Washington, Tel Aviv et Londres préparent-ils des bombardements contre l’Iran ? (Sputnik)
▻https://www.crashdebug.fr/international/16226-washington-tel-aviv-et-londres-preparent-ils-des-bombardements-cont
Israël se préparerait à des activités militaires contre l’Iran. La presse israélienne évoque des projets de raids communs au-dessus de la Syrie et de l’Iran avec des chasseurs-bombardiers de 5e génération F-35 de l’aviation américaine, israélienne et britannique.
Les avions d’Israël, des Etats-Unis et de la Grande-Bretagne s’entraînent actuellement à interagir en conditions de guerre, écrit le quotidien Nezavissimaïa gazeta. Le Pentagone a projeté 12 F-22 sur sa base d’Al Oudeid au Qatar. Jérusalem a accusé les militaires russes d’utiliser des moyens de guerre électronique empêchant la navigation aérienne dans la région. Damas se dit « totalement prêt » à utiliser le système antiaérien S-300 fourni par la Russie fin 2018. Moscou ne nie pas l’éventualité de livrer des S-400 à (...)
]]>Burying the Nakba: How Israel systematically hides evidence of 1948 expulsion of Arabs
By Hagar Shezaf Jul 05, 2019 - Israel News - Haaretz.com
▻https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium.MAGAZINE-how-israel-systematically-hides-evidence-of-1948-expulsio
Four years ago, historian Tamar Novick was jolted by a document she found in the file of Yosef Vashitz, from the Arab Department of the left-wing Mapam Party, in the Yad Yaari archive at Givat Haviva. The document, which seemed to describe events that took place during the 1948 war, began:
“Safsaf [former Palestinian village near Safed] – 52 men were caught, tied them to one another, dug a pit and shot them. 10 were still twitching. Women came, begged for mercy. Found bodies of 6 elderly men. There were 61 bodies. 3 cases of rape, one east of from Safed, girl of 14, 4 men shot and killed. From one they cut off his fingers with a knife to take the ring.”
The writer goes on to describe additional massacres, looting and abuse perpetrated by Israeli forces in Israel’s War of Independence. “There’s no name on the document and it’s not clear who’s behind it,” Dr. Novick tells Haaretz. “It also breaks off in the middle. I found it very disturbing. I knew that finding a document like this made me responsible for clarifying what happened.”
The Upper Galilee village of Safsaf was captured by the Israel Defense Forces in Operation Hiram toward the end of 1948. Moshav Safsufa was established on its ruins. Allegations were made over the years that the Seventh Brigade committed war crimes in the village. Those charges are supported by the document Novick found, which was not previously known to scholars. It could also constitute additional evidence that the Israeli top brass knew about what was going on in real time.
Novick decided to consult with other historians about the document. Benny Morris, whose books are basic texts in the study of the Nakba – the “calamity,” as the Palestinians refer to the mass emigration of Arabs from the country during the 1948 war – told her that he, too, had come across similar documentation in the past. He was referring to notes made by Mapam Central Committee member Aharon Cohen on the basis of a briefing given in November 1948 by Israel Galili, the former chief of staff of the Haganah militia, which became the IDF. Cohen’s notes in this instance, which Morris published, stated: “Safsaf 52 men tied with a rope. Dropped into a pit and shot. 10 were killed. Women pleaded for mercy. [There were] 3 cases of rape. Caught and released. A girl of 14 was raped. Another 4 were killed. Rings of knives.”
Morris’ footnote (in his seminal “The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949”) states that this document was also found in the Yad Yaari Archive. But when Novick returned to examine the document, she was surprised to discover that it was no longer there.
Palestine refugees initially displaced to Gaza board boats to Lebanon or Egypt, in 1949. Hrant Nakashian/1949 UN Archives“At first I thought that maybe Morris hadn’t been accurate in his footnote, that perhaps he had made a mistake,” Novick recalls. “It took me time to consider the possibility that the document had simply disappeared.” When she asked those in charge where the document was, she was told that it had been placed behind lock and key at Yad Yaari – by order of the Ministry of Defense.
Since the start of the last decade, Defense Ministry teams have been scouring Israel’s archives and removing historic documents. But it’s not just papers relating to Israel’s nuclear project or to the country’s foreign relations that are being transferred to vaults: Hundreds of documents have been concealed as part of a systematic effort to hide evidence of the Nakba.
The phenomenon was first detected by the Akevot Institute for Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Research. According to a report drawn up by the institute, the operation is being spearheaded by Malmab, the Defense Ministry’s secretive security department (the name is a Hebrew acronym for “director of security of the defense establishment”), whose activities and budget are classified. The report asserts that Malmab removed historical documentation illegally and with no authority, and at least in some cases has sealed documents that had previously been cleared for publication by the military censor. Some of the documents that were placed in vaults had already been published.
An investigative report by Haaretz found that Malmab has concealed testimony from IDF generals about the killing of civilians and the demolition of villages, as well as documentation of the expulsion of Bedouin during the first decade of statehood. Conversations conducted by Haaretz with directors of public and private archives alike revealed that staff of the security department had treated the archives as their property, in some cases threatening the directors themselves.
Yehiel Horev, who headed Malmab for two decades, until 2007, acknowledged to Haaretz that he launched the project, which is still ongoing. He maintains that it makes sense to conceal the events of 1948, because uncovering them could generate unrest among the country’s Arab population. Asked what the point is of removing documents that have already been published, he explained that the objective is to undermine the credibility of studies about the history of the refugee problem. In Horev’s view, an allegation made by a researcher that’s backed up by an original document is not the same as an allegation that cannot be proved or refuted.
The document Novick was looking for might have reinforced Morris’ work. During the investigation, Haaretz was in fact able to find the Aharon Cohen memo, which sums up a meeting of Mapam’s Political Committee on the subject of massacres and expulsions in 1948. Participants in the meeting called for cooperation with a commission of inquiry that would investigate the events. One case the committee discussed concerned “grave actions” carried out in the village of Al-Dawayima, east of Kiryat Gat. One participant mentioned the then-disbanded Lehi underground militia in this connection. Acts of looting were also reported: “Lod and Ramle, Be’er Sheva, there isn’t [an Arab] store that hasn’t been broken into. 9th Brigade says 7, 7th Brigade says 8.”
“The party,” the document states near the end, “is against expulsion if there is no military necessity for it. There are different approaches concerning the evaluation of necessity. And further clarification is best. What happened in Galilee – those are Nazi acts! Every one of our members must report what he knows.”
The Israeli version
One of the most fascinating documents about the origin of the Palestinian refugee problem was written by an officer in Shai, the precursor to the Shin Bet security service. It discusses why the country was emptied of so many of its Arab inhabitants, dwelling on the circumstances of each village. Compiled in late June 1948, it was titled “The Emigration of the Arabs of Palestine.”
Read a translation of the document here (1)
This document was the basis for an article that Benny Morris published in 1986. After the article appeared, the document was removed from the archive and rendered inaccessible to researchers. Years later, the Malmab team reexamined the document, and ordered that it remain classified. They could not have known that a few years later researchers from Akevot would find a copy of the text and run it past the military censors – who authorized its publication unconditionally. Now, after years of concealment, the gist of the document is being revealed here.
The 25-page document begins with an introduction that unabashedly approves of the evacuation of the Arab villages. According to the author, the month of April “excelled in an increase of emigration,” while May “was blessed with the evacuation of maximum places.” The report then addresses “the causes of the Arab emigration.” According to the Israeli narrative that was disseminated over the years, responsibility for the exodus from Israel rests with Arab politicians who encouraged the population to leave. However, according to the document, 70 percent of the Arabs left as a result of Jewish military operations.
Palestinian children awaiting distribution of milk by UNICEF at the Nazareth Franciscan Sisters’ convent, on January 1, 1950. AW / UN PhotoThe unnamed author of the text ranks the reasons for the Arabs’ departure in order of importance. The first reason: “Direct Jewish acts of hostility against Arab places of settlement.” The second reason was the impact of those actions on neighboring villages. Third in importance came “operations by the breakaways,” namely the Irgun and Lehi undergrounds. The fourth reason for the Arab exodus was orders issued by Arab institutions and “gangs” (as the document refers to all Arab fighting groups); fifth was “Jewish ’whispering operations’ to induce the Arab inhabitants to flee”; and the sixth factor was “evacuation ultimatums.”
The author asserts that, “without a doubt, the hostile operations were the main cause of the movement of the population.” In addition, “Loudspeakers in the Arabic language proved their effectiveness on the occasions when they were utilized properly.” As for Irgun and Lehi operations, the report observes that “many in the villages of central Galilee started to flee following the abduction of the notables of Sheikh Muwannis [a village north of Tel Aviv]. The Arab learned that it is not enough to forge an agreement with the Haganah and that there are other Jews [i.e., the breakaway militias] to beware of.”
The author notes that ultimatums to leave were especially employed in central Galilee, less so in the Mount Gilboa region. “Naturally, the act of this ultimatum, like the effect of the ’friendly advice,’ came after a certain preparing of the ground by means of hostile actions in the area.”
An appendix to the document describes the specific causes of the exodus from each of scores of Arab locales: Ein Zeitun – “our destruction of the village”; Qeitiya – “harassment, threat of action”; Almaniya – “our action, many killed”; Tira – “friendly Jewish advice”; Al’Amarir – “after robbery and murder carried out by the breakaways”; Sumsum – “our ultimatum”; Bir Salim – “attack on the orphanage”; and Zarnuga – “conquest and expulsion.”
Short fuse
In the early 2000s, the Yitzhak Rabin Center conducted a series of interviews with former public and military figures as part of a project to document their activity in the service of the state. The long arm of Malmab seized on these interviews, too. Haaretz, which obtained the original texts of several of the interviews, compared them to the versions that are now available to the public, after large swaths of them were declared classified.
These included, for example, sections of the testimony of Brig. Gen. (res.) Aryeh Shalev about the expulsion across the border of the residents of a village he called “Sabra.” Later in the interview, the following sentences were deleted: “There was a very serious problem in the valley. There were refugees who wanted to return to the valley, to the Triangle [a concentration of Arab towns and villages in eastern Israel]. We expelled them. I met with them to persuade them not to want that. I have papers about it.”
In another case, Malmab decided to conceal the following segment from an interview that historian Boaz Lev Tov conducted with Maj. Gen. (res.) Elad Peled:
Lev Tov: “We’re talking about a population – women and children?”
Peled: “All, all. Yes.”
Lev Tov: “Don’t you distinguish between them?”
Peled: “The problem is very simple. The war is between two populations. They come out of their home.”
Lev Tov: “If the home exists, they have somewhere to return to?”
Peled: “It’s not armies yet, it’s gangs. We’re also actually gangs. We come out of the house and return to the house. They come out of the house and return to the house. It’s either their house or our house.”
Lev Tov: “Qualms belong to the more recent generation?”
Peled: “Yes, today. When I sit in an armchair here and think about what happened, all kinds of thoughts come to mind.”
Lev Tov: “Wasn’t that the case then?”
Peled: “Look, let me tell you something even less nice and cruel, about the big raid in Sasa [Palestinian village in Upper Galilee]. The goal was actually to deter them, to tell them, ‘Dear friends, the Palmach [the Haganah “shock troops”] can reach every place, you are not immune.’ That was the heart of the Arab settlement. But what did we do? My platoon blew up 20 homes with everything that was there.”
Lev Tov: “While people were sleeping there?”
Peled: “I suppose so. What happened there, we came, we entered the village, planted a bomb next to every house, and afterward Homesh blew on a trumpet, because we didn’t have radios, and that was the signal [for our forces] to leave. We’re running in reverse, the sappers stay, they pull, it’s all primitive. They light the fuse or pull the detonator and all those houses are gone.”
IDF soldiers guarding Palestinians in Ramle, in 1948. Collection of Benno Rothenberg/The IDF and Defense Establishment ArchivesAnother passage that the Defense Ministry wanted to keep from the public came from Dr. Lev Tov’s conversation with Maj. Gen. Avraham Tamir:
Tamir: “I was under Chera [Maj. Gen. Tzvi Tzur, later IDF chief of staff], and I had excellent working relations with him. He gave me freedom of action – don’t ask – and I happened to be in charge of staff and operations work during two developments deriving from [Prime Minister David] Ben-Gurion’s policy. One development was when reports arrived about marches of refugees from Jordan toward the abandoned villages [in Israel]. And then Ben-Gurion lays down as policy that we have to demolish [the villages] so they won’t have anywhere to return to. That is, all the Arab villages, most of which were in [the area covered by] Central Command, most of them.”
Lev Tov: “The ones that were still standing?”
Tamir: “The ones that weren’t yet inhabited by Israelis. There were places where we had already settled Israelis, like Zakariyya and others. But most of them were still abandoned villages.”
Lev Tov: “That were standing?”
Tamir: “Standing. It was necessary for there to be no place for them to return to, so I mobilized all the engineering battalions of Central Command, and within 48 hours I knocked all those villages to the ground. Period. There’s no place to return to.”
Lev Tov: “Without hesitation, I imagine.”
Tamir: “Without hesitation. That was the policy. I mobilized, I carried it out and I did it.”
Crates in vaults
The vault of the Yad Yaari Research and Documentation Center is one floor below ground level. In the vault, which is actually a small, well-secured room, are stacks of crates containing classified documents. The archive houses the materials of the Hashomer Hatzair movement, the Kibbutz Ha’artzi kibbutz movement, Mapam, Meretz and other bodies, such as Peace Now.
The archive’s director is Dudu Amitai, who is also chairman of the Association of Israel Archivists. According to Amitai, Malmab personnel visited the archive regularly between 2009 and 2011. Staff of the archive relate that security department teams – two Defense Ministry retirees with no archival training – would show up two or three times a week. They searched for documents according to such keywords as “nuclear,” “security” and “censorship,” and also devoted considerable time to the War of Independence and the fate of the pre-1948 Arab villages.
“In the end, they submitted a summary to us, saying that they had located a few dozen sensitive documents,” Amitai says. “We don’t usually take apart files, so dozens of files, in their entirety, found their way into our vault and were removed from the public catalog.” A file might contain more than 100 documents.
One of the files that was sealed deals with the military government that controlled the lives of Israel’s Arab citizens from 1948 until 1966. For years, the documents were stored in the same vault, inaccessible to scholars. Recently, in the wake of a request by Prof. Gadi Algazi, a historian from Tel Aviv University, Amitai examined the file himself and ruled that there was no reason not to unseal it, Malmab’s opinion notwithstanding.
According to Algazi, there could be several reasons for Malmab’s decision to keep the file classified. One of them has to do with a secret annex it contains to a report by a committee that examined the operation of the military government. The report deals almost entirely with land-ownership battles between the state and Arab citizens, and barely touches on security matters.
Another possibility is a 1958 report by the ministerial committee that oversaw the military government. In one of the report’s secret appendixes, Col. Mishael Shaham, a senior officer in the military government, explains that one reason for not dismantling the martial law apparatus is the need to restrict Arab citizens’ access to the labor market and to prevent the reestablishment of destroyed villages.
A third possible explanation for hiding the file concerns previously unpublished historical testimony about the expulsion of Bedouin. On the eve of Israel’s establishment, nearly 100,000 Bedouin lived in the Negev. Three years later, their number was down to 13,000. In the years during and after the independence war, a number of expulsion operations were carried out in the country’s south. In one case, United Nations observers reported that Israel had expelled 400 Bedouin from the Azazma tribe and cited testimonies of tents being burned. The letter that appears in the classified file describes a similar expulsion carried out as late as 1956, as related by geologist Avraham Parnes:
The evacuation of Iraq al-Manshiyya, near today’s Kiryat Gat, in March, 1949. Collection of Benno Rothenberg/The IDF and Defense Establishment Archives“A month ago we toured Ramon [crater]. The Bedouin in the Mohila area came to us with their flocks and their families and asked us to break bread with them. I replied that we had a great deal of work to do and didn’t have time. In our visit this week, we headed toward Mohila again. Instead of the Bedouin and their flocks, there was deathly silence. Scores of camel carcasses were scattered in the area. We learned that three days earlier the IDF had ‘screwed’ the Bedouin, and their flocks were destroyed – the camels by shooting, the sheep with grenades. One of the Bedouin, who started to complain, was killed, the rest fled.”
The testimony continued, “Two weeks earlier, they’d been ordered to stay where they were for the time being, afterward they were ordered to leave, and to speed things up 500 head were slaughtered.... The expulsion was executed ‘efficiently.’” The letter goes on to quote what one of the soldiers said to Parnes, according to his testimony: “They won’t go unless we’ve screwed their flocks. A young girl of about 16 approached us. She had a beaded necklace of brass snakes. We tore the necklace and each of us took a bead for a souvenir.”
The letter was originally sent to MK Yaakov Uri, from Mapai (forerunner of Labor), who passed it on to Development Minister Mordechai Bentov (Mapam). “His letter shocked me,” Uri wrote Bentov. The latter circulated the letter among all the cabinet ministers, writing, “It is my opinion that the government cannot simply ignore the facts related in the letter.” Bentov added that, in light of the appalling contents of the letter, he asked security experts to check its credibility. They had confirmed that the contents “do in fact generally conform to the truth.”
Nuclear excuse
It was during the tenure of historian Tuvia Friling as Israel’s chief archivist, from 2001 to 2004, that Malmab carried out its first archival incursions. What began as an operation to prevent the leakage of nuclear secrets, he says, became, in time, a large-scale censorship project.
“I resigned after three years, and that was one of the reasons,” Prof. Friling says. “The classification placed on the document about the Arabs’ emigration in 1948 is precisely an example of what I was apprehensive about. The storage and archival system is not an arm of the state’s public relations. If there’s something you don’t like – well, that’s life. A healthy society also learns from its mistakes.”
Why did Friling allow the Defense Ministry to have access the archives? The reason, he says, was the intention to give the public access to archival material via the internet. In discussions about the implications of digitizing the material, concern was expressed that references in the documents to a “certain topic” would be made public by mistake. The topic, of course, is Israel’s nuclear project. Friling insists that the only authorization Malmab received was to search for documents on that subject.
But Malmab’s activity is only one example of a broader problem, Friling notes: “In 1998, the confidentiality of the [oldest documents in the] Shin Bet and Mossad archives expired. For years those two institutions disdained the chief archivist. When I took over, they requested that the confidentiality of all the material be extended [from 50] to 70 years, which is ridiculous – most of the material can be opened.”
In 2010, the confidentiality period was extended to 70 years; last February it was extended again, to 90 years, despite the opposition of the Supreme Council of Archives. “The state may impose confidentiality on some of its documentation,” Friling says. “The question is whether the issue of security doesn’t act as a kind of cover. In many cases, it’s already become a joke.”
