10 November 2012, The Israeli Communist Party http://www. maki.org.il (Israel)
Hundreds of Palestinians are being evacuated from the occupied
northern Jordan Valley to make way for an Israeli military training exercise,
local officials told Ma'an Palestinian new agency. Villagers received orders
this week from the Israeli army to leave their homes for the duration of the
exercise, which begins on Sunday.
Aqaba and Yarza village council head Mukhlas Masaid told Ma'an on
Wednesday that Ein al-Hilweh, Yarza, Ras al-Ahmar, al-Malih and al-Meiteh
villages received orders, displacing a population of 1,000. Al-Malih and
al-Madareb council chief Aref Daraghmeh said 57 families in al-Hamamat,
al-Burj and Humsa received the orders. Further south, 40 families in the
Jordan Valley village Khirbet Tana also received orders this week to evacuate
while the army conducts training. Daraghmeh said some families would be
permitted to return after a two-day exercise, while others were told to leave
their homes permanently. He said several Israeli departments were working
together to pressure Palestinians to leave the Jordan Valley in order to
build Jewish settlements and military bases.
Researcher for the Applied Research Institute - Jerusalem Juliet
Bannoura said the latest evacuation was part of a campaign since 1967 to remove
Palestinians from the Jordan Valley, most of which is designated a closed
military zone. "This is a trick in order to execute a silent and final
evacuation," Bannoura told Ma'an. "Now Israel is completing building
of the separation wall in the west, they want to work on the eastern side as well,"
she said.
The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs says Israel has
designated around 18 percent of the West Bank as closed military zones, an area
roughly equal in size to Area A, the 17.7 percent of the West Bank under
Palestinian Authority control. Around 5,000 Palestinians live in Israeli
military firing zones in the West Bank, UNOCHA says. Since 2010, Israel has
demolished the homes of 820 Palestinians located in firing zones.
It seems to me that aid of all kinds should
have basic human rights strings attached to it. I would have suspended all aid
to Israel when it refused to stop its settlement policy on the West Bank, but
that's a little like being in favor of an immediate space station on Mars,
given the Greater Israel lobby's grip on Congress.
So let me just reiterate something that has no
chance of ever happening, but I might as well put on the record: we should
treat Israel as any other recipient of US aid. If a country is occupying and
settling land conquered through war, if it's treating a minority population
with inhumanity, the US should stand up for Western values. It should not
single Israel out; but we have to stop treating Israel as the exception to
every other US foreign policy rule.
To begin with, the 15 church leaders are
heavyweights, top officials for their denominations. They include the leaders
of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), Evangelical Lutheran Church in America,
the United Methodist Church, the National Council of Churches, the United
Church of Christ, the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), the American
Friends Service Committee (a Quaker agency) and the Mennonite Central
Committee. Two Catholic leaders also signed, not including the Catholic Council
of Bishops.
These are not just leaders of a few religious
groups, which a Protestant version of the Jewish Council of Public Affairs
could corral into an interfaith dialogue meeting. These are the major-domos of
American Protestantism, which raises the question of what exactly gives the
JCPA and its scattered letter signers, these “outraged Jewish groups” as the Times
calls them, the right to claim religious standing in this conversation. Many of
these Jewish groups are secular and function as part of the Israel Lobby, a
collection of lobbying organizations that have Israel, not Judaism as their
primary client...
The JCPA and its letter signers have no dogs in
this hunt. They can be as outraged as they want. This is still a free country.
But the 15 church leaders have made the right religious, not political, move.
They are speaking the language of “moral responsibility” in a letter directed
to the U.S. Congress on the matter of U.S. funds used by Israel to violate the
human rights of the Palestinian people.
Interfaith dialogue has always been nothing
more than a device used by American Jewish groups to intimidate the American
churches into keeping the ecumenical deal. By this intimidation, these groups
have followed the example set by the government of Israel which has long used
the so-called “peace process” to sustain its occupation and expand its borders,
always to the detriment of the Palestinian people.
It is the right time for the leaders of the
American churches to make their moral demand to the Congress. With their
letter, they have done so, courageously, considering the political climate of
our time. Interfaith dialogue can wait.
