The Banality of Evil

https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/2025-09-16/ty-article-opinion/.premium/the-banality-of-evil/

This picture taken from a position at Israel's border with the Gaza Strip shows smoke above destroyed buildings in the besieged Palestinian territory on September 16, 2025, amid the ongoing war between Israel and the Palestinian Hamas militant group. Credit: AFP/MENAHEM KAHANA

by Ahmad Tibi (MK)             16 September 2025       Haaretz Opinion

The Israeli public is witnessing the expulsion of women, children and elderly people, and it is maintaining silence. It is witnessing the ethnic cleansing and says nothing. It is seeing the total destruction of the Gaza Strip and doesn't speak up. It knows that 18,000 children have been killed in Gaza and remains quiet. It knows that journalists, physicians, emergency workers, educators and thousands of civilians are buried under the rubble, and says nothing. And when houses and high-rise buildings are bombed, it says nothing, often demanding more, sometimes even smiling sadistically.

The atrocities in Israel's Gaza border communities, in which 30 children and hundreds of civilians were murdered, shocked Israel's public, and justifiably so. But what the government is perpetrating in Gaza, with the support of most of the public, is not "self-defense." It is not a temporary reaction but the implementation of an old plan that had been waiting in some drawer: a plan of transfer and annihilation arising from the depths of Israel's political-defense discourse. Israel's government has become an openly Kahanist one. 

The day is not far off when Likud ministers will place a wreath at the grave of Meir Kahane. What was once considered abominable and outlawed extremism has become the core of the ruling consensus.

All those who repeated the statement that "there are no uninvolved people in Gaza" afforded justification for the killing of children and innocent people. These words were not a slip of the tongue but a Nazi statement. As soon as you remove the distinction between a combatant and a civilian, the minute you say that all Palestinians are legitimate targets, you endorse the killing of millions of people.

Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, the most influential cabinet member, a minister with no public behind him, with all opinion polls showing that he remains under the electoral threshold, does not conceal his doctrine of annihilation. Smotrich has said, written and repeatedly explained that an entire people have to disappear. 

Benjamin Netanyahu, the son of a historian, is not stopping him. On the contrary, he is giving him free rein. It's hard to decide what's worse: Has Netanyahu forgotten Jewish history, or has he decided that this time he would be on the side of the exterminators?

Anyone seeing the ongoing atrocities the Israeli army is committing day and night in the Gaza Strip – with starving children, women with missing limbs, entire neighborhoods pulverized – yet still repeats the hackneyed and ridiculous mantra about the "most moral army in the world," is a full accomplice to these war crimes.

The camera of a Reuters photographer killed in the bombing of Nasser Hospital in Khan Yunis in August.Credit: AFP

There is no morality here, only institutionalized oppression. The poet Denise Levertov writes about the repeated killing of children, whose names are forgotten and sex undetectable in the ashes, rising in flames yet not disappearing.

Denial is also a form of being an accomplice, as is repressing the truth, ignoring it or remaining silent. The person who saw the picture of a starving Palestinian child and rushed to deny it, arguing that he was sick before that, or that this was part of some campaign, is also fully complicit in the crime.

The instinctive and human response of denial and fleeing the taking of responsibility or blame for this terrible deed attests to a society that's shed all its moral boundaries. Anyone who can't see this, anyone who is not prepared to confront reality is not a partner in the efforts to stop this horror.

No less grave is the double standards being used. Anyone who called the killing of hundreds of civilians in Israel a "holocaust," hence viewing all Palestinians as Nazis, must explain why he or she is shocked at the use of these terms in describing what has been happening in Gaza for the last two years: the large-scale killing and murder, starvation and expulsion, ethnic cleansing, uprooting and extermination. 

If using these terms is allowed when talking of the other but forbidden when describing Israel's actions, this amounts to moral hypocrisy and emotional manipulation aimed at legitimizing the horror.

A woman sits with her child in Gaza City, in July. Credit: Abdel Kareem Hana/AP

International law is clear: You cannot harm civilians or punish an entire population; you cannot deliberately destroy civilian infrastructure or expel people by force. Starvation cannot be used as a means of war. All of these are being done daily in full view of the world, at the instruction of Israel's government and with the support of the Jewish-Israeli public, whether by silence or with excessive enthusiasm.

Moreover, former IDF chief of staff Herzl Halevi has admitted that the army has hit around 200,000 Palestinians in Gaza, most of them civilians. Such a declaration is not a testimony of "morality." It is clear proof of a policy aimed at deliberately and seriously harming a civilian population.

There is a courageous minority in Israel, consisting of activists, citizens, journalists, artists, people in the health and academic worlds who oppose this, refusing to be swept up in the stream. They sign petitions and demonstrate in the streets, sometimes paying a heavy personal price. But they are only a few, and they're being muzzled. The vast majority is cooperating and supporting what is taking place in Gaza. History will remember this minority and the silence of the majority.

History will not forgive. It will remember that Jewish Israeli society, despite its historical traumas, perhaps because of them, mobilized in masses and turned a blind eye when an entire people were being exterminated. History will remember the destruction, the ruin, the ethnic cleansing and the killing of children. One day it will place a mirror in front of the people who yelled "the most moral army in the world" while destroying Gaza. 

