Jewish Care is a charity that “runs over 70 centres and services, caring for more than 7,000 people every week. We believe Jewish people should have access to specialist services that are designed to meet their needs. This is reflected in the care we provide which recognises traditions, beliefs and cultures, which are frequently shared by Jewish people. We offer care in an environment that recognises and respects our clients’ Jewish identity. We celebrate Jewish festivals and make Shabbat, helping people feel safe and comfortable in a ‘heimische’ atmosphere, at a time when they may feel most vulnerable. We work right across the community and provide care regardless of the level or nature of an individual’s religious observance. In doing so, our care recognises people’s differences as well as their similarities.

The Gospel according to Sand: We are not Jews

In How and When I Stopped Being Jewish (Hebrew only) author and professor Shlomo Sand argues that there is no such thing as a secular Jew.

By Ofer Aderet, Ha’aretz
May 19, 2013

Professor Shlomo Sand opens his new book, “How and When I Stopped Being Jewish,” with a warning. “Many readers will see the main point presented in this book as illegitimate and even infuriating. Many of the secular people among them who insist on defining themselves as Jews will reject it out of hand. Others will see me as a vile, self-hating traitor.”

Sand, a 66-year-old history professor at Tel Aviv University, does not seem to suffer from lack of self-confidence, nor does he have any difficulty expressing himself. On the contrary, the thousands of students packing the lecture halls to hear him speak over last three decades attest to his uncanny ability to distill controversial assertions into supremely fluent language.

Why, then, would this well-known, veteran professor feel compelled to open his new book with such a warning? Perhaps he has learned from experience, having authored the two previous books in the series, “The Invention of the Jewish People” (published in English by Verso Books, 2009) and “The Invention of the Land of Israel: From Holy Land to Homeland” (Verso Books, 2012). Both generated a great deal of controversy, some particularly harsh, within academia and among the general public as well.

“I suffer from people who don’t understand me — in class or in a press interview. But that’s very normal. I take into account that some people won’t understand me,” Sand says. “It’s not always easy for me to write for every person. I can’t write like [politician and journalist] Yair Lapid, but I try to be accessible.”

In the two preceding books, Sand claims that the notion of a unified Jewish people was invented, based on myths and fictional accounts, in order to further Zionist ideals. And it is this faulty logic, he says, that served as the excuse for the establishment of the State of Israel. Now, in “How and When I Stopped Being Jewish” (Kinneret Zmora-Bitan), Sand takes secular readers a step further, asserting that if there is no such thing as a Jewish people, then secular individuals cannot, by definition, be Jewish. Step by step, he undermines, weakens and deconstructs the identity of secular Jews.

“People tell me I belong to the nation of Albert Einstein, but I — Shlomo Sand — feel closer to the Israeli culture of Arik Sharon than to the German culture of Einstein,” he says. In other words, Sand does not identify with a Jewish nation, but rather with an Israeli one. “Ask me if I like it — not particularly, but I accept it as reality,” he says.

Marx, Freud and Einstein: Good for the Jews?
In “How and When I Stopped Being Jewish,” Sand asks whether there exists a secular Jewish culture that unites non-observant Jews throughout the world. He attempts, uncomfortably, to clarify whether there is a “Jewish component” that connects the philosophies of famous secular Jews such as Marx, Freud and Einstein.

“Did ‘Das Kapital,’ the theory of the unconscious and the theory of relativity contribute in any way to the shaping and preservation of secular Jewish culture?” he asks. In Sand’s view, the answer is no.

“Is Arthur Koestler, bold and provocative as he is, a Jewish writer? Did Serge Gainsbourg, of whom I’m a long-time admirer, write and sing Jewish songs rather than French ones, and no one ever knew it?” he asks sarcastically.

Sand even tries to take humor away from the Jews, asserting that figures such as Sholem Aleichem and Woody Allen, for example, drew on “Slavic-Yiddish humor” – a culture that, according to Sand, died out long ago. Though certain veins of humor mistakenly labeled as “Jewish” do indeed arouse strong feelings of nostalgia among many Diaspora Jews, Sand points out that these types of humor were never viewed as particularly funny by Jewish writers in Iraq, whose humor, he argues, is based on a different sort of logic.

If this is true, then what forms the basis for secular Jews’ Judaism? What connects secular Jews from Tel Aviv with non-believing Jews from Paris or New York? In Sand’s opinion, there is no connection.

“Those who are called ‘secular Jews’ don’t have a way of life in common. They don’t experience day-to-day pain and joy that connect them to other secular Jews throughout the world,” he says. “They speak, weep, make their living and create in their own languages and national cultures.”

So what’s left? If secular Jews share no mutual religion, no culture, no way of life, what can explain their inclusion in an exclusive nation? A few Jewish holidays and ceremonies? Sand seeks to undermine even that much. “Theodor Herzl, the founder of the Zionist movement in the late 19th century, celebrated Hanukkah with a Christmas tree and did not circumcise his son,” he points out. “On the basis of those practices, can he be considered a Jew or a Christian?”

A Jewish state incapable of defining Judaism
Sand’s book is disturbing, challenging, annoying, yes, and thought-provoking. “The deeper we delve into the subject, the more we have to admit that there is no unifying Jewish culture that is not religious,” he tells Haaretz. “You and I have a day-to-day experience and existence that are very much Israeli. They may have Jewish and Yiddish sources, but they’re Israeli.”

Today, this confusion in defining a “Jewish people” manifests as confusion in justifying a Jewish state, Sand asserts, presenting what he sees as the “cardinal claim” of the State of Israel: “It defines itself as a Jewish state, or as the state of the Jewish people across the world, but is not capable of defining who is a Jew.”

“No linguistic or cultural criterion can contribute to the definition of who is a Jew, since the descendants of Jews never had a language or secular culture in common,” he says. This explains why, in Sand’s view, Israeli legislators could fall back only on religious criteria in determining what constitutes Jewish identity: those born to Jewish mothers or who undergo an authorized conversion process.

Yet one need not go to any great lengths to find the inherent contradictions in this definition, as Sand deftly points out. “The state of the Jews isn’t all that Jewish. Being a Jew in the State of Israel doesn’t mean you have to observe all the commandments and believe in the Jewish God. You can explore Buddhist beliefs, as Ben-Gurion did, or eat shrimp, as Arik Sharon did. You don’t have to cover your head — most of Israel’s leaders and army generals don’t cover theirs.”

One of the major problems that arises from this confused definition, according to Sand, is the inherent discrimination shown by the Jewish state to Arabs living within its borders. “Being a Jew in Israel means, first and foremost, not being an Arab,” he writes, comparing the elevated status of Jews in Israel to that of whites in the American south through the 1960s, French settlers in Algeria before 1962, and white and Afrikaner residents of South Africa before 1994.

At the end of this list, Sand adds, with some reservation, Nazi Germany as well. “Maybe soon [the status of the Jewish Israeli] will also appear similar to the status of the Aryan in Germany of the 1930s,” he writes. In parentheses he adds, “I absolutely refuse to consider any sort of comparison to Germany in the 1940s.”

Why did you include the Nazis in that list?
“I hesitated when I wrote that, but I don’t want to be careful with the Israelis. I can’t treat Israelis with kid gloves in the early 21st century.”

What do you mean when you compare the State of Israel to Nazi Germany?
“I make a distinction between the 1930s and the 1940s. In the 1930s, they excluded the Jews, but they allowed them to leave. In the 1940s, they killed the Jews. There’s a significant difference. But the fact that the mayor of Upper Nazareth has kept his job even after stating, in 2013, that Arabs were not wanted there, this begins to remind me of the exclusion of the Jews. There is no historical comparison, however, between Zionism and Nazism. In no way whatsoever do I say that it will end in annihilation.”

The Holocaust is not absent from Sand’s book, however. In fact, according to “How and When I Stopped Being Jewish,” the Holocaust has become an important aspect of secular Jewish identity.

“The symbolic capital derived from the suffering of the past is supposed to be passed down in ink like any other capital,” Sand writes. “The Holocaust industry sought to maximize the suffering of the past and derive from it as much political and even financial capital as possible.”

“Instead of the old religious identity of the ‘chosen people,’ what arose was an extremely beneficial modern secular ritual of not only ‘the chosen victim’ but also ‘the exclusive victim.’” That same “chosen victim” became an “exclusive” one when he methodically began to ignore the other victims of the Holocaust, Sand asserts, until eventually “the genocide received Jewish exclusivity.”

“Since the last quarter of the 20th century, almost all other victims of the Holocaust whom the Nazis did not mark as ‘Semitic’ have vanished,” he writes. “From then on, all comparison with other acts of genocide was forbidden. … Any crime of the past or the present necessarily paled next to the great massacre of the Jews during World War II.”

Thus it is Hitler who has proved the victor of World War II, Sand claims. “Although he was defeated militarily and politically, only some years later the core of his perverted ideology seeped once more to the surface, and today it is alive, kicking and menacing.”

Sand is not referring here to anti-Semitism but to the way he says many Jews use racist doctrine to their advantage. “The perception of the Jews as a nation and a race whose traditional characteristics are passed down through heredity in some invisible way is still very much alive. Yesterday it was simple physical characteristics such as blood or facial structure. Today it’s DNA,” he writes. “Hitler’s desire to remove the Jews from ‘normal’ humanity was fulfilled in a perverted way by the politics of memory adopted by Israel and its followers in the Western world.”

Below, the Deborah Taylor nursery school, Leeds. Which is more significant – it was started by Orthodox Jews, or it caters for ‘the entire Jewish community’, including non-believers?

Beyond Bagels and Nazis

Judging the Jewish Quartely-Wingate Prize 2013

By Sam Leith, Jewish Quarterly
January 2013

The brief for the Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Prize is wonderfully — and, you could say, appropriately — open to interpretation. What does it mean to explore “themes of Jewish concern in any of its myriad possible forms either explicitly or implicitly” — and who is the “general reader” for whom that exploration is intended to be enlightening? That is the starting point and, to mix a metaphor, the touchstone for the judging process of the award, on the judging panel of which this year I had the honour to serve as the token goy (occasioning multi-recipient emails that might end: “Shabbat shalom and g’mar v’hatima tova and, Sam — Hi!”)

That openness to interpretation was part of what made the process as rich and thought-provoking as it was. Also, as fun. As judges we found ourselves asking things like: “Is a biography of a Nazi ipso facto a book that explores themes of Jewish concern?” Or: “Is this a distinctively Jewish story, or just a story with a lot of Jews in it?” Or: “This is a cookbook. Yes. But does containing bagels make the difference?” These inquiries can become — I was going to say “Jesuitical”, but perhaps “Talmudic” would be the word.

Yet you can make decisions about these things. It’s not meaningless to talk about topics of Jewish interest. If we sometimes differed in emphasis — hard to call, for instance, were a pair of books about the contributions of Jewish scientists to particular areas of physics; can science be Jewish? — we were more or less always able to reach agreement in substance. Our deliberations have been, you’ll be disappointed to learn, amicable. No tantrums, no resignations, no cries of “Clive Lawton! May his name be blotted out!” This shortlist is one that we’re all proud to own.

As the aforementioned token goy, my role, in part, was to represent that “general reader”. In our deliberations we came across some books, for instance, that seemed more hermetic than others: Jew speaking, as it were, unto Jew. While none of us ruled out esoterica — contributions to complex internal debates within Judaism or Jewish identity theory — these contributions needed to provide the outsider with a way in.

Just as my fellow judges, in theory, may have been less equipped to sense when something wasn’t speaking to the outside world, there were other qualities to which I will have been tone-deaf. Clive and Hephzibah, for example, were able to testify — as I could never do with authority — to the social accuracy of one of the books that came very close to being shortlisted, Francesca Segal’s fine first novel The Innocents. This, said Clive, uniquely among the submissions, nailed the North London Jewish world: “I know these people,” he said. I could admire Segal’s coolly well-constructed sentences, but I couldn’t know these people in the way my fellow judges did.

I was looking, finally, for books that would tell me something I didn’t know — which is not just a matter of providing facts or ideas I hadn’t come across, but of giving an entry-point to a Jewish perspective . I was grateful to be introduced, for instance, to some chewy discussions of the political theory of Zionism. I encountered a fresh line on Adorno’s famous (and, to my mind, regrettably silly) remark about poetry being impossible after Auschwitz; my objection was and remains Adorno’s implied ideas about poetry, but seeing it worked through from the Auschwitz end of things was enlarging. I learned from brisk books about prewar antifascism in London and the banjaxed history of Palestinian solidarity movements among Israelis.

On the face of it, it’s a very diverse shortlist indeed — both in subject matter, historical reach, style of approach and genre. We have men and women, Americans and Israelis and Brits, enormous publishers and tiny ones, fat books and thin ones, funny ones and serious ones, novels and short stories and narrative histories. We’re pleased with that diversity, though we didn’t aim for it.

We didn’t arrive at formal criteria of what it meant to be “of Jewish interest”. I think that was right. As one of the books on our shortlist, Bernard Wasserstein’s On The Eve, shows: defining or ringfencing Jewishness, particularly in opposition to particular ideas of non-Jewishness, is something with not only intellectual but moral hazards. It’s a non-neutral move — a decisive contribution to the long, long conversation about wagon-circling versus assimilation.
Instead we took the view that — as per Jonathan Miller’s gag about being “Jew-ish”— “of Jewish interest” was something we couldn’t and shouldn’t define, but we knew it when we saw it. And, more importantly, once you were, as it were, in the corral you competed on literary quality rather than Jewishness. A book could be called Mazel Tov! and tell the story of 400 Hasidic Jews emigrating from Temple Fortune to Jerusalem while reflecting on the Torah and eating gefiltefish, but if it was badly written, it could lose out to a well-written book about koi carp by a guy called Cohen.

The Jewishness, in other words, could enter sideways. Cynthia Ozick’s Foreign Bodies, for instance — a tragicomic variation on Henry James’s The Ambassadors — is set between Manhattan and postwar Paris. There the war, and what it meant, no more than lends a sinister perfume to the atmosphere of this very funny, very composed, mercilessly observed cakewalk over the edge of a cliff. One of our nonfiction titles, Stanley and Munro Price’s spry and elegant The Road To Apocalypse, is actually about an evangelical Christian: yet the beguiling story of the early 19th-century Christian Zionist enthusiast Lewis Way is, as it turns out, illuminating about the modern alliance between the US Christian Right and militant Israeli nationalists.

It was interesting, though, looking back from our shortlist to see what came in by way of submission: a piecemeal portrait, if you like, not necessarily precisely of Jewish writing or writing about Jewry and Judaism, but (self-selectingly) of what publishers think the Jewish-Quarterly Wingate Prize might think that category means. Naturally, some things came not single spies: anything to do with Israel being one well-represented category; and anything — even peripherally — to do with the Holocaust being the other. The Holocaust, even a lifetime on, is still the big presence in Jewish letters — under pressure, it seems to me, from impulses that pull in different directions: to memorialise it; to resist being defined by it.

We had a handful of what I have come to think of, slightly sourly, as “cache-in-the-attic” books. That is, memoirs or family histories which proceed from a dusty bundle of letters or photographs, discovered mouldering in the loft and giving rise to the author’s investigation of a grandparent’s time in the camps. I talk about these as if they are a distinct genre, and I think there’s a case that they are.

We’ve had the survivor-memoirs; now the second generation interrogates the silences of those who did or did not survive. For this generation, the Holocaust is a historical idea rather than a series of events through which people you know have lived.

The relation of genre to the Holocaust is a particularly difficult one, though. People who talk about “the Holocaust industry” are generally using the phrase sneeringly. But there is, undoubtedly, a vast and still-growing body of literature about the Holocaust; and like other bodies of literature it will tend to segment into genre. The further we come from the raw first-person testimony of the survivor, I’d suggest, the more entrenched those genres will become and the more literary their treatments.

That, I’d suggest, is a problem. Truth-to-fact (and especially the fact of particularity, the singularity of experience) and truth-to-genre do not pull the same way. Cliche — even second-order cliché — deadens and falsifies. This is a practical, a literary, problem in memoir and realist fiction. It’s a bigger problem — a more than literary problem—when it comes to the Holocaust: where “bearing witness” is enjoined; where the historical particularity (indeed, the historical uniqueness) of the Shoah is central article of the way it’s understood in the community.
An approach to this problem — or, in at least one case, a frontal attack on it — is to be found in more than one of the books we shortlisted, as well as in some we didn’t. Both Laurent Binet’s HHhH and Fabrice Humbert’s The Origin of Violence, in different ways, fretted about the way that literary expectations can determine, and in some cases derail, the way we approach the historical record.

The frontal approach was taken by Shalom Auslander in Hope: A Tragedy, about a neurotic Jewish guy in upstate New York who, investigating a noise in his attic, discovers an old, smelly, foul-mouthed and foul-tempered Anne Frank living up there. This is a killingly funny book, and sometimes in gasp-makingly poor taste; but it’s both funny and tasteless to a purpose. The stifling guilt and solemnity, the unimpeachable and overpowering moral mass that the Holocaust (or, rather, the idea of it) represents to writers of Auslander’s generation is summoned and exorcised with the freeing spell of the blown raspberry.

Deborah Levy’s spare and elliptical Swimming Home took a lateral approach. In this constantly wrongfooting novel what looks like realist social comedy gives way to passages of dream or hallucination; from broad comedy to fairytale to Pinteresque sexual menace. Rather in the way that astronomers can deduce the presence of black holes by the way in which they bend light from distant stars, you apprehend the ancient European wrongs at the heart of this novel by the gravitational pull they exert.

But the Holocaust was not the only presence that shaded the fiction we chose. The existential question of Judaism, or Jewry — as incarnated in Israeli statehood — underpinned Amos Oz’s quietly masterful collection of linked short stories Scenes From Village Life. Oz’s village is subject to irruptions of the irrational, to disappearances, unexpected violence, sudden fear. Tel Ilan is a “pioneer village, already a century old” — but one of uncertain foundations; where existential questions feel only provisionally settled; one that you feel could disappear.

It’s customary in these articles for prize judges to end by issuing some sort of bromide about “the rude health of British fiction”, or the “astonishing year for non-fiction” we’ve had, measured against no criterion in particular. I’ll spare you an announcement that it has been “an exceptional year for Jewishness”. We had lots of submissions, many good and a few lousy. These six books were, we think, the best — and we think they are very good indeed. I commend them to you. L’chaim!

Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Prize 2013 Shortlist

Hope: A Tragedy by Shalom Auslander (Picador)
Swimming Home by Deborah Levy (And Other Stories)
Scenes from Village Life by Amos Oz (Chatto and Windus)
Foreign Bodies by Cynthia Ozick (Atlantic Books)
The Road to the Apocalypse by Stanley and Munro Price (Notting Hill Editions)
On the Eve by Bernard Wasserstein (Profile Books)

Chair of the judging panel Diana Reich commented, “This year, the judges of the Jewish Quarterly Wingate Literary Prize had the task of winnowing 60 plus books of international fiction and non-fiction, with a Jewish dimension, to a short list of six. In the true spirit of Jewish disputation, both passionate and open minded, we reached a final outcome that is varied in genre, style and subject matter. The list contains short stories, an extended essay, novels and a work of scholarship. What they have in common is originality, a distinctive voice and an ability both to disturb and to entertain”.

Hope: A Tragedy by Shalom Auslander

Shalom Auslander’s novel starts with an extraordinary premise – that Solomon Kugel, a beleaguered salesman, has moved to a small town in New York State only to discover that a living, breathing, thought-to-be-dead specimen of history (namely, Anne Frank) is hiding in his attic. With the infernal logic of this comic genius, we embark on an outrageous novel that is both “blisteringly funny” (Sunday Times) and “audaciously brilliant” (Sunday Telegraph).

Swimming Home by Deborah Levy

Swimming Home is a subversive page-turner, a merciless gaze at the insidious harm that depression can have on apparently stable, well-turned-out people. Set in a summer villa, the story is tautly structured, taking place over a single week in which a group of beautiful, flawed tourists in the French Riviera come loose at the seams. Deborah Levy’s writing combines linguistic virtuosity, technical brilliance and a strong sense of what it means to be alive. Swimming Home represents a new direction for a major writer. In this book, the wildness and the danger are all the more powerful for resting just beneath the surface. With its biting humour and immediate appeal, it wears its darkness lightly.

Scenes from a Village Life by Amos Oz

Hailed by The Times as ‘a powerfully bleak portrait of loneliness, confusion and cracked bonds’, Scenes from a Village Life gradually pieces together a community united by hidden fears and secrets. A stranger turns up at a man’s door to persuade him to evict his ageing mother and sell the house; nearby a couple sleep soundly in their bed, unaware that their teenage son has committed suicide beneath it. This is a compelling, hypnotic work in which Amos Oz peers into the darkness of our lives and offers a glimpse of what goes on below the surface of everyday existence.

Foreign Bodies by Cynthia Ozick

The grand dame of American letters continues her preoccupation with the twentieth century Jew in this masterly, intricate novel. Set in the 1950s, Ozick turns the romanticising of Paris upon its head: American Bea Nightingale is sent to Paris to retrieve an errant nephew. Instead of the Paris of literary myth, she finds a shattered world peopled by survivors of World War Two. Based upon Henry James The Ambassadors, Ozick’s sixth novel is a literary sleight of hand and a tour de force in its own right. Shortlisted for the Orange Prize 2012, Foreign Bodies testifies to Ozick’s growing readership and recognition in the UK.

The Road to the Apocalypse by Stanley and Munro Price

In the winter of 1811 Lewis Way had an epiphany on the road to Exmouth. From that moment the eccentric millionaire devoted himself and his fortune to only one goal – the return of the Jews to the Holy Land. To achieve this mission he undertook extraordinary journeys as far as Moscow and Mount Lebanon. Lewis Way is now a neglected figure, but his legacy still has profound religious and political influence in the Middle East and today’s America.

On the Eve by Bernard Wasserstein

‘This is the portrait of a world on the eve of its destruction. Bernard Wasserstein presents a disturbing interpretation of the collapse of European Jewish civilization even before the Nazi onslaught. Wasserstein shows how the harsh realities of the age devastated the lives of communities and individuals. By 1939, the Jews faced an existential crisis that was as much the result of internal decay as of external attack. Ranging from Vilna (‘Jerusalem of Lithuania’) to Salonica with its Judeo-Español-speaking stevedores and singers, and beyond, the book’s focus is squarely on the Jews themselves rather than their persecutors. Wasserstein’s aim is to ‘breathe life into dry bones.’ Based on vast research, written with compassion and empathy, and enlivened by dry wit, On the Eve paints a vivid and shocking picture of the European Jews in their final hour.’

JUDGES

Diana Reich is the artistic director of the Charleston Festivals and the Small Wonder Short Story Festival. She has previously judged the Frank O’Connor Short Story Award. She is a former Director of English PEN, Administrator of the Orange Prize for Fiction and programmer of the Brighton literature festival.

Hephzibah Anderson is a book columnist for Bloomberg news and regularly contributes on cultural affairs to the Observer, Prospect and BBC Five Live. A former Fiction Editor at the Daily Mail, she has also written for publications including Vogue, The Times, and the Jewish Chronicle. She is the author of Chastened.

Clive Lawton has published extensively, mainly in the field of religious, moral and holocaust education. A former headmaster and teacher of English, he is involved in a senior capacity with many diverse Jewish charities and cultural organisations. He is on the faculty of the European Centre for Leadership Development and sits on the North London Bench.

Sam Leith is a former Literary Editor of the Daily Telegraph, and contributes regularly to the Evening Standard, Guardian, Spectator and Prospect. He is the author of two non-fiction books, Dead Pets and Sod’s Law and a novel, The Coincidence Engine. His latest book You Talkin’ To Me? Rhetoric from Aristotle to Obama is published by Profile Books.

NOTES TO EDITORs

The Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Prize was established in 1977 by the late Harold Hyam Wingate. The Harold Hyam Wingate charitable foundation is a private grant-giving institution, established over forty years ago. In addition to supporting the Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Prize it has also organised and supported the Wingate scholarships. The Jewish Quarterly-Wingate prize is the only UK award to recognise writing by Jewish and non-Jewish writers that explore themes of Jewish concern in any of its myriad possible forms either explicitly or implicitly. From 2013, the prize will be awarded in February to enable the prize to coincide with Jewish Book Week, now housed at King’s Place, where it will be able to grow both in scale and outreach.

Authors resident in the UK, British Commonwealth, Europe and Israel are eligible for the prize. Books submitted must be in English, either originally or in translation.

Shalom Auslander wins 2013 Wingate Prize

“God-wise, I’m kinda fucked”

By Philip Maughan, New Statesman
February 28, 2013

Last night Shalom Auslander was awarded the 2013 Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Prize for his novel Hope: A Tragedy. The £4000 prize, for “Jewish and non-Jewish writers that explore themes of Jewish concern”, was awarded to Auslander as part of Jewish Book Week, which will run at King’s Place until the end of the week.

During Auslander’s skyped acceptance speech he expressing shock that the prize didn’t go to Juno Diaz or Hilary Mantel, “since she seems to win everything”. He also witheld thanks from God, his editor, the academy and anyone else involved.

Hope: A Tragedy centres on Solomon Kugel, a down-at-heel office jobber and pschotheraphy patient, attempting to protect his family from the horrors of the world, urban and historical. Kugel has bought a house in the country, as did Auslander, while preparing to write the book. “I’ve moved to the country but there’s nowhere to walk after dinner,” he told the New Statesman’s culture editor Jonathan Derbyshire last year. “Your idea of nature is postcards, nice trees, but it’s fucking violent. I’m on a cliff and the winds from November to March just blast at the house relentlessly. Animals, bears, even the deer, are like fucking gang members where I live. You think, ‘Oh, it’s deer,’ and then they look at you and you think, ‘This thing is going to kill me if I go near the faun.’”

To add to his woes, Kugel finds that a portion of the house is already occupied. Typing and feasting on matzos in the attic is a beleagured and catatonic Anne Frank, tirelessly struggling with the follow-up to her first and only hit: the diary. Auslander recalls visiting his agent shortly after finishing the manuscript. She asked him:

“So is this a comment on Roth?” And I just said, “What are you talking about?” She was like, “You know, in his book where Anne Frank is alive.” My response was: “You have to be fucking kidding me.” When my memoir Foreskin’s Lament came out, it was the same: “Oh, so you’re intentionally doing Portnoy’s Complaint?” And in my head I was like, “If anything, it was Angela’s Ashes.”

Hope: A Tragedy makes a plaything of the darkest moments of the 20th century. Kugel and the house’s former owner, a man of German descent, wrestle the politics of evicting the century’s best-loved innocent victim. “Six million he kills,” Kugel thinks, unthinkably, “and this one gets away.”

Hope: A Tragedy, By Shalom Auslander

Review: The sad woman in the attic

By Doug Johnstone, Independent
February 26, 2013

We all know that the Holocaust is a great source of comedy, right? OK, maybe not, but in the hands of the brilliant US writer Shalom Auslander, it becomes so.

In the strong tradition of Jewish humour, his writing is incredibly sharp, hugely self-deprecating, riddled with insecurities and hang-ups, and often stupendously funny. At times, Hope: A Tragedy, his first novel, reads a little like the kind of film Woody Allen wouldn’t dare make anymore – or never had the balls to make in the first place. It is outrageous, sure, and will probably be offensive to some, but beneath the sur- face humour, Auslander also makes some very serious points indeed.

The book opens with our self-hating anti-hero, Solomon Kugel, lying in bed worrying. He has recently moved his young family to a farmhouse in Stockton, a nondescript part of upstate New York, only to discover a local arsonist is burning down farmhouses.

But that concern pales into insignificance when he finds Anne Frank hiding in his attic. A very old and decrepit Anne Frank. It turns out that she didn’t die in Belsen but was smuggled out of Europe by guilt-stricken Germans, and has spent the past 65 years cooped up in various lofts, working on a novel.

Of course, having sold 32 million copies of her diary, she’s suffering from writers’ block. On top of which, her publishers don’t particularly want her alive, as her non-death could affect diary sales. And, added to this tricky situation, we have Kugel’s elderly mother living in the farmhouse, a woman who claims to be a Holocaust survivor despite being born and raised in New York.

It’s Kugel’s mother’s appropriation of the guilt and anger of Jewish history that is the sharpest angle in Auslander’s tale; an intriguing psychology that he probes mercilessly. Towards the end of the book, Anne Frank repeats Kugel’s own words back to him: “I’m sick of that Holocaust shit.” But for all that Kugel wants to think otherwise, the Holocaust is something he can’t help but return to, again and again, having been conditioned since birth to keep picking at the scabs of history.

Auslander previously wrote a fantastic story collection, Beware of God, and a jaw-dropping memoir entitled Foreskin’s Lament, but the form of the novel seems to have focused his anger and humour into truly fearsome weapons.

[Shalom Auslander grew up in an Orthodox Jewish neighborhood in New York where he describes himself as having been "raised like a veal". His writing style is notable for its Jewish perspective and determinedly negative outlook.]

Academia Undermined:
Israeli restrictions on foreign academics in Palestinian Higher Education Institutions

Report by Right to Education
May 2013

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY (see foot for full report)
The quality of Palestinian education and higher education in particular, has been very negatively impacted by the prolonged Israeli military occupation. Schools and universities have been closed for extended periods. Students, staff and faculty have had restricted access to schools and institutions of higher education due to the pervasive and arbitrary Israeli regime of internal movement restrictions. The impacts on all levels of education have been well documented.

This report focuses on only one of the many problems related to movement and access restrictions that affect the quality of and access to education in the occupied Palestinian territories (oPt): the implications of Israeli restrictions on entry and residency for foreign academics wishing to serve at institutes of higher education operating in the (oPt). It is important to note that the term “foreign” is something of a misnomer: Israel treats all individuals without an Israeli-issued identity card [“hawiyya”] as a foreigner even if they are of Palestinian origin and even if they and/or their parents are born in Palestine. Thus “foreign” academics refers to anyone who does not hold a Palestinian identity card and must therefore enter the oPt on a foreign passport regardless of whether or not they are of Palestinian origin. “Foreign” academics or “foreign” nationals could therefore be of Palestinian origin (as is frequently the case) or have no Palestinian roots.

