Home

Glenn Greenwald on the Zionist attempt to suppress academic freedom at Brooklyn College

Details: Written by Glenn Greenwald Glenn Greenwald; Published: 03 February 2013 03 February 2013

Brooklyn College's academic freedom increasingly threatened over Israel event

New York politicians join the Alan Dershowitz-led campaign to dictate to colleges what academic events they can hold

Glenn Greenwald

guardian.co.uk, Saturday 2 February 2013 10.35 EST

On Tuesday, I wrote about a brewing controversy that was threatening the academic freedom of Brooklyn College (see Item 7). The controversy was triggered by the sponsorship of the school's Political Science department of an event, scheduled for 7 February, featuring two advocates of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement (BDS) aimed at stopping Israeli oppression of the Palestinians [one speaker is a Palestinian (Omar Barghouti) and the other a Jewish American (philosopher Judith Butler)]. The event is being co-sponsored by numerous student and community groups, including Students for Justice in Palestine, the college's LGBT group, pro-Palestinian Jewish organizations, and an Occupy Wall Street group.

When I wrote about this earlier in the week, opposition to the event was confined to the usual suspects devoted to so-called "pro-Israel" advocacy, including many with a long history of trying to destroy anyone critical of the Israeli government. The controversy was largely fueled by BC alumnus Alan Dershowitz, who denounced the event in a New York York Daily News Op-Ed as a "hate orgy". Dershowitz - with whom I had a lengthy and contentious email exchange yesterday on this and other topics (see below) - previously led the successful campaign to pressure DePaul University into denying tenure to long-time Israel critic Norman Finkelstein (after his tenure had been approved by an academic committee), all but destroying Finkelstein's career as an academic.

Dershowitz has been joined in his current crusade by a cast of crazed and fanatical Israel-centric characters such as Brooklyn State Assembly member Dov Hikind. Ignoring the BDS movement's explicit non-violence stance, Hikind publicly (and falsely) claimed that the event speakers (to whom he referred as "Barghouti and…the lady") "think Hamas and Hezbollah are nice organizations, and they probably feel the same way about al-Qaida".

Hikind called on the college's President, Karen Gould, to resign, recklessly insinuating (needless to say) that she's an anti-Semite: "Perhaps President Gould wasn't bullied; maybe she secretly approves. . . . I can only speculate to what her motivation or lack of motivation is in allowing this irresponsible endorsement of this loathsome event by her College." In 2011, Hikind led the campaign to force Brooklyn College to fire the young adjunct professor Kristofer Petersen-Overton for the crime of writing a pro-Palestinian paper (after firing him, the college rehired him days later).

Why Palestine Should Take Israel to Court

Details: Written by George Bisharat George Bisharat; Published: 30 January 2013 30 January 2013

January 29, 2013

Why Palestine Should Take Israel to Court in The Hague

By GEORGE BISHARAT

SAN FRANCISCO

LAST week, the Palestinian foreign minister, Riad Malki, declared that if Israel persisted in its plans to build settlements in the currently vacant area known as E-1, which lies between Palestinian East Jerusalem and the Israeli settlement of Maale Adumim, “we will be going to the I.C.C.,” referring to the International Criminal Court. “We have no choice,” he added.

The Palestinians’ first attempt to join the I.C.C. was thwarted last April when the court’s chief prosecutor at the time, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, declined the request on the grounds that Palestine was not a state. That ambiguity has since diminished with the United Nations’ conferral of nonmember state status on Palestine in November. Israel’s frantic opposition to the elevation of Palestine’s status at the United Nations was motivated precisely by the fear that it would soon lead to I.C.C. jurisdiction over Palestinian claims of war crimes.

Israeli leaders are unnerved for good reason. The I.C.C. could prosecute major international crimes committed on Palestinian soil anytime after the court’s founding on July 1, 2002.

Since the outbreak of the second Palestinian intifada in 2000, the Israel Defense Forces, guided by its military lawyers, have attempted to remake the laws of war by consciously violating them and then creating new legal concepts to provide juridical cover for their misdeeds. For example, in 2002, an Israeli F-16 dropped a one-ton bomb on an apartment building in a densely populated Gaza neighborhood, killing a Hamas military leader, Salah Shehadeh, and 14 others, including his wife and seven children under the age of 15. In 2009, Israeli artillery killed more than 20 members of the Samouni family, who had sought shelter in a structure in the Zeitoun district of Gaza City at the bidding of Israeli soldiers. Last year, Israeli missiles killed two Palestinian cameramen working for Al Aksa television. Each of these acts, and many more, could lead to I.C.C. investigations.

The former head of the Israeli military’s international law division, Daniel Reisner, asserted in 2009: “International law progresses through violations. We invented the targeted assassination thesis and we had to push it. At first there were protrusions that made it hard to insert easily into the legal molds. Eight years later it is in the center of the bounds of legitimacy.”

