1. Bills, Resolutions, Letters
2. Hearings & Travel
3. On the Record

1. Settlements & the Biden visit
2. Settlements/Annexation/Apartheid at the Center of Domestic Israeli Politics
3. Settler/IDF Violence
4. Ben & Jerry’s vs. Settlements
5. Masafer Yatta Ethnic Cleansing
6. Around the West Bank
7. Jerusalem & Its Environs
8. Bonus reads

FMEP publishes two resources on (most) Fridays: Lara Friedman’s Legislative Round-Up and Kristin McCarthy’s Settlement & Annexation Report. To subscribe to those reports, click here.

“On June 10 and 11, Israeli soldiers entered seven villages in Masafer Yatta, in the South Hebron Hills region of the occupied West Bank, and conducted a “census”: they went door-to-door demanding to know who lives in each house and collecting the ID numbers of every single resident. Anyone whose ID was not photographed by the soldiers was from that moment forbidden from being in the area — including medical professionals, teachers who work in the villages, and solidarity activists and journalists who regularly arrive to document and observe military and settler violence against Palestinians. This move is just the latest step in Israel’s attempts to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians of Masafer Yatta…In the weeks since May’s court decision, people’s lives here have become much harder. The army is hoping that by persecuting us enough they will make it impossible for us to remain, thus forcing us to leave “voluntarily.”…Detaining us, arresting us, and restricting our movement within and between our villages are just some of the tools the Israeli army is using to try to make us leave Masafer Yatta. Some people have had their vehicles confiscated from outside of their own homes and been beaten by soldiers in the process…What is happening now is clearly a policy of slow expulsion. They’re not arriving with trucks to deport us en masse, but the end goal is exactly the same.”

“In its latest live show, Palestine Deep Dive shines a spotlight on Israel’s ongoing forced displacement of Palestinians in Masafer Yatta, a region in the South Hebron hills of the occupied West Bank, Palestine. The show titled, ‘My Home is Not a Military Firing Zone: On the Ground in Masafer Yatta’ sees show host, Mark Seddon, who served as a speechwriter for former Secretary General of the United Nations Ban Ki-moon, in conversation with the journalists Basil Al-Adraa and Yuval Abraham…“The army announced that [the drills] are going to happen for one month,” Adraa says. “During this military exercise, they’re bombing, and today they were shooting. They come with tanks in the fields, in the villages and next to the houses… No one is allowed from the Palestinians to move around the village… today for example, a student has [missed] his secondary school exam. He was prevented [from attending] his school.”… Describing the circumstances surrounding the second clip Seddon plays in the show, which shows Israeli soldiers breaking into Adraa’s home on 23rd May, Adraa says: “Since February until today at least seven times, the soldiers have raided my family home. Two times in these raids my father was detained. I was beaten and attacked brutally while I was filming.” Adraa says that Israeli activists have also been beaten and had cameras confiscated in what he describes as “collective punishment” for their activism. Since December, he says the Israeli soldiers have confiscated five of his cameras and one laptop during raids on his family home.”

““Israeli soldiers held me captive for eight hours in the hot summer sun,” says Sami Huraini as he narrates how he was arrested and harassed by the Israeli occupation yesterday, June 28. After eight hours of detention, humiliation and dehumanization Sami was released…Last week, Sami received threats from Israeli soldiers warning him against organizing actions against the military training and other ethnic cleansing measures. Yesterday, “they translated their threats into action.””

