History Erased By Ha’aretz

Posted on July 7, 2007

 

 
 al-Majdal Asqalan‘s famous main mosque, early 1970s 

In July 1950, Majdal - today Ashkelon – was still a mixed town. About 3,000 Palestinians lived there in a closed, fenced-off ghetto, next to the recently arrived Jewish residents. Before the 1948 war, Majdal had been a commercial and administrative center with a population of 12,000. It also had religious importance: nearby, amid the ruins of ancient Ashkelon, stood Mash’had Nabi Hussein, an 11th-century structure where, according to tradition, the head of Hussein Bin Ali, the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, was interred; his death in Karbala, Iraq, marked the onset of the rift between Shi’ites and Sunnis. Muslim pilgrims, both Shi’ite and Sunni, would visit the site. But after July 1950, there was nothing left for them to visit: that’s when the Israel Defense Forces blew up Mash’had Nabi Hussein.

This was not the only Muslim holy place destroyed after Israel’s War of Independence. According to a book by Dr. Meron Benvenisti, of the 160 mosques in the Palestinian villages incorporated into Israel under the armistice agreements, fewer than 40 are still standing. What is unusual about the case of Mash’had Nabi Hussein is that the demolition is documented, and direct responsibility was taken by none other than the GOC Southern Command at the time, an officer named Moshe Dayan. The documentation shows that the holy site was blown up deliberately, as part of a broader operation that included at least two additional mosques, one in Yavneh and the other in Ashdod.

A member of the establishment is responsible for the documentation: Shmuel Yeivin, then the director of the Department of Antiquities, the forerunner of the present-day Antiquities Authority. Yeivin, as noted by Raz Kletter, an archaeologist who has studied the first two decades of archaeology in Israel, was neither a political activist nor a champion for Arab rights. As Kletter explains, he was simply a scientist, a disciple of the British school and a member of the Mandate government’s Department of Antiquities who believed that ancient sites and holy places needed to be preserved, whether they were sacred to Jews, Christians or Muslims. In line with his convictions, he fired off letters of protest and was considered a nudnik by the IDF.

 
Yibna‘s famous Abu Hurayra shrine and mosque, early 1900s 

“I received a report that not long ago, the army blew up the big building in the ruins of Ashkelon, which is known by the name of Maqam al-Nabi Hussein and is a holy site for the Muslim community,” Yeivin wrote on July 24, 1950, to Lieutenant Colonel Yaakov Patt, the head of the department for special missions in the Defense Ministry, and sent a copy to chief of staff Yigael Yadin and other senior officers. “That building was still standing during my last visit to the site, on June 10 – in other words, the army authorities found no reason to demolish it from the conquest until the middle of 1950. I find it hard to imagine the site was blown up due to infiltrators, as they have not stopped infiltrating the area during this entire period.”

The detonation, by the way, was extremely successful. Of the ancient and holy site, not so much as a stone remained.

Yeivin’s complaint was seemingly related to procedural matters, but only seemingly. The army, he wrote, needed to understand that there were “sanctified buildings,” and if it wanted to touch them, “it is proper, honest and courteous first to talk to the institutions that supervise these areas and buildings, and to consult with them in order to find ways to avoid destruction.” But that is not happening, Yeivin stated. “I was told that simultaneously, the mosque in the abandoned village of Ashdod was blown up,” Yeivin added. “This is not the first case. I already have had many occasions to draw your attention to similar cases elsewhere, and the chief of staff issued explicit directives with regard to the preservation of such buildings and places, but apparently none of this avails commanders of a certain type … I believe the commander responsible for this explosion should be brought to trial and punished, because in this case there was no justification for a swift, war-contingent operation.”

A perusal of the IDF Archives shows that Lieutenant Colonel Patt forwarded Yeivin’s complaint to Yadin. However, Yadin, who would later become Israel’s preeminent archaeologist and whose father, Eliezer Sukenik, was an archaeologist of repute in his own right and Yeivin’s colleague in the Mandate Department of Antiquities, was not unduly upset. Below Patt’s letter addressing Yeivin’s complaint are handwritten remarks: “1. Confirm receipt of letter and inform that the matter is being dealt with; 2. Add to Dayan‘s material for my meeting with B.-G.” – referring to then prime minister and defense minister David Ben-Gurion.

It stands to reason that the handwriting is Yadin’s, as it is unlikely that anyone else could have met with Ben-Gurion concerning “Dayan’s material.” And Yadin, as is clear from another note written on the letter, did not attribute any great importance to the complaint. “Teven la’afarayim,” it says, roughly the equivalent of “coals to Newcastle” – in short, there is nothing new in Yeivin’s complaint.

 
Aqir  village being usurped be  persecuted European Jews, 1949. 

Nor was Dayan unduly upset. In a response he sent to the chief of staff’s bureau, apparently on August 10 under the heading “Destruction of a holy place,” Dayan wrote: “The detonation was carried out by the Coastal Plain District, at my instruction.” The first words of the sentence have been struck out, but a letter dated August 30 removes all doubt. Dayan replied to a letter concerning “damage to antiquities in the Ashkelon area”: “The chief of staff approached me and I gave him my explanations; the action was carried out at my instructions.”

That reply was so embarrassing that Yaakov Prolov, the head of the Operations Department in the General Staff, sent a letter to the chief of staff’s bureau asking for guidelines on how to reply to Yeivin. “A mistake was made here and it can be assumed it will not happen again,” someone instructed him in script that looks like that attributed to Yadin in the previous letter. Whitewashing, it turns out, is not a new invention.

Blots on the landscape

Not surprisingly, it did in fact happen again. At the end of October, Yeivin sent another letter, this time directly to Yadin, to complain about “the blowing-up of the ancient mosque at Yavneh,” a 1,000-year-old structure whose minaret is still standing on a hill south of Yavneh, close to the train station. Yeivin reminded Yadin that he had been promised that those responsible would be punished this time. But it turned out there was an unexplained disparity between the explicit orders prohibiting damage to mosques and the actual policy in the field.

