Racist for over a century against immigrants and those fleeing oppression

The controversy over the Mail's anti-Semitism began over the attack on Ed Miliband's father, Ralph Miliband, whom I once debated and knew from the Socialist Society.  The idea that he 'hated' Britain is of course rubbish, but no doubt, like any socialist he hated the Britain of speculators, toffs, Cameroonians and privilege.  In other words, ruling class Britain complete with its prejudices and bias.  It is noticeable that in all her witterings, Melanie Phillips would have something to say about the newspaper which supported   the anti-Semitic British Union of Fascists.  You might be fooled into thinking that the Daily Mail had an anti-fascist record as it attacks its opponents on the left as ‘fascists’. However the truth is a lot stranger. 

To dismiss the Miliband charges first.  The fact that the article was written by Geoffrey Levy, who is Jewish, is irrelevant.  Jews are as susceptible to the Mail Shilling as any one else.  It is what he wrote that is important and this was a vicious attack on a Marxist Jewish refugee who fled Nazi Germany, served in the navy, but who hated the class nature of Britain and its iniquities, such as the fact that a tax-exile in France can try and sully the reputation of the late Ralph Miliband.  It neatly conflates the fact of being Jewish and a refugee is to make one an 'enemy'.  So yes, the article was anti-Semitic and Levy is a collaborator of the Zionist brand.
　

Rothermere and friend

Rothermere supported the attempt to build fascism in Britain

In Nazi Youth in Control [Daily News 4.9.33] Lord Rothermere, the owner of the Daily ‘Hate’ Mail wrote that

‘I WRITE from a new country on the map of Europe. Its name is Naziland. Of all the historic changes in our time, the transformation of Germany under Hitler has been the swiftest, most complete,’ which is certainly one way of putting it.

Rothermere waxed lyrical about the attractions and support of German people for Hitler, ‘forgetting’ to mention that the total vote for the Communist KPD and SPD in the last free elections in November 1932, was greater than that for the Nazis.

'Something far more significant than a new Government has arisen among the Germans. There has been a sudden expansion of their national spirit like that which took place in England under Queen Elizabeth. Youth has taken command. On a visit, which I am paying to Northern Germany I find-, the signs of the new Hitler spirit as manifest in the most out of-the-way villages as in the largest cities.'

Like most ruling class apologists for Hitler (most were members of the Anglo-German Fellowship) Rothermere considered the reports about Nazi brutality were figments of the imagination:

‘They have started a clamorous campaign of denunciation against what they call 'Nazi atrocities,' which, as anyone who visits Germany quickly discovers for him self, consists merely of a few isolated acts of violence.’

Rothermere made light of fascist violence against the workers of Italy under Mussolini, thousands of whom were butchered, comparing it to a nursery governess:

‘The administration of a few doses of castor oil to Communist adversaries.’  Perhaps in his visit he could have taken in the concentration camps of Dachau and Sachsenhausen.

But it in his naked anti-Semitism, whereby he justified Hitler, that Rothermere showed his true contempt: Under the title

JEWISH OFFICIALS IN KEY POSITIONS
'THE German nation, moreover, was rapidly falling under the control of its alien elements. In the last days of the pre-Hitler regime there were 20 times as many Jewish Government officials in Germany as had existed before the war. Israelites of international attachments were insinuating themselves into key positions in the German administrative machine. Three German Ministries only had direct relations with the Press, but in each case the official responsible for conveying news and interpreting policy to the public was a Jew. . It is from such abuses that Hitler has freed Germany.'

To Rothermere Hitler’s actions were to prevent Jewish ‘abuses’. They were of course entirely justified as there was in effect a Jewish conspiracy to take over the German Civil Service. What Rothermere omits to mention is the successive waves of legislation, beginning with the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service in April 1933 which de-Jewified the Civil Service (essay compare this with the Judaisation of the Galilee and other parts of Israel).

In other words Rothermere was quite prepared to justify anti-Semitism as the price of smashing communism and the labour movement. In this he was not alone. In his two-volume book on fascism, Robert Black quotes Lloyd George thus:

‘If the powers that be succeeded in overthrowing Nazism in Germany, what would follow? Not a Conservative-Socialist regime (SPD) nor a Liberal regime, but extreme Communism... A Communist Germany would be intimately more formidable than a Communist Russia.’ [Robert Black, p. 417, Fascism in Germany, pp. 296/297, Steyne Publications, 1975.
Nor was this attitude to anti-Semitism confined to non-Jews. Chaim Weizmann, President of the (World) Zionist Organisation and first President of the State of Israel wrote of Major Evans-Gordon MP, founder of the anti-Semitic British Brothers League, which campaigned against the admission of Jewish refugees from Czarist Russia that:

‘"Looking back now, I think our people were rather hard on him." And why? Because:

The Aliens Bill in England and the movement which grew up around it were natural phenomenon which might have been foreseen.’ To the Zionists anti-Semitism was a ‘natural phenomenon’ which could not be fought and this of course explains the collaboration with anti-Semitism including the Nazis (especially in the 1933-1939 period).

Of course today the pro-Zionist Daily ‘Hate’ Mail has transferred its venom onto Black and Asian immigrants but it is useful to remind ourselves what they said about the Russian Jews fleeing the pogroms in Russia in 1900 and Hitler in 1930:

The Mail not only denied the 'atrocity stories' Hitler but it opposed letting into Britain Jewish refugees

"The way stateless Jews from Germany are pouring in from every port of this country is becoming an outrage: the number of aliens entering the country through back door - a problem to which the Daily Mail has repeatedly pointed"

Indeed the Daily ‘Hate’ Mail did indeed warn of the Jewish peril. Throughout the 1930’s it and Lord Rothermere supported Hitler. In January 1934 appeared the famous ‘Hurrah for the Blackshirts’ article on the Mail’s front page. It was only after the BUF debacle at Olympia in July 1934 that the Mail began withdrawing its support.

The Mail's famous headline 'Hurrah for the Blackshirts' -  an attempt to build a native fascist organisation

Daily Mail, 20 August 1938.

Or go back further "They fought, they jostled to the foremost places at the gangways. When the Relief Committee passed by they hid their gold and fawned and whined in broken English asked for money for their train fare." Daily Mail, 3^rd February 1900.

Atzmon helps the Jewish Agency frame Ali Abunimah as a ‘racist’.

Gilad Atzmon, who nowadays has little or no influence in the Palestine solidarity movement, after the expulsion of a holocaust denier friend of his, Frances Clark-Lowes, from PSC in 2011, has taken to providing false or manipulated information to the people like Avi Mayer of the Zionist Jewish Agency suggesting that Ali is a racist.

Mayer is a paid propagandist of the Jewish Agency.  This is his profile:

Mayer Social Media Activist

With a new battle front opening up online, especially on Twitter, Mayer has become a vocal and tech savvy supporter of Jewry and the Jewish state. Whether it’s demolishing an anti-Israel advocate in 140 characters or less, or disseminating stories that shed light on the positive aspects emerging from Israel, Mayer is a leader of the new breed of internet cheerleaders and has become the bane of many an anti-Semitic tweeter.

Mayer’s use of ‘anti-Semitism’ is wholly cynical. Zionism came into being on the basis that anti-Semitism was a natural phenomenon.  As its founder, Theodor Herzl wrote:  In Paris I began to understand and to pardon anti-Semitism - Herzl Diaries p.6).   The only reason for the Jewish Agency existing today (it used to be the quasi-government of the Yishuv, the pre-1948 Jewish population in Palestine ) is to provide a means for the state to discriminate against Arabs whilst denying it is doing any such thing.

Instead of the State refusing the right of Arabs to lease land it subcontracts this out to the Jewish Agency. It uses the Jewish Agency and Jewish National Fund (another para-state organisation) to ‘Judaify’ areas such as the Galilee and Negev. One would have though that Meyer might first deal with the mote in his own eyes before searching for the beam in others!

The article itself is below, but I have a few comments of my own.

The key phrase that Ali Abunimah uses, that Avi Mayer exploits, is ‘What you describe as "Jewish" might perhaps be more accurately described as "Zionist," - and then we might find grounds for a lot of agreement.’ It is clear that the word ‘might’ qualifies both the description of Jewish behaviour as Zionism and any future agreement between the two. In retrospect, I am sure that Ali wishes that he had never even engaged with Atzmon or tried to give him the benefit of a doubt.   However many of us have tried to wean Atzmon off the equivalent of his mother's milk without success. 

To suggest that Ali’s comment above was ‘coaching’ or advising Atzmon to ‘conceal’ his anti-Semitism is a deliberate lie by someone to whom lying comes second nature. This suggestion by Mayer is a good example of someone well versed in the Goebbel’s technique – the bigger the lie the more likely it is to be believed.

In fact Atzmon demonstrates during the conversation both his Zionism and anti-Semitism. In the sentence ‘It is important for me to mention that I referred to Jewish identity and Jewish Ideology rather than to Jewish people. In my entire career I have never referred to Jewish people, Jewish ethnicity or race!!’ one has to remind him that there isn’t and never has been one Jewish identity, certainly not in the past century and a half. The suggestion that there is a ‘Jewish ideology’ is clearly anti-Semitic. Just as it would be nonsense to suggest there was a Catholic or Protestant ideology. Of course all religions change their ideas and identiy but Atzmon's essentialism fixes a Jewish identity for all time.  It is therefore either biologically determinist or cultural racism.  If Atzmon were simply referring to Orthodox Judaism there might be a grain of truth in it, but to suggest there is one common ideology that connects me and Netanyahu is racist. Pure and simple.
Atzmon also lies when he says he has never referred to Jewish people ethnicity or race. Perhaps he has a poor memory as smoking the weed can result in memory lapses. But in my Guide to Atzmon  the great man says, for example that ‘When a so-called ‘better’ Jew refers to himself as a ‘Jew’, what is it that he refers to? Is it his racial belonging? Is it biological determinism in play? Is it the ethnic identity…’‘Zionism is inherently a racially oriented "homecoming" project’‘‘Ostrovsky refers to racial solidarity, I call it 3rd category brotherhood and Weizmann calls it Zionism.’ No doubt there are more examples of how Atzmon never refers to Jewish ethnicity or race!

Atzmon goes on to say that ‘since Israel presents itself as ‘the Jewish state’, we must be entitled to elaborate on Jewish identity, Jewish ideology and Jewish politics.’ I am sure students of logic can see the flawed nature of this argument which is why Atzmon is both a Zionist and an anti-Semite. Do we accept Israel’s or Zionism’s claims to be a ‘Jewish’ state? What is inherently Jewish about it other than that it uses being 'Jewish' as a mark of privilege? Did White South Africans demonstrate that all white people are inherently racist?  Atzmon is happy to accept Israel’s self-definition of itself.

The other obvious nonsense is to suggest that Zionism is to do with the diaspora not Israel: ‘Zionism is not a living discourse in Israel. Zionism is a diaspora discourse. Both Ilan myself and a few other millions were not educated as Zionists ( Jews awaiting transformation) but as Sabras (the ‘success fruits’ of Zionism). We were the post revolutionary entities. Hence the attack on ‘Zionism’ can hardly touch Israelis (and in fact it doesn’t).'

This is a clear statement that the structures of apartheid are a product of Jewish racism, not the settler-colonial and Zionist nature of Israel. The fact that most Israelis consider Zionism irrelevant doesn’t mean that that is true. It means that they consider occupation, repression and discrimination are normative behaviour. Unfortunately Atzmon is at one with them.

Tony Greenstein

A response to recent efforts to cast me as a racist

Submitted by Ali Abunimah on Wed, 10/16/2013 - 10:08

I do not usually write in response to nonsensical online allegations by bigots. If I did I would have little time for anything else.

However, I thought it was important to do so in this case.

The allegation

Over recent weeks, MJ Rosenberg, a well-known pro-Israel commentator, published six blog posts smearing me as "anti-Semitic." His posts are not my concern here but are mentioned as context.
On 13 October, Gilad Atzmon made this post on Facebook:

M.J. Rosenberg is wrong this time; Ali Abunimah is not an antisemite, he is just dishonest/stupid. Abunimah calls Israelis Zionists because he needs the so called Jewish ‘anti’ Zionists to support his operation. The last time i communicated with Ali Abunimah he wrote to me, ‘Just refer to Zionism instead of Jewish identity and everything would be fine’. He basically asked me to lie.. I obviously refused…

Atzmon has even paid to promote this message on Facebook as a "sponsored" post. But the words that Atzmon attributes to me in his Facebook post are fabricated. I never wrote those words.
However, Avi Mayer, the social media director of Israel’s Jewish Agency, among others, has been gleefully disseminating Atzmon’s Facebook posting embellishing it with the allegation that I "coached" Atzmon on how to "hide his anti-Semitism."

Some examples of Mayer’s tweets:




Today, Atzmon repeated his allegations in a rambling blog postwhich includes a small snippet of a brief exchange of Facebook messages I had with him in 2010, where I wrote:

What you describe as ‘Jewish’ might perhaps be more accurately described as ‘Zionist,’ - and then we might find grounds for a lot of agreement.

 Atzmon claims that this is "a juicy bit of information Abunimah would probably prefer to keep hidden from the public eye."

Far from it. Atzmon did not publish our entire correspondence because that would undermine his nonsensical claims. So I will do so.

The facts

In November 2010, I was invited to speak at a conference in Stuttgart, Germany on the one-state solution.
Atzmon apparently invited himself to this conference and somehow parlayed his way onto the stage to give what was called a "greeting."
Atzmon was not an invited speaker and never appeared on the published conference program or the list of speakers (Videos of the conference were made and published by an independent organization, publicsolidarity.de).

At that point, I had not paid much attention to his work.

When he spoke, I (and many others at the conference) found Atzmon’s comments disturbing because he appeared to be blaming Jews as Jews for the conflict in Palestine, rather than the settler-colonial practice and political ideology of Zionism.

The first thing I did the next day, when it was my turn to speak, was to object publicly to Atzmon’s statements. My comments are in this video:

Stuttgart - Palästinakonferenz - Ali Abunimah (6/8)

Two days after the conference, Atzmon contacted me via Facebook and we had a brief, polite exchange of private messages, but one in which I reiterated the objections I made in Stuttgart. Atzmon initiated the exchange. I responded to him once. He followed up with two more messages.

It is, as far as I recall, the only occasion I have ever written to Atzmon.

Although the exchange was cordial, I never did meet with Atzmon, and never again responded to any of the numerous private messages he has sent me, including in the last few weeks, pleading with me to revise my views of him. The "Ilan" Atzmon refers to in his messages is Ilan Pappe, who was an invited speaker at the Stuttgart conference.

Here is the entire transcript of the exchange.

(Note: these messages appear in the chronological order in which they were sent. They are taken from the stored archive of a Facebook account I no longer use. A bug in the Facebook archive makes it appear as if the first message was sent on 1 December 2010. It was however sent before the other messages).

From: Gilad Atzmon
December 1, 2010 at 9:18 pm

Dear Ali,

I realised today that you were upset by my short talk in Stuttgart.

It is important for me to mention that I referred to Jewish identity and Jewish Ideology rather than to Jewish people. In my entire career I have never referred to Jewish people, Jewish ethnicity or race!!!

However, since Israel presents itself as ‘the Jewish state’, we must be entitled to elaborate on Jewish identity, Jewish ideology and Jewish politics.

I understand your concerns, I know exactly where you come from and I also appreciate your immense contribution to the discourse. However, as an artist and a writer i am somehow compelled to share my truth with others. I am sure that your realise that it is Jewish ideology and culture that stops Israelis from jumping on the OS [one state] wagon. Even the Jewish left stops short of doing so.

I somehow pretty sure that you know it yourself.

With great respect
Gilad

From: Ali Abunimah
November 30, 2010 at 5:16 pm

Dear Gilad, I appreciate your note. However I did not hear it quite like that and I am not sure that others did and my fear is that what you said can lead not to enlightenment, but to encouraging discrimination of deepening prejudices. I doubt that is your intent, but it is what could be the result. What you describe as "Jewish" might perhaps be more accurately described as "Zionist," - and then we might find grounds for a lot of agreement - but that is a longer discussion perhaps we’ll have a chance to have in person another time. Of course you have the right to speak your mind, and you always do!
Best
Ali

From: Gilad Atzmon
November 30, 2010 at 7:11 pm

Dear Ali thanks so much for taking the time… i will be very short. In my I writing differentiate between Jews (the people), Judaism (the religion) and Jewishness (the ideology). I ve never ever spoken about Jews (the people), I hardly speak about Judaism but restrict myself to a certain interpretation of it , yet, i am very critical of Jewish ideology, politics and identity.

In Germany, i spoke about Jewish Ideology and culture. Didn’t say a word about Jews, Jewish people, Jewish ethnicity or Jewish race. I just do not do it.

It is unfortunately a fact that Universalism and reconciliation are foreign to Jewish ideology for Jewish Ideology is tribal and defined by negation.

I do not agree that Jewishness (ideology) is ‘Zionism’. Zionism is indeed one manifestation of ‘Jewishness’. I won’t exhaust you with it, I am about to publish a book about it.

However, as you know, Zionism is not a living discourse in Israel. Zionism is a diaspora discourse. Both Ilan myself and a few other millions were not educated as Zionists ( Jews awaiting transformation) but as Sabras (the ‘success fruits’ of Zionism). We were the post revolutionary entities. Hence the attack on ‘Zionism’ can hardly touch Israelis (and in fact it doesn’t).

I believe that this understanding is crucial for the success of our project. I believe that we must understand what we are up against.

I was very excited to hear both you and Ilan. You are both incredible in what you are doing. However, I understand now that you probably do not approve my approach tactically.

You may be right about it, but as you know, i operate totally alone. I am not part of any movement. I am totally independent. I perform every night, I make each of my concerts into a rally for Palestine and the right of return. I take full responsibility for everything I say. And i also pay the price when there is a price to pay :)

I hope to meet once, not before too long, and elaborate on these issues. I believe that they are crucial

Peace and tx for your attention
Gilad

From: Gilad Atzmon
December 1, 2010 at 9:18 pm

do not have any plans to bother you with it… however, here is a new article by Uri Avneri… it elaborates on the issue you raised yesterday ..Jewish identity/ zionism..you may want to check the last 3 para’..

Peace G
http://palestinechronicle.com/view_article_details.php?id=16445

The conclusion

Firstly, the transcript shows that the quote Atzmon first attributed to me on Facebook is fabricated. I never wrote those words.

