person:mohammed abu khdeir

The Hebrew neo-Nazis -
By Gideon Levy | Aug. 20, 2017 | 4:43 AM
▻http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-1.807833

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Why Israelis are remaining silent about U.S. President Donald Trump’s comments about ’many fine people’ taking part in the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville

Israel has no moral right to judge U.S. President Donald Trump over his forgiving remarks about the neo-Nazis in his country. First, Israel wasn’t really shocked by what he said. After all, it is willing to accept anything from anyone who supports the Israeli occupation. That’s axiomatic at this point. Whether it’s a Hungarian fascist or an American neo-Nazi, as long as they support the occupation – even if they secretly hate Jews – they are considered friends of Israel and moral people.

The best of the “friends of Israel” today are fascists and evangelicals, xenophobes and Islamophobes. What’s most important is that they support the occupation. It’s only opponents of the occupation who are anti-Semites, and we will mount a special effort to combat them. We will forgive everyone else.

But there is also another reason for Israelis’ silence. It recalls the Yiddish saying about betrayal of one’s own guilt – that the thief thinks his hat is on fire. Neo-Nazis? We have a lot of our own “Made in Israel,” Hebrew equivalents of neo-Nazis, and the opposition to them in Israel is less than to neo-Nazis in the United States. A resolute counter-demonstration was organized by liberals in the face of the march in Charlottesville. What about here?

The sacred symmetry that Trump tried to create between attacker and attacked, between assailant and defender, between incitement and protest, between justice and evil – that was invented in Israel. Here we have the occupier and the occupied, a violent and at times even murderous right wing and a left wing that has never murdered, but they are deemed comparable.

Any assault by settlement thugs on Palestinian farmers on their own land is deemed a “clash.” Any Palestinian protest against the violence of the occupier is considered a “disturbance of the peace.” It’s a symmetrical brawl between the two peoples’ shepherds. After all, there are good and bad people among the settlers – just as Trump said with regard to his “alt-right.”

The Israeli alt-right is not neo-Nazi. But a thousand neo-Nazi flowers bloom on its margins that no one thinks about weeding out. Fascism in Israel has long been accepted. Neo-Nazis haven’t, but the distinction between the two is vague. If the extremist Lehava organization isn’t neo-Nazi, what is? If Beitar Jerusalem’s La Familia fan group isn’t neo-Nazi, what is? If the firebombing of the Dawabsheh family home in the West Bank village of Duma and the kidnapping and murder of Mohammed Abu Khdeir aren’t neo-Nazi acts, what are? And what about the Arabic-language highway sign near the settlement of Halamish declaring: “This area is under the control of the Jews. The entry of Arabs is forbidden and constitutes a risk to your life!”

The flag parade by Jews on Jerusalem Day is a state-sponsored neo-Nazi provocation, like the Purim rioting in Hebron. The Jewish community in Hebron is in essence neo-Nazi. Go see, judge for yourself. And the pools and Jewish communities along the way that are closed to Arabs? What will they do to any Arab who breaks the rules and sneaks into the Jewish swimming pool in Kochav Ya’ir – an Israeli community of people from the virtuous center-left, where a majority of voters support the enlightened Yesh Atid and Zionist Union parties? And what will they do in the Galilee community of Nofit if Arabs build houses there after expansion plans? After all, it’s not hard for us to imagine these people on the Zionist left objecting, even using unpleasant means, to Arabs coming into their communities.

The plan for surrender proposed by MK Bezalel Smotrich (Habayit Hayehudi) is neo-Nazi, despite all his protests. Among the three options he would provide to the Palestinians, there isn’t even one that is humane – and the third calls for their expulsion and destruction. What else do we need? And his wife’s objection to giving birth in the same room as a woman of the inferior race is also neo-Nazi.

Social media is full of frightful neo-Nazi statements – from wishing for the death of every dying Palestinian child, to similar wishes to those who tell the children’s stories. You cannot write this off as just as “a handful of deviants.” That, too, is the spirit of the times.

