Part 1 Finkelstein on Gaza: What to call it

Speech by Prof. Norman Finkelstein on Gaza

Part 2 Finkelstein on Gaza: Why?

Part 3 Finkelstein on Gaza: Deterrence Capacity

Part 4 Finkelstein on Gaza: We’re Crazy

Part 5 Finkelstein on Gaza: White Phosphorus

Part 6 Finkelstein on Gaza: Education and War Crimes (1 of 2)

Part 7 Finkelstein on Gaza: Education and War Crimes (2 of 2)

Part 8 Finkelstein on Gaza: Defeating the Palestinian Peace Offensive (1 of 2)

Part 9 Finkelstein on Gaza: Defeating the Palestinian Peace Offensive (2 of 2)

Palestinians hold banners reading: "No peace without the right of return"

Thousands of Palestinians gather to mark the ‘catastrophe’

OCCUPIED JERUSALEM (AlArabiya.net, Agencies )

The ultranationalist Yisrael Beitenu party said it would propose legislation next week for a ban on the practice and a jail term of up to three years for violators.

By Khalid Amayreh

I have been under fire of late from two diametrically opposite quarters. First, the fanatical, self-worshiping Zionists who think that non-Jewish suffering should never ever be compared with Jewish suffering.

Needless to say, this psychotic attitude stems from deep-seated convictions that a Jew is a special creature whose life is worth more than the rest of humanity. Haven’t we noticed, for example, how Israel has made “Gilad Shalit”, the Israeli soldier imprisoned by Hamas, a household name all over the world, while next to nothing is mentioned about the estimated 10,000 Palestinian political and resistance prisoners languishing in Israeli dungeons and concentration camps?

And, Second, some pro-Palestinian activists who believe that I should avoid invoking the holocaust in my writings lest this help legitimize the Zionist narrative and inadvertently justify Israeli crimes against the Palestinian people.

To our pro-Palestinian activists, I, with all due respect, would like to say the following: I sincerely believe that we would be walking in the path of immorality if we denied or belittled other people’s suffering. Indeed, it is imperative that we retain our humanity and moral fabric in the course of this legitimate struggle against the evil state. We must never imitate or emulate their ways and tactics. This would be self-defeating, self-destructive and immensely demoralizing.

Moreover, we must refrain from saying or doing things that would make others portray us as inherent enemies of Jews, because we are not.

We also need to be constantly vigilant and cautious about what we say and how we say it, lest we inadvertently besmirch the legitimacy of our just cause.

Israel is so manifestly criminal and ugly that we don’t need to deny anyone’s suffering to prove this plain fact.

In short, we don’t have to shoot ourselves in the foot. It is wrong and it hurts us a lot.

Obviously, the Zionists’ “arguments” are motivated, as always, by ill-will and a malicious desire to silence critics of Israeli criminality whose phantasmagoric expressions we all witnessed recently in the Gaza Strip.

The subject of contention this time has been an article I published a few days ago, entitled “Shame on us,” in which I strongly criticized efforts by some dubious “peace activists” to bamboozle some innocent Palestinian children from some impoverished localities into playing music before “holocaust survivors.”

This is what happened last week when a dozen young musicians from the Jenin Refugee Camp, in the northern West Bank, were taken surreptitiously to Tel Aviv where they were made to play a serenade before some elderly Zionists , some of whom veterans from the many criminal wars Israel had waged on our people. And as I said in the article, the ethnic cleansing of Palestine was not carried out by UFOs but by the very people our children are now being asked to cheer up.

Understandably, the not-so-innocent event left many Palestinians infuriated by the cheap exploitation of these kids for Israeli hasbara purposes. As one who lost three uncles in one day to Zionist murderers in 1954, I felt deeply wounded and humiliated by that event.

I am actually not against reconciliation between Palestinians and Jews. I don’t and never will view Jews as our inherent enemies. Some Jews are actually among the most effective supporters of our national cause. Those we salute for their honesty and morality.

