Category: Gaza Carnage – Resources page

EDITOR: The buildup to disaster continues!

Against logic and reason, the new disastrous war in the Middle East is being prepared at full speed. The axis, as usual, is US, UK and Israel, and below you can read about the unprecedented measures now being taken by the US in Israel. This is to make sure that an attack on Israel bu Iran, in retaliation for the widely expected Israeli strike against its nuclear programme, will be considered an attack on the US itself, making intervention simpler and quicker. Israel will strike, Iran will retaliate, then the Axis will go into real action – quite a bit liker the Suez imbroglio in 1956! Another imperialist useless and murderous war, which we will all pay for, in more than one way.

US commander visits Israel to finalize missile drill: JPost

Israel, US to hold largest ever missile defense exercise this spring; thousands of US soldiers will be deployed in Israel.

Israel is moving forward with plans to hold the largest-ever missile defense exercise in its history this spring amid Iranian efforts to obtain nuclear weapons.

Last week, Lt.-Gen. Frank Gorenc, commander of the US’s Third Air Force based in Germany, visited Israel to finalize plans for the upcoming drill, expected to see the deployment of several thousand American soldiers in Israel.

The drill, which is unprecedented in its size, will include the establishment of US command posts in Israel and IDF command posts at EUCOM headquarters in Germany – with the ultimate goal of establishing joint task forces in the event of a large-scale conflict in the Middle East.

The US will also bring its THAAD (Terminal High Altitude Area Defense) and shipbased Aegis ballistic missile defense systems to Israel to simulate the interception of missile salvos against Israel.

The American systems will work in conjunction with Israel’s missile defense systems – the Arrow, Patriot and Iron Dome.

Gorenc came to Israel for talks with Brig.-Gen. Doron Gavish, commander of the Air Force’s Air Defense Division.

He toured one of the Iron Dome batteries in the South and the Israel Test Bed lab in Holon where the IAF holds its interception simulation exercises.

The IAF is planning to deploy a fourth battery of the Iron Dome counter-rocket system in the coming months and is mulling the possibility of stationing it in Haifa to protect oil refineries located there.

The Defense Ministry has allocated a budget to manufacture an additional three Iron Dome batteries by the end of 2012. IAF operational requirements call for the deployment of about a dozen batteries along Israel’s northern and southern borders.

The IAF is also moving forward with plans to deploy Rafael’s David’s Sling missile defense system, which is designed to defend against medium-range rockets and cruise missiles. Rafael recently completed a series of successful navigation and flight tests of the David’s Sling’s interceptor and plans to hold the first interception test by mid-2012.

TENSIONS RATCHET UP IN STRAITS OF HORMUZ, U.S. ANNOUNCES ‘UNPRECEDENTED’ WAR GAMES IN ISRAEL, THOUSANDS OF TROOPS TO BE DEPLOYED: Richardsilverstein

A high level Iranian navy officer warned the U.S. not to send the U.S.S. Stennis back to the Straits of Hormuz through which it passed last week.  The threat remained unspecified, but the implications were clear.  If you return, you do so at your peril.  The U.S. government responded defiantly that it would continue patrolling the body of water to ensure the free flow of international commerce:
The U.S. Navy maintains a “constant state of high vigilance” to “ensure the continued, safe flow of maritime traffic in waterways critical to global commerce,” George Little, a spokesman for the Pentagon, said…
These are regularly scheduled movements in accordance with our longstanding commitments to the security and stability of the region…
Which is of course a lie since the reason the U.S. navy is there is to intimidate the crap out of the Iranians and enforce an embargo on Iranian oil and other trade.  It’s not yet officially come to that, but the Navy can and will place Iran under siege at the first opportunity, I’m certain.  Someone will have to explain to me how having almost the entire Fifth Fleet right up Iran’s tuchus ensures the security and stability of the region.  If the Chinese sent their new aircraft carrier to patrol off San Francisco would that ensure the security and stability of the region?
The Iranians test-fired a new medium-range missile during recent war games exercises, while the U.S. said it wouldn’t allow Iran to block the Straits.  Who knows what the outcome of such a confrontation would be.  The U.S. has might, the Iranians are fighting on their home ground.  I believe that in any such military confrontation the Iranians could cause us pain.
Everyone knows which way this is going.  The U.S. and Israel put the screws to the Iranians, trying to get them to cry “Uncle.”  When they don’t, things get worse. Eventually, there will be a war, although how it will start is undetermined.
U.S. officials and hawkish analysts are trumpeting the savage blows caused by the new oil embargo against the Iranian economy.  We hear about devaluations of currency and the like.  The implication is that the Iranians can’t go on like this forever.  That they will finally see the light and see it our way.  This is utter nonsense.  It’s simply wish-fulfillment and it is terribly naïve and destructive to base foreign policy on illusions as we are in this case.
In a separate development, the U.S. military announced it would hold major war game exercises in Israel during which thousands of U.S. troops would be deployed there.  The Jerusalem Post described the size of the operation as “unprecedented.”  While I’m not an expert on specific military exercises of this fashion, I don’t believe I’ve ever heard of such a large contingent of our troops being based in Israel for such a length of time.  This is clearly a warning to Iran not to attack Israel.  It also highlights more than almost anything could the symbiotic relationship between our two countries.  It isn’t clear whether Israel is our protectorate or whether Israel is actually the tail wagging our dog.  But the fact that U.S. troops are stationed now in Israel offers that country the relationship we’ve had with Germany and South Korea for decades.

The difference is that those two countries were always sensitive to the highly flammable nature of relations between the U.S. and its enemies.  They strove not to escalate tensions and force the U.S. to clean up the mess they made.  Israel is an entirely different matter.  Israel will not curb its appetite or perceived interests in order to protect the U.S. from such hostilities.  If Israel wants to go to war it will.  If it can use the death of U.S. soldiers to manipulate U.S. involvement in such hostilities, it will do that as well.  If Israel attacks Iran and the latter retaliates and in doing so kills U.S. troops stationed on Israeli soil, does that become a causus belli?  You bet it does in the eyes of national security hawks like Obama.
U.S. troops should not be in Israel.  It does not need our troops to defend it.  Iran will not attack Israel unless the latter attacks it first.  Placing our troops there is yet another escalation on the road to certain war.
Further, the worse this situation becomes the less pressure there will be to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which is a good part of Bibi’s political calculation here.  While the Israeli PM may half-believe the nonsense he’s peddling about Iran as an existential threat.  He far more likely considers ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as an existential threat to the settler-nationalist dream of controlling all of Eretz Yisrael.  His highest priority is not stopping Iran from getting a bomb, but maintaining Israeli hegemony over its territorial patrimony (as he defines it).

U.S. says will continue to deploy warships in Persian Gulf despite Iranian threats: Haaretz

Pentagon U.S. ‘committed to security and stability of region’; State Department: Iran threats show economic sanctions begin to bite.

By Reuters     and The Associated Press

The United States will continue to deploy its warships in the Gulf, a defense spokesman said on Tuesday after Iran threatened to take action if the U.S. Navy moves an aircraft carrier into the Gulf.

Want updates on the latest in Iran’s nuclear standoff with the West? Join Haaretz.com’s official Facebook page

“These are regularly scheduled movements and in accordance with our long-standing commitments to the security and stability of the region and in support of ongoing operations,” Commander Bill Speaks said in an emailed response to Reuters questions.

“The U.S. Navy operates under international maritime conventions to maintain a constant state of high vigilance in order to ensure the continued, safe flow of maritime traffic in waterways critical to global commerce,” he said.

When asked later Tuesday if the U.S. intends to send naval reinforcements to the Gulf in response to Iranian talk of closing the Strait of Hormuz, Pentagon spokesperson George Little did not answer directly but said, “No one in this government seeks confrontation over the Strait of Hormuz. It’s important to lower the temperature.”

Also referring to Iranian threats on Tuesday, State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said the U.S. saw “these threats from Tehran as just increasing evidence that the international pressure is beginning to bite.”

“They are feeling increasingly isolated and they are trying to divert the attention of their own public from the difficulties inside Iran, including the economic difficulties as a result of sanctions,” Nuland told a news briefing.

Earlier on Tuesday, Iran said it would take action if a U.S. aircraft carrier which left the area because of Iranian naval exercises returns to the Gulf. The state news agency IRNA quoted army chief Ataollah Salehi as saying that “Iran will not repeat its warning … the enemy’s carrier has been moved to the Sea of Oman because of our drill. I recommend and emphasize to the American carrier not to return to the Persian Gulf.”

Iran completed 10 days of naval exercises in the Gulf on Monday, and said during the drills that if foreign powers imposed sanctions on its crude exports it could shut the Strait of Hormuz, through which 40 percent of the world’s traded oil is shipped.

The U.S. Fifth Fleet, which is based in Bahrain, said it would not allow shipping to be disrupted in the strait.

Iran said on Monday it had successfully test-fired two long-range missiles during its naval drill, flexing its military muscle in the face of mounting Western pressure over its controversial nuclear program.

Iran also said it had no intention of closing the Strait of Hormuz but had carried out “mock” exercises on shutting the strategic waterway.

US vows to stay in Gulf despite Iran warning: Al Jazeera English

Pentagon and White House dismiss Iran’s threat of closing Strait of Hormuz as sign of Tehran’s “weakness”.
Last Modified: 04 Jan 2012 08:52

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The Pentagon has responded to an Iranian warning to keep US aircraft carriers out of the Gulf by declaring that US warships will continue regularly scheduled deployments to the strategic waterway.

George Little, the Pentagon press secretary, said on Tuesday that the navy operates in the Gulf in accordance with international law and to maintain “a constant state of high vigilance” to ensure the flow of sea commerce.

Earlier in the day, Iran’s army chief warned an American aircraft carrier not to return to the Gulf. Iran has also warned it could block one of the world’s key oil tanker sea lanes in response to economic pressures.

Jay Carney, the White House press secretary, dismissed Iran’s warnings as signs of Tehran’s weakness and of the international isolation it has faced for pursuing a nuclear programme.

“It’s the latest round of Iranian threats and is confirmation that Tehran is under increasing pressure for its continued failure to live up to its international obligations,” Carney said. “Iran is isolated and is seeking to divert attention from its behaviour and domestic problems.”

The US navy has said the aircraft carrier USS John C Stennis and another vessel left the Gulf through the Strait of Hormuz a week ago.

Strategic channel

Iran has been holding naval exercises since then near the strait at the mouth of the Gulf, which is a critically important passage for international oil supplies.

“The deployment of US military assets in the Persian Gulf region will continue as it has for decades,” Little said in a written statement.

“These are regularly scheduled movements in accordance with our longstanding commitments to the security and stability of the region and in support of ongoing operations.”

The US Navy Fifth Fleet has long been headquartered in the Gulf state of Bahrain.

Asked whether the US intends to send naval reinforcements to the Gulf in response to Iranian talk of closing the Strait of Hormuz, Little did not answer directly but said, “No one in this government seeks confrontation over the Strait of Hormuz. It’s important to lower the temperature.”

Little reiterated that any closure of the strait would not be tolerated, but he declined to elaborate.

Iran test-fired a surface-to-surface cruise missile on Monday as part of its naval manoeuvres in the Gulf, prompting Iran’s navy chief to boast that the strait is “completely under our control”.

Asked about the significance of the missile test, Little said: “We are aware of reports of missile tests that are apparently tied to Iranian naval exercises that began in late December. They have the right to conduct exercises.”

Little said the US believes that the “Iranian regime should devote its energy and resources to establishing friendly relations with countries in the Gulf region”.

Juppe’s remarks

Against this backdrop of tensions in the Gulf, Alain Juppe, the French foreign minister, has urged the international community to adopt tougher sanctions on Iran.

He told French broadcaster ITV on Tuesday that “there is no doubt” that Iran is pursuing the development of nuclear weapons, saying the last report from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) had been “quite explicit on this subject”.

