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.

Activists in Bil'in protest Israel's occupation and rally in solidarity with Khader Adnan.

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.

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.

Muhammad Ali Dirbas, seven years old, was detained by Israeli police. Photo via Ma'an News Agency.

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.

Thousands take part in a rally against gender segregation and violence against women in Beit Shemesh, near Jerusalem.

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.

Faced with Israel’s continued settlement expansion in the Palestinian territories, as well as Palestine’s statehood efforts at the U.N., European members of the U.N. Security Council released a joint statement Tuesday declaring the settlements as a principal obstacle to peace and illegal under international law.

The joint statement – made by Britain, France, Germany and Portugal – came after the UNSC’s closed-door meeting on the state of the Middle East, at which every member (except for the United States) condemned both Israel’s continued settlement expansion as well as the increase in settler violence against Palestinians, including the repeated torching of mosques in the West Bank.

According to Haaretz, Israel’s Foreign Ministry angrily responded by not just delegitimizing the critiques, but by denigrating some of its strongest allies in Europe:

A statement released by the Foreign Ministry on Wednesday said that the EU members of the Security Council would be well advised to exert their efforts on resuming direct talks between Israel and the Palestinians, instead of “interfering” in Israel’s internal affairs.

“If, instead of contributing to stability in the Middle East through these steps, they invest their efforts in inappropriate bickering with the one country where the independent law and justice system can handle lawbreakers of all kinds, they are bound to lose their credibility and make themselves irrelevant,” the statement said.

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.

How has it come to this? How is it possible that President Obama will be the one to codify, for the first time since the McCarthy era, the indefinite detention of U.S. citizens?

I will get to the answer. However, first, let me defend the title of this post by making clear that the revised National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) set to be signed by Obama – called “an astonishing attack on our civil liberties” by Sam Seder – indeed legislatively grants the U.S. military the authority to indefinitely detain U.S. citizens on American soil without a trial or charge.

While this codified detention authority is intended to be used on terror suspects, the categories of those who can be detained are so slippery and amorphous that they could, in the future, be potentially applied to anyone.

Donny Shaw at OpenCongress offers an analysis I wholly support:

The language of the bill authorizes indefinite military detention without trial for anyone who has “substantially supported al-Qaeda, the Taliban, or associated forces that are engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners.” The key phrases there – “substantial support,” “associated forces,” “hostilities” – lay the groundwork for the military’s detention power to be extended beyond al-Qaeda and the Taliban to anyone providing support for potentially any group that is hostile towards the U.S., domestic or abroad. For example, if a lone-wolf domestic terrorist claimed allegiance to an activist group or cause, nothing in this prevents the military from labeling the entire group “hostile” and using this power to detain them without trial. And the consistent over reactions to social uprisings of the increasingly militarized police forces across the U.S. does not help assuage concerns that this language could be used to justify cracking down on legitimate, constitutionally protected political action.

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.

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.”

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 tonight’s protests:

Protesters blocking a police car in a demand to release a protester who was arrested.

Israel’s newspaper Haaretz has declared that “democracy in Israel is under attack,” citing legislative measures limiting freedom of the press as one of the most troubling symptoms of this assault by hawkish lawmakers.

On Sunday, for the first time ever, many of Israel’s most influential journalists and media personalities gathered for an emergency conference in Tel Aviv to discuss alarming attempts by conservative lawmakers to silence dissenting, critical voices in the press.

One of the issues about which journalists are apoplectic is a current amendment – pending legislative approval – which would effectively allow anyone to lob charges of libel or slander against journalists with laughably low burdens of proof. The amendment, approved last month by the Constitution, Law and Justice Committee, would create a chilling legislative precedent clearly aimed at silencing left-leaning and critical voices in the media.

Journalists also discussed a number of politically-motivated actions taken against critical journalists. From Haaretz:

In addition to amendments and legislation being tossed around in the Knesset, recent action taken against journalists seen as highly critical of the government has caused many to fear an organized silencing of dissenting voices.

