“Experience teaches us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government’s purposes are beneficent.”
- Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis
Israel is planning to bring around 10,000 workers from India to fill positions in the construction and nursing industries, in a sign of deepening economic and political cooperation between Tel Aviv and New Delhi.
According to Hebrew news outlets, the workers will arrive in stages, with half destined for the construction sector and the remaining half designated for nursing roles.
At least 5,000 workers are due in the first year. The final labor agreement is still being negotiated between Israeli and Indian officials.
A few minutes after the Israeli parliament approved the budget for the next two years, a triumphant Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was quick to announce: "It's a great day for the people of Israel."
Leaders of the Palestinian community within Israel on Monday set up a "protest tent" in front of the government buildings in West Jerusalem to press authorities to address an escalating crime wave.
The protest, set to last three days, comes as scores of Palestinians in Israel have been killed in crime-related incidents this year.
Itamar Ben-Gvir’s second visit to Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa Mosque compound as Israel’s national security minister on May 21 represents a dangerous mix of religion and politics.
Ben-Gvir was seen standing and reading off his phone, apparently in prayer. Such an act would be forbidden under the current “status quo” governing Al-Aqsa, referred to as the Temple Mount or Har Habayit by Jews, even though a small group of Orthodox Jews is increasingly finding ways to pray on the holy site.
Israeli soldiers broke into a Palestinian elementary school in Beitunia, near Ramallah, and prevented students and teachers from leaving it, the official Palestinian news agency WAFA reported.
Local sources told WAFA that Israeli occupation forces stormed the Al-Kurom elementary school and held Palestinian students and teachers at gunpoint, threatening to shoot whoever tried to leave the school.
Israeli settlers on Monday relocated a Jewish religious school originally established on private Palestinian land in the illegal outpost of Homesh to nearby state-owned land.
Settlers have long campaigned for a yeshiva to be established in the area, and the latest move is part of an incremental effort by the government to legalise the Homesh settlement, built deep inside the occupied West Bank.
The battle for justice for Palestine is a battle of language. It is a battle not just of information, but of the context in which alleged facts are presented — that is, of narrative. Thus septuagenarian Israel employs a “national” narrative that begins in the Old Testament and enjoys our own media and governments as co-conspirators. Were instead the Western media to report the Israel-Palestinian reality, the entire Zionist project would become untenable overnight.
Israeli forces punitively blew up the home of slain Palestinian Mutaz Khawaja in the village of Ni’lin, in the occupied West Bank district of Ramallah on Tuesday, May 23. Khawaja’s family home was located on the second floor of an apartment building, and was home to five people. According to Wafa news agency, a large number of Israeli troops raided the village of Ni’lin, sparking confrontations with local residents. Israeli forces reportedly fired live ammunition and tear gas at locals, injuring two people.
Even with all the protests and mentions of Nakba Day on social media, commemorating this horrific, sad event is nowhere near where it ought to be. Arguably one of the darkest and most awful chapters in the long history of Palestine, the Nakba needs to be fully commemorated in every capital in the world.
The politicization of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine and the consequent installment of an apartheid regime to govern it is such that few countries dare even to mention these crimes against humanity.