Iran denies that its nuclear programme is aimed at producing weapons, insisting it is for peaceful purposes only, such as generating electricity.

The IAEA report, published in November, concluded that some alleged clandestine work by Iran could not be used for any other purpose than making nuclear arms.

“This is the reason why France has blocked all dialogue and negotiations with Iran and of course imposed tougher sanctions,” Juppe said.

“The French president has put forward two proposals: the first one is a freezing of the assets of Iran’s central bank – which would be a very harsh measure – and the second is an embargo on Iranian oil exports.”

Israel kidnapped & interrogated a 6-year old child for four hours: Occupied Palestine

JANUARY 3, 2012
Updated Jan 4, 2012

Israel’s mayhem against children is getting beyond every imagination. On Jan 3, three young children were arrested. The youngest was only 6 years old: Mohammed Ali Dirbas who was kidnapped from the street while going to the grocery store. After that Israel detained and interrogated little Mohammed for 4 hours.

Today Jan 4, 2012 we decide to go blog all future child arrests and campaign this information around  to create awareness for these zionist atrocities of the worst kind.

The arrest of a 6 year old is really the limit. At the moment over 160 children already are illegally detained, arbitrary and in violation with literally all International Laws, arrested, kidnapped, interrogated by every disregard of higher laws or regulations, tortured, and neglected – when ill-  even to death.

The new overview of all arrests of children will be daily and continuously updated with arrests of children if they occur and we want to ask all to help raise the awareness by sharing (and keep sharing this post), reblog it on your own weblog, website or refer or link to it.

The following updates have been published by media and/or reported and confirmed by activists on the ground in Silwan and ‘Isawiyya with regard to the appalling arrest of the 6 year old child Mohammed Ali Dirbas from Al’Isawiyya which updates will be maintained in this post for quick insights for all who want to know which depths zionist occupation has reached.

Below the list of arrests, resources and related information, reports of human rights organisations and legal context or documents will be continuously updated as well for your reference.

 

EDITOR: New year, old messages being recycled by Israel

Having persuaded themselves and the rest of the world that Jews can only live on their own, like Emperor Pengyuins on the South Pole, reality comes home to roost. Despite the Nakba and the many privations since then, There are as many Palestinians in palestine as there are Israeli Jews. So what are they going to do about it? Another Nakba? So was Zionism all in vain, and the wish of living ‘alone’ has to be forgotten? And what of ‘Jewish democracy’, controlling over six million Palestinians? Will Israel ever connect to these realities?

Israel’s right-wing is trying to stifle the reality of Palestinian demographics: Haaretz

Palestinian Authority’s Central Bureau of Statistics says number of Palestinians and Israeli Jews will be equal by 2015.
By Barak Ravid
Every year, in almost every country, government reports detailing statistics and demographics of the country’s citizens are published during the last week of December. The reports detail how many babies were born that year and how many people died.

Some of those reports are turned into semi-comic articles on the back page of the newspaper, or discussed on current event radio programs, and sometimes they are simply thrown to the wastebasket.

Last week, the Palestinian Authority’s Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS) published its report summarizing 2011. As one could expect, the conclusions of the report barely rose to Israeli consciousness, and the media almost completely ignored the findings. But a brief look over the report shows a worrying picture, which raises hopes that at least some of the government ministers were exposed to the statistics.

The report revealed that the number of Palestinians in the territories stands at about 4.2 million people: 2.6 million in the West Bank and 1.6 million in the Gaza Strip. Added to them are about 1.4 million Palestinians who are Israeli citizens and about 5.6 million Palestinians that belong to the Arab countries and the rest of the world.

Three days after the Palestinian Authority’s statistics was published, the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS) released its own report summarizing 2011. According to that report, the number of Israelis stands at 7.8 million people: 5.9 Jews, 1.6 million Arabs and 325,000 defined as “others.”

A conclusion of the findings shows that the number of Jews and Palestinians between the Jordan River and Mediterranean Sea are almost even. According to the Palestinian Authority’s CBS there are about 300,000 more Jews than Palestinians, while according to the Israeli CBS that number stands at 100,000.

What is especially disconcerting is the bottom line of the Palestinian Authority’s report. “On the basis of the estimations presented by the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics in 2010, and provided that natural growth remains unchanged, the number of Palestinians and Jews will become equal and stand at 6.3 million [each] by the end of 2015,” it said. “In addition, by 2020 the number of Palestinians living in historical Palestine will stand at 7.2 million people, while the number of Jews will stand at only 6.8 million.”

One can only hope that in light of the meeting Tuesday between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s personal emissary Isaac Molho and chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat in Amman, that Netanyahu was exposed to this data. When I read through the report I was reminded of a briefing Netanyahu gave to diplomatic correspondents in Washington in September 2010, hours after the launch of the direct negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians. Those negotiations lasted exactly three weeks before they collapsed.

Netanyahu spoke of the importance of attempting to reach an agreement with the Palestinians and also pointed out the issue of demographics. “We do not want to rule over one and a half million Palestinians in Judea and Samaria,” he had said. A number of reporters then reminded him that the number stands at almost 2.5 million Palestinians. He nodded and continued speaking.

Netanyahu’s words during that briefing represented the right-wing approach, according to which any demographic problem is far less serious than the picture that the Israeli left-wing is trying to paint. The “guru” at the head of this approach is Yoram Ettinger, who served at numerous posts in the Foreign Ministry in the past, including that of Minister for Congressional Affairs in Israel’s embassy in Washington. Ettinger knows Netanyahu well, and the two have been in close contact for many years.

Ettinger actually read the Palestinian Authority’s CBS report, but completely rejects it. He nicknamed the report “a misrepresentation of demographics”. According to Ettinger, the Palestinians publish misleading reports every few years in order to scare Israel. He is sure the PA is “inflating” the numbers of Arabs in the West Bank by 1 million people. This is probably where Netanyahu got his 1.5 million Palestinians in the West Bank figure from. In Gaza, Ettinger asserts, the numbers are inflated by 300,000 people. Similarly, Ettinger points out, the Palestinians “inflate” their birth rate and ignore the sharp increase in Jewish demographics.

The chances that the meeting between Molho and Erekat in Amman this afternoon will not end in failure are slim. The chances that their meeting will lead to a renewal of the peace process are nil. Based on this depressing state of affairs, the demographic data of the Palestinian Authority’s CBS are an even greater cause for concern.

EDITOR: A Middle East Fukushima…

Israel has some New Year resolutions, of course, but they are not different from last year’s, or the year before. Preparing for war, as ever, and now also facing Iran, Israel tells us of the new danger to the Middle East (but mainly to anyone living in Palestine – a Fukushima-like disaster during war. Something to look forwards to in this new year.

Israel to shut down Dimona nuclear reactor should war break out: Haaretz

IDF and the IAEC prepared for possibility of an attempted attack on the reactors during a conflict with Iran, Syria, Hezbollah in Lebanon or Hamas and other Palestinian organizations in Gaza.
By Amir Oren
Nuclear activity at the reactors at Dimona and Nahal Sorek will desist should missiles attack Israel’s home front. The aim of such nuclear stoppage would be to prevent damage to the reactors’ outlying area, should missiles penetrate the facilities’ defense shields. A decision for such a stoppage was reached by the Israel Atomic Energy Commission, in coordination with the IDF Home Front Command.

The working assumption shared by the Home Front Command and the IAEC management officials responsible for the two reactors is that the multilayered defense systems, which feature anti-missile missiles calibrated to intercept missiles at various heights, along with fortified installations, should be sufficiently effective to minimize damage in an attack against the reactors.

Nonetheless, in principle any defense system can be penetrated. For this reason, nuclear activity in the reactors will be halted should warnings come of impending war. This stoppage procedure could also be applied in non-war periods of escalated skirmishes that involve rocket attacks against Israel.

The official explanation for this policy is that activity at the reactors is carried out for research purposes, and such research work does not need to be carried out constantly, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

The IDF and the IAEC, which is subordinate to the prime minister, are prepared for the possibility of an attempted attack on the reactors during a conflict with Iran, Syria, Hezbollah in Lebanon or Hamas and other Palestinian organizations in the Gaza Strip.

Such attacks could be carried out using missiles, rockets, planes or drones. Workers at the reactors will continue to report for duty, but will be active in specially fortified installations and bunkers, as happens with workers employed at other infrastructure or security facilities.

Dimona is located within the range of surface-to-surface missiles possessed by Iran, Syria and Hezbollah. Rockets fired from Gaza in the direction of Ashdod-Gedera could land within the perimeter of the Nahal Sorek reactor. The Dimona reactor was attacked for the first time by Scud missiles fired from Iraq in January and February 1991. This could be seen as a belated response to the destruction of the Iraqi reactor by Israel Air Force F-16 planes in June 1981. The Iraqi missiles missed their target.

Since the establishment of the Dimona reactor at the start of the 1960s, Israel has been prepared to use planes and surface-to-air missiles to thwart reconnaissance flights and attempted attacks.

Egyptian, Soviet and even Western spy planes apparently attempted to photograph the Dimona reactor in the 1960s; but since then such flights have abated, as a result of satellite activity. Nonetheless, Israel enforces a strict ban on flights in air space around the reactor.

Iran threatens to take action if U.S. carrier returns to Persian Gulf: Haaretz

Army chief says Tehran will not issue warning to Americans more than once, after Iran monitored U.S. aircraft carrier near a strategic waterway in the Gulf.
Iran will take action if a U.S. aircraft carrier which left the area because of Iranian naval exercises returns to the Gulf, the state news agency quoted army chief Ataollah Salehi as saying on Tuesday.

“Iran will not repeat its warning … the enemy’s carrier has been moved to the Sea of Oman because of our drill. I recommend and emphasize to the American carrier not to return to the Persian Gulf,” Salehi told IRNA.

“I advise, recommend and warn them [the Americans] over the return of this carrier to the Persian Gulf because we are not in the habit of warning more than once,” the semi-official Fars news agency quoted Salehi as saying.

Salehi did not name the aircraft carrier or give details of the action Iran might take if it returned.

Iran completed 10 days of naval exercises in the Gulf on Monday, and said during the drills that if foreign powers imposed sanctions on its crude exports it could shut the Strait of Hormuz, through which 40 percent of the world’s traded oil is shipped.

The U.S. Fifth Fleet, which is based in Bahrain, said it would not allow shipping to be disrupted in the strait.

Iran said on Monday it had successfully test-fired two long-range missiles during its naval drill, flexing its military muscle in the face of mounting Western pressure over its controversial nuclear program.

Iran also said it had no intention of closing the Strait of Hormuz but had carried out “mock” exercises on shutting the strategic waterway.

Tehran denies Western accusations that it is secretly trying to build atomic bombs, saying it needs nuclear technology to generate electricity.

The United States and Israel have not ruled out military action against Iran if diplomacy fails to resolve the Islamic state’s nuclear row with the West.

The European Union is considering following the United States in banning importsof Iranian crude oil. U.S. President Barack Obama signed new sanctions against Iran into law on Saturday, stepping up the pressure by adding sanctions on financial institutions that deal with Iran’s central bank.

Abbas: Israel will face ‘hard measures’ if attempt to revive peace talks fails: Haaretz

Palestinian President issues warning as chief Israeli and Palestinian negotiators meet in Jordan, in the intended purpose of resuming long-stalled negotiations.
By Barak Ravid     and The Associated Press
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas threatened Tuesday to take “new measures” against Israel attempts to renew Mideast peace talks fail, as meeting between chief Israeli and Palestinian negotiators commences in Amman.

Abbas’ comments came a day after Haaretz reported that Palestinians were preparing a diplomatic campaign that aims to put Israel under “a real international siege.”

The measures could include more action at the UN. Mahmoud Abbas issued the warning shortly before the chief Israeli and Palestinian negotiators were to meet in Amman. The goal of their meeting, the first between the sides in more than a year, is to find an agenda for renewed peace talks.

