Religious intolerance in Israel

The terror lurking in a Christmas tree

By Jonathan Cook in Nazareth

Israel tries to ban non-Jewish celebrations

Israel’s large Palestinian minority is often spoken of in terms of the threat it poses to the Jewish majority. Palestinian citizens’ reproductive rate constitutes a “demographic time bomb”, while their main political programme – Israel’s reform into “a state of all its citizens” – is proof for most Israeli Jews that their compatriots are really a “fifth column”.

But who would imagine that Israeli Jews could be so intimidated by the innocuous Christmas tree?
This issue first came to public attention two years ago when it was revealed that Shimon Gapso, the mayor of Upper Nazareth, had banned Christmas trees from all public buildings in his northern Israeli city.

Upper Nazareth is a Jewish town and all its symbols are Jewish. As long as I hold office, no non-Jewish symbol will be presented in the city. (Shimon Gapso, Jewish Mayor of Upper Galilee)
 

“Upper Nazareth is a Jewish town and all its symbols are Jewish,” Gapso said. “As long as I hold office, no non-Jewish symbol will be presented in the city.”

The decision reflected in part his concern that Upper Nazareth, built in the 1950s as the centrepiece of the Israeli government’s “Judaization of the Galilee” programme, was failing dismally in its mission.

Far from “swallowing up” the historic Palestinian city of Nazareth next door, as officials had intended, Upper Nazareth became over time a magnet for wealthier Nazarenes who could no longer find a place to build a home in their own city. That was because almost all Nazareth’s available green space had been confiscated for the benefit of Upper Nazareth.

Instead Nazarenes, many of them Palestinian Christians, have been buying homes in Upper Nazareth from Jews – often immigrants from the former Soviet Union – desperate to leave the Arab-dominated Galilee and head to the country’s centre, to be nearer Tel Aviv.

The exodus of Jews and influx of Palestinians have led the government to secretly designate Upper Nazareth as a “mixed city”, much to the embarrassment of Gapso. The mayor is a stalwart ally of far-right politician Avigdor Lieberman and regularly expresses virulently anti-Arab views, including recently calling Nazarenes “Israel-hating residents whose place is in Gaza” and their city “a nest of terror in the heart of the Galilee”.

Although neither Gapso nor the government has published census figures to clarify the city’s current demographic balance, most estimates suggest that at least a fifth of Upper Nazareth’s residents are Palestinian. The city’s council chamber also now includes Palestinian representatives.

Christmas trees “offensive to Jewish eyes”

But Gapso is not alone in his trenchant opposition to making even the most cursory nod towards multiculturalism. The city’s chief rabbi, Isaiah Herzl, has refused to countenance a single Christmas tree in Upper Nazareth, arguing that it would be “offensive to Jewish eyes”.

That view, it seems, reflects the official position of the country’s rabbinate. In so far as they are able, the rabbis have sought to ban Christmas celebrations in public buildings, including in the hundreds of hotels across the country.

A recent report in the Haaretz newspaper, on an Israeli Jew who grows Christmas trees commercially, noted in passing: “Hotels – under threat of losing kashrut certificates – are prohibited by the rabbinate from decking their halls in boughs of holly or, heaven forbid, putting up even the smallest of small sparkly Christmas tree in the corner of the lobby.”

In other words, the rabbinate has been quietly terrorizing Israeli hotel owners into ignoring Christmas by threatening to use its powers to put them out of business. Denying a hotel its kashrut (kosher) certificate would lose it most of its Israeli and foreign Jewish clientele.

Few mayors or rabbis find themselves in the uncomfortable position of needing to go public with their views on the dangers of Christmas decorations. In Israel, segregation between Jews and Palestinians is almost complete. Even most of the handful of mixed cities are really Jewish cities with slum-like ghettoes of Palestinians living on the periphery.

Apart from Upper Nazareth, the only other “mixed” place where Palestinian Christians are to be found in significant numbers is Haifa, Israel’s third largest city. Haifa is often referred to as Israel’s most multicultural and tolerant city, a title for which it faces very little competition.

Non-Jewish New Year celebrations “seriously forbidden”

“It is a seriously forbidden to hold any event at the end of the calendar year that is connected with or displays anything from the non-Jewish festivals.” (Letter from Haifa rabbinate)
 

But the image hides a dirtier reality. A recent letter from Haifa’s rabbinate came to light in which the city’s hotels and events halls were reminded that they must not host New Year’s parties at the end of this month (the Jewish New Year happens at a different time of year). The hotels and halls were warned that they would be denied their kashrut licences if they did so.

“It is a seriously forbidden to hold any event at the end of the calendar year that is connected with or displays anything from the non-Jewish festivals,” the letter states.

After the letter was publicized on Facebook, Haifa’s mayor, Yona Yahav, moved into damage limitation mode, overruling the city’s rabbinical council on 23 December and insisting that parties would be allowed to go ahead. Whether Yahav has the power to enforce his decision on the notoriously independent-minded rabbinical authorities is still uncertain.

But what is clear is that there is plenty of religious intolerance verging on hatred being quietly exercised against non-Jews, mostly behind the scenes so as not to disturb Israel’s “Jewish and democratic” image or outrage the millions of Christian tourists and pilgrims who visit Israel each year.  

River to Sea Uprooted Palestinian  
The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of this Blog!

Jerusalem Arab-Free in 2015

The Capital of Palestine: Arab-Free in 2015

In 2010, the Israeli government set a precedent by ordering the expulsion of four Hamas Members of the Palestinian Legislative Council. The expulsion orders were based solely on their political activities. This comes under the Loyalty Law that will soon be effective on a wider scale.

A Palestinian demonstrator lies next to his national flag to block a road during a protest against the confiscation of Palestinian land to expand Jewish settlements in the West Bank village of Nabi Saleh near Ramallah on 31 August 2012. (Photo: AFP – Abbas Momani)

 

By: Maath Musleh

 

Published Tuesday, September 4, 2012

 

The Israeli Government is racing against time in a bid to put the finishing touches on its plan to annex and Judaize East Jerusalem. Palestinians represent roughly 58 per cent of the residents of East Jerusalem today. The Israeli plans in place aim to decrease the percentage of Palestinians in East Jerusalem to about 10 percent.

Israel has been determined to force irreversible facts on ground since day one of the occupation. On 10 June 1967, the Israeli government demolished the Moroccan quarter next to the Western Wall to make a public space for Jewish worshipers, destroying 135 historic residential buildings.

 

In 1980, Israel officially declared the annexation of East Jerusalem by passing the Jerusalem Law in the Knesset, declaring all Jerusalem, West and East, as the united capital of Israel. The United Nations Security Council condemned this declaration in its resolution 478. This disapproval did not stop Israel from freely pursuing its goals.
 

The mastermind behind the Israeli plans for Jerusalem is former-mayor Teddy Kollek. The strategy he devised consists of two parts: seizing the land and driving out the Palestinians.
 

The Israeli government seized the lands of East Jerusalem through creating the Law of Absentees, the building of settlements and the Apartheid wall. Demographic changes were also influenced by the increase of Jewish settlers in East Jerusalem. The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS) estimated 267,643 settlers in East Jerusalem living in 26 settlements end-of-2011.

As Israel annexed East Jerusalem, the state laws applied to the city. The Israeli government used the Absentees Property Law to seize vast areas of Palestinian land. This law had been passed in 1950 in a bid to legalize the acquisition of the lands of the Palestinian refugees expelled in 1947 and 1948.

In an interview with Al-Akhbar, Ziad Hammouri, director of the Jerusalem Center for Social & Economic Rights (JCSER) said:

“The Israeli government has confiscated about 86 percent of the Palestinian land in East Jerusalem since the occupation.” The mass confiscations limited the expansion of the Palestinian neighborhoods and villages in Jerusalem.

The Apartheid Wall was built in a way to annex empty land to Jerusalem. In some cases, inhibited areas were annexed, claiming the land while rejecting the citizens. Al-Walajeh, a village south of Jerusalem, is an example.

The Israeli government annexed vast areas of land in Walajeh and the houses on it. Currently, many Palestinians are living in their own houses “illegally” [according to Israeli laws] in the annexed areas. The same happened in areas in Anata and Beit Jala.

