Amnon Noiman testifies at Zochrot, in Tel Aviv, 06/19/2010. Testimony is part of the upcoming documentary Seven deadly Myths. http://sevendeadlymyths.webs.com
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Seven Deadly Myths is an upcoming documentary by journalist Lia Tarachansky. It is an exploration of the myths and realities of the 1948 war and the birth of the Palestinian refugee problem. It features veterans of the war, as well as historians who fought to reveal the true history of the events that took place in 1947-1949 and led to the creation of the state of Israel. http://sevendeadlymyths.webs.com
The ADL is not happy with Time. They sent the magazine a letter today in response to its current cover article, “Why Israel Doesn’t Care About Peace.” The gist of the article is that Israel is doing so well economically that affluent Israelis don’t really care about making peace with the Palestinians. The ADL finds this thesis (wait for it . . .) anti-Semitic.
In a letter to Managing Editor Richard Stengel, ADL called on the magazine’s editors to issue an apology to readers, both for the timing of the article and its calling up age-old anti-Semitic stereotypes about Jews and money.
The insidious subtext of Israeli Jews being obsessed with money echoes the age-old anti-Semitic falsehood that Jews care about money above any other interest, in this case achieving piece with the Palestinians,” wrote Mr. Foxman. “At the same time, Time ignores the very real sacrifices made by Israel and its people in the pursuit of peace and the efforts by successive Israeli governments of reconciliation.
Money aside, is there really a way to tell how much Israelis prioritize peace? Actually, I guess there is. Here’s a poll that was published in today’s Maariv:
Q. In your opinion, what are the most important subjects for the coming year?
Education—36%; the Iranian threat—13%; the war on corruption—12.7%; peace with the Palestinians—11.3%; traffic accidents—11.2%; dealing with poverty—7.9%
The poll by Teleseker questioned 500 people. The margin of error is 4.4 percent.
JERUSALEM (Ma’an) — In July, an Israeli court sentenced a Palestinian, Sabar Kushur, to 18 months imprisonment for obtaining consensual sex by failing to reveal he was not a Jewish bachelor.
The Israeli weekly magazine HaIr on Friday published testimony given in court by the complainant.
Kushur was initially charged with rape by force, and the conviction of “rape by deceit” was a plea bargain formulated and agreed to by the prosecution and defense. According to the report in HaIr, Kushur’s lawyers initiated the “rape by deceit” charge.
After the conviction, Israeli press reports on the court’s verdict were quickly picked up by the international media, which cited the court’s decision as an example of discrimination against Israel’s Arab citizens.
According to the woman’s testimony in court, declassified at the request of HaIr, Kashur brutally raped her and left her half naked, bleeding and beaten in a stairwell.
She told the court “he said that if I stay silent and I don’t resist, then it would end faster and it wouldn’t be like, he wouldn’t use force. I still resisted him and it was forced,” HaIr reported.
Immediately after the incident she was taken by ambulance to Shaarei Tzedek Hospital, her testimony said, and from there she was taken to Kfar Shaul psychiatric hospital, the report said.
In her testimony, the woman clarified that she was taken to Kfar Shaul because the hospital had a ward for women who had been sexually abused, HaIr said.
According to the report, the initial rape charge was reduced to “rape by deceit” to avoid further traumatizing the woman, who had come under aggressive questioning about her history of being sexually abused, and her former occupation as a sex worker.
The defense had demanded the woman testified again against previous complaints she had made, some of which had led to indictments. To avoid putting the woman on the stand again, the prosecutor agreed to the defense lawyer’s suggestion of a plea bargain, he told Ha’Ir.
The testimony sharply contradicted media reporting of the incident.
Following his conviction, Saber Kushur was interviewed on television, radio, and by several publications.
In an interview with the British newspaper The Observer, the interviewer reflected that the incident did not cast either party in a favourable light, and in a blog post on the website of sister publication The Guardian described the charge as a case of revenge by a lover.
The incident was variously referred to as a “casual fling,” a “brief encounter,” an “afternoon quickie,” and a “quickie on the roof of a nearby office block.”
Journalists also speculated that by having sex with a stranger the woman may not have sent “the right message.”
A reporter blogging on the website of the Qatar-based TV network Al-Jazeera suggested the woman had reported the rape when she realized Kushur was “never going to call her” and she “wasn’t the woman of his dreams.”
Commenting on reporting of the verdict, Tel Aviv-based journalist Lisa Goldman noted that not all the information was available to journalists at the time, as the court documents were sealed.
HaIr’s request for the court documents, however, was made through standard legal channels and was granted in one day, she said.
