Is Israël wel, zoals wordt beweerd, een "democratie", wanneer haar volksvertegenwoordigers dezelfde taal uitslaan in een proces waar wij over zeggen "dit nooit meer"? Wanneer een oppositie, mensen die ook democratie voor minderheden bepleiten, in het parlement "ziektekiemen" en "verraders die tegen elke prijs vervolgd moeten worden" worden genoemd? Waar hebben we dat soort taal eerder gehoord? Met zulke (PVV-)vrienden heeft Israël geen vijanden nodig. Het zal aan zichzelf ten onder gaan.
MK Ben-Ari: Eradicate treacherous leftists
After Knesset approves establishment of inquiry commission into funding of left-wing Israeli organizations, National Union MK tells Jerusalem conference they are 'enemies of Israel,' equates them to Hamas, Hezbollah
Just hours after the Knesset approved a motion calling for a parliamentary investigation into the activity of B'Tselem, Yesh Din, Breaking the Silence and other groups, National Union MK Michael Ben-Ari referred to members of the leftist organizations as "traitors who must be persecuted at any cost."
Speaking at an SOS Israel conference in Jerusalem Wednesday evening, Ben-Ari called the leftists "germs" and "enemies of Israel."
The rightist lawmaker went as far as equating the leftist organizations to Hamas and Hezbollah.
In an audio tape obtained by Ynet, Ben-Ari can be heard saying, "Elements that want to destroy the Jewish state are operating within the State of Israel. They are nothing short of traitors. They are persecuting IDF soldiers and want to castrate our resilience."
"I see the people from Peace Now; they each have a private car. Every clerk has the finest equipment. Who funds all of this? The greatest Israel haters are funding this. If we'll have to enact a law in the Knesset to eradicate this dangerous enemy, that is what we'll do. Such a germ can destroy Israeli society. This enemy threatens the state's existence," he added.
Extreme rightist Itamar Ben-Gvir, who also attended the conference, called on activists to protest outside the homes of the leaders of the leftist groups "and explain to their neighbors that these are people who harm IDF soldiers and cause Israel damage.
"We must also face them on the legal front – file lawsuits and show them we are not suckers. Those who harm the State of Israel and its soldiers will be punished," he said.
In addition to the mass support from right-wing factions, the proposal to set up an inquiry commission into the activity of leftist groups was also backed by three members of Kadima, which heads the opposition. "We must erect a democratic and Zionist barrier against the use of human rights claims at the expense of Israeli patriotism," MK Otniel Schneller said.
"These organizations apparently have a good reason for concealing their funding sources," he said.
Kadima MK Yulia Shamalov Berkovich said, "When I see Israeli organizations that harm the only consensus in Israel – the soldiers – I want to know how this happens."
MK Robert Tiviaev, who also voted in favor of an investigation, said "groups such as Adalah cannot be allowed to operate against the IDF."
Arieh Eldad, partijgenoot van Ben-Ari, organiseerde in 2008 de conferentie 'Facing Jihad' met Geert Wilders. Rechts van Wilders een andere extremist, Daniel Pipes, die o.a. van mening is dat alle Amerikaanse moslims geïnterneerd moeten worden in speciale kampen.
Until this month, the shadowy Lehava organisation was best known for issuing an eccentric demand in March urging Bar Refaeli, an Israeli model, not to marry Leonardo DiCaprio, the American actor, because he is a gentile.
But in recent weeks it has taken on a more sinister hue by spearheading a series of actions that included a rally in the coastal city of Bat Yam to denounce Jews who rent their homes to Arabs.
The rabbis, some of them of senior rank, signed up to an edict issued last month that declared: "It is forbidden in the Torah to sell a house or a field in the land of Israel to a foreigner."
In the broader political spectrum, Lehava may represent a tiny minority of malcontents but there is growing unease in Israel after the message about renting homes was effectively endorsed by 300 rabbis.
Bat Yam 20/12/2010
With its undertones reminiscent of 1930s Berlin, where Jews were relegated to second-class status and denied the right to rent German-owned properties, the pronouncement has appalled Holocaust survivors.
"As someone who suffered as a Jew and underwent the Holocaust, I remember the Nazis throwing Jews out of their apartments and city centres in order to create ghettos," said Noah Flug, the chairman of the International Association of Holocaust Survivors.
"I remember how they wrote on benches that no Jews were allowed, and of course it was prohibited to sell or rent to Jews. We thought that in our country this wouldn't happen."
As part of a campaign to "purify" the land of Israel, Lehava has also invited informants to denounce Jewish neighbours who have Arab tenants by telephoning a hotline. This week it distributed a letter from a group of rabbis' wives calling on Jewish girls not to go out with Arabs, work with them or perform national service in places where Arabs are employed.
The provenance of Lehava -- whose Hebrew acronym stands for "Preventing Assimilation in the Holy Land" -- remains largely a mystery, although there is evidence to suggest that it comprises remnants of Kach, a far-Right movement banned in 1994. One of the only individuals publicly associated with Lehava is Baruch Marzel, a former Kach spokesman.
Lehava has caused widespread concern by concentrating its attention on Israel's Arab minority, which makes up 20 per cent of the population. Israeli politicians, including Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister, as well as a large number of rabbis have denounced the edict.
Yet Israel's reputation of tolerance and inclusion towards its Arab minority has been tarnished. Chanting "death to the Arabs", a group of ultraorthodox Jews threw bottles and stones at a block of flats housing Arab students in the northern town of Safed. Elsewhere in the country, there have been several reported cases of Jewish gangs, one of them consisting of teenage girls, beating up Arabs on the street.
Mr Flug, who said many fellow survivors of the Holocaust had called him to express their anxiety, appealed to the Israeli government to take action against the rabbis. "Can you imagine what would happen if a Jew in Germany or Switzerland or Britain wanted to rent an apartment and neighbours or the mayor said no?" he said. "You must stop this kind of thing when it begins."
TomDispatch | by Max Blumenthal | December 19, 2010
Moments of imperial and economic decline -- according to a recent poll, 65% of Americans now believe this country to be “in a state of decline” -- can also be periods of cultishness, even of madness incarnate. Such a mood now seems to be spreading through the United States. It’s not so surprising, really. Since the attacks of September 11, 2001, fear has been injected into this “homeland” like a drug and a penumbra of official secrecy has settled over the land in a way that makes the secrecy of the Cold War years (when this country faced a superpower, not a ragtag set of jihadis, guerrillas, and terrorists) seem like an era of sunshine.
In an atmosphere of swirling fears and hysteria amid declining living conditions, “explanations” that at other times might have remained confined to tiny crews of conspiracy-mongers can suddenly gain a patina of plausibility and so traction. No wonder then that, as hard times hit, as the financial system seemed on the verge of collapse, as unemployment soared and a massive wave of home foreclosures swept into view, increasing numbers of Americans became prey to any wacky explanation for our troubles, none more so than the idea that Islam was somehow responsible, that mosques and Islamic centers meant for a sliver of a minority here were capable of imposing anything, no less a way of life on this country, or that Sharia law (of all things) might somehow worm its way into state legal systems, or that YouTube was a hotbed of terrorism worthy of suppression, or... well, you name it.
Max Blumenthal, author of the bestselling book Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement That Shattered the Party, has done the necessary legwork to take us deep into one of those crews of conspiracy-mongers who, at another time, just about no one would have paid much attention to, but in twenty-first-century America have gained a remarkable audience. They are a chilling barometer of the changing weather in America. Tom The Great Islamophobic Crusade Inside the Bizarre Cabal of Secretive Donors, Demagogic Bloggers, Pseudo-Scholars, European Neo-Fascists, Violent Israeli Settlers, and Republican Presidential Hopefuls Behind the Crusade By Max Blumenthal
Nine years after 9/11, hysteria about Muslims in American life has gripped the country. With it has gone an outburst of arson attacks on mosques, campaigns to stop their construction, and the branding of the Muslim-American community, overwhelmingly moderate, as a hotbed of potential terrorist recruits. The frenzy has raged from rural Tennessee to New York City, while in Oklahoma, voters even overwhelmingly approved a ballot measure banning the implementation of Sharia law in American courts (not that such a prospect existed). This campaign of Islamophobia wounded President Obama politically, as one out of five Americans have bought into a sustained chorus of false rumors about his secret Muslim faith. And it may have tainted views of Muslims in general; an August 2010 Pew Research Center poll revealed that, among Americans, the favorability rating of Muslims had dropped by 11 points since 2005.