Keren Neubach was dismissed from her position as anchorwoman of “Mabat Sheni” (Second Glance), Channel One’s news magazine show. Neubach who held the position for three years, is considered highly critical of the government, and many view her dismissal as politically motivated.

Channel 2 News anchor Yair Lapid warned: “An incontinent government is silencing dissenting voices.”

Palestinian activists in the West Bank are expanding their nonviolent protest efforts against civil and human rights abuses with a new campaign set to launch next week.

As Noam Sheizaf reports in +972 Magazine:

Palestinian activists are increasing their efforts to expose Israel’s segregation policy in the West Bank, as well as violations on their civil and human rights. In a message to the press, the Popular Struggle Committee announced that on November 15, Palestinian activists “will reenact the US Civil Rights Movement’s Freedom Rides to the American South by boarding segregated Israeli public buses in the West Bank to travel to occupied East Jerusalem.”

Palestinians in the West Bank have lived under Israeli military control since 1967. Among other restrictions, they can only vote in elections to the Palestinian Authority, which has very limited power on the ground. They cannot travel out of the West Bank or receive visitors without Israeli permits, and they are tried in military courts, which curtail the rights of defendants. Jews living in the West Bank enjoy full citizenship rights.

Occupy Wall Street protesters with a message that's been gaining traction.

Media outlets have steadily increased their Occupy Wall Street coverage in recent weeks – a victory in and of itself for the movement. However, most dramatic is the sudden narrative shift that has occurred at the national level as a result of this increased media coverage.

No longer are our pundits and reporters obsessed with “the deficit” and “ceilings” and incomprehensible numbers with zeros that go on ad infinitum. Instead, they are talking about popular disaffection with big banks, about personal financial struggles, about personal debt.

It’s a point Sarah Jaffe correctly noted, in passing, in a recent article on the possibility of debt strikes (a topic to which I will return):

One of the fascinating things about the media dominance of Occupy Wall Street has been how the conversation has shifted away from the deficit-obsession of the last few years. Suddenly the debt that everyone is talking about is personal, individual debt – student loans, mortgages, credit cards and other ways the big banks control our lives.

UNESCO's headquarters in Paris, where the Palestinians were granted full membership on Monday, allowing them to register important sites on the World Heritage List. Photo by Matthias Ripp.

On Monday, the United States earned two dubious distinctions. First, it became one of only 14 nations (out of 173) to vote against Palestinian admission into UNESCO – the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. Second, it became one of only two nations (Canada being the other) to vindictively punish UNESCO for admitting Palestine as a full member by immediately cutting off U.S. funding, which comprises 22 percent of the organization’s budget, or $70 million annually.

This funding cut was made due to U.S. legislation, over 15 years old, mandating a “complete cutoff of American financing to any United Nations agency that accepts the Palestinians as a full member.” However, those who have attempted to defend America’s move based upon a 15-year-old legal trigger – particularly when new legislation can always be written – fail to acknowledge the damage America is inflicting upon itself as it presses forward with an unbalanced foreign policy approach via-a-vis the Israelis and Palestinians.

As Daniel Levy notes in Foreign Policy:

America’s objections to the Palestinian move ring hollow across much of the world, and especially the strategically vital Middle East region. Its withholding of UN payments…is nothing short of a combination of the absurd and the vindictive. As former Senator Tim Wirth has pointed out this will be sapping to America’s soft power capacity. And if it continues, there may be more practical consequences, for instance, in regards to loss of American influence at the International Atomic Energy Agency and the World Intellectual Property Organization.

With the Knesset set to reconvene, and with the Occupy Wall Street protests reverberating from America, tens of thousands of protesters marched in cities across Israel, reigniting their struggle for social and economic justice.

Over 20,000 gathered in Tel Aviv's Rabin Square to demand social and economic justice, with many echoing refrains now heard at Occupy Wall Street protests.

Protesters railed against a host of social and economic injustices, including the growing gap between the rich and poor in Israel, with many protesters echoing refrains now heard at Occupy Wall Street protests in America. Many held signs that read “We are the 99 percent,” and several protesters mirrored the occupation language that has become synonymous with Occupy Wall Street. One particularly poignant sign read “Occupy Tel Aviv, Not Palestine.”

