Israeli Apartheid Report: Can a Critic of Israel not be Anti-Semitic?

Israeli government: The Israeli NGO B'Tselem, the American NGO Human Rights Watch, the UN, and Amnesty International, are all ANTISEMITES.

This would be funny if it were not true. But it is true, and ridiculous.

As Amnesty International prepares to publish its "Israel’s Apartheid against Palestinians: Cruel System of Domination and Crime against Humanity”report, the Israeli government has lashed out against the authors of the Israeli Apartheid report, namely the Israeli NGO B'Tselem, the American NGO Human Rights Watch, the UN, and Amnesty International, labeling them Antisemitic. It further asked these groups not to publish the Israeli Apartheid report.

(The full 280-page report can be downloaded from:
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/campaigns/2022/02/israels-system-of-apartheid/)

Which raises the question: Can Israelis or followers of the Jewish faith be Antisemitic? Or is Israel and its blind supporters hiding their crimes behind the guilt-laden label of antisemitism? Are the crimes committed by Europeans and others over centuries against the Jewish people, leading up to the Holocaust, merely a cheap argument to be used against anyone who dares level a rebuke of Israel's inhuman conduct in its treatment of the Palestinian people?

The report accuses Israel of the international crime of apartheid based on its nearly 55-year military occupation of lands belonging to the Palestinian people, the majority of whom are refugees inside Israel proper, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, and in the neighboring countries of Jordan, Egypt, Syria and Lebanon. The report also highlights Israel's abhorrent treatment of its own Arab minority.

Israeli Minister Yair Lapid said in a statement issued Monday that Amnesty “is just another radical organization which echoes propaganda, without seriously checking the facts," and that it “echoes the same lies shared by terrorist organizations.” He further said that “Israel isn’t perfect, but [it is] a democracy committed to international law, open to criticism, with a free press and a strong and independent judicial system".

One wonders how a commitment to international law translates into stealing occupied land, evicting occupied the Palestinian people from its ancestral lands, bulldozing people's homes and denying them  permits to expand their existing homes and villages, while at the same time granting those very same lands and homes to foreign occupying colonial racists without any historical ties to the land. 

One wonders how is Israel open to criticism, when any such criticism of Israel's forced de-arabization of Jerusalem and the West Bank and its dehumanization of the Palestinian people by confining them and walling them off like animals, becomes an act of Antisemitism?

To add insult to injury, the Israeli Foreign Ministry said in a statement that Amnesty's report “denies the state of Israel’s right to exist as the nation state of the Jewish people.[...] Its extremist language and distortion of historical context were designed to demonize Israel and pour fuel onto the fire of antisemitism.” 

One wonders how can a democracy be Jewish, or Muslim, or Christian, or Hindu, or affiliated with any such exclusive group as a religion? Is there any country on earth that claims to be a democracy whilst defining itself exclusively by a religious affiliation?  

Neither Human Rights Watch nor B’Tselem compared Israel to South Africa, where an apartheid system based on white supremacy and racial segregation was in place from 1948 until the early 1990s. Instead, they evaluate Israel’s policies based on international conventions like the Rome Statute, which defines apartheid as “an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group.” They argue that Israel’s various policies in the territories under its control are aimed at preserving a Jewish majority in as much of the land as possible by systematically denying basic rights to Palestinians. Israel says its policies are aimed at ensuring the survival and security of the world’s only Jewish state.

The International Criminal Court is already investigating potential war crimes committed by the State of Israel and by Palestinian militant groups (who are not a State) in the occupied territories. After last year’s Gaza war, the U.N. Human Rights Council set up a permanent commission of inquiry to investigate abuses in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, including “systematic discrimination and repression based on national, ethnic, racial or religious identity.”

For far too long, Israel has exploited the Holocaust and the centuries-long mistreatment of Jewish people across Europe as an excuse to, in turn, mistreat the Palestinian people and commit a slow-simmering genocide against them. Zionist mouthpieces across the media unleash claims that the Palestinian people never existed and that they are squatters who infiltrated "Israel" from the neighboring countries, when the undeniable facts of history are the complete opposite. 2,000 years ago, the Jews of Palestine became Christians with the advent of Christianity under the Roman occupation, then they became Muslims following the Muslim Arab conquest in the 8th century. This means that today's Palestinians are the original Jewish inhabitants of Palestine. No historical record exists that documents a massive Jewish migration out of Bronze Age Palestine after the destruction of the temple by the Romans in 70 AD. Today's Israelis are for the most part recent Eastern European converts to Judaism who have no historical well-founded claims to Palestine, other than the colonial drive of 19th century European Jewish racists - just like their French, British, German, Italian, Dutch, Spanish colonial counterparts. 

