The study found that while the average prison sentence for Jews was nine and a half months, Arabs convicted of the same crimes were given 14 months on average.
An Israeli academic study has revealed that Israeli judges are harsher with 1948-Palestinians (Arab Israelis) – during the conviction stages and when sentenced after conviction - in comparison to Jewish Israelis.
The statistical study that was commissioned by Israel's Courts Administration and the Israel Bar Association and conducted by three Jewish Israeli researchers, found that Arab Israelis charged with the same crimes as their Jewish Israeli counterparts are more likely to be convicted, and once convicted they are more likely to be sent to prison, for longer sentences.
The study involved 1,500 criminal cases handled in six magistrate courts and three district courts between 1996 and 2005 and proved that while 63.5 per cent of Arab Israelis convicted of violent crimes were sentenced to prison, only 43.7 per cent of Jewish Israelis convicted for the same crimes were.
The study also pointed to the discrepancies regarding probation sentences - 71.2 per cent for Jewish Israelis and 78.7 per cent for Arabs.
Regarding the length of prison sentences given to Arab Israelis and Jewish Israelis, the study found that while the average prison sentence for Jews was nine and a half months, Arabs convicted of the same crimes were given 14 months on average.
The study was conducted by Jewish Israeli professors Giora Rahav, Ephraim Yaar and Yoram Rabin. They accused the Israeli criminal justice system of dealing more harshly with Arab Israeli defendants than Jewish Israelis.
In memorium: friend of Palestine, a great French activist, who founded friends of Al-Rowwad Theater (Aida Refugee Camp) in France, Jean-Claude Ponsin passed away at age 81. We shall not forget such great human beings.
Some of my friends in Fatah and others will not like some of what I have to say here. Others will respect and even appreciate it including some members of Fatah central committee. The situation is becoming intolerable and some of us feel we cannot remain silent. I personally owe it to the 50,000 of you who occasionally read my emails and the many who specifically email to ask me about this issue of September. The proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back leading to this essay was an email from Dr. Saeb Erekat today that included a document claiming to be strategies of the Palestinian leadership in going to the UN in September for recognition. The same day, Israeli authorities initiated laws in the Knesset to make Israel more Jewish (see below) AND approved 930 new houses for a new Jewish only settlement of Har Homa C. This is an adjacent hill to Har Homa A and B and is on Jabal Al-Deek, land of my village of Beit Sahour. Words from unelected representative can be lost in the din of jack-hammers and bulldozers tearing the ancient landscape. Declarations to the media about 122 countries recognizing Palestine (about the same as was the case in 1989) mean little to villagers and refugees who are losing daily in their struggle to get their concerns heard by those driving SUVs and Mercedes cars in the streets of Ramallah and who go unhindered through checkpoints with VIP cards.
I talk and work with activists on the ground daily. The message they all relay is that there is a widening rift between all political parties and the people. They know it and admit it (many leaders said they can no longer mobilize people). The answer is known: go back to the people and reignite the revolutionary spirit that exists within each of us. The therapies for the metastatic growth of settlements on Palestinian land, to the increase in racist Israeli laws, to the plight of refugees all do not involve documents by Erekat or a resort to biased International fora that issues resolutions they were never willing to implement.
Under the category of “What we have to do?” Erekat’s document starts with “1. Open a strategic dialogue with the U.S. administration on the question of membership. It is evident that the use of the United States’ ‘veto’ makes it impossible for Palestine to become a member state. “After 37 years of opening “strategic dialogue” with the US, 18 years of direct negotiations under the auspices of the US, under what logic can such a dialogue lead to anything. Just think of the standing ovations given to the war-criminal Netanyahu in the US Congress to see that this is an illusion. If the PA could not even get Obama to stick to his own words on simple matters (e.g. settlement activity must be stopped), what makes Erekat and company think that talking more will get Obama to help establish a Palestinian state. Our own representatives refuse to even boycott Israeli officials (our UN representative attends a farewell party to the Israeli representative). Ofcourse every one knows that we Palestinians are the ones being pressured and not the Israeli government. The trap of Oslo that created a class of people dependent on their livelihood on aid ensured that independent Palestinian decision-making is impossible. Under these circumstances, what makes anyone think that it is possible to change the status quo without removing the structures of dependency created by the Oslo trap?