As things stand now, the Jewish groups have
called for a "summit" for the top leaders of Christian churches to
"discuss" the situation with them - and they are reportedly
considering it. I hope the Christian leaders will stand firm. It is not the
role of these Jewish organizations to dictate how Christian religious leaders
can live out their conscience or their values. These organizations have chosen
to walk away from the table - they are in no position to demand the terms by
which "dialogue" may resume.
We can only hope this sad turn of events will
lead to a more honest interfaith conversation about Israel-Palestine - one
based on honesty, respect and justice rather than emotional blackmail.
23 september 2012, Alternative Information Center http://www.alternativenews.org (Israel)
The Norwegian Ministry
of Finance resolves that: gifts to organisations that provide funds to Israeli
settlements are no longer tax-deductible.
(The Karmel-instituttet paid for half of the houses in
Alonei Shilo (above), a settlement illegal under both international and Israeli
law (Photo: Peace Now)
Following advocacy-work and pressure from Norwegian
People’s Aid (NPA) and the Norwegian Union of Municipal and General Employees
(NUMGE), the Norwegian Ministry of Finance today (20 September) announced their
decision to exclude the Norwegian organisation “Karmel-instituttet” from the
list of organisations to which the Norwegian public may get tax deductions for
providing funds to. The reason behind the decision is that the organisation
provides financial support to Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian
territories.
- We are very pleased that the Ministry of Finance has
made this decision, based on the fact that Karmel provides funds to the illegal
Israeli settlements. The decision follows a letter sent by NPA and NUMGE in
January this year, asking them to look into the issue’, says the
Secretary-General of NPA, Liv Tørres.
The Ministry of Finance, in their press release today,
writes that their intention is to ensure that the system of tax deductions does
not benefit organisations that actively support or contribute to acts that are
in contravention of international law. On the basis of information from the
Karmel-institute about their transfer of financial support to Israeli
settlements and the organisation’s own stated intention to continue providing
such support, the Ministry of Finance has decided that gifts to the
organization are no longer tax-deductible.
Commenting on the decision, Stein Guldbrandsen of
NUMGE said: ‘Norwegian citizens who have provided financial support to
Karmel-instituttet through the years must now contemplate that their support
has constituted a contribution to breaches of international law’.
Tørres and Gulbrandsen promise that the NPA and NUMGE
will continue to focus on how we may prevent all Norwegian financial support to
the Israeli settlements’ and add that ‘we see the decision of the Ministry of
Finance as an important political signal from the Norwegian government, that
such activities are unacceptable’.
Background-information
NPA and NUMGE’s work on Norwegian links to the Israeli
occupation: In May 2012, NPA and
NUMGE released a report (in Norwegian) looking at Norwegian links to the
Israeli occupation, in the form of trade with, investments in and financial
support to the settlements or corporations that are involved in the Israeli
occupation.
Karmel-instituttet: This Norwegian organisation has for a number of years
provided financial support to the illegal Israeli settlement of Alonei Shilo,
in the occupied Palestinian territories. According to the organization, around
half of the houses in the settlement (23 caravan-homes and 3 “study centres”)
are paid for through funds collected by Karmel-instituttet from Norwegian
citizens. In addition to being illegal according to international law, the
settlement of Alonei Shilo does not have an official permit from the Israeli
government, and is hence an illegal settlement also according to Israeli law.
The legal basis for the decision: Effective from 1 January 2012, the Norwegian Ministry
of Finance can remove organisations from the list of organisations approved for
tax-deductible gifts, with the stated purpose of ensuring Norwegian follow-up
of resolutions from the UN Security Council. One such resolution is UN SC
Resolution 465 (1980), which calls on all states ‘not to provide Israel with
any assistance to be used specifically in connection with settlements in the
occupied territories’. As tax-deductions should be seen as a form of
government-subsidizing, the letter from NPA and NUMGE asking the Ministry to
look into the case of Karmel, referring to this resolution as the basis for the
request. The Ministry of Finance, in their decision on the issue, did not refer
to particular UN resolutions or international conventions, but stated that
their intention is to ensure that the system of tax deductions does not benefit
organisations that actively support or contribute to acts that are in
contravention of international law.
22 February 2012, Shalom Rav http://rabbibrant.com (USA)
A Blog by Rabbi Brant Rosen
As a Jew, a rabbi and a person of conscience, I am voicing my support of the divestment resolution being brought to the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA) this June.
