Larry Derfner writes: Sitting in a barren, slightly mildewy campaign office in this Arab village, I asked Haneen Zoabi, an Arab member of the Israeli Knesset, what it was like being the country’s most hated politician. “It doesn’t bother me at all,” she said.

It’s easy to believe. Zoabi’s style is to head for the eye of the Arab-Jewish political storm — the result being that while she is the Jewish majority’s most hated politician, she may well be the Arab minority’s most beloved.

Zoabi is running for reelection in Israel’s Jan. 22 parliamentary election, but it was a struggle to even reach this point. Right-wing Knesset members moved to have her disqualified, saying she had “undermined the state of Israel” and “openly incited” against the government. Only a decision by the Israeli Supreme Court in late December overturned the ban. A poll published in Haaretz indicated that her legal victory stood to gain her small, virtually all-Arab party an additional Knesset seat.

Zoabi, 43, petite and pretty in black jacket, slacks, and pointed heels — a modern, single woman in a conservative, patriarchal Arab subculture — had just exhorted some 50 local residents to “use all the democratic tools at our disposal to carry on the struggle.” She urged them not to be what she derided as “good Arabs,” those who “thank Israel every day for not expelling them in 1948, who think they are not equal to Jewish citizens.”

She had held the audience’s attention for nearly two hours. In the front row sat middle-aged Arab women in Islamic headscarves next to high school girls in jeans. Afterward, amid the stream of well-wishers, the girls came up and exchanged phone numbers with her. “She’s the only Arab woman who speaks for us, who gives us the courage to stand up to the racism,” said one. [Continue reading…]

Jonathan Freedland writes: In a week when the dead number 60,000 in Syria – a figure considered an underestimate by the UN body that produced it – it can seem like displacement activity to speak of any other topic in the region. It is Syria, surely, that matters most, a slaughter whose scale shames a world that does so little to stop it.

And yet there are other conflicts in the Middle East that cannot be ignored. Not one of the Arab-Israeli wars of 1948, 1956, 1967, 1973 or 1982 left a death toll of even half the current Syrian number, but Israel-Palestine still matters – to Israelis and Palestinians most of all, but also to the many millions around the world who feel bound up in their fate.

For now the focus is on the Israeli elections of 22 January. The polls suggest that a government ranked as one of the most rightwing in Israel’s history is set to be replaced by one even further to the right. Binyamin Netanyahu’s Likud – now merged with the party headed by his ultra-nationalist former foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman – is losing ground to the ultra-ultra-nationalist Jewish Home party. Even the more modest projections suggest Jewish Home will emerge as the third-largest party, one that Netanyahu will find very hard to exclude from his next coalition.

And what kind of outfit is Jewish Home? Take a look at its leader, Naftali Bennett, born of American parents and a champion of the West Bank settlers. He demands immediate annexation by Israel of 60% of the West Bank. In a 2010 TV debate he dismissed a Palestinian member of the Knesset in these terms: “When you were still climbing trees, we had a Jewish state here… We were here long before you.”

Even if Bennett is kept out of coalition, Netanyahu will still head a more rightist government. The Likud’s few remaining moderates were purged in recent internal elections, replaced by hardliners such as Moshe Feiglin. Here’s what he told a reporter from the New Yorker: “You can’t teach a monkey to speak and you can’t teach an Arab to be democratic. You’re dealing with a culture of thieves and robbers … The Arab destroys everything he touches.” Not for nothing was Feiglin banned from entry to the UK in 2008.

Yet far from being ostracised, such overt racists are set to gain new seats at Israel’s ruling table. [Continue reading…]

The Independent reports: Israeli ambassadors from around the world meeting in Jerusalem for their annual get-together have been told to support the government’s domestic and foriegn policies or resign.

Yaakov Amidror, the head of Israel’s National Security Council, lashed out at the 150 diplomats, telling them they were “clerks” whose job was to represent and advise the government.

“If this doesn’t suit you, quit or run for political office,” Mr Amidror told the ambassadors after they applauded a question from Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, Ron Prosor, an ex-ambassador to London and former foreign ministry director-general.

Mr Prosor had queried the timing of a recent Israeli government decision announcing settlement construction in E1, an area of the West Bank east of Jerusalem that Palestinians say is vital for the geographical integrity of their future state. The undiplomatic bust-up, which occurred behind closed doors but was leaked to the press, reflected mounting frustration among Israeli diplomats who feel they are excluded from key areas of foreign policymaking. The two most important arenas of Israeli foreign policy – the peace process with the Palestinians and Israel-US relations – are handled directly by the Prime Minister, bypassing Israel’s regular diplomatic machinery.

