TEL AVIV — The first Molotov cocktail ignited a backyard fence, just a couple of feet from where three Eritrean refugees were sleeping outdoors on makeshift beds of wood planks atop old TVs. One man burned his arm trying to extinguish the flames with a blanket.
Moments later, a second firebomb was tossed through an open air vent into the adjacent apartment, where another family of African asylum-seekers was sleeping. It exploded in the shower without causing injury.
The post-midnight attacks last month by unknown assailants continued across Tel Aviv’s dilapidated Shapira neighborhood, striking another refugee house and a kindergarten catering to African children.
Israelis protesting in south Tel Aviv against anti-foreigner violence on Thursday. Photo by Tomer Appelbaum
“We’re just looking for some peace in our life,” said Berhun Gergrehra, 60, a former Eritrean soldier who fled poverty and repression there two years ago, arriving in Israel after walking through Sudan and Egypt with his teenage son and daughter. “But everyone here just hates us. Why?”
Israel is a nation founded by refugees, mostly Jews escaping persecution in Europe and the Middle East. It grew and prospered thanks to additional immigration from Russia, Ethiopia and other nations.
But now Israel’s identity as a refuge is being challenged by an influx of tens of thousands of Africans, who also see the country as a haven from oppression in their native lands. Since 2006, more than 60,000 Africans – mostly from Eritrea and Sudan, including the latter’s Darfur region – have poured over the border from Egypt’s Sinai desert, taking advantage of Israel’s proximity as one of the nearest modern democracies accessible to African refugees.
But unlike past waves of Jewish immigrants, the flood of Africans is triggering an ugly and sometimes violent backlash in Israel. Refugee activists say some government leaders are fostering the intolerance and anger toward Africans, who are accused of committing crimes, stealing jobs from Israelis and potentially undermining the Jewish character of the country. Read more »
[Update: Further news from the Financial Times, citing Addameer (the prisoners rights group), reported on the Egypt-brokered deal and its effect on the longer hunger strike among Palestinian prisoners:
":Sahar Francis, director of Addameer, said the agreement appeared to be favourable for Palestinian inmates. “It’s good – as far as the prisoners’ main demands, this appears to be enough,” she said.
It was not clear what impact the accord would have on a separate hunger strike by several prisoners against Israel’s policy of detaining Palestinians without charge for months or even years.
The Israeli activist organisation Physicians for Human Rights-Israel said on Monday that at least seven administrative detainees were on weeks-long hunger strikes. Most have been refusing food for at least 40 days. The group also said two had been refusing food for more than 70 days and were “in imminent risk of death”.
According to Israeli human rights activists, international law says countries should use administrative detentions only in exceptional cases but Israel implements it as a “blanket measure” against Palestinians....
The agreement did not make any mention of administrative detentions." (See the Financial Times and Addameer for more information. --Frontlines ed.]
by Nidal al-Mughrabi | Reuters | May 14, 2012
A Palestinian artist paints a mural in Gaza City in support of Palestinian prisoners on a hunger strike in Israeli jails May 14, 2012. REUTERS/Suhaib Salem
Palestinian women look at a man standing inside a mock prison cell during a rally in the West Bank city of Ramallah, May 14, 2012, in support of Palestinian prisoners on a hunger strike in Israeli jails. REUTERS/Mohamad Torokman
GAZA (Reuters) – Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails agreed on Monday to an Egyptian-brokered deal aimed at ending a mass hunger strike that challenged Israel’s policy of detention without trial and raised fears of a bloody Palestinian backlash if any protesters died.
Most of some 1,600 prisoners, a third of the 4,800 Palestinians in Israeli jails, began refusing food on April 17 although a few had been fasting much longer – up to 77 days.
Their protest centered on demands for more family visits, an end to solitary confinement and an easing of so-called “administrative detention”, a practice that has drawn international criticism on human rights grounds.
An Egyptian official involved in the talks said that under Monday’s deal to end the strike, Israel had agreed to end solitary confinement for 19 prisoners and lifted a ban on visits to prisoners by relatives living in the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip.