In a second point of “What we have to do?” Erekat states that “Recognizing a Palestinian State on the 1967 borders and becoming a UN member will make it easy for the Palestinian leadership to make a decision on the final status negotiations immediately, on all issues without exception (Jerusalem, borders, settlements, refugee, water, security, and the release of prisoners and detainees).” This is extremely dangerous and misleading. Why is UN recognition linked to unconditional return to fruitless negotiations? What makes anyone with any logic believe that the US would change without us first changing and applying some real pressure? And since when is the Palestinian struggle reduced to a Palestinian “state” in Part of the West Bank (no Palestinian or Israeli leader now believes even in getting the whole of the West Bank)? Many Palestinians point out that records of previous “negotiations” show that Qurei, Erekat and Abu Mazen were willing to give up on refugee and other rights in return for this emasculated state (see leaked Palestine documents and Abu-Mazin – Beilin agreement and Geneva accords).
In a third point, it states: “In light of President Obama’s speech on 5/19/2011 in which he talked about our choice to go to the UN saying: “for the Palestinians, their efforts to delegitimize Israel will ultimately fail, the symbolic actions to isolate Israel from the UN in September will not create an independent state. It is clear that the Obama administration understands that we are going to the UN for:
-An attempt to isolate and delegitimize Israel.
-That it is a symbolic act.
-Such effort will not lead to the creation of an independent state.
This understanding is contrary to what we want to achieve from applying for a membership for the State of Palestine on the 1967 borders with East Jerusalem as its capital. We do not seek to delegitimize Israel or isolate it nor is this a symbolicact.”
How many liberation movements in the world do you know of that refuse to even try to isolate a repressive apartheid regime? Just like many other situations before, this Palestinian authority wants to get Israel off the hook. Just like when they shelved consideration of the Goldstone report or when they lobbied Israel against release of Palestinian political prisoners (supposedly so that Hamas would not gain points). Just like when many of them said publicly that they do not boycott Israeli products but only “settlement products” (as if there is a difference in apartheid products). Just like when they issued instructions to their security services to stop popular resistance activities (only allowing vigils in the middle of cities but no friction with Israeli occupation soldiers). The list goes on and on.
As for the event at the UN being a symbolic act, indeed that is what is being contemplated. The PA should instead get beyond symbolism and do serious actions like demand the UN rescind Israel’s membership (since it failed to respect the UN charter and violated its own promises to comply with its obligations). A real effort would entail asking UN member state to deal with Israel like they dealt with Apartheid South Arica since Israel fulfills all the requirements of an apartheid regime under the relevant International convention.
A few years ago, Mr. Erekat came for a tour in the US. When some leading Palestinian Americans started questioning him on the failure of Oslo, he just got angry and said to about 40 of us that he has a PhD and that “who are you all to question things”. This is simply unacceptable. The cause of 11 million Palestinians cannot be left to a few individuals (no matter how or if well-meaning).
The fear of aid cut
US Aid to the Palestinian authority is done in a way to implement US policy which in turn (due to AIPAC and other lobbies) serves Israeli occupation policies. For example most USAID dollars go to infrastructure (mostly roads) that create temporary jobs and relieve the responsibility of the occupier. Most roads are alternative roads that help solidify the apartheid system (ie. roads around settlement blocks etc). The bulk of the aid goes directly to support the salaries of Palestinians employed by the Palestinian authority. Most of that budget goes toward salaries for security employees. Per Oslo II, that security is to ensure that there is no friction with Israelis (ie. suppress any resistance including nonviolent resistance). Because the salaries and political stability of the subservient Palestinian authority has come to depend on this aid, it is very easy to use it as leverage to extort high level officials. We saw this for example in the shelving of the report by the Goldstone commission. We saw it in 2006 and 2007 (when aid was cut following the elections, quickly the elites had to undermine the government and go back to supporting the status quo). In short, aid from the US harms Palestinian national interest and serves to perpetuate the occupation because it entrenches the status quo, reieves Israel from the cost of being an occupier, and restricts political freedom to liberate ourselves.
