racism

December 5, 2011December 11, 2020

Arch Enemy, Freedom of Speech and BDS

The metal band Arch Enemy is scheduled to play apartheid Israel on 24th January, following their Khaos Over Europe Tour in conjunction with Amnesty International’s freedom of expression campaign.

Amnesty International: Freedom of expression

Whilst Palestine is not one of the 9 cases on which Amnesty is focusing, those who do speak out in non-violent protest are targeted by Israel for example: Israel urged to lift Al-Haq director’s travel ban and also political prisoners of conscience detained in military prisons without trial or charge.

The BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) group Don’t Play Apartheid Israel (DPAI) created a Facebook page to support the Palestinian call for BDS and to try to persuade Arch Enemy to cancel the gig in support of the oppressed Palestinian people.

Arch Enemy: Resist Playing for Apartheid Israel

PACBI (Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel) issued a very strong plea for Arch Enemy not to play apartheid Israel.

“Today, Palestinian civil society groups are calling on artists to shun Tel Aviv in the same way that South African activists called on artists to boycott Sun City. All we are asking is for you to refrain from crossing a picket line called by Palestinian society, endorsed by international organizations, and increasingly supported by progressive-Israelis [17]. Palestinian civil society is asking this of you as the most essential contribution to their struggle to achieve peace and justice. They are calling for nothing short of revolution, rebellion, and freedom, as echoed in the slogan of the BDS movement for Freedom, Equality and Justice.”

Arch Enemy: Stand with Revolution not Apartheid

While espousing freedom of speech, Arch Enemy engaged in censorship and deleted all posts which asked them to refrain from playing in Israel and urged them to listen to and really hear the Palestinian people from their official FB page.

On Saturday 3rd December, Angela Gossow from Arch Enemy posted this on the BDS Facebook page, as well as the USACBI page:

Arch Angela: if the constant threat, bullying and slander of arch enemy via email and online does not stop immediately, we will publish some of the threats we have recceived from your supporters, where they claim they will come to some of our shows and threaten to attack us, both verbally and physically.

i am making amnesty international aware of your criminal methods and your breach of freedom of choice, freedom of expression and freedom of art. it is up to us (and only us!) to chose in which countries we perform and bring our message to. it is NOT yours to tell us what to do and to force your will upon us. you are hurting our rights of freedom and you make us fear for our safety. SHAME ON YOU! Music should transcend all races, political issues and borders – we will not be instrumentalised, neither by you or any other organization or government. who are you to tell us what to do?! Yesterday at 17:23

There were absolutely no threats made against Arch Enemy by BDS campaigners, rather attempts to highlight the terrible injustices that Israel subjects the Palestinians to and efforts to get the band to live up to its talk of freedom and equality and not to endorse a state which occupies, dispossesses and imprisons a people.

Today, further posts were removed from the Arch Enemy page, giving the lie to their claims of: “End repression. Allow expression!”

So, if Arch Enemy believes in freedom of expression, why do they engage in censorship? If they think there is nothing wrong in ignoring the Palestinians and playing in apartheid Israel, why not engage in discussion?

SOURCE

UPDATE

Another post in support of freedom of expression in Israel and BDS has been removed from Arch Enemy’s facebook page wall.

Administrative Detention in the Occupied Palestinian Territory – Between Law and Practice [.pdf]

The detention of Palestinians by the IOF is carried out on the basis of article
78 (a-d) of Military Order No. 378 of 1970 on “Security regulations” (Judea
and Samaria), as well as subsequent military orders amending that order.
Based on these orders, any Palestinian can be held for eight days without
being informed of the reason for his or her arrest and without being
brought before a judge on the basis of secret information that neither
the detainees nor their lawyers have access to. The detainee can also be
prevented from meeting with his or her lawyer for two days and the IOF is
not required to notify the family of the detainee of the reasons for, or the
location of, his or her detention. Thus, it can be concluded that the IOF
violate the right of Palestinian detainees to be informed of the reasons for
their detention, as provided for in international humanitarian and human
rights law.

