EDITOR: The J14 movement tries to rise again, despite growing police brutality
It seems that in Israel, not only the protesters are learning from the Arab Spring developments, but also the regime and its police. Used to act extremely violently against the Palestinians, the police now acts in a similar manner against the few hundreds who came out trying to continue last year’s unsuccessful protest during the summer of 2011. Netanyahu takes no chances he made sure the police sent a brutal message to the protesters.
Will this also persuade the J14 movement that excluding the occupation and Palestine from their campaign was a mistake? I personally doubt this. The J14 movement was a middle-class, nationalist uprising of an odd sort – making sure by all means that no Jews were excluded, thus excluding the Palestinians, both inside Israel and out, and insisting that this is is not ‘political’ protest, but ‘social’ only, as if one could so neatly divide such activities. What they meant by this claim, is that they are not entering the minefield of anti-occupation action, and remain withing the Jewish, nationalist collective, well-represented by the new right-wing leader of the Labour party, Shelly Yachimowich. If they thought this ploy will persuade the government not to touch them, they have failed. The two leaders of the J14 campaign have even been sent by the government to Britain on a special anti-BDS mission last year, after the protest died, in order to persuade academics in Britain that the BDS campaign is wrong. This has not stopped the police from acting brutally, once the campaign has been renewed. The fact that J14 has never been courageous or principled enough to stray away from the right wing nationalism now ruling Israel, makes it totally unlikely that it may embrace the case of Palestinian freedom and rights. A campaign dividing rights on imperialist lines – fighting for rights of the occupier, including the right to occupy – is likely to fail even on its own despicable terms! Justice, rights, peace – cannot be divided according to nationalist criteria – they are indivisible.
Thousands of Israelis Join “Citizen’s Mutiny”: TheRealNews
After violent arrest of the symbolic leader of Israel’s social justice movement, thousands pour onto streets in rage
| Related Story: Israel’s J14 Movement and the Occupation |
EDITOR: One down, more than 500 to go…
So, at last, one settlement is vacated, months after the High Court decision that it is illegal… Well, there are NO legal settlements in the Occupied Territories! All of them are illegal, as is the Apartheid wall! Nothing that Israel is doing there is legal, and it is about time not just Israel, but its many western allies, understand this.
West Bank Jewish settlers leave Ulpana outpost: BBC
Israeli authorities have begun to evacuate Jewish settlers from an unauthorised West Bank outpost after a court ordered it to be dismantled.
Officials arrived on Tuesday morning to help the first of 30 families relocate from Ulpana to temporary housing in adjoining settlement of Beit El.
There had been fears the settlers would resist and have to be forcibly removed.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has ordered the construction of 300 new homes in Beit El.
The move was seen as an effort to placate the settler movement and right-wing critics in Mr Netanyahu’s own Likud party
All settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem are considered illegal under international law, though Israel disputes this.
The settler outposts are also illegal under Israeli law and the government agreed to remove them under the 2003 Road Map peace plan.
The fate of Ulpana, which was built on private Palestinian land, has been a source of tension between settlers and the government.
Ulpana is part of the bigger settlement of Beit El, north of Jerusalem, which is built on land captured by Israel in the 1967 Middle East war. Palestinians say it should be part of their future state.
The decision to build the new homes in Beit El was criticised by the Palestinians and the US, which said it undermined peace efforts.
Israel Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial attack: Three held: BBC
Three ultra-Orthodox Jewish men have been arrested in Israel, suspected of defacing the national Holocaust memorial with anti-Zionist graffiti.
One of the slogans daubed in paint on the walls of the memorial read: “If Hitler had not existed, the Zionists would have invented him.”
The suspects have admitted vandalising the site, a police spokesman said.
Suspicion for the attack had fallen on radical ultra-Orthodox Jews who oppose the creation of the state of Israel.
One of the slogans, all in Hebrew, was signed “world ultra-Orthodox Jewry”.
Another read: “Thanks Hitler for the wonderful Holocaust you organised for us. Only thanks to you we got a state from the UN.”
A third went: “Honourable government of Poland, stop allowing the Zionists to hold manipulative ‘memorial’ ceremonies in Auschwitz.”
Some ultra-Orthodox Jews believe a Jewish state can be established only after the coming of the Messiah, and that the state of Israel is therefore illegitimate.
A small number of extremists believe the myth that Israel’s founders conspired with Hitler to bring about the Jewish state.
In a statement, Yad Vashem Chairman Avner Shalev said: “I believe that it was important to know the identities of those who spray-painted the graffiti. The suspects are extremist ultra-Orthodox Jews, anti-Zionists, who are on the fringes of society, and do not represent the majority who respect the memory of the Holocaust.”
Yad Vashem was established in 1953 and commemorates the six million Jews murdered by the Nazis during World War II.
The three suspects are to appear before a Jerusalem court later on Tuesday.