However, it is obvious that true reconciliation in this part of the world requires that the slate be made thoroughly clean. Usurped rights must be returned to rightful owners, and wrongs must be rectified. This I say to honest and conscientious Jews who are genuinely interested in justice and peace.

But to the Zionists I would like to say that the following: the latest point of contention is not about music or even peace. This is first and foremost about human dignity of which the children of the holocaust and their children and grand children and great grandchildren have been trying to rob us.

And whether you like it or not, for us, at least, you represent the real Wehrmacht, the real SS and real Gestapo. You are the Nazis of our time. This is what we see from our vantage point. This is what much of the world sees. This is what many honest and conscientious Jews see.

You stole our country, you murdered our people, you destroyed our homes, and you expelled and dispersed the bulk of our people to the four corners of the world. And after all of this, you have the audacity to dupe our children to sing and play music to you? This is simply beyond, far beyond, Chutzpah.

Some of you habitually babble the word “hatred” whenever a Palestinian asserts his people’s humanity and dignity.

Well, you are really sick to the bone if you think Palestinians must sacrifice their dignity in order to become a hate-free people according to the Zionist lexicon. We will not pay tribute to the killers of our children, we will not show respect to our grave-diggers.

Besides, who do you think you are anyway to lecture us on hatred? After all, you represent and embody hatred in its ugliest form. The extirpation of a people from its ancestral homeland from time immemorial is a satanic act par excellence. The destruction and obliteration of hundreds of Palestinian towns and villages to fulfill Jewish nationalism is diabolical act of the highest order.

Your recent blitzkrieg in Gaza during which your Nazi-like army ganged up on a helpless, unprotected civilian population, exterminating them with bombs and missiles and incinerating their children with White Phosphorus proved once again that you are no better than the hateful Nazis you curse day and night for what they did to you sixty years ago.

Well, try to get yourselves out of this cocoon of self-denial. The Palestinian people don’t hate music nor do they teach their kids to hate Jews or non-Jews, it is your evil and murderous actions that generate hatred against you not only among Palestinians and Muslims but among many other people around the world.

Just look at your ugly faces in the mirror.

Source: Palestine Information Centre

Thank you, George, for giving us back a measure of self-respect

‘Thank you, George, for giving us back a measure of self-respect.’

Comment: We also want to thank you George Galloway for what you have achieved by helping people of Gaza.  Your convoy with over 100 vehicles with much needed aid passed many obstacles to reach Gaza. Your accomplishment is a great landmark for the Palestinian people.  You have set an example for all people to follow. Administrador.

By Stuart Littlewood – London

The Viva Palestina convoy’s arrival in Gaza has worked wonders. It will be seen as a landmark achievement in the struggle for liberty.

Thank you, George, for making us British feel clean again.

Thank you, George, for giving us back a measure of self-respect.

For too many years our Israel-adoring politicians and government ministers have shamed us with their failure to stand up straight for justice in the Holy Land. Even those who claim to speak with God have endorsed Israeli oppression and supported the Zionists’ lust for land and racial supremacy.

They have ignored the human rights of the Palestinians that are enshrined in solemn declarations signed by all civilized nations. In particular they have refused to acknowledge the Palestinians’ right of self-determination and rudely reject their democratic choice of government. Like spiteful children they impose sanctions and inflict collective punishment. They even stir up trouble by backing Hamas’s defeated rivals in a bid to saddle the population with an illegitimate, unconstitutional ruling faction that can be counted on to comply with US-Israeli demands.

If people like George Galloway were in charge of Britain I like to think that we would not have been joined at the hip with one US administration after another, and we wouldn’t have been dragged into neocon wars on behalf of Israel.

We would have taken the precaution of firewalling ourselves against infection from America’s poxed financial institutions.

We would be trading happily with the Muslim world instead of conniving with the EU to grant undeserved advantages to Zionist business interests. We would not have bestowed a knighthood on the Israeli regime’s bloodthirsty president; and long ago all those connected with the Israel lobby would have been expelled from Westminster as agents of a foreign power.

