Far-right Britain First fosters ties with Zionist movement

[hackey lad 3,976]

Germany’s new Nazis see Israel as role model

Ali Abunimah

Power Suits

25 September 2017

 

Israel and its supporters have made alliances with racists, anti-Semites and Islamophobes all over Europe. (via Flickr)

“Unfortunately, our worst fears have come true,” Josef Schuster, president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, said of the electoral success in Sunday’s general election of Alternative for Germany.

 

Known by its German initials AfD, the extreme nationalist party won almost 100 seats in Germany’s lower house.

 

“A party that tolerates far-right views in its ranks and incites hate against minorities in our country is today not only in almost all state parliaments but also represented in the Bundestag,” Schuster said.

 

The party is notorious for harboring all manner of racists and extremists, including apologists for Germany’s war record and Holocaust revisionists.

 

It was a disaster that Germany’s mainstream politicians saw coming.

 

Sigmar Gabriel, the country’s foreign minister, warned earlier this month that if AfD scored well at the ballot box, “then we will have real Nazis in the German Reichstag for the first time since the end of World War II.”

 

Pro-Israel funder backs new Nazis

While Germany needs no lessons in how to be racist, this catastrophe can in part be attributed to leaders in Israel and their fanatical supporters: for years they have made common cause with Europe’s far right, demonizing Muslims as alien invaders who must be rejected and even expelled to maintain a mythical European purity.

 

It can also be attributed to German leaders who for decades have strengthened this racist Israel by financing Israel’s military occupation and oppression of Palestinians.

 

What happened in Germany is another facet of the white supremacist-Zionist alliance that has found a home in Donald Trump’s White House.

 

In the past few weeks, liberal flagships The New York Times and The Washington Post have been hunting for the nonexistent shadows of Russian interference in the German election.

 

Meanwhile, as Lee Fang reported for The Intercept, the Gatestone Institute, the think tank of major Islamophobia industry funder Nina Rosenwald, was flooding German social media with “a steady flow of inflammatory content about the German election, focused on stoking fears about immigrants and Muslims.”

 

The Gatestone Institute is chaired by John Bolton, the neoconservative former US diplomat notorious for his hawkish support of the invasion of Iraq.

 

Gatestone articles making claims about Christianity becoming “extinct” and warning about the construction of mosques in Germany were regularly translated into German and posted by AfD politicians and sympathizers.

 

Story after story claimed that migrants and refugees were raping German women and bringing dangerous diseases to the country, classic themes of the Nazi propaganda once used to incite genocidal hatred of Jews.

 

In a tragic irony, Rosenwald’s father, an heir to the Sears department store fortune, used his wealth to help Jewish refugees flee persecution in Europe.

 

His daughter took a different path. Journalist Max Blumenthal has called Nina Rosenwald the “sugar mama of anti-Muslim hate.”

 

Blumenthal reported in 2012 that Rosenwald “used her millions to cement the alliance between the pro-Israel lobby and the Islamophobic fringe.”

 

In addition to funding a host of the most notorious anti-Muslim demagogues, Blumenthal reported that Rosenwald “served on the board of AIPAC, the central arm of America’s Israel lobby, and holds leadership roles in a host of mainstream pro-Israel organizations.”

 

The party of Anders Breivik

In a profile the day after the election, The Jerusalem Report, published by the right-wing Jerusalem Post, gave AfD deputy leader Beatrix von Storch a platform to set out the party’s anti-Muslim ideology.

 

The Jerusalem Report also quotes German political scientist Marcel Lewandowsky explaining that “AfD members view the European Union as a traitor to Europe’s Christian heritage because they let in the Muslims. The view is that the Islamization of Europe was caused by the EU.”

 

“Replacement” by Muslims, Lewandowsky explained, “is the core of the fear of AfD voters.”

 

This means that the core ideology of the party is indistinguishable from that of Anders Breivik, the Norwegian who murdered dozens of his fellow citizens, mostly teenagers at a Labor Party youth camp, in July 2011, in the name of stopping the “Islamization” of Europe.