Israel also agreed to improve other conditions of detention, and to free so-called administrative detainees once they complete their terms unless they are brought to court, according to the official.
Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri confirmed the deal, telling Reuters that “the prisoners signed the deal after their demands were met. The deal was brokered by Egypt.”
Israel also confirmed an accord had been struck. “An agreement has been signed to bring about the end of a 28-day hunger strike by Palestinian security prisoners,” the Israel Prisons Authority said in a written statement. Read more »
Following a decision by the U.S. House of Representatives Defense Appropriations Subcommittee which just approved over $948 million in funding for Israel’s anti-missile defense programs, Israel will receive a record $4 billion in military aid in 2013.
The Jewish Press reports: Approximately $679 million of the funding will go to the Iron Dome, thanks in large part to legislation initiated last month by Reps. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.) and Howard Berman (D-Calif.), chairwoman and ranking Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, respectively.
The remaining $269 million will go to Israel’s other anti-missile initiatives: the short-range David’s Sling ($149.7 million), and the current long-range Arrow anti-ballistic missile system and its successor the Arrow 3 ($119.3 million). These projects, unlike the Iron Dome, are joint Israel-US projects.
While the increase in funding for the Iron Dome was expected, with the Department of Defense stating in March that it “intends to request an appropriate level of funding from Congress to support such acquisitions based on Israeli requirements and production capacity,” the funding for the other projects represents an increase of $169 million over the Obama administration’s proposed number.
(AFP) – Israel said Tuesday it has ordered Palestinian villagers to uproot 1,000 olive trees planted in an area of the West Bank under Israeli control and declared a nature reserve.
Israel’s Civil Administration, the military body that governs areas of the West Bank under full Israeli control, confirmed the issue of the order, which was first reported by Israeli daily Haaretz on Monday.
“These are trees that were planted in a nature reserve without coordination with the official for the area, as is required by law,” the body said in a statement.
“The owners have the opportunity to present their objections and arguments to officials from the civil administration,” it added.
The trees in question are in the Nahal Kana reserve, an area west of the city of Nablus in the northern West Bank, which Haaretz said includes large tracts of privately-owned Palestinian land.
Farmers there told the newspaper that the order violates their rights to the land, and said they would challenge it in court.
Haaretz said the Civil Administration uprooted hundreds of Palestinian trees in the same nature reserve last year.
[Some say the bankruptcy of the Greek economy is pulling its puppet government into compliance with -- and service to -- the geo-strategic, military and hegemonic energy needs of the US, EU, and Israel. But the people of Greece and Cyprus have not been considered as these arrangements have been made. -- Frontlines ed.]
At the same time the tripartite energy agreement will be signed between Greece, Israel and Cyprus on Thursday at Kavouri of Vouliagmeni, Athens, in the presence of Richard Morningstar, the special envoy of the US Foreign Affairs Ministry, a large-scale aeronautical military exercise will be taking place in the Southern Mediterranean.
According to defencenet.gr, Greece, Israel and USA will launch their joint military exercise from Crete to Haifa against “virtual enemy forces” that bear great resemblance to the Turkish aeronautical forces in this particular military operation scenario.
“Noble Dina” was initially planned to take place in April just like in 2011. However, it was decided that the military exercise should coincide with the date of the energy agreement signing between the three countries of the Southeastern Mediterranean. Thus, it would underline that the cooperation between Israel, Greece and the US does not only concern energy but military affairs as well.
Defencenet.gr reported that the implied “message” goes to Ankara, which for the time is a barrier to the common interests of Israel and USA in the broader region. The exercise is taking place only a few days after Turkey had claimed that the same thing that happened in Imia would also happen to the Eastern Mediterranean. Read more »
GASSING UP: Energy Ministers from Greece, Israel and Cyprus promised Wednesday to increase cooperation to exploit natural gas deposits in the Mediterranean, but warned that large-scale exports could take a decade.
