Ha'aretz - Article Thursday, October 31, 2002 : "Back aboard the ship of fools

By Ari Shavit

The state of Israel is threatened. It is surrounded by external threats, some threaten its existence. But the most dangerous threat to the state of Israel is not external, but internal - a psychological threat. The most dangerous threat to Israel is the threat of intellectual dishonesty. "
- posted by Editor @ 3:47 PM

Ha'aretz - Article: "Last Update: 31/10/2002 01:24

Leading Israeli authors help Palestinians harvest olives

By DPA

Jerusalem - Reacting to attempts by Israeli settlers to harass Palestinian olive pickers, bestselling Israeli authors A.B. Yehoshua, Amos Oz, Meir Shalev and David Grossman toured villages in the West Bank Wednesday and helped residents harvest their olives, Israel Radio reported.

Extremist settlers in the northern West Bank have in recent weeks disrupted the Palestinian olive harvest, beating and sometimes firing at Palestinians and Israeli peace activists who come to help them.

Most Israeli politicians have condemned the harassment, but police and the Israeli army have been unable to help the Palestinians and only a handful of settlers have been arrested[emph.Ed.]. "
- posted by Editor @ 3:33 PM

EducationGuardian.co.uk | Special Reports | 'We will not do business as usual with a racist state': "'We will not do business as usual with a racist state'

The gesture politics of an Israeli boycott

Tuesday July 23, 2002

The boycott of Israeli research and academic institutions increases the isolation imposed by the growing economic boycott. It says: we will not do business as usual with a racist state that doesn't give a damn about international law.
...
Mr Alderman tries to smooth over this scale by asserting that Israel is not a racist state: "Arabs and Christians may attend Israeli universities," he says, omitting to mention that appointments are exceptionally difficult for Arabs to get in Israeli universities, Arab student quotas are not any thing like proportionate to their numbers, and they cannot attend classes because they cannot come and go from their residences without being held up and humiliated at checkpoints or risk of shot - a small impediment not encountered by Jewish Israelis.

Of course Israel is a racist state: it is not a state of its citizens but of Jews - it is the Jewish state. Enough pussyfooting and mealy-mouthing about calling it what it is.

Miriam M. Reik, PhD
New York"
- posted by Editor @ 3:10 PM

Ha'aretz - Article: "Cave-men and women

By Daniel Ben Simon
...
Listen, we're also human beings and it's hard for me to see their suffering in the curfew. My friends in Tel Aviv pester me all the time about the way we are torturing the Palestinians. What can I tell them?" ... Isn't there morality in the army? Has everything become politics?"

A young Jewish settler, who was eavesdropping on the conversation, sent glances full of understanding and pity in the direction of the anguished soldier ... Settler: "If that's the way you feel, why don't you ask to be released from the army?"

"You don't understand," corrected the soldier. "I was in America with my family and I came to Israel especially in order to volunteer for the Paratroops. All my friends are in elite units like Sayeret Matkal and Duvdevan and all kinds of combat units. What bothers me is that we've stopped being combat soldiers. We're just guarding settlers and chasing after Palestinians."

Another soldier joined the conversation: "Don't pay any attention to him," he apologized to the young settler. "His leftist friends have screwed him up with all kinds of nonsense. The guys in the company aren't like him. He's just deviant." "[Ed.]
- posted by Editor @ 1:59 PM

Guardian Unlimited | Arts | Wake up, Israel: "Wake up, Israel

Can music stop a war? The great Israeli pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim thinks so. As his 60th birthday nears, he tells Emma Brockes why he is now directing his fierce energies at the Middle East crisis - and why he thinks Sharon is a danger to his homeland. In an exclusive extract from his autobiography, he explains why he broke his country's Wagner ban

Friday September 6, 2002
The Guardi
..."I think Sharon is leading the country along a path that is, long-term, against the interests of Israel and the Jewish people. Time is not on Israel's side, nor are demographics.
...
It's time that somebody in Israel wakes up and sees that the Jewish people are on a path which, for the first time since the creation of the state, makes one doubt that there will always be a Jewish state in Israel. That would not have been possible 10 years ago"
- posted by Editor @ 1:31 PM

Guardian Unlimited | Arts news | Barenboim defies Israeli opinion: "Barenboim defies Israeli opinion

Jonathan Steele in Jerusalem and Reuters in Ramallah
Wednesday September 11, 2002
The Guardian

The Israeli conductor and pianist Daniel Barenboim took his campaign for greater Israeli-Palestinian understanding into the heart of the West Bank yesterday, where he played at a Palestinian high school and said he 'felt sorry' for any potential Israeli critics.

The performance at a Ramallah school by the musician who has been a vocal critic of the rightwing prime minister, Ariel Sharon, came six months after he was forced to cancel a performance in the city when Israeli troops said they could not guarantee his safety. "
- posted by Editor @ 1:27 PM

Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | I would have done the same: " would have done the same

My son was killed by a Palestinian fighter. But Israel's occupation is to blame for his death

Yitzhak Frankenthal
Wednesday August 7, 2002
The Guardian

My beloved son Arik, my own flesh and blood, was murdered by Palestinians. ... If to hit his killers, innocent Palestinian children and other civilians would have to be killed, I would ask the security forces to wait for another opportunity.
...
Our ethics are hanging by a thread, at the mercy of every soldier and politician.

