Israel calls on the United Nations to take a more balanced approach

(WJC)–In a telephone call, Israel’s Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman has told UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon that Israel expected a more objective and constructive approach from the international community. Ban is to meet with US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton , Middle East Quartet representative Tony Blair and US Middle East envoy George Mitchell in Moscow on  Friday to discuss the stalled Middle East peace process. Ban is also expected to travel to Israel on Saturday.

“We are getting the feeling that all of the effort and positive steps Israel has taken over the last year, including [Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's] Bar-Ilan speech, the settlement freeze and the removal of checkpoints have been taken for granted by the international community,” Lieberman was quoted by ‘Haaretz’ as telling Ban, adding: “There has been no encouragement or incentive toward Israel as a result of these steps, only additional pressure, complaints and demands.”

In a radio interview on Tuesday, Lieberman said any ban on Jewish building in east Jerusalem was unacceptable: “There can’t be a situation where only Jews are prohibited from building in Jerusalem, while Arabs are allowed to both build and buy.”

The European Union’s foreign policy chief, Baroness Catherine Ashton, said in Cairo at the start of her tour of the Middle East that Israel was endangering the chances for talks with the Palestinians. She called all settlements beyond the 1967 Green Line “illegal”. German Chancellor Angela Merkel also strongly criticized Israel’s plan to build 1,600 new houses in east Jerusalem and said this was a “severe backlash” for the peace process.

On Monday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reportedly told a meeting of his Likud Party that construction in east Jerusalem would continue.

On Tuesday, Palestinians staged violent riots against the Israeli plans to build 1,600 new homes in Ramat Shlomo, an outskirt of Jerusalem. Dozens of masked youths pelted Israeli police with rocks and set tyres ablaze across east Jerusalem (see picture

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Israeli study exposes “four basic flaws” of Goldstone report

 

(WJC)–During the war in the Gaza Strip in December 2008 and January 2009, Hamas fighters used children as human shields and also established launching pads in, and near, more than 100 mosques and hospitals, according to a 500-page report released by the Israeli Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center (Malam), a small research group led by a retired IDF officer, Reuven Erlich. The Israel Defense Forces and the Shin Bet secret service cooperated with the report’s authors and declassified hundreds of photographs, videos, prisoner interrogations and Hamas-drawn sketches as part of an effort to counter the criticism leveled against Israel in the Goldstone Report.

Work on the report began immediately after retired South African Judge Richard Goldstone issued his damning report of Israel’s offensive in Gaza in September 2009, according to the ‘Jerusalem Post’. According to the Malam findings, the Goldstone report contains “four basic flaws”: it “does not deal with the nature of Hamas, particularly its terrorist aspects”; it “minimizes the extent and gravity of the terrorist activity carried out against Israel from the Gaza Strip and does not assign responsibility for it to Hamas”; it “does not deal with Hamas’ military buildup in the Gaza Strip during 2007-2008, which threatened Israel (as opposed to its extensive coverage of the historical development of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict)”; and it “completely ignores the massive amounts of aid Iran as well as Hezbollah and Syria (directly or through Hezbollah) gave Hamas to construct its military-terrorist infrastructure.”

“The Goldstone Report is one-sided, biased, selective and deceptive, since it simply accepts Hamas claims at face value and presents everything through Hamas’s eyes,” Erlich was quoted as saying by the newspaper. The Malam report also provides analysis of a sketch found during the offensive in a neighborhood in northern Gaza City that Erlich said proved Hamas’s culpability for the ensuing death and destruction. “By placing all of their weaponry next to homes, by operating out of homes, mosques and hospitals, by firing rockets next to schools and by using human shields, Hamas is the one responsible for the civilian deaths during the operation,” he said.

The Goldstone Report states that its authors “found no evidence that Palestinian combatants mingled with the civilian population with the intention of shielding themselves from attack.”

