For Six Months, 6 Palestinian Villages Had Running Water.
Israel’s Army, ‘the most moral in the
world’ Put a Stop to It
If you want to know what
the IHRA and Labour’s ‘anti-Semitism’ witch-hunt is about, then you could do
worse than read the 3 articles below. Human life is not possible without water
and that is why Israel is making it as hard as possible for Palestinians to
have direct access to clean, running water. The intent behind their poisoning of
Palestinian water sources, the theft of their aquifer water and the destruction
of water pipes that enable the transmission of water is simple - transfer.
Israel's hostility to
Palestinian obtaining water, such that they are forced to pay for their own
water, is ethnic cleansing. But if you dare to say this then Jon Lansman, Owen Jones and Jennie Formby will call you an 'anti-Semite'. It is what is called a 'trope'.
Making mendacious,
dehumanizing, demonizing, or stereotypical allegations about Jews as such or
the power of Jews as collective — such as, especially but not exclusively, the
myth about a world Jewish conspiracy or of Jews controlling the media, economy,
government or other societal institutions.
There is no doubt that the allegations made
against Jews in the Middle Ages were without substance. It was the product
of superstition, Christian anti-Semitism and the need for a scapegoat to
explain e.g. the Black Death.
Palestinian accusations of water theft and poisoning are treated as 'antisemitic' by Israel's right-wing Jerusalem Post because of false accusations against Jews in the Middle Ages
However Israel is not a Jew. It is a settler-colonial state, 'Jewish' only in so far as Jews
are privileged. It is also a documented fact that Israel does poison
Palestinian wells, water and farmland.
In February 2015 the Board of Deputies' then Treasurer,
Laurence Brass saw a rusty car that settlers had pushed into a Palestinian
well. According to the IHRA Laurence Brass is anti-Semitic, for reporting what he saw!
Brass, who had gone on a trip to the West Bank, saw things that shocked him. Yet he was viciously and bitterly criticised for having spoken out.
Brass is a liberal Zionist, a member of Yachad with a house in Israel. He is no left-winger yet what he described should have prompted the Board, if they had any sense of ethics and values, as opposed to seeing their role as an Israeli Solidarity Society, to protest. Instead Brass was forced to resign.
As Laurance Brass Demonstrated You Cannot Oppose Israel's Racist Treatment of Palestinians and remain an Officer of the Board of Deputies
“The village spokesman told us that he was very worried at the prospect of local Palestinian children being attacked by settlers on their way to school.
"Just 48 hours after we left, a six-year-old girl from the neighbouring village of Atuwani was admitted to hospital with head wounds after being stoned on her way to school, just as we had been warned might occur.
“I was shocked that this type of behaviour goes unchecked by the IDF.”
Mr Brass added that the abiding memory of his visit would be “the sight of an old rusty car being dumped down the village well, thus preventing the locals from having fresh water.
“I had also not known previously that, on the majority of the road signs in the area, the Arabic words have been deliberately obliterated. I had also not previously appreciated the ever increasing number of settler outposts which have sprung up all over Area C, which, although illegal, no one appears willing to prevent.”
Mr Brass said:
“The miserable existence of the Palestinian villagers we met will stay with me for a long time. It was difficult to reconcile that we were celebrating the festival of freedom, while these villagers were surviving in such squalid surroundings. I returned very depressed.”
Yet the Israel lobby, people who, like Luke Akehurst, are paid large salaries, defend this behaviour. Their argument is that it is 'illegal' to build water pipes. Strange no Jewish settlers aren't prosecuted. Even stranger the Israeli army has never entered a settlement and destroyed their water pipes!
But if you dare to mention ‘Israel Lobby’ Jennie Formby, Lansman and their faithful mouthpiece Owen Jones, will accuse you of ‘anti-Semitism’ as will Nareser Osei (nareser.osei@newham.gov.uk) the despicable woman who is the leading witch-hunter of socialists and Palestinian supporters at Labour HQ at Southside.
‘There have been countless occasions over the last six years when I’ve been bursting to criticise the Israeli administration, but I’ve restrained myself.
“I want to be released from the chains of office to contribute to the wider debate on the Middle East, as well as on the critical political issues that I consider to be important here at home.”
We reach the absurd situation, as a result
of the fake anti-semitism campaign, that something might be antisemitic even if
it's true! The idea that antisemitism
is based on the truth is itself anti-Semitic but that is the situation that the
adoption of the IHRA has led the Labour Party into.
Israeli bulldozer sets about destroying water infrastructure - this is why Israel's army is 'the most moral in the world'
Destruction
of Palestinian Water Infrastructure
What possible reason could there be for Israeli forces to arrive
in force, with excavating equipment, at the village of Tuwani in the South
Hebron Hills, to dig up European Union funded pipes that had been laid to
supply water to six villages and over a thousand people.
If you want to know why Israel is an apartheid state then all you
need to do is to contrast the settlements, with their unlimited supply of
(stolen) water with the water shortage that Palestinian communities experience.
This is what the Board of Deputies ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign is
really about. After all, section 3 (d) of the Board’s
Constitution under Aims, Purposes and Power contains the following clause:
Take such appropriate action as lies within its power to advance Israel's security, welfare and standing.
