The Death of an Eritrean 'Infiltrator'

Unnamed Eritrean Refugee - Murdered by Israeli Lynch Mob in Beer Sheva

Now that the lynching of an Eritrean refugee has gone viral, the same people who were denounced as a ‘cancer’  by the ‘Culture' Minister Miri Regev not so long ago, (though she did apologise to cancer patients for comparing them with refugees!) Netanyahu speaks up.   Before the news spread, the main story was the shooting of an Israeli soldier.  The death of a refugee, or ‘an infiltrator’ to use the term used by the Zionist right (Palestinian refugees used to be called infiltrators when they sought to return to their lands secretively) was just a footnote.

Regev's attitude to culture is to cut off funding for anything that isn't supportive of the settlements and the far-Right.  Clearly her feelings about culture resemble those of Goebbels who remarked that when he heard the word 'culture' he reached for his gun.

Now Netanyahu has condemned the lynching and the Police are conducting an investigation, don’t hold your breath.  Like the firebombing of the Dawabsheh family, and the murder of Abu Khedeir they will make a fuss about how much they are doing for the first day and then – nothing.  The investigation will peter out.  Naftali Bennett, the leader of HaBayit Hayehudi has already described it on Facebook as ‘friendly fire’ though one look at the video suggests what happened was anything but friendly.  Badly injured after being shot, the crowd finished him off with kicks and objects whilst the security looked on.  Such are the ways of the State that was supposed to be a ‘light unto the nations’.

Can a lynching be ironic?

Malynnda Littky
Times of Israel 19^th October

When I learned that Arab maintenance workers were being banned from schools in Tel Aviv, I thought I was about as angry as I could get for a third party problem. Yes, technically the order applies to both Jewish and Arab cleaning staff, but as everyone knows, as with most manual labor in this country, the positions are overwhelmingly filled by Arab laborers. I spent the afternoon questioning how telling 20 percent of the country that despite having done nothing wrong, they were liable to find themselves facing unemployment because of the actions of less than one percent of their fellows. I even asked my friends who supported the measure if it should also apply to Arabs who had fought in the Army or who were publicly defending Israel, like Muhammad Zoabi.

Refugees in Holot concentration camp

Having lived for several years in a village past the Green Line, I was saddened, but not exactly surprised when several of my friends said that Arabs had earned the ban because of the violence of their extremists. It was too much of an effort, they argued, to simply search all of the school employees, and besides, why put guards in danger of an attack?

I had some reservations regarding whether the ban was the best solution, especially considering that most Israelis already face multiple searches every day. A school guard, charged with defending the precious lives of our youth, couldn’t be expected to check for weapons, but weren’t guards at the mall, bus stations, and train stations – where not incidentally, there have already been actual incidents – supposed to risk life and limb to keep us safe? But then I heard about the terrorist attack on the bus station at Beersheba, and decided I had had enough of anger for one day and went to bed.

And so it was not until this morning that I learned that despite the headlines saying ‘one killed and eleven injured’, there were, in fact, two people killed last night in the Beersheba Central Bus Station. But since only one of them, a soldier named Omri Levy, was killed by an Arab, only he is recognized as the victim of a terror attack.

The other man, an Eritrean asylum seeker named Haftom Zarhum, died of wounds he received during the attack, where he was shot in the leg by a soldier who mistook him for a terrorist. After the shooting, in an act which should shock us out of our collective feelings of cultural superiority, Haftom was then savagely lynched by the crowd. While a medical crew tried to evacuate him for treatment, upstanding citizens decided he was a terrorist, and that he deserved to be beaten, spat upon, and cursed, all while chanting anti-Arab slogans. So, they basically acted the same way that Palestinians are denounced for acting when they riot.

Nice.

And what has the response to this news been so far? Well, first, to respond, people have to hear about it. The death seems to have racial undertones so strong that, in America, Al Sharpton would already be sharpening his pencil and throwing on some hair gel. And yet, it is appended to the stories surrounding the terrorist attack as some sort of throwaway news item – “It’s crazy… but what can you do?!”

