Jerusalem - Sona al-Deak

The settlements\' chemical factories poison Palestinian lands with toxic Toxic inhalation, waste and pollutants emitted from Israeli industrial factories on settlements in the West Bank, has been causing concern amongst  Palestinians, due to the serious harm to the environment and for people\'s health. Five Israeli industrial zones are built on Palestinian territories in the governorate of Silfit, containing 160 factories, which produce aluminum, leather, batteries, plastics, cement, food cans, fibre glass, chemical cleansers, Insecticides, marble, military equipment and other materials not suitable for populated areas.
\"The residues from these factories are causing harm  to health in addition to the environment and natural resources, especially drinking water and  cultivated lands,\" Jamil al-Motawer, deputy director of the Palestinian Environment Administration, told Arabstoday.
He added: \"The industrial drainage of these factories has reached  Palestinian cultivated lands and the water wells from which the sheep and cows drink. This drainage is also leaking into the groundwater resources, Needless to say,  these industrial zones prevent any chance for normal expansion of  Palestinian villages and towns.\"
The Palestinian governorate of Silfit, which includes 23 Israeli settlements, in which there are five industrial zones --  the most harmful being located in the settlement of Burkan. This zone contains factories producing some of the most harmful industrial residue for health and the environment. .
The director of the Palestinian Water Institution, Saleh al-Rabi, told Arabstoday that the industrial zone of Burkan produces more than 800,000 m3 of harmful industrial drainage,  which all finds its way to  Palestinian land and water resources.
\"The most affected villages of this drainage are Kafr el-Deak and Deir al-Ballout, \" Rabi said.
Air pollution is another main threat  which is emitting from Israeli factories, especially the plastics factories, which leaves solid chemical residues that are burnt and dissolved in the air, as well as the leather tanning factories, which leach heavy pollutants into the water.

http://www.arabstoday.net/en/330/venus-to-pass-the-face-of-sun-in-rare-transit

Quote:

cods wrote on Mar 18^th, 2017 at 9:46am:


Unforgreggory is too busy chatting to himself online to get a real job.

Bit late to be discussing this, isn't it?

It is high time the government also made it clear that those people who desecrate Muslim and Christian sites in Israel are the full equivalent of anti-Semitic hooligans, terrorists.

A Friday morning tour of the Mount Zion area, just outside the walls of the Old City of Jerusalem, organized by the impressive government- funded ICORE research project on Study of Conversion and Inter-Religious Encounters. We are introduced to the multiple complexities of this tiny piece of territory, encompassing within it the Dormition Church, the reputed Tomb of King David and place of the Last Supper, the Franciscan monastery and the separate Armenian, Greek, Protestant and other cemeteries, bordering on each other in a complex mosaic.

Unlike most areas of religious tension and conflict in Israel, there is no significant Muslim presence here at the moment, although it is clear from their architecture that many of the buildings, especially the King David site, date back to Muslim periods – many hundreds of years after the death of King David or the events of the Last Supper. The small Muslim Dajani-Daoud cemetery is fenced in tightly and is no longer in use, while the neighboring buildings, which used to belong to the Dajani family, are now occupied by the Holocaust Cellar Museum and the Diaspora Yeshiva.

The conflicts and tensions among the various Christian denominations and the active renewal of the Jewish presence, most notably through the takeover in recent years of David’s Tomb, are clear for all to see. The room of the Last Supper is now off limits to Christian prayer because of the Jewish argument that such prayer is idolatrous and full of impurity, and that this impurity should not be allowed to descend downward into David’s Tomb. This bizarre argument has been upheld by the courts and enforced by the police.

The accounts of Jewish youth accosting priests on the street and spitting at them, of graffiti on the walls of monasteries and churches and the desecration of gravestones in the local cemeteries are hard to accept, but there are too many such documented accounts for it to be pushed aside as the work of a few deviant youth. The establishment of a new police station in the very heart of Mount Zion and the installation of CTV cameras at almost every corner and passageway are disturbing evidence of the renewed religio-political tensions. Strict rules have been introduced restricting prayer services and other religious practices and such events are limited to a few holy days in the year. Religious and sectarian tensions have developed in recent years as a new, young, radical group of extremist right-wing elements have sought to take control and bring about a “Judaization” of the mountain.


All this takes place against the backdrop of the desecration of the Tabta Church overlooking the Sea of Galilee last week, also by groups of Jewish youth acting in the name of religion. Can there be a greater desecration of God’s name in the Holy Land than Jews doing to other religions what was done to their fathers and ancestors by other governments and religions throughout centuries of exile? They may wear the kippot, tzitzit, etc., but the last thing that they, or their teachers (who call themselves rabbis) can be labeled is “religious.” It is the ultimate “chilul hashem” (desecration of God’s name) which they have performed and it is high time that we, and our government, stopped pretending that this is just a small group of deviant youth which doesn’t reflect the wider sub-strata of society within which they are growing up and being educated.

