Category: News

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American Jews ditch Birthright trip to join anti-occupation Hebron tour

Activists are encouraging Birthright participants to question their tour guides about Israel’s occupation of Palestine.

By Emma Fiala | Mint Press News | Jun 30, 2018

“Like a lot of you, I came on this trip to be in a community with fellow Jewish youth and to learn. I really valued a lot of the experiences I’ve had. We have not been able to do that and as a result, the five of us will be leaving as we get off the bus and will be going on a trip with Breaking the Silence to learn about the occupation from the perspectives of Palestinians and IDF soldiers.”
— Birthright participant Bethany Zaiman

Five American Jews, who were visiting Israel as part of the Birthright Israel program, ditched the trip yesterday in protest. Instead of continuing on with the trip’s planned itinerary, on the eighth day of their trip the five Americans joined Breaking the Silence, an anti-occupation army veteran’s group, on a tour of Hebron.

One of the five Americans who walked off the trip, Sophie Lasoff, 24, insisted they did not know each other prior to their trip to Israel and had not planned to join Breaking the Silence. Instead, the five “wanted to give Birthright a chance,” says Lasoff. “We didn’t want to do something like that, but we felt that it was the right thing to do.”

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I am a Palestinian woman in Israel — you don’t get to define my labels

Israeli Arabs protest in northern Israel for the rights of Palestinian refugees, Apr 2018. (photo: Ammar Awad / Reuters)

The mere fact that we live within Israel’s borders does not make us less Palestinian. We suffer from the same bitterly oppressive policies, even if our suffering is of a different nature and takes a different form.

By Maha Ighbaria | Haaretz | Jul 8, 2018

This is not the first time that I, a Palestinian Israeli, have fallen between the categories: Not Israeli enough on the one hand, as a Palestinian, and not Palestinian enough on the other, as an Israeli.

About a month ago I applied to attend a seminar for Israeli and Palestinian women to be held this summer in Germany. Two weeks later, I received an email from the organizers informing me that my application was rejected.

The reason, they explained, was that I called myself a Palestinian Israeli. The Israeli designation, I was told, was reserved solely for Jewish women and the Palestinian designation was solely for Palestinian women from the West Bank or East Jerusalem. So where do I fit in?

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Israel-Palestine resolutions spark impassioned testimony

Tarek Abuata
Tarek Abuata of the pro-Palestinian Friends of Sabeel North America testifies at a hearing on General Convention resolutions related to Israel and Palestine, July 6. (photo: David Paulsen / Episcopal News Service)

Resolutions fast-tracked for consideration at Episcopal General Convention.

By David Paulsen | Episcopal News Service | Jul 6, 2017

“It’s a family fight, and like a family fight, there are two sides.”
— Katy Dickinson, Deputy, Diocese of El Camino Real in California

“It is not a family fight when my father has been abusing my mother and raping her for 70 years.”
— Tarek Abuata, Executive Director, Friends of Sabeel North America (FOSNA)

Dozens of people representing a broad range of inter-religious voices testified July 6 at a joint hearing on resolutions related to Episcopal Church policy toward Israel and Palestine, a contentious issue at past General Conventions that this year was discussed openly and, for the most part, cordially.

Some read their prepared statements by scrolling on their smartphones or shuffling through notes on paper. Others gave testimony from memory or off the cuff, and many of the nearly 50 people who addressed the committees shared grim examples of life and death in the region, from Gaza to the West Bank.

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Israel’s stupid, ignorant and amoral betrayal of the truth on Polish involvement in the Holocaust

The former Auschwitz camp is pictured through a fence on Jan 27, 2014. (photo: Reuters)

We have accepted the mendacious official Polish narrative, and we have legitimized the campaign to harass, fine and impoverish Polish liberals, academics, journalists and simply honest people who expose Poles’ involvement in the crimes of the Holocaust.

By Yehuda Bauer | Haaretz | Jul 4, 2018

The usual conduct [in occupied Poland] was not to help Jews, but to harm them, and many Poles were involved in the persecution of Jews. Europeans’ cooperation with the Nazi death machine was widespread, of course, not only in Poland. But in other countries, scholars who uncover this can’t be penalized.