“Now that we have introduced ourselves, we would like to tell you a little bit about Masafer Yatta and what is happening to our land these days. Masafer Yatta is made up of 22 Palestinian villages in the south of the West Bank…The meaning of Masafer Yatta comes from the term Safar- which means travel in Arabic. For thousands of years, when Muslims would travel to Mecca, they would pass through Masafer Yatta…Before 1966, Palestinians in Masafer Yatta lived simple lives as farmers, grazing their sheep and working their land. Many of them lived in caves they dug for themselves and their families…In the 1980’s, Israel began to build large settlements in Masafer Yatta, most of this land is stolen Palestinian land…During the same years, the military declared 12 villages in Masafer Yatta a firing zone, or land for the military to conduct their training, to justify the forced evacuation of about 1,300 Palestinians in the area…This past May, almost twenty-two years after fighting a very tough legal battle, the occupation court gave the green light to the army to do as they like in Masafer Yatta, allowing the military to legally transfer people from their homes and carry out military training in our backyards. We are here to tell their stories. Stories of demolitions, stories of families and stories of Palestine.”

“The European Union (EU) has told two prominent Palestinian NGOs that it will resume funding them after a yearlong suspension tied to unfounded “terror” allegations made by Israel. The European Commission – the EU’s executive branch – sent letters several days ago to Al-Haq and the Palestinian Center for Human Rights (PCHR), informing them that their 13-month-long suspensions were lifted unconditionally and with immediate effect…The Commission cited the results of a review conducted by the EU’s European Anti-Fraud Office (OLAF), which it said found “no suspicions of irregularities and/or fraud” and “did not find sufficient ground to open an investigation”” Also see FMEP’s resources on this topic:On Israel’s Declaration of Palestinian Human Rights Groups as “Terrorist Organizations” (FMEP), Israel smeared Palestinian activists, EU admits (EU Observer) and European Commission Lifts its Unlawful Suspension of Funding for Al-Haq (Al Haq)

“Anton Abu Akleh has been regularly in touch with representatives from the U.S. government since May 11, when his sister, a veteran Al Jazeera correspondent, was fatally shot in the back of the head while reporting on an early-morning Israeli military raid in the Jenin Refugee Camp. He has been asking the United States to take over the investigation into his sister’s killing from the Israeli army, which he says is “trying only to protect their own soldiers.” As a U.S. citizen, Anton said, she is owed accountability by her government. As a Palestinian, he’s hoping the galvanizing, global outpouring of support after her death will highlight, and potentially change, the system she covered for decades. Israel has seen a decline in military prosecutions despite a steady rise in the killings of Palestinian civilians, according to data by human rights groups.”

“Israeli forces recently arrested and interrogated family members of a Palestinian who was killed by an Israeli settler last week, the family said. Ali Harb, the 27-year-old Palestinian from the village of Skaka near Salfit, died after being stabbed by an Israeli settler in front of Israeli soldiers a week ago during a stand-off between villagers and settlers, just outside of Skaka. Naim Harb, the victim’s uncle and an eyewitness to the killing, told The New Arab that Israeli forces arrested him and two more family members on Monday and interrogated them over their accounts of the incident…”At 2 am on Monday, Israeli forces violently raided my house, forcing their way into the courtyard where one soldier threw a stun grenade and another fired shots in the air,” he described. “They blindfolded me, my son Firas and my nephew Zaid and took us to an interrogation centre.” “They kept me in a cell until 3 pm when they finally took me to interrogation,” Harb added. “All the questions were about our witnessing of what happened last week, particularly about us saying that when the settler stabbed Ali, Israeli soldiers were present.” “They said that soldiers had arrived after the stabbing had happened, but I maintained my testimony that the settler stabbed Ali in front of the soldiers, just as I had said in my declaration to the Israeli police just after the killing happened,” he noted.”

“In a scathing article published in early June, Richard Horton, one of the world’s foremost public health experts, accused the World Health Organization (WHO) of committing “statistical genocide” against Palestinians in the occupied territories after the organization omitted them from one of its major annual reports. In his article, which was published in the highly-regarded medical journal “The Lancet,” of which he is the editor-in-chief, Horton claimed that WHO had erased Palestinians living in the occupied territories from their 2022 World Health Statistics report. The report is the organization’s annual compilation of the most recent available data on health and health-related indicators for its 194 member states. Although the Occupied Palestinian Territories is on the list of member states of the WHO Regional Office for the Eastern Mediterranean (EMRO), the report does not contain any information on the Palestinian population in the West Bank, Gaza, or East Jerusalem..Following Horton’s column, a number of academics from universities in Birzeit, Cairo, and Beirut published a letter in The Lancet, claiming that the absence of Palestinians in the WHO report is unacceptable, and demanded the organization rectify the situation immediately. According to the authors, the “erasure and exclusion from history and from the present continue to be used against the Palestinian people as a weapon of war—a war in which even basic data on life and health are perceived as a threat, a threat to the uncovering of the truth: that Palestinians are here to stay.””

