Like many Palestinian citizens before him, Israeli police insist on holding Maysam Abu Alqian responsible for the beating he took in broad daylight.

The beating of 19-year-old Maysam Abu Alqian by plainclothes Border Police officers in central Tel Aviv on Sunday was depressingly familiar, both in the incident itself and its aftermath. Alqian, a Bedouin resident of Hura in the Negev Desert who works at a Tel Aviv supermarket, had stepped out of the store to take out the trash, when he was asked by the two plainclothes officers to present his ID. According to eyewitnesses, when he didn’t, they assaulted him, while other police officers came and joined in before hauling him off in a police car.

The police version of events is that Alqian attacked the officers first and that they “had to use force while the suspect continued attacking them,” according to spokesperson Micky Rosenfeld. For the time being, the police seem to be sticking to this version of events: in the middle of the night, Alqian was released to house arrest after a brief hearing. Although he eventually received delayed medical treatment, the police prevented his father from visiting him at the hospital.

Here, as is usually the case in such incidents, the onus is on the Palestinian victim to prove that they didn’t deserve to get a beating at the hands of the police. Indeed, when a Palestinian submits a formal complaint about police violence, Israeli police are in the habit of submitting a counter-claim alleging that the officers involved were the ones who had been attacked first, as Tom Mehager, who works with Adalah — The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, wrote on Facebook after the incident.

(Police chief Roni Alsheikh, sticking to the victimhood theme, on Monday complained — apparently without irony — that the media had turned his force into its “punching bag.”)

The working assumption of the police when dealing with Palestinians is that whoever they have beaten up — or shot — is guilty until proven innocent. And that premise is rooted squarely in racism: as Mehager noted in his post, the believability of a version of events wherein someone suddenly jumps police officers in the middle of their work day only stands up “in a country where the police assume that Arabs are violent by their very nature.”

The “self-defense” claim is not the only falsehood that snakes...

In appointing itself the gatekeeper of historical memory, Israel has shackled the promotion of its own narrative to the suppression of the Palestinian narrative.

A few years ago I took part in a class about the Armenian genocide at Toronto University with students from around the world, including several Armenian and Turkish participants.

Three of the Armenian students were sitting opposite me during the seminar. Within about 15 minutes of the lecturer beginning to speak, they broke down crying, one by one. Seeing their distress, one of our Turkish classmates, A., also began to weep. It was a stark visual lesson about how close to the surface grief remains when it is boxed in over decades, and when the perpetrator of that grief refuses to accept responsibility for the pain it has caused, as is the case with Turkey.

I was reminded of this scene recently when reading Louis Fishman’s excellent Haaretz op-ed about why Israel should recognize the Armenian genocide as well as its responsibility for the Nakba, when over 700,000 Palestinians were expelled and fled, and over 500 villages destroyed, in the war that accompanied the founding of the State of Israel.

Without drawing parallels between the nature of the two events, there is a meaningful comparison to be made regarding their position as defining national traumas. Additionally, as Fishman wrote, “it can be argued that Israel has adopted Turkey’s stance of denial as a model toward the Palestinian Nakba.”

Such denial does more than add insult to injury — it also houses the even more profound issue of the delegitimization of grief. Israel, like Turkey, has taken legislative steps against the mention or memorializing of the historical injustices it is responsible for. In appointing itself the gatekeeper of historical memory here, Israel has shackled the promotion of its own narrative to the suppression of that of Palestinians.

This is a hefty toll to exact on a population. As painful as grief is, having that grief unacknowledged, rejected or undermined cuts even deeper. Grief is an urgent and unwieldy human emotion, and we need its active expression, mourning, as a platform on which to shoulder the unbearable heaviness of loss.

When that platform is denied us, we can make no sense nor structure of our grief. It just remains there: thick, amorphous, and impossible to outrun. And just as grief that isn’t acknowledged or accommodated...

A recent poll finds that 72 percent of Jewish Israelis believe Israel’s control over the Palestinian territories does not constitute occupation. So what do you call military rule over a captive population that didn’t vote for the army to be there?

