Israel’s system of military justice – the complex and suffocating legal framework which has governed Palestinians in the Occupied Territories for decades – has been largely invisible to the outside world, including to many Israelis. However, a confluence of events in the past month is illuminating on a grand scale this cruel and repressive legal system that has dominated the lives of Palestinians for far too long.

Last month, a piercing documentary by Israeli filmmaker Ra’anan Alexandrowicz – The Law in These Parts- won the 2012 World Cinema Grand Jury Documentary Prize at the Sundance Film Festival. The film forces former IDF officials and judges to wrestle with the inherent injustices they helped create in forming Israel’s military justice system – including the practices of indefinite detention, land confiscation for settlements and the use of torture in interrogations. The Law in These Parts, and the prestigious award it garnered, helped spark conversations in Israel and abroad about the legal system which enables Israel’s occupation.

However, it has been the hunger strike of a Palestinian baker, Khader Adnan, that has dramatically illuminated Israel’s inhumane practice of indefinite detention as mainstream media organizations in the U.S. and abroad heighten its scrutiny.

Adnan, who as of this writing is entering the 65th day of his hunger strike, and who is, according Physicians for Human Rights, in immediate danger of death, was arrested two months ago and accused of being associated with Islamic Jihad. However, no charges have been filed against Adnan, and Israel has refused to say what, if any, evidence it has against him.

The situation, unfortunately, is a normative one, for in Israel’s system of military justice, Palestinians can be detained for indefinite periods without either a charge or access to the military’s evidence, making defending such detainees nearly impossible.

Adnan began his hunger strike to protest the inhumane and humiliating treatment he received after being detained without charge, and his dangerous act of civil disobedience has both inspired Palestinians and increased attention on the issue of Israel’s military court system.

As CNN reports:

Adnan’s hunger strike has become a rallying cry for Palestinians, who have staged multiple protests in the West Bank and Gaza demanding his release. Protesters have also launched a social media campaign to shed light on Israel’s administrative detentions.

“This is a violation of every aspect of human rights,” Palestinian legislator and human rights activist Mustafa Barghouti said during a recent West Bank rally.

“What Khader Adnan is doing today is to show the will of freedom even it means the loss of life.”

The high-profile hunger strike has sparked criticism from rights groups, which have called on Israeli authorities to either charge or release him.

In the wake of Adnan’s hunger strike, media outlets are suddenly devoting resources to additional (and disturbing) narratives produced by Israel’s system of injustice. This includes a profile in The New York Times yesterday on Islam Dar Ayyoub, one of thousands of minors who have been seized, detained and interrogated for rock-throwing without their parents, a lawyer or another adult present.

The Times’ piece begins:

A year ago, Islam Dar Ayyoub was a sociable ninth grader and a good student, according to his father, Saleh, a Palestinian laborer in this small village near Ramallah.

Then, one night in January 2011, about 20 Israeli soldiers surrounded the dilapidated Dar Ayyoub home and pounded vigorously on the door. Islam, who was 14 at the time, said he thought they had come for his older brother. Instead, they had come for him. He was blindfolded, handcuffed and whisked away in a jeep.

From that moment, Islam’s childhood was over. Catapulted into the Israeli military justice system, an arm of Israel’s 44-year-old occupation of the West Bank, Islam became embroiled in a legal process as challenging and perplexing as the world in which he has grown up. The young man was interrogated and pressed to inform on his relatives, neighbors and friends.

The article’s author, Isabel Kershner, goes on to note that Adnan’s hunger strike has focused attention on this system of military detention in Israel, as though implicitly admitting why it is she’s now focused her pen on Islam’s story. Concerning Islam, she also notes the following:

Islam was taken to a nearby army base where, his lawyer said, he was left out in the cold for hours. In the morning, he was taken to the Israeli police for interrogation. Accused of throwing stones at Israeli soldiers inside the village, he was encouraged to identify other youths and the adult organizers of weekly protests here.

In a police videotape of Islam’s five-hour interrogation, the teenager is at times visibly exhausted. Alone and denied access to a lawyer for most of the period, he was partially cautioned three times about his rights but was never told directly that he had the right to remain silent.

As the human rights organization, B’Tselem, reported this year, such youth have no chance in Israel’s military court system. Of the 853 minors charged with rock-throwing between 2005-2010, only one was acquitted (a conviction rate of 99.8 percent), and 15 percent of those minors arrested served prison sentences of over six months.

