NOVANEWS
Posted by: Sammi Ibrahem
Chair of West Midland PSC
Dear Friends,
Just 5 items below. The most exciting of these is the first one: Pete Seeger has finally understood why he should support bds and shun the JNF. That is something! I was so disappointed when he–whom I much respected, and whose music I loved—decided (notwithstanding attempts to convince him not to) to Israel to a festival. Now he has at last seen the light.
Item 2 is Yesh Gvul’s response to yesterday’s panel decision not to charge or punish anyone implicated in the killing of 15 people, only one of whom was the target of a one-ton bomb.
Item 3 is a racist demand to fire an Israeli citizen who happens to be an Arab, and a settlement leader’s refusal to do so.
Item 4 is likewise about racism, this time, though, between non-religious and ultra-religious Jews.
Item 5 is a segment on how to convince Palestinians to collaborate. It is in mahsanmilim www.mahsanmilim.com
All the best,
Dorothy
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1. February 28 2011
Independent commentary from Israel & the Palestinian territoriesCategories
News Analysis Life Images Activism Voices
Breaking: Pete Seeger endorses BDS, shuns Jewish National Fund
http://972mag.com/breaking-pete-seeger-endorses-bds/
By +972 staff
Legendary folklorist, singer, songwriter and long time political activist Pete Seeger has officially announced his support for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions against Israel, a press release by the Israel Committee Against House Demolition (ICAHD) said today.
According to the press release, Seeger, 91, took part in a virtual rally sponsored by the Arava Institute in the Negev last November, despite requests from BDS groups not to participate. In January, he met with representatives of the BDS movement at his home, who elaborated on the relations between the Jewish National Fund and the Institute. After the meeting, Seeger said he now endorses the BDS approach.
Seeger’s decision appears to be at least partly linked by the actions of the Jewish National Fund in the unrecognized village of Al Araqib. The JNF insists on planting a new forest on the village site, despite the fact the project causes state authorities to evacuate and destroy the village time after time – 14 times and counting.
“I appeared on that virtual rally because for many years I’ve felt that people should talk with people they disagree with,” Seeger is quoted as having told the activists. ”But it ended up looking like I supported the Jewish National Fund. I misunderstood the leaders of the Arava Institute because I didn’t realize to what degree the Jewish National Fund was supporting Arava. Now that I know more, I support the BDS movement as much as I can.”
ICAHD coordinator Jeff Halper is quoted in the press release as saying that “Pete did extensive research on this. He read historical and current material and spoke to neighbors, friends, and three rabbis before making his decision to support the boycott movement against Israel.”
We attach the full ICAHD press release for our readers and we’ll try to reach Mr Seeger for comment later today.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
February 28- Folk music legend Pete Seeger has come out in support of the growing Palestinian movement for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel as a program for justice for Palestinians and a route to peace in the Middle East.
Seeger, 92, participated in last November’s online virtual rally “With Earth and Each Other,” sponsored by the Arava Institute, an Israeli environmental organization, and by the Friends of the Arava Institute. The Arava Institute counts among its close partners and major funders the Jewish National Fund, responsible since 1901 for securing land in Palestine for the use of Jews only while dispossessing Palestinians. Although groups in the worldwide BDS movement had requested he quit the event, Seeger felt that he could make a strong statement for peace and justice during the event.
During a January meeting at his Beacon, NY home with representatives from the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD) and Adalah-NY, Pete Seeger explained, “I appeared on that virtual rally because for many years I’ve felt that people should talk with people they disagree with. But it ended up looking like I supported the Jewish National Fund. I misunderstood the leaders of the Arava Institute because I didn’t realize to what degree the Jewish National Fund was supporting Arava. Now that I know more, I support the BDS movement as much as I can.”
Jeff Halper, the Coordinator of ICAHD, added, “Pete did extensive research on this. He read historical and current material and spoke to neighbors, friends, and three rabbis before making his decision to support the boycott movement against Israel.” Seeger has for some time given some of the royalties from his famous Bible-based song from the 1960s, “Turn, Turn, Turn,” to ICAHD for their work in rebuilding demolished homes and exposing Israel’s practice of pushing Palestinians in Israel off their land in favor of development of Jewish villages and cities.
The November virtual rally “With Earth and Each Other” was billed as an apolitical effort to bring Israelis and Palestinians together to work for the environment. Dave Lippman from Adalah-NY noted, “Arava’s online event obfuscated basic facts about Israel’s occupation and systematic seizure of land and water from Palestinians. Arava’s partner and funder, the JNF, is notorious for planting forests to hide Palestinian villages demolished by Israel in order to seize their land. Arava was revealed as a sterling practitioner of Israeli government efforts to ‘Rebrand Israel’ through greenwashing and the arts.”
