Benjamin Netanyahu Proposes to ‘Swap’ Israel’s Arab citizens in exchange for the West Bank Settlements

August 12, 2017, 7:13 pm

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The Expulsion of Israel’s Palestinians is a Consensus Policy of Likud and Israeli Labour

Making its way through the Knesset is the Jewish State Bill, which removes the status of Arabic as an official language.  The Jewish State Bill also defines Israel as a state of the Jewish people.  By Jewish people is meant not just Jews who live in Israel but all Jews, including Jews in the diaspora.

Israel is quite unique in that it doesn’t have a single nationality covering all its citizens or residents.  In most countries citizenship and nationality are interchangeable, even when people define themselves as members of different nations.  One’s legal nationality is often different from the nation someone belongs to as in the case of multi-national states.

For example all British citizens are also British nationals even though the latter may consider themselves English, Scottish, Welsh or Irish.  Citizenship usually defines one’s political rights and sits on top of a shared nationality.

Israel's fascist Defence Minister Avigdor Lieberman, leader of the far-Right Yisrael Beitenu

There is no Israeli nationality.  There is a Jewish nationality, a Muslim, Christian and many other nationalities but in a Jewish state only one nationality counts.  Israel’s Arab citizens are considered by most Jews to be there on sufferance. They are viewed as a fifth column.  When e.g. there were wild fires in Israel over the summer, as has occurred in many countries, Israel's Arab citizens were immediately blamed by Minister of Public Security Gilad Erdan and Netanyahu.  When the fires had died down those Israeli Arabs who had been arrested were released but the memories of the 'fire intifada' remained.  Arabs in Israel are the scapegoat for all perceived ills in Israel much as Jews used to be the scapegoat in European countries. [see Two months on, still no evidence of a 'fire intifada' in Israel]  Israel's Arabs are the enemy within.  A plurality of Israeli Jews have consistently supported the physical expulsion of Israel’s Palestinian citizens.  See e.g. Nearly half of Israeli Jews believe in ethnic cleansing, survey finds.

That is the meaning of a Jewish state.  It isn’t a state in the same sense that Britain is a Christian state. In Britain, the fact that I am Jewish has no bearing on my rights and responsibilities. There is no Christian National Fund that tells me that as a Jew I cannot reside or live in a certain area.  In Israel there is a Jewish National Fund, which controls or owns 93% of Israeli land.  Non-Jews cannot live on such land which is why there is such overcrowding in the Arab sector.  When the Israeli Supreme Court ruled that the Israeli Land Authority and JNF could not refuse to lease or sell land to an Arab the Knesset passed a Reception Committee Bill which allowed all-Jewish communities to reject Arab applications to join those communities.  In South Africa that was called Apartheid.

The Israeli Right led by Avigdor Lieberman of Yisrael Beitenu, Israel’s fascist Defence Minister, has long advocated as part of a 2 state solution that Israel’s Palestinian citizens should be transferred into a Palestinian state (for which read Bantustan).  This is  another reason why a 2 State solution is an Apartheid solution.  A 2 state solution would be an open invitation to Israel to expel Israel’s Arabs.  Israel’s definition of itself as a Jewish state rests on how high the percentage of Jews in Israel is.  The higher the percentage of Jews the more secure and safe the Jewish state is.

Tzipi Livni, co-leader of the Zionist Union with the Israeli Labour Party, supports the transfer of Israel's Arab citizens

As the tide of corruption accusations begin to threaten Netanyahu’s ability to hold onto power, it is no surprise that he now supports the idea of a physical expulsion of Israel’s Palestinians.  No one should be under any illusions though that this is simply a product of Israel’s far-Right government.  Under the previous Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, negotiations conducted by the then Foreign Minister, Tsipi Livni, aimed at transferring Israel’s Palestinians into a Palestinian state.  Livni is now a co-leader of the Zionist Union, the electoral grouping that includes the Israeli Labour Party.  Israeli Labour is an ardent supporter of segregation between Jew and Arab, i.e. an Apartheid policy.

This is why Israel as a Jewish state is an inherently racist state.  It is not Jewish culturally or even religiously.  The defines its Jewishness based on a racial definition of who is Jewish.

Tony Greenstein

Umm el-Fahm

Netanyahu alarms Umm al-Fahm with talk of population swap

3 August 2017

After al-Aqsa attack, Israeli PM backs controversial transfer plan of far-right defence minister, Avigdor Lieberman

Middle East Eye – 4 August 2017

Israel’s crackdown on access to the al-Aqsa mosque compound after two Israeli policemen were killed there last month provoked an eruption of fury among Palestinians in occupied Jerusalem and rocked Israel’s relations with the Arab world.

Netanyahu and Lieberman agree on the ethnic cleansing of Israel's Arabs

Three weeks on, the metal detectors and security cameras have gone and – for now, at least – Jerusalem is calmer.

But the shockwaves are still reverberating, and being felt most keenly far away in northern Israel, in the town of Umm al-Fahm. The three young men who carried out the shootings were from the town’s large Jabareen clan. They were killed on the spot by police.

Umm al-Fahm, one of the largest communities for Israel’s 1.7 million Palestinian citizens, a fifth of the population, had already gained a reputation among the Jewish majority for political and religious extremism and anti-Israel sentiment.

In large part, that reflected its status as  home to the northern branch of the Islamic Movement, led by Sheikh Raed Salah. In late 2015, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu outlawed the Movement as a terror organisation, despite his intelligence agencies failing to find evidence to support such a conclusion.

More likely, Netanyahu’s antipathy towards Salah’s group, and Umm al-Fahm, derives from its trenchant efforts to ensure the strongest possible presence of Muslims at al-Aqsa.

As Israel imposed ever tighter restrictions on Palestinians from the occupied territories reaching the mosque, Salah organised regular coaches to bring residents to the compound from Umm al-Fahm and surrounding communities.

Umm el-Fahm - Israel's largest Arab city

Thousands attend funeral

Nonetheless, the three youths’ attack at al-Aqsa last month has served to bolster suspicions that Umm al-Fahm is a hotbed of radicalism and potential terrorism.

That impression was reinforced last week when the Israeli authorities, at judicial insistence, belatedly handed over the three bodies for burial.

Although Israel wanted the funerals as low-key as possible, thousands attended the burials. Moshe Arens, a former minister from Netanyahu’s Likud party, expressed a common sentiment this week: “The gunmen evidently had the support of many in Umm al-Fahm, and others seem prepared to follow in their footsteps.”

Yousef Jabareen, a member of the Israeli parliament who is himself from Umm al-Fahm, said such accusations were unfair.

“People in the town were angry that the bodies had been kept from burial in violation of Muslim custom for two weeks,” he told Middle East Eye. “There are just a few extended families here, so many people wanted to show solidarity with their relatives, even though they reject the use of violence in our struggle for our civil rights.”

Nonetheless, the backlash from Netanyahu was not long in coming.

In a leak to Israeli TV, his office said he had proposed to the Trump administration ridding Israel of a region known as the Little Triangle, which includes some 300,000 Palestinians citizens. Umm al-Fahm is its main city.

The Triangle is a thin sliver of Israeli territory, densely packed with Palestinian citizens, bordering the north-west corner of the West Bank.

As part of a future peace deal, Netanyahu reportedly told the Americans during a meeting in late June, Umm al-Fahm and its neighbouring communities would be transferred to a future Palestinian state.

‘A double crime’

In effect, Netanyahu was making public his adoption of the long-standing and highly controversial plan of his far-right defence minister, Avigdor Lieberman.

This would see borders redrawn to allow Israel to annex coveted settlements in the West Bank in exchange for stripping hundreds of thousands of Palestinians of their Israeli citizenship and reassigning their communities to a highly circumscribed Palestinian state.

Jamal Zahalka, another member of the parliament, from Kafr Kara in the Triangle, said Netanyahu was supporting a double crime.

“He wins twice over,” he told Middle East Eye. “He gets to annex the illegal settlements to Israel, while he also gets rid of Arab citizens he believes are a threat to his demographic majority.”

Lieberman lost no time in congratulating Netanyahu for adopting his idea, tweeting: “Mr Prime Minister, welcome to the club.”

With his leak, Netanyahu has given official backing to an aspiration that appears to be secretly harboured by many Israeli politicians – and one that, behind the scenes, they have been pushing increasingly hard with Washington and the leadership of the Palestinian Authority.

A poll last year showed that nearly half of Israeli Jews want Palestinians expelled from Israel.

With Netanyahu now publicly on board, it looks suspiciously like Lieberman’s role over many years has been to bring into the mainstream a policy the liberal Haaretz newspaper has compared to “ethnic cleansing”.

Marzuq al-Halabi, a Palestinian-Israeli analyst and researcher at the Van Leer Institute in Jerusalem, believed the move was designed with two aims in mind.

It left a “constant threat” of expulsion hanging over the heads of the minority as a way to crush political activity and demands for reform, he wrote on the Hebrew website Local Call. And at the same time it cast Palestinian citizens out into a “territorial and governmental emptiness”.

Inevitably, the plan revives fears among Palestinian citizens of the Nakba, the Arabic word for “Catastrophe”: the mass expulsions that occurred during the 1948 war to create Israel on the ruins of the Palestinian homeland.

Jabareen observed that the population swap implied that Palestinian citizens “are part of the enemy. … It says we don’t belong in our homeland, that our future is elsewhere.”

Backing from Kissinger

The idea of a populated land exchange was first formalised by Lieberman in 2004, when he unveiled what he grandly called a “Separation of the Nations” programme. It quickly won supporters in the US, including from elder statesman Henry Kissinger.

The idea of a land and population swap – sometimes termed “static transfer” – was alluded to by former prime ministers, including Ehud Barak and Ariel Sharon, at around the same time.

But only Lieberman set out a clear plan. He suggested stripping as many as 300,000 Palestinians in the Triangle of their Israeli citizenship. Other Palestinian citizens would be expected to make a “loyalty oath” to Israel as a “Jewish Zionist state”, or face expulsion to a Palestinian state. The aim was to achieve two states that were as “ethnically pure” as possible.

Jabareen noted that Lieberman’s populated land exchange falsely equated the status and fate of Palestinians who are legal citizens of Israel with Jewish settlers living in the West Bank in violation of international law.

Lieberman exposed his plan to a bigger audience in 2010, when he addressed the United Nations as foreign minister in the first of Netanyahu’s series of recent governments. Notably, at that time, the prime minister’s advisers distanced him from the proposal.

Mass arrests

A month after Lieberman’s speech, it emerged that Israeli security services had carried out secret exercises based on his scenario. They practised quelling civil disturbances with mass arrests following a peace deal that required redrawing the borders to expel large numbers of Palestinian citizens.

Behind the scenes, other Israeli officials are known to have supported more limited populated land swaps.

Documents leaked in 2011 revealed that three years earlier the centrist government of Ehud Olmert had advanced just such a population exchange during peace talks.

Tzipi Livni, then the foreign minister, had proposed moving the border so that several villages in Israel would end up in a future Palestinian state. Notably, however, Umm al-Fahm and other large communities nearby were not mentioned.

The political sympathies between Lieberman and Livni, the latter widely seen as a peacemaker by the international community, were nonetheless evident.

In late 2007, as Israel prepared for the Annapolis peace conference, Livni described a future Palestinian state as “the answer” for Israel’s Palestinian citizens. She said it was illegitimate for them to seek political reforms aimed at ending Israel’s status as a “home unto the Jewish people”.

Demographic reduction

The first hints that Netanyahu might have adopted Lieberman’s plan came in early 2014 when the Maariv newspaper reported that a population exchange that included the Triangle had been proposed in talks with the US administration, then headed by Barack Obama.

The hope, according to the paper, was that the transfer would reduce the proportion of Palestinian citizens from a fifth of the population to 12 per cent, shoring up the state’s Jewishness.

Now Netanyahu has effectively confirmed that large-scale populated land swaps may become a new condition for any future peace agreement with the Palestinians, observed Jabareen.

At Lieberman’s request in 2014, the Israeli foreign ministry produced a document outlining ways a land and population exchange could be portrayed as in accordance with international law. Most experts regardedthe document’s arguments as specious.

The foreign ministry concludedthat the only hope of justifying the measure would be to show either that the affected citizens supported the move, or that it had the backing of the Palestinian Authority, currently headed by Mahmoud Abbas.

Anything short of this would be a non-starter because it would either qualify as “forced transfer” of the Triangle’s inhabitants, a war crime, or render them stateless.

The problem for Israel is that opinion polls have repeatedly shown that no more than a quarter of Palestinians in the Triangle area back being moved into a Palestinian state. Getting their approval is likely to prove formidably difficult.

Zahalka rejected claims by Israeli politicians that this was a vote of confidence from Palestinian citizens in Israeli democracy.

“Israel has made the West Bank a living hell for Palestinians, and few [in Israel] would choose to inflict such suffering on their own families. But it also because we do not want to be severed from the rest of the Palestinian community in Israel – from our personal, social and economic life.”

Jabareen agreed. “We are also connected to places like Nazareth, Haifa, Acre, Jaffa, Lid and Ramle.”

And he noted that Netanyahu and Lieberman were talking about redrawing the borders to put only their homes inside a future Palestinian state. “Umm al-Fahm had six times as much land before Israel confiscated it. We still consider those lands as ours, but they are not included in the plan.”

Recognise Jewish state

It is in this context – one where Palestinians citizens will not consent to their communities being moved outside Israel’s borders – that parallel political moves by Netanyahu should be understood, said Jabareen.

Not least, it helps to explain why Netanyahu has made recognition of Israel as a Jewish state by Abbas’ Palestinian Authority a precondition for talks.

Aware of the trap being laid for it, the PA has so far refused to offer such recognition. But if it can be arm-twisted into agreement, Netanyahu will be in a much stronger position. He can then impose draconian measures on Palestinians in Israel, including loyalty oaths and an end to their demands for political reform – under threat that, if they refuse, they will be moved to a Palestinian state.

At the same time, Netanyahu has been pushing ahead with a new basic law that would define Israel as the nation state of the Jewish people, rather than of Israel’s entire population. The legislation’s intent is to further weaken the Palestinian minority’s claim on citizenship.

Netanyahu’s decision to ban the Islamic Movement as a terror organisation fits into the picture too.

In a 2012 report by the International Crisis Group, a Washington and Brussels-based conflict resolution group, an official in Lieberman’s party explained that one of the covert goals of Lieberman’s plan was to rid Israel of “the heartland of the Islamic Movement”.

Conversely, Netanyahu’s Likud allies and coalition partners have been pushing aggressively to annex settlements in the West Bank.

Zahalka noted that the prime minister gave his backing last week to legislation that would expand Jerusalem’s municipal borders to incorporate a number of large settlements – a move that would amount to annexation in all but name.

“The deal is Israel takes Jerusalem and its surrounding areas, and gives Umm al-Fahm and its surroundings to the PA,” he said.

The pieces seem to be slowly falling into place for a populated land exchange that would strip hundreds of thousands of Palestinians of their Israeli citizenship.

Paradoxically, however, the ultimate obstacle may prove to be Netanyahu himself – and his reluctance to concede any kind of meaningful state to the Palestinians.

Jonathan Cook is a Nazareth- based journalist and winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism

Netanyahu Offers Swapping Israeli Arab Communities With Settlements in Future Deal With Palestinians

PM raises idea of land swap in talks with senior Trump adviser Kushner and envoy Greenblatt, sources say. White House officials: One of many ideas discussed

Barak Ravid and Jack Khoury Jul 27, 2017 10:36 PM

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has suggested to American officials that Israeli-Arab communities could be moved under Palestinian control as part of a final status agreement, Israeli officials said on Thursday. In exchange, Israel would annex some West Bank settlements.

Netanyahu's idea for land swaps in the Wadi Ara region in return for Israeli settlements was reported for the first time on Thursday on Channel 2 News.

The officials, who requested anonymity, said Netanyahu raised the idea in the talks with U.S. President Donald Trump's senior advisor Jared Kushner and American envoy Jason Greenblatt, during their visit in Israel a few weeks ago.

"The issue didn't come up as a separate proposal, but as part of a proposal for a comprehensive arrangement with the Palestinians," one official said.

Senior White House officials said the issue was broached in the talks, but not in a serious or significant way. "This may have been one of many ideas discussed several weeks ago in the context of a peace agreement and not in the context of a separate annexation," an official said.

The report came a day after a mass funeral in Umm al-Fahm, an Arab city in Israel's Wadi Ara, of the three assailants who carried out the attack at the Temple Mount, in which two policemen were killed.

Calls for carrying out further attacks heard during the funeral evoked more criticism in the right wing against Netanyahu's decision to remove the contested metal detectors from the entrances to the Temple Mount. Israel had installed the security measure at the holy site following the attack.

The report also comes amid a wave of announcements and statements from the Prime Minister's Office in the last few days in a bid to appease rightist public opinion. Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman, who has been advocating for several years to hand over Wadi Ara to the Palestinians in a future peace agreement, tweeted on Thursday night: "Mr. prime minister, welcome to the club."

MK Aida Touma-Suliman responded on Thursday to the report about Netanyahu's proposal. "The cat is out of the bag and Netanyahu has shown his true colors regarding the Arab population,"she said. "Lieberman's plan has been adopted by the prime minister," she said.

"The Ara residents are not only Israeli citizens, they're also indigenous people who dwell on their land, and are not to be compared with settlers dwelling on another nation's land. We the Arab citizens aren't part of any such equation and aren't willing to pay the price again for Israel's policy of occupation and settlements."

See also Expelling Israel's Arab population? Al Jazeera 

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Zionism as a master-race ideology

August 15, 2017, 12:46 pm

≫ Next: Jeremy Corbyn Must Follow Ted Heath's example - He sacked Enoch Powell and Sarah Champion must be sacked

≪ Previous: Benjamin Netanyahu Proposes to ‘Swap’ Israel’s Arab citizens in exchange for the West Bank Settlements

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Zionist Invention of Iran Threat – An Interview with Prof. Yakov Rabkin

This is an important interview with Professor Yakov Rabkin that is well worth reading.  According to Wikipedia 

'Yakov M. Rabkin is a professor of history at the Université de Montréal, author and public intellectual. His book A Threat from Within: A Century of Jewish Opposition to Zionism was nominated for best French to English translation for "an important and timely work" at the 2006 Governor General's Awards.^[1] It has also been listed as one of the three best books of the year by Japan’s leading daily Asahi Shimbun in 2010.^[2] This book is currently available in fourteen languages.

Rabkin's analysis is from an Orthodox religious perspective.  Hence he sees the Torah as providing the focus of Jewish identity before the Land of Israel and colonisation took its place.  I disagree.  What united Jews was what they did and how they did it.  It was Jews specific socio-economic role as traders, money lenders, agents of money in a pre-capitalist society based on use values that distinguished them from non-Jews.  The religion, the Talmud, reflected their role.

Nonetheless Rabkin has many useful insights and it is a thought provoking essay.

Tony Greenstein

Holding placards stating “Judaism rejects Zionism and the State of Israel,” “Bibi’s on a world tour to fuel antisemitism,” and “The Jewish religion forbids the existence of the State of Israel,” dozens of radical haredim gathered in front of the US Consulate-General in Jerusalem on Tuesday to protest against Zionism and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech before Congress. Caption by JPost, photo by Marc Israel Sellem, March 2015.

 July 26, 2015

We have already talked about Iran in the last days, after the historical Iran Deal in Vienna, achieved after 12 years’ of work this 14th of July 2015. The only State opposing to this deal is Israel which talks about how dangerous Iran is for the Zionist State.

We have talked to Prof. Yakov Rabkin of the University of Montreal about this invention and culture of fear on which Zionism is based. We thank him a lot for his time.

We had already published his great article about Iran before the deal, when Netanyahu spoke in front of the US-Congress about the so called “Iranic threat”.´

Dr. Milena Rampoldi:How has Israel invented the Iranian threat and with which means does Israel try to keep it for ever?

Prof. Yakov Rabkin: In an earlier article I outlined the history of that invention. Israel used its allies and agents to promote it and make it into an international issue. Thus Israel was able to distract world attention from the Palestinians, and deal with them with impunity.

No less importantly, this fabrication offered Israeli society another “existential threat”. Apparently, the non-existent Iranian bomb has now been replaced by another “existential threat”  – BDS, international peaceful campaign to apply boycott, divestment and economic sanctions to make Israel change its policy toward the Palestinians. Some Israelis believe that their society would implode without these existential threats. Fear is what holds it together.

MR: How are the real relations between Jews and Iranian people in Iran which has a big Jewish community?

Prof. Yakov Rabkin:While I have no direct knowledge of the situation of Jews in Iran, it appears they are doing no worse than other Iranians. There have been no violence or specific repressive measures reported.

MR: How can a refusal of Zionist ideology help us today to promote the friendship between the Jews and the Muslim peoples in general and Iran in particular?

It is important to emphasize that Zionism has been a rupture and a rebellion against Judaism. Most Jews opposed it when it emerged in the late 19th century. One must reject antisemitic conspiracy theories and understand that Jews around the world, whatever their vocal support Israel, have no influence on Israeli policies. They should not be held responsible for what Israel is and does. Then one could see that Judaism and Islam are the two closest religions to each other, that Jews lived a lot better in Islamic than Christian realms and that many classical works of Judaism are written in Arabic. Moreover, Jews with their experience of antisemitism in Christian countries can help Muslim to cope with the growing Islamophobia.

MR: What would you say to the German Chief of the Zentralrat der Juden, Dr. Schuster, who said  the Iranian deal is dangerous for Israel and for the stability of the whole Middle East?

Israel fans around the world repeat whatever they are told to say by their Israeli masters. With all due respect to functionaries of Jewish organizations in Germany, they may be less well informed than their government that signed the Vienna agreement. This kind of support for Israel is not innocent. Recently it was revealed that Jewish organizations were covertly used by the Israeli army to spread its message during the attack on Gaza in 2014. Obviously, those Jewish functionaries who agreed to do this expose rank-and-file members of their organizations to reprisals, including violence. This is particularly grievous since most Jews, at least in the United States, support the Vienna agreement with Iran. Moreover, American Jews support it more than the average Americans.

This shows the growing estrangement of American Jews from Israel, which only strengthens the point I made in my answer to your previous question. In view of this, one wonders who exactly represent functionaries of Jewish organizations: Jews in their countries or the State of Israel.

MR: How long will people take to understand that Netanyahu’s position is wrong. What can we explain to these people to change their position?

Netanyahu relies on support from one of the main donors to the Republican Party. One can expect the Prime Minister’s credibility to remain sterling in those circles and their media. Elsewhere, he appears a lot less credible. But at issue is not his personality. Israel’s political mainstream is behind 

Netanyahu in denouncing the Vienna agreement. This is part of the inexorable shift of the Israeli public to the right. And this leads to Israel’s growing isolation in the world, including isolation from Jews in major countries.

Prof. Rabkin, photo from his publisher, Fernwood.

Yakov Rabkin’s devastating critique of Zionism: it is opposed to Jewish tradition and liberalism

By Philip Weiss, Mondoweiss
June 27, 2017

Last year one of the most important books on Zionism, ever, was published in English by Pluto: What Is Modern Israel? by Yakov Rabkin, a professor of history at the University of Montreal. The central theme of the book is how Zionists have exploited Judaism and western traditions to offer Israel as a liberal democracy when it is actually a nationalist colonialists project hanging on by its paranoid fingernails.

Rabkin has expertise. He is a religious academic, and it is his Judaism that has brought him to embrace universalist cosmopolitanism when it comes to interpreting history in our century. Given his background, he has been able to defy what he calls the “climate of intellectual terror that surrounds the Question of Israel.”

Published on 20 May 2016, Pluto Press, pb, £16.99

In reading his book, it struck me that the greatest service I could provide to a reader is to roll out Rabkin’s deadly insights about the nature of the “Jewish state,” and the essential antagonism of Judaism and Zionism. What follows is a long sequence of Rabkin’s observations and findings, all of which aim to end that climate of terror and allow westerners to speak freely about the Zionist era. 

Let’s go.

Zionism has four essential goals, Rabkin says.

1, “to transform the transnational Jewish identity centred on the Torah into a national identity like that of other European nations.”

2, “To develop a new vernacular language.”

3, “To displace the Jews from their countries of origin to Palestine”.

4, “To establish political and economic control over Palestine.”

Thus, Zionism is a case of “imposed modernization typical of western colonialism,” a policy rejected by both Arab and traditional Jewish populations.

Israel’s self-ascribed identity as a ‘Jewish state’ brings  legitimacy to the renewal of ethnicity as the criterion for belonging

Politically, Israel has been able to rely on the solid support of the elites of Western nations, in part due to Zionism’s colonialist aims:

“The essentially European character of this recently established settler colony, which resembles in many ways the United Kingdom’s former colonies throughout the world, also explains Western support of Israel. Its self-ascribed identity as a ‘Jewish state’ brings de facto legitimacy to the renewal of ethnicity as the criterion for belonging.”

Rabkin notes the popular trend we’ve been chronicling:

“Western partiality toward Israel suffers from a democratic deficit: contrary to their elites, the majority of the citizens of the Western nations consider the state of Israel as a threat to world peace.”

The distinction between left and right wings of Zionism is far less meaningful than is Zionism’s hostility to liberalism:

[I]t would surely be more useful to speak of a division between liberal cosmopolitanism and ethnic nationalism. Zionism, meanwhile, is fundamentally hostile to liberal cosmopolitanism, which explains why the Zionist “left,” in Israel and elsewhere, has gone largely over to the “right.” What unites the two camps—their conviction of the legitimacy of Zionism—is more substantial than the stylistic or tactical differences that divide them.

Rabkin links the rise of Zionism with the secularization of Jewish identity in modernity, and the Jewish aspiration to normal experience among the nations:

Jewish secular identity acquired a socio-cultural dimension: those who consciously rejected Judaism could preserve, at least for a while, a specific language (Yiddish), and a few cultural markers. This new identity was conjugated in a wide range of political options, often of socialist or nationalist inspiration. By consummating the break with tradition, the concept of the secular Jew, at variance with the traditional Jewish vision, made it possible to redefine the Jews as a “normal people” and thus became the cornerstone of Zionism.

But it was a special definition of peoplehood.

The concept of the Jewish people that Zionism relied on had little in common with traditional definitions of the term. Religious scholars know that: “the Torah, and only the Torah, makes of the Jews a collective identity.”

Jewish tradition has long put exile at the centre of Jewish existence. Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch:

Torah… obliges us, until God shall call us back to the Holy Land, to live and to work as patriots wherever He has placed us, to collect all the physical, material and spiritual forces and all that is noble in Israel to further the wealth of nations which have given us shelter.

But the new secular Jewish identity gained popularity in Eastern Europe and especially Russia, and it “eliminated the religious—and thus normative—dimension of Jewish identity and retained only its biological and cultural dimensions.”

