West Bank mosque fire ‘was most probably arson’: BBC
Holy books were also destroyed in the mosque fire
A West Bank mosque which was gutted by fire on Monday was most probably attacked by arsonists, Israeli fire-fighters say.
Officials believe arsonists broke into the mosque in Lubban al-Sharqiya, near Nablus, and set it on fire using paper.
Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas has accused Jewish settlers of starting the fire, warning the attack could jeopardise peace talks due to begin.
Initial reports said an electrical short circuit may have caused the fire.
“The investigation showed in most probability that this was a case of arson,” the spokesman for Israeli fire service in the West Bank Capt Jacky Binyamini told the BBC on Thursday.
“It is important to note that the investigation was carried out in full co-operation with investigators from the Palestinian fire fighting services,” the spokesperson said.
A report by the fire-fighters is expected to be submitted to Israeli police on Thursday, reports said.
The investigation ruled out the possibility that there was an electrical short circuit that caused the fire, Israel’s Yehdiot Aharanot newspaper reported.
Israeli police say the investigation is still under way, and the cause of the fire has not yet been determined.
Abbas’ warning
The mosque is close to three Jewish settlements.
The attack came as US Middle East envoy George Mitchell returned to the region, attempting to restart Israeli-Palestinian peace talks.
“This criminal attack threatens efforts to revive the peace process,” said Mr Abbas in a statement earlier this week.
He pointed the finger of blame at Israel, adding that “the Israeli army protects the settlers”.
Hamas, which is opposed to peace talks with Israel, has said the mosque attack is “the first fruit of the pointless negotiations,” Reuters reported.
Israel had warned Palestinians in the West Bank that there is a risk of local settlers attacking homes in the area after the Israeli army demolished houses in a settlement near Nablus, Palestinian officials say.
The West Bank has seen a series of attacks on mosques in recent months.
Last month, another mosque in the village of Huwara near Nablus was vandalised by Hebrew graffiti. Palestinian residents blamed activists from three nearby Jewish settlements.
In January, Israeli police arrested settlers as part of investigations into an arson attack on a West Bank mosque in 2009.
Video: Ameer Makhoul, Omar Said -Israel lifts gag order on new arrests: The Real News Network
In the past two weeks the Israeli internal intelligence agency, the Shabak / Shin Bet, arrested two prominent Israeli activists in the middle of the night. The men are well known leaders of Palestinian organizations inside Israel but were arrested and prevented the right to see counsel under emergency regulations, akin to those Palestinians in the occupied territories are subjected to. The men were arrested under secret evidence and a gag order was issued to the Israeli press regarding their arrests. The Real News’ Lia Tarachansky spoke to the men’s relatives, the legal organization representing them, and to one of them, prior to his arrest last week.
EDITOR: BDS takes hold in Israeli mainstream circles!
It is rather amazing how quickly the changes are taking hold. Akiva Eldar is explaining why botha the boycott and buying Palerstinian products is crucial. This was totally impossible a year ago!
Buy Palestinian products: Haaretz
By Akiva Eldar
Tags: Israel news Israel settlements Salam Fayyad
Suppose some Palestinian group managed to set up a new settlement on land abandoned by refugees of the 1967 war in the Jordan Valley. What would your average Israeli patriot have to say about an Israeli contractor who agreed to build it, or about Jewish workers clambering on Palestinian scaffolds? What an outcry we’d hear from the Israeli right about such traitors! Never fear, our forces would never allow the uncircumcised to fix even a peg in the occupied territory under absolute Israeli control (some 60 percent of the West Bank ). The imagined scenario of Jews building homes for Palestinians was created only for the sake of discussion – specifically of the protests in Israel against the ban recently imposed by the Palestinian Authority against Arabs working in the settlements.
It takes no small amount of audacity to threaten the Palestinians with harm to their economy if they refuse to continue building Israeli settlements on their own land. Only we are allowed to threaten boycotts every Monday and Thursday against countries that dare to criticize us. After all, we, as is well known, have the monopoly on patriotism. Remember the treatment the Etzel and Lehi underground militias meted out to Jewish girls who went to bed with British soldiers?
“Buy Israeli goods” is an important ethos – with emphasis on the word “Israeli.” Many Israelis, including this writer, and peace-seekers all over the world boycott products made in the settlements. But if Palestinian factory workers dare leave their jobs in the Barkan industrial zone in the West Bank, the president of the Manufacturers Association, Shraga Brosh, says he’ll make sure that the government closes off the Haifa Port to Palestinian goods.
The entire world, with our American friends at the forefront, insists that the beefing up of settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem cannot be reconciled with the “two states for two peoples” solution. How can the Palestinian leadership be expected to stand by idly while 25,000 Palestinian workers put a stamp of approval on the occupation through their own labor and the sweat of their own brows? Just as the Paris Protocol – the economic agreement between Israel and the PA – does not obligate Israel to employ Palestinian workers in Kfar Sava, neither does it prohibit the Palestinians from imposing restrictions on Arabs working in Ariel.
The commotion over the PA’s economic campaign against the settlements indicates, more than anything else, how the colonialist mindset has been branded into Israeli consciousness. The protests over the threatened loss of the hewers of wood and drawers of water shows how hard it is to shake off the master-servant attitudes that have taken root over the last 43 years. The gap between the economies of Israel and the occupied territories, the security restrictions on entering Israel and movement within the territories, and the discrimination in favor of Israeli goods, have all forced the West Bank’s labor force into the settlements. The settlers have also become dependent upon this asymmetrical relationship between themselves and the natives: Why should they accommodate Chinese workers on their holy land if they can get cheap Palestinian laborers who go home at the end of the day.