 

One of the biggest benefactors of Rosenwald’s largesse, according to Blumenthal, has been Daniel Pipes, the influential pro-Israel, anti-Muslim demagogue who Breivik cited 18 times in his notorious manifesto.

 

Admiration for Israel

AfD deputy leader von Storch, who sits in the European Parliament, also uses The Jerusalem Report interview to lay out her party’s pro-Israel stance, comparing its German nationalism to Israel’s Zionist ideology.

 

According to the The Jerusalem Report, von Storch is a founder of “Friends of Judea and Samaria,” a far-right European Parliament grouping that supports Israel’s illegal colonization of occupied Palestinian land.

 

Bizarrely, that group lists as one of its contact persons the head of the “Shomron Regional Council,” a settler organization in the occupied West Bank.

 

“Israel could be a role model for Germany,” von Storch told The Jerusalem Report. “Israel is a democracy that has a free and pluralistic society. Israel also makes efforts to preserve its unique culture and traditions. The same should be possible for Germany and any other nation.”

 

Von Storch’s identification with Israel echoes that of US Nazi demagogue Richard Spencer, who has described his vision of an Aryan “ethno-state” as “white Zionism.”

 

AfD chair Frauke Petry has also expressed support for Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank. In February, she told the right-wing Jewish publication Tablet that her only visit to Israel gave her a positive view of the country.

 

“Suddenly the picture you get is somewhat different than what you got when you live far away,” she said.

 

Israel’s settler leaders have taken note. As the world reeled from AfD’s electoral success, Yehuda Glick, a lawmaker in Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud Party, tweeted that all those who were “in a panic” about AfD should rest assured that Petry was working “intensively” to expel any anti-Semitic elements.

 

 

Glick, a leader in the apocalyptic movement that seeks to destroy Jerusalem’s al-Aqsa mosque and replace it with a Jewish temple, also recommended an article outlining AfD’s pro-Israel stance.

 

According to Tablet, Petry’s visit also led her to believe “that Europe should be learning more from Israel in its fight against terrorism.”

 

According to a recent survey, this strong support for Israel is felt across the ranks of AfD’s leadership.

 

Alliance with Zionism

There is a clear logic for AfD leaders to join the newly invigorated alliance between far-right, traditionally anti-Semitic forces on the one hand, and Israel and Zionists on the other.

 

Party chair Petry has argued that Jews should should be willing to talk to AfD over supposedly common interests, explaining, according to Tablet, that “it is the left wing in Germany and new Muslim immigrants who are leading her country’s anti-Israel movement.”

 

“Both anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism are strongest in the Islamic community, as well as the left,” von Storch said. “They reject the fact that the Judeo-Christian foundations of European civilization are instrumental to its success. We recognize the threat they pose to both Israel and Germany’s Jewish community and their safety is a high priority for us.”

 

This is of course the most brazen revisionism: for centuries Europe’s Christian authorities not only did not consider Jews as a foundational part of their “civilization,” but persecuted them mercilessly, eventually attempting genocide.

 

But such facts are glossed over in the interests of a present-day anti-Muslim alliance that is prepared to torch the increasingly frayed fabric of pluralistic societies for the sake of Israel and German national purification.

 

Israel’s support for fascists

Critically, as Glick’s tweets indicate, this has not been a one-way affair. It has been encouraged by Israel and its lobby groups.

 

The notion that Israel is the spearhead of a Western civilizational battlefront against Islam has been a key claim of Netanyahu.

 

He and other Israeli leaders have exploited every terrorist outrage in Europe to advance the poisonous message that Israel is “fighting the same fight.”

 

And powerful Israel lobby groups, such as the Anti-Defamation League, that are now expressing alarm at the electoral success of the AfD, are far from innocent.

 

For years, the Anti-Defamation League – which poses as an “anti-hate” group – courted and whitewashed influential anti-Muslim hate-preachers because they supported its pro-Israel agenda.