The Royal Navy, instead of lurking in the Gulf, would now be patrolling the Gaza coast guaranteeing freedom of the seas to Gazan fishermen and merchant and passenger shipping wishing to do business in Palestine.

The British army, instead of being bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan, would be in Gaza constructing the seaport and reinstating the airport, so that people could visit their friends without running the humiliating gauntlet of Israel’s neurotic security apparatus and businessmen could develop the seaside enclave’s vital import/export trade.

Why should Britain take a lead? Because for 90 years the British political establishment, starting with that Zionist convert Lord Balfour and the prime minister at the time, David Lloyd-George (who worked for the Zionists), has consistently betrayed and double-crossed the Palestinians. It was Britain, first as the occupying power then as the mandated government, who paved the way for a Zionist takeover.

And it was Balfour who wrote: “In Palestine we do not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country.”

Reparation is long overdue.

So thank you, George Galloway, for showing Britain’s latest bunch of mealy-mouthed, hand-wringing leaders some backbone. Thank you for showing them the meaning of positive action. Thank you for showing them their duty.

Source

To the President of the State of Israel and the

Director of the Yad Vashem Memorial

 
By MICHAEL NEUMANN
and OSHA NEUMANN
Following the example of Jean-Moise Braitberg, we ask that our grandmother’s name be removed from the wall at Yad Vashem. Her name is Gertrud Neumann. Your records state that she was born in Kattowitz on June 6, 1875 and died in Theresienstadt.
M. Braitberg delivers his request with excellent reasons and eloquent personal testimony. His words are inspiring, but they give you – and those who stand with you – too much credit. I will instead be brief. Please take this as an expression of my disgust and contempt for your state and all it represents.
Our grandmother was a victim of that very ideal of ethnic sovereignty in whose cause Israel has shed so much blood for so long. I was among the many Jews who thought nothing of embracing that ideal, despite the sufferings it had inflicted on our own race. It took thousands of Palestinian lives before, finally, I realized how foolish we had been.
Our complicity was despicable. I do not believe that the Jewish people, in whose name you have committed so many crimes with such outrageous complacency, can ever rid itself of the shame you have brought upon us. Nazi propaganda, for all its calumnies, never disgraced and corrupted the Jews; you have succeeded in this. You haven’t the courage to take responsibility for your own sadistic acts: with unparalleled insolence, you set yourself up as spokesmen for an entire race, as if our very existence endorsed your conduct. And you blacken our names not only by your acts, but by the lies, the coy evasions, the smirking arrogance and the infantile self-righteousness with which you embroider our history.
In the end, you will give the Palestinians some scrap of a state. You will never pay for your crimes and you will continue to preen yourself, to bask in your illusions of moral ascendancy. But between now and the end, you will kill and kill and kill, gaining nothing by your spoilt-brat brutality. In life, our grandmother suffered enough. Stop making her a party to this horror in her death.
Michael Neumann

I join my brother, Michael Neumann, in asking that any reference to our grandmother be removed from Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial.
I have been to this memorial. Its buildings, paved courtyards and plazas spread themselves authoritatively over many landscaped acres. It frames the Holocaust as a prelude to the creation of the state of Israel. It embalms memorabilia of the death camps and preserves them as national treasures. That treasure does not belong to Israel. It is a treasure only if it serves as a reminder never to permit any nation to claim an exemption for its chosen people from the bounds of morality and decency.
Israel has twisted the Holocaust into an excuse for perpetrating more holocausts. It has spent the treasure of the world’s sympathy for the victims of the Holocaust on a fruitless effort to shield itself from all criticism as it massacres and tortures Palestinians and suffocates them under a brutal occupation. I do not wish to have the memory of my grandmother enlisted in this misbegotten project.
I grew up believing that Jews were that ethnic group whose historical mission was to transcend ethnicity in a united front against Fascism. To be Jewish was to be anti-Fascist. Israel long ago woke me from my dogmatic slumber about the immutable relationship of Jews to Fascists. It has engineered a merger between the image of Jewish torturers and war criminals and that of emaciated concentration camp victims. I find this merger obscene. I want no part of it. You have forfeited the right to be the custodian of my grandmother’s memory. I do not wish Yad Vashem to be her memorial.
Osha Neumann
The Braitberg letter, in French can be found at

http://www.lemonde.fr/opinions/article/2009/01/28/effacez-le-nom-de-mon-grand-pere-a-yad-vashem_1147635_3232.html

and the translaton here:

http://www.bilin-village.org/english/articles/different-look/Erase-my-grandfather-s-name-at-Yad-Vashem