The Board of
Deputies’s ‘concern’ about anti-Semitism is in reality a concern or defending
Israel right or wrong. The Board has never
criticised racism in Israel still less the Zionist ideology that justifies it.
Palestinian children fill plastic gallons with drinking water from a vendor in Khan Younis. (AP)
There
is only question one needs to ask.
What kind of state would
uproot and destroy pipes carrying clean water to a Palestinian village?
It is a measure of the
toothlessness of the European Union that instead of taking the cost of the
equipment they destroyed from grants they give Israel, they continue to defend
Israel as a 'democracy'.
However
we should remember that it’s not just Palestinians in the Occupied Territories
who suffer from water shortage. Half of
Israel’s Arab villages are ‘unrecognised’ and that means they have neither
sewage or any other sort of facility, including electricity and running water. Could this happen to a Jewish community? Of course not. Israel is a Jewish state and therefore ALL Jewish communities are
automatically recognised.
This
is the kind of visceral racism that the Labour Party is defending
today in its fight against ‘anti-Semitism’
For six months, Palestinian villagers living on West
Bank land that Israel deems a closed firing range saw their dream of running
water come true. Then the Civil Administration put an end to it
On
February 13, 2019, Israeli forces arrived near the village of a-Tuwani in the
South Hebron Hills. The forces used excavating equipment to unearth and destroy
stretch of pipe, which was laid just months ago and supplied water to over
1,000 Palestinians. Residents say that without the system, “water has become
every family’s largest expense.”
The dream that came true, in
the form of a two-inch water line, was too good to be true. For about six
months, 12 Palestinian West Bank villages in the South Hebron Hills enjoyed
clean running water. That was until February 13, when staff from the Israeli Civil Administration,
accompanied by soldiers and Border Police and
a couple of bulldozers, arrived.
The troops dug up the pipes,
cut and sawed them apart and watched the jets of water that spurted out. About
350 cubic meters of water were wasted. Of a 20 kilometer long (12 mile) network,
the Civil Administration confiscated remnants and sections of a total of about
6 kilometers of piping. They loaded them on four garbage trucks emblazoned with
the name of the Tel Aviv suburb of Ramat Gan on them.
The demolition work lasted six
and a half hours. Construction of the water line network had taken about four
months. It had been a clear act of civil rebellion in the spirit of Mahatma
Gandhi and Martin Luther King against one of the most brutal bans that Israel
imposes on Palestinian communities in Area C, the portion of the West Bank
under full Israeli control. It bars Palestinians from hooking into existing
water infrastructure.
A little background
The residential caves in the Masafer Yatta village region
south of Hebron and the ancient cisterns used for collecting rainwater confirm
the local residents’ claim that their villages have existed for decades, long
before the founding of the State of Israel. In the 1970s, Israel declared some
30,000 dunams (7,500 acres) in the area Firing Range 918.
In 1999, under the auspices of
the negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, the army
expelled the residents of the villages and demolished their structures and
water cisterns. The government claimed that the residents were trespassing on
the firing range, even though these were their lands and they have lived in the
area long before the West Bank was captured by Israel.
When the matter was brought to
the High Court of Justice, the
court approved a partial return to the villages but did not allow construction
or hookups to utility infrastructure. Mediation attempts failed, because the
state was demanding that the residents leave their villages and live in the
West Bank town of Yatta and come to graze their flocks and work their land only
on a few specific days per year.
But the residents
continued to live in their homes, risking military raids and demolition action
— including the demolition of public facilities such as schools, medical
clinics and even toilets. They give up a lot to maintain their way of life as
shepherds, but could not forgo water.
“The rainy season has grown
much shorter in recent years, to only about 45 days a year,” explained Nidal Younes, the chairman of
the Masafer Yatta council of villages. “In the past, we didn’t immediately
fill the cisterns with rainwater, allowing them to be washed and cleaned first.
Since the amount of rain has decreased, people stored water right away. It
turns out the dirty water harmed the sheep and the people.”
Among many otherproblematic aspects of
the Trump administration’s peace plan for the
Middle East, one glaring fault is its lack of any serious attention to the
contentious question of how to divide up precious water resources between the
Israelis and Palestinians.
One of the many
reasons that the Palestinian leadership dismissed the proposal
out of hand was that it included a demand for Palestinians to cede the
water-rich West Bank and the entire Jordan Valley to Israel.
“What
struck me when I looked at the plan is how devoid it was of a historical
context. There was no recognition of the past agreements that dealt with water,
or recognition of the steps that had been put into place to allow for water
sharing, or recognition of water rights,”
said Erika Weinthal,
an expert on water politics and conflict at Duke University.
Access to water has for
decades been at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and many regional
tensions more broadly. The arid region has limited supplies of water that are
increasingly in demand for agriculture, and what water exists is largely shared
across national boundaries, including the Jordan River and the critical
underground aquifers in the West Bank and near the Gaza Strip.
That geology and geography
helps explain why water conflicts have been behind a lot of the region’s
sharpest clashes for centuries and even millennia, going back to when the
biblical Isaac and the Philistines fought over access to water wells. More
recently, former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon blamed water for
ultimately sparking the Six-Day War
in 1967.
