issue no 83

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Issue No : 83 24th February, 2014

Palestinian Cultural Organization Malaysia | 1


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FEATURED STORY

ARTICLE

The right of return is for individuals to decide, not for Abbas to concede

Report: Egypt closed the Rafah crossing for 96 days in 6 months

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Kerry: Israel’s security is top of my priorities

He hinted that settlers might not be evacuated as part of dealIsrael exploits peace talks to demolish more Palestinian homes in Jerusalem

Economic boycott costs Israel8 billion dollars

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CONTENTS

News of Palestine

Articles & Analyses

The right of return is for individuals to decide, not for Abbas to concede 10

Kerry: Israel’s security is top of my priorities 4

Israel exploits peace talks to demolish more Palestinian homes in Jerusalem 5

Economic boycott costs Israel 8 billion dollars 6

Organization: Over 200 Palestinians in administrative detention 7

9 Palestinian refugees proclaimed dead in Syria 8

Report: Egypt closed the Rafah crossing for 96 days in 6 months 9

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News of Palestine

20/2/2014

Israeli’s security interests are a top priority when considering a plan for lasting peace between Palestinians and Israelis, US Secretary of State John Kerry said.In an interview broadcast on Israel’s Channel 2 TV on Thursday, Kerry said he was committed to achieving his task to the fullest. “Israel’s security interests are top of my priorities and one of the most important issues for the United States.”Kerry also said that Israel will not sign any deal with the Palestinians unless its security concerns are put to rest, and hinted that evacuation of Israeli settlers from the West Bank may not be necessary.Israeli media praised Kerry’s remarks and described them as important.Kerry brushed aside criticism from senior Israeli officials including Economy Minister Naftali Bennett and Defence Minister Moshe Ya’alon who called Kerry an “obsessed Christian” saying “I do not want to squabble like children. I want to focus on the important issues. People who know me know that when I focus on something I do all I can to achieve it.”

Source: Agencies

Kerry: Israel’s security is top of my prioritiesHe hinted that settlers might not be evacuated as part of deal

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Israel exploits peace talks to demolish more Palestinian homes in Jerusalem

20/2/2014

The number of Palestinian homes demolished by Israeli occupation forces in Jerusalem since the be-ginning of this year has increase sharply as no political pressure is exerted on the Israeli govern-ment, an Israeli newspaper said on Thursday.According to data from the Jeru-salem Municipality, Haaretz said, 12 Palestinian homes were de-molished since the beginning of this year, most of them were in-habited compared with 25 homes demolished in 2013, and most of those were uninhabited.Israeli officials put the increase down to the absence of political pressure put on the Israeli govern-ment since the beginning of the on-

going negotiations between the Palestinian Authority (PA) and Israel.The officials, according to Haaretz, said this opened the door wide for the strong return of the homes’ demolition policy. They also said that the current calmness in occupied Jerusalem facilitates car-rying out demolition activities.Haaretz reported an account of a Jerusalemite family from the Sil-wan neighbourhood. M, a Jewish woman married to Mohamed Swahar, said Israeli police suddenly broke into her house with dogs and scared her children.They did not give the family time to dress the children or to collect any personal belongings. This was at 6am.According to the newspaper, the police beat the father because he was trying to reach his children to placate their fears.The family’s house was built 18-year-old ago and the family have tried to obtain necessary building permits, to no avail.M said, “I never imagined that one day I will be treated in this in-humane way,” she said.The family is now living in a tent donated to them by the Interna-tional Red Cross. Source: MEMO

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21/2/2014

Anadolu news agency quoted economic experts as saying that economic boycott would cost Israel U.S. $ 8 billion, in addition to the dismissal of more than 10 thousand Israeli workers.

The EU, which is considered Israel’s second largest market for exports (32% of the export market), has officially started academic, commercial and in-vestment boycott to Israel. Eu-ropean countries have started since the beginning of 2014 banning Israeli settlements’ products, according to John Gatt-Rutter, the EU represen-tative to the West Bank.

Three European companies bidding to build private sea-ports in Haifa and Ashdod dropped out this week of the Israeli government’s tender due to economic boycott. For its part Deutsche Bank, Ger-many’s largest bank, declared its boycott to Israel’s Hapoalim Bank.

