The Middle-East MAIN blog

islamozionism: Israel's Sacred Terrorism

2008-10-05T20:45:00.000Z

islamozionism: Israel's Sacred Terrorism

Vote 1: militant Zionism

2008-08-13T22:30:00.003Z

Israel E News

Vote 1: militant Zionism

Filed under Israeli politics, Opinion Editorials, Anti-Zionist Jews, Israeli Palestinian relations, Knesset members, Palestinian politics, Disputed territories, Israeli elections -

on Wednesday, August 13, 2008

By: Loewenstein, Antony

My latest New Matilda column is about the political realities in Israel and Palestine:

Antony Loewenstein looks behind the pre-election rhetoric in Israel and says the lack of a real difference between the front-runners means deeper trouble ahead for both Israel and Palestine

Israel is currently in political limbo. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s leadership of the Jewish state is nearly over due to his refusal to nominate for the upcoming Kadima primaries and rivals are positioning themselves for the poisoned chalice. Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, Deputy Prime Minister Shaul Mofaz, former Prime Minister and Defence Minister Ehud Barak and former leader Benyamin Netanyahu are all possible candidates.

None of them talks about ending the illegal occupation of Palestinian territory.

Gideon Levy, writing in Haaretz, puts his finger on what is missing from so much of the Western commentary chronically more interested in the personalities than the policies. Levy says the unwillingness of any of the candidates to make any real move towards a peace means there is really no choice for Israel’s voters, but constant demonisation of Netanyahu falsely implies that the others are moderates:

“That is the choice. That is the arsenal of candidates seeking to succeed Olmert. None speak in the name of any ideology whatsoever. A past prime minister who failed at his post and brought about the second intifada (Barak); a former chief of staff and defence minister, a cruel military man, who fanned the flames and knows only how to sow destruction and death (Mofaz); a mild-mannered foreign minister who has not advanced peace in any way (Livni); and Netanyahu - the person everyone loves to hate [ - no worse] than his fellow candidates, but immeasurably more persecuted. The media embraces Livni, accepts Mofaz as legitimate, sometimes supports Barak, but is terrified only by Netanyahu. Why?”

Meanwhile, settler violence towards Palestinians is on the increase in the West Bank, the IDF rarely intervenes and the world Jewish Diaspora remains relatively silent.

Veteran Israeli historian Zeev Sternhell, in a powerful recent essay in Haaretz, articulates what is at stake in the current political charade playing out in the Jewish state. He virtually pleads for the world to wake up and pay attention to what Israel has constructed in the occupied territories and pressure them to stop immediately. Despite his fears that the colonial enterprise will end the dream of a “democratic Jewish state” (arguably already an impossibility when one racial group discriminates against another) his words are powerful:

“…What was essential and therefore justified in the pre-state days is now assuming an ugly and violent form of colonial occupation: the authoritarian regime in the territories, the creation of two legal systems, the placing of the army and police at the service of the settlement movement, the robbing of Palestinian lands. These all symbolize not the fulfilment of Zionism but rather its burial. It is there, between Hebron and Yitzhar, that the settlements are burying the democratic Jewish state.

“…If society does not find the emotional strength to remove the noose of the settlements, nothing but a sad memory will remain of the Jewish state as it still exists.”

Alas, nobody is talking about seriously changing the power dynamic in the Middle East - and most in the region don’t expect a President Barack Obama to shift his country’s bias away from Israel’s occupation - or even attempt to halt the continued growth of settlements. Colonisation is now an essential part of Israel, and will destroy it, in my opinion.

Senior Palestinian negotiator Ahmed Qureia said on Sunday that the Palestinians may soon demand a bi-national state if Israel continues to reject proposed borders. The days of the Jewish state are numbered.

A recent Australian commentator argued that Prime Minister Kevin Rudd was subtly re-defining the country’s relationship with Israel to be more “even-handed” in the Middle East. However, actions speak louder than words, and maintaining an outright ban on dealing with Hamas and remaining virtually silent over Israel’s settlement project suggests a business-as-usual mentality.

One issue that has received rudimentary coverage in the Western media is the ongoing civil strife in Gaza and the West Bank. Although there has been some detail on the clan rivalries involved, there has been little discussion about the outside forces that are contributing to the instability. The elevation of Hamas in June 2007 to control of Gaza undoubtedly shifted the power dynamic in the Strip, and many established families quickly discovered the limits to their influence, but what of the US-backed Fatah forces that desperately crave dominance over Hamas?

The role of Washington has been virtually ignored in the current impasse, even after this detailed Vanity Fair essay in April that proved the Bush administration was involved in the instability, having attempted a failed coup in 2007 against Hamas by supporting Fatah forces and triggering a civil war between the rival groups. The aim was to install Fatah and wrestle power from the democratically-elected Hamas.

As recently as March, the Washington Post was reporting that these US-backed forces, being trained in Jordan, are “mired in delays, a shortage of resources, and differences between Israelis and the Americans over what military capabilities those forces should have once deployed in the territories.”

In other words, Fatah, under President Mahmoud Abbas, was willingly collaborating with Washington to provide military forces to essentially manage the occupation and suppress an opposing political party. The result, as we’ve seen over the last weeks, is a resurgent Hamas and brutal tactics from both sides (something rightly chastised by Human Rights Watch in a recent report).

But here’s the catch. Although much of the West stands by and cheers from the sidelines, pleased that the Palestinians are fighting amongst themselves, this thinking is seriously deluded. As pointed out by Daniel Levy - a former liberal Israeli peace negotiator whose blog is essential reading - Israel’s ceasefire with Hamas is threatened by the ongoing violence (something many Israeli politicians welcome, such is their desire to re-invade Gaza and attempt to destroy the Islamist group root and branch):

“…Perhaps most worrying of all is that as Palestinians lose hope in the peace process, and look despairingly at both the Fatah and Hamas leaderships, there is a danger of extremist Al Qaeda-style alternatives emerging. Such activity may already be taking place today, as politics breaks down into clan structures and groups like the Army of Islam appear. Hamas is not Al Qaeda, but the alternative to it might be.”

Palestinian lawlessness in Gaza and Israeli settler chaos in the West Bank is a toxic mix, and the Jewish state is fanning the former and ignoring the latter. The Palestinians are not blameless in this process, of course, with many rival groups positioning themselves for the spoils of (limited) power. But it’s vital to never forget the fact that Gaza remains an occupied prison, surrounded by Israel on all sides (something to be highlighted by the “Free Gaza” boat campaign this week).

More worrying still, the voices within Israel that shun any peace initiatives with the Palestinians are growing. Witness writer and playwright Naomi Ragen, soon to visit Australia, who told the Fairfax press last weekend that she opposed withdrawal from any occupied territory and supported killing all “terrorists”. Ragen, who slammed me as a “liar” and a “typical self-hating, ignorant Jew”, is symptomatic of modern, perverted Zionism. To them the Arabs are unpeople.

Jewish American professor Marc Ellis told the ABC in 2001 that contemporary Judaism was being increasingly defined through the barrel of the gun. “If we want helicopter gunships to define us as a people, say it”, he said, “but don’t pretend that helicopter gunships are not defining us.”

The Israel/Palestine conflict will never be resolved without a serious re-configuring of the Jewish mentality. Militant Zionism has become the default position.

We are barely past the starting line.

The opinions and views articulated by the author do not necessarily reflect those of Israel e News.

A prison is not a penal colony

2008-08-06T18:23:00.005Z

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Ha'aretz

A prison is not a penal colony

By Haaretz Editorial

July 31 2008

Tags: report, Prison, Israel

The Public Defender's report on the situation of prisoners in 2007 reveals serious failures in Israel's prisons. The editors of the report do note that the Israel Prison Service opened its doors without reservations to the inspector, related seriously to findings and criticism, and that at the time of the editing of the report, some of the distortions had been corrected. Nevertheless, the findings are cause for concern.

Most disturbing of all is the violence by prison guards and their commanders toward prisoners and detainees, especially when it comes to minors.

The report, which examined 11 prisons and jails, reveals inter alia that at the Ofek Prison, where all of the prisoners are minors, there are disproportionate and collective punishments including, for example, shackling all four limbs to a bed. Considered a means of restraining suicidal minors that requires a doctor's authorization, this is used at Ofek as a means of punishment. This is an outrageous, inhumane method that exacerbates despair and suicidal tendencies among the prisoners.

The Prison Service claims that the problems at Ofek, considered one of the most advanced facilities (the writers of the report confirm the classrooms, leisure time activities and physical facilities have improved), stem from poor management, and in a discussion in the Knesset Constitution, Law and Justice Committee they promised that the management would be replaced in the near future. If this is the case, there is no reason to wait, and it must be ensured that the new management changes the approach.

At other facilities, where physical conditions are also sometimes disgraceful - intolerable crowding, filth and negligible exposure to fresh air - cases of violence and harsh abuse were found. At all of the facilities there were beatings, delays in meetings with family members and lawyers and, worst of all, excessive punishment. It appears that the Prison Service has forgotten that prisons are not penal colonies ,and putting a person behind lock and key does not mean total and perpetual distancing from society. The period of imprisonment is supposed to be a designated period of punishment, but at the same time it must afford an opportunity for rehabilitation and provide new tools that will enable normative functioning. The Public Defender's report that sweeping punishment thwarts rehabilitation.

What is true of adult prisoners is even truer of minors. And, indeed, the report points to the need to staff the facilities for minors with superior and very skilled personnel. This, however, is not enough, as the report also reveals a serious dearth of manpower, social workers and treatment plans.

All of these are equally deleterious to the chances of rehabilitation, and moreover, transform the prisoners into recidivists who become a heavy burden on society and the economy. The harsh report does, however, have a bright spot, and this is the very fact of its existence. The flaws and injustices are grave, but there is no doubt that the oversight, and to an equal extent the exposure, that has been carried out by the Public Defender since 1999 contribute to the rectification of the norms that have engendered these flaws and injustices.

Help olim join the Jewish people

2008-08-05T14:15:00.003Z

Israel E News

Help olim join the Jewish people


Filed under Judaism, Jewish diaspora, IDF/Military, Opinion Editorials, Aliya, Russian Jewish, Israeli minorities, Israeli society, Russia - Friday, August 01, 2008 By: Avital, Colette

Colette Avital is an Israeli Knesset Member on behalf of the Labor Party, which she has represented since 1999. Born in Bucharest, Romania, she immigrated to Israel with her family in 1950.

While still a student, she began working in Israel's Ministry of Foreign Affairs as a secretary. Over the years, she rose through the ranks at the Ministry and in 2007, she was a candidate in the Israeli presidential election

She currently chairs the Immigration, Absorption, and Diaspora Committee. Avital also currently serves as the International Secretary of the Israeli Labour Party.

Some 300-350 thousand non-Jewish immigrants live in Israel today, mostly people who emigrated from the former Soviet Union under the Law of Return. They are all Israeli citizens; most of them well integrated in Israeli society. Many serve in combat units in the IDF. Under Israeli law and the famous Status Quo arrangement, the Orthodox establishment monopolizes the conversion process in Israel.

Non-Jewish immigrants can die for the country, but cannot marry a Jewish citizen in Israel.

Two months ago an urgent meeting took place in the Constitution, Law and Justice Committee of the Knesset. Its chairman, MK Menachem Ben-Sasson, convened the meeting following a preposterous case that took place in the Rabbinical Court of Ashdod. At the end of a simple divorce case, the court retroactively revoked the wife's conversion - which took place 15 years earlier - declaring her marriage null and void and her children gentiles. The decision not only cancelled the woman's conversion, but also discredited some 15,000 conversions preformed by Rabbi Haim Druckman, former head of the State Conversion Authority.

This meeting at the Knesset, as many before in the Immigration Committee, brought to light the catastrophic state of Israel's conversion authorities, where infighting and bickering between the omnipotent rabbinical courts and the powerless State Conversion Authority are the norm. Exposed too was the precarious situation of non-Jewish Israelis who seek to convert and face draconian measures.

Slowly but surely a sub-society is being formed in Israel: a society of citizens with Jewish ancestry who serve in the army and pay taxes, but are prevented from living as citizens with full rights integrating in Israel. Currently only 2,000 people convert every year: only 30% of the soldiers and 55% of the civilians who begin the process end up being converted. Clearly, this is a drop in the ocean. In fact, there are more non-Jewish children born to these families in Israel every year than there are converts.

Five years ago Prime Minister Ariel Sharon attempted to address this problem by establishing the State Conversion Authority in the Prime Minister's Office. Unfortunately, the new body was ineffective in substantially increasing the number of converts to Judaism. This is mainly due to the unwelcoming attitude of the rabbinical courts towards converts, as well as the rigid and protracted conversion process. A survey conducted by the Ministry of immigrant absorption found that 76% of non-Jewish immigrants said that the greatest deterrent to beginning the conversion process was the uncertainty that they will eventually be recognized as Jews. Most respondents commented that an easier and more welcoming process would encourage them to convert.

Recently, a committee headed by Erez Halfon, Director General of the Ministry of Immigrant Absorption, completed its work and compiled a plan to reform the conversion services in Israel. The Halfon Committee recommended the establishment of a Conversion Bureau in the Prime Minister's office, which would co-ordinate the various branches of the conversion process: special conversion courts, the various educational institutions and the information policy.

However, the recommendations of the Halfon Committee were watered down by the Prime Minister's Office. The only palpable change seems to be the transferring of budgets from the Ministry of Immigrant Absorption to the Prime Minister's Office, and the addition of some 10 Rabbis to the conversion courts. Even the idea to recruit dozens of volunteer Rabbis to expedite the conversions was knocked down. The solutions offered by the Prime Minister's office are too little too late.

We must not forget that decisions taken in Israel with regards to the conversion process have a profound effect on converts and Jews in the Diaspora. Many non-Jews are reluctant to convert in rabbinical courts which may eventually not be recognized by Israel, and many courts are reluctant to carry out conversions at all. This situation has, of course, an adverse effect on the view of many Jewish communities towards Israel, communities that often contain many converts.

Failure to solve this issue immediately means a long-term disaster for the Jewish State. The damage caused to our social cohesion and the absorption of immigrants is immense.

What is required today is a paradigm shift in thinking towards the entire issue of conversions in Israel. The monopoly in conversions given to the Orthodox should not be unconditional - it can only continue if the treatment of those wishing to convert is radically changed. Conversions must be facilitated both by a more welcoming rabbinical system and by the removal of bureaucratic barriers.

Let us not forget- the people in question have already decided to join the Jewish nation by immigrating to Israel. Their claim - as simple and honest as that of our matriarch Ruth, who declared "Your People is my people and your God- my God" - should be taken seriously.

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Why aren`t evangelicals denouncing Pastor John Hagee?

2008-07-19T04:16:00.002Z

Israel e News

Why aren`t evangelicals denouncing Pastor John Hagee?


Filed under: Israeli politics, Middle East, Anti-Semitism, Christian Zionism, Islamophobia, USA foreign policy, Missionising, Disputed territories, News, Religious extremism, US elections, Christian Fundamentalism, Zionism, Jerusalem On: Friday, July 18, 2008 -

Republican presidential nominee John McCain once sought the endorsement of Texas mega-church pastor John Hagee (left, with McCain). But once McCain got it he was forced to reject it. Why? Because Hagee has denounced Catholicism as "The Great Whore," called for the destruction of Islam, demonizes homosexuals, thinks global warming is a hoax and constantly insists the U.S. should attack Iran because it will help usher in the Second Coming.

Hagee's also a fervent supporter of the State of Israel against its Muslim neighbours. But he doesn't bother to tell Jews that Christians of his ilk expect all Jews to convert to Christianity. If they don't, such end-times Christians believe Jews will suffer eternal damnation when Jesus returns in the Last Judgment.

Hagee's people recently had his sermons removed form You Tube for alleged copyright reasons, after millions of people signed on to watch him say God sent Hitler to frighten European Jews into moving to Israel. Hagee is also reported to have said that the AntiChrist will be German, gay, a "blasphemer" and "partly-Jewish."

The silence from fellow evangelicals about Hagee's militant declarations are perplexing, given that mainstream Muslims are often criticized for not denouncing their extremist brothers and sisters in the faith.

Here's a piece I wrote about how some Jews are growing increasingly nervous about Christian Zionists support for the state of Israel:

Jews and Christians have rarely enjoyed a comfortable relationship. After a history of Christian persecution that contributed to the Holocaust, however, Jews began meeting with shamed Roman Catholics and mainline Protestants, who eventually agreed not to target Jews for conversion.

Evangelical Christians did not typically take part in the interfaith dialogues, or come to the same conclusion. As a result, many Jews have been offended by evangelicals who still believe Jews can go to heaven only if they recognize their "mistake" in not recognizing Jesus as their Messiah.

In politics, as well, there has often been tension between Jews and evangelicals. In the U.S., Jews strongly support the Democrats while white evangelicals firmly back the Republican party. That trend holds in Canada, where polls show evangelicals lean toward the Conservatives and Jews typically vote Liberal or New Democrat.

But there is one overriding issue that opinion polls show is increasingly bringing together many evangelical Christians and Jews in an uneasy alliance: The state of Israel. Many evangelicals, like influential Texas mega-church pastor John Hagee, now call themselves "Christian Zionists." They're supporting Israel against its Middle Eastern foes mainly because of the way they interpret biblical prophecy about the Apocalypse.

These evangelicals cite Genesis 12:3, which recounts God's promise to bless Israel's friends and curse its enemies. Based on their reading of the Book of Revelation, such evangelicals also worry Jesus will not return to Earth to bring in Judgment Day unless the holy land is governed by Jews.

A recent poll by the respected Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life found 63 per cent of white American evangelicals believe current conflicts involving the state of Israel "fulfil Biblical prophecy about the Second Coming."

American evangelicals, who constitute 26 per cent of the population, gave President George W. Bush 40 per cent of his votes in the last election. The Pew Forum poll found evangelicals are more than twice as likely as secular Americans to sympathize with Israel more than the Palestinians.

The complex and awkward subject of Christian Zionism -- which causes division within both Judaism and evangelicalism -- was highlighted last year by the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada, which represents 2.5 million conservative Protestants. The Canadian umbrella organization widelydistributed an article in which Christian Zionist Jim Hutchens accused a group of moderate U.S. evangelicals of "appalling ignorance" for supporting Bush's two-state peace proposal of separate nations for Palestinians and Israelis.

The EFC at the same time sent out a related article that offered evangelicals pointers on how to respectfully befriend Jews in hopes of converting them to Jesus Christ. In publishing the articles, however, the EFC says it doesn't necessarily endorse such views.

The issue of conversion is the most combustible ingredient in the political mix that is bringing together evangelicals and Jews.

The controversy relates to the Rapture, or evangelical beliefs about who will be saved on Judgment Day, which grow out of the apocalyptic Book of Revelation. Shaped in part by the phenomenal publishing success of the the Left Behind series, theological thrillers about the end of the world, polls show more U.S. evangelicals than ever believe the reconstitution of the state of Israel in 1948 after nearly 2,000 years signalled the start of a series of events presaging the Apocalypse.

Others signs include the war in Iraq, the oil crisis and the Iranian conflict. Many evangelicals (unlike Roman Catholics or mainline Protestants) believe the more Israel is threatened, the closer is the fulfilment of biblical prophecies about the end times.

For Jews, therefore, the big worry behind Rapture theology is that evangelicals believe they have a special duty to convert Jews to usher in the longed-for Judgment Day. On Judgment Day, many evangelicals believe, all those who have not become Christian, including Jews, will be condemned to eternal damnation.

The Left Behind series includes graphic scenes of unconverted Jews dying in a terrible conflagration. Given this, many Jews have conflicting feelings about embracing evangelical as allies. The national director of the U.S. Anti-Defamation League, Abraham Foxman, warned against it: "Make no mistake," Foxman said. "We are facing an emerging Christian right leadership that intends to 'Christianize' all aspects of American life."

In Canada, the most high-profile champion of Christian Zionism is Charles McVety, president of Canada Christian College in Ontario, head of the Defend Marriage Coalition and leader of Ottawa's new Institute for Canadian Values. Even though McVety is a Conservative party supporter, no political polling exists that I'm aware of about whether Canada's evangelicals, who make up almost 10 per cent of the population, agree with his views about the state of Israel or Judgment Day.

Canadian evangelicals, as a group, tend to be more moderate than their American cousins. But the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada's recent messages to adherents make clear the future of the state of Israel remains a live and sensitive issue for conservative Protestants north of the border.