Prof. Yakov Rabkin, at the Cork conference on international law and the state of Israel, April 2017. Photograph by Tom Suarez

At the same time as it countered Jewish religion, Zionism also countered liberalism: “Zionists consider a liberal, multicultural society as a major obstacle to the expansion of a Jewish national conscience.”

Zeev Sternhell:

“To accept the liberal concept of society would mean [for Jewish nationalist intelligentsia] the end of the Jewish people as an autonomous unit.”

Thus, Rabkin says: “The main threat to Zionism is European liberalism, which offers Jews an individual choice but, according to many Zionists, denies them the opportunity to live a true national life.”

Zionism is at root a response to challenges of liberalism: “far more Israelis take up residence in the world’s liberal democracies than citizens of those countries immigrate to Israel.” That goes for Russian Jews too:

“Out of the 1.2 million Jews who emigrated from Russia at the turn of the 20th century, a mere 30,000 made Palestine their destination, and of those, only a quarter remained there.”

The Jewish tradition of exile is so strong that when Soviet Jewry was allowed to emigrate, Israel was required to carry out “a full scale diplomatic campaign in an effort to prevail upon its allies (primarily the United States and Germany) to limit immigration to their countries of Soviet Jews.”

Rabkin says Zionism was pioneered by assimilated, secular Jews who felt that emancipation had freed them to penetrate the highest levels of European society, and found they were rejected, so they sought a nation like other nations out of this frustration. Torah had been the basis of Jewish unity till Zionism. But when they went back to the land of Israel, “they would no longer need to follow [Torah’s] precepts, for their national consciousness, as experienced in the land of Israel, would be sufficient to sustain that unity.”

Israel allowed these Jews to forgive themselves assimilation: because they were assimilating into “normal” history:

“Only the state of Israel offers the Jews the ultimate freedom to reject totally their spiritual heritage and become a ‘normal people.’ The new Israeli identity appears to facilitate collective assimilation while sparing those who adopt it the feeling of guilt often linked to assimilation on an individual basis.”

Rabkin quotes Rabbi Amram Blau saying that Zionism brought greater injury to the Jews than to the Arabs:

“The Arabs may have lost their land and their homes, but by accepting Zionism, the Jews lost their historic identity.”

And he quotes Meron Benvenisti, former deputy mayor of Jerusalem, characterizing the two-tier system of rights for Jews and occupied Palestinians as “Herrenvolk [master race] democracy.”

The elevation by Zionists of the volk [a superior people with a special destiny] as the exclusive subject of Jewish history led rabbis to denounce this “cardinal element” of Zionist ideology, Rabkin says. He quotes Robert Wistrich.

“There is no Jewish nation… [Jews] should cultivate the ancient Hebrew language, study their rich literature, know their history, cherish their faith, and make the greatest sacrifices for it; they should hope and trust in the wisdom of divine providence.”

Zionism depends on antisemitism, and it also fosters it.

“Political Zionism intentionally stirs up anti-Semitism,” I. M. Rabinowitch wrote in 1974. “From the very beginning, it has been the policy to deliberately incite hatred of the Jew and, then, in feigned horror, point to it to justify a Jewish state.”

Rabinowitch said that Zionism contains the “most fertile seeds for proliferation of antisemitism” – an element of dual loyalty. Rabkin then quotes a former Israeli diplomat describing the role of Jews in the west as “an Israel-vassalized diaspora.”

Here Rabkin is unintimidated by the climate of intellectual terror. The vassalizing of the diaspora goes beyond double allegiance to “a form of exclusive allegiance to the state of Israel.” (Remember Dennis Ross calling on U.S. Jews to be “advocates” for Israel, not for Palestinians.) Rakin says:

“The unconditional defence of Israel into which certain community leaders have dragooned the Jews tends to expose them to criticism, which in turn justifies Zionism and makes the state of Israel indispensable as an insurance policy. Even proudly secular Israelis find this policy suicidal for the future of the diaspora…

“The denigration of Jewish life outside of Israel has long been a feature of Zionist thought and practice. The mobilization of the diaspora to justify whatever political or military action Israel might undertake constitutes its critical element.”

Not that Zionists knew how to deal with Palestinians. The Zionist activists in Europe never knew the “tolerant variety of nationalism” that arose in the US and Canada that distinguishes between nation, religion, society and state. Rather, the two slogans adopted by the Zionist pioneers clearly illustrated their intentions: “conquest through labour” and hafrada(separation).

“In other words, the Zionist movement adopted a policy of separate development that remains in force up to the present, and explains in large measure the perpetuation of the conflict with the Palestinians and the isolation of the state of Israel in the region.”

These undertakings have led to great Israeli insecurity. Today the term “security” has replaced the concept of self-defence that was widely employed before the creation of the state.

“Israel, often held up as a place of refuge, and even as the ultimate refuge, may well have become the most precarious place of all for the Jews… Now, in contrast to the early years of Zionism, the sense of victimhood has become, over the last few decades, an integral part of Israeli Jewish identity.

“Some of those who have persisted in seeing themselves as victims have come to realize that they are actually victims of the Zionist enterprise, which has subjected them to interminable wars and, in the case of the Arab Jews, chronic social and economic inferiority.”

These conditions generate paranoia, which Rabkin traces to a biblical curse: “you shall flee though none pursues” (Leviticus).

Israeli Jews are aware at some level that their country is based on unstable foundations:

The sense of fragility is fed by awareness of Palestinian hostility, and of the hostility of the region’s population as a whole, a hostility often attributed to so-called “essentialist” causes—Islamic religion and irrational Jew-hatred—rather than to perfectly understandable social and political ones, such as the anger generated by discrimination, dispossession, and deportation of the indigenous population.

Israeli leaders’ demand that others recognize Israel as a Jewish state “testifies to the fragility of the Israeli state, for all its power and prosperity, as felt by many Zionists.” While Zionist fears of becoming a minority cause them to encourage discriminatory immigration policies that only exacerbate the problem.

“Jewish self-hatred” has been a hallmark of the Zionist ideology of national revival. And this too undermines any sense of Israeli permanence.

“Jewish tradition teaches that the Jews must take into account the impression they may make on others, even those who have persecuted them in the past… But the Zionist education system from its inception has promoted the use of force, self-affirmation, and combativeness. The Zionists looked upon the requirement to behave as moral exemplars with scorn and ridicule, caring little for the impression they, and later their state, make upon the world, and above all upon its immediate neighbors. Ben-Gurion formulated the proposition thus: ‘What matters is what the Jews do, not what the goyim think.’”

Thus Zionism produced a state that rejected “Judaism and its humility.” The new Zionist/Israeli culture sees itself as resolutely European. “So it was that dozens of songs, nursery rhymes, and children’s stories were translated from Russian into Hebrew during the early years of Zionist settlement.” But not Arab songs!

Zionists used violence to strip Jews from their religious tradition:

“Many of the founders of Jewish armed groups, in both Russia and Palestine, also recognized that the use of force was a way of tearing the Jews from Jewish tradition.”

Rabkin is not afraid of the Nazi analogy. Israel and Nazi Germany are “powerful states that scorn individual morality, practice racial discrimination, and commit crimes against humanity.” Civic spaces in Israel have become associated above all with “death for the fatherland,” a linkage going back to the beginning of Zionist colonization.

Hannah Arendt’s warning about Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann’s not being guilty of “crimes against the Jewish people,” but of his being a normal response to an evil bureaucratic system carries “a universal meaning, which should stand as a warning to any state that adopts ethnic discrimination as state policy,” Rabkin says.

Israel’s behaviour, the incarnation of the principle ‘might makes right’ has undermined the very bases of international public law

“There can be little doubt that after the Nazi genocide, the use of force became an article of faith for a large number of Jews. To cast doubt upon the legitimacy and efficacy of force is, in Zionist circles, tantamount to treason.”

That article of faith has caused Israel to abrogate international law:

“Since the proclamation of the state, Israeli policy has remained constant. It reflects the imperative to perpetuate a state established against the will of the native Arab population and situated predominantly on lands that had once belonged to that population….Israel’s behaviour, the incarnation of the principle ‘might makes right’ has undermined the very bases of international public law conceived to reduce conflict and promote peace.”

Rabkin is clear about the racist character of such Israeli institutions as the Jewish National Fund:

“This institution has played a crucial role in the development of the Zionist state. In response to an anti discrimination action brought against the JNF in 2004, the organization confirmed that ‘the loyalty of the JNF is given to the Jewish people and only to them is the JNF obligated. The JNF, as the owner of the JNF land, does not have a duty to practice equality towards all citizens of the state.’”

Among Haredi Jews, the criticism of Zionism is alive:

“While the respected Israeli intellectual Boaz Evron argues that ‘Zionism is indeed the negation of Judaism,’ the words that, for decades, have been inscribed on the walls of the Haredi quarter of Meah Shearim in Jerusalem echo this basic position: ‘Judaism and Zionism are diametrically opposed to each other.’”

And of course, Zionism’s international reputation has been transformed:

“Zionism as a symbol of the struggle against racism and for human rights has acquired the characteristics of an ideology that produces Jewish racism and an institutional system that has much in common with South African-style apartheid.

“The Zionist state, which was to have been an instrument of national liberation, has in reality become a skilled manipulator that has attempted to monopolize control of the land, the water, and the country’s other resources.”

Many Zionists have become disaffected:

“Emigration affects primarily the best-educated strata of the population. An estimated 25 percent of Israeli academics work in the United States.”

They understand that Zionism is out of step with history:

“[T]he post-modernist trend presages the collapse of Zionism, in which nationalism is perceived as a form of oppression that must give way to the affirmation of otherness and multiculturalism.”

Rabkin sees Israeli political culture as growing more and more authoritarian:

[T]he totalitarian current gives no sign of abating. If probing questions about certain Israeli policies are sometimes tolerated, not only are all fundamental critiques of Zionism delegitimized, but likewise any individual who might have dared to formulate such criticisms in the past. Such people are systematically excluded from community activities…

Let us recall that the leaders of socialist Zionism made the decision to assassinate Jacob de Haan [in 1924] above all because he “spoke ill of the movement to the outside world.”

This totalitarian culture has special implications for American Jews, those who uphold Zionist doctrine, and those who don’t:

[S]ensitivity to any criticism of Israel can easily be explained by the fact that for many people allegiance to Israel has long replaced Judaism as the anchoring principle of Jewish identity. But in the diaspora, this allegiance extends to an ideal, even imaginary, state rather than to the real and existing state of Israel, that economic and military power that dominates the region. Still, there also exists a Jewish identity whose sole content is to criticize and even to denounce the state of Israel…

The author shares in the hope for Israel to transform itself:

A former speaker of the Knesset, Avraham Burg, believes that converting Israel into a state of its citizens, and erasing its Jewish nature, is “our only hope for survival.” Prominent poet and intellectual Yitzhak Laor argues, “We don’t have to leave this place or give up our lives… we have to get rid of Zionism.”

Rabkin quotes other Jewish anti-Zionists on the urgency of this idea:

We must stop treating Israel as a romantic dream and learn to see her as a heterogeneous country

In accepting the idea that the structures of Zionism could simply be dismantled, Rabbi Moshe Sober emphasizes its psychological aspect—and expresses guarded optimism about its practicality:“A solution is not impossible; it is not even particularly costly. But it will never be achieved unless we can allow ourselves to forget for a moment our cherished beliefs for which we have sacrificed so many lives, and look instead at the actual realities of the situation. We must stop treating Israel as a romantic dream and learn to see her as a heterogeneous country in which two fiercely proud ethnic populations of similar size are struggling for control….”

Sober’s understanding leads to the acknowledgment of apartheid: “All discussion of the occupation simply conceals another reality, [Sober] concludes. Israel has in fact become a binational state that denies political rights to one of those nations.”

Rabkin is also critical of Israel’s need for geo-political supremacy in its region. Here too he sees racism:

Although both Israel and the United States possess nuclear weapons, they deny Iran the right to acquire similar weapons, arguing that its rulers are irrational religious fanatics. Clearly the principle of double standards is at work, reflecting the revival of the concept of so-called civilized countries that, against empirical evidence, are claimed to possess a monopoly on rationality in international politics.

The sense of superiority has nothing to do with Judaism or antisemitism. It is inherent to Zionism, which is opposed to liberalism.

References to Judaism and to Jewish tradition are of little help in understanding the contemporary Israel; quite the contrary, they are more likely to mislead, for Zionism and the state that incarnates it are revolutionary phenomena. It is easier, in fact, to understand that state’s politics, structure and laws without reference to either the Jews or their history…. It is thus imprecise to speak of a “Jewish state” or a “Jewish lobby”: “Zionist state” and “Zionist lobby” would be more appropriate.

Israel has… succeeded in making the Zionist outlook—by definition anti-liberal—acceptable to the general public as well as in the media and the academic world, even in countries with a long liberal tradition where the state, rather than confessional or “tribal” loyalty, theoretically ensures the rights of the citizen…. [T]he JNF, which for a century has been establishing segregated settlements that are out of bounds to Arabs, enjoys not only Canadian fiscal benefits, but the personal participation of top federal officials in the organization’s fundraising efforts.

The overt transformation of Jewish organizations around the world into Israeli vassals

We must criticize U.S. Jewish leaders for being such willing servants of this ideology, damaging both U.S. and Israeli notions of citizenship: 

Jeremy Corbyn Must Follow Ted Heath's example - He sacked Enoch Powell and Sarah Champion must be sacked

August 15, 2017, 5:19 pm

≫ Next: The Neo-Nazi organiser of Charlottesville, Richard Spencer, declares that he is a White Zionist

≪ Previous: Zionism as a master-race ideology

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You Can’t Have A Racist in the Shadow Cabinet

When Enoch Powell gave his ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech in 1968, Ted Heath instantly sacked him from the  Tory Shadow Cabinet.  Powell spoke of ‘Black piccaninnies’and, as a Classicist used a Roman metaphor:  "It is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre" and "Like the Roman, I seem to see the River Tiber foaming with much blood."

Heath was never forgiven for this by the Tory Right but by his swift action he made it clear that the kind of racist demonization we have seen in the last week is unacceptable.  It is equally intolerable that Sarah Champion, who has engaged in no less despicable racist stereotyping, remains as Labour's Shadow Minister for Women and Equalities.

Enoch  Powell was sacked by Ted Heath - Corbyn needs to demonstrate his mettle by sacking Champion

Sarah Champion’s decision to write an article in the Scum, of all papers, a paper which has made the depiction of women’s bodies for gratification into an art form, is shocking.  No less shocking is the headline over her article ‘British Pakistanis ARE raping white girls’.  The extrapolation from what a particular gang of Muslim men did to all Pakistanis is overtly racist and belongs in the repertoire of the British National Party and Britain First, not the Labour Party.

Sarah Champion - Labour's Enoch Powell

Noone pretends that the  activities of this gang of rapists in Newcastle is anything other than horrifying.  There is no justification for what they did and they deserve long prison sentences.  What is not acceptable is the drawing of an equation between Muslim or Pakistani men and rape and child sex abuse.  It hardly needs to be said that all men, whatever their colour or ethnic origin are equally capable of rape and paedophilia.

Sarah Champion chose well for her racist diatribe - the Sun

When a group of white men did exactly the same just over a year ago there were no lurid headlines in the Scumabout white men abusing and raping.  It was not considered newsworthy.

When Lord Greville Janner, the former President of the Board of Deputies of British Jews was widely acknowledged to have sexually abused and raped at least 20 young boys, no one except the most despicable fascist would have gone on to draw an equation between him and Jewish men per se.

Jimmy Saville - protected by the Police and BBC - is not believed to have been Pakistani or Muslim

Nor did anyone try to suggest that Jimmy Saville, whose activities were covered up by at least 3 Police forces and BBC Executives, was typical of White British men.

There is no evidence that Muslim men are more inclined than any other men to rape or abuse.  As Richard Seymour describes in the article below, there are material reasons why abuse by Muslim men in certain Northern cities may take a particular form.   The fact that they are engaged in night time trades, kebab shops, taxis etc. lends itself to this kind of networking.

The Rev. Peter Ball, ex-Bishop of Lewes, was gaoled for 32 months for abusing at least 18 children, one of whom later committed suicide as a result.  Doesn't seem to have a Pakistani heritage

In the same way, rape and abuse by Catholic and Church of England priests takes another form, often over much longer periods of time and also subject to various forms of cover up by the authorities.  When the impeccably White ex-Bishop of Lewes Peter Ball was gaoled for just 32 months, of which he served only 16 months, for abusing 18 aspiring young priests no one campaigned against White Priests once again being caught raping and abusing.  Noone seemed bothered to ask why Prince Charles and other members of the Establishment covered up for him.  Charles even provided Ball with a grace and favour home on his estate.  [see Disgraced sex abuse Bishop, who was protected from prosecution for years by Establishment figures, walks free from jail]

The abuse in Ireland, not simply sexual abuse but what was tantamount to the murder of children and young women in Catholic homes, hardly bears repeating.  It was a veritable holocaust but it reflected on the misogyny of the Irish Catholic church not all Irish Catholics.   The same is true of the Protestant Kincora home in Belfast where, under the watchful eye of MI6 and Northern Ireland’s Special Branch, young boys were raped and abused by senior Loyalists.

The fact is that sexual abuse and rape takes many forms in many societies.  There is no doubt that all religions, Islam included, are misogynist.  It hardly bears repeating that the West, Britain and the USA in particular, have sponsored and supported the most reactionary strand of Islam, Wahhabism in Saudi Arabia, a strand which encourages and legitimates sexual abuse.  It was Wahhabism which gave the inspiration to ISIS which made the enslavement and rape of Yazidi women a matter of policy. 

A poster that appeared in Streicher's Der Sturmer featuring the lecherous Jewish male predator - this is a common theme in racist narratives

In Nazi Germany Jewish men were also alleged to be predators.  It was the staple diet of Der Sturmer magazine run by Julius Streicher.  There is no doubt that the incidence of child sexual abuse within sections of Jewish ultra-orthodoxy is high.  People like senior Lubavitch Rabbi Manis Friedman have openly belittled and made light of such abuse.  [see Call for apology as Rabbi Manis Friedman likens child sex abuse to 'diarrhoea'] 

Lubavitch, which is a very active Hasidic sect in the Orthodox British Jewish community has consistently refused to condemn Friedman’s remarks.  Friedman who remains in a position of power is widely believed to be a child sex abuser himself, at least according to his son, who is also an abuser.

One could if one wanted to look at the way non-Jewish women are treated and considered in the Jewish religion since Islam is held up to the mirror.   The term ‘Shiksa’ for a non-Jewish woman is derived from Sheketz, ‘unclean’ and is used to refer to a prostitute.  The attitude of the Jewish Orthodoxy to non-Jewish women would not bear examination.

None of this excuses Sarah Champion’s decision to write in the Scum.  He decision has particular poignancy given that this was the paper that lied about Liverpool football fans at Hillsborough football stadium.  It should be a sacking offence for any Labour shadow cabinet minister to write in this paper.  To add political petrol to the flames of the Scum’s racism and sexism is unacceptable.

Sarah Champion Must Go – Corbyn Must Sack Her

Racism and sexual abuse

Aug 10 at 4:49pm

Richard Seymour

Operation Sanctuaryhas uncovered, prosecuted and convicted members of another large child sex grooming ring, this time in Newcastle.

As is always the case when the majority of the perpetrators are not white, this has provoked a 'debate' about race, that vacillates between the hand-wringing and the downright sinister. Sarah Champion MP has managed both, attacking the Tories from the right on race, and berating the "floppy left" for finding anything problematic in this. In particular, Champion avers that these offenders are "predominantly Pakistani" and castigates the government for not investigating this. Such debates are not provoked when the perpetrators are white, and this tells us something about the role of "race and culture" as talking points.

Now, contrary to what Champion claims, she is not breaking new ground here. Back in 2012 when a string of major child sex abuse stories, inculpating politicians, celebrities, senior police and others, exploded onto the national news, there was also a national panic about Muslim men as a result of child sex rings in the north. Keith Vaz MP explained on BBC Radio that one in five of the perpetrators of child sex grooming are British Asians. He was drawing on data from the Child Exploitation and Online Protection centre.

Even he wasn't breaking new ground, merely reiterating what Jack Straw MP had said years before. This is an old and dishonourable tactic by a certain kind of politician. In particular, it is Labour politicians who think that they have to demonstrate their un-PC credentials by pandering to racism.

That this is in fact what Champion is doing, and knowingly, is disappointing given her record. She won her seat by defeating a toxic Ukip campaign orchestrated precisely on the axis of a panic about child abuse, implicating British Asians as a menace to white sexual innocence. Ukip claimed that Labour was more worried about political correctness and not being racist than in protecting white British kids.

Champion did not, at the time, concede ground to the racist fearmongering. She, as a professional with direct experience in dealing with child abuse, knows the literature and expertise well enough to refute race-baiting. And she increased Labour's majority. Now she is repeating the Ukip lines.

There are a few things to clarify before a sensible discussion can even be had. First of all, "race and culture" should not be spoken in the same breath, as if they are the same type of thing. Cultures exist, but they are raggedy in outline, porous, and changeable. Their outlines are more like weather fronts than borders. Races don't exist, except as a political and ideological construct. The idea that any one specific culture could be imputed to British Asian men is incoherent.

Second, as an elementary point of logic, correlation is not causation. Commenting on the CEOP figures, an investigator told The Guardian that the higher representation of British Asian men in the data is likely to reflect not 'race' or 'culture' in these cases, but occupation. In other words, these grooming rings were made possible by a night-time economy populated by young girls moving between taxis and fast food outlets. Which, given a racial segregation of the labour force, meant that there was a unique opportunity for a small number of men, mostly British Asian in the case of Operation Sanctuary, to generate a grooming circuit, based on attention, flattery, parties, booze and drugs. Relatedly, where biases toward the over-representation of a particular minority group have been found among child sex abusers, typically it is because race is indexed to other factors that make children vulnerable, such as class.

Third, proof of the stereotypical nature of this debate is Champion's claim that gang-related child sexual abuse is "predominantly Pakistani". This is often asserted, but there's no evidence for it, and the CEOP figures simply don't bear that out. "Just 35 of the 415 Asians are recorded as having Pakistani heritage and thus highly likely to be Muslim, and only five are recorded as being from a Bangladeshi background. The heritage of 366 of the Asian group is not stated in those figures." As a result, the CEOP is quite explicit about its inability to draw any nationwide conclusions based on the fragmentary and partial nature of its data. It depends entirely on data deriving from cases reported to a police unit investigating these crimes.

Fourth, the construction of child abuse along racial or national lines depends entirely on how you focus your search. The majority of sex offenders in the UK, according to statistics collected by Sheffield Hallam University, are white. In the figures collected in 2007, 5.6 per cent of the sex offender population was 'South Asian' by origin, and 81.9% white. Taking into account the fact that this was the prison population, and that there are racial biases in the criminal justice system from arrest to prosecution, it would be surprising if these figures didn't exaggerate the representation of British Asians among the sex offenders population.

Fifth, one reason for the extraordinarily high rate of estimated non-disclosure is that the majority of sexual assaults are inflicted on children. And abuse selects for vulnerability. This means that there is, even in the best official data, a huge zone of blindness. But with the data we have, it is possible to say that the majority of child sex abuse is not like the grooming cases. It usually involves one-to-one assaults, in a residence, either first thing in the morning, during after-school hours, or at midnight. So, attempting to draw wider conclusions about the nature of child sexual abuse from the high profile grooming cases is at best a mistake.

The problem with Sarah Champion's intervention is not that she wants to talk about culture. If we started to talk about the cultural biases and cognitive distortions that enable abusers, that would require a careful and nuanced discussion, which would take into account the specific ways in which different groups of offenders -- be they the abusers at Kincora Boys Home, the groomers of Rotherham and Newcastle, or the fathers who assault their children ongoingly -- are informed by their cultural self-understandings, their religion, their socioeconomic position, and so on. It would not try to simplify all this by forcing it through the morally charged and oppressive grid of race.

To reinforce race as the appropriate framework for analysis and police action is to, as Sarah Champion admits, raise the pitch of nationwide Islamophobia. It is also to add one more giant weapon to the arsenals of silence. Children don't speak out for many reasons. In part because they fear they will not be believed, in part because they fear punishment or revenge. But one of the best known reasons is their fear of the process of accountability and prosecution itself. Their fear, in a word, that the process will run out of their control, that it will have consequences well beyond their intentions. If you turn child sex abuse into a national morality tale about race relations in 21st century Britain, you haven't made it easier for people to speak -- especially children who are particularly vulnerable because of the way they are racialised.

Because contrary to Champion's claims, this sort of intervention is not about protecting children. Racism is not child protection.

Addendum: Since I wrote this, Sarah Champion has taken to the pages of The Sun to further incite racial hatred. The headline: "British Pakistanis ARE raping white girls ... and we must face up to it". Followed by the first sentence: "Britain has a problem with British Pakistani men raping and exploiting white girls."

It is not trivial to point out that the majority of those arrested, prosecuted and convicted in this latest grooming circle in Newcastle are not Pakistani. To respond to this case by, as Champion has from the start, inciting against Pakistani men, is to conflate all the men with brown skin who were arrested, be they Iraqi, Bangladeshi, or Indian into a sort of racial amalgam, a Muslamic horde.

It also goes without saying that Champion styles herself as someone very brave and original, as though what she is saying has not been said over and over again by opportunistic Labour MPs, Tories, Ukippers, Sun columnists, and so on. "There. I said it. Does that make me a racist?" She asks. Yes.

Sarah Champion, I Think You’re Racist. There. I Said It.

Areeq Chowdhury Chief Executive of WebRoots Democracy

Sarah Champion MP, I think you’re racist. There. I said it. Does that make me politically correct? Or am I just prepared to call out this horrifying problem for what it is?

If you think I am being over the top, have a quick read of the column in the Sun written by Labour’s Shadow Equalities Minister, Sarah Champion. It’s entitled “British Pakistani men ARE raping and exploiting white girls... and it’s time we faced up to it.” She inexplicably opens with the line “Britain has a problem with British Pakistani men raping and exploiting white girls. There. I said it. Does that make me a racist? Or am I just prepared to call out this horrifying problem for what it is?”

Well to answer what I’m sure was a rhetorical question Sarah, yes, it does make you a racist. Let me explain why.

In a country which has a history of abuse against South Asians by way of activities such as “Paki-bashings” and at a time of resurgent racism, to make such a sweeping and factually inaccurate statement is incendiary and achieves nothing other than establishing further stigma against minorities. Is it true that there is “a problem with British Pakistani men raping and exploiting white girls” or is it just some Pakistani men? A very small minority? Your statement is lazy and suggests the problem is with all British Pakistani men, which as your colleague Naz Shah MP points out includes other politicians such as Sajid Javid and Sadiq Khan, as well as her two sons.

