This week’s postings at JfJfP.com

This week, 14-20th September 2015

The refugee crisis has been making headlines everywhere. Journalist Ramzy Baroud from Gaza looks especially at the refugees from Syria, particularly those from the Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp reduced now from 200,000 to fewer than 20,000. (They came of course, originally, from homes in Northern Israel.) But, while countries like Lebanon had accepted 1.72 million refugees (one in every five people in Lebanon is a Syrian refugee), Turkey 1.93 million, Jordan 629,000, Iraq 249,000, and Egypt 132,000, Israel made no offer to accept a single refugee. In People in Britain come out for refugees a selection of photos from Scotland and England show people coming out to declare their solidarity with, and welcome for, refugees. These photos intersperse an op-ed from Ynet where Sever Plocker wonders how the IDF and Israelis would respond if Syrian refugees flowed over the Israeli border.

In Israel, as ever, the state functions to suppress dissent and to protect its own. Asa Winstanley reports on a smear unit set up to work on BDS activists where a special military intelligence unit, Aman, spies on “overseas organizations … [including] dozens affiliated with the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement.” There is also intelligence on right-wing settler terrorists. So, according to defence minister Moshe Ya’alon, Shabak, those who firebombed the Dawabsheh family are known to the authorities. But “to maintain their sources” this settlers’ death squad is left untouched!

Netanyahu has responded to almost continuous mass protests by Palestinians in Jerusalem about the presence of settlers at Al Aqsa mosque by proposing increased sentences for stone-throwers and to allow police to use fire against the protesters. As Israeli police fail to stop settlers entering Haram Al-Sharif and themselves enter the mosque in pursuit of Palestinian youth, Arab leaders urge the UN to step in to prevent further escalation of violence.

The story of how the women of the Tamimi family managed to rescue the young Tamimi boy from the clutches of an Israeli soldier (see last week’s story IDF defeated by Tamimis, cameras, social media) has now been spun by an Israeli blogger who claims that the Tamimis have an ‘open passion for Jewish blood’. The young boy’s role, in this version, was to lure the soldier, by throwing stones at him, to pin him down thus exposing him, despite his anti-bite face-mask, to the vampires hunting their next meal…

American and Israeli Jews who silently fund terrorists brings together a series of articles on how tax-exempt US funds are used not just to aid settlement building but also to support groups like Honenu, portrayed as as a welfare / civil rights group, but in reality one of many pro-settler, anti-Arab groups protecting and defending Israel’s right-wing nationalist terrorists.

In Gaza the situation continues to fester. To keep towns clear of garbage, there has to be a functioning municipal authority, paid workers, a fleet of garbage trucks and fuel. Gaza has scant supplies of all these, so the garbage piles up and the habitat of Gazans is further eroded.

While the occupation deepens the IMF warns that Israel spends too much on defence, contributing significantly to its deficit. In addition, Israel is importing more and exporting less, despite rising sales to China and India. And still provision of housing, education and welfare is costly and underfunded.

Even this underfunding isn’t shared equally of course. There have been mass protests by Israeli Christians over schools. There are some 47 Christian schools in Israel with high educational standards,  valued by many Muslim families as well, who send their children to them. But not valued by the government which underfunds them systematically and they have been ‘on strike’ since the start of the school year with Muslim students joining Christians in protest at discriminatory education.

Fnally, in Bibi the blunderbuss veteran reporter Akiva Eldar suggests that Netanyahu has lost badly in his battle with the US over Iran; and Uri Avnery argues, in Zionism, then and now, that from the 1950s Zionism “became a cynical slogan, to be used by anyone to push his or her agenda”