Erupting so many years after the September 11th trauma, this spasm of anti-Muslim bigotry might seem oddly timed and unexpectedly spontaneous. But think again: it’s the fruit of an organized, long-term campaign by a tight confederation of right-wing activists and operatives who first focused on Islamophobia soon after the September 11th attacks, but only attained critical mass during the Obama era. It was then that embittered conservative forces, voted out of power in 2008, sought with remarkable success to leverage cultural resentment into political and partisan gain.
This network is obsessively fixated on the supposed spread of Muslim influence in America. Its apparatus spans continents, extending from Tea Party activists here to the European far right. It brings together in common cause right-wing ultra-Zionists, Christian evangelicals, and racist British soccer hooligans. It reflects an aggressively pro-Israel sensibility, with its key figures venerating the Jewish state as a Middle Eastern Fort Apache on the front lines of the Global War on Terror and urging the U.S. and various European powers to emulate its heavy-handed methods.
Little of recent American Islamophobia (with a strong emphasis on the “phobia”) is sheer happenstance. Years before Tea Party shock troops massed for angry protests outside the proposed site of an Islamic community center in lower Manhattan, representatives of the Israel lobby and the Jewish-American establishment launched a campaign against pro-Palestinian campus activism that would prove a seedbed for everything to come. That campaign quickly -- and perhaps predictably -- morphed into a series of crusades against mosques and Islamic schools which, in turn, attracted an assortment of shady but exceptionally energetic militants into the network’s ranks.
Besides providing the initial energy for the Islamophobic crusade, conservative elements from within the pro-Israel lobby bankrolled the network’s apparatus, enabling it to influence the national debate. One philanthropist in particular has provided the beneficence to propel the campaign ahead. He is a little-known Los Angeles-area software security entrepreneur named Aubrey Chernick, who operates out of a security consulting firm blandly named the National Center for Crisis and Continuity Coordination. A former trustee of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, which has served as a think tank for the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), a frontline lobbying group for Israel, Chernick is said to be worth $750 million.
Chernick’s fortune is puny compared to that of the billionaire Koch Brothers, extraction industry titans who fund Tea Party-related groups like Americans for Prosperity, and it is dwarfed by the financial empire of Haim Saban, the Israeli-American media baron who is one of the largest private donors to the Democratic party and recently matched $9 million raised for the Friends of the Israeli Defense Forces in a single night. However, by injecting his money into a small but influential constellation of groups and individuals with a narrow agenda, Chernick has had a considerable impact.
Through the Fairbrook Foundation, a private entity he and his wife Joyce control, Chernick has provided funding to groups ranging from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and CAMERA, a right-wing, pro-Israel, media-watchdog outfit, to violent Israeli settlers living on Palestinian lands and figures like the pseudo-academic author Robert Spencer, who is largely responsible for popularizing conspiracy theories about the coming conquest of the West by Muslim fanatics seeking to establish a worldwide caliphate. Together, these groups spread hysteria about Muslims into Middle American communities where immigrants from the Middle East have recently settled, and they watched with glee as likely Republican presidential frontrunners from Mike Huckabee to Sarah Palin promoted their cause and parroted their tropes. Perhaps the only thing more surprising than the increasingly widespread appeal of Islamophobia is that, just a few years ago, the phenomenon was confined to a few college campuses and an inner city neighborhood, and that it seemed like a fleeting fad that would soon pass from the American political landscape.
Wikipedia meldt over opperrabbijn Binyomin Jacobs: "De Opperrabbijn rekent zich tot de stroming van de Lubavitcher Chassidiem die bekend staan voor hun openheid naar zowel de niet-religieuze joodse gemeenschap als naar de niet-joodse samenleving."
De werkelijkheid is 180 graden anders. In een interview in Arutz Sheva, spreekbuis voor joodse extremisten in Israël, verklaarde hij:
"The gentiles will always find excuses for anti-Semitism. They will say Jews are richer, they separate themselves from the rest of society, geniuses etc... None of these reasons justifies anti-Semitism, but you can't change the outlook of Jew-hatred through rational arguments." (ynetnews.com)
Hoe moet je zoiets noemen? Antigentilisme? Goyofobie?
In oktober dit jaar sprak rabbijn Jacobs voor de gentilesChristenen voor Israël, een graag geziene gast van deze moslimhaters, over "geld verdienen, zakendoen, handeldrijven en rijkdom in het licht van de Thora, Talmoed, de Halaga, de Joodse leer". Op dezelfde gelegenheid gaf CvI informatie over hun "jongerenprojecten in Israël", waarmee in werkelijkheid hun financiering van zowel joodse nederzettingen als outposts op de Westelijke Jordaanoever wordt bedoeld.
In 2007 betoogde Jacobs in het Hirsch Instituut dat de genocide op de Kanaänieten in orde was omdat zijn god vond dat hun land aan de joden toebehoorde. En dat niemand een boodschap zou moeten hebben aan de resoluties van de VN, zo vervolgde hij, suggererend dat zijn god hetzelfde weer mag doen met de Palestijnen als met de Kanaänieten. Dat het niet een god was die de Kanaänieten uitroeiden vermeldt hij natuurlijk niet, zodat niemand hem kan beschuldigen van het bepleiten van genocide.
"Toon dat je vrede wilt hebben. Maar tegelijk geldt: staar je er niet blind op en zorg dat je leger in stand blijft." ... Focussen op het vredesproces of op militaire slagkracht? "Ik zie niet in waarom je tussen die twee zou moeten kiezen. Maar als het onverhoopt zou moeten, kies ik voor militaire slagkracht." ... Hardop peinzend: "Als ik in Israël zou wonen, zou ik denk ik inderdaad op Shas gestemd hebben. Maar ik zou dat niet van de daken schreeuwen." (interview met Jacobs, refdag.nl)
De spirituele leider van Shas is de extremistische rabbijn Ovadia Yosef, die meermalen heeft bepleit dat Arabieren en Palestijnen moeten worden uitgeroeid. Ook hij heeft het niet hoog op met niet-joden. In oktober dit jaar stelde hij: "Waarom gojim [niet-joden] nodig zijn? Ze zullen werken, ze zullen ploegen, ze zullen oogsten. Wij zullen zitten en eten als hun meester. Daarom werden de Goyim gemaakt." en "Gojim zijn alleen geboren om ons te dienen. Los daarvan, hebben zij geen plaats in deze wereld; alleen om het volk van Israël te dienen."
Wanneer we dan in Wikipedia lezen dat rabbijn Jacobs "een goed netwerk [heeft] weten op te bouwen zowel binnen de landelijke en lokale politiek" dan lopen mij de rillingen over de rug.
Over the past week, fierce forest fires have devastated large swathes of Israel, killing 42 people – including the country’s most senior female police officer. So you could be forgiven for thinking that the emergency services needed all the help they could lay their hands on.
It is not hard to imagine the firefighters’ anger – and disbelief – on discovering that the country’s interior minister, Eli Yishai, had rejected an offer by a Christian charity in North America to donate some fire engines. Given that the country often struggles to provide adequate cover during such emergencies, the proposal by the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews could have made a vital contribution to the attempts to bring the fires under control.
But Mr Yishai, who represents the ultra-Orthodox Shas party in the ruling coalition, had other ideas. Shas, which speaks for Israel’s burgeoning ultra-Orthodox community, is deeply suspicious of non-Jewish organisations, even those that are committed to Israel’s well-being. Many of its supporters fear any help offered by Christian groups is part of some sinister plot to convert the Jews.
Fanning the flames of intolerance: the rejection of Christian help to fight the forest fires has caused tension within Israel
So Mr Yishai vetoed the American charity’s offer – and in doing so, further inflamed tensions between more secular-minded Israelis, who form the majority of the population, and the religious hardliners whose growing influence over government policy is a source of mounting friction between the communities. The anger only grew when Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, the spiritual leader of Shas, publicly declared that the fires were divine retribution for the failure of secular Israelis to observe the Sabbath.
But then, such acrimonious exchanges have become the norm rather than the exception, in a country whose very future is, many fear, being placed in jeopardy by the growth of the extremists. And this week’s decision by Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, to reject an American request to extend the freeze on building in settlements, provides a graphic illustration of the trend.
After last year’s general election produced an inconclusive result, Mr Netanyahu took advantage of Israel’s complex electoral system to form what is arguably the most Right-wing government in its history. Thus, while his Likud party remains dominant within the coalition, it relies heavily on the support of Shas and the even more hardline Yisrael Beiteinu (“Israel is our home”), led by Avigdor Lieberman, the hawkish foreign minister. Mr Lieberman, who was born in Soviet-controlled Moldova and emigrated to Israel in the 1970s, finds his greatest support among the million or so Russian Jews who have become Israeli citizens since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The real problem, however, is that while many Israelis resent the growing influence of the likes of Shas and Yisrael Beiteinu, the coalition is in many respects a reflection of the demographic changes that have transformed the political landscape over the past 20 years.
