(Watch Part 1 here, Part 2 here, and Part 3 here.)
Category Archives: Israel
Palestinians remember 1948
On Orientalism — Edward Said (Part 3)
On Orientalism — Edward Said (Part 2)
(Watch Part 1 here.)
On Orientalism — Edward Said (Part 1)
Israel’s boycott ban is down to siege mentality
Carlo Strenger writes:
The flood of anti-democratic laws that were proposed, and partially implemented, by the current Knesset, elected in February 2009, constitute one of the darkest chapters in Israeli history. The opening salvo was provided by foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman’s Yisrael Beitenu party with its Nakba law, that forbids the public commemoration of the expulsion of approximately 750000 Palestinians during the 1948 war.
Since then, a growing number of attempts were made to curtail freedom of expression and to make life for human rights groups more difficult. The latest instance is the boycott law that was passed on Monday by the Knesset, even though its legal advisor believes it to be a problematic infringement on freedom of speech. This law makes any call for boycotting Israel economically, culturally or academically a civil offence that can be punished with a fine. Any public body making such a call will lose its legal status and will no longer be eligible for tax-deductible contributions.
The law, as Knesset member Nitzan Horowitz from the leftist Meretz party said, is outrageous, shameful and an embarrassment to Israel’s democracy.
Despite the outrage, I will try to analyse the question: what stands behind this frenzy of attempts to shut down criticism? The answer, I believe, is simpler than many assume: it is fear, stupidity and confusion.
Israel passes law banning free speech
Haaretz reports:
The Knesset passed Monday a law penalizing persons or organizations that boycott Israel or the settlements, by a vote of 47 to 38.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was not present during the vote. MK Zeev Elkin (Likud), who proposed the law, said the law is not meant to silence people, but “to protect the citizens of Israel.”
According to the law, a person or an organization calling for the boycott of Israel, including the settlements, can be sued by the boycott’s targets without having to prove that they sustained damage. The court will then decide how much compensation is to be paid. The second part of the law says a person or a company that declare a boycott of Israel or the settlements will not be able to bid in government tenders.
MK Nitzan Horowitz from Meretz blasted the law, calling it outrageous and shameful. “We are dealing with a legislation that is an embarrassment to Israeli democracy and makes people around the world wonder if there is actually a democracy here,” he said. Ilan Gilon, another Meretz MK, said the law would further delegitimize Israel.
Kadima opposition party spokesman said the Netanyahu government is damaging Israel. “Netanyahu has crossed a red line of political foolishness today and national irresponsibility, knowing the meaning of the law and it’s severity, while giving in to the extreme right that is taking over the Likkud.”
Israel expels 39 pro-Palestinian activists over weekend, holds 81 more in jail
A standoff between Israel and dozens of detained European pro-Palestinian activists continued Monday, with some of them refusing to be put on return flights.
More than 81 were still being held in an Israeli jail early Monday, three days after being refused entry on landing at Tel Aviv’s Ben-Gurion International Airport.
“Some of them refuse to be returned while with others, it is only a matter of finding a vacant seat on a flight,” said Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor. “The only delay is a vacancy on a free flight,” he added.
Some 39 had been expelled by Monday, including 10 Germans who landed in Frankfurt late Sunday. Among the expelled was an 82-year-old German, who complained that despite his advanced age, he was kept on a transportation vehicle for hours, then brought to Beer Sheva prison with the other activists. He said he had only told Israeli security at Ben-Gurion that he wished to “visit friends in Israel and Palestine.” Palmor said he had no information of the specific case, which outraged many.
The spokesman said Israel had denied entry to anyone who was on a list published by the Welcome to Palestine campaign, as soon as the coalition of Palestinian groups announced the activists would participate in unauthorized protests against the Israeli occupation.
‘If there wasn’t a Glenn Beck, Israel would have had to invent one’
Ami Kaufman reports on Glenn Beck’s visit to Israel’s Knesset today:
Outside the Negev hall, the atmosphere was like before a rock concert, complete with the pushing and shoving. Most attendees were religious, all the way from knitted kippas to haredim. After we sat down, it was only a few minutes wait till the star came in. Almost immediately the whole room stood up, including the Members of Knesset, and gave the man a standing ovation.
This was only the beginning of the biggest love-fest I’ve ever seen. At times, I was squirming in my chair. Considering how Beck has been accused of anti-semitism, the amount of love was particularly odd. Just recently, pundit Dana Milbank of the Washington Post listed a few of Beck’s feats in this field:
…hosting a guest on his show who describes as “accurate” the anti-Semitic tract “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion”; likening Reform rabbis to “radicalized Islam”; calling Holocaust survivor George Soros a “puppet master,” a bloodsucker and a Nazi collaborator; touting the work of a Nazi sympathizer who referred to Eisenhower as “Ike the Kike”; and claiming the Jews killed Jesus.