Douglas Todd - Vancouver Sun

Suspicion: Former IDF Intel chief exposed billionaire Egyptian Mossad agent Marwan

2008-07-18T20:57:00.006Z

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Israel E News

Suspicion: Former IDF Intel chief exposed billionaire Egyptian Mossad agent Marwan

Filed under: Israeli politics, Middle East, Business, IDF/Military, Mossad/Israeli intelligence, News, Intelligence (foreign), Law and courts, Scandals

On: Friday, July 18, 2008

By: Israel e News

Israeli investigators looking into suspicions that Eli Zeira, head of IDF intelligence during Yom Kippur War, revealed identity of Egyptian who warned Israel of coming Egyptian army attack

Ashraf Marwan

Israel Police and Shin Bet investigators are looking into suspicions that former IDF Intelligence chief Maj.-Gen. (res.) Eli Zeira exposed Mossad agent Ashraf Marwan, an Egyptian billionaire who warned Israel prior to the onset of the Yom Kippur War in October 1973.

Zeira, who was head of IDF intelligence during the war, is suspected of severe offences related to State security.

Since the 1990s, Israeli intelligence officials, including Zeira himself, have claimed that Marwan was a double agent who disclosed vital information on the Egyptian forces but also said they would launch an attack in the evening, when they actually attacked on the morning of October 6.

Marwan, the controversial son-in-law of Egypt's late President Gamal Abdel Nasser, died in June 2007 of a ruptured aorta caused when he fell from a window of his flat on the fifth floor of Carlton House Terrace in London. Some said Israel assassinated Marwan, while others claimed he was depressed and committed suicide.
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'Degree in chemical engineering'

In September 2002, the London-based Israeli historian Ahron Bregman published a book that included allegations that Marwan was Israeli's "master spy" in Cairo. In a subsequent interview with Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram, Bregman again named Marwan as Israel's disputed source.

Despite these allegations being made public, Marwan seemed to avoid any retaliation from Egypt. On October 6, 2004, two year after being named as a spy, Israeli intelligence officers observed Marwan being greeted warmly by current Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak; the only possible explanation, asserts Bregman, was that Marwan had been a double agent

According to the Israeli media reports, Marwan first walked into the Israeli Embassy in London in 1969 and volunteered to give information but was turned down. He later was allegedly recruited by the Israeli intelligence agency, Mossad.

Born to a father who was a military officer in Nasser's presidential guard, Marwan joined the army himself after he completed a degree in chemical engineering. He later worked as an assistant to Nasser and after Nasser's death in 1970, he became a political and security adviser to Anwar Sadat.

In the 1970s, Marwan worked as head of Egypt's huge government-owned military industry complex before he retired and moved to Britain 25 years ago to work in business.

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Ynet

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Einstein: Belief in God 'childish,' Jews not chosen people

2008-05-22T23:24:00.003Z

Einstein: Belief in God 'childish,' Jews not chosen people

In letter written by father of relativity, he reveals his belief that Jewish people 'have no different quality for me than all other people'

05-14-2008
AFP

Albert Einstein described belief in God as "childish superstition" and said Jews were not the chosen people, in a letter to be sold in London this week, an auctioneer said Tuesday.

The father of relativity, whose previously known views on religion have been more ambivalent and fuelled much discussion, made the comments in response to a philosopher in 1954.

As a Jew himself, Einstein said he had a great affinity with Jewish people but said they "have no different quality for me than all other people".

"The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish.

"No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this," he wrote in the letter written on January 3, 1954 to the philosopher Eric Gutkind, cited by The Guardian newspaper.

The German-language letter is being sold Thursday by Bloomsbury Auctions in Mayfair after being in a private collection for more than 50 years, said the auction house's managing director Rupert Powell.

In it, the renowned scientist, who declined an invitation to become Israel's second president, rejected the idea that the Jews are God's chosen people.

"For me the Jewish religion like all others is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions," he said.

"And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong and with whose mentality I have a deep affinity have no different quality for me than all other people."

And he added: "As far as my experience goes, they are no better than other human groups, although they are protected from the worst cancers by a lack of power. Otherwise I cannot see anything 'chosen' about them."

Previously the great scientist's comments on religion - such as "Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind" -- have been the subject of much debate, used notably to back up arguments in favour of faith.

Powell said the letter being sold this week gave a clear reflection of Einstein's real thoughts on the subject. "He's fairly unequivocal as to what he's saying. There's no beating about the bush," he added.

"We Created Terror Among the Arabs": The Deir Yassin Massacre

2008-05-22T13:40:00.004Z

"We Created Terror Among the Arabs": The Deir Yassin Massacre

Counterpunch
William James Martin

Tue, 13 May 2008

On April 9, 1948, members of the underground Jewish terrorist group, the Irgun, or IZL, led by Menachem Begin, who was to become the Israeli prime minister in 1977, entered the peaceful Arab village of Deir Yassin, massacred 250 men, women, children and the elderly, and stuffed many of the bodies down wells. There were also reports of rapes and mutilations. The Irgun was joined by the Jewish terrorist group, the Stern Gang, led by Yitzhak Shamir, who subsequently succeeded Begin as prime minister of Israel in the early '80s, and also by the Haganah, the militia under the control of David Ben Gurian. The Irgun, the Stern Gang and the Haganah later joined to form the Israeli Defense Force. Their tactics have not changed.

The massacre at Deir Yassin was widely publicized by the terrorists and the numerous heaped corpses displayed to the media. In Jaffe, which was at the time 98 percent Arab, as well as in other Arab communities, speaker trucks drove through the streets warning the population to flee and threatening another Deir Yassin. Begin said at the time, "We created terror among the Arabs and all the villages around. In one blow, we changed the strategic situation."

From about 1938 on to the founding of Israel, Begin was the leader of the Irgun. That group regularly assassinated English soldiers in Palestine and frequently hung their booby-trapped bodies in public places. Under Begin, the Irgun blew up the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in 1946, killing 97 British civil servants. The Stern Gang, under Shamir, also assassinated the U.N. representative to Palestine, Count Bernadotte, in 1948.

But Deir Yassin was not the only massacre by the Israeli Defence Force. That army, under Moshe Dayan, took the unarmed and undefended village of al-Dawazyma, located in the Hebron hills, massacred 80 to 100 of its residents, and threw their bodies into pits. "The children were killed by breaking their heads with sticks ... The remaining Arabs were then sealed in houses, as the village was systematically razed ..." (Nur Masalha, The Historical Roots of the Palestinian Refugee Question).

We read further. According to Yitzhak Rabin's biography:

We walked outside, Ben-Gurion accompanying us. Alon repeated his question: "What is to be done with the population?" BG waved his hand in a gesture, which said: Drive them out! ... I agreed that it was essential to drive the inhabitants out.

Continuing the narrative, Ben-Gurion University historian Benny Morris writes in "Operation Dani and the Palestinian Exodus from Lydda and Ramle in 1948", Middle East Journal, 40

At 13.30 hours on 12 July [1948]... Lieutenant-Colonel Yitzhak Rabin, operation Dani head Operation, issued the following order: '1. The inhabitants of Lydda must be expelled quickly without attention to age. They should be directed to Beit Nabala,... Implement Immediately.' A similar order was issued at the same time to the Kiryati Brigade concerning the inhabitants of the neighboring town of Ramle, occupied by Kiryati troops that morning... On 12 and 13 July, the Yaftah brigades carried out their orders, expelling the 50-60,000 remaining inhabitants of and refugees camped in and around the two towns....

About noon on 13 July, Operation Dani HQ informed IDF General Staff/Operations: 'Lydda police fort has been captured. [The troops] are busy expelling the inhabitants.... Lydda's inhabitants were forced to walk eastward to the Arab legion lines; many of Ramle's inhabitants were ferried in trucks or buses. Clogging the roads... the tens of thousands of refugees marched, gradually shedding their worldly goods along the way. It was a hot summer day. The Arab chroniclers, such as Sheikh Muhammed Nimr al Khatib, claimed that hundreds of children died in the march, from dehydration and disease. One Israeli witness described the spoor: the refugee column 'to begin with [jettisoned] utensils and furniture and, in the end, bodies of men, women, and children.

There were many other such villages with Arabic names that have almost been expunged from memory--but not quite. These facts have always been known to some historians, however they have been consistently denied by the official Israeli histories, as, indeed, Israel has never taken any responsibility for the exodus of Palestinians from the land of the present state of Israel.

Within the last 10 to 20 years, however, there has been an exponential increase in historical studies of the origins of the state of Israel which have coincided with the release by Israel of many, but not all, of the historical and military archives. Ben-Gurion University historian Benny Morris, as well as others, have systematically mined these documents and found numerous instances of massacres, and, by the way, not one shred of evidence for the frequently repeated official Israeli lie that the Palestinians fled Palestine because the surrounding Arab states told them to.

In fact, according to UN estimates, which some say are conservative, 750,000 Palestinians fled the site of the present Jewish state in 1948. Those refugees and their descendents now number about 4.5 million and constitute the largest and longest standing refugee population in the world. Many live in squalid refugee camps distributed in the surrounding Arab states or in the West Bank or Gaza, many retain the titles to their land, recognized by the British before 1948 or the Ottomans before that , and many retain the keys to their front doors of their former homes in what is now Israel, whether or not those doors still exists.

The '67 War generated a second wave of about 300,000 refugees from the West Bank and Gaza who were either expelled through direct or psychological methods or fled the Israel aerial attacks on the territories which included the extensive use of napalm.

The reader is invited to read the Hagana's Plan D , which has been available in English since the 1960s and was a military strategy of 1948 that entailed the evacuation of the Palestinian population from the areas of a future Jewish state.

Those who invoke the suicide bombings against mostly Israeli civilians to infer the righteousness of the Israeli cause live in a twilight of psychic denial of an otherwise unambiguous historical record: the state of Israel was founded on terrorism and ethnic cleansing.

The suicide bombings inside Israel, the first of which only occurred in 1994, after 25 years of occupation, is only a side show. That is a symptom and long way from the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

There will never be a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict until Israel takes responsibility, under U.N. Resolution 194, calling for reparation of the Palestinian refugees, and recognizes the immense suffering it caused at that time. We need also to recognize the US is giving unqualified moral support to a state that is based on racial purity and one that is intrinsically expansionist.

William James Martin is a visiting Instructor of Mathematics at the University of Central Florida, Orlando. He can be reached at: martinw@email.unc.edu

Comment:

It is interesting to notice that Israeli historian Benny Morris - quoted in the article above as one of the sources revealing crimes against Palestinians - will not condemn Zionism in spite of his findings. The following fragment of an interview speaks volumes:

When ethnic cleansing is justified

Benny Morris, for decades you have been researching the dark side of Zionism. You are an expert on the atrocities of 1948. In the end, do you in effect justify all this? Are you an advocate of the transfer of 1948?

There is no justification for acts of rape. There is no justification for acts of massacre. Those are war crimes. But in certain conditions, expulsion is not a war crime. I don't think that the expulsions of 1948 were war crimes. You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs. You have to dirty your hands.

We are talking about the killing of thousands of people, the destruction of an entire society.

A society that aims to kill you forces you to destroy it. When the choice is between destroying or being destroyed, it's better to destroy.

There is something chilling about the quiet way in which you say that.

If you expected me to burst into tears, I'm sorry to disappoint you. I will not do that.

So when the commanders of Operation Dani are standing there and observing the long and terrible column of the 50,000 people expelled from Lod walking eastward, you stand there with them? You justify them?

I definitely understand them. I understand their motives. I don't think they felt any pangs of conscience, and in their place I wouldn't have felt pangs of conscience. Without that act, they would not have won the war and the state would not have come into being.

You do not condemn them morally?

No.

They perpetrated ethnic cleansing.

There are circumstances in history that justify ethnic cleansing. I know that this term is completely negative in the discourse of the 21st century, but when the choice is between ethnic cleansing and genocide - the annihilation of your people - I prefer ethnic cleansing.

And that was the situation in 1948?

That was the situation. That is what Zionism faced. A Jewish state would not have come into being without the uprooting of 700,000 Palestinians. Therefore it was necessary to uproot them. There was no choice but to expel that population. It was necessary to cleanse the hinterland and cleanse the border areas and cleanse the main roads. It was necessary to cleanse the villages from which our convoys and our settlements were fired on.

The term "to cleanse" is terrible.

I know it doesn't sound nice but that's the term they used at the time. I adopted it from all the 1948 documents in which I am immersed.

What you are saying is hard to listen to and hard to digest. You sound hard-hearted.

I feel sympathy for the Palestinian people, which truly underwent a hard tragedy. I feel sympathy for the refugees themselves. But if the desire to establish a Jewish state here is legitimate, there was no other choice. It was impossible to leave a large fifth column in the country. From the moment the Yishuv [pre-1948 Jewish community in Palestine] was attacked by the Palestinians and afterward by the Arab states, there was no choice but to expel the Palestinian population. To uproot it in the course of war.

Remember another thing: the Arab people gained a large slice of the planet. Not thanks to its skills or its great virtues, but because it conquered and murdered and forced those it conquered to convert during many generations. But in the end the Arabs have 22 states. The Jewish people did not have even one state. There was no reason in the world why it should not have one state. Therefore, from my point of view, the need to establish this state in this place overcame the injustice that was done to the Palestinians by uprooting them.

And morally speaking, you have no problem with that deed?

That is correct. Even the great American democracy could not have been created without the annihilation of the Indians. There are cases in which the overall, final good justifies harsh and cruel acts that are committed in the course of history.

And in our case it effectively justifies a population transfer.

That's what emerges.

And you take that in stride? War crimes? Massacres? The burning fields and the devastated villages of the Nakba?

You have to put things in proportion. These are small war crimes. All told, if we take all the massacres and all the executions of 1948, we come to about 800 who were killed. In comparison to the massacres that were perpetrated in Bosnia, that's peanuts. In comparison to the massacres the Russians perpetrated against the Germans at Stalingrad, that's chicken feed. When you take into account that there was a bloody civil war here and that we lost an entire 1 percent of the population, you find that we behaved very well.

That is Benny Morris. For him, the goal of establishing a "Jewish state" justified any atrocities against the Palestinians.

For the Nazis, the ideal of the greatness of the "Fatherland" and the "Germanic Race" justified the extermination of Jews and others. They probably also thought that it was 'unfortunate' for those others, but that they had no choice.

It seems that for some people learning the facts is not enough to develop real empathy and conscience.

Reader Comments

Zionist Terrorism Pays!

By Righthand

Two Israeli Prime Ministers were terrorist that LED different terrorist gangs back in 1948. The present IDF comprises the 3 Zionist terrorist gangs; Stern Gang, Irgun, and Haganah. In addition to massacring countless Arab females, children and civilian males, they killed 97 British civil servants. The British rewarded terrorism by giving in and running. Zionist terrorism pays.

Today any voice for peace on the Arab side is assassinated. Back then it was the United Nations representative, Count Bernadotte that they assassinated. the UN rewarded them by creating the terror state of Israel, at war with its neighbours since. Zionist terrorism pays.

In 1967 Israeli war plains and navel deliberately attempted to sink the lightly armed intelligence USS Liberty killing 34 and wounding 174 USA personal. By a miracle it stayed afloat. The US rewarded the Zionist by totally resupplying them when Sadat was beating them. Zionist terrorism pays.

What lesson is there for the Arabs aside from no justice from the West. Terrorism pays, certainly if you are a Zionist.

Added: Sun, 18 May 2008 01:33 EDT

Sderot: Sacrifice a Few Immigrants for The Cause?

2008-05-14T12:06:00.004Z

Notes From the Levant

Over the 40 years since 1967, (2/3 of the State of Israel's entire history) I've changed from being a wide-eyed innocent sympathiser and great admirer of Israel to considering, now, that state as perhaps the world's most evil and ruthless narrow interest group, using the mostly benign and beneficial views and activities of world Jewry as a cover for a wholly bogus enterprise that no decent person could tolerate from anyone else.

===========

Tuesday, October 30, 2007

Sderot - Sacrifice a Few Immigrants for The Cause?

Let's get these deadly Palestinian rocket attacks into perspective.

Israel has a policy of establishing front-line, development towns where brave, courageousIsraeli colonists can confront the ' Arab Peril'. Sderot is one such.

It was set up as a front-line town, and it gets attacked, as it was planned to be. That's why Sderot's population is half recent Russian immigrant, and half Sephardi (Moroccan and Persian Jews). Not a brave Ashkenazi or Sabra in sight.

The Gaza Strip (not worth calling it anything more than a strip) is nothing more now than a refugee concentration camp where about half the Palestinians expelled from 'Israel' in 1948 ended up, in places like Jabalyah, Khan Yunis and Rafah refugee camps. There are 1.5 million people confined to 300sq km.

They are not allowed to leave Gaza, even for emergency medical care, or if they do, to return.

At least two generations of refugee peasant farmers, kicked off their land, have ended up in Gaza, with nothing much to do, no education, no jobs, and damned little hope.

But Sderot is useful as a subject for schmaltzy Israeli propaganda:
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Israeli pull out from the Gaza Strip has intensified the feeling of vulnerability in Sderot, a development town just 2 miles from the Palestinian controlled area.
Kasaam missiles continue to rain down on the town and its environs. The Israel Defense Forces created an early warning system that detects the incoming missiles.

The piercing siren often adds to the anxiety and trauma of the citizens.
NATAL's community outreach unit, through a generous grant from the Jewish Agency and the Joint Distribution Committee, is training emergency teams and educational, health and mental health professionals throughout the town.
The training helps the helpers identify their clients who are suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

The outreach unit trainers teach the Sderot professionals how to build resilience among the population by exercises that help bolster the emotional and psychological resources that help in times of crisis. The trainers also assist the helpers in dealing with secondary traumatization that can develop from overexposure to traumatized clients. [Poor dears]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Hilary Benn, son of old Wedgie, said this of the situations of Beit Hanoun and Sderot:
Victims of the failure of politics By Hilary Benn
Two conversations will remain with me as a result of my visit to Israel and the Palestinian Authority. One was with the mayor of Sderot, who told me how his town had seen 3,500 rocket attacks and 16 deaths in the last six years. The other, after a short journey to Gaza, was in Beit Hanun, where I met the family that tragically lost 19 members when a shell came through the roof of their home. A mother showed me where her 8-year-old son died as he slept. A father showed me photographs of his two daughters who also had been killed.

Sderot and Beit Hanun are terrible examples of the grim front line of the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians. Two communities, both of which have suffered terribly, have been deeply affected, and are yearning for an end to the cycle of hopelessness.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Hilary Benn, nice man as he may be, was entirely wrong - this was not a 'failure of politics' but a deliberate Israeli policy.

Just consider the position of the two towns - they are just 2km apart, separated by (you can see it here for yourself) the most effective people-killing wall/zone since the Berlin/East Germany one.

Take in a few details:

The undeveloped Arab town of Beit Hanoun to the left, with its tiny peasant fields around.

Beit Hanoun (Arabic: بيت حانون) is a city on the north-east edge of the Gaza Strip with a population of 35,000. It is administered by the Palestinian Authority. It is located by the Hanoun stream, just 6 kilometers (4 mi) away from the Israeli town of Sderot. As opposed to nearby Gaza City, its population is almost entirely of Bedouin descent. More than 5,000 of its residents are part of the "Zaneen" tribe.
The area is notorious in being the source of the launching of many Qassam rockets attacks by Palestinian militants against Israel, over the security fence.

This town is also notable for the Beit Hanoun November 2006 incident where 19 Palestinians were killed by IDF shelling. According to Israeli authorities it was in response for its use as a base from which Palestinian militant groups have fired Qassam rockets into the northern Negev towns like Sderot, as well as the former Gush Katif settlements.

In December 2006, the UN appointed a fact-finding commission led by Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu to investigate the attack. However, Tutu and the other members were not granted permission to travel by Israel and the investigation was cancelled.

The Palestinian Authority alleges that prior to the November 2006 incident, at least 140 Palestinians were killed by Israeli Forces in Beit Hanoun from September 2000 to November 2006.

The New Town of Sderot, paid for by contributions by (mostly) American Jews or the US Government.

The first inhabitants of Sderot arrived in 1951 to what was then known as the Gevim-Dorot transit camp. Most of these residents were Kurdish and Persian refugees who lived in tents and shacks before building permanent structures almost four years later in 1954. In the 1961 census, the percentage of North African immigrants, mostly from Morocco, was 87% in the town, whilst another 11% of the residents were immigrants from Kurdistan. In the 1950s, the city continued to absorb a large number of immigrants from Morocco and Romania, and was declared a local council in 1958.

