https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/news/middle-east/22986-palestinian-family-found-unconscious-inside-home-after-tear-gas-attack

A Palestinian family were reportedly left unconscious when suspected Israeli settlers attacked their home with tear gas overnight Monday.

Israeli police spokesperson Micky Rosenfeld confirmed graffiti and a gas canister were found at the home in a village near Ramallah.

Rosenfeld said they were investigating the case as a "criminal incident with nationalistic motives."
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The graffiti reportedly read "Revenge" and "Greetings, from prisoners of Zion", leading Israeli media to link the incident to a recent controversy surrounding the detention of Israeli settlers suspected of an arson attack that killed three members of the Palestinian Dawabsheh family, including an 18-month-old baby, earlier this year.

http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4742039,00.html

Greece is set to recognize a Palestinian state in a parliamentary vote to be attended by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas on Tuesday, a government source said.

A solemn ceremony will accompany the vote as Greece joins dozens of other countries that accord recognition to Palestine, the source said.

Abbas arrived in Athens on Sunday ahead of the vote and was set to meet with President Prokopis Pavlopoulos and Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras on Monday.

Last week, the Greek parliament's foreign affairs committee unanimously approved a motion to recognize Palestine.
Tsipras travelled to Israel last month when he met with both Abbas and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4742407,00.html

A bill to shut all business-related locations – from shopping malls to warehouses – on Saturday and holidays was unanimously approved on Sunday by the Ministerial Committee for Legislation. The Weekly Day of Rest Bill is now to go to the Knesset for a first reading within days.
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Zohar rejected the possibility that the move would be damaging to Israel's four million secular Jews and Arabs. "Everyone will be happy for the Sabbath to become a day of rest and not a day of work. After all, that's how we lived until a few years ago. The majority of people don't even go shopping on the Sabbath and there's no reason for a clothing store to be open on the Sabbath. It's over. If they want to, they can go to a movie theater or café."

Other politicians were staunchly opposed to the bill. "The bill is draconian and violates the status quo, so the ministerial committee decided to tie it to the executive committee," said MK Rachel Azaria (Kulanu). "The bill will thus fulfill the needs of the primaries that it was meant for and will not become a law."

"This is a bizarre bill that will finish, divide, and destroy Israel from within, and could lead to a civil war," said MK Yoel Razvozov (Yesh Atid)."The vast majority of Israel's Jews have fun and shop on Saturday without doing anything to hurt those who observe traditions. Israel will transform into Iran."

https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/news/middle-east/22911-israel-plans-to-build-walls-around-palestinian-towns

Media reports in Israel have reported that the army is planning to build walls around Palestinians towns and villages on the pretext that it will stop stones being thrown at illegal Jewish settlers.

“The army will build 9 metre high walls in the areas of Beit Ummar, Al-Arroub, Gush Etzion, and the areas surrounding Highway 60, south of the West Bank,” claimed Channel 2 TV.

In response, Mustafa Barghouti, the Secretary-General of the Palestinian National Initiative, told Anadolu, “The Israeli army’s decision to build walls around important and vital areas in the southern part of the West Bank aims to control large Palestinian areas for settlers. It also aims to isolate the areas from each other in order to prevent any chance to establish a Palestinian state.”

Two years ago, Kontorovich emigrated to Israel from the US, and moved to Alon Shvut, an Israeli colony south of Bethlehem. According to his listing at the Jerusalem Centre for Public Affairs, Kontorovich now lives in Neve Daniel, another settlement within the Bethlehem governorate.

But Kontorovich is not just a settlement resident; a video that has come to light shows him expressing support for a notorious right-wing settler group that sees all of the West Bank as “the exclusive possession” of Jews.

In December 2013, Kontorovich gave a talk as a guest of Women in Green (WiG) “on how to apply Israeli sovereignty overc Judea and Samaria [the West Bank] without jeopardizing the existence of Israel as a Jewish state.”

The event took place in Ush Ghurab, on the outskirts of Beit Sahour, where settler activists waged a long campaign to ensure the land remained out of bounds for local Palestinians.

http://972mag.com/maybe-theres-no-room-for-human-rights-in-israel/114828/


Those trying to delegitimize rights groups because their funds come from overseas are sending a very clear message: human and civil rights are not values that exist naturally in Israel.
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The attacks are also coming from more and more directions. In particular, Breaking the Silence, an organization of former Israeli soldiers who oppose the occupation, has been targeted in recent weeks by the country’s national police department, the defense minister, the education minister, and even the president himself. Critics of the organization rarely engage with Breaking the Silence’s messaging and activities, however. Instead the attacks tend to be ad hominem, focusing on where they fundraise and to whom they speak.

The persecution in Israel of human and civil rights NGOs — and the values they represent — is most certainly worrying, but it is not surprising. Similar trends have been documented around the world, often with much more ferocity. And it should not surprise anybody that a country that for five decades has justified the systemic violation of civil and human rights of one population would shy away from defending those very values against waves of populism, especially in the face of looming international isolation.

This story is not new, and yet it is only beginning. It used to be that Jewish privilege offered Israeli human rights activists some level of immunity from political persecution, the likes of which Palestinians have suffered for decades. With the current right-wing government’s strong hold on power, no discernible opposition in sight, and nobody even discussing ending the occupation, it is safe to say that the worst is yet to come.

http://mondoweiss.net/2015/12/netanyahu-politicians-community

Let me start by saying something personal. For almost 40 years I was a member of the Israeli foreign service and not only my job but my passion was to build support for the state of Israel in every single shape or form, whether by convincing journalists, politicians… trying to influence people how to vote at the United Nations. That was what I did.

