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Paintballing with the IDF

By ⋅ March 27, 2012 ⋅ Post a comment

A response to this, inspired by this

We figured they’d cheat; they were Israelis, after all. But none of us – a team of four Arab journalists – thought we’d be threatened by nuclear weapons when we initiated this ‘friendly’ paintball match.

The battle takes place in a field that used to be a Palestinian village, ethnically cleansed to pave  way for progress, democracy, and a Jewish state. Being threatened by a nuclear weapon when you merely have a paintball gun to defend yourself sure is stressful.

As I struggled with this conundrum hiding behind a barrel on the cusp of wetting myself, I could hear two IDF soldiers bearing down on me. I shot wildly, not daring to hit them lest they unleashed radioactive hell on my teammates and I.

I expected them to conform towards the accepted norms of international law, or at the very least follow the rules of paintball. Instead, they shot the referee.

As he crumped over, they proceeded to unload their steel-coated paintball bullets. The blue paint and red blood mixed together made an interesting violet color. I must admit, I grimly thought that such a shade was alluringly trendy. The referee’s muted yelps snapped me back from fantasizing and I began to fire wildly again.

David’s in here. Somewhere.

Admittedly at the time, I was confused and slightly in shock. I wasn’t expecting them to go all out, but they mumbled something about not giving an inch to anyone or it’ll be ‘the Samson option’.

Yes, I reminded myself, this is really happening: Four Arab journalists, plus one former Iranian IRCG -turned- resistance expert, are playing paintball with members of the Israeli military army frequently described by the Israelis themselves as “The most moral army in the world.”

It took nearly half a century to pull together this game, and all along I’d been convinced that things would fall apart at the last minute. Not actually killing someone is hard for the Israeli top brass to accept, so to arrange this match I’d relied on a man we’ll call David, one of my lower-level contacts within the IDF.

For full article

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Hundreds of soccer fans crowd Jerusalem mall: ‘Death to Arabs!’

by on March 24, 2012 100 comments

[youtube http://youtu.be/d3_dty1oSz4?]

We’ve missed this and everyone is talking about it: a massive anti-Arab gathering that took place in Israel on Monday. Chanting “Death to Arabs,” hundreds of Beitar soccer fans crowded into a mall in Jerusalem after their team won a match and what spilled out …words escape me:

The Independent:

Hundreds of fans, mostly teenagers, descended on busy Malha Mall, jumping on tables, waving scarves, and chanting “Death to Arabs”.

When a group of fans started to heckle and spit on Palestinian women dining with their children in the food hall, the centre’s Arab cleaning staff rushed to their defence and chased the fans off. But moments later, the fans returned, and started to attack the Arab staff.

“They [the fans] caught some of them and beat the hell out of them,” Yair, the Jewish owner of a bakery in the shopping centre, told Israel’s Haaretz newspaper. “They hurled people into shops, and smashed them against shop windows. … One cleaner was attacked by some 20 people, poor guy.” The brawl might have turned deadly, but food hall staff refused to respond to fans’ demands for knives and sticks. It was only when police arrived 40 minutes later the situation was brought under control.

“I’ve been here many years and I’ve never seen such a thing,” Haaretz quoted Gideon Avrahami, Malha’s director, as saying. “It was a disgraceful, shocking, racist incident; simply terrible.”

The police defended its failure to make any arrests, saying it had received no complaints from any of the public, a response that drew immediate derision. “No complaints and no arrests. Does this mean riots against Arabs in malls is acceptable behaviour in Israel?” tweeted Joseph Dana, an Israeli blogger.

Shmulik Ben Rubi, a Jerusalem police spokesman, later told The Independent the police would investigate the incident, which might lead to arrests.

After 40 minutes the police arrived.

One commenter at Haaretz noted “if it was skinheads beating Jews the whole world would know about this. ” Joseph Dana and others are questioning the implications of why there have been no arrests.

