Could you think of a more suitable Israeli Foreign Minister than Avigdor Lieberman??

June 12, 2018, 6:17 am

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A good well researched story by Richard Silverstein of Tikkun Olam on the pedigree of Israel’s fascist foreign minister. A former night club bouncer from Moldova, he beat up a 12 year old child and was convicted in Israel. But none of this stopped him from being elected, along with other racists, to Israel’s Knesset Previously he has been known for extreme anti-Arab racism including wishing that thousands of Palestinian prisoners might be drowned in the Dead Sea. See Lieberman Blasted for Suggesting Drowning Palestinian Prisoners

Tony Greenstein

Avigdor Lieberman, Convicted Child Beater to be Israeli Foreign Minister

March 7, 2009 By Richard Silverstein

While it is well known perhaps to Israelis, few outside know that Avigdor Lieberman, whom Israel’s new prime minister is poised to name as foreign minister, plead guilty in 2001 to beating a child. I’d heard of this story but never read any news coverage about the event nor read a confirmation that Lieberman was actually convicted.

One of my readers challenged my claim that he was and another confirmed that he had been. But I still could find no reference in Google or the Haaretz English language site. So in the interest in filling that gap on the English web, I decided to write this post. Of course, an added important element is letting the world know that Israel’s likely next foreign minister is a convicted child beater.

The September 25, 2001 Haaretz reports (translated from Hebrew):

Lieberman acknowledged yesterday in the Jerusalem District Court that he attacked a 12 year old boy from the Tekoah settlement, who had hit his son. He was charged with assaulting and threatening him. Lieberman was convicted based on his own confession in the context of a plea bargain. His attorney asked the judges, in the context of the arrangement, to restrict his punishment to a fine [17,500 shekels] and the defendant’s promise that he will not commit such an act in the future.

The beating occured in December, 1999 at the Nokdim settlement. His son told him that three boys hit him. Lieberman located one of the boys in a trailer and hit him in the face. After the boy fell and was injured, the defendant grabbed him by the shirt-collar and arm, took him back to his parent’s home in Tekoa and threatened that he would attack him again if he returned to Nokdim.

Another article notes that the complainant received his head injury when he was thrown into a wall by Lieberman.

The article notes that one of the reasons the prosecutor accepted the plea bargain rather than pursue the matter to trial was that Lieberman’s actions were not “characteristic” of his normal behavior. I guess she momentarily forgot he’d been a nightclub bouncer in Moldova and ignored his threats of death leveled against Arab MKs semi-regularly.

The court record in Hebrew can be found here. Thanks to Gershom Gorenberg for helping with this research.

Neturei Karta demonstrating outside Lieberman meeting

Discerning minds will recall that Lieberman has already settled on who will be his number 2 at the foreign ministry: none other than his legal “fixer” in the child assault case, Dov Weisglass. The latter is best known for telling an Israeli newspaper, while he was Ariel Sharon’s political fixer, that the Gaza disengagement was like “formaldehyde” which would put the peace process with the Palestinians into a deep freeze. This Weisglass keeps coming back like a bad penny.

Another interesting incident from Lieberman’s recent past should prove relevant to his ability to do his job as foreign minister: while complaining that Hosni Mubarak refuses to visit Israel, he told the Knesset that the Egyptian president can “go to Hell for all I care.” Would you say we have a problem of a lack of diplomatic temperament here? Egypt is Israel’s most important interlocutor in all matters pertaining to the Palestinians. Having cursed that nation’s leader, how will Yevgeny be able to have any sort of working relationship with him?

A sign of the bankruptcy of Netanyahu’s political calculations in forming his new government is that this incident either didn’t enter into his considerations; or, if it did, he dismissed it. That tells you quite a bit about Netanyahu.

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The historic contradictions of the Zionist Left are being played out in the death throes of Meretz

June 12, 2018, 6:21 am

≫ Next: If Israel is ‘the only democracy in the Middle East’ why does the Knesset Refuse to Even Discuss a Bill Calling for Israel to be a State of all its Citizens?

≪ Previous: Could you think of a more suitable Israeli Foreign Minister than Avigdor Lieberman??

You can no more be a Zionist and a Socialist than you can be a Carnivore and a Vegan

Below is an article from Gideon Levy. Gideon is one of the few, lonely voices of sanity in an Israel that has veered to the lunatic far-right. In his article Levy describes the terminal decline of the Zionist left as represented by Meretz, the Civil Rights Party. Also worth reading is Ron Calili’s Meretz, Israel's 'Zionist Left' Party, Is Finished

In an interview with Arutz Sheva, the settlers' radio station, the Leader of the Israeli Labour Party at the time, Shelly Yacimovich complained that calling the ILP a left-wing party was ‘a historical injustice’. On the contrary ‘Labor has always drawn its power from being a centrist party.’Shelly Yacimovich: Labor Is Not a Left-wing Party

Histadrut Poster in the 1930's urged Jewish housewives to only buy 'Jewish' water melons

I agree. It would indeed be an injustice to pretend that the Israeli Labour Party has ever been left-wing. Indeed it is a wicked calumny. Only fools or liars such as Emily Thornberry, would ever subscribe to such nonsense (I cannot decide which she is though I tend to the latter).

As Holocaust survivor and Hebrew University Professor Zeev Sternhell showed in his book The Founding Myths of Israel the ILP was never a socialist party. In 1930 the two existing Labour Zionist parties, Ahdut Ha’avodah and Hapoel Hatzair united to form Mapai, the Israeli Labour Party. Ahdut was the direct descendant of the right-wing of the ‘Marxist’ Poale Zion and Hapoel Hatzair was an avowedly non-socialist party of Zionist labour and Yosef Trumpeldor. It preached 'constructivism'. Hapoel Hatzair only agreed to the merger when it was satisfied that the ‘socialism’ of Ahdut was purely verbal and secondary to its Zionism. The class unity of Jewish workers with the Jewish bourgeoisie was a sine qua non of Zionism and far more important than ideas of class struggle and unity with Arab workers.

Poale Zion and Ahdut were bitterly opposed to any idea of class unity with the Arab working class. This came up repeatedly because there were some Jewish workers who genuinely believed in the 'socialism' of Zionism. Zionism was about class unity with the Jewish bourgeoisie who were financing the kibbutzim. This issue of class solidarity with Arab workers had split Palestinian Poale Zion before World War I, indeed at its first Palestinian conference in 1906.

The Zionists are fond of saying that the Arabs want to drive Israel's Jews into the sea. In fact the only people who were literally driven into the sea were the Arabs of Haifa in 1948, many of whom drowned

It was a certain von Plehve, Minister of Interior in the Czarist government and organiser of the Kishinev and other pogroms against Russia's Jews in 1903, who in a visit to London described Zionism, which he supported, as an 'antidote to socialist doctrines.' [Interview Lucien Wolfe, The Times, 6.2.04.]

Even the very term ‘socialist Zionist’ is an oxymoron. A socialist believes in the class struggle, opposing racism, colonialism and oppression. Socialism is about a society where the ownership and control of wealth is in the hands of those who produce it not the few who own it. Socialism is about unity of the working class and the oppressed regardless of religion, ethnicity, colour or national origin. Zionism is about the unity of Jewish people regardless of class.

Ilan Gilon and Zahava Galon - Meretz MKs

These are simple things really. Socialism is about universal values and the common struggles of humanity. Zionism is about particularism and Jewish chauvinism. In Palestine David Ben Gurion, the leader of Labour Zionism and Chair of the Jewish Agency in the 1930’s and the first Prime Minister of Israel coined the slogan ‘From class to nation’. In other words the class struggle of the Jewish workers was transformed into the national struggle against Arab workers. See Histadrut: Israel’s racist “trade union”

Socialist or Labour Zionism is predicated on colonisation and nationalism. The first question it asks is not whether something is good for the workers or humanity but whether it is good for the Jews. Socialist Zionism is bourgeois Zionism dressed up in social democratic and collectivist language. But today even this is not true. The Israeli Labour Party has abandoned any pretence of being on the left, even verbally.

David Ben Gurion, Israeli Labour Prime Minister who effected the transfer of 3/4 million Palestinians in 1948

Labour Zionism built the Israeli state. Labour Zionism pioneered the settlement of the land via its collective agricultural settlements, the Kibbutzim, which were stockade and watchtower collectives that excluded all non-Jews. The kibbutzim were established at first on land bought from absentee Arab landlords. The indigenous peasants were then evicted from the land and because of the policies of Jewish Labour they were not reemployed on the land as was traditional in most colonial societies. Thus the Palestinian refugee situation began from the start of the second Aliyah in 1904. Until 1948, there was an internal refugee problem in Palestine. It was only in 1947/8 with the onset of ethnic cleansing and the Naqba that the refugee situation was externalised and the Palestinians were expelled not only from the economy but from the land altogether.

This is not a matter of speculation or partisan propaganda. In response to the Arab riots of 1929 the British Government sent out to Palestine first the Shaw Commission, which in turn recommended a further Inquiry into the causes of the riots. Thus in 1930 the Hope Simpson Commission under Sir John Hope Simpson went out. Its Report was titled Immigration,Land Settlement and Development and was issued in October 1930 along with the Passfield White Paper implementing its recommendations (which Ramsay MacDonald promptly nullified in an infamous letter to the Zionist Organisation).

It's conclusions were devastating. They found that despite the warm words of the Zionists about how much they valued the Arabs, their policies were designed to exclude them from all employment and labour. Indeed the Labour Zionists were going out of their way to force the existing colonies of the Palestine Jewish Colonisation Agency (PICA), which had been founded in 1891 by Baron Maurice de Hirsch, to dismiss their Arab workers and replace them by Jewish workers.

Apartheid and the colour bar was at the heart of Labour Zionism. Whereas the Revisionist Zionists were happy to employ Arabs as cheap labour, the Labour Zionists fought to exclude Arabs regardless of cost. Of course the socialist answer would have been for Jewish-Arab workers to combine to fight for high wages but such unity was anathema to the Labour Zionists. This is important to understand. Historically Labour Zionism was more racist than its 'right-wing' Zionist opponents.

Ben Gurion, who was the Chairman of Histadrut railed against Moshe Smilansky of the Farmers Federation who, for the sake of narrow calculations of 'petty profit' preferred to hire Arab labour.

it is for this petty profit, not a twentieth of net income, that he would foist on the colonies the evil of mixed labour, which can only provoke trouble on national and social fronts alike

To the Labour Zionists 'mixed labour'was an evil. Clearly the idea of joint working class unity was alien to Labour Zionism. In its submission to the Hope-Simpson Inquiry the General Federation of Hebrew Labour, Histadrut (which excluded Arabs from membership) wrote that:

“The Jewish Labour Movement considers the Arab population as an integral element in this country. It is not to be thought of that Jewish settlers should displace this population, nor establish themselves at its expense. This would not only be impossible both from the political and economic standpoint, but it would run counter to the moral conception lying at the root of the Zionist movement. Jewish immigrants who come to this country to live by their own labour regard the Arab working man as their compatriot and fellow worker, whose needs are their needs and whose future is their future.”

Here you see an early example of Zionist hasbara at its finest. Zionist leaders would proclaim for all to hear the exact opposite of that which they were doing. These 'socialist' Zionists would quite happily say that 'It is not to be thought of that Jewish settlers should displace this population, nor establish themselves at its expense.'even whilst they were pursuing exactly this policy! To understand Zionism you need to understand that historically it has always proclaimed its adherence to peace whilst waging war. Indeed to understand Zionism it is best to assume the exact opposite of what it says.

It is worth quoting from this Report, the most important description of Zionist colonisation in Palestine that the British ever produced. It explains succinctly how the policy of Labour Zionism immiserated the Arab workers and thus were responsible for the Arab riots of 1929.

The effect of the Zionist colonisation policy on The Arab:— Actually the result of the purchase of land in Palestine by the Jewish National Fund has been that land has been extra-territorialised. It ceases to be land from which the Arab can gain any advantage either now or at any time in the future. Not only can he never hope to lease or to cultivate it, but, by the stringent provisions of the lease of the Jewish National Fund, he is deprived for ever from employment on that land. Nor can anyone help him by purchasing the land and restoring it to common use. The land is in mortmain and inalienable. It is for this reason that Arabs discount the professions of friendship and good will on the part of the Zionists in view of the policy which the Zionist Organisation deliberately adopted. (my emphasis)

Policy contrary to Article 6 of Mandate.—....The principle of the persistent and deliberate boycott of Arab labour in the Zionist colonies is not only contrary to the provisions of that article of the Mandate, but it is in addition a constant and increasing source of danger to the country. At the moment this policy is confined to the Zionist colonies, but the General Federation of Jewish Labour is using every effort to ensure that it shall be extended to the colonies of the P.I.C.A., and this with some considerable success...

Anyone who seriously wants to understand why there was such bitterness and antagonism between the Zionist settlers and the Palestinian Arabs can do no worse than read the Hope-Simpson Report which is widely available online.

The early mode of Zionist colonisation necessitated that it be carried out collectively as the most efficient mode. This was incidentally true in the American and South African settler colonies. Settlements could only be defended on a collective basis. Private enterprise was incapable of building up the institutions necessary to create the Zionist framework of the future Israeli state. It was because collectivism was the most efficient and effective method of colonisation that it was the bourgeois Zionists who helped fund the Labour Zionist settlements. As Ben-Gurion remarked:

Private investment, making so many opening for Jews, has done great things and the Jewish worker must not decry its importance and advantage for the Yishuv. But however private his capital, a settler can only possess his land by grace of Zionism and its work. Take away the resources of Jewry, its help and protection which buttress the Yishuv and no Jew here can enjoy peace or property. (Rebirth & Destiny, p. 76, 1954)

In the diaspora things were different. The contradiction between the fight against capitalism, poverty and anti-Semitism was at its sharpest in Poland and Russia. Zionism, with its dreams of colonisation, was irrelevant. In the words of Zionist historian, Dr Noah Lucas, ‘Zionism came into direct conflict with the. Jewish proletariats' perceived interest. It was in this context that the ideas of socialist Zionism were formulated.’ [A Modern History of Israel, p. 35]

This was the context in which Poale Zion groups formed in Europe at the beginning of the 20^th century, primarily in competition with the much larger and more influential Bund, a Jewish anti-Zionist party.

In the Soviet Union Poale Zion ended up joining the Bolshevik revolution and it fought as the Borochov Brigade. It effectively abandoned Zionism because the essence of Zionism is about postponing the class struggle until the achievement of a Jewish state in Palestine. Zionism no longer had any relevance because Zionism believed that the struggle in the diaspora was futile because Jews did not belong there in the first place.

The World Union of Poale Zion split into two at its fifth world congress in Vienna in 1920. The disagreement was on the priority accorded to socialism. Left Poale Zion refused to join the World Zionist Organisation, seeing it as a bourgeois movement. Right Poale Zion moved away from socialism altogether. Palestinian Poale Zion because it was involved in colonisation moved swiftly to the Right. Ze’ev Sternhell describes the battles in the 1920’s between the left kibbutzim of the work brigades, Gdud Avodah and the right-wing kibbutzim which centred on Kibbutz Ein Harod. The former were starved out by Histadrut and the Labour Zionists.

In Palestine Poale Zion split into two in 1919 and members of Left Poale Zion ended up forming the Jewish Communist Party. Right Poale Zion became the main engine of Zionist colonisation and Ahdut Ha’avodah.

In Poland where the struggle against fascism and anti-Semitism was at its sharpest Poale Zion split into two with Left Poale Zion drifting away from Zionism. Right Poale Zion, which was smaller, became more and more irrelevant. Left Poale Zion’s most famous member was Emanuel Ringleblum, the chronicler of the Warsaw ghetto.

The Jewish Labour Movements Director Ella Rose was a direct transfer from the Israeli Embassy

Today in Britain the only function of Labour Zionism is as an agent of the Israeli government inside the Labour Party. The Jewish Labour Movement and Labour Friends of Israel are essentially Trojan horses for the Right. They have no class politics. They are thoroughly Blairite organisations. The JLM and LFI have been the main engines of the false anti-Semitism smears against the Left.

When the JLM balloted in the 2016 leadership election, they voted 92-4% for Smith. The wonder is that even 4% voted for Corbyn!

The main target of the Zionist JLM is not British fascists or racists but the former leader of the Greater London Authority, Ken Livingstone, a pioneer of anti-racism in local government

It is clear today that Labour Zionism doesn’t even have a trace of radicalism left. Although the support of the Tribune left of the 1950’s for Israel was part and parcel of its overall support for colonialism, something that the Labour Party as a whole had been guilty of, at least at that time this Labour Zionist left was a component of the Left in the party. Figures like Ian Mikado, Tom Driberg, Jo Richardson and even Michael Foot combined support for Israel and a version of socialism.

The Jewish Labour Movement, an affiliated socialist society of the Labour Party occupies its far-Right anti-Corbyn wing. Seen here at the 70th anniversary of the Battle of Cable Street when Jewish socialists, communists and non-Jewish workers prevented Moseley's British Union of Fascists marching. At the time the Zionists together with the Board of Deputies OPPOSED confronting the Police who were protecting the British Union of Fascists but 70 years on they claim the credit that belongs to their political anti-Zionist opponents

The alliance with the Left in the Labour Party (& indeed outside it) died with the Lebanon war in 1982. It was now clear that Israel which was the major watchdog of imperialism in the Middle East. Both Tony Benn and Eric Heffer resigned from Labour Friends of Israel.

Historically it had been Labour’s Right that had been sympathetic with the Arabs and the Palestinians. Pro-Arabists such as Christopher Mayhew, Andrew Faulds and David Watkins were all on Labour’s Right. Tony Blair changed that. With New Labour support for Israel as the imperialist war horse was almost an article of faith.

Jeremy Newmark, former Chair of the JLM who led the witchhunt of left-wing anti-racists. He has since resigned under a cloud of suspicion after being accused by the Jewish Chronicle of fraud. He is currently under police investigation for financial malpractice at the JLM

The contradiction between socialism and Zionism has been resolved wholly in favour of the latter. The only function in Britain and other countries of Labour Zionism is as apologists for the Israeli state. Formally affiliated to the Israeli Labour Party, which they describe as their sister party, the JLM and LFI effectively act as the mouthpieces of the Netanyahu government. It is noticeable that when Netanyahu positioned snipers in Gaza to murder 120 Palestinians and injure 14,000, Labour Friends of Israel immediately tweeted its support blaming the Palestinians for their own deaths.

Labour Friends of Israel could not find a word of criticism, still less condemnation, of the use of live ammunition against Palestinian civilians. If this had been Jewish demonstrators in Israel ordinary riot control methods would have been used

Not one word of criticism was made by either organisation of the mass murder of unarmed Palestinians by the Israeli army. If one hadn't known better, one would have assumed that the killings must have been carried out by Hamas. Their racist statements denied agency to Palestinians depicting them as pawns of the evil Hamas. It was a classic example of the conspiracy theory.

Ruth Smeeth and Luciana Berger, part of the white lynch mob of MPs who marched to Marc Wadsworth's Kangaroo Court which expelled him - both MPs are on the anti-Corbyn wing of Labour

It was only after a massive backlash that LFI's tweets were withdrawn and a cleverer statement, which still blamed Hamas (which is code for Palestinians) was issued. The idea of condemning unreservedly the actions of the Israeli troops was and is anathema to these Labour apologists for genocide.

The reasons for LFI’s predicament are simple. Politically there is no difference between the ILP and Netanyahu when it comes to the Palestinians. The ILP supported the massacre of Palestinians in Gaza just as they have supported every war or armed attack by Likud, from Lebanon to Gaza. Recently the ILP supportedNetanyahu’s attempt to deport the Black African refugees from Israel on the grounds that they weren’t genuine refugees and because they are both Black and non-Jewish.

In the same way the ILP has supported the barring of Israeli Arabs from most Jewish communities and villages (the Reception Committee Law).

Poster of MAPAM - the United Workers of Zion

What then of what is left of the Zionist Left, that is Meretz? Meretz was formed in 1992 by a merger of 3 parties – Ratz, the civil rights party, Shinui – a centre party of Amnon Rubinstein and Mapam, the United Workers Party. Today it has 5 seats in the Knesset. In 2015 Meretz was unsure, because of a change in the law that had been designed to eliminate the Arab parties, the threshold for representation in the Knesset having been raised from 2% to 3.5%, whether they would gain representation. In the end they managed to slip in.

The late Shulamit Aloni - founder of Ratz and then Meretz - former Education Minister until ousted by Rabin at the instigation of the religious parties. A dedicated feminist and anti-racist who effectively abandoned Zionism towards the end of her life

The history of the Zionist left is best described by the number of seats they have gained in Israel’s Knesset over the past 70 years. In the first Knesset elections in 1949 Mapam stood with Ahdut Ha’avodah and gained the second highest number of seats, 19. In 1951 Mapam gained 15 seats. During the 1955 elections Mapam and Ahdut Ha'avoda had split in two. Mapam gained 9 seats and Ahdut 10 making a total of 19. In 1959 and 1961 Mapam retained their 9 seats but Ahdut dropped to 7 and 8 respectively. From then on Ahdut disappeared or rather united with Mapai. Ahdut, incidentally, which contained figures like Yisrael Galili, Yitzhak Tabenkin and Yigal Allon, became the most militaristic and racist element of Mapai and it is no accident that the first two became founder members of Gush Emunim, the Greater Israel Movement after 1967.

In 1965 Mapam gained 8 seats. From 1969 to 1984 Mapam was part of the Israeli Labour Alignment. In 1988 it stood separately again and gained just 3 seats. In 1992, as part of Meretz it gained 12 seats, a historic high. From then on it was all downhill – in 1996, 9 seats; in 1999, 10 seats; in 2003, 6 seats; in 2006, 5 seats; in 2009, 3 seats; in 2013, 6 seats; in 2015, 5 seats.

Between 1973 and 1988, Ratz stood as a separate party and gained 3,1,1, 3 and 5 seats. Shinui stood between 1981 and 1988 and gained 2, 3 and 2 seats respectively, so that in 1988 the combined total of the 3 separate parties was 10 seats. In the past 30 years the strength of the Zionist left has halved and in the 70 years since the formation of the Israeli state it has decreased by a factor of 4. This is the context for Gideon Levy’s article.

However the seeds of the political degeneration of the Zionist left, as represented by Mapam, began far earlier. Until 1948 it had, on paper at least, supported a bi-national not a Jewish state, but in practice it had been wholly in support of the racist policies of Histadrut and the ILP. Its members formed the backbone of the shock troops of the Labour Zionist movement, Palmach in 1947/8. It was Mapam members– Yigal Allon, Yitzhak Sadeh, Moshe Carmel and others – who led Palmach's ethnic cleansing in the Nakba.

Early policy towards Arabs

Mapam entered the 1948 coalition government with a radically different policy towards Arab civilians from that being pursued by David Ben-Gurion. Mapam's executive committee advocated Jewish–Arab coexistence, opposed the expulsion of civilians and was in favour of the right of refugees to return to their homes after the war.… At a Mapai Centre meeting, 24 July 1948, Ben-Gurion accused Mapam of hypocrisy, citing events at Mishmar HaEmek, he said:

"They faced a cruel reality ... [and] saw that there was [only] one way and that was to expel the Arab villagers and burn the villages. And they did this, And they were the first to do this."

Mapam was also opposed to the establishment of settlements on Arab land. But this created a dilemma as the kibbutz movement ideologically closest to Mapam, Kibbutz Artzi, was in the vanguard of the settlement movement. Of twelve new settlements created during May and June 1948 six were Mapam-related groups. … In the following months Mapam further diluted its position on the right of refugees to return by adding that there should be no return while a state of war existed and then it should only apply to the "peace-minded".

In November 1948, Eliezer Peri, the editor of Mapam’s newspaper Al Hamishmar, received a letter describing a massacre at al-Dawayima. Benny Morris estimated that there were ‘hundreds’ of dead. [Survival of the Fittest, Ha'aretz 8.1.04.] Agriculture Minister, Aharon Cisling referred to a letter he had received about the atrocities from Eliezer Kaplan, declaring: ‘I couldn’t sleep all night ... This is something that determines the character of the nation ... Jews too have committed Nazi acts.’ [The Birth of the Palestine Refugee Problem Revisited, p.488., Benny Morris]Cisling agreed that publicly Israel must admit nothing; but the matter must be thoroughly investigated. ‘The children they killed by breaking their heads with sticks. There was not a house without dead’, wrote Kaplan, the Jewish Agency [JA] Treasurer and later Minister of Finance.

The Political Committee was briefed on 11 November 1948 by the recently ousted Chief of Staff of the Haganah, Yisrael Galili, about the killing of civilians during Operations Yoav and Hiram. Aharon Cohen led a call for an independent inquiry. [Falsifying the Record: A Fresh Look at Zionist Documentation of 1948, Benny Morris Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol. 24, No. 3. (Spring, 1995), pp. 44-62].The problem was that the commanders of these operations were senior Mapam members, Yitzhak Sadeh and Moshe Carmel. Ben-Gurion however was opposed to any investigations of atrocities committed by Israel’s military.

In December party co-leader, Meir Ya'ari, publicly criticisedthe IDF for using the expulsion of civilians as an "imperative of strategy". This was probably directed at Mapam member Yigal Allon, who had been chief of operations during Operation Danny.

The history of the Zionist left has been a history of retreat from socialist principles in favour of Zionist chauvinism and exclusivism. It has been a history of hypocrisy, saying one thing and doing another. But in Israel today there is no need for a left-Zionist group. It appeals only to those intellectuals and academics, a tiny section of the Jewish intellectual elite who still fondly imagine that the Zionist dream can be reconciled with universalist principles. It is a losing struggle.

Today what is left of the Zionist left is a phantom because it has no objective reason for existing anymore. Zionism and Israel have moved on. Zionism has no ideological need any longer to maintain one face for socialist and labour parties abroad and another for the home audience. Israel today is the most right-wing and racist society on the planet. Just 8% of Israelis even identify as leftists. Indeed the very term 'leftist' is a term of abuse in Israel. That is why it is an utter disgrace that the apologists for apartheid are still affiliated to the British Labour Party.

Tony Greenstein

The Israeli Left Cannot Commit Suicide, It's Already Dead

The left is bleeding on the floor. The worst advice that can be given to the left right now is the kind that is being offered: to lean more to the right, to repress itself more, to lie more

Gideon Levy Mar 29, 2018

Tamar Zandberg celebrating after being chosen to be the new leader of the left-wing Meretz party on March 22.Meged Gozani

The dead don’t commit suicide. It’s too late. A terminally ill person usually finds it difficult to take his own life too, even “shooting himself in the foot” is hard for him. That’s how it is in life, and in death. All the lamenting about the “suicidal left” as described by Nehemia Shtrasler (Haaretz in Hebrew, March 27), simulates a non-existent reality: there is a left in Israel, it’s about to thrive, and then it commits suicide.

Well, there’s hardly any left, it’s certainly not thriving, so it is incapable of committing suicide. The left itself may be partly to blame for its dying, but not because it’s “going ho to destroy every possibility of winning,” or because it “excels at killing its leaders,” or because it doesn't lie enough like the right, as Shtrasler notes with envy. The Zionist left has lost its way, it has nothing unique to offer, it is less different than the right than it seems, it has no worthy leadership and it is up against a system of brainwashing and de-legitimization.

That is why it lies bleeding on the floor. The Zandberg affair – in which the new Meretz leader used a campaign consultant who previously worked for the far right, then lied about it – could serve as a positive reminder of what the left should and could have done: fought for its uniqueness. Not suicide.

The worst advice that can be given to the left right now is the kind that is being offered: to lean more to the right, to use the right’s consultants, to practice the right’s methods, to move further to the center, to repress itself more, to lie more, because that’s what everyone does. Even the advice to open its ranks to new groups is hollow. They too must be approached with something new, not with more of the same. The harsh attack on Tamar Zandberg was a reminder that the dying left still has enough libido to rise up and say: We are not the right; neither in content nor method.

Tamar Zandberg, new Meretz leader elected under a cloud

The Zionist left has an almost genetic structural problem — the awful contradiction between the left and Zionism, certainly in the reality of the Zionist apartheid of 2018 and the deliberate blurring of the term Zionism. The Zionist left is trying as hard as it can to hide the contradiction, cover it up, blur it, repress and deny it – but it doesn’t have a chance. As long as it sticks to its Zionism and as long as that Zionism is by definition a non-egalitarian ideology, which deprives, dispossesses, evicts and occupies, grants privileges to only one part of the country’s residents and not the other – that left cannot be a left. It’s merely a softer, more moderate right, a more restrained and liberally-styled version of the nationalist right.

That is not enough. The voter will always prefer the original, which is more authentic. That’s the deceptive web of lies in which the left is enshrouded, and it will be removed only if it touches the truth courageously and draws the necessary conclusions. It can’t have both – it’s one or the other. That’s also why the left is less resolved in its struggle than the right. On the Shomron hills in the West Bank Israelis are fighting for a cause that is clear; on Rothschild Boulevard they’re not. Not only because of temperament and self-indulgence issues, but because of the blurred path they are on.

The Labor Party is of course the mother of this deception, the mother of all sin, but Meretz, most of whose leaders still insist on defining themselves as Zionists, is also a partner to the treachery. Are they jealous of Naftali Bennett and Habayit Hayehudi? There they speak the truth. A fascist truth, but the truth. They don’t sweep it under the rug. That’s why the future is there. The Zionist left wants to have the best of all worlds – both Zionism and egalitarian humanism – and ends up losing them all.