The report details

 The impact on the quality of education provided, and

 The impact of the isolation of Palestinian academia from the broader academic community on the development of their academic institutions and educational development in general.

It concludes with some recommendations.

Research for this study was conducted by the Campaign for the Right to Enter the oPt (RTE), and was based on interviews with university officials, department chairs, faculty members and students at four Palestinian universities, three in the West Bank (Birzeit, Al-Quds, and Bethlehem) and one in Gaza (Islamic University of Gaza). Interviews were also undertaken with Israeli academics, and some case studies and testimonies were gathered on the actual experiences of foreign academics trying to enter the oPt and work at Palestinian universities. Additional material presented is drawn from RTE’s previous and ongoing research into issues around issues of access, movement and residency in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territory.

MAJOR FINDINGS
Israeli-imposed entry and residency restrictions on foreign academics have severely diminished opportunities for development of faculty, courses, and research programs at Palestinian institutes of higher education.

Over the last decade, as recruitment of foreign academics has shrunk, higher education institutions have limited their programs of study and cut back on the development of their research programs. Students do not have exposure to a diversity of perspectives, new ideas, cultural norms, ways of thinking and conceptualizing knowledge. With a shortage of qualified academics in highly specialized and cutting-edge fields, research capabilities have been undermined. Skill acquisition in second languages is being atrophied and the knowledge base and academic erudition of the institutions are being diminished as few new approaches and content flow in.

Foreign academics are less willing and able to consider taking up teaching and research posts in Palestinian institutions of higher education due to the arbitrary and unpredictable restrictions on entry and residency to which they may be subjected. Israel has established no clear and transparent policy, processes and procedures for issuing entry visas and residency permits to foreign passport holders wishing to visit or work in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Foreign academics have no reasonable guarantees that they will be permitted to travel to the Palestinian universities that recruited them, remain in the oPt for the duration of their academic contracts, or return to their universities should they travel abroad even briefly for academic or personal reasons. The broad discretion exercised on these matters by Israeli officials controlling entry at border crossings and handling applications for permit renewals and residency compounds this uncertainty and absence of accountability. Foreign academics have been arbitrarily denied entry at border crossings, refused extension of visas in mid-semester, refused re-entry to complete their contracted work, and been issued with visas that restrict their internal movement. Consequently, the numbers of foreign academics willing and able to teach at Palestinian universities are decreasing. Interviews conducted for this report confirm that this is directly due to the uncertainties and difficulties of securing permission to enter the oPt or to stay for the limited or extended periods required to carry out their academic objectives and commitments.

For decades Israel has operated a broad regime of internal and external movement and access restrictions to the detriment of Palestinian higher education and other vital Palestinian economic, social welfare and development processes in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. In light of its arbitrary and indiscriminate character, political inspiration and disruptive impact on Palestinian civil life, this broad restrictive regime clearly contravenes international law.The expertise and participation of foreign passport holders, including diaspora Palestinians, is often required to support each of these vital processes. For this specific reason, the arbitrary and indiscriminate restrictions on entry and presence to which foreign passport holders, including academics, are subjected clearly contravene international law.

A long line of UN Security Council and General Assembly resolutions, rulings of the International Court of Justice and Israel’s own Supreme Court affirm Israel’s obligation to exercise its control over the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip in strict accordance with international humanitarian law (including the Hague Convention of 1907 and the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949) as well as applicable international human rights law. As the occupying power, Israel is obligated to both protect and facilitate the functioning of Palestinian civil institutions, including Palestinian institutions of higher education. It is therefore also obligated to exercise its control over the entry and presence of foreign academics in a manner that causes no unnecessary or unjustifiable harm to Palestinian higher education, and to the Palestinian population’s right to education. Moreover, Israel may not exercise this control politically, to serve what it considers to be its own national interests.
Because restrictive measures do cause harm, they may only be justified on the basis of legitimate grounds of necessity: to protect the security of an occupying power’s own forces; to enable the occupying power to comply with its obligations under international humanitarian law and international human rights law, including its obligation to ensure safety and public order in occupied territory; to benefit the protected civilian population.

No legitimate grounds of necessity can be plausibly invoked to justify the difficulties actually imposed on foreign academics teaching at Palestinian universities. There is no evidence that foreign academics denied entry into the oPt, or denied the visa extensions and renewals needed to complete their teaching commitments, pose any sort of threat to security.

Third States have important responsibilities vis a vis the unlawful restrictive measures against foreign academics discussed in this report. These stem from their customary duties in international law to oppose, and not acquiesce to its violation,including the duty of States not to recognise as lawful any serious breach of international law, or an unlawful situation created by that breach. This duty is reaffirmed under the international law of occupation as the duty to ‘ensure respect … in all circumstances’ set out in Article 1 common to the four Geneva Conventions of 1949.

When restrictive measures are imposed on the entry or presence in occupied territory of foreign nationals, including foreign academics the first question that should be asked by their own States, as High Contracting Parties to the Fourth Geneva Convention,is whether the restrictions can be justified in light of the disruption caused to the civil life of the territory or the harm caused to the rights of its protected civilian population. The second question that State should consider asking, as a matter of their responsibilities to their own nationals, is whether their nationals are being targeted wrongfully, in particular on the basis their ethnicity or religion. This report and its appendices provide ample indications that both of these wrongs are indeed being committed widely, persistently and unaccountably. States have clear rights to ask such questions and pursue satisfactory answers from Israel. They have the option to cooperate and seek statisfaction jointly. It should be emphasized in this connection that the unquestioned right of any State to limit or deny entry into its own territory as it sees fit does not apply Israel’s occupation of Palestine. In the case at hand, repeated failures to pose the proper questions and pursue the satisfactory answers to which States are entitled, especially in cases involving their own nationals, implies acquiescence to Israel’s breaches of international humanitarian law.

RECOMMENDATIONS
We call on Palestinian educational institutions and representatives including universities, local academics, Palestinian Education unions, the Palestinian Authority, the Ministry of Education and Ministry of Higher Education, the PLO to work together to face this challenge. In particular, we urge

 Establish monitoring mechanisms within their institutions to track numbers of foreign academics on faculty, the visa/residency issues they face, loss of academic programs involved, and the costs incurred

 Take collective action on right to enter restrictions practiced by the Israeli authorities on foreign academics

 Activate right to education (right2edu) networks2 across the education sector throughout the oPt and globally to proactively monitor and address this issue Ensure that the consequences of access and movement restrictions on education are fully understood by local and international human rights organizations and Third States Ministry of Higher Education (MoHE) to raise issue of movement and access with Palestinian diplomats abroad

We call on international academic institutions and civil society institutions worldwide to join in support of a campaign that would:

 Call for an immediate halt to Israel’s arbitrary and abusive practice of denying entry to foreign nationals traveling to the oPt to promote educational development

 Demand Israel’s adoption and implementation of a clear, documented, and transparent policy enabling unhindered access to the oPt by foreign nationals who are coming to educate or promote educational development.  We call on Israel to

 Immediately eliminate the prohibitive stipulation “NOT ALLOWED TO WORK” added to visas issued to academics or researchers who are working for Palestinian universities in the oPt with the full prior knowledge of the Israeli authorities Provide multiple entry visas for people who are extending their visas, including family members

 Provide explicit assurances that people who have previously been denied entry will be permitted to re-enter the oPt

 End the practice of issuing permits that restrict exit and re-entry, or restrict the area of the visit (e.g. “Judea and Samaria only”)

 End the practice of issuing permits of less than three months to those traveling to the oPt Cease the collective punishment of those whose relatives may have “overstayed” their original visa duration.

We urge Third States that have friendly relations with Israel to

 Demand Israel’s adoption and implementation of a clear, documented, and transparent policy enabling unhindered access to the oPt by foreign nationals who are coming to educate or promote educational development

 Provide diplomatic support to their own nationals and citizens who are coming to work as educators, academics and researchers in Palestine

 Monitor and facilitate the entry of nationals traveling to occupied Palestinian Territory to provide educational, social, economic or development services at border crossings controlled by Israel

 Monitor and take steps to facilitate the issuance of residence permits for those nationals for the duration of their work contracts or periods of research

 Insist on ascertaining the factual justification and legitimacy of entry and residency restrictions imposed on those nationals on the basis of the applicable rules of IHL and principles of human rights law referred to in the Report’s introduction. Contest restrictions that lack lawful justification

 Ensure that the correct treatment accorded to Israeli nationals seeking to enter their countries is reciprocated by Israel’s correct treatment of their own nationals seeking to enter the oPt via Israeli-controlled borders.

Links
Full report: Academia Undermined, Israeli Restrictions on Foreign National Academics in Palestinian Higher Education Institutions

List of Palestinian Universities and Colleges

RTE: Campaign for the right to enter the oPt

BRICUP: British Committee for the Universities of Palestine

Mahmoud Sarsak, centre, addresses a meeting at the European parliament last month

Mahmoud Sarsak in European Parliament

EU News
April 15, 2013

Mahmoud Sarsak – Palestinian football player, member of the Palestine national football team gave a talk in European Parliament on April 11th about the Palestinian political prisoners in Israeli jails. Sarsak spent 3 years in jail under administrative detention, three months on hunger strike while imprisoned without trial in Israel. Sarsak was imprisoned in 9 detention centers and tortured and interrogated for 45 days. He was deprived of food and sleep, kept for a long time in an isolated cell with loud heavy metal music playing for 18 days. When falling asleep he received hot or cold water on his body… « All this for me to confess to things I didn’t do » he said.

At the end of his interrogation he was classified as « illegal fighter » – a category that didn’t exist before. For 3 years he didn’t see any lawyer nor family, he couldn’t write and receive letters either. « For them I was only a number and a number doesn’t have any rights. My number was 1220 » Sarsak concluded.

Mahmoud Sarsak is continuing in his efforts to highlight the issue of the Palestinian prisoners at the European political level. Several meetings were organised with the European Parliament to discuss the suffering of the prisoners including the harsh conditions they face inside the occupation prisons.

« This is not only Palestinian cause, it is also about human rights and international law. Palestinians are deprived of treatment when they are sick in prison. Two football players: Omar Abu Rouis and Mohammed Nemer from the Palestine national football team have been in prison for a year now without ever being charged of any crime » – he said

According to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics and the Ministry of Prisoners Affairs a total of 208 Palestinian prisoners have died in Israeli jails since 1967.

Mahmoud Sarsak called on the European Parliament to take urgent action to free Palestinian political prisoners and put pressure on UEFA not to hold sporting competitions in Israel.

UFree Network raises the prisoners’ issue at the European Parliament on the 65th anniversary of Palestinian Nakba

Media Release, UFree Network Brussels
May 17, 2013

UFree Network to defend the rights of Palestinian prisoners raises the issue of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails on the sidelines of the European Parliament session held in Brussels on the 65th anniversary of the Palestinian Nakba in coordination with the Council for European Palestinian Relations (CEPR).

UFree praised, in its statement issued on Thursday, the European Parliament session to mark the anniversary of Palestinian Nakba for the first time since its occurrence.

The Oslo based Network stated that the session discussed at first the European Parliament delegation’s visit to the Palestinian occupied territories.

Dr. Salman Abu Sitta, chair of Palestine Land Foundation, has detailed during the session the Israeli massacres and ethnic cleaning against the Palestinian people since the Nakba. He also stressed that the Palestinian Right of Return will never be compromised, calling to stop arming Israel.

For his part, Dr. Arafat Madi, the Director of the Council for European Palestinian Relations (CEPR), stressed the need to end the Palestinian refugees’ suffering by reinforcing the right of return of millions of Palestinians who were forcibly deported from their homeland.

Mr. Mohammed Hamdan, head of UFree Network, has presented the Palestinian prisoners’ suffering in Israeli jails and detailed the Israeli violations and discrimination policies against the detainees particularly the prisoners carrying the blue ID cards.

In a related context, Dr. Tareq Tahboub, the Assembly of Palestinian Doctors in Europe vice president, pointed out to the Israeli deliberate medical negligence policy against the Palestinian prisoners, calling for the formation of a European committee to check on the prisoners’ detention conditions in Israeli jails.

It is worth mentioning that the number of Palestinians arrested by Israel since 1967 is around 800,000, including 12,000 women and tens of thousands of children.

Around 5,000 Palestinian prisoners, including 14 women and nearly 230 children are currently held in Israeli jails.

A European political delegation visits the Arab areas inside Israel

By CEPR
May 12, 2013

The visit coincided with the anniversary of the Nakba.

A European Political and parliamentary delegation began its field tour in several Arab towns and villages inside Israel to examine the living conditions of Palestinians living inside the Green Line.

The Council for European Palestinian Relations (The CEPR) stated, Saturday, the 11th of May 2013, that the delegation’s visit coincides with the anniversary of the Nakba, It also pointed out that the delegation will do a series of visits and meetings in order to monitor the Israeli violations of the rights of the Palestinian population inside Israel and also to investigate the forms of Israeli racial discrimination against them.

Moreover, the statement added that the delegation, organized by The CEPR, has begun its tour with visits to the Northern Palestinian areas; specifically, the cities of Umm Al-Fahm and Nazareth in which the Israeli authorities are frequently demolishing Palestinian homes under the pretext of lack of license. In the northern city of Nazareth the delegation met with the Arab High Follow up Committee and a number of Arab Knesset members who briefed the delegation on the most important problems that face the Arab population inside Israel.

The delegation also visited the displaced villages of Al-Bassa and Baaloul to evoke the tragedy of the Nakba, which will be meeting its sixty-fifth anniversary by the mid of the month, when armed Jewish troops had forced nearly a million Palestinians out of their towns and villages before bringing Jewish immigrants to substitute them.

Furthermore, the Council affirmed that the EU delegation will continue its tour today in the southern Negev territories, in order to visit a number of Bedouin villages that are threatened with forced eviction by the Israeli authorities without providing any alternatives of housing. Not only do the Israeli authorities try to evict these villages, they also periodically destroy them. Nevertheless, the indigenous people of these villages, Bedouins of Negev area, rebuild them each time.

It is noteworthy that the visiting delegation will review what had been briefed in a report that will be submitted to the concerned committees in the European Parliament. In addition, the delegation will participate, on the mid of this month, in a discussion panel that will be organized by The CEPR in parliament.

CEPR Board of Trustee members Mazen Kahel, Commissioner Kristalina Georgieva, MEP Alexandra Thein (German, Free Democratic Party), and CEPR’s Parliamentary Officer James Tuite.

CEPR representatives meet with Commissioner Kristalina Georgieva

Media release, CEPR
March 21, 2013

On Tuesday 20th March 2013, CEPR was welcomed by the EU’s Commissioner for International Cooperation, Humanitarian Aid and Crisis Response. CEPR met with Commissioner Georgieva to present a report on our recent Parliamentary mission to Lebanon, and to discuss what the EU can do to assist Palestinian refugees affected by the crisis in Syria.

CEPR was represented by Board of Trustee members Mazen Kahel and MEP Alexandra Thein, and CEPR’s Parliamentary Officer James Tuite.

Around 455,000 refugees are registered with UNRWA (the United Nations Relief and Works Agency) in Lebanon. As a result of the on-going violence in Syria, Lebanon has received over 30,000 additional Palestinian refugees. UNRWA is stretched beyond its capacity, and urgently needs additional funds to cope with this humanitarian disaster. Palestinian refugees in Lebanon are politically marginalised, denied basic social and economic rights, and are trapped in squalid camps with limited and insufficient resources. Most refugees rely entirely on UNRWA as the sole provider of education, health and relief, and social services. CEPR expressed its concern that the plight of Palestinian refugees was being marginalised in the broader context of Syrian refugees. Commissioner Georgieva recognised these concerns, and assured CEPR that she would continue to raise this important issue within the Commission. CEPR also discussed what the EU can do to assist Palestinian refugees beyond providing additional monetary aid. Talks included; making it easier for students with scholarships to be granted visas in the EU, applying pressure on Lebanon to ease Palestinian housing restrictions and to allow Palestinian refugees to work (they are currently prohibited from working outside the camps and in over 70 professions), and what the EU can do to protect Palestinians inside Syria. CEPR’s full report on its February delegation to Lebanon can be found on our website. A briefing paper on Palestinian refugees in Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan is also available.

By Euronews
April 29, 2013

A delegation from the European Parliament has joined calls for the immediate release of Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails.

It coincided with recent protests in the West Bank and a two-day international conference entitled “Freedom and Dignity”, held in Ramallah.

The meeting focused on the case of a Fatah leader, Marwan Barghouti, who has spent 11 years behind bars. He was convicted of murder by an Israeli court in 2004.

“Over the past 11 years, we have noticed an important change concerning the European position and especially within the European Parliament, European countries’ (national) parliaments, and also among civil institutions and European human rights organisations. We note this as a positive change,” said Fadwa Barghouti, his wife and lawyer.

Barghouti recently acccused the Palestinian Authority of not doing enough to secure his release.

He has been quoted as saying that new negotiations with Israel would be a waste of time.

He commands widespread support among all Palestinian factions.

Speaking from Ramallah, euronews correspondent Mohammed Shaikhibrahim said:

Local efforts accompanied by an international campaign are ongoing to free the Palestinian prisoners in line with international agreements and in the first instance the Geneva accords; and this is aimed at relaunching the peace process between Palestinians and Israelis – since the prisoners issue is considered as unresolved between the two sides.

Kristalina Georgieva is a Bulgarian economist; she joined the EC as a Commissioner in 2010, and is Commissioner for International Cooperation, Humanitarian Aid and Crisis Response. She is affiliated with the European People’s Party, the centre-right EU grouping.

CEPR, About us

from their website
The Council for European Palestinian Relations (CEPR) is an independent not-for-profit organisation which has been established to promote dialogue and understanding between European, Palestinian and Arab parliamentarians and policy-makers. It seeks a resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict based on justice and the restoration of Palestinian rights in accordance with international humanitarian and human rights law.

Aims and Values
Peace based on justice and the restitution of Palestinian rights
Respect for international law, the United Nations Charter, UN Resolutions and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
A more robust EU foreign policy to the Occupied Palestinian Territories that will promote and defend Palestinian rights and self-determination
Inter-governmental dialogue to facilitate diplomacy and a greater understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Our Mission
To strengthen European-Palestinian relations and provide greater understanding of Palestinian issues for legislators and policy-makers
Develop Europe’s role in promoting and defending Palestinian rights
Facilitate parliamentary delegations and dialogue between governments and policy-makers across Europe and the Arab world
Produce accurate, up-to-the-minute research and reports to highlight the situation confronting Palestinians.

Our Work
The CEPR organises delegations of European parliamentarians and policy-makers to visit the Occupied Palestinian Territories and neighbouring countries which host Palestinian refugees. This enables delegates to witness at first-hand the situation confronting Palestinians and to gather information so that they can pursue policy changes from an informed and evidence-based perspective.

The CEPR is funded by individual donations from around the world in compliance with Belgian and UK legal requirements. It does not accept funds from any individuals or bodies whose objectives are inimical to the interests of peace and justice.

Catastrophic thinking: Did Ben-Gurion try to rewrite history?

The file in the state archives contains clear evidence that the researchers at the time did not paint the full picture of Israel’s role in creating the Palestinian refugee problem.

By Shay Hazkani,Ha’aretz magazine
May 16, 2013

The Israeli censor’s observant eye had missed file number GL-18/17028 in the State Archives. Most files relating to the 1948 Palestinian exodus remain sealed in the Israeli archives, despite the fact that their period as classified files − according to Israeli law − expired long ago. Even files that were previously declassified are no longer available to researchers. In the past two decades, following the powerful reverberations triggered by the publication of books written by those dubbed the “New Historians,” the Israeli archives revoked access to much of the explosive material. Archived Israeli documents that reported the expulsion of Palestinians, massacres or rapes perpetrated by Israeli soldiers, along with other events considered embarrassing by the establishment, were reclassified as “top secret.” Researchers who sought to track down the files cited in books by Benny Morris, Avi Shlaim or Tom Segev often hit a dead end. Hence the surprise that file GL-18/17028, titled “The Flight in 1948” is still available today.

The documents in the file, which date from 1960 to 1964, describe the evolution of the Israeli version of the Palestinian Nakba of 1948. Under the leadership of Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, top Middle East scholars in the Civil Service were assigned the task of providing evidence supporting Israel’s position – which was that, rather than being expelled in 1948, the Palestinians had fled of their own volition.

Ben-Gurion probably never heard the word “Nakba,” but early on, at the end of the 1950s, Israel’s first prime minister grasped the importance of the historical narrative. Just as Zionism had forged a new narrative for the Jewish people within a few decades, he understood that the other nation that had resided in the country before the advent of Zionism would also strive to formulate a narrative of its own. For the Palestinians, the national narrative grew to revolve around the Nakba, the calamity that befell them following Israel’s establishment in 1948, when about 700,000 Palestinians became refugees. By the end of the 1950s, Ben-Gurion had reached the conclusion that the events of 1948 would be at the forefront of Israel’s diplomatic struggle, in particular the struggle against the Palestinian national movement. If the Palestinians had been expelled from their land, as they had maintained already in 1948, the international community would view their claim to return to their homeland as justified. However, Ben-Gurion believed, if it turned out that they had left “by choice,” having been persuaded by their leaders that it was best to depart temporarily and return after the Arab victory, the world community would be less supportive of their claim.

Most historians today – Zionists, post-Zionists and non-Zionists – agree that in at least 120 or 530 villages, the Palestinian inhabitants were expelled by Israeli military forces, and that in half the villages the inhabitants fled because of the battles and were not allowed to return. Only in a handful of cases did villagers leave at the instructions of their leaders or mukhtars (headmen).

Ben-Gurion appeared to have known the facts well. Even though much material about the Palestinian refugees in Israeli archives is still classified, what has been uncovered provides enough information to establish that in many cases senior commanders of the Israel Defense Forces ordered Palestinians to be expelled and their homes blown up. The Israeli military not only updated Ben-Gurion about these events but also apparently received his prior authorization, in written or oral form, notably in Lod and Ramle, and in several villages in the north. Documents available for perusal on the Israeli side do not provide an unequivocal answer to the question of whether an orderly plan to expel Palestinians existed. In fact, fierce debate on the issue continues to this day. For example, in an interview with Haaretz the historian Benny Morris argued that Ben-Gurion delineated a plan to transfer the Palestinians forcibly out of Israel, though there is no documentation that proves this incontrovertibly.

Aharon Zisling, agriculture minister 1948, “not one Arab was expelled by us”.

Even before the war of 1948 ended, Israeli public diplomacy sought to hide the cases in which Palestinians were expelled from their villages. In his study of the early historiography of the 1948 war, “Memory in a Book” ‏(Hebrew‏), Mordechai Bar-On quotes Aharon Zisling, who would become an MK on behalf of Ahdut Ha’avoda and was the agriculture minister in Ben-Gurion’s provisional government in 1948. At the height of the expulsion of the Arabs from Lod and Ramle, Zisling wrote in the left-wing newspaper Al Hamishmar, “We did not expel Arabs from the Land of Israel … After they remained in our area of control, not one Arab was expelled by us.” In Davar, the newspaper of the ruling Mapai party, the journalist A. Ophir went one step further, explaining, “In vain did we cry out to the Arabs who were streaming across the borders: Stay here with us!”

Contemporaries who had ties to the government or the armed forces obviously knew that hundreds of thousands of Palestinians had been expelled and their return was blocked already during the war. They understood that this must be kept a closely guarded secret. In 1961, after John F. Kennedy assumed office as president of the United States, calls for the return of some of the Palestinian refugees increased. Under the guidance of the new president, the U.S. State Department tried to force Israel to allow several hundred thousand refugees to return. In 1949, Israel had agreed to consider allowing about 100,000 refugees to return, in exchange for a comprehensive peace agreement with the Arab states, but by the early 1960s that was no longer on the agenda as far as Israel was concerned. Israel was willing to discuss the return of some 20,000-30,000 refugees at most.

Under increasing pressure from Kennedy and amid preparations at the United Nations General Assembly to address the Palestinian refugee issue, Ben-Gurion convened a special meeting on the subject. Held in his office in the Kirya, the defense establishment compound in Tel Aviv, the meeting was attended by the top ranks of Mapai, including Foreign Minister Golda Meir, Agriculture Minister Moshe Dayan and Jewish Agency Chairman Moshe Sharett. Ben-Gurion was convinced that the refugee problem was primarily one of public image ‏(hasbara‏). Israel, he believed, would be able to persuade the international community that the refugees had not been expelled, but had fled. “First of all, we need to tell facts, how they escaped,” he said in the meeting. “As far as I know, most of them fled before the state’s establishment, of their own free will, and contrary to what the Haganah [the pre-independence army of Palestine’s Jews] told them when it defeated them, that they could stay. After the state’s establishment [on May 15, 1948], as far as I know, only the Arabs of Ramle and Lod left their places, or were pressured to leave.”

Lt. Col Moshe Dayan, c 1948, ordered expulsion of Negev Bedouin

Ben-Gurion thereby set the frame of reference for the discussion, even though some of the participants knew that his presentation was inaccurate, to say the least. Dayan, who as GOC Southern Command after 1949 ordered the expulsion of the Negev Bedouin, was not in a position to take issue with the prime minister’s statement that the Arabs had left “of their own free will,” despite being well aware of the facts. Ben-Gurion went on to explain what Israel must tell the world: “All of these facts are not known. There is also material which the Foreign Ministry prepared from the documents of the Arab institutions, of the Mufti, Jamal al-Husseini [He probably meant Haj Amin al-Husseini; Jamal al-Husseini was the Palestinians’ unofficial representative at the United Nations − S.H.], concerning the flight, [showing] that this was of their own free will, because they were told the country would soon be conquered and you will return to be its lord and masters and not just return to your homes.”

In 1961, against the backdrop of what Ben-Gurion described as the need for “a serious operation, both in written form and in oral hasbara,” the Shiloah Institute was asked to collect material for the government about “the flight of the Arabs from the Land of Israel in 1948.”

Nakba between the lines
The Shiloah Institute was an odd bird in Israel of the 1950s and 1960s. The idea of establishing a research institute akin to an Israeli version of Britain’s Chatham House was conceived by Reuven Shiloah, a Foreign Ministry official and former Mossad man. Shiloah died shortly after he finished planning the new institute. At the ceremony marking the 30th day after his death, the director general of the Prime Minister’s Office, Teddy Kollek, announced that the institute would bear Shiloah’s name and explained, “The institute’s purpose will be to study current problems at a scientific level … The institute will also make known to the world at large Israel’s views concerning the region.” The institute was established in conjunction with the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Defense and the Israel Oriental Society ‏(the umbrella organization of the Middle East scholars‏). It was managed by Yitzhak Oron, a major in the Intelligence Corps. A study by Prof. Gil Eyal of Columbia University, proved that the institute worked closely with the IDF’s Intelligence Corps, which regularly provided it with intelligence documents. As a result, most of the papers written in the Shiloah Institute’s first years were classified and not accessible to the general public. Researchers who worked in the institute in the 1950s described their activities as largely secret and considered themselves civil servants in every respect. The institute’s studies had a reputation for thoroughness and quasi-academic quality. In 1965, the institute came under the auspices of Tel Aviv University, though its clandestine ties with the intelligence community continued for many years thereafter, ending in recent decades. In 1983, the institute changed its name to the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies.

For Ben-Gurion, the Shiloah Institute was the perfect place to conduct the type of study he wished to arm himself with. Still, his request to the institute to collect material about “the flight of the Arabs” seemed a bit unusual. Since the end of the 1948 War, Israel had dealt with the issue of the Palestinian refugees almost exclusively as part of the diplomatic struggle in the international arena; hardly any attempt had been made to investigate this aspect of the war. But there was at least one person in the Shiloah Institute who knew something about the Palestinian exodus of 1948.

Rony Gabbay immigrated to Israel from Iraq in 1950. After four years in a transit camp he obtained a B.A. and subsequently earned a doctoral degree in political science in Switzerland, completing his dissertation on the Arab refugee issue in 1959. However, on his return to Israel he found himself involved in a fierce controversy with the Ashkenazi academic establishment after he accused a well-known political science professor of racism.

“At that time, many like me, of Mizrahi origin, who were ambitious, saw that the door was almost closed to us, so many left for Canada and America,” he says in an interview from his home in Perth, Australia, where he has lived for more than 40 years. “I ended up here and I do not regret it in the least.” Before leaving Israel, Gabbay spent a few years at the Shiloah Institute as deputy director. He was there at the time Ben-Gurion’s request had arrived.

It is quite unlikely that Ben-Gurion knew the topic of Gabbay’s doctoral dissertation, since it had not gained much publicity in Israel. Had he known, he might have looked for an alternative candidate to write this study, which was to serve as the linchpin of Israeli public diplomacy. A perusal of the book Gabbay published based on his dissertation shows that, three decades before Benny Morris published his groundbreaking book, “The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949,” Gabbay’s study confirmed what Palestinian refugees had been claiming since 1948. “In many cases,” Gabbay wrote, “such as during the battle to open the road to Jerusalem, Jewish forces took Arab villages, expelled the inhabitants and blew up places which they did not want to occupy themselves, so that they could not be reoccupied by their enemies and used as strongholds against them.”

Writing in the late 1950s, Gabbay drew on British statistics, UN documents, the Arab press and a number of Israeli documents he was able to obtain. He had no access to official IDF documents or to the minutes of cabinet meetings, of which Morris availed himself in the 1980s. Gabbay became convinced that there had not been a policy of systematic expulsion of Palestinians coming from the top, but rather that Palestinians were evacuated at the direction of local commanders ‏(such as Yigal Allon and Yitzhak Rabin‏), although this occurred in “many cases.”