In the 1990s Sderot again absorbed a large immigrant population from the former USSR, and doubled its population in this decade. In 1996 it was declared a city. According to CBS, in 2001 there were 9,500 males and 9,700 females (about half the population of its Palestinian twin, Beit Hanoun) Sderot lies a kilometer from the Gaza Strip. Since the beginning of the al-Aqsa Intifada in October 2000, the city has been frequently attacked by Hamas and Islamic Jihad militants using homemade rockets known as "Qassam rockets". Although they are very inaccurate, these attacks have resulted in a number of deaths and injuries as well as significant damage to homes and property, psychological distress among the residents, and a net emigration from the city. The Israeli government has installed a "Red Dawn" alarm system in an attempt to alert Israelis to possible shellings, though there are doubts concerning its effectiveness. Thousands of Qassam rockets have been launched from the Gaza Strip since Israel's disengagement from Gaza in September 2005.

How would you feel if a bunch of Russian immigrants were dumped in a brand-new town just a mile across an uncrossable border within your own homeland, and given huge subsidies as 'Jewish' immigrants, while you were left to rot in a prison?

But the score is pretty even - 16 victims in Sderot, over 6 years, versus 19 in Beit Hanoun, with just one shell, beside the 140 Palestinians killed in Beit Hanoun over those same 6 years.

An eye for an eye? Now the Israelis are besieging the entire 1.5 million population of the Gaza Strip, with the compliance of the EU, Britain, the US (all the usual suspects).

Realism from Riyadh

2008-05-11T21:04:00.006Z

Realism from Riyadh

Leaked notes provide rare insight into Saudi Arabia's trenchant but pragmatic approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, writes Ian Black

Ian Black
Saturday May 10 2008

Saudi Foreign Minister, Saud al-Faisal.

Prince Saud al-Faisal has been the discreet voice of Saudi Arabian diplomacy for more than 30 years, and he spoke with unchallenged authority at the recent meeting of the Quartet of Middle East peacemakers, giving what turned out to be a bleak assessment of the current negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians. The situation was "dire", he told the assembled dignitaries, including Condoleezza Rice, Tony Blair and Ban Ki-moon. "Many dangers loom. It seems we have reached a stage that I can only describe as a morass."

Such pessimism is not big news, though Saud's gloomy remarks were made, characteristically, behind closed doors at London's Lancaster House. It is certainly hard to find anyone who harbours much hope that there is a way out of the current impasse.

With Israel celebrating its 60th independence day, divided Palestinians marking their 1948 "nakba" or catastrophe and George Bush heading for what looks like yet another content-free visit to the region, prospects for the peace talks launched at Annapolis last November range from poor to non-existent.

The conservative, oil-rich kingdom is not a frontline state in the Arab conflict with Israel and it has no territorial quarrel with it. It is Washington's closest ally in the Arab world and drew up the groundbreaking Arab League initiative, which states unequivocally that peace with Israel is a "strategic choice" and which was reaffirmed at last year's Riyadh summit. The Saudis lead the camp of pro-western Sunni Arab states alarmed by the outcome of the war in Iraq and Iran's newly assertive role in the region. Two of its closest allies, Egypt and Jordan, already have peace treaties with the Jewish state. The Saudis brokered the agreement between the Palestinian Authority and the Islamists of Hamas, which collapsed in acrimony under US-Israeli pressure, prompting the Hamas takeover of the Gaza Strip. On a previous visit to London, Saud told journalists that the Israel-Palestinian conflict was a "border dispute", a remarkably low-key description.

Doubts notwithstanding, the Saudis have quietly supported the search for Israeli-Palestinian peace. Saud went to Annapolis on a promise that the Maryland summit would be more than just another photo-opportunity. David Milliband, Britain's foreign secretary, flew to Riyadh earlier this month to ensure that the prince would also attend the London Quartet meeting, which was held on a glorious early summer day at one of the British government's most splendid official residences.

Diplomats say that Saud's remarks, obtained by the Guardian, were motivated in part by irritation at Washington's insistence that its wealthy Arab allies were not providing sufficient financial support for the Palestinian Authority, as Rice complained.

Reproduced here, they provide rare insight into how this key Arab country perceives the conflict with Israel, the complexity of Middle East peace-making — and some thoughts on the way out.

The Saudi view is that the dispute could be resolved in a straightforward way on the basis of existing UN resolutions (and the principle of the inadmissibility of acquiring land by force), but that "many unrelated and superfluous elements" have been injected into the search for a solution. There were three inter-related reasons for this, Saud said:

"The apparent insistence of Israel on carving a state exclusively for the Jewish people on a land that has been inhabited by the Palestinians. This inevitably led to the expulsion of the bulk of the original inhabitants and threatened the rest of the Palestinians with the same fate. Conflict was bound to happen, as a result of which the Palestinians were denied their rights and continue to suffer brutalising and demeaning abuse under a state of denial and deprivation.
"The continued exercise by Israel of the policy that is based on the need to achieve absolute security for the Jewish state ... Absolute security for one country in a dispute of this nature means absolute insecurity for the other country.
"Widespread anti-Semitism in the west, and the ensuing holocaust perpetrated on the Jews, which justifiably generated great sympathy in the west and the rest of the world, resulted unfortunately in the state of Israel being given a license to use any policy it chooses even though it leads to perpetuating injustice on the Palestinian people while Israel continues to be perceived as a peace-loving state despite its warlike policies and practices. Furthermore, the Israeli-Palestinian problem became part and parcel of internal domestic issues in Europe and the United States, which aggravated the complication further and justified any action taken by Israel, no matter how illegal or outrageous. These perceptions replaced rational objectivity by emotional subjectivity."

Saud was not seeking "recrimination," he insisted, but he urged the Quartet to find a way out of the deadlock. An "honest and serious" approach could remove most of the "current complexity," he suggested.

"The security of Israel can best be served by the establishment of a viable Palestinian state living side-by-side with Israel, which would make the Palestinian state a responsible and accountable member of the world community."

The prince also attacked "continued efforts to divide the Palestinians rather than work assiduously towards uniting them behind the peace process". He refrained from directly accusing the US and EU of backing Israel in its attempt to isolate Hamas, but made it clear that Palestinian unity was a prerequisite for peace.

"We sincerely believe that there is an absolute need to effect change in the approach of the Quartet and introduce a shift in its focus. The focus should not be on stipulating conditions that cannot be fulfilled, but rather on creative suggestions that would help move things forward."

Claims Conference denies pressuring Bielski on survivor disbursement

2008-05-11T05:32:00.003Z

Claims Conference denies pressuring Bielski on survivor disbursement

Apr 17, 2008

By HAVIV RETTIG

The Claims Conference is withholding funds for Jewish Agency programs until agency head Ze'ev Bielski recants his assertion that the conference is failing to distribute money to Holocaust survivors, according to leaks to the media on Thursday.

For several years, joint efforts by Israeli survivors' organizations, Bielski and Pensioners Affairs Minister Rafi Eitan have tried to change the way Holocaust-era restitution funds held by the Claims Conference are distributed.

The conference is composed of two-dozen organizations, including many Israeli and survivor groups, but Israeli groups want a larger number of Israeli representatives on the board in order to funnel more funds to survivors here.

In the context of this fight, the instigators of the effort have said that the conference possesses some $1 billion which it is refusing to disburse to the deserving and ageing survivors. However, this claim, published last year in a report commissioned by Eitan and the Jewish Agency, is inaccurate.

"After we checked into it comprehensively, I can say the Claims Conference does not have a billion dollars sitting somewhere that they aren't distributing," said Jewish Agency Treasurer Hagai Merom. "They have a three-year plan for disbursing the remaining funds in a planned way."

Documentation of the Claims Conference shows that funds are mostly spoken for by heirs as they complete the restitution process and by an assessment of future needs.

According to the conference, funding has been frozen on three Jewish Agency educational projects - some 20% of the conference's funds go to education projects rather than survivors' welfare - whose value is $378,000.

Now, press leaks are trying to link the freezing of these projects - out of several million dollars in allocations given to the agency from the conference - to "a demand by the conference that Bielski apologize."

The Jewish Agency itself did not deny the contents of the leak, saying Bielski "would continue to act for survivors' welfare and transparency in organizations dealing with them," and "does not have any contact with the Claims Conference regarding his opinions or statements."

Conference officials completely denied the allegations, and sources familiar with the conference's operations said it was unclear why Bielski, who is also vice president of the conference, would support the assertion in the first place.

Published in Europe, the claims have reportedly hurt ongoing negotiation efforts for more aid to survivors.

Court applies Law of Return to Messianic Jews because of fathers

2008-05-11T05:18:00.003Z

Court applies Law of Return to Messianic Jews because of fathers

Apr 22, 2008

By DAN IZENBERG

Messianic Jews are entitled to Israeli citizenship according to the Law of Return if their father is Jewish, according to a precedent-setting ruling handed down last week by the High Court of Justice.

Fifteen years ago, the court rejected a petition by Messianic Jews who demanded to be recognized as Jews so as to automatically receive Israeli citizenship according to the Law of Return. In that landmark case, the court ruled that Messianic Jews had converted, and therefore were no longer Jewish.

Since then, the state has refused to grant all requests for citizenship according to the Law of Return by Messianic Jews.

Two years ago, however, a number of new immigrants to Israel belonging to the Messianic Jewish community petitioned the High Court after the Interior Ministry refused to grant them new immigrant status and citizenship according to the Law of Return.

These petitioners, represented by attorneys Yehuda Raveh and Calev Myers, argued that they were eligible for new immigrant status and citizenship because they were the offsprings of fathers who were Jewish, not because they themselves were Jewish according to the definition of "Who is a Jew" in the Law of Return.

According to Amendment 4A (a) to the Law of Return, passed in 1970,

"The rights of a Jew under this law... are also vested in a child and a grandchild of a Jew, the spouse of a Jew, the spouse of a child of a Jew and the spouse of a grandchild of a Jew, except for a person who has been a Jew and has voluntarily changed his religion."

The law defines a Jew as "a person who was born of a Jewish mother or has become converted to Judaism and who is not a member of another religion."

According to Myers, 12 Messianic Jews petitioned the High Court after the Interior Ministry refused to register them as new immigrants in accordance with the Law of Return. Myers said they had received letters stating that they would not receive citizenship because they allegedly engaged in missionary activity.

An article published in the Baptist Press after the High Court ruling was handed down maintained that the court had ruled that

"the Messianics should receive equal treatment under the Israeli Law of Return, which says that anyone who is born Jewish can immigrate from anywhere in the world to Israel and be granted citizenship automatically."

But, as was explained to The Jerusalem Post by a legal assistant to Myers, this is apparently a misunderstanding of the ruling, which determined that the petitioners were entitled to automatic new immigrant status and citizenship precisely because they were not Jews as defined by the Law of Return, but rather because they were the offspring of Jewish fathers.

THE PROBLEM OF JEWISH SELF-DEFENSE

2008-05-10T17:41:00.006Z

.

Historical and Investigative Research

17 Jan 2006

by Francisco Gil-White
http://www.hirhome.com/israel/leaders1.htm

1		How the mainstream Jewish
		leadership failed the Jewish
		people in World War II

"I would rather have my fellow Jews die in Germany…”[1]

Said on the eve of the Nazi genocide by “Reform Rabbi Stephen Wise, the undisputed leader of organized American Jewry”[19], and “probably the most influential and well-respected American Jew of his generation”[24a], in reply to British prime minister Neville Chamberlain’s suggestion that Jewish refugees from Hitler might settle in Tanganyika.

Stephen Wise got his wish.

< Introduction

< A few words about anti-Semitism

< Did mainstream American Jewish leaders help defend the Jews from genocide in World War II?

< Why Peter Bergson was obviously right and the “mainstream American Jewish leaders” who opposed him, obviously wrong

< How passionate were “mainstream American Jewish leaders” in their opposition to Peter Bergson?

< Why did the “mainstream American Jewish leaders” oppose themselves to Peter Bergson and to other rescue efforts on behalf of the European Jews?

< How similar to “mainstream American Jewish leaders” were mainstream Jewish leaders elsewhere?

As George Santayana famously said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” For the Jewish people, this means repeating Catastrophe. Therefore, if you are a member of the Jewish community, which has been subjected to genocidal attacks for over 2000 years, the rational thing is to expect another such attack and prepare for it, the better to mount an effective self-defense and, ideally, to prevent the next mass killing altogether. You should study the past and remember it, so that you can recognize the signs that herald a new genocide and identify them when they recur. Unfortunately, however, the Jews are ill-equipped and ill-disposed to do this: they find it difficult to think rationally about their self defence. Jewish author Kenneth Levin has recently made the latest addition to a large literature that tries to understand this general problem.[1a]

An example of what I mean is that most Jews are unable to recognize the signs indicating that their own mainstream leaders are taking them down the path to destruction, just as mainstream Jewish leaders did the same prior to and during World War2. Don't misunderstand me: it was the German Nazis who were killing the Jews, and this was obviously not the fault of the Jewish people or of its leaders. But equally obviously, the Jewish leadership prior to and during World War2 had an obligation to defend the Jewish people, and it must be held accountable for how it reacted before the threat of Jewish extinction.

But Jewish leaders have not been held accountable. Stephen Wise, quoted above, is - absurdly - considered a hero by modern Jews, and “in the Jewish world, schools and museums and streets are named after Wise.”[1b] And yet Wise's role, as I will document below, was to use his position of supreme authority in the American Jewish community to sabotage the most successful effort to rescue the desperate European Jews, making it easier for the German Nazis to murder in cold blood between 5 and 6 million innocent people, destroying a beautiful, irreplaceable culture.

So why the Jewish celebration of Stephen Wise?

One main reason is that most ordinary Jews are unaware of what Wise and Co. did prior to and during WW2 to sabotage the defence of the Jewish people. It is irrational that Jews should not know this history well, but it is true that some special institutional difficulties exist: the same mainstream leaders who betrayed the Jewish people in WW2 created the mainstream Jewish organizations that hold sway over the Jewish people today. Stephen Wise himself was

"president of both the American Jewish Congress and the World Jewish Congress [which organizations he created], and a key figure, often chief officer, of perhaps a dozen other organizations and institutes."[1c]

In consequence, the people running these dominant organizations today have been careful not to expose the performance of their predecessors, in whose steps they are eagerly following, once again endangering the Jewish people in circumstances very similar to those that announced the German Nazi Final Solution. The connections between the past and current leadership are clear.

The present article is concerned with what happened in WW2. Its prequel,

Part 0, covers the 1933 crisis, when Jewish leaders -- including Stephen Wise -- saved Hitler from a boycott that ordinary Jews around the world were organizing, and it explains the historical reasons for this behaviour. Its sequel,
Part 2, will examine how today's mainstream Jewish leaders in the Diaspora are condemning the Jews to repeat a horrific history.
Part 3 will do the same for today's Israeli leaders.
Part 4 will examine how Israeli leaders reacted to the Holocaust. In
Part 5 I begin to explore why it is so difficult for ordinary Jews to take their self-defence into their own hands. Beyond this, I will address the behaviour of religious Jewish leaders in Israel.

The point of this exercise is to prevent another Catastrophe, for the Jewish people is once again in mortal danger.
.

A few words about anti-Semitism

Did mainstream American Jewish leaders help defend the Jews from genocide in World War II?

Long before October 1943 everybody knew that the Jewish people was being exterminated in Nazi-occupied Europe.

“From the summer of 1941, reports were reaching the West regularly, through diplomatic and other channels, of large-scale massacres of Jews in areas of eastern Europe under Nazi control. In May, 1942, a message transmitted to the West through the Polish Government-in-Exile in London contained a compilation, by the Jewish Bund in Poland, of confirmed massacres. The Bund estimated that 700,000 Jews had already been killed and surmised that the Nazis had embarked on a campaign to annihilate all the Jews of Europe.”[3a]

A January 1943 headline in the New York Times announced, “Liquidation Day Set For France’s Jews,”[4] and another in February blared “Total Nazi Executions Are Put at 3,400,000; Poland With 2,500,000 Victims, Tops List,” followed by the explanation, in the body of the article, that in Poland “1,000,000 Jews were said to have been killed or permitted to die in concentration camps.”[5] This was, of course, precisely what Adolf Hitler had promised he would do in Mein Kampf and in his speeches: annihilate the European Jewish population. And yet, the Allies were doing worse than nothing to help stop the genocide.[6]

--------------

Hillel Kook (alias Peter Bergson)

“a kind of prince... a ladies man, a bon vivant... very bright and ambitious, with British manners and a great name -- Kook ”

Eliahu Amikam, quoted in Rapoport (1999:22)

--------------

In October of 1943, as related in an article published by the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, there was an effort in the United States to change that.

“The date was October 6, 1943, three days before Yom Kippur, and more than four hundred rabbis had come to plead for US government action to save Jews from Hitler.

The march was the brainchild of 33-year-old Hillel Kook of Jerusalem, nephew of Abraham Isaac Kook, the first chief rabbi of British Mandatory Palestine. Kook, who used the pseudonym Peter Bergson, travelled to the United States in 1940 to lobby for US support for Jewish immigration to Palestine and the creation of a Jewish state. After news of the Nazi genocide reached the United States in late 1942 and early 1943, Bergson established the Emergency Committee to Save the Jewish People of Europe, a political action committee that sought US action to rescue Jewish refugees.

Bergson understood the need for dramatic tactics to publicize his cause. To alert the American public about the Nazi massacres, the Bergson group sponsored a theatrical pageant called ‘We Will Never Die,’ authored by Academy Award-winning screenwriter Ben Hecht, which was viewed by more than 40,000 people at Madison Square Garden and then in other cities around the country. The Bergson activists also sponsored more than two hundred newspaper advertisements urging the United States government to rescue the refugees.”[7]

The identification of an absurdity is something that should make any rational person stop, for it is evidence that something important remains to be properly understood. But I have not shown you one yet -- so far this all makes sense. If the European Jews were being exterminated, it was perfectly natural for Jews who were in safety to try to do something about it. Jewish unity was equally to be expected, and in fact the Bergson effort brought together “an interesting array of hasidic rabbis side by side with rabbis known as mitnagdim, the traditional theological critics of Hasidism.” In other words, important differences were set aside in the Bergson effort because the Jewish people was being exterminated in Europe and unity was more important. The above does not contain absurdities: the Bergson effort made perfect sense.

No, the absurdity is here, in the article’s next sentence:

“Bergson’s hard-hitting approach rattled some mainstream American Jewish leaders, who feared that loud protests might provoke anti-Semitism.”

Ponder that. What could be the most extreme consequence of anti-Semitism? Why, an anti-Jewish genocide. So what could “some mainstream American Jewish leaders” fear might happen? The Jewish people was already being exterminated.

There is a joke told of two Jews, right before they are killed:

“Sam and Irving are facing the firing squad. The executioner comes forward to place the blindfold on them. Sam disdainfully and proudly refuses, tearing the thing from his face. Irving turns to him and pleads: ‘Please Sam, don’t make trouble!’”

The structure of this joke is identical to what happened when Peter Bergson tried to pressure the US government to save Jewish lives in Europe, causing “some mainstream American Jewish leaders” to say to his protesting rabbis: “Please, don’t make trouble.” The joke makes fun of a pathology of reasoning but the extermination of the Jewish people is not funny; if we do not want more exterminations of the Jewish people, we must understand this pathology of reasoning.

There is a promise in the above joke, and in that promise is locked a hope of mine. The joke is Jewish not only because it depicts Jews but because it is told by Jews (it is quite famous, and I heard it first from a Jewish friend). This is important, because by telling this joke Jews demonstrate that they are - at some level - aware that a certain pathology of reasoning makes their self-defence difficult.[7a] I have reason to hope, therefore, that a more careful reflection may be possible for the Jewish people before it is too late again. But we must move to a level of analysis considerably more sophisticated than the passing joke. And then there must be action.

Let us now return to the Wyman Institute piece and look the full absurdity in the face:

“Bergson’s hard-hitting approach rattled some mainstream American Jewish leaders, who feared that loud protests might provoke anti-Semitism. …Yet there were also pockets of sympathy for the Bergson group within the Jewish leadership.”

Given that the death factories from Auschwitz to Jasenovac were at that very minute busy murdering millions of innocent Jews, and billowing with smoke, where would you expect to find mere “pockets of sympathy” for those protesting this outrage? In a mostly antisemitic population. But the population in question here is “the Jewish leadership.”

“[the Bergson march] was to be the only rally in Washington on the rescue issue during the entire period of the Holocaust [but t]he idea of Jews marching through streets of the nation’s capital, promoting specifically Jewish requests such as rescue, especially during wartime, was anathema to mainstream Jewish leaders.”