Secondly, the claim that I "coached" Atzmon on how to "hide his anti-Semitism" is a pure fabrication by the Jewish Agency’s Avi Mayer.

Thirdly, the actual words I wrote that Atzmon selectively quotes in his blog were a response to his statement: "I am sure that your realise that it is Jewish ideology and culture that stops Israelis from jumping on the OS [one state] wagon. Even the Jewish left stops short of doing so."

It is in direct response to his assertion that I wrote: "What you describe as ‘Jewish’ might perhaps be more accurately described as "Zionist," - and then we might find grounds for a lot of agreement."

That’s a position I obviously stand by: it is Zionism, not Judaism or Jewishness, that is incompatible with the possibility of a single, democratic unified state.

While I gave Atzmon the benefit of the doubt at the time when I said it might not be his intent to foster prejudice, closer attention to his work convinced me that, indeed, his goal is to do precisely that. That is why I was pleased to sign, along with many other people I respect, the March 2012 statement on the racism and anti-Semitism in Atzmon’s work.

By fabricating words to attribute to me and selectively quoting my words, Atzmon hopes to implicate me in his racism.
 By latching on to his baseless allegations, anti-Palestinian propagandists hope to smear me as "anti-Semitic." They hope to claim that my well-known, crystal clear public stance against all forms of racism, including Islamophobia, anti-Semitism and Zionism, shared by many colleagues in this movement, is contradicted in private.

But as the the full exchange of messages shows, I repeated in private what I said to the Stuttgart audience in public: that Atzmon’s targeting of Jews fosters prejudice.
This was consistent with the public stance I took as far back as 2001 regarding Israel Shamir, emphasizing the importance of making no space for racism in the Palestinian rights movement. It is a position I will always defend.

For the record: It has been claimed – apparently because my name appears first in an alphabetical list – that I was the initiator of the March 2012 statement regarding Atzmon’s work.

Although I would have been proud to claim that credit, unfortunately I cannot. Nonetheless, when asked to sign, I did so without hesitation.

Israel's Palestinians Confined to a 'Citizenship' that is Meaningless

Uzzi Ornan displays his ID card - which unlike a passport does not have any mention of an Israeli nationality.

The Israel's Supreme Court recently rejected a claim that there was an Israeli nationality. The claim was brought by Uzzi Ornan, a 90-year-old linguistics processor at the Technion, Tel Aviv. An Israeli nationality would undermine the 'Jewish' nature of the Israeli state.

The judgment reinforces the decision in a similar case was brought by George Tamarin in 1970. In the Tamarin case the Supreme Court, presided over by Justice Agranat held that ‘the desire to create an Israeli nation separate from the Jewish nation is not a legitimate aspiration.’

Hebron settlers protected an army that gives Palestinians no protection

It is a very strange State where it is held to be 'illegitimate' to want citizenship and nationality to be one and the same.  That is the basis of all western democracies and the bourgeois revolutions.

Agranat pointed out that a division of the population into Israeli and Jewish nations would create a schism among the Jewish people and negate the foundation on which the State of Israel was established. The court ruling specified, "There is no Israeli nation separate from the Jewish People. The Jewish People is composed not only of those residing in Israel but also of Diaspora Jewry."

Jewish Nationality Status as the Basis for Institutionalised Racial Discrimination in Israel

In Ornan the court explained that creating an Israeli nationality would have "weighty implications" on the state of Israel and could pose a danger to Israel’s founding principle: to be a Jewish state for the Jewish people.

Israel is the only state in the world which is a state, not of its own citizens, but of people residing anywhere in the world who are Jewish. The only comparison is Nazi Germany which in 1935 stripped German Jews of their nationality. Henceforth they were not Germans of the Jewish faith but Jews who were German subjects. The German Volk/people extended to all Germans, wherever they resided, and that was the basis for the attack on Czechoslovakia – the Sudetan Germans were claimed by Hitler as part of the German Vok.   Poles and Jews were expelled from the annexed territories of Poland, in particular the Warthegau, and German residents of Poland and the Eastern Territories were brought in to settle the land.

An ultra orthodox boy watches Sheik Jarrah protest against land confiscation in Jerusalem.  Jewish nationals never have their land confiscated.

The question of what constitutes a Jewish or Israeli identity has been a permanent dilemma for Israelis and non-Israelis alike. The definition of ‘who is a Jew’ is defined in Israel by Orthodox Jewry, i.e. someone born of a Jewish mother who has not adopted another religion. It is much the same as the Nazi definition in the Nuremberg Laws 1935, i.e. based on ethnicity or race.

British journalist Jonathan Cook, who resides in Nazareth, wrote an article Court nixes push for ‘Israeli nationality’ 18.10.13 Al-Jazeera. There is little to disagree with in the article but Moshe Machover, a co-founder of Matzpen, the Socialist Organisation in Israel has responded with a piece ‘ ‘Confusion Compounded’. However Moshe confuses the debate even further with an exploration of nationality and citizenship in European countries as well as Israel. I have written a response below. Moshe’s argument is written in the context of his belief that Israeli Jews or Hebrews are a separate nation, with which I disagree.

Israel's flag is based on Jewish religious symbols -  it deliberately excludes non-Jews from feeling any attachment to the flag of the setters

Response to Moshe Machover on the question of Jewish citizenship and nationality

TG:  In Britain and most European countries, citizenship and nationality are one and the same, certainly in terms of their practical effects. They might not recognise what is termed ‘national identity’ but that is the price of the nation state. In Britain, there is a debate over whether people are British nationals or English/ Welsh, Scottish. In any event it is immaterial, because no practical consequences flow from this.

MM:  This is patently untrue. In several important respects the UK is a multi-national state. Wales has its own national assembly; Scotland has not only its own national assembly with considerable powers, but also its own legal and educational system. And let us not get into a discussion of Northern Ireland...

TG:  In terms of rights and responsibilities there are no differences.  Immigration and rights of residence, social security benefits, defence are all decided on a UK wide basis.  Likewise there are no borders between the different countries and of course they have the same currency, head of state etc. 

There are however different constitutional mechanisms, designed mostly to compensate for the remoteness of Scotland and Wales from London.  But the Assemblies, created by Devolution has very limited revenue raising powers and in Wales they are non-existent.

Moshe says that Scotland (not Wales!) has its own legal system.  Only up to a point.  The laws they implement are usually one and the same and Westminster law trumps Scottish law.  More importantly the Scottish Court of Session (our Court of Appeal) is not the highest judicial body.  That is the British, mainly English, Supreme Court (which used to be the House of Lords).  The Privy Council Judicial Committee whilst not binding is 'persuasive'.

The term British Citizen in the passport is therefore irrelevant (in fact it used to be Citizen of the UK and colonies, with the implication that you were a UK national).

Of course the definition of the Basques and other national minorities as belonging to the majority nation, for example Spanish or French, is a form of national oppression because it only recognises their individual rights and where there is a conflict, as with the Kurds in Turkey, then there isn’t even an equality of individual rights.

MM:  This is exactly my point. The official French position that the French "nation" is co-extensive with French citizenry is a deliberate confusion, designed to legitimize oppression of national minorities.

TG:  I'm not sure that the conflation of 'nation' and 'citizenship' by France, which Napoleon implemented in every country he conquered, was deliberately designed to legitimise national oppression.  Rather it was important in the breakdown of feudal relations, the caste and city states.  It was certainly welcomed by the Jews but those who were colonised, as in Algeria and Corsica, were of a different opinion.

TG:  But in western Europe the conflation of citizenship and nationality is important, not least because it recognises that regardless of colour, race, ethnicity etc. one has the same rights as the next person.

MM:  Yes; this is its positive side: recognition of equal individual rights. Its negative side is denial of collective rights of national minorities.

TG:  In Israel it does matter, because citizenship accords only the right to reside, work and vote. It does not presume equality. Jewish Nationality in Israel means to be a member of a superior race of people, one with all the privileges, whereas citizenship is the most basic minimum. We can see that in Palestine Papers re the ‘peace talks’. One of Tsipi Livni’s primary demands was an exchange of land so that a future Palestinian statelet could include Israeli Arabs/Palestinians. In other words Israeli citizenship means that your presence if tolerated, not welcomed and certainly doesn’t imply equality.

MM:   We agree on this. In Israel there is oppression of both kinds: there is no equality of individual rights of all citizens; and there is also denial of collective rights of the national minority.

TG:  The French concept of citizenship and nationality being coterminous did indeed mean that Jews were not a national minority and/or an alien presence. To paraphrase Clermont Tenerre in the 1789 Constituent Assembly, ‘to the Jews as a nation nothing, to the Jews as individuals everything.’ This was welcomed by Jews everywhere, not just France (with the exception of the Orthodox and later the Zionists).

MM:  Actually the Orthodox (especially in Western Europe) also had no objection – so long as the right of Jews to practise their religion was secure.
 
MM:  No, Tony. It is not an Israeli deception. The Israeli passport uses the generally accepted terminology used in most other passports, inherited from French (that used to be the language of international diplomacy). It is this terminology that is misleading, but Israel is not responsible for it. In this terminology, "nationality" means citizenship – as its clear from its use in other passports. The Israeli passport simply follows this general international practice: it uses 2 languages, Hebrew and English. On the left-hand side under the rubric "nationality" it says: "Israeli". On the right-hand side is the Hebrew translation. "Nationality" is translated as ezrahut, which is the Hebrew word for citizenship. There is no dishonesty in this translation, because the rubric "nationality" in a passport (Israeli, British, French or whatever) actually does mean citizenship and nothing else. 

TG:  Moshe I disagree.  For most states nationality and citizenship are one and the same, they are not based on religion or ethnicity, so the answer to the heading 'nationality' is the same as it would be to 'citizen'.  But in Israel this is not the case.  Citizenship accords very few rights.  Nationality, i.e. Jewish nationality grants all sorts of rights and privileges and this is based on Israel being a state of the mythical 'Jewish  people' rather than its own citizens.  So it is clearly fraudulent to put 'Israeli' on a passport or any other document when the Supreme Court has consistently ruled there is no such thing.

Thus when Moshe says that the use of the term ‘Israeli’ under nationality implies that there is such a thing as Israeli nationality ‘in the sense of citizenship’ I disagree. It does no such thing other than to try and pull the wool over peoples’ eyes abroad as to the real situation. 


MM:  Israel officially recognizes Israeli citizenship, which in its passports (as in passports of other states) comes under the heading "nationality". Israel does not recognize an Israeli "le'om" or "leumiout", which means nationality in the other sense (as in Kurdish or Basque nationality).

MM:  Nonsense. I do not claim that there exists an Israeli nation. I actually deny it. Citizenship is a formally and officially defined status. Israeli citizenship clearly exists. To translate it as "Israeli nationality" is indeed a confusion. But Israel is not responsible of this particualr confusion. This is what most passports do.TG:  Moshe says that the Hebrew word "le'om" in the Israeli ID card does mean Jewish nationality, but of course it is a false nationality from which non-Jews are, of course, excluded. The very definition of nationality as being based on religion not residence or citizenship, is itself a reactionary throwback to medieval Europe.  This is not a matter of semantics as very real human rights, such as the right to lease or buy ‘national’ land is dependent upon it. What is certain is that you cannot have Israeli nationality when you fly to Europe and then lose it in mid-air on the way back! Matter changes into energy when in motion but citizenship doesn’t change into nationality!MM:  You are right. The Israeli official classification under "le'om" is nonsensical, discriminatory and confused. It is in any case a scandal that a person's religion, ethnicity etc rather than citizenship is stated in their ID document.
TG:   Of course the Israeli Supreme Court was right to deny there was such a thing as Israeli nationality because this would conflict with the basis of Israel as a Jewish state, not of its own citizens but Jews everywhere.
Correct.


TG:  The question of Jewish Identity is not therefore just a racist question for Israel. It also affects Jewish people world-wide, not least in the United States, where most Jews would be considered non-Jews by Orthodox Jewry. It is clear that in the West today, in the absence of anti-Semitism and lacking any social or economic basis, the number of secular Jews is rapidly shrinking. Only Israel provides the racist glue to unite and define Jews. 

Moshe and myself had a further discussion on this which is below, in which I refer to a debate on Jewdas.

Moshé Machover wrote:

Tony,

Well is Israel following the international convention, or is it taking advantage of the confusion that results from the way the system works internationally?

Is there a difference? And if there is, how can you tell? Who is supposed to be confused by an Israeli passport? It is not a document that the general public looks at. It is looked at by border officials and similar functionaries. They know exactly what the rubrics mean. If they are "confused" by an Israeli passport, it is only because it is back to front...

Let us stick to the facts. The normal international convention is that the rubric "Nationality" in a passport refers to the bearer's citizenship, not to nationality in any other sense. The UK abides by this convention and so do lots of other countries, including multi-national ones. So does Israel. To make this even more obvious: in an Israeli passport the rubric "Nationality" is correctly translated into Hebrew as "ezrahut". So if we have any reason to complain, it is not about the rubrics in an Israeli passport.

This  rubric is based, as you say, on nationality and citizenship being one and the same. 

No; "nationality" and "citizenship" are not in general one and the same. The former is ambiguous, depending on context.; the latter is not ambiguous. 

However, in the context of a passport, the convention is that the rubric "Nationality" is to be understood as referring to citizenship. It does not follow that they are one and the same in other contexts.

But in Israel it isn't the same.  

It is the same in the context of an Israeli passport– as in the context of other passports. On the other hand, in other contexts it is not the same in many countries, including Britain.

Citizenship means very little if you are not a Jewish national and therein lies the deception.

This "deception" has nothing to do with passports. When an Israeli passport of an Arab citizen states that s/he is Israeli by "Nationality" (ezrahut in Hebrew) it is not deceiving anyone. Who is supposed to be deceived? Border officials know very well that what a passport states under the rubric "Nationality" is the bearer's citizenship. 

However, when Israel claims that it does not discriminate against its Arab citizens, it is deceiving the world.

ATB, Moshé

 Hi Moshe

The first major survey of American Jews in more than 10 years finds a significant rise in those who are not religious, marry outside the faith and are not raising their children Jewish — resulting in rapid assimilation that is sweeping through every branch of Judaism except the Orthodox.

The intermarriage rate, a bellwether statistic, has reached a high of 58 percent for all Jews, and 71 percent for non-Orthodox Jews — a huge change from before 1970 when only 17 percent of Jews married outside the faith. Two-thirds of Jews do not belong to a synagogue, one-fourth do not believe in God and one-third had a Christmas tree in their home last year.

"It’s a very grim portrait of the health of the American Jewish population in terms of their Jewish identification," said Jack Wertheimer, a professor of American Jewish history at the Jewish Theological Seminary, in New York.

The survey, by the Pew Research Center’s Religion & Public Life Project, found that despite the declines in religious identity and participation, American Jews say they are proud to be Jewish and have a "strong sense of belonging to the Jewish people."

While 69 percent say they feel an emotional attachment to Israel, and 40 percent believe that the land that is now Israel was "given to the Jewish people by God," only 17 percent think that the continued building of settlements in the West Bank is helpful to Israel’s security.

Jews make up 2.2 percent of the American population, a percentage that has held steady for the past two decades. The survey estimates there are 5.3 million Jewish adults as well as 1.3 million children being raised at least partly Jewish.

The survey uses a wide definition of who is a Jew, a much-debated topic. The researchers included the 22 percent of Jews who describe themselves as having "no religion," but who identify as Jewish because they have a Jewish parent or were raised Jewish, and feel Jewish by culture or ethnicity.

However, the percentage of "Jews of no religion" has grown with each successive generation, peaking with the millennials (those born after 1980), of whom 32 percent say they have no religion.

"It’s very stark," Alan Cooperman, deputy director of the Pew religion project, said in an interview. "Older Jews are Jews by religion. Younger Jews are Jews of no religion."
The trend toward secularism is also happening in the American population in general, with increasing proportions of each generation claiming no religious affiliation.

But Jews without religion tend not to raise their children Jewish, so this secular trend has serious consequences for what Jewish leaders call "Jewish continuity." Of the "Jews of no religion" who have children at home, two-thirds are not raising their children Jewish in any way. This is in contrast to the "Jews with religion," of whom 93 percent said they are raising their children to have a Jewish identity.

Reform Judaism remains the largest American Jewish movement, at 35 percent. Conservative Jews are 18 percent, Orthodox 10 percent, and groups such as Reconstructionist and Jewish Renewal make up 6 percent combined. Thirty percent of Jews do not identify with any denomination.

In a surprising finding, 34 percent said you could still be Jewish if you believe that Jesus was the Messiah.

When Jews leave the movements they grew up in, they tend to shift in the direction of less tradition, with Orthodox Jews becoming Conservative or Reform, and Conservative Jews becoming Reform. Most Reform Jews who leave become nonreligious. (Two percent of Jews are converts, the survey found.)

Jews from the former Soviet Union and their offspring make up about 10 percent of the American Jewish population.

While earlier generations of Orthodox Jews defected in large numbers, those in the younger generation are being retained. Several scholars attributed this to the Orthodox marrying young, having large families and sending their children to Jewish schools.

Steven M. Cohen, a sociologist of American Jewry at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, in New York, and a paid consultant on the poll, said the report foretold "a sharply declining non-Orthodox population in the second half of the 21st century, and a rising fraction of Jews who are Orthodox."

The survey also portends "growing polarisation" between religious and nonreligious Jews, said Laurence Kotler-Berkowitz, senior director of research and analysis at the Jewish Federations of North America.

The Jewish Federations has conducted major surveys of American Jews over many decades, but the last one in 2000 was mired in controversy over methodology. When the federations decided not to undertake another survey in 2010, Jane Eisner, editor in chief of The Jewish Daily Forward, urged the Pew researchers to jump in.


It was a multimillion-dollar effort to cull 3,475 respondents from a pool of 70,000. They were interviewed in English and Russian, on landlines and cellphones from Feb. 20 to June 13, 2013. The margin of error for the full sample is plus or minus three percentage points.

Ms. Eisner found the results "devastating" because, she said in an interview, "I thought there would be more American Jews who cared about religion."

"This should serve as a wake-up call for all of us as Jews," she said, "to think about what kind of community we’re going to be able to sustain if we have so much assimilation."
The conclusion that can be drawn from such a poll is unmistakable. At the core of Jewish identity is belief in the Jewish religion, yet increasing numbers are atheists or of no religion. Although two-thirds identify with Israel, as assimilation reduces the number of Jews this attachment can only reduce numerically. Should we mourn what is the disappearance of Jewish people in the West? No, it’s only those who have a romantic attachment to the idea that the traditional forms of Jewish identity can be resurrected who will mourn such a loss. Indeed, in so far as the majority Jewish identity is based around support for Israel then the assimilation of the world’s largest Jewish community is to be welcomed.