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The preceding provided by World Jewish Congress

A modest start

By Rabbi Dow Marmur

JERUSALEM– In some parts of Jerusalem, Christians and Jews live within spitting distance from each other; some Jews regard this as an incentive to actually spit on Christians. (Elsewhere, Palestinians and Jews live within a stone’s throw from each other… but that story is for another time, even though it’s acutely topical these days.) When this despicable practice was made public, Jewish religious authorities, including the Ashkenazi chief rabbi, come out strongly against it. The leaders of the Haredi community also condemned it calling it a desecration of God’s name.

But the practice still persists, particularly among young yeshiva students in the Old City and its environs. That’s why Jews and Christians committed to good relations came together the other day to talk about it. We met on the premises of a progressive modern Orthodox congregation to seek ways of stopping the ostensibly pious thugs from trying to humiliate Christians and thus give Judaism a bad name.

What seems to motivate them isn’t theology, whatever that may mean to them, but what they perceive to be history. It’s not because they view Christianity as idolatry, but because they pretend to carry the memories of European forbears about being maltreated by Christians. Now they feel that Jewish sovereignty entitles them to repay the debt. Shocking!

Spitting at a person is a crime in Israel. Though some get away with it by spitting on the ground, others in fact spit at Christians, especially members of religious orders in their habits, and women and men wearing crosses. But when these not infrequent occurrences are reported, normally no charges are laid for reasons that don’t seem clear to the complainants. At least on one occasion, when young Armenian seminarians gave the yeshiva hooligans what they deserved, the police detained the Christians (!) and the authorities are now trying to deport (!) the theology students. 

 The Armenians feel particularly aggrieved. They’ve lived in Jerusalem since the fourth century and feel that they’ve much in common with Jews. What the Jews experienced by the hands of Nazi Germany, the Armenians experienced by the hands of Ottoman Turkey (which, unlike Germany today, Turkey vehemently denies). Like the Jews, Armenians are dispersed all over the world. They, therefore, are deeply hurt when Jews show them contempt instead of sympathy.

Lack of confidence in the police is coupled with frustration in dealing with government agencies. The office that once dealt with religious minorities in the country no longer exists. The municipality of Jerusalem has a person assigned to relate to non-Jewish religious communities, but it’s not quite clear how much authority and clout he actually has.

That’s behind the call at the meeting for ordinary Jerusalemites to get involved in trying to protect adherents of others faiths from abuses by Jews. But it isn’t obvious what such action can achieve. Interfaith relations are very low on most people’s lists of priorities. This means that mass responses cannot be expected. And token gestures aren’t likely to change attitudes.

But they may make some Jews feel better defending Jewish values and showing esteem for all genuine believers. It may not be much, but it’s a start, albeit a modest one.

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Rabbi Marmur is spiritual leader emeritus of Holy Blossom Temple in Toronto.  He divides his year between Canada and Israel.

Egypt cancels ceremony at Cairo synagogue, blaming Jews and Israel

CAIRO–The Egyptian government cancelled the official inauguration ceremony for the restored Maimonides Synagogue in Cairo in response to what it called “provocative actions” by Jews in Cairo last week and restrictions placed on Muslim worshippers at the al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem by Israeli authorities. The head of Egypt’s Antiquities Department, Zahi Hawass, and Culture Minister Faruq Hosni had been due to attend the event on Sunday, following the re-dedication ceremony attended a week ago by 150 people, including rabbis and the US and Israeli ambassadors, but not by Egyptian officials.

Citing press reports, Zahi Hawass said that the cancellation of the official opening event came after “provocative” acts during the ceremony held in Cairo’s ancient Jewish quarter last week. He referred to “dancing and drinking alcohol in the synagogue, as reported by several newspapers,” and said such acts “were seen to provoke the feelings of millions of Muslims in Egypt and across the world.” Although the consumption of alcohol is banned in Islam, it is not unusual among Egyptian Muslims to drink it in bars and nightclubs across Cairo.

The decision was also taken at “a time when Muslim holy sites in occupied Palestine face assaults from Israeli occupation forces and settlers,” Zahi Hawass said. He was referring to clashes at Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa mosque, on Temple Mount, and plans to include two holy shrines in the West Bank on a list of Israeli heritage sites. Zahi Hawass said that Egypt respectsed its Jewish monuments, “the opposite of what Israel is doing in Jerusalem with Muslim monuments.”

