❶ Israeli forces kill 1 Palestinian youth, injure 1, and detain 1 other

• background from Journal of International Humanitarian Legal Studies

❷ Israel issues 34 admin detention orders

• background from Third World Quarterly

❸ Opinion/Analysis:  THE ANGELS I LOST IN GAZA
❹ POETRY by Mourid Barghouti
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❶ ISRAELI  FORCES  KILL  1  PALESTINIAN  YOUTH,  INJURE  1,  AND  DETAIN  1  OTHER
Ma’an News Agency
July 13, 2016
A Palestinian youth was killed and another injured by Israeli forces while a third was detained early on Wednesday, as soldiers opened fire at the youths’ vehicle in the town of al-Ram in the occupied West Bank’s Jerusalem district.
___The youth who was killed was identified as Anwar al-Salaymeh, 22, and the two survivors were identified as Fares Khader al-Rishq, 20, who remains critically injured, and Muhammad Nassar, 20, who was detained by Israeli forces after the incident.
___Locals told Ma’an that Israeli forces opened fire at three Palestinians youths, all residents of al-Ram, in a vehicle inside the town around dawn, as the three were seemingly unaware that Israeli forces were deployed in the town and conducting raids.      MORE . . .

From Journal of International Humanitarian Legal Studies
[. . . .] The human rights of many Palestinians are violated through discrimination, denial of freedom of movement, collective punishment, and economic sanctions resulting in widespread poverty. Combined, all these factors have devastating impacts on the social and economic situation in the Occupied Territories, and it can be argued that they constitute an “imminent and grave peril” to the Palestinian people’s interests.
[. . . .]
___The laws of war have failed to protect many Palestinian civilians, and doubt exists whether international law actually possesses the power to protect civilians or offers “no more than a reminder of the ideal. . . .“ Israel’s governments continue to fail to comply with the several international obligations and deny the applicability of the Fourth Geneva Convention to the Occupied Territories, the Fourth Hague Convention, and the Bill of Rights. This, however, does not mean that they lose their validity or cease to exist.
___The laws of war have been developed in order to regulate warfare and offer a certain amount protection in times of warfare. Even though civilian immunity is not absolute, it allows only for very few circumstances in which civilians can be targeted. Introducing more exemptions, or extending the existing ones further, bears the danger of seriously undermining the system and may have far-reaching negative consequences.
___. . . Humanitarian law, like human rights, has high standards and countries will not always be able or willing to live up to them. Nevertheless, their existence is crucial as a moral and legal obligation. The protection of non-combatants, including children, the elderly, and disabled is too important to be made part of military calculations. The fact that civilians can legitimately be killed in the form of “collateral damage” is concerning enough. While potentially unavoidable, it remains a dangerous act of balance between the accidental and the intentional. Any more leeway in regards to targeting civilians would suspend a fundamental cornerstone of our moral thinking.

• Küblbeck, Eva. “The Immunity of Civilians – A Moral and Legal Study Of Attacks on the Civilian Population.” Journal of International Humanitarian Legal Studies 4.2 (2013): 262-295.    SOURCE.

❷ ISRAEL  ISSUES  34  ADMIN  DETENTION  ORDERS
Days of Palestine
July 13, 2016
Israeli occupation issued on Tuesday 34 administrative detention orders ranging between three to six renewable months against Palestinians.
___Lawyer of the Palestinian Prisoner’s Society Mahmoud al-Halabi said that 24 of the orders were issued against prisoners, who had already spent months or years inside Israeli jails under administrative detention.
___Israeli uses administrative detention to keep Palestinians, including politicians and MPS inside prison for an unlimited period without any reasons.      MORE . . .   

From Third World Quarterly
[. . . .] It was clear to Arendt that Israel was crafting a new ‘regime of truth’. . . .  This rhetoric has become a real presence in the West. It has metastasised into a global truth and it controls much of the narrative on Muslims. Western foreign policy is substantially based on this ‘truth’. Muslims/Arabs are compelled to accept it. The disdain for Palestinians flows from it as well. Any opposition to it is labelled antiSemitic (as in hating Jews); resistance in Occupied Palestine is quelled by F16s and military invasions. The West sells this as stability and peace. To reject it is to rebuff human rights, freedom and democracy.
___The corollary of this logic is the sibling regime of anti-Semitism. Hating Arabs is normal and calling Palestinians the new Nazis obligatory. Loving Israel is a sign of tolerance, opposing its policies is ‘terrorism’. So is being Muslim, since Islam is deemed violent by nature. Critics of the Jewish/Israel lobby are branded ‘hateful’. Arendt understood that the Zionist settlers in Palestine had pioneered this logic: ‘they did not even to stop to think of the very existence of Arabs’, an attitude she condemned as ‘plain racist chauvinism’. Such arrogance would only make them unsafe and insecure. Arendt’s fear has been realised—although she was not above this sort of prejudice. She called Africans ‘savages’ continually.
___Since 1945 the ‘never again’ chant has become canonical. Yet the West did not oppose genocide in places like the Congo and Rwanda.

• Dossa, Shiraz. “Auschwitz’s Finale: Racism and Holocausts.” Third World Quarterly 33.9 (2012): 1575-1593.   SOURCE.

❸ Opinion/Analysis: THE  ANGELS  I  LOST  IN  GAZA
The Electronic Intifada
Doa’a Abu Amer
July 8, 2016
It has taken me a long time to gather the strength to write about a period of my life that has reshaped me completely: the night I lost 14 members of my family.
___It was a night I had barely escaped myself. I had been transported to safety in far away Australia not two weeks before.
___The evening of 17 July 2014 was to be my last in Gaza. I was due to be evacuated to Jordan and then Australia, to which I had a visa. It would be the last I would spend with my beloved family.
___The night before, the eighth night of Israel’s “Protective Edge” military assault on Gaza, we — along with 1.8 million other Palestinians besieged on a strip of land of 365 square kilometers — weren’t able to sleep. Tanks shelled civilian houses seemingly at random, drones filled the skies and the cries of ambulance sirens penetrated every home.   MORE . . .

“NORMAL  JOURNEY,”  BY  MOURID  BARGHOUTI

I have not seen any horrors,
I have not seen a dragon in the land,
I have not seen the Kraken* in the sea,
nor a witch or a policeman
at the outset of my day.
Pirates have not overtaken mu desires,
thieves have not broken down the door of my life,
my absence has not been long,
it only took me one lifetime.

How come you saw scars
on my face, sorrow in my eyes,
and bruises in my bones and in my heart?
These are only illusions.
I have not seen any horrors,
everything was extremely normal.
Don’t worry,
your son is still in his grave, murdered,
and he’s fine.

*a legendary sea monster of large proportions

Interview with Mourid Barghouti  
From Barghouti, Mourid. MIDNIGHT AND OTHER POEMS. Trans. Radwa Ashour. Todmorden, UK: Arc Publications, 2008. Available from Amazon.