 

This embrace between Zionists and their supposed opposites continues to thrive in the welcome former Trump advisers Steve Bannon and Sebastian Gorka have found from Israel and its lobby groups.

 

Bannon will speak at the Zionist Organization of America’s upcoming gala, while Gorka, who has ties to Nazis and violent anti-Semitic militias, was recently welcomed in Israel.

 

It can be seen in the Israeli government’s long and conspicuous silence while the rest of the world condemned August’s neo-Nazi rampage in Charlottesville, Virginia.

 

It can also be seen in Netanyahu’s embrace of far-right European leaders including Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who has attempted to rehabilitate his country’s Hitler-allied wartime leadership.

 

While the brazenness of this alliance may be shocking, it dates back to the early years of both the Zionist and Nazi movements. As Columbia University professor Joseph Massad has pointed out, Zionists and European anti-Semites historically shared the same analysis: that Jews were alien to Europe and had to be moved elsewhere.

 

And it continues: Israeli commentators are noting that Israel has not rushed to condemn AfD.

 

Netanyahu – always quick to pounce on the alleged anti-Semitism of Israel’s critics – took to Twitter to congratulate Chancellor Angela Merkel on her victory, but has so far remained silent about the subject that everyone else is talking about.

 

Going mainstream

Despite its electoral success, AfD is riven by splits: its chair Frauke Petry made the surprise announcement on Monday that she won’t join her party’s parliamentary caucus.

 

One strategy party leaders are deploying to make AfD more palatable is to try to assuage the fears of the Jewish community.

 

Undoubtedly, it will continue to attempt to do so by expressing admiration and support for Israel – the same approach as France’s historically anti-Semitic Front National.

 

We can expect to see AfD double down on its support of Israel, including its colonial settlements in “Judea and Samaria.”

 

But this is indeed a mark of its mainstreaming. Historically, Germany’s postwar establishment, including the governments led by Merkel, has “atoned” for the country’s genocide of Jews by supporting Israel to commit crimes against Palestinians.

 

Billions of dollars of German “reparations” went not to helping Holocaust survivors, but to arming Israel to carry out military occupation and colonization.

 

For Palestinians, then, Merkel’s “moderate” centrism and AfD’s overt bigotry and racism, are little different in effect.

 

Just as Donald Trump presents the unvarnished face of the American militarism and imperialism that has victimized people around the world for decades, AfD is in some ways a more honest voice of a Germany that speaks of “human rights,” while unconditionally supporting an Israel whose main export is extremism and Islamophobia.

 

Europe’s nativist racism joined with this ill-wind from Israel produces a toxic mix

https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/germanys-new-nazis-see-israel-role-model

 

my lord . I bet your fingers hurt of an evening

[Puggie 10]

His fingertips have gone shiny

[kidley 48]

shame if it gets pulled after all that:hihi:

[Andbreathe 10]

my lord . I bet your fingers hurt of an evening

 

You probably made more finger movements typing that than he did cutting and pasting...

[blake 10]

Another totally ludicrous electronicintifada article like the one that started this thread.

 

electronicintifada were always biased, but they've got more and more hyperbolic in recent years to the level of hysteria.

[WestTinsley 11]

"Court ok's Hebrew country-club denying membership to surrounding Arabs

From Eyal: "With court approval, Kokhav Yair to continue restricting entry of Tira

residents to the swimming pool

"The Lod (A-Llyd) District Court rejected the petition on grounds of discrimination and authorized that the local country club to sell 90% of its subscriptions only to residents of the settlement (Kokhav Yair - Tzur Yigal). The judge wrote: 'The fear that opening the registry may

harm the sense of belonging is legitimate.'"

And note that:

* If you think the 10% will actually materialize - don't worry, they're apparently allowed to discriminate further in pre-registration for membership.

* The settlement is named after Yair Stern, leader of the Stern Gang (Lehi); it was unified with Tzur Yigal several years back. They are built on the western side of the 1967 green line - just North of Qalqilya.

