“No one can prevent me from going to a university and standing together with my constituency,” Zuabi wrote in a letter to Yoav Lavee, the dean of students. “My participation in the event is part of my parliamentary activities, just as my participation in the freedom flotilla constituted a humanitarian, ethical, civic and political obligation of the first order and was part of my parliamentary activities.”
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Israel
An extraordinary meeting, the first such meeting of the Lieberman era, took place some days ago at the Israeli Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem, when Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon met behind closed doors with a delegation of senior officials of the Peace Now movement.
IOA Editor: The Peace Now Settlements Task Force has played an important role in documenting and exposing illegal Israeli West Bank settlements. As delineated by the author, this is quite apart from the Tel Aviv leadership of Peace Now, which is reported to be collaborating with Israel’s propaganda ministry under Lieberman’s leadership.
“A number of Knesset members and ministers from Yisrael Beitenu and Likud and other right-wing figures are calling for cutting off funding to artists that this week called for a boycott of the cultural center in Ariel… Threats of this type … do not scare us… As Israeli citizens, the refusal of these theater actors to perform in Ariel, which is not within the borders of Israeli sovereignty, is a democratic right.”
“The smokescreen called a medical school obscures an evil scheme: to establish a refugee camp for psychotic, sadistic and debased Arabs, whose deceptiveness is, and always has been, aimed at tempting [Jewish women] and cruelly abusing them. On orders of the great rabbis of Safed, may they be blessed with a long life, we declare our protest and vehement resistance, and reiterate that it is forbidden under the law of the Torah to offer these people apartments for sale, rent, work or any form of entry. Our city will not succumb to wanton behavior – go back to your own locales and do not defile our camp.”
Young men have reportedly been roaming in and around Independence Park seeking Arabs to attack, trying to identify them by their accent.
IOA Editor: As is so often the case, propaganda is Israel’s “solution” to most problems: Any rumors about the victimization of Palestinians in Israel will be quashed.
Safed’s chief rabbi, Shmuel Eliyahu: “When a non-Jew moves in, residents begin to worry about their children, about their daughters. Many Arab students have been known to date Jewish girls.”
Court rejects appeal by Jaffa residents, human rights groups challenging leasing land to company specializing in housing for religious Zionist community.
Safed was plastered with posters … denouncing a long-time resident for renting an apartment to three Bedouin studying at the local college. The posters are the latest episode in an ongoing campaign waged by certain Safed residents, led by chief municipal rabbi Shmuel Eliyahu, to halt the influx of Arab students attracted by the college.
A new joint report exposes routine ill-treatment of Palestinians in interrogations: The treatment of detainees … is consistent with an interrogation doctrine that seeks to break the spirit of the detainee by inducing anxiety and shock, completely removing him from his normal life, and subjecting him to extreme deprivation of sensory stimuli, movement, and human contact. Added to these is the induced enfeebling of the detainee by means of sleep deprivation, food reduction, exposure to cold and heat, and causing pain, mainly through forced stiff postures. This doctrine appeared in the CIA interrogation manuals of the 1960s and 1980s, used … as guides to interrogators operating in Latin American dictatorships.
Haneen Zoabi: “We are struggling for a normal state, which is a state for all of its citizens, [in] which the Palestinians and the Israeli Jews can have full equality. I recognize religious, cultural and national group rights for the Israelis, but inside a democratic and neutral state.”
Israel’s apartheid movement is coming out of the woodwork and is taking on a formal, legal shape. It is moving from voluntary apartheid, which hides its ugliness through justifications of “cultural differences” and “historic neglect” which only requires a little funding and a couple of more sewage pipes to make everything right – to a purposeful, open, obligatory apartheid, which no longer requires any justification.
Former chief rabbi Ovadia Yosef cites centuries-old interpretation of halakhic ruling barring the sale of land to non-Jews.
