As Uncle Tom Diplomat Ishmael Khalidi discovered,
being a Collaborator does not make you immune from being beaten up by Israeli
Security
You have to sympathise.
Ishmael Khalidi is Israel’s first Bedouin diplomat.Studying by candlelight in his tent (because
most Bedouin villages being ‘unrecognised’ don’t get supplied with electricity
or water) he nonetheless passed his exams and graduated. He even served in the
notoriously racist killer squad, the Border Police.
Then someone in the
Foreign Office talent spotted Ishmael. Clearly here was someone who would be
able to present Israeli ‘democracy’ to gullibleaudiences in America and speak out about BDS.Who better than an Israeli Arab to tell White
Americans that sanctions would hurt the Palestinians more than anyone and to
put over the lie that Israel is the land of equal opportunity.After all it is their concern for Palestinians
which leads Israel to oppose BDS!
Ishmael Khalidi - beaten up by Israeli security goons
Sure enough he was posted
to London and San Francisco.Not, of
course as Ambassador but senior enough to be someone who could be held up as an
example of how Arabs are not discriminated against in Israel.
None of that stopped 4 security
guards in Jerusalem pulling him to the ground, kneeling on his neck until he
was shouting ‘I can’t breathe’. After all, in the eyes of these goons, once an
Arab always an Arab.
Israel Hayom, a right-wing
pro-Netanyahu free sheet funded by billionaire Sheldon Adelson report
that ‘Khaldi rejected any comparisons to George
Floyd, the black American man whose death at the hands of Minneapolis
police has sparked
protests around the world. He also said he understands that Israeli
security guards have a job to do.’
The security guards
claimed that Khalidi had refused to show his ID and Israeli police spokesman,
Micky Rosenfeld, backed
this up. The security establishment are, of course, all pulling together.
No doubt the waste of
space that is Labour’s new leader, Sir Starmer, will think this is all an ‘anti-Semitic
conspiracy theory’.
Below is an article by
JonathanCook in Mondoweiss.
An Israeli diplomat filed a complaint last week with police
after he was pulled to the ground in Jerusalem by four security guards, who
knelt on his neck for five minutes as he cried out: “I
can’t breathe.”
There are obvious echoes of the treatment of George Floyd, an
African-American killed by police in Minneapolis last month. His death
triggered mass protests against police brutality and reinvigorated the Black
Lives Matter movement. The incident in Jerusalem, by contrast, attracted only
minor attention – even in Israel.
An assault by Israeli security officials on a diplomat sounds
like an aberration – a peculiar case of mistaken identity – quite unlike an
established pattern of police violence against poor black communities in the
US. But that impression would be wrong.
The man attacked in Jerusalem was no ordinary Israeli
diplomat. He was Bedouin, from Israel’s large Palestinian minority. One fifth
of the population, this minority enjoys a very inferior form of Israeli
citizenship.
Ishmael Khaldi’s exceptional success in becoming a diplomat,
as well as his all-too-familiar experience as a Palestinian of abuse at the
hands of the security services, exemplify the paradoxes of what amounts to
Israel’s hybrid version of apartheid.
Khaldi and another 1.8 million Palestinian citizens are
descended from the few Palestinians who survived a wave of expulsions in 1948
as a Jewish state was declared on the ruins of their homeland.
Israel continues to view these Palestinians – its non-Jewish
citizens – as a subversive element that needs to be controlled and subdued
through measures reminiscent of the old South Africa. But at the same time,
Israel is desperate to portray itself as a western-style democracy.
So strangely, the Palestinian minority has found itself treated
both as second-class citizens and as an unwilling shop-window dummy on which
Israel can hang its pretensions of fairness and equality. That has resulted in
two contradictory faces.
On one side, Israel segregates Jewish and Palestinian
citizens, confining the latter to a handful of tightly ghettoized communities
on a tiny fraction of the country’s territory. To prevent mixing and
miscegenation, it strictly separates schools for Jewish and Palestinian
children. The policy has been so successful that inter-marriage is all but
non-existent. In a rare survey, the Central Bureau of Statistics found 19 such
marriages took place in 2011.
The economy is largely segregated too.
Most Palestinian citizens are barred from Israel’s security
industries and anything related to the occupation. State utilities, from the
ports to the water, telecoms and electricity industries, are largely free of
Palestinian citizens.
Job opportunities are concentrated instead in low-paying
service industries and casual labour. Two thirds of Palestinian children in
Israel live below the poverty line, compared to one fifth of Jewish children.
This ugly face is carefully hidden from outsiders.
On the other side, Israel loudly celebrates the right of
Palestinian citizens to vote – an easy concession given that Israel engineered
an overwhelming Jewish majority in 1948 by forcing most Palestinians into
exile. It trumpets exceptional “Arab success stories”, glossing over the deeper
truths they contain.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, Israel has been excitedly
promoting the fact that one fifth of its doctors are Palestinian citizens –
matching their proportion of the population. But in truth, the health sector is
the one major sphere of life in Israel where segregation is not the norm. The
brightest Palestinian students gravitate towards medicine because at least
there the obstacles to success can be surmounted.
Compare that to higher education, where Palestinian citizens
fill much less than one per cent of senior academic posts. The first Muslim judge,
Khaled Kaboub, was appointed to the Supreme Court only two years ago – 70 years
after Israel’s founding. Gamal Hakroosh became Israel’s first Muslim deputy
police commissioner as recently as 2016; his role was restricted, of course, to
handling policing in Palestinian communities.
Khaldi, the diplomat assaulted in Jerusalem, fits this mould.
Raised in the village of Khawaled in the Galilee, his family was denied water,
electricity and building permits. His home was a tent, where he studied by
gaslight. Many tens of thousands of Palestinian citizens live in similar
conditions.