The above does not make one little bit of sense. Why is the idea of rescue odious “especially during wartime”? Are people supposed to be rescued in peacetime? And why is “the only rally [!] in Washington on the rescue issue during the entire period of the Holocaust” a “specifically Jewish request”? It isn’t. This was a crime against humanity.

You see, the problem is not merely that the reaction of the Jewish leadership was absurd, but that the author chronicling this reaction writes absurdly. After all, given that the Jewish people was already being exterminated, the right thing to do here was obvious. So how could the request for rescue be “anathema” to mainstream Jewish leaders? What in the world were they for, as Jewish leaders, if they could not find it in themselves to oppose an anti-Jewish genocide?

It is significant that the author, Rafael Medoff, directs the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, and also that he is one of the few people to do significant research on the Bergson effort. If he finds it difficult to write in a sensible manner, then it is unlikely that the majority of the Jewish people can learn from their own history. An institute of Holocaust studies should straightforwardly refute the arguments that supported the reasoning of Bergson's opponents, and which contributed to the deaths of millions. This is what I am doing here. My task is not difficult, because the issue is very clear, and the facts speak very loudly.

_____________________

Why Peter Bergson was obviously right and the “mainstream American Jewish leaders” who opposed him, obviously wrong.

The loathsome smearing of Israel's critics: Johann Hari

2008-05-09T14:30:00.017Z

The loathsome smearing of Israel's critics: Johann Hari

Thursday, 8 May 2008

Commentator: Johann Hari

In the US and Britain, there is a campaign to smear anybody who tries to describe the plight of the Palestinian people. It is an attempt to intimidate and silence – and to a large degree, it works. There is nobody these self-appointed spokesmen for Israel will not attack as anti-Jewish: liberal Jews, rabbis, even Holocaust survivors.

My own case isn't especially important, but it illustrates how the wider process of intimidation works. I have worked undercover at both the Finsbury Park mosque and among neo-Nazi Holocaust deniers to expose the Jew-hatred there; when I went on the Islam Channel to challenge the anti-Semitism of Islamists, I received a rash of death threats calling me "a Jew-lover", "a Zionist-homo pig" and more.

Ah, but wait. I have also reported from Gaza and the West Bank. Last week,

I wrote an article that described how untreated sewage was being pumped from illegal Israeli settlements on to Palestinian land, contaminating their reservoirs. This isn't controversial. It has been documented by Friends of the Earth, and I have seen it with my own eyes.

The response?

There was little attempt to dispute the facts I offered.
Instead, some of the most high profile "pro-Israel" writers and media monitoring groups – including Honest Reporting and Camera – said I an anti-Jewish bigot akin to Joseph Goebbels and Mahmoud Ahmadinejadh,
while Melanie Phillips even linked the stabbing of two Jewish people in North London to articles like mine.
Vast numbers of e-mails came flooding in calling for me to be sacked.

Any attempt to describe accurately the situation for Palestinians is met like this.

If you recount the pumping of sewage onto Palestinian land, "Honest Reporting" claims you are reviving the anti-Semitic myth of Jews "poisoning the wells."
If you interview a woman whose baby died in 2002 because she was detained – in labour – by Israeli soldiers at a checkpoint within the West Bank, "Honest Reporting" will say you didn't explain "the real cause": the election of Hamas in, um, 2006. And on, and on.

The former editor of Israel's leading newspaper, Ha'aretz, David Landau, calls the behaviour of these groups "nascent McCarthyism". Those responsible hold extreme positions of their own that place them way to the right of most Israelis. Alan Dershowitz and Melanie Phillips are two of the most prominent figures sent in to attack anyone who disagrees with the Israeli right. Dershowitz is a lawyer, Harvard professor and author of The Case For Israel. He sees ethnic cleansing as a trifling matter, writing:

"Political solutions often require the movement of people, and such movement is not always voluntary ... It is a fifth-rate issue analogous in many respects to some massive urban renewal."

If a prominent American figure takes a position on Israel to the left of this, Dershowitz often takes to the airwaves to call them anti-Semites and bigots.

The journalist Melanie Phillips performs a similar role in Britain. Last year a group called Independent Jewish Voices was established with this mission statement: "Palestinians and Israelis alike have the right to peace and security." Jews including Mike Leigh, Stephen Fry and Rabbi David Goldberg joined. Phillips swiftly dubbed them "Jews For Genocide", and said they "encourage" the "killers" of Jews. Where does this come from? She says the Palestinians are an "artificial" people who can be collectively punished because they are "a terrorist population". She believes that while

"individual Palestinians may deserve compassion, their cause amounts to Holocaust denial as a national project".

Honest Reporting quotes Phillips as a model of reliable reporting.

These individuals spray accusations of anti-Semitism so liberally that by their standards, a majority of Jewish Israelis have anti-Semitic tendencies. Dershowitz said Jimmy Carter's decision to speak to the elected Hamas government "border[ed] on anti-Semitism." A Ha'aretz poll last month found that 64% of Israelis want their government to do just that.

As US President, Jimmy Carter showed his commitment to Israel by giving it more aid than anywhere else and brokering the only peace deal with an Arab regime the country has ever enjoyed. He also wants to see a safe and secure Palestine alongside it – so last year he wrote a book called Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. It is a bland and factual canter through the major human rights reports. There is nothing there you can't read in the mainstream Israeli press every day. Carter's comparison of life on the West Bank (not within Israel) to Apartheid South Africa is not new. The West Bank is ruled in the interests of a small Jewish minority; it is bisected by roads for the Jewish settlers from which Palestinians are banned. The Israeli human rights group B'tselem says this "bears striking similarities to the racist Apartheid regime". Yet for repeating these facts in the US, Carter has widely called "a racist". Several universities have even refused to let the ex-President speak to their students.

These campus battles often succeed. Norman Finkelstein is a political scientist in the US whose parents were both Jewish survivors of the Warsaw ghetto and the Nazi concentration camps. They lost every blood relative. He made his reputation exposing a hoax called From Time Immemorial by Joan Peters which claimed that Palestine was virtually empty when Zionist settlers arrived, and the people claiming to be Palestinians were mostly impostors who had come from local areas to cash in. Finkelstein showed it to be scarred by falsified figures and gross misreading of sources. From that moment on, he was smeared as an anti-Semite by those who had lauded the book. But it was when Finkelstein revealed two years ago that Alan Dershowitz had, without acknowledgement, drawn wholesale from Peters' hoax for his book The Case For Israel, that the worst began. Dershowitz campaigned to make sure Finkelstein was denied tenure at his university. He even claimed that Finkelstein's mother – who made it through Maidenek and two slave-labour camps – had collaborated with the Nazis. The campaign worked. Finkelstein was let go by De Paul University, simply for speaking the truth.

Are the likes of Dershowitz and Phillips and Honest Reporting becoming more shrill because they can sense they are losing the argument? Liberal Jews – the majority – are now setting up rivals to the hard-right organisations they work with, because they believe this campaign of demonisation is damaging us all.

It damages the Palestinians, because it prevents honest discussion of their plight.
It damages the Israelis, because it pushes them further down an aggressive and futile path. And
it damages diaspora Jews, because it makes real anti-Semitism harder to deal with.

We need to look the witch-hunters in the eye and say, as Joseph Welch said to Joe McCarthy himself:

"You've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?"

j.hari@independent.co.uk

1. Israel is suppressing a secret it must face

It is the smell of shit. Across the occupied West Bank, raw untreated sewage is pumped every day out of the Jewish settlements, along large metal pipes, straight onto Palestinian land. From there, it can enter the groundwater and the reservoirs, and become a poison.

Meanwhile, in order to punish the population of Gaza for voting "the wrong way", the Israeli army are not allowing past the checkpoints any replacements for the pipes and cement needed to keep the sewage system working. The result? Vast stagnant pools of waste are being held within fragile dykes across the strip, and rotting. Last March, one of them burst, drowning a nine-month-old baby and his elderly grandmother in a tsunami of human waste. The Centre on Housing Rights warns that one heavy rainfall could send 1.5m cubic metres of faeces flowing all over Gaza, causing

"a humanitarian and environmental disaster of epic proportions".

2. "It is the smell of shit. Raw untreated sewage is pumped every day out of the Jewish settlements"

The local chief medical officer, Dr Bassam Said Nadi, explained to me: "Recently there were very heavy rains, and the shit started to flow into the reservoir that provides water for this whole area. I knew that if we didn't act, people would die. We had to alert everyone not to drink the water for over a week, and distribute bottles. We were lucky it was spotted. Next time..."

3. Friends of the Earth International (FOEI) is an international network of environmental organizations in 70 countries. In contrast to many other NGOs operating internationally, it is structured from the bottom up as a as a confederation of groups. Each country has its own separate different organization, which in many cases existed and campaigned in its own right before choosing to affiliate to the global network. The groups conduct their own campaigns and coordinate their activities through the umbrella body Friends of the Earth International. The national groups are often composed of grassroots local groups working in their own areas.

4. CAMERA The Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA) is a Boston-based, non-profit, pro-Israel media watch organization which was founded in 1982. CAMERA has been noted for its pro-Israel media monitoring and advocacy. CAMERA states it releases reports to stop what it sees as "frequently inaccurate and skewed characterizations of Israel and of events in the Middle East" that it believes may fuel anti-Israel and anti-Jewish prejudice.

5. Honest Reporting is a watchdog organisation that monitors the media for what it deems to be media bias against Israel. It's members contact news agencies to request changes when they identify sources that they consider to be deliberately biased against Israel.

6. Dr. Paul Joseph Goebbels was a German politician and Minister for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda in Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945. He was one of German dictator Adolf Hitler's closest associates and most devout followers. Goebbels was known for his zealous, energetic oratory and virulent anti-Semitism. After the Nazis gained power in 1933, he was appointed propaganda minister.

7. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is the sixth and current President of the Islamic Republic of Iran. He became president on August 6, 2005 after winning the 2005 presidential election by popular vote. Before becoming president, he was the mayor of Tehran. He is the highest directly elected official in the country; however, according to Article 113 of Constitution of Iran, he has less total power than the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who is the commander-in-chief of the armed forces of Iran and has the final word in all aspects of foreign and domestic policies.

8. Melanie Phillips is a British columnist and author. Her articles appear mainly in the Daily Mail newspaper and focus on political and social issues. She has previously written for The Guardian and other publications.

9. Well-poisoning is the act of malicious manipulation of potable water resources in order to cause illness or death, or to deny an opponent access to fresh water resources. Historically it was one of the gravest of three accusations brought against Jewish people as a whole (the other two being host desecration and blood libel), for example in Europe following the Black Death (1348-1350).

10. Independent Jewish Voices (IJV) is an organization launched on February 5, 2007 by 150 prominent British Jews such as Nobel laureate Harold Pinter, historian Eric Hobsbawm, lawyer Sir Geoffrey Bindman, film director Mike Leigh, and actors Stephen Fry and Zoë Wanamaker. The organization is reportedly

"born out of a frustration with the widespread misconception that the Jews of this country speak with one voice –– and that this voice supports the Israeli government's policies."

11. James Earl "Jimmy" Carter, Jr. was the 39th President of the United States from 1977 to 1981 and a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002. In foreign affairs, Carter pursued the Camp David Accords, the Panama Canal Treaties and the second round of Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT). Carter sought to put a stronger emphasis on human rights; he negotiated a peace between Israel and Egypt in 1979. His return of the Panama Canal Zone to Panama was a major reversal of U.S. claims of influence over parts of Latin America dating to the Monroe doctrine, and Carter came under heavy criticism for it.

After leaving office, Carter founded an institute to promote global health, democracy and human rights. He has travelled extensively to conduct peace negotiations and establish relief efforts; he is also a key figure in the Habitat for Humanity project. As of 2008, he is the earliest-serving living president and the second-oldest. Carter remains a relevant national figure today, and has been especially vocal on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

12. Haaretz founded in 1918, is Israel's oldest daily newspaper. It is published in Hebrew in Berliner format. Haaretz English Edition is the translated English edition of the paper. In Israel, it is published and sold together with the International Herald Tribune.

13. Alan Morton "Dersh" Dershowitz is an American lawyer, jurist, and political commentator. He is the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, and is known for his extensive published works, career as an attorney in several high-profile law cases, and commentary on the Arab-Israeli conflict.

14. Ethnic cleansing refers to various military policies or military practices aimed at achieving security during war through displacement of an ethnic group from a particular territory.

15. Hamas "Islamic Resistance Movement" is a Palestinian Sunni Islamist militant organization and political party. In January 2006, Hamas won a surprise victory in the Palestinian parliamentary elections, taking 76 of the 132 seats in the chamber, while the ruling Fatah party took 43.

16. Talk to Hamas, Israelis tell government as attacks continue

Feb 28 2008

Israel is under growing pressure to talk to the Islamist Palestinian group Hamas, which fired a barrage of rockets from the Gaza Strip into southern Israel yesterday, killing a student.
The strike followed the publication of a poll showing 64% of Israelis want their government to negotiate with Hamas to broker a ceasefire and secure the release of a soldier, Gilad Shalit, who was captured in 2006.

17. B'Tselem is an Israeli non-governmental organization (NGO) that describes itself as "The Israeli Information Centre for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories". It was founded by a group of Israeli public figures, including lawyers, academics, journalists, and members of the Knesset. B'Tselem's stated goals are "to document and educate the Israeli public and policymakers about human rights violations in the Occupied Territories, combat the phenomenon of denial prevalent among the Israeli public, and help create a human rights culture in Israel".

18. Norman Gary Finkelstein is an American political scientist and author, specialising in Jewish-related issues, especially the Holocaust and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. His writings, noted for their support of the Palestinian cause have dealt with politically-charged topics such as Zionism, the demographic history of Palestine and his allegations of the existence of a "Holocaust Industry" that exploits the memory of the Holocaust to further Israeli and financial interests. Citing linguist and political activis Noam Chomsky as an example, Finkelstein notes that it is "possible to unite exacting scholarly rigor with scathing moral outrage," and supporters and detractors alike have remarked on the polemical style of Finkelstein's work. However, its content has been praised by eminent historians such as Raul Hilberg and Avi Shlaim, as well as Chomsky.

19. From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab-Jewish Conflict over Palestine is a 1984 book by Joan Peters about the constant presence of Jews in Palestine (Eretz Yisrael). The famous controversial issue in the book is the amount of modern Arab immigration in comparison to parallel Jewish immigration. Responses to the book have been deeply divided and it continues to receive both positive responses as well as harsh criticism.

However, reviewing the book for the January 16, 1986 issue of The New York Review of Books, Yehoshua Porath wrote that Peters made 'highly tendentious use — or neglect — of the available source material'. But more crucially, he wrote, 'is her misunderstanding of basic historical processes and her failure to appreciate the central importance of natural population increase as compared to migratory movements.' Porath concluded:

'Readers of her book should be warned not to accept its factual claims without checking their sources. Judging by the interest that the book aroused and the prestige of some who have endorsed it, I thought it would present some new interpretation of the historical facts. I found none. Everyone familiar with the writing of the extreme nationalists of Zeev Jabotinsky's Revisionist party (the forerunner of the Herut party) would immediately recognize the tired and discredited arguments in Mrs. Peters's book. I had mistakenly thought them long forgotten. It is a pity that they have been given new life.'

20a. The Case for Israel is a New York Times bestseller by Alan Dershowitz, a law professor at Harvard University. The book responds to common criticisms of Israel.

Norman Finkelstein claims the book is a hoax and that some of its citations are plagiarized from From Time Immemorial, another book Finkelstein extensively criticized. These heated claims have led to what has become known to some as the Dershowitz-Finkelstein affair. Former Harvard president Derek Bok exonerated Dershowitz of the plagiarism charges. Finkelstein devotes much of his book Beyond Chutzpah to responding to Dershowitz's arguments.

Michael Neumann, a professor of philosophy at Trent University, wrote a book entitled The Case Against Israel published by CounterPunch in response to The Case for Israel.

20b. "The Case Against Israel" argues that Zionism was responsible for the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians and that Israel is responsible for its perpetuation. The argument rests on widely accepted factual claims and impeccable sources. It avoids rhetoric and gratuitous moralizing. There is no attempt to blacken Israel through association with colonialism, imperialism, or racism. Instead, Neumann's argument emphasizes the fateful Zionist quest for Jewish sovereignty in Palestine. This quest - not the massacres or plans for transfer or other blots on Zionist history - made violence inevitable and compromise impossible. The prospect of Zionists gaining the power of life and death over all inhabitants of Palestine "had" to be seen by the Palestinians as a mortal threat. They responded accordingly.

Memories of a promised land

2008-05-08T23:27:00.007Z

Memories of a promised land

Sixty years since its foundation Mike Marqusee and Eliane Glaser explore the state of Israel

May/June 2008

Mike Marqusee

Perhaps more than any country, Israel provokes strong feelings and violent arguments. Everyone, excluding the most fanatical Zionist or the Iranian President, seems to have complex, mixed feelings about it. Even the terms we use are booby-trapped. Does merely using the name Israel imply support of illegal occupation? If you call the region Palestine do you give succour to the suicide bombers? It is tempting to steer clear of the subject completely. Yet the fact of Israel’s existence and the arguments around it encapsulate so much that defines the present moment. As the frontier where memories of Nazism meet Islamic terrorism, as the continual reminder of the West’s hypocritical attitude to international law and as a profound contemporary case-study of the noxious influence of religion on politics, Israel has huge symbolic as well as strategic importance for all of us. To mark the 60th anniversary of its creation we asked two Jewish writers to reflect on what Israel means for them.

Mike Marqusee “The secular founders would be shocked to see the power obscurantist religious sects wield.”

Israel’s 60th birthday is being celebrated lavishly in Britain. The programme includes a gala fund-raising dinner at Windsor Castle in the presence of the Duke of Edinburgh, a variety show at Wembley Stadium and street parades in London and Manchester.

Meanwhile, Palestinians and their supporters will be recalling the same event in entirely different tones, without the benefit of state support or vast sums of money. In meetings, conferences and exhibitions they are seeking to remind the world of the Nakba – catastrophe in Arabic – that accompanied Israel’s birth in 1948.

In 1947 there were 1,293,000 Arabs and 608,000 Jews in Palestine. Though Jews made up 32% of the population, the UN partition plan (agreed in November 1947) assigned them 55% of the country, including the economically developed citrus-growing plains.
Israel’s Declaration of Independence on 15 May 1948 was preceded by several months of civil war between Jewish and Palestinian forces, and followed by more months of war between the new state and its Arab neighbours.

In April and May, before the expiry of the British mandate, the cities of Haifa and Jaffa fell to Jewish forces, and more than 100,000 Palestinians fled. To the north, in Galilee, the Haganah – the mainstream Zionist defence force – systematically conquered clusters of villages, emptying them of inhabitants and often levelling them.
In June, the Israelis advanced further into territory designated for the Arab state, capturing the towns of Lydda and Ramle where they killed 250 Palestinians and expelled almost all the rest – 40,000 – at gunpoint.

In the course of 1948, 531 Palestinian towns and villages were abandoned, evacuated or destroyed.
In the Jaffa area, 96% of the villages were totally erased.
As Jewish forces proceeded with the ethnic cleansing of territories both within and outside the UN-allotted borders of the Jewish state, a British army of 70,000 refused to intervene, despite being charged under the mandate with the protection of the civilian population.

When the fighting finished in early 1949, the Jewish state had acquired 78% of Palestine.
180,000 Palestinians found themselves a minority within the expanded borders of the Jewish state.
750,000 had been made refugees.

The homes and lands they left behind were quickly occupied by Jewish settlers and the new Israeli parliament passed laws confiscating their property.
Of 370 new Jewish settlements established between 1948 and 1953, 350 were on absentee property.
In 1954 more than one third of Israel’s Jewish population lived on absentee property.
Conquest and expulsion provided the material base for the building of the Jewish state.

For many years Zionists claimed that the Palestinians had left voluntarily, at the behest of Arab leaders.
That myth has been repeatedly disproved: there’s no evidence of so much as a single broadcast or leaflet telling people to abandon their homes.
There is, on the other hand, a great deal of evidence that the Zionists used the war to alter the demographic facts on the ground.
On April 6, for example, David Ben-Gurion told a Zionist meeting:
“We will not be able to win the war if we do not, during the war, populate upper and lower, eastern and western Galilee, the Negev and Jerusalem area, even if only in an artificial way, in a military way … I believe that war will also bring in its wake a great change in the distribution of Arab population.”

