Year: 2018

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Young evangelicals waver in support for Israel

evangelicals
US evangelical Christians march in the Sukkot holiday parade in Jerusalem on Octc20, 2016. (photo: Abir Sultan / EPA)

Generational split reflects concern over Palestinians, spurring outreach by some churches and groups.

By Ian Lovett | The Wall Street Journal | Jun 3, 2018

“The New Testament, I think, would be in favor of human rights.”
— Jackie Westeren, a rising senior at the evangelical Wheaton College

Growing up in evangelical Christian churches, Caleb Fitzpatrick learned quickly to be a steadfast supporter of Israel. From a young age, Mr. Fitzpatrick said, he was taught that Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, “was a hero” and that “Christians are supposed to back Israel on everything.”

But the Tampa, FL, native, who just finished his junior year at Liberty University, an evangelical school, has become critical of Israel for what he says is its mistreatment of Palestinians.

“Human rights is a core issue to me,” Mr. Fitzpatrick, 21, said. “It’s less important to me who has dominion over the northern part of historical Israel.”

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The Arab world needs to move beyond the liberation of Palestine

A Palestinian demonstrator covers her face with the colors of the Palestinian flag during clashes with Israeli security forces following a protest on the Gaza-Israel border, Apr 6, 2018. (photo: Mohammed Abed / AFP)

Israel is going nowhere, and we in the Arab world have to deal with it. That means offering Israelis prosperity, security and friendship; all Israel needs to do is overcome their prejudices and give Palestinians their rights.

By Khalaf Al Habtoor | Haaretz | Jun 4, 2018

Israelis and Palestinians should revolt against the useless old leadership and outdated playbooks keeping them on different sides of the fence. Tear down those figurative and material walls. People power could be a game changer. The men in suits bent on consolidating power have let you down. Peace engendered by the very people who have the most to gain (and to lose) could work where all else has failed.

For the people caught in the enduring Israeli-Palestinian conflict, their own leaders and Western intermediaries have failed.

Summits, conferences, accords and a roadmap going nowhere have been a waste of time and effort. Earlier attempts at finding solutions brokered by US presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton were genuine — but were stymied. Those that followed were either fig leaves or half-hearted.

Today, there is not only “nothing on the table,” there is no table. When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced there would never be a Palestinian state on his watch — a statement he later retracted for international consumption — he meant every word. Just days ago, his government announced it would consider approving the construction of 2,000 more settler homes on the West Bank.

And, quite frankly, I am beginning to think President Donald Trump’s blueprint for peace is a figment of his imagination.

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Israel resists recognizing degrees from Al-Quds University in Jerusalem

The Al-Quds University has campuses in Jerusalem, the West Bank, and in Abu Dis, shown here, just outside of Jerusalem. (photo: Majdi Mohammed / AP)

Although medical degrees from Al-Quds receive recognition, degrees in social work and education continue to be denied.

By Nir Hasson | Haaretz | Jun 3, 2018

“In an effort to bring about the closure of the Jerusalem campus, a political directive was given not to recognize degrees granted by the main campus in Abu Dis. As a result, most Al-Quds graduates who are Israeli residents are denied the possibility of working in Israel.”
— Al-Quds University attorney Shlomo Lecker

The Social Affairs Ministry is dragging its feet on recognizing hundreds of Palestinian social workers who graduated from Al-Quds University, in order to officially avoid recognizing the university.

The Jerusalem municipality says the city has a shortage of Arabic-speaking social workers and the Al-Quds graduates could help fill the gap. But the Social Affairs Ministry denies that any shortage exists.

For years, state agencies, led by the Prime Minister’s Office, have tried to push Al-Quds out of Jerusalem. Most of the university’s facilities are actually in Abu Dis, which lies just outside Jerusalem’s municipal borders in the West Bank. But the university still maintains some facilities inside Jerusalem.

Unlike Israeli universities, Al-Quds does not fall under the auspices of Israel’s Council for Higher Education, and it operates as a foreign university. But it cannot receive Israeli recognition as a foreign university the way universities in the West Bank do, because of its location in Jerusalem, which Israel considers its capital and its sovereign territory.

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China is fed up with Israel’s negligence at construction sites

A Chinese construction worker in Tel Aviv. (photo: Tomer Appelbaum / Haaretz)

Given the wave of racism swamping Israel, it’s hard to imagine public pressure ending the careless disregard; as long as it’s not Jews, who cares that dozens of workers are killed every year?

