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The Carmel Wildfire is burning all illusions in Israel

On 12.07.10, By Max

The following piece was originally published at Electronic Intifada:

“When I look out my window today and see a tree standing there, that tree gives me a greater sense of beauty and personal delight than all the vast forests I have seen in Switzerland or Scandinavia. Because every tree here was planted by us.”

– David Ben Gurion, Memoirs

“Why are there so many Arabs here? Why didn’t you chase them away?”

– David Ben Gurion during a visit to Nazareth, July 1948

JNF forests burning in Northern Israel (photo by Oren Ziv/Active Stills)

JNF forests burning in Northern Israel (photo by Oren Ziv/Active Stills)

Four days after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced plans to place thousands of migrant workers from Africa and Southeast Asia in a prison camp deep in the Negev Desert because, as he claimed, they pose a “threat to the character of [the] country,” a burning tree trunk fell into a bus full of Israeli Prison Service cadets, killing forty passengers. The tree was among hundreds of thousands turned to ash by the forest fire pouring across northern Israel, and which now threatens to engulf outskirts of Haifa, Israel’s third-largest city. Over the last four days, more than 12,300 acres have burned in the Mount Carmel area, a devastating swath of destruction in a country the size of New Jersey. While the cause of the fire has not been established, it has laid bare the myths of Israel’s foundation.

Israelis are treating the fire as one of their greatest tragedies in recent years. A friend who grew up in the Haifa area told me over the weekend that he was devastated by the images of destruction he saw on TV. His friend’s brother was among those who perished in the bus accident. Though he is a dedicated Zionist who supported Netanyahu’s election bid in 2008, like so many Israelis, he was furious at the response — or lack of one — by the government. “Our leaders are complete idiots, but you already know that,” he told me. “They invested so much to prepare for all kinds of crazy war scenarios but didn’t do anything to protect civilians from the basic things you are supposed to take for granted.”

On 3 December, Netanyahu informed the country, “We do not have what it takes to put out the fire, but help is on the way.” To beat back the blaze, Bibi has had to beg for assistance from his counterpart in Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Western-backed Palestinian Authority and Israel’s American and British patrons. Israel is a wealthy country which boasts to the world about its innovative spirit — its US-based lobbyists market it as a “Start-Up Nation” — but its performance during the forest fire revealed the sad truth: its government has prioritized offensive military capacity and occupation maintenance so extensively that it has completely neglected the country’s infrastructure, emergency preparedness and most of all, the general welfare of its citizens.

Beyond the embarrassing spectacle of Turkish supply planes landing in Tel Aviv just six months after Israeli commandoes massacred Turkish aid volunteers on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla, or the confessions of impotence by the hard-men Netanyahu and Avigdor Lieberman, the fire exposed a terrible history that had been concealed by layers of official mythology and piles of fallen pine needles.

“There are no facts”

Among the towns that have been evacuated is Ein Hod, a bohemian artists’ colony nestled in the hills to the north and east of Haifa. This is not the first time Ein Hod was evacuated, however. The first time was in 1948, when the town’s original Palestinian inhabitants were driven from their homes by a manmade disaster known as the Nakba.

Most of the original inhabitants of Ein Hod, which was called Ayn Hawd prior to the expulsions of ‘48, and was continuously populated since the 12th century, were expelled to refugee camps in Jordan and Jenin in the West Bank. But a small and exceptionally resilient band of residents fled to the hills, set up a makeshift camp and watched as Jewish foreigners moved into their homes.

In 1953, a Romanian Dadaist sculptor named Marcel Janco convinced the army not to bulldoze Ein Hod as it did the scores of nearby Palestinian towns it had ethnically cleansed five years prior. He proposed establishing an art commune to generate tourism and contribute to the culture of Zionism. Today, the rustic stone homes that once belonged to Palestinians are quaint artist studios, while the village mosque has been converted into an airy bar called Bonanza. Visitors to the town are greeted at the entrance by Benjamin Levy’s “The Modest Couple in a Sardine Can,” a sculpture depicting a nude woman and a suited gentleman in a sardine can, which was unveiled by Israeli President Shimon Peres in 2001.

After the catastrophe of 1948, the original Palestinians of Ayn Hawd set up their own village three kilometers away from what is today known as Eid Hod. For decades the villagers resisted attempts to dispossess them and were surrounded by a fence during the 1970s to prevent them from expanding according to natural growth. But they finally won official recognition in 2005. This meant that for the first time since the establishment of Israel they could receive electricity and trash service. Meanwhile, more than forty other Palestinian villages inside Israel remain “unrecognized.” The 80,000 or so residents of the villages, which lay mostly in the Negev desert, are tax-paying citizens of Israel. However, they have few rights; their homes are routinely demolished to make way for Jewish settlements and they are deprived of basic services.

I visited both Ein Hod and Ayn Hawd in June. When the residents of the Jewish village Ein Hod saw me filming, they reacted with a mixture of suspicion and hostility. “I know what you’re doing!” an elderly woman sneered at me, insisting that I not film her. Inside the bar, I asked patrons if the place was in fact a converted mosque. “Yeah, but that’s how all of Israel is,” a woman from a nearby kibbutz told me as she sipped on a beer. “This whole country is built on top of Arab villages. So maybe it’s best to let bygones be bygones.”

I provoked another annoyed reaction when I began filming a tour guide leading a group of elderly Israelis around the village. Speaking in Hebrew, the guide told the tourists as she took them through the art studios that they were inside “third generation houses” — forget the Arabs who lived in them for hundreds of years. In the studios I noticed that much of the art being produced was Judaica kitsch for sale to foreign tourists — generic shtetl scenes from the long lost, distant world immortalized in films like Fiddler on the Roof.

Later, before taking her group to the town’s Hurdy Gurdy museum, the guide mentioned a “welcoming committee” that vetted potential residents. Presumably this was how Ein Hod kept the pesky Arabs down the road from returning home. That and the Absentee Property Law of 1950 which placed all “abandoned” Arab property in the hands of the Jewish National Fund and the Israeli Land Administration, a provision that consolidated what the exiled Palestinian member of the Israeli parliament Azmi Bishara called “the largest armed robbery in history.”

During a break, the tour guide pulled me aside and demanded to know who I was. It was clear the villagers had grown wary of curious outsiders. Introducing herself as Shuli Linda Yarkon, a PhD candidate at Tel Aviv University, the tour guide told me she was the leading authority on Ein Hod. She said I had to allow her to review all the footage I shot, claiming that this would ensure that I not mistranslate words she used like kibbush, a Hebrew term that means “conquest” but is commonly used to refer to the occupation of Palestine.

“So what about the conquest you mentioned?” I asked her. “Why didn’t you tell the tourists who lived in the houses before 1948?” Visibly irritated, Yarkon remarked, “I’ve concluded after years of research that there are really no facts when you discuss this issue. There are only narratives.” She assured me that Ein Hod’s Jewish population maintained excellent relations with the expelled residents: “Go ask them. They will tell you how they feel.”

So I did. After following a winding dirt road around a hillside for several kilometers, I was inside Ayn Hawd, the Palestinian village. There was no installation art here, just ramshackle houses, dirt roads, a mosque with a tall minaret and lots of kids playing in the streets. Almost immediately some of the town’s residents appeared from their homes to greet me. Abu al-Hisa Moein, a village council member and schoolteacher, invited me to spend the rest of the afternoon with his family on a patio beside his home, which appeared newer and more stately than those of his neighbors. He told me his ancestors arrived in the village more than 700 years ago from what is now Iraq. His relatives who were expelled to Jenin in 1948 told him they would be too angry to even lay eyes their former homes with the new occupants inside. When I mentioned the bar built into the old mosque, Moein shook his head in disgust. “It’s very bad. It’s an insult,” he said.