Since 1967, water has
remained a big irritant in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in part because
Israel made control of access to water a cornerstone of its approach to the
Palestinians. Water access for Palestinians in the West Bank is limited enough,
with catastrophic impacts on farmers, whose rain-watered fields yield smaller
and less valuable harvests than the lush fields of their water-rich neighbors.
In the Gaza Strip, the situation is genuinely dire: More than 90 percent of the
water is unfit for human
consumption, and the sole aquifer is being invaded by seawater.
“Water
is always mentioned as one of the core issues in the conflict—not as high as
Jerusalem or the question of refugees, but it’s always been one of the core
issues,”
said Clive Lipchin,
the director of the Center for Transboundary Water Management at the Arava
Institute for Environmental Studies in Israel.
Hence it is odd that there
is no real discussion about how to share water resources between Israel and the
Palestinians in the plan proposed last month by U.S. President Donald Trump’s
son-in-law, Jared Kushner. (Although, since Kushner deliberately refused to discuss any
of the region’s history while working on the plan, it may not be that
surprising.) Water was the third of seven major pillars in the 1994 peace agreement between
Israel and Jordan, and water was a central part of the 1995 Oslo Accords, the
closest the two sides have come to finalizing a deal that would eventually see
the creation of a Palestinian state.
In contrast, water was
allotted a single paragraph in Kushner’s blueprint, just after plans for
building a tourist resort on the Dead Sea. Decades of bitter fights over who
should get access to how much water, and years of Israel’s use of water as a
tool to bolster the viability of its West Bank settlements while strangling
Palestinian farmers, was dismissed thus in the White House plan: “The
parties will work together in good faith to manage the details with respect to
water and wastewater treatment issues.”
The remnants of deals
related to water rights and water allocation in the Oslo Accords remain in
effect to this day. But water is still a hot-button issue between the Israelis
and Palestinians for two big reasons.
First, the Oslo commitments
on paper regarding Palestinians’ access to water were never ultimately
consummated in the hoped-for final agreement. That has left Israel in ultimate
control of Palestinians’ access to water, whether from the Jordan Valley or the
plentiful Mountain Aquifer. New Palestinian wells, for example, or irrigation
systems or wastewater plants all require Israeli signoff, which almost never
comes, leaving Palestinians’ water infrastructure woefully
underdeveloped compared to that of their settler neighbors. By some estimates, Israelis use
more than 80 percent of the water in the West Bank, leaving only a fraction for
Palestinians. [in other words settlers, who make up 20% of the population
use 80% of the water - TG]
Second, the water crunch
has only grown more acute in the 25 years since the Oslo accords were signed.
The Palestinian population has grown and with it demand for water, while
Israeli allocations of water rights agreed to in the 1990s have hardly changed,
Lipchin noted.
That’s why the Trump administration’s proposal, which talks a lot
about supercharging the Palestinian economy through international investment
and the creation of high-tech manufacturing zones, is jarring to many experts.
It doesn’t take into account the fundamental requirements that Palestinians in
Gaza need simply to find clean water to drink and bathe, or that West Bank
farmers need to irrigate crops that could provide a livelihood.
If some version of the
Trump proposal were implemented, including Israel’s now-greenlighted annexation
of the entire Jordan River Valley, those water inequities would only grow.
Weinthal has written previously of the securitization of water,
where Israel controls access to the vital resource to bolster its own security
and weaken Palestinian communities.
“This is
a plan that continues to ignore any form of effective diplomacy, holding water
and infrastructure hostage to the conflict, rather than prioritizing the basic
human needs of the Palestinian population,” she said. “At the end of the day, water is a basic human need
and a basic human right that should not be held hostage to the conflict or that
makes one party acquiesce.”
Could technology come to
the rescue and end the ages-old fight over wells and water? In recent years,
Israel has made huge strides in bolstering its own water security thanks to big
investments in desalination plants, which turn Mediterranean seawater into
another source of freshwater. The Trump plan, too, speaks of new big
investments by both parties in desalination plants that could provide ample
supplies of water, with an eye, perhaps, to sidestepping the fight over
precious groundwater resources and removing one of the roadblocks to a final
agreement.
The Arava Institute’s
Lipchin doesn’t buy it.
“Desalination will never take away water as a
source of conflict,”
he said.
“While it’s a fact that
Israel is much more water secure because of technologies including
desalination, Israel will never relinquish its rights to the natural
resources—those are always going to be the preferred source of water, and
always going to be looked at and managed as a buffer in any crisis that may
arise.”
The plan’s vision of a
booming, peaceful, prosperous Palestine—even one under Israeli security
tutelage and with little access to the outside world—is hard to square with a
future state that will be still be wholly dependent on its neighbor for access
to water to which it has a legitimate claim, Lipchin said. Water, as much as
control over borders and airspace that are also lacking in the Trump plan, is
the stuff sovereignty is made of.
“If
you’re talking about a viable and independent state, obviously you need to have
control over your natural resources,” he said. “What kind of state is
this going to be?”