Michael Neumann is a professor of philosophy at a Canadian university. He is the author of What’s Left: Radical Politics and the Radical Psyche and The Case Against Israel. He also contributed the essay, “What is Anti-Semitism”, to CounterPunch’s book, The Politics of Anti-Semitism. He can be reached at mneumann@live.com
Osha Neumann is a defense lawyer in Berkeley and author of Up Against the Wall MotherF**ker: a Memoir of the 60s with Notes for Next Time.

http://www.counterpunch.org/neumann02202009.html

–

To the President of the State of Israel and the

Director of the Yad Vashem Memorial

 
By MICHAEL NEUMANN
and OSHA NEUMANN
Following the example of Jean-Moise Braitberg, we ask that our grandmother’s name be removed from the wall at Yad Vashem. Her name is Gertrud Neumann. Your records state that she was born in Kattowitz on June 6, 1875 and died in Theresienstadt.
M. Braitberg delivers his request with excellent reasons and eloquent personal testimony. His words are inspiring, but they give you – and those who stand with you – too much credit. I will instead be brief. Please take this as an expression of my disgust and contempt for your state and all it represents.
Our grandmother was a victim of that very ideal of ethnic sovereignty in whose cause Israel has shed so much blood for so long. I was among the many Jews who thought nothing of embracing that ideal, despite the sufferings it had inflicted on our own race. It took thousands of Palestinian lives before, finally, I realized how foolish we had been.
Our complicity was despicable. I do not believe that the Jewish people, in whose name you have committed so many crimes with such outrageous complacency, can ever rid itself of the shame you have brought upon us. Nazi propaganda, for all its calumnies, never disgraced and corrupted the Jews; you have succeeded in this. You haven’t the courage to take responsibility for your own sadistic acts: with unparalleled insolence, you set yourself up as spokesmen for an entire race, as if our very existence endorsed your conduct. And you blacken our names not only by your acts, but by the lies, the coy evasions, the smirking arrogance and the infantile self-righteousness with which you embroider our history.
In the end, you will give the Palestinians some scrap of a state. You will never pay for your crimes and you will continue to preen yourself, to bask in your illusions of moral ascendancy. But between now and the end, you will kill and kill and kill, gaining nothing by your spoilt-brat brutality. In life, our grandmother suffered enough. Stop making her a party to this horror in her death.
Michael Neumann

I join my brother, Michael Neumann, in asking that any reference to our grandmother be removed from Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial.
I have been to this memorial. Its buildings, paved courtyards and plazas spread themselves authoritatively over many landscaped acres. It frames the Holocaust as a prelude to the creation of the state of Israel. It embalms memorabilia of the death camps and preserves them as national treasures. That treasure does not belong to Israel. It is a treasure only if it serves as a reminder never to permit any nation to claim an exemption for its chosen people from the bounds of morality and decency.
Israel has twisted the Holocaust into an excuse for perpetrating more holocausts. It has spent the treasure of the world’s sympathy for the victims of the Holocaust on a fruitless effort to shield itself from all criticism as it massacres and tortures Palestinians and suffocates them under a brutal occupation. I do not wish to have the memory of my grandmother enlisted in this misbegotten project.
I grew up believing that Jews were that ethnic group whose historical mission was to transcend ethnicity in a united front against Fascism. To be Jewish was to be anti-Fascist. Israel long ago woke me from my dogmatic slumber about the immutable relationship of Jews to Fascists. It has engineered a merger between the image of Jewish torturers and war criminals and that of emaciated concentration camp victims. I find this merger obscene. I want no part of it. You have forfeited the right to be the custodian of my grandmother’s memory. I do not wish Yad Vashem to be her memorial.
Osha Neumann
The Braitberg letter, in French can be found at

http://www.lemonde.fr/opinions/article/2009/01/28/effacez-le-nom-de-mon-grand-pere-a-yad-vashem_1147635_3232.html

and the translaton here:

http://www.bilin-village.org/english/articles/different-look/Erase-my-grandfather-s-name-at-Yad-Vashem