Addameer testifies at the Russell Tribunal on Palestine

Israel’s policies of large-scale and arbitrary arrest and detention of Palestinians are made possible by a discriminatory regime of law and institutions working in three main concurrent ways to maintain domination over Palestinians: first by applying a more advantageous legal regime to Jewish Israelis, whether residing in the oPt or in Israel; second by effectively criminalizing any opposition to the occupation; and finally by applying differing legal systems to different parts of the occupied Palestinian territory (oPt), thereby fragmenting and segregating the Palestinian territory and people.

In the West Bank, Israeli authorities carry out arrests and detentions of Palestinians by virtue of a system of military regulations in place since the beginning of the occupation. According to international humanitarian law, any new legislation enacted by the Occupying Power should be limited to regulations protecting the rights of protected persons or the security of the Occupying Power. The military orders issued by Israel, however, extend much beyond these limits and further criminalize any form of opposition to the occupation, legally cementing the oppression of the Palestinian people. Despite living in the same territory, Jewish settlers residing in the West Bank are not subjected to this legislation, but rather to Israeli civil law, applied extra-territorially. Under this separate and unequal legal regime, Palestinians are subjected to more severe detention and sentencing provisions than Jewish settlers, with little or no effective judicial oversight, most notably with regard to administrative detention. In addition, the military courts, through which these military orders are enforced, do not conform to international fair trial and due process standards, further contributing to the arbitrary nature of this regime.

Before Israel’s unilateral “withdrawal” from Gaza in 2005, a similar system of military orders governed the arrest of Palestinians in the Strip. Since then, however, Gazans have been subjected to a different legal regime than Palestinians in the West Bank and are instead mainly arrested on the basis of Israeli criminal law, under which they are automatically classified as “security” prisoners and suffer from harsher standards of detention and sentencing than their “criminal” counterparts.

In East Jerusalem, although Israel imposed Israeli civil law upon its illegal annexation of the city in 1967, Palestinian residents continue to be subjected to a dual system of law: Israeli civil law and Israeli military regulations. In that framework, Israeli authorities often detain and interrogate Palestinians from East Jerusalem under military orders, a system that permits longer periods of detention, before transferring them to the Israeli civil system for trial, where prosecutors can seek higher sentences based on the principle that security offenses are less common than in the military system in the oPt. The arrest and detention of Jewish settlers residing in East Jerusalem, however, is governed solely by Israeli civil law, which affords them greater protection and due process rights.

Finally, within the domestic criminal justice system itself, Israeli authorities discriminate between incarcerated Jewish and Palestinian citizens by defining them either as “security” or as criminal prisoners, with the overwhelming majority of the former being Palestinians. Classification as a security prisoner carries with it fewer legal guarantees and rights, with privileges such as receiving family visits without a glass divider, access to books or other items, and occasional visits outside the prison available only to criminal prisoners.

Furthermore, security prisoners are interrogated by the Israeli Security Agency, which often uses methods that amount to ill-treatment and torture. Criminal prisoners, on the other hand, are interrogated by the Israeli police, whose methods of operation are governed by a different set of rules. This has created two distinct regimes of interrogation, with the one affording less protection and rife with abuse used almost exclusively against Palestinians, whether from theoPt or Israel.

It therefore appears that Israel’s arrest and detention of Palestinians in the oPt and within Israel proper is governed by a regime of laws and institutions almost completely separate from the one administering the arrest of Jewish Israelis. Because this system enables the large-scale arbitrary arrest of Palestinians while generally affording them lower protections and guarantees than Jewish Israelis, it should be understood as a discriminatory institutional tool of domination and oppression against them.

