Israel is only Mideast state safe for Christians, envoy to U.S. says

[moderate libertarian]

Yes. BTW what are the laws in Israel that are equal to the laws of apartheid South Africa. What rights do Arabs not have in Israel?



Yes Israel is only mideast country safe for Christians.



That doesn't change the facts of the present.



I agree. Could you outline the evidence of why it isn't true.

If Israel is the only safe country in mideast for Christians, won't many arab Christians of mideast would naturally gravitate towards Israel to find safe refuge that also happens to be land where Christ once walked? Then how do you explain that Christians have shrunk to being only 2% of Israeli population despite arab countries around Israel burning through fires of freedom invasions and wars that cause great risks to Christian minorities there?

Numerous attacks/intimidation of Christians in Israel (Christians only 2.1% of Israeli population)

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&s...attacked&gbv=1

Almost no attacks/intimidation of Christians in UAE (Christians 12.6 % of UAE population)

http://www.google.com/search?q=uae++...ch&hl=en&gbv=1



To avoid typing again, earlier post in this thread should answer your questions:


I really didn't think this would be a debatable issue.

On a related note, have few questions about legal rights for Palestinian/Arab race Christians in Israel. If they are generaqlly safe with occasional intimidation/harrassment from Israeli settlers or legally a second class citizens in Israel, won't UAE be a safer place for Christians in mideast than Israel despite recent violent freedom "crusades" into mideast engineered by war itching neocons?


1- Do Palestinian/Arab Christians have same rights as Jews in Israel today?

2- Can a Palestinian/Arab race Christian man marry a Jewish girl inside Israel or they are banned from doing so?

http://www.google.com/search?q=arab+...1&spell=1&sa=X

http://www.google.com/search?q=arab+...=1&sa=N&tab=iw


http://www.google.com/search?q=vigil...1&spell=1&sa=X

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&s...b+muslim&gbv=1


3- Can Palestinian/Arab Christians freely celeberate Christmas in Israel with Christmas trees at shopping malls and public places without fear?

http://www.google.com/search?tbm=isc...ae%20christmas

http://www.google.com/search?q=israe...ource=hp&gbv=1

Freedom of religion in the United Arab Emirates

The Constitution of the United Arab Emirates provides for freedom of religion in accordance with established customs, and the government generally respects this right in practice; however, there were some restrictions. The federal Constitution declares that Islam is the official religion of the country. There were no reports of societal abuses or discrimination based on religious belief or practice.

4- Syria/Jordan opened their doors for hundreds of thousands of Iraqi Christians who fled Iraq freedom violence after we liberated it and handed it over to an Iran supported orthodox religious group, did Israel open its doors to even a single Iraqi Christian refugee when they most need refuge?

5- Iraq's last foreign minister was a Christian, Christians held high positions in PLO before Isreal created Hamas to weaken PLO. Behrain has minorities in high positions, its envoy to US is Jewish. US is a Christian majority nation with a Chriatian President Obama, about half or more than one third of his cabinet is Jewish. How many Christians are in current Israeli cabinet considering that we have "shared values"?

6. If current Christian President of US Barack Hussein Obama had moved to Israel instead of the White House few years ago, how would he have been treated by average Israeli as a Christian man? Granted, they probably don't have violent extremists like Andrew Adler of Atlanta there, would he have been safe near religious settlers?

[BlackTerrel]

I really didn't think this would be a debatable issue.

It isn't.

1- Do Palestinian/Arab Christians have same rights as Jews in Israel today?

Yes

2- Can a Palestinian/Arab race Christian man marry a Jewish girl inside Israel or they are banned from doing so?

Marriage in Israel is only done in Mosque, Church, or Synagogue. There are no civil marriages. Inter-religous marriages are considered marriages in Israel.

3- Can Palestinian/Arab Christians freely celeberate Christmas in Israel with Christmas trees at shopping malls and public places without fear?

Yes.

While we continue to chop down humongous trees to place in US cities, Haifa Israel has taken a much more green approach to the holidays this year when they unveiled a 38-foot Christmas tree made entirely of recycled water bottles and plastic objets. It is made up of 5,480 bottles and illuminated by LED-certified lights. Designed by Hadas Itzcovitch and her father, the tree is meant to shine more light on pressing environmental issues. Let’s hope they recycle the whole thing when the season is over.

4- Syria/Jordan opened their doors for hundreds of thousands of Iraqi Christians who fled Iraq freedom violence after we liberated it and handed it over to an Iran supported orthodox religious group, did Israel open its doors to even a single Iraqi Christian refugee when they most need refuge?

How many did Switzerland take in? Don't think that's a relevant argument to whether or not Israel is safe for Christians. Given the instability in Syria I'd say it's unlikely it will remain a safe harbor for long.

5- Iraq's last foreign minister was a Christian, Christians held high positions in PLO before Isreal created Hamas to weaken PLO. Behrain has minorities in high positions, its envoy to US is Jewish. US is a Christian majority nation with a Chriatian President Obama, about half or more than one third of his cabinet is Jewish. How many Christians are in current Israeli cabinet considering that we have "shared values"?

Look you're just making $#@! up. Here is Obama's cabinet - name me the third that are Jewish?

http://www.whitehouse.gov/administration/cabinet

I count 1. Out of 23. That's about 4-5% are Jewish in the US.

As far as Israel I don't know the percent but there is clear Muslim and Christian representation in their government.

From wiki:

Cabinet: Nawaf Massalha, an Arab Muslim, has served in various junior ministerial roles, including Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs, since 1999

Knesset: Arab citizens of Israel have been elected to every Knesset, and currently hold 12 of its 120 seats. The first female Arab MP was Hussniya Jabara, a Muslim Arab from central Israel, who was elected in 1999.[124]

Supreme Court: Abdel Rahman Zuabi, a Muslim from northern Israel, was the first Arab on the Israeli Supreme Court, serving a 9-month term in 1999. In 2004, Salim Joubran, a Christian Arab from Haifa descended from Lebanese Maronites, became the first Arab to hold a permanent appointment on the Court. Joubran's expertise lies in the field of criminal law.[125] George Karra, a Christian Arab from Jaffa has served as a Tel Aviv District Court judge since 2000. He was the presiding judge in the trial of Moshe Katsav. In 2011, he was nominated as a candidate for the Israeli Supreme Court.[126]

6. If current Christian President of US Barack Hussein Obama had moved to Israel instead of the White House few years ago, how would he have been treated by average Israeli as a Christian man? Granted, they probably don't have violent extremists like Andrew Adler of Atlanta there, would he have been safe near religious settlers?

Wow is that an anti-Obama poster in Israel? Between that and the big boobed chick that hates Jesus and toblerone you've really convinced me.

[moderate libertarian]

So we don't end up spending most of time in tangential points, this may have been typed after you responded:


If Israel is the only safe country in mideast for Christians, won't many arab Christians of mideast would naturally gravitate towards Israel to find safe refuge that also happens to be land where Christ once walked? Then how do you explain that Christians have shrunk to being only 2% of Israeli population despite arab countries around Israel burning through fires of freedom invasions and wars that cause great risks to Christian minorities there?

Numerous attacks/intimidation of Christians in Israel (Christians only 2.1% of Israeli population)

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&s...attacked&gbv=1

Almost no attacks/intimidation of Christians in UAE (Christians 12.6 % of UAE population)

http://www.google.com/search?q=uae++...ch&hl=en&gbv=1


Israel as a somewhat racist apartheid and with many Israeli jews especially settlers seeing many Christian arabs as somewhat "anti-semitic" has never been the "only safe place" in mideast. For sake of argument, UAE is far safer than Israel for Christians of mideast. I provided some evidence above, if you challenge, please present evidence to support your claim.

US cabinet and Congress do not much care about brown arab Christians, actions speak louder than words. As for arab/jewish contents of current Obama adminsitration, I was going by what I had read in some news reports ( http://www.huffingtonpost.com/martin..._b_143985.html ) but if you are stating that Obama administartion is not heavily loaded with jewish/Israeli interests and only 5% of his cabinet falls into that category, I'll correct my incorrect view if you're sure but I'm not inclined to research that right now as there is plenty evidence above to support main argument of this discussion.

A photo of Christmas tree in Israeli city Haifa made of all plastic recycled bottles is nice, it is one of the vew few images that I saw too in google images as opposed to zillions of Christmas trees that showed for UAE.

[BlackTerrel]

Thanks for not responding to any of my points.

The fact that we're now arguing about the number of Christmas trees in Israel compared to the "zillions" in the UAE means you've really run out of talking points. Are you using the same math you used to argue that 1/3 to 1/2 of Obama's cabinet are Jews? Name them. Who are they?

Regarding the UAE you do realize that Islam is the official state religion and there are basically no citizens who are non-Muslim right? There are foreign workers of many religions and nationalities but only Muslims are citizens.

[jmdrake]

This is reaching at straws. There is more Christian immigration to Israel than away from it. But you're talking about a county of single digit millions. They don't exactly have the capacity to accept hundreds of thousands of refugees every year. I think the OP's point was that Israel is not safe for Christians. All the facts point that he is wrong but those appear to be irrelevant.

Okay. How about taking a few thousand?

The US should do more. I agree. That is why it is important to bring attention to these issues. But when I do - you and others ignore it. Yes the US should do more to help these people and take them in.

You're kidding right? I've been the main one bringing up the Iraqi Christian problem and how our interventions cause more problems. You are stuck on Iran. Our intervention there might cause more problems.

As it is there are a million Arab Christians in the US (I know a few of them) and we've recently taken in tens of thousands of Egyptian refugees.

Sure. There are Copts here where I live. It's the Iraqi Christians that have been thrown to the wind. Politically incorrect to admit we caused more problems by deposing Saddam.

[ExPatPaki]

Democracy for a Few
Israel’s Repressive New Laws
by NEVE GORDON

"Bad laws," Edmund Burke once said, "are the worst sort of tyranny."

The millions of people who have been protesting – from Tunis, Egypt and Libya, to Bahrain, Yemen and Syria – appear to have recognised this truism and are demanding the end of emergency law and the drafting of new constitutions that will guarantee the separation of powers, free, fair and regular elections, and basic political, social and economic rights for all citizens.

To put it succinctly, they are fighting to end tyranny.

Within this dramatic context it is also fruitful to look at Israel, which is considered by many as the only democracy in the Middle East and which has, in many ways, been an outlier in the region. One might ask whether Israel or not stands as a beacon of light for those fighting tyranny.

On the one hand, the book of laws under which Israel’s citizenry live is – with the exception of a handful of significant laws that privilege Jews over non-Jews – currently very similar to those used in most liberal democracies, where the executive, legislative and judicial powers are separated, there are free, fair and regular elections, and the citizens enjoy basic rights – including freedom of expression and association.

