Israel/Palestine
Related: About this forumIsrael Needs Another Kind of Left, One That Won't Commit Moral Suicide
Ari Shavit Jan 13, 2016 11:41 PM
...A moral left should have no problem with such an exposé. On the contrary. A moral left should be faithful to the values of criticism, openness, transparency and universality. It should thank the two journalists for their courageous, professional work, denounce Ezra Nawi and his collaborators and make it clear that there is no connection between them and him. A moral left is supposed to say that the work done by the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, Physicians for Human Rights, Machsom Watch and countless other organizations acting for justice is sacred work. But a man who informs on Palestinians to the Palestinian Authority so it can lock them up or kill them is a villain. A villain who is one of us.
But how did the Israeli left react? With forgiving silence toward the abomination and a savage attack on the messengers who dared to expose the horror. So far, the Israeli left hasnt produced a single Reuven Rivlin to say: My world view is one thing and morality is another; and when I see villains who come from my tribe, I stand against them. So far no Yoel Bin Noon has been found on the Israeli left to stand up and say the rot has set into the camps fringes....
....Israel desperately needs the left. To save itself from the occupation, the settlements and the reactionary drift, Israel needs a strong, leading left. But as the weeks events have proved, the left Israel needs is another kind of left realistic, moral, democratic, liberal and decent.
read more: http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-1.697330?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter
aranthus
(3,385 posts)A "moral" Left seeks the destruction of the existing society, because that is the evil that stands in the way of building a better one. The Left in Israel and around the world supports Nawi, Hamas, etc. because it is the Left, not because it or the people who make up the Left are immoral. The Left shares the goals of Nawi and the Palestinians, at least as far as Israel is concerned. Israel doesn't need a moral Left. It needs a vibrant Liberal Center.
Israeli
(4,151 posts)Not one single person I know supports Hamas and nobody wants to destroy the " existing society " .
Ari Shavit is a Centralist ....he is blowing his own trumpet , we have a so called "Liberal Center" not that " vibrant " is an adjective I would use for it .
shira
(30,109 posts)shira
(30,109 posts)aranthus
(3,385 posts)What you call the Regressive left, I call the Left. What you call the Liberal Left, I call Liberal. What I see is that the Regressive Left has been influencing the Liberal Left in some unsavory ways (The Nawi incident being one of them). The Liberal Left needs to break free of that influence.
shira
(30,109 posts)Israeli
(4,151 posts)Hope this helps :
Ultimately, Israeli Leftism Is Based on Ones View of the Occupation
To the left, peace isnt merely a formal political framework but a profound process of reconciliation that requires each side to show respect for the culture, tradition and history of the other side.
Uri Avnery Oct 16, 2013
Ive been asked what the concept of the left means in Israel. I thought I could answer this question easily, then I realized it was a tough job.
Its easy to say what the left isnt. The left is the opposite of fascism the doctrine that the nation is the most important thing and people are merely cells in the national body. The left is also the opposite of Orthodox Jewish religious law, which states that one does not save the life of a non-Jew on the Sabbath. The left is also the opposite of communism in its Soviet form, which turned people into cogs in a destructive machine.
The left is human. The left believes that human beings are the most important thing. The state is based on an agreement among all its citizens, and the state has no mystical, national or religious significance. To the left, nationality is a cultural and political setting that gives people a feeling of belonging, according to their own free will.
The difference between the left and the right is mainly the difference between spiritual and emotional, from which the practical differences stem. Leftism is a worldview that encompasses all areas of life.
In Israel, because of the special circumstances under which the state was established and exists, the difference between left and right isnt the same as in other countries. In the broader world, the concepts of left and right are largely defined according to differences in social perception. In Israel they are defined first of all by ones relation to peace and occupation. A person cannot be a leftist if he supports a regime of occupation and repression.