This resolution, which has been a point of divisive contention between the PC (USA) and some American Jewish organizations for many years, endorses a recommendation of divestment from Caterpillar, Motorola and Hewlett-Packard. It was put forth by the church's committee on Mission Responsibility Through Investment that recommended divestment of companies engaged in "non-peaceful pursuits in Israel/Palestine."
There is a long and tumultuous history to this resolution - here's a basic outline:
- In 1971 and 1976 the Presbyterian Church stated that it had a responsibility to ensure that its funds be invested responsibly and consistent with the church's mission.
- In 1986, the PC (USA) formed the Committee for Mission Responsibility Through Investing (MRTI) in 1986. The MRTI Committee carried out the General Assembly's wish to engage in shareholder activism and as a last resort, divest itself of companies which contravened the GA's position. Divestment would follow a phased process starting with attempted dialogue and shareholder resolutions and ultimately the total sale of and future ban on the church's holdings in a company.
- In June 2004, the PC (USA) General Assembly adopted by a vote of 431-62 a resolution that called on the MRTI Committee "to initiate a process of phased, selective divestment in multinational corporations operating in Israel." The resolution expressed the church's support of the Geneva Accord, said that "the occupation . . . has proven to be at the root of evil acts committed against innocent people on both sides of the conflict," that "the security of Israel and the Israeli people is inexorably dependent on making peace with their Palestinian neighbors", that "horrific acts of violence and deadly attacks on innocent people, whether carried out by Palestinian suicide bombers or by the Israeli military, are abhorrent and inexcusable by all measures, and are a dead-end alternative to a negotiated settlement," and that the United States government needed to be "honest, even-handed broker for peace."
- In 2005, MRTI Committee named five US-based companies - Caterpillar Inc., Citigroup, ITT Industries, Motorola and United Technologies - for initial focus and that it would engage in "progressive engagement" with the companies' management.
- In 2006, following an uproar of criticism from American Jewish organizations, the PC (USA) General Assembly overwhelmingly (483-28) replaced language adopted in 2004 that focused the "phased, selective divestment" specifically on companies working in Israel. It now called for investment in Israel, the Gaza Strip, eastern Jerusalem and the West Bank "in only peaceful pursuits." The new resolution also required the consideration of "practical realities," a "commitment to positive outcomes" and an awareness of the potential impact of strategies on "both the Israeli and Palestinian economies." The 2006 resolution also recognized Israel’s right to build a security barrier along its pre-1967 boundaries. The GA acknowledged the "hurt and misunderstanding among many members of the Jewish community and within our Presbyterian communion" that resulted from the 2004 resolution and stated that the Assembly was "grieved by the pain that this has caused, accept responsibility for the flaws in our process, and ask for a new season of mutual understanding and dialogue."
The most recent resolution is the result of this new process and now focuses on three of the original six companies under consideration. From the PC (USA) website:
The General Assembly Mission Council (GAMC) is recommending that the upcoming 220th General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA) divest the church of its stock in three companies “until they have ceased profiting from non-peaceful activities in Israel-Palestine.”
The three companies are Caterpillar, Motorola Solutions and Hewlett-Packard.
At issue are their participation in the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, the construction of the “security barrier” between Israel and Palestinian territory, and the destruction of Palestinian homes, roads and fields to make way for the construction of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, which have been declared illegal under international law.
“We have run out of hope that these companies are willing to change their corporate practices [in Israel-Palestine],” said the Rev. Brian Ellison, a Kansas City pastor and chair of the denomination’s Mission Responsibility Through Investment Committee (MRTI). “We have made diligent effort to engage in conversation. We’d like to do more, to make progress, but substantial change does not seem possible.”
As stated above, I support this resolution without reservation and urge other Jewish leaders and community members to do so as well. I am deeply dismayed that along every step of this process, Jewish community organizations (among them, the Anti-Defamation League, the Simon Wiesenthal Center and the Jewish Council on Public Affairs) that purport to speak for the consensus of a diverse constituency have been intimidating and emotionally blackmailing the Presbyterian Church as they attempt to forge their ethical investment strategy in good faith.
It is extremely important to be clear about what is at stake here. First of all, this is not a resolution that seeks to boycott or single out Israel. Divestment does not target countries - it targets companies. In this regard speaking, the PC (USA)'s ethical investment process seeks to divest from specific "military-related companies" it deems are engaged in "non-peaceful" pursuits.
