Jewish World- - Israel News

South African Jews Vow Not Be ’Bullied’ by Calls to Cut Dual Israeli Citizenship - Jewish World News - Haaretz
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An attack on the Jewish community – that is how South African Jewish community organizations are describing proposed changes to the country’s dual-citizenship laws.
A deputy cabinet minister and senior official in the ruling African National Congress (ANC) made headlines at the weekend when he was quoted as saying that the government should look at changing current laws so as to prevent South African citizens from fighting for the Israel Defense Forces.
The South African Jewish Board of Deputies (SAJBD) and South African Zionist Federation (SAZF) condemned the comments made by Obed Bapela, who is also head of the ANC’s national executive committee’s panel on international relations. 
“He has undermined the very core value of South Africa’s democracy by proposing a change to our law purely to prevent one sector of our society, in this case, South African Jews, from having a relationship with Israel,” the SAJBD and SAZF said.
“The South African Jewish community will not be bullied or intimidated by his threats and have sought a meeting with President Jacob Zuma and will request further meetings to clarify Bapela’s statement.”
SAJBD chairwoman Mary Kluk told Haaretz that she didn’t know how many South Africans have served with the IDF in recent years.
Asked if she believed that Bapela’s views reflected those of the senior ANC leadership, she said: “No. I strongly believe that these are Bapela’s personal views and that he uses every opportunity provided to him to put them out there.”
Bapela rejected the notion that the proposed policy changes were aimed only at Israel.
In a radio interview, he said that Israel was used as simply an example, but that the government was also concerned about South Africans serving with other nations’ armies.
Several citizens had served with the American and British militaries during the invasion of Iraq, he said, and that others take part in mercenary wars and escape prosecution by adopting another country’s citizenship.
Responding to the assertion that the South African Jewish community was being singled out, Bapela said: "Not at all. We are not anti-Jewish. We are not anti-Semitic. That is why even the policy says ’the Israeli state co-existing with that of Palestine.’

Pro-Gaza, anti-Israel demonstrators in Cape Town, August 9, 2014.Reuters
“That’s recognition of Israel as an independent state and the Jewish community as citizens of the world. It’s the policies of the government of Israel we oppose and are against.”
He added, however, that if a “specific group” is sending boys to a country every year to receive military training, it was something that goes against ANC policies and would have to be looked at.
Speaking to Haaretz, SAZF President Avrom Krengel said that although the organization doesn’t keep track of how many South Africans have served in the IDF in recent years, it was definitely far less than the number who serve in the British armed forces.
“A year or two ago, the U.K. High Commissioner said that there were over 1,000 South Africans serving as British Marines,” Krengel said.
He added that while the children of South Africans who make aliyah would eventually end up in the IDF when they reached conscription age, it could not be interpreted as a case of South African Jews sending their children to Israel to be part of the army.
The fewer than 200 families who make aliyah every year come from a big cross-section of the community and are motivated to immigrate to Israel for various reasons, Krengel said.
“They are not going there to join the IDF,” he said.
He described Bapela as being part of a very vociferous anti-Israel camp in the ANC, but said his views weren’t shared by the country’s president, deputy president or senior cabinet ministers.
The mooted change to the law also drew sharp criticism from Mangosuthu Buthelezi, who for 10 years served as Minister of Home Affairs and is head of the opposition Inkatha Freedom Party.
Buthelezi said he felt frustrated by the ANC’s intention to “instruct” government to change its citizenship laws “purely on the basis that a few South Africans are also citizens of Israel, and a few among them may be receiving military training in Israel.”
Buthelezi pointed out that under current laws a citizen can only lose his or her citizenship for serving in the armed forces of a country with which South Africa is at war.
“We are not at war with Israel,” he noted.
“One can reach no other conclusion than that the ANC has moved from being ’pro-Palestine’ to being ’anti-Israeli’.”
Bapela was in the news less than two months ago for comments related to Israel.
He had harsh words for South African students who visited Israel under the auspices of the South Africa-Israel Forum, saying that they had brought the ANC into disrepute and promising to launch a probe.
At the time he accused Israel of “offering free trips and holidays to embarrass the ANC."
Bapela was also a featured speaker at a protest in March of this year against the South Africa-Israel Expo in Johannesburg.
During the BDS event, participants were heard shouting “You think this is Israel, we are going to kill you!” and “You Jews do not belong here in South Africa!”

