Coteret

Americans raid settlements

Ben Kaspit, Maariv, November 25 2009 [page 5]

The Americans are taking off the gloves and going into the field: In the past few days, American diplomats, who apparently belong to envoy George Mitchell’s team, have started to travel through Judea and Samaria and tour the Jewish settlements there, holding interviews and inquiries with the local leaders and other settlers, in order to get the feel of the situation on the ground.

The first of these diplomats arrived on Monday in the settlement Efrat.  This is Cindy-Noga Trin, a diplomat stationed at the US consulate in Jerusalem, who appears to belong to envoy Mitchell’s team.  She visited Efrat, a large Jewish settlement, and interviewed Council Chairman Oded Revivi at length, and four additional residents (one of whom is a relative of Ari Harrow, the prime minister’s bureau chief).

Trin arrived in a bulletproofed van, accompanied by a driver and security guard, and was businesslike and polite.  She took out a thick notebook and filled it diligently.  Every word that came out of the mouth of Council Chairman Revivi, a lieutenant colonel in reserves, who was elected to his post about a year ago, was written down and filed.  “We want to get a feel on the situation on the ground,” she said to Revivi, “my next stops are Kiryat Arba, and then Tapuah junction.”

The conversation was similar to a cross-examination.  The bizarre part of the event was when the US diplomat repeatedly asked Revivi, “why aren’t you continuing to build?” and “who is preventing you from building?”  Revivi explained that Efrat had not received building permits for the past eight years.

Trin persisted: “The city is supposed to reach 30,000 residents, you have master plans here, who is stopping construction?  And how long haven’t you received permits?”  Revivi explained: “Here, in Givat Hazayit, in the heart of the settlement, there is no expansion of the perimeter line, there are plans here for 400 housing units, the Housing Ministry completed the infrastructure at an investment of millions, but the land is not being marketed.”  Trin asked, “why?” and Revivi said that he had no idea, and showed her two other hills (Givat Hadagan and Givat Hatamar) with the same problem.

Trin took an interest in the way of life in the settlement, the sources of livelihood and the relations with the Arab neighbors.  Revivi planned a tour for her in the nearby village, Wadi Nis, and coordinated the matter with the Arab residents, but Trin’s appearance with a large bulletproofed vehicle and security guards caused the village residents to change their minds.

Revivi told the American diplomat about the good neighborly relations with the village residents.  “There is no fence between Efrat and the Arab villages.  Together with our Arab neighbors, we fought against the fence and won,” he said.  “This is the only place where Arabs and Jews demonstrated today and prevented a fence.  Our Arab neighbors have called twice to warn us against terror cells that were on their way here, and the warnings proved to be true.  We provide Wadi Nis with doctors, medicines and water, we renovate their water lines, they work here, we visit there, the relations are excellent and there are friendships and a lot of mutual help.”

Revivi told Trin that although the American initiative looked like a clever way to bypass the relationship between the governments, he was very glad for it.  “President Obama is trying to solve this conflict by means of satellite footage,” he explained.  “If he were to go out into the field, see things up close, understand that we live here with our neighbors in coexistence and study the everyday life here, he would understand the complexity of the story better.”

The meeting lasted for more than an hour, in which Cindy-Noga Trin filled a notebook in small handwriting.  The feeling, Revivi said later, was of a painstaking and detailed cross-examination.  She did not miss a word, and wrote everything down.  When she asked him who was stopping the construction, Revivi raised an eyebrow, since it is the Americans, and mainly Trin’s boss George Mitchell, who are the address for this question, but he answered nonetheless.  Afterwards, Trin met with Boaz Columbus, principal of the high school in Karmei Tzur, and with Ora Yanai and Rahel Goshen, Efrat residents who belong to the founding generation of the settlement.  The last one to be interviewed was Eve Harrow, a relative of Ari Harrow, who deals with public relations.

This surprising visit to Efrat is supposed to be the first of a series.  The Americans are descending on [the settlements] in the field.  Mitchell is determined to understand what is happening on the ground, and to compare what is happening with what he is being told.  All this is taking place a few days before Prime Minister Netanyahu’s expected announcement of a construction freeze in the settlements—an announcement that will probably not satisfy the Palestinians.  Mitchell may be trying now to rectify the errors of the past and to check what is being done on the ground before he issues statements and demands that could complicate the situation of the sides.

The Shaya family in their Jaffa home

Despite this blog’s title, this post is on something you can read about in Haaretz. I do add some analysis and access to additional materials, but the primary reason for the divergence is emotional. Not only is this a story of extraordinary injustice, it is also about the family of a friend and colleague, Mary Koussa.

You can read the entire saga of the Shaya family in this Haaretz article, but the gist is fairly simple. In the 1920′s, Salim Khoury Shaya, head of Jaffa’s once prosperous Greek Orthodox Palestinian community, built a house for his family. He had seven children. In 1948, a census was taken of the remnants of Jaffa’s Palestinian community. Empty houses were taken over by the State of Israel, according to the Absentee Property Law (more about that at the bottom of this post). The Shaya house was a unique case. Three of the siblings were absent (in Lebanon), but four were present. So the State proclaimed itself “partner” and legally took over 40% of the house.