Lisa Goldman at +972 :

Meanwhile, amongst the Israeli media only Haaretz newspaper published a report about this incident – even though it occurred five days ago. One would think that a major race riot in Jerusalem’s largest shopping mall, patronized by Jews and Arabs alike, would garner some significant local media attention. But no.

More shocking and insidious is the fact that, even though the riot was recorded by the Malha shopping centre’s CCTV cameras, no-one has been arrested. Why not? Well, said the police, because no-one filed a complaint.

Okay, let’s try a little thought experiment here. Imagine that a few hundred Palestinian-Arab citizens of Israel rioted at the upscale Ramat Aviv mall in northern Tel Aviv. Imagine that they were fans of the Arab soccer team Bnei Sakhnin, that they waved team jerseys and scarves as they chanted “death to Jews” in Arabic and cursed and spat at some nice middle class Jewish women sipping cappuccinos with their children and sharing pains au chocolat at the Arcaffe. Imagine that they ran around the mall, asking for knives to attack the cleaning staff that was trying to protect the women from being attacked. And that they slammed some of those cleaners into plate-glass shop windows.

Imagine that all of this was was recorded on the Ramat Aviv shopping centre’s CCTV cameras.

And then imagine the police announcing to the media that they had not made any arrests because no-one had filed a complaint.

Yes, I’ve imagined.

There were plenty of warning signs. Remember that this is the truth about Israeli society that Max Blumenthal has sought to convey and that so many denied–stuffing his video, Feeling the Hate. Last month in Newsweek, bureau chief Dan Ephron’s story ” No Arabs Allowed” reported “Jerusalem’s favorite football team has hiring policies reminiscent of Apartheid and Jim Crow”.

Israeli football teams started hiring Arabs only in the 1970s; these days they are among the highest scorers in the league. But Beitar, the team of Israel’s capital city, has been a holdout, shunning Arabs even as it hired other non-Jewish players from abroad. “It’s hard to explain the policy as anything but racism,” says Yoav Borowitz, an Israeli journalist who writes regularly about football.

Supporters of the team have a more nuanced explanation. They say the ban is bound up with Beitar’s history and with tensions in Jerusalem, a city where Arabs and Jews live mostly in their own segregated neighborhoods (Israeli Arabs make up 20 percent of Israel’s population). Until a few years ago, most Israeli football teams were affiliated with political parties. Beitar’s sponsor was the right-wing Likud, the party now headed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Though Likud was never an overtly Arab-hating party, Beitar became a magnet for right-wing extremists, who would often shout chants like “Death to Arabs” at players of opposing teams.

How much worse can it get before it gets better? And some still say it’s not apartheid– on both sides of the green line.

About Annie Robbins

Annie Robbins is Writer at Large for Mondoweiss, a mother, a human rights activist and a ceramic artist. She lives in the SF bay area.

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THE GENERAL’S SON

[youtube http://youtu.be/c4ZfnpN4Dfc?]
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Israel, Iran and America

Auschwitz complex

Mar 6th 2012, 19:04 by M.S.

DURING his meeting with Barack Obama on Monday, Bibi Netanyahu said Israel “must have the ability always to defend itself, by itself, against any threat.”

“I believe that’s why you appreciate, Mr. President, that Israel must reserve the right to defend itself,” Netanyahu said. “After all, that’s the very purpose of the Jewish state, to restore to the Jewish people control over our destiny. That’s why my supreme responsibility as prime minister of Israel is to ensure that Israel remains master of its fate.”

News flash: Israel is not master of its fate. It’s not terribly surprising that a country with less than 8m inhabitants is not master of its fate. Switzerland, Sweden, Serbia and Portugal are not masters of their fates. These days, many countries with populations of 100m or more can hardly be said to be masters of their fates. Britain and China aren’t masters of their fates, and even the world’s overwhelmingly largest economy, the United States, isn’t really master of its fate.