Moshe Ma’oz, replaced Rony Gabbay in an attempt by Ben-Gurion to get the evidence of Palestinian flight that he wanted.

Fifty-four years later, Gabbay is astonished to find that he was able to depict the events accurately with so few Israeli documents. “To this day I am still amazed that a researcher who was very methodical and very objective was able to read between the lines of open sources,” he says.

Ben-Gurion’s unusual request to the Shiloah Institute was accompanied by rare authorization to examine Israeli archives that were closed to the public. The institute’s researchers were allowed to peruse captured documents that had been collected by the Intelligence Corps and, more important material compiled on the subject by the Shin Bet security service, some of which had been transferred from the Haganah after 1948. Gabbay: “We were told, ‘We don’t know what to do with all this material, with this crate.’ So I went to Shin Bet headquarters for three or four days and went through all the material. After that they burned it, of course they didn’t give it to us.”

But there was one stack of documents that not even the Shiloah Institute team was allowed to read through. It consisted of the transcripts of the cabinet sessions during the war, in which the ministers discussed the Palestinians’ flight and, in some cases, their expulsion by IDF units.

‘Pure research’
The file in the State Archives contains a letter Gabbay had written on his research project after he completed the work, dated August 26, 1961, and addressed to the director general of the Foreign Ministry. Gabbay writes: “With the exception of isolated cases, the flight of the Arabs was due to the cumulative effect of a number of elements in the political, military, economic, social and psychological realms … Chapters 1-6 present documents, quotations and other material which prove the ‘contribution’ of this or that cause among the causes of the flight and underscore the blame of the Arabs. Thus, for example, there is a clear proof that the Arab states encouraged [Palestine’s] Arabs to flee, that the leaders fled [first], that atrocity stories were made up, and that Arab military leaders pressured to have villages evacuated from their inhabitants etc. The seventh and last chapter cites the documents which prove the efforts of the Jews to stop the flight.” Gabbay concludes the letter by expressing “my hope that this booklet will faithfully serve Israeli foreign policy.”

More than half a century later, Gabbay recalls the conclusions differently. As part of his research, Gabbay read Intelligence Corps transcripts of local radio broadcasts of propaganda aimed at the local population by the Arab armies that operated in Palestine. The broadcasts, Gabbay says, did not support the Israeli claim about the part played by the Arab and Palestinian leaders in the flight. “There was no mention of the local Arab leaders urging the Arabs to flee, that they ‘pushed them,’ as we claimed in our hasbara. I saw nothing like that.” It is noteworthy that Benny Morris, who researched the subject 20 years later, also found no directives by Palestinian leaders or Arab rulers calling on the villagers to leave.

In the conversation from Australia, Gabbay finds it difficult to explain the disparity between his letter of 1961 stating that the Arabs were to blame, and his account today. Only in Haifa, he says, did the local leadership urge the Palestinians to leave, even though the Jewish leaders there urged them to stay. That, though, was a singular case and even there, the calls to stay were undercut by the Haganah’s shelling of the Arab market, in which civilians were killed. Gabbay denies that his work at the Shiloah Institute prompted him to change the opinion he arrived at when he wrote his doctoral dissertation. He insists that he and the others on the research team ‏(Yitzhak Oron and Aryeh Shmuelevich‏) were asked only to collect and summarize material. “What we did at the Shiloah Institute was pure research. In other words, what we submitted, what we got our hands on and examined was what we wrote. There was no fear. We didn’t know, we didn’t think about public opinion, we didn’t consider anything like that.”

Prof. Gil Eyal, who has studied the connection between Israeli Middle East experts and the intelligence community, explained in a phone interview from New York that the research study on the refugees could in no way be viewed as an academic text. “Without going into the motives of those who were involved, it is clear to me that this study falls into the general category of public diplomacy ‏(hasbara‏). Public diplomacy, even when academics engage in it and make use of documents according to the research methods of historians, is still very different from academic research or from other forms of objective research. That is because in public diplomacy, what to look for in the files and what to prove is set forth in advance. Naturally, then, if there are other things in the file [that do not concur with the goals], they are simply not inserted into the study, because that is not what the authors wanted to find.”

Second try
Ben-Gurion, though, was not pleased with Gabbay’s report. Immediately after its completion he ordered his Arab affairs adviser, Uri Lubrani, to write a new study. Lubrani assigned the project to Moshe Ma’oz, now a professor of history specializing in Syria, then a student at the Hebrew University and an employee of the adviser’s unit. “I went into Middle East studies with the mind-set of ‘Know the enemy.’ It wasn’t until I did a Ph.D. at Oxford that things changed for me and I started to discover the Arab side, too,” Ma’oz says by telephone.

Ma’oz was assigned a number of researchers to assist him with the study, and received a budget. He started to collect dozens of documents, in Israel and from around the world. He interviewed Israeli and British officers as well as Palestinians who remained in Israel. The 150 documents and interview transcripts were cataloged meticulously and prepared as a file of evidence. Ma’oz notes that his findings were very similar to those of Benny Morris and pointed clearly to cases of expulsion, particularly in Lod and Ramle. “I don’t think I was biased or influenced by the boss,” he says, “but it is possible that I over-emphasized the issue of the flight. The dosage was different, because I was still under the influence of the nationalist conception in which we were educated at school and in the army.”

In fact, the documents in the file of the State Archives demonstrate the exact opposite. According to Ma’oz’s own telling of the documents, they ostensibly prove, without exception, that the Arabs fled of their own volition at their leaders’ orders. In December 1961, before embarking on the project, Ma’oz wrote to David Kimche, a senior Mossad official ‏(and years later director general of the Foreign Ministry‏), to ask for help in compiling the documents. “Our intention is to prove that the flight was caused at the encouragement of the local Arab leaders and the Arab governments and was abetted by the British and by the pressure of the Arab armies ‏(the Iraqi army and the Arab Liberation Army‏) on the local Arab population.”

In a letter of summation dated September 1962, which Ma’oz wrote to Lubrani after he had completed the task of collecting the documents, he noted that he had fulfilled the assignment, and proved what he had been asked to prove: “You assigned me to gather material on the flight of Palestine’s Arabs in 1948 which attests to and proves that:

“A. Arab leaders and institutions in Palestine and elsewhere encouraged Palestine’s Arabs to flee, and the local notables, by being the first to flee, prompted the people to flee.

“B. The foreign Arab armies and the ‘volunteers’ abetted the flight both by evacuating villages and by their harsh attitude toward the local population.

“C. In a number of places, the British Army assisted the Arabs to flee.

“D. Jewish institutions and organizations made an effort to prevent the flight.”

Immediately after submitting the summary report, Ma’oz left the office of the Arab affairs adviser and went to Oxford to begin his Ph.D. studies. He was replaced by another M.A. student, Ori Stendel, who continued to write the study of the Palestinian exodus. Shortly after taking over from Ma’oz, Stendel met with Ben-Gurion, who described the project as a “White Paper,” referring to the reports by British commissions of inquiry in Palestine and elsewhere in the empire. “I remember Ben-Gurion saying something like, ‘We need this White Paper, because people are saying that the Arabs were expelled and did not flee,” Stendel recalls. “As far as I remember, Ben-Gurion said, ‘They did flee, but the truth has to be told. Write the truth.’ That’s what he said.”

Stendel continued to collect material for a short time. He is convinced that the study he and Ma’oz wrote is a scientific work that proves Arab leaders called on the Palestinians to leave, though it does not avoid uncovering the cases in which expulsion occurred. After all the material had been collected, Stendel was again summoned to a meeting with Ben-Gurion, who wanted a summary of the findings. “I told him that it is impossible to speak in terms of uniformity. There was no [organized] expulsion activity, on the one hand, but on the other hand it is impossible to say that we tried to prevent the Arabs from fleeing in all parts of the country. I told him that I had no doubt, for example, that there was an expulsion in Lod and Ramle, pure and simple. He asked me, and I remember being surprised by this, ‘Are you sure?’ I replied, ‘I wasn’t there, I can’t tell you, but according to everything we read and collected, an expulsion took place there.”

As we saw, the documents in the archive make no mention of Stendel’s assertion that the research project included documents attesting to expulsion. Stendel does not rule out the possibility that an attempt was made to play down such documents, but rejects the possibility that they were deliberately hidden. “There was no guideline to the effect that this would be a propaganda study, that things would be filtered in order to help with hasbara. In practice, that might be what happened … Obviously, we worked in the Prime Minister’s Office and we wanted to help Israel in its struggle, so it was natural that we would look for the truth to prove that we did not expel people. It’s definitely possible that that was the motive, but I don’t remember that Ben-Gurion or Lubrani said, ‘You should do this and that.’”

Stendel remains convinced that Ben-Gurion really did not know how the refugee problem of 1948 was caused, because he was busy with strategic affairs and did not take the time to deal with the refugees. The proof of this, he says, is that he asked a number of organizations to research the subject, so he would get a full picture. “If Ben-Gurion had decided on a policy, then there would have been a policy, and then also, let’s put it like this: I think the Arab minority in Israel today would be a lot smaller. That is why I think that Ben-Gurion did not exactly know. It’s possible that he authorized an expulsion in one case or another, when he was told it was important for security reasons; but my conclusion is that Ben-Gurion did not authorize a policy of expulsion, and so he wanted to know exactly what had happened.”

Most historians who have researched the subject paint a radically different picture. They present evidence that Ben-Gurion knew in real time about the expulsion of Palestinians and apparently authorized expulsions in a number of cases. In the absence of reliable information from the period, it is difficult to determine with certainty whether Ben-Gurion had actually persuaded himself that the majority of Palestine’s Arabs had left of their own volition, or did not even believe this himself but wanted history to believe it.

In the meeting about the refugees at the end of 1961, Moshe Sharett, then the chairman of the Jewish Agency, suggested a modern spin: to leak the material that would be collected to foreign correspondents so that they would publish it as “objective” investigative reports without revealing their sources. “We need to see to it that articles appear in the major newspapers,” Sharett said. “That means we need to draw up a plan for each [foreign] capital, decide on a ‘victim,’ who the man will be, provide him with all the required information and all the arguments, and ensure that extensive articles appear ahead of the General Assembly session, because this issue is again becoming one of the more urgent ones.”

Ben-Gurion apparently adopted this idea. In the office of the Arab affairs adviser, Stendel did as he was asked and approached Aviad Yafeh, who headed the Foreign Ministry’s information ‏(hasbara‏) unit. According to a letter from May 1964, the two agreed to make available the material that had been collected to a correspondent of one of the major foreign magazines, so he could write a series of articles about the “flight.” According to Stendel, the plan was never implemented.

Rose-tinted history
Even though the Ma’oz-Stendel report on “the flight of the Arabs” appears to be lost for all time, the file in the State Archives contains clear evidence that the researchers at the time did not paint a full picture of Israel’s role in creating the refugee problem. The story of how the study came to be written, juxtaposed to the way the authors see it today, reflects the evolution of Israeli society’s relationship with the Palestinian narrative of the Nakba. In the 1960s, no one dared to admit publicly that Israel had expelled Palestinians, whereas today, in the post-Oslo period and following the research by the “new historians,” the subject of Israel’s culpability is no longer taboo.

After rereading the file in the State Archives, containing summaries he himself wrote in the 1960s, Moshe Ma’oz sent me the following email: “At that juncture I basically shared the views of most Israeli Jews, and that of the establishment, that most Arabs fled because their leaders escaped first and that other Arab leaders instructed them to do so. On the other hand, I did mention that Jewish organizations requested Arabs to stay and not to leave, but I did not mention that many Arabs fled for [reasons of] panic, war, massacres, etc. and that in certain places they were deported by the army. Perhaps these facts did not appear in the materials or were not known or appreciated.”

Ma’oz, then, underwent a conceptual shift at Oxford. After returning to Israel he worked for the military government in the occupied territories, but says he identified more closely with the Palestinians than with the Israeli government. Finally, he was booted out of the military government by the chief of staff, Rafael Eitan, after stating in a television interview in the early 1980s that Israel should hold talks with West Bank leaders affiliated with the Palestine Liberation Organization.

Most historians in Israel and abroad no longer dispute the fact that IDF soldiers expelled large numbers of Palestinians from their homes during the 1948 war, and banned their return after the war. However, the debate over whether this was a preconceived plan authorized by Ben-Gurion continues. File GL-18/17028 shows that throughout Israel’s 65 years of existence, the answer to the question of “What really happened?” varied according to who was responding.

Still, it is unlikely that Gabbay, Ma’oz, Stendel and Lubrani lied knowingly. More likely, they wanted to deceive themselves and create a slightly rosier picture of 1948, a formative year that changed the history of both the Jewish people and of the Arab Middle East for all time.

Shay Hazkani is a doctoral student in history at the Taub Center for Israel Studies at New York University.

Nick Buckles, CEO of G4S; his future is in jeopardy after ‘humiliating shambles’ of failure to fulful Olympics contract and questions about acquisitions. Questions about his company’s role in the oPt also need to be asked.

From the Stop G4S campaign

Stop G4S is calling for a Europe-wide demonstration of outrage as G4S congratulate themselves on another year of profiteering at the expense of human dignity.
Bring banners, flags and drums; bring yourself and your friends. Refuse to be taken in by their whitewashing of abuses, join us at the AGM to hold G4S to account. The AGM will be held at Salters’ Hall, 4 Fore Street, London EC2Y 5DE, Thursday 6 June 2013, 1pm

G4S launches landmark human rights policy

Media release, G4S
April 22, 2013

G4S, the world’s leading international security solutions group, has today launched a landmark global human rights policy, designed to safeguard the rights of its employees, support the communities in which it operates, and to ensure that its operational practices enable it to identify and mitigate against human rights risks

Co-authored by Dr Hugo Slim, an internationally recognised human rights expert, and senior G4S executives, the policy will be communicated to G4S staff in 125 countries across the world.

The policy and its related guidance aims to align the company’s human rights practices with the ‘UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (2011)’ and to introduce additional global guidelines for areas not currently covered by existing standards.

The policy is also designed to support the continued development of an ethical and sustainable business model that encourages the improvement of standards, job creation, community support and broader beneficial impacts on societies throughout the world. G4S recognises the leadership position it holds as one of the world’s largest private employers.

Work on the human rights policy started in the summer of 2011 after official recognition of the new UN guiding principles.*

The first phase involved identifying key human rights relevant to the vast array of services that G4S supplies. Phase two moved onto working out how to integrate G4S’ human rights risks and challenges with recognised international human rights standards and to identify the Group’s strengths and areas for improvement.

The final phase will be to implement and embed the policy. This will be supported by company-wide communications, awareness and training programmes during 2013 and beyond. Overall accountability for the policy will rest with the executive management of G4S and the Group’s CSR Committee.

G4S has previously undertaken extensive activities as part of its drive to improve human rights standards in the regions it operates in. For example, in 2011, the company became a signatory to theUN Global Compact, an international standard to promote socially responsible business behaviour involving human rights, employment, the environment and anti-corruption measures.

The company is also a founding signatory of the International Code of Conduct for Private Security Service Providers (ICoC), a Swiss government convened, multi-stakeholder initiative that aims to both clarify international standards for the private security industry operating in complex environments, as well as to improve oversight and accountability of these companies.

Debbie Walker, group communications director, G4S plc, said: “As an employer of such a vast and diverse workforce in some very challenging environments, we can play a positive role in maintaining and supporting human rights across the globe.

“John Ruggie’s UN guidelines have laid the foundation for a new wave of activity by responsible multinational businesses. The UN guidelines outline the role that every state should be playing to protect human rights and the duty that businesses have to respect human rights. We want to take it a step further and do what we can to implement best practice amongst our people and the communities we touch.”

Hugo Slim added: “In 2012, G4S has continued to work on integrating the UN Guidelines on business and human rights into its many businesses around the world and this policy puts human rights due diligence at the centre of the company’s approach to responsible business.

“It will encourage: greater awareness of human rights across all G4S businesses; improve human rights due diligence, and begin the process of specific reporting on the company’s impact on human rights.

“The people I have worked with at G4S have shown real intent to produce a meaningful policy that will reduce the risk of any form of company involvement in human rights violations.”

The launch of the human rights policy coincides with the publishing of G4S’ fifth global Corporate Social Responsibility report. The latest reporthighlights significant achievements in key areas such as health & safety, anti-corruption, audit and compliance, employee engagement and carbon intensity.

G4S shares suffer over warnings of lower 2013 profit margins

By Gill Plimmer, Financial Times
May 07, 2013

G4S blamed prison closures in the Netherlands and problem clients in Africa for an unexpected warning that profit margins in 2013 would be lower than expected.
Shares tumbled 14 per cent as the FTSE 100 company, which employs 675,000 people in 125 countries, brought forward its trading update to say that operating margins would be down 0.6 per cent in the three months to the end of March and would probably stay lower all year.

The news will add to pressure on Nick Buckles, chief executive, who is still trying to restore the company’s reputation in the wake of the Olympics fiasco.
Profits collapsed by a third and the security contractor was forced to pay out £88m after Mr Buckles was forced to admit that the company’s failure to provide enough security guards for the London 2012 Olympics was a “humiliating shambles”.

As chief executive since 2004, Mr Buckles had already survived a shareholder revolt in 2011 for his failed £5.2bn bid to buy ISS, the Danish cleaning services group.

Stephen Rawlinson, analyst at Whitman Howard, said: “Leadership change may be seen as essential now which will cause further hiatus with the stock, three strikes [ISS, Olympics, profit warning] is usually enough for any chief executive.”

Keith Bowman, analyst at Hargreaves Lansdown Stockbroker, said: “In the wake of a bad 2012, the current year is looking equally challenging. G4S appears to be suffering a dose of its own medicine, with both government and corporate desire to save costs now impacting at the group itself. A change of chief executive could now be a step nearer.”

Half of the fall in margin in the three months to end-March came from a £6m charge in Djibouti, after some clients did not pay their bills. But G4S also cited challenging conditions in continental Europe as reasons. It said the proposed closure of 30 prisons in the Netherlands as a result of a change of minister would have an impact on the business as contracts were phased out and 700 staff made redundant.

Prices in its cash solutions arm, which moves money between banks and retailers and to and from ATMs in the UK and Ireland, were also under pressure, it added.
“For all of these reasons, and despite ongoing business improvement plans, the first quarter margin trends are expected to continue for the full year,” the company said.

Robert Plant at JPMorgan said the news was disappointing “especially as the shares [had] been recovering since the Olympic news”.
David Brockton at Espirito Santo added: “We expect margin pressure to be sustained across the remainder of the business, particularly in manned security. In our view, this will continue to weigh on group performance and require further divestments and acquisitions to sustain the trajectory of growth.”
Shares in G4S closed down 45.5p, or 14.9 per cent, to 260p.

Security group G4S hit by Dutch prisons shake-up

By Christine Murray. Reuters
May 7, 2013

LONDON – G4S (GFS.L), the world’s largest security services firm, warned on Tuesday that its profits in 2013 would be lower than expected after a shake-up of the prison system in the Netherlands and problem clients in Africa hit first-quarter results.

The firm, which provides services ranging from security guards to cash transportation and the running of prisons, said in an unexpected trading statement its profit margin fell 0.6 percent in the first quarter and was expected to remain at a similar level for the full year.

Before the statement analysts were on average forecasting a pre-tax profit of 457 million pounds in 2013, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S Estimates.

Shares in the firm had risen 19.1 percent so far this year, ahead of the near 11 percent rise in the FTSE 100 .FTSE, but were trading down 14 percent at 262.7 pence by 1050 GMT on Tuesday, giving the firm a market value of 3.7 billion pounds.

Coming on top of last year’s major embarrassment over the last-minute failure to provide thousands of security guards promised for the London Olympics, the profit warning also raised renewed questions about Buckles’ own position.

In late 2011 Buckles had to abandon an $8 billion deal to acquire Danish cleaning services group

Notes and links

Dutch prisons
As part of the Europe-wide austerity measures, the Dutch government has decided to cut their prison population by 13.3 percent and use electronic tagging instead.

*The UN’s report: Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights: Implementing the United Nations “Protect, Respect and Remedy” Framework, is well worth reading for anyone seeking to hold a company to account.  It was produced in 2011 because of ‘the dramatic worldwide expansion of the private sector’ and accompanying abuses of human rights.

Although the document  lacks legal force, the principles have moral and poliical weight in any dispute, and are certainly a useful standard by which to judge the actions of G4S.

Point 6 in the document is:
The Framework rests on three pillars. The first is the State duty to protect against human rights abuses by third parties, including business enterprises, through appropriate policies, regulation, and adjudication. The second is the corporate responsibility to respect uman rights, which means that business enterprises should act with due diligence to avoid infringing on the rights of others and to address adverse impacts with which they are involved. The third is the need for greater access by victims to effective remedy, both judicial and non-judicial. Each pillar is an essential component in an inter-related and dynamic system of preventative and remedial measures: the State duty to protect because it lies at the very core of the international human rights regime; the corporate responsibility to respect because it is the basic expectation society has of business in relation to human rights; and access to remedy because even the most concerted efforts cannot prevent all abuse.

Protests force G4S to give up West Bank contracts
Palestinian political prisoners’ day, 17 April 2013
Why G4S should win the award for world’s worst company
G4S carries out Israel’s violations of Geneva and UN conventions

A portrait of enlightenment. The man in the red coat  is Moses Mendelssohn, the  Jewish philosopher and spearhead of the 18thC Jewish Enlightenment. Mendelssohn enjoyed almost universal respect during his life. The man standing is Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, a Christian, an author and a rationalist, who believed in religious tolerance and was one of Mendelssohn’s most vocal supporters. The man seated across from Mendelssohn is Johann Kaspar Lavater, a Christian cleric, well- known for his “scientific” writings on physiognomy. From Enlightened Chess.

The last of the Semites

It is Israel’s claims that it represents and speaks for all Jews that are the most anti-Semitic claims of all.

By Joseph Massad, Al Jazeeera
May 14, 2013

Jewish opponents of Zionism understood the movement since its early age as one that shared the precepts of anti-Semitism in its diagnosis of what gentile Europeans called the “Jewish Question”. What galled anti-Zionist Jews the most, however, was that Zionism also shared the “solution” to the Jewish Question that anti-Semites had always advocated, namely the expulsion of Jews from Europe.

It was the Protestant Reformation with its revival of the Hebrew Bible that would link the modern Jews of Europe to the ancient Hebrews of Palestine, a link that the philologists of the 18th century would solidify through their discovery of the family of “Semitic” languages, including Hebrew and Arabic. Whereas Millenarian Protestants insisted that contemporary Jews, as descendants of the ancient Hebrews, must leave Europe to Palestine to expedite the second coming of Christ, philological discoveries led to the labelling of contemporary Jews as “Semites”. The leap that the biological sciences of race and heredity would make in the 19th century of considering contemporary European Jews racial descendants of the ancient Hebrews would, as a result, not be a giant one.

Basing themselves on the connections made by anti-Jewish Protestant Millenarians, secular European figures saw the political potential of “restoring” Jews to Palestine abounded in the 19th century. Less interested in expediting the second coming of Christ as were the Millenarians, these secular politicians, from Napoleon Bonaparte to British foreign secretary Lord Palmerston (1785-1865) to Ernest Laharanne, the private secretary of Napoleon III in the 1860s, sought to expel the Jews of Europe to Palestine in order to set them up as agents of European imperialism in Asia. Their call would be espoused by many “anti-Semites”, a new label chosen by European anti-Jewish racists after its invention in 1879 by a minor Viennese journalist by the name of Wilhelm Marr, who issued a political programme titled The Victory of Judaism over Germanism. Marr was careful to decouple anti-Semitism from the history of Christian hatred of Jews on the basis of religion, emphasising, in line with Semitic philology and racial theories of the 19th century, that the distinction to be made between Jews and Aryans was strictly racial.

Assimilating Jews into European culture
Scientific anti-Semitism insisted that the Jews were different from Christian Europeans. Indeed that the Jews were not European at all and that their very presence in Europe is what causes anti-Semitism. The reason why Jews caused so many problems for European Christians had to do with their alleged rootlessness, that they lacked a country, and hence country-based loyalty. In the Romantic age of European nationalisms, anti-Semites argued that Jews did not fit in the new national configurations, and disrupted national and racial purity essential to most European nationalisms. This is why if the Jews remained in Europe, the anti-Semites argued, they could only cause hostility among Christian Europeans. The only solution was for the Jews to exit from Europe and have their own country. Needless to say, religious and secular Jews opposed this horrific anti-Semitic line of thinking. Orthodox and Reform Jews, Socialist and Communist Jews, cosmopolitan and Yiddishkeit cultural Jews, all agreed that this was a dangerous ideology of hostility that sought the expulsion of Jews from their European homelands.

The Jewish Haskalah, or Enlightenment, which emerged also in the 19th century, sought to assimilate Jews into European secular gentile culture and have them shed their Jewish culture. It was the Haskalah that sought to break the hegemony of Orthodox Jewish rabbis on the “Ostjuden” of the East European shtetl and to shed what it perceived as a “medieval” Jewish culture in favour of the modern secular culture of European Christians. Reform Judaism, as a Christian- and Protestant-like variant of Judaism, would emerge from the bosom of the Haskalah. This assimilationist programme, however, sought to integrate Jews in European modernity, not to expel them outside Europe’s geography.

When Zionism started a decade and a half after Marr’s anti-Semitic programme was published, it would espouse all these anti-Jewish ideas, including scientific anti-Semitism as valid. For Zionism, Jews were “Semites”, who were descendants of the ancient Hebrews. In his foundational pamphlet Der Judenstaat, Herzl explained that it was Jews, not their Christian enemies, who “cause” anti-Semitism and that “where it does not exist, [anti-Semitism] is carried by Jews in the course of their migrations”, indeed that “the unfortunate Jews are now carrying the seeds of anti-Semitism into England; they have already introduced it into America”; that Jews were a “nation” that should leave Europe to restore their “nationhood” in Palestine or Argentina; that Jews must emulate European Christians culturally and abandon their living languages and traditions in favour of modern European languages or a restored ancient national language. Herzl preferred that all Jews adopt German, while the East European Zionists wanted Hebrew. Zionists after Herzl even agreed and affirmed that Jews were separate racially from Aryans. As for Yiddish, the living language of most European Jews, all Zionists agreed that it should be abandoned.

The majority of Jews continued to resist Zionism and understood its precepts as those of anti-Semitism and as a continuation of the Haskalah quest to shed Jewish culture and assimilate Jews into European secular gentile culture, except that Zionism sought the latter not inside Europe but at a geographical remove following the expulsion of Jews from Europe. The Bund, or the General Jewish Labor Union in Lithuania, Poland, and Russia, which was founded in Vilna in early October 1897, a few weeks after the convening of the first Zionist Congress in Basel in late August 1897, would become Zionism’s fiercest enemy. The Bund joined the existing anti-Zionist Jewish coalition of Orthodox and Reform rabbis who had combined forces a few months earlier to prevent Herzl from convening the first Zionist Congress in Munich, which forced him to move it to Basel. Jewish anti-Zionism across Europe and in the United States had the support of the majority of Jews who continued to view Zionism as an anti-Jewish movement well into the 1940s.

Anti-Semitic chain of pro-Zionist enthusiasts
Realising that its plan for the future of European Jews was in line with those of anti-Semites, Herzl strategised early on an alliance with the latter. He declared in Der Judenstaat that:

“The Governments of all countries scourged by anti-Semitism will be keenly interested in assisting us to obtain [the] sovereignty we want.”

He added that “not only poor Jews” would contribute to an immigration fund for European Jews, “but also Christians who wanted to get rid of them”. Herzl unapologetically confided in his Diaries that:

Thus when Herzl began to meet in 1903 with infamous anti-Semites like the Russian minister of the interior Vyacheslav von Plehve, who oversaw anti-Jewish pogroms in Russia, it was an alliance that he sought by design. That it would be the anti-Semitic Lord Balfour, who as Prime Minister of Britain in 1905 oversaw his government’s Aliens Act, which prevented East European Jews fleeing Russian pogroms from entering Britain in order, as he put it, to save the country from the “undoubted evils” of “an immigration which was largely Jewish”, was hardy coincidental. Balfour’s infamous Declaration of 1917 to create in Palestine a “national home” for the “Jewish people”, was designed, among other things, to curb Jewish support for the Russian Revolution and to stem the tide of further unwanted Jewish immigrants into Britain.

The Nazis would not be an exception in this anti-Semitic chain of pro-Zionist enthusiasts. Indeed, the Zionists would strike a deal with the Nazis very early in their history. It was in 1933 that the infamous Transfer (Ha’avara) Agreement was signed between the Zionists and the Nazi government to facilitate the transfer of German Jews and their property to Palestine and which broke the international Jewish boycott of Nazi Germany started by American Jews. It was in this spirit that Nazi envoys were dispatched to Palestine to report on the successes of Jewish colonisation of the country. Adolf Eichmann returned from his 1937 trip to Palestine full of fantastic stories about the achievements of the racially-separatist Ashkenazi Kibbutz, one of which he visited on Mount Carmel as a guest of the Zionists.

Despite the overwhelming opposition of most German Jews, it was the Zionist Federation of Germany that was the only Jewish group that supported the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, as they agreed with the Nazis that Jews and Aryans were separate and separable races. This was not a tactical support but one based on ideological similitude. The Nazis’ Final Solution initially meant the expulsion of Germany’s Jews to Madagascar. It is this shared goal of expelling Jews from Europe as a separate unassimilable race that created the affinity between Nazis and Zionists all along.

While the majority of Jews continued to resist the anti-Semitic basis of Zionism and its alliances with anti-Semites, the Nazi genocide not only killed 90 percent of European Jews, but in the process also killed the majority of Jewish enemies of Zionism who died precisely because they refused to heed the Zionist call of abandoning their countries and homes.