These are the types of statistics which, for too long, have remained invisible. They tell the story of a military court system, picked apart in The Law in These Parts, that has for four decades placed the value of order over the value of justice. And they tell the story of a man whose life hangs in the balance in Adnan.

They are stories. Stories once invisible. Stories once whispered on the streets of Jerusalem and shouted in the streets of Ramallah. They are stories that are now being heard by citizens across the globe.

They are stories that must be told.

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Originally published at Daily Kos

I don’t even know where to begin with this one, other than to suggest that Andrew Adler, the owner and publisher of the Atlanta Jewish Times, should be ousted immediately and banished from the world of print “journalism.”

Why?

He advocates, in a recent opinion column, three ways to resolve the divergent opinions America and Israel have on how to deal with Iran’s nuclear threat. The third solution offered? That Israel should “order a hit” on Barack Obama.

Three, give the go-ahead for U.S.-based Mossad agents to take out a president deemed unfriendly to Israel in order for the current vice president to take his place, and forcefully dictate that the United States’ policy includes its helping the Jewish state obliterate its enemies.Yes, you read “three” correctly. Order a hit on a president in order to preserve Israel’s existence. Think about it. If I have thought of this Tom Clancy-type scenario, don’t you think that this almost unfathomable idea has been discussed in Israel’s most inner circles?

Another way of putting “three” in perspective goes something like this: How far would you go to save a nation comprised of seven million lives…Jews, Christians and Arabs alike?

You have got to believe, like I do, that all options are on the table.

John Cook at Gawker writes of his conversation with Adler:

A nervous Adler told me over the phone that he wasn’t advocating Obama’s assassination by Mossad agents. “Of course not,” he said.But do you think Israel should consider it an option? “No.”

But do you believe that Israel is in fact considering the option in its most inner circles? “No. Actually, no. I was hoping to make clear that it’s unspeakable—god forbid this would ever happen. I take it you’re quoting me?”

Yes. “Oh, boy.”

When I asked Adler why, if he didn’t advocate assassination and didn’t believe Israel was actually considering it, he wrote a column saying he believed that the option was “on the table,” he asked for a minute to compose himself and call me back. He did a few moments later, and said, “I wrote it to see what kind of reaction I was going to get from readers.”

And what was the reaction? “We’ve gotten a lot of calls and emails.”

I believe, as Cook intimates, that the next call should come from one place.

The Secret Service.

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Follow me on Twitter @David_EHG
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Cross-posted from Tikkun Daily.

When Jon Stewart is called a “smug, self-loathing Jew” by a right-wing Jewish personality (who is often called upon by conservative pundits to wax political), it’s tempting to dismiss the comment as a disgusting tribal dig.

When Jon Stewart is called a Judenrat who “would have been first on line to turn over his fellow Jews in Poland and Germany” by this same hawkish voice, it’s tempting – even though this voice has a visible platform – to just ignore the comment as the product of the Republican, FOX-inspired echo chamber.

However, ignoring these comments wouldn’t just be dangerous, it would be to allow a growing brand of hatred coursing through America’s veins – produced on the fringes – to continue infecting our public discourse (and public opinion) on matters both foreign and domestic.

It’s a hate-filled islamophobia that masquerades as patriotic, as anti-terrorism, as proudly American and Zionist (as though the two are synonymous). It’s a brand of hatred that the current GOP seeks, a hatred it feels it needs, a hatred it foments for perceived political gain at great cost to civil society. And, as much as it pains me as a progressive Jewish American to say, it’s a hatred right-wing American Jews are often solicited to be spokespeople for on venues like Fox News, with claims of anti-Semitism at the ready should they be critiqued by people such as, well, Jon Stewart.

So, wait – what happened to Jon Stewart, exactly? – you ask. Here is the context:

Jason Jones and The Daily Show crew produced this rather brilliant segment on how Broward County republicans orchestrated a campaign to block membership of a Muslim republican to the Broward Republican Party’s executive committee. This was done with the help of the Muslim-hating group ironically called Americans Against Hate (headed by Joe Kaufman, who is running against Debbie Wasserman Schultz for Congress).