We cannot ignore the sentiments in this country, where there is a policy of organized and institutionalized racism against African asylum seekers. Pre-fascist sentiments are taking hold here – with manifestations of state-sponsored neo-Nazism – more than in any other Western country.

In the West, most contemptuous efforts are directed against foreigners. In Israel, they are directed mostly against the people who are native to the country. Complaining about Trump? That would already be the height of hypocrisy.

Israel Prize winners call for release of Palestinian poet Dareen Tatour
Haaretz.com | Gili Izikovich and JTA Oct 11, 2016 6:41 AM
▻http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/1.747015

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Four Israel Prize laureates are among about 170 intellectuals and cultural figures who have recently signed a petition calling for the release from custody of Israeli Arab poet Dareen Tatour.

Tuesday marks a year since she was detained amid allegations of incitement. She is currently under house arrest at her parents’ home.

The signatories, who include writer A.B. Yehoshua, poet Tuvya Ruebner, philosophy professor Avishai Margalit and artist Tzibi Geva, are also calling for pending charges against her to be dropped.

Tatour, who in the past published a book of poetry in Arabic, was arrested in a police raid on her parents’ home, where she also lived, in the village of Reineh near Nazareth. She was accused of incitement primarily over a poem that she wrote following the 2014 murder by Jews of Palestinian teenager Mohammed Abu Khdeir and the murder of three members of the Palestinian Dawabsheh family in the West Bank town of Duma last year when their home was torched, allegedly also by Jews.

The poem, written in Arabic and posted on YouTube, is called “Resist my people, resist them.” She was charged with incitement to violence and terrorism. Although not directly referring to violence, some lines of the poem allude to joining martyrs and not “succumbing to the ‘peaceful solution.’”

Khaled Barakat : Vers une nouvelle Intifada ? - Coup Pour Coup 31
▻http://www.couppourcoup31.com/2015/10/khaled-barakat-vers-une-nouvelle-intifada.html

Khaled Barakat estime qu’il est difficile d’évaluer si une troisième intifada dans le vrai sens du terme est en cours. Il a noté que ce sont surtout les jeunes à Jérusalem, en Cisjordanie et à l’intérieur de la Palestine de 1948 (Israël) qui se battent contre les occupants. Israël tente de faire de cette recrudescence une question religieuse, tout comme ils ont essayé lors de la première et de la deuxième Intifada, mais il n’y a pas de substance à cette tentative ; la grande partie des jeunes révolté ne sont pas motivés par une question religieuse ! Les tensions politiques s’accroissent depuis que les colons israéliens ont brûlé vif le jeune adolescent palestinien, Mohammed Abu Khdeir, en Juillet 2014. Ceci est une révolte contre la brutalité israélienne, contre l’occupation, contre les démolitions de maisons, contre les massacres à Gaza, etc. La révolte est particulièrement forte dans les domaines qui sont en dehors de « l’administration » de l’Autorité palestinienne (AP). L’Autorité palestinienne, dirigée par Mahmoud Abbas, cherche à calmer et à faire taire la rébellion.

La première Intifada de 1987 a été une large poussée populaire, une intifada qui a impliqué tous les secteurs de la société palestinienne : les femmes et les hommes, jeunes et vieux, les mouvements de masse des étudiants, des enseignants, des travailleurs, des paysans et ainsi de suite. Il y avait une direction, et l’ensemble de l’Intifada a été organisée, tant par les circulaires hebdomadaires et les tracts trouvés en face de sa porte la nuit, qui informaient les Palestiniens sur le programme des jours de grève des prochains jours, des jours de manifestations, des jours d’ouverture d’écoles, etc. L’Intifada a menacé le contrôle d’Israël sur ces zones, et c’est la raison des accords d’Oslo. le but du processus d’Oslo était d’arrêter l’Intifada, et il a réussi à le faire.

Une 3ème intifada ? La seule surprise est qu’il ait fallu l’attendre 10 ans | Gideon Lévy | « Middel East Eye » le 5 octobre 2015. | Pour la Palestine | Traduction par Mathieu Vigouroux pour « Arrêt sur Info » (amendée par Luc Delval)
▻http://www.pourlapalestine.be/une-3eme-intifada-la-seule-surprise-est-quil-ait-fallu-lattendre-10-

(...) Les dés sont déjà jetés car le comportement d’Israël, dans toute son insupportable arrogance et intransigeance, ne peut manquer de provoquer une nouvelle et terrible explosion.

