Friday, January 7 2011|+972blog
By: Rechavia Berman
Demonstrators holding up a blood-stained Israeli flag, in a protest following the death of Bil’in’s Jawaher Abu-Rahmah (photo: Lisa Goldman)
I have a little something (little for a certified graphomaniac, of course) to say about the contemptible inquiry committee passed yesterday in Israel’s Knesset by MK Faina Kirshenbaum (Kremlin agent Evet Lieberman’s doll). But before I begin, a technical note:
The shameful step taken by Israel’s laughingstock of a parliament yesterday is, at least for now, political circus and nothing more. This “Inquiry Committee” has no real authority. It has no power of summons and no power to punish. One may comfortably ignore any summons from it and one may, like the wonderful Mikhael Manekin, accept the summons in order to spit its foul temerity right back in its face. But to repeat the main issue of this note, the headline reads: The Gestapo is not yet at the door. That may yet happen, and this pathetic circus may be the high water mark after which the slime will recede. Now, having said that, let us for a moment address the issue as though Michael Ben Ari’s fantasy has any actual teeth, and respond as follows:
If being an Israeli means to forever rule another people, steal its land, deny it basic rights and trample upon its dignity, then yes – such an Israel I shall betray.
If being an Israeli means to strive for ethnic cleansing as a means of escaping the tightening death trap of occupation, then yes – such an Israel I shall betray.
If being an Israeli means to steel the lands and crops of dirt-poor subsistence farmers, while ignoring one’s own Supreme Court, to suppress with beastly brutality non-violent demonstrations held with almost unimaginable restraint in the face of ongoing slaughter, and then lie about it when the slaughter happens, then yes – such an Israel I shall betray.
If being an Israeli means dismantling all facets of civil society, education, infrastructures, healthcare, all the while subsidizing a primitive culture of sloth that even the greatest rabbis of history would retch to behold, leaving the people of said culture trapped in a lack of self-sufficiency, captive to the rule of rabid rabbis, then yes – such an Israel I shall betray.
If being an Israeli means sending brave men and women to combat a wildfire without basic gear, leaving the poor periphery to ignorance and neglect, all the while spending vast fortunes on apartheid settlements in the occupied territories in the name of the Jehovah cult’s ideology, then yes – such an Israel I shall betray.
If being an Israeli means leaving 20 percent of the population in an ever-worsening state of second class citizenship, forbid them to import schoolbooks in their own language, speak their ostensibly official language in mixed schools, spread irrational fear of them “stealing our women”, condition their employment as teachers to their own children upon approval of the Shin Bet-Stasi, not building a single new settlement for them or approving zoning plans and then conducting a smear campaign about their “illegal construction”, or launching a reprehensible witch hunt when they choose not to build illegally and come to live in “our” towns, then yes – such an Israel I shall betray.
If being an Israeli means signing a “blood alliance” with the Druze minority, and then letting the sewage run free in their villages, discriminate against them in any setting out of uniform, form a unit with an overwhelming Druze majority and after fifty years feel oh-so-enlightened because we deigned to appoint a Druze as its commander, bar it from any career opportunity outside their pale of settlement except that of jack-booted thugs to do our dirty work for us, then yes – such an Israel I shall betray.
If being an Israeli means accepting a parliament in which a party, whose head undermines our legitimacy every time he opens his filthy mouth, launches a witch hunt against perfectly transparent “funding sources” of organizations who save what’s left of out tattered international respect, while the same kangaroo parliament refuses to investigate clear debacles by it inhabitants, let alone reach personal conclusions following fiascoes that have levied a toll in blood, then yes – such an Israel I shall betray.
If being an Israeli means subscribing to the superiority of the Jew by virtue of birth as such and placing at the heart of the collective identity the persecution, victimization and woe-is-me attitude in a manner that Hitler himself would have viewed as a historical victory and vindication, then yes – such an Israel I shall betray.
If being an Israeli means treating the persecuted and the sanctuary seeker the same way we cried foul over when directed at us back when we were in their shoes, then yes – such an Israel I shall betray.
If being an Israeli means calling yourself “the state of the Jews” while actively discriminating against the denominations of Judaism to which the absolute majority of the world’s Jews subscribe, rendering them invisible and illegitimate, then yes, indeed – such an Israel I shall betray.