United Electrical (UE, syndicat industriel) est le premier syndicat national étatsunien à rejoindre BDS

U.S. Industrial Union Votes to Endorse BDS
Haaretz — 30 August 2015
▻http://www.haaretz.com/jewish-world/jewish-world-news/1.673550

Je signale la fin: “The vote on Israel was prompted by an encounter with Palestinian trade unionists during the World Social Forum in Tunisia”

#Palestine #BDS #Syndicats #Etats_Unis

▻http://www.haaretz.com/jewish-world/jewish-world-news/1.665422
Un exemple de cet « Israël progressiste » tant vanté par les bureaucrates du PS ces derniers jours. Le Haaretz, soit-disant journal de gauche, fait les gros titres en relayant les « reports » du BNCVA. (Et non ça ne peut pas être une simple erreur, notamment parce que ce n’est pas la première fois)
Le BNCVA, pour ceux qui ne connaîtrait pas, c’est une officine qui ne représente pas grand-monde d’autre que Sammy Ghozlan. Ex-commissaire de police, pied-noir, sioniste pur sucre ayant déménagé en Israël, ancien délégué du CRIF, proche de l’UMP et de diverses groupuscules d’extrême-droite voire terroristes (il se vante notamment d’avoir texté plein de membres de la LDJ dans le désormais célèbre épisode de la Synagogue de Sarcelles), décoré de la Légion d’Honneur par le très anti-raciste Brice Hortefeux, se vantant d’une collaboration suivie avec le Mossad. Entre autres.

Iran deal fight splits American Jews - Jewish World News - Haaretz Daily Newspaper | Israel News
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“I am not concerned about acrimony in the Jewish community,” said Nancy Kaufman, CEO of the National Council of Jewish Women, which has 90,000 members in 70 chapters around the country. She spoke with Haaretz immediately after getting off an hour-long call with Vice President Joseph Biden, who held a phone meeting with leaders of Jewish organizations to respond to skepticism about the deal.

“When it manifests as disrespect, that’s when I’m concerned. You can say anything as long as it’s not telling someone that they are anti-Israel or a self-hating Jew. That kind of rhetoric has increased dramatically, to the detriment of our community,” Kaufman explained.

[...]

“I don’t know if the person in the street is all that focused on the question,” said Cohen, a sociologist and scholar of Jewish social policy at the Reform movement’s Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion. “My suspicion is that elites always overestimate interest in these inside-the-beltway questions.”

Meet the Jewish billionaires shaping the 2016 presidential election
▻http://www.haaretz.com/jewish-world/jewish-world-features/1.658520

A quick look at the list of top political donors for 2014 reveals a striking fact: At least a third of the most generous 50 mega-givers were Jewish. In fact, contributions from Jewish billionaires and multi-millionaires dominated the top 10 spots on the list.

Obama: Like Israelis, Palestinians have right to be free on their land | By Haaretz| May 22, 2015
▻http://www.haaretz.com/jewish-world/jewish-world-news/1.657739

In a speech at Adas Israel synagogue in Washington, president reaffirms ’unshakeable’ commitment to Israel’s security, but says two-state solution is the way to safeguard it.
(...)

Obama’s visit comes a day after he gave an extensive interview to The Atlantic, in which he talked about the new Israeli government, his relations with the American Jewish community and U.S. support for Israel.

Obama told Jeffrey Goldberg that despite the confrontations with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over the past number of years, most of the American Jewish community still voted for him in the 2012 presidential election.

