facility:tel aviv university

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

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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.

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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.

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Palestinian children awaiting distribution of milk by UNICEF at the Nazareth Franciscan Sisters’ convent, on January 1, 1950. AW / UN Photo

The 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.”

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IDF soldiers guarding Palestinians in Ramle, in 1948. Collection of Benno Rothenberg/The IDF and Defense Establishment Archives

Another 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:

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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.”

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Palestinian refugees leaving their village, unknown location, 1948. UNRWA

According 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?

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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.

(1) ▻https://www.haaretz.co.il/st/inter/Heng/1948.pdf

Le directeur du musée juif de Berlin démissionne après une polémique sur l’antisémitisme
Mis à jour le 15/06/2019
▻https://www.francetvinfo.fr/monde/europe/allemagne/le-directeur-du-musee-juif-de-berlin-demissionne-apres-une-polemique-su

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Le directeur du musée juif de Berlin, Peter Schäfer, a démissionné, vendredi 14 juin, sur fond de polémique. En cause : un tweet controversé de son établissement recommandant la lecture d’un article critique de la décision, en mai, du Parlement allemand de considérer comme « antisémites » les méthodes du mouvement BDS (Boycott Désinvestissement Sanctions). Peter Schäfer a remis sa démission à la ministre de la Culture allemande, Monika Grütters, « pour éviter de nouveaux préjudices au musée juif de Berlin », a indiqué ce dernier.

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Comment les services de renseignement israéliens collaborent à la lutte contre #BDS à travers le monde

Mossad involved in anti-boycott activity, Israeli minister’s datebooks reveal - Israel News - Haaretz.com

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The datebooks of Strategic Affairs Minister Gilad Erdan for 2018 reveal that he cooperated with the Mossad in the fight against the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement.

The diaries, which were released in response to a Freedom of Information request, show that Erdan met with Mossad head Yossi Cohen about “the struggle against the boycott.” The request was made by the Hatzlaha movement, an organization promoting a fair society and economy, to all ministers, deputy ministers and ministry directors-general.

Officials in the Strategic Affairs Ministry are proud of their work with the state’s security agencies, but hide the content and full scope of these activities on grounds that if these would be revealed, it would undermine the covert efforts being made against BDS and its leaders. Officials in Erdan’s office said that the meeting with Cohen was merely a “review,” but sources familiar with the ministry’s activities told Haaretz that the ministry indeed cooperates with the Mossad.

Erdan’s datebooks also show meetings with the head of the National Security Council and the head of the NSC’s intelligence branch, as well as meetings with representatives of numerous Jewish organizations, including the American Jewish Committee, B’nai B’rith, the American Jewish Congress, the umbrella organization of French Jewry, the U.S. Reform Movement and others. There are also logs of various meetings and phone calls that Erdan’s chief of staff held with foreign leaders and diplomats, as well as meetings with settler leaders, including the heads of the Samaria Regional Council and the Hebron Hills Regional Council.

Many of Erdan’s meetings in 2018 were devoted to establishing a public benefit corporation which at first was called Kella Shlomo but whose name was later changed to Concert. Its aim was to covertly advance “mass awareness activities” as part of “the struggle against the campaign to delegitimize” Israel globally. This corporation, which received 128 million shekels (about $36 million) in government funding and was to also collect 128 million shekels in private contributions, is not subject to the Freedom of Information Law.

In early 2018 Haaretz published the list of shareholders and directors in the company, which include former Strategic Affairs Ministry director general Yossi Kuperwasser; former UN ambassador Dore Gold, a former adviser to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu; former UN ambassador Ron Prosor; businessman Micah Avni, whose father, Richard Lakin, was killed in a 2015 terror attack in Jerusalem; Amos Yadlin, who heads Tel Aviv University’s Institute for National Security Studies; Miri Eisin, who served as the prime minister’s adviser on the foreign press during the Second Lebanon War; former National Security Council chief Yaakov Amidror; and Sagi Balasha, a former CEO of the Israeli-American Council.
Demonstrators wear shirts reading “Boycott Israel” during a protest in Paris, Dec. 9, 2017.
Demonstrators wear shirts reading “Boycott Israel” during a protest in Paris, Dec. 9, 2017. AP Photo/Kamil Zihnioglu

According to a government resolution, the funding was granted to implement part of the ministry’s activities related to the fights against delegitimization and boycotts against the State of Israel. It says the company would raise the private portion of its financing for the initiative from philanthropic sources or pro-Israel organizations. A steering committee was to be appointed for the initiative to comprise representatives of the government and the other funding partners.
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According to a ministry document revealed by The Seventh Eye website, the organization was expected to carry out mass awareness activities and work to exploit the wisdom of crowds, “making new ideas accessible to decision-makers and donors in the Jewish world, and developing new tools to combat the delegitimization of Israel.”

Elad Mann, Hatzlacha’s legal adviser, said, “Revealing the date books of senior and elected officials is crucial to understanding how the government system works and it has great value taken together with other details of information. This is how to monitor the government and its priorities or the actions it takes with more efficiency and transparency.”

Erdan’s office said that he “met during this past term with heads of the security echelons to give them a survey of the ministry’s activities in the struggle against the delegitimization and boycott of Israel.”

Josh Breiner contributed to this report.

Old Palestinian photos & films hidden in IDF archive show different history than Israeli claims

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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.

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#historicisation #Israël #Palestine #photographie #films #archive #histoire #Khalil_Rassass #Ali_Za’arur
ping @reka @sinehebdo @albertocampiphoto

The Knesset candidate who says Zionism encourages anti-Semitism and calls Netanyahu ’arch-murderer’ - Israel Election 2019 - Haaretz.com
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Few Israelis have heard of Dr. Ofer Cassif, the Jewish representative on the far-leftist Hadash party’s Knesset slate. On April 9, that will change
By Ravit Hecht Feb 16, 2019

Ofer Cassif is fire and brimstone. Not even the flu he’s suffering from today can contain his bursting energy. His words are blazing, and he bounds through his modest apartment, searching frenetically for books by Karl Marx and Primo Levi in order to find quotations to back up his ideas. Only occasional sips from a cup of maté bring his impassioned delivery to a momentary halt. The South American drink is meant to help fight his illness, he explains.

Cassif is third on the slate of Knesset candidates in Hadash (the Hebrew acronym for the Democratic Front for Peace and Equality), the successor to Israel’s Communist Party. He holds the party’s “Jewish slot,” replacing MK Dov Khenin. Cassif is likely to draw fire from opponents and be a conspicuous figure in the next Knesset, following the April 9 election.

Indeed, the assault on him began as soon as he was selected by the party’s convention. The media pursued him; a columnist in the mass-circulation Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper, Ben-Dror Yemini, called for him to be disqualified from running for the Knesset. It would be naive to say that this was unexpected. Cassif, who was one of the first Israeli soldiers to refuse to serve in the territories, in 1987, gained fame thanks to a number of provocative statements. The best known is his branding of Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked as “neo-Nazi scum.” On another occasion, he characterized Jews who visit the Temple Mount as “cancer with metastases that have to be eradicated.”

On his alternate Facebook page, launched after repeated blockages of his original account by a blitz of posts from right-wing activists, he asserted that Culture Minister Miri Regev is “repulsive gutter contamination,” that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is an “arch-murderer” and that the new Israel Defense Forces chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Aviv Kochavi, is a “war criminal.”

Do you regret making those remarks?

Cassif: “‘Regret’ is a word of emotion. Those statements were made against a background of particular events: the fence in Gaza, horrible legislation, and the wild antics of Im Tirtzu [an ultranationalist organization] on campus. That’s what I had to say at the time. I didn’t count on being in the Knesset. That wasn’t part of my plan. But it’s clear to me that as a public personality, I would not have made those comments.”

Is Netanyahu an arch-murderer?

“Yes. I wrote it in the specific context of a particular day in the Gaza Strip. A massacre of innocent people was perpetrated there, and no one’s going to persuade me that those people were endangering anyone. It’s a concentration camp. Not a ‘concentration camp’ in the sense of Bergen-Belsen; I am absolutely not comparing the Holocaust to what’s happening.”

You term what Israel is doing to the Palestinians “genocide.”

“I call it ‘creeping genocide.’ Genocide is not only a matter of taking people to gas chambers. When Yeshayahu Leibowitz used the term ‘Judeo-Nazis,’ people asked him, ‘How can you say that? Are we about to build gas chambers?’ To that, he had two things to say. First, if the whole difference between us and the Nazis boils down to the fact that we’re not building gas chambers, we’re already in trouble. And second, maybe we won’t use gas chambers, but the mentality that exists today in Israel – and he said this 40 years ago – would allow it. I’m afraid that today, after four years of such an extreme government, it possesses even greater legitimacy.

“But you know what, put aside ‘genocide’ – ethnic cleansing is taking place there. And that ethnic cleansing is also being carried out by means of killing, although mainly by way of humiliation and of making life intolerable. The trampling of human dignity. It reminds me of Primo Levi’s ‘If This Is a Man.’”

You say you’re not comparing, but you repeatedly come back to Holocaust references. On Facebook, you also uploaded the scene from “Schindler’s List” in which the SS commander Amon Goeth picks off Jews with his rifle from the balcony of his quarters in the camp. You compared that to what was taking place along the border fence in the Gaza Strip.

“Today, I would find different comparisons. In the past I wrote an article titled, ‘On Holocaust and on Other Crimes.’ It’s online [in Hebrew]. I wrote there that anyone who compares Israel to the Holocaust is cheapening the Holocaust. My comparison between here and what happened in the early 1930s [in Germany] is a very different matter.”

Clarity vs. crudity

Given Cassif’s style, not everyone in Hadash was happy with his election, particularly when it comes to the Jewish members of the predominantly Arab party. Dov Khenin, for example, declined to be interviewed and say what he thinks of his parliamentary successor. According to a veteran party figure, “From the conversations I had, it turns out that almost none of the Jewish delegates – who make up about 100 of the party’s 940 delegates – supported his candidacy.

“He is perceived, and rightly so,” the party veteran continues, “as someone who closes doors to Hadash activity within Israeli society. Each of the other Jewish candidates presented a record of action and of struggles they spearheaded. What does he do? Curses right-wing politicians on Facebook. Why did the party leadership throw the full force of its weight behind him? In a continuation of the [trend exemplified by] its becoming part of the Joint List, Ofer’s election reflects insularity and an ongoing retreat from the historical goal of implementing change in Israeli society.”

At the same time, as his selection by a 60 percent majority shows, many in the party believe that it’s time to change course. “Israeli society is moving rightward, and what’s perceived as Dov’s [Khenin] more gentle style didn’t generate any great breakthrough on the Jewish street,” a senior source in Hadash notes.

“It’s not a question of the tension between extremism and moderation, but of how to signpost an alternative that will develop over time. Clarity, which is sometimes called crudity, never interfered with cooperation between Arabs and Jews. On the contrary. Ofer says things that we all agreed with but didn’t so much say, and of course that’s going to rile the right wing. And a good thing, too.”