The Palestinians say Israel must freeze settlement construction and agree to return to its pre-1967 lines for peace talks to resume. The Palestinians want to establish an independent state in the West Bank, east Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip – areas that were captured in the 1967 Mideast war.

Mr. Abbas said that if Israel accepts the Palestinian conditions, “we will go to negotiations.” He said the Palestinians have set a Jan. 26 deadline for talks to resume. “After that date, we will take new measures. These measures might be hard,” he said.

Mr. Abbas said no decision has been made yet. But Palestinian officials have said they are considering resuming their push for UN membership as well as ways to isolate Israel at the United Nations, such as a new resolution condemning Israeli settlements in the West Bank and east Jerusalem.

Peace talks broke down in September 2010 after an Israeli slowdown on settlement construction expired. The Palestinians say there is no point in negotiating if Israel continues to settle captured lands. Some 500,000 Israelis now live in the West Bank and east Jerusalem.

Israel says peace talks should begin immediately without any preconditions. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu already has ruled out a return to the 1967 lines, saying they would be indefensible.

Tuesday’s meeting is taking place under the auspices of the Quartet of Mideast peace makers. The group, which includes the U.S., European Union, Russia and the United Nations, has been trying to restart peace talks for months, with the goal of brokering a peace deal by the end of the year.

In September, the Quartet set forth a four-month target for the sides to present proposals on the key issues of future borders and security arrangements. The Palestinians believe the timeline expires on Jan. 26. Israel says the clock doesn’t start ticking until negotiations are under way.

The meeting comes as Mr. Abbas is trying to reconcile with the militant Hamas group, which seized control of the Gaza Strip from forces loyal to Mr. Abbas forces in 2007. Israel has warned it will not negotiate with a Palestinian government that includes Hamas, which it considers a terrorist group. Hamas, which is committed to Israel’s destruction, has called on Mr. Abbas to call off Tuesday’s meeting.

Jordan’s King Abdullah II has implored Israel and Palestinians to resume peace talks. King Abdullah is worried about the growing influence of Islamic groups in the Middle East and fears that continued deadlock in peace efforts could strengthen radicals.

Ahead of Tuesday’s meeting, 13 Jordanian opposition groups comprising Muslim fundamentalists and leftist groups called for a demonstration against the talks. The groups said the Palestinians must instead carry out a third uprising or armed resistance against Israel.

Jordan has a peace treaty with Israel.

EDITOR: Does BDS work or not?

opposition to the BDS, sometimes from surprising quarters, such as Norman Finkelstein and Noam Chomsky, claims one of the reasons they are against it is it does not work. Read below about the Israel Philharmonic and its visit to London in Sepotember 2011. They were shocked and displeased about the level of unhappiness their visit has created, and the loud opposition both inside and outside the Hall to their performance. Israelis cannot ever grasp the fact that not everybody likes them and their wars. Life is so ynfair, isn’t it? So they may not come back to London? Good riddance. BDS works, and is getting more effective all the time. The only thing which does not work, is doing nothing about Israeli atrocities.

Israel Philharmonic hands free pass to pro-Pal agitators: NormanLebrecht

January 3, 2012
In the Times (off-line) today,  the long-serving secretary general of the Israel Philharmonic, Avi Shoshani, announces that the orchestra may never return to Britain after last summer’s Proms disruption.
‘I don’t think I really want to return to the UK,’ he tells Neil Fisher. ‘Why should I put my musicians in such an unpleasant situation? We want to make people happy – that’s what music is all about – and if people behave in such an uncivilised way why should we be part of it?’
The stupidity of his statement, in contrast to so many other reasoned arguments,  beggars belief. In two sloppy sentences, Shoshani delivers a slap in the face to the BBC, the Times and the British public who supported the orchestra’s right to be heard at the Proms – and an unearned victory to the Boycott Israel campaign which cannot surely believe its luck that Israel’s musical flagship has slunk off, defeated.
His remarks contradict Zubin Mehta’s determination to present the orchestra on every major stage and to make the orchestra more reprsesentative of its multi-cultured country. The IPO has yet to admit its first Arab Israeli player and is losing audiences among the younger generation and the religious sector.
Shoshani is employed by the orchestra as secretary general, a position less authoritative than chief executive. He has taken recently to speaking out in its name.

He has been in the job since 1973 and in that time the world has changed and Shoshani hasn’t. If Israel and its orchestra want to join the 21st century, they may need to nudge Avi Shoshani, 63, towards a well-earned retirement.

 

 Women Fight Religious Segregation in Israel: The Real News

Secular vs religious tensions rise as women fight segregation in Jewish Halacha law. Lia Tarachansky reports

Precis

On New Year’s Eve, thousands of Ultra Orthodox men came out in protest of what they called religious prosecution. In recent weeks, tensions in Israel between religious and secular Jews escalated after Israel’s main TV news, Channel 2 filed a report. It showed Ultra Orthodox men in the city of Beit Shemesh attacking an 8-year old Orthodox girl for not dressing modestly enough. The report sparked nation-wide outrage and brought thousands to Beit Shemesh in protest. The Real News’ Lia Tarachansky spoke to Rabbi Uri Regev of Hiddush as well as to Member of Knesset Tzipi Livni, the leader of the opposition and MK Sheli Yechimovitch, the leader of the Labor Party.

Watch a Palmach fighter admitting massacres during 1948 Nakba: YouTube

Ethnic cleansing, massacres, colonization and a great deal of racism are all revealed in this shocking video testimony of Amnon Neumann, who fought with the terrorist force (elite of the Haganah), Palmach, during the Nakba of 1948.

Neumann reveals that Moshe Dayan expelled Palestinians even as late as 1951! 

Despite some moments of remorse, the former member of this terror group tells the interviewer that he refuses to talk about the massacres, in particular, because he participated in them. He also tries to portray Palestinian villages as all made of straw and mud houses! Perhaps the selective amnesia that has afflicted almost all Jewish Israelis has not spared Neumann.

Warning to Palestinian refugees watching this: it can be really difficult to listen to parts of this testimony. I had to stop the video twice … the nonchalance with which Neumann describes (in clearly sanitized language) the forced expulsion, the killings of farmers tending their grapevines, … is overwhelming.

Omar Barghouti

 

Hundreds of ultra-Orthodox protesters riot in flashpoint town of Beit Shemesh: Haaretz

Protesters set fire to trash cans and hurl rocks; Police arrive in large numbers and arrest three.

Hundreds of ultra-Orthodox Jews protested on Thursday evening on a Beit Shemesh street, throwing rocks, blocking the road and burning trash cans. Police arrived in large numbers and have so far arrested three of the rioters.

The incident began as a small local gathering of about 20 people, who waved signs with slogans attacking Zionism. Shmuel Fefenheim, who lives nearby, said that “this group has been coming out every night recently with signs. Today, because of the atmosphere and people under arrest, someone decided to set fire to a large trash can and things spiraled from there.”

Earlier on Thursday, An 8-year-old girl who became the symbol of a recent public struggle against gender segregation and religious extremism returned to school for the first time since a violent incident that sparked a nation-wide protest movement.

Na’ama Margolese turned into a household name last week after Channel 2 broadcasted a segment in which the young girl’s described being spat on and accosted by ultra-Orthodox men over what they deemed to be her indecent apparel.

The story soon became a focal point for a rising protest movement against the exclusion of women in the public sphere, with thousands of Israelis amassing in Beit Shemesh to speak out against gender segregation.

Netanyahu’s embrace of ultra-Orthodox politicians may backfire on him: Haaretz

Benjamin Netanyahu’s embrace of his ultra-Orthodox coalition partners may yet backfire on him.
By Anshel Pfeffer
Looking back on the front pages of Israeli newspapers over the last couple of weeks, it is hard not to be astonished by the speed in which the issue of exclusion of women due to ultra-Orthodox sensitivities has become the main topic of the day.

In some ways it mirrors the trajectory of the social protests on Tel Aviv’s Rothschild Boulevard last summer: A campaign that would normally have stirred little interest to raise it out of obscurity was swiftly propelled by the Israeli media to prominence, becoming in the process a mass movement capable of bringing out hundreds of thousands of protesters onto the streets.

The press loved the Rothschild Summer for three main reasons. First, it supplied a story that was both sexy – young, attractive people camping out in the middle of Tel Aviv – and exhibited the news organizations’ newly discovered social conscience at the same time. Second, the timing was perfect, at the beginning of the “silly season” in which hard news is hard to come by and the media is gasping for a story to boost sales and ratings through the dry summer. Third, it opened a whole new avenue of Bibi-bashing for the majority of journalists hostile to the current government.

Netanyahu managed to reverse the plummeting of his popularity over the summer with a successful appearance at United Nations General Assembly, (thanks mainly to Barack Obama ) and the extraordinarily fortunate timing of the Gilad Shalit deal that boosted him back up to the highest ratings he has enjoyed in this government’s term. According to reliable reports he is now planning early elections, sometime this year, to take advantage of this spurt of public popularity before a global recession or diplomatic pressure pushes his ratings down again.

Nothing new

There was no way he could see this coming. Young women being abused on buses by Haredi men for daring to sit at the front is hardly a new phenomenon, and images of women on advertising posters were being defaced and censored in Jerusalem already in the 1980s. Neither is the clash between the IDF’s attempts to integrate both female and ultra-Orthodox soldiers into units throughout the military a new source of tension. It was already an issue when I was inducted 20 years ago.

All this seems to be making the headlines now for much the same reasons Rothschild did six months ago: It’s sexy, there isn’t much else happening in Israel right now, and it allows the media to stick it to Netanyahu and his coalition with the ultra-Orthodox parties. Netanyahu could still backtrack from his election plans and try and flog the exhausted horse of his coalition until mid-2013, and of course the media will find other matters to deal with asides from female exclusion in the coming months. But the intriguing possibility of an election fought over social battle lines – with religion and social justice, rather than the future of the settlements, being the main dividing factors – is intriguing. Based on current polling data, few, if any, political commentators are prepared to bet against a Netanyahu victory.

Throughout the last three years, his religious-right coalition has commanded a lead in the polls that Kadima and the other splintered remnants of the opposition have struggled ineffectually to erode. Most Likud voters nowadays are middle-class and secular or traditional, and Bibi’s traditional alliance with the religious and ultra-Orthodox parties may turn out to be his most vulnerable spot – in many ways, it brought about his downfall in 1999.

If religious issues come to dominate the next election, it will certainly not be in Netanyahu’s favor and there will be a delicious irony to that, as Bibi’s current strategy for remaining in power is based on religious extremism. He relies on the growing ranks of Jewish religious extremists in Israel to continue propping up his coalition, and on their ideological counterparts in the Diaspora to provide financial and vocal support for the right-wing view that Israel can do no wrong, shutting out other Jewish voices which believe that Netanyahu and his predecessors have a share of the blame for the situation we are in. He needs the specter of Islamic extremism, in the shape of the Islamist parties that have been winning elections in Egypt, Tunisia and Morocco, to reinforce the Israel-cannot-budge-because-all-the-Arabs-around-us-hate-us rhetoric, which excuses his inaction on the diplomatic front and Israel’s growing isolation.

Netanyahu’s nemesis

And he is banking on the Christian religious extremists in the United States to topple his nemesis Obama this November.

Indeed, 2012 could become the year of religion. In Israel, the wider Middle East and the United States, religious leaders and religious parties will play a central role in political developments and the faith and faith-related policies of candidates will become a major election issue and primary consideration for many voters. Netanyahu is certainly banking on that – but it could backfire on him drastically. The campaign against undue Haredi influence in the Knesset and religious extremism on the streets and buses of Israel could gather steam and lead to a public momentum that would chip away secular votes from Netanyahu and the right-wing block.

