Category Archives: Zionism

A Palestinian awakening and an Israeli nightmare

A refugee crisis that has lasted for 63 years following the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948.

Peter Beinart writes:

Why did thousands of Palestinians yesterday converge upon Israel’s borders? Partly because Syria’s war-criminal leader, Bashar al-Assad, and his ally, Hezbollah, wanted them to. But there’s more to it than that. Palestinians also marched from Jordan and Egypt, whose governments did their best to stop the protests. In fact, they marched from every corner of the Palestinian world, in a tech-savvy, coordinated campaign. What hit Israel yesterday was the Palestinian version of the Arab spring.

Something fundamental has changed. I grew up believing that we—Americans and Jews—were the shapers of history in the Middle East. We created reality; others watched, baffled, paralyzed, afraid. In 1989, Americans gloated as the Soviet Union, our former rival for Middle Eastern supremacy, retreated ignominiously from the region. When Saddam Hussein tried to challenge us from within, we thrashed him in the Gulf War. Throughout the 1990s, we sent our economists, law professors and investment bankers to try to teach the Arabs globalization, which back then meant copying us. In a thousand ways, sometimes gently, sometimes brutally, we sent the message: We make the rules; you play by them.

For Jews, this sense of being history’s masters was even more intoxicating. For millennia, we had been acted upon. Mere decades earlier, American Jews had watched, trembling and inarticulate, as European Jews were destroyed. But it was that very impotence that made possible the triumph of Zionism, a movement aimed at snatching history’s reins from gentiles, and perhaps even God. Beginning in the early 20th century, Zionists created facts on the ground. Sometimes the great powers applauded; sometimes they condemned, but acre by acre, Jews seized control of their fate. As David Ben-Gurion liked to say, “Our future does not depend on what gentiles say but on what Jews do.” The Arabs reacted with fury, occasional violence, and in Palestine, a national movement of their own. But they could rarely compete, either politically or militarily. We went from strength to strength; they never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity.

That world is gone. America and Israel are no longer driving history in the Middle East; for the first time in a long time, Arabs are. In Tahrir Square, Egypt’s young made a revolution. President Obama bowed to reality and helped show Hosni Mubarak the door; Benjamin Netanyahu stood athwart history, impotently yelling stop. Now Egypt’s leaders are doing its people’s will, bringing Hamas and Fatah together in preparation for elections. Hamas and Fatah are complying because they fear their own Tahrir Square. They sense that in Palestine too, a populist uprising stirs; that’s part of what yesterday’s marches were about. For American and Israeli leaders accustomed to Palestinian autocrats and Palestinian terrorists, this is something new. Netanyahu and his American backers are demanding that Obama rewind the clock, but he can’t. The Palestinians no longer listen to functionaries like George Mitchell. They have lost faith in American promises, and they no longer fear American threats. Instead, they are putting aside their internal divisions and creating facts on the ground.

Al Jazeera reports:

At least 353 people were injured, one of them critically, when Egyptian security forces attacked a pro-Palestine demonstration outside the Israeli embassy in Cairo on Sunday night, according to witnesses and the Health Ministry.

Activists told Al Jazeera that army and internal security troops used tear gas, rubber-coated bullets and live ammunition to disperse thousands of protesters who had gathered to mark the 63rd anniversary of the “Nakba” or “catastrophe” – the day in 1948 that Israel declared its independence and thousands of Palestinians fled or were expelled form their homes.

At least two protesters were shot by live ammunition, while others were hospitalised after inhaling tear gas or being hit by rubber-coated steel bullets, some of which penetrated the skin, witnesses said.

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Palestinians killed in Nakba clashes

Israeli soldiers stand at the border fence between Israel and Syria as demonstrators approach the village of Majdal Shams in the Golan Heights

Al Jazeera reports:

Several people have been killed and scores of others wounded in the Gaza Strip, Golan Heights, Ras Maroun in Lebanon and the Israeli-occupied West Bank, as Palestinians mark the “Nakba”, or day of “catastrophe”.

The “Nakba” is how Palestinians refer to the 1948 founding of the state of Israel, when an estimated 700,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled following Israel’s declaration of statehood.