Michael Neumann is a professor of philosophy at a Canadian university. He is the author of What’s Left: Radical Politics and the Radical Psyche and The Case Against Israel. He also contributed the essay, “What is Anti-Semitism”, to CounterPunch’s book, The Politics of Anti-Semitism. He can be reached at mneumann@live.com
Osha Neumann is a defense lawyer in Berkeley and author of Up Against the Wall MotherF**ker: a Memoir of the 60s with Notes for Next Time.

http://www.counterpunch.org/neumann02202009.html

–

Paul J. Balles

18 February 2009

Paul J. Balles argues that decent Americans need to reconsider their willing support of Israeli pathological murderers currently in control of the US – people who openly describe Palestinian civilians as “human animals” that should be slaughtered.

The Israelis control the policy in the Congress and the Senate. – Senator Fullbright, Chair of Senate Foreign Relations Committee
What kind of thinking explains why it is so easy for Israelis to slaughter 3500 civilians in Gaza, 40 per cent of whom were children? The Israeli murderers were fully aware of their incomparably strong armaments. They launched at least 2500 air-raids on Gaza, dropping more than 1000 tons of explosives, including phosphorous bombs, against a relatively helpless population.

Israeli spokesman Nachman Abramovic demonized Palestinian children, saying: They may look young to you, but these people are terrorists at heart. Don’t look at their deceptively innocent faces, try to think of the demons inside each of them… I am absolutely certain these people would grow to be evil terrorists if we allowed them to grow… [W]ould you allow them to grow to kill your children or finish them off right now?… [H]onest and moral people ought to differentiate between true humans and human animals. We do kill human animals and we do so unapologetically. Besides who in the West is in a position to lecture us on killing human animals. After all, whose hands are clean?It’s not only a single spokesman advocating genocide for the Palestinians. Brainwashing of leading Israeli scholars has prompted the most insane self-justification and rationalization for the atrocities committed against the innocent victims in Gaza.
Israeli educators, scholars and politicians openly advocate the annihilation of all Palestinians. Dr Nachum Rakover, a legal scholar, opined: “They voted for killers and sent them to kill us. To call them [civilians] innocent is a tragic comedy… [C]ivilians are partners of the killers.”

Many other politicians called for the need for “wiping off Gaza from the face of earth”, and “annihilating of every moving thing there”. The right-wing Israeli politician Avigdor Lieberman proposed nuking Gaza following the US example when it dropped the atomic bomb on Japan during World War II.“All of the Palestinians must be killed; men, women, infants and even their beasts,” cries the religious opinion of Rabbi Yisrael Rosen, the director of the long-established Tsomet Religious Institute.According to the Pakistan Daily, “Israeli spokeswoman Tzipora Menache stated that she was not worried about negative ramifications the Israeli onslaught on Gaza might have on the way the Obama administration would view Israel. She said ‘You know very well, and the stupid Americans know equally well, that we control their government, irrespective of who sits in the White House.”Adding to her own boasts, Tzipora Menache said:

You see, I know it and you know it that no American president can be in a position to challenge us even if we do the unthinkable. What can they [Americans] do to us? We control Congress, we control the media, we control show biz, and we control everything in America. In America, you can criticize God, but you can’t criticize Israel.
Meanwhile, as William A. Cook has noted:

Israel systematically engineered the execution of more than 1300 people and wounded or maimed for life more than 5000, people locked inside a cage, unable to protect themselves even by running away, for there was no place to run that the Israeli military could not see or destroy. Indeed, Israel’s foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, simply categorized Gazan civilians as “fighters” and their towns and villages “military bases”, thus enabling the IDF [Israeli armed forces] to continue its indiscriminate slaughter.
Apparently, little can be done to persuade sadistic Israelis that Palestinians are anything more than disposable goyim. However, decent Americans need to reconsider their willing support of pathological murderers currently in control of America.