Decades passed and, except for a number of failed attempts in the 50′s and 60′s, to sue for full property rights, the Shaya family didn’t hear much from the government. Their area of Jaffa (near Ajami) was a slum no one was really interested in. That all changed about four years ago. The Jaffa coast went through accelerated gentrification and property prices skyrocketed. Amidar, the government owned housing company that administrates most Absentee Properties, saw an opportunity for a windfall. Contrary to popular perception, most of the Palestinians living in the area are not descendants of the pre-1948 residents, but descendants of refugees displaced during the war from other parts of the country, and are now tenants of Amidar. Therefore, their eviction, on a variety of pretexts, was relatively simple. In 2007-2008 alone, Amidar issued at least 400 eviction notices in the Ajami neighborhood.

The few Palestinian owners were more of a problem. But in 2007, some bureaucrat looking through old case files discovered the Shaya family’s vulnerability and hatched a plan — slap them with an exorbitant demand for years of back rent for the 40% of the house “owned” by the government and then demand that the “partnership” be dissolved through sale of the house to a third party. The Shayas don’t want to leave their ancestral home, but their attempts to buy out the State were rebuffed, and now Amidar and the Israel Lands Administration (ILA) have taken them to court. They want them out.

Even from the perspective of Lieberman’s Jewish-Nationalist school of thought there is much that is wrong with this story.  As a devil’s advocate, I would ask his disciples in the government, why persecute “good Arabs?”  The Shaya’s are fully integrated in Israeli society. One of the second generation siblings worked at the Tel-Aviv municipality for his entire life. An uncle was the first Palestinian policeman recruited in Jaffa by the Israeli government in 1949. A visitor at the Sunday family gatherings hears a mix of Arabic and Hebrew. Why is Israel taking them back to the Nakba that it wants to force them to forget through legislation?

For Israelis who still believe in a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and for genuinely “pro-Israel” Jews abroad, this kind of reopening of 1948, which is also happening in Jerusalem and Haifa, is no less than suicidal. It severely undermines the premise of 1967 as the starting point for a diplomatic solution, with its implications regarding the 1948 refugees.

For all Jews, or at least those that see Judaism as a culture and a moral code, rather than an ethnic filter, the story of the persecution of the Shaya family presents a grave injustice for which we, as a collective, are responsible. It often seems to me that the apparatus of our government has lost any sense of justice and morality. Indeed it took a Palestinian citizen of Israel, the family’s lawyer, Adv. Hicham Chabaita of Tel-Aviv University’s Human Rights Clinic, to point out the immorality of suit.

This is how Chabaita opens his defense (Hebrew original here):

Adv. Hicham Chabaita

As in the story of the ‘Pauper’s Lamb,’ the plaintiff, a government authority, is cynically requesting, with no shame whatsoever, to dispossess the defendants of the home that has been their property since it was built by their grandfather decades before the State was founded, and thus to expel them…This case is not a regular civil suit, despite attempts of the State to present it as such…We are speaking about hard, uncommon facts, an outcome of the unique context of the 1948 War.”

Right above is  an excerpt from Samuel II, chapter 12, verses 1-4. Here it is, English translation alongside Hebrew original.

So the Lord sent Nathan to David. When he came to David, Nathan said, “There were two men in a certain city, one rich and the other poor. The rich man had a great many flocks and herds. But the pauper had nothing except for a little lamb he had acquired. He raised it, and it grew up alongside him and his children. It used to eat his food, drink from his cup, and sleep in his arms. It was just like a daughter to him. When a traveler arrived at the rich man’s home, he did not want to use one of his own sheep or cattle to feed the traveler who had come to visit him. Instead, he took the pauper’s lamb and cooked it for the man who had come to visit him.”

Chabaita also reminds the court that the Israeli Supreme Court described the Absentee Property Law as “meant to fill a temporary role: to preserve absentee properties lest they become abandoned and open to looting.”  He also dug up the protocols of the Knesset debate around the enactment of the law and quotes the Members of the First Knesset, keenly aware of the circumstances of their own people, so recently displaced and dispossessed, describing its purpose in the same way.

The Tel-Aviv Magistrate will hear the case in January.

[You can write the Shaya family at shaya.house@gmail.com]

According to Haaretz, Israeli President Shimon Peres announced Yesterday (November 22 2009) after his meeting with Mubarak that once Israeli-Palestinian negotiations restart, Israel will freeze settlements. A closer look revealsthat he is promising something Israel is presently committed to — no new settlements, no land confiscation and evacuation of “outposts”. The headline may, however, may be indicative of a new Israeli messaging strategy — “we will freeze settlements but the Palestinians are refusing resume negotiations” — aimed at moving the ball to Palestinian court.