In a polarized society, there is a tendency to “judge situations according to political ideology” without thorough examination, Goldman added.
Ten days after the verdict, Kushur’s defense appealed to the High Court for an acquittal, arguing that “the facts described in the updated indictment shouldn’t result in charges of rape by deception.”
The Supreme Court has yet to set a date for Kushur’s appeal, but agreed to delay his sentence and eased his remand conditions.
A spokesman for the Justice Ministry responded that the prosecution was “especially surprised” by the appeal for acquittal, given that the charge was the basis of the plea bargain the defense formulated with the prosecution and signed, HaIr reported.
JERUSALEM (JTA) — Three activists, including an Israeli lawmaker, heckled actors during a performance at a theater in Tel Aviv.
Monday night’s disruption was a protest of the more than 50 Israeli theater professionals who signed a petition in late August saying that they will not perform in the new Ariel cultural center in the West Bank when it opens in November. The activists included Knesset member Michael Ben-Ari of the National Union Party.
Both the playwright and the director of Monday night’s show at the Cameri Theater signed the petition.
Lead actor Oded Teomi, one of the Cameri’s veteran performers, did not sign the letter and tried to tell this to the hecklers.
“Because of your behavior, maybe we should consider whether there is anything to perform to in Ariel,” he then told the protesters, Haaretz reported.
The Ariel cultural center, which cost more than $10 million, was built with public funds. Several major Israeli theaters are scheduled to stage productions there this year.
At least 150 Israeli academics and authors, and another 150 American and British television and film professionals, also threw their support behind the boycott.
Ariel is one of the largest Jewish settlements in the West Bank.
Robert Del Naja of Massive Attack tells William Parry why he is boycotting Israel.
The movement for a cultural boycott of Israel in response to its treatment of the Palestinians, modelled on the boycott of apartheid South Africa, could eclipse decades of disingenuous political charades in engaging western intellectuals, academics and artists. Internationally renowned figures such as Naomi Klein and Ken Loach have supported the call, and now one of Britain’s most successful bands, Massive Attack, is publicly backing the boycott.
“I’ve always felt that it’s the only way forward,” Robert Del Naja, the band’s lead singer, tells me when we meet at the Lazarides gallery in Fitzrovia, London. Del Naja is an artist as well as musician and his face and fingers are speckled with paint. Dozens of his pictures are strewn
all over the wooden floorboards, drying. “It’s a system that’s been applied to many countries. It’s a good thing to aim for because it applies the continual pressure that’s needed.”
Musicians have a history of rallying the public to supporting political causes. The global anti-apartheid movement got the fillip it desperately needed when musicians began supporting it. The single “Sun City” by Artists United Against Apartheid in 1985 and the 70th-birthday tribute concert for Nelson Mandela at Wembley in 1988 catapulted the cause into millions of ordinary homes.
“I think musicians have a major role to play,” Del Naja says. “I find the more I get involved, the more the movement becomes something tangible. I remember going to ‘Artists Against Apartheid’ gigs, and ‘Rock Against Racism’ gigs around the same sort of time. Bands like the Clash and the Specials had a lot to do with influencing the minds of the youth in those days.” Those formative experiences are still evident in Massive Attack’s outlook today. A typical gig by the band is a blistering fusion of music with political messages and statistics flashed up on video screens, while the band regularly lends support to humanitarian causes.
Calls for a boycott were first issued five years ago by the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, but a series of developments beginning with the Gaza war in winter 2008-2009 have led to rising support for the campaign. After Israel’s deadly raid on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla in May this year, a number of leading artists, including the Pixies, Elvis Costello and Gorillaz, cancelled concerts in Israel. In August, 150 Irish visual artists also pledged not to exhibit in Israel, but it is musicians who have been the most prominent international supporters of the boycott.
Their views are not unanimous, however. Other musicians, from Elton John and Diana Krall (Costello’s wife) to Placebo and John Lydon, have refused to cancel concert dates in Israel. Some have insisted that engagement with Israel is more productive – a stance that Del Naja rejects. “We were asked to play Israel and we refused,” he says. “The question was asked: ‘If you don’t play there, how can you go there and change things?’ I said: ‘Listen, I can’t play in Israel when the Palestinians have no access to the same fundamental benefits that the Israelis do.’ I think the best approach is to boycott a government that seems hell-bent on very destructive policies. And it’s sad, because we’ve met some great people in Israel, and it’s a difficult decision to have to make.”
Beyond the arts world, an increasing number of trade unions, student unions and churches are signing up to the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. Even an Israel-based group, Boycott from Within, backs the campaign, stating that its government’s “political agenda will change only when the price of continuing the status quo becomes too high . . . because the current levels of apathy in our society render this move necessary”.
