Thousands protest Netanyahu ‘reforms’ for 18th week straight

6 May 2023

Source: News websites

By Al Mayadeen English 

Despite Netanyahu’s announcement of a suspension in legislation for the reforms more than a month ago, following weeks of enormous protests and a countrywide strike, Saturday’s marches took place as the settler population remains wary of Netanyahu’s intentions.

• Israeli protesters hold a poster depicting their Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gagged by a surgical protection mask in front of Netanyahu’s residence, occupied Al-Quds, Sept. 12, 2020. (AFP)

For the 18th week in a row, thousands of Israelis have marched in the streets in the occupied Palestinian territories to protest the Israeli hardline cabinet’s contentious “judicial reforms.” 

For months now, upheaval and chaos took the Israeli occupation entity by storm. Violent clashes have erupted between the Israeli opposition and police, as Israeli settlers continue to protest against the occupation government’s planned judicial overhaul.

Calls for civil disobedience and riots have been met with stern warnings from both sides, as political rifts are widening and warning against the outbreak of a “civil war”.

Protesters gathered in “Tel Aviv”‘s Habima Square on Saturday, waving flags and screaming anti- Netanyahu chants as they prepared to march along Kaplan Street, a key artery in the city’s center.

A protester displayed a photo of far-right Israeli minister Itamar Ben-Gvir with the phrase “the minister of national failure.”

Protest organizers claimed earlier in a statement that Netanyahu’s cabinet is preparing to convert “Israel” into a “messianic and dangerous dictatorship.”

Read more: Israeli reservists warn of collapse if judicial reform law is passed

The protests have been a weekly occurrence since January, when the regime unveiled revisions that aim to give Netanyahu’s hardline cabinet significant control over Supreme Court nominees.

Netanyahu’s coalition, formed by his Likud party and extreme-right and ultra-Orthodox political partners, contends that adjustments are required to equalize power between the regime’s executive and judicial branches.

Despite Netanyahu’s announcement of a suspension in legislation for the reforms more than a month ago, following weeks of enormous protests and a countrywide strike, Saturday’s marches took place.

The broader population, on the other hand, remains wary of the premier’s intentions, as seen by massive marches across the occupied territories since January, when the Israeli regime’s cabinet began laying the groundwork for the revisions’ implementation.

Earlier this month, Israeli President Isaac Herzog convened cross-party discussions to seek an agreement on the reform package. 

NETANYAHU’S POWER GRAB IS SHATTERING THE MYTH OF A UNITED, DEMOCRATIC ISRAEL

APRIL 3RD, 2023

Source

By Miko Peled

A few observations on things surrounding the issue of Israel. For reasons that are hard to understand at this point, the rapprochement between Iran and Saudi Arabia has had very little mention in the Israeli press. Considering its importance and potential impact on the region, it is difficult to see how Israel is hardly moved by this development. There was an expectation that Saudi Arabia would normalize relations with Israel. However, now the kingdom not only has not done so, but they are also building bridges with Iran, Israel’s biggest nemesis. It is a slap in the face of the U.S. and Israel and may soon be seen as diplomatic and intelligence failures of epic proportions.

The American attitude towards Israel has been consistently supportive, and of course, it is expected that it will continue to be supportive in the foreseeable future. $3.8 billion goes to Israel uninterrupted, even though Amnesty International has labeled it an apartheid regime. In fact, the U.S. support for Israel is not just “aid”; it is complicity in crimes against humanity as Israel continues to oppress the Palestinians.

Governments around the world discuss recognizing Palestine within the borders of 1967 – and some have already done so. However, the borders were created by Israel and have nothing to do with Palestine. Recognizing Palestine within these borders only legitimizes the Israeli crimes of 1948. There is one Palestine, and its borders are clear: the Jordan River in the east and the Mediterranean in the west. Palestine borders Syria and Lebanon in the north and the Gulf of Aqaba in the South.

Any recognition of a part of Palestine is really a recognition and legitimization of the apartheid state of Israel. If the U.K. – or any other government – was serious about supporting the Palestinian cause, they would recognize Palestine in all of historic Palestine and would support the fight to bring down the apartheid regime.

JUDICIAL REFORMS

The reforms that the Netanyahu government wants to pass touch on issues that relate only to the privileged class of Israeli Jews within the apartheid regime. They take away the ability of the high court to strike down undemocratic laws and allow politicians to have more control over the selection of judges. It is an undemocratic reform, to be sure, but we have to remember that “Israel” was never a democratic state. It was always – as we are told by the Amnesty report – a regime of apartheid, committing a crime against humanity towards the Palestinian people.

The hundreds of thousands of Israelis protesting in the streets are blind to the Palestinian issue. They have the power to end the apartheid regime, free the Palestinian political prisoners and stop destroying Palestinian homes and lives. Hundreds of fighter pilots are refusing to serve now, but they never refused to bomb Gaza (or Lebanon and Syria) and kill civilians.

There are two causes behind the protests. First, Israelis who did not vote for Netanyahu and his government hate him and the racist gangsters in the cabinet. They want bigoted thugs like Itamar Ben-Gvir, Bezalel Smotrich and their allies to stay in the West Bank and terrorize Palestinians. They don’t want to see these faces as members of the “legitimate” Israeli government. This is also why the Biden administration and the British prime minister are criticizing Netanyahu. They are also embarrassed to support an Israel that is being governed by these figures.

FRAGMENTED ISRAELI SOCIETY

There have always been inequalities among Israeli Jews of different backgrounds. In fact, one may argue that there was never a cohesive Israeli society. Israel is made up of a fragmented group of people who have very little in common. I grew up in a very white, European-centric suburb outside Jerusalem. I used to take the bus to go to school in Jerusalem and back. Just a few stops after mine, it was an entirely different world. There was another neighborhood, rather large, that was made up of Jews from Iraq and Kurdistan. We all used the same bus but went to separate schools. We never met or spoke to each other. We did not understand them, and they did not understand us. I came from “civilized” Europeans, and they were “Orientals,” – which means less privileged and beneath us. That is how I was raised; this is one small example of how fragmented Israeli society has always been.

One time I was in an Israeli jail after I was arrested at a protest in the West Bank. I was the only white guy in the jail cell with about ten or twelve other inmates. They were all Israeli Jews from Arab countries. Not only did we have nothing in common, they thought I was “worse than an Arab” because I was an Ashkenazi’ and an Arab lover – a leftist.

While there, I told my fellow cellmates a story from my childhood growing up in Jerusalem –

I went to a school that was only for Ashkenazi European Israelis. Then, one day, someone decided to initiate what they called “integration.” Not integration between Jews and Arabs who all lived in Jerusalem, but between Jewish Israelis of different social and economic classes. The authorities brought the children of the Arab Jews – who were of a lower social class and went to a school a few blocks away from my school – to the same school as me.

These kids were as different as could be. We never spoke to one another and never played with one another during recess. In fact, they placed them, the “other” kids, in different classes and with different teachers. When I told this to the other inmates in my cell, they knew what I was talking about. They all remembered how Israelis who are white or European treat them like dirt. They still thought I was a lefty enemy and worse than an Arab.

The illusion of a cohesive Israel, an Israel that is a miraculous success, exists only in the minds of privileged Israeli and some diaspora Jews. Some European politicians may also believe this to be the case, having been convinced by Jews in their countries. But it was never the case. And now, if Israel indeed does implode, if it really disintegrates, there will be no reason to mourn.

الحكومة الإسرائيلية المقبلة وتأكّل نظرية “بوتقة الصهر” لبن غوريون

 الاربعاء 30 نوفمبر 2022

حسن لافي 

ما يحدث في كيان الاحتلال ليس بعيداً من سعي نتنياهو لاستخدام بن غفير وسموتريتش لحسم قضايا إشكالية داخلية، مثل القضاء وسطوة “الجيش” وتدخله في القرار السياسي.

الحكومة الإسرائيلية المقبلة وتأكّل نظرية “بوتقة الصهر” لبن غوريون

نتائج الانتخابات الإسرائيلية الأخيرة وشكل الحكومة المقبلة بقيادة الرباعي بنيامين نتنياهو وبتسلئيل سموتريتش وإيتمار بن غفير وأريه درعي أوضحا عمق التأثيرات السلبية في وحدة المجتمع الصهيوني، والصراع على طبيعة “هُوية إسرائيل”، وما يواكبها من إعادة تعريف اليهودي والعديد من القضايا الأمنية الإستراتيجية التي أجّل حسمها عمداً المؤسسون الأوائل للكيان الصهيوني، لعدم إحداثها انشقاقات وللحفاظ على وحدة الكيان الناشئ حديثاً.

اعتمد ديفيد بن غوريون، المؤسس الفعلي للكيان، إستراتيجية تدريجية للانتقال من الهوية اليهودية المرتبطة بالمنفى والنشأة الإثنية لليهود وتحزباتهم أثناء فترة الييشوف قبل إنشاء الكيان، تحت ما يسمى المصطلحات الصهيونية الفكرية “نفي المنفى”، إلى الهوية الإسرائيلية الجامعة لكلّ سكان الكيان التي أطلق عليها نظرية “بوتقة الصهر”.

اعتمد بن غوريون في إستراتيجية “بوتقة الصهر” على عدة أدوات، أهمها:

أولاً، “الجيش” الإسرائيلي

أدرك بن غوريون أهمية إقامة جيش عسكري واحد موحد يمثل “إسرائيل” ومستوطنيها، بعيداً من حال العصابات اليهودية التي سادت في فترة الييشوف، وأطلق على “الجيش” الإسرائيلي اسم “جيش الشعب”، لكونه يدرك أهمية دوره في تشكيل الهوية الإسرائيلية الجديدة من خلال تحويله إلى نقطة التقاء الكلّ اليهودي الصهيوني خلال الخدمة العسكرية الإلزامية في “الجيش”.

أضف إلى ذلك قناعة بن غوريون، أول وزير “أمن” للكيان الإسرائيلي، وواضع مرتكزات العقيدة العسكرية الإسرائيلية، أن لـ”الجيش” مجموعة من المهامّ المجتمعية والاقتصادية والتعليمية والسياسية والاستيطانية. لذلك، لم يتردد بعد أقل من أسابيع على إقامة الكيان الإسرائيلي في أخذ قرار بحلّ كل العصابات العسكرية اليهودية ودمجها في الجيش الناشئ، بما فيها وحدة النخبة للهاغاناه الصاعقة “البلماخ”.

وهنا، يذكر التاريخ الصهيوني المعاصر حادثة سفينة “التلينا” التي قُتل فيها ما يقارب 16 صهيونياً من عصابة “الغيتسل”. كل ذلك من أجل تكريس احتكار السلاح والعسكرة في “الجيش” فقط.

ثانياً، النظام التعليمي في “إسرائيل”

أدرك بن غوريون مبكراً جداً أهمية النظام التعليمي في الكيان الناشئ، لما يحمله من دور مهم في صنع الهوية الإسرائيلية، وتعزيز الرواية الصهيونية التاريخية التلمودية الكاذبة، والأهم إتاحة الفرصة لكل اليهود لتطوير ذواتهم والحد من الفروقات الاجتماعية الطبقية، لكون التعليم أهم مرتكز يدخل في التفاوت الطبقي بين الفئات اليهودية الاستيطانية.

لذلك، اتخذ الكنيست عام 1953 قانون أساس التعليم الإسرائيلي، الذي عُدَّ بمنزلة ثورة تصحيحية لحال التشرذم في المناهج التعليمية الرسمية في “إسرائيل”، والتي ورثتها من فترة الييشوف.

ثالثاً، الكراهية للفلسطينيين والعرب

جنَّد الآباء المؤسسون للكيان الصهيوني، بشقيه العلماني العمالي بقيادة بن غوريون والعلماني اليميني بقيادة زئيف جابوتنسكي، الخوف الفطري لأولئك المستوطنين الصّهاينة الطارئين على أرض فلسطين من مقاومة الفلسطيني، من خلال منظومة متشابكة تكامل فيها “الجيش” والإعلام والفكر والتعليم والاقتصاد، من أجل خلق قاسم مشترك من الكراهية تجاهه يوحّد الفسيفساء الإسرائيلية داخلياً من خلال صناعة التهديد المشترك. 

أنتجت التغيرات السياسية والاجتماعية والاقتصادية في خريطة مركز القوى الإسرائيلية على مدار 73 عاماً من عمر الكيان تحديات جدية وجذرية أمام إستراتيجية “بوتقة الصهر” الإسرائيلية الهادفة إلى صنع الهوية الإسرائيلية المشتركة.

يكفي لمعرفة حجم هذه التغيرات متابعة تصريحات قادة “الجيش” والمؤسسة الأمنية وما يتحدث عنه كبار المحلّلين السياسيين في استديوهات التحليل ونشرات الأخبار عن شكل الحكومة الإسرائيلية القادمة وآثارها السلبية، ولكن ليس في النسيج الاجتماعي الإسرائيلي ومنظومة التعليم، الأمر الذي زاد توترات الشرخ العلماني الديني إلى درجات غير مسبوقة.

إنّ التأثيرات الأهم تتركّز على دور مؤسسات الحكم وكيانيتها في “إسرائيل”، وفي مقدمتها “الجيش” الإسرائيلي، المؤسسة الأهم فيها، التي بات مفهوم احتكارها للقوة العسكرية في “إسرائيل” يتراجع بعد إعلان الاتفاق على نقل صلاحيات كتائب حرس الحدود في الضفة الغربية البالغ عددها 2000 جندي من قيادة المنطقة الوسطى في “الجيش” إلى وزير “الأمن” القومي، المسمى الجديد لميلشيات بن غفير، لكنها هذه المرة ليست عصابات خارجة عن القانون، كما كانت مجموعات الحاخام الإرهابي مائير كهانا أو مليشيات “شبيبة التلال”، بل بغطاء قانوني رسمي، إلى درجة أن بعض الجهات الأمنية في “إسرائيل” قال: “أنشأوا جيشاً خاصاً لبن غفير”، وكأن “إسرائيل” تعود إلى فترة العصابات اليهودية قبل تأسيس الكيان.

في المقلب الآخر، طالب سموتريتش بنقل صلاحيات الإدارة المدنية الإسرائيلية في الضفة الغربية من “الجيش” إلى وزارة المالية التي يطالب بتوليها، ليكسر احتكار سيادة “الجيش” الإسرائيلي على ملف الاستيطان والتعامل مع الجبهة الفلسطينية الأهم في الصراع.