Moein took me inside his home for a tour, showing me the spacious, immaculately clean parlor and the picture window with a sweeping view of the valley below. He had built the whole place, he said with pride. Down a hall, his 13-year-old daughter, Ansam, was reclining on the floor of her room reading John Knowles’ classic bildungsroman, A Separate Peace. She leapt to attention when I entered and spent the next ten minutes showing me her library of literature. With night setting in, Moein and his family took me back on the patio. There, he unfurled a map of Mandate-era Palestine and ran his fingers over the names of scores of villages destroyed on the coast between Jaffa and Haifa by Zionist forces in 1948. He pointed to towns like Kafr Saba, Qaqun, al-Tira and Tantura, the site of a horrific massacre of unarmed Palestinian prisoners on the beach just one month after the Deir Yassin massacre. Moein was a history teacher, but Israel had forbidden him from discussing these events in his classroom, and is in the process of criminalizing any public observance of them.

As darkness blanketed the hills, I realized that I had lost track of time. I told Moein that I needed to get back to Tel Aviv. With that, his wife rushed into the house and gathered a bundle of grapes she had picked from a tree in the family’s yard, packing it for me in some tupperware from their kitchen. Then Moein walked me to my car and hugged me goodbye.

Redeeming the land

By now, both Ein Hod and Ayd Hawd are nearly empty. Most of their residents have fled for safer ground while the thousands of pine trees planted to provide Ein Hod’s artists with a sense of solitude are reduced to ash. As the trees burn, the fire exposes another dimension of Israel’s foundation that it has attempted to bury.

The pine trees themselves were instruments of concealment, strategically planted by the Jewish National Fund (JNF) on the sites of the hundreds of Palestinian villages the Zionist militias evacuated and destroyed in 1948. With forests sprouting up where towns once stood, those who had been expelled would have nothing to come back to. Meanwhile, to outsiders beholding the strangely Alpine landscape of northern Israel for the first time, it seemed as though the Palestinians had never existed. And that was exactly the impression the JNF intended to create. The practice that David Ben Gurion and other prominent Zionists referred to as “redeeming the land” was in fact the ultimate form of greenwashing.

The Carmel fire is burning JNF trees planted over destroyed Palestinian villages

The Carmel fire is burning JNF trees planted over destroyed Palestinian villages

Described by Israeli historian Ilan Pappe as “the quintessential Zionist colonialist,” the first director of the JNF, Yossef Weitz, was a ruthless ideologue who helped orchestrate the mass expulsion of Palestinians in 1948. Weitz notoriously declared “It must be clear that there is no room in the country for both peoples … If the Arabs leave it, the country will become wide and spacious for us … The only solution is a Land of Israel … without Arabs … There is no way but to transfer the Arabs from here to the neighboring countries, to transfer all of them, save perhaps for [the Palestinian Arabs of] Bethlehem, Nazareth and the old Jerusalem. Not one village must be left, not one tribe.”

After Weitz’s wishes were fulfilled, the JNF planted hundreds of thousands of trees over freshly destroyed Palestinian villages like al-Tira, helping to establish the Carmel National Park. An area on the south slope of Mount Carmel so closely resembled the landscape of the Swiss Alps that it was nicknamed “Little Switzerland.” Of course, the non-indigenous trees of the JNF were poorly suited to the environment in Palestine. Most of the saplings the JNF plants at a site near Jerusalem simply do not survive, and require frequent replanting. Elsewhere, needles from the pine trees have killed native plant species and wreaked havoc on the ecosystem. And as we have seen with the Carmel wildfire, the JNF’s trees go up like tinder in the dry heat.

But it seems that nothing can stop the JNF’s drive to “green” the land. Even in the parched Negev desert, the JNF is advancing plans to plant one million trees in a plot called “GOD TV Forest.” To accomplish the highly unusual feat of foresting a desert, the Israel Land Administration has ordered the expulsion of the Bedouin unrecognized village of al-Araqib, home to hundreds of Israeli citizens who have lived in the area for more than 100 years and who have served in the army’s frontline tracker units.

The Israeli government has tried time and again to force the people of al-Araqib into an American Indian reservation-style “development town,” but they have refused. The village has been razed to the ground by bulldozers on eight occasions, but each time the residents have rebuilt their homes, hoping to outlast a ruthless campaign to destroy their way of life.

What about the strange name for the proposed forest? It is a reference to GOD TV, a radical right-wing evangelical Christian broadcasting network that hosts faith-based fraudsters like Creflo Dollar and rapture-ready fanatics like Rory and Wendy Alec.

And why is GOD TV bankrolling the JNF’s ethnic cleansing campaign in the Negev desert? According to its website, “GOD TV is planting over ONE MILLION TREES across the Holy Land as a miraculous sign to Israel and to the world that Jesus is coming soon.”

In his 1970 short fiction story “Facing the Forest,” the famed Israeli author A.B. Yehoshua portrayed a mute Palestinian forest watchman who burns down a JNF forest to reveal the hidden ruins of his former village. Forty years later, as the JNF forests around Mount Carmel burn, right-wing Israeli lawmakers have demanded a search for the Arab who must have sparked the blaze, even though there is no firm evidence about the cause of the fire. Michael Ben Ari, a extremist Member of Knesset from the National Union Party, called for “the whole Shin Bet” — Israel’s domestic intelligence agency — to be mobilized to investigate what the right-wing media outlet Arutz Sheva said “may turn out to be the worst terror attack in Israel’s history.”

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Responding to Fania Oz-Salzberger, and searching for the ghost of Israeli democracy

On 11.25.10, By Max

Fania Oz-Salzberger has challenged my characterization of her comments at the Nexus Institute’s “Return of Ghosts” symposium. Here is what she wrote in the comments section of my post:

I am befuddled by your representation of what I thought had been a cordial and thoughtful exchange. The snippets you report of my symposium input are inaccurate and out of context. My arguments in the symposium and the accompanying article are far more qualified and complex than represented here. I do stand by the claim that Israel is a vibrant democracy, but it is also – as I said clearly – a flawed one. Wilders is unwelcome to many Israelis, certainly not the handful in which you purport to place me. More crucially, I never “proclaimed” “that occupation has little or nothing to do with the motives of suicide bombers”, but spoke against any insinuation that suicide bombings could be justified by occupation. Finally, I did not “jump in” but politely awaited my turn, despite being an Israeli. In our public and private exchanges I gave your opinions the respect that your blog has now denied my own views. You have good arguments in your arsenal, why the cheap shots?

I have been waiting for video of the symposium before responding to Oz-Salzberger or clarifying my own account, which was based on my impressions from the panel and recorded without the benefit of notes. Now that we are able to view a portion of the symposium’s first debate, let’s go to the videotape:

In her opening remarks (at around 2:45), Oz-Salzberger went on at length about Israel’s democratic tradition. I did not take her comments out of context. Oz-Salzberger said, “My own experience, I come from Israel; 62 years old. Always a democracy ever since it was founded, it was made a democracy which was quite an achievement for its generation, but always a democracy under siege from outside and from within.” I did not hear her describe Israel as a flawed democracy, though she did make a general statement against majoritarian rule and in favor of protecting minority rights in Israel and Europe.