La Cisjordanie est paisible depuis près de dix ans, au cours desquels Israël a prouvé avec persévérance aux Palestiniens que la tranquillité ne pourrait s’accompagner que d’une intensification de l’occupation, de l’expansion des colonies, d’une augmentation des démolitions de logements et des arrestations en masse — dont des milliers de soi-disant détenus administratifs qui sont jetés en prison sans procès —, sans oublier la poursuite des confiscations de terres, les incursions et arrestations complètement inutiles, ces doigts que la gâchette démange et qui provoquent des dizaines de morts chaque année, et les innombrables provocations à al-Aqsa/Mont du Temple qui froissent la susceptibilité des musulmans.[*]

Les Palestiniens doivent-ils accepter tout cela en silence ? Doivent-ils faire preuve de retenue lorsque la famille Dawabsha est brûlée vive à Duma et que personne n’est arrêté ni jugé par Israël, tandis que le ministre de la Défense Moshe Ya’alon fanfaronne en prétendant qu’Israël sait qui a commis ce crime scandaleux mais qu’il n’arrêtera pas les responsables pour préserver son réseau de renseignement ?

Quel peuple pourrait donc faire preuve de retenue face à une telle succession d’événements, à l’arrière-plan desquels se trouve toute la puissance de l’occupation, sans espoir, sans perspectives, sans issue en vue ?

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Even Gandhi would understand the Palestinians’ violence.
Gideon Levy • Haaretz • 08 Oct 2015 •
▻http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-1.679268

Through the haze of self-righteousness, media propaganda, incitement, distraction, brainwashing and victimhood of the past few days, the simple question returns in full force: Who’s right?

There are no justified arguments left in Israel’s arsenal, the kind a decent person could accept. Even Mahatma Gandhi would understand the reasons for this outburst of Palestinian violence. Even those who recoil from violence, who see it as immoral and useless, can’t help but understand how it breaks out periodically. The question is why it doesn’t break out more often.

From the question of who started it to the question of who’s to blame, the finger is rightfully pointed at Israel, at Israel alone. It’s not that the Palestinians are blameless, but the main blame lies on Israel’s shoulders. As long as Israel doesn’t shake off this blame, it has no basis for making even a scrap of a demand from the Palestinians. Everything else is false propaganda.

As veteran Palestinian activist Hanan Ashrawi wrote recently, the Palestinians are the only people on earth required to guarantee the security of the occupier, while Israel is the only country that demands protection from its victims. And how can we respond?

As Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has asked in a Haaretz interview, “How do you expect the Palestinian street to react after the burning of the teenager Mohammed Abu Khdeir, the torching of the Dawabsheh home, the settlers’ aggression and the damage to property under the eyes of the soldiers?” And what are we to answer?

To the 100 years of dispossession and 50 years of oppression we can add the past few years, marked by intolerable Israeli arrogance that’s exploding once again in our faces.

These were the years Israel thought it could do anything and pay no price. It thought the defense minister could boast he knew the identity of the Dawabsheh murderers and not arrest them, and the Palestinians would restrain themselves. It thought that nearly every week a boy or teenager could be killed by soldiers, and the Palestinians would stay quiet.

It thought military and political leaders could back the crimes and no one would be prosecuted. It thought houses could be demolished and shepherds expelled, and the Palestinians would accept it all humbly. It thought settler thugs could damage, burn and act as if Palestinian property were theirs, and the Palestinians would bow their heads.

It thought that Israeli soldiers could burst into Palestinian homes every night and terrorize, humiliate and arrest people. That hundreds could be arrested without trial. That the Shin Bet security service could resume torturing suspects with methods handed down by Satan.