Foreign ministry officials often complain in private that they have little or no input or knowledge about policy-making but are expected to defend controversial decisions once they are taken. Ambassadors said they had no advance warning of the E1 decision, which was taken in response to the UN General Assembly vote on 29 November recognising Palestine as a non-member observer state. Mr Prosor had led the doomed Israeli diplomatic effort to stymie the vote.

Israel’s ambassador in Prague wrote a scathing memo after the E1 decision, sarcastically congratulating the government on alienating the Czech government, perhaps Israel’s strongest supporter in Europe.

The Guardian reports: An Israeli-Arab politician who took part in a flotilla of ships attempting to breach the blockade of Gaza in 2010 will be able to compete in the general election in three weeks, after the supreme court unanimously overturned a ban on her candidacy.

A panel of nine judges overruled a decision by the central elections committee to disqualify Haneen Zoabi from seeking re-election as a member of the Israeli parliament. The committee’s decision was based on her participation in the flotilla.

Following the supreme court’s ruling on Sunday, Zoabi said the attempt to bar her from the election was “the result of political and personal persecution against me, against my party and against the Arab public as a whole”.

But, she added, “this ruling does little to erase the threats, delegitimisation and physical as well as verbal abuse that I have endured … over the past three years.”

Al Jazeera reports: A Palestinian-Israeli politician is appealing a court ruling barring her from running in Israel’s general elections next month.

Last week, Knesset member Haneen Zoabi was disqualified for “undermining” Israel because she was on board the Mavi Marmara ship in May 2010 as part of an international flotilla challenging Israel’s blockade on the Gaza Strip.

The Turkish ship was boarded by Israeli special forces as it approached waters off Gaza. In the violence that followed, nine activists were shot dead by the commando’s.

Israel’s Supreme Court now has four days to decide whether to revoke Zoabi’s election ban.

Speaking to Al Jazeera on Thursday, Zoabi said the ban was the culmination of a long process of persecution.

“Threats, I would say [I received] hundreds of threats, by letters, by email, by phonecall … They have disqualified me, stripped me from some Parliamentarian rights, such as my diplomatic passport,” Zoabi said.

“The Israeli Knesset is trying not just to disqualify me, but also to disqualify the Arab citizens in Israel. Because I represent those who vote for me, and the right wing in the Knesset – which is the majority within the Knesset – is trying to delegitimise the Arab voice within the Knesset,” she said.

Amira Hass reports: The Shin Bet security service includes among its activities something it calls “delegitimization.” At least that’s what one can infer from a Shin Bet operative’s statements to a left-wing activist, Dr. Kobi Snitz, who was summoned for interrogation on Wednesday. The Shin Bet didn’t respond to Haaretz’s request to define “delegitimization” or to state how activities against it come under its purview, or under which section of which law.

Snitz, 41, is a mathematician employed by the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot. He was summoned for questioning by the Shin Bet for the first time two years ago. This time, “at the Rehovot police station there was the same Rona from last year,” Snitz said, referring to a Shin Bet investigator who has questioned and/or warned several left-wing activists.

Snitz has been taking part in demonstrations by Palestinian villagers against the West Bank separation fence for more than 13 years. He is also an active member of the Israeli organization Boycott From Within, which supports the Palestinian call for a boycott on Israel, divestment and sanctions.

“There was someone with Rona called, if I’m not mistaken, Mati, and he said he was a director or head of a department. He didn’t say which department, but I assume it was the Jewish department. He said he was currently working on the extreme left and delegitimization.

“Their behavior, in my experience and that of other activists who have told me about their interrogations, is fairly standard. The only new twist I noticed was the inclusion of ‘delegitimization.’ I didn’t ask what that meant, because I said in advance I wouldn’t talk or enter into any kind of discussion with them. Mati didn’t mention Boycott From Within but spoke generally about demonstrations that require a permit.

“He said soldiers had been injured and that I allegedly take part in violent demonstrations. He threatened me, more or less, saying he has been hearing my name too often and that if I don’t stop they’ll use far less pleasant means – he didn’t specify the means – and that they would put me on trial.”

