Skip to main content

The West Bank: The unvarnished facts

Whilst Israel and its ever-loud allies forever pronounce that Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East - a dubious and more than questionable position - Bernard Avishai reveals the hard facts on the situation Palestinians find themselves in the West Bank.

"....One has only to look at how the system (if that's the phrase for it) of justice works in the West Bank to know that justice has been anything but blind for a generation. And no organization has looked into that system, more thoroughly than the somewhat ironically named Yesh Din, or "There is Justice (or, perhaps, Verdict)." The chief legal counselor to Yesh Din, the indomitable Michael Sfard, recently prepared a summary report on how criminal complaints have been handled since Yesh Din began its work in 2005, which he kindly sent over to me.

Of the total number of crimes committed against West Bank Palestinians, about 38% involved gunfire, 42% damaged property, and 15% encroachments on private land.

91% of complaints to police resulted in no indictment: 86% of violent crimes; 96% of property crimes. Of 127 cases of olive groves being uprooted between 2006-2011, one case resulted in an indictment.

66% of cases were closed because police claim the perpetrators were unknown, 24% because there were no (credible) witnesses. Under 4% of crimes brought to the military police were investigated. (In over 90% of cases, settler alibis were accepted without corroboration or further investigation.)

Between 2007-2011, 267 complaints were filed against soldiers; in just 30 cases (about 11%) was it decided to open an investigation.

13 cases of settlers building on Palestinian private land resulted in 11 High Court injunctions; 5 of these have been violated without consequence. Land illegally built on for settler roads were retroactively expropriated for public purposes."    

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Pentagon's eye-popping spending....and waste!

Only a gigantic bureaucracy could get away with spending of such dimensions - and the amazing waste involved in part of that ginormous spend.   Think US Pentagon..... "From spending $150 million on private villas for a handful of personnel in Afghanistan to blowing $2.7 billion on an air surveillance balloon that doesn’t work, the latest revelations of waste at the Pentagon are just the most recent howlers in a long line of similar stories stretching back at least five decades.  Other hot-off-the-presses examples would include the Army’s purchase of helicopter gears worth $500 each for $8,000 each and the accumulation of billions of dollars' worth of weapons components that will never be used. And then there’s the one that would have to be everyone’s favorite Pentagon waste story: the spending of $50,000 to investigate the bomb-detecting capabilities of African elephants. (And here’s a shock: they didn’t turn out to be that great!) The elephant research, of course, represe...
Post a Comment
Read more

Video: Israel demolishing a Bedouin village

From Mondoweiss - Israel's supposed "most moral army in the world", the IDF, engaged in immoral, and according to international law, illegal action.... "Israeli forces have demolished every home in the Bedouin village of Khirbet Taha in the northern West Bank district of Nablus during three separate demolitions since the start of the year. Unlike most Bedouin villages, the residents in Khirbet Taha own their own land. However that land falls in Area C, territory in the occupied West Bank under full Israeli control. The village’s only school was also destroyed, leaving children to study in a dilapidated 100-year-old mosque — the only structure left standing in the village. According the United Nations, Israel has demolished half as many Palestinian buildings in the first few months of 2016, as they had in all of 2015. In February alone, the UN found that more Palestinians homes were destroyed than any other month since 2009, when the organization began its docum...
Post a Comment
Read more

What does a no-fly zone actually mean?

As some countries consider imposing a no-fly zone in relation to Libya, the pertinent question must be what does that mean and entail? FP provides the answers: "It depends on the circumstances. There are two primary types of no-fly zones imposed by air forces. The first is imposed by one military over another, while the two sides are at war. In practice, this type of no-fly zone amounts to a warning from one side that it will engage the other's aircraft if they are spotted in a given territory. The second type, more applicable to the situation in Libya, is when an outside power possessing overwhelming air superiority restricts flights over a given country in order to discourage an internal conflict or humanitarian crisis. This is a relatively recent tactic, which was used most famously in Bosnia and Iraq during the 1990s. No-fly zones are often a compromise in situations where the international community is demanding a response to ongoing violence, but full military interven...
6 comments
Read more