Jan de Jong, a geo-strategic planner at the Palestinian Academic Society for the Study of International Affairs (PASSIA), said in an interview: “The Israeli government is working on drastically enlarging the settlements in Jerusalem.”

“The ring [Apartheid Wall] around Jerusalem is basically completed. You will be surprised to see how far the plans have already advanced…The old Oslo map might be changed,” added Jan de Jong.

Demographic Control

According to PASSIA research, the Palestinian population in East Jerusalem decreased by 18.8 percent within the first weeks of the occupation. Within two years of the occupation, the percentage of Palestinians in East Jerusalem dropped from 100 percent to only 67.2 percent. In 2011 it dropped to only 58 percent (382,041 Palestinians).

 

After the annexation of East Jerusalem, Jerusalemites were given a blue Jerusalem ID based on the Entry into Israel Law. This law was passed in the Knesset in 1952. It regulates the granting of a residency to non-Israeli citizens.

“The mere idea of granting us the blue ID based on this law, as if we are new-comers, means they were prepared to reduce the Palestinian population in Jerusalem at any time,” said Hammouri. According to the law, residency could be revoked in three cases: spending more than seven years abroad, acquiring residency in another country or getting a foreign citizenship.

Between 1967 and 2011, the Israeli government revoked the residency of 14,561 Palestinians in East Jerusalem, according to latest JCSER statistics. A UN High Commissioner for Human Rights report estimated that in 2010, 10,000 Palestinian children in East Jerusalem were unregistered because only one parent is a permanent resident.

Yakir Segev, who holds the East Jerusalem portfolio in the Jerusalem municipality, declared at Hebrew University in January 2010 that the Palestinian neighborhoods behind the separation wall were no longer part of Jerusalem.

Israeli Wall continues to blight Palestinian life says UN report

In December 2011, Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barakat announced that the municipality would soon classify 70,000 citizens of Jerusalem as non-residents, referring to Palestinians living behind the wall. He added that these areas will be under the West Bank civil administration.

“This is a dangerous declaration,” said Hammouri. “It means that Palestinians in these areas will be subjected to the military law.”

 Today, 290,000 Palestinians have the Jerusalem ID. According to Hammouri, between 100 thousand to 120 thousand of those live behind the wall.

“The municipality’s future plans will most probably include getting rid of highly-dense Palestinian neighborhoods in Jerusalem that are currently within the wall,” he added. “This plan will include Essawiyeh, Sur Baher, Im Tuba and Anata.”

The tens of thousands of Palestinians whose residency will be revoked will be considered Absentees according to the Israeli law. Subsequently, all the properties they own in Jerusalem will be confiscated by the state.

In 1995, The Israeli government introduced the concept of “Center of Life,” circumventing the Entry into Israel Law. “The Center of Life concept means that you are required to prove continuous residency in Jerusalem for at least two years,” said Hammouri. “The concept is vague. The government can define it in any way it wants.”

The Sharon Land-Grab Wall splitting Abu Deis Neighborhood in occupied East Jerusalem (Khalil Abu Arafeh, Alquds, 8/27/03).

Through building the Apartheid wall, the Israeli government has already managed to get rid of many densely populated Palestinian villages and neighborhoods such as Abu Deis, Shuafat, Qalandia and others. Nonetheless, they remain under the jurisdiction of the Israeli municipality of Jerusalem. In these neighborhoods, there is an estimated 100,000 Palestinians who still hold the blue Jerusalem residency ID.

Palestinian residents of the neighborhoods that are just behind the wall spend most of their day in the City [inside the wall]. They come for work or education.

“Because at the end of the day they sleep at home behind the wall, their ‘center of life’ is not considered Jerusalem,” said Hammouri.

In areas far from the wall [within the borders of the municipality of Jerusalem], Palestinians carrying Jerusalem IDs pay full taxes and receive medical and national insurance from the Israeli government. Governmental transactions are processed in special offices designated by the municipality inside a check point’s complex.

 

In early 2011, the municipality of Jerusalem stopped requiring some residents of these areas to pay Arnona tax. Paying the Arnona tax is pre-condition to prove that their center of life is in Jerusalem. “These special governmental offices designated at check points are tricky,” said Hammouri. “The government uses them to collect data on Palestinians living behind the wall and subsequently revoking their residency under what their Center of Life concept.”

In early 2012, the Israeli government introduced a new magnetic card that replaces the current blue IDs. Currently, acquiring the card is optional. In two years time it will become obligatory for all Israeli citizens and Jerusalem residents.

This magnetic card contains biometric information, tax records, movement [between Jerusalem and the West Bank], records and other information. Hammouri expects that in the near future Jerusalemites will be required to apply for permits in order to enter the West Bank. “They will declare all checkpoints as international crossing points,” said Hammouri.

Starting November 2011, Jerusalemites were permitted to carry their Jerusalem IDs abroad. Palestinians from East Jerusalem are required to deposit their IDs in Allenby Bridge before they leave the country. Hammouri predicts that Jerusalemites living abroad will not be granted the new magnetic card and the blue IDs they carry will be no more than a useless piece of paper.

The Ghost of Jerusalem

The emptying of Jerusalem from its residents is happening in a “soft” manner. The Israeli government does not physically expel Palestinians; the revoking of residency is happening in stages. As time progresses, thousands of Jerusalemites will be banned from entering the city.

Hamas MP Mohammed Abu Teir warned in 2010 that the expulsion order he received was the first in a series of orders that will see the expulsion of 315 politically active Palestinians in Jerusalem.

“In the near future, politically active Palestinians in Jerusalem will be expelled under the Loyalty Law,” said Hammouri. “It is one of the most ridiculous laws. They want us to be loyal to our occupiers.”

“Meanwhile, you will dream and live a fantasy that you are a Jerusalemite with an ID,” said Mahdi Abdel Hadi, head and founder of PASSIA. “But it will have no value because you are not part of the Israeli system.”

 

In efforts to pursue their plans undisturbed, the Israeli government is “drugging” Palestinians. The restrictions on entering Jerusalem during this Ramadan were eased in an unprecedented way since the eruption of the Second Intifada in 2000. Ma’an News Agency reported that the Israeli government granted around 150,000 Palestinians permits to enter Jerusalem in Eid al-Fitr. Even employees of Palestinian security forces, who were previously banned from getting permits, were granted permits. Palestinians who had a security ban in their files were granted permits despite the security ban.

“Israelis are enjoying 100 percent security in the West Bank and Jerusalem,” said Mahdi. Palestinians are being “domesticated,” lulled into accepting the Israeli reality for years to come. Currently, the Israeli government is testing the waters of the Palestinians reaction. We are in the experimental phase of the Israeli plans for Jerusalem.

The Israeli infrastructure was built on the determination never to withdraw from East Jerusalem. In 2011, Israel finished building the light train in Jerusalem. The track of the light train connects settlements in East Jerusalem to the center of West Jerusalem. The main highway that connects Jerusalem to Tel Aviv, “Road 1”, crosses portions of lands occupied in 1967 [Latrun Area].

The Guardian published in March 2009 an EU report that says: “Israeli ‘facts on the ground’ – including new settlements, construction of the barrier, discriminatory housing policies, house demolitions, restrictive permit regime and continued closure of Palestinian institutions – increase Jewish Israeli presence in East Jerusalem, weaken the Palestinian community in the city, impede Palestinian urban development and separate East Jerusalem from the rest of the West Bank.”

The 2010 statistics of the Israeli National Insurance Institute says that 78 percent of Palestinians in Jerusalem are below the poverty line. Today, there are 20,000 standing demolition orders for Palestinian houses and installations in East Jerusalem.

At this rate, within two years there will be a minimal Palestinian presence in Jerusalem. Palestinian negotiators will be faced with new facts on ground that make it impossible to reach an acceptable agreement on the status of Jerusalem. The Israeli government continues to stall to buy time to finish its plans, while the international community plays along and their only actions are ink on paper.

 

River to Sea Uprooted Palestinian  
The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of this Blog!

Why Yasser Arafat is back in news?

Posted on July 9, 2012 |

“By Way Of Deception, Thou Shalt Do War,” Israeli Mossad’s motto.

The recent the pro-USrael Al-Jazeera investigation into the death of PLO president Yasser Arafat (d. 2004), has claimed that Arafat could have been poisoned using elevated levels of a radioactive isotope (Polonium 210) found in his belongings. Arafat’s belongings were examined by the Institute of Radiation Physics in Lausanne, Switzerland.