Undoubtedly, the talented Khaldi overcame many hurdles to win
a coveted place at university. He then served in the paramilitary border
police, notorious for abusing Palestinians in the occupied territories.
He was marked out early on as a reliable advocate for Israel
by an unusual combination of traits: his intelligence and determination; a
steely refusal to be ground down by racism and discrimination; a pliable
ethical code that condoned the oppression of fellow Palestinians; and blind
deference to a Jewish state whose very definition excluded him.
Israel’s Foreign Ministry put him on a fast track, soon
sending him to San Francisco and London. There his job was to fight the
international campaign to boycott Israel, modelled on a similar one targeting
apartheid South Africa, citing his own story as proof that in Israel anyone can
succeed.
But in reality, Khaldi is an exception, and one cynically
exploited to disprove the rule. Maybe that point occurred to him as he was
being choked inside Jerusalem’s central bus station after he questioned a
guard’s behaviour.
After all, everyone in Israel understands that Palestinian
citizens – even the odd professor or legislator – are racially profiled and
treated as an enemy. Stories of their physical or verbal abuse are
unremarkable. Khaldi’s assault stands out only because he has proved himself
such a compliant servant of a system designed to marginalise the community he
belongs to.
This month, however, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu himself chose to tear off the prettified, diplomatic mask represented
by Khaldi. He appointed a new ambassador to the UK.
Tzipi Hotovely, a Jewish supremacist and Islamophobe,
supports Israel’s annexation of the entire West Bank and the takeover of Al
Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem. She is part of a new wave of entirely undiplomatic
envoys being sent to foreign capitals.
Hotovely cares much less about Israel’s image than about
making all the “Land of Israel”, including the occupied Palestinian
territories, exclusively Jewish.
Her appointment signals progress of a kind. Diplomats such as
herself may finally help people abroad understand why Khaldi, her obliging
fellow diplomat, is being assaulted back home.
This is an interesting article
by Newsweek of all publications. To listen to the nonsense coming out of racist Labour politicians like Emily Thornberry, Joan Ryan et al, you would think that Israel was the embodiment of western democratic values in the Middle East. The 'villa in the jungle' to borrow the racist phrase of the last Labour Prime Minister, Ehud Barak.
Yair Lapid is leader of Yesh Atid, a centrist party tipped to be the second largest party in the next Knesset
The reality is that Israel is the most right-wing, racist society on the planet. It is a society where hatred of Arabs, Africans and non-Jews is visceral. What is worse is that this hatred is encouraged by a far-Right government which includes a 'Justice Minister' Ayelet Shaked who has advocated genocide.
This is the consequence of Israel being an ethno-nationalist society, a society based on only part of its population. A society obsessed with racial purity, because being Jewish in Israel is a national/racial not a religious category. In Israel race is defined on the basis of religion, something which often confuses people. To make matters worse the Israeli Jewish population is itself divided between those who define themselves as Israeli first or Jewish first with a majority saying Jewish first. Not that this matters to Israel's Palestinians because they are excluded from the tent and confined to the margins.
Although the article is well worth reading on the
growing influence of Israel’s neo-Nazi far Right although it doesn’t deal with
the reason why Israel’s alt-Right is growing so fast. When Lehava calls for preventing Arab-Jewish relationships
they are going with the grain of society.
There is broad consensus in the whole of society that Jewish-Arab
relationships are a danger to society, because a Jewish state cannot tolerate
large numbers of mixed couples. That is
the nature of the racism of Israeli society.
Mixed relationships, mishlinge, were
also a problem for the Nazi state and this one topic consumed most of the time
at the Wannsee Conference in 1942 which was devoted to planning the Final
Solution.
Lapid is a Zionist consensus, from 'left' to 'right'. So Yair Lapid, of the secular centrist Yesh Atid declared that “It bothers me, I admit. I say that if tomorrow my son came to me and said, ‘Dad, I want you to meet Rona, not Rina, and she’s Russian Orthodox or Catholic and we’re getting married and the kids won’t be Jewish’ — would that bother me? It would bother me greatly.'
Israel is a Jewish state, or more
accurately a State of the Jews and the Jews are defined as a Jewish Nation.
What that means is that Israel consideres itself a state, not just of its own Jewish citizens
but all Jews, wherever they live. One of the central tasks of Zionism is the 'ingathering of the exiles'
What
Israel is not is a state of all of its citizens.
That is why it’s an apartheid state.
Non-Jewish citizens do not have equal right with Jewish citizens. That is why there is no Israeli nationality
but a central Jewish nationality and over 130 other nationalities.
Because a Jewish state means a
permanent Jewish majority, the idea ofmixed marriages and a dilution of the primary race is seen as a threat
to the state itself.That is why Lehava
thugs patrol areas of Jerusalem unmolested by the Police attacking Arab males who are seen as likely
to establish social or personal relations with Jewish women.
The suggestion that Israel can do
nothing about Lehava, as the article states, is for the birds.The article quotes Israeli authorities as saying that ‘there is little they can do to stop
Gopstein—that he is protected by free speech.’Utter nonsense. Israel's Palestinians are closely monitored on social media and any threats they make result in instant arrest. Of course Jewish abuse is not punished.
For example Dareen Tatour, a Palestinian Israeli poet, was imprisoned
and is now under house arrest, because she mentioned ‘resistance’ in an online
poem.The reason Gopstein has not been prosecuted
and gaoled is because he is Jewish. Even when he threatened to burn down churches and mosques he was not arrested. See for example VATICAN CALLS ON A-G TO INDICT EXTREMIST JEWISH LEADER FOLLOWING ENDORSEMENT OF BURNING CHURCHES
Raed Salah, leader of the Northern Muslim League,
was convicted of racial hatred and gaoled
for 9 months because it was held he made a comparison between Israel’s behaviour and the Jewish
blood libel, a comparison which incidentally he disputed.