If he had been Palestinian, it would have been even worse, because the media would have spun it that he was somehow at fault, or if not him, then the Palestinian people, for making us so scared that we shoot first and ask questions later. But this isn’t the fault of the Palestinians, or the Eritreans, or even the IDF, although I am interested in finding out the results of the investigation regarding the events that led up to the shooting of someone who doesn’t fit the vaunted “profile” that the Army leans on so heavily when performing security screenings.

No, the fault rest squarely on the shoulders of Israeli society. If Israeli Arabs lose their jobs or their lives, it’s painted as an unfortunate but acceptable casualty, even as we brag about the “fact” that they are citizens with as many rights as Jewish citizens have. And the refugees should just be glad for the chance to be here until we figure out how to get them the hell back to where they came from.
We demean Arabs and refugees as being violent, and when it comes down to it, we don’t think their lives matter as much as ours do. And by saying “ours” I’m being generous, because as a Black convert, sometimes I wonder just how much my fellow Israelis count me as being “part of the family,” so to speak. Thank God I speak English, right? I better add learning how to say “Black lives matter” to my Hebrew lessons.

I bet more than a few refugees are wondering if they should get some pepper spray right now. And my favorite rationalization I’ve heard so far about the incident? It isn’t fair to demonize us as a nation for the barbaric acts of a few. Yah. Ain’t that the truth. I wonder how Israeli Arabs feel about that statement. Can someone tell me how to say irony in Arabic?

Israeli mob attacks dying Eritrean refugee after soldier is killed

Rania Khalek Rights and Accountability 19 October 2015

Warning: This article contains video and images of extreme violence.
A gunman opened fire at the central bus station in Bir al-Saba (Beer Sheva), a city in the south of present-day Israel, on Sunday evening, killing an Israeli soldier and wounding up to 11 other people.
The assailant shot and killed a soldier and then “snatched his M-16 rifle” before opening fire on the others, most of whom were “members of Israel’s security forces,” Israel’s Ynet reported. Walla! News reported that four of the injured were soldiers.

Israeli police shot and killed the assailant.

Israeli media named the dead soldier as 19-year-old Sergeant Omri Levi. He was a member of the Israeli army’s Golani brigade.

There has been confusion and contradictory reports regarding the identity of the assailant.



Both Reuters and Ynet, citing Palestinian media, claimed he was Isam al-Araj from Shuafat, a neighborhood in occupied East Jerusalem whose Palestinian residents have frequently been targeted with violence by Israeli occupation forces and settlers. This information had not been confirmed by any official source. It was also not apparent which Palestinian media had reported the claim.

The Jerusalem Post later claimed that the Israeli army had named the attacker as Muhannad Al-Okabi, from the Bedouin town of Hura in the southern Naqab (Negev) region of present-day Israel. The same name was reported in other Israeli media, including Maariv.

Death-chanting mob

During the incident, a security guard shot 29-year-old Haftom Zarhum, an Eritrean refugee who was “misidentified” as a “terrorist,” according to Haaretz.  Zarhum later died of his injuries.
Zarhum came to Beer Sheva on Sunday to procure a visa.

Video captured by bystanders and posted to social media shows a mob of onlookers, including Israeli soldiers and police, kicking Zarhum in the head, pinning him under a chair and throwing a bench at him as he writhes on the floor, clearly in pain and bleeding severely.

Voices from the crowd can be heard chanting for Zarhum’s death, shouting “mehabel” (terrorist), “Kill him!” and “Break his head! Break his head! Son of a prostitute!”

Ynet reported that medics trying to evacuate Zarhum “ran into objection from the crowds at the scene, who blocked their way and called out ‘Death to Arabs,”Arabs out!’ and ‘Am Israel Chai’ (‘The people of Israel still live’).”

Haaretz correspondent Chaim Levinson tweeted a statement from an Israeli police spokesperson implying Zarhum might have been shot because of his race.