The left desires peace. It sees Israels second nation the Palestinian Arab nation as a brother nation. It utterly rejects the occupation, which is inhuman by its very nature. The left strives for Israeli-Palestinian peace. To it, peace isnt merely a formal political framework but a profound process of reconciliation that requires each side to show respect for the culture, tradition, history and desires of the other side. This will be the rule in the comprehensive Israeli-Arab peace that follows.
Since the left believes in every nations right to freedom and independence, it strives for coexistence between Israels two nations, each in a state that expresses its political and cultural essence. To the left, the settlement movement is a moral and political disaster because its main goal is to take control of the entire country, prevent peace and carry out ethnic cleansing. The left believes that the border between the two states should be open, in the hope that relations between them will strengthen.
The left wants Israel to be a member of the family of nations, faithful to international law and a full partner in the fight for a world order that prevents war and civil war, saves the planet and ends disease, hunger, suffering and ignorance.
The left also supports social justice and mutual responsibility. Every person has the right to use his or her abilities to the fullest. Below is a safety net that ensures a respectable standard of living for the weak, the poor, the handicapped and the unfortunate.
A leftist society is based on equality between men and women, Jews and Arabs, Ashkenazim and Mizrahim, members of all religions and members of none, with no discrimination based on sexual preference. A leftist society ensures all children the possibility to live under equitable conditions; every child has the right to a modern, egalitarian education open to the world. A leftist society treats refugees and labor migrants compassionately, integrates them into the job market and allows them to live as human beings.
A leftist society is based on the complete separation of religion and state. It has civil marriage and divorce, with every person possessing the right to join or leave any religion. All men and women live according to their own faith. Every person who shares in the fulfillment of this ideal in spirit and action, every single day, belongs to the Israeli left.
Uri Avnery
Haaretz Contributor
Source: http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-1.552576
King_David
(14,851 posts)Views on Israel ( but not the same views on Jews of course )
That goes for some single issue posters in our very own group and the BDS movement too where there's nothing actually classical "left" about them - such as the time they allowed the hateful gay hating homophobic performance at a reggae concert in Spain but wouldn't allow an American To perform because he was a Jew....
Israeli
(4,151 posts)ref : http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4752532,00.html
Little Tich
(6,171 posts)did that was wrong, it's important that there's serious introspection on the left. After all, if the cause isn't just, what's the point?
shira
(30,109 posts)That's all. Not that there's anything wrong with that - right?
No biggie?
Maybe if you called for the goon squad to target your neighbors next door to you, that wouldn't be a bad thing? Their crime being that they just signed papers selling their home to a Black person. Oh no!!!
Would you expect the Left to defend & support you? Maybe claim there's no evidence that goon squad ever killed anyone before?
Response to shira (Reply #7)
6chars This message was self-deleted by its author.
azurnoir
(45,850 posts)shira
(30,109 posts)Following the explosive revelation on Channel 2 TV, that central Jewish and Arab leftist activists have a policy of handing over to the Palestinian Authority (PA) Arabs who approach them and wish to sell land to Jews, leftists have been claiming that the PA does not execute such people.
The denials are meant to refute claims made by the central figure in the televised investigative piece, Ta'ayush's Ezra Nawi, who boasted on hidden camera that the men he handed over to the PA were tortured and then executed. Leftist journalist Haggai Matar published an article that claimed that Nawi was just making empty boasts, and that while Ramallah's courts do mete death sentences to people who sell land to Jews, PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas has not approved the carrying out of such sentences since 2005.
An investigative report by Akiva Bigman on the nationalist-conservative Mida website has found that this is a lie. While it is true that Abbas has not signed death warrants since 2005, the executions are carried out unofficially.
Israeli
(4,151 posts)...there is no way of avoiding that what he said was okay .......it wasnt okay .
However Ezra Nawi is just one man , a deeply flawed individual who does not represent all of the Israeli Left .
Probably you should read this for a more balanced report than what shira is feeding us :
The dirty war between Israels right-wing and left-wing NGOs
Read more: http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2016/01/ezra-nawi-btselem-leftwing-ngos-rightwing-camera-war.html#ixzz3xDWCdewZ
Little Tich
(6,171 posts)No point in defending Ezra Nawi then...
