Moderators: Elvis, DrVolin, Jeff
by 82_28 » Sat Dec 26, 2015 1:44 pm
by seemslikeadream » Thu Dec 31, 2015 3:19 pm
The suspected Israeli agent was inferred (it was the opinion of Josh Marshall and Ron Kampeas) to be Haim Saban, the giant contributor to the Democratic Party. So a “suspected Israeli agent” is also a giant Democratic funder with influence over the Congress? We’re headed for a showdown between the lobby and the grassroots, inside the Democratic Party. And praise to the Obama administration, who we guess is fueling the controversy out of “compelling national” interest.
http://mondoweiss.net/2015/12/israel-damning-wiretaps
by AlicetheKurious » Thu Dec 31, 2015 4:31 pm
seemslikeadream » Thu Dec 31, 2015 9:19 pm wrote:from MondoweissThe suspected Israeli agent was inferred (it was the opinion of Josh Marshall and Ron Kampeas) to be Haim Saban, the giant contributor to the Democratic Party. So a “suspected Israeli agent” is also a giant Democratic funder with influence over the Congress? We’re headed for a showdown between the lobby and the grassroots, inside the Democratic Party. And praise to the Obama administration, who we guess is fueling the controversy out of “compelling national” interest.
http://mondoweiss.net/2015/12/israel-damning-wiretaps
by tapitsbo » Thu Dec 31, 2015 4:52 pm
by seemslikeadream » Sat Jan 02, 2016 8:54 am
US Treasury Sued over Donations for Israeli Squatter Settlements in Palestine
By contributors | Jan. 1, 2016 |
By IMEMC | – –
A lawsuit has been filed in a US court seeking to stop non-profit groups from sending billions of dollars worth of tax-exempt donations to support illegal Israeli settlements and the Israeli army.
A group of American citizens filed the suit on December 21 against the US Department of Treasury, claiming about 150 non-profits have sent an estimated $280bn to Israel over the past two decades.
wikiYishuvEliShomron
The lawsuit claims, according to Al Jazeera, that the donations were “pass-throughs” and “funnels” to support the Israeli army and the illegal settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories.
The lawsuit claims that certain non-profit groups (including the Falic Family Foundation, FIDF (Friends of the Israeli Defence Force), American Friends of Ariel, Gush Etzion Foundation, American Friends of Har Homa, and Hebron Fund) directly contributed, tax-exempt, to violations of US law and international law, subverted US foreign policy, and contributed to countless crimes and human rights abuses targeting Palestinians.
The Treasury Department, which has 60 days to respond to the lawsuit, declined to comment, stating in an email to Al Jazeera: “We don’t comment on pending litigation.”
by seemslikeadream » Sat Jan 02, 2016 10:04 am
Why the U.S. Spies on Netanyahu
Should NSA listen in when a foreign government seeks to shape America's foreign policy?
By PHILIP GIRALDI • December 31, 2015
The Wall Street Journal story revealing that the Barack Obama administration used the National Security Agency (NSA) to listen to phone calls made by the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his aides is being spun in a number of different directions depending on one’s political proclivities. Sen. Rand Paul told Fox News that he was “appalled by it… you could see how it would stifle speech if you’re going to eavesdrop on congressmen and that it might stifle what they say or who they communicate with.”
But whom the congressmen speak to and regarding what is precisely the point, as they were elected to represent their constituents in the United States of America, not the Israeli government. Understanding that, the Obama White House was perfectly within its rights to move aggressively against Netanyahu. The snooping program itself was initiated with bipartisan support towards the end of Obama’s first term, when there were concerns that Netanyahu would order a unilateral attack on Iran that would drag the United States into an unwanted war. In early 2015 its focus shifted to Israeli interference in the U.S. government’s secret involvement in negotiations relating to a possible international agreement with Iran over its nuclear program. It was clear that the Israelis were obtaining classified information on the state of the negotiations and were leaking that information selectively to influence both Congress and supportive organizations within the U.S. regarded as part of the Israel lobby.
Obama was not eavesdropping on American legislators—he was working against a foreign country that was actively spying against the United States and using the information it obtained to interfere with U.S. policy formulation. That was more than sufficient reason to try to find out what Netanyahu was up to. The fact that he was talking to congressmen in an attempt to line them up against the White House is deplorable, but if the congressmen did not exchange classified information with the Israelis then their consciences should be more or less clear, if not completely untroubled.
How dare we spy on the head of a “friendly” government? Cries of outrage are coming from the usual sources—National Review, the Weekly Standard, and the Wall Street Journal—as this is America’s “greatest friend and closest ally” that we are talking about. Or is it? Israel spies on the United States more than any other ostensibly friendly government does. It has never hesitated to put its own interests first without concern for blowback against the American people. When it is caught out it lies: it did so in the 1954 Lavon Affair, when it would have blown up a U.S. government building; in 1967, when it tried to sink the USS Liberty; and yet again in 1987 to cover up the Jonathan Pollard spy case.
Nor is Israel shy about interfering in American politics. It openly supported Mitt Romney against Barack Obama in 2012. In 2009 Congresswoman Jane Harman was contacted by an Israeli intelligence “agent” and asked to attempt to influence a reduction of the espionage charges in the then ongoing trial of accused American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) spies Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman. In return, Harman’s contact promised to support her bid to become chairman of the House Permanent Committee on Intelligence. The Israeli caller, who some suspect was leading Democratic Party donor Haim Saban himself, indicated that he would pressure House speaker Nancy Pelosi using threats to withhold political contributions if Harman were not given the position. Harman was later spoken of as a possible candidate to become Director of Central Intelligence and, without the FBI recordings of her phone conversations, which were made known to Pelosi, she might have obtained either position, or possibly both in succession. (Saban, who has claimed that “I’m a one-issue guy, and my issue is Israel,” is currently poised to become the Hillary Clinton campaign’s principal financial contributor.)
So Washington was tapping Netanyahu’s phones to determine what he was up to and who was leaking classified information. And when the phones were tapped, something interesting developed. A number of congressmen were identified speaking to the Israeli officials, who were apparently trying to find out what inducement it would take to obtain a vote against the White House on Iran. And, of course, there might have been more than that, with some congressmen possibly offering to give the Israelis a little encouragement or even help. As the details of the conversations and the names of the congressmen have been redacted in the transcript version that went to the White House, we might never know exactly what happened, but it should be observed that the provision of classified information to someone representing a foreign government is a clear violation of the Espionage Act of 1918. The NSA is not obligated to turn over information it obtains to the Justice Department for prosecution. Nevertheless, given the possibility that there were criminal violations impacting on national security, it would be very interesting to find out who said what to whom in the transcripts of the complete conversations retained by NSA.
Then there are the Jewish organizations that were evidently being briefed, coached, and organized by the Israeli Embassy to oppose the White House proposals. That would be a violation of the Foreign Agent Registration Act of 1938, which requires any organization offering to work on behalf of a foreign government to register. That means, among other indignities, revealing their sources of funding. As most pro-Israel organizations have 501(c)(3) educational foundation tax status, that might prove most embarrassing and provide yet another bit of evidence to substantiate criticisms of how the Israel lobby is organized and operates to the detriment of American interests.
The final question has to be: who leaked the story to the Wall Street Journal? The authors of the piece claim to have numerous present and former officials as sources, which may be true, suggesting that it is a White House leak, which authorized a number of employees to provide information anonymously or off-the-record to the paper. If that is so, the story might be intended to send a warning shot to some congressmen regarding phone conversations that would best be forgotten. Not coincidentally, Congress is currently preparing to begin work on a new series of sanctions intended to disrupt the final stages of the nuclear agreement with Iran. That the White House would play hardball in this fashion is sheer speculation, but there is a certain plausibility to it.
Philip Giraldi, a former CIA officer, is executive director of the Council for the National Interest.
by seemslikeadream » Thu Jan 07, 2016 2:12 pm
Separating anti-Semitism from Anti-Zionism
By contributors | Jan. 7, 2016 |
By Lillian Rosengarten | (Informed Comment) | – –
The distinction between Zionism and Judaism remains in constant need of clarification and discussion. Fanatics closed to discussion believe in their moral superiority and create political terror so as to silence and deny. The charge of “delegitimizing Israel “ requires one to question what the Israeli government is hiding and whether Israel has not delegitimized itself through decades of illegal human rights abuses. I believe these abuses have contributed profoundly to the rise of true anti-Semitism in the world today.
Propaganda has successfully blurred the distinction between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. With adeptness and manipulation they have succeeded in spreading a form of fear to Europe and the United States. Use of the Holocaust as propaganda also invites fear and hysteria.
Netanyahu drew thunderous applause (speaking before the US congress) that followed the words loudly proclaimed as if he owned them: “Never Again.” I felt sick as he spoke of the deadly rise of anti-Semitism, a hatred of Jews bound together with the destruction of Israel. “Never Again,” a powerful and highly charged statement, was used here to create a lie in the suppression of the crimes of Israeli Zionism, covered up and justified as a means to “defend itself.”
What? To defend itself from a repeat of Hitler’s progrom to rid Europe of all Jews? Is that the vision of a Jewish State only, a place of safety for Jews to be protected from a hostile world, with walls, and born from the blood of apartheid and ethnic cleansing? Is this not insanity to pursue an agenda with complete disregard to human values except for Jews?
Now as Europe and the United States struggle to wake up, to question the blind support of Israel, those who speak out and say “No,” continue to be vilified. Israel’s shouts of “anti-Semite” are attempts to drown dissent. Can one really believe there still exists the possibility of another incarnation of the Nazi Holocaust? Zionist Jews in the US express fear of such an occurrence and see the “Israeli Jewish State” as the solution to extinction. Is this not reinforced by fear tactics created by a government intent to manipulate and frighten through the abuse of the memory of the Holocaust?
It is not difficult to observe the strong emotional responses, particularly in Jews and Germans, upon hearing reference to the ashes of the Holocaust as a justification for Israel to “defend itself. ” Germany continues to suffer from guilt of its Nazi past that has prevented a humanitarian response to the Israeli occupation. Instead Germany remains complicit with Israeli victim propaganda and the endless crisis of human rights violations and a half -century of Palestinian occupation. “Never again” can only be a cry against nationalism and racism in any form that leads to degradation and violence. To use this statement for personal aggrandizement is an affront to the victims of the Holocaust.