It thought that hunger strikers and freed prisoners could be rearrested, often for no reason. That Israel could destroy Gaza once every two to three years and Gaza would surrender and the West Bank remain calm. That Israeli public opinion would applaud all this, with cheers at best and demands for more Palestinian blood at worst, with a thirst that’s hard to understand. And the Palestinians would forgive.

This could go on for many more years. Why? Because Israel is stronger than ever and the West is indifferent and letting it run wild as it never has. The Palestinians, meanwhile, are weak, divided, isolated and bleeding as they haven’t been since the Nakba.
So this could continue because Israel can — and the people want it to. No one will try to stop it other than international public opinion, which Israel dismisses as Jew-hatred.

And we haven’t said a word about the occupation itself and the inability to end it. We’re tired. We haven’t said a word about the injustice of 1948, which should have ended then and not resumed with even more force in 1967 and continued with no end in sight. We haven’t spoken about international law, natural justice and human morality, which can’t accept any of this in any way.

When young people kill settlers, throw firebombs at soldiers or hurl rocks at Israelis, this is the background. You need a great deal of obtuseness, ignorance, nationalism and arrogance – or all the above – to ignore this.

What does Israel’s new justice minister really think about Arabs? - Ayelet Shaked has quickly become one of the country’s most controversial and talked-about politicians. A guide to separate the fact from the f(r)iction.
| Haaretz
▻http://www.haaretz.com/news/israel/.premium-1.655941

Does Israel’s new justice minister truly believe that a good Palestinian is a dead Palestinian, as some of her detractors would argue?

For those convinced that MK Ayelet Shaked (Habayit Hayehudi) is a flaming racist and, therefore, entirely unsuitable for her new job, one particular Facebook status update from last summer is providing potent ammunition. Written on June 30, as tensions were escalating between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, it cited an article authored by the late settler leader Uri Elitzur, which included the following passage, widely interpreted as a call by Shaked to murder innocent Palestinians:

“Behind every terrorist stand dozens of men and women, without whom he could not engage in terrorism. Actors in the war are those who incite in mosques, who write the murderous curricula for schools, who give shelter, who provide vehicles, and all those who honor and give them their moral support. They are all enemy combatants, and their blood shall be on all their heads. Now this also includes the mothers of the martyrs, who send them to hell with flowers and kisses. They should follow their sons, nothing would be more just. They should go, as should the physical homes in which they raised the snakes. Otherwise, more little snakes will be raised there.”

The post was picked up around the world, with the Turkish prime minister (and now president) Recep Tayyip Erdogan – not a great fan of Israel in the best of times – famously comparing Shaked to Hitler. Shaked published this post a day before Mohammed Abu Khdeir, a Palestinian teenager from East Jerusalem, was beaten and burned to death by Jews, in retaliation for the kidnapping and murder of three Jewish teens in the West Bank. The update was then rather mysteriously deleted.

Responding to the huge backlash that ensued, Shaked explained that her words had been taken out of context and mistranslated from the Hebrew. In a column published in The Jerusalem Post on July 16, under the title “Exposing Militant Leftist Propaganda,” the young lawmaker wrote, “A call for the indiscriminate killing of children is a terrible thing. But what if the statement was that any time you kill our children, you’re exposing your own children to the same fate? Still unsettling, but rational when you consider that they purposely use their kids as human shields. It’s not a call for indiscriminate murder.”

As for mistranslations of the English version of the post, the Jerusalem Post column provides no concrete evidence. Indeed, a screenshot of the original Hebrew post taken before it was deleted shows that the English translation was, indeed, very accurate.

Following the murder of Abu Khdeir, Israel’s justice minister-designate appeared to show some remorse. In a status update on her Facebook page a few days later, she wrote that whoever killed the Palestinian teen deserved the same punishment as any other “cold-blooded” murderer of innocents: life in prison with no pardon.

Shaked, a 39-year-old mother of two, is both the only woman and only non-Orthodox member of the right-wing Habayit Hayehudi party to sit in this Knesset. She rejects assertions that she is an extremist, defining herself as “mainstream right.”