To restate what I wrote in my previous post, I thought Oz-Salzberger’s remarks about Israel’s uninterrupted democratic tradition underplayed the severity of the situation in her country, and seemed incongruous in light of the other panelists’ remarks about the decline of democracy in their own countries. Reasonable people can debate whether Israel is a democracy. Personally I agree with MK Ahmed Tibi, who says that Israel is indeed a Jewish and democratic state: it is democratic to its Jewish citizens and Jewish to its Arabs. Just ask the residents of Dahamash and Al-Arakib — all Israeli citizens — if they think Israel is a democracy. I also think it is critical to note that Israel controls everything in the West Bank, administering a kangaroo court system that railroads non-violent activists and jails people for organizing against the occupation. Is that democratic? Whether or not it is, my only objection with Oz-Salzberger was that she downplayed the authoritarian and racist trends being advanced by Israel’s government, in the Knesset, and in the streets of Tel Aviv — and which beg for exposure.

I did not write anything in my first post about Oz-Salzberger’s reference to Israel as “a democracy under siege from outside and from within,” but after watching the video, I think this remark demands clarification, especially because of Oz-Salzberger’s claim to Ofer N. in my comments section: “I don’t believe in “enemies within”, and young (or old) Israelis holding such opinions [my note: she was referring to supporters of BDS] are no traitors. But I think they are wrong.” I distinctly recall Oz-Salzberger complaining to the audience about the leftists in Tel Aviv, presumably referring to supporters of BDS. There is no video yet to confirm my recollection, but I would be surprised if she thinks, as Avigdor Lieberman does, that this small element is besieging Israel “from within.” So whom or what was she referring to? Arabs? Leftists? Extremist settlers?

As for my characterization of Oz-Salzberger’s response to my comments on suicide bombing, I am still awaiting video of the exchange (I never accused her of interrupting me, but perhaps my use of the American colloquialism “jumped in,” which is the same as “weighed in,” but could be misconstrued as “cut in,” was unclear to her). Oz-Salzberger claimed she said suicide bombing could not be justified by occupation, but when did I say that it could? I was making an objective point about the motives of suicide bombers, not justifying their actions by way of insinuation. If video appears of the exchange, I will clarify this dispute.

If I took anything out of context, it was a comment by Mitchell Cohen. I originally reported that he “enthusiastically seconded” Oz-Salzberger’s remarks about Israel’s vibrant democracy. In fact, he seconded her opposition to majoritarian rule and made an important point about demagogues who exploit the language of democracy to advance an anti-democratic agenda. (I think he would have agreed with her characterization of Israeli democracy, but that is beside the point).

Based on our public and private interactions, which were indeed cordial and thoughtful, I think Oz-Salzberger represents an element within the Zionist movement that is reasonable and worldly, but is standing by passively with a sense of bewilderment while the colonial, ethnocentric aspects of Zionism consolidate their hold on Jewish Israeli society and gain strength in the Jewish diaspora. If a solution to the conflict ever appears on the horizon, I am confident that she and others like her would a part of it, especially if it preserves the fundaments of Zionism through two states. However, a solution has never been further away. Soothing a foreign audience by telling them that everything is basically kosher with Israeli democracy only furthers the problem because sooner or later, that celebrated democracy will may be nothing more than a ghost.

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Confronting the Hebron Settlers in New York

On 11.24.10, By Max
Jewish settler graffiti painted on door of Palestinian home in Hebron's H2 apartheid zone (photo by me)

Jewish settler graffiti painted on door of Palestinian home in Hebron's H2 apartheid zone (photo by me)

On November 16, the Hebron Fund, a tax exempt 501 c-3, held its annual fundraising dinner at Chelsea Piers. The Hebron Fund named its gala “The Hebron Aid Flotilla,” deliberately mocking the massacre of 9 activists on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla. The event consisted of a few hundred supporters — and residents — of the most racist, violent Jewish settlements in the West Bank cruising around New York for a few hours. To paraphrase Benjamin Netanyahu, this was no love boat. I do not think it is much of an exaggeration to describe the Hebron settlers as the Ku Klux Klan of Israel. These are the people who celebrated Yitzhak Rabin’s murder, who hailed Baruch Goldstein as a gever, who routinely terrorize and attack defenseless residents in Hebron’s H2 apartheid zone, and who abuse the Star of David as a symbol of Judeo-fascism, painting it on the doors of the Palestinian homes and shops they have forcibly closed.

I stood with about 100 demonstrators outside Chelsea Piers in silent protest of the Hebron Fund’s cruise. A group from J Street’s campus division protested nearby, but would not stand with us, which was weird but not unexpected. Regardless, it was nice to see that a few liberal Zionists were willing to back up their talk about removing settlements to make a Palestinian state possible. I hung around for an hour with good people like Joseph Dana, Noam Sheizaf, Adam Shapiro and Huwaida Arraf, Emily Henochowicz, Rebecca Vilkomersen, the Bitar family, Daniel Levy, Daniel May and a former Givati brigade soldier who turned his back on the occupation and now wears a Cynthia McKinney button emblazoned on his IDF uniform.

After the demo petered out, Joseph and I decided to gather up as many people as we could to speak to the Hebron Fund organizers directly. We found about 12 people still milling around; not many, but enough for a minyan. As soon as we reached the Hebron Fund’s registration desk, the group’s director, Yossi Baumol, began screaming about a series of prank phone calls he had received in the past few days. An activist who goes by the alias of Harrabic Tubman and who co-founded the Palestine solidarity/hip-hop network Existence is Resistance, which promotes the music of Palestinian hip-hop queen Shadia Mansour, confronted Baumol with his cheerleading for a settler leader’s decision to run over a 10-year-old Palestinian boy with his car in Silwan, Jerusalem. I told Baumol he should be ashamed to be raising money in public. For some reason this prompted him to launch into a bizarre rant that concluded with his announcement that he was a liberal. (Arthur Schlesinger has nothing on this guy!) Then, like the settlers of Hebron, Baumol scurried away behind a phalanx of security guards. See it for yourself above.

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The Return of Ghosts: Debating the rise of Geert Wilders and the far-right at the Nexus Symposium

On 11.18.10, By Max
The Nexus Institutes Return of Ghosts conference was inspired by the rise of far-right politician Geert Wilders in the Netherlands

The Nexus Institute's Return of Ghosts conference was inspired by the rise of far-right politician Geert Wilders in the Netherlands

I spent last week in Amsterdam, where I participated in the “Return of Ghosts” symposium of the Nexus Institute, a discussion/debate about the resurgence of neo-fascism in Europe and anti-democratic trends in the West. Besides providing a forum for debating European politics, the symposium was the occasion for the first public appearance in Europe by Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa since he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature last month. The arrival of Vargas Llosa, one of the world’s foremost intellectuals, resulted in an overflow crowd filled with members of the Dutch media, the country’s political class, and the royal family.

Even with Vargas Llosa in the spotlight, the participants’ attention was focused on Geert Wilders, the leader of the far-right Dutch People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy, which is now the third leading party in the Netherlands. With his gathering influence, Wilders has essentially placed the Dutch coalition government in a stranglehold; the government meets with him every Wednesday to gauge his opinions and ask for his instructions. While Wilders dictates at will to the government, he remains independent of it, comfortably avoiding the consequences of policies he has helped to shape. It is the perfect position for a politician whose agenda is comprised exclusively of xenophobic populism, and typical strategy of the far-right in countries across the continent.

Wilders’ base lies in the mostly Catholic south, where ironically few people have ever encountered a Muslim. He has also generated support in the city of Groeningen, once a citadel of the communists. Seeking to expand his base, Wilders promised to hire scores of “animal cops” to investigate and prosecute the abuse of animals, a clever wedge strategy in the only country I know of that has a party dedicated exclusively to animal rights. Of course, Wilders could care less about our furry friends. His stated goal is to end immigration not just to Holland but to all of Europe; ban the Quran (free speech is only for the “Judeo-Christian” community), and severely limit the rights of Muslim citizens of Europe by, for instance, instituting what he called a “head rag tax” on Muslim women. Wilders’ international allies include the goosestepping neo-Nazis of the English Defense League, the far-right pogromist Pam Geller, the Belgian neo-fascist party Vlaams Belang, and a substantial portion of the US neocon elite. Over the course of just a few years, he has become perhaps the most influential Islamophobe in the world.

