Tonight’s 6 items begin with a brief ‘don’t say we didn’t know.’ Amos sends these concise messages to remind us that we should know. If you are not yet on his list, his email follows the episode that he reveals. Easy to sign on. And his messages are never more than a paragraph or two, and therefore facilitate your learning about what is happening in Israel and the OPT.
The 2nd item is about settler violence towards a teen-aged Palestinian boy. The episode itself is disgusting. And that such things can be done to others by supposedly religious people confounds the doing even more. But then fundamentalists, whatever religion they are, are extremists. At least this one was not acquitted. Not that that will help the youngster forget his miserable experience.
Item 3 is about Yehuda Shaul, one of the founders of Shovrim Shtika (Breaking the Silence). On one occasion that I heard Yehuda relate his experiences (I think it was on a bus headed for a Hebron tour), he acknowledged that he did not know exactly when he began to question what he, an Israeli soldier in Hebron, was doing and why. But he thought it might have been when his fellow soldiers were beating up a 4 year old Palestinian child. Yehuda confessed that Shovrim Shtika and the tours to Hebron are a means to fighting off his own post-traumatic stress disorder. Shovrim Shtika has no political agenda. Its purpose is to give former soldiers a podium from which to tell of their experiences, both to help them battle post traumatic stress disorders, and to tell the world what Israeli soldiers do in the OPT.
If you have not visited the site, www.shovrimshtika.org you will find it worth your while. It contains testimonies, videos, and more.
Item 4 informs us that the London Review of Books, an intellectual and respected journal, is anti-Israel. Is it anti-Israel, or is it reporting factual material? It’s difficult to paint something inherently ugly as pretty.
Item 5 shows the main concern of a major portion of Israel’s leaders: demography. A Shas minister (Shas is a religious party) has the answer: seculars must bear more children. There was a period when Israel rewarded parents for having large families. But that ended long ago, perhaps because of the huge Russian influx, and also neo-liberalism which transformed Israel from a semi socialist state to a privatized one. I doubt that today money would convince most secular Israeli families to produce more children. I doubt even more that Ministers of Finance as the present one, and Israeli governments in general, would return to paying Jewish citizens to have more children. In any event, this minister’s recommendation is further evidence that immigration to Israel has dwindled next to nothing.
The final item is mainly for Americans, since it tells them that they are paying for the occupation. But it’s not solely the roads that Akiva Eldar writes about that American tax dollars construct. Every penny of the US $3billion in military aid to Israel comes from money that could have been much more usefully been put to work domestically, that is, in the US—whether for building schools, adding hospital rooms and equipment, or for any of hundreds of other projects that would benefit American citizens.
Wars and arms benefit only the manufacturers, bankers, and other relatively small number of individuals who make money from the horrors that others suffer from. As for the roads, well read what Akiva says about them and other things.
Have a good day/evening where ever you are.
Dorothy
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1. Don’t say we didn’t know 238
In 2007, the Supreme Court ruled – while ignoring the advisory ruling of the International Court of Justice in The Hague – that the path of the separation fence, on the land of the Palestinian village Bil’in, was disproportionate, and had to be moved westward. Only in February 2010 did the IDF start construction according to the new route, and now a wall has been built instead of a fence. Previously, some 2,300 dunums (dunum = 1000 sq.m) were on the other side of the fence, now, about 1,500 will be on the other side of the Wall.
Due to the popular struggle of Bil’in’s residents against the fence and robbery of their land, the IDF has been invading the village during the evening and night. Sometimes they come to arrest someone, sometimes just to spread fear. During some invasions stun and teargas grenades are thrown, and rubber bullets shot, and these cause nightmares to the children of Bil’in. Last week seven such invasions occurred.
Settler convicted of kidnapping, abusing Palestinian teen
Shiloh resident Zvi Struk kidnapped 15-year-old boy, beat him and left him naked, blindfolded and bound in field. Yesh Din: Most Palestinian complaints end without indictment
Zvi Struk from the settlement of Shiloh was convicted Sunday of kidnapping and abusing a bound 15-year-old Palestinian boy.