The swing necessary to deny him another term in office is not major – losing three or four Knesset seats is all it would take. And if Netanyahu manages to win the election in Israel, or decides to hold them in 2013, he could still lose the American election due to religious extremism. The Christian fundamentalists may not be able to marshal enough support for Mitt Romney the Mormon, or Newt Gingrich the lapsed Catholic, or their attacks on Obama could turn off many Americans. Either way, whoever emerges as the Republican candidate, if Obama gets four more years in the Oval Office, free from electoral constraints and with a justified feeling of vindication against the foreign leader who aligned himself so clearly with his political rivals, Netanyahu will be the loser.

An Obama administration in 2013 will mean a whole new ball game in the Middle East. If a fairly stable government emerges by then in Egypt, dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood party and allied with both Hamas in Gaza and Erdogan’s AK party in Turkey, an American decision to negotiate with Hamas is not inconceivable. What will Bibi say then to Obama – that you can’t talk with religious extremists?

EDITOR: To celebrate the anniversary, Israel prepares the new massacre…

What it did three years ago is not enough, the murder, the destruction, the horror – it needs to happen again, says Chief of Staff of the IOF )Israel Occupation Forces) on the anniversary of the war crime in December 2008/January 2009. If we do not act, he will indeed do what he threatens. Israel does not make idle threats – you can always be sure it will attack again, and you can always be sure its apologists around the globe will support any iniquity it will commit. In the meantime, they are preparing the attack on Iran.

Israel ‘will launch significant Gaza offensive sooner or later’: Haaretz

Israel Defence Forces chief of staff speaks on third anniversary of start of a major three-week Gaza assault
Harriet Sherwood in Jerusalem

A new Israeli military offensive against Gaza will be launched “sooner or later” and will be “swift and painful”, Israel’s most senior military officer has warned.

Benny Gantz, the chief of staff of the Israel Defence Forces, was speaking on the third anniversary of the start of a major three-week assault on Gaza during which around 1,400 Palestinians and 13 Israelis were killed.

That offensive was “an excellent operation that achieved deterrence for Israel vis-a-vis Hamas”, Gantz told Army Radio on Tuesday. He added there were signs that the deterrent effect was wearing thin.

“Sooner or later, there will be no escape from conducting a significant operation,” he said. “The IDF knows how to operate in a determined, decisive and offensive manner against terrorists in the Gaza Strip.”

Within hours of Gantz’s comments, the Israeli military launched two airstrikes on targets in Gaza, killing one person and injuring around 10, according to local reports.

A spokesman for the IDF said direct hits on two “terrorist squads with global jihad associations” had been confirmed. According to security officials quoted by Israel Radio, one of the targets was a cell en route to Sinai with the intention of launching an attack on Israel from Egypt.

Since the end of the Gaza war in January 2009, Hamas has attempted to enforce a ceasefire among militant groups, although sporadic rocket fire has continued. Israel holds Hamas, as the de facto government, responsible for all rocket fire emanating from Gaza.

There have been suggestions in recent weeks that Hamas is ready to distance itself further from attacks on Israel as part of its reconciliation process with its rival faction Fatah.

“They have accepted popular [non-violent] resistance,” senior Fatah official Mohammed Shtayyer said, adding that Hamas would stop “these fireworks” being launched.

However, Hamas officials have also said they reserve the right to self-defence and the prime minister, Ismail Haniyeh, pledged to continue “resistance” at a public rally this month.

Gantz’s comments were meant “to keep [Hamas] on their toes”, according to the Israeli analyst Yossi Alpher, who said: “He’s letting us know that another operation is possible and it would be successful.”

Alpher identified two constraining factors – moves towards Fatah-Hamas reconciliation “which may change the political nature of the Gaza regime”, and Egypt. “In the past, we could assume that if we launched an operation in Gaza, [former president Hosni] Mubarak would be largely sympathetic. That’s not necessarily the case now,” he said.

Hamas’s message was not unequivocal or comprehensive, he said, adding: “The question is, are we witnessing an evolutionary process in which Hamas follows the lead of Islamists in Egypt and Tunisia away from violence and into politics? My sense is we are, but it’s a slow process.”

Shlomo Brom, of the Institute for National Strategic Studies, said a new offensive on Gaza could be pre-empted by political developments, including the opening of a covert dialogue between Israel and Hamas.

“The developments of Hamas’s position taking into account the effects of the Arab spring could open different possibilities,” he said.

A KHANOUKA SPECIAL: They Have cancelled Christmas in Bethlehem!

Listen to the song here, with added pictures!

EDITOR: The partners in crime prepare the next crime…

The Land of the Brave, and the Judaic Republic are gearing up for the new war in the Middle East – after all, it is years since the last one… need to keep the troops moving. Don’t say you have not been told.

Israel, U.S. discuss triggers for military strike on Iran: Haaretz

The Daily Beast reports that the countries are discussing “red lines” in Iran’s nuclear program, that if crossed would justify a preemptive strike on its nuclear facilities.

Israel and the U.S. are discussing “red lines” in Iran’s nuclear program, that if crossed would justify a preemptive strike on its nuclear facilities, the Daily Beast website reported on Wednesday.

According to the report, Israel’s ambassador to the U.S., Michael Oren, filed an official complaint with the administration following a speech by U.S. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta a few weeks ago, warning against a military strike on Iran.

The Daily Beast reported that Panetta’s statements infuriated the Israeli government, which ordered ambassador Oren to file the complaint. The White House then relayed a message to Israel saying the administration has its own “red lines” concerning a strike on Iran, and that Israel does not need to act unilaterally. Israel’s protest also resulted in Panetta reversing his stand in an interview with CBS, saying the U.S. will use any means necessary to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon.

Patrick Clawson from the Washington Institute for Near East Policy said in the report that “If Iran were found to be sneaking out or breaking out then the president’s advisers are firmly persuaded he would authorize the use of military force to stop it.” However, he added that “we just don’t know how the president will react.”

The Daily Beast also reported that as part of the strategic dialogue between Israel and the U.S. that took place earlier this month, Israel presented new information about Iran’s efforts to build secret reactors for nuclear fuel production, and showed that these efforts were further along than the U.S. thought. Some of the intelligence was based on soil samples collected near the suspected sites.

Israel and the U.S. disagree about how far along Iran’s uranium enrichment program has developed, making it difficult for the two sides to formulate “red lines” concerning the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program.

EDITOR: More news from Haredistan, the Judaic Republic!

At last, the madness in Haredistan is getting into the foreign media. We should make sure it never gets overlooked or neglected by those slavishly allied to the Zionist state apparatus, and there are many in the western media, of course. Here are the seeds which will break the Judaic Republic.

Shimon Peres condemns ultra-orthodox extremists as tensions escalate: haaretz

Israel’s president says minority threaten national values as TV news shows sobbing 8-year-old recounting ordeal
Harriet Sherwood in Jerusalem

Israel’s president urged “the entire nation” to support the battle “to save the majority from the hands of a small minority” on Tuesday, amid rising tensions between the country’s secular and religious Jews on one side and extremist ultra-orthodox groups on the other.

“We are fighting for the soul of the nation and the essence of the state,” Shimon Peres said as thousands of Israelis gathered for a protest following an attack on an eight-year-old girl for dressing “immodestly”.

Tuesday’s demonstration in the town of Beit Shemesh took place close to a school at which girls as young as six have been targeted by zealous ultra-orthodox, or Haredi, men for dressing in regulation knee-length skirts and tops with sleeves to at least the elbow.

Haredi protesters have spat and shouted “whore” and “Nazi” at the pupils and their mothers. Earlier this week, Israeli television news broadcast footage of Naama Margolese, eight, sobbing as she described being abused and spat at on the street by Haredi men. The girl comes from an orthodox Jewish family and attends Orot girls school, which serves religious Jewish families in the area.

Two days of rioting and attacks on television crews by zealous Haredi men in Beit Shemesh followed the broadcast.

Beit Shemesh has become a focal point of tensions between extremist Haredi groups, whose numbers in the city are increasing, and its majority religious-nationalist population. The Haredim are opposed to the location of the girls’ school next to an ultra-orthodox enclave.

But there has been mounting concern in recent months over broader demands by extremist Haredim to remove images of women from advertising billboards in Jerusalem, enforce gender segregation on public transport, in shops and medical centres, and ban women soldiers from taking part in singing and dancing events organised by the army.

Last week a woman bus passenger made headlines when she refused to comply with a demand from a Haredi man on the bus that she move to the rear. A policeman called by the driver also asked the woman to move. When she continued to refuse, the Haredi man disembarked.

Despite an Israeli court ruling outlawing enforced segregation on buses earlier this year, “voluntary segregation” is permitted. Women mainly sit at the back and men mainly at the front on some routes in Jerusalem.

Peres told reporters at his official residence that Tuesday’s protest against ultra-orthodox extremism was “a test in which the entire nation will have to mobilise to rescue the majority from the claws of a small minority that is chipping away at our most hallowed values”.

He added: “No person has the right to threaten a girl, a woman or any person in any way. They are not the lords of this land.”

His comments followed similar criticism of extremist ultra-orthodox groups by the prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, earlier this week. He told cabinet colleagues there was no place for harassment or sex discrimination in Israel’s “democratic, Western, liberal state”.

The police, he said, would arrest people who “spit, harass or raise a hand”. But, Netanyahu added, this was a social issue, not just a legal one, and required action by public figures and religious leaders. The US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, also criticised gender segregation and the exclusion of women from the public sphere earlier this month, saying it was reminiscent of extremist regimes.

The Haredim in Israel are about 10% of the population, but form a far higher proportion in cities such as Jerusalem and Beit Shemesh.

Extremist protesters are a small minority within the ultra-orthodox community and many Haredi leaders have spoken out against their views and actions. Peres acknowledged that most Haredim did not support the extremists. “The ultra-orthodox public in Israel as a whole opposes these phenomena and condemns them,” he said. “It is important that they continue to do so and to speak in a loud and clear voice.”

Israeli female soldier accosted for rebuffing Haredi bus segregation: Haaretz

Jerusalem resident Doron Matalon says ultra-Orthodox man, 45, chided her for not moving to back of bus, calling her ‘gentile’ and ‘prostitute.’

A day after a massive rally in central Israel protested gender segregation and discrimination in Israel, a female Israel Defense Forces soldier reported being accosted by a Haredi man on Wednesday over her refusal to move to the back of a segregated bus in Jerusalem.

Want to learn more of religious tensions in Israel? Join the discussion on Haaretz.com’s official Facebook page

According to the soldier, Doron Matalon, a 45-year-old man asked her to move to the back of the bus, threatening her, and calling her “prostitute.”

“I didn’t want to move back, both on principle and because there wasn’t any room. It’s always stuffy and disgusting in the back,” Matalon said, adding that “everything was fine, I was almost at my stop, and then the conductors came on.”

At that point, the IDF soldier said, the ultra-Orthodox man chastised a woman who had come over to the front of the bus to have her ticket checked, saying: “You don’t have to come up front to check your ticket, a woman shouldn’t move to this side of the bus.”

“And then he turned to me,” Matalon said, and said ‘you too soldier, move back, and then he called me a prostitute.” According to the IDF soldier, the man was soon joined by other religious men in the bus, who proceeded to yell out “prostitute,” and “Shikse “(gentile woman).

Matalon said that at that point she “felt threatened and a huge commotion began. I yelled out for the conductor to come quick, and two male conductors rushed in. They pushed him away from me and said: ‘Why are you shouting, she’s a soldier,’ but he continued to be abusive.”

The bus was ordered to stop in the city’s Levi Eshkol Blvd, where the conductors called the police. Eyewitnesses reported that the Haredi men continued his disruptive behavior even after a police officer arrived at the scene.

All those involved were taken to questioning, with the ultra-Orthodox man the only one to be arrested following the incident.

“This isn’t the first time this has happened, I just asked for help this time,” Matalon said, adding that she had experienced “worse incidents on this line,” including one in which she was shoved off the bus when her stop arrived.”

“I’m slowly calming down, but I’m not over it yet,” the IDF soldier said.

