Bilin

Video captures Israeli occupation forces violently attacking Palestinians and international visitors touring the Old City of Hebron, as they attended the 7th International Bilin Conference on the Palestinian Popular Struggle

Violence has always been a useful term for governments and their allied establishment figures in media and punditry. Key to that utility is a very specialized use of the term as a descriptor for actions that don’t originate with the establishment or authorities. Police, armies, presidents and city administrators do not engage in violence. They use strategies, protocols, plans of action, deployments, operations and strikes. The people that are injured and die in those acts are not actively killed by violence. Rather, they suffer only in the passive voice.

Bilin is being used to test new Israeli weapons but the villagers keep protesting.

Activists in Pennsylvania hold a protest outside the headquarters of Combined Systems, Inc., the company that manufactures lethal tear gas canisters used against people from Palestine to Oakland. Adalah-NY has a full-length report on CSI and its domestic and international contracts.

Holiday shopping-related actions took place around the world as BDS activists encouraged shoppers not to buy Israeli products. And a group in California calls on the state pension fund to investigate its investment ties with Israeli companies and US companies that do business with the Israeli military.

Activists with the Minnesota Break the Bonds Campaign have officially filed a lawsuit against the State Board of Investments, demanding that Minnesota divest from Israel’s illegal military occupation activities in Palestine.

UPDATED: A leading Palestinian activist from Bil’in has become the village’s latest political prisoner. Ashraf Abu Rahmeh was kidnapped by Israeli occupation soldiers last week, and has now been indefinitely detained on the orders of an Israeli captain at Ofer prison.