GREECE ROLE: Greece, whose economy has been ravaged by a financial crisis, hopes to eventually start its own gas production and act as a transit point for supplies from Israel and Cyprus.
U.S. ON BOARD: The U.S. welcomed Mediterranean gas finds as a source of diversified energy supply for Europe, a senior U.S. envoy said, urging countries in the region to set aside their long-standing rivalries and do business.
Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/2012/03/28/4373309/summary-box-greece-israel-cyprus.html#storylink=cpy
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[Frontlines note: For more background, see this February news report on plans for an Israeli military base on Cyprus.]
Israel seeks Cyprus base to guard gas zone — Israel is reported to be seeking to deploy fighter aircraft in Cyprus, its partner in developing a natural gas bonanza under the eastern Mediterranean, to protect these vital energy resources. Read more »
GAZA CITY — Israeli airstrikes on the Gaza Strip have killed up to 12 Palestinians, mostly militants, in the worst flare-up of violence along the restive border in months.
The leader of a militant group is among the dead. Israel said it struck after Palestinians had launched rocket attacks from the territory.
Over 40 rockets were fired from Gaza into towns and cities in southern Israel, according to Israeli sources. Eight people are reported injured, one seriously.
The violence escalated after two militant leaders died when an Israeli air strike blew up a car in Gaza City.
One of them was Zohair al-Qaisi, said to head the Popular Resistance Committees armed group. Israel says he was targeted as he was planning an attack.
A spokesman for Gaza’s Hamas Islamist government held Israel responsible for what he called “a grave escalation”.
[It may be that most war criminals do not talk much about war crimes and international law, for obvious reasons. But this is not true for imperialists, who, along with their dictatorial friends and Zionist allies, carry out the largest crimes against humanity, yet arrogantly claim the mantle of "humanitarian" wars and occupations "to spread democracy and justice." The US and Israel do not submit to the authority of international law, or of the International Criminal Court, which they nevertheless invoke against defiant warlords, bullies, and petty criminals who refuse to serve imperial designs. In fact, the Iraqi regime, however much their roots were as puppets of the US occupation, were unwilling to further extend the immunity of US soldiers from prosecution for war crimes, under Iraqi law. And this was the reason for the withdrawal of US troops--and why the "democratic" claims of the US ring hollow, around the world. So, too, are the claims of Israel to be "the only democracy in the middle east"--far too many know the history of the removal of Palestinians from historic Palestine--ethnic cleansing--and of Israeli's apartheid "double standard" toward Palestinians, to even consider that phony, arrogant, and racist claim. This article by Joe Catron in Ma'an breaks this down. -- Frontlines ed.]
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Palestinians being searched by Israeli troops at one of the countless "check-points" that block the movement of Palestinians across historic Palestine
As Israeli Apartheid Week unfolds around the world, apologists for Israel’s crimes against the Palestinian people scramble to defend their chosen regime’s system of racism, ethnic cleansing, and occupation, against the charge of apartheid.
“The apartheid analogy is fatally flawed,” the Jerusalem Connection’s Shelley Neese writes. The David Project’s David Bernstein says, “The apartheid analogy is specious and absurd.” The Anti-Defamation League has even circulated an old report: “The Apartheid Analogy: Wrong for Israel.”
These commentators are right, but not for the reasons they claim. An apartheid ‘analogy’ is fatally flawed, specious, absurd, and wrong for Israel because apartheid is not an analogy, but a crime as well-defined in law as embezzlement or kidnapping.
The most relevant statute, the 1973 International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid, perhaps muddies the waters by stating that “the term ‘the crime of apartheid’ … shall include similar practices of racial segregation and discrimination as practiced in southern Africa.”
But it goes on to define exactly what those and other “inhuman acts committed for the purpose of establishing and maintaining domination by one racial group of persons over any other racial group of persons and systematically oppressing them” are.