At least one Palestinian was killed and up to 80 others wounded in northern Gaza as Israeli troops opened fire on a march of at least 1,000 people heading towards the Erez crossing between the Gaza Strip and Israel.

A group of Palestinians, including children, marching to mark the “Nakba” were shot by the Israeli army after crossing a Hamas checkpoint and entering what Israel calls a “buffer zone” – an empty area between checkpoints where Israeli soldiers generally shoot trespassers, Al Jazeera’s Nicole Johnston reported from Gaza City on Sunday.

Hasan Abu Nimah writes:

Sixty years ago in Battir, my small hillside village near Jerusalem, I witnessed the chaotic collapse of the British Mandate administration in Palestine and the beginning of the Nakba.

The previous months had been decisive ones for the fate of Palestine, although we did not yet know it. The Jews, fed up with British procrastination in fulfilling Balfour’s promise of letting them transform our homeland into their “national home,” launched a bloody campaign of terror both against the British and the Arabs. The Jewish militias targeted the British to speed up their departure from Palestine, and hit the Arabs to quell the rising resistance to Zionist colonization. Violence broke out in early 1947, after the British announced that they would leave Palestine by 15 May 1948. When the United Nations passed its partition resolution on 29 November 1947, the violence began to lurch into full-scale war.

Battir’s 1,200 inhabitants were wracked by uncertainty. There were hopes that things would turn out all right, but fear dominated as the atmosphere became bleaker by the day.

I vividly remember the stories of horror which haunted the people of Battir, such as the attack on the railway station in Jerusalem on 21 October 1946. The train was their lifeline to the city where they marketed their produce and bought their supplies. People also walked to Jerusalem and often traveled by car on the unpaved road that ran parallel to the railway line, though that was much harder. A few months earlier a Jewish bomb attack on Jerusalem’s King David Hotel, which served as the British headquarters, killed 91 people and injured dozens. Later, after the partition vote, when the Zionist forces began their armed campaign to seize Palestine, fighting erupted between Arabs and Jews in the land they both claimed.

Electronic Intifada has created an interactive map showing the Palestine villages destroyed in Nakba.

Noam Sheizaf writes:

I never heard the word Nakba before the nineties. It was simply not present in the Israeli language, or in the popular culture. Naturally, we knew that some Arabs left Israel in 1948, but it was all very vague. While we were asked to cite numbers and dates of the Jewish waves of immigration to Israel, details on the Palestinian parts of the story were sketchy: How many Palestinians left Israel? What were the circumstances under which they left? Why didn’t they return after the war? All these questions were irrelevant, having almost nothing to do with our history—that’s what we were made to think.

Occasionally, we were told that the Arabs had left under their own will, and it seemed that they chose not to come back, at least in the beginning. Years later, I was shocked to read that most of the notorious “infiltrates” from the early fifties were actually people trying to come back to their homes, even crossing the border to collect the crops from their fields at tremendous risk to their life – as IDF units didn’t hesitate to open fire.

We were made to think they were terrorists…

It’s hard to explain the mechanism which makes some parts of history “important” or some elements of the landscape “interesting.” I can only say that looking back, I understand how selective the knowledge we received was. But there is more to this. I think we all chose not to think about those issues. Even after the New Historians of the nineties made the term Nakba a part of modern Hebrew and proved that in many cases, Israel expelled Palestinians from territories it conquered in ‘48, we were engaged in the wrong kind of questions, such as the debate on whether more Palestinian were expelled or fled. The important thing is that they weren’t allowed to come back, and that they had their property and land seized by Israel immediately after the war (as some Jews had by Jordan and Syria, but not in substantial numbers). Leaving a place doesn’t make someone a refugee. It’s forbidding him or her from coming back that does it.

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Palestinian reconciliation

Daniel Levy writes:

The Palestinian factions have reached a power-sharing deal – albeit a fragile one. Regional developments helped, affecting the calculations of both Fatah and Hamas. The role of post-Mubarak Egypt and its emerging independent regional policy cannot be underestimated. Israel’s current government, though, is key to the glue binding Fatah and Hamas together. While the peace process has long been moribund, the Netanyahu government’s refusal to indulge in the make-believe of possible progress rendered obsolete even Fatah’s well-honed capacity to suspend disbelief.