That is partly why I was surprised, to say the least, that Ilan Pappe can be counted among the latter. In article Reclaiming Judaism from Zionism for Electronic Intifada of 18^th October 2013 http://electronicintifada.net/content/reclaiming-judaism-zionism/12859#comment-16729

Ilan indulges in a shmaltzy nostalgia for a period which is not going to return. He notes, correctly that when it first appeared, most Jewish rabbis and the Orthodox rejected it as substituting worship of a state for a god. But times change. Jewish Orthodoxy has benefited from Zionism, not least in the vast subsidies it has received.

Ilan is also right that most secular liberal, socialist or communist Jews rejected Zionism, believing that anti-Semitism could fought where it was found. In that respect Zionism was unique in that it accepted anti-Semitism as the natural reaction to Jews in their midst. In his Diaries (p.6 Ed. Ralph Patai), Herzl wrote that ‘In Paris ...I achieved a freer attitude towards anti-Semitism, which I now began to understand historically and to pardon. Above all I recognise the emptiness and futility of trying to ‘combat’ anti-Semitism.’ Likewise Chaim Weizmann, Israel’s first President and the long-standing President of the Zionist Organisation wrote in his autobiography Trial & Error (pp. 90-91) of the leader of the anti-Semitic British Brothers League that ‘Sir William Evans Gordon had no particular anti-Jewish prejudice. He acted as he thought, according to his best lights and in the most kindly way, in the interests of his country.


We are even told that he was "horrified" by events in Russia, indeed more than that:

'He was sorry but he was helpless. Also, he was sincerely ready to encourage any settlement of Jews almost anywhere in the British Empire, but he failed to see why the ghettos of London or Leeds or Whitechapel should be made into a branch of the ghettos of Warsaw and Pinsk.'

Normally meticulous as to his facts, Pappe’s sojourn into wishful thinking has also led to errors such as claiming that the description of the socialist Bund as Zionists who were afraid of sea-sickness was Trotsky’s comment. In fact it came from Plekhanov, a Menshevik who drifted so far to the right as to support Russian participation in World War I.

Pappe points to the contradiction inherent in secular, atheistic Zionists resting their claims to Palestine on a god whose existence they denied. But that is the whole point. By making such a claim they threw in their lot with reactionary Orthodox Judaism and turned their backs on socialism.

Pappe again goes astray when he asserts that the rejection of the Uganda plan was because of Christian opposition. In fact Joseph Chamberlain, the Colonial Secretary who made such an offer, was himself a Christian Zionist. The primary opposition came from within the Zionist movement and in particular the Russian Zionists under Menachem Ussishkin.

Herzl in any event had originally preferred Argentina (Der Judenstaat). Pappe is right that the anti-Semitic Christian Zionists wanted to be rid of the Jews in Europe and have them return to Palestine in order to hasten the second coming of the Messiah – and if they refused to convert to Christianity they would perish in the flames of Armageddon.

It is true that Orthodox Jewry opposed end "Exile" in the Diaspora, holding that a ‘return’ of the Jews could not be hastened by the Zionist movement.

Pappe argues that it was ‘One of the greatest successes of the secular Zionist movement was creating a religious Zionist component that found rabbis willing to legitimise this act of tampering’. That may be true but it is simply evidence that religions change as circumstances change.

Pappe argues that ‘in the 1990s the two movements - the one that does not believe in God and the one that impatiently decides to do His work - have fused into a lethal mixture of religious fanaticism with extreme nationalism.’ I would suggest that such a mixture had long been formed when Ben-Gurion decided to form a coalition government in 1949, not with the ‘ left’ Zionist Mapam but the National Religious Party.

Pappe clings to the Ultra-Orthodox Jews such as Neturei Karta – who ‘even profess allegiance to the Palestine Liberation Organization, while the vast majority of the Ultra-Orthodox express their anti-Zionism without necessarily offering support for Palestinian rights.’ This is heavy with wishful thinking. Neturei Karta, the far-right of the Palestine solidarity movement, are an exception. Although ultra Orthodox Jewry formally states it is not Zionist, in practice they constitute the most rabidly racist section of Israeli society. When Rabbi Yitzhak Shapira wrote and had published ‘Torat HaMelech’ which was a guide to the killing of non-Jews, he was supported by hundreds of rabbis when the State of Israel was forced to take token action against him. See 'Even Non-Jewish Children Must be Killed - Rabbi Yitzhak Shapirahttp://azvsas.blogspot.co.uk/2009/11/even-non-jewish-children-must-be-killed.html Rabbi Schochet of the Racist Lubavitch - Big Questions Panellist and Guardian Columnist http://azvsas.blogspot.co.uk/2010/11/rabbi-schochet-of-racist-lubavitch-big.html and 'Even Non-Jewish Children Must be Killed - Rabbi Yitzhak Shapira http://azvsas.blogspot.co.uk/2009/11/even-non-jewish-children-must-be-killed.html

It is true that this ‘religious-nationalist mixture that now informs the Jewish society in Israel has also caused a large and significant number of young American Jews, and Jews elsewhere in the world, to distance themselves from Israel.’ but what form has this taken? As the article from the New York Times shows, it leads primarily to abandoning being Jewish altogether with a minority of secular Jews rejecting Zionism on the basis of its racism. But this can and will only be a minority as there is no alternative social or economic basis for the existence other than Zionism itself, which is inadequate. As Pappe rightly says ‘This trend has become so significant that it seems that Israeli policy today relies more on Christian Zionists than on loyal Jews.’

Where Pappe indulges in wishful thinking it is when says that ‘It is possible, and indeed necessary, to reaffirm the pluralist non-Zionist ways of professing one's relationship with Judaism; in fact this is the only road open to us if we wish to seek an equitable and just solution in Palestine.’

The problem is that there is no way today, except for a tiny minority, for Jews to adopt an alternative, non-Zionist version of Judaism. Jewish Orthodoxy has long been captured for Zionism. Pappe writes that for Jews today it is; imperative to reconnect to the Jewish heritage before it was corrupted and distorted by Zionism.’ Again this is redolent of a heavy dose of wishful thinking. You can’t reverse the tide of history. It maybe an example of ‘nationalist criminality’ but it’s not something that can be reversed as there is no basis for example for the existence of the Bund. They and their supporters died in the Nazi genocide and only a remnant escaped, not least to Israel. A fascinating, yet very sad story of these remnants who lived primarily in Tel Aviv is Bundayim by Eran Torbiner, a supporter of Boycott from Within. These remnants made no concessions to Zionism but it was clear that they had had no impact or relevance on the settler colonial society surrounding them.

Ilan suggests that ‘We need to reclaim Judaism and extract it from the hands of the "Jewish State" as a first step towards building a joint place for those who lived and want to live there in the future.’ Not only is this impossible but I would ask why should one want to reclaim a dying religion? It certainly won’t affect the existence of Israel as a racist settler state, precisely because Israel’s racist is not based on but justified by an interpretation of the Pentateuch. Even if all Orthodox Jews became liberals overnight, Israel would still continue down the path to Armageddon. Ilan, like many others, needs to recognise that you cannot recreate the Jewish working class of Eastern Europe. Jews today have moved on and upwards socially and politically to the Right. No amount of self-delusions will change this simple fact.

Tony Greenstein

Supporters of the Jewish Defence League & other Zionist Loonies Take Over

Sussex Friends of Palestine picket Sodastream

Christian Fundamentalist & Zionist Jill Young supporting gay rights!  A lovable loony.

The snarling face of the Sussex Friends of Israel leader Simon Cobbs

Jason  White's pro-EDL/JDL site

'Jason White's racist site - Muslims value Jewish death more than they do Muslim life'  And the Zionists complain we call them racist!

Cobbs at a loss for words

Jason Whites  site promotes a 3rd Jewish temple - he is a supporter of Ateret  HaCohanim which is particularly active in Jerusalem evicting Palestinian families from houses they have lived in for centuries

Eventually I called him a Jewish Nazi [because accusations of ‘self-hatred’ and ‘traitor’ were directed by the Nazis at anyone who opposed them and their policies on race and nation]

Cobbs - Zionist leader - not a happy man

Would you like to meet him on a dark night?

  Zionism's Mediocre Academics Try to Censor

Conference on anti-Semitism

Brian Klug - Oxford don and target of the Zionist witch-hunters

On November 8-9th an international conference on anti-Semitism, is being held in Berlin. Under the name of the Berlin International Center for the Study of Antisemitism, (BICSA) (anyone these days can set up a Centre!) it seeks to prevent Brian Klug, one of the most thoughtful contributors to the debate over anti-Semitism from addressing the conference.

To that effect they have issued a dossier from 17 people.  The main contribution is from a Clemens Heni, whose primary objection is Klug’s refusal to acknowledge the ‘new anti-Semitism’.

Senator Joe McCarthy - Clemens Heni's political idol

Contributors include Gerald Steinberg and Lt. Col. (res.) Dr. Mordechai Kedar of Bar-Ilan University. A university which bars Arab students from its dormitories, because of the ‘danger’ of sexual relations between them. If the prize idiot, Clemens Heni, who heads this forlorn effort to ban Jews who are not Zionists from having a public forum, doesn’t understand what is wrong with this, then he should remember that is a short distance Berlin, where he pontificates on anti-Semitism, to Nuremberg. Because of course the Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honour was promulgated in that city in 1935.  

The House Committee on UnAmerican Activities - a Model for Zionism

But in Israel today, sexual relations between Jew and Arab is met with a hostility that would have done Goebbels proud. Three years ago, an Israeli Arab Sabbar Kashur was jailed for 18 months and placed under house arrest for two years for impersonating a Jew and having sex with a Jewish woman. He was convicted of ‘rape by deceit’. High Court frees Arab in case of 'rape by impersonating Jew’ Ha’aretz 4.8.10.  And of course there was the case of the Chief Rabbi of Safed, Shmuel Eliyahu, who issued a ruling that Jews should not rent flats to Arabs - Artists say no to Eliyahu as chief rabbi. Yet this is the tip of a racist Zionist iceberg.



Zionism's academic chump & McCarthyite -  Clemens Heni

List of Contributors to the publication

Chief Junk academic, Clemens Heni

Jonathan Hoffman & Millett - fresh from cavorting with the fascist EDL supporter of Ethnic Cleansing Ephraim Karsh

Far right-winger Gerald Steinberg

Even more absurd is the fact that the chump of chumps, Jonathan Hoffman, someone who was even denounced by fellow Zionists, was photographed dancing down the street with members of the fascist and holocaust denying English Defence League They were almost holding hands!  

So we have a Zionist publication dedicated to fighting ‘anti-Semitism’ which issues a call to ban anti-Zionist or non-Zionist Jews, containing an article by someone who has demonstrated and organised with the fascist EDL, to say nothing of Richard Millett, who was Hoffman’s bag carrier.

fascist EDL demonstrates its support for Zionism and Israel at Ahava

Then there is also a contribution from Ephraim Karsh of Kings College and the racist University of Bar-Ilan. Karsh’s main contribution to civilisation is to attack the fervently ultra-Zionist Benny Morris, for having revealed some of the truth about the Arabs of Palestine being driven out by massacre and forcible expulsion in 1948. In other words a supporter of mass murder and ethnic cleansing. There are one or two other nonentities who are not worth mentioning.

The main contribution is from Clemens Heni.  The main crime of Brian Klug is not to agree with the neo-con definition of ‘new anti-Semitism’. Israel is the ‘Jew’ among the nations. Apparently Israel is criticised because it is a Jewish state not because of what it does. Ordinary anti-Semitism is of little concern to them. The murder of 3,000 Argentinean Jews by the neo-Nazi Junta between 1976-83 and the silence of Israel, its blocking of exit visas to Jewish left-wingers and its $1 billion arms trade with the Junta are of no concern. Clemens is one of those Germans whose guilt over the past is transferred onto the Palestinians.

Even Prof. Yehuda Bauer, of the Hebrew University Jerusalem and Yad Vashem, an ardent apologist for Zionist collaboration with the Nazis during the war and Rudolph Kasztner in particular, says that‘Western anti-Semitism is not new. This concept of "New Antisemitism" is, I think, quite false.’ 

If you ask 99% of people to define anti-Semitism, they will say it is hatred or discrimination against Jews. Some may mention the world Jewish conspiracy theory. Most people know what anti-Semitism is. In my lifetime Israel has become transformed from the ‘hero’ of 1967 to the world’s main pariah state, supported only by US dollars. This hasn’t been because of an upsurge in ‘anti-Semitism’, quite the opposite, but because of Israel’s open attacks against its own Arab citizens.

This is the main conjuring trick of Clemens Heni and his associates like Gerald Steinberg a founder of NGO Monitor, which seeks to deprive non-governmental organisations which criticise Israel or give help to the Palestinians of their funding. Another McCarthyite is Sam Westrop of Stand for Peace, whose idea of ‘peace’ is a good example of Orwell’s doublethink. War is peace, black is white. You get the message.

And the jewel in the crown? Disgraced former MP Dennis McShameless. A crook who created invoices in order to enrich himself in Parliamentary expenses, was forced to resign from the British parliament last year. He is under investigation by the Police (though they are not exactly exerting themselves). He has set himself up as an expert in anti-Semitism. Previously he criticised the ‘anti-Semitism’ of Hugo Chavez on behalf of the US State department and is a cold war warrior, a relic of the past. 

MacShane and his partner-in-crime John Mann MP, who were given their license to libel by war criminal Tony Blair, were ‘expert’ witnesses in the recent Employment Tribunal case brought against Britain’s Universities College Union. The tribunal savagedMcShane & Mann:

‘Both gave glib evidence, appearing supremely confident of the rightness of their positions. For Dr MacShane, it seemed that all answers lay in the MacPherson Report (the effect of which he appeared to misunderstand). Mr Mann could manage without even that assistance. He told us that the leaders of the Respondents were at fault for the way in which they conducted debates but did not enlighten us as to what they were doing wrong or what they should be doing differently. He did not claim ever to have witnessed any Congress or other UCU meeting. And when it came to anti- Semitism in the context of debate about the Middle East, he announced, "It's clear to me where the line is ... " but unfortunately eschewed the opportunity to locate it for us. Both parliamentarians clearly enjoyed making speeches. Neither seemed at ease with the idea of being required to answer a question not to his liking.’ [my emphasis]

And that sums it up in a nutshell. Academic impostors like Heni only get away with their nonsense because they are never held to account for their views. When MacShane and Mann took the witness stand they were incapable of defending their nonsense. But to the academic propagandist Clemens Heni, who would no doubt have presented an equally ardent defence of the Stasi if circumstances had been different, a refusal to acknowledge his pet theory is in itself anti-Semitic.

One can judge the academic bona fides of Clemens Heni from his description of Independent Jewish Voices as ‘an anti-Israel group’. Quite the contrary, it has developed into a Jewish group mainly concerned with the (lack of) human rights in Israel. It is a group that has rejected the equation of Israel’s barbarities, its torture, the Apartheid Wall etc. with Jews in the West. Other than that it has no consensus on the question of Zionism.

It is blindingly obvious, as the Zionist Community Security Trust’s statistics make clear, that attacks on Jews increase when Israel bombs and kills a few hundred more Palestinians. Instead Clemens Heni concentrates on an obscure Saudi Arabian and his anti-Semitic poem. Strange that Saudi Arabia and Israel have an unwritten alliance and that the USA is the main supporter of the corrupt Wahhabi rulers. But as Herzl wrote ‘the anti-Semites will be our friends, the anti-Semitic countries our allies’ (p.84 Diaries)

What passes for ‘anti-Semitism’ in the Arab world is primarily a reaction to Israel. The anti-Semitism that led to the annihilation of Europe’s Jewish communities in the holocaust has no comparison in a region of the world where Jews lived peaceably for centuries. The only countries under Nazi and Vichy rule in the war where 99% of the Jews survived were the Arab countries and Muslim Albania (& Denmark)).

Clemens Heni and his gaggle of witch-hunters aren’t interested in anti-Semitism per se. As Heni complains ‘For him [Brian Klug], antisemitism only exists in marginal neo-Nazi groups or among people who promote obvious antisemitic conspiracy myths.’ Yes it’s quite a good start but one can understand why Heni doesn’t find this so ‘interesting’. After all most fascist and far-Right parties in Europe are pro-Israel. From the BNP and EDL in Britain to Poland’s Kaminisk and Latvia’s Robert Ziles (who marches each year with the Waffen SS veterans). See Conservatives Anti-Semitic Friend Declares his Undying Sympathy for Israel! 


Brian Klug’s main crime is that he exposed the European Union Monitoring Committees Definition of anti-Semitism as a bogus Zionist construct. The EUMC’s successor, the Fundamental Right's Agemcu, has now dispensed with what was only a working definition, foisted on them by the American Jewish Congress, a Zionist group and removed it from it from its web site. (see SWC to EU Baroness Ashton: “Return Anti-Semitism Definition Document to EU Fundamental Rights Agency Website”.

Just what type of idiot heads the Berlin Centre for anti-Semitism can be gauged by Hen’s comment that ‘Neo-Nazis killed Muslims in Germany in recent years not because they were seen as Muslims, but because they were seen as non-Germans or immigrants.’  I don’t recall Americans or Britons being killed for being non-German!  But this comes from someone who believes that if the Palestinians kill a bible bashing settler from Brooklyn, then that is automatically ‘anti-Semitic’ because the settler was Jewish.  Israel should therefore be given unlimited impunity for whatever it does. 

If you criticise an Israeli kindergarten for refusing to admit an Arab child, because they are Arab, then that is anti-Semitic!  It no surprise that Zionism’s Junk Academic Clemens Heni describes in his witch-hunting article ‘the security fence in Israel (which is in some regions a wall) as ―Apartheid wall.'  The fact that it deliberately carves deep into the West Bank is irrelevant.  In fact it doesn’t even exist in many Israeli localities, so much for the ‘security’ pretext.  But no doubt the International Court of Justice was also being anti-Semitic when it ruled that the Apartheid Wall was illegal under international law.