But Israel has even less control over its own destiny than Portugal or Britain do. The main reason is that, unlike those countries, Israel refuses to give up its empire. Israel is unable to sustain its imperial ambitions in the West Bank, or even to articulate them coherently. Having allowed its founding ideology to carry it relentlessly and unthinkingly into what Gershom Gorenburg calls an “Accidental Empire” of radical religious-nationalist settlements that openly defy its own courts, Israel is politically incapable of extricating itself. The partisan battles engendered by its occupation of Palestinian territory render it less and less able to pull itself free. It is immobilised, pinned down, in a conflict that is gradually killing it. Countries facing imperial twilight, like Britain in the late 1940s, are often seized by a sense of desperate paralysis. For over a decade, the tone of Israeli politics has been a mix of panic, despair, hysteria and resignation.

No one bears greater responsibility for the trap Israel finds itself in today than Mr Netanyahu. As prime minister in the late 1990s, he did more than any other Israeli leader to destroy the peace process. Illegal land grabs by settlers were tolerated and quietly encouraged in the confused expectation that they would aid territorial negotiations. Violent clashes and provocations erupted whenever the peace process seemed on the verge of concrete steps forward; the most charitable spin would be that the Israelis failed to exercise the restraint they might have shown in retaliating against Palestinian terrorism, had they been truly interested in progress towards a two-state solution. Mr Netanyahu believed that the Oslo peace agreements were a mirage, and his government’s actions in the late 1990s helped make it true.

Having trapped themselves in a death struggle with Palestinians that they cannot acknowledge or untangle, Israelis have psychologically displaced the source of their anxiety onto a more distant target: Iran. An Iranian nuclear bomb would not be a happy development for Israel. Neither was Pakistan’s, nor indeed North Korea’s. The notion that it represents a new Holocaust is overstated, and the belief that the source of Israel’s existential woes can be eliminated with an airstrike is mistaken. But Iran makes an appealing enemy for Israelis because, unlike the Palestinians, it can be fitted into a familiar ideological trope from the Jewish national playbook: the eliminationist anti-Semite. With brain-cudgeling predictability, Mr Netanyahu marked his meeting with Mr Obama by presenting him with a copy of the Book of Esther. That book concerns a plot by Haman, vizier of King Ahasuerus of Persia, to massacre his country’s Jews, and the efforts of the beautiful Esther, Ahasuerus’s secretly Jewish wife, to persuade the king to stop them. It is a version of the same narrative of repression, threatened extermination and resistance that Jews commemorate at Passover in the prayer “Ve-hi she-amdah”: “Because in every generation they rise up to destroy us, but the Holy One, Blessed be He, delivers us from their hands.”

Mr Netanyahu is less attractive than Esther, but he seems to be wooing Mr Obama and the American public just as effectively. The American-Israeli relationship now resembles the sort of crazy co-dependency one sometimes finds in doomed marriages, where the more stubborn and unstable partner drags the other into increasingly delusional and dangerous projects whose disastrous results seem only to legitimate their paranoid outlook. If Mr Netanyahu manages to convince America to back an attack on Iran, it is to be hoped that the catastrophic consequences will not be used to justify the attack that led to them.

Mr Netanyahu thinks the Zionist mission was to give the Jewish people control over their destiny. No people has control over its destiny when it is at war with its neighbours. But in any case, that is only one way of thinking of the Zionist mission. Another mission frequently cited by early Zionists was to help Jews grow out of the “Ghetto mentality”. Mr Netanyahu’s gift to Mr Obama shows he’s still in it.

(Photo credit: AFP)

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Norwegian Olive Planters Accused of Being Nazis


olivetrees21

PNN

On Wednesday March 7, A group of 11 Norwegian students and their teacher from Oslo have been insulted and threatened off the land of Palestinian farmer Yassin Da’doua in Beit Iskaria in the southern part of the Westbank where they were helping the farmer to plant olive trees.

The group had just started the planting of 200 olive trees when the leader of the radical settler organisation ‘Women in Green’, Nadia Matar, arrived with two other Israeli settlers who started taking photos of the young Norwegians. Nadia Matar raised her voice and told the Norwegian youth that “your grandparents have killed my grandparents in the holocaust and now you are helping the Arabs to steal our land. This is the land for the people of Israel. You are helping the wrong people. You are like the nazis.”

