domingo, 23 de fevereiro de 2020

India and Pakistan in the mood for colonial repressive rules


Rumour has it that Binyamin Netanyahu is very fond of Narendra Modi and vise versa, as both of them share the same expansionist views and methods of repression. 
On a cold January evening, a gang of masked intruders armed with sticks and iron rods entered the ruggedly beautiful and usually well-guarded campus of one of India's best-known educational institutions, Jawaharlal Nehru University.
They proceeded towards a venue where faculty members and students were peacefully discussing a rise in hostel accommodation charges and attacked those gathered there.
The mob, who JNY students have alleged were members of the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), a student organisation linked to the ruling Bharatiya Janta Party (BJP), then proceeded to vandalise student residences, apparently also targeting Dalit, Muslim and Kashmiri students.
Remarkably, Delhi's police, already amassed outside the campus, did not answer the victims' calls for help as they were waiting for Vice-Chancellor, M Jagadesh Kumar, to give them permission to enter the campus.
Close to 30 people were wounded, including Aishe Ghosh, the head of the JNU Students Union, who sustained a head wound.
The incident elicited international media attention, including stinging editorials, and widespread condemnation from academics across the world, a testimony to JNU's profile rather than to the violence itself. For the fact is that violent attacks upon university campuses have become routine in India today.
Before the JNU incident, two historically Muslim universities, the Jamia Millia Islamia in Delhi and Aligarch Muslim University in Uttar Pradesh, had both been targeted, not by mobs, but by police, who beat student protesters. In a context where religious minorities are being singled out for discrimination and violence, the targeting of JNU, a public relations disaster, has puzzled some India watchers.
What happened has to be understood as the opening of one more battlefront in what is fast becoming an ideological civil war. This is an India where not just minorities but any person or institution pushing back against the onslaught of state-sponsored bigotry faces the threat of punitive violence, whether directly from the state or from mobs it apparently protects.
As of this date, in a Kafkaesque move that appears to be the new normal in India, charges hae been filed against the victims of the JNU violence, including Ghosh, rather than those right-wing activists caught on camera perpetrating it.
This civil war, which has been quietly in the making for several years, has come to a flashpoint around the new Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), which has been pithily but accurately described by the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights as "fundamentally discriminatory in nature" in making religion a criterion for offering refuge and citizenship.
Combined with the planned National Register of Citizens (NRC) and National Population Register (NPR), it will render several communities, most prominently and significantly, Muslims - long demonised by the governing party - vulnerable to the removal of citizenship followed by detention and possible deportation.
In this context, the growing protests against the CAA, in which university students have been playing a major role, are significant and heartening. Many who have kept quiet for a long time are now standing up and refusing to be part of a fundamentally discriminatory national entity.
In the protests over the past few weeks there have been repeated invocations of the Indian constitution's spirit of plurality and collective recitations of its famous Preamble. People from different religious backgrounds have benn recommitting themselves to a vision of a nation that aspires to be just, equal and plural. Indian Muslims have been standing up in large numbers to lay claim to the nation, to their rights under the constitution and to their religious and cultural identities simultaneously.
There is no doubt that these protests are tremendously heartening to those many of Indians whose hearts have been growing heavier with each passing day over the last six years in which Narendra Modi's hardline Hindutva version of nationalism has made significant strides towards the achievement of an exclusionary and extremist "Hindu nation".
Equally, what has become clear in the violence exercised on campuses and upon protesters and other dissidents is that this is a regime that is prepared to unleash not just the full force of the law and security forces but also to enable vigilante groups such as the mob that attacked JNU. Peaceful protesters against the CAA have been subjected to colonial-era legislation preventing large gatherings and detained in their hundreds when they have persisted in protesting.
Some, like former civil service officer Kannan Gopinathan and activist Sadaf Jafar, have been detained. Jafar has said she was beaten while in police custody in Uttar Pradesh.
The Dalit leader Chandrashekhar Azad was also detained for several days after protesting against the CAA. Dissent in India today is a risky activity.
The JNU attacks were above all a message that the current government is happy for the battle to no longer be simply ideological but to escalate into street violence. This is why it was important to break up a peaceful meeting of academics and students: discussion and debate are off the table in favour of the language of iron rods, stones and tear gas.
While state violence has been endured by the people of Kashmir for an unconscionably long time, the message now being conveyed across India, six months after the unilateral abrogation of Article 370 which gave that region a historically necessary special status, is that no form of dissent will be tolerated in India either.
JNU has been in the sights of this government before, not least because the question of Kashmir was up for debate and discussion - as it must be in any accountable democracy - on that campus. This brought colonial-era legislation against "sedition" upon the heads of JNU students.
In the past few days, New Delhi's police commissioner has been given emergency powers under the draconian National Security Act, for the next three months. As one dissident journalist noted, the message that is now being signalled loud and clear is that Indian democracy may not have much time left
Those currently in power are part of a political dispensation that may not be planning, in the long term, to put itself to a democratic mandate in the first place, still less accountability.
The world must worry. What happens in India happens to nearly one-fifth of the world's population. And particularly in the context of the global rise of authoritarian ethnonationalism, the undermining and eventual abrogation of democracy in India will not be contained within the borders of that nation-state.
With a few exceptions, Western and other governments have been shamefully silent on the ongoing assault on democracy and constitutional rights in India. It may suit them to keep quiet but across the world, we must now form people's alliances to resist what will almost certainly become a global assault on the very idea of democracy itself. Speak up for India, for you speak up for yourself.