By Editorial | Haaretz | May 31, 2018

Chinese inspectors only work on sites where Chinese citizens are employed. On the sites excluded by China, no government — certainly not Israel’s — protects the workers properly.

Only a combination of greed and racism can explain the numerous fatalities on Israeli construction sites and the indifference with which these incidents are received. On Wednesday a worker was killed on a building site in Bnei Brak operated by Yesh Lee Or Construction. The man, who was identified as Munir Salah, was the 17th person to die this year in a construction-site accident.

Three weeks ago, a worker from China died in an accident on a Shikun & Binui construction site in Jerusalem’s Har Hotzvim industrial park. He was the second Chinese building-site fatality in Israel this year. The government in Beijing, outraged over the frequent deaths of Chinese laborers working in Israel, has barred 36 Israeli building projects from employing its nationals.

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Israel’s “one of a kind” new apartheid wall to choke Gaza: A triple-layered sea barrier

Construction equipment working on an undersea barrier near Israel’s border with the Gaza Strip. (photo: Israel Defense Ministry)

Unimpeded by an international community that remains largely silent over Israeli crimes, Tel Aviv has subjected the people of Gaza to numerous novel and experimental tools of repression and weapons delivery systems.

By Elliott Gabriel | Mint Press News | May 31, 2018

“Israel has besieged, tormented, and regularly attacked the Gaza Strip. The pretexts change: they elected Hamas; they refused to be docile; they refused to recognize Israel; they fired rockets; they built tunnels to circumvent the siege; and on and on. But each pretext is a red herring, because the truth of ghettos — what happens when you imprison 1.8 million people in a hundred and forty square miles, about a third of the area of New York City, with no control of borders, almost no access to the sea for fishermen, no real way in or out, and with drones buzzing overhead night and day — is that, eventually, the ghetto will fight back. It was true in Soweto and Belfast, and it is true in Gaza.”
— Rashid Khalidi, Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University

Whatever one’s opinion may be about the ongoing Israeli dispossession of the people of Palestine and the crippling siege of the Gaza Strip, one can’t fault Tel Aviv for lacking originality.

Such unique means of choking off the Palestinians’ ability to live as normal human beings will be on full display with a new $833 million sea barrier being erected: it will include a submarine barrier, a stone wall, and a layer of barbed wire that will be surrounded by an additional fence.

Hardline Israeli Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman described the barrier as a “one of a kind in the world” measure that protects the occupation “with power and sophistication” and prevents the people of Gaza from entering Israeli-controlled territory by sea.

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UN Security Council rejects US resolution on Gaza

US Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley, center, casts the lone Security Council vote in favor of a resolution introduced by the United States blaming Hamas for the recent violence in Gaza. (photo: Mary Altaffer / AP)

UN Security Council resoundingly rejects US-drafted resolution criticizing Hamas over recent Gaza violence.

By Al Jazeera | Jun 2, 2018

“I don’t know when there was last a resolution put to the Security Council that only got one vote in favor.”
— Al Jazeera correspondent James Bays

The United States has voted against a Kuwait-drafted United Nations Security Council resolution calling for the protection of Palestinian civilians, while being the only country to back its own measure condemning Hamas for the recent violence in the Gaza Strip.

More than 120 Palestinians have been killed and thousands wounded by Israeli forces during weeks-long peaceful protests in the besieged Gaza Strip near the fence with Israel. Among the victims have been medical professionals and journalists.

Ten countries, including Russia and France, voted in favour of the Kuwait-sponsored resolution on Friday.

Four others — Britain, Poland, the Netherlands and Ethiopia — abstained, while the US, a major ally of Israel, was the only country to vote against it.

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The Palestinians have not gone away

Palestinian boys wave national flags. (photo: Hatem Moussa / AP)

Seventy years after the Nakba, Israel has not succeeded in erasing Palestine — or the Palestinians.

By Rashid Khalidi | The Nation | May 10, 2018

After seven decades of attempting to replace one people with another, Zionism faces the unsustainability of such a project in the 21st century. . . . It is losing that battle today, which is a cause for optimism for those who seek peace with justice for Palestinians and Israelis.

With the replacement of Palestine by Israel and the expulsion of most of its Arab population in 1948, it appeared that the Zionist dream had become a reality. A Jewish state had arisen, and there was no competing Palestinian state; ethnic cleansing had produced a massive demographic transformation, and the land of all those “absent” Arabs could be appropriated.