The 28-year-old settler is the son of Yesha Human Rights Organization head Orit Struk.
The indictment stated that Struk, arrived at an outpost located between Shiloh and Kfar Kusra in the West Bank. He arrived on a mini tractor and began to chase Palestinian youths at the scene.
The youths attempted to escape, but Struk cornered one of them and his friend, armed with Struk’s M-16 rifle, began to fire in the air. According to the prosecution, Struk then began to beat the boy, who had put his hands up in surrender, and knocked him to the ground.
The indictment went on to say that Struk’s friend continued to beat the boy while he chased another youth, beat him, and dragged him to the mini tractor bleeding. He then proceeded to blindfold and tie him to the tractor, and rode off with his hostage in tow.
Amran Farah after attack (Archive photo courtesy of Yesh Din)
The prosecution claimed that the boy, Amran Farah, lost consciousness during the ride, and was brought to an open field where the two suspects beat him, undressed him, and left him blindfolded and tied. He remained there for a number of hours, until he managed to untie himself and find a car to take him home.
The boy was hospitalized in Nablus, and diagnosed with multiple contusions and lesions all over his body.
Struk had attacked the boy two months earlier, the indictment stated, while the latter was herding sheep with a friend near the village. Struk told them to leave the land, claiming it was his, and then beat the two boys. The settler also killed a young goat belonging to the Palestinian.
Ynet reported Tuesday that Jerusalem District Court Judge Amnon Cohen convicted Struk of assault under severe circumstances, kidnapping with intent to cause severe bodily injury and three more counts of assault.
The Yesh Din human rights group, which accompanied the Palestinian boy throughout the trial, expressed satisfaction with the verdict, but said, “According to our data, some 90% of complaints filed by Palestinians against Israeli citizens that hurt them or their property end without an indictment.”
Yesh Din stressed that Struk’s accomplice was never caught.
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3. LA Times,
November 16, 2010
FOREIGN EXCHANGE
Former Israeli soldier seeks to shine a light on Hebron
Yehuda Shaul of the group Breaking the Silence opposes the military’s treatment of Palestinians in the West Bank city.
Prepare to be pelted with eggs, the tour guide warns. Or maybe it will be rocks, bricks or spit wads.
The projectiles, guide Yehuda Shaul says, are courtesy of angry Jewish settlers opposed to his group, Breaking the Silence, which brings outsiders to the hotly disputed West Bank city of Hebron every week as part of an effort to expose what it considers military misconduct toward Palestinians.
From the moment the former Israeli soldier-turned-military-whistle-blower arrives, Shaul’s movements are tracked.
Sometimes soldiers discreetly whisper “Yehuda” into shoulder-mounted radios as he passes; other times they shout his arrival like a town crier: “Breaking the Silence guy!”
This time it’s a 12-year-old Orthodox boy, with cherub cheeks and sprouting side locks, who spots Shaul and raises the neighborhood alarm.
“Trash!” the boy screams, running up to Shaul, pointing and attempting a sort of menacing, in-your-face stance that a little kid can’t really pull off against a burly, 6-foot-1 activist. “Traitor! Trash! You will be forgotten!”
Shaul, who served two tours in Hebron during the 2001-03 Palestinian uprising, fixes a smile on his face, ignores the boy and picks up his pace.
“It’s best to keep walking before a crowd draws,” he says.
Shaul may be the closest thing Hebron’s Jewish Quarter has to a Public Enemy No. 1. He’s reviled by settlers, discredited by the military and distrusted by many Muslims, who don’t know what to make of this cheerful Orthodox Jew who looks like a settler in a full beard and kippah.
“It’s like I’m a walking threat,” Shaul says with a laugh.
His 6-year-old group is made up of former soldiers who once helped Israel manage the occupation and now accuse the military of deliberately killing civilians, using Palestinians as human shields and looting homes in the West Bank.