Israeli
(4,151 posts).......whilst criticizing him Little Tich.
see : http://972mag.com/i-too-was-undercover-when-i-met-ezra-nawi-this-is-what-i-saw/115878/
Anyhow it looks like there will be a trial .....and hopefully the truth will come out then .
Little Tich
(6,171 posts)then it's even worse...
shira
(30,109 posts)One of B'tselem's employees worked with Nawi to turn Palestinians in for torture, death.
Why wasn't he immediately shit canned by B'tselem - rather than defended?
branford
(4,462 posts)is defending him and castigating everyone else for having the temerity to report about it.
shira
(30,109 posts)Israeli
(4,151 posts)Uri Avnery
16/01/16
IN ANY list of Israel's 100 most important women, Ilana Dayan would occupy a prominent position.
Dayan (no relation to the late general with the eye patch) is the host of one of the most prestigious television programs. While Israeli TV in general is slowly sinking into a morass of stupid "reality" entertainment, her program, named "Uvdah" ("Fact" , stands out as a beacon of responsible investigative journalism, of the kind my late weekly news magazine was known for.
In general, Dayan has always been considered as mildly "leftist" since uncompromising criticism of the powers that be is generally identified with the Left.
Now she is being accused of serving the extreme, near-fascist Right. Shocking.
In the furious debate that ensued, Dayan quoted me for support. For 40 years, my magazine carried on its masthead the slogan "Without Fear, Without Prejudice". Dayan claimed that was acting according to this motto.
This compels me to get involved in the dispute against my better judgment.
THE BACKGROUND of this affair concerns the very foundation of the Israel-Palestine conflict.
Since the Six-day War of 1967, Israel has been occupying, among other territories, the area called by the Arabs, many Israelis and most of the rest of the world "the West Bank" (of the Jordan river) and by the Israeli government and right-wing Israelis "Judea and Samaria", their Biblical appellation.
Almost since the beginning of the occupation, the Israeli right-wing has been making strenuous efforts to "settle the land" putting up Jewish settlements, towns, villages and small "outposts" all over the place.
To whom do the lands, on which the settlements are built, officially belong?
Much of it was "government land". This goes back to the Ottoman Empire. Communal land reserves, which did not belong to individual fellahin (farmers) but to the entire village, were registered in the name of the Sultan. Under the British "Government of Palestine" it became "government land". When the Israeli army occupied the territory, the Israel government just laid its hands on all these properties. Which means that this land is now being held solely for the benefit of Jewish settlers.
Other areas of land were simply expropriated by the military government for "security reasons" or "public purposes" - and then turned over to the settlers.
Many of these settlements are manifestly illegal, even according to the Israeli law prevailing in these areas. But the law is very rarely applied. The Israeli military government, the army and the police quite openly support the settlements, protect them and connect them to Israeli grids. The courts very rarely intervene.
Yet what about settlements which are being set up on privately-owned Arab lands? Ah, there's the rub. All possible and impossible tricks have been used to take them over. Among them, the use of false documents, false signatures, often of dead owners. But the most common method is the use of Arab middlemen.
FOR THE Palestinian people, this is an existential struggle. The Israeli Right, which now dominates the government, does not hide its vision of a country free of Palestinian Arabs ("Araberrein" in German). The vision of the entire country settled by Jews, with no one else around, has strong attractions for some, especially in religious circles.
The settlers and their allies have created an entire network for "legal" land acquisition. They approach an Arab owner and offer hugely inflated prices for his land. The money comes from Jewish billionaires in the United States or from secret government funds. The Arab owner is sorely tempted. He wants to sell and run away with the money. But he is afraid of his neighbors and of Palestinian fanatics.
This is where the Arab middlemen come in. They act as agents of the settlers and buy the desired land, in a way that enables the sellers to claim that they sold their property to other Arabs.