Naz Shah’s rebuttal article makes me wonder whether you consulted with any of your British Pakistani colleagues before launching such a vocal tirade against Pakistani people. Did you?

You go on to say “for too long we have ignored the race of these abusers and, worse, tried to cover it up...these people are predators and the common denominator is their ethnic heritage.” Let’s overlook the questionable accuracy of your assumptions again, but look at the common denominator that you identify, their “ethnic heritage”.

The case which her comments come after is the horrendous sex gang case in Newcastle. Unusually for a sex abuse case, the ethnicity of the perpetrators has been the main focus, and the focus of choice for Labour’s Shadow Equalities Minister. The convicted men were mostly British-born, from Iraqi, Bangladeshi, Pakistani, Indian, Iranian, and Turkish communities. Whilst the majority were British Pakistani, not all were. Regardless of this, Ms Champion has labelled the problem as a “Pakistani” one. It’s a modern-day, non-violent version of “Paki-bashing” attacking those who are brown-skinned under the all-encompassing “Pakistani” label.

Like more contemporary racists, you have chosen to identify the common denominator, without proper evidence, as “ethnic-heritage” or as it appears you are unable to differentiate between different ethnic backgrounds, just the skin colour. But say it was the ethnic heritage. Is it British Pakistani culture and upbringing that you are pointing the finger at? Are you able to identify what that culture is? Because I can’t. Like every other “culture”, upbringing varies wildly based on multiple factors. Would you claim the culture and upbringing of an Eton-educated southerner is the same as a manual labourer from a working-class community in Wales, just because they are both White British? Give me a break. You could have pointed out that the common denominator is that they all have dark hair or that they are all men. But you chose race.

For argument’s sake, let’s assume the premise of your arguments are true. That child sexual exploitation is a problem unique to the British Pakistani community. The solution would therefore be to engage with British Pakistani communities and to enable them to tackle the problem head-on. But what do you hope to achieve by writing a column about it in the Sun? Have you been briefed that the Sun has a large Pakistani readership? Are Pakistani mothers and fathers buying copies of the Sun to catch a glimpse of Page 3? If there are huge numbers of Pakistani people reading it, why haven’t you addressed the article to them? When you refer to British Pakistani men as “these people” it sure doesn’t sound like you’re speaking to them directly.

There is a lot more that can said about this, but let me leave you with this thought. Had this article been written by an MP from any other political party or someone like Donald Trump or Nigel Farage, what would the reaction have been? The fact that the article has been penned by an MP from the proudly anti-racist Labour Party is reason enough to be shocked, nevermind the fact that the MP is the Shadow Minister for “Equalities.”

The Neo-Nazi organiser of Charlottesville, Richard Spencer, declares that he is a White Zionist

August 16, 2017, 6:52 pm

≫ Next: The Israeli-Saudi Alliance Deepens as Israel Begins Closing Al Jazeera

≪ Previous: Jeremy Corbyn Must Follow Ted Heath's example - He sacked Enoch Powell and Sarah Champion must be sacked

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The founder of the alt-Right and White Supremacist leader says Israel should respect him

Heil Trump - Richard Spencer Goes into Nazi Mode

Richard Spencer first came into prominence for his ‘Heil Trump’ rally held soon after Trump’s inauguration.  He is an open anti-Semite and White Supremacist and is credited with having first come up with the name Alt-Right. When Trump ‘forgot’ to mention the fact that it was the Jews who died in the Holocaust, Spencer wrote approving of Trump’s ‘de-judaification’ of the Holocaust.  

 Jewish activists, Spencer wrote in a short post for his new website Altright.com, have long insisted on making the Holocaust “all about their meta-narrative of suffering” and a way to “undergird their peculiar position in American society.”  White Supremacist Richard Spencer Hails Trump's 'de-Judaification' of Holocaust

Spencer asks a Zionist Rabbi Matt Rosenberg if he supports multi racialism in Israel

The Holocaust, in Spencer’s eyes, has become a sort of moral bludgeon — used against white nationalists like himself.  White Supremacist Richard Spencer Hails Trump's 'de-Judaification' of Holocaust

Trumps Fascist Trinity - Bannon, Miller, Gorka

Spencer was the organiser of last weekend’s demonstration at Charlottesville in which a variety of white supremacists and neo-Nazis attacked the unarmed crowd of anti-racists, anti-fascists and members of Black Lives Matter.  The attack, which killed one woman and injured several others, was the largest White Supremacist and neo-Nazi demonstration in living memory in the United States.

It is reported that 80% of the racists were armed and they were allowed by Police to wander unhindered around Charlottesville.

Anti-fascist demonstration at Charlottesville in favour of removing statue of General Robert Lee

The election of Trump has seen a coming together of a wide variety of White Supremacists, neo-Nazis and fascists under the banner of the Alt-Right.  They have in the White House three prominent advisors to Trump. There is Steve Bannon, Trump’s Strategic Advisor and former CEO of Breitbart News, an openly racist and White Supremacist magazine. Steven Miller, who has helped devise Trump’s immigration policy and who was mentored by Spencer. Some of idea of his views can be gleaned from this profilein The Telegraph:

He took to ringing his local radio stations to rail against multiculturalism and the usage of Spanish-language announcements, and wrote for his high school newspaper a column entitled “A Time to Kill”, urging violent response to radical Islamists.

Sebastian Gorka - Hungarian neo-Nazi and Trump adviser

The third member of the unholy trinity is far-Right Hungarian Sebastian Gorka who helped form the New Democratic Coalition in Hungary with ex-members of Jobbik, an openly fascist and anti-Semitic party.  Gorka also endorsed the Hungarian Guard, an anti-Semitic militia of Jobbik.  Gorka appeared at an inauguration ball for Trump wearing the Vitézi Rend, a medal of a knightly order of merit founded in 1920 by Admiral Miklos Horthy, Hungary’s anti-Semitic ruler and Hitler’s ally during World War II. Horthy presided over the deportation of nearly ½ million Jews to Auschwitz.  Gorka was up to his ears in fascist politics in Hungary, seeing Jobbik as too moderate. [EXCLUSIVE: Senior Trump Aide Forged Key Ties To Anti-Semitic Groups In Hungary]

Steve Bannon - Trump's anti-Semitic Breitbart adviser - Invited by the Zionist Organisation of America to its annual  gala dinner as a speaker

It is no surprise then that Spencer finds no difficulty in marrying his racist and anti-Semitic views with ardent support for Zionism and Israel.  In fact he sees Israel as a kind of model  for White Supremacism.  When Rabbi Matt Rosenberg of Texas A&M Hillel challenged Spencer at a meeting to be inclusive to others, Spencer threw the challenge back at the Rabbi.  ‘Would you want Israel to be radically inclusive’ knowing full well that Rabbi Rosenberg was like many Zionist ‘liberals’ – happy to support multi-racialism in the USA but opposed to intermarriage and equal rights for non-Jews in Israel.

Spencer’s declaration will no doubt be embarrassing to those like Rabbi Rosenberg who want ‘radical inclusion’ and tolerance in the United States, because that benefits American Jews but who would be aghast if the same principles were to apply to Israel.   The fact is that what Richard Spencer says is all too true – White Supremacists are only asking for what Zionists take for granted in Israel.  They are indeed White Zionists.

Tony Greenstein

WATCH Richard Spencer Tells Israelis They 'Should Respect' Him: 'I'm a White Zionist'

Spencer tells Israel's Channel 2 News: 'Jews are vastly over-represented in what you could call 'the establishment'

Richard Spencer, a white nationalist and de facto leader of the so-called “alt-right,” described himself to a reporter on Israel’s Channel 2 News as “a white Zionist” on Wednesday evening and argued that Israelis “should respect someone like me.”

The anchor had asked Spencer about the role of “alt-right” supporters in a march in Charlottesville, Viriginia on Friday, in which torch-bearing white nationalists shouted “Jews will not replace us!” in protest of the removal of a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee.

“Let’s be honest,” Spencer said, when asked whether such slogans constitute anti-Semitism. “Jews are vastly over-represented in what you could call ‘the establishment,’ that is, Ivy League educated people who really determine policy, and white people are being dispossesed from this country."

Asked how the mainly Jewish audience at home should take his remarks, Spencer responded:

 “... an Israeli citizen, someone who understands your identity, who has a sense of nationhood and peoplehood, and the history and experience of the Jewish people, you should respect someone like me, who has analogue feelings about whites. You could say that I am a white Zionist – in the sense that I care about my people, I want us to have a secure homeland for us and ourselves. Just like you want a secure homeland in Israel.”

This isn’t the first time Spencer has tried to wink at Israel. Last December, he told Haaretz that he “respects Israel” and that he would “respect” the decision to move the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

In an August 2010 article called “An Alliance with theJews,” published on his Radix Journal website, Spencer argued that Israel could become an ally of white nationalists in the United States. He wrote that in the face of the threat of nuclear weapons in countries hostile to Israel, there would be “hard-liners” in Israel who would prefer to see the extreme right in the White House.

Spencer, however, has also made headlines and sparked widespread outrage by making anti-Semitic remarks and engaging in Holocaust denial. Last December, for instance, the "alt-right" leader praised Trump's Holocaust Remembrance Day statement that failed to mention Jews and anti-Semitism as an important step, dubbing it the "de-Judaification" of the Holocaust.

Jewish activists, Spencer wrote in a short post for his website Altright.com, have long insisted on making the Holocaust “all about their meta-narrative of suffering” and a way to “undergird their peculiar position in American society.”

Spencer, a onetime Duke University PhD student, championed Trump through the presidential campaign – and though he has been critical of the president at times, seems to have come around to Trump. While he claims he's not a Nazi, Spencer also does not outright condemn Hitler, calling him a “historical figure.”

Why Israel isn’t shocked by anti-Semites in White House

YNet, Yaron London|Published:  21.11.16 , 13:48

Israel does not appear shocked by the appointment of racist anti-Semites to senior positions in US President-elect Donald Trump’s administration. There is no wonder there. First of all, it is not in our power to change it. Our complete dependence on the United States forces us to hold our tongue and restrain ourselves.

• Second, a world view which supports white supremacy matches our government’s interests. If Trump’s people are more disgusted by Arabs than they are by Jews (the liberals, the Wall Street people, journalists from the East Coast, lovers of black people, Hillary Clinton’s friends), we have struck quite a good deal. Trump and his friends see Israel as a forefront against the barbarians, and they are not exactly very observant.

To do the Netanyahu government justice, let me qualify my statement by saying that all forms of Zionism hold the perception that a certain extent of anti-Semitism benefits the Zionist enterprise. To put it more sharply, anti-Semitism is the generator and ally of Zionism. Masses of Jews leave their place of residence only when their economic situation and physical safety are undermined. Masses of Jews are shoved to this country rather than being attracted to it. The yearning for the land of Zion and Jerusalem is not strong enough to drive millions of Jews to the country they love and make them hold on to its clods.

Steve Bannon, Trump's controversial new chief strategist (Photo: AFP)

As the Jews in Israel long for immigrants with a certain affiliation to their people, and as Zionism—like any other ideology—needs constant justification, we have a secret hope in our hearts that a moderate anti-Semitic wave, along with a deterioration in the economic situation in their countries of residence, will make Diaspora Jews realize that they belong with us. Is proof even necessary? No one will protest the assertion that the rise in anti-Semitism in France gave us some satisfaction, in the sense of “we warned you, didn’t we?” Late Prime Minister Ariel Sharon did not hesitate to make such a declaration, angering the French government and many Jews who see themselves as unconditional French citizens. Thousands of Jews from France who see Israel as a lifeboat, as an insurance policy, purchased apartments here and raised real estate prices in the coastal cities. That’s good. It proves Zionism was right. Furthermore, no one can deny that the economic crisis in the Soviet empire, coupled with the nesting anti-Semitism there, were the cause of the immigration to Israel of about 1 million Jews and their non-Jewish relatives, most of whom have no affiliation to Jewish culture. Neither can anyone contradict the embarrassing fact that Israel worked to lock the gates to the US, the opening of which may have directed many of these Jews and their relatives there, and perhaps even most of them.

It was not the Jewish immigrants’ welfare that we saw before our eyes, but the state’s reinforcement. While the act of blocking and directing the Jews to Israel is ethically dubious, it was justified by the Zionist ideology which asserts that a normalization of the Jewish situation—in other words, concentrating the Jewish people in its own territory—is the only thing that will save us from another Holocaust and, according to some people, will even speed up the Messiah’s arrival.

The Jews’ comfortable situation in America raises doubts as to whether it was worthwhile to gamble on the establishment of a Jewish state. The normalization did not provide us, the Israelis, with a normal existence and did not lessen the anti-Semitism which is now drawing some of its arguments from the way we are managing the conflict with the Palestinians. There are Israelis whose parents or grandparents immigrated to Israel out a belief that this is where the agonizing historical journey will end, and now their offspring are learning that the promise has not been fulfilled.

In order to remove these malignant doubts, it would be good to have some anti-Semitism in America. Not serious anti-Semitism, not pogroms, not persecutions that will empty America from its Jews, as we need them there, but just a taste of this pungent stuff, so that we can restore our faith in Zionism. 

The Israeli-Saudi Alliance Deepens as Israel Begins Closing Al Jazeera

August 17, 2017, 5:54 pm

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As Saudi Arabia Prepares to Execute14 demonstrators Israel Supports the Saudis in their war against free expression

As Israel's Government Press Office prepares to remove the press credentials of Al Jazeera's correspondent in Jerusalem, Elias Karram, a Palestinian citizen of Israel, there is something quite touching about Israel’s claim to be the ‘only democracy in the Middle East’ as it consummates its relationship with Saudi Arabia.  Al Jazeera is quite unique in the Arab world for being a relatively free and independent TV station.  It has produced some excellent documentaries, not least The Lobby which exposed the efforts of the Israeli Embassy, the Jewish Labour Movement and Labour Friends of Israel to destabilise Jeremy Corbyn and create a bogus campaign of accusations of anti-Semitism in the Labour Party.

Netanyahu has claimed that Al Jazeera is just a front for ISIS, Iran, Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood.  It was a classic tactic of Nazi propagandists to make the Jews seem responsible for all the ills of society.  They were communists, capitalists, predators etc.  A moments thought would tell you that Isis and Hamas are enemies.  Iran being Shi’ite is likewise opposed to ISIS.  The  Muslim Brotherhood also comes from a different tradition to that of the Salafists.  But combining your enemy into one is the oldest tactic of the demagogue.

Theresa May and her good friend, King Salman of Saudia Arabia - no mention has been made by the Government of this attack on press freedom

Ayoob Kara, the Communications Minister is spearheading the attack on Al Jazeera which is accused of inciting the violence at Al Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem.  Nothing to do with the security gates, or the attempts of Jewish settlers to encroach on the area or the attacks of Israeli soldiers on worshippers.

What this should also do is open peoples’ eyes as to the nature of the Israeli state.  All wings of the Zionist movement from Labour to Likud support the attacks on Al Jazeera.  From the Jewish Labour Movement and Labour Friends of Israel in this country to supporters of Likud, Zionism is opposed to free speech for its opponents.  In fact Israel has amongst the most restrictive censorship laws in the world.  It is no surprise that the Israeli government thinks it is quite legitimate to close down a recognised and established broadcaster.

Israeli Minister Ayoob Kara seeks to close down Al Jazeera's office in Israel

Ironically Al Jazeera pioneered in the Arab world the use of Israeli spokespersons.  Arab stations have ritually barred access to Israelis as they purport to oppose the Zionist regime.  In practice, as we see with the attempted closure of Al Jazeera, there is a very close alliance between Israel, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states.  Both have an interest in closing down all avenues to freedom in the Middle East.  Qatar is no oasis of democracy, far from it, but when sanctions are imposed upon it by Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States, with the intention of closing down one of the few relatively free broadcasters in the Middle East we  should understand why it is that Israel and the Saudi butchers are singing from the same hymn sheet.

Despite its claims to be the Middle East's 'only democracy' Israel constantly allies itself with the most entrenched and bitter opponents of freedom in the region.  From Egypt under Sisi to King Salmon's Saudi Arabia, not forgetting Bahrain of course.

Below is, as always, an excellent article from the Independent’s Robert Fisk and two other articles, one from Al Jazeera and the other from the Jerusalem Post.

 Tony Greenstein

Al Jazeera offices in  Dhofar

If you're wondering why Saudi Arabia and Israel have united against Al-Jazeera, here's the answer

There are still honourable Israelis who demand a state for the Palestinians; there are well-educated Saudis who object to the crazed Wahabism upon which their kingdom is founded; there are millions of Americans, from sea to shining sea, who do not believe that Iran is their enemy nor Saudi Arabia their friend. But the problem today in both East and West is that our governments are not our friends

Robert Fisk 

Theresa May has already suppressed a report so it wouldn’t upset the Saudis. And we wonder why we go to war with the Middle East AFP

When Qatar’s Al Jazeera satellite channel has both the Saudis and the Israelis demanding its closure, it must be doing something right. To bring Saudi head-choppers and Israeli occupiers into alliance is, after all, something of an achievement.

But don’t get too romantic about this. When the wealthiest Saudis fall ill, they have been known to fly into Tel Aviv on their private jets for treatment in Israel’s finest hospitals. And when Saudi and Israeli fighter-bombers take to the air, you can be sure they’re going to bomb Shiites – in Yemen or Syria respectively – rather than Sunnis.

And when King Salman – or rather Saudi Arabia’s whizz-kid Crown Prince Mohammad – points the finger at Iran as the greatest threat to Gulf security, you can be sure that Bibi Netanyahu will be doing exactly and precisely the same thing, replacing “Gulf security”, of course, with “Israeli security”. But it’s an odd business when the Saudis set the pace of media suppression only to be supported by that beacon of freedom, democracy, human rights and liberty known in song and legend as Israel, or the State of Israel or, as Bibi and his cabinet chums would have it, the Jewish State of Israel.

So let’s run briefly through the latest demonstration of Israeli tolerance towards the freedom of expression that all of us support, nurture, love, adore, regard as a cornerstone of our democracy, and so on, and so on, and so on. For this week, Ayoob Kara, the Israeli communications minister, revealed plans to take away the credentials of Al Jazeera’s Israeli-based journalists, close its Jerusalem bureau and take the station’s broadcasts from local cable and satellite providers.

This, announced Ayoob Kara – an Israeli Druze (and thus an Arab Likud minister) who is a lifelong supporter of the colonisation by Jews of Israeli-occupied Arab land in the West Bank – would “bring a situation that channels based in Israel will report objectively”. In other words, threaten them. Bring them into line.

Bibi Netanyahu long ago accused Al Jazeera of inciting violence in Jerusalem, especially in its reporting of the recent Jerusalem killings – but since just about every foreign journalist in and outside Israel who has dared to be critical of the state has at one time or another been accused of incitement as well as anti-Semitism and other lies, this is just par for the course.

Personally, I have found Al Jazeera’s reporting from Israel pretty pathetic, its fawning reverence for the state all too painfully illustrated when its Qatar anchorwoman expressed to an Israeli government spokesman live on air her channel’s condolences on the death of Ariel Sharon, the monstrous Israeli ex-defence minister who was held responsible for the massacre of up to 1,700 Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camp massacres of 1982.

Ayoob Kara, however, has actually taken his cue from his fellow Arabs. And he admits it. Israel had to take steps, he said, against “media, which has been determined by almost all Arab countries to actually be a supporter of terror, and we know this for certain”. So the Israelis, it appears, now receive lessons on media freedoms from “Arab countries”. Not just the Saudis, of course, but from “almost all Arab countries” whose unfettered media – one thinks at once of the untrammelled liberal press of Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Algeria and yes, “almost” the entire media of the Gulf – are bastions of truth-telling, hard-hitting opponents of authoritarian regimes, constitutionally protected from dictatorial abuse. Forgive the hollow laughter. But is this really how Israel wants to define itself?

Well, yes it is, I suppose. For if an unwritten alliance really exists between Saudi Arabia and Israel, then all options – as US presidents and secretary Hillary Clinton used to say – are “on the table”.

Imprisonment without trial, extrajudicial executions, human rights abuses, corruption, military rule – let’s say this at once: all these characteristics belong to “almost all” Sunni Muslim Arab nations – and to Israel in the lands it occupies. And as for being a “supporter of terror” (I quote Israeli minister Kara again), one must first ask why Sunni Gulf Arabs have exported their fighters – and their money – to the most vicious Sunni Islamists in the Middle East. And then ask why Israel has never bombed these same vile creatures – indeed, ask why Israel has given hospital treatment to wounded fighters from the Sunni al-Nusra – in other words, al-Qaeda, the perpetrators of 9/11 – while attacking Shiite Hezbollah and Alawite (Shiite) led-Syria, and threatened to bombard Shiite Iran itself which is a project, I should add, of which Kara himself is all in favour.

Nor must we forget that America’s insane President and his weird regime is also part of the Saudi-Israeli anti-Shiite confederation. Trump’s obscene $350bn arms sales to the Saudis, his fingering of Iran and his hatred of the world’s press and television channels makes him an intimate part of the same alliance. Indeed, when you look at one of Trump’s saner predecessors – George W Bush, who also hated Iran, kowtowed to the Saudis and actually talked to Tony Blair of bombing Al Jazeera’s own headquarters in Qatar, he who made sure the wealthy bin Laden family were flown out of the States after 9/11 – this American-Saudi-Israeli covenant has a comparatively long history.

Being an irrational optimist, there’s an innocent side of my scratched journalistic hide that still believes in education and wisdom and compassion. There are still honourable Israelis who demand a state for the Palestinians; there are well-educated Saudis who object to the crazed Wahhabism upon which their kingdom is founded; there are millions of Americans, from sea to shining sea, who do not believe that Iran is their enemy nor Saudi Arabia their friend. But the problem today in both East and West is that our governments are not our friends. They are our oppressors or masters, suppressors of the truth and allies of the unjust.

Netanyahu wants to close down Al Jazeera’s office in Jerusalem. Crown Prince Mohammad wants to close down Al Jazeera’s office in Qatar. Bush actually did bomb Al Jazeera’s offices in Kabul and Baghdad. Theresa May decided to hide a government report on funding “terrorism”, lest it upset the Saudis – which is precisely the same reason Blair closed down a UK police enquiry into alleged BAE-Saudi bribery 10 years earlier.

And we wonder why we go to war in the Middle East. And we wonder why Sunni Isis exists, un-bombed by Israel, funded by Sunni Gulf Arabs, its fellow Sunni Salafists cosseted by our wretched presidents and prime ministers. I guess we better keep an eye on Al Jazeera – while it’s still around.

Israel moves to close Al Jazeera, ban its journalists

Doha-based network denounces the decision to revoke credentials of its journalists and close its offices in Jerusalem.

It was unclear when Israeli government will act on the request [File: Reuters]

Israel plans to revoke media credentials of Al Jazeera journalists and close the network's office in Jerusalem, the country's communication minister has announced.

Ayoub Kara made the announcement on Sunday during a press conference in Jerusalem, where Al Jazeera was barred from attending. 

 "We have based our decision on the move by Sunni Arab states to close the Al Jazeera offices and prohibiting their work," Kara said, adding that the channel is being used by groups to "incite" violence - an accusation the network has denied.

Kara said he expects Israel's parliament, the Knesset, to consider his request in the next session.

"I will go through the [legislatorial] mechanism to create the authority in which I can act freely. We will try to end it as quickly as possible."

Kara accused Al Jazeera of inciting violence - an accusation the network has denied [Dusan Vranic/AP]

Al Jazeera denounces measures

In a statement, the Doha-based media network denounced the measures from a country it says claims to be "the only democracy in the Middle East".

"Al Jazeera stresses that it will closely watch the developments that may result from the Israeli decision and will take the necessary legal measures towards it,"the statement read.

Al Jazeera also denied the charges its coverage of al-Aqsa Mosque unrest was unprofessional.

 "Al Jazeera will continue to cover the events of the occupied Palestinian territories professionally and accurately, according to the standards set by international agencies, such as the UK Office of Communications (Ofcom)."

The pan-Arab network's offices in the Palestinian territories of Gaza and the occupied West Bank city of Ramallah would not be affected by the current Israeli move.

The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, also known as Adalah, challenged the plan, saying it would be subject to scrutiny before the Supreme Court, adding that "it would fail the test of legality".

Al Jazeera's Scott Heidler, reporting from Jerusalem on Sunday, said that the request to revoke the credentials cover all the network's journalists in both the Arabic and English channels. 

It was unclear when the government will act on the request.

Our correspondent reported that Israel is also seeking to shut down Al Jazeera's cable and satellite transmissions in the country.

During the press conference, Kara also said that the interior ministry will also be involved in shutting down Al Jazeera's office in Jerusalem.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly threatened to shut Al Jazeera's operations in the country, accusing the network of inciting violence against Israel. His most recent attack on July 27 accused the network of "inciting violence".

Marwan Bishara, Al Jazeera senior political analyst, said the latest move by Israel shows a "synergy" of "dictatorships" in the Arab world and"dictatorship of military occupation in Palestine".

"It is as if closing down a network will diminish violence, when everyone knows that repression and military occupation and aggression is the reason for violence in the region. Not reporting it," he said.

Attack on press freedom

In an interview with Al Jazeera, Rami Khouri of the American University in Beirut, denounced the plan saying it is "very typical of regimes" in the region. 

"Regimes that want to control power will almost always go after two targets - the media and the foreigners. Everybody goes after the media." 

Aidan White, director of the London-based Ethical Journalism Network, called Israel's decision "a full frontal attack" on press freedom.

"It is a shocking statement, and it completely undermines Israel's claims to be the only democracy in the region, because it gets to the heart of one of the most important institutions of democracy.

"This attack on Al Jazeera is really an attack on all critical independent journalism."

The Committee to Protect Journalists has also criticised the Israeli move.

"Censoring Al Jazeera or closing its offices will not bring stability to the region, but it would put Israel firmly in the camp of some of the region's worst enemies of press freedom," CPJ Middle East and North Africa Programme Coordinator Sherif Mansour said in a statement.

"Israel should abandon these undemocratic plans and allow Al Jazeera and all journalists to report freely from the country and areas it occupies," it said.

In recent months, Saudi Arabia and Jordan both shut down Al Jazeera bureaus as part of a coordinated diplomatic and economic campaign against Qatar, where the headquarters of Al Jazeera Media Network is located.

Al Jazeera's signal has also been blocked in the United Arab Emirates. 

Egypt, which is also part of the blocking group, banned Al Jazeera several years ago. 

NETANYAHU BACKS PUSH TO SHUT DOWN AL JAZEERA'S ISRAEL OFFICES

 Al Jazeera says to fight any bid to shut its Jerusalem office

 Communications Minister Ayoub Kara starts working on Al-Jazeera shutdown

JERUSALEM POST BY LAHAV HARKOV

 AUGUST 6, 2017 17:53

Following in the footsteps of Saudi Arabia and Egypt, Israel aims to revoke press credentials of Qatari-based news organization.

