An educational look at how Israeli settlers behave when occupying other people’s land.

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A new report by Human Rights Watch has slammed Israel’s treatment of Palestinian communities in the West Bank. It says Israel is using a two-tier system to promote illegal settlements, while deliberately stifling Palestinian development.

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Dr. Elias Akleh writes:

Palestinians in the Israeli occupied West Bank face waves after waves of Israeli terror campaigns throughout the year. These terror waves are committed by Israeli extremist settlers (colonizers) as well as the Israeli army. The most common attacks include violent trespassing on Palestinian properties during the night, stone throwing at civilians and their homes, physical assaults on farmers, children and women, destruction of all types of properties, burning civilian structures, crops and trees, shooting livestock, poisoning wells, and theft of crops and cutting fruit trees. The worst of these Israeli terror attacks are committed during harvest seasons, especially during olive season.

For more information, continue reading the article at Sabbah Report.

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• FOTOS ISRAELI

An article in a leading Norwegian newspaper last weekend lambasted Israel and Judaism and said Israel has lost its right to exist in its present form. Entitled “God’s chosen people,” the article by author Jostein Gaarder in Aftenposten is raising a storm in Norway. Gaarder, author of the book “Sophie’s World,” links the Israel Defense Forces’ acts in Lebanon to Jewish history and foresees the coming dismantling of the state as it exists today, with the Jews becoming refugees.

In an interview with Haaretz, Gaarder said Thursday that he was misunderstood. “As John Kennedy declared in Germany ‘I am a Berliner’ I say now ‘I am a Jew,’” he said.

The article compares Israel’s government, the Afghan Taliban regime and South African apartheid, and states, “We no longer recognize the State of Israel” and “the State of Israel in its current form is history. We call child murderers ‘child murderers,’ and will never accept that they have a divine or historic mandate excusing their outrages,” Gaarder writes.

“Shame on ethnic cleansing, shame on every terrorist strike against civilians, be it carried out by Hamas, Hezbollah or the State of Israel!”

Gaarder repeatedly refers to the role Judaism plays in Israel’s territorial aspirations, writing, “We don’t believe in the notion of God’s chosen people. We laugh at this nation’s fancies and weep over its misdeeds.”

He writes, “It is the State of Israel that fails to recognize, respect or defer to the internationally lawful Israeli state of 1948. Israel wants more; more water and more villages. To obtain this, there are those who want, with God’s assistance, a final solution to the Palestinian problem.”

The article has triggered off thousands of comments and dozens of stormy debates in the Norwegian media. It also has sparked off a debate about Gaarder’s alleged anti-Semitic tendencies and the right to criticize Israel. The Jewish journalist and music critic Mona Levin spoke out in public against Gaarder and said she was shocked by the Norwegian government’s silence. She blasted the cabinet for not denouncing what she described as “the most appalling thing I’ve read since ‘Mein Kampf.’”

“We’re dealing with an ignorant man, a hate-filled man who derides Judaism,” she said in an interview from Oslo. Levin said it was unacceptable that a man of such international repute (26 million copies of his book have been sold) could attack an entire ethnic group and that politicians would remain silent.

“This is a classic anti-Semitic manifesto, which cannot even disguise itself as criticism of Israel,” said Professor Dina Porat, head of the Stephen Roth Institute for the Study of Contemporary Anti-Semitism and Racism at Tel Aviv University.

“The writer does not address the conflict in its contemporary context but reaches back thousands of years to assert that the Jewish people have traits of cruelty that have remained unchanged and account for the current war,” she says.

Porat says that according to the European Union, denying Israel’s right to exist arguing that its existence is racist is an anti-Semitic statement.

She also finds in Gaarder’s text the use of classic anti-Semitic symbols, like infanticide.

“I’ve been head of the Institute for the Study of Contemporary Anti-Semitism for 15 years and it’s not every day that I get to read such a radical document, in terms of its content and rhetoric,” she said.

Gaarder writes, among other things, “We do not believe that Israel mourns 40 killed Lebanese children more than it has lamented for more than 3,000 years 40 years in the desert. We note that many Israelis celebrate such triumphs like they once cheered the scourges of the Lord as ‘fitting punishment’ for the people of Egypt.”

He writes that the first Zionist terrorists started operating in the days of Jesus.

Speaking to Haaretz on Tuesday, a day before he stopped talking to the media, Gaarder said he was misunderstood and emphasized that he is a friend of Israel and the Jews.

“I think what Hezbollah is doing is terrible,” he said, adding that he supports Israel’s right to exist as a national homeland for the Jews since 1948.

Gaarder said he does not question Israel’s right to exist, “but not as an apartheid state.” He said he could understand how his article could be interpreted as “anti-Jewish” and admitted that if he were to rewrite it, he would change a few things.

He is aware he has hurt the Jews in Norway, he said, adding that he would make sure the article is not translated into other languages. However, Gaarder refused to retract publicly his main theme.

Aftenposten’s political editor Harald Stanghelle said he saw no problem publishing Gaarder’s article.

“Of course I don’t agree with what he says,” he said. “But an open debate on the issue is better than a covert one.

“Gaarder’s voice is important in the Norwegian discourse and it was right to publish the article,” he said.

Meanwhile, the furor over Gaarder’s article coincides with a series of anti-Semitic incidents in Norway, including the desecration of an Oslo Synagogue and cemeteries and the assault and battery of a skullcap-wearing youngster.

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Last Update: Friday, May 11, 2007. 7:19am (AEST)
Israel planning huge Jerusalem settlement

Israel says it plans to build 20,000 new homes for Jews in a settlement in Arab East Jerusalem, angering Palestinians who want the land for a future state.