Israel’s double standard

However, on the other hand, the Israeli military law used to manage the Palestinians are similar to those deployed in most Arab countries, where there is no real separation of powers and people are in many respects without rights. Even though there has been a Palestinian Authority since the mid-1990s, there is no doubt that sovereignty still lies in Israeli hands.

One accordingly notices that in this so-called free and democratic country, there are in fact two books of laws, one liberal for its own citizenry and the other for Palestinians under its occupation. Hence, Israel looks an awful lot like apartheid or colonialism.

But can Israel’s democratic parts serve as a model of emulation for pro-democracy activists in the neighbouring Arab countries?

The answer is mixed – because as Arab citizens across the region struggle against tyranny, in Israel there appears to be an opposite trend, whereby large parts of the citizenry are not only acquiescent but have been supportive of Knesset members who are drafting new legislation to silence public criticism and to delegitimize political rivals, human rights organizations, and the Palestinian minority. The idea is to legally restrict individuals and groups that hold positions at odds with the government’s right-wing agenda by presenting them as enemies of the State.

The Association for Civil Rights in Israel recently warned that the laws promoted by the Knesset are dangerous and will have severe ramifications for basic human rights and civil liberties. The association, which is known for its evenhanded approach, went on to claim that the new laws "contribute to undemocratic and racist public stands, which have been increasingly salient in Israeli society in the past few years".

New wave of repressive laws

Here are just a few examples of approximately twenty bills that have either been approved or are currently under consideration.

? The Knesset approved a new law stating that organisations and institutions that commemorate Nakba Day, "deny the Jewish and democratic character of the State", and shall not receive public funds. Thus, even in the Arab schools within Israel, the Nakba must be erased. So much for democratic contestation and multiculturalism.

? Another new law states that "acceptance committees" of villages and communities may turn down a candidate if he or she "fails to meet the fundamental views of the community". According to ACRI, this bill intends to deny ethnic minorities’ access to Jewish communities set up on predominantly public lands. So unless the new Arab pro-democracy movements want to base their countries on apartheid-like segregation, this is also not a law to emulate.

? The Knesset has approved a bill that pardons most of the protesters who demonstrated against Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza. Although legislation easing punitive measures against persons who exercise their right to political protest is, in principle, positive, this particular bill blatantly favours activists with a certain political ideology. This does not bode well for the basic notion of equality before the law.

? An amendment to the existing Penalty Code stipulates that people who publish a call that denies the existence of the State of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state shall be imprisoned. This extension of the existing law criminalises political views that the ruling political group does not accept. It is supported by the government and has passed a preliminary reading. Burgeoning democracies should definitely shy away from such legislation.

? There is currently a proposed bill to punish persons who initiate, promote, or publish material that might serve as grounds for imposing a boycott. The bill insists that these people are committing an offence and may be ordered to compensate parties economically affected by that boycott, including fixed reparations of 30,000 New Israeli Shekels (US$8,700), without an obligation on the plaintiffs to prove damages. This bill has already passed the first reading.

? Finally, a bill presented to the Knesset in October would require members of local and city councils, as well as some other civil servants, to pledge allegiance to Israel as a Jewish and democratic state.

Democracy for a few

There is a clear logic underlying this spate of new laws; namely, the Israeli government’s decision to criminalise alternate political ideologies, such as the idea that Israel should be a democracy for all its citizens.

Hence, one witnesses an inverse trend – as the Arab citizens in the region struggle for more openness and indeed democracy, toppling dictators and pressuring governments to make significant liberal reforms, the Israeli book of laws is being rewritten so as to undercut democratic values.

Israelis celebrating the state’s 63rd birthday should closely examine the pro-democracy movements in Tahrir, Deraa and across the Arab world. They might very well learn a thing or two.

[ExPatPaki]

Distorting the Basic Law
Apartheid at the Israeli High Court
by URI WEISS

In 1992 the Knesset enacted Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty. This basic law speaks clearly about human dignity. It states explicitly: "All persons are entitled to protection of their life, body and dignity". And let it be emphasized: all persons, not just citizens, not just residents, and not just Jewish persons. However, Judge Aharon Barak’s Supreme Court (sitting as the HCJ) has ruled that the law is applicable to Jewish settlers in the territories, but the question of whether it is applicable to their Palestinian neighbors has been left as "pending decision", i.e. an open question about which the need to decide has not yet arisen.

This ruling is crude legal activism by the HCJ, distorting the words of the basic law enacted by the Knesset, turning it into an Apartheid law. More precisely, this is Apartheid common constitutional law.

Since then, the Israeli Supreme Court has added two building blocks to the edifice of Apartheid. The first one is the ruling which recognized "Bank-Hamizrachi’s" constitutional property right in a house built in the Gaza strip. Thus, the HCJ actually decided that a Jewish corporation in the occupied territories is entitled to constitutional rights stemming from the Basic Law, but the question whether a Palestinian person in this area is entitled to those rights has been left open. The second building block was laid by the Ga’abith ruling, which addressed the question whether a Palestinian man residing in Israel as the spouse of an Israeli resident has the right of hearing, after the state decides to deport him for security reasons. The state argued that the Palestinian man had no such right, since he had no legal status in Israel. Judge Elyakim Rubinstein recognized the Palestinian man’s right of hearing, since this right is supposed to be granted to every person. However, lo and behold, the view of this judge who represents the religious right wing remained a minority view! The seemingly liberal judges, Dorit Beinish and Hanan Meltzer, ruled that the Palestinian man’s right could be derived from the right granted to his Israeli spouse, and subsequently left open the crucial question whether he himself has that right independently.

By doing so, the HCJ has completed the edifice of Apartheid which it had been building. Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty is not applicable to all those who are regarded as human beings by a humanist attitude. Neither are the boundaries of its jurisdiction geographic, like the green line. Instead, they are substantively ethnic. A Jewish settler will be protected by the basic law – both in the territories and in Israel. Her Palestinian neighbor’s rights, which should follow from the basic law, either inside Israel or in the occupied territories, have yet to be decided.

Leaving this question open, under the status of "pending discussion", leads, at the very least, to a delay in the recognition of the Palestinians’ right and conveys the message that for 17 years Israel’s Supreme Court has been regarding basic laws as currently irrelevant for granting constitutional protection to the Palestinians. Thus, contrary to the common view, the Supreme Court has not only exercised a tight-fist policy in protecting Palestinians from violations carried out by the other Israeli branches of power, it has also exacerbated these violations, through its "legal activism" approach, denying Palestinians protection granted by the Israeli parliament.

URI WEISS is a PHD law student at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem.

This article was translated from the Hebrew by URI WEISS and Ofer Neiman.

[ExPatPaki]

What Kind of Country Attacks Its Own Human Rights Groups?
Israel’s Assault on Human Rights
by NEVE GORDON

Imagine a college student returning to her university after spending Christmas break at home. At the airport she logs on to the Internet to double check some of the sources she used in her final take-home exam for the course "Introduction to Human Rights." She gets online and begins to surf the web; however, she soon realizes that the websites of Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch are blocked. She calls the service provider’s 800 number, only to find out that all human rights organizations’ websites have indeed been restricted and that they can no longer be accessed from the airport.

This, you are probably thinking, cannot happen in the United States. Such practices are common in China, North Korea and Syria, but not in liberal democracies that pride themselves on the basic right to freedom of expression.

In the United States students can of course access human rights websites, no matter where they surf from. But in Israel, which is also known as the only democracy in the Middle East, human rights websites as well as the websites of some extreme right-wing organizations cannot be accessed from Ben-Gurion, the country’s only international airport.

If this attack on freedom of expression was merely an isolated incident, one might be able to conclude that it was a mistake. Yet the restriction of human rights websites is actually part of a well-orchestrated assault carried out by the current government and legislature against Israel’s democratic institutions, procedures and practices. A spate of anti-democratic bills, now in the process of being ratified in the Israeli Knesset, render it a crime to support any ideology that poses alternatives to conservative interpretations of Zionism, such as support for the notion that Israel should be a democracy for all its citizens.

In early January forty-one (versus sixteen) Knesset members voted in favor of a proposal to establish a parliamentary inquiry commission into the funding of Israeli human rights organizations. MK Fania Kirshenbaum, who submitted the proposal, accused human rights groups of providing material to the Goldstone commission, which investigated Israel’s 2008-09 Gaza offensive.

Considering that the funding of all human rights organizations in Israel is made public each year and scrutinized by the state auditor, the idea of creating a parliamentary commission to inspect their income is merely a smokescreen. The parliamentary commission’s actual goal is to intimidate Israeli rights groups and their donors and, as a result, stifle free speech.

MK Kirshenbaum said as much when she accused the rights organizations of being "behind the indictments lodged against Israeli officers and officials around the world." The majority of Knesset members supporting Kirshenbaum’s proposal wish to deter human rights organizations from making use of international human rights law and universal jurisdiction. They thus want to deprive Israeli rights groups of their most basic tools, the tools deployed to criticize rights-abusive policies. They might not oppose human rights groups, but they certainly do not want human rights work. In their myopic minds, the problem is not Israel’s unethical practices, but the organizations that reveal them.

The ongoing delegitimization of those watchdogs of democracy?human rights NGOs, the press and public intellectuals?is leading Israel down a steep and slippery slope. The next time someone travels through Ben-Gurion airport, he or she might not be able to access the websites of Israeli rights groups like Physicians for Human Rights and B’Tselem, not because they have been blocked, but because the organizations have been shut down.

The question Kirshenbaum and her supporters need to ask themselves is what kind of countries attack their own human rights organizations? The answer is straightforward.

[ExPatPaki]

First Goal: Stop Gaza War Crimes Revelations
Israel’s Campaign to Silence Human Rights Groups
by JONATHAN COOK

Nazareth.

In a bid to staunch the flow of damaging evidence of war crimes committed during Israel’s winter assault on Gaza, the Israeli government has launched a campaign to clamp down on human rights groups, both in Israel and abroad.

It has begun by targeting one of the world’s leading rights organisations, the US-based Human Rights Watch (HRW), as well as a local group of dissident army veterans, Breaking the Silence, which last month published the testimonies of 26 combat soldiers who served in Gaza.

Additionally, according to the Israeli media, the government is planning a “much more aggressive stance” towards human rights groups working to help the Palestinians.

Officials have questioned the sources of funding received by the organisations and threatened legislation to ban support from foreign governments, particularly in Europe.

Breaking the Silence and other Israeli activists have responded by accusing the government of a “witch hunt” designed to intimidate them and starve them of the funds needed to pursue their investigations.

“This is a very dangerous step,” said Mikhael Mannekin, one of the directors of Breaking the Silence. “Israel is moving in a very anti-democratic direction.”

The campaign is reported to be the brainchild of the far-right foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, currently facing corruption charges, but has the backing of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Early last month, Mr Lieberman used a press conference to accuse non-government organisations, or NGOs, of replacing diplomats in setting the international community’s agenda in relation to Israel. He also threatened reforms to curb the groups’ influence.

