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While I do not believe that the roots of the Israel-Palestine conflict are to be found in religious issues, it seems clear now that religious extremists have entered the fray from all sides and have made the path to a just peace even more difficult. Whether it be Christian Nationalists in the U.S., Christian Zionists, Right wing Zionists, Radical Islamists or Ultra Orthodox religious Zionists, all these groups have done nothing for the cause of justice, peace, self determination, democracy and reconciliation. This is because all of these groups place a very low priority on these values and hence find it easy to turn religious values that esteem the ideas of compassion and mercy into dogmas where hatred becomes virtuous. The following article was posted on the Mondoweiss website on 8th October 2011.
Muslim and Christian cemeteries desecrated in Jaffa on eve of Yom Kippur
Oct 08, 2011 07:17 pm | annie
(Photo: Facebook)
From the Facebook photo album “Extremist attack Muslim and Christian cemeteries in Jaffa”:
Images of assault by the Zionist extremists on the Islamic cemetery named “Al-kazachana”, and they also made a assault on the Christian Orthodox cemetery adjacent to it.
They left racist statements such as “Death to Arabs” and “Price Tag” on the graves and walls in addition to Smashing and vandalizing a number of gravestones.
While Haaretz opens its report on the desecration of Muslim and Christian graves in Jaffa with Prez Peres’s denouncement Yossi Gurvitz over @+972 hits all the right notes: “So what can be done? We can begin by closing down the hornet’s nest, the yeshiva in Yitzhar, and ban all its teachers and students from the West Bank.”
The fact that they boil over the Green Line is not accidental. These people, after all, are the disciples of Baruch Goldstein; if they had broader horizons, they could name Abu Musab Al Zarqawi as another mentor. Their whole purpose is ending this calmness. They want blood, fire and columns of smoke. When these will appear, they will lean back and say “we told you so.” Another point worth noting is the desecration of the Christian cemetery: Contrary to the myths, it proves that the hatred of mankind of Orthodox Judaism has little if anything to do with the current conflict with the Palestinians. It is the last in a long, under-reported attacks on Christian establishments in Israel.
One further wonders whether this escalation – how many more steps to the gates of hell? – is not a response, among others, to the arrest of a suspect in the burning of the mosque in Tuba Zangaria. Terror organizations often react in this way to the arrest of their members, and the whole logic of the “price tag” pogroms is to punish Palestinians for the actions of the security forces.
The guilt resides, as Tibi noted correctly, with the government of Israel. PM Netanyahu may denounce these pogroms, but he is speaking out of both sides of his mouth: He had no problem whatsoever sitting on the same platform with Dov Lior, possibly the worst of the inciting rabbis. Shmuel Elihau, the municipal rabbi of Safed, keeps drawing his government salary despite publishing illegal calls for denying apartments to Israeli Palestinians. This is the same Eliahu who openly and clearly refused to denounce the “price tag” pogroms. He is still in office. Chief Rabbi Shlomo Amar – the one suspected of kidnapping and assault, not the one suspected of receiving bribes and inappropriately touching men – said this week that the burning of the mosque in Tuba Zangria “may have been a blood libel.” (Hebrew) It’s easy to imagine the uproar had, say, a Polish bishop said he opposed the burning of synagogues, but we should first ascertain this isn’t a blood libel against good Christians. Amar keeps his job as if nothing happened; we didn’t even had a proper public outcry. In short, the government of Israel looks, when trying to fight Jewish terrorism, like the Saudi government of a decade ago, facing the Salafist terrorists: It is a main source of funds to the terrorists, and they can only exist because the government’s armed forces support them.
The West Bank pogromchiks has made a mockery of the IDF’s legal obligation to protect the indigent population from them. Now they are trying to make it plain to Israeli Palestinians that they, too, will not be protected by the Zionist regime – and the latter know it’s not that the regime can’t, it’s that it won’t.
Read the entire article. Gurvitz is Tweeting (Hebrew) from a protest going on in Jaffa right now. “More than a hundred people, in my estimation.”
The supporters of Israel see nothing provocative in the U.S. withholding $200 million in aid to Palestine while giving some $7 billion to Israel (officially a developed nation according to the United Nations) unconditionally. The U.S. once again shows that they consider economic and strategic interests above human rights every time. Adam Horowitz published the following article on the Mondoweiss website on October 1st 2011.
US withholds $200 million from PA for punishment over statehood bid
Oct 01, 2011 09:21 am | Adam Horowitz
From Haaretz:
The United States Congress has blocked nearly $200m in aid to the Palestinians, the U.K’s Independent newspaper reported on Saturday.
The aid, which was destined for projects related to food aid, health care, and state building efforts, was to have been transferred to the Palestinian Authority during the U.S. fiscal year that ends today, according to the report.
However, following what the Independent described as an “unpublicized block” imposed on funding to the Palestinians since August this year, in response to the Palestinian bid for statehood at the UN, the remainder of the aid allocated to the Palestinian Authority for the current financial year will not be transferred.
The Independent reported that the block by three Congressional committees has been in force since August 18, when it was formally notified that USAID, the U.S. government aid agency, wanted to transfer the remaining $192m funding for the current fiscal year.
Obama’s administration is unable to commit further funding to the Palestinian Authority unless it persuades Congress to lift the freeze, according to the report.
