The War for Israel`s Soul

September 29, 2008 – By: Weiss, Philip

Further evidence of the war within Israeli society: The tragedy of the occupation has brought about  “an unprecedented number of young people who are choosing to go to jail rather than serve in the Israeli army,“

says a Refuser Solidarity group. And the government of Israel is trying to shut down New Profile, a leftwing feminist group that supports these young “shirkers,” New Profile reports. The group describes the spiritual despair that the occupation, and the Nakba before that, has caused inside Israel.

And mentions soldier suicides as the leading cause of death:

• Four generations and over six decades of repeated, unending “military solutions” have engendered an expanding movement of young people who experience and express excruciating inner struggles and rifts in face of the legal duty to serve. …
• For some young people, [these crises] involve highly dangerous levels of personal distress and indeed, in recent years, suicide has claimed the lives of more Israeli soldiers than all other causes-of-death combined.
• Rather than listening to the voice raised by these future citizens, rather than fathoming the social change it reflects and responding with changed, innovative policies, Israel ’s state institutions have chosen to wage a “war” against these youths and the developments they represent.

Read it and weep

Another facet of Israel’s regime in the occupied territories has come to light – and it’s tearing families apart

Friday September 12 2008

A disturbing report published this week highlights yet another facet of Israel’s regime in the occupied territories that is seeing Palestinian lives ruined and families torn apart. As if the alienation of the Palestinians from their pre-1948 homelands wasn’t crushing enough to those affected, the Hamoked-B’Tselem study reveals an alarming increase in forcible transfers of West Bank residents to the Gaza Strip, effectively making refugees twice over of those falling victim to this punitive policy.

Palestinians whose registered address is in Gaza are now prohibited from living in the West Bank, regardless of how long ago they made the move eastwards. Thanks to Israel’s flouting of the Oslo agreements, the process of updating Palestinians’ addresses on the population registry has been indefinitely frozen, making criminals of everyone who falls foul of the rule.

• The effect has been to separate husbands from their wives and parents from their children, and to add yet another layer of hardship to the already gruelling circumstances in which the Palestinians live.

According to the authors of the paper, the reason behind the Israel authorities’ recent escalation of enforcing this law is based on a desire to do everything within their power to drive a wedge between the West Bank and Gaza, and to turn them into separate entities. This is, again, in direct contravention of the Oslo Accords, which state that the two areas are to be treated as one geographical unit; but at the same time it is entirely in keeping with Israel’s strategy of cutting off Gaza as a way of punishing the Hamas government.