“We are not going to achieve a quick liberation,” Del Naja concedes, but says the point is to apply “pressure, the continual pressure that’s needed”. And the threat of international isolation and economic repercussions is clearly starting to bite: Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, recently passed the first reading of a bill that would impose heavy fines on Israeli citizens who initiate or support boycotts against Israel, and a bill to bar foreigners – like Del Naja – who do the same from entering Israel for ten years.
“The boycott is not an action of aggression towards the Israeli people,” he says. “It’s towards the government and its policies. Everyone needs to be reminded of this because it’s very easy to be accused of being anti-Semitic, and that’s not what this is about.”
William Parry’s “Against the Wall: the Art of Resistance in Palestine” is published by Pluto Press (£14.99)
When I went into the Jewish religious book emporium, Pomeranz, in central Jerusalem to inquire about the availability of a book called Torat Ha’Melech, or the King’s Torah, a commotion immediately ensued. “Are you sure you want it?” the owner, M. Pomeranz, asked me half-jokingly. “The Shabak [Israel’s internal security service] is going to want a word with you if you do.” As customers stopped browsing and began to stare in my direction, Pomeranz pointed to a security camera affixed to a wall. “See that?” he told me. “It goes straight to the Shabak!”
As soon as it was published late last year,Torat Ha’Melech sparked a national uproar. The controversy began when an Israeli tabloid panned the book’s contents as “230 pages on the laws concerning the killing of non-Jews, a kind of guidebook for anyone who ponders the question of if and when it is permissible to take the life of a non-Jew.” According to the book’s author, Rabbi Yitzhak Shapira, “Non-Jews are “uncompassionate by nature” and should be killed in order to “curb their evil inclinations.” “If we kill a gentile who has has violated one of the seven commandments… there is nothing wrong with the murder,” Shapira insisted. Citing Jewish law as his source (or at least a very selective interpretation of it) he declared: “There is justification for killing babies if it is clear that they will grow up to harm us, and in such a situation they may be harmed deliberately, and not only during combat with adults.”
In January, Shapira was briefly detained by the Israeli police, while two leading rabbis who endorsed the book, Dov Lior and Yaakov Yosef, were summoned to interrogations by the Shabak. However, the rabbis refused to appear at the interrogations, essentially thumbing their noses at the state and its laws. And the government did nothing. The episode raised grave questions about the willingness of the Israeli government to confront the ferociously racist swathe of the country’s rabbinate. “Something like this has never happened before, even though it seems as if everything possible has already happened,” Israeli commentator Yossi Sarid remarked with astonishment. “Two rabbis [were] summoned to a police investigation, and announc[ed] that they will not go. Even settlers are kind enough to turn up.”
In response to the rabbis’ public rebuke of the state’s legal system, the Israeli Attorney General and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu kept silent. Indeed, since the publication of Torat Ha’Melech, Netanyahu has strenuously avoided criticizing its contents or the author’s leading supporters. Like so many prime ministers before him, he has been cowed into submission by Israel’s religious nationalist community. But Netanyahu appears to be particularly impotent. His weakness stems from the fact that the religious nationalist right figures prominently in his governing coalition and comprises a substantial portion of his political base. For Netanyahu, a confrontation with the rabid rabbis could amount to political suicide, or could force him into an alliance with centrist forces who do not share his commitment to the settlement enterprise in the West Bank.
On August 18, a pantheon of Israel’s top fundamentalist rabbis flaunted their political power during an ad hoc congress they convened at Jerusalem’s Ramada Renaissance hotel. Before an audience of 250 supporters including the far-right Israeli Knesset member Michael Ben-Ari, the rabbis declared in the name of the Holy Torah that would not submit to any attempt by the government to regulate their political activities — even and especially if those activities included inciting terrorist attacks against non-Jews. As one wizened rabbi after another rose up to inveigh against the government’s investigation of Torat Ha’Melech until his voice grew hoarse, the gathering degenerated into calls for murdering not just non-Jews, but secular Jews as well.
“The obligation to sacrifice your life is above all others when fighting those who wish to destroy the authority of the Torah,” bellowed Rabbi Yehoshua Shapira, head of the yeshiva in the Tel Aviv suburb of Ramat Gan. “It is not only true against non-Jews who are trying to destroy it but against Jewish people from any side.”