Keith Johnson is a senior staff writer at Foreign
Policy. Twitter: @KFJ_FP
Palestinian medical workers tend to wounded children, members of a family where six were killed in an Israeli airstrike in central Gaza Strip on November 14, 2019. (Photo by AFP)
Gaza has become “uninhabitable,” not because of ecological
disaster or Palestinian poor stewardship of the land, but because Israel
chooses to destroy it by every means – poisoning, starvation, disease, poverty,
medical neglect, and invasion – while the world stands silent. (Read this for examples of atrocities)
by
Robert Inlakesh,
We have now
entered 2020, the year in which experts at the United Nations (UN) once
predicted Gaza would become unliveable. But the sad reality is not only that
those same experts said that Gaza was already unliveable in 2017, but that now
the population of 2 million residing in Gaza are under the real threat of
genocide.
Sara Roy of
Harvard University’s Centre for Middle Eastern studies, who is considered the
leading scholar on Gaza’s economy, has written that “innocent human beings,
most of them young, are slowly being poisoned in Gaza by the water they drink
and likely by the soil in which they plant.” So let us break down that
statement, based upon the data available to us.
Facts on the ground
The population
of the Gaza Strip is over 2 million strong, more than 50% of which are children
(18 and under). Ninety-seven percent of Gaza’s water is undrinkable with only
the upper 10% of Gaza’s population having access to clean water according to
the UN. If we take these statistics and we look at them critically that would
mean that according to conservative estimates only 40% of Gaza’s children are
consuming water that is fit for human consumption. This means that parents in
the Gaza Strip are forced to make the decision to allow their children to drink
contaminated water in order for them to survive.
Gaza humanitarian crisis: A Palestinian woman gives water to her son in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip December 19, 2018. (REUTERS/Ibraheem Abu Mustafa - RC1E7E1A8CD
Israel, which has
enforced its illegal blockade of Gaza since 2006 – although Zionist
propagandists claim it started in June of 2007, which is incorrect – is under
international law required to provide Gaza with the ability to sustain itself.
Gaza is not a State; it is not a sovereign territory in of itself. According to
the UN Gaza constitutes part of what is called the Palestinian occupied
territories, with the focus here being on the word “occupied.”
According to
the 4th Geneva Convention, Israel is required under International Law to
provide the ability for Gaza and the West Bank to sustain an environment of
liveability. Israel will argue, however, that Gaza specifically is not
occupied; that it withdrew in 2005. However Israel still controls the
population registry, the entries and exits, all imports and exports, the
electromagnetic sphere, the armistice lines (what Israel calls the border), the
territorial waters, airspace as well as having a monopoly on the electricity in
Gaza. Israel controls Gaza through and through; meaning that if Israel does not
declare an occupation, it is a de facto annexation of the territory.
Shocking realities
In excess of 108,000 cubic meters of untreated sewage water flows into
the Mediterranean Sea from Gaza. This is due to a lack of power for Gaza’s
desalination plant and the lack of building material required to expand, both
of which are due to Israel’s policies towards the besieged coastal enclave. The
situation is so bad that not only is Gaza’s sea water heavily contaminated,
leading to deaths as recently as last year, but also Israel’s Askalan
(Ashkelon) based desalination plant periodically halts operations due to the
pollution, showing that Israel is willing to put the purification of 20% of its
own water at jeopardy in order to punish the Gaza Strip.
Arising from
the problem of water contamination is also disease. Gideon Grumberg, the
founder and director of Israel’s ‘Ecopeace’, told the Jerusalem Post in 2016 that Gaza is a ticking time
bomb for cholera and typhoid epidemics. Since then there have been repeated
calls for a change to be made to Gaza’s lack of clean water by various experts.
If a change is not made in 2020 then Gaza could become a hotbed for disease the
way that Yemen has, again due to an illegally imposed blockade.
Beyond the
water problem are also numerous other issues plaguing Gaza, all of which are
again due to Israel’s illegally imposed – for nearly 15 years now – siege.
Upwards of 80% of Gaza’s population are reliant upon international food aid in
order to survive, with Israel enforcing a policy of “putting the people of Gaza
on a diet,” entailing that Israel counts the minimum caloric intake for the
Gazan population to stay alive. Israel of course controls the food aid coming
into the Gaza Strip and even makes a profit off of it. The restrictions Israel
applies to food coming into Gaza is also used as a political tool in order to
punish the Palestinians for their acts of resistance against Israel.
The
conservative estimates, according to the United Nations, also indicate that
Gaza’s youth unemployment rate is close to hitting 70% with an overall
unemployment rate recorded to be at around 50%. Israel also has repeatedly
blocked Palestinian cancer patients from entering Israel in order to receive
life-saving treatment. Not only this, but due to the lack of power in Gaza,
cardiac monitors and X-ray machines become unreliable. In the first half of
2019, the Gaza Health Ministry, which has a regular budget of $40 million a
year, had only 10 million dollars worth of supplies available to them and in
July (2019) declared a warning of an unprecedented shortage of medicine and
medical supplies. According to the World Health Organization 39% of Gaza applications for cancer patients to exit the
blockaded Strip were “unsuccessful” in 2018.
A Palestinian man and boy navigate the streets of Gaza City, which are flooded with sewage. (Mohammed Salem/Reuters)
Gaza’s
population is subjected to sewage regularly flooding, after rainfall, into the
streets and causing sickness, especially amongst the poorer population. Even
the more well-off, financially, of Gaza’s population, some of which reside in
areas such as Gaza City (North East Gaza), are losing their wealth.