Arafat’s widow, Suha Arafat, a Catholic born in the West Bank in 1963 – claims that the belongings were put in a secure room at her attorney’s office in Paris after Arafat’s death and stayed there until Al-Jazeera approached the lab on her behalf at the beginning of this year. Watch video below.

The current PA president Mahmoud Abbas, a USraeli double agent, met France’s Jewish president President Francois Hollande to discuss the new finding. His negotiator, Saeb Erekat, called for the exhumation of Yasser Arafat’s body for examination to be conducted by a medical team appointed by the Arab League that is controlled by pro-USrael Saudi Arabia and Qatar.

The Zionist-controlled mainstream media is trying its best to prove that Yasser Arafat was an anti-USrael Palestinian terrorist who could have been poisoned by Mossad as it killed former KGB colonel Alexander Litvinenko. However, beyond the several ‘hero myths’ surrounding Yasser Arafat – in reality, he was no better than Mahmoud Abbas. He let Israel grab more Palestinian land through ‘negotiations’ than the Jewish army could have captured by force.

Jeffrey Blankfort, an American Jewish writer, author and human-rights activist, sort of agrees with me.

 “Having been a major “asset” for the Israelis for years, delivering the land of Palestine to Oslo, apparently the reason behind their placing $8 million a month in his personal bank account afterward, they had nothing to gain by killing him. People who didn’t know better believed the charade about him being a “prisoner” in his Ramallah compound when there was not a single Israeli in sight and from which he could have walked out at any time and the same ones have believed that he was a “hero” and “leader of his people” rather than what he was, a traitor and collaborator. Indeed, the Israelis helped to maintain the fiction. Whenever the people of the WB, who had no love for him, began to complain about the undemocratic practices of the PA, the Israelis would come to his aid by “threatening” him and, as anticipated, the Palestinians would put aside their complaints and rally around him,”he wrote.

However, Alan Hart, a British television journalist, documentary-maker and author of Yasser Arafat’s biography, ‘Arafat: A Political Biography’, paints a different picture of the late Fatah leader. Alan wrote an open letter to newly elected President Barack Obama, in which he informed Obama that Hamas, Hizbullah and Iran are not the real evildoers in the Middle East – it’s Israel.
 He also claimed in the letter that Arafat was “most probably the first victim of Israeli biological warfare”.
Alan Hart told Obama that Hamas, Hizbullah and Syria don’t need arm-twisting by Tehran to make peace with Israel. They will all be happy if Israel decides tomorrow to withdraw to pre-1967 borders and declare Jerusalem capital of both Israel and Palestinian state. Even though “Iran’s preferred solution is the complete de-Zionisation of Palestine, otherwise known as the One State Solution – one secular, democratic state in which Arabs and Jews enjoyed equal political, other civil and human rights“.

Judging by the past records of Al-Jazeera and its owner, the Qatar ruling al-Thani family’s (mere implementer of US-Israeli policies in the Middle East) against Qadaffi, Hizbullah, Afghanistan, Iran and Syria – this new ‘revelation’ is most probably meant to provide an excuse to the Jewish army to force the native Palestinians out of the West Bank and Gaza Strip and achieve Zionism’s old dream of Eretz Yisrael for Jews only.

The Zionist regime believes that with bloody foreign insurgency going on in Syria which has spilled-over to neighboring Turkey, Lebanon and Egypt – Hamas has been isolated from its supporters and therefore, it’s the best chance to solve Israel’s Arab demographic problem.

In case you missed it

• Alan Hart Seconding Yasser Abed Rabbo’s Call: Yes indeed, show us all the map!
• Saudi King Abdullah Should invite Netanyahu to Riyadh
• Palestinians versus the Samson option blackmail
• Time to close the Palestinian file
• Annual Nakba Commemoration Dinner Speech – Carton added

River to Sea Uprooted Palestinian  
The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of this Blog!

Israel: As seen by an Israeli General’s son

Posted on February 27, 2012

“Israel is not an occupation. It’s the ethnic-cleansings of the native Palestinians,” Miko Peled, son of Israeli Gen. Matti Peled and brother of Professor Nurit Peled-Elhanan. Miko Peled is a former Israeli soldier. Last year Miko gave an interview to the Alternate Focus describing his experiences as a young soldier in the Jewish army. He also describes a confrontation with the same army on a recent visit to Israel and the West Bank. Watch the video below.

Both Miko, an Israeli-American citizen, and his sister, Nurit, are among the few courageous Israeli Jews who those born and raised in committed Zionist Jewish families – have the moral courage to challenge Israel’s official Hasbara (propaganda) lies about Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims. Their grandfather, Dr. Avraham Katsnelson, sang Israeli anthem on Israel’s unilateral declaration of a state in May 1948 and their father Gen. Matti Peled was a commanding officer during 1967 war. Later both of them became committed to building a single democratic state in occupied Palestine for the foreign Jews and the native Palestinian Muslims and Christians.

A former soldier in Israel Occupation Force (IOF), Miko has turned into peace-activist. His passionate memoir, ‘The General’s Son: Journey of an Israeli in Palestine‘ is expected to be at stores this Spring. Incidently, Miko Peled’s experience living in Israel’s racist society and a country ruled by Zionazi leaders – is not much different than my blogger friend – Israeli-born Gilad Atzmon, who has documented his views on Israel and Judaism in his controversial book, ‘The Wandering Who? A Study Of Jewish Identity Politics‘.

Miko Peled’s favorite story from the Bible is: “The Bible tells us a great story of the patriarch Abraham willing to sacrifice his beloved son, Isaac to prove his faith. At the moment of truth, when Abraham was about to kill his son an angel appeared telling Abraham not to harm the boy. In the Koran, Abraham is about to sacrifice Ishmael to the same God and the angel of God appears telling him not to harm his beloved son, Ishmael. The moral of the story is quite clear: Neither Israelis or Palestinians are called to sacrifice their sons and daughters to war, in fact, whether we are believers or not we are all called by our God or our conscience to care for our children so that they may live in peace and grow up as the equals that they are”.

Miko’s sister, Dr. Nurit Peled-Elhanan, in her address at the European Union in 2005, told the Islamophobe western delegates: “The so-called free world is affraid of the Muslim womb“.

River to Sea Uprooted Palestinian  

The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of this Blog!

Lifting ban on Palestinian spouses is "national suicide": Israel court

Published Thursday, January 12, 2012

Updated 2.21pm: Israel’s Supreme Court has rejected constitutional challenges to a law that makes it more difficult for Palestinians to get permission to live with their Israeli spouses inside Israel.

Israel’s parliament approved a law in 2003 that severely limits the ability of Palestinians to gain Israeli citizenship through marriage to an Israeli national.

Civil rights organizations and Arab rights advocates filed the appeal in 2007.

The ruling was passed with a narrow majority, with six judges voting in favor of maintaining the law late Wednesday, while five were against.

“Human rights are not a prescription for national suicide,” Justice Asher Grunis writes in the majority position.

Israeli rights groups and parliamentarians criticized the court ruling that prevents Palestinians married to Arab Israelis from obtaining Israeli citizenship or residency.

In contrast, the ruling was welcomed from Israel’s rightwing.

“It is a dark day for the protection of human rights and for the Israeli High Court,” attorneys Dan Yakir and Oded Feller from the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) said in a statement.
ACRI was one of three rights groups that had appealed to the High Court over a law preventing the Palestinian spouses of Israeli citizens from obtaining either Israeli citizenship or residency.
At present, Palestinian men over 35 and women over 25 married to Israeli citizens can only obtain short-term permits to be in Israel.

They have limited permission to work, but the permits must be regularly reviewed and they get no social benefits.

Arab MP Jamal Zahalka, of the Balad party, said the court “had failed the test of justice.”
“This decision will encourage the racist groups in the Knesset (parliament) to enact more anti-Arab, anti-democratic and anti-human rights laws,” he warned.

“The court’s ruling pours oil on the fire of racism burning in the Knesset and removes any fear that the Supreme Court will repeal laws on grounds of unconstitutionality,” he added.
Mohammed Barakeh, an Arab MP with the Hadash party, said the ruling proved a “wave of racism” was sweeping through Israeli institutions.