“The Israeli government’s decision to start the process of registering the ownership of land adjacent to al-Aqsa Mosque in occupied East Jerusalem risks enabling a takeover that has “severe far-reaching implications”, rights groups warned on Monday. The justice ministry last week initiated the “settlement of land title procedure” in Abu Thor area as well as the Umayyad Palaces site adjacent to the southern wall of al-Aqsa Mosque. The procedure is using a government fund allocated to “reduce socio-economic gaps” and “create a better future” for Palestinians in the city. However, the fund has been largely utilised to register land for illegal settlements and will ultimately lead to further Palestinian dispossession, according to a joint statement by Israeli rights groups Ir Amim and Bimkom seen by Middle East Eye. The Jerusalem-based NGO said there is speculation that the Israeli government may be attempting to register the area south of al-Aqsa Mosque as state land.” See also the statement from Ir Amim and Bimkom, “In a Dramatic Development, Israel Initiates Settlement of Land Title Procedure on Land Adjacent to Al Aqsa and Across Abu Thor”

“Donors pledged about $160 million for the U.N. agency helping Palestinian refugees, but it still needs over $100 million to support education for more than half a million children and provide primary health care for close to 2 million people and emergency cash assistance to the poorest refugees, the agency’s chief said Friday.”

“Twenty years after Israel decided to build its controversial separation barrier, the network of walls, fences and closed military roads remains in place, even as any partition of the land appears more remote than ever. Israel is actively encouraging its Jewish citizens to settle on both sides of the barrier as it builds and expands settlements deep inside the occupied West Bank, more than a decade after the collapse of any serious peace talks. Palestinians living under decades of military occupation, meanwhile, clamor for work permits inside Israel, where wages are higher. Some 100,000 Palestinians legally cross through military checkpoints, mainly to work in construction, manufacturing and agriculture.” See also In pictures: Palestinian villages before the Nakba (Middle East Eye)

“Last Wednesday, in an opinion that could have a major impact on Americans’ First Amendment rights, the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled to uphold an Arkansas law preventing state contractors from boycotting Israel. The Eighth Circuit—widely considered one of the most conservative circuit courts in the country—claimed that a consumer boycott of Israel does not count as protected speech under the First Amendment, deeming such a boycott “non-expressive” economic conduct. The ACLU, which represents the plaintiff, The Arkansas Times, has pledged to appeal to the Supreme Court, setting the stage for a major ruling that could either bolster or significantly restrict the right to engage in any kind of politically motivated boycott…Arkansas is one of 26 US states with laws preventing state contractors from boycotting Israel. Most of the laws passed between 2015 and 2017 in response to a national campaign by right-wing legislative groups, supported by Israel advocacy groups and bolstered by the Israeli government, to legislate against BDS…After consulting various experts involved in litigating or supporting challenges to anti-BDS laws, I put together this explainer on the legal issues at stake in the Eighth Circuit decision and how the case might fare at the Supreme Court.”