Interview: Hunger strikes created “new sense of solidarity”
A Palestinian political prisoner’s take on Israel’s protest movement
PCHR Weekly Report: 2 Palestinians wounded, 23 abducted by Israeli troops this week
Nobel Peace Laureate Mairead Maguire on Palestine, Political Prisoners and Nuclear Weapons
Abraham Foxman in the Huffington Post: Israel’s democracy is eroding
Richard Falk on the Russell Tribunal : The importance of the RToP session is to strengthen the civil society case against the Israeli treatment of the Palestinian people. As such, it adds a certain quality of gravitas to such international initiatives as the Freedom Flotilla and the BDS (boycott, divestment and sanctions) campaign.

November 24, 2011December 11, 2020

Children of Palestine Tormented by Israel

Moammar Mashni from Australians for Palestine makes some excellent points on Israel’s heinous treatment of Palestinian children under the illegal Occupation at The Drum:

Thus the prospects of peace could be fleeting or imminent, depending on which Israel decides to turn up to any future negotiations. In what can only be described as a blatant act of aggression, Israel has approved more settlement construction in September and October, thus the future of an independent Palestinians state is all but out the window upon examination of any map, particularly this most recent one from the UN.

Contrary to the often regurgitated myth that Palestinians use their children as human shields, it has never been proven – not once. Yet in October 2010, two Israeli soldiers were convicted of using a 9-year-old boy as a human shield during the infamous Operation Cast Lead of 2008/9. There are at least 15 other documented cases of children being used as human shields since 2004, with only the aforementioned case of the 9-year-old ever having been investigated.

Analysing the statistical data of child mistreatment by Israel is a horrific mission. The average number of Palestinian children in Israeli detention over the last 12 months is 212 – that is children aged 12 to 18 locked up on for the most minor indiscretion as Israel creates specific military orders that criminalise any form of opposition to the occupation.

Without doubt though, the statistic that should trouble any person of good conscience is the data relating to child fatalities. From 2000 to 2009, 1,329 children were killed by Israel. In real terms that means a Palestinian child was killed every three days, of every week, of every month, of every year, for 10 long years. How can this possibly be justified?

The international community has a moral obligation to hold Israel accountable for these crimes. Without the rule of law, and in this case we are talking about International Law and International Humanitarian Law, how can we possibly expect that the state of play will ever change?

Whether we like it or not, it is an undisputable fact that every single one of the 12 or so million people living between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea (historic Palestine) are under Israel’s rule. Is it therefore acceptable, that in the 2011 we still have a system that deliberately privileges one people over another in the same land? Or should this current spawn of apartheid be also discarded to the annals of history in the same way it was for South Africa in 1989.

Israel’s use of Palestinian children as human shields is highlighted. The comments following the post which support zionism nearly all blame Palestinian children for their own incarceration. Yet are Israeli children who throw stones at Palestinians and others collectively punished or incarcerated by the Israeli state? No.

Palestine / Israel Links

Announcing the Official Launch of Punks Against Apartheid!
Chief Palestinian Negotiator Saeb Erakat talked with Aaron David Miller about the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, the current state of the negotiations, U.S. policy, and future prospects for Arab-Israeli peace.

Aaron David Miller asks Erekat 10 questions about the peace negotiations back in November 2010, followed by questions from the audience.

Erekat reveals lots of interesting points from behind the scenes, including Hamas position that they have never challenged the authority of the PLO.

Most negative thing for negotiating for Palestinians was the US insisting on Palestinians recognise Israel without it defining its borders.

Do we have someone in Israel willing to engage in decisions?

“The state of Israel was recognised by us [in September 1993] … then they changed the wording to recognise Israel as the Jewish state. I will not become zionist, I will not.”

