#InPalestine ~~ ALARM CLOCKS AND PHONE APPS CAN REPLACE THE CALL TO PRAYER

Israeli legislation ostensibly intended to tackle noise pollution from Muslim houses of worship has, paradoxically, served chiefly to provoke a cacophony of indignation across much of the Middle East.

Prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared his support this month for the so-called “muezzin bill”, claiming it was urgently needed to stop the dawn call to prayer from mosques ruining the Israeli public’s sleep. A vote in the parliament is due this week. The use of loudspeakers by muezzins was unnecessarily disruptive, Mr Netanyahu argued, in an age of alarm clocks and phone apps.

But the one in five of Israel’s population who are Palestinian, most of them Muslim, and a further 300,000 living under occupation in East Jerusalem, say the legislation is grossly discriminatory. The bill’s environmental rationale is bogus, they note. Moti Yogev, a settler leader who drafted the bill, originally wanted the loudspeaker ban to curb the broadcasting of sermons supposedly full of “incitement” against Israel.

And last week, after the Jewish ultra-Orthodox lobby began to fear the bill might also apply to sirens welcoming in the Sabbath, the government hurriedly introduced an exemption for synagogues.

The “muezzin bill” does not arrive in a politically neutral context. The extremist wing of the settler movement championing it has been vandalizing and torching mosques in Israel and the occupied territories for years.

The new bill follows hot on the heels of a government-sponsored expulsion law that allows Jewish legislators to oust from the parliament the Palestinian minority’s representatives if they voice unpopular views.

Palestinian leaders in Israel are rarely invited on TV, unless it is to defend themselves against accusations of treasonous behavior.

And this month a branch of a major restaurant chain in the northern city of Haifa, where many Palestinian citizens live, banned staff from speaking Arabic to avoid Jewish customers’ suspicions that they were being covertly derided.

Incrementally, Israel’s Palestinian minority has found itself squeezed out of the public sphere. The “muezzin bill” is just the latest step in making them inaudible as well as invisible.

Notably, Basel Ghattas, a Palestinian Christian legislator from the Galilee, denounced the bill too. Churches in Nazareth, Jerusalem, and Haifa, he vowed, would broadcast the muezzin’s call to prayer if mosques were muzzled.

For Ghattas and others, the bill is as much an assault on the community’s beleaguered Palestinian identity as it is on its Muslim character. Netanyahu, on the other hand, has dismissed criticism by comparing the proposed restrictions to measures adopted in countries like France and Switzerland. What is good for Europe, he argues, is good for Israel.

Except Israel, it hardly needs pointing out, is not in Europe. And its Palestinians are the native population, not immigrants.

Haneen Zoabi, another lawmaker, observed that the legislation was not about “the noise in [Israeli Jews’] ears but the noise in their minds”. Their colonial fears, she said, were evoked by the Palestinians’ continuing vibrant presence in Israel – a presence that was supposed to have been extinguished in 1948 with the Nakba, the creation of a Jewish state on the ruins of the Palestinians’ homeland.

That point was illustrated inadvertently over the weekend by dozens of fires that ravaged pine forests and neighboring homes across Israel, fuelled by high winds and months of drought.

Some posting on social media relished the fires as God’s punishment for the “muezzin bill”.

With almost as little evidence, Netanyahu accused Palestinians of setting “terrorist” fires to burn down the Israeli state. The Israeli prime minister needs to distract attention from his failure to heed warnings six years ago, when similar blazes struck, that Israel’s densely packed forests pose a fire hazard.

If it turns out that some of the fires were set on purpose, Netanyahu will have no interest in explaining why.

Many of the forests were planted decades ago by Israel to conceal the destruction of hundreds of Palestinian villages, after 80 percent of the Palestinian population – some 750,000 – were expelled outside Israel’s new borders in 1948. Today they live in refugee camps, including in the West Bank and Gaza.

According to Israeli scholars, the country’s European founders turned the pine tree into a “weapon of war”, using it to erase any trace of the Palestinians. The Israeli historian Ilan Pappe calls this policy “memoricide”.

Olive trees and other native species like carob, pomegranate and citrus were also uprooted in favor of the pine. Importing the landscape of Europe was a way to ensure Jewish immigrants would not feel homesick.

Today, for many Israeli Jews, only the muezzin threatens this contrived idyll. His intermittent call to prayer emanates from the dozens of Palestinian communities that survived 1948’s mass expulsions and were not replaced with pine trees.

