IDF Chief Rabbi: Troops who show mercy to enemy will be ‘damned‘: Ha’aretz
The Israel Defense Forces’ chief rabbi told students in a pre-army yeshiva program last week that soldiers who “show mercy” toward the enemy in wartime will be “damned.”
Brig. Gen. Avichai Rontzki also told the yeshiva students that religious individuals made better combat troops.
Speaking Thursday at the Hesder yeshiva in the West Bank settlement of Karnei Shomron , Rontzki referred to Maimonides’ discourse on the laws of war. That text quotes a passage from the Book of Jeremiah stating: “Cursed be he that doeth the work of the Lord with a slack hand, and cursed be he that keepeth back his sword from blood.” In Rontzki’s words, “In times of war, whoever doesn’t fight with all his heart and soul is damned – if he keeps his sword from bloodshed, if he shows mercy toward his enemy when no mercy should be shown.”
Rontzki’s remarks came during a ceremony to celebrate a new Torah scroll at the yeshiva. The service was held in commemoration of Yosef Fink, one of two yeshiva students kidnapped by Hezbollah in 1986.
Their bodies were returned 10 years later in a prisoner exchange.
Rontzki also referred specifically to the Israel Defense Forces’ conduct during Operation Cast Lead in Gaza. “Apropos all that we’ve heard in the media of late, thank God that the people of Israel has united recently around the simple understanding of how it must fight. One of the major innovations of that offensive was the conduct of war – not as some kind of mission or detention.”
“We all remember the beginning of the war, with a major attack of 80 planes bombing various places, and then artillery, mortar and tank fire and so forth, as in war,” he said. “Everyone fought with all their heart and soul, and that includes bravery of course, but also fighting with all the resources one has – to fight as if to truly determine the mission.”
Rontzki also referred to the qualities of the ideal combat soldier.
“In Israel’s wars, warriors are God-fearing people, righteous people, people who don’t have sins on their hands,” he said. “One needs to fight with an understanding of what one is fighting for.”
Right-wing groups creating climate of fear at Israeli universities: The Electronic Intifada
Jonathan Cook, 16 November 2009
Right-wing groups in Israel want to create a climate of fear among left-wing scholars at Israeli universities by emulating the “witch-hunt” tactics of the US academic monitoring group Campus Watch, Israeli professors warn.
The watchdog groups IsraCampus and Israel Academia Monitor are believed to be stepping up their campaigns after the recent publication in a US newspaper of an Israeli professor’s call to boycott Israel.
Both groups have been alerting the universities’ external donors, mostly US Jews, to what they describe as “subversive” professors as a way to bring pressure to bear on university administrations to sanction faculty staff who are critical of Israeli policies.
“I have no hesitation in calling this a McCarthyite campaign,” said David Newman, a politics professor at Ben Gurion University, in Israel’s southern city of Beersheva. “What they are doing is very dangerous.”
Last month, in what appeared to be a new tactic, IsraCampus placed a full-page advertisement in an official diary issued to students at Haifa University, urging them to visit its website to see a “rogues’ gallery” of 100 Israeli scholars the group deems an “academic fifth column.”
“The goal is to transform our students into spies in the classroom to gather information and intimidate us,” a senior Israeli lecturer said. “It’s a model of ‘policing’ faculty staff that has been very successful in stifling academic freedom in the US.”
Both Israel Academia Monitor, established in 2004, and the later IsraCampus, model themselves on Campus Watch, a US organization founded by Daniel Pipes, an academic closely identified with the US neoconservative movement.
Campus Watch has been widely accused of intimidating US scholars who have expressed views critical of US and Israeli policies in the Middle East. The organization’s goal, according to critics, is to pressure US universities to avoid hiring left-wing lecturers or awarding them tenure.
The advertisement placed by IsraCampus, and seen by Haifa University students as they returned from their summer break, warned that a number of their professors “openly support terrorist attacks against Jews, initiate an international boycott of Israel, exploit their status in the classroom for anti-Israeli incitement and anti-Zionist brainwashing, collaborate with known anti-Semites … who publicly call for Israel’s destruction.”