“This law, which differentiates between people in a repulsive, racist fashion, sets standards for an individual’s personal life and denies Arabs their right to choose their life partner,” he said.
Arab citizens form roughly 20 percent of Israel’s population, not including approximately 4 million Palestinians living in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and the besieged Gaza Strip.

Arab and Jewish populations are relatively even when considering the entire territory of mandate Palestine, adding to Israeli anxieties of a demographic time bomb.
Israel’s staunchly right-wing government is determined to retain the Jewish character of the state, much to the detriment of Arab citizens within the country, and millions of Palestinians under Israeli occupation.

A further 4 million Palestinians reside in refugee camps in neighboring states, descendants of the great exodus following the creation of the state of Israel in 1948.

Hamas and several members of Fatah still insist on the right of return of Palestinian refugees, which would result in a clear Arab majority.

Israel objects to the right of return, fearing an Arab majority would undermine the Jewish character of the state.

Arab citizens within Israel are often subject to discrimination, with the latest Supreme Court decision further adding to their restrictions.

Palestinian Israelis still retain links to Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, with marriages still common between Palestinians throughout their native land.

Arabs in Israel are remnants of a Palestinian population that were either expelled or fled their homes during Israel’s violent creation.
(Al-Akhbar, AFP, AP)

River to Sea Uprooted Palestinian

The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of this Blog!

The September entitlement: Behind the headlines

The Arab-Israeli conflict can’t really be resolved without one side suffering a final historical victory while the other side suffering a final historical defeat.

Comment:
In other words Nothing but Full Liberation
The September entitlement: Behind the headlines

By Khalid Amayreh in occupied Palestine

[ 07/09/2011 - 11:11 PM ]

As it looks now, the Palestinian Authority (PA) seems fairly determined to formally ask the United Nations to recognize “Palestine” within the borders of the 4th of June, 1967, as a member-state of the international organization.

So far, as many as 140 states have signaled their willingness to support the Palestinian UN membership bid. This fact alone can be viewed as a great symbolic diplomatic victory for the Palestinians and a dismal diplomatic failure for Israel. How this victory will manifest itself on the ground is an entirely different matter.

Israel has been trying rather desperately to enlist as many countries as possible to thwart the expected Palestinian move at the UN. However, it seems that by now Israeli efforts are facing stiff resistance in so many capitals that Israeli diplomats, including the Israeli envoy to the UN, have conceded defeat in this regard.

This doesn’t mean at all that the apartheid state will surrender tomorrow and come to terms with legitimate and internationally-recognized Palestinian rights to freedom and self-determination.

Far from it, Israel will try to manipulate and thoroughly exploit every conceivable American leverage to force the PA, whose financial survival depends to a large extent on American and European aid, to either reconsider its plans at the UN or succumb to Israeli dictates and blackmailing tactics, e.g. by pledging that the final borders of the prospective Palestinian entity would only be decided through peace negotiation with the Jewish state.

Needless to say, such a pledge by the Ramallah leadership, regardless of how exactly would be worded, would spell disaster for Palestinian aspirations and rights since it would effectively grant the Zionist entity a veto power and a final say over the shape and character of the would-be state.

Israel, as we all know, considers the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip disputed rather than occupied land in contravention to international law and numerous UN resolutions.

Hence, giving Israel a right to decide the borders of the Palestinian state would be tantamount to accepting the Israeli narrative, at least de facto.

So far, the Ramallah leadership has successfully resisted American efforts to cajole or force the PA to reconsider its UN membership bid.

This doesn’t mean, however, that the Obama administration will finally decide to be level-headed and come to terms with Palestinian aspirations.

At the end of the day, President Obama realizes that his administration is being handcuffed by all sorts of Jewish shackles and clutches, and that in case he refrained from swallowing the Jewish bait, hook, line and sinker, he would be committing a pre-election political suicide and consequently presenting the Republicans, including the Nazi-like Tea Party what could be a decisive propaganda victory.

Hence, it is likely that Obama will go to any extent in order to demonstrate and reassert his loyalty to Israel, if only to enhance his re-election chances and ward off vitriolic attacks by the shipyard dogs of the Jewish-controlled media.

* “Arab and Muslim Revolution”

Obama, like all other political animals, might even decide to sacrifice American national interests, such as alienating Arab revolutions* (WHICH REVOLUTION???)and Muslim public opinions, for the sake of appeasing a few Jewish Robber Barons who would not hesitate to blackmail the American people to give Israel the last American dollar and shed the last American drop of blood for the sake of satisfying the vagaries of Jewish territorial expansion in the Middle East.

In light, the Palestinian people, including the Ramallah leadership, will have to show real determination to withstand and defy American and other pressure. I know this won’t be easy especially when people’s livelihood is affected.

However, getting our freedom from a manifestly criminal occupying power that seeks our national obliteration and extinction from the face of earth ought to be our paramount priority.

Unfortunately, the PA leadership is not reputed for its iron-clad steadfastness and resilience, especially in the face of financial pressure. This is why the PA must be forewarned that backtracking is an ultimate red line as far as the Palestinian people are concerned.

As to Israel , it is obvious that the Zionist state will behave characteristically concerning a possible recognition by the UN of a Palestinian state and the granting of such a state full UN membership. This, at least from the view point of international law, would transform the Palestinian cause from a people languishing under foreign military occupation to a UN member-state under foreign military occupation. Needless to say, Israel dreads this prospect very much.

Such a development would cost Israel a lot of diplomatic isolation and make the Jewish state look more a pariah state and less a legitimate member of the international community.

Non the less, with Israel having a decidedly fascist government, tightly controlled by the gurus of Jewish fascism and religious fundamentalism who would do the unthinkable for the sake of seeing Jewish nationalist and religious whims come true, it is more likely that Israel will take draconian measures either to thwart Palestinian aspirations or torment and savage Palestinians for daring to challenge Israel’s mighty power, especially Israel’s de facto hegemony over American politics and policies.

There are several scenarios that Israel could resort to in case the Palestinians showed unflinching determination to cross the Rubicon, once and for all.

Dayton Army

First, Israel could re-impose its direct occupation all over the occupied territories by dismantling the PA government. 

However, this is unlikely to happen since Israel would lose a strategically valuable asset, namely the existence of a quasi-national Palestinian authority carrying out the functions of the occupying power while leaving nearly all the basic assets of the Israeli occupation unscathed.

Second, Israel could take a rash decision to annex the West Bank. This scenario is also unlikely since the addition of several million non-Jews to Israel would be a demographic nightmare as the Jewish state would then lose its Jewish identity.

Israel could try to circumvent this prospect by instituting formal or informal apartheid (as is the situation now). However, maintaining apartheid would be a disastrous choice for the PR-conscious worldwide Jewish community.

The third and most likely scenario is that Israel will simply try to cling to the status quo for as long as possible in the hope of gaining more time to build more settlements and especially in order to frustrate the Palestinians into entering into open-ended negotiations with an insolent Israel which would lead to the Palestinians surrendering to Israeli dictates.

Never the less, and given the facts on the ground, it is nearly impossible for any prospective Israeli government to agree to return to the borders of the 4th of June, 1967, which would necessitate the dismantling of numerous Jewish colonies, viewed by large segments of Israeli Jews as the eye apple of Israel and penultimate step before Jewish redemption.

This leaves us with the uncomfortable fact, namely that the Arab-Israeli conflict can’t really be resolved without one side suffering a final historical victory while the other side suffering a final historical defeat.

River to Sea Uprooted Palestinian

Reasonable conjecture on Israel’s changing demographics

By Lawrence Davidson

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20 June 2011

Lawrence Davidson considers why a growing number of Israeli Jews are voting – or preparing to vote – with their feet by emigrating or acquiring foreign passports, and views a possible future scenario where the majority of Jews remaining in Israel are racist, ideologically-motivated religious fanatics.

”…as Zionism “purifies” itself, gets rid of all those who would question it or compromise it, it must take its remaining adherents into the realm of unadorned horror. We should all be afraid of this. Very afraid.” (Lawrence Davidson)

Israeli Jews are voting with their feet

If the historical goal of the state of Israel is to provide the world’s Jews with a secure national home, a place of refuge in a world of real or potential anti-Semitism, it seems to have failed. It has failed not because this writer says so, but because an increasing number of its own Jewish citizens say so.