The government-funded terror academy
The disturbing philosophy expressed in Torat Ha’Melech emerged from the fevered atmosphere of a settlement called Yitzhar located in the northern West Bank near the Palestinian city of Nablus. Shapira leads the settlement’s Od Yosef Chai yeshiva, holding sway over a small army of fanatics who are eager to lash out at the Palestinians tending to their crops and livestock in the valleys below them. One of Shapira’s followers, an American immigrant named Jack Teitel, has confessed to murdering two innocent Palestinians and attempting to the kill the liberal Israeli historian Ze’ev Sternhell with a mail bomb. Teitel is suspected of many more murders, including an attack on a Tel Aviv gay community center.
Despite its apparent role as a terror training institute, Od Yosef Chai has raked in nearly fifty thousand dollars from the Israeli Ministry of Social Affairs since 2007, while the Ministry of Education has pumped over 250 thousand dollars into the yeshiva’s coffers between 2006 and 2007. The yeshiva has also benefited handsomely from donations from a tax-exempt American non-profit called the Central Fund of Israel. Located inside the Marcus Brothers Textiles store in midtown Manhattan, the Central Fund transferred at least thirty thousand to Od Yosef Chai between 2007 and 2008.
Though he does not name “the enemy” in the pages of his book, Shapira’s longstanding connection to terrorist attacks against Palestinian civilians exposes the true identity of his targets. In 2006, Shapira was briefly held by Israeli police for urging his supporters to murder all Palestinians over the age of 13. Two years later, according to the Israeli daily Haaretz, he signed a rabbinical letter in support of Israeli Jews who had brutally assaulted two Arab youths on the country’s Holocaust Remembrance Day. That same year, Shapira was arrested under suspicion that he helped orchestrate a rocket attack against a Palestinian village near Nablus. Though he was released, Shapira’s name arose in connection with another act of terror, when in January, the Israeli police raided his settlement seeking the vandals who set fire to a nearby mosque. After arresting ten settlers, the Shabak held five of Shapira’s confederates under suspicion of arson.
Friends in high places
Despite his longstanding involvement in terrorism, or perhaps because of it, Shapira counts Israel’s leading fundamentalist rabbis among his supporters. His most well-known backer is Dov Lior the leader of the Shavei-Hevron yeshiva at Kiryat Arba, a radical Jewish settlement near the occupied Palestinian city of Hebron and a hotbed of Jewish terrorism. Lior has vigorously endorsed Torat Ha’Melech, calling it “very relevant, especially in this time.”
Lior’s enthusiasm for Shapira’s tract stems from his own eliminationist attitude toward non-Jews. For example, while Lior served as the IDF’s top rabbi, he instructed soldiers: “There is no such thing as civilians in wartime… A thousand non-Jewish lives are not worth a Jew’s fingernail!” Indeed, there are only a few non-Jews whose lives Lior would demand to be spared. They are captured Palestinian militants who, as he once suggested, could be used as subjects for live human medical experiments.
Otherwise, Lior appears content to watch Palestinians perish as they did at the muzzle of Dr. Baruch Goldstein’s machine gun in 1994. Goldstein, who massacred 29 Palestinians and wounded 150 in a shooting spree while they prayed in Hebron’s Cave of the Patriarchs mosque, was a compatriot and neighbor of Lior in the settlement of Kiryat Arba. At Goldstein’s funeral, Lior celebrated the massacre as an act carried out “to sanctify the holy name of God.” He then extolled Goldstein as “a righteous man.” Thanks to Lior’s efforts, a shrine to Goldstein was constructed in center of Kiryat Arba so that locals could celebrate the killer’s deeds and pass his legacy down to future generations.
Though Lior’s inflammatory statements resulted in his being barred from running for election to the Supreme Rabbinical Council, according to journalist Daniel Estrin, the rabbi remains “a respected figure among many mainstream ZIonists.” By extension, he maintains considerable influence among religious elements in the IDF. In 2008, when the IDF’s chief rabbi, Brigadier General Avichai Ronski, brought a group of military intelligence officers to Hebron for a special tour, he concluded the day with a private meeting with Lior, who was allowed to revel the officers with his views on modern warfare — “no such thing as civilians in wartime.”
Besides Lior, Torat Ha’Melech has earned support from another nationally prominent fundamentalist rabbi: Yaakov Yosef. Yosef is the leader of the Hazon Yaakov Yeshiva in Jerusalem and a former member of Knesset. Perhaps more significantly, he is the son of Ovadiah Yosef, the former chief rabbi of Israel and spiritual leader of the Shas Party that forms a key segment of Netanyahu’s governing coalition.
Yaakov Yosef has brought his influence to bear in defense of Torat Ha’Melech, insisting at the August 18 convention in Jerusalem that the book was no different than the Hagadah that all Jews read from on the holiday of Passover. The Hagadah contains passages about killing non-Jews and so does the Bible, Yosef reminded his audience. “Does anyone want to change the Bible?” he asked.