* Many top Israeli military officers live or have lived in Kohav Yair, including Lt. Gen. Ehud Bakar, Lt. Gen. Shaul Mofaz, Shin-Bet head Danny Yatom, Shin-Bet head Gideon Ezra, Maj. Gen. Menahem Einan and Maj. Gen. Uzi Dayan."

As'ad AbuKhalil at 7:42 AM"

http://www.haaretz.co.il/news/education/.premium-1.4461502%20https://pastebin.ca/raw/3877476

 

---------- Post added 29-09-2017 at 00:11 ----------

 

《Racists, anti-Semitic, Holocaust-deniers love Israel

"But, like many far-right parties in Europe and elsewhere, the AfD presents itself as staunchly supportive of Israel. According to a wide-ranging poll commissioned by a group promoting German-Israeli relations, most AfD politicians profess to care deeply about Israel’s security, support Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s demand that the Palestinians recognize Israel as a Jewish state, reject unilaterally recognizing a Palestinian state, and generally support a stronger relationship between Jerusalem and Berlin. Nearly 90% of the 35 AfD members who were surveyed totally or somewhat support Chancellor Angela Merkel’s dictum that “Israel’s security is Germany’s raison d’etre.” "》

http://www.timesofisrael.com/loathed-by-jews-germanys-far-right-afd-loves-the-jewish-state/

Edited September 28, 2017 by WestTinsley

[mafya 248]

Another totally ludicrous electronicintifada article like the one that started this thread.

 

electronicintifada were always biased, but they've got more and more hyperbolic in recent years to the level of hysteria.

 

Give it a rest you hasbara troll! ?

[blake 10]

"Court ok's Hebrew country-club denying membership to surrounding Arabs

From Eyal: "With court approval, Kokhav Yair to continue restricting entry of Tira

residents to the swimming pool

"The Lod (A-Llyd) District Court rejected the petition on grounds of discrimination and authorized that the local country club to sell 90% of its subscriptions only to residents of the settlement (Kokhav Yair - Tzur Yigal). The judge wrote: 'The fear that opening the registry may

harm the sense of belonging is legitimate.'"

And note that:

* If you think the 10% will actually materialize - don't worry, they're apparently allowed to discriminate further in pre-registration for membership.

* The settlement is named after Yair Stern, leader of the Stern Gang (Lehi); it was unified with Tzur Yigal several years back. They are built on the western side of the 1967 green line - just North of Qalqilya.

* Many top Israeli military officers live or have lived in Kohav Yair, including Lt. Gen. Ehud Bakar, Lt. Gen. Shaul Mofaz, Shin-Bet head Danny Yatom, Shin-Bet head Gideon Ezra, Maj. Gen. Menahem Einan and Maj. Gen. Uzi Dayan."

As'ad AbuKhalil at 7:42 AM"

http://www.haaretz.co.il/news/education/.premium-1.4461502%20https://pastebin.ca/raw/3877476

 

more total dishonesty, from West Tinsley.

 

click to the alleged Haaretz link PAGE NOT FOUND.

 

West Tinsley has copied and pasted that text from a blog called angryarab.blogspot.com

 

you can tell how biased and twisted the link is because it refers to this community where the country club is as a 'settlement' even though as it says itself, the club is INSIDE the Green Line.

 

even if its true, and I can't find any trace of it anywhere except in that blog, then Lod is only a very low level court and it has to go all the way through Israel's judicial system yet. Lod is one of Israel's most mixed towns, totally unlike anything you ever saw in apartheid South Africa. Lod's about 30-35% Arab. Higher than the 23% overall Arab Israeli figure.

Edited September 29, 2017 by esme
quote tags

[WestTinsley 11]

"Alleged haaretz link. " Christ ..this stuff has been going on decades ..stop fooling yourself .. fwiw haaretz pulled the article link since last night.. as haaretz is an Israeli rag..i wonder why they did that.. btw lydda was 100 pc palestinian in 1948

 

---------- Post added 29-09-2017 at 08:24 ----------

 

NEWS

Israel builds settlements 'at high rate': UN

 

AFP AFPSeptember 25, 2017

 

 

More

United Nations (United States) (AFP) - Israel continues to build settlements "at a high rate," the UN envoy for the Middle East said Monday, in defiance of Security Council demands for an end to the expansion of Jewish outposts.