Depending on who you speak to, the word “occupation” is either the most loaded or the most ignored term in Israel-Palestine. For some, it’s a canard bandied about by traitorous leftists who want nothing more than to destroy the country by smearing it into oblivion; many believe that Israel cannot occupy territory that the bible says was promised by God to Jews; for a dwindling minority, it represents all that is rotten in the State of Israel. And for others, it’s something that happens “over there” which a lot of people seem to make a lot of fuss over, but which has (as far as they’re concerned) little impact on their day-to-day life.

So it’s perhaps not surprising to read in the latest Peace Index from the Israeli Democracy Institute that 72 percent of Jewish Israelis believe Israel’s control over the Palestinian territories does not constitute occupation — of whom 50 percent are “sure” that Israel is not an occupying power, and 22 percent “think” that it isn’t.

If that’s the case, though, what word does accurately describe military rule over a captive population that didn’t vote for the army to be there and that has no sovereignty? How do you describe a military regime that can seal off entire towns, villages or the whole West Bank whenever it feels like it?

How would you describe a state of affairs wherein a native population of one ethnicity is subject to military law while a civilian population of a different ethnicity that has been moved into the territory, against international law, is subject to civil law? (Aside from apartheid, that is.)

What about an authority that sits within the Ministry of Defense, and that decides where the people under that military law can and can’t build homes? What would you call the same authority when it tears down the houses of those who weren’t fortunate enough to get inside the one percent approval bracket Israel gives to Palestinians seeking building permits in the West Bank?

How would you characterize a situation in which Palestinians can have their land arbitrarily designated a firing zone, conservation area...

Israel’s military government is once again rebuked in court over its continued failure to meet the bare minimum of its obligations under the Freedom of Information Act, and moreover must compensate the NGO petitioning to bring it to account.

Israel’s military government, which rules over millions of Palestinians, was hit with a nearly unprecedented court ruling and rebuke this week for flouting its obligation to publish regulations in Arabic.

The Civil Administration — which is a part of the Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT), itself part of the Defense Ministry — now has six weeks in which to publish all its outstanding policies and procedures in both Arabic and Hebrew, documents that directly affect 2.8 million Palestinians living in the West Bank. There are currently 25 procedures that have not been published at all in either language, and a further four which have not been published in Arabic.

Citing repeated delays in fulfilling its commitments, the Jerusalem District Court judge also ordered the Civil Administration to pay NIS 30,000 in legal costs to Gisha, the Israeli human rights NGO which since December 2014 has been petitioning the government body to make all its policies and procedures public.

The documents in question dictate fundamental, day-to-day processes for Palestinians in the West Bank, such as obtaining travel and work visas, getting entry permits into Israel and dealing with medical requests. Palestinians’ ability to go abroad, attend weddings, visit sick relatives and live in one place or another are all subject to these procedures.

Access to this information in Arabic is therefore critical for Palestinians subject to Israel’s military regime, in order for them to know what their rights are and how they can claim them. Without this knowledge an occupied population is at the mercy of the whims of the occupier and a crucial passage of legal recourse is blocked off, as illustrated by a former COGAT policy that randomly barred Palestinians from entering Eilat. Until fresh guidelines were issued last year, no one could challenge the rule because apparently no one at COGAT knew where the original copy of the policy was, much less why it had originally been put in place.

Since Gisha filed the FOIA petition nearly a year-and-a-half ago, the Civil Administration has on five separate occasions — and only under duress from the court — committed to publish all of its policies and procedures, setting...

With war raging over Israel’s border with Syria, it’s easy to forget that the Golan Heights — a buffer between the two countries — is occupied territory. But occupied it is, and the landscape bears witness to a history of violence and expulsion.

“The sky fell to earth, the stars turned to stones…”
— Elias Khoury, Gate of the Sun

I’m standing at the top of a crumbling minaret, looking into Syria. The tower belongs to a mosque in the destroyed Circassian village of Sur’aman, whose ruins are gradually being consumed by the woods around them. In the distance lies a white UN observer post that sits on the 1974 ceasefire line between the occupied Golan Heights and Syria proper.

The view of Syria on the horizon is covered with a blue gauze; standing on the precipice of the minaret, I remember an essay by the American writer Rebecca Solnit in which she describes how light at the blue end of the spectrum doesn’t travel all the way to us from the sun. When we look out over the horizon, she explains, the blue tinge that we see is “the light that got lost…the color of there seen from here, the color of where you are not.”