By the way, I am a Semite and proud of it.

Hanibaal

Israeli Army Terrorism: Ultra-Orthodox soldiers of the most "Moral" Army in the World

This is how Israel is sapping every bit of humanity out of the Palestinian people. The Israeli Army is essentially a horde of fundamentalist terrorists of the Jewish faith - just like their Muslim counterparts of Al-Qaeda and Daesh - except that in Israel they hide behind the veneer of respectability that Israel is given by guilt-ridden Europeans and blackmailed Americans. The Jewish terrorist groups - Haganah, Stern, Lehi, etc. - which ethically cleansed Palestine of its original people in the 1930s and 1940s later coalesced to form the Israeli Army, which is what a future Palestinian Army would look like if you bring together today's Palestinian Muslim terrorist groups like the PLO, Islamic Jihad and Hamas.

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From: https://www.yahoo.com/news/autopsy-says-violence-caused-death-100031880.html

JOSEPH KRAUSS

Thu, January 27, 2022, 5:00 AM

JERUSALEM (AP) — An autopsy has found that a 78-year-old Palestinian man who was pronounced dead shortly after being detained by Israeli troops in the occupied West Bank died of a heart attack caused by “external violence.”

The autopsy confirmed that Omar Asaad, who has U.S. citizenship, suffered from underlying health conditions. But it also found bruises on his head, redness on his wrists from being bound, and bleeding in his eyelids from being tightly blindfolded.

The report, a copy of which was obtained by The Associated Press on Thursday, concluded that the cause of death was a “sudden cessation of the heart muscle caused by psychological tension due to the external violence he was exposed to.”

The New York Times was the first to report on the autopsy.

Asaad was detained while returning home from a social gathering at around 3 a.m. on Jan. 12 by Israeli soldiers who had set up a flying checkpoint in his home village of Jiljiliya. It's a common occurrence in the West Bank, which has been under Israeli military rule since Israel captured the territory in the 1967 Mideast war.

Palestinian witnesses say Asaad was roughed up before being bound and blindfolded, and then taken to an abandoned apartment complex nearby. Other Palestinians who were detained in the same building later that night said they didn't realize he was there until after the soldiers left, when they found him unconscious, lying face down on the ground, and called an ambulance.

The Israeli military has said he was detained after resisting an inspection and later released, implying he was alive. It's unclear when exactly he died. Initial reports said he was 80 years old.

The unit that detained Asaad, Netzah Yehuda, or “Judea Forever,” is a special unit for ultra-Orthodox Jewish soldiers. It was formed with the aim of integrating a segment of the population that does not normally do military service. But Israeli media have reported problems in the unit stemming from the hard-line ideology of many of the soldiers.

Lt. Col. Amnon Shefler, an Israeli military spokesman, said the incident remains under investigation and that “actions will be taken if wrongdoing is found.”

The State Department has said it is in touch with the Israeli government to seek “clarification” about the incident and that it supports a “thorough investigation.” U.S. officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the autopsy.

The Israeli human rights group B'Tselem said Asaad's detention was “bizarre."

“This is a very small, quiet village,” said Dror Sadot, a spokeswoman for the group. "There was no reason at all to take an 80-year-old and to drag him and handcuff him. I have no idea why they did it.”

Israel says it thoroughly investigates incidents in which Palestinians are killed by Israeli troops. But rights groups say those investigations rarely lead to indictments or convictions, and that in many cases the army does not interview key witnesses or retrieve evidence.

Sadot said the fact that the military is still investigating more than two weeks after the incident, even with the added pressure of American scrutiny, indicates that any eventual conclusion will be another “whitewash."

“I don't know, but from our experience, it will lead to nothing," she said.

 

Academic Anti-Semitism: Denigrating the Phoenicians

Phoenicians and the Making of the Mediterranean
Carolina López-Ruiz
Harvard University Press, January 2022

Despite many decades of research, publications and academic activism (e.g. Martin Bernal's Black Athena), Western academe persists in adopting a Hellen0-centric view of the origins of European culture, for no other reason than a traditional residual anti-Semitism dating back to the 18th and 19th centuries. Somehow, out of nowhere, tell us the history texts that are taught to our young people, European culture sprung out of islands in the Eastern Mediterranean (e.g. Rhodes, Crete, etc.), as if by spontaneous generation. 