The anti-Semites will become our most dependable friends, the anti-Semitic countries our allies.
Theodor Herzl , Diaries

After the War, the horror at the Jewish holocaust did not stop European countries from supporting the anti-Semitic programme of Zionism. On the contrary, these countries shared with the Nazis a predilection for Zionism. They only opposed Nazism’s genocidal programme. European countries, along with the United States, refused to take in hundreds of thousands of Jewish survivors of the holocaust. In fact, these countries voted against a UN resolution introduced by the Arab states in 1947 calling on them to take in the Jewish survivors, yet these same countries would be the ones who would support the United Nations Partition Plan of November 1947 to create a Jewish State in Palestine to which these unwanted Jewish refugees could be expelled.

The pro-Zionist policies of the Nazis
The United States and European countries, including Germany, would continue the pro-Zionist policies of the Nazis. Post-War West German governments that presented themselves as opening a new page in their relationship with Jews in reality did no such thing. Since the establishment of the country after WWII, every West German government (and every German government since unification in1990) has continued the pro-Zionist Nazi policies unabated. There was never a break with Nazi pro-Zionism. The only break was with the genocidal and racial hatred of Jews that Nazism consecrated, but not with the desire to see Jews set up in a country in Asia, away from Europe. Indeed, the Germans would explain that much of the money they were sending to Israel was to help offset the costs of resettling European Jewish refugees in the country.

After World War II, a new consensus emerged in the United States and Europe that Jews had to be integrated posthumously into white Europeanness, and that the horror of the Jewish holocaust was essentially a horror at the murder of white Europeans. Since the 1960s, Hollywood films about the holocaust began to depict Jewish victims of Nazism as white Christian-looking, middle class, educated and talented people not unlike contemporary European and American Christians who should and would identify with them. Presumably if the films were to depict the poor religious Jews of Eastern Europe (and most East European Jews who were killed by the Nazis were poor and many were religious), contemporary white Christians would not find commonality with them. Hence, the post-holocaust European Christian horror at the genocide of European Jews was not based on the horror of slaughtering people in the millions who were different from European Christians, but rather a horror at the murder of millions of people who were the same as European Christians. This explains why in a country like the United States, which had nothing to do with the slaughter of European Jews, there exists upwards of 40 holocaust memorials and a major museum for the murdered Jews of Europe, but not one for the holocaust of Native Americans or African Americans for which the US is responsible.

Aimé Césaire understood this process very well. In his famous speech* on colonialism, he affirmed that the retrospective view of European Christians about Nazism is that:

it is barbarism, but the supreme barbarism, the crowning barbarism that sums up all the daily barbarisms; that it is Nazism, yes, but that before [Europeans] were its victims, they were its accomplices; and they tolerated that Nazism before it was inflicted on them, that they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimised it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples; that they have cultivated that Nazism, that they are responsible for it, and that before engulfing the whole of Western, Christian civilisation in its reddened waters, it oozes, seeps, and trickles from every crack.

That for Césaire the Nazi wars and holocaust were European colonialism turned inwards is true enough. But since the rehabilitation of Nazism’s victims as white people, Europe and its American accomplice would continue their Nazi policy of visiting horrors on non-white people around the world, on Korea, on Vietnam and Indochina, on Algeria, on Indonesia, on Central and South America, on Central and Southern Africa, on Palestine, on Iran, and on Iraq and Afghanistan.

The rehabilitation of European Jews after WWII was a crucial part of US Cold War propaganda. As American social scientists and ideologues developed the theory of “totalitarianism”, which posited Soviet Communism and Nazism as essentially the same type of regime, European Jews, as victims of one totalitarian regime, became part of the atrocity exhibition that American and West European propaganda claimed was like the atrocities that the Soviet regime was allegedly committing in the pre- and post-War periods. That Israel would jump on the bandwagon by accusing the Soviets of anti-Semitism for their refusal to allow Soviet Jewish citizens to self-expel and leave to Israel was part of the propaganda.

Commitment to white supremacy
It was thus that the European and US commitment to white supremacy was preserved, except that it now included Jews as part of “white” people, and what came to be called “Judeo-Christian”** civilisation. European and American policies after World War II, which continued to be inspired and dictated by racism against Native Americans, Africans, Asians, Arabs and Muslims, and continued to support Zionism’s anti-Semitic programme of assimilating Jews into whiteness in a colonial settler state away from Europe, were a direct continuation of anti-Semitic policies prevalent before the War. It was just that much of the anti-Semitic racialist venom would now be directed at Arabs and Muslims (both, those who are immigrants and citizens in Europe and the United States and those who live in Asia and Africa) while the erstwhile anti-Semitic support for Zionism would continue unhindered.

Hungary’s 100,000 Jews alarmed at racism
West Germany’s alliance with Zionism and Israel after WWII, of supplying Israel with huge economic aid in the 1950s and of economic and military aid since the early 1960s, including tanks, which it used to kill Palestinians and other Arabs, is a continuation of the alliance that the Nazi government concluded with the Zionists in the 1930s. In the 1960s, West Germany even provided military training to Israeli soldiers and since the 1970s has provided Israel with nuclear-ready German-made submarines with which Israel hopes to kill more Arabs and Muslims. Israel has in recent years armed the most recent German-supplied submarines with nuclear tipped cruise missiles, a fact that is well known to the current German government. Israel’s Defence Minister Ehud Barak told Der Spiegel in 2012 that Germans should be “proud” that they have secured the existence of the state of Israel “for many years”. Berlin financed one-third of the cost of the submarines, around 135 million euros ($168 million) per submarine, and has allowed Israel to defer its payment until 2015. That this makes Germany an accomplice in the dispossession of the Palestinians is of no more concern to current German governments than it was in the 1960s to West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer who affirmed that “the Federal Republic has neither the right nor the responsibility to take a position on the Palestinian refugees”.

This is to be added to the massive billions that Germany has paid to the Israeli government as compensation for the holocaust, as if Israel and Zionism were the victims of Nazism, when in reality it was anti-Zionist Jews who were killed by the Nazis. The current German government does not care about the fact that even those German Jews who fled the Nazis and ended up in Palestine hated Zionism and its project and were hated in turn by Zionist colonists in Palestine. As German refugees in 1930s and 1940s Palestine refused to learn Hebrew and published half a dozen German newspapers in the country, they were attacked by the Hebrew press, including by Haartez, which called for the closure of their newspapers in 1939 and again in 1941. Zionist colonists attacked a German-owned café in Tel Aviv because its Jewish owners refused to speak Hebrew, and the Tel Aviv municipality threatened in June 1944 some of its German Jewish residents for holding in their home on 21 Allenby street “parties and balls entirely in the German language, including programmes that are foreign to the spirit of our city” and that this would “not be tolerated in Tel Aviv”. German Jews, or Yekkes as they were known in the Yishuv, would even organise a celebration of the Kaiser’s birthday in 1941 (for these and more details about German Jewish refugees in Palestine, read Tom Segev’s book The Seventh Million).

Add to that Germany’s support for Israeli policies against Palestinians at the United Nations, and the picture becomes complete. Even the new holocaust memorial built in Berlin that opened in 2005 maintains Nazi racial apartheid, as this “Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe” is only for Jewish victims of the Nazis who must still today be set apart, as Hitler mandated, from the other millions of non-Jews who also fell victim to Nazism. That a subsidiary of the German company Degussa, which collaborated with the Nazis and which produced the Zyklon B gas that was used to kill people in the gas chambers, was contracted to build the memorial was anything but surprising, as it simply confirms that those who killed Jews in Germany in the late 1930s and in the 1940s now regret what they had done because they now understand Jews to be white Europeans who must be commemorated and who should not have been killed in the first place on account of their whiteness. The German policy of abetting the killing of Arabs by Israel, however, is hardly unrelated to this commitment to anti-Semitism, which continues through the predominant contemporary anti-Muslim German racism that targets Muslim immigrants.

Euro-American anti-Jewish tradition
The Jewish holocaust killed off the majority of Jews who fought and struggled against European anti-Semitism, including Zionism. With their death, the only remaining “Semites” who are fighting against Zionism and its anti-Semitism today are the Palestinian people. Whereas Israel insists that European Jews do not belong in Europe and must come to Palestine, the Palestinians have always insisted that the homelands of European Jews were their European countries and not Palestine, and that Zionist colonialism springs from its very anti-Semitism. Whereas Zionism insists that Jews are a race separate from European Christians, the Palestinians insist that European Jews are nothing if not European and have nothing to do with Palestine, its people, or its culture. What Israel and its American and European allies have sought to do in the last six and a half decades is to convince Palestinians that they too must become anti-Semites and believe as the Nazis, Israel, and its Western anti-Semitic allies do, that Jews are a race that is different from European races, that Palestine is their country, and that Israel speaks for all Jews. That the two largest American pro-Israel voting blocks today are Millenarian Protestants and secular imperialists continues the very same Euro-American anti-Jewish tradition that extends back to the Protestant Reformation and 19th century imperialism. But the Palestinians have remained unconvinced and steadfast in their resistance to anti-Semitism.

European Jews were transformed into the instruments of aggression; they became the elements of settler colonialism intimately allied to racial discrimination…

Yasser Arafat, 1974 UN speech

Israel and its anti-Semitic allies affirm that Israel is “the Jewish people”, that its policies are “Jewish” policies, that its achievements are “Jewish” achievements, that its crimes are “Jewish” crimes, and that therefore anyone who dares to criticise Israel is criticising Jews and must be an anti-Semite. The Palestinian people have mounted a major struggle against this anti-Semitic incitement. They continue to affirm instead that the Israeli government does not speak for all Jews, that it does not represent all Jews, and that its colonial crimes against the Palestinian people are its own crimes and not the crimes of “the Jewish people”, and that therefore it must be criticised, condemned and prosecuted for its ongoing war crimes against the Palestinian people. This is not a new Palestinian position, but one that was adopted since the turn of the 20th century and continued throughout the pre-WWII Palestinian struggle against Zionism. Yasser Arafat’s speech at the United Nations in 1974 stressed all these points vehemently:

Just as colonialism heedlessly used the wretched, the poor, the exploited as mere inert matter with which to build and to carry out settler colonialism, so too were destitute, oppressed European Jews employed on behalf of world imperialism and of the Zionist leadership. European Jews were transformed into the instruments of aggression; they became the elements of settler colonialism intimately allied to racial discrimination…Zionist theology was utilised against our Palestinian people: the purpose was not only the establishment of Western-style settler colonialism but also the severing of Jews from their various homelands and subsequently their estrangement from their nations. Zionism… is united with anti-Semitism in its retrograde tenets and is, when all is said and done, another side of the same base coin. For when what is proposed is that adherents of the Jewish faith, regardless of their national residence, should neither owe allegiance to their national residence nor live on equal footing with its other, non-Jewish citizens -when that is proposed we hear anti-Semitism being proposed. When it is proposed that the only solution for the Jewish problem is that Jews must alienate themselves from communities or nations of which they have been a historical part, when it is proposed that Jews solve the Jewish problem by immigrating to and forcibly settling the land of another people – when this occurs, exactly the same position is being advocated as the one urged by anti-Semites against Jews.

Israel’s claim that its critics must be anti-Semites presupposes that its critics believe its claims that it represents “the Jewish people”. But it is Israel’s claims that it represents and speaks for all Jews that are the most anti-Semitic claims of all.

Today, Israel and the Western powers want to elevate anti-Semitism to an international principle around which they seek to establish full consensus. They insist that for there to be peace in the Middle East, Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims must become, like the West, anti-Semites by espousing Zionism and recognising Israel’s anti-Semitic claims. Except for dictatorial Arab regimes and the Palestinian Authority and its cronies, on this 65th anniversary of the anti-Semitic conquest of Palestine by the Zionists, known to Palestinians as the Nakba, the Palestinian people and the few surviving anti-Zionist Jews continue to refuse to heed this international call and incitement to anti-Semitism. They affirm that they are, as the last of the Semites, the heirs of the pre-WWII Jewish and Palestinian struggles against anti-Semitism and its Zionist colonial manifestation. It is their resistance that stands in the way of a complete victory for European anti-Semitism in the Middle East and the world at large.

Joseph Massad teaches Modern Arab Politics and Intellectual History at Columbia University in New York. He is the author of The Persistence of the Palestinian Question: Essays on Zionism and the Palestinians.

Establishing the ‘Anti-Semitic’ Roots of Zionism?

By Mira Sucharov, Daily Beast
May 14, 2013

In a rambling essay on Al Jazeera, Columbia University professor Joseph Massad seeks to establish what he calls the “anti-Semitic” roots of Zionism. It’s not the first time this year that an alleged relationship between Zionism and Nazism has been tossed into the wind. Back in January, Mahmoud Abbas made similar claims, prompting historian David N. Myers to respond in Open Zion.

But Massad’s argument goes beyond historical aspersion and into the realm of the philosophical. It can be summed up by this sentence:

What Israel and its American and European allies have sought to do in the last six and a half decades is to convince Palestinians that they too must become anti-Semites and believe as the Nazis, Israel, and its Western anti-Semitic allies do, that Jews are a race that is different from European races, that Palestine is their country, and that Israel speaks for all Jews.

Let’s start with the least controversial—but still lacking—of these three claims, namely that Israel and its allies attempt to cast Israel as the legitimate speaker of the Jewish people. Certainly there is some truth to this observation. But Massad misses an important component of the dynamic.

True, the Diaspora-Israel relationship has attempted to establish Israel as a natural homeland in the minds of Jews. The annual general meeting of a Jewish Community Centre—today more fitness facility than kibbutz dining hall—in any given North American city might typically open with the singing of Hatikvah. The fully-subsidized trip that Diaspora Jewish youth take to Israel is called Birthright. The annual Jewish Federation of North American annual fundraising campaign includes a portion of precious monies that could be spent on protecting Jewish education instead being sent to Israel. And so on.

The idea of Israel speaking in the name of Jews is reinforced most strongly, and ironically, by the two opposing poles: on one hand are Jewish critics of Zionism like the group Not in My Name; on the other are the many mainstream Diaspora supporters of Israel who view vocal and public criticism as a form of collective treason. But missing from these two groups is the incredibly embattled, liberal middle of Diaspora discourse: the supporters of groups like J Street, Peace Now and Ameinu—organizations that seek to establish a more robust, vocal, dialectical relationship between Israel and its Diaspora, where Diaspora Jews can wrestle with the Jewish State, struggling to define the future of Zionism, together.

Massad makes two other claims about Zionism, namely that it holds “that Jews are a race that is different from European races, [and] that Palestine is their country.” Contemporary Zionism has abandoned whatever racial discourse it may have once nurtured in certain corners. But Massad is right in describing Zionism as being premised on Jewish distinctiveness. At its core, Zionism casts Jews as a people deserving of physical rehabilitation in the one area on earth where centuries-long collective Jewish imaginings have pointed.

Buoyed by a thin layer of overlap between Jewish self-described distinctiveness and anti-Semitism as having cast Jews as distinct, Massad implies that the unjustness of Zionist claims is self-evident. But why should one follow from the other? If Zionists articulated a collective Jewish national self-awareness that had previously belonged to the Jew haters, what of it?

Here I would borrow from the words of Israeli security analyst Yossi Alpher. Last week, Alpher spoke in Ottawa, at one point politely responding to a skeptical Israeli-Canadian audience member regarding the Palestinian claim to national distinctiveness. After thoughtfully grappling with the question historically, Alpher concluded with five simple words: “Who are we to judge?”

There is no doubt that the Palestinian Nakba casts a long shadow on the Zionist enterprise. But today the solution to the competing claims of Jewish and Palestinian nationalism is widely known: dividing the land between two national peoples where each can live with collective dignity, nursing their mutually-inflicted wounds while building their future. As an intellectual exercise, Massad’s essay is interesting for anyone seeking to understand how ideologies sometimes oddly intersect across the pages of history. But by undermining one nation’s political legitimacy, Massad’s polemic moves us farther away from a solution. Ironically, in so doing, his attacks on Zionism sadly resemble the Jewish right’s oft-heard attempts to delegitimize Palestinian identity. So it is to both sides that I ask today: who are we to judge?

Mira Sucharov is associate professor of political science at Carleton University in Ottawa, where she specializes in Israeli-Palestinian relations and Jewish affairs. She is the author of The International Self: Psychoanalysis and the Search for Israeli-Palestinian Peace, and is the current country analyst for Israel, the West Bank and Gaza for Freedom House. She is a recipient of a Simon Rockower Award for Excellence in Jewish Journalism, and is currently writing a book on nostalgia and political change.

Notes and links
*Discourse on Colonialism by Aimé Césaire, plus an interview with him.

**”Judeo-Christian: a tradition invented in the 1930s to show American Christians that Nazis were also attacking Judiasm – and Jews. See Peter Novick, The Holocaust and Collective Memory, 2001

PHOTOS: Resistance from within Israeli society

Alternative Information Center (AIC)
May 15, 2013

Anti-Zionist Israeli activists hung posters in the ultra-orthodox neighbourhood of Mea Shearim in West Jerusalem on Tuesday, supporting the community in its struggle against forced enlistment in the Israeli army. The posters further noted that Zionism has appropriated Judaism from Jews throughout the world and that its ruling regime is undemocratic and unrepresentative of those living here.

Israeli anti-Zionist activist speaking with residents of West Jerusalem’s Mea Shearim neighbourhood (Photo: Israeli activists)

Below is a translation of the poster, together with photos of the action itself.

We, people who live under the regime titled “The State of Israel”, acknowledge that the Zionist project is void of any democratic value.

We acknowledge that the Zionist idea purposely denies equality among all human beings. We acknowledge that among the communities harmed by “The State of Israel” regime is the Haredi (ultra orthodox) community. We acknowledge that a minority group founded the regime and it alone enjoys the power. We acknowledge that this secular minority group has appropriated Judaism from Jews all over the world. We acknowledge that the question of drafting into “The State of Israel’s military”, also referred to as “sharing of the burden”, is being used to suppress a fundamental question – what type of governance befits all people of this land?

We acknowledge that “allowances” given to the Haredi community have covered up throughout the years over a fundamental question – what type of governance befits all the people of this land?

The governance which best befits all the people of this land should be established by all those living in this land and all those who have been forcefully expelled from it.

Hanging posters in support of the Haredi resistance to forced enlistment in Israel’s army (Photo: Israeli activists)

We acknowledge that again, during these days, the Haredi community is under a blatant, aggressive and irrelevant assault by the representatives of the Zionist-nationalist minority.

We therefore wish to show solidarity and express our support of the Haredi community in relation to the forced recruitment into the army of the State of Israel.

We therefore wish to express our disapproval of the harsh words of hatred towards the Haredi community, attributing to it the behaviour of “parasites” and “leeches”.

Residents of Mea Shearim were receptive to the activists’ action and message Photo by Israeli activists.

As long as the Haredi community resists plans for forced recruitment, as well as for the denial of allowances on the basis of economic relief for the society – we will stand in support with the Haredi community. The path for coexisting in harmony among different communities goes through joint work, and know that we are ready for the task.

“Some in the chariots and some on horses, and we shall recall the Lord our God”

Poster advertising a Haredi demonstration planned for Thursday [17th May] against forced military enlistment. Photo: Israeli activists

Haredim advised to emigrate from Israel
Booklet handed out in Jerusalem’s Mea Shearim calls on ultra-Orthodox public to leave country following battles over IDF draft, core curriculum subjects

By Moshe Heller, Ynet news
May 13, 2013

Dozens of copies of a booklet calling on ultra-Orthodox Jews to emigrate from Israel were handed out last week near the main synagogue in Jerusalem’s Mea Shearim neighborhood, on the backdrop of the battle between Israel’s haredi and secular publics over the attempt to draft yeshiva students to the Israel Defense Forces and introduce core subjects into haredi schools’ curriculum.

Although the booklet was written about 15 years ago by Rabbi Moshe Dov Beck of the extreme Eda Haredit faction, it was handed out once again this week in light of the haredi draft issue, which has reached the High Court of Justice.

The 50-page publication cites passages from the Holy Scriptures as proof of the obligation to “escape from under the Zionist regime and not go in to visit there.”

The claim is based on the haredi perception which sees the establishment of the State as a revolt against God and the world’s nations, which citizens will be punished for. Another reason for the grave punishment is that many in the country fail to observe mitzvot.

Beck also blasts what he refers to as the “hypocrisy” of extreme haredi factions, which protest against the State’s authorities which they do not recognize, yet request permission to protest from the police and authorities.

He further writes that contrary to the common assumption, the radical factions do not believe in the possibility of living in peace with the Palestinians.

“When we investigate the spirit of rebellion and the use of weapons against the Palestinians, which is the essence of Zionism, have we heard a voice of protest against it?” he asks.

“And if we do hear a little from some of the protestors, they are the same ones who want to stone them and swallow them alive, and the vast majority of those who don’t participate in the elections – they believe that we must deal with the Palestinians with an iron fist and not surrender to the nations.”

Military Service
Military service is compulsory for all Israelis 18 and over – except for Arabs and students engaged in studying the Torah (which may take a life-time). In practice, the proportion of Israeli citizens doing military service has fallen to 50% not least becausethe main role of the IDF is policing the occupation which few see as noble, heroic, or good civic practice (for accounts of this practice, see Breaking the Silence. This falling proportion is a factor in the new pressure to force the haredi/Torah students, to do their share of military service.

There are individuals who refused military service as conscientious objectors. Adam Keller gives a brief account of ‘refusers in Refusenik new leading light of the right, women in Feminist military refusers claim their own voice

Anti-Zionist Jews, and political objectors in
I refuse to perpetuate the rule of terror: Israel’s refuseniks
There are a number of Jewish anti-zionist organisations as well as the well-known Neturei Karta. Their common belief is that Judaism is a spiritual religion as well as a set of religious customs and practices, while zionism is a religious state-building project that conflicts with the practices of judaism. Many liberal, refirm and secular Jews are anti-zionist. There are also Orthodoz anti-zionist groups, mostly small and little-known. Some are listed on the Jews Not Zionists website.See also True Torah Jews

The oldest American anti-zionist organisation is the American Council for Judaism, founded 1942.
It says on its website;

We view Judaism as a universal religious faith, rather than an ethnic or nationalist identity. We further recognize the silent and often non-participating majority who define their Judaism in the context of their own perspectives. We remain committed to the ethical, intellectual, and prophetic values of Judaism. We cherish the spiritual ties that link us to our fellow Jews around the world, with whom we share our heritage and history.

The State of Israel has significance for the Jewish experience. As a refuge for many Jews who have suffered persecution and oppression in other places, Israel certainly has meaning for us. However, that relationship is a spiritual, historical, and humanitarian one – it is not a political tie. As American Jews, we share the hope for the security and well being of the State of Israel, living in peace and justice with its neighbors.

We celebrate the rich diversity of opinion within today’s changing Jewish community. No one group or perspective reflects the broad range of positions among American Jews. We embrace the American tradition of open and respectful dialogue.

Our most fervent hopes are for a strong, creative and spiritually renewed American Jewish community, and for freedom and security for Jews everywhere; so that we might fulfill our historic mission of working together with all people to build a world of justice, freedom, and peace.

Despite Their Wide Differences, Many Israelis and Palestinians Want Bigger Role for Obama in Resolving Conflict

SURVEY REPORT

Pew Research Center
May 09, 2013

Israelis and Palestinians differ widely in their outlook for a peaceful resolution of their longstanding conflict and in their views about the United States. But both want U.S. President Barack Obama to play a larger role in resolving the Israeli-Palestinian stalemate.

Israelis, on balance, believe a way can be found for an independent Palestinian state to coexist peacefully with their country. Palestinians, on the other hand, overwhelmingly do not think this is possible, and a plurality believes armed struggle rather than negotiations or nonviolent resistance is the best way to achieve statehood.

Views of the United States also continue to vary considerably between Israelis and Palestinians. Israelis are far more likely to rate the U.S. favorably and to say its policies in the Middle East are fair.

Nonetheless, while Palestinians give the U.S. negative ratings and are nearly unanimous in saying the U.S. favors Israel in the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, many join Israelis in welcoming a larger role for the Obama administration in resolving the conflict.

While Obama, who visited Jerusalem and the West Bank in March, remains largely unpopular in the Palestinian territories, his ratings have improved markedly in Israel. The president enjoys the confidence of 61% of Israelis, up 12 percentage points from 2011. Palestinians, however, remain negative, with just 15% expressing confidence in Obama to do the right thing in world affairs, and 82% saying they have little or no confidence in the American president.

These are among the key findings from a new survey by the Pew Research Center of 14,997 people in 12 countries and the Palestinian territories from March 3 to April 12, 2013. Survey countries include Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey, Tunisia, Egypt, Israel and the Palestinian territories, as well as the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council – the United States, France, Britain, China and Russia – and Germany, which has played an active role in key issues related to the Middle East. Surveys in Israel and the Palestinian territories were conducted after Obama’s trip to the region.

Israel’s image is overwhelmingly negative in the region; 86% or more in Lebanon, Jordan, the Palestinian territories, Egypt, Tunisia and Turkey have an unfavorable view. Israel also has few friends in France, Germany and China, where majorities express negative opinions of the Jewish state. The U.S. is the only country surveyed where a majority (57%) gives Israel a favorable rating.

Despite their negative views of Israel, Westerners generally believe a peaceful resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is possible. At least half in France, Germany, Britain and the U.S. think a way can be found for Israel and an independent Palestinian state to coexist peacefully. In contrast, publics in Turkey and in the Arab countries surveyed are skeptical that this is possible.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas receive negative ratings in the region, although majorities in Israel and in the Palestinian territories rate their own leader favorably.

Netanyahu’s ratings are especially negative, with seven-in-ten in Turkey and at least 85% in Lebanon, the Palestinian territories, Jordan, Egypt and Tunisia expressing unfavorable views. Abbas receives his most negative ratings in Israel, where 84% have an unfavorable view of the Palestinian leader. Majorities or pluralities in Lebanon, Egypt, Jordan and Turkey also offer negative ratings of Abbas.

In Israel, a substantial number believes the continued building of Jewish settlements in the West Bank hurts their nation’s security, an opinion that is held by nearly half of secular Jews and by a large majority of Arabs in that country. In contrast, just 19% of Israeli Jews who describe themselves as traditional, religious or ultra-Orthodox, say the continued building of settlements makes Israel less safe, while 41% say it makes Israel safer and 31% say it does not make a difference.

Middle East Sympathies

Perceptions of the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians differ considerably across the countries surveyed. In the U.S., about half (53%) say they sympathize more with Israel, while just 14% sympathize more with the Palestinians. This is virtually unchanged from the last time the Pew Global Attitudes Project asked this question in 2007.

Views are more mixed in France, Germany and Russia. For example, 40% of French respondents sympathize more with Israel, while 44% say their sympathies lie with the Palestinians. Similarly, in Germany and Russia, about as many side with Israel as side with the Palestinians, but substantial numbers in these countries do not sympathize with either side in this conflict (31% and 42%, respectively).

One-in-five respondents in Britain also do not sympathize with either side in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but those who choose a side tend to sympathize with the Palestinians. About a third (35%) of the British sympathize with the Palestinians, while 19% side with Israel.

In Turkey and the Arab countries where this question was asked, overwhelming majorities side with the Palestinians. At least nine-in-ten in Tunisia (98%), Jordan (94%) and Egypt (92%) sympathize with the Palestinians in the dispute with Israel, as do 88% in Lebanon and 66% in Turkey.

For the most part, there has been little change in perceptions of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in recent years. In France, however, opinions are more balanced than they were in 2007, when 43% sympathized with the Palestinians and 32% sympathized with Israel. Germans also offer more even views now compared with six years ago; 34% sided with Israel and 21% sided with the Palestinians in 2007.

Prospects for Palestinian Statehood

Israelis and Palestinians have very different opinions on the prospects for the establishment of an independent Palestinian state that coexists peacefully alongside Israel. Half of Israelis think this is possible, while 38% say it is not and 9% say it depends.

Palestinians are far less optimistic; 61% do not believe a way can be found for Israel and an independent Palestinian state to coexist peacefully, while 14% say this is possible and 22% say it depends.

Israeli Arabs are considerably more likely than Jews to say it is possible for Israel and an independent Palestinian state to coexist peacefully; 75% of Arabs in Israel say this is the case, compared with 46% of Israeli Jews.

Among Jews in Israel, a majority of those who describe themselves as secular believe a peaceful two-state solution is a possibility, while just 32% of those who describe themselves as traditional, religious or ultra-Orthodox share this view.

Elsewhere, at least half in France (71%), Germany (59%), Britain (52%) and the U.S. (50%) are optimistic that a way can be found for Israel and an independent Palestinian state to coexist peacefully with each other.

In Lebanon and Tunisia, majorities say there is not a way for a peaceful two-state solution to be achieved (80% and 57%, respectively), and about half (47%) in Turkey and 40% in Egypt are also skeptical. Opinions are somewhat more divided in Jordan, Russia and China, although pluralities in Russia and China say there is a way for Israel and an independent Palestinian state to coexist peacefully.

Palestinians are more likely to say armed struggle is the best way for their people to achieve statehood (45%) than they are to say negotiations or nonviolent resistance offer the best prospect for the creation of a Palestinian state (15% each). Another 22% volunteer that a combination of these three approaches would be most effective.

When asked whether Arab countries are doing too much, too little or enough to help the Palestinian people achieve statehood, three-quarters in the Palestinian territories say they are doing too little; 16% say other Arab nations are doing enough and 5% believe they are doing too much to help Palestinians achieve statehood.

In the other Arab countries surveyed, only in Tunisia and Egypt do majorities or pluralities say their country could be doing more to help the Palestinians. More than six-in-ten (64%) Tunisians say their country is doing too little to help the Palestinian people achieve statehood. In Egypt, 47% believe their country is doing too little, but 34% think it is doing enough and 14% think Egypt is doing too much to help Palestinians with this goal.