Ultimately, Solnit says, blue is also the color of where you can never be, because it isn’t the actual color of those places you’re gazing at, but of “the atmospheric distance between you and the mountains.” From where I’m standing, Syria is blue, the color of a physical and logistical atmospheric distance.

The Golan, too, is blue, for the 130,000 Syrians — Bedouin, Turkmen and Circassian — who were expelled following Israel’s capture of the area during the Six-Day War in 1967, and who cannot return to their homes. Many were pushed further into Syria, although not all of the refugees stayed there.

One of those Syrian-Circassian refugees is the reason I am standing at the top of the minaret. Farouk Merza, the father of a friend, Eléonore, was born in the village of Mansura in the northern Golan, and eventually settled in France after being expelled from his home in 1967. We are in Mansura to visit the site where Farouk’s house once stood, as well as other village landmarks that now exist only in memory.

Not all were expelled. Between 6,000-7,000 Syrians were left behind in the Golan after...

When Israeli leaders keep pushing the message that killing Palestinian attackers is a laudable act, is it any wonder that the shooters become our national heroes?

WARNING: This post contains a highly graphic video and images.

The actions of an Israeli soldier who executed a wounded Palestinian attacker in Hebron on Thursday have been condemned by politicians from right to left, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon — albeit indirectly — as well as by the Israeli media. Everyone is at pains to stress how far the soldier strayed from the IDF’s values when he shot Abed al Fatah a-Sharif in the head as he lay injured in the street, having already been shot after reportedly attacking a different soldier.

The military itself sprang into action, arresting the soldier in question and opening an investigation against him on suspicion of murder.

But the shock itself is jarring. Since the current wave of increased violence began — set off, arguably, by an Israeli soldier killing Hadeel al-Hashlamon in almost exactly the same spot, almost exactly six months ago — Israel’s ruling coalition has done next to nothing to try and calm down a public that is apparently in favor of extrajudicial killings and has at the same time developed a serious snuff film habit.

The biggest uproar over the issue of Israelis shooting dead Palestinian assailants in recent months was actually caused by IDF Chief of Staff Gadi Eizenkot, who said that he didn’t want to see “a soldier empty a magazine on a girl with scissors.” Eizenkot was swiftly criticized by numerous members of the ruling coalition.

By comparison, when (“centrist”) politicians in government or spiritual leaders have expressed the need to shoot to kill every Palestinian assailant there has been precious little notice taken, while vigilantism is at best half-heartedly advised against and at worst actively encouraged.

The Israeli press bears huge responsibility for this state of affairs as well, using chauvinistic, dehumanizing and vulgar terminology when describing Israeli responses to Palestinian assailants, would-be or actual (and occasionally when no attack has been planned at all).

Words like “eliminated” and “neutralized” are de rigueur when referring to a Palestinian assailant who has been shot by Israeli security forces, and the shot individuals themselves are only ever labeled terrorists, whether...

A worldwide consortium of civil liberties groups just published new report, ‘Lethal in Disguise,’ on the health consequences of crowd control weapons, in which Israel features prominently. +972 Magazine speaks to one of the editors about how Israel fares compared to the rest of the world.

An increase in popular protests worldwide over the last few years, coupled with the growing militarization of police forces around the globe have created a booming industry for crowd control weapons. Yet international regulations have failed to keep up, and the marketing of these weapons as “less lethal” means that they are frequently misused, causing injury, permanent disability and death.

Israel-Palestine, where the use of such weapons is a near-daily occurrence, features prominently in the report.

+972 Magazine spoke with Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) attorney Anne Suciu, who was one of the editors of the report, a collaboration of Physicians for Human Rights (no relation to Physicians for Human Rights—Israel) and the International Network of Civil Liberties Organizations shows, to find out more about how Israel is faring in the realm of crowd control.

When researching the report, did you get a sense of how Israel compares to the rest of the world in its use of crowd control weapons?