Authoritarism has been strengthened on the two sides of the border. It appears to be sedition season on the Indian subcontinent. A relic of the colonial era, the sedition law has become a potent weapon in the hands of the Pakistani and Indian governments to crush dissenting voices. 
In December 2019, Pakistan's government charged hundreds of people with sedition for taking part in the countrywide Students Solidarity March, which called for the restoration of student unions among other demands. One of the participants in the march, Alamgir Wazir, was arrested on December 2, and has since been languishing in jail for allegedly "conspiring to overthrow the government".
On January 27, Manzoor Pashteen, the leader of the Pashtun Tahaffuz Movement (PTM), was also arrested on charges of sedition in a late-night raid on his residence in Peshawar. A day later, police arrested and charged with sedition 23 other people, including several young activists from the left-wing Awami Workers Party (AWP), for attending a protest in Islamabad against Pashteen's arrest. 
The PTM is an ethnic Pashtun rights movement that has been calling for accountability for alleged rights abuses committed by Pakistan's military in its war against the Pakistan Taliban. The peaceful rights movement has been the target of a sustained campaign of intimidation and arrests since its formation.
Activists from AWP and many of PTM's supporters have been released, but scores of activists remain incarcerated, including Pashteen himself. These individuals face the risk of spending years behind bars merely for daring to criticise the actions of their government. Their ordeal demonstrates the Pakistani state's eagerness to use the sedition law to silence anyone it perceives as a threat to its authority. 
Across the border in India, the sedition law was notoriously invoked against Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) student leaders Kanaiyha Kumar and Umar Khalid (among others) in 2016, for allegedly shouting "anti-India" slogans during a protest. JNU has a reputation for being a hotbed of left-wing dissent. As a result, India's Hindu-nationalist BJP government believes the institution presents an obstacle to its authoritarian agenda and continuously harasses its faculty and students with frivolous lawsuits. 
Earlier this month, a researcher at JNU, Sharjeel Imam, was charged with sedition for participating in the ongoing protests against the Citizenship Amendement Act. In recent years, the sedition law has been used against a host of other people, including trade unionists, environmentalists and professors across the country.
What is particularly remarkable about all this is that these unfounded accusations are being hurled through a law which was created and widely used by the British Raj against the insurgent anti-colonial movement in India. 
Bal Gangadhar Tilak, one of the most prominent nationalist leaders of colonial India before Gandhi's emergence on the national stage, was tried several times under the sedition law for "inciting the public" through his writings. In his 1916 trial, he was defended by the young barrister, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, who would later go on to become a major proponent of the partition of India and a founding father of the state of Pakistan.
From the 1920s to the 1940s, scores of Indians were tried under the sedition law, including Mahatma Gandhi, Maulana Mohammad Ai Jauhar, Bhagat Singh and M N Roy, among others. Prior to independence, the sedition law was synonymous with the absurdity of colonial rule as British officials used this law to accuse locals of being "foreign agents" in their own lands. 
Independence activists across the subcontinent who were imprisoned for "sedition" carried the charge as a badge of honour. They were viewed by the general public as heroes, because back then being patriotic meant dissenting from those in power. 
Yet, at their birth, the nation-states of India and Pakistan were confronted with the paradox of acquiring the twin inheritance of anti-colonial politics premised on popular sovereignty and a colonial state apparatus that was geared towards silencing and terrorising the population. The gap between these two legacies continues to haunt both countries to this day. The sedition law is a reminder that the colonial logic, which sees the state not as a body that is designed to serve the people but a weapon to subdue them, is alive and well today. 
