Posted by: Sammi Ibrahem Chair of West Midland PSC
Dear All,
More than one village has suffered from the killing of 5 in the colony of Itamar. Item 1 relates the typical IOF handling of the villages. I do not know whether or not Awarta suffered more than other communities, but I do know that the description below is not one that, sad to say, is not unusual—sad not only for the villagers who experience such things but also for the soldiers who inflict the suffering. What will they think of themselves once they are again civilians. What would they think of others who did the same, who behaved like beasts, like animals?
Of the remaining 4 items, item 2 reports a poll which should make Israel’s leaders think. They should have known that they could not forever play on the guilt of others with the Holocaust. Indeed, the further that generations are removed from it, the less will the Holocaust serve to make people feel anything except anger at the Jews for eternally bringing it up. This is a pity. WWII was a horrible event—not only for Jews. So many were killed (30-60 million!), so much damage. It should be studied for why and how it happened so as to avoid another such war. But thanks to Israel’s harping on it, people instead will shut their ears whenever they hear the word ‘Holocaust’. Meanwhile, I disagree with Dr. Moshe Kantor, that criticism of Israel is a form of anti-Semitism.
Item 3 begins with a report about anti-Semitism at the University of California, Santa Cruz. As soon as I saw the name of the university and its location, I scanned quickly for two names—and found one of them:
Tammi Rossman-Benjamin. Of course ! She and her husband Ilan are hugely right wing, like Avigdor Lieberman’s crowd. Last year she and her spouse, Ilan Benjamin, successfully prevented a talk by a Palestinian and an Israeli Jew from taking place on campus. The talk nevertheless took place a few blocks away at a church, and was immensely successful, with quite a large crowd.
Because the Israeli Jew happened to be a member of New Profile, we felt that the Benjamin’s letter demanded a response . Their letter opposing the event taking place on campus was distributed to the provosts and staff members. Our letter was addressed to the Benjamin’s but its target audience were the others who received the Benjamin’s letter. I have pasted our letter following the report of Tammi’s recent anti-Palestinian venture. From our response, you will get the gist of their missive. Our letters won’t impact on the views of people like these Benjamins. But we hoped that by writing we might help the others next time be less prone to agree to the Benjamin demands and accusations. One staff member who received our letter wrote me and told me how much she appreciated it.
Item 4 is a link to Palestine Today. Please take a moment to glance through it.
Item 5 is a link to a 5 minute video that reflects much that New Profile opposes. It takes place in New York, but the idea that martial arts and the use of firearms can bring security is a false notion. It is even a dangerous one, as one of the speakers so correctly points out.
Let’s hope that Libya does not turn into another Iraq or Afghanistan.
All the best,
Dorothy
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1. Village of Awarta faced mass arrests, violence and massive destruction during five days of curfew
19 March 2011 | International Solidarity Movement
During the five day curfew in the village of Awarta, south of Nablus, the Israeli military raided homes and detained around 300 people, the youngest 14 years old. Some of the men were taken to the local boy school were they had to leave their finger prints and DNA and some were taken to the military base at Huwwra checkpoint. According to mayor, Qays Awwad, 55 men are still in Israeli custody. Some of the detainees reported that they had been abused by the soliders while they were detained and handcuffed. It has been reported that a 75 year old woman was handcuffed and had to sit on the ground while the soliders went through her home, and that an 80-year-old woman was beaten by soliders.
Three scandinavian ISM activists were in Awarta during the five day curfew, from saturday afternoon until wednesday noon. From the roofs of people’s houses they witnessed how the Israeli soliders went into homes, arrested men and made the familes wait outside while they raided their homes resulting in large scale damage to property. The ISM activists also visited homes that soldiers had searched to find broken windows, cut fuse-cables, smashed furniture, and polluted drinking water caused by Israeli soldiers.