“I have just received an official reply from your bureau chief [Michael Avitzur], and after reading it I am totally at a loss,” Yeivin wrote to Yadin. “On the one hand, I have in front of me your explicit order, which speaks unequivocally about preserving places of archaeological or historical value … On the other hand, I read in the letter of Lieutenant Colonel Michael Avitzur that the mosque at Yavneh ‘was exploded on July 9, 1950, before the date on which the cessation of blowing up mosques was announced.’ How can these two things be reconciled?”

Yeivin’s quotation from Avitzur’s letter makes it clear that blowing up mosques was widespread enough that it required a special order to stop it. Yeivin himself wrote later in the letter, “I am extremely concerned following my talks with a number of people involved in the policy on this question.” Yeivin did not specify whom he spoke to, but noted, “I do not see myself as being able to write explicitly about everything.”

David Eyal (formerly Trotner), who was the military commander of Majdal at the time, says “he does not want to return” to that period. The historian Mordechai Bar-On, who was Dayan’s bureau chief during his term as chief of staff and remained close to him for years, says he himself did not serve in Southern Command at the time and therefore is not familiar with the destruction of mosques in Ashkelon, Yavneh and Ashdod, and also never heard Dayan issue any such order.

“As a company commander in Central Command, we expelled the Arabs from Zakariyya, but we did not destroy the mosque, and it is still there,” Bar-On says. “I know that in the South, in the villages of Bureir and Huj [near today's Kibbutz Bror Hayil], the villages were leveled and the mosques disappeared with them, but I am not familiar with an order to demolish only mosques. It doesn’t sound reasonable to me.”

The affair of the mosque demolitions does not appear in Kletter’s book “Just Past? The Making of Israeli Archaeology,” published in Britain (Equinox Publishing) in 2005. Kletter, who has worked for the Antiquities Authority for the past 20 years, does not consider himself a “new historian” and has no accounts to settle with Zionism or the State of Israel. Nevertheless, the story of archaeology comes across in his book to no small degree as one of destruction: the utter destruction of towns and villages, the destruction of an entire culture – its present but also its past, from 3,000-year-old Hittite reliefs to synagogues in razed Arab quarters, from a rare Roman mausoleum (which was damaged but spared from destruction at the last minute) to fortresses that were blown up one after the other. Had it not been for a few fanatics like Yeivin, who pleaded to save these historical monuments, they might all have been wiped off the face of the earth.

As the documents quoted in the book show, only a small part of this devastation occurred in the heat of battle. The vast majority took place later, because the remnants of the Arab past were considered blots on the landscape and evoked facts everyone wanted to forget. “The ruins from the Arab villages and Arab neighborhoods, or the blocs of buildings that have stood empty since 1948, arouse harsh associations that cause considerable political damage,” wrote A. Dotan, from the Information Department of the Foreign Ministry, in an August 1957 letter that is quoted in Kletter’s book. A copy was sent to Yeivin in the Department of Antiquities. “In the past nine years, many ruins have been cleared … However, those that remain now stand out even more prominently in sharp contrast to the new landscape. Accordingly, ruins that are irreparable or have no archaeological value should be cleared away.” The letter, Dotan noted, was written “at the instruction of the foreign minister,” Golda Meir.

 
al-Khadir Shrine west of Haifa’s city center, early 1900s 

Kletter reveals in his book that Yeivin and his staff occasionally tried to stop the destruction – not always, not consistently, and not for moral reasons or out of any special respect for the people (the Arabs) who lived for centuries in these towns and quarters. Their grounds were scientific, and Kletter believes this approach stemmed from their background. Before 1948 they worked for the Department of Antiquities of the Mandate government under British management, alongside Arab employees. Kletter relates that in the department they fought for the “Judaization” of the names of ancient sites, but nevertheless remained loyal to the department – so much so that after the United Nations passed the partition plan, in November 1947, Yeivin proposed that the department remain unified even after the country’s division into a Jewish state and an Arab state. Eliezer Sukenik went one step farther: “I do not believe the Jewish state will preserve its antiquities,” he said in a December 1947 discussion. “We must place scientific sovereignty above political sovereignty. We are interested in the archaeology of the whole land, and the only way [to ensure this] is a unified department.”

Perjury at Megiddo

“Yeivin was not the greatest archaeologist in the world, but he had personal integrity, which is the most important trait of the British heritage,” Kletter says. “But that heritage did not suit the nationalism of the 1950s, because Ben-Gurion wanted to erase everything that had been, to erase the Islamic past.”

Ben-Gurion saw everything that existed here before the revival of the Jewish community as wasteland. “Foreign conquerors have turned our land into a desert,” he said at a meeting of the Society for Land of Israel Studies in 1950. Thus the failure of Yeivin and his colleagues was a foregone conclusion. In the 1950s, when archaeology was a fad and archaeologists like Yadin were cultural heroes, people of science were nudged out of management positions. Yeivin was forced to resign and “technocrats” like Teddy Kollek were effectively put in charge of managing Israel’s major archaeological sites.

The Department of Antiquities was formally established in July 1948, as a unit of the Public Works Department in the Ministry of Labor. Even before this, the veterans of its Mandatory predecessor tried to preserve antiquities, and in particular to prevent looting, but did not always succeed. The museum in Caesarea was emptied out by thieves, and the same fate befell the findings and documents at Tel Megiddo, which were concentrated in the offices of the University of Chicago archaeological expedition, which had been digging there since the 1920s. Rare collections, such as the one at Notre Dame Monastery in Jerusalem, disappeared almost completely, and private collections and antique shops in Jaffa and Jerusalem were also targeted by thieves. “All the objects have disappeared from the government museum [more than 100 fragments of inscriptions and parts of pillars],” reported Emanuel Ben-Dor, who would later become Yeivin’s deputy director, after visiting Caesarea. “The collection in the office of the Greek patriarch was destroyed.” The Megiddo incident was particularly embarrassing, as the dig was carried out by American archaeologists and the U.S. consulate wanted to know who was responsible for the devastation. An investigation was launched under Yeivin’s supervision, and the local commanders said that Arab units had wrecked the site. Yeivin discovered that this was untrue, and that Israeli soldiers had looted the site and then burned the archaeological expedition’s offices.