Nonetheless, despite its weaknesses this article
should be read by people as it outlines very well where Israel is now heading.
I also attach an older article beneath it from the Jerusalem Post, when Tzipi Hotovely, who is now acting Foreign Minister of Israel, invited Benzi Gopstein into the Knesset to address a Committee on the 'problem' of combating inter-marriage. Racism in Israel starts from the top down.
American-born rabbi Meir Kahane, founder of the Jewish Defense League, in Jerusalem, where he was known for his extreme views, such as expulsion of all Palestinians on the West Bank. He was assassinated in New York City.David H. Wells/Corbis via Getty
Updated | On November 5, 1990, at a
Marriott Hotel on Manhattan’s East Side, Rabbi Meir Kahane had just taken his
seat at a Zionist conference when El Sayyid Nosair, a 34-year-old
Egyptian-American, shot him in the neck. Hours later, the Brooklyn-born
rabbi—known as the most racist politician in Israeli history—was pronounced
dead.
Most Israelis didn’t mourn. Two years before, the Israeli government had
banned his political party, Kach, for its anti-Arab platform. Kahane had called
for the forced expulsion of the millions of Arabs living in Israel, whom he
often referred to as “dogs.” As the Israeli writer Yossi Klein Halevi puts it,
“Kahane turned his political agenda into a kind of Jewish jihad with an
explicitly religious, apocalyptic message.”
Yet 27 years after Kahane’s murder, on another November evening,
hundreds of Israelis gathered in West Jerusalem to commemorate the anniversary
of his death. It was one of 25 such events held throughout Israel that week. At
the podium, Jewish extremists took turns praising the rabbi, calling him a
righteous prophet whose politics were ahead of his time.
Among those in attendance: Kahane’s prodigy and successor, Ben Zion
“Bentzi” Gopstein. In 2005, he established Lehava, a nonprofit whose Hebrew
name translates to “preventing assimilation in the Holy Land.” Gopstein’s group
sends patrols of young men to “defend” Jewish women from Arabs. It also runs a
hotline for people to report Jews having interfaith relationships, or renting
or selling apartments to Israeli Arabs. Lehava has grown into the largest
radical right-wing organization in Israel, with chapters in every city and more
than 10,000 registered members—most of them young adults and teenagers. The
group spreads its message and recruits members in schools, city streets and
community centers.
Though Gopstein operates under the guise of fighting assimilation—a
cause familiar to many American Jews—his critics argue that mission is just a
front. Lehava, they say, is as dangerous as Kach. And like Kahane before him,
Gopstein is rallying people around the goal of expelling Palestinians from
Israel and the West Bank.
Benzi Gopstein, Israeli leader of the extreme right-wing movement Lehava, poses on August 11, 2015, in Jerusalem. Israel police had questioned him after he condoned torching churches amid an uproar over hate crimes, including the deadly firebombing of a Palestinian home. MENAHEM KAHANA/AFP/Getty
But unlike Kahane’s views, which stood on the margins of Israeli
society, Gopstein’s perspective has become mainstream—a shift, analysts say,
that reflects Israelis’ dwindling faith in the prospect of peace with the
Palestinians.
Critics argue that Israeli lawmakers have also enabled Lehava, even as
they’ve demonized left-leaning human rights groups. Yet Israeli authorities say
there is little they can do to stop Gopstein—that he is protected by free
speech, and because his group is a nongovernmental organization, it has avoided
the legal restrictions placed on Kahane’s political party. “Lehava is doing
this very smartly,” says Tehilla Shwartz-Altshuler, a law professor at Hebrew
University and a senior fellow at the Israel Democracy Institute, a Jerusalem-based think tank.
But the group’s critics aren’t giving up. Last fall, the state
attorney’s office announced its intention to indict Gopstein on charges of
incitement to violence, racism and terrorism, along with obstruction of
justice, pending a prehearing. (The charges all relate to statements he’s made
in recent years. Among them: that Palestinian men who flirt with Jewish women
deserve to be beaten.) Gopstein is still awaiting his prehearing. In the
meantime, to the dismay of his distractors, he is a free man, with a large and
growing following.
"The Israeli army, the Shin Bet and Mossad, they know how to deal
with Muslim terror,” says Gadi Gvaryahu, the chairman of Tag Meir, one of the organizations battling Lehava. “Yet the state of Israel
doesn’t know how to deal with right-wing extremists. People like Bentzi
Gopstein are more dangerous to Israel than Muslim terror.”
‘You Can’t
Coexist With Cancer’
Several months ago, I met Gopstein in the lobby of a Jerusalem hotel,
and he appeared giddy. A Jewish teenager had just left her Arab lover. Gopstein
had been calling her for months, urging her to do so. Now, she finally
had—because she was pregnant with his child. Gopstein says this was important
because now the baby would be raised Jewish instead of Muslim.
Since founding Lehava, he says, he has “rescued” at least 1,000 girls
like her. And in Jerusalem, Lehava activists are known for harassing—and
sometimes beating—Palestinian men. Gopstein’s work has sometimes gotten him
into trouble. Weeks earlier, police detained him, along with 14 members of
Lehava, for threatening Arabs who were dating Jewish women. “Every time they
arrest me, more people join my cause,” he says, smiling. In 2016, he was questioned
by police after calling Christians
bloodsucking vampires who should be expelled from the country. In 2014, he was
detained after Lehava members set fire to a joint Jewish and Arab school in Jerusalem. The group also sprayed
graffiti on the school’s walls. "You can't coexist with cancer,” it read.
In each of those cases, Gopstein was released the same day. He has never
been indicted either. The last time Israeli authorities put him behind bars was
in 1994, when the government banned Kahane’s political party. (The ban was in
response to a massacre committed by another Kahane prodigy, Baruch Goldstein,
who opened fire in Hebron’s Cave of the Patriarchs, killing 29 Muslim
worshippers and wounding 125 others.)