As Hannah Arendt wrote, "the sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil; evil comes from a failure to think… the banality of evil." That's the core of the matter. It's the silence of the majority, the moment at which people get used to the evil and stop thinking, opposing or refusing to be part of it.

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• As Israel kills and starves thousands in Gaza, it destroys itself in the process Iris Leal
• Israel must investigate every serious accusation of committing war crimes in Gaza Dan Meridor
• You can't be selectively moral: Why Israel's hostage protest movement ignores Palestinians Gideon Levy

'The settlers are in control': How the West Bank is being ethnically cleansed

https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/settlers-are-control-how-west-bank-being-ethnically-cleansed

Armed, funded and openly endorsed by Israel's far-right government, settlers are terrorising Palestinians with impunity

by Peter Oborne                15 May 2026            Middle East Eye

The 50km journey from Ramallah north to Nablus in the occupied West Bank used to take an hour. Israeli checkpoints now mean it can take half a day or more.

It’s Friday morning and I’m on a bus full of students and young families going to stay with relatives for the weekend.

We swing left to join Highway 60, which runs along the ancient route from Hebron in the south to Jenin and Nazareth to the north.

In Ottoman times it was known as the “route of the thieves”, with robbers lying in wait for unwary travellers. Today the thieves are Israeli settlers.

Were Palestine to become its own state, Highway 60 would become a key piece of national infrastructure. But now every hundred metres or less is an Israeli flag.

On the bus there’s a discussion about who planted the flags. All agree they weren’t there a year ago.

Beside the flags are occasional posters depicting a rabbi in a black coat, with a protruding beard under his black homburg hat.

Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson died 30 years ago, but to many settlers he is a living presence. His followers believe that all the land of historical Israel belongs to the Jews.

Settlers paste his emblem - a blue crown against a yellow background above a Hebrew word meaning messiah - in Palestinian villages and at crossroad

An Israeli soldier at an army post bearing a poster of Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson at a junction south of Nablus in 2021 (Menahem Kahana/AFP)

The rabbi’s followers believe the arrival of the messiah is imminent. 

Groups of settlers congregate along the road. Some carry machine guns. The women wear long woven dresses.

Many settlers, especially those in remote outposts, view Palestinians with hatred and contempt. 

We pass Turmus Ayya, which is under regular attack. Rampaging settlers, many armed, destroy crops, burn cars and houses, wreck agricultural machinery.

We pass close to Shilo, a religious settlement named after the ancient biblical city of Shiloh.

A young mother sitting near me on the bus shivers: “It’s the one that’s killing everybody. The head of the snake.”

All Israeli settlements in the West Bank are illegal under international law, according to a ruling by the International Court of Justice in 2024.

Many Shilo settlers are American Israelis, while many American Palestinians live in Turmus Ayya. 

Back in the United States they might be neighbours and friends. In the West Bank, the Shilo settlers are intent on driving out or killing the Palestinians and seizing their land.

We pass along the road to Beita, a village that has come under repeated murderous assault since a settlement outpost called Evyatar  was launched with the support of the radical settler movement Nachala which has received funding from organisations in the US.

I have visited Beita several times. Every Friday the youth of Beita march to protect their land. They mostly throw stones and set light to tyres. But they don’t pose any realistic danger to settlers or well-armed Israeli soldiers.

Sixteen of them had been shot dead when I last visited in September 2024, with many others injured. An American-Turkish dual national, Aysenur Ezgi Eygi, was one of the martyrs, targeted by an israeli soldier with a shot to the head.

The direct route to Nablus should pass through Huwwara, the scene of a notorious settler pogrom three years ago.

Today Huwwara is cut off by one of the ubiquitous barrier gates installed across the West Bank to enable the occupying Israeli authorities to block off towns and villages.

The bus driver swings left and up the hill. We are now close to Yitzhar, an especially violent settlement known for its motto “expel or kill”, which has been graffitied on homes and walls in Palestinian villages.

A settler website includes a photograph of a flag with Rabbi Schneerson's emblem waving above a military outpost in Yitzhar.

Under the flag the text states that it is there to remind “the residents of the Arab villages of their true destiny - to be slaves to the children of Israel”.

Two white caravans

The passenger next to me points to two white caravans parked at the top of a hill.

“They weren’t there last week. Next week they will have a small house. Then another.

“They will come down the hill. They will seize livestock. They will take the land. They are armed. If we resist, they will kill us. They will invade our houses.”

The Old Testament prophet Elijah in the Book of Kings speaks of “a little cloud no bigger than a man’s hand”.

Hard to detect in the distance, those two white caravans signal the inevitable destruction of Palestinian homes and livelihoods.

A hilltop settlement south of Jenin in April 2026 (Jaafar Ashtiyeh/AFP)

These tiny unregistered outposts are appearing all over the West Bank. According to the International Crisis Group, 94 were planted last year. They start as a handful of armed fanatics in mobile homes. Over time they grow, gain formal recognition, become permanent.

Israelis build their settlements on hilltops. Deeply rooted Palestinian villages favour gently sloping terrain on the lower slopes where they are closer to agricultural land and can make the best use of springs and natural breezes.