We'd be hard-pressed indeed to make the case that the Israeli government is engaged in "non-peaceful pursuits" in the Occupied Territories and East Jerusalem. I won't go into detail here because I've been writing about this tragic issue for many years: the increasing of illegal Jewish settlements with impunity, the forced evictions and home demolitions, the uprooting of Palestinian orchards, the separation wall that chokes off Palestinians from their lands, the arbitrary administrative detentions, the brutal crushing of non-violent protest, etc, etc.
All of us - Jews and non-Jews alike - have cause for deep moral concern over these issues. Moreover, we have cause for dismay that own government tacitly supports these actions. At the very least, we certainly have the right to make sure that our own investments do not support companies that profit from what we believe to be immoral acts committed in furtherance of Israel's occupation.
As the co-chair of the Jewish Voice for Peace Rabbinical Council, I am proud that JVP has initiated its own divestment campaign which targets the TIAA-CREF pension fund, urging it to divest from companies that profit from Israel's occupation. Among these are two of the three companies currently under consideration by PC (USA): Motorola and Caterpillar.
Why the concern over these specific companies? Because they are indisputably and directing aiding and profiting the oppression of Palestinians on the ground. Caterpillar profits from the destruction of Palestinian homes and the uprooting of Palestinian orchards by supplying the armor-plated and weaponized bulldozers that are used for such demolition work. Motorola profits from Israel’s control of the Palestinian population by providing surveillance systems around Israeli settlements, checkpoints, and military camps in the West Bank, as well as communication systems to the Israeli army and West Bank settlers.
And why is Hewlett-Packard under consideration for divestment by the PC (USA)? HP owns Electronic Data Systems, which heads a consortium providing monitoring of checkpoints, including several built inside the West Bank in violation of international law. The Israeli Navy, which regularly attacks Gaza’s fishermen within Gaza’s own territorial waters and has often shelled civilian areas in the Gaza Strip, has chosen HP Israel to implement the outsourcing of its IT infrastructure. In addition, Hewlett Packard subsidiary HP Invent outsources IT services to a company called Matrix, which employs settlers in the illegal settlement of Modi’in Illit to do much of its IT work at low wages.
I repeat: by seeking to divest from these companies the PC (USA) is not singling out Israel as a nation. The Presbyterian has every right to - and in fact does - divest its funds from any number of companies that enable non-peaceful pursuits around the world. In this case specifically, the PC (USA) has reasonably determined it considers these particular "pursuits" aid a highly militarized, brutal and oppressive occupation - and it simply does not want to be complicit in supporting companies that enable it.
I am fully aware that there are several organizations in the Jewish community that are already gearing up a full court press to intimidate the PC (USA) from passing this resolution in June. JCPA President Rabbi Steve Gutow recently accused national Presbyterian leaders of "making the delegitimization of Israel a public witness of their church." The Simon Wiesenthal Center has called the resolution" poisonous," and that by considering it the PC (USA) is "showing its moral bankruptcy."
The sorts of statements do not speak for me nor, I am sure, do they speak for the wide, diverse spectrum of opinion on the issue in the American Jewish community. There is no place for public bullying in interfaith relations - I believe this kind of browbeating is decidedly counter to principles of honest, good faith dialogue. To our Presbyterian friends: please know there are many Jewish leaders who stand with you as you seek the cause of peace and justice in Israel/Palestine.
In a recent open letter to the PC (USA), Rabbi Margaret Holub, my colleague on the JVP Rabbinical Council expressed this sentiment eloquently with the following words:
Your Church has long been active in pursuing justice and peace by nonviolent means, including divestment, in many places around the world. As Christians, you have your own particular stake in the land to which both our traditions have long attachments of faith and history. We particularly acknowledge the oppression of Palestinian Christians under Israeli occupation and the justice of your efforts to relieve the oppression directed against your fellows.
To advocate for an end to an unjust policy is not anti-Semitic. To criticize Israel is not anti-Semitic. To invest your own resources in corporations which pursue your vision of a just and peaceful world, and to withdraw your resources from those which contradict this vision, is not anti-Semitic. There is a terrible history of actual anti-Semitism perpetrated by Christians at different times throughout the millennia and conscientious Christians today do bear a burden of conscience on that account. We can understand that, with your commitment to paths of peace and justice, it must be terribly painful and inhibiting to be accused of anti-Semitism.