An Israeli official said that the plan foresaw three separate Jewish neighbourhoods being set up on land Israel annexed after the 1967 Middle East war in a move that has not been recognised internationally.

Some 200,000 Jews already live in the eastern part of Jerusalem among about 230,000 Palestinians who, under an agreement forged after Israel’s capture of the city, are legal residents.

Yehoshua Pollak, a deputy mayor and chairman of the Jerusalem municipality’s Planning and Construction Committee, said the proposed units would provide housing mostly for young Israeli couples.

Palestinian chief negotiator Saeb Erekat condemned the plan.

“This destroys the efforts exerted to revive the peace process. The Israeli Government must choose between settlements and peace. They can not have both,” he said.

Jerusalem’s municipality said in a statement no decisions have been made regarding the construction of the neighbourhoods.

Mr Pollak said it could take several years for the project to be ratified by municipal committees.

The construction of the homes would create a Jewish residential bloc linking Jerusalem with two major Jewish settlement blocs north and south of the city.

- Reuters

Israel published construction tenders for new homes in the largest West Bank settlement.

The Housing and Construction Ministry on Monday issued the tenders for 44 new units in Ma’aleh Adumim, drawing criticism from left-wing groups.

The U.S.-led “road map” to Israel-Palestinian peace calls for a halt to settlement expansion in the West Bank.

But Ma’aleh Adumim falls within the settlement blocs that Israel, with the tacit approval of the Bush administration, has vowed to annex under any final accord.

“The settlement is built on our land,” says Mr Zidane, referring to the Jewish settlement Bet El, whose red-roofed houses can be seen from his general store.

“I’m angry that my land has been stolen. How would you feel if someone came to your home and took your land?”

According to a report released late last year by the Israeli campaign group Peace Now, Mr Zidane is not alone.

Nearly 40% of the Jewish settlements in the West Bank are built on privately owned Palestinian land, the report states.

Peace Now accuses the government of building settlements on land that has been “effectively stolen”.

Under international law, all Israel’s settlements – home to about 430,000 Jews – in the West Bank and East Jerusalem are illegal, although Israel disputes this.

U.S. criticizes Israel over settlement plans
By BARRY SCHWEID
Associated Press
Dec. 27, 2006, 3:05PM

WASHINGTON — Israel’s plan to construct a new settlement on the West Bank drew rare criticism today from the Bush administration.

If Israel goes ahead, it would violate Israel’s obligations under the roadmap for peacemaking, a State Department spokesman said.

“The U.S. calls on Israel to meet its roadmap obligations and avoid taking steps that could be viewed as predetermining the outcome of future negotiations,” the spokesman, Gonzalo R. Gallegos, said.

Israel agreed to the roadmap in 2003. It was devised by the United States, the United Nations, the European Union and Russia in an effort to guide Israel and the Palestinians into an agreement that establishes a Palestinian state.

The Jewish settlement would be the first new one established on the West Bank in 10 years. The plan has drawn Palestinian and European expressions of concern. Other settlements have been expanded.

The Bush administration rarely criticizes Israel’s actions and has gained Israel support for establishment of a Palestinian state.

Immigration to Israel falls to 18 year low
Wed Dec 27, 2006 2:54pm ET137
By Steven Scheer

LOD, Israel (Reuters) – Immigration to Israel hit its lowest in 18 years in 2006 due to a drop in the number of Jews arriving from former Soviet states, although immigration from North America edged higher, figures showed on Wednesday.

Some 21,000 made “aliya”, the Hebrew word for immigrating to Israel, according to the Jewish Agency, which promotes immigration. The 2006 figure was the lowest since 13,000 in 1988. A total of 22,657 people moved to Israel in 2005.

The agency said it was getting harder to bring immigrants out of countries that made up the former Soviet Union, from where more than one million people moved to Israel in the 1990s. The number for 2006 was 7,300 — about 23 percent down on 2005.

“These people are no longer running away from something,” said Michael Jankelowitz, a spokesman for the Jewish Agency, explaining the decline.

The agency played down suggestions that the war with Lebanese Hezbollah guerrillas during the summer had a negative impact on immigration — which had grown recently after a sharp drop following the start of a Palestinian uprising in 2000.

218 Indian Jews immigrate to Israel
The Hindu

Tel Aviv, Nov. 30 (PTI): A fresh batch of Mizo Jews, who claim to be descendants of an ancient Jewish tribe, arrived here yesterday, taking the total number of Indian jews who have immigrated to Israel over the past week to 218.

The new immigrants from India’s northeastern states call themselves as ‘Bnei Menashe’ and have arrived here in batches since the past week. Today’s batch was the fourth to arrive here.

The Bnei Menashe claim descent from the tribe of Manaseh, one of the ten tribes exiled from the land of Israel by the Assyrians over 2,700 years ago.

“Being a Jew it is our duty to be in our Homeland and I am glad I have been able to fulfill that”, PeterZokhuma, who recently adopted a Jewish name, Peertlau’, said.

An electrical enginner, who had set up private business in Mizoram a decade back, Peertlau, waiting for a surname, said he doesn’t regret leaving all that because he has to fulfill “his forefather’s dream”.

The children, however, are a little less enthusiastic with some of them “missing their friends and worried about making new friends”.

“We are very gald that our people have been able to fulfill their dream of coming to the Promised Land after years of waiting. I hope the remaining members of the community will also be able to immigrate to Israel”, the Secretary of Bnei Menashe Council Tzvi Khaute said.

“These people will be for the time-being settled in Carmiel and Upper Nazareth in the north of Israel”, Michael Jankelowitz, a spokesman for the Israel Jewish Agency said.