When the army arrived the soldiers told the group to stop planting trees because it is prohibited to plant on Stateland. The farmer has documents both from the Ottoman period and from the Israeli court that state he is the private owner of the land. More soldiers arrived as well as the civil police, the boarder police, riot police and a representative of the Israeli Land Authorities.

When some of the Norwegian students continued planting trees, the army decided to arrest one of the Palestinian youth, the nephew of the farmer.

By this time the Norwegian students were overwhelmed by the number of army and police and the aggressiveness of the settlers. “How can they call me a nazi? My grandparents fought the nazis during the second world war,” said one of the students.

The commander in chief told the coordinator of the Olive Tree Campaign that the farmer and his family could stay on the land but the Norwegians had to leave. The bus was then escorted back to Bethlehem by an Israeli police car. On the way the farmer called to tell that the remaining olive trees and the tools had been confiscated by the army.

A team of 3 Israeli laywers from the ‘Rabbis for Human Rights’ is currently on the case.

Women in Green

Women in Green is a registered non-profit organization founded in 1993, and is not affiliated with any political party. According to the group’s website, the movement is “dedicated to the security and Jewish heritage of historic Israel”. It is opposed to a two-state solution; that is, the creation of a Palestinian state alongside, and mutually recognizant with, Israel. The group particularly opposes the return of land captured in1967, and aggressively supports Israeli settlement of those territories, which it proposes should be annexed.

Ruth and Nadia Matar, co-chairwomen of Women in Green, argue in Transfer of Arabs is the Only Solution for Peace that Arabs in the “Holy Land” are descended from relatively recent immigrants, and favor their “transfer” to the neighboring Arab countries from which, the Matars claim, they originate. They maintain that the United States and the E.U. could use the aid they provide (and political pressure) to help resettle Arabs, and that co-operation from surrounding Arab states would be required as well. They insist that “Fair payment can be made to those Arabs who agree to leave the Holy Land”, and that “Arabs who wish to remain can do so, provided they agree to be a citizen of a Jewish State.”

Women in Green’s political activism extends to the United States, where it maintains several chapters, which hold demonstrations and fundraisers every year.

From their website http://www.womeningreen.org :

We act out of our firm belief in the central role of Eretz Israel for the future of the Jewish People. Today, more than ever, we must actualize our possession of our land. In addition to our usual activities of education and hasbara as to the right of the Jewish people to its Biblical Homeland, Women in Green is also behind the struggle for a Jewish Shdema and the Yibaneh fund for building and planting in the hills of Judea. One of the places where Women in Green plant trees to safeguard Israel’s Statelands, is Netzer; in the heart of Gush Etzion, between Elazar and Alon Shvut.

The area referred to as Netzer in the last sentece, in the heart of the Gush Etzion settlement block, is the location where farmer Yassin Da’doua has his lands where the Norwegian group was invited to plant trees.

source

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Ten reasons why AIPAC is so dangerous

by  on February 28, 2012 121

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Graphic from the Occupy AIPAC website – www.occupyaipac.org

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) is one of the most powerful lobby organizations in the country. AIPAC’s clout helps fuel a never-ending cycle of violence in the Middle East.

1. AIPAC is lobbying Congress to promote a military confrontation with Iran. AIPAC – like the Israeli government – is demanding that the U.S. attack Iran militarily to prevent Iran from having the technological capacity to produce nuclear weapons, even though U.S. officials say Iran isn’t trying to build a weapon (and even though Israel has hundreds of undeclared nuclear weapons). AIPAC has successfully lobbied the U.S. government to adopt crippling economic sanctions on Iran, including trying to cut off Iran’s oil exports, despite the fact that these sanctions raise the price of gas and threaten the U.S. economy.

2. AIPAC promotes Israeli policies that are in direct opposition to international law. These include the establishment of colonies (settlements) in the Occupied West Bank and the confiscation of Palestinian land in its construction of the 26-foot high concrete “separation barrier” running through the West Bank. The support of these illegal practices makes to impossible to achieve a solution to the Israel/Palestine conflict.