Hadash chairman MK Ayman Odeh also says he’s pleased with the choice, though sources in the party claim that Odeh is apprehensive about Cassif’s style and that he actually supported a different candidate. “Dov went for the widest possible alliances in order to wield influence,” says Odeh. “Ofer will go for very sharp positions at the expense of the breadth of the alliance. But his sharp statements could have a large impact.”

Khenin was deeply esteemed by everyone. When he ran for mayor of Tel Aviv in 2008, some 35 percent of the electorate voted for him, because he was able to touch people who weren’t only from his political milieu.

Odeh: “No one has a higher regard for Dov than I do. But just to remind you, we are not a regular opposition, we are beyond the pale. And there are all kinds of styles. Influence can be wielded through comments that are vexatious the first time but which people get used to the second time. When an Arab speaks about the Nakba and about the massacre in Kafr Kassem [an Israeli Arab village, in 1956], it will be taken in a particular way, but when uttered by a Jew it takes on special importance.”

He will be the cause of many attacks on the party.

“Ahlan wa sahlan – welcome.”

Cassif will be the first to tell you that, with all due respect for the approach pursued by Khenin and by his predecessor in the Jewish slot, Tamar Gozansky, he will be something completely different. “I totally admire what Tamar and Dov did – nothing less than that,” he says, while adding, “But my agenda will be different. The three immediate dangers to Israeli society are the occupation, racism and the diminishment of the democratic space to the point of liquidation. That’s the agenda that has to be the hub of the struggle, as long as Israel rules over millions of people who have no rights, enters [people’s houses] in the middle of the night, arrests minors on a daily basis and shoots people in the back.

"Israel commits murder on a daily basis. When you murder one Palestinian, you’re called Elor Azaria [the IDF soldier convicted and jailed for killing an incapacitated Palestinian assailant]; when you murder and oppress thousands of Palestinians, you’re called the State of Israel.”

So you plan to be the provocateur in the next Knesset?

“It’s not my intention to be a provocateur, to stand there and scream and revile people. Even on Facebook I was compelled to stop that. But I definitely intend to challenge the dialogue in terms of the content, and mainly with a type of sarcasm.”

’Bags of blood’

Cassif, 54, who holds a doctorate in political philosophy from the London School of Economics, teaches political science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Sapir Academic College in Sderot and at the Academic College of Tel Aviv-Yaffo. He lives in Rehovot, is married and is the father of a 19-year-old son. He’s been active in Hadash for three decades and has held a number of posts in the party.

As a lecturer, he stands out for his boldness and fierce rhetoric, which draws students of all stripes. He even hangs out with some of his Haredi students, one of whom wrote a post on the eve of the Hadash primary urging the delegates to choose him. After his election, a student from a settlement in the territories wrote to him, “You are a determined and industrious person, and for that I hold you in high regard. Hoping we will meet on the field of action and growth for the success of Israel as a Jewish, democratic state (I felt obliged to add a small touch of irony in conclusion).”

Cassif grew up in a home that supported Mapai, forerunner of Labor, in Rishon Letzion. He was an only child; his father was an accountant, his mother held a variety of jobs. He was a news hound from an early age, and at 12 ran for the student council in school. He veered sharply to the left in his teens, becoming a keen follower of Marx and socialism.

Following military service in the IDF’s Nahal brigade and a period in the airborne Nahal, Cassif entered the Hebrew University. There his political career moved one step forward, and there he also forsook the Zionist left permanently. His first position was as a parliamentary aide to the secretary general of the Communist Party, Meir Wilner.

“At first I was closer to Mapam [the United Workers Party, which was Zionist], and then I refused to serve in the territories. I was the first refusenik in the first intifada to be jailed. I didn’t get support from Mapam, I got support from the people of Hadash, and I drew close to them. I was later jailed three more times for refusing to serve in the territories.”

His rivals in the student organizations at the Hebrew University remember him as the epitome of the extreme left.

“Even in the Arab-Jewish student association, Cassif was considered off-the-wall,” says Motti Ohana, who was chairman of Likud’s student association and active in the Student Union at the end of the 1980s and early 1990s. “One time I got into a brawl with him. It was during the first intifada, when he brought two bags of blood, emptied them out in the university’s corridors and declared, ‘There is no difference between Jewish and Arab blood,’ likening Israeli soldiers to terrorists. The custom on campus was that we would quarrel, left-right, Arabs-Jews, and after that we would sit together, have a coffee and talk. But not Cassif.”

According to Ohana, today a member of the Likud central committee, the right-wing activists knew that, “You could count on Ofer to fall into every trap. There was one event at the Hebrew University that was a kind of political Hyde Park. The right wanted to boot the left out of there, so we hung up the flag. It was obvious that Ofer would react, and in fact he tore the flag, and in the wake of the ruckus that developed, political activity was stopped for good.”

Replacing the anthem

Cassif voices clearly and cogently positions that challenge the public discourse in Israel, and does so with ardor and charisma. Four candidates vied for Hadash’s Jewish slot, and they all delivered speeches at the convention. The three candidates who lost to him – Efraim Davidi, Yaela Raanan and the head of the party’s Tel Aviv branch, Noa Levy – described their activity and their guiding principles. When they spoke, there was the regular buzz of an audience that’s waiting for lunch. But when Cassif took the stage, the effect was magnetic.

“Peace will not be established without a correction of the crimes of the Nakba and [recognition of] the right of return,” he shouted, and the crowd cheered him. As one senior party figure put it, “Efraim talked about workers’ rights, Yaela about the Negev, Noa about activity in Tel Aviv – and Ofer was Ofer.”

What do you mean by “right of return”?

Cassif: “The first thing is the actual recognition of the Nakba and of the wrong done by Israel. Compare it to the Truth and Reconciliation Commissions in South Africa, if you like, or with the commissions in Chile after Pinochet. Israel must recognize the wrong it committed. Now, recognition of the wrong also includes recognition of the right of return. The question is how it’s implemented. It has to be done by agreement. I can’t say that tomorrow Tel Aviv University has to be dismantled and that Sheikh Munis [the Arab village on whose ruins the university stands] has to be rebuilt there. The possibility can be examined of giving compensation in place of return, for example.”

But what is the just solution, in your opinion?

“For the Palestinian refugees to return to their homeland.”

That means there will be Jews who will have to leave their home.

“In some places, unequivocally, yes. People will have to be told: ‘You must evacuate your places.’ The classic example is Ikrit and Biram [Christian-Arab villages in Galilee whose residents were promised – untruly – by the Israeli authorities in 1948 that they would be able to return, and whose lands were turned over to Jewish communities]. But there are places where there is certainly greater difficulty. You don’t right one wrong with another.”

What about the public space in Israel? What should it look like?

“The public space has to change, to belong to all the state’s residents. I dispute the conception of ‘Jewish publicness.’”

How should that be realized?

“For example, by changing the national symbols, changing the national anthem. [Former Hadash MK] Mohammed Barakeh once suggested ‘I Believe’ [‘Sahki, Sahki’] by [Shaul] Tchernichovsky – a poem that is not exactly an expression of Palestinian nationalism. He chose it because of the line, ‘For in mankind I’ll believe.’ What does it mean to believe in mankind? It’s not a Jew, or a Palestinian, or a Frenchman, or I don’t know what.”

What’s the difference between you and the [Arab] Balad party? Both parties overall want two states – a state “of all its citizens” and a Palestinian state.

“In the big picture, yes. But Balad puts identity first on the agenda. We are not nationalists. We do not espouse nationalism as a supreme value. For us, self-determination is a means. We are engaged in class politics. By the way, Balad [the National Democratic Assembly] and Ta’al [MK Ahmad Tibi’s Arab Movement for Renewal] took the idea of a state of all its citizens from us, from Hadash. We’ve been talking about it for ages.”

If you were a Palestinian, what would you do today?

“In Israel, what my Palestinian friends are doing, and I with them – [wage] a parliamentary and extra-parliamentary struggle.”

And what about the Palestinians in the territories?

“We have always been against harming innocent civilians. Always. In all our demonstrations, one of our leading slogans was: ‘In Gaza and in Sderot, children want to live.’ With all my criticism of the settlers, to enter a house and slaughter children, as in the case of the Fogel family [who were murdered in their beds in the settlement of Itamar in 2011], is intolerable. You have to be a human being and reject that.”

And attacks on soldiers?

“An attack on soldiers is not terrorism. Even Netanyahu, in his book about terrorism, explicitly categorizes attacks on soldiers or on the security forces as guerrilla warfare. It’s perfectly legitimate, according to every moral criterion – and, by the way, in international law. At the same time, I am not saying it’s something wonderful, joyful or desirable. The party’s Haifa office is on Ben-Gurion Street, and suddenly, after years, I noticed a memorial plaque there for a fighter in Lehi [pre-state underground militia, also known as the Stern Gang] who assassinated a British officer. Wherever there has been a struggle for liberation from oppression, there are national heroes, who in 90 percent of the cases carried out some operations that were unlawful. Nelson Mandela is today considered a hero, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, but according to the conventional definition, he was a terrorist. Most of the victims of the ANC [African National Congress] were civilians.”

In other words, today’s Hamas commanders who are carrying out attacks on soldiers will be heroes of the future Palestinian state?

“Of course.”

Anti-Zionist identity

Cassif terms himself an explicit anti-Zionist. “There are three reasons for that,” he says. “To begin with, Zionism is a colonialist movement, and as a socialist, I am against colonialism. Second, as far as I am concerned, Zionism is racist in ideology and in practice. I am not referring to the definition of race theory – even though there are also some who impute that to the Zionist movement – but to what I call Jewish supremacy. No socialist can accept that. My supreme value is equality, and I can’t abide any supremacy – Jewish or Arab. The third thing is that Zionism, like other ethno-nationalistic movements, splits the working class and all weakened groups. Instead of uniting them in a struggle for social justice, for equality, for democracy, it divides the exploited classes and the enfeebled groups, and by that means strengthens the rule of capital.”

He continues, “Zionism also sustains anti-Semitism. I don’t say it does so deliberately – even though I have no doubt that there are some who do it deliberately, like Netanyahu, who is connected to people like the prime minister of Hungary, Viktor Orban, and the leader of the far right in Austria, Hans Christian Strache.”

Did Mapai-style Zionism also encourage anti-Semitism?

“The phenomenon was very striking in Mapai. Think about it for a minute, not only historically, but logically. If the goal of political and practical Zionism is really the establishment of a Jewish state containing a Jewish majority, and for Diaspora Jewry to settle there, nothing serves them better than anti-Semitism.”

What in their actions encouraged anti-Semitism?