Hundreds of soldiers entered the village in military vehicles early on the morning of the 12th of march, following the murder of five members of a settler family in the nearby illegal Israeli settlement of Itamar. According to the soliders, they were searching for the murderer and would continue until they found one. One soldier told ISM activists, ”we will serch this village until we find someone.” In the process of ”searching” the houses the sodiers damaged framed pictures, funiture, Tv-sets, gasheaters, smashed holes in floors and walls, stole money and jewlery, and poured liquids over computers. The Israeli forces occupied around 30 houses to sleep in during the four nights they remained in Awarta. In some of the houses they evicted the families who had to seak shelter outdoors or in neighbours homes during the night; in others they forced the families to stay in one room as the soldiers occupied the rest of the house. In occupied houses the sodiers deficated in the rooms and used the famlies bed sheets as toilet paper.
Alot of the houses were ”searched” and wrecked up to three times over five days. The soldiers did not seem to follow any apperent pattern when choosing which house to search or who to arrest, ”It all looked very random ” one activist said. In at least one case, on monday the 14th of march, the soldiers still did not know the name of the man that they had previously arrested and had to ask his family for it. The man that they had arrested was village council member Salim Qawaric. Approxametely 25 soliders entered his house causing severe damage on the family’s property while the family had to wait in the backyard. The following day the soldiers came back and searched the home once again resulting in further damage to the family’s home and property.
The ISM activists were not allowed to take pictures, and when they did it anyway, they soldiers pointed their guns at them shouting: ”Do not take pictures!” One of the activists had her memory card stolen by a soldier who took her camera from her by force.
During the cerfew many families ran short of gas, food, water and medicine.
There have been numerous reports of physical abuse. According to eyewitnesses, Mashmod Zaqah, 28, had his hands cuffed behind his back and was blindfolded before he was beaten by at least six soldiers during a period of two hours, periodicly he lost consciousness and couldnt feel his legs or fingers. His family managed to smuggle him to Rafidia hospital in Nablus. He suffers a dislocated shoulder, back injuries, and a badly twisted ankle.
Accourding to eyewitnesses, around 300 israeli settlers, of whom some were masked, entered the village on saturday the 12th of March and threw stones at windows, injuring two Awarta residents by breaking their arms. Villagers tried to protect homes while israeli soldiers responded by shooting teargas at the villagers.
It has been reported that children were bitten by the israeli military dogs that the soldiers had with them. A young physically disabled man was bitten by a dog which resulted in his hospitalisation. Loay Medjet Abdet is now scared to go inside his own home because he believes the dogs will attack him again.
For the activists, it was clear that the repression against Awarta was only a form of collective punishment. When one activist asked: ”Why do you have to punish all this people?” The solider responded with: ”We have to punish these people so they will understand.”
Even though this kind of systematic collective punishment is illegal according to International law, is it frequently used by the Israeli military all over the West Bank and in Gaza.
When medical vehicles tried to access the area they were stopped by Israeli forces. ISM activists went to the checkpoint near Awarta on March 15 and reported that ambulances were being held several hours before they could enter the village. As an occupying force, Israel is obligated under article 56 of the Geneva Conventions not to hinder the work of medical personnel in a conflict zone.
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2. Poll conducted by German think-tank finds 72% of Poles, 68% of Hungarians and 50% of Germans believe ‘Jews try to take advantage of having been victims during the Nazi era’
The European Jewish Congress (EJC) has called a poll conducted by a German think-tank on European attitudes towards Jews and Israel “deeply disturbing”. The Friedrich Ebert Foundation, a think-tank associated with Germany’s Social Democratic Party, found extremely worrying attitudes amongst a host of Europeans.
Perhaps the most remarkable finding in the survey was when asked to respond to the statement that “Israel is conducting a war of extermination against the Palestinians,” 63% of the study’s participants in Poland agreed with the statement, while in Germany 47.7% expressed agreement.
Dr. Moshe Kantor, President of the EJC expressed incredulity at the results. “It is astonishing to see these figures and a damning indictment on efforts to fight hatred and intolerance in Europe,” Kantor said. “The governments of Europe, and the European Union, have to wake up to this before it is too late.”