The Justice Ministry refused to comment on Gopstein’s case while the
investigation is underway. “He’s always been found not guilty because they have
nothing,” says Gopstein’s attorney, Itamar Ben Gvir. “They don’t even have one
example of Bentzi telling people to commit an attack. Praising Baruch Goldstein
[which Gopstein has done] isn’t illegal. You can think it’s an awful thing to
say. You can think it’s a wonderful thing to say. That’s a democracy.”
Yet Gopstein’s actions, critics say, speak to his real agenda:
anti-Palestinian hatred. “Gopstein wants us to believe that he’s just worried
about the future of the Jewish religion, but he’s not,” says Gvaryahu. “We
never heard him fight against assimilation in the United States, and here the
intermarriage rate is really insignificant.” Indeed, just 2 percent of Jewish Israelis have a non-Jewish spouse, compared with 44 percent in the U.S.
The Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security agency, has a unit for Jewish
terrorism, but a spokesman tells me it’s the police’s responsibility to deal
with Lehava. Israel Police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld says the local cops have
been trying to prevent and respond to violence committed by Gopstein’s
activists, but there is only so much they can do. “Police operations take place
all year round in connection with Lehava,” Rosenfeld says, speaking in October,
shortly after Gopstein’s latest detention. “Those suspects were released after
significant evidence was presented against them. The police recommendation was
to continue holding them. But at the end of the day, the decision made by the
court, unfortunately, is what it is.”
Gopstein’s critics argue that Israel should treat him the same way it
treats his Palestinian counterparts. But Israel has a long history of handling
Jewish radicals differently. In 1984, the authorities determined that a Jewish
militant group was plotting to blow up the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, one
of Islam’s holiest shrines. A court convicted 25 Jewish settlers of waging an underground campaign of violence
against Arabs in the West Bank and the Golan Heights. All were soon released,
except for three who were convicted of murder and sentenced to life in
prison—but they wound up serving less than seven years. Jewish settlers cheered
their return home. And they weren’t the only ones. Many of the Jewish
extremists arrested in the 1980s and 1990s quickly re-entered Israeli society,
becoming settlement leaders and political activists.
Israeli supporters of Lehava chant slogans outside the wedding hall where an Arab-Israeli man and a Jewish woman got married on August 17, 2014, in the Israeli coastal city of Rishon Letzion. GALI TIBBON/AFP/Getty
More recently, in 2005, a Jewish extremist went to prison for stabbing
marchers at Jerusalem’s gay pride parade. In 2015, three weeks after his
release, he stabbed a 16-year-old Israeli girl to death at the same event.
Gopstein and Lehava activists protested against that parade, calling it an
“abomination,” and have continued to protest it every year since. “Israel
should put much more into fighting Bentzi,” argues Gvaryahu. “It’s about time.”
Yet Gopstein’s supporters believe the state has treated him too harshly,
protecting free speech for Arabs and not for Jews. “What they’re accusing
Bentzi of, you can say the same about the Arabs,” says Ben Gvir, Gopstein’s
attorney. “Thousands of Arabs praise Palestinian terrorists, and no one is
indicting them.”
Human rights groups call that argument absurd. Israel has imprisoned 470
Palestinians for social media incitement since 2015. Among them: the Arab-Israeli poet Dareen Tatour, who was arrested in October 2015, jailed for three months and remains
under house arrest for publishing a poem and two Facebook status updates, which her attorneys claim Israeli
authorities translated improperly. Tatour was indicted for incitement to
violence and support of a terrorist organization.
Some, such as Shwartz-Altshuler, say this disparity is not caused by
racism or bias but by outcomes: Because Arabs commit more terrorist attacks
against Jews than the other way around, they’re more likely to be convicted of
incitement. “The fear is that those incitements on Facebook in Arabic will make
someone who sees them take a knife and go stab someone,” says the law
professor. “On the other hand, Israeli authorities are well aware of the
dangers that movements like Lehava pose to Israeli society”—and yet perhaps
less concerned they’ll lead to deadly violence.
But are they doing enough to contain that danger? Jewish extremists have
committed some of the most horrific crimes in Israeli history—from Goldstein’s
massacre to the murder of Yitzhak Rabin, the prime minister who championed
peace with the Palestinians. His assassination—by Yigal Amir, a Jewish
radical—came after months of right-wing Jewish incitement against Rabin and his
peace efforts. It remains the only assassination of an Israeli head of state in
the country’s history.
This poster is indicative of the racism in Israeli elections - a government party promises to campaign against inter-racial sex and relationships
“The fact that Kach was considered a terror organization means that any
group stemming from it is essentially also a terrorist group,” argues Fady
Khoury, an attorney at Adalah, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in
Israel.
Unlike the U.S., Israel has no constitution—and so no fundamental right
to free speech. Instead, Israeli courts protect this freedom on a case-by-case
basis. “The courts are very careful when it comes to pressing criminal charges
against people over speech,” says Shwartz-Altshuler. And when it comes to
people like Gopstein, the professor claims, “the Supreme Court is more afraid
of government censorship than of what Lehava is saying to Israeli society.”
Ultimately, Israel may not have the power to stop Gopstein, since he is
not a politician and has not committed any known attacks. “Kahane was not
banned from speaking outside the Knesset,” notes Halevi, a senior fellow at the
Shalom Hartman
Institute and a former member of Kahane’s
Jewish Defense League in New York. “A democracy, especially a democracy under
siege from constant war and terror, needs to walk a fine line between allowing
freedom of speech and ensuring that freedom of speech doesn’t result in
violence. Lehava needs to be reined in when it crosses the line. And it has
repeatedly crossed the line. At the same time, Lehava’s ideas cannot be
banned.”