——————————————————————————–
SOURCE
Paul J. Balles is a retired American university professor and freelance writer who has lived in the Middle East for many years. For more information, see http://www.pballes.com.

Paul J. Balles

18 February 2009

Paul J. Balles argues that decent Americans need to reconsider their willing support of Israeli pathological murderers currently in control of the US – people who openly describe Palestinian civilians as “human animals” that should be slaughtered.

The Israelis control the policy in the Congress and the Senate. – Senator Fullbright, Chair of Senate Foreign Relations Committee
What kind of thinking explains why it is so easy for Israelis to slaughter 3500 civilians in Gaza, 40 per cent of whom were children? The Israeli murderers were fully aware of their incomparably strong armaments. They launched at least 2500 air-raids on Gaza, dropping more than 1000 tons of explosives, including phosphorous bombs, against a relatively helpless population.

Israeli spokesman Nachman Abramovic demonized Palestinian children, saying: They may look young to you, but these people are terrorists at heart. Don’t look at their deceptively innocent faces, try to think of the demons inside each of them… I am absolutely certain these people would grow to be evil terrorists if we allowed them to grow… [W]ould you allow them to grow to kill your children or finish them off right now?… [H]onest and moral people ought to differentiate between true humans and human animals. We do kill human animals and we do so unapologetically. Besides who in the West is in a position to lecture us on killing human animals. After all, whose hands are clean?It’s not only a single spokesman advocating genocide for the Palestinians. Brainwashing of leading Israeli scholars has prompted the most insane self-justification and rationalization for the atrocities committed against the innocent victims in Gaza.
Israeli educators, scholars and politicians openly advocate the annihilation of all Palestinians. Dr Nachum Rakover, a legal scholar, opined: “They voted for killers and sent them to kill us. To call them [civilians] innocent is a tragic comedy… [C]ivilians are partners of the killers.”

Many other politicians called for the need for “wiping off Gaza from the face of earth”, and “annihilating of every moving thing there”. The right-wing Israeli politician Avigdor Lieberman proposed nuking Gaza following the US example when it dropped the atomic bomb on Japan during World War II.“All of the Palestinians must be killed; men, women, infants and even their beasts,” cries the religious opinion of Rabbi Yisrael Rosen, the director of the long-established Tsomet Religious Institute.According to the Pakistan Daily, “Israeli spokeswoman Tzipora Menache stated that she was not worried about negative ramifications the Israeli onslaught on Gaza might have on the way the Obama administration would view Israel. She said ‘You know very well, and the stupid Americans know equally well, that we control their government, irrespective of who sits in the White House.”Adding to her own boasts, Tzipora Menache said:

You see, I know it and you know it that no American president can be in a position to challenge us even if we do the unthinkable. What can they [Americans] do to us? We control Congress, we control the media, we control show biz, and we control everything in America. In America, you can criticize God, but you can’t criticize Israel.
Meanwhile, as William A. Cook has noted:

Israel systematically engineered the execution of more than 1300 people and wounded or maimed for life more than 5000, people locked inside a cage, unable to protect themselves even by running away, for there was no place to run that the Israeli military could not see or destroy. Indeed, Israel’s foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, simply categorized Gazan civilians as “fighters” and their towns and villages “military bases”, thus enabling the IDF [Israeli armed forces] to continue its indiscriminate slaughter.
Apparently, little can be done to persuade sadistic Israelis that Palestinians are anything more than disposable goyim. However, decent Americans need to reconsider their willing support of pathological murderers currently in control of America.

——————————————————————————–
SOURCE
Paul J. Balles is a retired American university professor and freelance writer who has lived in the Middle East for many years. For more information, see http://www.pballes.com.