Yet if the deal is to last, the Palestinian factions will eventually have to address substance: their national goals and the strategies to be pursued in attaining them. A real political dialogue will force both Fatah and Hamas out of their respective comfort zones. Fatah will have to elaborate a post-negotiation and (one imagines ) non-violent plan for freedom, and decide how such a plan co-exists or breaks with existing donor and international relations, including coordination with Israel. Hamas will have to confront the requirements of international law (including abandoning the use of violence against civilians ), and ultimately resolve its own verbal acrobatics regarding a Palestinian state alongside Israel – if a serious deal becomes available.

Not surprisingly, unity is also popular in Israel. Israeli unity that is. Palestinian unity has been met with almost blanket condemnation at the political level. But in reacting to Palestinian developments, we Israelis should first of all be asking what the problem is that we need to address. For the Netanyahu government that major problem, apparently, is Israel’s international image and the prospect of pressure being exerted on Israel to advance peace. In the community of nations, Israel’s standing has further plummeted under the tutelage of Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman. The intra-Palestinian deal therefore offers a delightful opportunity for Israel to register some big points on the “Who’s to blame for no peace?” scorecard and to fend off any such pressure.

Israel’s challenge, though, goes way beyond public relations. Israel’s challenge is how to adapt, shape and secure its future in this region.

For that reason alone, we would benefit from our own national reconciliation dialogue, one focused on what Israel’s aspirations and strategies should look like.

As tectonic plates shift around us, Israel is clinging to an illusion, namely that when and if the Palestinians are ready, Israel will be able and willing to deliver a dignified two-state solution. The truth is less comforting. Currently there is no political path to an Israeli governing majority that could deliver a mutually acceptable two-state outcome. And there is no status quo: Israel’s predicament is deteriorating, not stable. It is time for Israel to engage in the exercise that Palestinians have begun, and to ask what it is that we really want for ourselves.

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Heading toward an Israeli apartheid state

Daniel Blatman writes:

It has been 60 years since the apartheid state was established in South Africa. In March 1951, a few years after the racist National Party came to power, racial segregation was anchored in law. As was common in other countries that adopted racist laws in the 20th century, those in South Africa were accompanied by “laundered” explanations.

Hitler declared after the Nuremberg Race Laws were passed in 1935 that they would create a suitable basis for a separate but worthy existence for Jews in Germany alongside German society. The race laws in South Africa established that people of different colors cannot exist when mixed with each other – only in separate, protected spaces.

The tsunami of racist laws passed by the Knesset in recent months is also being explained by reasoned and worthy arguments: the right of small communities to preserve their own character (the Acceptance Committees Law ); the state’s right to prevent hostile use of the funds it allocates to education and culture (the Nakba Law ); and the right to deny citizenship to persons convicted of espionage or treason (the Citizenship Law ). But I believe that as in other historical instances, the aim of this legislation is the gradual establishment of an apartheid state in Israel, and the future separation on a racial basis of Jews and non-Jews.

An apartheid state is not created in the blink of an eye. What was created in Germany in 1935 was the outcome of a long and sometimes violent debate, which had been ongoing since the middle of the 19th century, about the place of Jews in modern Germany and Europe. Indeed, the desire to isolate and distance the Jews from society – legally and socially – was part of the belief system of anti-Semites in Europe for decades before Hitler came into power.

In this respect the Nazi regime, along with other regimes that passed racial separation laws (among them those in Romania, Hungary, Italy and Vichy France in 1940 ), only anchored in legislation a reality that had already been enthusiastically received by the populace. Of course, when such laws were enacted, the regimes involved did not support or imagine that at the end of the road, a “final solution” was waiting in its Nazi format. However, once the seeds were sown, no one was able to figure out what fruit they would bear.

The historical background of the Israeli apartheid state-in-the-making that is emerging before our eyes should be sought in 1967. It is part of a process that has been going on for about 44 years: What started as rule over another people has gradually ripened – especially since the latter part of the 1970s – into a colonialism that is nurturing a regime of oppression and discrimination with regard to the Palestinian population. It is robbing that population of its land and of its basic civil rights, and is encouraging a minority group (the settlers ) to develop a crude, violent attitude toward the Arabs in the territories. This was exactly the reality that, after many years, led to the establishment of the apartheid state in South Africa. [continue reading…]

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Can Israel survive without anti-Semitism?

