http://972mag.com/israeli-memes-mock-netanyahus-hitler-revisionism/113028/


Netanyahu claimed yesterday that the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem was responsible for convincing Hitler to exterminate the Jews. Israelis and Palestinians are not letting him get off that easy.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke to the World Zionist Congress in Jerusalem Tuesday afternoon, where he claimed that until he was convinced by the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Hitler never actually planned on exterminating European Jewry.

According to Netanyahu’s curious reading of history, Hitler had only intended to expel the Jews, a plan that allegedly worried the Mufti, who was concerned that they would flee Europe for Palestine. Thus the Mufti hatched a new plan — one the Nazis had yet to come up with themselves: “Burn them.”

But Netanyahu didn’t get off so easy. Despite trying his best to backpedal on Wednesday, the prime minister’s words caused an uproar, prompting both the Israeli opposition as well as Holocaust historians to condemn his remarks. Average Israelis and Palestinians did not hold back, taking to social media to mock Netanyahu’s comments. Here are a few of my personal favorites:

http://www.maannews.com/Content.aspx?id=768363

TUBAS (Ma'an) -- Israeli forces on Tuesday delivered demolition orders to two Palestinian families in the northern Jordan Valley, notifying them that their tin shacks and tents would be destroyed in less than a month.

Local sources said the structures belonged to the families of Lutfi Muhammad Bani Audah and Muhammad Ali Bisharat and would be destroyed on Nov. 8.
---
As a result of rarely-approved permits, Palestinians are often forced to build structures without permits, which are liable to be torn down later by Israeli forces.

Last year Israel demolished 601 Palestinian-owned structures, displacing 1,215 people.

The video also shows a small number of policemen and civilians trying to stop the mob from further harming Zarhum. But their efforts were unsuccessful. At one point a man walks through the loose ring they’d formed around Zarhum, who was writhing in pain, and casually kicks his head like a soccer ball as he passes the already bloody and battered asylum seeker.

When medical personnel arrived, a crowd that was chanting “Death to Arabs” tried to prevent them from reaching Zarhum. The medics first treated the wounded Jewish Israelis. The asylum seeker was reportedly the last to receive help.

Zarhum later died of his injuries. Police on Tuesday said they were waiting to charge anybody in the death until an autopsy clarified whether the gunshot or the beatings caused his death.

Israeli media quickly labeled the incident a “lynch.” Yedioth Ahronoth, Israel’s top-selling daily newspaper, ran a photograph of Zarhum lying in his own blood and trying to protect his head, on the front page of Monday’s paper with the caption “A terrible mistake.” The article inside the paper was titled: “Just because of his skin color.”

What is going on today in Israel/Palestine is the unraveling of the original social contract, given that the Israeli Leviathan can no longer fulfill its task of maintaining internal stability through the denial of human rights and through unlimited violence channeled outwards in the direction of Palestinian people.

Everything is unfolding following the scenario foreseen by Hobbes in early modernity: each citizen reclaims for her- or himself the right to exercise force, which has previously been entrusted to the political state. Nir Barkat’s appeal to the Jewish residents of Jerusalem to carry firearms with them at all times; the simplification of Israeli gun licensing laws; the rush by civilians to purchase new weapons—all of these are telltale signs of a return to the Hobbesian state of nature, where no one is safe. (Think of the Jewish Israeli recently stabbed by his fellow citizen, who confused him for a Palestinian enemy.) The crowds chanting on a daily basis “Death to the Arabs!” and the lynch mob that, yesterday, executed an Eritrean migrant on the suspicion that he was involved in an attack on the central bus station in Beer Sheva are still more obvious expressions of the state of nature uncovered beneath the thin veneer of political state.

Above all, the narrative of democratic Israel as an orderly exception amidst the chaos of the Middle East has been exposed for what it is, namely a relatively short-lived fiction. That fantasy was plausible to the extent that a violent repression of Palestinian people produced the desired calm within the Israeli polity. However, once a small portion of that violence ricocheted and the sense of security was lost, sovereignty passed from the militarized state apparatus to the increasingly militarized civil society, less and less distinguishable from the a-civil state of nature.

As a post-scriptum to these brief reflections, I would like to add the idea that occupation and violence inflicted on others cannot be sequestered indefinitely; sooner or later, they affect and consume the occupying and violent self. An exception to the general state of emergency is bound for dilution in the prevailing chaos that surrounds it. The occupying mind cannot help but become an occupied mentality, which, in concrete (also in the literal sense of the word) terms, means that separation from the neighboring other is the segregation, enclosure, and ghettoization of the self. The construction of separation barriers is happening at an alarmingly fast pace not only in Israel/Palestine, where Jerusalem is effectively being divided by the Israeli authorities, but also in Central and Eastern Europe, as well as between the United States and Mexico. Yet, it is in Israel alone that this process is accompanied by an equally speedy collapse of civil society. Pity that the Israelis have not understood a simple fact: the biggest threat hurled in their direction comes from themselves.

A new international network of Jewish groups and individuals committed to justice in Palestine released a statement over the weekend calling for an end to the killing and an end the occupation. The network, which first met over the summer and has yet to come up with a name, currently spans 16 countries — from Brazil, to Australia, to Switzerland and South Africa — and represents 15 organizations.

According to the preface to their statement, the group seeks to “reclaim Jewish identity not as a nationalist identity but as one that celebrates our diverse roots, traditions & communities wherever we are around the world. We believe that it is essential for there to be a global Jewish voice to challenge Israel’s destructive policies, in solidarity with the Palestinian struggle. This international Jewish network aims to become that voice.”

Forty Palestinians and eight Israelis have been killed since the beginning of the month. There have been over two dozen stabbing attacks against Israelis across Israel and the West Bank, with around 100 Israelis and well over 1,000 Palestinians wounded, many of them by live fire.