Modern Israel is barely recognisable from the country I was first posted to 25 years ago. Then, the overwhelming consensus favoured peaceful co-existence with its Arab neighbours. Shimon Peres, the Labour leader who now serves as Israel’s president, was at the forefront of official efforts to make peace with the country’s enemies, which ultimately resulted in the signing of treaties with Egypt and Jordan.
In my district of Jerusalem, Jews and Arabs lived happily side by side; it was not uncommon for Palestinians to babysit Israeli children while their parents enjoyed a night out, perhaps at one of the Palestinian restaurants that catered for Israeli tastes.
Today, the divisions between the communities are so entrenched as to make such cosy arrangements unthinkable. The current attitude is better reflected by a recent rabbinical edict that forbids Jewish landlords from renting properties to Palestinian tenants.
Looking back, it seems clear that the rapid expansion of the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community, together with the mass immigration of Russian Jews, has been a major factor in this sharp shift in political orientation.
The closest Israel has come to making peace with the Palestinians was in 1993, when Bill Clinton signed the ground-breaking Oslo Accords with Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli prime minister, who was subsequently murdered by a Jewish extremist opposed to any deal. Reflecting on recent efforts to revive the dialogue by his wife Hillary, now Secretary of State, Mr Clinton singled out Russian immigrants as the central obstacle, identifying “children of Russians and settlers” as “the hardest-core people against a division of the land”.
That is a view shared by many senior officials in Whitehall, who tell me they are pessimistic about the prospects for a Middle East peace settlement. “Israel is a very different country today to what it was 20 years ago,” one recently admitted. So long as the country’s fate lies in the hands of religious and nationalist extremists, I find it almost impossible to contemplate the day when Israelis can once again co-exist peacefully with their Palestinian neighbours.
De column - zeg maar monoloog - van de Leuvense burgemeester, minister van staat en grand old man van het Vlaams socialisme verschijnt wekelijks op vrijdag. Louis Tobback spreekt, Walter Pauli tekent op.
"Ik was oprecht geschokt toen ik las dat Frits Bolkestein de Joden aanraadde om vanuit Nederland naar Israël en de VS te verhuizen, de enige landen waar ze beschermd zouden zijn tegen moslims. Ik heb Bolkestein altijd gezien als een rechtse, conservatieve liberaal. Maar nog altijd een liberaal. Ik heb me blijkbaar vergist.
"Bolkestein zal volhouden dat hij geen racist is. Ik geloof hem. Maar hij verspreidt populisme en paniek. Hij dedouaneert Wilders en zijn zootje. Door te mikken op de islam in plaats van op 'ras', hoeven die niet te zeggen dat iedereen met kroeshaar en donkere huid gevaarlijk is. Dat men in de Leuvense stationscafés dwaasheden verkoopt, tot daar aan toe. Als Bolkestein toogpraat opblinkt tot een serieus discours, is dat onrustwekkend.
"Het wijst ook op een graad van ontbinding van de Nederlandse samenleving. Heel Nederland dekt dit beschamende incident toe met de mantel der liefde. Waar is de grote verontwaardiging? Het NRC, nochtans een bastion van liberaal vrijheidsdenken, wilde er geen zaak van maken. Men vergist zich. Het puistje op mijn arm is niet belangrijk. Behalve als het een teken is van een algemene bloedvergiftiging. Bolkestein is niet meer zo belangrijk als politicus, maar wel als symptoom.
"Ook in België stel ik vast dat eminente intellectuelen en progressieven zich grote zorgen maken over 'de islam'. Maar ik hoor ze zich amper afvragen waarom dat probleem van moslimfundamentalisme zich altijd stelt in Schaarbeek, Anderlecht of Molenbeek, en nauwelijks in Ukkel, Bosvoorde of de betere buurten van Elsene? Zou er zelfs in Algerije misschien een verband zijn tussen de fanatieke moslim en de arme moslim? De vraag stellen is ze beantwoorden. Ja, natuurlijk is er een band tussen marginalisering, criminaliteit en radicalisme. Dat is het cruciale probleem, niet de islam an sich. Toch gaat de anti-islamboodschap er gemakkelijk in. Ook bij de Joodse gemeenschap, zo merk ik. Het is een tegennatuurlijk bondgenootschap: Dewinter die vanaf het strand bij Gaza Israël uitroept tot een bolwerk van de westerse beschaving tegen het oprukkende moslimfundamentalisme, en daarvoor tot in de Joodse gemeenschap applaus krijgt.
"Maar die attitude mag je niet bekritiseren. Je mag zelfs niet opmerken dat het regent boven Jeruzalem of je riskeert het verwijt van antisemitisme. Dan krijg je de Freilichen over je heen. Dus bibber ik van angst en zwijg. Toch wil ik de Joodse gemeenschap blijven waarschuwen voor slechte vrienden.
"En het belet me niet om te blijven opkomen voor het recht voor moslims om hun godsdienst te beleven. Al keur ik daarom nog geen praktijken goed zoals het achterstellen van vrouwen. Net zoals ik geen getuige van Jehova ben, en hen toch niets in de weg zal leggen, zolang ze maar niet beletten dat hun kind een bloedtransfusie krijgt. Piet Vermeylen zei al: 'Ik ben geen vrouw, maar ik verdedig de rechten van vrouwen.' Ik verdedig dus de godsdienstvrijheid. Maar dergelijke begrippen zijn aan het verdwijnen in de Nederlandse politieke cultuur. Het land is zijn zelfvertrouwen kwijt.
"Het gaat dus niet alleen over de PVV. Door Wilders belachelijk te maken is de ziekte van het land niet weg. Je stopt de bloedvergiftiging niet door dat puistje weg te krabben. Het zal nog lang duren voor de vanzelfsprekendheid van een aantal democratische waarden terug is.
"Zeker als politici en partijen die beter zouden moeten weten zich van die populistische technieken bedienen. Vroeger was er vooral afgunst voor vreemdelingen. Sinds de financiële crisis kwam er ook angst bij: 'Ze gaan mij straks nog afpakken wat ik heb.' Hogere burgers als Bolkestein manipuleren en exploiteren de paniek bij de kleinburgerij. En richten die naar de moslims. Het curieuze is dat er ook progressieven meelopen in dat simpele anti-islamverhaal, en ze het risico niet zien dat zich daarbij aftekent. Wilders mobiliseert de racisten, en Bolkestein en de 'nuttige intellectuelen' helpen hem daar een handje bij. Terwijl men vooral rustig moet blijven, en niet in paniek slaan.
"Ik geef nog een voorbeeld. Ik kan slachtoffer worden van een overval. Moet ik dan conclusies trekken over 'de vreemdelingen', of 'de moslims'? Waar eindigen we dan? Ik dacht altijd dat de kwaliteit van het vrije denken bestond uit het vermogen om incidenten te kunnen overstijgen, te kunnen werken met concepten, te kunnen abstraheren. Het alternatief is dat we alle nuances weigeren. Gaan we voor die diefstal de doodstraf herinvoeren? Dat is dan al kort bij de sharia, niet?"
Geert Wilders houdt een extremistisch toespraakje in een 'klein zaaltje' in Tel Aviv waar hij 'een thuiswedstrijd [speelt] voor 20 man,' onder wie de Volkskrant-correspondent Rolf Bos. Vervolgens drukt de Volkskrant voor de zoveelste maal de radicale nonsens van Wilders af en zorgt op die manier ervoor dat diens extremisme weer eens meer dan een halve pagina lang wordt verspreid. Zo werkt dat. Waar slechts 19 Joden in Israel op afkomen moet groot nieuws zijn op de pagina buitenland van de Volkskrant. Succes collega's, houdt het extremisme warm onder jullie achterban. Paul Brill is trots op jullie.
"Ik ben vierkant pro-Israël ('extreem-rechtse kolonistenleiders' - zoals de krant hen noemt - zijn voor mij mensen bij wie ik graag over de vloer kom)." (NRC 24.11.10) (update: NRC heeft het verwijderd, hier nog wel te lezen)
And when it’s all over,
my dear, dear reader,
on which benches will we have to sit,
those of us who shouted “Death to the Arabs!”
and those who claimed they “didn’t know”?