In fact, many of us in the Jewish community recognize that the continuing occupation of Palestine itself presents a great danger to the safety of the Jewish people, not to mention oppressing our spirits and diminishing our honor in the world community. We appreciate the solidarity of people of conscience in pursuing conscientious nonviolent strategies, such as phased selective divestment, to end the occupation.
I am proud my name is under this letter, alongside many other members of our Rabbinical Council. If you stand with us, please join us in supporting the PC (USA) divestment resolution at their GA in Pittsburgh this summer.
22 February 2012, Tikun Olam-תיקון עולם http://www.richardsilverstein.com (USA)
Over the past week or so there have been some strange doings on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount. As the lyrics of the old song go:
There’s something happnin’ here
What it is ain’t exactly clear
There’s a man with a gun over there
Telling me I’ve go to beware
It appears that a growing band of Israeli messianic settlers have banded together to orchestrate a crisis on the Temple Mount. Their ultimate goal seems to be taking Jewish control over the sacred ground, including two of the holiest sites in Islam, the Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa Mosque.
For many years, there have been radical settler groups preparing for such a day. Ateret Cohanim maintains a yeshiva which is training priests to resume the Temple rituals including animal sacrifice. Dov Hikind’s wife earns $150,000 a year as its U.S. fundraiser. They’re also breeding cattle in the hopes of find that miraculous red heifer which would serve as a sign that God is ready to resume Jewish rites on this sacred ground.
The settlers know that for Jews to rebuild the Temple would mean a holy war in the Holy Land that would likely dwarf the Crusades for passion and bloodletting. For these Jews, such an eventuality would bring the days of the coming of the Messiah closer, thus making the human suffering not just acceptable, but even desirable.
These Temple activists are also fundraising on behalf of their messianic Armageddon. Here, they’re raising $10,000 to preserve “Jewish rights” on the Temple Mount. The website says there is no written budget because the uses to which the funding would be put would be “sensitive.” Therefore such documentation is for “internal” purposes only. You can imagine what this means. They’re likely raising a lot of their funding from the types of American Jews giving to the Hebron Fund and Central Fund of Israel.
There is a political echelon in the radical settler movement which is preparing the ground for such a Jewish takeover. It’s led by Moshe Feiglin, who recently took nearly a quarter of the vote in the Likud leadership primary by running to the right of (!) Bibi Netanyahu. Flyers were publicly posted throughout Jerusalem two weeks ago calling for Jews to make aliyah en masse to the Temple Mount. The term aliyah in the Temple context is a historic term used to denote Jewish pilgrims who went to the sacred spot for worship on Jewish festivals. In other words, it would only be used today by someone who saw himself as commanded to rebuild and renew Jewish worship there. To do this, one must first evict or destroy the Muslim holy sites there as was done by Hindu nationalists to a mosque in Ayodiyah, India.
The extremist site, The Temple Mount is Ours, calls for a mass pilgrimage ”in order to strengthen claim of Jewish sovereignty” to the site. You can see in the video above from February 19th and this one what is the result of such settler provocation. The last time such a thing was attempted, Ariel Sharon instigated the Second Intifada and propelled himself into the prime minister’s chair. Feiglin is smart enough to understand that such political grandstanding can be the making of an Israeli prime minister.
But he’s also smart enough to understand that by identifying himself too explicitly with this movement he could get himself investigated by the police and possibly jailed. So he deftly denied credit for the flyer and made his own visit to the Temple Mount earlier than the time specified in the flyer.
A Feiglin associate in this interview posted by IMRA denies that the founder of the Manhigut Yehudit ["Jewish Leadership"] movement wants to rebuild the Temple. Instead, he claims Feiglin only wants to prepare the Jews for the moment when the Messiah will come and accomplish this task. I’m afraid this sort of nuance is justifiably lost of Muslims who mistake a Jew who wants to lay the groundwork for stealing their holy site from them, with a Jewish Messiah who will actually do this. Feiglin’s representative rather ominously states in the interview that it’s the founders’ dream to “make” all Jews share in his vision, and that this is what will bring the Messiah and a rebuilt Temple.