“I haven’t touched a word. The Police spokesman’s (Negev region) statement: One of the wounded persons, who was shot by security forces, is a foreign citizen; at the moment it is not clear if he is involved with the event or if he was shot due to his exterior appearance,” Levinson wrote.
Non-Jewish refugees from African states regularly experience extreme racism and hostility in Israel.
Israeli leaders have labeled them a “demographic threat” to Israel’s Jewish majority, as they have Palestinians. They are at constant risk of indefinite detention and deportation.

During preliminary questioning, the security guard who shot Zarhum was quoted by the Israeli news site Maariv, stating: “I was sure he was the terrorist, he wasn’t hiding like everyone else.”

“I saw him running toward me and not hiding like the others, so I shot him,” added the security guard.

However, another video of the incident, widely shared on social media, appears to show the shooting of Zarhum. It flatly contradicts the security guard’s account.

In the video, a man can be seen crawling on all fours, clearly posing no threat to anyone and likely trying to escape to safety, when a man with a handgun approaches and shoots him.

The shooting victim is then seen writhing on the floor in a similar position to the video showing Zarhum being attacked by the mob.

In both videos, the shooting victim is lying near the set of orange chairs used to attack Zarhum and near a dark line on the floor.

No one offers him medical assistance.

There have been other recent examples of such lynch mob behavior, including before and after the summary execution of Fadi Alloun, a Palestinian youth in Jerusalem, on 4 October. These mob killings come amid a growing chorus of incitement by Israeli leaders, who have openly encouraged vigilante revenge against Palestinians following stabbing attacks that have left seven Israelis dead.

Last week, a video captured Israelis screaming “Die you son of a prostitute!” at Ahmad Manasra as the Palestinian 13-year-old lay covered in blood and gasping on the ground. The boy and his cousin Khalid Manasra who was killed, were accused of involvement in a stabbing that injured two Israelis in the settlement of Pisgat Zeev.

Since 1 October Israeli forces have killed at least 42 Palestinians, many in what nine human rights groups condemned as “extrajudicial killings” of alleged attackers and Palestinian demonstrators.

Gag order

The Israeli government has placed a gag order on all aspects of the police investigation into the bus station attack until 18 November.


The gag order, which was leaked on social media, prohibits media from sharing “any detail about the investigation,” “any detail that could identify the suspects,” and “the fact of the existence of the investigation.” 

Land – the Basis of Israeli Apartheid

In which other country would one group of citizens be prevented, through planning laws, from building houses, whilst the dominant group is allowed to build?  In Israel not only are half the Palestinian villages ‘unrecognised’ and liable to instant demolition, but even those which are recognised are not permitted to expand.

Apartheid?  Perish the thought.

Tony Greenstein

Israel’s Arab citizens fight for a roof over their heads

Jonathan Cook, 25 June 2015

Official ‘Judaisation’ policy blamed for severe housing crisis as anger mounts over family made homeless twice in two months

Middle East Eye – 24 June 2015

 The start of the Muslim holy fasting month of Ramadan has been bitter for Tareq Khatib.

The Israeli authorities razed his home for the second time in two months last week. Now under house arrest, he is confined to a friend’s home and separated from his wife and children.

His lawyer has warned that he should expect a bill from the state for hundreds of thousands of dollars to cover the costs of the demolitions and security operations.

Arab Israelis take part in a rally organized by the High Follow-Up Committee for Arab Citizens of Israel, in protest against the demolition of homes in Arab communities, at Rabin Square, Tel Aviv, April 28, 2015. (AFP/JACK GUEZ)

Fingering prayer beads, the 48-year-old father of five looked disconsolate, his hopelessness compounded by fatigue from the afternoon heat and a long day without food or water.

           A relative of Abdelrahman Shaludi, a Palestinian who killed two Israelis with his car last month, displays his portrait inside his family home after it was razed by Israeli authorities in east Jerusalem Silwan neighborhood on November 19, 2014, (Photo: AFP/Ahmad Gharabli)

“Where are my family and I supposed to live?” he asked. “It seems the government thinks the only place for us is out on the street, without a roof over our heads. It’s like they are waging a war against their own citizens.”

A relative surveys the ruins of Tareq Khatib’s home / Photos: Jonathan Cook

In the darkness before dawn on June 15, hundreds of Israeli police entered the Galilee town of Kafr Kana, close to Nazareth, to destroy Khatib’s almost-completed house.