Egalitarian humanism is not possible in an occupying country, with military oppression in its back yard. That’s why this left has no chance, with or without Moshe Klughaft. Zandberg and her party members are filled with good intentions to change the situation, to stop the deportation of asylum seekers, to increase equality for Israel’s Arabs, safeguard the courts and even end the occupation in the framework of a two-state solution. But they want to remain Zionists. And that doesn’t work. It’s an oxymoron.

Tamar Zandberg, Go Home!

The new Meretz chairwoman betrayed voters by using the services of a far-right spin doctor and compounded the damage by lying about it

Alit Karp

Mar 26, 2018

New Meretz Chairwoman Tamar Zandberg on March 23, 2018.Meged Gozani

Tamar Zandberg, go home. You proved that everything they say about the left is true. From the start, I thought that most of your public appearances in various forums were dedicated to trivial issues such as legalizing marijuana, rather than fighting corruption and making peace with the Palestinians. But now — after it turned out that you used the services of Moshe Klughaft, a political strategist known for his anti-left campaigns; dissembled when asked about it, according to your interview with the Kalman-Liberman radio show on Reshet Bet Sunday morning and in fact openly lied — go home. If you stay at the helm of Meretz, you’ll underscore the arguments of opponents of the left: The left is irresponsible, it likes the easy life, it’s hypocritical, it lies and takes shortcuts it wouldn’t allow anyone else to take. And so, you must free us from you and your kind.

I’ve been a Meretz voter for a very long time, but if you head it I will no longer give the party my vote. For liars who feign innocence, for people who hire the creators of incitement campaigns and then lie about it, I don’t need to vote Meretz. I can vote for any other party with less pretense and a greater likelihood of becoming part of the decision-making process in this country.

Voting for Meretz is like being a fan of a soccer team that never wins. It’s difficult, exhausting and rooted in a belief in the justness of the cause, together with a belief in the integrity of its thought — and certainly in the integrity of those who lead it. I believed in the integrity of Shulamit Aloni, I believed in the integrity of Yossi Sarid, I believed in the integrity of Zehava Galon, and I do not believe in your integrity. It wasn’t enough that you used Klughaft’s services so you could learn from him how to use his morally corrupt tools; you then lied about it.

It doesn’t matter a bit whether you paid him or not, whether he led your party primary campaign or merely poured poison into the ears of those who took part in it. This is hair-splitting that is worthy of other politicians, the kind with which I thought you had nothing in common. Your saying he was not paid for his advice only makes it worse, since it means he volunteered for you. Soon you’ll be telling us that it’s all right for politicians to accept gifts from friends.

Your kind is a dime a dozen in Israeli politics. People of the true left, whose only remaining asset was their honesty and their faith in their leaders, feel, in the wake of this affair, that they were robbed even of this. Don’t dig in your heels. If you genuinely want the good of the party, submit your resignation today, call for a new party primary and do not put yourself forward as a candidate. All your good points, and you undoubtedly have them, are dwarfed by your lies.

The violent roots of Israel's Labor party

The Labor party’s glory days included the Nakba, conquering and settling the West Bank and East Jerusalem and other affairs Israeli society has yet to begin processing.

By Tom Pessah, +972 Blog, March 9, 2015

Senior Labor MK and former leader Shelly Yachimovich (Photo by Yotam Ronen/Activestills.org)

Senior Labor MK Shelly Yachimovich published the following status on her personal Facebook page a few weeks ago:

“Hi this is Shelly. Spot the differences: education minister and member of the diplomatic-security cabinet Yigal Allon moves apartments.”

In an attempt to criticize Prime Minister Netanyahu’s lavish expenditures, Yachimovich, number three on the Zionist Camp list, uploaded a photo of a letter written by Yigal Allon — one of Israel’s revered military leaders and a central figure in the historic Labor Party. The letter, which was written sometime in April 1969, is a request by Allon that the furniture for his new state-owned apartment be imported from his old one, so as to not to waste too much of the budget allocated to him as minister.

Like many in her party, Yachimovich is nostalgic for the “good old days” before Likud came to power in 1977, when Israeli leaders were known for their humility. But these days weren’t exactly good for everyone.

Allon, perhaps more than any other person, can be seen as the architect of the Nakba — the expulsion and dispossession of 750,000 Palestinians during the 1948 war and the establishment of the State of Israel. As the commander of the pre-state Palmach militia, he initiated a “whisper campaign” in April 1948 to terrify Palestinians into fleeing the eastern Galilee. Here is the plan in his own words:

I gathered the Jewish mukhtars [elders from local kibbutzim and villages – T.P.] who had connections with the different Arab villages, and I asked them to whisper in the ears of several Arabs that giant Jewish reinforcements had reached the Galilee and were about to clean out the villages in the Hula, [and] to advise them, as friends, to flee while they could. And the rumor spread throughout the Hula that the time had come to flee. The flight encompassed tens of thousands. The stratagem fully achieved its objective.

But this was just the beginning. Allon served in the Galilee, where he conquered the cities of Tiberias and Bisan; in the central area, where he attacked Lydda and Ramle; and in the south, fighting the Egyptian army. And in every place he went, as his biographer writes, he did his best “not only to conquer areas of Eretz Yisrael, but also to empty them from their Arabness.”

In October, for instance, he ordered transfer of Bedouin who were considered friendly to the Zionist forces from the heart of the Negev to an area close to the Egyptian border.

Prime Minister Levy Eshkol (left) and Min. Yigal Allon (second from left) in the Negev, May 25, 1967. (Photo: GPO)

While documents from 1948 are beginning to be revealed, state archives still limit our knowledge of another central event in early Israeli history – the tragedy of the Yemenite children. Allon’s wife admitted that she and her husband went to a hospital and took one of the children for their friends in a kibbutz. We still do not know who is responsible for taking these children away from their biological parents, falsely claiming that they were dead, and passing them on to adoptive families.

Perhaps Yachimovich is ignorant of Israeli history, and that of her own party. But she must have read the letter that she herself posted. The letter mentions that Allon’s new government-subsidized apartment is located in the Old City of Jerusalem, which was conquered during the Six-Day War just two years prior. According to the architect who built the apartment, “there was a will to put symbols of government in the Old City, in order to represent our presence there.” Allon’s modest apartment was part of the strategy of annexing large parts of the West Bank, which he himself promoted after 1967.

The historical legacy of today’s “centrist” Zionist Camp is based on the expulsion of Palestinians and the repression of Mizrahim. As MK Jamal Zahlaka of the Joint List once said: “the Ashkenazim took Palestine from us, not the Mizrahim. It’s not the ones saying “death to Arabs” who took the land from us. It’s the ones who said, ‘we come in peace’ [‘Hevenu shalom aleichem’].”

Yigal Allon’s taste in furniture may have been admirable, but in glorifying him, Yachimovich is only whitewashing his crimes.

Tom Pessah is an Israeli sociologist and activist, currently residing in Tel Aviv.

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If Israel is ‘the only democracy in the Middle East’ why does the Knesset Refuse to Even Discuss a Bill Calling for Israel to be a State of all its Citizens?

June 14, 2018, 4:40 am

≫ Next: The Zionist Attacks on Gordon Nardell QC, Labour’s newly appointed lawyer, demonstrate their contempt for the Idea of Innocent until Proven Guilty

≪ Previous: The historic contradictions of the Zionist Left are being played out in the death throes of Meretz

As long as Israel is a Jewish state it can’t be a democratic state

JAMAL ZAHALKA and Haneen Zoabi. (photo credit: MARC ISRAEL SELLEM/THE JERUSALEM POST)

When the three members of Balad in the Knesset proposed a Bill calling for Israel to be a state of all its citizens rather than a Jewish state, all hell broke loose. The Knesset Praesidium, a Committee responsible for the conduct of parliamentary business refused even to table it for debate – an extremely unusual occurrence – the first time this has occurred in this Knesset.

Why? Because any challenge to the Jewish nature of the Israeli state is like going to church and challenging the existence of god.

The Jewish MK’s were unanimous in their hostility. Possibly the most ludicrous comment of all was from Zionist Union (Labour) MK Revital Swid:

“Placing this bill on the Knesset's table may set a precedent for placing other inherently racist bills on the Knesset table,”

A bill which explicitly grants equality to all citizens without making any religious or national distinctions is apparently ‘racist’. Clearly the word ‘racist’ has taken on an entirely new meaning in this Alice in Wonderland parliament. Usually racism means discrimination against someone on the grounds of race, religion etc. In Israel it means not discriminating against them.

Of course the cry goes up that ‘Israel is the only Jewish state in the world.’ The argument being that everyone has a vote in Israel. This is, however deliberately disingenuous in a state where Arabs are in a permanent minority and apart from the Communist Party all parties are either Arab or Jewish. The Israeli state is specifically constructed in order that Jews have a permanent majority. The definition of a Jew can be as flexible as racial demographics allow but the key unwritten assumption is that Arabs can never become a majority.

That was why, in 1948, 85% of Palestinians, some 3/4 million, were expelled from what became Israel.

This was best expressedby the former leader of the Israeli Labour Party, Isaac Herzog:

In about a decade, the Arabs between the Jordan and the Mediterranean will be a majority and the Jews a minority. The Jewish national home will become the Palestinian national home. We will be again, for the first time since 1948, a Jewish minority in an Arab state. I want to separate from the Palestinians. I want to keep a Jewish state with a Jewish majority. I don’t want 61 Palestinian MKs in Israel’s Knesset. I don’t want a Palestinian prime minister in Israel. I don’t want them to change my flag and my national anthem.I don’t want them to change the name of my country to Isra-stine. (my emphasis)

When Enoch Powell, in his Rivers of Blood speech in 1968, spoke about the Black man having the whip hand over the white man’ people understood that this was an appeal to the basest racial prejudice yet such sentiments as the leader of the Israeli Labour Party expressed are par for the course in Israel. Israeli politics are based not on class but on a racial division between Jew and Arab.

It should also be stressed that we now have one Greater Israel in all but name. There is no Green Line dividing pre-1967 Israel from the Occupied Territories. Yet in the West Bank there are two sets of laws – military law for the Palestinians and normal Israeli law for the settlers. In Israel’s general elections the half a million settlers can vote but those living under occupation have no vote. If they did then Palestinians would be in the majority and Herzog’s nightmare would come true.

Tony Greenstein

Thousands of Palestinian citizens of Israel take part in the March of Return, in the lands of the destroyed village of Hadatha, near Tiberias, April 23, 2015. (photo: Omar Sameer/Activestills.org)

Rebuffed parliamentary bills foil efforts to end Israeli apartheid

10 June 2018

Just as Israel’s belligerent rule in the occupied territories is under ever greater scrutiny, so too is its claim to be a democracy conferring equal rights on all citizens

Jonathan Cook - The National – 10 June 2010

For most of the seven decades after its establishment, Israel went to extraordinary lengths to craft an image of itself as a “light unto the nations”.

It claimed to have “made the desert bloom” by planting forests over the razed houses of 750,000 Palestinians it exiled in 1948. Soldiers in the “most moral army in the world” reputedly cried as they were compelled to shoot Palestinian “infiltrators” trying to return home. And all this occurred in what Israelis claimed was the Middle East’s “only democracy”.

An industry known as hasbara – a euphemism for propaganda – recruited Jews in Israel and abroad to a campaign to persuade the world that the Palestinians’ dispossession was for the good of mankind. Israel’s achievements in science, agriculture and medicine were extolled.

But in a more interconnected world, that propaganda campaign is swiftly unravelling. Phone cameras now record “moral” soldiers executing unarmed Palestinians in Gaza or beating up children in Hebron.

The backlash, including a growing international boycott movement, has driven Israel’s right wing into even greater defiance and self-righteousness. It no longer conceals its goal to aggressively realise a longed-for “Greater Israel”.

A parallel process is overtaking Israel’s traditional left but has been far less noticed. It too is stubbornly committed to its ideological legacy – the creation of a supposed “Jewish and democratic state” after 1948.

And just as the immorality of Israel’s belligerent rule in the occupied territories is under ever greater scrutiny, so too is its claim to be a democracy conferring equal rights on all citizens.

Haneen Zoabi of Balad

Israel includes a large minority of 1.8 million Palestinian citizens, the remnants of those who survived the expulsions required for its creation. Although Palestinian citizens have the vote, it was an easy generosity after Israel gerrymandered the electoral constituency in 1948 to ensure Palestinians remained a permanent and decisive minority.

In a system of residential apartheid, Palestinian citizens have been confined to ghettos on a tiny fraction of land while Israel has “nationalised” 93 per cent of its territory for Jews around the world.

But after decades of repression, including an initial 20 years living under military rule, the Palestinian minority has gradually grown more confident in highlighting Israel’s political deficiencies.

In recent days, Palestinian legislators have submitted three legislative measures before parliament to explode the illusion that Israel is a western-style liberal democracy.

None stood the faintest chance of being passed in a system rigged to keep Palestinian lawmakers out of any of Israel’s complex but entirely Zionist coalition governments.

The first measure sought to revoke the quasi-governmental status of major international Zionist organisations like the Jewish National Fund (JNF) and the Jewish Agency.

Although they are treated like state bodies, these organisations are obligated through their charters to discriminate in allocating state resources and rights to Jews around the world rather than to Israelis. The aim is to exclude Palestinian citizens from major state benefits.

The JNF bans access for non-Jews to most land in Israel and develops new communities exclusively for Jews, while the Jewish Agency restricts immigration and associated perks to Jews alone.

The bill – designed to end decades of explicit discrimination against one fifth of Israel’s citizenry – was defeated when all the Jewish parties voted against it. Zuheir Bahloul, the sole Palestinian legislator in Zionist Union, the centre-left party once called Labour, was furiously denounced by Jewish colleagues for breaking ranks and voting for the bill.

That was no surprise. The party’s previous leader, Isaac Herzog, is the frontrunner to become the next chair of the Jewish Agency. Israel’s left still venerates these organisations that promote ethnic privileges – for Jews – of a sort once familiar from apartheid South Africa.

Mr Bahloul also found himself in the firing line after he submitted a separate bill requiring that for the first time the principle of equality be enshrined in all 11 Basic Laws, Israel’s equivalent of a constitution. The proposal was roundly defeated, including by his own party.

The third measure was a bill demanding that Israel be reformed from a Jewish state into a state of all its citizens, representing all equally. In a highly irregular move, a committee dominated by Jewish legislators voted to disqualify the bill last week from even being allowed a hearing on the parliament floor.

The parliament’s legal adviser, Eyal Yinon, warned that the measure would alter Israel’s character by giving Jewish and Palestinian citizens “equal status”. Knesset Speaker Yuli Edelstein called the bill “preposterous”. “Any intelligent individual can see it must be blocked immediately,” he said.

Law professor Mordechai Kremnitzer, meanwhile, conceded that the bill exposed Israeli democracy as “fundamentally flawed”.

These three bills from Palestinian legislators might have redressed some of the inequities contained in nearly 70 Israeli laws that, according to Adalah, a legal rights group, explicitly discriminate based on ethnicity.

Paradoxically, the number of such laws has grown prolifically in recent years as Adalah and others have challenged Jewish privileges in the courts.

The Israeli left and right have joined forces to shore up these threatened racist practices through new legislation – secure that an intimidated supreme court will not dare revoke the will of parliament.

The reality is that left-wing Israelis – shown beyond doubt that their state is not the liberal democracy they imagined – have hurried to join the right in silencing critics and implementing harsher repression.

Palestinian citizens who peacefully protested against the massacre of demonstrators in Gaza by army snipers were assaulted in police custody last month. One arrested civil society leader had his knee broken. There have been barely any objections, even on the left.

Today, Israelis are hunkering down. Boycott activists from abroad are denied entry. Unarmed Palestinian demonstrators have been gunned down in Gaza. And critics inside Israel are silenced or beaten up.

All these responses have the same end in mind: to block anything that might burst the bubble of illusions and threaten Israelis’ sense of moral superiority.

Knesset blocks bill to deem Israel 'state for all its citizens'

Akiva Eldar June 7, 2018

Article Summary

Knesset Speaker Yuli Edelstein rejected this week a law proposal presented by the Arab Joint List redefining Israel as the state of all its citizens.

REUTERS/Ammar Awad Israeli lawmakers attend a vote on a bill at the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, in Jerusalem, Feb. 6, 2017.

Rarely do parliaments in democratic states flatly refuse to debate proposed bills and disqualify them before they are even put on the agenda. However, this happened June 4 when the Knesset Presidium decided in “an unusual move,” by its own admission, to reject the submission of a proposed constitutional law sponsored by three members of the Balad faction within the Arab Joint List. Their proposed basic law, titled “State of all its citizens,’’ sought to redefine the character of the Jewish state, qualifying it as giving equal status to the Jewish nationality and the Arab nationality.

Knesset Speaker Yuli Edelstein said this was the first time since he took office five years ago that he had recommended vetoing proposed legislation, adding that the presidium had not vetoed a single proposed bill in the current Knesset or in the previous one.

“The three [Knesset members] from Balad keep trying to garner votes through provocation,” Edelstein stated, “and we cannot lend a hand to this.” Has he really forgotten the embarrassing provocation to which his Likud Party colleague Culture Minister Miri Regev subjected him on Israel’s recent Independence Day celebrations? When she hijacked the traditional keynote address at the ceremony from the speaker for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, was Regev not trying to “garner votes” among Likud members? Does Edelstein not know of any Jewish lawmakers who submit bills in order to pick up votes? “Placing this bill on the Knesset's table may set a precedent for placing other inherently racist bills on the Knesset table,” said Knesset member Revital Swidof the center-left Zionist Camp. Swid was one of seven presidium members who voted to disqualify the proposed law. Only two presidium members (both Arabs), Esawi Frej of the left-wing Meretz Party and Ahmed Tibi of the Joint List, voted “nay.”

What was the issue that so riled Jewish lawmakers from the coalition and opposition parties? Why did this proposal make them bare their teeth? What is that “precedent for other inherently racist bills” to which Swid referred? Can they be referring to a clause in the bill that recognizes the existence and rights of the two national groups — one Jewish, one Arab — living in the State of Israel? Perhaps the problem lies in its proposed system of government based on separation of religion and state, while ensuring freedom of worship for all religions? Or were they beside themselves over language stating, “The state shall respect the individual and collective identity of its citizens on an equal basis, without discrimination on the basis of nationality, race, religion, gender, language, color, political views, ethnic origin or social status"?

Indeed, the proposed law is not Zionist. Its sponsors seek to nullify the right of return that grants automatic citizenship to all Jews and to change the symbols and anthem of the state so that they provide equal expression to both nations living in Israel. What racist overtones does it contain that are any different from the ones enshrined in the proposed nationality law that enjoys the support of Netanyahu and most members of the ruling coalition? The proposed nationality law seeks to define the character of the state through constitutional-style legislation that fails to guarantee the human rights of all the country’s citizens, chief among them the right to equality, the right to language, culture and minority rights. The proposed bill enshrines racial segregation in housing and undermines the rights of one-fifth of the country’s citizens to their language, culture and identity.

“There is something highly embarrassing in viewing Israel’s definition as a state of all its people as undermining the fundamental principles of our system of government and therefore disqualifying it in advance,” wrote leading legal scholar Mordechai Kremnitzer in Haaretz on June 5. Kremnitzer, a professor emeritus of the Faculty of Law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, said, “If this is not an obvious fact, there is something fundamentally flawed in our democracy.” The latest Peace Index, issued this week, indicates that almost half of all Israelis (41%) think the country’s democracy is under severe threat. That view is held by 75% of those defining themselves as left wing and 70% of the Arabs polled.

To protect the state from any hint that its Jewish character and symbols are being eroded in favor of the principle of equality, most Knesset members are willing to destabilize one of the central pillars of democracy. At the same time, these same lawmakers support policy and legislation that deprives Israel of its Jewish majority. Since the seating of the current Knesset, 31 bills have been submitted calling for the direct annexation of Israeli settlements in the occupied territories, whether by annexing the entire West Bank, annexing blocs of settlements or imposing Israeli planning and construction laws on extensive areas outside sovereign Israel. It is only thanks to human rights organizations that refuse to give in to the campaigns of incitement being waged against them that the Regularization Law, designed to authorize the establishment of settlements on private Palestinian lands, is now under deliberation by the Supreme Court.

In addition to the moral, security and diplomatic cost being exacted by the settlements on Israel, they are forcing the state to choose between turning into a binational state or an apartheid regime.
According to data presented to the Knesset by military authorities in March, Arabs outnumber Jews in the area under Israeli control between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River — 6.8 million Arabs versus 6.5 million Jews. The latest violence along the border with Gaza clearly demonstrates that Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from the enclave in 2005 failed to sever it from Israel, which continues to control its air space, territorial waters, supply of goods, water and power.

The Jewish majority in the Knesset can violate the right of Arab lawmakers to submit a bill seeking to define Israel as a state of all its citizens, even though this is an accepted definition in all democratic nations around the world. However, Israel can hardly be called a democracy when this majority refuses to represent millions of people whose fate is controlled by the state and to ensure their rights. At the same time, many Jews around the world, most of them affiliated with liberal Judaism, are having a hard time defining an occupying state that establishes settlements on stolen lands as a Jewish one.

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The Zionist Attacks on Gordon Nardell QC, Labour’s newly appointed lawyer, demonstrate their contempt for the Idea of Innocent until Proven Guilty

June 15, 2018, 4:58 pm

≫ Next: It is time that the Palestine solidarity movement recognised that Abbas and the Palestinian Authority are integral to the Occupation and the Siege of Gaza

≪ Previous: If Israel is ‘the only democracy in the Middle East’ why does the Knesset Refuse to Even Discuss a Bill Calling for Israel to be a State of all its Citizens?

If there’s one thing the Tories & Zionists can’t stand it is Natural Justice, Due Process and Fairness

Beware the rubber backbones of Corbyn and Formby – the pressure on Nardel to ‘resign’ will be immense

The appointment of Gordon Nardell QC has outraged the merchants of anti-Semitism

It must have sent the Israel lobby and the Tory press into apoplexy. Having invested a small fortune in time and money in waging the false anti-Semitism campaign, having gathering ‘evidence’ that the Labour Party is ‘riddled with anti-Semitism’, having waged a bogus war from John O’Groats to Lands End on Jeremy Corbyn, having successfully intimidated Corbyn into confessing that there are non-existent ‘pockets’ of anti-Semitism in the Labour Party, to say nothing of John McDonnell ‘weeping’ over non-existent anti-Semitism, what do they go and do? They appoint a Jewish lawyer and QC who is not only of the Left (strange that in the Labour Party) but one who believes in justice!! Even worse, the man isn’t a Zionist. Oy vei some might say.

That well known anti-racist paper the Sun was apoplectic. In the neutral and unbiased tones for which it is justly famous, its headlineran ‘Leftie lawyer hired by Labour to oversee anti-Semitism cases is ‘friends with anti-Jewish activists’. In the Sun’s eyes those who are accused of anti-Semitism must be guilty as charged. The job of Labour’s lawyer is to ensure that the bogus charges stick not to pussy foot around with notions of due process and natural justice. The Sun, lest anyone forget, is the paper which has employed the two most racist ‘journalists’ in Britain – Richard Littlejohn and Katy Hopkins. However when it comes to ‘anti-Semitism’ the Sun is with the best of them.

Lucian Berger is worried that natural justice and due process may form a part of the disciplinary processes in Labour - the sooner this racist is deselected the better

Luciana would prefer a safe Tory pair of hands - a left wing lawyer is not to her taste

Luciana Berger, who was Director of Labour Friends of Israel for 3 years before becoming an MP, let it be knownthat she had ‘no faith’ in Nardell, which to most people must be a good thing. Berger, being a member of LFI, made no complaint about the tweet a month ago which blamed those who were murdered in Gaza by Israeli snipers for their own deaths.

Civil Liberties group Liberty have rejected the IHRA definition of antisemitism

What is even worse is that Nardell believes that you cannot use the discredited International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of anti-Semitism (which the civil liberties group Liberty has just rejected). Whereas the Oxford English Dictionary definition of anti-Semitism takes just 6 words ‘Hostility to or prejudice against Jews’the IHRA definition takes up some 450 words. This is necessary in order to conflate anti-Semitism with anti-Zionism.

The Jewish Chronicle's take on Nardell's appointment

The Jewish Chronicle, never one to let a bogus allegation of ‘anti-Semitism’ pass by unnoticed, could barely constrain its anger. Not being a great believer in separating new and comment out, it led with a headline (as if British Jews have no other problems) ‘Gordon Nardell, lawyer dealing with Labour antisemitism, to adopt only part of broader Jew hate definition - Respected QC will not use IHRA definition of antisemitism.

As the respected former Appeal Court Judge, Sir Stephen Sedley, who is himself Jewish, wrote in London Review of Books, [Defining Anti-Semitism] the purpose of the IHRA definition of ‘anti-Semitism’ is

“to conflate the two [anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism] by characterising everything other than anodyne criticism of Israel as anti-Semitic’ Further ‘what is new is the adoption by the UK government (and the Labour Party) of a definition of anti-Semitism which endorses the conflation.’

The OED definition of antisemitism is just 6 words - the Zionists prefer a definition of 450 words

The appointment of Gordon Nardell throws a spanner in the works. Zionists are not interested in genuine Jew hate, on the contrary they spend much of their time these days demonstrating alongside anti-Semites and fascists. [see The Zionist – Fascist Alliance was Consummated at the Al Quds Demonstration]. When fascist groups from Britain First to the EDL, British National Party and Tommy Robinson fall over themselves to express their admiration for Israel and Zionism, as the only state which truly oppresses Muslims and Arabs, you might think that those concerned with anti-Semitism would turn their attention elsewhere.

When every self-respecting fascist and anti-Semite, from Marine Le Pen of France to Geert Wildersof The Netherlands to Heinz Christian Strache of Austria say how much they love Israel then you might think that our Zionists might show some humility. When the founder of the alt-Right in the USA, the movement that helped bring Trump to power, neo-Nazi Richard Spencer declares that he is a ‘White Zionist’ you would expect the Zionists to keep a low profile.

Instead we have this utterly false and fake campaign of ‘anti-Semitism’ directed at the Labour Party. It is to Corbyn’s eternal shame and McDonnell too, that instead of standing up to this campaign they have given in to it, almost oblivious to the fact that it is they, not me or Jackie Walker or Marc Wadsworth, who are the main targets. We are simply collateral damage.

The artificial campaign against Gordon Nardell is simply the latest instalment of the fake anti-Semitism campaign. The Zionists characterised Chakrabarti’s Anti-Semitism Report as a whitewashnot because it was hostile to Zionism, quite the contrary but because it argued for due process and natural justice in Labour Party disciplinary procedures. Even though Chakrabarti herself abandoned this when she pushed for Livingtone to be expelled, the fact is that natural justice is the last thing the Zionists want. The whole basis of this false anti-Semitism campaign rests on people being expelled for artificial trumped up reasons.

Collier's outrage is a good reason to keep Nardell

David Collier with Brian Thomas, who has recently organised a 'Free Tommy Robinson' demonstration outside the British Embassy in Tel Aviv

Another person who is outraged is Tommy Robinson supporter David Collier. Collier, who is a far-Right Zionist, makes Netanyahu seem a moderate. He denies that there is any such a thing as Palestinian refugees, who whom he refers in the third person as 'it'. He is of course outraged by the appointment of Nardell. He would prefer the appointment to be left in the hands of the Israeli Embassy.

It is of course understandable that Luciana Berger and Ruth Smeeth prefer Israel’s form of justice whereby political critics are simply locked up without trial, however so far in this country there is still a presumption of innocence.

Collier and Mad 'Mel P'

Collier with Britain First member Paul Besser (in blue anorak)

I was expelled for ‘abusing’ Louise Ellman – calling her a supporter of Palestinian child abuse was apparently an attempt to ‘shame her (not that she has any shame). Marc Wadsworth offended Ruth 'liar' Smeeth by pointing to her links with the Daily Telegraph.

If Labour's disciplinary processes are to be fair then the MPs who support LFI should have the whip withdrawn

This is what the campaign against Gordon Nardell is about and my great fear is that Corbyn will once again cave in just as he did with Christine Shawcroft, who Corbyn personally told to resign, and Ken Livingstone with whom he did likewise. Together with Jenny Formby, Corbyn and McDonnell believe that if they appease the Zionists and Labour Friends of Israel, they will be left alone. They are mistaken. Feeding sharks only increases their appetite. In the words of John Donne, ‘don’t ask for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.’

By supporting Gordon Nardell we are, despite Corbyn, supporting Jeremy Corbyn.

Tony Greenstein

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It is time that the Palestine solidarity movement recognised that Abbas and the Palestinian Authority are integral to the Occupation and the Siege of Gaza

June 16, 2018, 1:51 pm

≫ Next: Unison’s Shameful Betrayal of its members – it supports the right to dismiss a worker for attending a demonstration

≪ Previous: The Zionist Attacks on Gordon Nardell QC, Labour’s newly appointed lawyer, demonstrate their contempt for the Idea of Innocent until Proven Guilty

Palestinians deserve better than PA brutality

Palestinians take part in a protest demanding the lifting of Palestinian Authority sanctions on the Gaza Strip, in the West Bank city of Ramallah, on 10 June. The PA used riot police and party thugs to violently suppress a similar protest on 13 June. Eyad Jadallah APA images

These articles from Electronic Intifada and Middle East Eye are shameful. The Palestinian Authority, who are nothing less than subcontractors for the Israeli state, violently attacked a demonstration in Ramallah in support of their brothers and sisters in Gaza. And they did this on behalf of Israel (& the United States & Europe).