See this morning’s (November 23 2009) Yediot article below describing how the IDF is preparing for a settlement freeze “as part of Israel’s political preparations for a resumption of the talks with the Palestinians” and that this move “went hand in hand with President Shimon Peres’s statement yesterday in Cairo to the effect that Israel would cease all construction in the settlements upon the resumption of talks with the Palestinians.”

IDF prepares for construction freeze in settlements

Alex Fishman, Yediot, November 23 2009 [page 9]

The Defense Ministry’s legal counsel has recently finalized the preparation of military orders that enjoin a full moratorium on construction everywhere in Judea and Samaria.

The military orders were drafted in coordination with the Prime Minister’s Office as part of Israel’s political preparations for a resumption of the talks with the Palestinians. The orders that were drafted by the Defense Ministry will become “orders by the OC Central Command,” who is the sovereign over the West Bank, immediately upon a decision by the Israeli political echelon to resume talks with the Palestinian Authority.

In the course of their most recent visit to the United States, the defense minister and prime minister apprised senior American officials with whom they met, including President Barack Obama and special US envoy to the Middle East George Mitchell, of the preparations Israel was making in advance of the possibility that talks with the Palestinians would be renewed. In the course of those meetings an Israeli commitment was made to impose a complete moratorium on construction in the settlements.

In the past number of months there has been an unprecedented boom of both legal and illegal construction across Judea and Samaria. The legal construction involves construction work on the basis of old permits that were not acted on, as well as the approximately 3,000 permits that were issued by the Defense Ministry legalizing the completion of buildings that were already in the process of being built. The settlers’ various settlement apparatuses had also prepared well in advance for the possibility of a construction freeze and for the past number of months have been making a concerted effort to build as much as possible before the OC Central Command’s order goes into effect.

Informed sources said that Israel was likely to find itself facing a strongly-worded American protest once the latter realized, by means of aerial photographs and inspections on the ground, that the actual scope of construction in Judea and Samaria exceeded the scope that had been authorized by the Israeli government as it had been reported to the them. Informed sources in the security establishment said that issuing orders enjoining a construction freeze upon the resumption of the political negotiations went hand in hand with President Shimon Peres’s statement yesterday in Cairo to the effect that Israel would cease all construction in the settlements upon the resumption of talks with the Palestinians.

UPDATES

• Novemeber 24 2009 — Haaretz’s Akiva Eldar: Netanyahu new exactly what was going on.

ORIGINAL POST

Last week’s US-Israeli crisis following the announcement of new construction in Gilo was analyzed by three of Israel’s leading political and diplomatic commentators in the Friday Political Supplements. Haaretz’s Verter and Yediot’s Barnea see bungling. Maariv’s Ben Kaspit hints at a premeditated provocation.

Haaretz’s senior political analyst, Yossi Verter writes that Netanyahu was taken completely by surprise.

On Monday evening Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sat contentedly in his office at the Knesset…and then Yedioth Ahronoth journalist Shimon Schiffer called, seeking the reaction of the Prime Minister’s Bureau to the Americans’ statement of opposition to some building project in East Jerusalem.

What’s this about, Netanyahu asked his people. No one knew. Netanyahu asked them to call in Interior Minister Eli Yishai, whose purview includes Jerusalem. Yishai ran over from his office. That’s when they figured it out: It was about the northwestern part of the Gilo neighborhood. Netanyahu called several of the relevant players. He was told that this was strictly a technical matter, that on the following day, the Jerusalem District Planning and Building Commission would be approving the construction of 900 new housing units in the neighborhood.

He knew he was about to get slapped, but it is doubtful he imagined the barrage of condemnation: from U.S. President Barack Obama, who said the construction in Gilo did not contribute to Israel’s security

[...]

Yediot’s Nahum Barnea says basically the same, but blames Netanyahu fro bad staffing decisions (full translation here.)

Netanyahu was surprised to discover this week how little he knows about what is taking place in the state he heads. He did not know about the demolition of houses in East Jerusalem. He did not know about the Jerusalem municipality decision to approve the construction of 900 housing units in Gilo. He did not know about the request of special US envoy to the Middle East George Mitchell to delay the approval.

When Shimon Shiffer, Yedioth Ahronoth’s political affairs correspondent, asked the Prime Minister’s Bureau to comment on Tuesday evening, Netanyahu said he had no idea. Attorney Yitzhak Molcho, who was in the middle of a meeting with Mitchell in London, said that he heard of the American request only minutes earlier. He told Mitchell that he had no idea. He was concerned lest he get into trouble: Netanyahu had promised Obama full transparency, and what was emerging was muddy water.

Then it turned out that Mara Rudman, a top member of Mitchell’s team, that same day, had asked the Israeli embassy in Washington about the construction in Gilo. The request was relayed to the Prime Minister’s Bureau, but got stuck on the way. It turned out that Interior Minister Eli Yishai knew. He did not think he had to inform the prime minister.