Reporting to the council, envoy Nickolay Mladenov accused Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government of using provocative rhetoric to shore up the drive for new settlements.

 

From June to September, new construction was mostly in east Jerusalem, with plans for some 2,300 new housing units -- a 30 percent increase from last year, he said.

"Israel's illegal settlement activities have continued at a high rate, a consistent pattern over the course of the year," Mladenov told the council.

Nine months ago, the Security Council adopted a controversial resolution demanding an end to settlements. The measure passed after the United States declined to use its veto and instead abstained.

The vote angered the incoming administration of then president-elect Donald Trump, who had called for a US veto and whose aides had lobbied council members to vote against the resolution.

The United Nations considers Israeli settlements illegal under international law and has repeatedly called for a halt to their expansion on land earmarked to be part of a future Palestinian state.

"Israeli officials continue to use provocative rhetoric in support of expansion," said Mladenov.

At a ceremony launching new construction last month, Netanyahu praised his government's push for more settlements, vowing to "deepen our roots, build, strengthen and settle."

Senior Israeli politicians have made repeated calls for annexing the West Bank, with one Knesset member saying this would "destroy" hopes for Palestinian statehood, Mladenov said.

Aside from new construction, Mladenov said the demolition of Palestinian homes and schools continued, but at a significantly lower rate.

In all, 344 buildings have been destroyed, a third of them in east Jerusalem, displacing over 500 people, he said.

Israeli settlement construction continued even as UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres declared during a visit to Israel and the Palestinian territories in August that the two-state solution must be saved.

Mladenov said the ongoing settlement expansion "is making the two-state solution increasingly unattainable

 

https://www.yahoo.com/news/israel-builds-settlements-high-rate-un-190102316.html?utm_content=buffer93ac9&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer

Edited September 29, 2017 by WestTinsley

[WestTinsley 11]

How Israel robs Palestinians of citizenship

Jonathan Cook

The Electronic Intifada

19 September 2017

Without citizenship, Bedouins would be largely defenseless against steps to evict them, advocates say. Ryan Rodrick Beiler ActiveStills

Israel has quietly revoked the citizenship of thousands of members of its large Palestinian minority in recent years, highlighting that decades of demographic war against Palestinians are far from over.

 

The policy, which only recently came to light, is being implemented by Israel’s population registry, a department of the interior ministry. The registry has been regularly criticized for secrecy about its rules for determining residency and citizenship.

 

According to government data, some 2,600 Palestinian Bedouins are likely to have had their Israeli citizenship voided. Officials, however, have conceded that the figure may be much higher.

 

The future offspring of those stripped of citizenship are likely to suffer problems gaining citizenship too.

 

Human rights groups have severely criticized Israel for violating its own laws, as well as international conventions to which it is a party, in carrying out such revocations.

 

Sawsan Zaher, a lawyer with Adalah, a legal center for Israel’s Palestinian minority, told The Jerusalem Post newspaper: “This policy is illegal and in contravention to international law because you cannot leave someone stateless.”

 

Palestinian citizens, one in five of Israel’s population, are descended from Palestinians who survived a mass ethnic cleansing campaign waged during Israel’s creation in 1948.

 

Today, some 200,000 Bedouins live in Israel, most of them in a semi-desert area known as the Naqab.

 

One of the two fastest-growing groups in Israel’s population, the Bedouins have faced especially harsh treatment. Israel continued expelling them to Jordan, Egypt and Gaza through the 1950s and to this day tightly limits the areas in the Naqab where the Bedouins can live.

 

Revelations of the revocations emerged as Ayelet Shaked, the far-right justice minister, warned Israel’s judges to prioritize demographic concerns and maintenance of the state’s Jewishness over human rights. She called growing numbers of non-Jews in the state “national challenges” that risked turning a Jewish state into “an empty symbol.”