I shall betray it openly and without a shred of guilt. I shall advertise its shame the world over, and take the largest hatchet I can find to its false pretense of legitimacy. I shall hand over the names of its criminals – from general and minister to corporal and private, to anyone who will bring them to justice. I shall make sure you cannot set foot anywhere a civilized person would want to go. I shall do all this and more, and you can investigate me to your putrid hearts’ content.
I shall betray such an Israel because I am loyal to a very different Israel. An Israel of a people proud and unafraid. An Israel that shall accord full and true equality to all its citizens. An Israel that does not wish to rule another people for decades in the name of its traumas and fears, and definitely does not wish to use these fears as an excuse to steal that people’s land and colonize it. An Israel guided by the morals of the prophets and not by the racism of the Talmud. An Israel of “Blessed be my people Assyria, blessed be my people Egypt”, and not of “You are called man and they are not called man.” And I know I will not be alone in this betrayal, because as the Reverend Martin Luther Ling Jr. said: “The arc of history is long, but it bends toward justice.”
Now, can I get an Amen?
Rechavia Berman is an Israeli journalist and Blogger. This post originally appeared in Hebrew on Rechavia’s blog
For years I have been rather ambivalent about the wisdom of boycotting Israel. While a boycott of anything related to the illegal settlements in the West Bank, which are a clear derivative of a brutal occupation, is an absolute necessity, and which I have fully supported, I have always been reserved about the boycotting of Israel proper. Today I feel that there is no choice but to call for a full and total boycott directed against Israel – Boycott, Divest, Sanction (BDS).
For the good of Israel and in the hope that blatant pressure from abroad directed primarily at the Israeli economy is the only way to wean Israel from what Thomas Friedman in a recent editorial called “Israel’s crack addiction”. It is the only way to wake Israelis up from their (crack) pipe dream of “business as usual” or the feasibility of maintaining a disastrous status quo that will only lead to more land grabs, violence and war, ultimately jeopardizing Israel itself. It is the only way to convince present and future governments that the current situation is untenable and unviable. It is the only way to save us from ourselves. At this point in time, Israelis are unable to affect change from within.
The atmosphere has become so poisoned that attempts at the grassroots level to affect political change are insignificant at best, particularly in light of attempts at the legislative level to delegitimise grassroots initiatives and make local NGOs seeking to advance political change illegal.
The current Israeli government (as well as past governments, whether led by Labour, Likud or the catch all Kadima party) has zero intention of moving forward with negotiations with the Palestinians. They would much rather “manage” the conflict than seek a truly just solution.
The continued occupation is having a disastrous effect on Israeli society as a whole. Human life has become cheap, a form of Judeo-Fascism is developing here, led by rabbis, far right politicians in the Knesset and leaders in the occupied Palestinian territory. Jim Crow legislation has been tabled at the Knesset, rabbis have signed calls not to lease or sell property to Arab Israelis, hundreds demonstrate against Arab Israeli neighbors, and recently a group of minors were arrested for conducting what can only be called pogroms against innocent Arab citizens in the center of Jerusalem.
The poison of the occupation has infected Israeli society as a whole at a level that can only be diagnosed as gangrenous. The only way to convince Israelis that the current status quo cannot be continued is to attach a real and significant price to the continued occupation, and yes, to force local political leaders to take responsibility, to lead rather than manage, to commit, rather than hide behind spin doctors or the outright lies of Prime Minister Netanyahu.
Anyone who yet rationalises non-action against Israel is actively contributing to the inevitable use of the only other tool world history has provided for social and political change: violence! Please boycott my country today, you are our only hope!
The author chooses to withhold his name for fear of repercussions against his family. The threat is real. Suffice to say that the author is an Israeli academic in the field of the social sciences. While the author is fully prepared to pay the price for his opinions, there is no reason for his family to suffer.
The author can be reached at: pleaseboycottus@gmail.com
Dear Friends,
Dr. Nurit Peled-Elhanan is the mother of Smadar Elhanan, 13 years old when killed by a suicide bomber in Jerusalem in September 1997. Below is Nurit’s speech made on International Women’s Day in Strasbourg earlier this month. Please listen to the words of a bereaved mother, whose daughter fell victim to a vicious, indiscriminating terrorist attack. I wish her words will enter the hearts of all peace seekers in our troubled and divided world.
For better days,
Professor Avraham Oz Department of Hebrew and Comparative Literature University of Haifa
WOMEN
Nurit Peled-ElhananThank you for inviting me to this today. It is always an honour and a pleasure to be here, among you (at the European Parliament).