General view of Safad City soon after Nakba, early 1950s 

In a confidential report, Yeivin quoted from an internal letter of the local unit: “In consultation with the battalion commander and with the brigade’s operations officer, we agreed that in the event of an investigation by the U.S. consul general … we will (shamefully) lie and say the place was found in this condition when it was captured and that the crime was committed by the Arabs before they fled.”

But the theft of antiquities was only a small part of the problem. The major problem was the destruction. In August 1948, the army started to demolish ancient Tiberias, apparently in the wake of a local decision. The attempts to salvage some of the town’s archaeological gems were to no avail. In September the site was visited by Jacob Pinkerfeld, from the Department of Antiquities’ monument conservation unit.

“In ancient Tiberias the army began to blow up a hefty strip of buildings in the Old City,” Pinkerfeld wrote in his report. “In talks with all the responsible parties at the site, we emphasized the special importance of the ancient stone with the relief of the lions on it, which was built into one of the walls. We were promised that this antiquity dating back 3,000 years would be specially guarded, but in my last visit I found precisely this stone blown to bits.” So sweeping was the destruction of Tiberias that even Ben-Gurion was taken aback when he visited the city in early 1949.

The list for destruction sometimes assumed ludicrous proportions. During a visit to Haifa in August 1948, Yeivin discovered the army was laying waste to large sections of the Arab city around Hamra Square (now Paris Square) under the direction of the city engineer. In his restrained language, Yeivin expressed his astonishment at the destruction: “With our own eyes we saw the ruins of half of a building that had served as a synagogue on the Street of the Jews … According to Jews who live there and wandered about among the ruins, another two or three synagogues were also destroyed there … It would appear that with attentiveness, the damage inflicted to these holy buildings could have been avoided.”

Depressing impression

The leveling of the villages began as soon as the fighting ended. During his visit to the North, Yeivin saw the army blowing up villages near Tiberias and Mount Tabor. He asked that before villages were demolished, consultations be held with representatives of the Department of Antiquities, because “in many villages, ancient building stones are embedded in the houses.” At Zir’in (now Kibbutz Yizrael) a Crusader tower was blown up, and the fortress at Umm Khaled, near Netanya, was reduced to rubble.

al-Muzayri‘a’s mausoleum that later converted to a mosque.

al-Muzayri’a‘s mausoleum that later converted to a mosque.

But there were successes, too. An order was issued to raze the fortress at Shfaram, but Antiquities Department staff arrived at the last minute and blocked the demolition. And at Al-Muzeirra, a village south of Rosh Ha’ayin, a miracle occurred: the army used a handsome building of pillars in the middle of the abandoned village for target practice, apparently without knowing it was “the only mausoleum that survived in our country from the Roman period,” according to Yeivin. When, nonetheless, the decision came to blow up the mausoleum in July 1949, an antiquities inspector arrived at the site and prevented the blast. The site is now known as “Hirbat Manor” (the Manor Ruin) and is recommended in all sightseeing guides for the area.

Kletter relates that in February 1950, at the initiative of Yeivin and others, who grasped that without government intervention, the country’s urban past would simply disappear, Ben-Gurion agreed to establish a government committee “for sacred and historic sites and monuments.” The committee was staffed by senior government and military personnel. The report, which was submitted in October 1951, stated that certain sites had to be preserved as “whole units” – “Acre, a few quarters in Safed, small sections of Jaffaand Tiberias, small sections of Ramle and Lod, a few sections of Tarshiha.” The rest of the towns, and hundreds of villages, were already lost.

However, the state institutions failed to honor even these conclusions. According to Kletter, Yeivin was one of the first to fight the August 1950 decision to demolish all of Jaffa. Afterward, artists who had moved into the abandoned city joined the struggle, as did Development Authority personnel, and thus a few sections were spared total annihilation. Yeivin was less successful in Lod. In June 1954, he wrote a protest letter to the education minister, in the wake of a decision on “the destruction of the ancient quarter in the city of Lod.” Israeli law, pursuant to British law, stipulated that only what was built before 1700 was considered an “antiquity,” but Yeivin wrote that the other sites should also be preserved – both for tourism and because they are “cultural and educational assets and living historical testimonies that every enlightened state is obliged to preserve.”

 

 

Qisarya was completely destroyed except its mosque.

Kletter’s book leaves the impression that the destruction was not accidental and that its perpetrators were aware of its significance. The ideological foundation of the devastation is set forth in the August 1957 Foreign Ministry letter sent at the behest of Golda Meir. After the author of the document, A. Dotan, requested the Ministry of Labor to “clear the ruins,” he specified “four types” of “ruins” and the grounds for their destruction:

 

“First, it is necessary to get rid of the ruins in the heart of Jewish communities, in important centers or on central transportation arteries; rapid treatment must be given to the ruins of villages whose residents are in the country, such as Birwe, north of Shfaram, and the ruins of Zippori; in areas where there is no development, such as along the rail line from Jerusalem to Bar Giora, one receives a depressing impression of a once-living civilized land; attention must also be directed to ruins in distinctly tourist areas, such as the ruins of the Circassian village in Caesarea, which is intact but empty … Accordingly, the Ministry of Labor should assume the mission of clearing the ruins … It should be taken into account that the participation of nongovernmental elements requires caution, as politically it is desirable for the operation to be executed without anyone grasping its political meaning.”

Kletter says he was surprised to discover the scale of the destruction, but that to some extent he understands those who were behind the operation. The decision not to allow the Palestinian refugees to return was unavoidable, he believes, if the idea was to establish a Jewish state here. Those were the rules of the game in that period, he says, and if the Jewish community had lost in 1948, the Arab victors would likely have treated the Jews in the same way. And because it was impossible to preserve hundreds of abandoned Palestinian towns and villages, there was no choice but to demolish most of them, Kletter maintains.