November 7, 2011December 11, 2020

The Desperate Racist Game of Hasbara Bingo

Hasbara Bingo

After visiting Palestine in 1897, two rabbis from Vienna reported that “The bride is beautiful, but she is married to another man”, and so Northern European zionists realised they would have to conjure up ‘plausible’ reasons to justify genociding and expelling indigenous Palestinians, acquiring their land to establish the racist ethnosupremacy of Israel. For Herzl and other early zionists, the ‘Jewish question’ could be solved with Jewish nationalism, as they held the essentialist antisemitic belief that Jews carried antisemitism wherever they went. Racism and bigotry however must be countered and nullified wherever they exist. In order to assert its legitimacy, Zionist ideology has incorporated many cognitively dissonant memes and myths, including the direct denial, in keeping with other settler colonial land-thieving projects in Australia (“terra nullius”) and the US (“the Promised Land”), that there ever was a place called Palestine, or a Palestinian people.

Political zionism is manifestly expansionist and militarist – belligerent expansionism is the zionist elite’s strategy, tactic and aim. To obscure its crimes however, Israel projects the lie in its marketing endeavours that it is pursuing ‘peace negotiations’ earnestly, whilst simultaneously sabotaging peace and precluding the formation of a viable Palestinian state by stealing as much Palestinian land and building as many illegal zionist jews-only settlements on Palestinian land as possible, using the contradictory pretext of ‘defence and security’.

Ali Abunimah described an example of this apparent cognitive dissonance recently – “Israel claims Gaza waters are “closed military zone” but that it “withdrew” from Gaza in 2005. Which is it liars?”

Israel’s deceitful posturing as a ‘peace-seeking’ nation whilst behaving in the exact opposite to sabotage peace was demonstrated well recently by Netanyahu after the successful vote to admit Palestine to UNESCO.

As it began, someone shouted Vive La Palestine (long live Palestine); when the delegates began to vote on the resolution to admit Palestine, the hall rang with loud and sustained cheers, as representatives of Austria, Russia, Brazil, India, China, South Africa and France indicated their country’s affirmative vote. The resolution was carried with 107 for, 14 against and 52 abstentions.

Reasonable people would think this is a wonderful triumph for the Palestinian quest for peace, the object of which is, after all, the establishment of an independent Palestinian state. The two-state solution is supported not only by the Quartet (US, Russia, the EU, and the UN) — the sponsors of the peace process — but also by the parties themselves — Israel and Palestine.

Yet, the Obama administration and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed that Palestinian membership in UN agencies undermines the peace process. They, therefore, announced punitive retaliatory measures: Washington will punish Unesco by withholding its financial contributions to it. Israel will go further by withholding its financial contribution to Unesco; and by punishing the Palestinians. Netanyahu announced that his government will accelerate the construction of new colonies in occupied East Jerusalem — a policy that has been condemned by the UN, the EU, and even by Washington itself as lacking legitimacy and undermining the peace process.

There is something wrong here. Either the Palestinians, supported by the international community, are misguided and their quest for membership in UN agencies does undermine the peace process. Or the peace process is intellectually corrupt claiming to serve the cause of peace when in fact it is perpetuating conflict.

There have been many instances in which it is possible to say that the Palestinians have pursued misguided policies. In a recent interview on Israeli television Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas mentioned two such instances — the Palestinian refusal to accept the 1947 UN Resolution recommending the partition of Palestine and the 2000 second Palestinian intifada. The editors of Wall Street Journal, a leading supporter of the American-Israeli position on the Palestinian quest for UN membership, recently explained that the Palestinian move undermined the peace process because it alienated Israel.

This logic reverses the roles: The occupier is absolved of its obligations under international law, and the victim is burdened with the obligation not to alienate the occupier even in the face of oppression, dispossession and collective punishment. If alienating your interlocutor undermines the quest for peace, then the Palestinians — who experience daily alienation under Israeli occupation — can legitimately argue that the Israelis have destroyed the peace process.

Israel treats Palestinians and other non-Jews as second class citizens in Israel and denies any rights at all to Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. Despite the UN in 1948 requiring that its admission of Israel as a state was dependent upon Israel recognising Palestinian refugees’ right to return, Israel has still failed to fulfill its promise. Instead, this legal recognition is cast by pernicious zionist hasbara as tantamount to destroying Israel, and so, too, is the one state solution vilified.