ما يحدث ليس بعيداً من سعي نتنياهو لاستخدام بن غفير وسموتريتش وأدرعي لحسم قضايا إشكالية داخلية، مثل القضاء وسطوة “الجيش” وتدخله في القرار السياسي، إضافة إلى أن إرباك المشهد السياسي الداخلي في “إسرائيل” يصب في مصلحته لكي يمرر القوانين التي تجنّبه المحاكمة، من خلال تدمير المنظومة القانونية، وسحب صلاحيات المحكمة العليا؛ آخر معاقل العلمانيين اليساريين، التي لم يجرؤ مناحيم بيغن ذاته على المساس بها، وهو صاحب مقولة: “هناك قضاة في القدس”، في إشارة إلى احترامه المحكمة العليا وقراراتها.

أضف إلى ذلك تدخل نتنياهو الواضح في تعيين القضاة وإمكانية إلغاء منصب المستشار القانوني للحكومة، لتصبح المنظومة القضائية الإسرائيلية من دون صلاحيات فعلية.

لذلك، نجد أنَّ نتنياهو مستعدّ للتنازل عن قضايا مركزية لها علاقة بهوية الكيان وإدارة الصراع مع الفلسطيني، مثل الاستيطان في الضفة الغربية، والعمل على تهجير فلسطينيي الـ48، لكون ذلك بات محل إجماع صهيوني، وخصوصاً بعد معركة “سيف القدس” وتنامي الانتفاضة في الضفة والقدس، من أجل إحكام سيطرته على مقاليد الحكم تماماً وعدم خروجه من مقر رئيس الوزراء في شارع بلفور مرة أخرى.

إن الآراء المذكورة في هذه المقالة لا تعبّر بالضرورة عن رأي الميادين وإنما تعبّر عن رأي صاحبها حصراً

إقرأ للكاتب

• الصهيونية الدينية من الهامش إلى مركز القرار الإسرائيلي (1)
• الصهيونية الدينية من الهامش إلى مركز القرار الإسرائيلي (2)
• تشكيل الحكومة الإسرائيلية بين التحديات والفرص
• نتائج انتخابات الكنيست الإسرائيلي.. الدلائل والمؤشرات
• “عرين الأسود” وحسابات الانتخابات الإسرائيلية
• مستقبل العلاقة بين لبنان و”إسرائيل” في ضوء اتفاق ترسيم الحدود البحرية

WORSENING CHAOS: ISRAEL’S POLITICAL INSTABILITY IS NOW THE NORM

JULY 15TH, 2022

FILE – Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett makes a call before voting on a law on the legal status of Jewish settlers in the occupied West Bank, during a session of the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, in Jerusalem, June 6, 2022. Nir Orbach, a member of Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett’s party, said Monday, June 13, 2022, he would cease voting with the governing coalition, dealing yet another blow to the teetering government as it marks one year in office. (AP Photo/ Maya Alleruzzo, File)

Source

Even if a purportedly centrist or even leftist prime minister finds himself at the helm of the government, outcomes will not change when the Knesset – in fact, most of the country – is governed by a militaristic, chauvinistic, and colonial mindset.

By Dr. Ramzy Baroud

The collapse of the short-lived Israeli government of Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid validates the argument that the political crisis in Israel was not entirely instigated and sustained by former Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.

Bennett’s coalition government consisted of eight parties, welding together arguably one of the oddest coalitions in the tumultuous history of Israeli politics. The mishmash cabinet included far-right and right groups like Yamina, Yisrael Beiteinu, and New Hope, along with centrist Yesh Atid and Blue and White, leftist Meretz, and even an Arab party, the United Arab List (Ra’am). The coalition also had representatives from the Labor Party, once the dominant Israeli political camp, now almost completely irrelevant.

When the coalition was formed in June 2021, Bennett was celebrated as some kind of a political messiah, who was ready to deliver Israel from the grip of the obstinate, self-serving and corrupt Netanyahu.

Confidence in Bennett’s government, however, was misplaced. The millionaire politician was a protégé of Netanyahu and, on many occasions, appeared to stand to the right of the Likud party leader on various issues. In 2013, Bennett proudly declared “I have killed lots of Arabs in my life – and there is no problem with that.” In 2014, he was very critical of Netanyahu for failing to achieve Israel’s objectives in one of the deadliest wars on besieged Gaza. Moreover, Bennett’s core support comes from Israel’s most extreme and far-right constituency.

Many wished to ignore all of this, in the hope that Bennett would succeed in ousting his former boss. That possibility became very real when Netanyahu was officially indicted in November 2019 on various serious corruption charges.

When Bennett and Lapid’s government was officially sworn in, on June 13, 2021, it seemed as if a new era of Israeli politics had begun. It was understood that Israel’s political camps had finally found their common denominator. Netanyahu, meanwhile, was exiled to the ranks of the opposition. His news began to peter out, especially as he sank deeper into his ongoing corruption trial.

Though some analysts continue to blame Netanyahu for the various crises suffered by Bennett’s coalition – for example, when Idit Silman resigned her post on April 6, leaving the coalition government with only 60 seats in the Knesset. But there is little proof of that. The short-lived Israeli government has collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions.

Would the actions of the government that ruled over Israel between June 2021 and June 2022 have been any different if Netanyahu was still the Israeli prime minister? Not in the least. Illegal Jewish settlements continue to grow unhindered; home demolitions, the dispossession of Palestinian communities in the West Bank and occupied Jerusalem and various routine acts of Israeli aggression against its Arab state neighbors remained unchanged.

According to United Nations data, 79 Palestinians were killed in the West Bank by the Israeli army between June 2021 and May 2022. The region of Masafer Yatta, a 36-square km area located in the Southern Hebron Hills, has been designated for total annexation by the Israeli army. The expulsion of the area’s 1,200 Palestinian residents has already begun.

Regarding occupied Jerusalem, specifically in the case of the so-called Flag March, Bennett has proved to be even more extreme than Netanyahu. Bernard Avishai writes in The New Yorker that, in 2021, “Netanyahu’s government changed the march’s route away from the Damascus Gate to minimize the chance of violence”, while the ‘change government’ – a reference to Bennett’s coalition – “had reinstated the route, and even permitted more than two thousand national-Orthodox activists, including the extremist national-camp Knesset member Itamar Ben-Gvir,” to conduct their provocative ‘visits’ to Haram Al-Sharif,  one of Islam’s holiest sites.

This is not to suggest that a return of Netanyahu, following the now scheduled November elections – Israel’s fifth general elections in less than four years – would be a welcome change. Instead, experience has shown that, regardless of who rules Israel, the political attitude of the country, especially towards Palestinians, would most likely remain unchanged.

True, Israeli politics are known to be unstable. This instability, however, worsened in recent decades. Since 1996, the average Israeli government has not served more than 2.6 years. But since April 2019, the average dramatically shrank to less than a year per government. The long-standing argument was that Netanyahu’s domineering and polarizing attitude was to blame. The last year, however, has demonstrated that Netanyahu was a mere symptom of Israel’s pre-existing political malaise.

Some Israeli analysts suggest that Israel’s political crisis can only end when the country institutes electoral and constitutional reforms. That, however, would be a superficial fix; after all, much of Israel’s parliamentary and electoral laws have been in effect for many years, when governments were relatively stable.

For Israel to change, a language of peace and reconciliation would have to replace the current atmosphere of incitement and war. Israeli politicians, who are currently fanning the flames, jockeying for positions and feeding on the violent chants of their supporters, would have to be transformed into something else entirely, a near impossibility in the current hate-filled atmosphere throughout the country.

Chances are Israel’s political crises will continue to loom large; coalitions will be assembled, only to collapse soon after; politicians will continue to move to the right even if they allege to be members of other ideological camps. Israel’s political instability is now the norm, not the exception.

In an interview with CNN, Yohanan Plesner, a former Member of the Knesset (MK), said that the problem is Israel’s need for “electoral and constitutional reforms, such as making any attempt to initiate early elections dependent on a two-thirds majority in parliament and amending the current law that demands new elections when a budget fails to pass.”

What Israelis refuse to face is the fact that governments which are predicated on right-wing, far-right, extremist constituencies are inherently unstable. Even if a purportedly centrist or even leftist prime minister finds himself at the helm of the government, outcomes will not change when the Knesset – in fact, most of the country – is governed by a militaristic, chauvinistic, and colonial mindset.

«Israeli» Elections: The Labor Party

Designed By: Abeer Mrad

Jews Call for Destruction Of Christianity During Greek Orthodox Pentecost Prayer in Jerusalem

Source

Jewish demonstrators shouted ‘We will tear down this abomination, you are evil. The Jewish people lives forever! King David lives forever! May the name of your so-called God be blotted out forever…’

‘It hurts me that they are letting these goyyim come here. It hurts me that these evil men, who have oppressed the Jews throughout history, are being allowed to contaminate our holy sites…’

‘The goyyim got their way this time, but they won’t the next time. King David lives forever!  The people of Israel lives forever!..’

Haaretz

Religious tensions roiled anew on Mount Zion this week when police detained five of some dozens of enraged Jewish extremists who attempted to disrupt Pentecostal prayers held by hundreds of Greek Orthodox worshipers.

As the Greek Orthodox procession made its way on Monday to the compound that houses the Cenacle, the presumed site of the Room of the Last Supper, and the presumed Tomb of King David, the Jewish demonstrators with flowing ear locks and large knitted yarmulkes screamed, booed and blew shofars at the worshipers.

As the procession made its way up the narrow stairs to the Cenacle, Jewish demonstrators, held back by Border Police and riot control teams, could be heard shouting:  “We will tear down this abomination,” and, “you are evil.”

The procession was led by kuwwas, the traditional guardians of Christian holiness, wearing crimson fez-like hats. They pounded wooden staffs on the ancient stone walkways to make way for the bishop, the head of the local church.

Resplendent in heavy white robes embroidered in gold threat, the bishop was followed by scores of priests and religious officials, all dressed in long back head gear, and hundreds of pilgrims, all chanting liturgies in Greek.

At the height of the ceremony, a small group from the Greek Orthodox, led by the bishop, came down the stairs and entered the Tomb of King David, escorted by the police.

The Jewish protestors grew more frenzied.  “The Jewish people lives forever!” King David lives forever!” one screamed.  “May the name of your so-called God be blotted out forever,” cursed another. “Nazi,” someone screamed at the police. Seemingly oblivious to the crowd, the Greek Orthodox worshipers stayed in the Tomb only a few moments then went back up the stairs.

 A man dressed in ultra-Orthodox garb, who would only give his name as “Tzvi from Jerusalem,” stood by with tears in his eyes.

“It hurts me that they are letting these goyyim (non-Jews) come here,” he said. “It hurts me that these evil men, who have oppressed the Jews throughout history, are being allowed to contaminate our holy sites.  And it hurts me even more that the police, led by our Jewish government, are allowing them to do so.”

Scenes like this occur often on Mount Zion. The 30-acre mountain that spreads out to the west from the Zion Gate holds a jumble of Christian churches from many different denominations, abandoned Muslim shrines, active and abandoned Jewish, Christian and Muslim cemeteries, and archaeological digs, along remnants of the War of Independence and the Six-Day War.

It is also home to artists and sculptors, including the widow of sculptor David Palombo, who designed the gates to the Knesset; banquet halls and the somber Chamber of the Holocaust, Israel’s first national Holocaust museum, which predates Yad Vashem by several years.

Across the conquests though the centuries, by Christians, Muslims, British, and, most recently, by Israel, members of various religious faiths have lived here together, sometimes in peace, at times in war, and most often according to carefully-set arrangements between them.

Mount Zion was central to Israeli national and religious observance following the War of Independence, because it was the only site in East Jerusalem held by Israel and because it offered views into the Old City and its sacred sites, held off-limits by the Jordanians to Jews and Israelis. The Mount was subsequently neglected after the Six-Day War, when the Old City was returned to Israeli control.

But in recent years, various Jewish groups have tried to reclaim the centrality of Mount Zion. Fueled by religious zealotry, some of them are hill-top youth prevented by  security authorities from being in the West Bank, and have instead made Mount Zion their home.

Tensions have increased particularly since a visit by Pope Francis in 2014, when rumors circulated that Israel intends to cede parts of Mount Zion, including David’s Tomb, to the Vatican and other Christian institutions.

Israeli officials have repeatedly denied these rumors.  The extremists aren’t convinced, though.

“There are Jews who would sell away that that is most precious to the Jewish people,” says one of the young activists. “They have forgotten what it means to be Jewish. To be proud and defend the land. We will be the defenders.”

Part of the Jewish extremists’ plan of defense has included defacing churches and their property, desecrating Christian cemeteries, and spitting on and verbally accosting priests and monks.

According to activists from “Window on Mount Zion,” a project sponsored by the Jerusalem Intercultural Center and Search for Common Ground, there has been relative calm over the past few months, thanks in part to police station established on Mount Zion last year.

According to various agreements, Christians are entitled to observe communal worship in the Cenacle five times a year, including the Pentecost. For individual prayer, the room is open to all. King David’s Tomb, which has unofficially been turned into a synagogue, is open for Jewish communal and individual prayer at all times.

This week, the trouble began well before the Greek Orthodox observance. There are three observances of Pentecost in Jerusalem, and the Armenians celebrated theirs on Sunday afternoon.

In the early hours of Sunday morning, several Jewish extremists barricaded themselves in David’s Tomb, apparently mistakenly believing the Armenians would be granted the right to enter David’s Tomb – which, in fact, is part only of the Greek Orthodox tradition. They protesters were removed, detained, and issued restraining orders banning them from the site.

But others returned early on Monday morning and tried once again to take control over the site, and by 7 A.M., dozens had already gathered near the scene. In carefully choreographed arrangements, police allowed early morning Jewish prayers on Monday morning, then closed the tomb to visitors until after the Greek Orthodox prayer and set up security perimeters.

In prior coordination with the police, Rabbi Aaron Yitzhak Stern from Bnei Brak, unofficially appointed by adherents as the “Rabbi of Mount Zion,” removed the Torah scrolls from David’s Tomb then returned them after the Christians had concluded their prayers. Also in coordination with police, the Greek worshipers did not bring any Christian symbols, icons, or incense into the Tomb.