Under the guise of the deceptively mundane name “Amendment to the Cooperative Associations Bill,” an Israeli parliament committee finalized a bill intended to bypass previous rulings of the High Court of Justice. If this legislation is approved by parliament, it will not be possible to describe it as anything other than an apartheid law.
Protest met with rubber bullets: Israeli police shoot ‘hated’ Arab legislator in back.
MP Zoabi: “The police proved that they are a far more dangerous threat to me and other Arab citizens than the fascist group that came to Umm al-Fahm.”
Ameer Makhoul admits to charges of espionage, contact with a foreign agent and conspiring to assist an enemy, in plea bargain reached Wednesday.
IOA Editor: This is a travesty of justice of the first order: A man is kidnapped from his bed in the middle of the night by the police and held for days without the ability to consult a lawyer; he’s tortured, and signs an ‘admission.’ By law, his accusers – the Israeli government’s secret services and prosecution – are not required to present to him, and to his legal team, the evidence based on which he stands to be found guilty and be sentenced for a very long jail term. Finally, given the virtual outlawing of anything Palestinian in Israel today, it is no wonder that an accused would feel compelled to sign a plea-deal that is likely to land him in jail for 7-10 years – probably far less than if he were to deny the charges.
“Many Jews come to Umm al-Fahm every day and we have no problem, but Marzel and his gang come as enemies and we want to tell them that they are not welcome to …” Before he could finish his sentence police fired a volley of stun grenades, provoking a stampede.
IOA Editor: MPs Haneen Zoabi and Afou Agbaria injured in violent Israeli police actions against demonstrators.
Guardian photos of the clashes: www.guardian.co.uk/world/gallery/2010/oct/27/israel-protest#/?picture=368107548&index=0
According to Makhoul’s brother Issam, a former MK for Hadash, his brothers’ Attorneys … will ask the prosecution to drop the severe charge of espionage in exchange for Makhoul’s confession on several other counts. If the plea bargain is put into action Makhoul is expected to serve between seven to ten years in jail, yet the details of the plea bargain have not yet been finalized.
Interior Minister Eli Yishai’s proposal has been presented as a method of deterring potential criminals from embarking on terrorist activities, seen as targeting Israeli Arabs in particular.
IOA Editor:This Haaretz header is entirely misleading, as is made clear in the body of the story. The targets of this ‘legal’ campaign aren’t convicted terrorists but Arab minority dissenters who don’t play by the “Jewish and Democratic” majority’s rules, as Israel’s Interior Minister Yishai states: [loyalty] “declarations and oaths are not sufficient when dealing with cases such as Azmi Bishara and Hanin Zoabi.” (Neither MP was ever charged or convicted of any ‘State Security’ violations.) And, the truth surfaces when Yishai states “Anyone who betrays the state will lose his citizenship.” This flexible term can be useful in eradicating Palestinian dissent: disobedient Arab citizens (e.g., Ameer Makhoul) of the “Jewish and Democratic” State. This is the latest phase of the Nakba, now dressed in a Blue-and-White ‘legal’ attire: Arab, you’ve been outlawed, and now off you go.
Over the past two years, we have been increasingly troubled by expanding tendencies to harm Israel’s democracy… In anticipation of Israel’s Knesset’s Winter Session 2010-11, we wish to warn against the troubling trend of infringement against democracy in Israel as expressed through the persistent promotion of anti-democratic bills, decision-making process, and conduct by Members of Knesset (MK).
The [Israeli] right … is well on its way to negating Israel’s earlier achievements in crushing the Palestinian people, and it will bring about their reunification. The Israeli left and center did quite a lot to split the Palestinian people and to transform them into distinct groups: Palestinians in Israel, Palestinians in the West Bank, Palestinians in Jerusalem, Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and Palestinians in the diaspora.
My nearly 25 years of covering the Israeli occupation and expressing my controversial opinions have indeed stirred up wrath in some circles. But I have always taken pride in the fact that after hundreds of reports from the field – this entire modest documentation enterprise – none of the facts have ever been refuted despite the efforts of many.