“The very appeal to Jews throughout the world – the very fact of treating them as belonging to the same nation, when they were living among other nations. The whole old ‘dual loyalty’ story – Zionism actually encouraged that. Therefore, I maintain that anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism are not the same thing, but are precisely opposites. That doesn’t mean, of course, that there are no anti-Zionists who are also anti-Semites. Most of the BDS people are of course anti-Zionists, but they are in no way anti-Semites. But there are anti-Semites there, too.”

Do you support BDS?

“It’s too complex a subject for a yes or no answer; there are aspects I don’t support.”

Do you think that the Jews deserve a national home in the Land of Israel?

“I don’t know what you mean by ‘national home.’ It’s very amorphous. We in Hadash say explicitly that Israel has a right to exist as a sovereign state. Our struggle is not against the state’s existence, but over its character.”

But that state is the product of the actions of the Zionist movement, which you say has been colonialist and criminal from day one.

“That’s true, but the circumstances have changed. That’s the reason that the majority of the members of the Communist Party accepted the [1947] partition agreement at the time. They recognized that the circumstances had changed. I think that one of the traits that sets communist thought apart, and makes it more apt, is the understanding and the attempt to strike the proper balance between what should be, and reality. So it’s true that Zionism started as colonialism, but what do you do with the people who were already born here? What do you tell them? Because your grandparents committed a crime, you have to leave? The question is how you transform the situation that’s been created into one that’s just, democratic and equal.”

So, a person who survived a death camp and came here is a criminal?

“The individual person, of course not. I’m in favor of taking in refugees in distress, no matter who or what they are. I am against Zionism’s cynical use of Jews in distress, including the refugees from the Holocaust. I have a problem with the fact that the natives whose homeland this is cannot return, while people for whom it’s not their homeland, can, because they supposedly have some sort of blood tie and an ‘imaginary friend’ promised them the land.”

I understand that you are in favor of the annulment of the Law of Return?

“Yes. Definitely.”

But you are in favor of the Palestinian right of return.

“There’s no comparison. There’s no symmetry here at all. Jerry Seinfeld was by chance born to a Jewish family. What’s his connection to this place? Why should he have preference over a refugee from Sabra or Chatila, or Edward Said, who did well in the United States? They are the true refugees. This is their homeland. Not Seinfeld’s.”

Are you critical of the Arabs, too?

“Certainly. One criticism is of their cooperation with imperialism – take the case of today’s Saudi Arabia, Qatar and so on. Another, from the past, relates to the reactionary forces that did not accept that the Jews have a right to live here.”

Hadash refrained from criticizing the Assad regime even as it was massacring civilians in Syria. The party even torpedoed a condemnation of Assad after the chemical attack. Do you identify with that approach?

“Hadash was critical of the Assad regime – father and son – for years, so we can’t be accused in any way of supporting Assad or Hezbollah. We are not Ba’ath, we are not Islamists. We are communists. But as I said earlier, the struggle, unfortunately, is generally not between the ideal and what exists in practice, but many times between two evils. And then you have to ask yourself which is the lesser evil. The Syrian constellation is extremely complicated. On the one hand, there is the United States, which is intervening, and despite all the pretense of being against ISIS, supported ISIS and made it possible for ISIS to sprout.

"I remind you that ISIS started from the occupation of Iraq. And ideologically and practically, ISIS is definitely a thousand times worse than the Assad regime, which is at base also a secular regime. Our position was and is against the countries that pose the greatest danger to regional peace, which above all are Qatar and Saudi Arabia, and the United States, which supports them. That doesn’t mean that we support Assad.”

Wrong language

Cassif’s economic views are almost as far from the consensus as his political ideas. He lives modestly in an apartment that’s furnished like a young couple’s first home. You won’t find an espresso maker or unnecessary products of convenience in his place. To his credit, it can be said that he extracts the maximum from Elite instant coffee.

What is your utopian vision – to nationalize Israel’s conglomerates, such as Cellcom, the telecommunications company, or Osem, the food manufacturer and distributor?

“The bottom line is yes. How exactly will it be done? That’s an excellent question, which I can’t answer. Perhaps by transferring ownership to the state or to the workers, with democratic tools. And there are other alternatives. But certainly, I would like it if a large part of the resources were not in private hands, as was the case before the big privatizations. It’s true that it won’t be socialism, because, again, there can be no such thing as Zionist socialism, but there won’t be privatization like we have today. What is the result of capitalism in Israel? The collapse of the health system, the absence of a social-welfare system, a high cost of living and of housing, the elderly and the disabled in a terrible situation.”

Does any private sector have the right to exist?

“Look, the question is what you mean by ‘private sector.’ If we’re talking about huge concerns that the owners of capital control completely through their wealth, then no.”

What growth was there in the communist countries? How can anyone support communism, in light of the grim experience wherever it was tried?

“It’s true, we know that in the absolute majority of societies where an attempt was made to implement socialism, there was no growth or prosperity, and we need to ask ourselves why, and how to avoid that. When I talk about communism, I’m not talking about Stalin and all the crimes that were committed in the name of the communist idea. Communism is not North Korea and it is not Pol Pot in Cambodia. Heaven forbid.”

And what about Venezuela?

“Venezuela is not communism. In fact, they didn’t go far enough in the direction of socialism.”

Chavez was not enough of a socialist?

“Chavez, but in particular Maduro. The Communist Party is critical of the regime. They support it because the main enemy is truly American imperialism and its handmaidens. Let’s look at what the U.S. did over the years. At how many times it invaded and employed bullying, fascist forces. Not only in Latin America, its backyard, but everywhere.”

Venezuela is falling apart, people there don’t have anything to eat, there’s no medicine, everyone who can flees – and it’s the fault of the United States?

“You can’t deny that the regime has made mistakes. It’s not ideal. But basically, it is the result of American imperialism and its lackeys. After all, the masses voted for Chavez and for Maduro not because things were good for them. But because American corporations stole the country’s resources and filled their own pockets. I wouldn’t make Chavez into an icon, but he did some excellent things.”

Then how do you generate individual wealth within the method you’re proposing? I understand that I am now talking to you capitalistically, but the reality is that people see the accumulation of assets as an expression of progress in life.

“Your question is indeed framed in capitalist language, which simply departs from what I believe in. Because you are actually asking me how the distribution of resources is supposed to occur within the capitalist framework. And I say no, I am not talking about resource distribution within a capitalist framework.”

Gantz vs. Netanyahu

Cassif was chosen as the polls showed Meretz and Labor, the representatives of the Zionist left, barely scraping through into the next Knesset and in fact facing a serious possibility of electoral extinction. The critique of both parties from the radical left is sometimes more acerbic than from the right.

Would you like to see the Labor Party disappear?

“No. I think that what’s happening at the moment with Labor and with Meretz is extremely dangerous. I speak about them as collectives, because they contain individuals with whom I see no possibility of engaging in a dialogue. But I think that they absolutely must be in the Knesset.”

Is a left-winger who defines himself as a Zionist your partner in any way?

“Yes. We need partners. We can’t be picky. Certainly we will cooperate with liberals and Zionists on such issues as combating violence against women or the battle to rescue the health system. Maybe even in putting an end to the occupation.”

I’ll put a scenario to you: Benny Gantz does really well in the election and somehow overcomes Netanyahu. Do you support the person who led Operation Protective Edge in Gaza when he was chief of staff?

“Heaven forbid. But we don’t reject people, we reject policy. I remind you that it was [then-defense minister] Yitzhak Rabin who led the most violent tendency in the first intifada, with his ‘Break their bones.’ But when he came to the Oslo Accords, it was Hadash and the Arab parties that gave him, from outside the coalition, an insurmountable bloc. I can’t speak for the party, but if there is ever a government whose policy is one that we agree with – eliminating the occupation, combating racism, abolishing the nation-state law – I believe we will give our support in one way or another.”

And if Gantz doesn’t declare his intention to eliminate the occupation, he isn’t preferable to Netanyahu in any case?

“If so, why should we recommend him [to the president to form the next government]? After the clips he posted boasting about how many people he killed and how he hurled Gaza back into the Stone Age, I’m far from certain that he’s better.”

#Hadash

Des universitaires et des artistes israéliens mettent en garde contre une mise en équation de l’antisionisme et de l’antisémitisme
22 novembre | Ofer Aderet pour Haaretz |Traduction J.Ch. pour l’AURDIP
▻https://www.aurdip.org/des-universitaires-et-des-artistes.html

Une lettre ouverte de 34 éminents Israéliens, dont des chercheurs en histoire juive et des lauréats du Prix Israël, a été publiée mardi dans les média autrichiens appelant à faire une différence entre critique légitime d’Israël, « aussi dure puisse-t-elle être », et antisémitisme.

Cette lettre a été émise avant un rassemblement international à Vienne sur antisémitisme et antisionisme en Europe.

L’ événement de cette semaine, « L’Europe par delà l’antisémitisme et l’antisionisme », se tient sous les auspices du Chancelier autrichien Sebastian Kurz. Son homologue israélien, Benjamin Netanyahu, devait y prendre part, mais est resté en Israël pour s’occuper de la crise dans sa coalition gouvernementale.

« Nous adoptons et soutenons totalement le combat intransigeant [de l’Union Européenne] contre l’antisémitisme. La montée de l’antisémitisme nous inquiète. Comme nous l’a enseigné l’histoire, elle a souvent été l’annonce de désastres ultérieurs pour toute l’humanité », déclare la lettre.

« Cependant, l’UE défend les droits de l’Homme et doit les protéger avec autant de force qu’elle combat l’antisémitisme. Il ne faudrait pas instrumentaliser ce combat contre l’antisémitisme pour réprimer la critique légitime de l’occupation par Israël et ses graves violations des droits fondamentaux des Palestiniens. » (...)

#antisionisme #antisémitisme

Israeli academics and artists warn against equating anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism
Their open letter ahead of a conference in Vienna advises against giving Israel immunity for ‘grave and widespread violations of human rights and international law’

Ofer Aderet
Nov 20, 2018

▻https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-israeli-professors-warn-against-equating-anti-zionism-with-anti-se

An open letter from 35 prominent Israelis, including Jewish-history scholars and Israel Prize laureates, was published Tuesday in the Austrian media calling for a distinction between legitimate criticism of Israel, “harsh as it may be,” and anti-Semitism.
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The letter was released before an international gathering in Vienna on anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism in Europe.
The event this week, “Europe beyond anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism: Securing Jewish life in Europe,” is being held under the auspices of Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz. His Israeli counterpart, Benjamin Netanyahu, had been due to take part but stayed in Israel to deal with the crisis in his coalition government. 
“We fully embrace and support the [European Union’s] uncompromising fight against anti-Semitism. The rise of anti-Semitism worries us. As we know from history, it has often signaled future disasters to all mankind,” the letter states. 
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“However, the EU also stands for human rights and has to protect them as forcefully as it fights anti-Semitism. This fight against anti-Semitism should not be instrumentalized to suppress legitimate criticism of Israel’s occupation and severe violations of Palestinian human rights.” 