After the initial research done by Physicians for Human Rights, when we looked at the chart with the list of different kinds of weapons (kinetic impact projectiles, chemical irritants, water cannons, acoustic weapons and disorientation devices – nr), the first thing we saw is that Israel is using all the weapons mentioned in the report and many others.

There is quite a flourishing industry of crowd control weapons here, and it’s very important to mention it’s not just the West Bank — they’re used by the police for any demonstration, including the Ethiopian-Israeli ones last year where they used skunk (a powerful water jet with a foul-smelling liquid added – nr), water cannons, tear gas and shock grenades.

What about accountability for the use of all these weapons? How is it regulated in Israel-Palestine?

You can never know what the police are using, how they’re using it. According to their internal procedures, every time these weapons are used the police need to make a report of how, why, and what weapons were used by whom. ACRI always asks for the reports and never gets them. According to the police’s own procedures, the...

Israel demolishes 235 Palestinian structures in the West Bank in February — the highest monthly total for at least seven years.

Israeli forces demolished 235 Palestinian-owned structures in the West Bank in February, according to the UN’s humanitarian agency, the highest such figure since it started keeping record in 2009.

In all, UN OCHA confirmed to +972 Magazine, the demolitions displaced 331 Palestinians, including 174 children, and otherwise affected a further 740 Palestinians.

March began as February ended, with Israel demolishing 41 structures in Khirbet Tana, located southeast of Nablus in the West Bank, displacing 36 people including 11 children. The destroyed structures included 12 provided by the Palestinian Red Crescent and the Palestinian Authority as humanitarian assistance, as well as an elementary school, according to an OCHA statement released on Friday.

In total, the Civil Administration — the Israeli military’s governing arm in the West Bank — has demolished at least 323 structures so far in 2016, over three-quarters of the number of Palestinian structures in the West Bank it demolished in all of 2015. The overwhelming majority of these demolitions were carried out due to a lack of building permits.

Particularly affected have been Palestinian communities in the South Hebron Hills, the Jordan Valley and the E1 area around Ma’ale Adumim. The intensive rate of demolitions since the start of the year is in marked contrast to a relative lull at the end of 2015, which itself followed several waves of mass demolitions throughout last summer.

Israel has issued over 14,000 demolition orders against Palestinian structures in Area C of the West Bank, which is under full Israeli security and administrative control, since 1988. Around 3,000 demolitions have been carried out in that time, leaving some 11,000 orders outstanding that affect over 17,000 structures.

The Israeli government argues that such demolitions are ordered and carried out because the structures were built without permission, but between 2010 and 2014 only 1.5 percent of permit requests by Palestinians in the West Bank were approved.

In addition, about 18 percent of the West Bank is declared as a closed military zone reserved for IDF drills, meaning that Palestinians are prohibited from building in these areas. An IDF officer has previously admitted that this is a tactic the Israeli army uses for expelling Palestinians from parts of the West Bank.

Reported incidents of sexual harassment, assault and rape by high-ranking Israeli officials are flooding their way into the media. Why is the violation of women’s bodies and dignity so endemic in Israeli society?

Several days ago a story broke in Israel that has been dominating the headlines ever since: a senior Israeli army officer has been suspended from his duties after coming under suspicion of having sexually assaulted a female soldier under his command.

Ofek Buchris, whose name was originally under gag order, is suspected of five counts of assault, including rape. And as a high-ranking official in the most trusted institution in the country, his alleged transgressions have provoked outrage, bewilderment, and outright denial.

Buchris is the latest in a recent string of high-profile men in Israel to come under suspicion of sexually assaulting or harassing women. The IDF is currently faced with another two ongoing sexual harassment cases involving officers, according to Israeli news site Ynet, and in 2015, 12 separate cases of suspected rape were reported. According to military police, there were 125 incidents of suspected sexual assault or harassment in the army throughout last year. A report from 2013 showed that one in eight women in the IDF were sexually assaulted that year.

It’s not just in the army. At the end of last year, former interior minister and deputy prime minister Silvan Shalom and former Jewish Home MK Yinon Magal resigned within weeks of one another following a string of complaints from former female employees that they were sexually assaulted and harassed by the two men while working under them.