I urge the central committee of Fatah which acted boldly to remove Dahlan from his position as its media person to act boldly to go down the path of further and bolder changes. Setting term-limits on service would be an appropriate first step for Fatah and could set the stage also for setting term limits for PA positions. My humble and open recommendation is for the Palestinian leadership to come back to the people and get new blood periodically. With this new blood, a mobilization of the Palestinians in exile can be done to effect real change by building appropriate short, medium, and long term strategies for example by lobbying, media work, and BDS (Boycotts, divestments, and sanctions). Internally, the Palestinian house needs to be put in order by implementing existing agreements to create a representative Palestinian National Council (of the PLO). That would create an atmosphere of real popular resistance that could indeed quickly change the dynamics on the ground.[See my book on lessons from 130 years ]
There are hundreds of Palestinian lawyers, political science professors, and other experts who can be consulted to build a real strategy and direction towards liberation. Engaging in open dialogue about these things is good for everyone. The status quo cannot be tolerated. It is better to do this now than wait till September when the people (having falsely raised their hopes of an end to the occupation) will see the leaders who kept talking to them about September flounder and fall.
It really makes no difference whether one is apathetic or one is colluding with the status quo of an occupation profitable to the occupiers (thanks to the Oslo accords). After all, silence is complicity.
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Palestinians will soon come full circle: Years have been wasted making concessions to their colonisers. Palestinians were right to call for a secular state at the outset
[After passing laws that discriminate in land rights, in civil rights, in privileges, in residency, and even in marriage among many others, now comes new laws on freedom of speech, and then there is this…]
Lawmakers seek to drop Arabic as one of Israel’s official languages
“Another clause states that Jewish law will be a source of inspiration to the legislature and the courts. This would mean that MKs would be asked to legislate in the spirit of Jewish law, and courts to adjudicate by it in cases where no other express law exists.”
Must read especially to those who still believe in Oslo accord: Palestinian low salaries also linked to Israeli social struggle
Published Thursday 04/08/2011 (updated) 06/08/2011 10:36
Israeli soldiers fire tear gas last Friday at Palestinians protesting against
West Bank settlement expansion. [AFP/File Abbas Momani]
JERUSALEM (AFP) -- Israel's interior ministry has given final approval for the construction of 900 new homes in the east Jerusalem settlement neighborhood of Har Homa, a ministry spokeswoman told AFP on Thursday.
"This is a programme which was approved by the regional (planning and construction) committee two years ago," spokeswoman Efrat Orbach said.
"According to the planning process in Israel, (it) needed the completion of amendments, therefore it was finally approved today."
The approval marks the final planning stage for a project that has garnered fierce criticism from the Palestinians and the international community.
It will significantly expand the hilltop neighborhood, which lies in Jerusalem's southwest and is defined as being within the municipal boundaries despite lying directly next to the Palestinian West Bank town of Bethlehem.
Har Homa is known as Abu Ghnaim to Palestinians and used to be a lush forested area in northern Bethlehem before being destroyed to make space for the illegal settlement.
Hagit Ofran, who monitors settlement activity for the Israeli group Peace Now, described the final approval of the project as "a very dramatic development" because of where the new housing will be located.
"It adds a new ridge to Har Homa which blocks the territorial contiguity between east Jerusalem and Bethlehem and adds a further barrier to the possibility of east Jerusalem as the Palestinian capital in a two-state solution," she told AFP.
Israel captured Arab east Jerusalem along with the rest of the West Bank in the 1967 Six Day War and later annexed it in a move not recognized by the international community.
Israel does not view construction in the east to be settlement activity, calling both east and west Jerusalem its "eternal, indivisible" capital, and some 200,000 Israelis now live in east Jerusalem amid nearly 270,000 Palestinians.
But the Palestinians view settlement construction in Arab east Jerusalem as an Israeli attempt to extend control over the sector of the city that they want for the capital of their future state.