Specifically the residents of the al-Rimal area, who are viewed by many as
living in an area of prestige are having to flee to places like Istanbul, or
become refugees abroad and are losing their families assets due to an absence
of income.
Gaza currently
survives on a few hours of electricity per day, this is due to the fact that
Israel put a cap on the amount of electricity it allows into Gaza, as well as
the fact that Israel has bombarded and destroyed Gaza’s electrical grid and
power plants, on various occasions. The sole, partially destroyed by
bombardment, power plant in Gaza is also in a semi-operational state due to the
cutting of diesel fuel from the Strip in early 2018, after the Palestinian
Authority stopped paying for the fuel.
As of February
2018, the Gaza Strip has been in a “state of emergency.” Enduring, since the
beginning of the siege, eight large-scale military offensive massacres by
Israel, with hundreds of smaller bombardments coming in between.
A 17 year old
in Gaza would have experienced Israeli internal occupation, a 15 year long ever
tightening siege, 8 large scale massacres, hundreds of other attacks, three
wars, the constant buzzing of drones, the deaths of friends and family, temporary
or permanent displacement and the list goes on and on.
To top this
all off, when the people of Gaza rose up in their hundreds of thousands
non-violently, beginning on the 30th March (2018), they were ignored by the
world which has done nothing to stop Israel for its murder of 330+ unarmed
demonstrators and the injuring of approximately 40,000. Until now, the
demonstrations are still ongoing on a weekly basis and no Israeli soldiers have
been killed or sustained any serious injuries.
Resistance is a right
According to
International Law, the people of Gaza have every right to use armed force in
order to struggle for self determination and to end the siege. Israel has no
claim to a “right of self defence”, just as a rapist would have no claim to a
right of self defence against their rape victim, and the next time we hear of
Israel’s “right” in anyway to use force, we must know that whoever repeats this
is contradicting the Fourth Geneva Convention.
File photo: A street scene looking down the street into a Bedouin community in Gaza.
Aviv Kochavi said
recently in a speech pertaining to a future war against Gaza, that Israel will
target electrical, agricultural and other structural components, which
according to Israel contribute to keeping Hamas – Gaza’s governing Party –
afloat. This means that if Israel does begin a new massacre (war) against Gaza
– or Hamas as they will claim – then it will mean that all the statistics
listed off above will accelerate to unprecedented numbers and that Gaza will
become even more uninhabitable.
The only questions now left to be answered are,
what will stop Israel from completely genociding the people of Gaza? and how
will the world’s future generations look at us today for allowing this
holocaust to occur against the people of Palestine. One million Palestinian
children are being systematically poisoned by Israel and there is nothing but
deafening silence.
Robert
Inlakesh is a journalist, writer and political analyst, who has lived in and
reported from the occupied Palestinian West Bank. He has written for
publications such as Mint Press, Mondoweiss, MEMO, and various other outlets.
He specializes in analysis of the Middle East, in particular Palestine-Israel.
He also works for Press TV as a European correspondent.
Palestinians filling bottles and jerricans with drinking water at the Al-Shati refugee camp in the southern Gaza Strip, March 22, 2017. Hosam Salem / NurPhoto
Gazans are forced to buy water at
six times the standard rate from private enterprises
Almost all of
the drinking water in the Gaza Strip is
impotable because of sewage pollution or high salinity levels, according to
data presented last week by a hydrologist who advises the Palestinian Water
Authority.
From the Greens to the
neo-Nazis (AfD), from the Social Democrats to the Christian Democrats there was
unanimity – a Boycott of Israeli Apartheid is 'anti-Semitic'
Two
months ago I attended
a War on Want meeting where Ronnie Kassrills, the
Jewish founder of the ANC’s military wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe, described how
Vienna’s Council had unanimously decided to prevent him speaking on Council
property.
From
the Green Party to the neo-Nazi Freedom Party there was unanimity that a Jewish
anti-Zionist and a
veteran of the Anti-Apartheid Struggle in South Africa should not be
allowed to speak. Even neo-Nazis are signed up to the Zionist definition of ‘anti-Semitism’!
So we have the obscene spectacle, in the city where Hitler spent his most
formative period, that a party created by and which harbour open neo-Nazis, can
nonetheless ban a Jewish founder of the Anti-Apartheid struggle for
‘anti-Semitism’?
In
May 19th in the German Bundestag the same obscene spectacle was
repeated. Alternatives
for Germany, which contains many neo-Nazis, voted alongside the Green and
Social Democratic parties, to condemn BDS although it would appear that some
members of Die Grunen had a
conscience and abstained.
This is an acceptable price to pay for German political and commercial relations with Israel
The
fake ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign is not just a British Labour Party but a growing
European phenomenon.Everywhere from the
United States to France and Hungary, anti-Semites are trying to outlaw
solidarity with the Palestinians in the name of ‘anti-Semitism’. We have the
absurdity of the most racist and anti-Semitic
President of the United States in living memory condemning
Ilhan Omar and Rashid Tlaib for supporting BDS!
Truly
we live in the world of Lewis Carroll’s Alice :
People
may recall the exchange in Through the Looking Glass:
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said “it
means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” “The question is,”
said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s all.”
‘Why
now. Why the contemporary concern with the Jewish genocide… compared to its
treatment in the period immediately after the Second World War?’