Avraham Burg writes:

In a very short time we will no longer be able to evade the real questions: Are we capable of apprehending our existence without the hatred of others? Do we really need external anti-Semitism as a means to define our inner identity? Think for a moment about a world in which Jews are not hated; about a utopia of peace in the Middle East, fraternity wherever our brethren live. Unreasonable? Definitely not! A hundred years ago, who believed in the existential transformations being played out before our eyes? Few, indeed.

A hundred years ago, Europe was awash in bloodshed that had lasted a thousand years, yet now it is a peaceful continent. Only a few months ago, the Middle East was one of the world’s largest repositories of nasty, bizarre dictatorships, yet today we are on the brink of what appears to be a historic and positive change. And with the world going into this mode, immediately or soon, will the Jewish people be able to survive without an external enemy? It’s not certain.

We have proven methods of coping with persecution, hatred and pogroms. But we don’t have a clue and don’t have experience when it comes to openness, acceptance and full equality for Jews, as for everyone else. That prospect threatens us in the deepest recesses of our being and confronts us with questions about our national existence as such, as “a people that shall dwell alone, and shall not be reckoned among the nations.” This being so, we tend to return to the sick, pathological molds which are so familiar to us: junkies of hatred, we isolate ourselves from the haters, real or imagined. As though the evil we know is preferable to the potential – and threatening – good.

From this point of view, the establishment of the State of Israel not only failed to solve the problems for the sake of which it was founded but, on the contrary, made them a great deal worse. Israel is the biggest shtetl in the history of the world. One big town around which walls of segregation and resentment rise higher every day, cutting it off from its surroundings. Few of us know any other existential reality apart from our unrelenting war with everyone, all the time and over all issues.

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Who is afraid of Julian Schnabel?

Jordan Elgrably writes:

Miral, currently in theatres, portrays the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from an entirely Palestinian perspective. It is nothing earth-shattering (a brief filmography at the end of this article offers other films that do this far more effectively) except that it was made by a Jewish filmmaker.

Several Jewish organisations and the Israeli government have seen fit to protest against the film. They say it does not tell both sides of the story. But that is precisely the point. When director Julian Schnabel – previously lauded for his lavish features Basquiat, Before Night Falls and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly – decided to make this film, based on the book by Palestinian journalist Rula Jebreal, his intention was to tell the story Rula tells in Miral.

Schnabel is an Academy-Award nominated director, and his film has brought “the conflict” into the mainstream. The fact that he happens to be Jewish while representing the Palestinian perspective inflames some in the Jewish community, who consider his film an act of betrayal.

I saw the film earlier this week in a special screening hosted by Javier Bardem, who starred in Before Night Falls and wanted to support Schnabel’s “brave film”. The director was there with his daughter Stella, who appears in the film, and with his new wife – Rula Jebreal. I could not help but wonder what the Jewish community thinks when a Jew marries a Palestinian.

More to the point, why are some Jews afraid of Jews who embrace narratives other than those officially sanctioned in the Jewish and Israeli community? Why do such narratives when told by Jews – including books by Norman Finkelstein and Noam Chomsky, and Israeli revisionist historians such as Avi Shlaim, Ilan Pappé and Tom Segev – cause such ire?

I am one of these contrarian Jews. Why do I strive to see things not only from the Jewish perspective but the Arab one? Because my father’s family lived for centuries in an Arab country, Morocco, and because long ago I recognised that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is about nothing else if not conflicting narratives.

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Israel may have squandered its last best chance for peace

Patrick Cockburn writes:

The bomb attack on a bus in Jerusalem this week killed one woman and wounded 24 people. The casualties were not high compared with similar bombings in the city over the last 20 years. I lived off the Jaffa Road for four years in the mid-1990s when bus bombings were common. I used to walk to look at the smouldering carcass of the latest bus to be hit, its metal panels bulging out from the force of the explosion. The latest bombing is having more impact than its predecessors because it is the first in Jerusalem for seven years. It comes just as there is an increase of violence between Israelis and Palestinians on the West Bank and in and around Gaza. None of this might have serious repercussions except that these incidents are happening just as the political landscape of the Arab world is being radically transformed to a degree that has not happened for half a century.