The international community, including the United States, has regularly criticized Israel for building settlements in the West Bank and particularly east Jerusalem, describing them as counterproductive and calling for a halt to all such construction.
Israel's settlement construction has also snarled peace talks, which were restarted in September 2010 but ground to a halt shortly after they began when a partial Israeli ban on settlement building expired.
Israel declined to renew the freeze, which covered the West Bank but not east Jerusalem, and the Palestinians say they will not negotiate while Israel builds on land they want for their future state.
More than 300,000 Israelis live in settlements in the West Bank and another 200,000 live in settlements in east Jerusalem, which is also home to some 270,000 Palestinians.
Israel has occupied the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem since 1967.
It is as if Israel has pushed the Fast-Forward button in the process of digging the grave for its own occupation and apartheid policies.
*
Dropping the last mask of democracy
New Israeli legislation banning the support of boycott movements goes even further in limiting Palestinian rights.
By Omar Barghouti*
Students attend boycott rally at the University of Ber Zeit, north of Ramallah [EPA]
“You should definitely postpone your book launch in Jerusalem,” warned a close friend who felt that the planned event for launching my recently published book on the Palestinian-led movement for boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) against Israel might be too risky in light of the recently passed Israeli law that effectively bans support for the thriving boycott movement. At the packed bookshop-cafe in occupied East Jerusalem last Thursday, however, the engaged and Italian-coffee scented atmosphere was almost jubilant, as if declaring a collective defiance of Israel’s latest draconian measure.
Much controversy has arisen since the Israeli parliament passed legislation that would effectively criminalise support for any boycott against Israel or its institutions, under threat of heavy penalties and worse, without the need to prove “guilt”. Dozens of Israeli civil society organisations and leading legal scholars, including many opposing the boycott, have resolutely opposed this exceptionally authoritarian law on diverse grounds, ranging from the most principled to the downright pragmatic.
Palestinian perspective
Missing in most of the debate is the Palestinian perspective, which is undoubtedly most relevant given that this law was entirely motivated by the spectacular growth in recent years of the global boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel, which was launched in 2005 and is led by the largest coalition of Palestinian civil society parties, unions, and NGOs: the Boycott National Committee (BNC).
While expressing alarm at this latest repressive attempt by Israel to crush Palestinian peaceful resistance and support for it among conscientious Israelis, a BNC statement conveyed confidence that this law will bolster the spread of BDS even faster among liberal communities the world over. Hind Awwad, coordinator with the BNC, reacted: “This new legislation, which violates international law, is testament to the success of the rapidly growing global BDS movement and a realisation within political elites inside Israel that the state is becoming a world pariah in the way that South Africa once was.”
Eilat Maoz, coordinator of the Coalition of Women for Peace, a leading Israeli feminist alliance that endorses BDS, was quoted in Maariv (Hebrew) saying: “An illegitimate government passes an illegitimate law to protect an illegitimate occupation, while complaining about de-legitimisation. We will continue boycotting, protesting, demonstrating and resisting the occupation - and we call on everyone else to do so.” The Palestinian BDS leadership stood by its Israeli partners saying: “We stand in solidarity with all principled Israeli citizens and organisations who are the primary target of this law, and who may be fined and even imprisoned for exercising their fundamental right to speak out and act non-violently in order to bring their state into compliance with international law.”
International condemnation
Amnesty International condemned the new Israeli bill, saying it “will have a chilling effect on freedom of expression”. Members of the European Parliament raised similar concerns, while the EU itself, typically submissive to Israeli-US interests, expressed alarm at the law’s implications on basic rights. Even a New York Times editorial slammed it as undemocratic. All this will further aggravate Israel’s already low standing in international public opinion.
It is as if Israel has pushed the Fast-Forward button in the process of digging the grave for its own occupation and apartheid policies.