Unlike Mati, Rona read from a printed sheet, “as though she were reading from the Torah,” said Snitz. “She handwrote on a page and read it to me: ‘We at the Shin Bet are following your activities; this is a democracy, but if one breaks the law … we will not let you break the law.'” [Continue reading…]

The Associated Press reports: Israel’s decision to approve 3,000 new homes on occupied territory drew sharp condemnation from European allies on Monday, with at least three governments summoning ambassadors to express their disapproval of an action they say undermines an already troubled peace process.

The Israeli envoy to Paris was called to a meeting late Monday morning, according to a statement from the French foreign ministry spokesman, Philippe Lalliot. France, which was the first major European country to announce support for the Palestinian effort to win recognition at the U.N., also sent a letter to the Israeli government, calling the settlement decision “a considerable obstacle to the two-state solution.”

Britain and Sweden also summoned the Israeli ambassadors, and Germany said the decision would hurt Israel’s ability to negotiate a long-term peace agreement.

None of the European governments openly threatened any concrete measures to punish Israel.

Earlier, Haaretz reported a senior European diplomat saying: “This time it won’t just be a condemnation, there will be real action taken against Israel.”

Is huffing and puffing, real action? So far it just looks like the familiar ritual of condemnation. For Israel to really feel the heat will require more than stern disapproval being expressed to a couple of Israeli ambassadors.

Haaretz reports: Britain and France are poised to take action − possibly including the unprecedented step of recalling their ambassadors, according to senior European diplomats − in protest at Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s decision to move settlement construction ahead in the area known as E1, between Ma’aleh Adumim and Jerusalem.

“This time it won’t just be a condemnation, there will be real action taken against Israel,” a senior European diplomat said.

Netanyahu’s decision Friday to move ahead on construction in E1 and to build 3,000 housing units in the settlement blocs east of Jerusalem, has apparently shocked the foreign ministries and the leaders in London and Paris. Not only do Britain and France view construction in E1 as a “red line,” they are reportedly angry because they view Israel as having responded ungratefully to the support the two countries gave it during the recent Gaza operation.

“London is furious about the E1 decision,” a European diplomat told Haaretz.

According to three senior diplomats from various EU countries, Britain and France were coordinating their moves against Israel, which they will reportedly implement over the next few days, and have discussed the extraordinary step of recalling their ambassadors from Tel Aviv for consultations. This step has never been taken before by these countries toward Israel. It would be so extreme that Britain and France may not take such action at this point but, rather, could invoke it in the case of further escalation of Israeli actions against the Palestinians. A final decision in the matter will be made today by the British and the French foreign ministers. [Continue reading…]

Bloomberg reports: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s lead heading toward elections on Jan. 22 has been little affected by the entry into the race of former Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, according to a poll published today.

Livni’s new party, dubbed “The Movement,” would win just seven seats in Israel’s 120-seat parliament, according to a voter survey commissioned by the Haaretz daily. Netanyahu’s combined list with Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman, Likud- Beitenu, would garner 39 seats according to the survey, more than double the 18 seats gained by its nearest contender, the Labor Party.

Other Netanyahu allies in the current ruling coalition would provide the prime minister with more than the 60 seats needed to form a new government, the poll showed. Livni’s former Kadima party, now headed by former Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz would gain just two seats, the survey showed.

In an analysis on defense minister Ehud Barak’s sudden announcement that he is withdrawing from Israeli politics, Anshel Pfeffer wrotes:

[I]n recent weeks, Barak has finally realized that his chances of remaining Netanyahu’s defense minister are increasingly slim. Not because Bibi doesn’t want him by his side; it’s simply because the odds are against him.

Barak has long been a hate-figure for the right-wing element in the Likud who blame him for blocking construction in the settlements and occasionally dismantling outposts. For months, while rumors said that Netanyahu might award him a spot on the Likud list – the prime minister had voiced the possibility that as party leader he would be allowed to “parachute” his own candidates into the list, which widely assumed to be for Barak’s benefit – he faced mounting pressure from his own party ranks against the motion. They didn’t really care whether Barak would become a Likud member or not; they just didn’t want to see him in the next cabinet altogether. One reason why former IDF Chief of Staff and Likud minister Moshe Ya’alon was expected to do well in the Likud primaries is that many members want to make it clear to Netanyahu that he is their candidate for defense minister.

Barak realized that even if Atzmaut would succeed in securing him a seat in the next Knesset, an outcome far from assured, Netanyahu would be unable to reappoint him to the only cabinet position he has any interest in. That was the moment he knew he had to resign and become master of his political fate.