He also has nothing against the archaeologists who in the early years of the state were concerned almost exclusively with Jewish sites, or in the best case with Christian or Roman sites, and ignored Muslim sites almost completely. It is natural for researchers to be interested first and foremost in their own culture, Kletter says; and besides, relative to the political pressure exerted on them by people like Ben-Gurion, who declaredly wanted to erase the Arab past of this country, they behaved honorably. “Early Israeli archaeology has something to be ashamed of and much to be proud of,” Kletter writes.

Still, Kletter says, his book is “about loss, about what could have been but was not. The loss of archaeology that began with a scientific tradition and did not continue, the loss of vast historical information, the loss of the village landscape. I don’t think this village landscape belongs to us – it belongs to the people who lived here – but still, there is longing for that lost landscape. We cannot bring it back, but at least we should be aware of the truth and not lie to ourselves.”

Kletter says this country’s great good fortune lies in the fact that it contains so many monuments that it was impossible to destroy all of them. But even those that were destroyed somehow continue to live a different life. Mash’had Nabi Hussein, the holy site in Ashkelon, was leveled in 1950, but the Muslim believers did not forgo it. A few years ago, the Shi’ite Ismaili sect, which is based in central India, established a kind of small marble platform at the site, on the grounds of Barzilai Hospital, and since then thousands of believers have come there every year. In Yavneh, only the minaret remains of the razed ancient mosque, standing alongside heaps of rubble and one fig tree, but in a visit to the site a week ago I saw a group of elderly Ethiopians there on the hill, praying ardently under the fig tree. It was as if the place had remained holy even if its inhabitants had changed.

(www.palestineremembered.com / 13.05.2012)

Algerian Islamist calls for Tunisia-style revolt over vote results

Algeria’s Islamist Front for Justice and Development issues calls for popular uprising in wake parliamentary polls it says were rigged in favour of ruling party

An Algerian woman casts her ballot during parliamentary election at a polling station in Algiers .

An Algerian Islamist leader said Sunday that a Tunisian-style revolt was the only option after polls he charged were fraudulent and threatened a mass pullout of the smaller parties from parliament.

“These results closed the door on change by the ballot box and the Tunisian option is all that’s left for those who believe in change,” Abdallah Djaballah, who heads the Front for Justice and Development, told AFP.

His party mustered only seven seats out of the 462 up for grabs in the national assembly, according to provisional results for Thursday’s legislative election.

The former single party, President Abdelaziz Bouteflika’s National Liberation Front, tightened its grip on power by securing 220 seats.

Djaballah had hoped to benefit from the so-called Arab Spring effect and emulate the electoral gains recorded by Islamist parties in neighbouring countries.

But Algeria bucked the regional trend, largely preserving the political status quo in polls that even saw Islamist parties lose ground, with all seven parties contesting the vote managing only a combined 59 seats.

“These elections are a farce. We dot not recognise these results… They create a situation of insecurity and instability,” Djaballah said.

“Sooner or later, the only option will be the Tunisian scenario,” he said, in reference to the founding uprising of the Arab Spring which toppled long-time Tunisian president Zine el Abidine Ben Ali in January 2011.

(english.ahram.org.eg / 13.05.2012)

Netanyahu ordered evacuation of Hebron home over fears of war crimes suits

AG’s fear of legal action against Israeli officials at The Hague also reason for state’s hesitance regarding authorization of the Ulpana Hill West Bank outpost.

Border Police officials evacuating a Hebron house taken over by settlers, April 4, 2012.

Benjamin Netanyahu at the Knesst, May 7, 2012.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered the evacuation of a Hebron home taken by settlers last month after being informed that the expropriation of Palestinian homes and lands could complicate Israeli officials in war crimes litigation, Haaretz learned on Sunday.

Last month, Israeli security forces evacuated Israeli settlers from a house in a Palestinian neighborhood in Hebron, in a surprise move that ended an affair that sparked controversy across Israel and caused a rift in the government.

Senior officials in the prime minister’s office said at the time that the evacuation was carried out after careful coordination between the defense minister and the prime minister. Nevertheless, Netanyahu’s aides went on the defensive against right-wing criticism and said that the premier had no choice but to approve the evacuation out of security and legal consideration.

The aides said that during the late night discussion prior to the evacuation no decisions were made regarding the immediate evacuation of the house.

However, in a meeting between Netanyahu, Barak, and Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein on the morning of the evacuation, the AG reportedly presented his legal opinion, according to which a lack of strict adherence to the law on the matter could complicate Israel in an international legal crisis.

Weinstein reportedly told Netanyahu and Barak that the expropriation of Palestinian land and homes, such as the Hebron takeover, could lead to Israeli officials being indicted at the International Criminal Court in The Hague.

Barak then claimed that the house must be evacuated before the Passover holiday, which led to Netanyahu’s order to clear the Hebron outpost.

Sources in the Justice Ministry indicated that they fear the State of Israel or Israeli officials could be charged by the ICC, in operation since 2002. According to the Fourth Geneva Convention, an occupier moving population into occupied land constitutes a war crime.

Weinstein also repeated his stance concerning the contentious Ulpana Hill neighborhood of the West Bank settlement of Beit El.

The AG also expressed his opinion concerning the kind of High Court-bypassing laws suggested by some in the right in order to sanction outposts and settlements found illegal by the court.

Weinstein reportedly expressed the legal system’s opposition to the legislation of such laws and warned against what he said were the far-reaching legal consequences of such legislation, since the High Court is viewed around the world as a check maintaining the rule of law.

As of now, among the team of ministers dealing with the issue, Netanyahu, Barak, and Strategic Affairs Minister Moshe Ya’alon oppose such a law, citing, among other reasons, the AG’s opposition. Education Minister Gideon Sa’ar, however, supports such legislation, with the stance of new Vice Prime Minister Shaul Mofaz not yet clear.

A spokesperson at the Justice Ministry refused to comment on the issue.