Hard-Right Turn
In recent years, there have been political efforts to derail Gopstein,
but they have largely failed. In 2015, former Israeli Defense Minister Moshe
Ya'alon tried to designate Lehava as a terrorist group. A year later, he was
forced out of the government and replaced by Avigdor Lieberman, a hawkish
figure who once said that disloyal Arab citizens of Israel should be beheaded. “Extremist and dangerous forces, Ya’alon warned as he resigned, “have taken over Israel.”
Since Kahane’s days, Israel has moved far to the right. Today, according
to a recent Pew Research Center poll, 48 percent of Jewish Israelis believe that Israel should expel its
Arab citizens, who constitute nearly 20 percent of its population. Twenty years
ago, 32 percent of Israelis considered themselves left-wing. Today, that figure is 19 percent, according to the IDI, the Jerusalem-based think tank. A November report by IDI found that 51.5 percent of Jewish Israelis feel that to preserve
Israel's Jewish identity, Arabs and Jews should live separately, and 58 percent
say that people who aren’t willing to say Israel is the nation-state of the
Jewish people should have their citizenship revoked. Today, the government is
even considering legislation that some observers say would make Israel’s status
as a Jewish-majority state more important than its democratic values. This
would be the first step, some observers claim, toward establishing the country
Kahane envisioned.
Part of this hard-right shift, analysts say, has to do with the trauma
of the violent second intifada, or uprising. Between 2000 and 2005, Israelis
lived through a long series of almost daily suicide bombings in cities such as
Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. It also reflects a loss of faith in the peace process.
After Israel and the Palestinians signed the historic Oslo Accords in 1993,
many had hoped the bloody, decades-long conflict would end. Instead, both sides
are locked in a stalemate, and Israel has fought two wars with Hamas, the
Islamist group that controls Gaza.
Arab-Israeli Muslim groom, Mahmoud Mansour, and his Israeli bride Morel Malcha sit in Mansour's family home in Tel Aviv on August 17, 2014, ahead of their wedding ceremony. Their union was met with extreme protests from Lehava, which militates against the "Jewish assimilation and intermarriage." Daniel Bar-On/AFP/Getty
Gopstein says he’s merely expressing what most Israelis believe, which
he insists isn’t racist. "Arabs who accept this state as a Jewish state
can stay here. Those who don’t need to leave,” he tells me. “We don’t want to
kill Arabs just because they’re Arabs. That’s racism. But Arabs who want to
take our country from us? God gave Israel to the Jewish people, and people who
don’t believe that shouldn’t be here. ”
A resident of Kiryat Arba, the radical Jewish settlement inside the
mostly Palestinian city of Hebron, Gopstein rejects the claim that he
encourages or even inspires his followers to commit violence. “I’m against
doing illegal things,” he insists. “The solution is not to burn the Arab-Jewish
schools; the solution is to close them.” And yet he doesn’t condemn those
illegal acts and even defends Goldstein’s Hebron massacre. “I don’t think that
what Goldstein did was bad. I just wouldn’t do it myself. He saw Arabs killing
his friends and family, and he saw them being happy about their deaths. So he
took revenge.”
Gopstein claims to have no interest in following Kahane’s footsteps into
politics. Yet his influence is felt, even without him serving in the Israeli
parliament. Members of the country’s ruling party
have invited him multiple times to speak in the
Knesset. The Jerusalem municipality allowed Lehava to post billboards in November, advertising the Kahane memorial and thanking Gopstein for
his work. In 2015, the Education Ministry banned an award-winning novel about an Arab-Jewish romance from the national high school curriculum,
after Gopstein launched a campaign against it.
Like Kahane, Gopstein’s ultimate dream is an Israel that operates
according to Jewish law, or Halacha, where the only Arabs who live there are
those loyal to a Jewish theocracy. “At this rate,” he says of Palestinian
citizens of Israel, “it’s either us or them.”
This story has updated the titles of Tehilla
Shwartz-Altshuler and Fady Khoury
Marriages between Jewish women and Arab men took center stage at a meeting of
the Knesset Committee for the Advancement of Women this week, when committee
chairwoman Tzipi Hotovely (Likud) hosted a hearing on the subject in honor of
Jewish Identity Day in the Knesset.
“We must confront the fact that the country has not valued education, which is the
only way to prevent Jewish women from forging life connections with non-Jews,”
Hotovely said.
“The struggle against assimilation only reaches headlines through stories about
Jewish women marrying Muslim men, but it is important to remember that the
phenomenon is much wider – 92,000 mixed families live in the State of Israel.
There is a need to create a curriculum for girls in high schools that deals
with Jewish identity. The fact that girls reach a state of intermarriage
testifies to the fact that the education system was absent.”
Jewish Identity Day in the Knesset on Tuesday was sponsored by the Tzohar
organization and by MK Zevulun Orlev (Habayit Hayehudi), and featured a number
of committee meetings, all focusing on aspects of Jewish identity in Israel.
But not all the lawmakers thought that the subject was appropriate material for
a committee hearing.
“There cannot be a hearing that seeks to determine with whom it is permissible
to be married. It is a personal issue – there are things that the state should
not be involved with,” complained MK Taleb a-Sanaa (United Arab List-Ta’al).
“This hearing gives legitimacy to an anti-democratic and very dangerous
situation in which the Knesset is expected to back up Halacha – the concept of
Jewish identity does not need to make racism kosher.”
Sanaa elicited a chuckle from fellow MKs when he cited the Bible as proof of
his argument.
“Ruth the Moabite wasn’t Jewish, but her descendant was King David,” he said.
“I’d like to see what would happen if in France they held a hearing about what
happens when Christians marry Jews.”
Yad L’Achim’s Zehava Drori said her organization took care of women who “are
affiliated with all kinds of minorities.
“The scale of the problem is very wide – we feel that there is a constant
silencing of the phenomenon,” she said.
