PLEASE NOTE: The content of this blog is slightly changed with fewer news items and more background for those items. This will provide deeper understanding of the issues shaping the news. All articles without direct links can be found through an EBSCO search in any library with online databases.

❶ Israel to Demolish Palestinian Houses, Sheds, Electricity Line in Nablus Village
❷ Israel extends detention of 12-year-old Palestinian for 1 year
❸ Opinion/Analysis: FREE  AND  DANGEROUS  CONCESSIONS
❹ POETRY by Fadwa Tuqan
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❶ ISRAEL  TO  DEMOLISH  PALESTINIAN  HOUSES,  SHEDS,  ELECTRICITY  LINE  IN  NABLUS  VILLAGE
Palestine News and Information Agency – WAFA
May 26, 2016
Israeli forces Thursday delivered demolition notices for a number of Palestinian houses, sheds and an electricity grid in Duma village, south of Nablus, said a local activist.
___Ghassan Daghlas, an official who monitors Israeli settlement construction in northern West Bank, said that Israeli forces delivered demolition notices for three houses and two sheds in the Duma locality of Abu Safi.      MORE . . . 

“. . . the qualification of the occupation as “illegal” [by the International Court of Criminal Justice] while it does not affect the continued application of both humanitarian and human rights law . . . does affect the legality of the security measures taken in its defense―as distinct from measures undertaken to protect Israel itself―as such measures are thereby illegal themselves. This consequence is relevant . . . to the legal assessment of various security measures undertaken by Israel, including but not limited to the Wall . . . . Indeed, the perception of the Israeli occupation as illegal and illegitimate might well have been the main factor which informed the ICJ’s perception of the Wall . . .  While refraining from commenting on the occupation regime itself, the Court was well aware of the “greater whole” of which the Wall is but one aspect.”

• Ben-Naftali, Orna, Aeyal M. Gross, and Keren Michaeli. “Illegal Occupation: Framing the Occupied Palestinian Territory.” Berkeley Journal of International Law 23.3 (2005): 551-614

“As happened in South Africa, what begins as segregation is liable to evolve into an institutionalized system of racial domination. Such separateness cannot be sustained without spawning suffering and cycles of violence. . . . With the dual system of law that currently prevails in the occupied Palestinian territory . . . logic dictates that Israel will inevitably reach the tipping point at which it is forced to confront its own racial realities vis-à-vis the Palestinians. While the shape that such a transformation ultimately takes will depend primarily on social attitudes and political craft, international law may retain a role through the light that it shines on the normative issues to be resolved in this context.”   MORE . . .

• Dugard, John, and John Reynolds. “Apartheid, International Law, and the Occupied Palestinian Territory.” European Journal of International Law 24.3 (2013): 913.

❷ ISRAEL  EXTENDS  DETENTION  OF  12-YEAR-OLD  PALESTINIAN  FOR  1  YEAR
Ma’an News Agency
May 25, 2016
The Israeli magistrate court extended the detention of 12-year-old Muhammad Ismail Hushiyeh for a year on Wednesday, according to the head of the Jerusalem Committee for Families of Prisoners.
___Amjad Abu Asab told Ma’an that Hushiyeh would be detained in a juvenile facility in the town of Ablin in northern Israel.
___Hushiyeh is the youngest Palestinian prisoner from Jerusalem held by Israeli authorities.       MORE . . .

“The American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) held a June 2 [2015] congressional briefing at the Capitol Visitors Center in Washington, DC to reveal widespread and systematic ill-treatment of Palestinian children held in Israeli military detention. Speakers urged the 100 attendees, including staff members from 30 different congressional offices, to bring international juvenile justice reform to children in Israeli military detention by signing on to Rep. Betty McCollum (DMN)’s letter to Secretary of State John Kerry. . . .  Israel is the only nation in the world that systematically and automatically prosecutes children in military courts.”   MORE . . .

• Quinn, Erin, and Delinda C. Hanley. “Israeli Detention Of Children: “It’s Time To Break The Cycle.” Washington Report On Middle East Affairs 34.5 (2015): 46-47.

The Israeli Army has maintained an unwelcome military occupation in the West Bank and Gaza Strip for over 40 years. During this time, an increasing carceralization of society has occurred, most evident in three architectural forms: prisons, checkpoints, and walls. These three forms and their accompanying practices of social control, which have been refined and developed, are purportedly intended to prevent Palestinian violence against Israelis. But carceralization has had more insidious outcomes: dividing Palestinians, confiscating their land, destroying their livelihoods, and, thus, giving rise to some submission (collaboration with occupiers or emigration) but mostly to resistance (ranging from non-cooperation to militancy).   MORE (via EBSCO) . . . 

• Bornstein, Avram. “Military Occupation as Carceral Society Prisons, Checkpoints, and Walls in the Israeli-Palestinian Struggle.” Social Analysis 52.2 (2008): 106-130.

❸ Opinion/Analysis: FREE  AND  DANGEROUS  CONCESSIONS
The Middle East Monitor – MEMO
Hussein Laqra’a
May 26, 2016
A number of recent reports have been talking about Arab countries, which describe themselves as “moderate” countries, making amendments to the Arab Peace Initiative approved during the Beirut summit in 2002. These countries presented the Israelis, through an international mediator, with new proposals regarding the occupied Golan Heights and the right of Palestinians to return to their land, and are now waiting for the Israelis to respond. This is in an effort to revive the direct negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority in order to reach a comprehensive peace agreement, based on the initiative.
___Experience has taught us that the Arabs make one concession after the other, and when the Israelis reject them, they present more.      MORE . . . 

“MY SAD CITY,” BY FADWA TUQAN
(The day of Zionist Occupation, June 27, 1967)

The day we saw death and betrayal,
The tide ebbed.
The windows of the sky closed,
And the city held its breath.
The day the waves were vanquished, the day
The ugliness of the abyss revealed its true face,
Hope turned to ashes,
And gagging on disaster,
My sad city choked.

Gone were the children and the songs,
There was no shadow, no echo.
Sorrow crawled naked in my city,
With bloodied footsteps,
Silence reigned in the city,
Silence like crouching mountains,
Mysterious like the night, tragic silence,
Burdened,
Weighed down with death and defeat.
Alas! My sad and silent city.
Can it be true that in the season of harvest,
Grain and fruit have turned to ashes?
Alas! That this should be the fruit of all the journeying!
―Translated by A.M. Elmesseri

From BEFORE  THERE  IS  NOWHERE  TO  STAND:  PALESTINE ISRAEL  POETS  RESPOND  TO  THE  STRUGGLE. Ed. By Joan Dobbie and Grace Beeler. Sandpoint ID: Lost Horse Press, 2012. Available from B&N.
Obituary for Fadwa Tuqan, 2003.