For the Palestinian community, these middlemen are worse than traitors. They endanger the very existence of the Palestinian people. They arouse intense fury.
THAT IS where the TV report of Ilana Dayan starts.
It centers on an Israeli peace activist called Ezra Nawi, an Iraqi-Jewish name. He is very active in the Hebron area in the southern West Bank. I have known his name for decades.
My impression has always been that Nawi is a kind of a loner, selflessly at work to help the Palestinians, connected with some of the many active Israeli peace organizations, especially Ta'ayush.
Hebron is a center of the most fanatical Jewish settlers. It is there that the settler-mass-murderer Baruch Goldstein massacred dozens of Arabs while they were praying in the mosque, after which he was killed by the enflamed survivors. He is now revered by the settlers as a saint.
These settlers are engaged in a prolonged struggle to get all the Arabs out of the surrounding villages. They destroy their homes, cut down their fruit trees, fill their wells with dirt. Ezra Nawi works untiringly to help the Arabs to hold on.
ON THE settlers' side there are several Jewish fascist organizations (sorry, no other appellation quite meets the case), who are lavishly financed by US Jewish billionaires.
As now appears, these organizations have built an espionage network to infiltrate Israeli peace and human rights groups. One of their agents succeeded in winning the confidence of the unsuspecting Nawi, who, in a moment of self-aggrandizement, bragged that he had disclosed the names of Arab land-sale middlemen to the Palestinian security forces, who executed them for treason.
The fascist organization turned the information over to Ilana Dayan, who made it the centerpiece of her weekly TV program. Nawi made a run for the airport, but was taken off the plane by the police.
So here we are.
In the furious debate now raging in the media, Dayan is accused by leftists like Gideon Levy of having become a turncoat and serving the fascists. Dayan responded with a furious article, in which she cited my motto. It is not her concern, she claimed, to ask herself whether her disclosures serve the Left or the Right. Her job is only to make sure that they are true.
Also, she asserts, it is not her business to investigate the motives of the people who supply the information. There, again, I have to agree with her. Important information may sometimes emanate from quite disgusting sources. The public good may demand its publication nonetheless.
I am against the death penalty under any circumstances. I am also against torture. However, I have never seen any evidence that the Palestinian security services have executed Arab land-sale middlemen, though some may have been interrogated harshly.
There is a comic angle, too. Nawi is accused of having contacts with foreign agents, a crime that equals espionage. Which foreign agents? The security services of the Palestinian Authority, under the command of Mahmoud Abbas. Yet only a few days ago the Israeli security service disclosed that the two security services the Israeli and the Palestinian work closely together to prevent Arab terrorism and that many Israeli lives have been saved this way. So when are the Palestinian services enemies, contact with whom is such a serious crime?
Another question concerns the disclosure that extreme right-wing organizations, financed by foreign (Jewish-American) donors, are conducting widespread secret espionage activities against Israeli activists. How come the Shin-Bet doesn't know about this or if they do know, why do they keep it secret?
One thing is certain: Israeli politics is becoming uglier by the day. The gap between left and right is turning into a gulf of hatred. The right-wing uses methods that remind me of what I saw as a child in 1933 Germany.
Source : http://zope.gush-shalom.org/home/en/channels/avnery/1452867180
bemildred
(90,061 posts)as though they had any clue at all what that word means.
shira
(30,109 posts)bemildred
(90,061 posts)azurnoir
(45,850 posts)for alleged torture and execution even though no executions have taken place? and then babble on about morality?
what is the Hebrew word for irony?
shira
(30,109 posts)Leftists deny it, but Arabs who sell land to Jews are murdered
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/206345#.VphBQpMrK1t
azurnoir
(45,850 posts)and it seems Israel may have turned a blind eye to the murder of someone who was a Palestinian citizen of Israel in Palestine, just as they did with Juliano Mer-Khamis
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/206345#.VpiIsvkrLIW
here's the Haaretz story no mention of Fatah involvement
The body of Mohammed Abu al-Hawa, 40, from the East Jerusalem neighborhood of A-Tur, was found in his burned-out car in the West Bank city of Jericho early yesterday morning. Police believe the murder was motivated by Hawa's recent sale of a four-story apartment building to Jews.