Views are more mixed in Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey. For example, about the same number of Lebanese say their country is doing too little to help the Palestinian people achieve statehood (37%) as say it is doing enough (38%), while about a quarter (24%) believe Lebanon is doing too much. Among Jordanians, 28% say their country could be doing more to help Palestinians, while 38% think it is doing enough and 29% think Jordan is doing too much. And in Turkey, 26% say their country is doing too little, but 33% believe it is doing enough and 15% say it is doing too much to help the Palestinian people achieve statehood.

Views of Israel Largely UnfavorableThe U.S. is the only country surveyed where a majority expresses positive views of Israel: 57% of Americans have a favorable opinion and 27% have an unfavorable view of one of their country’s closest allies in the Middle East. Russians also express more favorable than unfavorable views of Israel (46% vs. 38%).

In predominantly Muslim countries, as well as in France, Germany, Britain and China, majorities or pluralities express negative opinions in Israel. At least eight-in-ten in Lebanon (99%), Jordan (96%), the Palestinian territories (94%), Egypt (92%), Turkey (86%), and Tunisia (86%) offer unfavorable views. Majorities in China (66%), France (65%) and Germany (62%) also express negative opinions of Israel, as does a 44%-plurality in Britain.

Negative Views of Netanyahu and Abbas

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu receives overwhelmingly negative ratings in neighboring countries. At least nine-in-ten in neighboring Lebanon (99%), Palestinian territories (96%), Jordan (95%) and Egypt (92%) have an unfavorable view of the Israeli leader; 85% in Tunisia and 70% in Turkey also express negative opinions of Netanyahu.

In Israel, by contrast, more than half (56%) view Netanyahu favorably, while 42% have an unfavorable opinion of their country’s prime minister. Israeli Jews are far more likely than Israeli Arabs to express positive views of Netanyahu. Among Jews, 63% have a favorable opinion and 36% have an unfavorable view of the prime minister; among Arabs, just 20% have a positive view, while 76% have a negative view of Netanyahu. Israeli Jews who describe themselves as traditional, religious or ultra-Orthodox are especially likely to have a favorable opinion of Netanyahu (70% vs. 58% of secular Jews).

Views of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas are also largely negative across the region, but not as overwhelmingly so as views of Netanyahu. More than eight-in-ten (84%) Israelis hold unfavorable opinions of Abbas, but Arabs in that country are more positive, with 52% expressing favorable views and 44% expressing negative opinions of Abbas.

Majorities in Lebanon (64%), Egypt (58%) and Jordan (56%) also have unfavorable views, as does a 42%-plurality in Turkey. Tunisians are nearly evenly divided, with 40% expressing positive views and 37% expressing unfavorable views of the Palestinian leader.

In Lebanon, views of Abbas reflect religious and sectarian differences. Majorities of Christians (78%) and Shia (66%) hold unfavorable opinions of Abbas. Among Lebanese Sunnis, however, most (54%) give the Palestinian leader a positive rating, while 44% have a negative opinion of him.

Palestinians express mostly positive opinions of Abbas; 61% have a favorable view and 34% have an unfavorable view of the Palestinian president. Abbas is viewed favorably by majorities in both the West Bank (57%) and Gaza (68%). His party also receives positive ratings among Palestinians; 69% have a favorable view of Fatah, while 27% express unfavorable opinions.

Islamic Jihad and Hamas, two groups designated as terrorist organizations by the U.S., receive lower ratings among Palestinians than Fatah, which renounced terrorism in 1988. Still, a majority of Palestinians (56%) holds favorable opinions of Islamic Jihad, while about a third (35%) gives the militant organization negative ratings.

Opinions of Hamas are more mixed, with 48% of Palestinians viewing the extremist group favorably and 45% saying they have an unfavorable view of Hamas. In 2011, when Pew Research last asked Palestinians about Hamas, more held negative views (56%) than expressed positive opinions (42%), but the militant organization was more popular in 2007, when 62% of Palestinians gave it a positive rating. Views of Hamas and Islamic Jihad do not vary significantly between the West Bank and Gaza or across demographic groups.

Many Israelis Say Settlements Hurt Security
About four-in-ten Israelis (42%) believe the continued building of Jewish settlements in the West Bank hurts their nation’s security; 27% say the expansion of settlements helps Israel’s security, and 23% say it does not make a difference.

Israeli Arabs are far more likely than Israeli Jews to say the continued building of Jewish settlements in the West Bank hurts Israel’s security. More than eight-in-ten (84%) Israeli Arabs express this view, while 4% say it helps their country’s security and 2% believe it does not make a difference. Israeli Jews are divided: 35% say the expansion of settlements hurts the security of Israel, 31% say it helps, and 27% say it does not make a difference.

Among Jews, those who are secular are considerably more critical of the continued building of settlements than those who describe themselves as traditional, religious or ultra-Orthodox. Nearly half of secular Jews in Israel (47%) believe the continued building of Jewish settlements in the West Bank hurts their country’s security; fewer say it helps or does not make a difference (23% each). Among more observant Jews, just 19% say expansion of settlements hurts Israel’s security, while 41% say it helps and 31% say it does not make a difference.

Israelis and Palestinians Differ on Views of U.S. and Obama

The U.S. receives overwhelmingly positive ratings in Israel, with even more Israelis now saying they have a favorable view of their country’s ally than did so two years ago, when Pew Research last conducted a survey in Israel; today, 83% express a positive opinion of the U.S., compared with 72% in 2011. In contrast, about eight-in-ten (79%) Palestinians express unfavorable views of the U.S., virtually unchanged from recent surveys.

In Israel, Jews are far more likely than Arabs to express positive views of the U.S.; nine-in-ten Israeli Jews have a favorable opinion, compared with 42% of Israeli Arabs. Arabs and Jews in Israel agree, however, that their country’s relationship with the U.S. is good. Overall, 94% of Israelis think Israel and the U.S. have a good relationship; 93% of Israeli Jews and 95% of Israeli Arabs share this view.

In the Palestinian territories, about one-third (35%) describe relations between the Palestinian Authority and the U.S. as good, while most (57%) say they are bad. Opinions are especially negative in Gaza, where just 24% say the relationship between their government and the U.S. is good, while 73% say it is bad. Views are more mixed in the West Bank, with 42% saying the Palestinian Authority has a good relationship with the U.S. and 47% saying relations between the two governments are bad.

Israelis and Palestinians also differ on views of Obama. About six-in-ten (61%) Israelis express confidence in the American president to do the right thing regarding world affairs, up from 49% in 2011. In the Palestinian territories, just 15% have confidence in Obama, while 82% have little or no confidence in him.

In Israel, opinions of Obama are far more positive among Jews than among Arabs. More than six-in-ten (64%) Jews express confidence in the American president, compared with about half (48%) of Arabs.

Secular Jews in Israel are especially positive in their views of Obama. About seven-in-ten (71%) secular Jews have confidence in Obama to do the right thing when it comes to world affairs, compared with 56% of Israeli Jews who describe themselves as traditional, religious or ultra-Orthodox.

U.S. Policies in the Middle East

Israelis are more likely than they were six years ago to see U.S. policies in the Middle East as fair. Nearly half of Israelis (47%) say this is the case, while 35% say U.S. policies favor their own country too much and 14% say the U.S. is biased towards the Palestinians. In 2007, 37% of Israelis believed the U.S. was fair, while 42% said it favored Israel too much and 13% said the U.S. was overly supportive of the Palestinians.

Israeli opinions about U.S. policies in the Middle East vary considerably by ethnicity and religious affiliation. About six-in-ten (62%) secular Jews in Israel see the U.S. as fair, while 23% say the U.S. is biased toward Israel and 12% say the U.S. is biased toward the Palestinians. Among Israeli Jews who describe themselves as traditional, religious or ultra-Orthodox, 47% say U.S. policies in the region are fair, 23% say they favor their own country too much, and 22% say the U.S. is biased towards the Palestinians. Israeli Arabs overwhelmingly believe U.S. policies favor Israel too much; 94% say this is the case.

Palestinian assessments of U.S. policies in the Middle East mirror those of Arabs in Israel. More than nine-in-ten (95%) Palestinians believe the U.S. is biased toward Israel, virtually unchanged from past surveys.

When asked whether they would like the Obama administration to play a larger role, a smaller role or about the same role it has been playing in resolving the conflict in the Middle East, at least four-in-ten Israelis and Palestinians say they would like it to play a larger role in the coming months.

About half (49%) of Israelis would like the Obama administration to be more involved, while 15% would like it to play a smaller role and 29% would like it to play the same role it has been playing in resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Opinions on this do not vary considerably between Israeli Arabs and Jews.

In the Palestinian territories, 41% would welcome more involvement from the Obama administration in the coming months; about a quarter (26%) of Palestinians want the American president to play a smaller role in resolving the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, and 19% would like it to play the same role it has been playing. Those who live in the West Bank are more likely than Gaza residents to say they would like the Obama administration to play a larger role in the Middle East conflict; 47% in the West Bank want more U.S. involvement, compared with 30% in Gaza.

Israeli and Palestinian Policies toward the U.S.

A majority of Israelis (61%) approve of Netanyahu’s policies toward the U.S., while 28% disapprove. Israeli Jews who describe themselves as traditional, religious or ultra-orthodox are especially likely to approve of Netanyahu’s policies (75% approve), but most secular Jews also approve (63%). Israeli Arabs are more critical of the prime minister’s policies toward the U.S.; just 22% approve and 59% disapprove of Netanyahu’s policies toward the U.S.

In the Palestinian territories, half approve of Abbas’ policies toward the U.S., and 38% disapprove. Views of the way Hamas is handling the U.S. are more mixed; 39% approve and 46% disapprove. Opinions about Hamas’ policies toward the U.S. are similar in the West Bank and Gaza.

Pew:The Palestinians in the occupied lands favor armed resistance

By Palestinian Information Centre
May 16, 2013

WASHINGTON – A US opinion poll stated that majority of the Palestinians do not believe a way can be found for an independent Palestinian state to coexist peacefully with Israel.

According to a recent survey of public opinion conducted by Pew research center, a plurality of the Palestinians, about 45 percent, in the occupied Palestinian territories believes that negotiations and nonviolent resistance are useless and that the best way to achieve statehood is through armed struggle.

61 percent of the Palestinians in the occupied territories do not believe a way can be found for Israel and an independent Palestinian state to coexist peacefully, while 14 percent say this is possible and 22 percent say it depends, the poll showed.

The center also surveyed the public opinion in some European countries about their sympathy with Palestinians or Israelis and the results were unanimously in favor of the Palestinians.

In Britain, about 35 percent of the British expressed sympathy with the Palestinians, while 19 percent sided with Israelis.

In France, 43 percent sympathized with the Palestinians and 32 percent sympathized with Israelis.

Germans also offered more even views now compared with six years ago in 2007, when 34 percent of them sided with Israel and 21 percent sided with the Palestinians. Now 26 percent of them showed sympathy with the Palestinians, while 28 percent favored Israelis.

Jon Benjamin, outgoing CEO of the Board of Deputies with Japanese diplomat at the BoD’s 250th anniversary bash at an ‘exclusive events venue’ in Knightsbrige in 2010. Guest speaker Middle East Minister Alistair Burt MP told the 150 diplomats and guests: “The Board of Deputies is a model of unified leadership.” Bad information, Minister.

Board of Deputies ‘in chaos’

Former vice president savages culture and competence of communal leaders

By Simon Rocker, Jewish Chronicle
May 17, 2013

The former vice-president of the Board of Deputies, Jerry Lewis, has launched a scathing attack on its current leaders, saying “Vivian Wineman and his team are presiding over the rapid disintegration” of the organisation.

Mr Lewis hits out at the “alarming signs of chaos, verging on a disaster” and attacks the role played by the Board’s chief executive for the past eight and half years, Jon Benjamin, who left his post last week.

Writing in today’s JC, Mr Lewis says the Board “is in a complete mess” and “has become increasingly irrelevant”. It is only able to function because the Jewish Leadership Council makes up for its incompetence.

There has, he says, been “a calamity in…staffing at the Board. Two key departments have no experienced personnel. Four key staff have left over the last month.” He also attacks a “toxic” atmosphere among the Board’s staff.

He accuses the Board’s President, Vivian Wineman, of ignoring its standing orders and stifling debate.

Mr Lewis, who failed to win re-election as vice-president last year, says he had kept his counsel but can “keep quiet no more”.

He says: “Individuals are appointed to posts [and] expenditure is approved without adequate scrutiny”.

Mr Lewis also writes of the proposed new Code of Conduct for Deputies: [T]he most important section relates to bullying. In my last years as a vice-president, I sensed an uncomfortable climate amongst staff.”

Mr Benjamin declined to respond to Mr Lewis’s remarks. In a statement released last Friday, he said the time had felt right to leave the Board to pursue the “new and different opportunities that I have beckoning”.

Vivian Wineman, L, welcomes the Queen during her Diamond Jubilee. The outgoing Chief Rabbi, C, presides.
“The Board is the democratic institution of the community. I’m elected. We’re the true leadership,” Vivian Wineman said last February in an outspoken attack on the Jewish Leadership Council for purporting to represent British Jews.

Mr Wineman rejected suggestions from deputies that the departure was linked to talks between the Board and the JLC for a closer relationship.

In a Facebook post, one deputy, Jonathan Sacerdoti, commenting on an “exodus” of staff, said: “It seems the JLC has achieved its final goal of essentially emasculating/killing off the 250-year old democratic body.”

Former vice-president Eric Moonman said; “It would seem very unlikely his departure is unrelated to the growing influence of the JLC.”

But Mr Wineman declared; “Jon Benjamin chose to leave the Board this week to pursue his career elsewhere. His departure was in no way related to the JLC or to any discussions taking place between the JLC and the Board.

“These discussions are at a very early stage and can go no further until the deputies, who have the most important say, have been fully consulted.”

The Board and JLC are understood to be looking at possible unification, with one model being a two-chamber house and an elected leader.

Meanwhile, the Board’s former interfaith officer Phil Rosenberg is to return as its new public affairs director, it was announced this week.

Mr Wineman said: “We’ve appointed a new public affairs director aand are about to make at least one, possibly two, appointments in addition in the public affairs office.

“We’re close to appointing a successor to Jon.

“So we are creating a new young professional team.

“There have never been so many new projects at the Board — the community partnership project to deal with small communities, the Closer to Israel programeme, our interfaith initiatives with the Methodists and Church of Scotland.

“We’ve made changes to our plenary sessions to make them more open and accessible to deputies and give more deputies a chance to participate.

“Naturally, any change is distasteful to some of those who are living in the past and some who did not get elected to office but those changes have been approved democratically.”

Toxic, weak and chaotic at the Board

The JC Essay by Jerry Lewis
May 17, 2013

The departure of Jon Benjamin as CEO of the Board of Deputies is not only welcome it is also, I believe, much overdue. He is one of the nicest guys around but the introduction of fresh blood at the Board cannot come soon enough to improve effectiveness across the organisation.

Against a background of rising antisemitism, growing anti- Zionism and ongoing attacks on shechita and brit milah, the need for a pro–active Board has never been greater. Yet it has become increasingly irrelevant and has been outpaced by the Jewish Leadership Council. Not, as many suppose, because the JLC’s members want to run our community but because, under the Board’s current lay and professional leadership, it has left so many gaps – black holes, to be more precise – that, were it not for the quick-reacting JLC team, would have left our community in a far worse place.

Fitting the JLC and the Board onto the same stage was always going to be a difficult juggling act. In my periods as a Vice President and Senior Vice President of the Board, I was opposed to the JLC, fearing it would eventually dominate the communal scene and diminish the role of the Board.

Former Board President and senior JLC office holder Henry Grunwald ensured in his own way that the two organisations worked in parallel. But they rarely worked together.

The CEO’s departure affords a wonderful opportunity to reconstruct the Board
And he made two strategic errors that lost the Board key roles: hiving off the protection of shechita to Shechita UK; and the creation of the London Jewish Forum to tackle the Livingstone threat. Both should have remained under the Board’s auspices.

Jon Benjamin’s departure coincides with what can best be described as a calamity in other staffing at the Board. Two key departments have no experienced personnel. Four key staff have left over the last month; another is due to go on maternity leave next month.

Staff morale is already very low; the atmosphere has been described as ‘toxic’.

Junior staff are paid such ridiculously low salaries that, within a year or two, they move on to a better level of remuneration. Such short-sightedness wrecks continuity and gives no encouragement to those who wish to make a career in our community. We lose talented young people.

I have held my counsel until now and admit I did not do enough when I was a Vice President, until May 2012. But I can keep quiet no more. The President, Vivian Wineman, and his team are presiding over the rapid disintegration of what was once an organisation of which I and so many others were immensely proud. Any Deputy close to the Board will be witness to the alarming signs of chaos, verging on disaster.

Small wonder the Jewish Leadership Council have surveyed the situation and are taking urgent measures to plug the numerous lacunae.

For a start, the President pays scant attention to constitutional guidance and precepts designed (by me amongst others) to protect the Board from unwelcome influences, such as restricting speakers at debates to just two minutes, ignoring the standing order that allows for four.

Individuals are appointed to posts, expenditure is approved without adequate scrutiny and the Board signs up to campaigns which, according to its rules, should follow a debate and the agreement of all 265 Deputies. But communication is poor or non-existent, and attempts to ascertain information can hit a brick wall.
For years there has been harmony between the various segments of the community represented at the Board. Henry Grunwald and I worked scrupulously to ensure that no sector or denominatio was disadvantaged in our decisions and work. That is now changing. One wing – Reform – is now trying to assert itself and throw out the careful balance on which the Board depends. The President has allowed this.

Worse still is the atmosphere at the top. The Board are proposing a Code of Conduct for Deputies, a move I championed for 30 years. It will deal with a host of issues. But as far as I am concerned, the most important section relates to bullying. In my last years as a Vice-President, I sensed an uncomfortable climate amongst staff.

As for a President who has verbally attacked his own colleagues at the Jewish Leadership Council: this does such harm to the very relations that need to be encouraged and improved. Little wonder that those same – usually very generous – individuals have tended to shun the Board’s requests for donations.

The Board used to have ten committees on differing subjects (Israel, international, shechita, education, parliament etc) each of which elected their own chairman. They were knowledgeable and experienced and constituted the Executive. About 40% of Deputies were thus ‘involved’ in the Board.

Then management consultants were called in, who failed to understand the representative and democratic nature of the Board. Now only 50 Deputies are involved and there are just four divisions of 12 people. The four Honorary Officers are elected separately and appointed by the President to head a Division, with little regard for their abilities or knowledge.

Add to that a Chief Executive who had what might politely be described as a hands-off management style and one quickly sees a recipe for disaster.

Judge for yourself. When a delegation led by the JLC goes to meet a minister, it is serviced with a briefing document listing all the participants, the issues to be raised, who is to lead on each issue, descriptions of who they are to face on the other side of the table and on occasion a draft statement to be agreed at the conclusions of the talks.

In all my time as an Honorary Officer, not once was I given even a single such note. Hopeless.

No wonder we do not operate as we should.

Another example. I was asked by the President to work on a scheme for Israel and other advocacy. With my experience in Westminster, Whitehall and the media I had the ideas and know how. But even though a budget and an intern were provided, every attempt to get the scheme off the ground was frustrated.

The Board is in a complete mess. It is a relief, although no way to run an organisation, that the JLC repeatedly steps in to provide cover for our failures. The Honorary Officers of the Board will deny all this but the JLC and many others who try to deal with the Board have been aware for a long time that it is no longer ‘fit for purpose’.

When Mick Davis addressed the Board – and was treated despicably by Deputies – he could not have been clearer. The JLC sees itself primarily as a strategic body. It was constituted to allow key communal organisations to deal collectively with risks and deliver solutions.

From a position of having opposed the JLC, due principally to its undemocratic set up, I have now turned 180 degrees. It is a vital piece of our communal architecture.

Out of the shambolic situation the Board is now in, the best move we can now make to save it is to secure an immediate merger of the two civil services. That will automatically cut out rivalry and enable those who know what they are doing to get on with the real work – and to do so under the imprint of the Board.

This will need goodwill from both sides and carefully worked on safeguards to retain the democratic and representative nature of the Board. There will need to be properly elected committees to set out policy which, via accountable, transparent procedures, a revitalised staff can implement. Talks are now underway – but without the vast majority of Deputies being involved in any changes.

The CEO’s departure and the serious situation facing the Board today afford an opportunity to reconstruct the Board to work in partnership with the JLC, with staff able to work in a professional atmosphere, properly rewarded for their endeavours in a framework that adheres to the principles of accountability, openness and transparency, retaining the democratic and representative aspects of the Board to be combined with the professionalism and well resourced JLC. It could be a winning combination.

There is a place for both organisations to work alongside each other. Each of us have a role to play but, for the Board to continue, it now has no option but to share resources and staff with the JLC.

I desperately want the Board to survive but the only way left is for a rapid merger with the JLC at staff levels and a new democratic structure for the combined organisation. I am prepared to work for that. I hope Deputies will respond to the call to enable this to happen as soon as possible.

Jerry Lewis was Senior Vice President of the Board of Deputies until May 2012

Note from JfJfP postings editor on why the articles on the Board of Deputies have been reposted on the JfJfP website
May 19, 2013

JfJfP was established to give a public voice to a significant body of opinion amongst Jews in the UK who believed, amongst other points:
Peace requires the end of illegal occupation and settlement.
Violence against civilians is unacceptable.
Israel’s policies in the West Bank and Gaza are breeding hatred and resentment.
It is crucial that Jews speak out for Palestinians’ human rights.

The need to speak out was felt especially strongly because  no establishment Jewish bodies spoke out for Palestinian rights, or stated directly that there could be no peace while Israel enforced an illegal occupation with military intransigence. The bodies which were regarded as ‘leading’ all British Jews had nothing to say about Palestinians’ rights, or the wrongness of colonisation and occupation.

The current fall-out at the BoD, and between some of the BoD and the JLC, is related to 1) the scramble to be ‘the’ representative and leadership of British Jews and 2) their direction of so much of their sense of purpose and role into the defence of Israel, in the process weakening a distinctive Jewish tradition of being a voice for freedom and justice. (Hence the quotation on our website: “That which is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbour. That is the whole Torah, the rest is commentary.”
RABBI HILLEL)

The BoD is the most representative and democratic of mainstream Jewish organisations and for a long time its leaders have been the chosen group for consultation with the British government on matters where the government wants the ‘British Jewish view.’ (That role however, fear some in the BoD, is being usurped by the Jewish Leadership Council.)

Although the BoD always acknowledges it includes people who are critical of Israeli policies, its public voice is habitually used to support Israeli policies. For example, its three leading members at the time of Operation Pillar of Defence in November 2012 signed the notorious letter to Israeli Daniel Taub, Israeli ambassador to the UK praising Israel’s political and military leadership.
Report from Jewish Chronicle, November 16, 2012

Unanimous UK Jewish communal organisations support for Israel over Gaza fighting

Representatives of the Anglo-Jewish community of all political persuasions have joined together to express solidarity with Israel.

In a letter to Israeli ambassador to the UK Daniel Taub, officials from groups including the Board of Deputies, Jewish Leadership Council, Chief Rabbi’s Office and Movement for Reform Judaism wrote that sentiments of support prevailed across “all sections of our community”, reflecting the “national consensus” in Israeli society.
…

The letter said
“Operation Pillar of Defence is an entirely understandable response to the intolerable assault upon the citizens of Southern Israel and the continued provocations of Hamas –‐ an antisemitic terrorist organisation,” the signatories stated. “We take pride in the commitment of Israel’s political and military leadership to leave no stone unturned in seeking to avoid civilian casualties and remain true to the Jewish ethical ethos that underpins the doctrine of the IDF.”

The three BoD signatories were Vivian Wineman – President, Board of Deputies of British Jews, Jon Benjamin – CEO, The Board of Deputies of British Jews
Alex Brummer – Vice-President of Board of Deputies (Chair International Division)

See also ‘Leaders’ of Jewish communities speaking only for themselves

The BoD’s stated position on Israel/Palestine is here.

“Israel
Central to much of our international work is the community’s relationship with the State of Israel, which is why the Board remains unwavering in its approach, as stated in our Constitution, to take “such appropriate action as lies within its power to advance Israel’s security, welfare and standing.”
This policy allows us to accommodate the diverse opinions that exist within the community, without us presuming to comment on or seek to prescribe particular political solutions on the people of Israel.

Rather, we concentrate on the undoubted effect of events in the region on the British Jewish community, and the importance of Israel being treated fairly and impartially within British society, in the face of campaigns to demonise, boycott and sanction the Jewish State.”

Treated as the leadership of British Jews

Foreign Secretary meets leaders of the Jewish Community

Media Release, William Hague, FCO
16 June 2011

“It was a great pleasure to welcome Vivian Wineman, President of the Board of Deputies of British Jews and members of the Jewish community to the Foreign Office today. As the implications of the Arab Spring reverberate throughout the region, today’s meeting provided an important opportunity to share perspectives and discuss current issues affecting Israel and the Jewish community.

“Our discussions focused on the Peace Process and I underlined the urgent need for both sides to resume talks. As a firm friend of Israel I emphasised that the status quo is in no way sustainable and that the Peace Process is not immune from the effects of change and instability elsewhere. President Obama’s recent statement that negotiations should be on the basis of 1967 borders with mutually agreed land swaps and proper security arrangements offers an important opportunity for progress and we should do all that we can to build on this now”.

“We also discussed concerns about a potential Palestinian Authority move at the UN for recognition of a Palestinian state and I stressed again that the best way to achieve a lasting solution that delivers a sovereign, independent and contiguous Palestinian state alongside a safe and secure Israel at peace with its neighbours is through a negotiated solution. On the issue of the planned flotilla to Gaza, I emphasised that our travel advice clearly sets out that we advise against all travel to Gaza, including the waters off the Gaza coast”.

WATCH: Israeli journalist discusses her article defending Palestinian stone-throwing

By Mairav Zonszein, +972
April 12, 2013

Amira Hass, who drew heavy criticism from Israeli media about her op-ed in Haaretz last week defending the right of Palestinians to throw stones, and was accused of incitement to violence by the Yesha Council (of West Bank settlements), appeared on Democracy Now this week to discuss her article. I have embedded the interview below, which is in two parts, and highly recommend watching it.

Hass speaks so directly and cooly about the situation as she sees it – saying plainly that Israel has become a foreign ruler in this place and cannot expect to survive this way. You can understand from her answers that she is portraying what she has been witness to as a reporter in the occupied Palestinian territories for 20 years.

Here are some choice quotes from her interview I want to highlight:

Any hegemonic group, sees its hegemony, and the violence it uses, as self-evident, as a natural thing. And we do everything possible to protect this hegemony.

I don’t like the term non-violent because it puts the onus on the occupied rather than on the occupier.

Answering the question about the significance of Kerry’s visit to the region, she said

negotiation becomes an end to itself, and not a means to reach independence…U.S. policy is to keep the status quo going.

We maintain our hegemony with the use of almost unlimited institutional power against the Palestinians…Palestinians have tried many ways, diplomatic ways and others to resist Israeli domination and it has not suceeded. Stone throwing is a message, and the Israelis don’t listen to it. Twenty-five years ago in the first Intifada, Israelis did listen – they did understand it’s a message – not in order to kill or hit somebody but to tell, you are unwelcome visitors in our midst.

The two parts of Amira Hass’s interview on the Democracy Now TV channel can be reached by clicking on the headline above.

Yesha council files police complaint against Haaretz, Amira Hass

Umbrella body of municipal councils in Judea and Samaria Yesha Council says Hass op-ed, which claims “stone-throwing is the birthright and duty of anyone subject to foreign rule,” legitimizes acts of terror against Jews and incites violence.

By Yori Yalon, Edna Adato and Israel Hayom Staff
April 04, 2013

The Yesha Council has filed a police complaint against Haaretz newspaper and journalist Amira Hass over an opinion piece which it said incites violence.

The op-ed was published following Tuesday’s conviction of Waal al-Arja, a former officer in the Palestinian Authority’s security forces, in the 2011 murders of 30-year-old Asher Palmer and his 1-year-old son Yonatan.

Palmer was killed after Arja and another man, Ali Saada, threw a large rock at his car as it was traveling on Route 60. As a result, Palmer lost control of the vehicle, which overturned, landing on the side of the road. Both he and his son were killed on impact.

Arja was convicted of two counts of murder in the Palmer case and 22 counts of attempted murder over a series of stone-throwing incidents on Route 60 in Judea and Samaria. His sentence is pending.

Hass’ opinion piece, titled “The inner syntax of Palestinian stone-throwing,” said: “Throwing stones is the birthright and duty of anyone subject to foreign rule. Throwing stones is an action as well as a metaphor of resistance.”

The Yesha Council, which is an umbrella organization of municipal councils in Judea and Samaria, claimed in its police complaint that Hass’ piece was “singing the praises of stone-throwing and legitimizing such actions.”

“The piece totally disregards the fact that throwing stones is an illegal act that places Israeli lives at risk, and that such acts have caused grave injuries and death,” the council said.

The complaint cited the Palmers’ murder as well as a mid-March incident in which Adva Biton and her three young daughters were wounded after stones hurled at their car on a Samaria road caused it to collide with an oncoming truck. Two-year-old Adele Biton sustained a severe head injury and is still fighting for her life.

The Legal Forum for the Land of Israel was also vexed by Hass’ opinion piece and filed a petition with Attorney-General Yehuda Weinstein urging him to launch an investigation against Haaretz, its editor Aluf Benn and Hass, for inciting violence.

The forum’s legal counsel, attorney Hila Cohen, wrote in the petition that Hass’ “grave statements constitute incitement to violence and encouraging murderous acts of terror.”