Earlier Sunday, a ministerial legislation panel rejected a bill geared at applying Israeli law on settlements in the West Bank, following an intervention by Justice Minister Yaakov Neeman.

The justice minister’s move came after it had become apparent that the bill would pass the Ministerial Committee for Legislation, after nine of the panel’s members indicated that they would back the legislation.

At that point, Neeman attempted to convince the bill’s initiator Likud MK Miri Regev to postpone the vote to a later date, in a bid to avert a head-on collision between Netanyahu’s government and the administration of U.S. President Barack Obama.

As a result of Regev’s continued insistence, Neeman made it clear that it was Netanyahu’s position to vote against the bill, at which point panel members reversed their original votes.

(www.haaretz.com / 13.05.2012)

Settler attacks farmer in Beit Ummar

Settler attacks are common and rarely prosecuted.

HEBRON (Ma’an) — A local farmer was attacked by a settler on Sunday while tending to his land in Beit Ummar, a local official said.

Walid Muhammad Salman Sabarneh, 30, was farming his land when a settler approached and ordered him at gunpoint to leave the area, popular committee spokesman Muhammad Ayyad Awad told Ma’an.

After refusing to leave his land, the settler began to throw rocks at Sabarneh, before assaulting him using the butt of his gun.

Saberneh was taken to hospital in Hebron, Awad said. Israeli soldiers stood by as the incident took place, he added.

The settler from Karmi Zur is well known to local residents and has threatened farmers in the area on several occasions.

(www.maannews.net / 13.05.2012)

Netanyahu crowns himself King of Israel

Jonathan Cook argues that the newly announced coalition in Israel between the Likud and Kadima parties will give Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu time to entrench moves towards authoritarianism – weakening the media, human rights groups and the courts – and allow him to further undermine rival centres of power and overturn even the most sacrosanct of Israel’s basic laws.

Israelis barely had time to absorb the news that they were heading into a summer election when Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu on 8 May pulled the rug from underneath the charade. Rancourous early electioneering had provided cover for a secret agreement between Netanyahu and the main opposition party, Kadima, to form a new, expanded coalition government.

Rather than facing the electorate in September, Netanyahu and his hardline right-wing government are expected to comfortably see out the remaining 18 months of his term of office. Not only that, but he will now have the backing of more than three-quarters of the 120-seat Israeli parliament, leading one commentator to crown him the “King of Israel”.

Dysfunctional political culture

The announcement may have taken Israelis by surprise but it fully accorded with the logic of an increasingly dysfunctional Israeli political culture.

Shaul Mofaz, who a few weeks ago ousted Tzipi Livni as head of the centre-right Kadima party, had been vitriolic in denouncing Netanyahu. He called the prime minister a “liar” and went to the trouble of posting on his Facebook page a pledge that he would never make a deal with this “weak, incompetent and deaf government”.

He also boasted in a recent interview that he would topple Netanyahu by leading the revival of mass social protests expected in the summer.

“Netanyahu … has created a national unity government that more precisely reflects the majority mood: an unalloyed, aggressive and xenophobic rightwing consensus”

Last year hundreds of thousands took to the streets to demand an end to the rocketing cost of living, much of it caused by business cartels that were empowered by Netanyahu and his Likud party in privatization programmes years ago.

But the reality was that Mofaz, a hawkish former army chief of staff who is seen as a lacklustre, power-hungry and slippery politician, had no credibility with either the demonstrators or the wider electorate.
 
Kadima, which has never strayed far from its ideological roots in the Likud, from which it split several years ago, is currently the largest faction in the parliament. But polls suggested Mofaz would lead it to electoral oblivion.

The deal will win him a temporary reprieve, with a seat in the inner circle alongside Netanyahu and Ehud Barak, the long-time defence minister whose own party was expected to vanish if the September election had taken place.

Kadima will get no ministries but Mofaz will have a say in the biggest issues facing Israel: its dealings with Iran and the Palestinians.
 
This may be good for Mofaz personally but most likely his act of supreme duplicity will finish off Kadima as an independent party. The next year and a half may see him try to return to the Likud fold.
 
Netanyahu, meanwhile, has created a national unity government that more precisely reflects the majority mood: an unalloyed, aggressive and xenophobic rightwing consensus.
 
There was little need for Netanyahu to bring Kadima into the coalition. He was racing ahead in the polls, his popularity outstripping that of all the other major party leaders combined. And he had won this scale of support even as senior security officials, including the former heads of the Mossad and the Shin Bet, questioned his rationality on the issue of whether to attack Iran.

Consolidating authoritarianism

But there are advantages to Netanyahu in postponing an election he was expected to win.
 
Not least, it gives him time to entrench moves towards authoritarianism. Netanyahu has been behind a series of measures to weaken the media, human rights groups and the courts. At the moment his government is defying a series of Supreme Court rulings to dismantle several small Jewish settlements on Palestinian land that are illegal even under Israeli law.
 
An uninterrupted 18 months will allow him to further undermine these rival centres of power. One of the promises he and Mofaz made on 8 May was to overhaul the system of government. Netanyahu now has enough MPs to overturn even the most sacrosanct of Israel’s basic laws.

In addition, the new coalition will face an all but non-existent parliamentary opposition: a shrivelled centre-left of the Labour and Meretz parties, with only a handful of seats; a few noisy ultra-nationalists who would be more trouble in government than Netanyahu needs; and the Arab parties, who are reviled by Jewish public and politicians alike.
 
Labour’s new leader, Shelly Yachimovich, was expected to partially revive her party’s fortunes on the back of the social protests and might have been joined in a potentially confrontational opposition by a new centrist party, headed by TV news anchor and heart-throb Yair Lapid. Now both are relegated to the political margins.
 
Avigdor Lieberman, the foreign minister and leader of the far-right Yisrael Beiteinu party, whom Netanyahu fears most as a potential challenger, has also been defanged. His current, pivotal role in the coalition will be savagely diminished by the bulky presence of Kadima.
 