Suppose the uprisings across the Middle East had happened five years ago: Israel could not have been certain of the inaction of Arab leaders as it launched two limited wars. The Israeli bombardment and ground invasion of Lebanon in 2006 created a furious popular reaction in the region. But this did not much matter because power among Israel’s neighbours was in the hands of kings and presidents who covertly hoped that the Hezbollah movement in Lebanon would be destroyed or crippled.

The same thing happened during “Operation Cast Lead” in 2008-9 when Israel launched a three week-long air and land bombardment of Gaza which killed at least 1,200 Palestinians. Thirteen Israelis died during the conflict. Throughout, the Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak cooperated with Israel, in sealing off Gaza from the outside world. The political cost to Israel and the US was not high because condemnation by the “Arab street” – that patronising and dismissive term that encapsulates the media’s contempt for the Arab public – did not count.

This is not going to happen again in quite the same way. No wonder the Israeli establishment was aghast as it watched Mubarak being gradually forced from power. Israeli leaders bad-mouthed Barack Obama for not supporting the Egyptian leader more effectively. Egypt is not going to abrogate its peace treaty with Israel, but it is likely to react more forcefully than in the past to Israeli actions of which ordinary Egyptians disapprove.

Previous political calculations about the outcome of Israeli actions in the Middle East have all changed over the past three months. States like Egypt will no longer be politically neutered by being wholly under the control of a decrepit and unpopular ruler who was not going to go against US wishes. That said, the degree of change is still unclear. Elites that got rid of Ben Ali in Tunisia and Mubarak in Egypt and possibly, in the next few weeks, Ali Abdullah Saleh in Yemen, are doing so in order to make sure that uprisings do not turn into real revolutions.

The US has much the same aim. But it may not be able to achieve this if, in future, its tolerance of Israeli colonisation of the West Bank remains automatic. It has to grapple with the fact that in Turkey, Egypt and Pakistan – together with Saudi Arabia the three Muslim countries that matter most to the US – an average of 17 per cent of people view US policies favourably, according to a poll by the Pew Research Centre.

Democratisation in the Middle East was always going to produce governments that the US and Israel would not like.

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Yaakov Amidror – in his own words

Ori Nir reports:

Israel’s Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has reportedly decided to appoint an ultra-hawk, one of Israel’s leading national-religious icons, as his new national security adviser.

If media reports are correct, Netanyahu’s new pick for the important position is Major-General (res.) Yaakov Amidror, who in the past advocated for reoccupying the Gaza Strip and staying there “for many years.” Earlier this month, Amidror wrote that “negotiations with the Palestinians and even an agreement with the Palestinians (…) will not benefit Israel in any way as it faces the threats that might emerge in the future.”

Amidror retired from the IDF in 2002, after serving as the head of the analysis wing of Israel’s military intelligence and as the commander of the IDF’s academies. After retiring from the IDF, he wrote extensively for Israeli think tanks and daily newspapers. His paper trail leaves no doubt about his extreme views, which included vicious attacks on the New Israel Fund, sharp criticism of the Obama administration’s “naive” Middle East policy, and dismissive views regarding the viability and advisability of creating a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza.

Amidror is associated with the ultra-right national-religions party “The Jewish Home.” In 2008, he headed a commission tasked with composing the party’s list for the general elections. The party, which is dominated by former National Religious Party (NRP) politicians, supports a “greater Israel” ideology and is considered the most authentic political representative of the ideological messianic settlers in the West Bank.

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Obama does not get it

Lamis Andoni writes:

Barack Obama, the US president, has still not fully grasped the essence of the revolutions underway in the Arab world. He genuinely seems to believe that the people rallying for democracy in the region are making a pro-Western, if not pro-Israeli, statement.

“All the forces that we’re seeing at work in Egypt are forces that naturally should be aligned with us, should be aligned with Israel – if we make good decisions now and we understand sort of the sweep of history,” Obama recently told a group of Democrats in Florida.

I am not sure how Obama drew this conclusion, but he is either terribly misinformed or engaged in a serious bout of wishful thinking.

His statements, however, echo the assessments of many American pundits, some of whom have been celebrating the fact that anti-Israeli or American slogans have not dominated the recent and ongoing uprisings.
It is true that the protesters are not focusing on Israel.