Publication of the advert was supported by the head of Haifa’s student union, Felix Koritney: “Students who study here need to know who their lecturers are, and if there are lecturers who oppose the state of Israel it is important to publish their names.”
In a statement, Haifa University officials also defended the advertisement — after receiving a complaint from a student who called the advertisement incitement — justifying it on the grounds of “freedom of speech.”
IsraCampus is associated with Steven Plaut, an economics professor at Haifa University, who was reported to have paid for the advertisement. On the group’s site and on his personal blog, Plaut has lambasted many Israeli left-wing academics.
IsraCampus and Israel Academia Monitor have targeted professors for criticizing the occupation, joining protests against Israel’s wall in the West Bank, signing petitions or attending conferences critical of Israel, defending the UN report of Judge Richard Goldstone on last winter’s attack on Gaza, or calling for a boycott of Israel.
Both groups have focused their efforts on the staff at Ben Gurion and Haifa universities, two regional campuses that have attracted more outspoken dissidents.
Ilan Pappe, a former history professor at Haifa University and the author of The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, admitted he abandoned his academic career in Israel and relocated to the UK after a campaign of vilification.
But, according to Newman, Ben Gurion University had become the groups’ “public enemy No 1” after publication by Neve Gordon, a colleague of Newman, of an article in the Los Angeles Times calling for a boycott of Israel.
Despite having tenure, observers say, Gordon has come under increasing pressure from the university to resign his position as chair of the university’s politics department over his published views.
Rivka Carmi, president of Ben Gurion University, issued a statement shortly after Gordon’s article was printed, condemning his opinions as “morally repugnant” and warning that he was “welcome to search for a personal and professional home elsewhere.”
Dana Barnett, founder of Israel Academia Monitor, has launched a petition demanding that Gordon be sacked from his position as chair, that his courses be treated as elective rather than compulsory for his students, and that he be denied travel and research funding.
Newman said decisions about hiring and retaining staff at Ben Gurion were still being taken on academic grounds but that the monitoring groups were seeking to change that by calling for donor boycotts of universities seen to be harboring anti-Zionist professors.
Yaakov Dayan, the Israeli consul in Los Angeles, sent a letter to Ben Gurion University after publication of Mr Gordon’s article, warning that private benefactors “were unanimous in threatening to withhold their donations to your institution.”
Although the universities are chiefly backed by government money, external donations account for about five percent of their funding. With universities struggling with large debts, donations can be seen as leverage over the universities.
Newman said the monitoring groups hoped to redirect donations to right-wing academic institutions and think tanks, such as the Shalem Centre in Jerusalem, whose founding president is the US neoconservative scholar Martin Kramer, and Ariel College, located in a West Bank settlement near Nablus.
On his website, Plaut credited IsraCampus with forcing Tel Aviv University last week to investigate claims by one of its professors, Nira Hativa, that some right-wing students were afraid to speak out in class because of fears that they would be penalized by their lecturers.
Under questioning from the Haaretz newspaper, Hativa admitted that her allegations were based only on “intuition and personal impressions.”
Both IsraCampus and Israel Academia Monitor have been incensed by the support offered to Gordon’s call for a boycott of Israel by a small number of Israeli academics.
One such professor, Anat Matar, who teaches philosophy at Tel Aviv University, said the atmosphere both within the universities and more widely in Israeli society was changing rapidly and becoming increasingly “intolerant” of dissent. “We’ve become a little more fascistic as a society,” she said.
Plaut has been at the centre of a libel battle with Gordon since 2002 after he called him a “Judenrat wannabe” — a reference to Jewish collaborators with the Nazis.
Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. His latest books are Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East (Pluto Press) and Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair (Zed Books). His website is www.jkcook.net.
A version of this article originally appeared in The National, published in Abu Dhabi.
There are serious difficulties for the IOF, as many school leavers find ways of avoiding conscription. The following item in instructive:
IDF officers to visit schools in bid to boost enlistment: Ha’aretz
Some 279 Israeli Defense Forces officers will be speaking to high-school teachers in a program to increase army service that Education Minister Gideon Sa’ar calls one of his “central aims.” Sa’ar presented his ideas to the Knesset Education Committee yesterday, and the new program was attacked by some education professionals.