An employee walks inside an office of Qatar-based Al-Jazeera network in Jerusalem June 13, 2017. . (photo credit:REUTERS)

Security comes before freedom of expression, Communications Minister Ayoub Kara said at a press conference on Sunday, as he laid out a fivepoint plan backed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to shut down Qatari cable network Al Jazeera.

Netanyahu congratulated Kara on Twitter, writing: “Following my instructions, he took several practical steps today to stop the actions of incitement by Al Jazeera in Israel.”

Kara said Al Jazeera should be banned from broadcasting from Israel on grounds of incitement.

 “I want to make clear: Our citizens’ security and welfare overcomes freedom of expression in times of terror, period. Freedom of expression is not freedom to incite,” Kara said. “Democracy has limits. When we ask what overcomes what, I have no doubt at all. I prefer our citizens and soldiers alive.”

Kara asked the Government Press Office to revoke Al Jazeera reporters’ press cards. He also spoke to the cable and satellite television companies in Israel, which he said expressed willingness to stop broadcasting Al Jazeera.

In addition, Kara asked Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman to use his authority to close the network’s Israeli offices and asked for the channel’s broadcasts on open satellites – used by many Israeli Arabs – to be blocked.

Finally, Kara announced plans to promote legislation that would give the government the ability, in exceptional cases, to put security before freedom of expression.

Last week, Kara put his plan to shutter Al Jazeera in a broader Middle Eastern context, saying Saudi Arabia and other Sunni countries have called to shut down Al Jazeera entirely as part of their pressure on the Qatari regime. The countries campaigning against Qatar are not democracies that purport to have a free press.

 “We identify with the moderates in the Arab world who are fighting terrorism and religious extremism,” Kara said. “Here in Israel, there is no place for a channel that backs terrorism either.”

The Foreign Press Association, of which Al Jazeera journalists in Israel are members, said most of them have identification cards issued by the Government Press Office, which means they are government- vetted. They called Kara’s actions a “slippery slope.”

When reports first surfaced last month that the channel might be taken off the air, Al Jazeera stressed it would take “all necessary legal measures [if Israel] acts on its threat.”

See Israel moves to close Al Jazeera, ban its journalists

Employment Tribunals - Guardian Letter

August 19, 2017, 2:12 pm

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Abolition of Fees for Claimants

Three weeks ago I did a post Supreme Court Abolishes Employment Tribunal Fees - Thank the Lib Dems, Jo Swinson & Vince Cable for introducing them and also sent a letter into the Guardian.

Unfortunately I must have missed it and it has only just been pointed out to me.  So until I get a hard copy, I will have to make do with a copy from the Internet!

How do you tell if someone is a Nazi?

August 19, 2017, 3:06 pm

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Answer – It Depends on their Attitude to Israel

It must be very difficult for Zionists these days.  Netanyahu goes off to greet Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who is busy rehabilitating the former pro-Nazi leader of Hungary, Admiral Miklos Horthy, who presided over the deportation of nearly 1/2m Jew to Auschwitz.  The loss of Steve Bannon has caused real grief amongst Zionists in Israel and the USA.  And then there is Charlottesville, who do you condemn there?  Sure they are neo-Nazis and White Supremacists on one side and anti-fascists and Black Lives Matter on the other, but that is the problem.

A simple guide to who is and who is not a Nazi

The neo-Nazis and White  Supremacists might hate Jews but they love Israel, whereas the anti-fascists and Black Lives Matter activists detest Zionism but they have no problem with Jews – indeed there were many Jews amongst their ranks.

I therefore though it might be helpful if I could post a flow diagram explaining how best to judge who is and who is not a Nazi!

Reaction to Charlottesville

As I said Charlottesville present the Zionists with a real dilemma.  It took Netanyahu three days before he could say anything about the neo-Nazi murder of an anti-fascist at Charlottesville.  In the Times of Israel of 15.8.17. in an article headed ‘3 days later, Israeli leaders still conspicuously silent on Charlottesville’ Raphael Ahrens wrote that:

three days after neo-Nazis marched in broad daylight through the streets waving swastika flags and chanting “Jews will not replace us,” the leader of the Jewish state had still not publicly commented on the matter as of Tuesday.

Netanyahu’s silence in the face of images that send chills down the spines of Jews worldwide has raised eyebrows among analysts and experts.

Similarly, an article For Israel, White House Ties Trump Neo-Nazi Condemnation for NDTV reports on how ‘An Israeli cabinet minister has said relations with US President Donald Trump take priority over condemning neo-Nazis, to justify Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's muted response to events in Charlottesville.’

Below is a good article on Mondoweiss on the dilemmas of Zionists today and they are dilemmas.  The far-Right in Europe and the USA is motivated primarily by hatred of Muslims and Islam.  Israel is seen as the standard bearer in that fight.  The fact that it is Jewish is irrelevant because it is also a virulently racist state.  Indeed fascists are quite capable of differentiating between Jews at home in the USA and Israeli Jews.  As Richard Spencer, leader of the Alt-Right repeatedly states, he is a ‘White Zionist’.

President Trump’s initial statement on the Charlottesville violence

President Trump’s initial statement on the Charlottesville violence, where he said “We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence, on many sides, on many sides”, has taken on a life of its own. Equating the Nazis and white supremacists with their victims has become a national (as well as international) sport, and the promulgators of this “many sides” narrative are getting so excited with the prospect of it, that they are even going further, to regard the leftists as worse than Nazis.

All this has made various Israeli leaders rather uncomfortable. Because although they are on board with Trump’s attacks on the left, his “many sides” narrative was, after all, normalizing bona fide anti-Semitism.

But before we get to Israel, let’s see how the ‘left-equals right’ notion has been mainstreamed:

The notion of a supposed ‘Alt-Left’ as equal to the Alt-Right was voiced loudly merely a day after the Charlottesville violence via none other than the newspaper of record – New York Times, which published an op-edby Erick Woods-Erickson, opening with the following:

“As a conservative, I see both the social justice warrior alt-left and the white supremacist alt-right as two sides of the same coin.”

Vox congressional reporter Jeff Stein tweeted in disbelief:

“NYtimes oped begins by admonishing “social justice warrior alt-left” the day after they fought Nazis. Unreal.”

Meanwhile, in Israel, Head of Republicans Abroad in Israel Marc Zell said that he holds “leftist thugs,” local authorities and organizations such as the American Civil Liberties Union responsible for Saturday’s events:

“I am, of course, no supporter of Nazis or white supremacists. But this very tragic event could have been avoided,” he said. “It was clear to all that the leftist thugs would come out to provoke and escalate the events. These thugs are the ugly face of progressivism around the country. They are looking to shut down free speech.”

Zell even went as far as to suggest that the car-ramming attack might have been a ‘false flag’:

“I am confident that Attorney General Jeff Sessions, and the newly appointed director of the FBI, Christopher Wray, will conduct a proper investigation. And I will not be surprised if they find that the incident was deliberately provoked by the left”, he said.

As I had mentioned in my first commentary on the Chartlottesville aftermath, Trump’s equivocal statements were a dog-whistle. He was calling on the dogs, and he was waiting to see how loud they could bark.

But there was also fierce pressure on Trump to name the thugs by name. So on Monday he finally did call out the KKK, Neo-Nazis and White-Supremacists, albeit ending the condemnation with “other hate groups that are repugnant to everything we hold dear as Americans”. Coming from Trump, the latter could be read as another opening to the “many sides” narrative.

Indeed, on Tuesday, Trump went back and doubled down on his original message, applying the “alt-left” notion which was being mainstreamed in the meanwhile. Speaking at the Trump Tower in New York on Tuesday, the president was asked for his opinion after Senator John McCain had condemned the “alt-right” for its role in the violent rally, to which he responded:

“What about alt-left? Do they have any semblance of guilt?”

Let’s hop back to Israel now, because the fact that the Nazis are involved in this is causing a certain discomfort to many Jewish Israelis. As CNN host Anderson Cooper was sayingon Tuesday, the Charlottesville Neo-Nazis “were freaking chanting ‘Jews will not replace us’ on the streets of America.”

Thus Israeli centrist leaders Yair Lapid and Tzipi Livni were rather vociferous and unequivocal in their condemnations. Yesterday, Lapid said that

“There aren’t two sides. When Neo-Nazis march in Charlottesville and scream slogans against Jews and in support of white supremacy, the condemnation has to be unambiguous. They represent hate and evil. Anyone who believes in the human spirit must stand against them without fear.”

Sounds good. Let’s put aside for the moment Lapid’s ownanti-Palestinianism, anti-miscegenationism (against mixed marriage) and ultra-nationalism.

Tzipi Livni, who had joined forces with the left under the Zionist Union was also quite clear:

“When it comes to racism, anti-Semitism and Nazism, there are never two equal sides. There’s good and there’s evil. Period”, she said.

Let’s also put aside for the moment the fact that Livni, who was Foreign Minister during Israel’s 2008-9 Gaza onslaught saidthat “Israel demonstrated real hooliganism during the course of the recent operation, which I demanded”, as well as that “Hamas now understands that when you fire on its citizens it responds by going wild – and this is a good thing.”  – I mean, just because it’s hooliganism on a national level, doesn’t mean it’s racist, does it?

Israeli Education Minister Naftali Bennett has called on US leaders to denounce the rally’s “displays of anti-Semitism” and Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked of Bennett’s Jewish Home party has urged prosecution of neo-Nazi activists. Once again, let’s put aside for the moment the Education Minister’s“I’ve killed many Arabs and there’s no problem with that”, as well as the Justice Minister’s advocacy for genocideof Palestinians.

Now, as the condemnations were coming from the right of Netanyahu, that was a sign that he shouldn’t be too silent on this, even if he wanted to not upset Trump. So Netanyahu finally tweeted on Tuesday that he was “outraged by expressions of anti-Semitism, neo-Nazism and racism. Everyone should oppose this hatred.”

But, alas, another Netanyahu came out on this. Netanyahu Jr., that is – Yair Netanyahu. Writingon his Facebook yesterday:

“To put things in perspective. I’m a Jew, I’m an Israeli, the neo nazis scums in Virginia hate me and my country. But they belong to the past. Their breed is dying out. However the thugs of Antifa and BLM who hate my country (and America too in my view) just as much are getting stronger and stronger and becoming super dominant in American universities and public life.”

The Times of Israel reports sources “close to the Prime Minister” taking a distance, claiming that “Yair is an adult and his views are his alone”.

But this is where it gets more confusing. Because yesterday, ‘Hail Trump’, white supremacist, Alt-Right leader Richard Spencer was interviewed on Israeli Channel 2, and said that Israelis should respect someone like him, because he’s “a white Zionist”:

“An Israeli citizen, someone who understands your identity, who has a sense of nationhood and peoplehood, and the history and experience of the Jewish people, you should respect someone like me, who has analogue feelings about whites. You could say that I am a white Zionist – in the sense that I care about my people, I want us to have a secure homeland for us and ourselves. Just like you want a secure homeland in Israel”, he said.

At the same time, Spencer voiced the classical anti-Semitic tropes about Jewish ‘over-representation’ and separating them from ‘whites’, when he was asked whether slogans such as “Jews will not replace us” constitute anti-Semitism:

“Let’s be honest,” Spencer said, “Jews are vastly over-represented in what you could call ‘the establishment,’ that is, Ivy League educated people who really determine policy, and white people are being dispossesed from this country.”

This is not the first time Spencer brings up the ‘white Zionism’ notion. He has also managed to leave Texas rabbi Matt Rosenberg speechless, when the latter, an avowed Zionist, challenged him with ‘love an inclusion’, where Spencer presented to him the question:

“Do you really want radical inclusion into the State of Israel? And by that I mean radical inclusion. Maybe all of the Middle East could go move in to Tel Aviv or Jerusalem. Would you really want that?”

Spencer added to the blow a white-supremacist embrace of “respect”:

“Jews exist precisely because you did not assimilate. That is why Jews are a coherent people with a history and a culture and a future. It’s because you had a sense of yourselves. I respect that about you. I want my people to have that same sense of themselves”, he said.

Not only is this not new from Spencer – it is not new from Nazis in general. As Adolf Eichmann saidin 1960 (Time):

“In the years that followed (after 1937) I often said to Jews with whom I had dealings that, had I been a Jew, I would have been a fanatical Zionist. I could not imagine anything else. In fact, I would have been the most ardent Zionist imaginable.”

Indeed, the anti-Semitic, white-supremacist notions represented in Charlottesville, make the proximity between Zionism and anti-Semitism too close for comfort for many Jews, especially the Zionist ones. Zionism has a long and murky record of collaboration with Nazis, which presents a contradiction to the narrative of Israel being a diametric answer to anti-Semitism and the Holocaust.

But having mentioned Yair Netanyahu, it could be an interesting anecdote to mention the letter of another Yair – the Jewish terrorist ‘Stern Gang’ leader Avraham ‘Yair’ Stern (‘Yair’ being his nom de guerre), offeringallegiance to Hitler in January 1941. Here Stern offers to “actively take part in the war on Germany’s side” and that “common interests could exist between the establishment of a new order in Europe in conformity with the German concept, and the true national aspirations of the Jewish people as they are embodied by the NMO” (NMO stands for National Militant Organization, of which the Stern Gang became an offshoot).

When Herzl wrote in his diary that “the anti-Semites will become our most dependable friends, the anti-Semitic countries our allies”, he was already pinpointing a notion which Zionism and Israel would desperately seek to conceal. Which is, that Zionism, the state ideology, and anti-Semitism, are tightly knit and inter-dependent. Zionism is not an answer to anti-Semitism – it is an extension of it. And when the unabashed racists and anti-Semites go marching, when their Israel-loving President keeps exonerating them and equating them with their victims, then it becomes a bit uncomfortable. The ideological affinity between anti-Semitism and Zionism becomes exposed. And that’s where the Zionist apologists try to cover it up again, under the balancing act of being a Zionist and opposing anti-Semitism.

But Benjamin Netanyahu’s son, Yair, he got the trick. The trick is to demonize the left as “haters” and “thugs”, so as to also be able to condemn the Nazis, as it were, but effectively making the left worse than Nazis, by downplaying the Nazis as a thing “of the past”. Because Israel is now in an ideological international fight both against anti-Semitism, supposedly and as it were, but more importantly and more truly, against the left. But it has to look good. You don’t want to seem too Nazi. 

Jewish Voice for Labour & the Politics of Self-Indulgence - Nothing to say on Palestine or Zionism

August 22, 2017, 4:08 pm

≫ Next: EXCLUSIVE – Lifting the lid on Collaboration between the Far Right and Zionist Activists

≪ Previous: How do you tell if someone is a Nazi?

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Jews in the Labour Party should oppose Israeli Apartheid not obsess about identity politics

For two years, even before Jeremy Corbyn was elected as leader of the Labour Party, the Zionist movement has waged an anti-Semitism smear campaign.  In August 2015, Corbyn was accused of links with a holocaust denier Paul Eisen.

At the forthcoming Labour Party Conference the Jewish Labour Movement will seek to move a Rule Change which will mean that any supporter of Israel can claim to be a ‘victim’ of anti-Semitism if the issue of Palestine is raised. 

False accusations of ‘anti-Semitism’ have been the principal weapon of the Right in the Labour Party.  Supporting Austerity or cutting benefits is unattractive politically.  Even supporting the bombing of Syrians and Yemenis isn’t as appealing as opposing ‘anti-Semitism’ and defending Israel’s ‘right to exist’. Cloaking yourself in the mantle of the Holocaust and ‘anti-Semitism’ even though you are supporting a 50 year old military occupation and the Apartheid State of Israel, is seen as offering better political dividends.  ‘Anti-Semitism’ is the go to weapon of choice for Labour’s Right.

Jeremy Newmark - Chair of the Jewish Labour Movement who was captured by Al Jazeera openly working with the Israeli Embassy in its infiltration of the Labour Party

Because the Jewish Labour Movement claims that they represent all Jews in the Labour Party no one doubts that an alternative Jewish organisation is necessary which stands for the principles of anti-racism and support for the Palestinians. 

 

Unfortunately Jewish Voices for Labour which has just been set up doesn’t want to so much challenge the politics of the JLM as avoid them.  Its founding statement of principles completely avoids saying anything about the Right’s ‘anti-Semitism’ smear campaign which has led to the suspension of Ken Livingstone, Jackie Walker, myself and others.  Indeed it wants to say as little as possible about Palestine and Zionism.  This is not accidental.

Jewish Voices for Labour Statement of Principles

Founding member Rachel Lever of Jews 4 Justice 4 Palestinians explained in an email to others her role in drafting the JVL’s founding statement.  She wanted a Jewish group that would explore its own ‘heritage’ and engage in navel gazing.  A Jewish consciousness raising group for which the whole Palestine/Israel/Zionist thing was an unnecessary encumbrance.  The purpose of the new group was:

To discard the shackles and gather with other Jews to explore, celebrate, critique etc our heritage at this juncture without the Israel thing, and in the context of the resurgence and ascendancy in the Labour Party of values that we share in some part because of our Jewishness.

Having a Jewish statement that omits Israel and Zionism (in either a positive or a negative formulation) is implicitly part of the argument that antisemitism and antizionism needs to be uncoupled from each other....

If anyone can’t live without the words Israel, Zionism, Palestine, Gaza, BDS (and why not add Occupation, the Wall, administrative detention, land theft, child prisoners, war crimes, apartheid, racism, settlements etc etc) then this is not the organisation for them.

So there we have it.  What Lever calls ‘the Israel thing’ is part of the ‘shackles’ of being Jewish.  Whilst many Jews are active in rejecting a Zionist movement that has linked up with Trump, Orban, Bannon and the alt-Right, Lever and co. prefer to sit around ‘exploring, celebrating, critiquing etc. their heritage’.  Quite what they think they will discover is mind boggling because, as Sivanandan explained, identity is what you do and who we are not what you think. 

Ian Saville, the Jewish Socialist Group enforcer (& a socialist magician!) speaking a year ago at a meeting against the witch hunt with Jackie Walker - today the JSG had to be dragged into issuing any statement regarding Jackie

But to Lever, Amanda Sebastyen and others, Israel and Zionism is an optional extra. It is a lifestyle choice not a permanent political commitment. Going on a demonstration is a recreational activity.

The purpose of a Jewish group in the Labour Party is political or it is nothing.  Zionism deliberately conflates being Jewish and being Zionist.  Any Jewish group that claims to be socialist has no choice but to challenge the JLM and Labour Friends of Israel. It has a political and moral duty to oppose the actions of those who claim Israel’s war crimes in the name of all Jews. 

It is interesting that Rachel Lever explicitly rejects the second of her four choices that she articulates in her email viz. 'To spend our lives and energies exposing it [Israel] and campaigning for justice for Palestinians, thus making its negation also an intrinsic part of our identity.' Most of the 'non-Zionist' peace wing of JfJP aren't so explicit in saying what they really believe so we should be grateful to Rachel.

When asked about Israel's 'right to exist' the response was that JVL was a British group and therefore has no position on any state!

It has been suggested that we should judge JVL more by what it does than by what its founding principles say.  I disagree. What confidence can one have in an organisation that dares not speak its mind, that doesn't openly state what it believes in and which hides its principles behind a bushel?  Who does it think it is deceiving?  Surely not the JLM.  That is dishonest politics.

 

I fully understand why Asa Winstanley of Electronic Intifada, should welcome the formation of JVL, as an alternative non-Zionist Jewish group in the Labour Party. Asa is not alone in wanting to see an alternative to the execrable JLM, the British wing of the racist Israeli Labour Party, and LFI, which is an extension of the Israeli Embassy inside the Labour Party.

It is therefore regrettable that JVL has not only been set up undemocratically but a Founding Statement of Principles has been issued which is politically disingenuous.

Despite being asked to sign a statement of support for JVL, I was not invited to its inaugural meeting when a founding statement was agreed.  Nor were other Jewish anti-Zionists including the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network.

It is clear that those who were instrumental in the formation of this group, in particular Jews for Justice for Palestinians and the Jewish Socialists Group, were determined that JVL would neither be a democratic nor a campaigning group inside the Labour Party on the issue of Palestine and Zionism.  In particular they they did not want it to be seen to oppose the JLM’s Zionist agenda.  Instead of debating out differences openly, its founders have used administrative methods to exclude potential critics.

I issued a statement a week ago Some Comments on the Formation of Jewish Voices for Labour. which I sent to members of JVL's Facebook group. I then applied to join the FB group and was accepted.  However that didn’t last very long.  Almost immediately Ian Saville, warned me not to ‘attack’ members of the Steering Committee and in particular not to ‘disparage the process of its formation’.  Clearly democracy isn’t one of JVL’s strong points.  When I responded to this warning with JVL – What are they scared of? I was removed from the group.

What are the problems with Jewish Voices for Labour

1.      JVL’s formation was undemocratic, effectively a stitch-up between leading members of JfJP and JSG.

2.      Given that the JLM have been waging a false-anti-Semitism campaign for nearly two years it is unbelievable that JVL have nothing to say about this campaign.  On the JVL FB group, some members of the group were openly calling for support for the expulsion of Livingstone.

3.      JVL takes no position on giving concrete support for the Palestinians.  It isn’t necessary to take an explicitly anti-Zionist position but when the JLM is saying that even to use the word ‘Zionist’ is abusive it is political cowardice to avoid the word.  Zionism is the racist ideology and movement that led to Israel, a Jewish supremacist state.  A state which has reduced Gaza to a human rights disaster yet Gaza too is not mentioned.

4.      Perhaps the single most important issue in terms of solidarity is the question of BDS.  JVL supports the right of others to support BDS however it abstains from supporting BDS itself.  Nor does it make any mention of the Palestinian Right of Return. 

5.      JVL is Jewish only.  There is often a good reason for having specific Jewish solidarity groups (e.g. Jews for boycotting Israeli Goods, JfJP etc.) but in terms of the Labour Party it is important to have a common front against Zionist reaction and that must include non-Jews.  Ironically even the JLM accept non-Jews.  It is a concession to chauvinism to exclude non-Jews from the organisation.

6.      The statement makes no mention of the Zionist campaign to redefine anti-Semitism, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition. When the Zionists are waging campaigns against our very right to campaign on Palestine and smear Palestinian supporters as ‘anti-Semitic’, to pretend this is not happening is unreal.

When the Zionists and the Right explicitly link being Jewish and supporting Israel, to refuse to mention Israel or Zionism is not some brilliant political manoeuvre but an act of political cowardice.  The Labour Party is not a knitting circle.  The idea that the JLM is going to be defeated by this political sleight of hand is wishful thinking.  The way to ‘decouple’ anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism is not by pretending the debate doesn’t exist but by engaging in it and politically challenging the supporters of Zionism. 

Email of Rachel Lever and Amanda Sebestyen

Below is some of the correspondence preceding the setting up of Jewish Voices for Labour 

Email from Rachel Lever re founding of JVLOn 8 Jul 2017, at 20:26, Rachel Lever wrote:One of Zionism’s greatest triumphs has been to shackle Jews the world over to Israel, defined by it either positively or negatively. IHRA is the latest in a long line of such shackles. Jews have four choices  1. To “Love Israel” and make it part of our identity 2. To spend our lives and energies exposing it and campaigning for justice for Palestinians, thus making its negation also an intrinsic part of our identity  3. To abstain or compromise or have “doubts” which still leaves us marked by Israel 4. To discard the shackles and gather with other Jews to explore, celebrate, critique etc our heritage at this juncture without the Israel thing, and in the context of the resurgence and ascendancy in the Labour Party of values that we share in some part because of our Jewishness. There is in any case no need for yet another Jewish Anti-Z organisation, in or out of the Labour Party.  There is however an absolute imperative to deny to the JLM the status of “Labour’s Jewish voice” and the harm they can do using that monopoly. In practical terms, omitting Israel may make this alternative Jewish voice more effective and authentic and deny the JLM their franchise, than if we simply invert their pro-Israel identity and become anti-Z “usual suspects”..... I freely confess to having drafted some of the wording of the statement. It is intended both to help to create something slightly different for which I believe there is a genuine gap in the market (and which might yield some new faces and insights), and to stake a claim against the heinous new “definitions” of antisemitism that explicitly connect Jews to Israel.  Having a Jewish statement that omits Israel and Zionism (in either a positive or a negative formulation) is implicitly part of the argument that antisemitism and antizionism needs to be uncoupled from each other. Needless to say, membership is entirely voluntary. If anyone can’t live without the words Israel, Zionism, Palestine, Gaza, BDS (and why not add Occupation, the Wall, administrative detention, land theft, child prisoners, war crimes, apartheid, racism, settlements etc etc) then this is not the organisation for them. Rachel From: Haim Bresheeth Sent: 09 July 2017 09:27To: Rachel LeverCc: Michael Kalmanovitz; mailings@jfjfp.com; Jonathan Rosenhead; Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi; Mike Cushman; richard kuper; Amanda Sebestyen
Subject: Re: FREE SPEECH AND ISRAEL: A CALL TO LABOUR PARTY MEMBERS Interesting, Rachel. Than the new organisation is devoted to silencing the debate on Palestine? To keeping mum on the anti-Semitism lies and slurs? To avoid speaking on the long list of topic you number? Well, my my, I thought that was the role of JLM, and it was already doing that rather well… So JVL will try to replace JLM in making Palestine and the occupation invisible? Now it is all clear, at last.
Yes, maybe that is not an organisation I need not consider joining. I am very impressed by the pride you voice inhaling been at the cradle of its auspicious birth… HaimProf. Haim BresheethProfessorial Research AssociateFaculty of Arts and HumanitiesSchool of Oriental and African Studies And Director of Camera Obscura Films

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On 8 Jul 2017, at 23:09, Amanda Sebestyen wrote:I think this sums up the role and importance of JVL beautifully, Rachel.