How mainstream is she? The following quotes, culled from interviews she’s given in recent years, offer some clues:

• In March 2011, terrorists brutally murdered five members of the Fogel family from the Jewish settlement of Itamar in their sleep. At the time, Shaked was running a right-wing advocacy group called My Israel (Yisrael Sheli) and had convinced relatives of the family to hand over graphic photos of the victims to be distributed to the international media. After commenting on this highly controversial PR ploy in an interview with Haaretz Magazine in June 2012, she said, “The soldiers who arrested the murderers of the Fogel family − I admire them for not shooting them in the head. I admire them.”

• In a Channel 2 interview program broadcast in January 2012, she was asked the following question: “When your husband the pilot, when he’s up in the air, do you hope he’ll be pounding the Arabs hard with bombs?” Shaked responded first with a laugh and then said, “Yes.”

• While she was running My Israel, Shaked learned that Bank Leumi was promoting the sale of a real estate company in Jerusalem to a consortium that included a Palestinian investor. Here’s how she described what ensued in an interview with Haaretz in April 2011, “In order to prevent the sale of the neighborhood to Arab hands, all members of the group [My Israel] were instructed to call senior executives at the bank and protest, and those with accounts at Bank Leumi were instructed to call their branch managers and notify them of their desire to leave the bank.” The campaign ultimately paid off.

• In an interview with the nrg website in March 2013, Shaked was asked to address the issue of Jewish sovereignty over the Temple Mount – a key flashpoint in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. “I’m not saying that now, de facto, we should get up and change the status quo. But we do need to talk about it, and we do need to allow Jews to go up there more and pray,” she said.

On most issues, Shaked does not keep her views a secret. She is, in fact, quite outspoken. She was a driving force behind the highly controversial “nation-state” bill, which puts Israel’s Jewishness above its democratic aspirations. She has lobbied incessantly for legislation that would outlaw foreign contributions to left-wing NGOs. She has railed against the government for not cracking down more forcefully on asylum seekers from Africa.

But on matters of religion and state, she tends to keep uncharacteristically mum. The reason, it would seem, is to avoid offending her party’s overwhelmingly Orthodox voters. So when Jewish Pluralism Watch, an organization founded by The Masorti Foundation for Conservative Judaism in Israel, recently surveyed Knesset members about their views on matters of religion of state, the woman poised to take control of Israel’s legal system pleaded the Fifth on the following queries:

• How do you feel about recognizing and providing equal status to all the various streams of Judaism [non-Orthodox movements]?

• Would you support legislation that allows religious services (marriage, divorce, conversion, burial, etc.) to be provided through all the various streams of Judaism [non-Orthodox movements]?

• Do you believe that equal rights for the LGBT community should be legislated? Including the possibility of marrying and setting up a family?

Le père du meurtrier présumé d’Abu Khdeir prie à la synagogue attaquée (rapport) | i24news - Voir plus loin
▻http://www.i24news.tv/fr/actu/israel/diplomatie-defense/51433-141118-le-pere-du-meurtrier-presume-d-abu-khdeir-prie-a-la-synagogue-a

Pour les médias israéliens, l’attaque de Jérusalem de mardi matin pourrait être un acte de vengeance

Le père du meurtrier présumé de l’adolescent Palestinien Mohammed Abu Khdeir qui avait été retrouvé brûlé vif dans une forêt de Jérusalem en juillet dernier, prie régulièrement à la synagogue qui a été prise pour cible par des terroristes palestiniens mardi, révèle le quotidien israélien Maariv.

Le journal avance que l’attaque meurtrière de mardi matin au cours de laquelle quatre israéliens ont été tués dans une synagogue à Jérusalem ouest, pourrait être un acte de vengeance en réaction à l’assassinat de Abu Khdeir.

Selon un autre rapport publié dans les médias israéliens, les trois suspects dans l’assassinat de l’adolescent palestinien fréquentaient également la synagogue avant leur arrestation.

Le principal suspect dans l’assassinat de Mohammed Abu Khdeir avait affirmé lundi être mentalement inapte à répondre aux accusations portées contre lui devant le tribunal.

Lors d’une brève apparition devant la Cour de district de Jérusalem, Yosef Ben-David s’est déclaré incapable de répondre à l’accusation d’assassinat en raison de son état psychologique.