But does this make Wilders a fascist? Rob Riemen, the director of the Nexus Institute, thinks so. Riemen has just published a book entitled “De Eeuwige Terugkeer Van Het Fascisme,” or “The Eternal Return of Fascism” (I eagerly await its English translation), dedicated to highlighting the danger of Wilders’ eerily familiar brand of right-wing populism. In the book, Riemen urges readers to compare Wilders’ politics to the early incarnations of European fascism, not to the genocidal terminal stage fascism of late World War II. He calls the parallels between Wilders and the early fascists “one-and-one.” In an economic and civilizational crisis like the kind the Netherlands is facing, Riemen warns that reactionary figures like Wilders can easily seize power while centrist elements stand by politely and passively, refusing to call a spade a spade. Where Wilders’ ascendancy will lead is unknown, but if he is not stopped in his tracks, Riemen is certain the story will not end well. In the week after its publication, Riemen’s book flew off the shelves, selling 5000 copies while generating heated reactions from across the spectrum of debate.

Riemen told me that despite the public enthusiasm for his book, his characterization of Wilders has been attacked as “un-Dutch.” In Dutch culture, as in so many others, open confrontation is avoided at all cost. Political disagreement is welcomed only if it is expressed in a collegial manner, as though nothing more than reputations were at stake. So the Dutch cultural elite generally goes along to get along. The resistance Riemen has met since he called Wilders out seemed to have alarmed and frustrated him. Why was it so difficult for liberal elements in the Netherlands to recognize the clear resonances of fascism in Wilders’ political style? he wondered. And why did they seem more concerned with regulating the terms of debate than with forming a united front against the far-right? Once the symposium opened and I was able to see the Dutch elite in action, I began to understand Riemen’s indignation.

The symposium began with a speech by Vargas Llosa, a complex personality who has allied himself with center-right parties in Spain and elsewhere but whose politics remain fundamentally rooted in cultural liberalism. Vargas Llosa’s differences with leaders of the left, which he used to belong to, exploded over the issue of free trade. He is an ardent neo-liberal and reviles Latin populists like Hugo Chavez and Ollanta Humala who advocate protectionism and industrial nationalization.

Vargas Llosa decorated his speech with literary metaphors and natural imagery to describe the challenges of democracy, particularly in Europe. But the body of the address was devoted to the supposed threat Islamic extremism posed to Western civilization. Vargas Llosa singled out suicide bombing as the most dangerous phenomenon, pointing to the Madrid and London bombings by al-Qaida inspired operatives, while curiously not mentioning suicide attacks by secular groups like the Tamil Tigers and the Kurdish PKK, or the nationalistic suicide terror by Palestinian militants (Vargas Llosa declared in his speech that “Israel deserves to be treated like any other nation,” and has been harshly critical of the state in the past).

During the first panel, which I participated in, Fania Oz-Salzberger, an Israeli professor of history and the daughter of famed author Amos Oz, boasted to crowd of Israel’s “vibrant democracy.” She was enthusiastically seconded by Mitchell Cohen, a former editor of Dissent who has devoted considerable energy to assailing anti-Zionist Jews, writing that “the dominant species of anti-Semitism encourages anti-Zionism.” I found it odd that neither expressed any concern over the almost endless stream of anti-democratic laws passing through the Knesset, or by the general authoritarian, anti-liberal trend in Israeli society. Oz-Salzberger went on to announce to a smattering of applause that “Geert Wilders and politicians like him are not welcomed by Israelis.”

Yet Wilders is one of Israel’s most frequent guests, having visited the country over 40 times in 20 years. In fact, he claims that his views on Islam and Arabs were forged while living on an Israeli moshav. “Nowhere did I have the special feeling of solidarity that I get when I land at Ben Gurion airport,” he once said. Wilders reportedly receives heavy support from Dutch financial backers of Israel, and has met with a range of Israeli officials. His closest allies lie within the extremist settler movement, prompting him to call for the forced transfer of Palestinians to Jordan. Members of the liberal Zionist intelligensia like Oz-Salzberger may not not want Wilders around, but who in Israel is listening to them? Israel’s mainstream leadership echoes Wilders’ crudest talking points on a regular basis, while the Zionist left clings to a dwindling handful of Knesset seats and watches passively — even resentfully — as a rag-tag band of leftist radicals fights for equality for all. Consider a recent statement by former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who is seen as a centrist within the Israeli political spectrum: “The origin of terrorism is within Islam,” Olmert declared this month.

The pro-Israel position of the new breed of European far-rightists has to be recognized as much more than a convenient political tactic. Of course, saying you “stand with Israel,” as Wilders so often does, is an easy way to insulate yourself from charges of anti-Semitism. But the extreme right is also attracted to Israel because the country represents its highest ideals. While some critics see Israel as a racist apartheid state, people like Wilders see Israel as a racist apartheid state — and they like it. They richly enjoy when Israel mows down Arab Muslims by the dozens and tells the world to go to hell; they admire Israel’s settler culture; and most of all, they yearn to live in a land like Israel that privileges its ethnic majority above all others to the point that it systematically humiliates and dispossesses the swarthy racial outclass. The endgame of the far-right is to make Europe less tolerant and more Israeli.

After the Italian philosopher Paolo Flores D’Arcais proclaimed that Italy was no longer a democratic country, citing PM Silvio Berlusconi’s control over 90 percent of the country’s media, the government’s deep seated corruption and the Prime Minister’s repeated attempts to impose onerous restrictions on journalistic freedom, Riemen asked me if the United States was a democracy given the the rapidly rising influence of corporations over the media and elections. After two panelists had described Israel as a vibrant democracy while another labeled Italy a non-democratic quasi-dictatorship, I decided that our definition of democracy was subjective at best. So I sidestepped the question and outlined a few of the greatest blows to American democracy, from the elimination of the Fairness Doctrine to the Telecommunications Deregulation Act to the Citizens United SCOTUS decision. Later in the evening, D’Arcais would remark to me with amazement that he never knew American media was ever regulated in the first place.

During the 20 minutes or so when students of Tilburg University were able to question the panel, one student asked whether suicide terror was a uniquely Islamic phenomenon, apparently referring to Vargas Llosa’s address. I responded that it of course was not, citing the example of secular groups like the Tamil Tigers which brought the tactic into practice. I recommended that the audience review the research of Robert Pape, the University of Chicago political scientist who has  demonstrated a clear connection between the American and Israeli occupation of Middle Eastern countries and the motivations of suicide bombers. Oz-Salzberger jumped in, proclaiming that occupation has little or nothing to do with the motives of suicide bombers. She did not marshal any evidence to support her point, possibly because our time was so limited. It would have been hard to do so, however, without supporting the fundamental argument of Wilders about Islam’s inherent violence — or the even sillier theory by the Israeli filmmaker/professional hasbarist Pierre Rehov that suicide bombers are motivated by sexual repression.

Next, the Dutch panel took the stage. The main attraction was Frits Bolkstein, the longtime leader of the People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy who employed Wilders as his parliamentary aide, providing him a stepping stone to his political career. He was a silver haired curmudgeon from aristocratic stock who reminded me instantly of the “paleocon” characters I’ve met while covering white nationalist conventions like American Renaissance.

“Everything went wrong when the government became impressed in the 90’s with the idea of the ‘good stranger,’” Bolkstein declared. “If the previous governments had tightened their immigration laws, there would not have been a Mr. Wilders.”