The signatories accuse Netanyahu of suggesting an equivalence between anti-Israel criticism and anti-Semitism. The official declaration by the conference also notes that anti-Semitism is often expressed through disproportionate criticism of Israel, but the letter warns that such an approach could “afford Israel immunity against criticism for grave and widespread violations of human rights and international law.”
The signatories object to the declaration’s alleged “identifying” of anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism. “Zionism, like all other modern Jewish movements in the 20th century, was harshly opposed by many Jews, as well as by non-Jews who were not anti-Semitic,” they write. “Many victims of the Holocaust opposed Zionism. On the other hand, many anti-Semites supported Zionism. It is nonsensical and inappropriate to identify anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism.”
Among the signatories are Moshe Zimmerman, an emeritus professor at Hebrew University and a former director of the university’s Koebner Center for German History; Zeev Sternhell, a Hebrew University emeritus professor in political science and a current Haaretz columnist; sculptor Dani Karavan; Miki Kratsman, a former chairman of the photography department at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design; Jose Brunner, an emeritus professor at Tel Aviv University and a former director of the Minerva Institute for German History; Alon Confino, a professor of Holocaust Studies at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst; and graphic designer David Tartakover.

Ofer Aderet
Haaretz Correspondent

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Cooperation Agreement Signed Between TAU and the Collège de France | Tel Aviv University
Agreement strengthens existing strong relations between the two institutions in the areas of humanities and exact sciences
24 July 2018
▻https://english.tau.ac.il/impact/tau_college_de_france_agreement

A collaboration agreement was signed between Tel Aviv University and the prestigious Collège de France in Paris, during a joint symposium of the two institutions that was held as part of the 2018 France-Israel Exchange Season.

The symposium addressed four themes through round table discussions with the participation of scholars from both institutions. These included: biblical archeology; literature and society; renewable energies; quantum physics; and string theory.

Why the expected wave of French immigration to Israel never materialized

It seemed as if the Jews of France would come to Israel in droves after the 2015 attacks in Paris. It turns out that these expectations were exaggerated - here’s why
By Noa Shpigel Jul 25, 2018

▻https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium.MAGAZINE-why-expected-wave-of-french-immigration-to-israel-never-m

It was early 2015 in Paris and the attacks came one after the other. On January 7, there was the shooting attack on the editorial offices of the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo that took 12 lives; the next day a terrorist shot a policewoman dead, and the day after that brought the siege on the Hypercacher kosher supermarket that ended in the deaths of four Jews.
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On January 11, some four million people marched through the streets of Paris and other French cities in a protest against terror; some 50 world leaders marched in Paris, among them Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who a few hours later spoke at the Great Synagogue in Paris and urged French Jews to make aliyah.

[You have] the right to live in our free country, the one and only Jewish state, the State of Israel,” he said, to applause from the crowd. “The right to stand tall and proud at the walls of Zion, our eternal capital of Jerusalem. Any Jew who wishes to immigrate to Israel will be welcomed with open arms and warm and accepting hearts.” The Immigration Absorption Ministry estimated that more than 10,000 French Jews would make aliyah that year.
That forecast was premature. According to the Central Bureau of Statistics, in 2014, there were 6,547 olim from France, while in 2015, the number rose only to 6,628. In 2016, the number of immigrants dropped to 4,239, and last year, there were only 3,157. Based on the first five months of this year, it seems that the downtrend is continuing; in the first five months of 2018, there were 759 olim from France, while during the comparable period in 2017, the number was 958.
Joel Samoun, a married father of four from Troyes and a nurse by profession, remembers Netanyahu’s speech. “The speech definitely moved me. It was also a period when we weren’t feeling safe in France,” he says. He began the aliyah process: He made contact with the Jewish Agency and even had his professional credentials and recommendation letters translated into Hebrew. But when Samoun discovered what a lengthy procedure he would have to undergo to work in his field in Israel, he decided to give up on the dream, at least for now. “It’s somewhere in my head,” he said. “Maybe when I reach retirement age.”

Nor is Annaell Asraf, 23, of Paris, hurrying to leave. Her sister made aliyah four years ago, did national service, and somehow managed. She herself worked in Israel for six months, then returned to France, finished her degree in business administration and founded an online fashion business.
“I have a good life in France,” she told Haaretz. Many of her friends, she said, “tried to make aliyah, waited two years to find work, and came back. On paper it looks easy, but it’s much more complicated.”

Annaell Asraf, 23, of Paris, prefers to remain in France Luana Hazan
What are the primary obstacles? Gaps in language and mentality that aren’t easy to bridge, she says, plus, for anyone who didn’t serve in the army, it’s harder to find work. Moreover, she now feels safe in France. “Maybe someday,” she says, when asked if she sees herself returning to Israel to live.
Ariel Kendel, director of Qualita, the umbrella organization for French immigrants in Israel, says, “On the one hand, we see that aliyah is down, but on the other hand, the potential is great. If you know Jews in the community in France – it’s hard to find people who’ll say they don’t want to come to Israel.”
According to Kendel, the drop in aliyah has a number of causes. The primary ones are absorption difficulties; transitioning from the welfare state they are used to; and the fact that there are no aliyah programs tailored specifically for the French. “Where will I live, how will I make a living, what happens to my kids between 2 and 6 [P.M.],” he says. “In France, there is a developed welfare state. We don’t expect it to be like that here, but you can’t tell an immigrant at the airport to take the absorption basket [of services] and that’s it. Apparently every office in Israel should be asking itself these questions.”
Another problem he cites is the process of having professional credentials recognized in Israel. Although certification for physicans has been streamlined (to a trial period), nurses must undergo a test.
“People are asked to take an exam after 30 years of experience, it’s a scandal,” says Kendel. “We have at least one hundred nurses – 50 in Israel and 50 in France – who cannot work here. I don’t think that anyone in France is afraid to go to the hospital; [health care] is not at a low level. You can’t tell someone, ‘come, but chances are that we won’t accept your diploma.’”

Daniella Hadad, a bookkeeper who made aliyah with her husband and five children in 2015, works now in childcare. “When we made aliyah, there was a lot of terror and they said that we should immigrate more quickly,” she says. “They told me to work as a bookkeeper I would have to take all the courses from scratch, and that’s hard in Hebrew.” Now she’s looking for new avenues of employment and wants to improve her Hebrew.
Hadad is convinced that being able to make a living is the most important element in a successful landing in Israel. “I know a woman who made aliyah with her husband and children, but they had a hard time and now they are going back after two-and-half years.
Olivier Nazé, a father of four, is a dentist who made aliyah eight years ago. He had to invest a great deal in order to be able to work in his profession in Israel. Before moving the family, he came a few times on his own, to pass the required exam. He says his brother and family are worried about making aliyah as a result.
“If you have a profession, and you’re making money, it’s hard to get in because it’s like starting from zero,” he says. “In France I made a lot of money, and in Israel at the beginning, I was making a tenth of that. Now it’s slowly rising, but not everyone can afford to wait.” Despite everything, he says, “the quality of life is better here, for the children as well.”
According to a survey conducted by Zeev Hanin, the Absorption Ministry’s chief scientist, the results of which were published in June, 47 percent of French immigrants say their standard of living is not as good as it was in France, while 32 percent said their standard of living had improved. In terms of income, 80 percent responded that their situation was less favorable than in France, whereas 5 percent reported an improvement. But while many people indicated a worsening of various conditions compared to what they had in France, 67 percent said that they felt more at home in Israel, and 78.3 percent said they do not intend to leave.
Drop in incidents
It’s not surprising to learn that a drop in the incidents of anti-Semitism in France has been accompanied by a lack in emigration to Israel. Riva Mane, a researcher at the Kantor Center for the Study of European Jewry at Tel Aviv University, says that in 2015, the French Interior Ministry reported 808 anti-Semitic incidents in the country, whereas, in 2016 the number dropped to 355, and in 2017 to 311. Although not all incidents are reported, she said, the trend is clear.
Nevertheless, Mane says, “There is an increase in the number of violent attacks on Jews; 97 such incidents were reported in 2017, compared to 77 in 2016.” She added that there is still a sense of insecurity in the Jewish community, and that in recent years there has been an increase in internal migration. “Tens of thousands are leaving the poorer neighborhoods that also have a significant Muslim population and where there have been many incidents, for central Paris and other wealthier areas, where there are fewer Muslims,” she says. She also noted that Jewish pupils are increasingly leaving the public schools for private ones, where they are also likely to encounter fewer Muslim students.

Olivier Nazé, a father of four, is a dentist who made aliyah eight years ago Rami Shllush
“There’s always a reason for a wave of aliyah,” explained Immigrant Absorption Minister Sofa Landver. “Not all the olim come because of Zionism. There was a reason for this wave from France – fear of terror. Olim came from Ukraine a year ago when there was a security crisis there vis-à-vis Russia. And now people are coming from Argentina and Brazil due to the economic situation.”
Landver says that her ministry is fighting to remove barriers to successful absorption. “I’m out in the field and I meet with olim from France who are very satisfied,” she reports. Although the minister knows that the immigrants from France cannot receive what the welfare state provides there, such as schools that are open late and two years of unemployment payments, her ministry continues to encourage aliyah.

Landver says that she has instructed ministry staff to make home visits to people who have opened an aliyah file, and that the ministry provides money for the translation of documents and removes employment barriers insofar as possible. “We, together with the municipalities, are doing everything possible to increase the number of olim. I really want them here and I’ll do everything to ease their absorption and to support this aliyah.”

Valerie Halfon, a family financial consultant from the organization Paamonim, said she has met with hundreds of families in France before their aliyah, helping them to prepare an economic assessment, so they’ll know what to expect. For example, she says, she consulted with a young couple who were hesitant, because friends told them that they would need 20,000 shekels a month ($5,500) to get by. She said that after making their calculations, “we got to 8,000-9,000 shekels. There are rumors, and they’re not all true. You have to adapt, you have to make changes.”
Still, whether it’s the improvement in the security situation in France, or the fear of making a new start – or a combination of these – there has been a decline in aliyah. “Today there’s a feeling that things have calmed down in France,” says Arie Abitbol, director of the European division of the Jewish Agency’s Masa programs. “There’s a president [Emmanuel Macron] who’s empathetic, and there’s a sense that he cares about the Jews and wants them to stay. The feeling is that the threat of Islamic extremism is a threat to everyone, and not only to the Jews.”
He says that from his experience working with young people in France, “People don’t say that they don’t want to come, they say that at the moment the circumstances are unsuitable and they’ll wait a little more – maybe in a few more years.” He doesn’t blame only the Israeli government and absorption difficulties: “When there’s a trigger of a security situation, people find the strength to leave, but the biggest enemy of aliyah is the routine. From 2014 to 2016, there were unusually high numbers, and now there’s a return to ordinary dimensions, because as far as they’re concerned, the situation is back to routine.”