Haaretz was unavailable for comment.

Notes and links
The two parts of Amira Hass’s interview on the Democracy Now TV channel can be reached by clicking on the top headline.
Palestinian schools should teach forms of resistance Amira Hass, April 03, 2013
For the International Women’s Media Foundation 2009 Lifetime Achievement Award to Amira Hass, see International Women’s Media Foundation Honors Israeli Journalist

‘We Are Not Fanatic Killers’

In an exclusive conversation with Khaled Meshaal, the Hamas chief talks about how Assad should have listened to his advice, and why he’s not “bloodthirsty” or “against” Jews.

By David Kenner, Foreign Policy
May 14, 2013

DOHA, Qatar — In January 2012, Hamas abandoned its ally, Bashar al-Assad, cutting itself loose from the Syrian regime and relocating its headquarters from Damascus. Syrian state media launched a broadside against Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal in response, referring to him as “ungrateful and traitorous,” and Iran reduced its financing (estimated at $20 to $30 million per year) of the movement. Meanwhile, Meshal now notes that he’s “not against the Israelis because they hold a different faith,” and championing the virtues of democracy, diversity, and human rights. So, what’s gotten into Hamas’ chief?

In an exclusive interview with Foreign Policy, his first face-to-face talk since being re-elected last month, Meshaal explains why he chose to walk away from his benefactors. “[The Assad regime] took the wrong option — they were wrong about their vision toward the conflict. Not only toward their internal conflict in Syria, but toward the whole Arab Spring,” Meshaal told FP. “People aspiring for democracy and freedom should have been dealt with through political arrangements to meet their rightful aspirations. This would have reinforced the power of the country, the bonds between the people and their leadership, and it would have been for the best interest of the country.”

To replace his alliances with Syria and Iran, Meshaal built strong ties with rising powers such as Turkey and Qatar — countries that, far from being international pariahs, have strong working relations with the United States and Europe. The Qatari emir’s visit to Gaza in October marked the first blow to international efforts to isolate the Hamas government there, and Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan plans to visit the strip [soon ] as well.

Meshaal told FP that Hamas “felt a responsibility to extend all advice we can” when protests against the Syrian regime first broke out in March 2011, with the goal of achieving a quick solution to the crisis. Last month, journalist Nicholas Blanford, quoting an anonymous Western source, reported that Hamas had presented Assad with a seven-point program for defusing the crisis, which included open elections and Assad’s eventual resignation. In both Meshaal’s and the Western source’s account, however, Assad ignored Hamas’s recommendations.

“After all the efforts we have done with the Syrian leadership, we felt that nobody was listening,” Meshaal said. “With the bloody developments in the Syrian Spring, we knew that the Syrian leadership wanted to use Hamas [to bolster its legitimacy]. We had no choice but to respect our beliefs, our principles, our values — and we felt that after 10 months that we had no choice but to leave.”

Meshaal made the case that the Assad regime — by trying to resolve the conflict through brute military force rather than a political agreement — paved the way for the violence that grips the country today. “[A political solution] would have spared Syria a lot of misery, a lot of casualties, a lot of the destruction and bloodshed that we see today,” he said.

The Israeli-Palestinian arena

Describing his agenda for his new four-year term at the head of Hamas, Meshaal emphasized one issue above all others: The need to end what he described as the “occupation” of the Palestinian people’s land, and the “atrocities” being committed against them by Israel.

“[Palestinians] are suffering from the settlements, they are suffering in the detention camps and the prisons of the occupation,” Meshaal said. “[We aim] to stop the suffering of our people in Jerusalem, as they are suffering from the Judaization of the city… We want a real peace that would regain the rights for our people.”

Brief History of Stephen Hawking’s Hypocrisy
By Eli Valley, Jewish Forward
May 14, 2013

Jonathan Cook: Missing from the Arab peace plan – an Israeli partner

By Jonathan Cook, Israeli Occupation Archive
May 10, 2013

Washington’s reputation as an “honest broker” in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is in tatters after four years of indulging Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s intransigence. The Obama administration desperately needs to resurrect a credible peace process.

Faced with a diplomatic impasse between Israel and the Palestinian Authority of Mahmoud Abbas, John Kerry, the US secretary of state, seized his chance earlier this month. He extracted from the Arab League an agreement to dust off a decade-old regional plan, the Arab Peace Initiative, declaring the move “a very big step forward”.

Unveiled by Saudi Arabia in 2002, the plan promises Israel normal relations with the whole of the Arab world in return for its acceptance of a Palestinian state based on the pre-1967 borders, or 22 per cent of historic Palestine.

The new Arab overture, like its antecedent, has raised barely a flicker of interest from Israel. Tzipi Livni, Washington’s sole ally in Mr Netanyahu’s cabinet, predictably lost no time in praising the plan. But the prime minister himself has studiously avoided mentioning it, leaving his aides to dismiss the initiative as a “trick” designed to ensnare Israel in injurious peace talks.

His oblique response serves as a rejoinder to one of the conflict’s most enduring myths. Even before Israel occupied the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza in 1967, it presented itself as eager for acceptance from the Arab states. This fiction, which continues to shape western perceptions, rests on two pillars.

The first assumes Israeli fervour to engage diplomatically with the Arab world. Or, as Israel’s then-defence minister Moshe Dayan famously told the BBC just days after the end of the Six Day War: “We are awaiting the Arabs’ phone call.”

The second, articulated most clearly by the late foreign minister Abba Eban, castigates the Arabs for “never missing an opportunity to miss an opportunity” to make peace with Israel.

And yet the historical record suggests the exact opposite. After their humiliation in 1967, the Arab states quickly conceded – at least, privately – that Israel was here to stay and began considering ways to accommodate it.

As Shlomo Ben-Ami, an Israeli historian who was foreign minister during the 2000 Camp David peace talks, observed: when the Arab states called, “Israel’s line was busy, or there was no one on the Israeli side to pick up the phone.”

Such obduracy was confirmed in last month’s disclosure by WikiLeaks of classified US diplomatic cables from that period. In late 1973, a few weeks after the end of the Yom Kippur War, the Arab League quietly offered Israel a regional peace agreement that would recognise its pre-1967 borders. But the Arab states were rebuffed.

The Roman fortress at Masada where, according to myth, 960 Jews preferred to destroy themselves rather than let the fortress back into Roman hands in the 1st century CE.

According to a cable from January 1975, US diplomats in the Middle East concluded that Israel’s leaders demonstrated “an extraordinary lack of understanding” of Arab intentions, preferring instead to gird “their loins for the fifth, sixth, seventh Israeli-Arab wars”. The cables describe Israel as hellbent on self-destruction, suffering, in the words of US officials, from a “Masada or Samson complex”.

This context should be borne in mind as Israel’s current opposition to peace talks is ascribed solely to the hawkishness of Mr Netanyahu’s government. In truth, this is a pattern of behaviour exhibited by Israel over many decades – or what former Palestinian prime minister Salam Fayyad termed last week Israel’s “occupation gene”.

The Saudi peace initiative of 2002 arrived at a time early in the second intifada when Israelis were terrified by a wave of suicide bombings and the Israeli economy appeared close to collapse. Nonetheless, the then military chief of staff – today’s defence minister – Moshe Yaalon advised that Israel’s highest priority was not negotiations but a military campaign to “sear defeat deep into the Palestinian consciousness”.

At least, the newly revived Arab peace initiative has the advantage that it appears – unlike its predecessor – to have the enthusiastic backing of the White House.

Another difference, doubtless due to pressure from Mr Kerry, is a concession from the Arab states that an agreement on Palestinian statehood will not require Israel to return to the 1967 lines. Approval of “minor” and “comparable” territorial exchanges brings the Arab League into line with the diplomatic positions of Mr Abbas, US President Barack Obama and, ostensibly at least, several previous Israeli prime ministers.

But Mr Netanyahu seems to be opposed even to testing the sincerity of the Arab initiative. His main objection – beyond a general antipathy to any proposal for Palestinian statehood – is reportedly that “minor” land swaps will not be generous enough to ensure Israel keeps all of its settlements.

Such rejectionism is mirrored by Hamas, which has protested that the League is treating the contours of the Palestinian state as “property for sale”.

Mr Netanyahu’s inflexibility is being advanced even as he insists that there must be no preconditions on talks and warns that, without a peace agreement, Israel faces a bleak future. Mr Kerry, meanwhile, has proffered his own warning: there is a two-year deadline to finding a solution to the conflict.

Whatever his protestations, none of this will overly worry Mr Netanyahu. After all, this is a government that last week found grounds for complaint in Google’s decision to confer the status of “Palestine” on a search engine designation.

The reality is that another round of failed peacemaking will do more damage to the Palestinians and Washington’s reputation than to an Israel that never intended to pick up the phone in the first place.

Jonathan Cook won the 2011 Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His latest books are Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East (Pluto Press) and Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair (Zed Books); and his website is www.Jonathan-Cook.net.

Im Tirtzu protests ‘nakba bullshit’ at Tel Aviv University

By Allison Deger, Mondoweiss
May 14, 2013

For the second time in two years, students at Tel Aviv University (TAU) commemorating the 1947-49 Palestinian expulsion and the destruction of villages were met with a counter-protest. At last year’s event over 1,000 amassed on campus, ending in clashes incited by members of Knesset. Again this year, the youth-based “new Zionist” group Im Tirtzu bottom-lined the demonstration, distributing a counter analysis pamphlet titled “Nakba Harta” or “Nakba-Bullshit”. (The English booklet’s title reads “Nakba Nonsense,” but the Hebrew title uses the word “Hartata,” or “bullshit.”).

“Reading the names of the [destroyed] villages leaves it open to interpretation and many people believe that the state of Israel is a consequence,” said Ben Gross, 26, from Im Tirtzu. Gross explained that his group does recognize a catastrophe was experienced by the Palestinian people during Israel’s war of Independence but qualifies, without proper context, [this by saying] Israelis will be led astray to feelings of guilt and remorse over their territorial gain. “There is no need for us to apologize for winning the war,” Gross stated.

Through Im Tirtzu, Gross tries to stop what he views as a loss of pride in his country. And in doing so the group separates itself from the gamut of pro-Israel advocates that shy away from a frank acknowledgment of Palestinian suffering caused by Zionist militias in 1948. Still, Im Tirtzu’s criticism of the Arab Student Union’s Nakba commemoration left no room for Palestinians to conduct their reading of destroyed villages uninterrupted. Decked out with nearly one Israeli flag per demonstrator and demanding “no chaos, no trouble,” Im Tirtzu, slickly undermined the event.

Gross and a fellow student explained that Im Tirtzu was protesting because they feel the Palestinian students and leftists who planned the memorial tacitly support Nazism and a culture of Holocaust denial. “The problem is not reading the names of villages, it’s what stands behind it,” said Gross. Another member of Im Tirtzu said that weeks ago a lecture was held on campus at which faculty made comparisons of the Palestinian Nakba to the Holocaust–a comparison he said exemplifies holocaust denial. Both students then noted the ties between Adolf Hitler and Amin al-Husayni, the former Grand Mufti of Jerusalem during the British Mandate period.

The Israel advocates argued that because al-Husayni famously and controversially met with the Nazi leader and appealed for him to support a Palestinian National state, today’s Nakba memorial ought to acknowledge those events, and al-Husayni’s possible ideology. Gross said he does not oppose what the Palestinians students were saying or doing at the commemoration but what they didn’t say.

You might think that discussing a Nazi affiliate at a Nakba memorial is really not to the point, but Gross’s stance is more thought through than his organization’s claim that the Nakba is bullshit. Reading Im Tirtzu’s website later, it is is clear that Gross agrees whole-heartedly with the groups’s reinvigurated vision of secular Zionisim founded by Theodore Herzl–although in Herzl’s Palestine, there never was a nakba and Jews and Arabs lived harmoniously in European-inspired fantasy of a Jewish state. Gross’s charm is that he doesn’t sound rehearsed. The communications student entered the hasbara scene a few years ago as an unaffiliated online activist. Initially he tried to make up the deficit he saw in the state’s official internet presence. He cited the Mavi Marmara PR disaster as an example where Israel had a chance to win, but lost a communications battle. At that time Gross had already served in the Israeli Defense Forces, in duty during the second war in Lebanon. Although he said his army service and losing loved ones to political violence was not the sole factor in prompting the goal of becoming a professional Israel advocate after graduation, he did find those experiences instrumental.

“I think that [serving in the military] makes you one of us. There is a certain amount of pride in being Israeli.” Now he is a regular participant in Im Tirtzu’s weekly counter-protests against students demonstrating on campus in support Palestinian hunger strikers. And during Operation Pillar of Cloud last fall, Gross was active in the “situation room,” a student government supported computer facility where pro-Israel students used campus resources for online hasbara.

“It feels like they are talking to themselves, to walls,” said Hanin Majdali, 23, a Palestinian student also at Tel Aviv University. Majdali said her participation in the nakba event “was automatic, it was not like I even asked myself to go.” When presented with Im Tirtzu’s position of protesting the commemoration because of al-Husayni, and their underlying feeling of nefarious motives on the part of the Arab Student Union, perplexed, Majdali said, “I don’t feel that I’m in a situation where … I can feel something with their narrative.”

“If they want to explain to themselves something other than what we mean” she continued, “it’s their problem.”

Majdali is from Baqa al-Gharbiya, the western half of a village split in two by the separation wall in the Wadi Ara region of northern Israel. Wadi Ara was not ethnically cleaned during Israel’s war of Independence and was under Jordanian administration from 1948 to 1967. However, Majdali mother’s side is from Tantura, the location of a nakba massacre that is a symbol for collective Palestinian sorrow and loss. “It was one of the cruelest massacres, like Deir Yassin.”

Ilan Pappe describes the sacking of Tantura in The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. Pappe quotes from a Jewish militia officer,

Prisoners were led in groups to a distance of 200 metres aside and there were shot. Soldiers would come to the commander-in-chief and say, ‘My cousin was killed in the war.’ His commander heard that and instructed the troops to take a group of five to seven people aside and execute them…

Like many Palestinians from the north studying in Tel Aviv, Majdali rents a flat in Jaffa, a city full of historic Palestinian Arab architecture. Yet after 1948 through zoning laws the entire old city was purged of its Palestinian residents. Majdali lives on a main street where many Mandate period buildings have been torn down and replaced by canonical non-Arab structures. The demolitions are a reminder of how swiftly Palestinian life and its memory was erased from society. “I feel really angry,” she said, “every time I see Israeli or European house styles.”

“We are a class B citizen, or even less,” she continued. For many Palestinian citizens of Israel remembering nakba annually is not about a push to return to villages destroyed over 60 years ago, but about their present struggles for equality and maintaining land that can be confiscated under Israeli laws that effect Palestinians alone. These more contemporary land grabs inside of Israel’s 1948 borders are what critics refer to as “the on-going nakba.”

Looking down on the steps of the campus plaza, watching her comrades dressed in black disperse from the commemoration Majdali thought for a moment. “It’s very important to remember the nakba because it is still happening.” Where Majdali’s family lives in Wadi Ara, villages are at over capacity and in some cases are beginning to resemble the contruction patterns inside the West Bank’s refugee camps. The crowding has caused Palestinians to seek housing elsewhere. But often nearby Jewish-Israeli localities pass laws that Israel’s high court has upheld, where it is legal to bar non-Jews from purchasing homes.

“In every detail of your life you are not Israeli, you are not Jewish,” and therefore do not have full access to the rights guaranteed to citizens, reflected Majdali. As Palestinians, one way they are legislated separately from their Israeli-Jewish counterparts is through land code. For the most part Palestinians live on private land and Israelis on state owned land. The two systems exist as a combination of a spillover from the Ottoman period and Israeli land reforms that sought to nationalize territory. In the first two decades of statehood, Israel required land registrations that invalidated droves of Palestinian property titles. The process of expropriation continues today, mostly through the same zoning laws that legalize home demolitions.

Cumulatively, since Israel’s founding 93% of Palestinian land has been confiscated by the state, with only 3% of the total land of Israel owned by Palestinians, even though they comprise nearly 20% of the population.

Notes

Im Tirtzu is a Zionist group which campaigns to make Israel throughly Zionist, especially in higher education which it claims has been infiltrated by un-Israeli left-wingers.It was founded in 2006 by Ronen Shoval, chairman, and Erez Tadmor, spokesperson.

From Im Tirtzu’s website
Public Campaigns

Im Tirtzu has been leading significant changes in the Israeli public and media discourse. From time to time the Movement has initiated wide-ranging public campaigns aimed at arousing a discussion on various issues. Among the movement’s major campaigns, we note the following:

Publishing a report and launching a campaign in the Israeli media which revealed the connection between organizations supported by the New Israel Fund and the Goldstone Report.

Publishing a report and launching a campaign in the Israeli media which revealed the connection between organizations supported by the New Israel Fund and the ongoing witch-hunt against senior Israeli public figures abroad.

Publishing a report and launching a campaign in the Israeli media which revealed the anti-Zionist bias and the exclusion of Zionist positions and research within Israeli academic institutions.

A campaign that presented the positions of the late Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, OBM, on the issue of the indivisible unity of Jerusalem.

Exposing the falsifications in the discourse on the issue of Israel’s War of Independence and the Nakba propaganda, and publishing the Nakba-Harta booklet which presents the true historical context and facts and the distortions made by anti-Israel propaganda in its attempts to re-write history.

Bethlehem–Thousands of Palestinians mark the 65th anniversary of the Nakba, and participate in a huge procession organized by the Badil Center for Palestinian Residency and Refugees Rights, reaffirming the legitimate Palestinian Right of Return to their homeland, homes and towns.Najwa Darwish, head of the Badil Center, stated in an opening speech, “The Nakba happened, and its wounds are still open, more than 70% of the Palestinian people are refugees, living in refugee camps here, and in exile around the world”. From IMEMC Thousands Mark The Nakba In Bethlehem. Photo by Ma’an images.

Palestinians mark 65th anniverary of Nakba

Protests to be held across occupied territories to mark the “catastrophe” of the creation of Israel in 1948.

Al Jazeera, May 15, 2013

Palestinians are marking the 65th anniversary of the Nakba, when hundreds of thousands of Arabs were forced out of their homes and into exile.

Sirens will be sounded for 65 seconds and demonstrations will take place in Ramallah, Nablus, Tulkarem, Qalqilya, Bethlehem and Jericho to mark the day.

Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled or were forced from their villages during the war that established Israel in 1948, an event they commemorate every year as their Nakba Day, Arabic for “catastrophe”.

On Tuesday, the eve of the anniversary, Palestinians carried 65 torches through the streets of Ramallah to mark the event, while hundreds of others gathered around a stage to hear the Palestinian National Forces band play their instruments.

In the evening, a special pre-recorded speech by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas was broadcast on Palestinian television.

Abbas said that the Palestinian right to an “independent state” had been affirmed by “countries all over the world” and called on the Israeli government to show its positive intentions during negotiations by releasing Palestinian prisoners.

“If the Israeli government has positive intentions it should release our prisoners, especially those who are in prison before 1993 and also the sick, the women, the children and our brothers, the Palestinian party leaders and the Palestinian legislative council members,” he said.

‘Right of return’

Palestinians have maintained for six decades that Arabs who either fled or were expelled from their homes during the fighting that followed Israel’s 1948 creation, as well as all their descendants, all have the right to reclaim former properties in what is now Israel.

The uprooted Palestinians and their offspring, now numbering several million people, cite United Nations resolutions in claiming the right to return to the property they left behind.

The fate of Palestinian refugees and the Palestinian claim to what they call “the Right of Return” is an explosive issue that has loomed large in the failure of Israeli-Palestinian peace talks over the past two decades.

In previous rounds of negotiations, several ideas were floated, including allowing for a limited return of refugees to what is now Israel and settling the rest in a future Palestinian state and third countries along with compensation.

Talks broke off four years ago.

Palestinian children mark the Nakba in Ain al-Hilweh, Lebanon, May 14, 2013.

Nakba Day: Palestinians remember their home

By Mohammed Zaatari, The Daily Star
May 15, 2013

SIDON, Lebanon–Fatima Miari is adamant that she one day will return to her village in Palestine, the one she was forced to leave 65 years ago.

“You never lose the right you keep fighting for. We will return home to Palestine,” Miari, 77, said as she watched some kids re-enact a scene depicting their grandparents fleeing from their villages in May 1948, a performance organized by a number of Palestinian associations at the Ain alHilweh refugee camp in Sidon.

May 15 marks the 65th anniversary of the Nakba or “Catastrophe,” when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were displaced from their homeland as a result of a war which would conclude with the founding of the Jewish state.

The student performance was one among many events that Palestinian factions all over Lebanon have organized to commemorate Nakba Day. A number of tents will also be erected in Ain al-Hilweh Wednesday to commemorate the day.

“I still remember how our house looked. If I die before my return, I want its photo to be buried with me,” Miari explains.

With beards and moustaches drawn on their faces, kids taking part in the performance hurriedly packed mattresses, blankets and other necessities, just like their grandparents did more than six decades ago. They also carried cardboard keys, representing the ones to their original homes, along with banners bearing the names of cities and villages that Palestinians were made to leave.

“I am here for the sake of Palestine, so that we return home,” said Mohammad Qusaya, who along with all the young performers wore a traditional Palestinian kaffiyeh.

“My grandparents have experienced the Nakba. A long time has passed, we should return home,” he said, as fellow Palestinian kids waved their nation’s flag.

Passersby stood on the roads to observe as Hiam Abu Salem, a teacher, asked her students to wave Palestinian flags and sing a song with her about returning to Palestine.

“Tomorrow we will return home. My grandfather will return, carrying his house key. He will plant olives, figs, apples and oranges and my grandmother will bake and tell stories about our country,” sang the students.

“We are marking the Nakba by teaching children not to forget Palestine. They all know by now which villages their families were forced to leave,” Abu Salem said.

“We teach them these lessons about Palestine so that we can preserve our right to return.”

Palestinian children who were recently displaced as a result of the Syrian war also took part in the show.

“We came from Haifa. My family was displaced from Palestine and we were displaced from Syria. I wish we could die so that this torture ends,” said Hanan Abu Taha.

“We feel pain every day. Life is difficult here; there is no place to have fun,” she added. “Isn’t it my right to live like the children in other parts of the world? Isn’t it my right to sleep at home in Palestine?”

Mahmoud Hasan Mohammad, a former fighter for the pro-Syrian Palestinian Liberation Army still believes that resistance, rather than diplomacy, is the only way to return to Palestine.

“Palestine will be back only when we obey God’s orders to fight the Jews, the enemies of God. Negotiations only create obstacles, not solutions,” says 53-year-old Mohammad, from Haifa originally.

“We have to organize ourselves and then prepare [for resistance].”

Palestinian factions in Lebanon began holding events, similar to the students’ performance, to commemorate the Nakba.

To mark the day the Hamas Movement held a rally in Sidon’s Martyrs Square Sunday. The speakers at the rally unanimously emphasized that only resistance could liberate the Palestinian territories.

On Monday, refugees and representatives from most Palestinian factions demonstrated in the southern town of Naqoura. A delegation of protesters handed officials from the U.N. Interim Force in Lebanon a memo meant for U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, highlighting the need for the agency to help implement their right of return.

All Palestinian factions, save Hamas, will combine their efforts and hold ceremony at the Mar Elias refugee camp in Beirut Wednesday.

The Palestinian Liberation Organization also held an exhibition Monday of photographs taken during the Nakba.

Palestinians mark 65th anniversary of Nakba

PLO urges Fatah and Hamas to bridge their differences and achieve reconciliation

By Nasouh Nazzal, Gulf News
May 14, 2013

Ramallah: Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, the 1948 areas and the diaspora marked the 65th anniversary of the Nakba by organsing activites in the Palestinian territories and around the world.

Palestinians in occupied Jerusalem along with children of Younus village (the E1) planted saplings to remember the residents who were forced to leave their homes.

West Bank cities witnessed major processions to mark the occasion and several streets in Hebron were given new names.
A major celebration was organised in Beir Zeit University where black flags signifying the right of refugees’ return were installed around the campus

Families of Palestinian prisoners and hundreds of activists held a strike in front on the premises of the UN Headquarters in Ramallah. Representatives of families of prisoners handed the General Commissioner a letter signed by thousands of Palestinians urging the international community to pressure Israel to release prisoners in Israeli jails.

Many plays were staged and films shown in various Palestinian cities highlighting the sufferings of the Palestinians due to the Nakba which is considered the worst disaster in Palestinian history.

The Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) said the Nakba anniversary gives the chance for rivals – Hamas and Fatah- to end their bickerings and achieve reconciliation. The PLO warned of a permanent split between the West Bank and Gaza Strip if there is no unity and counselled that that would be the worst ever Nakba (disaster) in the Palestinian history. “It is time for the Palestinians to open a new page in their history without looking back to the dark era of the Palestinian split,” said the PLO in a statement.

The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS), in a a special bulletin said, in 1948, 1.4 million Palestinians lived in 1,300 Palestinian towns and villages.

More than 800,000 were driven out of their homeland to the West Bank and Gaza Strip, neighbouring Arab countries and other parts of the world. Thousands of Palestinians were displaced from their homes but stayed within the Israeli-controlled 1948 territory.

According to documentary evidence, the Israelis controlled 774 towns and villages and destroyed 531 Palestinian towns and villages during the Nakba. The atrocities of Israeli forces also included more than 70 massacres in which 15,000 Palestinians were killed.

The bureau said that the Palestinian population was 1.37 million in 1948. By the end of the 2012, the estimated population of Palestinians scattered around the world totalled 11.6 million. This indicates that the number of the Palestinians worldwide has multiplied eight-fold in 65 years.

According to statistics, the total number of Palestinians living in historic Palestine (between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean) by the end of 2012 was 5.8 million and this number is expected to rise to 7.2 million by 2020, based on current growth rates.

Data also shows that the refugees constitute 44.2 per cent of the total Palestinian population.

UNRWA records showed that there were 5.3 million Palestinian refugees registered in mid-2013, constituting 45.7 per cent of the total Palestinian population worldwide. 59.0 per cent of these refugees are living in Jordan, Syria and Lebanon, 17 per cent in the West Bank, and 24 per cent in the Gaza Strip. About 29 per cent of Palestinian registered refugees live in 58 refugee camps, of which 10 per cent are in Jordan, nine per cent in Syria, 12 per cent in Lebanon, 19 per cent in the West Bank, and eight in Gaza Strip.

Palestinians believe that the Nakba did not end in 1948 as Israelis still destroy villages, displace Palestinians and apply ethnic cleansing in the territories. According to Dr. Mustafa Al Barghouti, the Secretary-General of the Palestinian National Initiative, “Palestinian existence on Palestinian national soil is currently under serious Israeli threat and it is endangered more than at any time in Palestinian history. The Israeli plans never ended with the 1948 Nakba. Taking over the West Bank and the occupied East Jerusalem is a typical Israeli policy and gives us a clear picture of what happened in 1948.”
“The Israelis are changing the facts on the ground by force,” he said, stressing that the Palestinians maintain their links to their land and will never repeat the 1948 tragedy.

Thanks to Brian Robinson for providing the material and Professor Steven Rose for a guiding hand wading through it. No more guidance will be provided on interpreting these five articles:

1) Jewish Forward: Israeli Scientist Challenges Hypothesis of Middle East Origins;
2) Diana Appelbaum: A Problematic Reading of the Genetic History of the Jews;
3) Jewish Forward: Jews Are a ‘Race,’ Genes Reveal; May 2012
4) Science magazine: Who Are the Jews? Genetic Studies Spark Identity Debate;
5) New Scientist: How religion made Jews genetically distinct, 2010;

‘Jews a Race’ Genetic Theory Comes Under Fierce Attack by DNA Expert

Israeli Scientist Challenges Hypothesis of Middle East Origins

By Rita Rubin, Jewish Forward
May 07, 2013, issue of May 10, 2013.

Scientists usually don’t call each other “liars” and “frauds.”

But that’s how Johns Hopkins University post-doctoral researcher Eran Elhaik describes a group of widely respected geneticists, including Harry Ostrer, professor of pathology and genetics at Yeshiva University’s Albert Einstein College of Medicine and author of the 2012 book “Legacy: A Genetic History of the Jewish People.”

For years now, the findings of Ostrer and several other scientists have stood virtually unchallenged on the genetics of Jews and the story they tell of the common Middle East origins shared by many Jewish populations worldwide. Jews — and Ashkenazim in particular — are indeed one people, Ostrer’s research finds.

It’s a theory that more or less affirms the understanding that many Jews themselves hold of who they are in the world: a people who, though scattered, share an ethnic-racial bond rooted in their common ancestral descent from the indigenous Jews of ancient Judea or Palestine, as the Romans called it after they conquered the Jewish homeland.

But now, Elhaik, an Israeli molecular geneticist, has published research that he says debunks this claim. And that has set off a predictable clash.“He’s just wrong,” said Marcus Feldman of Stanford University, a leading researcher in Jewish genetics, referring to Elhaik.

Eran Elhaik. According to his research, the (Turkic) Khazars massively converted to Judaism, forming the basis of today’s Ashkenazi Jews. Photo by Rita Rubin.

The sometimes strong emotions generated by this scientific dispute stem from a politically loaded question that scientists and others have pondered for decades: Where in the world did Ashkenazi Jews come from?

The debate touches upon such sensitive issues as whether the Jewish people is a race or a religion, and whether Jews or Palestinians are descended from the original inhabitants of what is now the State of Israel. Ostrer’s theory is sometimes marshaled to lend the authority of science to the Zionist narrative, which views the migration of modern-day Jews to what is now Israel, and their rule over that land, as a simple act of repossession by the descendants of the land’s original residents. Ostrer declined to be interviewed for this story. But in his writings, Ostrer points out the dangers of such reductionism; some of the same genetic markers common among Jews, he finds, can be found in Palestinians, as well.