But to say that these forces could be natural allies of Israel and the West is to take a huge leap into a highly inaccurate assessment of the situation. The US president is misreading the message of the protesting Arab masses.

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For just an extra $20 billion from US taxpayers, Israel can offer “stability” in defense against the Arab democratic threat

The Wall Street Journal reports:

Israel will need to boost military spending and may seek an additional $20 billion in U.S. security assistance to help it manage potential threats stemming from popular upheavals in the Arab world, Defense Minister Ehud Barak said Monday.

Still, he said Israel shouldn’t fear changes in the region or the risk of offering bold concessions in a renewed bid to achieve peace with the Palestinians.

“It’s a historic earthquake…a movement in the right direction, quite inspired,” Mr. Barak said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal, surveying the youthful revolts in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and the Gulf. “It’s a movement of the Arab societies toward modernity.”

In the short term, however, Israel worries that adversaries Iran and Syria “might be the last to feel the heat” of regional unrest, he said, and that public pressure could push new leaders in Egypt away from that country’s 1979 peace treaty with the Jewish state.

“The issue of qualitative military aid for Israel becomes more essential for us, and I believe also more essential for you,” said Mr. Barak, a former prime minister. “It might be wise to invest another $20 billion to upgrade the security of Israel for the next generation or so….A strong, responsible Israel can become a stabilizer in such a turbulent region.”

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J Street: How the pro-Israel pro-peace lobby promotes war

Chase Madar writes:

J Street, America’s premier liberal pro-Israel lobbying group, has just wrapped up its third annual conference in Washington. There have been sessions and panels on “building peace from the ground up,” on “expanding the tent” and even some passionate condemnations of the Occupation. Amid so much good feeling it’s almost possible to lose sight of one of J Street’s fundamental missions: to promote and guarantee America’s lavish and unconditional military aid to Israel.

This may seem like a harsh assessment of the lobbying group. After all, isn’t J Street routinely attacked by neocon ultras and praised by American liberals? But hack through J Street’s verbiage about “dialogue” and “conversation” and one finds this blandly phrased position statement: “American assistance to Israel, including maintaining Israel’s qualitative military edge, is an important anchor for a peace process based on providing Israel with the confidence and assurance to move forward on a solution based on land for peace. J Street consistently advocates for robust US foreign aid to Israel.” This last sentence is 99% of what one needs to know about J Street.

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The racist entity that is taking over Israel must be toppled

Sefi Rachlevsky writes:

The wretchedness of the law in the face of Rabbi Dov Lior has many meanings, and Lior’s refusal to be interrogated over his support for “The King’s Torah – The Laws for Killing Gentiles” – only marginally gets at the heart of the matter.

Thirty years ago, the terrorist organization known as the “Jewish Underground” was set up with the purpose of killing Arabs. The group’s head of operations, Menachem Livni – who was convicted on multiple counts of murder before being pardoned by the regime – testified at the time that the living spirit, the initiator, the religious instructor and the coordinator of the murders was Lior.

This was true for the murders the underground carried out, and was also true for the pressure he put on the murderers to blow up buses and their passengers. The law states that someone who dispatches murders should receive multiple life sentences, along with additional time for organizing the crime. But thanks to instruction from higher up, Lior was never imprisoned, put to trial and or even properly interrogated.

And so he continued: Baruch Goldstein, who murdered 29 Muslims at prayer in Hebron in 1994, saw Lior as his rabbi and counselor. After the Tomb of the Patriarchs massacre, Lior declared that “Baruch Goldstein was holier than the saints of the Holocaust.” The living spirit behind the religious edicts against Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, which lead to his 1995 assassination, was also, according to testimonies, Lior. Rabin’s assassin frequented Hebron, where he used to see Lior.

Rabbi Lior is not in prison. He currently serves as a municipal rabbi, the head of a Jewish court and the dean of a large IDF yeshiva. He also heads the Judea and Samaria rabbis committee. Thousands adhere to his commands, hundreds of thousands are taught his ideology, tens of thousands of shekels are paid to him by the Israeli taxpayer every month.