The Zionists’ hope and expectation was that the refugees would simply disappear, and even the memory that this had been an Arab-majority country for more than a millennium could be effaced. As Golda Meir put it, “There were no such thing as Palestinians. . . . They did not exist.” It seemed that the colonial-settler ideal had been realized: The natives were gone, there was plenty of space, their beautiful stone houses could be repurposed, and their “khummus” could be rebranded and mispronounced.

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What Part of bombing a kindergarten is OK?

A man holds shrapnel from mortar shells fired from the Gaza Strip that landed near a kindergarten, in a Kibbutz on the Israeli side of the Israeli-Gaza border, May 29, 2018. (photo: Amir Cohen / Reuters)

Collective punishment is immoral. Period. Whether it’s rockets or the siege, whether the targets Israelis or Gazans.

By Bradley Burston | Haaretz | May 30, 2018

Collective punishment is immoral no matter who carries it out. Us or them. It’s immoral no matter what form it takes, indiscriminate shelling or gratuitously injurious siege, terrorism or oppression. No matter the justification.

What part of bombing a kindergarten is OK?

Don’t answer right away. Take a moment.

This week, when a mortar shell fired from Gaza slammed into the yard of a border-area Israeli kindergarten just before the children and staff were to arrive, the answers to the question came fast and furious.

“When Israel is bombing and killing people in Gaza on a daily basis, what do you expect?” a twitter user wrote in response to EU envoy Emanuele Giaufret’s condemnation of the shelling.

Among other answers: The Israeli kindergarten is reinforced against attack, as opposed to the much more vulnerable construction of Gaza schools, one of which was hit by an Israeli attack later in the day. Or, the rockets and mortars fired at Israel by Hamas, the Islamic Jihad and others in Gaza are largely ineffectual weapons, as opposed to the deadly, state of the art munitions employed by Israel.

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Confessions of an Israeli traitor

A Palestinian argues with Israeli policemen during clashes in the West Bank city of Hebron, Oct 2015. (photo: Abed al Hashlamoun / EPA)

The internal discussion in Israel is more militant, threatening and intolerant than it has ever been.

By Assaf Gavron | The Washington Post | Oct 23, 2015

No matter how many soldiers we put in the West Bank, or how many houses of terrorists we blow up, or how many stone-throwers we arrest, we don’t have any sense of security; meanwhile, we have become diplomatically isolated, perceived around the world (sometimes correctly) as executioners, liars, racists. As long as the occupation lasts, we are the more powerful side, so we call the shots, and we cannot go on blaming others. For our own sake, for our sanity — we must stop now.

I was an Israel Defense Forces soldier in Gaza 27 years ago, during the first intifada. We patrolled the city and the villages and the refugee camps and encountered angry teenagers throwing stones at us. We responded with tear gas and rubber bullets.

Now those seem like the good old days.

Since then, the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians has seen stones replaced with guns and suicide bombs, then rockets and highly trained militias, and now, in the past month, kitchen knives, screwdrivers and other improvised weapons. Some of these low-tech efforts have been horrifically successful, with victims as young as 13. There is plenty to discuss about the nature and timing of the recent wave of Palestinian attacks — a desperate and humiliated answer to the election of a hostile Israeli government that emboldens extremist settlers to attack Palestinians. But as an Israeli, I am more concerned with the actions of my own society, which are getting scarier and uglier by the moment.

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Trump considering downgrading US consulate in East Jerusalem

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, left and US Ambassador David Friedman in the Old City of Jerusalem, May 21, 2017. (photo: Abir Sultan / AP)

US Ambassador to Israel David Friedman is advocating for having the embassy in Jerusalem subsume the consulate in East Jerusalem.

By Josh Lederman and Matthew Lee | Associated Press via ArkansasOnline | Jun 2, 2018

For decades, the East Jerusalem consulate has operated differently than almost every other consulate around the world. Rather than reporting to the US Embassy in Israel, it has reported directly to the State Department in Washington, giving the Palestinians an unfiltered channel to engage with the US government.

President Donald Trump is considering giving US Ambassador to Israel David Friedman more authority over the US outpost that handles Palestinian affairs, five US officials said.

Any move to downgrade the autonomy of the US Consulate General in Jerusalem — responsible for relations with the Palestinians — could have potent symbolic resonance, suggesting American recognition of Israeli control over east Jerusalem and the West Bank. And while the change might be technical and bureaucratic, it could have potentially significant policy implications.

As president, Trump has departed from traditional US insistence on a “two-state solution” for the Mideast conflict by leaving open the possibility of just one state. As his administration prepares to unveil a long-awaited peace plan, the Palestinians have all but cut off contact, enraged by Trump’s decision to move the US Embassy to Jerusalem.

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