The segment elicited this disgusting display from Pamela Geller:

This is not the first time that The Daily Show made fun of, ridiculed, and smeared proud Americans and passionate zionists. What’s he doing? And why? Does he know how much CAIR raised for their home office, Hamas, whose stated goal is to destroy the Jewish homeland, through the Holy Land Foundation? Stewart missed his calling. He would have been first on line to turn over his fellow Jews in Poland and Germany. Smug self-loathing Jew.

Yes, Geller is a nut. And yes, this particular display has been limited – so far – to her personal site. But Geller, just one of many fringe figures who inexplicably get airtime aplenty, knows what she’s doing. She knows the game: play the anti-Semitism card.

And not just any anti-Semitism card – the self-hating-Jew card. And she plays it against one of our country’s most important media critics and defenders of reason. Why? Because he represents exactly what she and her right-wing minions loathe: someone willing to call out islamophobia for what it is, even when promoted by American Jews.

While it would be easy to dismiss all this due to the messenger, does Jon Stewart shy away from railing against hatred and bigotry when it is perpetrated by the unhinged?

Nope.

And neither should we.

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Tragically, the story contained below is not an isolated incident or some stark anomaly. Rather, it is a common occurrence in a country I love, but a country which continues to fall into a police-state abyss.

The story comes from Jerusalem, a city with a mayor, Nir Barkat, who has allowed (to reference Mayor Bloomberg) his own personal army to routinely and illegally suppress the rights of Palestinian citizens with impunity.

As Yossi Gurvitz in +972 Magazine reports:

Nir Barkat, the de jure mayor of Jerusalem and de facto military governor of Jerusalem, toured Issawiya yesterday, and the locals, taking a dim view, stoned his entourage. Soon afterward…policemen detained Muhammad Ali Dirbas, aged seven, carried him off to a nearby police station, interrogated him for three or four hours, and then released him. Further information, obtained by B’Tselem, shows that Dirbas was was detained by YASAM (riot police) at about 4 P.M., and was then moved to a police station at about 5 P.M. His father came to the police station circa 6 P.M., was kept apart from his child until about 9 P.M., and then Muhammad was interrogated in the presence of his father until around 11 P.M.

Forget for a moment that a child – a first grader – was detained by riot police for throwing stones. Forget for a moment that this child was held, for hours, in isolation with the authorities as his father waited, worried about what was happening to his child in the same building.

And forget that doing so contravened Israeli law, where the age of criminal liability is 12, and where detaining such minors is patently illegal.

Instead, consider that the scene depicted above is replayed time and again. But not only that. Consider this: in the last five years, 835 minors were tried in military courts on suspicion of throwing stones, with 255 being between the age of 12-13. And out of those 835, how many were acquitted?

Only one, which is an acquittal rate of 0.11 percent.

And of those children between the ages of 12-13 charged, 19 of them served jail sentences of up to two months, despite the fact that, in Israel, it is forbidden for minors under the age of 14 to serve time in prison.

Indeed, as B’Tselem reports:

The infringement of the minors’ rights begins from the time of arrest and interrogation. Minors are often arrested in the middle of the night and taken to interrogation alone, without being allowed to consult with an attorney or even their parents, and without a parent being allowed to be present at the questioning. Often they are treated violently. The violation of their rights continues during the course of the court proceeding. Judges order the vast majority of minors to be held in custody until the end of the criminal proceedings, forcing plea bargains. This is because even if the minor is eventually acquitted, he will spend a longer period of time in custody during the course of a full trial than the length of punishment if he pleads guilty in a plea bargain. The military justice system views incarceration as the primary means for penalizing minors, and hardly considers other options. While incarcerated, the minors’ receive almost no family visits and face numerous restrictions on their ability to complete their studies.

It should be noted that Israel is a country which just received a boost in U.S. military aid, thanks to President Obama’s signing of NDAA, and a country to which, according to multiple reports, the U.S. is planning on deploying several thousand troops.

Given the incredible importance Israel plays as a U.S. ally – as a democratic nation in the Middle East – and the astronomical monetary and logistical support with which the U.S. provides Israel on a yearly basis, Israel’s treatment (or abuse) of the Palestinians matters.

It matters just as the human rights record of any nation matters, no doubt. But it matters in this sense: America has the potential to influence behavior, particularly behavior – such as settlement construction – that it wholly opposes, behavior that continues to do harm to any chance of peace and/or a two-state resolution.