It is unethical to kill innocent Israeli or Palestinian women and children. It is also unethical to control another nation and to lead it to lose its humaneness. It is patently unethical to drop a bomb that kills innocent Palestinians. It is blatantly unethical to wreak vengeance upon innocent bystanders.

It is, on the other hand, supremely ethical to prevent the death of any human being. But if such prevention causes the futile death of others, the ethical foundation for such prevention is lost
...
This lack of ethics is bound to corrupt us.

My son Arik was murdered when he was a soldier by Palestinian fighters who believed in the ethical basis of their struggle against the occupation. My son Arik was not murdered because he was Jewish but because he is part of the nation that occupies the territory of another."
- posted by Editor @ 12:52 PM

Ha'aretz - Article Thursday, July 18, 2002 : "A family argument

By Meron Benvenisti [former major of Jerusalem? [Ed.]

Demonstrators protesting against the Druckman Law in Jerusalem on Sunday. The sigh of relief heaved by the anti-racism fighters created a false sense of victory that repressed and ignored an entire system of official discrimination.
...
The outrage over the Druckman Law was attributed to its being the first time that the country's lawbooks would explicitly refer to different laws for Jews and non-Jews, other than the Law of Return. But in the 54 years of the state's existence, an entire lexicon of laundered euphemisms have obviated the need to bluntly define ethno-national discrimination - ranging from "the absentees," to "army veterans" and "those eligible for citizenship according to the Law of Return." Most of the national-ethnic discrimination is carried out by the Zionist institutions - the Jewish National Fund and the Jewish Agency - and they were deliberately established so the state would not be accused of deviation from universal norms.
...
It's not the Druckman Law and Adel Ka'adan's house that are the test of racism of Israel, but the collective discrimination against sectors that do not belong to the Jewish group - the Bedouin, the internal refugees, "unrecognized villages," cities and towns suffocating because of lack of room to expand, economic discrimination and racial prejudice camouflaged as "concern for security."
- posted by Editor @ 11:08 AM

Ha'aretz - Article Friday, June 28, 2002 : "Zionism or colonialism?

By Ze'ev Sternhell

It is generally accepted today that at this stage, the declared primary aim of Jewish settlement in the territories has already been achieved ...
...
The land was not empty of people: The slogan "A land without a people for a people without a land" was nothing but a gimmick for purposes of internal conviction, for silencing the conscience and for maintaining good public relations.
...
These children did not ask the soldiers to wipe out terror and strike at the terrorists, but "to kill as many Arabs as possible." One asked: "For me, kill at least 10"; another made an even simpler suggestion: "Ignore the laws and spray them."
...
Writing in the daily newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth (May 5), Emunah Elon, a spokeswoman for the settlers, does not apologize and does not see these letters as "an educational failure." No one is going to catch her in any admission of having lost the way: She praises these manifestations as "healthy hatred" (no less!) and also sees the suggestion to ignore the laws of the state as a healthy, practical and mature approach.
...
To this pass we - the people that was itself the victim of the values that are being preached at the educational institutions in the settlements - have come because of the abysmal scorn for human rights and because of the blind belief in our absolute right to rule this entire land and its inhabitants. Even the barbaric Palestinian terror cannot justify such bestiality. [Ed.]
- posted by Editor @ 10:42 AM

Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | Israel set on tragic path, says chief rabbi: "Israel set on tragic path, says chief rabbi

Guardian interview will shock Jewish community

Jonathan Freedland
Tuesday August 27, 2002
The Guardian

Britain's chief rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, today delivers an unprecedentedly strong warning to Israel, arguing that the country is adopting a stance 'incompatible' with the deepest ideals of Judaism, and that the current conflict with the Palestinians is 'corrupting' Israeli culture.
In a move that will send shockwaves through Israel and the world Jewish community, Professor Sacks departs from his usual policy of offering only public endorsement of Israel, and broad support for moves toward peace, by giving an explicit verdict on the effect that 35 years of military occupation and decades of conflict are having on Israel and the Jewish people.
'I regard the current situation as nothing less than tragic,' he tells the Guardian in an exclusive interview. 'It is forcing Israel into postures that are incompatible in the long run with our deepest ideals.'
He goes on to speak of being 'profoundly shocked' at the recent reports of smiling Israeli servicemen posing for a photograph with the corpse of a slain Palestinian. 'There is no question that this kind of prolonged conflict, together with the absence of hope, generates hatreds and insensitivities that in the long run are corrupting to a culture.' "
- posted by Editor @ 4:08 PM

The Observer | Special reports | Jacqueline Rose: This land is your land: "This land is your land

The first time Jacqueline Rose visited Israel she learnt that it was not her home. The second time, she found others who believe in a common future for Jews and Arabs