Most will sound familiar to anyone who follows news from Palestine. The ban on “arbitrary arrest and illegal imprisonment of the members of a racial group or groups” should bring to mind Hana Shalabi, Khader Adnan, and 307 other administrative detainees held indefinitely without charges, evidence, or trials. This is further to the 4,078 Palestinian political prisoners sentenced by military courts or facing the imminent prospect, all under occupation laws no Jew will ever face.
The prohibition of “measures calculated to prevent a racial group or groups from participation in the political, social, economic and cultural life of the country” could have been meant to describe discrimination against Palestinian citizens of Israel. Read more »
Hucksters for Israel attempt to make up for in chutzpah what they lack in facts.
On opening night of the eighth annual Israeli Apartheid Week at NYU — at an event featuring Omar Barghouti and Noura Erakat, leading Palestinian figures in the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) campaign — apologists for Israel’s crimes showcased one of their more curious myths. Defenders of Israel repeatedly argued in the Q & A section that America’s foremost Black icon, Martin Luther King Jr., was an arch defender of the Jewish state.
Let’s explore the evidence.
Pro-Israel Web sites, politicians and campus activists often reference the source of their claim about MLK’s defense of Israel by citing King’s “Letter to an Anti-Zionist Friend,” supposedly published in an August 1967 edition of the Saturday Review. Here’s the quote they cite:
“… You declare, my friend; that you do not hate the Jews, you are merely ‘anti-Zionist’ … And I say, let the truth ring forth from the high mountain tops, let it echo through the valleys of God’s green earth: When people criticize Zionism, they mean Jews… Anti-Semitism, the hatred of the Jewish people, has been and remains a blot on the soul of mankind. In this we are in full agreement. So know also this: anti-Zionist is inherently anti-Semitic, and ever will be so.”
This quote even made its way into an excellent exposé of Israel’s deadly decades-long relationship with apartheid South Africa, Sasha Polakow-Suransky’s The Unspoken Alliance: Israel’s Secret Relationship with Apartheid South Africa. In fact, I repeated part of the quote in my own review of the book, much to my regret. Later I discovered that the MLK letter was a hoax.
Antiracist activist Tim Wise published an article on Znet in 2003, “Fraud Fit for a King,” in which he documents the fact that no such letter appears in any of the 1967 issues of the Saturday Review.
The alternative source provided by Zionists for this apparently nonexistent letter is a nonexistent book by King, This I Believe: Selections from the Writings of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. According to the authors of Electronic Intifada’s 2004 piece that further details this bamboozle, “Israel’s Apologists and the Martin Luther King Hoax”: ”No such book was listed in the bibliography provided by the King Center in Atlanta, nor in the catalogs of several large public and university libraries.” Read more »
Mourners carry the body of Palestinian activist Mustafa al-Tamimi during his funeral in the West Bank village of Nabi Saleh on December 11, 2011 (Photographer: ABBAS MOMANI/Source: AFP/Getty Images)
Mostafa Tamimi from Nabi Saleh, Bahjat Zaalan and his son Ramdan from Gaza died on my fiftieth birthday and just a few days after Newt Gingrich declared them an invented people. They were murdered by the Israeli terrorist organization, the IDF, an organization that is supported and funded by the US. One Israeli terrorist shot the invented Tamimi in the head with a tear gas canister, and another Israeli terrorist fired a rocket that murdered the invented Zaalan and his boy Ramadan. Both terrorists were educated and trained by Israel, and armed by the US. The Israeli terrorists are not invented but quite real, and they are safe, protected by the apartheid regime that trained and sent them on their missions, and the Israeli court system will make sure that they are never brought to justice. This is how Israel’s well-oiled ethnic cleansing machine operates.