“Multinational consumer goods company Unilever has sold its Ben & Jerry’s ice cream business in Israel to its local licensee for an undisclosed sum, after the United States brand announced last year that it would stop marketing products in Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories, saying it was “inconsistent” with its values. Under the new arrangement, announced on Wednesday, Ben & Jerry’s ice cream will be available to all consumers in Israel and the occupied West Bank, including in Jewish settlements. Ben & Jerry’s expressed its disagreement with its parent company’s decision, saying that, despite the company no longer profiting from Ben & Jerry’s ice cream sold in illegally-occupied territories, their position had not changed. “We continue to believe it is inconsistent with Ben & Jerry’s values for our ice cream to be sold in the Occupied Palestinian Territory,” the company said on Twitter.” See also Ben & Jerry’s’ corporate owner found a workaround to sell ice cream in the West Bank (NPR); Ben & Jerry’s says it opposes parent company’s plan to sell the brand’s Israel rights (JTA); Statement on Unilever’s sale of Ben & Jerry’s interests in apartheid Israel (BDS Movement, Adalah Justice Project, Movement for Black Lives, Jewish Voice for Peace, US Campaign for Palestinian Rights, Palestine Legal)

“General Mills had been one of the last remaining multinational corporations to operate a factory in the occupied territories after other companies—including the French-Belgian bank Dexia, the French telecom company Orange, and even the global security firm G4S—have quietly backed out of their enterprises in the settlements in recent years. So when General Mills announced on May 31st that it was not just leaving the factory, but selling off its dough-marketing joint venture in Israel entirely, BDS activists celebrated: “VICTORY! General Mills to divest from apartheid Israel,” the BDS movement wrote on its website. General Mills, however, quickly moved to clarify that the decision was purely economic, part of a larger strategic shift that has also included selling its dough business in Europe…The fact that Ben & Jerry’s decision leaves the company vulnerable to anti-BDS legislation while General Mills’s does not underscores how such legislation targets company speech, not just company activities.” See also Facing Illinois blacklist, Morningstar commits to resolving anti-Israel biases (Jewish Insider)

“Being haunted by their past, Germans are trying to export their feelings of guilt onto the shoulders of Palestinians. Antisemitism is not their problem anymore – it is the Palestinians’. Palestinians who are not going to bear this responsibility and apologise are not appropriate and acceptable voices. What the Goethe Institut did is delegitimise Kurd’s voice and everything he represents. It will be hard from now on for any German institution to invite Kurd. The standard has been set.”

“Maya Berry, the executive director of the Arab American Institute, was in the Middle East earlier this month with her children…Since she had a free day in Jordan, Maya planned a 24-hour visit to the West Bank and Jerusalem where she hoped to pray at al Aqsa, go to the Ibrahim Mosque in Hebron, and then spend the night in Bethlehem. What should have been a quick and rewarding trip turned into a nightmare—one that is tragically all too common for Arab Americans visiting the Holy Land. Maya and her two college-aged children spent hours being rudely interrogated by Israeli border control officials at the Allenby Bridge crossing from Jordan to the West Bank…They finally gained entry and were able to proceed to Jerusalem where Maya and her children would fulfill their dream of praying at al Aqsa. They then set out for Hebron where the nightmare continued. There they spent another three hours dealing with the same indignities at a checkpoint near the Ibrahim Mosque. In all, one-third of their entire visit was spent being subjected to humiliating treatment at the hands of Israelis…

Over the years Maya and I have fielded hundreds of similar complaints from Arab Americans, especially Palestinian Americans, who’ve provided us affidavits of their treatment on trying to enter Israel/Palestine…This issue is once again front and center, for two reasons: Israel’s request that they be admitted to the US Visa Waiver Program (VWP) and President Joseph Biden’s upcoming trip to Israel. Because admittance into the VWP requires reciprocity—i.e. each party agrees to fully respect, without discrimination, the rights of each other’s citizens—and because Israel has never demonstrated that it is ready to fulfill this requirement, we’ve had several meetings with administration officials in recent months urging them to reject Israel’s request. From the treatment Maya Berry and her children received a few weeks back—and the degrading treatment other Arab Americans will surely be subjected to during the summer travel season—it doesn’t seem that Israel is ready to take that step and Biden should make it clear that its refusal to do so will preclude them from the program. It is the least that could be done to afford our community basic equal protection from Israel’s well-established human rights violations.” See also US ambassador urges passage of visa waiver bills held up by opposition

“The US Presbyterian Church voted on Tuesday at its 225th General Assembly to declare Israel an “apartheid state” and designate a Nakba Remembrance Day within their calendars.”