Never mind that the Greeks themselves attribute their origins to a princess who, they say, was kidnapped by Zeus disguised as white bull off of a beach in the city of Tyre, and taken across the Mediterranean to lands we know today as Europe. In fact, the Princess's name was Europa. Her brothers, notably Cadmus, Cilix, and Phoenix among others - were summoned by their father, King Agenor to go search for her and to never return if they don't find her. And so they did. Having failed to find their sister, they settled in various regions of continental Europe, thus becoming the founders of major European civilizations. A legend, granted, yet very telling. 

Never mind, again, that the city of Carthage (in today's Tunisia) was founded in the 9th century BC by another Tyrian princess, Elyssa-Dido, whose descendants the Carthaginians came very close to defeating Rome before it became an empire, which would have changed the course of history in unimaginable ways.

In her latest book, Phoenicians and the Making of the Mediterranean, Professor
Carolina López-Ruiz does justice to the contributions of the Phoenicians in creating the crucible from which all later Mediterranean civilizations emerged, including the Greek civilization. Here is the description of the book as it appears on the jacket:

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The first comprehensive history of the cultural impact of the Phoenicians, who knit together the ancient Mediterranean world long before the rise of the Greeks.

Imagine you are a traveler sailing to the major cities around the Mediterranean in 750 BC. You would notice a remarkable similarity in the dress, alphabet, consumer goods, and gods from Gibraltar to Tyre. This was not the Greek world―it was the Phoenician. Based in Tyre, Sidon, Byblos, and other cities along the coast of present-day Lebanon, the Phoenicians spread out across the Mediterranean building posts, towns, and ports. Propelled by technological advancements of a kind unseen since the Neolithic revolution, Phoenicians knit together diverse Mediterranean societies, fostering a literate and sophisticated urban elite sharing common cultural, economic, and aesthetic modes.

The Phoenician imprint on the Mediterranean lasted nearly a thousand years, beginning in the Early Iron Age. Following the trail of the Phoenicians from the Levant to the Atlantic coast of Iberia, Carolina López-Ruiz offers the first comprehensive study of the cultural exchange that transformed the Mediterranean in the eighth and seventh centuries BC. Greeks, Etruscans, Sardinians, Iberians, and others adopted a Levantine-inflected way of life, as they aspired to emulate Near Eastern civilizations. López-Ruiz explores these many inheritances, from sphinxes and hieratic statues to ivories, metalwork, volute capitals, inscriptions, and Ashtart iconography.

Meticulously documented and boldly argued, Phoenicians and the Making of the Mediterranean revises the Hellenocentric model of the ancient world and restores from obscurity the true role of Near Eastern societies in the history of early civilizations.

UNIFIL: Get the Hell out of Lebanon

Per the AP story below, Hezbollah operatives [yes, those unknown perpetrators mentioned by the AP article] have begun a series of attacks against UNIFIL forces stationed in south Lebanon. These UN peacekeeping forces were deployed along the Lebanese-Israeli border, first in 1978 following the Israeli invasion against Palestinian (PLO) guerillas, then expanded in 2006 after the Hezbollah-Israeli July war of that year.

Though UNIFIL is a friend of Lebanon, its forces perpetuate the instability in the south of the country by acquiescing to a role by militias, guerillas and non-state actors at the expense of the Lebanese state. The UN should instead work hard to permit the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) to take control of the entire length of the country's borders not only with Israel, but also with Syria. The ceasefires that the UN has worked out over the decades always minimized the role of the legitimate Lebanese Army in deference to Israel and Syria, while the LAF ought to be the exclusive military custodian of the borders of the country.

Now that Hezbollah has become under pressure from the entire Lebanese population, after it had dragged the country into endless warmongering and covered the rampant corruption of its sister Shiite organization Amal (led by the corrupt speaker of parliament Nabih Berri), it is now activating its cells in the south against the UNIFIL which is perceived as a Western bulwark against Hezbollah's desire to mount attacks, unhampered, against Israel. Recall that it was Hezbollah, backed by Syria and Iran, that dislodged all Western presence in Lebanon in the 1980s by bombing the Multinational force (US Marines and French Paratroopers] and the US and French embassies, by assassinating numerous American and French ambassadors (Francis Meloy and Louis Delamare), educators (Malcolm Kerr), journalists and others; hijacked flight TWA847 in which they killed US Navy soldier Dean Stethem; kidnapped dozens of journalists, clergymen, educators, and administrators from the US, France, the UK, India, Ireland.... The objective was to take Lebanon out of the Western orbit in which it had always been. And Hezbollah succeeded, Ronald Reagan withdrew the Marines, the French, the British and the Italians withdrew their soldiers and abandoned Lebanon to Syrian troops of occupation which entered Beirut and remained in the country until 2005.