In the view of Yad Yaari’s Dudu Amitai, the confidentiality imposed by the Defense Ministry must be challenged. In his period at the helm, he says, one of the documents placed in the vault was an order issued by an IDF general, during a truce in the War of Independence, for his troops to refrain from rape and looting. Amitai now intends to go over the documents that were deposited in the vault, especially 1948 documents, and open whatever is possible. “We’ll do it cautiously and responsibly, but recognizing that the State of Israel has to learn how to cope with the less pleasant aspects of its history.”
In contrast to Yad Yaari, where ministry personnel no longer visit, they are continuing to peruse documents at Yad Tabenkin, the research and documentation center of the United Kibbutz Movement. The director, Aharon Azati, reached an agreement with the Malmab teams under which documents will be transferred to the vault only if he is convinced that this is justified. But in Yad Tabenkin, too, Malmab has broadened its searches beyond the realm of nuclear project to encompass interviews conducted by archival staff with former members of the Palmach, and has even perused material about the history of the settlements in the occupied territories.
Malmab has, for example, shown interest in the Hebrew-language book “A Decade of Discretion: Settlement Policy in the Territories 1967-1977,” published by Yad Tabenkin in 1992, and written by Yehiel Admoni, director of the Jewish Agency’s Settlement Department during the decade he writes about. The book mentions a plan to settle Palestinian refugees in the Jordan Valley and to the uprooting of 1,540 Bedouin families from the Rafah area of the Gaza Strip in 1972, including an operation that included the sealing of wells by the IDF. Ironically, in the case of the Bedouin, Admoni quotes former Justice Minister Yaakov Shimshon Shapira as saying, “It is not necessary to stretch the security rationale too far. The whole Bedouin episode is not a glorious chapter of the State of Israel.”
Palestinian refugees leaving their village, unknown location, 1948. UNRWAAccording to Azati, “We are moving increasingly to a tightening of the ranks. Although this is an era of openness and transparency, there are apparently forces that are pulling in the opposite direction.”
Unauthorized secrecy
About a year ago, the legal adviser to the State Archives, attorney Naomi Aldouby, wrote an opinion titled “Files Closed Without Authorization in Public Archives.” According to her, the accessibility policy of public archives is the exclusive purview of the director of each institution.
Despite Aldouby’s opinion, however, in the vast majority of cases, archivists who encountered unreasonable decisions by Malmab did not raise objections – that is, until 2014, when Defense Ministry personnel arrived at the archive of the Harry S. Truman Research Institute at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. To the visitors’ surprise, their request to examine the archive – which contains collections of former minister and diplomat Abba Eban and Maj. Gen. (res.) Shlomo Gazit – was turned down by its then director, Menahem Blondheim.
According to Blondheim, “I told them that the documents in question were decades old, and that I could not imagine that there was any security problem that would warrant restricting their access to researchers. In response, they said, ‘And let’s say there is testimony here that wells were poisoned in the War of Independence?’ I replied, ‘Fine, those people should be brought to trial.’”
Blondheim’s refusal led to a meeting with a more senior ministry official, only this time the attitude he encountered was different and explicit threats were made. Finally the two sides reached an accommodation.
Benny Morris is not surprised at Malmab’s activity. “I knew about it,” he says “Not officially, no one informed me, but I encountered it when I discovered that documents I had seen in the past are now sealed. There were documents from the IDF Archive that I used for an article about Deir Yassin, and which are now sealed. When I came to the archive, I was no longer allowed to see the original, so I pointed out in a footnote [in the article] that the State Archive had denied access to documents that I had published 15 years earlier.”
The Malmab case is only one example of the battle being waged for access to archives in Israel. According to the executive director of the Akevot Institute, Lior Yavne, “The IDF Archive, which is the largest archive in Israel, is sealed almost hermetically. About 1 percent of the material is open. The Shin Bet archive, which contains materials of immense importance [to scholars], is totally closed apart from a handful of documents.”
A report written by Yaacov Lozowick, the previous chief archivist at the State Archives, upon his retirement, refers to the defense establishment’s grip on the country’s archival materials. In it, he writes, “A democracy must not conceal information because it is liable to embarrass the state. In practice, the security establishment in Israel, and to a certain extent that of foreign relations as well, are interfering with the [public] discussion.”
Advocates of concealment put forward several arguments, Lozowick notes: “The uncovering of the facts could provide our enemies with a battering ram against us and weaken the determination of our friends; it’s liable to stir up the Arab population; it could enfeeble the state’s arguments in courts of law; and what is revealed could be interpreted as Israeli war crimes.” However, he says, “All these arguments must be rejected. This is an attempt to hide part of the historical truth in order to construct a more convenient version.”
What Malmab says
Yehiel Horev was the keeper of the security establishment’s secrets for more than two decades. He headed the Defense Ministry’s security department from 1986 until 2007 and naturally kept out of the limelight. To his credit, he now agreed to talk forthrightly to Haaretz about the archives project.
“I don’t remember when it began,” Horev says, “but I do know that I started it. If I’m not mistaken, it started when people wanted to publish documents from the archives. We had to set up teams to examine all outgoing material.”
From conversations with archive directors, it’s clear that a good deal of the documents on which confidentiality was imposed relate to the War of Independence. Is concealing the events of 1948 part of the purpose of Malmab?
Palestinian refugees in the Ramle area, 1948. Boris Carmi / The IDF and Defense Establishment Archives“What does ‘part of the purpose’ mean? The subject is examined based on an approach of whether it could harm Israel’s foreign relations and the defense establishment. Those are the criteria. I think it’s still relevant. There has not been peace since 1948. I may be wrong, but to the best of my knowledge the Arab-Israeli conflict has not been resolved. So yes, it could be that problematic subjects remain.”
Asked in what way such documents might be problematic, Horev speaks of the possibility of agitation among the country’s Arab citizens. From his point of view, every document must be perused and every case decided on its merits.
If the events of 1948 weren’t known, we could argue about whether this approach is the right one. That is not the case. Many testimonies and studies have appeared about the history of the refugee problem. What’s the point of hiding things?
“The question is whether it can do harm or not. It’s a very sensitive matter. Not everything has been published about the refugee issue, and there are all kinds of narratives. Some say there was no flight at all, only expulsion. Others say there was flight. It’s not black-and-white. There’s a difference between flight and those who say they were forcibly expelled. It’s a different picture. I can’t say now if it merits total confidentiality, but it’s a subject that definitely has to be discussed before a decision is made about what to publish.”
For years, the Defense Ministry has imposed confidentiality on a detailed document that describes the reasons for the departure of those who became refugees. Benny Morris has already written about the document, so what’s the logic of keeping it hidden?
“I don’t remember the document you’re referring to, but if he quoted from it and the document itself is not there [i.e., where Morris says it is], then his facts aren’t strong. If he says, ‘Yes, I have the document,’ I can’t argue with that. But if he says that it’s written there, that could be right and it could be wrong. If the document were already outside and were sealed in the archive, I would say that that’s folly. But if someone quoted from it – there’s a difference of day and night in terms of the validity of the evidence he cited.”
In this case, we’re talking about the most quoted scholar when it comes to the Palestinian refugees.
“The fact that you say ‘scholar’ makes no impression on me. I know people in academia who spout nonsense about subjects that I know from A to Z. When the state imposes confidentiality, the published work is weakened, because he doesn’t have the document.”
But isn’t concealing documents based on footnotes in books an attempt to lock the barn door after the horses have bolted?
“I gave you an example that this needn’t be the case. If someone writes that the horse is black, if the horse isn’t outside the barn, you can’t prove that it’s really black.”
There are legal opinions stating that Malmab’s activity in the archives is illegal and unauthorized.
“If I know that an archive contains classified material, I am empowered to tell the police to go there and confiscate the material. I can also utilize the courts. I don’t need the archivist’s authorization. If there is classified material, I have the authority to act. Look, there’s policy. Documents aren’t sealed for no reason. And despite it all, I won’t say to you that everything that’s sealed is 100 percent justified [in being sealed].”
The Defense Ministry refused to respond to specific questions regarding the findings of this investigative report and made do with the following response: “The director of security of the defense establishment operates by virtue of his responsibility to protect the state’s secrets and its security assets. The Malmab does not provide details about its mode of activity or its missions.”
Lee Rotbart assisted in providing visual research for this article.
]]>Nouvelle journée de #manifestations après la mort d’un Israélien d’origine éthiopienne
Des manifestations ont eu lieu mercredi à Tel-Aviv et dans le nord d’#Israël pour la troisième journée consécutive, après le décès d’un jeune Israélien d’origine éthiopienne, tué par un policier, la communauté éthiopienne dénonçant un crime raciste.
#Solomon_Teka, âgé de 19 ans, a été tué dimanche soir par un policier qui n’était pas en service au moment des faits, à Kiryat Haim, une ville proche du port de Haïfa, dans le nord d’Israël.
Des dizaines de policiers ont été déployés mercredi dans la ville de Kiryat Ata, non loin de Kiryat Haim. Des manifestants tentant de bloquer une route ont été dispersés par la police.
Malgré des appels au calme lancés par les autorités, des jeunes se sont aussi à nouveau rassemblés à Tel-Aviv. Une centaine de personnes ont défié la police en bloquant une route avant d’être dispersées.
En trois jours, 140 personnes ont été arrêtées et 111 policiers blessés par des jets de pierres, bouteilles et bombes incendiaires lors des manifestations dans le pays, selon un nouveau bilan de la police.
Les embouteillages et les images de voitures en feu ont fait la une des médias.
Le Premier ministre Benjamin Netanyahu et le président israélien Reuven Rivlin ont appelé au calme, tout en reconnaissant que les problèmes auxquels était confrontée la communauté israélo-éthiopienne devaient être traités.
– ’Tragédie’-
« La mort de Solomon Teka est une immense tragédie », a dit le Premier ministre. « Des leçons seront tirées. Mais une chose est claire : nous ne pouvons tolérer les violences que nous avons connues hier », a-t-il déclaré mercredi lors d’une réunion du comité ministériel sur l’intégration de la communauté éthiopienne.
« Nous ne pouvons pas voir de routes bloquées, ni de cocktails Molotov, ni d’attaques contre des policiers, des citoyens et des propriétés privées », a-t-il ajouté.
Le ministre de la Sécurité publique, Gilad Erdan, et le commissaire de la police, Moti Cohen, ont rencontré des représentants de la communauté israélo-éthiopienne, selon un communiqué de la police.
La police a rapporté que le policier ayant tué le jeune homme avait tenté de s’interposer lors d’une bagarre entre jeunes. Après avoir expliqué qu’il était un agent des forces de l’ordre, des jeunes lui auraient alors lancé des pierres. L’homme aurait ouvert le feu après s’être senti menacé.
Mais d’autres jeunes présents et un passant interrogés par les médias israéliens ont assuré que le policier n’avait pas été agressé.
L’agent a été assigné à résidence et une enquête a été ouverte, a indiqué le porte-parole de la police.
En janvier, des milliers de juifs éthiopiens étaient déjà descendus dans la rue à Tel-Aviv après la mort d’un jeune de leur communauté tué par un policier.
Ils affirment vivre dans la crainte d’être la cible de la police. La communauté juive éthiopienne en Israël compte environ 140.000 personnes, dont plus de 50.000 sont nées dans le pays. Elle se plaint souvent de racisme institutionnalisé à son égard.
▻https://www.courrierinternational.com/depeche/nouvelle-journee-de-manifestations-apres-la-mort-dun-israelie
#discriminations #racisme #xénophobie #décès #violences_policières #police #éthiopiens
Tractations entre Riyad et Tel Aviv sur un aéroport militaire israélien en Arabie ? – Site de la chaîne AlManar-Liban
▻http://french.almanar.com.lb/1412864
Selon des sources arabes citées par le site d’informations en ligne Khalij on line, cet aérodrome devrait être destiné à accueillir ses avions militaires, à les approvisionner en carburant et y héberger ses soldats. Il serait même question d’y installer des radars et des appareils de surveillance et d’espionnage spécialement conçus pour les aéroports militaires.
La demande israélienne a déjà été présentée aux autorités saoudiennes depuis plusieurs mois, indiquent les sources arabes selon lesquelles les tractations ont été entamées pour louer une portion de terre pour une longue durée.
Elle pourrait se situer non loin de l’aéroport de l’émir Sultane ben Abdel Aziz à deux kilomètres de la ville de Tabouk, dans le nord du royaume.
Cette région hautement sensible revêt son importance stratégique et militaire du fait qu’elle se situe dans une zone censée être la plus proche de la Palestine occupée.
]]>Israël tente-t-il de dissimuler des exportations d’armes aux milices néonazies en Ukraine ?
Par Shuki Taussig – 19 juin 2019 – +972/Seventh Eye | Traduction : JPP pour l’Agence Média Palestine
▻http://www.agencemediapalestine.fr/blog/2019/06/21/16721
Israël vend-il sciemment des armes aux milices néonazies d’Ukraine ? En juin dernier, un groupe de militants israéliens pour les droits de l’homme a déposé une requête auprès du tribunal de district de Tel Aviv pour demander que le gouvernement cesse d’exporter des armes vers ce pays où des groupes armés se sont engagés depuis ces cinq dernières années.
En réponse, l’État a demandé que le tribunal rende une ordonnance d’obligation au secret sur les procédures judiciaires relatives à la vente prétendue d’armes et de compétences militaires aux combattants néonazis d’Ukraine, et il a demandé au tribunal de tenir son audience à huis clos et d’exposer ses arguments lors d’une audience ex parte (sans que la partie intimée en soit informée – ndt). (...)
]]>Renault et Nissan inaugurent un laboratoire conjoint en Israël
Reuters10 juin 2019
▻https://fr.news.yahoo.com/renault-nissan-inaugurent-laboratoire-conjoint-145157731.html
TEL AVIV (Reuters) - Renault et Nissan, dont les relations sont actuellement tendues, ont inauguré lundi à Tel Aviv un laboratoire d’innovation conjoint censé permettre à leur alliance de développer des projets avec des start-up israéliennes.
Ce laboratoire, qui bénéficie d’un partenariat exclusif avec l’autorité israélienne de l’innovation, sera dédié au développement de capteurs pour véhicules autonomes, à la cybersécurité et au « big data », l’analyse de données.
]]> Reporters sans frontières : le crime paie Théophraste R. - 3 Juin 2019 - LGS
▻https://www.legrandsoir.info/reporters-sans-frontieres-le-crime-paie.html
Le 21 octobre 2000, le journaliste Jacques-Marie Bourget (1) se trouvait sur une place publique à Ramallah (Palestine). Tout était calme, les cafés étaient ouverts quand un tireur d’élite israélien « non identifié » lui a perforé le poumon d’une balle ▻https://www.legrandsoir.info/macron-soutiendra-t-il-les-correspondants-de-guerre.html de son fusil d’assaut américain « M16 ». Alors même que le pronostic vital était engagé, il a fallu l’intervention personnelle de Jacques Chirac pour qu’Israël autorise l’évacuation du journaliste. La victime miraculée nous dira prochainement sur ce site tout ce qu’elle ne doit pas à Reporters sans Frontières.
C’était hier, c’est encore aujourd’hui. Le 28 février 2019, une commission d’enquête ►https://news.un.org/fr/story/2019/02/1037422 indépendante de l’ONU a révélé que des tireurs d’élite israéliens tirent intentionnellement sur des journalistes (2).
En novembre 2007, Maxime Vivas publiait un livre-enquête sur l’organisation Reporters sans Frontières et sur son secrétaire général Robert Ménard, alors intouchable et coqueluche des médias, toutes tendances confondues (Ménard fut invité à la fête de l’Huma). Mettant de côté son amour pour la liberté d’expression, le secrétaire général de RSF menaça à 4 reprises de traduire l’impertinent auteur devant un tribunal.
Le 19 mai 2019, Christophe Deloire, actuel secrétaire général de Reporters sans frontières a reçu le prix de la « défense de la démocratie » ▻https://www.legrandsoir.info/reporters-sans-frontieres-recoit-le-prix-du-regime-assassin-de-journal (sic) lors d’une cérémonie à Tel Aviv en présence du président israélien Reuven Rivlin.
Théophraste R. Auteur du proverbe : « RSF est à la liberté d’expression ce que Monsanto est à l’écologie, Ségolène Royal au socialisme et BHL à la philosophie ».
(1) Grand reporter et écrivain, Jacques-Marie Bourget a publié 95 articles sur le site d’information alternative Le Grand Soir. Il a commencé sa carrière chez Gallimard à la NRF puis il a enchaîné à l’ORTF, l’Aurore, le Canard Enchainé, l’Express, VSD, le Sunday Times, Paris-Match et Bakchich. En 1986 a obtenu le Prix Scoop pour avoir révélé l’affaire Greenpeace.
(2) Gaza 2018 : « La Commission a constaté que les forces de sécurité israéliennes avaient tué 183 […] manifestants avec des balles réelles, dont 35 enfants, trois ambulanciers paramédicaux et deux des journalistes, clairement identifiés. »
#crimes_de_guerre #israel #israël #gaza #occupation #colonisation #rsf #reporters_sans_frontières #robert_ménard #christophe_deloire
]]>Israël aurait largement compté sur la #NSA pendant la #guerre du #Liban de 2006 | The Times of Israël
▻https://fr.timesofisrael.com/israel-aurait-largement-compte-sur-la-nsa-pendant-la-guerre-du-lib
Israël a largement compté sur les renseignements américains lors de la guerre du Liban de 2006, et a demandé, à de nombreuses reprises, de l’aide pour localiser des terroristes du #Hezbollah en vue d’assassinats ciblés, selon les derniers documents classifiés ayant fuité par l’intermédiaire du lanceur d’alerte américain Edward Snowden.
Les deux documents divulgués mercredi ont révélé que même si l’Agence de sécurité nationale (NSA) n’avait pas l’autorisation légale de partager des informations en vue d’assassinats ciblés, la pression israélienne a conduit à la création d’un nouveau cadre de travail pour faciliter le partage de renseignements entre les deux pays.
L’un des documents rendu public cette semaine, par The Intercept, était un article de 2006 paru dans la newsletter interne de la NSA, SIDToday, écrit par un officiel anonyme de la NSA à Tel Aviv qui officiait comme agent de liaison avec des officiels israéliens pendant le conflit de 2006.
[...]
Le rapport explique que la guerre de 2006 a poussé l’ISNU [l’unité israélienne SIGINT de renseignements militaires] dans ses « limites techniques et de moyens », et des officiels israéliens se sont tournés vers leurs homologues américains à la NSA pour obtenir un grand soutien et de nombreuses informations sur des cibles du Hezbollah.