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From: Michael Kalmanovitz Sent: 08 July 2017 11:05To: 'Haim Bresheeth'; mailings@jfjfp.comCc: 'Jonathan Rosenhead'; 'Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi'; 'Rachel Lever'; 'Mike Cushman'; 'richard kuper'; 'Amanda Sebestyen'Subject: RE: FREE SPEECH AND ISRAEL: A CALL TO LABOUR PARTY MEMBERS Haim Bresheeth said “three important words have not made their way to this text: Israel, Palestine and Zionism”.  May we add two more to his: “Gaza” – which is the best known example of Israel’s slaughter of the innocents; and “BDS” – the massive & growing international non-violent antiracist boycott movement.
Are we to assume therefore that these will not be central issues of the group that this letter is proposing to form? 
The Jewish Labour Movement, Labour Friends of Israel, Progress, & the Israeli embassy have constantly sought to undermine the most radical & massive movement we have seen in the Labour Party for many years (as seen on Aljazeera!). This movement, called forth by the election of Jeremy Corbyn, is the greatest protection for every sector that is discriminated against. In your text there is no mention of or commitment to it. The Zionist/right-wing’s weapon of choice against this movement are manufactured allegations of antisemitism to manipulate themselves into power in the Labour Party, and undermine Corbyn & McDonnell. (They were able to deprive us of Ken 

"what is your proposed organisation for?"                      Michael Kalmanovitz

Livingstone’s considerable electioneering skills during the campaign.)  The election result has slowed down the Zionists/right-wing. 
Bearing all this in mind, what is your proposed organisation for? 
If JVL isn’t opposing what the Israeli occupation is doing to Palestinian people, promoting BDS, opposing the Zionist/right-wing’s undermining of the new movement, what else should people organised as Jews within the Labour Party who are not Zionists be forming an organisation to accomplish?
Surely JVL will not want to resurrect the antisemitism “discussion”, which is what the Zionist/right-wing wants, taking the focus off defeating the red Tories & the blue.

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From: Haim Bresheeth
Sent: 29 June 2017 17:20To: mailings@jfjfp.comCc: Michael Kalmanovitz; Jonathan Rosenhead; Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi; Rachel Lever; Mike Cushman; richard kuper; Amanda Sebestyen
Subject: Re: FREE SPEECH AND ISRAEL: A CALL TO LABOUR PARTY MEMBERS Dear Jenny Manson, Thank you for sending me the proposed text for JVL attached below. I have read this carefully, only to discover that three important words have not made their way to this text: Israel, Palestine and Zionism… If we are to have an Jewish progressive alternative to JLM, which I, as ~ member of the party would love, why can it not outline some differences, and open some distance between us and them?  Otherwise, what is the point? From the wording below, most people would not work out why there needs to be another Jewish grouping in the Labour Party… I hope a group can be set up of which I would like to be a member! HaimProf. Haim Bresheeth

Proposal to set up a new Jewish Organisation within the Labour Party - Who We Are

Jewish Voice for Labour (JVL) is a network for all Jews in the Labour party.

Our political priorities are universal human rights and dignity; justice for all; freedom of speech and free-thinking; and democracy in the Labour Party. 

Our mission is to contribute to making the Labour Party an open, democratic and tolerant party, encouraging all ethnic groups and cultures to join and participate freely. As such we aim to strengthen the party in its opposition to all forms of racism including antisemitism, broadening the party’s appeal to all sections of British society.

We take our inspiration from the long history of Jewish involvement in the socialist and trade-union movement and in antiracist and antifascist struggles including the civil-rights movement. We stand for rights and justice for Jews everywhere without wrongs and injustice to other people anywhere.

At a time of profound divisions in Jewish communities, JVL offers a space to explore and debate the many questions (personal, social, cultural, political) that are important to us as progressive Labour Jews. We aim to create an alternative voice on the left for the Jewish values and heritage we can all be proud of.  

We will work where appropriate with existing groups concerned with Jewish issues from an internationalist and anti-racist perspective.

We will try to arrange a meeting in a couple of weeks time to agree a minimal set of rules, membership fees and to elect such officers as decided then. We will aim to launch publicly at the Labour Party conference in September.

Please add your voice to ours by replying to jewishvoiceforlabour@gmail.com

Signed:

Jenny Manson, co-convenor
Ian Saville, co-convenor

Julia Bard
Graham Bash
Pam Blakelock
Mike Cushman
Richard Kuper
Pam Laurance
Rachel Lever
David Rosenberg
Jonathan Rosenhead
Amanda Sebestyen
Glyn Secker
Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi

Of the 8 people who 'liked' the decision, at least 3 are Jewish Socialists Group and one, Miriam Yagud is a Green Party member who has called for Livingstone's expulsion

How my exclusion was announced to the JVL list - no mention of who is excluded still less the reason why.  But as Leah Levane explained there are more important things than democracy.

A Warning Message from Ian Saville – Please Desist from Criticism

Hello Tony, I am writing to you as one of the administrators of the JVL Facebook Group. Whatever your intention, the effect of your interventions in the group in the short time in which you have belonged to it are likely to have a negative effect on the functioning and perception of the group. The group should be a place where people with a diverse range of opinions can engage in comradely discussion without being attacked or denigrated. Your posts attacking the steering group (of which I am not a member) and other people posting on the page seem provocative and divisive, and have caused concern to other members. If you persist with such posts you will be removed from the group. It seems also that even before joining the group you circulated some of its members with unsolicited material attacking the JVL and disparaging the process of its formation. This has also been a matter of concern to some who received your message. Please take this as a warning and desist from this sort of behaviour, as any further instances will result in you being immediately excluded from the group. 

Yours, Ian Saville

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EXCLUSIVE – Lifting the lid on Collaboration between the Far Right and Zionist Activists

August 24, 2017, 7:56 pm

≫ Next: Israel Army Demolishes 2 ‘Illegal’ EU funded Palestinian schools

≪ Previous: Jewish Voice for Labour & the Politics of Self-Indulgence - Nothing to say on Palestine or Zionism

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Zionist Demonstration Outside Palestine Expo 2017 included neo Nazi group Britain First’s Intelligence Chief Paul Besser and Jonathan Hoffman

Paul Besser - Intelligence Chief of neo-Nazi group Britain First with Jonathan Hoffman - JDL member Gemma Sheridan is between them Hoffman tries to deny Besser is in neo-Nazi group Britain First

Outside the Ahava shop in Covent Garden - Hoffman pictured with the EDL in khaki at the rear and Roberta Moore of the JDL alongside

Britain First's 'Intelligence' FB page run by Besser who Hoffman covers for

In the run up to Palestine Expo 2017, Europe's largest Palestinian art cum cultural political festival, held on July 8^th and 9^th at the Queen Elizabeth II Centre in Westminster, there was a concerted campaign from ‘Jewish Human Rights Watch’ run by far-right solicitor Robert Festenstein and the bogus charity CampaignAgainst Anti-Semitism, which is currently under investigation by the Charity Commission, to ban the festival.

A packed hall at Palestine Expo 2017 listen to veteran anti-imperialist journalist John Pilger - the Zionists and neo-Nazis hate opposition to racism and imperialism - hence they cry 'anti-Semitism' and 'terrorism'

Besser's Twitter account boasts a replica of the Yellow Star that the Nazis forced Jews to wear - it takes pride of place on Besser's Twitter page - the German Zionist paper Judische Rundschau once told German Jews to 'Wear the Yellow Star with Pride' Jonathan Arkush, President of the Board of Deputies, addresses a crowd at an Al Quds demonstration with Robert Jonge and Roberta Moore in JDL tee-shirts - JDL was set up by Rabbi Meir Kahane of Kach, which even Israel banned

The pretex for the Zionist attempt to ban Expo 2017 was that it was a ‘Jewish hate fest’ and ‘anti-Semitic’.  These are the usual accusations that Zionist organisations hurlagainst any solidarity with the Palestinians.  Even Sajid David, the Community Secretary, disregarded them (under a certain legal persuasion!).  It was also alleged that the Festival was a front for Hamas, which the Zionists term a ‘terrorist’ organisation, because all opposition to Israel’s military occupation is, by definition, ‘terrorist’.  Suffice to say that the real reason was the fact that Zionists hate any public manifestation of Palestinian identity or political representation, in other words the campaign against Palestine Expo was thoroughly racist. 

Another Zionist front group run by Sharon Klaff and Ambrosine Shitrit

It is noticeable that mainstream Jewish and Zionist groups, in particular the Board of Deputies and the Community Security Trust did not join in with these attacks.

The festival, which included a range of Jewish speakers such as Professor Ilan Pape of Exeter University and Miko Peled, son of the late Israeli General Matiyahu Peled as well as speakers such as John Pilger and Professor Virginia Tilley of Southern Illinois University attracted over 17,000 attendees.

The Bogus 'Charity''Campaign Against Antisemitism' did its best to have Palestine Expo Banned

Jewish Human Rights Watch's far-Right solicitor Robert Fenstenstein writes trying to intimidate the Queen Elizabeth Centre into banning Palestine Expo 2017

It also attracted a small Zionist demonstration outside including the notorious Jonathan Hoffman, former Vice Chair of the Zionist Federation.  Hoffman has form when it comes to demonstrating with fascists.  At the Ahava demonstrations in Covent Garden in 2011 he demonstrated alongside the English Defence League.  When caught in the act he said that the allegations were based on evidence that was ‘photoshopped’.  In one photograph he was pictured with Robert Moore of the Jewish-Nazi terror group, the Jewish Defence League (then the Jewish wing of the EDL).  His allegation that photographer David Hoffman (no relation) had doctored his photographs led to a grovelling apology under threat of libel.

Paul BesserF standing with Standing with Israel

Left to Right  - Robert Spencer of Counter-Jihad, Kevin Carroll of EDL, Pamela Geller, - virulent anti-Islamic bigot and Tommy Robinson, founder of EDL and arch Zionist. Spencer & Geller were prohibited by Theresa May from entering UK - EDL and Zionist flags in background

Who should turn up to the Expo 17 Zionist demonstration but one Paul Besser, the Intelligence Officer (I use the term ‘Intelligence’ loosely) of the neo-Nazi Britain First group.  It is the group that Jo Cox’s killer, Thomas Mair, was associated with.  Despite Hoffman alleging that it was all a ‘lie’ the evidence is displayed here that Besser runs the Britain First intelligence operation.  An operation that anti-fascists have had no difficulty cracking. 

Neil Horan, Hitler admirer, demonstrates with Hoffman and Besser

Neil Horan at the Albert Hall Zionist counter-demonstration in 2011

Also present at the Zionist demonstration against ‘anti-Semitism’ was another odd ball, defrocked priest Neil Horan.  Besides running on the track of the 2003 British Grand Prix and physically attacking the leading marathon runner in the 2004 Athens Olympics, he expressed his supportfor Rolph Harris outside his recent trial.  Horan is also on record as sayingthat he intended to carry posters at the World Cup Final in 2006 declaring that "Adolf Hitler was a good leader who was following the word of Christ", give the Hitler salute and light a candle for Hitler at the Gestapo headquarters.'  Despite these avowedly anti-Semitic sentiments Hoffman and the rest of the Zionist crew had no problems with him participating in their demonstration either. 

Gemma Sheridan of the neo-Nazi Jewish Defence League, banned in the USA as a terrorist group

It is not the first time Horan has participated in a Zionist demonstration.  Let’s hope it is the last time.  Horan performed a jig outside the Albert Hall in 2011, as part of the Zionist demonstration, when BDS protestors successfully disrupted the performance of the Israeli Philharmonic Orchestra.  Perhaps the Community Security Trust or the misnamed Campaign Against Antisemitism might want to get onto the case!

It would seem that in the fight against ‘anti-Semitism’ Israel’s supporters are leaving no stone unturned even if it is fascist maggots that emerge.  These days, most Nazis and White Supremacists are self-declared White Zionists.  For the full lowdown on Horan see Wikipedia.

Besser of Britain First, Ambrosine Shitrit, Gemma Sheridan JDL, Sharon Klaff and Jonathan Hoffman

The defenders of the Israeli state and the Zionist movement, especially those who manufacture ‘anti-Semitism’ whenever the issue of Palestine is raised, need to answer why it is that on a Zionist demonstration outside a Palestine Festival, there were at least two neo-Nazis present.  Even for Zionists this is a strange way to express your opposition to anti-Semitism!

Paul Besser's Other Activities

Paul Besser owns a company London Security Patrol- whose address is 7 Boundary Road WALTHAMSTOW E17 8NL.  You can ring him if you are interested in employing him on 0798 352 1403 or 0208 281 0157

Kay Wilson who was the main speaker at ZF/BOD Al Quds counter-demo this year with Tommy Robinson in Israel.Wilson was one of the people who hosted Robinson on his trip to Israel

Letter from Kay Wilson from Israel complaining to British police about their treatment of Tommy Robinson

 

Gemma Sheridan and another fascist openly wear JDL shirts at Al Quds counter-demo July 2016

 

Roberta Moore and her non-Jewish partner De Jonge

Shitrit, Besser, Klaff and Hoffman - all fascists together

Besser engaged in a little intelligence gathering

Besser's security firm is based at the above premises

Where Besser's business operations are based

Besser's Twitter account boasts a replica of the Yellow Star that the Nazis forced Jews to wear - it takes pride of place on Besser's Twitter page - the German Zionist paper Judische Rundschau once told German Jews to 'Wear the Yellow Star with Pride'

Israel Army Demolishes 2 ‘Illegal’ EU funded Palestinian schools

August 25, 2017, 2:46 pm

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Israel’s ‘Logic’: Arab labourers don’t need to read and write in order to obey orders

There is a certain logic in Israel’s actions.  A population under military occupation does not need anything except the most rudimentary education.  All it needs to do from the Occupier's perspective is to learn to obey.  The purpose of Palestinians in Area C, which Israel retains full control over, is to provide cheap labour for Israel’s agri business.  You don’t need to read to pick dates or olives or to plant seed.  Indeed education can be dangerous because it helps people think about their own situation.

When Nazi Germany invaded Poland for the first two years it exterminated the Polish intelligentsia – priests, teachers, academics, civil servants etc.  More Jews died in this time because they were Polish intellectuals than because they were Jews.

The Nazis held that the Poles were a slave nation.  Independence or self-rule was out of the question.  Their only role was to work for their Nazi overlords.  There was no need for education or learning or for that dangerous species – the intellectual or member of the intelligentsia.

after demolition this is all that remained of the school

Even in Victorian England working class children were taught to read only, in order that they could read instructions.  Writing was unnecessary.

Israel operates according to the same ‘logic’ as the Nazi overlords of Poland.  Hence the quite genuine anger in Tel Aviv that the European Union continues to fund ‘illegal’ Palestinian schools. In Area C, the 60% of the West Bank that Israel fully controls, it is illegal to erect a building or solar panels or sink a well or indeed do anything that constitutes economic activity by the Palestinians unless you have a permit.  Permits are rarely granted.  

Of course the Jewish settlers do not need a permit.  They operate under an entirely different legal system.  ‘Apartheid’ I hear you cry?  Nonsense.  It’s Separate Development except that the Jewish part develops at a greater rate than the non-Jewish.   They used to call it Separate but Equal until the US Supreme Court in Brown v Board of Education decided that if it was separate it was unlikely to be equal.  Israeli society and the occupation is still at a stage somewhere before 1954 when Brown was decided.

Israel, it has to be said, is very angry at the Dutch government and the EU generally for funding things like schools and homes when such things are quite contrary to Israel's occupation policy.  Indeed some souls have suggested that this policy is 'anti-Semitic'.  It is something that I shall not comment on!

IDF destroys two illegal EU-funded Palestinian schools

ByTovah Lazaroff

August 23, 2017 22:19

B’Tselem said that Civil Administration’s actions left 80 elementary school pupils in Jub a-Dib without any place to study near their homes.

On the eve of the new school year the IDF this week destroyed two illegally built modular Palestinian and Beduin schools funded by the European Union.

On Tuesday evening, the Civil Administration of Judea and Samaria took down a building made up in six caravans in the village of Jub al-Dib near Bethlehem. On Sunday demolished a one-room modular kindergarten in the Beduin herding village of Badu al-Baba near the town of Eizariya just outside of Jerusalem. In both cases the Civil Administration said the structures lacked permits.

 “The building in Jub al-Dib was built illegally last weekend, a blunt violation of stop work orders and without receiving the required permits. Therefore, the confiscation was carried out in accordance to the Civil Administration’s authorities,”it said.

Of the kindergarten Eizariya it said “an illegal tin and wood shed was found in Eizariya, that was established over the past two weeks without receiving the required permits.

 “The shed was confiscated by virtue of the procedure to confiscate caravans and in accordance to the law. We would like to emphasize that the construction was not in use,” the Civil Administration said.

Israeli information center for human rights, B’Tselem, said that Civil Administration’s actions left 80 elementary school pupils in Jub al-Dib without any place to study near their homes.

In past years they had gone to the nearby village sou Dar Salah and Beit Ta’mir.

 “The demolition of a school building the night before the start of the year epitomizes the administrative cruelty and systematic harassment by authorities designed to drive Palestinians from their land,” B’Tselem said.

It noted that in June the Civil Administration had confiscated solar panels from Jub al-Dib funded by the Dutch government.  Palestinians and Beduin in Area C receive very few construction permits from the Civil Administration. As a result the EU has said helping them with housing is a humanitarian gesture allowed under international law.

Israel demolishes school serving 80 children in Jub a-Dib on eve of new school year 

Demolition follows on heels of destruction of two other educational facilities in Area C 

On the evening of Tuesday, 22 August 2017, at around 7:00 P.M. Israeli Civil Administration officials and security forces arrived at the village of Jub a-Dib, southeast of Bethlehem. The forces demolished the community's recently constructed school building. The demolition, which ended around midnight, took place the night before the start of the Palestinian school year, and left eighty pupils without an educational facility. In previous years, the children of Jub a-Dib had to walk to school in the Dar Salah and Beit Ta'mir areas, outside the village.   

The demolition of a school building the night before the start of the year epitomizes the administrative cruelty and systematic harassment by authorities designed to drive Palestinians from their land. In late June, the Civil Administration confiscated solar panels installed in Jub a-Dib by Israeli-Palestinian nonprofit Comet-ME and financed by the Dutch government, after Israel consistently shirked its obligation to connect the village to the electric grid. 

The school consisted of six pre-fabs donated by the European Union, that the security forces dismantled and confiscated. The area was declared a closed military zone, and security forces used stun grenades to keep residents away.  

Recently, Israeli authorities damaged two other educational facilities in Palestinian communities: in Abu a-Nuwar, on 9 August 2017, the Civil Administration confiscated solar panels donated by the international community, that provided electricity to the school and kindergarten.  

On 21 August 2017, at around 5:00 A.M., Civil Administration personnel accompanied by around fifty soldiers, Police and Border Police officers arrived at the Badu al-Baba community which is located near al-‘Eizariyah, northeast of Jerusalem. They dismantled and confiscated a pre-fab that had been placed there around three weeks prior, to serve as a kindergarten for 25 local children aged 4-6, who do not have an alternative educational facility. The forces confiscated the equipment in the kindergarten: 10 desks, 30 chairs, two cabinets and a blackboard. The caravan and equipment were funded by the community and valued at approximately NIS 10,000. 

Jub a-Dib and the previous confiscation of solar panels

Hanin al-Wahsh, 20, an art, photography and film editing student, explained how the confiscation of the solar panels has disrupted her life:

Seven months ago, our village was connected to a regular power supply through solar panels. That helped me because I really need electricity for my studies, for example in order to use a computer. Until then I had to stay at college until late, and sometimes at night, in order to use the computer. So I was really glad when they connected our home to the electric supply.

After the connection I could work on the computer at home, and when it was hot I could put a fan on. I spent hours working at home, downloading projects and uploading photos and video clips.

The general quality of life at home improved. We bought a fridge and a washing machine. Until then my mother had worked very hard to wash all our clothes and suffered from that. We also began to watch television together as a family and to surf the internet.

We were very happy – until yesterday, 28 June 2017. The Civil Administration and the army arrived, dismantled the solar panels, and left the village without electricity. I saw it happening and tried to document what they were doing, but one of the soldiers got in my way, so I only managed to document part of the incident.

After they dismantled the solar panels I was in a state of shock. I was so disappointed. I thought about how much my family has suffered over the years because of the lack of electricity – how we spent the nights in darkness and suffered in the heat without fans. Worst of all, I thought about how I’d have to stay late at college again to study and work on my projects, and find a way to get back to my remote village that doesn’t have any public transportation.

Now things will be hard for me again. I don’t know what I’ll do until I finish my studies next year.

I saw how angry, helpless and despairing the villagers were. In just a few hours they pushed us back to the past. I don’t understand why this is happening to us – we deserve to get electricity just like other people. I don’t understand why a regular electricity supply threatens the security of the State of Israel.One of the hardest things for me is that I can’t regularly use my smartphone, because I don’t have any way to charge it. I don’t even know how I’ll manage to get to sleep without a fan in this heat, which is getting worse every year. We don’t even have cold water to drink when it’s hot. I feel frustrated, helpless and sad about what’s happening. I hope our village will get its electricity back as soon as possible. For additional information: Roy Yellin, +972-54-4654431, ryellin@btselem.org

Our mailing address is

B'Tselem, The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories

P.O. Box 53132, Jerusalem 9153002 

Paul Besser – Jonathan Hoffman’s Neo-Nazi Friend Goes into the Security Business

August 27, 2017, 8:59 pm

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Intelligence is the one thing that Britain First's Intelligence Chief Doesn’t Possess!

It might better be called standing with neo-Nazis

Hoffman and Besser with Gemma Sheridan in between

Readers of this blog may recall my recent story about the Zionist picket of Palestine Expo 2017, on July 8^thand 9^th.  This picket, which was organised by Jonathan Hoffman, a former Vice-Chair of the Zionist Federation of England & Wales, was in protest against the ‘anti-Semitism’ of Europe’s largest Palestinian festival.

The Zionists did their best to get Expo 2017 banned

The Zionists pulled out all the stops to get the government to cancel the booking with the Queen Elizabeth II Centre in Whitehall alleging that it was a Jewish hate festival.  You got the impression that anyone Jewish would be in danger of their life if they set foot in the QEII Centre. Of course the many Jewish attendees and speakers thoroughly enjoyed themselves.  Apart that is from David Collier and Hoffman, both of whom were requested to leave.

Besser takes a leap into the unknown

So concerned were Hoffie, the misnamed Campaign Against Anti-Semitism and the even more absurdly named Jewish Human Rights Watch, with ‘anti-Semitism’ at Palestine Expo 2017 that they decided to hold a joint demonstration with anti-Semites!  Presumably on the basis that if you can’t beat them join them.

Amongst members of the far-Right in attendance was none other than Paul Besser, Britain First’s Intelligence Chief.  Besser is no ordinary fascist, he considers himself an astute businessman and he is in the security business no less.

One's sympathies go out to anyone who actually employs Besser's outfit

It would seem that Besser is as clueless about running a business as he is about  politics.  He claims he is Jewish but that doesn’t stop him joining a neo-Nazi group that had Thomas Mair, who murdered Jo Cox MP, among its ranks.

We have been sent a number of clips of Besser’s attempts to break into the ranks of the security business and challenge the likes of G4S.

Far-right 'charity' CAA does its best to have Palestine Expo banne

As the graphic below shows, having decided to go into the security business he was stuck – where could he get a model contract from?

Outside te Ahava picket a few years ago - in the good company of the EDL and their 'Jewish' section

He then decided to branch out and start running Citizenship and Life in the UK courses.  Judging by this advert he might brush up his spelling first.  He wonders what qualifications might be necessary!  How about an English GCSE for starters?

Eventually a fellow fascist messages him back saying he has some templates that might come in handy.

Fawlty Towers has nothing on Besser

Unfortunately he seems to have had no end of trouble with other security firms!

However no one can blame him for not trying.  His request for a ‘lesson palan’ (sic) should bring a tear even to the hardest of hearts!

For those who are interested in contracting with Paul’s business I have helpfully posted his details for you to peruse.  I am also posting  a pic. of his the registered office of London Security Patrol- 7 Boundary Road WALTHAMSTOW E17 8NL 0798 352 1403 0208 281 0157 in order to help you make a decision.

The heart of Besser's security empire

I note that Besser says he has more than 15 years of experience in the security industry.  A claim that might fall foul of the Trades Description Act. 

He also says that he has previously worked for the Metropolitan Police.  However he doesn’t say in what capacity!  Whether being a prisoner counts as having worked for the Met is a moot point which I confess to not being qualified to answer!

Business problems mount for Besser

URGENT: Stop the Zionist Amendment which would Outlaw Criticism of Israel in the Labour Party

August 28, 2017, 8:00 pm

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Time is Running Out to Stop the JLM’s Clause Attacking Free Speech on Israel

At the Labour Party Conference at the end of September, the Jewish Labour Movement and a few CLPs are proposing to move an amendment which, if passed, will brand criticism of Israel and Zionism, as ‘anti-Semitic’. 

In Israel there is a far simpler way of preventing criticism than changing Rule Books. Palestinians who express forbidden views (& virtually everything can be forbidden at whim) are simply locked up. Administrative detention means that you can be gaoled without trial, for 6 months at a time, renewable indefinitely. All this is in addition to censorship.

The poem that led to 3 months prison, months under house arrest

Dareen Tatour who posted a poem, Resist, My People, Resist Them, on Facebook was arrested in October 15 2015 and spent 3 months in prison and the rest of the time since then under house arrest.  Only a major international campaign and petition, led by Jewish Voices for Peace in the United States, led to her being transferred to house arrest.  See Dareen Tatour, Palestinian poet imprisoned by Israel for social media posts, shares her story

The Jewish Labour Movement, which has never, not once, opposed or criticised Israel’s racist and genocidal policies towards the Palestinians is now attempting to make criticism of Dareen’s arrest and similar injustices, a disciplinary offence in the Labour Party.  It is of course supported by Tom Watson MP, Progress and other racist trash.

Benzi Gopstein, leader of fascist Lehava, called for the burning down of churches and mosques - he still remains free

In Israel Jews can post the most vile and obscene insults on Facebook with impunity – only Arabs are ever arrested or charged.  See Train driver calls on every Israeli to “run over” an Arab.  Benzi Gopstein, leader of Lehava, a government funded fascist organisation which campaigns to break up and prevent relationships between Jews and Arabs using bands of thugs, called for the burning down of mosques and churches.  Despite calls from the Vatican for his prosecution, he is still at liberty. Burning of Christian churches in Israel justified, far-Right Jewish leader says  If an Arab had suggested burning down synagogues then he would have been immediately arrested. 

The JLM Amendment, which is based on a misrepresentation of a recommendation in the MacPherson Report into the murder of Stephen Lawrence reads:

 “Where a member is responsible for a hate incident, being defined as something where the victim or anyone else think it was motivated by hostility or prejudice based on disability, race, religion, transgender identity, or sexual orientation, the NEC may have the right to impose the appropriate disciplinary options from the following options: [same as D]”

Shami Chakrabarti in her Report on Racism and Anti-Semitism dealt with this attempt to say that a hate incident or crime was anything that the ‘victim’ defined it as. 