“The settlers are in control,” remarks a bus passenger. “They rule the West Bank now. The army does what they tell them.

“It was better when the army was in charge. They were brutal. But they had rules. They were more predictable.”

Today settlers enjoy near total impunity from the law and can rely on military support if Palestinians resist. They descend from their hilltops and do what they want. Burn. Loot. Steal. Kill.

Palestinians are the object of a vicious programme of organised ethnic cleansing.

'My mother was a Holocaust survivor, and what I saw reminded me of the events that happened against Jews in the last century'

- Tamir Pardo, former Mossad director

According to Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, Israel has driven out 59 Palestinian communities, home to more than 4,000 people, since 7 October 2023.

Many more live in daily fear.

In addition, B’Tselem reports, the Israeli army has driven more than 32,000 people from their homes in refugee camps, with many houses deliberately destroyed.

According to the United Nations, more than 1,000 Palestinians, including 200 children, have been killed by Israel during this period.

Tamir Pardo, a former director of Mossad, visited the West Bank last month. Afterwards he remarked: “My mother was a Holocaust survivor, and what I saw reminded me of the events that happened against Jews in the last century.”

He added: “What I saw today made me feel ashamed to be Jewish.”

While the new wave of ferocious settler attacks has been fuelled in part by a thirst for vengeance after the 7 October Hamas-led attacks of 2023, the fundamental explanation lies in the political pact struck between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and far-right religious parties in late 2022. 

After failing to secure a majority in the Knesset, Netanyahu entered into coalition with Itamar Ben Gvir’s Jewish Power and Bezalel Smotrich’s Religious Zionist parties.

In return for their support, Netanyahu appointed Smotrich as finance minister and awarded him control of the West Bank.

This was a gross breach of international law. Israel has been the occupying power in the West Bank since it seized the territory from Jordanian control during the 1967 Arab-Israel war.

Under international law any power must manage occupied territory through a military mechanism.

There’s a logic here: any military occupation has a duty to govern in the interests of the people it occupies, and not the occupier.

In order to hand over the West Bank to Smotrich, Netanyahu created a new body, the Settlement Administration.

Israel’s Smotrich leads settler raid into Joseph’s Tomb in the occupied West Bank

Read More »

Though located for administrative reasons inside the Ministry of Defence, this new body is overseen and controlled by Smotrich, a civilian politician.

This created a new legal and moral framework.

As Peace Now, an Israeli NGO, points out, the Settlement Administration “is a body that is committed and by law to the interests of the state of Israel and its citizens”. 

Whereas the army had (in theory at least) an over-riding duty to act in the interests of Palestinians, the Settlement Administration serves only Israeli citizens. And not just any Israeli citizens: Israeli settlers. 

Smotrich, who himself lives in a settlement and has built his career standing up for violent settler interests, has used his powers to the full.

In the almost 60 years since its occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, Israel constructed 127 settlements.

Earlier this year the Israeli cabinet approved the construction of 34 new settlements, bringing the total approved by the Netanyahu coalition to 102. 

Meanwhile scores of irregular “outposts” are being approved, with ruinous consequences for Palestinians.

Money and guns

The settlers require guns, homes, agricultural machinery, drones, new roads and off-road vehicles as they drive Palestinian off their land. This programme of ethnic cleansing does not come cheap.

Crucially, Smotrich is not just controller of the West Bank. As finance minister he has approved a substantial funding uplift in support of the settlers’ campaign.

While Netanyahu’s straightened coalition government is cutting national budgets, it pours money into settlements.

“This is daylight robbery of public funds to benefit a small group within the government’s base,” says Peace Now.

When Middle East Eye visited Peace Now executive director Lior Amihai in his Tel Aviv office he told us that Smotrich had allocated seven billion shekels ($2.4bn) to a five-year plan for settlement roads, many of which are built on Palestinian-owned land. 

That’s 1.4bn shekels a year - or 30 percent of the national roads budget.

This means that nearly a third of Israel’s intercity roads budget is being spent on just 300,000 settlers making up about three percent of the Israeli population.

Experience shows that once roads are built the settler population increases exponentially, with local Palestinians driven out.

A girl walks past Hebrew graffiti painted by settlers on the wall of a Palestinian school in the West Bank city of Nablus in April 2026 (Reuters)

While Smotrich underwrites the settler project, his coalition partner (and political soulmate) Ben Gvir arms it.

In January he approved personal gun licences in 18 illegal settlements to “enhance self-defence and increase personal security”.

Settlers, all of whom are living illegally in the West Bank, have ready access to weapons ranging from M16 assault rifles to pistols and drones. 

It is no surprise that the United Nations recorded almost 2,000 settler attacks - approximately five a day - in 2025.

Over the last three years the West Bank has become a lawless and terrifying place where not even Israelis are safe.

Three weeks after MEE interviewed him in Tel Aviv, Peace Now’s Amihai was assaulted by settlers while leading a tour of the Jordan valley for Israeli left-wing activists.

Footage of the event shows settlers hitting him before shoving him against the side of a vehicle and asking “Why did you bring Arabs here?” 