The facts of the Nakba are now well documented and beyond serious dispute. Yet Nakba denial remains widespread, and shamefully acceptable in polite circles. That is partly because its victims have been so demonised and dehumanised. Acknowledgement of the Nakba is also resisted because it undermines Israeli and Jewish self-definitions; for many, it is a truth that simply cannot be assimilated.

The Nakba is far more than a historical controversy. It’s an unresolved and pressing global issue. The Palestinian refugee population – descendants of those driven out in 1948 – now numbers more than five million, one half of whom live in Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. One million remain stateless, with no form of identification other than a card issued by UNWRA, the United Nations refugee agency. This is the world’s largest and oldest continuing refugee crisis. Each year since December 1948, the UN General Assembly has reconfirmed Resolution 194, which enshrines the refugees’ right to return and compensation. The right of refugees to return to their homes is a necessary protection for all civilian populations in times of war. Without it, ethnic cleansing would be encouraged. Yet those who press for the implementation of that right are denounced as extremists who refuse to accept Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state.

There is today a huge Jewish population in Palestine whose rights as human beings must be recognised, but why should anyone anywhere be compelled to recognise the “right to exist” of a particular state formation? What’s being demanded here is ideological conformity: support for the right of the Jewish state to exist, in perpetuity, in Palestine, regardless of what that fact entails for others (or indeed for the welfare of Jews). For Palestinians, recognising Israel’s right to exist – as opposed to the fact of its existence – is tantamount to an historical seal of approval on the Nakba. Those who refuse to certify as legitimate a national project built on dispossession and ethnic supremacy are condemned as “anti-Semites” or, if they are Jews, as “self-haters”. The allegations rest on a false conflation of Israel and “the Jews”, one propagated by Zionists, who use it to exempt the Jewish state from the requirements of international standards of human decency.

Israel is “Jewish” in a sense that no existing state is Christian, Muslim, Hindu or Buddhist.
Though these religions are privileged in various states, none of those states claims to be the sole global representative of the faith; none grants citizenship to people solely because of their religion (without regard to place of birth or residence).
Maintaining a Jewish state in Palestine means maintaining a sizeable Jewish majority population which enjoys privileged access to land, work and civic rights.

The founders of Israel were secularists; they saw Jewishness as a national rather than religious identity. Many were atheists and contemptuous of rabbinical culture. Like MA Jinnah, the secular Muslim founder of Pakistan, they would be shocked and dismayed if they could see the influence obscurantist religious sects now wield in the polities they established.

From the beginning, the notion that the State of Israel could be both “Jewish” and “democratic” was unsustainable, and was seen as such by significant numbers of diaspora Jews. Indeed, it’s important to remember that anti-Zionism was a Jewish ideology long before it was anything else. But in the wake of the Holocaust, and with the evolution of big power politics in the Middle East, Zionism came to dominate the diaspora. And the truth of the Nakba was shrouded beneath the myth of Israel’s “David versus Goliath” struggle for survival against irrationally hostile Arabs.

But what of the plight of the Jewish refugees in postwar Europe? Without Israel, what would have become of them? The answer is that they would have shared the same variety of fates as the general refugee population of Europe, of which they were part. The roots of that crisis lay in the refusal of the US, Britain and other countries to admit large numbers of displaced persons. It could not be resolved by allocating each group a “state of their own”, inevitably at the expense of another people. The right of refuge is a universal right (and need) but instead of shouldering that collective responsibility, the Western powers, with the support of the Soviet Union, dumped it on Palestine, demanding that a people who bore no responsibility for the Holocaust make way for its victims.

Many Zionists who do acknowledge the Nakba characterise it as tragic but “irreversible”. The Nakba was not, however, an isolated episode; it was a paroxysm in a process that continues to this day. The Jewish state remains incompatible with Palestinian rights and increasingly the very existence of Palestinians, as illustrated by the current siege of Gaza and the continuing assault on Palestinian society on the West Bank through the construction of the apartheid wall and the extension of Jewish settlements.

It has become ever more apparent that Zionism will not tolerate any meaningful form of Palestinian independence.
The exigencies of maintaining a Jewish state will not allow it.
Within Israel, expansionist claims – in which the Jews are declared the rightful owners of the whole of the West Bank and even beyond – are commonplace, as are calls for the permanent transfer of the remaining Palestinian population.
Some respectable voices speak openly of the need to finish the work left undone in 1948 – in order to ensure the survival of “the Jewish state”.

As ever, much of this is cloaked in Biblical sources.

The paradox of Zionism was always that it was a secular ideology whose foundation lay in a religious discourse.
At its heart is an obscurantist claim to historic territory.
There is indeed much in the Hebrew Bible that gives succour to the wilder Zionist ambitions. But there is also another strand, one that warns against the menace of marrying religion to the state.
In particular the Prophet Amos, a champion of the universality of ethical standards, explicitly denies the exclusivism of the Zionist claim to Palestine:

To Me, O Israelites, you are
Just like the Ethiopians – declares the Lord.
True I brought Israel up
From the land of Egypt,
But also the Philistines from Caphtor
And the Arameans from Kir.

Mike Marqusee (born 1953) is an American-born writer, journalist and political activist in London. His partner is the barrister Liz Davies.

Marqusee, who describes himself as a "deracinated New York Marxist Jew" has lived in Britain since 1971. He writes mainly about politics, popular culture, the Indian sub-continent and cricket, and is a regular correspondent for, among others, The Guardian, Red Pepper and The Hindu. Marqusee has been the editor of Labour Left Briefing, and an executive member of the Stop the War Coalition and the Socialist Alliance . He is a leading figure in Iraq Occupation Focus.

Rabbis call for Bible Quiz boycott

2008-05-08T15:04:00.004Z

Rabbis call for Bible Quiz boycott
Rabbis call for Bible Quiz boycott

May 1, 2008

By MATTHEW WAGNER

A group of religious Zionist rabbis have called for a boycott of this year's International Bible Quiz after discovering that one of the four finalists from Israel is a Messianic Jew who believes Jesus is the true Messiah.

"Messianics are missionaries who proselytize in very sophisticated ways," said Rabbi Shlomo Aviner, one of the rabbis calling to boycott the quiz. "It is forbidden to give them legitimacy by allowing them to take part in the quiz."

Other rabbis that have called to boycott the quiz include Shmuel Eliyahu, chief rabbi of Safed, Ya'acov Yosef, son of Shas mentor Rabbi Ovadia Yosef and Rabbi Tzvi Tau, head of Har Hamor Yeshiva.

The call to boycott the quiz came after Yad L'Achim, a haredi anti-missionary organization, discovered that one of the finalists, Bat-El Levi, an 11th grader from a high school in Pisgat Ze'ev, was a Messianic Jew.

Levi won this year's national bible quiz for state schools and will be one of four finalists from Israel competing for the International Bible Quiz Championship on Independence Day.

The Education Ministry said in response to a query from The Jerusalem Post that the "Global Bible Quiz for Jewish Youth" was open only to Jewish pupils. Regarding Messianic Jews, the pupil in question was Jewish, and therefore, according to the ministry's legal department, was not disqualified from participating.

Calev Myers, founder and chief counsel of the Jerusalem Institute of Justice, an advocacy group that represents members of the Messianic community, said that the rabbis' call to boycott the quiz was a show of weakness.

"If the participation of a Messianic Jewish lady is enough to shake up those rabbis' world, it shows the weakness of that world," said Myers. "Why should they have a problem with a young woman who knows how to quote from the Bible?

"It is about time that they stop having a monopoly over determining who is a Jew. The beauty of the Jewish world is the diversity. If you can still be considered a Jew even if you believe that the Lubavitch Rebbe [Menachem Mendel Schneerson] is the messiah, the same thing should hold true if you believe Jesus is."

Levi and her parents Ruti and Yitzhak declined to comment on the rabbis' call.

Rabbi Shlomo Aviner.

.

Body of 15 year old Palestinian boy found mutilated in Israeli settlement

2008-05-08T13:44:00.002Z

SABBAH

Body of 15 year old Palestinian boy found mutilated in Israeli settlement

19 April 2008

Author: Haitham

At 3pm on Wednesday, 16th April, the mutilated body of 15 year old Hammad Nidar Khadatbh was found in lands of the illegal Israeli settlement of Al-Hamra by his father, who was out searching for his missing son.

Hammad had left the house at 9am on Tuesday, 15th April to work on the family’s land, located near the stolen agricultural lands of the settlement. As the second eldest son, he was picking cucumbers for the family rather than going to school, to help with the income of his struggling family. At evening he failed to return home, and so his father and other family members immediately went searching for him. They found nothing. They set out again the next day, Wednesday, and found his body in a place they had searched the day before - clearly dumped overnight.

Hammad’s body was naked, bloated, and tortured. His neck was broken, and his face had been smashed in with rocks. One finger had been cut off and there were multiple holes in his torso, seemingly made by a sharp, round implement - something like a pen, his family explained. An Israeli police officer who arrived on the scene to investigate the incident confirmed that Hammad had been murdered, but made no comment as to by whom. Hammad’s body was immediately taken to the coroner in Jerusalem, but the report on the exact cause of his death will not be available for another week.

After speaking to many people in the area, it was established that Hammad had tried to return home via the Al-Hamra (Arabic for “red area”) checkpoint, but was refused passage through as being only 15 years old, he had no identification (IDs are only issued to Palestinians aged 16 years and over). It appears that Hammad was then forced to walk around the long way home, and was taken at this point on Tuesday night.

Given the location of the body - on settlement lands and near an Israeli-only apartheid road - the family are convinced that Hammad was killed by settlers from the Al-Hamra settlement. His father explained that his son was only a young boy, and had no enemies. Also, he explained, there are no Palestinians in that area, only settlers from the agricultural settlement.

The 11500 residents of the village of Beit Furiq, located near the northern West Bank city of Nablus, have regular problems with the illegal settlements near their village. Approximately three years ago a 78 year old man, Mohammad Abu Oday, was killed when settlers from Itamar settlement destroyed his head with large rocks. Another young man was also shot dead by settlers, and five others have been injured whilst attempting to pick their olives. Residents advise that these attacks happen when Palestinians go to lands that are anywhere near to settlements, occurring every couple of years.

Interestingly, these attacks elicit no repercussions on the settlers by the Israeli military such as are inflicted upon Palestinian villages in similar, or even lesser situations. The village of Beita, for example, was shut down for four days last week, with massive roadblocks installed on every road to the village, and residents arrested for attempting to leave after a shooting occurred near an Israeli-only road in which no one was injured.

Hammad was buried at 3pm on Thursday 17th April, and is survived by his parents and seven siblings.

Source: International Solidarity Movement

UK Letter divides anti-Zionist Jews

2008-05-08T00:54:00.002Z

UK Letter divides anti-Zionist Jews

May 4, 2008 0:07
JONNY PAUL - LONDON

A member of the anti-Zionist Jewish community in London has revealed that a number of its members chose not to add their signatures to a letter pledging to not celebrate Israel's 60th anniversary because the wording was "too strong" and it supported a one-state solution.

Wednesday's issue of the Guardian carried a letter signed by some 100 Jewish anti-Zionists decrying the celebration of a state "founded on terrorism, massacres and the dispossession of another people from their land," adding that now was the time to "acknowledge the narrative of the price paid by another people for European anti-Semitism and Hitler's genocidal policies."

"We cannot celebrate the birthday of a state that even now engages in ethnic cleansing, that violates international law, that is inflicting a monstrous collective punishment on the civilian population of Gaza and that continues to deny to Palestinians their human rights and national aspirations," the letter said.

A source within the anti-Zionist Jewish community told The Jerusalem Post that prominent members, such as the leadership of the fringe group Jews for Justice for Palestinians (JfJfP), and Prof. Jacqueline Rose, who is vocal in the academic boycott movement and who proofread the letter, did not sign the letter because they thought its text was "too strong" and supported a one-state solution.

JfJfP chair Dan Judelson said: "With Israel extending the occupation it's not surprising that people should express frustration with celebrations that pretend all is well. Israel's future and security are not and will never be guaranteed by burying our heads in the sand. JfJfP is united in deploring celebrations of the 60th anniversary that do not acknowledge the pain that was caused, and continues to be caused, to the Palestinians."

Asked why he did not sign the letter, Judelson pointed to its support of a one-state solution.

"I think that Israel's future and security will only be achieved by accepting a Palestinian state beyond the Green Line. The best support Diaspora Jews can give is to say this very loudly and very clearly. The letter didn't include that."

One of the signatories, Daniel Machover, an Israeli-born lawyer who brings war crimes charges against former IDF officers who enter the UK, defended the letter, saying: "I can't see how I can celebrate dispossession and human rights abuses on a massive scale, even when borne out of the experiences of victims of oppression and racism. As the letter says, equal rights of Arab and Jewish people sharing the same land would be something to celebrate.

"The way forward is therefore for Israelis to come to terms with their past and make a decisive break from it by deciding that Israel will be a state for all its citizens equally, repeal the Law of Return and comply with UN resolutions, becoming a true democracy and the progressive multi-cultural country that it still has the potential to become. These are things that do not depend on others and there is nothing to wait for. When Israel makes these unilateral steps, that will be a cause for celebration."

The letter mentioned "the infamous massacre at Deir Yassin" and Plan Dalet as authorizing "the destruction of Palestinian villages and expulsion of the indigenous population outside the borders of the state." It also cited a number of examples of "ethnic cleansing" perpetrated by Israel.

"In July 1948, 70,000 Palestinians were driven from their homes in Lydda and Ramle in the heat of the summer with no food or water. Hundreds died. It was known as the 'Death March,'" the letter said. "Some 400 villages were wiped off the map. That did not end the ethnic cleansing. Thousands of Palestinians were expelled from the Galilee in 1956. Many thousands more when Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza. Under international law and sanctioned by UN Resolution 194, refugees from war have a right to return or compensation. Israel has never accepted that right."

Dr. Colin Shindler, a lecturer at London University's School of Oriental and African Studies, questioned the letter's version of history. "It contradicts not only the official Israeli government version of 1948 but also that of the well-known historian Benny Morris, who has spent decades investigating this subject," he said.

"Apart from being selective in their outrage, they are also economical with the facts... Even Palestinian and pro-Palestinian writers and academics would have balked at such a reductionist version of history. I defend the right of the signatories to publicly propagate their views but I deplore their abysmal ignorance of recent history."

Chief rabbis against dodging IDF reserve duty

2008-05-07T14:09:00.003Z

Chief rabbis against dodging IDF reserve duty

'For the first time, even officers are questioning their commitment to the army because they are referred to as suckers by people who sit in Tel Aviv bars,' Rabbi Metzger says during visit to southern army base

04-08-2008

Kobi Nahshoni

Israel's chief rabbis are expected to declare the Shabbat before Passover "Shabbat of the reserves" and instruct Israel's Jewish leaders to stress the importance of reserve duty to their congregations.

Rabbis Yona Metzger and Shlomo Amar announced these plans on Monday during a visit to the Tze'elim army base in south Israel, where they took part in a special ceremony in which a Torah scroll was placed in the base's synagogue.

During the ceremony at the synagogue, dozens of soldiers wearing kippas and berets danced with the Torah scroll and then placed it in the temple's Holy Ark.

Chief rabbis with soldiers in Tze'elim

The rabbis also met with senior army officials, including IDF Personnel Directorate Head Major-General Elazar Stern, who asked that they back the effort to increase the motivation among Israel's soldiers.

'Only one solution'

Stern told the rabbis that the integration of 'Hesder' yeshiva students (program that combines advanced Talmudic studies with military service) into regular army units "would bring religious and secular people closer together."

Rabbi Amar said a special prayer should be written for the safety of citizens who are called up for reserve duty. "A special blessing should be said for those who leave their families and businesses – so they may return to their homes in peace."

Rabbi Metzger, for his part, said the statistics indicating a rise in draft-dodging surprised him, and linked the phenomenon to the "erosion of values related to faith, religion and love of the land.

"For the first time, even officers are asking their commanders 'What are we doing here?' because they are referred to as 'suckers' by people who sit in bars in Tel Aviv and other cities," he said.

"There is one solution, and that is to place a great emphasis on religious and educational values."

Messianic Jews stir controversy in Jerusalem

2008-05-07T13:45:00.004Z

Messianic Jews stir controversy in Jerusalem

Group's plan to open centre in heart of secular Rehavia neighbourhood enrages local residents, who threaten to launch bitter fight to prevent project from materializing

04-08-2008

Danny Adino-Ababa

A request recently granted by the Jerusalem District Planning and Construction Committee for the restoration of a house in the well-to-do Rehavia neighborhood in the capital is threatening to lead to a violent conflict in this normally peaceful area of the city.

The reason: The request was submitted by Netivyah, an organization of Messianic Jews wishing to open "a new public centre" at the heart of the mostly-secular neighbourhood. Local residents, in response, pledged to do whatever was needed in order to thwart the project, including an appeal to the High Court of Justice and even rioting.

"This is like building a synagogue in the midst of Umm al-Fahm," said one of the outraged residents. "This is set to be the first institute in the country to be openly operated by Messianic Jews. This centre will be erected over our dead bodies," he proclaimed.

Another resident warned of "an all-out war" should the construction of the center go ahead as planned. "We don't care if a mosque or a church are built here, but we won't tolerate the presence of missionary Messianic Jews," he stated.

The locals' greatest concern is that Messianic Jews would "infiltrate" their neighbourhood and try influencing their children.

A group of residents, together with three city council members representing the National Religious Party, are now planning to file a petition against the project to the National Planning and Construction Committee.

'As good as those who claim to be real Jews'

Joseph Shulam, Netivyah chairman and one of the Jewish Messianic community's leaders in Israel, said he was already used to such threats. Ten years ago, two Molotov cocktails were thrown at his house. "I've paid a hefty price for my belief," he stated.

Shulam claimed that his organization has been operating in Rehavia for many years conducting charity activities and aiding the needy, with the cooperation of some of the neighborhood's residents.

"The people of Rehavia are being incited by haredi groups. Most of the opponents don't even live in the neighbourhood… I don’t understand all this hassle, we are Jews as good as those who claim to be real Jews," he explained.

Nevertheless, you can sympathize with the concerns of the neighborhood's residents.

"We have never concealed out faith. Throughout the years we have operated in the neighborhood, everybody knew what we were doing. We don't preach or convert Jews to Christianity. All we do is help Jews by opening soup kitchens, giving alms, nothing more."

In the meantime the project, which has already received the required permits, is set to go ahead as planned. "We will go through all the committees and the center will be founded here," Shulam concluded.

Jerusalem mother charged with child abuse

2008-05-07T13:14:00.005Z

Jerusalem mother charged with child abuse

Indictment reveals rabbi instructed woman to 'repair' her children through 'beating, tying, burning organs and feeding them with faeces'

04-06-2008

Aviram Zino

As her three-and-a-half-year-old comatose son continued to lie in his hospital bed, a Jerusalem woman was indicted Sunday by the Jerusalem District Court of abusing him and his four-and-a-half-year-old brother.

The court also indicted a family friend accused of conducting a "tikkun" (exorcism) on the children under the influence of a rabbi who fled to Canada.

Shortly after the indictment was submitted, the remand of another suspect involved in the affair was extended. The man, a acquaintance of the mother, allegedly took part in the abuse.

According to the indictment, "During the months of February and March, the accused and her children moved to her mother's apartment in Jerusalem. During this period, the mother found it difficult to cope with the burden of raining her small children, and particularly with their education.

"The defendant turned to a rabbi and asked for his advice in terms of his children's education. The rabbi concluded that the children were 'possessed' with evil spirits and advised the defendant and other suspects to carry out 'tikkunim' on the children in order to help them get rid of those demons."

The indictment went on to say that the rabbi instructed the mother to conduct "tikkunim" on the children – "meaning, jolting, beating, tying, burning organs, feeding them with faeces, and more.

"Two of the suspects were put in charge of educating the children, and systematically abused them and the defendant's other children in a large number of cases, for a long time, claiming that these 'tikkunim' were aimed at removing these evil spirits from the children."

Some of the acts of abuse were also described in the indictment. "The defendant, who knew about the abuse, continued to desert her children."

The mother was accused of "cooperating with some of the other suspects in forcibly jolting the children in at least 40 cases, grasping them in the back or shoulders, or grasping them in their hands and legs and shaking them with their heads moving back and forth and from side to side.

"The defendant and the other suspects also used to tie the children's hands and legs with plastic restraints and ropes for many hours, as well as hit one of the children in the face and bend his hands behind his back, throwing him in the air."

'Police veterans were shocked'

In one of her remand hearings, the police representative presented the judge with a photo album containing shocking pictures of the children.

