Jonathan Cook The National. August 17 2010

Photo: Palestinian refugees displaced via Israel in 1948.

History may be written by the victors, as Winston Churchill is said to have observed, but the opening up of archives can threaten a nation every bit as much as the unearthing of mass graves.

That danger explains a decision quietly taken last month by Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, to extend by an additional 20 years the country’s 50-year rule for the release of sensitive documents.

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Jerrold Kessel & Pierre Klochendler, Inter Press Service 19 August 2010.

Photo: Destroyed family home is Jeruslame

Jerusalem – On the eve of the start of Ramadan last week, Israeli police demolished the Bedouin village of al-Araqib in the Negev desert. It was the third time within two weeks that the village had been razed.

Unfazed, the Bedouin villagers immediately began rebuilding.

“We have already put back up some twenty of our huts, and we’re putting up more every day — despite the fast,” village leader Sheikh Sayyah Abu Drim told IPS when reached by telephone a week after the last police action.

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statement Boycott Israeli Apartheid Coalition, Tuesday, August 24 2010

Photo Palestinians flag on fishing boats in the Gaza Strip.

Vancouver – Locally-based activists, called out by the Boycott Israeli Apartheid Coalition (BIAC), are mounting a picket line at the Port of Vancouver’s Delta Port facility at Roberts Bank, south of Vancouver, as part of a mounting international campaign to put pressure on the government of Israel.

The Israeli ship Djibouti, owned by Zim, one of the ten largest shipping companies in the world, is scheduled to land at Delta Port at 7:00 a.m. this morning.

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BADIL statement August 2010

Photo Remains of Palestinian home destroyed via Israeli demolition policies.

While President Barack Obama pressures Palestinians to re-engage in direct peace talks, and Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu loftily counsels President Mahmoud Abbas not to miss the opportunity, recent demolitions within the Occupied Palestinian Territory and Israel continue unabated and unaddressed.

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Hicham Safieddine, Electronic Intifada 18 August 2010

Photo Massel Cassel A weapon is positioned at a UN base in southern Lebanon.

The international coverage of border clashes between Lebanese and Israeli military forces earlier this month may have suggested the confrontation was a mere squabble over cutting a tree that went awry in a “trigger-happy” and “conflict-prone” region. Less than a week later, one of several recent speeches by Hizballah’s Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah managed to get brief global media coverage. He presented visual and audio material suggesting that Israel may have assassinated former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri in February 2005.

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Open letter, 18 August 2010

Photo: Protesters hold Palestinian and Turkish flags during a rally to denouncing Israel’s attack on an aid ship bound for Gaza in New York, Tuesday, June 1, 2010.

The following open letter to Recep Tayyip Erdogan, prime minister of Turkey, was issued by various Palestinian organizations on 17 August 2010:

Dear Mr. Prime Minister We are writing to you from under a brutal, hermetic siege now entering its fourth year to express our outrage against the nomination of the notorious former president of Colombia, Alvaro Uribe Velez to the Panel of Inquiry into the 31 May 2010 Israeli brutal attack on the humanitarian flotilla to Gaza.

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Jerrold Kessel & Pierre Klochendler, Electronic Intifada 17 August 2010

Photo: Luay Sababa Palestinians try to cross into Jerusalem through an Israeli checkpoint in the West Bank city of Bethlehem during the first Friday of the holy month of Ramadan, 13 August 2010.

Hirbet Deir, occupied West Bank – For Muhammad al-Baradiyeh, 38, the Muslim holy month of Ramadan is always a blessing.

In fact, every day of the month-and-a-half prior to Ramadan has been good for Muhammad. Thanks to a permit granted by the Israeli authorities, he’s been able to work inside Israel and save extra money he’ll need for the holiday.

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guardian.co.uk by Ben White, Tuesday 17 August 2010

Photo Beduoin Camp, Dead Sea Valley, Jordan.

The Jordan Valley, stretching all the way down the West Bank’s eastern side, is a microcosm of Israel’s discriminatory policies of colonisation and displacement. For 40 years, settlements have been established, military no-go areas declared, and Palestinians’ freedom of movement restricted. There are now 27 colonies in the Jordan Valley – most of them had been established by the late 1970s under Labour governments. There are also nine “unauthorised” outposts. In the 1990s, the size of territory afforded to the settlements increased by 45%.

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August 2010 by Jeff Halper Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions

Photo Palestinian home under Israeli demolition.

On the day before the Muslim holy month of Ramadan began, at 2:30 in the morning, workers sent by the Israeli authorities, protected by dozens of police, destroyed the tombstones in the last portion of the Mamilla cemetery, an historic Muslim burial ground with graves going back to the 7th Century, hitherto left untouched. The government of Israel has always been fully cognizant of the sanctity and historic significance of the site. Already in 1948, when control of the cemetery reverted to Israel, the Israeli Religious Affairs Ministry recognized Mamilla “to be one of the most prominent Muslim cemeteries, where seventy thousand Muslim warriors of [Saladin’s] armies are interred along with many Muslim scholars. Israel will always know to protect and respect this site.”

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TruthDig by Chris Hedges, Aug 16, 2010

Photo: Palestinian child standing close to Israeli occupation soldiers in West Bank.

Time is running out for Israel. And the Israeli government knows it. The Jewish Diaspora, especially the young, has a waning emotional and ideological investment in Israel. The demographic boom means that Palestinians in Israel and the occupied territories will soon outnumber Jews. And Israel’s increasing status as a pariah nation means that informal and eventually formal state sanctions against the country are probably inevitable.

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