Some two dozen volunteers from Window on Mount Zion were visibly present in their distinctive yellow vests. Project coordinator Merav Horowitz-Stein said they provided “another set of eyes, and individuals who can try to reason with the extremists from any side and explain the situation to the tourists.”

Police acknowledged that the volunteers, who tried to engage the protestors in discussion and explain the commotion to foreigners, played a crucial role in maintaining the relative calm.

In Christian belief, Pentecost marks the fiftieth day after the Last Supper, on which the Holy Spirit entered each of the Holy Apostles. Teaching them to speak in foreign languages, the Spirit instructed the Apostles to spread the world of Christianity throughout the world. To many, the holiday thus marks the actual founding of the Christian Church.

“The tradition of King David and the psalms is particularly significant to the Greek Orthodox,” Yisca Harani, an expert in Christianity from the Yad Ben Tzvi Institute, explains to Haaretz. They come to the tomb as pilgrims.”

Harani says the Pentecost observance has much in common with the Jewish holiday of Shavu’ot. “There is a clear parallel between the way that the Jews believe they received the Torah from Moses from Mount Sinai and the way Christians believe that the Holy Spirit came down to the apostles. And both are based on the number fifty.

“Observances like this provide an opportunity and a demand from the State of Israel to truly provide freedom of worship and equality for all,” Harani says.

Several police officials noted with satisfaction that “overall, the events passed without incident” and that the police had been able to find a “balance between the right to protest and the lack of any right to violently disrupt anyone else’s right to prayer.”

But as the crowds dispersed, one of the protesters made it clear that he and fellow demonstrators had no intention of backing down.

‘The goyyim got their way this time. But they won’t the next time. King David lives forever!  The people of Israel lives forever!’

’Israeli’ Minister Arrested for Spying for Iran!

 

Local Editor

18-06-2018 | 22:46

 

A new scandal strikes the “Israeli” political institution.

 

Gonen Segev, a former “Israeli” Knesset member and minister, is accused of spying for Iran and aiding it during wartime, the Shin Bet security service said Monday.

 

On Monday, the Shin Bet security service announced that Segev – the former energy minister who previously served time in jail for drug smuggling – was extradited to “Israel” from Equatorial Guinea and charged with spying for Iran last month.

 

The physician who served as the apartheid entity’s energy and infrastructure minister from 1992 to 1995, was jailed for five years in 2005 for trying to smuggle more than 30,000 ecstasy tablets into it from the Netherlands and forging a diplomatic passport. He was released in 2007.

 

According to the so-called “Israel’s” internal security agency and the police discovered that Segev had been recruited by Iran and became an agent for its intelligence services. Segev later met twice with his handlers in Iran.

 

“Israeli” police said this case is one of the “most severe security breaches it has known.”

 

Segev sent information to his Iranian sources regarding “Israel’s” energy sector, security sites, structures, and the identity of officials in the security and political establishments in “Israel”, among other things.

Related Articles

• Former Zionist Minister Arrested on Charges of Spying for Iran

Press Tv-How long can Benjamin Netanyahu survive? Feat: Jafar Hassan & Gilad Atzmon

March 03, 2018  /  Gilad Atzmon

In this week’s The Sun Will Rise, Roshan Muhammed Salih, Jafar Hassan and myself looked into  Benjamin Netanyahu’s political fate and the criminality within Israeli political elite.  Very interesting discussion (starting at 3min 29sec). I was very happy to meet mr. Hassan. I am getting familiar with his work.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZgrcp7qTJA&t=3m28s

Protesters in Tel Aviv Call on ‘Crime’ Minister Netanyahu to Step down

 February 16, 2018

Israeli demonstrators gathered in Tel Aviv on Friday to urge the enemy’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to resign after police recommended he be charged with bribery in two corruption cases.

Police said on Tuesday enough evidence had been found for Netanyahu to be charged, saddling the four-term premier with one of the biggest challenges to his long dominance of Israeli politics.

Netanyahu, 68, denies wrongdoing in both cases and has said nothing will come of the police investigations. It is now up to the attorney general to determine whether to press charges against him.

Around 1,000-2,000 protesters rallied in a Tel Aviv square, some with signs saying “crooks go home” and “crime minister”.

“We think the prime minister should immediately disqualify himself and resign,” said Shlomit Bar, 63, a retired music teacher. “He cannot be any longer the prime minister of Israel.”

Netanyahu: What happens next?

“From a moral standpoint, this is a disgrace to the ‘state of Israel’, where a prime minister is suspected of such serious crimes,” said Oren Simon, one of the protesters. “He should go home. Enough.”

A poll published on Wednesday showed almost half of Israel’s electorate believe the police rather than Netanyahu.

Netanyahu is currently entangled in four political scandals: Case 1000 which involves allegations that the PM and his wife accepted illegal gifts from businessmen; Case 2000 which accuses Netanyahu of attempting to buy favorable newspaper coverage; Case 3000, also known as the “submarine scandal”; and Case 4000, in which a close associate of Netanyahu is suspected of providing confidential information to Israel’s largest telecoms company.

New Israel election poll places Yair Lapid ahead of Netanyahu

The Zionist prime minister’s wife, Sara Netanyahu, has also been a

Source: Websites

• هل تنهي السجائر عهد نتنياهو؟؟
• Landmine Blast Injures Seven Israeli Soldiers in Occupied Jericho City
• Key Israeli Minister Criticizes Netanyahu, but Staying in Coalition

The Scam of Binary Options

February 06, 2018  /  Gilad Atzmon

 

By Eve Mykytyn

Israel’s binary options business has been closed down by Israeli lawmakers as of the end of January 2018. This move should have come as a relief to investors and law enforcement officers world wide as the insidious binary options business had cost investors billions of dollars and run roughshod over laws in other countries. Despite the deceptive nature of the business, Israel allowed the binary options business to develop and operate openly, and with support from authorities, for over 10 years.

Beginning around 2006 Israelis entered the business of ‘binary’ options.  A binary option is simply a bet an investor places on the price of a given security at a set time in the future.  For instance, if an investor bets that the price of stock X will be at least $65 on Friday, the broker who takes the bet is betting that the price of X will be under $65 on Friday. Neither buyer nor seller owns any interest at all in the underlying stock X at any time during the transaction. Brokerages make money on binary options by selling losing bets to investors.

Israeli brokerages identified potential investors by using call centers that employed primarily young immigrants whose native language was not Hebrew so that they could easily pretend to be calling another city or country, usually a  financial center like London or Frankfurt. Employees were taught the techniques of high pressure sales and were paid based upon the investments they generated. (See: http://www.timesofisrael.com/the-wolves-of-tel-aviv-israels-vast-amoral-binary-options-scam-exposed/)

Once an investor was hooked, he was matched with a broker who would negotiate the investment.  The investor who had been brought in by promises of riches was not told that the brokerage firm had the other side of the bet. The results of the bets were determined by a ‘trading platform’ (instead of actual real time stock market quotes) and, of course, the trading platform was controlled by the brokerage firm.

If an investor came to understand that he had been duped or wanted his money returned for whatever reason, his money was suddenly unavailable.

Clearly, most of the victims were not sophisticated investors with knowledge of pricing stocks or options. This created additional value to the brokerage firm who, having finished with an investor, would sell his name to other schemers.

The Israeli police responded to investor complaints by telling the caller that he had to come to the police station in person to file a complaint. Even when fraud charges were directly filed, as they ultimately were, the police failed to act and not a single Israeli binary options villain, in an industry that fleeced billions of dollars, has ever been convicted in Israel.

Finally, in March, 2016, The Times of Israel exposed the scheme in an article entitled ‘The Wolves of Tel Aviv.’ The article decried the fact that for thousands of Israelis their job was to pretend to be a financial expert, pretend  to be based in one or another global financial capital, call people all over the world and use every foul means to defraud customers.

Shmuel Hauser, the head of Israel Securities Authority (the Israeli equivalent of the SEC), initially claimed to know nothing of the scheme. When Netanyahu was informed, his only response was to demand that binary options trading be shut down all over the world.

Finally, in 2016, Hauser introduced a bill in the Knesset to shut down binary options trading. The Knesset duly acted, and shut down binary options trading but only for Israeli investors.

Apparently the Hebrew press ignored the issue. Maybe this is because, after spring 2016, only  non Israelis were being defrauded. Perhaps the Israeli press was intimidated. After breaking the story, The Times of Israel was subjected to a ‘welter of legal and illegal threats’ and intimidation some of which were delivered by Israel’s most prestigious law firms no doubt paid for by the billions scammed.

In October, 2017 following the arrest by the FBI of Lee Elbaz,  CEO of Yukom Communications Ltd, an Israeli binary options company, for wire fraud and conspiracy, the Knesset finally passed legislation closing down binary options brokers three months in the future. What justification could there have been for allowing brokers an additional three months to perpetuate their fraudulent activities? In any event, only binary options trading is prohibited, leaving plenty of  alternatives open to the former binary options  brokers.

And indeed, the brokers are already back up and running, having transferred their attentions to cryptocurrency. They have re-branded their scheme removing the word ‘binary’ and replacing it with ‘crypto.’ Their business continues to be stealing money from unsuspecting people worldwide who are wrongly led to believe that they are investing in something when in fact there is no underlying asset at all. The financial website Finance Feeds has done extensive research into binary options, an excellent summary of the selling techniques can be found here.

Finance Feeds’ conclusion was :

“They [binary options brokers] are as far removed from the leaders of the genuine financial services industry globally as cheese is from thermonuclear fission, however they clearly understand that they live and operate from a region in which pretty much anything goes. No other OECD nation on the planet has allowed a fraudulent business to mimic the genuine financial services business…

The same country that allows cartels to block the import of competing goods to the supermarket sector, allows families to run national banks, and maintains a criminal family which operates the country’s national port authority, taking imported goods, impounding them and then selling them via a network of equally disreputable individuals is the same country that is allowing semi-literate binary options fraudsters to have their cake and eat it.”

 

From ‘Russia-Gate’ to ‘israel-Gate’, As one fake scandal fades, a real one emerges

 by Justin Raimondo

As one fake scandal fades, a real one emerges

Life is full of surprises. Like that time you were counting on a new bike for Christmas, and were totally certain your parents were going to come through, and then – lo and behold! – on Christmas morning there it was: a spanking brand-new Segway! The final evidence that, despite your best efforts, you’d always be a nerdy little dork. (And yes, a pocket calculator turned up in your stocking,)

That’s just what happened to #TheResistance this holiday season. For months they’ve been salivating heavily in anticipation of the turning of Michael Flynn, the former National Security Advisor now charged with lying to the FBI. Flynn has admitted doing so on at least two occasions, both involving his answers to questions about his conversations with Russian ambassador Sergey Kisylak. During the transition – after Trump’s election but before he took office – Flynn was talking to the Russians about two subjects: the possible blowback from the Obama administration’s decision to impose more sanctions and close the Russian compound in Maryland, and the Russian position on the controversial UN resolution condemning Israel for building yet more “settlements” on Palestinian land.

The incoming Trump team was “intensely focused on improving relations with Moscow and was willing to intervene to pursue that goal,” as the New York Times phrased it, even as the war cries in the Democratic party got louder and demagogues like Adam Schiff waved the bloody shirt of Russia-gate. That took balls: and here’s another instance where the alleged non-interventionists ensconced in the world of thinktanks and academia fail to give the Trump people the credit that is their due.

Think about it, folks: both the US and the Russians possess enough nuclear firepower to destroy all life on earth several times over. This sword of Damocles is hanging over us by a thread, just as it loomed large during the last cold war with Moscow. It’s a  machinery of annihilation that is set on hair-trigger alert, and any number of events could unleash it: a miscalculation, a foolish bluff, a misunderstanding, a technical glitch, a showdown similar to the Cuban missile crisis. All that stands between us and utter extinction is the hope that this apparatus of death can be restrained by mutual agreement. Bravo to the Trump administration for making peace a priority. If this is now a crime, and even “treason,” as the mouth-breathers of #TheResistance would have it, well then let the Washington Inquisition make the most of it.

I feel obligated to repeat my admonition of the various Beltway careerists who light up the small firmament of anti-interventionism: why no defense of the White House on this vitally important issue?

Given the scope of a special counsel’s powers, and the wide berth he is given to pursue possible violations to the law far removed from his original mandate, perhaps we should have expected that some other foreign connection would come to light. Flynn was instructed by none other than Jared Kushner, the President’s son-in-law, to approach “every member of the Security Council” to block the resolution condemning the seizure of Palestinian property. The Russians were directly contacted by Flynn, who asked them to veto the resolution in the Security Council.

Flynn’s unsuccessful efforts on behalf of the Israelis were the fruit of an Israeli appeal to the incoming Trump administration. The day after Flynn’s conversation with the Russian ambassador on this subject an anonymous Israeli official told CNN “that Israel – and reportedly the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, himself – had contacted Trump to seek his assistance in killing the resolution.”

As special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe continues, the full extent of the covert Israeli effort to undermine what was then US policy will come to light, and this may prove to be the most revealing aspect of the whole affair.

What’s interesting is that an Israeli official would come right out and brazenly boast of having turned to the Trump team to stop the resolution:

“The official – in comments that may come back to haunt the White House – said that Israel had ‘implored the [Obama] White House not to go ahead and told them that if they did, we would have no choice but to reach out to President-elect Trump.

“‘We did reach out to the president-elect,’ the official added, ‘and are deeply appreciative that he weighed in, which was not a simple thing to do.’”

By inserting that information into the public record, the legal case against both Flynn and possibly other figures in the Trump administration is considerably strengthened. Which makes one wonder: did the Israelis deliberately burn Trump?

Yes, I’m indulging in pure speculation, and yet why would an Israeli official openly discuss such a delicate matter? Even as the outgoing Obama-bots were setting the trap for Flynn – an effort Tel Aviv may well have been privy to – the Israelis were letting the world know that they had the Americans in their pocket.

This is more grist for Mueller’s mill: aside from that, Kushner has financial and political links to Israel, and these are now likely coming under the special counsel’s scrutiny. One can now see what direction this investigation may be taking us: Instead of revealing collusion between the Trump team and the Russians, the Flynn indictment exposed Kushner’s collusion with Israel.

Has Russia-gate morphed into Israel-gate?