The only member of the panel to mount a significant challenge to Bolkstein was the Tilburg University professor Paul Frissen, who argued that the rule of law and basic standards of democracy protects “the right to be fundamentalist.” The other panelists either gave Bolkstein’s xenophobia a pass or attempted to surpass his resentment of Muslims. After Bolkstein lightly criticized Wilders’ call for banning the Quran, remarking that “what he says about Islam is nonsense” because it contradicts the freedom of religion, AB Klink, a former Dutch senator and ex-Minister of Health, chimed in.”It’s not nonsense because Islam is so different in its cultural values than ours,” Klink claimed.

Then, when Bolkstein called for shutting down Islamic schools, Frissen reminded him that state-supported Christian schools in the Dutch Bible belt teach theocratic concepts as well. Meindert Fennema, the political biographer of Wilders, entered the debate to demand that all religious schools be closed. “I’m against all forms of religious teaching!” he proudly exclaimed, sending gales of applause through the audience. “How can you call yourself a liberal?” Frissen asked with a tone of exasperation. Fennema ignored him.

During question time, a young freelance writer from India named Natasha Ginwala asked Bolkstein to answer for the “ghost of neo-colonialism,” which “the African people never voted for.” She mentioned the exploitative deals forced on developing countries by transnational oil companies, possibly alluding to Bolkstein’s role as a manager at Royal Dutch Shell in authoritarian countries like El Salvador, Indonesia, and Honduras during the 1970’s (I’m sure nothing unseemly happened during Bolstein’s tenure in these places). Bolkstein’s responded bluntly, “If these countries try to be self-sufficient it just doesn’t work!”

After the symposium, I talked to Ginwala and a group of her friends, who were mostly immigrant students. They were appalled by the ignorance of the Dutch panelists. “None of them knew the first thing about Islam,” an Arab student remarked. “They couldn’t even pretend to understand what Muslims actually believe.” Ginwala added, “How can Bolkstein tell me my country can’t be self-sufficient? I come from India. It’s one of the most diversified economies on the planet.”

I was not in Amsterdam long enough to do any formal reporting. However, I did notice that all of the immigrants I spoke to were closely and nervously following the rise of the right. At the airport, while waiting to board my flight, I talked to a 20-something security guard named Muhammad who seemed almost as bored as I was. Muhammad had spent his whole life in Amsterdam, but his parents were from Cairo, Egypt. He told me he wanted to take his girlfriend on a trip to New York City and Miami someday. When I brought up the topic of Wilders, he scoffed at his perception of Muslims. “Most of us aren’t even religious,” Muhammad said. “When I hear him talking about Muslims wanting to take over, I just laugh. I’m like, is this guy serious?”

But he did not underestimate Wilders’ appeal. “Everything he does and everything he says, it seems like it’s carefully planned. He obviously knows what he’s doing. And they let him get away with it,” Muhammad remarked. “Look, I’m just a citizen, I’m nobody, but if I say something about Christians or Jews that the government doesn’t like, I’ll be punished. But when Wilders, who is a public official, says all the things he says about Muslims, nothing happens to him. Instead, more and more people are voting for him.”

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The Rally To Restore Sanity and The Campaign To Restore The Radical Right

On 11.02.10, By Max

On my way to the Stewart/Colbert Rally to Restore Sanity/Fear, I got a text from John Legend, who has been my friend since our college days. He told me he had decided at the last second to fly into to DC to perform with The Roots on the National Mall. So within a few minutes I was backstage with John and the rest of the performers.

John Legend, Tony Bennett and some random guy

John Legend, Tony Bennett and some random guy

As I stood beside the stage watching John and The Roots play Donny Hathaway’s “Little Ghetto Boy” before a huge and relatively diverse crowd, it occurred to me that this was the first time in a long time I had witnessed a rally on the Mall that wasn’t filled with troglodytic racists and anti-abortion fanatics. The Sanity/Fear rally was calculated as the mirror opposite of the rallies I have grown accustomed to reporting on for the past six years: Blind rage and cultural despair was replaced with irony and high-minded humor, while the Tea Party was mocked not as a dangerous movement comprised of pathological bigots but as a stupid and uncool endeavor. One sign read: “Tea Parties Are For Little Girls and Imaginary Friends.”

Most of the performers had to watch the rally on a big screen TV in a tent that was set up behind the stage. I watched with them, except for the moments when Father Guido Sarducci stood in my way (his tattered cape was hard to see around). Cat Stevens aka Yusuf Islam, who now lives in Dubai, told me that he wanted his appearance at the rally to represent his return to the US since being denied entry to the country by the Bush administration for specious reasons. I talked to Tony Bennett about the influence of Yiddish Theater on Irving Berlin. “That guy knew what he was doing,” Bennett remarked. The crooner spent most of his time writing down song lyrics on a small pad of paper and quietly rehearsing them to himself. At one point, a security guard asked Kareem Abdul Jabbar to take a picture of him standing beside John Legend — a weird spectacle. When Jabbar excused himself as he nudged past me, I asked him if I was blocking his view (I wasn’t). Later, Ozzy Osbourne rushed in and out of the tent with glasses of water for himself and Sharon, while I talked to Jacob “Dude, you have no Quran” Isom about his theory on why God created gays.

As much as I enjoyed the uplifting rally, the backstage fun and clever street theater on the Mall, I was disturbed by John Stewart’s constant drawing of false equivalencies between the extremist Tea Party and mainstream liberals, which he employed again and again to supposedly reveal how the political debate has careened out of control. In Stewart’s presentation, open racist conspiracists like Glenn Beck, Pam Geller and the Fox News grotesque gallery of pundits were likened to center-left figures like Keith Olbermann and Ed Schultz simply because they all broadcast their opinions at maximum volume and rely on emotional manipulation. It was like comparing the Klan to the Shriners because members of both groups wear funny costumes.

(more…)

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Meltdown of the Macher: Abe Foxman loses it, calls Israeli interviewer a bigot and condemns the Seinfeld “Soup Nazi”

On 10.28.10, By Max

Abraham Foxman from Blue Pilgrimage on Vimeo.

Anti-Defamation League National Director Abe Foxman arrived in Israel in mid-October on the heels of several controversial decisions that prompted a hail of criticism in the United States. Foxman may have hoped that while in Israel he would have been able to avoid sensitive issues like his condemnation of the construction of an Islamic community center near Ground Zero; the ADL’s honoring of right-wing media kingpin Rupert Murdoch; or the ADL’s release of a blacklist of “anti-Israel organizations.” And for most of his trip, Foxman was able to propagate his message to the Israeli public and international media without any background noise from the US.

Then the great macher agreed to an on-camera interview with David Sheen, a young writer and videographer who splits time between the center-left Israeli paper Haaretz and independent documentary projects. Sheen, an Israeli citizen who is a friend and colleague of mine, makes no secret of his strong views about issues ranging from the occupation of Palestine to animal rights. He submitted his questions to Foxman days before the interview at the request of the ADL’s press handler. But Foxman did not bother to review the questions. Instead, he walked into the interview expecting to be handled as he was by the rest of the Israeli media: gently and with a degree of deference.

This may explain why Foxman appears so shocked when Sheen confronts him with pointed questions about the ADL’s honoring of Murdoch (Foxman calls him “a media genius”) and his endorsement of the “bigoted” positions of opponents of the Park 51 mosque (Foxman claims the reporter who quoted him defending the anti-mosque crowd’s bigotry “didn’t know history from borscht”). As Sheen presents Foxman with a litany of concerns of his growing legion of detractors, who have accused him of turning the ADL into a smear machine that has nothing to do with its stated mission of promoting civil rights, Foxman furiously lashes out at his interviewer, accusing him of staging a “set up.”

