Attorney General Menachem Mazuz decides to put Balad Knesset member on trial for alleged contact with foreign agent during 2007 trip to Syria when he met with PFLP number two and tried to meet with Khaled Mashaal.
Israeli Palestinians
Jonathan Cook gave a talk to a visiting delegation from Belgium in Bethlehem on 5 December 2009. Much of the talk, presented in five parts, is included here. It covers a wide range of topics, including Israel’s development of the homeland security industry, its economic dependence on US aid, its use of Gaza as a laboratory for experimentation in warfare, its need to promote a global clash of civilisations, and the increasing promotion of Jewish religious fundamentalism.
For additional Jonathan Cook interviews: www.jkcook.net/Interviews
Jonathan Cook: A recent report from Israel’s National Insurance Institute showed that half of all Arab families in Israel are classified as poor compared with just 14 per cent of Jewish families.
Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz appears to have been unaware of some important facts when he said at a recent conference on discrimination that Arab society in Israel is partially responsible for the low levels of employment for Arab women.
The results of the study show the textbooks are full of spelling and grammatical errors, and that a direct link can be demonstrated between the poor quality of the books and the poor level of Arabic among first and second graders.
The judge accepted the defense attorney’s claim that the youth must be “protected against justice” and said that sentencing the Nazareth citizen to prison would be contradictory to the principles of justice of the country.
A Tel Aviv-Jaffa City Council member resigned Sunday in protest of what he called “efforts to erase any memory of Arab names and identity from the city.” The municipality also failed to mark the new street name in Arabic, despite most residents of the neighborhood being Arabs. “It’s not enough that they ignore our requests, but how can they ignore the fact that a third of Jaffa’s population are Arabs?” Masharawi said Friday. “I’m afraid this is intentional, and motivated by a desire to Judaize Jaffa, to draw more Jews to the city.”
During the discussion, Tibi added that the proposed law reminded him of the “thought police” in George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984.
Israel’s Education Ministry has recalled all copies of a history textbook because of a passage alleging “ethnic cleansing” of Palestinians during the 1948 war, a newspaper reported on Monday. Israel’s Haaretz newspaper said the secondary school textbook was removed from shelves because it sought to present both Israeli and Arab perspectives on the departure of some 750,000 Palestinians during the fighting that erupted after the creation of the Jewish state.
IOA Editor: “Deny, deny, deny…” see No Atonement
“The police commissioner has apparently forgotten that Umm al-Fahm and Ramle are parts of the State of Israel,” Al-Sana said. “The residents of these Arab communities are not demanding independence and are not undermining Israeli sovereignty – and are fighting for their equal civil rights and social justice.”
While Israel often accuses Palestinians of misusing ambulances as cover for attacks, a new report from the country’s second-largest newspaper suggests Israel may want to clean up its own house.
The [Israeli] police have recently started operating an undercover unit among Israeli citizens. Some two months ago, Police Commissioner David Cohen said the force had “no intelligence infrastructure to deal with the Arab community.”
According to the Saban Center poll, 55% of Israeli-Arabs surf the Internet on a near daily basis, 14% go online a few times a week, and only 24% do not use the Internet at all.
To protest the killing of 13 Palestinian demonstrators in 2000, stop land confiscations and house demolitions, advance full civic and national rights for Arab Palestinian citizens.
Participation of foreign diplomats represented a turning point in the way that the world treated relations between Israel’s Arab population and the state… About a month ago, The Higher Arab Monitoring Committee decided to declare a general strike in all Israeli Arab communities on Thursday, October 1st.
IOA Editor: The participation of foreign diplomats in events related to the General Strike would be a remarkable change, and would add to Israel’s feeling of growing global pressure. Let us hope that this will actually happen.
“The Jewish soul is a precious, all-too-rare resource, and we are not prepared to give up on even a single one”
Hadash Chairman Mohammad Barakeh said the statistics were the result of long term government policies: “We are living in two states here. This is the result of actions by generations of Israeli governments. The data speaks for itself… It’s a policy meant to place the Arab citizens under siege and it translates into poverty”
Two cases brought before Israeli courts last week revealed the attitude of the establishment towards Palestinian Arab citizens of the state. One shows how Palestinian citizens are treated as victims of police brutality, and the second shows how they are regularly victimised because of their opposition to injustice.
“There is so much paranoia from the government, the municipality and the courts about Muslims using this mosque again,” said Nuri al-Uqbi, a 67-year-old Bedouin activist in Beersheva. “It was built with money raised from the local Bedouin and we should have the right to pray in it.”