The study – “Intolerance, Prejudice, Discrimination: A European Report” – questioned roughly 1,000 people in Great Britain, Holland, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Hungary, Poland and France.
The researchers also asked respondents whether they agreed with the statement “Jews try to take advantage of having been victims during the Nazi era.” 72.2% of Poles, 49.8% of Germans and 68.1% of Hungarians replied in the affirmative.
“For too long there have been some who have explained that they are not anti-Semitic, but merely anti-Israel, this study, along with many others, proves a significant correlation between the two,” Kantor said.
“We need a unified standard of what is legitimate criticism and what is hate speech with regards to Israel and the Jewish people.
“A number of years ago, the European Union Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia (EUMC) created a Working Definition of Anti-Semitism as it manifests itself with regards to Israel. These are very strong guidelines and should be adopted officially by the European Union.”
“These results prove that we can no longer hide behind the mantra of free expression or couching anti-Semitic beliefs as mere criticisms of Israeli government policy. Hate speech is proscribed in every society and we need to legally define it as it relates to singling out the one Jewish state in the world.”
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3. Ynet,
March 19, 2011
Federal Investigation
Anti-Israel protest (archives) Photo: Reuters
US eyes anti-Semitism claims at university
Department of Education investigating faculty member’s complaint that series of pro-Palestinian events at University of California, Santa Cruz created hostile environment for Jewish students
The US Department of Education is investigating a faculty member’s complaint that a series of pro-Palestinian events at a California university crossed the line into anti-Semitism and created a hostile environment for Jewish students.
The department’s Office for Civil Rights notified the University of California, Santa Cruz, last week that it planned to look into allegations made by Hebrew lecturer Tammi Rossman-Benjamin dating back to 2001.
The probe “in no way implies that OCR has made a determination with regard to their merits,” Arthur Zeidman, director of the San Francisco office, said in a letter to the instructor and campus officials.
In her June 2009 complaint, Rossman-Benjamin said administrators repeatedly failed to address concerns voiced by her and several students about academic departments and residential colleges at Santa Cruz sponsoring “viciously anti-Israel” speakers and film screenings with campus funds.
She also alleged that some professors have used their classes to promote an anti-Israel political agenda and failed to intervene or joined in when students were verbally attacked for defending the Jewish state.
“The impact of the academic and university-sponsored Israel-bashing on students has been enormous,” she said. “There are students who have felt emotionally and intellectually harassed and intimidated, to the point they are reluctant or afraid to express a view that is not anti-Israel.”
Campus counsel Carole Rossi said the university will cooperate with the federal investigation.
“We not only look forward to fully participating in OCR’s review of the matter, we are confident that the agency will determine that the allegations are unfounded,” Rossi said in a written statement. “Our campus is absolutely committed to the enforcement of policies that protect every individual from unlawful discrimination and harassment – and that value and support an atmosphere of personal and intellectual freedom.”
Kenneth Marcus, who used to direct the education department’s civil rights office and now heads the anti-Semitism initiative at the Institute for Jewish and Community Research in San Francisco, said the department typically launches more than 1,000 investigations a year, most of them involving individual students with learning disabilities.
Investigations based on anti-Semitism bias are rare, Marcus said, in part because the Department of Education did not have regulations until 2004 allowing it to handle such cases as violations of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
The regulations were suspended in the last years of the Bush administration, but revived and clarified in October, he said.
Tensions high on Irvine campus
UC Santa Cruz, a liberal, 16,000-student school known for idyllic setting amid coastal redwoods, counter-culture vibe and Grateful Dead memorabilia collection, is not the first public university in California where heated discussions about the Middle East have devolved into polarizing debates about academic freedom and alleged anti-Semitism.
A former University of California, Berkeley, student who was co-president of the Zionist student group Tikvah sued the university in federal court earlier this month over her alleged March 2010 assault by the campus leader of Students for Justice in Palestine.