One of the most remarkable features of this latest round of repression has been the emphasis on "seditious speech". Today, in neither Pakistan nor India is it necessary to prove that there was in place a plan of action to undermine national sovereignty to charge someone with sedition. Instead, speeches and slogans alone are considered "proof" of some deeper conspiracy against the nation-state. 
The states are using sedition laws to violently patrol the boundaries of acceptable speech and thought in the public sphere, exposing the vulnerability they feel in the face of righteous and peaceful criticisms of their exclusionary, divisive and dangerous policies. 
This sense of insecurity stems from the growing inability of these states to fulfil their responsibilities towards the public. In Pakistan, the Imran Khan-led government has signed one of the most punishing deals with the IMF,  resulting in unprecedented austerity. The education budget has been cut by 40 percent and the health sector is being privatised. Meanwhile, wheat shortages have marred the food market and inflation has reached an unprecedented 14 percent.
In India, the economy has also taken a sharp downturn. The economic growth has tumbled from an annual expansion rate of 8.1 percent in the first quarter of 2018 to just 4.5 per cent in the third quarter of last year. Rising unemployment coupled with an agrarian crisis left many poor families with no other option but to cut back their food consumption, shattering Prime Minister Narendra Modi's promise of delivering "Acche Din" (Good Days) for the country's impoverished majority.
Moreover, the growing economic uncertainty has accelerated the need for the region's ruling classes to produce fake enemies to distract the public from their persistent inability to provide them with a decent standard of living. 
This is why an unprecedented number of people across the political spectrum in Pakistan are facing the accusation of being "an Indian agent", while in India, opponents of the government are being branded "ISI agents", in reference to Pakistan's intelligence agency. And this is why so many people are facing charges for allegedly serving the enemy in both countries today. 
Yet, there is growing resistance in both India and Pakistan against the authoritarianism engulfing the region. Two features stand out as salient in these burgeoning movements. 
First, they are being led by young citizens who are increasingly wary of the fear and hate-mongering methods that are being used by the ruling elites to convince the public to give up on their most basic rights to safety, employment and free speech. Thousands of students, for example, joined the campaign in India against the discriminatory CAA, posing perhaps the greatest challenge to the Modi government in India. 
Similarly, in Pakistan, the Students Solidarity March and the PTM emerged as youth-led movements and managed to unite the public behind a common cause at a time when mainstream political parties appear unable to build an opposition to a faltering political and economic system.
The second striking feature of these movements is that they base their legitimacy on the constitution. In India, the anti-CAA protestors are claiming that such discriminatory laws undermine the basic architecture of the constitution and facilitate India's drift towards communal majoritarianism. In Pakistan, activists are defending freedom of speech and unionisation as basic elements of the constitution without which democracy becomes meaningless.
In both cases, the state has responded by hurling allegations of treason and imposing sedition charges on the protesters. This led to the bizarre situation where the state's foremost legal document is transformed into subversive literature, signifying the crisis of legitimacy that haunts authoritarian governments in South Asia.
Activists in both India and Pakistan have recently become more vocal in their demand for the repeal of sedition laws. Indeed, they are asking the pertinent question: who are the people being seditious against if they, themselves are the rulers? An honest resolution of this question will not only allow the sub-continent to overcome one of the darkest legacies of colonial rule, but it will also aid us in figuring out what it means to be patriotic in a region where nationalism is becoming increasingly insular and punishing. 

