As President Obama’s Middle East peace initiative appears destined for failure, there is increasing speculation that a third intifada may follow, but whereas the first two Palestinian uprisings took place primarily inside the occupied territories, the third uprising may well start inside Israel. The Israeli-Arab town of Umm al Fahm is now a tinder box.
In The National, Jonathan Cook reports:
Israeli police and stone-throwing Arabs clashed in northern Israel yesterday as a group of Jewish right-wing extremists tried to march through the Arab-Israeli town of Umm al Fahm.
Two Arab legislators were injured in the violence. Afu Aghbaria, an Arab MP with the joint Jewish-Arab Communist party, said he had been hit in the leg.
Haneen Zoubi, a parliament member who has received hundreds of death threats since her participation in an aid flotilla to Gaza in the summer, also was among those hurt.
Ms Zoubi reported being hit in the back and neck by rubber bullets as she fled the area after police opened fire. In an interview with The National, she said she believed that she had been specifically targeted by police snipers after they identified her.
Israel deployed a secret police “mistaravim” unit (a Hebrew term meaning “disguised as an Arab”) in Umm al Fahm. In the image below, at least half a dozen such undercover operatives can be seen taking down demonstrators. The one on the far left appears to be firing a hand gun. The image is grabbed from news footage in a sequence that starts 38 seconds into the video shown below.
Dominic Waghorn at Sky News adds:
Israeli border police tactics in this week’s clashes in Umm al Fahm are being scrutinised.
The concentration and intensity of stun grenades and tear gas volleys unleashed on a few hundred Israeli Arab was unprecedented in many observers’ experience.
The police say they launched it as soon as the first stones were thrown. One Israeli Arab Knesset member claims the stones were thrown by undercover Israeli police masquerading as Arabs in the crowd.
Israeli Channel 2 reported claims the tear gas volleys were fired in such a way because the crowd had just started turning on a suspected undercover police officer.
As Sameer Bazbaz captured in this sequence later [see image on the right], the undercover police were very active later, hiding among the crowd then pouncing on Israeli Arabs as uniformed colleagues swarmed to join them.
The undercover officer shown in the image above with his right arm firmly gripped around a teenager’s neck appears to be the same individual who can be seen at the beginning of the video above who 10 seconds in, can be seen at the road’s edge apparently picking up a stone to throw at Israeli police.
So now the violence starts again inside Israel? I wonder, how do the Jews who live in the U.S.A. feel watching the goings on over there? They identify with, but don’t want to live there. Does that tell something all should sit up & take notice from? More & more, this is resembling history, how the German Brown Shirts dealt with the dissidents in their time. Like a petulant child, Israel seems destined to repeat the very actions that they have spent the past 65 years preaching about being done to them. How sad.
“I wonder, how do the Jews who live in the U.S.A. feel watching the goings on over there? They identify with, but don’t want to live there.”
Norman, I can tell you that this Jew living in the U.S.A. identifies with the Palestinians – those with and those without Israeli citizenship. When I see, hear and read about how the Israeli government and many Jewish Israelis treat Palestinians, I cannot adequately express my fury and my frustration. I agree with you that the government of Israel has been “out-Nazi-ing” the Nazis in Germany: this process has the potential to put many millions of lives in danger, including the lives of those who live in North America.
The only way to stop this madness is for the United States to end its $15 million “daily allowance” to Israel, which includes more than $10 million each day for weapons, planes, tanks, etc. Israel “thrives” on a deadly trust fund from the U.S., and the U.S. must be held responsible and accountable for the atrocities which are committed by Israel.
The AshkeNAZIS and the RedSoviets have finally gotten hold of Israel’s Government in order to make the kind of Israel they always wanted. What died as Apartheid South Africa survives as this Mideastern “gift of the people of USA,” apartheid Israel!
Thank God that Israel’s young best&brightest managed to escape this regime migrating to the West. They’ll never go back again turning their backs on this “new” Israel that is exsanguinating wonderful human beings who used to populate it and now turn their backs on its inhumane ugliness. Israel’s loss is our gain. It’s now time to stop paying with our declining hard currency for this degenerate racist “democracy.”
What God spared from the Holocaust is among us, not in that land of the Zionazis!
I pray that none of Israel’s adherents to the Jewish Ethic are left to suffer in this state whose name means DEFIANCE OF GOD!
As an outspoken opponent of Israel, denying even that any such society which depends on state practitioners of racist murder, in order to exist has any right to exist, I have to criticise the reference to the man in gripping a Palestinian by the neck, as being the apparently same person, as someone earlier picking up a stone. I accept there may be a point to be made, about balaclavas being choice of apparel for undercover cops, in those situaitons. He’s also, wearing jeans, so, OK, he’s undercover, while nicking someone. But his top, also has a black stripe, across the chest, and the stonethrower, has a white one. And without such a discrepancy, the claim that it’s the same man, has to appear a bit thin, and thereby weaken everything else, that critics of the state practitioners of racist murder, ( neo – natzi’s) say about this incident
“Man has dominated man to his injury.” (Ecclesiastes 8:9)