Yad L’Achim representatives said there was a growing phenomenon of “girls who
are converted to Islam without even being aware of the significance of what is
happening to them. The sheikh comes to their house, and converts them.”
Under Israeli law, mixed-religion couples cannot be married in Israel, and thus
the women are converted to Islam. But the women, said organization
representatives, do not understand that their children, though Jews according
to Halacha, will be registered as Muslim.
Yad L’Achim says it is currently working with approximately 1,000 women, while
in 2008, it only had about 500. Most of the women, it says, came from
backgrounds of severe economic or emotional distress.
“It is not racist to oppose intermarriage – marriages between Jewish women and
Muslim men are like water and oil,” said Sarit, a Jewish woman who had been
married to an Arab man. “It is not racist because they are not bad, but there are
differences in mentalities that are impossible to deny.”
Ben-Zion Gopstein of the Lehava organization said that “there are a number of
organizations that work with these girls after they ask for help, but we need
to reach them before they get to the [Arab] villages.
“This is Lehava’s goal. We go to schools and to entertainment areas and explain
to girls what it means to be a Jewish woman. There are those who date and marry
Arabs – including those from religious schools, and haredi girls.”
Gopstein said that in one religious girls’ school he had visited in Bat Yam, 20
percent of the girls at the age of 14 were dating Arabs. “The problem is the
legitimacy that is given today to intermarriage,” he said.
“The Jewish Agency invests millions in the war against assimilation overseas,
but here in Israel, every girl wants to be Bar Refaeli,” he continued,
referring to the Israeli supermodel who is dating non-Jewish film star Leonardo
DiCaprio.
Gopstein noted that “in this very Knesset, there is an MK who is married to a
German man,” a reference to Labor MK Einat Wilf. But, he complained, “it is not
politically correct to speak out about it. We don’t discuss this as being
unacceptable.”
Umm al-Hiran on the morning before the bulldozers moved in for a spot of ethnic cleansing
Racism and Zionism are like Siamese Twins
Shami Chakrabarti, who was enlisted by Jeremy Corbyn
to write a report on racism and anti-Semitism spouted a load of nonsense about Zionism,
the racist ideology and movement that gave birth to the State of Israel.
She talked of ‘some people personally
redefining their Zionism in ways that appear to grant less support to the State
of Israel and more solidarity to fellow Jewish people the world over.’
It’s like saying that some people redefined
their fascism to be less racist.
She then went on to say that ‘My advice to critics of the Israeli State
and/or Government is to use the term "Zionist" advisedly,
carefully and never euphemistically or as part of personal abuse.’ This was in response to the attempt of the Zionists
and the Jewish Labour Movement to outlaw the use of the term ‘Zionist’ as being
a term of abuse. My response is simply
that Zionism is abusive so of course it will be perceived by some as being
perjorative.
Joint Arab-Jewish demonstration in Tel-Aviv
But what has happened this week at the
Bedouin village of Umm al-Hiran is a classic example of Zionism in action. As Moshe Dayan once said:
‘During the last 100
years our people have been in a process of building up the country and the
nation, of expansion, of getting additional Jews and additional settlements in
order to expand the borders here. Let no Jew say that the process has ended.
Let no Jew say that we are near the end of the road
Women weep outside the demolished home of Yaqub Musa Abu al-Qian, who was shot dead by police. The Israeli authorities claim that Qian deliberately ran over a police officer with his car, killing him, while eyewitnesses say that police opened fire on the car before it sped up — a version that appears to be supported by police aerial footage of the incident. Umm el-Hiran, January 18, 2017. (Faiz Abu Rmeleh/Activestills)
Umm al-Hiran, with the JNF bulldozers, was a classic
example of Zionism, which has always meant the dispossession of the indigenous
Arab to make way for the Jewish settler.
Those, like the Jewish Labour Movement who pretend that Zionism is some
kind of national liberation movement are no different from those who held that
Nazism was the genuine national expression of the German people.
Umm el-Hiran before and after Israeli bulldozers carried out demolitions, January 18, 2017. (Keren Manor/Activestills)
There isn’t a single occasion when there has been a
conflict between the testimony of the Israeli Police and their victims that the
former have been proven, when video evidence has emerged, to be telling the
truth. It was no different in Umm
al-Hiran yesterday.
lying police tweet
Add caption
The Police alleged that the attack on the leader of
the Arab opposition in the Knesset, Ayman Odeh, was a stray stone that was
thrown. It is obvious to anyone that his
injuries weren’t caused by a solitary
stone. What is also evident is that if
he had been the leader of a Jewish/Zionist party then he would not have been
injured.
Police began violently dispersing those present, using shock grenades, pepper spray and sponge-tipped bullets. Among those injured by the latter was Joint List head Ayman Odeh, who was allegedly struck in the head and back. Police assert that Odeh was struck with a stone thrown by protesters, but eyewitnesses dispute this claim. Umm el-Hiran, January 18, 2017. (Keren Manor/Activestills)
Aymen Odeh lying on the floor
But on the basis of Police lies Aymen is already
being attacked as a terrorist supporter in the Knesset. Already one of the Joint List MKs, Basel
Ghattas of Balad is set
to be expelled from the Knesset after the passage 3 months ago of an
Expulsion Bill. Although of course its
text was neutral it was obvious that its intended target were the Arab
MKs. Disgracefully the Israeli Labour
Party is supporting or not opposing it.
Whereas the vilest of Jewish racists in the Knesset like Bezalel
Smotrich of Jewish Home remain untouched.
police guard car
Yesterday a Palestinian was shot dead in his
car. By good fortune the car then went
out of control and killed one of his murderers, an Israeli policeman. Immediately the Police echoed by Netanyahu and
also the President Reuben Rivlin, took up the theme that the Arab was a member
of ISIS. Not a shred of evidence was
produced or will be produced. This is
another racist meme which basically says that opposition to the demolition of
an Arab village to make way for a Jewish town is the work of ‘terrorists’. If you oppose the demolition of your home and
demonstrate against it then you will be classified as a ‘terrorist.’