"The Jerusalem Police veterans found it difficult to listen to such a shocking story," a police representative said during the previous hearing.

The mother admitted to the suspicions and went back on her confession, while the father and another person arrested denied the allegations.

"Evidence submitted to the court testifies to a long and harsh abuse," a police representative said during the hearing.

The small son, who was hospitalized at the Hadassah Ein Kerem hospital's intensive care unit, suffers from brain damage which has left him in a vegetative state.

Efrat Weiss contributed to this report

Don’t politicize child abuse case

2008-05-06T19:10:00.005Z

Don’t politicize child abuse case

Horrific story of rabbi-inspired abuse must not be used to stigmatize haredi society

04-14-2008

This week a horrific story of child abuse came to light in Jerusalem. Child abuse is always terrible and leaves psychological scars on its victims. Tragically in this case, one of the children involved has been severely and irreversibly physically injured as well.

However, what makes this case even more disturbing, if such a thing were possible, is the fact that the person who inspired and advised this abuse called himself a rabbi. Elior Chen, together with some of his students, is suspected of beating two children aged three and four with hammers and knives and other instruments over many months. The three-year-old finally fell into a coma last month, and is not expected to recover.

Any normal human being finds it difficult to read the horrific details of the abuse in this case. How a parent could allow this to be done to his or her child and even participate in it is beyond comprehension.

Violence less common in haredi society

Unfortunately, religion has its share of crazies and phonies that use a religious façade for their own nefarious and narcissistic purposes. The so-called rabbi involved in this case was such a person. Clearly he had tremendous influence over his followers, and sadly they trusted in him completely.

Lamentably, however, as is happening with the tragic Kolko case in the United Sates, some in Israel have politicized this horrific case and used it to bash the haredi community as a whole. Some have claimed, falsely, in my opinion, that abuse is commonplace within the haredi community and for appearance’s sake is just brushed under the carpet.

Of course there are psychopathic people in every society, but anecdotal evidence and my experience—having lived among both groups of people—tells me that family and domestic problems are far less common in Orthodox and haredi communities. The following incident will illustrate this.

Nearly 10 years ago I had the distinct honor and privilege of accompanying one of Israel’s senior rabbis to a meeting with Rebbe Moshe Yehoshua Hager of Vizhnitz, who currently resides in the Israeli town of Bnei Brak. During the meeting, Rebbe Hager related that he had just been visited by the Israeli Chief of Police who told him that there was, at the time, a serious problem with juvenile criminals in Israel. Rabbi Hager told us that he asked the police chief how many of these juvenile criminals were haredi. “None,” the police chief replied.

Don't stigmatize entire community

Whatever problems and difficulties the haredi community has—and it has its fair share—they seem to have their domestic arrangements figured out rather better than secular society does.

This dreadful case of abuse must not be used as a reason to stereotype haredi rabbis either. What we now know about Elior Chen demonstrates that he is a person with serious mental health problems and the case should be seen as such rather than as a general community issue.

Most haredi rabbis I know are good, well-intentioned people, who not only have a deep knowledge of the Torah and Judaism but also a lot of wisdom in other areas, including the rearing of children. It is therefore perfectly normal for religious parents to go to their rabbi for advice on how to deal with a difficult child. It is equally obvious that psychologically healthy parents would never listen to the advice of any person—no matter how spiritual or divine he seemed—if he told them to hurt their own child.

The perpetrators in this case need to be brought to justice and feel the full weight of the law. It is, however, mistaken and in horribly bad taste to use this heartbreaking and horrific case, as some have, to attack and stigmatize an entire community of good and decent people, the overwhelming majority of whom manage to bring up their children in an enviable manner.

Rabbi Levi Brackman (www.levibrackman.com) is executive director of Judaism in the Foothills (www.jitf.org). His upcoming book, about Jewish Business Success, is set to be published in late 2008.

Abuse stems from distortion of Kabbalah

2008-05-06T18:44:00.004Z

Rabbi Metzger: Abuse stems from distortion of Kabbalah

Chief rabbi addresses child abuse affair in Jerusalem, says 'this is horrifying proof of what unsupervised Kabbalah studies can lead to'

Neta Sela

04-18-2008

The disastrous results of unsupervised Kabbalah studies have reportedly led to a series of child abuse cases, Chief Rabbi Yona Metzger said Saturday.

Speaking during a Great Shabbat (the Shabbat which immediately precedes Passover) sermon in Jerusalem, Rabbi Metzger noted that Kabbalah studies by those who have yet to fully internalize the six books of the Mishnah and have yet to turn 40 years old have not been prohibited for nothing.

Even then, he said, this must only be done under the guidance of a famous rabbi with superior knowledge in mysticism.

"If, as a result of studying practical Kabbalah, this person's mind has been disrupted, and if it is true that this 'rabbi' (Elior Chen) explained this acts of abuse as a repair of the soul, this is horrifying proof of what can happen when Kabbalah is studied without being supervised and guided by the greatest sages of Israel who are known to all as having superior knowledge of Kabbalah's wisdom."

'Court has crushed symbol of freedom'

Rabbi Metzger went on to speak about his visit to the IDF base in Tze'elim last week.

"This week I met IDF regiment commanders who told me painfully about the constant drop in the number of officers and commanders enlisting to reserve duty. When we tried to understand the main cause for this phenomenon, there was an agreement that the reservists' value system is worn out, leading to a drop in the motivation for reserve duty.

"And I tell you, gentlemen, when the court crushes with its own hands a sacred Jewish value like prohibiting leavened food during Passover, this crushes the symbol of Jewish freedom.

"The 'matza' we eat in Pesach has served as a symbol of the Jewish people's freedom for 3,000 years. With it we left Egypt with the goal to immigrate to the fatherland. If we trample the flag of Jewish freedom with our own hands, we are to blame for the results. I was sorry to hear that officers refuse to serve because they don’t want to miss work days…

"When I served in the IDF, an officer would be ashamed to raise such an option, but when he sees that the values sacred to the Jewish people are being crushed, including those symbolizing the hasty Exodus in order to reach the Land of Israel which he is asked to fight for, unfortunately he does not feel the duty."

Metzger added, "I am not a legalist, and it is possible that the ruling includes different arguments explaining it, but I am puzzled by the timing of its delivery, just before the Passover holiday."

Opinion

Don’t politicize child abuse case / Rabbi Levi Brackman

Horrific story of rabbi-inspired abuse must not be used to stigmatize haredi society

Full story

Rabbinical court forces woman to divorce over medical condition

2008-05-05T20:18:00.004Z

Rabbinical court forces woman to divorce over medical condition

Great Rabbinical Court in Jerusalem enables husband to force divorce on his wife after she was diagnosed with epilepsy.
Ruling based on centuries-old halachic law deeming condition 'a great deformity.' Wife to appeal to High Court

04-17-2008

Yoram Yarkoni

The Great Rabbinical Court in Jerusalem rendered a rare ruling Thursday, forcing a woman to agree to a divorce because she was diagnosed with epilepsy.

According to a report in Yedioth Ahronoth, the court further ruled the woman will not be eligible for alimony. The husband was, however, obligated to pay her the full amount mentioned in her ketubah – NIS 18,000 (approx $5,000).

The Jerusalem court's ruling cemented a previous decree made by the Tiberias Rabbinical Court, which ruled epilepsy was a "great deformity," thus enabling the husband to force a divorce on his wife.

The couple was married for 12 years and has two children. The woman was reportedly involved in a car accident prior to the marriage and sustained a severe head injury. The husband first filed for divorce two years ago, but was denied by the Tiberias Rabbinical Court, which cited insufficient grounds.

According to the husband's attorney, Zion Smucha, the man became aware of his wife's condition only after witnessing a seizure during an event the two attended separately. He then refiled his petition.

Outdated halachic ruling

The Tiberias Court appointed neurologist Amikam Reshef of Haemek Medical Center in Afula to assess the woman's medical condition, but deemed an examination was unnecessary, ordering the doctor to make his diagnosis based on the woman's medical records – which led Dr. Reshef to diagnose the woman as suffering from epilepsy.

The court further found that the husband was aware of his wife's condition, and the fact that she was treated for it, prior to the marriage, but since she demonstrated no symptoms, the seizure could be construed as a new medical condition.

The court then relied on a halachic ruling, dating back several hundred years, deeming epilepsy a physical deformity that can be used as grounds for divorce.

The woman appealed the Tiberias Court's decision at the Great Rabbinical Court in Jerusalem, saying she was not properly examined and that therefore her diagnosis should be declared null and void. She further claimed that epilepsy could not be used as grounds for divorce.

However, as noted, the Rabbinical Court in Jerusalem chose to side with the husband.

"Have we gone back to the middle ages? What is this? The rabbis are going by a religious ruling rendered centuries ago. People with epilepsy live full lives just like everybody else,"

said the woman's attorney, Avraham Stern, adding his client intends to file a petition with the High Court to have the ruling overturned.

Cause and Effect?

Rabbinical courts' authority to be upgraded / Tova Tzimuki

Secular-religious status-quo may tilt as Ministerial Committee on Legislation passes bill expanding rabbinical courts' authorities to include property settlements, despite Justice Ministry's objections. Bill defies religious courts' original purpose, says ministry

Full story

Rabbi: Redesign synagogues, for women's sake

2008-05-05T19:56:00.004Z

Rabbi: Redesign synagogues, for women's sake

Prominent Religious Zionist Rabbi Yuval Sherlo rules women should be integrated into prayers even if this would require redesigning synagogue

04-25-2008
Ynet

The public must sit down and find the way to design the synagogue in order to make women an inseparable part of the prayer, Rabbi Yuval Sherlo ruled Thursday

Sherlo, head of the hesder yeshiva in Petach Tikva and one of Religious Zionism's most prominent rabbis, explained that he did not believe there were any halachic rules in regards to this issue, stating that "this is obvious."

Sherlo was asked the following question in the Q&A section of the Moreshet website:

"In the synagogue near my home, one cannot hear the prayer and the rabbi's sermons from the women's gallery, or view the Holy Ark and the taking out of the Torah Scrolls

"Are there any halachic rules guaranteeing women's ability to hear, see and feel that they are praying in public? All the answers I've come against only address the assurance of men's ability to pray properly"

In his reply, Rabbi Sherlo wrote that women should be allowed to become an inseparable part of the prayer, even if this would require redesigning the synagogue

The rabbi admitted that he had no explicit halachic text to back this issue, "apart from one, which is a great Torah rule – love your neighbour as yourself"

Le Pen: Auschwitz didn't have gas chambers

2008-05-05T18:46:00.004Z

Le Pen: Auschwitz didn't have gas chambers

Extreme right-wing leader repeats claim that no Jews were gassed or burned at Nazi death camps, says Auschwitz inmates worked as labourers for factory

04-25-2008

AFP

Far-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen sparked a chorus of outrage in France on Friday by repeating an incendiary claim that the Nazi gas chambers were a "detail of history."

Anti-racism and Jewish groups threatened immediate legal action against the National Front chief - who already holds several similar convictions - after he made the comments in a magazine interview.

"I said the gas chambers were a detail of the history of World War II: that, to me, seems so obvious," the 79-year-old Le Pen told Bretons magazine.

Le Pen was fined 1.2 million francs ($290,000) for making the initial remarks in a radio interview in 1987.

When the Bretons journalist told him that the Nazis "deported people to camps simply to kill them," Le Pen replied: "But that is what you believe. I don't feel obliged to adhere to that view."

"I observe that in Auschwitz there was the IG Farben factory, there were 80,000 laborers working there. As far as I know they were not gassed, anyway, nor burned."

The French Council of Jewish Institutions (CRIF) accused Le Pen, whose political fortunes have recently slumped, of "going even further down the road of revisionism... to draw attention to himself."

SOS racism called his remarks "a pitiful attempt to keep himself in the media eye", while the French Jewish Student Union (UEJF) said it was taking legal action against him.

The International League Against racism and anti-Semitism (LICRA) said it planned to file fresh legal action against Le Pen after consulting its lawyers.

And France's Young Socialist Movement (MJS) said it hoped "the courts will not let such remarks go unpunished."

Convicted several times for inflammatory comments on race and World War II history, Le Pen was handed a three-month suspended jail sentence in February for describing the Nazi occupation of France as "not especially inhumane".

He was found guilty of denying a crime against humanity and complicity in condoning war crimes, over the remarks made in an interview with a far-right magazine in 2005.

In 2002 the firebrand leader shocked Europe by making it through to the second round of France's presidential election.

But his party has racked up millions of euros of debts after losing state subsidies thanks to its unexpectedly poor showing in last year's parliamentary elections

Rabbi: Revoke citizenship of non-Jews

2008-05-05T17:32:00.003Z

Rabbi: Revoke citizenship of non-Jews

Prominent Religious-Zionist Rabbi Zalman Melamed suggests conferring Israeli citizenship on all Jews worldwide while stripping rights of 'gentiles striving to undermine the country'

04-28-2008

Kobi Nahshoni

"There must be legislation allowing Jewish people everywhere in the world to become Israeli citizens, even if they do not live here," asserted Rabbi Zalman Melamed on Sunday at a conference debating Torah-derived teachings as they pertain to minority issues in Israel.

Melamed is regarded as an influential authority in the Religious Zionism movement and currently serves as Beit El's chief rabbi.

Doing so, said Melamed, would strengthen the idea of Israel as the nation of all Jews while simultaneously shoring up the country's Jewish demographic in future elections.

However, he agreed, Jews who do not reside in Israel should not receive monetary benefits so long as they are also exempted from paying taxes and other national duties.

"Our ideal objective is for the land of Israel, on all its borders, to be filled with the people of Israel, as was promised to Abraham our father. For the country to operate in accordance with the Torah of Israel," said the rabbi, adding that Knesset Member Uri Ariel (National Union–National Religious Party) is already working towards legislating such a bill.

Biblical resident aliens

Melamed advocates stripping Israeli Arab's of their civil rights. "Even those with a democratic viewpoint understand that we must limit the rights of those who wish to harm the State. There are many non-Jews in Israel who are striving to undermine the country," he said at the conference. "These people should not be able to vote who sits in the Knesset or determine who leads the country. The law must dictate that the subversive cannot be citizens."

In his opening statements the rabbi discussed the position of the adjudicators regarding non-Jewish residents under Jewish rule and asserted that in accordance with the Torah, anyone who recognizes Israel as a Jewish nation and pledges to adhere to the seven Noahide Laws should be conferred the status of 'Ger Toshav.' The term literally means 'resident alien' and was used to refer to gentiles living in Israel under during biblical times.

However, said the rabbi, in modern times Israel cannot do as it pleases and uphold democratic values and minority rights. "We can't be isolated from all other nations, be it politically, economically and scientifically, or when it comes to defense."

Israel, said Melamed, must strive to be a "light unto the gentiles" and not just adhere to the way of life dictated by the Torah. "To influence other nations you must communicate with them, you cannot be isolated."

Struggle

Arabs battle for citizenship; State unyielding / Tani Goldstein

Mohammed al-Deik has lived in Israel for 18 years, paid taxes, employed workers in his factory and even married two Israeli citizens and fathered an Israeli girl, but Interior Ministry still refuses to grant him citizenship

Full story

British Jews: Don't celebrate Israel's 60th

2008-05-05T08:46:00.006Z

British Jews: Don't celebrate Israel's 60th

'We cannot celebrate birthday of state founded on terrorism… which engages in ethnic cleansing,' says group of prominent British Jews, saying time has come to recognize 'Naqba' as Palestinian equivalent to Holocaust

04-30-2008

Hagit Klaiman

On the eve of Holocaust Remembrance Day and a week before Israel marks its 60th Independence Day, a group of over 100 British Jews comprised of well-known academics, writers, actors and other public figures has launched a scathing attack against the Jewish state.

'We're not celebrating Israel's anniversary,' proclaimed the letter carried by the Guardian newspaper on Wednesday. Among the signatures of those claiming Israel forced 70,000 Palestinians into a Death March in 1948 are Prof. Haim Bresheeth, a professor at the University of East London who organized the call for an academic boycott against Israel, playwright Harold Pinter, Attorney Daniel Machover, who filed a lawsuit against Maj. Gen. Doron Almog, and Stephen Fry.

"We cannot celebrate the birthday of a state founded on terrorism, massacres and the dispossession of another people from their land," say the letter writers. "We cannot celebrate the birthday of a state that even now engages in ethnic cleansing, that violates international law, that is inflicting a monstrous collective punishment on the civilian population of Gaza and that continues to deny to Palestinians their human rights and national aspirations. We will celebrate when Arab and Jew live as equals in a peaceful Middle East."

"In July 1948, 70,000 Palestinians were driven from their homes in Lydda and Ramleh in the heat of the summer with no food or water. Hundreds died. It was known as the Death March. We will not be celebrating," the letter continues.

"In all, 750,000 Palestinians became refugees. Some 400 villages were wiped off the map. That did not end the ethnic cleansing. Thousands of Palestinians were expelled from the Galilee in 1956. Many thousands more when Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza. Under international law and sanctioned by UN resolution 194, refugees from war have a right to return or compensation. Israel has never accepted that right. We will not be celebrating."

'Israel responsible for attacks on Sderot'

In an interview with Ynet Prof. Haim Bresheeth rejected any claim that the letter was in any way anti-Semitic.

"I don't understand why the signatories are being accused of anti-Semitism and support of terrorism. None of those who attached their names to the letter supports harming civilians or senseless victims on both sides," he said.

"We want Israel and the Palestinians to live side by side in peace, without missiles, without Qassams and without warplanes hovering above. I want to live in Palestine, without killing on both sides.

"Israel is unwilling to talk to Hamas, which won the democratic elections. Hamas on the other hand, is willing to talk to Israel so long as it withdraws from all the territories."

Bresheeth accused Israel as being responsible for the situation in the territories:

"The real terror is the one Israel has inflicted on the Palestinians for 40 years now, the terrorism of a strong state against a relatively weak organization. We are pushing the Palestinians into a corner where they have no choice by the attacks. We must not do this, the fact that the government of Israel cannot ensure the safety of its residents and the safety of Sderot is solely its own fault."

Israel's ambassador to Britain, Ron Proser, responded to the letter:

"Israel is a democratic nation where anyone can speak their mind and freely criticize anything with virtually no restraints, but when a ground such as this one, of Jews and former Israelis, sums up 60 years of Israeli existence with hate slogans like these – they deserve to be denounced and even ostracized.
"We are proud of the marvelous achievements Israel and the Jewish people have accomplished in our 60 years of existence and we will not allow this harebrained group to spoil our celebration."

Women must not wear pants even when alone: Rabbi Aviner

2008-05-04T19:08:00.005Z

Women must not wear pants even when alone: Rabbi Aviner
One of Religious Zionism's most prominent leaders defines trousers as a 'self-prohibition,' says women 'must dress modestly also when alone and in the dark'

05-02-2008

Rabbi Levi Brackman

Women must not wear pants even when they are home alone, Rabbi Shlomi Aviner has ruled.

Aviner, Beit El's rabbi and one of Religious Zionism's most prominent leaders, was asked in a cellular Q&A session published in the "Small World" bulletin, "When a girl goes to relieve herself at night, is she allowed to say the 'Asher Yatzar' ('he who formed') prayer while wearing a short-sleeved shirt and trousers?"

The rabbi replied that it is permitted to say the prayer in such a case, but added that "in general, a woman must always wear modest clothes even when she is alone and in the dark, because the Holy one blessed be he is everywhere. And yes, trousers are a self-prohibition even when a woman is alone."

Meanwhile, Rabbi Israel Rosen, head of the Tsomet Institute, has claimed an article published in synagogues over the weekend that "too much modesty leads women to the opposite direction, from abstinence to immorality."

According to the rabbi, this is "an axiom which applies to people who have experienced leaps forward and sharp transitions in their religious conduct throughout their lives."

Rabbi Rosen also slammed the haredi norm to omit names of women from newspapers and from invitations, comparing it to the veil phenomenon in Muslim countries

"For so-called modesty reasons, the woman is only presented as 'his wife', nameless, veiled, and my heart twitches," he wrote in a weekly column published in synagogues over the weekend. "Is there no psychological connection between the hypocrisy of concealing the name and hiding the face under the 'Taliban-style' veil?"

Haredim boycott 'Zionist' snacks

2008-05-04T17:31:00.003Z

Haredim boycott 'Zionist' snacks

Haredi Community's leaders urge their public not to buy products adorned with Israeli flag 'or any other symbol that advocates Zionist idolatry'

Nissan Shtrauchler

05-04-2008

The Haredi Community, an ultra-Orthodox communal organization which strongly opposes Zionism, declared a consumers' boycott on leading Israeli food brands that have been adorned with the Israeli flag in honour of the country's 60th birthday.