domingo, 16 de fevereiro de 2020

HBO & Netflix at the service of Israel The UN step up against settlements


Israel's latest propaganda war is being waged through slick tv shows on various media service providers such as Netflix and HBO.
While racist depictions of Arabs and the glorification of Israel is not new in the film and TV industry, there has recently been a surge in programmes venerating the Israeli secret services while demonising Palestinians as threats to global security and erasing their history. 
The most well-known is the Israeli Netflix series Fauda (meaning chaos in Arabic) which has been a global hit. The series follows an undercover Israeli special forces unit known as the "musta'ribim", who disguise themselves as Palestinians to infiltrate Palestinian towns, villages and protests. They are particularly known for blending into protests dressed as young Palestinian men and kidnapping protesters. Fauda has been heavily criticised for dehumanising Palestinians and completely erasing the military occupation by failing to show any of the massive and visible infrastructure built across the West Bank and Gaza to keep Palestinians contained.
Another TV show, on HBO, called Our Boys, dramatises the infamous events surrounding the killing of three teenage Israeli settlers and the subsequent killing of a Palestinian boy, Mohammed Abu Khdeir. Many praised the show for being critical of Israel, particularly after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu denounced it as "anti-Semitic". However, the series not only reinforces the Israeli narrative but also shows Israel's secret police agency Shin Bet as a defender of the rule of law. Similar Netflix programmes such as The Spy (starring Sasha Baren Cohen) also glorify the Israeli secret services as an agency of good fighting the bad, which inevitably happens to be all the neighbouring Arab countries.
The latest addition to the list of TV shows supporting Israel in its propaganda war against the Palestinians is Netflix's The Messiah. In the show, a messiah-like figure from the Middle East causes concern for the CIA and the Shin Bet. In the first episode, he is seen to lead a group of Palestinian-Syrian refugees to Syria's border with presumably the occupied Golan Heights. A fictional CNN reporter declares that "as displaced Palestinians they claim they are entitled passage into the West Bank as rightful citizens". Yet Palestinian refugees in Syria come from historic Palestine, now recognised as Israel, and they do not demand to become citizens of the West Bank. Rather they demand their right to return to their villages and towns of origin from which they were displaced in 1948 - a right that is inalienable and enshrined in international law.
This is not pedantism; this kind of consistent and subtle denial of Palestinian rights seeps into what becomes hegemonic, accepted norms. This is further demonstrated when the show consistently refers to Jerusalem as Israel's capital, while international law and consensus denies it as such in recognition of the Palestinian right to the city.
We also know far too well what happens when Palestinian refugees march to Israeli military fences and demand their inalienable rights to return home. Indeed the courageous Great March of Return in Gaza shows us the horrific consequences of such an action: Israeli soldiers shot dead hundreds of Palestinians. In contrast, The Messiah shows a few Israeli army jeeps standing by as the refugees camp next to the fence.
Other Palestinian protests later on in the series are consistently referred to as riots - a word commonly used by mainstream media to delegitimise political protest, evoking connotations of senseless violence and often holding heavy racial undertones.
The show also glorifies a troubled Shin Bet agent who kidnaps and tortures a young Palestinian boy to near death, while it is later discovered that he previously killed another Palestinian boy in an act of revenge. Not only are Palestinians so dehumanised that their torture and killing is seen as justifiable, but the agent is also portrayed as a tortured soul, a heroic protagonist who works with a CIA agent for the sake of world security.
Similar to the portrayal of the CIA in the show Homeland, in The Messiah, the Shin Bet is portrayed as an ultimately virtuous organisation that sometimes has to undertake "unsavoury" activities for the sake of the greater good. Yet we have clear documentation of the Shin Bet's systematic human rights abuses and crimes against the Palestinians and others, including their torture and violent interrogations of Palestinians, which contravene international law and all considerations of morality. None of this is surprising, especially as the CIA continues to be portrayed as a force for good in mainstream media despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
While it can be expected that a large media organisation such as Netflix has no interest in humanising Palestinians or Middle Easterners or portraying their narratives accurately, it is particularly disappointing that Arab actors take part in these programmes and become complicit in racist propaganda and ultimately their own dehumanisation. Yet throughout the history of television and film this too has always been the case.
This latest surge of programmes focusing on Israel and trying to show it as a force for good is a clear attempt to win the current legitimisation battle. While it may seem like one of the less important battles, the effectiveness of such TV shows cannot be understated. They feed into global narratives on Israel and Palestine and soon become part of hegemonic norms or facts. Indeed in today's world, media services such as Netflix, and their popular TV shows, are the main sources of knowledge for many people. And although not as crude as classic Orientalist cinema and TV, these programmes are no less racist and perhaps even more dangerous in their subtlety and slick presentation.
Boycott, Resist, Push Back: Shifting Israel narratives in the US
 
