❶ Israeli forces demolish residential buildings in occupied East Jerusalem neighborhoods

• Background:  “Jerusalem In The Courts And On The Ground.” Florida Journal Of International Law

❷ Israeli forces shut down wedding hall in al-Eizariya (Bethany)
❸ Opinion/Analysis:  Israel increasingly defiant as the world loses interest in Palestine

• Background: “Planning Apartheid And Human Rights In The Occupied Palestinian Territories.” Palestine-Israel Journal Of Politics, Economics & Culture

` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` `
❶ ISRAELI  FORCES  DEMOLISH  RESIDENTIAL  BUILDINGS  IN  OCCUPIED  EAST  JERUSALEM  NEIGHBORHOODS
Ma’an News Agency
Nov. 8, 2016
Israeli authorities Tuesday morning demolished two residential buildings in the occupied East Jerusalem neighborhoods of Wadi al-Jouz and al-Issawiya for building without Israeli-issued licenses.
___Locals told Ma’an that Israeli forces escorted two excavators to the Wadi al-Jouz neighborhood at 4 am. Israeli soldiers were also deployed throughout the alleys of the neighborhood, before surrounding a three-story building as Israeli excavators tore it down.
___According to locals, the building consisted of stores on the ground floor, apartments on the second, while the third floor was still under construction.
___Local sources highlighted that the stores on the first floor contained food supplies belonging to Palestinian families, adding that Israeli forces demolished the stores without allowing families to remove their supplies.        More . . .  

• Halabi, Sam F. “Jerusalem In The Courts And On The Ground.” Florida Journal Of International Law 26.2 (2014): 223-270.  Full article.  

[. . . .] . . .by examining certain “interpretation catalysts”—presidential speeches from Clinton to Obama and the U.S. Government’s pleadings in its lawsuit with the Zivotofskys (and, by extension, Congress), it is possible to see a growing flexibility toward adopting a foreign policy position that accommodates a Palestinian self-determination movement that sounds more like civil rights in Israel rather than sovereignty under international law. [This] Article does not argue that there has been a fundamental abandonment of the two-state solution in U.S. foreign policy. Indeed, President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry have explicitly adopted it as their current platform in the predictable second-term push for Arab-Israeli peace. However, given the realities on the ground, firstly and most importantly with respect to Jerusalem, it is possible to see a U.S. acceptance that the time for the two-state solution may have already passed.

❷ ISRAELI  FORCES  SHUT  DOWN  WEDDING  HALL  IN  AL-EIZARIYA  (Bethany)    Ma’an News Agency  
Nov. 7, 2016
Israeli forces shut down a wedding hall in the village al-Eizariya in the occupied West Bank district of Jerusalem, claiming that Palestinians  shoot  firearms in the air during wedding celebrations in the hall.
___Israeli security sources said in a statement, received by Ma’an, that Israeli forces closed the al-Awda wedding hall in order to prevent the “very dangerous phenomenon and bad tradition” of shooting in the air during weddings and special occasions.
___The statement added that the closure of the wedding hall came as part of the Israeli fight against unlicensed weapon ownership among Palestinians.      More . . .  

❸ Opinion/Analysis:  ISRAEL  INCREASINGLY  DEFIANT  AS  THE  WORLD  LOSES  INTEREST  IN  PALESTINE
+972 Magazine 
Michael Schaeffer Omer-Man
Nov. 2, 2016
Israel’s leadership wants you to think it is worried about some bold move by President Barack Obama during his lame duck period . . .  After all, there’s a compelling argument to be made that it would be bad for Israel if Washington threw its support behind a UN Security Council resolution reaffirming that Israeli settlements are illegal, or one that codifies a framework for an eventual peace deal.
___An Israeli prime minister worried about international condemnation of his country’s illegal settlements probably wouldn’t declare that, “[t]here is no government that supports, or will support, settlement more than my government.”
___An Israeli government concerned with the world’s perception of its intransigence wouldn’t send the deputy foreign minister . . . . to demand the annexation of Israel’s third-largest settlement.
___Yet the Israeli government doesn’t seem to be worried at all.     “The answer to the international battle over Jerusalem is to impose sovereignty over Ma’aleh Adumim,” Deputy Foreign Minister Tzipi Hotovely said Monday.      More . . .  

• Amar-Shiff, Netta. “Planning Apartheid And Human Rights In The Occupied Palestinian Territories.” Palestine-Israel Journal Of Politics, Economics & Culture 21.3 (2016): 65-68.   Source.  

For years the Israeli human rights community has been trying to defy Israeli demolitions of Palestinian houses and other structures in the West Bank. Their opposition is based on individual human rights arguments and international humanitarian law, focusing attention on the unlawful policies of the Israeli Civil Administration (1CA) in the West Bank and their devastating humanitarian consequences on the protected civilian Palestinian population. These included primarily the rights of Palestinians to property and adequate housing and other economic, social and cultural rights, as well as the obligation of the occupying power to ensure public order for the occupied population, according to the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949. While legal arguments mentioned the illegality of the settlements, they were cautious not to compare settlers and Palestinians.
[. . . .]   The use of the Apartheid paradigm in the context of the West Bank raises the obvious question of the basis for comparison between the Israelis and Palestinians living in the occupied West Bank, especially considering the fact that settlements are illegal under the law of occupation and should not be there in the first place. While Apartheid presumes the equal citizenship status shared by blacks and whites in one state, South Africa, the national conflict in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian state seems to negate the use of the conceptual framework of Apartheid, which seems to unfairly marginalize the existence of the national conflict. But moving beyond the national conflict, the main problem in the comparison to the Apartheid framework is that although it is based on similarly applied practices of racial segregation and discrimination as the International Convention On the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid states, it does not emphasize what seems to be the main motivation behind the legal segregation and discrimination: the Israeli spatial expansionist interests to advance and reinforce the settlement project until the full conversion of the Israelis in the West Bank from settlers to indigenous peoples.  [. . . .]