The Independent report adds:
Former President Bill Clinton, among others, this month warned legislators to leave the issue of aid to the administration, adding: “Everybody knows the US Congress is the most pro-Israel parliamentary body in the world. They don’t have to demonstrate that.”
Even the Israeli Media shows more balance.
The second flotilla is on its way to Gaza to provide humanitarian aid and help start a real process to end the illegal siege of Gaza, but you would be excused for not knowing it if you only read the mainstream Australian media. Four brave Australian human rights workers, SYLVIA HALE – former Greens MP, VIVIENNE PORZSOLT from Jews Against the Occupation, MICHAEL COLEMAN – social worker and youth activist and NICK WALLWORK – graduate student are on the Gaza Flotilla. What is most shocking to me is that an article on the 4 Australians printed in Haaeretz is far more balanced and reasonable than the bigoted tirade that appeared in The Australian on June 24th by Arsen Ostrovsky. Apart from the usual Zionist nonsense that the flotilla is designed to legitimize Hamas and that there is no crisis in Gaza and that the blockade is totally legal, Ostrovsky has nothing interesting to say. See below how the Israeli media dealt with the issue.
Haaretz
29 June 2011
by Amira Hass
GREECE – This is not the first time that Sylvia Hale, 69, has been asked why she is so active for the Palestinian cause. What about the discrimination against the Aborigines in her own country, Australia, for example? Hale, a former Green Party parliamentarian who is still active in the party, immediately responded: “Undoubtedly, Australia has a very racist history. Aborigines were given the right to vote only in 1967. But whoever asks us ‘what about the Aborigines,’ are not the ones who are interested in their rights, and not the ones fighting for those rights. They are using this as a diversionary tactic for evading the debate over Israel’s policy, or to delegitimize criticism of Israel.”
And yes, for anyone who is interested: She was and remains involved in other struggles. She has rallied against the initiative to limit the rights of the Aborigines, fought the discriminatory attitude toward refugees in Australia and opposed the policy of stopping boat refugees. Prior to entering parliament, she hid two refugees in her home so that they
would not be arrested.
This week Hale and three of her compatriots will climb on board the Tahrir, the Canadian ship that is participating in the flotilla to the Gaza Strip. She and her Australian colleagues traveled the greatest distance of all the participants. Their flight lasted 48 hours, including the stops in various airports.
Hale and her friend, Vivienne Porzsolt, also 69, give the impression of being typical Western tourists, middle class, middle aged, staying at the hotel where the passengers of the Tahrir have gathered.
In Greece there is a general strike, demonstrations and tear gas in Athens, but the tourists are oblivious: They walk around and catch the rays. Perhaps the tourists wonder who these people are, as they go from one meeting to another, from the dining room to the lobby, and then to the corner where the Internet is available. These tourists have not caught any
sunshine during the past five days.
Porzsolt has also been involved in social struggles in New Zealand, where she was born, and in Australia, where she now lives. In her CV of activism she includes protesting against the war in Vietnam, and apartheid in South Africa, and involvement in the feminist movement.
Activism against Israel’s occupation is a given for Porzsolt, as it is for Hale. From this point of view they are characteristic of most of the voyagers on the Tahrir, and especially those aged 40 and up. Social and political activists for many years, for whom this sort of activity is as natural as going to work or establishing a family. For the two of them, activism for Palestinian rights is part of a general outlook they hold as Western citizens, with the privileges that this gives them.
But Porzsolt’s involvement also stems directly from being Jewish, she says. “My activism against the Israeli occupation is linked to my Jewish-secular background, the values of equality and morality in the home of my parents [who were] natives of Prague who managed to escape from it immediately following the Nazi occupation in March, 1939. During the 1990s the Jewish element in my life became stronger and I became more interested in the Israeli-Palestinian issue. Because Israel considers itself the country that represents all the Jews of the world, my participation in this voyage is my way of declaring that Israel is not acting on my behalf.”
“There are situations a person cannot avoid being aware of and cannot pretend they do not exist. And this is the case of the situation in Gaza,” Hale says.
She visited the Gaza Strip with a delegation of Australian unions. The pictures of the children at the hospital at Khan Yunis, full of bombings and tanks, continue to haunt her and remind her of her granddaughter.
“We went to see the tunnels and the airport. It had already been completely destroyed. I saw people with carts with donkeys, going through the rubble to find construction materials. The next day I read that the army had fired into that area. What is especially shocking in this situation is that lack of proportionality in the means Israel is utilizing, and the collective
punishment that it regularly applies.”
Porzsolt visited the Gaza Strip more than a decade ago. She visited Israel and the West Bank several times, and participated in demonstrations at Sheikh Jarrah (in East Jerusalem) and Bili’in (in the West Bank ). “In my visit to Israel I discovered that the Israeli and Palestinian movements against the occupation are weak and need outside support,’ she said.
What troubled her most is the extreme situation in Gaza, “an enormous prison under the sky. The strong sense that there is something wrong in every sense of the word.”
During the past year they worked to raise $50,000 for the purchase of Tahrir and to fund the flotilla. The fund raising in Australia was a good way to raise awareness of the blockade on Gaza, they say.
But they are not deluding themselves about the speed with which changes occur. The struggle against “White Australia,” the policy which limited the immigration of non-Whites to the continent, lasted some 70 years before being cancelled in 1973.
The Australian, hang your head in shame!
Craig Nielsen
ACTION FOR PALESTINE
Israel-Palestine 