It is ironic that the pacifying efforts of the UNIFIL troops have also had a detrimental impact on the sovereignty of Lebanon and the sovereign right of the Lebanese state and army to be the only guardians of the border. Why, I ask UN Secretary António Guterres, who recently visited the country, why can't the world assist the Lebanese State in recovering its sovereignty over its borders, instead of protecting illegal terrorist militias like Hezbollah?

The UN should no longer cover for Hezbollah and its allied terrorist militias in the south, and should pull out of the south, while at the same time urging those Western countries that fund UNIFIL to spend their money at strengthening the capabilities of the Lebanese Armed Forces. Unfortunately, those Western countries do not want a strong capable Lebanese army because of pressure from Israel and Syria, both of whom find a lawless border with Lebanon convenient for breaching Lebanese sovereignty, smuggling, and warmongering.

The UN should not renew the mandate of UNIFIL at the next scheduled renewal request in August 2022. Lebanon must be put to the minimal test of securing its own borders. The UN and its backers should either let Lebanon fend its way, even at extreme cost, or support it against Israeli and Syrian proclivities to undermine Lebanon as they have done for five decades. If Lebanon is unable to secure its own borders against Syria and Israel, then what purpose is there in propping up a dysfunctional state that has failed for close to five decades?

Hanibaal

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 Associated Press: UN peacekeepers attacked in south Lebanon near Israel border

Wed, January 5, 2022, 7:44 AM

BEIRUT (AP) — Unknown perpetrators attacked a group of U.N. peacekeepers in southern Lebanon, vandalizing their vehicles and stealing official items from them, a U.N. official said Wednesday.

Such scuffles with U.N. peacekeepers are not uncommon in southern Lebanon since the peacekeeping force was expanded following the 2006 war between Israel and the Lebanese militant Hezbollah group.

The U.N. force, known as UNIFIL, called on Lebanese authorities to “investigate quickly and thoroughly, and prosecute all those responsible for these crimes,” said Kandice Ardiel, a UNIFIL press official. She added that the attack occurred on Tuesday night.

Local media reported that residents of the southern town of Bint Jbeil scuffled with Irish peacekeepers who they said were taking photographs of residential homes. The reports added that the U.N. force was not accompanied by Lebanese troops.

..............  Continue reading AP article at:

https://www.yahoo.com/news/un-peacekeepers-attacked-south-lebanon-124444036.html

Lebanon's Incessant Blowups: Separation as the Answer

Tensions are so high in Lebanon, in every possible sector - sectarian, political, social, financial - that an explosion is bound to happen. It is no longer a matter of "if", what is difficult to foresee is the how and when. When pressure is applied on a system, common sense dictates that something has to give, something has to open up to dissipate the pressure.

Right now, and always comparing the current situation with its predecessors (since I have experienced the many ups and downs of Lebanon for the past several decades), one of the principal means by which a tense situation is defused is, unfortunately, violence. Throughout the country's past contemporary history, and given the multiplicity of actors (local, regional and international), any spontaneous or manufactured incident can lead to a blowup which could very likely degenerate into an all-out breakdown and descent into mayhem. And as often as the past tells us, it is only following such a blowup that solutions are found under duress. While these solutions bring an end to the tensions, they are not final or definitive because they deal with the symptoms rather than the root causes. 

Perhaps it is a trait inherent to haphazard nations like Lebanon that the actors are unable to sit down in a time of relative peace and negotiate a forward-looking solution for the next phase in the nation's history. Instead, the political immaturity of the people and the political class of Lebanon have consistently led to catastrophic transient settlements to crises, and when viewed from the high altitude of history, it is clear that the country continues to ricochet from one crisis to the next. The chain of crises and temporary solutions is so long that people forget how they got there in the first place, i.e. they forget the root original cause. 