Rachel Shabi writes: It’s hard to shake off the image of them staring into space. On benches and dried-out grass in south Tel Aviv’s Levinsky Park, small rows of men and women sit in wide-eyed silence. They are in shock. Many of them don’t offer details of their journey into Israel: ‘It was terrible,’ they say, and then stop. Refugees from mostly South Sudan, Eritrea, Sudan and also the Ivory Coast and the Congo, they entered the country through the Sinai Desert’s border with Egypt. ‘There were bad things, very bad things,’ one South Sudanese woman ventures, looking at her solemn seven-year-old daughter: they crossed the border a few years ago, and the girl barely spoke for months afterward.

Refugee organisations report that if people do speak of the journey, it is of unspeakable things: beatings, torture, rape, extortion, and imprisonment. A recent Human Rights Watch report catalogues nightmare cruelties at the hands of human traffickers in the Sinai. One practice is to beat migrants while playing their screams to relatives back home, for money.

When refugees from sub-Saharan Africa survive the trip to Israel, and the trauma that goes with it, they might end up functioning, working in menial jobs and living in overcrowded slums. That they put up with this semi-existence after the tortures of getting to the country tells us only that there is no alternative.

Israel, of course, is not unusual in being panicky over migrants, especially dark-skinned migrants from the ‘developing world’. But when Jews from all over the world migrate to Israel, it is given a Hebrew term, aliyah, or ‘ascent’, to make clear that this relocation is not really immigration but rather a welcomed homecoming. In a nation numbering almost 8 million, there are some 1.6 million Palestinian citizens, who stayed in Israel after the 1948 war that created the nation. Four per cent of the population is ‘other’. Meanwhile, the collapse of the Soviet Bloc in the early 1990s brought close to a million Russian Jews to Israel, though non-Russian Israelis sometimes moan that many of these are not ‘really’ Jewish. However, they are Jewish enough for official Israel, which is obsessively preoccupied with what is viewed as the existential imperative of boosting Jewish demographics.

Many Israelis, now sharing space with some 60,000 refugees from the sub-Saharan region, are making their reluctance known, with hate graffiti, verbal abuse, and demonstrations calling for the eviction of African refugees from the Jewish state. The migrants have been coming since 2005. Given no status, no rights, no work permits, they have crowded into run-down parts of Tel Aviv. In May this year, there were pogrom-style attacks against African migrants, smashed windows and burned buildings — the hate on the street stoked by equally hateful words from government ministers. Miri Regev, of the right-wing Likud party, for example, described the refugees as ‘a cancer in the body’ of the nation.

Rami Gudovitch, an Israeli activist who works with the refugees in south Tel Aviv, has described what he sees as ‘open, explicit and humiliating racism’. The attacks on refugee populations, he said, are ‘physical, verbal, brutal, serious, and endless’. What’s more, he is attacked, too, for siding with the migrants and speaking out about their plight. Watching from further afield, some have wondered how Israel — a nation of desperate, traumatised refugees — could be so unfeeling and closed to another set of desperate, traumatised refugees. But that’s the wrong question. That isn’t how it works.

In creating a Jewish homeland, Israel’s founders sought both a refuge from and an erasure of the brutal history of Jewish persecution in Europe. They wanted to do away with any idea of a scraping, craven, Diaspora Jew and replace it with a strong, confident, ‘new Jew’ belonging to this new nation. Alongside that, of course, was another erasure: of the people already on the land earmarked for the Jewish state — an air-brushing instantly surmised in the early Zionist slogan for Mandate Palestine: ‘A land without a people, for a people without a land.’

Zionism was always a bit obsessed with hygiene, mirroring the way that Europeans — colonisers and settlers of that time — were finicky and aloof about the supposedly unwashed, disease-riddled developing world. Israeli writers such as Amos Oz have described, with dark humour, the germ-averse fretfulness of their forebears upon arrival to then-Palestine, a fear of the ‘dirty’ Orient. But there’s another purity drive in Israel — not to do with grime and infestation. Much of the country’s 64-year history has been a chronicle of its attachment to erasures: to wiping things clean and out of the way. [Continue reading…]

Ynet reports: US President Barack Obama’s re-election was celebrated almost everywhere around the world Wednesday, while in Israel members of the Likud party rushed to expressed their disappointment, some publicly and some anonymously.

Following the negative responses, Ynet has learned, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered all of his party’s ministers and Knesset members to avoid commenting on Obama’s re-election without coordinating their statements with the Prime Minister’s Office.

Knesset Member Danny Danon was one of the first to express his disappointment with the election results, saying that Obama cannot be trusted. “The State of Israel will not surrender to Obama. We have no one to rely on but ourselves,” he argued.

