APN's daily news review from Israel - Wednesday July 1, 2020

Quote of the day:

"Annexation is a policy of belligerence unbecoming of a country that professes to pursue peace. It’s the diplomatic equivalent of unprovoked aggression, one of the staple Israeli accusations against its neighbors. Rather than proving the wisdom and prudence Israel has always boasted of, annexation is provocative, reckless and dangerous...(it) negates efforts to portray Israel as a responsible member of the free world and international community. It casts Israel as a rogue state that defies not only public opinion but international law as well."
--Haaretz commentator Chemi Shalev writes that annexation ruins 53 years of Israeli propaganda, according to which the evils of occupation are the fault of the Palestinians, who refuse to make peace.*

You Must Be Kidding: 
Despite the sharp rise in coronavirus cases, senior army officials approved that religious settlers hold a mass prayer service with thousands of participants at Joseph’s Tomb in the West Bank in order for G-d to help make Israeli annexation of West Bank land happen.**

APN's daily news review from Israel - Tuesday June 30, 2020

You Must Be Kidding:
There are no fewer than 10 cameras in the 150 meters (164 yards) between Lions Gate, where the chase began, and the garbage room, where the Border Policeman shot dead the autistic Palestinian young man, Eyad Alhalaq. Yet the Police and the Justice Ministry have produced no video footage of the killing.*

APN's daily news review from Israel - Monday June 29, 2020

Quote of the day:

"It will not happen overnight, and it will be done gradually over years, but the path is clear and one-way: a fundamental change in the character of the state and a change in the nature of the Israeli economy. Partial annexation will create a new dynamic. Israel will not only lose its Jewish character, but also its economic and social character."
--Former CEO of Finance Ministry, David Brodt, writes about the implications of Israeli annexation of the West Bank in Yedioth. See translation in Commentary/Analysis below.*

APN's daily news review from Israel  - Thursday June 25, 2020

Quote of the day:

"Israel is the land of memorials. There are more memorials in Israel in relation to the population than in any other country; a memorial for every eight fallen in battle, on average. In Europe there’s a memorial for every 10,000 fallen. Nevertheless, one can hope that someday Israel will confront its past and find those who will dare to take down both the signs and heroes."
--Haaretz+ commentator Gideon Levy on the hope that Israel will one day be able to review its past as the US is.*

APN's daily news review from Israel - Wednesday June 24, 2020

Quote of the day:

"Because this time, it was impossible not to see how his long strong hand stubbornly extended toward the depleted state coffers, how it reached there before the hands of other citizens - self-employed people, entertainers, senior citizens, students, disadvantaged people."
--Yedioth columnist Meirav Betito writes that Netanyahu's request - and its approval - for tax benefits at a time when many families are collapsing with no income due to the corona crisis exposes his indifference to the needs of the country's citizens.*

You Must Be Kidding: 
“The prime minster shouldn’t have to try to find a way to make it through the month."
—Netanyahu loyalist, MK Miki Zohar, argued in support of approving tax breaks for Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu.**

APN's daily news review from Israel - Tuesday June 23, 2020

Quote of the day:

“It was the first time I had heard that there are antiquities there, and my family has been here for decades. My great-grandfather lived here.”
--Mahmoud Bisharat, a resident of a tiny West Bank village in the Beqaa Jordan Valley, was recently ordered by Israel to destroy some of his buildings, a well, olive trees and concrete casting around the structures that are on his property, because Israel suddenly declared they were on an archaeological site."

You Must Be Kidding:

In 2019, Israel issued 167% more demolition orders and warnings to Palestinians in the West Bank for structures built on what Israel claimed were archaeological sites than it had two years earlier. The initiative grew out of the right-wing Regavim movement.**

APN's daily news review from Israel - Monday June 22, 2020

 Quote of the day:

"I want to know that when I check out, my daughters and my granddaughters will continue to live a normal life here. That is all we wanted. But today I do not see that normal life as assured. I do not see the future of my daughters and granddaughters as assured. And that truly haunts me. What haunts me is knowing that what exists today is liable to fall apart tomorrow.”
--Prof. Zeev Sternhell, a world renown expert on fascism and a Holocaust survivor, was a vocal supporter of peace and opposed occupation. He died Sunday.*

Quote of the day:

"One doesn’t need to read 'The Protocols of the Elders of Zion' in order to be filled with feelings of discomfort and injustice by the fact that the team mediating between representatives of the nation-state of the Jewish people and representatives of the Palestinian people is comprised entirely of Jews."
--Carolina Landsmann writes in Haaretz of the hypocrisy of the right-wing, which accuses the left-wing of being 'PC' and which likes to portray itself as “telling it as it is,” but is silent about the make-up of the US team that drafted the Trump peace plan and offered itself as an objective, impartial, unbiased broker between Palestinians and Israelis. Landsmann writes that one of the Trump team members, US Ambassador to Israel David Friedman, is so pro-settler he "makes Bibi (Netanyahu) look like Ahmad Tibi."*

You Must Be Kidding: 
45 days of community service.
--The sentence an IDF soldier received for shooting and killing a Palestinian fisherman in Gaza in 2018.**

APN's daily news review from Israel 

Thursday June 18, 2020

Quote of the day:"It's called apartheid via salami tactics."
--Former Meretz Chairwoman Zahava Galon said of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's 'annexation in stages' proposal.*

APN's daily news review from Israel - Wednesday June 17, 2020

Quotes of the Day:

“The court is sending a clear message to law enforcement authorities today that there is no longer a basis for the many years of immunity that the state has granted to the heads of the settlement movement, who have done in the settlements whatever they have felt like, in violation of the law, and all of this to create facts on the ground that affect the future of all of Israel. We hope that the message is heard and that they finally a stop is put to the lawlessness in the settlements and outposts.”
--Peace Now responds after court orders the State to explain its failure to investigate illegal construction in West Bank settlement.*

"Fifty-three years of occupation since the Six Day War have fundamentally changed Israel. After more than 40 years of right-wing rule, Israelis identify and are identified more with ruling whites than with oppressed Blacks. Ethnocentrism, Jewish fundamentalism and hostility towards Palestinians, it seems, have spawned blatant racism towards minorities in general, as Israel’s own black minority of Ethiopian Jews can attest."
--Haaretz+ commentator Chemi Shalev writes about why Israelis backed the civil rights movement in America, but don't back the Black Lives Matter movement**

"Supporters of annexation want to strengthen Israel by reducing danger. They are trying to get rid of a chronic illness that we have been living with for more than 50 years, but the problem is that the medicine they offer could kill the patient, that is, the State of the Jewish people."
—Sallai Meridor, former Israeli ambassador to the US, former Jewish Agency chairman and a present-day settler, shares his view on annexation.***