]) after he successfully wrestled with the angel of the Lord.^[30] Jacob's twelve sons became the ancestors of the Israelites, also known as the Twelve Tribes of Israel or Children of Israel. Jacob and his sons had lived in Canaan but were forced by famine to go into Egypt for four generations until Moses, a great-great grandson of Jacob,^[31] led the Israelites back into Canaan in the "Exodus". The earliest archaeological artifact to mention the word "Israel" is the Merneptah Stele of ancient Egypt (dated to the late 13th century BCE).^[32]

The area is also known as the Holy Land, being holy for all Abrahamic religions including Judaism, Christianity, Islam and the Bahá'í Faith. Prior to the 1948 Israeli Declaration of Independence, the whole region was known by various other names including Southern Syria, Syria Palestina, Kingdom of Jerusalem, Iudaea Province, Coele-Syria, Retjenu, Canaan and, particularly, Palestine.

The Bank of Israel was ranked first among central banks for its efficient functioning, up from the 8th place in 2009. Israel was also ranked as the worldwide leader in its supply of skilled manpower.^[278] The Bank of Israel holds $78 billion of foreign-exchange reserves.^[279]

Source: Wikipedia

Israel kills six Palestinians in West Bank, Gaza

Israeli soldiers shot and killed six Palestinians in two separate incidents on Saturday in the occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip, in one of the deadliest outbreaks of violence in months. Three of those who were killed belonged to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah movement, and his top aide accused Israel of inflaming tensions and seeking to torpedo US-backed efforts to renew stalled peace talks.

The violence came a day before the anniversary of a three-week Gaza war that killed about 1 400 Palestinians and 13 Israelis. Peace talks have been frozen since. An Israeli military spokesperson said soldiers shot and killed three Palestinians suspected of trying to infiltrate from Hamas-ruled coastal Gaza, and three West Bank militants accused of killing a Jewish settler in a roadside shooting on Thursday. A Hamas security source said the three shot in Gaza at daybreak were apparently civilians collecting scrap metal in an industrial zone near the Israeli border.

In the West Bank, Palestinian medics and witnesses said soldiers surrounded the homes of three members of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, a militant group of Abbas's Fatah group, and then killed all three. The shootings infuriated Palestinian leaders
"This grave Israeli escalation shows Israel is not interested in peace and is trying to explode the situation," Nabil Abu Rdainah, a top aide to Abbas, told Reuters. "Israel is torpedoing international and American efforts to restart peace talks," Rdainah said. An Israeli military spokesperson said troops had launched a "pinpointed raid to capture the perpetrators of the shooting attack and during the operation three who were involved in carrying out that attack were killed".

At least one of the militants was armed during the raid and four rifles and ammunition were found at the scene, the spokesperson said. The settler had been the first Israeli killed in a Palestinian attack in about eight months in the West Bank, territory Israel captured in a 1967 war and which Palestinians seek for a state. Sources in Fatah said those who were killed in the West Bank raid belonged to their group. At least one had been on an Israeli wanted list, the sources said.

Abbas has demanded a halt to Jewish settlement building before peace talks delayed since a Gaza war in January may resume, and has rejected a temporary building freeze announced last month by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as insufficient.

Source: Mail & Guardian

Human Rights in the Occupied Territories

June 2007 marked the 40th anniversary of Israel's occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. During this entire period, Israel has denied millions of Palestinian residents their basic rights and has prevented them from taking part in decisions affecting their fate. The occupation permeates every aspect of Palestinians' daily lives, with violations of the right to life and bodily integrity, freedom of movement, employment, family life, housing, health, education, and human dignity forming an inescapable part of their reality.

In the field of human rights in the Occupied Territories, ACRI is a key player in the struggle to ensure the fundamental rights of the Palestinian population. ACRI's efforts are designed to redress the broad range of human rights violations while bringing pressure to bear on the Israeli government to fulfill its obligations under international law to ensure the protection and well-being of the Palestinian civilian population under occupation.