We observe how the memory of the Holocaust has been ignited as cries of “anti-Semite” increase and create fear. Useful for the purpose of taking the focus off internal brutal assaults, land stealing, apartheid and ethnic cleansing, it is an Israeli distortion in my view, to justify the actions of the Zionist government. It creates fear and provides strength to the dream of a Jewish state only. True anti-Semites hate Jews. Rising up against Israel is about standing against an ideological, nationalistic and racist government.
I feel particularly as Jews we have a responsibility to remain vigilant and to speak out against the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. The pursuit of a just society is a fundamental concept of Judaism, which teaches involvement and concern with the plight of our fellow human beings. Every life is sacred and we are obligated to do what we can to help others. The Torah states, “neither shalt thou stand idly by the blood of thy neighbor.“ (Lev. 19:16) There is nothing anti-Semitic about speaking out against the suffering perpetrated on the lives of Palestinians.
Lillian Rosengarten is the author of “Survival and Conscience: From The Shadows Of Nazi Germany To The Jewish Boat To Gaza” (Just World Books 2015)
by Belligerent Savant » Thu Jan 07, 2016 8:35 pm
New Jersey High Schooler Sent to Principal’s Office for “Anti-Israel” Tweets
A Jewish-Israeli junior at a high school in New Jersey became the center of an uproar on Twitter yesterday after she live-tweeted a trip to the principal’s office. According to her own secret recordings, it all started because of the sixteen-year-old’s anti-Zionist tweets.
While Benny Koval had previously tweeted about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict quite a bit (in one tweet she refers to Israel as “a terrorist force” in relation to the Gaza bombing of 2014), this was likely the tweet that sparked the trouble with her school:im sooooo glad that pro-Israel girl from my school unfollowed me! I'm so FREE now like..... FUCK ISRAEL FUCK ISRAEL FUCK ISRAEL FUCK ISRAEL
— benny (@bendykoval) December 27, 2015
From The New York Times:[Benny] said they also reprimanded her for a second tweet in which she told a friend she would name the student in a private message.
Ms. Koval said on Wednesday she believed neither statement constituted an act of bullying.
“Her name was never mentioned,” she wrote in a message on Twitter. “I never degraded her. They use ‘bullying’ as a guise to cover their pro-Israel, pro-censorship agenda.”
Been recorded her conversation with an administrator identified as Frank Guadagnino, which she posted on Twitter later that day:
Guadagnino: Do you realize that what you put out electronically can also get you in trouble in school or... put you in some kind of problems?
Benny: Well, I haven’t put anything problematic out there—maybe controversial.
Guadagnino: Ok, well. That’s your interpretation. There’s a state law that might interpret it differently.
In the next clip, Guadagnino warns her not to bother the kids who reported her for the original tweet:
Guadagnino: I’m just saying, electronically, you can get yourself in trouble. So... I would back off and make sure you don’t bother those kids. And don’t get involved in a conversation of who, what, where, when—you can sit there with your smug attitude right now, but if it’s gotta go into a bullying case because you think it shouldn’t be, but the state says it is, you’re going to lose.
Then:
Guadagnino: [Quoting a tweet] ‘But I’m so glad that pro-Israel girl from my school unfollowed me.’
Benny: Is that really offensive? That I was glad that she unfollowed me?
Guadagnino: No.
Benny: I didn’t think so.
Guadagnino: No, I know. But then you said, ‘I’m DMing you their names right now”... So you are talking about her to somebody else.
Later, Benny was called back to the office and asked to make a written statement. She requested to have an attorney present, but was denied.
Guadagnino: Uh... there’s no need for an attorney. I’m just investigating something that’s going on in school.
Benny: The fact that you’re “investigating” me means there’s need for an attorney.
Guadagnino: This is not a court of law.
Benny: I don’t want to make a statement.
Guadagnino: So am I just supposed to take her statement as gold? And follow through and give this up—
Benny: I believe I have the right to an attorney.
Guadagnino: You don’t. This is not a court of law.
COMMENTS:
HypnoCat
Ashley Feinberg
1/07/16 2:30pm
My sympathies for her political view aside, it does seem to be that she is escalating much of the drama herself. She should feel free to tweet what she wants, and if other students disagree, that is their right. I am really not sure from the above why she felt the need to take to twitter again to confront the other student. A simple “It’s my opinion and I am entitled to it” would have sufficed.
Mew-Tang-Clan
Ashley Feinberg
1/07/16 2:30pm
This is ridiculous. Nothing violent, nothing extreme. It’s ironic that so many Christian conservatives here in the US have co-opted the Israel/Palestine conflict, and never stop to notice that a large percentage of Israelis in Israel/Jews in America are very critical of what Benjamin Netanyahu and his ilk spew. Just as the United States is not a hive mind, American Jews and Israel as a whole is not either.
lbxxoo
Mew-Tang-Clan
1/07/16 4:47pm
She is not getting in trouble as a result of her political views. She is in trouble because she is engaged in a conflict with another student. If she hadn’t mentioned her classmates, the school wouldn’t be involved in this.
by seemslikeadream » Sun Jan 10, 2016 1:03 pm
Jewish terror bomber claims influence with Ted Cruz
Asa Winstanley Lobby Watch 8 January 2016
In a video posted to YouTube, convicted JDL bomber Victor Vancier announces the start of a “Ted Cruz blitz”.
A campaigner for US presidential hopeful Ted Cruz has praised the Israeli accused of killing Palestinian baby Ali Dawabsha.
Cruz, now seeking the Republican nomination in the US presidential race, has declined to distance himself from Victor Vancier, a convicted bomber fond of making racist comments on the Internet.
Vancier’s praise of the man alleged to have killed Ali and his parents Riham and Saad has been published since he established a campaign called Jews For Cruz.
Vancier has also suggested his group is providing financial support to Israeli extremists accused of attacks on Palestinians.
The Ted Cruz for President campaign did not reply to multiple email and phone requests asking if Cruz would distance himself from Vancier and his organization.
As part of his Jewish Task Force Vancier has been running a campaign called Jews for Cruz since 2013. He announced a “Ted Cruz blitz” of publicity Sunday, and his group regularly republishes Cruz campaign ads on YouTube, adding JTF and Jews For Cruz logos.
Vancier (also known as Chaim ben Pesach) spent five and a half years in federal prison after executing a Jewish Defense League bombing campaign in the 1970s and 1980s.
But the passage of time has not dimmed his enthusiasm for violent extremism.
In a video published Sunday Vancier said that an Israeli accused of a July firebomb attack which burnt to death the three members of the Dawabsha family near Nablus was a “Jewish hero.”
“Ted Cruz is the best”
In the same video he questioned the motives of Israel for accusing “Israeli Jewish patriots” of carrying out the firebombing to “avenge the hundreds of acts of Arab Muslim Nazi terrorism.”
Vancier claimed that the main suspect, Amiram Ben-Uliel, has been “falsely accused.”
The Jewish Defense League was founded in New York in 1968 by Rabbi Meir Kahane, whose manifesto called for all Palestinians to be expelled from the “Land of Israel.”
Kahane reportedly once called Vancier “the most dangerous Jew alive today” and (according to prosecutors) picked him as his chosen sucessor to lead the JDL.
Vancier is considered extreme even by the Israeli government, which (according to his supporters in the JDL UK) banned him from settling there in 1996.
In one recent YouTube video Vancier said: “on Israel and Iran, Ted Cruz is the best.”
Ted Cruz meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in 2014. (Prime Minister of Israel/Flickr)
Cruz staunchly opposed the six-power agreement with Iran earlier this year to curtail its nuclear energy program.
At a speech to the Republican Jewish Coalition in December, Cruz promised to begin the process of moving the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem on “the very first day in office” (other candidates have made similar pledges).
He conceded that the Palestinian-led boycott, divestment and sanctions movement is gaining “more and more momentum behind it” and threatened that any university that supports it “will find its federal funds stripped away.”
Vancier is dismissive of the other Republican candidates, and views them as soft on immigration: “you can’t trust these establishment whores,” he says in the same video.
This contempt extends to frontrunner Donald Trump, who Vancier sees as lukewarm on Israel and a media distraction. Polls say Cruz is currently the number-two contender for the Republican nomination.
But Vancier himself claimed recently that JTF has close ties to the Cruz campaign. He said that JTF is “meeting with some of the top people who literally speak to him [Cruz] almost every day and who are among his most important supporters.”
Although stating that some of these supporters held political office, Vancier declined to name them “because, you know, we’re controversial.”
“Prisoner of Zion”
Vancier’s specialty since coming out of prison has been long racist rants – such as the one endorsing the accused killer of the Dawabshas.
Once broadcast on New York City public access TV, these are now mostly posted to YouTube.
In a recent video he called Palestinians “Muslim Nazi terrorists” and “Arab, Jew-hating beast[s].”
The accused, 21-year-old extremist Amiram Ben-Uliel, was finally charged for the murders on Sunday, despite Israel’s defense minister admitting as far back as September that the authorities knew who was behind the fatal attack.
In a 20 December video Vancier said that “our movement is proud to be supporting those Jewish prisoners,” in reference to Israeli settlers suspected of attacks on Palestinians, likely including Ben-Uliel. “We support them, we support their families. We support them financially, and we support them in other ways,” he added.
Support for the most hardcore Israeli ultra-nationalists imprisoned by Israel is a cause célèbre for Vancier, who positions himself as a Jewish dissident. He claims the Israeli government is too soft on the Palestinians.
Another recent video, posted on the JTF’s Hebrew site “is dedicated to the speedy release of the hero Meir Ettinger, who is a prisoner of Zion.”
Ettinger is Meir Kahane’s grandson and an up-and-coming ultra-nationalist leader in his own right.
In August he was detained without charge by the Shin Bet, Israel’s secret police. Even the Shin Bet – a notoriously violent organization that speciallizes in kidnapping and torturing Palestinians – has called Ettinger “a violent and dangerous ideological criminal.”
Ettinger has been accused of leading Israeli settler attacks on Palestinians.
Suspected of murder
The Jewish Defense League’s terror campaign in the US was aimed mostly at Soviet, Palestinian and other Arab targets. The group also criticized Jewish organizations it viewed as soft on Israel, as well as engaged in internecine warfare within the Kahanist movement.
It was during this period that Victor Vancier was most active, finally going to jail in 1987.
The JDL is suspected by FBI investigators to be behind the murder of Alex Odeh, a Palestinian American staffer with the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee.
Odeh’s California office was fatally targeted by a bomb in 1985. No one was ever charged with the assassination, and some of the suspected killers are still at large after fleeing to Israel.
In 2001, the JDL was listed in the FBI’s annual terrorism report.