The Polish and Israeli governments have reached an agreement on an amendment to the Polish law that states that claiming that Poland as a country, or the Polish people, were responsible for crimes committed by the Nazis is a criminal offense punishable by up to three years in prison. According to the agreement, this criminal aspect was removed.

The Polish government passed the law to begin with to defend its good name against accusations that many Poles took part in the murder of Jews during the Holocaust. And who will decide on the historical facts? According to the Poles, it will be the Institute of National Remembrance, which is run by the politicians controlling the country today.

And so according to the law — even after the agreement with Israel — the government will determine what happened in the past via historians in its service, and this narrative cannot be critiqued by historians, independent researchers or others. Is this acceptable to the Israeli government?

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Yad Vashem rebukes Israeli and Polish governments over Holocaust law

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial center in Jerusalem in April. (photo: Tsafrir Abayov / Associated Press)

The venerated authority on the Holocaust rebukes the prime ministers of both Israel and Poland.

By Isabel Kershner | The New York Times | Jul 5, 2018

“I don’t know what was going on here — ignorance, stupidity or the clear amoral victory of transient interests that will remain with us as an eternal disgrace.”
— Yad Vashem historian Yehuda Bauer

Israel’s official Holocaust memorial center on Thursday issued a stinging critique of a joint statement by the Israeli and Polish prime ministers that was meant to resolve a rift between the countries over a contentious Polish law on the Holocaust.

The Polish law, which made it illegal to accuse Poland of complicity in the Holocaust, was amended last week. The two leaders — Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and his Polish counterpart, Mateusz Morawiecki — issued their statement in an effort to put the controversy over the law behind them.

But the memorial center, Yad Vashem, said the statement contained “grave errors and deceptions.”

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Netanyahu: No news but my news

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu showed pictures of clashes between Israeli forces and Palestinians during a visit in Berlin this month. (photo: Omer Messinger / EPA-EFE / Shutterstock)

A bill before the Knesset would outlaw photographing confrontations between soldiers and Palestinians.

By Gershom Gorenberg | The Washington Post | Jun 20, 2018

The core right-wing parties in Netanyahu’s coalition have waged a long, public and legislative campaign against groups whose original and primary aim is to inform Israelis about what their government is doing in the occupied territories. . . . The goal is to protect policies and politicians by limiting or distorting what voters know.

For 10 years or so, I regularly gave lectures to Israeli army units on the need for a free press in a democracy. It was my army reserve duty, in the army’s Education Corps. The qualifications for such duty, as a graduate school professor said when he told me to apply, were “higher education and a low medical profile.”

So I spoke before officers and mechanics, tank crews and pilots, and often to infantrymen serving in the West Bank. As soldiers they feel uncomfortable with journalists watching them, I explained, but as citizens they needed the media to shine light on the government’s actions — including its military operations. A subtext was that it was a dumb idea to stick your hand over a photographer’s lens. I don’t know if my civics lessons had any effect, but I was impressed that the army wanted them.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, on the other hand, thinks it’s a great idea to put the heavy hand of the law over every lens pointed at Israeli soldiers. On Sunday, a committee of cabinet ministers (half from Netanyahu’s Likud party) voted to support a bill that would outlaw photographing confrontations between soldiers and Palestinians.

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US close to releasing Mideast peace plan . . .

White House senior adviser Jared Kushner speaks during the Saban Forum in Washington in Dec 2017. (photo: Jose Luis Magana / AP)

. . . that Palestinian leadership may immediately reject.

By Anne Gearan, Karen DeYoung and Loveday Morris | The Washington Post | Jun 21, 2018

“There is no plan. Kushner and Greenblatt are trying to dictate the solution by making Jerusalem the capital of Israel, legitimizing the settlements and changing the conflict from a political one to a humanitarian one.”
— chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat

The Trump administration is close to releasing a long-awaited Middle East peace proposal that officials said would present US goals for a settlement between Israel and the Palestinians, despite the Palestinian position that President Trump cannot be an honest broker.