The immediate reason for this failure is that the people with whom Netanyahu has manned his bureau are fine and good, but none of them is actually connected to the Israeli experience. They have no sources. They have no antenna. They live in a bubble, an aquarium. When Dov Weissglas was Sharon’s bureau chief, he managed by means of an interdisciplinary committee whose goal was to respond quickly and efficiently to any call from the American administration. Yoram Turbowicz, Olmert’s bureau chief, had a similar arrangement.

Maariv’s Ben Kaspit suggests that Netanyahu was purposely trying to provoke Obama.

What is really happening is that Netanyahu is trying to promote the political process with one hand, while attempting to delay it with the other.  This is a new version of a remark Ariel Sharon once made, speaking from the Likud Central Committee podium.  I am willing to help him, he said, but I do not know which of Bibi’s hands I should be helping, the right or the left.

Against this backdrop, suspicions emerged that the fact that the Americans protested the Gilo construction plan was actually leaked to Yedioth Ahronoth by members of Netanyahu’s inner circles in an attempt to make the Palestinians explode, to embarrass the Americans, and to slightly damage progress.  And thus, while Netanyahu of the big speeches talks about peace, Netanyahu of the back rooms engages in guerilla warfare.  “Only Bibi can,” Binyamin Ben-Eliezer said in a fascinating interview with Maariv’s Sofshavua Supplement.  He is right, of course.  Indeed, only Bibi can.  The only question is:  Does he want to?

Security checks at Israeli airports and border crossings are infamous among Palestinian-Israelis and internationals working in Israel (see this satire via Dion Nissenbaum at the Checkpoint Jerusalem blog; h/t Lara Friedman.)

Below is a Maariv article on the legal battle on this issue waged by one Palestinian-Israeli, Dannan Maarouf, and the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) against the Israeli GSS (General Security Service.)

Not a pleasant flight

Shmuel Mittelman, Maariv, November 18 2009 [page B8]

Dannan Maarouf can be quite pleased. Recently the courts instructed the Airports Authority to compensate him with NIS 1,000 plus NIS 250 in court fees. This was because of the inappropriate behavior of the inspectors in Ben-Gurion Airport before he flew out of the country. Maarouf alleged in his lawsuit that the inspection resulted in damage to both his property and his dignity, because it took place before everyone and took longer than necessary. The Magistrates Court ruled that the inspectors’ behavior was indeed discourteous, although Maarouf’s behavior was also out of place.

Furthermore, the court ruled that the security procedures were followed correctly in this instance, and that there was no evidence that Maarouf was discriminated against in the course of the inspection, but added that the Airports Authority officials ought to have conducted the inspection patiently.

If the promises delivered by the GSS are to become reality, than the flight and landing experience of Maarouf and other Israeli Arabs in the country’s main airport may become a great deal more pleasant. This follows many complaints by Arab Israelis over delays in flights, suitcases inspected before everyone, affronts to their dignity and public humiliation upon entering and exiting the country.

The GSS, with the aid of the Airports Authority, revealed this week that it has formulated a plan to significantly alter its security inspections. These changes will, within two to three years, reduce the “the differential component of inspection” — both in extent and in essence, thus minimizing and blurring the discriminatory inspection of passengers based on their groupings. This way the organization hopes to terminate or significantly lessen the damage caused to the Arab population, while maintaining a proper level of security. These important steps will require the purchase of equipment, new technologies and logistical preparations in Ben-Gurion Airport, which are expected to amount to some NIS 300 million.

However, even after the changes and steps aimed at easing [the passengers’ situation], GSS sources clarify that in light of the danger of terror to civil aviation in Israel in general, and in light of the great fear of an aerial mega-terror attack in particular, they will not be able to refrain from carefully checking certain populations that will be segmented by various data, while building a “risk profile” of a potential terrorist.

It would appear that this profile will also include the term “Arab,” but in reference to a smaller risk group than until today.  This step does not satisfy the human rights organizations.  The GSS is relying, on this matter, on the United States, where the court has permitted the use of risk profiles on the basis of ethnicity or race, in order to protect national security.

Cosmetic changes

The GSS revealed the expected changes in a detailed response that it submitted to the High Court of Justice following a petition of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI).  The petition said that the security checks were wrongful because they “discriminated against Israel’s Arab citizens on grounds of national and ethnic affiliation.”  The GSS and the Airports Authority have asked the High Court of Justice to reject the petition and enable implementation of the changes in a gradual manner.

Human rights organizations, however, have cast doubt on this, and say that the new measures are insufficient and that they are only “cosmetic.”  ACRI says in its petition, submitted by Attorneys Auni Bana and Dan Yakir, that the security checks at airports in Israel “puts an entire population group into the circle of suspicion, and exposes all its members to special checks due to their national affiliation.”  These checks, ACRI says, are “painstaking, invasive, troublesome and long,” and unlawfully infringe upon their constitutional rights.  Therefore, ACRI demands that security checks be carried out for all citizens, “on the basis of equal, substantive and uniform criteria.”