Bibi buckles
Only days before direct negotiations in Washington between Israel and the Palestinian Authority planned for early September, Yaakov Yosef’s 89-year-old father, Ovadiah delivered his weekly sermon. With characteristic vitriol, he declared: “All these evil people should perish from this world… God should strike them with a plague, them and these Palestinians.”
The remarks have sparked an international furor and earned a stern rebuke from Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat. “While the PLO is ready to resume negotiations in seriousness and good faith,” Erekat remarked, “a member of the Israeli government is calling for our destruction.”
Palestinian Israeli member of Knesset Jamal Zehalka subsequently demanded that the Israeli Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein put Yosef on trial for incitement. “If, heaven forbid, a Muslim spiritual leader were to make anti-Jewish comments of this sort,” Zehalka said, “he would be arrested immediately.”
Here was a perfect opportunity for Netanyahu to demonstrate sincerity about negotiations by shedding an extremist ally in the name of securing peace. All he had to do was forcefully reject Yosef’s genocidal comments — a feat made all the easier by the White House’s condemnation of the rabbi. But the Israeli Prime Minister ducked for political cover instead, issuing a canned statement through his office. “Rabbi Ovadiah Yosef’s remarks do not reflect Netanyahu’s views,” the statement read, “nor do they reflect the position of the Israeli government.”
Thus on the eve of peace negotiations, Bibi chose political expediency over condemning the murderous oath of a coalition partner.
I will not comment on the Hamas killings of four settlers in the West Bank except to comment that I will not comment on those killings. As Seham points out in the last several months there were many Israeli attacks against Palestinians. Many Palestinians were shot or died and I did not even write about every atrocity I saw with my own eyes in Gaza. No one apologized for those atrocities. No heads-of-state spoke about the assassination of Ahmed Salem Deeb, nor did the New York Times decide to cover the day when a dum-dum bullet turned his leg to jelly, leading to his death. That paper does not cover or condemn the quotidian crimes committed against the Palestinian populace, and the good people of New York and LA either don’t know or don’t care that the attack against the armed paramilitary settlers in the West Bank is only visible because of the religion of the dead. The uproar is about racism, it’s about valuing a white corpse complicit in atrocity higher than the brown corpse of its victim, and so I see no particular value in condemning a people psychically lacerated by living through over 60 years of hell for lashing out against their tormentors [Sorry Ahmed], no matter the motivation.
What concerns me here is the reaction from the PA-Vichy quislings [Thanks David]:
In the largest arrest campaign since it took power in 1994, the Palestinian Authority, run by the Fateh party, sent security officers all over the West Bank Wednesday morning to arrest known members of the rival Hamas party, after Hamas’ armed wing claimed responsibility for the killing of four Israeli settlers Tuesday night. According to the Palestinian Authority, at least 300 were arrested and taken to Palestinian police stations and prisons.
Local sources report that the Palestinian security forces entered homes and workplaces, arresting anyone they suspected of being connected to the Hamas party. The crackdown on Hamas comes as the Palestinian leadership heads to Washington for negotiations with Israel, during which they must prove that they have full control over the West Bank, and are carrying out the interests of the Israeli state there.
Tuesday night’s attack marks the highest number of fatalities in a single attack against Israelis since 2006. Palestinians in the West Bank point out that during the last four years, which Israel calls ‘relative calm’, over 2,000 Palestinians have been killed, and daily invasions, blockades and land seizures have made life anything but calm for the Palestinian residents of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
A leader of the Hamas party in Gaza, which was elected in 2006 but prevented from taking power in the West Bank by an Israeli-backed coup by the Fateh party, said that the attack Tuesday night was the natural result of the ongoing Israeli occupation of the West Bank.
Omar Abdel-Raziq, a legislator with the Hamas party, said the arrest campaign was political, adding, “They are trying to tell the Israelis that they are capable of doing the job after the attack.”
The ability of the Palestinian Authority to control its population is one of the main issues that the Israeli government has said it would bring to the negotiating table in Washington. The Palestinian Authority, with no political, economic or judicial power, comes to the negotiating table without the means to push for their core demands to be met – the three core demands of the Palestinians are the creation of a Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital, the return of Palestinian refugees, and the release of Palestinian prisoners.
The job of the PA is to prevent resistance. By preventing resistance, the money keeps flowing to Ramallah, keeping the PA elite in a decent standard of living, and they will be permitted to administer the prison called a state that Israel and America will allow through the peace process. The point of the crackdown is to convince Israel that the PA is still a competent collaborator. It shows its competence by jailing the resistance and by ignoring the demands of civil society. It won’t last.
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