Police sources indicated that the suspected was to be held until Thursday, at which point he will face a court remand hearing.

Top Israeli rabbi: Gender segregated buses go against Jewish Law: Haaretz

Rabbi Eliezer Melamed says gender segregation on public buses hurts the ‘proper family order’, notes gender segregation is appropriate only during when performing ‘public acts’.

A leading Israeli rabbi condemned gender segregation on public buses Tuesday, saying that such policies “destroy the foundations of the Torah.”

In his weekly column for the religious newspaper B’Sheva, Rabbi Eliezer Melamed said that Jewish law makes a clear distinction between “what is required and what is optional”, and that gender segregation on public buses hurts the “proper family order.”

Melamed also stated that gender segregation is appropriate only during when performing “public acts”, and said that riding the bus is considered a “private act.”

Moreover, the rabbi added that there is no need to add new laws regarding modesty, stating that former rabbis were able to create a modest society with “respectable distances between men and women” and that any attempt to prevent interactions between the sexes may “only give rise to unwanted urges.”

Melamed’s comments come a day after thousands of Israelis amassed near the Orot girl’s school in Beit Shemesh on to protest gender segregation in a city that has become a symbol for the struggle against religious extremism.

Continue reading December 28, 2011

EDITOR: An internal conflict grows fast! The Jewish democracy Vs the Judaic Republic!

In the strange half-light of the Netanyahu regime, where he is riding all the tigers in the Israeli zoo, playing them against each other, a moment of great tension has arrived. The different camps all detest not only the Palestinians, but even more so, each other. The liberals cannot stand the Lieberman ‘Russians, who hate the Mizrahis, who cannot stand the Ashkenazi Jews, who treat them abominably, and so on ad infinitum. Netanyahu survives by feeding the extremes, and controlling them through a series of political dance steps which are becoming ever more complex and dangerous.

Especially after the bizarre episode of the Israeli Summer of tent protest, which seems to have never happened, but may well be still festering underground, waiting fora moment to emerge again, one can hardly think of a time more fraught in recent memory. The conflict between the westernised, liberal tendency symbolised by Tel Aviv, and responsible for the Two State solution and for ‘Jewish democracy slogans, and the Judaic Republic forces of the religious right, is now coming into its own, boiling over by the day. There seems no way the two can survive side by side, and many of the liberals now start seeing they have more in common with the Palestinians, than with the Iran-like Judaists. It is not going to be boring. This Khanouka, the tensions between the main tendencies of Zionism are as nasty as they were so many centuries ago, during the Macabeean struggle for power. In truth, the Judaists are a larger threat to the Jewish democracy, than are the Palestinians at this juncture, and many realise this, as the model crumbles. In the battle between the ‘Jewish democrats’ and the Judaic extremists, the latter must win, as they are more ‘Jewish’ by definition…

Below are some examples of the arguments between the mortal enemies.

Israeli city braces for 10,000-strong protest against exclusion of women: Haaretz

Ultra-Orthodox clashed with police officers, calling them Nazis over course of Monday; at least six were arrested or detained for questioning.

More than 10,000 people are expected at a rally in Beit Shemesh on Tuesday to protest the exclusion of women as well as violence against girls and women by Haredi extremists. The rally will begin at 6 P.M., near the Orot girl’s school.

The school’s arguably most-famous student is Na’ama Margolese, the 8-year-old American immigrant who became a focal point after Channel 2 news broadcast a story Friday night showing her facing a daily gauntlet of abuse from Haredi extremists as she walks to school. The rally was originally slated to take place in the courtyard of the school, but the venue was changed after organizers said Haredi extremists had threatened violence unless the location were changed.

On Monday night, MK Chaim Amsellem (Shas) visited the Margolese family at home and participated in their Hanukkah candle-lighting ceremony. Amsellem gave Na’ama a siddur, or prayer book, in which he wrote a dedication: “When you walk to school, an entire nation is behind you.”

Beit Shemesh Mayor Moshe Abutbul had asked to visit the family for candle-lighting Monday but the Margoleses firmly rejected the request, even after repeated phone calls and text messages from city officials.

Meanwhile, violence continued in Beit Shemesh on Monday as Haredim clashed with police officers and attacked two television news crews. At least six people were arrested or detained for questioning.

The violent scenes in Beit Shemesh on Sunday, when a Channel 2 news team was attacked by 200 Haredi men, were repeated on Monday.

On Monday morning, dozens of ultra-Orthodox men surrounded police officers and municipal inspectors who came to remove, for at least the third time this week, a sign on Hazon Ish Street, in the Haredi neighborhood Nahala Vemenuha, ordering men and women to use separate sidewalks. The men tried to prevent the sign’s removal, calling the police officers “Nazis” and dancing around them in circles.

A few hours later a crew from Channel 10 was attacked as it tried to film a piece on education in the city. Police officers dispatched to the scene after the news team called for help clashed with dozens of Haredim. Some of them lay on the ground in an attempt to keep other members of the group from being arrested. Three people were taken into custody.

About an hour later, a second television crew was attacked as it filmed the controversial sign. The Channel 2 camera crew was pelted with eggs, and a videographer was physically assaulted. Police officers sealed off the street and found themselves facing around 300 Haredim who shouted at them to leave, threw rocks at them and set dumpsters on fire. Officers detained three suspects for questioning.

Like the social protests of the past year, the rally scheduled for tonight came together spontaneously on Facebook. Within hours of the airing of the television segment, Beit Lessin Theater actor Tsviki Levin started a Facebook group called, in Hebrew, “1,000 Israelis are going to Beit Shemesh to protect little Na’ama.” He soon linked up with the Be Free Israel (Israel Hofshit) movement, and additional organizations such as Hitorerut Yerushalmim (Wake up Jerusalem) joined them.

Na’ama Margolese, city officials, Tanya Rosenblit – who became a symbol of the cause when she recently refused to sit in the back of a public bus carrying Haredi passengers – and Zion Sultan, a local journalist and activist against religious coercion, will take part in lighting the Hanukkah menorah on stage.

Buses will be chartered, using donated funds, to bring participants from Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Haifa and the Sharon region. Organizers say Meretz and Kadima are expected to charter additional buses for their respective party workers.

Israel Hofshit said politicians would not be allowed to address the rally or to conduct political activities, in keeping with the request of Beit Shemesh residents who say they don’t want the event to become political.

A group of Haredi residents of Beit Shemesh led by Rabbi Dov Lipman has asked to take part in the rally. Lipman has requested permission to address the crowd.

Ultra-Orthodox Jews ask Israeli media to help rid them of extremists: Haaretz

Ultra-Orthodox community says fear of radicals has created leadership vacuum; many think secular media plays key role in increasing pressure on Beit Shemesh, Jerusalem extremists.
By Yair Ettinger
One after another the Haredim came up to the reporters. Some gave their full names, some refused to give any name or – as with one leading rabbi – asked that their names not be published. Some approached in the streets of Beit Shemesh, some made a phone call.

They’re not reaching out to protest the media’s portrayal of the ultra-Orthodox, after Haredi residents of Beit Shemesh harassed and spat at religious Zionist schoolgirls, attacked a television news crew trying to film a sign that ordered women to walk on the other side of the street, and called the police “Nazis” when they escorted municipal officials who took down the sign.

They’re reaching out to plead for the help of journalists who work for secular newspapers, which many ultra-Orthodox now think will play a decisive role in increasing the public pressure on the extremists living in Beit Shemesh and Jerusalem. They want the police and the government to get on the extremists’ case, because the leadership vacuum created by politicians, rabbis and newspapers that serve the ultra-Orthodox world has left mainstream Haredim looking for help in places they normally wouldn’t go.

Changes are afoot even within the Haredi media. True, the ultra-Orthodox Yated Neeman newspaper warned in its lead headline on Monday of an “incitement campaign” against the ultra-Orthodox, which it said was aimed at breaking up the coalition alliance between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Haredi parties, as well as putting a damper on the goal of making more Jews Torah-observant. But several writers for Haredi websites are consistently and vigorously attacking the extremists – and even declaring them to be enemies of the ultra-Orthodox, no less.

“This is the time to create a barrier between us and the extremists,” said Aryeh Goldhaber, an activist in the Tov movement, which represents moderate Haredim on the Beit Shemesh and Betar Ilit city councils. “People, even among the secular population, are beginning to realize that those who are going wild in Beit Shemesh are a crazy extremist group spreading fear through the streets, beating people, vandalizing, using violence. The public is afraid of them, the rabbis are afraid of them. This has to stop.”

Tov representatives, who paid a visit Monday to the home of Na’ama Margolese, an 8-year-old girl who was spat upon by Haredim protesting the “immodesty” of religious schoolgirls on their way to class, see themselves as an alternative to the ultra-Orthodox parties United Torah Judaism and Shas. In addition to seeking a crackdown on the extremists, Tov also wants to develop a different model of ultra-Orthodox, said Goldhaber.

For instance, though many ultra-Orthodox men refuse to work for a living, Goldhaber does, and he is trying to foster a larger group of Haredim who both work and learn Torah. He helped found an ultra-Orthodox yeshiva, Metivta Beit Shemesh, that is one of the few Haredi yeshivas in Israel in which high school students take the bagrut matriculation exams.

He says Haredim like him fall between the cracks.

“Instead of helping us, the establishment ignores us or makes it hard for us,” said Goldhaber.

The Beit Shemesh municipality did not allocate land for the yeshiva, forcing the founders to solicit donations from the parents of prospective students and rent a building. Goldhaber said the Education Ministry does not officially recognize the yeshiva and that it has faced many bureaucratic obstacles.

“The more support we get from the outside, the more effective we will be able to be,” he said. “But if we aren’t granted legitimacy, both from the public at large and from the ultra-Orthodox population, if we don’t manage to establish more normal yeshivas where you can take the bagrut, then we’re on the sure path to civil war.”

Another area resident, a Hasidic man who lives in Ramat Beit Shemesh, called on the police to take action against the extremists.

“The police have to crack down on them,” he said. “They’re violent, they threaten us, they’re strangling us and their own rabbis. They don’t let anyone live.”

The man said his wife quit what he said was her “kosher” job, for which she studied at a Haredi institute for professional training, because extremists warned them they would put up flyers condeming them if she didn’t.

“Their rabbis don’t dare say a word to them,” the man said. “I think that the ones responsible for excluding women here are the state, the police – for not doing anything about them.”

Netanyahu is fanning the flames of religious incitement: Haaretz

Israel only has a very brief time left while change can still take place. It must either stop feeding the fire that is consuming it, or the country will cease to exist.
By Sefi Rachlevsky
Benjamin Netanyahu is not guilty. He learned that trick the first time he was elected. After he took part in orchestrating the rallies inciting against Yitzhak Rabin (“With blood and fire we will expel Rabin” ), along came the assassination. Netanyahu recognized the significance of the role he played and was certain the right wing was going to collapse in the next election. But miraculously, the non-right didn’t raise the assassination or the incitement during the election campaign – the shooting was reduced to the act of a single bad apple – and Netanyahu became prime minister.

Netanyahu is not the first to identify the formula. In the 1980s several fires broke out on Israel Air Force bases. It was always the same firefighter who was the first to notice the fire, arrive, put it out and reap the praise. As the incidents piled up, an undercover investigation began. The firefighter, it turned out, was the one setting the fires.

The Hasidic man from Beit Shemesh who was interviewed for a TV news segment that aired Friday has revealed the truth even to those who excel at repression. He is the product of an educational system that incites its students, creates segregation between boys and girls from childhood, and teaches boys that religious law states that spilling their seed is the worst of all sins – and that the spilled seed of sinning Jews gives rise to all the demons in the world, which are responsible for every tragedy, including, of course, the Holocaust. When the Israeli government allows itself to fund such an educational system, a place like Beit Shemesh can be expected to flourish. It’s clear to the product of this incitement that if a “normal man” like him doesn’t forcibly cover the arms of an 8-year-old girl, the world will be filled with his demons.