Raymond SACKLER Officier of the Legion of Honor - France in the United States / Embassy of France in Washington, D.C.
▻https://fr.franceintheus.org/spip.php?article5052

Dear Dr. Sackler,
Dear Mrs. Sackler
Distinguished guests,
American and French friends,

It is a great pleasure and honor for me to be here with you today on this very special occasion and I would like to express my warmest thanks to Raymond Sackler, whom we are honoring today, for welcoming us to this beautiful location.

We are gathered here this afternoon to honor one of the most remarkable medical doctors in the field of Psychiatry and a very successful businessmanwho is also a great friend of France and an exceptional individual, Raymond Sackler.

I would like to thank Mr. Sackler’s family and friends who have joined us here this afternoon to show their support and admiration, with a special word of appreciation to his wife Beverly, to whom I also want to pay tribute.

Before proceeding with the ceremony, I would like to say a few words about the award I will bestow upon Mr. Sackler. The Legion of Honor was created by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1802 to reward extraordinary accomplishments and outstanding services rendered to France.
It is France’s highest distinction and one of the most coveted in the world. And the rank of officier that I will bestow upon Raymond Sackler is truly exceptional.

Dear Dr. Sackler,

You have accomplished so much that it is difficult to briefly sum up all of your outstanding achievements.

Already at a very young age, you were interested in France and French culture. You first visited France in 1939, and since then, have come to France very often, becoming a true Francophile, as evidenced throughout your professional life and philanthropic activities.

Together with your brother Mortimer, also a medical doctor, you created a pharmaceutical laboratory in France that was and still is a great success story. Being aware of the caliber of French research in medical and pharmaceutical sciences, you chose France for their first industrial investment, co-funding Les Laboratoires SARGET (today MEDA-PHARMA). You developed this company by creating or acquiring several subsidiaries in France, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands and Portugal.

You were incredibly successful, bringing the “Laboratoires SARGET” from a staff of a few hundred people in 1961, when it was created, to more than two thousand in 1987, when it was sold. With your brother and family, you later created another pharmaceutical company, MUNDIPHARMA, which is still growing, creating many jobs in France, and thus significantly contributing to the rise of the pharmaceutical industry in our country.

At the same time, you and your wife, Beverly, became patrons of a number of worthy causes: many scientific institutions, universities, and museums such as the Louvre and the Musée d’Art Contemporain de Bordeaux have benefited from your generosity. You also expressed a special interest in IHES, the Institut des Hautes Etudes Scientifiques, that is very well represented this afternoon.

I’d like to recognize the new Chairman of the Friends of IHES, Prof. Michael Douglas, the new Director of IHES Emmanuel Ullmo and its former director Jean-Pierre Bourguignon.

If IHES is what it is today, a worldclass scientific center that is second to none, it is to a large extend thanks to you mon cher Jean-Pierre, to your talent, dedication and commitment to the Institute.

It is also thanks to the support of many of you, Luc Hardy, and Raymond and Beverly Sackler in particular.

Cher Raymond,

Since 1990, you have made 3 donations to IHES, leading to the creation of 2 permanent endowments to host 2 scientists every year. You also supported the agreement between IHES and the Raymond and Beverly Sackler School of Mathematical Sciences at Tel Aviv University. You encouraged IHES to diversify its scientific activities by making an additional donation in 2012 to create a Chair in Physics and Cosmology.

Your long friendship and tremendous generosity toward French arts and science mirror your exceptional qualities as human beings. Your professional and social success go hand in hand with a unwavering intellectual curiosity and a strong commitment to future generations.

You were originally named Chevalier of the Legion of Honor by President Mitterrand. Your name had been proposed by the Minister of Foreign Affairs and Benoît d’Abboville, then French Consul in New York, who presented you with the award here in New York in 1990.

Today, in recognition of your continued dedication and commitment to French-American cultural and scientific cooperation, the President of the French Republic has promoted you to the rank of Officier dans l’Ordre national de la Légion d’Honneur.

It is my great pleasure and privilege to award you this distinction. I will now proceed in French:

Raymond SACKLER,

Au nom du Président de la République, je vous fais Officier dans l’Ordre de la Légion d’Honneur.

#Opioides #Sackler #Légion_honneur

Winner of prestigious Israeli award to donate prize money to human rights organizations

Feminist and scientist Evelyn Fox Keller, a former professor at MIT, will give her Dan David Prize money to anti-occupation organization B’Tselem, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel and Physicians for Human Rights

Haaretz.com | Amira Hass May 07, 2018 8:11 AM
▻https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-winner-of-dan-david-prize-to-donate-proceeds-to-fight-occupation-1

https://www.haaretz.com/polopoly_fs/1.6061046.1525669949!/image/4212496870.jpg_gen/derivatives/headline_1200x630/4212496870.jpg

One of the winners of this year’s Dan David Prize plans to give the prize money to three Israeli human rights organizations.

Prof. Evelyn Fox Keller, one of nine people who received the award at Tel Aviv University Sunday night, will give the money to B’Tselem, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel and Physicians for Human Rights.

The scientist and feminist thinker told Haaretz that the moment she found out she had won the prize, she decided she could accept it only if she gave the money to organizations combating Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians.

In a written statement to Haaretz on Sunday, the 82-year-old, who last taught at MIT wrote, “I am deeply grateful to the Dan David Foundation both for the honor conferred by the prize, and for the opportunity it provides me to support those elements of Israeli society committed to peaceful coexistence and to the protection of human rights for all.”

Asked why she didn’t just refuse the prize, since it is granted by an Israeli university which is part of the system and doesn’t criticize it, she replied, “I didn’t see it that way. I am accepting the prize in support of people who resist the system. I didn’t see what would be served by turning it down. As a political statement, it is stronger if I take the prize and give it away.”

The interview with Fox Keller took place last Thursday, less than 24 hours after she landed in Israel. She said she decided to announce her plans for the prize money through this interview rather than during the ceremony because “I didn’t want it to be a ‘fuck you’ statement. I don’t want to be the focus of the night.”

On Saturday, she revealed her plans to her two co-winners in the “Past – History of Science” category, Prof. Lorraine Daston of Berlin’s Max Planck Institute for the History of Science and Prof. Simon Schaffer of Cambridge University. The other six winners were in the categories of “Present – Bioethics” and “Future – Personalized Medicine.” The $3 million purse will be evenly divided among the nine of them.

The prize, named for the international entrepreneur and philanthropist who established it, is granted annually “for achievements having an outstanding scientific, technological, cultural or social impact on our world,” according to its website. Fox Keller won for “pioneering work on language, gender, and science” which “has been hugely influential on shaping our views of the history of science.” Her research specialties are theoretical physics, mathematical biology, feminist thought and history of science.

The website’s reference to her “pioneering work” refers to her discovery of the degree to which modern scientific thought and its depiction of natural phenomena were shaped by patriarchal ideology and language. For instance, biologists searched for a “master” molecule – a dominant molecule that would operate an entire system – rather than recognizing the cooperation and self-organization of the various component parts.

Christina Agapakis, a biologist and founding editor of “Method Quarterly,” wrote in her introduction to an interview with Fox Keller in 2014, “Throughout her career she has pushed the boundaries of science, confidently crossing the borders that separate disciplines and breaking down the barriers keeping women out of the highest reaches of scientific achievement.”

Asked whether she thought Israeli universities should speak out against infringements on Palestinians’ academic freedom — such as Israel’s refusal to let students from the Gaza Strip study in the West Bank and obstacles it places before foreign academics and students who wish to teach or study in the occupied territories — Fox Keller responded, “Of course I think they should, but they don’t. And they don’t want to and don’t have a voice.”

It’s not just Tel Aviv University that “doesn’t have a will,” she added. “None of the universities in Israel have a will.”

Her last visit here was 10 years ago, when she was hosted by the Weizmann Institute of Science. She said she was shocked by the changes in her friends, who used to consider themselves liberals and socialists, yet had no idea what was happening in the Palestinian territories under Israeli rule.

“The biggest change is probably the children, the effect the army had,” she said.

“I said [then that] Israel makes me ashamed of being a Jew,” she added. “Yes, I feel the same today.”

Asked why she should feel that way, since she’s an American Jew rather than an Israeli, she replied, “It was just a gut response. I cannot defend it ... [except to say that] my political commitments are whatever remains of my Jewish leftist heritage.”

Why you should be skeptical of Israeli government’s anti-Semitism reports -

It’s important to monitor hate crimes, but the reports illustrate the difficulty of measuring incidents on social media and the findings seem to reflect interests, not reality

Ofer Aderet Jan 22, 2018

Yaakov Haguel, acting director of the World Zionist Organization, offered cabinet members Sunday a harsh and emotive assesment as he presented them what he called “an important and comprehensive survey on anti-Semitism”
That it was a report thin on methodology and data, did not stop him from declaring, according to a press release: “The Jewish people and the state of Israel will lose contact with millions of Jews around the world if something isn’t done with regard to European governments and the world.”
“Jews are afraid; they are assimilating and taking cover,” he said “Anti-Semitism is on the rise and European governments and the world is ignoring this. Israel’s government is also responsible for world Jewry.”
And then came the presentation of antother report on anti—Semitism to the Cabinet: this time presented by Naftali Bennet, speaking in his capacity as Minister for Diaspora Affairs. The report is entitled “Report on anti-Semitic Trends and Incidents for 2017.”
According to Bennett’s report, 2017 was a record year in terms of the number of anti—semitic incidents in Great Britain, with Germany also seeing a number of “serious incidents.” His ministry’s official website, which posted the report, sends readers to a more extensive write-up on the topic on the website of the Arutz Sheva (also known as Israel National News), a network associated with religious Zionism.
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The post there claimed, citing unnamed surveys, “more than 50 percent of refugees in Western Europe hold anti-Semitic views.”
There are now numerous reports of “spiking anti-Semitism in Europe”, “a record number of incidents” and “a new rise in anti-Semitism.” However, an even cursory review of the “data” on which these reports are based and their comparison to other reports in order to raise some questions or the suspicion that the two documents - which were presented ahead of Saturday’s commemoration of International Holocaust Remembrance Day – are less scientific reports but are appear to be more public relations tools meant to justify agencies whose existence is arguably questionable – the ministry for Diaspora affairs and the World Zionist Organization.