]]>Eurovision : Une danseuse de Madonna interrogée en Israël pour avoir porté le drapeau palestinien sur scène
Huffington Post Maghreb, le 21 mai 2019
▻https://www.huffpostmaghreb.com/entry/eurovision-une-danseuse-de-madonna-interrogee-en-israel-pour-avoir-
Un argument qu’on oublie parfois de donner aux artistes (et surtout aux groupes d’artistes) qui se rendent en israel, c’est qu’ils vont faire face à la douane israélienne et à son racisme, qui sera en particulier sans pitié si l’un des membres du groupe a un nom à consonance arabe, ou une couleur de peau un peu trop foncée... C’est ce qui est arrivé à la danseuse d’origine marocaine de la troupe de Madonna. A mon avis, le fait que ce soit elle qui portait le drapeau palestinien sur son costume n’est qu’une circonstance aggravante :
Au moment de l’enregistrement à l’aéroport de Tel Aviv, son passeport est en effet consulté par plusieurs personnes, dit-elle. “Puis j’ai été détenue pour un interrogatoire d’une heure et demie ! J’ai dû leur raconter ma vie, les raisons pour lesquelles j’ai voyagé dans des pays arabes, ma relation à la religion, ma situation familiale, montrer l’emploi du temps détaillé de mon séjour, et expliquer exactement ce que je faisais et où je suis allée la dernière fois que je suis venue à Jerusalem il y a trois ans”.
Si le motif justifiant l’interrogatoire ne lui a pas été dévoilé, la danseuse établit un lien entre la prestation scénique délivrée samedi soir et cette expérience “intense” qui l’a menée à âtre interrogée par les autorités israéliennes : “Tout ça probablement parce que j’ai porté un drapeau dans le cadre d’une performance faisant référence à un conflit actuel, pour promouvoir la paix, l’unité et la liberté. Je ne peux même pas imaginer la surveillance et la répression auxquelles le peuple palestinien est confronté quotidiennement.”
NB : en 2008, le seul danseur noir de la troupe d’Alvin Ailey (son prénom était aussi Abdur-Rahim) avait été interrogé pendant des heures, et forcé de danser dans l’aéroport pour prouver qu’il était véritablement un danseur...
▻http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7606996.stm
#Palestine #Eurovision #Madonna #Alvin_Ailey #danse #Frontière #Douane #Aéroport #Racisme #Musique #Musique_et_politique #BDS #Boycott_culturel
Sur ce sujet, une liste d’expulsions aux frontières israéliennes ici :
►https://seenthis.net/messages/364741
Des manifestants haredi dispersés à Jérusalem par des femmes en soutien-gorge | The Times of Israël
▻https://fr.timesofisrael.com/des-manifestants-haredi-disperses-a-jerusalem-par-des-femmes-en-so
Les ultra-orthodoxes manifestaient contre la « profanation » du Shabbat par l’Eurovision ; ils ont préféré quitter les rues que de rester face à des femmes dévêtues
Des dizaines de policiers à Jérusalem aidés par la police montée, qui tentaient de disperser une émeute ultra-orthodoxes samedi, a reçu de l’aide d’un intervenant inattendu : des femmes qui ont retiré leur haut, dispersant tous les manifestants, qui n’ont pas le droit, selon la loi religieuse, de les regarder.
Des centaines d’hommes et de jeunes garçons ultra-orthodoxes ont affronté la police samedi après-midi, bloquant la circulation et attaquant les policiers durant une manifestation contre la profanation du Shabbat par les employés qui préparaient l’Eurovision à Tel Aviv lors du jour du repos du Shabbat.
Alors que les protestants bloquaient les routes d’un quartier ultra-orthodoxe, au centre de la ville, au moins quatre femmes se sont dévêtues pour rester en soutien-gorge, obligeant ainsi les manifestants à quitter les rues, étant donné qu’il leur est interdit de regarder des femmes jugées impudiques.
]]>Un drapeau palestinien brandi par le groupe islandais, la prestation de Madonna : les polémiques de l’Eurovision en vidéos
AFP - Publié à 08h35
▻https://www.rtbf.be/info/medias/detail_un-drapeau-palestinien-brandi-par-le-groupe-islandais-la-prestation-de-m
La finale de l’Eurovision, résolument apolitique mais précédée par les appels au boycott de la part des défenseurs des Palestiniens, n’a pas échappé entièrement à la controverse. Selon les médias israéliens, deux des danseurs de Madonna, annoncée comme la grande invitée vedette de la soirée, arboraient dans le dos des drapeaux israélien et palestinien. Ce qui pouvait être interprété comme un message de fraternité.
Plus polémique, au moment de l’annonce des résultats, les membres du groupe islandais Hatari, connu pour leur opposition déclarée à l’occupation israélienne des Territoires palestiniens, ont déployé des banderoles aux couleurs palestiniennes, suscitant des sifflets dans le public.L’Union européenne de Radio-télévision (UER), organisatrice, a souligné dans un communiqué que la référence politique faite par les danseurs de Madonna ne figurait pas dans les répétitions telles que l’UER les avait approuvées. L’Eurovision « est un évènement apolitique et Madonna en avait été informée », a-t-elle dit.
Quant à Hatari, leurs agissements « contreviennent directement » aux règles du concours, et « les conséquences (en) seront discutées » par la direction de la compétition, a-t-elle dit. (...)
“““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““"
PACBI :
▻https://twitter.com/PACBI/status/1129884683855179779
Palestinian civil society overwhelmingly rejects fig-leaf gestures of solidarity from international artists crossing our peaceful picket line #Hatari
▻https://twitter.com/PACBI/status/1130045587070619648
Even @Madonna had to raise a Palestinian flag in her complicit #Eurovision performance- testament to growing support for Palestinian rights globally. Still, entertaining apartheid Tel Aviv for $1M serves an immoral political agenda. #BoycottEurovision2019 #ESF19 #DareToDream
]]>Eurovision 2019 : dernier appel de Gaza | Agence Media Palestine
▻http://www.agencemediapalestine.fr/blog/2019/05/17/eurovision-2019-dernier-appel-de-gaza
Qu’est-ce que cela fait de chanter si près de tant de misère humaine et de tant de souffrance ?
Par Haidar Eid, 17 mai 2019
Chère Madonna, chers concurrents de l’Eurovision 2019,
Vous avez jusqu’à présent décidé d’ignorer plusieurs demandes de respecter le piquet de grève palestinien. Le 9 mai, des organisations culturelles et des artistes de Gaza ont lancé un appel fort demandant de boycotter la compétition par respect pour les deux bébés et les deux femmes enceintes tués avec 23 autres Palestiniens dans le dernier assaut violent d’Israël sur la Bande de Gaza.
En plus des appels répétés des Palestiniens et de leur mouvement de Boycott, désinvestissement, sanctions (BDS), des dizaines de milliers de personnes en Europe et dans le monde entier ont signé des pétitions réitérant l’appel à #BoycottEurovision2019 à Tel Aviv et vous ont demandé d’arrêter de blanchir l’occupation et l’apartheid par votre art. Mais tout ceci est tombé dans les oreilles de sourds !
Il est possible que vous vous en moquiez, il est possible que vous croyiez en la propagande d’Israël selon laquelle nous sommes tous des terroristes et les attaques sur Gaza des « opérations de sécurité ». Certains d’entre vous ont évoqué vouloir soutenir la paix, mais si vous le faisiez vraiment, alors vous ne seriez pas en train de chanter en Israël.
Laissez moi vous dire ce que soutenir la paix signifie réellement. (...)
]]>#Facebook busts Israeli campaign to disrupt #elections in African, Asian and Latin American nations - Israel News - Haaretz.com
▻https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/facebook-busts-israel-based-campaign-to-disrupt-elections-in-african-asian-
Dozens of accounts, pages and groups operated by private firm peddling #fake_news were deleted, tech giant says
[...]
Nathaniel Gleicher, Facebook’s head of cybersecurity policy, told reporters that the tech giant had purged 65 Israeli accounts, 161 pages, dozens of groups and four Instagram accounts. Many were linked to the Archimedes Group, a Tel Aviv-based political consulting and #lobbying firm that boasts of its social media skills and ability to “change reality.”
]]>L’Eurovision en Israël : « Oser rêver » sauf si l’on est enfermé à Gaza par Abier Almasri
▻https://www.hrw.org/fr/news/2019/05/16/leurovision-en-israel-oser-rever-sauf-si-lon-est-enferme-gaza
Les Palestiniens vivant dans la bande de Gaza aspirent pourtant aussi à la liberté et à l’égalité
▻https://www.hrw.org/sites/default/files/styles/open_graph/public/multimedia_images_2019/201905mena_israel_palestine_gaza_eurovision.jpg?itok=2ui6LcRO
Ces jours-ci, Israël accueille à Tel Aviv le concours Eurovision de la chanson, sous le slogan « Osez rêver » (« Dare to dream »). De nombreux Européens ont parcouru plusieurs centaines de kilomètres pour se rendre en Israël afin d’assister aux festivités. Mais en tant que résidente de Gaza, je n’ai moi-même pas le droit de faire ce voyage, alors qu’il durerait moins d’une heure en voiture.
En coordination avec l’Égypte, Israël a transformé Gaza en une prison à ciel ouvert, renfermant deux millions de Palestiniens sur une petite superficie. Depuis près de 12 ans, les autorités israéliennes ont sévèrement restreint la possibilité de traverser la frontière, essentiellement réservée à des « cas humanitaires exceptionnels ». Ceci équivaut à une interdiction généralisée de voyager qui est illégale, et ne repose sur aucune évaluation individuelle de risques sécuritaires. En 2018, le nombre de personnes autorisées à traverser le pont d’Erez pour sortir de Gaza ne représentait plus qu’environ 1 % du nombre enregistré en septembre 2000, avant l’imposition du blocus.
Malgré cette dure réalité, j’ai longtemps « osé rêver » de pouvoir voyager et de voir le monde, et même simplement de visiter Jérusalem, non loin de Gaza. L’année dernière, l’armée israélienne m’a enfin permis de quitter Gaza pour la première fois de ma vie, à l’âge de 31 ans, afin d’assister à des réunions au siège de Human Rights Watch à New York. J’ai par la suite été autorisée à me rendre en Israël et en Cisjordanie pour la première fois. J’ai savouré chaque instant, sachant que ce serait peut-être la dernière fois.
Je sais aussi que j’ai plus de chance que la plupart des habitants de Gaza, dont 80 % dépendent d’aide humanitaire et plus de la moitié sont sans emploi.
Je souhaiterais que des spectateurs de l’Eurovision viennent aussi ici à Gaza et prennent connaissance de notre propre réalité, comme les longues et fréquentes coupures de courant, et le supplice psychologique de se sentir piégé et interdit de voyage.
En tant que Palestiniennes et Palestiniens de Gaza, nous ne sommes pas en mesure d’assister sans entrave à l’Eurovision, mais nous ne cesserons jamais d’oser rêver de liberté.
]]>L’interview de Michael Oren, ancien ambassadeur d’Israël aux États-Unis (2009-2013), se termine mal :
– toute la Palestine m’appartient, c’est mon héritage biblique depuis 3000 ans
– pourtant vous êtes né à New York ?
– je n’aime pas vos questions, cette interview est terminée…
Michael Oren Cuts Short a Conversation About Israel
▻https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/michael-oren-hangs-up-on-a-call-about-israel
Where did you get that right?
It’s my heritage for three thousand years. It’s the same exact right I have from where I am talking to you. I am talking to you from Jaffa. I live in Jaffa. The same right I have to live in Jaffa I have in [the settlement] Beit El or Efrat, or in Hebron. Exact same right. Take away one right, the other right makes no sense. By the way, P.S., most of the lands of pre-1967 Israel are not even in the Bible. Haifa is not in the Bible; Tel Aviv is not in the Bible.
O.K., I just want to understand this because I don’t want to misunderstand it. You are saying there are Palestinians living in various areas of the West Bank right now—
There are, indeed.
—which may or may not at some point become a state. But you are saying that, wherever they are living, they have less right to be there than you as a Jew born in New York.
I didn’t say that. Don’t impute words to me I didn’t say.
I’m sorry, I thought you just said that.
No, I did not say that in any way. Listen, I don’t think I want to continue this interview. I don’t think this is a constructive interview.
]]>BDS = Beautiful, Diverse, Sensational: Israel fights Eurovision boycott campaign using Google ads
The new PR campaign attempts to counter BDS by putting up ads that use the same acronym but lead to a website exalting Israel
Reuters - May 10, 2019 5:46 PM
▻https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/israel-fights-eurovision-boycott-campaign-using-google-ads-1.7220938
Israel has launched a PR campaign to counter calls for a boycott of the upcoming Eurovision Song Contest final in Tel Aviv, using Google ads which refer to the boycott but lead to a glossy website extolling Israel.
The international boycott, divestment, sanctions (BDS) movement dismissed the tactic as “crude propaganda”.
BDS has called on artists, music fans and broadcasters to avoid the 2019 contest, arguing that it amounts to “whitewashing” Israel’s policies towards Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. Israel calls international boycotts discriminatory and anti-Semitic.
Internet advertisements on Google featuring the words “boycott” and “Eurovision” encourage searchers to click on a link that, in fact, leads them to a pro-Israel website which - in a play on the BDS initials - extols Israel as “Beautiful, Diverse, Sensational”.
#BDS
]]>The symphony when the devil plays for the participants in Eurovision in Tel Aviv
By: Dr. Nasser Laham
▻http://www.maannews.com/Content.aspx?ID=783407
To all the artists participating in the Eurovision song contest in Tel Aviv. This is not the beautiful Tel Aviv that they have told you about, this is the Palestinian city of Yaffa, the one that Zionists occupied in 1948, the one where Israel killed another nation and took its land by force. Israel, the one that imposed a siege on Gaza. Israel, the one that bans Palestinians from singing, dancing, and celebrating.
Have you heard about famous Palestinian artists? Muhammad Assaf from Gaza? Have you heard of Reem Banna from Nazareth? Or any other name for any Palestinian artist singing inside the walls of an Israeli prison? Has anyone ever translated the words of Palestinian songs to you?
As you sing, look at the faces in the audience, are there any Arabs? Is there any Palestinian allowed to enter the hall and listen to your songs? (...)
]]>Gaza a fait son choix : toujours elle résistera !
Et aucune accumulation de propagande israélienne ni réhabilitation par l’Eurovision ne peuvent effacer la légitimité de son droit à le faire.
Haidar Eid - 6 mai 2019 – Al Jazeera – traduction : JPP pour l’Agence Média Palestine
▻http://www.agencemediapalestine.fr/blog/2019/05/07/gaza-a-fait-son-choix-elle-continuera-a-resister
(...) Dans le cas présent, le gouvernement israélien est impatient de calmer Gaza avant la généreuse opportunité que lui ont offert les pays européens de blanchir ses crimes de guerre par l’accueil du concours Eurovision de la chanson à Tel Aviv, à une heure de route de la bande de Gaza.
Comme par le passé, les Palestiniens sont à présent censés accepter, et avec gratitude, une « période de calme » où les bombes israéliennes ne pleuvront pas sur leurs maisons, et où le blocus continuera d’étrangler Gaza.
En fait, ce qu’on exige régulièrement des Palestiniens, c’est qu’ils se conduisent comme des « Palestiniens domestiques », et qu’ils soient reconnaissants envers leurs maîtres ashkénazes blancspour les miettes de pain qu’ils leur laissent pour à peine survivre.
Ils doivent se laisser aller à une mort lente, mourir comme des cafards, ne manifester aucune forme de rébellion, et accepter que s’ils meurent en résistant, eh bien que ce soit de leur propre faute.
Mais trop c’est trop ! (...)
#Gaza
]]>Encore des victoires de BDS aux Etats-Unis :
BDS universitaire à la New-York University :
Le département d’analyse sociale et culturelle de l’université de New York (#NYU) met fin à toute relation officielle avec le campus de Tel Aviv
Jenni Fink, Newsweek, le 2 mai 2019
▻http://www.agencemediapalestine.fr/blog/2019/05/05/le-departement-danalyse-sociale-et-culturelle-de-luniversite-de
Une conférence prévue à la fac à côté de Boston, avec #Linda_Sarsour et #Roger_Waters, était menacée d’annulation. Un juge l’a autorisée :
Judge OKs pro-Palestinian event on UMass Amherst campus
Rick Sobey, Boston Herald, le 2 mai 2019
▻https://www.bostonherald.com/2019/05/02/judge-oks-pro-palestinian-event-on-umass-amherst-campus
A mettre avec l’évolution de la situation aux États-Unis vis à vis de la Palestine :
►https://seenthis.net/messages/752002
Spain’s Far-right Vox Received Almost $1M from ’Marxist-Islamist’ Iranian Exiles: Report | News | teleSUR English
▻https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Spains-Far-right-Vox-Received-Almost-1M-from-Marxist-Islamist-Irania
It is unlikely that Vox’s hyper-nationalist voters know that their party scored a significant presence in Spain’s parliament mostly thanks to Zionists, Islamists and foreigners.
With the April 28 general elections in Spain over, the far-right party Vox gained about 10 percent of parliamentary seats, marking the far-right’s rising comeback into politics four decades after Francisco Franco’s dictatorship. While a less alarmist reading would say that the far-right was always there, hidden in the conservative People’s Party (PP), the fact that they are out in the open strengthens Europe’s wave of far-right xenophobic and anti-European advance.
The party appealed to voters in one of Spain’s most contested elections since its return to democracy, mostly basing its arguments against leftists politics, social liberals, migrants, charged mainly with an Islamophobic narrative. Emphasizing the return of a long lost Spain and pushing to fight what they refer to as an “Islamist invasion,” which is the “enemy of Europe.” One could summarize it as an Iberian version of “Make Spain Great Again.”
Yet while this definitely appealed to almost two million voters, many are unaware of where their party’s initial funding came from. Back in January 2019, an investigation made by the newspaper El Pais revealed, through leaked documents, that almost one million euros - approximately 80 percent of its 2014 campaign funding - donated to Vox between its founding in December 2013 and the European Parliament elections in May 2014 came via the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), a self-declared “Marxist” organization and an Islamist group made up of Iranian exiles.
However, this is where things get complicated. The NCRI is based in France and was founded in 1981 by Massoud Rajavi and Abolhassan Banisadr, nowadays its president-elect is Maryam Rajavi (Massoud’s wife). The Rajavis are also the leaders of the Mojahedin-e-Khalq (MEK). A reason for many to believe that the NCRI is just a front for the MEK, which over the past few decades has managed to create a complicated web of anti-Iranian, pro-Israel and right-wing government support from all over the world.
To understand MEK, it’s necessary to review the 1953 U.S. and British-backed coup which ousted democratically elected prime minister of Iran Mohammad Mosaddegh and instituted a monarchical dictatorship led by Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.
The oppression carried out by the Pahlavi royal family led to the creation of many radical groups, one which was MEK, whose ideology combined Marxism and Islamism. Its original anti-west, especially anti-U.S. sentiment pushed for the killing of six U.S citizens in Iran in the 1970s. While in 1979, they enthusiastically cheered the seizure of the U.S. embassy in Tehran. After the Iranian Revolution, its young leaders, including Rajavi, pushed for endorsement from the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, but were denied.