Niet gericht tegen Israëli's, maar uitgevoerd door Israeli's tegen Palestijnen. En het leven van Palestijnen is volgens de dames en heren journalisten van onze zelfbenoemde kwaliteitspers zo onbelangrijk, dat het niet eens nieuws is. Was het omgekeerde het geval, dan las je dagenlang vette koppen in de krant.
Bomb Thrown At Hadarim Prison
After unknown persons hurled a bomb at the Hadarim Israeli prison, Palestinian Minister of Detainees, Issa Qaraqe’, held, on Wednesday, the Israeli government responsible for what he described as an attempt to kill Palestinian leaders and political detainees.
Qaraqe’ stated that this incident is an attempted collective murder of Palestinian detainees sentenced to high terms by Israel, and accused the Israeli government of failing to protect the detainees.
There are nearly 800 Palestinian political detainees imprisoned at the Israel's Hadarim prison.
The Palestinian Minister demanded that the United Nations form an investigation committee into the attack adding that Palestinian political figure Marwan Barghouthi, and several other political leaders are imprisoned in Hadarim.
The Israeli police declared, on Tuesday, at night that the bomb was hurled by a person driving his motorcycle near the compound; no injuries were reported in the attack.
The police added that several policemen chased a number of suspects but did not announce any arrests.
Despite the deceptive and mythical "Israeli democracy is being corrupted" mantra -- as if democracy could have ever coexisted in Israel with incessant ethnic cleansing, apartheid laws, military occupation and denial of Palestinian refugees their right of return -- that is parroted in several quotes in this article from Zionist "left" writers who ought to and in fact do know better, the article as a whole is quite informative and critical.
I think this growing outcry about Israel "becoming fascist," other than being slightly exaggerated and a bit too alarmist, reflects the horrific anxiety of "liberal" Zionists in Israel and elsewhere about Israeli apartheid and fascist tendencies that have always targeted the indigenous Palestinians of the land since 1948 finally coming home to roost and targeting Jewish Israeli dissenters and non-conformant organizations as well.
The facade of democracy is what is truly collapsing, not democracy, as the latter has never existed -- nor could have -- in any true form in a settler-colonial state like Israel. Apartheid South Africa was a "democracy" for whites, after all, and the entire US was a "democracy" when Southern states were still holding on to apartheid laws against African-Americans and other non-whites. But when the facade of democracy and enlightenment collapses, the entire Israeli regime of apartheid, settler-colonialism and occupation becomes at serious risk of collapsing as well, as it will be even less tolerated by the world and more likely to trigger even more resistance to it, internally.
While some writers quoted below are comparing what they perceive as Israel's demise to Germany's, perhaps justifiably, there is another ghost hovering over their heads but will take them some more time to publicly recognize and admit. More Jewish Israelis are finally smelling South Africa in the air, and this is making them tremble. Despite the misleading appearances of initial tribal banding together "against the world," or what a US commentator called in a different context, "circling the wagons," increasingly, Jewish Israelis are debating why "everyone" is against Israel, or so it seems to them. Whether the impact of their debates and growing protests will out pace the inevitable -- and quite evident -- intensification of Israel's isolation and pariah status remains to be seen.
Disturbing signs are ominous. On November 8, Israel demolished and ransacked a Negev Bedouin Arab mosque in Rahat, removing it for Jewish development. Professor Yousef Salamah called it "a criminal act," done on the pretext that it was unlicensed.
"These are not new acts but were preceded by many incidents and attacks, when the Israeli authorities demolished dozens of mosques inside Israel, turning some into museums, barns, restaurants, synagogues and parking lots."
Five Bedouins, Israeli citizens, were arrested for protesting. Others were attacked. On November 8, Haaretz writers Jack Khoury and Yanir Yagnar headlined, "Defiant Bedouin(s) rebuild Rahat mosque razed by state," saying: Along with a one-day general strike, residents laid a foundation to rebuild. Yusuf Abu Jama, local leader of the Northern Branch of the Islamic Movement said:
"If they continue to destroy it, we will rebuild the mosque over and over again."
Southern District commander Yohanan Danino said:
"The mosque was born in crime and as a symbol of the radicalization and escalation of the members of the Northern Branch of the Islamic Movement within Rahat...."
Look for another demolition and more confrontation, denying Israeli Arabs equal rights with Jews, but even theirs are eroding. Israel is now unsafe for anyone challenging state authority, no matter how repressive its policies. On November 8, Haaretz writer Noah Kosharek headlined, "Supreme Court okays Jewish-only buildings in Jaffa," saying:
The Court approved three apartment buildings solely for Jews in the mixed Ajami neighborhood, "even as it implied that such a project could constitute discrimination." Most modern states reject segregation out of hand. Israel practices it as policy.
On November 9, at 3:00AM, Israeli soldiers stormed Bil'in village, targeting two homes, looking for Ashraf al-Khatib, a wounded demonstrator, shot in the leg weeks earlier, protesting for village rights. In recent years, Bil'in has been repeatedly raided, its residents arrested for peacefully resisting occupation and Israel's Separation Wall, systematically destroying the village. On November 11, Haaretz writers Nir Hasson and Shlomo Papirblatt headlined, "Gang suspected of attacks on Arabs in Jerusalem," saying:
"Young (Jewish) men have reportedly been roaming in and around Independence Park seeking Arabs to attack, trying to identify them by their accent." Two already were assaulted. Also a Chilean tourist mistaken for an Arab. In July, another Arab was stabbed.
Other incidents occur regularly, too numerous to list, both in Israel and the Territories. Besides wars, repeated incursions, lawless land seizures, killings, arrests and torture, they include middle-of-the-night home raids, assaults against nonviolent protestors, farmers, fishermen, women and children. Their crime: being Muslims in a Jewish state or on land Israel occupies, systematically stealing it dunum by dunum as well as depriving non-Jewish citizens of their rights. Where this ends worries many, including Uri Avnery, founder of Gush Shalom, "The Peace Bloc." In his October 25 article titled, "Weimar in Jerusalem: Israel on the Footsteps of Nazi Germany," he said as a young boy he witnessed firsthand:
"the collapse of German democracy and the ascent of the Nazis to power. The pictures are engraved in my memory - the election campaigns following each other, the uniforms in the street, the debates around the table, the teacher who greeted us for the first time with "Heil Hitler."
For Averny and many others, the
"all-important question in Israel with growing concern (is whether) the Israeli republic is collapsing. For the first time, this question is being asked in all seriousness."
Netanyahu's Welfare Minister, Yirzhak Herzog, worries that
"fascism is touching the margins of our society." He's wrong, says Averny. It's "not only touching the margins, it is touching the government in which he is serving, and the Knesset, of which he is a member."
Almost daily, Knesset members introduce new repressive bills, including the Law of Citizenship's Loyalty Oath amendment, requiring non-Jews to pledge it to "the State of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state." Otherwise, their citizenship and residency rights may be revoked. Perhaps also their freedom. Dozens of other repressive laws have been tabled. Many more are coming, measures real democracies won't tolerate. Avery said MKs have been "act(ing) like sharks in a feeding frenzy," competing "to see who can devise the most racist bill." It's not a uniquely Israeli phenomenon. It's surfacing across Europe and in America, its recent election sending a legion of extremist bigots to Congress, joining many others already there from both parties. Avery "always worried that (Israeli) democracy was hanging by a thin thread, that we must be on our guard every hour, every minute." As in America, it's now "facing an unprecedented test." Failing it leaves the door open to fascism. Again, like in America, the choice is "peace or eternal war" and accompanying repression. Peace requires equal rights for non-Jewish citizens and Palestinians, notions Israel won't countenance. As a result, Avery worries that "For the second time in my life, I may have to witness the collapse of a republic." Only an aroused public can stop it. In a November 9 Haaretz op-ed, Haifa University Professor Daniel Gutwein headlined, "Israel needs a Leftist revolution to stop the fascism," saying:
"A social revolution on the left is the necessary condition to stop (what's) seep(ing) into the halls of government..."
The Loyalty Oath, repressive occupation, and denial of non-Jewish citizens equal rights are most evident, but also much more. Eroding social benefits and growing privatizations for example. Combined they show "the transformation of fascism from scattered, isolated 'weeds' to an official policy." Neoliberal privatizations turn "social services from citizens' rights into merchandise which is gained via the merchandising of citizenship itself," beside matters of equity and affordability. Gutwein calls fascism "occupation by other means, and as such it imports the logic of occupation rule into Israel itself....At the same time, in light of deepened social gaps caused by privitization(s), fascism becomes an internal Israeli mechanism of compensation, through which the privatizing regime strengthens its hold on society." Change requires a "social-democratic revolution on the left" in time to stop it, one nowhere so far in sight. Haaretz writer Gideon Levy worries about issues reflecting growing repression and fascism, including in his November 7 article titled, "Dear American Jews, if you love Israel - criticize it," saying:
Criticize its "policy of force and occupation....someone has to wean it from these addictions. Like any other junkie, it is incapable of helping itself. Thus the job falls to you" and Israeli citizens. Israel's "arrogant behavior (makes) it despised....The town is burning....Israeli democracy is being torn apart; soon, it will no longer be possible to talk about 'the only democracy in the Middle East,' " no matter how nonsensical it is now. Act, "Criticize it as it deserves." It's the first step to change.