His
answer was that this was about
‘consolidating
a new ideology of exclusion. Now it is the Jews who are the insiders… the genocide
and the Jews served in the construction of a European identity…’
Not
only are Jews the insiders but the memory of the Holocaust has been twisted and
distorted as a justification for Western support for Israel and imperialism in
the Middle East. In short the most barbaric act of German imperialism is now
used to justify the barbarism of western imperialism.
Israel
is seen by the European far-Right as the last defence against Islam. In the words of
Dutch fascist Geert Wilders ‘If Jerusalem
falls into the hands of the Muslims, Athens and Rome will be next.’ For
Germany coming to terms with the Holocaust has been seen in terms of uncritical
support of Israel as a ‘Jewish’ state.
The
irony is that Israel from its formation modelled
its settler-colonial model on Prussian militarism and colonisation. Instead of
drawing the lesson from the Nazi era that racism and racial supremacy should be
opposed, the German state has given carte blanche to an Israeli state which is
the embodiment of Prussian militarism.
Indeed
the Israeli state, with its segregation between Jew and non-Jew, is the embodiment
of Nazi values. If one looks at the period from 1933-39 then the parallels
between Israel and Nazi Germany are uncanny not least in the Nuremburg Laws of
1935 which the Zionists alone in the Jewish community welcomed.
Eugenics
played a key role in Nazi Germany. The Holocaust began in 1939 with the
extermination of the disabled. Six killing centres were set up and gas trucks,
which were later used in the first concentration camp Chelmno, began their
operations. In Israel conscious attempts to ‘improve’ the Jewish ‘race’ were
undertaken by Arthur Ruppin through selective
Jewish immigration.
In
the 1950’s thousands of babies of Yemenite parents were simply stolen and
transferred to Ashkenazi parents in the belief that the latter would improve
the children. It is a scandal which has been smouldering for over half a century.
See for example The
Disappeared Children of Israel.
Far from the German Bundestag rejecting
the values of Hitlerism, by their actions they have endorsed the perpetuation
of those values in the hands of the Israeli state.If Israel, the Jewish state, can act like
Germans once did, then the logical conclusion is that perhaps the Nazi period
wasn’t so bad after all.That is a
message that the AfD and Austria’s Freedom Party understand too well.
When the Chief Rabbi of Safed, Shmuel
Eliyahu issues an edict banning the renting of apartments to Arabs and when
criticised his actions are endorsed
by dozens of other rabbis, or when Jewish mobs chant
‘death to the Arabs’ it is clear that the values of German ethno-nationalism
have been transformed into Jewish ethno-nationalism.
It is a sign of the abject cowardice of
the Greens and SPD that they have nothing to say about the virulent racism of the
Israeli state. What part of the house demolitions, the ethnic cleansing or the
shooting of unarmed demonstrators do they not understand?
It is Israelis themselves who recognise
that Israel’s ethno-nationalism are symbolic of the era of fascism.
Zeev Sternhell, a former Professor at
the Hebrew University and a world authority on fascism, as well as being a
child survivor of the Holocaust, In Israel, Growing Fascism and a Racism Akin to Early Nazism
spoke
of a
‘toxic ultra-nationalism that has evolved
here, the kind whose European strain almost wiped out a majority of the Jewish
people.’
He
is not alone.Other Israelis
including Daniel
Blatman, a Holocaust researcher and chief historian at the new Warsaw
Ghetto museum and Ofer Casif, a Hebrew University lecturer and newly elected MK
for Hadash, argued
thatIsrael today is similar to early
Nazi Germany.
Even in Latvia, over 90% of whose Jewish population were murdered, the Boycott of Nazi Germany was effective
Members
of the German Bundestag are probably unaware that when the Nazis took power in
1933, they were met with a worldwide Jewish
boycott of Nazi Germany. Just like now, the ruling classes railed at this
interference with free trade and the Nazi state initiated legal proceedings in
countries like Latvia. The Zionists did their best to undermine the boycott agreeing
reaching their own trade agreement Ha'avara, with the Nazis.
The
German establishment, from the Greens to the AfD, may pretend that they are
opposing anti-Semitism but in reality they are supporting a Jewish supremacist
state which owes much to the Nazi period.
‘What message
does Germany send when it protects a violent military power that in the past
year alone had indiscriminately killed over 450 Palestinians, while at the same
time condemning a non-violent movement that merely demands that Israel abides
by its obligations under international law?’
The
decision of the Bundestag and its conflation of Zionism and Judaism disregards
the long history of Jewish opposition to Zionism, as well as ignoring the
numerous Jewish individuals and organizations who either support BDS or defend
its legitimacy.
It
may be painful for German legislators to understand, but a state that
demolishes Palestinian homes in order erect Jewish homes in their place owes
more to the Nazis than those who suffered under them.
few
would deny that modern German identity has had a central role in the
formulation of Jewish-Israeli identity, especially in light of the Holocaust
and its key impact on the past of the two peoples.
Using
a psychological analogy he described how ‘A battered child often turns into a battering parent, and what applies
on the personal level is also valid on the national one.’