Submissions to my Inquiry reveal a level of concern and confusion (in some quarters) about the "Macpherson" definition of a racist incident. This is of course a reference to the famous Report of 1999 into the Metropolitan Police after its appalling mishandling of Stephen Lawrence's murder. The principle that an incident should be recorded as " racist " when perceived that way by a victim may indeed have some useful application outside the policing context, and even here in the world of Labour Party discipline. However the purpose of the approach is to ensure that investigators handle a complaint with particular sensitivity towards the victim. It is to suggest the seriousness with which a complaint must be handled, but in no way to determine its outcome. If I complain to the police that I have been the victim of a racist attack on the street, I should expect my complaint to be so recorded. However investigation and due process must of course then follow and it is perfectly possible that an investigator, prosecutor or magistrate will subsequently find either that no attack took place at all, or that its motivation was something other than racism. In the present context, my complaint that I have been subject to racist or other personal abuse by a fellow Party Member should be so recorded, taken seriously and handled sensitively. However it will be for the investigation and any subsequent process to determine whether my complaint was ultimately well -founded

In other words the JLM has perverted the meaning of the MacPherson Report recommendation into the initial recording by Police of an incident as a racial incident in order to brand as racists, people who criticise Israel. 

If someone, who happens to be Jewish, takes offence at political criticism of Israeli practices or policies and says that in their view what has been said is anti-Semitic, then the proposed new rule means that their view will determine the guilt or otherwise of the person accused.  According to this, any Zionist who happens to be Jewish can call themselves a ‘victim’.

Imagine, in the days of Apartheid in South Africa, a White South African saying that criticism of Apartheid was racist against him as a White person. He would have been laughed out of town.  Yet that is exactly what is being proposed except that Israel is substituted for South Africa.

It is identity politics gone mad.  It means that a racist, when criticised, can define themselves as a victim and no one can challenge their self-definition.

Logically anyone who wants to defend reactionary or oppressive practices can claim they are a victim of racism.  Some people argue that Female Genital Mutation is an integral part of their religion or ethnicity.  Perhaps criticism of FGM could be construed as racist? Likewise some people claim the Burka is part of the Islamic faith.  Perhaps criticism of this is also racist?  Anyone criticising any religion could be branded as racist thus forbidding at a stroke secularism.  What has happened to the principles of Charlie Hebdo or Voltaire?

There isn’t a Palestine Solidarity activist in the country who hasn’t been accused of ‘anti-Semitism’. 

The Campaign Against Antisemitism, a bogus Zionist charity, filed a complaint about Corbyn's racism because this video said that the antisemitism allegations in the Labour Party had been got up

There has been a bogus ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign in the Labour Party for two years.  It has been directed at the Left, including Jewish supporters of the Palestinians such as myself and Jackie Walker.  Jeremy Corbyn was accusedof anti-Semitism for allegedly associating with a holocaust denier. The bogus Zionist ‘charity’ the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism even filed a complaint against Corbyn for anti-Semitism.

If the JLM amendment is passed then anyone who criticises Israel or Zionism, the ideology and movement that led to the founding of the Israeli state as a Jewish majority and racial supremacist state, will be liable to be accused of anti-Semitism.  The JLM’s attempt to forbid criticism of Israel by crying ‘anti-Semitism’ will have a chilling effect on free speech in the Labour Party. 

Anyone can define themselves as a victim. In practice this will be only Zionist Jews.  Anti-Zionist Jews, who are the subject of real abuse, (‘self haters, kapos etc.) can expect to be disregarded.  Some of us already have been suspended in Iain McNicol’s witch-hunt. 

The racist Israeli Labour Party is JLM's 'sister party'

The JLM is the British branch of the Israeli Labour Party.  It describes itself as the ‘sister party’ of the ILP.  The ILP is an openly racist party.  Isaac Herzog, its recently resigned leader spoke of his nightmare that Israel had a Palestinian Prime Minister and 61 Palestinian Members of Israel’s Knesset.  Who needs the Right when we have Isaac Herzog?  Herzog also recently declared that he wanted to dispel the false impression that the ILP were ‘Arab Lovers’ Herzog slammed for remark about ‘Arab lovers’.  It was an Israeli Labour Government that expelled ¾ million Palestinians in 1948 in order that Israel could become a majority Jewish state. 

The JLM’s Amendments

Chapter2 – Clause 1, Section 8– Conditions of Membership reads:

8.    No member of the Party shall engage in conduct which in the opinion of the NEC is prejudicial, or in any act which in the opinion of the NEC is grossly detrimental to the Party. Any dispute as to whether a member is in breach of the provisions of this subclause shall be determined by the NCC in accordance with Chapter 1 Clause IX above and the disciplinary rules and guidelines in Chapter 6 below. Where appropriate the NCC shall have regard to involvement in financial support for the organisation and/ or the activities of any organisation declared ineligible for affiliation to the Party under Chapter 1.II.5 or 3.C above; or to the candidature of the members in opposition to an officially endorsed Labour Party candidate or the support for such candidature. The NCC shall not have regard to the mere holding or expression of beliefs and opinions.

The JLM Amendment adds after ‘opinions’ at the end:

‘except in instances involving anti-Semitism, Islamophoia or racism.’

So the ‘mere holding or expression of belief’ will become a disciplinary offence – this is thought crime.  Many people hold racist opinions.  We live in a racist, sexist etc. society.  The way to eradicate such views is not to expel people but to persuade and educate them.  It would exclude large swathes of the working class from membership because their language is not PC.

This is a pernicious and dangerous amendment from those whose prime purpose, ironically, is to defend a state that thinks nothing of demolishing a Bedouin village such as Umm al-Hiran in order to replace it with a Jewish town.  See New Israeli Town Built on Ruins of Bedouin Village Trying to Bar non-Jews (Ha’aretz, 8.8.17.)

It is ironic that the defenders of Apartheid are proposing an ‘anti-racist’ amendment to Labour’s rules!

Israel defines itself as a ‘Jewish state’, that is a state in which Jews will always be in a large and permanent majority.  It is a state where Jews are privileged over and above non-Jews.  That is why Israel has a Jewish and Arab education system, why Arabs are barred from many areas of employment and land, why Jewish students are eligible for grants unlike most Arab students and why a plurality of Israeli Jews believe that Arabs should be physically expelled from Israel altogether.  The chant of ‘death to the Arabs’ is a favourite of the Right in Israel. 

The whole purpose of the JLM is to defend the Israeli state, right or wrong. This amendment means that if Israel is criticised, it is the critics who will be charged with ‘anti-Semitism’.

The JLM also propose that:

‘A member of the Party who uses antisemitic, Islamophobic, racist language, sentiments, stereotypes or actions in public, private, online or offline, as determined by the NEC, shall be deemed to have engaged in conduct prejudicial to the Party.’ 

So if someone is deemed to have used racist language in private they are guilty. This is an open invitation to set up a police state within the Labour Party, replete with informers. This suits the JLM, since their whole purpose is to defend the Israeli state, but Labour members should be worried.

The JLM helpfully provide what they call ‘Supporting argument and rationale’ and here they get to the real reason for these amendments on ‘anti-Semitism’.  The JLM says that

‘This rule change would recognise that it is not acceptable to use Zionism as a term of abuse or to substitute the word Zionist for where the word Jew has been commonly used by antisemites, such as alleging Jewish political, financial or media conspiracies and control.’

The JLM’s actual amendments are ostensibly about anti-Semitism not Zionism but these ‘supporting arguments’ make it clear that the intention and rationale behind the amendments is to defend Israel and Zionism.  In other words the JLM is admitting to the fact that their amendments are not about anti-Semitism but have an ulterior purpose.

The JLM want to outlaw any use of the term Zionist or Zionism that is pejorative.  The problem is that Zionism is a racist political ideology and movement.  It is an extremely abusive indeed murderous ideology.  How can its use be anything other than abusive or derogatory? There is no ‘nice’ version of Apartheid.  Of course the word Zionist should not be substituted for Jew but the people who are most guilty of this are Zionists!  For example in his article for the Daily Telegraph, the Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis, wrote that ‘One can no more separate it from Judaism than separate the City of London from Great Britain.[see Ken Livingstone and the hard Left are spreading the insidious virus of anti-Semitism].

See also Skawkbox

Most dangerous rule-change in years is in line for Conference 2017 vote

Follow the money - your guide to Israeli policy

August 29, 2017, 11:39 am

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Political economist Shir Hever on "Israel's Weapons Industry" 

An absolute must watch. You will not regret spending an hour.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PeDFEoKEi8Y
Follow the money, locate the oppression,

Israel's Nuclear Weapons - Consistency Demands Sanctions

August 29, 2017, 12:09 pm

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 Israel must give up its worst-kept secret: the bombs

The not so secret Dimona nuclear plant in Israel is a taboo subject [AFP]

Across the globe, headlines pronounced that a "breakthrough agreement"had been reached in Geneva. Iran's atomic ambitions had been curbed in exchange for limited sanctions relief, thus deflating the long-standing military standoff.

The deal hammered out between Iran and the United States, France, Germany, Britain, China and Russia stipulates that Tehran will halt progress on enrichment capacity, stop developing its heavy water reactor at Arak, and open access to international weapons inspection. While this deal paves the way for Iran's reintegration into the family of Western nations, and can therefore be conceived as a real milestone, in terms of the Middle East nuclear problem, any robust agreement,however, will have to include Israel.

Within Israel, speaking about the nuclear programme in Dimona is taboo. Mysteriously, however, there is also a broad-based agreement to keep silent about it in Washington and in most European capitals. Despite claims made by independent analysts that Israel likely has around 80 warheads, and is believed to be the only state in the region that has produced separated plutonium, and possibly highly enriched uranium, the two key ingredients in nuclear weapons. Indeed, it may now have enough plutonium, including the plutonium already in weapons, for up to 200 nuclear warheads.

Creating a nuclear weapon free zone in the Middle East is actually not a new idea. Ironically, it was first proposed in the United Nations General Assembly in 1974 by no other than the major 'culprit' in the recent fray

Iran.

The IPFM experts emphasise that Israel's eventual nuclear disarmament would be a necessary condition for any Middle East nuclear weapon-free zone, while regional measures would serve to bring the Middle East closer to that goal, and make the zone more robust. These measures would include stopping the separation of plutonium, a ban on the use of highly enriched uranium or plutonium as fuel, and the end of national enrichment plants.

As the only country in the Middle East with a national civilian enrichment programme, the experts from Princeton suggest that Iran could play a pioneering role precisely by advancing a global shift away from national enrichment plants. Countries in the region with plans to construct nuclear power plants (so far, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt) could join in the management of Iran's enrichment plants and help set the goals for the programme and fund any expansion. This would create a major barrier to Iran using its enrichment plants for making material for a nuclear weapon .

Israel, too, must take initiative to demonstrate that it is seriously interested in a regional zone free of weapons of mass destruction. The experts propose a series of steps: Israel should begin by ending any further production of plutonium and highly enriched uranium, declaring the size of its stocks of these materials, and placing portions of its fissile material stocks under IAEA safeguards for elimination. By the time a Middle East zone comes into force, Israel would need to have eliminated all of its nuclear weapons and placed all of its fissile materials under international safeguards - as South Africa did when it gave up its nuclear weapons in the early 1990s.

Regional inspections

To keep everyone honest, the IPFM proposes that discussions be launched among the members of a possible Middle East free zone committee, on the design of regional verification arrangements strong enough so that all countries in the region can have confidence in the absence of secret nuclear weapon programmes, and that countries are complying with the Chemical and Biological Weapons Conventions. This regional inspection system would be in parallel to the international verification systems associated respectively with the NPT and the Chemical Weapons Convention. There is currently no international system to verify the Biological Weapons Convention.

photograph of some nuclear device that Vanunu supplied

The experience of creating nuclear free zones following the end of the Cold War, suggests that progress can be made in the absence of a larger or more comprehensive settlement of political conflicts and disputes.
Neve Gordon is the author of Israel's Occupation and can be reached through his website.
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The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.

Source:  Al Jazeera

Arabs not allowed in Hochav Yair Tzur’s Country Club – Apartheid? Perish the thought

August 29, 2017, 5:38 pm

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In the affair over the refusal to admit non-Jews to the country club in Hochav Yair Tzur, you see the realities of Israeli social apartheid and the ingrained racism in Israel.  Structurally Apartheid already exists in relation to residence, employment and education.  When an Israeli Arab applied to join the club, which has good social facilities including a swimming pool, he immediately ran into opposition.  Only a small Jewish child could had no objections!

Those with long memories will remember the bar on Jews joining golf clubs and similar institutions in this country and the United States.  Most of these have now disappeared but in Israel Jewish local government strains every muscle to keep Arabs out.

Swimming pool in the Lev Hamakom country club - the Jewish residents find it 'unpleasant' to have Arabs swimming alongside them

Below is an editorial in Ha’aretz concerning the Jewish town of Kochav Yair Tzur.  In order to keep Arabs out of its country club, the Council kindly amended its laws to distinguish between its own residents (all Jewish) and outsiders.  Nominally this meant Jewish as well as non-Jewish non-residents but in practice, Jews from outside the town are allowed in.

Although Israel has laws banning discrimination in services and goods, just as Britain does.  However it is a law that has as many holes as a colander.  The Knesset kindly passed a law allowing discrimination between a town’s residents and non-residents.  In Israel this is a cover for allowing discrimination against Arabs.

Residents of Umm al-Hiran watch its destruction

Ha’aretz gives the example of the Bedouin village of Umm al-Hiran, which Israel demolished in January to make way for the Jewish town of Hiran.  When this issue came up in the High Court the Justices pretended that the present inhabitants of Umm al-Hiran could live in the Jewish town when it was built.  Now it turns out that they can only do so if they are believes in the Torah or a Jewish Israeli! 

One suspects that having found legal fictions in order to disguise the ongoing discrimination against Palestinian Israelis for 70 years, the High Court is not going to reconsider its verdict because of changed circumstances. 

This is why Israel’s High or Supreme Court (the same thing) cannot be seen as a neutral body but is one imbued with the principles and logic of Zionism.

Tony Greenstein

Jewish town of Kochav Yair

Bylaws: No Entry for Arabs

Israel has never ceased to demonstrate creativity when it comes to discriminating against Arab citizens of the state. Hiran and Kochav Yair are just the latest examples

Haaretz Editorial Aug 09, 2017 3:27 AM

Israel has never ceased to demonstrate creativity when it comes to discriminating against Arab citizens of the state. As readers may recall, the state sought to evacuate and demolish the Bedouin community of Umm al-Hiran to make way for a new Jewish town called Hiran. In 2015, the High Court of Justice rejected Umm al-Hiran residents’ arguments against their eviction, asserting that the Bedouin would still be able to live in the planned Jewish town. Nor did the fact that the plan for the town included a Jewish ritual bath and a synagogue undermine the principle of equality, Justice Elyakim Rubinstein wrote.

 What drives people from the club isn’t the price, but the Arabs. We came to live in a community. Whether we’re racist or not, it doesn’t matter. The fact is that residents are leaving the community center because of the Arab children. It’s not clear why we can’t express our opinion.”

Country club in Kochav Yair

Even then, it was clear the court was regrettably turning a blind eye to the character of the planned town and of the agencies establishing it. And indeed, it now turns out that among the criteria for admission laid down in the bylaws of the Hiran cooperative association is one requiring an applicant to be “a Jewish Israeli citizen or permanent resident who observes the Torah and the commandments according to the values of Orthodox Judaism” (Tuesday’s Haaretz). In other words, not only is Hiran slated to be inhabited by Jews only, they must also be Orthodox Jews.

This lie, which regrettably gained traction even in the High Court, is additional proof that the only correct and just solution to this affair is to allow residents of Umm al-Hiran to return to their land and live there in peace, rather than being dispossessed in favor of a Jewish town.

Another “Jewish innovation” is an amendment to the law banning discrimination in selling products and services, or in admission to places of entertainment and public venues. Under this amendment, a local government can distinguish between its own residents and those of other towns without this being considered discrimination, if the distinction is intended to allow it to exercise its powers for the benefit of its own residents.

Tira, the Arab village near Kochav isn't quite as salubrious

 This amendment may now play a role in a lawsuit against the town of Kochav Yair-Tzur Yigal and the organization that runs the town’s country club. To prevent Arabs from joining the club, its bylaws state that only residents of the town can join. But the fact that in practice, memberships were also sold to Jews who weren’t residents of the town, combined with many statements by residents and members of the town council, show the real intent behind this ban (Or Kashti, Haaretz, August 4).

 'If anyone wants to swim with Arabs, let him take them home. Here there's no place for it,' says resident of Kochav Yair-Tzur Yigal

Both Hiran and Kochav Yair are examples of ugly discrimination against Israel’s Arab citizens. The justice system cannot close its eyes and legitimize such discrimination with legal hair-splitting disconnected from the situation on the ground. While Hiran is a town whose very establishment constituted a fundamental injustice, and therefore shouldn’t be permitted, the Kochav Yair-Tzur Yigal case merely requires forbidding discrimination and ordering that anyone who wants to join the country club be given an equal right to do so.

There are still "portals" in the world that maintain our connection to the cosmos!

"The above article is Haaretz's lead editorial, as published in the Hebrew and English newspapers in Israel

Haaretz Editorial

Upscale Israeli Country Club Changes Rules to Prevent Arabs From Joining

'If anyone wants to swim with Arabs, let him take them home. Here there's no place for it,'says resident of Kochav Yair-Tzur Yigal, echoing local sentiment

Or Kashti Aug 04, 2017 2:48 AM

Lev Hamakom country club, July 2017.  Moti Milrod

For the past seven years the country club in the local council Kochav Yair-Tzur Yigal in central Israel has refused to accept Arab members. Yet the community’s Jewish neighbors were welcome to enjoy the club’s three swimming pools, fitness room, lawns and other facilities.

Some 20 percent of the Lev Hamakom country club’s members are from the Tzur Yitzhak community and the West Bank settlement Tzofim, to the east of it.

Following a petition filed by a resident of the nearby Arab village Tira against the club’s policy three years ago, the club recently decided to sanitize the ban: From now on, membership will be restricted to Kochav Yair-Tzur Yigal’s residents, who of course are all Jewish, while no outsiders, Jewish or Arab, will be allowed in, the local council decided.

“We don’t want the Arabs to swim with us,” says a Kochav Yair resident. “When they were here, it wasn’t pleasant.”

She finds nothing wrong with banning from the club anyone who doesn’t live in the local council. 

“It’s no big deal if that’s the price our Jewish brothers [outside the local council] have to pay.”

The residents of Tzur Yitzhak and Tzofim agree with her, perhaps because they have other ways of enjoying themselves in the summer. The idea that Jews and Arabs can share the same pool appears to many of them unacceptable.

Lev Hamakom country club, July 2017. Moti Milrod

Israeli Arab applicant turned down

Dr. Ahmed Mansour, an ophthalmologist from Tira, petitioned the Lod District Court three years ago against Kochav Yair-Tzur Yigal and the organization operating the country club after his request to buy a club membership for himself, his wife – a physiotherapist in Tel Aviv’s Ichilov Hospital – and their small son was denied. The petition was submitted by the Association for Civil Rights in Israel.

Mansour said in the petition that there was no swimming pool in Taibeh and Kalansua, the neighboring towns, while the pool in Tira only opens late in the summer.

The court has debated the petition several times but hasn’t reached a decision.

“There appear to be good neighborly relations with Kochav Yair,” Mansour said this week. “My clinic is full of people from there. Many of them shop in our town too. It becomes a problem only when we also want to be in the country club. Suddenly, segregation is required. It’s offensive. I could buy membership to a pool in Kfar Sava despite the distance. But this racism annoyed me. I only want justice.”

“We don’t want the Arabs to swim with us,” says a Kochav Yair resident. “When they were here, it wasn’t pleasant.”

The petition cites a protocol of a council meeting in Kochav Yair-Tzur Yigal in 2010, before the decision was made to close the country club to outside residents.

“Would it be possible to market to Tzur Yitzhak the sports center, and then we’ll have fewer minority members?” asked one council member. Another said: “What drives people from the club isn’t the price, but the Arabs. We came to live in a community. Whether we’re racist or not, it doesn’t matter. The fact is that residents are leaving the community center because of the Arab children. It’s not clear why we can’t express our opinion.”

However, according to the document, Arabs comprised only 3 percent of the club’s members.

After that meeting the council decided to close the club to anyone who wasn’t a resident of the community. But later, probably due to the few members who joined, it was reopened to the residents of Tzur Yitzhak and Tzofim, whose children go to school in the local council.

“The admission policy to the club constitutes discrimination based on nationality,” the petition says, “motivated by public pressure to prevent Arabs from the region from becoming members.”

The council’s decision is based on “familiar patterns of segregation in residence and schools, and creates clear discrimination on the basis of nationality,” the petition says.

Council: 'A social-communal consideration'

The local council said in response that the ban wasn’t nationality-based discrimination but “a social-communal consideration based on granting priority to residents, a consideration that is not prohibited by law.”

However, this may not be merely a local issue. Over the years the state has participated in financing the country club, also through the Association of Community Centers.

In March, while the petition was discussed in court, the Knesset passed an amendment to the law banning discrimination in products, services and admission to public places. Under the amendment, the law will not apply to “distinction made by a local council between its residents and those who aren’t, to the extent required to carry out its duties or to operate its powers for its residents’ benefit.”

Following the amendment, the court instructed the parties to update their positions.

At the beginning of June the Kochav Yair-Tzur Yigal council discussed the issue. “At the bottom line there are two possibilities,” the council’s legal advisers said. “You can either enable anyone to buy a membership, or restrict it to residents only.”

If membership is available to anyone who is interested, it could cause an “overload.” In this case, limiting membership to residents only falls under the clause of “operating powers for the residents’ benefit,” they said.

One of the council members asked about the current situation, which enables Jews who are not residents of the local council, but whose children study in it, to be members. The legal advisers said “there’s no way to defend such a decision, as it doesn’t comply with the law.”

A non-resident may only enter the country club as a guest of a member who lives in the local council, they said.

'I know discrimination is wrong, but ...'

Residents of Kochav Yair-Tzur Yigal appear to agree with this.

“Our first concern is for our children,” a resident said. “I know discrimination is wrong. But we have the right to decide who uses the facilities and who doesn’t, because it’s our tax money. We should close our community completely.”

Another said, “We’re a very tolerant community, but there’s something very aggressive about the Arabs entering the pool with their clothes on. It doesn’t look good. Since we can’t deny only Arabs from being members, the residents of Tzur Yitzhak and Tzofim are harmed. It’s regrettable, but there’s no other way.”

A third resident says, “If anyone wants to swim with Arabs, let him take them home. Here there’s no place for it.”

Only a little girl, still in her bathing suit, disagreed. “They don’t get in anyone’s way. Anyone who wants to should be allowed into the club,” she said.

Some 200 families from Tzur Yigal and Tzofim are club members.

“I totally understand Kochav Yair’s decision,” a Tzur Yitzhak resident said. “Nobody wants Arabs from the whole region to come to his country club. We should focus on building our own pool instead of going to other places.”

“Jews and Arabs aren’t the same thing,” another resident says. “They don’t deserve to swim with us. I’d rather they don’t go in the pool, even if it means I can’t use it.”

Similar sentiments were voiced in Tzofim. “It’s a totally sensible decision,” one settlement resident said. “We’ll manage. At the most we’ll travel a little farther.”

The manager of the country club wrote in a statement to the court that memberships are not sold to residents who are not members of Kochav Yair-Tzur Yigal. He told Haaretz that the decision went into effect on July 1.

Last week, outside the country club, a Tzur Yitzhak resident said she and a few of her friends bought membership to the club that day.

A club official who came out asserted: “You’re a Kochav Yair resident.”

“No, I’m not,” the neighbor said. “You never even asked me when I paid for the membership.”

A person who called the club and said he lived in Tira also received details of the membership’s price.

The Association for Civil Rights in Israel wrote in the response to the court that “legitimizing closure of public facilities and restricting them to residents only is a social disaster. In Israeli reality, where wealthy communities sometimes border poor ones, such segregation leads to inequality in the access to public resources.”

The association said the Kochav Yair-Tzur Yigal local council is interpreting the law in a way that’s opposite to the Knesset’s intent. “Instead of reducing discrimination, it claims the law allows it to exclude anyone who isn’t a resident of the community. If this interpretation is accepted, wealthy communities will be able to close their gates to their less wealthy neighbors who cannot afford parks, sports, culture or entertainment facilities.”

The Kochav Yair-Tzur Yigal local council said it “firmly dismisses any attempt to allude to discrimination. The council’s stance is that all the decisions on the issue were made in keeping with the law.”

Or Kashti

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The Chief Rabbi of Safed, Shmuel Eliyahu, rules that rape in war is justified

August 30, 2017, 1:58 pm

≫ Next: Stirring up hatred – CAA exonerates the far-Right and blames Anti-Zionists and Muslims for anti-Semitism

≪ Previous: Arabs not allowed in Hochav Yair Tzur’s Country Club – Apartheid? Perish the thought

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Ellie Tzavieli - the Holocaust survivor who was threatened for defying Eliyahu and renting rooms to Arab students

Rabbi Shmuel Eliyahu of Safed, notorious for incitement against Palestinians.

Just when I’ve taken a vow to abide by the Zionists' International Holocaust Remembrance Alliancedefinition of anti-Semitism (which defines anti-Zionism and support for the Palestinians as ‘anti-Semitic’) along comes Rabbi Shmuel Eliyahu.  The IHRA definition of anti-Semitism stipulates that anti-Semitism might be

• ‘Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.

The problem is, what is someone behaves like a Nazi?  Is it still anti-Semitic to call them what they are?  Rabbi Shmuel Eliyahu is an old favourite.  He is not any common or garden rabbinical Nazi.  

Shmuel is the son of the former Sephardic Chief Rabbi of Israel, Mordechai Eliyahu.  He is also a member of the Chief Rabbinate Council, who when it came to racism was no slough.

Mordechai Eliyahu gave a passionate eulogy to the neo-Nazi Rabbi Meir Kahane who was assassinated by a Palestinian in New York in 1990.  He ruled that Jewish settlers in the West Bank could harvest Palestinians' olive trees and steal their crops as the land really belonged to the Jewish people anyway. He told students at the ultra-nationalist Mercaz Harav Yeshiva following an attack that "even when we seek revenge, it is imperative to remember that a thousand Arabs are not worth one yeshiva student." During Operation Cast Lead in Gaza he wrote to the prime minister Ehud Olmert, that there was nothing wrong with indiscriminately bombing and killing Palestinian citizens if this would make the battlefield safer for Jewish soldiers.  Anshel Pfeffer / Rabbi Mordechai Eliyahu – an Eloquent Racist

It is a case of like father like son.  Shmuel Eliyahu advocated genocide in Gaza in ‘retaliation’ for the firing of Quassem rockets.  Despite these rockets, which are mainly fired in retaliation for Israel's attacks, killing 44 people over 10 years, compared to 2,200 killed in Operation Protective Edge and another 1,400 in Operation Cast Led,  he said that:

‘If they don't stop after we kill 100, then we must kill a thousand," said Shmuel Eliyahu. "And if they do not stop after 1,000 then we must kill 10,000. If they still don't stop we must kill 100,000, even a million. Whatever it takes to make them stop."  