If this is, indeed, the direction Mueller is taking, then this development is certain to end the fondest hopes of #TheResistance. Because it’s highly unlikely any public official, no matter how compromised, is going to be prosecuted for collusion with the Israelis and/or their American lobby. The last time US law enforcement tried that was back in 2009, in the Larry Franklin spy scandal, in which two employees of AIPAC, the powerful Israeli lobby, were prosecuted for procuring vital secrets from National Security Council analyst Larry Franklin. That case was dropped because pursuing it would have revealed yet more secrets.

That was a case of outright espionage: “collusion” is a far different – and much vaguer – matter. In any event, the fact is that after what seems like years of accusations, not a single iota of actual evidence has corroborated the charge that the Trump campaign plotted with Putin to deprive Hillary Clinton of her divine right of succession to the Oval Office. The foundational myth upon which the Mueller investigation rests – the idea that Russia was behind the WikiLeaks email dump – was never real to begin with: the Mueller probe, therefore, once launched, branched out into a more general look at foreign influence on the incoming administration. Which could and should mean that half of Washington will soon be lawyering up.

israel’s ethnic cleansing/genocide, one and the same

ETHNIC CLEANSING / GENOCIDE … ONE IN THE SAME

Recently declassified cabinet meeting transcripts show that top Israeli officials discussed ethnic cleansing tactics to deal with Six-Day War fallout.

Image by Carlos Latuff

Declassified Israeli Transcripts Discuss Ethnic Cleansing

eclassified cabinet meeting minutes show that top Israeli cabinet officials contemplated an ethnic cleansing of the Gaza Strip and Galilee, rewriting history textbooks in favor of a pro-Zionist version of history, and censoring political speech in newspapers to deal with the fallout of the Six-Day War in 1967.

The material posted to the Israeli archives website shows hundreds of pages of previously classified cabinet meeting minutes, including those between August and December of 1967, which followed closely after the Six-Day War in June. From this archive, Israeli officials demonstrated a lack of direction following the war in which the Israeli military conquered and illegally occupied East Jerusalem, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, the Golan Heights, and the Sinai Peninsula.

Officials initially contemplated the difficulties of administering the illegally occupied lands.

“At some point we will have to decide. There are 600,000 Arabs in these territories now. What will be the status of these 600,000 Arabs?” Prime Minister Levi Eshkol asked.

“I suggest that we don’t come to a vote or a decision today; there’s time to deal with this joy, or better put, there’s time to deal with this trouble,” he said. “But for the record I’m prepared to say this: There’s no reason for the government to determine its position on the future of the West Bank right now. We’ve been through three wars in 20 years; we can go another 20 years without a decision.”

Later documents show that Eshkol felt the pressure of ethnic diversity in the occupied lands which were under the illegal administration of the ethnocentric occupying forces.

“The strip of this country is like a miserable, threatening neck for us, literally stretched out for slaughter,” he said. “I cannot imagine it — how we will organize life in this country when we have 1.4 million Arabs and we are 2.4 million, with 400,000 Arabs already in the country?”

Eshkol and his cabinet later floated a covert ethnic cleansing policy by “working on the establishment of a unit or office that will engage in encouraging Arab emigration.” The prime minister added, “We should deal with this issue quietly, calmly and covertly, and we should work on finding a way from them to emigrate to other countries and not just over the Jordan [River].”

Eventually the cabinet discussed more extreme plans.

“Perhaps if we don’t give them enough water they won’t have a choice, because the orchards will yellow and wither,” Eshkol said in one meeting. The prime minister also discussed the idea of initiating a war of aggression against Palestinians to force them to leave their ancestral lands.

“Perhaps we can expect another war and then this problem will be solved. But that’s a type of ‘luxury,’ an unexpected solution.”

Realizing the optics of the illegal occupation and ethnic cleansing, Education Minister Zalman Aranne remarked:

“I do not for one minute accept the idea that the world outside will look at the fact that we’re taking everything for ourselves and will say, ‘Bon Appetit,’” he said. “After all in another year or half a year the world will wake up; there’s a world out there and it will ask questions.”

After 50 years, Israel has instituted a “apartheid regime” in Palestine, according to a landmark United Nations report that has since been retracted following political backlash.

Rima Khalaf, the former UN Under-Secretary General and ESCWA Executive Secretary, affirmed the report’s findings by saying that the report “clearly and frankly concludes that Israel is a racist state that has established an apartheid system that persecutes the Palestinian people”.

 

SOURCE OF REPORT

israel’s Rogue Arms Trade

by Jonathan Cook

Israel has not divulged details of its ties to Myanmar’s military government, but public records show that it has sold the military there armed patrol boats, guns and surveillance equipment [File: Soe Zeya Tun/Reuters]

Human rights activists are stepping up efforts to expose Israel’s long and covert history of supplying weapons and military training to regimes while they actively commit massacres, ethnic cleansing and genocide.

The issue of Israel’s trade with rogue regimes has been thrust into the spotlight again after revelations that it is sending weapons to Myanmar, in defiance of a US and European arms embargo.

Formerly known as Burma, Myanmar was condemned last month by the United Nations for conducting what it called a “textbook ethnic cleansing” of the Rohingya, a Muslim minority. Hundreds of thousands of Rohingya are reported to have fled to neighbouring Bangladesh in recent weeks, after evidence of the torching of entire villages, massacres and systematic rapes.

Israel has not divulged details of its ties to Myanmar’s military government, but public records show that it has sold the military there armed patrol boats, guns and surveillance equipment. Myanmar’s special forces have also been trained by Israelis.

Human rights groups are set to stage a protest outside Israel’s parliament on October 30, calling for an immediate halt to the weapons sales to Myanmar.

Israeli firms have also broken with the United States and Europe by supplying weapons and surveillance equipment to militias in South Sudan, where a civil war has raged since late 2013. Some 300,000 Sudanese are believed to have been killed in the fighting.

Eitay Mack, a human rights lawyer, has submitted a spate of petitions to the Israeli courts in an attempt to bring to light details of Israel’s trade with such regimes. He said the cases were designed to hasten war crimes investigations of the officials and contractors involved.

“Many Western states sell arms, but what’s unique about Israel is that, wherever war crimes and crimes against humanity are being committed, you find Israel is present,” Mack told Al Jazeera.

“The companies selling the weapons, and the officials who quietly approve the trade, must be held accountable. Otherwise, why would this ever stop?”

Clandestine practice

Mack said that Israel’s collusion with Myanmar’s military was part of a pattern of aiding rogue regimes that went back decades and reflected the importance of the arms trade to Israel’s economy.

Over the summer, it was revealed that Israeli defence officials approve 99.8 percent of all requests for arms export licences.

As well as fuelling the current violence in Myanmar and South Sudan, Israel has been accused of clandestinely providing arms used in notorious past episodes of genocide and ethnic cleansing in places such as Rwanda, the Balkans, Chile, Argentina, Sri Lanka, Haiti, El Salvador and Nicaragua. Israel also cultivated close ties to apartheid South Africa, Mack noted.

Yair Auron, a genocide researcher at Israel’s Open University, said that Israel’s supply of weapons to regimes such as Myanmar should be compared to the sending of arms to Nazi Germany during the Holocaust.

“These sales turn me and all Israelis into criminals, because they are sent in our name,” he told Al Jazeera. “We are abetting genocide.”

Efforts by human rights groups to shed light on Israel’s collusion with Myanmar have so far been frustrated by Israeli authorities and the courts.

The Haaretz daily accused Defence Minister Avigdor Lieberman of “lying” when he claimed in parliament last month that Israel’s policy in Myanmar accorded with that of the “enlightened world”.

Officials refused to disclose information of arms exports to the military government during a hearing at Israel’s Supreme Court last month on a petition to halt the sales. Lawyers for the state insisted on closed-door sessions when discussing relations with Myanmar.

The three judges hearing the case issued a gag order to prevent publication of their decision, widely assumed to have approved the continuation of arms sales. They justified the blackout on the grounds that publicity risked damaging Israel’s foreign relations.

Late last year, the same court rejected a petition demanding that officials release documents showing Israel’s role in arming Serbian forces that carried out massacres of Bosnians in the 1990s.

Campaigners are waiting on hearings in a host of other cases concerning South Sudan, Rwanda, Chile, Haiti and Argentina.

In August, Israeli officials argued before the Supreme Court that its exports to militias in South Sudan were “lawful”.

Evidence suggests that Israel sold rifles and surveillance equipment to militias and the army in South Sudan. A UN report found that the Israeli-made Ace and Galil rifles were in widespread use there. 

‘No oversight’

Next week, the Supreme Court is due to hear a petition on Israel’s involvement in Rwanda, where it reportedly armed Hutus who carried out genocidal attacks against Tutsis.

Mack noted that there were a handful of officials in the Israeli Defence Ministry overseeing some 400,000 annual permits issued for weapons sales. “That means in practice, there is no oversight at all,” he said.

Israeli companies, meanwhile, are authorised to sell arms to some 130 countries, though activists say there are other states with which Israel deals covertly.

Israel is the only major weapons exporter that has consistently bucked the global trend of a downturn in arms sales. In March, it was reported that Israel’s weapons trade in 2016 was worth some $6.5bn, up from $5.7bn the year before. That included a 70 percent jump in sales to Africa.

If countries want the best arms, then they probably go to the US and Europe. But when no one else will sell to you, then you turn to Israel. John Brown, investigative journalist

African states accused of widespread human rights abuses were among more than 100 countries that attended the annual Israel Defence Exhibition, a weapons trade fair, in June.

Despite its tiny size, Israel is believed to be the sixth biggest arms exporter in the world – and the largest one per capita.

That has made arms sales integral to the Israeli economy, accounting for possibly as much as 8 percent of gross domestic product. As many as 100,000 Israeli households are reported to be dependent on the arms industry.

John Brown, an investigative journalist with the Haaretz newspaper who writes under a pseudonym, said there was a long history of what he called “Uzi diplomacy” – referring to the Israeli sub-machine gun that became a favourite with security forces around the world from the 1960s onwards.

“If countries want the best arms, then they probably go to the US and Europe. But when no one else will sell to you, then you turn to Israel,” he told Al Jazeera.

“The benefits for Israel are not just measured in money. Often even more important are the diplomatic and strategic alliances Israel can gain from this arms trade.”

A conduit for drones

Mack said that mounting international outrage over the plight of Myanmar’s Muslim minority provided an opportunity to shine a light on Israel’s long role in supporting regimes in the midst of ethnic cleansing and genocide.

In what sounded like a rare rebuke to Israel, Nikki Haley, the US ambassador to the UN, said last month: “Any country that is currently providing weapons to the Burmese military should suspend these activities until sufficient accountability measures are in place.”

Although the Israeli courts have blocked access to documents that could shed light on what arms have gone to Myanmar, activists have been able to identify some dealings from open sources

In September 2015, Min Aung Hlaing, the commander of Myanmar’s army, posted on social media details of a “shopping trip” to Israel that included visits to leading Israeli weapons manufacturers and a meeting with the Israeli military’s chief of staff, Gadi Eisenkott.

A year later, Michael Ben Baruch, an Israeli defence ministry official in charge of exports, visited Myanmar to meet its army’s top brass to sign a deal for patrol boats.

Shortly afterwards, the website of TAR Ideal Concepts, an Israeli company, posted images of its staff training Myanmar special forces and teaching them how to handle Israeli-made Corner-Shot guns.

Other analysts have suggested that Israel has also been acting as a conduit for Chinese weapons, including drones, to Myanmar, allowing Beijing to bypass the embargo.

“There is no statute of limitations on war crimes and crimes against humanity, so we will keep putting Israeli officials under pressure till the trade stops,” Mack said. “They will have to endure a regular ‘walk of shame’ in the courts, forcing them to explain their policies and why the documents remain secret.”

He noted that Israel’s success in arms dealing was intimately tied to five decades of its control over the occupied Palestinian territories.

“Israeli companies exploit Israel’s long experience there to sell arms, arguing that the weapons and training have been tested in real-world conditions.”

Brown said that Israel appeared to be indifferent towards the victims of the violence it helped to stoke. This was especially evident during the so-called “Dirty War” in Argentina, through much of the 1970s, when 30,000 left-wing activists were “disappeared”, he said. Israel is believed to have supplied the military government there with some $700m in weapons. 

“Of those killed, probably some 2,000 were Argentinian Jews,” he said. “Israel knew that the weapons it was selling were being turned on Jews, but that did not stop it selling arms. It simply didn’t care.”

Source

The History of israeli Support for Oppression and Genocide across the World (Part II)

(Part II)

The history of supports that the Zionist regime has provided for dictatorships around the world is filled with examples that should be registered in a long list.

The Israeli regime, weak at the beginning in the mid of twentieth century, made attempts to favor the countries from which it could get a mutual support. From the US to Britain, Germany and smaller countries like Myanmar, the Zionists made a long history of lining up with dictatorships.

Between 1973 and 1991, Pinochet’s dictatorship in Chile received weapons and training from Israeli governments and the IDF. The regime committed crimes against humanity, disappeared thousands, and tortured tens of thousands. The Pinochet regime brought torture to new heights of cruelty, unseen in modern history.

Between 1991-1995, the second Rabin Government sold arms used in both the Rwandan Genocide and the Bosnian War. As early as mid-1992, reports and footage of concentration camps set up by the Serbs for Bosnian Muslims began to emerge. Detainees in these camps were starved and tortured, and their bodies were thrown to the animals. Additional findings attested to the existence of rape camps, where Serbs held Muslim and Croatian women. Yet Israeli arms exports did not stop.

It was revealed, in September 2016, that Israel is trying to ensure the lifting of sanctions against Sudan, following the latter’s abandonment of its alliance with Iran. This took place although no one can deny that Sudanese dictator Omar al-Bashir — wanted by the International Criminal Court for the genocide in Darfur — continues to commit grave crimes.

The Nazis and Nazi Collaborators (Punishment) Law (1950), The Israeli Law on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide (1950) and Article 16 of the Israeli Penal Law (added in 1994) were the Three laws which deals with offenses by “the Law of the Nations.” They have all stipulated universal jurisdiction in Israel for severe crimes under international law. In reality, these laws have been rendered null and void by the IDF, the Ministry of Defense, Israeli arms dealers, and senior Israeli officials.

The State of Israel’s fight against global anti-Semitism has been hollow from the beginning, in view of the racist elements underlying the ostensibly democratic regime within the Green Line and the military government in the occupied Palestinian territories, as well as Israel’s treatment of Mizrahi Jews, Ethiopian Jews, Palestinian citizens, refugees, and foreign workers.

One cannot fight anti-Semitism seriously without fighting racism inside and outside Israel, and without ending Israeli support for racist regimes across the world. One cannot speak of the lessons of the Holocaust while abetting the genocide of other nations, and even inviting murderers to lay wreaths at Yad Vashem.

Israel is the modern version of dictatorship from which no one could expect justice because it has been ruled mainly by dictators who excuse anything for the sake of reaching selfish and inhumane aims.

Religious bigotry is alive and well in israel

Source

Huge Spike in Number of Israelis ‘un-Jewed’ by Chief Rabbinate in Past Two Years

Trend appears related to new practice of re-examining and revoking religious status of citizens already recognized as Jewish

Judy Maltz, Haaretz
17 September 2017

The number of Israelis featured on a blacklist of  “unmarriageable” individuals, maintained by the Chief Rabbinate, has grown exponentially over the past two years, a new document obtained through a Freedom of Information Act inquiry shows. The list refers to individuals who are recognized as Jewish in the Population Registry but who are prohibited from marrying in Israel for various reasons.

This spike, as documented in a recent petition to the Supreme Court, coincides with a relatively new practice embraced by the Chief Rabbinate: Over the past two years, its representatives have begun summoning immigrants, already recognized as Jewish and who married in Israel, for background checks after doubts were raised about the religious status of relatives seeking to marry in the country. In such cases, after the marriage applicants had their request to marry denied, their relatives in Israel were suddenly notified that their Jewish status was either revoked or awaiting clarification.

Jews cannot marry in Israel without providing evidence to the Chief Rabbinate that they are Jewish. Typically, that evidence consists of the marriage certificates of their parents or, in the case of Jews from abroad, letters of certification from their congregational rabbis. Immigrants are often asked to provide the names of relatives living in Israel who can vouch for them. The Chief Rabbinate has the sole authority over marriage and divorce of Jews in Israel. Without being approved by the Chief Rabbinate, Jews cannot marry legally in Israel.

According to the newly released document compiled by the administrative offices of Israel’s rabbinical courts, almost 900 Israelis were added in 2015 and 2016 to the list of “unmarriageable” individuals in the following two categories: “pending clarification” and “non-Jews.” In all cases, these were individuals who were previously registered as Jewish.

The Chief Rabbinate began compiling its blacklist of “unmarriageable” Israelis in 1954. Since then, the total number of individuals in these two categories has been fewer than 4,000. That means that 22 percent of them were added in the past two years alone. Other categories included on the blacklist are “mamzerim” (the offspring of relationships forbidden by Jewish law), individuals suspected of still being married or divorced couples who have resumed living together. The total number of individuals on the list, since it was first compiled, is close to 6,800.

These numbers were compiled by the administrative offices of Israel’s rabbinical courts in response to a Freedom of Information Inquiry submitted by ITIM, an organization that advocates on behalf of immigrants facing challenges from Israeli religious authorities.

They are cited in an appeal to the Supreme Court filed by the organization several weeks ago on behalf of four families in Israel whose members were recently added to the blacklist.

The appeal was filed after the highest court of the Chief Rabbinate ruled, on appeal, that its representatives are authorized to reexamine the Jewish credentials of Israelis who have already been recognized as Jews in Israel. The ruling was issued in December, just days after the Chief Rabbinate published a new regulation allowing it to investigate the religious status of Israelis even if they are not applying to marry in Israel and even if they were already recognized as Jewish for the purpose of marriage.

In its appeal, ITIM argues that the Chief Rabbinate does not have this authority. It also argues that such background checks constitute an invasion of privacy.

According to Rabbi Seth Farber, the founder and executive director of ITIM, never in the past have relatives of marriage applicants had their Jewish status revoked or subject to further clarification.

“The idea that the Chief Rabbinate can suddenly ‘un-Jew’ individuals,” he said, “is completely antithetical to halakha (Jewish religious law), which states that one must take the word of people who say they are Jewish,” he said.

Representing the four families whose Jewish status in Israel has been challenged are also the Center for Women’s Justice and the Rackman Center for the Advancement of the Status of Women at Bar-Ilan University.

One case involves an American-born woman who married an Israeli in a civil ceremony in Florida in 1984. The couple moved to Israel that year, and the woman and the couple’s oldest child converted to Judaism the following year. Both were subsequently registered as Jewish in the Population Registry, as were two daughters later born to the couple. A few years ago, the oldest daughter applied to marry in Israel. In the process, her mother was notified by a representative of the Chief Rabbinate that her marriage was no longer valid because she was not Jewish. Her daughter subsequently decided to marry in a civil ceremony in Cyprus. The couple’s other daughters were notified that their names had been added to the blacklist until further clarification.

A second case involves a family of immigrants from the former Soviet Union. Recently, a relative of theirs who applied to get married in Israel was rejected because he could not provide sufficient proof that he was Jewish. After he was rejected, all his family members, who had already been registered as Jewish, were notified that their Jewish status was now pending clarification. A third case involves another family that immigrated to Israel from the former Soviet Union. When a daughter of theirs applied to get married two years ago and was not able to provide sufficient proof of her Jewish ancestry, all her relatives in the country, who already had been registered as Jewish, were subsequently informed that their religious status was now also pending clarification.

The fourth case also involves a family of immigrants from the former Soviet Union. In this particular case, an investigation was launched when a member of the family sought to divorce her husband, citing domestic violence. The estranged husband, in response, claimed that his wife had converted to Christianity. Based on this claim, which the woman categorically denied, the Chief Rabbinate notified relatives, who had already been registered as Jewish, that their Jewish status was now pending clarification.

Commenting on the four cases, Farber said: “ Behind each story here are real families who have had the carpet pulled out from under their feet. Halachic Judaism is not meant to cause suffering. By initiating Jewishness investigations, the rabbinate is further undermining its historic role in Israel.”

A few months ago, it emerged that the Chief Rabbinate also maintains a blacklist of rabbis from abroad whose letters of certification for the purpose of marriage it does not honor. This controversial list was also obtained through a Freedom of Information Act inquiry. The Chief Rabbinate has since announced that it plans to make public a new list of criteria for approving rabbis from abroad for such letters of certification.

The Brutal Realities of israel’s Iron-fisted Occupation

The Brutal Realities of Israel’s Iron-fisted Occupation

By Dennis J Bernstein and John Pilger

Israel is well-known for having a potent U.S. lobby that not only influences Congress and the mainstream media but intimidates Americans who dare criticize its policies toward the Palestinians, as Dennis J Bernstein describes.

The Price for Criticizing Israel

There are very few journalist in the U.S. or Europe who have the courage to report fairly on Israel’s seemingly endless illegal occupation of Palestinian lands. Personally, as a Jewish-American, and the grandson of a revered Rabbi, I have been roundly denounced by pro-Israeli representatives and their Zionist lobbyists in the U.S.

I’ve stopped counting the number of vicious personal attacks that have labeled me a self-hating Jewish anti-Semite. Here’s one that got my attention and the attention of journalist Robert Fisk of the Independent of London, who I introduced one night for a lecture in Berkeley, California, and who then wrote an article about the plight of Jewish journalists and activists in the U.S. who dare to write or speak honestly about Israel’s brutal and illegal occupation of the Palestinians:

“You mother-fucking-asshole-self-hating Jewish piece of shit. Hitler killed the wrong Jews. He should have killed your parents, so a piece of Jewish shit like you would not have been born. God willing, Arab terrorists will cut you to pieces Daniel Pearl-style, AMEN!!!” The latter reference to the late Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, who was kidnapped and  decapitated in Pakistan.

And at another level, the Israeli consulate in San Francisco has complained to my managers at KPFA/ Pacifica Radio repeatedly about my “pro-Palestinian terrorist” and “anti-semitic” reporting, and my apparent “hatred” for the Jewish State.

Emmy award-winning filmmaker and investigative reporter John Pilger is one of the rare exceptions who has plowed head-first into this crucial story of our time. Pilger has made two documentaries 25 years apart about Palestine, with almost the same name, Palestine is the Issue and then Palestine is Still the Issue.

I spoke recently with Pilger about Palestine and the brutality of the continuing occupation, and also about the responsibility for empowering and sustaining the occupation that falls at the feet of the Western press, based on its misreporting and, in some cases, not reporting at all the brutal realities of Israel’s iron-fisted occupation of Palestinians, which many critics, as well as several UN officials, have labeled as a form of ethnic cleansing that borders on genocide.

I also spoke with Pilger about the recent G-20 meetings in Germany, where President Trump held his first meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin amid the Russia-gate frenzy. John Pilger’s latest film is The Coming War on China. He recently gave a moving talk at the Palestine Expo in London on the ongoing battle for the liberation of Palestine, excerpts of which have been published by Consortiumnews.

Dennis Bernstein: Let’s start with some current events. We just had the G20 meeting in Europe with a big deal made about the meeting between Trump and Putin and a lot of action in the streets. Your thoughts on what happened there and some of the goings-on?

Click below to listen to full interview with John Pilger

 

The discussion was appropriated by the meeting between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. Putting aside all the grotesque, cartoon qualities of Trump, the one thing that he has been consistent about is doing some deal with Russia. This has gotten him in a lot of trouble because the Democratic Party and, in fact most of the beltway institutions in Washington, don’t want this to happen. They would like Russia to remain a perennial enemy.

Without Moscow there as the demon, it is very difficult to justify a lot of the infrastructure of power in the United States, particularly the massive armament and military industries. Trump openly challenged this, virtually from the beginning. Although he seemed to have to prove himself to the pillars of power in Washington by firing missiles at Syria, this element in his presidency has remained pretty much constant.

This was of course the first meeting between Trump and Putin. They spoke for two hours and twenty minutes and, by all accounts, some kind of rapport was developed. In previous times that would be good news. It used to be called “detente.” These days this is not good news, either in the US political establishment and corporate media or, to a large degree, here in Britain.

The ridiculous allegations that the Russians helped to elect Trump by directly interfering in the great American democratic process have converged with the news that Trump and Putin may well have struck some kind of deal. Whether Trump is allowed to pursue whatever arrangements he has made toward normalizing relations with Russia, given the institutions of power in the United States, is rather doubtful.

DB: Of course, the corporate press is not at all interested in detente in Syria. Their main story ever since Trump’s meeting with Putin has been that his son may be guilty of treason.

JP: I’ve never heard something so absurd in my life, especially as the United States has intervened so aggressively in post-Soviet Russia. All through the 1990’s the open and quite successful intervention was blatant. And for these powerful forces in the United States to obsess with Russian meddling in our election process demonstrates a kind of double standard that is difficult to comprehend.

DB: In light of your new film, The Coming War on China, this is a time when detente at all levels is crucial because the dangers of staying the course are so huge. It is interesting to see that right-wing hawks in Washington are helping to foster a new relationship between Russia and China. But detente is the only answer at this point, isn’t it?

JP: Yes, it is. What’s needed is a diplomatic settlement. Unfortunately, the United States doesn’t do that anymore. It doesn’t have “diplomats” in the real sense of the word. To now see the presidents of two of the major nuclear-armed powers in the world seemingly forging some kind of political arrangement–agreeing, apparently, that they shouldn’t go to war with nuclear weapons. This is a throwback to a time before George W. Bush abolished the START treaties and others that were put together so painstakingly over so many years between the Soviet Union and the United States. It demonstrates how far the world–at the level of its political elite–has regressed. The United States is a very frightening vision for most of us because nuclear weapons are in the background all the time. The chance of a mistaken launch of nuclear weapons is high.

Consider the case of Korea, where the United States has installed its very aggressive THAAD so-called “defense” system which threatens China. No one believes for a minute that these missiles are pointed at North Korea, which could be dealt with in many other ways by the United States. The long-term strategy of an ascendant Pentagon is the balkanization of the Russian Federation and the intimidation of China. And if there is any glint of some kind of pullback from that position, as there might have been in the meeting between Trump and Putin, then that is good news.

DB: And of course it is so bizarre that you have America talking about the role that China should be playing and how we are so disappointed that they are not doing all they can to facilitate THAAD, which is part of a strategy to surround their country in what we know is shaping up to be “the Chinese century.”

John, I’d like you to talk about how you first began to report on Palestine and then I’d like to fast forward to current issues.

JP: I first went to Palestine in the 1960’s and stayed on a kibbutz. I probably came with the popular assumption that Israel’s myths about itself were true, that Israel was a good idea. I conflated the horror of the Holocaust with the new Jewish state. The people on the kibbutz regarded themselves as both socialists and Zionists.

I came to understand the doublespeak or the contemporary amnesia that is so pervasive in Israel. We had some very lively discussions but rarely mentioned the majority people. I saw them one evening and they were referred to as “them,” as silhouettes beyond the limits of the kibbutz. I asked about them and was told, well, they’re the Arabs. One man called them nomads. By just asking the question I was crossing a line, and a disturbed silence followed. I was with good people on the kibbutz, they had principles, many had memories of the horrors in Europe. They knew, of course, that they were on stolen land.

The word “Palestinian” was almost never used, rather echoing Golda Meir’s later remark that “there’s no such thing as Palestinians.” Because once the term “Palestinian” was recognized, the state of Palestine had to be recognized. For me it was a very interesting introduction to the extraordinary situation in Palestine. I learned a lot from a wonderful photographer named Dan Hidani who lost all his family in Germany during the War. We talked out this subject of the so-called Arabs and I learned a lot from him about the guilt of the colonizers that can never quite be covered up. These early experiences really alerted me to the huge injustice the Palestinians were suffering and of course still suffer today.

DB: Could I ask you to tell the story of the novelist Liana Badr, because it really does speak to what has happened to many Palestinians and the way they have been treated?

JP: In 2002, when Ariel Sharon was prime minister and several times sent the Israeli army and tanks into the West Bank, I arrived in Ramallah just when the Israeli army was withdrawing. Ramallah was devastated and one of the places I visited was the Palestinian Cultural Center. There I met the center’s director, the renowned Palestinian novelist Liana Badr, who teaches at Columbia University now. Her manuscripts were torn and scattered across the floor. The hard drive containing her fiction and a whole library of plays and poetry had been stolen by the Israeli soldiers. Not a single book had survived. Master tapes of one of the best collections of Palestinian cinema were lost.

This was an assault on a people’s culture. The soldiers had urinated and defecated on the floors and on the desks and smeared feces on children’s paintings. It was the most vivid and telling symbol of what a colonial power does to the people whose country it occupies

It was an attempt to dehumanize, that is what this assault on the Palestinian Cultural Center represented. What struck me, as well, was the determination of the Palestinians in this situation not to comply with what was expected of them as victims. That is the most astonishing thing about the Palestinians. As you walk through the rubble of Gaza, where the Israelis have attacked so many times, all of a sudden you see in the distance a group of school girls beautifully turned out in their starched and pressed uniforms and their hair done. It is a vision of defiance and determination to keep going. So the occupation may have worked physically but it hasn’t worked spiritually. And perhaps in the near future it may not work politically.

Jaffa oranges are famous around the world. Actually, Jaffa is a Palestinian town taken by Israel. Jaffa oranges form part of the mythical history of modern Israel, the idea that the desert of Palestine would be made green by the arriving Jews, who would make the desert bloom. But the oranges and grapes were in fact grown by Palestinian farmers and the oranges had been exported to Europe since the eighteenth century. At one time, a rather melancholy name for the town of Jaffa used by its former inhabitants was “the place of sad oranges.”

DB: I want to talk to you about Palestine and journalism. Maybe we could compare and contrast Mohammed Omer, on the one hand–who is dodging bombs and trying to get food for his family as the drones are flying past his window, trying to get as best he can the truth from the ground–compare Mohammed Omer with the people at CNBC and the BBC.

JP: Well, we know that most of mainstream journalism is simply an extension of the state. We’ve talked about the extraordinary McCarthy-like propaganda campaign that wants to blame everything including the weather on Russia. That happens because the media is the propaganda wing of the institutions that form power in the West.

The one that produces the most refined propaganda is the BBC. CNN and the others are just cruder versions. Any truth about Israel/Palestine or, more generally, the Middle East is not going to come from the mainstream media. Those of us who know this should rather stop beating our heads against a brick wall, asking why they don’t tell the truth. That’s not what they’re there for.

Fortunately, there are now many independent sources, such as your program. You mentioned Mohammed Omer. We saw how brilliant and objective his reporting was from Gaza during the last terrible attack in 2014. His own family was under attack, they had very little food and water and so on, but every day he would produce these concise reports of no more than maybe 800 words, together with his photographs that would tell you what was happening as he witnessed it. It was about how people were still leading their lives in the most extraordinary ways, despite all the grief and suffering.

In other words, he did what the official media in the West rarely does: He put faces and names on people, he described their lives. He has collected those pieces together in a book. And there have been other journalists, particularly Palestinian photographers and camera people, who have done similar work. They make me proud to be a journalist.

DB: I only bring up the corporate journalists because they sustain these kinds of conditions by not reporting them or misreporting them.

JP: From my own point of view, I find it unwatchable, unless I am either monitoring it or deconstructing it. It is their censorship by omission, by distortion, by demonology. General Petraeus once said he spent most of his time with the media because that mattered more than trying to defeat the Taliban.

The good news is that a lot of people don’t believe it anymore. One of the elements in the rebellion rolling across Western societies is an anger with the media. This is certainly true in Britain. I’ve never known the media to be so popular a subject for debate. And it’s being discussed with a great deal of resentment. Reporters find themselves now having to account for their actions. That’s a new development.

Yesterday, The Guardian ran a rather defensive front-page article about journalists being called to account by the survivors of the terrible Grenfell Tower fire here in London. Well, that was emblematic of the media being called to account over a wide range of issues. People are becoming aware, they understand now. They’re no longer simply consumers of this sort of nonsense.

Certainly, the power of the media remains. But one of my favorite stories is that, on the night that Jeremy Corbyn almost won the election here, there was a party at the Times newspaper, which of course is run by Rupert Murdoch. When the first results came in and it became clear that Labor was doing so well, Murdoch stormed out. That was a very symbolic moment because it meant that his media and the media like his no longer had the power to ensure that certain politicians were elected. Two days before the election, The Daily Mail devoted thirteen pages to an attempted character assassination of Corbyn. It had no effect whatsoever.

DB: We just had on our show Arab Barghouti, the son of Mustafa Barghouti, who hasn’t touched his father for two years. Mustafa Barghouti has been in prison for fifteen years and just led a major hunger strike. Strong, articulate, he can’t be silenced. Or you mentioned Dr. Mona El-Farra, a medical director on the ground who had a good part of her extended family wiped out in 2014. She is still ministering to the people and telling the truth to anyone who will listen. It’s amazing.

JP: Yes, these are amazing people and it’s quite inspiring to be in their company. Even amidst all the carnage in the world, they make you feel good about being human.

DB: Why do you think Nelson Mandela said Palestine is the greatest moral issue of our time?

JP: There is a lot to criticize about Mandela but one of the things that was interesting and admirable about Mandela was that he was loyal to those who had supported and given solidarity to the people in South Africa struggling for their freedom. Certainly, right through his time in prison he always stressed the importance of that solidarity. In other words, of people standing together. It was a rather old-fashioned internationalist view of struggle.

He associated the struggle of the majority people of South Africa against the apartheid regime with the plight of the Palestinians who were struggling with their own form of apartheid. In the same way, Desmond Tutu has been to the West Bank and has been very outspoken in echoing what Mandela said. Tutu is on the record as saying that he regards the structures of apartheid in Israel/Palestine as in some respects even worse than those in South Africa.

I suppose Mandela considered Palestine the greatest moral issue because it was about a people wronged. The Palestinians were not the Germans, they didn’t do terrible things to the Jewish people. In fact, they had lived peacefully with the Jewish people for a very long time. They were the majority people in their country. Jews, Muslims, Christians lived together in peace, generally speaking, until the state of Israel was imposed on them.

As Mustafa Barghouti put it, “The Zionists wanted a state at the expense of the Palestinians.” That’s what Mandela meant. Palestine is a classic colonial injustice. [Israel] is the fourth largest military power in the world backed by the largest military power, the European Union and other Western countries, taking away the freedom and imposing oppression on the people of Palestine.

DB: And the idea of a free Palestinian people is one that is very troubling to the Arab world that is aligned with the United States. It seems nobody wants to think about the liberation of Palestine because then they have to think about their own corrupt and vicious dictatorships. Palestine really is the issue of war and peace. Whether there will ever be peace depends on whether these people will ever have a place to call their home again.

JP: Certainly, until the Palestinians have justice–in a way that they recognize it–there will be no peace in the region. In a sense, all roads of conflict in this troubled region lead back to Palestine. If the Palestine issue were resolved, that would mean that Israel would be a normal country. Not armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons and intimidating and oppressing the indigenous people, but a normal country living with equality within its own sphere. If that happened, if that were resolved, I’m not saying that peace would suddenly break out all over the Middle East, but it would be the beginning.

DB: Do you see the boycott/divestment movement as a hopeful light? Clearly, people who have supported it in the US, students and teachers, have suffered great repression. But do you see this as a viable movement? In some ways it is modeled on the South African anti-apartheid movement.

JP: All you have to do is look at the reaction in Israel. They are terrified of it. They have brought all kinds of pressure to bear on governments, particularly the British government, to stop the BDS movement having an influence. Just the other day, a court judgment found that local councils in Britain could indeed boycott, dis-invest and sanction whoever they please. The British government had told them they couldn’t. Well, they can.

The BDS movement really worries the Israeli regime because it’s popular. In Norway, the biggest trade union has endorsed it. Student bodies in the United States are going along with it. People have had their say and they have voted for it. It represents a kind of local democracy. It’s much more widespread in the United States than people realize and it certainly is across Europe.

BDS on its own is not going to bring about freedom for the Palestinians. In South Africa, the sanctions did undoubtedly have an effect. But White South Africa managed to get around the sanctions. It was when it lost a powerful friend, when the Reagan administration decided that South Africa was causing more trouble than it was worth and finally withdrew its support, that the system fell.

I’m afraid that that is the way power works. But there is no doubt that power is always influenced by popular movements such as BDS. Ultimately, I believe that the solution is in the United States. Without US backing in all its forms, Israel would have no choice but to become a normal country.

DB: It is interesting to see how strong the reaction has been to the boycott/divestment movement. Professors have lost their jobs, kids have been beaten up. Below the corporate media surface, it has really been reverberating out there in the grassroots.

Dennis J Bernstein is a host of “Flashpoints” on the Pacifica radio network and the author of Special Ed: Voices from a Hidden Classroom. You can access the audio archives at www.flashpoints.net.

John Pilgers website is http://johnpilger.com/

 

Isaac Herzog: Netanyahu and I Visited Arab Leaders

Local Editor

03-07-2017 | 15:29

‘Israeli’ opposition leader Isaac Herzog confirmed that he, along with Zionist Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited leaders in the Arab world, saying: “I met with leaders that have never been seen by ‘Israeli’ eyes. The political process I was in charge of was huge, and it gives hope of building a Palestinian state,” ‘Israel’ Hayom reported.

Herzog, however, said he was “not ready for any one-sided step,” the newspaper added. “There is an alternative coalition in our hands. Proper work might defragment Netanyahu’s coalition,” he added.

Herzog’s remarks were made on the eve of the preliminary elections of the Zionist “Labor” Party which will take place on Tuesday to elect a new president.

Estimations, however, show that none of the candidates will win 40% of the votes, the required percentage for someone to win, expecting to hold another round next Monday.

Source: Zionist Media, Edited by website team

It’s official, israel is on the road to fascism

IT’S OFFICIAL ~~ ISRAEL IS ON THE ROAD TO FASCISM

First a flashback to the 60’s …. There was a joke circulating that went something like this … An American and a Soviet were having a discussion. The American said “I live in a Democracy, I can call President Kennedy a bastard and nothing will happen to me”. The Soviet responded, “I too live in a Democracy, I can also call President Kennedy a bastard and nothing will happen to me”.

Now, a look at ‘The Only Democracy in the Middle East” ….

U.S.-born Jeff Halper, cofounder of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, was held after leading a tour of the E1 area across the road from the Israeli settlement of Ma’aleh Adumim.

Police Detain Prominent Israeli Activist for Alleged Possession of BDS Material
Yotam Berger

Police detained prominent left-wing activist Jeff Halper last Wednesday at the Ma’aleh Adumim settlement, for suspected incitement, saying they acted on a complaint he had “materials related to BDS” in his possession.

Halper, who moved to Israel from the United States in 1973, was picked up after leading a tour of foreigners to the E1 site across the road from the settlement and transported by police van to a nearby station then released without being placed under arrest.

Police officers photographed the posters and maps he was holding before freeing him. Halper denies handing out any material related to BDS during the tour, or even discussing the boycott movement.

Handing out such materials would not have been in violation of the law, even a 2011 anti-boycott law according to which a person or an organization calling for the boycott of Israel, including the settlements, can be sued by the boycott’s targets without them having to prove that they sustained any damage.

The law also denies a person or a company that declares a boycott of Israel or the settlements eligibility to bid for government tenders. A separate law passed this month entitles Israel to deny entry to pro-BDS activists.

Halper, cofounder of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, told Haaretz he was on a tour with foreign visitors in the territories last Wednesday. He took the group of 15 to a lookout over Area E1, near Ma’aleh Adumim.

“It’s a good place to show them this context of where Ma’aleh Adumim is located relative to Jerusalem. It’s a regular stop on our tours, this wasn’t the first time I was taking a group to this spot,” Halper said.

After the tour the tourists boarded a bus headed north and he headed to catch a bus to Jerusalem, but “as I ran toward a bus, I saw police in the area, and I saw them talking and contacting the group. I called the Palestinian driver (of the bus transporting the tourists) and he said he had heard a rumor that we were distributing BDS material.”

“Suddenly the bus came to a stop in the Middle of Maaleh Adumim, after two stops, the police boarded the bus and told me, you are being detained, and they took me off the bus,” Halper said.

Halper was questioned about the material he had.

“They didn’t tell me why I was being detained; they said something about BDS, but no details. They put me into a van, which is unpleasant as it is. They drove me in the direction of the police station. Just when we got to the station they stopped and asked me a few questions about what I had in my bag and whether I had any BDS material in the bag.

“We got out of the vehicle and they threw my maps on the van, the maps were of Jerusalem and the greater Jerusalem area. There was also something on which it was written BDS for BDS, it’s something that I use. I say that we have no solution to offer and I propose a binational democratic state, so I have the slogan that goes BDS for BDS. It’s not a sticker or flyer, but just a map with those words on it.

“They found it and took it, wrote up a summons or something like that, and released me,” Halper said.

Halper said the police refused to give him a copy of the ticket or explain what he was suspected of.

In response to a query from Haaretz, the Samaria regional police said:
“There is no investigation into this matter. There was information checked by a patrol once it became clear he committed no violations, he was freed.”
Police spokespeople said the suspicion against him is “incitement” but he was released after questioning, and no further investigation was expected to take place.

Jeff Halper from his Facebook page. Credit Facebook

Also this weekend ….

British pro-BDS activist barred from entering Israel

Week after Knesset passes law banning foreign nationals who call for boycotts, ex-chair of Palestine Solidarity Campaign Hugh Lanning denied entry

Full report HERE

Israel is quickly getting there …

’Israeli’ A-G Orders Criminal Investigation into Netanyahu المدعى العام فى إسرائيل يأمر بالتحقيق فى “أمور” تتصل بنتنياهو

Local Editor

‘Israeli’ Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit reportedly approved a full criminal investigation of Zionist Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu into allegations of bribery and fraud.

Netanyahu will be investigated by police for two separate cases and will be called in for police questioning in the coming days, Channel 10 reported on Wednesday.

Earlier on the same day, ‘Israeli’ media reported that the police obtained new documents in a secret probe against Netanyahu, prompting them to seek a full criminal investigation against him.

Since discovering the files, police have requested from Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit that he allow a full investigation against Netanyahu.

 

Authorities are reportedly convinced that they will be able to open one in the coming days, Channel 2 News reported, according to The Times of ‘Israel’.

The documents were reportedly obtained as part of a secret inquiry against Netanyahu by special police unit Lahav 433, which was launched in June. The probe was given the green light by Police Chief Roni Alsheich, who demanded secrecy and that no details of the investigation be leaked to the media.

Meanwhile, Mandelblit also reportedly instructed employees in the state prosecutor’s office to look into allegations that Netanyahu accepted €1 million [$1.04 million] from Arnaud Mimran, a French businessman currently serving eight years in prison for committing carbon tax fraud.

During his trial, Mimran claimed he donated the money to Netanyahu during his 2009 election campaign.

However, Netanyahu has repeatedly denied the donation, and a spokesperson for him called the newest action “nonsense.”

It is indeed far from the first time that Netanyahu has come under fire for suspected corruption. Last month, Mandelblit opened a probe into an alleged scandal involving the purchase of German submarines, with Netanyahu’s personal friend and lawyer suspected of a conflict of interest. The prime minister is expected to be questioned in the probe.

In July 2015, then-Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein announced a criminal investigation into alleged misconduct at Netanyahu’s residences.

Netanyahu’s wife, Sara, has also found herself in the spotlight for corruption, accused of misusing public funds in May. She was also accused of stealing thousands of dollars worth of state funds from bottles returned to local supermarkets last year.

Source: News Agencies, Edited by website team

28-12-2016 | 10:43

—————————-

قالت وزارة العدل الإسرائيلية اليوم الأحد إن المدعى العام فى إسرائيل أمر بفتح تحقيق فى “أمور” تتصل برئيس الوزراء بنيامين نتنياهو لكن الوزارة لم تحدد ماهية هذه الأمور.
جاء هذا البيان بعد أيام من تكهنات وسائل الإعلام الإسرائيلية بشأن وجود شكوك رسمية محتملة فى ارتكاب أخطاء من جانب نتنياهو أو أشخاص مقربين منه.
ونفى نتنياهو عبر محاميه ارتكاب أى أخطاء. ويقضى نتنياهو الفترة الرابعة له فى منصب رئيس الوزراء.

وقال البيان إن قرار المدعى العام أفيخاى ماندلبليت جاء بعد الحصول على معلومات عن أمور تتعلق ضمن أشياء أخرى برئيس الوزراء، والتى بحثها مع مسئولين كبار فى الشرطة والادعاء.
وتابع البيان لابد من التأكيد على أن هذه عملية بحث وتحر ولم يفتح بعد تحقيق جنائى يتعلق برئيس الوزراء.

ويمكن أن تكون هذه العملية مرحلة أولية تقود إلى فتح تحقيق جنائي.

 

 

UN Security Council Resolution 2334 (Full text)– Beginning Of The End For Apartheid israel

UN Security Council Resolution 2334 – Beginning Of The End For Apartheid Israel?
by : Dr Gideon Polya

Resolution 2334 (2016) of the UN Security Council condemning Israeli atrocities in the Palestinian Territory in gross violation of international law was passed unanimously 14-0 on 23 December 2016, with the pro-Zionist US Obama Administration failing to veto and recording an unprincipled abstention. Hopefully UNSC Resolution 2334 is the beginning of the end for Apartheid Israel.

The full text of resolution 2334 (2016) reads as follows:

“The Security Council,

“Reaffirming its relevant resolutions, including resolutions 242 (1967), 338 (1973), 446 (1979), 452 (1979), 465 (1980), 476 (1980), 478 (1980), 1397 (2002), 1515 (2003), and 1850 (2008),

“Guided by the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations, and reaffirming, inter alia, the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by force,

“Reaffirming the obligation of Israel, the occupying Power, to abide scrupulously by its legal obligations and responsibilities under the Fourth Geneva Convention relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War, of 12 August 1949, and recalling the advisory opinion rendered on 9 July 2004 by the International Court of Justice,

“Condemning all measures aimed at altering the demographic composition, character and status of the Palestinian Territory occupied since 1967, including East Jerusalem, including, inter alia, the construction and expansion of settlements, transfer of Israeli settlers, confiscation of land, demolition of homes and displacement of Palestinian civilians, in violation of international humanitarian law and relevant resolutions,

“Expressing grave concern that continuing Israeli settlement activities are dangerously imperilling the viability of the two-State solution based on the 1967 lines,

“Recalling the obligation under the Quartet Roadmap, endorsed by its resolution 1515 (2003), for a freeze by Israel of all settlement activity, including “natural growth”, and the dismantlement of all settlement outposts erected since March 2001,

“Recalling also the obligation under the Quartet roadmap for the Palestinian Authority Security Forces to maintain effective operations aimed at confronting all those engaged in terror and dismantling terrorist capabilities, including the confiscation of illegal weapons,

“Condemning all acts of violence against civilians, including acts of terror, as well as all acts of provocation, incitement and destruction,

“Reiterating its vision of a region where two democratic States, Israel and Palestine, live side by side in peace within secure and recognized borders,

“Stressing that the status quo is not sustainable and that significant steps, consistent with the transition contemplated by prior agreements, are urgently needed in order to (i) stabilize the situation and to reverse negative trends on the ground, which are steadily eroding the two-State solution and entrenching a one-State reality, and (ii) to create the conditions for successful final status negotiations and for advancing the two-State solution through those negotiations and on the ground,

“1. Reaffirms that the establishment by Israel of settlements in the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967, including East Jerusalem, has no legal validity and constitutes a flagrant violation under international law and a major obstacle to the achievement of the two-State solution and a just, lasting and comprehensive peace;

“2. Reiterates its demand that Israel immediately and completely cease all settlement activities in the occupied Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem, and that it fully respect all of its legal obligations in this regard;

“3. Underlines that it will not recognize any changes to the 4 June 1967 lines, including with regard to Jerusalem, other than those agreed by the parties through negotiations;

“4. Stresses that the cessation of all Israeli settlement activities is essential for salvaging the two-State solution, and calls for affirmative steps to be taken immediately to reverse the negative trends on the ground that are imperilling the two-State solution;

“5. Calls upon all States, bearing in mind paragraph 1 of this resolution, to distinguish, in their relevant dealings, between the territory of the State of Israel and the territories occupied since 1967;

“6. Calls for immediate steps to prevent all acts of violence against civilians, including acts of terror, as well as all acts of provocation and destruction, calls for accountability in this regard, and calls for compliance with obligations under international law for the strengthening of ongoing efforts to combat terrorism, including through existing security coordination, and to clearly condemn all acts of terrorism;

“7. Calls upon both parties to act on the basis of international law, including international humanitarian law, and their previous agreements and obligations, to observe calm and restraint, and to refrain from provocative actions, incitement and inflammatory rhetoric, with the aim, inter alia, of de-escalating the situation on the ground, rebuilding trust and confidence, demonstrating through policies and actions a genuine commitment to the two-State solution, and creating the conditions necessary for promoting peace;

“8. Calls upon all parties to continue, in the interest of the promotion of peace and security, to exert collective efforts to launch credible negotiations on all final status issues in the Middle East peace process and within the time frame specified by the Quartet in its statement of 21 September 2010;

“9. Urges in this regard the intensification and acceleration of international and regional diplomatic efforts and support aimed at achieving, without delay a comprehensive, just and lasting peace in the Middle East on the basis of the relevant United Nations resolutions, the Madrid terms of reference, including the principle of land for peace, the Arab Peace Initiative and the Quartet Roadmap and an end to the Israeli occupation that began in 1967; and underscores in this regard the importance of the ongoing efforts to advance the Arab Peace Initiative, the initiative of France for the convening of an international peace conference, the recent efforts of the Quartet, as well as the efforts of Egypt and the Russian Federation;

“10. Confirms its determination to support the parties throughout the negotiations and in the implementation of an agreement;

“11. Reaffirms its determination to examine practical ways and means to secure the full implementation of its relevant resolutions;

“12. Requests the Secretary-General to report to the Council every three months on the implementation of the provisions of the present resolution;

“13. Decides to remain seized of the matter” [1].

The UN Security Council (UNSC) has 5 Permanent Members ( China, France, Russian Federation, the United Kingdom and the United States) and 10 non-permanent members elected for two-year terms by the General Assembly, namely (with end of term date indicated in brackets): Angola (2016), Egypt (2017), Japan (2017), Malaysia (2016), New Zealand (2016), Senegal (2017), Spain (2016), Ukraine (2017), Uruguay (2017), and Venezuela (2016) [2]. The racist, pro-Zionist, pro-Apartheid US failed to veto Resolution 2334 and merely abstained, but the remaining UNSC members unanimously supported UNSC Resolution 2334 [1].

It is appropriate on this auspicious occasion to succinctly record the principal ways – as evidently perceived by all the UN Security Council members except for the US – in which nuclear terrorist, racist Zionist-run, genocidally racist, democracy-by-genocide, neo-Nazi Apartheid Israel violates International Law, UN conventions, UN resolutions and indeed the Natural Law of Humanity.

1. Apartheid Israel is in gross and deadly violation of the Geneva Convention.

Apartheid Israel grossly violates Articles 55 and 56 of the Geneva Convention relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War that demand that an Occupier must provide life-sustaining food and medical requisites to its Conquered Subjects “to the fullest extent of the means available to it” [3]. However the “GDP per capita” is $38,000 for the Israel-proper part of Apartheid Israel as compared to $2,800 for the Occupied Palestinian Territories (UN; 2014) [4]. As outlined below, this gross income disparity has deadly consequences.

Avoidable mortality (avoidable death, excess mortality, excess death) is the difference between the actual deaths in a country and the deaths expected for a peaceful, decently-run country with the same demographics. For impoverished Third World countries avoidable deaths are about 1.4 times the under-5 infant deaths [5]. About 3,000 Occupied Palestinian under-5 year old infants die each year. Accordingly, annual avoidable Occupied Palestinian deaths total about 3,000 x 1 .4 = 4,200 of which about half (2,100) are of children. Annual violent Occupied Palestinian deaths currently total about 500 per year of which about 120 are of children. Thus the racist Zionists violently kill about 120 Occupied Palestinian children each year and passively murder another 2,100 Occupied Palestinian children annually through imposed deprivation. This means that on average the Apartheid Israeli authorities violently kill 1 Palestinian child every three days but on average also deliberately passively murder about 6 Palestinian children each day through imposed deprivation as surely as if they beat, bombed, shot or gassed them as did their genocidally racist Nazi German role models. In contrast, annual avoidable deaths on this comparative basis are zero (0) for Apartheid Israel. Since the mid-1930s there have been 2 million Palestinian deaths from Zionist violence (0.1 million) or Zionist-imposed deprivation (1.9 million ) as compared to about 4,000 Zionist Jewish deaths at the hands of Indigenous Palestinians since 1920 [6].

2. Apartheid Israel grossly violates all 30 articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as applied to Occupied Palestinians.

Nearly 50 years after the 1967 war criminal Apartheid Israeli conquest of all of Palestine, the Western-backed, invasion-, occupation- , theft- , genocide-, lying- and race-based Apartheid State of Israel still comprehensively violates all basic human rights of Occupied Palestinians as set out in the 30 Articles of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights [7, 8].

3. Apartheid Israel grossly violates the Convention on the Rights of the Child.

As evidence by huge differential avoidable mortality and infant mortality statistics, genocidally racist Apartheid Israel grossly violates Article 6 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child which states: “ 1. States Parties recognize that every child has the inherent right to life. 2. States Parties shall ensure to the maximum extent possible the survival and development of the child” [9]. Apartheid Israel comprehensively violates the “Convention on the Rights of the Child” in denying not just the Right to Life on a massive, genocidal, mass paedocidal and mass infanticidal scale, but also in denial of essentially all other rights of the child to Occupied Palestinian children [10]. Of the 2 million Occupied Palestinians in the Israeli-blockaded Gaza Concentration Camp over half are children who are highly abusively confined without human rights and without charge or trial and for the asserted crime of being Indigenous Palestinians living in a tiny part of the country inhabited continuously by their forebears for thousands of years to the very dawn of agrarian civilization. Of the 2.7 million Occupied Palestinians in the West Bank about half are children highly abusively confined without human rights to ever-dwindling Bantustans under violent Israeli military rule and forbidden access by Israeli Apartheid to “Jewish” roads and “Jewish” land. While the West Bank Bantustans are policed by war criminal Israeli military with guns, the Gaza Concentration Camp is policed by Israeli naval shelling, Israeli military shelling and gunfire and Israeli air force rockets, phosphorus bombs and high explosive bombs [6, 10]. It gets worse – a recent survey, and the first of its kind to be conducted in Apartheid Israel, found that close to half of Israeli children reported that they had been physically, emotionally or sexually abused [10, 11].

4. Apartheid Israel violates the UN Genocide Convention.

The situation in Palestine has been described as a Palestinian Holocaust by Palestinian scholar Dr Elias Akleh, exiled from his homeland and now living in the US [12]. It has been frequently described by many anti-racist Jewish and non-Jewish scholars and writers as a Palestinian Genocide, a term that is amply justified in relation to the definitions of the UN Genocide Convention as outlined below [5, 6, 13, 14, 15].

Article 2 of the UN Genocide Convention states that :“In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such: a) Killing members of the group; b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group” [15]. Apartheid Israel is guilty of violating all these elements of the UN Genocide Convention: (1) since 1936 there have been 2 million Palestinian deaths from Zionist violence (0.1 million) or Zionist-imposed deprivation (1.9 million ); (2) there are 7 million Palestinian refugees and all of the 12 million Palestinians are excluded from all or part of Palestine; (3) of 12 million Palestinians (half of them children), 6 million are forbidden to even step foot in their own country, 4.7 million are highly abusively and violently held hostage with zero human rights under Israeli guns in the Gaza Concentration Camp (2.0 million) or in ever-dwindling West Bank Bantustan ghettoes (2.7 million), and 1.7 million live as Third Class citizens as Israeli Palestinians under Nazi-style Apartheid Israeli race laws; (4) 90% of Palestine has now been ethnically cleansed of Indigenous Palestinian inhabitants; (5) the huge disparity in GDP per capita between Occupied Palestinians ($2,800) and Israel-proper ($38,000) is reflected in huge differential avoidable mortality of over 4,000 avoidable deaths per year for Occupied Palestinians versus zero (0) for Israelis; (6) through imposed deprivation, each year Apartheid Israel passively murders about 2,700 under-5 year old Palestinian infants and passively murders 4,200 Occupied Palestinians in general; (7) Apartheid Israel violently kills an average of about 500 Occupied Palestinians each year; (8) Occupied Palestinians are deprived of essentially all human rights by Apartheid Israel of which the most fundamental is the right to live unmolested in their own country [6, 16].

5. Apartheid Israel violates the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) was adopted by the General Assembly on Thursday, 13 September 2007, by a majority of 144 states in favour, 4 votes against (Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States, all these states resembing Apartheid Israel in being based on genocide of the Indigenous inhabitants) and 11 abstentions (Azerbaijan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Burundi, Colombia, Georgia, Kenya, Nigeria, Russian Federation, Samoa and Ukraine). In May 2016 Canada officially removed its objector status to UNDRIP, almost a decade after it was adopted by the General Assembly. By now the other 3 objectors have, to various degrees, changed their vote. Genocidally racist Apartheid Israel, which continues to grossly maltreat its Indigenous Palestinian subjects, was conveniently absent from the vote [17].

6. Apartheid Israel grossly violates the 1951 Refugee Convention.

Apartheid Israel grossly violates the 1951 UN Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees (aka the 1951 Refugee Convention) [18]. There are 7 million Palestinian refugees remorselessly prevented by Apartheid Israel from returning to their homes and all of the 12 million Palestinians are excluded from all or part of Palestine on pain of death [13, 14, 16].

7. Apartheid Israel grossly violates the Natural Law.

Outstanding anti-racist Jewish American scholar Professor Jared Diamond in his best-selling book “Collapse” (Prologue, p10, Penguin edition) enunciated the “moral principle, namely that it is morally wrong for one people to dispossess, subjugate, or exterminate another people”, an injunction that is grossly violated by racist Zionist (RZ)-run Apartheid Israel and by its racist, genocide-committing and genocide-ignoring US Alliance backers. Thus the Zionist-perverted and Zionist-subverted US Alliance is involved in a genocidal Zionist-promoted US War on Muslims (aka the US War on Terror, Muslim Holocaust, Muslim Genocide) in which 32 million Muslim deaths from violence (5 million) or imposed deprivation (27 million) have been associated with US Alliance invasions of 20 countries since the US Government’s 9-11 false flag atrocity that killed about 3,000 people [19-23]. The remorseless, ongoing Palestinian Genocide [6] and the remorseless , ongoing Zionist-promoted Muslim Holocaust and Muslim Genocide [19-23] remind one of the racist American saying “The only good Indian is a dead Indian” that is often attributed to American General Phil Sheridan in the context of the 19th century North American Indian Genocide [5].

8. Apartheid Israel violates one-person-one-vote and the anti-Apartheid convention.

Nelson Mandela, famed Nobel Laureate and heroic South African leader in the fight against Apartheid, stated: “The UN took a strong stand against apartheid; and over the years, an international consensus was built, which helped to bring an end to this iniquitous system. But we know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians” [24]. In 1973 the United Nations General Assembly opened for signature and ratification the International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid that defined the crime of Apartheid as “inhuman acts committed for the purpose of establishing and maintaining domination by one racial group of persons over any other racial group of persons and systematically oppressing them”. Article 1 of the Apartheid Convention declares that Apartheid is a crime against humanity and that “inhuman acts resulting from the policies and practices of apartheid and similar policies and practices of racial segregation and discrimination” are international crimes [26]. Liberal Western democracies of the Anglosphere are based on “one-person-one-vote” and “equal rights for all” but these fundamental principles die at the border. This is no better illustrated than by the liberal democracies Australia and Canada led by PMs Malcom Turnbull and Justin Trudeau, respectively, that arguably rank equal second after the United States as supporters of Apartheid Israel, an Apartheid rogue state that denies the vote to 73% of its now 52% majority Indigenous Palestinian subjects, denies all human rights to the Occupied Palestinians, and denies equal rights to “lucky” Palestinian Israelis by Nazi-style race laws [27].

9. Genocidally racist Zionist exceptionalism threatens all of Humanity.

Put simply, while a universalist Christianity attracted adherents with the promise of life everlasting after death as a reward for a good life on Earth, it had to compete in the first centuries AD with a universalist Judaism that offered a God-protected and God-rewarded good life on Earth as a reward for doing His will. Indeed today’s ethnic and cultural descendants of the Jewish and non-Jewish Palestinian at the time of that wonderful Palestinian humanitarian Jesus are mostly the Indigenous Palestinians whereas most Jewish Israelis derive from Berber, Yemeni and Khazar converts to Judaism [28-31]. A recent major genetic study published in the prestigious scientific journal Nature has found from mitochondrial DNA analysis that there is a substantial prehistoric European ancestry in Ashkenazi Jewish maternal lineages [32]. Orthodox Judaism believes in the beautiful concept of a “kingdom of the mind” and rejects Zionism as heresy, holding that a return to Zion (Jerusalem) can only happen after the Messiah arrives to reveal the glory of God to the whole world [31, 33]. The non-religious, secular racist Zionists have obscenely perverted the Jewish theological notion of being rewarded by God for doing God’s will (and vice versa, of being punished by God for not doing God’s will) ) into a vile, racist, and genocidal secular exceptionalism of a kind that has also been variously adopted by genocidal British, French, German and American imperialists. Anti-racist Jewish Canadian writer Naomi Klein has distilled the anti-racist Jew versus racist Zionist debate as follows: “There is a debate among Jews – I’m a Jew by the way. The debate boils down to the question: “Never again to everyone, or never again to us?… [Some Jews] even think we get one get-away-with-genocide-free card…There is another strain in the Jewish tradition that say[s], ’Never again to anyone.”” [34]. A large body of anti-racist Jewish and non-Jewish humanitarian are opposed to the racist, child-abusing, nuclear terrorist, serial war criminal, state terrorist and genocidal exceptionalism of Apartheid Israel [9, 35-39] and its powerful backer, the US [40- 42].

Genocidally racist Zionist exceptionalism is reflected in the genocidal racist exceptionalism of Zionist-perverted America and the US Alliance. The world is acutely threatened by nuclear weapons, poverty and climate change, noting that a nuclear exchange would essentially wipe out most of Humanity and the Biosphere [39], that 17 million people already die avoidably each year from deprivation in the Third World [5], and about 10 million people die from climate change or air pollution each year with an estimated 10 billion to die thus this century if man-made climate change is not requisitely tackled [43]. Apartheid Israel arguably ranks third in the world for numbers of nuclear weapons [39], Apartheid Israeli per capita GDP is 14 times greater than that of its Occupied Palestinian subjects, and adumbrated Apartheid Israeli exploitation of Eastern Mediterranean gas violates the science-informed position of no new fossil fuel exploitation. Dangerous nuclear terrorist, fanatical neoliberal, racist, bigot, anti-Arab anti-Semite, Islamophobe and climate criminal climate change denier, Donald Trump, the fervently exceptionalist, pro-Zionist president-elect of the US, demanded that the US veto Resolution 2334, wants to increase the US nuclear arsenal, threatens a trade war with Developing nations (notably China), and is committed to unlimited greenhouse gas (GHG) pollution that threatens not just widespread speciescide and ecocide but terminal omnicide and terracide.

10. UNSC Resolution 2334 is a call for resolute international action against Apartheid Israel.

Point 11 of Resolution 2334 of the UNSC “Reaffirms its determination to examine practical ways and means to secure the full implementation of its relevant resolutions”. Decent anti-racist people around the word must urgently (a) inform everyone they can about the horrendous crimes of Apartheid Israel; (b) urge and apply Boycotts. Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against Apartheid Israel and all the people, politicians, parties, countries, companies and corporations complicit in the racist Zionist Palestinian Genocide by nuclear terrorist, genocidally racist, democracy-by-genocide, racist Zionist-run, neo-Nazi Apartheid Israel (just as BDS was successfully applied against US-, UK-, Australia- and Apartheid Israel-backed Apartheid South Africa); and (c) declare that Zionism is genocidal racism, and that the racist Zionists (RZs) and their supporters must be sidelined from public life as have been the Nazis, neo-Nazis, Apartheiders and the Ku Klux Klan (KKK).

With 90% of the land of Palestine now ethnically cleansed of Indigenous Palestinian inhabitants, the only realistic solution for a peaceful and just Palestine is immediate dissolution of Apartheid Israel and its immediate replacement (after the example of post-Apartheid South Africa) by a nuclear weapons-free, unitary or Federal state in which all Indigenous Palestinians, including 6 million presently exiled Palestinians, will live peacefully in Palestine with Israelis, with peace, internationally-guaranteed airport-level security, justice, equity, reconciliation, one-person-one-vote, equal human rights for all, and zero tolerance for racism. It could and should happen tomorrow.

References.

[1]. United Nations, “Israel’s settlements have no legal validity, constitute flagrant violations of international law, Security Council reaffirms. 14 delegations in favour of Resolution 2334 as United States abstains”, 23 December 2016: https://www.un.org/press/en/2016/sc… .

[2]. United Nations Security Council: http://www.un.org/en/sc/members/ .

[3]. International Committee of the Red Cross, “Convention (IV) relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War. Geneva, 12 August 1949”: https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/ihl/… .

[4]. “List of countries by GDP (nominal) per capita”, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_…)_per_capita .

[5]. Gideon Polya, “Body Count. Global avoidable mortality since 1950”, that includes a history of every country from Neolithic times and is now available for free perusal on the web: http://globalbodycount.blogspot.com/ .

[6]. “Palestinian Genocide”: https://sites.google.com/site/pales… .

[7]. “UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights”: http://www.un.org/Overview/rights.html .

[8]. Gideon Polya, “Apartheid Israel Excludes Occupied Palestinians From All Provisions Of The Universal Declaration Of Human Rights”, Countercurrents, 20 May, 2012: http://www.countercurrents.org/poly… .

[9]. “Convention on the Rights of the Child”: http://www.ohchr.org/EN/Professiona… .

[10]. Gideon Polya, “Horrendous Pro-Zionist, Zionist And Apartheid Israeli Child Abuse Exposed”, Countercurrents, 21 April, 2014: http://www.countercurrents.org/poly… .

[11]. Yarden Skop, “Nearly half of Israel ’s children suffer physical, sexual or emotional abuse, study finds”, Haaretz, 13 November 2013: http://www.haaretz.com/news/nationa… .

[12]. Dr. Elias Akleh, “Gaza’s Holocaust”, Countercurrents, 4 March, 2008: http://www.countercurrents.org/akle… .

[13]. William Cook (editor) “The Plight of the Palestinians. A long history of destruction”; for review see Gideon Polya, “Review “The Plight of the Palestinians. A long history of destruction”, Countercurrents, 17 June 2012: http://www.countercurrents.org/poly… .

[14]. Gideon Polya, “Review: “The Plight Of The Palestinians. A Long History Of Destruction”, Countercurrents, 17 June, 2012: http://www.countercurrents.org/poly… .

[15]. Article 2 of the UN Genocide Convention: http://www.edwebproject.org/sidesho… .

[16]. Gideon Polya, “2015 update on the ongoing Palestinian Genocide by Apartheid Israel”, Palestinian Genocide, 2015: https://sites.google.com/site/pales… .

[17]. “Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples”, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decla… .

[18]. “Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees” : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conve… .

[19]. Gideon Polya,“Paris Atrocity Context: 27 Million Muslim Avoidable Deaths From Imposed Deprivation In 20 Countries Violated By US Alliance Since 9-11”, Countercurrents, 22 November, 2015: http://www.countercurrents.org/poly… .

[20]. “Experts: US did 9-11”: https://sites.google.com/site/exper… .

[21]. “Muslim Holocaust Muslim Genocide”: https://sites.google.com/site/musli… .

[22]. “Afghan Holocaust, Afghan Genocide”: http://sites.google.com/site/afghan… .

[23]. “Iraqi Holocaust, Iraqi Genocide”: http://sites.google.com/site/iraqih… .

[24]. Nelson Mandela quoted in “Nelson Mandela quotes: A collection of memorable words from former South African president”, CBS News, 5 December 2013: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/nelson-… .

[25]. “Crime of Apartheid”, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime… .

[26]. “Convention on the suppression and punishment of the crime of Apartheid”, Audiovisual Library of International Law: http://legal.un.org/avl/ha/cspca/cs… .

[27]. Gideon Polya, “Turnbull & Trudeau, anti-BDS & pro-Apartheid Israel”, MWC News, 27 November 2016: http://mwcnews.net/focus/analysis/6… .

[28]. Shlomo Sand, “The Invention of the Jewish People”.

[29]. Arthur Koestler, “The Thirteenth Tribe”.

[30]. Gideon Polya, “The Invention of the Jewish People”, MWC News, 2 April 2010: http://mwcnews.net/focus/analysis/1… .

[31]. Gideon Polya, “UN Makes 2014 International Year Of Solidarity With The Palestinian People – Boycott Apartheid Israel”, Countercurrents, 10 January, 2014: http://www.countercurrents.org/poly… .

[32]. Marta D. Costa et al, “A substantial pre-historic European ancestry amongst Ashkenazi maternal lineages’, Nature Communications, 4, no. 2543, October 2013: http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2013/1… .

[33]. Neturei Karta, “Israeli Independence Day”: http://www.nkusa.org/activities/Sta… .

[34]. Naomi Klein quoted in Yotam Feldman, “Naomi Klein: oppose the state not the people”, Haaretz, 2 July 2007: http://haaretz.com/hasen/spages/109… .

[35]. “Boycott Apartheid Israel”: https://sites.google.com/site/boyco….

[36]. “Gaza Concentration Camp”: https://sites.google.com/site/pales… .

[37]. “Jews Against Racist Zionism”: https://sites.google.com/site/jewsa… .

[38]. “Non-Jews Against Racist Zionism”: https://sites.google.com/site/nonje… .

[39]. “Nuclear weapons ban , end poverty & reverse climate change”: https://sites.google.com/site/300or… .

[40]. “Stop state terrorism” : https://sites.google.com/site/stops… .

[41]. “State crime and non-state terrorism”: https://sites.google.com/site/state… .

[42]. William Blum, “Rogue State”.

[43]. Gideon Polya, “Humanity Must Pledge Inescapable Dispossession And Custodial Retribution For Climate Criminals”, Countercurrents, 20 December 2016: http://www.countercurrents.org/2016…