Israeli opponents say the group presents a distorted view of the Israel Defense Forces. Supporters call the activists courageous. The group was one of three finalists this month for the European Parliament’s prestigious Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought, which went to Cuban dissident Guillermo Farinas Hernandez.
Over a glass of spiced coffee, Shaul runs quickly through Hebron’s recent history. Here in the city that is home to the Tomb of the Patriarchs, a biblical burial place sacred to both Jews and Muslims, the two groups coexisted for centuries. Jews were evacuated after a 1929 massacre in which Arabs killed 67 Jews.
After Israel took control of the city during the 1967 Middle East War, Jewish pilgrims returned a year later to hold a Passover ceremony in a Hebron hotel, and then refused to leave, marking the start of renewed Jewish settlement.
Hebron was split in two in the aftermath of the 1994 massacre by settler Baruch Goldstein, who shot to death 29 praying Palestinians.
Today about 800 Jews live around the city’s old quarter, protected by nearly as many soldiers. An additional 7,000 settlers live in Kiryat Arba adjacent to the city. More than 150,000 Palestinians live in Hebron, including thousands in Israeli-controlled sectors.
“This is what they call a sterilized road,” Shaul says. That means Palestinians are prohibited from using it, even if they live on it. To keep a security buffer, the military has welded shut metal front doors of Palestinian homes and businesses, leaving a row of abandoned shops in what was once a bustling marketplace.
Most businesses left or closed because of a lack of customers. Those who remain have to leave their homes over the rooftops, use backdoors or cut holes in the interior walls of adjacent empty buildings behind them.
“Every year they take another corner,” Shaul says.
He disagrees with what has happened to Palestinians here, he says. But at the same time, as a former soldier who spent months in Hebron as a grenade machine-gun operator, Shaul recalls the violence against Jews that triggered the crackdown. Over there, he motions, a 10-month-old was shot by a sniper. There were regular stabbings and shootings. Soldiers were killed almost weekly.
The problem, according to Shaul, is that Israel’s occupation of Hebron goes beyond what is needed for security. According to testimony and photographs released by his group, soldiers routinely humiliate Palestinians, raid civilian homes as a form of harassment and violate international laws regarding occupied territory. The military rejects the group’s allegations.
Motioning to a white building on a distant hill, he points to his old lookout post on the second floor, where he once sprayed grenades into the valley below — officially aiming at empty buildings to harass the enemy but avoid civilian casualties, but knowing his weapon was imprecise.
From more than half a mile away, he says, he can’t know what he might have hit or whom he might have hurt.
“We didn’t always agree with what was happening, but when you’re a soldier, you have an excuse not to say anything or do anything,” he says. “When you get out, how can you justify not taking a stand? I needed to answer to myself: What did I do?”
He says that’s what keeps him coming back to Hebron.
Wrapping up another tour, Shaul hops into a car when a soldier, once again, comes rushing over to question him.
But rather than a cold stare, Shaul is greeted with a broad smile. “You leaving?”
Comprehensive study reveals London Review of Books presents ‘starkly one-sided and fringe approach’ against Jewish state. Israeli, Jewish contributors among harshest critics
British organization Just Journalism on Monday published a scathing study on the way Israel is being covered by London Review of Books – one of the most important and widely circulated literary magazines in the world.
According to the comprehensive study, the magazine systematically publishes articles clearly criticizing Israel. “The State of Israel wishes to inculcate in its soldiers a neo-Nazi ideology wrapped in Judaism” or “the Israelis think of Arabs much as they think of chickens of cats” are only two of the many statements which appear regularly in the luxurious magazine’s articles.
While elements in the British press stress constantly their attempts to be balanced and fair in their coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the highly regarded magazine presents a “starkly one-sided and fringe approach”.
The LRB is a fortnightly literary and political magazine which publishes opinion articles and book reviews written by leading intellectuals.