However, I must admit I believe you should have invited a Palestinian woman at my stead, because the women who suffer most from violence in my county are the Palestinian women. And I would like to dedicate my speech to Miriam R’aban and her husband Kamal, from Bet Lahiya in the Gaza strip, whose five small children were killed by Israeli soldiers while picking strawberries at the family`s strawberry field. No one will ever stand trial for this murder.
When I asked the people who invited me here why didn’t they invite a Palestinian woman, the answer was that it would make the discussion too localized.
I don’t know what is non-localized violence. Racism and discrimination may be theoretical concepts and universal phenomena but their impact is always local, and real. Pain is local, humiliation, sexual abuse, torture and death, are all very local, and so are the scars.
It is true, unfortunately, that the local violence inflicted on Palestinian women by the government of Israel and the Israeli army, has expanded around the globe, In fact, state violence and army violence, individual and collective violence, are the lot of Muslim women today, not only in Palestine but wherever the enlightened western world is setting its big imperialistic foot. It is violence which is hardly ever addressed and which is halfheartedly condoned by most people in Europe and in the USA.
This is because the so-called free world is afraid of the Muslim womb.
Great France of “la liberte égalite et la fraternite” is scared of little girls with head scarves. Great Jewish Israel is afraid of the Muslim womb which its ministers call a demographic threat.
Almighty America and Great Britain are infecting their respective citizens with blind fear of the Muslims, who are depicted as vile, primitive and blood-thirsty, apart from their being non-democratic, chauvinistic and mass producers of future terrorists. This in spite of the fact that the people who are destroying the world today are not Muslim. One of them is a devout Christian, one is Anglican and one is a non-devout Jew.
I have never experienced the suffering Palestinian women undergo every day, every hour, I don’t know the kind of violence that turns a woman’s life into constant hell. This daily physical and mental torture of women who are deprived of their basic human rights and needs of privacy and dignity, women whose homes are broken into at any moment of day and night, who are ordered at a gun-point to strip naked in front of strangers and their own children, whose houses are demolished , who are deprived of their livelihood and of any normal family life. This is not part of my personal ordeal.
But I am a victim of violence against women insofar as violence against children is actually violence against mothers. Palestinian, Iraqi, Afghan women are my sisters because we are all at the grip of the same unscrupulous criminals who call themselves leaders of the free enlightened world and in the name of this freedom and enlightenment rob us of our children.
Furthermore, Israeli, American, Italian and British mothers have been for the most part violently blinded and brainwashed to such a degree that they cannot realize their only sisters, their only allies in the world are the Muslim Palestinian, Iraqi or Afghani mothers, whose children are killed by our children or who blow themselves to pieces with our sons and daughters. They are all mind-infected by the same viruses engendered by politicians. And the viruses , though they may have various illustrious names–such as Democracy, Patriotism, God, Homeland–are all the same. They are all part of false and fake ideologies that are meant to enrich the rich and to empower the powerful.
We are all the victims of mental, psychological and cultural violence that turn us to one homogenic group of bereaved or potentially bereaved mothers. Western mothers who are taught to believe their uterus is a national asset just like they are taught to believe that the Muslim uterus is an international threat. They are educated not to cry out: `I gave him birth, I breast fed him, he is mine, and I will not let him be the one whose life is cheaper than oil, whose future is less worth than a piece of land.`
All of us are terrorized by mind-infecting education to believe all we can do is either pray for our sons to come back home or be proud of their dead bodies.
And all of us were brought up to bear all this silently, to contain our fear and frustration, to take Prozac for anxiety, but never hail Mama Courage in public. Never be real Jewish or Italian or Irish mothers.
I am a victim of state violence. My natural and civil rights as a mother have been violated and are violated because I have to fear the day my son would reach his 18th birthday and be taken away from me to be the game tool of criminals such as Sharon, Bush, Blair and their clan of blood-thirsty, oil-thirsty, land thirsty generals.
Living in the world I live in, in the state I live in, in the regime I live in, I don’t dare to offer Muslim women any ideas how to change their lives. I don’t want them to take off their scarves, or educate their children differently, and I will not urge them to constitute Democracies in the image of Western democracies that despise them and their kind. I just want to ask them humbly to be my sisters, to express my admiration for their perseverance and for their courage to carry on, to have children and to maintain a dignified family life in spite of the impossible conditions my world in putting them in. I want to tell them we are all bonded by the same pain, we all the victims of the same sort of violence even though they suffer much more, for they are the ones who are mistreated by my government and its army, sponsored by my taxes.