So Rajavi, allied with the winner of the country’s first presidential election, Abolhassan Banisadr, who was not an ally of Khomeini, either. Soon Banisadr and MEK became some of Khomeini’s main opposition figures and had fled to Iraq and later to France.
In the neighboring country, MEK allied with Sadam Hussein to rage war against Iran. In a RAND report, allegations of the group’s complicity with Saddam are corroborated by press reports that quote Maryam Rajavi encouraging MEK members to “take the Kurds under your tanks, and save your bullets for the Iranian Revolutionary Guards."
The organization was deemed a terrorist organization by the U.S. and European Union for the better part of the 1990s, but things changed after the U.S. invasion to Iraq in 2003. This is when the U.S. neoconservative strategist leading the Department of State and the intelligence agencies saw MEK as an asset rather than a liability. Put simply in words they applied the dictum of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.”
The U.S.’s dismissal of past crimes reinvigorated MEK’s intense lobbying campaign to have itself removed from terrorist lists in the U.S. and the European Union. MEK, which by the beginning of the 21 century had morphed into a cult-like group according to many testimonies from dissidents, moved from Camp Ashraf to the U.S-created Camp Liberty outside of Baghdad. And that’s when things rapidly changed.
According to the Guardian, between 2007 and 2012, a number of Iranian nuclear scientists were attacked. In 2012, NBC News, citing two unnamed U.S. officials, reported that the attacks were planned by Israel’s Mossad and executed by MEK operatives inside Iran. By 2009 and 2012, the EU and the U.S. respectively took it out of its terrorist organizations list.
Soon after it gained support from U.S. politicians like Rudy Giuliani and current National Security Advisor John Bolton, who now call MEK a legitimate opposition to the current Iranian government. As the U.S. neocon forefathers did before, MEK shed its “Marxism.” After the U.S.’s official withdrawal from Iraq, they built MEK a safe have in Albania, near Tirana, where the trail of money can be followed once again.
Hassan Heyrani, a former member of MEK’s political department who defected in 2018, and handled parts of the organization’s finances in Iraq, when asked by Foreign Policy where he thought the money for MEK came from, he answered: “Saudi Arabia. Without a doubt.” For another former MEK member, Saadalah Saafi, the organization’s money definitely comes from wealthy Arab states that oppose Iran’s government.
“Mojahedin [MEK] are the tool, not the funders. They aren’t that big. They facilitate,” Massoud Khodabandeh, who once served in the MEK’s security department told Foreign Policy. “You look at it and say, ‘Oh, Mojahedin are funding [Vox].’ No, they are not. The ones that are funding that party are funding Mojahedin as well.”
Meanwhile, Danny Yatom, the former head of the Mossad, told the Jersulamen Post that Israel can implement some of its anti-Iran plans through MEK if a war were to break out. Saudi Arabia’s state-run television channels have given friendly coverage to the MEK, and Prince Turki al-Faisal, Saudi Arabia’s former intelligence chief, even appeared in July 2016 at a MEK rally in Paris.
With Israel and Saudi Arabia backing MEK, the question of why a far-right movement would take money from an Islamist organization clears up a bit. Israel’s support of European far-right parties has been public. In 2010, a sizeable delegation arrived in Tel Aviv, consisting of some 30 leaders of the European Alliance for Freedom, gathering leaders such as Geert Wilders of the Netherlands, Philip Dewinter from Belgium and Jorg Haider’s successor, Heinz-Christian Strache, from Austria.
Yet for the U.S., Israel, and Saudi Arabia, MEK represents an anti-Iranian voice that they so desperately need, and that on the surface didn’t come from them directly. It is unlikely that Vox’s hyper-nationalist voters know that their party scored a significant presence in Spain’s parliament mostly thanks to Zionists, Islamists and foreigners.
#Espagne #extrême_droite #Israël #Iran #Arabie_Saoudite #OMPI #Albanie
]]>Dans une nouvelle vidéo, Imperial Girl, la chanteuse Danielle Alma Ravitsky, chanteuse israélienne vivant à New York, recommande à Madonna de ne pas participer au festival Eurovision de blanchiment de l’apartheid à Tel Aviv, entre le 14 et le 18 mai prochain :
▻https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ar_RRzUyaVQ
Dans le même genre, en Angleterre :
Eurodivision - Cultural Boycott
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/758647
►https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3orfG--JhHI
Slovo - Not My Kinda Party
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/772317
►https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ouibGAgONVQ
#Palestine #Musique #Musique_et_politique #Eurovision #Boycott #BDS #Boycott_culturel #Danielle_Alma_Ravitsky #Slovo #USA #UK
]]>Décès d’un Palestinien blessé par des balles israéliennes - L’Orient-Le Jour - AFP - 28/04/2019
▻https://www.lorientlejour.com/article/1168243/deces-dun-palestinien-blesse-par-des-balles-israeliennes.html
Un Palestinien blessé par des balles israéliennes le 20 avril lors d’une tentative d’attaque contre des officiers selon la police, a succombé, a annoncé dimanche le ministère palestinien de la Santé. Omar Awny Younés, 20 ans, originaire du village de Saniria, dans le nord de la Cisjordanie occupée, est décédé samedi soir dans un hôpital israélien près de Tel Aviv, selon un communiqué du ministère.
Le 20 avril, la police israélienne avait déclaré que le Palestinien s’était « approché des policiers avec un couteau » près d’un poste de contrôle militaire près de Naplouse, en Cisjordanie occupée. « Le terroriste a été blessé par balle », mais aucun policier n’a été touché, avait-elle ajouté.
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Palestinian Dies From Serious Wounds Suffered A Week Earlier Near Nablus
April 27, 2019 9:38 PM | IMEMC News
▻https://imemc.org/article/palestinian-remains-in-a-serious-condition-after-soldiers-shot-him-near-nablu
The Palestinian Health Ministry has reported that a young Palestinian man died, on Saturday evening, from serious wounds he suffered a week earlier, after Israeli soldiers shot him at a military roadblock in northern West Bank.
The Health Ministry said the young man, Omar ‘Awni Abdul-Karim Younis , 20, died at the Israeli Beilinson Israeli medical center.
The soldiers, stationed at Za’tara military roadblock, north of Nablus, shot the young man with several rounds of live ammunition, reportedly after he attempted to stab them, and prevented Palestinian medics from approaching him.
The Palestinian was from Sanniriya town, south of Qalqilia, in the northern part of the occupied West Bank. No soldiers were injured in the reported incident.
]]>U.S. denies entry to BDS founder Omar Barghouti
Noa Landau | Apr 11, 2019 7:22 PM | Haaretz.com
▻https://www.haaretz.com/us-news/bds-founder-omar-barghouti-denied-entry-to-the-united-states-1.7110679
The U.S. government denied entry to co-founder of the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement Omar Barghouti on Thursday.
Airline staff at Israel’s Ben Gurion International Airport informed Barghouti that he could not fly to the United States, despite holding valid travel documents. He was told that U.S. immigration officials ordered the American consul in Tel Aviv to deny him permission to board the flight.
Barghouti was told that it is an “immigration matter,” according to a statement by the Arab American Institute, a Washington-based advocacy group. They added that Barghouti often faces travel restrictions from Israel, but not from the United States.
Barghouti was set to attend his daughter’s wedding, who lives in the United States. He was also set to speak at Harvard, New York University and a Philidelphia bookstore owned by Marc Lemont Hill, whose contract at CNN was terminated last year over his support for Palestinian rights. (...)
]]>Quand l’histoire tourne au polar avec Shlomo Sand
03/04/2019
►https://www.franceculture.fr/emissions/la-grande-table-1ere-partie/quand-lhistoire-tourne-au-polar-avec-shlomo-sand
Shlomo Sand , professeur émérite d’Histoire à l’Université de Tel Aviv, est invité pour son premier roman noir : « La mort du Khazar rouge »,
aux éditions Le Seuil.
▻http://media.radiofrance-podcast.net/podcast09/12360-03.04.2019-ITEMA_22026037-0.mp3
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Leïla Shahid - Shlomo Sand : Le cinéma peut-il se jouer de la guerre ?
03/04/2019
▻https://www.franceculture.fr/emissions/la-grande-table-2eme-partie/leila-shahid-shlomo-sand-le-cinema-peut-il-se-jouer-de-la-guerre
Face à la guerre, le cinéma est-il plus puissant que la diplomatie ? Shlomo Sand, historien israëlien, et Leïla Shahid , anciennement ambassadrice de Palestine, seront les invités de cette Grande table à l’occasion du 14ème panorama des cinémas du Maghreb et du Moyen-Orient (du 2 au 20 avril 2019).
▻http://media.radiofrance-podcast.net/podcast09/12360-03.04.2019-ITEMA_22026037-1.mp3
]]>« تل أبيب ع نار » للفلسطيني سامح زعبي : السلاح يغير السيناريو لا الحمص | القدس العربي
▻https://www.alquds.co.uk/%D8%AA%D9%84-%D8%A3%D8%A8%D9%8A%D8%A8-%D8%B9-%D9%86%D8%A7%D8%B1-%D9%84%D9%
Ne vous jetez pas sur un traducteur en ligne si vous avez envie de savoir pourquoi le hoummous/khoummous est un personnage essentiel de Tel Aviv on fire (تل أبيب ع نار), le second film de Sameh Zoabi, un Palestinien de 48 qui considère "qu’au Moyen-Orient le feuilleton est une chose sérieuse". Un must à ne manquer sous aucun prétexte. (Au fait, certains experts de la région vont être déçus : pas une seule allusion à l’islam, même pas un petit appel à la prière !)
في الفيلم يأمر الضابط سلام بالقدوم بصحن حمص، كلما مرّ بالحاجز كي «يساعده» في إعادة كتابة السيناريو. سلام الذي لا يأكل الحمص منذ الصغر بسبب عقدة سببها حصار الجيش لبيت أهله في الانتفاضة الأولى، ولم يكن لديهم غير الحمص لأكله، اشترى مرة حمصا معلبا وأعده للضابط الذي أكله بشهية. لاحقا، في مطعم حمص فلسطيني، يقول الضابط لسلام إن الأحمق فقط من يأكل الحمص المعلب، عاجزا عن التمييز بين المعلب والطازج.
وإن استطاع الضابط إحداث تغييرات في السيناريو الفلسطيني، بالسلاح، ليلائم الإسرائيلي، في الصراع بين الروايتين/الحكايتين وأصحابهما، يبقى هذا القادم الطارئ على البلاد عاجزا عن التمييز بين الحمص الطازج والحمص المعلب، وله روايته الكاذبة عن «ملكية الحمص»، ولنا روايتنا، وهذا ما لا يستطيع تغييره بالسلاح.
]]>171 Swedish artists demand boycott of Eurovision in Israel
April 4, 2019 11:14 A.M. (Updated: April 4, 2019 12:15 P.M.)
▻http://www.maannews.com/Content.aspx?ID=783095
STOCKHOLM (Ma’an) — Some 171 Swedish artists and celebrities have signed an open letter urging to boycott the 2019 Eurovision Song Contest, in Tel Aviv, Israel, on Wednesday.
In the open letter, the Swedish signatories said that "Just a few days after the Israeli victory in the Eurovision Song Contest in May 2018, Israel’s army killed 62 unarmed Palestinians who protested against their prison-like imprisonment in Gaza. Six of those murdered were children.”
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UK Band Release Song Highlighting Israeli Apartheid (VIDEO)
April 4, 2019 5:36 AM IMEMC News & Agencies
▻https://imemc.org/article/uk-band-release-song-highlighting-israeli-apartheid-video
The UK-based band Slovo has released a new song which calls for a boycott of the Eurovision Song Contest final, which will be held in Tel Aviv on the 18th of May.
▻https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=227&v=ouibGAgONVQ
#BDS
» One Palestinian Killed, Another Wounded, in Attack by Israeli Settler Near Nablus
April 3, 2019 10:08 AM - IMEMC News
▻https://imemc.org/article/one-palestinian-killed-another-wounded-in-attack-by-israeli-settler-near-nabl
Israeli soldiers have reported that a Palestinian was killed, and another injured, when an Israeli settler opened fire on them near Beita town, south of Nablus.
The Palestinian who was killed was identified as Mohammad Abdul-Mon’em Abdel-Fattah from Khirbet Qeis village in the Salfit district, in the northern West Bank.
The one who was injured has been identified as Khaled Salah Rawajba, a 26-year-old resident of the village of Rujeib, east of Nablus. He was shot in the abdomen and taken to Rafidia hospital in Nablus, where he remains in serious condition.
The Israeli settler who shot and killed the young man tried to claim that “he had a knife” – but video footage taken by another Israeli settler on the scene, showing the brutal and callous treatment of Adel-Fattah’s body after he was killed, shows that there was no weapon.
In the video, a soldier and a settler are seen kicking the young man’s corpse, flipping him over and going through his pockets, finding nothing.
According to eyewitnesses, the claim of an attempted stabbing were completely false. They said that Mohammad was a truck driver who was waiting at the checkpoint when the Israeli settler closed the road with his car. Khaled then got out of his car and tried to tell the settler to move. But the Israeli settler began shooting.
Khaled Rawajba, an employee at an auto repair shop on the side of the road, heard the altercation and stepped out of his workplace to see what was happening. He was then shot as well, and seriously wounded.
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In video - Palestinian shot dead by Israeli settler, another injured
April 3, 2019 9:45 A.M. (Updated: April 3, 2019 9:45 A.M.)
▻http://www.maannews.com/Content.aspx?id=783082
NABLUS (Ma’an) — A Palestinian was shot and killed by an Israeli settler, while another was injured at the Huwwara checkpoint in the northern occupied West Bank district of Nablus, on Wednesday, for allegedly attempting to carry out a stabbing attack.
Medical sources reported that the shot Palestinian was taken in critical condition to Beilinson Hospital in Petah Tikva, east of Tel Aviv, in central Israel, where he was pronounced dead.
Sources identified the killed Palestinian as Muhammad Abed al-Fattah , a resident from the northern West Bank district of Salfit.
Local sources said that an Israeli settler, identified as Joshua Sherman, from the illegal settlement of Elon Moreh, northeast of the Nablus district, blocked the road with his vehicle, preventing al-Fattah from crossing the road, and opened fire at him.
]]>Les #gilets_jaunes vus de New York...
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Driving was already expensive in France when in January 2018 the government of President Emmanuel Macron imposed a tax that raised the price of diesel fuel by 7.6 centimes per liter and of gasoline by 3.8 centimes (about 9 and 4 cents, respectively); further increases were planned for January 2019. The taxes were an attempt to cut carbon emissions and honor the president’s lofty promise to “Make Our Planet Great Again.”
Priscillia Ludosky, then a thirty-two-year-old bank employee from the Seine-et-Marne department outside Paris, had no choice but to drive into the city for work every day, and the cost of her commute was mounting. “When you pay regularly for something, it really adds up fast, and the increase was enormous,” she told me recently. “There are lots of things I don’t like. But on that I pushed.” In late May 2018, she created a petition on Change.org entitled Pour une Baisse des Prix du Carburant à la Pompe! (For a reduction of fuel prices at the pump!)
Over the summer Ludosky’s petition—which acknowledged the “entirely honorable” aim of reducing pollution while offering six alternative policy suggestions, including subsidizing electric cars and encouraging employers to allow remote work—got little attention. In the fall she tried again, convincing a radio host in Seine-et-Marne to interview her if the petition garnered 1,500 signatures. She posted that challenge on her Facebook page, and the signatures arrived in less than twenty-four hours. A local news site then shared the petition on its own Facebook page, and it went viral, eventually being signed by over 1.2 million people.
Éric Drouet, a thirty-three-year-old truck driver and anti-Macron militant also from Seine-et-Marne, created a Facebook event for a nationwide blockade of roads on November 17 to protest the high fuel prices. Around the same time, a fifty-one-year-old self-employed hypnotherapist named Jacline Mouraud recorded herself addressing Macron for four minutes and thirty-eight seconds and posted the video on Facebook. “You have persecuted drivers since the day you took office,” she said. “This will continue for how long?” Mouraud’s invective was viewed over six million times, and the gilets jaunes—the yellow vests, named for the high-visibility vests that French drivers are required to keep in their cars and to wear in case of emergency—were born.
Even in a country where protest is a cherished ritual of public life, the violence and vitriol of the gilets jaunes movement have stunned the government. Almost immediately it outgrew the issue of the carbon taxes and the financial burden on car-reliant French people outside major cities. In a series of Saturday demonstrations that began in mid-November and have continued for three months, a previously dormant anger has erupted. Demonstrators have beaten police officers, thrown acid in the faces of journalists, and threatened the lives of government officials. There has been violence on both sides, and the European Parliament has condemned French authorities for using “flash-ball guns” against protesters, maiming and even blinding more than a few in the crowds. But the gilets jaunes have a flair for cinematic destruction. In late November they damaged parts of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris; in early January they commandeered a forklift and rammed through the heavy doors of the ministry of state—the only time in the history of the Fifth Republic that a sitting minister had to be evacuated from a government building.
The gilets jaunes are more than a protest. This is a modern-day jacquerie, an emotional wildfire stoked in the provinces and directed against Paris and, most of all, the elite. French history since 1789 can be seen as a sequence of anti-elite movements, yet the gilets jaunes have no real precedent. Unlike the Paris Commune of 1871, this is a proletarian struggle devoid of utopian aspirations. Unlike the Poujadist movement of the mid-1950s—a confederation of shopkeepers likewise opposed to the “Americanization” of a “thieving and inhuman” state and similarly attracted to anti-Semitic conspiracy theories—the gilets jaunes include shopkeepers seemingly content to destroy shop windows. There is an aspect of carnival here: a delight in the subversion of norms, a deliberate embrace of the grotesque.
Many have said that the gilets jaunes are merely another “populist movement,” although the term is now so broad that it is nearly meaningless. Comparisons have been made to the Britain of Brexit, the United States of Donald Trump, and especially the Italy of Cinque Stelle. But the crucial difference is that the gilets jaunes are apolitical, and militantly so. They have no official platform, no leadership hierarchy, and no reliable communications. Everyone can speak for the movement, and yet no one can. When a small faction within it fielded a list of candidates for the upcoming European parliamentary elections in May, their sharpest opposition came from within: to many gilets jaunes, the ten who had put their names forward—among them a nurse, a truck driver, and an accountant—were traitors to the cause, having dared to replicate the elite that the rest of the movement disdains.
Concessions from the government have had little effect. Under mounting pressure, Macron was forced to abandon the carbon tax planned for 2019 in a solemn televised address in mid-December. He also launched the so-called grand débat, a three-month tour of rural France designed to give him a better grasp of the concerns of ordinary people. In some of these sessions, Macron has endured more than six hours of bitter criticisms from angry provincial mayors. But these gestures have quelled neither the protests nor the anger of those who remain in the movement. Performance is the point. During the early “acts,” as the weekly demonstrations are known, members refused to meet with French prime minister Édouard Philippe, on the grounds that he would not allow the encounter to be televised, and that sentiment has persisted. Perhaps the most telling thing about the gilets jaunes is the vest they wear: a symbol of car ownership, but more fundamentally a material demand to be seen.