Today I am coming here to say that without foreign intervention, without pressure on Israel, nothing will move. It certainly is not easy for me to have made that change. And that change is necessary, it has been necessary to me. I love the country, I am Zionist, but I do not approve of the policies. So there is a difference between supporting Israel as a country and objecting to its policies. And it’s in the spirit that I would like to say what I think should be done.

And what I think should be done is to try to get through the bubble in which the Israelis live. It is not only Netanyahu or [Naftali] Bennett or [Uri] Ariel who are the drivers. For that you need the public. And I would say the public has swayed very much to the right. It is living in a kind of bubble where everything is possible. The prime minister is doing anything he can conceive or think because he thinks that this is being done with impunity. He has managed to convince the Israelis, not only that we do not have a partner but that the Arabs have always hated us, they always hate us… There’s no way in normal civility to ever have any kind of agreement with the Palestinians.

So what I think has to be done is a combination of things to reach the Israeli public. I do not think we can change the mind of Netanyahu. He is immune to criticism, he has brought relations with the United States to the point that we know, the lowest point. He objects from time to time to what the foreign minister of Sweden says, but he is really doing what he wishes because he thinks that nobody is going to punish him, because he thinks for instance that in America at the end of the day any politician will need the support of the Jewish community, so there is no real pressure of America on Israel.

http://972mag.com/right-wing-campaign-portrays-human-rights-leaders-as-foreign-agents/114805/

One minute and nine seconds. That’s the length of the inciting video published this morning by right-wing activist Ronen Shoval. In less than a minute-and-a-half, Shoval manages to sum up all the reasons why an Israeli court deemed it okay to call “Im Tirzu” — an organization he founded — a “fascist” group.

The video is part of a campaign by the group against foreign governments “planting” activists and groups belonging to Israeli civil society. It begins with a clip of a Palestinian man moving his knife toward the camera, as if he is trying to stab the viewer himself, while horror film music plays in the background. The video then goes on to accuse four Israelis who work for human rights organizations — Breaking the Silence’s Avner Gvaryahu, Hamoked’s Sigi Ben Ari, Ishai Menuchin of the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel, and B’Tselem’s Hagai El-Ad — of being “planted.”
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Things I learned from the Weimar Republic

The enemy is no longer comprised of various anti-Israel groups. The enemy now has a name, his face is out in the open; these are the people fighting against us from within. These four are now connected to the knife-wielding Palestinian. They are the knife stabbing us in the back.

After watching Shoval’s video I immediately looked up the Hebrew Wikipedia entry for what was known as the “stab-in-the-back myth.” According to the myth, Germany’s loss in World War I came as a result of treasonous activities by Jews, Marxists, freemasons, and others who stabbed the nation in the back.” I also learned that “most of the German people accepted the myth as fact, and that placing the blame on Jews and Marxists for the German defeat became commonplace. Moreover, the myth was convenient in that it served certain psychological aspects of German society, at a time when powerful forces left over from the era of German Emperor Wilhelm II still strived for territorial expansion and had militaristic ambitions. Far-right völkisch parties made use of the myth, and after the Nazis came to power in 1933, the myth won official government support and became part of Germany’s history curriculum.”

http://972mag.com/why-do-so-many-israelis-hate-breaking-the-silence/114763/

But let’s take a look at the accusations against Breaking the Silence one by one:

The first claim, which in my mind is the most important and most critical accusation to refute, is that Breaking the Silence is not credible. The organization’s critics come up with all sorts of reasons why the organization isn’t credible, but there is one rebuttal that is awfully difficult to refute: In the 11 years that Breaking the Silence has collected and published testimonies, there has not been one instance in which a serious error, or a fabrication, has been found in their published testimonies.

That is no insignificant point. That needs to be the heart of the debate. An organization that publishes hundrds of testimonies, which works with more than 1,000 soldiers, which has dealt with very complicated subject matter for 11 years — not a single fabricated published testimony has ever been found. No court of law in any land can boast of such a record. And that is despite a number of attempts to fool the organization by giving them false testimonies. Their researchers and fact-checkers seem to have a perfect record of catching fabrications before publication.

That astounding success is the result of the massive investment Breaking the Silence makes in every single testimony. As the organization’s director of research has written here in the past, every testimony that a soldier or former soldier gives is fact-checked, the background of the incident or testimony is verified along with the identity of the testifier him or herself (and that they are not an aspiring politician looking to make a name for himself), and then the entire testimony is corroborated with any available information — both from other soldiers’ testimonies and open source information. Some of the most hair-raising testimonies collected by Breaking the Silence were never published because the organization could not independently corroborate them. Just imagine if journalists who published attack pieces on the organization applied their strict verification standards to their own work and the malicious things that are said about it.

http://www.timesofisrael.com/us-officials-netanyahu-myopic-entitled-untrustworthy-disrespectful-of-obama/

A new profile of US Secretary of State John Kerry in The New Yorker casts light on the stormy relationship between the US and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who have often clashed publicly over the Iran nuclear deal and the Palestinian conflict but who also routinely refer to each other as friends.

The piece, written by the magazine’s editor in chief, David Remnick, quotes “American officials” who describe Netanyahu as “myopic, entitled, untrustworthy, routinely disrespectful toward the president, and focused solely on short-term political tactics to keep his right-wing constituency in line.”

The piece goes on to describe the “sources of Kerry’s exasperation with Netanyahu.” Quoting State Department aides, it says these “range from the injustice of settlement building in the West Bank to the way he employs Yitzhak Molcho, his lawyer and confidant, to stifle even the most inconsequential negotiation.”

Remnick quotes Kerry as saying that, in 2010, Netanyahu balked at an opportunity to revive the peace process between Israel and Syria, despite assurances from President Bashar Assad that “he was ready to make a deal.”