Such attacks on Israelis have become normalised.

Human rights activist Aviv Tatarsky of the peace organisation Ir Amim told MEE how settlers attacked him last month in Deir Istiya, a small village 15km south of Nablus, after he intervened when farmers were assaulted.

Tatarsky, like Amihai an Israeli citizen, told MEE that his assailants came from the ultra-orthodox Emmanuel (translation: God is with us) settlement.

“They assaulted me, beat me with a plastic hose, hit me in the face,” he said.

Tatarsky played down the attack, stressing that Palestinians endured much worse assaults on a daily basis. Nevertheless, he was forced to take a week off work.

He told MEE: “We know their names. Where they live is known. We filed a complaint to the police, but have heard nothing back.”

Even foreign media are now fair game for settlers as last July’s assault on a German TV crew and the detention of CNN journalists in March proves.

Palestinians have no way of fighting back.

“Anyone who throws stones gets shot dead,” says Jamal Juma, coordinator of the Stop the Wall campaign.

The Palestinian Authority has 70,000 soldiers at its disposal, but they never come to the aid of threatened Palestinians. Instead they are deployed to help Israel police Palestinian resistance.

One senior PA officer admits: “We are collaborators. We are under the orders of Israel. Anyone who denies this is a liar.”

As the bus approached Nablus the tension finally eased. This ancient city, built in the first century CE by the Roman emperor Vespasian, comes under settler and Israeli army assault but on nothing like the same devastating scale as other major towns like Tulkarm in the east or Jenin in the north. 

It may not be safe for much longer.

Symbol of sumud

In February, Smotrich announced a shake-up of land registration law in the West Bank which will make it easier for Israelis to claim Palestinian land.

Smotrich boasted: “We will continue to kill off the idea of a Palestinian state.”

The main effect is expected be felt in the rural areas of the West Bank because it makes it far more difficult to prove ownership of the land.

Most rural areas fall within Area C, the 60 percent of the West Bank that has remained under full Israeli control since the Oslo Accords which established the Palestinian Authority in the 1990s.

Palestinians told MEE they feared the effect that the new mechanism demanding that Palestinians are compelled to prove ancient property rights could be applied to devastate cities like Nablus.

They point to the example of Hebron where settlers have seized property in the heart of the city.

Military forces were brought in to protect them and vast areas of the old city have been cleared of Palestinians.

But the spirit of resistance remains. I witnessed this defiant endurance after I left Nablus to catch a bus to visit friends in the nearby village of Burqa. 

Like so many Palestinian villages Burqa is an ancient community that feels as if it has merged with the land that surrounds it.

At its centre stand elegant Ottoman-era buildings, including an old church. The view to the south towards Nablus is magical, with rolling hills and olive trees.

But on top of the hill above Burqa now looms Homesh, a radical settlement with a complicated history.

Established on stolen Palestinian land in 1978, the settlers were evicted in 2005 as part of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s disengagement plan.

But they never fully left. Palestinians were not given back their stolen land and settlers maintained a presence by building a yeshiva (religious school) on the site. 

Shmuel Wendy, manager of the Homesh Yeshiva, makes no secret of his ambition.

In footage that can be viewed on YouTube he recently told supporters: "The nation of Israel demands to return to occupy, to take possession and to return to our holy land… it is just about going back to a place that belongs to us."

His ambition includes the destruction of the Oslo Accords and any hope of a Palestinian state.

Settlers from Homesh descend to Burqa several times a week to terrorise Palestinians. They steal cars, sheep and agricultural equipment. Two days before my visit they had swarmed through olive trees, setting them alight.

But villagers told me that the settlers were afraid to enter the village itself.

"We have placed a sign at the entrance of our village: ‘Stay away to be safe’. When they come into the village we send a message to all the men in Burqa to come out," one of them said.

"People carry sticks. We attack. Once a week they come in and we drive them out."

We walked up the hill through olive trees towards the Homesh settlement. We found an elderly farmer clearing land so that he could plant beans.

He told us he was working his plot of land because “today is a Saturday, the Jewish holy day, and on other days we are afraid the settlers will come and kill us”.

Burqa's Handala statue was destroyed by Israeli soldiers, but they were unable to remove the feet (Supplied)

Mamoun, a retired social worker and teacher, invited MEE into his house for coffee. 

“Burqa has a long tradition of resistance,” he said.

“We are educated. We have schools in Burqa. We know what happens if we lose our land. In our DNA we have loyalty to this country.”

Mamoun, who fought in the first Intifada, proudly told MEE: “Shimon Peres came in his car to Burqa. He said that he hadn’t been attacked by any village except Burqa.”

 After coffee Mamoun took me to the memorial wall near the entrance to the village where the names of those who gave their lives for resistance are inscribed. Almost all Palestinians remember their martyrs in this way.

“This wall is like a challenge,” said Mamoun. “We are continuing our resistance to Israeli attacks.”

More than 70 names are recorded on the wall, dating back to the Arab revolt against British rule in 1936.

The first 18 martyrs on the wall died fighting the British. Ten died during the Nakba. Others during the Black September uprising of 1970, and then during the first and second intifadas.