The student, Jessica Felber, claims she was injured when the other student leader rammed a shopping cart into her as she was holding a placard reading, “Israel Wants Peace.” She claimed the confrontation was the latest episode of harassment, intimidation, incitement and violence directed at vocal supporters of Israel and to which university officials had turned a blind eye.
The university has denied the allegations.
Meanwhile, tensions between Jewish and Muslim students have run high at the university system’s Irvine campus for several years, and the campus chapter of Muslim Student Union was suspended for four months last year after a group of students interrupted a speech by the Israeli ambassador to the United States.
In 2005, the Zionist Organization of America complained to the Department of Education about Jewish students at Irvine being subjected to slurs and discrimination at events similar to those at Santa Cruz.
The civil rights office concluded after a two-year investigation that “although offensive to the Jewish students, the speeches, articles, marches, symbols and other events at issue were not based on the national origin of the Jewish students, but rather based on opposition to the policies of Israel.”
Last year, the Zionist Organization of America encouraged potential Jewish students and donors to take their money elsewhere.
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The New Profile response to the Benjamin’s missive.
Saturday, April 24, 2010
To: Tammi Rossman-Benjamin and Ilan Benjamin
From New Profile
Dear Tammi Rossman-Benjamin and Ilan Benjamin,
We have carefully perused your letter of Friday, April 16, 2010 to Provost Shemek and Provost Lau, and have seriously considered your “three compelling reasons” that the college should withdraw sponsorship for an event about “Costs of War on Israeli Society: Two Unheard of Perspectives.”
We wish here to comment on certain statements and viewpoints in your letter that we believe to be erroneous.
1. Not the least of these is your contention that the program was “politically motivated.” The speakers, after all, were not running for office nor asking that the audience vote on an issue. Furthermore, would you have claimed the same had the speakers been from AIPAC, an acknowledged lobby? What has happened to freedom of speech? And where is freedom of speech more important than in colleges, where young minds are being formed? Should students be denied the opportunity to hear opinions not frequently available except from discussions the nature of one on “Costs of war”?
Would it not have been wiser on your part to allow the event to take place, to attend it, and during the Q and A to express objections to ideas that you disagreed with? Or were you afraid that your objections would have seemed weak, senseless, or uninformed in the light of the information that the speakers had brought to the fore?
2. As for your implying that there is something shameful about ‘actively promoting the demilitarization of Israel and providing support to Israeli men and women (18 year olds!) who refuse compulsory military service,’ would you have claimed the same for organizations that aided American COs during the Vietnam war, when the draft was compulsory. One reason that America has no draft today is that its leaders learned from that experience that you cannot force individuals of conscience to kill or be killed.
So it is in Israel that there are young people who are pacifists or who disagree with their governments’ policies and refuse to enlist. Many of them are willing to pay the price and have served time in prison.
Civil disobedience is a time-honored and respected practice in the United States, as it should be everywhere. Jimmy Carter’s first act as president was to offer amnesty to Vietnam War ‘draft dogers.’ And just this month the City Council of Berkeley, Calif. passed a resolution calling for “Universal and Unconditional Amnesty for Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan War Military Resisters and Veterans Who Acted In Opposition to the War for Matters of Conscience” (http://www.couragetoresist.org/x/content/view/825/1/)
In the same spirit, New Profile guides youngsters who request help. New Profile does nothing illegal. NP does not, as you claim, ‘actively encourage Israelis to break the law.’ NP does help individuals who need guidance about the law, who have questions, and NP tries to encourage Israeli youth to think (something that Israeli education fails to do). But NP neither actively calls for refusal nor incites, as you can readily see from our website www.newprofile.org .
Furthermore, the investigation was not instigated by the police, but began at the bequest of “the High Court of Justice following a petition filed by the Israeli Forum for the Promotion of Equal Share in the Burden to have the New Profile movement dismantled following the content published on its website.”