By using sophisticated molecular tools, Feldman, Ostrer and most other scientists in the field have found that Jews are genetically homogeneous. No matter where they live, these scientists say, Jews are genetically more similar to each other than to their non-Jewish neighbors, and they have a shared Middle Eastern ancestry.

The geneticists’ research backs up what is known as the Rhineland Hypothesis. According to the hypothesis, Ashkenazi Jews descended from Jews who fled Palestine after the Muslim conquest in the seventh century and settled in Southern Europe. In the late Middle Ages they moved into eastern Europe from Germany, or the Rhineland.

“Nonsense,” said Elhaik, a 33-year-old Israeli Jew from Beersheba who earned a doctorate in molecular evolution from the University of Houston. The son of an Italian man and Iranian woman who met in Israel, Elhaik, a dark-haired, compact man, sat down recently for an interview in his bare, narrow cubicle of an office at Hopkins, where he’s worked for four years.

In “The Missing Link of Jewish European Ancestry: Contrasting the Rhineland and the Khazarian Hypotheses,” published in December in the online journal Genome Biology and Evolution, Elhaik says he has proved that Ashkenazi Jews’ roots lie in the Caucasus — a region at the border of Europe and Asia that lies between the Black and Caspian seas — not in the Middle East. They are descendants, he argues, of the Khazars, a Turkic people who lived in one of the largest medieval states in Eurasia and then migrated to Eastern Europe in the 12th and 13th centuries. Ashkenazi genes, Elhaik added, are far more heterogeneous than Ostrer and other proponents of the Rhineland Hypothesis believe. Elhaik did find a Middle Eastern genetic marker in DNA from Jews, but, he says, it could be from Iran, not ancient Judea.

Elhaik writes that the Khazars converted to Judaism in the eighth century, although many historians believe that only royalty and some members of the aristocracy converted. But widespread conversion by the Khazars is the only way to explain the ballooning of the European Jewish population to 8 million at the beginning of the 20th century from its tiny base in the Middle Ages, Elhaik says.

Elhaik bases his conclusion on an analysis of genetic data published by a team of researchers led by Doron Behar, a population geneticist and senior physician at Israel’s Rambam Medical Center, in Haifa. Using the same data, Behar’s team published in 2010 a paper concluding that most contemporary Jews around the world and some non-Jewish populations from the Levant, or Eastern Mediterranean, are closely related.

Elhaik used some of the same statistical tests as Behar and others, but he chose different comparisons. Elhaik compared “genetic signatures” found in Jewish populations with those of modern-day Armenians and Georgians, which he uses as a stand-in for the long-extinct Khazarians because they live in the same area as the medieval state.

“It’s an unrealistic premise,” said University of Arizona geneticist Michael Hammer, one of Behar’s co-authors, of Elhaik’s paper. Hammer notes that Armenians have Middle Eastern roots, which, he says, is why they appeared to be genetically related to Ashkenazi Jews in Elhaik’s study.

Hammer, who also co-wrote the first paper that showed modern-day Kohanim are descended from a single male ancestor, calls Elhaik and other Khazarian Hypothesis proponents “outlier folks… who have a minority view that’s not supported scientifically. I think the arguments they make are pretty weak and stretching what we know.”

Feldman, director of Stanford’s Morrison Institute for Population and Resource Studies, echoes Hammer. “If you take all of the careful genetic population analysis that has been done over the last 15 years… there’s no doubt about the common Middle Eastern origin,” he said. He added that Elhaik’s paper “is sort of a one-off.”

Elhaik’s statistical analysis would not pass muster with most contemporary scholars, Feldman said: “He appears to be applying the statistics in a way that gives him different results from what everybody else has obtained from essentially similar data.”

Elhaik, who doesn’t believe that Moses, Aaron or the 12 Tribes of Israel ever existed, shrugs off such criticism.

“That’s a circular argument,” he said of the notion that Jews’ and Armenians’ genetic similarities stem from common ancestors in the Middle East and not from Khazaria, the area where the Armenians live. If you believe that, he says, then other non-Jewish populations, such as Georgian, that are genetically similar to Armenians should be considered genetically related to Jews, too, “and so on and so forth.”

Dan Graur, Elhaik’s doctoral supervisor at U.H. and a member of the editorial board of the journal that published his paper, calls his former student “very ambitious, very independent. That’s what I like.” Graur, a Romanian-born Jew who served on the faculty of Tel Aviv University for 22 years before moving 10 years ago to the Houston school, said Elhaik “writes more provocatively than may be needed, but it’s his style.” Graur calls Elhaik’s conclusion that Ashkenazi Jews originated to the east of Germany “a very honest estimate.”

In a news article that accompanied Elhaik’s journal paper, Shlomo Sand, history professor at Tel Aviv University and author of the controversial 2009 book “The Invention of the Jewish People,” said the study vindicated his long-held ideas. ”It’s so obvious for me,” Sand told the journal. “Some people, historians and even scientists, turn a blind eye to the truth. Once, to say Jews were a race was anti-Semitic, now to say they’re not a race is anti-Semitic. It’s crazy how history plays with us.”

The paper has received little coverage in mainstream American media, but it has attracted the attention of anti-Zionists and “anti-Semitic white supremacists,” Elhaik said.

Interestingly, while anti-Zionist bloggers have applauded Elhaik’s work, saying it proves that contemporary Jews have no legitimate claim to Israel, some white supremacists have attacked it.

“The disruptive and conflict-ridden behavior which has marked out Jewish Supremacist activities through the millennia strongly suggests that Jews have remained more or less genetically uniform and have… developed a group evolutionary survival strategy based on a common biological unity — something which strongly militates against the Khazar theory,” former Louisiana state assemblyman David Duke wrote on his blog in February.

“I’m not communicating with them,” Elhaik said of the white supremacists. He says it also bothers him, a veteran of seven years in the Israeli army, that anti-Zionists have capitalized on his research “and they’re not going to be proven wrong anytime soon.”

But proponents of the Rhineland Hypothesis also have a political agenda, he said, claiming they “were motivated to justify the Zionist narrative.”

To illustrate his point, Elhaik swivels his chair around to face his computer and calls up a 2010 email exchange with Ostrer.

“It was a great pleasure reading your group’s recent paper, ‘Abraham’s Children in the Genome Era,’ that illuminate[s] the history of our people,” Elhaik wrote to Ostrer. “Is it possible to see the data used for the study?”

Ostrer replied that the data are not publicly available. “It is possible to collaborate with the team by writing a brief proposal that outlines what you plan to do,” he wrote. “Criteria for reviewing include novelty and strength of the proposal, non-overlap with current or planned activities, and non-defamatory nature toward the Jewish people.” That last requirement, Elhaik argues, reveals the bias of Ostrer and his collaborators.

Allowing scientists access to data only if their research will not defame Jews is “peculiar,” said Catherine DeAngelis, who edited the Journal of the American Medical Association for a decade. “What he does is set himself up for criticism: Wait a minute. What’s this guy trying to hide?”

Despite what his critics claim, Elhaik says, he was not out to prove that contemporary Jews have no connection to the Jewish people of the Bible. His primary research focus is the genetics of mental illness, which, he explains, led him to question the assumption that Ashkenazi Jews are a useful population to study because they’re so homogeneous.

Elhaik says he first read about the Khazarian Hypothesis a decade ago in a 1976 book by the late Hungarian-British author Arthur Koestler, “The Thirteenth Tribe,” written before scientists had the tools to compare genomes. Koestler, who was Jewish by birth, said his aim in writing the book was to eliminate the racist underpinnings of anti-Semitism in Europe. “Should this theory be confirmed, the term ‘anti-Semitism’ would become void of meaning,” the book jacket reads. Although Koestler’s book was generally well reviewed, some skeptics questioned the author’s grasp of the history of Khazaria.Graur is not surprised that Elhaik has stood up against the “clique” of scientists who believe that Jews are genetically homogeneous. “He enjoys being combative,” Graur said. “That’s what science is.”

Contact Rita Rubin at feedback@forward.com

A Problematic Reading of the Genetic History of the Jews

Book Review
Legacy: A Genetic History of the Jewish People by Harry Ostrer. Oxford University Press, 2012

By Diana Muir Appelbaum, GeneWatch blog
September, 2012

Harry Ostrer is a distinguished medical geneticist at Albert Einstein College of Medicine whose new book, Legacy: A Genetic History of the Jewish People, is not nearly as good as it could-or should-have been.

Part of the difficulty arises from Ostrer’s tendency to make un-nuanced assertions. The book opens with the statement: “In June 2010, I published a scientific article that demonstrated a biological basis for Jewishness.”

 Harry Ostrer, photo by Lou Manna.

Ostrer is referring to the findings of his 2010 study, “Abraham’s Children in the Genome Era: Major Jewish Diaspora Populations Comprise Distinct Genetic Clusters with Shared Middle Eastern Ancestry,” which appeared within a month of a study by an Israeli group led by Doron Behar, “The Genome-wide Structure of the Jewish People.” Both studies compared DNA microarray analyses of Jews whose recent ancestors lived in a variety of Jewish communities scattered across several continents. The data for these Jewish communities, all of which had strong traditions of endogamy, were compared with existing data on West Eurasian populations.

The Behar et al. study looked at a wider assortment of Jewish communities, while Ostrer et al. sampled a larger number of individuals, but the two came to remarkably similar conclusions. Most of the communities of the diaspora, and all of the largest communities, are more closely related to one another than they are to the populations of the countries in which they have lived for centuries or millennia. This despite the fact that they were spread from Lithuania to Yemen, ranged from short and swarthy to tall and blue-eyed, and in many cases had limited opportunities for contact with one another for the better part of two millennia.

The non-Jewish population to which Jews can at present be shown to be most closely related is the Samaritans, an ethno-religious group that most people associate with the New Testament parable of the “good Samaritan.” Samaritans are understood as originating in an ancient (first millennium BCE) schism within the Jewish community in Palestine. The group, which follows the law of the Torah but not rabbinic Judaism and never left the land of Israel, practices endogamy and has shrunk over the millennia to a mere handful of families. Genetic mapping also shows high overlap between Jews and Druze, another indigenous, endogamous Levantine ethno-religious group, and with Cypriots. Jews and Palestinians are less closely related, not only because Jews mixed with other populations during the long diaspora, but also because Palestinian Muslims have substantial non-Levantine ancestry.

There is interesting work still to be done. It would be interesting to compare Jewish markers with those of more populations historians regard as most likely to have continuously resided in the Levant, such as Palestinian Christians, Maronites, and Aramaic-speaking Christians. But we may be able to get even closer to knowing what the ancient Jewish gene pool looked like by examining DNA from Jewish burials in the Roman catacombs or graveyards in Palestine such as Beit She’arim.

These fine-grained details would be interesting to see, but the debate over whether Jews can claim significant Middle Eastern descent is settled. DNA evidence of Jewish peoplehood and Near Eastern origins corroborates the evidence of Jewish unity and cultural continuity in the linguistic, historical and archaeological record. Less than twenty years ago almost all historians assumed that while Jews shared a unique cultural heritage traceable to origins in the hill country of Judea, they shared most of their ancestry with the peoples among whom they lived. These assumptions have been overturned by the work of Ostrer and others demonstrating that Jews from every continent share genetic markers with surprising frequency. Racists, of course, always suspected something of the sort.

None of this, however, suggests that there is a biological basis for “Jewishness,” whatever that vague entity might be. As the genetic data and the historical record make clear, no small number of non-Jews has joined the Jewish people over the last several millennia. Ruth, the Moabite ancestor of King David, may have been the most widely publicized convert, but she was by no means the last. Debates over whether Jews are best understood as constituting a religion or a nation may continue forever, but neither category has a biological basis.

Ostrer also exhibits a disappointing proclivity for overreading the import of his findings for contemporary geopolitical dilemmas. This is why readers will be troubled by Ostrer’s assertion that “the stakes in genetic analysis are high,” because genetic evidence lies at “the heart of Zionist claims for a Jewish homeland in Israel.”

This is a problematic assertion for several reasons, of which the simplest is that Ostrer conflates the claim to a national homeland made by pre-state Jewish nationalists and the right to sovereignty on the part of an existing nation state. More troubling is Ostrer’s assertion that investigation of where one’s ancestors lived upwards of 2000 years ago is relevant to the rights of nations-a standard that would leave few contemporary nation states on firm footing. Ostrer “can imagine future disputes about exactly how large the shared Middle Eastern ancestry of Jewish groups has to be to justify Zionist claims.” It doesn’t require much imagination. One only has to look at the emerging use of genetic information for similarly dubious purposes, for example the Hungarian Member of Parliament from the Jobbik party who hired a genetic testing laboratory to certify that he is free of Jewish and Roma (Gypsy) genetic markers.

The Zionist claim was not based on genetics; it was based on the liberal political principle that sovereignty resides in the people. The claim that Israel is the territory in which Jews are entitled to have a sovereign state was based on the demonstrable cultural continuity of the Jewish people since ancient times, on the argument that Israel was the “cradle” of the Jewish nation, and the fact that the Jewish nation has historically been a sovereign nation on this land before. But the claim to sovereignty itself is based on the right of a people to self-determination, not on genetic data or ancestry.

Some of Ostrer’s misstatements will make Jewishly knowledgeable readers smile; his assertion that Sephardic Jews spoke “Latino” has real charm. (They spoke a Judeo-Spanish language called Ladino.) Other statements, like the false precision of asserting that “27,290 members of the kingdom of Israel” were deported by Assyria in 722 BCE, make it clear that Ostrer has no idea how to judge the reliability of historical sources. And no one familiar with European Jewish history or geography could describe a world in which Warsaw lies east of Kiev. Indeed, the proofreading of the book as a whole is abysmal.

Beyond unfamiliarity with the details of Jewish history, there is a quirkiness to the topics Ostrer chooses to discuss. He is, for example, fascinated by a minor early twentieth- century Jewish medical researcher named Maurice Fishberg who “proved” that Jews are not a race by the assiduous measurement of Jewish crania. But Ostrer fails to provide the context of the fin de siècle investigation of race and eugenics in which Jews figured in a minor way. He might have been better off with a coauthor better versed in Jewish and intellectual history.

A thornier problem is that Ostrer, like many research physicians, takes genetic data to be more scientific, and therefore more definitive, than they are. Genetically described populations reflect probabilistic clusters of markers inscribed in our DNA. They are not a concretization of race. Moreover, many of the conclusions that can be drawn from genetic evidence are reliant on the quality of accompanying historical data. For example, the Cohen modal haplotype is a cluster of distinctive genetic markers shared by a high percentage of contemporary Jewish Cohanim (the priestly clan that traces its ancestry back to Moses’ brother Aaron). The idea that the ancestry that these men share can be traced to the ancient Israelite priesthood makes sense to almost everyone who views these data, but it is not inherent in the data. The data show only that these men share common ancestors who lived a specified number of generations ago. Estimating when those ancestors lived depends on an educated guess about the length of an average generation during the last 3000 years or so. But the idea that those ancestors were Cohanim is derived from our knowledge of Jewish history, it is not inscribed in the genetic markers.

Determining who does and who does not bear West Asian genetic markers is even more fraught. We do not have the genomes of the ancient Israelites, Phoenicians, Philistines or any of the other ancient peoples of the Near East. All that we have are genetic data on the peoples who live in the region today, and even these are not as refined as data for some other populations. We do know that there have been significant in-migrations, depopulation events, population bottlenecks, and constant contact with other peoples. What we do not know is the relative significance of these factors in producing modern Middle Eastern populations. The ongoing work on the genetic roots of the British, in which the influence of waves of conquest is beginning to be limned, is a possible model for the kind of investigation that could be done on the ancestral origins of the peoples of the Middle East. Meanwhile, Ostrer necessarily used a cruder tool, comparing his Jewish samples to modern populations of Druze, Bedouin and Palestinian Arabs. Although his findings show enough similarity to make shared origins for some ancestors among these four groups clear, there is work yet to be done.

This is important because there has been more than a little over-interpretation of the findings. For example, studies of the Y-haplotypes passed from father to son show that a remarkably high percentage of the male founders of Jewish communities in almost all parts of the diaspora were almost certainly descended from Near Eastern ancestors. This naturally roused curiosity about the mitochondrial DNA passed on by the founding mothers of diaspora communities; the findings support longstanding assumptions by historians that diaspora communities were often founded at least in part by Jewish men who reared Jewish families with local women who had not been born Jewish. A 2006 study of the mitochondrial DNA of Ashkenazi Jews excited particular interest because it demonstrated that as many as 70% of Ashkenazi (Eastern European) Jews descend from four women who lived about 2000 years ago.[5] The authors of the study argue that “Near Eastern origin” of these four ancestors was “likely.” Ostrer agrees that evidence shows “four common types of mitochondrial genomes… suggesting four founder females… (who) originated in the Middle East and their descendants migrated to Europe by way of the Rhineland.” But the data do not trace a route along the Rhine-this is an assumption borrowed from historical evidence. Nor do the data make the ethnic or geographic origin of these four maternal ancestors of Ashkenazi Jews at all clear; merely, they raise the possibility, or arguably the probability, of a West Asian origin.

The greatest surprise has been the discovery of genetic evidence showing that Jews from the large communities of the diaspora-from Persia to Morocco, and from Basra to Vilna-are more closely related to one another in the male line than they are to the peoples among whom their ancestors lived for centuries. Harry Ostrer is surely correct when he writes, “To look over the genetics of Jewish groups and to see the history of the Diaspora woven in is truly a marvel.”

What we have with advances in population genetics are new and marvelous tools with which to explore the past. Together with what we know from linguistics, history and archaeology, they can widen our understanding of the course of history, including the history of peoples and nations. But let’s not get carried away, or carry our conclusions beyond the evidence.

Diana Muir Appelbaum is an author and historian. She is at work on a book tentatively entitled Nationhood: The Foundation of Democracy, and often writes on topics related to genetic history.

Paul S. Appelbaum, MD, is the Dollard Professor of Psychiatry, Medicine & Law at Columbia, where he conducts research on the ethical, legal and social implications of advances in genetics.

Jews Are a ‘Race,’ Genes Reveal

Author Uncovers DNA Links Between Members of Tribe

By Jon Entine, Jewish Forward
May 04, 2012, issue of May 11, 2012

Legacy: A Genetic History of the Jewish People
By Harry Ostrer
Oxford University Press, 288 Pages, $24.95

In his new book, “Legacy: A Genetic History of the Jewish People,” Harry Ostrer, a medical geneticist and professor at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, claims that Jews are different, and the differences are not just skin deep. Jews exhibit, he writes, a distinctive genetic signature. Considering that the Nazis tried to exterminate Jews based on their supposed racial distinctiveness, such a conclusion might be a cause for concern. But Ostrer sees it as central to Jewish identity.

“Who is a Jew?” has been a poignant question for Jews throughout our history. It evokes a complex tapestry of Jewish identity made up of different strains of religious beliefs, cultural practices and blood ties to ancient Palestine and modern Israel. But the question, with its echoes of genetic determinism, also has a dark side.

Geneticists have long been aware that certain diseases, from breast cancer to Tay-Sachs, disproportionately affect Jews. Ostrer, who is also director of genetic and genomic testing at Montefiore Medical Center, goes further, maintaining that Jews are a homogeneous group with all the scientific trappings of what we used to call a “race.”

That special Jewish tailoring gene. Photo by Getty images

For most of the 3,000-year history of the Jewish people, the notion of what came to be known as “Jewish exceptionalism” was hardly controversial. Because of our history of inmarriage and cultural isolation, imposed or self-selected, Jews were considered by gentiles (and usually referred to themselves) as a “race.” Scholars from Josephus to Disraeli proudly proclaimed their membership in “the tribe.”

Ostrer explains how this concept took on special meaning in the 20th century, as genetics emerged as a viable scientific enterprise. Jewish distinctiveness might actually be measurable empirically. In “Legacy,” he first introduces us to Maurice Fishberg, an upwardly mobile Russian-Jewish immigrant to New York at the fin de siècle. Fishberg fervently embraced the anthropological fashion of the era, measuring skull sizes to explain why Jews seemed to be afflicted with more diseases than other groups — what he called the “peculiarities of the comparative pathology of the Jews.” It turns out that Fishberg and his contemporary phrenologists were wrong: Skull shape provides limited information about human differences. But his studies ushered in a century of research linking Jews to genetics.

Ostrer divides his book into six chapters representing the various aspects of Jewishness: Looking Jewish, Founders, Genealogies, Tribes, Traits and Identity. Each chapter features a prominent scientist or historical figure who dramatically advanced our understanding of Jewishness. The snippets of biography lighten a dense forest of sometimes-obscure science. The narrative, which consists of a lot of potboiler history, is a slog at times. But for the specialist and anyone touched by the enduring debate over Jewish identity, this book is indispensable.

“Legacy” may cause its readers discomfort. To some Jews, the notion of a genetically related people is an embarrassing remnant of early Zionism that came into vogue at the height of the Western obsession with race, in the late 19th century. Celebrating blood ancestry is divisive, they claim: The authors of “The Bell Curve” were vilified 15 years ago for suggesting that genes play a major role in IQ differences among racial groups.

Furthermore, sociologists and cultural anthropologists, a disproportionate number of whom are Jewish, ridicule the term “race,” claiming there are no meaningful differences between ethnic groups. For Jews, the word still carries the especially odious historical association with Nazism and the Nuremberg Laws. They argue that Judaism has morphed from a tribal cult into a worldwide religion enhanced by thousands of years of cultural traditions.

Is Judaism a people or a religion? Or both? The belief that Jews may be psychologically or physically distinct remains a controversial fixture in the gentile and Jewish consciousness, and Ostrer places himself directly in the line of fire. Yes, he writes, the term “race” carries nefarious associations of inferiority and ranking of people. Anything that marks Jews as essentially different runs the risk of stirring either anti- or philo-Semitism. But that doesn’t mean we can ignore the factual reality of what he calls the “biological basis of Jewishness” and “Jewish genetics.” Acknowledging the distinctiveness of Jews is “fraught with peril,” but we must grapple with the hard evidence of “human differences” if we seek to understand the new age of genetics.

Although he readily acknowledges the formative role of culture and environment, Ostrer believes that Jewish identity has multiple threads, including DNA. He offers a cogent, scientifically based review of the evidence, which serves as a model of scientific restraint.

“On the one hand, the study of Jewish genetics might be viewed as an elitist effort, promoting a certain genetic view of Jewish superiority,” he writes. “On the other, it might provide fodder for anti-Semitism by providing evidence of a genetic basis for undesirable traits that are present among some Jews. These issues will newly challenge the liberal view that humans are created equal but with genetic liabilities.”

Jews, he notes, are one of the most distinctive population groups in the world because of our history of endogamy. Jews — Ashkenazim in particular — are relatively homogeneous despite the fact that they are spread throughout Europe and have since immigrated to the Americas and back to Israel. The Inquisition shattered Sephardi Jewry, leading to far more incidences of intermarriage and to a less distinctive DNA.

In traversing this minefield of the genetics of human differences, Ostrer bolsters his analysis with volumes of genetic data, which are both the book’s greatest strength and its weakness. Two complementary books on this subject — my own “Abraham’s Children: Race, Identity, and the DNA of the Chosen People” and “Jacob’s Legacy: A Genetic View of Jewish History” by Duke University geneticist David Goldstein, who is well quoted in both “Abraham’s Children” and “Legacy” — are more narrative driven, weaving history and genetics, and are consequently much more congenial reads.

The concept of the “Jewish people” remains controversial. The Law of Return, which establishes the right of Jews to come to Israel, is a central tenet of Zionism and a founding legal principle of the State of Israel. The DNA that tightly links Ashkenazi, Sephardi and Mizrahi, three prominent culturally and geographically distinct Jewish groups, could be used to support Zionist territorial claims — except, as Ostrer points out, some of the same markers can be found in Palestinians, our distant genetic cousins, as well. Palestinians, understandably, want their own right of return.

That disagreement over the meaning of DNA also pits Jewish traditionalists against a particular strain of secular Jewish liberals that has joined with Arabs and many non-Jews to argue for an end to Israel as a Jewish nation. Their hero is Shlomo Sand, an Austrian-born Israeli historian who reignited this complex controversy with the 2008 publication of “The Invention of the Jewish People.”

Sand contends that Zionists who claim an ancestral link to ancient Palestine are manipulating history. But he has taken his thesis from novelist Arthur Koestler’s 1976 book, “The Thirteenth Tribe,” which was part of an attempt by post-World War II Jewish liberals to reconfigure Jews not as a biological group, but as a religious ideology and ethnic identity.

The majority of the Ashkenazi Jewish population, as Koestler, and now Sand, writes, are not the children of Abraham but descendants of pagan Eastern Europeans and Eurasians, concentrated mostly in the ancient Kingdom of Khazaria in what is now Ukraine and Western Russia. The Khazarian nobility converted during the early Middle Ages, when European Jewry was forming.

Although scholars challenged Koestler’s and now Sand’s selective manipulation of the facts — the conversion was almost certainly limited to the tiny ruling class and not to the vast pagan population — the historical record has been just fragmentary enough to titillate determined critics of Israel, who turned both Koestler’s and Sand’s books into roaring best-sellers.

Fortunately, re-creating history now depends not only on pottery shards, flaking manuscripts and faded coins, but on something far less ambiguous: DNA. Ostrer’s book is an impressive counterpoint to the dubious historical methodology of Sand and his admirers. And, as a co-founder of the Jewish HapMap — the study of haplotypes, or blocks of genetic markers, that are common to Jews around the world — he is well positioned to write the definitive response.
In accord with most geneticists, Ostrer firmly rejects the fashionable postmodernist dismissal of the concept of race as genetically naive, opting for a more nuanced perspective.

When the human genome was first mapped a decade ago, Francis Collins, then head of the National Genome Human Research Institute, said: “Americans, regardless of ethnic group, are 99.9% genetically identical.” Added J. Craig Venter, who at the time was chief scientist at the private firm that helped sequenced the genome, Celera Genomics, “Race has no genetic or scientific basis.” Those declarations appeared to suggest that “race,” or the notion of distinct but overlapping genetic groups, is “meaningless.”

But Collins and Venter have issued clarifications of their much-misrepresented comments. Almost every minority group has faced, at one time or another, being branded as racially inferior based on a superficial understanding of how genes peculiar to its population work. The inclination by politicians, educators and even some scientists to underplay our separateness is certainly understandable. But it’s also misleading. DNA ensures that we differ not only as individuals, but also as groups.

However slight the differences (and geneticists now believe that they are significantly greater than 0.1%), they are defining. That 0.1% contains some 3 million nucleotide pairs in the human genome, and these determine such things as skin or hair color and susceptibility to certain diseases. They contain the map of our family trees back to the first modern humans.

Both the human genome project and disease research rest on the premise of finding distinguishable differences between individuals and often among populations. Scientists have ditched the term “race,” with all its normative baggage, and adopted more neutral terms, such as “population” and “clime,” which have much of the same meaning. Boiled down to its essence, race equates to “region of ancestral origin.”

Ostrer has devoted his career to investigating these extended family trees, which help explain the genetic basis of common and rare disorders. Today, Jews remain identifiable in large measure by the 40 or so diseases we disproportionately carry, the inescapable consequence of inbreeding. He traces the fascinating history of numerous “Jewish diseases,” such as Tay-Sachs, Gaucher, Niemann-Pick, Mucolipidosis IV, as well as breast and ovarian cancer. Indeed, 10 years ago I was diagnosed as carrying one of the three genetic mutations for breast and ovarian cancer that mark my family and me as indelibly Jewish, prompting me to write “Abraham’s Children.”

Like East Asians, the Amish, Icelanders, Aboriginals, the Basque people, African tribes and other groups, Jews have remained isolated for centuries because of geography, religion or cultural practices. It’s stamped on our DNA. As Ostrer explains in fascinating detail, threads of Jewish ancestry link the sizable Jewish communities of North America and Europe to Yemenite and other Middle Eastern Jews who have relocated to Israel, as well as to the black Lemba of southern Africa and to India’s Cochin Jews. But, in a twist, the links include neither the Bene Israel of India nor Ethiopian Jews. Genetic tests show that both groups are converts, contradicting their founding myths.

Why, then, are Jews so different looking, usually sharing the characteristics of the surrounding populations? Think of red-haired Jews, Jews with blue eyes or the black Jews of Africa. Like any cluster — a genetic term Ostrer uses in place of the more inflammatory “race” — Jews throughout history moved around and fooled around, although mixing occurred comparatively infrequently until recent decades. Although there are identifiable gene variations that are common among Jews, we are not a “pure” race. The time machine of our genes may show that most Jews have a shared ancestry that traces back to ancient Palestine but, like all of humanity, Jews are mutts.

About 80% of Jewish males and 50% of Jewish females trace their ancestry back to the Middle East. The rest entered the “Jewish gene pool” through conversion or intermarriage. Those who did intermarry often left the faith in a generation or two, in effect pruning the Jewish genetic tree. But many converts became interwoven into the Jewish genealogical line. Reflect on the iconic convert, the biblical Ruth, who married Boaz and became the great-grandmother of King David. She began as an outsider, but you don’t get much more Jewish than the bloodline of King David!

To his credit, Ostrer also addresses the third rail of discussions about Jewishness and race: the issue of intelligence. Jews were latecomers to the age of freethinking. While the Enlightenment swept through Christian Europe in the 17th century, the Haskalah did not gather strength until the early 19th century.

By the beginning of the new millennium, however, Jews were thought of as among the smartest people on earth. The trend is most prominent in America, which has the largest concentration of Jews outside Israel and a history of tolerance.

Although Jews make up less than 3% of the population, they have won more than 25% of the Nobel Prizes awarded to American scientists since 1950. Jews also account for 20% of this country’s chief executives and make up 22% of Ivy League students. Psychologists and educational researchers have pegged their average IQ at 107.5 to 115, with their verbal IQ at more than 120, a stunning standard deviation above the average of 100 found in those of European ancestry. Like it or not, the IQ debate will become an increasingly important issue going forward, as medical geneticists focus on unlocking the mysteries of the brain.