The most recent martyr is 16-year-old Nidal Shaqnoubi. There's a gap for his name to be inscribed on the wall.

Beside the wall of martyrs there used to stand a statue of Handala, a cartoon character who has become a symbol of steadfastness (sumud) for Palestinians.

With his hands clasped and back turned, Handala refuses to face the world until Palestine is free.

Mamoun recalls: “The soldiers came here and cut down Handala because they know that the symbol reminds our villagers to be awake.”

Then he points downwards. Handala’s feet are still there. The soldiers couldn’t remove them. They remain fixed, obstinate, unyielding, immovable, stubbornly planted in Palestinian soil.

*************************************************************************************

The myth of an undivided Jerusalem is collapsing under its own weight

Binyamin Netanyahu is misguided to believe a two-state Israel-Palestine solution is possible while keeping a deeply divided city intact

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jan/08/myth-undivided-jerusalem-israel-palestine-binyamin-netanyahu

by Daniel Saideman          The Guardian:Comment is Free        8 January 2014

The US secretary of state, John Kerry, with the Israeli prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, in Jerusalem last week. Photograph: Xinhua /Landov/Barcroft Media

As John Kerry's Israeli-Palestinian peace initiative moves into a decisive stage, two Jerusalem truths are becoming crystal clear. First, either the two-state solution will also take place within Jerusalem, or there will be no two-state solution at all. Second, any attempt to reach a permanent status agreement regarding Jerusalem that ignores the already existing, deeply rooted urban realities of this bi-national and divided city is doomed to failure.

These truths were on display on 22 October 2013, when Jerusalem held mayoral elections. The incumbent mayor, Nir Barkat, an up-and-coming political star in Israel's ideological right, was re-elected. His victory was convincing: Barkat received 51.9% of the vote, in comparison with the 44.6% received by his closest rival.

Barkat, along with the Israeli prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, is a vocal champion of "Jerusalem-the-eternal-capital-of-Israel-that-will-never-be-divided". Conceding that there have long been major inequities in the level of services between East and West Jerusalem, Barkat proudly claims to have made progress in narrowing the gaps, asserting that his efforts have met with satisfaction from Palestinian residents. Citing this accomplishment, Barkat claims to represent all residents of his city, both Israeli and Palestinian, and has said: "The vast majority of the Arabs in Jerusalem prefer to be on the Israeli side. They don't want the city divided."

At first glance, the 2013 municipal election results appear to support such claims. The number of votes Barkat received from the Palestinian sector in this election was 90% higher than what he received in 2008, winning him 46.9% of votes cast by Palestinians of East Jerusalem. Receiving a percentage of the vote slightly below that which he received from the Israeli sector, Barkat was well ahead of his closest rival, who received only 19.7% of the Palestinian vote.

A more careful look at the numbers, however, tells a very different story. There are approximately 157,382 eligible voters among the Palestinians of East Jerusalem. Of these, a total of 1,101 voted in the 2013 election – meaning a Palestinian voter turnout of only 0.7%. Barkat received 46.9% of these votes – a total of 516 votes, a mere 0.3% of the total vote of all eligible Palestinian voters. In short, Barkat's assertion that he "represents" all residents of Jerusalem is without basis in fact.

Some will argue that Palestinian residents of Jerusalem were intimidated into boycotting the election. This assertion is baseless. All organs of Palestinian authority and political organising in East Jerusalem have been crushed by the government of Israel. There is simply no Palestinian capacity in East Jerusalem to organise a campaign of intimidation, or of anything else of consequence. The Palestinians didn't vote in this election, just as they have refrained from voting in previous municipal elections, because they were making a statement about their own identities: "we are Palestinian, not Israeli".

The results in Israel's national elections for the Knesset, which took place on 22 January last year, are no less illuminating. In those elections, 28.4% of eligible Palestinian voters in East Jerusalem cast a ballot, a seemingly respectable number. A more careful look, once again, tells a different story – in this case a story of formal disenfranchisement.

Out of the approximate 157,382 Palestinian residents of Jerusalem of voting age, only 10,431 actually have the right to vote in Israel's national elections (a number that is artificially high, since it includes thousands of Israeli Arab citizens who moved to Jerusalem from areas in pre-1967 Israel, rather than native Palestinian East Jerusalemites). This means that the number of East Jerusalemite Palestinians entitled to vote in national elections hovers at around 5% of the voting-age Palestinian population of the city. Only 2,965 of the East Jerusalem Palestinians – 1.9% of the Palestinian population – voted in Israel's 2013 national elections, with another 95% denied the right to vote.

This bizarre situation exists because most Palestinians in "undivided Jerusalem" are legally classified as "permanent residents", rather than citizens of Israel. As such, they do not enjoy the right to vote in national elections. An estimated 13,000 Palestinians of all ages, out of a total Palestinian population of 293,000 (37% of Jerusalem's total population), have received Israeli citizenship.

By disenfranchising Palestinians of East Jerusalem from national elections, Israel has declared unequivocally that these residents of Israel's "undivided capital" are not, in fact, part of Israel's body politic. And by overwhelmingly refraining from voting in municipal elections, even when that right exists, Palestinians of East Jerusalem are emphatically agreeing.