I must confess that I know Brian and occasionally meet up for a drink or meal.  Brian is not an anti-Zionist but a non-Zionist like Tony Lerman who was witch-hunted out as Director of the Institute for Jewish Policy Research.   We have many disagreements but on one thing we agree - the days when people could be intimidated by accusations of 'anti-Semitism' are over.

Tony Greenstein

Banning sexual relations between a Jew and a non-Jew

A protest against the attack by a Jewish mob on three Palestinians in Zion Sq., Jerusalem. August 18, 2012 (photo: Activestills)

 There is one primary difference between Nazi Germany between 1933 and 1939 (i.e before the final solution began) and Apartheid South Africa and Israel.  Whereas the first two enacted legislation explicitly forbidding sexual relations between 'races', Israel prefers more informal methods.  Among Israeli Jews there is an overwhelming consensus against such relations. Jews who break this taboo are ostracised and there is a major campaign by the religious and settler right to prevent and if necessary  break-up such relations.  Because of the overwhelming racism in Israeli society, this is as effective as legislation in Germany and South Africa was.

Sabbar Kashur - imprisoned for rape by deception

As I reported at the time, an Arab male Sabbar Kashur, was given an 18 month prison sentence and held under house detention for two years for ‘impersonating a Jew’.   His offence?  Rape by deceit!  High Court frees Arab in case of 'rape by impersonating Jew'

 Now there is a good argument that someone carrying a transmittable disease (HIV, Hepatitis etc.) is under a positive duty to inform the woman (or man) of their condition and that such a failure means there was no genuine consent.  But only in Israel, is pretending to be of a different religion an offence  considered rape.  Kashur was freed by the Supreme Court after massive international pressure drew the same comparisons between Nazi Germany, Apartheid South Africa and Israel.

The Nuremberg Race Laws (the Reich Citizenship Law and the Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honor). Germany, September 15, 1935.  — National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, Md.

As the articles below show, the pressure is immense on a Jewish woman not to have sex with an Arab (it doesn’t work the same way with a Jewish man – the same was true in Nazi Germany where Hitler had a much more tolerant attitude to relations between German men and Jewish women, because the racial gene pool was not affected).

As the Holocaust Encyclopedia’s article Anti-Jewish Legislation in Prewar Germany outlines:

‘At their annual party rally held in Nuremberg in September 1935, the Nazi leaders announced new laws which institutionalized many of the racial theories prevalent in Nazi ideology. These "Nuremberg Laws" excluded German Jews from Reich citizenship and prohibited them from marrying or having sexual relations with persons of "German or German-related blood."

Israel racist?  Perish the thought.  After all, it’s the Middle East’s only democracy!

It should be noted that Orthodox Jews have always opposed such relations   with non-Jews.  When I grew up there was a taboo against 'marrying-out'.  But many Jews did so and today in Britain and the USA a majority marry out.  But when the State and society enforce such medieval attitudes with the power of the state, then it becomes not chavinist but racist, a demonstration of a sick, racist society.  In Israel this opposition is not confined to the religious sector.  Naftali Bennett leads the settler  Jewish Home party which is secular and anti-religious.


Tony Greenstein

  Racist Jews lead drive against ‘their’ women having sex with Palestinian men

Articles on the growth of the Jewish campaign against Jewish/Palestinian relations from Ma’an, Ha’aretz and +972.

Rabbi Dov Lior - "A Jewish fingernail is worth more than 1,000 non-Jewish lives" elected repeatedly to settler Yesha Rabbinical Council

The campaign against relationships, especially sexual, between Jewish women and Arab men is led by Lehava and, amongst others, Rabbi Dov Lior [above], notorious for his racist pronouncements including the proposals that Bedouin should be paid to move to ‘their homelands’ – Libya and Saudi Arabia.
By Ma’an news
October 20, 2013
BETHLEHEM — Jewish women have been banned from working night shifts as a part of their national service at hospitals in Israel in order to avoid “contact with Arabs,” Israeli Channel 10 reported on Wednesday.

Israeli National Service Administration Director Sar-Shalom Jerbi issued the directive two weeks ago banning any volunteer shifts past 9 p.m. for women fulfilling their national service duties.
The director explained that “we reached the decision based on concern for our volunteers, and Minister [Naftali] Bennett gave his blessing.”

Naftali Bennett is the leader of the far-right Israeli political party “Jewish Home,” and is currently the minister of religious services.

Many young Jewish women in Israel choose to volunteer at hospitals in order to fulfill their national service requirements. The national service is an alternative to service in the Israeli army, which is required for most Israeli Jews.

The decision marks a victory for an intense campaign led by religious Zionist rabbis and other right-wing groups within Israel to prevent contact of any sort between Israeli Jews and Palestinians, especially between Jewish women and Palestinian men.

A flyer warning the public about an Arab who threatens to “defame” Jewish girls, distributed in a Jerusalem neighborhood in 2011.

According to the Channel 10 report, these groups began a campaign against women’s night-time service last year after reports surfaced of “intimate relations” between some Jewish volunteers and Palestinian doctors at hospitals.

In response to the decision, the director of the Lehava organization which was involved in the campaign issued a statement lamenting that the move did not go far enough. “Unfortunately, this is too narrow and too late a step. National service should be terminated anywhere there are non-Jews,” he said.

Lehava is an Israeli organization that campaigns to prevent relationships between Jewish women and non-Jewish men. The main targets of their campaigns tend to be Muslim and Christian Arabs.
Among the leaders of the campaign was Rabbi Dov Lior, the Chief Rabbi of Hebron and Kiryat Arba settlements who was in 2011 arrested for incitement against Arabs.

Lior has previously made numerous controversial and racist statements towards non-Jews, and called Baruch Goldstein, the perpetrator of the 1994 Cave of Patriarchs massacre which claimed the lives of 29 Muslim worshipers, “holier than all the martyrs of the Holocaust.”

Jewish girls, beware the ‘evil’ Arab doctor

How did sex, which is supposed to be an intimate matter between two adults, become the doomsday weapon of generations of racists of whatever nationality or religion?
By Oudeh Basharat, Ha’aretz October 21, 2013

Arab physicians have become the latest target of racism.Photo by Nimrod Glickman

If Channel 10 were to run a news item about a tomato that caused an upset stomach, Heaven forbid, the officials in charge would make sure to get a comment, if not from the tomato itself, then at least from the farmer who had grown it. But Arab physicians do not have this luxury.

Channel 10’s main news broadcast last Wednesday evening reported that the National Civilian Service Administration had ordered its religiously observant women volunteers not to work after 9 P.M. According to the news broadcast, this decision was made by the Lehava anti-assimilation organization after “reports were received about intimate relationships between young women performing their national service and Arab physicians in the hospitals where they volunteered,” as reported on the Nana 10 online portal. The website quoted one of the rabbis as having said in the past, “I’m hearing horrible stories about good girls.” The head of the National Civilian Service Administration made sure to mention that the decision was made with the blessing of the minister in charge, Naftali Bennett.

Channel 10 conveyed the news item with equanimity, as if it were a weather report. Nobody there bothered to invite an Arab physician, or at least the director of the hospital where these lewd acts are supposedly taking place, to give their version of events. In the Soviet Union, Stalin himself concocted the Doctors’ Plot against Jewish physicians. Today, all that’s necessary are a few racist rabbis, the director of the National Civilian Service Administration, brother Naftali and a major media outlet that forgets to ask for a response from the ones being maligned — and voila: a plot that would give the anti-Jewish propaganda industry since the Middle Ages something to be proud of.

After turning the Arabs into thieves, layabouts, non-tax-paying deadbeats and backstabbers, now the time has come to malign the Arab physicians. And they, the jewel in the crown, are portrayed as sexual deviants who go after helpless teenage girls. Well then, ladies and gentlemen, be careful when you walk around in the hospitals, because you never know where it’s going to come from: the hallways teeming with hormone-ridden physicians on the prowl. This is the Arab portrayed in the Israeli media. In situations like these, when any response pales next to the plot, the writer Emile Habibi would mutter, “Treacherous time.”

How did sex, which is supposed to be an intimate matter between two adults, become the doomsday weapon of generations of racists of whatever nationality or religion — a weapon that brings all the hidden demons of their sick souls out into the open? But if so, why punish the Jewish women doctors and nurses, who will become easy prey for all the hormonal attacks of the Arab doctors once the teenage girls doing their national service have left for the night? Well, Jewish physicians, get out of bed and go to work! Stand guard en masse during the night to maintain racial purity. And as for you, Arab physicians, here you go — finally, an evening with your families and a warm bed at night, just as long as you do not profane the modesty of the Arab girls.

All these good things, and the major festival of racism — the Knesset’s winter session — are still in store for us. If the media adopt the promotional methods customary on television, then it’s likely that we’ll be seeing promos before the Knesset’s hearings with the slogan “Racism not of this world” alongside a photograph of MK Ze’ev Elkin, for example. Or an announcer saying, “How to sweep the Arabs out of the Knesset,” while Deputy Minister Danny Danon is shown holding a large broom with the words “The Governance Bill” written on it. MK Yariv Levin will also appear with a similar broom, bearing the caption “The Prawer Bill,” while the announcer tells us, in formal tones, of “an eviction operation that will surpass the expulsion from Spain.”

Yil’an al-shaitan, as the Arabic saying goes — damned be the devil, who feeds the anger and despair that lie in wait o ambush the best of both peoples. Collaboration in this ugly phenomenon is so prevalent in Israeli society, Jews and Arabs alike, that it is hard to know who here is a Jew and who an Arab. Faced with this arid desolation of racism, the soil yearns for the blooming oases of normalization. Give normalization a chance!

Jewish women can’t volunteer at night – to avoid ‘contact with Arabs’

Benzi Gopstein - Member of the neo-Nazi Kach Organisation treated with respect by Knesset MPs

The Israeli government succumbs to pressure by racist and anti-miscegenation organizations, banning Jewish women from volunteering in hospitals at night, when they might be more likely to encounter Arab workers and doctors.
By Mairav Zonszein, +972
October 17, 2013

Young Israeli women volunteering at hospitals in Israel as part of their national service (an alternative to serving in the Israel Defense Forces) will no longer be allowed to do night shifts in order to avoid any contact with Arabs, Channel 10 reported Wednesday (Hebrew).

The director of Israel’s National Service Administration, Sar-Shalom Jerbi, issued a directive two weeks ago banning any volunteer shifts past 9:00 p.m.: “We reached the decision based on concern for our volunteers, and Minister [Naftali] Bennett gave his blessing.”

According to the report, the decision was made following a pressure campaign waged by religious Zionist rabbis, among them notorious Kiryat Arba Rabbi Dov Lior (arrested in 2011 for incitement against Arabs and for legitimizing the killing of non-Jews in war time) and the radical Israeli anti-miscegenation organizationLehava. They began the campaign over the last year after hearing reports of “intimate relations” between some of the Palestinian-Arab doctors and the Israeli Jewish volunteers.

The decision was not sharp enough for Lehava, however, according to a statement issued by its director: “Unfortunately, this is too narrow and too late a step. National service should be terminated anywhere there are goyim [non-Jews].”

Just last month, I reported on another anti-miscegenation religious organization Yad La’achim, which is collecting IDs of Jewish Israeli girls who are found socializing with Arabs.

The holy war against Arab-Jewish relations and the Jerusalem lynch

Those who attacked Palestinians in central Jerusalem [August 17th, 2012] claimed they wanted to prevent them from speaking to Jewish girls. The fear of interracial relations once found only in the fringes of the right are now turning into a legitimate, mainstream political issue in national-religious circles.
By Noam Sheizaf, +972 August 21, 2012

There are several organizations promoting ethnic segregation in Israel, with a special emphasis on preventing relations between Jewish girls and Palestinian men. The most vocal is Lehava, an NGO that calls upon citizens to inform them of any case of mixed marriage or relationship. Their low-tech internet site, filled with racism and hate-talk, has a section titled “shame page,” which features the pictures of women, mostly public figures, who are in relationships with non-Jews. The head of Lehava, a Kahanist called Bentzi Gopstein, said today that the Jerusalem attackers “have raised Jewish honor from the floor and did what the police should have done.”

Likud MP Tzipi Hotovely a racist who believes Netanyahu is too soft  supports annexing the West Bank but says it would mean offering Palestinians Israeli citizenship

Likud deputy transport minister Tzipi Hotovely; she presided over a 2011 Knesset hearing on ‘Jewish identity’ which centred on eradicating intimate relationships between Jews and Arabs.

Lehava wouldn’t merit much attention if it wasn’t for their legitimacy in right-wing circles. In February 2011, MK Tzipi Hotovely (Likud) invited Gopstein to a formal session of the Knesset Committee for the Advancement of Women, along with other members of organizations who work to expose and prevent inter-racial relations. The title of the hearing was “the phenomena of assimilation in Israel – a special session in honor of Jewish Identity Day.”

Gopstein had the opportunity to explain the work of his organizations, and even to complain about “lack of cooperation” from the Ministry of Education; he mentioned the case of a school in Bat Yam “where 20 percent of the girls are dating Arabs.” MK Hotovely turned to a representative from the Department of Education, Dr. Zvi Zameret, for an explanation, and the latter, instead of calling racism for what it is, replied: “This is the first time I am hearing those figures… I made a note to look into that.”

A quote from Gopstein was the first one to appear in a press release that MK Hotovely sent following the session, and other Knesset members present at the debate congratulated her for tackling this issue.
The holy war against interracial relationships has been central to the agenda of racist groups throughout modern history. In many places, the first to suffer from attacks (and later, laws) were Jews. An attempt to introduce laws against intermarriage was the main reason the Knesset rejected Jewish supremacist Meir Kahane in the 1980s. At the time, Justice Shamgar wrote that such ideas “remind us of the worst persecution in Jewish history.”

Times have changed. The demand for racial purity is becoming mainstream, re-entering the Knesset through the front door. Leading rabbis, most of them state employees, have signed letters calling on Jewish homeowners to refrain from renting their apartments to Arabs, or warning Jewish girls against dating Arabs.

Michael Ben Ari - first disciple of Rabbi Meir Kahane elected to the Knesset for the National Union

 Michael Ben-Ari joined a party of 50 right-wingers who travelled to a village last May to prevent a Jewish woman marrying an Arab man. The former MK said, “We came to say that the women of Israel belong to the Jewish people. Assimilation is one of the greatest tragedies of the Jewish people. Every Jew can sleep tonight while clicking his tongue, but he must know that another daughter of Israel has married an Arab.”

It’s a form of racism that treats women as the object of the (Jewish) man, his to keep within the tribe. It’s not surprising therefore that the calls to ban women from public life come from the same national-Orthodox circles who want to “save” those women from Palestinian men. But while the attempts to limit the presence of women in public are (rightly) meeting fierce opposition, the revolting attempts to delegitimize, ban or punish interracial relations are endorsed by not-so-marginal circles, and practically accepted as a legitimate political concern within the Jewish mainstream.

Newspaper reports from the Jews for Justice Weekly Reports

48.9% of the the Jews agree with the statement that Jews should have more rights than non Jews

Ethiopia's Black Jews Demonstrate Against Israeli Jewish Racism - Many Israeli Jews don't see them as Jewish  unlike non-Jewish white Russians

 An Israeli comrade writes:

'This is the Haaretz English story on this important poll, which happens to be the 'positive spin' version... The Hebrew story (link below), written by a different journalist (Jonathan Lis), is the 'realistic version' pointing to the same stats but in a rather different light, which is far more critical. The Hebrew header reads "Democracy Index: Half the Public Supports Preferential Rights to Jews" (obviously, the "public" here is the Jewish public). The Hebrew version starts by pointing to the finding that 48.9% of the the Jews agree with the statement that Jews should have more rights than non Jews, a significant increase since 2009. It then focuses on the deterioration of the 'balance' between democratic and Jewish state where, among those polled, 'democratic' loses in favor of 'Jewish'.

As is clearly demonstrated by the article header and sub-header, below, the English version is a different story altogether, focusing on those parts of the survey whose results display "improvements" over past years. For example, Arabs are no longer the number one on the list of undesirable neighbors; since the last survey, they've been replaced by foreign workers... (They surely must feel much better about this one...) Only towards the end of the English version coverage of the ugly reality returns, but with less emphasis and detail than can be found in the Hebrew version.'

Israeli flag flying over Maale Adumim - Israeli settlement just outside Jerusalem

English: http://www.haaretz.com/news/national/.premium-1.550838
Hebrew: http://www.haaretz.co.il/news/politi/.premium-1.2133862
Among Israeli Jews - Poll: Jewish majority more important than West Bank sovereignty

Fewer Jewish Israelis favor policies that encourage Arab emigration away from Israel, compared with past.

By Judy Maltz | Oct. 6, 2013

Almost two-thirds of Israeli Jews believe it is more important for their country to maintain a Jewish majority than to maintain sovereignty over the West Bank. Only 21 percent feel maintaining sovereignty over the West Bank is more important than preserving the Jewish majority and 7 percent believe both are equally important.

Campaign poster for Shimon Gafsou, mayor of upper Nazareth, who is so proud of the title 'racist scum' that he put up posters to that effect, promising not to change the "Jewish character" of the city and to prevent the building of an Arab school. Photo: QUIQUE KIERSZENBAUM

These were among the findings of the 2013 Israeli Democracy Index,   published Sunday by the Guttman Center for Surveys  the Israel Democracy Institute. The index, released annually since 2003, measures trends in public opinion.

The findings also indicate what might be considered a softening in attitudes of Jewish Israelis toward the country’s Arab citizens. About 44 percent of Jewish respondents said this year that they favored government policies that encourage Arab emigration, down from 51 percent in 2010 and 54 percent in 2009 – the last two times this question was asked in the survey.

Similarly, the survey shows that Arabs no longer top the list of neighbors Israeli Jews would consider undesirable, replaced now by foreign workers. Almost 57 percent of Jewish respondents said that having foreign workers as neighbors would bother them. Next in line among those considered undesirable neighbors for Israeli Jews were an Arab family (48 percent), a homosexual couple (30.5 percent), ultra-Orthodox Jews (21 percent) and Shabbat desecrators (10 percent).

Slightly over 46 percent of Arab respondents said that having homosexual neighbors would bother them. Next in line among those considered undesirable neighbors for Arab Israelis were a Jewish family (42 percent) and foreign workers (31 percent).

The Israeli Democracy Index bases itself on a representative sample of 1,000 Israeli adults. The following are some other key findings published on Sunday:

A substantial majority of Jewish Israelis (63 percent) believes soldiers do not have the right to refuse to serve in the West Bank because they oppose the occupation. Slightly over half believe soldiers do not have the right to disobey an order to evacuate settlements either.