After countless delays, the UN released the highly-anticipated database of companies that operate in Israel’s hundreds of illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank.
The Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) released the list on Wednesday to Palestinain fanfare and Israeli condemnation.
The list names 112 business enterprises — 94 Israeli and 18 international (in the US, France, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Thailand and the United Kingdom. Among these, was the US-based home sharing company, Airbnb) — that have ties to illegal settlements, and are involved in one or more of the following 10 activities as stated by the OHCHR:
. The supply of equipment and materials facilitating the construction and the expansion of settlements and the wall, and associated infrastructures;
. The supply of surveillance and identification equipment for settlements, the wall and checkpoints directly linked with settlements;
.The supply of equipment for the demolition of housing and property, the destruction of agricultural farms, greenhouses, olive groves and crops;
. The supply of security services, equipment and materials to enterprises operating in settlements;
. The provision of services and utilities supporting the maintenance and existence of settlements, including transport;
. Banking and financial operations helping to develop, expand or maintain settlements and their activities, including loans for housing and the development of businesses;
. The use of natural resources, in particular water and land, for business purposes;
. Pollution, and the dumping of waste in or its transfer to Palestinian villages;
. Captivity of the Palestinian financial and economic markets, as well as practices that disadvantage Palestinian enterprises, including through restrictions on movement, administrative and legal constraints;
. Use of benefits and reinvestments of enterprises owned totally or partially by settlers for developing, expanding and maintaining the settlements.
According to the council, the initial investigation began with a potential list of 321 companies, but was eventually narrowed down to the business enterprises listed below. The database is expected to be updated every year, with more companies to be added to the list.
Among the international businesses listed are several companies in the travel industry previously known to operate in settlements, like Airbnb, Booking.com, Expedia, and TripAdvisor.
American food manufacturer General Mills and telecommunications giant Motorola Inc. are also on the list, along with British corporation JCB Ltd. which manufactures construction and demolition equipment.
The high commissioner of the UN council is Chile's former president Michelle Bachelet. She released a statement along with the report, saying she was “conscious this issue has been, and will continue to be, highly contentious. However, after an extensive and meticulous review process - compiling the database had been a "complex process" involving "widespread discussions" with states, think-tanks, academics and the companies themselves - we are satisfied this fact-based report reflects the serious consideration that has been given to this unprecedented and highly complex mandate, and that it responds appropriately to the Human Rights Council’s request contained in resolution 31/36.”
The UN report comes in response to a 2016 UNHRC resolution calling for a "database for all businesses engaged in specific activities related to Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territory".