The results of these two recent elections reveal the fundamental political truth of contemporary Jerusalem: the only place where Jerusalem is "the undivided capital of Israel" is in the fertile imaginations of ideologues such as Netanyahu and Barkat. Nowhere else in the world is there a prime minister so utterly detached from the daily realities of a city that he claims to be his nation's "exclusive" capital; and nowhere else is there a mayor so utterly disconnected from – and in denial about – the realities of the flesh-and-blood city over which he purports to preside.

Those engaged in the current negotiations can ignore these facts only at great peril. When Netanyahu says he supports the two-state outcome, but opposes anything less than an undivided Jerusalem under sole Israeli sovereignty, he is really saying: "I reject the two-state solution".

The myth of "undivided Jerusalem" is collapsing under the weight of its own fictions. Should the Kerry initiative – the last, best hope for the two-state solution – end in failure, Jerusalem will degenerate into the epicentre of a festering conflict, the arena of recurrent rounds of convulsive violence. But should, against all odds, these talks end in agreement, a new Jerusalem, rooted in its genuine political and urban realities, will emerge: a politically divided, bi-national city, the respective capitals of Israel and Palestine – which is the sine qua non of any permanent status agreement.

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Every Jew should see the Bedouin issue as test of Israel's moral values

http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/1.535827

Why have the relocations and demolitions of Negev Bedouin homes, an issue not related to Israel's security or vexed questions such as "Who is a Jew?", aroused such strong feelings amongst Diaspora Jews activley engaged with Israel?

by Rabbi Jonathan Wittenberg        15 July 2013           Haaretz

Bedouin               Photo by Eliyahu Hershowitz

Should the Begin-Prawer plan become law, it will have an enormous effect on Israel’s Bedouin, with tens of villages destroyed and tens of thousands of people removed from their homes into poverty-stricken townships. This will be extremely painful for Israel's supporters in the Diaspora to observe.

That is why the progress of the bill through the Knesset is making such an impact well beyond the Negev, in Israel and abroad. In Britain, sixty-five rabbis from across the denominations, supporting the courageous lead of Israel’s Rabbis for Human Rights, signed a letter to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other senior ministers, asking them to re-consider their proposals. In the U.S., the Religious Action Centre of the Reform Movement, the Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association, T’ruah, the Rabbinic Call for Human Rights, and thousands of individual rabbis and Jews have written in a similar vein.

We know that, for all the daily difficulties the country encounters, this Israel is not just the stuff of dreams. Countless Israelis put into practice in their daily lives the values of justice and compassion. ‘That’s only a bubble’, someone recently told me. If so, it’s a big bubble or many bubbles. One has only to think of Israel’s extraordinary number of chesed organisations. To the outsider it can be hard to credit how many groups work across the painful divisions between Arab and Jew, Israeli and Palestinian and continue to affirm in spite of all the conflicts the core Jewish value of universal human dignity in the image of God.

Why should this issue, which does not threaten Israel’s immediate security and has no influence over the vexed questions of ‘Who is a Jew?’ with its obvious Diaspora dimensions, have aroused such strong feelings amongst Jews actively engaged with Israel?

The matter goes to the heart of how we identify with Israel, and of the nature of Israel as a society. Living abroad, rightly or wrongly, we don’t experience Israel through the everyday realities of its traffic jams, cafes, and hamsins. We identify with Israel because we are family. We identify via those hyper-sensitive antennae which quadruple our anxiety the moment we hear Israel mentioned on the news. Primarily, we identify with Israel as Jews.

To some the slogan is ‘Israel, right or wrong’. To a few it is, sadly and unjustly, ‘Israel, usually wrong’. But for most of us, in spite of all the fears and frustrations, Israel remains the country where our Jewish values are, should and shall be realized. We still hope for and believe in the Israel whose founders, less than three years after the Holocaust, presented to the world the remarkable vision of a country which "will uphold the full social and political equality of all its citizens, without distinction of religion, race, or gender; will guarantee full freedom of worship, conscience, culture and education" and live and legislate according to "the precepts of liberty, justice and peace taught by the Prophets of Israel."

We know that, for all the daily difficulties the country encounters, this Israel is not just the stuff of dreams. Countless Israelis put into practice in their daily lives the values of justice and compassion. ‘That’s only a bubble’, someone recently told me. If so, it’s a big bubble or many bubbles. One has only to think of Israel’s extraordinary number of chesed organisations. To the outsider it can be hard to credit how many groups work across the painful divisions between Arab and Jew, Israeli and Palestinian and continue to affirm in spite of all the conflicts the core Jewish value of universal human dignity in the image of God.

That is why so many of us care when Israel threatens to pass a law so deeply at odds with its own principles. "So long as Israel claims to be a Jewish state, it must act according to Jewish moral values," commented Gidon Remba, Director of the U.S.-based Campaign for Bedouin-Jewish Justice. "The way a country treats its most disadvantaged citizens defines its moral character, and so too its Jewish character as a bearer of the Jewish moral tradition."

It’s not just that Diaspora Jews are pained by the prospect of watching on their national television Israeli bulldozers flattening villages and forcing thousands of men, women and children from their homes, actions which the Begin-Prawer plan could indeed entail. The matter goes deeper than the damage that would be done to Israel’s international reputation.