We should have been proud of the fact that the president and prime minister condemned the action, that Knesset speaker Yuli Edelstein convened a group of rabbis and religious leaders to set up a fund to help repair the damage to the church. But we didn’t hear any major statements of denunciation from the Chief Rabbinate, the official state religious authority.

Most of the right-wing government ministers have remained silent, where they would have been the first to shout out loud were it a Jewish cemetery or synagogue under attack elsewhere in the world (in Europe or North America), demanding that the respective governments and police forces immediately take action to arrest the culprits, to make good the damage and to put in place security measures aimed at ensuring that such activities are not repeated in the future.

Instead, we have heard one of the country’s most extreme right-wing rabbis, Dov Lior, formerly of Kiryat Arba and recently relocated to Jerusalem, questioning the idea that Jews should donate money toward the restoration of the church, arguing instead that the same money should be used for restoring the desecrated graves on the Mount of Olives which have been damaged by loathsome people acting in the name of Palestinian nationalism and Islam.

As though there is some symmetry in acts of desecration. If they can do it to us, then we have the right to do it to them. Reducing this bitter and endless conflict to tit for tat child’s game – what you can do I can do better.

freediver wrote on Mar 25^th, 2017 at 9:17pm:


No I do not oppose the two state solution but the BIG question is HOW could this be achieved?

We have allowed Israel to do as it pleases for far too long.
 
Could Israel be forced to go back to the 1967 border allowing any Jews that wanted to stay in the occupied land if they so wished and given Palestinian citizenship and Palestinian in Israel’s territory given full Israeli rights and citizenship if they wish to stay there.  Would Palestinians and Jews accept that?  Could a buffer zone controlled by a peace keeping force be formed between the two?  Will the Palestinians who were forced out of Palestine be allowed to return to their land?
 
I really don’t know what can be done but sure know that something must be done as the Palestinians have been suffering for 70 years under the apartheid Israel rule.  Jews and Arabs used to live peacefully in Palestine before the Zionists took over.

Yadda wrote on Mar 28^th, 2017 at 7:59am:



Klaven's right.

Nearly 400 Israeli settlers, guarded by regime forces, have once again stormed the al-Aqsa Mosque compound in the Israeli-occupied Old City of East Jerusalem al-Quds.

Firas al-Dibs, spokesperson of the Islamic Waqf, which manages the compound’s affairs, told the Palestinian Ma’an news agency that large groups of Israeli settlers, approximately 385 in total, “raided the mosque” on Thursday.

The official also told Turkey’s Anadolu news agency that the intruding settlers tried to perform rituals and attempted to attack the mosque guards, while Israeli forces made two arrests in the mosque’s courtyard.

The al-Aqsa Mosque compound is a flashpoint Islamic site, which is also holy to the Jews.

Under a 1967 deal between Israel and Jordan, the compound’s custodian, non-Muslim worship is prohibited at the site.

In defiance of the agreement, the regime in Tel Aviv regularly allows Israeli settlers and extremists to enter the site and carry out religious rituals -- often under armed guard.

Thursday marked the third day of the Jewish holiday of Passover.

In a similar move on Wednesday, nearly 300 settlers and extremists entered the compound by force, performing acts deemed provocative by Palestinians.

In the lead-up to Passover, Israeli forces had detained at least 30 Palestinians during raids in occupied East Jerusalem al-Quds.

Muslim bodies in Jerusalem al-Quds condemned the incursions, saying they are meant to change al-Aqsa’s historical character.

    “We cannot accept such arbitrary, barbaric … measures under the pretext of Jewish holidays,” the Department of Islamic Waqf and Islamic Higher Council, as well as Dar Al-Ifta and the Supreme Islamic Council, said in a joint statement.

Last week, the Palestinian Prisoners’ Society (PPS) criticized the Israeli regime for stepping up its crackdown on Palestinians every year during Passover.

“For (Palestinian) Jerusalemites, the Jewish holiday season means an escalation in arbitrary detentions, house raids, and searches -- measures that terrify families. The installation of additional security checkpoints, particularly at the al-Aqsa Mosque (compound)’s gates and in the Old City, only increase tensions in Jerusalem,” the PPS  head in Jerusalem Nadi Qaws told Ma’an last week.

In a war in 1967, Israel captured the West Bank and East Jerusalem al-Quds, where the Aqsa Mossque compound is located. Since then, Tel Aviv has continued to expand its illegal settlements there.

http://presstv.com/Detail/2017/04/14/517974/Israel-Settlers-Aqsa