This normal man from Beit Shemesh continued to cover the arms of truth when he said “we have rabbis, and they’re the ones who order us to take action.” And that is the essence of the incitement. In the rallies that led to Rabin’s assassination, Netanyahu was assisted by Rabbi Dov Lior and his followers. Menachem Livni, the operational head of the Jewish Underground in the early 1980s, who was convicted of killing Arabs, has said Lior was the one who pressured him to kill and sent him out to do so. Lior was not questioned seriously, nor was he put on trial. He later went on to announce that his former student – Baruch Goldstein, who massacred 29 Muslim worshipers in the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron in 1994 – was a martyr, greater than all the martyrs of the Holocaust. And several rabbis have said Lior was the rabbi who ruled that Rabin should be killed because he was a rodef and moser, meaning that he was seeking to kill Jews and give up Jewish land. Rabin’s would-be assassin, Yigal Amir, attended many of Lior’s gatherings.

Today, the Netanyahu government is giving Lior tens of thousands of shekels a month in the salaries he receives in various capacities. When Netanyahu returned to Israel as a victor after confronting U.S. President Barack Obama earlier this year, he went straight to Mercaz Harav Yeshiva, pointed to the podium where Lior was sitting, and said that was the elite commando unit leading the Jewish people.

The “normal” bad apples who called Israelis soldiers “Nazis” also have rabbis. Lior has ruled that soldiers who evacuate outposts are like Nazis, and should be treated as such. The Netanyahu government is continuing to waste millions of shekels on education that passes on the kind of values embraced by Lior – who also heads a large hesder yeshiva, combining Torah study and military service. And it’s not just Lior. This week Shas spiritual leader Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, Netanyahu’s “moderate” partner, ruled that Jewish doctors should not treat non-Jews or secular Jews on Shabbat. In 1997 Netanyahu told the late Rabbi Yitzhak Kadouri that Israel’s leftists had forgotten what it means to be Jewish. In that spirit, most young Jews are now being taught what being Jewish is all about: segregation, and the creation of hierarchies that fervently discriminate.

If I wanted to establish a school system that separates redheads from everybody else and teaches them that they are inferior, that the sight of them causes demons to be born and so they should not be seen, I would probably be either hospitalized or arrested. But the Israeli government is sending most of the first-graders it classifies as Jews to religious schools, whether Orthodox or ultra-Orthodox. Those schools are doing essentially the same thing; they are operating an apartheid system that discriminates against girls.

At the end of the McCarthy era, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that separate is not equal. For all that he was a Republican, President Dwight D. Eisenhower sent federal troops into Arkansas to uphold the right of black students to attend the same schools as whites. In Israel there’s no need to send in the army; it would be enough to stop funding every segregated school. No so-called education system that segregates boys and girls should get a single shekel from the state. That would be enough to stop the madness.

Israel has a clear choice to make. It can continue with the Netanyahu government – which is igniting, fanning and subsidizing the rabbinical flames of incitement and, as the fire consumes all, promises to take care of the bad apples – or another government can step in and put out the fire.

Each of the three instances since 1977 in which the right lost the vote all had something in common: In all three cases, the public became more aware of the domestic threat, consisting primarily of religious extremists threatening to take over. By now it’s no longer just a threat. Israel only has a very brief time left while change can still take place. It must either stop feeding the fire that is consuming it, or the country will cease to exist.

Continue reading December 27, 2011

Editor: Even the Zionist left is losing its blinkers

Avraham Burg, once leader of the much reduced and much humiliated Avoda (Labour) Party, is writing in terms which could not have been foreseen even a short time ago, proposing a one-state solution to the Palestine conflict. This is almost unbelievable!

Now it’s your turn: Haaretz

There is a very reasonable chance that there will be only one state between the Jordan and the sea – neither ours nor theirs but a mutual one. It is likely to be … patently not democratic, like the one that exists today.
By Avraham Burg
I have listened very attentively to the contemporary discourse of the right. Some of the speakers express remorse, others wonder “What has happened to us?” while yet others lament: “They are going against us, these youth who riot.”

They have one common denominator: the left, a terrible, shady enemy because of whom everything has gone wrong for them. A cunning and elusive devil that controls the media, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s bureau and world diplomacy. Were it not for the left, all their good would have been understood by everyone, the hooligans complain as they make themselves look wretched. It is interesting how long they will be afraid of this scarecrow which does not impress even itself any more.

For the better part of the past 30 years, the right has controlled the government. The Labor Party freed it from its grasp only for a very short time. The historical Labor Party never would accept the fact that Israelis preferred the Likud and its satellites. It never agreed to give up being part of the government in order to become a fig leaf par excellence, the kashrut certificate for the failures of the right in every sphere – and the chief purifier of all its vermin.

With great benevolence, Ehud Barak decided to deal the Labor Party a death blow and sent his former colleagues to sit on their backsides in the opposition. Only time will tell how their sprit and values will take shape there once again. One thing is clear: The present Netanyahu government does not have any derivates from the left nor any incidence of a left-wing party.

They are there alone. All this dirt belongs to them and they must clean it up alone. That is what a right-wing party looks like when it doesn’t have a worn-out babysitter. This is their dream coalition – right-wing legislation, simplified nationalism and cruel economics. That is who they are. That is whom the nation elected and that is whom they got.

We must not disturb them. Let them go all the way until the end. Until the end of their legislation and until the end of their political understanding. Let them rule. Not only is it forbidden to interfere, one must refrain from any kind of conversation with them. When they bring their idiotic laws up for a vote, one must not be a partner to the voting. Let them not say that they passed the legislation by a majority over a minority. One must not collaborate with this democratic act of pulling the wool over our eyes. Those votes in the Knesset must take place without any of the minority present, only the religious right-wing dictatorship.

The opposition must no longer initiate peace moves of its own; they merely worsen the situation. They create an illusion at home or abroad that the present reality is temporary. That it is still possible to put the fattened genies back in their small bottle. But that is cynical deception because it’s not possible. Because we have crossed all the red lines and all the points of no return.

Until now, we the seekers of peace, wandered through the world, spreading the hope that there would soon be solutions, while they were busy creating disheartening facts on the ground. With time, our rhetoric was victorious (Netanyahu said “two states” ), but it died. Their acts won the day and are already killing all of us.

So enough of the illusions. There are no longer two states between the Jordan River and the sea. Let the right-wing MKs, the Katzes and the Elkins, travel around the world and show the beauty of their faces without the deceptive layer of makeup we provided.

Meanwhile we must consider how we can enter into the new Israeli discourse. It has intriguing potential. The next diplomatic formula that will replace the “two states for two peoples” will be a civilian formula. All the people between the Jordan and the sea have the same right to equality, justice and freedom. In other words, there is a very reasonable chance that there will be only one state between the Jordan and the sea – neither ours nor theirs but a mutual one. It is likely to be a country with nationalist, racist and religious discrimination and one that is patently not democratic, like the one that exists today. But it could be something entirely different. An entity with a common basis for at least three players: an ideological right that is prepared to examine its feasibility; a left, part of which is starting to free itself of the illusions of “Jewish and democratic”; and a not inconsiderable part of the Palestinian intelligentsia.

The conceptual framework will be agreed upon – a democratic state that belongs to all of its citizens. The practicable substance could be fertile ground for arguments and creativity. This is an opportunity worth taking, despite our grand experience of missing every opportunity and accusing everyone else except ourselves.

 

 

EDITOR: So what kind of animal is Israel?

You often hear the claim, when anti-BDS people speak against the boycott on Israel, that Israel is not like South Africa. Yes, this is true. In some areas, it is much worse. Below in Haaretz editorial, you can read about a parallel drawn with the Southern US before the Civil Rights victories. and yes, Israel is not like that, either, but worse, in this instance – there is a wide acceptance of the Ultra-Orthodox supremacy – after all, is Israel not a “Jewish democracy”? And who decides what is really Jewish? Obviously, not the atheists…

So Israel is an animal which you cannot find in the political zoo – it is like South Africa and not like it, it reminds us of the 1950s in the Southern US, but it is definitely different, it does many things like Iran, and it is also not Iran! So what is it?

Well, Israel is a unique society, indeed. It is a colonising nation, but with only the colon, and without an imperial, colonial base country; Israel uses apartheid, but bases it not on colour or race, but on nationality and culture; Israel is a Jewish theocracy, denying most rights to non-Jews, yet calls itself a Jewish democracy – an oxymoron, if there ever was one. Israelis are in a quandary – they have never decided, neither would they like to do so now – if they are Jews living in the Middle East in their own tribal theocracy, or Israelis pretending to be modern and democratic. They have also made this most difficult by both considering themselves a “Jewish democracy” and continuing with an aggressive and oppressive military occupation, controlling four million non Jewish Palestinians outside their state, and almost two millions inside. You can either have a ‘Jewish democracy’ or what should really be called a Judaic Republic, but not with six millions of non-Jews under your heel.

And they will not decide, of course, because decision means action, means clarity, means either getting out of the territories altogether, or annexing them and having a state of its citizens – both options not on the table for Zionism, or for its many supporters in the west.

So, as long as they decide not to decide, as long as they do not set the Palestinians free – they themselves shall not be free, men, women or children. Only the deluded will continue to refuse seeing the clarity of this equation, and to force the Middle East into further turmoil for probably long decades of suffering for all concerned.

This complex nettle is not grasped even by the most enlightened critics within Israel. Akiva Eldar – one of the most knowledgeable liberal thinkers and commentators with Zionist Israel, is as blind to this contradiction as some of his enemies on the political right… You cannot actually have a Jewish democracy which is not racist, and 7 decades should be long enough to prove this.

This is a debate which will run and run, but until the basic facts are admitted and faced, there shall be no respite from that quarter of Jewish liberalism. Maybe what is necessary is non-Jewish, Israeli liberalism, which seems have gone into the bunkers years ago.

Netanyahu must work to defeat religious bullying: Haaretz Editorial

Netanyahu did well to denounce those who accosted Rosenblit, but it does not suffice: The PM, his cabinet ministers and the entire public sector must mobilize to defeat extremist religious bullying.
Despite all the differences, it’s hard not to connect Tanya Rosenblit, the courageous passenger who, on a bus ride between Ashdod and Jerusalem refused to sit in the back, and civil rights activist Rosa Parks. In December 1955, the latter boarded a bus in Montgomery Alabama and, defying the racist segregation policy in effect at the time, refused to yield her seat to a white person. She was arrested, tried and convicted of disturbing public order. The incident led to the bus boycott led by the Reverend Martin Luther King; thereafter, the law mandating racist segregation was challenged in the courts. Toward the end of 1956, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a lower court ruling, holding that Alabama’s segregation law for buses was unconstitutional.

Like Parks, it appears that Rosenblit simply wanted to “go home peacefully” – in this case to her workplace in Jerusalem, though she was turned into a heroine against her will. Her obstinate refusal to acquiesce to the violence of some of the Haredi men around her, and her decision not to compromise after a policeman arrived on the scene and tried to mediate between her and her assailants – this was proof that it is possible to stand up to fanatical elements who are trying to forcibly impose their discriminatory norms on the public, and that one must not be deterred by such elements.

Rosenblit thus drew the lines for a civil struggle. From this point, the struggle should be waged hour by hour, day after day, on all bus lines where the Egged company has yielded to pressure and allowed separation between men and women. This is a struggle of supreme importance that should not be relinquished; by the some token, it is totally wrong to allow women to be excluded from other public venues, or to allow their voices to be stifled.

Discrimination against women, and efforts to push them into traditional roles, constitutes just the tip of the iceberg in a process by which Israel is being transformed into a backward, fanatic and unenlightened country.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu did well Sunday to denounce those who accosted Rosenblit. But this denunciation does not suffice: The prime minister, his cabinet ministers and the entire public sector must mobilize to defeat extremist religious bullying. If they do not, they will be lending support to a dangerously anti-democratic trend.