Today there is little in the way of formally organized JDL activity in the US. But the group has not been banned in the UK, Canada or France.
France’s Ligue de Défense Juive is a particularly virulent branch of the JDL, and its actions tend to be well organized and violent.
Jews For Cruz?
Vancier and his group started their campaign long before Cruz officially began his run in March. JTF announced the launch of Jews For Cruz back in October 2013.
An entirely separate “Jews For Cruz” group was subsequently formed in 2015. Not surprisingly, this has caused some confusion; Time magazine mixed up the two groups in an article published last June.
It said that Jews For Cruz had been compelled to change its name by the Federal Elections Committee as it was not an authorized Political Action Committee.
Jonathan Brodo, the founder of this newer Jews For Cruz told The Electronic Intifada in an email that he has “no connection to the Jewish Task Force page at all … I do not subscribe to their radical views.”
Brodo said that he “would agree” with a statement on the JTF issued by the Anti-Defamation League, a pro-Israel group. That statement criticized the JTF for promoting bigotry.
Federal Election Commissions filings show that Brodo terminated his campaign group later in 2015.
JewsForCruz.com and JewsForCruz.org both redirect to jtf.org.
It remains a mystery why the Cruz campaign should be so reluctant to take the opportunity to distance itself from a convicted bomber whose views are too extreme even for some of Israel’s most stalwart supporters.
by seemslikeadream » Fri Jan 15, 2016 1:10 pm
Behind the Ban on the Islamic Movement in Israel
by Jonathan Cook / January 12th, 2016
The decision to outlaw the northern wing of the Islamic Movement in Israel was announced by Benjamin Netanyahu’s government on November 17, 2015, days after attacks claimed by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, left 130 dead in Paris. Although the ban had been long in the making, the timing was patently opportunistic, with Netanyahu even comparing Israel’s Islamic Movement to ISIS. It is still unclear how the Israeli intelligence services and police will enforce the ban, given that the group has thousands of paid-up members among Israel’s large Palestinian minority, and ties to welfare associations and charities in Palestinian communities across Israel. The movement’s leader, Sheikh Ra’id Salah, has vowed to carry on, declaring: “The movement is not a passing phenomenon but one with deep roots everywhere.”
The only person arrested so far, more than a month on, is not Salah, but a 64-year old female resident of East Jerusalem. Zinat Jallad was brought to court on December 11, accused of belonging both to the Islamic Movement and to the Murabitat (Defenders of Islam). The latter group comprises women who study and pray at the Haram al-Sharif, or Noble Sanctuary, a compound in Jerusalem’s Old City that contains the al-Aqsa Mosque and the gold-topped Dome of the Rock shrine. To Jews, it is known as the Temple Mount, after two long-lost temples that they believe lie beneath the esplanade. The Murabitat and an associated group of men known as the Murabitun were declared illegal organizations by Netanyahu’s government in September, as a prelude to the crackdown on the northern Islamic Movement. The groups, established in 2012, were accused by Netanyahu of acting as Salah’s agents at al-Aqsa.
The prohibition on the Islamic Movement was formally issued by the defense minister, Moshe Yaalon, based on emergency regulations inherited from the British Mandatory authorities. But the driving force was Netanyahu himself and his strong antipathy to Salah and his activities at al-Aqsa. After weeks of unrest in Jerusalem and the West Bank that began in the late summer of 2015, Netanyahu held a press conference in early October in which he stated: “We are in the midst of a wave of terrorism with knives, firebombs, rocks and even live fire. While these acts are mostly unorganized, they are all the result of wild and mendacious incitement by Hamas, the Palestinian Authority, several countries in the region and—no less and frequently much more—the Islamic Movement in Israel, which is igniting the ground with lies regarding our policy on the Temple Mount.”
A month later Netanyahu’s office announced the outlawing of the movement, claiming it was required “in the name of state security, public safety and public order,” and as a “vital step to prevent the loss of life.” Officials also declared Salah’s movement a “sister” organization of Hamas, arguing that there was “close and secret” cooperation between them. No evidence was provided.
Netanyahu’s efforts to blame “incitement” from the Islamic Movement for Palestinian protests and sporadic attacks conflicted with the advice he was receiving from his intelligence services. In early November, shortly before the ban was announced, Herzi Halevi, head of military intelligence, told the cabinet that a mix of “despair” and a sense that that they had “nothing to lose,” and to a lesser extent what he termed “incitement” from social media, were the factors driving Palestinians to carry out “terror” attacks. He did not mention the Islamic Movement. The domestic intelligence service, the Shinbet, concurred. A report issued a week before the outlawing of Salah’s movement concluded that Palestinian attackers were chiefly motivated by “feelings of national, economic and personal deprivation.”
Behind the scenes, the Israeli daily Haaretz reported, the Shinbet had advised Netanyahu that there was no evidence linking the Islamic Movement to terror attacks and that it was operating within the law. The Shinbet’s head, Yoram Cohen, was also known to have lobbied the cabinet against the ban, warning that it was likely to be interpreted as a declaration of war not only on Salah’s movement but also on the Muslim community in Israel generally, as well as an assault on the wider political rights of the Palestinian minority.
Facts on Jerusalem’s ground
The security services began scrutinizing Salah’s organization from the moment of its birth in 1996, when it broke away from the rest of the Islamic Movement, Israel’s branch of the Society of Muslim Brothers. The split had been provoked by the Oslo accords concluded three years earlier. Salah, along with Hamas in the occupied Palestinian territories, rejected the terms of a diplomatic process premised on a two-state solution, fearing that it would be seen implicitly to recognize Israel as a Jewish state. Further, Salah, then mayor of Umm al-Fahm, vehemently opposed the decision of the rest of the movement, now labeled the southern wing, to participate in Israel’s parliamentary elections. But unlike Hamas, Salah made clear he eschewed violence, arguing that the struggle from within Israel must take a different form.
Instead Salah pursued a strategy familiar to other marginalized Muslim Brother movements, concentrating his energies on building up a network of charities and welfare associations—including kindergartens, health clinics, sports associations and cultural centers—in some of the poorest Palestinian communities in Israel. The northern wing’s good works, and Salah’s quiet charisma, soon won it support. More significantly, Salah recruited a large following by turning the Haram al-Sharif into a political project for Israel’s Palestinian minority, 1.6 million citizens comprising a fifth of the population.
Salah was quick to recognize the dangers implicit in the Oslo accords for al-Aqsa and the surrounding esplanade. The re-partition of historical Palestine assumed to be at the heart of the new diplomatic initiative would be most hotly contested in Jerusalem. It was generally assumed that the eastern sections of the city, occupied by Israel in 1967, would become part of the Palestinian state presaged by Yasser Arafat and the PLO’s return to the West Bank and Gaza. But Salah, unlike the newly established Palestinian leadership in the Occupied Territories, believed Israel was likely to respond to the Oslo process by intensifying its Judaization policies in East Jerusalem rather than conceding it as a capital of a future Palestinian state.
Just as Oslo witnessed a rapid expansion of Jewish colonization of the West Bank, with settlers running to “seize the hilltops,” as Israeli general-turned-politician Ariel Sharon commanded, it also unleashed a new urgency to create facts on the ground in Jerusalem. In 1996, the year the northern Islamic Movement was born, Netanyahu, in his first term as prime minister, authorized the opening of the Western Wall tunnels. These extensive excavations ran close by the al-Aqsa compound and triggered Palestinian riots and a lethal response from Israeli security forces. Those confrontations were the bloodiest since the conclusion of the Oslo accords.
With the occupation of Jerusalem in 1967, the holy esplanade had acquired an ever-greater centrality in the thinking of both religious and secular Jews. The Temple Mount served a useful political purpose: It was a symbol that brought the religious and secular populations closer together by blurring the differences between them. Control over the Temple Mount could exemplify both the rebirth of God’s plan in the Promised Land and the reassertion in the Middle East of the earthly powers of a long-exiled people. As Israeli politicians cultivated a popular attachment to the Temple Mount, it soon came to serve a totemic function none of them could afford to be seen neglecting.
At the Camp David summit in the summer of 2000, the presumed conclusion of the Oslo process, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak staked Israel’s claim to sovereignty over al-Aqsa in front of President Bill Clinton. Contrary to popular perception of a flexible and “generous” Israeli approach, Barak was reported by his own advisers to have “blown up” the negotiations on this single issue.
Off-limits
Salah and the northern Islamic Movement not only identified Israel’s increasingly aggressive ambitions toward al-Aqsa, but also the lack of a credible Palestinian or Islamic response. Over time, the northern Islamic Movement stepped in to fill an organizational and strategic void at al-Aqsa that grew ever more apparent after the signing of the Oslo accords.
Following Israel’s seizure of East Jerusalem in 1967 and the Palestinian city’s annexation, formal control over al-Aqsa remained with the waqf, an Islamic authority controlled by Jordan. But with Oslo’s establishment of a Palestinian Authority under Yasser Arafat in the territories, Israel gradually exploited the weakening lines of authority at the esplanade to undermine the roles of both the PA and Jordan. After the outbreak of the second intifada, Israel moved swiftly to bar the PA from Jerusalem entirely; and with diplomatic relations deteriorating, Jordan could exercise its power only at arm’s length. The only other major Palestinian faction, Hamas, was treated as a terrorist organisation by Israel and locked out of having any meaningful political role at al-Aqsa.
The partition principle inherent in Oslo—and enforced one-sidedly by Israel—added to the isolation of the holy esplanade. While settlers moved into the Occupied Territories in greater numbers than ever, Palestinians found themselves increasingly locked into ghettoes. Permits and checkpoints limited movement through the 1990s, culminating in the construction of a massive separation barrier from 2003. Jerusalem became off limits to most Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. And in turn, that meant few could reach al-Aqsa to pray.
It was in this atmosphere, in late 2000, as the holy esplanade (and, indeed, all of East Jerusalem) was being physically separated from its Palestinian hinterland, that Sharon made his incendiary visit to al-Aqsa, backed by hundreds of armed police. There he asserted de facto Israeli sovereignty over al-Aqsa, in the immediate wake of Barak’s failure at Camp David to win US recognition of Israel’s de jure sovereignty. The visit triggered the second intifada.
‘Al-Aqsa sheikh’
Salah was far from idle as these developments unfolded. Soon after founding the northern wing, he launched a political campaign for the Palestinian public in Israel, popularizing the slogan, “al-Aqsa is in danger.” An annual rally in Umm al-Fahm attracted tens of thousands of Palestinian citizens of Israel. Salah was determined to bolster the status of al-Aqsa mosque as a religious and nationalist symbol for Palestinians to inoculate it from the counter-narrative being advanced by Israeli politicians.