The demands of the demonstrators were simple - that the PA stop acting as a collaborator in enforcing Israel's siege of Gaza e.g. by requesting that Israel cut the amount of electricity Gaza receives to 3-4 hours a day or by itself cutting the salaries of 50,000 civil servants in Gaza.

It is clear that the actions of Fateh thugs who, in co-ordination with the Palestinian Security Police, attacked the demonstration mean that Fateh should no longer be seen as a resistance movement and should be treated in the same way as the Village Leagues used to be treated. Collaborators.

What is also shameful is that Palestinian Solidarity Campaign and the solidarity movement in this country has nothing to say about this. The Anti-Apartheid Movement never hesitated to condemn Inkatha under Mangosuthu Buthelezi in South Africa. Inkatha Freedom Party was used and helped by the Apartheid regime to attack the anti-apartheid struggle and the ANC. It was responsible for much of the appalling violence in the lead up to South Africa's independence.

I'd be interested to hear what the difference is between the PA and Inkatha. I have moved motions in the past at PSC AGM calling the PA a quisling regime, the equivalent of the Vichy regime in France under the Nazis and calling for PSC to dissociate itself from the PA. Always the response is that this is 'internal' to the Palestinian movement. This is a shameful and cowardly response. If we condemn Israel we cannot avert our eyes from those Palestinians who enforce Israel's occupation.

It should be a matter of shame that someone can say that 'It is a bizarre feeling when everyone around you is more scared of Palestinian forces than they are of the Israeli army.'

No doubt the PA feel the need to prove to Israel and Trump that they are 'reliable'. That whatever rhetoric they indulge in they can be relied on to uphold the occupation's norms. In Abbas's own words, security co-operation with Israel is 'sacred'. As an article in the Jerusalem Post last year WILL ABBAS SEVER HIS ‘SACRED’ SECURITY COOPERATION WITH ISRAEL? made clear 'suspending security cooperation is one of the Palestinians’ strongest cards. If Abbas does follow through on his threat to end it, Israel’s security will be greatly affected, as Palestinian security forces have stopped many attacks in the West Bank since a wave of terrorism broke out in October 2015.'

The suggestion that the PA is 'internal' to the Palestinian movement is a lie. It is a threat to the Palestinian resistance movement and it has never hesitated to act to control and prevent any movement growing which challenges the Israeli state. It is part of the political incoherence and worse of PSC and its current leadership that they have nothing to say about the role of the PA.

Tony Greenstein

Abbas - is the Palestinian equivalent of the Mangosuthu Buthelezi - the Black African collaborator with Apartheid

Palestinians deserve better than PA brutality

The Electronic Intifada15 June 2018

Human rights workers seldom agree with Donald Trump and his entourage.

Yet this week I found myself echoing a view expressed by Jason Greenblatt, a Middle East envoy for the US president. For very different reasons to the ones he cited, I arrived at the same conclusion as Greenblatt: the Palestinian people deserve better than the Palestinian Authority.
This was evident as I observed the PA’s handling of a protest on Wednesday evening.

The protest was organized by ordinary Palestinians who object to how the PA has imposed sanctions on Gaza. It was banned by the PA on the spurious pretext of avoiding disruptions to the Eid al-Fitr holiday celebrations.

Yet the protest went ahead – without official approval – in Ramallah, a city in the occupied West Bank. Its organizers refused to be bullied into canceling a display of solidarity with their fellow Palestinians in Gaza.

During the early stages of the protest, riot police working for the PA attacked its participants. They beat protesters, taking a number of them into custody. I saw one riot police officer – his face covered by a balaclava – rolling a stun grenade towards the crowd.

After about an hour, groups of thugs and secret police dispersed among the crowd took over the task of suppressing the protest.

The thugs in question wore hats, identifying themselves as supporters of Fatah, the party dominating the PA. Some of these hats depicted a kuffiyeh, the Palestinian checkered scarf. The irony involved here was sordid: the kuffiyeh is supposed to be a symbol of liberation.

Secret police

The secret police in the crowd were easy to spot, if you looked for them. They were men with large muscles, who watched over everyone else. They could be found in groups of four.

The secret police could be seen pointing out individuals to the thugs with the Fatah hats. If individuals who had been pointed out resisted arrest by these thugs, they were dragged away and beaten. None of the thugs looked older than 25.

The thugs grabbed many protesters and placed them in headlocks. Other protesters were punched and slapped in the head. One man had his shirt completely ripped off him by the thugs before they handed him over to the riot police.

Numerous protesters were rounded up and placed in vans, which were waiting near al-Manara Square in the city center. In one case, a protester was placed in an ambulance.

I later learned that protesters who had been rounded up were driven to police stations and to the headquarters of the PA’s “preventive security” division.

While I was standing next to some protesters on Wednesday, I suddenly felt my arms being restrained. One of the secret police had forced my hands behind my back. He did not use extreme force to do so. But he was certainly asserting his control.

The man told me to come with him. He pushed me down a lane. “Don’t be scared,” he whispered. “We respect people.”

I would have laughed – if I was not worried about having my head bashed in, which the man could have done on a whim.

The secret police officer brought me near the vans full of protesters who had been arrested. He handed me over to another man, who was carrying a walkie-talkie. That man asked me – in fluent English – what I was doing at the protest. Where was I from? Was I a journalist?
I replied in Arabic that I was not a journalist.

The man took my phone and went through the photos and messages saved on it. When he handed the phone back to me, he asked me for my ID card. I told him I did not have it with me.
The man then instructed the secret police officer who had grabbed me to take me away. I was ordered to go home. As I did so, I was followed through the streets by three other secret police officers.

Police working for the Palestinian Authority are funded and trained by the European Union and the United States. A key purpose of this training is to ensure that the PA works in the interests of Israel.

The way they handled this week’s protests illustrated how the PA’s police can be similarly brutal to Israel’s forces of occupation. Palestinians surely deserve better than that.

The author is a human rights worker in Palestine. They requested anonymity as they had been instructed by their organization to remain silent on how the PA handled Wednesday’s protests.

Protests in Ramallah: Does the PA actually care about Palestinians?

#PalestineUnity
It is a bizarre feeling when everyone around you is more scared of Palestinian forces than they are of the Israeli army

Photo: Palestinian security forces stand guard in Ramallah on 13 June 2018, during a protest calling on President Mahmoud Abbas to end financial sanctions against Palestinians in Gaza (Reuters)
Tessa Fox
Saturday 16 June 2018 10:30 UTC

As I stepped out onto Rukab Street, one of the main streets in Ramallah, at once I heard the cries: "There's gas!"

Wednesday night's protest, organised by the Campaign to Lift PA Sanctions on Gaza, had only just begun, but security forces were already firing stun grenades and tear gas cannisters directly at crowds that only 20 seconds earlier had raised banners demanding that sanctions against Gaza be lifted and chanted: "In spirit, in blood, we redeem you Gaza."

Everyone seemed still for a while: many were scattered in different areas around central Ramallah. Tension lay heavy in the air as people stood frozen on footpaths and in the streets, staring at the number of government personnel present.

It seemed as if the Palestinian Authority had sent out every member of its security forces for this event, including the National Security Service, the Palestinian police (including riot police), the General Intelligence Service and the Preventive Security Service.

There was also a downright terrifying gang of Fatah party members, loyal to PA President Mahmoud Abbas. Some carried pepper spray. Each wore a white cap. All of them were prowling around the gathered protesters.

On Tuesday, the night before the demonstration, the PA called for a counter-protest. This, everyone knew, would be a recipe for disaster.

"I don't even know if there's going to be protest," a friend said to me. People's concerns were repressed before they could even be expressed.

The protesters' simple message was directed at the PA, which more than a month ago halved the salaries of approximately 50,000 government employees in Gaza, leaving workers unable to provide for their families.

Palestinian security personnel confront a protest in Ramallah on 13 June 2018 (Tessa Fox/MEE)

The cut came after the PA also stopped paying for Gaza's electricity last year, further limiting residents' access to power and crippling industry and essential public services including hospitals, schools.

The Palestinian National Council, the PA's legislative body, as well as factions within the PA have all called for the sanctions to be lifted. That's left Abbas to shoulder much of the blame, as his critics accuse him of trying to unseat Hamas from Gaza, where it rules the territory, while using Gaza's two million residents as political pawns.

It's left Gaza caught in a dire humanitarian crisis, between the Israeli blockade of the strip on one side and on the other the punitive approach of the PA, whose actions have been so extreme that residents within Ramallah itself, the PA's seat of government, have risen up against the authorities and called for sanctions to be lifted.

PA uses same tactics as Israel

Photos and captions circulating on social media suggested that thousands of people were there, although it was hard to differentiate between protesters, bystanders and undercover police.

I tried to push as close as I could to what was going on to take some pictures, even though I had been warned only half-an-hour earlier that taking photos and videos was banned.

I was also warned that the police were trying to break cameras and confiscate memory cards. To me, this is one of the first signs that a government can give to show that it is actually an oppressive regime. That night the PA did everything in its power to restrict the free flow of information.

Palestinians in Ramallah demand the lifting of sanctions against Gaza on 13 June 2018 (Reuters)

The whole scene was one of chaos. In one area, security forces threw rounds of sound bombs. Riot cops started running down yet another street to try to block any entrance to al-Manara, the main square in Ramallah. And dotted among the crowd were those white-capped members of Fatah, some of whom were undercover officers, taking matters into their own hands and beating up protesters, all under the watchful eye of the police.

A friend who works at a local Palestinian TV station told me that around 2,000 undercover forces were within the area. Someone else told me that one female protester had a gun pointed at her head by one of the undercover officers. She couldn't talk afterwards, she was in such a state of shock.

It felt as if those undercover police were mirroring the same tactics as used by the Israeli mustarabeen, the undercover unit trained to look and act like Arabs.

By deploying so many police in civilian clothes, the authorities sought not only to maximise the number of arrests but also to dismantle any network of trust among civilians and destroy the solidarity that is a necessary tool against any oppressive regime.

It's always been the goal of the Israeli occupation to break the unity of historical Palestine, including movement to and from Gaza, using the building of illegal settlements, restrictions on access to pre-1948 areas of the West Bank and the Greater Jerusalem Bill.

Now it is out in the open that the PA, as led by Fatah, is prepared to crush the Palestinian cause and unity to retain power over the Palestinian population.

Undercover forces made the majority of arrests, which numbered more than 60 by the end of the night. I saw people, including women and young girls, kicked, punched and beaten with batons. People's bodies were pulled in all directions as they were dragged away by at least five men to a fenced-off car park, where riot police stood guard, waiting for vans to pick up their latest prisoners.

Need to witness brutality

I knew I had to try and document the brutality. But less than 10 minutes after arriving at the protest I had already been sternly warned by an undercover policeman not to take photos.

Eventually I managed to climb up the roundabout at al-Manara. Standing on top of one of the lion statues, I had a clear vantage point of just how many people were in the streets and the brawls that were unfolding below.

Soon, I heard someone yell at me, then realised that multiple people were pointing and starting to run in my direction. I ran down the back of the statue while taking my memory card out of my camera and shoving it in my pants.

By the time I jumped down, civilian and uniformed police had already climbed inside the fence. I was trapped. They grabbed me by my arms while another tried to take my camera. I thought for sure they were going to break it. I just kept screaming and yelling at them, telling them to let me go and to wait so I could "prove" to them I had no photos.

They then put three women police officers onto me. One held my arm and kept telling me to be quiet and calm down. I yelled back: "How on earth can I be calm down when you're trying to arrest me and break my camera?"

The sound of the commotion began to work in my favour, as an older Palestinian woman came over and started apologising for what was happening. A man dressed in civilian clothes stepped forward and declared that he was a policeman. I replied that he should be wearing uniform.

I wanted to yell at them that they weren't true Palestinians; that all they were was part of a single faction, Fatah, and were simply government employees; that they didn't care about the Palestinians in Gaza; that they didn't care about the Palestinians in Ramallah, who they were beating up; that they didn't care about the Palestinians who had travelled all the way from Haifa by bus to protest alongside their brothers and sisters; and that the the people living under dictatorships across the Palestinian territories counted for nothing in their eyes.

Why is Palestinian Authority doing this?

Finally I was released and found my friend. She was beside herself because the undercover forces had taken her cameraman's memory card while she was doing a live broadcast criticising the PA. She thought for sure that she would be arrested the next day. She was terrified.

The problem was, the Palestinian security forces were driven by complete emotion. Couple this with them not being experienced enough to deal with such large crowds and it meant that their use of weapons was a disaster.

At one stage, a security officer, holding a sound bomb in his hand, wrestled with a protester. During the scuffle, the bomb went off. It seemed like all the actions of the security forces were driven by impulse rather than orders from their superiors.

Stories have also emerged of sexual harassment, perpetrated by the men wearing those Fatah caps. One woman was chased down a side street and sexually abused before she was rescued by people she knew.

Many of the Fatah supporters are themselves from families of martyrs or political prisoners. Other Palestinians cannot fathom how they could act this way during a protest in support of their brothers and sisters in Gaza. Are they attempting to create conflict among the factions?
Protesters and residents are still in a complete state of shock, as well as physical and mental exhaustion. The night after the protest, those who had attended were still too scared to walk the streets or go into public spaces for fear of being arrested or beaten up.

People unconnected to the protests were targeted just for being in the street. I witnessed multiple families and women with babies, who were trying to walk home, standing bewildered as they were yelled at by the presidential guard.

Why the protests will continue

Another protest is already set for Wednesday. What sort of excuse will the PA use then to repress people's freedom of expression and assembly when it is held outside of the Eid holiday? Will they find new grounds to ban and criminalise protests?

Fatah and Abbas showed their true colours to the people of Palestine this week as well as alienating some of the supporters from their own party. The protest held last Wednesday night wasn't organised to bring down the PA or to depose Abbas.

It was in support of another persecuted population of Palestinians, who may live under separate Hamas rule in Gaza but whose fate has now been crushed still further by the regime controlling the West Bank.

But if the removal of sanctions against Gaza is not achieved in good time, then do not be surprised if those living in the West Bank focus their energies on removing heads of government. On Friday, 70 civil society organisations and trade unions within Palestine called for the dismissal of Rami al-Hamdallah, the Palestinian prime minister and interior minister.
The activists are now recovering, tending their wounds, being released from prison and embracing their close support networks to nurture their emotionally drained minds.

Hopefully the organisation and unity of Palestinians will now only be strengthened even more, as their fight for their brothers and sisters in Gaza is emboldened by the brutality that the protesters in Ramallah faced.

- Tessa Fox is a freelance journalist, photographer and filmmaker focusing on war & conflict, indigenous affairs and the environment. She has had work published for Al Jazeera, Deutsche Welle, Al-Monitor, The Independent (UK), Holistic News (Poland), Mail & Guardian (South Africa), Knack (Belgium), Australian Broadcasting Corporation, SBS World News, New Matilda, VICE and Crikey among others. Fox was also a finalist for the Dart Centre for Journalism and Trauma Asia Pacific Prize and, as a correspondent, has reported from Turkey, Myanmar, Ethiopia, Russia, Vanuatu, the Solomon Islands, Australia and the EU among others.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.

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Unison’s Shameful Betrayal of its members – it supports the right to dismiss a worker for attending a demonstration

June 17, 2018, 6:26 pm

≫ Next: A Jewish, Settler Colonial, State Can Only be a Racist State

≪ Previous: It is time that the Palestine solidarity movement recognised that Abbas and the Palestinian Authority are integral to the Occupation and the Siege of Gaza

Why I face disciplinary action for criticising London Regional Organiser Steve Terry who scabbed on Stan Keable

Two weeks ago I was called to an investigation hearing. A complaint had been made against me regarding criticism I had made in various articles of UNISON’s London Region Organiser, Steve Terry, a right-wing Labour Councillor in Walthamstow. The articles are below:

Stan Keable - Suspended for Expressing his Opinion on Zionism - Welcome to Stephen Cowan's Thought Police in Hammersmith & Fulham Council

What is UNISON for if it doesn't defend its own members? Stan Keable - abandoned by Steve Terry, the union’s London Regional Officer

No criticism permitted

Stan Keable, an employee of Hammersmith and Fulham Council and also Secretary of Labour Against the Witch-hunt, attended a demonstration in London on March 26^thcalled by Jewish Voice for Labour. It was called in opposition to the Zionists’ ‘Enough is Enough’ demonstration outside Parliament. It was part of the fake anti-Semitism campaign before the local elections, whose target was Jeremy Corbyn.

Unison sells itself more as an insurance company than a trade union

The Zionist demonstration was billed as an ‘anti-racist’ demonstration (the first one the Board of Deputies has called in its history) but an anti-racist demonstration at which Norman Tebbit and the Democratic Unionist Party are participants, to say nothing of Uncle Tom Chuku Ummuna and Sajid David is unlikely to be about fighting racism.

BBC 'journalist' David Grossman, with the ethics of a rattle snake

Stan got into a discussion with a Zionist in the course of which he expressed the view that the Zionist movement had collaborated with the Nazis. The discussion was recorded by BBC Newsnight editor and all round bigot, David Grossman. Placed on social media it caused the racist local Tory MP, Greg Hands to demand that Stan be sacked. Thus we see how the false anti-Semitism campaign is a threat to free speech and democratic rights, aided by yellow journalists such as the BBC’s Grossman.

H&F Council leader Steve Cowan promptly ensured that Stan was suspended and last month I represented Stan at his disciplinary hearing the result of which was that he was sacked. I should not, of course, have had to represent Stan as I am from Brighton and Hove UNISON not Hammersmith but when Stan approached the London Regional Organiser, Steve Terry for support he received none.

Terry’s advice was that Stan should plead guilty and plead for forgiveness. In a letter of May 8^th Terry advised Stan that:

‘the course that you should take is to indicate that you regret any offence caused by your remarks and plead mitigating circumstances.’

A supporter of Progress, Terry was completely unfit to make a decision in this case. His own prejudices rendered him incapable of seeing that the main issue was not whether or not Stan was correct in his views but an elementary one of the right to free speech and free assembly, rights guaranteed under Articles 10 and 11 of the European Convention of Human Rights. The ECHR was drawn up and approved by the European countries precisely because of the lack of rights of civilians under Nazi occupation during the war. Terry however is a pen pushing bureaucrat, incapable of comprehending such issues. For him, defence of Zionism was the only issue.

Tony Jones - one of my two investigators

The two main charges against Stan were:

1. That, in attending a counter demonstration outside the Houses of Parliament on the 26th March 2018, you knowingly increased the possibility of being challenged about your views and subsequently proceeded to express views that were in breach of the Council’s Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Policy and the Council’s Code of Conduct (‘Working with integrity’ and ‘Working with the media’).

2. That you made inappropriate comments which were subsequently circulated on social media which are deemed to be insensitive and likely to be offensive and potentially in breach of the Equality Act 2010 and/or the Council’s Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Policy.

In other words Stan should not have attended the demonstration in question because he rendered himself susceptible to being challenged about his view! Could you have a more pathetic attack on the basic rights of any citizen?

Gail Adams, the second of my investigators, receiving a CBE from Prince William

To anyone with a modicum of understanding of human rights issues, let alone employment rights, these charges were a threat to all workers. Terry however was too dim to understand that.

The idea that by ‘causing offence’ Stan was guilty of a disciplinary offence is outrageous. Where lies freedom of speech? As Jodie Ginsberg wrote in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo shootings and the murder of a Danish filmmaker by jihadists,

the right to free speech means nothing without the right to offend. If all you have the right to do is to utter platitudes then free speech is meaningless.

Of course Terry was unconcerned by issues such as free speech. This overpaid and useless official considers that the members are accountable to him. It was therefore not surprising that Terry, who is not used to criticism from members, made a complaint via his superior, the London Regional Secretary against me.

The racist Zionist demonstration whose counterdemonstration Stan joined

On June 4^thI was called to an investigation hearing conducted by 2 more officials, Gail Adams and Tony Jones from the southern region. Ms Adams is Head of Unison’s Professional Services Unit and Tony Jones is Regional Manager for the South-East and as Tony revealed during the course of the interview is himself a Labour councillor in Reading! Most of the interview was conducted by Tony Jones, who was jovial and pleasant. Gail Adams was mostly silent but her hostility was evidenced by her body language and general demeanour. Clearly the idea of criticising a fellow official didn’t go down well.

You can read the whole interview hereor you can listen to the tape of the interview here. Amongst the ‘highlights of the interview was my statement, in a letter to the Head of UNISON’s Executive Office, Beth Bickerstaffe, that the Inquiry could only be a ‘stitch-up.’ Tony Jones was offended by this description so I had to point out that this was not intended personally. Rather it was the fact that I was the person who was subject to a complaint rather than Terry, for his refusal to defend a member under attack and his incompetence in failing to have any grasp of basic employment or human rights, to say nothing of his refusal to get a legal opinion. On any objective basis Terry should be suspended on charges of gross misconduct as a prelude to his dismissal. But of course to Ms Bickerstaffe, daughter-in-law of former UNISON General Secretary Rodney Bickerstaffe, it is me who is guilty of the ‘crime’ of criticising a full-time official.

What my case demonstrates is the democratic deficit in UNISON. Despite supporting Jeremy Corbyn in the leadership elections in 2015 and 2016 (despite rumours that Dave Prentis would withdraw his support) UNISON is not a left-wing union. In the past 8 years, at a time of massive cuts in local government, it has abysmally failed to take any action against those attacks on members’ jobs and conditions or pay. When there was action a few years ago and strikes over pensions the union leadership did their best to get the action called off by pretending that they had secured concessions. Prentis is well-known for his lack of backbone.

Despite the fact that UNISON has good policy on Palestine and supports BDS (albeit doing very little to implement it) it has also supported the false ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign against supporters of Palestine. I spoke on the motion in 2007 and again 2008 at national conference when policy on BDS was first proposed. The arguments of the Zionists were basically that those supporting BDS were supporters of Hamas and anti-Semitic! Rodney Bickerstaffe, when he spoke at a PSC AGM attacked the use of false accusations of anti-Semitism against supporters of Palestine. People are well aware of how Zionists weaponise ‘anti-Semitism’ but today they remain silent.

That is what the actions of Terry are about. He is a fulsome supporter of the idea that support for the Palestinians is ‘anti-Semitic’ and in particular criticism of Zionism, the ideology of the movement that dispossessed the Palestinians. That is why Stan has been abandoned and that is why I am subject to a bogus ‘investigation’ that can only conclude that I am guilty as charged, even though charges have yet to be laid.

Tony Greenstein

↧

A Jewish, Settler Colonial, State Can Only be a Racist State

June 19, 2018, 10:01 pm

≫ Next: Our Congratulations to the Jewish Labour Movement on the appointment of Ivor Caplin as their new Chair

≪ Previous: Unison’s Shameful Betrayal of its members – it supports the right to dismiss a worker for attending a demonstration

Israel is the only Jewish State in the World – it is also the only Apartheid State in the World

One of the most familiar Zionist refrains is that Israel is ‘the only Jewish state in the world’. This is a last ditch defence of Israel. However bad Israel might be, whatever it does, it is the only thing that Jews in the world have. It is therefore important to understand why a Jewish state, in a settler colonial context, must be a racist state.

Demonstration in Afula against selling homes to Arabs

In Britain for example if individuals were to campaign to exclude Black or Muslim people from living in a town they would be charged with incitement to racial hatred. The state, even though it is racist, as the appalling treatment of the Windrush people demonstrates, is also committed to a formal legal and political equality.

That was the legacy of the Scarman Inquiry in the early 1980’s, set up as a result of the inner city riots. It was realised that the existing level of police racism and violence and the fascist violence of organisations such as the National Front could no longer be tolerated if British society were not to be torn apart.

Killing a sea-turtle will get you a heavier sentence than killing a Palestinian in Israel

In Israel it is different. It is the State itself which is responsible for implementing and reinforcing the already existing level of racism. It is the State which, for example, sponsors and works with the the Jewish National Fund, the Zionist organisation which openly refuses to allocate land for the use of Israeli Palestinians.

Israel is a Jewish supremacist state. In Israel being Jewish means you are entitled to privileges that non-Jews don’t receive whereas in Iran or Saudi Arabia being a Muslim give you privileges. A Muslim state merely legitimises its repression through the use of Islam.

The British state is formally Christian. The Irish Republic is Catholic, albeit not much of one after the votes legalising gay marriage and abortion. However the difference is that the rights and privileges of non-Christians is not dependent on their religion.

The Zionists argue, if you are opposed to Jews having just one Jewish state then that is anti-Semitic. There is however a gaping hole in this ‘logic’. The primary reason for opposition to a ‘Jewish’ state is not that it is Jewish but that it is discriminatory.

In Britain there is no Christian National Fund which owns or controls 93% of the land. No one says to me, sorry you cannot rent or buy a property or live in a particular area because you aren’t Christian. But in Israel, if you are not Jewish, then your right to live anywhere you want is severely restricted. 93% of the land is owned or controlled by the JNF whose constitution reserves the land it owns to Jews only.

In Israel over 400 towns or villages bar non-Jews from living in them. As the reportfrom Afula demonstrates, when Arabs bid for houses in a ‘Jewish’ area or actually manage to buy a property there then it causes mass demonstrations of Jewish residents.

In the good old days when Israeli Labour welcomed their fellow apartheid politicians from South Africa

In Israel there is no Group Area Act or petty apartheid as used to be the case in South Africa, there are no signs barring Palestinians from certain areas but nonetheless there is a residential apartheid in Israel which is just as effective as that in Apartheid South Africa.

In 2014 the Knesset passed a Receptions Committee Law with the express purpose of allowing Israeli Jewish villages to bar Arabs and anyone else they didn’t like. This decision was upheld by 5-4 in the Supreme Court. High Court Upholds Residential Screening Law, Enabling Jewish Villages to Keep Arabs Out

The law didn’t specifically state that Arabs could be barred but that was the motive. In so doing the Court retreated from its own decision in 2000 when it ruled, in the Ka’adan case, that an Arab couple could not be refused the right to buy property because they were not Jewish.

Israeli soldiers firing tear gas at demonstrators

In the Jewish Nation State bill which is making its way onto the Statute Book there is a provision which explicitly allows for the creation of Jewish only communities. As Ayelet Shaked, the ‘Justice Minister’ explained: “There is place to maintain a Jewish majority even at the price of violation of rights.” ‘Shaked referred to Ka’adan and said regarding “the argument over whether it’s all right for a Jewish community to, by definition, be only Jewish, I want the answer to be ‘yes, it’s all right.’”

In 70 years in Israel, despite a tenfold increase in the Arab population not one new Arab town or village has been created. Arabs are confined to about 3% of the land despite being 20% of the population.

Opinion polls demonstrate the racist nature of the Israeli state as reflected in the opinions of ordinary Israelis. An article ‘Marriage to an Arab is national treason’ (27.3. 07) revealed that over half of the Jewish population in Israel believes the marriage of a Jewish woman to an Arab man is equal to national treason. Note it is not a religious offence but it is seen as treasonous towards the (Jewish) nation.

Over 75 percent of participants did not approve of apartment buildings being shared between Arabs and Jews. Sixty percent of participants said they would not allow an Arab to visit their home. About 40 percent of participants agreed that “Arabs should have their right to vote for Knesset revoked”. The number was 55 percent lower in the previous survey. Also, over half of the participants agreed that Israel should encourage its Arab citizens to emigrate. Over half of the participants said they would not want to work under the direct management of an Arab, and 55 percent said “Arabs and Jews should be separated at entertainment sites”. Over 56 percent of participants said they believed that Israel’s Arab citizens posed both a security and a demographic threat to the country.

These results have been repeated subsequently. For example in the Pew Research Centre’s Israel’s Religiously Divided Society in 2016 48% of Jews say all Arabs should be expelled from the country, compared to 46% who are opposed.

A Jewish State established by settler colonialism cannot be other than racist. That is the truth that racist hypocrites like Emily Thornberry refuse to see.

I am copying below articles that illustrate the depths of racism in the ‘Jewish’ state and why it is qualitatively different to normal western capitalist states. This is important to understand. Israel is not a ‘normal capitalist state. Its political economy and social relations are distorted by its settler colonial nature.

1. The first article Ignoring Racism in Afulais about two days of demonstrations in the Jewish town of Afula in Northern Israel. They are demonstrations by 150 Jewish residents against the sale of a house to an Arab. “The residents of Afula don’t want a mixed city, but rather a Jewish city, and it’s their right,” explained Avi Elkabetz, a former Mayor who is running for the position again. There has been no condemnation of this by Netanyahu or indeed the Opposition parties. Such things are taken for granted in the ‘only democracy in the Middle East. Neither Elkabetz nor any of the demonstrators were arrested or charged. Contrast this with the Israeli Palestinian poet Nadeen Tatour, who was arrested and charged in October 2015 and spent several months in prison before being held under strict conditions of house arrest. She has just been convictedof “inciting violence and supporting a terrorist organisation over comments she made on social media.”. The Israeli state is seeking to gaol her for having written a poem which included the lines “Resist, My People, Resist Them”.

Miki Zohar, Israeli MK and expert on Jewish Race

2. The second article, Israeli lawmaker proclaims supremacy of ‘Jewish race’ concerns the comments of Miki Zohar, a Likud member of the Knesset. Zohar was explaining why it was that, despite the clear evidence of Prime Minister Netanyahu’s corruption, such as accepting hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of the best champagne and cigars, Israeli Jews are unconcerned. The ability of Netanyahu to play the race card is such that everything else is secondary. Zohar’s explanation? The ‘Jewish race’ is so superior to everyone else in the world that they can see through the Israeli Police case against Netanyahu!