A week later, Mr Netanyahu’s office weighed in against Human Rights Watch, heavily criticising the organisation for its recent fund-raising activities in Saudi Arabia.

HRW has pointed out that it only accepts private donations, and has not accepted Saudi government funds, but Israeli officials say all Saudi money is tainted and will compromise HRW’s impartiality as a human rights watchdog in its treatment of Israel.

“A human rights organisation raising money in Saudi Arabia is like a women’s rights group asking the Taliban for a donation,” Mark Regev, a government spokesman, told the right-wing Israeli daily newspaper the Jerusalem Post.

HRW recently published reports arguing that the Israeli army had committed war crimes in Gaza, including the use of white phosphorus and attacking civilian targets.

HRW is now facing concerted pressure from Jewish lobby groups and from leading Jewish journalists in the US to sever its ties with Saudi donors. According to the Israeli media, some Jewish donors in the US have also specified that their money be used for human rights investigations that do not include Israel.

Meanwhile, Israel’s foreign ministry is putting pressure on European governments to stop funding many of Israel’s human rights groups. As a prelude to a clampdown, it has issued instructions to all its embassies abroad to question their host governments about whether they fund such activities.

Last week the foreign ministry complained to British, Dutch and Spanish diplomats about their support for Breaking the Silence.

The testimonies collected from soldiers suggested the Israeli army had committed many war crimes in Gaza, including using Palestinians as human shields and firing white phosphorus shells over civilian areas. One soldier called the army’s use of firepower “insane”.

The Dutch government paid nearly 20,000 euros to the group to compile its Gaza report, while Britain funded its work last year to the tune of £40,000.

Israeli officials are reported to be discussing ways either to make it illegal for foreign governments to fund “political” organisations in Israel or to force such groups to declare themselves as “agents of a foreign government”.

“Just as it would be unacceptable for European governments to support anti-war NGOs in the US, it is unacceptable for the Europeans to support local NGOs opposed to the policies of Israel’s democratically elected government,” said Ron Dermer, a senior official in Mr Netanyahu’s office.

He added that many of the groups were “working to delegitimise the Jewish state”.

Jeff Halper, the head of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, said the government’s position was opposed to decades-old developments in human rights monitoring.

“Every dictator, from Hitler to Milosevic, has said that there must be no interference in their sovereign affairs, and that everyone else should butt out. But international law says human rights are universal and cannot be left to individual governments to interpret. The idea behind the Geneva Conventions is that the international community has a duty to be the watchdog on human rights abuses wherever they occur.”

Mr Halper, whose organisation last year received 80,000 euros from Spain to rebuild demolished Palestinian homes, was arrested last year for sailing to Gaza with peace activists to break the siege of Gaza.

Other groups reported to be in the foreign ministry’s sights are: B’Tselem, whose activities include providing Palestinians with cameras to record abuses by settlers and the army; Peace Now, which monitors settlement building; Machsom Watch, whose activists observe soldiers at the checkpoints; and Physicians for Human Rights, which has recently examined doctors’ complicity in torture.

The government’s new approach mirrors a long-running campaign against leftwing and Arab human rights groups inside Israel conducted by NGO Monitor, a rightwing lobby group led by Gerald Steinberg, a professor at Bar Ilan University, near Tel Aviv.

NGO Monitor has also targeted international organisations such as Oxfam and Amnesty, but has shown a particular obsession with HRW. Mr Steinberg recently boasted that HRW’s trip to Saudi Arabia in May reflected the loss of major Jewish sponsors in the US following the publication of its Gaza reports.

In an article in the Jerusalem Post on Sunday, Mr Steinberg claimed that European governments treated their funding of Israeli human rights organisations “as ‘top secret’, reflecting the realization that such activities lack legitimacy”.

Mr Mannekin said the Breaking the Silence report listed donors on the first page. “We are far more transparent than NGO Monitor. We don’t know who funds them.”

NGO Monitor, which according to its website is chiefly funded by the shadowy Wechsler Family Foundation in the US, is closely linked to Dore Gold, a hawkish former adviser to Ariel Sharon.

Mr Mannekin added: “The government cannot suppress information about what happened in Gaza by shutting us down. You can’t send 10,000 soldiers into battle and not expect that some of the details will come out. If it’s not us doing it, it’ll be someone else.”

The government’s current campaign follows a police raid on the homes of six Israeli women peace activists in April.

The women, all members of New Profile, a feminist organisation that opposes the militarisation of Israeli society, were arrested and accused of helping Israeli youngsters to evade the draft. The women are still waiting to learn whether they will be prosecuted.

[ExPatPaki]

"The Ultimate Aim is the Transfer of Arab-Israelis"
Ethnic Cleansing and Israel
by CONN HALLINAN

One of the more disturbing developments in the Middle East is a growing consensus among Israelis that it would acceptable to expel—in the words of advocates “transfer”—its Arab citizens to either a yet as unformed Palestinian state or the neighboring countries of Jordan and Egypt.

Such sentiment is hardly new among Israeli extremists, and it has long been advocated by racist Jewish organizations like Kach, the party of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane, as well as groups like the National Union, which doubled its Knesset representation in the last election.

But “transfer” is no longer the exclusive policy of extremists, as it has increasingly become a part of mainstream political dialogue. “My solution for maintaining a Jewish and democratic state of Israel is to have two nation-states with certain concessions and with clear red lines,” Kadima leader and Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni told a group of Tel Aviv high school students last December, “and among other things, I will be able to approach the Palestinian residents of Israel, those whom we call Israeli Arabs, and tell them, ‘ your national solution lies elsewhere.’”

Such talk has consequences.

According to the Israeli Association for Civil Rights, anti-Arab incidents have risen sharply. “Israeli society is reaching new heights of racism that damages freedom of expression and privacy,” says Sami Michael, the organization’s president. Among the Association’s findings:

Some 55 percent of Jewish Israelis say that the state should encourage Arab emigration;

78 percent of Jewish Israelis oppose including Arab parties in the government;

56 percent agree with the statement that “Arabs cannot attain the Jewish level of cultural development”;

75 percent agree that Arabs are inclined to be violent. Among Arab-Israelis, 54 percent feel the same way about Jews.

75 percent of Israeli Jews say they would not live in the same building as Arabs.

The tension between Israeli democracy and the country’s Jewish character was the centerpiece of Avigdor Lieberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu Party’s campaign in the recent election. His party increased its Knesset membership from 11 to 15, and is now the third largest party in the parliament.

Lieberman, who lives in a West Bank settlement near Bethlehem, calls for a “loyalty oath” from Arab-Israelis, and for either expelling those who refuse or denying them citizenship rights. During a Knesset debate last March, Lieberman told Arab deputies, “You are only temporarily here. One day we will take care of you.”

Such views are increasing, particularly among young Jewish Israelis, among whom a politicized historical education and growing hopelessness about the future has fueled a strong rightward shift.

In a recent article in Haaretz, Yotam Feldman writes about a journey through Israel’s high schools, where students freely admit to their hatred of Arabs and lack of concern about the erosion of democracy.

“Sergei Liebliyanich, a senior, draws a connection between the preparation for military service in school and student support for the Right” Feldman writes, “‘ It gives us motivation against the Arabs. You want to enlist in the army so you can stick it to them…I like Lieberman’s thinking about the Arabs. Bibi [Benjamin Netanyahu, leader of the rightwing Likud Party] doesn’t want to go as far.”

Feldman polled 10 high schools and found that Yisrael Beiteinu was the most popular party, followed by Likud. The left-wing Meretz Party came in dead last.

In part, the politicalization of the education system is to blame.

Mariam Darmoni-Sharviot, a former civics teacher who is helping implement the 1995 Kremnitzar Commission’s recommendations on education and democracy, told Feldman, “When I talk to a civics class about the Arab minority, and about its uniqueness in being a majority that became a minority, my students argue and say it’s not true that they [Arabs] were a majority.” She said when she confronted teachers and asked why students didn’t know that Arabs were a majority in 1947, the teachers become “evasive and say it’s not part of the material.”

In part, students reflect the culture that surrounds them.

“Israeli society is speaking in two voices,” says Education Minister Yuli Tamir. “We see ourselves as a democratic society, yet we often neglect things that are very basic to democracy…If the students see the Knesset disqualifying Arab parties, a move that I’ve adamantly opposed, how can we expect them to absorb democratic values?”

All the major Israeli parties voted to remove two Arab parties, United Arab List-Ta’al and Balad, from the ballot because they opposed the Gaza war. Balad also calls for equal rights for all Israelis. Kadima spokesperson Maya Jacobs said, “Balad aims to exterminate Israel as a Jewish state and turn it into a state for all its citizens.” Labor joined in banning Balad, but not Ta’al.

The Israeli Supreme Court overturned the move and both parties ended up electing seven Knesset members in the recent election.

“The ultimate aim here,” says Dominic Moran, INS Security Watch’s senior correspondent in the Middle East, “is to sever the limited ties that bind Jews and Arabs, to the point that the idea of the transfer of the Arab-Israeli population beyond the borders of the state, championed by Yisrael Beiteinu, gains increasing legitimacy.”

This turn toward the Right also reflects an economic crisis, where poverty is on the rise and the cost of maintaining the settlements in the Occupied Territories and Israel’s military is a crushing burden. Peace Now estimates that the occupation costs $1.4 billion a year, not counting the separation wall. Israel’s military budget is just under $10 billion a year. According to Haartez, the Gaza war cost $374 million.

Some 16 percent of the Jewish population fall below the poverty line, a designation that includes 50 percent of Israeli Arabs.

“The Israeli reality can no longer hide what it has kept hidden up to now—that today no sentient mother can honestly say to her child: ‘ Next year things will be better here,’” says philosophy of education professor, Ilan Gur-Ze’ev. “The young people are replacing hope for a better future with a myth of a heroic end. For a heroic end, Lieberman fits the bill.”

Intercommunity tension manifests itself mainly in the Occupied Territories, where the relentless expansion of settlements and constant humiliation of hundreds of Israeli Army roadblocks fuels Palestinian anger.

This past December, settlers in Hebron attacked Palestinians after the Israeli government removed a group of Jewish families occuping an Arab-owned building. In response, the settlers launched “Operation Price Tag” to inflict punishment on Palestinians in the event the Tel Aviv government moves against settlers. Rioters torched cars, desecrated a Muslim cemetery, and gunned down two Arabs.

Settler rampages on the West Bank are nothing new, even though they receive virtually no coverage in the U.S. media. But a disturbing trend is the appearance of extremist settlers in Israel. Late last year Baruch Marzel, a West bank settler and follower of Kahane, threatened to lead a march through Umm al-Fahm, a largely Arab-Israeli town near Haifa.

“We have a cancer in our body capable of destroying the state of Israel,” Marzel told The Forward, “and these people are in the heart of Israel, a force capable of destroying Israel from the inside. I am going to tell these people that the land of Israel is ours.”

