Haaretz reports: The harsh criticism sounded by former Shin Bet head Yuval Diskin against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over the issue of Iran on Friday were only the tip of the iceberg.

During the same speech in the “Majdi Forum” in Kfar Saba, Diskin blamed Netanyahu, not Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, for the freeze in the peace process.

“Forget the stories they tell you about how Abbas is not interested in negotiation,” said Diskin, adding, “We are not talking to the Palestinians because this government has no interest in negotiations.”

The former Shin Bet chief added, “I was there up to a year ago and I know from up-close what is happening. This government is not interested in solving anything with the Palestinians, and I say this certainty,” he added.

Diskin pointed the finger at Netanyahu. “This prime minister knows that if he makes the slightest move forward, then his well-established rule and his coalition will fall apart.”

“It’s simple,” he said, “Thus, no one has any interest in changing the situation. Abbas made mistakes, but this is beside the point. We as a people have an interest in this, but not this government. The problem becomes more difficult with every passing day.”

Diskin’s criticism of Netanyahu over the Palestinian issue is even more significant than his declarations over the Iranian issue. The reason for this is that the Shin Bet is the body responsible for the Palestinian issue on both the political and security-related levels, whereas the issue of a nuclear Iran falls under the Mossad’s area of expertise as well as that of Israel Defense Forces’ intelligence unit.

Diskin also warned that a “feeling of hopelessness” was developing among the Palestinians. He further stated that he was in contact with senior officials in the Palestinian Authority who tell him about “the lack of faith that something will change, especially in the West Bank.”

“In this kind of situation, when the concentration of gas fumes in the air is so high, the question is only when the spark will come to light it,” he said, adding: “It won’t happen tomorrow morning… but all the basic elements to allow it are there.”

Diskin also referred to last summer’s wave of social protests, indicated that part of the unrest was prompted by the weakening of the Israeli government’s control, saying that “control over what is happening beyond Gedera and Hadera [Israel’s center] is weak” both in “the Jewish respect and in the Arab one.”

According to the former Shin Bet chief, the protest was prompted by real and just reasons, adding, however that those who led it weren’t ready to pay a personal price in order to achieve their goals.”

“What’s the difference between the, quote-unquote, revolutionists in Rothschild Boulevard and those in Tahrir Square?” he asked, answering that there was a “small, but significant difference – the people in Tahrir Square were willing to pay the price, and the people in Rothschild Boulevard didn’t really.”

Diskin added that as “soon as the festival season was over and all the singers were done, as soon as the people were done taking a dump in the backyards of their neighbors in Rothschild, the summer was over and they went back to university.”

“In Tahrir Square people paid a price for their principles. If that doesn’t happen here, all this social justice thing will be another summer festival in Israel. I think that the people who led it, most of them, aren’t really willing to pay a price for it,” he said.

Haaretz reports: Former Shin Bet chief Yuval Diskin expressed harsh criticism of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak on Friday in a meeting with residents of the city of Kfar Sava, saying the pair is not worthy of leading the country.

“My major problem is that I have no faith in the current leadership, which must lead us into an event on the scale of war with Iran or regional war,” Diskin told the “Majdi Forum,” a group of local residents that meets to discuss political issues.

“I don’t believe in either the prime minister or the defense minister. I don’t believe in a leadership that makes decisions based on messianic feelings,” he added.

Diskin deemed Barak and Netanyahu “two messianics – the one from Akirov or the Assuta project and the other from Gaza Street or Caesarea,” he said, referring to the residences of the two politicians.

“Believe me, I have observed them from up close… They are not people who I, on a personal level, trust to lead Israel to an event on that scale and carry it off. These are not people that I would want to have holding the wheel in such an event,” Diskin said.

“They are misleading the public on the Iran issue. They tell the public that if Israel acts, Iran won’t have a nuclear bomb. This is a misrepresentation. Actually, many experts say that an Israeli attack would accelerate the Iranian nuclear race,” concluded the former security chief.