More than half of Israeli Jews (52 percent) believe that human and civil rights organizations, such as the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) and B’Tselem, harm the state, while 36 percent disagree.

Overall, young Israeli Jews are more patriotic and right-wing in their leanings than their elders.
Close to half (49 percent) of all Israeli Jews believe that Jewish citizens should have more rights than non-Jewish citizens.

Most Jews feel that critical national decisions should be determined by a Jewish majority, both on matters of peace and security (67 percent) and on socioeconomic issues (57 percent).

Roughly one out of every three Israeli Jews (31 percent) believes that only Jews should determine the outcome of a referendum on peace that includes withdrawal from the West Bank.

Three-quarters of Israeli Jews believe Israel can be both a Jewish and democratic state. Only one-third of Arab respondents shared this view.

Roughly one-third of the Jewish respondents think the Jewish component of Israel’s definition as a Jewish and democratic state is more important, while 29 percent attach greater importance to the democratic component. The percentage of respondents who prefer the combined definition “Jewish and democratic” has declined steadily in recent years, reaching 37 percent this year.

The share of Jewish respondents who would choose democratic principles over Jewish religious law in the event of a conflict between the two is 43 percent – much higher than the 28 percent who would opt for the latter.

Jewish Israelis most frequently assess the country’s overall situation as “so-so” (43 percent,) with 37 percent calling it “good” and 18 percent calling it “bad.” A much higher percentage of Israeli Arabs (39 percent) consider the situation “bad.”

An overwhelming 83 percent of Jewish Israelis said they are proud to be Israelis and two-thirds said they feel part of the state and its problems. Among Arabs, only a minority of 40 percent said they felt proud to be Israeli or have a sense of belonging to the country (28 percent).

About 42 percent of Israelis feel the right to live with dignity is upheld “too little” or “far too little” in the country.

Almost two-thirds of Israelis believe it is important to narrow socioeconomic gaps in the country even if this means raising taxes.

As in past surveys, the army topped the list of institutions and public servants deemed trustworthy by Jewish Israelis, followed by the president of Israel. Among Arab citizens, the Supreme Court topped the list, followed by the media.

Although the assessment of Knesset members’ performance has improved somewhat, compared with previous surveys, more than two-thirds of Israelis still feel that their politicians are more concerned with their own interests than those of the public.

Israeli army veterans admit role in massacres of Palestinians in 1948

Tuesday, 16 October 2012 16:05

Amnon Neumann

The testimony of 83-year-old Yitzhak Tishler, who lives in Mafsirt Tsyon, confirms the accounts provided by other veterans who spoke of looting houses and stores. He also said that he took part in the killing of dozens of villagers in the village of Al-Sheikh near Haifa in revenge for the Jewish workers who were killed in a quarrel near Rifyanry

Mr. Neumann admitted that he took part in displacing Palestinians from their villages.

Dozens of Israeli army veterans have admitted their involvement in massacres against Palestinian civilians in 1948, and acknowledged that Zionism misled them and is a catastrophe for both Jews and Arabs. The details have been revealed by the Yazkern organisation, which was founded in 2001 and seeks to unveil the truth and spread the Palestinian narrative of the country's history among Israelis and convince them of Zionism's false account. The organisation believes in a one-state solution and in Palestinians' right to return to their land and homes.

Pictures taken of Nakba in 1948

Israeli army veteran Amnon Neumann is 82 and from Haifa. He said that he was a member of the Palmach, the elite fighting force of the Haganah, the underground army of the Yeshuv Jewish community during the period of the British Mandate of Palestine. Neumann joined the Palmach in 1946 after he came to Palestine from Poland at the age of 16.

Building demolished by Zionist forces

He said that there were no real battles due to Palestinian poverty and lack of organisation, training and arms. The official Israeli account of that period claims that the displacement and killing of Palestinians was the normal result of a war.

Civilian killed by Hagannah lies dead

Mr. Neumann admitted that he took part in displacing Palestinians from the villages of Simism, Najd, Kawkaba, Burayr and other places which were fully inhabited by their owners; this runs contrary to Zionist claims. Confessing to his participation in the massacre that was committed against the people of Burayr, Neumann noted that they had Czech-made guns which they used to expel the local inhabitants towards the Gaza Strip.

The Haganah forces were surrounding the village on three sides, he recalls, and firing in the air before entering and expelling its people forcefully. The houses were burnt down, as per the orders the armed forces had received. According to the veteran, he heard a confession by a Haganah officer after the occupation of Burayr that he had shot a Palestinian girl in the head after raping her. It was later revealed, said Neumann, that the girl had indeed been raped.

Another veteran, Arhamel Khnovitc, also 83 years old, now lives in the settlement of Daghania. He confessed that he took part in the massacre in the Dahmash Mosque in Al-Lydd in July 1948; he also took part in the ethnic cleansing of the villages of Jamzu and Dan'el.

"I headed to the mosque, as per an order from the command, and I kept my ears and eyes open after I quietly opened the door,” said Khnovitc. “Then I fired a Fiat missile, following orders. Many corpses flew and got stuck to the walls due to the severity of the blast."

Arab buildings destroyed in Nakba

Benyamin Eisht, 85, who lives in Bilhaym, said that he saw the Palestinian survivors of Al-Lydd and Ramla after the massacre, walking in lines toward Ramallah, with dead bodies scattered on the sides of the road.

Arab buildings bombed and set on fire in 1948

The testimony of 83-year-old Yitzhak Tishler, who lives in Mafsirt Tsyon, confirms the accounts provided by other veterans who spoke of looting houses and stores. He also said that he took part in the killing of dozens of villagers in the village of Al-Sheikh near Haifa in revenge for the Jewish workers who were killed in a quarrel near Rifyanry.

See full article at

 Below is an article from Ha'aretz, Israel’s only liberal daily, on their reaction to Israel’s threats and attempts to derail the negotiations with the Iranian regime.  Israel, of course, doesn’t like negotiations, especially those that might succeed!

Of course before the State of Israel there were major Arab Jewish communities in the Middle East, including 100,000 (one-third) of Baghdad but the uncertainty created by the Israeli state’s expulsion of the refugees coupled with Zionist agents, who were caught red-handed in some cases, planting bombs in or near Jewish targets set off a stampede.  All the details of what happened in Iraq (& Egypt) are detailed in Marion’ Woolfson’s Prophets in Babylon and David Hirst’s The Gun and the Olive Branch.  The Israeli agents involved felt betrayed (and in the case of one, in Egypt, he was sentenced to 10 years in a secret trial in Israel) and hence they spilt the beans to an Israeli satirical weekly, edited by Uri Avneri, Haolem Hazeh of 20.4.66.

Iranian Jewish MP Siamak Moreh Sedq and schoolboys read prayers during a demonstration in front of the UN's building in Tehran. November 19, 2013.Photo by AFP

Ha'aretz Nov. 19, 2013
By The Associated Press | Nov. 19, 2013

Hundreds of Iranians, including university students and members of the country's Jewish community, rallied Tuesday in support of the Islamic Republic's disputed nuclear program on the eve of the resumption of talks with world powers.

Iranian state TV showed students gathered at the gate of Fordo enrichment facility, carved into a mountain south of Tehran. They formed a human chain, chanted "Fordo is in our hearts" and denounced the West, which has put pressure on Iran to curb enrichment activity which can be a step toward weapons development.

A worshipper carries a cylinder containing Torah scrolls. The scrolls, kept under lock at the front of the synagogue, are taken out on for special occasions, including the first of every month, for special prayers. (Muhammad Lila/ABC News)

In Tehran, meanwhile, several dozen people identifying themselves as Iranian Jews gathered outside a UN building. It was a rare public display by the community, which tends to keep a low profile despite being the largest in the region outside Israel and Turkey.

Iran's nuclear program is popular, including among critics of the clerically dominated system, but any major gatherings or demonstrations would need official approval.

Iranian Jews demonstrate in support of Iran's nuclear program and Iranian negotiators. November 19, 2013.AFP

Iranian Jews demonstrate in support of Iran's nuclear program and Iranian negotiators. November 19, 2013.

A Xmas Surprise for Sodastream

Not a shopper in sight

A group of far-Right Zionists, including EDL supporter Simon Cobbs, have attempted to disrupt and stop the picket - but to no good effect.  Their main chants when I'm there are 'traitor -presumably a loyal Jew is a racist Jew according to this 'logic'.

The campaign in Brighton has not only been successful in its own terms but it has sparked a world-wide boycott of Sodastream, a company based on confiscated land on the Mishor Adumim industrial estate between Jerusalem and Maaleh Adumim (an Israeli settlement).  Palestinians, of course work there (a favourite Zionist argument) just as they did in South Africa's gold and diamond mines.  Not out of choice but necessity.

Simon Cobbs, leader of the Zionist contingent, looking non too pleased

However what expense-paid journalists like Simon Keenan of the Argus appear not to have noticed is that anyone who joins a trade union is a ' trouble maker' and instantly fired.

I am pleased to say that during the entire period of our picket, from 5-6 pm, in freezing weather, not a single customer entered the shop and when I went back an hour later the same situation applied.  I'd lost count of people who, when taking our leaflets, said they had heard of our campaign.  Likewise the number of Jewish people who come up to me and say that the actions of Israel are no different from the traditional anti-Jewish racists.

Shop acts as a loss leader - most of the time it is empty

But as the founder of political Zionism, Theodor Herzl wrote in his Diaries (p.6)
‘In Paris ...I achieved a freer attitude towards anti-Semitism, which I now began to understand historically and to pardon. Above all I recognise the emptiness and futility of trying to ‘combat’ anti-Semitism.’

 Corporate Watch Investigation into Sodastream

Xmas picket of Sodastream

 Sodastream, a carbonated beverage manufacturer is based in the Mishor Adumim settlement industrial zone. Mishor Adumim is an industrial are attached to the residential settlement of Ma'ale Adumim, East of Jerusalem in the Israeli occupied West Bank.

Xmas picket at 'Eco' Stream

Israeli company Soda Club, which owns the Sodastream brandname, has opened a new store called Ecostream on Western Road in Brighton.

Sodastream, a carbonated beverage manufacturer is based in the Mishor Adumim settlement industrial zone. Mishor Adumim is an industrial area attached to the residential settlement of Ma'ale Adumim, East of Jerusalem in the Israeli occupied West Bank.

Corporate Watch contacted Steve Bannatyne, who has been employed by Sodastream to open the store in Brighton.

Bannatyne said that the store was a place where people could buy refillable bottles for Sodastream syrups and detergents and would be branching out into food products too. The store stocks a range of Sodastream products.

The eco-concept store, which is owned on a lease, is Sodastream's only store in the UK. The company chose Brighton because of the strong green movement in the city.

3 prize Zionist fools - man in centre is an admirer of Omar Barghouti - spokesperson for Boycott National Committee

Last month Corporate Watch spoke to a woman who had attended an interview to work at Ecostream but had decided to withdraw her application after she became aware that Sodastream profit from ?from the Israeli occupation and human rights abuses?.

Bannatyne said he had passed the concerns on to the company and they had responded but that he felt he was not qualified to comment on behalf of the business?

The expansion of Mishor Adumim settlement industrial zone, where the main Sodastream factory is based, is encroaching on the land of the Jahalin bedouin, who are being forcibly relocated to a reservation in Abu Dis, next to the Jerusalem Municipal rubbish dump.

Bannatyne told Corporate Watch that he had been taken on a short visit to Israel by Sodastream where he was taken to two of the company's factories. He was taken to the company's Ashkelon factory, inside 1948 Israel, where syrup is manufactured and to the Mishor factory which manufactures 'machinery'. He said he was 'pleasantly surprised' by the conditions at the factories and that he was told that 'the workers were paid more than in the neighbouring villages'.

However, Palestinians living in the villages around Mishor Adumim are prevented from building any permanent structure under Israeli military orders. Their tents and huts, and even a primary school at Khan-al-Ahmar, are subject to demolition by the army (more details see)

'Ecostream is not Green' appeals to people

These building restrictions prevent the establishment of any Palestinian businesses, meaning that local Palestinians are forced to work in the settlements. Palestinian agriculture is limited by the settlements monopoly on land and the restrictions placed on the grazing of cattle, often leading to the seizure of cattle by the army see).

Palestinians working for Sodastream in Mishor Adumim are working in the context of the occupation. In January 2012 activists from Stop Sodastream Italy made the following statement in response to claims by the company that its workers were well treated: ?the fact remains that, as subjects of an occupation regime, these workers do not enjoy civil rights (including the right of workers to organize) and are under constant threat of having their permits to work in the settlement revoked by the company at any moment.?

"Palestinian workers often have no choice but to work in the settlements, with high unemployment rates that are a direct result of the Israeli occupation. The 2011 United Nations Conference on Trade and Development report explicitly links the decline in Palestinian agricultural and industrial sectors and the dire humanitarian conditions with Israeli government policies, in particular the confiscation of land and natural resources, restrictions on movement of people and goods, and isolation from international markets. Only a colonial mindset could claim to provide jobs to the very same people whose land and freedom have been stolen."

The Palestinian call for boycott, divestment and sanctions urges a boycott of all Israeli companies until Israel complies with international humanitarian law, recognizes the fundamental rights of the Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel to full equality, the rights of return of refugees and ends the siege of Gaza and the occupation of all lands occupied in 1967.

Sodastream products are sold in the UK at Robert Dyas, John Lewis, Argos, Comet, Lakeland and some Sainsbury and Asda stores.

For more information on Soda Club see  pages 96-102 and here
Sodastream’s reply fails to convince

And just in, a devastating defeat for the anti-boycott movement in France.   

French  supermarket protestors

From Electronic Intifada

The case dates back to a July 2009 when a protest in a Carrefour supermarket in Évry, a suburb of Paris, led to Director Olivi Zemor, being prosecuted.    She was acquitted in two lower court appeals but the Zionist Chamber of Commerce and 3 other pro-Israeli groups appealed this.

The Court of Cassation – the highest criminal court of appeal – affirmed the acquittals and ruled that the pro-Israel groups had no standing to bring an action.

Implications

“The lack of standing of the France-Israel Chamber of Commerce has been confirmed, at least for all the current cases,” CAPJPO-EuroPalestine said in a statement lauding the court’s decision.
Several other cases against activists are still making their way through lower courts in several cities.

The ruling, moreover, “confirms the legality of the boycott Israel campaign as long as this state, its government and its army trample on the most elementary rights of the Palestinian people,” the statement adds.

The Jewish State Loses its Attraction for Jews

 It is somewhat ironic that Israel – founded as a ‘Jewish; state –has more Jews leaving it than entering it, despite it being a social taboo.

Amos Elon - author of ' Founders & Sons' emigrated to Tuscany, Italy

Why is this so?  Because even most Israelis see through the propaganda that says that ‘anti-Semitism’ is growing in Europe.  Because of the racist and intolerant society and atmosphere in Israel.  Because far-right nationalists and Orthodox Jews have taken over the government led by Netanyahu and because the most dangerous place to be in the world is Israel! 

The murder of 3,000 Argentinian Jews during the Junta, when Israel blocked visas for Jewish leftists whilst carrying on a profitable trade with the regime, has blown out of the water the idea that Israel is a refuge.  To many intellectual Israelis like Amos Elon, whose final  days were spent in Tuscany, Italy, Israel has nothing to offer than a racist state obsessed with ‘who is a Jew’ and the demographic terror of waking up to ‘too many’ Arabs.

Israeli protests over standard of living

Below are 3 articles on a subject that Zionists rarely discuss.

Tony Greenstein

Why Jews flee to Europe (or at least half of it)

Doug Saunders, Vienna — The Globe and Mail
Saturday, Nov. 16 2013

Have you heard about Europe’s Jewish exodus? Amid growing tensions and tough economic conditions, tens of thousands of educated middle-class Jews are fleeing every year – not out of the continent, but rather from Israel into Europe, and especially to Germany, which has become the chief destination (after the United States) for the half-million Israelis who have left the country amid its much-discussed “brain drain.”

Egyptian write Ahdaf Soueif speaking to Israeli apartheid week in Gaza

This has taken both Israelis and many Europeans by surprise – and offended some Israeli leaders. Last month, Foreign Minister Yair Lapid, during a visit to Budapest, took to Facebook to denounce the growing wave of Europe-bound Jews who have become known in the Israeli media as the New Yordim (emigrants, or literally, “fallen”).

“A word to all those who are fed up, and are leaving for Europe,” he wrote, then described his family’s tragic history in the Holocaust, concluding: “Forgive me if I’m a little impatient with those who are willing to throw away the only country the Jews have because it’s easier to live in Berlin.”
Easier to live in Berlin? That would not, even a generation ago, have been a common Jewish sentiment. Among North American Jews, even visiting Germany on vacation remains a matter of controversy and distaste. The black years of the Shoah are too fresh in many family histories.

Yet for this generation of Israelis, the shift to Europe is surprisingly uncontroversial. Last year, I had a conversation with a successful Israeli historian who had taken up residency in Germany. “That move must have shocked a lot of your friends in Israel,” I suggested. She looked askance, as if this was an unheard-of notion: “No, of course not,” she said. “My friends are all just jealous that I can get a visa to live here. Every Israeli academic of my generation wants to move to Europe.”
Much of this emigration has to do with Israel’s impossible economic conditions – writer Ruth Margalit recently noted  that 87 per cent of Israelis over 25 are financially dependent on their parents.
But it is also political: European countries are seen by Israelis as stable, egalitarian and safe, while in an Israel governed by hard-line regimes, the zealots and the Orthodox seem destined to prevail. “With all due respect,” Jerusalem Post columnist Susan Hatis Rolef recently wrote, “I think it is physically safer for a Jew to live in Berlin these days than in Jerusalem, though I do not belittle the emotional difficulty involved for a Jew to do so, given the not-too-distant history.”

She listed the reasons for the exodus: “loss of hope that peace will ever prevail … discomfort with the lack of determination of Israel’s leaders to make a serious effort to separate religion and state … and the feeling that life in Israel frequently feels like life in a pressure cooker.”

Still, it might seem more logical that the Jewish exodus would be out of Europe, not into it. Here in Austria, a party with an anti-Semitic and neo-Nazi background won nearly a fifth of the vote in the Sept. 29 elections. In Hungary, France, Greece and the Netherlands, parties based on religious and racial intolerance have had strong showings (although they govern nowhere). In a recent survey, 76 per cent of European Jews said they believe anti-Semitism has increased over the past five years. In France, home to half of Europe’s Jews, almost half said they had considered emigrating out of Europe.