But I guess it takes one to know one, which is why I wasn’t surprised to see Baruch Marzel (the notorious Kahanist and in my humble opinion of of the most dangerous people this country has seen) taking a seat to hear Beck’s sermon.
MK Danny Danon (Likud), the committe chairman, warned the audience not to clap in the Knesset. Yet to no avail. Dannon went on to introduce Beck as “a friend of Israel. If there wasn’t a Glenn Beck, Israel would have had to invent one.”
The first thing Beck did was apologize for not wearing a tie. He proceeded to tell some kind of story about clothes and meeting a vice premier here, where Danon cut in and said: “Which vice? We have many vices,” which is where I said under my breath: ‘You got that right, Danny boy! Many vices indeed!”
American Jewish atheist refused entry to Israel on suspicion of converting to Islam
Amira Hass reports:
With regard to a young American Jew named Harald Fuller-Bennett, the Taglit-Birthright project to some extent achieved its goal. The project brings young Jews from around the world for a trip in Israel “in order to diminish the growing division between Israel and Jewish communities around the world; to strengthen the sense of solidarity among world Jewry; and to strengthen participants’ personal Jewish identity and connection to the Jewish people,” to quote its own words. And indeed, about two years after coming on a Taglit-Birthright tour, Fuller-Bennett intended to visit Israel again.
But this time, the people working to diminish the distance between him and Israel were two Tel Aviv lawyers, Omer Shatz and Iftach Cohen, and Jerusalem District Court Judge Yoram Noam. Together, they overturned a bizarre attempt by the Shin Bet security service to accuse him of having connections with terrorists and intending to convert to Islam – for which reasons it barred him from entering Israel for 10 years.
Fuller-Bennett is now 30 years old. On his Taglit-Birthright tour in January 2008, he said, “I gained a lot of sympathy for Israelis and for the multitude of challenges they face (and the many mistakes the government is currently making in facing them ). We had a number of engaging Israeli military members on our bus. I am still Facebook friends with some of them. My conversations with them taught me much about the complexity of modern Israel, and the difficulty of being born into a state with a siege mentality.”
Fuller-Bennett joined a group within the Taglit program called “Peace, Pluralism and Social Justice.” He is not certain that this subgroup of Taglit is still active, but the fact of its existence shows the organizers recognized that there are young Jews whose interest in Israel has not eliminated their capacity for criticism. “We had questions about Israel but wanted to see for ourselves,” Fuller-Bennett said.
But it was not his participation in Taglit’s “most lefty, peacenik” group, as Fuller-Bennett defines it, that made the Shin Bet decide this employee of the U.S. Department of Agriculture was dangerous.
That happened on May 2, 2010, when he and his girlfriend (now his fiancee ) landed at Ben-Gurion International Airport for a week-long visit to Israel. This would have been his third visit to the country. But to their astonishment, after his passport was stamped for entry, he was taken aside, interrogated and put on a plane back to the United States. The fresh stamp was crossed out with two diagonal lines and the additional stamp: “Denied Entry.”
Israel to deport pro-Palestinian ‘fly-in’ activists within 48 hours
Pathetic reporting from Haaretz.
Out of 120 pro-Palestinian activists attempting to enter Israel only four were willing to pledge that they would not participate in violent protests. So the remaining 116 wanted to keep open their option to use violence?
Wrong. They merely refused to submit themselves to a political litmus test now required by anyone attempting to enter the so-called democratic state of Israel.
Immigration and Population Authority officials told Haaretz on Saturday evening that all foreign pro-Palestinian ‘fly-in’ activists who were refused entry into Israel over the past few days would be deported back to their home countries within 48 hours.
At this point, there are 120 detained activists. Eighty-five are being detained at the Givon facilty in Ramle and the rest are being held at the Ela detention facility.
Four activists from Germany and Holland were released and permitted to enter Israel after they pledged not to participate in violent protest activities.
According to police, anyone “who wanted to protest in a legitimate and non-violent manner was permitted to enter” Israel.
The 120 detained activists are less than half of the more than 300 who were originally questioned by police. Police said that the detained activists were those who refused to promise not to participate in violent protests.
Some activists refused to talk to investigators and only presented their passports.
Leftist organizations said that a number of ‘fly-in’ activists succeeded in entering Israel and participated on Saturday in small demonstrations at the Qalandiya checkpoint and in East Jerusalem.