3. The third case, the killing or rather murder of Samir Awad, a child of 15 from the village of Budrus, is truly shocking. Two soldiers, known only by their initials A.G. and A.D, caught Samir trying to cross a forbidden fence circling the village. First they shot him in the thigh and got hold of him but the little devil escaped from their clutches and so. as he was running, they shot him in the back and in the neck.

No doubt, like me, you will be wondering why A.G. and A.D were ever charged and the answer is because of the interference of the B’tselem human rights organisation. For over two years, the soldiers had hanging over them the charge of committing “an act of haste and negligence”. Outrageous I’m sure you will agree as it is clear that this young scamp, had he grown up, would have become a terrorist.

4. The fourth case concerns a swimming pool in Mabu'im in Israel’s south. At the swimming pool in question, there is strict separation between Bedouin and Israeli Jews. When the Jews want to use the pool, which is most of the week, the Bedouin can’t use it and when the Bedouin are able to use the pool Jews are banned. In other words there is complete equality. Only malevolent and malicious troublemakers would wish to upset this arrangement. It is cultural self-determination. Each group prefers to be amongst its own and only a handful of leftists could possibly object.

The Board of Deputies, which is always concerned about 'antisemitism' harbours a number of vile Islamaphobes

Roslyn Pine's manifesto when she stood for Vice President of the Board of Deputies

5. The next story concerns Roslyn Pine of the Board of Deputies who described Muslims as “the vilest of animals” and Arabs in similar terms. I am sure you will agree that Ms Pine, although she might be considered a tad controversial, is entitled in a free society to express her opinions. Only leftist troublemakers and anti-Semites could possibly object to her expressing her opinion.

The fact that the Board of Deputies has been leading the charge against Corbyn’s ‘anti-Semitism’ is completely irrelevant. There is no comparison between anti-Semitism, which as we all know is the world’s longest hatred and calling Muslims ‘animals’ when we all know that most Muslims are only waiting for the chance to become martyrs in the global jihad.

Roslyn Pine's opposition to 'antisemitism' doesn't extend to Muslims

However I am sure that you will all be pleased to hear one piece of good news from Israel. The Times of Israel reportsthat a man was sentenced to 10 months for stabbing a rare sea turtle, killing the blighter. This is one more month than Elor Azaria received for murdering Abed al Fatah a-Sharif, a wounded Palestinian who was lying unconscious on the road. Yes I hear you say, how disgraceful that the turtle killer received one more month in prison than an Arab killer. Don’t they know that, according to the Deputy Defence Minister Eli Dahan Palestinians are animals? New deputy defense minister called Palestinians ‘animals’ What possible justification is there for having given Azaria only 1 month less than the turtle killer? The turtle in question was very rare . Palestinians by way of contrast are only too numerous. Clearly the Israeli justice system leaves a lot to be desire!

Ignoring Racism in Afula

Netanyahu and his fellow cabinet members promote racist laws whose sole purpose is to give this superiority the force of law

Haaretz Editorial, Jun 18, 2018

Some 150 Afula residents, including former Mayor Avi Alkabetz, who is running for the position again, and Acting Mayor Shlomo Malihi, demonstrated Wednesday against the sale of a home in the city to an Arab family. “The residents of Afula don’t want a mixed city, but rather a Jewish city, and it’s their right,” explained Elkabetz, adding, “That’s not racism.”

If that isn’t racism, then what is? In Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israel, which translated the Zionist vision of a national home for the Jewish people into an ultranationalist project of Jewish supremacy, it is easy to get confused. Racism and ethnic superiority have acquired legitimacy, and Netanyahu and his fellow cabinet members promote racist laws whose sole purpose is to give this superiority the force of law. Theoretically, if we’re talking about the kind of Jewish state the right talks about, why resist Afula’s desire to be a Jewish city?

As long as such racist behavior gets by without provoking determined opposition, public condemnation and vocal criticism, it will increase and become legitimate and transparent. The opposition to the right-wing government has an important role to play here. It must draw red lines and mold the public discussion in accordance with its worldview. Why weren’t Zionist Union Chairman Avi Gabbay, Meretz Chairwoman Tamar Zandberg and even Yesh Atid Chairman Yair Lapid in Afula leading an anti-racism counterdemonstration? Why didn’t they express support for the sale of the home to an Arab family?

This is a critical ethical question with far-reaching political implications. The right, as it is reflected in the most ultranationalist government in Israel’s history, draws its power in part from a blatantly racist, anti-Arab base. Netanyahu himself appealed to his potential voters in the last election by warning that “Arabs are coming to the polls in droves.”

The left must recognize that its main purpose is to erase racism and represent a sane, enlightened alternative to the moral darkness into which Netanyahu is leading Israel. Otherwise the left will never be reawakened and it will be wiped off the political map.

Israel expects foreign governments to take expressions of anti-Semitism within their borders seriously and to publicly denounce it. In Israel, in contrast, expressions of hatred for Arabs are met with total indifference at best or encouragement at worst. To our great shame, we cannot expect the government to denounce such ugly behavior, since the right itself spreads hatred and racism and benefits from them in elections. But if the protest in Afula failed to bring opposition leaders, who claim to champion equality and human dignity, to the streets, then who needs them?

The above article is Haaretz’s lead editorial, as published in the Hebrew and English newspapers in Israel. See also:

The Israelis Who Protested Against a Home Sale to Arabs Aren't Alone. They Have Friends in the Left

Dozens of Israelis Demonstrate Against Home Sale to Arab Family for Second Straight Day

Israeli lawmaker proclaims supremacy of ‘Jewish race’

Likud's MK Miki Zohar says Jews are the smartest in the world, so know Netanyahu isn't corrupt

By Stuart Winer13 June 2018

Likud MK Miki Zohar speaks during an Interior Affairs Committee meeting at the Knesset, in Jerusalem, February 20, 2018. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)

A lawmaker from the ruling Likud party said Wednesday that the “Jewish race” is the smartest in the world and possessing of the “highest human capital,” which is why, he said, the Israeli public did not buy into the allegations of wrongdoing by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

MK Miki Zohar made the comments during a radio debate with veteran political journalist Dan Margalit about the corruption investigations in which Netanyahu is either a suspect or has given testimony.

Ahma Tibi notes the similarity between Jewish race specialists and Nazi race specialists

His assertions led to a Twitter spat with Joint (Arab) List party MK Ahmad Tibi, who noted Nazi Germany’s treatment of Jews as a race during the Holocaust.

Citing recent opinion polls that show Netanyahu enjoying strong support despite being a suspect in three graft investigations, Zohar argued that the media focus on the probes has not convinced the Israeli public that the prime minister is unsuited to lead the country.

“I can tell you something very basic,” Zohar said during the Radio 103FM debate. “You can’t fool the Jews, no matter what is the media writes. The public in Israel is a public that belongs to the Jewish race, and the entire Jewish race is the highest human capital, the smartest, the most comprehending. The public knows what the prime minister is doing for the country and how excellent he is at his job.”

Tibi, in response, tweeted a picture of Zohar with the message: “An elected official in ‘the Jewish state’ presents: race theory.”

Tibi, whose party and its members have often raised ire among their Jewish colleagues with their open support for the Palestinian cause, followed that tweet up with a photo of himself reading Amos Elon’s book “The Pity of It All,” which examines how the Holocaust brought an end to German-Jewish culture.

Zohar tweeted back: “And on the back cover there is a photo of Albert Einstein, another Jew who brought great news to the world.”

“What’s the connection between you and Einstein?” Tibi rejoined. “It isn’t even a relative relationship.”

In a follow-up interview with Hadashot TV news, Zohar at first denied that he had spoken about the supremacy of the “Jewish race,” but, presented with a recording of his earlier comments, doubled down and reiterated: “The Jewish people and the Jewish race are of the highest human capital that exists.”

“What can you do? We were blessed by God… and I will continue to say that at every opportunity,” he said. “I don’t have to be ashamed about the Jewish people being the Chosen People; the smartest, most special people in the world.”

Zohar cited the many innovations and discoveries made by Jews, and said that Israel had achieved more in its 70-year span than some peoples had in thousands of years.

“You can understand why we usually win a lot of Nobel Prizes,” he said.

Killing a Child Is 'Not Right', but Not Wrong Enough for an Indictment

Israeli prosecutors concluded that the two soldiers acted properly when they shot and killed an unarmed teenager 10 meters away as he ran away from them

Gideon Levy, Jun 14, 2018 4:57 AM

Opinion

Palestinian and Israeli activists flee tear gas fired by Israeli soldiers during a demonstration against Jewish settlement construction in the West Bank, on November 17, 2016. Majdi Mohammed/AP

A.G. and A.D. presumably celebrated. Maybe they raised a toast with their lawyers at some fashionable pub, or perhaps they just basked in the good news with their families. It was the relief of their lives. The poor souls’ nightmare is over. How they harassed them when the teenager was killed, but all’s well that ends well: The central district prosecution decided last week to withdraw the indictment against them, two-and-a-half years after it was filed.

True, it was sickeningly ridiculous that they were charged with “an act of haste and negligence” for shooting an unarmed, already wounded teenager in the back as he was running or his life. Still, it was an indictment, which itself was only filed after the deceased’s family and B’Tselem petitioned the High Court of Justice.

For a moment it seemed as if the two would be given a suspended sentence of maybe a day, or even a one-penny fine for killing a boy who had not yet turned 16, even though he didn’t pose any danger or threat to them. But even this faint hope for a remnant of delayed and symbolic justice – for even the faintest likeness of justice – was dashed, and what could be more predictable than that?

The indictment was withdrawn. A.G. and A.D. acted properly when they shot an unarmed teenager from a range of 10 meters as he ran from them. They violated nothing. Their act of killing wasn’t even hasty or negligent. They are good soldiers, excellent ones, even though the day after the killing a senior officer said, “Something that wasn’t right happened there.” Not right, but apparently not wrong enough. So go ahead, dear soldiers; continue to kill Palestinian teenagers who don’t endanger you. You can even kill them as they run away, because no harm will come to you.

A.G. and A.D. were a platoon commander and a soldier from the 71st Battalion of the Armored Corps. They shot from behind and killed Samir Awad, who tried to cross the fence that constricts his village, as he ran from an ambush the soldiers had set up in the prickly-pear bushes. They shot him in the back and will never be punished for their act. They shot him in the leg first, and after he fell wounded and got back on his feet they managed to grab him by the arm, but he got away from them. Then they shot him twice from behind, a bullet to the back of his neck and a bullet in his back, killing him. So now they can calmly fly off to India or Costa Rica for their post-army trip – perhaps they’ve already done so – and forget everything. But the home of the boy they killed in Budrus will never be the same again.

It was winter 2013, the last day before the semester break. The science exam was over, and the pupils left the school, located around 200 meters from the fence. Six of them came down the hill, for their usual test of courage – crossing the fence. It was Munir, Hosni, Muhammad, Saher, Musa and Samir.

The first five sensed danger and decided to back off. Samir chose to continue. He did not know that six soldiers lurked among the cactuses. He crossed an old hole in the inner fence and was caught in the space between two fences. Then the soldiers of the brave Reshef battalion emerged from their hiding places and shot in the air. Samir was scared to death and tried to retrace his steps. His legs got tangled in the brambles. They shot him in the thigh. He managed to extract himself and began to run, wounded, back toward the village. They shot him twice more from behind. The indictment that was annulled detailed the serious deviations from the rules of engagement.

When I came to the village the day after the killing, Samir’s blood was still smeared on the rocks. Here the soldiers hid, and here he was caught between two fences and here’s where they shot him. The picture was clear, the facts decisive. After two and a half years of intensive investigation it emerged that there was no evidence. In the interim, Israeli soldiers also killed Lafi Awad, in the same place, the same way. Why not? The two graves are next to each other, and the two killers are already someplace else.

End Separation of Jews and Bedouin at Pool in Israel's South, Lawmakers Tell AG

MKs say the practice, which is unofficial but familiar to residents, 'has no place in a democratic state'

Almog Ben Zikri, Jun 19, 2018 6:43 PM

The entrance to the pool, Mabu'im, June 17, 2018. Eliyahu Hershkovitz

Knesset members from both the opposition and the ruling coalition called on the attorney general Tuesday to work toward ending the separation between Bedouin and Jews at a public swimming pool in southern Israel.

As Haaretz revealed at the beginning of the week, Bedouin are not permitted to enter the pool in Mabu'im at hours designated for Jews – and vice versa. Bedouin who wanted to enter the pool on Saturday were stopped at the entrance and were told that the pool was "for members only."

In a letter to Attorney General Avichai Mendelblit, Knesset members called the separation "a grave practice that has no place in a democratic state" and said it violates an anti-discrimination law.

They added that "it is difficult to stand idly by while children are kept outside of the pool only because of their religion, in a country where they are considered equal citizens."

The letter was signed by Meretz MKs Tamar Zandberg, Mossi Raz, Michal Rozin, Ilan Gilon, and Esawi Freige; MK Yousef Jabareen (Joint List); Zionist Union MKs Eyal Ben-Reuven and Stav Shaffir; Yesh Atid MKs Pnina Tamano-Shata and Yael German, and MK Akram Hasson (Kadima).

As previously reported by Haaretz, the separation is undeclared but nevertheless familiar to both residents and visitors, Jews and Bedouin alike.

An employee said the pool has activities for the Bedouin community during the week ater 6 P.M. and on Friday nights, while the rest of the time the pool is open only to members.

"There is a tacit agreement here," a resident of Mabu'im said. "Bedouin will not enter the pool when there are Jews because the residents threatened to stop coming."

Senior Member of The Jewish Board of Deputies labels Muslims as “the vilest of animals”

By Tom Barker

- 16th June 2018

For some time now, the Board of Deputies of British Jews has been leading the charge against Jeremy Corbyn over highly controversial allegations of anti-Semitism. But now, undeniable evidence has reportedly emerged exposing that a leading member of the Board of Jewish Deputies is an out-and-out racist.

Last Thursday the Jewish Chronicle reported that they had “seen tweets shared by Roslyn Pine, who stood unsuccessfully to be vice-president of the Board in last month’s elections, describing Muslims as “the vilest of animals”, as well as one describing Arabs as “so evil”. She also retweeted a message describing Arab migrants to Europe as “an invading army”.”

When challenged by the Chronicleon her abhorrent views Pine, who represents a far-right tendency within the Board, was emphatic

I detest the creed of Islam and I’m entitled to say it.

Her invective stands in stark contrast with the words and actions of the longstanding anti-racist campaigner Marc Wadsworth – who was recently expelled from the Labour Party over extremely dubious allegations of anti-Semitism – as well as Jeremy Corbyn himself.

And Pine’s dangerous views are not anomalous amongst the leadership of the Board of Deputies either. Robert Festenstein, who also stood to become a Vice President of the Board, courted controversy recently by agreeing to be interviewed by Britain’s leading Islamophobe, Tommy Robinson. Festernstein is also a director of the right-wing Jewish Human Rights Watch, a group that conflates opposition to the crimes of the Israeli State with anti-Semitism.

In August 2015, another representative of the Board of Deputies (as well as Jewish Human Rights Watch), Jonathan Neumann, compared Leicester City’s Labour-run Council to Hitler’s genocidal regime because the Council had agreed to boycott goods from illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank.

In a YouTube video made at the time, Neumann explains, in direct referenceto Leicester’s boycott: “When the Nazis first came to power in 1930s Germany, one of the very first things they implemented were boycotts of Jews.”

Who do the Board of Deputies Represent?

The Board of Deputies of British Jews has been presented in the Tory press as an organization that represents the voice of Jewish people in Britain… as if there is just one voice! This is not the case. As Jewish Voice for Labour made clear in a recent statement:

“We are appalled by the actions and statements of the Board of Deputies. They do not represent us or the great majority of Jews in the Party who share Jeremy Corbyn’s vision for social justice and fairness.”

Rather, the Board of Deputies represents a very particular strain of thought – one which unflinchingly supports the actions of the current Israeli government. This was confirmed by Roslyn Pine herself when, during her leadership campaign, she was asked“How will you [as a potential Vice President of the Deputies] represent the diversity of opinion in our community with regards to Israel?” She responded:

That is not required by the Board’s constitution, nor is it feasible. The Board should take no view as to this or that Israeli policy. The Board’s remit is to do whatever in its power to support Israel’s security, well-being and standing.

Clearly a large part of this mission includes smearing and attacking those who oppose Israeli State terror, including Labour’s current leader.

The Fight for Democracy

And while Corbyn and his supporters have always sought to promote democracy and fairness, the Board of Deputies serves the opposite purpose. Indeed, Roslyn Pine again provides evidence of this when responding to the following question“What is the one thing that most frustrates you about the Board?” She replied:

Not having any role in decision making, despite sitting on a division (International). The democratic mandate seems to be for the very few. It seems that the views of the average deputy count for very little.

Her wording (unconsciously) evokes the very antithesis of the Labour Party’s current slogan – “for the many, not the few” – as well as the underpinning values of the labour movement.

But clearly there remains a minority of Labour Party members who do not share in this noble idea – including numerous MPs and Councillors, many of whom are enthusiastic supporters of the ongoing witch-hunt against socialists.

One of the main tasks facing Labour members at the moment, therefore, is to push for the full democratisation of the Labour Party – including the readmission of expelled socialists and the reintroduction of mandatory reselection – which would enable pro-working-class MPs and councillors to replace the current pro-capitalist ones.

↧

Our Congratulations to the Jewish Labour Movement on the appointment of Ivor Caplin as their new Chair

June 21, 2018, 5:11 am

≫ Next: How sick can they get? Judeo-Nazi settlers celebrate the burning alive of a Palestinian child at the trial of his killers whilst the Police stand idly by

≪ Previous: A Jewish, Settler Colonial, State Can Only be a Racist State

Jeremy Newmark, Fraudster and Perjurer, has been succeeded by a War Criminal AND Expenses Cheat

Caplin is a worthy successor to the amateur Newmark - having trousered thousands of pounds from the tax payer and refused all requests to pay back what he considers is rightfully his

It’s not often that I find myself offering my congratulations to a Zionist organisation, especially the Jewish Labour Movement. After all, the JLM were one of the principal organisations responsible for my expulsion from the Labour Party. Reporting on Caplin’s appointment as the new Chair of the JLM the Jewish Chronicle of 29^th May 2018 noted how:

One thing you cannot accuse Caplin of is modesty, tolerance or a belief in democratic debate. One can imagine that if he were Netanyahu he would be complaining that the snipers in Gaza had only managed to kill 120 people after more than a month of trying. What kind of kill rate is that?

Not only did Caplin singlehandedly effect my expulsion (methinks he played a somewhat more minor role than he’s claiming credit for) but he wants to see the whip removed from Chris Williamson for daring to support Marc Wadsworth and myself. Caplin is a worthy son of Israel.

How news of Caplin's appointment broke

However it would be churlish and unsporting to let my own feelings get in the way. Praise where praise is due. And praise is clearly due to the JLM on what is, by any stretch of the imagination, a magnificent appointment.

Readers will I am sure remember the sad demise of the former Chair of the JLM, Jeremy Newmark, after the Jewish Chronicle outed him for historic and it would appear not so historic fraud. I honestly didn’t believe that the JLM could possibly find someone with the qualities and calibre of a Jeremy Newmark. How wrong I was.

Newmark's frauds and thefts were covered up by the the JLC's equally dodgy trustees - fortunately all the money would have been spent on fighting the Palestinians and BDS

Newmark led a riotous life at the expense of a Zionist 'charity' - now it appears he has dined and wined off the JLM - let's hope Ivor doesn't require another house

If you remember Newmark started his meteoric political career perjuring himself at the Fraser –v- University College Union Employment Tribunal. The words of the Chair of the Tribunal, Judge Snelson, still ring in my ears:

We also reject as utterly unfounded the emotive allegation of Ms Ashworth that Mr Newmark was “Jew-baited”. He was not baited at all. ... We regret to say that we have rejected as untrue the evidence of Ms Ashworth and Mr Newmark concerning the incident at the 2008 Congress ... Evidence given to us about booing, jeering and harassing of Jewish speakers at Congress debates was also false, as truthful witnesses on the Claimant’s side accepted. One painfully ill-judged example of playing to the gallery was Mr Newmark’s preposterous claim... that a ‘pushy Jew’ stereotype was being applied to him.”

It would seem that despite initial hopes, Newmark plundered the JLM's coffers too - since the JLM is heavily subsidised by Gilad Erdan's anti-BDS slush fund, it was probably the best use of the money

Newmark wasn’t merely a perjurer but a major fraudster as well. In his role as Chief Executive of the Jewish Leadership Council the Jewish Chronicle reportedthat ‘he deceived the organisation out of tens of thousands of pounds and misled charities about the cost of projects he worked on.’ Newmark was alleged to have:

Ø Billed thousands of pounds of “inappropriate” personal expenses to the JLC — including holidays in Israel and VIP transport for himself, his wife and their children

Ø Withdrawn thousands of pounds of unaccounted for cash on JLC credit and debit cards while failing to provide receipts to justify this expenditure

Ø Leased a new BMW car worth £46,000, paid for by the JLC, to which he fixed his own personal number plate — and then attempted to have his wife insured on the vehicle

Ø Employed his wife’s fundraising and events consultancy firm, Secure Prospects, to run a JLC-backed educational project, paying the company more than £36,000 — in spite of concern expressed by the governors of two leading Jewish schools that the project was not being properly managed

Ø Misled communal charities, including the London Jewish Forum and Chabad, over the true cost of projects in an attempt to secure larger donations

Ø Attempted to cover up possible financial irregularities by blocking communication between the JLC and its auditors, after staff became suspicious about his conduct.

When Jonathan Hoffman, friend of the EDL and Tommy Robinson starts defending you you know you're in difficulty

It is indeed a hard act to follow and Mike Katz, Adam Langleben and the other members of the JLM Executive, including of course its fragrant Director, Ella Rose, are to be congratulated on the appointment of Caplin.

A flashback to just before the Iraq War - Caplin was as wrong about WMD as he is wrong about Palestine

Ivor does not do regret - like Blair he has no intention of apologising for the million dead Iraqis je ne regrette rien

Not only was Caplin a major fraudster in his own right (being one of the major culprits in the parliamentary expenses scandal during his time as MP from 1997-2005) but he is also a Junior War Criminal, having served as a Under Secretary of State at the Defence Ministry during the Iraq War. In Cheating MPs still refuse to repay thousands of pounds in expenses the Evening Standard described how

‘Ivor Caplin, a former Labour defence minister, has not replied to correspondence and phone messages asking him to repay £17,865 for mortgage payments.

Letters from Sir Thomas asking him to justify the mortgage claims went unanswered, resulting in the auditor declaring that the entire claim should be refunded to the taxpayer.

Since then, Commons officials have tried to contact Mr Caplin, who stood down at the last election, without getting a response.

The former MP did not respond to messages left by the Evening Standard on his phone and at lobbying firm Foresight Consulting, which lists him as a senior consultant.

A Westminster source said: "Officials have made strenuous efforts to discuss this with him, but without success. The vast majority of MPs very quickly agreed to make repayments but there is a small handful of retiring MPs who are refusing to agree."

In the case of retiring MPs, Commons Speaker John Bercow has ruled that money owed must be deducted from their "golden goodbye" resettlement allowances, which are worth up to £64,000.

As a former MP, however, Mr Caplin is beyond their reach unless he volunteers to pay.

He is a hard act to follow but we have no doubt that Caplin will rise to the occasion

Not only can Caplin match Newmark in the fraud stakes, having bought himself a house courtesy of the public purse, but he is also an unrepentant war criminal. In an interview with the Brighton Argus [I totally stand by what happened, says former defence minister] Caplin made it clear that he is a man of principle. “I have no regrets” he said after the damning publication of the Chilcot report. Caplin told the Argus that ‘he stood by his decision to support the war.’ And ‘Like the Prime Minister Tony Blair he dutifully followed and acted as a government whip for, Mr Caplin also failed to apologise specifically for the decision.’ Defiant to the last, Caplin declared “I stand totally by what happened before.’

In happier days - despite remorselessly attacking him, Newmark nearly got elected to Parliament on Corbyn's coat tails, losing by 2,000 in Finchley and Hendon

It is difficult not to admire a man with such deeply held convictions. No fly by night politician is Ivor. Whereas people like Gordon Brown now regret going into Iraq and killing a million or so people, Ivor Caplin has no such doubts. He would do the same tomorrow if given half the chance.

Ivor Caplin seems like an excellent choice as Chair of the Jewish Labour Movement. He is a worthy successor to Jeremy Newmark and one can only wish him well in his post. I am sure that he is going to make the Israeli Labour Party and Benjamin Netanyahu proud.

Tony Greenstein

↧

How sick can they get? Judeo-Nazi settlers celebrate the burning alive of a Palestinian child at the trial of his killers whilst the Police stand idly by

June 23, 2018, 5:07 pm

≫ Next: US court documents reveal - Immigrant children tied down, hooded, beaten, stripped and drugged under Obama

≪ Previous: Our Congratulations to the Jewish Labour Movement on the appointment of Ivor Caplin as their new Chair

For writing a poem calling on fellow Arabs to “resist the settlers robbery” Israeli Palestinian poet Dareen Tatour is facing gaol. Palestinians on Facebook who make any anti-Israel comment are regularly arrested for ‘incitement’ unlike Israelis who are neverprosecuted.

Similarly Sheikh Raeed Saleh, leader of the Northern Islamic League was gaoledfor 9 months for ‘incitement’ and is facing further terms of imprisonment for having led the resistance to Israel’s attacks on Muslim worshippers at the Golden Dome and Al Aqsa mosque.

No attempt was made by the Police to take down this banner and prosecute those holding it. But a demonstration against the murder of Gaza's protestors was violently attacked in Tel Aviv

By way of contrast Israeli Jews who incite and threaten violence, including chanting ‘Death to the Arabs’ are never prosecuted. The two rabbis, Yitzhak Shapira and Josef Elitzur, who authored Torat HaMelech, a religious handbook of when it is permitted to kill non-Jews, including children and infants, have never faced any charges. Israel’s High Court upheldthe Attorney General’s decision not to prosecute the rabbis for incitement to racial hatred.

You can get the flavour of the book from the following article:

‘Many saw the book as justifying violence against Palestinians and Arabs. One chapter states that the prohibition of “Thou shalt not kill” does not apply to a Jew who kills a gentile. It also claims that it is permitted to kill an enemy during a state of war even if he poses no threat. In addition to a chapter on the spiritual inferiority of non-Jews, the authors write that even noncombatants and children, if they are non-Jewish, may be killed in war.

But when supporters of the murder of little baby Ali Dawabshe taunt his grandfather with the most obscene, Nazi-like comments about his grandson being ‘grilled’ Israel’s police stood idly by, which is a eloquent testimony to the embedded racism of Israel’s Police.

Palestinian child Ahmed Dawabsheh can be seen in hospital receiving treatment after being burnt alive by Israeli settlers [file photo]

In 2015 the home of the Dawabshehs was set alight by Molotov cocktails in the early hours of the morning. The father and mother both died from their burns as did 18 month old Ali. 4 year old Mohammed suffered severe burns but survived. Israel’s authorities denied him ‘anti-terrorism’ compensation because the family were not Jewish.

Nonetheless after world wide outrage some of what is known as the hilltop youth were arrested and some were tortured. Although Palestinians are regularly tortured this was a first for Jews and for once the settlers poured forth their outrage – not at torture per se of course but at the fact that Jews were tortured.

Below is an article by Jonathan Ofir, an exiled Israeli musician on these horrors.

Settlers, the 'hilltop youth' demonstrate their perverted lust

Ali is on the grill!’ Israeli settlers celebrate burning of Palestinian baby

Jonathan Ofir June 21

Hussein Dawabshe, with his grandson Ahmad, in 2016.

There’s something particularly disturbing about celebrating the burning alive of a baby.

This is precisely what Israeli Jewish settlers were doing yesterday, outside the court in Lod.“’Ali was burned, where is Ali? Ali is on the grill!”, they chanted, in reference to the 18-month old baby Ali Dawbsheh, who was burnt alive by Jewish terrorists in the West Bank town of Duma in 2015. Ali’s mother Riham and father Saad died of their wounds a few weeks later. Of the family of four, only 5-year-old Ahmad survived the arson with severe burns.

The terror-supporters were actually taunting Ali’s grandfather, Hussein Dawabshe, who was attending a preliminary hearing at which the court decided to indict one adult suspect who confessed to the murders, as well as a minor who was an accomplice. Hussein was accompanied by Palestinian-Israeli lawmakers Ayman Odeh and Ahmed Tibi. Tibi posted the video of the chanting, with policemen standing by doing nothing, and wrote:

Settler Youth demonstrate outside the court wishing that Mohammed had also died

“Where’s Ali? There’s no Ali. Ali is burned. On the fire. Ali is on the grill” – all this was thrown at our face – including at the grandfather Dawbsheh concerning his 18-month-old grandson by the riff raff of ‘price tag’. In front of us stood policemen and officers and did nothing. No words…

The terror supporters also referred to the other family members: “Where is Ali? Where is Riham? Where is Saad? It’s too bad Ahmed didn’t burn as well.”