“What I also think is that there has been a very concerted effort on the part of some political forces to equate being pro-Israel, and hence being supportive of the Jewish people, with a rubber stamp on a particular set of policies coming out of the Israeli government,” he said. “So if you are questioning settlement policy, that indicates you’re anti-Israeli, or that indicates you’re anti-Jewish. If you express compassion or empathy towards Palestinian youth, who are dealing with checkpoints or restrictions on their ability to travel, then you are suspect in terms of your support of Israel. If you are willing to get into public disagreements with the Israeli government, then the notion is that you are being anti-Israel, and by extension, anti-Jewish. I completely reject that.”

Natalie Portman is ’very disappointed’ with Netanyahu’s re-election -
Hollywood actress, who supported anti-Netanyahu group in the last Israeli elections, says she finds Netanyahu’s ’racist comments horrific.’
By Nirit Anderman | May 7, 2015
Jewish World News - Israel News | Haaretz
▻http://www.haaretz.com/jewish-world/jewish-world-news/1.655294

U.K. funding of Palestinian play angers local Jewish community - Jewish World - Israel News | Haaretz
▻http://www.haaretz.com/jewish-world/1.654750

The funding of a Palestinian play by the United Kingdom’s Arts Council England, a taxpayer-funded body, has aroused the ire of the British Jewish community the Mail Online reported.

“The Siege,” which recounts the story of how armed Hamas fighters hid out in Bethlehem’s Church of the Nativity for 39 days in 2002, is due to begin touring the U.K. in mid-May.

Arts Council England has donated $22,700 (88,000 shekels) to the staging of the play in the U.K. Defending its decision to fund the play, the council said in a statement that it was not the body’s role “to censor the artists’ message”.

The Board of Deputies of British Jews, the representative body of British Jewry, expressed concerns over the funding in a statement on Saturday. “We would be extremely concerned if British taxpayers were funding a play that promoted terrorism as positive and legitimate,” the board said.

The play’s British co-director Zoe Lafferty responded to the criticism by saying that the production “is pro-human rights, pro-justice and pro-equality. Our work is trying to talk about the truth of what’s happening on the ground and counter the propaganda that’s constantly being directed at the Palestinians.”

Eight people were killed during the course of the 39-day siege of the church, which ended with the fighters agreeing to be exiled in Europe without first seeing their families. One man was killed by a sniper while tolling the church bell, and seven others died inside the church from sniper fire.

Put on by the Jenin-based Freedom Theatre, the production has already received cash from the British Council and the EU for performances in the West Bank.

HBO buys rights to film about Holocaust documentary maker Claude Lanzmann - Jewish World News - Israel News | Haaretz
▻http://www.haaretz.com/jewish-world/jewish-world-news/1.654381

HBO Documentary Films has bought the American television rights to “Claude Lanzmann: Spectres of the Shoah,” according to the Hollywood Reporter. The film is a portrait of the French director who is best known for his monumental nine and a half hour 1985 Holocaust documentary “Shoah.”

The new movie portrait of Lanzmann, which was produced, directed and written by Toronto-based director Adam Benzine, is to air on HBO next year, possibly on Holocaust Remembrance Day, the Reporter said. It traces what the Reporter described as Lanzmann’s “harrowing artistic journey” between 1973 and 1985 in making “Shoah.”

French police investigating attack on Jewish man walking out of synagogue - Jewish World News - Israel News | Haaretz
▻http://www.haaretz.com/jewish-world/jewish-world-news/1.653811

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French police are investigating an attack on a 53-year-old Jewish man on his way out of synagogue Saturday afternoon, the French edition of The Local reported Monday.

One of three assailants pulled out a knife and the others urged him to stab the Jewish man, saying, “Go on, stab him, Jew,” the victim of the attack told Le Parisien. The incident took place as the man was leaving the Saint-Ouen synagogue in the Seine-Saint-Denis area, north of Paris.

The victim, who owns a supermarket and has lived in the area for 15 years, told the French media the first assailant went for the knife after repeatedly calling him a “dirty Jew” and spitting at him.