The plan is to have the army officers rally teachers in encouraging their students not to avoid conscription and to join combat units.
Sa’ar also plans to publish the conscription rates in the IDF of individual schools and to hold a national conference on the subject of conscription and the role of schools with the participation of high-school principals and Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi.
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Sa’ar’s new program drew reaction. “This shows there are no limits,” said Hagit Gur-Ziv, an academic lecturer at the Seminar Hakibbutzim Teachers College in Tel Aviv.
Diana Dolev, of the organization New Profile said that “there is an element of fascism introducing people in uniform into the schools and the teacher’s room.”
At the Knesset Education Committee meeting Sa’ar presented the main points of his policy. “Increasing the numbers of those being drafted by the IDF among the youth is one of my central aims. We are applying this program broadly to encourage conscription into the IDF,” the minister said.
One of the key components of the program, which was prepared in coordination with the Defense Ministry, is to have a group of 279 officers visit with teachers in schools so “school activities would encourage conscription into IDF combat units,” according to a statement.
Some 600 high-school principals have been invited to participate in a Jerusalem conference December 1 on ways to encourage youth to join combat units. Ashkenazi and Sa’ar will be at the meet. Its organizer, Yossi Levy, who heads the ministry’s Society and Youth Administration, said the ministry expects the teachers will contribute to promoting conscription. “It is a goal that was set by the education minister himself, and this obligates the principals more than previous programs,” Levy said.
The publication of conscription rates from individual schools will begin, experimentally, in Haifa and Petah Tikva.
Gur-Ziv said publishing draft rates according to schools “creates a distorted picture … without even mentioning the militaristic assumption behind it – it assumes that a school needs to educate toward the draft and combat service. A proper education system would, at least, raise these issues for discussion.”
A glimmer of hope: The Electronic Intifada
Ziyaad Lunat and Max Ajl, 12 November 2009
The Obama Administration proved twice recently that it intends to continue to consider Israel above the law. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton caused consternation amongst the US’s allies in the Palestinian Authority and across the region by declaring Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s intention to “restrict” settlement activity in the West Bank “unprecedented.” Netanyahu’s restriction restricts very little. Three thousand housing units that are already approved will be built. Netanyahu announced plans for building a new settlement in Jerusalem, Ma’aleh David, while settlers continue their violent assault against Palestinians, intending to expel them from the city. Last week, settlers invaded a Palestinian house, backed by a court order. The US responded with a statement calling Israel’s moves “unhelpful,” but did nothing to stop them.
If Obama’s first message to the Palestinians as elected president went to those living in the occupied West Bank — as president-elect he was quiet during Israel’s winter invasion of Gaza — the second was to the families of the thousands of victims of that three-week attack. Last week the US voted against a UN General Assembly resolution to endorse the findings of the Goldstone report, which calls for Israel and Hamas to investigate allegations of war crimes. Hamas accepted the report. Israel, which killed 1,417 Palestinians, 926 of them civilians, including 437 children, according to the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, did not. The US consented to Israel’s disapproval and initiated a campaign in the UN to discredit the report. The facts in the report remained unchallenged.
The US House of Representatives condemned the report as “one-sided and distorted.” In a letter to the sponsors of the resolution, Judge Goldstone pointed out gross “inaccuracies” in the resolution. It is probable that most of those who voted for the resolution, sponsored by the powerful lobby American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), did not read the 575-page report. What’s called “support for Israel” in Congress has achieved the status of a sacred cow. Dissent comes only at significant political cost, and inevitable smear campaigns by the pro-Israel lobby. Notwithstanding these facts, 36 representatives opposed the resolution, and 22 abstained, signs that the lobby’s control of Congress may be cracking slightly. In contrast, the House was almost unanimous in its support of the Israeli offensive in January.
The US has a long history of vetoes to protect Israel from accountability. During the Nixon presidency, in 1972, the US first used its veto power in the Security Council to protect Israel. This was its second veto overall, preventing the passing of a resolution that would have condemned Israel for the killing of hundreds of civilians in air raids against Syria and Lebanon. The US has since used its veto power more than 40 times to give Israel a free hand to commit atrocities against Palestinians and the region’s peoples.