There have been studies originating both in Israel and abroad that show “as many as half of the Jews living in Israel will consider leaving … if in the next few years the current political and social trends continue”. This finding is in addition to the fact that yerida, or emigration out of Israel, has long been running at higher numbers than aliyah, or immigration into the country. “ According to the Israel Central Bureau of Statistics, as of 2005, 650,000 Israelis have left the country for over one year and not returned”. The great majority of these were Jews. In addition, polls show that at least 60 per cent and as high as 80 per cent of remaining Israeli Jews “sympathize with those who leave the country”.

Among those who stay, there is the conviction that the safe thing is to have a second passport issued by the United States or a European country. As the Haaretz reporter Gideon Levy puts it, “if our forefathers dreamt of an Israeli passport, there are those among us who are now dreaming of a foreign passport”.

At present the United States has issued over half a million passports to Israelis and a quarter million additional applications are pending. Germany runs second with 100,000 passports given to Israeli Jews and 7,000 new ones issued yearly.

“…when you combine the growth in emigration with the desire for foreign passports you get a different sort of message. Planning to possibly emigrate on a foreign passport implies that there are a number of Israelis who foresee the demise of the state. In other words, they foresee a day when the Israeli passport will be worthless.”

Why the scramble for foreign passports? Well, according to Levy, “the excuses are strange and diverse, but at the base of them all are unease and anxiety, both personal and national. The foreign passport has become an insurance policy against a rainy day. It turns out there are more and more Israelis who are thinking that day may eventually come.”
There are two prevailing explanations for this phenomenon. The first is that it reflects the conviction that the safe haven that Zionism was suppose to create is not safe at all. This is the position taken by the University of Pennsylvania political scientist Ian Lustick. According to him,

The danger for the Jewish state is that, given the choice between convincing Middle Easterners that Israel can be a good neighbour and leaving the neighbourhood, more and more Israelis are attracted to the latter… The logically extreme expression of escape is, of course, emigration.

Lustick is supported by Stephen Walt, Professor of International Relations at Harvard University, who suggests that “the Zionist ideal is losing hold within Israel itself” because the Israeli government “endlessly delays the [peace] process”.

The second explanation is that suggested by the editors of the Jerusalem Post who cite interviews with “hundreds of Israeli expats in North America”. Their conclusion is that when Israelis go abroad and stay, it is due to economic, and not political or security reasons.

Actually, the explanation offered by the Jerusalem Post is suspect. If the desire to emigrate is motivated mainly by economics, the demand for second passports would not be necessary. Israelis travel freely in the United States and the economic interconnections between the two countries make it relatively easy for Israeli Jews to get “green cards” to stay and work. This is probably true in some other parts of the West as well, as long as you are not tagged as a war criminal.

However, when you combine the growth in emigration with the desire for foreign passports you get a different sort of message. Planning to possibly emigrate on a foreign passport implies that there are a number of Israelis who foresee the demise of the state. In other words, they foresee a day when the Israeli passport will be worthless. Given the fact that emigration is something of an ideological sin for Zionists, it is no surprise that some of the emigrants tell pollsters their motivation is economic. It sounds better. But in the end it hardly matters, leaving for whatever reason is the equivalent of voting with your feet.

Not without its costs

This trend is no doubt encouraging to the Palestinians and their supporters, but it is not without its costs. If we assume no change and project this development into the future, say 20 years or so, what will Jewish Israel look like?

“In a population shorn of its middle class, there will be no real political opposition and the right-wing parties will become ever more aggressive against what they regard as anti-Zionist elements within the Jewish population.”

First, the ratio of Jews to Israeli Arabs within the Green Line [i.e. the pre-1967-war borders] will certainly shrink. That is, the Arab population, which already has a higher birth rate than the Jewish one, will grow all the more rapidly, making up an increasing percentage of the population. Factor in the occupied territories and there will be more Palestinians than Jews.
One can, of course, say that this is as it should be. The notion that Palestine must have a Jewish majority has always been a perverse one. Nonetheless, as a consequence of the changing demographics, it is almost certain that Palestinian-Jewish Israeli relations, which have never been good, will get rapidly and proportionately worse. Why so? The second point answers this question.

Second, of the Jews who remain in Israel, an increasing percentage will be ideological fanatics. Take a look at the religiously-motivated, armed and aggressive settlers on the West Bank and then imagine them, along with those in black hats and pa’ot (unshaven sideburns), as making up 60 or 70 per cent of the Jewish population. That is a masada majority who will be willing to “defend” their way of life in all of Palestine not due to patriotic propaganda, but out of real racial conviction and religious zeal.

Third, the other remaining Jews, the ones not necessarily fanatical, will be mostly docile. These are the ones who cannot get the foreign passports, who have no relatives abroad to vouch for them, and not enough resources to bankroll a new start even if they could find another place to go. They will follow what orders they are given by their increasingly fanatical government for the sake of their jobs, their pensions, to put bread on the table, because their peers are doing so, etc.

Fourth, ideological fanatics confronting their worse nightmare, in this case the “demographic holocaust”, are not going to be devotees of democracy and human rights. Israel’s government will become more and more dictatorial. We can already see this in today’s Israel where the Knesset, presently controlled by ideological parties, is in the process of passing anti-democratic laws. This may be just the beginning. In a population shorn of its middle class, there will be no real political opposition and the right-wing parties will become ever more aggressive against what they regard as anti-Zionist elements within the Jewish population. Organizations such as B’tselem, Gush Shalom, Rabbis for Human Rights, the Israeli Committee Against Home Demolitions and the like will be shut down. Supporters of these groups will become silent or go into exile, as will the small number of Israeli academics who now stand against government policy. If they do not, they will likely end up in jail.

Conclusion

“In today’s Israel you can still tell the difference between those Jewish Israelis who want a just and humane settlement with the Palestinians and those who do not. If things keep going as they are now there will come a time when it will be much harder to make that distinction.”

This, of course, is just conjecture. However, it is reasonable conjecture. And so we really ought to think about this. In today’s Israel you can still tell the difference between those Jewish Israelis who want a just and humane settlement with the Palestinians and those who do not. If things keep going as they are now there will come a time when it will be much harder to make that distinction. In other words, when the everyday man and women just looking for economic or physical safety, just looking for a better place to raise their kids, packs up and leaves, the “neutral zone” of everyday life vanishes with them. Society becomes a place where, as George Bush once put it, you’re with us or against us. And, if to be with us means to be a racist, a supporter of the God-chosen people and an active enemy of the inferior and doomed Amalekites, then that is how everyone still in residence will behave.

When and if that time comes, how are we on the outside, and especially those of us who are Jews, going to react to an Israel where those who seek a just peace are either silenced, imprisoned or exiled? What do you do with a society where everyone must support injustice or be themselves condemned as traitors or criminals? Under these circumstances how do you tell the difference between the innocent and the guilty?

This is not a potential scenario unique to Israel’s situation. It has been played out before. The difference is that before the Jews were among the victims and not victimizers. This is what happens when any group gives itself over to a doctrine, be it racial, religious or political, which destroys all notions of common humanity. That is what the prevailing ideology of Israel has done. And, if history remains consistent, as Zionism “purifies” itself, gets rid of all those who would question it or compromise it, it must take its remaining adherents into the realm of unadorned horror. We should all be afraid of this. Very afraid.

Israelis Rush for Second Passports as Palestinians Preparing to Return
River to Sea Uprooted Palestinian

What Bibi Didn’t Say in His Congress Speech

Netanyahu speech to the American congress

“I intend to speak the unvarnished truth because now more than ever what we need is peace” Netanyahu said before he twisted the truth in his speech to the American Congress.

var addthis_product = ‘wpp-257′;var addthis_config = {“data_track_clickback”:true};“Demographic changes … this is may be the most concrete point Netanyahu has come to mention in his whole speech and could very well be the name of the Israeli next game of forestalling any possible agreements in the Mideast talks”

by Dr. Ashraf Ezzat

Something about Netanyahu’s eloquent speech lately to a joint meeting of Congress, which has been interrupted by 29 standing ovations, sounded familiar to me. I don’t mean Netanyahu’s words but the response of his high caliber audience; it seems as if I have seen it before.