When the Jewish man asked him to stop, the assailant head-butted him, he told a reporter. “I was bleeding everywhere,” he said. Then two others joined the initial assailant.

“They beat me up,” he said. “They kicked me in the leg, back, and that’s when the first attacker took out a knife.”

The Jewish man said he jumped on the knife-wielding assailant to compel him to drop the weapon. The assailants fled after kicking the man in the stomach, The Local reported.

Last year the number of anti-Semitic acts recorded on French soil doubled compared with the previous year, to 851, according to a report by the French Interior Ministry and France’s Jewish Community Security Service, known as SPCJ.

Anti-Semitic attacks in France were in the international spotlight after four people were killed in a January 9 attack on the Paris kosher supermarket Hyper Cacher, two days after 12 people were killed in an attack on the Charlie Hebdo newsroom.

Israel divestment efforts increasing on U.S. campuses
By Debra Nussbaum Cohen | Apr. 20, 2015 | Haaretz

▻http://www.haaretz.com/jewish-world/jewish-world-news/.premium-1.652673

NEW YORK – The debate went on for close to nine hours, before the student government at the University of California, Santa Barbara, narrowly voted down an Israel divestment resolution last week.

In the end, it lost by a single vote. It was the third year in a row that this particular campus in the UC system – which has more than 18,000 undergraduate students, including about 2,500 Jews – narrowly defeated divestment.

Princeton University undergrads will vote on a similar motion this week, in a referendum capping months of activity from both sides on what is usually a nonpolitical campus.

While there has been no precipitous jump in the number of divestment resolutions, such efforts are gradually rolling out from coast to coast.

They are presently being considered at the University of New Mexico; Bowdoin College in Maine; Wisconsin’s Marquette University; Ohio State University; and the University of Texas at Austin.

They have already passed at colleges including Loyola, Wesleyan, Oberlin, DePaul University, Evergreen, University of Toledo, Stanford, and the University of California campuses at Berkeley, Davis, Irvine, Los Angeles, Riverside and San Diego. The February vote at UC Davis was overturned by another campus body, which said it was not within the purview of the student government to approve such a measure.

New York University professors and students recently published an open letter and are gathering signatures for a similar effort.

At some campuses, the divestment question has crept into other areas. Molly Horwitz, a Jewish candidate running for election to Stanford University’s student government, was questioned about having dual loyalties. Horwitz reportedly scrubbed her Facebook page of evidence indicating support for Israel before she began collecting signatures for her campaign.

At UCLA, a candidate for the student council judicial board was initially disqualified from running, and accused by the student council of having a conflict of interest because of her affiliation with Hillel and a Jewish sorority.

At Princeton, the undergraduate student referendum – part of a student government election ballot open to the university’s 5,200 undergraduates this week – seeks to impact the policy of the Princeton University Investment Company (Princo), which manages a $19 billion endowment. That is the third-largest endowment of any university in the United States.

The referendum calls on Princo to withdraw money from multinational corporations “that maintain the infrastructure of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank,” are involved with Israeli and Egyptian “collective punishment of Palestinian civilians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and facilitate state repression against Palestinians by Israeli, Egyptian and Palestinian Authority security forces.”

There is a high bar to meet, said the chair of the committee that functions as the endowment managers’ gatekeeper. That group, called Princeton’s Resources Committee, earlier this year rejected resolutions calling for Israel divestment. “The committee was correct to do so,” Princeton President Christopher L. Eisgruber told Haaretz.

Tensions about the referendum have grown in recent days on the bucolic New Jersey campus.

Kyle Dhillon, a junior from Atlanta who is involved with both the Princeton Committee on Palestine and Princeton Divests Coalition, said their posters around campus were repeatedly torn down last week. Table tents left in the residential dining halls also mysteriously disappeared. “Typically, we don’t have to worry about people limiting free speech here,” said Dhillon. The divestment coalition held a “teach-in” on April 8, at which Cornel West, a Princeton professor emeritus, spoke, as well as Max Blumenthal, who last year called the European Union “an accomplice to the preexisting ethnically cleansing Jewish state.”