Like an unwelcome ghost, the sound now haunts neighboring Jewish towns.

The “muezzin bill” aims to eradicate the aural remnants of Palestine as completely as Israel’s forests obliterated its visible parts – and reassure Israelis that they live in Europe rather than the Middle East.

A version of this article first appeared in the National, Abu Dhabi.

ZION REDEFINES ANTI SEMITISM ~~ AND A PHOTO ESSAY TOO

It must have been tough, but Breitbart’s Jerusalem bureau chief and investigative reporter tracked Alan Dershowitz down in Tel Aviv for comment on the Steve Bannon controversy. And longtime Dershowitz followers may be surprised to learn that he is defending the man who could become the most highly-placed American official accused of anti-Semitism in many decades, in this interview with Aaron Klein:

I think we have to be very careful before we accuse any particular individual of being an anti-Semite . . .  And I think one has to be very careful about using the term anti-Semitic.

But “care” about using the words anti-Semite has never been the hallmark of Dershowitz’s long career as a polemicist.

Was he being “careful” when he said that Black Lives Matter was guilty of an anti-Semitic “blood libel” in charging Israel with genocide against Palestinians?

Was he “careful” when he likened Judge Richard Goldstone to Nazi Dr. Mengele after Goldstone put out a report highly critical of Israel in 2009, which Dershowitz termed a “blood libel”?

Was he practicing “care” when he flatly described the late Harvard President Nathan Pusey as an anti-Semite in his book Chutzpah, and accused the entire American legal profession of anti-Semitism?

“Upon learning of the way law was practiced in American firms, I resolved never to become part of that system.”

More from the Breitbart interview:

I don’t think anybody should be called or accused of being anti-Semitic unless the evidence is overwhelming.

Was the evidence “overwhelming” with Jimmy Carter and Desmond Tutu — when Dershowitz accused them of mainstreaming anti-Semitism because they were critical of Israel? And said that Carter had the “blood of thousands” on his hands?

Dershowitz says that Bannon is a friend of Jews:

The evidence certainly suggests that Mr. Bannon has very good relationships with individual Jews. My former researcher, Joel Pollak, is an Orthodox Jew who takes off the Jewish holidays, who is a committed Jew and a committed Zionist, and he has worked closely with him. He has been supportive of Israel.

Is that the one and only criterion of whether someone is an anti-Semite or not? Being supportive of Israel?  I think it might be.

So, I haven’t seen any evidence of personal anti-Semitism on the part of Bannon. I think the [Breitbart] headline about a Conservative Republican being a renegade Jew was ill-advised. But it doesn’t suggest to me anti-Semitism. It suggests to me a degree of carelessness.

“Ill-advised.” So who “advised” Stephen Bannon to make that nasty crack about Bill Kristol? Why weren’t Walt and Mearsheimer only “ill-advised” and “careless,” instead of, as Dershowitz said, guilty of writing a “hate-filled screed against Jewish participation in American politics.”

Dershowitz goes on to apologize for Trump.

I think the larger problem – and it’s a very complicated one today – is how you assess a person who himself might not have negative characteristics, but who has widespread appeal to people who do. And I think that problem exists on the right and the left. I think there are left-wing candidates who appeal to some of the worst bigots on the hard left. Anti-Semites on the hard left. Anti-Israel people on the hard left. And I think the same thing is probably true of some very right-wing conservatives who appeal advertently or inadvertently to people whose values they probably themselves don’t agree with.

He is obviously worried that Trump may not be pro-Israel, and so he is sucking up to him.

But it is not legitimate to call somebody an anti-Semite because you might disagree with their policies.  Or because in one instance, like in the Bannon case, an aggrieved wife in a divorce may have said something which he himself has denied having said. I think you always have to have a presumption of innocence and of good faith.

“Innocence” and “good faith?” Doesn’t that describe Students for Justice in Palestine, who Dershowitz has not hesitated to call anti-Semites? And what about anyone who supports Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel — Dershowitz has accused them too of anti-Semitism.

Meanwhile, on the streets of New York ….

On Sunday night, 11/20/16, many hundreds of people gathered in  front of NYC’s main library at Fifth Avenue and 42^nd St. to protest the Zionist Organization Of America (ZOA) invitation to Steve Bannon, an anti-Semitic white nationalist and a current member of Trump’s incoming administration,  to speak at their annual awards dinner.