Gracie Barhoum, specialist in Israeli economy, stated that European boycott to Israel is still individual cases carried out by EU companies and in-stitutions, but it has achieved an important part of its aims, and caused a state of panic within the Israeli government.

Gracie quoted Israel’s Finance

Minister Yair Lapid as saying that the boycott campaign could cost the economy nearly $8 billion annually, in addition to the dis-missal of more than 10 thousand Israeli workers.

Israeli Export Institute has ex-pressed fears earlier this year of declining GDP and Israeli exports to the EU countries that represent 32% of Israel’s export market.

For his part, Antoine Shalhat, a Palestinian political analyst at the Palestinian Center for Israeli Studies, said the Israeli will wit-ness larger declines in gross do-mestic product and labor market.

According to Gracie and Shal-hat, Israeli government will start dismissing Arab workers as a re-sponse to EU decision to boycott Israeli exports.

According to Israel Central Bu-reau of Statistics, approximately

25% of Palestinians living in the OPT are unemployed. Anadolu news agency quoted economic experts as saying that economic boycott would cost Israel U.S. $ 8 billion, in addition to the dismissal of more than 10 thou-sand Israeli workers.

The EU, which is considered Israel’s second largest market for exports (32% of the export market), has officially started academic, commercial and in-vestment boycott to Israel. Eu-ropean countries have started since the beginning of 2014 banning Israeli settlements’ products, according to John Gatt-Rutter, the EU representa-tive to the West Bank.

Three European companies bid-ding to build private seaports in Haifa and Ashdod dropped out this week of the Israeli govern-ment’s tender due to economic

Economic boycott costs Israel8 billion dollars

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Organization: Over 200 Palestin-ians in administrative detention

20/2/2014

The number of Palestinian administrative detainees in Israe-li jails recently passed 200, a human rights organization said Tuesday. Usama Maqbol, a lawyer from the Palestinian human rights group Solidarity Foundation for Human Rights, said that the rise in the number of administrative detainees is the result of an ongoing campaign of daily arrests by Israeli forces.He said that this campaign is targeting recently freed prisoners and leaders of Palestinian political groups, highlighting that 90 percent of administrative detainees are from those two catego-ries, he added. Israeli human rights groups B’tselem reported in October that 140 Palestinians were being kept in administrative detention in Israeli prisons, down from a high of nearly 1,000 in 2002. The new numbers, however, suggest a renewed push on the part of Israeli occupation authorities.Maqbol explained that the orders for administrative detention come from the regional military commanders of each region according to undisclosed information, and that the orders do not rely on evidence or confessions. The information is even kept secret from defense lawyers, he added.Administrative detention refers to the tactic of keeping a pris-oner without charge or trial for extended periods of time, often due to “security” concerns.Israel routinely uses this tactic on detained Palestinians, even though international law stipulates it only be used in excep-tional circumstances. Source: Ma’an

boycott. For its part Deutsche Bank, Germany’s largest bank, declared its boycott to Israel’s Hapoalim Bank.

Gracie Barhoum, specialist in Is-raeli economy, stated that Euro-pean boycott to Israel is still in-dividual cases carried out by EU companies and institutions, but it has achieved an important part of its aims, and caused a state of panic within the Israeli govern-ment.

Gracie quoted Israel’s Finance Minister Yair Lapid as saying that the boycott campaign could cost the economy nearly $8 billion annually, in addition to the dis-missal of more than 10 thousand Israeli workers.

Israeli Export Institute has ex-pressed fears earlier this year of declining GDP and Israeli exports to the EU countries that represent 32% of Israel’s export market.

For his part, Antoine Shalhat, a Palestinian political analyst at the Palestinian Center for Israeli Studies, said the Israeli will wit-ness larger declines in gross do-mestic product and labor market.

According to Gracie and Shal-hat, Israeli government will start dismissing Arab workers as a re-sponse to EU decision to boycott Israeli exports.

According to Israel Central Bu-reau of Statistics, approximately 25% of Palestinians living in the OPT are unemployed.