As Martin Woollacott correctly observes in his review of Ghada Karmi’s book “Married to Another Man”, ‘The single-state argument is not the essence of the problem. The essence is a change in the nature of Zionism’. Deconstruction and dismantlement of the white supremacist ideology of zionism is essential if peace is to be achieved in the region. Until then, Israel will remain the useful tool of exploitative imperialists which British Prime Minister Campbell-Bannerman envisaged in 1907. Thus does empire employ racism as a divide and rule tactic to achieve its rapacious ends to monopolise the vast resources of the Middle East.

Supported by other settler colonial and imperial entities and regardless of the negative consequences on Israel’s legitimacy in the Middle East, Israel’s crimes against humanity and war crimes are minimised and shrugged off – for Israel, land and resource theft are of singularly paramount import and is even portrayed as of ‘benefit’ to the dispossessed. In settler colonial Australia too, the suspension of human rights under the Anti-Discrimination Act for Aboriginals in the Northern Territory for the horrific Intervention was justified on the grounds of ‘need’ and sold to the public as essential for the ‘good’ of Aboriginals, despite protest from Aboriginal groups and communities.

The zionist regime similarly fails to acknowledge the racist nature of its laws which deliver privilege to 80% of the population and discriminate deliberately through birth or religion against 20% of the population. The racist Knesset proceeds instead to pass even more such laws. Yet it can hardly be expected for racists to recognise racist laws – the disease of racism occludes perceptions which threaten its eradication. Israel obscures its apartheid ziocolonial practices through a prism of overweaning need. In fact, Israel has no intention of permitting a Palestinian state or relinquishing one metre of land it has already stolen, yet to bolster the perfidious legitimacy of its theft, pretends it is seeking to negotiate for a Palestinian state for which Palestinians must deliver ever more concessions to achieve. By this strategy, Israel and its cruel western sponsors cast the onus onto Palestinians to pursue ‘peace’ while Israel continues its oppression and illegal appropriation of more Palestinian land and resources.

The boot on the neck of the oppressed can hardly expect the oppressed to remain silent while the boot attempts to crush them. Boycott, divestment and sanctions have been called by Palestinian civil society to counter Israel’s rejection of Palestinians rights – and increasingly, people of conscience throughout the world are answering the call.

‘The Arab Spring has pushed Israel into a strategic trap from which it can extricate itself only through accommodation with the Palestinians. In the current political climate, Arab leaders, whether conservative or revolutionary, can no longer afford to be seen as complicit with Israel and the United States in the region. The Palestinian cause will now resonate louder than ever in the central squares of Cairo, Amman and Ankara.’

Political History of Australia
White Australia – Nation of Bigoted Climate Savers
The Phantom Menace: Fantasies, Falsehoods, and Fear-Mongering about Iran’s Nuclear Program

Other Links

As women everywhere should through protest movements, not just in the Arab world : Women urged to put their stamp on Arab Spring
Muslim Brotherhood did not understand Erdogan’s message on secularism
Julie action doll! Julia Gillard makes surprise visit to Afghanistan

November 6, 2011December 11, 2020

Of Rabin and Rodefs

“The ties that hold Israel together as a united society have long been in a tragic process of disintegration. What we have here is not a society but cells inimical to one another in a state of potential civil war. Israel will not be able to stand this way before an enemy or confront the difficult challenge of peace.” Professor Shlomo Ben-Ami

Yigal Amir, the unrepentant, fanatical right wing orthodox jew who murdered Rabin and is jailed for life, claimed justification of his act due to Rabin being defined a ‘rodef’ by several of his religious peers. However

Dayan Weiss (Teshuvot Minchat Yitzchak 8:148) notes that only responsible Jewish leadership (i.e. a recognized Beit Din) may determine that an individual constitutes a danger to the community and is classified as a Rodef.