So which is it: a Europe safe for Jews disenchanted by Israel, or a Europe Jews are seeking to flee? It’s important to understand that there are really two Europes.

The most comprehensive recent study of cross-European attitudes toward religious minorities was conducted two years ago by Andreas Zick of the Institute for Interdisciplinary Resarch on Conflict and Violence. It found a huge divergence in attitudes.

On the statement “Jews have too much influence in my country,” a staggering 69 per cent of Hungarians and 50 per cent of Poles answered yes, compared to far smaller numbers in Western Europe (14 per cent in France, 20 per cent in Germany and 6 per cent in the Netherlands) Likewise, majorities in Poland, Hungary and Portugal agreed with the statement “Jews in general do not care about anything or anyone but their own kind,” while this was a small minority view in the larger economies.

In Europe’s centre and east, where hardly any Jews remain to be found, public intolerance has risen to dangerous proportions. In the larger economies, Jews are largely seen as fellow citizens with a different religion. Unfortunately, the places where people of any religious minority are free from annoying zealotry are becoming fewer in number.

Why Are So Many Jews Leaving Israel?

by URI AVNERY

THOSE WHO are interested in the history of the Crusades ask themselves: what brought about the Crusaders’ downfall? Looking at the remnants of their proud fortresses all over the country, we wonder.

The traditional answer is: their defeat in the battle of the Horns of Hattin, twin hills near the Lake of Galilee, in 1187, by the great Muslim Sultan Salah ad-Din (Saladin).

However, the Crusader state lived on in Palestine and the surroundings for another hundred years.
The most authoritative historian of the Crusades, the late Steven Runciman, gave a completely different answer: the Crusader kingdom collapsed because too many Crusaders returned to their ancestral homelands, while too few came to join the Crusaders. In the end, the last remnants were thrown into the sea (literally).

THERE ARE vast differences between the Crusader state that existed in this country for two hundred years and the present State of Israel, but there are also some striking similarities. That’s why their history always attracted me.

Lately I was reminded of Runciman’s conclusion because of the sudden interest of our media in the phenomenon of emigration. Some comments bordered on hysteria.

The reasons for this are two. First, a TV network reported on Israeli descenders abroad, second, the award of the Nobel chemistry prize to two ex-Israelis. Both caused much hand-wringing.

“Descenders” (Yordim) is the Hebrew term for emigrants. People coming to live in Israel are called “ascenders” (Olim), a term akin to pilgrims. Probably the word has something to do with the fact that Jerusalem is located on a hill surrounded on all sides by valleys, so that you have to “go up” to reach it. But of course there is an ideological Zionist connotation to the terms.

Before the founding of our state and during its first few decades, we saw ourselves as a heroic society, struggling against great odds, fighting several wars. People leaving us were looked upon as deserters, like soldiers running away from their unit during a battle. Yitzhak Rabin called them ‘trash”.

What made the TV story so frightening was that it showed ordinary middle-class young Israeli families settling for good in Berlin, London and New Jersey. Some of their children were already speaking foreign languages, abandoning Hebrew. Terrible.

Until lately, “descending” was mostly attributed to misfits, lower-class people and others who could not find their place in ordinary society. But here were normal, well-educated young couples, Israeli-born, speaking good Hebrew. Their general complaint – sounding rather like an apology – was that they could not “end the month” in Israel, that their middle-class salaries did not suffice for a decent living, because salaries are too low and prices too high. They singled out the prices of apartments. The price of an apartment in Tel Aviv is equivalent to 120 months’ average middle class income.

However, sober research showed that emigration has actually decreased during the last few years. Polls show that the majority of Israelis, including even a majority of Arab citizens, are satisfied with their economic situation – more than in most European nations.

THE SECOND reason for hysteria was the award of the Nobel Prize to two American Chemistry professors who were educated in Israel, one of them born in a Kibbutz.

Israel is immensely proud of its Nobel laureates. Relative to the size of the country, their number is indeed extraordinary.

Many Jews are deeply convinced that the Jewish intellect is superior to that of any other people. Theories about this abound. One of them is that in medieval times, European intellectuals were mostly celibate monks who did not bequeath their genes to any offspring. In Jewish communities, the opposite happened: the rich were proud to marry their daughters to especially gifted Torah scholars, allowing their genes to start life in privileged circumstances.

Yet here were these two scholars who left Israel decades ago to graze in foreign meadows, continuing their research in prestigious American universities.

In former years, they would have been called traitors. Now they only cause profound soul-searching. One of the two had left Israel because the highly-regarded Weizmann Institute did not offer him a professorship. Why did we let him go? What about all the others?

Actually, this is not a specifically Israeli problem. Brain-flight is taking place all over the world. An ambitious scientist longs for the best of laboratories, the most prestigious university. Young minds from all over the world flock to the US. Israelis are no exception.

We have good universities. Three of them figure somewhere on the list of the world’s hundred best. But who can resist the temptations of Harvard or MIT?

THE SUDDEN disillusion caused Israelis to take a hard look at Israeli academia. It appears that our standards are slipping all along the line. Our universities are under-funded by the government, the number of professors and their quality decreasing. High-school students are slipping in their exams.
Why?

Immense funds are swallowed by the army, whose demands grow from year to year, though our security situation is improving all the time.

Our eternal occupation of the Palestinian territories is a drain on our meager resources. So are the settlements, of course. Our government invests in them huge sums of money. The exact amounts are a state secret.

In the long run, a small country with limited resources cannot sustain a huge army, as well as an occupation regime and hundreds of settlements, without depriving everything else. One single fighter plane costs more than a school or a hospital or a laboratory.

BUT MY worry about emigration is not limited to material considerations.

People do not leave for material reasons only. They may think that they are emigrating because life in Berlin is cheaper than in Tel Aviv, apartments easier to find, salaries higher. But it is not only the strength of the attraction of foreign lands that counts – it is also the strength or weakness of the bond to the homeland.

In the years when “descenders” were considered trash, we were proud of being Israeli. During the fifties and sixties, whenever I presented my Israeli passport at any border control, I felt good. Israel was viewed with admiration throughout the world, not least by our enemies.

I believe that it is a basic human right to be proud of one’s society, one’s country. People belong to nations. Even in today’s global village, most people need the sense of belonging to a certain place, a certain people. No one wants to be ashamed of them.

Today, when presenting his passport, an Israeli feels no such pride. He may feel a sense of contrariness (“us against the whole world”), but he or she is conscious of his country being considered by many as an apartheid state, oppressing another people. Every person abroad has seen countless photos of heavily armed Israel soldiers confronting Palestinian women and children.

Nothing to be proud of.

This is not a subject anyone ever speaks of. But it is there. And it is bound to get worse.
Jewish Israelis are already a minority in the country ruled by Israel, from the Mediterranean to the Jordan. The majority of subjects deprived of all rights is growing by the year. Oppression will necessarily grow. The image of Israel throughout the world will get worse. Pride in Israel will fade.
ONE EFFECT is already becoming obvious.

A prestigious recent poll conducted among American Jews shows a marked loosening of the attachment young Jews there feel for Israel.

The American Jewish scene is dominated by elderly professional leaders who were never elected by anyone. They exert immense power over American political life, but their influence in their own community is slipping. Young Jewish Americans are no longer proud of Israel. Some of them are ashamed.

These young Jews do not, in general, stand up to protest. They are afraid of providing ammunition to the anti-Semites. They are also educated from childhood that we Jews must stand together against the Goyim who want to destroy us.

So, instead of raising their voice, they keep quiet, leave their communities, disappear from sight. But this process can be utterly disastrous for Israel, Our leaders rely completely on the stranglehold they have on American politicians. If these perceive that the Jewish support of Israel is diminishing, they will be quick to liberate themselves.

THERE IS another aspect to the Zionist part of the equation.

Zionism is supposed to bring Jews to Israel. That is what it is all about. But Zionism can be a two-way street.

Israel declares itself to be “the State of the Jewish People”. Jews all over the world are considered de facto Israeli nationals. But if there is no basic difference between a Jew in Haifa and a Jew in Hamburg, why stay in Haifa when life in Hamburg seems to be so much better?

I have campaigned for decades to exchange Zionist theology for a simple Israeli patriotism. Perhaps the time has finally come to do so – after turning Israel into a country we can be proud of again.

URI AVNERY is an Israeli writer and peace activist with Gush Shalom. He is a contributor to CounterPunch’s book The Politics of Anti-Semitism.

The million missing Israelis - Israeli emigration

Joseph Chamie, Barry Mirkin | Foreign Policy blog | July 5, 2011

Over more than six decades of statehood, successive Israeli governments have repeatedly stressed the centrality of Jewish immigration and the Law of Return of all Jews to Israel for the well-being, security, and survival of the nation. Yet while much is published on Jewish immigration to Israel, considerably less information is available about Jewish emigration from Israel.

Government estimates of the numbers of Israelis residing abroad vary greatly due mainly to the lack of an adequate recording system. Consequently, scholars and others have questioned the accuracy of government figures. Besides the statistical and methodological shortcomings, the number of Israeli expatriates is open to considerable debate and controversy because of its enormous demographic, social, and political significance both within and outside Israel.

At the lower end is the official estimate of 750,000 Israeli emigrants -- 10 percent of the population -- issued by the Israeli Ministry of Immigrant Absorption, which is about the same as that for Mexico, Morocco, and Sri Lanka. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government places the current number of Israeli citizens living abroad in the range of 800,000 to 1 million, representing up to 13 percent of the population, which is relatively high among OECD countries. Consistent with this latter figure is the estimated 1 million Israelis in the Diaspora reported at the first-ever global conference of Israelis living abroad, held in this January.

Current estimates of Israelis living abroad are substantially higher than those for the past. During Israel's first decade, some 100,000 Jews are believed to have emigrated from Israel. By 1980, Israel's Central Bureau of Statistics estimated some 270,000 Israelis living abroad for more than a year, or 7 percent of the population. Several decades later, the number of Israeli emigrants had swelled to about 550,000 -- or almost double the proportion at the end of the 1950s.

Of the Israelis currently residing abroad, roughly 60 percent are believed to have settled in North America, a quarter in Europe, and 15 percent distributed across the rest of the world. It is estimated that about 45 percent of the adult Israeli expatriates have completed at least a university degree, in contrast to 22 percent of the Israeli population. The Israeli emigrants are deemed to be disproportionately secular, liberal, and cosmopolitan. Furthermore, the emigrants are generally younger than the immigrants to Israel, especially those from the former Soviet Union, hastening the aging of Israel's population.

The often-cited reasons for Israeli emigration center on seeking better living and financial conditions, employment and professional opportunities, and higher education, as well as pessimism regarding prospects for peace. Consistent with these motives, one of the most frequently given explanations for leaving Israel is: "The question is not why we left, but why it took us so long to do so." And recent opinion polls find that almost half of Israeli youth would prefer to live somewhere else if they had the chance. Again, the most often-cited reason to emigrate is because the situation in Israel is viewed as "not good."

Another important factor contributing to the outflow of Jewish Israelis is previous emigration experience. As 40 percent of Jewish Israelis are foreign-born, emigration is nothing new for many in the country. Moreover, as Israeli emigrants cannot yet vote from abroad, they are likely to feel marginalized from mainstream Israeli society, further contributing to their decision to remain abroad as well as attracting others to do the same. Whether the Netanyahu government's effort in the Knesset to approve a bill granting voting rights to Israelis living abroad will slow the trend is uncertain.

Adding to emigration pressures, many Israelis have already taken preliminary steps to eventually leaving. One survey found close to 60 percent of Israelis had approached or were intending to approach a foreign embassy to ask for citizenship and a passport. An estimated 100,000 Israelis have German passports, while more are applying for passports based on their German ancestry. And a large number of Israelis have dual nationality, including an estimated 500,000 Israelis holding U.S. passports (with close to a quarter-million pending applications).

Population projections show that Jewish Israelis will remain the large majority in Israel for the foreseeable future. However, it will be a challenge for Jewish Israelis to maintain their current dominant majority of approximately 75 percent, primarily due to higher fertility among non-Jewish Israelis -- nearly one child per woman greater -- the depletion of the large pool of likely potential Jewish immigrants, and large-scale Jewish Israeli emigration. Consequently, demographic projections expect the Jewish proportion of the country -- which peaked at 89 percent in 1957 -- to continue declining over the coming decades, approaching a figure closer to two-thirds of the population by mid-century.

The emigration of a large proportion of a country's population, especially the well-educated and highly skilled, poses serious challenges for any nation. However, large-scale emigration is particularly problematic for Israel given its relatively small population, unique ethnic composition, and regional political context.

Moreover, not only is Israeli emigration increasing the influence of the orthodox Jewish communities, it is also boosting the need for temporary, non-Jewish foreign workers, especially in agriculture, construction, and care-giving. The presence of more than 200,000 foreign workers -- nearly half of whom are unauthorized and mainly from Asia (in particular Thailand and the Philippines, but also increasingly from Africa) -- is also contributing to the changing ethnic composition of the country.

The departure of Jewish Israelis also contributes to the undermining of the Zionist ideology. If large numbers of Jewish Israelis are opting to emigrate, why would Jews who are well integrated and accepted in other countries immigrate to Israel? Furthermore, up to a quarter of young Israelis in Europe marry outside their faith. The majority do not belong to a Jewish community and do not participate in any Jewish activities. As with other expatriate groups in Western nations, Israelis living abroad often profess their intention to return. However, Israeli emigrants are likely to remain in their adopted countries insofar as they and their families have become successfully settled and integrated.

Israeli governments have already consistently perceived immigration levels as too low and emigration levels as too high. In addition to policies encouraging immigration for permanent settlement, Israel has programs and media campaigns actively promoting the return of Israelis residing overseas. The government also maintains connections with the country's expatriates through mandatory registration in its consulates overseas and outreach programs and activities -- and provides counseling, guidance, financial assistance, and tax benefits to returning citizens.

Despite these efforts, it is doubtful based on past and current trends that these various incentives and appeals will be sufficient to entice the return of the million missing Israelis. Large-scale emigration has not only resulted in critical demographic and socioeconomic imbalances in the country, but more importantly poses grave political challenges and jeopardizes the basic Jewish character and integrity of Israel.

Joseph Chamie is research director at the Center for Migration Studies, and Barry Mirkin is an independent consultant.

Alon Ben-Meir

Senior Fellow, NYU's Center for Global Affairs

'The Jewish State of Israel'

As the Israelis and Palestinians are presently negotiating in an effort to end a nearly seven decades-old conflict, Prime Minister Netanyahu has made recognition of the Jewish right to a homeland in Israel "the most important key to solving the conflict."The 1947 UN Partition Plan called for the establishment of a Jewish state and a Palestinian state and this fact was not lost to the 160 countries that have since recognized Israel, but none were required to recognize it by name as the Jewish state. Why, then, is Netanyahu making this requirement sine qua non to resolving the conflict with the Palestinians?

There is no doubt that the Jewish right to a homeland in Israel is central to preserving the Jewish national identity of the state and providing a safe and secure haven for the Jews to ensure their survival.

The Jewish people have for millennia endured persecution, discrimination, and expulsions, culminating in the unimaginably horrific Nazi Holocaust. Only when seen in the context of survival itself is one able to grasp why the vast majority of Jews in and outside Israel are committed to the survival of the state and its Jewish identity.

That said, the irony is that current and previous Israeli governments have regularly embraced policies and taken measures that directly undermined any prospect of preserving Israel as the state for the Jewish people.

The problem here is while a sustainable Jewish majority is central to permanently securing that objective, there are many indicators that clearly demonstrate the diminishing Jewish majority in Israel, and little is being done by Netanyahu to reverse the trend.

Instead, Netanyahu is demanding that the Palestinians recognize Israel as a Jewish state, as if such recognition will eternally guarantee the national identity of the state regardless of the changing demographic composition of Jews and Arabs in Israel.

Writing in Commentary magazine in May 2009, historian Michael B. Oren, who shortly thereafter became Israel's Ambassador to the United States, identified "the Arab demographic threat" as one of seven "existential threats"facing the existence of Israel.

"Israel, the Jewish State, is predicated on a decisive and stable Jewish majority of at least 70 percent,"wrote Oren. "Any lower than that and Israel will have to decide between being a Jewish state and a democratic state. If it chooses democracy, then Israel as a Jewish state will cease to exist."

Here are the startling demographic trends that if continued unchecked will reduce Israeli Jews to a minority and endanger the very purpose why Israel was created.

First, the Arab citizens of Israel constituted 20.7 percent of the total population in 2012. In 2011, the birth rate among Israeli Jews was 3.0 births per woman verses 4.38 per Palestinian woman. Some reports state that the Israeli Arab population will grow from the current number of 1.658 million to 2.4 million by the year 2030. This could represent nearly one quarter of the Israeli population.

Ironically, in his speech in 2003 at the Interdisciplinary Center (IDC) in Herzliya, Netanyahu spoke of the demographic threat. "We have a demographic problem," he said, "but it lies not with the Palestinian Arabs, but with the Israeli Arabs [who will remain Israeli citizens]."

He continued to say, "If Israel's Arabs become well integrated and reach 35-45 percent of the population, there will no longer be a Jewish state [emphasis added]." Therefore, a policy is needed that will balance the two. Paradoxically, Netanyahu's policy is in fact gradually realizing his own ominous prediction.

Second, there is an alarming number of Israelis who are emigrating from Israel. Statistics show that up to one million Israelis (13 percent of the population) are living abroad, and very few are planning to return to Israel.

Many have left because they are seeking better job opportunities; others because they are weary of the continuing conflict with the Palestinians. Many have concerns about security, while others flatly admit that they want to shield their children from compulsory military service.

Third, immigration to Israel is hardly balancing emigration from Israel. In the year 2012, 16,577 Jews immigrated to Israel verses the 16,000 who emigrated from Israel. It is projected that by 2030, between 440,000 to 623,000 will immigrate to Israel and perhaps as many will leave Israel if current trends continue.

The largest reservoir of Jews outside Israel is in the U.S. with 6-6.7 million, followed by Europe with 1.4 million. Given the continuing conflict with the Palestinians and the growing disenchantment of young American and European Jews with the Israeli occupation, the likelihood of a huge influx of newcomers from these two major Jewish centers is diminishing.