I grew up with the stories of my parents' generation and their own parents. My grandparents were born in the 1870s-1880s right after the civil wars and massacres of the 1830s-1860s. Their children (my parents' generation) were born after World War I (1914-1918), which saw Lebanon decimated by the exactions of the Turkish Ottoman occupation and famine, and they grew up under French rule during the League of Nations mandate of 1921-1943. World War II (1939-1945) followed, and my generation was born soon after, only to come of age and be traumatized by the wars of 1967, 1973, 1975, 1982, 1988, with the Taif Agreement putting the lid on the boiling pot through the 1990s to the present day. Of course, with the periodic eruptions of political instability and violence in 1996, 2000, 2004-2005, 2008 and through the revolution of October 2019. My own children's generation was then born in the midst of uncertainty and exile during the 1980s an 1990s. There has never been a time in Lebanon's modern history where one generation was born and died within a time span that was free of violence. How can a country remain viable, how can a people be psychologically normal, when every generation experiences repeated existential traumatizing upheavals?

As far as I remember from the days of my childhood, Lebanon was muddled into the Arab nationalism crisis of the 1950s and 1960s (Abdel Nasser of Egypt), the Palestinian Revolution of the late 1960s and 1970s, the Israeli invasions of the 1970s and 1980s, the endless Syrian interference, invasions, occupation and undermining of stability throughout the decades since the 1943 independence and through the mid-2000s, the Iranian meddling via its Hezbollah militia's desire to fight a long-term war against Israel (1991-present), etc... And at every step of the way, solutions were drawn that put a heavier lid on the boiling pot, which would boil over again at the next phase. From the Baghdad Pact of the 1950s, the Cairo Accords of 1969, the massacres and urban warfare of the 1970s and 1980s with their truces, ceasefires, massacres, and failed peacekeeping missions, the Taif Agreement of 1989, the fake peace and military eruptions of 1996, 2006 and 2008, the Doha Agreement... And now what portends to be the final breakdown and dissolution of the Lebanese State and the near certain death of the Greater Lebanon fallacy drawn up in the 1920s.

This existence of Lebanon always on the edge of the abyss is stunning, yet acknowledged and recognized by almost everyone with an interest in the country. According to political analyst Nasri al-Sayigh, “No one can predict the return anytime soon of the military violence to Lebanon, however, the Lebanese live under the weight of permanent violence arising from standing in sectarian and political formations and media violence. These phenomena provide ammunition for a future battle which would be postponed pending the calculations of politicians about the gains and losses from unleashing the latent violence.” (Quoted in Lubnan fi madar al-unf, Samir Khalaf, Dar al-Nahar, Beirut, 2002).

Lebanon is plagued by its many religious identities that crush the emergence of a national identity. This character is pervasive in the country's DNA, and is, in my opinion, the sole obstacle to an exit from the cycle of violence. Defenders of religions will say whatever they wish to claim that religions promote wisdom and morality, and could not be the drivers for the savage state in which Lebanon continues to flounder across the centuries. But they forget that in Lebanon, religious identity defines the citizens' relationship with their government and state institutions. So, yes, while religion itself is not the direct cause of Lebanon's ailments, the fact that religious identity supersedes national identity is itself the underlying cause for the torment of the country. 

The complexity of Lebanon's social makeup is such that one is, sooner or later, led to reject the existence of a Lebanese national ethos, a prerequisite for nation building. Instead, we conclude after much intellectual and mental wrangling that Lebanon is better defined as an amalgam of mini-nations, stitched together like multicolored Lego blocks over the puny territory they inhabit, but without ever cementing into a one-color melting pot. 

In fact, one is obligated to take the next leap: If I want my children's children to grow up as the first intact, non-traumatized generation, LET THESE MINI-NATIONS SEPARATE FROM ONE ANOTHER. Let each draw its territory, preferably in agreement with the other mini-nations, but with bloodshed if necessary, to produce a patchwork of independent and socially homogeneous mini-states. Something like Switzerland, but non-confederated. We are not mature enough politically to deliberately come together into a confederation. I'd rather see Monaco, Lichtenstein, Luxembourg, Andorra, Vatican, San Marino.... right next to each other. The secession of Pakistan from India, then of Bangladesh from Pakistan, or the creation of Israel, etc., were possible after massacres, population transfers and exchanges, yet no one today decries the fact that these countries enjoy much more stability than Lebanon, specifically because they separated into homogeneous populations. Granted that they were political monstrosities at the start, but they have fared much better than Lebanon. I am tired of the marketing formula that Lebanon is an experiment in tolerance, pluralism and shared living: It has not worked. People are not guinea pigs with which to run political and moral experiments.