What happened to a seven-year-old boy yesterday matters not just because a Palestinian’s human rights were violated. It matters because such violations harm both the primary victims and the secondary victims – Israelis who simply want to live in peace, but who are held captive by both hawkish and centrist leaders alike.

The longer this conflict continues, and the farther we stray from the potential for resolution, the more we creep into an area that looks anything like what is in America’s best interest for the region.

And that fact is reflected through the eyes of a seven-year-old child.

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For years, secular citizens and municipal authorities alike have turned a blind eye as ultra-Orthodox extremists – mirroring the Taliban – have imposed strict gender segregation and modesty rules in public spaces in Israel, forcing women off of sidewalks, banishing them to the back of buses and assaulting those who dare show tiny amounts of skin.

However, after a recent Channel 2 news report on 8-year-old Na’ama Margolis and her heartbreaking story of trauma – a story of the gauntlet of abuse she suffers at the hands of ultra-Orthodox men on her walk to school every morning – few in Israel are turning a blind eye anymore. Indeed, it’s all the country has been able to talk about in recent days.

The news report, which aired on Friday and shows Na’ama crying as her American-born mother shields her while walking to school, immediately galvanized the anger of a nation that for too long has been quiet on the issue of gender segregation and rising religious coercion.

By Tuesday evening, that galvanized anger had suddenly and unexpectedly translated into a massive rally near Na’ama’s school in Beit Shemesh (near Jerusalem), where nearly 10,000 citizens from across the country chanted against religious extremism and offered support to those who, like Na’ama, were suffering at the hands of a tiny, yet powerful religious minority.

With settler violence on the rise – violence that has led to attacks against both Palestinians and Israeli police, violence that has led to the burning of mosques and vandalism on IDF bases – the issue of religious extremism was already one that had taken center stage in the public discourse.

Now, after the airing of Na’ama’s story and Tuesday’s massive rally, Israel’s very soul – its nature and future as a State – is an issue that not only hangs in the balance, but now hangs on the tongues of citizens everywhere.

What Israel will look like in twenty years remains uncertain. However, what is certain today is this: Tuesday’s rally brought tears of joy to Na’ama’s mother and a smile to Na’ama’s face, for they know that they are not alone in what is becoming a national struggle against religious extremism.

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Cross-posted from Tikkun Daily.

In a scene that could have been lifted from Montgomery, Alabama in the 1950s, a public bus was halted in Israel on Friday when an ultra-Orthodox man boarded and demanded that Tanya Rosenblit, commuting to Jerusalem for work, get up and move to the rear.

She refused, at which point the offending man told the bus driver that “it was his right to have her sit in the back and that he had paid to be able to do so.” He then pried open the doors, refusing to allow the bus to continue, at which point the driver called police.

When an officer arrived and approached Rosenblit, his first words weren’t empathic notes of comfort, nor were they chagrined articulations of an apology. Instead, the officer asked if she might, you know, respect the man’s wishes and move to the back.

In a Facebook post chronicling the ordeal, Rosenblit responded unequivocally:

I answered that I respected them enough by wearing modest cloths, because I knew I was going to an Orthodox neighborhood, but I wouldn’t be humiliated by those who can’t even respect their own mothers and wives.

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While Egged, the company which runs public buses in Israel, explicitly prohibits forced segregation of any form, such segregation is commonly occurring de facto on buses that run through ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods. This is why, when Rosenblit originally alighted, the bus driver – on a line that runs from Ashdod to Jerusalem – gave her a look of astonishment.

And it’s why a group of grassroots activists in Jerusalem and across Israel are planning a major act of civil disobedience this coming New Year’s Day, when over 500 protesters will board segregated buses headed to ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods.

As Haaretz reports:

The event, which was created by Jerusalem resident Alon Visser calls on people to put an end to the apathy and changing the status quo. Visser says that he has gotten used to seeing gender-segregated buses run through Jerusalem’s central bus station.

“This is not the society that I want to live or raise my children in,” writes Visser on the event’s Facebook page. “We cannot continue to be silent on the issue of gender segregation on bus lines – it is against the law and against human rights.”

Given Rosenblit’s experience, the scheduled protest is not only prescient, but entirely necessary.

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Cross-posted from Daily Kos

The rightward tilt of America’s foreign policy stance toward Israel – which in many ways parallels the Christian right’s co-opting of the GOP – is replete with shameful anecdotal displays.