Bush Administration Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, defending the US’s refusal to support a cease-fire during the 2006 assaults on Lebanon and Gaza, said that “It is time for a new Middle East, it is time to say to those who do not want a different kind of Middle East that we will prevail; they will not.” The “new Middle East” that Rice was referring to is one where Israel can continue to occupy the land of millions, kill thousands and kidnap hundreds, all the while running roughshod over human rights and international law.
Susan Rice, the Obama Administration ambassador to the UN, is scarcely distinguishable from the other top diplomat sharing her last name. She said in an interview with The Washington Post that the Goldstone “mandate was unbalanced, one-sided and unacceptable.” She justifies this statement by claiming that it was “85 percent oriented towards very specific and harsh condemnation and conclusions related to Israel.”
Yet, even if Judge Goldstone had wanted to dedicate an equal number of pages to both sides, there is only so much one can write about the three Israeli civilians killed by Palestinian fighters, or of the holes punched in roofs by the home-made projectiles. The difference in power, Israel’s status under international law as an occupying power, and the catastrophe that befell a besieged population that had nowhere to flee (unprecedented in modern warfare) suggest nearly indisputable grounds for substantiating the allegations of “war crimes” and “crimes against humanity.” Moreover, all that the report asked for were credible investigations and prosecution for those found to merit it. Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Daniel Ayalon said that Israel arrived at a “silent understanding” with the Obama Administration that a veto will be applied if there are attempts made to put the report before the Security Council following the UN General Assembly vote.
But there is a glimmer of hope that the people of Gaza will see justice. The massacre brought about sweeping change, across the world, in perceptions of Israel. Citizen-led mobilizations in the past few months have showed that where governments have failed, ordinary citizens can, perhaps, make a difference. Even in the US, where public support for Israel has been consistently high, a discourse supporting justice for Palestinians is now voiced in mainstream media. Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was met with a frigid reception in a series of lectures around the country, with audience members interrupting constantly, calling for his immediate arrest. Moreover, there are signs that opposition to AIPAC’s dominance within the Jewish American community is gaining strength.
The movement for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) called for by Palestinian civil society in 2005 has also gained momentum, as the Norwegian government has divested from Elbit Systems as a result of its role in the construction of the apartheid wall. Last month, an Israeli deputy prime minister was forced to cancel a trip to the UK for fear of arrest. He has since announced that he will forgo all trips to European capitals.
And while the world’s most powerful governments cavil over making Israel comply with international law, their citizens do not. Some of them — some of us — are taking up the banner of the international nonviolent struggle, staying loyal to principles of human rights and international law, following the wishes of the Palestinian people. In December, we will march in solidarity with the Palestinians living imprisoned in Gaza. In December, the Gaza Freedom March will attempt to lift the siege of Gaza, as we commemorate the one-year anniversary of Israel’s invasion. From 29-31 December, we will move through Rafah and Khan Younis and Gaza City, the length of the Strip, with a host of luminaries including Alice Walker and Walden Bello. On 31 December, we will march to the threshold of the Erez crossing. The peoples of nearly every continent will be there, in Gaza, demanding that the world take action, that the leaders of the world recognize their peoples’ solidarity with the Palestinian struggle, and recognize the inhumanity of the siege, and end it. Punishing a people in this way is not only illegal. It is wrong. It is time to make it stop.
Ziyaad Lunat is one of the organizers of the Gaza Freedom March (www.gazafreedommarch.org) and an activist for Palestine. He can be contacted at z.lunat A T gmail D O T com. Max Ajl is also one of the organizers of the Gaza Freedom March and blogs on the Israel-Palestine conflict at www.maxajl.com.
U.S. ‘dismayed’ at Israel plan to build 900 homes beyond Green Line: Ha’aretz
The White House responded angrily Tuesday to Israel’s plan to build 900 new housing units beyond the Green Line in Jerusalem, despite specific objections from the U.S., saying that “we are dismayed.”