Palestinian police handed over Hawa's body to their Israeli counterparts, who transfered it to Tel Aviv's Institute of Forensic Medicine at Abu Kabir for examination.
Relatives of the father of eight said that seven bullets were fired at his head and car before the vehicle was set on fire with Hawa inside.
Palestinian sources said he had also been beaten around the head.
According to Israel Police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld, "It seems to be that he was murdered in connection with the selling of a property to a Jewish buyer."
read more: http://www.haaretz.com/e-jerusalem-man-slain-after-he-sells-building-to-settlers-1.185256
shira
(30,109 posts)You can try to deflect all you want, but I'd imagine you're now all done claiming no Palestinians have been murdered for selling land.
read more: http://www.haaretz.com/e-jerusalem-man-slain-after-he-sells-building-to-settlers-1.185256
There you go - Fatah involvement.
What else do you need?
azurnoir
(45,850 posts)someone from East Jerusalem to Ramallah, murdered him dumped the body and then had their own security forces turn the body over to Israeli authority who merely said tsk tsk -right,
read more: http://www.haaretz.com/e-jerusalem-man-slain-after-he-sells-building-to-settlers-1.185256
Israeli
(4,151 posts)the original charge was .....on suspicion of conspiracy to commit a crime.......which has been changed to .... having contact with foreign agents.
There is a gag order in place now azurnoir so if you want further information it needs to come from outside the country .....
try here : http://www.mintpressnews.com/egypt/212692/
azurnoir
(45,850 posts)It reeks of desperation and over reach IMO
Israeli
(4,151 posts)...notice nobody is talking of this anymore ........
http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1134&pid=121798
azurnoir
(45,850 posts)Breaking the Silence and B'Tselem, we've seen similar in the US, one against ACORN which was a success for the Rightists here and a current one against Planned Parenthood that isn't going quite as well, but organizations are dependent to a large degree on money from our government
azurnoir
(45,850 posts)First, its important to understand who the spies are. Beyond their personal background, Walla news portal reported this week that their organization, Ad Kan is funded partly by the Samaria Settlers Committee. Thats the same group which in 2015 created an eerie youtube ad attacking the foreign funding of left-wing NGOs, replete with Nazi-era anti-Semitic caricatures and a gruesome hanging at the end.
The Committee is also a partially publicly funded organization so Israeli taxpayers are likely paying to send citizens to spy on each other. How much? The Walla reporter didnt know yet. Which is odd, considering how important financial transparency is for the Right.
This highlights the next point, that right-wing activists are turning out contradictions that could also be described as screaming hypocrisies. The arrest and indictment of murder suspects in the Duma case led the Right in Israel to express unprecedented concern for human and civil rights. Torture, it turns out, is a bad thing when right-wing suspects have to endure it.
The spy rings crowning achievement was to capture veteran activist Ezra Nawi boasting that he would turn over a Palestinian land broker to the Palestinian authorities, who he suggests might torture and kill the broker for selling land to Jews. Never has such somber concern been heard for the life of a Palestinian from the Right. Amir, the Ad Kan spy interviewed on Channel 2, spoke with gravitas how their people passed the information to the police. He seemed surprised nothing had happened. Why, I never knew you cared.
http://972mag.com/israels-volunteer-thought-police/115972/
shira
(30,109 posts)azurnoir
(45,850 posts)and Breaking the Silence? What about the settler funding okay with that too?
facts are not deflection
Israeli
(4,151 posts)......" just more deflection " ????
Time to break the silence: An open letter to American Jews
The American Jewish establishment, from the Federations to synagogues, must take a look in the mirror and decide whether this is the Israel it identifies with. If it isnt, it should speak up. Urgently.
Source : http://972mag.com/time-to-break-the-silence-an-open-letter-to-american-jews/115934/