Sadly, many of them have happened quite recently:

Newt Gingrich, in an effort to bulk up his “pro-Israel” credentials, calling Palestinians an “invented people” who want to destroy Israel.

Mitt Romney, in a similar effort, claiming President Obama threw Israel “under the bus” for articulating long-standing U.S. policy with regard to peace negotiations being based upon 1967 borders.

Congress, during a rare speech by Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, giving Israel’s leader standing ovations for effectively signaling the end of Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations.

Such moments almost make one forget that, thirty years ago, a man now revered by the right as a staunch friend of Israel – Ronald Reagan – engaged in foreign policy decisions that today would lead to apoplectic bouts of rage both real and manufactured. Decisions that, if made by Obama today, would lead to reactions too bombastic to contemplate.

This is what Chemi Shalev argues in a recent op-ed in Haaretz entitled, “If Obama Treated Israel Like Reagan Did, He’d be Impeached.” Here is how he begins a piece I highly recommend be read in its entirety:

Imagine if Israel would launch a successful preemptive strike against a country that is building a nuclear bomb that threatens its very existence, and the American president would describe it as “a tragedy.”And then, not only would the U.S. administration fail to “stand by its ally,” as Republicans pledged this week, but it would actually lend its hand to a UN Security Council decision that condemns Israel, calls on it to place its nuclear facilities under international supervision and demands that it pay reparations (!) for the damage it had wrought.

And then, to add insult to injury, the U.S. president would impose an embargo on further sales of F-16 aircraft because Israel had “violated its commitment to use the planes only in self-defense.”

Shalev is referencing Israel’s bombing of Iraq’s Osirak Nuclear Research Facility in 1981 as well as some of the Reagan administration’s reactions to it. Indeed, it was a bombing raid that America’s Ambassador to the U.N. compared to the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan. Did you catch that? He compared Israeli aggression to a Soviet action. During the Cold War.

Compare that to what happened last week when America’s envoy to Belgium, Howard Gutman – a Jew and child of Holocaust survivors – said the continuation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was breeding a new type of anti-Semitism. He was attacked for being anti-Semitic himself, and unending calls came for his dismissal.

Even though, thankfully, the Obama administration stood by him, it’s just one more piece of evidence demonstrating how far to the right we’ve moved as a country in 30 years at the leadership level on this issue.

Now, this observation is not intended to be a defense (on my part) of many of President Obama’s policy stances with which I’ve disagreed, particularly the administration’s opposition to Palestine’s bid for statehood at the U.N. and its refusal to hit Israel with real consequences for its continued illegal settlement construction and abuse of nonviolent protesters in the West Bank.

That said, we are at a point where Congress is farther to the right than Israel’s conservative Knesset on some of Israel’s own issues. And we’re talking about a Knesset that can’t move much farther right (though it’s trying).

As Israel continues to come up in GOP debates – as we continue to hear candidates woo the Christian right and the conservative Israel lobby in America (AIPAC) – we’re going to be treated to more bizarre displays and statements.

As we do, it will be instructive to remember that what we’re witnessing is not just the ignorant, bloated pandering of our current, dishonest crop of Republican presidential candidates. It’s the result of a toxic environment in which, with regard to Israel, nobody seems to have the latitude to be honest anymore about anything.

Follow me on Twitter @David_EHG

Cross-posted from Tikkun Daily.

Militarized riot police stand against Occupy Oakland on October 29, 2011. Photo by Soozarty1.

A month before Occupy Oakland was violently raided by riot police using chemical weapons, rubber bullets and flash grenades – a raid which critically injured Iraq war veteran Scott Olsen – the Oakland Police Department and the Alameda County Sheriff’s Department trained alongside a military unit from Bahrain and an Israeli Border Police unit.

The occasion was Urban Shield 2011, an annual training competition which gathers heavily militarized police from the United States and across the globe to explore the latest in tactical responses and to promote collaboration. It’s a training that northern California police departments credited for their “effective teamwork” in dealing repressively with Occupy Oakland.