In a September interview, Levy commented on the political climate in Israel and prospects for peace, saying that recent events showed that
"nothing was left of the Israeli Left, except for some small, devoted, courageous groups which are still active. Unfortunately, they are not very influential."
Why so? Because people believe "there is no 'Palestinian partner' " when, in fact, the opposite is true. It made him doubt the existence of Israeli leftists. His main concern is extremist governance under Netanyahu and a supportive Knesset.
"(I)t's going to destroy Israel from within. I think that Israeli democracy is now facing its biggest challenge ever: a systematic campaign against any kind of alternative voices." So far, parts of the media operate freely, "because most of (it) collaborate(s) with the occupation project, and those of us - the very few - who go against the stream, until now we were untouched, but this I don't take for granted."
Repressive laws have targeted human rights NGOs and dissident academics. Conditions are "deteriorating day after day. It might touch me personally very soon but so far" not yet. Yedioth Ahronoth, Israel's largest circulation daily, fired writer B. Michael (Michael Berizon), known for attacking Israeli politicians and the occupation satirically. An epilogue in his last column said he'd "been fired. Good-bye." Without explaining further, his political views left him vulnerable. For example, his denunciation of Cast Lead, saying:
"There it is again, the cyclical 'deja vu war.' The same ceremonial bloodshed that again is being poured into the hot lava that has been leading the entire region to misery for dozens of years now."
With that type writing, it's surprising Yediot Achronot kept him on for 15 years, calling Gaza "a giant prison," saying years of Israeli aggression reflects "one great butcher shop," and much more just as harsh. Few mainstream journalists anywhere approach that honesty or courage. Levy does it for Haaretz, calling it Israel's most influential paper because it impacts politicians, business leaders, and other parts of the media, though less now than earlier. It's also read globally, "but (don't) exaggerate" its importance. Calling Israel a racist state, Levy said his views hardened over time.
"(T)he more Israel becomes nationalistic, the more the government becomes violent and aggressive," the more radicalized he's become. In his recent book, "The Punishment of Gaza," he called Cast Lead a "wild onslaught upon the most helpless population in the world."
As for the current round of peace talks, he unequivocally negative, seeing no hope in them whatever, calling them
"another scene in this ongoing masquerade, another photo opportunity." Their failure, in fact, may "lead to another bloodshed." Commenting on how he persists, he responded saying "do I have a choice? I can't change my mind. I will not stop raising my voice as long as (I) have a platform" to do it.
Israel's lurch toward Gomorrah jeopardizes everyone challenging state policy, especially vocal journalists, academics, and human rights activists, the very people authorities want silenced.
Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.
Ook in Nederland hebben/hadden [?] we een tak van de Joodse Defensieliga, die zich in 2003 lieerde met Nieuw Rechts van Michiel Smit en andere Fortuynvrienden.
11 september 2003 in Rotterdam met linksonder op de foto NNP'ers en Nieuw Rechts. Rechtsboven de JDL in bomberjacks en baretten
Als klap op de vuurpijl wordt de verzamelplaats voor de 11 september herdenking beveiligd door een groepje stoere mannen van de Joodse Defensie Liga (JDL). Michiel Smit ziet in deze radicale Joodse organisatie een geestverwant tegen de moslims. Kennelijk heeft Nieuw Rechts hun hulp ingeroepen om zich tegen politieke tegenstanders te beveiligen. Dit resulteerde in de absurde situatie dat Philip Awuy met zijn Nederlandse afdeling van de JDL in camouflagebroeken een groepje rechts-extremisten staat te beveiligen. Met onder hen diverse fascisten die zich in het verleden anti-semitisch uit hebben gelaten. Tel dat op bij een coalitie tussen Fortuynisten en het NNP-kader en deze herdenking scoort hoog in één van de meest bizarre demonstraties van de afgelopen jaren.
Later verklaart NNP-secretaris Paul Peters op een internetforum nog dat zijn partij niet zo blij was met komst van de JDL: “De herdenking werd georganiseerd door een groepje burgers uit Rotterdam. Die nodigde de NNP uit. Is de NNP dan verantwoordelijk als er een groepje joden opkomt dagen?” Peters was in april 2001 mede-verantwoordelijk voor het vernielen van een joodse begraafplaats in Oosterhout met leuzen als ‘Jude Raus‘. Hij kreeg hiervoor een maand celstraf. Desondanks handhaaft de partij hem als landelijk secretaris. Kennelijk vormt dit alles voor de Jonge Fortuynisten, de groep ‘Vrienden van Pim Fortuyn’ en een aantal individuele Fortuynisten geen beletsel om politieke acties met de NNP te voeren. Ook worden ze niet teruggefloten door het LPF-bestuur.
Later this year, 21-year-old Ephraim Khantsis will pack a couple of suitcases, say good-bye to his mother, leave his home in Brooklyn, and move to Israel. On arrival in Jerusalem he will enroll in a yeshiva, or religious school, that is popular with Americans. After a few months he will make his way north, to a place this young American feels is his true home: the Jewish settlement of Kfar Tapuach.
Perched on a hill just off Route 60, the main north-south road in the occupied West Bank, Kfar Tapuach is known as a particularly hard-line community. Home to about 600 people, the settlement has a history of welcoming American immigrants whose beliefs and acts raise alarms among Israeli intelligence agencies, leading them to monitor it as a haven for suspected terrorists.
Khantsis, who is in the process of applying for Israeli citizenship, will fit right in. Like the assassinated Brooklyn-born rabbi Meir Kahane, the man some in Kfar Tapuach consider their spiritual leader, Khantsis believes that all Arabs and Palestinians should be forcibly removed from territory controlled by Israel, including the West Bank.
“It’s the most humane way to solve the situation,” Khantsis—who has just graduated from Stony Brook University, on Long Island, with a degree in computer science—says, sipping a soda in an Israeli-run kosher pizzeria in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, this past June. He acknowledges that he is advocating ethnic cleansing.
While such a view is unlikely to become mainstream in Israel, there’s a pledge Khantsis makes, one that it’s also possible to hear from Americans already living in settlements, that might be more troubling to Israeli authorities: If the Israeli military comes to remove him from his new home—and many in Israel believe such an event is likely—he will not leave peacefully.
“I would fight against it with all my strength, and I would leave nothing back to try to stop it,” says the slim young man wearing a black yarmulke. He speaks so softly that at times it’s hard to hear him. “If they use violence, then we’re justified doing the same.”
Would that include using a gun?
“Yes,” he says.
Is he absolutely sure that he would use a weapon against Israeli soldiers?
“That’s right. I strongly hope it would never come to that,” he says. But “if they’re already shooting us, I’d have no option. I don’t think the right thing to do is turn the other cheek. It’s not a Jewish thing to do.”
After Israel won the Six-Day War in 1967 and took control of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank—Palestinian areas that had been held by Egypt and Jordan, respectively—religious and right-wing Jews quickly began pushing for the establishment of communities on what they considered land promised them by God. At first the Israeli government refused to let them build on occupied territory, but as the years went by, homes and businesses started popping up.
In May of this year, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made it clear that the Obama administration would have little tolerance for the growth of existing settlements. After Obama’s position was made public, extremist settlers rapidly erected new buildings and repaired outposts. In one location they built a wooden structure they named an “Obama hut.” Around the same time, an Israeli newspaper reported that the senior Israeli army officer in the West Bank had received threatening letters, apparently from radicals trying to dissuade the military from evicting settlers from their homes.
An unknown number of North Americans have settled in the West Bank and Jerusalem since Israel occupied the territories in 1967 and retain dual citizenship. Middle East historian Juan Cole wrote that an estimated one third of West Bank settlers are "Americans." (Bron: Bingo! U.S. donors fund illegal Jewish settlements)
There are now more than a quarter of a million Jewish settlers living among almost 2.5 million Palestinians in the West Bank—and many of the radicals resisting Obama’s wishes are American. The approximately 100,000 U.S. immigrants in the West Bank and Israel have been influential from the beginning of the movement, and many of them have been among the most extreme of the pioneers: Kahane founded a political party that was deemed racist and banned from the Knesset before he was assassinated in Manhattan in 1990; Brooklyn-born Baruch Goldstein shot dead 29 Palestinians in Hebron in 1994; and a group of settlers in Hebron, whose spokesman is New Jersey–born David Wilder, was involved in a violent confrontation with the Israeli military last year.