 

According to Adalah, Bedouins typically learn that they have been stripped of citizenship when they approach the interior ministry for routine services such as renewing an identity card or passport, obtaining a birth certificate, or declaring a change of address.

 

Some have discovered their loss of status when seeking a passport to go on pilgrimage to Mecca, one of the obligations for Muslims.

 

Tip of the iceberg?

Aida Touma-Sliman, a Palestinian member of the Israeli parliament, said the policy of revocations had intensified over the past 18 months.

 

“I’m afraid that what has been exposed is only the tip of the iceberg and what hasn’t been revealed yet is even more serious,” she told the Haaretz newspaper.

 

The legislator fears that many other Bedouins have been stripped of citizenship, but have yet to learn of the fact.

 

She said she believed that the government was in part targeting Bedouins with revocation of citizenship to weaken long-standing land claims against the state.

 

Tens of thousands of Bedouins have been mired in legal action for decades trying to claim back the title deeds to ancestral lands seized from them by military officials in the first years after Israel’s creation.

 

Israel has declared the surviving communities as “unrecognized,” effectively criminalizing their inhabitants and denying them basic services such as water and electricity. Officials have also been trying to revive the Prawer Plan, which seeks to evict some 40,000 Bedouins – Adalah puts the figure at 80,000-90,000 – and force them into poor “townships.” The original plan was ostensibly frozen in late 2013 after mass protests across the Naqab.

 

Touma-Sliman said that without citizenship, Bedouins would be largely defenseless against steps to evict them.

 

Endless foot-dragging

Mahmoud al-Gharibi, an unemployed carpenter from the al-Azazme tribe, was one of several Bedouins who spoke to Haaretz in August during a protest rally in the Naqab village of Bir Hadaj.

 

He was told his citizenship had been revoked when he applied for a new identity card in 2000. “Since then I’ve applied 10 times [for renewed citizenship], getting 10 rejections, each time on a different pretext,” he said. “I have two children who are over 18 and they too have no citizenship.”

 

Another Bedouin who spoke anonymously to Haaretz said: “No one explains anything and all of a sudden your status changes. You go in as a citizen and come out deprived of citizenship, and then an endless process of foot-dragging begins.”

 

Zaher pointed out that many of those recently stripped of citizenship had been voting in parliamentary elections for years, even though it is a right available solely to citizens.

 

Adalah has warned that revoking citizenship is not only illegal according to Israel’s own laws, but violates the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Convention Relating to the Status of Stateless Persons, and the Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness, which Israel signed in 1961.

 

The group has appealed to Israel’s interior ministry and attorney general, demanding that they cancel the policy. Israeli officials have justified the revocations on the grounds that bureaucratic errors made in the state’s early years meant that the affected Bedouin’s parents or grandparents were not properly registered.

 

Israel did not pass its Citizenship Law – governing citizenship for non-Jews – until 1952. The legislation’s primary purpose was to strip some 750,000 Palestinians who had been made refugees by the 1948 war, and their millions of descendants, of a right to live in Israel.

 

A separate law, the 1950 Law of Return, entitles all Jews around the world to instant Israeli citizenship.

 

Martial law

The failure to register many Bedouins in Israel is related to a draconian period of martial law imposed on the Palestinian minority during Israel’s first 18 years.

 

Bedouins, like other Palestinian citizens, were not allowed to leave their communities without a special permit. But the remoteness of their communities and Israel’s continuing efforts to expel them through the 1950s mean that officials may have preferred to avoid registration in many cases.

 

According to reports by the United Nations and others, thousands of Bedouins were secretly expelled into neighboring Egypt and Jordan during the early years of the military government.

 

Even those who were not expelled outside Israel were often evicted from their ancestral lands and forced into overcrowded “townships.”

 

This intentionally murky period in Israel’s history has made it hard for the Bedouins to prove many decades later what happened to their parents or grandparents.

 

Adalah’s Zaher told The Jerusalem Post: “Basically, we’re talking about the grandparents of the people who are now affected and don’t know what happened under military rule. And then suddenly in 2010 they were told that because their grandparents were granted citizenship by mistake, now they will be stripped of their citizenship.”