Inequality in France is less extreme than in the United States and Britain, but it is increasing. Among wealthy Western countries, the postwar French state—l’État-providence—is something of a marvel. France’s health and education systems remain almost entirely free while ranking among the best in the world. In 2017 the country’s ratio of tax revenue to gross domestic product was 46.2 percent, according to statistics from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)—the highest redistribution level of any OECD country and a ratio that allows the state to fight poverty through a generous social protection system. Of that 46.2 percent, the French government allocated approximately 28 percent for social services.
“The French social model is so integrated that it almost seems a natural, preexisting condition,” Alexis Spire, a sociologist of inequality at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, told me recently. A number of the gilets jaunes I met said that despite the taxes they pay, they do not feel they benefit from any social services, since they live far from urban centers. But anyone who has ever received housing assistance, a free prescription, or sixteen weeks of paid maternity leave has benefited from the social protection system. The effect of redistribution is often invisible.
And yet the rich in France have gotten much richer. Between 1983 and 2015, the vast majority of incomes in France rose by less than one percent per year, while the richest one percent of the population saw their incomes rise by 100 percent after taxes. According to World Bank statistics, the richest 20 percent now earns nearly five times as much as the bottom 20 percent. This represents a stark shift from the Trente Glorieuses, France’s thirty-year economic boom after World War II. As the economist Thomas Piketty has pointed out, between 1950 and 1983, most French incomes rose steadily by approximately 4 percent per year; the nation’s top incomes rose by only one percent.
What has become painfully visible, however, is the extent of the country’s geographical fractures. Paris has always been the undisputed center of politics, culture, and commerce, but France was once also a country that cherished and protected its vibrant provincial life. This was la France profonde, a clichéd but genuinely existing France of tranquil stone villages and local boulangeries with lines around the block on Sundays. “Douce France, cher pays de mon enfance,” goes the beloved song by the crooner Charles Trenet. “Mon village, au clocher aux maisons sages.” These days, the maisons sages are vacant, and the country boulangeries are closed.
The story is familiar: the arrival of large multinational megastores on the outskirts of provincial French towns and cities has threatened, and in many cases asphyxiated, local businesses.1 In the once-bustling centers of towns like Avignon, Agen, Calais, and Périgueux, there is now an eerie quiet: windows are often boarded up, and fewer and fewer people are to be found. This is the world evoked with a melancholy beauty in Nicolas Mathieu’s novel Leurs enfants après eux, which won the Prix Goncourt, France’s most prestigious literary prize, in 2018.
The expansion since the 1980s of France’s high-speed rail network has meant that the country’s major cities are all well connected to Paris. But there are many small towns where the future never arrived, where abandoned nineteenth-century train stations are now merely places for teenagers to make out, monuments of the way things used to be. In these towns, cars are the only way people can get to work. I met a fifty-five-year-old truck and taxi driver named Marco Pavan in the Franche-Comté in late November. What he told me then—about how carbon taxes can seem like sneers from the Parisian elite—has stayed with me. “Ask a Parisian—for him none of this is an issue, because he doesn’t need a car,” Pavan said. “There’s no bus or train to take us anywhere. We have to have a car.” I cited that remark in a Washington Post story I filed from Besançon; in the online comments section, many attacked the movement for what they saw as a backward anti-environmentalism—missing his point.
Few have written as extensively as the French geographer Christophe Guilluy on la France périphérique, a term he popularized that refers both to the people and the regions left behind by an increasingly globalized economy. Since 2010, when he published Fractures françaises, Guilluy has been investigating the myths and realities of what he calls “the trompe l’oeil of a peaceful, moderate, and consensual society.” He is one of a number of left-wing French intellectuals—among them the novelist Michel Houellebecq, the historian Georges Bensoussan, and the essayist Michel Onfray—who in recent years have argued that their beloved patrie has drifted into inexorable decline, a classic critique of the French right since 1789. But Guilluy’s decline narrative is different: he is not as concerned as the others with Islamist extremism or “decadence” broadly conceived. For him, France’s decline is structural, the result of having become a place where “the social question disappears.”
Guilluy, born in Montreuil in 1964, is something of a rarity among well-known French intellectuals: he is a product of the Paris suburbs, not of France’s storied grandes écoles. And it is clear that much of his critique is personal. As a child, Guilluy, whose family then lived in the working-class Paris neighborhood of Belleville, was forcibly relocated for a brief period to the heavily immigrant suburb of La Courneuve when their building was slated to be demolished in the midst of Paris’s urban transformation. “I saw gentrification firsthand,” he told Le Figaro in 2017. “For the natives—the natives being just as much the white worker as the young immigrant—what provoked the most problems was not the arrival of Magrebis, but that of the bobos.”
This has long been Guilluy’s battle cry, and he has focused his intellectual energy on attacking what he sees as the hypocrisy of the bobos, or bourgeois bohemians. His public debut was a short 2001 column in Libération applying that term, coined by the columnist David Brooks, to French social life. What was happening in major urban centers across the country, he wrote then, was a “ghettoization by the top of society” that excluded people like his own family.
Guilluy crystallized that argument in a 2014 book that won him the ear of the Élysée Palace and regular appearances on French radio. This was La France périphérique: comment on a sacrifié les classes populaires, in which he contended that since the mid-1980s, France’s working classes have been pushed out of the major cities to rural communities—a situation that was a ticking time bomb—partly as a result of rising prices. He advanced that view further in 2016 with La Crépuscule de la France d’en haut—now translated into English as Twilight of the Elites: Prosperity, the Periphery, and the Future of France—a pithy screed against France’s bobo elite and what he sees as its shameless embrace of a “neoliberal,” “Americanized society” and a hollow, feel-good creed of multicultural tolerance. In 2018, one month before the rise of the gilets jaunes, he published No Society, whose title comes from Margaret Thatcher’s 1987 comment that “there is no such thing as society.”
In Guilluy’s view, an immigrant working class has taken the place of the “native” working class in the banlieues on the outskirts of major cities. This native class, he argues, has been scattered throughout the country and become an “unnoticed presence” that France’s elite has “made to disappear from public consciousness” in order to consolidate its grip on power. Cities are now the exclusive preserve of the elites and their servants, and what Guilluy means by “no society” is that the visible signs of class conflict in urban daily life have vanished. This is his trompe l’oeil: rich, insulated Parisians have convinced themselves that everything is fine, while those who might say otherwise are nowhere near. “The simmering discontent of rural France has never really been taken seriously,” he writes in Twilight of the Elites.
Since November, much of the French press has declared that Guilluy essentially predicted the rise of the gilets jaunes. They seem, after all, a fulfillment of his prophecy about “the betrayal of the people” by the elites, even if he is always elusive about who exactly “the people” are. While critiques from the movement have remained a confused cloud of social media invective, Guilluy has served as its de facto interpreter.
No Society puts into words what many in the gilets jaunes have either struggled or refused to articulate. This is the hazy middle ground between warning and threat: “The populist wave coursing through the western world is only the visible part of a soft power emanating from the working classes that will force the elites to rejoin the real movement of society or else to disappear.”
For now, however, there is just one member of the elite whom the gilets jaunes wish would disappear, and calls for his violent overthrow continue even as the movement’s momentum subsides.
An intense and deeply personal hatred of Macron is the only unifying cry among the gilets jaunes. Eighteen months before the uprising began, this was the man who captured the world’s imagination and who, after populist victories in Britain and the United States, had promised a French “Third Way.” Yet the Macronian romance is already over, both at home and abroad.
To some extent, the French always turn against their presidents, but the anger Macron elicits is unique. This is less because of any particular policy than because of his demeanor and, most of all, his language. “Mr. Macron always refused to respond to us,” Muriel Gautherin, fifty-three, a podiatrist who lives in the Paris suburbs, told me at a December march on the Champs-Élysées. “It’s he who insults us, and he who should respond.” When I asked her what she found most distasteful about the French president, her answer was simple: “His words.”
She has a point. Among Macron’s earliest actions as president was to shave five euros off the monthly stipends of France’s Aide personalisée au logement (APL), the country’s housing assistance program. Around the same time, he slashed France’s wealth tax on those with a net worth of at least €1.3 million—a holdover from the Mitterand era.
Macron came to office with a record of unrelentingly insulting the poor. In 2014, when he was France’s economic minister, he responded to the firing of nine hundred employees (most of them women) from a Breton slaughterhouse by noting that some were “mostly illiterate.” In 2016 he was caught on camera in a heated dispute with a labor activist in the Hérault. When the activist gestured to Macron’s €1,600 suit as a symbol of his privilege, the minister said, “The best way to afford a suit is to work.” In 2018 he told a young, unemployed gardener that he could find a new job if he merely “crossed the street.”
Yet nothing quite compares to the statement Macron made in inaugurating Station F, a startup incubator in the thirteenth arrondissement of Paris, housed in a converted rail depot. It is a cavernous consulate for Silicon Valley, a soaring glass campus open to all those with “big ideas” who can also pay €195 a month for a desk and can fill out an application in fluent English. (“We won’t consider any other language,” the organization’s website says.) Google, Amazon, and Microsoft all have offices in it, and in a city of terrible coffee, the espresso is predictably fabulous. In June 2017 Macron delivered a speech there. “A train station,” he said, referring to the structure’s origins, “it’s a place where we encounter those who are succeeding and those who are nothing.”
This was the moment when a large percentage of the French public learned that in the eyes of their president, they had no value. “Ceux qui ne sont rien” is a phrase that has lingered and festered. To don the yellow vest is thus to declare not only that one has value but also that one exists.
On the whole, the gilets jaunes are not the poorest members of French society, which is not surprising. As Tocqueville remarked, revolutions are fueled not by those who suffer the most, but by those whose economic status has been improving and who then experience a sudden and unexpected fall. So it seems with the gilets jaunes: most live above the poverty line but come from the precarious ranks of the lower middle class, a group that aspires to middle-class stability and seeks to secure it through palliative consumption: certain clothing brands, the latest iPhone, the newest television.
In mid-December Le Monde profiled a young couple in the movement from Sens in north-central France, identified only as Arnaud and Jessica. Both twenty-six, they and their four children live in a housing project on the €2,700 per month that Arnaud earns as a truck driver, including more than €1,000 in government assistance. According to statistics from France’s Institut national de la statistique et des études économiques (Insée), this income places them right at the poverty line for a family of this size, and possibly even slightly below it. But the expenses Arnaud and Jessica told Le Monde they struggled to pay included karate lessons for their oldest son and pet supplies for their dog. Jessica, who does not work, told Le Monde, “Children are so mean to each other if they wear lesser brands. I don’t want their friends to make fun of them.” She said she had traveled to Paris for gilet jaune protests on three separate weekends—journeys that presumably cost her money.
Readers of Le Monde—many of them educated, affluent, and pro-Macron—were quick to attack Arnaud and Jessica. But the sniping missed their point, which was that they felt a seemingly inescapable sense of humiliation, fearing ridicule everywhere from the Élysée Palace to their children’s school. They were explaining something profound about the gilets jaunes: the degree to which the movement is fueled by unfulfilled expectations. For many demonstrators, life is simply not as they believed it would be, or as they feel they deserve. There is an aspect of entitlement to the gilets jaunes, who are also protesting what the French call déclassement, the increasing elusiveness of the middle-class dream in a society in which economic growth has not kept pace with population increase. This entitlement appears to have alienated the gilets jaunes from immigrants and people of color, who are largely absent from their ranks and whose condition is often materially worse.2 “It’s not people who don’t have hope anymore, who don’t have a place to live, or who don’t have a job,” Rokhaya Diallo, a French activist for racial equality, told me recently, describing the movement. “It’s just that status they’re trying to preserve.”
The gilets jaunes have no substantive ideas: resentment does not an ideology make. They remain a combustible vacuum, and extremist agitators on the far right and the far left have sought to capitalize on their anger. Both Marine Le Pen of the recently renamed Rassemblement National and Jean-Luc Mélenchon of the left-wing La France Insoumise have tried hard to channel the movement’s grassroots energy into their own political parties, but the gilets jaunes have so far resisted these entreaties. The gilets jaunes also found themselves at the center of a diplomatic spat: in early February Italy’s deputy prime minister, Luigi Di Maio, met with two of their members on the outskirts of Paris in a jab at Macron. Two days later, France withdrew its ambassador to Rome for the first time since 1940, but the gilets jaunes have not attempted to exploit this attention for their own political gain. Instead there was infighting—a Twitter war over who had the right to represent the cause abroad and who did not.
The intellectual void at the heart of an amorphous movement can easily fill with the hatred of an “other.” That may already be happening to the gilets jaunes. Although a careful analysis by Le Monde concluded that race and immigration were not major concerns in the two hundred most frequently shared messages on gilet jaune Facebook pages between the beginning of the movement and January 22, a number of gilets jaunes have been recorded on camera making anti-Semitic gestures, insulting a Holocaust survivor on the Paris metro, and saying that journalists “work for the Jews.” Importantly, the gilets jaunes have never collectively denounced any of these anti-Semitic incidents—a silence perhaps inevitable for a movement that eschews organization of any kind. Likewise, a thorough study conducted by the Paris-based Fondation Jean Jaurès has shown the extent to which conspiracy theories are popular in the movement: 59 percent of those surveyed who had participated in a gilet jaune demonstration said they believed that France’s political elites were encouraging immigration in order to replace them, and 50 percent said they believed in a global “Zionist” conspiracy.
Members of the movement are often quick to point out that the gilets jaunes are not motivated by identity politics, and yet anyone who has visited one of their demonstrations is confronted with an undeniable reality. Far too much attention has been paid to the symbolism of the yellow vests and far too little to the fact that the vast majority of those who wear them are lower-middle-class whites. In what is perhaps the most ethnically diverse society in Western Europe, can the gilets jaunes truly be said to represent “the people,” as the members of the movement often claim? Priscillia Ludosky, arguably the first gilet jaune, is a black woman. “It’s complicated, that question,” she told me. “I have no response.”
The gilets jaunes are also distinctly a minority of the French population: in a country of 67 million, as many as 282,000 have demonstrated on a single day, and that figure has consistently fallen with each passing week, down to 41,500 during “Act 14” of the protest on February 16. On two different weekends in November and December, other marches in Paris—one for women’s rights, the other against climate change—drew far bigger crowds than the gilets jaunes did. But the concerns of this minority are treated as universal by politicians, the press, and even the movement’s sharpest critics. Especially after Trump and Brexit, lower-middle-class and working-class whites command public attention even when they have no clear message.
French citizens of color have been protesting social inequality for years without receiving any such respect. In 2005 the killing of two minority youths by French police in the Paris suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois ignited a string of violent uprisings against police brutality, but the government declared an official state of emergency instead of launching a grand débat. In 2009, the overseas departments of Guadeloupe and Martinique saw a huge strike against the high cost of living—a forty-four-day uprising that also targeted fuel prices and demanded an increase to the minimum wage. In 2017 an almost identical protest occurred in French Guiana, another French overseas department, where residents demonstrated against household goods that were as much as 12 percent more expensive than they were in mainland France, despite a lower minimum wage. The French government was slow to respond in both of these instances, while the concerns of the gilets jaunes have resulted in a personal apology from the president and a slew of concessions.
Guilluy, whose analysis of la France périphérique ultimately fails to grapple significantly with France’s decidedly peripheral overseas territories, does not shy away from the question of identity. He sees a racial element to the frustrations of la France périphérique, but he does not see this as a problem. Some of the most frustrating moments in his work come when he acknowledges but refuses to interrogate white working-class behavior that seems to be racially motivated. “Public housing in outlying communities is now a last resort for workers hoping to be able to go on living near the major cities,” he writes in Twilight of the Elites, describing the recent astronomic rise in France’s urban real estate prices. “These projects, mostly occupied by immigrant renters, are avoided by white French-born workers. Barring some utterly unforeseeable turn of events, their expulsion from the largest urban centers will be irreversible.” It would not diminish Guilluy’s broader point about la France périphérique if he acknowledged that victims of structural changes can also be intolerant.
Guilluy also regularly recycles anxieties over immigration, often from controversial theorists such as Michèle Tribalat, who is associated with the idea of le grand remplacement, the alleged “great replacement” of France’s white population by immigrants from North and Sub-Saharan Africa. In making his case about “the demographic revolution in process,” Guilluy has been accused of inflating his statistics. France, he wrote in Fractures françaises, “welcomes a little less than 200,000 legal foreigners every year.” But these claims were attacked by Patrick Weil, a leading French historian of immigration, who noted in his book Le sens de la République (2015) that Guilluy failed to consider that a large number of those 200,000 are temporary workers, students who come and go, and others of “irregular” status. Guilluy has not responded to these criticisms, and in any case his rhetoric has since grown more radical. In No Society he writes, “Multiculturalism is, intrinsically, a feeble ideology that divides and weakens.”
Whether the gilets jaunes will eventually come to agree with him is a crucial question. Like Guilluy, they are responding to real social conditions. But if, following Guilluy’s lead, they ultimately resort to the language of race and ethnicity to explain their suffering, they will have chosen to become a different movement altogether, one in which addressing inequality was never quite the point. In some ways, they have already crossed that line.
On the afternoon of Saturday, February 16, the prominent French intellectual Alain Finkielkraut got out of a taxi on the Boulevard Montparnasse. A crowd of gilets jaunes noticed him and began hurling anti-Semitic insults. The scene, recorded on video, was chilling: in the center of Paris, under a cloudless sky, a mob of visibly angry men surrounded a man they knew to be Jewish, called him a “dirty Zionist,” and told him, “go back to Tel Aviv.”
Finkielkraut’s parents were Polish refugees from the Holocaust. He was born in Paris in 1949 and has become a fixture in French cultural life, a prolific author, a host of a popular weekly broadcast on France Culture, and a member of the Académie Française, the country’s most elite literary institution. In the words of Macron, who immediately responded to the attack, he “is not only an eminent man of letters but the symbol of what the Republic affords us all.” The irony is that Finkielkraut—another former leftist who believes that France has plunged into inexorable decline and ignored the dangers of multiculturalism—was one of the only Parisian intellectuals who had supported the gilets jaunes from the beginning.
I spoke to Finkielkraut after the attack, and he explained that the gilets jaunes had seemed to him the evidence of something authentic. “I saw an invisible France, neglected and forgotten,” he said. “Wearing fluorescent yellow vests in order to be visible—of being a ‘somewhere’ as opposed to an ‘anywhere,’ as Goodhart has said—seemed to me an absolutely legitimate critique.” The British journalist David Goodhart, popular these days in French right-wing circles, is the author of The Road to Somewhere (2017), which sees populist anger as the inevitable response to the widening gulf between those “rooted” in a particular place and cosmopolitans at home anywhere. “France is not a ‘start-up nation,’” Finkielkraut told me. “It can’t be reduced to that.”
