Who else? Ha'aretz op-ed argues against civil rights for Jews

...This conflict is indeed about rights, and too many people think that Jews have none. For hypocritical Ha'aretz writers like Hasson, human rights are not absolute: the only absolute is the minimization of Jewish national and religious rights. Ultimately, that is the crux of the entire anti-Israel argument, that Arab rights are sacred and competing Jewish rights are non-existent in comparison.

Elder of Ziyon..
02 November '14..





Ha'aretz' Nir Hasson is clearly upset that the major argument for giving Jews free access to the Temple Mount is a liberal one:

The success of right-wing activist Yehuda Glick and the Temple Mount movement in recent years stems in part from the change Glick led in the discourse about the Mount. Instead of fiery threats to blow up the mosques and build the Temple, Glick argued the right to worship as a human right. His main point: It is inconceivable for a Jew not to be able to pray at the site most sacred of all to Jews, and that Jews who visit the Temple Mount are considered unwanted guests and are closely scrutinized, prohibited from conduct considered provocative, and first and foremost prohibited from praying.

Glick was wise enough to uncover the absurdity created at the Temple Mount, where people are arrested because they mumbled a prayer, moved to the rhythm of prayer or, perish the thought, knelt at the holy place. Raised awareness of the status quo and Glick’s argument placed no small challenge on the doorstep of spokespeople of the left, who were forced to defend a policy on the Mount that discriminates against people because of their religion – in this case, Jews.

This is terrible! An argument that Jews have rights could undermine everything Ha'aretz stands for!
Naturally, it is incumbent for Ha'aretz readers to know how to counter the argument that Jews have equal rights, and by golly, Hasson will give it his best shot. He enumerates a series of four "talking points" to counter Jewish religious, cultural, civil and human rights:

(Continue)

Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Check-it out!
.

Israel, Jewish civil rights and privatization by Caroline Glick

...Alon's claims deserve scrutiny because they expose just how deeply his political views impede his ability to understand and competently perform his duties. Alon disclosed that the Popular Committee Against the Wall and Settlements is the group behind the riots and the attacks on Israeli civilians and military forces. The group, he revealed, is bankrolled by the Palestinian Authority.

Caroline Glick..
CarolineGlick.com..
21 June '13..

OC Central Command Maj.-Gen. Nitzan Alon has done it again. You may recall that Alon was the "senior military official," who as commander of the Judea and Samaria Division blamed the massacre of the Fogel family in March 2011 on undefined acts of vandalism in Arab villages allegedly carried out by Israelis.

He also told The New York Times that he disagreed with Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's view that Hamas's takeover of Gaza following Israel's withdrawal demonstrated that a unilateral withdrawal from Judea and Samaria would be reckless in the extreme.

Over the past four months Alon has been criticized for his refusal to take actions to end the massive proliferation of terror attacks against Jews in Judea and Samaria. For months Alon ordered IDF soldiers to stand down as Palestinians hurled rocks and firebombs at them and at civilians. He set rules of engagement that are so restrictive that soldiers are better off running away from Palestinian mobs than defending themselves and Israeli civilians.

After Adele Biton, a three-year-old girl, was critically wounded when her mother's car was stoned, and as online videos proliferated of IDF soldiers fleeing from assaults, and of Israeli civilians being beaten and assaulted on the roads with firebombs, rocks and bullets, the media finally began reporting on the terror surge. Public pressure mounted for Alon to finally take action or be fired from his post.

You might think that given public scrutiny of his failures Alon would keep a low profile. But he hasn't.

On Tuesday he spoke to a group of foreign journalists and diplomats and said that in his "professional" opinion, if we don't start negotiations with the Palestinians soon, we are likely to see an escalation of Palestinian terrorism against Israelis.

Alon's claims deserve scrutiny because they expose just how deeply his political views impede his ability to understand and competently perform his duties. Alon disclosed that the Popular Committee Against the Wall and Settlements is the group behind the riots and the attacks on Israeli civilians and military forces. The group, he revealed, is bankrolled by the Palestinian Authority.

According to Alon, out of respect for US Secretary of State John Kerry's attempts to renew peace talks, the PA suspended the group's funding. He explained that this PA decision has led to a steep drop in terror attacks.

Alon said that the PA has kept its funding cutoff - like the funding itself - secret. He attributed the PA's silence to its leaders' modesty and moderation.

In his words, "They weren't looking for diplomatic recognition for the move but rather for the territory to quiet down."

Alon also mentioned that PA security forces are involved in stone and firebomb attacks on Israelis.