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La synagogue se situe dans le quartier Har Nof à l’ouest d’AlQuds.

▻http://www.ism-france.org/analyses/Deir-Yassin-Comment-la-Palestine-est-devenue-Israel-article-4794

Deir Yassin Maintenant

Bien que le village existe toujours, le nom de Deir Yassin n’est sur aucune carte. La partie centrale du village est un hôpital pour handicapés mentaux. À l’est, c’est la zone industrielle de Givat Shaul.
Au nord, on trouve Har Hamenuchot, un cimetière Juif Orthodoxe, et à l’ouest, c’est Har Nof une colonie Juive Orthodoxe . Mais, au sud, il y a une vallée, et de l’autre côté de cette vallée, il y a le Mémorial Juif de l’Holocauste de Yad Vashem.

Abu Khdeir suspects to plead insanity | Jonathan Cook’s Blog
▻http://www.jonathan-cook.net/blog/2014-07-14/abu-khdeir-suspects-to-plead-insanity

Three Israeli suspects who have confessed to the gruesome killing of 16-year-old Mohammed Abu Khdeir, who was abducted in East Jerusalem and later burnt to death, are going to plead “temporary insanity”, according to Haaretz. Mohammed’s father guessed as much last week, when asked whether he trusted Israel’s judicial system: “I think they will say that [the murderers] were insane and give them a year or two and that’s all. (...)”

That’s not because Hussein Abu Khdeir has incredible prescience; it’s because this is how it works in Israel. Palestinians who kill Israelis are terrorists, and Israelis who kill Palestinians are either heroes, if they are doing it in an official capacity, or deeply damaged individuals on the “fringes of society”, if they act on their own. Either way, they are not meaningfully held to account.

As Hussein also implies, the three, if convicted, will probably get a lenient sentence and then pardoned when the fuss dies down in a year or two.

Implementing the master plan for East Jerusalem
By Amira Hass | Jul. 11, 2014
Haaretz
▻http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-1.604352

There is a direct connection between the murder of Mohammed Abu Khdeir on the one hand, and the Jerusalem municipality, Interior Ministry, Jerusalem police and High Court of Justice on the other. Since the occupation and annexation of East Jerusalem, these official bodies have initiated, implemented and approved deliberately discriminatory policies against its Palestinian residents. Their message is clearly heard by the inciters and has been internalized by the murderers.

A long, long time ago, in other words two or three days ago, before the new war with Gaza began, the murder of Abu Khdeir by Jews aroused condemnation and shock, including from the right-wing establishment: ministers, MKs and settlement rabbis. They managed to present it as a single, isolated incident, unrelated to anything. Although the impression is spoiled by the Facebook storm troopers who praise the murder, and the anonymous individuals who destroyed the monument built by Israelis in the Jerusalem Forest, where the boy’s body was found, what’s important is that people abroad know that Economy Minister Naftali Bennett and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu condemn the act. They are even considering declaring Abu Khdeir a terror victim.

Because what could be easier than condemning the burning of a boy when he was still alive? It’s also easy to condemn the murder because the suspects come from the social sector, the community, the accent, the political party and the place of residence that can be conveniently shrugged off. It’s not “our people.” After all, they’re not really normative like us. And the main thing, they aren’t settlers or “hilltop youth.”

Rightly it was written here about the incitement that gave rise to the murder after the report of the murder of the three yeshiva students, and about the connection to rabbinical and other incitement in recent years, and the evidence of racism among teens. Rightly there was mention of the attacks against Palestinians in the West Bank, including acts of murder, which were buried in the uncaring bureaucracy of the police and State Prosecution.

On the website “Sikha Mekomit” [the Hebrew sister site of the +972 blogsite], Haggai Matar rightly wrote about 1,384 Palestinian children and teens killed by Israel Defense Forces soldiers since 2000 (not including victims of the present assault). On average, one child has been killed every 3.7 days, compared to 127 Israeli children killed by Palestinians.