These products include sugar, oil and peanut butter snacks, which are now marketed in special editions with packages that have been redesigned to include the blue and white flag.

In notices distributed across Jerusalem this weekend, the hardei public was urged not to buy any product that carries the flag or any other symbol "that advocates Zionist idolatry."

A source in the community, which numbers some 7,500 households, said:

"It is a well-known fact that the Haredy Community opposes Zionism. It is unacceptable for companies that use our kashrut authorization to use this against us and promote these messages among us."

Meanwhile, a large group of prominent haredi rabbis is calling for a boycott of Independence Day celebrations, fearing they might encourage promiscuity.

"All those who fear God and are concerned for their sons' and daughters' education – will prevent their family from attending these places or participating in mixed dancing," the rabbis wrote in notices published last week. "Whoever transgresses from these prohibitions will be committing severe sins that carry severe punishment," they stated

Israel is suppressing a secret it must face

2008-05-03T20:33:00.005Z

ISRAEL E NEWS

Israel is suppressing a secret it must face

How did a Jewish state founded 60 years ago end up throwing filth at cowering Palestinians?

Filed under: Jewish history & culture, Settlements, Environment, Palestinian politics, Disputed territories, News, Poverty, Palestinian society, History, Zionism, Refugees, Israel's 60th

On: Friday, May 02, 2008

By: Israel e New

When you hit your 60th birthday, most of you will guzzle down your hormone replacement therapy with a glass of champagne and wonder if you have become everything you dreamed of in your youth. In a few weeks, the state of Israel is going to have that hangover.

She will look in the mirror and think – I have a sore back, rickety knees and a gun at my waist, but I'm still standing. Yet somewhere, she will know she is suppressing an old secret she has to face. I would love to be able to crash the birthday party with words of reassurance. Israel has given us great novelists like Amos Oz and A.B. Yehoshua, great film-makers like Joseph Cedar, great scientific research into Alzheimer's, and great dissident journalists like Amira Hass, Tom Segev and Gideon Levy to expose her own crimes.

She has provided the one lonely spot in the Middle East where gay people are not hounded and hanged, and where women can approach equality.

But I can't do it. Whenever I try to mouth these words, a remembered smell fills my nostrils. It is the smell of shit. Across the occupied West Bank, raw untreated sewage is pumped every day out of the Jewish settlements, along large metal pipes, straight onto Palestinian land. From there, it can enter the groundwater and the reservoirs, and become a poison.

Standing near one of these long, stinking brown-and-yellow rivers of waste recently, the local chief medical officer, Dr Bassam Said Nadi, explained to me:

"Recently there were very heavy rains, and the shit started to flow into the reservoir that provides water for this whole area. I knew that if we didn't act, people would die. We had to alert everyone not to drink the water for over a week, and distribute bottles. We were lucky it was spotted. Next time..."

He shook his head in fear. This is no freak: a 2004 report by Friends of the Earth found that only six per cent of Israeli settlements adequately treat their sewage.

So how did it come to this? How did a Jewish state founded 60 years ago with a promise to be "a light unto the nations" end up flinging its filth at a cowering Palestinian population?

The beginnings of an answer lie in the secret Israel has known, and suppressed, all these years. Even now, can we describe what happened 60 years ago honestly and unhysterically? The Jews who arrived in Palestine throughout the twentieth century did not come because they were cruel people who wanted to snuffle out Arabs to persecute. No: they came because they were running for their lives from a genocidal European anti-Semitism that was soon to slaughter six million of their sisters and their sons.

They convinced themselves that Palestine was "a land without people for a people without land". I desperately wish this dream had been true. You can see traces of what might have been in Tel Aviv, a city that really was built on empty sand dunes. But most of Palestine was not empty. It was already inhabited by people who loved the land, and saw it as theirs. They were completely innocent of the long, hellish crimes against the Jews.

When it became clear these Palestinians would not welcome becoming a minority in somebody else's country, darker plans were drawn up. Israel's first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, wrote in 1937:

"The Arabs will have to go, but one needs an opportune moment for making it happen, such as a war."

So, for when the moment arrived, he helped draw up Plan Dalit. It was – as Israeli historian Ilan Pappe puts it –

"a detailed description of the methods to be used to forcibly evict the people: large-scale intimidation; and laying siege to and bombarding population centres".

In 1948, before the Arab armies invaded, this began to be implemented: some 800,000 people were ethnically cleansed, and Israel was built on the ruins. The people who ask angrily why the Palestinians keep longing for their old land should imagine an English version of this story. How would we react if the 30m stateless, persecuted Kurds in the world sent armies and settlers into this country to seize everything in England below Leeds, and swiftly established a free Kurdistan from which we were expelled?

Wouldn't we long forever for our children to return to Cornwall and Devon and London?
Would it take us only 40 years to compromise and offer to settle for just 22 per cent of what we had?

If we are not going to be endlessly banging our heads against history, the Middle East needs to excavate 1948, and seek a solution. Any peace deal – even one where Israel dismantled the wall and agreed to return to the 1967 borders – tends to crumple on this issue. The Israelis say: if we let all three million come back, we will be outnumbered by Palestinians even within the 1967 borders, so Israel would be voted out of existence. But the Palestinians reply: if we don't have an acknowledgement of the Naqba (catastrophe), and our right under international law to the land our grandfathers fled, how can we move on?

It seemed like an intractable problem – until, two years ago, the Palestinian Centre for Policy and Survey Research conducted the first study of the Palestinian Diaspora's desires. They found that only 10 per cent – around 300,000 people – want to return to Israel proper. Israel can accept that many (and compensate the rest) without even enduring much pain. But there has always been a strain of Israeli society that preferred violently setting its own borders, on its own terms, to talk and compromise. This weekend, the elected Hamas government offered a six-month truce that could have led to talks. The Israeli government responded within hours by blowing up a senior Hamas leader and killing a 14-year-old girl.

Perhaps Hamas' proposals are a con; perhaps all the Arab states are lying too when they offer Israel full recognition in exchange for a roll-back to the 1967 borders; but isn't it a good idea to find out? Israel, as she gazes at her grey hairs and discreetly ignores the smell of her own stale shit pumped across Palestine, needs to ask what kind of country she wants to be in the next 60 years.

Johann Hari - The Belfast Telegraph

Theology vs democracy

2008-05-03T20:07:00.004Z

ISRAELI E NEWS

Theology vs democracy

Filed under Judaism, Jewish history & culture, Opinion Editorials, Knesset members, Religious extremism, Law and courts, Israeli society -

on Friday, May 02, 2008

By: Shoher, Obadiah

Israel goes from one restructuring crisis into another. Socialism, successive waves of aliyah, near-bankruptcy in the arms race, ideological changes from mini-state in 1948 to mini-empire in 1967 to defeatism since the 1990s strain government’s credibility and make Jews doubt if the nation has any ideology to sustain statehood.

Democracy is a comfortable order for established societies, but in times of crises, Romans appointed dictators. Voting for personalities invokes more responsibility than for parties; Israelis who vote for Kadima might not vote for Olmert. Strong presidential republic where the president is elected directly by public weathers crises better.

Mass democracy, however, is inherently evil

Politically active, engaged populations seek to determine policies and control politicians, but such control is short-lived. People hate doing useless job, and the control of elected government soon proves useless. People hate responsibility, and political demagogues urge them to trust the government. When someone promises to care about you, and everyone around seems to concur, you also tend to concur.

Small groups are still reasoning entities, but reason disappears from large populations. The major reason for that is the mob tendency of adapting to the lowest common denominator: people shrink from offending others, realizing subconsciously that that may be dangerous, and seek the common points with them. The common point is the lowest common denominator, and for the large country such denominator is really low.

If the problems are both hard and not imminent, people prefer avoiding them. So, the sweetly talking demagogues are voted into the offices even though their promises are evidently absurd. "The dream of reason produces monsters." Any candidate who tells the unpleasant truth to the mob has no chances of being elected.

In the era of mass media, election campaigns are expensive. Grassroots financing is a fairy tale: once a candidate becomes widely known and his chances appear somewhat realistic, large donors flock to him. That is venture financing in political sphere: risks are large, but potential profits are staggering, as the first large donors would likely remain the new ruler’s closest confidants throughout his career. And so we saw German industrialists financing Hitler, and Jewish American businessmen – Obama. An honest candidate stands no chance of securing sufficient financing, as he is not sufficiently corrupt to shower his benefactors with government contracts and subsidies upon reaching the office.

In large countries with the history of freedom, mass media somewhat check the corrupt and obviously wrong policies. The minuscule Israel with a history of socialist oppression is exactly the opposite. A few oligarchs who control Israeli media critically depend on the government for contracts, permits, and non-extradition. Israeli media are therefore completely subservient to the establishment.

Democracy is a very accidental political system. It was never practised on large scale in antiquity, but only in small cities where participatory democracy remains viable. In all cases, democracy quickly eroded into demagoguery, tyranny, and then monarchy. Modern states erroneously identified as democracies are actually republics, the difference being that some basic values in republics are closed to democratic discourse; on the other hand, even theocracy allows democratic decision-making on mundane issues while the core values are kept non-negotiable. Democracy gained popularity during the Renaissance when westerners marvelled at everything ancient. Unlike the classic art, democracy remained popular because it allowed the ruling classes to rule as if by popular consent (manufacturing and twisting that consent) and provided academics with the opportunity to legitimately influence societies with social theories.

There are three viable alternatives to democracy. Two of them are biblically sanctioned: anarchy and monarchy, while the third was employed by Jews throughout most of our history - theocracy. Anarchy operates as a network of townships bonded together by mutual defence agreements, common and criminal law. The legal system is kept to a minimum, and people are free to a high extent.

Jewish monarchy is a constitutional one, where king is bounded by myriad restrictions. Short of a very bad king, such system is finely suited for opinionated Jews, whose perpetual debates and vacillations it crushes. If the king proves very bad, he can be removed both on religious grounds (as a traitor) or simply by the masses exercising their right of insurrection.

Theocracy is also not bad. Someone like Ovadia Yosef, for all his shortcomings, won’t be a worse leader of Israel than Olmert or Netanyahu. At least, Rabbi Ovadia has Jewish ideas and convictions. Theocracy served Jews well for the nineteen centuries. It wasn’t perfect, but enough that it is workable.

No realistically electable politician in Israel is better than Olmert. But there are viable forms of Jewish government better than democracy where the likes of Olmert would never succeed.

Obadiah Shoher is the author of "Samson Blinded,a Machiavellian view of the Middle East conflict," and the accompanying blog.Samson Blinded, which advocates a ultra-hard-line Israeli approach to Arab nations. Shoher denies ethnic-blind democracy and argues for expulsion of Arabs from Israel. He rejects democratic process , and calls for violent opposition to police efforts at removing the illegal settlements, dismantling the Israeli army and fully relying on nuclear response to counter possible Arab aggression. Shoher's real identity is unknown but he is believed to be an Israeli politician, writing under the pen name, "Obadiah Shoher".

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Religion: Messianic Truth In Advertising

2008-05-03T19:20:00.005Z

ISRAELI E NEWS

Messianic Truth In Advertising

Filed under Judaism, Christianity, Christian Zionism, Social activism, Jewish diaspora, Opinion Editorials, Conspiracies, Jewish organisations worldwide, Missionising, Israeli minorities -

on Tuesday, February 05, 2008

By: Ravitz, Rabbi

The growth of the Jews for Jesus and Messianic movements in Israel, especially as we approach Israel’s 60th Anniversary, is unprecedented and an outcome of unrestrained relationships with evangelical Christians. There are more than 15,000 “Messianic Jews” residing in Israel and more than 275,000 in the Diaspora.

Some Israeli politicians and prominent rabbis are associating with “Messianic Jews,” inadvertently lending them credibility. Others rabbis are outraged about a “Messianic Jew” in the International Bible Quiz for Jewish youth, and this week called for a boycott. Of grave concern are the actions of messianic lawyer Calev Meyers who has been fighting in the Israeli Supreme Court for messianic rights, including initiating changes in the law-of-return that with help messianic missionaries become Israeli citizens.

Meyers and the messianic movement are trying to pull the wool over the eyes of the Israeli public. It is misleading for them to claim that the only difference between “messianic Jews” and other Jews, is their belief that Jesus is the Messiah. This was highlighted by Meyers recent quote in the Jerusalem Post comparing messianic Jews to messianic Chabadniks. In fact, “Messianic Jews” intentionally avoid mentioning a fundamental difference. In addition to believing Jesus is the Messiah, they believe he is God in the flesh and part of a Trinity. Beliefs considered idolatrous by all denominations of Judaism.

As early as 1980, Jews for Jesus founder Moshe Rosen in his book “Sharing the New Life with a Jew,” advised messianic missionaries to avoid mentioning their belief in the deity of Jesus because it makes witnessing to Jews extremely difficult. Additionally, attempts by the messianic movement to prove their theology from biblical and rabbinic sources are based on misquotations and mistranslations.

Even before Christianity, Jews rejected these anti-Jewish non-monotheistic beliefs. We also realize they were introduced into Christianity due to the influence of pagan cult gods like Osiris and Dionysus.

Obviously there are other differences. “Messianic Jews” accept the Greek New Testament as divinely inspired scripture and they believe that all Jews who don't believe in Jesus face eternal damnation in hell. However, historically it is their idolatrous beliefs that have ultimately placed “Jews who believe in Jesus” outside the pale of Judaism.

Christian friendship is appreciated; however we must stop pandering to Christianity and call for truth in advertising by the messianic movement. We should also call on “messianic Jews” to reject these pagan beliefs and return to the pure monotheistic unity of God that defines our identity and personal relationship with God.

Jews for Judaism is doing its part. Our recently opened Jerusalem office is our sixth international centre responding to deceptive missionaries and providing respected educational and counselling services to the Jewish community, helping Jews rediscover and return to their heritage.

BENTZION K RAVITZ , an acknowledged authority on Judaism and Christian polemics, is the founder of Jews for Judaism International Inc., and is the Executive Director of the Los Angeles branch of Jews for Judaism. A renowned lecturer, he has appeared on both television and radio programs in Israel and around the world. With over 25 years of experience, he has one of the highest success records in the Jewish community for counseling Jews involved in cults and Christian missionary groups. Rabbi Kravitz has successfully published many of his own articles and audiotapes and is the author of the highly acclaimed, multi-lingual booklet, The Jewish Response To Missionaries

The Bomb Squads: How to Survive a Gaza Refugee Camp

2008-05-02T18:23:00.003Z

The Bomb Squads:
How to Survive a Gaza Refugee Camp

by Ramzy Baroud
Global Research,

May 2, 2008

The following article are excerpts from Baroud’s upcoming book, “101 Ways to Survive a Refugee Camp.” We waited breathless. Breathing heavily was hazardous under these somewhat exceptional circumstances. The army, my father often advised, was sensitive to the slightest movements or sounds, including a whisper, a cough, or God forbid, a sneeze. Thus we sat completely still. Muneer, my younger brother was entrusted with the mission of peering through the rusty holes in the front door. It bothered me that I was not the one elected for the seemingly perilous mission. My father explained that Muneer was smaller and quicker, he could negotiate his way back and forth, seamlessly, between the observation ground and the room where everyone was hiding. The house’s main door was riddled with holes; the upper half spoke of past battles between the neighbourhood’s stone throwers and Israeli soldiers. The holes on the lower half, however were not those of bullets, but rust and corrosion. These holes often served us well. Muneer would lie on his belly and peek through them; he followed the movement of the soldiers as their military vehicles often used the space in front of our house. They pondered their moves from there, and often used our house’ front step as a spot for lunch or tea. Worse, they often released their frustrations on the house’s helpless residents, that being my family. But this time the air is truly gloomy. Soldiers had never gathered in such numbers and remained for that long. Muneer, crawling back and forth, between the door and the kitchen -where we often hid - the only room with a concrete ceiling, thus much safer than the rest of the house – reported increasingly disturbing news. “There are men in white.” He divulged the latest development with total bewilderment. “They are wearing masks. And there is a robot.” For once, we felt in doubt of Muneer’s version of events, which were most often sharp and truthful. Only my father seemed to understand. “Bomb squads,” he whispered. His words left us in a state of dread and speechlessness. The sheer terror that we felt at that moment was of a new kind; a bomb only a few feet away from our house, and we couldn’t escape for snipers were positioned all across the street, on the water-tower, behind the graves, everywhere. My mother hurried to her safe corner of reciting Quranic verses. She long argued that selected verses from the Quran were sure to create a protective shield between one and his enemies. My father was in no mood to scoff at her or anyone else. He looked as if he were in a trance. I cannot even begin to imagine what must’ve went through his head that day. He pulled a cigarette from a long, white pack of Kents and seemed past the point of ordinary nervousness. Even if the bomb was diffused, the soldiers would most certainly round up all the youth in the neighbourhood, as they had done repeatedly, starting with us, and herd everyone into the military camp’s temporary holding facilities. Torture and beating to glean urgently needed information were surely to follow. My mom was still in her corner, with audible words here and there breaking the frightening silence, things about God, and “my kids are the only thing I have in this life”, and other supplications. My father called on Muneer to join the rest of us, and decided to take on the mission of watching outside’s happenings as they unfolded, himself. My father laid facedown for a long time. A military helicopter hovered in place for a little while and then disappeared, perhaps following a moving target, I thought. Helicopters were the best way to chase down fidayeen – freedom fighters - as they sought escape in the refugee camp’s orchards. Did they find the one who planted the bomb? But what about the bomb itself? News was still scarce and my father was still laying on the chipped tiles behind the door. Suddenly engines of military vehicles outside began charging one after the other. Some began moving away. The noise increasingly subsided. Foot soldiers seemed to be the only ones left behind. One could tell through the continuous murmurs and chatter. The bewilderment intensified, although this time with some hopeful prospects. Are we really meant to survive the unfolding ordeal? My father began making his way back, crawling back to the kitchen. He often crawled that way to show off some of his training in the army many years back. We looked at him with inquiring eyes. My mother abandoned her figurative corner for a few moments, and joined us. “Its our bag of trash,” my father said in a tone that was meant to dispel the mystery. “They thought our trash was a bomb.” My father opted to throw our trash in the street just hours earlier. Garbage accumulated for weeks in our house as the military curfew kept us indoors without a chance to step foot outside. So a few hours earlier, he did what we had urged him to do for days, since we couldn’t cope with the suffocating odor. He opened the double doors for a few seconds and threw one black garbage bag as far as he could to the middle of the open space in front of the house. Little did he know that his desperado act would send the Israeli army on high alert; would invite bomb squads, helicopters and perhaps every available tank and military vehicle to our unsuspecting neighboured. Within minutes, the serenity and silence of the military curfew was back. Except that watermelon rinds and my father’s used Kent packs and other items, were scattered about the street. “Whose God damn idea was it to throw the trash in the street?” my father mumbled. No one answered. My father puffed on his cigarette and quickly delved into a contemplating mode. “I have never seen such military build- up since the war of ‘67,” he said. His surreal look was interrupted by one hardly audible chuckle, and that was enough to ignite a storm of laughter among my brothers and even my mother which lasted for a long long time. I took my turn peeking through the rust holes to get a piece of the excitement and follow the progress of the trash as it was scattered by the wind and hungry cats in every possible direction. “Hey guys, the chains of the tanks softened the area outside. It should be really good for soccer when the curfew is lifted,” I declared jubilantly. And the curfew was indeed lifted, some forty days later. Ramzy Baroud (www.ramzybaroud.net ) is an author and editor of PalestineChronicle.com. His work has been published in many newspapers and journals worldwide. His latest book is The Second Palestinian Intifada: A Chronicle of a People's Struggle (Pluto Press, London).
Ramzy Baroud is a frequent contributor to Global Research. Global Research Articles by Ramzy Baroud

Sixty years ago in Battir

2008-05-01T20:51:00.007Z

Sixty years ago in Battir

Hasan Abu Nimah writing from Amman, Jordan, Live from Palestine,

30 April 2008

The author's mother (right) with family members preparing food, early 1950s.

Sixty years ago in Battir, my small hillside village near Jerusalem, I witnessed the chaotic collapse of the British Mandate administration in Palestine and the beginning of the Nakba.