By passing this exceptionally draconian law that blatantly stifles free speech, Israel seems ready to sacrifice one of its very last masks of “democracy” for the sake of crushing, with an iron fist, the BDS movement. This provides further, irrefutable evidence of the level of panic in the Israeli establishment of the dramatic expansion of the movement with its simple yet compelling slogan, Freedom, Justice, Equality. It also proves, once again, the futility of all the other unsavoury weapons in Israel’s massive arsenal of intimidation, smears, threats and bullying in combating BDS, which, as a non-violent, morally consistent movement, has dragged Israel into a “battlefield” where even its daunting nuclear weapons are deemed ineffective.
Israeli justification
The Israeli establishment’s attempt to justify its repressive new law under the rubric of countering a movement bent on “delegitimising” it and calling into question its very existence has failed to convince any significant portion of world public opinion. Most observers cannot but ask, why wasn’t the anti-apartheid boycott in South Africa considered a threat to the existence of the state? Also, did ending segregation in the southern states of the US delegitimise whites or end their existence? In fact, the only things that justice and equality delegitimise are injustice and inequality.
Similarly, BDS aims to “delegitimise” Israel’s occupation and colonial policies and structures. And it seems many in international civil society are gradually moving in the direction of supporting the movement and bringing closer Israel’s South Africa moment.
As to those who may say that this law will corrupt Israel’s democracy, one can only wonder whether a state that has dozens of laws discriminating against its “non-Jewish” citizens solely based on their religious/ethnic identity can be called a democracy. Can a state involved in occupation, forced displacement, siege and denial of basic rights of refugees be regarded as a democracy? The prominent Israeli historian, Ilan Pappe, calls Israel a “herrenvolk democracy”, one only for the masters.
Finally, Israel’s claim that BDS is somehow against Jews is best refuted by Avraham Burg, former chairman of the Jewish Agency and for many years speaker of the Israeli Knesset, where the latest legislation only underlines the pivotal role it has consistently played in maintaining Israeli colonial oppression.
”Israel sweeps all the criticism against it, both justified and unjustified, under the same anti-Semitic rug. It is actually we who are repeatedly mixing up proper criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism. The reason is to avoid at any price having to confront the situation and make tough existential decisions: the occupation, the injustices, the discrimination, the persecution of the non-Jewish minority in our midst. …There is no other country in the Western world from which the international community has been willing to put up with acts of state violence for five decades, other than Israel. … And there is no other colonialist left in the world, other than ‘the only democracy in the Middle East.’ The world is still putting up with all this, but not for much longer – it will soon be over.”
If Palestinian activists learned anything from the South African struggle it is that the darkest moment is that that precedes dawn. In an ironic way, this new Israeli law may be a harbinger for that darkest moment, with no masks or pretence, and then we see the light of freedom and justice.
*Omar Barghouti is a human rights activist, founding member of the Palestinian-led, global boycott movement against Israel, and author of Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS): The Global Struggle for Palestinian Rights.
On August 2nd 100+ people gathered at All Souls Church in N.Y.C. to hear reports from 6 people who went to Greece to participate in Freedom Flotilla 2 – Stay Human to break the siege of Gaza. It was exactly a year ago that people met at the same location to hear a report from Adam Shapiro and Ann Wright about last year’s flotilla when 9 people were murdered and 50 injured by Israeli commandos on the Mavi Marmara. That night the decision was made to have a U.S. boat in the next flotilla. A year of very hard work by dedicated organizers and the contributions of thousands of people from all over the U.S. made our boat, the Audacity of Hope, a reality.
The 6 speakers all believe that their mission was successful despite the flotilla boats not leaving Greek waters (actually the small French yacht, the Dignite, with 10 non-violent peace activists on board got very close to Gaza before it was stopped by 3 Israeli war ships). It was a success because it brought the attention of the world to what the people of Gaza are forced to endure under Israeli occupation. They spoke of the solidarity among flotilla participants and of the strong support they received from the Greek people. All boats are still in Greek custody but legal action is underway to have them released.
Participants are going around the country on speaking tours to tell people about the flotilla, what happened in Greece, why the flotilla was so important to the people of Gaza and important to people everywhere who stand for justice. They said their efforts to reach Gaza will continue, they are undaunted, and Gaza WILL be free. The audience cheered in approval, many ready to join in the preparations for the next flotilla. * * * * * * * * * * * *