But even these contexts of Abu Khdeir’s murder are insufficient. The Israeli government committed three crimes after the occupation of East Jerusalem in 1967: It defined the Palestinians there as non-Jewish immigrants to Israel, according to the Citizenship and Entry Into Israel laws (as though they chose to live in Israel, rather than Israel being the party that “entered” their home); confiscated from them about 24,500 dunams (about 6,050 acres) of land, mainly private, which were allocated for construction for Jews only; and imposed draconian building restrictions on the Palestinians in the area it left to them.

Those who implement this policy are generations of interior ministers and officials of the ministry and the municipality, its mayors, clerks, planners and architects. And also the police and the National Insurance Institute, the enforcers, and the High Court, which approves directly or indirectly.

These crimes were the source of the other official crimes, laws and regulations, walls and restrictions, which have turned East Jerusalem into what it is today – a collection of impoverished, crowded neighborhoods, with an insufficient infrastructure, a shocking school dropout rate and few employment opportunities, cut off from the rest of the Palestinian territory. And every resident lives in fear that his permanent residence status will be revoked and he will be expelled. The bottom line: Living in constant humiliation.

Israel’s undeclared goal regarding the residents of East Jerusalem is to expel them from the city, or at least to limit their number and weaken them as a national community. Its clear message is: The Palestinians are inferior. Not human beings like us. The racist murder is an extreme but self-evident translation of the message, the policy and the goal.

How pinkwashing leaves Israel feeling squeaky clean - Opinion Israel News | Haaretz
►http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-1.603731

Now that suspected Jewish extremists have confessed to the murder of Palestinian teen Mohammed Abu Khdeir and are in police custody, it is only fair to look at the rumored scenarios that were spread before the Shoafat murder was seemingly solved – the ones speculating that the motive for the murder was an “honor killing.”

The rumor that Abu Khdeir had been murdered for being gay was spread widely over the social networks and treated as proven fact. Whatever the source of the rumors, they were disseminated over the social networks – and not just by the far right.

People posted to Facebook, with absolute certainty, that this was the motive for the murder, and that the victim was known at the Jerusalem Open House for Pride and Tolerance (an LGBT organization in Jerusalem that had supposedly released a statement about his death). The executive director of Open House had to issue a denial, stating that the boy was unknown to the organization, which, in any case, had never issued any statement about him.

Despite the denials, photographs of the boy were posted online with the caption “The Arabs killed him for being gay.”

Even if the people in custody are still defined as suspects – which means that the murder is not completely solved – it is important to remember that the fact so many people were quick to believe the gay rumors shows a wish to deny the possibility that we are also capable of murdering children out of extremist national hatred.

Yet the willingness to believe those rumors uncritically has another significance: The marking of Palestinians as barbaric and homophobic, as people who would murder their own children for being gay.

It is difficult to avoid comparing the attribution of Abu Khdeir’s murder to homophobes to the denial of homophobia after the 2009 double murder at the Bar Noar LGBT youth center in Tel Aviv.

When the police thought Hagai Felician was the perpetrator (he was indicted in July 2013 but released seven months later without charge), it attributed the murder to personal revenge, not homophobia. According to the narrative that was published at the time, Felician had received information that one of his relatives, a minor, had been seen at Bar Noar and had asked the relative what he had been doing there. The boy told him that he had indeed been there, and that he had been sodomized by a community activist and wanted to hurt him.

Many people cited this scenario (which was subsequently ruled out) as supposed evidence that the murder was not a hate crime, but an act of personal revenge.

On the other hand, most people who have experienced homophobia understood that it was a homophobic crime for two reasons: Because this narrative was one of homophobia within the family, and because indiscriminate gunfire on LGBT teenagers at Bar Noar – even had it been perpetrated by a person whose hatred had been instigated by personal motives – is not disconnected from the social constructs of heterosexism and homophobia.

The desire to deny familial and societal homophobia in the Bar Noar case, together with the desire to attribute the murder in Shoafat to homophobia, are evidence of the success of pinkwashing – the use of LGBT rights as propaganda to portray Israel as an enlightened democracy and Palestinian society as homophobic.