Juan Cole on Israeli Colonialism

Details: Written by Juan Cole Juan Cole; Published: 28 January 2013 28 January 2013

Dead Children and Arrested Babies: Palestinian Life under

Israeli Colonialism

POSTED ON 01/27/2013 BY JUAN COLE

The Palestinian West Bank has been illegally de facto annexed by Israel. This territory was not awarded

to Israel even in the UN General Assembly partition plan of 1947, and indeed Israel’s possession of it

is not recognized even by the US, much less the rest of the world. It was conquered by main force in

1967 and has been settled by hundreds of thousands of Israeli colonists, who have encroached on

Palestinian orchards and farms, and have diverted Palestinian water. The Palestinians there have been

kept stateless and without the rights of citizenship. They are sentenced in Israeli military courts. Israel

controls their land, water and air space, and simply takes what land of theirs it wants, at will.

Palestinians have been divided by Israeli Apartheid highways, checkpoints and the Apartheid Wall, so

that often getting to hospital in an emergency is impossible and a one-hour journey now takes 8

hours. Israel controls the contours of their lives, but they have no vote in Israel. Here are some recent

news items about the West Bank Palestinians. It is like this all the time, but Western media almost

never report from the West Bank.

Israel's "foreign policy of deception"

Details: Written by Rod Such Rod Such; Published: 25 January 2013 25 January 2013

Israel’s "foreign policy of deception" documented in new book

Rod Such The Electronic Intifada 16 January 2013

Avi Raz’s The Bride and the Dowry: Israel, Jordan, and the Palestinians in the Aftermath of the June 1967 War is a meticulous examination of the two-year period that followed Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, Gaza and the Syrian Golan Heights.

It is notable for a number of reasons: its documentation of the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians that occurred during and after the war and its exposure of a policy of deliberate lying to conceal Israel’s real aims in the newly occupied territories. And perhaps most importantly, its virtually unassailable argument that Israeli policymakers never intended to relinquish the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, which it promptly annexed, and contemplated annexing Gaza.

Also notable are the disclosure that Israeli officials acknowledged that the annexation of East Jerusalem and the construction of settlements in the West Bank violated international law, and Raz’s depiction of the US government’s steady supply of arms and political support to Israel during this period.

Raz is a former Israeli journalist turned historian who is now a member of the Faculty of Oriental Studies at Oxford University in England. The title of the book derives from an infamous quote by Levi Eshkol, Israel’s prime minister during that time, who referred to the West Bank and Gaza as the “dowry” Israel won in the 1967 War: “The trouble is that the dowry is followed by a bride [the Palestinians] whom we don’t want,” Eshkol said.

As Raz shows, Israel wasted little time in attempting to get rid of as many “brides” as it could without provoking an international furor. As early as the third day of the war, Defense Minister Moshe Dayan told Lt. Gen. Yitzhak Rabin “that the aim was to empty the West Bank of its inhabitants.”

More than 200,000 Palestinians fled or were forced to flee their homes and villages in the West Bank, even though none participated in the 1967 War. Some twenty West Bank villages were destroyed, either partially or completely. The main purpose of the village destruction, Raz notes, “was to obliterate the Green Line,” the unofficial border created by the 1949 armistice agreements.

The Israeli military “encouraged” Palestinians to flee eastward toward the East Bank of the Jordan River. Raz documents that thousands of Palestinians who attempted to return to their homes after the fighting ended were labeled “infiltrators.” Hundreds were killed when they tried to return, including women and children, some of whom were buried in mass graves.

Israel Arrests Human Rights Activist

Details: Written by Maureen Clare Murphy Maureen Clare Murphy; Published: 25 January 2013 25 January 2013

Israel arrests Stop the Wall youth coordinator in latest attack on Palestinian human rights defenders

Submitted by Maureen Clare Murphy on Thu, 01/24/2013 - 18:36

Israeli forces arrested activist and human rights defender Hassan Karajah during a nighttime raid on his home in the occupied West Bank village of Saffa, near Ramallah, yesterday morning.

According to Stop the Wall, Israeli forces damaged property and attempted to humiliate Karajah’s family:

Armed soldiers of the IOF [Israeli occupation forces] stormed the home of Hassan Karajeh at 2:30am, and, gathering the family together in one room, separated the men and women from each other. The soldiers started to search the family members and ordered them to strip naked for a strip search, however the men and women refused and defied this order.

Muhannad Karajeh, Hassan’s brother and a lawyer, reported that special units of the Israeli army stormed the house and carried out an extensive search, in the process breaking furniture, scattering the contents of the house, and taking three personal computers, three mobile phones, and five bags of private documents belonging to the family.

Muhannad Karajeh further described how the Israeli soldiers attacked his brother Hassan, handcuffed and blindfolded him, and, arresting him, took him to an undisclosed location and refused to tell the family where.

The aftermath of Israel’s raid on the Karajah family home. (Stop the Wall)

The Palestinian human rights and prisoner advocacy group Addameer has also published a profile of Karajah with a detailed description of the raid and arrest, and states that Karajah is currently being held at Jalameh interrogation center. The group also stated on its Facebook page today that an Israeli military court has ordered Karajah’s detention for another 12 days of interrogation, and that Karajah was “beaten shortly after his arrest when he was first detained at a checkpoint.”

Americans United for Palestinian Human Rights

New

Events

In Focus

Glenn Greenwald on the Zionist attempt to suppress academic freedom at Brooklyn College

Why Palestine Should Take Israel to Court

Juan Cole on Israeli Colonialism

Israel's "foreign policy of deception"

Israel Arrests Human Rights Activist

More Articles ...