Max Blumenthal, who broke this story in al-Akhbar in an exhaustive piece on the militarization of U.S. police, describes the units alongside which multiple California departments trained before violently crushing Occupy Oakland:

Training alongside the American police departments at Urban Shield was the Yamam, an Israeli Border Police unit that claims to specialize in “counter-terror” operations but is better known for its extra-judicial assassinations of Palestinian militant leaders and long record of repression and abuses in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. Urban Shield also featured a unit from the military of Bahrain, which had just crushed a largely non-violent democratic uprising by opening fire on protest camps and arresting wounded demonstrators when they attempted to enter hospitals. While the involvement of Bahraini soldiers in the drills was a novel phenomenon, the presence of quasi-military Israeli police – whose participation in Urban Shield was not reported anywhere in US media – reflected a disturbing but all-too-common feature of the post-9/11 American security landscape.

That landscape is being revealed in full relief as militarized SWAT police across America continuously crack down on nonviolent, peaceful Occupy Wall Street protesters. Indeed, excessive, coordinated force – unparallelled in contemporary American history – is being used against both protesters merely assembling to air their grievances and against journalists attempting to merely chronicle such protests.

One needs to look no further than Urban Shield 2011 to see why police departments across the country are beginning to resemble repressive forces in countries such as, say, Bahrain.

Indeed, Urban Shield 2011 was held on the University of California, Berkeley’s campus weeks before university police used excessive force on students occupying a campus green. One of the departments that participated in Urban Shield 2011 was the University of California Police Department, Berkeley. Is it any wonder, then, why campus police brutally beat and arrested students in early November in a crackdown on its Occupy Cal encampment?

Occupy Wall Street is not going anywhere. Even as groups are evicted from their encampments, protest actions are creatively expanding – from reclaiming foreclosed-upon homes to flash occupations of commercial districts.

As these nonviolent protests expand, it will be telling how long Americans will tolerate militarized police responses to what is becoming one of this generation’s civil rights movements.

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Follow the author – David Harris-Gershon – on Twitter @David_EHG.

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A rally for Palestine in Iceland. Photo by Karl Gunnarsson.

On Tuesday, Iceland became the first Western European nation to pass a parliamentary motion recognizing Palestine as an independent state. The motion – symbolically passed on the United Nation’s annual day of solidarity with the Palestinian people – backs a Palestinian state on 1967 borders, calls on both Israel and Palestine to reject violence and notes the question of Palestinian refugees.

Calling the vote historic, Foreign Minister Ossur Skarphedinsson indicated that Iceland’s move was precipitated by the Palestinians’ application for full U.N. membership – an application which has not been accepted by the U.N. Security Council.

Icelandic lawmaker Amal Tamimi, who was born in Palestine, applauded the move as a necessary step, stating, “I hope that more countries will follow suit.“

As the Icelandic parliament moved to recognize Palestine, the Palestinian Authority made clear it intends to push forward with its U.N. membership bid:

Palestinian UN observer Riyad Mansour read a message from Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas at UN headquarters on the occasion of the day of solidarity with the Palestinian people. He reaffirmed the Palestinian’s bid for UN membership, saying it should complement peace negotiations, provided that Israel is prepared to negotiate on the basis of the 1967 borders.

Abbas said the Palestinians are not seeking “to delegitimize Israel” by applying to join the UN “but to delegitimize its settlement activities and the seizure of our occupied lands.”

With its U.N. bid stalled in the Security Council, it remains unclear whether or not Abbas will push forward with an attempt to secure a non-binding resolution in the General Assembly affirming Palestinian statehood. Such a resolution, if moved upon, would be almost guaranteed to pass despite opposition from the United States.

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In Israel, conservative lawmakers are attempting to legislatively intimidate journalists and muffle criticism via a series of draconian bills slated to come before the Knesset.

In response, several thousand protesters took to the streets of Tel Aviv on Tuesday evening, voicing their opposition to what many view as a series of anti-democratic measures that threaten Israel’s democratic standing.

One such measure – a bill that would effectively amend Israel’s libel law such that claimants could sue newspapers for libel without having to prove damages – would send a chilling message to journalists, particularly those penning articles critical of the government. Another bill, which seeks to limit foreign funding to human rights organizations and NGOs, could financially impact many leftist organizations, including those charged with monitoring Palestinian rights, the occupation and settlements.

After the main rally concluded, several hundred protesters blocked the streets outside Likud’s headquarters – the party to which Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and many in the current cabinet belong. Police clashed with the protesters, spraying them with pepper spray and arresting several.

Below are some of the scenes from Tuesday’s protests:

A protester silenced by a sticker that reads “police.”

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