Also at the end of 2015, a senior Israeli police officer was accused of sexual harassment by two separate women (although then-Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein decided to close the file on the incidents). In January of this year, Ashkelon Mayor Itamar Shimoni was arrested on suspicion of rape and using bribe money to buy the silence of the women he had allegedly assaulted.

It is important to note that this flurry of cases — and these are by no means all the stories that have made the press in the last year — are not necessarily evidence of an increase in sexual assault and harassment, but potentially a sign that more women are coming forward and finally revealing how systematic the abuse is. The case that seems to have...

As the Knesset marks first ever ‘gay community rights day,’ new reports on homophobia in Israel show 80 percent increase in documented homophobic incidents, alarming statistics about levels of violence faced by the LGBT community. 

The state of LGBT rights in Israel can effectively be summed up in a series of events surrounding the Knesset’s first ever LGBT rights day. As much of an achievement as that was — although with caveats — the day was overshadowed by a number of proposed bills to advance LGBT rights that were shot down before before even getting off the ground.

A day earlier, a major gay rights advocacy organization released its latest set of figures on homophobia in Israel. The report showed an 80 percent increase in the number of documented anti-LGBT statements and incidents in 2015, compared with the previous year.

A second report published by a coalition of feminist organizations found that around two-thirds of LGBT women have suffered sexual harassment, a third have been subjected to physical violence and 81 percent felt compelled to hide their identity in some way or another. A report released earlier last year showed that half of Israel’s transgender population has been physically assaulted at least once.

These statistics are backed up by research undertaken by the Berl Katznelson Foundation last December, which found that the LGBT community was second only to Palestinians as the targets of online incitement in 2015. A social media monitoring service found 6,836 homophobic statements posted on Hebrew-language social media in January 2016 alone.

And 2015 was, of course, the year in which an ultra-Orthodox Israeli went on a stabbing spree at the Jerusalem pride parade — for the second time — killing one and wounding five.

To have the Knesset’s first gay rights day in this atmosphere was both a landmark moment and a red herring of sorts. Brought about by the Knesset LGBT Lobby — headed by MKs Michal Rozin (Meretz), Merav Michaeli (Zionist Union) and Yael German (Yesh Atid) — it was attended by over a quarter of Knesset members, although mostly from the opposition. As Michaeli told +972 Magazine, “it’s a legitimization [of the LGBT community and its rights], even if that should no longer be this complicated.”

But the day, and those that came before and after, only served to highlight the gap between perception and reality of LGBT...

Over 500 Palestinians have been displaced by the demolitions since the start of 2016, the vast majority of them in the West Bank.

Israel demolished 313 Palestinian structures in the West Bank and East Jerusalem between January 1 and February 15 2016, more than half the total such number in all of 2015. More than a third of those demolitions were carried out within the space of a week, between February 9 and 15, according to the UN’s humanitarian agency, OCHA.

The intensive rate of demolitions since the start of the year is in marked contrast to a relative lull at the end of 2015, which itself followed several waves of mass demolitions throughout last summer. Over 500 Palestinians have been displaced by the demolitions since the start of 2016, the vast majority of them in the West Bank.

Particularly affected have been Palestinian communities in the South Hebron Hills, the Jordan Valley and the E1 area around Ma’ale Adumim, according to Israeli human rights organization, B’Tselem. The overarching reason behind the demolitions vary across these three areas.

In the South Hebron Hills, eight villages lie within ‘Firing Zone 918,’ a military training zone unilaterally declared by the Israeli army. For the past 15 years, the army has been trying to force the Palestinians out of this territory in order to be able to use it for military drills. The most recent spate of demolitions took place at the beginning of February when the Civil Administration — Israel’s military government in the West Bank — demolished 22 structures in two separate villages.

The Jordan Valley is a long-term annexation target of the Israeli government. Demolitions, disruptive and destructive military drills and arbitrary rezoning of land are all being used in order to bundle the area’s Palestinian residents into smaller and smaller enclaves, with the ultimate aim of squeezing them out altogether. The Civil Administration carried out a string of demolitions in the Jordan Valley in January and the first part of February.

