Welcome to the West Bank documentation project

Let us begin with something that everyone knows ..or maybe not everyone as current generations did not grow up in an era when there was no video but celluloid. And even then, when there were videos (VHS and Betamax), there was no YouTube, Dailymotion, Vimeo, TikTok or Instagram. The first Internet video hosting site was ShareYourWorld.com, founded in 1997.

There are many definitions of history. However, the most simple way to explain it is to use the pictured images.

A celluloid film consists of a series of frames. Each frame is part of a scene which, in return, may be part of a series of scenes. They all together form what is called a sequence. So, a movie is built up by a series of sequences.

If you watch the whole film, you will see a chronology of frames, scenes, and sequences. In today's video technology, you don't need to stretch the movie. It's already done while you load it in a video editor.

Visualizing history is similar to this, meaning that you can imagine history as a complete movie unless you cut it into pieces to remove frames, scenes, or even a whole sequence that you don't want people to watch.

Like every movie, any event must have a beginning as nothing happens in a vacuum. There is always a main cause or root, which always lies in the very past.

And so it is about the West Bank.

The West Bank, so called due to its location relative to the Jordan River, is the larger of the two Palestinian territories that comprise the State of Palestine.

In 1956, David Ben-Gurion, the European Zionist migrant who became the first Israeli leader, stated that: "Jordan has no right to exist. [...] The territory to the West of the Jordan should be made an autonomous region of Israel". There had been a very strong opposition to any "Balkanization" or division of Palestine, especially among American Zionists, in the mid-late thirties, since it would have made a prospective homeland, thus truncated, suicidally small. It was in this context that Ben-Gurion argued forcefully for accepting partition agreements as temporary measures, steps on the way to an incremental incorporation of all of Palestine into a Jewish state.

According to Israeli historian Adam Raz, as early as 1961, the Israeli armed colonist forces had drawn up meticulous plans for the conquest and retention of not only the West Bank, but also the Sinai Peninsula and Gaza Strip from Egypt, and the Golan Heights from Syria. In August 1963, within the framework of "expected directions of expansion", southern Lebanon up to the Litani River was also included.

During the 1967 June War Israel appointed a Military Governor to rule the West Bank, with a remit to retain Jordanian law except where these conflicted with Israel's rights as a belligerent occupying power. The Israeli administration of Palestinian territories became in time "the longest – and, accordingly, the most entrenched and institutionalized – belligerent occupation in modern history"

However, the occupying power must not deport or transfer parts of its civilian population into the territory it occupies. If the occupying power considers it necessary, for imperative reasons of security, to take safety measures concerning civilians, it may at the most subject them to assigned residence or to internment. But "assigned residence or to internment" refers to existing locations.

Any completion of a new assignment into visible permanent inhabitation is colonization, not occupation as the latter is explained differently in International Humanitarian Law where occupation is a temporary situation at the end of which control of the territory will return to the original sovereign. The latter is not the case.

On January 21, 2024, President Donald Trump’s pick to be the United States ambassador to the United Nations became the latest administration nominee to express the belief that Israel has “biblical” dominion over the occupied West Bank.

Elise Stefanik’s comment on Tuesday came during her confirmation hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, where she also pledged to further Trump’s “America First” mission.

This is such an ill-conceived claim.

The Jews don't have the Bible. They have the Torah and the Talmud. The evolution of the religion of the Jews just ended there where the evolution of the Bible begins. 

It is appalling to see how pro-Israelis abuse history. No (extreme) right-wing American has ever made such a stupid statement since the Israeli occupation of the West Bank in 1967.

The name "Israel" is borrowed from the name "Israelites". They were a nomadic tribe who invaded the Amalekites' homeland (the Negev desert) from the south (the Sinai desert)  and slaughtered the women, children, and even animals that the Amalekites kept.

However, there is much confusion about the origin of the Amalekites because it is unclear where they originated. It is certain that the Israelites, as the Israelis like to refer to themselves, are not the original inhabitants.

The West Bank did not exist then, not even when Canaan was a patchwork of tribal areas.

The entire region has been renamed over and over again. But still, the Israelis just erased all the renamings before "Samaria" and "Judea", the name Ottoman Palestine, and British Mandatory Palestine so that the "history" of the West Bank begins there.

They and their followers still do the same about the Holocaust by only mentioning the Jews.

They use the word "Hebrew" on an industrial scale and speak the Hebrew language as if it has always been the language of the Jews. Well, the latter is a fictional reality as Hebrew is borrowed from the tribe of Abraham that lived in the region of Ur in the southeast of Mesopotamia in today's Iraq. 

Abraham and his people weren't Jews, as Judaism didn't exist when he was still in his homeland. First, they had to arrive in Canaan, where Abraham joined other tribes to reach a covenant in which they all agreed to accept one god.

Babylonian Talmudic rabbis, known for their weird and extreme ideas,  speak about "the Romans borrowed" referring to the time when Palestine was a province of the Roman Empire but didn't say something similar about Palestine under Muslim rule for hundreds of years.

Well, the Romans may have "borrowed". At least, they weren't accused of stealing, which the ancestors of the modern-day Israelis did when they invaded British Mandatory Palestine in 1947.

No, the Israelis don't have any right to be in historic Palestine at all", which their European Zionist ancestors renamed into "Israel" as it was masterminded in 1916 by the Briton Mark Sykes and the Frenchman Francoise Picot when they divided the remains of the Ottoman Empire into British and French colonies. It was concluded a year later by another Briton, Arthur Balfour with the words "We have a Jewish state."

No country has ever emerged to exist by conspiracy, masterminding, and invented ideology.

The West Bank Documentation differs from the Gaza documentation. Here, we document crimes committed by Israelis while acting as an occupying power but in the West Bank. 

Click on the screenshot to enlarge.

A few examples:

The developments in Gaza have resonated in the West Bank since that day as they fueled illegal colonists to take advantage to launch series of attacks on the Palestinian people by burning their cars, setting houses on fire or attacking these people physically. Many of these colonist attacks were in the presence of the occupation forces.

The situation escalated when the occupying power began to arm their people many of them resorting to a form of perfidy, meaning pretending to be part of the occupation forces by dressing themselves like members of these forces. That makes them combatants or active participants in the practice of military occupation.

Destroying infrastructures, houses and other buildings, water resources, and markets, are acts of employing collective punishment.

There were cases of extrajudicial killings reported so we looked for information which resulted in the finding of videos.

We're sorry for the inconvenience that we can explain.

The documentation about the West Bank and Gaza form the Palestine Archive containing more than 30.000 videos, photos, screenshots and documents, and is therefore too large. Upgrading the used ISP package is not the solution as the archive keeps growing.

GLOSM is a self-funded project. Technically, it is more than keeping a (huge) website online.

In addition to standard costs like your domain and package, the larger the website, the more web space you need, and the higher the monthly cost.

Then, there are extra monthly costs, such as keeping the website secure and protected. Hardware doesn't last a lifetime. You have to update, repair, or replace hardware parts occasionally.

The documentation runs locally for the reasons above.