The rights council, which is made up of 47 governments, had never before requested such a list scrutinising corporate activities.
In 2016, the UN Human Rights Council adopted resolution 31/36, requesting the OHCHR to produce a report investigating the “implications of settlements on the civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights of the Palestinian people throughout the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem.”
Due to heavy Israeli and US pressure, the publication of the report was delayed for years, to the disdain of human rights groups around the world.
The release of the report on Wednesday was swiftly criticized by Israel and its supporters. Whereas the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement released a statement praising the action as a “first significant and concrete step by any UN entity towards holding to account Israeli and international corporations that enable and profit from Israel’s grave violations of Palestinian rights.
BDS did call out a number of companies and banks that were left off the list, like Hewlett Packard companies, Elbit Systems, Caterpillar, Hyundai Heavy Industries, Volvo, Heidelberg Cement, and Cemex, as being “irrefutably implicated in Israel’s illegal settlement enterprise.”
“It is high time for all public institutions, city councils, churches, trade unions, cultural organizations, universities, investment funds, and others to stop contracting, procuring from or investing in any of the companies on the UN list of shame, to avoid complicity in Israel’s settlement enterprise,” the group said.
List of companies operating in illegal settlements in the West Bank, besides those listed by the BDS above:
Afikim Public Transportation Ltd.
Airbnb Inc.
American Israeli Gas Corporation Ltd.
Amir Marketing and Investments in Agriculture Ltd.
Amos Hadar Properties and Investments Ltd.
Angel Bakeries
Archivists Ltd.
Ariel Properties Group
Ashtrom Industries Ltd.
Ashtrom Properties Ltd.
Avgol Industries 1953 Ltd.
Bank Hapoalim B.M.
Bank Leumi Le-Israel B.M.
Bank of Jerusalem Ltd.
Beit Haarchiv Ltd.
Bezeq, the Israel Telecommunication
Corp Ltd.
Booking.com B.V.
C Mer Industries Ltd.
Café Café Israel Ltd.
Caliber 3
Cellcom Israel Ltd.
Cherriessa Ltd.
Chish Nofei Israel Ltd.
Citadis Israel Ltd.
Comasco Ltd.
Darban Investments Ltd.
Delek Group Ltd.
Delta Israel
Dor Alon Energy in Israel 1988 Ltd.
Egis Rail
Egged, Israel Transportation Cooperative Society Ltd.
Energix Renewable Energies Ltd.
EPR Systems Ltd.
Extal Ltd.
Expedia Group Inc.
Field Produce Ltd.
Field Produce Marketing Ltd.
First International Bank of Israel Ltd.
Galshan Shvakim Ltd.
General Mills Israel Ltd.
Hadiklaim Israel Date Growers Cooperative Ltd.
Hot Mobile Ltd.
Hot Telecommunications Systems Ltd.
Industrial Buildings Corporation Ltd.
Israel Discount Bank Ltd.
Israel Railways Corporation Ltd.
Italek Ltd.
JC Bamford Excavators Ltd.
Jerusalem Economy Ltd.
Kavim Public Transportation Ltd.
Lipski Installation and Sanitation Ltd.
Matrix IT Ltd.
Mayer Davidov Garages Ltd.
Mekorot Water Company Ltd.
Mercantile Discount Bank Ltd.
Merkavim Transportation Technologies Ltd.
Mizrahi Tefahot Bank Ltd.
Modi’in Ezrachi Group Ltd.
Mordechai Aviv Taasiot Beniyah 1973 Ltd.
Motorola Solutions Israel Ltd.
Municipal Bank Ltd.
Naaman Group Ltd.
Nof Yam Security Ltd.
Ofertex Industries 1997 Ltd.
Opodo Ltd.
Bank Otsar Ha-Hayal Ltd.
Partner Communications Company Ltd.
Paz Oil Company Ltd.
Pelegas Ltd.
Pelephone Communications Ltd.
Proffimat S.R. Ltd.
Rami Levy Chain Stores Hashikma Marketing 2006 Ltd.
Rami Levy Hashikma Marketing Communication Ltd.
Re/Max Israel
Shalgal Food Ltd.
Shapir Engineering and Industry Ltd.