Israel can be Jewish without being racist: Haaretz

What’s easier for a secular person to hate than an ultra-Orthodox Jew who sets fire to an Israeli flag on the holiday of Lag Ba’omer? The answer is a religious West Bank Jewish settler who torches a mosque on any old day.
By Akiva Eldar
What’s easier for a secular person to hate than an ultra-Orthodox Jew who sets fire to an Israeli flag on the holiday of Lag Ba’omer? The answer is a religious West Bank Jewish settler who torches a mosque on any old day.

The shared revulsion of those thugs who have acquired the nickname “hilltop youth” and whose hate crimes have euphemistically come to be called “price tag” attacks assuages the consciences of those who consider themselves secular liberals.

Like this summer’s wave of protests for social justice, the recent attacks on Israel Defense Force soldiers have created a national consensus, bringing together cheeseburger eaters and skullcap wearers. All of us are for equality, tolerance and love of humanity. All of us are against the band of rabbis who called for Jews not to rent to Arabs in Safed. All of us are against the fundamentalist rabbis from the settlement of Yitzhar whose students throw stones at army officers.

True, the young Jewish terrorists can usually be seen in the traditional side curls and tzitzit, the ritual fringes worn by religious Jewish males. And in the initial years after the Six-Day War, it was in fact the religious Gush Emunim movement that spread the settlement plague, but there is no wall separating the religious from the secular. Jewish ethnocentrism – and the desire to erase the collective identity of the Palestinians and take control of their land – have been a thread linking religious and secular over the past 44 years.

The late settlement movement leader Hanan Porat resettled the Gush Etzion bloc after the Six-Day War with the blessing of Prime Minister Levi Eshkol of the Labor Alignment. Yigal Alon, the deputy prime minister and a kibbutznik, visited Rabbi Moshe Levinger in his settlement outpost in Hebron. The orders issued by Labor’s Shimon Peres, who was defense minister at time, to arrest Gush Emunim activists on their way to the illegal Sebastia settlement “were either given half-heartedly or were negligently carried out,” as the late Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin wrote. And Ariel Sharon, who was the settlers’ king of kings (until he withdrew from the Gaza Strip in 2005 ) was a known fan of shellfish, hardly an item to be found in a kosher kitchen.

The most racist legislative proposals have been the product of Knesset members such as Avigdor Lieberman, Avi Dichter, Danny Danon, Yariv Levin, Faina Kirshenbaum and Anastassia Michaeli, none of whom have religious motives. In their holy writ – that is, opinion poll results – it is said that most of the Jewish population supports limiting the right to vote, allowing only those who swear allegiance to the Jewish state to have a say in who gets elected to run the country.

According to a 2010 poll by the Israel Democracy Institute, most of the Jewish population also believes that Jews should be allocated more resources than Israeli Arabs. And the most important and sensitive resources are in fact being allocated, both from a legal and a practical perspective, by the Israel Lands Administration and the Jewish National Fund. It is these mainstream institutions, not the ultra-Orthodox Council of Torah Sages or the Yesha Council of settlements, that are implementing the worldview reflected in the poll. What is the difference between preventing rentals to non-Jews and banning the sale of land to the goyim?

In a courageous article in the most recent issue of the Shalom Hartman Institute journal Dorsheni, Prof. Ishay Rosen-Zvi writes that although arrogance and discrimination vis-a-vis non-Jews may be deeply rooted in the concept of chosen peoplehood, it is the state, guided by the national interest, that decides what the extent of Jewish nationhood is and what special rights derive from it.

“It was not religious people who coined the phrase ‘demographic problem’; it was not they who legislated the Law of Return [giving Jews abroad the right to immigrate to Israel]; it was not they who founded the Jewish National Fund; not they who declared the policy to make the Negev and Galilee more Jewish,” he writes.

Rosen-Zvi notes that the decision to expel the children of migrant workers was made by a government with a clear secular majority that provided a secular reason: the desire to maintain Israel’s Jewish majority. In the name of democracy, discriminatory ethnic laws of return are the equivalent here of naturalization laws in democratic Western countries. The laws here also grant special rights to relatives of Jews who are not themselves Jewish according to religious law.

At the end of a meeting held last week with rabbis and settlement leaders, President Shimon Peres said: “There is one thing that unites us all: not abandoning this country to a group of people who constitute a major danger to the existence of the state.”

Mr. President, it is not a marginalized “group of people” that constitutes the major danger to the existence of Israel as a democratic and Jewish state, rather than a racist and Jewish one. The seeds of lawlessness were sowed by good secular people like you.

Israeli leaders are to blame for the religious segregation they decry: Haaretz

The sudden public outcry over gender segregation on ultra-Orthodox buses is misplaced: such practices have been going on for years. There are other new phenomena that should worry us more.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spent the opening minutes of the weekly cabinet meeting on Sunday decrying ultra-Orthodox efforts to segregate women and men on public buses, after one female passenger refused to sit in the back of the bus on a trip from Ashdod to Jerusalem.

“I heard about an incident in which a woman was moved on a bus,” Netanyahu told his cabinet ministers. “I adamantly oppose this. Fringe groups must not be allowed to tear apart our common denominator. We must preserve public space as open and safe for all citizens of Israel.”

Opposition leader Tzipi Livni made a personal call to the woman, Tanya Rosenblit, and praised her for her “bravery” and “determination.”

“Her determination symbolizes the need for all of us who fear for Israel’s image to fight and not give in,” Livni said. “Tanya has shown personal bravery.”

Along with those politicians eyeing elections on the horizon, half of the state is currently outraged over what is actually a longstanding phenomenon, in place officially for more than 10 years, and in practice even longer. No new developments have occurred since the matter was approved by the Supreme Court in January of this year.

Nothing new has occurred and nothing has changed, except that the Israeli media, dealing with the issue at the highest possible decibel, is playing into the hands of Netanyahu, Livni and all the rest of the politicians, who morning and night issue declarations of condemnation and consternation over the phenomenon of “excluding women from public space”.

As of yet, nobody has asked them the underlying question, of how the phenomenon of segregation on buses emerged over the last decade with the approval of a long line of transportation ministers, many of whom are still prominent in the leaderships of the Likud, Kadima, and Yisrael Beiteinu: Ariel Sharon, Tzachi Hanegbi, Avigdor Lieberman, Meir Sheetrit, Shaul Mofaz and Yisrael Katz.

The bus on which Rosenblit was traveling that day, No. 451, is registered under the High Court of Justice as a ‘mehadrin line’, otherwise known as ‘strictly kosher’. This designation was given to more than 50 bus lines, serving both inter and inner city, for a “trial period” which has lasted for over two years already.

The court, which issued an order against adding any more bus lines during this “trial period”, has also refused to define them according to the popular-media term ‘mehadrin’. In actuality, the court has refused to define these bus lines at all.

It has dealt only with legitimizing the procedure under which passengers can board a bus through the back door, though it’s obvious that the only passengers boarding through the back are ‘she’s and not ‘he’s. That is, women passengers in the back, men in the front. For all intents and purposes, it is the court that made bus segregation kosher.

The High Court ruling in January made it possible for both the ultra-Orthodox ‘defenders of modesty’ and their opponents to declare victory: the opponents celebrated the explicit prohibition against forced segregation, but the ultra-Orthodox ‘defenders’ understood that these mehadrin lines are free to roam the streets of the country.

It is worthy to note that the demand to institutionalize gender segregation on these buses came originally from passengers on the overcrowded buses of Jerusalem and the “Eida Haharedit”, a sect of fanatical zealots who represent a mere minority in the ultra-Orthodox sector but set the tone for many a public issue.

Not a single ‘mehadrin line’ has been opened in the ultra-Orthodox city of Bnei Brak. Furthermore, none of the public figures who identity as ultra-Orthodox – such as MK Moshe Gafni or Deputy Health Minister Yaakov Litzman – have never uttered a word, neither good nor bad, about these mehadrin lines. This is not their battle, nor is it the central battle of the ultra-Orthodox sector. Transportation Minister Yisrael Katz is much more to blame for the mehadrin line than Gafni.

It’s hard to know whether the current public debate will have any real impact on the relationship between the ultra-Orthodox minority and the non ultra-Orthodox majority, but it is clear that the outside noise is reverberating inside the home of the leader of the non-Hasidic ultra-Orthodox Jews, the ‘sage of this generation’, Rabbi Yosef Shalom Elyashiv.

Among those in the house of the ‘sage of this generation’, there now rages an intense and fascinating argument over what should be its true position regarding the mehadrin lines.

Although Rav Elyashiv is signatory to the ‘kol koreh’ document compiled a few years ago in favor of bus segregation, many of his closest associates are coming out to the media these days to clarify just how much they oppose forced segregation.

It is unprecedented for the spokesmen of such a rigid leader – who has never allowed communal opinion or public consideration to sway him from an unpopular stance – to come out one by one after the public media frenzy burst into the secular sphere.

It was also interesting to hear Chief Rabbi Yona Metzger, who sees himself as directly subordinate to Rav Elyashiv, declare on the ultra-Orthodox radio station Kol Berama that “if we want there to be segregation, it would be most legitimate for us to create a special bus company for these specific lines, so that we can be their ‘landlords’. But as long as they pay as we do, and it is a public company that serves not only the ultra-Orthodox sector, what can we do?”

The incident in which Tanya Rosenblit found herself clashing with her fellow passengers on the bus to Jerusalem was unusual, but not unprecedented. It was not even the most serious incident to have occurred on board the mehadrin lines since they first began roaming a decade ago, as the High Court itself has clarified.

This particular incident has just emerged at a perfect time, when every event somewhat related – whether it is in fact or not – to the headline “Exclusion of Women from Public Spaces” is a potential bomb.

The age-old daily phenomena, such as segregation in public swimming pools, have suddenly been sensationalized into front page news, without opponents stopping to consider that there is no actual exclusion of women at these pools, that the hours are just divided for women and men accordingly; without stopping to consider that there is nothing new here under the sun.

What is new are the phenomena occurring on a much smaller level, those with high media profile, concerning the modesty revolution spiraling among the traditional religious circles, particularly among those who have become more religiously fervent than their parents.

One such phenomenon, which has angered the general population and with good reason, are the incidents involving the Israel Defense Forces soldiers – most of them graduates of nationalist Orthodox yeshivas – who refuse to be present at public ceremonies where women are singing.

This group of soldiers has received the backing of prominent rabbis, including Rabbi Elyakim Levanon of Yeshivat Elon Moreh, who believes that the army has ceased to be a Jewish army.

Another such phenomenon is that of the shawl-draped ‘taliban’ women on the fringes of the ultra-Orthodox society, who have stirred a stormy debate of late within the Haredi sector.

In both of these phenomena, the controversy began first as internal debate before emerging into the public sector. Suddenly, every separate swimming hour held at the university pools looks like the ayatollah regime has descended.

Continue reading December 19, 2011

EDITOR: Surprise, surprise…

For years now, the settlers are making the life of Palestinians utter hell. They murder people, terrorise them, attack little children on the way to school, stone Palestinians in Hebron and elsewhere, block roads at will, burn mosques and desecrate them – the list goes on (though mosques are burnt now regularly all inside Israel… see item below). All this was more or less disregarded by the IDF and the legal system in Israel – after all, the criminals are Jewish, aren’t they? They only attack Arabs, so what the problem?

As Gideon Levy notes below, it all changed when they managed to take over an army base and hurt a high ranking officer. They have been attacking army units for some time, but again their actions, until now, were treated as ‘in the family’ – everyone knows the husband beats his wife, but it stays in the family.

Now, it seems this all different. The attacks of army units, were they carried out by Palestinians, would carry a prison sentence of few decades. The settlers until now got no punishment, not even a court invite. This is how racism operates. The law is directed at one group, disregarding the larger crimes of another group, because they are part of the ‘self’ the entity for the protection of which laws are enacted and enforced. There is no citizenship – there are only tribes – ours and theirs.