Consider the statements attached to their pubilcation. Two of Haguel’s statements are particularly noteworthy. “Israel is responsible for world Jewry”. Is it? Shouldn’t Jews around the world be asked if they agree with this statement? He then said that “Jews are assimilating.” One only need ask if this is a result of anti-Semitism, which he warns against, or a natural corollary of life outside Israel, where the majority populations are not Jewish.
Even the most significant words of the acting director of the WZO, according to which anti-Semitism is on the rise, can be disputed. To do this one should look at another report, the one published on the last Holocaust Remembrance Day by the Kantor Center for the Study of Contemporary European Jewry at Tel Aviv University. This report showed a 12 percent decline in the number of violent attacks committed in Europe with an anti-Semitic basis. The report notes that this decline reflects a continuing trend, mainly in the decline in violent incidents which were registered in key countries, in terms of the size of their Jewish populations and their international standing.
On the other hand, the Kantor Center’s report notes a “continuing rise, often dramatic, in visual and verbal expressions [of anti-Semitism], mainly on social networks and at demonstrations.” It notes that this cannot be quantified, concluding that “even though the number of incidents has declined, the prevailing sense among Jews is that things are bad, and that’s the most worrisome feature.”
Indeed, it’s hard to argue with feelings, but the professional integrity of the Kantor Center prevented it from providing the media with dramatic headlines indicating a “sharp rise” in anti-Semitism. One doesn’t need to look far in order to find contradictions in the current furor. While Haguel’s report showed one thing, Bennett’s presented the opposite. His report states that in France the government is taking determined steps to prevent expressions of anti-Semitism, including a government-sanctioned program to combat racism and anti-Semitism. This has borne fruit, with a drop last year in the number of incidents.
So what’s going on here? A drop? A rise? Are governments ignoring the phenomenon or combating it? It depends how you count an “anti-Semitic incident”, who’s counting, who is presenting it and what his interests are.
Looking again at the WZO report, the data raises the suspicion that someone was looking hard for ways to present the numbers in a manner that migtht sound alarm bells, as is worthy of a week ending in Holocaust Remembrance Day. Eighty percent of people surveyed around the world “were exposed to incitement against Jews in the media or on social networks”; 70 percent were affected by anti-Semitic events last year” and “78 percent experienced anti-Semitism in recent years.”
It’s hard to argue with such superficial, general and unscientific statements.
But it’s surprising that only 80 percent were exposed to incitement – anyone with access to Facebook could be considered someone exposed to incitement, not only of the anti-Semitic kind.
Secondly, one could ask if every anti-Semitic response by some wooly-headed ultra-nationalist is necessarily an anti-Semitic “incident” and every exposure to it an anti-Semitic “experience”. If so, then the more hours one spends in front of a computer screen, particularly reading anonymous talkbacks, the more one can be considered someone deeply affected by anti-Semitic content. How should one relate to the data indicating that 59 percent of respondents across the world thought that politicians in their countries were somewhat anti-Semitic?
This is certainly not scientific research.
“The situation is deteriorating daily, spreading to new countries,” Haguel wrote in his dramatic summarizaton of the report’s findings. “We see the WZO playing a key role in preserving Jews and their identity around the world and in helping welcome and acclimitize [immigrants] to this country.”
Herein lies the not so covert vested interest lurking behind the current round of cries bemoaning anti-Semitism. The WZO needs to show that it is still needed in 2018. Who if not this organization will work to preserve Jewish identity and settle Jews from around the world in Israel?
It’s regrettable that state agencies belittle the public’s intelligence. It’s also lamentable that they contribute to producing fake news, confusion and deceptions such as these.
The topic is too important to be left in the hands of politicians and public relations officers.
It’s certainly important to follow with concern data that is not based on telephone interviews or social media. It’s preferable to rely on police reports, public security or internal affairs departments in different countries, as well as interviews with local Jewish community leaders and people who are more connected to events on the ground.
But still, let there be no doubt. Even without these surveys there is no room for optimism. Anyone visiting Jewish communities in Europe knows that in 2018 there are places where it’s uncomfortable for Jews to wear a kippah. Traditional hatred of Jews has been joined in recent years by threats coming from extremist elements among Arab migrants, whose hatred towards Israel because of conflict in the Middle East is morphing into anti-Semitism.
One shouldn’t take an extreme stance and shut one’s eyes to these reports. But the worrisome situation requires serious analysis, thorough and based in accurately collected data. It should be done by independent researchers using scientific tools and accepted methodology.

Ofer Aderet
Haaretz Correspondent

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Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington | Why the Trump Administration Should Reconsider Oman

▻http://www.agsiw.org/why-the-trump-administration-should-reconsider-oman

by Sigurd Neubauer and Yoel Guzansky
Following his historic address to the U.S.-Arab-Islamic Summit in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, U.S. President Donald J. Trump held bilateral talks with every Gulf Cooperation Council leader except for Oman’s deputy prime minister, Sayyid Fahd al-Said, who had his meeting cancelled at the last minute with no public explanation. Oman’s unique foreign policy record – which ranges from facilitating the early U.S.-Iranian contact that eventually led to the nuclear agreement, to its active contribution to the Middle East peace process, to more recently supporting the United Nations-sponsored Yemen peace negotiations – was also ignored altogether during the president’s speech, even though he thanked each of the other GCC countries for their respective commitments to fighting extremism and regional terrorist groups.

In fact, it may be that the very nature of Oman’s engagement in efforts to defuse regional conflicts has prompted the Trump administration to view it warily, given Washington’s efforts to restore close relations with Saudi Arabia. In this context, Oman’s established links to both Tehran and the political leadership of Yemen’s Houthi insurgents – clearly valued by the administration of former President Barack Obama – may be seen now as reasons to keep Oman at arm’s length. Further evidence that the U.S.-Omani relationship may be heading toward uncertainty came as Secretary of State Rex Tillerson cancelled his meeting in Riyadh with his Omani counterpart, Yusuf bin Alawi. This, coupled with the Trump administration’s Budget Blueprint for fiscal year 2018 – which suggests a 35 percent cut in annual military/security assistance to Oman, down from $5.4 million to $3.5 million – further suggests that Washington is revising its approach toward Muscat.

The Sultanate of Oman has been a U.S. strategic ally for nearly two centuries, and was the second Arab country, after Morocco, to establish diplomatic relations with Washington, in 1841. Moreover, Oman is only one of two GCC countries to enjoy a free trade agreement with the United States.

Building on these historic ties, Sultan Qaboos bin Said of Oman, the Arab world’s longest-serving monarch, has skillfully managed throughout his 44-year tenure to serve as a regional intermediary to help defuse tensions between Washington and Tehran, and has at the same time actively contributed to Israeli-Arab dialogue by hosting the Middle East Desalination Research Center (MEDRC), a Muscat-based organization dedicated to sharing Israeli expertise on desalination technologies and clean fresh water supply.

Given that Trump has pledged to reset U.S.-GCC relations and accelerate the Israeli-Palestinian peace process as part of an apparent strategic effort to counter Tehran’s “malign” regional influence, it is also surprising that Qaboos is the only GCC leader that Trump has yet to call, especially considering Oman is the only GCC country to enjoy pragmatic relationships with Iran and Israel.

In recent years, Oman used its channels to Tehran – and to the Houthis in Yemen – to gain the release of a half dozen U.S. citizens who had been detained, efforts that earned Oman public expressions of thanks from Obama.

In addition, “Oman recognizes that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is an irritant between the U.S. and the Arab world, but – consistent with Qaboos’ philosophy of peaceful coexistence and conflict resolution – he wanted to play a constructive role,” said Richard Schmierer, former U.S. ambassador to Oman, adding that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was not a top issue on the U.S.-Omani bilateral agenda during his tenure in Muscat.

Nonetheless, in 2010 U.S. Secretary of State Hilary Clinton hailed MEDRC as “a model for Middle East peace making.” A year later, it was revealed that Obama personally called Qaboos to ask him to lead Arab goodwill gestures toward Israel in exchange for a settlement freeze moratorium.

A Long History of Support for Mideast Peace

Following the 1979 Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty, Oman was the only GCC member to consistently engage with Israel through a number of informal diplomatic initiatives. Oman was also one of only three Arab League members not to boycott Egypt after its peace treaty with Israel while actively supporting Jordanian-Israeli peace talks in the ensuing years.

Qaboos demonstrated his commitment to reaching a comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace treaty by inviting Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin to visit him in Muscat in 1994. Rabin’s visit came only months after Israel and Jordan signed a comprehensive peace treaty. Although Rabin’s landmark visit was initially conducted in secrecy, it was announced publicly upon his return to Israel.

Though falling short of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat’s historic Knesset address in 1977 and the Israeli-Jordanian peace treaty of 1994, Qaboos granted Rabin and the Israeli leadership what it had strived for since the inception of the Jewish state in 1948: recognition and legitimacy. Moreover, Qaboos’ invitation arguably signaled publicly to Rabin, the Israeli public, and the Arab world at large a willingness to distance Oman from the Saudi position by granting Israel de facto recognition.

Following the assassination of Rabin, Qaboos once again displayed his commitment to the peace process by dispatching Oman’s foreign minister to attend Rabin’s funeral. In a subsequent interview with Israeli media, Alawi said, while being hosted by acting Prime Minister Shimon Peres, “Oman will soon have diplomatic relations with Israel, Oman was never in a state of war with Israel so there is no need for a peace agreement.”

The brief relationship between Qaboos, Rabin, and Peres has had concrete and positive outcomes: Oman has maintained a diplomatic channel with Israel since 1996 by hosting MEDRC. MEDRC is the only surviving organization of five regional initiatives included in the Oslo Accords as part of an effort to accelerate the peace process. Through it, participants from Gaza, Jordan, and the West Bank have attended, with Israeli counterparts, a number of courses on desalination and wastewater management in Tel Aviv.

On the surface, Oman’s quiet diplomatic style of doing business appears to be by design: By maintaining a policy of neutrality and noninterference, Oman seeks to preserve its independence and stability by closely aligning with Britain and the United States while balancing relations with its powerful neighbors, Iran and Saudi Arabia. The Israeli-Palestinian angle, however, does not fit into Oman’s immediate strategic concerns; unlike Iran, with whom it shares the Strait of Hormuz, Israel is a distant power.

Given Trump’s quest to forge a comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace agreement, Oman could potentially again play a pivotal role through its MEDRC networks. A White House invitation to Oman’s newly-appointed deputy prime minister for international cooperation, Sayyid Assad bin Tariq al-Said, might provide an opportunity to explore this potential with the man who appears to be in line to become Qaboos’ eventual successor. And, unlikely as it would seem at the moment given Trump’s strident anti-Iran rhetoric, Oman could also reprise its role as a conduit for quiet messaging between Tehran and Washington on regional security issues as part of an effort to mitigate the risk of conflict.

While the last U.S. president to visit Oman was Bill Clinton in 2000, the administration of George W. Bush dispatched vice president Dick Cheney to Muscat in 2002, 2005, and 2006 to discuss Iran and other regional issues. More recently, the Obama administration and its secretary of state, John Kerry, in particular, came to rely on Muscat on a host of regional initiatives ranging from Iran, Syria, and Yemen. In fact, Kerry grew so appreciative of Oman’s effective diplomacy that he attended Oman’s national day celebration in 2016, a most unusual public gesture for a secretary of state. Whether Oman regains this coveted position in the eyes of the current administration remains to be seen, although its unique contributions in support of efforts to resolve some of the Middle East’s most intractable problems would at the very least argue for open channels of communication.