 

The interior ministry has downgraded those Bedouins stripped of citizenship to “permanent residents” – the same status accorded to Palestinians in occupied East Jerusalem.

 

However, in practice, Israel does not treat “permanent residency” as permanent. Figures show that Israel has voided the residency status of nearly 15,000 Palestinians in East Jerusalem since the city’s occupation began in 1967.

 

Treated as foreigners

Bedouins have been told they are eligible to apply for citizenship again through a naturalization process, treating them effectively as foreigners.

 

However, according to Adalah, many have found that when they apply they continue to be denied citizenship, often on grounds that documents cannot be located or they lack sufficient proficiency in Hebrew.

 

There is no Hebrew language test for foreigners seeking citizenship, either Jews immigrating under the Law of Return, or non-Jewish spouses of Israeli citizens naturalizing under the Citizenship Law.

 

According to Haaretz, other Bedouins have found the interior ministry so unresponsive they have given up in despair.

 

The only provision allowing citizenship to be canceled is for recent arrivals who provided false information in their applications. Even then, the interior ministry was required to act within three years – otherwise it had to make an application for revocation through the courts.

 

Adalah has complained that those affected were not given a hearing before their citizenship was rescinded or the chance to appeal. Zaher said the policy was also blatantly discriminatory as no Jews had been denied citizenship because of errors in their parents’ or grandparents’ registration under the Law of Return.

 

Equal rights for equal burden?

The treatment of Bedouins gives the lie to one of Israel’s most familiar claims: that Palestinian citizens will receive the same rights as Jewish citizens if they share an equal burden. Avigdor Lieberman, the defense minister, has repeatedly campaigned on a platform of “no loyalty, no citizenship.” He argues that Palestinian citizens who do not serve in the Israeli army or perform an equivalent form of national service should lose their citizenship.

 

However, a proportion of those stripped of citizenship are from Bedouin families that have served in the Israeli army as desert trackers.

 

Several unrecognized villages, home to some 100,000 Bedouins, have a tradition of military service, but have still been denied services. Their homes are all under threat of demolition.

 

Some of the residents of Umm al-Hiran, which is currently being demolished to make way for the exclusively new Jewish community of Hiran, served as trackers for the Israeli army.

 

Atalla Saghaira, a resident of the unrecognized village of Rahma, told Haaretz he had been stripped of his citizenship in 2002 when he applied for a passport, even though his father was a tracker for the Israeli army. After 13 years of struggle, he eventually managed to regain citizenship, but three of his brothers were still stateless.

 

No harm intended?

The Israeli parliament’s interior committee held a meeting last year at which officials for the first time gave details of the revocation policy.

 

The head of the interior ministry’s citizenship department, Ronen Yerushalmi, submitted a report stating that as many as 2,600 Bedouins were affected. He admitted, however, that the data was not precise and the figure could be even higher.

 

At another meeting, the committee’s legal adviser, Gilad Keren, warned that the ministry was most likely breaking Israeli law. He said he could not “understand how, when a person has been a citizen for 20 years and the state makes a mistake, that person’s status is changed.”

 

In a statement to The Jerusalem Post, the interior ministry denied the evidence heard by the committee, claiming that only about 150 people had been affected. “No one means to harm them,” a spokesperson said. “Now the ministry is asking them to legally re-register so they will remain citizens.”

 

Revelations of the mass revocations came as an Israeli court last month approved for the first time stripping of citizenship a Palestinian convicted of carrying out an attack.

 

The interior ministry gave Alaa Zayoud, from the town of Umm al-Fahm in present-day northern Israel, the status of temporary resident after he was sentenced to 25 years for carrying out a car-ramming attack last October on Israeli soldiers. Four people were injured in that incident.

 

The revocation was made on the basis of a 2008 amendment to the Citizenship Law that allows citizenship to be rescinded for “breach of loyalty” to the state.