Death to the Arabs is never prosecuted in Israel - if Arabs were to chant 'Death to the Jews' then not only would they be prosecuted but we would have Zionist organisations the world over telling us that this terrible antisemitism is proof that the Arabs hate us

This is certainly not the first time that the burning of this baby was celebrated. In December 2015, a video showing dozens of wedding guests celebrating the arson went public via Channel 10. The guests are seen dancing with Molotov cocktails, knives and guns, and stabbing a photo of baby Ali Dawabsheh. The wedding couple was said to be “very well known in the radical right”. Following widespread public outrage, Netanyahu distanced himself from the event, saying that these were “shocking images” which “show the true face of a group that constitutes a danger”, but he also provided the “many sides” narrative:

“That is not the proud religious Zionism that contributes to the state, and whose sons serve in the elite units in the army… It is also impossible to compare the scope of that terror with Arab terror. In the last month they [Arabs] carried out hundreds of attacks against us, and we saw just a few Jewish terrorist attacks.”

A year later, 13 people from what became known as the “murder wedding” were indicted for incitement to terrorism.

Meanwhile, last month, in what was probably much less noticed, the Dawabsheh family home was torched once again:

“A group of settlers attacked my home at dawn today, breaking a window and throwing a Molotov cocktail inside before fleeing the scene,” Yasser Dawabsheh said. “We were lucky that I was able to hear them when they attacked, so I was able to evacuate all my family,” he said. “Fire crews reacted quickly and put out the fire before the whole house burnt down…”

The defense had made a central issue of the torture that was applied in the early interrogations close to the time of the arson, and this was a can of worms for the court.

The defendants made an issue of their interrogations by Shin Bet officers, saying that they were tortured. In fact, the settlers had held a press conference to this effect at the very same hall in which the “murder wedding” was held.

The court announced at yesterday’s preliminary hearing that confessions obtained under torture by the Shin Bet interrogators would not be admissible, but that later confessions would be admissible. Haaretz note:

“If the confessions had been declared admissible, they probably would have ended in a conviction of the two suspects, legal experts had said. The rejection is a blow to the State Prosecutor’s Office as it will now be more difficult to obtain a conviction.”

Of course, Israel and the court refer to torture with euphemisms such as “moderate physical pressure” and “special methods”. But it’s torture – and the Haaretz coverage is clear about that, and even charts out some of the torture methods. The thing is, that torture (under whatever euphemism) is legal in Israel under certain circumstances, known as the “ticking bomb” scenario – where there is knowledge of other network members at large, who are bound to perpetrate an attack. Haaretz:

“Law enforcement agencies said the interrogation was justified because the two suspects had knowledge about a group that sought to perpetrate similar attacks. In the event, there were two failed attempts to commit similar attacks.”

So is the court now saying that torture is not permissible under any circumstance?

In 2007, the Israeli Supreme Court ruled that torture was permissible under those ‘special circumstances.’ The Public Committee Against Torture in Israel (PCATI) slammed it, saying the ruling was interpreted by the Shin Bet as a green light to torture almost every Palestinian detainee. “Today in Israel, there is no effective barrier – not legal and certainly not ethical – that stands in the way of using torture. A secret service organization such as the GSS (Shin Bet) decides independently to use torture and, afterwards, investigates itself as to whether the use of interrogation was justified,” the committee said.

Israel has effectively been permitting torture in various modes. In 1987 the Landau commission overtly legalized torture. This prompted the outspoken scientist Yeshayahu Leibowitz to call Supreme Court judge Moshe Landau a “Judeo-Nazi”. Israel has wandered back and forth with the legality and its more or less overt modes, but the practices have continued.

Yet now the Lod court is effectively saying that confessions from such practices are simply inadmissible under any circumstances. Would this also apply to Palestinians? This is doubtfully the case. The court is only a District Court, and it is only relating to this particular case, which happens to involve Jewish – not Palestinian – terrorists.

Judge Ruth Lorach was particularly effusive in her appraisal of the “special methods.” She said, “These methods have hurt the basic rights of the defendants in a severe manner – rights concerning preservation of the wholeness of the body and soul, and they have hurt their dignity.”

(This quote is notably only to be found in the Hebrew version of the Haaretz coverage).

So how much “dignity” are Palestinians really going to get from all this?

The virulently hateful scenes outside the court yesterday did not bode well.

Ahmed Tibi told Ynet that he asked police officers to do something about those chanting and taunting, but that they responded with indifference.

“What would have happened had the situation been reversed?”, he asked. “If 20 Arab youths were shouting about a Jewish fatality ‘he’s on the grill, he’s burning’? How many of them would have gone home with broken legs? How many would have been arrested?” Tibi wondered. “Part of the reason it was horrifying was the police’s indifference, like nothing had happened,” he explained. “They (the police) could have at least removed them from the court. (No need) to break legs. Legs are only broken to Arabs in Haifa, not to Jews. But they could have at least removed them,” he added.

Tibi notes that there were expressions of disgust from across the political spectrum, but silence at its top:

“But lo and behold—not a single minister (said anything), not Miri Regev [minister of culture], not Yisrael Katz [minister of intelligence], not Ayelet Shaked [justice minister], not Naftali Bennett [education minister] and in particular not the prime minister, who knows how to retweet awful things. He remained quiet instead of condemning this sickening phenomenon”.

See Jewish extremists taunt ‘Ali’s on the grill’ at slain toddler’s relatives

↧

US court documents reveal - Immigrant children tied down, hooded, beaten, stripped and drugged under Obama

June 24, 2018, 1:26 pm

≫ Next: In Israeli hospitals, Jewish and Arab women are segregated into separate maternity wards

≪ Previous: How sick can they get? Judeo-Nazi settlers celebrate the burning alive of a Palestinian child at the trial of his killers whilst the Police stand idly by

Democratic Hypocrisy over the separation of child immigrants – they began it as a ‘Consequence Delivery System’

Nothing is more hypocritical than seeing the Democrat's Senate leader, Charles Schumer the New York Senator, waxing lyrical about how terrible Trump’s separation of child immigrants is and what a blow it is to ‘American values.’ This is the same Schumer who has defended Israel’s murder of over 120 unarmed Palestinians in Israel’s turkey shoot in Gaza. It is the same Schumer who has defended every Zionist barbarity and dehumanised Palestinians as the ultimate ‘other’.

It's not enough to demand an end to family separation - there must be an end to the detention of migrant workers.

Now it turns out that the Democrat’s outrage over Trump’s border policy is entirely synthetic and at one with their support for Israel’s abuse of Palestinian children. It was under Obama, who deported over 2 million refugees, that the policy of child separation first began. The articles below give examples of the what these children have experienced in America’s prison estate courtesy of Obama, Clinton and Schumer. Trump merely ramped up the policy and, even worse, publicised and justified it. Trump’s principal crime seems to have been to try and justify the separation of children. If he had kept quiet then so would Senators Schumer, Feinstein and all the other Democrat hypocrites.

Children like this were caged under Democrat administrations without a peep from the glitterati

We should bear this is in mind when we listen to the hyperbolic and hypocritical denunciations of Trump by the Democrats. In the United States there are two ruling capitalist parties, the differences between which are semantic not principled. Although people like Bernie Sanders on the outer edge of the Democrats are not the same as the Clintons and Obamas, mainstream Democrats like Hilary Clinton are no different from the Republicans. Both adhere to both capitalism and the United State’s imperialist role in the world. And that includes unswerving support for the Israeli state, which today provides training for some of the United State’s most murderous and racist police forces.

Amidst all the sound and fury last week, one simple demand was missing and that was an end to the detention of all immigrants and in particular child immigrants.

As it used to be said, the Democrats are the graveyard of all protest politics.

Tony Greenstein

The leader of the Democrats in the Senate, Charles Schumer, who openly supports Israel's murder of unarmed demonstrators. This hypocrite had nothing to say when Obama caged children from Latin America

There is no limit to the self-serving hypocrisy of Charles Schumer

Immigrant children tied down, hooded, beaten, stripped and drugged

By Patrick Martin
22 June 2018

Court documents made public in Virginia and Texas give a glimpse of the systematic brutality being meted out to immigrant children in both public and private jails. Children are strapped down, hooded and beaten, or drugged by force, as part of the everyday procedure in what can only be called the American Gulag.

An Associated Press report published Thursday gave details of the abuses committed last year against young Latino migrants at the Shenandoah Valley Juvenile Center near Staunton, Virginia. Lawyers for the teenage victims sued the prison—a state facility run by a consortium of seven towns and cities in the Shenandoah Valley—and a court hearing is set for July.

Migrant children were sent to Shenandoah detention centre in Virginia to be abused and tortured under Obama

Unfortunately Trump is quite right - it was the Democrats who began imprisoning and separating children in detention

According to a half-dozen sworn statements, given by the victims in Spanish and then translated for filing with the federal court for the Western District of Virginia, children as young as 14 were beaten while handcuffed, tied down to chairs while stripped naked and hooded, and held for long periods in solitary confinement, sometimes naked and cold.

All these are forms of torture practiced at Guantanamo Bay and at CIA torture prisons around the world. These techniques have been transferred back into the United States and unleashed on immigrant children, who have been demonized by the Trump administration.

The lawsuit filed by the nonprofit Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs declares that young Latino immigrants held at Shenandoah “are subjected to unconstitutional conditions that shock the conscience, including violence by staff, abusive and excessive use of seclusion and restraints, and the denial of necessary mental health care.” As a result of “malicious and sadistic applications of force,” the youth have “sustained significant injuries, both physical and psychological.”

A Honduran youth sent to Shenandoah when he was 15 said in his statement, “Whenever they used to restrain me and put me in the chair, they would handcuff me… [They] strapped me down all the way, from your feet all the way to your chest, you couldn’t really move… They have total control over you. They also put a bag over your head. It has little holes; you can see through it. But you feel suffocated with the bag on.”

Shenandoah was set up under Obama not Trump

A 15-year-old from Mexico who spent nine months at Shenandoah described similar treatment.

“They handcuffed me and put a white bag of some kind over my head,” he said, according to his sworn statement. “They took off all of my clothes and put me into a restraint chair, where they attached my hands and feet to the chair. They also put a strap across my chest. They left me naked and attached to that chair for two and a half days, including at night.”

A 14-year-old Guatemalan youth reported frequent imprisonment in his tiny cell for up to 23 hours a day, as well as long periods of physical restraint. “When they couldn’t get one of the kids to calm down, the guards would put us in a chair—a safety chair, I don’t know what they call it—but they would just put us in there all day,” he said in his sworn statement. “This happened to me, and I saw it happen to others, too. It was excessive.”

A 17-year-old who fled Mexico to escape an abusive father and drug cartel violence was arrested at the US border and passed through several detention centers before arriving at Shenandoah, one of three facilities in the United States with contracts from the Office of Refugee Resettlement, part of the Department of Health and Human Services, to provide “secure facilities” for young immigrants. The boy was frequently shackled, usually with cloth bindings, and reported at least one violent strip search and several beatings. He was driven to attempt suicide several times.

Other allegations include that the Latino youth received worse food and facilities than local juvenile prisoners, mostly white, and that meals were frequently cold and inadequate, leaving the children hungry.

The AP interviewed an unnamed child development specialist who had worked with teens at Shenandoah. “The majority of the kids we worked with when we went to visit them were emotionally and verbally abused. I had a kid whose foot was broken by a guard,” she said. “They would get put in isolation for months for things like picking up a pencil when a guard had said not to move. Some of them started hearing voices that were telling them to hurt people or hurt themselves, and I knew when they had gotten to Shenandoah they were not having any violent thoughts.”

Because the children held at Shenandoah were unaccompanied minors, rather than separated from their families, there were some suggestions in the media that they had gang connections that somehow justified the brutal treatment. But according to the AP report, a program director at the facility said the youth had been screened for gang connections and were actually suffering from mental health issues resulting from trauma in their home countries.

The acts of torture involved multiple guards at the facility, which was run by a regional board but under the ultimate control of the state government, headed throughout this period by Democratic Governor Terry McAuliffe. The new governor, Democrat Ralph Northam, who took office January 1, ordered a state investigation into the claims of abuse, but only after the AP report became public Thursday.

Even younger children were targeted for abuse at a Texas facility operated under contract with the Office of Refugee Resettlement, according to a report published by the Center for Investigative Reporting and the Texas Tribune Tuesday. The allegations were further detailed in a court suit filed by the Center for Human Rights & Constitutional Law.

The lawsuit charges that the Shiloh Treatment Center in Manvel, Texas administered psychotropic drugs to immigrant children, who in some cases were separated from their parents at the border. Neither the children, some as young as nine years old, nor the parents gave consent to the treatment, and in some cases, children were forcibly drugged as they fought and screamed.

One report reads: “Some children held at Shiloh reported being given up to nine different pills in the morning and six in the evening, including antipsychotic drugs, antidepressants, Parkinson’s disease medication and seizure medications. They were told they would remain detained if they refused drugs, the lawsuit said. Children also said that after taking the drugs, they experienced side effects that rendered them fatigued and incapable of walking.”

The lawsuit charges: “ORR routinely administers children psychotropic drugs without lawful authorization... When youth object to taking such medications, ORR compels them. ORR neither requires nor asks for a parent’s consent before medicating a child, nor does it seek lawful authority to consent in parents’ stead. Instead, ORR or facility staff sign ‘consent’ forms anointing themselves with ‘authority’ to administer psychotropic drugs to confined children.”

The seven pills named in the court filings—clonazepam, duloxetine, guanfacine, Geodon, olanzapine, Latuda and divalproex—are medications used to control depression, anxiety, attention deficit disorder, bipolar disorder, mood disorders, schizophrenia and seizures. This treatment amounted to applying “chemical straitjackets” to subdue the children, rather than meeting medical needs, the lawsuit charges.

According to the investigative reporting, the ORR paid $3.4 billion to private organizations to hold immigrant children, and nearly half of this, $1.5 billion, went to 13 companies that had been accused of hundreds of serious violations of their responsibility to provide care. These included failure to obtain medical treatment for accidents or illness, “inappropriate contact” between children and staff (apparently of a sexual nature), and neglect.

These reports of horrific treatment of innocent children do not just expose the savagery and sadism of individual guards, administrators and other officials, or the greed of corporate bosses seeking to join in the orgy of profiteering from federal contracts for the detention and abuse of immigrants. What is revealed above all is the criminal character of the American political elite, both Democrats and Republicans, who have deliberately encouraged an atmosphere of brutality and terror as their preferred method of “deterring” immigrants from crossing the US-Mexico border. The responsibility, moreover, rests not just with the sociopathic bully in the White House today, but also with his Democratic predecessor, responsible for more deportations than any previous president.

Obama’s Department of Homeland Security chief Jeh Johnson declared that the jailing of Central American refugees seeking asylum, and the separation of parents and children, would have a positive effect in reducing the sudden influx of refugees in 2014. It was Terry McAuliffe, the longtime crony of Hillary Clinton, who presided over the torture of immigrant teenagers at Shenandoah from 2014 to 2017.

The shift from Obama to Trump has not fundamentally changed the policy of the US ruling class towards immigrants, which has always been of an anti-democratic and brutal character. But in the hands of Trump and his fascistic aide Stephen Miller, the brutality has become more systematic, and it is accompanied by a campaign aimed at whipping up anti-immigrant racism and hysteria over the purported danger that the United States will be “overrun,” as Trump claimed in his speech Wednesday night to a rally in Minnesota.

According to a report in the Wall Street Journal Thursday, the Trump administration awarded multiple contracts involving tens of millions of dollars earlier this year to build detention facilities for children. This confirms that the mass separation of children from their parents, which followed the announcement of the “zero tolerance” policy by Attorney General Jeff Sessions, was not an unexpected byproduct of the new policy, but was planned and deliberate. It is a premeditated crime, the state kidnapping of more than 2,400 children, for which Trump, Sessions, Stephen Miller, Kirstjen Nielsen and other top officials should be prosecuted and jailed.

Far from abandoning this policy—as media reports on the executive order issued by Trump Wednesday suggested—the White House is preparing to accelerate the mass detention of immigrants, including children. A Pentagon spokesman said Thursday that military bases in Texas and Arkansas had been reviewed as possible locations for housing as many as 20,000 immigrant children, double the number currently in custody.

Immigrant teens were allegedly abused and denied medical care at Virginiaprison

Teens as young as 14 allege they were beaten regularly, denied adequate medical treatment, and had bones broken by prison guards.

Several immigrant teens at a Virginia juvenile prison detailed horrific allegations of abuse in newly revealed court filings. Above: A Honduran teenager during an interview at "Casa Alianza", a shelter for Mexican and foreign minors deported from the United States, on June 12, 2014 in Mexico City. (CREDIT: OMAR TORRES/AFP/Getty Images)

Immigrant children being housed in a Virginia detention facility were subjected to brutally abusive conditions, the Associated Press reported Thursday.

The claimswere made public in a series of court filings against the Shenandoah Valley Juvenile Center in Staunton, Virginia, which holds 58 secure beds for youths 12 to 17 years old, and has allegedly imprisoned a number of Latinx teens for anywhere from a few months to several years.

The teens, some of whom are as young as 14, say they were sent to the prison after being accused by U.S. immigration officials of belonging to gangs like MS-13, a favorite topic of discussion for President Trump. Their allegations detail horrific acts of violence, including broken bones, regular beatings, and psychological abuse.

According to the AP, “Latino children were frequently punished by being restrained for hours in chairs, with handcuffs and cloth shackles on their legs. Often, the lawsuit alleged, the children were beaten by staff while bound.”

“Whenever they used to restrain me and put me in the chair, they would handcuff me. They also put a bag over your head,” said one Honduran immigrant who was locked up in the prison when he was only 15 years old.

A former child-development specialist who was previously employed by Shenandoah Valley, and spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity because she was not authorized to comment publicly, told reporters she “saw kids there with bruises and broken bones they blamed on guards.”

The facilities where things go from bad to worse for children separated from their parents

Children separated from their families are already arriving in these more secure facilities, lawyers say.

Amanda Michelle Gomez ,Joshua EatonJun 20, 2018, 5:52 pm

The filings allege that children were frequently denied adequate medical care; one teen, a 17-year-old Mexican citizen detained at the U.S. southern border, claimed that, after being diagnosed with three separate mental disorders, including depression, he was given no further treatment to address the issues.

Some of the teens allege that they were locked in prison cells for most of the day, barring a few hours each day during which they were given meals, recreation time, or education courses. Others said they were never allowed to go outside.

Shenandoah Valley lawyers have denied the allegations outlined in the lawsuit, a hearing for which will be held July 3 in Virginia.

The alleged abuses further compound concerns from migrant rights groups and immigration lawyers who have heard complaints about the facility and others like it, and worry about the children detained and separated from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border who could soon be sent there.

Under the Trump administration’s zero-tolerance immigration policy, anyone detained at the border without documentation is referred to authorities for criminal prosecution, a change from past administrations, who treated unauthorized border crossings as a misdemeanor. The policy makes no exceptions for asylum-seekers, many of whom have been illegally turned away from the border ports of entry.

Due to a 1997 court settlement, Flores v. Reno, officials are barred from holding children in detention facilities for longer than 20 days. The Trump administration has exploited that loophole to violently separate immigrant children from their parents, under the guise of following the law, sending kids to their own facilities or internment camps, sometimes without their parents’ knowledge.

Trump signed an executive order Wednesday ordering border agents to keep families detained together and asking the courts to change their view on Flores, which means that indefinite detainment of families could be a possibility.

Currently, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is charged with handling the children who have already been separated as well as thousands of other unaccompanied immigrant minors. While the majority remain in detention facilities — with children under the age of 12, including infants, being housed in “tender age” prison camps — HHS also contracts with three secure detention centers, including Shenandoah Valley, and several semi-secure facilities and psychiatric treatment centers, to house youths it deems dangerous or disruptive.

As ThinkProgressreported this week, that could include anyone from a child who has a fight, to one with a suspected gang affiliation, to a teen in the middle of a mental health crisis.

‘Tender age’ facilities across U.S. rampant with allegations of abuse

Sexual abuse, lapses in medical care, neglect — and that's just what we know.

Immigration lawyers say they’re worried children currently suffering traumatic breakdowns after being ripped from their parents’ care at the border may be labeled “disruptive” and sent to places like Shenandoah Valley.

“We haven’t seen any of the family separation cases yet — probably just because I don’t know if any of them have made their way to Virginia,” Legal Aid lawyer Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg, who works with children housed at the prison and another Virginia detention facility, told ThinkProgress Wednesday. “But I’m sure we will any day now.”

“Undoubtedly, children that are ripped away from their parents at the border are experiencing an extreme form of trauma that they are not equipped to handle,” Jesse Hahnel, executive director of the National Center for Youth Law added in an email. “This trauma may lead to intense mental health distress that paves the path to their being stepped up to more secure facilities.”

Once those children arrive at the facilities, they’re at risk of suffering the kinds of alleged abuses detailed in the Shenandoah Valley lawsuit — and more.

“We’ve heard children in secure detention and staff-secure detention taking medication and not knowing the names of the medication or what they’re for,” Nithya Nathan-Pineau, a lawyer representing migrant children at two secure detention facilities in Virginia, told ThinkProgress. “[They’re] also being told that if they don’t take the medication, that will be counted against their behavior.”

She added that many of the children she had worked with previously were not warned ahead of time that they were being transferred to the prisons from their detention facilities, or given any chance to challenge the reasoning behind their move.

“They may be given a written notice of why they’re being stepped up, but they often, they don’t totally understand it, or it’s not something that’s very clear to them,” she said. “The process isn’t very clear."

↧

In Israeli hospitals, Jewish and Arab women are segregated into separate maternity wards

June 25, 2018, 8:34 am

≫ Next: The Theft of a Blind Palestinian Girl’s Savings is Just a Small Illustration of the Petty Cruelty of the Zionist State

≪ Previous: US court documents reveal - Immigrant children tied down, hooded, beaten, stripped and drugged under Obama

‘This is about a superior race, racial purity... This is a Nazi way of thinking.’

Nothing is more guaranteed to raise the ire of Zionists than to tell them that Israel is an Apartheid state. After all, they say, Arabs have the vote. Which is true except that in Israel politics are ethnically not class based. Arab parties are therefore always in the minority. Class politics are almost absent from both the Knesset and Israeli society, subsumed by Jewish supremacy, segregation and Zionist chauvinism.

The key test of any Apartheid society is the question of segregation. In the Deep South of the USA and South Africa this meant signs saying ‘No Blacks or Coloreds’. In Israel segregation is far more subtle. There are for example no signs in schools saying No Arabs yet Israel’s schools are completely segregated between Jew and Arab (except for a handful of private ones). Likewise Jewish towns exclude Arabs as do social clubs and facilities. Again there are no signs.

In Israel’s hospitals there are no signs saying that Jewish and Arab women are segregated when giving birth but that is the situation.

This issue came to the fore a few years ago when Bezalel Smotrich MK, a Deputy Speaker of Israel’s Knesset and member of the far-Right Habayit Hayehudi called for Jewish and Arab women giving birth to be segregated remarkingthat "it's only natural that my wife would not want to lie next to a woman giving birth to a baby who would want to slaughter her baby 20 years from now." There were the usual hypocritical denunciations of this from both the Zionist left and right.

Habayit Hayehudi MK Bezalel Smotrich.Olivier Fittousi

Smotrich’s wife explainedthat "The very first moment a baby comes out to this world is a holy moment, a pure moment, a Jewish moment."According to a radio report

‘only two hospitals refuse to participate in segregation: the Rambam hospital in Haifa and Soroka hospital in Beersheba. At least five hospitals nationwide engage in the practice, the radio reported, though the hospitals denied that segregation was a matter of policy. Officials at some said they would consider it if mothers requested it.

I wrote about this phenomenon in an article dealing with the segregation of men and women at the Hebrew University [Israel's Universities Plan Gender-separate Classes for ultra-Orthodox - Saudi Arabia comes to Israel]. The liberal American Jewish paper, The Forward reported that Maternity Ward Segregation (is) Just Tip of the Iceberg in Israel.

Below are articles in Ha'aretz and +972 Magazine describing this practice. But remember, if you hold an Israel Apartheid week at a British university you will be accused of anti-Semitism under the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of anti-Semitism. People like Emily Thornberry will call for the expulsion from the Labour Party of anyone who opposes the Jewish Apartheid nature of the Israeli state and Ken Livingstone has been forced to resign from the Labour Party for telling the truth about the history of the vile racist movement that goes by the name of Zionism.

Uproar in Israel: MK calls for hospital segregation quoted Uri Misgav, who published an opinion piece in Ha’aretz " The Judeo-Nazis in Israel's Legislature" referring to "Smotrich and his loyalists." Misgav wrote that "This is not just racism. Racism is always reprehensible and it is important to fight it. But there are also degrees of racism."

"What we see here is a debate about a superior race, racial purity and holiness. About an inferior race that could contaminate the upper race. About a living space uncontaminated by the enemy. About babies who will grow up to be deadly enemies, because they belong to a race of enemies. This is a Nazi way of thinking. There are no other words to put that."

It is fortunate that Misgav wasn’t a member of the Labour Party because that detestable racist, Labour's Shadow Foreign Secretary Emily Thornberry would be calling for his expulsion. After all under the fake IHRA definition of ‘anti-Semitism’ comparing anything in Israel to the Nazis is ‘anti-Semitic’!

Tony Greenstein

A maternity ward in Israel with an Arab and Jewish nurse in the background. (Seth J. Frantzman)

In Israeli Maternity Wards, Jewish and Arab Segregation Is the Default

More than a decade after the practice was exposed in investigative reports, Arab women say it has not ended and the Health Ministry tuns a blind eye

Revital Hovel and Ido Efrati May 18, 2018 3:05 AM

New evidence from four Israeli hospitals indicates that maternity wards place Jewish and Arab women in separate rooms on their own initiative, not only at the expectant mothers’ request.

“We generally arrange this automatically,” a representative of Haemek Hospital in Afula told a pregnant woman who inquired about the hospital’s policy in a conversation that she recorded.

“We try to arrange separate rooms because the culture and visiting times are really different,” said a nurse in the hospital. “You feel very intensely that there’s one person and there’s a clan. We try, we can’t say 100 percent, but on days that there’s no pressure, we arrange separate accommodations [for people speaking] different languages.”

This and other recordings are part of the testimonies of four Arab women who gave birth and were roomed separately from Jewish women at Hadassah University Hospital, Mt. Scopus in Jerusalem; Haemek in Afula; Nahariya’s Western Galilee Hospital in and Soroka Medical Center in Be’er Sheva. The women filed a class action Wednesday against the long-standing practice, which they call discriminatory.

More than a decade after the practice was exposed in a number of investigative reports, causing a public storm, Arab women say it has not ended and that the Health Ministry continues to turn a blind eye. In the class-action, filed by lawyers Nadav Miara and Gil Ron of Gil Ron Kenan & Co., in cooperation with the Class Action Clinic of the Tel Aviv University law school, the four are demanding that hospitals prohibit such segregation and pay significant compensation to anyone offended by the policy, in the hope that hitting hospitals in their pockets will finally lead to change.

“The subject of segregation in maternity wards has been in the headlines for a long time; it was in the Knesset, it was in the press, it’s not something new,” said Prof. Alon Klement, Israel’s most prominent class-action attorney and the clinic’s academic supervisor.

“The Class Action Clinic spoke with dozens of women to determination the extent of this segregation. Our research showed that things haven’t changed sufficiently, and there is still blatant segregation in the hospitals. We spoke to women who were made to feel terrible by the experience. The four plaintiffs signed on the suit were willing to stand up and represent an entire group because it is so important to them,” Klement said.

He estimates that thousands of Arab women have been segregated from Jewish ones in this fashion over the past seven years (earlier cases are subject to a statute of limitations).

Rana (a pseudonym), a social worker who lives in Jerusalem, had her three children at Hadassah on Mount Scopus. She became aware of the separation policy in 2009, when she gave birth to her second daughter.

“After the birth I was transferred to the maternity ward and was hospitalized in a room with two other Arab mothers,” she recalls in her affidavit. “When one of my roommates was discharged, an Arab woman replaced her, which aroused my suspicions. As I looked through the rooms on the ward, I saw the segregation — Arab mothers were placed separately, not with Jewish mothers.”

When Rana wrote a complaint letter, a nurse came to her room and explained that the separation was done out of “social sensitivity” and was also in the best interests of the Arab women. “I was not convinced,” wrote Rana. “I felt that this was an excuse for racial segregation.”

In the winter of 2017, Rana returned to Hadassah to give birth to her third child. “This time I was also in a room with only Arab women,” she wrote. Each Arab woman who was discharged was replaced by another Arab woman. “I felt humiliated, I was offended,” she concluded.

Two years ago, an investigative report by Israel Radio brought testimonies of segregation at Hadassah and other hospitals. That was when MK Bezalel Smotrich raised a storm when he commented, “My wife is really no racist, but after giving birth she wants rest and not the mass feasts that are common among Arab mothers who give birth.” He added fuel to the fire later when he tweeted, “It’s only natural my wife would not want to lie next to someone who just gave birth to a baby that might murder her baby in another 20 years.”

That this segregation continues as a matter of policy was made clear in the research done for the class action, in which women phoned various hospitals and asked about the separation of Arabs and Jews in calls that were recorded. Women also asked these questions during tours of the hospitals. All the hospitals responded that the separation was arranged without anyone needing to ask.

Testimony to this policy at Soroka came not just from Arab women who gave birth there and researchers who inquired, but from Naomi, a Jewish teacher from an area kibbutz who had her three children there. When she gave birth there last month, she was put in a room with another Jewish woman. When that mother was discharged the following morning, she was replaced by an Arab woman.