It was carried out like a military operation, he told Middle East Eye. Police, some on horse-back, sealed off the roads to the area while others fired stun grenades and rubber bullets as dozens of neighbours and relatives tried to stop the demolition. Four people were arrested, including Khatib himself.

Residents of Kafr Kanna stand in the rubble of a demolished home (Photo: Hassan

Treated like an enemy

Khatib’s long and unsuccessful battle to build his family a home legally has come to symbolise a much larger struggle by Israel’s Palestinian minority against decades of land confiscations, severe planning restrictions and an ever-escalating housing crisis.

Israel’s 1.5 million Palestinians, a fifth of the population, have citizenship but their leaders say they are treated more like an enemy population.

A man walks amidst the rubble of a house belonging to an Arab-Israeli family .

The formation in May of an ultra-nationalist coalition under Benjamin Netanyahu has further raised fears that the destruction of Khatib’s home will herald a wave of house demolitions in the Galilee.

Interior ministry officials are evasive about figures for unauthorised building in Israel, but experts say the number of such homes is believed to have reached around 30,000 in Israel’s Palestinian communities.

“That means one in 10 Arab homes in Israel is treated as illegal by the government and faces the threat of demolition,” said Hana Swaid, who was until recently an Arab member of the Israeli parliament.

He heads the Arab Centre for Alternative Planning, an organisation promoting fairer land and housing allocations for the Palestinian minority.

According to Swaid, the housing problems faced by Khatib and thousands of other Palestinian families in Israel derive from an official Zionist policy of “Judaisation”.

“The goal since the state’s creation has been to Judaise territory. That doesn’t mean just building communities for Jews but tightly restricting where Arab citizens can live. They are trapped with no options for the future for themselves or their children.”

The result has been rampant overcrowding in Arab communities, with a chronic lack of open spaces, proper roads, and industrial and commercial centres offering employment opportunities.

100,000 homes needed

Khatib’s troubles gained public attention in April when he, his wife and three of his children were evicted. The house he had built two years earlier in his family’s olive grove, on the edge of Kafr Kana, was destroyed.

Some 26 other homes in the town are threatened with immediate demolition. Despite repeated appeals from the local municipality, planning officials have refused to expand the town’s residential area for more than 15 years.

Arfan Khatib, a local councillor, told the Haaretz daily that parts of Kafr Kana – the place where Jesus reputedly performed his first miracle, turning water into wine – now looked more like “refugee camps”.

Tareq Khatib said: 

“I have been trying for years to get a permit to build on my land without success. We couldn’t keep living in a small rented apartment for ever, so I decided it was time to build.”

A recent study, according to Haaretz, showed that approval of at least 100,000 additional homes was needed over the next decade to avert a deepening housing crisis among the Palestinian minority.

Based on the housing ministry’s current estimates, barely a fifth of the necessary building permits will be issued to Palestinian citizens. In recent years approval rates have actually fallen.

The demolition of Khatib’s house in April, along with five homes in three buildings in the village of Dahmash in central Israel, triggered a general strike by the country’s Palestinian minority and a protest by thousands in central Tel Aviv under the banner “Fighting for our homes”.

Ayman Odeh, leader of the Joint List, the main Arab party in the Israeli parliament, told the demonstrators: “A family which loses its home, built on its own private land, is shattered.”

Simultaneous efforts to hold an emergency debate in parliament on the minority’s housing problems were blocked by opposition from the Jewish parties.

The attorney general, Yehuda Weinstein, meanwhile, has warned that a failure to enforce demolitions would be “irreconcilable” with the rule of law.

House built in six days

Angered by the demolition in Kafr Kana, local residents rallied to Khatib’s side and rebuilt his house this month in just six days.

Their efforts now lie in ruins. A large mound of rubble and twisted steel wires marks the spot where his second house briefly stood.

A torn green canvas and crumpled metal frame close by are all that is left of a large tent the family had been living in while they finished the house. Friends were able to salvage only mattresses, blankets and chairs before the bulldozers set to work.