As an Egyptian who is not so keen on following much of the American congressional sessions, if any, still this extraordinary joint session of the American Congress with all that public display of candid acquiescence to everything Bibi said, or even thought, reminded me of the similarly eloquent speeches Mubarak used to deliver at the Egyptian parliament for well over 30 years of sordid dictatorship.
And also as an Egyptian I could attest to the fact that the televised sessions of the former president speeches to the Egyptian parliament members ranked high, not on the most viewed political videos but on the funniest ones.

For 30 long years Mubarak has been ranting about his relentless efforts to build a strong democracy where freedoms and the rule of law would be respected where in fact he was sincerely engaged in doing the exact opposite. But still his full house audience of apparently attentive parliamentarians kept on showing their frantic applause and repeated standing ovations to every one of his deceiving talks.
Of course Mubarak has been lying all along and he knew it and may be enjoyed it too, but what about those flocks of parliamentarians and politicians, how could we explain their attitude? Were they lied to, intimated or just hypnotized by the power of the presidential office?

The post- Mubarak probes proved beyond any reasonable doubt that 90% of those then incumbent high statesmen knew for a fact that Mubarak was the scum of the earth and they cheered for him only in gratitude for letting them keep their jobs and for the slim chance they would join in for a tiny slice of the ripped off cake. Oh yes, and the remaining 10% were just plain fools who just happened to hop in for the ride.

Shared values and interests

Haredi, ultra-Orthodox Jews

Going over Bibi’s landmark speech to the congress and trying to recapitulate the main points he stressed in his long speech, the first thing that strikes me as enigmatic and hard to grasp is his assertion that the relation between Israel, or the so called the Jewish state, and the United States is so strong because it is rooted in shared values and interests.

And every time I listen to this assertion, which usually pops up whenever Israel needs another big favor of Uncle Sam, being a foreigner I wonder, what on earth those shared values and interests might be. Are they so exclusively Israeli-American that no other nation on planet earth could hope to subscribe to?

In his speech, the Israeli Prime minister set out by stressing his country’s stand as a democratic “friend of America” in the Middle East, but largely ruled out touching on the issues that are important to Palestinians and their history.

In the warm arms of the US Congress, he somehow managed to get away with alleging that Jewish settlers – living in illegal settlements – in the West Bank and East Jerusalem are not occupiers, that the West Bank (using the biblical designation, Judea and Samaria) is not occupied territory, that a united Jerusalem is the eternal capital of Israel and that Israel should be recognized as “a Jewish state”.

Netanyahu reiterated the same old Israeli-Zionist jazz we have been listening to for years, boasting about the Jew’s historical and spiritual claims to the land.

But were all the senators and congressmen attending the speech aware that modern historians and archeologists had refuted the Biblical narrative of ancient Israelites and their stories of exodus, conquest and a magnificent unified kingdom. In other words, most of the ancient Israelite Biblical history is now more close to being a mere myth than a historical fact that cannot, or better yet shouldn’t be counted upon as historical evidence.

Were they aware, when Netanyahu spoke of giving up parts of the ancestral Jewish homeland, that the Palestinians are more likely to be the true descendants of the ancestral Israelites than those Ashkenazi and Haredi – orthodox- Jews who are in fact immigrants, who fled Eastern and Western Europe following the horrors of the WWII, and whose ancestors just happened to adhere or convert to Judaism centuries ago?

When Benjamin Netanyahu told Congress that Israel is prepared to make “painful compromises” for peace with the Palestinians, including the handover of land they seek for a state, had it crossed the minds of his esteemed audience that the land Mr. Netanyahu was most kind and generously willing to hand over is not Jewish land in the first place under any international law, no matter how biased or manipulated it could get.

Repeating a message he has delivered consistently during his visit to Washington, Netanyahu said “Israel will not return to the indefensible boundaries of 1967 narrow lines because they don’t take into account certain demographic changes that have taken place on the ground over the last 44 years.

Demographic threat, in other words Palestinian Arabs

“Demographic changes” … this is may be the most concrete point Netanyahu has come to mention in his whole speech and could very well be the name of the Israeli next game of forestalling any possible agreements in the Mideast talks.

In 1996, Israel’s population was 5.7 million people; today, that number is 7.75 million. Today, there are 1.59 million Palestinian Arabs in Israel, compared to 1.03 million in 1996.

In my opinion, while the historical, spiritual and political Zionist claims to the disputed land of Palestine are liable to be questioned, doubted or even refuted by professional academics and scholars, demographic changes remain the one robust reality on the ground that defy neglect or negating.

Over the last 6 decades Israel has not only succeeded in actualizing the Zionist’s dream of establishing a statehood for the Jews from all over the world, or the invention of the Jewish people, as the prestigious historian, Shlomo Sand put it, but also managed to turn it into a demographic reality.
while he was getting his, God knows how many, enthusiastic applause and standing ovation for branding Hamas as the Palestinian version of al Qaeda Netanyahu was thrilled the Zionist-controlled main stream media had managed, throughout the last decade, to downplay the world wide accusations pointing the finger at Mossad and its covert role in 9/11 and his own statements of how good it was for Israel.

Avigdor Lieberman

Advising or rather, patronizing Mahmoud Abbas, the PLO leader to break his pact with Hamas, Netanyahu somehow disregarded the fact that he himself had made a political bond with Yisrael Beiteinu, the right-Zionist party that advocates kicking out, or to put it mildly, the transfer of 1948 Palestinian Arabs out of East Jerusalem and the West Bank and moreover appointed its leader, Avigdor Lieberman as his deputy and foreign minister who has been called by western and Israeli media as “neo-fascist, a certified gangster and anti-Arab virulent racist”

It doesn’t make much sense for Netanyahu to order Abbas to break up with Hamas while his coalition government is currently harboring hard-line extremists from both Yisrael Beiteinu and Shas parties who are deemed not only as anti-Arabs but whose highest spiritual leader, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef publicly advocates that Arabs should perish and be wiped off the face of the earth- a virulent hatred that Netanyahu usually dismisses while focusing on the long time israeli propaganda of ” we want peace, but unfortunately there is no one to talk to from the other side”. A pretext that Tel Aviv is bound to fully exploit after the late Palestinian reconciliation deal.

And as Netanyahu was keen to draw the attention to the Israeli demographic reality he never mentioned how a society deeply rooted in modern and civilized American values spoke of the Arabs and Palestinians in particular.

“If Obama wants to know who the true unacceptable partners for peace are, all he has to do is get an English transcript of discussions from the Israeli Knesset (parliament) and read how members from the political right call Arabs “animals” and make all manner of racist slurs against Palestinians” says Aljazeera opinion writer, Lamis Andoni.

And if the world cares to find out who is the intransigent party that is persistently hindering all the declared peace talks and the secret ones as well, all we have to do is to examine the “Palestine papers” leaked by aljazeera that revealed tons of documents exposing generous and extremely painful concessions offered by the Palestinian authority which had been turned down by the Israeli side in the most degrading and humiliating manner.

Over the last 20 years, and as the demographic changes Bibi mentioned has been in the making more kindergartens and primary schools were increasingly in demand. And with the ultra-orthodox Shas party running almost 30% of those primary schools one can imagine the kind of hate speech that is being indoctrinated to Israel kids. As a matter of fact the anti-Arab rhetoric in those primary schools has been so obvious and huge it became a rich material for the Israeli popular comic TV shows.
And since Comedy has to be based on truth, those shows are regarded as a funny way of being serious about Israel’s controversial policies and practices.

YouTube – Veterans Today -Arabs in the Israeli TV comic shows

In his memorable speech to the congress and as he took the stage Netanyahu kept a long legacy of depicting Israel as the utopia of the Middle East alive.

Israeli Demographic changes manifested by non-stop new settelments

As he was elaborating on the long list of values Israel shared with the United States Netanyahu refrained from depicting the other side of Israel with a whole set of its other genuine values, such as segregation, blockade, covert operations and military expansion, that Israel cared to share only with its Mossad and Zionist ideologues.

Touching on any of those unpleasant issues could have carried the risk of tarnishing the glittering utopian image of Israel he was sketching before a joint assembly of American statesmen 90% of whom knew who Netanyahu really was and what he stood for and the remaining 10% just happened to be invited for the free Zionist ride on the Israeli-American campaign to block the UN vote aiming to recognize Palestine as a sovereign state due next September where Israel and America will yet to stand isolated once more against the will of the free world, but what does it matter, after all that what friends who share the same values and interests, are for.