In times of heightened violence, specifically against Israelis, Jewish organizations and individuals around the world tend to either show support for Israel or stay silent. It is taboo to criticize Israel when there are terror attacks against Israeli citizens, as was clear during the Second Intifada. But that is precisely when it is most necessary. To both identify as Jewish and show a deep concern for what is going on in Israel while criticizing its policies is rare, making this letter is so important.

Jeff Halper grew up in the 1960s, and as a 60s radical he knew there was “a problem with Israel and the Palestinians”. So deciding to take up his Jewish ‘Right of Return’ in the early 1970s and become an Israeli was hardly the most obvious life choice. “I wanted to go to a place where I could be politically active,” Halper explained as we talked at the Greenbelt Festival in Kettering, England at the end of August. “I wanted to be in a country where I would have a voice”. Activism turns out to be Halper’s defining characteristic.

In the early 1970s Jeff Halper didn’t call himself a Zionist despite his decision to make his home in the Jewish State. Today he’s quite clear where he stands, “I’m an anti-Zionist”.

That “anti-Zionism” has expressed itself in the last 18 years through his work as Director of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions which he co-founded in 1997. Since 1967, 48,488 Palestinian homes and other buildings have been demolished by the Israeli authorities, 450 so far during 2015. This is not an exercise in collective punishment for alleged terrorist activities, but rather the playing out of a policy that makes home building for Palestinians almost impossible in Area C of the West Bank but remarkably straightforward if you are a Jewish Settler. ICAHD has chosen to focus its educational and campaigning work on an issue that makes plain Israel’s strategy for the West Bank.

Not every activist gets to coin a phrase that encapsulates their cause and then enters the lexicon of the conflict. Halper has achieved exactly that with his ‘Matrix of Control’.

The noose is tightened by the actions of the Israeli military and police. Averaged out, Israel has killed over 10 Palestinians per week over the past 15 years, according to statistics compiled by B’Tselem. Granted, some of these Palestinians were engaged in violently resisting the Israeli occupation, but the vast majority were not. Who among us wouldn’t be angry if they heard three of their neighbors were murdered when their house was firebombed, or to see entire neighborhoods of your country decimated?

And this is further exacerbated by the presence of armed settlers who are protected by the Israeli military and police, even while committing violent crimes. This double standard that exists in relation to breaking the peace, and even the law, is stifling. There is little doubt that if a band of Palestinians walked up to an Israeli settlement and set fire to its fields that Israeli forces would open fire on them. It took only a couple of days for Israeli forces to arrest suspects in the killing of the couple in their car a few weeks ago. But what about justice for the Palestinian family that was burnt alive? How many times have Israeli settlers attacked Palestinian villagers while Israeli soldiers stood in their midst and the moment the Palestinians come out to defend their village, they are fired upon by soldier and settler alike. And now, even a mere accusation of attempting a stabbing is enough to get a Palestinian killed, even without evidence of a knife.

So if the Israeli cabinet is looking for someone or something to blame, blame the occupation. Blame the double standards. Blame the military and paramilitary forces that have no connection to any semblance of a moral compass. And then, instead of bombing, perhaps now might be a good time to make amends. Because the desperation among Palestinians is only going to increase. And as we have seen from the past three weeks, there are many who just can’t take it anymore.

(HRC quote transcribed from pic)

“I am alarmed by the recent wave of attacks against Israelis, including more than a dozen separate attacks since last Saturday. My thoughts and prayers are with the victims and their families. Men and women living in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and elsewhere cannot carry groceries or travel to prayer without looking over their shoulder. It is wrong, and it must stop. There's no place for violence--only dialogue can produce a lasting peace.”

By stalling while deepening the occupation, successive Israeli leaders — of whom Netanyahu is only the most recent — have dragged Israelis and Palestinians into a dance of death.


The terminology one applies to this latest spike in violence is academic. It also distracts from the underlying and fundamental issue: that successive Israeli leaders have, like the knight in The Seventh Seal, tried to cheat the inevitable, which in this case is the end of the occupation. Israeli leaders continuously choose the path of dodging fate, notching up one Pyrrhic victory after another over the Palestinians in an attempt to buy a little more time, seize a little more land, and shore up a little more political support.

For the time being — as my colleague Noam Sheizaf recently wrote on this site — Israel still holds the tools to end the occupation with a degree of control over the matter. And it will and must end; such a combustible situation, in which millions of Palestinians are bottled up and subject to the one-two of both random and structural violence that military occupation brings, cannot continue indefinitely.

Flare-ups such as the current “wave of violence” (which is only the “latest round” for Israelis — arbitrary lethal violence is a daily fact of life for Palestinians under occupation and siege) may act as a valve to temporarily release pressure. Ultimately, however, a meltdown is unavoidable. If the recalcitrance of the Israeli leadership — of whom Benjamin Netanyahu is simply the latest, and probably worst, incarnation — continues, the occupation will be ended on Israel’s behalf. The unpredictability of such a process does not need spelling out and risks coming at a price greater than anything we have witnessed until now.

GAZA CITY (Ma’an) -- A doll and a few toys were the only belongings left by two-year-old Rahaf Hassan when she was killed along with her 25-year-old pregnant mother in an Israeli airstrike in southern Gaza City on Sunday.

Shortly before the attack, Rahaf and her mother had been safe in their family home, which lies among olive groves in an agricultural area, seemingly far from any military presence.

Israel claims that the house lay close to a military base used by Palestinian resistance fighters, justifying a missile fired by an M16 Israeli fighter jet that in the early hours of Sunday brought the house crashing down.

The family was trapped among the rubble, Rahaf's father, Yahya, told Ma'an, and his two-year-old daughter screamed for him in the hope he would hurry to pull her out.