On at least four occasions, Foxman threatens to end the interview, claiming the questions are “not productive” and that he has better things to do. But each time he remains in his seat and berates Sheen. As the interview progresses (or deteriorates), it is clear that Foxman has little interest in promoting the work of the ADL, or even in rebutting his critics. He is far more interested in screaming at Sheen. It is one of the strangest and most embarrassing interview performances I have seen since Sarah Palin campaigned for Vice President.

(more…)

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Feeling the Loyalty to the Jewish State of Israel

On 09.16.10, By Max

The Israeli Knesset is debating a bill proposed by David Rotem of the extreme right Yisrael Beiteinu party that would require all Israeli citizens to swear loyalty to Israel as a “Jewish and democratic state.” This bill is targeted at increasing pressure on the twenty percent of Israelis who are Palestinian citizens while forcing the ultra Orthodox Jewish minority who reject the legitimacy of any state not based on Jewish biblical law to accept Zionism. If passed in its proposed form, citizens unwilling to take the loyalty oath would be at risk of losing citizenship.

Israeli leaders committed to a classic secular political Zionist platform have always fought at all costs to guard Israel’s “Jewish character,” even while they reveal their inability to properly define exactly what it is. The loyalty oath and push for a two-state solution are the most profound examples of the insecurity that has roiled beneath the surface in Jewish Israeli society since the state’s inception. Without a Jewish majority exhibiting clear legal and political dominance over the non-Jewish or non-Zionist minority, the Zionist movement becomes meaningless. So as the Palestinian-Israeli minority actively resists its dispossession and the ultra-Orthodox stubbornly reject the concept of a Jewish state, the Israeli establishment feels increasingly compelled to seek draconian measures to salvage its vision of Zionism.

The loyalty oath was one of the main platform issues for Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman’s far right Yisrael Beitenu party when it campaigned in 2009. “No citizenship without loyalty,” was among Lieberman’s most effective campaign slogans (his other slogan: “Only Lieberman speaks Arabic”), helping guide his party to an astonishing third place, with 15 of the 120 seats in Israeli Parliament. The draft bill currently debated in the Parliament would allow the Interior Ministry to strip even native Israelis of their nationality if they refused to swear allegiance to the Jewish state and “its symbols and values,” and failed to profess their willingness to perform military service. Abraham Foxman, the national director of the Anti-Defamation League, has expressed support for Yisrael Beiteinu’s loyalty crusade.

After the proposed law failed its first reading in the Knesset due to opposition from a handful of liberal members of the ruling Likud party, Yisrael Beiteinu released the following statement: “Yisrael Beitenu will continue to act for Israel’s basis as a Jewish, Zionist and democratic state and will fight against disloyalty and the negative exploitation of Israeli democracy.” In July, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet has approved a similar bill requiring all new citizens to take an oath of loyalty to the Jewish state. The measure would make attaining citizenship nearly impossible for Palestinians residing inside Israel.

(more…)

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“There Are No Civilians In Wartime.” Rachel Corrie’s Family Confronts The Israeli Military In Court

On 09.09.10, By Max
Cindy, Sarah, and Craig Corrie in the Haifa District Court for the second round of hearings in their civil suit against the Israeli government

Cindy, Sarah, and Craig Corrie in the Haifa District Court for the second round of hearings in their civil suit against the Israeli government

In a small courtroom on the sixth floor of Haifa’s District Court, a colonel in the Israeli engineering corps who wrote a manual for the bulldozer units that razed the Rafah Refugee Camp in 2003 offered his opinion on the killing of the American activist Rachel Corrie.

“There are no civilians during wartime,” Yossi declared under oath.

Yossi made his remarkable statement under withering cross examination by Hussein Abu Hussein, the lawyer for the family of Corrie, who was crushed to death by an Israeli bulldozer in Rafah on March 17, 2003. In the back of the courtroom were Rachel’s parents, Craig and Cindy, and her sister, Sarah, back in Israel for the second round of hearings in their civil suit against the state of Israel. They were joined by supporters, friends and a handful of reporters, including me (see Nora Barrows-Friedman’s report for more). No one from the Israeli media was present — the case has been virtually ignored inside Israel.

In the immediate wake of Corrie’s killing, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, then the chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, instructed Corrie’s parents to demand a “thorough, fair and transparent investigation” from the Israeli government. Since then, the Israelis have stonewalled them, refusing to provide key details of their investigation, which was corrupted from the start by the investigators’ apparent attempts to find evidence that a bulldozer did not in fact kill Rachel.

A 2003 bill introduced in the House International Relations Committee calling for a thorough Israeli investigation in Corrie’s killing and for American efforts to prevent such killings from happening again garnered 78 signatures in support (Rahm Emanuel was the only Jewish signer). However, Republican Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, one of the Israel lobby’s closest allies in Congress, prevented the bill from getting out of the committee. President George W. Bush could have pressed for a full floor vote on the bill but he did nothing. The bill died as a result.

Having been obstructed by the Israelis’ opaque investigation and betrayed by their own government (with notable exceptions like former Rep. Brian Baird), the Corries have been forced to take matters into their own hands. And so they have filed suit against the Israeli government for criminal negligence. Whether or not they will be able to secure the ruling they seek, Rachel Corrie’s family has already elicited a number of damning revelations about the Israeli army’s abuses in Gaza in 2003 and the machinations it has relied on to obscure evidence of its criminal conduct.

“I think we are in a situation similar to South Africa. What we are trying to make clear is that the truth has to be pursued diligently or we won’t make it to the point of reconciliation,” Craig Corrie told me, referring to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that enabled South Africa to peacefully transition from an apartheid system to representative democracy. “We need to understand and acknowledge the truth first.”

So far, the truth has not been easy to come by. The Corries are saddled with a judge who is said to have never ruled in favor of any plaintiff in a civil rights-related suit. And the defense has claimed unspecified state security concerns in its successful bid to avoid revealing the full contents of the investigation into Rachel Corrie’s killing — the family’s lawyers have only been allowed to view a summary. But the Corries’ legal efforts have not been in vain.

On the first day of hearings, the Corries’ lawyers were able to confirm through testimony from “Oded,” one of the investigators of Rachel Corrie’s killing, that Major General Doron Almog, then the head of the Israeli army’s Southern Command, had attempted to stop the military investigators from questioning the bulldozer operators who killed Rachel. When asked why he did not challenge Almog’s apparently illegal intervention, Oded stated that he was only 20-years-old at the time, with no college education and only a few months of training as an investigator. He was intimidated by the high-ranking officer who stormed into the room and menaced him and the other investigators. (Almog once canceled a trip to Britain after being warned that he would be arrested on arrival for ordering the destruction of 59 homes in the Rafah refugee camp in 2002).

Among the most disturbing aspects of Corrie’s case is the abuse of her body by Israeli authorities after she was killed. Craig Corrie recalled to me a panicked phone conversation he had with Will Hewitt, a friend and former classmate of Rachel Corrie who had just witnessed her killing.

“It’s getting dark over here and there are no refrigeration units for her body in Gaza,” Hewitt told Craig Corrie.

“Just leave it until tomorrow,” Craig replied. “We don’t want you or anyone else to get killed.”

“But her body is starting to smell,” Hewitt pleaded.

Somehow Hewitt and his fellow activists from the International Solidarity Movement were able to get Rachel Corrie’s body out of Gaza. But first Hewitt was ordered by Israeli troops to remove the body from the casket and carry it across a border checkpoint. Only Hewitt was allowed to escort Corrie’s body in the ambulance; the rest of the activists who witnessed her death were forced to hitchhike home in the desert. Finally, Corrie’s body was transported to the Abu Kabir Forensic Institute in Tel Aviv where the notorious Dr. Yehuda Hiss autopsied her.