3. AIPAC’s call for unconditional support for the Israeli government threatens our national security. The United States’ one-sided support of Israel, demanded by AIPAC, has significantly increased anti-American sentiment throughout the Middle East, thus endangering our troops and sowing the seeds of more possible terrorist attacks against us. Gen. David Petraeus on March 16, 2010 admitted that the U.S./Palestine conflict “foments anti-American sentiment, due to a perception of U.S. favoritism for Israel.” He also said that “Arab anger over the Palestinian question limits the strength and depth of U.S. partnerships with governments and peoples in the [region] and weakens the legitimacy of moderate regimes in the Arab world. Meanwhile, al-Qaeda and other militant groups exploit that anger to mobilize support.”

4. AIPAC undermines American support for democracy movements in the Arab world. AIPAC looks at the entire Arab world through the lens of Israeli government interests, not the democratic aspirations of the Arab people. It has therefore supported corrupt, repressive regimes that are friendly to the Israeli government, such as Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak. Events now unfolding in the Middle East should convince U.S. policy-makers of the need to break from AIPAC’s grip and instead support democratic forces in the Arab world.

5. AIPAC makes the U.S. a pariah at the UN. AIPAC describes the UN as a body hostile to the State of Israel and has pressured the U.S. government to oppose resolutions calling Israel to account. Since 1972, the US has vetoed 44 UN Security Council resolutions condemning Israel’s actions against the Palestinians. President Obama continues that policy. Under Obama, the US vetoed UN censure of the savage Israeli assault on Gaza in January 2009 in which about 1400 Palestinians were killed; a 2011 resolution calling for a halt to the illegal Israeli West Bank settlements even though this was  stated U.S. policy; a 2011 resolution calling for Israel to cease obstructing the work of the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees; and another resolution calling for an end to illegal Israeli settlement building in East Jerusalem and the occupied Golan Heights.

6. AIPAC attacks politicians who question unconditional support of Israel. AIPAC demands that Congress to rubber stamp legislation drafted by AIPAC staff. It keeps a record of how members of Congress vote and this record is used by donors to make contributions to the politicians who score well. Members of Congress who fail to support AIPAC legislation have been targeted for defeat in re-election bids. These include Senators Adlai Stevenson III and Charles H. Percy, and Representatives Paul Findley, Pete McCloskey, Cynthia McKinney, and Earl F. Hilliard. AIPAC’s overwhelmingly disproportionate influence on Congress subverts our democratic system.

7.  AIPAC attempts to silence all criticism of Israel by labeling critics as “anti-Semitic,” “de-legitimizers” or “self-hating Jews.” Journalists, think tanks, students and professors have been accused of anti-Semitism for merely taking stands critical of Israeli government policies. These attacks stifle the critical discussions and debates that are at the heart of democratic policy-making. The recent attacks on staffers at the Center for American Progress is but one example of AIPAC efforts to crush all dissent.

8. AIPAC feeds U.S. government officials a distorted view of the Israel/Palestine conflict. AIPACtakes U.S. representatives on sugar-coated trips to Israel. In 2011, AIPAC took one out of very five members of Congress—and many of  their spouses—on a free junket to Israel to see precisely what the Israeli government wanted them to see. It is illegal for lobby groups to take Congresspeople on trips, butAIPAC gets around the law by creating a bogus educational group, AIEF, to “organize” the trips for them. AIEF has the same office address as AIPAC and the same staff. These trips help cement the ties betweenAIPAC and Congress, furthering their undue influence.

9. AIPAC lobbies for billions of U.S. taxdollars to go to Israel instead of rebuilding America. While our country is reeling from a prolonged financial crisis, AIPAC is pushing for no cuts in military funds for Israel, a wealthy nation. With communities across the nation slashing budgets for teachers, firefighters and police, AIPAC pushes for over $3 billion a year to Israel.