Sigurd Neubauer is a non-resident fellow at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington. Yoel Guzansky is a research fellow at the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University, a National Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, and a 2016–17 Israel Institute postdoctoral fellow.

Documents reveal how Israel made Amnesty’s local branch a front for the Foreign Ministry in the 70s
▻http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-1.777770

What the minister reported to the Knesset was that for a number of years, Israel had tried to influence the Amnesty’s activity from within. Documents collected by the Akevot Institute for Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Research and revealed here for the first time show that some of the people who headed Amnesty Israel from the end of the 1960s to the mid-1970s reported on their activity directly and in real time to the Foreign Ministry, consulted with its officials and requested instructions on how to proceed. Moreover, the Amnesty office was at the time supported by steady funding transferred to it through the Ministry of Foreign Affairs: hundreds of Israeli pounds for flights abroad, per diem allowances, registration fees and dues payments to the organization’s headquarters.

The documents show that the most substantive connection was between the Foreign Ministry and Prof. Yoram Dinstein, who headed the branch between 1974 and 1976. Dinstein, an internationally renowned expert on the laws of war who later served as president of Tel Aviv University, had previously been a Foreign Ministry official and served as the Israeli consul in New York.

During his time as chairman of Amnesty Israel, years after he left the ministry, he regularly reported to his former colleagues on his activities and contacts with the international organization.

Library of Congress | The Palestine Poster Project Archives

▻http://palestineposterproject.org/special-collection/library-of-congress

Déja sur les collines... J’avais raté ce site, sur lequel il y a des pépites.

http://palestineposterproject.org/sites/default/files/3760_pppa.jpg

The Palestine Poster Project Archives
The Liberation Graphics Collection of Palestine Posters - Nominated to UNESCO’s Memory of the World Program 2016-2017
About the Palestine Poster Project Archives

This website has been created to mark headway on my masters’ thesis project at Georgetown University. It is a work-in-progress.

I first began collecting Palestine posters when I was a Peace Corps volunteer in Morocco in the mid-1970s. By 1980 I had acquired about 300 Palestine posters. A small grant awarded with the support of the late Dr. Edward Said allowed me to organize them into an educational slideshow to further the “third goal” of the Peace Corps: to promote a better understanding of other peoples on the part of Americans. Over the ensuing years, while running my design company, Liberation Graphics, the number of internationally published Palestine posters I acquired steadily grew. Today the Archives numbers some 5,000 Palestine posters from myriad sources making it what many library science specialists say is the largest such archives in the world.

The Palestine poster genre dates back to around 1900 and, incredibly, more Palestine posters are designed, printed and distributed today than ever before. Unlike most of the political art genres of the twentieth century such as those of revolutionary Cuba and the former Soviet Union, which have either died off, been abandoned, or become mere artifacts, the Palestine poster genre continues to evolve. Moreover, the emergence of the Internet has exponentially expanded the genre’s network of creative contributors and amplified the public conversation about contemporary Palestine.

My research has two major components: (1) the development of a curriculum using the Palestine poster as a key resource for teaching the formative history of the Palestinian-Zionist conflict in American high schools. This aspect of my work is viewable in my New Curriculum and; (2) the creation of a web-based archives that displays the broadest possible range of Palestine posters in a searchable format with each poster translated and interpreted.

This library and teaching resource allows educators, students, scholars, and other parties interested in using the New Curriculum to incorporate Palestine posters into classroom learning activities. Titles included are from the Liberation Graphics collection, the Library of Congress, the Central Zionist Archives in Jerusalem, the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam, Yale University, the University of Chicago and a host of other sources. To facilitate my research I have broken the genre of the Palestine poster into four sources, or wellsprings.

These wellsprings are:

1) Arab and Muslim artists and agencies

2) International artists and agencies

3) Palestinian nationalist artists and agencies

4) Zionist and Israeli artists and agencies

For the purpose of this research project, I have arbitrarily defined a “Palestine” poster as:

1) Any poster with the word “Palestine” in it, in any language, from any source or time period;

2) Any poster created or published by any artist or agency claiming Palestinian nationality or Palestinian participation;

3) Any poster published in the geographical territory of historic Palestine, at any point in history, including contemporary Israel;

4) Any poster published by any source which relates directly to the social, cultural, political, military or economic history of Palestine; and/or

5) Any poster related to Zionism or anti-Zionism in any language, from any source, published after August 31, 1897.

The majority of posters in this archives are printed on paper. However, an increasing number of new Palestine posters are “born digitally” and then printed and distributed locally, oftentimes in very small quantities. This localization represents a sea change in the way political poster art is produced and disseminated. Traditionally, political posters were printed in a single location and then distributed worldwide. The global reach of the internet combined with the rising costs of mass production is shifting production away from large centralized printing operations to a system controlled more by small end-users in myriad locations.

Electronic, digitally created images included in this archives meet these requirements: they are capable of being downloaded and printed out at a size at least as large as 18” X 24” and they deal substantially with the subject of Palestine. Computer generated images will be identified as such. I am uploading posters in what may appear to be a haphazard order; actually the order is a reflection of the way(s) in which many of the posters were originally collected, stored, and digitized on CDs over the past fifteen years.

As time and funds permit, I will be uploading the entire archives.

I want to specifically thank the following people without whose assistance I would not have been able to even begin this research: Dr. Lena Jayyusi, for both her thorough critique of the New Curriculum as well as her steadfast moral support over many years; Dr. Rochelle Davis, my academic advisor at Georgetown who gave me the freedom to explore the questions of most interest to me and who encouraged me to look at the genre from visual anthropology and ethnographic perspectives; Catherine Baker, who has provided creative, editorial and moral support of incalculable value to me and to whom I am forever indebted; Dr. Eric Zakim, the director of the Joseph and Alma Gildenhorn Institute for Israel Studies at the University of Maryland at College Park whose translations of the Hebrew text in the Zionist/Israel poster wellspring and whose breadth of knowledge of Zionist history and iconography proved indispensable; Dr. Elana Shohamy of Tel Aviv University for opening up to me the worlds of Jewish language history, Israeli language policy and perhaps most importantly, the principles of language rights, and; Richard Reinhard whose early and complete review of the New Curriculum helped keep me on schedule and in focus.

Special thanks are also due Jenna Beveridge, the Academic Program Coordinator at Georgetown’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, without whose guidance through the halls of academia I would have been hopelessly lost. There are, in addition, legions of people who over the years have encouraged me to persevere in this work. I will make it a point to thank them at regular intervals in the progress of this project.

Dan Walsh Silver Spring, MD April 2009

Anarchism Triumphant
▻http://old.law.columbia.edu/my_pubs/anarchism.html

The spread of the Linux operating system kernel has directed attention at the free software movement. This paper shows why free software, far from being a marginal participant in the commercial software market, is the vital first step in the withering away of the intellectual property system.

I. Software as Property: The Theoretical Paradox
II. Software as Property: The Practical Problem
III. Anarchism as a Mode of Production
IV. Their Lordships Die in the Dark?
Conclusion

...
Our Media Lords are now at handigrips with fate, however much they may feel that the Force is with them. The rules about bitstreams are now of dubious utility for maintaining power by co-opting human creativity. Seen clearly in the light of fact, these Emperors have even fewer clothes than the models they use to grab our eyeballs. Unless supported by user-disabling technology, a culture of pervasive surveillance that permits every reader of every “property” to be logged and charged, and a smokescreen of droid-breath assuring each and every young person that human creativity would vanish without the benevolent aristocracy of BillG the Creator, Lord Murdoch of Everywhere, the Spielmeister and the Lord High Mouse, their reign is nearly done. But what’s at stake is the control of the scarcest resource of all: our attention. Conscripting that makes all the money in the world in the digital economy, and the current lords of the earth will fight for it. Leagued against them are only the anarchists: nobodies, hippies, hobbyists, lovers, and artists. The resulting unequal contest is the great political and legal issue of our time. Aristocracy looks hard to beat, but that’s how it looked in 1788 and 1913 too. It is, as Chou En-Lai said about the meaning of the French Revolution, too soon to tell.
–---
This paper was prepared for delivery at the Buchmann International Conference on Law, Technology and Information, at Tel Aviv University, May 1999; my thanks to the organizers for their kind invitation. I owe much as always to Pamela Karlan for her insight and encouragement. I especially wish to thank the programmers throughout the world who made free software possible.

About the Author

Eben Moglen is Professor of Law & Legal History, Columbia Law School.
E-mail: Mail: moglen@columbia.edu

source différente pour le même texte : ▻http://journals.uic.edu/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/684/594

#capitalisme #software #droit #propriété_intellectuelle #histoire #politique

Side-channel attack: PC Hardware is physically leaking encryption keys through the operating noise it makes

Five researchers from Tel Aviv University discovered a way to pick up cryptographic keys from the sound emanating from different components exchanging data inside a computer. For example they can exploit what is called “coil whine”, the sound made by coils and other components as electrical current passes through them. They say they can do this by extracting binary operations from the sound waves through reverse engineering.

When a PC is running, the power consumption of its CPU and related chips changes drastically depending on the computation being performed in each moment. If the computer is trying to encrypt data in various applications, the electronic components in the PC’s internal power supply struggle to provide constant voltage to the chips, and this causes the fluctuations and the resulting vibrations.

The paper that appeared in the Communications of the ACM:
Physical Key Extraction Attacks on PCs
(Daniel Genkin, Lev Pachmanov, Itamar Pipman, Adi Shamir, Eran Tromer)

▻http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2016/6/202646-physical-key-extraction-attacks-on-pcs/fulltext
▻http://delivery.acm.org/10.1145/2860000/2851486/p70-genkin.pdf

By recording such noise while a target is using the RSA algorithm to decrypt ciphertexts (sent to it by the attacker), the RSA secret key can be extracted within one hour for a high-grade 4,096-bit RSA key. We experimentally demonstrated this attack from as far as 10 meters away using a parabolic microphone or from 30cm away through a plain mobile phone placed next to the computer.

[...]

A surprising result of our research is how practical and easy are physical key-extraction side-channel attacks on PC-class devices, despite the devices’ apparent complexity and high speed. Moreover, unlike previous attacks, our attacks require very little analog bandwidth, as low as 50kHz, even when attacking multi-GHz CPUs, thus allowing us to utilize new channels, as well as inexpensive and readily available hardware.

Other articles
Motherboard

▻http://motherboard.vice.com/read/pc-hardware-is-physically-leaking-your-encryption-keys

Softpedia

▻http://news.softpedia.com/news/new-attack-extracts-cryptographic-keys-from-a-computer-s-emanated-so

Internatioal Business Times

▻http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/now-you-can-steal-rsa-encryption-keys-through-pcs-noises-old-am-radio-156

Their previous side-channel attack example from 2014, by just touching a laptop while wearing an anti-static wristband. The wristband will measure all the tiny changes in the ground electrical potential that can reveal even stronger encryption keys, such as a 4,096-bit RSA key.