Another bonus for Netayahu is that he is now better situated to see off the potentially dangerous early days of a Barack Obama second term, if the US president is re-elected in November. This is when some observers believed the US president, serially humiliated by Netanyahu over the settlements and the peace process, might seek his revenge.
 
But should Obama choose a fight on the Palestinian issue, he will be facing a prime minister whose position in Israel is unassailable.

Implication for Iran and the Palestinians

What does all this mean for Iran and the Palestinians?

“…Netanyahu will doubtless exploit his strengthened position to up the rhetoric against Tehran and add to the pressure for intensified action from the US and Europe.”

Regarding Iran, several commentators and some of his own ministers have argued that Netanyahu now has a free hand to launch a go-it-alone attack on Iran and destroy what he claims is a nuclear weapons programme that might one day rival Israel’s own secret arsenal.

 More likely, the expanded coalition will make little difference to Israeli calculations over Iran, one way or the other. Mofaz, like most of the security establishment, opposes an attack unless it is headed by the US.
 
But Netanyahu will doubtless exploit his strengthened position to up the rhetoric against Tehran and add to the pressure for intensified action from the US and Europe.
 
As for the Palestinians, it can mean only more of the same – or worse. Mofaz, who tried to distinguish himself in opposition by proposing a miserly peace plan that would see the Palestinians holed up in a series of enclaves, lacks the political weight to deflect Netanyahu from his even more intransigent approach.
 
But at least for Netanyahu, the Kadima leader will cut a more presentable figure in Washington than Lieberman as an advocate for Israel’s hard line.

The Israeli prime minister’s claim on 8 May that he was about to unveil a “responsible peace process” should be taken no more seriously than his professed commitment, abandoned the same day, to submit himself to the judgment of the Israeli electorate.
 
The one small sliver of light is that what remains of the Israeli left, so long in hibernation or denial, may finally be stirred into a response by the antics of this ugly ruling cabal.
 
Last year’s social protests remained, in a great Israeli tradition, studiously “apolitical”, unlike their counterparts, the Occupy movements, in the United States and Europe.
 
The demonstrators refused to draw any connection between the rapidly polarized economic situation – the gap between Israel’s rich and poor is now as bad as in the US – and either the right’s self-serving neo-liberal policies or the occupation that has channelled endless resources to the settlers and the security establishment.
 
This summer Israel may finally get its own Occupy movement – one prepared to tackle the real occupation.

(theuglytruth.wordpress.com / 13.05.2012)

Group: Prisoners refuse water in hunger strike escalation

Around 2,000 prisoners are taking part in a hunger strike.

GAZA CITY (Ma’an) — Two prisoners announced Sunday that they will escalate their hunger strike action by refusing to drink water, a prisoners group said.

Kamal Issa, who is affiliated to Fatah, and Jamal al-Hour, from Hamas, will refuse both food and water as part of their strike action, Hussam Prisoners Assembly said.

In the past month, around 2,000 prisoners joined a group of administrative detainees on hunger-strike, according to prisoners groups’ estimates.

They are calling for improved conditions in Israeli custody, such as an end to solitary confinement and bans on family visits, in addition to ending administrative detention.

(www.maannews.net / 13.05.2012)

Medics: Teenager injured by tear gas canister in Hebron

HEBRON (Ma’an) — A teenage boy was injured and another arrested in north Hebron on Sunday as locals clashed with Israeli soldiers, medics said.

Ali Manasra, 15, was injured when a tear gas canister was fired at his chest in the village of Bani Naim, medical sources told Ma’an. He was taken to hospital by the Red Crescent.

Nihad Trayreh, 16, was arrested by soldiers and taken to an unknown destination, locals said.

An Israeli army spokeswoman had no immediate reports of the incident.

(www.maannews.net / 13.05.2012)

Sourani Participates in Activities in Solidarity with Palestinian Prisoners in Israeli Jails

The Palestinian Center for Human Rights (PCHR) has continued its efforts to support the cause of Palestinian prisoners detained in Israeli prisons, in the context of advocacy activities to support this cause at the human, legal and political level.

On 10 May 2012, Mr. Raji Sourani, Director of PCHR, held a meeting with leaders of the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) in Paris.  Mr. Sourani is the Vice President of FDIH.  The meeting discussed possible ways for the FIDH to support Palestinian prisoners and their cause.  In the conclusion of the meeting, the participants approved a number of activities in this regard, including conducting visits by an FIDH delegation, which will include a number of physicians and lawyers, to Palestinian prisoners detained in Israeli prisons.  The delegation will meet leaders of prisoners and leaders who have been on hunger strike.  FIDH will also participate in the solidarity event organized by PCHR, in cooperation with the Arab Organization for Human Rights and the Egyptian Journalists Syndicate, in Cairo on Monday, 14 May 2012.  Furthermore, the 168 member organizations of FIDH will organize a sit-in in solidarity with Palestinian prisoners in their hunger strike.

At another level, Mr. Sourni participated in the tenth annual conference of the International Legal Assistance Consortium (ILAC),  which was held in Stockholm, Sweden, on 11 May 2012.  During the proceedings of the conference, the issue of Palestinian prisoners detained in Israeli prison and their living conditions under their ongoing hunger strike were addressed.  Besides the conference, ILAC hosted a panel debate on the topic of “Legal Reform and the Arab Spring – is there a role for the international community?”

The panel was comprised of Samir Annabi, Tunisian attorney and head of the recently established Tunisian Anti-Corruption Agency; Jan Thesleff, Sweden’s ambassador to Tunis and Libya. The panel was moderated by Todd Benjamin, a former anchor, correspondent, and financial editor for CNN.  The participants discussed the implications of the Arab revolutions, and the dual standards and selectivity in the application of international humanitarian law by the international community, the most notable example of which is the issue of Palestinian prisoners detained in Israeli prisons.

