The search for justice never ends! The Hind Rajab Foundation is tracking down Israeli criminals, and bringing them to justic. This is vital in the effort to hold Israel accountable. May they also turn their sights on the criminal leaders of the countries of the west who are co-perpetrators of these crimes.
Re: the NBC crew. Here'sw Jeremy Ben-Ami, from J Street, a Jewish organization.
Last week, I stood in the abandoned Palestinian community of al-Mu’arrajat in the Jordan Valley on the occupied West Bank. And I cried.
For years, this community endured attacks by Israeli settlers – homes and property damaged, livestock stolen, families harassed and beaten, access to grazing land increasingly restricted. Family after family gave up and left.
The settlers succeeded.
The community I visited Sunday – once 600 strong – was now totally abandoned. I visited the remains of the community’s mosque. Its tile floor ripped apart. I viewed the nearby school. Destroyed. The terrorists had reduced the homes to piles of metal and rubble.
And I thought about my own family and their experience in Czarist Russia before my great-grandparents made aliyah to Palestine in the 1880s. Like so many Jews of their generation, they came from communities in Eastern Europe that were regularly attacked, terrorized and ultimately emptied by people who believed that Jews did not belong.
Standing amid the ruins of al-Mu’arrajat, I could not escape the question: How can it be that Jews, who know so intimately what it means to be driven from our homes, now stand by while other Jews do this very thing to another people? How can Israelis and Jews around the world remain so quiet?
I spent the day driving through the Jordan Valley and then north toward Nablus and Jenin, an area of the West Bank I hadn’t visited in several years. I was shocked. The settlement enterprise has advanced with astonishing speed. In the enormous stretch of land between just north of Jericho and the area around Duma, Israeli outposts and farms now spread across all the hillsides and valleys.
For the past few generations, Palestinian families – many of them herders and subsistence farmers – lived here, raised sheep, cultivated fields and tended olive trees. Many had been forced from or fled Green Line Israel in 1948. Now, community after community is gone. Hundreds of square miles where thousands of Palestinians had lived and worked.
And, in places like Ras Ein al ‘Auja and al-Mu’arrajat, each recently home to many hundreds of Palestinians, there is no one left. Homes and animal pens have been abandoned or destroyed. The schools are empty. The land where Palestinians once grazed their sheep taken over by Israeli settler farms and outposts.
My guide described it in words I found almost unbearable to repeat: the area has been “cleansed” of Palestinians.
And then there are the olive trees.
I saw grove after grove that had been destroyed on the drive out of the Jordan Valley. Uprooted trees lay on their sides like bodies strewn on a battlefield.
It’s one thing to read about settler terror or to hear cold statistics. It’s something else altogether to drive through the area and realize that the people who lived there are simply gone.
This is not a case of Palestinians caught up in a military operation against Hamas. There was no military objective here. These were not fighters. They were families – herders, farmers, children – living in some of the poorest communities in the West Bank.
Whatever arguments one may make about Israel’s security, none of them explains why these people had to leave their homes. There is only one goal: to forcibly displace Palestinians, to push them into confined urban areas and ultimately to remove them from the land.
When NBC went to the area on Saturday to try to report this story, their crew was beaten. Also on Saturday, a British activist providing ‘protective presence’ in the Palestinian town of Umm al-Kheir in the South Hebron Hills was detained by settlers. These incidents happen week in and week out to activists, media and even foreign officials all across the West Bank.
And this is where my moral outrage leads me to demand legal justice.
You won’t find “ethnic cleansing” as a legal term in international law. But you will find Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention which prohibits individual or mass forcible transfers of protected persons from occupied territory, except in narrowly defined circumstances.
The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court defines the deportation or forcible transfer of a population as a crime against humanity when carried out as part of a widespread or systematic attack against a civilian population.
Those who directly attack Palestinians and drive them from their homes should be investigated and, where the evidence supports it, prosecuted. Those who organize, finance or facilitate these efforts should be held accountable. The US and other nations must impose sanctions. And officials who use their authority to enable or celebrate policies of displacement should not be beyond the reach of the law.
Israel has the first responsibility to investigate crimes committed by its citizens and officials. But if it will not, international law exists because these are crimes too serious to be left to a system unwilling to hold its own people accountable.
Responsibility rests not only with the courts. It rests with all of global Jewry.
