The UN’s cultural body on Wednesday appealed to the US to rescind its decision to freeze its funding of the organization.

“I call on the US administration, Congress and the American people to find a way forward and continue support for UNESCO in these turbulent times,” said Irina Bokova, director-general of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization.

On Monday, the US announced that it had frozen a $60 million payment due to UNESCO for its 2011 budget.

It was mandated to do so by an American law that forbids the US to finance UN-related organizations that recognize a unilaterally declared Palestinian state without a peace agreement. On Monday, UNESCO voted to admit Palestine as it 195th member.

The US has already paid $11.8m. to UNESCO this year. Its $71.8m. contribution makes up 22 percent of the Paris-based organization’s budget.

The Bulgarian Bokova said that the loss of the money “will immediately affect our ability to deliver programs in critical areas: achieving universal education, supporting new democracies and fighting extremism.”

http://www.jpost.com/DiplomacyAndPolitics/Article.aspx?id=244202

At the top of an unmarked track leading into the small village of Alsra, in the Negev desert, somebody has placed a triangular road sign barring the entry of bulldozers. They will come, nevertheless, for every family in this village has been served with a demolition order by the Israeli authorities.

The indigenous Bedouin Arabs have eked out an existence in the desert for generations, but despite being citizens of Israel, their communities do not exist officially. Alsra, and others like it, does not appear on any official map; does not connect to any roads, and does not receive basic services from the state, such as electricity or sewage treatment.

By contrast, Jewish families have been encouraged to settle in this part of the country to make the desert "bloom" and small, gated farming communities – fully serviced with water and electricity – have sprung up close to the Bedouin villages.

For the Bedouin, however, worse is to come. Under a sweeping new proposal, dubbed the Prawer report, Israel is seeking to corral 30,000 Bedouin living in the Negev's "unrecognised" villages – some little more than tented encampments – into destitute Bedouin townships, a move that human rights groups say will not only dispossess a people of their ancestral lands but also shatter a disappearing way of life.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/the-bedouin-vs-israels-bulldozers-6256918.html

The trick is a worlwide con: ask people to present a title-deed to the land they are living upon... As most people who have lived on the land for centuries do not have such paperworks, the place is thus declared terra nullius... piece of cake robbery...

This week, the Russell Tribunal on Palestine will consider the question of whether Israel's practices in the occupied Palestinian territory (OPT) constitute the crime of apartheid within the meaning of the 1973 International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid. This Convention, which has been incorporated into the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, is not confined to apartheid in South Africa. Instead it criminalises, under international law, practices that resemble apartheid.

The Russell Tribunal was initiated in the 1960s by the philosopher Bertrand Russell to examine war crimes committed during the Vietnam War. It has now been revived to consider Israel's violations of international law. It is not a judicial tribunal, but a tribunal comprising reputable jurors from different countries, that seeks to examine whether Israel has violated international criminal law and should be held accountable.

In essence, the Russell Tribunal is a court of international public opinion. It will hear evidence in Cape Town on the scope of the 1973 Apartheid Convention, on apartheid as practiced in South Africa, on Israeli practices in the OPT, particularly the West Bank, and on the question whether these practices so closely resemble those of apartheid as to bring them within the prohibitions of the 1973 Apartheid Convention. The Israeli government has been invited to testify before the tribunal, but, at this stage, has not replied to the invitation. Most of the evidence will inevitably, therefore, be critical of Israel.

Israel cannot be held accountable for its actions by any international tribunal as it refuses to accept the jurisdiction of either the International Court of Justice or the International Criminal Court. The Russell Tribunal seeks to remedy this weakness in the international system of justice by providing for accountability by a court of international opinion.

http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/11/201111395153781378.html

At the top of a steep and ramshackle street in the Palestinian neighbourhood of Silwan, a rusty, battered gate opens into an unremarkable house. Less than a quarter mile away, though, stand the Al Aqsa mosque and the Wailing Wall, two of Jerusalem's most venerated holy sites, making it a very attractive piece of real estate indeed.

For Mohammed Sumarin, 52, whose late uncle owned this house, this is home. He was born here, raised here, and has never lived anywhere else. But now he faces losing his home of more than half a century to the Jewish National Fund (JNF), an Israeli charity that claims the house for its own and is battling to evict the family.

Silwan, sprawled along the southern flank of Jerusalem's Old City, is the politically sensitive epicentre of the struggle for East Jerusalem, coveted by Palestinians as the capital of their future state, and claimed by Israel, which annexed the eastern sector after the 1967 Six Day War, as an integral part of an undivided Jerusalem.

The evictions and demolitions of Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem are widely seen as deliberately aiding Israeli settlers in staking the Jewish claim to the eastern part of the city to thwart a final peace agreement that could cleave the city in two.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/stories-from-the-old-city-we-are-not-living-like-human-beings-6269727.html

See toon at top...

Itai Harel gazed across at the rocky wilderness of the Judaean Mountains and urged us to "look at all this wonderful, empty land all the way from Jerusalem, waiting for its sons to come to build and live in it". It was one of the few moments that Mr Harel, a 38-year-old social worker, turned lyrical in helping to explain why he, his wife and six children are living with 50 other families in a fenced outpost on a remote hilltop east of the West Bank city of Ramallah.

Standing by the stables Mr Harel uses for the successful therapeutic riding centre he runs, you would hardly guess that Israel's Supreme Court has ordered that every structure here should be evacuated and demolished in little more than eight weeks. Or that the outpost has become the crucible for a political and judicial trial of strength; one which may decide whether Israel's government is prepared to put any limits at all on illegal Jewish West Bank settlement.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/settlers-who-went-too-far--even-for-netanyahu-6295350.html