While Kahane’s original followers and other American extremists continue to face arrest and monitoring by Israeli security services, it is the young people—many of them, like Ephraim Khantsis, American—in the settler movement who are now the Israeli government’s primary concern. This new generation of hard-liners differs from the previous one in a crucial way—its members are profoundly alienated from the secular Israeli state.
This increasing radicalization is a response to the forced removal of Jews from West Bank settlements that the Israeli government considers obstacles to peace. In August 2005, the government of Ariel Sharon, once the great champion of the settlement movement, evacuated thousands of people from the Gaza Strip. The settlers generally did not use violence against the soldiers and police officers who came to evict them, tearfully pleading with—and even hugging—them instead. But that strategy failed. Some extremist settlers said they would never leave so easily again. True to their word, they put up a fight when the army tried to evacuate a settlement at Amona, in the West Bank, in February 2006—more than 300 people were injured.
Nowadays the talk is that the next evacuation will lead to even more violence. “I can tell you one thing,” says Yedidya Slonim, a 16-year-old Australian immigrant who lives in a sizable cave on a hill in the West Bank that functions as an illegal outpost called Shvut Ami. “What happened over there when the people hugged the policemen—that ain’t going to happen.”
“A lot of kids have got no authority, just them and God out there on the hills,” says Yekutiel Ben Yaakov, 50, formerly of Queens, New York, who now lives in Kfar Tapuach and has provided guard dogs for some of the young extremists who set up illegal hilltop camps.
How far the youth of the West Bank are prepared to go to stay on what much of the world considers occupied land is a question that is increasingly haunting a country surrounded by enemies. In November 2008, Yuval Diskin, the head of Israel’s internal intelligence service, told the Israeli cabinet that future evacuations would involve “a very high willingness among this public to use violence—not just stones but live weapons—in order to prevent or halt a diplomatic process.”
Making peace with Israel’s traditional enemies may have to wait until the country has dealt with the enemy within.
West Bank settlers clashing with Palestinians who were evicted from their Sheikh Jarrah, East Jerusalem, February 15, 2010. (TIME, Muammar Awad/AP)
Aaron Gottlieb is 15 years old, speaks in a rapid-fire American accent, and has yet to have his first shave. He does not look like much of a threat, but he is part of a group that has many in Israel deeply worried: the Hilltop Youth.
Gottlieb grew up in New Rochelle, New York, and immigrated to Israel with his family when he was 9. Whenever he can get away from his yeshiva in the town of Petah Tikva, he spends the night, along with Yedidya Slonim and other teenage boys, at Shvut Ami. Their mission is simple: to establish Jewish homes on as many strategic hilltops as possible throughout the West Bank. According to Peace Now, an Israeli pacifist organization, there are about 100 such outposts. The mainstream settler movement has largely disowned this radical wing and its frequently violent acts.
“I very much believe I’m a threat to my own government,” Gottlieb says. “There will be no giving up.”
Shvut Ami sits close to Route 60, near the hard-line settlement of Qedumim, one of the first to be established in the West Bank. Israeli police have tried numerous times to remove the teenagers—arresting some of them and destroying their temporary structures—but the kids keep coming back. In four months over the winter, they used picks and shovels to dig the cave into the hillside. To get rid of it, police will need to use dynamite. The boys live there among dusty blankets and pillows, a gas heater keeping them warm at night while they study the Torah.
Many saw the strong resistance put up by the Hilltop Youth and others at Amona as a harbinger of battles to come. “When bricks are thrown at the heads of soldiers and police officers, a line has clearly been crossed,” said then acting prime minister Ehud Olmert.
Like most other settlers, Gottlieb doesn’t call the people in the nearby town “Palestinians.” That would imply that there was a country called Palestine. Sometimes they’re “Arabs,” but mostly he calls them “terrorists.” Gottlieb says he’s not afraid. “God’s with me,” he says. “This land has been ours forever.”
Gottlieb’s belief in his right to live in the West Bank despite international condemnation and the laws of his own government is total. There is very little of America left in him. He goes back sometimes to visit his grandmother, who lives on Park Avenue in New York City, but he dislikes what he sees as the sinfulness of the United States.
“How much are you prepared to sacrifice?” I ask.
“For the land of Israel?” He taps his chest where his heart is.
“Your life?”
“Mm-hm,” he says.
The Palestinian town of Jenin lies about 15 miles north on Route 60 from the cave at Shvut Ami. It was at the refugee camp here, in April 2002, that militant leader Zakaria Zubeidi helped direct a brutal nine-day fight against the Israeli army, during which 23 Israeli soldiers and up to 56 Palestinians, including some civilians, died. Zubeidi survived, escaped capture, and spent the next five years on the lam, avoiding Israeli attempts to assassinate him—he was shot 11 times. In 2007, he and 178 members of the Palestinian political party Fatah, including members of his militia, the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade, were granted amnesty by the Israeli government as part of a deal intended to strengthen Fatah. Zubeidi committed himself to working for peace.
But given the recent rise in settler violence, Zubeidi, 33, has begun to lose faith in the possibility of avoiding more bloodshed.
“The next war is with the settlers,” he says, sitting in a room at Jenin’s Freedom Theatre complex this past January. He works at the theater, which was founded in memory of an Israeli woman in order to provide a creative outlet for young Palestinians. “I feel it will be very soon. I would not give it more than a year.”
Zubeidi’s body bears the marks of his experiences during the second Intifada. His face and eyes are scarred from a bomb that blew up as he was handling it. It gives him the look of a crudely tattooed Maori warrior.
I ask him if he and Jenin’s other militants are making specific preparations for war with the settlers.
“Of course we are preparing,” he says. “It will be dependent on individuals—to bomb themselves [as suicide bombers]. And some small guns. If the guns are not available and explosives are not available, we have experience using stones.”
During the six years of the first Intifada, Palestinian protesters, many of them young boys, would line up against Israeli soldiers and tanks, raining stones on the well-armed troops.
“I don’t fight in the shadows,” Zubeidi says. “I am in the right. They are taking my freedom. They are oppressing me. They are taking our land. We, the Palestinian people, are fighting for our freedom.”
Since I met Zubeidi, that fight has quietly but brutally intensified, and there have been several violent attacks on settlers in the West Bank. On April 2, a Palestinian was accused of using an ax to kill a 13-year-old boy in the settlement of Bat Ayin. A 7-year-old boy, whose father has been in prison for seven years for planning to bomb a Palestinian girls’ school, was also injured.
Security sources told the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz that they feared Jewish extremists would seek revenge for the attacks. In a vicious cycle of violence that appears to be quickening, radicals on one side are breeding radicals on the other.
Yehuda Goldberg was 16 years old when Israeli intelligence agents came for him. “They surrounded the house and knocked on the door—because they don’t want you to jump out of the window,” says Goldberg, 20, who has a pensive stare and wears the large yarmulke of the youth movement. “It was four or five in the morning. They came also four or five into the house.”
The Israeli officers, from the Shin Bet—Israel’s FBI—searched Goldberg’s bedroom at his family’s house in Kfar Tapuach. They found ammunition, explosives, and knives. He was given a suspended sentence and community service. Goldberg’s father, Lenny—who emigrated from New York City in 1985—is proud of his son. “He was going hand-to-hand combat with soldiers,” he says. “Our generation used to give cups of coffee to soldiers. The police found weapons in his room.”
Goldberg doesn’t want to reveal what he intended to do with the ammunition and weapons. “It’s not weird to have such things in our area,” he says. “Legally, it’s not allowed. But every kid can get ammunition.”
Soon after that arrest, the Shin Bet came to get Goldberg again, accusing him of involvement with a 19-year-old friend who, while awol from the Israeli army, had killed four Israeli Arabs and wounded nearly two dozen with his army-issue M-16 rifle.
The Shin Bet “had information that he was my friend,” Goldberg explains, sitting on a plastic garden chair outside his home while his mother prepares Shabbat dinner. “They arrested me and two other kids. They held me in a chamber for four days, with the light always on. I don’t have bathroom. They close my eyes with black glasses, put me in a chair with my hands behind my back.”
Eventually the Shin Bet released Goldberg and he received a letter saying the case was closed.