In a statement, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs voiced the U.S.’s disappointment with “the Jerusalem Planning Committee’s decision to move forward on the approval process for the expansion of Gilo in Jerusalem.”
The Jerusalem municipal planning committee approved the construction plan Tuesday despite an expose in Israel’s Yedioth Aharonot newspaper earlier in the day revealing that the U.S. has specifically objected to the construction outlined in the plan.
“At a time when we are working to relaunch negotiations,” the White House spokesman went on to say, “these actions make it more difficult for our efforts to succeed. Neither party should engage in efforts or take actions that could unilaterally pre-empt, or appear to pre-empt, negotiations.”
“The U.S. also objects to other Israeli practices in Jerusalem related to housing, including the continuing pattern of evictions and demolitions of Palestinian homes,” the statement continued.
“Our position is clear: the status of Jerusalem is a permanent status issue that must be resolved through negotiations between the parties,” he added.
State Department Spokesman Ian Kelly also voiced disapproval, saying “we understand the Israeli point of view about Jerusalem but we think all sides right now should refrain from these actions. We’re calling on both parties to refrain from action and from rhetoric that would impede this process. It’s a challenging time and we need to focus on what’s important.”
The plan – named “Gilo’s western slopes” – will account for a significant expansion of the neighborhood. The planned 900 housing unites will be built in the form of 4-5 bedroom apartments, in an effort to lure relatively well-off residents.
The plan was initiated by the Israel Land Administration, and has received an initial green light, but on Tuesday the authorization was finalized.
The additional housing units are only part of the planned expansion of Gilo. In fact, the majority of apartments slated to be built in Jerusalem in the coming years will be located in Gilo. Other building plans in various stages of approval include some 4,000 new housing units in Gilo and adjacent areas.
According to sources in the planning committee, extensive building plans stem from the scrapping of the Safdie plan, which would have seen the city expand westward. The Safdie plan, named after architect Moshe Safdie, included over 20,000 housing units on open areas covering 26,600 dunams (some 6,600 acres) west of the city on natural and planted forests near Ramot. The plan had come under attack by environmental groups, and was later discarded.
According to the sources, this created a need for new land for construction, which can be found in the southern parts of the city and beyond the Green Line.
The chairman of the Gilo community administration, Moshe Ben Shushan, voiced amazement at the American disapproval, saying “this is a trend of interference in Israel’s policies. I have never thought of Gilo as a settlement.”
Senior Palestinian official Saeb Erekat said Tuesday that there was no point in negotiating while Israel expands Jewish neighborhoods in the part of Jerusalem the Palestinians want for their capital.
He said the Israeli move shows that it is meaningless to resume negotiations.
Over recent days, American officials have shown a tremendous amount of interest in the construction plans, and have even approached left-wing activists for information.
Well, you can imagine how ‘dismayed’ they are in Washington, as they continue to pay for Israel’s plethora of crimes…
Israeli judge rules Arabs need “protection” from justice system: The Electronic Intifada
Jonathan Cook, 17 November 2009
An Israeli judge made an historic ruling last week when he decided that an Arab teenager needed “protection” from the justice system and ordered that he not be convicted despite being found guilty of throwing stones at a police car during a protest against Israel’s attack last winter on Gaza.
Prosecutors had demanded that the juvenile, a 17-year-old from Nazareth in northern Israel, be convicted of endangering a vehicle on the road, a charge that carries a punishment of up to 20 years’ imprisonment, as a way to deter other members of Israel’s Palestinian Arab minority from committing similar offenses.
But Judge Yuval Shadmi said discrimination in the Israeli legal system’s treatment of Jewish and Arab minors, particularly in cases of what he called “ideologically motivated” offenses, was “common knowledge.”
In the verdict, he wrote: “I will say that the state is not authorized to caress with one hand the Jewish ‘ideological’ felons, and flog with its other hand the Arab ‘ideological’ felons.”
He referred in particular to the lenient treatment by the police and courts both of Jewish settler youths who have attacked soldiers in the West Bank and who violently resisted the disengagement from the Gaza Strip in 2005, and of religious extremists who have spent many months battling police to prevent the opening of a car park on the Sabbath in Jerusalem.