“Shortly afterward a nurse came over and apologized,” Naomi wrote in her affidavit.

“I didn’t understand what the apology was for. The nurse, who was careful to whisper, answered that it was because they’d put ‘her,’ the Arab woman, in the room. She said the department staff did not usually do that and that I had the right to ask to move to another room. The nurse added that the department staff always tried not to put Arab and Jewish women in the same room, but this time there was no choice because this was last available bed in the ward.”

“I was shocked and embarrassed. The whole conversation took place with my roommate lying next to me with only a curtain separating us. I knew she spoke Hebrew and I explained to the nurse that there was no reason for the Arab woman to disturb me. We are all brothers and we are all equal.”

When Hana (a pseudonym) had her fourth child at Haemek Hospital in the summer of 2016, she was put in an Arab-only room, as had been the case after the three previous births. This time she asked if she could be moved to a larger room. “My request was accepted, apparently because I’d had a difficult birth,” she wrote in her affidavit.

“I got to the room with my husband during the night. The Jewish mother who was in the room heard us speaking Arabic and ran out of the room, demanding in a loud voice not to be in a room with an Arab mother. Unfortunately, this request was accepted. Within a short time, The Jewish woman was moved to a different room. After that only Arab mothers were put in my room. I felt humiliated and offended even more than the other times. I felt like they were treating me like a person from an inferior race.”

Of the four hospitals being sued, only Western Galilee Hospital, in Nahariya, is government-owned. Dunya (a pseudonym) gave birth there in 2011 and in 2014 and both times had to remain in the hospital for more than a week after the delivery. “Both times, throughout my hospitalization, not one Jewish mother was put in the room with me. Women came and went, but all of them were Arabs,” she said.

Nothing has changed since then. Women who called the hospital and recorded the conversations were told the segregation policy was still in effect. “How do you divide the rooms?” asked one woman inquiring about giving birth in the hospital. “Well if you’re asking, there is separation,”said the hospital representative. “If you mean Jewish-Arab, then we don’t put [them] together.”

Then-Health Ministry Director General Roni Gamzu refused to issue written instructions barring such segregation. “I do not intend to issue a circular on this issue. It will be disgraceful and probably do more harm than good,” he wrote to Physicians for Human Rights in 2013. A State comptroller’s report issued last year criticized the Health Ministry for not investigating the issue. In its response to the comptroller, the ministry said that since there hadn’t been any official complaints, “As far as we’re concerned it’s not a phenomenon.”

In 2016, Health Ministry Director General Moshe Bar Siman Tov summoned hospital directors to a meeting on this issue. The hospital directors denied there was an official policy on segregating by religion or nationality. They claimed that if it was happening, it was done at the mothers’ requests out of a desire to please them. They explained that the hospitals compete fiercely for births because they get 13,000 shekels (around $3,600) from the National Insurance institute for each birth and thus seek to satisfy the mothers.

For this report the Health Ministry responded, “The suit has not yet been received, and when it is received it will be studied and we will respond in court, as is customary.”

'Israeli maternity wards segregate Jewish, Arab mothers'

+972 Magazine, Michael Schaeffer Omer-Man Published April 5, 2016

An investigative report finds that numerous Israeli hospitals are openly implementing segregation. But journalists have exposed the phenomenon for at least a decade and nobody seems willing to do anything about it.

Despite years of denials and regulators vowing to tackle the problem, a number of major Israeli hospitals continue to segregate Jewish and Arab mothers in maternity wards across the country, according to an investigation published Tuesday by public radio broadcaster Israel Radio.

The segment on Israel Radio included recorded conversations with three separate hospitals in which a Jewish reporter posed as an expectant mother shopping around for a maternity ward.

The reporter asked a maternity nurse in each hospital whether after giving birth she could avoid being placed in the same room as a non-Jewish (read: Palestinian) woman.

“That’s not a problem, we always do that,”answered a maternity nurse at the Mt. Scopus campus of Jerusalem’s Hadassah Hospital.

‘Is that an official policy of the hospital?’ The reporter followed up.

“Of course,” the nurse responded. “Especially in the maternity ward… we always try to arrange separate rooms.”

Another hospital, Meir Medical Center in Kfar Saba, told the reporter that it couldn’t guarantee a segregated room but that the maternity staff always tries to keep Jews and Arabs separate. “We try not to mix,” even when patients don’t request it, a representative was recorded as saying.

Two hospitals, Soroka Medical Center in Beer Sheva and Rambam in Haifa, were found to not practice segregation in maternity wards.

Nothing new

The phenomenon of segregating Jewish and Palestinian women in Israeli hospitals is far from new, and it has been reported by major media outlets for at least the past decade.

A 2006 article in Haaretz highlighted the practice in two hospitals in northern Israel. One of the hospitals defended the policy at the time citing “differences in mentality” among Jewish and Palestinian patients.

Six years later, in 2012, the Ma’ariv daily newspaper did an undercover investigation in which it found identical results at some of the exact same hospitals that Israel Radio exposed as implementing segregation. “We try to not put Arabs in the same rooms [as Jewish women],” a Ma’ariv reporter was told in the maternity ward of Kfar Saba’s Meir Medical Center at the time.

All of the exposés on the phenomenon over the past decade included statements from hospital administrators and even Ministry of Health officials rejecting any policies or practices of segregation in the provision of health services, specifically in maternity wards. The Knesset has even held parliamentary hearings into the matter over the years.

And yet the practice continues. Nobody seems to be willing or able to put an end to it.

Not just in health care

Of course, segregation also occurs outside of the medical system in Israel. Inside Israel proper educationis almost entirely segregated, and housing is largely segregated, especially in smaller communities where officially sanctioned systems are in place to ensure ethno-religious homogeny. Across the West Bank, a massive system has been built to ensure segregation in housing, buses, roads, legal systems, and even some streets. And a majority of Jewish Israelis support that segregation.

And even in the Israeli health system segregation does not only take place along Jewish-Arab divides. In 2012 the Health Ministry ordered hospitals across the country to put African asylum seekers into isolation. That was after Tel Aviv’s Sourasky Medical Center was found to be implementing purely racist isolation policies.

MK Bezalel Smotrich (Jewish Home), a member of the ruling coalition, tweeted out a particularly racist diatribe in defense of the maternity ward segregation on Tuesday.

After claiming that Arab families are louder than Jewish families after giving birth, the hyper-nationalist and admittedly homophobic lawmaker added: “it is natural for my wife to not want to lie next to somebody who just gave birth to a baby that might want to murder her baby in 20 years. That’s the most natural, normal thing in the world.”

Pushing back

Anti-racism group Tag Meir, a group usually demonstrates on-the-ground opposition to Jewish settler violence, announced on Tuesday that it was planning a direct action in response to the report on segregation in maternity wards.

The group was calling on activists to come hand out flowers to both Arab and Jewish women in the maternity ward of the Mt. Scopus campus of Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem on Wednesday. Activists held a similar action following a notoriously racist and Islamophobic annual march through Muslim neighborhoods of the Old City of Jerusalem last year.

See also Segregation in Israel does not begin or end on buses, Michael Schaeffer Omer-Man, +972 Magazine May 20, 2015

Who is “offended” by maternity ward segregation at Israeli hospitals?, Seth Frantzman

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The Theft of a Blind Palestinian Girl’s Savings is Just a Small Illustration of the Petty Cruelty of the Zionist State

June 27, 2018, 6:33 am

≫ Next: In Israel non-Jewish Life is Cheap

≪ Previous: In Israeli hospitals, Jewish and Arab women are segregated into separate maternity wards

Why Did the Israeli Army Seize This Blind Palestinian Bereaved Daughter's Cash?

Yasmin Eshtayyeh. Nidal Eshtayyeh

It is easy to get used to Israel’s Kafkaesque inhumanity but every so often you read a story that is so distressing you wonder how any human being could live with themselves for treating anyone else this way. How do Israelis manage this? Because, with some honourable exceptions, they have dehumanised the Palestinians. Palestinians have become sub-human, a species of animal in the wordsof their Deputy Defence Minister Eli Dahan.

The story of Yasmin Eshtayyeh's encounters with the Israel authorities and the theft of her money, energy, agency and dignity is such an example.

Tony Greenstein

The Israeli army confiscated Yasmin Eshtayyeh's cash at a border crossing, calling it 'terrorist money'– without proof, interrogation or trial. She hasn't let adversity stop her from fighting to get it back

By Amira Hass, Apr 03, 2018

About 5,000 shekels led me to Yasmin Eshtayyeh; more precisely, a combination of $357, 500 shekels and 668 Jordanian dinars. Those are the currencies and the amounts that the Israeli authorities at the border crossing with Jordan removed, seized and confiscated from bags of Eshtayyeh and her sister Suhad in 2013. This past February 14, an anonymous soldier from the ombudsman’s office in the bureau of the head of the Israel Defense Forces Central Command ruled that Eshtayyeh did not have the right of appeal or objection. End of discussion.

And immediately, beneath the thin narrative shell of Israelis who confiscate money, a whole life was revealed of a young woman of 31 who has been blind from birth. Her memory tells her that she became aware that she was different only at the age of 5. Her parents, and especially her father, Sael, swaddled and pampered her protectively. Her mother, Muna, always washed her and then dressed her (to this day her mother chooses her clothes for her).

On one occasion, her little cousin visited her, and they bathed together. Suddenly the cousin disappeared. Where was she? She’d gone to get dressed. And it was then that 5-year-old Yasmin grasped that children of her age dress themselves. Then, or earlier, she also noticed that on the street the other children run, jump, go to the grocery store by themselves, whereas she — someone was always holding her hand. The facts piled up. The concept of sight wasn’t yet completely clear to her, but her difference from others was.

The awareness of the existence of a supreme entity that rules all preceded her awareness of blindness and the sense of sight. At least that’s what her memory tells her. At the age of 4 or thereabouts — meaning in 1991 — the family was sitting in the yard of their house in the village of Salem, east of Nablus. “Suddenly someone shouted, ‘Come here, if not, I’ll shoot you,’” she says. The “come here” was in Hebrew, the rest in Arabic. She already knew what shooting was. Apparently she had also heard the word “army.” The thumps on the asphalt that she heard, she knew, were stones being thrown by children. The words didn’t yet jell into a complete concept. It was her first conscious encounter with the voice of a soldier, representative of earthly rule.

“I thought a soldier was a gigantic being,” she recalls. “Bigger than regular people. I didn’t understand how he could behave like that, against human beings.” As with many others, “Jew” and “soldier” became synonyms in her lexicon. It would be the greatest tragedy of her life, when she was 17, that would enable her to distinguish between the two.

Yasmin Eshtayyeh as a child, with her father. Reproduction

‘Request denied’

She won’t forget the soldier named Uri. “One of the worst I’ve seen in my life,” she says. Using that word: “seen.” In December 2013, she took part with other Palestinian women in a gathering in Amman about advancing the rights of disabled women in the Middle East. The girl who had only discovered at age 5 that girls dress themselves was now the holder of a master’s degree in English and translation, and an articulate representative of disabled women who seek to integrate into society and the workforce.

Eshtayyeh worked for the Palestinian organization Stars of Hope, which was founded to promote the integration of women with disabilities, and she represented the organization at the United Nations-sponsored conference that December. Her sister joined her as an escort. When they returned, on December 22, all the other women went through the al-Karameh (“dignity” in Arabic) border crossing (also known as the Allenby crossing) without incident, but to their astonishment, she and her sister were detained.

They were stopped at passport control, were required to remove their head coverings and coats and take off their shoes. They were body-searched, and the money that was found in their handbags was taken. Eshtayyeh tells about the narrow room to which they were taken, the drinking water that wasn’t offered to them and the bathroom they were not permitted to go to, and about the soldier Uri, who wouldn’t let them move, and shouted at them. There was also an Israeli policeman who introduced himself as Ahmed. “He told me: ‘We are concerned that someone from Hamas will use you.’ I replied that I had studied at university, traveled abroad and worked, and that I had never allowed anyone to exploit me.”

They were asked about the source of the money. The answer was easy: 500 shekels (currently $142) and another 98 dinars ($138) were from her salary at Birzeit University, where she was employed as an adviser at the Center for Development Studies. She was very proud of her ability to support herself and also help the family out. She had received the dollars from Stars of Hope to cover expenses during the trip, and she was expected to give back whatever was left over. The money that was taken from her sister was from some girls and women in the family who wanted her to buy cosmetics for them in the Jordanian capital. But the conference days were longer and more intense than they’d expected, they had little time to look for bargains and, above all, they discovered that Amman wasn’t less expensive.

Despite the explanations, before they left they were handed a notification from the Israel Police stating that their money had been seized “due to suspicion of the transfer of funds connected to an illegal association, and the commander of the IDF forces in Judea and Samaria [the West Bank] intends to confiscate the money that was seized.” At about 1:30 A.M., on that December day four years ago, after a delay of eight hours, they were permitted to leave the empty terminal. They begged to be left with a little money so they could take a taxi home. The people who’d taken their money refused. They waited another few hours for an uncle to drive in the middle of the night from the Nablus area and pick them up.

That was the start of a bureaucratic and legal saga that continues to this day, which has woven into Yasmin Eshtayyeh’s life not only soldiers and police officers but also Supreme Court justices Elyakim Rubinstein (now retired), Noam Sohlberg and Menachem Mazuz.

Two Israeli friends wrote letters to the military legal adviser in Judea and Samaria, requesting that the money be returned. They received a response from the legal adviser on April 8, 2014. It stated that just a day earlier, i.e., April 7, an order to confiscate the money was issued, this “in the light of reliable and cross-matching intelligence information that was presented.” Without proof, without evidence, without explanations and details, without hearing what the women had to say. They were not arrested, were not summoned for an interrogation about an offense they had supposedly committed, were not tried.

Until December 25, 2013, Palestinians whose property was confiscated by order of the military commander could at least appeal to a military court. But on that day, Maj. Gen. Nitzan Alon, at the time the head of Central Command and the sovereign in the West Bank, signed an order depriving military courts of that authority and thus exempting the confiscators of the need to provide any semblance of proof and transparency.

In a society in which large families are dependent on one salary, and where the minimum monthly wage is 1,400 shekels ($405), and many women earn even less than that, 5,000 shekels is a great deal of money. The sisters turned for assistance to Yesh Din: Volunteers for Human Rights, an organization that operates in Israel and the West Bank. Yesh Din attorneys Michael Sfard, Emily Schaeffer Omer-Man and Noa Amrami petitioned the High Court of Justice in their name. The petition argued that the confiscation order was illegal as was the denial of the right of appeal. The High Court united the petition with two similar cases. The justices did not even address the cases of confiscation in the petitions, and ruled that there was no legal impediment in the order by the head of Central Command denying the right of appeal. At the same time, they suggested that the army make possible “a forum of objection or appeal on the confiscation decisions,” to reduce the number of petitions to the High Court. They thought that the specific cases that were now before them would be resolved within the framework of such a “forum.”

Yasmin Eshtayyeh. Nidal Eshtayyeh

The army accepted the proposal, with one substantial difference: A committee was duly established consisting of representatives from the office of the military advocate general, the Intelligence Corps and the Civil Administration — but its authority was limited to discussing “seizure of objects,” a stage preceding confiscation. Anyone whose property had already been declared confiscated could kiss it goodbye. Last May, the justices expressed their satisfaction, declared that the petition had “achieved a goal of importance” and ordered the state to pay the representatives of the three petitioners court costs of 10,000 shekels ($2,850).

For Yasmin and Suhad Eshtayyeh this was a Kafkaesque outcome. Thanks to their petition, among others, the justices had suggested that the order be amended, and a military committee was set up to hear objections, but they themselves were unable to appear before the committee because their money had already been declared “confiscated.” Sfard and another Yesh Din attorney, Sophia Brodsky, asked a representative of the state prosecution, attorney Roy Shweika, to find a way out. He refused. They asked for a clarification from the court, which had mistakenly thought that its judgment had also intimated a solution for the appellants. Last November, Justice Sohlberg ruled that, as far as he was concerned, the sisters could submit a new petition. In other words, another court fee to pay, more running around. More time and mental and material resources wasted.

The lawyers then wrote to the current head of Central Command, Maj. Gen. Roni Numa, and to the legal adviser, Lt. Gen. Eyal Toledano, in the hope that possibly they would agree to show flexibility, revoke the confiscation order and allow the sisters to submit their objection to the committee that had been established in the wake of their petition. But the anonymous soldier from the ombudsman’s office in the legal adviser’s bureau, who replied last month, clung to the circular explanation: The information that led to the confiscation (without the right of appeal) was solid and reliable, the committee discusses only pre-confiscation appeals of seizures. “Your client’s case is not consistent with the committee’s authority.” Request denied.

The IDF Spokesperson’s Unit, responding to a request for comment, told Haaretz, “In 2014, money was confiscated from the Palestinians mentioned in the article which, according to reliable intelligence information, is terrorist money originating in the Hamas organization.” By the way, Hamas was never mentioned in the official notifications the two received.

To see the sea

“We know that change is possible,” states the “Guide for (Public) Pressure and Advocacy for the Subject of Disabilities: Concepts and their Application,” published by Birzeit University’s Center for Development Studies. Yasmin Eshtayyeh is one of the guide’s authors. The center combines the development of theoretical thinking with public and social activity. She worked there as an adviser in a project that lasted about a year and a half on society’s attitude toward people with disabilities. The guide mentions, as proof of the possibility to change, the activities of Palestinian associations of disabled people and a 1999 Palestinian law that clarifies their rights. In April 2015, she appeared at a public event where she spoke about the belief in the change that people can foment. The occasion was the annual Memorial Day ceremony held by the Israeli-Palestinian organization Combatants for Peace, to which she had been invited as a bereaved daughter: a settler from Itamar, Yehoshua Elitzur, murdered her father, Sael, on September 27, 2004.

The Eshtayyeh family. Reproduction

In her speech she stated, “The anger and the hatred that accompanied me would probably have continued to haunt me if I had not met other Jews.” A few days after her father was murdered, activists from the Villages Group in Israel came to the village to express their condolences and anger. Eshtayyeh told the audience at the ceremony that at first she had refused to shake the hands of one of the activists, “because she was a Jew.” Gradually she relented and got to know other members in the group of activists. They and other Israeli Jews led her to believe in change that people can foment. One of the activists gave music lessons in the village. Eshtayyeh was invited as an interpreter. She fell in love with the harp, which allowed her “to see the sea, which I have never visited,” and she began to learn to play the instrument.

Following the ceremony she joined the Parents Circle–Families Forum (the forum of bereaved families), and has been an active member since then.

Her father was employed for 18 years by a Rishon Letzion-based company that distributes cooking-gas tanks. His work there was terminated during the second intifada. At the age of 46, he started to work as the driver of a group cab. In the days of the roadblocks and roads closed to Palestinians, that meant traveling on dirt trails and bypassing the long lines at the checkpoints, to get people to work, school, the market and medical clinics.

At the memorial ceremony she said, “My father was the sole provider. And the worst nightmare in life happened to us. On September 27, 2004, my father went to work as he did every day, and when he turned onto a bypass road built by settlers, so they could travel without rubbing up against Palestinians, a settler attacked him and shot him in the heart. The murderer is a German who converted to Judaism and lives in a settler outpost next to Itamar.”

Yehoshua Elitzur, the settler who killed Sael Eshtayyeh, in court in 2004. \ Moti Kimche

The killer, who was convicted of manslaughter, was for some reason placed under house arrest after the murder and again after the conviction. Before sentence was pronounced, he disappeared. Haaretz correspondent Shay Fogelman looked for him, in a labyrinthine journey combining detective work with history to which he devoted five years of his life and which also jelled into a film that will be screened in a few months. In the meantime, Yehoshua Elitzur was tracked down in Brazil, from which he was extradited to Israel in mid-January of this year. He is now in prison, awaiting his sentence.

The hunt for Elitzur drew Fogelman close to the Eshtayyeh family. Yasmin mentions him with special fondness. He was a witness to the absurd situation in which many Palestinian families whose loved ones are killed by Israeli soldiers or civilians find themselves: the Shin Bet security service and the army mark them as “dangerous.” And the fact is, almost every year, soldiers are dispatched to break into Yasmin’s family’s house in the middle of the night and conduct searches. “Fine, let them search, but they always leave behind broken things and a big mess,” she says.

Two years ago, Eshtayyeh and her younger brother, Mohammed, who is also blind from birth, went to Sheba Medical Center in Tel Hashomer for a special eye examination. The two of them may be eligible for the implantation of a device that would let them see. Their mother, who’s 57, accompanied them. At the checkpoint she was told: “Denied.” The two waited for friends from the bereaved-families forum to come and escort them. Since stepping up her activity in the forum, Yasmin, too, has been added to the list of Palestinians denied entry to Israel, after many years during which she received permits.

Despite her academic degrees and success in time-limited projects, Eshtayyeh is unable to find a permanent job — her biggest wish. Implementation lags behind Palestinian law for integrating disabled people into society, she says, and people with disabilities still feel discrimination. Those with sight or who don't need to use a wheelchair also often need connections to find a job. Discrimination against women with disabilities is even more acute, and the social misgivings about them are sharper yet — a blind woman has little prospect of raising a family.

Still, tell me about happy days in your life, I asked her a few weeks ago when we were sitting on the porch of their home. A big smile lit up her face: “The two happiest days of my life were the parties that mom organized for me in honor of my first degree, in English language and literature, and afterward in honor of my second degree, in translation,” she said. Everything and everyone was there. Debka folk dancing, fireworks, festive attire, a special hairdo under the kerchief and dozens of people from the family and the village who came to share in her joy and pride

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In Israel non-Jewish Life is Cheap

June 28, 2018, 7:17 pm

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≪ Previous: The Theft of a Blind Palestinian Girl’s Savings is Just a Small Illustration of the Petty Cruelty of the Zionist State

For Killing a Palestinian prisoner 9 months, for slapping an Israeli soldier 8 months - Israeli Justice at its finest

The Lynching of Hoftar Zarhum

When Palestinian prisoners went on hunger strike to demand better conditions, the standard Israeli retort was that of Avi Dichter, the Public Security Minister and former head of Shin Bet, Israel's MI5: ‘Barghouti Has Blood on His Hands, Must Stay in Prison’.

Of course if you are Jewish then having the blood of Palestinians on your hands is no problem. Indeed it can be a positive boon. Elor Azaria, an Israeli army medic no less, who fired at point blank range at a Palestinian lying prone on the ground because he had allegedly tried to stab a soldier with a knife, became a hero. His charge was reduced from murder, which it obviously was, to manslaughter. Why are Israelis lauding soldier Elor Azaria as a hero?

Sentenced to a ludicrous 18 months imprisonment even this was successively reduced to 9 months. As a final insult to his victim, Azaria was let out of prison two days early in order to attend his brother’s wedding.

Ahed Tamimi

Indeed Azaria received just one month more for murdering a Palestinian than Ahed Tamimi did for slapping a heavily armed soldier who invaded the grounds of her house. Remember that originally Education Minister Naftali Bennett had said that Ahed should spend the rest of her life in prison.

None of this should surprise people. In 2009 Rabbis Yitzhak Shapira and Yosef Elitzur wrote a book, Torat HaMelech (the King’s Torah). This learned study explained how it was possible to murder non-Jews, including children and infants, according to halacha (Jewish law) without incurring a penalty. As should be widely known, the Talmud makes a distinction between the killing of a Jew and a non-Jew, only the former of which is a capital offence. [see Murder and Genocide in Jewish Religious Law, Israel Shahak]

Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein declared that the authors would not be prosecuted. In the case of the leader of the Northern League, Sheikh Raed Salah, the Israeli state pulled out all the stops to convict him of incitement to hatred, even though the evidence was so tenuous that the original decision to acquit him by the Jerusalem Magistrates Court had to be overturned by the Jerusalem District Court in a nakedly political decision.

Raed Salah had allegedly invoked the Jewish blood libel myth in an attack on the Israeli authorities for barring access to the Al Aqsa and Golden Dome mosques. However Raed Salah denied making any such comparison. As he exclaimed “Show me one Jewish inciter who has been jailed.”

That is why the horrific incident below when an Eritrean refugee was lynched by Israeli vigilantes is so outrageous. Their punishment? Not the 35 years for Marwan Barghouti or other Palestinians, but community service. This is yet another reason why Israel is an apartheid state. Justice for Palestinians is always different from that for Jews.

Tony Greenstein

Nine Israelis Who Savagely Murdered African Refugee Get Off with Community Service

by Richard Silverstein

In all the annals of miscarriage of justice, Israel-style, this one is right up there. Two years ago, during the Knife Intifada, an Israeli Bedouin attacked the Beersheva bus station. One soldier was killed and ten others wounded. In all the confusion, Israeli vigilante bystanders, who included both police personnel and prison guards, saw an Eritrean refugee, Haftom Zarhum, who'd come to Beersheva to renew his work visa.

Hoftar Zarhum, lynched by bloodthirsty Israeli vigilantes who get slap on the wrist for cold-blooded murder

Even though Eritrean refugees look nothing like Palestinians and he had no weapon, they decided that Zarhum was the terrorist and began assaulting him. Eight shots were fired into his body from almost point-blank range. They kicked him in the head and beat him senseless. Then the "piece de la resistance" of torture was the vigilante who ripped a row of metal chairs from the floor, ran over to the victim and brought the entire apparatus down on his head with full force. Though the coroner said the bullets killed him, this was certainly the coup de grâce (I don't know French well enough to know that the opposite of grace is in this case--the word is certainly is inapt in this grisly case).

I posted about this case when it was first reported. Though there was tremendous soul-searching in some Israeli circles about the savagery of this attack. I apologize for the violence in the above video--I usually eschew this approach to reporting, but this incident is so egregious I want everyone who can stomach it to watch the horrific violence and consider where it comes from and what it means). Some Israelis were horrified by the homicidal racism which spurred this lynching.

But I knew in my heart it would all be swept under the rug. That indeed is what the Israeli justice system proposes. After all the outrage, the overwhelming force of the national security state came to bear. The police and prison authority united to protect their own. As a result, the guy (referred to as "Moyal" in the passage below) who smashed Zarhum with the chairs gets off scot-free (just after the killing he told an interviewer: "what's to apologize for?"). The other seven defendants get off with no jail time at all. They will do community service and perhaps shed a crocodile tear or two (or not) and return to their lives:

Under the plea bargain offered, Moyal, who had worked at a shwarma sandwich shop at the bus station during the incident, will be convicted of abusing a helpless person. The penalty under law is up to seven years in prison. The original charge, of aggravated assault, carries up to 20 years imprisonment. But if the plea bargain is approved, Moyal won’t do a day behind bars, after the prosecution agreed to community service, the extent of which will be determined by the court. Moyal’s defense lawyers will also be able to demand that Moyal’s conviction be set aside...

In June 2016, a Prisons Service tribunal decided against charging prison warden Hananiya Shabbat for involvement in the mob attack on Zarhum.

In some circles they'll even be applauded as heroes of the nation just as the IDF murderer of Abd al-Fatah a-Sharif, Elor Azarya, was hailed as the conquering hero after the IDF brought him up on relatively minor charges in the aftermath of the cold-blooded execution. They'll say of the Beersheva killers: "well you never know with these people. He could very well have been a terrorist. You did what you thought best to protect us."

But make no mistake, this was an act of terrorism, cold-blooded vigilante lynching like what Southern whites did to Blacks a century ago. It doesn't matter what the killers thought they were doing or how confusing the situation might have been. This was blood vengeance. And the Israeli justice system's whitewashing of the legal case with these pathetic sentences is state sanctioning of such terrorism.

This is the fate of African refugees in Israel. Viewed as little more than infiltrators. A spreading cancer, toxic to the Jewish state and its pure bloodlines. Instead of, if not welcoming, them, at least being cognizant of the Jewish people's historic responsibility to treat strangers with a minimum of dignity, they are hated, imprisoned, and expelled, contrary to international humanitarian law. This is but one of many reasons I believe it's a misnomer to call Israel a Jewish state. It ignores or even disdains some of the most cherished traditions of Judaism, in favor of a truculent, violent, even homicidal version of the religion, which I prefer to call Judeanism. Personally, I find this distorted religion to be little more than pagan idolatry, the worship of supposedly historical myths, relics and ruins, in favor of real living people and ethical values.

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John Mann MP’s opposition to ‘anti-Semitism’ doesn’t extend to Gypsies and Travellers

June 30, 2018, 6:23 pm

≫ Next: Shame on Time Out for Supporting Apartheid - Inminds Activists Destroy Israeli 'Ice-Cream' Hasbara Stunt

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John Mann's Racist Hypocrisy - whilst opposing ‘anti-Semitism’ he fans the flames of racism against Roma and Gypsies

How is one to understand the fact that John Mann MP, who is Chair of the Parliamentary Committee Agains Anti-Semitism is a common and garden racist when it comes to Travellers, Gypsies and Roma?

In ‘the Bassetlaw anti-social behaviour handbook – your guide to the law’, written by Mann, advice is given to his constituents on how to deal with ‘loitering by youths’, ‘graffiti’, ‘neighbours from hell’, ‘alcohol’ – and ‘travellers’. In other words Travellers, Gypsies and Roma are one more social nuisance to be dealt with by way of an ASBO.

Strangely Mann's opposition to 'antisemitism' doesn't prevent him giving advice on how to deal with Gypsies

In the section on ‘Travellers’ there is a big, bold strapline saying “the Police have powers to remove any gypsies and travellers”. Imagine if you were to substitute ‘Jews’ for ‘gypsies and travellers’. It might be the first substantive evidence of anti-Semitism in the Labour Party!