On Monday, 14 May 2012, PCHR, in cooperation with the Arab Organization for Human Rights and the Egyptian Journalists Syndicate, will organize in the Syndicate’s premises in Cairo an event in solidarity with Palestinian and Arab prisoners detained in Israeli prison.  A number Arab and international organizations will participate in the event, including the Arab Lawyers Union, FIDH and others.  A delegation of families of Palestinian prisoners and prominent ex-prisoners from the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and Arab communities inside Israel will also participate in the event.  The delegation of families from the Gaza Strip, which traveled to Egypt this morning, is headed by the mother of Ibrahim Baroud, a Palestinian prisoner, while the families from the West Bank will be headed by the wife of Marwan Barghouthi, who is detained in Israeli prisons.

Members of the delegation will hold a series of meetings in Cairo.  They will meet with members of the Political Committee and the Human Rights Committee in the Egyptian Parliament.  They will also meet with Assistant Secretary-General of the League of Arab States and the Assistant Secretary General for Palestine’s Affairs.  They will not meet with the Secretary-General because he is currently outside Cairo.

Activities in solidarity with Palestinian prisoners will continue in the upcoming days.  After participating in the solidarity event in Cairo, Mr. Sourani will travel to Spain to participate in two central events organized by solidarity organizations and the Arab House Society in Madrid and Cordoba, marking the anniversary of the Palestinian Nakba (the uprooting of the Palestinian people from their lands in 1948.  The events will be focused on solidarity with Palestinian prisoners detained in Israeli prisons.

On 21 May 2012, Mr. Sourani and Fadwa Barghouthi, the wife Marwan Barghouthi, a prisoner in detained in Israeli prisons, will hold a press conference in Paris.

(www.pchrgaza.org / 13.05.2012)

US demonizes Islam to sell weaponry to world: Analyst

The US has embarked on inciting Islamophobia as its post-Soviet agenda, in an attempt to create a global market for its arms production, an American political analyst tells Press TV.

In a Friday interview, Ralph Schoenman, an author and commentator, argued, “With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the entire rationale for the hundreds of billions of dollars that are allocated to the Pentagon and to the military, which is the largest factor in the entire capitalist economy, had been removed.”

“US imperialism, which is the primary sponsor of the Israeli state, incorporated that notion of the necessity to demonize Islam and to create a rationale for permanent war in the region, and adapted it as the whole rationale for US capitalism and imperialism itself in its military projects,” the analyst pointed out.

“It’s the entire … rationale for imperialism; for perpetual war on the peoples of the region; to seize their oil; to destroy their sovereignty; to break up the nations into ethnic and religious components,” Schoenman added.

The comments come on the heels of new media revelations that the US military has been offering a course which teaches that its enemy is Islam in general, suggesting a Hiroshima-type massacre to obliterate the Islamic holy cities of Mecca and Medina in what can be seen as another instance of promoting Islamophobia in the United States.

The course, titled “Perspectives on Islam and Islamic Radicalism,” has been offered five times a year since 2004, with about 20 students each time, meaning roughly 800 students have taken the course over the years before it was removed in late April after protests. This is not the first such incident as only last year the FBI was forced to discontinue a lecture that was hostile to Islam. The instructor of the course had told agent trainees in Virginia that the more devout a Muslim is, the more likely he is to be violent.

The report comes less than two months after the US forces, in a blatantly Islamophobic act, burned the copies of the Holy Qur’an and other Islamic materials at the US-run Bagram Airbase in the province of Parwan in northeastern Afghanistan.

Islamophobia is systematically promoted and financially supported in the United States. The project which has cost more than $40 million over the past ten years has been funded by seven foundations in the United States: 1. Richard Mellon Scaife Foundation; 2. Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation; 3. Newton and Rochelle Becker; 4. Foundation and Newton and Rochelle Becker Charitable Trust; 5. Russell Berrie Foundation, Anchorage Charitable Fund and William Rosenwald; 6. Family Fund; 7. Fairbrook Foundation.

(www.presstv.ir / 13.05.2012)

Israel: Profile of a Police State

 

Police states are defined by lawlessness, injustice, and contempt for democratic values.

Merriam Webster calls them “political unit(s) characterized by repressive governmental control of political, economic, and social life usually by an arbitrary exercise of power by police and especially secret police in place of regular operation of administrative and judicial organs of the government according to publicly known legal procedures.”

Power trumps rights. Crackdowns enforce social control. Arrests, imprisonment, torture, and abuse are commonplace. Murder is committed with impunity. State terror is policy.

Palestinians understand well. They’ve suffered horrifically for decades. Legitimate resistance is called terrorism. Nonetheless, they persist.

Courageous prison hunger strikers define them. They vow to keep struggling for justice. On May 9, hundreds of family members, supporters, and human rights activists protested in front of the UN’s Ramallah office.

The international body has done nothing to help. Demonstrators chanted “(w)e don’t want wheat or bread. We want the liberation of detainees.” They demand UN officials intervene for justice.

Released hunger striker Khader Adnan called “surrounding the UN office….a daring move that aims at sending the detainees’ message to the world.” It’s also a “move that sheds light on the suffering of the political prisoners.”

After weeks of protest actions, Israel began negotiating. Ahrar Center for Detainees Studies head Fuad Al Khoffash called it “cheap bargaining.”

Israel offers easily reversed concessions. Prisoners are released, then harassed and rearrested. Promises are made, then broken. Israel doesn’t negotiate. It demands and wants things its way. Since 1967, Palestinians were denied all rights. Militarized occupation assures none.

Al Khoffash called Israel’s move a maneuver. At issue is subverting unity and breaking the spirit of detainees. They chose “dignity over food.” They won’t tolerate manipulation. They’ve been through this before. Harshness masquerades as concessions. Those made are then broken.

On May 7, Israel’s High Court spurned justice. In response to an urgent appeal to save Bilal Diab and Thaer Halahleh, they ruled let ‘em die. On May 10, both men reached hunger strike day 73.

They face imminent death. Neither committed crimes. They’re wrongfully imprisoned. So are thousands of other Palestinians.

Israel’s High Court won’t intervene. Reasons given are spurious. Right-wing justices work cooperatively with Netanyahu hard-liners. Palestinians behind or outside prison walls don’t have a chance.