Currently, the JNF is supporting an Israeli government effort to demolish the Bedouin village of Al-Araqib in order to plant trees from the JNF that were paid for by the international evangelical group GOD-TV. The Friends of the Arava Institute’s new board chair has recently published an op-ed in the Jerusalem Post that only cautiously questions some activities of the JNF, an organization whose very raison-d’etre is to take over land for Jews at the expense of the Palestinian Arab population.
Pete Seeger’s long-time colleague Theodore Bikel, an Israeli-American known for his life-long involvement with Israeli culture, recently supported the Israeli artists who have refused to perform in a new concert hall in Ariel, a large illegal Israeli settlement in the West Bank.
Seeger joins a growing roster of international performers who have declined to whitewash, greenwash, or in any way enable Israel’s colonial project, including Elvis Costello, Gil Scott-Heron, Roger Waters, Devendra Banhart, and the Pixies.
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2. February 28, 2011
Press Release
Yesh Gvul’s Response to the Findings of the Committee Appointed to Inspect the Shehade Assassination
“If I had known that there was an intelligence picture which was connected to acts I find illicit, I would not have attacked. I should not have attacked.[…] Once I take off, I become a war machine. Up to the point where I know I am doing something not good. Something not good is to just kill people”.
The navigator who dropped the bomb talking to youths, December 2010
On July 22th 2002, close to midnight, the Israeli air force dropped a one ton bomb on a residential building in the heart of Gaza city. Saleh Shehade, 14 Innocent civilians were killed in the attack, and 150 were wounded.
In 2003, Yesh Gvul, along with a gallery of public figures, petitioned the Israeli High Court of Justice (HCJ), asking it to instruct the authorities to initiate an investigation into the attack. The matter has been dragged, for years by the HCJ and for three additional years by an inspection committee devoid of significant authority. Yesh Gvul refused to appear before this committee, believing its conclusions to be fixed in advance. Its findings, published today, cast doubt on the state’s ability to investigate allegations of war crimes. The committee’s report is toothless, paving the road to similar military actions in the future. The report will not protect alleged war criminals from indictment.
On the one hand, the committee has found that an intelligence failure had occurred and erroneous discretion had been exercised. On the other hand, no one has been held accountable, and everyone can sleep well at night.The committee goes on to argue that lessons have been learned. Fact: During the 2nd Lebanon war, 7 innocent civilians were killed in Gaza when, again, a one ton bomb was dropped on their house during a failed attempt to assassinate Muhammed Def.
Yesh Gvul expects the State of Israel to assume responsibility. compensate the families of the victims, and assist in the medical care provided to civilians who have been wounded for no reason. We intend to continue our activity on this matter.
Thanks
Yesh Gvul
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3. Haaretz,
February 28, 2011
Settlement leader rejects demands to fire Israeli Arab bus driver
Residents of Gush Etzion settlement bloc demanded the bus driver be dismissed after word got out that he would work as a school-bus driver in the settlement of Elazar.
By Chaim Levinson
Residents of the Gush Etzion settlement bloc near Jerusalem are demanding a bus driver be dismissed because he is Arab. The head of the regional council has rejected the demand.
The driver, an Israeli Arab, is employed by the Gush Etzion Development Company. The company is an agency of the Gush Etzion Regional Council.
The development company operates a bus service for local school children and employs dozens of drivers. The employee in question was hired several months ago to perform a range of tasks, but word got out that he would work as a school-bus driver in the settlement of Elazar.
In a letter, Elazar residents objected to the Israeli Arab’s placement as a school-bus driver in the settlement.
Acknowledging that Jews and Arabs are “cousins,” the residents said that the regional council “apparently wants to save a few pennies at the expense of the safety of our children, or perhaps for another reason, regional peace, eating baklava in Hebron, hummus in Bethlehem or a real vision of the end of days.”
The residents stressed that the complaint was not motivated by anti-Arab racism but rather by what they said were legitimate concerns for their children’s safety. They said that if a member of the driver’s family were detained by the army, it was impossible to know how what the driver might do as a response.
The secretary of the settlement of Elazar, Yossi Kaufman, told Haaretz: “[Residents of] Elazar have approached the regional council and requested that the settlement’s buses not have an Arab driver. If army directives require a guard for an Arab entering the community, there can’t be an Arab school-bus driver. If someone wants to earn a living, be my guest. In fact, Arabs built the houses in Elazar. When it comes to children, that’s an issue of safety. We were notified that the driver is not Arab and that was the end of the story.”