If the government of Israel were genuinely interested in the partition of the land, it would follow in the PA’s footsteps and cut itself off from the settlers. In addition to freezing construction in the settlements, it would cancel the special benefits enjoyed by the industrial zones in the territories, which attract greedy entrepreneurs. Instead of encouraging settlement beyond the Green Line, the Israeli government would promote legislation for compensating those settlers willing to come home. Instead of hiding behind the self-righteous claim that it is providing livelihoods for thousands of indigent laborers, let the government open the Israeli markets to more goods and workers from the territories.
Meanwhile, what will happen to the workers who the Palestinian Authority will compel to leave the building sites, fields and factories that the settlers have established on the Palestinians’ land? Who is going to feed the tens of thousands of families whose breadwinners will lose their jobs? The Palestinian economics minister, Hassan Abu Libdeh, has promised that before the boycott regulations go into effect, the government of Salam Fayyad will help those who work in the settlements to find jobs within the PA. The boycott of settlement produce, he says, has already increased the consumption of goods manufactured by Palestinian plants as well as the demand for local labor.
The economic divorce of Palestinians from the Jewish settlements is an important step toward divorce from Israel’s occupation policies. Buy Palestinian.
Gideon Levy: Israel’s security measures? Don’t make me laugh: Haaretz
Has anyone ever heard of a supporter or benefactor of the most extremist of settlers being deported?
Gideon Levy
Who says Jewish humor has disappeared from Israel? Who says that even the state’s shadowiest organizations don’t enjoy occasional moments of levity, in between carrying out assassinations and foiling conspiracies? Israel’s ongoing fascistization, isolation, nationalism and militarism don’t make for much comic relief. So listen to what Barak Ravid reported in Haaretz on Thursday.
A Spanish clown – it sounds like the start of a joke – lands in Israel. Not just any clown, but Spain’s greatest, Ivan Prado. He expected to sail through passport control – a Spanish citizen, even a clown, needs no security authorization to enter the democratic State of Israel – claim his bags of tricks and continue to Ramallah.
He had planned, this joker, to establish an international clown festival in Ramallah, of all places. It was the mistake of a lifetime, a truly mad idea. First, what use do the Palestinians have for clowns from other countries? They have quite enough of their own, thank you. Anyway, what do they have to laugh about in Ramallah?
In the blink of an eye one of the Shin Bet’s finest appeared, a true guardian of Israel, to take this jester in for questioning about his links to “terror groups.” Prado, silly clown that he is, refused to answer. The Shin Bet agent (a clown of lesser renown ) apparently believed he had been chosen to save the day.
To make a long story short, after six hours of waiting miserably at Ben-Gurion International Airport Prado was informed by an Interior Ministry official, “You’re being expelled. Get on the first flight to Madrid, where there’s room for jokers like you.” With that, Prado transmogrified into a prophet of the apocalypse. After landing in Spain he began denouncing Israel to the local press, comparing the Palestinians’ plight with that of the Jews in wartime Poland. Just what we need, more Polish jokes.
The Israeli embassy in Madrid sent an urgent communique to Jerusalem: asking “What did you do?” The Foreign Ministry replied curtly, “security reasons.” Rage spread through the embassy, which sought a more substantive response with which to counter questions from the Spanish media, sure that a clown’s deportation for “security reasons” must be some kind of joke. But the Shin Bet security service and the Defense Ministry did not bother to reply. “The man declined to provide complete information to the security people, especially in regard to his links with Palestinian terror organizations,” the Shin Bet told Haaretz in response to a request.
A textual interpretation: Prado, as understood by the omniscient Shin Bet, clearly has links with terror groups, otherwise he wouldn’t want to establish a clown festival in Ramallah. Worse, he refused to speak about those links. Which “terror groups”? Islamic Jihad or the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades perhaps? Al-Qaida? Iran’s Quds Force? What links? Was the clown considering transferring Spain’s vast stockpiles of laughter to hostile elements? Joke bombs to the jihadists? A devastating punch line to Hamas? “You can laugh,” a Foreign Ministry official said afterward, “but the incident has already caused serious damage to Israel’s image abroad, which only increased when Israel failed to provide a serious explanation.”
Prado is not alone. Were the story not so inane, grotesque and infuriating we might hurt ourselves laughing. But dozens of foreign visitors have been similarly expelled in the past few months because they were suspected of sympathizing with the Palestinians – a grave offense indeed. These are people of conscience who came to express support for the Palestinians but were foiled by the airport’s thought police. The Jewish-American historian Norman Finkelstein was expelled for supporting a one-state solution to the Mideast conflict and believing that Israel has turned the Holocaust into an industry. But had he requested a new immigrant document he would have to receive one immediately, in accordance with the Law of Return. But to come to visit and dare to criticize? Send him back to America.
Likewise, three Swedish activists for a Jewish-Palestinian educational group were recently expelled, as was an American journalist who had worked for years for the Palestinian news agency Ma’an. Has anyone ever heard of a supporter or benefactor of the most extremist of settlers being deported? Please – don’t make the Shin Bet and the Interior Ministry laugh.