Islam in itself, like Judaism in itself and Christianity in itself, is not a threat to me or to anyone. American imperialism is, European indifference and co-operation is and Israeli racism and its cruel regime of occupation is. It is racism, educational propaganda and inculcated xenophobia that convince Israeli soldiers to order Palestinian women at gun-point, to strip in front of their children for security reasons, it is the deepest disrespect for the other that allow American soldiers to rape Iraqi women, that give license to Israeli jailers to keep young women in inhuman conditions, without necessary hygienic aids, without electricity in the winter, without clean water or clean mattresses and to separate them from their breast-fed babies and toddlers. To bar their way to hospitals, to block their way to education, to confiscate their lands, to uproot their trees and prevent them from cultivating their fields.
I cannot completely understand Palestinian women or their suffering. I don’t know how I would have survived such humiliation, such disrespect from the whole world. All I know is that the voice of mothers has been suffocated for too long in this war-stricken planet. Mothers` cry is not heard because mothers are not invited to international forums such as this one. This I know and it is very little. But it is enough for me to remember these women are my sisters, and that they deserve that I should cry for them, and fight for them. And when they lose their children in strawberry fields or on filthy roads by the checkpoints, when their children are shot on their way to school by Israeli children who were educated to believe that love and compassion are race and religion dependent, the only thing I can do is stand by them and their betrayed babies, and ask what Anna Akhmatova–another mother who lived in a regime of violence against women and children–asked:
Why does that streak o blood, rip the petal of your cheek?
Weekly Worker 836 Thursday October 07 2010
Genuine socialists fight against the Zionist project, writes Moshé Machover
As the desultory “peace process” meanders from pointless appointment to meaningless meeting between heads of the Israeli settler state and the authorityless Palestinian Authority, with the US playing the part of dishonest broker, there can no longer be any lingering doubt that this is a charade staged by charlatans.
But behind and beyond this fairly obvious confidence trick there is a much more subtle deception or self-deception: it is widely assumed – even taken for granted – that “peace” is what it would take to resolve the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. In other words: that what is needed is a genuine peace process instead of the present fake one.
This belief is held by almost all decent enlightened Israelis (the so-called Israeli left) – which is why they refer to themselves collectively as “the peace camp” and individually as “peace activists” – and it is shared by their friends and supporters in the west.
The ‘left’ Zionists of Peace Now as well as the ‘soft’ Zionists and semi-Zionists of Gush Shalom (‘the Peace Bloc’) display this self-deception on their name tags. The non-Zionist, Stalinist-turned-reformist Israeli Communist Party insists on giving top prominence to peace slogans.
Many of the activities in which these good people engage are highly commendable: dissent from oppressive policies and actions of the Israeli authorities, and in particular opposition to the post-1967 occupation. Some of them show real moral and physical courage in various acts of solidarity with the oppressed Palestinians. Nevertheless, their self-description as “peace activists” reveals a profound misapprehension as to the nature of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict and a delusion as to how it might be resolved.
The image it evokes is essentially symmetric: two sides, two nations, at war with each other, locked in a series of battles over a piece of disputed turf. To end the conflict, the two sides need to end the war, sit down together, and make peace.
In fact this is also the image promoted by Israeli hasbarah (propaganda). It likes to speak the symmetric language of “war” and “peace”. Thus, Israel and its friends describe the assault on Gaza in the winter of 2008-09, codenamed ‘Operation Cast Lead’, as a “war”. In reality, it was not a war: there was virtually no fighting. It was a one-sided massacre. Similarly, Israeli diplomacy insists on referring to the territories seized by Israel in 1967 as “disputed” – a deliberately symmetric description – rather than occupied.
As for peace: none wish for it more ardently than most of Israel’s leaders. I am saying this with hardly a trace of irony. It is the truth. Only very few people – psychopaths, arms dealers and other war profiteers, as well as some cynical careerist demagogues and military officers eager for fast-track promotion – actually prefer war per se to any kind of peace. I suppose that a few Israeli political and military leaders do belong to each of these exceptional categories. But most Israeli leaders genuinely wish for peace – peace on Israel’s terms: their cherished wish is that the Palestinian people, dispossessed and subjugated, should peacefully accept their lot and give up the struggle.