Currently the fight against [Arab-Jewish] intermarriage is spearheaded by the Yad L’Achim organization . Not long ago its chairman, Rabbi Shalom Dov Lipschitz, wrote to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Education Minister Gideon Sa’ar, warning of “a fundamental failure in the Jewish education and values in the secular education system in Israel.”
IOA Editor: This is traditional racism at its very best: such attitudes – the separation of couples on racial grounds – are well known in European and North American history, and elsewhere. This news story is important because in the “advanced” countries that Israel would like to associate with and be treated as an ally of, such behavior would be rejected, and is generally outlawed. One would think that such blatantly racist practices are not in Israel’s self-interest, yet it involves organizations which benefit from government support, possibly involving high level government officials.
“Out of 20 percent of the population of the state, not one Arab could be found who would be qualified to be honored with serving on the committee?”
It would seem that as long as Arab educators, academics and policymakers are excluded from planning, there will be no improvement. The Arab minority constitutes nearly 20 percent of Israel’s population, but has little to no real influence over its own education policy, budgets, standards or curricula.
The performances of Amos Kenan’s play “Friends Talk about Jesus,” scheduled for next week at the Arab-Hebrew Theater of Jaffa, have been canceled due to opposition from Jaffa residents.
A ministerial panel approved Sunday a bill to ban funding by the state of groups that mark the Palestinian Nakba, which commemorates Israel’s independence as a day of mourning… The bill is the revised version of a proposed law scrapped two months ago – after opposition from several ministers – that would have forbidden Israeli Arabs from commemorating the Nakba, or “catastrophe,” on Independence Day.
The proposal by Transportation Minister Yisrael Katz to redo all signs so that even names written in Arabic will be transliterations of Hebrew (for example, the city known as Jaffa in English will now be written as Yafo on signs in Arabic, not Yaffa), was received like all other injuries to Arabs: easily – like Arab high-schoolers’ matriculation results or Arab infants’ high mortality rates.
Housing Minister Ariel Atias… warned against the spread of Arab population into various parts of Israel, saying that preventing this phenomenon was no less than a national responsibility. “I see [it] as a national duty to prevent the spread of a population that, to say the least, does not love the state of Israel,” Atias told a conference of the Israel Bar Association, which focused on a reforming Israel’s Land Administration.
It seems that never before has so much been written and said about the “natural growth” of so few… Maybe it is no coincidence that the government spokespeople insist on describing the homes for “sons returning from the army” rather than homes for young couples, or students. Someone might dare to check the housing situation in Arab villages or East Jerusalem, whose residents actually on Israeli soil as opposed to the settlers.
Residents of the Misgav bloc of communities in the Galilee consider themselves to be liberal, peace-loving people who support coexistence with their Arab neighbors… Which is why they were shocked this week when proposals raised at local council meetings to accept only applicants who shared their Zionist principles drew negative headlines and criticism for alleged racism.
A million and a half Arab citizens cannot be expected to recognize Israel as a Jewish and Democratic State. They want it to be “a state of all its citizens” – Jews, Arabs and others. They also claim with reason that Israel discriminates against them, and therefore is not really democratic.
A million and a half Arab citizens cannot be expected to recognize Israel as a Jewish and Democratic State. They want it to be “a state of all its citizens” – Jews, Arabs and others. They also claim with reason that Israel discriminates against them, and therefore is not really democratic.
The survey shows that Holocaust denial among Israeli Arabs has become more prevalent in recent years… “This radicalization in the positions of Arabs was caused by a series of factors such as the Second Lebanon War, the stalemate in the negotiations with the Palestinians.”
Hadash Chairman MK Mohammed Barakeh: “Passing our heritage from one generation to the next is essential for our steadfastness and survival in our homeland. Our survival is not open to interpretation or negotiation, and is our formative feature as a community that narrowly escaped the threat of expulsion and remained in its country.”
A complaint of racism and incitement has been lodged against an Upper Nazareth city councillor who called for Arabs to “disappear,” in an Independence Day greeting to local residents… Upper Nazareth is a sister city to Nazareth, the largest Israeli Arab municipality in Israel.
IOA Editor: Referring to Upper Nazareth as a “Sister City” to Nazareth is quite remarkable: Might the Haaretz editors mean the younger sister who sneaked up behind her older sibling, stabbed her and grabbed her jewelry?
Ms Zoubi, 39, a representative of the Tajamu Party, known for its Palestinian nationalist platform, has already shown she will not be following in their path. On a recent induction day for Knesset members, she made headlines locally when she pointed out to an official who repeatedly referred to “the territories” that he meant “the occupied Palestinian territories”.
