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israel israel

JERUSALEM -- Israel advanced plans for the construction of more than 4,000 settler homes in the occupied West Bank on Thursday, a rights group said, a day after the military demolished homes in an area where hundreds of Palestinians face the threat of expulsion.

It was a jolting illustration of Israel's policies in the territory it has occupied for nearly 55 years. Critics, including three major human rights groups, say those policies amount to apartheid, a charge Israel rejects as an attack on its very legitimacy.

Hagit Ofran, an expert at the anti-settlement watchdog group Peace Now, told The Associated Press that a military planning body approved 4,427 housing units at a meeting on Thursday that she attended. “The state of Israel took another stumble toward the abyss and further deepened the occupation,” she tweeted.

Spokespeople for the Israeli government and the military body in charge of civilian affairs in the West Bank did not respond to requests for comment.

It's the biggest advancement of settlement projects since the Biden administration took office. The White House opposes settlement construction and views it as an obstacle to any eventual peace agreement with the Palestinians.

There was no immediate comment from the administration on Thursday's decision. But last week, when the first reports emerged of the impending settlement approval, State Department spokeswoman Jalina Porter reiterated that the U.S. “strongly” opposes settlement expansion.

U.N. Mideast envoy Tor Wennesland condemned the announcement, calling the settlements a “major obstacle to peace” that undermines hopes for a two-state solution.

“Continued settlement expansion further entrenches the occupation, encroaches upon Palestinian land and natural resources, and hampers the free movement of the Palestinian population,” he said.

Most of the international community considers the settlements illegal and supports a two-state solution to the conflict. But neither the United States nor other world powers have given Israel — the stronger party — any incentive to accede to such an arrangement. Israel says Palestinian leaders have rejected proposals by previous governments that would have given them a state.

Israel views the West Bank as the biblical and historical heartland of the Jewish people. Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, who once led the main settler organization, is opposed to Palestinian statehood, but his government has taken steps to improve economic conditions for Palestinians.

Israel approved some 3,000 settler homes in October, brushing aside a rebuke from the U.S., its closest ally. Peace talks with the Palestinians broke down more than a decade ago, in part because of Israel's continuing construction on lands the Palestinians want for a future state.

On Wednesday, Israeli troops demolished at least 18 buildings and structures in the West Bank following a Supreme Court decision that would force at least 1,000 Palestinians out of an area Israel designated as a firing zone in the early 1980s.

B’Tselem, another Israeli rights group, said 12 residential buildings were among the structures that were demolished, in villages in the arid hills south of the West Bank city of Hebron.

Residents of the Masafer Yatta say they have been living in the region, herding animals and practicing traditional desert agriculture for decades, long before Israel captured the West Bank in the 1967 war. The Supreme Court sided with the military, which says there were no permanent structures in the area before it was designated a training zone.

“What’s happening now is ethnic cleansing," Sami Huraini, an activist and a resident of the area, told the AP. “They are trying to expel the people from this land, saying they never lived here permanently, which is a lie.”

He said residents of the area where the demolitions were carried out are determined to remain there. “The people are staying on their land and have already started to rebuild," he said.

The military declined to comment on the demolitions.

Neighboring Jordan, which made peace with Israel in 1994, condemned both the settlement expansion and the forced displacement of Palestinians, calling it a “a flagrant violation of international law.”

Israel has built more than 130 settlements across the West Bank that today are home to nearly 500,000 settlers, who have Israeli citizenship. Nearly 3 million Palestinians live in the territory under open-ended Israeli military rule. The Palestinian Authority exercises limited self-rule over parts of the West Bank and cooperates with Israel on security matters.

The Palestinians want the West Bank to form the main part of a future state, along with east Jerusalem and Gaza, all territories seized by Israel in the 1967 war. Israel annexed east Jerusalem in a move not recognized internationally, and Israel and Egypt imposed a blockade on Gaza after the Palestinian militant group Hamas seized power there in 2007.

The Palestinians view the expansion of settlements in the West Bank and annexed east Jerusalem as a major obstacle to any future peace deal because they reduce and divide up the land on which such a state would be established.

———

Associated Press writer Ilan Ben Zion in Jerusalem contributed.

https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/israel-levels-palestinian-homes-ahead-settlement-approval-84663662

goose-stepping with the USA….