For more articles by Dr. Ashraf Ezzat visit his website

River to Sea Uprooted Palestinian

MASSAD: Are Palestinian children less worthy?

Via A4P

 30May11

by Joseph MAssad

30 May 2011

What is it about Jewish and Arab children that privileges the first and spurns the second in the speeches of President Barack Obama, let alone in the Western media more generally? Are Jewish children smarter, prettier, whiter? Are they deserving of sympathy and solidarity, denied to Arab children, because they are innocent and unsullied by the guilt of their parents, themselves often referred to as “the children of Israel”? Or, is it that Arab children are dangerous, threatening, guilty, even dark and ugly, a situation that can only lead to Arabopaedophobia – the Western fear of Arab children?

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Jewish Innocence

Innocence and childhood are common themes in Western political discourse, official and unofficial. While it is a truism to state that since the end of European colonialism the US and Europe have been, at the official and unofficial levels, friendly to and supportive of the Zionist colonial project and hostile to Palestinians and Arabs in their resistance to Zionism, the expectation would be that a West that insists rhetorically on the “universalism” of its values would show at least a rhetorical commitment to the equality of Arab and Jewish children as victims of the violence visited on the region by Zionist colonialism and the resistance to it.

Yet, the only Western sympathy manifest is to Jewish children as symbols of Zionist and Israeli innocence. This Western sympathy is deployed primarily to denounce Arab guilt, including the guilt of Arab children.

Indeed, the only time Arab children received any sympathy at all in the West was a few years ago when Israeli and US propaganda outlets, official and unofficial alike, mounted a major propaganda campaign to save these children from their barbaric Arab and Palestinian parents, who allegedly trained them to commit violent acts, or who unlovingly placed them in the middle of danger, sacrificing them for their violent political goals.

It was not Israel who was to blame for killing Palestinian children, but the children’s own uncaring and cruel parents who placed them in the path of Israeli Jewish bullets, which left Israeli Jews no choice but to kill them.
This of course is an old Israeli casuistry used to justify Israel’s carnage of Palestinians. Golda Meir had famously articulated the workings of Israel’s Jewish conscience thus: “We can forgive you for killing our sons. But we will never forgive you for making us kill yours.”

In the official discourse of post-World War II US power, Jewish children have been often invoked to illustrate the innocence of Israel, a tradition carried faithfully by Barack Obama’s rhetoric.

Refusing to even acknowledge Arab children as victims of Israel, ( Check The other side of the story) on June 4, 2009, Obama told Arabs in his Cairo speech: “It is a sign of neither courage nor power to shoot rockets at sleeping children, or to blow up old women on a bus. That is not how moral authority is claimed; that is how it is surrendered.” He reiterated this in his May 19, 2011 “winds of change” speech, declaring: “For decades, the conflict between Israelis and Arabs has cast a shadow over the region. For Israelis, it has meant living with the fear that their children could get blown up on a bus or by rockets fired at their homes, as well as the pain of knowing that other children in the region are taught to hate them.”

A Gazan boy sells vegetables in the rain after the Israeli blockade crushed the economy in the coastal territory  [GALLO/GETTY]

Later that week, in his speech to the American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) on May 22, Obama expressed sympathy with the hardship colonising Jews experience while appropriating the lands of the Palestinians: “I saw the daily struggle to survive in the eyes of an eight-year old [Jewish] boy who lost his leg to a Hamas rocket.”
He averred that the US and Israel, presumably unlike Palestinians or Arabs more generally, “both seek a region where families and their children can live free from the threat of violence”.



Endorsing Israel’s illegal occupation of East Jerusalem, he asserted: “We also know how difficult that search for security can be, especially for a small nation like Israel in a tough neighbourhood. I’ve seen it firsthand. When I touched my hand against the Western Wall and placed my prayer between its ancient stones, I thought of all the centuries that the children of Israel had longed to return to their ancient homeland.” Aside from borrowing anti-Black American white racism with the use of terms like “tough neighbourhood” – a term first borrowed by Binyamin Netanyahu to refer to the Middle East over a decade ago – wherein Arabs are the “violent blacks” of the Middle East and Jews are the “peaceful white folks”, Obama’s endorsement of the Israeli claim that East Jerusalem is part of the Jewish homeland is the first such official US endorsement of Israel’s illegal occupation of the city.



Nonetheless, Obama’s attention lay elsewhere, in the fear he expresses of Arab children. He first articulated this fear in his May 19 speech: “The fact is, a growing number of Palestinians live west of the Jordan River.” In his speech to AIPAC three days later, Obama reiterated his fear once more, as the first “fact” and threat that Israel, Jews, and the US must face: “Here are the facts we all must confront. First, the number of Palestinians living west of the Jordan River is growing rapidly and fundamentally reshaping the demographic realities of both Israel and the Palestinian territories.”

This is hardly a new fear, as Israelis have annual conferences, and have developed all kinds of political and military strategies, to deal with their fear of Palestinian children, whom Israel’s President Shimon Peres calls a “demographic bomb” that he wants to defuse. Golda Meir herself once revealed in the early seventies that she could not sleep worrying about the number of Palestinian children being conceived every night.
If children are the future – except that Arab children are a negation of it – then the crux of the argument is simple: Israel can only have a future with more Jewish children and fewer Arab children.

Murdering Arab children



The story of Arab children, and especially Palestinian ones, is not only tragic in the context of Israeli violence, but one that also remains ignored, deliberately marginalised, and purposely suppressed in the US and Western media – and in Western political discourse.



When Zionist terrorists began to attack Palestinian civilians in the 1930s and 1940s, Palestinian children fell victims. The most famous of these attacks include the Zionist blowing up of Palestinian cafes with grenades (such as occurred in Jerusalem on March 17, 1937) and placing electrically timed mines in crowded market places (first used against Palestinians in Haifa on July 6, 1938).

While the violence of the 1930s was the first introduction to the Middle East of such horrific terrorist violence, it is in the 1947-48 Zionist invasion of Palestinian villages and towns that Palestinian children were deliberately not spared. In December 1947, one of the first attacks by the Haganah (the pre-Israel Zionist paramilitary army) first attacks – which would become typical in this period – targeted the Palestinian village of Khisas in the Galilee and killed four Palestinian children. This proved to be a small number compared with the subsequent mass murders awaiting the Palestinians. In the village of Al-Dawayimah, where the Haganah committed a massacre in October 1948, an Israeli army soldier, quoted by Israeli historian Benny Morris, described the scene as such: 

The first [wave] of conquerors killed about 80 to 100 [male] Arabs, women, and children. The children they killed by breaking their heads with sticks. There was not a house without dead… One commander ordered a sapper to put two old women in a certain house… and to blow up the house with them. The sapper refused… The commander then ordered his men to put in the old women and the evil deed was done. One soldier boasted that he had raped a woman and then shot her. One woman, with a newborn baby in her arms, was employed to clean the courtyard where the soldiers ate. She worked a day or two.

In the end they shot her and her baby.Palestinian children were murdered along with adults in April 1948 in the Deir Yassin massacre, to name the most well known slaughter of 1948. This would continue not only during Israel’s wars against Arabs in 1956, 1967, 1973, 1978, 1982, 1996, 2006, and 2008, when thousands of children fell victim to indiscriminate Israeli bombardment, but also in more outright massacres: in Qibya in 1953 where even the school was not spared Israel’s destruction; in Kafr Kassem in 1956 where the Israeli army massacred 46 unarmed Palestinian citizens of Israel, 23 of whom were children. This trend would continue.

Bahr El-Bakr massacre

In April 1970, during the War of Attrition with Egypt, Israel bombed an Egyptian elementary school in Bahr al-Baqar. Of the 130 school children in attendance, 46 were killed, and over 50 wounded, many of them maimed for life. The school was completely demolished. The first Israeli massacre at Qana in Lebanon in 1996 spared no child or adult, and the second massacre in the same village in 2006 did the same – adults aside, 16 children were killed that year.

The number of Palestinian children killed by Israeli soldiers in the first intifada (1987-1993) was 213, not counting the hundreds of induced miscarriages from tear gas grenades thrown inside closed areas targeting pregnant women, and aside from the number of the injured.