If Israel is the Jewish state, then what right do we Palestinian interlopers have to be here at all? None. And so it should be little surprise that Lieberman is simultaneously pushing a plan to trade Palestinian citizens of Israel into a rump state in the West Bank.
“My biggest struggle,” he says, “is to rehumanize the Palestinians. There’s a whole machinery of brainwashing in Israel which really accompanies each of us from early childhood, and I’m a product of this machinery as much as anyone else. [We are taught] a few narratives that it’s very hard to break. That we Israelis are the ultimate and only victims. That the Palestinians are born to kill, and their hatred is irrational. That the Palestinians are not human beings like us? So you get a society without any moral doubts, without any questions marks, with hardly public debate. To raise your voice against all this is very hard.”
Director of Mossawa advocacy center for the Palestinian minority: “The police have already repeatedly demonstrated their hostility to Palestinian citizens, but this move proves that the authorities want to extend and deepen our oppression.”
In all likelihood, I will be one of the very first non-Jews expected to swear loyalty to Israel as an ideology rather than as a state. Until now, naturalising residents, like the country’s soldiers, pledged an oath to Israel and its laws. That is the situation in most countries. But soon, if the Israeli parliament passes a bill being advanced by the government, aspiring citizens will instead be required to uphold the Zionist majority’s presumption that Israel is a “Jewish and democratic state”.
Underneath everything is hatred – hatred and contempt for Arabs … Manifestations of hatred are received with sympathy or indifference, even by those who should be standing in the breach: the opposition, the media and the education and judicial systems.
ACRI’s move follows an Israel Prisons Service drill last week that had wardens practicing dealing with numerous Israeli Arabs being detained after a wave of riots. According to Israel Radio, the “riots” supposedly broke out as a result of a peace agreement including a population transfer between Israel and the PA.
Carmiel Deputy Mayor: “Carmiel is a Jewish city, plain and simple. It was founded for the purpose of Judaizing the Galilee. In my opinion it is not proper for Arab families to live here. In recent years, there are attempts by our [Arab] neighbors in the Western Galilee villages to migrate into Carmiel, and we must not ignore this phenomenon.”
“Ramallah approved the project only after PA officials read the textbook, while in Israel the book was banned even though officials in Jerusalem did not even check its contents,” said one official. “From the Palestinian standpoint, this is a breakthrough because they are ready to teach the Israeli narrative. On the other hand, in Israel they are hunkering down in old positions.”
Over 100 people demonstrated against loyalty oath in Tel Aviv; warn ‘Israel is becoming a fascist state.’
From now on, we will be living in a new, officially approved, ethnocratic, theocratic, nationalistic and racist country. Anyone who thinks it doesn’t affect him is mistaken. There is a silent majority that is accepting this with worrying apathy, as if to say: “I don’t care what country I live in.”
A vague security offence of “contact with a foreign agent” is being used by Israel’s secret police, the Shin Bet, to lock up Arab political activists in Israel without evidence that a crime has been committed, human rights lawyers alleged this week.
Dr. Omar Said, the Kafr Kana resident who was released last week after five months in jail, is one of dozens of Israeli Arabs who have been detained over allegations of security and espionage offenses. As in most of these cases, the story opened with massive media coverage and serious suspicions, but ended with a limited indictment – contact with an enemy agent – and a relatively short jail sentence.
Israeli historian Tom Segev: “Who does this country belong to?”
Should Mr al-Uqbi win his case, tens of thousands of Bedouin … could be entitled to repossess their agricultural lands… Theoretically, it might also open the door to claims by millions of Palestinian refugees scattered across the Middle East.
Israeli academe, which was once considered a bastion of free speech, has become the testing ground for the success of the assault on liberal values. And although it is still extremely difficult to hurt those who have managed to enter the academic gates, those who have not yet passed the threshold are clearly being monitored.