Observer Worldview

Sunday August 18, 2002
The Observer

My first visit to Israel in 1980 was hardly typical for a young Jewish woman. On the plane, I found myself sitting next to Dima Habash, 16-year-old niece of George Habash, the leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. 'Are you Jewish?' she asked, and when I said I was, without a moment's pause she continued: 'You think Israel belongs to you.'
'No,' I replied, surprised by my own urgency, 'I think it belongs to you.'
I am not an Israeli and I have never understood why, solely as a Jew, I should lay claim, over the Palestinians, to the land. I have never understood why the historic, biblical claim of the Jewish people, even when seared by the horror of the Holocaust, should usurp the rights of the Arabs who had lived there for hundreds of years. I was going as a stranger to see a sister, who was on an extended visit to the country. 'Come to Ramallah,' Dima insisted, 'so you can see the camps for yourself.' "
- posted by Editor @ 3:21 PM

Famous Zionist Leaders Quotes
- posted by Editor @ 3:09 PM

Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | 'It's gone beyond hostility' Suzanne Goldenberg
Monday August 12, 2002

Increasingly, Israelis are resistant to hearing or seeing anything that challenges their version of events, a nationally adopted cant that basically says: "We are the victims, they are terrorists and the whole world is against us."

Palestinians, naturally, see themselves as universal victims as well. The competition for victimhood reached its apogee a few days after September 11, when Palestinians and Israelis held candelight memorials with astoundingly similar placards: "We know how you feel, we are victims of terrorism too."
...

It is a kind of thinking that has overwhelmed Israeli society. Where racist remarks were once confined to a close circle of friends - whose views were known and presumably similar - the old inhibitions have slipped away. The slow winding down of a Friday afternoon into the Jewish Sabbath is a rarefied time in Jerusalem, a few hours when the city permits itself to relax. Government offices are shut. Shops and banks close early. Errands done, people while away the afternoon in cafes, as did we last week.

They were playing Edith Piaf and conversations started easily in Hebrew, English, Russian and French - for once not on "the situation" but movies, living in America, bad driving habits. Then the man at the end of the table chimed in: "Erasure," he said, inspired by talk of an Arnold Shwarzenegger movie. "That's what Israel needs to do." [Ed.]

There was a moment's embarrassed silence. We were strangers after all. But he persisted. "Imagine if you could erase them all, starting from Jerusalem, Tulkaram and Ramallah."
- posted by Editor @ 3:07 PM

Thousands attend peace rally; call for exit from territories: "Thousands attend peace rally; call for exit from territories

By Jonathan Liss and Amit BenAroya.
Ha'aretz
May 11, 2002

Tens of thousandsof peace activists gathered in Rabin Square in Tel Aviv on Saturday night for a Peace Coalition rally. 1,500 security guards and police officers were securing the event. Opposition leader MK Yossi Sarid (Meretz) and former Justice Minister Yossi Beilin spoke at the rally, as did entertainer Dudu Topaz and writer Amos Oz.

The Peace Now movement said that more than 100,000 people had attended the rally, while police estimates put the number at 60,000. The demonstrators held up signs calling for the withdrawal of IDF forces from the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and 'two states for two peoples.' "
- posted by Editor @ 2:56 PM

Telegraph | Opinion: "Ashamed to be Jewish
Date: 4 April 2002

SIR - The Palestinians have no helicopter gunships or tanks. They are occupied by Israeli settlers who behave in a manner that is, in many ways, similar to that of the Nazis in Hungary in 1944.

I do not think 14- to 18-year-olds need brainwashing to become suicide bombers, when they see their parents humiliated day after day, their houses destroyed, their injured relatives prevented from going to hospital, their friends shot and a future that is, at present, hopeless. They act as much out of sheer desperation as out of hate or hope for martyrdom.

Suicide bombers kill innocent children, youngsters and women. But the numbers killed fade into insignificance compared with the more than 600 women and children killed in Shatila by Falangists under the command of Ariel Sharon. Do not say he was not responsible; my father, killed in a concentration camp in 1945, was not killed by Adolf Eichmann, but Eichmann was still responsible.

Arafat may be a poor and two-faced leader, but he is not a war criminal, as Israel's leader is."
- posted by Editor @ 12:51 PM

Telegraph | News | Israel's wall sparks row among US Jews: "Mr Bronfman is known as one of the harshest critics of Aipac, one of the most powerful lobby groups in Washington, and of the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organisations, which he believes have been hijacked by hardliners"
- posted by Editor @ 9:14 AM

Telegraph | Opinion | No political imperative: "is it possible for us in the Jewish Diaspora to remain silent concerning those who are so passionately bent on destroying the rights of the families of those three quarters of a million indigenous people uprooted upon the justification of European anti-Semitism and the Holocaust?

We cannot purchase our freedom at the expense of the freedom of others. There has been enough blood shed since 1948, and to continue with half-truths and revisionist history to bolster a cause is a matter that must surely concern us all, be we Jew or Gentile.

An injustice of immense proportions has been suffered by the people who were born and lived in Palestine in comparative peace prior to the middle of the 20th century."
- posted by Editor @ 7:50 AM