In a comprehensive response submitted by the GSS (by means of representatives of the State Attorney’s Office, Attorneys Osnat Mandel, Einav Golomb and Gilad Shirman), it insists that the system of security checks at Ben-Gurion Airport—“with all the changes that have been incorporated in it and will be incorporated in the near future”—is very different from the descriptions of the petitioner, and is conducted with a balance between security needs and the need to minimize the resulting harm to the population.

[…]

The GSS emphasizes that in order to thwart such terror attacks, it cannot base itself only on objective information and data about the passenger.  This is due to the limitations of intelligence information and the possibility of manipulations and exploitation of the passenger by terror organizations, even without his knowledge.

Conversely, an identical system of checks cannot be instituted for all passengers, since if such checks are “average,” this will lower the standard of checking that is currently employed.  However, if the level of checks is stringent, it will greatly burden all the passengers and critically damage the functioning of the airport and service to the passengers.  [The GSS] says that contrary to the assertion of the petitioner, there is no uniform stringent level of checks for all of Israel’s Arab citizens.  “In practice, most of this population undergoes quick checking procedures that do not cause an undue burden or delay,” it states.

[…]

UPDATE: November 20 2009 — The full translation of Gonen Ginat’s column can be seen here. The scan of the original clipping is here.

ORIGINAL POST

Noam Sheizaf at the excellent Promised Land blog spotted this particularly vile attack on J Street by the deputy editor of Sheldon Adelson’s Israeli Netanyahu fanzine, Israel Hayom, in the paper’s Friday (November 20 2009) edition.

Let’s see if Abe Foxman of the ADL (the acronym, it’s sometimes easy to forget, for the Anti Defamation League) is as quick to defend J Street as he was to jump to Sara Palin’s aid.

Some of Ginat's co-religionists outside the conference. (Photo credit: Matt Duss via Steve Clemons.)

Gonen Ginat is deputy editor for Israel Hayom, the free paper billionaire Sheldon Adelson has launched last year in support of Benjamin Netanyahu and that since became the second widely read paper in Israel.

(The not-so-secret admiration of Israel Hayom for the PM was demonstrated again this week, following a visit by Netanyahu to a navy base. The PM slipped on a boat, and nearly fell to the water. The day after three out of four dailies printed the pictures of Netanyahu loosing his footing, while oneshowed the PM in full command, standing next to the Chief of Staff. You can read more about it and see pics here.)

Back to Ginat. This weekend, Israel Hayom published its first weekend edition (what caused great concern among the other tabloids). Ginat holds the prestigious last page column of the political section, and he decided to make its debut with a brutal attack on J-Street. His entire article was dedicated to comparing the new lobbying group to a Jew named Yaakov Tachtenberg who published in April 33′ a statement in support of Nazi Germany.

It is no news that the only history lesson the Israeli Right attended was about Europe before WW2. with them it’s always 39′, everyone who doesn’t agree with them is an anti-Semite, probably a Nazi, and every Arab leader is Hitler (following this line, Netanyahu’s idol is Churchill). Egypt’s Nasser was Hitler, Arafat was Hitler, Ahmadinijad is Hitler, and only Abu-Mazen is not Hitler, just a Holocaust denier, i.e. a Nazi (That’s in Ginat article as well, by the way). But still, throwing the Nazi connection at the ever-so-careful people of J-Street, who open every sentence with “as Zionists and supporters of Israel”? That’s taking it a bit too far, I would say.

After quoting the Tachtenberg piece from 33′, and before quoting a similar article, written by a German “intellectual and reform Rabbi” (Ginat is Orthodox), Ginat writes:

“Soon they will be heating the ovens in Auschwitz, but the Jews of Germany didn’t let the facts reach them. Typical Jewish stubbornness, just like in J-Street (…). They published letters and made it clear that the fear of eradication is merely propaganda. With about the same words J-Street uses when Iran is discussed.”

Forget the fact that in 33′ nobody discussed eradication, not even the Nazis. Let’s listen to the deputy editor’s bottom line:

“Not that many years after (the holocaust), J-Street don’t get what’s wrong with hosting anti-Semites and cheering for holocaust deniers (…). Maybe they are right, maybe. On the other hand, when J-street find it difficult to figure who is right in the confrontation between Israel and Hamas, from the Middle East it is difficult, real difficult, to tell the difference between Tachtenberg and J-Street.”

In order to understand the dangers of this campaign, and how hypocritical the demand for “freedom of worship” is, it’s important to remember that Yitzhar’s Od Yosef Hai yeshiva was originally located at the tomb. Just last week the yeshiva’s dean published “The complete guide to killing non-Jews.”

Back to Joseph’s Tomb

Roi Sharon, Maariv, November 19 2009 [page 6]

The right wing has marked its next target: nine years after the IDF’s withdrawal from Nablus, right wing groups plan to restore the Jewish presence in Joseph’s Tomb.