Eliyahu Advocates Carpet Bombing Gaza,Matthew Wagner, Jerusalem Post,  May 30, 2007 

Its not a long hop from one million to five or even six million.  There are those who argue that it is ‘anti-Semitic’ to compare Zionism with the Nazis.  But how else can one characterise Eliyahu other than to call him a Jewish Nazi?

None of this has prevented Eliyahu being appointed as the head of Israel’s Red Cross, Magen David Adom.

Shmuel briefly embarrassed the authorities a few years ago when he issued an edict forbidding Jews in Safed to rent or lease accommodation to Arabs.  When the international press got hold of this and made an issue of it, Netanyahu briefly condemned him.  But when the media circus moved on so did Israel’s Zionist establishmen.  Eliyahu remained a paid official of the state, which all Chief Rabbis are and he has continued to enforce his Nazi-style edict. [Nazi Rabbi Shmuel Eliyahu - the Plan to Remove Arabs from Safed is Successfully Continuing]

The only Israeli Jew in Safed who stood up to Eliyahu was Eli Tzavieli, a Holocaust survivor, who understood the Nazi implications of forbidding a racial minority from renting property, since it was of course applied to Germany’s Jews. (see below)

Now Eliyahu has excelled himself. He has found a biblical justification for the rape of Palestinian women by soldiers.  It has to be said that he is not the first Zionist creature to advocate rape in war.  That accolade goes to the Israeli ‘academic’ and former colonel, Mordechai Kedar, a lecturer at Bar Ilan, a religious University in Tel Aviv. [see Sussex Friends of Israel Welcome Rape Supporter Mordechai Kedar] 

Perhaps when Hove MP next goes along to a meeting of the far-Right SFI he might bear in mind what their real attitude to such matters is.

Eliyahu argued, and you can see the whole article below, that Israel’s soldier, when he is away from home fighting the holy war ‘he is enflamed’.  Although ‘It is not proper to think of the Comely Woman – but he is.’

There you have it.  ‘he needs to fight, and you should moralize him!! ... Do not weaken his spirit!!’

Yes I hear you cry, rape is wrong in all circumstances but it is not that simple according to our revered Rabbi (& he is revered – when he was attacked over his edict banning renting land to Arabs hundreds of rabbis leapt to his defence).  Eliyahu explains that:

‘If you forbid him the Comely Woman, and he is enchanted by wily charms, he’ll think about her constantly, and may reach the point where the People of Israel will be defeated. What would you gain by that? That thousands of Jewish women will be raped by the accursed evildoers.’

So you see.  If the pure Israeli soldier is denied the ‘Comely woman’he may think of her and forget to fight properly and then Israel may be defeated and thousands of Jewish women may be raped.  Framed like that of course, who would deny that one rape is preferable to thousands of rapes?

Indeed it is really her fault.  She ‘may have prettified herself specifically to entrap him and incriminate him, and may have not).’  So really it is her fault, just like women who wear short skirts.  She prettified herself to entrap him.  So any Palestinian women who are raped can be assumed to have wanted it anyway.

Eliyahu tells us to ‘Pay attention – her life was spared in war!!  She’s not even a war captive!!  He cannot live with her as with a wife, and then sell her as a slave!!  He lets her go!!  Scot free!!  Have you ever heard of such laws, in any country in the world?’ You must admit that there are relatively few countries with laws that allow rape. 

And this kind of argument is common amongst Israel’s pampered religious rabbinate who are paid by the state, revered, given a special position as the arbiters of personal law in Israel.  And then there are fools who parrot that Israel is a democracy!

Rabbi Col. Eyal Karim (left), nominated to become IDF chief rabbi, sits next to his predecessor, Brig. Gen. Rafi Peretz, on April 21, 2016 (Diana Khananashvili/Defense Ministry)

Prominent Israeli rabbi preaches rape in war time

Yossi Gurvitz on August 28, 2017

Rabbi Shmuel Eliyahu is the Rabbi of the town of Safed, and is one of the most notoriously racist rabbis in Israel. Prosecutors twice considered indicting him for breaking the law against incitement, and twice backed down. He has publicly said he will not condemn “price tag” attacks (by settlers on Palestinians), saying “if the government won’t act, then the public should” (Hebrew). His most notorious act was signing a petition demanding no Jew rent or sell apartments to a non-Jew in his town of Safed; 300 rabbis joined the call. While the act was openly racist, and illegal, the Israel law against incitement to racism specifically excludes “religious debate” from the law; thus the case against Eliyahu was closed (Hebrew). Eliyahu’s ongoing racism, however, is likely to have cost him the 2013 election of the office of Chief Sephardic Rabbi, though he came relatively close (he got 49 votes, the winner got 68). Eliyahu, a member of the Chief Rabbinate Council, also failed to get elected in 2014 as rabbi of Jerusalem; at the time he was reputed to be the candidate of the Jewish Home (Hebrew).

An Israel blogger, Ruhama Weiss, exposed yesterday (Sunday) an old ruling (from 2002) of Eliyahu regarding the thorny issue of rape during war, the mizvah of the Comely Woman. Those who read Hebrew can read the original here.  Below is a translation of Eliyahu’s reply. Be advised: the text is rather brutal and I endeavored to keep the translation as close as possible to the original.

First, several necessary notes:

1. The Comely Woman issue appears in the Bible in Deuteronomy 21. (“If you notice among the captives a comely woman and desire her, you may take her as your wife.”) However, the Talmudic sages changed the law somewhat; as can be seen in Maimonides (Hebrew) the woman is first raped in the field, and the issue of the ritualistic humiliation takes place after the war.

2. Eliyahu is lying when he says that a Comely Woman is to be released if her kidnapper dislikes her. Perusing the same Maimonides chapter, you find that she is only released if she has converted to Judaism: otherwise, “A Comely Woman who refuses to refrain from idolatry after twelve months is killed.”

3. The current Chief Rabbi of the IDF, Eyal Qarim, was exposed by me as espousing much the same views (though his writing is more elusive and much less brutal) in 2012; and this came close to torpedoing his appointment. Qarim had to recant his views before the High Court of Justice would permit his appointment. The question of whether the rape of gentile women in wartime is permitted is apparently alive and well in some circles.

On to the translation, then. Keep your barf bags handy. Rabbi Eliyahu states:

Regarding this issue of “Comely Woman”, there are two different situations:

– One is in which a man goes to war with supreme holiness, and thereby saving the souls of converts and the like, as is in your quote of the saintly Or Ha’yim.

– Another is that of taking a woman in a storm of passion.

You’re assuming that the majority of the cases are of the second kind, maybe you’re right, and maybe not, and apparently it’s sometimes one way and sometimes the other.

Whether it’s the majority or the minority, your question is: Why permit a bad act because of a person’s weakness? Why not always say: “Better to transgress than to sin willfully”? Should we allow all transgressions?

The answer depends on what case the Jewish people are in. The case we’re talking about is one in which a man is going to sacrifice his life, and everything he has, for others. A battle for life or death.

Should Israel’s fighters fail – the foreigners will come and murder men, women and children. They’ll rape, pillage, and bring about a catastrophe on the whole nation, or a few towns.

If Israel’s fighters succeed – the lives of millions of people will be saved. And evil in the world will be reduced.

In that case, in which the warrior is separated from his wife for long months, and the urges burn in him, he may think of women during the fighting, become lax and fight less well.

Why?

Because this specific soldier is that way? Seeing the Comely Woman, he is enflamed!

It is not proper to think of the Comely Woman – but he is.

Now he needs to fight, and you should moralize him!! Do it at home, before the war, not in the middle of the war. Do not weaken his spirit!!

If you forbid him the Comely Woman, and he is enchanted by wily charms, he’ll think about her constantly, and may reach the point where the People of Israel will be defeated. What would you gain by that? That thousands of Jewish women will be raped by the accursed evildoers.

Therefore, the Torah said: in this case, if you’re so enflamed – take the Comely Woman!!

It’s not the best solution.

It may cause division within your house.

It may lead to the birth of a Rebellious Son.

It may bring you to great harm.

But the Torah said: In this case – the Comely Woman is permitted.

The eating of pork was permitted to those who are hungry and need the strength to fight.

The violation of the Sabbath was also permitted, as well as other very important issues, so as to prevent loss of life.

A similar case is what we say nowadays, not to listen to all those “bleeding hearts” who sit at their homes and preach morals to the dedicated IDF [Israeli Defense Forces] soldiers, why did they shoot and accidentally hit a Palestinian child or “the innocents”? Don’t listen to them and don’t listen to all those who judge IDF soldiers for taking a popsicle and not paying a full price, VAT included. Remember that at that hour they gave all that was dear to them for the People of Israel – their lives. And in such an hour, you judge them for nothing, certainly for things lives don’t hang on. All that will be dealt with later, proportionally.

Please remember!!

Even those who, by the Grace of God, came back home alive and well – they, too, sacrificed their lives for the public, and this sacrifice is not lesser than that of those who were killed for the sanctification of God’s Name. Those who returned home, well or wounded – sacrificed their lives!!

Aside from that, see how the Torah kept the honor of the Comely Woman, as well as that of the woman left at home.

The Torah said: you were attracted to beauty – to the Comely Woman? We’ll put you through boot camp!!

Do not marry just the surface beauty, because if you do you would harm yourself, harm this woman, and harm your wife who patiently awaited you at home.

Hence “she shall shave her head, and pare her nails”.

(Don’t pity the Comely Woman – hair and nails grow back quickly, and this is less painful than captivity or death at war.)

If our warrior finds out he became a captive of the Comely Woman (who may have prettified herself specifically to entrap him and incriminate him, and may have not).

If he finds out that he became a captive of surface beauty. If, after her shaving, he calms down and returns to mental health, overcome his urges – then “then thou shalt let her go whither she will; but thou shalt not sell her at all for money, thou shalt not make merchandise of her, because thou hast humbled her.”

Pay attention – her life was spared in war!!

She’s not even a war captive!!

He cannot live with her as with a wife, and then sell her as a slave!!

He lets her go!!

Scot free!!

Have you ever heard of such laws, in any country in the world?

After all, in the famed United States it was common, up until some 100 years ago (or so) that a master can have intercourse with his black [also possibly: “nigger”] slaves as often as he wanted. Willingly or forcibly – everything was legal!!

Then they would continue to be his humiliated slaves. Then he could show them cruelty and sell them like beasts in the slave market, with their children or without them. He [could also] sell just the children, ignoring the women’s cries.

And they weren’t [even] war captives!!

So it was in the democratic United States a hundred years ago, and so it was in the Torah three thousand years ago.

This is what the Torah teaches: either a wife or a slave!

If a slave – not a sex slave.

If a slave – let her work with dignity.

If you beat her, and break one of her teeth (for instance), she is immediately released to freedom. Did you hear me?!?

My dear boy!

In the US, it was permitted to cut off the limbs of an escaped slave with a knife, and also to… castrate him. That was the law. Unpleasant yet very terrible!!

Therefore, take heed before you question the morality of the Torah.

Remember where you live!!

Also remember that all we said is not in advance, but only in retrospect and only in times of war and only when lives are on the line and only when the urges are burning.

When lives are on the line, you do not educate the soldiers to morality. It’s time to win!!

See also the report in the Times of Israel of 12 July 2016 about the appointment of the Chief Rabbi of the Israeli Defence Forces, Eyal Karim, who also advocated rape in war.  It would seem that raping non-Jews in wartime is seen as perfectly acceptable by large parts of the nationalist Orthodox rabbis.  Lovely people.

IDF taps chief rabbi who once seemed to permit wartime rape

Eyal Karim later retracted remarks; has also said women's enlistment is 'entirely forbidden,' opposes female singing at army events

Chief of Staff Gadi Eisenkot on Monday nominated a rabbi who once appeared to condone rape during wartime to take over as the IDF’s chief chaplain...  (cont)

Below is the story of a holocaust survivor who defied Rabbi Eliyahu and continued to rent rooms to Arabs in Safed

The Holocaust survivor whose life is in danger again

Eli Tzavieli has been harassed for renting part of his house in Safed to Arabs

Ellie  Tzavieli - the holocaust survivor threatened for renting rooms to Arab students

In the Israeli city of Safed, an 89-year-old man has been accused of treachery for welcoming Arab students. Catrina Stewart reports

Monday 15 November 2010

First they threatened to burn his house down. Then they pinned leaflets to his front door, denouncing him as a Jewish traitor. But Eli Tzavieli, an 89-year-old Holocaust survivor, is defiant. His only "crime" is to rent out his rooms to three Arab students attending the college in Safed, a religious city in northern Israel that was until recently more famous for Jewish mysticism and Madonna.

A campaign waged by Shmuel Eliyahu, the town's radical head rabbi, culminating in a ruling barring residents from renting rooms to Israeli Arabs, means that Safed is fast emerging as a byword for racism.

"I'm not looking for trouble, but if there is a problem, I'll confront it," says Mr. Tzavieli, a Jew who survived Nazi forced labour camps and whose parents perished in Auschwitz. 

"These [tenants] are great kids. And I'm doing my best to make them comfortable."

At an emergency meeting last month, Mr. Eliyahu, the son of a former chief rabbi of Israel, was joined by 17 other religious leaders in warning that the city's 40,000 Jewish residents were threatened with an "Arab takeover."

The declaration appeared to trigger a campaign of harassment against Mr. Tsavieli to pressure him into throwing the students out. When the pensioner paid little heed to his aggressors, he received an anonymous threat to set fire to his house and a vicious poster campaign accused him of "returning the Arabs to Safed."

Mr. Eliyahu, who once advocated the mass slaughter of Palestinians civilians in Gaza to stop the firing of Qassam rockets, declined to be interviewed for this story.

Sprawled over a hilltop in the Upper Galilee, Safed is one of Israel's most picturesque towns, enjoying commanding views over the north of the country. A leading centre for Kabbalah, or Jewish mysticism, it is one of Judaism's four holiest towns, and every year draws a diverse celebrity crowd.

In 1948, Safed was a mixed Jewish and Arab Palestinian community, with some 10,000 Palestinians living in the town. As Jewish forces battled for control, the Palestinians fled, including a 13-year-old Mahmoud Abbas, who would later become the Palestinian President.

After Israel's founding, some Palestinians accepted Israeli citizenship and remained in Israel, and now number 1.5 million, a fifth of the country's population.

These days, Safed is home to a large community of ultra-orthodox Jews, who are deeply conservative and observe a strict code of behaviour, including no driving or smoking in public on Shabbat, the Jewish Sabbath.

As Mr Tsavieli poses for a photograph outside the entrance to his home in Safed's Old City, a Jewish labourer shouts at him: "I'm warning you, it won't do you any good to attract attention like this."

The pensioner continues to smile, but it's clear that he's a little rattled. Sitting in his leafy courtyard, he talks about his extensive voluntary and social work, including time as a probation officer ("The moment you have a problem, Eli, you just let us know," a former inmate told him after hearing of the threats), and says that he's only trying to do "a good thing."

As he talks, Nimran Grefat, one of his Arab tenants, dashes in to pick up some books for his next class, stopping briefly to chat. "He's a good man, he's like a father to us," Mr Grefat, 19, says later of his landlord. "He told us: 'If someone hurts you, he hurts me.'"

Tension in the city ratcheted up a notch last month after a violent clash between a Jewish mob and Arab students. Thirty or so Jewish youths converged on a building rented to Arab students, throwing bottles and chanting "stinky Muslims" and "death to Arabs." The students retaliated by throwing stones, prompting an Israeli policeman to loose off rounds from his rifle. He was later charged along with a friend for firing live rounds.

Mr Grefat says that he is afraid, and even considered dropping his studies or moving into dorms. Encouraged by Mr Tsavieli to stick it out, he takes basic safety precautions, such as not returning home alone late at night. "I didn't come here to live," he says. "I'm not going to build a family here. I just came for three years to study, after which I'll go back to my village."

The tensions that many hoped were confined to Safed are spreading to other towns, too. The deputy mayor of Carmiel, a mere 30 kilometres from Safed, was recently sacked for anti-Arab statements and for employing a militia to prevent Arabs from entering the city.

Many civil rights defenders have warned that the events in Israel's north are not an isolated phenomenon, but rather a symptom of the growing racism and anti-Arab sentiment sparked by a political shift to the right in recent years.

"The government should be mitigating these tensions, but instead it is escalating them with new laws and a vacuum of decisions," said Ali Haider, a director at Sikkuy, an Israeli organisation committed to civic equality.

Several bills currently making their way through the Knesset have been slammed by liberal commentators as racist or anti-Arab, including a loyalty bill requiring new citizens to swear allegiance to a "Jewish and democratic" Israel. Moreover, small Jewish communities are lobbying to determine just who can and cannot move into their communities, a demand widely interpreted as a move to keep Arabs out.

Israel's firebrand Foreign Minister, Avigdor Lieberman, has even proposed a population transfer in the event of a peace agreement that would see Israel's Arab citizens placed under Palestinian sovereignty.

These proposals have drawn a barrage of criticism from the left of the political spectrum, but observers say such ideas are moving into the mainstream, as evidenced by robust support for Mr Lieberman and his ultra-nationalist party, Yisrael Beitenu, Israel's third-largest party. Several Israeli commentators have sounded a note of alarm at exclusionary moves, warning that the prevailing trends in Israel are beginning to resemble Nazi-era policies.

"In other countries, in other eras, the selling and renting of homes to Jews was forbidden, and those who violated the ban were penalised harshly. We all remember where it ended up," wrote Ziv Lenchner in an op-ed on Israeli news site Ynet. "Well, do we really remember?"

But that argument cuts little ice in Safed, where many residents feel the 1,350 Arabs studying at the nearby college are an unsettling influence that threatens Safed's religious and Jewish character, not least because of fears of intermarriage.

"I see the Arabs here wearing gold chains, and it looks like Syria," says a young woman, who wears a modest headscarf to cover her hair. "This is an orthodox city, and [that] is impure."

A new medical school is to open in the area early next year, prompting concerns among Jews that it will bring even more Arabs to the town.

Moshe, 35, a music store manager, insists the issue is not one of racism, but that encouraging a large influx of Arabs into the city demonstrates a "blatant disregard" for the existing Jewish community.

"Our experience of Arabs over the last 10 years is terror," he said. "Now they're saying, 'Let us be neighbours.' You don't force peace on people." 

Stirring up hatred – CAA exonerates the far-Right and blames Anti-Zionists and Muslims for anti-Semitism

September 1, 2017, 6:57 pm

≫ Next: Israel Passes the 'Regularisation' Law - its like having a law to compensate the burglar who enters your home

≪ Previous: The Chief Rabbi of Safed, Shmuel Eliyahu, rules that rape in war is justified

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The Campaign Against Anti-Semitism hypes up fears of ‘anti-Semitism’ as part of the Zionist campaign to ‘persuade’ British Jews that Israel is their real home

Despite the evidence from the CST's  Incidents Report that 115 out of 176 anti-Semitic incidents are from the far-Right, it is 'Islamist' and 'far-left' anti-Semitism that concerns the racist CAA

When Benjamin Netanyahu went to France, in the wake of the killing of four Jews in a kosher supermarket in Paris, to persuade French Jews that their 'real home' was not France but Israel, he got short shrift - both from French Jews and France's leaders.  [Leaders reject Netanyahu calls for Jewish mass migration to Israel] This is the Zionist answer to anti-Semitism. Run away from it, repatriate yourself. That is what the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism's real game is.  It wants British Jews to go to Israel.  That is why its focus is not on the far-Right but the anti-Zionist left and Muslims.

Community Security Trust's Incidents Report for the first half of 2017 show that 115 out of 176 incidents came from the fascist right - the CAA ignores the actual statistics

The CAA is very concerned that people understand that it is not the far-Right but the Left and Muslims who are anti-Semitic thus following the Netanyahu line

Can you imagine what the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism would have done if it had been members of PSC or prominent anti-Zionists who had been caught holding a picket of a Zionist meeting with members of the neo-Nazi Britain First?  The group that Thomas Mair, Jo Cox MP’s murderer was associated with.  It would have been all over social media and their web site.   We would never have heard the end of it.  There would have been articles in the Guardian and the Daily Mail all proclaiming the alliance between the far-left, Palestine haters and fascists.  Instead of course silence.

Gideon Falter is a Director of the racist JNF UK, an organisation which subscribes to the view that land should only be allocated to Jews in Israel - the JNF complains on its web site that 70% of Israeli Jews oppose allocating JNF land to non-Jews and that more than 80% prefer Israel as a Jewish state to a state of all its citizens

It wasn’t Palestinian solidarity organisations but the former Vice Chair of the Zionist Federation, Jonathan Hoffman, in addition to Sharon Klaff, Ambrosine Shitrit and other Zionist activists, who participated in a picket with Paul Besser, Intelligence Officer of Britain First. [EXCLUSIVE – Lifting the lid on Collaboration between the Far Right and Zionist Activists] Not content with consorting with Besser, they also welcomed open Hitler lover, Neil Horan, to their motley crewe. Horan was there to add his support to the picket of Palestine Expo on July 8^th and 9^th. [see  Far-right Britain First fosters ties with Zionist movement]

As a Zionist organisation the CAA propagates the view that British Jews are thinking of leaving Britain - hoping that this will become a self-fulfilling prophecy

The Community Security Trust is a thoroughly Zionist organisation and as I have shownis happy to hype and inflate the amount of genuine anti-Semitism in Britain.  Their Anti-Semitism Incidents Report for January-June 2017 shows a ludicrous increase of 30% in anti-Semitic hate crime in the last year. 

This racist cartoon is to be found on the CAA's site

Nonetheless the CST, because it does at least take its job of collating anti-Semitic incidents seriously, leaving aside the question of how it defines those incidents, accepts that most anti-Semitism comes from the Far-Right.  In its latest Report it has a graph showing that out of 176 anti-Semitic incidents, 115 of them were perpetrated by the far-Right, 49 by anti-Zionists and 12 by Islamists.

Another absurd claim is that 36% of British people are anti-Semitic (though it's down on 45% 2 years ago!)

I don’t accept that anti-Semitic incidents are perpetrated by anti-Zionists for the simple reason that anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism are diametrically opposed to each other.  If someone is anti-Semitic then they are not anti-Zionist.  There may be people who are both pro-Palestinian and anti-Semitic, but today it is the far-Right which combines both anti-Semitism and pro-Zionism.

Another myth is that criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic

The CST which unlike the CAA, is not overtly anti-Islamic, has no problem tweeting out that most anti-Semitism comes from the far-Right not Muslims.

The Campaign Against Anti-Semitism does the exact opposite.  It is a purely political Zionist organisation.  It has no interest in anything other than using contrived and manipulated opinion polls to hype up fears of ‘anti-Semitism’ amongst the Jewish community with the purpose of encouraging Jews to go to Israel.

CAA's message is that Labour is 'harbouring anti-Semites' - the bigger the lie the more people you'll fool is how CAA operates

Hence it shouts that ‘British Jews are concerned about Islamist, far-left and far-right anti-Semitism, in that order’

The CAA ludicrously claims on its Facebook page that 36% of British people are anti-Semitic and that one-third of British Jews are considering leaving the country. These lies have been debunked before, not least by the Jewish Chronicle in a pollby Survation, in direct response to a previous campaign by CAA.  

The JC reported that ‘Almost nine out of 10 – 88 per cent - say that they have not considered quitting the UK since last week’s atrocities, compared to just 11 per cent who have thought of leaving.’ 

Even the Jewish Chronicle was forced into debunking claims that over a third of British Jews were considering emigrating to Israel

This is slightly different from the  hysterical 1/3 figure that the CAA likes to quote.

CAA is a thoroughly Zionist organisation.  It is Chaired by Gideon Falter, who is a Director of JNF UK, an organisation whose sole purpose in Israel is to lease and allocate land for Jews only. When the JNF was forced, temporarily, to end their policy of only renting land to Jews, it whined that 

'A survey commissioned by KKL-JNF reveals that over 70% of the Jewish population in Israel opposes allocating KKL-JNF land to non-Jews, while over 80% prefer the definition of Israel as a Jewish state, rather than as the state of all its citizens.'

In other words it is a 100% racist organisation and it is no surprise that Falter and co. should be trying to stir up fears of anti-Semitism.  If British Jews do think that it is the left and Muslims are anti-Semitic then it is groups like CAA who are to blame for lying to them, with the support it has to be said of much of the British media, the BBC included.

Tony Greenstein 

Israel Passes the 'Regularisation' Law - its like having a law to compensate the burglar who enters your home

September 2, 2017, 12:45 pm

≫ Next: In Israel to be an Arab is in itself grounds for suspicion

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Pity the Poor, Distressed Zionist Land Thief

Imagine a law in Britain which is specifically designed to legalise squatting on other peoples’ land.  Not only would this be impossible, in fact the opposite occurred under the last government.  The actions of the homeless have increasingly been criminalised, even when they take over empty housing that rich people have decided to keep empty for reasons of making a profit.

The settlement of Amona

Settlers like Education Minister, Naftali Bennett were not homeless.  Bennett came as a rich businessman from Brooklyn, New York.  He and thousands of others are ideological squatters.  They believe they are fulfilling god’s commandments to steal the land of others.  Unlike in Britain they are backed by the force of the State.

Jewish settlers have squatted in their thousands on private Palestinian land [i.e. land which the State has not confiscated under one pretext or another] to which they have no entitlement. 

Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit attends a ceremony in Jerusalem, June 13, 2017. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)

Instead of evicting them, as would happen if Palestinians in Israel did the same, the Knesset recently passed a ‘Regularisation Law’ which regularised the position of the land thieves.  It retrospectively legalised the theft of private Palestinian land in the West Bank.  Even the Attorney General, Avichai Mendelblit, a member of Likud, refused to support it describing it as unconstitutional but Netanyahu and his far-Right government proceeded regardless.  After all this is what settler colonialism has always done.

The Jewish settlers believe that god gave them the land, on the basis that their ancestors, completely mythical creatures, apparently lived there a few thousand years ago.  Imagine if the whole world were ordered on this basis!  In reality the settlers are doing no more than colonists have always done in places like Southern Africa.  Using the Bible to justify their expropriation of the land of the indigenous people.

See also the excellent article by Gideon Levy Oh Merciful God, Show Some [Mercy] to Victims

Tony Greenstein

Israeli ‘Regularisation Law’ is Designed to Protect those who steal Palestinian land

Israel to High Court: Law Seizing Palestinian Land Is Humane Response to 'Distress' of Thousands of Settlers

Private lawyer representing the state says expropriation of Palestinian lands in West Bank is constitutional under both Israeli and international law

Yotam Berger 22.08.2017 12:17 Updated: 12:18 PM

The unauthorized outpost of Mitzpeh Kramim. Israel says the expropriation law would help residents there with construction. Michal Fattal

The state on Monday asked the High Court of Justice to reject legal challenges to a controversial law that would allow for the retroactive expropriation of land owned by Palestinians in West Bank settlements. It called the law “a humane, proportional and reasonable response to the genuine distress of Israeli residents.”