One is tempted to wonder why Amir’s Shabak friend, Avishai Raviv, to whom he confided his plans, did not stop the assassination. If anyone would qualify as a rodef it would be Amir, given his murderous intentions. According to some sources, Raviv, the head of an ultra rightwing zealot organisation, Eyal, a tool of the General Security Service, incited Amir.

The classification of a forfeiter of land as a rodef states that “If a Jew gives up the land of other Jews to Goyim, and he persists in this, that is, he gives up the land of three or more Jews, he is a Rodef.”

Uri Dan, a journalist close to Ariel Sharon, wrote that witnesses heard Raviv tell Amir: “Be a man! Kill him already!”

Then GSS boss was Carmi Gillon, appointed personally by Rabin despite opposition from high-ranking security officials. Accused of human rights abuses during his GSS term, Gillon became mayor of the Jerusalem suburb Mevasseret Zion. After Rabin’s assassination, Nutanyahoo inherited the GSS position and the peace process de-materialised. What was Sharon up to at the time?

Why did the GSS foment crazed religious hatred toward Rabin?

Raviv, for those who might have forgotten, was the obedient General Security Service operative who was ordered to create violence-orientated rightist gangs, preferably kippa-wearing.

After successfully defending himself from implication in the assassination “on the grounds that he had just been doing his job and events had spun out of control”, Raviv has gone to ground.

From the New York Times, April 1999:

Once a high-profile fixture of militant opposition to peace deals with the Palestinians, he has been largely untraceable since Mr. Rabin’s assassin, Yigal Amir, gunned down the Israeli Prime Minister in November 1995.

In 1999, Haaretz revealed that records involving Raviv were blacked out.

Justice Yaacov Turkel issued a gag order yesterday on the minutes of a secret discussion held in the office of Attorney General Elyakim Rubinstein regarding former Shin Bet security service undercover agent Avishai Raviv.

…

The document in question is the minutes of a discussion held in May 1996 regarding what was called the “swearing-in ceremony” of the extreme-right Eyal group, organized by Raviv in the summer of 1995. Raviv is currently on trial in connection with his role in the group’s activities as well as on charges of not preventing a crime, in connection with the assassination of the late Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. The discussion was held in the office of then Attorney General Michael Ben-Yair, and was attended by the state attorney and other officials in the attorney’s office and the Shin Bet.

http://www.wrmea.com/backissues/08092000/0010072.html

Raviv Prodded Amir to Kill Rabin

By Arutz-7

According to the classified chapters of the Shamgar report, GSS agent Avishai Raviv told Yigal Amir that Yitzchak Rabin falls into the classification of a “pursuer” who may be killed. According to the report, Raviv even prodded Amir to kill him, although Amir did not tell Raviv of his specific plans to do so.

The heretofore secret parts will not be released until Thursday — in accordance with a request by Labor Knesset faction head Raanan Cohen, who said that it would not be appropriate to release them on the official day of memorial for Rabin. Five of the seven pages that will be publicized deal with Raviv, and the others deal with the supervision by the prime minister over the GSS. Two other chapters, dealing with the performance of the GSS unit for protection of persons and the GSS relationship with the police, will remain classified.

Another conclusion gleaned from a perusal of the report is that the GSS had the police cancel the criminal files opened against Raviv during the eight years that he served as its agent. The report emphasizes that Raviv was not responsible for distributing the Rabin-SS picture, although he was the one who made sure to show it to a television reporter.

Guela Amir, A Mother’s Defense, published in George Magazine, March 1997, p. 138

The right wing conspiracy theory:

But according to an investigation by the Jerusalem Post, Raviv’s task involved much more than infiltration: His orders were to attract individuals to Eyal, incite them to illegal activities, and then inform on them to the Shin Bet.