Shufersal Ltd.
Sonol Israel Ltd.
Superbus Ltd.
Tahal Group International B.V.
TripAdvisor Inc.
Twitoplast Ltd.
Unikowsky Maoz Ltd.
YES
Zakai Agricultural Know-how and inputs Ltd.
ZF Development and Construction
ZMH Hammermand Ltd.
Zorganika Ltd.
Zriha Hlavin Industries Ltd.
Alon Blue Square Israel Ltd.
Alstom S.A.
Altice Europe N.V.
Amnon Mesilot Ltd.
Ashtrom Group Ltd.
Booking Holdings Inc.
Brand Industries Ltd.
Delta Galil Industries Ltd.
eDreams ODIGEO S.A.
Egis S.A.
Electra Ltd.
Export Investment Company Ltd.
General Mills Inc.
Hadar Group
Hamat Group Ltd.
Indorama Ventures P.C.L.
Kardan N.V.
Mayer’s Cars and Trucks Co. Ltd.
Motorola Solutions Inc.
Natoon Group
Villar International Ltd.
Greenkote P.L.C.
Palestinian Prime Minister Mohammed Shtayyeh threatened to take international legal action against the companies named in the report, demanding they "immediately close their headquarters and branches inside illegal Israeli settlements because their presence contradicts international and UN resolutions". He added Palestinians would also "demand compensation" for what he called "their use of our occupied land illegally."
Human Rights Watch's deputy advocacy chief Bruno Stagno welcomed the publication of the database: This "should put all companies on notice: to do business with illegal settlements is to aid in the commission of war crimes". 
The report highlights the international community's stance, that these settlements in the West Bank are "illegal under international law". Unfortunately, it doesn't have any legality in terms of implementing consequences for these companies, but it does open them to the potential for any Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. 
Wednesday's report, however, stressed that companies do not have to remain on the database forever.
"Where there are reasonable grounds to believe that ... the business enterprise is ceasing or no longer involved in the relevant activity, the business enterprise would be removed from the database," it said.
The report recommended that the database be updated annually, and urged the Human Rights Council to appoint a group of independent experts to handle this task.
Trump's plan
Israel occupied the West Bank and Est Jérusalem in the Six-Day War of 1967 in a move never recognised by the international community.
Its settlements are deemed illegal under international law and widely seen as a sticking point in peace negotiations.
Some 600,000 Israeli settlers live in the occupied West Bank and Israeli-annexed East Jerusalem among about 2.9 million Palestinians.
In recent weeks, Binyamin Netanyahu has pledged to annex Israel's more than 100 settlements in the West Bank, a move that he US signalled would greenlight.
The UN report came a day after Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas Addrressed the UN Security Council, rejecting US President Donald Trump's so-called Middle East plan.
The plan envisions a disjointed Palestinian state that turns over key parts of the West Bank to Israel and favours Israel on key contentious issues including borders, the status of Jerusalem and Jewish settlements.
The proposal was made without the input of Palestinians, who broke off ties with the Trump administration after it controversially recognised Jerusalem as the capital of Israel in late 2017.
PALESTINA

To Gaza, from Israel? That's risky!

INTERACTIVE: Palestinian Remix


OCHA  



BRASIL

O Papa Francisco recebeu Lula no Vaticano e conversaram longamente sobre as desigualdades que avassalam a nossa América Latina e os outros continentes.



AOS FATOS:Todas as declarações de Bolsonaro, checadas