On May 8, Physicians for Human Rights-Israel (PHR-I) established a hunger striker “situation room.” Plans call for round the clock operation and cooperative efforts to “to gather and distribute any relevant information and to enable a public campaign for supporting the demands by the prisoners to respect their human rights.”

PHR-I will provide information for family members, their attorneys, doctors, and local as well as international human rights organizations and activists. Local and foreign diplomats will be kept informed. So will national and international media, as well as the public.

PHR-I listed prisoner demands. They include:

1. Ending punitive isolation.
2. Stopping the practice of imprisoning Palestinians in Israel. Doing so violates international law.
3. Renewing family visits for Gazan detainees denied them for six years.
4. Renewing them for West Bank and East Jerusalem prisoners whose families were denied visitation rights.
5. Providing proper medical care, including access to independent physicians and civilian hospitalization when serious medical conditions exist.
6. Terminating daily punitive, violent cell and strip searches. Usually done late at night, sleep is disrupted one or more times.
7. Ending strip searches for visiting family members.
8. Terminating shackling prisoners during family and attorney visits, as well as when hospitalized for medical care.
9. Fulfilling prisoners’ right to education.
10. Ending all severe, disproportional punishments.
11. Ending violations of other basic rights, including attorney visits during ongoing investigations and restricting judicial oversight.

PHR-I “supports the prisoners’ struggle and their demand for a full respect of their human rights. We are acting on several levels in order to make sure that the prisoners’ rights are maintained in the course of the hunger strike.”

“PHR is making a significant effort to treat and represent people whose medical condition is the worst, and whose right to health and appropriate treatment is being violated behind prison walls.”

Nearly one-third of uncharged Palestinian administrative detainees have been held from six months to a year. Another third endured one to two years of incarceration.

Thirteen have been imprisoned from two to four years, and another two for over four and half years UNCHARGED. Israel can hold them forever in limbo harshness.

Nearly all Israeli prison facilities are within its borders. Incarcerating Palestinians there violates international law. Holding them anywhere spurns it. They’re innocent. They committed no crimes. Free societies don’t govern this way. Police states do. On issues affecting Palestinians, Israel is one of the worst.

Israel’s High Court Affirms State of Emergency Conditions

On May 8, the High Court rejected an Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) petition. At issue is canceling an official state of emergency in force since May 1948 after Israel’s war of independence.

In 1992, the Knesset passed Basic Law: The Government which created an outer limit to the state of emergency for one year reserves the right for unlimited renewals.

Each government took full advantage despite no justification whatever. Israel hasn’t been attacked for nearly 40 years. Yet a virtual state of war exists.

As a result, authorities maintain unconstitutional police state powers. Draconian harshness is enforced. Freedoms are restricted or denied, including expression, labor and property rights.

The court ruled “Israel is a normal country that isn’t normal.” The statement defies logic. Falsely, the decision said Israel “essentially fulfills its mandate as a Jewish and democratic state.”

Jewish, yes, although 20% of its population is Muslim. Democratic, no. Israel mocks democracy. Arabs have no rights. Even Jewish ones are compromised.

Israel “is not normal,” the court held, “in that its existential threats have yet to be quelled….the battle against terror continues, and apparently will continue for the foreseeable future.”

Israel’s only threats are those it invents to impose occupation harshness, attack neighboring states, and threaten other nonbelligerent ones like Iran.

Stop the Wall Activists Targeted

On May 8 at 1:30AM, Stop the Wall (STW) activists issued an “Action alert: STW office raided by Israeli military,” saying:

Ten armored jeeps, dozens of security forces, and intelligence agents surrounded and raided STW’s Ramallah offices. Their property was confiscated. Seized were two laptops, three hard drives, and 10 memory cards with files and photos.

Authorities also took “archival material relating to the work that (STW) does in opposition to Israel’s apartheid wall and the attack on Palestinian human rights that the wall and” settlements represent.

“This is a renewed attack upon Palestinian civil society and their struggle against the physical and psychological oppression, land confiscation and ethnic cleansing policies of the Israel.”

The raid coincided with High Court injustice condemning Bilal and Thaer to death. At issue is quashing resistance before further traction is gained, behind and outside prison walls.

Earlier, STW activists were harassed, raided, and terrorized. Today they say they’re stronger than ever. They have global support. Word spreads. STW urges supporters tell others, demand their governments intervene, and “(l)et Israel know that walls cannot isolate anybody!”

A Final Comment

On May 8, the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD) issued an “Urgent Alert: Imminent Displacement Risk in the Jerusalem Periphery,” saying:

Palestinian residences in the West Bank’s Area C (east of Jerusalem) face “looming threat of immediate demolition.” Those threatened “include EU-funded residential structures provided in response to previous demolitions in the area.”

Mostly Bedouin communities are affected. They’re targeted for ethnic cleansing to provide land for Israeli residential and commercial development.

Communities were told “they have no option but to leave.” It’s part of a larger scheme to steal all valued Judea and Samaria land. Total Judaization is planned. Arabs aren’t wanted. Those unwilling to leave will be forced out.

Areas most affected include Jerusalem’s periphery, the Jordan Valley, and south Hebron Hills. Israel wants Palestinians excluded. Eviction orders are issued. Private property is confiscated. Residents have lived there for decades, some for generations. International law is violated.

Israel’s Civil Administration (ICA) falsely claims Palestinian structures were built illegally. It also calls Area C sovereign Israeli territory. It comprises over 60% of the West Bank. It contains valued water resources. Israel wants Palestinians denied them, including on their own private property.

Since 1997, ICAHD courageously resisted lawless Israeli demolitions. It also addresses land theft, settlement expansions, Jews-only by-pass roads, apartheid “closure” and “separation” policies, destroying Palestinian fruit and olive trees, the Separation Wall, besieged Gaza, and other vital issues.

It opposes Israel’s lawless occupation and repression of Palestinians wanting to live free, on their own land, in their own country peacefully. It’s their sovereign right.

(www.veteranstoday.com / 13.05.2012)