By Salman Rafi Sheikh

Even though Israel had previously refused to oppose or condemn Russia’s special military operation in Ukraine– which was provoked by the West’s irresponsible expansionism associated with NATO’s enlargement plans – the situation has changed in the last few days. Israel has clearly altered its previous status, as Jerusalem not only criticised Moscow’s military operation, but also signalled its willingness to assist NATO’s supply of advanced weapons systems to Ukraine against Russia. Foreign Minister Yair Lapid recently “condemned” in a tweet Russia’s military operation in Ukraine. Moscow responded by pointing to Israel’s position as “a poorly camouflaged attempt to take advantage of the situation in Ukraine to distract the international community’s attention from one of the oldest unsettled conflicts – the Palestinian-Israeli one.” Russia has also warned Jerusalem against providing any weapons systems to Kyiv, stating that Moscow will respond “accordingly.” What happened that has brought both countries to the point of a diplomatic spat that could very well escalate into an Israeli war effort against Russia?

The immediate background to Jerusalem’s change of heart is a recent phone call between Biden and Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett. Apparently, the Biden administration has offered Jerusalem something highly valuable that it cannot refuse. As details show, Washington has decided to ditch Tehran, yet again, to appease Jerusalem and enlist its support against Russia. The evidence for this has been supplied by none other than Bennet himself.

As the Israeli readout of the Biden-Bennet call shows, Bennet received an assurance from Biden that Iran’s Revolutionary Guards will continue to be listed as a ‘terrorist’ outfit – an assurance that could only be a prelude to the eventual failure of the ongoing US-Tehran talks to revive the 2015 nuclear-deal: Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). According to the readout, Bennet said that,

“I am sure that President Biden, who is a true friend of Israel and cares about its security, will not allow the IRGC to be removed from the list of terrorist organizations. Israel has clarified its position on the issue: The IRGC is the largest terrorist organization in the world.”

Previously, the US had shown its willingness to drop the IRGC’s status as a terrorist organisation to facilitate the ongoing process and elicit some guarantees from Iran about its regional activity. Now that Washington has decided to appease Israel to strengthen its anti-Russia bloc, Iran had once again become a casualty of Washington’s expansionist geopolitics.

Israeli officials are already confident that the US will soon announce the failure of talks with Iran. According to an unnamed Israeli official quoted in Israeli media, “The possibility that the parties will sign an agreement in the foreseeable future is dwindling at an exponential rate.”

It is ironic to see that, while the US has been engaged in talks with Iran for many months now, it is only now that top officials from within the Biden administration have started voicing their opposition to the possibility of changing the IRGC’s current status. The US Joint Chiefs Chairman General Mark Milley told a congressional hearing that, “In my personal opinion, I believe the IRGC Quds Force to be a terrorist organisation and I do not support them being delisted from the foreign terrorist organisation list.”

If talks fail to revive the JCPOA, it would mean that the US superimposed the issue of the IRGC deliberately to scuttle the whole process. Let’s not forget that the issue of the IRGC’s status as a terrorist outfit has nothing to do with the deal that was signed by the Obama administration in 2015. Therefore, by highlighting that the US will not take any steps to de-list the IRGC, it has also signalled to Iran that it can either accept a deal on the US terms or walk away empty-handed.

While we are yet to see how Iran responds to this shift, it remains that any deal offered now will have a visible Israeli imprint on it, making it difficult for Tehran to accept it. By extension, it also means that West Asia’s most powerful military force will now be aiding NATO against Russia. This makes perfect sense for the Biden administration which has been seeking ways for the past two months to expand its support for Kyiv.

The US Secretary of Defence is actively lobbying with officials from many other countries to increase support for Kyiv on a long-term basis. Israel is one of the 40 countries that participated in the summit recently held in Germany. The core objective of this summit is, according to Mark Milley, to coordinate security assistance to Kyiv, including heavy weapons, to help it, in the words of Austin, “defeat” Russia.

Israel has, thus, traded its neutrality for a deal with the US to keep Tehran in check. But the crucial question is how good is this trade-off actually? Israel’s help for Ukraine today could easily change into Moscow turning a blind eye to Iran’s activity in Syria, Lebanon and other parts of West Asia against Israel. This, in other words, means that Iran could seek to settle scores with Israel for the latter’s deliberate sabotage of the nuclear deal.

In short, with Israel having now picked up a side in the ongoing conflict in Ukraine, it has very consciously become a tool for the West’s policy of expansionism. This is not ironical insofar as the West’s expansionism is matched only by Israel’s own for-ever exploding expansionism vis-à-vis the Palestinians and other nations. It was in this context that Russia’s permanent representative to the United Nations, Vasily Nebenzya, reminded – and warmed – Israel during a recent meeting of the UN Security Council that Jerusalem’s “settlement plans in occupied Syrian Golan threaten to undermine regional stability” as much as Israel’s supply of weapons systems to Kyiv.