Religious groups are ‘penetrating’ Israeli army
Jonathan Cook, Foreign Correspondent

The greater role of Jewish extremist religious groups in the Israeli army came to light last week when it emerged that the army rabbinate had handed out a booklet to soldiers preparing for the recent 22-day Gaza offensive, notes Jonathan Cook.

Religious extremists’ rapid rise through the ranks.

Extremist rabbis and their followers, bent on waging holy war against the Palestinians, are taking over the Israeli army by stealth, according to critics.
In a process one military historian has termed the rapid “theologisation” of the Israeli army, there are now entire units of religious combat soldiers, many of them based in West Bank settlements. They answer to hardline rabbis who call for the establishment of a Greater Israel that includes the occupied Palestinian territories.

Their influence in shaping the army’s goals and methods is starting to be felt, say observers, as more and more graduates from officer courses are also drawn from Israel’s religious extremist population.

“We have reached the point where a critical mass of religious soldiers is trying to negotiate with the army about how and for what purpose military force is employed on the battlefield,” said Yigal Levy, a political sociologist at the Open University who has written several books on the Israeli army.

The new atmosphere was evident in the “excessive force” used in the recent Gaza operation, Dr Levy said. More than 1,300 Palestinians were killed, a majority of them civilians, and thousands were injured as whole neighbourhoods of Gaza were levelled.

“When soldiers, including secular ones, are imbued with theological ideas, it makes them less sensitive to human rights or the suffering of the other side.”

The greater role of extremist religious groups in the army came to light last week when it emerged that the army rabbinate had handed out a booklet to soldiers preparing for the recent 22-day Gaza offensive.

Yesh Din, an Israeli human rights group, said the material contained messages “bordering on racist incitement against the Palestinian people” and might have encouraged soldiers to ignore international law.

The booklet quotes extensively from Shlomo Aviner, a far-right rabbi who heads a religious seminary in the Muslim quarter of East Jerusalem. He compares the Palestinians to the Philistines, the Biblical enemy of the Jews.

He advises: “When you show mercy to a cruel enemy, you are being cruel to pure and honest soldiers … This is a war on murderers.” He also cites a Biblical ban on “surrendering a single millimetre” of Greater Israel.

The booklet was approved by the army’s chief rabbi, Brig Gen Avichai Ronsky, who is reportedly determined to improve the army’s “combat values” after its failure to crush Hizbollah in Lebanon in 2006.

Gen Ronsky was appointed three years ago in a move designed, according to the Israeli media, to placate hardline religious elements within the army and the settler community.

Gen Ronsky, himself a settler in the West Bank community of Itimar, near Nablus, is close to far-right groups. According to reports, he pays regular visits to jailed members of Jewish terror groups; he has offered his home to a settler who is under house arrest for wounding Palestinians; and he has introduced senior officers to a small group of extremist settlers who live among more than 150,000 Palestinians in Hebron.

He has also radically overhauled the rabbinate, which was originally founded to offer religious services and ensure religious soldiers were able to observe the sabbath and eat kosher meals in army canteens.

Over the past year the rabbinate has effectively taken over the role of the army’s education corps through its Jewish Awareness Department, which co-ordinates its activities with Elad, a settler organisation that is active in East Jerusalem.

In October, the Haaretz newspaper quoted an unnamed senior officer who accused the rabbinate of carrying out the religious and political “brainwashing” of troops.

Dr Levy said the army rabbinate’s power was growing as the ranks of religious soldiers swelled.

Breaking the Silence, a project run by soldiers seeking to expose the army’s behaviour against Palestinians, said the booklet handed out to troops in Gaza had originated among Hebron’s settlers.

“The document has been around since at least 2003,” said Mikhael Manekin, 29, one of the group’s directors and himself religiously observant. “But what is new is that the army has been effectively subcontracted to promote the views of the extremist settlers to its soldiers.”