Arab-Israelis charge that settlers—some of them extremists re-settled from Gaza three years ago— played a role in last year’s Yom Kippur riots in the mixed city of Acre and forced Arab families our of their houses in the east part of the city. Arabs make up about 14 percent of Acre and 20 percent of Israel.

Rabbi Dov Lior, chair of the West Bank Rabbinical Council, has decreed, “It is completely forbidden to employ [Arabs] and rent houses to them in Israel.”

The Adallah Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights is urging Israeli Attorney General Mernachem Mazuz to investigate “Wild incitement to racism against Arabs in general and the [Arab] residents of Acre in particular.”

On Oct. 15, three days after the Acre riots, two Arab apartments in Tel Aviv were attacked with Molotov cocktails. Seven Jewish men were arrested. The Arab residents of Lod and Haifa charge that they too are being pressured to move.

In the case of Lod, municipal authorities are open about their intentions. Municipal spokesman Yoram Ben-Aroch denied that the city discriminates against Arabs, but told The Forward that municipal authorities want Lod, to become “a more Jewish town. We need to strengthen the Jewish character of Lod and religious people and Zionists have a big part to play in this strengthening.”

However, the growing lawlessness of West bank settlers and Jewish nationalists has begun to unsettle the authorities in Tel Aviv. After rightwing extremists tried to assassinate Peace Now activist Professor Zeev Sternhell, Shin Bet chief Yuval Diskin said the intelligence organization was “very concerned” about the “extremist right” and its willingness to resort to violence.

Even Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said “We are not willing to live with a significant group of people that has cast off all authority,” and called Operation Price Tag a “pogrom.”

So far, however, the government and Shin Bet have done little to rein in the rising tide of rightwing terror, which is aimed at Jews as well as Arabs.

Ahmad Tibi of the Arab Ta’al Party says that while Arab Israelis feel threatened by what Ben Gurion University political scientist Neve Gordan calls a “move toward xenophobic politics,” Tibi warns that, “It is the Jewish majority that should be afraid of this phenomenon.”

Readers might want to subscribe to Jewish Peace News at jpn@jewishpeacenews.net for a very different picture of Israel than most Americans get.

CONN HALLINAN can be reached at: ringoanne@sbcglobal.net

[ExPatPaki]

Fact or Fiction?
Israeli Democracy, Fact or Fiction?
by WILLIAM A. COOK

Israel’s bulldozing of 62 shops in the village of Nazkt Issa, north of Tulkarem next to the West Bank line with Israel on Tuesday and its refusal to allow International and Israeli peace activists to witness the devastation illustrates the total control of the military in what is supposed to be a democratic state. Americans saw and heard little of this action except that it was caused by the illegal establishment of the shops by Palestinians. In a democratic state, the alleged “illegality” would be dealt with in a court of law, not by an army protecting bulldozers from citizens throwing stones. But Americans hear only what Sharon allows the corporate media in America to receive from his minions as he prevents outsiders from witnessing the demolition.

The impending Israeli elections and the plethora of commentary that touts Israel as the only bastion of Democracy in the mid-east warrants consideration of the truth of the claim in light of Tuesday’s devastation. It would appear that the American public accepts the reality of Israel as a democratic state and finds comfort in its compatibility with American values. That comfort translates into approximately three billion dollars per year for Israel, more aid than any other country receives.

A true Democracy must meet two criteria: one philosophical that presents the logic of its argument in a declaration and/or constitution; the other practical that demonstrates how the Democracy implements legislation, distributes resources, and makes equitable all policies and procedures for all its citizens.

Democracy is first and foremost a concept, a philosophical understanding concerning the rights of humans relative to the government that acts in their name. A Democratic government serves through the manifest consent of the governed. That government receives its authority through the citizens in whom the right resides. Inherent in this philosophical understanding is the acceptance of the rights of all citizens that reside in a state: each and every citizen possesses the right to consent to the legitimacy of those who govern, and each and every citizen must receive equal treatment before the law.

For a state to claim a Democratic form of government, it must have an established geographic area accepted by other nations as legitimate and defined. The need for established borders is both obvious and necessary with necessity arising out of the obvious. Without borders, there can be no absolute determination of citizenry, and, therefore, no way to fulfill the establishment of the rights noted above. What has this to do with the Democratic state of Israel? Everything.

Israel has no accepted legitimate borders other than those provided to it by Resolution 181, according to Anthony D’Amato, Leighton Professor of Law at Northwestern University, in his brief “The Legal Boundaries of Israel in International Law”: “The legal boundaries of Israel and Palestine were delimited in Resolution 181.” Since the 1967 war, the borders of the current area controlled by Israel exceed those outlined by the UN in Resolution 181 of 1948 as the current incident in Nazkt Issa illustrates. Despite numerous resolutions from the UN demanding that Israel return to its proper borders, most especially Resolution 242, Israel defies the world body continuing to retain land illegally held. The reality of this dilemma is most manifest in the settlements. Here, Jews residing in Palestinian areas continue to vote while Palestinians literally surround them and cannot vote. Where is the state of Israel? A look at a map would make it appear that Israel has the spotted coloration of a Dalmatian. Clearly, those living under Israeli domination are not considered citizens of the state of Israel even though they reside within parameters controlled by Israel. Since they are not citizens of Israel, and since there is no Palestinian state, these people are without a country and, therefore, without rights; an untenable position for any group which is recognized as a distinct governing group by the UN through its election of the Palestinian Authority as its governing body. That election followed democratic procedures including the creation of a constitution and the international monitoring of the election process.

A Democratic state must declare the premises of its existence in a document or documents that present to the world the logic of its right to govern. That usually comes in the form of a constitution. Unlike the Palestinians, Israel has no constitution. Chuck Chriss, President of JIA writes, “Israel has no written constitution, unlike the United States and most other democracies. There was supposed to be one. The Proclamation of Independence of the State of Israel calls for the preparation of a constitution, but it was never done.” It’s been more than 50 years since that “call”. Why has Israel demurred on the creation of a constitution? Both Chriss in his article and Daniel J. Elazar, writing in “The Constitution of the State of Israel,” point to the same dilemma: how to reconcile the secular and religious forces in Israel. Elazar states: “Israel has been unable to adopt a constitution full blown, not because it does not share the new society understanding of constitution as fundamental law, but because of a conflict over what constitutes fundamental law within Israeli society. Many religious Jews hold that the only real constitution for a Jewish state is the Torah and the Jewish law that flows from it. They not only see no need for a modern secular constitution, but even see in such a document a threat to the supremacy of the Torah”

The consequences of this divide can be seen in the discrepencies that exist in practice in Israel. While “the State of Israel is described in the Proclamation of Independence as both a Jewish State and a democracy with equal rights for all its citizens,” the Foundation Law of 1980 makes clear that Israeli courts “shall decide [a case] in the light of the principles of freedom, justice, equity and peace of Israel’s heritage.” Without a written constitution, Israel relies on a set of laws encased in Israel’s heritage, “some blatantly racist in their assignment of privilege based on religion,” according to Tarif Abboushi writing in CounterPunch in June of 2002. But the structure of Israel’s governing process that depends on a Knesset is also flawed. According to Chriss, “Members of the Knesset are elected from lists proposed by the parties on a national basis. Following the election, the parties get to assign seats in the Knesset based on their proportion of the national vote, drawing from the party list.Thus, individual MKs owe allegiance to the party chiefs and not directly to the electorate.” (Emphasis mine). He goes on to say, “This political system has resulted in some distortions in which Israeli law and government do not reflect the actual wishes of the voting population.”

For a state to claim a Democratic form of government, it must accept the equality of all residents within its borders as legitimate citizens regardless of race, ethnicity, creed, religion, political belief, or gender. For a state to claim it is Democratic and reserve the rights of citizenship to a select group negates its claim. It is an oxymoron to limit citizenship rights to Jews alone and call the state Democratic. As Joel Kovel has stated in Tikkun, “a democracy that is only to be for a certain people cannot exist, for the elementary reason that the modern democratic state is defined by its claims of universality.” Yet this inherent contradiction exists in Israel. And this brings us from the philosophical phase to the practical one.

Daniel Elazar, reflecting on this conundrum in the postmodern era, notes that this “makes it impossible for the State to distinguish between the entitlements of Jewish citizens and others based upon obligations and performance; i.e., more benefits if one does military service than if one does not.”

How does Israel implement the Democracy it claims to possess? First, any Jew from anywhere in the world can come to Israel and receive citizenship by virtue of his/her Jewishness. By contrast, a Muslim or Christian Palestinian living in exile because of the 1948 war cannot claim citizenship even though they were indigenous to the area, nor can their descendents claim citizenship. Second, ninety percent of the land in Israel is held in restrictive covenants, land initially owned by Palestinians for the most part, covenants that bar non-Jews from ownership including the Palestinians who hold a limited version of Israeli citizenship. Third, Israeli citizens who are Muslim or Christian do not share the rights accorded Jews who serve in the military, nor do they receive the benefits extended to those who serve in the military. Non-Jews are taxed differently than Israeli citizens and the neighborhoods in which they live receive less support. As recently as June 12, 2002, Paul Martin writing for the Washington Times noted “Israeli Arabs are trying to strike down a new law reducing family benefits, arguing that it has deliberately been drafted in a way that will affect Arabs more harshly than Jews.”

While Arabs constitute 20% of the population within Israel, their voice in government is limited. Recently, an “expert” working for the General Security Service submitted his “expert opinion” to the Central Election Committee that undertook to disqualify Azmi Bishara and other Arab MKs from taking part in the election. This action would have deprived the Arabs of a voice in the Knesset if it had not been overturned by the Israeli court. The reality of Israeli political parties virtually assures non-representation of the Palestinians in the governing process. Even with Bishara permitted to run, the voice of the Palestinians is muted. As Uri Avnery noted recently, “One glance at the poitical map shows that without the Arab votes, no left-wing coalition has any chance of forming a government ? not today, nor in the forseeable futureThis means that without the Arabs, the Left cannot even dictate terms for its participation in a coalition dominated by the Right.”

Perhaps the most graphic illustration of the non-democracy that exists in Israel comes from Human Rights Watch and the US State Department reports published in Jurist Law. The range of abuses listed by the State Department includes detainees beaten by police, poor prison conditions that did not meet international standards, detainees held without charge, holding of detainees as bargaining chips, refusal to allow access to Obeid by the Red Cross, imposition of heavier sentences on Arabs than Jews, interference with private rights, etc,, and finally, “Trafficking in women for the purpose of forced prostitution is a continuing problem.”

Human Rights Watch offers a litany of abuses, many more serious than those proferred by the Department of State: Israel has maintained the “liquidation” policy targeting individuals without trial by jury, lack of investigations to determine responsibility for killings and shootings, increased use of heavy weaponry, including F-16 fighter jets etc. against “Palestinian police stations, security offices, prisons, and other installations.” HRW also references the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the occupied Territories for the wanton killing of civilians by settlers. The listing is too extensive to offer in its totality here.