Salman Rafi Sheikh, research-analyst of International Relations and Pakistan’s foreign and domestic affairs, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

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By Gus Leonisky at 13 May 2022 - 8:28pm
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a violation by the German authorities….

On the morning of May 13, Enrique Mora, the political director of the European External Action Service (EEAS), was briefly retained in the Frankfurt airport by the German police upon his return from Tehran, where he traveled in an effort to salvage the faltering nuclear agreement with Iran, known as JCPOA.

The head of the EEAS Iran Task Force Bruno Scholl, who accompanied Mora, was similarly retained, as was EU Ambassador to the UN in Vienna Stephan Klement. Noting that he was carrying a Spanish diplomatic passport, Mora pointed to a possible violation by the German authorities of the Vienna convention on diplomatic relations. According to the diplomat, no explanation was given for their detentions, and his phones and passport were taken for examination by the police.

Reports say the three men were held separately for 40 minutes before they were sent on their way back to Brussels.

For their part, the police said the detention was due to “IT-based indications, not related to the individuals.” According to this Politico account, “one explanation circulating among EU officials was that the travel patterns of the diplomats, who had to rebook their flights back to Europe several times due to a fluid schedule in Tehran, triggered an automatic alert with the border police, who failed to take into account the identity of the travelers.”

While Mora’s boss, the EU high representative for foreign policy Josep Borrell, sought to downplay the incident and emphasize that he is “in contact” with the German authorities, Mora decided to take it public.

“Retained by the German police at the Francfort (sic) airport on my way to Brussels, back from Teheran. Not a single explanation,” Mora tweetedon Friday morning. “An EU official on an official mission holding a Spanish diplomatic passport. Took out my passport and my phones.”

Indeed, what happened in Frankfurt is highly unusual and embarrassing for the EU and its efforts to play a serious role in international affairs.

It is possible, although improbable, that Mora’s retention was simply due to a mistake by the border police in the airport. But he is a well-known individual, a top EU diplomat traveling with a diplomatic passport of a EU member state. It is inconceivable that the police in Frankfurt — a major international transport hub — might be unaware of the conventions guiding diplomatic immunity.

That raises a number of troubling questions. Why would German authorities act in this way, given that Germany is a member of the European trio (along with Britain and France) of parties to the JCPOA that pledged their commitment to save the agreement, precisely the mission with which Mora is tasked?

When a member state treats a top EU official in such a derogatory way, it inevitably raises questions about the unity within the EU — an asset that the EU officials are willing to emphasize as they deal with external threats, such as the Russian aggression in Ukraine, for example.

Such incidents also greatly undermine the EU’s relations with third party countries. Events in Frankfurt obviously did not go unnoticed in Tehran. The fact that Mora’s phone was temporarily confiscated no doubt raised concerns that it might have been compromised. This further damages the bloc’s credibility — particularly given the sensitivity of Mora’s mission in Tehran.

What happened in Frankfurt early on May 13, on the face of it, bears the hallmarks of potential diplomatic sabotage at a particularly sensitive time of negotiations with Iran. German government owes a thorough explanation to its own citizens and its partners in the EU.

This article reflects the personal views of the author and not necessarily the opinions of the S&D Group or the European Parliament.

https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2022/05/14/the-strange-detention-of-eu-diplomats-returning-from-tehran/

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By Gus Leonisky at 15 May 2022 - 1:01pm
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jewish nazis…...

Russian security forces announced the arrest of 61-year-old Mikhail Kavun. This person, of Jewish ethnity, confessed to having financed, between 2015 and 2019, the Ukrainian banderite group, Pravy Sector, noted for advocating racial hatred, torture and incitement to murder.

Numerous Russian sources have recounted the history of the Jewish-banderites (Zhidobandera), a term that first cropped up in the USSR in 1981. This group of violently anti-Russian Jews supported the banderites, to avoid being the target of their anti-Semitism.

This affair comes after the face-off between Russian Foreign Affairs Minister Sergey Lavrov and the Israeli government [1]. According to the office of Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, President Vladimir Putin presented his apologies to him, something that the Kremlin has not confirmed [2].

Mr. Lavrov had evoked the participation of Jews in Nazi crimes, which Jewish figures interpreted as making light of those crimes. Such participation, although extremely marginal, remains the most deep-seated taboo among Jewish communities.

https://www.voltairenet.org/article216850.html

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By Gus Leonisky at 15 May 2022 - 1:41pm
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