Another Likud lawmaker said that “Obama is not good for Israel and we’re concerned that he will try to pressure Israel into making concessions because of his chilly relationship with Netanyahu.”

According to a senior Likud official, the Prime Minister’s Office was alarmed by the negative reactions to Obama’s re-election, which could intensify the cold relationship between the two leaders – and therefore decided to begin damage control and prevent uncoordinated responses.

On Wednesday afternoon, the ministers’ spokespersons and advisors received text messages from Netanyahu’s office, asking them not to comment about Obama’s re-election. The Likud spokespersons were requested to stick with the statements issued by Netanyahu’s office.

Jamal Zahalka, a member of Israel’s Knesset, writes: Ahead of the Israeli elections next January, a merger between the parties of the prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, and the foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, has been announced. They are to contest the elections on a joint list, intending to become the largest bloc in the Knesset.

The move is seen as an achievement for both men. Netanyahu was shaken by the recent decline in the popularity of his Likud party at the rate of one seat per week. More specifically, his apprehension revolved around the possible return of Ehud Olmert, the former Israeli prime minister, as leader of an opposition alliance consisting of Tzipi Livni, the former foreign minister; Shaul Mofaz, leader of Kadima; and Yair Labed, a rising political star.

Netanyahu’s avowed objective is to assemble a major political force that would guarantee his re-election and ensure his dominance of the Israeli right. Lieberman is the main beneficiary of this alliance: it guarantees power for his party, Yisrael Beiteinu, and under the agreement, Lieberman can choose to run whatever ministry he desires, including the important ministry of defence. He will gain political legitimacy and be transformed from a mere participant in a coalition government to a key player. If in recent years the government has been a construct of Netanyahu and Ehud Barak, the defence minister, the next government will be a Netanyahu-Lieberman one. Lieberman can also contest Likud’s leadership after Netanyahu.

The alliance reflects a lunge to the right, at a time of greater extremism in Israeli politics. [Continue reading…]

The Forward reports: Pro-Israel activists who have long depicted Israel’s firebrand foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, as a marginal figure are now pondering how to explain his enhanced role to American politicians and others following Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s decision to merge his party with Lieberman’s and effectively make Lieberman his chief deputy.

Lieberman, a longtime lightning rod, has epitomized the concerns some critics voice about Israel’s commitment to democratic norms. They cite his objection to any move toward compromise with the Palestinians, his call to curb Israeli Arabs’ citizenship rights and his support for restrictions on Israeli civil society organizations, among other things.

Now, the merger of his party, Yisrael Beiteinu, with Netanyahu’s ruling Likud faction will give Lieberman control of one-third of the seats in the new, merged party’s political list as it prepares for upcoming elections.

“Likud’s merger with Avigdor Lieberman’s party is bad news for Israel,” said Ori Nir, spokesman for Americans for Peace Now, a dovish group on the left end of the Jewish organizational spectrum. “It will further isolate Israel globally and erode its image as a democracy and a legitimate member of the family of nations.”

But others, closer to the center, don’t see Lieberman’s embrace by Netanyahu as a drag on Israel’s image or on its relations with the United States, since the platforms of the Israeli government coalition and the Likud party that leads it have not changed.

“Israel’s government supports a two-state solution, as does ours, and the merger of their two leading coalition partners, and the emergence of others parties, like [Yair] Lapid’s Yesh Atid, seems to make a secular, centrist coalition even more likely after their upcoming elections,” said Josh Block, CEO and president of The Israel Project, a group focused on promoting a pro-Israel approach in the media and in public opinion.

The complexity of the Israeli political system and Lieberman’s divergence from formerly known patterns of right-wing politics have made it difficult to decipher the possible impact of the merger of his party — Israel’s third largest — with Israel’s largest political party. The Moldovan-born Lieberman staunchly opposes abandoning exclusively Jewish settlements on the Israeli-occupied West Bank in order to achieve compromise with the Palestinians. But he willingly accepted the Netanyahu government’s guidelines, which declare the government’s support for a two-state solution to Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians. On domestic issues, critics view him as the single biggest threat to equality and democracy in Israel. At the same time, he is staunchly anti-clerical and a consequent ally of liberals in their fight against perceived religious infringements on the rights of secular Israelis. [Continue reading…]

October 28, 2012 Tel Aviv, Jewish protesters demanding the expulsion of all non-Jewish African asylum-seekers.