As I mentioned at the outset of this article, the American public hears constant reference to Israel as the only democratic nation in the mid-east. They receive little or no information about the accuracy of that statement. Yet Americans accept this administration’s and past administrations’ support of Israel in large measure because they believe that it reflects the ideals expressed in the American Constitution and they are willing to spend their tax dollars in support of those ideals. In reality, American democracy and Israeli democracy are decidedly distinct.

Democracy cannot exist in ignorance of policies, processes, and actions undertaken on behalf of the people including the refusal to admit citizens to areas like Nazkt Issa where non-democratic action exists. Silence by the peoples’ representatives concerning reasons for actions taken in their name corrodes democracy. Americans have not been told, for example, that American authorities removed 8000 pages of information from the 12,000 provided by the Iraqi government to the UN Inspectors, according to former MP Anthony Wedgewood Benn in an interview on BBC January 12th , pages removed to protect corporations that provided Iraq with chemicals and other material that could be used to develop WMD. Die Tageszeitung, a Berlin Daily, reported the names of the corporations that acted with the government’s approval through the ’80s and up to 1991 supplying Saddam with nuclear, chemical, biological and missile technology. An extensive report on the chemicals sent to Iraq by the US was disclosed in the Sunday Herald by Neil Mackay and Felicity Arbuthnot, but received little press beyond this paper. How can the American people respond intelligently to the designs of this administration against Iraq without knowing how Iraq obtained its capability to develop WMD and the reasons for developing them?

Similarly, Israel cannot restrict its citizens, including peace activists, or its American supporters, from knowing how it acts relative to Palestinians by preventing reporters or activists from describing what is done in their name. Preventing the UN investigation of the Jenin “massacre” is only one example. Restricting journalists from occupied territory is another. Preventing Israeli and international peace activists from Nazkt Isa is the most recent.

While the founding fathers’ verbalized the concepts and ideals that are the foundation of American Democracy in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, the full implementation of those ideals took many, many years to bring to fruition: a Civil War that freed slaves more than 70 years after the creation of the nation, Women’s Rights more than 120 years after the founding, and the Civil Rights Acts of the ’50s and ’60s more than 150 years after its birth. That, however, is not a reason for Israel, or any nation moving toward a democratic status, to delay implementation of equal rights for all of their citizens; rather it is a demonstration of the necessity to introduce and ensure equity from the outset.

William Cook is a professor of English at the University of La Verne in southern California. His new book, Psalms for the 21st Century, will be published by Mellen Press in January. He can be reached at: cookb@ULV.EDU

[ExPatPaki]

Thanks for not responding to any of my points.

He actually did, illiterate troll.

[ExPatPaki]

Privatization to Subvert Palestinian Hopes of Restitution
Israeli Land Sale
by JONATHAN COOK

Tzipori.

Amin Muhammad Ali, a 74-year-old refugee from a destroyed Palestinian village in northern Israel, says he only feels truly at peace when he stands among his ancestors’ graves.

The cemetery, surrounded on all sides by Jewish homes and farms, is a small time capsule, transporting Mr Muhammad Ali — known to everyone as Abu Arab — back to the days when this place was known by an Arabic name, Saffuriya, rather than its current Hebrew name, Tzipori.

Unlike most of the Palestinian refugees forced outside Israel’s borders by the 1948 war that led to the creation of the Jewish state, Abu Arab and his family fled nearby, to a neighbourhood of Nazareth.

Refused the right to return to his childhood home, which was razed along with the rest of Saffuriya, he watched as the fields once owned by his parents were slowly taken over by Jewish immigrants, mostly from eastern Europe. Today only Saffuriya’s cemetery remains untouched.

Despite the loss of their village, the 4,500 refugees from Saffuriya and their descendants have clung to one hope: that the Jewish newcomers could not buy their land, only lease it temporarily from the state.

According to international law, Israel holds the property of more than four million Palestinian refugees in custodianship, until a final peace deal determines whether some or all of them will be allowed back to their 400-plus destroyed Palestinian villages or are compensated for their loss.

But last week, in a violation of international law and the refugees’ property rights that went unnoticed both inside Israel and abroad, Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister, forced through a revolutionary land reform.

The new law begins a process of creeping privatisation of much of Israel’s developed land, including refugee property, said Oren Yiftachel, a geographer at Ben Gurion University in Beersheva.

Mr Netanyahu and the bill’s supporters argue that the law will cut out a whole level of state bureaucracy, make land transactions simpler and more efficient and cut house prices.

In practice, it will mean that the 200 Jewish families of Tzipori will be able to buy their homes, including a new cluster of bungalows that is being completed on land next to the cemetery that belonged to Abu Arab’s parents.

The privatisation of Tzipori’s refugee land will remove it from the control of an official known as the Custodian of Absentee Property, who is supposed to safeguard it for the refugees.

“Now the refugees will no longer have a single address — Israel — for our claims,” said Abu Arab. “We will have to make our case individually against many hundreds of thousands of private homeowners.”

He added: “Israel is like a thief who wants to hide his loot. Instead of putting the stolen goods in one box, he moves it to 700 different boxes so it cannot be found.”

Mr Netanyahu was given a rough ride by Israeli legislators over the reform, though concern about the refugees’ rights was not among the reasons for their protests.

Last month, he had to pull the bill at the last minute as its defeat threatened to bring down the government. He forced it through on a second attempt last week but only after he had warned his coalition partners that they would be dismissed if they voted against it.

A broad coalition of opposition had formed to what was seen as a reversal of a central tenet of Zionism: that the territory Israel acquired in 1948 exists for the benefit not of Israelis but of Jews around the world.

In that spirit, Israel’s founders nationalised not only the refugees’ property but also vast swathes of land they confiscated from the remaining Palestinian minority who gained citizenship and now comprise a fifth of the population. By the 1970s, 93 per cent of Israel’s territory was in the hands of the state.

The disquiet provoked by Mr Netanyahu’s privatisation came from a variety of sources: the religious right believes the law contravenes a Biblical injunction not to sell land promised by God; environmentalists are concerned that developers will tear apart the Israeli countryside; and Zionists publicly fear that oil-rich sheikhs from the Gulf will buy up the country.

Arguments from the Palestinian minority’s leaders against the reform, meanwhile, were ignored — until Hizbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, added his voice at the weekend. In a statement, he warned that the law “validates and perpetuates the crime of land and property theft from the Palestinian refugees of the 1948 Nakba”.

Suhad Bishara, a lawyer from the Adalah legal centre for Israel’s Palestinian minority, said the law had been carefully drafted to ensure that foreigners, including wealthy sheikhs, cannot buy land inside Israel.

“Only Israeli citizens and anyone who can come to Israel under the Law of Return — that is, any Jew — can buy the lands on offer, so no ‘foreigner’ will be eligible.”

Another provision in the law means that even internal refugees like Abu Arab, who has Israeli citizenship, will be prevented from buying back land that rightfully belongs to them, Ms Bishara said.

“As is the case now in terms of leasing land,” she explained, “admissibility to buy land in rural communities like Tzipori will be determined by a selection committee whose job it will be to frustrate applications from Arab citizens.”

Supporters of the law have still had to allay the Jewish opposition’s concerns. Mr Netanyahu has repeatedly claimed that only a tiny proportion of Israeli territory — about four per cent — is up for privatisation.

But, according to Mr Yiftachel, who lobbied against the reform, that means about half of Israel’s developed land will be available for purchase over the next few years. And he suspects privatisation will not stop there.

“Once this red line has been crossed, there is nothing to stop the government passing another law next year approving the privatisation of the rest of the developed areas,” he said.

Ms Bishara said among the first refugee properties that would be put on the market were those in Israel’s cities, such as Jaffa, Acre, Tiberias, Haifa and Lod, followed by homes in many of the destroyed villages like Saffuriya.

She said Adalah was already preparing an appeal to the Supreme Court on behalf of the refugees, and if unsuccessful would then take the matter to international courts.

Adalah has received inquiries from hundreds of Palestinian refugees from around the world asking what they can do to stop Israel selling their properties.

“Many of them expressed an interest in suing Israel,” she said.

[ExPatPaki]

Jewish Couple Loses Court Battle to Help Bedouin Friends
Israel’s "No Renting to Arabs" Policy
by JONATHAN COOK

Nevatim.

The Zakai and Tarabin families should be a picture of happy coexistence across the ethnic divide, a model for others to emulate in Israel.

But Natalie and Weisman Zakai say the past three years — since the Jewish couple offered to rent their home to Bedouin friends, Ahmed and Khalas Tarabin — have been a living hell.

“I have always loved Israel,” said Mrs Zakai, 43. “But to see the depth of the racism of our neighbours has made me question why we live in this country.”

Three of the couple’s six dogs have been mysteriously poisoned; Mrs Zakai’s car has been sprayed with the words ”Arab lover” and the windows smashed; her three children in school are regularly taunted and bullied by other pupils; and a collection of vintage cars in the family’s yard has been set on fire in what police say was an arson attack.

To add to these indignities, the Zakais have spent three years and thousands of dollars battling through the courts against the elected officials of their community of Nevatim, in Israel’s southern Negev desert, who have said they are determined to keep the Tarabins from moving in.

Last week the Zakais’ legal struggle looked like it had run out of steam. The supreme court told the two families the Tarabins should submit to a vetting committee of local officials to assess their suitability – a requirement that has never been made before by the Negev community in the case of a family seeking to rent a home.

“The decision of the committee is a foregone conclusion,” Mr Tarabin said.

Chances for Jews and Arabs to live together — outside of a handful of cities — are all but impossible because Israel’s rural communities are strictly segregated, said Alaa Mahajneh, a lawyer representing the Zakais.

Israel has nationalised 93 per cent of the country’s territory, confining most of its 1.3 million Arab citizens, one-fifth of the population, to 120 or so communities that existed at the time of the state’s creation in 1948.

Meanwhile, more than 700 rural communities, including Nevatim, have remained exclusively Jewish by requiring that anyone who wants to buy a home applies to local vetting committees, which have been used to weed out Arab applicants.

But Mr Mahajneh, from the Adalah legal centre for the Arab minority, noted that legal sanction for such segregation was supposed to have ended a decade ago, when the supreme court backed an Arab couple, the Kaadans, who had been barred by a committee from the community of Katzir in northern Israel.

Although the Kaadans were eventually allowed to move into Katzir, the case has had little wider effect.

In fact, Mr Mahajneh said, the decision in the Zakais’ case suggests “we’re going backwards”. The Kaadans won the right to buy a home in a Jewish community, whereas the Tarabin family were seeking only a short-term rental of the Zakais’ home.

The Zakais said they had been told by the officials of Nevatim, a community of 650 Jews a few kilometres from the city of Beersheva, that it would not be a problem to rent out their home.