Many Israelis, led by a prime minister who warned of the coming demographic threat, are doing nothing to reverse this trend by taking the necessary measures to increase the Jewish population.

On the contrary, Netanyahu is making matters worse by his expansionist policies in the West Bank and his discriminatory treatment of Israeli Arabs, which can only further exacerbate relations between them. Thus, instead of becoming a positive component of the Israeli social fabric, they may well become a fifth column.

What will it take then to ensure that Israel maintains its Jewish national identity while still preserving its democratic nature, given the gloomy demographic picture?

First, Israel must resolve the conflict with the Palestinians based on a two-state solution, which would remove Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza from the demographic equation that Israel faces today.

The continuing occupation and the expansion of settlements run contrary to the need to establish a Palestinian state in order to prevent the creation of a de facto one state, which will obliterate Israel's Jewish national identity. This would also enhance Israel's security and serve to make it a more attractive destination for Jews worldwide.

Former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's warning in a 2007 interview with Haaretz remains as valid today as it was six years ago when he said, "If the day comes when the two-state solution collapses, and we face a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights (also for the Palestinians in the territories), then, as soon as that happens, the State of Israel is finished."

"The Jewish organizations," he continued, "which were our power base in America, will be the first to come out against us because they will say they cannot support a state that does not support democracy and equal voting rights for all its residents." This will certainly dry up any prospect of immigration of American Jews in any significant number.

Second, Israel must discourage emigration of Israeli Jews to Western countries by providing job opportunities and better prospects for the future. It was inequality and rising prices that brought hundreds of thousands of Israelis to the streets in the summer of 2011.

Meanwhile, the government is spending hundreds of millions of dollars on building new and expanding current settlements at the expense of poor Israelis who are living hand-to-mouth, driving many from raising their families in Israel.

The answer to this dilemma is a new economic policy that diminishes the socioeconomic gaps in Israel while sparing no effort to establish a comprehensive peace with the Arab states. This would open up new markets on Israel's borders, enabling new business opportunities to flourish in what President Shimon Peres used to call "a new Middle East."

Third, although the pool of Jews who wish to immigrate to Israel is limited, cultural and religious ties are still a magnet that will bring Jews to reside in Israel. These potential immigrants will be encouraged to make the move provided that they believe Israel offers new and exciting opportunities for growth and serves the purpose that was intended by its founders: a secure and democratic Jewish state at peace with its neighbors.

Fourth, Israel should institute policies that encourage a greater birthrate among secular Jews by providing appropriate subsidies, especially affordable housing. The divide between Israel's religious and secular communities is often portrayed in the animosity driven by the significant subsidies offered to the rapidly-growing religious community.

A campaign to reach all Israelis and offer appropriate assistance for higher education and housing is essential if Israeli citizens are to have the confidence that they can provide for larger families.

Fifth, as beloved as Israel may be in the eyes of American and European Jews, they are weary of Israel's tarnished image resulting from its discriminatory policies toward the Palestinians by bending democratic principles and perpetuating the occupation, which is akin to apartheid.

Never before has Israeli democracy been so clearly under attack. Bills introduced in the Israeli Knesset in 2011 under Netanyahu's stewardship sought to limit free speech by cutting funding from left-wing non-governmental organizations, curtailing the power of the judiciary, and explicitly declaring Israel as a Jewish state in a blatant measure to isolate its Arab citizens.

Even former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton reportedly likened Israel's undemocratic legislation with the mullahs of Iran in her 2011 address to the closed-door Saban Forum, hosted by the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC.

Clinton's comments came days after former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta implored Israel to institute civil measures and American Ambassador Dan Shapiro joined his European colleagues in conveying to Israeli officials the US' concerns regarding the state of Israel's democracy.

Israel must decide what kind of nation it seeks to become: an undemocratic apartheid state or a democracy at peace with its neighbors that enjoy strong relations with allies in the West. It has never been clearer that Israel cannot have it both ways.

Recognizing Israel as a Jewish state by the Palestinians, as demanded by Netanyahu, is of no value or consequence, not any more than the four countries identified by their religious majority: the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, the Islamic Republic of Iran, the Islamic Republic of Pakistan and the Islamic Republic of Mauritania.

Perhaps Netanyahu should call for renaming Israel "the Jewish state of Israel," but then he must remember that only a sustainable Jewish majority will make it so.

It is time for the Israelis to ask their prime minister where Israel will be in 15 to 20 years down the line should he pursue the same illusionary policy. I am prepared to venture that his answer will be "I do not know."

The absurdity of linking peace with the Palestinians to their recognition of Israel as a Jewish state is glaringly clear because this will neither mitigate the challenging growth of the Israeli Arabs nor advance the peace process. Moreover, it will neither retain the democratic principle of the state nor will it ensure Israel's Jewish national identity.

Therein lies the danger to Israel's existence as a Jewish state, regardless of by what name Israel is recognized and by whom.

Blaming the poor for poverty

Do you remember Ian Duncan Smith and hi The idiot who the Tories put in charge of poor bashing  IDS in the days when he was 'concerned' about poverty  s Centre for Social Justice?  After Tory MPs passed a vote of no confidence in him and he was forced into resigning as leader he apparently underwent a damascene conversion.  He set up him Social Market Foundation and visited Easterhouse, the most infamous of Scottish housing estates in Glasgow. Apparetly the "levels of social breakdown which appalled me. In the fourth largest economy in the world, too many people lived in dysfunctional homes, trapped on benefits. Too many children were leaving school with no qualifications or skills to enable them to work and prosper. Too many communities were blighted by alcohol and drug addiction, debt and criminality, many of them with stunningly low levels of life expectancy The idiot who the Tories put in charge of poor bashing What IDS has done is to cut benefits to the bone.  Housing Benefit for under-25's will soon be gone.  The 'granny tax' will and is ensuring new levels of homelessness,  massive levels of sanctions are forcing people into starvation.   All the while  his friends in the City and Utility companies reap the rewards of making the poor pay for their gambling habits. Below is an excellent article from the 'Outrage' Blog.  The 'quiet man' of politics has become a spluttering mass of incompetence.  His universal credit, aimed at combining 6 benefits and working 'real time' has been so complex that the IT systems couldn't cope and it is way behind schedule, if it ever materialises. But what has the opposition to say?   Rachel Reeve the new Shadow Minister for the DWP said New Labour would be tougher than the  Tories on welfare recipients, proving that  New Labour wouldn't recognise a principle if it bit it on the buttocks.  But as Dennis McShameless has proved Miliband's New Labour is corrupt and useless as the Tories. Tony Greenstein Like his 18th century counterparts Iain Duncan Smith has managed to turn a profit out of the sick, disabled and unemployed, who next OAP? Posted: 28 Nov 2013 05:35 PM PST The 18th century would have approved of entrusting the disappearance from sight of the poor, the afflicted, the workless, the seeker of asylum and the criminal, to new superintendents of the poor, including A4E, Capita and Serco. When the powerful invoke "fairness", and represent the privileged as victims of exploitation by the powerless, it is usually the prelude to some spectacular act of injustice towards minorities, the excluded and the poor.  The Quiet Man is not happy The singular achievement of the present government has been to appoint new "overseers of the poor", although it forbears from using this term, which dates from the 16th century, when it designated the administrators and distributors of poor relief. These new overseers are far from the flinty and ignorant officials of the Old Poor Law, as they are – and not for the first time – commercial entities. The poor have often been eyed covetously by enterprise, as they represent an apparently enduring group in society, out of whom it must surely be possible, in one way or another, to make a profit, the word David Cameron has cleansed of any association with dirt – perhaps prematurely, as G4S and Serco demonstrated, when they charged the government for tagging prisoners who did not exist. Atos, tasked with the judgment of whether individuals are fit for employment, finds itself the inheritor of an ancient debate about the "deserving" and "undeserving". The fate of the most vulnerable people – in children's homes, prisons, care homes, rehabilitation centres, adult care homes and probation services – is increasingly in the hands of private providers, just as they were when known as orphans, felons, the lame and the halt, and the aged, who have "borne the heat and burthen of the day". This government's use of private companies – a policy re-affirmed last week by Francis Maude – in the improvement of pauper management has its antecedents in the 18th century, when the task was widely outsourced to willing providers. Far from being an "innovative" approach to poverty, the present government looks deep into a punitive past for inspiration. Perhaps these modern Conservatives hark back to the Poor Law Relief Act of 1723, when local justices of the peace were allowed to contract the administration of relief out to those who would feed, clothe and house the poor. Relief was given according to a prescribed quantity of labour, and was calculated to put an end to the "false and frivolous pretences" under which many people were believed to have found relief. The poor were to be managed by the contractor at so much a head, or maintained for a lump sum agreed in advance. In the first case, it served the contractor to cram as many people into the workhouse as possible; in the second, it was in his interest to keep them out. This was achieved by the payment of pensions that cost less than the paupers' upkeep in the workhouse. The standard inside was so low that people willingly accepted miserable payments as "out-relief". The poor rates duly declined. Everything that could be was contracted out – physicians for medical services, carpenters for making coffins, shifts for living paupers and shrouds for dead ones. Of course, the rhetoric has changed: the oratory of the 18th century has decayed, and is now inflected by a show of caring: we shall not neglect you or abandon you to worklessness, says George Osborne, but his embrace of the excluded is as uncharitable as it ever was, as he also declares that the "something-for-nothing culture" is at an end. The indolent and the workshy, identified during half a millennium of Poor Laws, are impervious to threats and exhortations. Those who suffer will be people whose lives have already been blighted, and many of whom were born to an inheritance, not of "hard-working strivers", but of despair. They are, for the most part, highly vulnerable and, if among them foxy cheats dissimulate themselves, these should not be used to inspire terror in the weak and wounded of society. What useful purpose is served by compelling the injured and humiliated of the world to sign on daily, to clear litter from the streets, to work for charities for nothing? Picking oakum looks, by contrast, like a positively purposeful activity. What triumph lies in compulsion intended for the defeated and the demoralised, the unloved and abused, the frightened and the mentally infirm, the under-endowed and the psychologically damaged (often with invisible handicaps), people immobilised by depression or detached, not from society, but from life itself? It is one thing to boast of hard work and achievement, but in the presence of the shut-ins and the frightened, the twilight world of the addict and the obsessive, these heroics are tainted. This is why it is ignoble to attack those predestined to lose all the rewards and prizes with which the rich and capable have so effortlessly made off.If there is a ghostly quality in the language of today's warriors against the poor, it is because the prescriptions they offer have been tendered at least since the consolidation of the Elizabethan Poor Law of 1601. When Iain Duncan Smith, George Osborne, Frank Field and former archbishops give their prescriptions, it is like being at some cosmic seance, as they are enunciating a wisdom from beyond the grave. In 1798, Jeremy Bentham published Pauper Management Improved. He proposed institutions for regulating the poor and, to facilitate this, he drew up a map of what he called Pauperland. This was an inventory of "that part of the natural livestock which has no feathers and walks on two legs". He meant those who labour. In his opinion, "Not one person in a hundred is incapable of all employment. Not the motion of a finger, not a step, not a wink, not a whisper, but ought to be turned to account in the way of profit." Bentham's cheeseparing scheme for the poor inspired generatio/ns of administrators: he would make hats brimless so as not to waste material; bedcovers would be fastened by clips to save on superfluous fabric. What an inspiration to the tax on those in social housing with a spare room, even if it holds necessary aids that enable disabled people to participate in society. Meanwhile, turning the "wink and the whisper" of the sick to profit is admirably pursued by Atos, which has deemed fit for work people with terminal illness, some of whom have indeed died within days of being declared employable. The 18th century would have approved of entrusting the disappearance from sight of the poor, the afflicted, the workless, the seeker of asylum and the criminal, to new superintendents of the poor, including A4E, Capita and Serco. The charge is not one of parsimony, nor even of the elevation of efficiency over humanity. It is that the richest societies in the world are still ready to impose punitive sanctions upon the least defended. If anthropologists wish to examine life and labour in a savage society, they no longer need seek out rare, uncontacted peoples in the Amazon or Polynesia; all they require is an airline ticket to contemporary Britain. By Jeremy Seabrook

There is a debate among many Jews as to whether they should circumcise a male child, at 8 days, or not.  There are views  either way though my own view is that it is a form of genital mutilation.



circumcision ceremony



 

Of the three sons I had, he first was circumcised, albeit by a trained surgeon but the other 2 were not.  My own views have changed over the years and I don't believe parents have the right to genitally mutilate their children in the name of religion.

 

Of course male circumcision cannot be compared to female genital mutilation which can involve cutting out the whole of the clitoris but nonetheless the principle is much the same.  Is the Covenant allegedly made between Abraham and god, of which circumcision was the price, something which should be indulged in in present day society.

 

In 'the only democracy in the Middle East' the Rabbis have absolute control over 'personal affairs' which is why some people mistakenly see it as a theocracy.   In the case below a women who is divorcing a man who wants the boy circumcised, has been fined $140 a day! 

 

Although it is kept quiet, many children have died from infection after being circumcised by untrained mohels (those who carry out the procedure).   The equipment is not sterilised and the Rabbi (usually) has no medical training.  By the time the parents realise something is wrong the child is dead.

 

Tony Greenstein

Israeli woman fined $140 a day for refusing to circumcise son

Ha'aretz,Netta Ahituv                                                                  Nov. 26, 2013
 In unprecedented ruling, court obligates mother to circumcise son or be penalized; In divorce hearing, father insists boy be circumcised.

baby during circumcision process 

Here's a bizarre story that highlights something I hadn't known about "the only democracy in the Middle East". Here's Ha'aretz: http://www.haaretz.com/news/national/.premium-1.560245

An Israeli rabbinical court has handed down a precedent-setting ruling that requires a mother to circumcise her son, against her will, or pay a fine of NIS 500 ($140) for every day he remains uncircumcised.

"The baby was born with a medical problem, so we couldn’t circumcise him on the eighth day as is customary," said Elinor, the boy’s mother."  As time went on, I started reading about what actually happens in circumcision, and I realized that I couldn’t do that to my son. He’s perfect just as he is."

The mother said that the baby’s father had a part in the decision, but when the couple began to discuss their divorce in the rabbinical court, he unexpectedly decided to insist that their son be circumcised.

Israel's rabbinical courts are part of the country's justice system and have legal jurisdiction over matters of religion, including marriage and divorce, when it comes to the country's Jewish citizens.

Good for Jews? I don't think so but I wonder if Israel grants the same powers to the clergy of other religions.
reprinted from Jewssansfrontieres

Cobbs Demonstrates What Zionist  'Peace & Dialogue Mean in Practice

Brighton PSC has taken to picketing the Sodastream shop on weekdays as well as Saturday.  The allegations Cobbs makes, that we intimidate the 2 women shop keepers are, of course lies.  Unless they find the loneliness of an empty shop intimidating!  Though they should be used to it by now!

Cobbs, who was recently revealed to have served 9 months in Exeter Prisons, having been sentenced to 18 months for theft and deception, should be proud of himself.  Theft and deception is, in the Bible, a capital offence as it is one of the injunctions of the Decalogue.  However salvation is at hand because if is only an offence if the victim in a Jew!

As Israel Shahak, a biblical scholar and former Professor at the Hebrew University explained "Robbery (with violence) is strictly forbidden if the victim is Jewish.  However, robbery of a Gentile by a Jew is not forbidden outright but only under certaian circuumstances such as 'when the Gentiles are not under our rule' but is permiteed 'when they are under our rule'.... This may explain why so very few rabbis have protested against the robbery of Palestinian property in Israel:  it was backed by overwhelming Jewish Power.' [Israel Shahak, Jewish History, Jewish Religion - the Weight of Three Thousand Years, Pluto, London, 1997, p.90].

However I digress, Cobbs seems to have been a filthier mood than normal when we turned up at Sodastream's shop on Friday, which of course is a prime example of the theft of Palestinian property.



Still Cobbs is but small fry when compared  to Labour Friends of Israel stalwart, Dennis McShameless, Robert Maxwell, Gerald Ronson and the appropriately named Bernie Madoff (whose sins were compounded because he not only robbed non-Jews but Jews).

Today the theme of the Brighton demonstration was the Prawer Plan which involves the ethnic cleansing of 70,000 Bedouins of the Negev and their transfer to shanty towns.

Knowing they can't defend the Prawer plan for Judification of the Negev (comparison the deJewification of  Germny) the Zionists try to block the message with Zionist flags!

Police, protesters clash in Israel's south at rally against Bedouin relocation

Allegiance to Israel Threatens Safety of Jews in America

General Ulysses Grant who issued an order expelling the Jews from Mississippi, Kentucky, and Tennessee, the most anti-Semitic official order in American history because of Jewish clothing manufacturers' decision to move southern cotton northwar

It is a long-standing canard of anti-Semites that Jews are not members of the nations amongst whom they live but constitute a separate race/nation.  Hence Germans of the Jewish  Faith were transformed by the Nuremburg Laws into being Jews who resided, as subjects not citizens in Germany.
It was the basis of Emancipation that Jews were part of the nations amongst which they lived.  They may not owe loyalty to the particular state, especially if they were socialists or communists, because the State is an instrument of class domination.  But Jews no more owed a loyalty to another state, still less constitution a separate nation, than Catholics or Protestans.

The annual Israel Day parade in New York - a disgusting mixture of racism and chauvinism

The Zionists hated Emancipation, the idea of equal political and civil rights and the removal   of political disabilities on Jews.  Theodor Herzl, founder of Political Zionism held, absurdly that ‘anti-Semitism is a consequence of the Emancipation of the Jews.’ [Diaries, p.9] In his  pamphlet Der Judenstaat (The State of the Jews) He wrote that ‘‘In the principle countries where anti-Semitism prevails, it does so as a result of the emancipation of the Jews.’ [p.25] The anti-Semites agreed.  Eduord Drumont, the leading anti-Dreyfusard and a vicious anti-Semite, had written La France Juive, [Jewish France] one the 2 major works of anti-Semitism in the 19th Century, (the other was Houston Stuart Chamberlains Myths of the 19th Century) which sold 100,000 in its first edition.  He was in total agreement with Herzl. ‘According to Drumont ‘the emancipation of the Jews in 1791 was a blunder.’ [Alex, Bein, Biography of Theodor Herzl p.80].  Unsurprisingly Drumont might been a virulent anti-Semites, editing the anti-Semitic daily La Libre Parole, but he and Herzl got on famously. 
Herzl persuaded Drumont, via another anti-Semite, Daudet, to review the Jewish State in La Libre Parole, which he did on January 15 1897.  Herzl was ecstatic about ‘Drumont’s highly flattering editorial about me and promises more.’  [Drumont] "praised the Zionists of Herzl's persuasion for not seeing in us fanatics ... but citizens who exercise the right of self-defense."[Desmond Stewart, Theodor Herzl, Artist and Politician, 251].