If your
history has imposed a burden and an obligation upon you, it is to defend
justice not Israel. This is what Judaism, not Zionism, demands. Your obligation
does not lie in making Israel or the Jewish people special or selectively
excusing injustice because Jews happen to be committing it; it lies in holding
Israel and Jews to the same ethical and moral standards that you would demand
of any people, including yourselves.
Your
sense of guilt, if that is the correct word, should not derive from criticizing
Israel. It should reside in remaining silent in the face of injustice as so
many of your forebears did before, during and after the Holocaust.
I
lost a large extended family to fascism and racism. By endorsing the motion
that alleges that BDS is anti-Semitic—regardless of one’s position on BDS—you
are criminalizing the right to free speech and dissent and those who choose to
exercise it, which is exactly how fascism takes root. You also trivialize and
dishonor the real meaning of anti-Semitism. Sincerely,
Zionist campaign against Brian Klug in 2013
The Bundestag vote has been felt in a renewed Zionist attack on Berlin’s
Jewish Museum. This is an institution that the Zionists have long detested as
it isn’t under their control. Zionism has not only colonised Palestine but Jewish
communities and their institutions in the diaspora.The Jewish museum ofBerlin is an exception.
In 2013, the non-Zionist British lecturer Brian Klug delivered
a thoughtful lectureWhat Do We Mean
When We Say ‘Antisemitsm’? Echoes of shattering glass on the 75th
anniversary of Kristallnacht.
There was an immediate Zionist response. A group calling themselves ‘International
scholars and authors under the auspices of The Berlin International Center for
the Study of Antisemitism (BICSA) compiled a Dossier
on Brian Klug. And what a collection of
scholars it was. It was headed by Gerald
Steinberg of the McCarthyite NGO
Monitor, which spends its time attacking Israeli human rights
organisations, junk historian Ephraim Karsh, [I
recommend Benny Morris’s review of Karsh’s book Fabricating Israeli Histor: The New ‘Historians’ in Journal of
Palestine Studies Vol. 27 No. 2 Winter 1998] Sam Westrup, ‘Senior Fellow’ of
the virulently Islamaphobic Gatestone Institute whose Wikipedia entry
describes it in these terms: Gatestone is
anti-Muslim. The organization has attracted attention for publishing false
articles and being a source of viral falsehoods.’ Another ‘scholar’ was Lt.
Col. (res.) Dr. Mordechai Kedar, whose main claim to fame is advocating
the rape of Palestinian women in war as a deterrent to ‘terrorists’. These ‘scholars’ even extended to our own hoodlums,
Jonathan Hoffman and Richard Millet!
Their leader Clemens Heni wrote in The
Times of Israel that ‘Brian Klug is
among the worst choices for a keynote speaker’ because ‘he denies that there is a new antisemitism.’
There is a good riposte to this in Mondoweiss‘Klug
targeted by McCarthyite ‘dossier’– because he will speak on anti-Semitism in
Berlin on Kristallnacht anniversary.’
In other words Brian Klug should have been banned because he was not prepared
to say that anti-Zionism was anti-Semitism. Such is the value that Zionism accords
to freedom of speech
Other
sins
include that fact that in 2012 ‘the
Jewish Museum hosted a podium discussion with US academic Judith Butler, who
renewed her calls to boycott Israel.’ Clearly this is a call for the
neo-Nazis and Greens in the Bundestag to take the kind of action Hitler would
have approved and close down a cultural and academic institution which Gerald
Steinberg has described as the “anti-Jewish
Museum”.
‘Branding BDS
as anti-Semitic... Fighting anti-Semitism solves any problems associated with
explaining Israel’s actions. Just say “anti-Semitism” and the world is
paralyzed. One can kill children in Gaza, then say “anti-Semitism!” and squelch
any criticism. Europe is still vulnerable on this. Exploit it to the hilt.
It’s
hard to believe that the hundreds of Bundestag members who voted for this
resolution, which defines a completely legitimate struggle as anti-Semitic,
actually agreed with it. One may assume that deep inside, many harbor doubts if
not opposition to a move that was imposed on them. It’s not only in Germany. In
most European countries it’s difficult to criticize Israel without being
accused of anti-Semitism.
Rather than slaying the dragon of racism and fascism the Green, Social
Democratic and Die Linke (who put forward their own motion) have given a boost
to the forces of racism and fascism. One hopes that these hypocrites and
ignoramuses take on board the fact that Netanyahu has no greater friend
than Hungary’s Prime Minister, Viktor Orban for whom the pro-Nazi leader of
war-time Hungary, Admiral Horthy was an ‘exceptional
statesman’
One thing is for sure, German politicians today and the cowards who
inhabit the Bundestag are anything but exceptional statesmen. They are much the
same cowards who in 1933 voted for the Enabling Act thus
ushering in the personal dictatorship of Hitler.
Below is a
message from Prof. Amos Goldberg of the Dep of js History
at the Hebrew University and Yaara Benger Alaluf of Berlin’s Max Planck Institute.
If any of you would be willing to send a short message
of support to the Jewish Museum, this would be highly appreciated. Their
e-mail address is: info@jmberlin.de.
Please direct it to Peter Schäfer, the director
of the museum. The museum’s website is www.jmberlin.de.
Furthermore, please
consider contributing to the several discussions on twitter, of which
you find links below.
These are simple steps but might be highly influential.
Thank you for your
continued support, which is highly appreciated!