Abir Baker, a lawyer with Adalah, a legal group for Israel’s 1.3 million-strong Arab minority, said the ruling was the first time a judge in a criminal court had acknowledged that the state pursued a policy of systematic discrimination in demanding harsher punishments for Arab citizens.
“We have known this for a long time, but it has been something very hard for us to prove to the court’s satisfaction,” she said. “Now we have a legal precedent that we can use to appeal against convictions in similar cases.”
The youth was arrested during a protest on a road near Nazareth a few days after Israel launched its operation in Gaza last December.
Dozens of demonstrations took place in Israel during the three-week attack, leading to the arrests of 830 protesters in what human rights groups described as often brutal Israeli police action.
The overwhelming majority of those arrested, say the rights groups, were Arab citizens, despite the participation of Israeli Jews. Adalah reported that 250 protesters were subsequently indicted, almost all of them Arabs and half of them minors.
Judge Richard Goldstone, in his United Nations fact-finding report into the Gaza assault published in September, wrote that he had been “struck” by the fact that despite many counter-demonstrations by right-wing Jews that had turned violent the police appeared to have made “no arrests” in those cases.
He also noted that, according to the information he had seen, most Arab protesters had been refused bail and held in detention for lengthy periods, even in cases where they faced relatively minor charges.
Of the court system, Goldstone concluded that “the element of discrimination between … and differential treatment of Palestinian and Jewish citizens of Israel by the judicial authorities, as reflected in the reports received, is a substantial cause for concern.”
The ruling by the Nazareth juvenile court appeared to confirm those findings.
Shadmi wrote in his verdict that, in recent years, the Israeli authorities had been “working on two fundamentally different enforcement levels in relation to crimes perpetrated by [Israeli] minors.”
He pointed out that in cases of violence by Jewish youths against the security services, legal proceedings were usually frozen or cancelled before the indictment stage. He said he had not heard of a single instance of a Jewish minor being sent to prison for such offenses, even though most Arab minors were convicted and jailed.
The judge admitted that he had nearly been swayed by prosecution demands for a lengthy jail term for the youth, who cannot be named because of his age. But ultimately, he said, he had been persuaded by the defense’s argument that similar cases of “ideological violence” involving Jewish youths — such as settler attacks on soldiers — rarely, if ever, merited jail terms.
“If the state feels that ideological offenses justify relatively forgiving enforcement for minors, then this should be the policy towards all minors regardless of nationality or religion.”
Earlier this year the justice ministry recommended that 40 Jewish settlers convicted of resisting the disengagement from Gaza be pardoned on the grounds that their acts “were prompted by an unusual historical event and that the perpetrators are not felons.” According to Israeli media reports, many of the settlers arrested over the disengagement will never be brought to trial.
Shadmi ordered the Nazareth youth to refrain from committing any offense against the police for two years against a bond of $1,300. In a procedure mainly reserved for juvenile offenses, he sentenced the youth to 200 hours of community service without convicting him.
The verdict was greeted with surprise by the youth’s family. The father told the Israeli media: “Thank God we had a judge like him, who is not motivated by racism. This may lead the state of Israel to understand that it’s time to stop treating the Arab population like enemies.”
The prosecution announced that it would appeal against the decision.
Gideon Fishman, a sociology professor at Haifa University who has made a study of criminal sentencing policies in Israel, said he was not aware of research into discriminatory policies by prosecutors towards juvenile offenders. However, he said he was sure that there was systematic bias.
“The judge is right to raise his voice against a policy that is more lenient towards Jewish offenders. This is a policy being pursued by state prosecutors intentionally and not by accident, and it undermines trust in the system.”
Judge Shadmi referred only to discrimination in sentencing in Israeli criminal courts.
Palestinians from the Occupied Palestinian Territories are tried in Israeli military courts under different legal rules and procedures that have been severely criticized by human rights groups.
Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. His latest books are Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East (Pluto Press) and Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair (Zed Books). His website is www.jkcook.net.
A version of this article originally appeared in The National, published in Abu Dhabi.