Finkielkraut said that the attack was a sign that the reasonable critiques orginally made by the gilets jaunes had vanished, and that they had no real future. “I think the movement is in the process of degradation. It’s no longer a social movement but a sect that has closed in on itself, whose discourse is no longer rational.”
Although the Paris prosecutor has opened an investigation into his attackers, Finkielkraut has not pressed charges. He told me that the episode, as violent as it was, did not necessarily suggest that all those who had worn yellow vests in recent months were anti-Semites or extremists. “Those who insulted me were not the nurses, the shopkeepers, or the small business owners,” he said, noting that he doubted he would have experienced the same prejudice at the roundabouts, the traffic circles across the country where gilets jaunes protesters gathered every Saturday. In a sense, these were the essence of the movement, which was an inchoate mobilization against many things, but perhaps none so much as loneliness. The roundabouts quickly became impromptu piazzas and a means, however small, of reclaiming a spirit of community that disappeared long ago in so many French towns and villages.
In Paris, where the remaining gilets jaunes have now focused most of their energy, the weekly protests have become little more than a despicable theater filled with scenes like the attack on Finkielkraut. There is no convincing evidence that those still wearing yellow vests are troubled by the presence of bigotry in their ranks. What is more, many gilets jaunes now seem to believe that pointing out such prejudice is somehow to become part of a government-backed conspiracy to turn public opinion against them.
Consider, for instance, a February 19 communiqué released in response to the attack on Finkielkraut from La France en Colère, one of the movement’s main online bulletins. “For many days, the government and its friends in the national media seem to have found a new technique for destabilizing public opinion and discrediting the Gilets Jaunes movement,” it begins. “We denounce the accusations and the manipulations put in place by this government adept at fake news.” But this is all the communiqué denounces; it does not address the anti-Semitic violence to which Finkielkraut was subjected, nor does it apologize to a national figure who had defended the movement when few others of his prominence dared to do the same.
A month after our last conversation, I called Priscillia Ludosky back, to see if she had any reaction to the recent turn of events in the movement her petition had launched. She was only interested in discussing what she called the French government’s “systematic abuse to manipulate public opinion.” She also believes that a government-media conspiracy will stop at nothing to smear the cause. “If there was one person who ever said something homophobic, it was on the front page of every newspaper,” she told me.
In the days after the attack, Finkielkraut lamented not so much the grim details of what had happened but the squandered potential of a moment that has increasingly descended into paranoid feverishness. As he told me: “This was a beautiful opportunity to reflect on who we are that’s been completely ruined.”
▻https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2019/03/21/low-visibility-france-gilet-jaunes
]]>Une roquette tirée depuis la bande de Gaza fait plusieurs blessés en Israël - moyen orient - RFI
▻http://www.rfi.fr/moyen-orient/20190325-israel-roquette-tir-bande-gaza-maison-blesses
Un tir de roquette en provenance de la bande de Gaza a fait cinq ou six blessés – selon les sources – au nord de Tel-Aviv, en Israël, ce lundi 25 mars. Le Premier ministre Benyamin Netanyahu a annoncé qu’il allait raccourcir sa visite aux Etats-Unis et a promis de riposter « avec force ». L’armée israélienne envoie des renforts autour de Gaza. (...)
#GAZA
]]>If Palestinians have 22 states, Israeli Jews have 200
The notion that the Palestinians have 22 states to go to is a blend of malice and ignorance: The Palestinians are the stepchildren of the Arab world, no country wants them and no Arab country hasn’t betrayed them
Gideon Levy
Mar 16, 2019 1
▻https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-if-palestinians-have-22-states-israeli-jews-have-200-1.7023647
Here we go again: The Palestinians have 22 states and, poor us, we have only one. Benjamin Netanyahu isn’t the first to use this warped argument; it has been a cornerstone of Zionist propaganda that we’ve imbibed with our mothers’ milk. But he returned to it last week. “The Arab citizens have 22 states. They don’t need another one,” he said on Likud TV.
If the Arab citizens of Israel have 22 countries, the state’s Jewish citizens have almost 200. If the prime minister meant that Arab citizens could move to Arab countries, it’s obvious that Jews are invited to return to their country of origin: Palestinians to Saudi Arabia and Jews to Germany.
Netanyahu belongs in the United States much more than Ayman Odeh belongs in Yemen. Naftali Bennett will also find his feet in San Francisco much more easily than Ahmad Tibi in Mogadishu. Avigdor Lieberman belongs in Russia much more than Jamal Zahalka belongs in Libya. Aida Touma-Sliman is no more connected to Iraq than Ayelet Shaked, whose father was born there. David Bitan belongs to Morocco, his birthplace, much more than Mohammad Barakeh does.
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The notion that the Palestinians have 22 states to go to is a blend of malice and ignorance. Underlying it are the right wing’s claims that there is no Palestinian people, that the Palestinians aren’t attached to their land and that all Arabs are alike. There are no greater lies than these. The simple truth is that the Jews have a state and the Palestinians don’t.
The Palestinians are the stepchildren of the Arab world. No country wants them and no Arab country hasn’t betrayed them. Try being a Palestinian in Egypt or Lebanon. An Israeli settler from Itamar is more welcome in Morocco than a Palestinian from Nablus.
There are Arab states where Israeli Arabs, the Palestinians of 1948, are considered bigger traitors than their own Jews. A common language, religion and a few cultural commonalities don’t constitute a common national identity. When a Palestinian meets a Berber they switch to English, and even then they have very little in common.
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The suggestion that Israel’s Arab citizens move to those 22 states is despicable and mean, well beyond its reference to a common language. It portrays them as temporary guests here, casting doubt on the depth of their attachment to their land, “inviting” them to get out. The amazing thing is that the ones making such proposals are immigrants and sons of immigrants whose roots in this country still need to withstand the test of time.
Palestinians are attached to this country no less than Jews are, possibly more so. It’s doubtful whether the hysterical clamoring for foreign passports would seize the Arab community as it did the Jewish one; everybody was suddenly of Portuguese descent. We can assume that there are more people in Tel Aviv dreaming of foreign lands than there are in Jenin. Los Angeles certainly has more Israelis than Palestinians.
Hundreds of years of living here have consolidated a Palestinian love of the land, with traditions and a heritage – no settler can match this. Palestinians have za’atar (hyssop) and we have schnitzel. In any case, you don’t have to downplay the intensity of the Jewish connection to this country to recognize the depth of the Palestinian attachment to it.
They have nowhere to go to and they don’t want to leave, which is more than can be said for some of the Jews living here. If, despite all their woes, defeats and humiliations they haven’t left, they never will. Too bad you can’t say the same thing about the country’s Jews. The Palestinians won’t leave unless they’re forcibly removed. Is this what the prime minister was alluding to?
When American journalist Helen Thomas suggested that Jews return to Poland she was forced to resign. When Israel’s prime minister proposes the same thing for Arabs, he’s reflecting the opinion of the majority.
From its inception, the Zionist movement dreamed of expelling the Palestinians from this country. At times it fought to achieve this. The people who survived the ethnic cleansing of 1948, the expulsions of 1967, the occupation and the devil’s work in general have remained here and won’t go anywhere. Not to the 22 states and not to any one of them. Only a Nakba II will get them out of here.
]]>Israeli TV says Hamas ’accidentally’ launched rockets at Tel Aviv
▻https://www.almasdarnews.com/article/israeli-tv-says-hamas-accidentally-launched-rockets-at-tel-aviv
The launch of two rockets from the Gaza Strip prompted Israel to launch a massive airstrike in retaliation Thursday evening. The Israel Defense Forces seem to agree with the assessment, while the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank doubts the Israeli TV report.
The two rockets that were fired from the Gaza Strip towards Tel Aviv and almost started a war were launched by “accident,” Israel’s Channel 13 reported Friday.
According to the report, the launch happened after low-level Hamas operatives “messed with” the rocket launcher, which was set up to fire at Tel Aviv in case of a future conflict. The Jerusalem Post reports that the rockets could have accidentally gone off during a routine maintenance operation.
Personne n’est obligé d’y croire...
]]>Il est temps pour moi de faire une #recension sur #appropriation_culturelle et #Palestine, qui recouvre des sujets aussi larges que : #Houmous #Hummus #rrroumous #Chakchouka #falafel #couscous #Shawarma #zaatar #Nourriture #Cuisine #Danse #dabke #vêtements #langage #arabe #Art #Cinéma #Photos #Littérature #Poésie #Photographie #Documentaire ...
Le Rrrizbollah aime le rrroumous
@nidal, Loubnan ya Loubnan, le 10 octobre 2008
►https://seenthis.net/messages/97763
Israel’s cuisine not always kosher but travelling well
Stephen Cauchi, The Age, le 22 mai 2011
►http://seenthis.net/messages/493046
Make Hummus Not War
Trevor Graham, 2012
►https://seenthis.net/messages/718124
NYC Dabke Dancers respond to ZviDance "Israeli Dabke"
Dabke Stomp, Youtube, le 3 août 2013
►http://seenthis.net/messages/493046
►https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JM9-2Vmq524
La Chakchouka, nouveau plat tendance (PHOTOS)
Rebecca Chaouch, HuffPost Maghreb, le 15 avril 2014
►http://seenthis.net/messages/493046
Exploring Israel’s ‘ethnic’ cuisine
Amy Klein, JTA, le 28 janvier 2015
►http://seenthis.net/messages/493046
International Hummus Day : Israeli Entrepreneur’s Middle Eastern Food Celebration Is Still Political For Some
Lora Moftah, IB Times, le 13 mai 2015
►http://seenthis.net/messages/493046
Israel’s obsession with hummus is about more than stealing Palestine’s food
Ben White, The National, le 23 mai 2015
►http://seenthis.net/messages/493046
Palestine : étude d’un vol historique et culturel
Roger Sheety, Middle East Eye, le 15 juillet 2015
►https://seenthis.net/messages/646413
La « guerre du houmous »
Akram Belkaïd, Le Monde Diplomatique, septembre 2015
►https://seenthis.net/messages/718124
L’appropriation culturelle : y voir plus clair
LAETITIA KOMBO, Le Journal En Couleur, le 31 août 2016
►https://seenthis.net/messages/527510
Hummus restaurant
The Angry Arab News Service, le 5 novembre 2016
►https://seenthis.net/messages/539732
Le Houmous israélien est un vol et non une appropriation
Steven Salaita, Al Araby, 4 September 2017
►https://seenthis.net/messages/632441
Looted and Hidden – Palestinian Archives in Israel (46 minutes)
Rona Sela, 2017
►https://seenthis.net/messages/702565
►https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0tBP-63unME
►https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVTlLsXQ5mk
Avec Cyril Lignac, Israël fait découvrir son patrimoine et sa gastronomie
Myriam Abergel, Le Quotidien du Tourisme, le 27 janvier 2018
►http://seenthis.net/messages/493046
Why does Virgin find “Palestinian couscous” offensive ?
Gawan Mac Greigair, The Electronic Intifada, le 10 février 2018
►https://seenthis.net/messages/668039
Maghreb : une labellisation du couscous moins anodine qu’il n’y paraît
Le Point, le 13 février 2018
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/764021
Medieval Arabic recipes and the history of hummus
Anny Gaul, Recipes, le 27 mars 2018
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/744327
Que font de vieilles photos et de vieux films de Palestiniens dans les archives de l’armée israélienne ?
Ofer Aderet, Haaretz, le 2 juillet 2018
►https://seenthis.net/messages/612498
En Israël, une exposition montre des œuvres arabes sans le consentement des artistes
Mustafa Abu Sneineh, Middle East Eye, le 17 juillet 2018
►https://seenthis.net/messages/708368
Yalla
►https://seenthis.net/messages/716429
Houmous, cuisine et diplomatie
Zazie Tavitian, France Inter, le 21 août 2018
►https://seenthis.net/messages/718124
Pourquoi un éditeur israélien a-t-il publié sans agrément un livre traduit d’essais en arabe ?
Hakim Bishara, Hyperallergic, le 13 septembre 2018
►https://seenthis.net/messages/723466
La nouvelle cuisine israélienne fait un carton à Paris
Alice Boslo, Colette Monsat, Hugo de Saint-Phalle, Le Figaro, le 26 septembre 2018
►https://seenthis.net/messages/725555
Cuisine, art et littérature : comment Israël vole la culture arabe
Nada Elia, Middle East Eye, le 3 octobre 2018
►https://seenthis.net/messages/726570
Pins Daddy - Israel Costume
►https://seenthis.net/messages/726570
Shawarma, the Iconic Israeli Street Food, Is Slowly Making a Comeback in Tel Aviv
Eran Laor, Haaretz, le 8 janvier 2019
►https://seenthis.net/messages/493046
What is Za’atar, the Israeli Spice You Will Want to Sprinkle on Everything
Shannon Sarna, My Jewish Learning, le 7 mars 2019
►https://seenthis.net/messages/767162
#Vol #appropriation_culinaire #racisme #colonialisme #Invisibilisation #Histoire #Falsification #Mythologie #Musique #Musique_et_Politique #Boycott_Culturel #BDS
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En parallèle, un peu de pub pour la vraie cuisine palestinienne ou moyen-orientale :
Rudolf el-Kareh - Le Mezzé libanais : l’art de la table festive
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/41187
Marlène Matar - Ma’idat Marlene min Halab
►https://seenthis.net/messages/537468
La cuisine palestinienne, c’est plus que ce qu’on a dans l’assiette
Laila El-Haddad, Electronic Intifada, le 15 Juin 2017
►https://seenthis.net/messages/612651
Palestine : la cuisine de Jerusalem et de la diaspora
Alain Kruger, France Culture, le 25 février 2018
►https://seenthis.net/messages/671981
La Palestine, ce n’est pas seulement de la géographie, c’est notre façon à nous de faire la cuisine, de manger, de bavarder
Shira Rubin, Eater, le 9 novembre 2018
►https://seenthis.net/messages/737305
Une écrivaine décrit la cuisine palestinienne et le monde qui l’entoure
Mayukh Sen, The New-York Times, le 4 février 2019
►https://seenthis.net/messages/760255
La Troika Libanaise
►https://www.facebook.com/LaTroikaLibanaise
Les Ptits Plats Palestiniens de Rania
►https://lesptitsplatspalestiniensderania.wordpress.com
Une Palestinienne à Paris
►https://unepalestinienneaparis.wordpress.com
Hind Tahboub - Bandora
►https://www.bandoracuisine.com/bandora-cuisine
Askini
195 rue Saint-Maur
75010 Paris
►https://www.facebook.com/askiniparis
Ardi
10 rue Lydia Becker
75018 Paris
►https://www.facebook.com/ardiconceptstore
Sharqi’s
24 rue de l’Université
34000 Montpellier
▻https://www.facebook.com/Sharqis-1837468433036940
La Palestine
24 Rue Mazenod
13002 Marseille
►https://www.lapalestine.fr
Eurovision 2019 : le groupe islandais Hatari menacé d’interdiction d’entrée en Israël
Par Damien Mercereau Mis à jour le 12/03/2019 à 15:04
▻http://tvmag.lefigaro.fr/programme-tv/eurovision-2019-le-groupe-islandais-hatari-menace-d-interdiction-d-en
(...) « Vous signez un contrat qui stipule que nous n’êtes pas autorisé à faire de la politique durant la compétition », a confié Matthías Haraldson à Independent . « Mais si quelqu’un pense pouvoir se rendre à Tel Aviv sans exprimer un message politique, il a totalement tort. C’est un paradoxe. Toutes les chansons qui seront interpretées durant le concours heurteront la sensibilité de beaucoup de gens à cause du contexte dans lequel il va se dérouler et des critiques légitimes que beaucoup expriment. »
Le chanteur du groupe Hatari estime qu’aucun artiste ne pourra se produire sur la scène du Convention Center de Tel Aviv « sans enfreindre les règles de l’Eurovision ». « Vous ne pouvez pas complètement vous taire sur la situation (en Israël, ndlr) parce que le silence est également un positionnement politique », a-t-il déclaré. Outre leur soutien à la Palestine, le trio s’est livré à quelques provocations à l’encontre du Premier ministre israélien Benyamin Netanyahou, l’invitant à un combat de Glima, de la lutte traditionnelle islandaise.
Selon Haaretz, l’organisation Shurat Hadin qui représente les victimes du terrorisme et des causes juives et israélienne a demandé au ministre de l’Intérieur, Arye Dery, d’interdire Hatari d’accès au territoire. Une requête qui serait, selon plusieurs médias locaux, actuellement étudiée par plusieurs ministères. L’Union Européenne de radio-télévision (UER), organisatrice de l’Eurovision, a quant à elle rappelé que le concours doit rester inclusif et que le diffuseur israélien devra respecter la liberté de toutes les délégations et artistes participants. (...)
]]>Hatari, groupe SM et pro-palestinien, représentera l’Islande à l’Eurovision
04/03/2019
▻https://people.bfmtv.com/musique/hatari-groupe-sm-et-pro-palestinien-representera-l-islande-a-l-eurovis
Les trois membres du groupe islandais sélectionné pour l’Eurovision prévoient une prestation très politique en faveur de la cause palestinienne. Ils ont même invité le Premier ministre israélien à les affronter lors d’un combat de lutte.
« La haine va prévaloir ». C’est ce que signifie Hatrið Mun Sigra, le titre de la chanson que défendra le groupe islandais Hatari à l’Eurovision 2019 à Tel Aviv. L’affirmation correspond bien à l’état d’esprit des trois musiciens, très remontés contre la politique israélienne, ils ont d’ores et déjà annoncé une prestation très engagée contre le Premier ministre Benyamin Netanyahu. (…)
]]>Les USA ferment leur mission palestinienne à Jérusalem
4 mars 2019 Par Agence Reuters
▻https://www.mediapart.fr/journal/international/040319/les-usa-ferment-leur-mission-palestinienne-jerusalem?onglet=full
JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Les Etats-Unis ont amené lundi le drapeau du consulat général américain à Jérusalem, qui servait de représentation diplomatique pour les Palestiniens.
Les employés de la mission palestinienne seront intégrés à l’ambassade que les Etats-Unis ont inaugurée à Jérusalem en mai 2018, sous le nom d’"unité des affaires palestiniennes" et sous la responsabilité de l’ambassadeur David Friedman.
« C’est le dernier clou dans le cercueil » des pourparlers de paix israélo-palestiniens, a réagi sur Twitter le négociateur palestinien Saeb Erekat.
Les négociations sont au point mort depuis 2014 et l’administration de Donald Trump est boycottée par les Palestiniens depuis l’annonce, en décembre 2017, du transfert de l’ambassade américaine de Tel Aviv à Jérusalem.