Anti-Roma racism in Britain is over 6 times as high as anti-semitism. In Italy 82% of the population have racist attitudes to Roma - it is no surprise that John Mann indulges in racism against Roma whilst purporting to oppose antisemitism

After the existence of Mann’s racist booklet was revealed Traveller Times reported that the ‘Parliamentary group for anti-Semitism, which Mann chairs, pulled out of a debate on Gypsies, Roma and Travellers “with no explanation” after failing to answer questions on Mann’s booklet

When Mann was contacted by Traveller TimesMann stood by the booklet, 20,000 of which he claimed had been distributed. Mann claimed not to understand why his booklet is racially offensive. Since Romani Gypsies and Irish Travellers are protected, like Jews, under the Equality Act 2010, he must know that his booklet contravenes that Act as well as being simply racist and offensive in itself.

John Mann's helpful guide to evicting Gypsies or Travellers

The explanation for Mann’s behaviour is quite simple. Mann’s concern with ‘anti-Semitism’ is related to support for Zionism and the Israeli state. The campaign which he has fronted over ‘anti-Semitism’ has always been about criticism of Israel not hate of Jews.

Gypsy children like these were deported like Jewish children to Auschwitz and gassed - however it is inconvenient today to remember that the Holocaust also murdered Gypsies.

We live in times when anti-Roma hate is rising fast. In Italy the Interior Minister, Matteo Salvini has threatened to expel thousands of Roma and create a register of those who remain. Mann's behaviour fits into the increasing hostility and overt racism towards Gypsies. Opposition to fake 'antisemitism' is easy for racists like Mann.

The Zionist movement has always considered the Holocaust as unique and opposed any attempt to generalise from the Nazi Holocaust to anti-racism as a universal principle. In the words of Professor Yehuda Bauer of the Hebrew University Jerusalem and Yad Vashem, ‘Roma were not Jews, therefore there was no need to murder all of them’, his assumption being that the Nazis only intended to wipe out the Jews. [Yehuda Bauer, "Jews. Gypsies. Slavs: Policies of the Third Reich." UNESCO Yearbook on Peace and Conflict Studies 1985 (Paris, 1987), p. 86]

Bauer elaborated his views in a debatewith the late Sybil Milton [The History Teacher, Vol. 25, No. 4. (Aug., 1992), pp. 513-521] Milton showed that all Bauer’s assumptions concerning the Gypsies and the Holocaust were based upon Nazi stereotypes, for example that it was only itinerant gypsies who caused social problems who were the target for elimination.

Sybil Milton, senior historian at the US Holocaust Museum wrote, ‘the percentage of Gypsy mortality was approximately the same as the percentage of Jewish mortality in the Holocaust.’(Gypsies and the Holocaust, The History Teacher, Vol. 24, No. 4. (Aug., 1991), p. 377). Approximately half a million Gypsies and Roma were murdered in the Holocaust. Despite this the fate of the Gypsies has been comprehensively ignored and the historical narrative distorted.

The Holocaust has become an ideological weapon deployed by Zionism against the Palestinians. The Holocaust is seen as the primary justification for a Jewish state. An ethno-religious state is an oddity that went out with the French Revolution. Israel’s exceptional status owes a great deal to the Nazi murder of six million Jews.

Zionism has been quick to argue that although the Nazis had many victims, only one group were the victim of genocide – the Jews. As Milton noted although the diary of Adam Czerniakow, the head of the Warsaw Ghetto Judenrat recorded the presence of both German and Polish Gypsies in the Warsaw ghetto, Professor Yisrael Gutman’s comprehensive study ‘avoids even passing mention of them’. [The Jews of Warsaw,:Ghetto Underground Revolt, Brighton, England. 1982]. Gutman was based at Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust Propaganda Museum.

Gypsies are a variant of Noisy Neighbours and Neighbours from Hell

It is ironic that John Mann, Chair of the All Parliamentary Group on Anti-Semitism and the person who accused Ken Livingstone of being a Hitler apologist, is revealed as an anti-Gypsy bigot and racist.

John Mann was the 'best friend, best man and political ally'of the racist New Labour Immigration Minister Phil Woolas

However it isn’t really that surprising. Mann was a strong supporterof racist New Labour Immigration Minister Phil Woolas. Woolas, who told a number of outrageous lies about his Lib-Dem opponent in 2010 was the only MP in living memory to have his election result nullified by an election court for electoral fraud. Amongst the emails uncovered was one from his election agent Joe Fitzpatrick which stated‘If we don't get the white folk angry he [Woolas]'s gone.’ Stirring up racism was seen as crucial to a Woolas victory. See John Mann MP – Zionist Scumbag and Apologist for Phil Woolas, New Labour Racist Kicked Out by an Electoral Court

This was one of the racist leaflets issued by Phil Woolas's campaign in Oldham East - yet John Mann was happy to stand by 'Phil'

Following the decision of the High Court to annul the election, Harriet Harman as acting Labour Party leader took the decision to withdraw Labour’s support for Woolas in his legal battle. She rightly decided that the facts that were found by the High Court, his clear lying and appeal to white racism, could not be condoned by the Labour Party even if legally he might have a case. John Mann, his best friend and best man at his wedding disagreed. Mann, who knew Woolas from their days in student politics, had no problem with Woolas’s racism or his record of hostility to asylum seekers and refugees.

John Mann was outraged when his racist friend, Phil Woolas, had his funding cut off by the Labour Party

Harriet Harman’s actions caused an uproar in the Parliamentary Labour Party and one of his main backers was – John Mann! It would seem that some forms of racism are more acceptable to this racist opportunist. ‘Anti-Semitism’ is verboten but a bit of anti-gypsy racism, hostility to refugees and Islamaphobia is perfectly acceptable to this hypocrite.

↧

Shame on Time Out for Supporting Apartheid - Inminds Activists Destroy Israeli 'Ice-Cream' Hasbara Stunt

July 2, 2018, 3:57 pm

≫ Next: Israel finds that the Holocaust is becoming inconvenient when it comes to friendship with far-Right regimes

≪ Previous: John Mann MP’s opposition to ‘anti-Semitism’ doesn’t extend to Gypsies and Travellers

Jonathan Hoffman left with ~~egg~~ ice-cream on his face

Zionist fascist Jonathan Hoffman was reduced to shouting 'it's all lies'presumably there were no Palestinian deaths in Gaza - it was all a lie

At this time of tragedy and despair and with the imminent eviction of the Bedouin village of Khan al Ahmar in the West Bank, it was nice to see the Inminds activist group in London brilliantly disrupting a Time Out sponsored Israeli ice-cream stunt in Bloomsbury Square, London.

Time Out sponsored holidays in Israel whilst the blood of the dead demonstrators in Gaza is not yet dry

As a result the Israeli ice cream PR actors were forced to pack up early. Entertainment was provided by the Zionist clown Jonathan Hoffman who was reduced to crying out ‘it’s all lies.’ because as we all know, Israel is a haven of peace and equality where the only thing on most people’s minds is which ice cream they should devour.

Shame on Time Out for agreeing to sponsor an Apartheid Israel tourism stunt.

Tony Greenstein

On 28th June 2018, Inminds human rights group successfully stopped the Israeli governments latest attempt to use culture and food to whitewash war crimes against the Palestinian people.

At a time when over 120 Palestinians, including women and children, medics and journalists, have been killed and more than 3,800 injured by Israeli army fire, during the Great March of Return, when Palestinians non-violently attempted to walk back to their homes in occupied Palestine, the the Israeli Ministry of Tourism co-opted Time Out magazine and the Israeli restaurant, Honey & Co to attempt to whitewash these war crimes. They wanted to portray a sympathetic image of Israel, and promote Jerusalem - illegally occupied since 1967, as Israel's capital and Tel Aviv - build on the stolen Palestinian land of 9 ethnically cleansed towns and villages, as holiday destinations. In this sick scheme they were going to give out 600 free 'Israel inspired' ice-creams in Bloomsbury Square, London, and ask people to tag #2cities1break to pictures of the free ice-cream in order to win holidays to aparthied Israel, all the while Palestinian children are being shot dead in Gaza.

With just a hand full of activists Inminds successfully thwarted the scheme costing the Israeli Ministry of Tourism thousands of pounds.

A promotions company had turned up with power generators, stage, flat screen, and scantily clad women to dish out the ice cream. A transport delivery vehicle had brought the specially decorated 'ice-cream' van promoting #2cities1break project to the square. Faced with the Inminds protest unmasking their hasbra, sharing with a sympathetic audience the reality of Israel's racist apartheid genocidal regime, the Israeli Ministry of Tourism initially tried to silence our protest. A goon was sent to disrupt our speaker from revealing to the eager public why we were protesting this event. The goon, later identified as former vice-chair of the Zionist Federation, kept on shouting in the face of our speaker, trying to intimidate her with non-stop screams of 'liar'. Initially the police let the intimidation happen but when members of the public seeing the bullying started to intervene by themselves, the police finally acted and dragged him away.

Having failed to stop our protest the Israeli Ministry of Tourism decided to pull the plug on their detestable hasbra project. The ice-cream van was whisked away, having never left the transport delivery vehicle, the stage in the process of being setup was abandoned and the flat screen turned off after a few embarrassing minutes of showing sunny beaches in Tel Aviv contrasting sharply with our banners a few feet away showing the reality of a regime that specialises in infanticide.. killing one Palestinian child every 60 hours for the last 14 years with posters reading "Ice-Cream Can't Hide Apartheid War Crimes" and "Whilst You Eat Ice-Cream Palestinian Children Die". As the promotions team packed up in a hurry and scuttled away, the goon was seen chasing behind them them shouting "don't go, I'm calling the embassy".

Many people from the offices overlooking the square came out to congratulate us. They were horrified to learn that Time Out magazine had partnered with Israel in this nefarious project. Within hours of the project having failed, Time Out magazine removed all traces of the project from its web site. Gone was the page promoting it, gone was the competition to win holidays in Israel, gone was the request for ice-cream selfies. Before the protest we had contacted Time Out magazine to ask if it was their official policy to ignore international law and British government policy, to promote the illegal Israeli occupation of East Jerusalem. We never got a reply.

Culture has always been an important weapon in the Israeli government's public relations campaign. The Israeli Foreign Ministry's Deputy Director General Nissim Ben-Sheetrit announced in 2005 that "We see culture as a propaganda tool of the first rank, and I do not differentiate between propaganda and culture", and in 2006, the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs launched an multi-million dollar initiative called "Brand Israel," whereby culture is used to whitewash an apartheid state founded on the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people and occupation of their land. Arye Mekel of Israel's Foreign Ministry explained "We will send well-known novelists and writers overseas, theater companies, exhibits… This way you show Israel's prettier face, so we are not thought of purely in the context of war." This latest initiative of promoting Israel via free ice cream is the latest chapter of this Brand Israel propaganda project.

Inminds chair Abbas Ali said "We as Londoners reject this cheap propaganda stunt. It's perverted for Israel to be giving out free ice cream whilst at the same time shooting Palestinian children! Shame on Time Out magazine for succumbing to what amounts to bribery in helping Israel whitewash war crimes against the Palestinian people! We are overwhelmed by the support we received by fellow Londoners and pleased that together we have struck a blow for Palestinian human rights, the message is clear - there is no 'business as usual' with Israel whilst it slaughters Palestinians - Palestinian lives matter, Palestinian human rights matter, Palestinian freedom matters!"

Inminds Human Rights Group

www.inminds.com
fb.com/inmindscom
twitter.com/InmindsCom
youtube.com/user/inminds

↧

Israel finds that the Holocaust is becoming inconvenient when it comes to friendship with far-Right regimes

July 2, 2018, 5:43 pm

≫ Next: Andriy Parubiy, a Ukrainian neo-Nazi is given a welcome at the heart of the US Foreign Policy Establishment

≪ Previous: Shame on Time Out for Supporting Apartheid - Inminds Activists Destroy Israeli 'Ice-Cream' Hasbara Stunt

Netanyahu invites Viktor Orban, Hungary’s racist anti-Semitic Prime Minister for a state visit.

It is no surprise that nearly 3 years after his speech to the World Zionist Congress, when Netanyahu tried to blame the Palestinians for the Holocaust, that he has now gone one step further and exonerated the anti-Semitic leaders of the Polish and Hungarian regimes. According to Netanyahu it wasn’t Hitler who thought up the idea of exterminating the Jews it was the Palestinian Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj al Amin Husseini. In his speech Netanyahu explained

“Hitler didn’t want to exterminate the Jews at the time, he wanted to expel the Jews. And Haj Amin al-Husseini went to Hitler and said: ‘If you expel them, they’ll all come here [to Palestine].’” According to Netanyahu, Hitler then asked: “What should I do with them?” and the mufti replied: “Burn them.”

You can read about this in my article Rewriting the Holocaust.

Earlier this year Poland’s Senate passed a Holocaust law making it a criminal offence to blame Poland for any crimes committed during the Holocaust. The bill was proposed by the ruling Law and Justice party (PiS) and called for up to three years in prison. “We have to send a clear signal to the world that we won’t allow for Poland to continue being insulted,” Patryk Jaki, a deputy justice minister, told reporters in parliament.

The legislation criminalised any mention of Poles “being responsible or complicit in the Nazi crimes committed by the Third German Reich.”The harshest penalties were reserved for those who referred to Nazi-era concentration camps such as Auschwitz as “Polish death camps.” Only scientific research into the war and artistic work was exempted. To be fair though it is highly inaccurate to describe the Nazi extermination camps as being Polish.

Former U.S. President Barack Obama caused an uproar in Poland when he used the phrase “Polish death camp” while posthumously bestowing a Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012 on Jan Karski, a Polish World War II resistance fighter. Obama apologized for using the phraseafter being denounced by current European Council President Donald Tusk, who was then the Prime Minister of Poland.

PiS is a virulently racist and xenophobic party. Its Defence Minister, Antoni Macierewicz told listeners to the anti-Semitic Catholic radio station, Radio Maryja in 2002 that he had read Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the infamous Czarist forgery, termed a ‘Warrant for Genocide’a pamphlet that purports to be a Jewish plan to control the world but which has been exposed as a hoax. Whilst acknowledging there was debate about the pamphlet’s authenticity, he told listeners that: “Experience shows that there are such groups in Jewish circles.” Polish defence minister condemned over Jewish conspiracy theory

PiS’s leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski once said Muslim refugees carried “various parasites and protozoa” and the government’s education minister in 2016 discounted two well-documented massacres of Jews, including Jedwabne, by calling it a matter of “opinion”. Jedwabne was a village in Eastern Poland where up to 1600 Jews were burnt alive after being herded into a barn by fellow Polish villagers. See Jedwabne – The Polish Village Where Up to 900 Jews Were Burnt Alive by Fellow Poles

There has been a resurgence of far-right sentiment in the country. A Polish government pollster found in a surveythat more than one in three polled said they supported far-right activities. That same month, far-right nationalists marched in Warsaw, brandishing slogans and signs that said “Clean Blood,” “White Europe, and “Europe Will Be White.”Foreign Minister Witold Waszczykowski said the march was fueled by “patriotic behavior of Poles” and displays of xenophobia were “incidents” that were “of course, reprehensible.”See Poland Just Passed a Holocaust Bill That Is Causing Outrage. Here's What You Need to Know

Not only has Netanyahu done a deal with the far-Right Polish government that removes prison sentences for mentioning Polish complicity in the Holocaust but he has also invitedto Israel the anti-Semitic far-Right Prime Minister of Hungary, Viktor Orban from July 18^th-20^th.

This is the same Orban who waged an anti-Semitic campaign against George Soros and who has praisedHungary’s pro-Nazi ruler, Admiral Horthy as an ‘exceptional statesman’. Given that Horthy presided over the unprecedented rapid deportation of nearly ½ million Jews to Auschwitz between May 15^th and July 7^th1944 he probably was exceptional.

To those who maintain that opposing Israel is somehow ‘anti-Semitic’ the proof that this is an egregious lie is the support that the Israeli government gives to far-Right and anti-Semitic governments in Europe. Indeed today, the best friends of Israel are to be found amongst fascists, neo-Nazis and assorted anti-Semites. This should be our response to allegations that criticism of Israel is ‘anti-Semitic’/

This is from Jews Against Genocide:

Stop the Lies

Israeli citizens file a freedom of information request regarding the shameful joint Israeli-Polish statement on the Holocaust and its commemoration!

הוגשה בקשה לפי חוק חופש המידע בעניין שיתוף חוקרי/ות שואה בהכנת ההצהרה המשותפת המבישה של ישראל ופולין! עברית להלן

The racist right wing Israeli government has accepted the racist right wing Polish government's position on the Holocaust, apparently for cynical purposes and without consulting Holocaust researchers.

Professor Yehuda Bauer, one of the world's leading Holocaust researchers, called Netanyahu's move "treason", adding that Israel has granted its "stamp of approval to the [right wing] Polish narrative", although it's a "totally fictitious story". Professor Bauer believes that even after the annulment of the Polish penal code clause which makes it illegal to ascribe to the Polish people responsibility for the Holocaust, the current Polish government will use the Polish civil code to prosecute Polish researchers who criticize the government's lie. Bauer summarized: "The Poles have deceived us, they have played a trick on us and we went along, because for the State of Israel the political-economic-military relations with Poland are more important than such a small thing, the Holocaust".

The statement was apparently drafted in by a closed forum at a meeting at Mossad headquarters, without any serious consultation of the relevant professionals.

Therefore. the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs is requested to disclose all relevant information in the case.

Furthermore, Israeli journalist Gili Cohen reports that Netanyahu is pressuring Poland (and Slovakia, Hungary and the Czech Republic) to move its embassy to Jerusalem, and the shameful Israeli-Polish declaration may be Netanyahu's gift in exchange.

Representing the petitioners: Attorney Eitay Mack.

The memory of the Nazi-inflicted Holocaust, and all its victims - Jews, Romani, political dissidents, disabled people, LGBTQ people and others - is NOT FOR SALE!!!

מאת עו"ד איתי מק:

"הוגשה בקשה לפי חוק חופש המידע בעניין שיתוף חוקרי/ות שואה בהכנת ההצהרה המשותפת של ישראל ופולין:

יחד עם פעילות ופעילי זכויות האדם רעיה רותם, רם כהן, תמר להן, ורדה חלד, רוני סגולי, עירית הלביא, ד"ר ניב גורדון, קלאודיו קוגון, גלעד ליברמן, גיא בוטביה, שאול צ'ריקובר, עופר ניימן וד"ר חנה ספרן, הוגשה בקשה לפי חוק חופש המידע בעניין שיתוף חוקרי/ות שואה בהכנת ההצהרה המשותפת של ישראל ופולין.

ביום 27.6.2018 הקריא ראש הממשלה ושר החוץ, בנימין נתניהו, הצהרה משותפת עם ממשלת פולין. בראיון לרון נשיאל ב"כאן ב", פרופ'יהודה באואר, חתן פרס ישראל ומבכירי חוקרי השואה, הגדיר את ההצהרה "בגידה". לדבריו, ישראל קיבלה את הנרטיב הפולני ו"נתנה לו גושפנקה", אף כי הוא "סיפור שקרי לגמרי". באואר העריך כי גם אחרי ביטול הסעיף הפלילי בחוק הפולני האוסר לייחס לעם הפולני אחריות לפשעי השואה, פולין תשתמש בחוק האזרחי כדי לרדוף חוקרים פולנים. באואר סיכם "הפולנים הונו אותנו, סובבו אותנו על האצבע ואנחנו הסכמנו לזה, כי למדינת ישראל יותר חשובים היחסים הכלכליים-ביטחוניים-פוליטיים עם פולין מאשר עסק קטן כזה, כמו השואה".

נוסח ההצהרה גובש במחשכים בהובלת פרופ'יעקב נגל וד"ר יוסף צ'חנובר, כולל לפי הפרסומים בפגישה שהתקיימה בבסיס של המוסד..זאת אף שראוי להחליט על הצהרות היסטוריות מסוג זה רק לאחר דיון מעמיק עם מומחים לנושא והציבור. על פני הדברים, נראה כי ההצהרה גובשה במחטף ומבלי לקיים התייעצות רצינית עם אנשי המקצוע הרלוונטיים.

לכן, משרד החוץ התבקש למסור לנו את פרטי חוקרי/ות השואה והמוסדות האקדמיים ולחקר השואה שהכינו ואישרו את נוסח ההצהרה שפורסם.

כזכור, כדי להעביר את שגרירות פרגוואי לירושלים ממשלת נתניהו הייתה מוכנה לטייח את עברה הנאצי של המדינה. עתה העיתונאית גילי כהן, מתאגיד השידור הציבורי, חושפת כי הטירוף של השבועות האחרונים גם קשור לעניין:
https://twitter.com/kann_news/status/1013481691359465472

Top Holocaust Historian: Netanyahu’s Deal on Poland’s Holocaust Law ‘A Betrayal' That 'Hurts the Jewish People'

Israel agreed to the Polish narrative ‘because to the State of Israel, economic, security and political ties are more important than a little matter like the Holocaust,'Yehuda Bauer says

Ofer Aderet

Jun 30, 2018 9:53 PM

Yehuda Bauer, an Israel Prize-winning Holocaust historian at Yad Vashem, said the Israeli-Polish statement that followed Poland’s revisiting of its controversial “Holocaust law” was a “betrayal” that “hurt the Jewish people and the memory of the Holocaust.”

In a radio interview, the 92-year-old said the backtracking on the law and the signing of a joint statement with Poland was “a small achievement and a very big mistake, bordering on betrayal.”

Bauer said Israel had accepted the Polish narrative and “legitimized it,” even though it was a “completely mendacious story.”

Later in the interview, Bauer repeated his stance, saying “the joint statement is betrayal, betrayal, betrayal.”

On Wednesday, following secret negotiations between Israel and Poland, Warsaw said it would abolish the law’s clauses threatening imprisonment for anyone who claimed that the Polish nation was involved in Nazi crimes.

In the joint declaration, read live on television Wednesday by both Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his Polish counterpart Mateusz Morawiecki, only one sentence refers to the part played by Poles in the murder of Jews: “We acknowledge and condemn every single case of cruelty against Jews perpetrated by Poles during World War II.”

File photo: Yehuda Bauer in 2006. Kobi Gideon / GPO

Later the declaration states that “some people” assisted the Nazis, doing so “regardless of their origin.” It also claims that “numerous Poles” risked their lives to save Jews.

Bauer came out harshly against these words. “This is a complete lie,” he said. “What is ‘regardless of their origin’? Were they born on the moon? It’s Poles, and not one or two.”

Regarding Poles who saved Jews, and the fact that the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial has recognized around 6,700 Righteous Among the Nations, Bauer said this number was far from “numerous.”

“Even if we assume that the real figure is 200,000, out of 21 million Poles, that’s only 1 percent,” he said. “What about the other 99 percent?” According to Bauer, the joint declaration “devalues the true Righteous Among the Nations and minimizes the value of their heroism.”

Bauer said the Poles “cheated us, twisted us around their finger and we agreed to it because to the State of Israel, economic, security and political ties are more important than a little matter like the Holocaust.”

Bauer said that by signing the declaration, Israel had betrayed Polish historians who had been persecuted by the Polish government because they “tell the truth.” He was referring to scholars such as Prof. Jan Tomasz Gross and Jan Grabowsky, who research the role of Poles’ involvement in the murder of Jews during the Holocaust.

Bauer said Poland would still use civil law to persecute Polish scholars who “tell the truth.”

“They will demand money from them, they will impoverish them, they will keep funding from them. And we are legitimizing [this] . They will say: ‘What do you want, the Israelis agreed to this, why are you making noise?’”

↧

Andriy Parubiy, a Ukrainian neo-Nazi is given a welcome at the heart of the US Foreign Policy Establishment

July 3, 2018, 4:28 am

≫ Next: Israel's Ethnic Cleansing Proceeds as the Eviction and Demolition of Khan al-Ahmar is Imminent

≪ Previous: Israel finds that the Holocaust is becoming inconvenient when it comes to friendship with far-Right regimes

Congress w elcomes an actual fascist as Nazi violence rages in Ukraine

A disturbing video on the reception by the American Foreign Policy Council, a conservative think tank at the heart of the US political establishment for Andriy Parubiy, the Speaker of Ukraine's parliament and the founder of two neo-Nazi organisations in Ukraine, the Social National Party of Ukraine and the Patriot of Ukraine.

Neo-Nazi Parubiy welcomed at the heart of the US Foreign Policy Establishment

In 2010 Parubiy asked the European Parliament to reconsider its negative reaction to former Ukrainian President Victor Yushchenko's decision to award Stepan Bandera, the leader of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, the title of Hero of Ukraine. The programe of the faction of OUN that Bandera led stated that

The Jews in the USSR constitute the most faithful support of the ruling Bolshevik regime, and the vanguard of Muscovite imperialism in Ukraine. The Muscovite-Bolshevik government exploits the anti-Jewish sentiments of the Ukrainian masses to divert their attention from the true cause of their misfortune and to channel them in a time of frustration into pogroms on Jews. The OUN combats the Jews as the prop of the Muscovite-Bolshevik regime and simultaneously it renders the masses conscious of the fact that the principal foe is Moscow.^[62]

Stepan Bandera - awarded the Hero of Ukraine was a Nazi collaborator whose organisation was responsible for at least 100,000 deaths - Parubly asked the European Parliament to reconsider its hostility to the award

OUN perpetrated the massacres of Poles in Volhynia, and in early 1944, ethnic cleansings also spread to Eastern Galicia. It is estimated that more than 35,000 and up to 60,000^[55] Poles, mostly women and children along with unarmed men, were killed during the spring and summer campaign of 1943 in Volhynia, and up to 100,000 if other regions (Eastern Galicia) are included.^[56]^[57]

We can of course assume that Israel and the Zionist organisations will have nothing to say about this kind of support for anti-semitism.

Tony Greenstein

↧

Israel's Ethnic Cleansing Proceeds as the Eviction and Demolition of Khan al-Ahmar is Imminent

July 3, 2018, 10:28 am

≫ Next: Betrayed by the Guardian, abandoned by Australia Drop the Charges against Julian Assange

≪ Previous: Andriy Parubiy, a Ukrainian neo-Nazi is given a welcome at the heart of the US Foreign Policy Establishment

Like Apartheid South Africa before it, Israel is moving Palestinians into bleak and desolate townships

Khan al-Ahmar is a Palestinian village located between the Israeli settlements of Ma'ale Adumim, a city of nearly 40,000 settlers which is 4 miles from Jerusalem and Kfar Adumim. About 200 people live there with a school that is attended by about 150 children in the area. The aim of the eviction is to create a continuous belt of settlements from Jerusalem into the West Bank, at the same time dividing the West Bank in two.

The Jahalin Bedouin of Khan al Amar were expelled from the Negev in 1952 by the Israeli army. They moved the following year to the West Bank. In the late 1970s the villagers found themselves incorporated into lands that were assigned to what became the Maale Adumim settlement. The village is one of the only remaining Palestinian areas within the E1 zone, strategically significant because it connects the north and south of the West Bank.

The village has suffered from continual harassment and attacks by the Israeli army and the settlers. In 2015, solar panels were donated to provide the village with electricity. In July, the Civil Administration confiscated the solar panels, as well as one which had been in the village for several years.[1]Palestinians don’t require electricity under Israel’s colonial regime.

Children in the Bedouin village of Khan al-Ahmar, West Bank, May 15, 2017.

On the 24 of May Israel’s Supreme Court ruled unanimously that starting from June, the Israeli army could move the village to a different location and carry out the demolition and eviction of the Palestinian village of Khan al-Ahmar.[2]Justices Noam Solberg, Yael Willner and Anat Baron approved expelling the population and razing their homes.

The Court was presided over by Noam Sohlberg, who is himself a resident of an illegal Israeli settlement, Alon Shvut in the Gush Etzion bloc. Sohlberg wrote that the grounds for the decision rejecting a villagers' petition for a stay in the order, was that the residents had unlawfully engaged in building both the school and housing, and that it was not within the court's remit to meddle in the execution of Israeli state laws.

Of course the reason why the buildings are illegal is because Israel’s colonial administration refused to issue permits to Palestinians for such things as schools and housing. The Supreme Court however was not interested in asking why permits are not granted to Palestinians because that might come perilously close to examining the legitimacy of the Occupation itself. A colonial court such as Israel’s Supreme Court can only concern itself with procedural questions. Of course Israeli settlements aren’t troubled by such legal niceties since the granting of permits and master plans for their development is taken for granted.

Abu Ali Abu Ghalia at the projects committee for a Jahalin Bedouin neighborhourhood

The villagers have been in their current location since before the settlement of Kfar Adumim was established. Despite this, the state refused to include them in the master plans it prepared for the settlers. Consequently, the buildings that the justices deemed illegal were all built without permits.