Over 45,000 Holocaust survivors living in poverty in Israel - Israel News, Ynetnews
▻http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4646867,00.html

Approximately 189,000 Holocaust survivors are living in Israel in 2015. Many of whom are below the poverty line, suffer from health problems, often feel lonely and believe that future generations will forget the Holocaust after they are gone, a report released Monday showed.
 
 
A day before Holocaust Remembrance Day, the Foundation for the Benefit of Holocaust Victims in Israel (FBHV) has published its annual report, which found that despite a NIS 1 billion plan implemented by the government, about 45,000 of survivors live below the poverty line - 30 percent of all Holocaust survivors living in Israel.
 
According to the report, some 78 percent of survivors suffer from health problems, 45 percent often feel lonely and 46 percent believe that their children and grandchildren will forget the Holocaust after they are gone.

EasyJet Zionism in the 21st century - Jewish World Features - Israel News | Haaretz
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SodaStream changes labeling to ’Made in the West Bank’ - Jewish World News - Israel News | Haaretz
▻http://www.haaretz.com/jewish-world/jewish-world-news/1.650579
By Haaretz | Apr. 5, 2015

SodaStream, the Israeli manufacturer of home carbonation systems, has changed its product labeling to “Made in the West Bank” following complaints by human rights activists in the Unites States.

The company’s main production facility is in the industrial zone of Ma’aleh Adumim, an Israeli settlement in the West Bank, where it employs Palestinian workers.

The facility’s location has made SodaStream a target of the global anti-Israel boycott, divestment and sanctions movement and put the company at odds with European policies blocking the import of products made in West Bank settlements.

In May 2014, a coalition of human rights activists in the U.S. state of Oregon complained to the Oregon Department of Justice that the company was violating the state’s Fair Trade Practices Act by labeling its products as “Made in Israel.”

The complaint was forwarded to SodaStream, which replied by saying that the labels would be changed to “Made in the West Bank” with immediate effect. The new labels have now begun appearing on SodaStream boxes in Oregon retail outlets, according to the International Middle East Media Center.

Oregon’s Fair Trade Practices Act is a consumer protection law that makes false representations and false advertising of a consumer product illegal. The Act also holds retail stores responsible if they knowingly sell a product that is “misrepresented.”

The coalition has also filed an official complaint with the U.S. Customs & Border Control Agency, on the grounds that the false labeling also violates U.S. Customs regulations. That complaint, filed in November 2014, is presently under investigation.

“This appears to be the first time that an Israeli settlement manufacturer has corrected its labels for products sold in the United States,” said activist Rod Such of the PDX Boycott Occupation Soda! Coalition based in Portland, Oregon.

"Many people of conscience refuse to purchase products made in Israel’s illegal settlements on occupied Palestinian land in the West Bank, but in the case of SodaStream they were deceived by false labeling that claimed the products were produced within Israel’s internationally recognized borders.”

SodaStream announced last October that it would be closing its Ma’aleh Adumim plant in 2015 as part of a plan to boost growth.

“We are working with the Israeli government to secure work permits for our Palestinian employees,” CEO Daniel Birnbaum said.

SodaStream’s revenues and profit have plummeted recently due to weak sales of its home soda machines in the U.S. The drop has been attributed to a move among American consumers to healthier drinks, such as juices and teas.

#BDS

J Street’s Ben-Ami tells Netanyahu: You don’t speak for us - Jewish World News - Israel News | Haaretz
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Ben-Ami, for his part, delivered a fiery address to an appreciative audience, telling the prime minister: "We say to Netanyahu, who claims to speak for all the Jews of the world - you do not speak for us.” He said that J Street is not only feeling disappointment at the election results - “It’s anger and it’s pain that we’re feeling at having watched the Prime Minister of Israel use fear mongering and scare tactics tinged with racism to claw his way to 23 per cent of the vote.”