What is also disgraceful is the silence of British politicians
who are quick to condemn the death of Israeli military. Last week the killing of 4 Israeli soldiers
in Jerusalem by a lorry was condemned in the Western media and by western
politicians but the demolition of an Arab village and the attack on the leader
of the Arab opposition merits no comment.
Below is a quite detailed video of the murder of the
Palestinian which leaves no doubt that the Israeli Police were lying. There is also a story about a radio host who expressed sympathy with the dead Bedouin driver being sacked. Being sympathetic to an Arab in Israel today is a risky business.
Hundreds of Israeli police officers arrived in Umm el-Hiran at around 5.30am, running towards the mosque where residents and activists had gathered, ahead of planned demolitions in the unrecognized village. Shortly after a few rounds of live fire were heard, followed by a burst of shots and shouts that people had been killed. (Keren Manor/Activestills)
Although
all evidence points to wounds from sponge-tipped bullets, police claim
Joint List head Ayman Odeh was hit by stones thrown by Bedouin protesters
in Umm el-Hiran. If the police are proven wrong, it means they shot the
leader of the third-largest party in Israel in the face without any justification.
UPDATE:
This post was updated with a photo of Ayman Odeh’s back showing his injury to
be consistent with that of a wound from a sponge-tipped bullet, and that he is
filing a complaint with the Department of Internal Police
Investigations.
MK Ayman Odeh holding the sponge bullet he says was shot at him by Israeli forces in Umm el-Hiran. (Photo: Joint List)
Where Aymen Odeh had been shot - that was clearly no stone
The
debate continues to rage over the killing
of an Israeli police officer and a Bedouin man in Umm el-Hiran on
Wednesday, when Israeli forces turned up to begin demolishing the Bedouin
village in order for it to be replaced with a Jewish town. Police and much
of the media have the incident down as a car-ramming attack, while
residents and eyewitnesses say that police opened fire at the car before it
sped up and hit officers — a version that appears to be supported by police
aerial footage. But another contested event, involving the injuring of Joint
List head and Knesset member Ayman Odeh, flew largely under the radar.
Police
claim that Odeh was hit by rocks thrown by the Bedouin residents he
was with, and police spokesperson Micky Rosenfeld insisted to +972 that
Odeh’s injuries were caused by stones. Yet Odeh and the people who
were beside him all say he was shot by black
sponge-tipped bullets. A report in the Ma’ariv newspaper on
Thursday morning cited police as saying that Odeh’s injuries could not have
been caused by these projectiles as they aren’t in possession of such
weapons. But police use of black-sponged tipped bullets against
Palestinian youth is widely
documented — particularly in East Jerusalem, where they have resulted
in at least one death. On the other hand, the injuries Odeh suffered were
relatively minor, which is unusual for this kind of bullet, but it also depends
on the exact distance and angle it was shot from, which is unclear.
MK Ayman
Odeh with blood dripping down his face from what he claims is a sponge-tipped
bullet wound and police claim is a stone. (Photo: Joint List)
There
were no firsthand reports of any rocks being thrown when Odeh was allegedly
attacked by police, and none of the injuries at the scene were reported as
having been caused by stones. You can hear bullets being fired in the video shot
by Activestills that was broadcast all over the Israeli media. There are
photos of Odeh holding the bullet that he says hit him and plenty more of the
bullets lying around at the scene. All the people I spoke with who were
there deny that any stones were thrown at the time that Odeh was
apparently shot. The only mention of stones at all in Israeli media reports are
from the police account about Odeh specifically.
“There
were no rocks. None. Zero. The police are liars,” Odeh told +972, adding that
the police first sprayed his face with pepper spray and after that fired at
him, hitting his head and his back. “Who sprayed me? Was that the protesters
too?” Odeh said. “The security forces are hostile towards Arabs, that is what
they are programmed to do. They are liars.”
The
Soroka Medical Center report of his treatment does not determine what
caused the injury and only states that the patient, Odeh, claims it was caused
by bullets. This is standard, as hospital policies are to not get involved
in the cause of injury. According to a few doctors I consulted there is no
way, medically-speaking, for the physicians who treated Odeh to definitively
differentiate between a wound from a stone and a wound from a bullet.
The only way to start to uncover the cause of injury is to do a forensics
exam. So for now, it’s the police’s word against that of Odeh and at least half
a dozen witnesses.
UPDATE,
Thursday, 8:30PM: Ayman
Odeh underwent a forensic exam today, as part of a complaint he is filing
with the Department of Internal Police Investigations, accusing the police
of aggravated assault and unlawful use of weapon. The findings of the exam are
still not out, however Odeh provided +972 with this photo of the wound on his
back, whose round shape and bruising is consistent with wounds from
sponge-tipped bullets. The complaint is being filed by attorneys with Adalah
and the Public Committee Against Torture.
Joint
List MK Ayman Odeh’s back, showing round bruising that is consistent with an
injury caused by a sponge-tipped bullet. (Joint List)
I don’t
find the police version credible, to say the least, but I cannot disprove it at
this time. However, the recent allegations by police, government and media of
an “arson
intifada” by Arab citizens following the fires in Haifa, despite there
being no evidence or a single charge made, are a good reflection of their
disingenuous conduct.
Either
way, this is an incident of critical importance. If, as suspected, Odeh
was in fact shot in the face and back by police, it means the head of Israel’s
third-largest party was shot by his own police force for absolutely no reason.
One of the videos from the scene shows Odeh talking with police and
explaining that he is a Knesset member and is of course not armed.