La décision de fusionner consulat et ambassade avait été annoncée en octobre par le secrétaire d’Etat Mike Pompeo.
]]>Netanyahu recevra Bolsonaro juste avant le scrutin du 9 avril
28 février 2019 Par Agence Reuters
▻https://www.mediapart.fr/journal/international/280219/netanyahu-recevra-bolsonaro-juste-avant-le-scrutin-du-9-avril?onglet=full
JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Le président brésilien Jair Bolsonaro se rendra en Israël peu avant les élections législatives israéliennes du 9 avril qui verront le Premier ministre Benjamin Netanyahu briguer un cinquième mandat, a annoncé jeudi le gouvernement israélien.
La visite du président d’extrême droite brésilien est susceptible de constituer un soutien pour le chef du gouvernement israélien.
Jair Bolsonaro, qui a pris ses fonctions en janvier et avait auparavant reçu Benjamin Netanyahu, a affiché sa proximité avec la droite israélienne. A l’instar des Etats-Unis, il a évoqué un déplacement de l’ambassade brésilienne à Jérusalem, mais n’a pas pour autant fixé de date.
La perspective d’un transfert de l’ambassade de Tel Aviv à Jérusalem inquiète les exportateurs brésiliens qui craignent de perdre l’accès à de grands marchés dans les pays arabes, notamment pour la viande halal.
La visite du chef de l’Etat brésilien est prévue du 31 mars au 4 avril, précise le ministère israélien des Affaires étrangères sans autres détails.
Ancien capitaine de l’armée, Jair Bolsonaro a accédé au pouvoir en promettant de s’attaquer au crime et la corruption, mais il a du mal à stabiliser son gouvernement de coalition sur fond d’affaires de corruption et des luttes intestines qui ont entaché son premier mois de mandat.
]]>Israel is playing a big role in India’s escalating conflict with Pakistan
Robert Fisk | The Independent - Thursday 28 February 2019
Signing up to the ‘war on terror’ – especially ‘Islamist terror’ – may seem natural for two states built on colonial partition whose security is threatened by Muslim neighbours
▻https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/israel-india-pakistan-conflict-balakot-arms-trade-jaish-e-mohammed-a8
When I heard the first news report, I assumed it was an Israeli air raid on Gaza. Or Syria. Airstrikes on a “terrorist camp” were the first words. A “command and control centre” destroyed, many “terrorists” killed. The military was retaliating for a “terrorist attack” on its troops, we were told.
An Islamist “jihadi” base had been eliminated. Then I heard the name Balakot and realised that it was neither in Gaza, nor in Syria – not even in Lebanon – but in Pakistan. Strange thing, that. How could anyone mix up Israel and India?
Well, don’t let the idea fade away. Two thousand five hundred miles separate the Israeli ministry of defence in Tel Aviv from the Indian ministry of defence in New Delhi, but there’s a reason why the usual cliche-stricken agency dispatches sound so similar.
For months, Israel has been assiduously lining itself up alongside India’s nationalist BJP government in an unspoken – and politically dangerous – “anti-Islamist” coalition, an unofficial, unacknowledged alliance, while India itself has now become the largest weapons market for the Israeli arms trade.
Not by chance, therefore, has the Indian press just trumpeted the fact that Israeli-made Rafael Spice-2000 “smart bombs” were used by the Indian air force in its strike against Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) “terrorists” inside Pakistan
Like many Israeli boasts of hitting similar targets, the Indian adventure into Pakistan might owe more to the imagination than military success. The “300-400 terrorists” supposedly eliminated by the Israeli-manufactured and Israeli-supplied GPS-guided bombs may turn out to be little more than rocks and trees.
But there was nothing unreal about the savage ambush of Indian troops in Kashmir on 14 February which the JeM claimed, and which left 40 Indian soldiers dead. Nor the shooting down of at least one Indian jet this week.
India was Israel’s largest arms client in 2017, paying £530m for Israeli air defence, radar systems and ammunition, including air-to-ground missiles – most of them tested during Israel’s military offensives against Palestinians and targets in Syria.
Israel itself is trying to explain away its continued sales of tanks, weapons and boats to the Myanmar military dictatorship – while western nations impose sanctions on the government which has attempted to destroy its minority and largely Muslim Rohingya people. But Israel’s arms trade with India is legal, above-board and much advertised by both sides.
The Israelis have filmed joint exercises between their own “special commando” units and those sent by India to be trained in the Negev desert, again with all the expertise supposedly learned by Israel in Gaza and other civilian-thronged battlefronts. (...)
]]>Pendant six mois, ces villages palestiniens ont eu de l’eau courante. Israël y a mis fin
25 février | Amira Hass pour Haaretz |Traduction SF pour l’AURDIP
►https://www.aurdip.org/pendant-six-mois-ces-villages.html
Pendant six mois, des villageois palestiniens vivant en Cisjordanie sur une terre qu’Israël considère comme une zone de feu fermée, ont vu leur rêve d’eau courante devenir réalité. Puis l’administration civile y a mis fin.
Le rêve devenu réalité, sous la forme d’une canalisation d’eau de deux pouces (5 cm), était trop beau pour être vrai. Pendant environ six mois, 12 villages palestiniens des collines au sud de Hébron ont joui d’une eau courante claire. Cela, jusqu’au 13 février, lorsque l’équipe de l’Administration Civile israélienne, accompagnée de soldats et de la police des frontières est arrivée avec deux bulldozers.
Les soldats ont déterré les tuyaux, les ont coupés et sciés et ont regardé les jets d’eau qui en giclaient. Environ 350 mètres cubes d’eau ont été gaspillés. L’administration civile a confisqué des restes et des sections de tuyaux de 6km environ sur un réseau de 20 km de longueur. Ils les ont chargés sur des camions à ordures à l’effigie de Ramat Gan, une banlieue de Tel Aviv.
Le travail de démolition a duré six heures et demie. La construction du réseau d’adduction d’eau avait pris à peu près quatre mois. Ce fut clairement un acte de rébellion civile dans l’esprit du Mahatma Gandhi et de Martin Luther King contre une des privations les plus brutales qu’Israël impose aux villages palestiniens de la zone C, la partie de la Cisjordanie qui est totalement sous contrôle israélien. Cela empêche les Palestiniens de se brancher sur les infrastructures d’eau existantes.
Les grottes qui servent d’habitation dans le district de Masafer Yatta, au sud de Hébron et les anciennes citernes de collecte d’eau de pluie confirment la revendication des villageois selon laquelle leurs villages existent depuis des décennies, bien avant la fondation de l’État d’Israël. Dans les années 1970, Israël a déclaré que quelque 30 000 dounams (3 000 ha) étaient dans la Zone de Feu 918.
traduction de l’article cité ici : ▻https://seenthis.net/messages/762571
#IsraelUE
Old Palestinian photos & films hidden in IDF archive show different history than Israeli claims
Palestinian photos and films seized by Israeli troops have been gathering dust in the army and Defense Ministry archives until Dr. Rona Sela, a curator and art historian, exposed them. The material presents an alternative to the Zionist history that denied the Palestinians’ existence here, she says.
The initial reaction is one of incredulity: Why is this material stored in the Israel Defense Forces and Defense Ministry Archive? The first item is labeled, in Hebrew, “The History of Palestine from 1919,” the second, “Paintings by Children Who Go to School and Live in a Refugee Camp and Aspire to Return to Palestine.” The third is, “Depiction of the IDF’s Treatment and Harsh Handling of Palestinians in the Territories.”
Of all places, these three reels of 16-mm film are housed in the central archive that documents Israel’s military-security activities. It’s situated in Tel Hashomer, near the army’s National Induction Center, outside Tel Aviv.
IDF archive contains 2.7 million photos, 38,000 films
The three items are barely a drop in an ocean of some 38,000 films, 2.7 million photographs, 96,000 audio recordings and 46,000 maps and aerial photos that have been gathered into the IDF Archive since 1948, by order of Israel’s first prime minister and defense minister, David Ben-Gurion. However, a closer perusal shows that this particular “drop in the ocean” is subversive, exceptional and highly significant.
The footage in question is part of a collection – whose exact size and full details remain unknown – of “war booty films” seized by the IDF from Palestinian archives in raids over the years, though primarily in the 1982 Lebanon War.
Recently, however, following a persistent, protracted legal battle, the films confiscated in Lebanon, which had been gathering dust for decades – instead of being screened in cinematheques or other venues in Israel – have been rescued from oblivion, along with numerous still photos. The individual responsible for this development is Dr. Rona Sela, a curator and researcher of visual history at Tel Aviv University.
For nearly 20 years, Sela has been exploring Zionist and Palestinian visual memory. She has a number of important revelations and discoveries to her credit, which she has published in the form of books, catalogs and articles. Among the Hebrew-language titles are “Photography in Palestine/Eretz-Israel in the ‘30s and ‘40s” (2000) and “Made Public: Palestinian Photographs in Military Archives in Israel” (2009). In March, she published an article in the English-language periodical Social Semiotics on, “The Genealogy of Colonial Plunder and Erasure – Israel’s Control over Palestinian Archives.”
Now Sela has made her first film, “Looted and Hidden: Palestinian Archives in Israel,” an English-language documentary that surveys the fate of Palestinian photographs and films that were “captured” and deposited in Israeli archives. It includes heretofore unseen segments from films seized by the IDF from Palestinian archives in Beirut. These documentary records, Sela says, “were erased from consciousness and history” for decades.
Sela begins journey in 1998
Getting access to the films was not easy, Sela explains. Her archival journey began in 1998, when she was researching Zionist propaganda films and photos that sought to portray the “new Jew” – muscular, proudly tilling the soil – in contradistinction, according to the Zionist perception, to the supposedly degenerate and loutish Palestinian Arab.
“After spending a few years in the Central Zionist Archive in Jerusalem and in other Zionist archives, researching the history of Zionist photography and the construction of a visual propaganda apparatus supporting the Zionist idea, I started to look for Palestinian visual representation as well, in order to learn about the Palestinian narrative and trace its origins and influence,” she says.
That task was far more complicated than anyone could have imagined. In some of the Zionist films and photos, Sela was able to discern, often incidentally, episodes from Palestinian history that had “infiltrated” them, as she puts it. For example, in Carmel Newsreels (weekly news footage screened at local cinemas) from 1951, showing the settlement of Jews in Jaffa, demolished and abandoned Arab homes are clearly visible.
Subsequently, Sela spotted traces and remnants of a genuine Palestinian visual archive occasionally cropping up in Israeli archives. Those traces were not immediately apparent, more like an elusive treasure concealed here and there beneath layers of restrictions, erasures and revisions.
Khalil Rassass, father of Palestinian photojournalism
Thus, one day she noticed in the archive of the pre-state Haganah militia, stills bearing the stamp “Photo Rissas.” Digging deeper, she discovered the story of Chalil Rissas (Khalil Rassass, 1926-1974), one of the fathers of Palestinian photojournalism. He’s unknown to the general public, whether Palestinian or Israel, but according to Sela, he was a “daring, groundbreaking photographer” who, motivated by a sense of national consciousness, documented the pre-1948 Palestinian struggle.
Subsequently she found hundreds of his photographs, accompanied by captions written by soldiers or Israeli archive staff who had tried to foist a Zionist narrative on them and disconnect them from their original context. The source of the photographs was a Jewish youth who received them from his father, an IDF officer who brought them back with him from the War of Independence as booty.
The discovery was unprecedented. In contrast to the Zionist propaganda images that exalted the heroism of the Jewish troops and barely referred to the Palestinians, Rissas’ photographs were mainly of Palestinian fighters. Embodying a proud Palestinian stance, they focused on the national and military struggle and its outcome, including the Palestinians’ military training and deployment for battle.
“I realized that I’d come across something significant, that I’d found a huge cache of works by one of the fathers of Palestinian photography, who had been the first to give visual expression to the Palestinian struggle,” Sela recalls. “But when I tried to learn more about Chalil Rissas, I understood that he was a forgotten photographer, that no one knew the first thing about him, either in Israel or elsewhere.”
Sela thereupon decided to study the subject herself. In 1999, she tracked down Rissas’ brother, Wahib, who was working as a photographer of tourists on the Temple Mount / Haram a-Sharif in Jerusalem’s Old City. He told her the story of Chalil’s life. It turned out that he had accompanied Palestinian troops and leaders, visually documenting the battles fought by residents of the Jerusalem area during the 1948 War of Independence. “He was a young man who chose the camera as an instrument for changing people’s consciousness,” Sela says.
Ali Za’arur, forgotten Palestinian photographer
Around 2007, she discovered the archive of another forgotten Palestinian photographer, Ali Za’arur (1900-1972), from Azzariyeh, a village east of Jerusalem. About 400 of his photos were preserved in four albums. They also depicted scenes from the 1948 war, in which Za’arur accompanied the forces of Jordan’s Arab Legion and documented the battle for the Old City of Jerusalem. He photographed the dead, the ruins, the captives, the refugees and the events of the cease-fire.
In the Six-Day War of 1967, Za’arur fled from his home for a short time. When he returned, he discovered that the photo albums had disappeared. A relative, it emerged, had given them to Jerusalem Mayor Teddy Kollek as a gift. Afterward, the Jerusalem Foundation donated them to the IDF Archive. In 2008, in an unprecedented act, the archive returned the albums to Za’arur’s family. The reason, Sela surmises, is that the albums were captured by the army in battle. In any event, this was, as far as is known, a unique case.
Sela took heart from the discoveries she’d made, realizing that “with systematic work, it would be possible to uncover more Palestinian archives that ended up in Israeli hands.”
That work was three-pronged: doing archival research to locate Palestinian photographs and films that had been incorporated into Israeli archives; holding meetings with the Palestinian photographers themselves, or members of their families; and tracking down Israeli soldiers who had taken part in “seizing these visual spoils” and in bringing them to Israel.
In the course of her research Sela met some fascinating individuals, among them Khadijeh Habashneh, a Jordan-based Palestinian filmmaker who headed the archive and cinematheque of the Palestinian Cinema Institute. That institution, which existed from the end of the 1960s until the early ‘80s, initially in Jordan and afterward in Lebanon, was founded by three pioneering Palestinian filmmakers – Sulafa Jadallah, Hani Jawhariyyeh and Mustafa Abu Ali (Habashneh’s husband) – who sought to document their people’s way of life and national struggle. Following the events of Black September in 1970, when the Jordanian army and the Palestine Liberation Organization fought a bloody internecine war, the filmmakers moved to Lebanon and reestablished the PCI in Beirut.
Meeting with Habashneh in Amman in 2013, Sela heard the story of the Palestinian archives that disappeared, a story she included in her new documentary. “Where to begin, when so much material was destroyed, when a life project falls apart?” Habashneh said to Sela. “I can still see these young people, pioneers, bold, imbued with ideals, revolutionaries, who created pictures and films and documented the Palestinian revolution that the world doesn’t want to see. They refused to be faceless and to be without an identity.”
The archive established by Habashneh contained forgotten works that documented the Palestinians’ suffering in refugee camps, the resistance to Israel and battles against the IDF, as well as everyday life. The archive contained the films and the raw materials of the PCI filmmakers, but also collected other early Palestinian films, from both before and after 1948.
Spirit of liberation
This activity reflects “a spirit of liberation and revolt and the days of the revolution,” Habashneh says in Sela’s film, referring to the early years of the Palestinian national movement. That spirit was captured in underground photographs and with a minimal budget, on film that was developed in people’s kitchens, screened in tents in refugee camps and distributed abroad. Women, children, fighters, intellectuals and cultural figures, and events of historic importance were documented, Habashneh related. “As far as is known, this was the first official Palestinian visual archive,” Sela notes.
In her conversation with Sela, Habashneh nostalgically recalled other, better times, when the Palestinian films were screened in a Beirut cinematheque, alongside other works with a “revolutionary spirit,” from Cuba, Chile, Vietnam and elsewhere. “We were in contact with filmmakers from other countries, who saw the camera as an instrument in the hands of the revolution and the people’s struggle,” she recalled.
“Interesting cultural cooperation developed there, centering around revolutionary cinema,” Sela points out, adding, “Beirut was alive with an unprecedented, groundbreaking cultural flowering that was absolutely astonishing in terms of its visual significance.”
IDF confiscates film archive
But in 1982, after the IDF entered Beirut, that archive disappeared and was never seen again. The same fate befell two films made by Habashneh herself, one about children, the other about women. In Sela’s documentary, Habashneh wonders aloud about the circumstances in which the amazing collection disappeared. “Is our fate to live a life without a past? Without a visual history?” she asks. Since then, she has managed to reconstruct a small part of the archive. Some of the films turned up in the United States, where they had been sent to be developed. Copies of a few others remained in movie theaters in various countries where they were screened. Now in her seventies, Habashneh continues to pursue her mission, even though, as she told Sela during an early conversation, “the fate of the archive remains a puzzle.”
What Habashneh wasn’t able to accomplish beginning in 1982 as part of a worldwide quest, Sela managed to do over the course of a few years of research in Israel. She began by locating a former IDF soldier who told her about the day on which several trucks arrived at the building in Beirut that housed a number of Palestinian archives and began to empty it out. That testimony, supported by a photograph, was crucial for Sela, as it corroborated the rumors and stories about the Palestinian archives having been taken to Israel.
The same soldier added that he had been gripped by fear when he saw, among the photos that were confiscated from the archive, some that documented Israeli soldiers in the territories. He himself appeared in one of them. “They marked us,” he said to Sela.
Soldiers loot Nashashibi photos & possessions, take photo from corpse
Another former soldier told Sela about an unusual photo album that was taken (or looted, depending on one’s point of view) from the home of the prominent Nashashibi family in Jerusalem, in 1948. The soldier added that his father, who had served as an IDF officer in the War of Independence, entered a photography studio and made off with its archive, while other soldiers were busy looting pianos and other expensive objects from the Nashashibis. Another ex-soldier testified to having taken a photo from the corpse of an Arab. Over time, all these images found their way to archives in Israel, in particular the IDF Archive.
Sela discovers IDF archive
In 2000, Sela, buoyed by her early finds, requested permission from that archive to examine the visual materials that had been seized by the army in the 1980s. The initial response was denial: The material was not in Israel’s hands, she was told.
“But I knew what I was looking for, because I had soldiers’ testimonies,” she says now, adding that when she persisted in her request, she encountered “difficulties, various restrictions and the torpedoing of the possibility of perusing the material.”
The breakthrough came when she enlisted the aid of attorneys Michael Sfard and Shlomi Zacharia, in 2008. To begin with, they received word, confirmed by the Defense Ministry’s legal adviser, that various spoils taken in Beirut were now part of the IDF Archive. However, Sela was subsequently informed that “the PLO’s photography archive,” as the Defense Ministry referred in general to photographic materials taken from the Palestinians, is “archival material on matters of foreign affairs and security, and as such is ‘restricted material’ as defined in Par. 7(a) of the Archives Regulations.”