Colonial conflict
The key to a proper understanding of the conflict is that it is an extremely asymmetric one: between settler-colonisers and the indigenous people. It is about dispossession and oppression. As was the case in other colonial conflicts, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has involved real wars between Israel and the neighbouring states; but these were spin-offs, consequences of the fundamental cause: the Zionist colonisation of Palestine. As this colonisation proceeds and expands, Israel will need to maintain its regional hegemony as western imperialism’s local sub-contractor, and new wars will no doubt be provoked.
In colonial conflicts, the colonisers always regard themselves as coming in peace, bearing the gifts of enlightenment and progress. It is the benighted natives who are the aggressors, resorting to violence against their benefactors. This compels the colonisers to use their superior force in order to put down the native aggressors. The latter have only themselves to blame.
I suppose this is the kind of thing my late friend, the socialist poet Erich Fried, had in mind when he wrote this poem:
Clean Sweep
The causes
now fight
their effects,
so that one can no longer
hold them
responsible for the effects;
for even
to make them responsible
is part of the effects
and effects are forbidden
and punished
by the causes themselves.
They do not wish
any longer
to know about such effects.
Anyone who sees
how diligently
they pursue the effects
and still says
that they are
closely connected with them
will now have to
blame
only himself.
While the colonisers’ aim is to impose peace – on their own terms and, if necessary, by force – the indigenous people tend to have a rather different view of the matter. Their concern is not to make peace with their dispossessors but to resist being dispossessed. To this end they often need to come bearing not peace, but the sword.
This is why you would be hard put to find peace activists among the native Americans or Australian aborigines resisting colonisation in the 19th century, or among Algerian liberation fighters or anti-apartheid militants in the 20th century.
Of course, the Israeli peace activists do not support all the harsh “peace” terms that their government wishes to impose on the Palestinian people (although some of them do not object to some of these unequal terms). But by their reductive definition of the issue as being all about peace, they knowingly or unwittingly accept a point of view biased in favour of the colonisers.
This biased viewpoint is inconsistent with internationalism. So Israeli self-proclaimed peace activists cannot be genuine socialists. Israeli socialists, whether Hebrew or Arab, fight against the Zionist project and its practices: colonisation, dispossession, discrimination; and for equal rights and universal liberation.
Peace will be an outcome of liberation, not its starting point.
the joy of marriage, Rabbi Israheil Meir Ben Hirsch [HQ]
de Maha Abu-Zaineh (vidéos)
2:51
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Ha’ حميد رابحى..HEY!.. LOOK AT THAT ! THESE GUYS REALLY KNOW HOW TO PARTY !!!
Quote: my sweet sis and white heart open for all humanity LOVE from all over the world.. Daphne Bradshaw.. O People, Those who love the God of Abraham are allies of one another…be they Jew, Christian, Muslim or Believer…or any others who love the only True God. Together we will defeat the EVILDOERS… all those who are causing and planning harm to us and our brothers, including Zionist who have hijacked Judaism. we will be victors over the Illuminati and it’s Scheme for a New World Order…with GOD’s help. “THEY plotted and schemed, but so did GOD, and GOD is the Best Schemer.” Prophet Muhammad, Surah 3:54, Holy Quran “And just a little while longer, and the Wicked ones will be no more…the Wicked one is plotting against the Righteous one, and at him the Evil ones grind their teeth. Jehovah Himself will laugh at him (the evil ones), for He certainly will see that the Evildoers day will come.” Prophet David, Psalms 37:10-13, Holy Bible..
The Rabbis described the Israeli aggression as illegal. One Rabbi asked the world not blame the great religion of Judaism for the actions of the Israeli government. Pappe is an ISRAELI historian and a senior lecturer at Haifa University, has written a superb account of the Israeli expulsion of the Palestinians from their land in 1948. He says that between 30 March and 15 May 1948, i.e. before any Arab government intervened, Israeli forces seized 200 villages and expelled 250,000 Palestinians. The Israeli leadership stated, “The principal objective of the operation is the destruction of Arab villages … the eviction of the villagers.” On 9 April, Israeli forces massacred 93 people, including 30 babies, at Deir Yassin. In Haifa, the Israeli commander ordered, “Kill any Arab you encounter.” Overall, the Zionist forces uprooted more than half Palestine’s population, 800,000 people, destroyed 531 villages and emptied eleven urban neighborhoods of their inhabitants. Pappe concludes that this was “a clear-cut case of an ethnic cleansing operation, regarded under international law today as a crime against humanity. According to B’Tselem’s research, from January to December 27, 2006, Israeli security forces killed 660 Palestinians in the Occupied Territories VS. 16 Israeli civilians. Who are the real victims???
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