One of the sources of this information was Rabbi Benny Elon, the dean of Yeshivat Beit Orot, a religious college, and son of a retired Supreme Court justice. Elon would later become a Knesset member in 1996. This prominent Jewish-settlement activist and leader of the right-wing group Moledet held a press conference and charged that Raviv had effectively manufactured the wild far Right. He was, in Elon’s words, an “agent provocateur,” carrying out a mission by the government to discredit the right-wing opposition, including, by association, the Likud. “I would venture to say,” Elon added, “that the whole organization [Eyal] and its activities, including the poster depicting Rabin in an SS uniform, were all paid for by the Shin Bet.” (The Shin Bet later denied the charge.) Elon went on to say, “There is a reasonable suspicion that [Raviv’s activity] was okayed by the legal authority.”

Michael Karpin and Ina Friedman

A racist, messianic rabbi is the ruler of Israel

The order came down: Lior was not to be arrested, tried or even seriously interrogated. The very belated and slight delay for an hour of questions relating to the book Torat Hamelech (The King’s Torah ) is therefore ridiculous. It’s even convenient for Lior. He’s responsible for more important and extreme books. Lior does not stop at incitement.

Nor does Lior stop at non-Jews. Leading rabbis have testified that Lior was the source of rulings labeling the late Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin a “rodef” and a “moser” (a traitor who endangers Jewish lives ). Here, too, he didn’t stop at incitement. Rabin’s assassin used to travel to Hebron to see the rabbi. Baruch Goldstein (who massacred Arabs at the Cave of the Patriarchs in 1994 ) also visited King Lior for instruction. After he massacred dozens of people, the rabbi ruled that Goldstein was “holier than all the martyrs of the Holocaust.”

The government is taking action. Twenty-five senior members of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition, including its chairman and the chairman of the Knesset Constitution, Law and Justice Committee, ruled that a shocking deed had been done. How did they dare to investigate Rabbi Lior? Shocked, they demanded the full force of the law be used against Deputy State Prosecutor Shai Nitzan, who is bringing down the State Prosecutor’s Office and the police.

And the ruler of the coalition? Upon returning as a victor from President Barack Obama, he went to Mercaz Harav. The featured speakers endorsed each other. And then the prime minister warmly thanked the rabbi who refuses to be investigated or to explain himself, as Lior and his disciples had given Netanyahu the strength to confront the American president. They are the elite commando unit leading the nation and paving the way, Netanyahu said.

Summer vacation begins today. Yesterday, most of the first graders who are defined in Israel as Jews were attending religious and ultra-Orthodox classes. Many of their educators receive a state salary to preach in the spirit of inflammatory and racist “Torat Hamelech.” There’s a reason why the “moderate” chief rabbis supported Lior.

It’s not a one-hour delay that Israel needs. Without dramatic change here, the government is making all of its laws illegal. As long as hesder yeshivas like Nir are not dismantled; as long as rabbis who identify with Rabbi Lior are not ousted from their jobs; as long as funding for the present religious education is not stopped; as long as Lior’s involvement in acts of murder, according to the testimony of the perpetrators, is not prosecuted, the country has no right to demand its citizens serve in the army or pay taxes. Until the change takes place, Israel is not a state.

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Translation from Hebrew Haaretz Rabin was assassinated as an Israeli, not as a Jew

Salman Masalha

4 November 2012 4.08

As the years keep on passing, both the name and the memory continue to wane away. But the memory does not become duller by itself. There are those who have put in the effort to ensure that it does. Seventeen years have passed since that fateful Saturday, 4 November, in the square that then bore the name of the Kings of Israel.

The impact of the shock that hit the country was limited to producing a crop of memorial candles, which were lit everywhere but nothing more. So much emphasis was placed on establishing internal peace within Jewish society that no one saw the assassin and those who were behind him, or the victim. Everyone has been satisfied with commemorating Rabin by naming the square after him as well as well a street here and a building there.