Strangely, the representative of Feiglin’s group adamantly maintained that it had no obligation to publicly renounce the flyer. Further, he said it had no plans to file a complaint with the police about the document it claims was a fraud. This is generally diametrically opposite from the way most political parties operate in Israel. In similar circumstances, they would file a complaint and ask the police to investigate in order to clarify to the public their rejection of the message and the act of fraud. The fact that Manhifut Yehudit behaved so differently in this case raises major questions about its relationship to the flyer and those who created it.
The settler agitators are camouflaging their covert campaign for Jewish sovereignty, couching it in terms of religious liberty. No one, they seem to think, can reject a call for Jews to have the same access to the Temple Mount that Muslims enjoy. The only problem with this notion is that Muslims for generations have controlled the area. Until the type of agitation initiated by Sharon, access was relatively open. In fact, I can remember visiting both holy mosques during my stays in Israel in 1972-73 and 1979-1980. It was only after Muslims became afraid that Jews wanted to take control from them that relations went bad.
There will be some among you who will say: C’mon. You’re making a mountain out of a molehill. Feiglin barely has a following. Hardly anyone takes him seriously. He leads a bunch of radical kooks. No Israeli in their right mind would come anywhere near these cockamamie ideas.
That’s all well and good. But I’m not buying. History is full of examples of kooks whose ideas began by being spurned by the mainstream, until they weren’t. While this will agitate some of our friends, remember Hitler’s beer hall putsch in 1923? What did they think of him then? Crackpot, right? Threw him in jail, where he proceeded to write Mein Kampf and plan his takeover of the German state.
OK, so you don’t like that analogy. How about one closer to home? In 1967, Israel conquered the West Bank and reunited Jerusalem after the War. On Passover 1968, Rabbi Moshe Levinger held his first Passover seder in Hebron. There were no settlements then. The Greater Land of Israel was only a gleam in his eye. But every great movement begins with a small spark. And from that spark comes a terrible conflagration.
After that Seder, the messianic nationalists who founded Gush Emunim provoked a crisis. Instead of waiting for government approval, they re-established the Gush Etzion settlement which had been destroyed by the Jordanians in 1948. This had been one of the more traumatic incidents of the war in which a group of Jews had been slaughtered by the Arab army in the battle for Jerusalem. While Levinger’s re-occupation of the Etzion bloc on behalf of Israel was an enormously popular nationalist statement, it also ignited the decades of hate and mistrust that have inflamed relations with the Palestinians ever since.
Later in 1975, Gush Emunim organized the aliyah to Sebastia, where they created a new settlement, Elon Moreh. After numberous attempts were rebuffed by the IDF, the Israeli government in the form of Shimon Peres, signed an agreement legalizing the new settlement, which in turn opened the floodgates for the massive expropriations and settlement growth that followed. This was the first example of government capitulation to the settler movement and was the model the movement used in all its subsequent confrontations.
This is the history of the settler enterprise. They begin with an inch, and within a year or a decade they’ve taken not just a mile, but an entire city or nation. But they recognize that in the case of the Temple Mount they are dealing with an even more sensitive subject. One that has no national consensus as the settlement enterprise perhaps did in 1967.
National polls show that while Israeli Jews overwhelming want to rebuild the Holy Temple, only 30% are willing to see the government take active steps to do so. In other words, while most Israelis harbor vague religious hankerings to restore the glory of the Holy Temple in Jerusalem. Most realize that to do so would start a religious war the likes of which the region hasn’t seen for centuries. In fact, in this report Jordan, which is nominally responsible for the Muslim holy places in Jerusalem warns Israel not to attempt to change the status quo or risk grave consequences.
So the settlers must mount a carefully calibrated campaign to achieve their goal. It must start with small incremental steps that lead to larger ones. One of these is the call for full Jewish access to the sacred confines of the Temple Mount. To dramatize this, they’ve enlisted the willing help of their U.S. Jewish water carriers, the Zionist Organization of America. ZOA put out a bizarre press release calling for all the mainstream American Jewish groups to take up this cause of religious liberty by criticizing the Israeli government for its supposedly high-handed tactics in denying Jews access:
The Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) believes that unfettered access and freedom to pray at a holy site is a basic, universally recognized right, which certainly should be accorded to Jews in the Jewish State of Israel…Yet, Israeli police and security personnel, hoping to appease Muslim extremists including the Wakf authority on the Temple Mount, have been engaging in blatantly discriminatory and humiliating behavior toward Jewish visitors.