In March, former Mossad chief Meir Dagan also spoke out against a military option against Iran, telling CBS’ 60 Minutes that an Israeli attack would have “devastating” consequences for Israel and would be unlikely to put an end to the Iranian nuclear program.

Larry Derfner writes: In his 2004 book The Case for Democracy, Natan Sharansky (with co-author Ron Dermer, head of Bibi Netanyahu’s brain trust) popularized his “town square test,” which he called the threshold test of whether a society is free or not. It went like this:

If a person cannot walk into the middle of the town square and express his or her views without fear of arrest, imprisonment, or physical harm, then that person is living in a fear society, not a free society. We cannot rest until every person living in a “fear society” has finally won their freedom.

The town square test was adopted by George W. Bush, Condoleezza Rice and the rest of the war-on-terror crowd; it flattered their self-delusion that they invaded Iraq for altruistic purposes. What always got me, though, was that Sharansky, a true-blue Jewish nationalist, didn’t notice that his test was an embarrassment to Israel because it proved that Israel was not a free society, but a fear society. Can an Arab or Jewish citizen enter a public square in this country, especially in Jerusalem, the capital, and denounce the occupation or one of our wars without being physically harmed by people in the crowd? Of course not. If Mohammed Bakri or Uri Avnery, let’s say, were crazy enough to take the town square test, they would be set upon by the rednecks present, mainly young ones, and if they didn’t shut up and get out of there ASAP, they’d be physically attacked. At best, the cops would come break it up and likewise tell Bakri or Avnery to get moving fast, and if they didn’t, they’d be arrested, and if they insisted on going back and taking the town square test again, they’d be imprisoned.

By the renowned standard of the chairman of the Jewish Agency and one of the great heroes of modern Jewish history, Israel is not a free society, but a fear society. [Continue reading…]

Leehee Rothschild writes: The first text message I received around 22:30 read “The cops have surrounded the building. It’s quite likely that everybody will be arrested once we try to get out of the door. Alert everybody.” The message was sent by a friend of mine, who along with 14 other activists came to the offices of Zochrot (remembering), an Israeli NGO that focuses on commemorating and raising awareness to the Palestinian Nakba, on the eve of the Israeli independence day. They were planning to go out to the street and remind the celebrators the horrible price that was paid and is still being paid by Palestinians for this so called independence. [Continue reading…]

On the Zochrot website, Norma Musih writes:

The Jewish people in Israel, or at least most of them, live in complete ignorance or even denial of the Palestinian disaster that took place in 1948, the Nakba. The Nakba has no place in the language, the landscape, the environment, and the memory of the Jewish collective in Israel.

Traveling in Israel, one may find signposts, landmarks and memorials that create and sustain the Jewish-Israeli narrative. Jewish-Israeli events that took place more than 2,000 years ago are celebrated through these memorials while Palestinian memorials are nowhere to be seen. Moreover, there is an attempt to erase this memory from the collective consciousness and from the landscape. We, the Israelis, study in our schools that the Jews came to Israel to transform the desert into a blooming country, because we were a “people without a land” returning to a “land without a people.”

Zochrot is an NGO whose goal is to introduce the Palestinian Nakba to the Israeli-Jewish public, to express the Nakba in Hebrew, to enable a place for the Nakba in the language and in the environment. This is in order to promote an alternative memory to the hegemonic Zionist memory. The Nakba is the disaster of the Palestinian people: the destruction of the villages and cities, the killing, the expulsion, the erasure of Palestinian culture. But the Nakba, I believe, is also our story, the story of the Jews who live in Israel, who enjoy the privileges of being the ‘winners.’

Zochrot was founded in early 2002 and its main goal is to bring knowledge of the Palestinian Nakba to Jewish-Israeli people. One of the basic assumptions of our work is that the Nakba is the ‘ground zero’ of the Israeli-Palestine conflict. Awareness and recognition of the Nakba by Jewish-Israeli people, and taking responsibility for this tragedy, are essential to ending the struggle and starting a process of reconciliation between the people of Palestine-Israel.