The principle of the ZOA appears to be  that an anti-Semite is acceptable if he supports the Zionist State of Israel.

The hundreds of protesters came from a  wide variety of Jewish  organizations as well  as individual participants. There were secular Jews, religious Jews, civil rights activists, youth and older citizens.

After the speeches at the library the protesters began a march to the  Grand Hyatt Hotel where the dinner was taking place. As they walked they shouted for the firing of Bannon chanted against Trump.  At the hotel the streets were jammed by the protesters with their chanting:   “When Muslim communities are under attack

                               What do we do? Stand up, Fight back.”

                               “2 4 6 8: No to Trump, No to Hate.”

                               “GOP (Trump) you can’t hide, we can see                                   Your racist side!”

Photos and commentary © by Bud Korotzer

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Related report (Click on link)

Bannon a no-show at ZOA gala as protesters gather outside

A LETTER FROM GAZA TO STANDING ROCK ~~ ‘YOUR STORY IS OUR STORY’

Dear Native Americans:

Although we are of different color, religion, culture and place, I have learned, as I read about the protests at Standing Rock, that we have much more in common than differences. When I read your history, I can see myself and my people reflected in yours. I feel in my core that your fight is my fight, and that I am not alone in the battle against injustice.

My ancestors were not the only ones who lived in Palestine. Jews, Christians and Arabs all lived side by side in my country. But my ancestors—including my grandparents and great-grandparents—were the indigenous people, just like you. And they suffered the same fate as your people. America’s policy of occupation and displacement through forced marches like the Trail of Tears, and the gradual transfer of so many of your people to massive, impoverished reservations, hurts me deeply because it is so similar to the ethnic cleansing of my ancestors by the Israeli military occupation in what we call “al-Nakba” (the catastrophe). We know what you know: that our land is sacred.

In 1948, my ancestors—along with nearly a million other Palestinians—were frightened away or forced off their lands, in some cases at gunpoint. More than 10,000 others were massacred. Hundreds of our villages and cities were completely destroyed in a systemic plan to erase our identity—just as yours has been under continuing assault.

Palestine today is just 22 percent of our original homeland. Like you, some of my people (an estimated 1.5 million) must live in degrading “camps” (our word for reservations), where living conditions are “comparable to the Third World.” Like your reservations, they are characterized by high rates of unemployment, poverty and suicide.

Many other Palestinians (about 6 million)—now including descendants of the original residents—are scattered elsewhere around the world, just as yours are around the United States. Today, not only has the military occupation taken over our land and declared it “the state of Israel,” but it continues to carry on a policy of expulsion, demolishing Palestinian houses in the little bit of land we retain, building illegal settlements and preventing free movement with a network of “security checkpoints.”

Like you, we don’t control our natural resources. Just as you were not consulted about the Dakota Access Pipeline that will traverse your land and contaminate your water supply if installed, we are not consulted by Israel, which wants to mine the gas supply in our harbor for its own use and monopolizes the water supply in the West Bank for the green lawns of its own residents—leaving Palestinians parched and dry. In Gaza, where I live, only 10 percent of our water supply is drinkable due to the conditions in which we must live. We too know that “water is life.”

When I was young, I saw how the media portrays negative images of you, especially in Hollywood films—depicting you as uncivilized, savage, racist and drug abusers. Likewise, my people are portrayed as terrorists, “backward,” misogynists and anti-Semitic. And yet no one regards whites as all the same.

Like yours, our resistance has been labeled as acts of terrorism and violence rather than as a fight for survival and dignity. That’s not surprising, since this is the policy of every oppressor who seeks to criminalize others to justify its acts. It is the oppressor’s way to create its own version of reality to rationalize its behavior and brainwash the masses. And it is the oppressor’s plan to make the colonized feel weak and alone. But you are proving they won’t succeed and I want you to know that my people are with you.

Seeing your women, elders and youth stand together to protest the pipeline and your exclusion from decision making is so inspiring! It gives us strength to go on with our own struggle.

As a Palestinian in Gaza, I have grown up feeling detached from the rest of the world as Israel tightens its decade-long blockade. I am sure many of you feel the same way. But we are not isolated. We are “soulmates” in the way that counts.

Sincerely,

Israa Suliman
We Are Not Numbers

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Image by Latuff

Palestinians and Dakota People together