New Profile questions the need for wars, whereas the “Israeli forum for the Promotion of Equal Share in the Burden” accepts wars as matter of fact, and demands that all Israeli youngsters conscript. The Israeli forum failed to delegitimize New Profile, but not for want of trying. The investigation found no evidence to back up the Forum’s complaint. We presume that you trust the judgment of the police, the courts, and the prosecutor.
3. Your claim that the “sole” purpose of the speaking event was to “harm the Jewish state” implies that anyone who disagrees with Israel’s governments’ policies intends to ‘harm the Jewish state.’ Do you also believe that anyone who criticizes US policies aspires to harm America?
And to imply that people as Scott Kennedy and Ofra Lyth or that events of the sort they take part in are anti-Semitic is pure nonsense! It is no more anti-Semitic to criticize Israel than it was anti-American to criticize the Vietnam war, nor is anti-American to criticize the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan! To the contrary!
4. Furthermore, while we can sympathize with the student, Jenna Miller, that Israel is central to her identity,” she lives in America (as do both of you, apparently), whereas the speakers live in Israel, as do we.
We therefore pose this question to you, since you appear to condone Israel’s colonization of Palestine: Just how many more generations of our children, grand children, and great grand children, and our neighbors’ children and their children, et al. do you wish to fight and die so that you, Jenna, and others like you can feel that this place somewhere out there that is called Israel is central to your identity, disregarding the price we in Israel pay, namely that of burying our young. Till today Israel has seen 12 wars and military campaigns—-yes 12! In less than 62 years, with the next war always just around the corner!!!
One bereaved mother, Nurit Peled-Elhanan–who lost her only daughter in a suicide bombing–captures in a nutshell an important aspect of what New Profile is battling by objecting to militarism. Professor Peled-Elhanan, when speaking to the EU Parliament on International Women’s Day in 2005 stated the following:
“. . . Israeli, American, Italian and British mothers have been for the most part violently blinded and brainwashed to such a degree that they . . . are all mind-infected by the same viruses engendered by politicians. And the viruses , though they may have various illustrious names such as Democracy. Patriotism. God. Homeland, are all the same. They are all part of false and fake ideologies that are meant to enrich the rich and to empower the powerful.
We are all the victims of mental, psychological and cultural violence that turn us to one homogenic group of bereaved or potentially bereaved mothers. Western mothers who are taught to believe their uterus is a national asset just like they are taught to believe that the Muslim uterus is an international threat. They are educated not to cry out: “I gave him birth, I breast fed him, he is mine, and I will not let him be the one whose life is cheaper than oil, whose future is less worthy than a piece of land.”
All of us are terrorized by mind-infecting education to believe all we can do is either pray for our sons to come back home or be proud of their dead bodies.”
Is this the message that you fear to have told? Do you wish to hide from American students that Israel’s wars are not from Heaven nor necessary? Do you wish to hide from students that since 2002 Israel’s governments have refused to accept a comprehensive peace package offered by its Arab neighbors? Do you wish to hide from students and faculty the fact that Israel’s governments thus devaluate human life—-Jewish as well as non-Jewish, because the Greater Israel is more important to our leaders than are our children’s lives?
5. Lastly, you attempt to paint Scott Kennedy and Ofra Lyth in evil colors! But of course it is always easier to ply ad hominem rather than to deal with the facts. Unfortunately, you won this battle. Unfortunately for the students, unfortunately for us who live in Israel, where the rituals of mourning over dead sons and daughters killed in the conflict are so frequent and abundant.
How many more Israeli parents and families must become bereaved and grieve while you ply your pen to keep students and faculty from hearing truths—perhaps the saddest truth of all being that excepting war zones as Afghanistan, Israel is the least safe place in the world for Jews. Nowhere else have so many Jews been killed since WWII. No where else is every Jewish child obliged to conscript at the age of 18. No where else is there so much post-traumatic distress symptoms among Jewish youth. Please convey this to Jenna Miller.