Israel’s Supreme Court operates on the basis that the Occupation, which is in conflict with International Law is nonetheless legal under Israeli law. The role of the Court is to put a legal gloss on the Occupation. Whenever there is a conflict between Israeli Law and International Law the former prevails.[3]As Hagai El-Ad, Director the Israeli Human Rights NGO B’tselem noted:

school in Khan al Ahmar

For decades, the Supreme Court justices have granted legitimacy to practically any injustice that Israel wishes to cause to the Palestinians: demolishing their homes, administrative arrests, revoking residency rights, seizing land, constraining their movement. Still, it isn’t every day that six of the 15 Supreme Court justices sign off on rulings on the fate of Palestinian subjects that boil down to approving crimes.[4]

David Zonsheine, executive director of B'tselem, explained that Israel had failed to connect the township to water, power and sewerage services, and that the villagers had built without permits because Israeli policy is such that is dissuades Palestinian villagers from even trying to obtain licenses to build, a claim also repeated by Human Rights Watch. The effect of the dismantlement and evictions will be, he added, to bisect the West Bank from north to south.[5]

Thousands of settlers in Kfar Etzion celebrating celebrating 50 years of settlement September 27, 2017. (Gershon Elinson FLASH90)

Solberg wrote: “The question at stake is not whether the path the state plans meets the requirements of the law, but whether carrying out the demolition orders meets the requirements of the law.” The “inarguable point of departure” was that the buildings in question were “illegal.”

Why a school building was illegal was not something that the Court was concerned about. It noted that “the village school doesn’t have a yard that meets standards.” It didn’t even meet “acoustic standards”! In normal circumstances one might expect that a court of law would order that the owners install sound proofing or build a yard of sufficient size. However that would be to entirely miss the point. This is Israel and these are Palestinians. The only solution that the Court was prepared to agree to was to demolish and expel.

The Bedouin village of Khan al-Ahmar, West Bank, May 15, 2017.

However every cloud has a silver lining. Even though the Bedouin village of Khan al-Ahmar is going to be demolished and its inhabitants expelled the Civil Administration (run by the Military) is set to approve the construction of 92 building in Kfar Adumim, a settlement less than a mile away from Khan al-Ahmar.[6]

The plan covers an area of 122 dunams (30 acres) which in turn is part of a larger plan, comprising 322 new homes on 660 dunams, which passed the first stage of its approval process in February 2017. The new neighborhood will be called Nofei Bereishit.

The funds for this development will come from the World Zionist Organization Settlement Division. The Jewish Labour Movement, which as we all know is terribly concerned about ‘anti-Semitism’, is affiliated to the WZO.[7]So although the JLM is formally a supporter of a 2 States solution, they are affiliated to a body that is responsible for providing funds to build settlements designed to prevent that solution! Such is the hypocrisy of Labour Zionism.

Justice Willner, one of the three judges has a brother and sister who live in Kfar Adumim. Nevertheless, she didn’t offer to recuse herself from hearing the case. Willner, Sohlberg and Baron subsequently rejected a request by attorney, Shlomo Lecker, that she do so.

As Peace Now’s Hagit Ofran observed “They’re destroying Khan al-Ahmar because they didn’t give them building permits, it turns out that the Israeli government has no problem with issuing permits for this land – just not to Palestinians.”

Girls going to school in the Bedouin village of Khan al-Ahmar,

The state intends to evacuate the residents of Khan al Ahmar to the village of Al Jabel, an area near the Abu Dis garbage dump that the state has allocated for the permanent settlement of the Jahalin Bedouin, refugees from the Negev who have lived in the area since before 1967. It has already become a slum and the shepherds will have to give up their flocks, with the consequent increase in unemployment. The status of women will also be adversely affected.[8]

The garbage heap, which also serves Ma’aleh Adumim, brings throngs of flies and mice to the neighborhood, conveying the Israeli authorities’ contempt. The sewage holes frequently overflow. This is one of the residents’ main grievances: If they already prepared the land for construction, why didn’t they build a sewage system?

In the late ‘90s, Israel expelled around 150 families from about 10 Bedouin communities, including Salaila’s, to the new site. The Bedouin’s expulsion for a “permanent settlement,” now known as al-Jabal (the mountain), was carried out in three phases. Now the High Court of Justice has let the state expel to that site a fourth wave of Bedouin families from Khan al-Ahmar. It’s locked between the largest garbage dump in the West Bank to the east, and the Al-Eizariya car junkyard to the west. [9]

The settlement of Kfar Adumim

Hamda Salaila spoke passionately about the women’s committee she set up two years ago that meets regularly in a large container that houses old furniture, a modest kitchenette and an old ventilator to alleviate the heat a bit.

Salaila and a few other local women run all the activities, which consist of courses for women, project-management training, and games and tutoring for children. Amir Hass described how three women joined the conversation with Salaila: the twins Amani and Iman Abu Ghalia, 22, and their cousin, Hind Abu Ghalia, 27. “Men are not part of this,” Salaila said, with unconcealed pride.

Still, the four women, all university graduates hoping to continue their studies, refused to have their faces photographed. While assertive and aware of their duty to advance the status of women in their community, they nonetheless partially submit to what Salaila calls “the shame culture,” part of which is their families’ – especially the men’s – objection to having pictures of women published.

Palestinian girls watch TV at their home on May 30, 2018 in Khan al-Ahmar village. MENAHEM KAHANA AFP

A stroll around the neighborhood at midday revealed a strange phenomenon: no women are in sight. Is it the heat? No. Even the four women we talked to in the container wouldn’t join our stroll but went straight to their homes next door.

“We don’t walk on the street just like that,” one of them said. “Once we used to stroll outside the neighborhood a little.”

Bulldozers from the Defense Ministry’s Civil Administration have flattened a few lots, on which the forced evacuees are supposed to build their own houses. The new plots are very near one another, a tight cluster of houses and families alien to the Bedouin’s way of life.

In the semi-urban Jahalin neighborhood there is no room for flocks of sheep. “We buy milk. Imagine that – Bedouin buying milk!” says Hind Abu Ghalia. She has lived in the neighborhood most of her life but feels the absurdity of this reality.

“Today woman have a lot of free time. In the past they took part in the work. Economically, a man couldn’t make it without his wife. Today the woman is only at home with no work opportunities,” Salaila says.

“The man goes out, works in settlements and doesn’t let his wife go out. If she hasn’t studied, she’s even more captive in her own house. Once, when we lived in the encampment, women also met and talked to each other. That custom has been lost.”

Plots leased to the Bedouin at al-Jabal in the West Bank

The women now have electricity, running water, and shelter from nature’s hazards. But deprived of the chance to work for a living, they’ve lost the reason to move around.

“We’re imprisoned at home,” Bedouin women told researchers from the group Bimkom, who last year wrote a report about the expulsion’s negative effect on women at al-Jabal and Arab al-Rashayida southeast of Bethlehem.[10]When there’s no choice but to leave home, they wear a niqab, a face covering that wasn’t customary when they lived in the open. Twenty years after the forced relocation, most of them have suffered damaged self-esteem.

At first the neighborhood got its water from Israel water company Mekorot, allowing for a regular water supply. Then the locals were linked to the Al-Eizariya municipality. Israel limits the water supply to the Palestinians, so in the hot months they don’t have running water every day.

To make a living, some families have split. Some of their members look after the flocks and still live outdoors in tents. Some make a living off jobs in nearby settlements. But according to a member of the neighborhood’s projects committee, Abu Ali Abu Ghalia, unemployment among the men is very high.

“Some basic conditions must be kept when you move from a life of herding to an urban environment. A water and electricity infrastructure isn’t enough. You have to give the people training to change their profession so we can live in the new conditions. A man can’t turn overnight from a shepherd into a driver or a teacher,” he adds.

The lots there are planned at 300 square meters (3,229 square feet) per family, less than what was allocated for the previous waves of expellees. No pasture land has been allotted.

In its response to Lecker’s petition against the demolition at Khan al-Ahmar, the state said that at the beginning of June it would finish building a school that will replace the ecological school. The new school would accommodate 150 students.

This week Civil Administration employees accompanied by policemen entered Khan al-Ahmar to take measurements. It would appear that the demolition and evictions are imminent. [11]Ahmad Abu Dahuk, a village resident, told Haaretz that the Civil Administration representatives, accompanied by security personnel, were seen five times at the entrance to the village, on Route 1, which leads to Jericho. The sixth time, he said, on Sunday around noon, they entered the village, walked around the houses, entered the ecological school (the well-known one made of tires, which is also slated for demolition), and counted the flocks of sheep. He said the children who were in the school fled in panic.

Residents told B’Tselem that a police officer told them they would be evacuated by force and that they would be better off leaving “willingly.”

Abu Dahuk also told Haaretz that “We are afraid to sleep, in case they come at night and destroy our homes, and we are afraid when we wake up, in case they come then to destroy them.”.

Since the High Court paved the way for the demolition last month, police, army and Civil Administration representatives have been coming to the site periodically to survey the area and the houses to determine the best points of entry for the heavy vehicles and bulldozers. This time, however, the surveying raised concerns that the demolition and eviction were imminent. No doubt Sohlberg, Baron and Willner will sleep easily in their beds.

Thus Israel’s ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians continues apace. After having concentrated the Bedouin in the new township the next phase will be transfer from the country altogether.

Tony Greenstein

[1] See Khan al-Ahmar, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khan_al-Ahmar.

[2] Israel to Demolish Entire West Bank Bedouin Village, Ending Year-long Legal Battle , Amira Hass, Ha’aretz 25.5.18. https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-israel-to-demolish-entire-west-bank-bedouin-village-1.6116488

[3] See Israel's Supreme Court: Liberal bastion or an enforcer of injustice?, Ben White, Middle East Eye, 23.3.18., http://www.middleeasteye.net/columns/how-israel-s-supreme-court-reinforces-discriminatory-status-quo-1678693361

[4] Khan al-Ahmar and Gaza: Two Sides of the Same Legal Coin, Ha’aretz, 5^thJune 2018, https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/khan-al-ahmar-and-gaza-two-sides-of-the-same-legal-coin-1.6152008

[5] Khan al-Ahmar, http://www.jerusalemania.com/place.php?uid=8e820b6f-7783-11e8-b826-002590574a0e

[6] Israel to Build 92 New Settlement Homes Near Bedouin Village Slated for Demolition, Amira Hass, Ha’aretz, 30.5.18., https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-israel-to-build-92-homes-in-settlement-near-condemned-bedouin-village-1.6132947

[7] About the Jewish Labour Movement, http://www.jlm.org.uk/about

[8] Israel’s Solution for Expelled Bedouin: Between the Garbage Dump and Junkyard, Ha’aretz, 11.6.18., Amir Hass, https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium.MAGAZINE-israel-s-solution-for-expelled-bedouin-between-garbage-and-junkyard-1.6158225

[9] Israel to Demolish Entire West Bank Bedouin Village, Ending Year-long Legal Battle, Amira Hass, Ha’aretz 25.6.18., https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-israel-to-demolish-entire-west-bank-bedouin-village-1.6116488

[10] The effect of forced transfer on Bedouin women, Bimkom, http://bimkom.org/wp-content/uploads/The-effect-of-forced-transfer-on-Bedouin-women-Eng_DESIGN1.pdf

[11] State Takes Preparatory Steps Ahead of West Bank Bedouin Village’s Demolition, Amira Hass, https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-state-takes-prepares-for-demolition-of-west-bank-bedouin-village-1.6224740 , Ha’aretz 2.7.18.

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Betrayed by the Guardian, abandoned by Australia Drop the Charges against Julian Assange

July 4, 2018, 10:31 am

≫ Next: The Campaign Against Anti-Semitism is a Campaign of Political Terrorism

≪ Previous: Israel's Ethnic Cleansing Proceeds as the Eviction and Demolition of Khan al-Ahmar is Imminent

We Should Recognise that Julian Assange is a Political Hostage

I am happy to reprint this appeal by John Pilger. Assange was subject to deportation proceedings on a phony warrant issued by Sweden.

Phony because the allegations of rape themselves were fake and manufactured by the Swedes with the intention of deporting Assange on to the United States where a secret Grand Jury had been arraigned.

The allegations against Assange have now been dropped. The Swedes refused to promise that if deported he would not be sent on to the USA.

He took refuge in the Ecuadorian Embassy but since the change in regime for the worse in Ecuador, like much of the South American continent, has been subject to virtual isolation in the Embassy including the cutting off of his Internet.

There is no doubt that Assange’s only offence was shining a light on to the secret state and in particular the United States. The secret state wants to know everything about us but we are not allowed to know anything about them. The attitude of Assange’s home country, Australia, has been particularly outrageous.

Needless to say The Guardian, which initially used and profited by Assange’s Wikileaks has long since abandoned him.

Tony Greenstein

Bringing Julian Assange Home

By John Pilger

This is an abridged version of an address by John Pilger to a rally in Sydney, Australia, to mark Julian Assange's six years' confinement in the Ecuadorean embassy in London.

June 17, 2018 "Information Clearing House"- The persecution of Julian Assange must end. Or it will end in tragedy.

The Australian government and prime minister Malcolm Turnbull have an historic opportunity to decide which it will be.

They can remain silent, for which history will be unforgiving. Or they can act in the interests of justice and humanity and bring this remarkable Australian citizen home.

Assange does not ask for special treatment. The government has clear diplomatic and moral obligations to protect Australian citizens abroad from gross injustice: in Julian's case, from a gross miscarriage of justice and the extreme danger that await him should he walk out of the Ecuadorean embassy in London unprotected.

We know from the Chelsea Manning case what he can expect if a US extradition warrant is successful -- a United Nations Special Rapporteur called it torture.

I know Julian Assange well; I regard him as a close friend, a person of extraordinary resilience and courage. I have watched a tsunami of lies and smear engulf him, endlessly, vindictively, perfidiously; and I know why they smear him.

In 2008, a plan to destroy both WikiLeaks and Assange was laid out in a top secret document dated 8 March, 2008. The authors were the Cyber Counter-intelligence Assessments Branch of the US Defence Department. They described in detail how important it was to destroy the "feeling of trust" that is WikiLeaks'"centre of gravity".

This would be achieved, they wrote, with threats of "exposure [and] criminal prosecution" and a unrelenting assault on reputation. The aim was to silence and criminalise WikiLeaks and its editor and publisher. It was as if they planned a war on a single human being and on the very principle of freedom of speech.

Their main weapon would be personal smear. Their shock troops would be enlisted in the media -- those who are meant to keep the record straight and tell us the truth.

The irony is that no one told these journalists what to do. I call them Vichy journalists -- after the Vichy government that served and enabled the German occupation of wartime France.

Last October, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation journalist Sarah Ferguson interviewed Hillary Clinton, over whom she fawned as "the icon for your generation".

This was the same Clinton who threatened to "obliterate totally" Iran and, who, as US secretary of State in 2011, was one of the instigators of the invasion and destruction of Libya as a modern state, with the loss of 40,000 lives. Like the invasion of Iraq, it was based on lies.

When the Libyan President was murdered publicly and gruesomely with a knife, Clinton was filmed whooping and cheering. Thanks largely to her, Libya became a breeding ground for ISIS and other jihadists. Thanks largely to her, tens of thousands of refugees fled in peril across the Mediterranean, and many drowned.

Leaked emails published by WikiLeaks revealed that Hillary Clinton's foundation - which she shares with her husband - received millions of dollars from Saudi Arabia and Qatar, the main backers of ISIS and terrorism across the Middle East.

As Secretary of State, Clinton approved the biggest arms sale ever -- worth $80 billion -- to Saudi Arabia, one of her foundation's principal benefactors. Today, Saudi Arabia is using these weapons to crush starving and stricken people in a genocidal assault on Yemen.

Sarah Ferguson, a highly paid reporter, raised not a word of this with Hillary Clinton sitting in front of her.

Instead, she invited Clinton to describe the "damage" Julian Assange did "personally to you". In response, Clinton defamed Assange, an Australian citizen, as "very clearly a tool of Russian intelligence" and "a nihilistic opportunist who does the bidding of a dictator".

She offered no evidence -- nor was asked for any -- to back her grave allegations.

At no time was Assange offered the right of reply to this shocking interview, which Australia's publicly-funded state broadcaster had a duty to give him.

As if that wasn't enough, Ferguson's executive producer, Sally Neighour, followed the interview with a vicious re-tweet: "Assange is Putin's bitch. We all know it!"

There are many other examples of Vichy journalism. The Guardian, reputedly once a great liberal newspaper, conducted a vendetta against Julian Assange. Like a spurned lover, the Guardian aimed its personal, petty, inhuman and craven attacks at a man whose work it once published and profited from.

The former editor of the Guardian, Alan Rusbridger, called the WikiLeaks disclosures, which his newspaper published in 2010, "one of the greatest journalistic scoops of the last 30 years". Awards were lavished and celebrated as if Julian Assange did not exist.

WikiLeaks' revelations became part of the Guardian's marketing plan to raise the paper's cover price. They made money, often big money, while WikiLeaks and Assange struggled to survive.
With not a penny going to WikiLeaks, a hyped Guardian book led to a lucrative Hollywood movie deal. The book's authors, Luke Harding and David Leigh, gratuitously abused Assange as a "damaged personality" and "callous".

They also revealed the secret password Julian had given the Guardian in confidence and which was designed to protect a digital file containing the US embassy cables.

With Assange now trapped in the Ecuadorean embassy, Harding, who had enriched himself on the backs of both Julian Assange and Edward Snowden, stood among the police outside the embassy and gloated on his blog that "Scotland Yard may get the last laugh".

The question is why.

Julian Assange has committed no crime. He has never been charged with a crime. The Swedish episode was bogus and farcical and he has been vindicated.

Katrin Axelsson and Lisa Longstaff of Women Against Rape summed it up when they wrote, "The allegations against [Assange] are a smokescreen behind which a number of governments are trying to clamp down on WikiLeaks for having audaciously revealed to the public their secret planning of wars and occupations with their attendant rape, murder and destruction... The authorities care so little about violence against women that they manipulate rape allegations at will."

This truth was lost or buried in a media witch-hunt that disgracefully associated Assange with rape and misogyny. The witch-hunt included voices who described themselves as on the left and as feminist. They willfully ignored the evidence of extreme danger should Assange be extradited to the United States.

According to a document released by Edward Snowden, Assange is on a "Manhunt target list". One leaked official memo says: "Assange is going to make a nice bride in prison. Screw the terrorist. He'll be eating cat food forever."

In Alexandra, Virginia - the suburban home of America's war-making elite -- a secret grand jury, a throwback to the middle ages -- has spent seven years trying to concoct a crime for which Assange can be prosecuted.

This is not easy; the US Constitution protects publishers, journalists and whistleblowers. Assange's crime is to have broken a silence.

No investigative journalism in my lifetime can equal the importance of what WikiLeaks has done in calling rapacious power to account. It is as if a one-way moral screen has been pushed back to expose the imperialism of liberal democracies: the commitment to endless warfare and the division and degradation of "unworthy" lives: from Grenfell Tower to Gaza.

When Harold Pinter accepted the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005, he referred to "a vast tapestry of lies up on which we feed". He asked why "the systematic brutality, the widespread atrocities, the ruthless suppression of independent thought" of the Soviet Union were well known in the West while America's imperial crimes "never happened ... even while [they] were happening, they never happened.".

In its revelations of fraudulent wars (Afghanistan, Iraq) and the bald-faced lies of governments (the Chagos Islands), WikiLeaks has allowed us to glimpse how the imperial game is played in the 21st century. That is why Assange is in mortal danger.

Seven years ago, in Sydney, I arranged to meet a prominent Liberal Member of the Federal Parliament, Malcolm Turnbull.

I wanted to ask him to deliver a letter from Gareth Peirce, Assange's lawyer, to the government. We talked about his famous victory -- in the 1980s when, as a young barrister, he had fought the British Government's attempts to suppress free speech and prevent the publication of the book Spycatcher -- in its way, a WikiLeaks of the time, for it revealed the crimes of state power.

The prime minister of Australia was then Julia Gillard, a Labor Party politician who had declared WikiLeaks "illegal" and wanted to cancel Assange's passport -- until she was told she could not do this: that Assange had committed no crime: that WikiLeaks was a publisher, whose work was protected under Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, to which Australia was one of the original signatories.

In abandoning Assange, an Australian citizen, and colluding in his persecution, Prime Minister Gillard's outrageous behaviour forced the issue of his recognition, under international law, as a political refugee whose life was at risk. Ecuador invoked the 1951 Convention and granted Assange refuge in its embassy in London.

Gillard has recently been appearing in a gig with Hillary Clinton; they are billed as pioneering feminists.

If there is anything to remember Gillard by, it a warmongering, sycophantic, embarrassing speech she made to the US Congress soon after she demanded the illegal cancellation of Julian's passport.

Malcolm Turnbull is now the Prime Minister of Australia. Julian Assange's father has written to Turnbull. It is a moving letter, in which he has appealed to the prime minister to bring his son home. He refers to the real possibility of a tragedy.

I have watched Assange's health deteriorate in his years of confinement without sunlight. He has had a relentless cough, but is not even allowed safe passage to and from a hospital for an X-ray .

Malcolm Turnbull can remain silent. Or he can seize this opportunity and use his government's diplomatic influence to defend the life of an Australian citizen, whose courageous public service is recognised by countless people across the world. He can bring Julian Assange home.

John Pilger Biography

See UK Should Reject Extraditing Julian Assange to US by Human Rights Watch

↧

The Campaign Against Anti-Semitism is a Campaign of Political Terrorism

July 4, 2018, 6:41 pm

≫ Next: Shin Bet Torture Transcript Published

≪ Previous: Betrayed by the Guardian, abandoned by Australia Drop the Charges against Julian Assange

Please Support this Crowdfunding Appeal for my Libel Action Against this McCarthyist Campaign

The Campaign Against Antisemitism is one of the nastiest and most vicious political organisations in Britain. It specialises in defaming anti-Zionists and supporters of the Palestinians by accusing them of ‘anti-Semitism’. No-one is immune to their depradations.

Absurdly this racist group is a charity. Perhaps it is not so absurd because the Charity Commission was, until recently, headed by one of the chief Islamaphobic bigots in public life, William Shawcross, who was on the board of the Anglo-Israel Association and the far-Right Henry Jackson Society. [see Rightwing thinktank pulls funds for Commons groups after disclosure row]

The CAA is a far-Right organisation with close links to far-Right Zionists who work with the Football Lads Alliance, Tommy Robinson and assorted fascist organisations. The CAA chose to call the fascists who attempted to disrupt the recent Al Quds demonstration, ‘anti-terrorism activists’.

I am bringing a libel action against the CAA for having called me a ‘notorious anti-Semite.’ I am not alone. If you are Jewish and anti-Zionist then you are almost certain to be defamed by the CAA. Its list of victims is a lengthy one and includes Israeli Professor Moshe Machover, the late Gerald Kaufman MP, Jackie Walker as well as assorted Palestinians.

I have decided to make a stance against this McCarthyist organisation which pollutes public life and destroys debate and dialogue. It has borrowed all the techniques of the American political scene where ‘attack ads’ are the standard fare in political life. The CAA believes that by screaming ‘terrorist’ and ‘anti-Semite’ at anything to do with the Palestinians or anti-Zionism that it can drown out rational discussion and intimidate its opponents into silence.

On the basis of the quote by Ben Gurion above, Jackie Walker was accused of exonerating Hitler

The CAA operates according to Goebbel’s maxim that the bigger the lie the more likely it is to be believed. It particularly specialises in distorting what people say to fit in with their agenda. So when Jackie Walker asked why should Arabs make peace when the Zionists have taken their country and stolen their land the CAA screamed 'anti-semitism. When she then went on to say that anti-Semitism, the Nazis and Hitler had nothing to do with the Palestinians, the CAA pounced. Jackie Walker was accused of exonerating Hitler of the Holocaust. Indeed she was all but accused of denying that there was a Holocaust. EXCLUSIVE: The Campaign Against Anti-Semitism Accuses Jackie Walker of Holocaust Denial

The Campaign Against Anti-Semitism is racist and Islamaphobic

The only problem was that Jackie Walker didn’t say this. She was quoting from a book by the former President of the World Zionist Organisation, Nahum Goldmann, The Jewish Paradox! Even worse Goldmann was in turn quoting from the first Israeli Prime Minister, David Ben Gurion! Needless to say this post was quickly pulled but not before it had been widely quoted and copied.

The CAA launched a vicious attack on the late Sir Gerald Kaufmann when news of his death was announced. Sir Gerald despite his earlier Zionist politics had been an outspoken Jewish supporter of the Palestinians

Only an organisation that deliberately sets out to distort and mangle what people say, in order to silence any criticism or debate about Zionism could possibly mistake a quote from Ben Gurion for an apologetic for Hitler. Ben Gurion was trying to understand and explain Arab hostility to Zionism from the Arab perspective. He was trying to put himself in the shoes of the Arabs. The CAA is consistent in refusing to admit or accept that the Palestinians have any case. They are unconcerned with the feelings of Arabs or Palestinians. Arabs are cardboard cut-out terrorists and ‘genocidal anti-Semites’ (one of their favourite phrases). In their eyes all Muslims are anti-Semitic (apart from a few tame quislings).

The CAA targeted Malaka Mohammed, a young anti-racist Palestinian at Exeter because she was Palestinian - even the Daily Mail apologised for the CAA's lies

The hall of shame - racists and bigots to a man (including the one woman)

In the past 18 months, the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism has accused me of being a ‘notorious anti-Semite’ five times in retaliation for my initiating a petition to have the Charity Commission deregister them. Accusations of 'anti-semitism'were made by way of retaliation.

I therefore decided, that we have to put an end to these McCarthyite accusations of anti-Semitism – which are nothing more than a form of political terrorism. I launched a libel action earlier this year. Libel actions however cost money. An earlier crowdfunding appeal raised £8,722 of which £2,400 was spent paying a barrister to draft the initial Particulars of Claim. I now need to be able to pay for more legal work and that is why I am relaunching my CAA Libel Appeal. There is still £6,222 left from the original appeal but given that libel actions can run into hundreds of thousands of pounds my appeal for £15,000 is for the bare bones and nothing more.

Just a few of the CAA's anti-Corbyn headlines

So please give generously to the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism Libel Fund! This is not for me but for all those campaigners for Palestine who have been accused of ‘anti-Semitism’.

And please sign the petition to deregister the CAA as a charity

Tony Greenstein

↧

Tamar Zandberg, Go Home!

As long as Israel is a Jewish state it can’t be a democratic state

Knesset blocks bill to deem Israel 'state for all its citizens'

Secret police

Protests in Ramallah: Does the PA actually care about Palestinians?

PA uses same tactics as Israel

Need to witness brutality

Why is Palestinian Authority doing this?

Why the protests will continue

Why I face disciplinary action for criticising London Regional Organiser Steve Terry who scabbed on Stan Keable

Israel is the only Jewish State in the World – it is also the only Apartheid State in the World

Likud's MK Miki Zohar says Jews are the smartest in the world, so know Netanyahu isn't corrupt

Israeli prosecutors concluded that the two soldiers acted properly when they shot and killed an unarmed teenager 10 meters away as he ran away from them

End Separation of Jews and Bedouin at Pool in Israel's South, Lawmakers Tell AG

The Fight for Democracy

See Jewish extremists taunt ‘Ali’s on the grill’ at slain toddler’s relatives

Democratic Hypocrisy over the separation of child immigrants – they began it as a ‘Consequence Delivery System’

As it used to be said, the Democrats are the graveyard of all protest politics.

By Patrick Martin 22 June 2018

Teens as young as 14 allege they were beaten regularly, denied adequate medical treatment, and had bones broken by prison guards.

The Israeli army confiscated Yasmin Eshtayyeh's cash at a border crossing, calling it 'terrorist money'– without proof, interrogation or trial. She hasn't let adversity stop her from fighting to get it back

For Killing a Palestinian prisoner 9 months, for slapping an Israeli soldier 8 months - Israeli Justice at its finest

Netanyahu invites Viktor Orban, Hungary’s racist anti-Semitic Prime Minister for a state visit.

Like Apartheid South Africa before it, Israel is moving Palestinians into bleak and desolate townships

[1] See Khan al-Ahmar, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khan_al-Ahmar.

[2] Israel to Demolish Entire West Bank Bedouin Village, Ending Year-long Legal Battle , Amira Hass, Ha’aretz 25.5.18. https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-israel-to-demolish-entire-west-bank-bedouin-village-1.6116488

[3] See Israel's Supreme Court: Liberal bastion or an enforcer of injustice?, Ben White, Middle East Eye, 23.3.18., http://www.middleeasteye.net/columns/how-israel-s-supreme-court-reinforces-discriminatory-status-quo-1678693361

[4] Khan al-Ahmar and Gaza: Two Sides of the Same Legal Coin, Ha’aretz, 5thJune 2018, https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/khan-al-ahmar-and-gaza-two-sides-of-the-same-legal-coin-1.6152008

[6] Israel to Build 92 New Settlement Homes Near Bedouin Village Slated for Demolition, Amira Hass, Ha’aretz, 30.5.18., https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-israel-to-build-92-homes-in-settlement-near-condemned-bedouin-village-1.6132947

[7] About the Jewish Labour Movement, http://www.jlm.org.uk/about

[8] Israel’s Solution for Expelled Bedouin: Between the Garbage Dump and Junkyard, Ha’aretz, 11.6.18., Amir Hass, https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium.MAGAZINE-israel-s-solution-for-expelled-bedouin-between-garbage-and-junkyard-1.6158225

[9] Israel to Demolish Entire West Bank Bedouin Village, Ending Year-long Legal Battle, Amira Hass, Ha’aretz 25.6.18., https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-israel-to-demolish-entire-west-bank-bedouin-village-1.6116488

Please Support this Crowdfunding Appeal for my Libel Action Against this McCarthyist Campaign

By Patrick Martin
22 June 2018

[4] Khan al-Ahmar and Gaza: Two Sides of the Same Legal Coin, Ha’aretz, 5^thJune 2018, https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/khan-al-ahmar-and-gaza-two-sides-of-the-same-legal-coin-1.6152008