Do Jews have a cobblers’ gene? Shoe repair shopkeeper, Spitalfields, London 1969

Many liberal Jews maintain, at least in public, that the plethora of Jewish lawyers, doctors and comedians is the product of our cultural heritage, but the science tells a more complex story. Jewish success is a product of Jewish genes as much as of Jewish moms.

Is it “good for the Jews” to be exploring such controversial subjects? We can’t avoid engaging the most challenging questions in the age of genetics. Because of our history of endogamy, Jews are a goldmine for geneticists studying human differences in the quest to cure disease. Because of our cultural commitment to education, Jews are among the top genetic researchers in the world.

As humankind becomes more genetically sophisticated, identity becomes both more fluid and more fixed. Jews in particular can find threads of our ancestry literally anywhere, muddying traditional categories of nationhood, ethnicity, religious belief and “race.” But such discussions, ultimately, are subsumed by the reality of the common shared ancestry of humankind. Ostrer’s “Legacy” points out that — regardless of the pros and cons of being Jewish — we are all, genetically, in it together. And, in doing so, he gets it just right.

Jon Entine is the founder and director of the Genetic Literacy Project at George Mason University, where he is senior research fellow at the Center for Health and Risk Communication. His website is www.jonentine.com.

Who Are the Jews? Genetic Studies Spark Identity Debate

By Michael Balte, Science, Vol. 328 no. 5984 p. 1342
11 June 2010

The world’s 13 million Jews are strongly linked by religion and culture. But do they share a common genetic heritage? Two new studies conclude that most members of the far-fl ung Jewish Diaspora can trace their roots to ancestors who lived in the Middle East more than 2000 years ago. The new research, based on recent advances in genome technology, apparently refutes controversial claims that most of today’s Jews descend from more recent converts. And it finds that Jews in Ethiopia and India who also claim origins in ancient Israel are more distantly related to other Jewish groups. Yet some researchers argue that although science can track Jewish ancestry, it has little to say about who is a Jew today.

The studies “clearly show a genetic common ancestry” of most Jewish populations, says Sarah Tishkoff, a geneticist at the University of Pennsylvania, thus indicating a distinct Jewish people through history. Indeed, says Harry Ostrer, a geneticist at New York University Medical School and leaderof one of the teams, the genomewide scans used in the studies can detect Jewish ancestry in anonymous DNA samples. But Doron Behar, a geneticist at the Rambam Health Care Campus in Haifa, Israel, and lead author of the second report, argues that genes do not necessarily make the Jew. There is no “metaphysical” difference between someone born Jewish and a convert to Judaism, Behar says.

The two studies—one led by Behar and published online this week in Nature, and Ostrer’s, published last week in TheAmerican Journal of Human Genetics—speak to a current debate about Jewish origins, including that of the Ashkenazi Jews of Europe, who make up 90% of American Jews and nearly 50% of Israeli Jews. Tel Aviv University historian Shlomo Sand’s 2008 book The Invention of the Jewish People argued that few modern Jews can trace their heritage to ancient Israel. He in part resurrects a thesis, made famous by writer Arthur Koestler in the 1970s, that Ashkenazi Jews are actually descended from a Turkic people in Central Asia whose rulers converted to Judaism in the 8th century C.E.

The new studies contradict that conclusion. Both teams used DNA microarrays to examine variation within Jewish groups worldwide and between those groups and non-Jewish populations. Microarrays allow comparisons of thousands of genetic differences, from single nucleotide pairs to longer stretches of DNA, between different individuals (Science, 21 December 2007, p. 1842). This genomewide approach is much more powerful than previous analyses of Y chromosomes and mitochondrial DNA, which
were often inconclusive.

The Ostrer team analyzed nuclear DNA from 237 Jews representing the three main Diaspora groups: Ashkenazi Jews; Sephardic Jews from Spain and Portugal; and Middle Eastern, or Oriental, Jews. Their DNA was compared with that of about 2800 presumably non-Jewish people from around the world. The Behar study employed smaller sample sizes—121 Jews and 1166 nonJews—but from more population groups and also analyzed 8000 non-Jewish Y chromosomes and 14,000 mtDNA genomes.

The studies came up with very similar results: Jews from the three Diaspora groups were closer to each other genetically than to non-Jews from the same geographic region.

Indeed, the Ostrer study found that Ashkenazi Jews were as closely related to each other as fourth or fi fth cousins, even though their genetic profi les indicated between 30% and 60% admixture with non-Jewish Europeans. Jewish groups also clustered tightly with non-Jewish Middle Eastern populations such as the Druze and the Cypriots, strongly suggesting an origin in that geographic region. “I would hope that these observations would put the idea that Jewishness is just a cultural construct to rest,” Ostrer says.

The Behar study also included three Jewish groups whose ancestry has been uncertain: the Beta Israel Jews of Ethiopia, the Cochin Jews of southern India, and the Bene Israel Jews of northern India. It found that all three groups genetically clustered with non-Jewish Ethiopians and Indians rather than with the Diaspora groups. However, analysis of the Y chromosomes of the Bene Israel Jews showed paternal links to the Middle East, suggesting that they might share ancient roots with Jews from that region.

So it’s possible, Behar and other researchers say, that the Ethiopian and Indian Jewish groups were founded by Jews from other regions who then intermarried and/or converted many local non-Jews to Judaism, thus expanding their numbers but diluting their Jewish genetic signatures.

Overall, “these results confirm the common wisdom that Jews have always held,”
that they stem from a common Middle Eastern origin and heritage, says historian Anita Shapira, also from Tel Aviv University. “It is nice to get support from modern genetics, which refutes [Sand’s] assertions,” she says.Sand counters that the whole concept of identifying Jews genetically is fallacious. “No study … has succeeded in identifying a genetic marker specifi c to Jews,” he insists.

He adds, “It is a bitter irony to see the descendants of Holocaust survivors set out to find a biological Jewish identity. Hitler would certainly have been very pleased.” But Ostrer says that Sand has not kept up with advances in genetic research: “We can tell who the Jews are genetically.”

How religion made Jews genetically distinct
By Andy Coghlan, New Scientist
June 04 2010

Jewish populations around the world share more than traditions and laws – they also have a common genetic background. That is the conclusion of the most comprehensive genetic study yet aimed at tracing the ancestry of Jewish people.

In a study of over 200 Jews from cities in three different countries, researchers found that all of them descended from a founding community that lived 2500 years ago in Mesopotamia.

Harry Ostrer of New York University, whose team carried out the study, likens modern Jewish populations to a series of genetic islands spread across the world.

The main reason that Jews continue to form a distinct genetic group, despite their wide dispersal is the exclusivity of the Jewish religion and the tight restrictions it imposes on marriage to those outside the Jewish faith.

Ostrer’s colleague Gil Atzmon of Albert Einstein College of Medicine at Yeshiva University in New York says that the religious traditions and laws shared by practising Jews around the world, and their isolation from their non-Jewish neighbours, means that Jews share many more genomic segments with each other than they do with non-Jewish people.

Marrying out
Jewish law makes it hard for non-Jews to convert. Communities that do accept converts expect them to spend several years studying the traditions and laws of Judaism. Most observant Jews marry other Jews, which limits genetic mixing with other populations, although in the past century some communities have become more accepting of marriage outside the faith.

Atzmon and his colleagues studied the DNA of 237 Jews from New York, Seattle, Athens and Rome, representing Ashkenazi, Turkish, Greek, Italian, Syrian, Iranian and Iraqi groups. They searched for genetic similarities among these populations, and compared them with the DNA of 418 non-Jews.

The study compared 2 million distinct DNA markers known as SNPs spread across the entire genome. That’s four times the number of markers used in previous studies. “We are the first to analyse genome-wide differences,” says Atzmon.

Atzmon’s team found that the SNP markers in genetic segments of 3 million DNA letters or longer were 10 times more likely to be identical among Jews than non-Jews.

Atzmon says that overall, the genetic similarity among Jews is equivalent to what would be expected among fifth cousins from a random population.

Results of the analysis also tally with biblical accounts of the fate of the Jews. Using their DNA analysis, the authors traced the ancestors of all Jews to Persia and Babylon, areas that now form part of Iran and Iraq.

Exiled from Babylon
The genetic tree shows that between 100 and 150 generations ago – the equivalent of 2500 years – the founder population split in two, with half the Jews being dispersed into Europe and North Africa, the other half remaining in the Middle East.

This corresponds with accounts of the expulsion of the Jews into exile in 587 BC by the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar.

The genetic analysis shows that amongst modern Jews, the populations that are most genetically similar are those originating from Iraq and Iran. The rest share much more of their DNA with non-Jewish Europeans and North Africans, which may be why many Jews whose recent ancestors lived in Europe or Syria have blond hair or blue eyes.

The team found genetic traces of a period of intense conversion to Judaism during the time of the Roman Empire, when up to 10 per cent of citizens were Jewish. Among modern non-Jewish Europeans, Italians, Sardinians and the French are most closely genetically similar to modern Jews, the team found.

Atzmon says that the analysis could bring medical benefits by helping to identify genetic markers for diseases common in Jewish communities breast cancer, prostate cancer and the inherited metabolic condition, Tay-Sachs disease, which kills in infanthood.

Journal reference: American Journal of Human Genetics, DOI: 10.1016/j.ajhg.2010.04/015

 Many European Jews worked as rag-pickers or rag and bone men.

In the early 1900s, Tiberias in northern Palestine — nothing but swamps, according to Shimon Peres

What It Is Like Being Invisible 

By Faysal Mikdadi, first posted JfJfP/also in London Progressive Journal
May 13, 2013

“Someone must have traduced Joseph K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning”.

So starts one of the iconic novels of the Twentieth Century. Kafka wonderfully captures the mood of his time in a nightmare narrative.

Israeli President and Nobel Peace Prize winner Shimon Peres is equally brilliant at creating fiction that captures the mood of the last sixty five years. In a recent interview, talking about Israel’s sixty fifth birthday, he had this to say:

“I remember how it all began. The whole state of Israel is a millimeter of the whole Middle East. A statistical error, barren and disappointing land, swamps in the north, desert in the south, two lakes, one dead and an overrated river. No natural resource apart from malaria. There was nothing here. And we now have the best agriculture in the world? This is a miracle: a land built by people” (Maariv, 14 April 2013).

I, celebrating my sixty fifth birthday too, was very surprised to find out that, along with some twelve million Palestinians, I never existed.

I am delighted to hear that Palestine was “a land without a people given to a people without a land”.

I am delighted because all that went wrong in my life can now be erased magically because every single Palestinian person who I have ever known was, presumably, a figment of my imagination. What I did not know was that I, too, being Palestinian, never existed.

It is wonderful to be invisible. When my wife married me, she married an image. When my children were born, they bonded with a character out of fiction. My ghastly and nightmarish education in Beirut is suddenly pleasant for I never was there to be so miserable.

That time in my teenage years when I ranted and raved at my poor father for never seeing my point of view, I must have been imagining it since he never existed.

In 1967, when I cried over the death of Palestinian friends, I shed meaningless tears because these friends, according to your Mr. President, never existed – unless they were part of the only life in Palestine: Malaria protozoan parasites.

There was nothing here. And we now have the best agriculture in the world

So many – many faces that scroll before me as I look back at sixty five years were a great invention of my non existent Palestinian creative mind. My first Palestinian girlfriend was a beautiful phantom capable of great love.

View from Jaffa’s orange groves, 1898-1914; amazing what grew in the barren desert. Matson Collection.

All those children’s stories I heard as a child must have taken place in Chicago or Argentina since Nablus, Tulkarem, Jerusalem, Haifa, Yafa, Bethlehem, Nazareth, Netanyeh and many other places were pure fictions inhabited by no people, apart, of course, from a few Malaria carriers passing through – not Palestinian but protozoan – sounds vaguely the same.

I remember reading Palestinian poetry – or am I imagining these mellifluous lines that never existed?

Of course, my questions are non sensical and a waste of time, since, having come from an empty country, I am clearly not even here writing this piece.

Bethlehem in the 1930s – or was it just a desert mirage

It took a Jew of German culture living in a Czech city to write the nightmare novel of the last Century.

It took a Jew of Polish birth – born in Wolozyn in Poland (now Valozhyn in Belarus) living in Palestine to tell us that he remembers arriving in an empty land and turning it into paradise through sheer hard work! Wonderful story! Even Shimon Peres did not really exist when he was born because the Polish baby was Shimon Perski.

No wonder Jewish Settlements can continue to be built on Palestinian lands. What’s the harm? There is no one there apart from a few stones, some wild plants and manufactured memories.

And, Mr. President, it takes a non existent Palestinian writer educated in a city that your army almost obliterated and now living in a British town to show up your fabricated excuses for taking Palestinian lands from non existent Palestinians.

And your Government tells us, Mr. President, that you want to make peace with us Palestinians. How can you? We don’t exist… You even said that you would be willing to swap land for peace. Which bit? The swamp? The dead lake? The Malaria infested area? The desert?

Let us have an invisible conversation about peace. I am willing to live with you. Together we can turn that Palestinian Malaria ridden swamp into the Biblical paradise that it never was.

Happy birthday Mr. President.

He might like to spend it at this splendid 17th century hammam in Nablus. Photo by Alamy.

Map of East Jerusalem; the new Netanyahu road will connect Pisgat Ze’ev to Neve Ya’akov in the Jewish settlement (blue) to the highway further north.

Paving the way to an indivisible Jerusalem

A new highway connecting Jewish neighborhoods in northern Jerusalem is the latest addition to a network of roads making a future division of the city increasingly unlikely.

By Nir Hasson, Ha’aretz
May 10, 2013

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last Sunday joined Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat to dedicate Route 20, a highway that connects Jewish neighborhoods in northern Jerusalem and happens to have an interchange named after the prime minister’s father, historian Benzion Netanyahu.

“We are working unceasingly, systematically, to link Jerusalem to itself,” the prime minister declared.

The road may turn out to be the most important legacy of both generations of Netanyahus in that, as part of the road network encompassing Jerusalem, it could be the nail in the coffin for plans to re-divide the capital and attach its Arab areas to a future Palestinian state.

According to retired Israel Defense Forces Col. Shaul Arieli of the Council for Peace and Security, the construction of the highway constitutes a break with a longstanding policy that left the door open to the re-division of Jerusalem.

“Up to now, the development of Israeli settlement in East Jerusalem was based on maintaining and separating Jewish and Palestinian contiguity,” said Arieli, who was a drafter of the Geneva Initiative, an unofficial plan for peace between Israel and the Palestinians. “In Jerusalem, there are two separate cities each of which has had territorial contiguity. That was the mosaic concept of [late Jerusalem Mayor] Teddy Kollek – that the Jewish and Palestinian neighborhoods would be next to each other but not inside each other. This principle was breached by the Israeli transportation network, which will make separation very difficult.”

Route 20 was designed to alleviate severe traffic congestion around Jerusalem’s French Hill neighborhood, but it is also the latest project to make re-division of the city less practicable. The short stretch of highway crosses Jerusalem’s Arab Beit Hanina neighborhood to connect the northern Jewish neighborhoods of Pisgat Ze’ev and Neveh Yaakov. Residents of Jewish settlements in the northern West Bank will also benefit from the access the highway provides from the northern Jerusalem neighborhoods to the center of the capital via the Begin Highway.

Actually, the most prominent highway project that would complicate the city’s re-division is the route through the southern Arab neighborhood of Beit Safafa. The road is designed to serve residents of the Jewish Gilo neighborhood and the Gush Etzion bloc of settlements south of the city. Another road is slated to bisect the Arab Beit Hanina neighborhood to connect the Jewish Ramat Shlomo neighborhood with Route 20. Prior to these recent highway plans, few if any major roads connecting Jerusalem’s Jewish neighborhoods went through neighborhoods with Arab populations.

The first real break with the policy came in the 1990s, when small numbers of Jews began to move into entirely Arab neighborhoods, including Silwan, Ras-al-Amud and Jabel Mukaber, though their numbers have remained relatively small.

According to Arieli, it is hard to overstate the importance of the new roads in undermining the prospect of the re-division of the city and the creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel. All of the proposed peace plans, he said, including the Geneva Initiative and proposals that came out of the United States-brokered summits at Annapolis and Camp David, have provided for the division of Jerusalem and the transfer of control of portions of the city to a Palestinian state.

“Is there anyone who really believes there is a chance for a permanent agreement [with the Palestinians] without a Palestinian capital in East Jerusalem?” Arieli asked.

Arieli’s views are echoed by Danny Seidemann, an expert on Jerusalem’s demography and residential patterns. “I think the purpose of these highways is to clearly integrate the [Jewish] settlement blocs into the national highway network of Israel and thereby place East Jerusalem and the settlement blocs within Israel’s de facto borders,” he said.

Referring to the West Bank settlement of Ma’aleh Adumim, east of Jerusalem, Seidemann said, “The significance of Route 20 is that someone departing from the center of Tel Aviv would get to Ma’aleh Adumim more quickly than he would to my [Jerusalem] neighborhood of Arnona.”

Sari Kronish of the Israeli human rights group Bimkom said that although it happens that Route 20 will serve residents of Beit Safafa, it clearly was not designed with them in mind.

“If they were planning for the benefit of the Palestinian residents, then these highways have no internal logic. The highway doesn’t begin within a Palestinian commercial center and end in a Palestinian neighborhood,” she said.

A resident of East Jerusalem’s Beit Safafa overlooking the highway construction works. Photo by Emil Salman for Ha’aretz

Netanyahu opens new east Jerusalem road

Peace Now says infrastructure deepens Israel’s hold on area that should be part of Palestinian state.

By Tovah Lazaroff, JPost
May 06, 2013

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu ceremoniously opened a new road in east Jerusalem on Sunday that eased traffic congestion but angered the Palestinians who oppose all Israeli activity over the pre-1967 lines.

The completion of the NIS 180 million project for 400 meters of Highway 20 asphalt allows residents of the Jewish east Jerusalem neighborhoods of Pisgat Ze’ev and Neveh Ya’acov to link up with Route 443 without traveling through French Hill and clogging up its roads.

Israeli Arabs living in the east Jerusalem neighborhood of Beit Hanina will similarly be able to scoot more easily onto Route 443.

The road’s interchange was named for Netanyahu’s father, Benzion, who passed away on April 30 last year at age 102.

Early in the morning, Netanyahu stood there as he inaugurated the road along with Transportation Minister Israel Katz and Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat.

“We are working continuously and systematically to link Jerusalem with itself and to the other parts of the country, because Zion is important to us and it was important to my father,” said Netanyahu.

“He wasn’t named ‘Benzion’ for nothing. It says everything – Benzion, literally ‘Son of Zion,’” Netanyahu said.

Fatah spokesman Husam Zomlot attacked the opening of the road and said it showed that Israel was not serious about a two-state solution.

“It is just another proof that Mr. Netanyahu has only one plan for one state – and that is the state for the settlers,” Zomlot said.

“It is another proof that his entire agenda is that of further colonization and providing all the services possible for the settlers,” Zomlot said.

“The position of my movement, the leading party of the PLO, is that there shall be no peace and no political settlement without east Jerusalem as the capital of the Palestinian state,” Zomlot said.

But Netanyahu has always insisted that a united Jerusalem will remain under Israeli sovereignty in any twostate solution.

Speaking on Sunday morning at the road, he said that his father had taught him “that our state is a deposit for the generations of Jews who dreamt and prayed and fought and sacrificed so that we might return to our land and renew in it our independence.

“He taught me about the enormous responsibility that we have to ensure the security of the State of Israel and build up its future. This heritage needs to unite us all every day, and so it does,” Netanyahu said.

Katz said the new road was part of an ongoing effort to improve access to the capital, which included an upgrade to Route 1 and plans for a highspeed rail line to Jerusalem.

“The opening of Highway 20 and the Benzion interchange will ease traffic congestion in northern Jerusalem and allow hundreds of thousands of visitors and tourists additional access that is easy and quick,” Barkat said.

But Hagit Ofran of Peace Now said that a small portion of Highway 20 goes through the West Bank, as it leaves Jerusalem’s municipal border and links to Route 443, which also cuts through the West Bank before linking with the major artery to Tel Aviv.

But, she said, the main issue was that such infrastructure deepens Israel’s hold on an area that should be part of a Palestinian state and makes it more difficult to come to a two-state solution.

The opening of the road comes amidst a renewed push by the United States to resume direct negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians, negotiations which have been largely frozen since December 2008.

UN calls to nix settler highway in East Jerusalem

By Alternative Center
May 14, 2013

United Nations Special Rapporteur Richard Falk is calling for an immediate halt to construction of a settlement highway through the East Jerusalem neighbourhood of Beit Safafa, urging the Israeli government to stop the highway which, if completed, would divide Beit Safafa into two and ruin the livelihoods of the 9,300 Palestinian residents.

Construction of the six-lane highway through East Jerusalem’s Beit Safafa continues despite pending legal cases (Photo: Lea Frehse, AIC)

“The projected six-lane highway extending 1.5km will do irreparable damage to the community, cutting off local roads and blocking access to kindergartens, schools, health clinics, offices, and places of worship,” warned Professor Falk, the independent expert designated by the UN Human Rights Council to monitor and report on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967.

The Special Rapporteur noted that the highway purpose is to annex the Gush Etzion settlement bloc and pave the way for further expansion of Israel’s illegal settlements around East Jerusalem. “It will consolidate the highway network from Gush Etzion settlement in the southern West Bank through West and East Jerusalem, leading to the Ma’ale Adumim settlement bloc and the E1 area,” he said.

“The residents of Beit Safafa, who were not consulted at any stage of the planning, will be placed in an absurd situation where places within their own community – previously accessible within ten minutes’ walk – would require travel by car on bypass roads and a bridge,” he said.

Beit Safafa residents have petitioned Israel’s judicial system against the highway, and have launched demonstrations and protests near the construction site and outside the Jerusalem municipality and Israeli Knesset.

The Special Rapportuer noted that the road project, which began in September 2012, was challenged in the Jerusalem District Court last December, but the residents’ petition to stop construction was rejected. An appeal filed with the Israeli High Court against the District Court’s decision was also rejected in March 2013. While courts have suspended a land confiscation order pending a final ruling by Israel’s High Court, scheduled for 26 June 2013, the court rejected an appeal by Beit Safafa residents to halt highway construction until the High Court hearing.

Jerusalem Attractions,  Neighborhoods in Jerusalem

From Go Jerusalem.com Tourism

 Apartheid South Africa – unitary state with master/slave relation?

The Donkey of the Messiah

By Uri Avnery, Gush Shalom
May 11, 2013

“THE TWO-STATE solution is dead!” This mantra has been repeated so often lately, by so many authoritative commentators, that it must be true. Well, it ain‘t.

BY NOW this has become an intellectual fad. To advocate the two-state solution means that you are ancient, old-fashioned, stale, stodgy, a fossil from a bygone era. Hoisting the flag of the “one-state solution” means that you are young, forward-looking, “cool”.

Actually, this only shows how ideas move in circles. When we declared in early 1949, just after the end of the first Israeli-Arab war, that the only answer to the new situation was the establishment of a Palestinian state side by side with Israel, the “one-state solution” was already old.

The idea of a “bi-national state” was in vogue in the 1930s. Its main advocates were well-meaning intellectuals, many of them luminaries of the new Hebrew University, like Judah Leon Magnes and Martin Buber. They were reinforced by the Hashomer Hatza’ir kibbutz movement, which later became the Mapam party.

It never gained any traction. The Arabs believed that it was a Jewish trick. Bi-nationalism was built on the principle of parity between the two populations in Palestine – 50% Jews, 50% Arabs. Since the Jews at that time were much less than half the population, Arab suspicions were reasonable.

On the Jewish side, the idea looked ridiculous. The very essence of Zionism was to have a state where Jews would be masters of their fate, preferably in all of Palestine.

At the time, no one called it the “one-state solution” because there was already one state – the State of Palestine, ruled by the British. The “solution” was called “the bi-national state” and died, unmourned, in the war of 1948.

WHAT HAS caused the miraculous resurrection of this idea?

Not the birth of a new love between the two peoples. Such a phenomenon would have been wonderful, even miraculous. If Israelis and Palestinians had discovered their common values, the common roots of their history and languages, their common love for this country – why, wouldn’t that have been absolutely splendid?

But, alas, the renewed “one-state solution” was not born of another immaculate conception. Its father is the occupation, its mother despair.

The occupation has already created a de facto One State – an evil state of oppression and brutality, in which half the population (or slightly less than half) deprives the other half of almost all rights – human rights, economic rights and political rights. The Jewish settlements proliferate, and every day brings new stories of woe.

Good people on both sides have lost hope. But hopelessness does not stir to action. It fosters resignation.

LET’S GO back to the starting point. “The two-state solution is dead”. How come? Who says? In accordance with what scientific criteria has death been certified?
Generally, the spread of the settlements is cited as the sign of death. In the 1980s the respected Israeli historian Meron Benvenisti pronounced that the situation had now become “irreversible”. At the time, there were hardly 100 thousand settlers in the occupied territories (apart from East Jerusalem, which by common consent is a separate issue). Now they claim to be 300 thousand, but who is counting? How many settlers mean irreversibility? 100, 300, 500, 800 thousand?

History is a hothouse of reversibility. Empires grow and collapse. Cultures flourish and wither. So do social and economic patterns. Only death is irreversible.
I can think of a dozen different ways to solve the settlement problem, from forcible removal to exchange of territories to Palestinian citizenship. Who believed that the settlements in North Sinai would be removed so easily? That the evacuation of the Gaza Strip settlements would become a national farce?

In the end, there will probably be a mixture of several ways, according to circumstances.

All the Herculean problems of the conflict can be resolved – if there is a will. It’s the will that is the real problem.

THE ONE-STATERS like to base themselves on the South African experience. For them, Israel is an apartheid state, like the former South Africa, and therefore the solution must be South African-like.

The situation in the occupied territories, and to some extent in Israel proper, does indeed strongly resemble the apartheid regime. The apartheid example may be justly cited in political debate. But in reality, there is very little deeper resemblance – if any – between the two countries.

David Ben-Gurion once gave the South African leaders a piece of advice: partition. Concentrate the white population in the south, in the Cape region, and cede the other parts of the country to the blacks. Both sides in South Africa rejected this idea furiously, because both sides believed in a single, united country.

They largely spoke the same languages, adhered to the same religion, were integrated in the same economy. The fight was about the master-slave relationship, with a small minority lording it over a massive majority.

Nothing of this is true in our country. Here we have two different nations, two populations of nearly equal size, two languages, two (or rather, three) religions, two cultures, two totally different economies.

A false proposition leads to false conclusions. One of them is that Israel, like Apartheid South Africa, can be brought to its knees by an international boycott. About South Africa, this is a patronizing imperialist illusion. The boycott, moral and important as it was, did not do the job. It was the Africans themselves, aided by some local white idealists, who did it by their courageous strikes and uprisings.

I am an optimist, and I do hope that eventually Jewish Israelis and Palestinian Arabs will become sister nations, living side by side in harmony. But to come to that point, there must be a period of living peacefully in two adjoining states, hopefully with open borders.

THE PEOPLE who speak now of the “one-state solution” are idealists. But they do a lot of harm. And not only because they remove themselves and others from the struggle for the only solution that is realistic.

If we are going to live together in one state, it makes no sense to fight against the settlements. If Haifa and Ramallah will be in the same state, what is the difference between a settlement near Haifa and one near Ramallah? But the fight against the settlements is absolutely essential, it is the main battlefield in the struggle for peace.

Indeed, the one-state solution is the common aim of the extreme Zionist right and the extreme anti-Zionist left. And since the right is incomparably stronger, it is the left that is aiding the right, and not the other way round.

In theory, that is as it should be. Because the one-staters believe that the rightists are only preparing the ground for their future paradise. The right is uniting the country and putting an end to the possibility of creating an independent State of Palestine. They will subject the Palestinians to all the horrors of apartheid and much more, since the South African racists did not aim at displacing and replacing the blacks. But in due course – perhaps in a mere few decades, or half a century – the world will compel Greater Israel to grant the Palestinians full rights, and Israel will become Palestine.

According to this ultra-leftist theory, the right, which is now creating the racist one state, is in reality the Donkey of the Messiah, the legendary animal on which the Messiah will ride to triumph.

It’s a beautiful theory, but what is the assurance that this will actually happen? And before the final stage arrives, what will happen to the Palestinian people? Who will compel the rulers of Greater Israel to accept the diktat of world public opinion?

If Israel now refuses to bow to world opinion and enable the Palestinians to have their own state in 28% of historical Palestine, why would they bow to world opinion in the future and dismantle Israel altogether?

Speaking about a process that will surely last 50 years and more, who knows what will happen? What changes will take place in the world in the meantime? What wars and other catastrophes will take the world’s mind off the “Palestinian issue”?

Would one really gamble the fate of one’s nation on a far-fetched theory like this?

ASSUMING FOR a moment that the one-state solution would really come about, how would it function?

Will Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs serve in the same army, pay the same taxes, obey the same laws, work together in the same political parties? Will there be social intercourse between them? Or will the state sink into an interminable civil war?

Other peoples have found it impossible to live together in one state. Take the Soviet Union. Yugoslavia. Serbia. Czechoslovakia. Cyprus. Sudan. The Scots want to secede from the United Kingdom. So do the Basques and the Catalans from Spain. The French in Canada and the Flemish in Belgium are uneasy. As far as I know, nowhere in the entire world have two different peoples agreed to form a joint state for decades.

NO, THE two-state solution is not dead. It cannot die, because it is the only solution there is.

Despair may be convenient and tempting. But despair is no solution at all.