Lenny and his wife and their eight children seem to be a welcoming, loving family. Lenny rents out inflatable castles and swimming pools in the summer months. It’s quite a change from his life in New York, where he worked at J. Walter Thompson, a major advertising agency. His children don’t bear much resemblance to the American kid Lenny once was. “They have more chutzpah. They’re more brazen,” he says.
When I meet the Goldberg family in January, Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza is reaching its end, and Lenny—who is not legally permitted to carry a weapon after a mid-nineties crackdown on Kahane supporters—is frustrated with the military’s strategy, which involves sending soldiers into Gaza. Like many other hard-line settlers, Lenny is not hesitant to express views that most Israelis would consider abhorrent.
“I want them to bomb all of Gaza, even if they kill all the civilians,” Lenny says. “You have to firebomb all of Gaza and not let one Jew get hurt.”
“We can erase them in no time,” Yehuda says of the Palestinians. “But the government won’t let us do it.”
“How does it feel to meet a Jewish terrorist?” asks Yekutiel Ben Yaakov, the guard-dog trainer, laughing, when we meet at a café in the large settlement of Ariel.
“We’re heading toward a situation where in all likelihood there will be bloodshed between Jews,” he says. “I say this with a heavy heart.”
Would this mean settlers shooting at Israeli soldiers?
“I think we’ll see more innovative forms of Jewish resistance,” says Ben Yaakov, who is friends with Ephraim Khantsis and encouraged the young Brooklyn student to move to Kfar Tapuach. “We may see guys that themselves were colonels in the Israeli army or engineers helping the kids create rockets to shoot into Arab villages.”
The point of attacking Palestinians at a time when Israeli soldiers are coming to expel Jews from settlements would be, Ben Yaakov says, to distract and divert the Israeli army and to “change the balance”—to alter the dynamic of the conflict. That would also reduce the chances, he says, of Jews’ killing Jews.
In recent months, this strategy has been adopted by radical settlers around the West Bank. They call it the “Price Tag” campaign: The price for the Israeli government will be high. So far, settlers have blocked roads, attacked Palestinians with guns—during my visit a settler shot dead a Palestinian who was allegedly throwing stones at his car—and other weapons, daubed graffiti on at least one mosque, and battled soldiers by hand and with stones.
Pride of the nation: the Israeli bulldozer.
What Ben Yaakov sees happening is a step up from that kind of resistance.
It would include planting bombs in Palestinian villages. The Dome of the Rock, one of Islam’s holiest sites, might also be a target for Jewish terrorists, as it was in the early 1980s for a group named the Jewish Underground.
There could, perhaps, be no more provocative action for extremist settlers to take than an attack on the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa mosque, which sit in the old city of Jerusalem, on top of the holiest site in Judaism, the Temple Mount.
Back in the Brooklyn pizzeria, when talk turns to the Temple Mount, Khantsis’ conviction is resolute. “I think it’s one of the greatest insults to put their place on our holy site,” he says. “I think the mosques should be removed. At best they should be peacefully removed and built elsewhere.”
The other option, he says, is that they should be “violently disassembled.”
That is a nightmare scenario for the Israeli government—an act of destruction that would make all-out war almost inevitable.
And it’s a nightmare that has roots that stretch all the way from the hilltops of the West Bank to the quiet streets of the United States.
In de zogeheten 'Opinie'-sectie van de Volkskrant krijgen extremisten, en oorlogsmisdadigers en andere criminelen ruim baan om hun meestal weerzinwekkende denkbeelden verspreiden. Maar daar verontwaardigd op reageren mag niet, dus heb ik een IP-ban gekregen. Sterker nog, de krant heeft in één keer overal al mijn reacties, tot meer dan 3 jaar terug, verwijderd. De racistische haat-diarrhee van andere reageerders blijft uiteraard staan, en ook hun reacties op mijn (verwijderde) reacties.
Yochanan Visser, kolonist te Efrat, aannemer (sic) en bezettingsideoloog
Zo stuitte ik gisteren op een "opinie" van de Nederlandse kolonist Yochanan Visser, die in de joodse nederzetting Efrat woont op de Westelijke Jordaanoever. Hiero.
Vrijetijdsbesteding van de inwoners van Efrat. Op de website van Efrat staat dat dit een "Cursus Omgaan met Bewoners" betreft.
Efrat staat bekend om de soms gewelddadige acties van haar militante bewoners tegen de omwonende Palestijnen, van wie ze in 1983 hun land gestolen hebben. Visser beweert echter regelmatig Palestijnse vrienden te hebben - voor wie zijn zelfgekozen joodse ghetto verboden gebied is - die toevallig allemaal het liefst zien dat de Westelijke Jordaanoever permanent bezet blijft door het geweldige Israël, omdat hun mede-Palestijnen, om kort te gaan, niet deugen. In zijn "opinie" artikel dus weer de gebruikelijke nonsens die de Volkskrant helpt verspreiden.
Extremisten als Yochanan Visser refereren altijd aan andere extremisten om de schijn van waarheid te suggereren. En helemaal scoren is het natuurlijk wanneer hij een collaborateur (een bekend fenomeen bij bezettingen) naar voren kan schuiven. In dit propagandavod is dat "de bekende Palestijnse journalist" Khaled Abu Toameh, waar ik nog nooit van heb gehoord had. Achtergrondcheck: werkt voor rechtse en pro-Israël media, pist altijd op Palestijnen en portretteert ze als gewetenloze barbaren en leugenaars, en is aangesloten bij de rechtse Amerikaanse think tank het Hudson Institute - hoewel Visser die connectie in zijn vodje wijselijk verzwijgt. Wijselijk, omdat het Hudson Institute een neoconservatieve pro-Israël organisatie is die gespecialiseerd is in (militaire) regeringsadviezen voor, om het maar even populair te zeggen, het Ausradieren van alles en iedereen die kritiek op Israêl durft te hebben. Daarnaast financiert het zionistische en kolonistenorganisaties in Israël. U begrijpt nu waarom ik moeiteloos het beladen woord "collaborateur" gebruik bij voornoemde Palestijnse journalist.
Ook aan de kinderen in Efrat wordt gezellig familievermaak geboden. Kunnen ze oorlogje mee spelen met hun Palestijnse buurkinderen? Nou nee, even wachten tot ze wat ouder zijn, als ze in dienst moeten. (On the day Israel celebrates its founding, the army puts on shows of military hardware at various sites. This row of machine-guns was available to bystanders in the settlement of Efrat in the Palestinian West Bank, just south of Bethlehem)
Anyway, Yochanan Visser mag zijn dingetje weer doen in de Volkskrant. Maar wat schetst mijn verbazing? Onder zijn dingetje staat vermeldt:
Dit was echt de limit. Ik schreef een verontwaardigde reactie met veel echte informatie en de groeten. De volgende morgen was mijn reactie verdwenen en had ik ook een IP-ban. Blijkbaar teveel informatie voor de tere zieltjes van de vaste moslimhaters die de opiniepaginagina's nog steeds vrijuit mogen volspuiten met hun weerzinwekkende propaganda-diarrhee.
Jewish settlers build a [nep] cement foundation for a [nep] synagogue as a symbolic act of protest against the Israeli government decision to freeze construction of private homes in settlements, in the West Bank Jewish settlement of Efrat south of Jerusalem, Wednesday, Dec. 2, 2009. Is dat Yochanan Visser niet, met zijn Joods Nationaal Fonds-petje?
Ook andere kritische reacties met informatie over Visser blijken verwijderd
Voilà. Een nieuwe regering, een nieuwe Volkskrant. Echte informatie niet gewenst. Ik parafraseer Danny 'The News Dissector' Schecter: hoe meer we de krant lezen, hoe minder we weten. En vanaf heden ligt de Westelijke Jordaanoever dus in Israël, volgens de redactie. Hier leest u kritische geluiden van andere reageerders over Yochanan Visser die ook verwijderd blijken te zijn. Kritiek op Israël en zijn handlangers als Visser bestaat dus niet. En dat de Volkrant hun spel meespeelt, mag niemand weten. Een praktijk bekend van het voormalige Oostblok.