CAMERA - A Distorted Comparison

CAMERA Media Analysis
10 July '11

http://www.camera.org/index.asp?x_context=2&x_outlet=55&x_article=2081


CAMERA/Presspectiva Rebuts Yael Sternhell in Ha'artez

In a letter published in Hebrew July 10 in Ha'aretz, Yishai Goldflam, editor-in-chief of Presspectiva, CAMERA's Israeli site, rebuts a July 7 Op-Ed by Yael Sternhell of Hebrew University. (Her Op-Ed appeared in Hebrew and English.) CAMERA's translation of Goldflam's letter follows:

A Distorted Comparison

In response to "Empathy toward the Palestinian side invokes hatred and distrust" (Ha'aretz, July 7) [In Hebrew, "On the correct side of History"]

Yael Sternhell compares the 1960s African American civil rights movement with the Palestinian bid to declare the establishment of a state in September.

This is a distorted comparison detached from reality. The Palestinian movement for self-determination in their own territorial sovereignty is not similar to the African American movement for equal rights within the American sovereignty. Unlike the Palestinians, the American blacks of the 1960s did not have a territorial conflict with the American government. They also did not have an autonomous authority which glorified murderers. They did not hold elections in which the majority voted for a terrorist organization seeking to destroy the United States. They did not shoot missiles at Memphis and did not send suicide bombers to murder families in Mississippi pizzerias.

The correct comparison is with Israeli Arabs. Unlike the blacks of the 1960s, they do have equal rights in the State of Israel.

[With respect to the Palestinians], the conflict is not only territorial, but also has deep religious roots which long precede the "occupation." Unlike in the United States, the conflict here will not be solved by way of marches, speeches, and the release of balloons. Rather, it will be resolved with the emergence of a Palestinian leadership which chooses to lead its people towards a genuine reconciliation with its Israeli neighbors.

Yishai Goldflam

Jerusalem

If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.

.

Do You Want To Help Arabs In The Territory of the Former Mandate of Palestine?

Yisrael Medad
My Right Word
09 January '11


Are you a humanitarian?

Someone who deeply cares about civil liberties, freedoms and rights?

Are you appalled by arbitrary governmental actions, lack of transparency of official procedures, police torture, insufficient legal avenues?

Are you excited by assisting the Arabs residing in the former territory of the Mandate of Palestine?

Well, go to this site (Kippah tip: MH) and learn about

Violations of Human Rights and Public Freedoms for November 2010

and

Violations of Human Rights and Public Freedoms for October 2010

and read the

Fifteenth Annual report on the Status of Human Rights in Palestine during 2009

as well as read

A Legal Review of Provisions on Torture in the Palestinain Legal System, 2009

and you can learn about the

Palestinian Independent Commission for Human Rights.


And none of it about Israel.


If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.
.

To URJ: Israel is not the USA

FresnoZionism.org
29 October 09

News item:

SAN FRANCISCO (JTA) — A newly restructured and slimmed down Union for Reform Judaism will focus on interfaith relations and the rights of Israeli Arabs at its biennial convention Nov. 4-8 in Toronto…

“The union has long held that Israel should live up to its Jewish values and its democratic values for all citizens,” said Rabbi Elliott Kleinman, director of Advancing Reform Judaism, a position created this summer to coordinate Union for Reform Judaism activities worldwide.

With all due respect, this is not an appropriate path for an American Jewish denomination to take.

There’s no doubt that there’s inequality in the treatment of the Arab minority in Israel. The average American, on hearing this, will think: it’s just like our own civil rights struggles. Israeli Arabs are like African-Americans, and the solution is just to force Israel, like Mississippi, to give them their rights.

It is nothing like that. Not at all.

For one thing, some of the perceived differences between Jewish and Arab towns may not be due to discrimination. If a road in an Arab town isn’t paved, is it because the money hasn’t been allocated or because the mayor of the Arab town has different priorities, like projects benefiting members of his own clan?

For another, Canada and Mexico are not populated by hostile cousins of our African-Americans. The US has not recently fought several major and numerous minor wars with them. Mexican and Canadian blacks are not firing rockets into our cites, kidnapping our soldiers or infiltrating our borders to blow us up.

Israeli Arabs are not descended from slaves (unless some of them were slaves of other Muslims), and they had the ability to vote from 1948, before many American blacks did. There was no Reconstruction and counter-Reconstruction, no Jim Crow laws, no segregated buses or lunch counters. There is no tradition of lynching Arabs who look at Jewish women — the lynching that sticks in my mind happened to Jewish reservists. And there is no long history of terrorism by African-Americans.

African-Americans are not demanding that the US change its flag or its national anthem, or that a ‘black caucus’ have a veto power over all acts of Congress. They are not demanding a change in our national identity.

There have been riots by African-Americans in our cities — after the murder of Martin Luther King Jr., after the Rodney King beating, etc. It’s clear where the frustration that led to these riots came from, even if there was a criminal element that may have exploited the chaos.