At the same time, the right-wing Komemiyut movement wrote to the Gush Etzion Regional Council asking that the council stop employing Arabs. The movement’s board members include Rabbi Dov Lior of Kiryat Arba, against whom an arrest warrant was issued after he supported a book justifying the killing of non-Jews under some circumstances.
“In recent years we have been disabused of our innocence and know that to inherit the land, we must see to it that our enemies are not given a source of livelihood,” wrote Komemiyut chairman Moshe Cohen. “Whereas otherwise, heaven forbid, we will meet a fate similar to the fate of the Jews of Gaza, who were ultimately expelled from their land because they were left very few in number in the heart of a massive number of Arabs.”
In response to the objections, Shaul Goldstein, the head of the regional council, sent a letter to area residents. He said employing Israeli Arabs is not an “innovation” of the regional council, adding that 40 percent of public drivers in the country are Arab and that the situation is similar in the construction industry. He said hundreds of Arab workers come to Gush Etzion settlements every day to work.
“Arabs in the State of Israel are employed in every field: doctors, economists, gas-station attendants, construction workers, teachers, Knesset members … and drivers too,” he wrote.
Goldstein also noted that racist discrimination in employment is illegal and that as long as education encouraging manual labor is not being provided, “this is not the ideal reality, but that’s the situation.”
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4. Haaretz,
February 28, 2011
We should beware of the Jewish Brotherhood
Jews and Arabs still get along in Haifa. But if the ultra-Orthodox are taking over the city, the good relations between Jews and Arabs may also be at risk.
http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/opinion/we-should-beware-of-the-jewish-brotherhood-1.346130
By Neri Livneh
The year was 1945 and my father, Sgt. Joseph Weiss, was at the end of a very long stay at the Augusta Victoria hospital in Jerusalem, after suffering a serious injury in a battle fought by his battalion in the British army. It was already known that most of his huge ultra-Orthodox family in Czechoslovakia and Hungary had been was killed in the Holocaust, but he remembered that in Jerusalem, in the Ungarin houses in Mea She’arim, he had relatives.
One sunny Shabbat he took a bicycle and rode to the neighborhood for a visit, his hand still entirely bandaged. Youths in the neighborhood stoned him, the relatives scolded him for not wearing a skullcap and my father – a yeshiva graduate who had left religion, become a Zionist, immigrated to Palestine and wanted to fight Hitler – cultivated an abhorrence of Jerusalem that lasted until his dying day. To him it resembled a stronghold of “strictly religious, fanatical and parasitic haters of Israel,” or a “safari.” He chose to move and went to live in Haifa, a city that was then free, multinational, and which, over the years and to this very day, is still considered by many to be the most sane and secular city in Israel, because it even has buses that run on Shabbat.
For a while now readers have been writing me that the neighborhood where I grew up, Neveh Sha’anan, which had a clearly middle-class, blue-collar character, is becoming more ultra-Orthodox. In the Neveh Sha’anan of my childhood there was only one religious school where boys and girls studied together in the same classes. Today, the high school where my brother studied has become a yeshiva. The building where my family lived has mostly ultra-Orthodox residents. The last time I visited the area I found out that the entire street we lived on, which was once called “municipal employees’ housing,” has become an ultra-Orthodox area.
It’s all a matter of demography, and there’s no one to blame for it, but something essential has changed in the relations between ultra-Orthodox and secular Israelis around the country. So much for Jerusalem, which we gave up on a long time ago. We also conceded Beit Shemesh, and never had hopes for Bnei Brak. But we were so preoccupied with Jerusalem and the southern towns that we forgot about the rest of the country.
Once when skullcap-clad people who combined Torah with work were just called “religious,” without reference to the sort of materials from which their head-covering was made, and only extremists like those in Jerusalem were called “strictly religious” or “Israel haters” – we, in Haifa as well, could return the glares of the strictly religious boys who spoke Yiddish and had long earlocks, who gazed at us with anthropological interest from behind the fence of Vizhnitz yeshiva as we walked barefoot from Neveh Sha’anan, through Geula Street, where the yeshiva stood, to the pool.
We were their safari, and they were our zoo. Secular people, by the way, were called “free” then. But where has this freedom gone today, even in Haifa? The buses still run on Shabbat and the beaches are full, but what began as one small yeshiva, in an area that was once completely secular, has already spilled over into the whole area. From two large neighborhoods with a tiny ultra-Orthodox island in their midst, parts of Hadar and Neveh Sha’anan have become secular fringes of what is becoming one large ultra-Orthodox enclave.
Jews and Arabs still get along in Haifa. But if the ultra-Orthodox are taking over the city, the good relations between Jews and Arabs may also be at risk. Instead of worrying about the Muslim Brotherhood in the Arab states, we should start fearing the Jewish Brotherhood that is about to take over, and start acting accordingly.