We need to look. We need to go there. We need to listen to the Palestinians who lived in these communities and to the Israeli and Jewish activists who stand beside them, sometimes literally putting their own bodies between vulnerable families and armed settlers.
I am deeply connected to Israel and to the Jewish people. I want Israel to be free, safe and democratic. I want it to be a Jewish homeland worthy of all the effort our forebears made to bring our people there and to build a remarkable country.
That is why we must face up to what is happening in our name. Our obligation in support of Israel is not to defend every act of the government. And at this point, frankly, it’s not even enough to condemn individual acts of violence.
We need to contend with – and ultimately defeat – the goal of those driving this whole enterprise: the expulsion of another people from their land so that they can take it for themselves.
If we truly care about Israel, if we truly care about Jewish values, then we must take this fight on and help Israel live up to the vision of its founders and the values of our people.
Who said all Jews are Zionists? Nobody. You are making a point about something nobody said. American journalists are assaulted. A Palestinian WOMAN was beaten unconscious and you are on here talking about more ways we need to defend Jewish people. Like… what video are you watching? Why is that your focus
They bomb journalists and hospitals, murder schoolgirls and babies, beat, rape, and torture helpless prisoners whose only "crime"is not being "white." Fame and decency are no defense: just ask Greta Thunberg. They are protected by AIPAC-bribed politicians and bought-up media. Israel ceased to be a country and is a racketeer-incluenced and corrupt organization, like the USA.
Their enabler Drumpf once said he could shoot someone at random on Fifth Avenue and still people would vote for him. Netanyahu is his most fervent disciple.
We simply aren't doing enough to stop these monsters.
Our tax dollars are paying for these crimes.
100%
both abroad and here in the US
The search for justice never ends! The Hind Rajab Foundation is tracking down Israeli criminals, and bringing them to justic. This is vital in the effort to hold Israel accountable. May they also turn their sights on the criminal leaders of the countries of the west who are co-perpetrators of these crimes.
Find out what they’re doing here:
https://www.hindrajabfoundation.org
The least we can do is donate to help them:
Support the Hind Rajab Foundation
https://donate.stripe.com/cN228hbY5g7jaM84gg
Indeed. I love them.
Horrible and evil
Absolutely
Being appalled or concerned is not good enough!
It’s not good enough at all
No one was arrested. Netanyahu, Putin, and Trump are all lawless war criminals and murderers.
Journalists are always the first casualties of totalitarian régimes..
SHAUN, I’M SOOO ASHAMED AS AN AMERICAN THAT THE USA BACKS THIS VIOLENCE TOWARD INNOCENT PPL. 😡💔😢😢💔😡
Same
This is a good reason to become a tax resister
Just like the leopards are eating faces, the wagons are dragging 🫏
Calling them "Israeli Terrorists" is repetitive. Both words mean the exact same thing.
Re: the NBC crew. Here'sw Jeremy Ben-Ami, from J Street, a Jewish organization.
Last week, I stood in the abandoned Palestinian community of al-Mu’arrajat in the Jordan Valley on the occupied West Bank. And I cried.
For years, this community endured attacks by Israeli settlers – homes and property damaged, livestock stolen, families harassed and beaten, access to grazing land increasingly restricted. Family after family gave up and left.
The settlers succeeded.
The community I visited Sunday – once 600 strong – was now totally abandoned. I visited the remains of the community’s mosque. Its tile floor ripped apart. I viewed the nearby school. Destroyed. The terrorists had reduced the homes to piles of metal and rubble.
And I thought about my own family and their experience in Czarist Russia before my great-grandparents made aliyah to Palestine in the 1880s. Like so many Jews of their generation, they came from communities in Eastern Europe that were regularly attacked, terrorized and ultimately emptied by people who believed that Jews did not belong.
Standing amid the ruins of al-Mu’arrajat, I could not escape the question: How can it be that Jews, who know so intimately what it means to be driven from our homes, now stand by while other Jews do this very thing to another people? How can Israelis and Jews around the world remain so quiet?
I spent the day driving through the Jordan Valley and then north toward Nablus and Jenin, an area of the West Bank I hadn’t visited in several years. I was shocked. The settlement enterprise has advanced with astonishing speed. In the enormous stretch of land between just north of Jericho and the area around Duma, Israeli outposts and farms now spread across all the hillsides and valleys.