Israel, wake up and smell the coffee: Haaretz

Years of rioting against Palestinians, uprooting of trees, vandalism, arson, destruction, dispossession, theft, rocks and axes didn’t cause a ripple, but one rock to the head of a deputy brigade commander made all the difference.
By Gideon Levy
If I could, I’d send a modest bouquet of flowers as a gesture of thanks for the work of the rioters – the ones who infiltrated the Ephraim Brigade base in the West Bank last week. They achieved, at least for a moment, what others had failed to do: stir Israeli public opinion and maybe even the army and government against the West Bank settlers.

Good morning, Israel. You’ve woken up? Years of rioting against Palestinians, uprooting of trees, vandalism, arson, destruction, dispossession, theft, rocks and axes didn’t cause a ripple here. But one rock to the head of a deputy brigade commander, Lt. Col. Tzur Harpaz, made all the difference.

An all-out riot. Jewish terrorism. There are militias in the West Bank, settler-terrorists in a no-man’s-land. And all this due to a rock that drew a few drops of sacred Jewish blood.

Here they are again: arrogance and nationalist ideology. How is it possible that terrorism has arisen from the Chosen People? How could a few drops of blood from one person shock more than streams of other people’s blood? How did the rock that scratched Harpaz’s forehead reverberate immeasurably more than the teargas canister that ripped through the forehead of Palestinian Mustafa Tamimi, killed four days earlier by soldiers from the army Harpaz serves in?

No, the right wing’s hilltop youth haven’t endangered the State of Israel. They haven’t even distorted its image, as it’s now popular to proclaim. What do you want from them? They’ve been made accustomed to think that anything goes. Enough with the self-righteous clucking of tongues. Enough with the “condemnations” and expressions of bogus and belated shock. There is nothing new under the sun when it comes to the settlers. It’s not a “new level” of activity, and it doesn’t involve the crossing of “red lines.” The only line that has been crossed, perhaps, is the line of apathy.

We’ve been reporting for years about the settlers’ misdeeds, week after week. We’ve recounted how they have threatened Palestinians, hit their children on their way to school, thrown garbage at their mothers, turned dogs on elderly Palestinians, abducted shepherds, stolen livestock, embittered their lives day and night, hill and vale, invading and taking over. And it never touched a soul.

Now all of a sudden there is shock. Good morning, Israel. Why? What happened? You can’t chastise those young people after years of not only apathy toward their parents’ misdeeds but also the warm embrace of most of society and sweeping support from the IDF and every Israeli government. You can’t speak about them as brother-pioneers, give them huge budget allocations, promise they’ll be allowed to remain where they are forever, view them as a legitimate, not to say principled, segment of society, and then suddenly turn your back on them, condemning and attacking them. And all due to a rock.

You can’t change the rules that way, one fine day. And the rules were set long ago: It’s their land, the land of the settlers; they’re the masters of it and can do anything there. Only a distorted double standard would permit a change in the rules due to a minor injury to the Israel Defense Forces. Only in the name of a distorted double standard could you be shocked about the recent acts, which were by no means the most serious or cruel.

Of course Israel has the right (and duty ) to change the rules, but such a change must be revolutionary and be carried out across the settlement enterprise, halting it entirely and changing the illegal, unethical and intolerable reality that exists in our backyard. The government isn’t interested in such a change. The IDF isn’t either, and it’s doubtful most Israelis want such a change. But anything less than that is hollow lip service, nothing more than a small wave on the hull of this decades-long enterprise.

Until that happens, let’s leave them alone. There’s no point evacuating a chicken coop at the Mitzpeh Yitzhar outpost while the settlement of Efrat is lapping at the edge of Bethlehem. There’s no point waging war against the “illegal” outposts while the “legal” settlement of Ofra has been built on stolen land. And there’s no point issuing restraining orders to keep out a clutch of rioters while it never occurs to Israel to issue similar orders against all their brethren.

The violent demonstrators at the Ephraim Brigade base are the opposite of anarchists, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called them. They just want to preserve the existing order, just as most Israelis, led by the prime minister, do. Flowers for the rioters? On second thought, they haven’t done a thing.

Netanyahu’s crackdown on Jewish extremists unlikely to change West Bank status quo, IDF officials say: Haaretz

Prime minister approved measures including issuing administrative detention orders for Jewish extremists responsible for recent attacks on IDF soldiers, other targets.

IDF officials said Wednesday that there is only a small chance that the steps taken by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to crack down on Jewish extremists responsible for recent violent attacks on IDF soldiers and other targets would change law enforcement in the West Bank.

Netanyahu approved measures on Wednesday including issuing administrative detention orders for the Jewish extremists, as is usually done with Palestinians suspected of being a security risk.

Moreover, the prime minister approved trying the Jewish activists in military courts, which would effectively expedite their sentencing and make their punishment more severe.

Public opinion has had its effect. Netanyahu appears to have acted following the extensive media coverage of violence and inaction by the army and police.

To some extent, the public reaction is also linked to the atmosphere created by right-wing MKs’ legislative rampage over the past two months. Netanyahu also acted against the backdrop of what was perceived as a problem of governance. When soldiers are attacked and don’t respond, the government looks bad, too. Neither the prime minister nor the press acted when those same right-wingers threw stones at Palestinian cars and burned homes and vehicles.

But there were still major skeptics in the army and police on Wednesday over the effectiveness of the steps approved by an impressive margin. Officers said there is only a small chance the latest steps will fundamentally change the state of law enforcement in the territories.

A system established over decades in the West Bank and the mutual dependence between the settlers, the politicians and the security forces is too strong to be reversed in one fell swoop. The measures approved yesterday include steps in the right direction, but it appears they don’t amount to more than a band-aid.

It was announced that soldiers would be given arrest authority – this power has existed in practice for some time. Arrest and exclusion orders also existed in the past, albeit on a smaller scale, while the addition of personnel will be examined over time.

The truth is, the Israeli government missed plenty of chances to deal with this problem in the past – after the massacre at the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron in 1994, after the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995, and amid acts by the Jewish terrorist organization that operated in the territories at the beginning of the last decade. Its members have never been prosecuted.

Even if these steps bear fruit, there are many other obstacles. Netanyahu, for example, approved the decision to have the rioters stand trial in military courts, but it’s by no means clear that these courts can handle the cases. It’s not clear whether they will be stricter than civilian courts, which have displayed a frightening leniency against ideologically motivated right-wingers.

The Israel Police’s West Bank district has been suffering from inadequate staffing, and it’s no secret that it can’t handle all its tasks. Meanwhile, the Shin Bet security service division in charge of investigating Jews frequently can’t meet the burden of proof required in court when it comes to Jewish defendants.

There is no choice but to ask Netanyahu and his cabinet colleagues why it only occurred to them to act now after “price tag” hooligans have run wild in the territories for nearly two years. It will also be hard for the army to switch gears regarding the right wing, because it has gotten used to viewing the Israeli citizen, any Israeli citizen, as an ally who has to be protected. It’s hard to explain that at a given moment, a small percentage of those citizens have become the enemy.

Significant results in the battle against extreme right-wing lawbreakers will only be achieved if the approach is changed from the top down. The police have chalked up successes in fighting organized crime. But crime families, unlike right-wing rioters, lack a support base in the Knesset.

It could be that a better comparison to Netanyahu’s steps on Wednesday is the Trajtenberg report on social issues that was issued after the summer of social protest. It involved public pressure, a lot of good intentions and a few cosmetic changes, but no major transformation as of yet.

The media’s agenda is liable to change soon. It’s hard to imagine that the latest measures, justified as they may be, will reverse a major trend that has been in place for many years.

Mosque set alight in suspected ‘price tag’ attack in Upper Galilee: Haaretz

Graffiti with the words ‘price tag’ found on wall of the mosque in northern Israel; Northern District Police Commander describe incident as ‘very serious.’
One of three mosques in the village of Tuba-Zangariyye in the Upper Galilee was set on fire overnight Sunday in a suspected “price tag” attack.

It is thought that the attackers arrived at the mosque at approximately 1.30 A.M. and set it alight.

The entire interior of the mosque went up in flames, causing heavy damage. Holy books inside the mosque were burned.

Graffiti with the words “price tag” was found on the wall of the mosque.

Northern District Police Commander Major-General Roni Atia who was on the scene described the incident as “very serious in the context of ‘price tag’ attacks.” Atia has set up a special team to investigate the incident and bring the perpetrators to justice.

Residents of the village also described the attack as “very serious.”

“It is obvious that Jewish extremists did this; despite the internal divisions we have, no one here would dare harm the mosque,” one of the residents said.

Opposition leader Tzipi Livni commented on the incident, saying that if it was indeed a “price tag” act, then it must be condemned.

“Burning mosques contradicts Israel’s values as a Jewish state,” she said. “Such serious incidents obligate us to conduct a national self-examination.”

Hezbollah accuses ‘Zionist settlers’ of attack on Israel mosque: Haaretz

Lebanese militant group claim ‘Zionists expanding their attacks on Christian and Islamic shrines in the occupied Palestinian territories.”

Hezbollah on Monday slammed the torching of a mosque in northern Israel and accused “Zionist settlers of attacking religious shrines.”

“The Zionists are expanding their attacks on Christian and Islamic shrines in the occupied Palestinian territories,” the Lebanese Shiite movement said in a statement.

Hezbollah also warned that the incident “is a danger that targets religious shrines.”

Vandals torched a mosque in northern Israel in a suspected revenge attack by right-wing extremists.

The mosque, located in the Bedouin village of Tuba-Zanghariyya in the northern Galilee region, sustained heavy damage in the overnight attack.

The assailants entered the village overnight, lit fires in the mosque, took copies of the Koran and burnt them outside and spray-painted Hebrew slogans on the walls, with the words “Price Tag” and “Revenge.”

EDITOR: From the horse’s mouth…

Peres, hypocrite number ONE in the middle East, long time supporter of crimes against Palestine and other Arab countries, as well as supporter of the settlements, most of which were emerging under his regime or while serving in governments he was a senior minister in, is speaking in his ‘voice of peace’ imitation, supposedly shocked by the deeds of those snakes he has nurtured when they were much smaller.

Peres: Galilee mosque arson shameful for the State of Israel: Haaretz

The President stresses the importance of the time in which mosque attack took place – the Ten Days of Atonement.

President Shimon Peres on Monday condemned an arson attack on a mosque in the Upper Galilee village of Tuba the night before, branding it an immoral and illegal act that contradicts Jewish values and is a source of shame for the State of Israel.

“This is a difficult day for the entire Israeli society, not only the Arab sector,” Peres said.

The president noted the importance of the time in which the attack took place, the Ten Days of Atonement between Rosh Hashanah (the Jewish New Year) and Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement).

“This is a time for reflection, in which we should condemn such acts among us,” Peres said. “Acts that sabotage our relationship between us and our neighbors and between the different religions living in Israel.”

Peres warned that Israel would not allow extremists and lawbreakers to undermine the need to live together and with mutual respect.

“I am convinced that the police and security forces will apprehend the criminals and bring them to justice, but it is up to all of us to uphold the law and stand against those who break it,” Peres said.

The mosque in the Bedouin village of Tuba-Zangariyya was set on fire in a suspected “price tag” attack by settlers angry at Israeli policy. The entire interior of the mosque went up in flames, causing heavy damage, and holy books inside the mosque were burned. Graffiti with the words “price tag” was found on the wall of the mosque.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also expressed outrage over the arson, instructing the head of the Shin Bet security service to quickly locate those responsible, his office said in a statement.

“The prime minister was furious when he saw the pictures, and said that the incident contradicts the values of the State of Israel – such as freedom of religion and freedom of worship,” the statement said. “The pictures are horrifying and have no place in Israel,” Netanyahu was quoted as saying.

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