Wikipedia: A pogrom (Russian: погро́м) is a form of violent riot, a mob attack directed against a minority group, and characterized by killings and destruction of their homes and properties, businesses, and religious centers. It originally and still typically refers to 19th- and 20th-century attacks on Jews, particularly in the Russian Empire.

The Jerusalem Post reports: Unidentified attackers on Friday threw Molotov cocktails at four houses and one kindergarten connected to a community of African asylum seekers in the Shapira neighborhood of Tel Aviv.

No one was injured, but there was property damage, and neighbors believed that the attack was organized and specifically directed against the refugees. Police arrived in the neighborhood to investigate the case after the incident.

Police would not comment in detail on what they referred to as the “attempted arson.” Specifically, they refused to comment on whether the crime had been racially-motivated and on reports that additional Molotov cocktails were found nearby.

Police admitted to The Jerusalem Post that they had not sent out an announcement to the press regarding the incident. When asked by the Post why they had not followed standard protocol of sending out a press announcement, the police said that while there was no conscious decision not to, that typically announcements were only made for “serious” incidents and not “every little incident.” The police did not explain why the throwing of several Molotov cocktails was not considered serious.

The attackers threw one of the Molotov cocktails near a courtyard where five Eritreans regularly sleep. The residents were awoken by the fires and extinguished them, but did not see who threw the bottles.

Requesting anonymity, one neighbor claimed that the only reason for the attack would be if someone was trying to scare away the refugees. The neighbor added that the Molotov cocktail had almost burned his car and was thrown into a house where a little girl lived.

Shortly afterwards, two Molotov cocktails were thrown into another two houses of asylum seekers. One resident described waking up from a fire right next to the bed.

Many residents asked rhetorically who could do such a thing, with no answer expected to be immediately forthcoming from police.

While the asylum seekers were circumspect about claiming that these sorts of incidents were racially-motivated, Israeli residents were more outspoken on the issue.

Some neighborhood activists plan to respond to the incident with a protest vigil on Friday afternoon. “There is racial incitement trickling down from the government, coming from several city council members, and it impacts the situation on the street,” stated Nir Nader. “People who incite racism should go to jail, and if the state does not stop them, we will stop them with our bodies.”

As Haggai Matar reports, whoever conducted the attacks, Israelis in the neighborhood supported the attackers goals if not their methods.

“Somebody is trying to get rid of these damn Sudanese,” said an Israeli resident of Shapira neighborhood in south Tel Aviv this morning. The term “Sudanese” is commonly used by Israelis to describe all African asylum seekers. The house adjacent to the house of this Israeli was hit at around 1:30 a.m. by three Molotov cocktails: two were thrown through the window, and one into the entry hall. No one was hurt, as residents and neighbors quickly awoke and extinguished the fire. Another fire bomb was thrown into a neighboring yard, where five asylum seekers sleep outdoors. Furniture was badly burned, but none of the residents were hurt. All of the cases are probably linked, as Mya has noted.

“Whoever did this is right, but he’s doing it the wrong way,” says the neighbor. “This fire almost burned my car, and also – there is a small girl in that house. He should have waited until nobody was home, and then blown the place up to send them a message”.

Mya Guarnieri reports:

The African community in Israel has been the target of numerous acts of violence in the past. In January of 2011, for example, a burning tire was thrown into the apartment five Sudanese refugees shared in Ashdod. The men suffered from smoke inhalation and two were hospitalized.

Also in January of 2011, three teenage girls – the Israeli-born, Hebrew-speaking daughters of African migrant workers – were beaten by a group of Jewish teenagers. The attackers, one of whom was armed with a knife, allegedly called them “dirty niggers.” One of the girls needed medical treatment for her injuries.

Speaking in the aftermath of the 2011 attack on the girls, Poriya Gal, spokeswoman for the Hotline of Migrant Workers, told me, “It’s worth noting that the girls had already experienced such violence in the neighbourhood. But they chose not to report it to the police out of the fear that they would be attacked again.”