Portside

"...Palestinian children in particular are in dire need of “safe spaces.” Since Palestinian homes and neighborhoods are subjected to frequent night raids, schools are usually one of the sole places where children are confident in their safety"

Currently, an estimated 75 Palestinian children from East Jerusalem are being held in Israeli prisons and detention centers.

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In many ways the Security Council vote is Obama’s last hurrah, the swan song not only of his presidency but of unequivocal American support for a two-state solution and opposition to Jewish settlements.

In testimony at his manslaughter trial for summarily executing a disarmed Palestinian attacker, Elor Azaria, an Israeli Defense Force sergeant, is openly describing the violence, de-humanization, hatred, and settler domination that define the Israeli occupation. But make no mistake; he’s not breaking his silence, he is unrepentant. This is the trial of a soldier who committed a crime, and of an entire system mobilized to brand him as an “unrepresentative” lone gunman.

Pulitzer Prize Winning Author Michael Chabon speaks with The Forward’s Naomi Zeveloff at the end of his weeklong tour of the Israeli Occupied West Bank earlier this month. Chabon was a member of a literary tour organized by the Israeli group, Breaking the Silence, which collects and distributes testimonies of Israeli soldiers who served in the occupied territories. He termed the occupation “the most grievous injustice I have ever seen in my life.”

There is only one group in Israel that is strong enough, cohesive enough, determined enough to take over the state: the settlers. The process is already well advanced. The new police chief is a kippah-wearing former settler. So is the chief of the Secret Service. More and more of the army and police officers are settlers. In the government and in the Knesset, the settlers wield a huge influence.

The rapidly deteriorating health of Mohammed Allaan, a Palestinian political prisoner on hunger strike has pit Israeli legislators, who recently enacted a law mandating that he be force-fed, against physicians, who refuse to comply on grounds that doing so would be tantamount to "torture," and violate their Hippocratic Oath. Hunger strikes have become a common form of protest by Palestinians held indefinitely without charge in Israeli administrative detention.

According to the United Nations Report on Children and Armed Conflict, the number of Palestinian children killed in the occupied territories in 2014 was the third highest of all situations monitored by the UN, following only Afghanistan and Iraq. But in response to diplomatic pressure from the U.S., UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon made the last-minute decision to leave Israel off the UN’s annual list of states and groups that gravely violate children’s rights.

When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu signed the coalition agreement with the right-wing extremist settler party, Jewish Home, he also agreed to appoint Rabbi Eli Ben-Dahan as Israel’s deputy defense minister, responsible for the army’s “Civil Administration” of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. Member of the Knesset (MK) Rabbi Ben-Dahan has publicly declared Palestinians “are not human.”