There have been Arab riots, too. There was a ‘riot’ in 1834 in Tzfat, in which an entire Jewish community was destroyed. Arabs have rioted periodically in response to incitement about the al-Aqsa Mosque. This happened in 1929, when hundreds of Jews were murdered, long before there was an Israel to ‘discriminate’ against them; it happened in 2000 after Yasser Arafat threw Israel’s offer of a sovereign state back in its face; and it happened a couple of weeks ago. The politically correct view is that this happens because Arabs are ‘frustrated’ about being ’second class citizens’, but what they are actually frustrated about is not being in possession of all of Jerusalem (and Israel).

There is plenty of tension between Jews and Arabs in Israel, but it is only to a small extent a question of civil rights. A whole lot of it has to do with a trend for Arab citizens of Israel to more and more identify as ‘Palestinians’, not just alienated from but actively hostile to the Jewish state. Unsurprisingly, the solution does not lie in — why does this seem so familiar? — forcing Israel to accept Arab demands.

It’s incredibly arrogant and insulting when Rabbi Kleinman (above) calls for Israel to “live up to its Jewish values and its democratic values for all citizens,” implying that Israel does not live up to said values.

But what word characterizes liberal American Jews better than ‘arrogant’? The J Street approach, that a bunch of ‘progressive’ American Jews can and should tell the democratically elected government of Israel how it ought to act — during a time that is probably no less perilous than any since 1948 – is an example.

Another is the New Israel Fund, which collects money from well-meaning American Jews and uses it to support groups that are actually working to destroy the Jewish state, also in the name of ‘civil rights’.

Americans — including Jews — don’t understand Israel very well, and insist on applying American paradigms where they don’t fit. How can you discuss the relationship between Jewish and Arab citizens of Israel without considering the context of the Israeli-Arab conflict, or indeed, the 100-year Arab war against Israel?

Lest they make fools of themselves and hurt Israel at the same time, I suggest to the URJ that their people concentrate their efforts on helping poor people and solving social problems here in the USA. That’s enough to keep them busy for years.

.

Poll: 77% of 'Soviet' Olim Support Arab Transfer

Survey conducted by Israel Democracy Institute focuses on integration of immigrants from former Soviet Union into Israeli society after 20 years of aliyah. 2009 Democracy Index finds immigrants tend to be more hawkish, believe less in Israeli democracy, and are much more pessimistic.

Ynet
Israel News
08.03.09

(Other than the title there are a number of interesting points in this poll. As usual one needs to bear in mind what the question is and how it was asked. As the article itself points out, a high percentage of the olim live in the rocket zone of the South. Bet you can guess how they related to security questions, as opposed to non-olim living in the Gush-Dan region.)

The 2009 Democracy Index, published by the Israel Democracy Institute on Sunday, reveals marked differences between the immigrant population from the former Soviet Union and the general population in Israel.

The IDI's 2009 Democracy Index was handed to President Shimon Peres Monday. The survey was carried out in March 2009 on a sample representative of the adult population in Israel of 1,191 respondents. The respondents were interviewed in three languages: Hebrew, Arabic, and Russian. The sampling error is 2.8%.

Around half of the public feel that they are unable to influence government policy, but almost 80% feel that they are able to change things in different frameworks in which they live, work or study. It should be emphasized that among immigrants the sense of influence is the lowest, with more than 40% of them feeling that they have no ability to change things within any of these frameworks.

The Israeli public believes in freedom of expression as a general value, but for the most part refuses to allow harsh criticism to be expressed against the state. 74% support “Freedom of expression for everyone, regardless of their opinions.” However, 58% agree that “political speech should not be permitted to express harsh criticism of the state of Israel.” This is a significant increase as compared to 48% in 2003.

Growing support for denying Arabs' rights

53% of the Jewish public supports encouraging Arabs to emigrate from Israel. 77% of immigrants support this idea, compared with 47% of the veteran public. 33% of veteran Jews are accepting of the inclusion of Arab parties in the government, by comparison with 23% of immigrants.

Only 27% of respondents objected to the statement that there should be “a Jewish majority in decisions relating to the fate of the country,” by comparison with 2003, when 38% objected to this statement. These figures indicate relatively broad support for decreasing the political rights of Israel’s Arab minority.

54% of the general public (Jews and Arabs) agrees that “only citizens who are loyal to the state are entitled to benefit from civil rights” (56% of the veterans, 67% of immigrants and 30% of the Arabs). 38% of the entire Jewish public believe that Jewish citizens should have more rights than non-Jewish citizens (43% of the veterans hold this belief, versus 23% of immigrants). In addition, 41% of veteran Jews are of the opinion that “Israeli Arabs face greater discrimination than Jewish Israelis,” compared to 28% of immigrants holding this view.
(For full article)