It relates to a profound moral instinct that Israel’s safety depends not only on military superiority and the skill and courage of its armed forces, but is connected in some unquantifiable way to its faithfulness to the age-old Jewish values of justice and human dignity.

It connects to those historical experiences of exile and persecution which Jews carry subliminally in their souls. As Theodore Bikel, who played Tevye in countless productions of Fiddler on the Roof, said, "What hurts is the fact that the very people who are telling them [the Bedouin] to “Get out” are the descendents of the people of Anatevka. My people."

I’ve been to El Arakib, demolished fifty times, spoken with its leaders and seen footage of its destruction. It was a shocking experience. "You mustn’t believe everything the Bedouin claim", I was told. Yet Bedouin land ownership was honoured by the Ottomans and the British, and pre-State aerial photographs document extensive Bedouin agriculture. There is much misinformation. A recent poll conducted by Panelresearch showed that 70% of Israelis thought on average that the Bedouin wanted forty per cent of the Negev. In fact, they are asking for just 5.4% of the area. When told this fact most Israelis felt the Bedouin claims were reasonable.

It’s beyond dispute that the situation of Israel’s Bedouin requires legislation. Their villages can’t remain unrecognised, without the provision of electricity and hygiene services other Israelis take for granted. After all, the Bedouin are full citizens and many have traditionally served in the IDF. What the thousands of voices from abroad and within Israel are asking for is a proper partnership between Israel and the Bedouin leadership in agreeing a solution. As Rabbi Jill Jacobs of T’ruah writes, "Demolishing homes, forcing people off their land, and denying basic government services contradict the moral values…on which the State of Israel was founded."

Surely the Knesset, and the Jewish community around the world, will not allow that to happen.

Jonathan Wittenberg is a rabbi of the New North London Synagogue and has strong family, communal and charitable connections with Israel. 

 
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Drafting the blueprint for Palestinian refugees' right of return

http://www.haaretz.com/weekend/twilight-zone/1.550550

A conference last week at the Eretz Israel Museum, of all places, showed that the plans made for Palestininians to rebuild and move into the villages abandoned in 1948

by Gideon Levy and Alex Levac

Salameh Heibi at the conference this week. "here I am. I live five minutes from Maghar and I'm a refugee. Someone else lives in your place and you're a refugee."

For two days, participants in the international conference of the Zochrot organization, which took place this week at the Eretz Israel Museum in Tel Aviv, discussed how to promote the return of the Palestinian refugees, how to plan their villages that are to be rebuilt, and whether their houses will be similar to those that were destroyed.

Was it a hallucination?

There was probably no more appropriate venue than this: the Eretz Israel Museum, with vestiges of the lovely Palestinian stone houses belonging to the village of Sheikh Munis, standing among its exhibition pavilions; a place that describes itself on its official website as a “multidisciplinary museum dealing with the history and culture of the country.” Even the posters that were hung outside on the street where the museum is located spoke of “Cultural Memory” − although they were referring to the seventh Israeli Ceramics Biennale.

There was probably no less appropriate time: When the only issue on the agenda is the Iranian bomb; when the possibility of a resolution of the conflict with the Palestinians seems more distant than ever; and when the term “right of return” is far more threatening to Israelis than the term “the Iranian bomb” − this was the time and this was the place for holding the Zochrot conference, under the headline of “From Truth to Redress,” with its declared intention of promoting the return of the Palestinian refugees to their lost villages.

About 200 Israelis, Jews and Arabs, along with several guests from abroad, participated in the event. Had a passerby found himself there, he would have been persuaded to believe that the return was imminent, any day now. Someone in the lobby said, “It’s a little bizarre” − but under the radar, there is a tiny minority of Israelis, Jews and mainly Arabs, who are working seriously toward making it all happen.

For one, the Udna ‏(Our Return‏) project is in full force. There are already several groups of young Israeli Arabs, third- and fourth-generation refugees, who are not only dreaming about return but are also planning it, recreating their grandparents’ villages in their imagination and planning their reconstruction.

And, in fact, the most powerful part of this conference was the revelation of the existence of such groups − descendants of the uprooted, refugees in their own country − who already have architectural models of the villages slated to be rebuilt. Some of these people even live now among their ruins, in a quasi-underground manner. In a country where there are people who are seriously planning the construction of the Third Temple; where an outpost is established on every barren hill of the West Bank; where every furrow of land is sacred to the Jews − there is room for them, too, of course.

But the construction of the Third Temple or the establishment of innumerable illegal settlements threatens the Israelis far less than the implementation of past decisions by the High Court of Justice and Israeli governments to restore the uprooted residents of Ikrit, for example, to their land. It turns out that a group of 15 young people has been living for about two years in the village’s church; they are descendants of the original uprooted residents, Arab hilltop youth, who are determined to rebuild the village.

“Transitional justice” is the legal term for what they dream of, and they tried this week ‏(in vain‏) to pursue justice in the museum.