Bush & Netanyahu - Israel serves US strategic interests in the region

Although most Zionists are unaware of it, a key concept in Zionist theology is the ‘negation of the Diaspora', a rejection of Jewish existence outside Israel.  Its most articulate advocate today is the Zionist author A B Yehoshua and and academic Anita Shapira. Speaking to a meeting of the British Zionist Youth Council, Yehoshua described the Jewish Diaspora as a "cancer connected to the mainstream of the Jewish people."  Jewish Chronicle 22 December 1989.

Idiotic chauvinists and racists cover themselves in the Zionist and US flags - or the 'butcher's apron' as Irish Republicans used to describe the Union Jack.

 Its classic Zionist exponent was Jacob Klatzkin, co-founder of the Encyclopaedia Judaica and editor of the Zionist Organisation paper Die Welt (1909-11). In a collection of essays, Boundaries (Tehumim), 1914-21, he wrote that "Galut can only drag out the disgrace of our people and sustain the existence of a people disfigured in both body and soul, in a word, of a horror. At the very most it can maintain us in a state of national impurity and breed some sort of outlandish creature in an environment of disintegration of cultures, of darkening spiritual horizons. The result will be something neither Jewish nor gentile - in any case. '-not a pure national type. Perhaps it is conceivable that, even after the disintegration of our national existence in foreign lands, there will remain for many generations some sort of oddity among the peoples going by the name of Jew."The Zionist Idea, A Hertzberg, 1959, Atheneum, p.323, NY.  Zionism's negation of the Jewish diaspora rested on a caricature of Jews that was a reflection of anti-Semitism. 
 The attempt to suggest that Jews have a dual loyalty, to the USA and Israel is a gift to the anti-Semites.  You only need to read articles such as Are Jews Guilty Of Dual Loyalty?  or David Duke’s article Is Discussing Jewish Dual Loyalty Anti-Semitic? to realise whose agenda such questions are meant to serve.

Jonathan Pollard, an American Jew and a member of Naval Intelligence sold US secrets to Israeli and was sentenced to life imprisonment.

A very real example was the conviction of Jonathan Pollard, a 31 year old American Jew andan employee of US Naval Intelligence who provided Israeli spies with classified American satellite data on the location of Syrian antiaircraft batteries and of Iraqi nuclear test sites. The FBI arrested Pollard in November 1985. An American court sentenced him to life in prison. The Pollard Affair: Was it dual loyalty?Jerusalem Post 2.11.09.

Which is why when the Israeli Embassy distributed a questionnaire to American Jews asking whether they were more loyal to America or Israel, Jewish community leaders, usually quite tame and slavish supporters of all that Israel does, were outrage, as the following article in Ha'aretz describes:

Israel asks U.S. Jews, Israelis: Where do your loyalties lie?

PM orders ministries to stop distributing the survey, which asks questions about dual allegiance and the Jewish lobby in America.

Two sensitive and potentially explosive issues have always clouded the relationship between the Jewish community in the United States and the State of Israel. The first relates to claims of “dual allegiance” to both Israel and the United States; the other concerns the pro-Israel, American “Jewish lobby.” Many of those raising such claims against American Jewry have themselves been accused of anti-Semitism.

So it's strange that representatives of Israel’s immigrant absorption and foreign ministries have just distributed a questionnaire to tens of thousands of Israelis living in the United States and Jewish Americans, which includes problematic questions on exactly these issues, and asks them to indicate where their allegiance would lie in the case of a crisis between the two countries.

On Sunday, following the report of the story in Haaretz, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu directed the ministries to stop distributing the questionnaire. He also ordered that it not be promoted by any official government agency.

The survey was commissioned by the Israeli American Council, a private nonprofit group based in Los Angeles. Its mission is "to build an active and giving Israeli-American community in order to strengthen the State of Israel, our next generation, and to provide a bridge to the Jewish-American community,” according to the IAC website.


The IAC was established by Israelis living in Los Angeles in 2007, and is primarily supported by Israeli-American businessman Haim Saban, who has donated close to a million dollars in the past four years.


In September, the IAC announced plans to expand by establishing new branches throughout the United States. Conducting the survey is seen as part of this process.


According to the IAC, casino mogul Sheldon Adelson has taken it upon himself to help finance the group's expansion.

Adelson, considered one of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s closest allies, owns the pro-Netanyahu free daily Israel Hayom, and donated tens of millions of dollars to Republican candidates in the last U.S. presidential election.

Last Tuesday, the IAC’s chief operating officer, Miri Belsky, sent an email to the Israeli embassy in Washington with a link to the survey, asking that Israeli consulates in the United States be instructed to distribute it. She even asked that the consulates send out four reminders - one every three days – in order to elicit replies from at least 10 percent of their mailing list.

That same day, the Israeli consulates in the United States received instructions from the embassy in Washington and the Immigrant Absorption Ministry’s returning citizens' department to distribute the survey by email to the tens of thousands of Israelis and Jews on their mailing lists.

“The IAC is conducting a survey of Israelis in the United States to map their positions and needs,” read the email the Washington embassy sent to the consulates. “We will be partners in the findings. They are asking for our help in distributing the questionnaires via our communication channels, in order to reach as many Israelis as possible … We thank you for promoting this from today.”

Midgam Research and Consulting, a polling company, has been hired to carry out the survey, which is apparently financed by the IAC but was endorsed by official Israeli government agencies. The symbol of the State of Israel appears on the survey’s opening page, and the questionnaires were sent from official Foreign Ministry email accounts.

However, it is unclear what governmental level approved this move, or whether absorption or foreign ministry officials checked what type of questions would be asked. Only after several of the consulates had already distributed the survey to tens of thousands of recipients did some Israeli diplomats realize the significance, and partially halted its distribution.

“Tell her not to send it out. The questions in this survey are unbearable and not legitimate,” Gil Lainer, consul for public diplomacy at the Israeli Consulate in New York, wrote to one of his colleagues in an email.

One question in the survey asks specifically which side the respondents would support publicly if there was a crisis in the relationship between the United States and Israel. The respondents are also asked to what extent the presidential candidates or Congress members' attitudes toward Israel impact their voting decisions.

They are also asked about the impact of American Jews and U.S. Jewish organizations on American policy, and how Israelis living in the United States and American Jews have an impact on Israel’s strength.

An Immigrant Absorption Ministry spokesperson told Haaretz, “this survey has no connection to the ministry,” but admitted ministry personal were involved in its distribution. “We will check how this hitch occurred.” 

The Foreign Ministry noted that “the survey was distributed by Ella Saban - director of the department for returning Israelis at the Absorption Ministry - to the consulates. It is a project of the Absorption Ministry and the IAC.” However, it noted that the embassy in Washington and the consulates around the U.S. helped circulate the survey.

The IAC replied via its PR, Moshe Debby. “The Israeli American Council initiated and approved the survey and questions,” Debby said. “We drafted the survey and it was distributed by many organizations, including [the Immigrant Absorption Ministry agency] Bait Israeli. The government of Israel was not involved in drafting the survey. We chose to conduct this survey … checking the characteristics of Israelis living in America and their children, to learn about the community’s nature.
 
“We think those questions are legitimate, as they are not influencing the reader to vote one way or another. The survey is totally anonymous and the results are for statistical study. The questions you referred to are questions that many Jews and Israeli Americans are faced with.”

Mira Bar Hillel
Tuesday 29 October 2013

Israel and the US: Drawing up lines of allegiance

Jewish Americans are being asked whether they feel more loyal to the US or Israel – it's hard to imagine the issue being raise at a more sensitive time

 Ask British Jews whether they feel more loyal to this country or to Israel – and expect to be instantly labelled anti-Semitic and sent packing. The same, only more so, applies in the USA.
The issue has always been sensitive. Nowadays, with Israel being increasingly criticised for its harsh treatment of the Palestinians and asking to be allowed to bomb Iran, it is potentially explosive.

When Israeli positions conflict with British ones, nothing is more inflammatory than allegations of “dual allegiance”, not to mention putting Israel first. The pro-Israel lobbyists do their work subtly, although in the US their activities, especially among politicians, attract more attention.

Which makes it even more peculiar that tens of thousands of leaflets have recently been distributed to Jewish Americans, as well as to Israelis living in the United States, asking them to indicate where their allegiance would lie in the case of a crisis between the two countries. Almost incredibly, the leaflet was originally endorsed by representatives of Israel’s Foreign Ministry.

Within days, following the report of the story in the Israeli press, Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu hastily directed the ministry to stop backing the questionnaire, which was commissioned by the Israeli American Council, a private nonprofit group established in Los Angeles in 2007. In September, the IAC announced plans to expand by establishing new branches throughout the United States. The survey is seen as part of this process.

According to the IAC, this expansion is to be sponsored by Vegas casino billionaire Sheldon Adelson.   Adelson, 80, is one of the biggest financial backers of both Netanyahu and Mitt Romney and is said to have spent as much as $100 million trying to help defeat Obama last year. According to a report (by Seth Hanlon, the director of fiscal reform at the Center for American Progress Action Fund), the canny Adelson could have turn that investment into a $2 billion tax cut had Romney been elected.

In Israel, Adelson established and pays for a free newspaper, Hayom, devoted to praising Netanyahu and his controversial wife on a daily basis with endless “scoops” about the First Family.

The 12th richest person in the world with an estimated net worth of $34.4 billion recently wrote in the Wall Street Journal that the one reason why he switched from Democrat to Republican was that Republicans were more supportive of Israel than Democrats. That certainly applied to Romney and Netanyahu, a pair who stayed very close after working together at the Boston Consulting Group in the 70s.

In October 2013 Adelson called upon the US to warn Iran it would use Nuclear missiles if necessary, initially aimed at the desert and subsequently threatening to hit Tehran if it did not halt its nuclear programme . This could have been – and possibly was – scripted by Netanyahu.

I wouldn’t dare ask Sheldon Adelson, whose wife is Israeli, where his allegiances lie. But I would dearly love to hear his answer.

Does Uri Avnery know so little about Israel?

Below is a reply by British journalist Jonathan Cook, who lives in Nazareth to the nonsense spouted by Uri Avnery. Avnery, of Gush Shalom, has a record of opposing the occupation and repression of the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories.  He risked jail when it was a crime to meet the Palestine Liberation Organisation.  He is also a veteran of

Uri Avnery

 1948 and the expulsions, which he sees as a clean war, and was a member of the Irgun, the fighting wing of the Zionist Revisionists under Menachem  Begin.
 Avnery’s problem is that he has never made the connections between Zionism and the inevitable racism of a Jewish state that seeks to maintain its racial purity.  This is why be believes that the position of Arabs in Israel (a position taken by Norman Finkelstein) is no different to any other national minority.

He cannot see that the racism experienced by those who live under the heel of a settler colonial state is qualitatively different to that in Europe, where racism is bad enough but isn’t an integral part of the very state itself.

Tony Greenstein

Jonathan Cook

One of my concerns about Uri Avnery is that, whatever the good work he has done as a journalist and peace activist, especially in regard to the occupied territories, he still has an ability to write utter nonsense when it comes to what is happening inside Israel. It is difficult to know whether this is simple ignorance or a bad case of ideological blinkers. But it is also hard to believe a man who has studied his own society for so long can really know so little about what is going on there.

There is a lot to challenge in his latest piece, on the comparison between Israel and apartheid South Africa, but the following paragraph really assaults the intellect:

On the whole, the situation of the Arab minority inside Israel proper is much like that of many national minorities in Europe and elsewhere. They enjoy equality under the law, vote for parliament, are represented by very lively parties of their own, but in practice suffer discrimination in many areas. To call this apartheid would be grossly misleading.
I’d love Avnery to point out the European state where, like Israel, 93 per cent of the land has been nationalised for one ethnic group (Jews) to the exclusion of another ethnic group (Palestinian Arabs). Or where vetting committees operate by law in hundreds of communities precisely to prevent one ethnic group (Palestinian Arabs) from living in these communities.

Or the European state, like Israel, where two separate citizenship laws exist – the Law of Return (1950) and the Citizenship Law (1952) – which are designed to confer rights on members of an ethnic group (Jews) who are not actually yet citizens or present in the state, privileging them over a group (Palestinian Arabs) who do have citizenship and are present in the state.

Or a European state that has 55 laws that explicitly discriminate based on which ethnic group you belong to.

Or a European state that, like Israel, defers some of what should be its sovereign powers to extra-territorial bodies such as the Jewish Agency and the Jewish National Fund whose charters obligate them to discriminate based on ethnic belonging.

Or the European state that denies its citizens access to any civil institutions on personal status matters such as marriage, divorce and burial, requiring all citizens to submit to the whims and prejudices of religious leaders.

Or a European state which does not recognise its own nationality, and where the only way to join the dominant national group (Jews) or to immigrate is through conversion.

I’d be surprised if he could find one European state that has a single one of these characteristics. Even if he could, it would not have more than one of those characteristics. Israel has them all and many more.

Now tell me Israel discriminates against Palestinian Arab citizens the way European states do against their minorities.
Taking Apartheid Apart Uri Avnery



A banner headline which didn't match the strap lines



 

Left Unity is the brainchild and founding father, the distinguished socialist film maker Ken Loach who has produced more radical and socialist films that I can remember.

 

Ken Loach - Left Unity's guiding light

 

A conference session

Kes - the first of Ken Loach's films I saw and possibly the best

Left Unity conference

But of course positive discrimination is not something particularly socialist or ‘left’.  Anyone who remembers that photo of the 101 Blair Babes, women labour MPs, most of whom owed their position to all–women short-lists, might also recall that when it came to the vote against the Iraq War in 2003, 40% of male Labour MPs voted against war and just 25% of female MPs voted against the war and many of them were the old, traditional socialist working-class women, like Alice Mahon, who had become an MP in the absence of any positive discrimination.

To get 500 socialists in a conference hall, without a solitary Socialist Worker seller, is an achievement.  However I fear that Left Unity has already reached its apogee and the way from now on will be down.  Left Unity has been set up on the basis of a false analysis of the problems facing the socialist left which is not that we don’t all come together but that there is no shared strategy.   

This is, in turn, the product of a working class that has been defeated and restructured (atomised) with a consequent weakening of trade unions.  The problem with Left Unity is that the debate on the Constitution prevented any discussion or debate on strategy or elections through lack of time.  This was a serious, if not fatal mistake.

Tony Greenstein

Western Leaders are Lying When They Claim to be Certain that Assad Used Chemical Weapons

Medics in Khan al-Assal, Aleppo, treat an injured man

I recommend the Washingtons Blog for much of this information .  There is a wealth of links to reputable sources in an article Yes, the Syrian Rebels DO Have Access to Chemical Weapons
Even the only reputable Israeli Daily Newspaper Ha'aretz has carried an article 'Jihadists, not Assad, apparently behind reported chemical attack in Syria'By Anshel Pfeffer, its Defence Correspondent, on 24.3.13.
He asked 'Was the first use of chemical weapons in the Syrian civil war carried out by rebel forces fighting against the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad?'

The mysterious explosion last Tuesday near the city of Aleppo, which killed 26 people and wounded dozens, was swiftly labeled by Western intelligence agencies as a chemical incident perpetrated by forces loyal to Assad.

U.S. President Barack Obama was even asked during a press conference in Israel whether the incident would change his administration's non-intervention policy on Syria. But as more information passes, a different picture is beginning to emerge. The explosion claimed the lives of Syrian Armed Forces soldiers who are apparently loyal to Assad, and the Syrian government was quick to demand an international investigation of the incident.
These two facts would indicate that Assad's forces were not behind the attack.      

In addition, from what has been released of the physical and medical evidence, it seems that some of the injuries were caused by chlorine. While chlorine gas has been used in the past as a weapon, mainly in the First World War, the chemical arsenals of nations developing these weapons have for decades focused mainly on mustard gas and various types of nerve agents, which, had they been used last week, would have caused different symptoms that were not observed.

It appears that the target of the attack was a checkpoint manned by Syrian Armed Forces, which reinforces the theory that rebel forces, probably jihadists known to be operating around Aleppo, were behind it. A report by Britain's Channel Four, based on Syrian military sources, claims that the weapon used in the attack may have been a missile carrying a warhead filled with chlorine mixed into a saline solution. The Syrian source also said that a factory that manufactures chlorine is located nearby.

If these claims are true, it would seem to prove that the jihadists have the technical expertise necessary to insert chlorine gas into a warhead and seal it so that the gas does not leak during launch but only upon impact with the target. Another possibility is that it was a conventional missile that hit a chlorine storage tank, causing leaking gases that resulted in casualties.

Not all intelligence experts share the deep concern over a possible use of chemical weapons by Assad's forces. The large stockpiles of chemical substances held by the Syrian regime are closely guarded by the Air Force Intelligence, a branch extremely close to the Assad family, and, despite losing control of wide swathes of Syrian territory, the regime is making extreme efforts to safeguard these assets. Even though the regime has the capability to launch a chemical attack using artillery shells, warplanes and missiles, they normally store chemical substances separately and it is expected that Western intelligence agencies would identify any attempt by the regime to prepare a large quantity of chemical warheads. In one case, a number of months ago, such a mixing operation was noted and the United States issued stern warnings to the Assad regime to desist.      

According to a number of reports, American and perhaps also British special forces are willing to enter Syria to secure the chemical weapons stockpiles from bases in Jordan and Turkey should there be any sign that they are about to be captured or used by terror organizations. The Sunni-dominated Free Syrian Army, which has among its ranks senior officers who defected from forces loyal to Assad, has also prepared a plan to take over the chemical bases in the case of the regime's sudden collapse.

Of course this blows a gaping hole in the certainty of trigger-happy western leaders.  Because they know what the Saudis have supplied the Al Nusri Front, the main rebel group and Al Queda front, with.  They also know that this includes both chemical weapons and a means of delivery.

There is only one conclusion.  Obama wants to bomb Syria and intervene in the conflict there in order to send a message to Iran and Hizbollah.  Israel of course is fully behind him.

Tony Greenstein