The rallies across Israel were held against the backdrop of tragic escalations of violence in the southern portion of the country. Rockets fired by Islamic Jihad in Gaza struck several southern cities, killing one Israeli civilian, and an Israeli bombing raid in Gaza killed at least seven Palestinians. In spite of the intense security situation, remarkably, approximately 20,000 people gathered in Tel Aviv, another 5,000 in Jerusalem and thousands more in locations across the country.

In the midst of such a tragic and emotional security event, these types of numbers would not have showed up for a protest of this nature in the past. The security situation – rockets falling in southern Israel – would have likely trumped all else. However, as is the case in countries throughout the world, difficult economic conditions precipitated by government corruption and corporate greed are changing the game.

Several days ago, I described how Occupy Wall Street is approaching – or has reached – its Tipping Point. However, there’s a much more subversive, and equally interesting, way to view the manner in which Occupy Wall Street is quickly being embedded into the American consciousness. And that is by thinking about the movement’s progression in consumerist terms.

The chart below illustrates the general way in which a new technology or inventive product becomes firmly entrenched in the marketplace:

First you have the inventors, those who create a product and launch it into the marketplace.

In the case of Occupy Wall Street, the inventor – the creator of the idea to occupy Wall Street as a Tahrir-style tactic – would be Adbusters magazine and the 700 brave souls who marched to Zuccotti Park on September 17. (An argument could be made to include those who began to increase that initial encampment in its first week, as well as those who have begun occupations in different cities around the country.)

Next, you have the early adopters, those souls who choose – at a very early stage – to try out a product before it catches mainstream appeal and sales. (These are your iPad cheerleaders, for example.)

In the case of Occupy Wall Street, this is many of us on the progressive left (myself included) – those who immediately latched onto the idea of occupation as a way to protest the corrupt control the wealthiest one percent have maintained over our political system.

And here is where things get exciting: the early majority. See that graph above? Notice the peak? According to polls released in the past several days, Occupy Wall Street appears to have reached the early majority stage, if we are to subvert this consumerist concept and apply it to the world of principles and ideas.

Malcolm Gladwell defines a tipping point as a “moment of critical mass” in which an idea or movement spreads virus-like through the repetition of small, meaningful moments.

In his book, The Tipping Point, he describes it as a threshold moment; a liminal moment. The moment when an idea – pushed to the precipice by untold numbers of tiny, concussive shoves – finally loses its footing and plummets uncontrollably into the hearts and minds of millions.

United States Marine Corps. Sgt. Shamar Thomas confronts the NYPD after scenes of police brutality in Times Square.

Over a five week period, we have witnessed in our country the coalescence of thousands of small, meaningful moments that comprise an ever-expanding movement: The Brooklyn Bridge; Zuccotti Park’s canceled eviction; Times Square.

However, while there have been ongoing occupation events in hundreds of municipalities across the country – and while recent polls show increasing favorability trends – the movement has remained on the outside of mainstream America looking in. (Roughly a third of Americans currently view the movement favorably.) This is due, in part, to the way in which Occupy Wall Street has been portrayed by the corporate media as a disorganized, muddled mass. More importantly, though, has been its marginalization by certain politicians and media outlets as an anti-American, dangerous force.

The surest way to dull a popular movement is to brand it as dangerous to America. And with scenes of arrests and confrontations between police and protesters filling living room television screens (no matter that the police are often to blame), such branding has been made all too easy.

However, the moment such branding can be fractured and utterly torn asunder is the moment Occupy Wall Street will reach its tipping point. And I believe it’s now standing on the precipice, ready to make the mainstream plunge as both military veterans and even active duty police officers begin to stand in opposition against those forces intent on ending the Occupy movement.

The tent city along Rothschild Boulevard in Tel Aviv stretched for over a mile this summer.