Source: PIC

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9 Palestinian refugees proclaimed dead in Syria

23/2/2014

Nine Palestinian refugees died in Syria during the past week, in-cluding seven who were starved to death due to the continued siege imposed on Yarmouk Refugee camp southern Damascus.The other two victims died un-der torture in Syrian prisons after their kidnapping according to the sources.On the other hand, a mine detec-tion team entered Yarmouk refu-gee camp on Monday as part of the agreement to neutralize the camp, the Action Group added.In a related context, the Euro-mid Observer for Human Rights said that the number of Palestinian asy-lum seekers fleeing from Syria to Europe has noticeably increased during the past few weeks due to the ongoing clashes and siege im-

New waves of Palestinian refugees to Europe

posed on Palestinian refugees camps in Syria.The Euro-mid Observer warned of new sinking accidents wait-ing to happen similar to the sinking of migrant boats carry-ing refugees and “illegal immi-grants” during the fourth quar-ter of 2013.The Geneva-based observer said in its statement issued on Tuesday that hundreds of Pal-estinian and Syrian refugees have reached Europe via Italy during the past three weeks in an attempt to have access to other European cities looking for better conditions for asylum seekers.The European human rights center pointed out that the refu-gees have been often smuggled

in rickety wooden vessels in a very dangerous journey amid volatile atmosphere in the Mediterranean Sea, calling on European countries particu-larly Italy, Malta and Greece to take necessary precautions to prevent such disasters.The Euro-mid Observer’s statement called on European Union to “provide safe routes for refugees fleeing from the bloody conflict in Syria.”The statement stressed the need for close coordination and cooperation between EU countries and the office of the United Nations High Com-missioner for Refugees (UN-HCR) to facilitate refugees’ access to Europe.

Source: Agencies

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Report: Egypt closed the Rafah crossing for 96 days in 6 months

19/2/2014

Palestinian official statistics showed that in the past year 2013, the Rafah border crossing was closed for 101 days, while the number of its closure days reached 96 since June 30.Annual Statistics, issued by General Administration of crossings at the Ministry of Interior and National Se-curity in Gaza, showed that the number of departures via the Rafah crossing in 2013 has only reached 152 thousand and 278 passengers, which is a small number compared to the year 2012, due the repeated closure of the crossing, especially during the second half of the year.Rafah crossing has been partially opened since the first of last July after the Egyptian military coup.Meanwhile, thousands of people have been trapped in the Gaza Strip because of the continued closure of the crossing, which has caused a real humanitarian catas-trophe.

Source: PIC

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Articles & Analyses

The right of return is for individuals to decide, not for Abbas to concede

By: Ibrahim Hewitt

Yet again, we hear that Presi-dent Mahmoud Abbas has more or less conceded the lawful right for Palestinian refugees to return to their homeland. Last year he told Israelis that although he would like to visit his birthplace in Safed, which is now in Israel, he did not ex-pect to live there. Now he has told a group of Israelis visiting Ramallah that he has no wish to “drown the Jewish charac-ter” of Israel with returning refugees. This is an astonishing thing for him to say because its implications are so serious.For a start, let us make it clear that the right to return is an in-dividual right so it is not within the Palestinian Authority lead-er’s power to concede it on be-half of anyone other than him-self. It may be that he was well aware of that when he signalled his own reluctance to return to Safed but his latest statement is worrying for the millions of refugees festering in squalid UN-run camps around the re-gion.One journalist said that Ab-bas’s comments “seemed to signal a significant concession on the so-called right of return - the Palestinian demand that several million descendants of 700,000 refugees expelled dur-ing Israel’s 1948 war of inde-

pendence be allowed to go back to their homes.” For the benefit of the Daily Telegraph’s Robert Tait, it should be remembered that the right to return is not a “Palestin-ian demand”, it is enshrined in UN General Assembly Resolution 194 dated 11 December 1948: “…refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date…” Israel’s membership of the UN was conditional inter alia on it implementing this resolu-tion, something which, of course, it has never done.Israel’s unilateral “Declaration of Independence” of 1948 is clear that it was established as “the Jewish State in Palestine”. Among other things, the founding docu-ment insists that Israel “will loy-ally uphold the principles of the United Nations Charter”, among which is a commitment to imple-

ment resolutions; Israel has ignored more UN resolutions than it has ever implemented.This “Jewish State” was rec-ognised implicitly by the Pal-estine Liberation Organisation (PLO) in 1993 when the former “terrorist” group came in from the cold and recognised Israel’s “right to exist”. That being the case, it must be asked why Benjamin Netanyahu is insist-ing on Palestinian recognition of the “Jewish character” of Israel as a pre-condition for a peace agreement.Experience shows that Israel is an expansionist state; it has never declared its borders and has grown exponentially ever since it was created. Indeed, even by then it had morphed itself from the “national home for the Jewish people” in Pales-tine mentioned in the infamous Balfour Declaration of 1917 to

