First the United Nations, now Google. On Thursday, the Palestine News Network noticed that the Internet giant had changed the tagline for the Palestinian edition of its search engine, Google.ps, from the “Palestinian Territories” to “Palestine.” The decision comes after a November vote by the U.N. General Assembly to recognize Palestine as a non-member state over the objections of Israel and the United States.
Here’s how Google.ps looked earlier this year, according to the Wayback Machine Internet archive. The gray words in Arabic below the word “Google” say, “Palestinian Territories.”
And here’s how the same page looks today, with the word “Palestine” instead:
The change is obviously a minor one, but within the context of the fraught politics of the Middle East, Google’s decision could be interpreted as a victory for advocates of Palestinian statehood who supported Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s recent decision to circumvent the long-stalled, U.S.-supported peace process with Israel.
Since the beginning of the settlement enterprise, Israel has not constructed advanced regional wastewater treatment plants in the West Bank settlements as it has done inside Israel. Only 81 of the 121 settlements are connected to wastewater treatment facilities, and even these are outdated, frequently malfunction and shut down, and are not able to treat the necessary amount of sewage. Of the 17.5 million cubic meters of wastewater created annually by the settlements, 5.5 mcm flow as raw sewage into West Bank streams and riverbeds. The Israeli Ministry of Environmental Protection has failed to take serious enforcement actions against settlements.
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The first victims of the neglect of wastewater treatment are Palestinians, primarily residents of small towns and villages, who depend on water from natural sources - springs and wells - whose pollution causes disease and harms crops. Because settlements are generally at higher altitudes, their untreated wastewater flows down to nearby Palestinian communities.
Photograph: A Palestinian farmer checks his destroyed crop as raw sewage from the illegal Jewish settlement of Elon Moreh flows through his olive grove, close to the Palestinian village of Deir al-Hatab in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, October 26, 2010. The Israeli army regular denies residents access to the grove for ‘security reasons’, despite the land and all surrounding areas belonging to Palestinians. The residents discovered thousands of destroyed olive trees on this rare occasion that they were allowed to enter their own farmland. (Getty Images)
I feel that the growing practice of sending young people abroad to volunteer is often not only failing the communities they are meant to be serving, but also setting these travellers, and by extension our whole society, up for failure in the long run.
Hundreds of thousands of young people are going abroad to volunteer each year, as part of school requirements, to build their resumes/CVs, and as part of gap year trips.
Yet much of this demand is fuelled by the belief that because we come from financially wealthier countries, we have the right, or the obligation, to bestow our benevolence on people. Never mind if we don’t speak the language, don’t have the skills or experience to qualify for the jobs we’re doing, or don’t know anything about what life is like “over there”.
As a former serial volunteer myself, I’m not in any way trying to criticise the good intentions of these volunteer travellers - I know from my own experience that our desire to help is sincere - but I now also know that good intentions are not enough.
Our lack of critical engagement about international volunteering is creating a double standard.
When someone goes for a work experience or internship placement in a law firm or an accounting company, they don’t expect to be leading a case in a courtroom, or managing their own clients - they understand their number one job is to learn (and bring the coffee). Yet when we go abroad, we sometimes forget that we have to learn before we can serve.
It’s like we think we are all Clark Kent. At home we slave away and work hard to be useful in our jobs, but then we enter a magical phone booth and - ta-dah - we take off to a far-away country and somehow our Superman suit, or our volunteer T-shirt, gives us all of the power and knowledge we need to save the world.
We’re teaching our next generation of leaders that development work is easy, and that their skills are so valuable to the people abroad that it is worth donating money to send them to help.
And we’re teaching them that, just because they come from the UK or the US, they are in a position of superiority over the people they are going to “serve”.
A number of volunteers are completely unsupervised - you just walk in and play with the kids”
We must stop volunteering abroad from becoming about us fulfilling our dreams of being heroes.
The travellers are not just missing out on learning the lessons that lead to more sustainable changes in themselves and in the world, but they are also often negatively impacting the people they are meant to be “serving”.
Orphanage volunteering is one of the most popular volunteer travel offerings in part because it fits with both our desire to be heroes and our desire for fun.
Volunteering to take care of orphans might not sound too bad at first - at least I didn’t think so on my initial orphanage visits.
But then I started to realise that my visit repeated over and over and over again can indeed become a problem.
Imagine if an orphanage near your home had a rotating door of volunteers coming to play with these children who have already been deemed vulnerable.
Imagine if, during times when they were meant to be in school, they were performing “orphanage dance shows” day after day to visiting tourists. Imagine if any tourist could come in off the street and take one of the children out for the day with them? You are right in any assumptions you might have about what type of harm that could expose them to.
(Reuters) - Israeli soldiers evicted several hundred Bedouins from a village in the occupied West Bank on Monday after the army declared the area a live-fire training zone.