The proposal is likely to be released within weeks, with the aim of beginning negotiations between the parties, perhaps as early as this summer, diplomats and other officials said. It has been delayed by a months-long Palestinian boycott in protest of Trump’s policy that Jerusalem is Israel’s capital, and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas may reject the framework out of hand. . . .

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“You never told me”: Confronting American Jewish myths about Israel

An activist with IfNotNow is carried away by Israeli police during a Jerusalem Day protest, Jerusalem, May 24, 2017. (photo: JC / Activestills.org)

A group of young American Jews are challenging the the institutionalized myths they were taught about the Jewish state in classrooms, youth group trips, and summer camps.

By Emma Goldberg | +972 Magazine | Jun 19, 2018

The American Jewish community must confront the myths we’ve manufactured and institutionalized in day school classrooms, youth group trips, and summer camp celebrations of “Israel Day.” That most Jewish students can trace Israel’s borders but do not know what the Nakba or Green Line are is the sign of a serious failure. Tomorrow’s American Jewish leader deserve a better, more nuanced education.

US anti-occupation movement IfNotNow released its “Liberation Syllabus” last week. Crowd-sourced from teachers, students, journalists, and rabbis, the syllabus offers a collection of resources — from picture books to nonfiction, cookbooks to podcasts — that Jewish institutions can integrate into their curricula to offer more balanced and just lessons about the occupation.

The syllabus is part of IfNotNow’s “You Never Told Me” campaign, in which alumni of Jewish summer camps, day schools, and youth groups are calling on their institutions to change their Israel education to include honest understandings of the occupation and Palestinian narratives. Some of the resources in IfNotNow’s syllabus, for example, include Rashid Khalidi’s Palestinian Identity and Edward Said’s The Question of Palestine.

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Our outpouring of compassion will vanquish moral bankruptcy

Detainees sleep and watch television in a holding cell where hundreds of mostly Central American immigrant children are being processed and held at the U.S. Customs and Border Protection Nogales Placement Center in Nogales, AZ. (photo: Ross Franklin / AP Photo)

So many of us are deeply wounded by Trump’s immigration policies and what they reflect about our less welcoming, more calloused new national norm.

By Daniel Weiner | The Seattle Times | Jun 20, 2018

To deliberately subvert divinely inspired ideas to absolve the inhumanity of imprisoning children, or to glean political advantage to enact even more draconian measures against the most vulnerable, crosses some kind of unseen line . . . .

Many have marveled at the citing of sacred texts to support even the most heinous of thoughts and acts. Others still have struggled to understand the mind and heart that could do such damage to holy writ. And people of faith take unique exception to the mangling of words that bind them to God.

And so, when Attorney General Jeff Sessions doubled down on rooting an immigration policy of family separation in the holy justification of biblical texts, faith communities across the ideological spectrum united in opposition to a perversion that defied even our most jaded expectations for this administration’s chutzpah.

The outrage goes beyond the gall of employing a text as cover for a policy that embodies the very inverse of its meaning, or omitting the myriad expressions of compassion and welcome that represent the fullness of the Bible.

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US quits UN Human Rights Council

US Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley, with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, speaking at the Department of State in Washington, DC, on Tuesday.
(photo: Andrew Caballero-Reynolds / AFP / Getty Images)

Nikki Haley says council is “protector of human rights abusers” that targets Israel in particular and ignores atrocities elsewhere.

By Julian Borger | The Guardian | Jun 19, 2018

“The UN human rights council has played an important role in such countries as North Korea, Syria, Myanmar and South Sudan, but all Trump seems to care about is defending Israel.”
— Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch

The US is withdrawing from the United Nations human rights council, the Trump administration announced on Tuesday, calling it a “cesspool of political bias” that targets Israel in particular while ignoring atrocities in other countries.

The US ambassador to the UN, Nikki Haley, said she had traveled to the council’s headquarters in Geneva a year ago to call for reforms, to no avail.

“Regrettably it is now clear that our call for reform was not heeded,” Haley told reporters at the state department. “Human rights abusers continue to serve on, and be elected to, the council.”

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