Now, that the official ceremony, the national Memorial service, and all the speeches are well and truly over we can revert to calling the murder by its true name. Because fixing the date of the commemoration of the 12th day of Jewish month of Cheshvan, also has a substantial role in diminishing the significance of the murder.

We need to reiterate and remind those who trying to make sure the assassination’s memory is dimmed forget that Rabin was assassinated on 4 November. He was not murdered on the 12th of Cheshvan. In other words, the Israeli prime minister was assassinated as an Israeli. He was not murdered as a Jew. Only the murderer and his ideological dispatchers (who have remained behind the scenes) acted as Jews functioning under the Jewish order of the day.

In a society ruled by tribal codes, the individual has no value, even if he is the Prime Minister of the tribe. The value of the individual is measured by their ability to adopt the strict tribal codes and operate by them. Any violation of these codes could lead to an extreme response from those who view themselves as the tribe’s flag bearers and guards of honour.

The original Zionist sin during the creation of state was the way the ZIonist leaders, from the left to right, did not use their wisdom to differentiate between the Jewish religion and the Jewish state. Two decades later the Six Day War broke out, which in turn brought the Jewish tribe closer to places laden with religious and tribal values.

As the years went on the occupation, settlements were established and demography continued to chart its own course. The First Intifada prompted a change in Yitzhak Rabin’s point of view. In 1967 he had been the Chief-of-Staff of the Occupation. During the First intifada, as Defence Minister, he was busy taking charge of the breaking of the arms and legs of protesting Palestinians.

But belatedly, Rabin realised that the continued Occupation of another people, who continues to proliferate thus threatening the existence of a Jewish state with a Jewish majority, was creating a knot that would be too difficult to untangle. So he turned, however hesitantly, to the Oslo path.

But in order to reach his Zionist-Israeli destination Rabin crossed the red lines drawn by the Jewish tribe’s flag bearers. To form a government he relied on an Israeli majority in the Knesset. His government was propped by the so-called “Arab parties” who ensured his government survival. This act can be compared to waving a red flag at the swaggering bull of Jewish fundamentalism and Israel very existence as a “Jewish state.”

For this reason the Right levelled the racist accusation at him of not having a “Jewish majority” to carry out his policy. In response, he began a civil society discourse using the state-owned channel for the purpose. He tossed such terms as racism and Apartheid at the Right.

The tribe elders gathered and out of the past began to evoke such concepts as Din Moser [Halachic law relating to someone handing Jewish persons or property to non-Jewish authorities] Din Rodef [the law dealing with someone believed to be about to murder] and a host of other laws and ways to treat a son who has gone astray. Only one minor question remained open – Who would carry out the verdict.

The shots were fired by those who saw the Kings of Israel Square as the Shabbat Square, the Tribe’s Square [An alliteration in Hebrew.] In other words, Rabin was assassinated as an Israeli who relied on an Israeli majority. That is, for crossing the Jewish tribe’s red lines. He was murdered in an honour killing, for defiling the honour of the Jewish tribe.

The discourse which is centred on the concept of a “Jewish state” has deepened in recent years. It seems that as far as the Israeli Right is concerned the assassination continues to pay off.

Salman Masalha is a Druze-Israeli poet, writer, essayist and translator.

Hebrew original: http://www.haaretz.co.il/opinions/1.1856203

Translated by Sol Salbe of the Middle East News Service, Melbourne Australia.

November 5, 2011December 11, 2020

Macy Gray Reconsiders, Would Not Have Played Israel If She Knew

After participating with BDS activists to persuade her to respect the boycott, Macy Gray played apartheid Israel in February 2011.

By Novemeber that year, Macy changed her view, tweeting “i had a reality check and I stated that I definitely would not have played there if I had known even the little that I know now.”

@muiz i had a reality check and I stated that I definitely would not have played there if I had known even the little that I know now.

— Macy Gray (@MacyGraysLife) November 4, 2011