The residents of Wadi al-Maleh, a village mostly inhabited by shepherds in the arid area bordering Jordan, had almost all left their homes by an evening curfew and retreated to neighbouring villages, Aref Daraghmeh, a local leader, told Reuters.
The displacement coincided with several demolitions of Arab properties in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, which come as the United States is trying to revive stalled peace.
In January, villagers received a similar eviction order and left without resisting, only to return after 48 hours. Almost all of their 90 buildings, including shelters for their animals, were demolished in 2010, local rights groups said.
Israeli soldiers prevented outsiders, including journalists, from entering the area, saying it was a “closed military zone”.
“It should be emphasised that these structures, located in closed military zones actively used by the IDF, are illegal in nature…the residents of these illegal structures have been requested in advance to vacate the premises voluntarily,” an Israeli Defence Forces spokesperson said.
“This drill is a part of the IDF’s pre-planned yearly exercise schedule,” the spokesperson said.
Wadi al-Maleh is located in “Area C,” a swath of land making up two-thirds of the West Bank under full Israeli control and where most [illegal] Jewish settlements are located.
Half a million settlers live [illegally] in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, territory captured in the 1967 Middle East War which Palestinians want for a future state.
Israeli army firing zones comprise 18 percent of the West Bank, roughly the same size of “Area A,” the land including major cities and towns which is under full Palestinian control.
According to the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), 5,000 Palestinians in 38 herding communities live on army firing zones, along with several sprawling Jewish settlements and farms.
Besides al-Maleh, 12 Bedouin villages throughout the length of the Jordan Valley have received eviction orders since 1999, according to the Association for Human Rights in Israel.
The International Court of Justice and most governments deem Jewish settlements in the West Bank illegal. Israel disputes this and cites Biblical and historical links to the land.
Israeli authorities razed two family homes in the East Jerusalem neighbourhood of al-Tur on Monday morning, displacing 18 Palestinians who failed to acquire elusive building permits, local officials said.
The army also demolished a well near a Palestinian refugee camp south of the city of Hebron and cleared an agricultural area of dozens of olive trees east of Bethlehem, according to Palestinian government media.
Israeli officials did not immediately respond to requests for comment on those incidents.
Israel airport security ‘allowed to read tourists’ email’
JERUSALEM (AFP) — Israeli security officials at Ben Gurion airport are legally allowed to demand access to tourists’ email accounts and deny them entry if they refuse, the country’s top legal official said on Wednesday.
Details of the policy were laid out by Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein in a written response to the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, the group said in a statement.
In June 2012, ACRI’s Lila Margalit wrote to the attorney general demanding clarification following media reports about security officials demanding access to tourists’ email accounts before allowing them into the country.
“In a response dated April 24, 2013, the attorney general’s office confirmed this practice,” ACRI said, quoting sections of the document which said it was only done in exceptional cases where “relevant suspicious signs” were evident and only done with the tourist’s “consent”.
“However, the attorney general’s office also noted that while a tourist may refuse such a search, ‘it will be made clear to him that his refusal will be taken into consideration along with other relevant factors, in deciding whether to allow him entry to Israel’,” it continued.
ACRI slammed the policy as a “drastic invasion of privacy” heaping scorn on the idea a tourist could freely give their consent while facing the threat of possible deportation if they refused.
“A tourist who has just spent thousands of dollars to travel to Israel, only to be interrogated at the airport by Shin Bet (domestic security) agents and told to grant access to their email account, is in no position to give free and informed consent,” Margalit said.
“Such ‘consent’ — given under threat of deportation — cannot serve as a basis for such a drastic invasion of privacy,” she said.
“Allowing security agents to take such invasive measures at their own discretion and on the basis of such flimsy ‘consent’ is not befitting of a democracy.”
Samer al-Issawi in deal with Israel to end fast
RAMALLAH, West Bank (Reuters) - A Palestinian prisoner held by Israel has agreed to end an on-off hunger strike on Monday which lasted for more than eight months in exchange for an early release, Palestinian officials told Reuters.
The fast by Samer al-Issawi, 32, from a suburb of Jerusalem, had stoked weeks of street protests and concerns by Israel that his death might lead to mass unrest.
Issawi agreed on a deal brokered by Israeli and Palestinian officials to serve eight months for allegedly violating bail conditions for an earlier release, after which he will be freed to his Jerusalem home, Qadura Fares, head of the Palestinian prisoner organization, told Reuters.
Issawi’s lawyer and sister conveyed the offer just before midnight to his bedside in Israel’s Kaplan hospital, where he had been under Israeli guard and receiving intravenous vitamins but was refusing food.
Israel convicted Issawi of opening fire on an Israeli bus in 2002, but released him in 2011 along with more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners in exchange for an Israeli soldier held hostage by the Hamas Islamist group in Gaza.
He was re-arrested last July after Israel said he violated the terms of his release by crossing from his native East Jerusalem to the West Bank, both majority-Palestinian areas, and ordered him to stay in jail until 2029 - his original sentence.