This summer, thousands of social justice protesters built tent cities across Israel, occupying public spaces in dozens of cities. Taking inspiration from Cairo’s Tahrir Square – and enraged by skyrocketing costs of living and the growing economic divide between the country’s wealthiest elite and everyone else – protesters fought against what they viewed as corrupt economic systems by being perpetually present, by sleeping.

This seemingly simple form of civil disobedience – sleep – is fittingly what awoke within Israel a slumbering populace and brought them, marching and chanting, into the streets.

Sound familiar?

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After one month, the Occupy Wall Street movement has remarkably mirrored what occurred in Israel this summer. Occupations have sprung up in public parks and squares across the country as protesters rage against the nation’s wealthiest one percent and the corrupt influence many have over economic policy-making. And these occupations, while executed by a relatively small number of activists, have sparked marches and rallies in nearly one hundred American cities.

On October 15, in solidarity with the Global Day of Change, thousands gathered in countless municipalities across America, with some marking the beginning of additional occupations, signaling Occupy Wall Street’s continued expansion. (Pittsburgh, where 3,500 participated in the city’s first Occupy Pittsburgh march – and which now has 150 people camping in Mellon Bank’s green space – serves as a prominent example.)

And yet, as winter approaches – as brutal weather awaits some of the nation’s most critical occupations, including those in New York and Boston – being physically present, at least outdoors, may reach a point of being unsustainable.

Which begs the question: how will the movement continue its momentum? Or more simply: what next?

Israel’s social justice protesters may be offering an answer.

On Saturday, over 1,000 Jews gathered for Occupy Yom Kippur in New York City – for a Kol Nidre service held near Zuccotti Park in solidarity with Occupy Wall Street that was simultaneously subversive and transformational.

Occupy Sukkot - raising our fists with a lulav. Graphic by Daniel Sieradski.

That moment, sparked by media entrepreneur and activist Daniel Sieradski, has given birth to a burgeoning expansion of Occupy Wall Street participation within the Jewish community that is quickly coming to be known as Occupy Judaism thanks, in large part, to the grassroots marketing work of Sieradski.

And the next initiative? Occupy Sukkot.

Already, activists in six cities are preparing to construct a sukkah as part of their local occupation protest, and have created Facebook pages to announce such construction: New York City, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Boston and Washington, D.C. However, it is the first one, being organized by Sieradski and a host of social-justice-minded Jews of multiple stripes in New York, that is most-visibly providing a real-time example of the intersect currently occurring between Jewish activism and civil disobedience. Sieradski writes of the pop-up sukkah activists plan to construct this afternoon:

This is a protest action. We do not have a permit for our sukkah. We expect confrontation with the NYPD and cannot guarantee our sukkah will stay standing all week. We have received generous guidance from NYC Council member Brad Lander as to permit regulations, however we cannot promise that the police will accept our arguments and allow the sukkah to stay standing. We therefore need volunteers to be present all week long, around the clock, to help us ensure our sukkah stays up and to document any potential physical encounters with the police.

There is currently a strongly-enforced rule against building structures in Zuccotti park. We are working with the organizers at Occupy Wall Street to ensure that this protest builds the larger movement. We will use consensus to adapt and respond to challenges from the NYPD as necessary, and we will work to ensure that our protest does not put others at Occupy Wall Street at greater risk.

Social justice protesters chant in anger as police and city officials tear down tents on Rothschild Boulevard in Tel Aviv.

Tel Aviv’s iconic tent city on Rothschild Boulevard – where Israel’s social justice protest movement was born three months ago – was demolished today by municipal authorities and police amidst the anguished cries of those being evacuated and the angered chants of activists.

Many of the evicted, who were homeless and have nowhere else to go, had found refuge in the tent city. They had also taken solace in the movement’s efforts to fight for economic justice on their behalf and on behalf of millions of lower- and middle-class Israelis struggling to survive as the gaps between the rich and the poor grow.

Oren Ziv, a photojournalist for Activestills – a collective of independent photographers in Israel – witnessed the eviction of protesters and the homeless from their tents, and captured these powerful images: