more "Democratic and Jewish" tales from apartheid Israel

from Portside

Businesses Strike in Israel Over Gaza

Gregg Carlstrom
July 21, 2014
Aljazeera

Thousands of businesses across the country join strike in protest over the Israeli offensive on Gaza.



The strike drew an angry response from Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman , Gregg Carlstrom/Al Jazeera,


Nazareth, Israel - The main commercial street in this majority-Palestinian city was shuttered on Monday, as residents joined a general strike and staged protests against the two-week-old Israeli offensive in Gaza.

Thousands of businesses across Israel and the West Bank joined the strike, organised after a day of intense Israeli shelling in Gaza killed more than 100 people.

Several thousand demonstrators held posters with the photos of children killed during the offensive, and chanted slogans calling the army "terrorists" and "war criminals".

Protesters clashed briefly with police after the main rally, and at least a dozen people were arrested.There were scattered protests against the war last week, including a rally in Haifa at which several Knesset members were detained or beaten, but Monday's strike was the first large coordinated movement."The action itself is what is important, to show solidarity and to protest against the crimes," said Samir Haddad, a resident of Nazareth.

"We need to show that we are one people."

The call for a general strike drew an angry response from Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, who urged his supporters to boycott businesses that joined.

"I call on everyone not to buy anything more from the shops and businesses in the Arab community who are participating in today's general strike," he wrote on Facebook.

Anger has been mounting for months among Israel's Palestinian citizens, who make up about 20 percent of the population.

The government has pursued a number of initiatives seen as discriminatory, including a bill that could effectively drive Palestinian parties out of the Knesset, and a plan to draft more Christians into army service.

The tensions reached a peak earlier this month, when a 16-year-old boy from East Jerusalem was kidnapped and brutally murdered, an apparent revenge attack for the murder of three teenage Jewish settlers in June.

Residents of his neighbourhood fought with police for three days, and the clashes spread to Palestinian towns in central and northern Israel.

Nearly 700 people were arrested after those protests, rights groups say, including 224 from East Jerusalem.

The majority have been released, but dozens face charges for throwing stones and blocking roads, the latter of which carries up to a 15-year jail term.

"Some of them were charged, or at least investigated, just because of using Facebook," said Salah Mohsen, from Adalah, a local rights group.

"The leaders of this movement who called [online] for demonstrations, we know a few of them who were investigated and detained."

‘We have nothing left to lose. I would rather die with my family under the rubble of our house than have a humiliating truce’: Palestinian youth demand justice

from mondoweiss.org
Pam Bailey on July 21, 2014 15


Palestinian youths gesture during a demonstration next to the security fence standing on the Gaza border, east of Khan Yunis, in the Gaza Strip, on November 23 2012. (Photo: AFP - Said Khatib)

I awoke Sunday morning to news of a massacre in Gaza that evoked memories of Sabra and Shatila – not in terms of absolute numbers, but in the nature of its brutality. An estimated 60 Palestinians had been killed, more than 300 injured and hundreds more forced to flee their homes as Israeli troops and tanks barreled into Shejaiya, a neighborhood in eastern Gaza City. Spokesman for the Palestinian Ministry of Health Ashraf al-Qidra reported that Israeli forces had denied ambulances access to the houses under siege, saying that the area was a “closed military zone.”

And yet. amidst the reports of destruction, pain and loss, there were Facebook posts like this one from Malaka Mohammed, a young woman from the same Gazan neighborhood who is studying international law in the UK: “Watching Al-Jazeera and my friends and relatives among the casualties. And still strong. I have not seen my family as strong as today. We will never give up till we get our freedom.” For an hour and a half, her father refused to evacuate, even as the bombs were landing at a rate her neighbor described as “more than three in one second.”

In a post the day before, from the Jabalya refugee camp, Sarah Ali (a contributor to a collection of short stories called Gaza Writes Back) wrote: “Last night was horrible. My house shook every five minutes! Except for half an hour in the evening, we’ve been without electricity for over 48 hours. Due to the long blackout, we had no water as well. The Israelis have (again) bombed a main power generator that supplies electricity to many areas. There was Israeli shelling from the sea, air and land. I could hear the kids in our neighbors’ houses crying in terror all night. This is not about destroying Hamas; this is about destroying every Palestinian in Gaza, destroying our lives, crushing our dignity and morale. Let it be known to (Israel) that the more they kill and destroy, the stronger we become. We have nothing left to lose. Now I would rather die with my family under the rubble of our house than have a humiliating truce. No justice, no peace.”

In dozens of conversations with other youth in Gaza (who make up 65 percent of the population of nearly 1.8 million), the opinion was nearly universal: Despite their heavy losses and the gross imbalance of power, they do not want a ceasefire that merely stops the immediate fighting and promises to open negotiations on their other grievances. (The Gaza Strip has been under Israel’s control in some fashion for 47 years, but with suffocating intensity since 2007. Israel strictly limits travel in and out; controls the supplies that come in, including a ban on most construction materials; and prohibits virtually all exports, thus crippling the economy and triggering one of the highest poverty and unemployment rates in the Arab world.)

No. What they insist on – demand – is a ceasefire tied to an end to their repression, even if it means more death and destruction for their people. Life is meaningless, they say, if it is spent under the boot of an oppressor. My conclusion after numerous interviews with ordinary youth, from one end of Gaza to the other? Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his spokesmen are wrong when they accuse Hamas of ordering a sheep-like people to act as human shields or to remain in their homes in the face of warnings to evacuate. The decisions of tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza to stay in their homes until they were literally forced to leave were for some an act of desperation, saying they had nowhere else to go. (UN schools already are crammed with 84,000 displaced individuals.) However, for many others, they were the principled actions of a proud, independent people. And when Hamas rejected the ceasefire unilaterally declared by Egypt and Israel, it had the support of the vast majority of residents.

“Honestly, most of the Gazan people are urging the resistance to continue fighting until they achieve our conditions – which is simply to be able to live as humans with freedom and dignity,” says Fadi Alshaer, a 29-year-old who studied English at the Islamic University of Gaza and lives in the Rafah area. “People here don’t believe that Israel will do anything to give us back our rights if they are not forced to.”

Ola Ziada, a 24-year-old news reporter and English instructor in Gaza’s Jabalya camp, is even stronger: “If they accepted the ceasefire with no preconditions, then I would consider it a betrayal of the blood that has been shed, of the four kids who were murdered just for playing on the beach. We would rather die than go back to the way we were before, imprisoned and forbidden from enjoying what a human should have for a decent life. We have been negotiating for decades and we have gotten nothing. I believe this is the war to determine whether to be or not to be.”

Of course, there are others who have paid a dear price who reluctantly feel otherwise. Omar Mansour, who lives in a town in northern Gaza that has been hit particularly hard, believes the casualties are too high and an internationally negotiated ceasefire should be accepted, even with no pre-set conditions. After holding out even after the Red Crescent tried to help his family evacuate, Mansour finally accompanied his parents to the home of friends in Gaza City when two relatives were killed and much of his block was destroyed. Still, he says he will return in the next day or so, despite the continued violence in his area. “I’m not afraid of death. All I’m afraid of is to watch them destroying my lovely house,” he says.

Mansour doesn’t disagree, however, when Alshaer, Ziada and others point out that the only significant “wins” the Palestinians have ever achieved is not through pleas to the United Nations or international courts, but through rocket fire (such as the concessions achieved at the end of the 2012 “eight-day war”) or abductions of soldiers (Gilad Shalit is a case in point, who was released in return for more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners).

Lest one think that these are the fantasies of young people not properly schooled in history or the lessons of life, consider these words of Haider Eid, associate professor of postcolonial and postmodern literature at Gaza’s al-Aqsa University:

“The urgent question facing us in Gaza is not just how to survive for today, but how to hold Israel accountable to international law and basic principles of human rights; how to stop the current escalation and the ongoing massacre and how to stop this from ever happening again.

“Knowing that the credible Goldstone report on suspected war crimes in Gaza in 2008-09, and reports by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch are all ignored or undermined, there is a bitter awareness that we in Gaza can have no expectation of Israeli accountability for the current onslaught…What Palestine needs from the world today is not just a condemnation of the Gaza massacres and siege, but also a delegitimization of the ideology that produced this policy and justifies it morally and politically, just as the racist ideology of apartheid was delegitimized.”

Netanyahu’s ‘Telegenically Dead’ Comment Is Grotesque but Not Original

By Glenn Greenwald21 Jul 2014, 7:59 AM EDT 113

from the intercept DISPATCHES
Netanyahu’s ‘Telegenically Dead’ Comment Is Grotesque but Not Original

Benjamin Netanyahu, yesterday, on CNN, addressing worldwide sympathy for the civilian victims of Israeli violence in Gaza:

They want to pile up as many civilian dead as they can. They use telegenically dead Palestinians for their cause. They want the more dead, the better.

Joseph Goebbels, November 16, 1941, essay in Das Reich, addressing Germany sympathy for German Jews forced to wear yellow stars:

The Jews gradually are having to depend more and more on themselves, and have recently found a new trick. They knew the good-natured German Michael in us, always ready to shed sentimental tears for the injustice done to them. One suddenly has the impression that the Berlin Jewish population consists only of little babies whose childish helplessness might move us, or else fragile old ladies. The Jews send out the pitiable. They may confuse some harmless souls for a while, but not us. We know exactly what the situation is.

Rather than lard up the point with numerous defensive caveats about what is and is not being said here (which, in any event, never impede willful media distorters in their tactics), I’ll simply note three brief points:

(1) To compare aspects of A and B is not to posit that A and B are identical (e.g., to observe that Bermuda and Bosnia are both countries beginning with the letter “B” is not to depict them as the same, just as observing that both the U.S. in 2003 and Germany in 1938 launched aggressive wars in direct violation of what were to become the Nuremberg Principles is not to equate the two countries).

(2) In general, the universality of war rhetoric is a vital fact, necessary to evaluate the merit of contemporary claims used to justify militarism (claims that a war amounts to mere “humanitarian intervention”, for instance, have been invoked over and over to justify even the most blatant aggression). Similarly, the notion that one is barred from ever citing certain historical examples in order to draw lessons for contemporary conflicts is as dangerous as it is anti-intellectual.

(3) Anglo-American law has long recognized that gross recklessness is a form of intent (“Fraudulent intent is shown if a representation is made with reckless indifference to its truth or falsity”). That’s why reckless behavior even if unaccompanied by a desire to kill people – e.g., randomly shooting a gun into a crowd of people – has long been viewed as sufficient to establish criminal intent.

One can say many things about a military operation that results in more than 75 percent of the dead being civilians, many of them children, aimed at a population trapped in a tiny area with no escape. The claim that there is no intent to kill civilians but rather an intent to protect them is most assuredly not among them. Even stalwart Israel supporter Thomas Friedman has previously acknowledged that Israeli assaults on Lebanon, and possibly in Gaza, are intended ”to inflict substantial property damage and collateral casualties” because “the only long-term source of deterrence was to exact enough pain on the civilians” (which, to the extent it exists, is the classic definition of “terrorism”). The most generous claim one can make about what Israel is now doing in Gaza is that it is driven by complete recklessness toward the civilian population it is massacring, a form of intent under centuries of well-settled western law.

* * * * *

American journalism is frequently criticized with great justification, but there are a number of American journalists in Gaza, along with non-western ones, in order to tell the world about what is happening there. That reporting is incredibly brave and difficult, and those who are doing it merit the highest respect. Their work, along with the prevalence of social media and internet technology that allows Gazans themselves to document what is happening, has changed the way Israeli aggression is seen and understood this time around.

Credit to Jonathan Schwarz, now working with Matt Taibbi’s forthcoming First Look Media digital publication, for finding the 1941 article cited here.

From Granma, newspaper of the Cuban Communist Party - Israel: War Criminal

Havana. July 16, 2014

Israel: War criminal

In Israel’s latest attack on Gaza, the Tel Aviv government warned hundreds of thousands of inhabitants of the north of the Gaza Strip to abandon their homes, as the zone would be attacked by aircraft bombers from Tel Aviv.


The military offensive of Israel’s Zionist army has cased the death of almost 200 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, the majority civilians and between 25-30% children.

This has caused an exodus towards the south of the Gaza, worsening the already catastrophic conditions in which the Palestine population live, with thousands of wounded, over-crowded hospitals, scarcity of vital medicines, water and food shortages and only one access point, on the border with Egypt, from which Gaza can communicate with the rest of the world. Over the days of the military offensive called Border Protector, almost 200 people have died; hundreds of homes and buildings destroyed; with the Israeli air force choosing - among its targets – a hospital, a school and a mosque.

According to Palestinian accounts, the majority of victims - dead and injured - are civilians, 25-30% of whom are children. But, after bombing more than 600 targets and dropping hundreds of tons of high impact explosives over Gaza, Israeli soldiers have not killed a single leader of Hamas or the Islamic Jihad - the supposed targets of the Tel Aviv government - which has not even been able to significantly reduce the pace at which homemade missiles are launched from the Gaza border into Israeli territory.

Dozens of these missiles – which cause fear in Israeli neighborhoods bordering Gaza, but posses an insignificant destructive capacity - continue to be launched daily. They are the only possible defensive response available to Palestinians.

After two previous grand scale military offensives against Gaza (2008-2009 and 2012), based on the same pretexts, Tel Aviv authorities have been obliged to admit that the massive bombardments and military raids on Gaza will not stop the manufacture or use of rudimentary arms by Palestinians.

The only real objective of the current attack seems to be to kill civilians, as journalist Gideon Levy commented in his article published in Haaretz, "Israel’s real purpose in Gaza operation? To kill Arabs," given that overthrowing the Hamas government is an illusory and illegitimate objective, as well as undesirable, since the alternative could be far worse. Israel sincerely believes that if it kills hundreds of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, calm will be restored.

This strategy, as well as the destruction of homes "is a war crime, even if the Israeli solders label them control and command centers or conference rooms," stated Levy, renowned for his critical stance toward the Tel Aviv government.

The brutality and cruelty perpetrated against the defenseless population of Gaza are unfathomable, but the passivity and indifference of the United States and European Union in the face of a genocidal military operation is also incomprehensible. The Western powers have mounted campaigns against the Syrian government and intervened militarily in Libya to overthrow Muammar Gaddafi, for a lot less.

The suffering of the Palestinian population clearly demonstrates the obscenity and hypocrisy of the U.S. and Europe, both accomplices overlooking the war crimes perpetuated by Tel Aviv in martyred Gaza. (La Jornada)

July 19, Times Square 3-6 pm two block long demonstration in support of Gaza against Israeli massacre

Protest in Haifa against assault on Gaza is assaulted by police

from Haaretz
Clashes in Haifa over Gaza operation, 30 arrested
Activists claim police acted brutally and assaulted Knesset members and other protesters; police say demonstrators attacked officers.
By Eli Ashkenazi and Nir Hasson | Jul. 19, 2014 | 4:27 AM | 1



Clashes erupted in Haifa on Friday between demonstrators demanding an end to the operation in Gaza and police. Several protesters and officers sustained light injuries, and 30 people were arrested. Knesset members from the Arab party Balad claim they were attacked by the police during the demonstration. The head of the Haifa police was assaulted with a club.

Some 400 people marched to Peace and Tolerance Square on Ben-Gurion Boulevard in Haifa's German Colony. The protesters attempted to block the street at which point clashes with the police broke out. MK Basel Ghattas and MK Jamal Zahalka said that police officers attacked them.

"I was assaulted twice, hit in my hips and legs. The police didn't respect our right to protest and acted brutally. They came to show that they had power, but our fight against the slaughter in Gaza will continue," Zahalka said, adding that he intends to file a complaint with the police's internal affairs department.

MK Haneen Zoabi was handcuffed by a police officer and was released half an hour later by order of the district commander. Haifa police chief Avi Edri, who was attacked by a protester with a club, said that the police would contact the attorney general since, according to him, Zoabi assaulted an officer.

One protester, Wadiya Awawda, said the police broke up a legitimate rally against the operation in Gaza. "We wanted to protest but the police locked us up in a small compound. Children were suffocated and we wanted to leave at which point cavalry was sent in at attacked us. We wanted to protect someone and then serious violence began. The police have to understand that we have the right to protest," Awawda said. According to him MK Zahalka was badly beaten.

According to Commander Edri, the police allowed the rally to take place even though it did not receive a permit.

"It was an unauthorized protest; still we acted in a balanced manner. I was in contact with the protesters. A number of times this worked out and a number of times it didn't," Edri said. "People from outside of Haifa came in with the intention of rioting and clashing with the police. They were arrested only once they tried to block the road and assault police officers. What happened was very serious. We will prosecute the offenders to the full extent of the law, and tomorrow we will ask the court to extend their remand."

Haifa Mayor Yona Yahav said that "As we expected, members of marginal groups in the likeness of MK Zahalka and MK Zoabi, accompanied by their followers, came to disrupt the wonderful coexistence in Haifa. I state here that all of us in Haifa, Arabs and Jews alike, will not support any radical group in the city." Yahav added that "Haifa refuses to be a hotspot for protests and provocations. Anyone interested in protesting against the global situation of the Middle East should go elsewhere and to the halls of government, not in our city."

On Saturday another demonstration is scheduled to take place in Haifa, with a proper permit, against the operation in Gaza. Police said they expect the rally to encounter a counter-protest by right-wing activists, and that they are prepared to prevent clashes.

Clashes broke out in Jerusalem at the end of the Friday prayer on Temple Mount. Seven Palestinians were arrested. According to the police, a few dozen young Palestinians, wearing masks, threw stones at police officers at Mughrabi Gate. A police force stormed Temple Mount and repelled protesters using non-lethal weapons.

The only democracy in the middle east happens to hate democracy

Now we know: In the Jewish state, there is pity and humane feelings only for Jews, rights only for the Chosen People. The Jewish state is only for Jews.


Gideon Levy
July 6, 2014
Haaretz

The youths of the Jewish state are attacking Palestinians in the streets of Jerusalem, just like gentile youths used to attack Jews in the streets of Europe. The Israelis of the Jewish state are rampaging on social networks, displaying hatred and a lust for revenge, unprecedented in its diabolic scope. Some unknown people from the Jewish state, purely based on his ethnicity. These are the children of the nationalistic and racist generation – Netanyahu’s offspring.

For five years now, they have been hearing nothing but incitement, scaremongering and supremacy over Arabs from this generation’s true instructor, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Not one humane word, no commiseration or equal treatment.

They grew up with the provocative demand for recognition of Israel as a “Jewish state,” and they drew the inevitable conclusions. Even before any delineation of what a “Jewish state” means – will it be a state that dons tefillin (phylacteries), kisses mezuzot (doorpost fixtures with prayer scrolls), sanctifies charms, closes down on the Sabbath and keeps strict kashrut laws? – the penny has dropped for the masses.

The mob was the first to internalize its true significance: a Jewish state is one in which there is room only for Jews. The fate of Africans is to be sent to the Holot detention center in the Negev, while that of Palestinians is to suffer from pogroms. That’s how it works in a Jewish state: only this way can it be Jewish.

In the Jewish state-in-the-making, there is no room even for an Arab who strives his utmost to be a good Arab, such as the writer Sayed Kashua. In a Jewish state, the chairman of the Knesset plenary session, MK Ruth Calderon (from Yesh Atid – the “center” of the political map, needless to say), cuts off Arab MK Ahmed Tibi (United Arab List-Ta’al), who has just returned all shaken up from a visit to the family of the murdered Arab boy from Shoafat, impudently preaching to him that he must also refer to the three murdered Jewish teens (even after he did just that).

In a Jewish state, the High Court of Justice approves the demolition of a murder suspect’s family home even before his conviction. A Jewish state legislates racist and nationalist laws.

The media in the Jewish state wallows in the murder of three yeshiva students, while almost entirely ignoring the fates of several Palestinian youths of the same age who have been killed by army fire over the last few months, usually for no reason.

No one was punished for these acts – in the Jewish state there is one law for Jews and another for Arabs, whose lives are cheap. There is no hint of abiding by international laws and conventions. In the Jewish state, there is pity and humane feelings only for Jews, rights only for the Chosen People. The Jewish state is only for Jews.

The new generation growing in its shadow is a dangerous one, both to itself and its surroundings. Netanyahu is its education minister; the militaristic and nationalist media serves as its pedagogic epic poem; the education system that takes it to Auschwitz and Hebron serves as its guide.

The new sabra (native-born Israeli) is a novel species, prickly both on the outside and the inside. He has never met his Palestinian counterpart, but knows everything about him – the sabra knows he is a wild animal, intent only on killing him; that he is a monster, a terrorist.

He knows that Israel has no partner for peace, since this is what he’s heard countless times from Netanyahu, Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman and Economy Minister Naftali Bennett. From Yair Lapid he’s heard that they are “Zoabis” – referring dismissively to MK Haneen Zoabi (Balad).

Being left wing or a seeker of justice in the Jewish state is deemed a crime, civil society is considered treacherous, true democracy an evil. In a Jewish state – dreamed of not only by the right wing but also by the supposed center-left, including Tzipi Livni and Lapid – democracy is blurred.

It’s not the skinheads that are the Jewish state’s main problem, it’s the sanctimonious eye-rollers, the thugs, the extreme right wing and the settlers. It’s not the margins but the mainstream, which is partly very nationalistic and partly indifferent.

In the Jewish state, there is no remnant of the biblical injunction to treat the minority or the stranger with justice. There are no more Jews left who marched with Martin Luther King or who sat in jail with Nelson Mandela. The Jewish state, which Israel insists the Palestinians recognize, must first recognize itself. At the end of the day, at the end of a terrible week, it seems that a Jewish state means a racist, nationalistic state, meant for Jews only.

Gideon Levy is a Haaretz columnist and a member of the newspaper's editorial board. Levy joined Haaretz in 1982, and spent four years as the newspaper's deputy editor. He is the author of the weekly Twilight Zone feature, which covers the Israeli occupation in the West Bank and Gaza over the last 25 years, as well as the writer of political editorials for the newspaper. Levy was the recipient of the Euro-Med Journalist Prize for 2008; the Leipzig Freedom Prize in 2001; the Israeli Journalists’ Union Prize in 1997; and The Association of Human Rights in Israel Award for 1996. His new book, The Punishment of Gaza, has just been published by Verso Publishing House in London and New York.