This utter aberration is no accident. The regime chose Lior. Tel Aviv is a dream world. The actual reality that has been instilled in Israel is Lior. Under King Lior, Israel has built a world where the Jews are citizens and the Arabs are not, both in the occupied territories and in Jerusalem; where a Jewish man is a citizen and his Arab neighbor is not. Most Jewish first-graders attend ultra-Orthodox and religious schools. The majority of them are educated along the lines of “The King’s Torah.” A Jew is human. A non-Jew is non-human. “Thou shalt not kill” does not apply to non-Jews. And this is not delivered in the form of incitement, but as a simple statement of a fact. As simple as calling a chair a chair.

There are no ifs, ands or buts about it. Either you’re with Lior or you’re against him. The rabbis who chose him are Lior. The education minister – who visited the Tomb of the Patriarchs hand in hand with the convicted terrorist Livni, whom he seeks to put in charge of educating the children who will be brought to Hebron – is Lior. The prime minister, who enslaves Israel to the racist world of the settlements, is Lior.

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Jewish youth screaming “death to Arabs” murder Palestinian in Jerusalem

Joseph Dana reports:

Amid the revolutionary cheer that was emanating from Egypt last week, a group of Israeli Jews attacked and killed a Palestinian in the heart of West Jerusalem. 24-year-old Palestinian Hussam Rwidy was killed by a group of nationalist Jewish youth screaming “death to Arabs” as he was walking home from work. The Israeli government quickly put a media blackout on the case fearing a violent reactions from Palestinians in Jerusalem, Israel and the West Bank. Once the media blackout was lifted, select Israeli media outlets covered the story as a “drunken brawl turned bad” and the story was largely ignored.

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The democratic threat to the Jewish state

Ilan Pappe writes on why Israelis fear the prospect of becoming surrounded democratic Arab states.

Nonviolent, democratic (be they religious or not) Arabs are bad for Israel. But maybe these Arabs were there all along, not only in Egypt, but also in Palestine. The insistence of Israeli commentators that the most important issue at stake — the Israeli peace treaty with Egypt — is a diversion, and has very little relevance to the powerful impulse that is shaking the Arab world as a whole.

The peace treaties with Israel are the symptoms of moral corruption not the disease itself — this is why Syrian President Bashar Asad, undoubtedly an anti-Israeli leader, is not immune from this wave of change. No, what is at stake here is the pretense that Israel is a stable, civilized, western island in a rough sea of Islamic barbarism and Arab fanaticism. The “danger” for Israel is that the cartography would be the same but the geography would change. It would still be an island but of barbarism and fanaticism in a sea of newly formed egalitarian and democratic states.

In the eyes of large sections of Western civil society the democratic image of Israel has long ago vanished; but it may now be dimmed and tarnished in the eyes of others who are in power and politics. How important is the old, positive image of Israel for maintaining its special relationship with the United States? Only time will tell.

But one way or another the cry rising from Cairo’s Tahrir Square is a warning that fake mythologies of the “only democracy in the Middle East,” hardcore Christian fundamentalism (far more sinister and corrupt than that of the Muslim Brotherhood), cynical military-industrial corporate profiteering, neo-conservatism and brutal lobbying will not guarantee the sustainability of the special relationship between Israel and the United States forever.

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Egypt in 2011 is not Iran in 1979

Hamid Dabashi writes:

The pro-Isreali neocons in the United States and their Zionist counterparts in Israel compare the Egyptian and Iranian revolutions because they are frightened out of their wits by a massive revolutionary uprising in a major Arab country that may no longer allow the abuse of the democratic will of a people for the cozy continuation of a colonial settlement called “Israel”.

Echoing the Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, the Iranian neocon contingencies like Abbas Milani of the Hoover Institute think tank in California fear that the Muslim Brotherhood will take over the Egyptian revolution and create an Islamic Republic—habitually turning a blind eye to the fact that a fanatical “Jewish Brotherhood” has already created a Jewish Republic for more than sixty years in the same neighborhood.

Soon after Binyamin Netanyahu and Abbas Milani, and from precisely the opposite ideological direction, Ali Khamenei, the leader of the Islamic Republic and the vast petrodollar propaganda machinery at his disposal, celebrated what is happening in Egypt as a reflection of Khomeini’s will and legacy and the commencement of an “Islamic awakening”. Not so fast, interjected an almost instant announcement from the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. This was not an Islamic Revolution, they explained, but an Egyptian revolution that belonged to all Egyptians—Muslims, Christians, people from other ideological persuasions.