The Swedish branch of Save the Children estimated that “23,600 to 29,900 children required medical treatment for their beating injuries in the first two years of the intifada”, one third of whom were children under the age of ten years old. In the same period, Palestinian attacks resulted in the death of five Israeli children. In the second intifada (2000-2004), Israeli soldiers killed more than 500 children with at least 10,000 injured, and 2,200 children arrested.

The televised murder of the Palestinian child Muhammad al-Durra shook the world – but not Israeli Jews, whose government concocted the most outrageous and criminal of stories to exonerate Israel.

In the Israeli attack on Gaza in December 2008, 1,400 Palestinians were killed, of whom 313 were children.

This exhibition of atrocity is not simply about regurgitating the history and present of Israel’s murder of Arab children for the past six decades and beyond – a history well-known across the Arab world – but to demonstrate how obscene Obama’s references to Jewish children are when he insists to Arabs that they must show sympathy with Jewish children, without ever enjoining Jews to show sympathy with the far larger number of Arab children killed by Jews. But Obama himself shows no sympathy with Arab children. Had he attempted to mourn the Arab children who fell and fall victim to Israeli violence at the rate of hundreds, if not thousands, of Arab children to one Jewish child, Arabs might have forgiven him this indiscretion.

Alas, Obama has no place in his heart for Arab children, only for Jewish ones. He even manages to infantilise Israeli Jewish soldiers who kill Palestinians, as nothing short of innocent children whose families miss them. In his AIPAC speech, Obama calls on Hamas “to release Gilad Shalit, who has been kept from his family for five long years”, but not on Israel to release the 6,000 Palestinian political prisoners, who include 300 Palestinian children, languishing in Israel’s dungeons for many more years. Perhaps Obama could have at least mentioned the reports of Israeli soldiers’ torture of detained Palestinian children issued in late 2010 by Israeli human rights groups. In the case of detained Palestinian sixth graders, in addition to being beaten up and deprived of sleep by Israeli soldiers, two thirteen-year old children testified that “the most awful thing that happened, was when the soldiers went to the bathroom, they peed on us and did not use the toilet. One of them videotaped it.” But Obama was not moved by their plight, for they were not Jewish children.

Zionism and Jewish children

Interestingly and unlike Obama, Zionism did not always show similar love towards Jewish children, whom it never flinched from sacrificing for its colonial goals. In the Nazi period, Zionist leaders, for example, protested strongly against granting European Jews refuge in any country other than Palestine. In December 1938, David Ben-Gurion responded to a British offer, in the aftermath of Kristallnacht, to take thousands of German Jewish children directly to Britain by saying: “If I knew it would be possible to save all the children in Germany by bringing them to England, and only half of them by transporting them to Eretz Yisrael (the land of Israel), then I would opt for the second alternative, for we must weigh not only the life of these children but also the history of the people of Israel.”

In November 1940, the Zionists responded to the British-imposed restrictions on Jewish immigration to Palestine, long demanded by the Palestinian people, by blowing up a ship with Jewish civilian passengers in Haifa – killing 242 Jews, including scores of children. For Zionism, Jewish children are as expendable as Palestinian and Arab children, unless they serve its colonial goals. In light of this, it becomes clear that it is not simply the Jewishness or Arabness of children that makes them expendable or not, but their insertion into a political project as figures that can advance its goals or constitute obstacles to them.

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“Inocent” Israeli girls write messages on a shell at a heavy artillery position near Kiryat Shmona, in northern Israel, next to the Lebanese border, Monday, July 17, 2006 [AP]

Israel’s recruitment of Jewish children in paramilitary organisations, which began in 1948, continues apace, and is perhaps best exemplified in its Gadna ["Youth Battalions"] programme, where young Jewish boys and girls are prepared early for their future military service in the most militarised state on earth. 

The most outrageous use of Jewish children, however, would be illustrated when the Israeli army invited them to write messages of hate on the missiles about to be launched against Lebanese children during Israel’s July 2006 invasion of Lebanon. Captured by an Associated Press cameraman, the picture of blond Jewish girls near the Israeli town of Kiryat Shmona writing messages of death to Lebanese children circulated the globe – though it remains unclear if they ever made their way to Obama’s desk. It is important to note that Obama might have met these same blond girls when he visited Kiryat Shmona a few months earlier, in January 2006. He recalled later that the town resembled an ordinary suburb in the US, where he could imagine the sounds of Israeli children “at joyful play just like my own daughters”.

Teaching children to hate



Given this history, not only are Palestinian children guilty of hating Israeli Jews, but also, Obama insists, they have no reason to hate Jews unless their evil elders indoctrinate them to do so. Binyamin Netanyahu himself, in his speech before Congress last week, reiterated Obama’s condemnation of Palestinians who allegedly “continue to educate their children to hate”.

 But what about Israeli Jewish children’s hatred of Arabs? A March 2010 poll by Tel Aviv University found that 49.5 per cent of Israeli Jewish high school students believe Palestinian citizens of Israel should not be entitled to the same rights as Jews in Israel; 56 per cent believe they should not be eligible for election to the Knesset, the Israeli parliament. According to a report in January 2011 in the largest Israeli daily Yediot Aharonot, Jewish teachers in Israel stated that anti-Arab racism among Jewish students reached alarming levels, advocating killing Palestinians. The teachers found graffiti written on school walls and even on exam papers stating “Death To Arabs”. According to the report, a student at a school in Tel Aviv told his teacher during class that his dream is to become a soldier so he can exterminate all Arabs; several students in his class applauded in support of him. This, in no small amount, is the direct result of the racist Israeli school curricula with which Jewish children are regularly indoctrinated.

In his speech to Congress, Prime Minister Netanyahu correctly diagnosed the situation on the ground. He declared: “Our conflict has never been about the establishment of a Palestinian state. It has always been about the existence of the Jewish state.” It is the establishment of a Jewish settler colony that the Palestinians must accept to ensure a future for Jewish children and terminate a future for Palestinian children. Indeed it is precisely the refusal of Arabs to adopt Arabopedophobia that is the biggest impediment to peace in the region. Obama hopes that a Palestinian bantustan could limit the threat that Palestinian children constitute to the nightmare that is “the Jewish and democratic state”. He recognises that the world can no longer claim to support universalism while endorsing Israel’s right to discriminate against non-Jews. In his AIPAC speech, he said as much when he told Israel’s lobby that the entire world, including Asia, Latin America, Europe (and he could have added Africa, which he inexplicably excluded) and the Arab World can no longer tolerate Israel’s institutionalised racism; that America in fact stands alone with Israel today. Clearly, Obama’s love for Jewish children knows no limits. His Arabopedophobic views, however, are not accidental, but are motivated by his great love for the “children of Israel”, a love that can only be realised through continued hatred and containment of all Arabs, children and adults alike.

Joseph Massad is Associate Professor of Modern Arab Politics and Intellectual History at Columbia University. He is author of The Persistence of the Palestinian Question (Routledge, 2006).

• A “culture” of Hate!
• A “culture” of supremacy

River to Sea Uprooted Palestinian

"We, the Palestinians, no longer seek a homeland of our own!" (this would bring about the end of Israel)

Via FLC

Goldberg writes: “If I were a Palestinian (and, should there be any confusion on this point, I am not), and if I were the sort of Palestinian who believed that Israel should be wiped off the map, then I would be quite pleased with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s performance before Congress this morning….. In fact, I would make support for Netanyahu the foundation stone of my patient campaign to dismantle the world’s only majority-Jewish country…. … … My goal: To hopelessly, ineradicably, entangle the two peoples wedged between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. Then I would wait as the Israeli population on the West Bank grew, and grew some more. I would wait until 2017, 50 years after the Six Day War, which ended with Israel in control of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. I would go before the UN and say the following:

“We, the Palestinians, no longer seek a homeland of our own. We recognize the permanence of Israeli occupation, the dominion of the Israeli military and the power of the Israeli economy. So we would like to join them. In the 50 years since the beginning of the ’temporary’ occupation, we have seen hundreds of thousands of Israelis build communities near our own communities. We admire what they have built, and the system of laws that governs their lives. Unlike them, many of us live under Israeli military law but have no say in choosing the Israelis who rule us. So we no longer want statehood. We simply want the vote.”

And this, of course, would bring about the end of Israel….” (continue, here)

Posted by G, M, Z, or B at 1:13 PM