“Following the success of the March meeting of U.S. Secretary of State Tony Blinken and the foreign ministers of Israel, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, Morocco and Bahrain, Washington is spearheading an effort to formalize the new framework for regional cooperation, a senior State Department official familiar with the matter said on Tuesday…The official’s comments about enhancing regional security come amid media reports of growing military cooperation between Israel and Arab nations, although the official did not offer specifics regarding security cooperation that may come out of the Negev Forum framework.”

“Hossein Taeb, a 59-year-old cleric and chief of intelligence for the powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, seemed untouchable. That was until he was abruptly removed from his position last week, a casualty of a relentless campaign by Israel to undermine Iran’s security by targeting its officials and military sites, according to officials and analysts in both countries…“The security breaches inside Iran and the vast scope of operations by Israel have really undermined our most powerful intelligence organization,” Mr. Abtahi said by telephone from Tehran. “The strength of our security has always been the bedrock of the Islamic Republic and it has been damaged in the past year.”…During the past year, Israel has intensified the scope and frequency of its attacks inside Iran, including on the nuclear and military sites that Mr. Taeb’s organization was responsible for protecting…Keren Hajioff, a senior adviser to Prime Minister Naftali Bennett of Israel, said in an interview that the strategy targeting Iran was part of Mr. Bennett’s “octopus” doctrine. “This doctrine is a strategic shift from the past, when Israel focused on Iran’s proxy ‘tentacles’ across the region, in Lebanon, Syria and Gaza,” she said. The new tactic, she added, was “a paradigm shift: Now we go straight for the head.”” See also This Could Be the Next Big War That Grips the Entire World (Daily Beast//Neri Zilber)

“Israel aspires to upgrade its relations with NATO beyond geography, offering technological innovation and intelligence-gathering capabilities as a basis for stronger ties.”

“Palestinian authorities are systematically mistreating and torturing Palestinians in detention, including critics and opponents, Human Rights Watch said today in a parallel report submitted jointly to the United Nations Committee Against Torture with the Palestinian rights group Lawyers for Justice. Torture, both by the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority (PA) in the West Bank and Hamas authorities in Gaza, may amount to crimes against humanity, given its systematic nature over many years…In light of this pattern of abuse, other countries should cut assistance to abusive Palestinian security forces, including the PA police who played a central part in recent repression. The International Criminal Court’s Office of the Prosecutor should investigate and prosecute people credibly implicated in these grave abuses.”

“More than anything in the past decade, the Unity Intifada has totally reconfigured basic assumptions many have come to hold as truths about Palestine, including that the Palestinians have been pacified and defeated, and that they lack the capability or interest to protest. Another assumption that was negated is that Palestinians have acquiesced to their fragmentation. Indeed, the Unity Intifada has shown not only that Palestinians are a single people facing a single regime intent on their elimination, but that the people are able to rise in a sustained manner across the land, from the river to the sea, to protest their oppression. The principal takeaway is that, once Palestinians rise as a single people, they have the capacity to overwhelm a regime that had, until then, been perceived as invincible. For Palestinians, the Unity Intifada revealed, perhaps for the first time, the cracks in Israel’s apartheid regime.”