At the holy esplanade, Salah took a decisive hand. He recruited volunteers from the Muslim community inside Israel to do much of the heavy lifting as the waqf renovated extensive areas of the compound in the late 1990s. The restoration of prayer halls expanded the number of worshipers the site could accommodate, further highlighting the importance of attendance by Palestinians from Israel. To the irritation of Jordanian and PA officials, Salah had soon earned the popular moniker “al-Aqsa sheikh.”
Additionally, Salah arranged buses to ferry large numbers of supporters from Palestinian heartlands in Israel’s north and south to restore al-Aqsa as a central place of Muslim worship and to shop in Jerusalem’s Old City, where the tourist trade was suffering after the outbreak of the second intifada in late 2000. Merchants and residents of the Old City were indebted to him, benefiting from this new kind of Palestinian tourism to Jerusalem—one that replaced the foreign tourists, who were too fearful to visit the region, and West Bank Palestinians, who were shut out.
Salah’s increasing identification with al-Aqsa—not only locally but in the Arab and Muslim worlds—brought prestige and funding that helped him to expand the busing operations and a growing network of charities and religious institutions. The southern wing had its two or three members sitting in the Knesset; Salah had al-Aqsa and his credibility bolstered as both a spiritual leader and a forceful independent political actor.
It was therefore inevitable that he would run afoul of Sharon after the latter became prime minister in 2001. Sharon immediately began tearing up the Oslo accords by reinvading and locking down the West Bank, and then approving a separation barrier that would run through Jerusalem. Jordan had cut ties with Israel. Only Salah and his Islamic Movement stood in the way of al-Aqsa’s complete isolation.
Campaign of harassment
It was in May 2003 that Salah was awakened in the hospital, at the bedside of his dying father, to find himself surrounded by Israeli police and camera crews. He and 15 other northern Islamic Movement officials were arrested, accused both of funneling money to Hamas to “oil the wheels of murderous terrorism” and of making contact with an Iranian “foreign agent.”
In fact, as later became clear, Salah was being charged over his charitable work, under a new kind of offense Israel was promoting—one now popular with US and European governments, too. The northern movement was accused of directing millions of dollars to Palestinian charities in the Occupied Territories that Israel alleged were allied to Hamas and which had been set up to help the victims of Israel’s military operations, including widows and orphans. Salah later stated that he had received permission from the Shinbet to make the transfers. But no matter: The money to humanitarian causes could now be presented as a form of assistance, even if indirect, to a terror organization.
During Salah’s 18-month trial, the charges were progressively scaled back, the allegation that he had met a foreign agent was dropped, and dramatic evidence Sharon’s office kept promising would soon be presented to the court never materialized. In early 2005, a plea bargain was announced in which Salah was sentenced to three and a half years. He was released a short time later.
In interviews at that time, Salah pointed out that his arrest and trial followed Sharon’s repeated efforts to outlaw the Islamic Movement. But, as his successors would discover, there was stiff opposition from the Shinbet. The intelligence service was worried that banning the movement would cause more problems than it solved. It would be hard to enforce a ban on a movement with more than 10,000 members and an extensive network of charities, many of them carrying out vital work in deprived Palestinian communities the state had forsaken. The movement would be driven underground, making it harder to track, and some of its members might be pushed toward violence. And there was the fear that Salah’s popularity would rocket following a ban, “radicalizing,” in the words of officials, the wider Palestinian public in Israel.
Instead Salah found himself the target of a campaign of relentless personal harassment. He was repeatedly arrested, accused of making inflammatory sermons, or insulting or assaulting police officers. He has spent much of the intervening period under heavy surveillance, in jail or under travel restrictions, either barring him from traveling abroad or from entering Jerusalem. Paradoxically, if Salah’s lawyers soon exhaust the appeals process in a long-running court case, his first stint in prison following the ban may be for a speech he gave in 2007 in which he is alleged to have incited the audience to violence.
Noteworthy parallels
When Netanyahu returned to power in 2009, Salah was high in his sights, both for his work at al-Aqsa and for his wider role among the Palestinian minority in Israel.
Israel has a history of suppressing Palestinian political movements that challenge the very ideological foundations on which a Jewish state was created. The first serious threat of that kind had been posed by al-Ard, a secular pan-Arabist movement established in 1959, when the Palestinian minority lived under military rule. Al-Ard was officially outlawed in 1964, and a year later the Israeli Supreme Court disqualified its list of candidates from running in the 1965 general election.
In recent times the only other Palestinian leader in Israel who had troubled the political-security establishment as much as Salah was Azmi Bishara, leader of the secular democratic nationalist Balad party, or Tajammu‘ in Arabic. Like Salah, he had founded a new party in reaction to Oslo. In his case, he identified the key unresolved question for the Palestinian minority in Oslo’s presumed partition of historical Palestine as the nature of continuing citizenship for non-Jews in a Jewish state.
There are noteworthy parallels between the Bishara and Salah approaches, and their respective handling by Israel.
In 2007, when Bishara was abroad, the Shinbet announced that, if he returned, he would put on trial for treason. He was forced into political exile. The main accusation, barely credible, was that he had helped direct Hizballah rocket fire into Israel during Israel’s confrontation with the Lebanese faction in 2006. More likely, the leadership had grown incensed by Bishara’s confrontational positions, his efforts to develop ties between the Palestinian minority and surrounding Arab states, and his demands that Israel be reformed from a Jewish state into “a state of all its citizens.”
Around this latter idea, Bishara and his Balad party had campaigned for educational and cultural autonomy as a way to strengthen Palestinian society in Israel. They also urged reform of the minority’s only national political body, the Arab Higher Follow-Up Committee, to make it more representative and accountable to the Palestinian public. Balad saw these moves as essential defenses against the disruptive powers of a state with highly developed national institutions serving only the Jewish population.
Extreme measures
In many ways Salah shared a similar vision, if one with an obviously more religious tone. As well as trying to infuse the public with greater Islamic zeal, the northern movement’s network of charities and associations was designed to strengthen the Palestinian minority, especially poorer communities, and provide it with a degree of autonomy from a hostile state.
That was particularly evident in the Naqab (Negev), where the movement quickly used its mosques and associations to find favor with local Bedouin youth. Many of their parents and grandparents, cut off and vulnerable in Israel’s semi-desert south, had tried to accommodate Israel by serving in the army and taking casual and low-paid jobs in the Israeli economy. But the younger generation saw how their elders had failed to advance in spite of their loyalty: Their rights to their ancestral lands were rejected and their villages criminalized, denied water and electricity and their homes demolished in a bid to pressure them into townships lacking infrastructure and employment opportunities.
Salah’s movement offered a route out of degrading dependence and a chance at dignity. When Netanyahu’s government tried to force tens of thousands of Bedouin off their lands under the Prawer Plan, large protests, assisted significantly by the organizational work of the Islamic Movement, forced a government climbdown in late 2013. For Israeli officials, the resolve of the Bedouin to resist their mistreatment was proof of “radicalization”—and the Islamic Movement was blamed.
Salah, like Bishara’s Balad party, was also sympathetic to the idea of reforming the Follow-Up Committee. It was the Jewish-Arab Communist Party and the local, more tribally based mayors that were opposed. Like Bishara, Salah had also raised the Palestinian minority’s profile in the region—in his case through his work at al-Aqsa. And, in ways appreciated by Balad activists, Salah accentuated the nationalist as much as the Islamic significance of the holy esplanade in Jerusalem.
For these reasons, Netanyahu and the Shinbet wanted Salah “neutralized,” just as Bishara had earlier been. Two incidents in particular suggested to observers that Netanyahu’s government was seeking ways, possibly extreme ones, to eliminate Salah as a threat.
In 2010, the sheikh was among a handful of Israeli-Palestinian leaders who joined an aid flotilla to break Israel’s blockade of Gaza. The main ship, the Mavi Marmara, was intercepted by the Israeli navy in an operation in international waters that killed nine of the humanitarian activists aboard. First reports suggested that Salah was among the dead. With astonishing speed, large numbers of police were drafted into Palestinian areas in Israel in expectation of violent protests. Only later did it emerge that the commandos had killed a man, shot in the head at point-blank range, who closely resembled Salah. It has been hard to dispel the impression among the Palestinian minority that Israel hoped to take advantage of the interception to rid itself of Salah.
A year later the sheikh managed to travel outside Israel again, this time to Britain. The British media appeared familiar with Salah from the moment of his arrival, warning that he was a “preacher of hate,” a “vile militant extremist” and an anti-Semite. Shortly before he was due to address a public meeting in the parliament building, he was arrested in his hotel. The British government insisted on his immediate deportation, saying he had managed to enter despite being on an entry blacklist. But as a series of tribunal hearings dragged on for many months, it emerged that British officials had acted exclusively on briefings provided by the Community Security Trust, a local right-wing Zionist organization with close ties to the Israeli government. The tribunal overruled the deportation order, with the judge criticizing the British government for acting on erroneous information, including a patently faulty translation of one of Salah’s speeches made by the Israeli right-wing daily, the Jerusalem Post.
Digging in
Israel’s Judaization efforts, especially in the areas immediately around al-Aqsa, intensified in East Jerusalem following the outbreak of the second intifada and the PA’s exclusion from the city. Emek Shaveh, an organization of dissident Israeli archaeologists, has sounded repeated warnings that Israel is aggressively using archaeological pretexts to encircle the holy esplanade. Most notably, a settler organization, Elad, assisted by the government, police and Jerusalem municipality, created an archaeological park, claiming to be the City of David, next to the esplanade’s southern wall, immediately below the al-Aqsa Mosque. Palestinian residents of neighboring Silwan are being gradually driven out of the area as Elad quite literally digs in.
Salah has expressed equal concern about what he believes is ultimately intended inside the Haram al-Sharif itself. According to oral understandings between Israel and Jordan, known as the “status quo,” Israel has responsibility for overseeing security arrangements at al-Aqsa, while the Jordanian-controlled waqf is supposed to have sole religious authority over the esplanade. In practice, however, Israel’s security mandate means it has an active role in shaping the physical environment at al-Aqsa and deciding who can enter. That has resulted in extremist Jews, some of them committed to the destruction of al-Aqsa and its replacement with a third temple, gaining ever greater access to the site, with a near-doubling of such visits recorded over the last six years. Salah characterizes these developments as a prelude to Israel dividing al-Aqsa “temporally and spatially.” Israel, he says, intends to introduce de facto changes to the status quo that will provide Jews either with their own section for prayer or their own dedicated prayer times.