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a “Jewish State” by 1948. The land it occupied by the 1949 armistice was greater in area than the allocation of the UN Partition Plan of 1947; this was increased yet again when Israel launched the Six-Day War in 1967 and occupied all of his-toric Palestine. While not occu-pying the Gaza Strip physically since 2005, Israel controls its borders, territorial waters and air space; it is an occupation legally and in all but name. As the “negotiations” (a euphe-mism for Palestinian conces-sions) drag on for 20 years and counting, Israel creates more facts on the ground, grabbing ever more land for its illegal settlements, settler-only roads, military zones and “nature re-serves”. I think that it is fair to say that Israel’s leaders have no intention whatsoever of giving up any land upon which Jews are now living as they push to create “Eretz Israel”, the Greater Israel that is Zionism’s dream.Recognition of the “Jewish character” of Israel will give it the green light to complete the ethnic cleansing started in 1948, with the 20 per cent of non-Jewish Israeli citizens be-ing “transferred” to the rump statelet of Palestine that may or may not come into being; ideally, from a Zionist perspec-tive, the transfer won’t end there and life will be made so miserable for Palestinians in the West Bank that they will cross into what many Israelis already call the state of Pales-tine; the rest of us know this as the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. This is the “alternative homeland” scenario dreaded

nature. Fear of being an obvious apartheid state with a democratic façade is genuine; Jewish stu-dents in America are already be-ing coached about how to defend the case for declaring a Jewish state while basically disenfran-chising 1-in-5 of Israel’s citizens and implementing a raft of dis-criminatory laws.That is why Mahmoud Abbas needs to wake from his stupor and understand that while he is free to give up his own right of return, he has no right whatsoever to con-cede that right for all Palestinian refugees. Israel and its Western backers will, of course, continue to ignore the UN resolutions in any case and so won’t mind that the legal niceties are chewed up and spat out as long as what Israel wants, Israel gets. But that will never produce a just and lasting peace in the region. Maybe that doesn’t bother the military-indus-trial complex upon which Israel is so reliant; it certainly won’t bother the neoconservatives run-ning America. Their plans for the Middle East don’t include a state of Palestine; they want to see US-Israeli hegemony at any cost.More than anything else, Abbas’s ill-advised statements demon-strate the ridiculous nature of the whole peace process, which is producing neither peace nor much of a process at the moment. The one-state solution is being talked about in all sorts of circles these days, as more and more people realise and accept that two-states are a non-starter. If the message can get through to Mahmoud Ab-bas and his cronies in Ramallah on board the Palestinian Author-ity gravy train, maybe peace will have a chance after all.

Jewish students in America are already being coached about how to defend the case for declaring a Jewish state while basically disenfranchising 1-in-5 of Israel’s citizens and implementing a raft of discriminatory laws.

““by Palestinians who have no wish to leave their historic homeland.Israel will cite “security” con-cerns in order to get its way, though, and willing dupes like US Secretary of State John Kerry, ever-ready to do the pro-Israel Lobby’s bidding, will put pres-sure on the Palestinian Authority to concede even more than it has already. This includes agreement to a strong Israeli military pres-ence in the Jordan Valley, so that an “independent state of Pales-

tine” will be nothing of the sort; it will have an army of occupation on its territory from Day One.Once Israel is cleared of the “de-mographic time-bomb” of its Pal-estinian citizens it can claim, with hand on heart, that it is indeed both Jewish and democratic in

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issue no 83

Documents

palestinian refugees

number of palestinian

israels security interests

israeli media

israeli newspaper

evacuation of israeli

security concerns

senior israeli ofcials