In one case, this ideology sought to deny homophobia as a motive in the Bar Noar murder and replace it with personal revenge. In another, it demanded that the murder of Abu Khdeir be attributed to homophobia, which would cleanse Israel – that supposedly liberal and democratic country – of the guilt of racism.

The fact that so many Israelis, some of them gay, convinced themselves and others that Abu Khdeir was murdered by his family for being gay shows how successful this propaganda has been not only abroad, but also here at home.

Is it too late to clean Israel’s education system of its racism?
By Or Kashti | Jul. 7, 2014
▻http://www.haaretz.com/news/national/.premium-1.603454

It may be difficult to accuse Education Minister Shay Piron of direct responsibility for the murder of Mohammed Abu Khdeir from Shoafat at the hands of Jews, be they youths or adults. But his responsibility is much clearer in ignoring the racist cancer infecting tens of thousands of young people who learned in schools that it is possible — and maybe even necessary — to wipe out the other.

This is malignant apathy, different only in its style from the nationalist indoctrination of Interior Minister Gideon Sa’ar. The fruits whose seeds were planted by education ministers such as Zevulun Hammer, Limor Livnat and Sa’ar are now being harvested. An entire generation is demanding a victim, but Piron excels in turning his gaze in other directions.

(...)

The problem of racism will not be solved by the Education Ministry’s “The Other is Me” program, an updated version of “Love your neighbor as yourself” seasoned with a pinch of warm, embracing New Ageism. Instead of silencing the conflicts and covering them with a thick layer of makeup, the Education Ministry would do better to deal with the fear that blunts its various educational programs for Jews and Arabs. Based on Piron’s actions so far, it may be too late to entertain such a hope.

#Israël #racisme #éducation

Jewish hate of Arabs proves: Israel must undergo cultural revolution -
Without a revolution based on humanist values, the Jewish tribe will not be worthy of its own state.
Haaretz Editorial | Jul. 7, 2014 |
▻http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-1.603451

There are no words to describe the horror allegedly done by six Jews to Mohammed Abu Khdeir of Shoafat. Although a gag order bars publication of details of the terrible murder and the identities of its alleged perpetrators, the account of Abu Khdeir’s family — according to which the boy was burned alive — would horrify any mortal. Anyone who is not satisfied with this description, can view the horror movie in which members of Israel’s Border Police are seen brutally beating Tariq Abu Khdeir, the murder victim’s 15-year-old cousin.

The Israel Police was quick to label the murderers “Jewish extremists,” meaning they aren’t part of the herd, they are outliers, “wild weeds.” This is the police’s way of trying to justify a sin, to “make the vermin kosher.” But the vermin is huge, and many-legged. It has embraced the soldiers and other young Israelis who overran the social media networks with calls for revenge and with hatred for Arabs. The vermin was welcomed by Knesset members, rabbis and public figures who demanded revenge. Nor did it skip over the prime minister, who declared “Vengeance for the blood of a small child, Satan has not yet created.”

Abu Khdeir’s murderers are not “Jewish extremists.” They are the descendants and builders of a culture of hate and vengeance that is nurtured and fertilized by the guides of “the Jewish state": Those for whom every Arab is a bitter enemy, simply because they are Arab; those who were silent at the Beitar Jerusalem games when the team’s fans shouted “death to Arabs” at Arab players; those who call for cleansing the state of its Arab minority, or at least to drive them out of the homes and cities of the Jews.

No less responsible for the murder are those who did not halt, with an iron hand, violence by Israeli soldiers against Palestinian civilians, and who failed to investigate complaints “due to lack of public interest.” The term “Jewish extremists” actually seems more appropriate for the small Jewish minority that is still horrified by these acts of violence and murder. But they too recognize, unfortunately, that they belong to a vengeful, vindictive Jewish tribe whose license to perpetrate horrors is based on the horrors that were done to it.

Prosecuting the murderers is no longer sufficient. There must be a cultural revolution in Israel. Its political leaders and military officers must recognize this injustice and right it. They must begin raising the next generation, at least, on humanist values, and foster a tolerant public discourse. Without these, the Jewish tribe will not be worthy of its own state.