The power of the religious right in the army reflected wider social trends inside Israel, Dr Levy said. He pointed out that the rural cooperatives known as kibbutzim that were once home to Israel’s secular middle classes and produced the bulk of its officer corps had been on the wane since the early 1980s.

“The vacuum left by their gradual retreat from the army was filled by religious youngsters and by the children of the settlements. They now dominate in many branches of the army.”

According to figures cited in the Israeli media, more than one-third of all Israel’s combat soldiers are religious, as are more than 40 per cent of those graduating from officer courses.

The army has encouraged this trend by creating some two dozen hesder yeshivas, seminaries in which youths can combine Biblical studies with army service in separate religious units. Many of the yeshivas are based in the West Bank, where students are educated by the settlements’ extremist rabbis.

Ehud Barak, the defence minister, has rapidly expanded the programme, approving four yeshivas, three based in settlements, last summer. Another 10 are reportedly awaiting his approval.

Mr Manekin, however, warned against blaming the violence inflicted on Gaza’s civilians solely on the influence of religious extremists.

“The army is still run by the secular elites in Israel and they have always been reckless with regard to the safety of civilians when they wage war. Jewish nationalism that justifies Palestinian deaths is just as dangerous as religious extremism.”

Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. His latest book is “Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His website is www.jkcook.net. A version of this article originally appeared in The National.

Christians in Jerusalem want Jews to stop spitting on them

By Amiram Barkat

A few weeks ago, a senior Greek Orthodox clergyman in Israel attended a meeting at a government office in Jerusalem’s Givat Shaul quarter. When he returned to his car, an elderly man wearing a skullcap came and knocked on the window. When the clergyman let the window down, the passerby spat in his face. Advertisement

The clergyman prefered not to lodge a complaint with the police and told an acquaintance that he was used to being spat at by Jews. Many Jerusalem clergy have been subjected to abuse of this kind. For the most part, they ignore it but sometimes they cannot.

On Sunday, a fracas developed when a yeshiva student spat at the cross being carried by the Armenian Archbishop during a procession near the Holy Sepulchre in the Old City. The archbishop’s 17th-century cross was broken during the brawl and he slapped the yeshiva student.

Both were questioned by police and the yeshiva student will be brought to trial. The Jerusalem District Court has meanwhile banned the student from approaching the Old City for 75 days.

But the Armenians are far from satisfied by the police action and say this sort of thing has been going on for years. Archbishop Nourhan Manougian says he expects the education minister to say something.

“When there is an attack against Jews anywhere in the world, the Israeli government is incensed, so why when our religion and pride are hurt, don’t they take harsher measures?” he asks.

According to Daniel Rossing, former adviser to the Religious Affairs Ministry on Christian affairs and director of a Jerusalem center for Christian-Jewish dialogue, there has been an increase in the number of such incidents recently, “as part of a general atmosphere of lack of tolerance in the country.”

Rossing says there are certain common characeristics from the point of view of time and location to the incidents. He points to the fact that there are more incidents in areas where Jews and Christians mingle, such as the Jewish and Armenian quarters of the Old City and the Jaffa Gate.

There are an increased number at certain times of year, such as during the Purim holiday.”I know Christians who lock themselves indoors during the entire Purim holiday,” he says.

Former adviser to the mayor on Christian affairs, Shmuel Evyatar, describes the situation as “a huge disgrace.” He says most of the instigators are yeshiva students studying in the Old City who view the Christian religion with disdain.

“I’m sure the phenomenon would end as soon as rabbis and well-known educators denounce it. In practice, rabbis of yeshivas ignore or even encourage it,” he says.

Evyatar says he himself was spat at while walking with a Serbian bishop in the Jewish quarter, near his home. “A group of yeshiva students spat at us and their teacher just stood by and watched.”

Jerusalem municipal officials said they are aware of the problem but it has to be dealt with by the police. Shmuel Ben-Ruby, the police spokesman, said they had only two complaints from Christians in the past two years. He said that, in both cases, the culprits were caught and punished.

He said the police deploy an inordinately high number of patrols and special technology in the Old City and its surroundings in an attempt to keep order.

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