At this stage, it is not clear that the Immigration and Population Authority will be able to fulfill its intention to deport the activists within 48 hours as foreign airlines that operate in Israel have said that they would have a hard time flying large groups of activists home.
A senior official for one of the large European carriers told Haaretz on Saturday that “the airlines will have a hard time dealing all at once with large groups of pro-Palestinian activists that Israel wants to deport.”
Dangerous middle-aged Englishwoman enters Israel — security forces on high alert
Haaretz reports:
A group of 25 people suspected to be pro-Palestinian activists arrived at Ben-Gurion International Airport on Friday night, and were expected to be denied entry to Israel.
The suspected activists arrived on a Lufthansa flight from Frankfurt late Friday night, after their flight’s departure was delayed due to runway improvement work being conducted at Ben-Gurion International Airport on Friday evening from 19:00 to 22:00.
The activist aboard the plane were not on the list of 342 blacklisted passengers submitted by the Transportation Ministry to foreign airlines on Thursday, and as such were able to board the plane.
Earlier in the day, police called Friday’s operations at Ben-Gurion Airport “successful” as most of the activists were identified and taken for questioning during the afternoon hours.
Not including those passengers who arrived on the Lufthansa flight, a total of 310 arriving passengers were questioned by the Immigration and Population Authority. Sixty-nine of those passengers were found to be “fly-in” activists and were denied entry to Israel. The others were found to be regular tourists and were permitted entry.
At this time, four of the 69 activists have been deported to their home countries. The rest have been sent to detention facilities until they can be deported.
Ten of the activists arrived on an easyJet flight, while another 20 came on an Alitalia flight. The rest arrived on other flights.
Israel has thus far been successful in preventing the entry of 200 passengers wishing to come to Israel as part of the Welcome to Palestine campaign, which had organized a “fly-in” to the Middle East this weekend for solidarity visits in the Palestinian territories.
Israel Police estimate that the bulk of events related to the pro-Palestinian ‘fly-in’ have ended.
Want to visit the Palestinian prison camp (the West Bank)? Israel says you can’t — it’s a provocation.
Haaretz reports:
Security forces detained 30 pro-Palestinian activists attempting to enter Israel on board easyJet and Alitalia flights on Friday as part of an attempt to stymie an influx of activists into the country.
Ten of the activists were on board the easyJet flight, while the remaining 20 were flying with Italian airline Alitalia. Earlier in the day, police arrested six Israelis who arrived at the airport with signs reading “Free Gaza”.
The flights landed at Ben-Gurion International Airport Friday afternoon, however when it became clear that there were activists on board the planes were diverted to a runway further away from the airport and the activists were detained by police.
Israel has thus far been successful in preventing the entry of 200 passengers wishing to come to Israel as part of the Welcome to Palestine campaign, which had organized a “fly-in” to the Middle East this weekend for solidarity visits in the Palestinian territories.
The 200 activists were on a list of 342 blacklisted passengers scheduled to arrive in Israel later Thursday and early Friday, submitted by the Transportation Ministry to foreign airlines on Thursday.
Earlier Friday, two American citizens planning to take part in the pro-Palestinian “fly-in”, were refused entrance to Israel after landing at Ben-Gurion Airport, and were sent on an outbound flight back to Greece.
The women, wearing “fly-in” T-shirts, flew in from Athens and were stopped by the Israeli police, who decided to decrease security presence at the airport on Thursday evening, saying it no longer expects mass fly-in activists, because most of them had been already stopped abroad.
The women were questioned and after stating the reason for their visit, Israel Police sent them on an outbound flight due to their intention to create provocations and disrupt the peace.
In Israel, a tsunami warning
Noam Chomsky writes:
In May, in a closed meeting of many of Israel’s business leaders, Idan Ofer, a holding-company magnate, warned, “We are quickly turning into South Africa. The economic blow of sanctions will be felt by every family in Israel.”
The business leaders’ particular concern was the U.N. General Assembly session this September, where the Palestinian Authority is planning to call for recognition of a Palestinian state.
Dan Gillerman, Israel’s former ambassador to the United Nations, warned participants that “the morning after the anticipated announcement of recognition of a Palestinian state, a painful and dramatic process of Southafricanization will begin” – meaning that Israel would become a pariah state, subject to international sanctions.
In this and subsequent meetings, the oligarchs urged the government to initiate efforts modeled on the Saudi (Arab League) proposals and the unofficial Geneva Accord of 2003, in which high-level Palestinian and Israeli negotiators detailed a two-state settlement that was welcomed by most of the world, dismissed by Israel and ignored by Washington.