The Zionist ethnic cleansing of Palestine is not a thing of the past but an ongoing campaign that is executed by three arms of the State of Israel: The education system, a dedicated bureaucracy and the security forces. The education system is dedicated to indoctrinating and producing soldiers and bureaucrats who will execute and enforce the ethnic cleansing. The bureaucracy is charged with making rules that make life unlivable for Palestinians. Rules that restrict Palestinian access to their lands, and restrict their ability to travel freely to work and school. This same bureaucracy then demands that Palestinians pay for permits to be allowed do these very same basic things that they were denied. The security forces, the most obvious of which is the IDF, are charged with enforcing the restrictions, fighting off the resistance, armed or peaceful, and terrorizing the “invented” people of Palestine.
Since my father was a general and I served as a soldier in the IDF terrorist organization, people often ask me how is it that Israeli children who are raised in a Western style democracy become such monsters once they are in uniform? The detailed answer can be found in my book, The General’s Son due out in February 2012, but the short answer is this: Education – Racism requires a mindset that is fashioned by education. In order to rationalize and justify the ethnic cleansing the Israeli education system portrays Palestinians as culturally inferior, violent and bent on the annihilation of the Jews, and at the same time, void of a true national identity. Palestinian national identity is but a figment of some anti-Semitic imagination.
Israeli children are educated to see the Palestinians as a problem that must be solved and as a threat that must be eliminated. They can go through life, as I did growing up in Jerusalem, without ever meeting a Palestinian child. They know nothing of the life or culture of Palestinians who quite often live only several hundred meters from them. Read more »
A flotilla with as many as a dozen activists — including Code Pink’s Kit Kittredge- was bound to Gaza bearing humanitarian aide on November 4th. The Israeli military boarded seized the ship, and took all of the activists into custody.
Occupy Boston then marched on the Israeli Consulate in solidarity
The prisoner swap deal, reached by the Hamas movement and Israel, does not include several senior political leaders of the major Palestinian factions, senior sources told the Palestinian Ma’an News Agency early on Wednesday.
The exchange does not include; Fatah senior leader, Marwan Al-Barghouti; the Secretary-General of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Ahmed Saadat; several top Hamas leaders, including: Ibrahim Hamed, Hasan Salameh, Abdullah Al-Barghouti, Jamal Abu El-Heija, Abbas Issyd. As well as several other senior Hamas officials, whose names are still anonymous, the Israeli Channel Two reported the Israeli Intelligence Chief saying. Read more »
The protests against neoliberal governmental policies in the State of Israel have
attracted huge numbers of people, enough to rattle the Netanyahu government. The
protestors wanted a restoration of their standard of living they had enjoyed under
“socialist” governments since the creation of the Israeli State in Palestine. While not
all Israeli Jews had been treated equally before the erosion of the standard of living ,
Israeli Jews, for the most part, had been doing well.
Hardly any Israeli Jews across the political spectrum had upheld the national and
human rights of the Palestinian people under occupation. The ethnic cleansing of
750,000 Palestinians in 1948 to establish the Zionist State, is well documented (Ilan
Pappé 2006). So is the internal displacement of Palestinians within the State of
Israel (Nur Masalha 2003; 2005). Since the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, the
Gaza Strip, and the Golan Heights that Syria had lost in 1967, Israel had been
displacing Palestinian residents of the West Bank (and Gaza until the Israelis
evacuated it in 2005), confiscating their lands and homes to build colonies
(euphemistically called settlements) exclusively for Jews. The separation Wall that
exists and termed by Palestinians and international human rights activists as the
“Apartheid Wall,” is another proof of the racism that has pervaded Israeli society
since 1948.
It is interesting that in their overwhelming majority the Israeli protestors against
their State’s neoliberal policies, have chosen not to say anything about the rights of
the Palestinian citizens of Israel (Israeli citizens, that is) and the third‐class status
that they have been relegated to in the State of Israel. The protestors have
mentioned nothing about the occupation of the West Bank and the blockade of Gaza,
which constitutes collective punishment of 1.5 million Palestinians. Those practices
are considered crimes under international law. Nor have they mentioned anything
about the relationship between the occupation of the West Bank and the problems
that they have been facing as a consequence of the neoliberal policies of their own
State. Not one word about the Palestinian Arabs and their national and human
rights. Read more »
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