10. Money to Israel takes funds from world’s poor. Israel has the 24th largest economy in the world, but thanks to AIPAC,  it gets more U.S. taxdollars than any other country. At a time when the foreign aid budget is being slashed, keeping the lion’s share of foreign assistance for Israel meaning taking funds from critical programs to feed, provide shelter and offer emergency assistance to the world’s poorest people.

The bottom line is that AIPAC, which is a de facto agent for a foreign government, has influence on U.S. policy out of all proportion to the number of Americans who support its policies. When a small group like this has disproportionate power, that hurts everyone—including Israelis and American Jews.

From stopping a catastrophic war with Iran to finally solving the Israel/Palestine conflict, an essential starting point is breaking AIPAC’s grip on U.S. policy.

About Medea Benjamin

Medea Benjamin is cofounder of http://www.codepink.org and http://www.globalexchange.org. She is one of the organizers of Occupy AIPAC, which will take place March 3-5 in Washington DC.

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State University Hosts Israeli Historian Ilan Pappe- Says No to McCarthyite Campaign

Breaking news/a good day for free speech: despite extensive efforts by the new Amcha Initiative to get Israeli historian Ilan Pappe booted from Cal State University campuses, where he is scheduled to speak next week, the presidents of Cal State Fresno, Cal State Northridge, and Cal Poly have taken a strong, unanimous stand in support of free speech on college campuses.

If you’re near any of these campuses, please go hear Ilan Pappe speak the week of February 20th. He’s a brave, important scholar whose analysis and insights are invaluable to understanding Israel and Palestine. He’s speaking at Cal State Northridge, Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo and Cal State Fresno.

In the attempt to censor Pappe, who is a Jewish Israeli, UC Santa Cruz Hebrew lecturer Tammy Rossman-Benjamin, under the aegis of her new group, “The Amcha Initiative: Protecting Jewish Students,”  recently sent a letter to the president of the CSU system against Pappe and his CSU hosts. The letter is a prime example of doublespeak, emphasizing – using bold font and capital letters – that “are NOT asking that these three events be cancelled or that Ilan Pappe be censored.” (emphasis in original)

What, then, were they asking for? For the Cal State campuses and Cal Poly to “rescind all … sponsorship and support” from the Pappe events. What does that mean, exactly? Removing the events from campus and preventing the faculty from hosting Pappe in their official capacity. So no, that wouldn’t exactly be censoring Pappe – he could still speak off-campus, we presume – but it would surely be censoring the faculty who invited him, making a mockery of the freedom of intellectual inquiry and free speech that are so essential to college campuses.

(continued here)

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Israelis celebrate death of Palestinian children killed in accident

Ten Palestinian children were killed and 20 wounded on Thursday morning after an Israeli truck carrying a fuel tank crashed into the school bus transporting the kindergarten children near the Qalandia checkpoint in Ramallah.

The bus carrying the children collided with the truck at an intersection in Jaba’a, overturned, and caught on fire.

Ten children immediately died and at least 20 were injured, eight of whom are in critical condition, according to medical officials with the Palestinian Red Cross.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has declared three days of mourning.

Ramallah-based journalist Diana Alzeer said the collision was likely an accident due to wet weather, and not politically motivated.

In Bethlehem, a 15-year-old boy died this morning after a truck skidded on a slippery road and ran the boy over.

A statement released by the police said they have opened an investigation and confirmed that the boy died on the spot. Emergency crews arrived to the scene and transferred the boy’s body to a hospital in Beit Jala.

Israelis on Facebook were celebrating the deaths of the Palestinian children, writing derogatory statements on a wall of a news post regarding the accident.

The Israeli comments have gone viral on Twitter, shocking users into disbelief at the level of racism and hatred directed towards the deceased Palestinian children.

Israel maintains a military occupation of the West Bank and Jerusalem, imposing harsh restrictions on indigenous Palestinians while providing privileges to illegal Jewish settlers.

Palestinians are frequently attacked and harassed by settlers as well as the Israeli military, often with impunity.

(Al-Akhbar, Wafa)

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JUDGE NAPOLITANO FIRED AFTER THIS BROADCAST OF FREEDOM WATCH

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