 

Adalah, which opposed the government’s decision, pointed out a double standard in not applying the amendment to Israeli Jews. It cited recent cases such as that of a Jewish man and two Jewish juveniles who burned alive a 16-year-old Palestinian, Muhammad Abu Khudair, in Jerusalem in 2014, and that of Jewish settlers behind an arson attack a year later that killed three members of the Dawabsha family in the occupied West Bank village of Duma. None had citizenship revoked.

 

In 1996, Israel’s high court also refused a request to rescind the citizenship of an Israeli Jew, Yigal Amir, who a year earlier had assassinated Yitzhak Rabin, then prime minister. The judges ruled that such offenses should be dealt with in the criminal courts, not by revoking citizenship.

 

Previous revocations, though rare, have solely targeted Palestinian citizens. In 2002, Eli Yishai, then interior minister, stripped Nahad Abu Kishaq and Kais Obeid of citizenship.

 

Zayoud’s case was different because the interior ministry needed to seek court approval, therefore setting what Adalah and the Association for Civil Rights in Israel have called a “dangerous precedent.”

 

The fear is that Israel will use the case to justify many more such revocations or condition citizenship for the Palestinian minority on loyalty.

 

Ethnic cleansing

The question of whether Palestinians should have been awarded citizenship in the state’s early years is one that has exercised the Israeli leadership for decades. Many have feared that a growing Palestinian population in Israel poses a “demographic threat” to the state’s Jewishness.

 

Writing in 2002, Israeli historian Benny Morris suggested that Israel’s founding father, David Ben Gurion, should have “gone the whole hog” in 1948 – ethnically cleansing all Palestinians from the newly founded state of Israel.

 

Research has shown that Ben Gurion gave citizenship only reluctantly to the 150,000 Palestinians who survived the mass expulsions. They were initially assigned residency, chiefly as a way to aid in identifying and expelling Palestinian refugees trying to cross back into the new state of Israel to reach their villages.

 

Only in 1952, under international pressure, did Israel award the Palestinian minority citizenship through the Citizenship Law, legislation separate from that for Jews.

 

However, scholars have noted that for more than a decade Israeli leaders repeatedly attempted to find ways to expel Palestinian citizens or establish incentive schemes to encourage them to leave.

 

Israeli scholar Uri Davis has noted that 30,000 Palestinians living in Israel remained stateless until 1980, when Israel passed an amendment to the Citizenship Law belatedly awarding them citizenship.

 

Ben Gurion himself hoped to fix the percentage of Palestinians in Israel at no higher than 15 percent of the population. But with the proportion of Palestinian citizens now at one in five, Israeli politicians have been seeking ever more desperate ways to rid Israel of sections of the minority.

 

In July, the office of Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, was reported to have urged the Trump administration in the US to agree to a land swap that would move an area home to some 250,000 Palestinian citizens of Israel to Palestinian control.

 

The proposal echoed Avigdor Lieberman’s long-standing plan to redraw Israel’s internationally recognized borders as a way to deny hundreds of thousands of Palestinians their citizenship.

 

In early 2014, the Maariv newspaper reported that Netanyahu had first posited a land and population exchange as a quick fix to reduce Palestinian citizens to no more than 12 percent of the population.

 

Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. Website: jonathan-cook.net

[blake 10]

Haaretz is not an 'Israeli rag' and when West Tinsley refers to it as such it shows what a Jew-hater he really is.

 

Haaretz is a progressive newspaper equivalent to the UK's the Guardian. Like other Israeli newspapers, even newspapers with less 'progressive' reputations, it has a mixed Jewish-Arab staff. Over the years it has consistently broken the news stories that have turned out to be the most embarrassing to the Israeli authorities. Right-wing Israelis are always moaning, about Haaretz and it shows where West Tinsley is coming from when he refers to Haaretz as an 'Israeli rag'. What West Tinsley means, when he refers to Haaretz as an 'Israeli rag', is that Haaretz a 'Jewish rag'.

[WestTinsley 11]

With ridiculous comments like that it shows that you are unable to defend the indefensible.