Mrs Zakai brought the Tarabins’ ID cards to the community’s offices for routine paperwork. “When I handed in the IDs, the staff looked at the card and said, ‘But they’re Muslims’.” Later, according to Mrs Zakai, the council head, Avraham Orr, rang to say he Arabs would be accepted in Nevatim “over my dead body”.

Several weeks later, Mrs Zakai said, two threatening men came to their door and warned them off renting to Arabs. Soon afterwards 36 cars belonging to Mr Zakai, who has a used car business, were set on fire.

Then behind the Zakais’ back, Nevatim went to a local magistrate’s court to get an order preventing them from renting their home. The couple have been battling the decision ever since.

Mr Mahajneh said the Tarabins had accommodated a series of “extraordinary conditions” imposed by Nevatim on the rental agreement, including certificates of good conduct from the police, a commitment to leave after a year, and limited access to the house’s extensive grounds.

But still Nevatim officials were dissatisfied, insisting in addition that the Tarabins submit to questioning by a vetting committee to assess their suitability. Although 40 other homes in Nevatim are rented, Mr Mahajneh said testimonies from past members of the vetting committee showed that this was the first time such a demand had been made.

“It is true that anyone buying a property in Nevatim is supposed to be vetted by the committee, but there is no reference in the community’s bylaws to this condition for renters,” Mr Mahajneh said.

In 2008, a district court judge in Beersheva overruled Nevatim’s new condition, arguing that the vetting requirement would be “unreasonable and not objective”. The supreme court judges, however, sided with Nevatim in their concluding statements on March 10.

Mrs Zakai said they had offered to rent their home to the Tarabins after the Bedouin couple’s home burnt down in their village in early 2007, killing one of their 10 children. The Tarabins have been living with relatives ever since, unable to afford a new home and keen to move away from the site of the tragedy.

Mr Tarabin, 54, said: “I want Khalas to rest and heal and this place would have been perfect for her. The house has large grounds and we could have kept to ourselves. No one in Nevatim needs to have anything to do with us if they don’t want.”

A Nevatim resident who spoke anonymously to the Haaretz newspaper last week suggested reasons for the community’s opposition: “If tomorrow the entire Tarabin tribe wants to live here and we don’t agree, what will people say? The problem will start after the first one comes because then dozens more families will want to move here.”

The close friendship forged between the Zakais and Tarabins is rare in Israel. The privileged status of Jews legally and economically, communal segregation and the hostility provoked by a larger national conflict between Israel and the Palestinians ensure that Jewish and Arab citizens usually remain at arm’s length.

But Mr Zakai, 53, whose parents emigrated from Iraq and who speaks fluent Arabic, befriended Mr Tarabin in the late 1960s when they were teenagers in Beersheva. Later they served together in the Israeli army as mechanical engineers.

Mrs Zakai said: “If Jews were being denied the right to live somewhere, it would be a scandal, but because our friends are Arabs no one cares.”

Avraham Orr, the Nevatim council head, denied that he was opposing the Tarabins’ admission because they are Arab. “There are rules,” he said. “Every family that wants to buy or rent a property must first go through the committee.”

Fearful of the implications of the Kaadan ruling, Jewish communities in the Galilee unveiled a new approach to barring Arab applicants last year. They introduced bylaws amounting to loyalty oaths that require applicants to pledge to support “Zionism, Jewish heritage and settlement of the land”.

[ExPatPaki]

This a true example of the "rights" this Arab child has in Israel:

[ExPatPaki]

Arabs don't have a right to solar panels in Israel:

Palestinians prepare to lose the solar panels that provide a lifeline

Two large solar panels jut out of the barren landscape near Imneizil in the Hebron hills. The hi-tech structures sit incongruously alongside the tents and rough stone buildings of the Palestinian village, but they are fundamental to life here: they provide electricity.

Imneizil is not connected to the national electricity grid. Nor are the vast majority of Palestinian communities in Area C, the 62% of the West Bank controlled by Israel. The solar energy has replaced expensive and clunky oil-powered generators.

According to the Israeli authorities, these solar panels – along with six others in nearby villages – are illegal and have been slated for demolition.

Nihad Moor, 25, has three small children. The family live in a two-room tent kitted out with a fridge, TV and very old computer. She also has a small electric butter churn, which she uses to supplement her husband's small income from sheep farming.

"The kids get sick all the time. At the moment, because of a change in the weather, they all have colds. Without electricity I wouldn't even be able to see to help them when they need to use the [outdoor] toilet at night," Moor says. "I don't want to imagine what life would be like here if [the panels] were demolished."

Imneizil's solar system was built in 2009 by the Spanish NGO Seba at a cost of €30,000 to the Spanish government. According to the Israeli authorities, it was built without a permit.

Guy Inbar, a spokesperson for the Israeli authorities in the West Bank, explains: "International aid is an important component in improving and promoting the quality of life of the Palestinian population but this does not grant immunity for illegal or unco-ordinated activity."

The problem for Palestinian communities here is that permission to build any infrastructure is very hard to come by. According to figures from the civil administration quoted by the pressure group Peace Now, 91 permits were issued for Palestinian construction in Area C between 2001 and 2007. In the same period, more than 10,000 Israeli settlement units were built and1,663 Palestinian structures demolished.

The Jewish settlements in Area C are connected to the national water and electricity grids. But most Palestinian villages are cut off from basic infrastructure, including water and sewage services. Imneizil, which borders the ultra-religious settlement of Beit Yatir, currently has nine demolition orders on various structures, including a toilet block and water cistern for the school.

Comet ME is an Israeli NGO trying to circumvent these crippling restrictions on Palestinian development by harnessing Hebron's abundant natural energy sources – wind and sun.

Funded largely by the German government, the organisation has already provided tens of Palestinian villages with electricity through solar panels and wind turbines. Its goal is to reach all villages in the southern Hebron area by the end of 2013.

"In technical terms it's do-able, but it depends on Israeli policies," says Elad Orian, Comet ME's founder. "Power is a human right, like housing and education," he says. "We deal with providing basic energy services. Renewable energy provides the best route to do it."

The green energy solution has its flaws. At a cost of around $4,500 per family, it is expensive. Nor does it generate enough electricity to sustain a community. But it has offered a lifeline to the 150,000 Palestinians living in Area C's impoverished communities.

However, it will become increasingly difficult to convince donors that alternative energy is worth investing in if the expensive technology they are funding is destroyed. After the order issued against the Imneizil solar panels in September, six alternative energy systems built by Comet ME in Hebron have received demolition orders.

A legal fight waged by Rabbis for Human Rights has succeeded in suspending, but not lifting, the demolition of Imneizil's panels. The German foreign office has launched an intense diplomatic effort to save the others in nearby villages.

One UN expert, speaking anonymously as they are not authorised to talk to the media, believes the crackdown on the alternative energy movement by the Israelis is part of a deliberate strategy in Area C. "From December 2010 to April 2011, we saw a systematic targeting of the water infrastructure in Hebron, Bethlehem and the Jordan valley," the source said. "Now, in the last couple of months, they are targeting electricity. Two villages in the area have had their electrical poles demolished.

"There is this systematic effort by the civil administration targeting all Palestinian infrastructure in Hebron. They are hoping that by making it miserable enough, they [the Palestinians] will pick up and leave."

According to UN research, that is happening. Ten out of 13 Palestinian communities living in Area C surveyed by the Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs in 2011 reported that families had already left their land as a result of Israeli policies. Ali Mohamed Hraizat, 49, head of Imneizil's village council, fears that if the solar panels are destroyed, his community will see an exodus.

"We've been here since 1948. We try to stay and maintain our lives, but people will leave if the electricity is cut off," he says. "They are used for light for their children to study by and for televisions. They will move into town. The solar panel isn't doing any harm … I just don't see the point in demolishing it."

[BlackTerrel]

Okay. How about taking a few thousand?

Yeah that would be great.

But the fact that they didn't take in Iraqi refugees isn't evidence that they are a horrible country. Switzerland didn't either but is anyone going to make the argument that Switzerland isn't safe for Christians?

Look we're ten pages in and the best way to demonize Israel so far is that they didn't accept Iraqi Christian refugees. That in itself is a sign that all these arguments are bull$#@!. If Israel was really as evil as some here claim the number of Iraqi refugees they accepted would be about number 10,000 on their list of evil things.

You're kidding right? I've been the main one bringing up the Iraqi Christian problem and how our interventions cause more problems. You are stuck on Iran. Our intervention there might cause more problems.

I've brought it up a number of times if you look at my post history.

The difference is I do not know of a single member of this site who has argued that Iraq war is good or that we should still be there. There is no debate on that topic so you get less posts. However there are members of this forum who believe that Iran killing converts to Christianity is good and just - that is why there is debate.

Sure. There are Copts here where I live. It's the Iraqi Christians that have been thrown to the wind. Politically incorrect to admit we caused more problems by deposing Saddam.

I don't think it's politically incorrect. I think most Americans would agree with that. And the US should be doing much more to right the wrongs that we started.

[RickyJ]

Good grief the race card.

Race? No, Muslims are a religious group, not a race.

[ExPatPaki]

Hardly surprised that the illiterate troll BlackTerrell hasn't responded to any of the articles I posted. Must be too many big words in those articles.

[lilymc]

Well first off. I didn't make that claim. I simply reject the claim that,,

Because it is bull$#@!. Christians are persecuted there. And Christians live peacefully is other areas of the Mideast.

The thread title and statement is bull$#@!.

Ok, I had to jump in here because what you're saying is pretty much the opposite of what I've seen and heard. Christians go to Israel all the time. I know a number of people who were there somewhat recently, and according to them they had an amazing visit. No persectution, rapes or being forced into sex slavery.

I lived in Saudi Arabia for 2 years when I was a kid (because of my dad's job). We were not allowed to openly practice our religion, everything had to be secretive. That was many years ago, but I'm pretty sure it's just as bad, if not worse. It's definitely worse in other ways, as there is much more of an anti-American sentiment there than there was years ago when I lived there.

[ExPatPaki]

Israel: New Laws Marginalize Palestinian Arab Citizens
Measures Threaten Discrimination; Chill Freedom of Expressionhttp://www.hrw.org/news/2011/03/30/i...-arab-citizens

(Jerusalem) - Two new Israeli laws affecting Israel's Palestinian Arab residents would promote discrimination and stifle free expression, Human Rights Watch said today. One would authorize rural, Jewish-majority communities to reject Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel and other "unsuitable" applicants for residency, and the other would chill expression regarding a key moment in the history of Palestinian citizens, Human Rights Watch said.
"These laws threaten Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel and others with yet more officially sanctioned discrimination," said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East director at Human Rights Watch. "Israeli parliamentarians should be working hard to end glaring inequality, not pushing through discriminatory laws to control who can live where and to create a single government-approved view of Israel's history."

The Knesset passed both laws on March 23, 2011. One officially authorizes "admissions committees" in about 300 Jewish-majority communities to reject applicants for residency who do not meet vague "social suitability" criteria. The measure anchors in law a practice that has been the basis for unjustly rejecting applications by Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel as well as members of socially marginalized groups such as Jews of non-European ancestry and single-parent families.