Who is Dr. Hiss? The chief pathologist of Israel for a decade and a half, Hiss was implicated by a 2001 investigation by the Israeli Health Ministry of stealing body parts ranging from legs to testicles to ovaries from bodies without permission from family members then selling them to research institutes. Bodies plundered by Hiss included those of Palestinians and Israeli soldiers. He was finally removed from his post in 2004 when the body of a teenage boy killed in a traffic accident was discovered to have been thoroughly gnawed on by a rat in Hiss’s laboratory. In an interview with researcher Nancy Schepper-Hughes, Hiss admitted that he harvested organs if he was confident relatives would not discover that they were missing. He added that he often used glue to close eyelids to hide missing corneas.

When Craig and Cindy Corrie learned that Hiss would perform an autopsy on their daughter, they stipulated that they would only allow the doctor to go forward if an official from the American consulate was present throughout the entire procedure. An Israeli military police report stated that an American official did indeed witness the autopsy. However, when the Corries asked American diplomatic officials including former US Ambassador to Israel Daniel Kurtzner if the report was true, they were informed that no American was present at all. The Israelis had lied to them, and apparently fixed their own report to deceive the American government.

On March 14, during the first round of hearings in the Corries’ civil suit, Hiss admitted under oath that he had lied about the presence of an American official during the autopsy of Rachel Corrie. He also conceded to taking “samples” from Corrie’s body for “histological testing” without informing her family. Just which parts of Corrie’s body Hiss took remains unclear; despite Hiss’s claim that he “buried” the samples, her family has not confirmed the whereabouts of her missing body parts.

“It’s so hard to know that Rachel’s body wasn’t respected,” Rachel’s sister, Sarah, told me. “Doctor Hiss and the Israeli government knew what our family’s wishes were. The fact that our wishes were disregarded and a judge hasn’t done anything is absolutely horrifying.”

The treatment of Rachel Corrie’s body is peripheral to her family’s lawsuit. But it demonstrates the degree to which she and those whose homes she died defending have been dehumanized — “there are no civilians during wartime,” as Colonel Yossi declared. Rachel Corrie’s family is seeking only one dollar in symbolic punitive damages from the Israeli government. Their real goal is to force a country in a perpetual state of warfare to treat its innocent victims as human beings, and to be held accountable if it does not.

“It is incredibly expensive for us to carry this case on both emotionally and financially,” Craig Corrie remarked. “It is a whole lot to ask of a private citizen. But as a family we still have the ability to do a lot, so we are going to carry this cause on for everyone who cannot.”

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Knesset Speaker Reuven Rivlin’s admission: Israel “expelled Arabs” across Palestine in 1948

On 09.03.10, By Max
Knesset Speaker Reuven Rivlin is cursed with a penchant for intellectual honesty

Knesset Speaker Reuven Rivlin is cursed with a penchant for intellectual honesty

In a little noticed article on page 19 of the September 1 edition of Maariv, the Speaker of the Israeli Knesset, Reuven Rivlin, assailed the actors and artists who have refused to perform at the theater in the Jewish settlement of Ariel. As a proud advocate of Greater Israel and professed friend of even the most fanatical members of the settlement enterprise (see his remarks at the recent funeral of murdered settlers in Kiryat Arba), Rivlin’s attack would not have been significant if he hadn’t revealed some uncomfortable facts in the process.

Seemingly lost in his anger at the lefty artists, Rivlin conceded that the founders of Israel, the cream of the kibbutznikim, had carried out a campaign of ethnic cleansing to a massive degree. “I say to those who want to boycott – Deer Balkum ['beware' in Arabic],” Rivlin said to Maariv. “Those who expelled Arabs from En-Karem, from Jaffa, and from Katamon [in 1948..] lost the moral right to boycott Ariel.”

So according to one of the most powerful politicians in Israel, the official story of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which denies that Palestinians were forced from their homes in 1948 (they “abandoned their homes…at the request of Arab leaders,” the ministry’s website claims), is false. The Nakba happened after all. But in Rivlin’s view, those who carried out the Nakba no “moral right” to oppose settlement activity because they stole more from the Palestinians than the settlers intend to steal.

As it is said, there is no honor among thieves.

Here is a complete translation of the Hebrew-only Maariv report (thanks to the great Aki Orr for translation assistance):

Rivlin castigates the boycotting artists (“Ma’ariv” Sept. 1, bottom of page 19)

Rubi Rivlin, Chairman of the KNESSET, yesterday viciously attacked Israeli artists, players, and writers, who imposed a cultural boycott on the town of ARIEL, due to its location beyond the “Green Line” [in territories conquered in 1967]

“I say to those who want to boycott – Deer Balkum [“beware” in Arabic] Those who expelled Arabs from En-Karem, from Jaffa, and from Katamon [in 1948..] lost the moral right to boycott Ariel” said Rivlin to “Ma’ariv” yesterday.

Rivlin described the artists’ call for a boycott as “lacking intellectual honesty” adding that those who settled in Ariel and other places in Judea and Samaria [the official Israeli name for the occupied West Bank] did so “due to the orders of society, and some may say – due to the orders of Zionism.”

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How To Kill Goyim And Influence People: Leading Israeli Rabbis Defend Manual for For Killing Non-Jews

On 08.31.10, By Max

When I went into the Jewish religious book emporium, Pomeranz, in central Jerusalem to inquire about the availability of a book called Torat Ha’Melech, or the King’s Torah, a commotion immediately ensued. “Are you sure you want it?” the owner, M. Pomeranz, asked me half-jokingly. “The Shabak [Israel's internal security service] is going to want a word with you if you do.” As customers stopped browsing and began to stare in my direction, Pomeranz pointed to a security camera affixed to a wall. “See that?” he told me. “It goes straight to the Shabak!”

As soon as it was published late last year,Torat Ha’Melech sparked a national uproar. The controversy began when an Israeli tabloid panned the book’s contents as “230 pages on the laws concerning the killing of non-Jews, a kind of guidebook for anyone who ponders the question of if and when it is permissible to take the life of a non-Jew.” According to the book’s author, Rabbi Yitzhak Shapira, “Non-Jews are “uncompassionate by nature” and should be killed in order to “curb their evil inclinations.” “If we kill a gentile who has has violated one of the seven commandments… there is nothing wrong with the murder,” Shapira insisted. Citing Jewish law as his source (or at least a very selective interpretation of it) he declared: “There is justification for killing babies if it is clear that they will grow up to harm us, and in such a situation they may be harmed deliberately, and not only during combat with adults.”

In January, Shapira was briefly detained by the Israeli police, while two leading rabbis who endorsed the book, Dov Lior and Yaakov Yosef, were summoned to interrogations by the Shabak. However, the rabbis refused to appear at the interrogations, essentially thumbing their noses at the state and its laws. And the government did nothing. The episode raised grave questions about the willingness of the Israeli government to confront the ferociously racist swathe of the country’s rabbinate. “Something like this has never happened before, even though it seems as if everything possible has already happened,” Israeli commentator Yossi Sarid remarked with astonishment. “Two rabbis [were] summoned to a police investigation, and announc[ed] that they will not go. Even settlers are kind enough to turn up.”