“They chose their moment carefully,” Khatib said. “That day we were due to get the house connected to water and move in. Now nothing’s left.”

Will he try to build his house a third time? He shrugged, the mammoth task one he is apparently not yet willing to contemplate. “The system is rigged against us,” he said.

The interior ministry, which oversees building permits, was unavailable for comment. Government officials, however, regularly claim that Palestinian citizens like Khatib are refusing to abide by planning rules and prefer to build illegally.

Jeff Halper, director of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD), said thousands of Palestinian families in Israel were trapped in what he termed the same “matrix of control” that operates in the occupied territories of East Jerusalem and the West Bank, where demolitions also regularly take place.

“People are surprised that Israel demolishes three times more homes inside Israel, against its Palestinian citizens, than it does in the occupied territories,” he told MEE. “The number of demolitions in Israel undermines the idea that the policy is simply a problem of the occupation.”

ICAHD, he said, had launched a new campaign called “Judaising Palestine” to emphasise that Israel’s goal was confinement and displacement of all Palestinians wherever they were living in historic Palestine.

Despite a slow-down in Jewish immigration in recent years, Judaisation is still being actively pursued.

In late 2013 the Jewish National Fund, an international Zionist charity with semi-governmental status, announced it would invest $1 billion over the next decade to encourage 250,000 Jews from the US and Europe to move to the Galilee and Negev.

Jewish-only communities

The land and housing problems faced by Israel’s Palestinian citizens, note experts, have a long history that started in the immediate wake of the 1948 war that established Israel as a Jewish state.

Israel confiscated most of its new Palestinian minority’s lands, as well as that of the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians freshly made refugees. It then nationalised 93 per cent of its total territory on behalf of worldwide Jewry.

Israel built hundreds of rural, land-hungry communities for Jews, including farming collectives like the kibbutz, that exclude Palestinian citizens through admission committees, said Swaid.

The Palestinian minority has been mostly confined to some 130 separate communities occupying just 2.5 per cent of Israel’s land.

“While over 1,000 new Jewish communities have been established [since Israel’s creation], not a single Arab settlement has been authorized,” notes the website of Adalah, a legal centre for Israel’s Palestinian minority.

The Or Commission, an Israeli judicial-led inquiry, concluded in 2003 that systematic discrimination in land and housing had been a major cause of unrest in the Galilee three years earlier. Israeli police shot dead 13 unarmed Palestinian citizens and wounded hundreds more during demonstrations in Israel at the start of the second intifada.

The commission observed that waves of massive land expropriations had been viewed by the Palestinian minority as a “dispossession enterprise”. Despite a sevenfold increase in the Palestinian minority’s numbers since the state’s founding, it added, zoning for residential areas had barely increased.

Destroyed 80 times

The picture in Israel’s south, in the semi-desert Negev, is particularly extreme, Maysanna Morany, a lawyer with Adalah, told MEE.

There, several dozen Bedouin villages have been unrecognised by the state and 10,000 homes are automatically under threat of demolition.

The small village of al-Araqib, near Beersheva, has become a test case for the government, with the authorities destroying the entire village more than 80 times over the past five years.

Last month the Israeli Supreme Court also approved the demolition of another Bedouin village, Umm al-Hiran, to make way for an exclusive Jewish town on its land.

But there are severe problems too in the 120 or so recognised Arab communities in the Galilee and Triangle areas in the north and centre of the country, where 20,000 homes are ruled illegal.

In most cases it is because they are built in communities either lacking a state-approved master plan or with a long out-dated master plan that fails to take account of the Palestinian minority’s growth, said Morany.

Umm al-Fahm, the second largest Palestinian town in Israel after Nazareth, with a population of 50,000, has no master plan, making all its homes illegal.

A change in approach has been blocked because planning committees, dominated by Jewish officials, have refused to abandon the state’s Judaisation policy, said Swaid.

Recent research based on interior ministry data showed that no Palestinian citizen held a professional position on any of Israel’s planning committees, which oversee and approve community master plans. Further, none of the 74 staff of the interior ministry’s Planning Authority was Arab.