In March, Israel’s Defense Minister Ehud Barak warned of the prospective U.N. action as a “tsunami.” The fear is that the world will condemn Israel not only for violating international law but also for carrying out its criminal acts in an occupied state recognized by the U.N.
The U.S. and Israel are waging intensive diplomatic campaigns to head off the tsunami. If they fail, recognition of a Palestinian state is likely.
Pro-Palestinian activists ‘at large’ inside Israel
In the days before hundreds of pro-Palestinian activists tried invade Israel on board an Air Flotilla, five managed to get past security and are on the loose inside Israel. The future of the Jewish state could be in jeopardy.
Noam Sheizaf reports:
Panic. There is no other way to describe the Israeli reaction to a plan organized by a few activists—no more than a thousand, according to the most generous estimates—to try and travel to the West Bank via Ben Gurion International Airport. A handful of those visitors arrived (five of them have already been deported), and it seems that the whole country has gone mad.
Haaretz has reported a special deployment of hundreds of police officers and special units both inside and outside the terminals, “in case one of the arrivals tries to set himself on fire.” The Petach Tikva court, in charge of the airport area, is to have more arrest judges on alert, and the minister for Hasbara (propaganda) Yuli Edelstein demanded that the government take no chances, “because we should remember what happened on 9/11.”
All this, lets not forget, in order to welcome between a few dozen to a few hundred Westerners (most of them quite old, according to reports), who would arrive on separate flights and on different hours, who went through extensive security checks before boarding their planes, and who openly declared their intentions to visit the Palestinian territories. This is the national threat that has captured all the headlines for some days now in a country armed with one of the strongest armies in the world as well as an extensive arsenal of nuclear bombs.
Gideon Levy writes:
The danger is tangible. It is approaching our shores at alarming speed. It is approaching us from the air, from the sea and from the land and nobody can stop it. Someone must do something, quickly. Warning, danger! Israel is losing its senses.
We had not yet finished celebrating our victories – killing those who sought to cross the border on Nakba Day, thwarting the flotilla to Gaza, not handing bodies over to the Palestinians and saving Amir Peretz from a British prison – when we were already forced to prepare for the next existential threat: activists flying in from Europe.
Here’s a safe bet: We’re going to win another sweeping victory. The public security minister said “hooligans,” the police commissioner promised that “we won’t treat them gently.” The prime minister held a special “security” consultation before taking off for Romania and hundreds of policemen and security guards, both uniformed and plainclothes, as well as Shin Bet and Mossad agents deployed in Ben-Gurion Airport.
Our next great victory is already assured. Early yesterday afternoon, our forces scored their first triumph on the battlefield: Five activists were expelled.
If it weren’t so sad, it would be funny. Israel is becoming grotesque. Nonviolent demonstrators, some of them well-wishers, who pose no threat to Israel’s security, wish to go to Gaza, some by sea and some by air. Yet they are being portrayed as enemies of the state and of the people, not to mention of all humanity. Israel is employing its entire arsenal of tricks to prevent them from carrying out their legitimate protest.
First Israel magnifies the danger, then it legitimizes all means against it. And finally, it glorifies the achievement of destroying it.
Meanwhile, a high profile panel of experts which recently met in Jerusalem debated whether President Obama is showing enough love for Israel.
Elliott Abrams, former senior White House adviser in the George W. Bush administration, asserted: “There is no great love in his heart for Israel.” At the same time, Abrams felt assured that America as a nation has enough love for Israel thanks to tens of millions of right-wing Christians who will only vote for pro-Israel candidates.
Members of the panel connected to the current administration countered that it too is overflowing with the devotion that Israelis have come to expect from Washington.
“The notion that Obama does not have the requisite love, or cares in his kishkas [guts], defies the facts,” said [former Florida Democratic Congressman Robert] Wexler, today the president of the S. Daniel Abraham Center for Middle East Peace in Washington.
Former IDF spokesman Ruth Yaron countered that even with all that, Israelis want to feel the love, not just hear that the president has done a great deal for security cooperation.
“I’m not questioning his love,” she said. “I would say please make sure this love is not only felt, but also seen by countries around us.”
Without feeling secure in this love and a feeling that Israel will never be left to “walk alone,” the country would be less willing to take risks, Yaron said.
This dimension of the Israeli psyche – of wanting to feel, and not only hear, about the love – was dismissed as “neurosis” by [Martin] Indyk, who today is vice president of the Brookings Institution.
Saying that Obama is not a “warm and cuddly guy,” and calling him “no drama Obama,” Indyk said that the only intimate relationship Obama has with any foreign leader is with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev.