In response to the rabbis’ public rebuke of the state’s legal system, the Israeli Attorney General and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu kept silent. Indeed, since the publication of Torat Ha’Melech, Netanyahu has strenuously avoided criticizing its contents or the author’s leading supporters. Like so many prime ministers before him, he has been cowed into submission by Israel’s religious nationalist community. But Netanyahu appears to be particularly impotent. His weakness stems from the fact that the religious nationalist right figures prominently in his governing coalition and comprises a substantial portion of his political base. For Netanyahu, a confrontation with the rabid rabbis could amount to political suicide, or could force him into an alliance with centrist forces who do not share his commitment to the settlement enterprise in the West Bank.

On August 18, a pantheon of Israel’s top fundamentalist rabbis flaunted their political power during an ad hoc congress they convened at Jerusalem’s Ramada Renaissance hotel. Before an audience of 250 supporters including the far-right Israeli Knesset member Michael Ben-Ari, the rabbis declared in the name of the Holy Torah that would not submit to any attempt by the government to regulate their political activities — even and especially if those activities included inciting terrorist attacks against non-Jews. As one wizened rabbi after another rose up to inveigh against the government’s investigation of Torat Ha’Melech until his voice grew hoarse, the gathering degenerated into calls for murdering not just non-Jews, but secular Jews as well.

“The obligation to sacrifice your life is above all others when fighting those who wish to destroy the authority of the Torah,” bellowed Rabbi Yehoshua Shapira, head of the yeshiva in the Tel Aviv suburb of Ramat Gan. “It is not only true against non-Jews who are trying to destroy it but against Jewish people from any side.”

The government-funded terror academy

The disturbing philosophy expressed in Torat Ha’Melech emerged from the fevered atmosphere of a settlement called Yitzhar located in the northern West Bank near the Palestinian city of Nablus. Shapira leads the settlement’s Od Yosef Chai yeshiva, holding sway over a small army of fanatics who are eager to lash out at the Palestinians tending to their crops and livestock in the valleys below them. One of Shapira’s followers, an American immigrant named Jack Teitel, has confessed to murdering two innocent Palestinians and attempting to the kill the liberal Israeli historian Ze’ev Sternhell with a mail bomb. Teitel is suspected of many more murders, including an attack on a Tel Aviv gay community center.

Despite its apparent role as a terror training institute, Od Yosef Chai has raked in nearly fifty thousand dollars from the Israeli Ministry of Social Affairs since 2007, while the Ministry of Education has pumped over 250 thousand dollars into the yeshiva’s coffers between 2006 and 2007. The yeshiva has also benefited handsomely from donations from a tax-exempt American non-profit called the Central Fund of Israel. Located inside the Marcus Brothers Textiles store in midtown Manhattan, the Central Fund transferred at least thirty thousand to Od Yosef Chai between 2007 and 2008.

Though he does not name “the enemy” in the pages of his book, Shapira’s longstanding connection to terrorist attacks against Palestinian civilians exposes the true identity of his targets. In 2006, Shapira was briefly held by Israeli police for urging his supporters to murder all Palestinians over the age of 13. Two years later, according to the Israeli daily Haaretz, he signed a rabbinical letter in support of Israeli Jews who had brutally assaulted two Arab youths on the country’s Holocaust Remembrance Day. That same year, Shapira was arrested under suspicion that he helped orchestrate a rocket attack against a Palestinian village near Nablus. Though he was released, Shapira’s name arose in connection with another act of terror, when in January, the Israeli police raided his settlement seeking the vandals who set fire to a nearby mosque. After arresting ten settlers, the Shabak held five of Shapira’s confederates under suspicion of arson.

Friends in high places

Despite his longstanding involvement in terrorism, or perhaps because of it, Shapira counts Israel’s leading fundamentalist rabbis among his supporters. His most well-known backer is Dov Lior the leader of the Shavei-Hevron yeshiva at Kiryat Arba, a radical Jewish settlement near the occupied Palestinian city of Hebron and a hotbed of Jewish terrorism. Lior has vigorously endorsed Torat Ha’Melech, calling it “very relevant, especially in this time.”

Lior’s enthusiasm for Shapira’s tract stems from his own eliminationist attitude toward non-Jews. For example, while Lior served as the IDF’s top rabbi, he instructed soldiers: “There is no such thing as civilians in wartime… A thousand non-Jewish lives are not worth a Jew’s fingernail!” Indeed, there are only a few non-Jews whose lives Lior would demand to be spared. They are captured Palestinian militants who, as he once suggested, could be used as subjects for live human medical experiments.

Otherwise, Lior appears content to watch Palestinians perish as they did at the muzzle of Dr. Baruch Goldstein’s machine gun in 1994. Goldstein, who massacred 29 Palestinians and wounded 150 in a shooting spree while they prayed in Hebron’s Cave of the Patriarchs mosque, was a compatriot and neighbor of Lior in the settlement of Kiryat Arba. At Goldstein’s funeral, Lior celebrated the massacre as an act carried out “to sanctify the holy name of God.” He then extolled Goldstein as “a righteous man.” Thanks to Lior’s efforts, a shrine to Goldstein was constructed in center of Kiryat Arba so that locals could celebrate the killer’s deeds and pass his legacy down to future generations.

Though Lior’s inflammatory statements resulted in his being barred from running for election to the Supreme Rabbinical Council, according to journalist Daniel Estrin, the rabbi remains “a respected figure among many mainstream ZIonists.” By extension, he maintains considerable influence among religious elements in the IDF. In 2008, when the IDF’s chief rabbi, Brigadier General Avichai Ronski, brought a group of military intelligence officers to Hebron for a special tour, he concluded the day with a private meeting with Lior, who was allowed to revel the officers with his views on modern warfare — “no such thing as civilians in wartime.”

Besides Lior, Torat Ha’Melech has earned support from another nationally prominent fundamentalist rabbi: Yaakov Yosef. Yosef is the leader of the Hazon Yaakov Yeshiva in Jerusalem and a former member of Knesset. Perhaps more significantly, he is the son of Ovadiah Yosef, the former chief rabbi of Israel and spiritual leader of the Shas Party that forms a key segment of Netanyahu’s governing coalition.

Yaakov Yosef has brought his influence to bear in defense of Torat Ha’Melech, insisting at the August 18 convention in Jerusalem that the book was no different than the Hagadah that all Jews read from on the holiday of Passover. The Hagadah contains passages about killing non-Jews and so does the Bible, Yosef reminded his audience. “Does anyone want to change the Bible?” he asked.

Bibi buckles

Only days before direct negotiations in Washington between Israel and the Palestinian Authority planned for early September, Yaakov Yosef’s 89-year-old father, Ovadiah delivered his weekly sermon. With characteristic vitriol, he  declared: “All these evil people should perish from this world… God should strike them with a plague, them and these Palestinians.”

The remarks have sparked an international furor and earned a stern rebuke from Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat. “While the PLO is ready to resume negotiations in seriousness and good faith,” Erekat remarked, “a member of the Israeli government is calling for our destruction.”

Palestinian Israeli member of Knesset Jamal Zehalka subsequently demanded that the Israeli Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein put Yosef on trial for incitement. “If, heaven forbid, a Muslim spiritual leader were to make anti-Jewish comments of this sort,” Zehalka said, “he would be arrested immediately.”

Here was a perfect opportunity for Netanyahu to demonstrate sincerity about negotiations by  shedding an extremist ally in the name of securing peace. All he had to do was forcefully reject Yosef’s genocidal comments — a feat made all the easier by the White House’s condemnation of the rabbi. But the Israeli Prime Minister ducked for political cover instead, issuing a canned statement through his office. “Rabbi Ovadiah Yosef’s remarks do not reflect Netanyahu’s views,” the statement read, “nor do they reflect the position of the Israeli government.”

Thus on the eve of peace negotiations, Bibi chose political expediency over condemning the murderous oath of a coalition partner.

 

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