The new initiative was born as a result of the current security situation in the Palestinian Authority territories, after many roadblocks to the Palestinian cities were removed. After the removal of the Hawara roadblock near Nablus, illegal visits to Joseph’s Tomb increased. Contrary to earlier years, when Joseph’s Tomb worshippers would infiltrate in the depths of night using various bypass roads, in recent months worshippers enter during daylight of day and via the main roads.

The promoters of this initiative are the hill top folks, residents of Samaria’s settlements, rabbis and long time settlers. A group of several dozens has united under the name “the Nablus core,” and in recent days began circulating a position paper which states: “for nine years now Joseph’s Tomb remains burnt, desecrated and abandoned…it is time to remove the stain.”

An epistle to be sent to Samaria residents in the coming days states: “for nine years Joseph’s Tomb has been forsaken and there is no Jewish presence in the city of Nablus. Nine years have passed since the destruction, burning and pogrom. We all recall and are pained with the sight, how hundreds of savages who defeated the Israeli Defense Forces, broke, burned and rejoiced. Have we forgotten? Have we grown despondent? We are determined to change the situation: not to forget. Not to grow despondent.”

“The vicinity of Od Yosef Hai Yeshiva in Nablus today stands abandoned, even though this is Israeli territory according to all opinions and even according to Israel law,” states the letter. “Never has their been an official decision concerning this shameful abandonment, it was executed quickly and unannounced, under pressure, at a time when the IDF was an all time low. Today there is no security impediment to dwelling in the area again, and it is realistically possible to secure the place. Today the roadblocks are all open, and every Arab from Balata enters and leaves Nablus freely, traveling to all destination of Judea and Samaria. And only we shall remain shut out?”

Organizers plan on recruiting as much wide spread support as possible through PR campaigns. As a second phase, organizers plan to pitch a protest tent at the entrance to Nablus. In the future they will attempt a march into the city towards the tomb. In the last phase, a massive entry into the vicinity of the tomb is planned, with the goal being to remain there.

Benny Katzover, who is involved with the initiative, told Ma’ariv last night that “the basic demand to allow Jews free worship is an elementary one which no people in the world would give up, and it is also mandated by the miserable Oslo Accords — just as is the case with Rachel’s Tomb in Bethlehem. We must battle in order to change this intolerable situation, in which this sacred place remains in a state of disgrace, destroyed and shattered, and Jews may enter it only once a month in the dead of night.”

RELATED POST: Religious freedom in Israel and the “one state reality”

On October 26 2009, the US State Department issued a scathing report on religious freedom in Israel and the Occupied Territories. On November 9, The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg expressed wonder at the fact that the report had not sparked a debate in Israel and among its supporters.

I’m a critic of the Goldstone report in good measure because of its source — the hopelessly anti-Israel United Nations, and its farcical Human Rights Council. But not all Israel investigations are created equal. When the United States State Department issues a new report cataloging the Israeli government’s double-standard on the protection of holy places, I think we have to pay a bit more attention. But I haven’t seen much of a debate, or introspection, about the State Department’s findings so far.

He was right. The report barely registered a blip in Israeli news reporting and the pundits ignored it completely. This morning (November 18 2009) Naomi Chazan, President of the New Israel Fund, broke the silence with an op-ed in Yediot, Israel’s largest circulation daily. Full text below.

Freedom of religion: At the bottom of the list

The State Department’s report is just a warning light, showing sincere friendly concern.  It should be viewed as a signal from a faraway friend relating the grave state we are in

Op-ed, Naomi Chazan, Yediot, November 18 2009

Recently we heard that a US State Department report that examined degrees of freedom of religion around the world put Israel at the bottom of the democratic states’ list.  According to the report, Israel treats other religions and certain Jewish currents unequally and often with disrespect.  According to the report, Israel has failed in every parameter of equality, liberty, and openness towards a variety of religious currents.  Reality as reflected in this report requires that we boldly examine where we came from and where we are headed.

The State of Israel was established by many groups that were identified with various religious and secular currents and that often clashed over the wishes each of them had to apply their views to the entire state.  Israel’s founding document, the Declaration of Independence, proclaimed pluralistic equality when it declared that the State of Israel “will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture; it will safeguard the Holy Places of all religions.”

Yet, this vision had enemies from day one.  Ironically, one of the declaration signatories, the late Minister David Tzvi Pinkas, fought against traffic on the Sabbath and anti-religious radicals attempted to assassinate him.  This example goes to show that brute force and intolerance come from every direction and attack everyone.

Over the years, however, a certain religious current assumed hegemony over religious issues in the State of Israel, even though it does not represent the majority of its citizens and is even rejected by certain parts of the Orthodox currents.  That hegemony established that there is only one way to be a Jew, marry, divorce, be buried, convert to Judaism, and give meaning to the vision of the Jewish state.  This monolithic approach, which confuses unity with uniformity, drove many groups away from Jewish heritage, and is far from reflecting the spirit of the Declaration of Independence, the world Jewry, and the wide diversity of Jewish views and expressions that exist in the 21st century.  This exacerbated tensions within the Israeli society and helped mutual disrespect, which has become increasingly typical of the Israeli way of life today, take deeper root.  Additionally, it contributes to the further alienation between the State of Israel and the world Jews, most of whom live in pluralist societies.