Source: Association for Civil Rights in Israel

Address to the Nation: Hussein bin Talal

Recognizing the desirability of supporting the Palestinians in their struggle for independence, on July 28, 1988, King Hussein announced the cessation of a $1.3 billion development program for the West Bank, explaining that the measure was designed to allow the PLO more responsibility for the area. Two days later, he formally dissolved Parliament, ending West Bank representation in the legislature. Finally, on July 31 he announced the severance of all administrative and legal ties—with the exception of guardianship over the Muslim Holy Sites of Jerusalem—with the occupied West Bank.

This severance of ties allowed Jordan’s electoral law to be changed, redrawing the map to include only East Bank districts. Disengagement therefore marks the turning point that launched the current democratic process, and began a new stage in Jordan’s relationship with the Palestinians.

Source: The Royal Hashemite Court

Israeli Soldiers Kill a Palestinian and Wound 15

Israeli troops shot and killed a West Bank resident and wounded at least 15 other Palestinians today as violent unrest continued for the second day and spread throughout the occupied territories. In the city of Gaza and in refugee districts throughout the Gaza Strip, where a 17-year-old youth was killed yesterday by troops, Palestinians gathered in throngs, burned tires, threw stones at vehicles and blocked roads, witnesses said. Army reports said 5 people were wounded by gunshots in the West Bank and 10 were wounded by gunfire in the Gaza Strip. In addition, a dozen people were hurt in scuffles between Palestinian students and the Israeli police outside a school north of Jerusalem, according to radio reports.

Soldiers fatally shot the 19-year-old Nablus man today when a group of Palestinian youths in the northern West Bank city surrounded a military patrol, pelting it with iron bars and rocks, an army spokesman said. ''The forces tried to disperse them with rubber bullets and tear gas,'' a spokesman said. ''But the force was endangered when its officer was wounded from an iron bar, and the soldiers had no choice but to shoot to get themselves out.''

A woman tried to stab a Border Police soldier in the nearby Balata refugee district but he managed to grab the knife from her hand just in time, an army spokesman said. In the Khan Yunis refugee district in the Gaza Strip, soldiers opened fire and wounded at least eight people after crowds threw gasoline bombs at a military patrol, an army spokesman said. At least two wounded people were brought into the Shifa hospital in Gaza, where merchants along the main street closed their shops and schools were disrupted by protesting students, an army spokesman said. Investigations by Army The army said it was investigating all of the shooting incidents. One unidentified soldier, serving in Gaza city, told Israel's Army Radio, ''We try to be restrained and not let things heat up to much, but when there's a situation that puts us in danger we have to act accordingly.''

By late afternoon, the riots and clashes that had continued throughout the day subsided, the army spokesman said. The Jabalya refugee district, where a resident was shot to death Wednesday after a teenager threw a firebomb at soldiers, remained sealed today.

In the West Bank areas north of Jerusalem, two gasoline bombs were thrown at vehicles today but did not explode. Six Israeli policemen and as many Palestinian teen-agers were injured when the police tried to control students who poured out of a high school at Kalandia, north of Jerusalem, and started stoning passing vehicles, radio reports said.

MOSHE DAYAN, 66, DIES IN ISRAEL; HERO OF WAR, ARCHITECT OF PEACE

Moshe Dayan, the Israeli soldier-statesman, died of a heart ailment today in Tel Aviv's Sheba Medical Center. He was 66 years old.

Mr. Dayan was rushed to the medical center around midnight last night, complaining of chest pains and shortness of breath. A former Chief of Staff, Defense Minister and Foreign Minister, he was an architect of Israel's victories in the 1967 and 1973 wars as well as the Camp David accords that led to the peace treaty with Egypt.

He resigned as Foreign Minister in October 1979, citing differences with Prime Minister Menachem Begin over policy toward the Palestinian Arabs in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Source: New York Times