Then, one day in 2010, Sela received a fax informing her that Palestinian films had been found in the IDF Archive, without elaboration, and inviting her to view them. “There were a few dozen segments from films, and I was astonished by what I saw,” she says. “At first I was shown only a very limited amount of footage, but it was indicative of the whole. On the basis of my experience, I understood that there was more.”
A few more years of what Sela terms “endless nagging, conversations and correspondence” passed, which resulted in her being permitted to view dozens of segments of additional films, including some that apparently came from Habashneh’s archive. Sela also discovered another Palestinian archive that had been seized by the IDF. Established under the aegis of the PLO’s Cultural Arts Section, its director in the 1970s was the Lod-born painter and historian Ismail Shammout (1930-2006).
One of the works in that collection is Shammout’s own film “The Urgent Call,” whose theme song was written and performed by the Palestinian singer Zainab Shathat in English, accompanying herself on the guitar. “The film was thought to be lost until I found it in the IDF Archive,” says Sela, who describes “The Urgent Call” as “a cry about the condition of Palestine, its sons and its daughters.”
Viewing it takes one back in time to the late 1960s and early ‘70s, when the cinema of the Palestinian struggle briefly connected with other international revolutionary film movements.
Legendary French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard
For example, in 1969 and 1970 Jean-Luc Godard, the legendary filmmaker of the French New Wave in cinema, visited Jordan and Lebanon several times with the Dziga Vertov Group of French filmmakers (named after the Soviet pioneer documentarian of the 1920s and ‘30s), who included filmmaker Jean-Pierre Gorin, who worked with Godard in his “radical” period. They came to shoot footage in refugee camps and in fedayeen bases for Godard’s film “Until Victory.” Habashneh told Sela that she and others had met Godard, assisted him and were of course influenced by his work. [Ed. note: Godard’s work on Palestine caused him to be accused of antisemitism by the Washington Post’s Richard Cohen and others. “In Hollywood there is no greater sin,” the Guardian reported.]
Along with “The Urgent Call” – excerpts from which are included in her “Looted and Hidden” documentary – Sela also found another Shammout work in the IDF Archive. Titled “Memories and Fire,” it chronicles 20th-century Palestinian history, “from the days depicting the idyllic life in Palestine, via the documentation of refugeehood, to the documentation of the organizing and the resistance. To use the terms of the Palestinian cinema scholar and filmmaker George Khleifi, the aggressive fighter took the place of the ill-fated refugee,” she adds.
Sela also found footage by the Iraqi director Kais al-Zubaidi, who worked for a time in the PLO’s Cultural Arts Section. His films from that period include “Away from Home” (1969) and “The Visit” (1970); in 2006 he published an anthology, “Palestine in the Cinema,” a history of the subject, which mentions some 800 films that deal with Palestine or the Palestinian people. [Ed. note: unfortunately it appears this book has never been translated into English.]
IDF seals the archive for decades
Some of the Palestinian movies in the IDF Archive bear their original titles. However, in many other cases this archival material was re-cataloged to suit the Israeli perspective, so that Palestinian “fighters” became “gangs” or “terrorists,” for example. In one case, a film of Palestinians undergoing arms training is listed as “Terrorist camp in Kuwait: Distribution of uniforms, girls crawling with weapons, terrorists marching with weapons in the hills, instruction in laying mines and in arms.”
Sela: “These films and stills, though not made by Jewish/Israeli filmmakers or military units – which is the central criterion for depositing materials in the Israeli army archive – were transferred to the IDF Archive and subordinated to the rules of the State of Israel. The archive immediately sealed them for many decades and cataloged them according to its terminology – which is Zionist, Jewish and Israeli – and not according to the original Palestinian terminology. I saw places where the word ‘terrorists’ was written on photographs taken by Palestinians. But after all, they do not call themselves as such. It’s part of terminological camouflaging, which subordinated their creative work to the colonial process in which the occupier controls the material that’s captured.”
Hidden Palestinian history
Sela’s discoveries, which are of international importance, are not only a research, documentation and academic achievement: They also constitute a breakthrough in regard to the chronicling of Palestinian history. “Palestinian visual historiography lacks many chapters,” she observes. “Many photographs and archives were destroyed, were lost, taken as spoils or plundered in the various wars and in the course of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”
From her point of view, the systematic collecting of Palestinian visual materials in the IDF Archive “makes it possible to write an alternative history that counteracts the content created by the army and the military archive, which is impelled by ideological and political considerations.” In the material she found in the army archive, she sees “images that depict the history of the Palestinian people and its long-term ties to this soil and this place, which present an alternative to the Zionist history that denied the Palestinians’ existence here, as well as their culture and history and the protracted tragedy they endured and their national struggle of many years.”
The result is an intriguing paradox, such as one often finds by digging deep into an archive. The extensive information that Sela found in the IDF Archive makes it possible to reconstruct elements of the pre-1948 existence of the Palestinians and to help fill in the holes of the Palestinian narrative up until the 1980s. In other words, even if Israel’s intention was to hide these items and to control the Palestinians’ historical treasures, its actions actually abet the process of preservation, and will go on doing so in the future.
Earlier groundbreaking discovery – confiscated Palestinians books & libraries
Sela’s research on visual archival materials was preceded by another groundbreaking study – dealing with the written word – conducted by Dr. Gish Amit, an expert on the cultural aspects of Zionism at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. Amit chronicled the fate of Palestinian books and libraries that, like the photographs and films Sela found, ended up in Israeli archives – including in the National Library in Jerusalem.
In his 2014 book, “Ex-Libris: Chronicles of Theft, Preservation, and Appropriating at the Jewish National Library” (Hebrew), Amit trenchantly analyzes the foredoomed failure of any attempt to conceal and control the history of others. According to him, “an archive remembers its forgettings and erasures,” “documents injustice, and thus makes it possible to trace its paths” and “paves a way for forgotten histories which may, one day, convict the owners” of the documents.
However, Amit also sees the complexity of this story and presents another side of it. Describing the operation in which the Palestinian books were collected by Israeli soldiers and National Library personnel during the War of Independence, he raises the possibility that this was actually an act involving rescue, preservation and accessibility: “On the one hand, the books were collected and not burned or left in the abandoned houses in the Arab neighborhoods that had been emptied of their inhabitants. Had they not been collected their fate would have been sealed — not a trace of them would remain,” he writes, adding, that the National Library “protected the books from the war, the looting and the destruction, and from illegal trade in manuscripts.”
According to the National Library, it is holding about 6,500 Palestinian books and manuscripts, which were taken from private homes whose owners left in 1948. The entire collection is cataloged and accessible to the general public, but is held under the responsibility of the Custodian of Absentees’ Property in the Finance Ministry. Accordingly, there is no intention, in the near future, of trying to locate the owners and returning the items.
Israeli control over history
Sela views the existence of these spoils of war in Israel as a direct expression of the occupation, which she defines, beyond Israel’s physical presence in the territories, as “the control of history, the writing of culture and the shaping of identity.” In her view, “Israel’s rule over the Palestinians is not only geographic but extends also to culture and consciousness. Israel wants to erase this history from the public consciousness, but it is not being successful, because the force of the resistance is stronger. Furthermore, its attempts to erase Palestinian history adversely affect Israel itself in the end.”
At this point, Sela resorts to a charged comparison, to illustrate how visual materials contribute to the creation of personal and collective identity. “As the daughter of Holocaust survivors,” she says, “I grew up in a home without photographic historical memory. Nothing. My history starts only with the meeting of my parents, in 1953. It’s only from then that we have photos. Before that – nothing.
“I know what it feels like when you have no idea what your grandmother or grandfather looked like, or your father’s childhood,” she continues. “This is all the more true of the history of a whole people. The construction of identity by means of visual materials is very meaningful. Many researchers have addressed this topic. The fact is that Zionist bodies made and are continuing to make extensive and rational use of [such materials too] over a period that spans decades.”
Sela admits that there is still much to be done, but as far as she’s concerned, once a crack appeared in the wall, there was no turning back. “There is a great deal of material, including hundreds of films, that I haven’t yet got to,” she notes. “This is an amazing treasure, which contains information about the cultural, educational, rural and urban life of the Palestinian people throughout the 20th century – an erased narrative that needs to be restored to the history books,” she adds.
Asked what she thinks should be done with the material, she asserts, “Of course it has to be returned. Just as Israel is constantly fighting to retrieve what the Nazis looted from Jews in the Holocaust. The historical story is different, but by the same criterion, practice what you preach. These are cultural and historical materials of the Palestinian people.”
The fact that these items are being held by Israel “creates a large hole in Palestinian research and knowledge,” Sela avers. “It’s a hole for which Israel is responsible. This material does not belong to us. It has to be returned to its owners. Afterward, if we view it intelligently, we too can come to know and understand highly meaningful chapters in Palestinian history and in our own history. I think that the first and basic stage in the process of conciliation is to know the history of the Other and also your own history of controlling the Other.”
Defense Ministry response
A spokesperson for the Defense Ministry, which was asked to comment on the holdings in the IDF Archive, the archive contains 642 “war booty films,” most of which deal with refugees and were produced by the UNRWA (the United Nations refugee relief agency) in the 1960s and 1970s. The ministry also noted that 158 films that were seized by the IDF in the 1982 Lebanon War are listed in orderly fashion in the reading-room catalog and are available for perusal by the general public, including Arab citizens and Palestinians.
As for the Palestinian photographs that were confiscated, the Defense Ministry stated that there is no orderly record of them. There are 127 files of photographs and negatives in the archive, each of which contains dozens of photographs, probably taken between the 1960s and the 1980s, on a variety of subjects, including visits of foreign delegations to PLO personnel, tours of PLO delegations abroad, Palestinian art and heritage, art objects, traditional attire and Palestinian folklore, factories and workshops, demonstrations, mass parades and rallies held by the PLO, portraits of Arab personalities and PLO symbols.
The statement adds that a few months ago, crates were located that were stamped by their original owners, “PLO/Department of Information and National Guidance and Department of Information and Culture,” during the evacuation of the archive’s storerooms in the Tzrifin base.
▻https://israelpalestinenews.org/old-palestinian-photos-films-hidden-idf-archive-show-different-
#historicisation #Israël #Palestine #photographie #films #archive #histoire #Khalil_Rassass #Ali_Za’arur
ping @reka @sinehebdo @albertocampiphoto
For six months, these Palestinian villages had running water. Israel put a stop to it
For six months, Palestinian villagers living on West Bank land that Israel deems a closed firing range saw their dream of running water come true. Then the Civil Administration put an end to it
Amira Hass Feb 22, 2019 3:25 PM
▻https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-why-doesn-t-israel-want-palestinians-to-have-running-water-1.69595
The dream that came true, in the form of a two-inch water line, was too good to be true. For about six months, 12 Palestinian West Bank villages in the South Hebron Hills enjoyed clean running water. That was until February 13, when staff from the Israeli Civil Administration, accompanied by soldiers and Border Police and a couple of bulldozers, arrived.
The troops dug up the pipes, cut and sawed them apart and watched the jets of water that spurted out. About 350 cubic meters of water were wasted. Of a 20 kilometer long (12 mile) network, the Civil Administration confiscated remnants and sections of a total of about 6 kilometers of piping. They loaded them on four garbage trucks emblazoned with the name of the Tel Aviv suburb of Ramat Gan on them.
The demolition work lasted six and a half hours. Construction of the water line network had taken about four months. It had been a clear act of civil rebellion in the spirit of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King against one of the most brutal bans that Israel imposes on Palestinian communities in Area C, the portion of the West Bank under full Israeli control. It bars Palestinians from hooking into existing water infrastructure.
The residential caves in the Masafer Yatta village region south of Hebron and the ancient cisterns used for collecting rainwater confirm the local residents’ claim that their villages have existed for decades, long before the founding of the State of Israel. In the 1970s, Israel declared some 30,000 dunams (7,500 acres) in the area Firing Range 918.
In 1999, under the auspices of the negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, the army expelled the residents of the villages and demolished their structures and water cisterns. The government claimed that the residents were trespassing on the firing range, even though these were their lands and they have lived in the area long before the West Bank was captured by Israel.
When the matter was brought to the High Court of Justice, the court approved a partial return to the villages but did not allow construction or hookups to utility infrastructure. Mediation attempts failed, because the state was demanding that the residents leave their villages and live in the West Bank town of Yatta and come to graze their flocks and work their land only on a few specific days per year.
But the residents continued to live in their homes, risking military raids and demolition action — including the demolition of public facilities such as schools, medical clinics and even toilets. They give up a lot to maintain their way of life as shepherds, but could not forgo water.
“The rainy season has grown much shorter in recent years, to only about 45 days a year,” explained Nidal Younes, the chairman of the Masafer Yatta council of villages. “In the past, we didn’t immediately fill the cisterns with rainwater, allowing them to be washed and cleaned first. Since the amount of rain has decreased, people stored water right away. It turns out the dirty water harmed the sheep and the people.”
Because the number of residents has increased, even in years with abundant rain, at a certain stage the cisterns ran dry and the shepherds would bring in water by tractor. They would haul a 4 cubic meter (140 square foot) tank along the area’s narrow, poor roads — which Israel does not permit to have widened and paved. “The water has become every family’s largest expense,” Younes said.
In the village of Halawa, he pointed out Abu Ziyad, a man of about 60. “I always see him on a tractor, bringing in water or setting out to bring back water.”
Sometimes the tractors overturn and drivers are injured. Tires quickly wear out and precious work days go to waste. “We are drowning in debt to pay for the transportation of water,” Abu Ziyad said.
In 2017, the Civil Administration and the Israeli army closed and demolished the roads to the villages, which the council had earlier managed to widen and rebuild. That had been done to make it easier to haul water in particular, but also more generally to give the villages better access.
The right-wing Regavim non-profit group “exposed” the great crime committed in upgrading the roads and pressured the Civil Administration and the army to rip them up. “The residents’ suffering increased,” Younes remarked. “We asked ourselves how to solve the water problem.”
The not very surprising solution was installing pipes to carry the water from the main water line in the village of Al-Tuwani, through privately owned lands of the other villages. “I checked it out, looking to see if there was any ban on laying water lines on private land and couldn’t find one,” Younes said.
Work done by volunteers
The plumbing work was done by volunteers, mostly at night and without heavy machinery, almost with their bare hands. Ali Debabseh, 77, of the village of Khalet al-Daba, recalled the moment when he opened the spigot installed near his home and washed his face with running water. “I wanted to jump for joy. I was as happy as a groom before his wedding.”
Umm Fadi of the village of Halawa also resorted to the word “joy” in describing the six months when she had a faucet near the small shack in which she lives. “The water was clean, not brown from rust or dust. I didn’t need to go as far as the cistern to draw water, didn’t need to measure every drop.”
Now it’s more difficult to again get used to being dependent on water dispensed from tanks.
The piping and connections and water meters were bought with a 100,000 euro ($113,000) European donation. Instead of paying 40 shekels ($11) per cubic meter for water brought in with water tanks, the residents paid only about 6 shekels for the same amount of running water. Suddenly they not only saved money, but also had more precious time.
The water lines also could have saved European taxpayers money. A European project to help the residents remain in their homes had been up and running since 2011, providing annual funding of 120,000 euros to cover the cost of buying and transporting drinking water during the three summer months for the residents (but not their livestock).
The cost was based on a calculation involving consumption of 750 liters per person a month, far below the World Health Organization’s recommended quantity. There are between 1,500 and 2,000 residents. The project made things much easier for such a poor community, which continued to pay out of its own pocket for the water for some 40,000 sheep and for the residents’ drinking water during the remainder of the year. Now that the Civil Administration has demolished the water lines, the European donor countries may be forced to once again pay for the high price of transporting water during the summer months, at seven times the cost.
For its part, the Civil Administration issued a statement noting that the area is a closed military zone. “On February 13,” the statement said, “enforcement action was taken against water infrastructure that was connected to illegal structures in this area and that were built without the required permits.”
Ismail Bahis should have been sorry that the pipes were laid last year. He and his brothers, residents of Yatta, own water tankers and were the main water suppliers to the Masafer Yatta villages. Through a system of coupons purchased with the European donation, they received 800 shekels for every shipment of 20 cubic meters of water. But Bahis said he was happy he had lost out on the work.
“The roads to the villages of Masafer Yatta are rough and dangerous, particularly after the army closed them,” he said. “Every trip of a few kilometers took at least three and a half hours. Once I tipped over with the tanker. Another time the army confiscated my brother’s truck, claiming it was a closed military zone. We got the truck released three weeks later in return for 5,000 shekels. We always had other additional expenses replacing tires and other repairs for the truck.
Nidal Younes recounted that the council signed a contract with another water carrier to meet the demand. But that supplier quit after three weeks. He wouldn’t agree to drive on the poor and dangerous roads.
On February 13, Younes heard the large group of forces sent by the Civil Administration beginning to demolish the water lines near the village of Al-Fakhit. He rushed to the scene and began arguing with the soldiers and Civil Administration staff.
Border Police arrests
Border Police officers arrested him, handcuffed him and put him in a jeep. His colleague, the head of the Al-Tuwani council, Mohammed al-Raba’i, also approached those carrying out the demolition work to protest. “But they arrested me after I said two words. At least Nidal managed to say a lot,” he said with a smile that concealed sadness.
Two teams carried out the demolition work, one proceeding toward the village of Jinbah, to the southeast, the second advanced in the direction of Al-Tuwani, to the northwest. They also demolished the access road leading to the village of Sha’ab al-Butum, so that even if Bahis wanted to transport water again, he would have had to make a large detour to do so.
Younes was shocked to spot a man named Marco among the team carrying out the demolition. “I remembered him from when I was a child, from the 1980s when he was an inspector for the Civil Administration. In 1985, he supervised the demolition of houses in our village, Jinbah — twice, during Ramadan and Eid al-Fitr [marking the end of the Ramadan holy month],” he said.
“They knew him very well in all the villages in the area because he attended all the demolitions. The name Marco was a synonym for an evil spirit. Our parents who saw him demolish their homes, have died. He disappeared, and suddenly he has reappeared,” Younes remarked.
Marco is Marco Ben-Shabbat, who has lead the Civil Administration’s supervision unit for the past 10 years. Speaking to a reporter from the Israel Hayom daily who accompanied the forces carrying out the demolition work, Ben-Shabbat said: “The [water line] project was not carried out by the individual village. The Palestinian Authority definitely put a project manager here and invested a lot of money.”
More precisely, it was European governments that did so.
From all of the villages where the Civil Administration destroyed water lines, the Jewish outposts of Mitzpeh Yair and Avigayil can be seen on the hilltops. Although they are unauthorized and illegal even according to lenient Israeli settlement laws, the outposts were connected almost immediately to water and electricity grids and paved roads lead to them.
“I asked why they demolished the water lines,” Nidal Younes recalled. He said one of the Border Police officers answered him, in English, telling him it was done “to replace Arabs with Jews.”
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