It is hard to overstate the threat this poses to the State of Israel’s inner strength and stability.  The State Department’s report is just a warning light, showing sincere friendly concern.  It should be viewed as a signal from a faraway friend relating the grave state we are in.  If we wish to continue existing as a state that belongs in the realm of open and democratic states, while offering a supportive and welcoming home for the various religious currents that exist inside it, the State of Israel must seriously address the grave consequences of the status quo in state-religion affairs that remains in effect.

The fact that a significant movement that promotes religious pluralism is evolving in the civilian society here is challenging the recurring attempts to further anchor the hegemony of the old religious establishment.  Furthermore, that movement offers a vision of hope and a different kind of relations between the various religious and secular groups in the Israeli society.  That pluralist, civilian movement shows its power by continuously creating various alternatives for weddings, other rituals, and Jewish identity as a whole.  Expanding further, these alternatives will eventually shed a ridiculous light on the current uniform religious hegemony.  Only then will Israel be taken off the list of countries where freedom of religion and conscience is restricted.

On its front-page, this morning’s (November 17 2009) Maariv runs an analysis piece by Ofer Shelah, a defense commentator at paper and a well known Israeli television personality.  Disturbed by the current settler-soldier rebellion in the West Bank, Shelah tells his readers that it is a product of “long-running processes,” through which the settler movement has infiltrated and co-opted the IDF. Shelah points out that the “army’s officers have learned that it is worth their while to get along with the…settlers” and asserts that the fundamentalist preaching that accompanied combat units during the Gaza war is now boomeranging.

The army is now eating the rotten fruits of long-running processes—for some of which it is to blame and for some of which it isn’t. With the army’s blessing, wholesale and premeditated law-breaking was carried and continues to be carried out with the establishment of outposts; the army’s officers have learned that it is worth their while to get along with the Judea and Samaria settlers, and its soldiers are put in impossible situations every day facing people, some of whom deny the legitimacy of the regime they represent.

[...]

Anyone who goes back and reads about the military rabbis, and the non-military rabbis, who walked around and met with the troops just before Operation Cast Lead and who talked about a holy war and who handed out booklets in which the enemy was described as Amalek [the Hebrews’ biblical nemesis whom they were divinely enjoined to destroy], those who thought that this well of motivation would be relegated only to the war against Hamas, will be given a stinging slap to the face.

Sheleh’s commentary (full text below) comes on the same morning that a recently retired IDF  general warns that the IDF “must not turn into the Phalangists” and a senior military analyst at Yediot asserts that Israeli inaction against settler lawbreaking “is providing the rope that will be used as a noose for the [Israeli Palestinian diplomatic] negotiations.”

This is only the beginning

Analysis, Ofer Shelah, Maariv, November 17 2009 [front-page]

The parents of the soldiers from the Nahshon battalion who held up protest signs against evacuating settlers and who were sentenced yesterday to time in the stockade, insist that their sons had not coordinated the act in advance but, rather, had acted spontaneously in response to the evacuation of the houses in Negohot. That could be, but it no longer makes much difference: after all, they were emulating exactly what the soldiers of another battalion in the same brigade did not long ago. And from the moment the pattern was set—holding up signs, making sure that there is someone around to photograph the event and send it to the media—the IDF has to realize that this is a phenomenon that is not about to go away.

It wasn’t born in a vacuum, of course. The army is now eating the rotten fruits of long-running processes—for some of which it is to blame and for some of which it isn’t. With the army’s blessing, wholesale and premeditated law-breaking was carried and continues to be carried out with the establishment of outposts; the army’s officers have learned that it is worth their while to get along with the Judea and Samaria settlers, and its soldiers are put in impossible situations every day facing people, some of whom deny the legitimacy of the regime they represent. On the other hand, the army was also used by a cynical regime and by the top commanding ranks, which enthusiastically took part in disengagement, in which Ariel Sharon used the army’s prestige as armor. In any case, the army can no longer claim its hands are clean and be horrified by the fact that some of its soldiers do not shrink from committing  political acts while still in uniform. The officers did this before them.

And those whose children don’t serve in infantry brigades that serve in the territories, particularly Kfir, whose soldiers spend nearly their entire service there, have no right to complain about those who do choose to do combat service and to become officers, who feel they have the right to express their views, especially since they are paying a price for them.

The message that the Kfir soldiers are sending is that this is only the beginning. A government that continues to hide its head in the sand, that continues to think that it is doing its job by one-time acts and plays a double and triple game with all the political sides, will get an army in which the political act, either by a lone soldier and then maybe of an entire unit, become more and more legitimate. A command level that continues to say “the army does not choose its assignments,” and does not set a clear red line between what the IDF does and what it does not do, will get units that will be torn apart from within. The chief of staff should remember very well the last time this happened, albeit on a small scale—in the ranks of the reserve corps in the years after the first Lebanon War.