De veel gelauwerde en onafhankelijke journalist John Pilger vertelde hierover:
"Ironically, I began to understand how censorship worked in so-called free societies when I reported from totalitarian societies. During the 1970s I filmed secretly in Czechoslovakia, then a Stalinist dictatorship. I interviewed members of the dissident group Charter 77, including the novelist Zdener Urbanek, and this is what he told me. 'In dictatorships we are more fortunate that you in the West in one respect. We believe nothing of what we read in the newspapers and nothing of what we watch on television, because we know its propaganda and lies. Unlike you in the West. We’ve learned to look behind the propaganda and to read between the lines, and unlike you, we know that the real truth is always subversive.'" (bron: transcriptie van een lezing in 2007)
*) Onderschriften bij "opinies" van niet in Israel wonende Yochanan Visser:
03-10-2010: "Yochanan Visser is onderzoeker Missing Peace Informatie in Jerzualem"
01-04-2009: "Yochanan Visser werkt vYochanan Visser werkt voor Israel Facts monitorgroep in Israël"
01-07-2010: "Yochanan Visser is onderzoeker van Missing Peace in Israël"
19-05-2009: "Yochanan Visser is manager Israel Facts Monitorgroep, Israël"
(vervolg) In Umm el-Fahm zette Israël vandaag haar Darth Vader leger in tegen protesterende Palestijnse Israëli's, en om een mars van joodse fascisten door de Arabische stad te beschermen.
UPDATE In tegenstelling tot eerdere berichten over de "provocaties" van de "stenengooiende" Palestijnen, waar de Israëlische politie op "reageerde", zoals we voorspelbaar in Elsevier kunnen lezen, schreven kranten als Yediot Ahronot en de Jerusalem Post dat de politie al begon met het afschieten van stun grenades op de protesteerders nog voordat de joodse extremisten gearriveerd waren, "to disperse the crowd" om ruimte te maken voor de extremisten.
Israeli undercover policemen detain Israeli-Arab protestors during clashes in Umm El-Fahm, Israel, Wednesday, Oct. 27, 2010
Israeli Arabs run from tear gas and stun grenades during clashes with Israeli riot police, not seen, in the northern Israeli town of Umm el-Fahm, Wednesday, Oct. 27, 2010.
A Jewish extremist shouts slogans towards Israeli Arabs, not seen, in the northern Arab Israeli town of Umm el-Fahm, Israel, Wednesday, Oct. 27, 2010.
Aanhangers van de Amerikaanse rabbijn Meir Kahane, oprichter van de Jewish Defense League (JDL), en van de in 1994 door Israël wegens racisme verboden Kach partij, hebben gisteren gemeld dat ze een eventuele Palestijnse staat van de kaart willen vegen.
Het 'Kahanisme' wordt over het algemeen, ook in Israël zelf, gezien als de Israëlische variant op het fascisme. De hypocrisie is groot omdat zijn aanhangers gewoon onder andere partijnamen in het Israëlische parlement, en nu ook in de regering, zitten. Onze hypocrisie is het ook, omdat wij democratische Westerlingen Israël desondanks blijven betitelen als "de enige democratie in het Midden-Oosten".
De Jewish Defense League was in 1985 volgens de FBI "the second most active terrorist group" in de VS, verantwoordelijk voor 37 aanslagen tussen 1977 en 1984 (Orange County Register, Nov. 19, 1985).
Jewish Defense League youth group at a midtown Manhattan demonstration on January 19, 1975.
De JDL gebruikt de holocaust als inspiratiebron.
De terroristische beweging steunt Geert Wilders.
Zoals gewoonlijk worden berichten over joods racisme door de Nederlandse pers verzwegen, omdat het niet past in het propagandaplaatje van het democratische en vredelievende Israël.
Momenteel neemt de spanning toe in de stad Umm el-Fahm, gelegen in Israël, maar vrijwel uitsluitend bevolkt door Arabische Israëli's. Israël heeft de stad volgezet met honderden politieagenten nadat het Israëlische hooggerechtshof een mars van de fascisten door de stad heeft goedgekeurd. Zoals gewoonlijk reageert de Israëlische politie met geweld op Palestijnse demonstranten en stenengooiers. In werkelijkheid staan ze daar om de fascisten en hun 'democratische recht' om te demonstreren te beschermen. Nadat de fascisten zich terug hadden getrokken in hun bussen, bestormde de Israëlische politie vanmorgen de Palestijnse demonstranten.
De joodse fascisten hebben gisteren te kennen gegeven een eventuele Palestijnse staat van de kaart te vegen. Ik citeer uit de rechtse Israëlische krant Yediot Ahronot:
During memorial service on 20th anniversary of Kach leader's death, Rabbi Yisrael Ariel says, 'If Ishmael state is established - we will destroy it. Suspected 'Jewish terrorist' Haim Pearlman also participates. His wife declares: 'Kahane' is not a dirty word
Hundreds of Land of Israel Movement activists and supporters of the radical movement Kach held a memorial service on Tuesday to mark 20 years since Rabbi Meir Kahane's assassination.
Kach activist Haim Pearlman, currently under house arrest after his suspected killing of four Arabs in the 1990s, was also among the participants. The wife of the 'Jewish terrorist,' Keren Pearlman, told Ynet: "Today everybody knows that 'Kahane' is not a dirty word."
The assembly was held at the Ramada Renaissance Hotel in Jerusalem, where shirts, books and other items were sold to the crowd. Speeches of the late Kahane were screened as well, while protestors went wild, clapping every time he said "Arabs out."
The founder of the Temple Institute, Rabbi Yisrael Ariel, said during the assembly: "Leaders who have ruined our country always tell us that no one can teach them how to love Israel. But this love they are referring to makes them establish an Ishmael state in Israel. If, G-d forbid, an Ishmael state will be built, we will destroy it." The crowd kept cheering him on enthusiastically.
Foto's uit Umm el-Fahm van een protest tegen eenzelde mars in maart 2009, waarover de rechter toen nog besloot dat die alleen in de buitenwijken gehouden mocht worden. Toen werden er meer dan 2500 politieagenten ingezet (onderschriften: BBC News):
Israeli-Arab protesters have clashed with police as Jewish-Israeli right-wingers held a march in the majority-Arab town of Umm al-Fahm in northern Israel.
Police declared an Israeli-Arab counter-demonstration illegal and ordered the protesters to disperse.
Police used stun grenades and tear gas to break up the crowds of hundreds of Israeli-Arab protesters.
Israeli-Arabs hit back by throwing stones at police, as the demonstration descended into violence.
The trouble began during the march of about 100 far-right Israeli-Jewish activists through Umm al-Fahm.
About 2,500 police were deployed to protect the Jewish marchers, whom after several postponements the High Court allowed to march on the outskirts of Umm al-Fahm, but not in the centre.
One of the leaders of the march was Baruch Marzel, who led the anti-Arab Kach party that was banned in Israel in 1994.
Israeli-Arabs make up about a fifth of Israel's population and hold full Israeli citizenship, but face widely-documented discrimination.
Portret van de situatie in Umm el-Fahm, de joodse fascisten en ook de 'loyalty oath' (The Guardian, februari 2009):
Is Israël wel, zoals wordt beweerd, een "democratie", wanneer haar volksvertegenwoordigers dezelfde taal uitslaan in een proces waar wij over zeggen "dit nooit meer"? Wanneer een oppositie, mensen die ook democratie voor minderheden bepleiten, in het parlement "ziektekiemen" en "verraders die tegen elke prijs vervolgd moeten worden" worden genoemd? Waar hebben we dat soort taal eerder gehoord? Met zulke (PVV-)vrienden heeft Israël geen vijanden nodig. Het zal aan zichzelf ten onder gaan.
Population changes are transforming the country’s politics for the worse, argues Con Coughlin.
De column - zeg maar monoloog - van de Leuvense burgemeester, minister van staat en grand old man van het Vlaams socialisme verschijnt wekelijks op vrijdag. Louis Tobback spreekt, Walter Pauli tekent op.
Kijk, het gaat als volgt:
"Ik ben vierkant pro-Israël ('extreem-rechtse kolonistenleiders' - zoals de krant hen noemt - zijn voor mij mensen bij wie ik graag over de vloer kom)." (
Niet gericht tegen Israëli's, maar uitgevoerd door Israeli's tegen Palestijnen. En het leven van Palestijnen is volgens de dames en heren journalisten van onze zelfbenoemde kwaliteitspers zo onbelangrijk, dat het niet eens nieuws is. Was het omgekeerde het geval, dan las je dagenlang vette koppen in de krant.
Via 
“It’s the most humane way to solve the situation,” Khantsis—who has just graduated from Stony Brook University, on Long Island, with a degree in computer science—says, sipping a soda in an Israeli-run kosher pizzeria in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, this past June. He acknowledges that he is advocating ethnic cleansing.
(
Aanhangers van de Amerikaanse rabbijn Meir Kahane, oprichter van de Jewish Defense League (JDL), en van de in 1994 door Israël wegens racisme verboden Kach partij, hebben gisteren gemeld dat ze een eventuele Palestijnse staat van de kaart willen vegen.
