Acting the Landlord: Israel’s Policy in Area C, the West Bank. B’Tselem, June 2013. This sober 120 page report by B’Tselem describes the impact of the decision, taken as part of the Interim Agreement of the Oslo Accords, to classify 60 percent of West Bank lands as “Area C,” leaving these lands under full and exclusive Israeli control. To quote from the report summary, “Israel’s policy in Area C is anchored in a perception of the area as meant above all to serve Israeli needs. Consequently, Israel consistently takes actions that strengthen its hold on Area C, displace Palestinian presence, exploit the area’s resources to benefit Israelis, and bring about a permanent situation in which Israeli settlements thrive and Palestinian presence is negligible. Israel’s actions have brought about a de facto annexation of Area C and have created circumstances that will influence the final status of the area.”
Administrative Detention in the Occupied Palestinian Terriotry: A Legal Analysis Report. Third edition. Addameer, 2013. This 48 page report produced by Addameer, Prisoner’s Support and Human Rights Association, a Palestinian non-governmental, civil institution that works to support Palestinian political prisoners held in Israeli and Palestinian prisons, is a thorough documentation of administrative detention from the perspective of international law, Israeli law, and “administrative detention in practice.”
The Inheritance of Abraham? A Report on the ‘Promised Land.’ Revised version. The Church of Scotland, May 2013. This is the third report coming from the Church of Scotland on Israel/Palestine in the past ten years. “The key conclusions of this report are that the Church of Scotland does not agree with a premise that scripture offers any peoples a divine right to territory, and that the current situation in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory is characterized by an inequality in power” (p. 3).
Land of Promise? An Anglican Exploration of Christian Attitudes to the Holy Land, with Special Reference to ‘Christian Zionism’: A Report from the Anglican Communion Network for Inter Faith Concerns. London: Anglican Consultative Council, 2012. The project group, chaired by the Rt. Rev. Clive Handford, formerly Bishop President of the Episcopal Church of Jerusalem and the Middle East, spent two and a half years to produce this 76-page report. Although “this report seeks to set out an Anglican response to the phenomenon of Christian Zionism, and to do so within a wider account of Christian thinking about Israel” (p. 7), an awareness of the growing fragility of the Christian communities in the Holy land and the wider Middle East was ever in the mind of the project group.
Report of the Independent International Fact-Finding Mission to Investigate the Implications of the Israeli Settlements on the Civil, Political, Economic, Social and Cultural Rights of the Palestinian People Throughout the Occupied Palestinian Territory, Including East Jerusalem. UN Human Rights Council, 2013. The fact-finding mission’s scathing 37-page report in its first of six recommendations says “Israel must, in compliance with rticle 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, cease all settlement activities without precondition. In addition, it must immediately initiate a process of withdrawal of all settlers from the OPT” (p. 21). Of great value is the appendix, “Timeline – Israeli Settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territory” from 1948 to 2012.