The second law would heavily fine any government-funded institution, including municipalities that provide health and education, for commemorating the "Nakba" - the Arabic term to describe the destruction of Palestinian villages and expulsion of their residents after Israel's declaration of independence - and for expression deemed to "negate the existence of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state."

The "admissions committee" law requires anyone seeking to move to any community in the Negev and Galilee regions with fewer than 400 families to obtain approval from committees consisting of town residents, a member of the Jewish Agency or World Zionist Organization, and several others. The law empowers these committees to reject candidates who, among other things, "are ill-suited to the community's way of life" or "might harm the community's fabric."

There are more than 300 such small communities in the Negev and Galilee, either small cooperative "kibbutzes" with some shared property, farming communities called "moshavs," or small rural "community towns," on land leased by the state. These communities already have admissions committees established under regulations of the Israel Land Authority, the state agency that leases them their land. But the committees and screening procedures had not been specifically authorized under national laws.

Although Palestinian Arabs are in the majority in the Negev and Galilee, the state has never allocated lands to allow these Israeli citizens to establish small communities there. All of the towns and communities to which the new law applies were established for and have a majority of Jewish residents.

Parliamentary statements indicate that the law's sponsors intended it to allow majority-Jewish communities to maintain their current demographic makeup by excluding Palestinian Arab citizens, an act of discrimination on the basis of their race, ethnicity, and national origin.

One of the law's sponsors, David Rotem of the Yisrael Beiteinu (Israel Our Home) party, told the Knesset in December 2009 that such a law would allow towns to be "established by people who want to live with other Jews." In a radio interview that month, Rotem said the law would codify screening procedures so that Jewish Israelis could "establish a place where everybody is an army veteran, a Yeshiva alumni, or something of that sort."

Another sponsor, Yisrael Hasson of the Kadima party, said in December 2010 that "the bill reflects the Knesset's commitment to work to preserve the ability to realize the Zionist dream in practice in the state of Israel" through "population dispersal," which the government had begun "thirty years ago ... [with] a string of small communities in the Galilee and Negev."

"Realization of these goals obliged us as legislators to ensure the existence of a screening mechanism for applicants to these communities," he said.

Late in negotiations over the law, legislators added a clause that nominally forbids committees to discriminate on the basis of race, religion, gender, nationality, or disability. However, the law's exclusion criteria threaten to do exactly what is supposedly prohibited, allowing admissions committees to mask discrimination under the vague criteria that a candidate is "unsuitable" to the community's "social characteristics," Human Rights Watch said.

Israeli opponents of the law argued that it would effectively bolster the legal and political standing of admissions committees and allow them to bypass a previous Supreme Court ruling against discrimination in property rights. In the case that led to that ruling, a village rejected an Arab-Israeli couple because the village was established on land that Israel had leased to the Jewish Agency, which did not lease land to non-Jews. Most of the land in Israel is state-owned and leased for 49- or 98-year periods.

The couple petitioned the Supreme Court, which ruled in 2000 that allocating land to citizens solely on the basis of their religion constituted prohibited discrimination, including cases in which the state first leased land to third parties that would not then lease it to non-Jews. However, the court limited the ruling to the specific case and stated that it might not make the same ruling in unspecified "special circumstances." The village committee then rejected the couple because they "did not fit its character." After further legal action, the couple was able to lease the land in 2007.

The law states that each community's unique "characteristics" will be "codified," and that rejected candidates are entitled to an explanation. However, in a February 2011 Supreme Court hearing regarding two couples whom admission committees rejected, the petitioners argued that many small rural communities are not designed exclusively for particular social groups with unique ways of life, such as ultra-Orthodox religious communities. The chief justice stated that the town in question "does not have any unique characteristics," and called the screening process an "invasion of privacy." But the court has yet rule in this case.

In a petition to the Supreme Court against the new law that has yet to be ruled on, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, a nongovernmental group, cited court cases brought by Palestinian Arabs and other families whom village acceptance committees rejected because they did not "socially fit." In one case, a kibbutz justified its rejection of an Arab-Israeli couple because its admissions criteria required residents to be eligible for membership in the World Zionist Organization and to have served in the Israeli army. Few Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel perform military service.

Another village committee requires applicants to embrace the values in the village's charter, including "Zionism" and "Jewish tradition." Other communities rejected Jews of North African and Middle Eastern descent and a disabled veteran. In these cases, the parties compromised or the court ordered the committees to re-evaluate the application, with the result that the courts have not explicitly ruled the committees' actions to be discriminatory.

In an affidavit submitted by the civil rights group, the former chairperson of one acceptance committee stated that the committee often rejected applicants on the basis of committee members' personal preferences, and that in most cases the evaluation process merely rubber stamps a decision to reject applicants.

As originally drafted, the law would have applied to communities across Israel, but after a compromise, the final law, which passed after 2 a.m. on March 23 by 35 to 20, applies only to the Negev and Galilee regions. Longstanding Israeli policy seeks to "Judaize the Galilee," and Israeli officials have promoted plans to encourage large-scale Jewish immigration to the Negev. In 2010, several rabbis in the Galilee, who are government officials, campaigned for Jewish Israelis not to rent apartments or sell land to Arab-Israelis; and the Knesset gave preliminary approval to a parliamentary inquiry into alleged purchases of Israeli land by "foreign governments" for the benefit of Arab-Israeli citizens. Arab citizens of Israel have sought to move into Jewish communities in part because of a lack of housing for Palestinian Arab citizens. While Israeli planning authorities have established hundreds of Jewish towns and villages, Israel has not allowed Arab citizens to establish any new towns since 1948, except for seven communities that the state planned for Bedouins from the Negev, whom the government urged to relocate from their traditional lands or forcibly evicted from them.

Since the 1990s state planning bodies have approved "expansions" for Jewish towns, rezoning adjacent agricultural lands for residential construction. An Israel Lands Authority administrative decision from 1993 granted local residents and their children "preferred access" to the newly expanded residential areas, and authorized the towns to create admissions committees to review outside applicants. By contrast, Human Rights Watch has documented cases in which Israeli planning authorities consistently rejected the petitions of Arab-Israelis to rezone "agricultural" lands for residential purposes.

In 2007 the United Nations committee that oversees states' compliance with the Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination recommended that Israel examine the role of admissions committees, "ensure that state land is allocated without discrimination, direct or indirect," and "assess the significance and impact of the 'social suitability' criterion in this regard." Under the convention, Israel is obliged to prohibit and eliminate racial discrimination in all its forms and to guarantee the right of everyone, without distinction as to race or ethnic or national origin, to freedom of movement and residence, and to housing.

"Countries should seek to end the segregation and negative treatment of minority communities, yet Israel is moving in the other direction," Whitson said. "A state that deliberately promotes the residential rights and privileges of one ethnic group while diminishing those of another is practicing illegal discrimination, pure and simple."

The Knesset passed, 37 to 25, the law that allows the government to penalize any state-funded institution that commemorates the "Nakba," the Arabic term meaning "catastrophe" and referring to the historic episode in which hundreds of thousands of Palestinian residents of what is now Israel fled and hundreds of villages were destroyed during the conflict after Israel declared independence in 1948. The penalty could also be imposed on an institution that "denies the existence of the State of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state," an action the law does not define.

Palestinian Arab members of Israel's parliament, community leaders, and civil society groups have frequently stated their view that definitions of Israel as a "Jewish state" marginalize and exclude them.

The law, formally an amendment to the Budget Principles Law, enables the finance minister to cut government funding to such institutions by three times the amount that the institution spent on the "illegal" activities. The law does not distinguish cases in which institutions spent non-government funds on such activities. The finance minister would need the approval of other budgetary officials to cut the funds.

The law does not define "institution," but states that it applies to any state-funded entity. Entities at risk include not only municipalities, but also theaters and schools that stage plays or screen films about the Nakba or cultural organizations that hold "coexistence" activities for Jewish and Arab Israeli students to commemorate both Israel's independence day and the "Nakba" as a form of mutual learning.

"This effort to punish the peaceful expression of opinions by Israelis who receive state funding is an insult to Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel and a threat to freedom of expression," Whitson said. "Since when does the Israeli government have the right to tell Israeli citizens what they're not entitled to say about history?"

The Nakba law's threefold financial penalty threatens to harm the rights of citizens - for example, by cutting federal funds that municipalities need to provide health, housing, education, and other services, Human Rights Watch said. For example, according to an Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development report on Israel, local governments are responsible for providing basic social services but receive 75 percent financing from the central government to procure those services. The predictable result of the law's severe penalties and the vagueness of the acts and institutions that could be penalized is that it will broadly chill freedom of expression by preventing various institutions from commemorating the Nakba at all, Human Rights Watch said.

"The government is telling Arab-Israeli municipalities and other institutions that if they don't shut up about the Nakba and anything else that bureaucrats may deem anti-Israeli, they'll have to shut down programs and services for lack of funds," Whitson said. "Democracies shouldn't quash expression even if it's unpopular, and in this case, what's unpopular to some legislators is central to the historical narrative of a million and a half citizens."

[Carson]

Some beg to differ.

A "beforeitsnews.com" story:

Top 5 Places Not To Be During A Dollar Collapse (video)

[ExPatPaki]

Forgotten Christians
Not all displaced Palestinians are Muslims.
By Anders Strindberg

Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ” is playing to full houses in the Syrian capital Damascus. Watching it here turns out to be much the same as watching it on opening night in New York—customarily rowdy moviegoers observe a reverent silence, the usual sound of candy wrappers is replaced by sobbing and gasping, and, at the end of it all, the audience files out of the theater in silence and contemplation. Many of those watching the movie on this occasion are Palestinian Christian refugees whose parents or grandparents were purged from their homeland—the land of Christ—at the foundation of Israel in 1948. For them the movie has an underlying symbolic meaning not easily perceived in the West: not only is it a depiction of the trial, scourging, and death of Jesus, it is also a symbolic depiction of the fate of the Palestinian people. “This is how we feel,” says Zaki, a 27-year old Palestinian Christian whose family hails from Haifa. “We take beating after beating at the hands of the world, they crucify our people, they insult us, but we refuse to surrender.”

At the time of the creation of the Israeli state in 1948, it is estimated that the Christians of Palestine numbered some 350,000. Almost 20 percent of the total population at the time, they constituted a vibrant and ancient community; their forbears had listened to St. Peter in Jerusalem as he preached at the first Pentecost. Yet Zionist doctrine held that Palestine was “a land without a people for a people without a land.” Of the 750,000 Palestinians that were forced from their homes in 1948, some 50,000 were Christians—7 percent of the total number of refugees and 35 percent of the total number of Christians living in Palestine at the time.