Ben-Ami also blasted Netanyahu, Israeli ambassador Ron Dermer and House Speaker John Boehner for the “partisan gamesmanship” that enabled Netanyahu’s speech to Congress – and damaged U.S.-Israeli relations, according to Ben Ami.

Ben-Ami told his audience “being pro-Israel doesn’t mean you have to be anti-Palestinian.” He said that J Street would urge U.S. leaders to declare the settlements illegal, to publish a set of parameters for a two-state solution and to support a United Nations Security Council resolution that would provide guidelines for reaching a final settlement.

Jacobs, for his part, blasted the Jewish establishment’s rejection of J Street, saying that he was “stunned at the vituperative criticism of some who seem to imply that the greatest threat facing Israel and the Jewish people is not Iran, Hamas, or Hezbollah’s missiles but rather this pro-peace, pro-Israel group known as J Street.”

Netanyahu election may increase American Jewish alienation from Israel, leaders here warn
Reform movement head Rick Jacobs: ‘This is going to be a challenging time.’
By Debra Nussbaum Cohen | Mar. 20, 2015 | Haaretz
▻http://www.haaretz.com/jewish-world/jewish-world-news/.premium-1.648028

NEW YORK – Several national leaders of the American Jewish community this week were openly critical of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s successful 11th hour pitch to his conservative base, in which he decried Arab citizens of Israel voting, and his pledge not to allow a Palestinian state.

While Netanyahu qualified his statement significantly in a U.S. television interview with Andrea Mitchell two days after the election, saying that there can be no Palestinian state right now, but that such an outcome is not permanently off the table, many in the U.S. remained worried.

They are concerned about Israel’s increasing isolation on the world stage and the Obama administration’s apparent disenchantment with Netanyahu, who openly flaunted the American leader’s wishes when he spoke directly to Congress just two weeks before Israel’s March 17th election.

They are also worried about an ever-widening breach between most American Jews and their sense of connection to Israel.

“It would be hard to not be disheartened, distressed and frankly stunned by the video and the way in which it portrayed citizens of Israel doing what we pray all citizens do, which is voting,” Rabbi Rick Jacobs, president of the Union for Reform Judaism, America’s largest Jewish denomination, told Haaretz in an interview. “To rouse the base by saying ‘they’re coming in droves’ is anti-democratic and such a sad commentary on how Arab citizens of Israel are viewed,” he said.

Netanyahou approché pour jouer dans House of Cards. Incroyable mais ça a l’air vrai

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Netanyahu tapped for guest role in fourth season of ’House of Cards’ - Jewish World - Israel News | Haaretz
▻http://www.haaretz.com/jewish-world/1.645323

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to a joint session of both houses of the U.S. Congress was, Haaretz can reveal here exclusively, more than an opportunity to warn American lawmakers about the dangers of a “bad deal” over the Iranian nuclear program.

According to sources close to Netflix, the Israeli prime minister was actually auditioning for a role in the fourth season of the hit TV show ’House of Cards.’

According to the show’s producers, Netanyahu will play the Republican presidential challenger to President Francis Underwood, the Machiavellian lead character played by Kevin Spacey.

Although the script for the fourth season of the show has not yet been written – the third season was released on Netflix earlier this month – it is believed that Netanyahu’s character will be based on an amalgam between Mitt Romney, who unsuccessfully challenged President Barack Obama in 2012, and Martin Van Buren.

James Foley, who directed several episodes of the show, told Haaretz that he first contacted Netanyahu’s agent after seeing the Israeli prime minister address the General Assembly of the United Nations in 2013.

“The moment I saw him on that stage,” Foley said, “I knew I wanted him in my show. The way he managed to speak for half an hour without cracking up was incredible. He’s a born actor.”

Netanyahu reportedly turned down an offer of a similar guest star role in ’Game of Thrones,’ telling producers that, “It’s just too close to reality.”