The previous months had been decisive ones for the fate of Palestine, although we did not yet know it. The Jews, fed up with British procrastination in fulfilling Balfour's promise of letting them transform our homeland into their "national home," launched a bloody campaign of terror both against the British and the Arabs. The Jewish militias targeted the British to speed up their departure from Palestine, and hit the Arabs to quell the rising resistance to Zionist colonization. Violence broke out in early 1947, after the British announced that they would leave Palestine by 15 May 1948. When the United Nations passed its partition resolution on 29 November 1947, the violence began to lurch into full-scale war.

Battir's 1,200 inhabitants were wracked by uncertainty. There were hopes that things would turn out all right, but fear dominated as the atmosphere became bleaker by the day.

I vividly remember the stories of horror which haunted the people of Battir, such as the attack on the railway station in Jerusalem on 21 October 1946. The train was their lifeline to the city where they marketed their produce and bought their supplies. People also walked to Jerusalem and often travelled by car on the unpaved road that ran parallel to the railway line, though that was much harder. A few months earlier a Jewish bomb attack on Jerusalem's King David Hotel, which served as the British headquarters, killed 91 people and injured dozens. Later, after the partition vote, when the Zionist forces began their armed campaign to seize Palestine, fighting erupted between Arabs and Jews in the land they both claimed.

The gunfire and chaos edged ever closer to Battir, a village that traces its roots to the second century, and which now found its peace and tranquillity under threat.

Apart from home just up the hill, the centre of my life was at the elementary school for boys, that I attended, and that lay at bottom of the valley that Battir overlooks. Just next to the school was the railway station which was the first stop on the railway line from Jerusalem to Jaffa. The station and the school with its small football field formed a sort of campus at the edge of the village, surrounded by tall pine and citrus trees providing ample greenery and shade on hot summer days. For us children it was the perfect place to play and loiter in and out of school hours.

I remember these as the lively, busy places they once were with schoolchildren, the station staff, and at one point a British military garrison. Families would take the train down from Jerusalem to enjoy weekly picnics in the romantic rural atmosphere of our village and they would be joined by local people doing the same. At school we experimented with practical agriculture which was part of the curriculum; this included keeping beehives for honey and breeding chickens.

A view of the Jerusalem-Jaffa railway line as it runs along the valley below the village of Battir in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. Ruined station buildings can be seen to the left of the track, while the village elementary school can be seen to the right.

Villagers, adults and children alike, never tired of the spectacle of the steam engines stopping to fill their huge tanks with water, and bringing with them all kinds of people to spark local curiosity. Villagers would sell fruit and vegetables to passengers through the carriage windows -- a small but steady source of badly needed income.

The nearest village to Battir was al-Walajah, just less than two miles north, and across the railway line to the west. People from the neighbouring villages mixed and intermarried freely.

During the last days of the Mandate all this began to change. Cargo trains became the targets of robbers who forced them to stop along the line and emptied them of all their valuables. British soldiers on board the trains, supposedly to guard them, hardly offered any resistance; they often dropped their arms and left the scene peacefully. Soon the trains stopped coming completely, and when the trains stopped everything else fell apart too. The station offices and the station manager's house were ransacked, and so was our school. There was no law or authority to protect people's lives and property. We had to look after ourselves.

By this time the well-documented and carefully organized campaign of ethnic cleansing by the Haganah and other Jewish militias had begun, with the goal of conquering as much land as possible from the Palestinians so that the state of Israel could be established. One wave after another of people from Jerusalem-area villages, fleeing Jewish attacks, started to arrive in Battir, seeking shelter and safety. People received them hospitably, believing it was only a temporary crisis. But as one village after another fell to the Jewish forces, and the front line approached us, we too had to leave for safety.

That was soon after news of the April 1948 massacre in the village of Deir Yassin reached us. As Deir Yassin was not far away, some of the survivors arrived in Battir. They told of the horror they witnessed and the futile attempts to resist the onslaught. As the Jewish attackers intended, their deeds instilled terror in the hearts of Palestinians.

One afternoon in May 1948, Battir fell under heavy fire from the opposite slopes, across the railway line to the west, which had fallen to the Jewish fighters. We carried whatever belongings we could and headed east a few miles where there were vineyards and a small spring. I was only with my mother and my younger sisters; all the other members of my family had left separately. We too thought it would be a short escape, but we camped in that vineyard with many other people from the village all summer, our hopes dimming as the heat rose.

At first we slept in the open, under the trees. Then we built small shelters out of branches in an attempt to gain some privacy. We cooked and baked bread on an open fire. The one great relief is that the spring gave us a reliable supply of fresh water, but otherwise life was very difficult and dreadfully uncertain. When people started to fear that our departure might not be temporary, some of them risked their lives to return to the village to recover whatever belongings they could.

By the end of the summer, with life under the trees becoming unbearable, people started to disperse in every direction. Many joined refugee camps in the Jordan Valley. My mother, my younger sister and I went to Bethlehem where we joined my older brother who had previously been an officer in the Palestine police and had now joined the Jordanian army. In his tiny officer's apartment, as well as us, he ended up sheltering my eldest sister and her large family as well as his own. It was hard, but we were grateful. We stayed in Bethlehem until the summer of 1949 when the war was ended by the armistice agreement.

Battir lay right on the ceasefire line, and it was now physically divided by barbed wire. Unlike hundreds of thousands of other Palestinians forced out of their villages, we did return home. But there we faced a totally new situation.

To be continued.

Hasan Abu Nimah is the former permanent representative of Jordan at the United Nations. This article first appeared in The Jordan Times and is reprinted with the author's permission.

Haaretz in 1932: Hitler makes better impression than expected

2008-04-29T17:52:00.007Z

Haaretz in 1932: Hitler makes better impression than expected

Last update - 20:21 29/04/2008

By Ofri Ilany

Tags: Adolf Hitler, Nazis


		The Davar newspaper front page after Hitler's election victory in 1933

The date is January 28, 1932. Haaretz' correspondent in Berlin, Gershon Savitt, reports from the courthouse. In the defendant's chair is Adolf Hitler, the leader of the Nazi party, who is facing a libel suit filed by his former friend, Walter Stennes. A year before his appointment as chancellor of Germany, Hitler is still not very well known to Haaretz's readers.

In the article, "Hitler up close and personal," he emerges as an exotic figure, somewhat peculiar. "I must note right away that the impression Hitler makes is immeasurably better than expected," writes Savitt. "He is 46, but looks younger. Incidentally: he is a bachelor. Self-satisfaction and self-confidence are apparent in his movements; he acts and feels as if he himself is a 'star.' Because the world's eyes are now turned upon him and this pleases him."

The Mandate-era Hebrew press watched with wonder mixed with concern at the unprecedented political phenomenon that surfaced in those years in Germany: the rapid gains of the Nazi party until it took over the government.

Ilana Novetsky-Bendet, a doctoral student at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, is researching the Hebrew press' attitude toward events in Germany from the time of the emergence of the Nazis as a significant political force, until World War II. In Bendet's master's thesis, which covers the period up until Hitler's rise to power, she found that the Hebrew press showed an interest in and followed the growing strength of the Nazis as early as the late 1920s. However, the papers in Palestine had trouble discerning Hitler's political power and the centrality of the racist component of the party's ideology.

"The more the party's electoral power increased, the greater the interest in it," says Bendet, whose mentor for her doctoral thesis is Prof. Moshe Zimmerman. "But hardly any of the papers grasped the severity of Nazi anti-Semitism."

There were seven newspapers operating in mandatory Palestine at the time, and each one of them represented a different party or political line:

Davar was the Histadrut labor federation paper;
Hapoel Hatzair was the Mapai paper;
Haaretz was the liberal paper;
Hatzofeh was the paper of the religious;
Haboker was the paper of the general Zionists; and there were a few other papers associated with the revisionists, including Doar Hayom, Hazit Ha'am and Hayarden.

The information from Europe they received came primarily from news agencies, and occasionally from trains that relayed the reports from Cairo to the land of Israel. Some of the papers also employed writers in Germany, most of them Russian Jews who immigrated to Germany in the 1920s, and who occasionally also reported for other papers around the world. According to Bendet, some of these writers remained in Germany even after the Nazis' rise and left only in the mid-1930s.

"The heroes of the most recent elections to the Reichstag are, undoubtedly, the Communists," wrote Yeshayahu Klinov in Haaretz following the July 31, 1932, elections, when the Nazis became the biggest party in the Reichstag.

After the November 6 elections that year, when the Nazis were slightly weakened, Haaretz - under the editorship of Moshe Glicksman - declared "the end of Hitler's career." An analysis published in the paper on November 11 stated: "Hatred of Israel, with all the appeal it has for darkened masses at a time of emergency, is not negotiable currency in Germany: this nation has absorbed too much culture to be able to agree to discriminate against citizens who live in the same homeland."

On December 7, the paper declared: "Hitler no longer has any hope of becoming the sole ruler in Germany, at most there is a chance that the Nazi party will earn only a few crumbs of power."

The shortsightedness of the Hebrew papers can be understood in light of the uncertainty and political chaos prevailing in the German political area during those months. According to Bendet, the information that arrived from Germany about the complex intrigues and political contacts between the different parties was partial, because the talks were secret.

"When Hitler was appointed chancellor, it was a complete shock to all the papers," she says. "Almost everyone trusted President Hindenburg because they said he despises Hitler and would not allow him to assume power. They didn't believe that the rules of the game could change so quickly.

In the doctoral thesis she is now writing, Bendet reviews to what extent Yishuv (pre-state Jewish community) society understood the essence of Nazi fascism after its rise to power, and how the Yishuv assessed the chances of another outbreak of war, and its results. Bendet says the only journalist who did discern the Nazis' strength was Itamar Ben Avi, the son of Eliezer Ben Yehuda and the editor of Doar Hayom.

"Itamar Ben Avi was not shocked by the Nazis' rise to power, because before then he already said that Hitler will in the end achieve what he wants."

Most Hebrew papers were stunned by the party's quick takeover of the institutions of power, and the racist persecution of Jews enacted in Germany. Many described the racist regime as "a return to the Middle Ages."

Only one paper took a completely contrary position to Hitler's ascendance: Hazit Ha'am, the journal of the right-wing of the Revisionists. "If the segments of our people draw the appropriate conclusions from the Hitlerism, then we will be able to say that something good came out of a bad situation," the paper stated a few days after Hitler's appointment as chancellor.

The paper even praised certain foundations of the Nazi ideology, primarily its fight against communism: "the anti-Semitic husk should be discarded, but not its anti-Marxist inside," the paper's editors wrote of Nazism. The praise of Nazism stopped only after the intervention of Ze'ev Jabotinsky, who called for "a total end to this abomination." Around two years later, in 1935, Hazit Ha'am folded.

The newspaper headlines in the days after the burning of the Reichstag on February 27, 1933, and the passage of the law that granted Hitler dictatorial powers on March 24 clearly reflected the fear Nazism inspired: "A day of heavy boycotting of Germany's Jews. Goering came out of a mental institution to assume power!"; "Hitler will not budge from his position toward the Jews, says the German consul in London." "1933 is the darkest year in the last 500 years of the history of Germany and its Jews," the papers said.

"Will a general strike not break out? Will the German people really not rise up against the wild leadership of the barbaric dictator?" mused Davar two months after Hitler's rise to power.

But as the Nazi party established itself in power and radicalized its actions more, the papers recognized the severity of the threat. According to Bendet, "In the mid-1930s, when it emerges that Hitler is implementing the Nazi ideology and the race laws, there is growing concern that the Nazis will bring a tragedy upon Europe's Jews."

And nevertheless, until the late 1930s, most papers felt that the democratic superpowers would succeed in preventing war, and that the Nazis were primarily a threat to German Jewry. Even after the annexation of Czechoslovakia on April 14, 1939, Jabotinsky still promised in the newspaper Hamashkif: "In the place where the confidence in the surety of a 'European' war stars, that is where any threat of war passes. And the strongest of the strong and the brazen of the daring, will be deterred at the last minute - meaning, a 'European' war is not a possibility."

According to Bendet, "most of the papers here assumed that Germany was unprepared for war. They thought that there was more 'noise and ringing' there than any real threat."

However, after the annexation of Czechoslovakia following the Munich Agreement of September 1938, the papers started voicing fear about the fate of the young Yishuv in Palestine.

"When they see that the conciliatory policies of Britain and France capitulate before Hitler, they worry that the British will sacrifice them as well, the Nazis will reach the gates of the land of Israel, and the Zionist enterprise will collapse," she says. "The Zionist enterprise is the focus of their interest and they worry about that more than about European Jewry."

Is it possible to learn something about the ability to predict future threats from the newspaper forecasts of the Nazis' aims? According to Bendet, "it is possible to discern a certain tendency to suppress threats. On the other hand, it's no great feat to pass judgment after the fact. It's hard to predict what will happen in real time. Sometimes the papers say: we're not prophets."

Hebrew Hitler jokes

The Davar newspaper published a column called Be'vat Tzehok (With a Smile) that included jokes about current events. In the 1930s, some of the jokes featured were about Hitler and about Nazism.

b American: Medical science here has advanced 10 steps forward. Look, not along ago they amputated a man's right leg and made him a wooden leg - he ended up being one of the best soccer players.
Frenchman: And here not long ago a man's arm was amputated and they made him an artificial wooden hand and he's now one of the best pianists.
German: And here, one man lost his head in the Munich beer hall putsch. They say he now has a wood head, and he's one of the leading rulers. (April 21, 1935)

b Hitler once went to a magician-fortune teller and asked her to tell him what would happen at the end of his life.
Fortune teller: Am I allowed to tell you everything?
Hitler: Yes, on the contrary, tell me everything without any fear.
Fortune teller: I see that you will die on the eve of big Jewish holiday.
Hitler: If so, I'll cancel all of the Jews' festivals and holidays.
Fortune teller: Even so, the day after your death will be a big Jewish holiday. (May 5, 1935)

b A soldier from the strike forces assaulted a passerby on a Berlin street and repeatedly struck him with deadly blows. The victim started shouting: "Murder! Beating! Help!" A guard approached him and said: "I ask you not to talk too loudly about politics!" (August 2, 1935)

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Hizbollah builds up covert army for a new assault against Israel

2008-04-27T17:17:00.006Z

Hizbollah builds up covert army for a new assault against Israel

Villages empty as Shia militia sends recruits to tough training camps in Bekaa Valley, Syria and Iran, reports Mitchell Prothero in southern Lebanon

by Mitchell Prothero,

Sunday April 27 2008

The dead of southern Lebanon watch the living from the sides of buildings and from lampposts, their faces staring out defiantly from posters, heads often superimposed on bodies of generic men in uniform. These are Hizbollah's martyrs: men killed fighting against Israel before it abandoned the occupation of the south in 2000 or in the numerous clashes since, including the bloody summer war of 2006.

The images are often the only public acknowledgement of the individuals who make up this most secretive of institutions: Hizbollah's military wing.

But an Observer investigation has discovered that this covert organisation is quietly but steadily replacing its dead and redoubling its recruitment efforts in anticipation of a new, and even more brutal, conflict. Hizbollah has embarked on a major expansion of its fighting capability and is now sending hundreds, if not thousands, of young men into intensive training camps in Lebanon, Syria and Iran to ready itself for war with Israel. 'It's not a matter of if,' says one fighter. 'It's a matter of when Sayed Hasan Nasrallah [Hizbollah chief] commands us.'

The group's policy of refusing to discuss military matters extends to the highest levels. In speeches and rare interviews, Nasrallah refuses to answer even the simplest questions about the military wing, never referring even to the fact that his eldest son, Hadi, was a fighter himself. Life as a Hizbollah fighter is anonymous until death. But meetings with fighters, activists, Lebanese security officials, the UN peacekeepers along the border and residents of south Lebanon and the southern suburbs of Beirut, where the group is most active, offered a glimpse inside the workings of a group rarely open to outsiders. None of the sources within the group can be named - Hizbollah has barred members from speaking with the Western media since the mysterious death of a top commander, Imad Mughniyeh, in a Damascus car bomb.

'The most important thing is to never talk,' says one fighter, who agreed to speak about the group without revealing his name or specific duties inside 'the Islamic Resistance of Lebanon', as the military wing of Hizbollah is known. 'From the moment we begin our training, we are told two things: never disobey an order and never talk about the resistance. Hizbollah is not a job, it is not a family. It is a mix of religion, honour, dignity and discipline. It is my life.'

But what is becoming more obvious, even as Hizbollah tries to hide it, is that the group has embarked on an unprecedented build-up of men, equipment and bunker-building in preparation for the war that almost everyone - Lebanese and Israeli - considers inevitable. 'The villages in the south are empty of men,' said one international official. 'They are all gone, training in Bekaa, Syria and Iran.'

A trip by The Observer through villages in the Hizbollah heartland confirmed a conspicuous lack of fighting-age men. Visible were several new martyr posters, but unlike the traditional ones they portrayed anonymous, fresh-faced youngsters without military garb. According to locals, these are boys who have been killed accidentally in the latest wave of training in Iran. In the city of Tyre, too, posters showing young men killed in training exercises are cropping up. One is of Ahmad Hashem, killed while instructing recruits in the use of rocket-propelled grenades.

The initial training and selection of recruits is done in Lebanon, with Iran preferred for training on specialities - use of certain weapons, RPGs and anti-tank missiles - that require firing live rounds. 'But mostly the training in Iran is in theoretical things: philosophy, religion. The best training for fighting is done here in Lebanon,' said a fighter. 'We are so close to Israel here that our training becomes real.'

Israeli official statements suggest the increasingly aggressive recruiting results from the heavy casualties suffered by the group in 2006, a notion dismissed by sources within Hizbollah and even by the US military.

While Israel contends that between 500 and 700 Hizbollah fighters were killed, the group itself said that about 80 fighters had died.
Hizbollah sources admit that the losses were double that figure, while the US military study decided the death toll was 184.

'How could they be lying so much?' asked one resident of the south. 'People would not tolerate not having a funeral or posters of their son or husband. If it were 700 dead fighters, we would all know. We'd know more people killed, we'd be hearing the complaints from the families. Where can you hide 700 dead bodies in south Lebanon? It's too small.'

Losses aside, before 2006 most observers also widely overestimated the size of the military group. Some analysts put it as high as 5,000 men with more than 10,000 reservists, including its allied Amal - meaning Hope - militia supporting them.

'Ridiculous,' says the Hizbollah member. 'Before 2006 there were not more than 1,000 professional fighters, guys who manned bunkers and conducted operations full-time. The rest are trained and armed but lead ordinary lives unless called upon.'

This assessment is supported by regional intelligence services and Lebanese Shias, but now signs of the militia's dramatic expansion are alarming Hizbollah's domestic and international enemies.

The US military study described Hizbollah's military wing as 'completely decentralised'. Its commanders famously exercised this independence when they refused orders by the top command to abandon Bint Jebel in 2006 - then under massive Israeli ground assault. The town did not fall and Hizbollah rank-and-file today laud the refusal of orders as one of the biggest victories in the war. Recruiters closely watch youngsters for this kind of nerve and self-motivation, selecting the most talented boys for advanced training when they reach adulthood.

Hizbollah fighters describe a series of units - built around specialities such as rocket teams, heavy weapons experts, infantry, scouts and or part-time basis.

'Some units will be sent for training or operations for one, even two, years. Others continue to work or go to school. But even if you work your life is still Hizbollah. They call and that's it - you go. Maybe you tell your boss or professors you're going to Qatar or something for family reasons. But you never tell anyone what you're really doing.'

The decision to expand both the military wing and the supporting militias stems not from the losses during the 2006 war but from Hizbollah's success as a conventional military force in that conflict, says a Lebanese army commander who has worked with the group, his view being confirmed by the US military study.

'They were guerrillas during the occupation but shocked Israel in the war by standing and fighting from fixed positions. Even badly outnumbered, they held territory with minimal losses even under assault from tank units,' he says. 'Now they want to expand to make sure they can stop the next invasion before the tanks reach the flat plains of the Bekaa, where Israel's armoured units will have the advantage.'

Another crisis driving the build-up is Lebanon's political conflict, which pits Hizbollah and its allies against a coalition of Sunni, Druze and Christians supporting the Western-backed government. Street fights between Sunnis and Shias are becoming commonplace but Hizbollah cannot afford to take its men away from the bunkers in the south to fight on the streets of Beirut, say members of Amal and the Lebanese army.

'They know they can't send their best fighters, or the Israelis could attack. Israel will always be their main focus. But they have access to many that are good enough to fight with rocks, sticks and maybe some guns. They're training those guys to fight the Sunnis in Beirut,' says the army officer.

One Hizbollah fighter says he hopes that the situation doesn't deteriorate into them taking up arms against other Lebanese groups, but admits it is possible. 'God willing, I will never fight a Lebanese, but I will if ordered.'