When Aziz al-Touri, a representative of the unrecognized Negev village of Al-Araqib, asked why Jews are allowed to move to the Negev, to kibbutzim, moshavim and isolated farms there, but the Bedouin are not allowed to live in their villages, the question of justice echoed through the museum in full force, reminding everyone that, in effect, 1948 never ended. Over the past three years the huts of Al-Araqib have been rebuilt 59 times. That, too, constitutes a return of sorts, after Israel demolished them 58 times, an unmarked Guinness record, perhaps, that few people in this country have even heard about.

The question of justice also reverberated when the homes of tens of thousands of citizens of the nascent state were destroyed in 1948 and afterward. When some of these people were forced to abandon their houses in the heat of battle, when some were promised they could return quickly. To date, no Jewish communities were built on the ruins of some of their villages − and still Israel stubbornly refuses to allow even them, and not only the refugees in the camps and the residents of the diaspora, to return to their land. Why? After all, they aren’t a threat to Israel’s “Jewish character.”

Amnon Neumann, a former fighter for the Palmach − the pre-state Jewish commando force of the Haganah − opened the second day of the Zochrot conference with a manifesto he wrote against Zionism and in favor of theone-state solution. A video clip that was produced by Zochrot and screened at the gathering brought his testimony about 1948: He took part in the occupation and expulsion campaigns in the south of the country, between Sderot and Gaza.

“In all the Arab villages in the south,” he said in the clip, “almost nobody fought. The villagers were so poor, so miserable, that they didn’t even have weapons ... The flight of these residents began when we started to clean up the routes used by those accompanying the convoys. Then we began to expel them, and in the end they fled on their own. They didn’t think they were fleeing for a long time. They didn’t think that they wouldn’t return. Nor did anyone imagine that an entire nation wouldn’t return. We began expelling them, and then we began to spread out to the sides ... We expelled them because of Zionist ideology. Plain and simple: We came to inherit the land and that’s why we didn’t bring them back ...

“I don’t want to get into these things, these aren’t things that you get into. Why? Because I did it. During that period, I didn’t see anything wrong with it. I received the same education as everyone else. I carried it out faithfully, and if they told me things that I don’t want to mention, I did them without having any doubts at all. Without thinking twice. I’ve been eating myself up for 50-60 years already, but what was done was done. It was done on orders.”

Dr. Munir Nuseibah, a lecturer and researcher in law from Al-Quds University, spoke of the right of return of the tens of thousands of Palestinians who over the years lost their right to return to the Gaza Strip, where Israel continues to control the population registry.

Amir Mashkar, a young man of 19, told about his and his friends’ outpost in the Ikrit church: “There was no longer a war, the war was over, there weren’t any confrontations, and suddenly the village disappeared. Only the church and the cemetery remained ... to this day we bury our dead in Ikrit. We return to our village only as corpses.”

Everything he and his friends try to plant or build around the church is uprooted or destroyed by the Israel Lands Administration. The land was confiscated, after all. One day, members of Mashkar’s group put down synthetic grass, imagined there was a soccer stadium there, played against the team Ahi Nazareth − and won. Ikrit the champion. “Oh, tanks and cannons, we are returning to Ikrit,” they wrote on the victory poster.

Said Salameh Heibi, 30, a mother of three with a bachelor’s degree in economics, an Israeli woman descended from the community of Maghar, who lives today in the northern town of Kabul ‏(south of Acre‏) and wears a black kerchief and keffiyeh: “They always said that the young people would forget. The young people won’t forget: Here I am. I live five minutes from Maghar and I’m a refugee. Someone else lives in your place and you’re a refugee. It’s not easy. Every time I open the window I can see the mountain that belonged to my family. I don’t aspire to return to the entire territory − others deserve something, too − but the right of return is a right, not a dream, a right that’s not up for negotiation.

“They succeeded in 1948, but we won’t forget. The generation after us won’t forget. We visit there almost every day. For a Maghari who meets another Maghari, it’s like meeting a cousin. I feel as though I was expelled. This land is ours and it caused pain to my father. I saw him crying many times because of it, every time they said: Maghar. It’s not easy. We’re the third generation and we’re saying: Enough.”

Another young man, whose family comes from Lajoun, in Wadi Ara, presented a digitized preview of his ancestral village, which he intends to rebuild: cobblestone “Dutch” streets, stylish stone houses, pergolas, promenades, water canals − a lovely village.

Michal Ran, an American doctoral student from the University of Chicago, presented her vision of return, urban planning based on research of several villages. She says that al-Ruways, a village northeast of Haifa, can be rebuilt, that nobody lives on its ruins and all its descendants live in Tamra. Ran is deliberating as to whether to build high-rises, and recommends developing green spaces and pedestrian paths.

And Aziz al-Touri, of Al-Araqib, spoke about the wheat fields that the Israel Lands Administration sprayed with poison from a plane in the late 1990s. And also about the special forces of the Israel Police, the planes, horses, bulldozers, commandos, the Border Police and members of its counter-terrorism unit − all of whom came in the middle of the night on July 27, 2010, three generations removed from 1948, and destroyed his village. Since then, he said, they repeatedly destroy, and the residents repeatedly rebuild and repeatedly return.

The vision of the pergolas and the promenades in Lajoun simply evaporated.

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