Netanyahu would not be the first Israeli leader to cross over into the world of entertainment. David Ben-Gurion famously appeared on the 1965 cover of GQ and Shimon Peres has made cameo appearances in every James Bond movie since ’The Man with the Golden Gun.’

The Prime Minister’s Office declined to comment on this article, saying it is clearly a Purim spoof.

More than 1,000 Muslims form ’peace ring’ around Oslo synagogue - Norway’s Muslims offer symbolic protection for the city’s Jewish community while condemning synagogue attack in neighboring Denmark last weekend.
By Balazs Koranyi Feb. 21, 2015 Haaretz
▻http://www.haaretz.com/jewish-world/jewish-world-news/1.643521

REUTERS - More than 1,000 Muslims formed a human shield around Oslo’s synagogue on Saturday, offering symbolic protection for the city’s Jewish community and condemning an attack on a synagogue in neighboring Denmark last weekend.

Chanting “No to anti-Semitism, no to Islamophobia,” Norway’s Muslims formed what they called a ring of peace a week after Omar Abdel Hamid El-Hussein, a Danish-born son of Palestinian immigrants, killed two people at a synagogue and an event promoting free speech in Copenhagen last weekend.

“Humanity is one and we are here to demonstrate that,” Zeeshan Abdullah, one of the protest’s organizers told a crowd of Muslim immigrants and ethnic Norwegians who filled the small street around Oslo’s only functioning synagogue.

“There are many more peace mongers than warmongers,” Abdullah said as organizers and Jewish community leaders stood side by side. “There’s still hope for humanity, for peace and love, across religious differences and backgrounds.”

Norway’s Jewish community is one of Europe’s smallest, numbering around 1000, and the Muslim population, which has been growing steadily through immigration, is 150,000 to 200,000. Norway has a population of about 5.2 million.

The debate over immigration in the country came to the forefront in 2011 when Anders Behring Breivik killed 77 people and accused the government and the then-ruling Labour party of facilitating Muslim immigration and adulterating pure Norwegian blood.

Support for immigration has been rising steadily since those attacks, however, and an opinion poll late last year found that 77 percent of people thought immigrants made an important contribution to Norwegian society.

When a black German woman discovered her grandfather was the Nazi villain of ’Schindler’s List’ - Jewish World Features - Israel News | Haaretz

▻http://www.haaretz.com/jewish-world/jewish-world-features/1.640997

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In the mid-1990s, near the end of the period during which she lived in Israel, Jennifer Teege watched Steven Spielberg’s film “Schindler’s List.” She hadn’t seen the film in a movie theater, and watched it in her rented room in Tel Aviv when it was broadcast on television.

“It was a moving experience for me, but I didn’t learn much about the Holocaust from it,” she tells me by phone from her home in Hamburg, mostly in English with a sprinkling of Hebrew. “I’d learned and read a great deal about the Holocaust before that. At the time I thought the film was important mainly because it heightened international awareness of the Holocaust, but I didn’t think I had a personal connection to it.”

#nazis #holocauste #amon_goeth

’Censored Voices’ film tears apart Israel’s heroic narrative of Six-Day War - Jewish World Features - Israel News | Haaretz
▻http://www.haaretz.com/jewish-world/jewish-world-features/1.640216

C’est du Oz a l’état pur : Des saloperies d’accord, mais ce sont les Arabes qui ont commencé et nous aurions subi un génocide si nous n’avions pas réagi,

In the wake of Israel’s seemingly miraculous triumph in the Six-Day War in 1967, the country’s victorious soldiers were lionized as heroes.

But in private, even just one week after the conflict, many of them didn’t feel that way. One describes feeling sick to his stomach in battle and collapsing into a trench.

“I wanted to be left alone,” he says. “I didn’t think of the war.”

Another talks about watching an old Arab man evacuated from his house.

“I had an abysmal feeling that I was evil,” the soldier says.