‘I’m unambiguously hostile to Israel because it’s a mendacious state,” the magazine’s editor, Mary-Kay Wilmers, wrote in one of her articles. “They do things that are just so immoral and counterproductive and, as a Jew, especially as a Jew, you can’t justify that.”
The study reveals that LRB takes the harshest stand against Israel among all British media outlets, and that many of the strongest condemnations come from Israeli and Jewish contributors of all people.
“The only danger is the danger facing the Palestinians,” wrote author Yitzhak Laor in an article published by LRB during the al-Aqsa Intifada. “Gas chambers are not the only way to destroy a nation. It is enough to destroy its social tissue, to starve dozens of villages, to develop high rates of infant mortality.”
And Laor is not alone. Historian Ilan Pappe, who in the past called for an academic boycott of Israel, noted in a scathing article published by LRB that “Palestinians have been so dehumanized by Israeli Jews…that killing them comes naturally.”
Just Journalism is a London-based research organization which focused on how Israel and Middle East issues are reported in the British media. It is funded by donations.
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5. Ynet,
November 16, 2010
Shas minister: Procreate instead of complaining
Minister of Religious Services Yacov Margi calls on secular public to boost birth rate in effort to thwart demographic threat
Minister of Religious Services Yacov Margi (Shas) is calling on the secular public to boost its birthrate in order to battle the demographic threat Israel is facing.
In a forum titled “Haredim in Israeli society” held last week as part of the Israel-Sderot Conference on Social Issues, Margi said, “Bring more kids to the world instead of complaining about the haredim. I, as a haredi man, fear for the fate of Israel.”
The minister added that within a few years he believes most people in the IDF and the education system will be wearing skullcaps.
Margi commented on the integration of haredim into the job market, and noted that the 2003 cutbacks in funds for the haredi sector, coupled with the world economic crisis of 2008 increased the rate of working yeshiva students because “nobody wants to be economically dependent on someone else.”
The Shas minister lauded this phenomenon, saying “there is an increased openness in the haredi sector, although it may not be publicized. The changes must seep in slowly, and not be forced.”
In reference to the relationship between the haredi sector and Israeli society, Margi noted that “we are now in the process of compromising and bridging; however, if we don’t recognize the needs of both sectors, we won’t get anywhere, and only continue to gnaw at each other from the inside.”
Margi took the opportunity to criticize the secular education system, saying that its flaws led many parents to send their kids to religious and haredi schools.
“Those who think haredim study in yeshivot only to evade military service are completely wrong. The reason for the high demand for religious education is because the public education system lacks Jewish values,” he said.
Shahar Ilan, vice president of Hiddush organization for Religious Freedom and Equality said that “Shas’ greatest sin is that it sends its youth to small yeshivot that do not offer general studies.”
During the discussion, Ilan presented data indicating that the number of yeshiva students increased over the past two years from 65,000 to 75,000 haredi men, despite the millions of shekels the government spent in an effort to incorporate them into the job market.
“There is no better proof that there’s a need to call off the income support and condition any such aid with employment,” said Ilan.
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6. Haaretz,
November 16, 2010
U.S. taxpayers are paying for Israel’s West Bank occupation
According to a June 2010 fact sheet on the USAID Internet site, last year American taxpayers funded the paving of 63 kilometers of asphalt roads in the West Bank.
Travelers along the “original” West Bank roads, the ones enabling drivers to bypass Palestinian villages, can see signs declaring “USAID from the American People.”
The roads are one of the initiatives of the United States Agency for International Development for building infrastructure in underdeveloped countries. Israel has already proudly left the club of developing countries and is not among the clients of USAID. Nevertheless, it appears the Smith family of Illinois is making the occupation a little less expensive for the Cohen family of Petah Tikva.
According to a June 2010 fact sheet on the USAID Internet site, last year American taxpayers funded the paving of 63 kilometers of asphalt roads in the West Bank. It also says completion of a road in the southern part of the West Bank dramatically increased the amount of trade between Dahriya and Beer Sheva.