▻http://thehackernews.com/2014/08/stealing-encryption-keys-just-by.html

#side-channel_attack
#RSA #encryption

NYU Graduate Student Union Adopts BDS Resolution - Israel News - Haaretz

▻http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/1.715960

Resolution passes with 66.5 percent in favor, additional 57 percent pledging to boycott Israeli academic institutions; vote is ’at odds with the principles of academic freedom and the free exchange of ideas,’ NYU says.

A graduate student union at New York University passed a motion supporting the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel on Friday.
The resolution was backed by two-thirds of voters with over 600 union members participating in the vote, the Graduate Student Organizing Committee, which represents more than 2,000 graduate teaching and research assistants at NYU, said. 
According to the resolution, the union will continue to support the boycott until “Israel complies with international law and ends the military occupation, dismantles the wall, recognizes the rights of Palestinian citizens to full equality, and respects the right of return of Palestinian refugees and exiles,” a statement on the union’s website read.
The resolution called for the union and its parent, the United Auto Workers, to divest from Israeli companies and for NYU to close its program in Tel Aviv University, which it said violates the university’s non-discrimination policy. 
In addition, 57 percent of union members took a personal pledge to boycott Israeli government and academic institutions “complicit in Israeli violation of Palestinian rights.”

Tel Aviv U. academics hold first-ever discussion about BDS - Israel - - Haaretz Daily Newspaper | Israel News
▻http://www.haaretz.com/news/israel/.premium-1.660328#

About 30 Tel Aviv University students, mostly graduates and Ph.D. candidates, took part on Monday in a discussion about the boycott movement against Israel, particularly the academic boycott. The very fact that a discussion was held that did not completely condemn the BDS movement and included some expressions of support, is considered unusual.

The discussion was held under the auspices of the university’s sociology and anthropology department. It was the first such event held by the department, and apparently the first at Tel Aviv University.

One of the speakers was Dr. Hila Dayan of Amsterdam University College in Amsterdam, one of a group of about 40 anthropologists who oppose the attempt by the Israeli Anthropological Association to ban discussion on Israel at an upcoming international conference. The association is due to discuss the issue on Thursday.

Dayan drew a connection between what she said was the failure of Israel’s universities to deal with inequality in education and “their indifference to what is happening in the occupied territories.” She said that she did not support an academic boycott “because I think that Israel will be saved from itself only thanks to the enlightened world.” But she said she supported an “inner boycott.”

According to Dayan, “sanctimoniousness reigns” among leftists who oppose a boycott. “Many of them think that an economic boycott, like the pressure on Orange and boycotting the settlements is legitimate, but an academic boycott is not. Why, though?” Dayan criticized the universities for “on the one hand claiming that they are for dialogue and an exchange of views and on the other, vehemently opposing any demand to take a stand on the occupation. So what kind of an exchange of opinions is that?” she asked.

Professor Dan Rabinowitz of the university’s sociology department and head of its Porter School of Environmental Studies pointed to a petition signed by some 1,300 anthropologists worldwide calling on universities in Israel to persuade the government to withdraw from the territories as one of the conditions for lifting the boycott. 

“That is a condition that cannot be met,” he said. “The universities are not in a position to make an institutional stand on political issues. We don’t know the opinion of Tel Aviv University on the occupation and refugees, just as we don’t know the opinion of UCLA Berkeley on climate change, Guantanamo or the war on terror.”

According to Rabinovitz, BDS is led by people who “never believed in a two-state solution, or who gave up on it,” while in the Israeli academic world there are still many people who believe in Israeli-Palestinian dialogue. For people who believe that it is better for Israel as a political entity to stop existing, “the presence of Israelis who can show an enlightened face and arouse empathy is an obstacle. Therefore Israeli academic and cultural institutions are a nuisance. The universities are more dangerous to the post-Zionist vision than Netanyahu, Bennett, and Shaked,” he added.

Far-right parties sweeping EU vote should serve as warning sign -

The shared fear of Muslims has not yet led major Jewish organizations to lift their boycotts against dubious politicians in far-right parties.

By Asaf Ronel | May 27, 2014

Haaretz
▻http://www.haaretz.com/news/world/.premium-1.595445

Despite Sunday’s election gains for far-right parties, according to the latest report on the issue by the Kantor Center for the Study of Contemporary European Jewry, published last month, the number of anti-Semitic incidents in Europe actually declined last year.

The center, at Tel Aviv University, is headed by Prof. Dina Porat. And while the Anti-Defamation League’s Global 100 Index found that 24 percent of Western Europeans held anti-Semitic attitudes, it is hard to find a direct link to the election results.

The index scores in France and the United Kingdom, where far-right parties swept the EU polls, were 37 percent and 8 percent, respectively. And Greece and Sweden, both of which voted to send parties with a neo-Nazi past to Strasbourg for the first time, were on either end of the Global 11 Index, at 69 percent and 4 percent, respectively.

Another measurement of the threat felt by European Jews is immigration to Israel. While in most countries on the continent the number of Jews coming to Israel declined between 2012 and 2013, in France the number rose by nearly 50 percent, to 3,200, and so far this year the pace is only increasing. France had the most anti-Semitic incidents in the world, according to the Kantor Center report, but perhaps it can shed light on the situation throughout the continent.

Marine Le Pen, the leader of the National Front and the daughter of party founder Jean-Marie Le Pen, has made tremendous efforts to shed the party’s anti-Semitic image. And while her father suggested last week that the deadly Ebola virus could solve Europe’s immigration problems, his daughter has successfully rebranded the party as protecting “ordinary citizens” from both the bureaucrats in Brussels and mass immigration from Africa.

In France as in other EU member states, the makeovers of the far-right parties included removing most of their anti-Semitic features to focus on fear of the “Muslim threat” to the continent.

Many French Jews are still repelled by the National Front, and German Jews are certainly shocked by the neo-Nazis’ gains in their country (even if they had more to do with the lowering of the electoral threshold than a significant rise in support for the NPD).

But a significant proportion of the anti-Semitic incidents in France and elsewhere in Europe are a product of anti-Jewish sentiment among Muslims, linked to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and not “old-school” Christian anti-Semitism.

Until Saturday’s attack in Brussels, the worst anti-Semitic attack in Europe in recent years was the 2012 killing of four people at a Jewish school in Toulouse by a Muslim extremist.

The shared fear of Muslims has not yet led major Jewish organizations to lift their boycotts against dubious politicians in far-right parties.

But the common interest is clear, and the wall is more porous than it once was, as seen in the increasingly close ties between the extreme right in Europe and in Israel.

Renewal of peace talks shores up Netanyahu’s popularity ; Lapid’s ratings drop- ▻http://www.haaretz.com/weekend/.premium-1.538131

A Haaretz-Dialog Institute poll conducted on Tuesday, under the supervision of Prof, Camile Fuchs, from the Department of Statistics at Tel Aviv University, finds the nation deeply skeptical. About 70 percent of respondents say they do not believe a peace agreement will be achieved, and some 60 percent do not believe that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu truly intends to divide the land into two states, ours and theirs. But a majority ‏ (55percent‏) say they will vote for any agreement the prime minister makes with the Palestinians, compared with 25 percent who would vote against.

Le fait que la majorité des sondés est convaincue que Netanyahou ne fait que ruser, n’empêche cependant pas que...

...56 percent of respondents think Netanyahu is best suited to be prime minister;...

Court grants Israel gay couple divorce for first time
An Israeli court has granted a divorce of a gay couple for the first time in the country’s history
03 December 2012 | By Dan Littauer
Professor Uzi Even and Amit Kama made legal history in Israel forcing the country’s ministry of interior to register them as divorced

A court has ordered the ministry of interior of Israel to register a gay couple as divorced after it continually rejected their requests.

Yesterday (2 November) a Ramat Gan family court approved the request of Uzi Even, a former Israeli member of parliament and professor at Tel Aviv University, and Amit Kama, who teaches communications at Max Stern Yezreel Valley College, to order Israel’s ministry of interior to register them as divorced.

Haaretz daily reported that the former couple were married in Canada over eight years ago, while marriage proceedings are open to any national, divorce is only reserved for Canadian nationals.

Marriage and divorce in Israel are under the jurisdiction of the religious courts: Jewish, Muslim, Druze, and Christian.

The former couple had no choice but to appeal to the Jewish court (rabbinical) which is vehemently opposed to gay issues, and simply ignored their repeated requests to open divorce proceedings.

They then appealed to the family court in the city of Ramat Gan against Israel’s ministry of interior, which claimed the rabbinical court was not given ‘enough time’.

The judge rejected the state’s arguments that only the rabbinical courts have the authority to dissolve marriage, and instructed Israel’s interior ministry to register the former lovers as divorced.

Judge Yehezkel Eliyue said he based his decision on a previous ruling of Israel’s high court of justice’s instruction to the state to register the marriages of five same-sex couples who were married Canada.

The court ruled: ‘Once the High Court of Justice ordered the registration of the marriage, the possibility cannot be considered that petitioners who have agreed to end their marriage should remain tied to each other.

‘This runs contrary to the rights and liberties of the individual; it goes against Basic Laws and the basic values of justice and equality’.

The judge further stated: ‘Under these circumstances the rabbinic court lacks the authority to hear the petition, and in any case is not the proper forum to discuss it’.

This is a legal breakthrough in Israel as it sets a legal precedent for both gay and straight couples who want to divorce after they got married in a civil court abroad.

Kama told Haaretz daily: ‘From my point of view, even if the state appeals and we have to keep going down this road, the verdict shows the beginning of the undermining of the rabbinate.

‘I am very happy that we may have made a breakthrough’, he said, adding that the decision could affect not only other same-sex couples but also straight couples.

‘Pinkwashing’ and Israel’s Use of Gays as a Messaging Tool - Sarah Schulman
►http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/23/opinion/pinkwashing-and-israels-use-of-gays-as-a-messaging-tool.html?_r=1

“pinkwashing”: a deliberate strategy to conceal the continuing violations of Palestinians’ human rights behind an image of modernity signified by Israeli gay life. Aeyal Gross, a professor of law at Tel Aviv University, argues that “#gay rights have essentially become a public-relations tool,” even though “conservative and especially religious politicians remain fiercely homophobic.”

#homophobie #islamophobie #pays-bas #israel #palestine via @zackie

cf. ►http://seenthis.net/messages/34093 comme exemple-type de #pinkwashing

Free software campaigner Richard Stallman cancels Israel lectures due to Palestinian pressure - Haaretz Daily Newspaper
►http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/free-software-campaigner-richard-stallman-cancels-israel-lectures-due-to-pa

The American software freedom activist Richard Stallman has cancelled a lecture that he was scheduled to give at Tel Aviv University due to pressure from the Palestinian Authority.

The funding for his trip came from the Palestinians who invited him to lecture for them, Stallman wrote in a letter explaining the cancellation.