In the process of “Judaizing” Palestine, numerous convents, hospices, seminaries, and churches were either destroyed or cleared of their Christian owners and custodians. In one of the most spectacular attacks on a Christian target, on May 17, 1948, the Armenian Orthodox Patriarchate was shelled with about 100 mortar rounds—launched by Zionist forces from the already occupied monastery of the Benedictine Fathers on Mount Zion. The bombardment also damaged St. Jacob’s Convent, the Archangel’s Convent, and their appended churches, their two elementary and seminary schools, as well as their libraries, killing eight people and wounding 120.

Today it is believed that the number of Christians in Israel and occupied Palestine number some 175,000, just over 2 percent of the entire population, but the numbers are rapidly dwindling due to mass emigration. Of those who have remained in the region, most live in Lebanon, where they share in the same bottomless misery as all other refugees, confined to camps where schools are under-funded and overcrowded, where housing is ramshackle, and sanitary conditions are appalling. Most, however, have fled the region altogether. No reliable figures are available, but it is estimated that between 100,000 and 300,000 Palestinian Christians currently live in the U.S.

The Palestinian Christians see themselves, and are seen by their Muslim compatriots, as an integral part of the Palestinian people, and they have long been a vital part of the Palestinian struggle. As the Anglican bishop of Jerusalem, the Reverend Riah Abu al-Assal has explained, “The Arab Palestinian Christians are part and parcel of the Arab Palestinian nation. We have the same history, the same culture, the same habits and the same hopes.”

Yet U.S. media and politicians have become accustomed to thinking of and talking about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as one in which an enlightened democracy is constantly forced to repel attacks from crazy-eyed Islamists bent on the destruction of the Jewish people and the imposition of an Islamic state. Palestinians are equated with Islamists, Islamists with terrorists. It is presumably because all organized Christian activity among Palestinians is non-political and non-violent that the community hardly ever hits the Western headlines; suicide bombers sell more copy than people who congregate for Bible study.

Lebanese and Syrian Christians were essential in the conception of Arab nationalism as a general school of anti-colonial thought following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire at the beginning of the 20th century. During the 1930s, Hajj Amin al-Hussein, the leader of the Palestinian struggle against the British colonialists, surrounded himself with Christian advisors and functionaries. In the 1950s and ’60s, as the various factions that were to form the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) emerged, some of the most prominent militants were yet again of Christian origin. For instance, George Habash, a Greek Orthodox medical doctor from al-Lod, created the Arab Nationalists’ Movement and went on to found the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Naif Hawatmeh, also Greek Orthodox, from al-Salt in Jordan, founded and still today heads up the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Among those better regarded in the West, Hannan Ashrawi, one of the Palestinian Authority’s most effective spokespersons, is a Christian.

In fact, over the decades, many of the rank and file among the secular nationalist groups of the PLO have been Christians who have seen leftist nationalist politics as the only alternative to both Islamism and Western liberalism, the former objectionable because of its religiously exclusive nature, the latter due to what is seen by many as its inherent protection of Israel and the Zionist project.

Among the remnant communities in Palestine, most belong to the traditional Christian confessions. The largest group is Greek Orthodox, followed by Catholics (Roman, Syrian, Maronite, and Melkite), Armenian Orthodox, Anglicans, and Lutherans. There is also a small but influential Quaker presence. These communities are centered in Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Beit Jala, Beit Sahour, and Ramallah.

For them, the conflict with Israel is quite obviously not about Islamism contra enlightenment but simply about resistance against occupation. To be sure, there have been periods of tension between the Christian communities and members of the Islamist groups, yet to many Christian Palestinians the Islamist movements have emerged by default as the heroes in the conflict with Israel. Following the incremental atrophy of leftist ideals, the Islamists are seen as the only ones who are willing and able to fight the occupation. The Lebanese Hezbollah, widely seen as a nonsectarian organization that is able to cooperate with people of all faiths, is particularly admired both among the refugees in Lebanon as well as those who remain in Palestine. “We have received far more support and comfort from the Hezbollah in Lebanon than from our fellow Christians in the West,” remarked one Christian Palestinian refugee in Damascus. “I want to know, why don’t the Christians in the West do anything to help us? Are the teachings of Jesus nothing but empty slogans to them?”

This is a justified and important question, but the answer is not straightforward. The Catholic Church has, in fact, long argued for an end to the Israeli occupation and for improvement of the Palestinians’ situation. The leaders of the Eastern Orthodox churches have taken similar, often more strongly worded positions. Likewise, many Lutheran and Calvinist churches run organizations and programs that seek to ease the suffering of the Palestinians and draw attention to the injustices with which they are faced. Usually working within strictly religious frames of reference, however, their impact on the political situation has been minimal.

This political limitation has not applied to those parts of the Evangelical movement that have adopted Zionism as a core element of their religious doctrine. Christian Zionists in the U.S. are currently organized in an alliance with the pro-Israel lobby and the neoconservative elements of the Republican Party, enabling them to put significant pressure on both the president and members of Congress. In fact, they are among the most influential shapers of policy in the country, including individuals such as Ralph Reed, Pat Robertson, and Jerry Falwell, and groups such as the National Unity Coalition for Israel, Christians for Israel, the International Christian Embassy Jerusalem, and Chosen People Ministries.

Christian Zionism is an odd thing on many levels. A key tenet of Christian Zionism is absolute support for Israel, whose establishment and existence, it is believed, heralds Armageddon and the second coming of Christ. The politically relevant upshot of this is that without Israel’s expansion there can be no redemption, and those who subscribe to this interpretation are only too eager to sacrifice their Palestinian fellow Christians on the altar of Zionism. They do not want to hear about coreligionists’ suffering at the hands of Israel.

Israeli and Jewish American leaders have until recently kept their distance from the Christian Zionist movement. But Beltway alliance politics coupled with a sharp turn to the right among American Jewish organizations since Israel began its onslaught on Palestinians in September 2000, has driven them into each other’s arms. One of the most potent forces behind the Evangelical Zionist influence in Washington is Tom DeLay, leader of the Republican majority in the House. DeLay insists that his devotion to Israel stems from his faith in God, which allows him a clear understanding of the struggle between good and evil. Be that as it may, he is also able to cash in financially and politically from his position. Part of DeLay’s growing influence within the Republican Party stems from the fact that his campaign committees managed to raise an impressive $12 million in 2001-2002. Washington Post writer Jim VandeHei suggested, “In recent years, DeLay has become one of the most outspoken defenders of Israel and has been rewarded with a surge of donations from the Jewish community.”

In Oct. 2002, Benny Elon, Sharon’s minister of tourism and a staunch advocate of a comprehensive purge of Palestinians from the Holy Land, appeared with DeLay at the Washington convention of the Christian Coalition. Crowds waved Israeli flags as Elon cited Biblical authority for this preferred way of dealing with the pesky Palestinians. DeLay, in turn, received an enthusiastic welcome when he called for activists to back pro-Israel candidates who “stand unashamedly for Jesus Christ.” In July 2003, Tom DeLay traveled to Israel and addressed the Knesset, telling the assembled legislators that he was an “Israeli at heart.” The Palestinians “have been oppressed and abused,” he said, but never by Israel, only by their own leaders. DeLay received a standing ovation.

Christians find themselves under the hammer of the Israeli occupation to no less an extent than Muslims, yet America—supposedly a Christian country—stands idly by because its most politically influential Christians have decided that Palestinian Christians are acceptable collateral damage in their apocalyptic quest. “To be a Christian from the land of Christ is an honor,” says Abbas, a Palestinian Christian whose family lived in Jerusalem for many generations until the purge of 1948. “To be expelled from that land is an injury, and these Zionist Christians in America add insult.” Abbas is one of the handful of Palestinian Christians that could be described as Evangelical, belonging to a group that appears to be distantly related to the Plymouth Brethren. Cherishing the role of devil’s advocate, I had to ask him, “Is the State of Israel not in fact the fulfillment of God’s promise and a necessary step in the second coming of Christ?” Abbas looked at me briefly and laughed. “You’re kidding, right? You know what they do to our people and our land. If I thought that was part of God’s plan, I’d be an atheist in a second.”

[onlyrp]

That would be correct, if you don't count Lebanon, Armenia, Iraq and Egypt.

[RickyJ]

For all you so-called "Christians" supporting the terrorist state of Israel, I think you should know something about Israeli law. It is against the law for a Christian to even attempt to convert a Jew to Christianity in Israel. How is that safe for Christians to go to jail for doing what Jesus commanded them to do?

[BlackTerrel]

For all you so-called "Christians" supporting the terrorist state of Israel, I think you should know something about Israeli law. It is against the law for a Christian to even attempt to convert a Jew to Christianity in Israel. How is that safe for Christians to go to jail for doing what Jesus commanded them to do?

Look the problem is again and again what people are saying is not true.

Proselytizing is not against the law in Israel. It is against the law to proselytize to someone under 18 or to pay someone to convert.

[BlackTerrel]

Hardly surprised that the illiterate troll BlackTerrell hasn't responded to any of the articles I posted. Must be too many big words in those articles.

You don't debate someone by copying and pasting 15 articles most of which are based on opinion when we're trying to discuss facts. Maybe as a rebuttal I will post another 20 articles. That will really get this discussion going.

[ExPatPaki]

You don't debate someone by copying and pasting 15 articles most of which are based on opinion when we're trying to discuss facts.

They're actually based on facts, if you actually bothered to read them, illiterate troll. I know reading is a difficult task for you, but come on, you're a big boy/girl/other. You can do it!

And if you think what you're doing is debating, you're a bigger idiot than I originally thought.

The ONLY reason you called them an "opinion articles" is because they don't fit your narrow world view where Palestinians are evil and deserve to have their homes bulldozed and Israelis are good for bulldozing those homes because they belong to Arabs.

The only rights Arabs have in Israel is to have their homes bulldozed and you want to show that as a good thing.

Why don't you refute every article, if you're so convinced they are based on opinion and give your own opinion on why Palestinians should be treated like $#@! like in Israel. I know you have a genocidal hatred of Palestinians and that's why you support Israel's apartheid (but as a hypocrite speak out against South Africa's past apartheid) but try to keep your hate to a minimum level for this discussion.

[DerailingDaTrain]

Since I don't want to read 10 pages of arguing can someone please explain to me what Black Terrel's problem is with Palestinians and what is ExPatPaki's problem with Israelis?

[RickyJ]

Look the problem is again and again what people are saying is not true.

Proselytizing is not against the law in Israel. It is against the law to proselytize to someone under 18 or to pay someone to convert.

So what do you call the "anti-Missionary law?" This law will indeed put Christians in jail for attempting to convert a Jew to Christianity. Israel is undoubtedly a state founded on the religion of Judaism. All other religions are discriminated against in Israel, this is a fact most Christians don't know anything about. Most Christians also know little to nothing about the Talmud. They only know that they are called "God's people" in the Old Testament and many think they still are his people. They are wrong, God's people are called Christians today.

Christian Deported from Israel