Salah’s claims are not simple conspiracy theory. They are rooted in fears that Israel will try to reproduce its success in Hebron, where in the 1990s it split the Ibrahimi mosque in two, giving settlers control of a section now called the Tomb of the Patriarchs. For that reason, his concerns resonated with many Palestinians, including even the PA President Mahmoud ‘Abbas. He issued a similar warning to the UN General Assembly in September 2015.
In a counter-move in 2012, two groups of Islamic guardians were established at al-Aqsa, known as the Murabitun and Murabitat: men and women committed to being present at and defending the holy esplanade. Although Salah denies being directly responsible for founding the groups, his northern Islamic Movement undoubtedly helped to organize and fund them. The Murabitun and Murabitat run prayer circles (halaqat) and education courses in al-Aqsa mosque and the Dome, respectively, for men and women. Netanyahu and his officials accuse the Islamic groups of harassing “tourists” visiting al-Aqsa. In fact, the groups target not tourists, but ultra-nationalist Jews, backed by Israeli police, who have been coming in ever larger numbers to the holy esplanade to assert Jewish control at the site and the right to pray there. Typically, the Murabitun and Murabitat confront and intimidate such Jews by massing near them and crying out “Allahu akbar!”
In addition, young men from East Jerusalem—nicknamed Shabab al-Aqsa by the Israeli media—became a more visible and active presence at the Haram al-Sharif, clashing frequently with police as Israel intensified restrictions on Palestinian worship and access by extremist Jews increased. Israeli security officials accused the northern wing of organizing the youths and inspiring their violence.
More generally, Palestinian unrest found an outlet in Jerusalem from the summer of 2014 onward. By then ordinary Palestinians had grown exasperated by the failure of Mahmoud ‘Abbas’ PA to make diplomatic headway on statehood. The trigger for unrest that summer was the kidnapping and burning to death of a local 16-year old boy, Muhammad Abu Khudayr, by extremist Jews. Immediately afterward, Israel launched another lethal attack on Gaza, Operation Protective Edge. While the West Bank’s population was kept largely in check by the PA’s repressive security forces, Jerusalem erupted into violence.
The clashes with Israeli police lasted weeks and were supplemented by sporadic attacks over the next months carried out by individual Palestinians on Israelis—many of them stabbing or car-ramming incidents. At the time Netanyahu loudly accused Salah’s Islamic Movement of helping to organize the violence in Jerusalem, although again he produced no evidence. The Israeli media reported that the prime minister had demanded that the Shinbet investigate how to implement a ban on the Islamic Movement.
When Jerusalem, and more specifically the holy esplanade, became the center of trouble again at summer’s end in 2015, as the Jewish high holidays brought large numbers of ultra-nationalist Jews to the Haram al-Sharif, a drastic move against Salah’s Islamic Movement seemed all but inevitable. The waters were tested first by outlawing the Murabitun and Murabitat in September.
The mood sours
A ban on the northern wing had long been blocked by the Shinbet, but their resolve weakened as regional and global opinion hardened toward political Islam. Following the 2013 military coup in Egypt, Field Marshal ‘Abd al-Fattah al-Sisi helped pave the way for Netanyahu’s move by outlawing the Muslim Brothers at home and waging a low-level war on Hamas in Gaza. Meanwhile, the mood in Europe and the United States soured after the Paris attacks. Netanyahu knew the international community was unlikely to raise objections or study too closely the comparisons he was making between Salah’s Islamic Movement, Hamas and ISIS.
According to Salah, the US and an Arab state—almost certainly Jordan—played an important part behind the scenes in giving Netanyahu a green light. He says the ban was engineered at a meeting in late October between Netanyahu and Secretary of State John Kerry. The talks focused on introducing cameras on the holy esplanade, an idea proposed by Netanyahu but for which Jordan’s King ‘Abdallah II was accorded the credit. The ostensible purpose of the cameras was to reassure Palestinians that Israel was not trying to change the status quo at the Haram al-Sharif, in the hope of calming tensions in Jerusalem and the West Bank. Palestinians immediately feared a trap, however, suspecting that Israel would use the footage, which is supposed to be broadcast online, as a way to identify activists and harass or arrest them.
Salah told me that, according to his sources, the parties at that meeting more specifically wanted to find a way to “clear the path to banning the Islamic Movement, to get us out of the way.” That assessment is partially confirmed by a diplomatic source who said Jordan had been growing increasingly unhappy about the role of the Islamic Movement at al-Aqsa. Amman, the source said, was worried that Salah’s prominence had undermined its own authority there. It also preferred that the spotlight during the current wave of unrest be removed from the esplanade.
Although the Shinbet decided not to stand in Netanyahu’s way, the ban on the northern Islamic Movement sets them a task they seem unsure how to carry out. Highlighting the decision’s political rather than security rationale, it was reported by Haaretz that the head of the Shinbet, Yoram Cohen, had tried to persuade the cabinet to avoid a ban only a fortnight before Netanyahu’s announcement was made. Two unnamed government ministers said Cohen had observed that the move would do “more harm than good” and that his agency had found no evidence of links to “terrorism.”
In contrast to the Shinbet’s position, the Israeli police were reported to be “enthusiastic” about enforcing a ban on Salah and his followers. Veteran Israeli journalist Ben Caspit summed up the police’s optimistic view: “Any agitation arising among Israeli Arabs will be insignificant and containable, while the legal tools given to the authorities to neutralize incitement and extreme Islam in Israel will be substantial.” Netanyahu also faced no meaningful political opposition. Isaac Herzog, the head of the centrist Zionist Union, the official opposition, praised the ban, adding only a mild rebuke to Netanyahu for not acting sooner: “It’s a shame it took him so long to take this necessary step.”
An unclear ban
Technically, anyone supporting the Islamic Movement now risks being arrested and jailed, as happened to Zinat Jallad. According to Israeli legal expert Aeyal Gross, the emergency regulation invoked against the movement means: “Anyone who belongs to an outlawed organization, acts on its behalf, holds a job in it, does any work for it, attends one of its meetings or possesses one of its books, periodicals, fliers or any other publication may be prosecuted and sentenced to up to ten years in prison.”
But it is still unclear how strictly the ban will be implemented. Polls conducted beforehand showed that more than half of the Palestinian minority believes Salah’s movement represents them, including many Palestinian Christians. A tenth said they identified with the movement more closely than any other organization in Israel.
Further complicating the picture for the Shinbet, the organizational links between the northern and southern wings are not always clear-cut, making disentangling them difficult. The northern Islamic Movement also has strong support from major extended families, giving it a powerful social standing. Disbanding the movement would require a massive and costly security operation and campaign of intimidation, including imprisoning many of its members, shutting down its mosques and closing its network of welfare associations.
The signs so far are that the Shinbet is reluctant to take such a draconian step, fearful of the potential backlash. Instead it appears readier to use a light touch in the short term, exploiting the new situation to isolate, harass and possibly imprison Salah’s inner circle, and find ways to defund the movement’s activism in Jerusalem. That was the impression created by a senior Israeli official, who told the local media: “The problem is that in the law you can’t distinguish each element with tweezers—the police and the Shinbet will decide where it is proper to act and the priority will of course be against incitement over the Temple Mount and similar things.”
Over the long term, its foes probably hope, the movement can be weakened through a war of attrition, persuading some supporters to gravitate to the southern wing. The danger is that others will be driven underground, and seek ideological consolation in more extreme or militant groups. In recent months, Israel has claimed to uncover several small cells of ISIS supporters inside the Green Line. The credibility of these specific claims is open to question, but the prospect of greater extremism is real.
It is equally unclear what tools the northern Islamic Movement can muster to challenge the decision. A 30-day window to appeal the ban has now expired. The movement’s lawyers are pondering instead whether to turn to Israel’s Supreme Court. Ostensibly, they have a good case. Adalah, a legal group for Israel’s Palestinian minority, has questioned the legitimacy of exploiting the colonial legal framework of emergency regulations drafted by the British in 1945 rather than using the normal legal requirements for “conducting investigations and collecting evidence to support the state’s accusations.”
Further, the Supreme Court should approve the ban only if it can be demonstrated that the “dominant purpose and actions” of the Islamic Movement are illegal. Given the lack of evidence that the group’s leaders justify violence, that would be hard to do. Lawyers add that instances of incitement by the movement’s leaders should be dealt with through individual prosecutions, not through a sweeping ban.
The hesitation of Salah’s lawyers to pursue legal avenues, however, is prompted by concerns about the state’s reliance on classified information and the makeup of the Supreme Court, which, like Israeli society, has shifted to the right in recent years. Should the judges reject an appeal, Netanyahu’s decision, which currently smells of a purely political maneuver, would be given the stamp of judicial authority.
Next in the firing line
For the time being Salah and his followers, locked out of their offices in Umm al-Fahm, have decamped to a protest tent in a large covered market on the outskirts of the city. Attendance varies from days when only a few hundred turn up to days when many thousands come to show their support at protest events.
Salah has found backing from all the other political factions, which are only too aware of the red line Netanyahu has crossed in imposing the ban. Yusuf Jabarin, a Knesset member with the Communist Front party, which shares little ideological ground or sympathy with Salah, called the decision “dangerous political persecution and a serious violation of a national minority’s basic right for the freedom of expression, the freedom of religious, and the freedom of assembly.” Immediately after the northern wing was outlawed, the Follow-Up Committee called a general strike in Palestinian communities, though one that was not universally observed.
One seasoned observer of the Palestinian political scene in Israel, Raef Zreik, contends that the ban is the most significant change in relations between Israel and its Palestinian citizens since martial law ended for them in 1966. He considers it a potential “rethinking [of] 1948 and the granting of Israeli citizenship to Palestinians who remained within the state’s borders.”
The reasonable fear is that, with Salah’s movement out of the way, other political movements and civil society organizations will be next in the firing line. Atop the list is likely to be Bishara’s Balad party, which, despite his exiled status, still operates and has three members in the current Knesset, part of the wider coalition of Arab parties known as the Joint List. One of Balad’s MKs, Hanin Zu‘bi, has been the target of almost relentless vilification and repeated efforts to deny her the right to stand for election. It is not beyond the realm of the possible that Netanyahu will seek to ban the entire party before the next national elections.