…The ZOA strongly urges the ADL, AJ Committee, the Orthodox Union, Emunah, AMIT, RZA and other groups to work to end bias and discrimination on the Temple Mount against identified Jews.
The group is playing the role of key interlocutor among American Jews on behalf of settler extremism. They published this press release in coordination with the flyer I mentioned above which called for a mass rally to the Mount:
…[To] purify this place of the enemies of Israel, thieves of [Holy] lands, in order to rebuild the Holy Temple on the ruins of [their] mosques
The flyer was so egregious, so incendiary that police immediately cancelled access to the site for Jews and blamed Moshe Feiglin for provoking the hysteria. As soon as Feiglin denied responsibility for the flyer, ZOA immediately took down its press release, only to republish it four days later, after the incident had blown over.
The press release and accompanying rhetoric pulls out all the guilt-inducing stops in the Jewish conscience. It accuses Israeli police, responsible for determining who and how many Jews will enter the Temple confines, with organizing “selektzias,” (the Nazi term for lining up concentration camp inmates to determine who would live and who would die) in which they line up Jews before entering the Muslim sacred grounds. Note below how the ZOA both inappropriately exploits Holocaust rhetoric and shamelessly excuses the offense at the same time:
Identified Jews are shunted to the side to wait separately in what some have come to cynically call “the selekzia,” alluding to the Nazis’ orderly process of deciding which Jews would live and which Jews would go to their demise. [While ZOA does not condone inappropriate use of Holocaust imagery, especially in matters relating to Israel, it is telling that Jews subjected to systematic abuse on the Temple Mount would even contemplate using this term.]
The ZOA claimed police were looking for “Jewish traits” in determining who could enter and who couldn’t:
Identifiably Jewish visitors to the Temple Mount are singled out for biased treatment…Remarkably, if your appearance or behavior openly shows you are a Muslim you are treated with respect [!]
All of this is meant to conjure up the Holocaust in Jewish consciousness in much the same way that settlers evacuated from Gush Katif wore orange armbands with Jewish stars that denoted they were being treated by the Israeli police and IDF the same as Jews sent to the gas chambers during World War II.
The press release also exhibits historical amnesia by erasing past incidents of Jewish and non-Jewish terror associated with the holy site contested by two major religions:
There is no security basis for targeting Jews on the Temple Mount…
Overall, this is a tremendously effective bit of political-religious theater in an Israel context. The secular government has little response to it other than invoking its own civil authority, which isn’t a very resonant concept when compared with the Holocaust. That is why the settlers have vanquished the secular authorities at every turn and all but dominated the political realm.
The current campaign for the right of Jews to freely access the Temple Mount is two-pronged. There’s a grassroots cadre who agitate on the spot by lining up and demanding physical access. Their efforts have been successful at causing serious rioting over the past few days which involved Israeli police invading the sacred confines of the mosques. This, of course, is a severe breach of the sanctity of the place, all of which the settlers want.
Israeli police official testifies before Knesset committee on Temple Mount Jewish access
The grassroots element is supported by an official political effort backed by far-right Knesset members. Members of the Interior Committee in fact, have dragged before them the senior Israeli police officer responsible for maintaining order on the Mount. They publicly excoriated him for the demeaning treatment he’s allegedly offered Jewish Temple visitors. All this serves as a pincers movement against the civil authorities. They’re beset on the one side by the activists in the street and on the other by the political leaders demanding the government take their hands off these poor Jews doing nothing worse than demanding their God-given right to visit the Holy Temple.
But given the history since 1967, we know where this will lead. The police will eventually back off. The settlers will become more provocative and brazen. Confrontations will become more violent and more frequent. Till there is some sort of defining catastrophic moment.
In 1984, the Jewish Underground attempted to foment such a crisis by bombing the Mount and destroying the mosques. Fortunately, the conspiracy was exposed and the members arrested before they could carry out their plans. Of those arrested, most were eventually pardoned, which again shows the impotence of civil authority in the face of the religious zeal of the settler movement.
We don’t know what the settlers have in mind to provoke such a crisis this time around. But the angrier they can make the Muslims in Jerusalem, the more violence they can provoke, the closer will come the Final Day of Reckoning.
Let any who dismiss this as a far-fetched fantasy beware. Such fantasies have a way of becoming not just reality, but nightmare reality in the pathological hot-house environment of the Middle East.