An Israeli official told Reuters last week that Issawi had crossed into the West Bank as part of “continued involvement in attempting to establish terror cells.”
Monday’s deal dispenses with conspiracy charges and will see Issawi serve eight months for leaving Jerusalem - a decision Palestinian officials say will likely be endorsed by an Israeli military court on Tuesday.
Both Palestinian and Israeli officials have visited Issawi frequently in recent weeks to reach a compromise and pre-empt the violence his death could provoke.
The Palestinian Authority, based in Ramallah, has said it will try to prevent any mass uprising against Israel and has renounced violence in its quest for statehood.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas is keen to give U.S. President Barack Obama a chance to renew stalled Israeli-Palestinian talks after his visit to the region last month.
Israel holds some 4,800 Palestinians it accuses of committing or planning violence against it. 207 Palestinian security prisoners have died in Israeli jails since 1948, Palestinian officials say.
UC Berkeley student senate passes divestment bill
In a meeting that lasted nearly ten hours, the Daily Californian reports that:
Anna Head Alumnae Hall overflowed with hundreds of UC Berkeley students, faculty and community members engaging in a contentious debate regarding the bill, SB 160.
SB 160, authored by Student Action Senator George Kadifa, calls the UC system a “complicit third party” in Israel’s “illegal occupation and ensuing human rights abuses” and seeks the divestment of more than $14 million in ASUC and UC assets from Caterpillar, Hewlett-Packard and Cement Roadstone Holdings. According to the bill, these companies provide equipment, materials and technology to the Israeli military, including bulldozers and biometric identification systems.
The final vote, which occurred just before 5:30 a.m., was met with cheering, stomping and cries of joy by supporters of the bill.
Independent Senator and bill co-sponsor Sadia Saifuddin said she saw the vote as the culmination of years of struggle.
“Tonight is not about corporations,” she said. “It’s about asking ourselves before we go to sleep whether our money is going toward the destruction of homes, toward the erection of a wall. I am a working student. And I don’t want one cent of my money to go toward fueling the occupation of my brothers and sisters.”
Black and North African workers were excluded from Paris’s main railway station during a visit by Israel’s President amid fears they might be Muslim, it has been alleged.
The decision was reportedly made ahead of Shimon Peres’s arrival in the city on March 8 to discuss the Middle East peace process with President Francois Hollande.
The Telegraph reports Peres and his delegation were greeted at Paris Gare du Nord by non-excluded staff from France’s state-owned railway SNCF, and their baggage handling subsidiary, ITIREMIA.
The allegations are made in an official complaint by the left-wing SUD-Rail transport union, which claims deliberate steps were taken to ensure there were “no Muslim employees to welcome the Head of State of Israel.”
It adds the decision was “based on the appearance of employees”.
SUD-Rail spokesman Monique Dabat told Radio Internationale Française: “The employees noticed that anyone who was black or Arab was excluded from the job and when afterwards they demanded an explanation from the site boss they received the reply that it wasn’t because they were black or Arab but there couldn’t be any Muslims getting close to Shimon Peres.”
According to the SUD-Rail statement, employees were initially told by SNCF the measure was taken following “security demands” from the French Interior Ministry and the Israeli Embassy in Paris, both of which have denied all knowledge of the ban.
The Telegraph says SNCF has since admitted the order came from management, with a spokesman promising “a full investigation”.
The incident is being branded by Twitter users as “shocking”, “racist” and “shameful”.
There are an estimated six million Muslims in France, of which around 100,000 are thought to be converts, the New York Times reports.
The country, which has a population of around 65 million, defines itself as secular and publishes no official statistics on race or creed.
The incident is particularly embarrassing for the SNCF because it played a role in the deportation of Jews during the Second World War.
In 2011 it released a statement expressing “sorrow and regret” in which it conceded the SNCF’s equipment and staff were used to haul 76,000 French and other European Jews to Germany, where they were sent to death camps.
Fewer than 3,000 returned alive.
The railroad has repeatedly reiterated it was requisitioned for the Nazi war effort and had no choice in the matter, the Associated Press reports.
Israeli officers arrest a Palestinian woman in the Palestinian city of Hebron for protesting against the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, Palestine, June 5, 2012.
Photographs: Abed Al Hashlamoun / European Pressphoto Agency
The JIDF (Jewish Internet Defense Force) - one of the largest Zionist organizations for spreading propaganda online - responds to the Boston Marathon bombings
The JIDF website calls Muhammad - who Muslims believe was the final prophet sent by G-d - “a genocidal pedophile”.
The organization was notibly outspoken against the proposed cultural center in New York, saying: “We are against Islam, just as we are against Nazism. Just as we don’t wish to see Nazi institutions springing up everywhere, we don’t need to see Islamic one’s springing up everywhere, either.”