Kind regards,
Prof. Amos GoldbergYaara
Benger Alaluf
Department of
Jewish History Center for the
History of Emotions,
and Contemporary
Jewry Max Planck Institute
for Human
Hebrew
University, Jerusalem, Development,
Berlin
In an articleBerlin
Jewish Museum Director Resigns After Tweet Supporting BDS Freedom of SpeechHaaretz reported that the Jewish
Museum’s Director, Peter Schafter, had resigned. ‘days after it was criticized for endorsing a petition against a
parliamentary motion defining anti-Israel boycotts as anti-Semitic and banning
the boycott movement from using public buildings.’ ‘ Schafter’s resignation
came ‘after Israeli Ambassador to Germany Jeremy
Issacharoff called the museum’s sharing of the petition “shameful.”
The petition, asserting that "boycotts
are a legitimate and nonviolent tool of resistance," was signed by 240
Jewish intellectuals including Avraham Burg and Eva Illouz, who called on the
German government not to adopt the motion, to protect freedom of speech.
Ha’aretz reported that ‘Last year,
it was reported that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu demanded from Chancellor
Angela Merkel that Germany stop funding the museum because it had
held an exhibition about Jerusalem, “that presents a Muslim-Palestinian
perspective.” Merkel was asked to halt funding to other organizations as
well, on grounds that they were anti-Israel, among them the Berlin
International Film Festival, pro-Palestinian Christian organizations, and the
Israeli news website +972, which receives funding from the Heinrich
Böll Foundation.
Netanyahu did not deny the report and his bureau confirmed that he had
raised “with various leaders the issue of
funding Palestinian and Israeli groups and nonprofit organizations that depict
the Israel Defense Forces as war criminals, support Palestinian terrorism and
call for boycotting the State of Israel.”
The Bundestag’s motion last month marked the first time a
European parliament had officially defined the BDS movement as anti-Semitic.
The motion, which is a call to the government and isn’t legally binding, won
broad multiparty support from Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union, the Social
Democrats and the Free Democratic Party. Some members of the Greens Party also
supported the motion, though others abstained at the last minute. The motion
stated that the BDS movement’s “Don’t Buy” stickers on Israeli products evoke
the Nazi slogan “Don’t buy from Jews.”
One wonders at the gutlessness of a German government that wasn’t capable
of telling Netanyahu to take a running jump, preferably into a stretch of deep
water.
The Bundestag motion, passed with broad
multiparty support last month, has drawn wide opposition, including from Jewish
intellectuals
Haaretz,
11 June 2019, Noa Landau
The
German government is examining whether to adopt a motion by its parliament that
defines the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement as anti-Semitic
and bans it from use of public buildings – and how such a decision would affect
German funding to groups that support the movement.
Haaretz
has learned that Israel and various public diplomacy groups are pressuring
Germany to adopt the motion, stirring strong disagreements among government
ministries. Chancellor Angela Merkel’s bureau has yet to decide on an official
position.
German
sources told Haaretz that the country’s Interior Ministry, led by the
commissioner for battling anti-Semitism Felix Klein, generally supports the
motion, while the Foreign Ministry opposes it. Foreign Ministry officials
recently told journalists that they oppose a boycott of Israel, but that the
BDS movement includes a broad spectrum of positions and each instance and
organization must be examined individually to determine if it’s anti-Semitic.
The
Bundestag’s motion last month marked the first time a European parliament had
officially defined the BDS movement as anti-Semitic. The motion, which is a
call to the government and isn’t legally binding, won broad multiparty support
from Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union, the Social Democrats and the Free
Democratic Party. Some members of the Greens Party also supported the motion,
though others abstained at the last minute. The motion stated that the BDS
movement’s “Don’t Buy” stickers on Israeli products evoke the Nazi slogan
“Don’t buy from Jews.”
Last
week, 240 Jewish intellectuals published a petition against the Bundestag’s
motion, saying “boycotts are a legitimate and nonviolent tool of resistance.”
The signatories, among them Avraham Burg and Eva Illouz, called on the German
government not to adopt the motion, to protect freedom of speech and continue
funding of Israeli and Palestinian organizations “that peacefully challenge the
Israeli occupation, expose severe violations of international law and
strengthen civil society. These organizations defend the principles and values
at the heart of liberal democracy and rule of law, in Germany and elsewhere.
More than ever, they need financial support and political backing.”
The Jewish Museum in Berlin shared the petition
on Twitter, generating an online backlash. Israeli Ambassador to Germany Jeremy
Issacharoff called the museum’s sharing of the petition “shameful.”
Last
year, it was reported that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu demanded
from Merkel that Germany stop funding the museum because it had held an
exhibition about Jerusalem, “that presents a Muslim-Palestinian perspective.”
Merkel was asked to halt funding to other organizations as well, on grounds
that they were anti-Israel, among them the Berlin International Film Festival,
pro-Palestinian Christian organizations, and the Israeli news website +972,
which receives funding from the Heinrich Böll Foundation.
Netanyahu
did not deny the report and his bureau confirmed that he had raised “with
various leaders the issue of funding Palestinian and Israeli groups and
nonprofit organizations that depict the Israel Defense Forces as war criminals,
support Palestinian terrorism and call for boycotting the State of Israel.”