If he does so, it will pose a severe problem to the rest of the Joint List, whose participation in the Knesset, following the ban on the northern Islamic Movement, is already looking discredited to many. If Balad is outlawed, it is difficult to imagine how the other Arab parties and the joint Arab-Jewish Communist Party could legitimately continue to serve in the Knesset.
But even if Netanyahu fails to extend the ban to other parties, the move against the Islamic Movement alone may be enough to bolster the already significant boycott of recent Knesset elections by the Palestinian citizenry. In March 2015, as Israelis went to the polls, Netanyahu issued a much-criticized warning that the Arab population were turning out en masse to help in the election of a center-left government. With the Islamic Movement out of the way, Zreik notes, “the concern of the prime minister over Palestinians streaming to the polls ‘in droves’ will thus be resolved.”
Happily for Netanyahu and the rest of his far-right government, the further depression of the Arab vote would likely guarantee their continuing hold on power for the foreseeable future.
• First published at Middle East Report Online
Jonathan Cook, based in Nazareth, Israel is a winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His latest books are Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East (Pluto Press) and Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human Despair (Zed Books). Read other articles by Jonathan, or visit Jonathan's website.
This article was posted on Tuesday, January 12th, 2016 at 1:17pm and is filed under Israel/Palestine, Jordan.
by seemslikeadream » Sun Jan 24, 2016 9:44 am
71 UK doctors call on World Medical Association to Expel Israel over Torture
By contributors | Jan. 24, 2016 |
Ma’an News Agency | – –
‘BETHLEHEM (Ma’an) — A group of British doctors is pushing for the World Medical Association (WMA) to expel the Israeli Medical Association (IMA), the IMA’s chairman said on Wednesday during a meeting of the Knesset Science and Technology committee.
In a discussion dealing with the academic boycott of Israel, Zeev Feldman said that 71 British doctors recently called on the WMA to remove the Israeli medical group from its ranks due to allegations of torture by Israeli doctors on Palestinians.
Israeli doctors in prison facilities have long been accused of standing by or abetting the torture of Palestinian detainees.
“The sword of the boycott is being raised on the Israeli scientific-medical community’” Feldman said.
During the meeting, Likud MK Anat Berko called the academic boycott a “sort of jihad in a suit.”
However, Basel Ghattas, an MK from the Joint List, argued that “you can think differently from the entire world, it is your right, but it is also the world’s right to take measures in order to force you to establish two states.”
Speaking to the academics in attendance, Ghattas added: “As academic intuitions, you have not taken any moral measures to prevent the occupation. There are Jewish professors who believe in calling for a boycott [on Israel] because it is the best price without paying in blood.”
In an interview with The Jerusalem Post following the meeting, Feldman said he feared that a medical boycott of Israel would have a “domino effect and radiate to all other scientific associations.”
Israel has been struggling to tackle a growing Palestinian-led boycott campaign which has had a number of high-profile successes abroad in both academic and artistic fields.
Known as the BDS movement — boycott, divestment and sanctions — it aims to exert political and economic pressure over Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories in a bid to repeat the success of the campaign which ended apartheid in South Africa.
In October, a group of 343 professor and lecturers bought a full page advertisement in the UK’s Guardian newspaper to publicize the launch of the group’s academic boycott of Israeli institutions, launched on the grounds that Israeli universities are “deeply complicit” in “Israeli violations of international law.”
In June, Britain’s National Union of Students voted to affiliate itself with the BDS movement, in a move which drew a sharp rebuke from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
In February 2015, more than 1,000 British artists — including Ken Loach, Miriam Margolyes, and Brian Eno — signed a pledge vowing not to perform in Israel in protest of its violations of human rights and international law.
Via Ma’an News Agency
——
Related video added by Juan Cole:
RT from last summer: “Palestinian prisoner likely to die if force-fed by Israelis – physician”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4x2unoDqVG0
Extreme, Extremer, Extremest
by Uri Avnery, January 23, 2016
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As is well-known, Israel is a "Jewish and democratic state".
That is its official designation.
Well…
As for Jewish, it’s a new kind of Jewishness, a mutation.
For 2000 years or so, Jews were known to be wise, clever, peace-loving, humane, progressive, liberal, even socialist.
Today, when you hear these attributes, the State of Israel is not the first name that springs to mind. Far from it.
As for "democratic", that was more or less true from the foundation of the state in 1948 until the Six-day War of 1967, when Israel unfortunately conquered the West Bank, the Gaza strip, East Jerusalem and the Golan. And, of course, the Sinai peninsula which was later returned to Egypt.
(I say "more or less" democratic, because there is no completely democratic state anywhere in the world.)
Since 1967, Israel has been a hybrid creation – half democratic, half dictatorial. Like an egg that is half fresh, half rotten.
The occupied territories, we should be reminded, consist of at least four different categories:
East Jerusalem, which was annexed by Israel in 1967 and is now part of Israel’s capital city. Its Palestinian inhabitants have not been accepted as nor applied to be Israeli citizens. They are mere "inhabitants", devoid of any citizenship.
The Golan Heights, formerly a part of Syria, which was annexed by Israel. The few Arab-Druze inhabitants who remain there are reluctant citizens of Israel.
The Gaza Strip, which is completely cut off from the world by Israel and Egypt, acting in collusion. The Israeli navy cuts it off at sea. The minimum the inhabitants need to survive is allowed to come through Israel. The late Ariel Sharon removed the few Jewish settlements from this area, which is not claimed by Israel. Too many Arabs there.
The West Bank (of the Jordan river), which the Israeli government and right-wing Israelis call by their Biblical names "Judea and Samaria", home of the largest part of the Palestinian people, probably some 3.5 million. It is there that the main battle is on.
From the first day of the 1967 occupation, right-wing Israelis were intent on annexing the West Bank to Israel. Under the slogan "the Whole of Eretz Israel" they launched a campaign for annexing this entire territory, driving the Palestinian population out and setting up as many Jewish settlements as possible.
The extremists never hid their intent of “cleansing” this land entirely of non-Jews and establishing a Greater Israel from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River.
This is a very difficult aim to achieve. In 1948, during our so-called "War of Independence", Israel conquered a far larger territory than allotted to it by the United Nations, but was forgiven. Half the Palestinian population of the country was driven out or fled. The fait accompli was more or less accepted by the world because it was achieved by military means in a war started by the Arab side, and because it happened soon after the Holocaust.
By 1967, the situation was quite different. The causes of the new war were disputed, David had turned into Goliath, a worldwide Cold War was on. Israel’s conquests were not recognized, not even by its protector, the US.
In spite of several new Israeli-Arab wars, the end of the Cold War and many other changes, this situation has not changed.
Israel still calls itself a "Jewish and democratic state". The population in "Greater Israel" is by now half Jewish and half Arab, with the Arabs gaining. Israel proper is still more or less democratic. In the occupied Palestinian territories, a dictatorial "military government" is in charge, with hundreds of thousands of Jewish settlers trying to push out the Palestinian Arab population by all means available, including fraudulent acquisition of land and terrorism (called "retaliation").
In Israel proper, the government belongs to the extreme Right, with some elements that would be called "fascist" anywhere else. The Center and Left are impotent. The only real political fight is between the radical Right and the even more radical extreme Right.
This week, a furious battle broke out between Binyamin Netanyahu together with his Minister of Defense, Bogie Ya’alon, both of the Likud Party, and the Education Minister, Naftali Bennett, the leader of the Jewish Home Party. Bennett, a wildly ambitious Rightist, makes no secret of his intention to replace Netanyahu as soon as possible.
The kind of language used by the two parties would be considered extreme even if used between the coalition and the opposition. Between partners of the coalition government it is, to put it mildly, rather unusual, even in Israel.
Compared to this, the language of the Leader of the Opposition, Yitzhak Herzog, is practically polite.
Bennett said that Netanyahu and Ya’alon hawk old and obsolete ideas and suffer from "mental paralysis", thereby worsening Israel’s already shaky standing in the world. Netanyahu and Ya’alon, a former Kibbutz member and army Chief of Staff, accused Bennett of stealing. According to them, whenever a good idea is aired in the cabinet, Bennett runs out of the room and proclaims it as his own. Ya’alon called Bennett “childish” and “reckless”.
Who is right? Unfortunately, all of them.
In between stands (or rather sits) the present army Chief of Staff, Gadi Eizenkot, son of immigrants from Morocco in spite of his German-sounding name. In Israel, curiously enough, the army chiefs are generally more moderate than the politicians.
The general proposed ameliorating the conditions of the Arab population in the occupied territories, such as allowing the people in Gaza to build a harbor and come into contact with the world at large. Amazing.
All this happened at a conference of so-called security experts where everybody had his or her say.
The leaders of the opposition parties also took part. Yitzhak Herzog of Labor, Yair Lapid of the centrist "There is a Future" party and others had their say, but their speeches were so tedious that they were reported only for fairness’ sake. They grabbed some ideas from here and there, called it "my plan" – with peace, if mentioned at all, deferred to the very, very distant future.
Peace, one gathers, is something nice, the matter dreams are made of. Not something for serious politicians.
What remains is a furious fight between the Far Right and the Even Further Right.
Bennett, a former high-tech entrepreneur, wears a kippah on his bald head (frankly, I always wonder what keeps it there, perhaps sheer willpower). He does not hide his conviction that he must replace the stagnant Netanyahu as soon as possible, for the good of the nation.
Bennett accused the incompetent political leadership of failing our brave soldiers and their commanders – an accusation straight out of Mein Kampf, which is about to appear in Hebrew.
Netanyahu’s only possible successor within his Likud party is Ya’alon, a man devoid of any charisma or political talent. However, to succeed, Bennett and his Jewish Home party must overtake Likud at the ballot box – a very difficult thing to do. That’s where the kippah comes in – Divine intervention may be called for.
Speaking about divine intervention: last week the Swedish Foreign Minister, Margot Wallstrom, criticized Israel’s legal system for having different laws for Jews and Arabs. Netanyahu reacted sharply, and lo and behold – by sheer accident, a few days later the Swedish press was full of stories about the corruption of Wallstrom, who did pay less rent for her government apartment than she should have.
All this could be amusing, if it did not concern the future of Israel.
Peace is a dirty word. The end of the occupation is not in sight. The United (Arab) Party is not even in the picture. The same (almost) goes for Meretz.
On the left, despair is the synonym of laziness. There is a mild debate about the idea that only the outside world can save us from ourselves. This is now propagated by the respected former Director General of our Foreign Office, Alon Lyel, a very brave ex-official. I don’t believe in this. The idea of running to the Goyim to save the Jews from themselves is not one to gain wide popularity.