For the past few generations, Palestinian families – many of them herders and subsistence farmers – lived here, raised sheep, cultivated fields and tended olive trees. Many had been forced from or fled Green Line Israel in 1948. Now, community after community is gone. Hundreds of square miles where thousands of Palestinians had lived and worked.
And, in places like Ras Ein al ‘Auja and al-Mu’arrajat, each recently home to many hundreds of Palestinians, there is no one left. Homes and animal pens have been abandoned or destroyed. The schools are empty. The land where Palestinians once grazed their sheep taken over by Israeli settler farms and outposts.
My guide described it in words I found almost unbearable to repeat: the area has been “cleansed” of Palestinians.
And then there are the olive trees.
I saw grove after grove that had been destroyed on the drive out of the Jordan Valley. Uprooted trees lay on their sides like bodies strewn on a battlefield.
It’s one thing to read about settler terror or to hear cold statistics. It’s something else altogether to drive through the area and realize that the people who lived there are simply gone.
This is not a case of Palestinians caught up in a military operation against Hamas. There was no military objective here. These were not fighters. They were families – herders, farmers, children – living in some of the poorest communities in the West Bank.
Whatever arguments one may make about Israel’s security, none of them explains why these people had to leave their homes. There is only one goal: to forcibly displace Palestinians, to push them into confined urban areas and ultimately to remove them from the land.
When NBC went to the area on Saturday to try to report this story, their crew was beaten. Also on Saturday, a British activist providing ‘protective presence’ in the Palestinian town of Umm al-Kheir in the South Hebron Hills was detained by settlers. These incidents happen week in and week out to activists, media and even foreign officials all across the West Bank.
And this is where my moral outrage leads me to demand legal justice.
You won’t find “ethnic cleansing” as a legal term in international law. But you will find Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention which prohibits individual or mass forcible transfers of protected persons from occupied territory, except in narrowly defined circumstances.
The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court defines the deportation or forcible transfer of a population as a crime against humanity when carried out as part of a widespread or systematic attack against a civilian population.
Those who directly attack Palestinians and drive them from their homes should be investigated and, where the evidence supports it, prosecuted. Those who organize, finance or facilitate these efforts should be held accountable. The US and other nations must impose sanctions. And officials who use their authority to enable or celebrate policies of displacement should not be beyond the reach of the law.
Israel has the first responsibility to investigate crimes committed by its citizens and officials. But if it will not, international law exists because these are crimes too serious to be left to a system unwilling to hold its own people accountable.
Responsibility rests not only with the courts. It rests with all of global Jewry.
We need to look. We need to go there. We need to listen to the Palestinians who lived in these communities and to the Israeli and Jewish activists who stand beside them, sometimes literally putting their own bodies between vulnerable families and armed settlers.
I am deeply connected to Israel and to the Jewish people. I want Israel to be free, safe and democratic. I want it to be a Jewish homeland worthy of all the effort our forebears made to bring our people there and to build a remarkable country.
That is why we must face up to what is happening in our name. Our obligation in support of Israel is not to defend every act of the government. And at this point, frankly, it’s not even enough to condemn individual acts of violence.
We need to contend with – and ultimately defeat – the goal of those driving this whole enterprise: the expulsion of another people from their land so that they can take it for themselves.
If we truly care about Israel, if we truly care about Jewish values, then we must take this fight on and help Israel live up to the vision of its founders and the values of our people.
Stop conflating Israeli zionists with Jews. These are the same monsters that we see here in ICE. All Jews are not Zionists.
Who said all Jews are Zionists? Nobody. You are making a point about something nobody said. American journalists are assaulted. A Palestinian WOMAN was beaten unconscious and you are on here talking about more ways we need to defend Jewish people. Like… what video are you watching? Why is that your focus
They bomb journalists and hospitals, murder schoolgirls and babies, beat, rape, and torture helpless prisoners whose only "crime"is not being "white." Fame and decency are no defense: just ask Greta Thunberg. They are protected by AIPAC-bribed politicians and bought-up media. Israel ceased to be a country and is a racketeer-incluenced and corrupt organization, like the USA.
In the photos, he is still alive. Did he die later? I share your article & pictures daily & I will probably be asked to answer the question.
Their enabler Drumpf once said he could shoot someone at random on Fifth Avenue and still people would vote for him. Netanyahu is his most fervent disciple.