Those who hope that the national-religious public will continue to produce an enormous number of officers and combatants and that this will not have an effect on the units’ functioning, should open their eyes. Anyone who goes back and reads about the military rabbis, and the non-military rabbis, who walked around and met with the troops just before Operation Cast Lead and who talked about a holy war and who handed out booklets in which the enemy was described as Amalek [the Hebrews’ biblical nemesis whom they were divinely enjoined to destroy], those who thought that this well of motivation would be relegated only to the war against Hamas, will be given a stinging slap to the face.

The Kfir soldiers must be punished, and not excessively severely, because that is military practice and law. But clearly this is not a punishment for them. They become heroes and models for emulation among their community. During disengagement, the commanders avoided dealing with the problem by keeping certain soldiers away, sometimes even certain units, from the inner circle of eviction. What was written on the signs held up yesterday, in the space between the lines, is very clear: don’t think that you can manage with this cosmetic act in the future too.

Major General (ret.) Elazar Stern, who served as head of the IDF’s Human Resources Branch, Chief Education Officer and the commander of the Officer’s Academy, is a product of the mainstream Religious-Zionist movement. In an op-ed placed alongside news reporting on the latest chapter of the settler-soldier rebellion in the West Bank, he makes an impassioned call to settler-soldiers to cease and desist from sedition. He minces no words in directly attacking the settler and religious leadership for its silence and in some cases support for the phenomenon.

This public will not lend a hand to turning the IDF into an army of Phalangists in which each soldier obeys only his local leader. They won’t permit a fulminating handful of people to drag them and us to that abyss.

The more important reason for why we need to respond to this provocation is that, regrettably, it enjoys a support system. Regrettably, someone who is already past the age of 18 perceives this action to be a form of Zionism, Judaism and a way of protecting the integrity of the Land of Israel.

[...]

But more disturbing for me is the resounding silence of a preponderance of the religious public’s leaders. Perhaps they are not aware of the gravity of the implications of these precedent-setting actions, not only for democracy in Israel but, first and foremost, for their own community.

Stern’s op-ed is part of a two-page spread on the issue. Facing it is an analysis piece by Yediot’s senior military analyst, Alex Fishman, who angrily asserts that “with our own [Israeli] two hands, are providing the rope that will be used as a noose for the [Israeli-Palestinian diplomatic] negotiations.”

See below for the full text of Stern’s op-ed.

We must not turn into the Phalangists

Op-ed, Elazar Stern, Yediot, November 17 2009 [page 6]

The author is a major general in reserves and served in the past as the director of the IDF’s Human Resources Branch, chief education officer and the commander of the Officer’s Academy

There are many religious soldiers in the army. The absolute majority of them regard actions as these as an extremist phenomenon that threatens them as well. They are the ones who pay the price for it because they are perceived as potentially insubordinate soldiers. And they have already proven in difficult tests that that is not the case. The absolute majority among them has shown a mature and profound understanding of the army’s duties in a democratic society. Just as they did not disobey orders during disengagement, I am confident that they will not disobey orders in the future as well. This public will not lend a hand to turning the IDF into an army of Phalangists in which each soldier obeys only his local leader. They won’t permit a fulminating handful of people to drag them and us to that abyss.

The more important reason for why we need to respond to this provocation is that, regrettably, it enjoys a support system. Regrettably, someone who is already past the age of 18 perceives this action to be a form of Zionism, Judaism and a way of protecting the integrity of the Land of Israel. He is so confident in the justness of his position that he is not ashamed to give financial rewards to future insubordinate soldiers. Only a disgraceful educational and religious failure could prompt a person bearing the title of rabbi to seduce and to remunerate his flock with money. I hope that the law enforcement authorities have been looking into the question of whether the people who pay soldiers to break the law aren’t breaking it themselves.

But more disturbing for me is the resounding silence of a preponderance of the religious public’s leaders. Perhaps they are not aware of the gravity of the implications of these precedent-setting actions, not only for democracy in Israel but, first and foremost, for their own community.

The very fact that kippa-wearers are responsible for these phenomena has contributed to having the army closed to Judaism. These phenomena prompted, and justly so, army commanders to cancel Sabbath hosting for soldiers by religious families. Those very same commanders are afraid that in the course of those weekends the soldiers will be exposed not only to good old Jewish culture, but also will be urged to disobey orders.

If it becomes evident that the soldiers in question are students of a hesder yeshiva, and if they received the support of their rabbis from that yeshiva, the army’s arrangement with those yeshivas needs to be stopped. If their rabbis do not support the action that was taken by the soldiers, it is incumbent upon them to say so out loud and clearly, and to remove those soldiers from the hesder yeshiva program of their own volition, before the IDF does so. If they fail to take that course of action, that too will serve as a clear statement. Clear and dangerous.