“In his decision to dissolve the government in order to save its apartheid policies in the occupied territories, Naftali Bennett clearly illustrated both that Israel’s apartheid regime stretches across either side of the Green Line, and that the logic of Jewish supremacy is the foundation upon which this regime was built. In other words, “Jewish and democratic” Israel is fully enslaved to the maintenance of apartheid: this is the government’s paramount goal, overriding any other consideration related to the interests of the citizens living within the sovereign borders of the state.See also Winners, losers emerge as Israel’s parliament dissolves (Al Monitor), Yair Lapid takes over as Israel’s 14th prime minister (TOI), Outgoing Israeli PM Naftali Bennett won’t run in upcoming election (Axios)

“In 2021, the Israeli military censor barred the publication of 129 articles in the media, and interfered with the content of another 1,313, according to data provided by the censor at the request of +972 Magazine and the Movement for Freedom of Information in Israel. This marks the third year in a row that there has been a decline in the military censor’s activity, which is now at an 11-year low (the entire period for which we have data). All media outlets in Israel, as well as authors and publishers, are required to submit articles relating to security and foreign relations to the IDF chief military censor for review prior to publication, in line with the “emergency regulations” enacted following Israel’s founding, and which remain in place. These regulations allow the censor to fully or partially redact articles submitted to it, as well as those already published without its review. Media outlets are barred from indicating in any way whether the censor has altered a story…The decline in the censor’s interference is a small consolation, however, when we consider the bigger picture: once every three days, on average, a military body prevents journalists in Israel from sharing with the public a story that they believe is worth publishing; and about four times a day, it interferes in the news that we read without us even knowing. This should shock anyone entertaining the illusion that we live in a democracy… it is no coincidence that there is no other Western democracy that uses a mechanism at all similar to Israel’s military censor, which requires all journalists to submit security-related articles for review before publishing — where the definition of “security” is so broad that its examples stretch over six pages — so they can be approved, altered, or banned entirely.”

“Zulat’s report shows that Israel has never been a model of a liberal democracy. In other words, its regime has been a hybrid of both democratic and authoritarian components, which at different periods has tilted toward one of those extremes. The flaws in the regime and its inherent deep tensions have afflicted the State of Israel since its inception. To illustrate this, we will briefly refer to the authoritarian tendencies in the first decades of the state when the Mapai party was in power. The report shows that the democratic crisis did not begin only because of this or that prime minister but due to historical, political, social, and economic circumstances, both in the domestic and international arenas. The report’s focus on the reigns of Mapai and Likud stems from the similarity between the authoritarian tendencies of both parties and from the fact that these are periods that shaped the character of the regime. An intensification of the authoritarian elements took place at the turn of the 21st century, during the tenures of Binyamin Netanyahu, Ehud Barak, Ariel Sharon, and Ehud Olmert, until the elections of March 2009, when Netanyahu was re-elected prime minister. This process, which redoubled against the backdrop of the second intifada, was largely influenced by the changes in the balance of political power in Israeli society after the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. Thus, in parallel with the expansion of the settlement enterprise in the West Bank and rule over the Palestinian people, Israel saw the surge of delegitimization and discredit of the judiciary, the gatekeepers, the Left camp, and Israel’s Arab citizens.”

“Tantura is a mirror of Israeli society. The attitudes of those interviewed [in the new documentary, “Tantura”] are a reflection of how Israeli society understands its histories, the foundation of the state, as well as its contemporary understanding of Palestinians. Watching the film in the aftermath of the assassination of Shireen Abu Akleh and the ongoing  state sanctioned expulsion of residents of Masafer Yatta, it is clear there is a direct line between the impunity with which these veterans recount their time in 1948 and the impunity with which Israel can attack Palestinians both within and beyond the Green Line, without any material consequences or accountability…The blatant refusal by Jewish Israelis to confront 1948 means that the legacy of the war acts like a dormant virus in Israeli society. It forces Israel to render the mere existence of Palestinians as an existential threat.”

“Israel has eased access to abortion in response to the U.S. Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, a move that the country’s health minister said has set back women’s rights by “one hundred years.” The new policy, approved on Monday by an overwhelming majority in the parliamentary committee, will grant women access to abortion pills through Israel’s universal health system and will exempt women from appearing before a special committee, whose approval has been required for decades for the termination of a pregnancy. The committee, made up of a social worker and two doctors, will not be abolished, but it will review applications digitally and only conduct hearings in the very rare case it initially denies the procedure.”