Bennett is right on one point: stagnation, both mental and practical, is no solution. Things must move again. I fervently hope that the young generation will give birth to new forces and new ideas that will push aside Netanyahu, Bennett and their ilk.
As to our much-lauded democracy: it appears that a group financed by the government has for years paid a private detective, whose job was to rifle through the paper baskets of peace activists to obtain information on human rights and peace associations and personalities.
(Fortunately, I shred everything.)
200 Brazilian Academics to Join Boycott Force
author Saturday January 23, 2016 03:38author by IMEMC News & Agencies Report post
In just three days, an online letter endorsing the academic boycott of Israeli institutions, circulated by Brazilian intellectuals, received 200 signatories from faculty across Brazilian universities.
According to the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic & Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI), the letter was signed by well-known academics, including Paulo Sergio Pinheiro, a popular Brazilian diplomat who served on the country’s Truth Commission on human rights abuses that took place during the era of Brazil’s military dictatorship and was the U.N.’s Special Rapporteur on human rights in Myanmar as well as B. Boris Vargaftig, physician, pharmacologist, and one of the most internationally quoted Brazilian academics.
According to the PNN, this campaign came right after extremely popular Brazilian congressman Jean Wyllys accepted to participate in a conference at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, which has deep ties to human rights abuses against Palestinians.
Most of the University campus is built in the occupied East Jerusalem and, for that reason, was recently the subject of a new and influential boycott.
A letter signed by 351 international academics explains that “while all Israeli universities are deeply complicit in the occupation, settler-colonialism, and apartheid, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem is particularly noteworthy.”
It goes on to highlight how “the university is complicit in the unequal treatment of Palestinians, including those who are citizens of Israel”; “restricts the freedom of speech and protest of its few Palestinian students”; and is affiliated with Ariel University in the occupied West Bank, while refusing to recognize academic credentials from the Palestinian Al Quds University.
According to The Intercept, numerous critics expressed shock and outrage that a standard-bearer of Brazil’s progressive movement would so completely break with his party’s official position in support of the BDS movement.
But Wyllys further inflamed the outrage over the next several days with a series of self-defenses, and speaking about building bridges, dialogues and expressing his position against the academic boycott of Israel.
In a video message posted on Facebook, Paulo Sérgio Pinheiro (one among the 200 signatories of the academic boycott), harshly criticized the congressman.
“Lamentable and deplorable, congressman Jean Wyllys’ comments about his visit to Israel reveal a crass ignorance of and total misinformation about Israel’s current human rights policies,” he said.
One example of his lack of knowledge appeared when he characterized the apartheid wall as being “constructed by Israel to impede terrorist attacks”.
Wyllys’ controversial visit to the Hebrew University and his defense of Israeli policies came at a particularly tense moment in bilateral relations between the two governments.
Brazil’s nominally leftist Worker’s Party (PT) government, led by embattled President Dilma Rousseff, has refused to accept the appointment of Dani Dayan as Israel’s ambassador to Brazil on the grounds that he is a proponent of Israel’s illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank.
Under both Rousseff and her predecessor, PT’s Lula da Silva, their party has been vocally supportive of Palestinians.
PSOL positions itself as the left-wing alternative to the more moderately left PT, making Wyllys’ statements particularly surprising and shocking.
by seemslikeadream » Sat Jan 30, 2016 10:46 pm
Exasperated by Netanyahu, France Prepares to Recognize Palestinian State
By Juan Cole | Jan. 30, 2016 |
By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – –
Even the staunchly pro-Israel French Socialist Party has had it with Israeli expansionism and aggression. French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius announced Friday that France would make one last push to restart diplomatic negotiations between Israel and Palestine, but said that if the endeavor failed then France intended to recognize the Palestinian state. Paris is obviously implying that the failure of diplomacy and the abrogation of the Oslo peace process are primarily the fault of the Likud government of Israel.
The French parliament urged recognition of Palestine in a vote in 2014. Sweden has recognized Palestine and a number of other European countries have raised the Palestinian mission in their capitals to the rank of full embassy.
This tendency toward recognition of Palestine holds severe diplomatic and economic dangers for Israel. Such recognition gives aggrieved Palestinians the possible right to sue Israeli squatters and the politicians backing them in European courts. Already, the French, British and Dutch governments advise their corporations not to do business with Israeli squatters on the West Bank, since they are opened to being sued by the actual owners of that land. The European Union recently insisted that squatter produce be so labeled and not be dishonestly represented as “Israeli.” Even the US State Department has backed the EU on this measure.
On Tuesday in an address on policy to the diplomatic corps in Paris, French President Francois Hollande had said,
“the Israeli-Palestinian conflict continues to be felt throughout the Middle East. It would be naive, dangerous even, to look the other way. Each day, we see the risk of a flare-up. Every missed deadline takes us further away from the two-state solution, which is nonetheless the solution backed by the international community. France has therefore once again taken the initiative, as announced by Laurent Fabius, of mobilizing the Arab actors and the European and American partners in the framework of an international support group and the Security Council. This proposal is still on the table and it is the only one, currently, that would enable the dialogue to be resumed.”
The remarks came after a review of French steps to fight terrorism, and it seems clear that establishing a Palestinian state is seen by Paris to be a form of counter-terrorism, having potential for tamping down tensions in the Middle East. Paris was hit by significant terrorist attacks twice in 2015, with most of the perpetrators being marginalized, angry French and Belgian second-generation Arab immigrants. Something on the order of 5% of French are Muslim, and that community tends to support Palestinian rights and to pressure the French government to do so. French Muslims vote heavily for the ruling Socialist Party in France, fearing the anti-immigrant sentiments common on the French Right, including among Gaullists.
France also has good and close relations with many Arab governments, and is pressured by them about Israeli mistreatment of the Palestinians, as well.
Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has become more and more strident and arrogant in dealing with European and international politicians, acting as a sort of Donald Trump of the Middle East.
He recently has gone around accusing everyone from UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to Swedish Foreign Minister Margot Wallström of being terrorists for complaining about his oppression of the Palestinian people. (Netanyahu maintains, laughably, that Palestinian resistance activities have nothing to do with their being militarily occupied by the Israelis, and reacts to suggestions that he might by his policies be producing Palestinian violence with the casuistic charge that making this observation encourages terrorism). At the same time, his government just this week cheekily announced that it was stealing another 150 hectares of Palestinian land on the West Bank, which it had pledge in the Oslo peace accords to turn over to Palestine.
France roundly condemned the further land theft.
On Friday Fabius slapped down Netanyahu for his insults to Ban Ki-moon and lamented that “unfortunately the colonization [of Palestinian land by Israelis] continues.”
No American politician can call Israeli policy what it is, colonization, for fear of vicious reprisals by the bullies in the Israel lobbies.
by seemslikeadream » Wed Feb 03, 2016 3:26 pm
Thousands of Fake Copies of the New York Times Hit NYC Streets Reimagining Paper as Balanced on Palestine
The parody is titled “Rethinking our 2015 Coverage on Israel-Palestine: A Supplement.”
By Sarah Lazare / AlterNet February 3, 2016
Frustrated with the New York Times’ unfair coverage of Israel and Palestine, human rights campaigners took matters into their own hands on Tuesday, printing and distributing a stunning 10,000 parody versions of the paper that imagine the premier news outlet as responsible and balanced.
Titled “Rethinking our 2015 Coverage on Israel-Palestine: A Supplement,” the satirical issue hit the streets of New York blaring headlines such as “In the Footsteps of Mandela and King: A Non-Violent Movement Gains Ground Ten Years On,” a reference to the Palestinian call for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) on Israel. Other articles are titled, “Congress to Debate U.S. Aid to Israel” and "IDF Generals Blame Israeli Government for Recent Violence."
One story reveals that, following his trip to Israel, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio will hold a conference on Islamophobia at Brooklyn College. Another article announces that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has decided to ditch her presidential bid and will instead become director of the nonprofit Human Rights for All Women Foundation, which is based in Ramallah, New York, Nairobi and Charleston.
10,000 parody versions of the New York Times hit the streets Tuesday. (Image: Jewish Voice for Peace)
The prank paper includes an advertisement for the company Shalom Cement, which builds “the finest separation walls.” The spoof continues: “No walls say 'apartheid' like Shalom Cement.”
The prank includes an important Corrections section, which notes: “It has come to our attention that the vast majority of articles about violence in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories have failed to include the names of Palestinians killed by Israeli forces."
The stunt quickly captured attention and headlines, with the Village Voice speculating that the paper was the work of the Yes Men, who produced their own spoof New York Times edition in 2008 announcing the end of the Iraq war. But the mystery was put to rest Wednesday when groups including Jewish Voice for Peace New York, Jews Say No! and two other unnamed New York organizations "devoted to justice in Palestine and Israel" claimed responsibility in a press statement which was first reported by Salon.
“The articles highlight Israel’s ongoing policies of military occupation, displacement, and oppression, and ‘facts on the ground,’ such as settlement expansion, the rise in settler violence, discriminatory anti-democratic laws targeting Palestinian citizens of Israel and the increase of right-wing voices in the Knesset,” the organizations declared.
“As a leading source for news in the United States and in the world, the New York Times has a responsibility to its readers to provide fair, balanced, and fact-based coverage. Our paper reflects the news that we wish the Times and other papers would report,” said Jewish Voice for Peace New York organizer Candace Graff. “It includes the context and facts too often missing from the New York Times and other U.S. media outlets.”
by backtoiam » Wed Feb 03, 2016 4:17 pm
by seemslikeadream » Sat Feb 06, 2016 12:48 pm
Silencing Critics of Israel
02/06/2016 07:54 am ET | Updated 1 hour ago
James Zogby
President, Arab American Institute; author, 'Arab Voices'
Israel doesn't accept criticism. In fact, whether from friend or foe, even mild criticism is viewed as an existential threat prompting Israeli officials to unleash a torrent of abuse in an effort to silence and/or punish critics. And given new initiatives being rolled out in Israel and here is the US, by Congress and some state legislatures, this effort to silence critics is endangering free speech and the search for peace.
This worrisome tendency was on display in recent weeks as Israelis reacted with striking vehemence to remarks by United Nations Secretary General, Ban Ki Moon, and US Ambassador Daniel Shapiro.