What the site doesn’t say is that a significant segment of the road goes through Area C – the 60 percent of the West Bank under exclusive Israeli civilian and military control and responsibility under the interim agreement of 1995 (the second Oslo agreement ). The agreement states: “Territorial jurisdiction includes land (and ) subsoil.”
This is not the only occupation-perpetuating road funded by American money. Dror Etkes, an expert on the settlements, noticed a few days ago USAID workers energetically laying asphalt on two roads in the Samaria region (northern West Bank ) that crosses Area C. Israelis haven’t been traveling these roads for years now because the taxpayer (in this case, the Israeli taxpayer ) has already paved separate, wide, modern roads for them.
Etkes wondered how it is possible that the Obama administration, which is vociferously opposed to the continuation of the status quo in the West Bank, continues to subsidize the road for Israel. “If the state of Israel is insisting on continuing to hold on and de facto annex the West Bank,” he says, “it should also be allocating the money needed to take care of the infrastructure.”
I asked an American official why the administration isn’t demanding of Israel that it fulfill its obligations and pay the price of the occupation out of its own pocket.
“Who told you we aren’t demanding that?” replied the official. “We are also demanding a construction freeze in the settlements and you know at least as well as anyone else what is happening on the ground.”
It is worth mentioning that the when the Palestinians sought permission to pave a short road in Area C to enable access to the planned town of Rawabi, Israel pulled out the Oslo accord and kicked them down the stairs. The USAID tractors don’t have access to the area either.
However, when it suits his interest, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is a stickler for Oslo. A few days ago he announced that unilaterally declaring a Palestinian state would be considered a violation of the agreement. Tomorrow, incidentally, will mark the eighth anniversary of Foreign Minister Netanyahu’s statement on Israel radio that “all the Oslo agreements are null and void.”
A USAID spokeswoman responded that the program’s infrastructure projects “respond to the needs of the Palestinian people and are implemented in response to requests from the Palestinian Authority. Many of the USAID funded projects cross from one area to another in accordance with the needs of the Palestinian communities and the specific project. There are roads and water pipelines that cross through Area C or are adjacent to Area C as designs require and agreements with Civil Authorities allow.”
No way home
The Oslo agreement, which is so close to Netanyahu’s heart, also states that both sides see “the West Bank and Gaza Strip territory as a single territorial unit.”
Nevertheless, since the outbreak of the second intifada, Israel has cut off almost entirely the connection between these two areas.
Security authorities make a point of expelling Gazans from the West Bank and they do not allow residents of Gaza to reunite with their families in the West Bank.
A year ago, in response to a petition to the High Court of Justice by the Hamoked Center for the Defense of the Individual, the State Prosecutor’s Office said the policy does not apply to individuals who took up residence in the West Bank before the year 2000 and “about whom there exists no negative security material.”
Be that as it may, during this past year a number of Palestinians have been expelled from the West Bank even though they arrived there prior to the cut-off date, and had no “negative security material” against them. Several have applied to Hamoked for help.
One of them, Muhammad Nimruti, 29, went to Gaza in 2004 to participate in the mourning for his father. Since then he has been stuck and is in hiding from Hamas, which has issued an arrest warrant for him.
The coordinator of permits at the Coordination and Liaison Office in the Israel Defense Forces has recommended that Nimruti’s request to return to the West Bank be granted. In the opinion appended to the recommendation, the aforementioned response by the prosecutor to the High Court of Justice is cited.
But the High Court of Justice is one thing and the reality is another. The Liaison Office’s legal adviser rejected the recommendation and wrote that it is necessary “to be strict about consistency, paying attention to the fact that approving the request might be a precedent for approving similar requests.” In another case handled by Hamoked, the adviser wrote that Gazan Tzabar Abu Jazar entered the West Bank in 2000 and should not be expelled under the guidelines. So why has Abu Jazar been sent to Gaza and not allowed back in the West Bank?
“The aforementioned is a bachelor and he has no family connection in Judea and Samaria,” was the response. Truly an excellent reason. The time has come for him to find a bride in Ramallah and marry.