In seeking to persuade the court to reject the legal challenges – filed by Palestinian and Israeli human rights organizations – the state argued that the “practical alternative” to the law is the maintenance of the existing situation, which the state said is disruptive to the lives of “hundreds of families” in settlements, including families who built homes based on representations by government authorities that it was permissible.

The state added that the law is constitutional under Israeli law and also meets the requirements of international law.

Amona settlers building

Subject to specific provisions, the law allows Jewish settlers to remain in homes built on privately owned Palestinian land, even though it does not grant them ownership of the land. It also denies the Palestinian owners the right to claim the land or take possession of it “until there is a diplomatic resolution of the status of the territories.”

The state’s response was prepared by Harel Arnon, a private lawyer retained by the government after Attorney General Avichai Mendelblit refused to represent it, saying the legislation was not constitutional. Prior to its passage, he also tried to halt the legislative process.

Implementation of the law had been informally suspended following the legal challenge. However, at Mendelblit’s request, the court made the suspension official on Monday through a court order. This will remain in effect until the court makes its ruling.

Bennett shakes hands with Zeev Elkin

 The law also provides a mechanism for compensating Palestinians whose lands are seized: A landowner can receive an annual usage payment of 125 percent of the land’s value as determined by an assessment committee, or an alternate plot of land if this is possible – whichever the Palestinian landowner chooses.

The state said the law addressed “a reality in which the owners of the land are not benefiting from their rights, particularly a reality that time after time has been polarizing and tearing Israeli society apart, and severely harming public trust and institutions of government.”

The state called the current situation “a national problem.”

It also noted a number of cases in which it said residents would benefit from the law if it is found constitutional, including construction at the unauthorized outpost of Mitzpeh Kramim and a number of buildings in the settlement of Ofra.

Demolition of Amona

The state’s response included data from the Israeli Civil Administration in the West Bank, detailing the numbers of orders issued against illegal settlement construction on privately owned Palestinian land.

It said that between 2012 and 2016, orders were issued against 285 illegally built structures; between 2007 and 2011, orders were issued in connection with 251 structures; and between 2002 and 2006, more than 450 orders were issued. Between 1992 and 1996, however, the figure was only 20.

In conclusion, the state said that although there are many issues that prompted the legal challenges to the law requiring thorough consideration, ultimately the petitioners are making “much ado about nothing.”

The law, the state said, does not run counter to any precedent or legal principle, and instead is meant to deal with a unique and complex situation that at times has led to demolitions that benefited no one – a situation that places hundreds of families under “a cloud of uncertainty.”

In response, the organizations Yesh Din, Peace Now and the Association for Civil Rights in Israel – which are some of the petitioners in the case – responded: “The State of Israel, in its response today, is trying to present the land expropriation law as addressing a national problem, when in practice it involves continued government support for a criminal enterprise that has continued for decades.

“The government is minimizing the continuing harm to the rights of the Palestinian landowners, and at the same time is trying to present the Israeli citizens who are taking part in the looting of West Bank Palestinians as people who have been harmed and who require ‘compensation’ for their part in the looting,” they added. “We hope the court rejects the state’s arguments out of hand, strikes down this unconstitutional and immoral law, and sends a loud and clear message: No more.”

Yotam Berger

Haaretz Correspondent

State says outpost legalization law protects Palestinians

Responding to petition from left-wing NGOs, government insists preventing additional outpost evacuations is in Israel’s ‘national interest’

In its official response Thursday to a High Court of Justice petition against a new law to legalize wildcat West Bank outposts, the state argued that the legislation, if implemented, would benefit Palestinians.

Private attorney Harel Arnon crafted the response on behalf of the state after Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit refused to defend the legislation. In his 156-page response, Arnon wrote that the law will ensure just compensation for Palestinian landowners who would otherwise receive the death penalty from the Palestinian Authority for selling their land to Jews.

“The law even improves the situation of landowners, who will receive significant compensation for the use of their land — an option denied to them without the law,” Arnon wrote on behalf of the state.
The response also rejected claims that the legislation violates Israeli and international law. Arnon argued that it was in Israel’s “national interest” to prevent the evacuation of the some 4,000 homes that the law would legalize retroactively.

Defense Ministry dismantling Amona outpost in the central West Bank on February 6, 2017. (Courtesy Amona Council)

“The Regulation Law balances the obligation of the government towards thousands of citizens who have relied in good faith on government action and a minor infringement of property rights, with increased compensation to the landowners,” the state concluded.

Passed over six months ago, the Regulation Law allows the Israeli government to expropriate private Palestinian land where illegal outpost homes have been built ex post facto, provided that the outposts were “built in good faith” or had government support.

In return, the legislation states, the Palestinian landowners will be compensated financially or with other land.

The passage of the bill, originally meant to save the since-razed outpost of Amona, was roundly condemned by a slew of activists and political figures in Israel and abroad.

Its legality was immediately challenged in a High Court petition from left-wing NGOs Peace Now, Yesh Din and ACRI (Association for Civil Rights in Israel) on behalf of 27 Palestinian local councils and 13 Israeli civil society organizations.

Regardless of the petition, the law was supposed to have gone into effect last week. However, at the behest of Mandelblit, the High Court ruled Thursday to freeze its implementation for two months.

Jewish Home chair Naftali Bennett (R) shakes hands with Minister for Jerusalem Affiars Zeev Elkin after a vote on the so-called Regulation Bill, a controversial bill that seeks to legitimize illegal West Bank outposts, December 7, 2016. (Hadas Parush/Flash90)

Consequently, no additional land will be expropriated even if it fits the above conditions. At the same time, outposts found to have been built in good faith or with government backing will not be demolished until a final decision is made.

Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked echoed state’s response to the High Court petition in a Monday statement praising the legislation. “The law offers a counter to the racism of the Palestinian Authority, which places the death penalty on those who sell land to Jews,” she said

But the left-wing NGOs behind the High Court challenge said the government’s response was an attempt to cover for a “criminal enterprise.”

“The Israeli government’s response seeks to present the expropriation law as a solution for a national problem, while the real problem is the state’s involvement in illegal settlement activity for the past five decades,” they said in a joint statement.

The court is now set to hear a response from the Knesset’s legal adviser in mid-September, followed by what is expected to be an unprecedented challenge to the law from Mandelblit himself in October.

In the months leading up to the February 6 Knesset vote on the Regulation Law, Mandelblit warned that the legislation bypassed standard land regulation procedures in the West Bank and that it legalized Israeli settlements built on private Palestinian land in breach of local and international law.

Mandelblit also cautioned that the legislation openly curtailed property rights of Palestinians in the West Bank in a way that contravenes the protections granted to occupied populations under the Fourth Geneva Convention.

When the Knesset passed the law anyway, Mandelblit officially notified the High Court that he would not defend the legislation if it was challenged. Arnon was subsequently chosen to represent the state in Mandeblit’s stead.

In May, Haaretz revealed that Arnon’s own home in the Elazar settlement is being built illegally on land that had been designated strictly for military purposes.

Revealed: Nearly 3,500 Settlement Homes Built on Private Palestinian Land

These illegal structures could be legalized under Israel's contentious 'land-grab' law, whose validity is now being determined by the High Court of Justice

Yotam Berger Aug 23, 2017 9:01 AM 

Settlers build in the illegal West Bank outpost of Amona, since evacuated by Israel. Emil Salman

There are 3,455 residential and public buildings built on private Palestinian lands in the West Bank, according to Civil Administration data. These illegal structures could be legalized under the expropriation law, whose validity is now being determined by the High Court of Justice in response to Palestinian petitions against the law.

Extensive details on the scope of illegal structures on private Palestinian land were revealed in an appendix to the state’s response to the petitions.

The law allows the state to expropriate Palestinian lands on which settlements or outposts were built “in good faith or at the state’s instruction,” and deny its owners the right to use those lands until there is a diplomatic resolution of the status of the territories. The measure provides a mechanism for compensating Palestinians whose lands are seized.

According to the Civil Administration, the 3,455 structures fall into three categories. The first includes 1,285 structures that are clearly private land. These are structures built during the past 20 years on land that was never defined as state land and all have had demolition orders issued against them. The second category comprises 1,048 structures that were built on private land that had earlier been erroneously designated state land. The third category contains 1,122 structures that were built more than 20 years ago, during a period when planning laws were barely enforced in the West Bank.

The structures on clearly private land are within the jurisdictions or adjacent to the jurisdictions of 74 settlements throughout the West Bank. Of these, 874 are in outposts – small, illegal satellites of larger settlements. One example would be the Tzur Shalem outpost near Karmei Tzur in the Etzion Bloc. Amona, which was evacuated in February, was another example. The other 411 are individual structures that were built on enclaves of private land within various legal settlements that were planned in accordance with Israeli law.

Israel just passed the land-grabbing law. What is it all about?

Of the 1,285 structures built on clearly private land, 543 are built on what the Civil Administration calls “regularized private land,” meaning lands whose owners are known and whose ownership is formally registered. The other homes are built on lands recognized as private after aerial photos proved that these lands had been cultivated over the years, but there is no definitive registry of who was cultivating them. Cultivating land establishes ownership in the West Bank in accordance with the Ottoman-era laws that still prevail there.

According to Dr. Ronit Levine-Schnur, an expert on property rights at the Interdisciplinary Center, Herzliya, “Regularized land is land for which there is clear land registration, whether performed under Jordanian rule or during the Mandate period. The land at Amona was regularized land. In these cases there is no doubt about the rights because the registration invalidates any competing right and there’s no such thing as a statue of limitations on registered land. Non-regularized land can be unregistered but known to be privately owned, or registered but in a registry that doesn’t have the same strong evidentiary power.”

The second category includes structures built on lands that had been erroneously declared state land. Because the original declarations of state land were based on obsolete surveying technology, when the technology improved, errors were discovered and lands were removed from the state land listings. As a result, 1,048 structures suddenly found themselves outside the “blue line” that demarcates state lands. Of these, 799 structures are in areas that had a valid master plan and were thus planned and built based on the earlier declarations. Of this subcategory, 303 buildings are in the ultra-Orthodox city of Modi’in Ilit.

The third category of structures were built on private lands, with the Civil Administration admitting that in most cases the owners of the lands are known. These structures, however, were built more than 20 years ago, during a period when there was almost no oversight regarding construction on private Palestinian land. Until 1998, the policy was to conduct virtually no enforcement actions in the settlements. Of these 1,122 structures, 480 are in Ofra, 193 are in Beit El, and 146 are in Elon Moreh. Dozens of other such homes were built in Eli, Shavei Shomron, Psagot, Ma’aleh Michmash and Hermesh.

All told, of the 3,455 structures built on private Palestinian land in the West Bank, 1,576 (around 45 percent) were built on regularized private land and the rest on private land whose owners are not confirmed. This number includes residential structures and public buildings, mobile and permanent alike, but doesn’t include other types of structures like storage rooms, fences, roads and infrastructures that were built on private land.

The Civil Administration data is similar to the numbers that appeared in a recent Peace Now report, which estimated that the expropriation law could legalize up to 4,000 housing units in the settlements and outposts. Outposts that could be legalized included Avigail, Ahuzat Shalhevet, Beit El East, Bat Ayin West, Jebal Artis, Hill 725, Givat Assaf and more. The report noted that numerous homes could also be legalized in Oranit, Asfar, Beit El, Givat Ze’ev, Gitit, Har Gilo and others.

The Civil Administration appendix also details how many demolition orders were issued against illegal structures in the settlements. Between 2012 and 2016 there were 285 orders issued; between 2007 and 2011 – 251; from 2002 to 2006 – 451; between 1997 and 2001 – 278 orders and between 1992 and 1996 only 20 demolition orders were issued.

Yotam Berger

Haaretz Correspondent

In Israel to be an Arab is in itself grounds for suspicion

September 3, 2017, 11:29 am

≫ Next: Are anti-Semitic attacks at a record high or is it the Israel lobby up to their old tricks?

≪ Previous: Israel Passes the 'Regularisation' Law - its like having a law to compensate the burglar who enters your home

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Israel's Racial Profiling is Donald Trump's Wet Dream

In Israel racial profiling is taken for granted.  Arabs are automatically assumed to be guilty unless proven otherwise.  At Ben Gurion Airport and at bus stations if an Arab or minority member doesn’t have ID then they are automatically detained. 

Editorial in Israel's only liberal daily paper

There are of course some people who claim that Zionism is not racist.  Some are merely ignorant but there are those, like the Jewish Labour Movement, whose sole job it is to accuse Israel's critics of 'antiSemitism' in order to deflect attention from the racism of the Israeli settler colonial state.

Tony Greenstein

 Racial Profiling at Tel Aviv's Central Bus Station

Racial profiling by station guards is a racist, discriminatory and illegal practice applied to Israeli minority members. It must be prohibited

The controversial profiling system – based on ethnic-national appearance – practiced at border and passport controls has spread inland and now security guards in the Tel Aviv Central Bus Station have been ordered to ethnically profile Arabs.

Anyone who looks like a Palestinian Arab supposedly constitutes a risk, which justifies a security check on him. The guards demand identification from people who appear to be Arab and detain Arabs who fail to present documents, thus exceeding their authority under the law (Ilan Lior, Wednesday).

Israeli soldiers and police officer at Tel Aviv bus station

The security guards say they “only check the identification of people who look like they are members of the [Arab] minority.” Even worse – the guards don’t focus strictly on securing the bus terminal and the buses, but are “moonlighting” as policemen, without being authorized or qualified to do so. 

“It’s hunting down illegal aliens for sport. The entire system has been harnessed to it and the guards argue with each other over how many illegals they managed to catch, as though they were dealing with animals,” one guard said. Others said that on a daily basis, they detain five to 20 Palestinians who don’t have permits to be in Israel, without documenting this in their reports. A guard said their instructions are “to stop them and pull them aside and demand an ID card. If they don’t have one, we must call the police.”

Security Guards at Tel Aviv Bus Station

“Sometimes they stand for half an hour or 40 minutes until the police come,” he said.

The guards do this not only at the entrance to the bus terminal, but inside the buses as well. “Anyone who looks like a minority member I tell him please take out identification. If he does and I see it’s expired, I take him off the bus and call the police. It’s checking people like an idiot, like a robot, looking only at the faces,” another guard said.

racial profiling at Ben Gurion airport

 The security company’s director at the terminal claimed the guards’ inspection is based on suspicious signs in people’s behavior and appearance, and on the police’s instructions, regardless of religion, gender or race. But the guards say their inspection of Jews is different from their inspection of Arabs. “Jews we are allowed to detain only if they have a knife, brass knuckles or things like that. We don’t check their ID cards or anything,” a guard said.

The law for maintaining public security stipulates that security guards have the authority to detain a person until a policeman comes, if there’s reasonable suspicion that he’s carrying a weapon illegally or is about to use a weapon illegally. The law also permits a guard to detain a person if he has carried out a violent act or if there’s an immediate threat of his doing so. But the security guards at the Tel Aviv Central Bus Station base their suspicions on ethnic or national affiliation.

This is a racist, discriminatory, illegal practice applied to Israeli minority members, and it must be prohibited. The police must also order the security guards to stop detaining Palestinians without permits, because this is not within their authority.

The above article is Haaretz's lead editorial, as published in the Hebrew and English newspapers in Israel.

Haaretz Editorial

See

Israel: Tel Aviv Bus Station Guards Detain All Arabs Who Don’t Have ID In Racial Profiling Strategy

Are anti-Semitic attacks at a record high or is it the Israel lobby up to their old tricks?

September 4, 2017, 5:04 pm

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Hyping up Fears of Anti-Semitism is part of a strategy designed to make Jews feel unsafe

Below is a guest post by  Alan Maddison on what I've termed the fake anti-Semitism campaign.  In the Labour Party the Zionist/pro-Israel lobby has deliberately manufactured a media consensus that there is anti-Semitism in order that those who oppose Israeli Apartheid can be smeared with the label anti-Semitism.  All the figures and statistics show that anti-Semitism is and we should be grateful that it is, at a historically low level.

The Media reports “Anti-Semitic attacks at a record high”– but what does this really mean for British Jews? 

by Dr Alan Maddison

Following the recent publication of the latest Community Security Trust (CST) report into 767 anti-Semitic incidents for the 6 months to June 2017, an increase of 30% over the same period last year, we have seen many articles in the media (July 2017) with quotes such as, 

“Anti-Semitic attacks at a record high…….rising hatred and anger”

Then Gideon Falter, chairman of the 'charity' CampaignAgainst Anti-Semitism (CAA), made a scathing attack in the media on the Police and the Crown Prosecution Services. He accused them of betraying British Jews by failing to crack down on anti-Semitic crime and having low prosecution rates. Mr Falter went on to say, 

 “ British Jews continue to endure intolerable levels of hate crime …….there is a very real danger of Jews emigrating”

Such media articles and statementsmust be very worrying for British Jews to read, especially given the rise of Far Right neo-Nazi movements and Islamist terrorism, the main perpetrators of anti-Semitic attacks in the UK.

Whilst not wishing to under-play the real threats to British Jews, I think it might reassure them to give broader context to these rather ‘anxiogenic’ articles, and to tell them their home is here in the UK and they should stay. 

Are British Jews now especially at risk for hate crime attacks in the UK?

Anti-Semitism: From Prejudice to hate crimes

Surveys (Pew Research, YouGov) indicate prejudice against Jews does exist, but seems to be restricted to a small minority of people (7-8%), with the majority of UK citizens appreciating their Jewish neighbours and the contribution they have made to our society. Up to 6-8 times more prejudice was recorded against Muslims and Roma Gypsies respectively than for Jews.

Of course prejudice, though deplorable, is not hatred, and rarely leads to a hate crime offence. The police have not yet released data to March 2017, but their latest figures for reported hate crimes for the 12 months to March 2016 in England and Walesare shown below, together with CST data for anti-Semitic incidents.

The 924 anti-Semitic incidents published by the CST represented around 1.5% of the 62 518 reported hate crimes. This is illustrated above with estimates of the breakdown for other victim groups for comparison.

It is true that 1.5% seems a low share for anti-Semitism, but the Jewish population is only around 267,000, compared, for instance, with an Asian population of 4.37 million. To appreciate the relative risk for British Jews becoming a victim of a hate crime we need to look at the pro-rata data and these are shown below per 100 000 of each victim population. 

                                

For an anti-Semitic incident the relative risk is slightly less than for a racist attack for all forms of hate crime offences, but higher than for other groups. What seems surprising in the above illustration is that violent assaults (with or without injury) represented about 30-40% for most victim groups, yet only 8% of those anti-Semitic incidents reported by the CST.  Soan Asian or Black person probably has a relative risk of a Hate Crime assault four times greater than a Jewish person.

In addition, over a quarter of hate crime assaultsreported to the police involved injury, for anti-Semitism the CST reported only 4.6% for this period, at least using GBH as a criterion. 

It is possible that, given these assault data, attacks on British Jews may be less frequent and less violent than those on Asian or Black people. Another explanation is that the CST has succeeded in its mission to encourage reporting of the less serious incidents, those incidents less likely to motivate victims to report to the police. The CST also seems to have greater resources than other victim groups to identify social media abuse. This could mean that by reporting such less severe forms of abuse, the 924 anti-Semitic incidents reported by the CST are “inflated” in relation to police reports for other hate crimes by a factor of around four.

From both prejudice and hate crime data, it does seem that British Jews are NOT at greater risk, indeed BAME victim populations are four times more likely to be assaulted. 

   

Are the CAA allegations of “Police and CPS betrayal” justified?

 Gideon Falter, chairman of the CAA, reviewed recent information from their own records and other sources. He reported that according to his data compilation, 1078 anti-Semitic offences registered in 2016, but there were only 89 charges (8.3%) and 15 prosecutions.

The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) responded to this accusation by saying it was wrong to claim it does not take anti-Semitic crime seriously,  “ Last year we prosecuted more hate crimes than ever before – more than 15 000 cases.”  The CPS said they did not recognise the statistics contained in the CAA report.

In fact, records show that the CPS did indeed prosecute 15 442 out of a total of those 62 518 hate crime cases reported over 12 months to March 2016, as they say, a prosecution rate of 24.7%. 

Police also report the breakdown for prosecutions and convictions for the main strands (motivations) of Hate Crimes as shown below. As police do not report national figures for further sub-groups within each strand, such as those motivated by Islamophobia or anti-Semitism, I have inserted the CAA anti-Semitism data for the full year of 2016 in italics.

The average total hate crime prosecution rate (24.7%) is three times more than that which the CAA claims for the anti-Semitic hate crimes (8.3%), based on their own data. In addition, the CAA estimate of conviction rate for anti-Semitic hate crimes (16.8%) is very low compared with the 83% average.

These “betrayal” allegations from Mr Falter are very serious indeed, and must be worrying for British Jews, and other citizens who expect the police and CPS to do their job effectively and without bias.

It seems unlikely that over 40 police forces and the CPS would deliberately discriminate against British Jewish victims of hate crimes. Indeed most reports of any prejudice involved the past treatment of BAME individuals who make up most of the hate crime motivated by the Race category. This now has a prosecution rate of 25% and a high conviction rate.

The CPS says they do not recognise the CAA figures, so it could be simply that the Mr Falter’s allegations are based upon unreliable data. However, the CST did report only 22 successful prosecutions out of 1 309 for 2016, this represents 1.7% which is very low compared with the 20.5% conviction rate for total hate crimes reported to the police.

In the absence of more detailed police data it seems likely that the prosecution and conviction rates of anti-Semitic incidents are low. So how do we explain this?

The police record that in general the main reasons for failure to prosecute involve evidential difficulties (26%) and no suspect being identified (48%). Reporting an offence as a hate crime requires noevidence of motivation, just a claimed perception of the victim. But charges and prosecution DO need convincing evidence to be provided. Why should this be more of a problem for alleged anti-Semitic offences?  Well there are three possible reasons besides police and CPS “ betrayal”.

Firstly most hate crimes are reported directly to the police by the victim. But for anti-Semitic offences, many are passed on by the CST who in their recent report says only 38% come from the victim. In fact, the CST accepts anonymous reporting too. These processes would certainly make it harder for police to gather adequate prosecution evidence.

Secondly, the CST encourages reporting of less serious offences which is evidenced by the fact that only 8-10% of their incidents involve assault, yet for all hate crime victim group strands this is around 33%.  In one London Met Police report they stated that, “non-violent offences present less evidential opportunities.”It is therefore probably harder for police to gather adequate evidence for more minor incidents such as graffiti or social media abuse.

The fact that there were four times more violent assaultsreported for other hate crime victims than Jewish victims could explain why their prosecution rate is three times that for anti-Semitic incidents.

Thirdly, the CST seems to use the IHEA definition of anti-Semitism and says they encourage the CPS to prosecute anti-Zionist or anti-Israel comments used in an accusatory or abusive manner. The validity of this has been challenged from a legal perspective. It is still lawful to voice legitimate criticism of the Zionist movement policies and those of the Israeli Government. Such freedom of speech may contribute to lower prosecution/conviction rates for anti-Semitic incidents.

It therefore seems that Mr Falter is NOT justified in his public accusations of  “Police and CPS betrayal of British Jews”. 

We need to place anti-Semitic attacks in a broader perspective.

Not all assaults are a result of hate crimes. In fact the general population was exposed, over the same period, to 745 528 general assaults (402 316 of them inflicting injury). Of these assaults only 21 950 (2.2%) were reported as a Hate Crime.

Below we illustrate the calculation of relative risk of being a victim of a general assault, or an assault motivated by either racism or anti-Semitism for each victim group.

These figures are based upon Police and CST reports for 2016 and estimates of population sizes, largely from census data. 

Based upon data from England and Wales above, each year all British residents share an average risk of 13.5/1000 for being the victim of a reported assault. This is 34 times greater than the risk of a British Jew being the victim to an anti-Semitic assault (0.4/ 1000).

We have also illustrated above, as seen earlier, that the Jewish community is exposed to only one quarter the risk for hate crime assaults compared with the predominantly BAME community.

In other words, if according to Mr Falter, British Jews ‘endure intolerable levels of hate crime”, how must the BAME, EU immigrant and other communities at risk for racist attacks feel when their individual risk for assault is four times greater? What about the rest of us? Should we all emigrate when we carry a pro rata assault risk 34 times that of a Jewish person for an anti-Semitic assault, and an even higher risk of injury? In fact, based on CST assaultdata, a Jewish person also shares with the rest of us, a 34 times greater probability of being the victim a general assault than they do for one motivated by anti-Semitism. 

Conclusion

I have attempted to provide a broader perspective for the relative risks regarding anti-Semitic attacks for British Jews, and alternative explanations for apparently low prosecution and conviction rates.

The allegations and remarks of Mr Falter do not seem justified. He has not presented convincing evidence that the police and CPS have betrayed British Jews. He is no stranger to unfounded claims such as these. Under his chairmanship, the CAA has devoted much of its time to attacking Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party with claims of rampant anti-Semitism. Yet in the Home Affairs Select Committee report into anti-Semitism  (October 2016) they state that there is no evidence to support this. Such alarmist and unjustified accusations against important British institutions, like the Police, CPS and main Opposition Party, are divisive and undermine the genuine fight against anti-Semitism.

We should remember that every week, in addition to TWO anti-Semitic assault cases, the police and CPS have to deal with 14 000 criminal assaults including over 8 000 with injury. Police resources are being cut, so it is understandable that some less serious offences, especially with poor evidence, may receive a lower priority, whether these are related to anti-Semitism or not.

In addition, the evidence does not support the idea that British Jews should emigrate to avoid “enduring intolerable levels of hate crime” because the individual hate crime risk for them is relatively low, and more importantly probably 34 times lower than for a general assault.

This is not to deny that hate crimes, however infrequent, are dreadful and lead to fear and anxiety of becoming a future victim oneself, or having a member of one’s family attacked. No British Jew, nor anyone indeed, should have to live in such fear. The rise of the Far Right neo Nazis in the USA may embolden those in the UK too. But we must fight anti-Semitism together, unrelentingly, using education, prevention measures and the application of the law. British Jews have excellent public, political and media support and should have confidence that the police and CPS are doing a good job on their behalf.

The vast majority of British people, including myself, appreciate our Jewish neighbours and want them to stay in the country we have shared as our home, often for generations.

The fight against ant-Semitism, Racism and all hate crimes, especially at this worrying time, requires bringing our communities together, not frightening British Jews to emigrate to Israel. 

                                                                                 Dr Alan Maddison, 20^th August 2017