In between the frightful Zionist propaganda and Islamist wishful thinking myriads of other opinions have been aired over the last two weeks in one way or another measuring the influence of the Islamic Revolution in Iran over the revolutionary uprising in Egypt.

This is a false and falsifying presumption first and foremost because what happened in Iran during the 1977-1979 revolutionary uprising was not an “Islamic Revolution” but a violently and viciously “Islamised revolution”.

A brutal and sustained course of repression—perpetrated under the successive smoke screens of the American Hostage Crisis of 1979-1981 and the Iran-Iraq War of 1980-1988, and the Salman Rushdi Affair of 1989-1999—is the crucial difference between an “Islamic” and “Islamised” revolution.

A cruel crescendo of university purges, cultural revolutions, mass executions of oppositional forces, and forced exile, took full advantage of domestic and regional crisisis over the last three decades to turn a multifaceted, modern, and cosmopolitan revolution into a banal and vicious theocracy.

The CIA-sponsored coup of 1953, the massive arming of Saddam Hossein to wage war against Iran, and the creation of the Taliban as a bulwark against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, all engineered by the United States, and the continued armed robbery of Palestine by Israel have been the regional contexts in which the Islamic Republic destroyed all its ideological and political alternatives and created a malicious theocracy, consistently and systematically abusing regional crisis to keep itself in power.

That historical fact ought to be remembered today so no false analogy or anxiety of influence is allowed to mar the joyous and magnificent uprising of Tunisians and Egyptians to assert and reclaim their dignity in a free and democratic homeland.

There is no reason whatsoever to believe that Tunisians or Egyptians will allow such a treacherous kidnapping of their dreams and aspirations by one fanatical ideological absolutism or another.

What we are witnessing in Tunisia and in Egypt today, as we in fact have been over the last two years in Iran, is a people’s democratic will to retrieve their cosmopolitan political culture, wresting it from colonial (Tunisia), imperial (Egypt), or tyrannical (Iran) distortion, deception, and corruption.

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The fear of freedom

As the train of democracy gathers steam in Egypt, there are those nearby who seem eager to throw themselves under its wheels.

No doubt an observer such as the Israeli historian, Benny Morris, is vain enough to imagine that he is not about to get run over but, on the contrary, hopes his grave warnings will encourage others to seize the train’s brakes and prevent an imminent catastrophe.

What is more likely to happen is that we will only need wait a matter of months before Morris and fellow fearmongers will be exposed as hysterical fools or intellectual rogues.

Morris believes that those of us in the West currently intoxicated by the glorious vision of democracy taking birth in Egypt, have only been able to indulge in such emotions because we don’t understand what Egyptians really want.

Alas, I fear, Westerners will see what most Egyptians actually think and want if and when the country holds free and fair general elections (perhaps in September-October). And I fear that they will be surprised—perhaps even shocked—by the results, and by what the Egyptian masses then say about what they actually think and want. I fear that at that point, “Death to Israel,” “Death to America,” and “Allahu Akbar” will drown out every democratizing and liberalizing chant.

But by then the genie will be well out of the bottle; by then, it will be too late.

Trapped inside a misanthropic Zionist mindset, Morris seems incapable of recognizing that at the core of the Egyptian and Tunisian revolutions, the driving force is not ideological. It is a universal and human demand for respect.

Sensing themselves newly visible on a world stage, ordinary Tunisians and Egyptians stood up, individually and collectively, and said: we refuse to be treated as less than human. We are reclaiming the dignity that is everyone’s birthright and will no longer tolerate the abuse of brutal rulers or the indifference of foreign powers. We demand to be heard and respected.

To the extent that the call from the dignity revolutions is being heard far beyond the Arab world, it resonates most with those who to differing degrees and for different reasons, share the same experience. That many of us live in democracies does little to diminish a sense that our governments do not represent our interests. And that so many of our fellow citizens respond to this reality with indifference only makes us envy the courage and imagination of people who do otherwise as they rise up, declare and discover: we have the power to change the world.

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