In a speech to the Security Council, the Secretary General decried the "unacceptable levels of violence and polarized public discourse" that has taken hold in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories. He condemned the Palestinian attacks on Israeli civilians and insisted that "the full force of law must be brought to bear on all of those committing crimes--with a system of justice applied equally for Israelis and Palestinians alike".
But Ban went further, observing that "security measures alone will not stop the violence. They cannot address the profound sense of alienation and despair driving some Palestinians...Palestinian frustration is growing under the weight of a half century of occupation...[and] as oppressed peoples have demonstrated throughout the ages, it is human nature to react to occupation, which often serves as a potent incubator of hate and extremism".
The Secretary General went on to express his concern with recent Israeli announcements to expand settlements in the occupied lands, urging them to: stop the demolitions of Palestinian homes and confiscation of Palestinian lands; address the humanitarian situation in Gaza; and to take concrete steps to improve the daily lives of the Palestinian people--noting that all of these behaviors made more difficult the achievement of an Israel-Palestinian peace.
Ban offered, as well, a series of steps the Palestinians needed to take to end their internal divisions, put their house in order, and end incitement against Israel.
In an address to an Israeli think tank, Ambassador Shapiro echoed some of Ban's concerns, noting "we are concerned and perplexed by Israel's strategy on settlements. This government and previous Israeli governments have repeatedly expressed their support for a negotiated two-state solution -- a solution that would involve both mutual recognition and separation ... Yet separation will become more and more difficult if Israel plans to continue to expand the footprint of settlements."
Shapiro also criticized the way Israel governs in the occupied lands, saying "too much Israeli vigilantism in the West Bank goes on unchecked," he said. "There is a lack of thorough investigations ... at times it seems Israel has two standards of adherence to rule of law in the West Bank -- one for Israelis and one for Palestinians."
The Israeli reactions to both Ban and Shapiro were predictably harsh. Ban was accused of demonstrating a "double standard" with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu saying that the United Nations had "lost its neutrality and moral force" and charging that Ban had given "tail wind to terror". Netanyahu also called Shapiro's observations "unacceptable". The Ambassador was accused demonstrating a "double standard" and was crudely dismissed by a former Netanyahu aide as a "little Jew boy" courting favor.
All of this heightened hyper-reaction to criticism plays out against a backdrop of dangerous moves by Israel and its supporters in the US to not only defame and politically punish critics and in some instances to go further by making criticism illegal. In Israel, steps have been taken to punish teachers and artists and the Knesset is considering a series of measures and the passage of a new law that target domestic critics in an effort to blacklist them as "traitors".
Meanwhile, here in the US, the Department of State has issued guidelines on anti-Semitism which, in addition, to including examples of displays of "hatred toward Jews...Jewish institutions and religious facilities" also goes down a dangerous path terming as anti-Semitic "applying double standards by requiring of [Israel] behavior not expected of any other democratic nation". And several state governments have passed laws prohibiting efforts that call for boycotting, sanctioning, of divesting from Israel because of Israel's treatment of Palestinians.
The net effect of all these measures will be to silence critics and to deny them not only their right to speak out, but to peacefully organize and act to affect change in Israel's policies in the occupied Palestinian lands.
There is a certain irony in all of this because in their hysterical use of charge of "double standard"--i.e. that Israel is being "singled out for criticism"--it is Israel's supporters who are themselves guilty of a "double standard", since, if they were to have their way, it is Israel which would be singled out as the only country that cannot be criticized.
In the end, Ban and Shapiro are right. Israel's behavior is doing grave damage to the Palestinian people and to any hope for peace. And their critics are wrong. It is not a double standard to criticize Israel and it is most certainly not anti-Semitic. In fact, the overreaction to criticism harms our political discourse, damages the effort to combat real anti-Semitism, and because it serves to enable destructive Israeli policies, it makes a just peace a near unattainable goal.
Optimism of the Will
by Uri Avnery, February 06, 2016
So now we have another anti-Semite. Mazal Tov ("good luck") as we say in Hebrew.
His name is Ban Ki-moon, and he is the Secretary General of the UN. In practice, the highest international official, a kind of World Prime Minister.
He has dared to criticize the Israeli government, as well as the Palestinian Authority, for sabotaging the peace process, and thereby making Israeli-Palestinian peace almost impossible. He emphasized that there is a worldwide consensus about the "Two-state Solution" being the only possible one.
The formulation sounded neutral, but Ban made it quite clear that almost the entire fault lies with the Israeli side. Since the Palestinians are living under a hostile occupation, there is not much they can do one way or the other.
Anyone blaming Israel for anything is, of course, a blatant anti-Semite, the latest addition to a long line, starting with Pharaoh, king of Egypt, a few thousand years ago.
I am not criticizing Ban, except for being too soft-spoken. Perhaps that is the Korean style. If I had been – God forbid – in his place, my formulation would have been a lot sharper.
Contrary to appearances, there is no great difference between Ban and Bibi, as far as the prognosis is concerned. A few weeks ago, Binyamin Netanyahu announced that we shall "forever live by the sword” – a Biblical phrase going back to the admonition of Avner, King Saul’s general, who cried out to King David’s general Yoav "Shall the sword devour for ever?" (I always liked Avner and adopted his name.)
But what is good for a patriot like Netanyahu is not good for a Jew-hater like Ban. So to hell with him.
Netanyahu may have disliked Ban’s statement that the "Two State Solution" is now the consensus of the entire world. The world except Netanyahu and his cohorts.
That was not always so. Quite the contrary.
The Partition Plan was first adopted by the British Royal Commission appointed after the 1936 Arab Revolt (called "the Events" by the Jews) in which many Arabs, Jews and British soldiers died. In this plan the Jews were allotted only a small part of Palestine, a narrow strip along the sea, but it was the first time in modern history that a Jewish state was envisioned. The idea caused a deep split in the Jewish community in Palestine (called the "Yishuv"), but the outbreak of World War II put an end to the plan.
After the war and the Holocaust, there was a worldwide search for a permanent solution. The General Assembly of the new United Nations decided on the partition of Palestine into two states, one Jewish and one Arab. The Jewish leadership formally accepted this, but with the secret intention of enlarging the territory of their state at the first opportunity.
This opportunity came soon enough. The Arabs rejected partition and started a war, in which we conquered much more territory and annexed it to our fledgling state.
With the end of the war, by early 1949, the situation was thus: the enlarged Jewish state, now called Israel, occupied 78% of the country, including West Jerusalem; the Emir of Transjordan retained the West Bank of the Jordan with East Jerusalem and changed his title to King of Jordan; the King of Egypt retained the Gaza Strip.
Palestine had disappeared from the map.
When I was discharged from the army (because of my wounds) I was convinced that this situation would lead to permanent conflict. During the war I had seen many Arab villages and towns, from which the inhabitants had fled or been evicted, and was convinced that a Palestinian people existed – contrary to Israeli assertions and worldwide opinion – and that there would never be peace if this people was denied a national state of their own.
Still wearing uniform, I looked for partners in an endeavor to spread this conviction. I found a young Muslim Arab architect in Haifa and a young Druze sheikh. (The Druze are Arabs who seceded from Islam and founded a new religion many centuries ago).
The three of us met several times in the apartment of the architect, but found no public echo. Government policy and public opinion in Israel favored the status quo. The existence of a Palestinian people was fervently denied, Jordan became de facto an ally of Israel – as it had secretly been all along.
If someone had taken an international public opinion poll in the early 1950s, I wonder if they would have found a hundred people in the world who seriously favored a Palestinian state. Some Arab states paid lip service to the idea, but no one took it seriously.
My magazine, Haolam Hazeh, and later the party I founded (which bore the same name) were the only organizations in the world that carried on this struggle. Golda Meir famously said that "There is no such thing as a Palestinian people" (and less famously: "I am ready to mount the barricades to get Uri Avnery out of the Knesset!")
This total rejection of the rights and the very existence of the Palestinian people was further strengthened by the 1967 Six-day war, when Israel took possession of what was left of Palestine. The ruling doctrine was the "Jordanian Option" – the idea that if and when Israel would give back the West Bank or parts of it, it would give them to King Hussein.
This consensus extended from David Ben-Gurion to Levy Eshkol, from Yitzhak Rabin to Shimon Peres. The idea behind it was not only the inherited denial of the existence of the Palestinian people, but also the harebrained conviction that the king would give up Jerusalem, since his capital was Amman. Only a total ignoramus could have believed that the Hashemite king, a direct descendant of the Prophet, could give the third-holiest city of Islam to infidels.
The pro-Soviet Israeli Communist party was also for the Jordanian Option, causing me to joke in the Knesset that it was probably the only Communist Monarchist party in the world. This ended in 1969, when Leonid Brezhnev suddenly changed course and accepted the "Two States for Two Peoples" formula. The Israeli communists followed almost before the words were out of his mouth.
The Likud party, of course, was never ready to give up even an inch of Eretz Israel. Officially, it still claims the East bank of the Jordan River, too. Only a practiced liar like Netanyahu could publicly proclaim to the world his acceptance of the "Two-state Solution". No Likud member took this seriously.
So when the world’s highest diplomat says that there is a worldwide consensus for the Two-state Solution, I have the right to enjoy a moment of satisfaction. And optimism.
Optimistic is the title of my memoirs, the second part of which just came out this week. (Alas, only in Hebrew. Have not yet found publishers in other languages.)
When the first part appeared, people thought the title was crazy. Now they say that it is insane.
Optimistic? Today? When the Israeli peace camp is in deep despair? When homegrown fascism is raising its head and the government is leading us towards national suicide?
I have tried several times to explain where this irrational optimism comes from: genetic roots, life experience, the knowledge that pessimists don’t do anything, that it is the optimists who try to effect change.
To quote the motto of Antonio Gramsci: "Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will."
Ban is not the only anti-Semite who was unmasked lately. Another one is Laurent Fabius, Foreign Minister of France.
How come? Fabius has lately floated the idea of convening (in Paris, of course) an international conference for Israeli-Palestinian peace. He declared in advance that if this idea is not accepted, France will officially recognize the State of Palestine, opening the gates of Europe for others to follow.
This raises a semantic question. In Zionist parlance, only a non-Jew can be an anti-Semite. A Jew who says exactly the same is a "Jewish self-hater".
Fabius belongs to a Jewish family that has converted to Catholicism. Under Jewish religious law (the Halakha) a Jew who has sinned remains a Jew. Converting is a sin. So is Fabius a non-Jew and therefore an anti-Semite, or a Jewish sinner, a self-hater?
How, exactly, should we curse him?
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