When is
the last time (if ever) that a Knesset member was shot by security forces? In
2006, rightwing Knesset members Effie Eitam and Aryeh Eldad were wounded by
border police officers during the evacuation of
Amona. But having a gun pointed at you is substantially different, and
while Odeh is fighting for the rights of Palestinian citizens of Israel, Eitam
and Eldad were fighting for the rights of illegal settlers in occupied
territory.
The
police shoot Palestinian youth in East Jerusalem with the same
potentially-lethal black sponge-tipped bullets — and in the West Bank with
rubber bullets — on a regular basis with impunity, but what could
possibly be their excuse for shooting a public servant who posed no
threat? They have to stick to the stone story, otherwise they’d have a lot more
explaining to do.
With the
driver, the police can at least claim there was the threat of a ramming attack.
But with Odeh I don’t believe they have any excuse. Which is why the
Israeli authorities and media are pushing hard the line that Odeh and
other members of the Joint List are inciting the Arab public. They are
victimizing and vilifying him.
Odeh told
+972 that negotiations between the Bedouin residents of Umm el-Hiran and
authorities to settle their relocation had reached a breakthrough Tuesday night
and they were close to reaching an agreement, when things suddenly changed at
midnight, and a decision was clearly made by someone in the government to scrap
the agreement and instead go in full force to demolish the village. According
to Odeh, “It was possible to prevent the spilling of blood…Prime Minister
Netanyahu is responsible for the blood spilled.”
MKs Dov
Henin and Issawi Freij: "The deeper the corruption investigation of
Netanyahu – the wider his inflammatory incitement the Arab citizens of Israel”
Knesset
Member Dov Khenin of Hadash charged Prime Minister Netanyahu with deliberately
inciting against the country’s Arab citizens and setting the police to brutal
raids – with the deliberate intention of distracting attention from the ongoing
police investigation into charges of corruption against the PM. “The deeper the
police investigation of Netanyahu, the wider the flames of his incitement”.
Khenin was
speaking at a protest rally held on King George Street in Tel Aviv, in the
aftermath of widespread police violence, bloodshed and demolition of
homes at the Bedouin village of Um al-Hiran in the Negev. Khenin noted that
there was a visible direct relation between
the intensification of the PM’s investigation on charges of corruption and the
intensification of home demolitions and police violence against Arab residents
in such places as Qalansawa and Umm al-Hiran.
MK Issawi
Freij of Meretz spoke in a similar vein and said,
"Today there was a
completely unwarranted police offensive against the residents of Umm al-Hiran.
Two people paid with their lives, a civilian and a police officer. Two people
paid with their lives, two families became bereaved, two sets of children were
orphaned. Two people were killed needlessly, with no justification and no
reason for their deaths. It happened only and solely because the Prime Minister
wants to distract attention from the steady supply of expensive cigars and
champagne which he allegedly got from an American billionaire. The Prime
Minister wants to mark out an enemy on whom his voters can vent their anger.
This enemy which the PM has targeted and marked out is me - an Arab
citizen of the State of Israel and a Member of Israel’s Parliament, along with
all my Arab fellow citizens, a full twenty percent of Israel’s citizen body. We
are to be the scapegoats! I declare it loud and clear: we who stand here and at
other protests around the country, Jews and Arabs united in voicing our
protest, will not let Netanyahu succeed in this filthy design!”
The
hundreds of demonstrators, who listened to the speeches on King George Street
in downtown Tel Aviv, responded by chanting: "Netanyahu is dangerous –
both corrupt and a racist!" and “Jews and Arabs refuse to be enemies!”
Other
demonstrations took place at Jaffa’s Clock Square, in front of the Prime
Minister’s residence in Jerusalem, in Haifa, at intersections near Acre,
Shfaram, Umm al-Fahm and Klaonsooh – as well as by Jewish and Arab students at
the universities of Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Haifa and Beersheba.
"The direct responsibility for today’s
dangerous escalation and bloodshed at the village of Um al-Hiran in the
Negev rests upon those who took the decision to destroy a Bedouin village which
had existed for decades, completely raze and wipe it off the face of the earth,
to expel the residents and establish a Jewish ‘community’ in its place.
In recent days, government officials arrived at the village, bluntly threatened
its residents, and demanded that they move immediately to the town of Hura
where there is no residence available to them. Those who initiated and
implemented such brutal measures against Bedouin villagers (who happen to
be citizens of Israel) are directly responsible for the terrible events that
took place today in the village" say the organizers of the demonstrations,
peace and civil rights groups such as the Negev Coexistence and Civil
Equality Forum, Coaltion of Women for Peace and the Recognition Forum (i.e.,
recognition of the so-called “unrecognized villages” of which Um al-Hiran
is one.
Protesters
call for a comprehensive and impartial investigation of the circumstances which
led to the death of a of Umm al-Hiran resident Yacoub Musa Abu Alkian and
police officer Erez Levy. They call upon the communications media not to
repeat uncritical the highly tendentious and inflammatory accounts disseminated
by police and government speakers - which are contrary to the eyewitness
testimonies of Jews and Arabs present on the scene.
The terrible
bloodshed was the culmination of a day of violence which began in the
morning when massive demolition crews arrived at the village, accompanied by
large forces of the Yoav unit of the police (created specifically for such
anti-Bedouin actions). They had specifically declared intention of
expelling the residents and demolishing their homes, in order
to make place for construction of the purely Jewish “community” of Hiran. The
police used live ammunition and well as rubber bullets and tear gas.
Villagers - men, women and children – were injured in the police shooting, as
were many of the Jewish and Arab supporters who came to offer solidarity with
them.
Biased and
tendentious media reports, couched in inciting and inflammatory tones –
refusing to recognize that the residents were protesting the
destruction of their village and homes, and labeling them as “terrorists "
- are a direct continuation of the police violence on the ground.