Calling Yaron’s description of Israel’s psyche the picture of a “neurotic nation,” Indyk said, “It’s time to grow up. We should get over the question of whether he loves me or he loves me not, and focus on question of finding a solution to conflict with the Palestinians.
“When Israel decides by itself to solve that problem, it will have the overwhelmingly cuddly support of the US president.”
Russian-speaking immigrants push Israel further right
Haaretz reports:
Immigrants from the former Soviet Union who came to Israel in the 1990s are moving further to the right of the political spectrum, even as they increasingly feel part of Israeli society, according to a new poll.
According to the study, only 13 percent of immigrants polled said they were prepared to concede any territory at all in exchange for peace with the Palestinians, down from 37 percent in 1999.
The report also found that 84 percent of immigrants say they feel “at home” in Israel, up from 53 percent in a survey conducted 12 years ago. Nevertheless, only 62 percent said they are sure they will stay here, virtually unchanged from 60 percent in 1999.
Dr. Zeev Khanin, the Immigrant Absorption Ministry’s chief scientist, dismissed the significance of this finding, saying that similarly high percentages of veteran Israelis describe themselves as being unsure they will stay here. This ambivalence is due mainly to the challenges of life in Israel, “and isn’t necessarily connected to absorption difficulties,” he argued.
Central Bureau of Statistics data seems to contradict this claim, showing that of Israelis who left the country in 2008 and stayed away for more than a year, almost one-third were immigrants from the former Soviet Union. But the ministry said the number of people leaving the country permanently has dropped since 2004, and today, only some 97,000 immigrants from the former Soviet Union live overseas.
The study also surveyed the immigrants’ attitudes toward Israeli Arabs and the Israeli-Arab conflict. It found that while immigrants from the former Soviet Union had negative attitudes toward Arabs back in the 1990s as well, this trend has strengthened in the intervening decade. According to Prof. Majid Al-Haj, Haifa University’s vice president and dean of research, who served as lead researcher on the study, the immigrants’ views are more extreme than those of veteran Israelis.
For instance, the study found, 55 percent of the immigrants said Israel should work to reduce the number of Arabs in the country, compared to only 41 percent of veteran Israelis. About two-thirds said Israeli Arabs constitute a national security risk, compared with 59 percent of veteran Israelis. And only 4 percent would accept their child marrying a Muslim Arab, compared to 9 percent of veteran Israelis.
U.N. slams Israel for lethal reply to protesters along Lebanese border
The Wall Street Journal reports:
The United Nations sharply criticized Israel for using live ammunition in May against Palestinian protesters who tried to scale an Israeli security fence on the Lebanese border, according to a U.N. report reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.
The confidential report to the U.N. Security Council, dated Friday, also accuses Israel of violating the 2006 cease-fire agreement that ended the six-week conflict between Israel and Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shiite group. The May 15 incident near Maroun al-Ras, Lebanon, led to seven deaths and 111 injuries.
The report also accuses about 1,000 protesters of a group of 10,000 that day of violating the cease-fire by carrying out a “provocative and violent act.”
The report appears to have further strained relations between the U.N. and Israel and is likely to increase Israel’s isolation amid an international campaign to challenge its policies on the occupied territories.
The U.N. blamed Israel for turning too quickly to live ammunition to stop the protesters advancing on the Israeli border. “Other than firing initial warning shots, the Israel Defense Forces did not use conventional crowd-control methods or any other method than lethal weapons against the demonstrators,” the report said. It added that the act “constituted a violation of [the cease-fire] resolution and was not commensurate to the threat to Israeli soldiers.”
Journalists barred from flight to Israel
Al Jazeera reports:
Two Dutch journalists were not allowed to board a flight from Amsterdam to Tel Aviv late yesterday.
Security Correspondent Bud Wichers and Photographer Ettora Hesseling, who are both working for an International news agency, recently covered the preparation of the Dutch Flotilla activists from Greece.
They intended to sail with flotilla, but backed out after a disagreement between the Dutch organizers and Dutch journalists.
They were told by a staff member of El Al Airlines, an Israeli company, that that they would pose a serious flight risk, and for that reason could not board the plane.“We wanted to tell both sides of the Flotilla story and scheduled interviews with Israelis who oppose the action of the activists,” said Wichers.
“Later on we wanted to go to Gaza to see how Israel is bringing aid to the people there. Israel denied us the opportunity to tell their side of the story. Instead we are labeled terrorists now, even though Netanyahu’s office specifically said they would not target journalists who covered the Freedom Flotilla 2.”
Wichers has worked numerous times in the Israel and the Palestinian areas and covered the Middle East for over 10 years.