JAI: An Eye on Palestine – 1 August 2016
The YMCA-YWCA Joint Advocacy Initiative issues this bi-weekly newsletter to keep you updated on the situation in the occupied Palestinian territories related to the Israeli occupation.
Israeli expulsion law ‘violates all rules of democracy’
Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, awarded itself a draconian new power last week: A three-quarters majority of its members can now expel an elected politician if they do not like his or her views.
According to Adalah, a law centre representing the fifth of Israel’s population who are Palestinian citizens, the so-called expulsion law has no parallel in any democratic state in the world. Read more
War of the Words: Palestinian poetry broadcast terrifies Israeli right
Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman summoned Army Radio commander Yiron Dekel for a reprimand July 20. The station had broadcast a program on the work of Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, as part of a series on formative Israeli texts. “It is obvious that this represents a failure and cannot go unchallenged,” said the defense minister’s spokesperson. He commented that this is a serious matter, as to this very day Darwish’s works add fuel to the fire of terrorism against the State of Israel. Read more
PA calls on UK to apologise for Balfour Declaration
The Palestinian Authority yesterday called on the United Kingdom to apologise as a “first step to uplift the historical oppression laid on the Palestinians due to the 1917 Balfour Declaration,” Arabs48.com reported.
In a statement, the PA foreign ministry said: “If Britain wanted to unload the burden of the historical responsibility laid on its shoulders regarding the Balfour Declaration, there are certain measures it must carry out.”
One of these measures, the statement said, is for the “highest bodies” to apologise to the Palestinian people due to “what happened to them because of the Balfour Declaration and the British Mandate.” Read more