Palestinians living in the E1 area around the settlement of Ma’ale Adumim, meanwhile, are under ongoing threat of expulsion due to Israel’s plans to create a contiguous territory between Jerusalem and the settlement. Several rounds of demolitions occurred there in January. On Sunday the only school in Abu al-Nuwaar, a Bedouin community in the E1 area, was demolished by...

From surreal exaggerations to outright lies, Netanyahu dished up another batch of nonsense utterings to a foreign audience in Berlin this week. We picked three of the best and broke them down for you.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has something of a track record of saving his most nonsensical and demonstrably false statements for foreign audiences. Although honesty is also not his strong point on home turf, it’s when he’s speaking in English that he gets really creative.

Less than four months after his bumbling attempt to pin the Holocaust on the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem aroused equal parts derision and mirth (and that wasn’t the only lie he told that month), Netanyahu was at it again on Tuesday during an official visit to Berlin.

“The French initiative … says … if you do not succeed we are already predetermining the result – we will recognize a Palestinian state… It does not matter if this state could become another Islamic dictatorship … [or if parts of it are taken over by] by Daesh or Hamas or both of them.”

This is pure Bibi patois: a lot of rambling about doomsday scenarios while putting words in his opponent’s mouth in order to make them seem hopelessly unaware of the apocalyptic reality on their doorstep, and at the same time undermining the very premise of the initiative. (Cf. when Bibi took on the West over Iran.)

Netanyahu took care, as he has done since the last Gaza war, to mention Islamic State and Hamas in the same breath, before getting tangled up in a Dick Cheney-esque, vaguely metaphysical speculation on why the talks were doomed to fail before they’d even begun. He also seemed to suggest that just by recognizing the State of Palestine (like 136 other countries already have), the French will automatically make a state come forth — which somewhat channels Theodor Herzl and his “if you will it, it is no dream” spirit.

This holds a few functions for Netanyahu. Firstly, it allows him to again cast himself as the visionary leader with unparalleled diplomatic insight and security nous (a role he likes to play at home, too). Secondly, it lays the groundwork for Israel to be able to reject whatever comes out of the initiative, because as we all know, the Palestinians aren’t going to get anything unless Netanyahu is...

In its ongoing efforts to save every Jewish soul, anti-assimilation group Yad L’Achim has broadened its offerings and is now extending its marriage-wrecking service to Jewish men in relationships with non-Jewish women. 

Israeli anti-miscegenation group Yad L’Achim took a step towards equality last week when it announced via its website that it had rolled out its anti-assimilation “rescue” service to Jewish men in relationships with non-Jewish women.

A more established counterpart to Lehava‘s goon squads, Yad L’Achim is also known for harassing Messianic Jews as part of its anti-assimilation efforts.

Like Lehava, Yad L’Achim has traditionally focused on preventing relationships between Jewish women and non-Jewish men, particularly Palestinians. Indeed, the project to maintain ethnic purity — which has benefitted from taxpayers’ money — is one of the few areas in which women are a higher priority than men; after all, a woman’s body is clearly far too precious a national resource for her to be trusted to know what to do with it.

But now Yad L’Achim has appointed itself the task of invading the bedrooms of Jewish men intending to marry non-Jewish women as well. According to the edifying story provided on its website, the organization dispatched one of its august rabbis, Yoav Zeev Robinson, on a mission to break up a relationship between a young Jewish man and his wife-to-be, who the prospective groom had recently discovered was not halakhically Jewish. (She had been adopted by Jewish parents but had never formally converted, rendering her a gentile in the eyes of the rabbinate.)

The young man had initially resisted calls to break off the engagement. According to Yad L’Achim, however, once he was shown a few photos of the rabbi’s forefathers, he realized — with some coaxing from the rabbi himself — that his own forefathers might be disappointed at his marrying a non-Jew, and announced that he would be canceling the wedding.

Mission accomplished. Whether the story is true or not, the message is clear: Yad L’Achim is expanding the scope of whose lives they’re tasking themselves with trying to destroy — sorry, save.

But there is one glaring absence from the marriage-wrecking catalog of Yad L’Achim, Lehava, Hemla and their ilk. There’s much talk of Jewish women in relationships with non-Jewish men and vice-versa, but what about LGBT Jews who may enter relationships with non-Jews?

Don’t we deserve the right to have...