The voices come from tapes made just weeks after the war’s conclusion and now presented, some of them for the first time, in the powerful new documentary “Censored Voices,” which premiered Jan. 24 at the Sundance Film Festival here.

Piece by piece and story by story, they tear apart the heroic narrative of Israel’s great victory in favor of something far messier, more chaotic and more human.

The tapes were made by fellow kibbutzniks Avraham Shapira and the novelist Amos Oz, who were driven by a sense that amid the triumphalism, more ambivalent emotions were not being expressed.

“It was a sadness that could only be felt in the kibbutz because we were living so close to each other,” Shapira recalls in the film.

Traveling from kibbutz to kibbutz with a borrowed reel-to-reel tape recorder, Shapira and Oz convinced fellow veterans to open up about their feelings, their memories and their misgivings from the war. But when they moved to publish what they had gathered, the Israeli government censored 70 percent of the material. Shapira published the remaining 30 percent in his book “The Seventh Day: Soldiers’ Talk about the Six-Day War.”

Now, thanks to the efforts of director Mor Loushy, who convinced Shapira to give her access to the tapes, all of the soldiers’ stories can be heard. Films in Israel can be subject to censorship, but according to producer Hilla Medalia, “We were able to release the film as we wanted it.”

The voices from the tapes are combined to great effect with archival footage, photographs, contemporary news accounts and film of the now-aged veterans to tell the story of the war and its aftermath.

What emerges is a vivid portrait of the war as it was lived by those who fought in it. In the tradition of soldier’s-eye narratives like “A Farewell to Arms” and “The Red Badge of Courage,” the movie allows the soldiers to depict themselves as confused, selfishly afraid, often stupefied by the sight of death and dying, and morally troubled when they encounter the enemy as fellow humans.

Conflicting emotions

There is little doubt that prior to the war, the soldiers saw the build-up of hostile Arab forces on their borders as an existential threat.

“There was a feeling it would be a Holocaust,” one says.

Yet once the battle was joined, the soldiers find themselves besieged by a welter of conflicting emotions. They watch their comrades die. They feel terror. They find themselves killing.

“I was impressed at the calmness with which I was shooting,” says one veteran, recalling himself gunning down Egyptian soldiers. “I felt like I was at an amusement park.”

The veterans also graphically describe multiple instances of Israeli soldiers — including themselves — shooting unarmed soldiers and civilians.

“Several times we captured guys, positioned them and just killed them,” one veteran recalls.

They also recall the shock and anguish of being forced to confront the humanity of the men they were killing. One tells of sorting through the papers of a dead Egyptian officer and finding a picture of his two children on the beach. Another recounts captured Egyptian soldiers pleading for water and mercy, and frightened teenage soldiers who soil their pants. One watches Arab families carrying their belongings from Jericho and thinks of his own family fleeing the Holocaust.

Even the recapture of the Old City of Jerusalem and the Western Wall evokes mixed feelings far from the iconic images of conquering soldiers weeping for joy. One participant says that when a shofar blows at the wall, it “sounded like a pig’s grunt.” Others are troubled by the sense that they are conquering not soldiers in the Old City but civilians in their homes.

“It wasn’t a freed city, it was an occupied city,” one says.

It is that sense of occupation and displacement of Palestinian natives — that Israel was not merely defending itself, but acting as a conqueror — that troubles the soldiers.

“I was convinced the war was just. It was about our existence,” one says. “But then it became something else.”

There is so much raw, varied and shocking material in the movie that parts can easily be wielded or attacked to serve particular political arguments. But the film is courageous enough to embrace contradictions and leave them unresolved. It offers an unflinching look at Israeli atrocities without being unpatriotic or anti-Zionist, recounting the horrors of the war without suggesting that Israel should have refused to fight it. It is critical of the Israeli occupation, yet doesn’t claim to offer answers.

“This film is about listening,” producer and co-writer Daniel Sivan puts it after the screening.

At the end of the film, Oz, now 78, is asked what he thinks of the tapes.

“I feel we spoke truth,” he replies.