He added that Egypt took an interest in “all Islamic, Coptic and Jewish antiquities on its territory,” because all were part of the country’s heritage. “These projects are overseen by the Supreme Council of Antiquities without funds from abroad or from foreigners or Jews.”

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The preceding provided by World Jewish Congress.

US Congressmen rebuke Obama administration for stark criticism of Israel

WASHINGTON, D.C.–The sharp criticism by the Obama administration of Israel’s announcement to build 1,600 new housing units in east Jerusalem has been rebuked by a number of US senators from both the Democratic and the Republican parties. Senator John McCain of Arizona, who lost against Barack Obama in the 2008 presidential election, said: “It might be well if our friends in the administration and other places in the United States could start refocusing our efforts on the peace process. Now we have had our spat. We have had our family fight, and it is time for us now to stop and get our eye back on the goal, which is the commencement of the Israeli-Palestinian peace talks.”

McCain and the independent senator from Connecticut, Joe Lieberman, both urged the administration to ease the tone of the dispute, which they said was demonstrating disunity and weakness to steadfast allies of Iran. “It is unnecessary; it is destructive of our shared national interest. It is time to lower voices, to get over the family feud between the US and Israel. It just doesn’t serve anybody’s interests but our enemies.

Congressman Eric Cantor, the number two Republican in the House of Representatives, declared: “To say that I am deeply concerned with the irresponsible comments that the White House, vice president and the secretary of state have made against Israel is an understatement. In an effort to ingratiate our country with the Arab world, this administration has shown a troubling eagerness to undercut our allies and friends.”

On Friday, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had upbraided Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a telephone call for the housing announcement, and White House officials have since repeated the criticism in public. “It is hard to see how spending a weekend condemning Israel for a zoning decision in its capital city amounts to a positive step towards peace,” Senator Sam Brownback, a Republican from Kansas, was quoted by AP as saying.

US Middle East envoy George Mitchell has reportedly delayed his departure to the region, where he is scheduled to hold separate talks with Israeli and Palestinian leaders. The State Department on Monday said it was still awaiting a formal response from Israel to Clinton’s call and, while repeating elements of the criticism, stressed that the US commitment to Israel’s security remained “unshakable.”

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The preceding provided by World Jewish Congress.

May this Passover be more peaceful than that one

By Ira Sharkansky

JERUSALEM–The dust has not settled from the Biden-Ramat Shlomo incident.

Early signs are that the Israeli government is not complying with American demands. There has been no cancellation of the planning decision to build 1,600 new apartments in the Ramat Shlomo neighborhood, and the prime minister has reiterated his intention of continuing to build in neighborhoods throughout the city. Most of the vacant land is in the neighborhoods that the Obama administration considers to be non-Kosher, but new planning approvals and building continue.

Special Envoy George Mitchell has delayed a visit meant to promote the start of negotiations. While Americans may see that as a sanction or a warning to Israel, it may also be viewed as an American surrender to Middle Eastern realities. Insofar as the White House was standing against the expectations or desire of both Israelis and Palestinians, perhaps its people have come to realize that there is not much point at beating a dead horse.
 
Israel’s lack of enthusiasm for negotiations is well known. The Palestinians’ can be inferred from their insistence on conditions they know Israel would not accept, as well as from the reality of a Palestine divided between Fatah and Hamas, West Bank vs Gaza, with the Fatah regime hanging on only with Israeli, Jordanian, and American help, more than a year beyond the end of its term, with no election in sight.

What we are seeing is the result of several violations of the political norms that demand moderation.

Israel went a step too far in announcing construction as a greeting for the Vice President. The White House earlier went a step too far in demanding a construction freeze in Jewish neighborhoods of Jerusalem. It now may again be going a step too far by demanding a cancellation of the planning for Ramat Shlomo, as well as other steps, to build confidence, that Israel had earlier rejected. Israel went a step too far by including Rachel’s Tomb and the Cave of the Patriarchs on a list of national heritage sites. Palestinians and other Muslims went a step too far by calling for demonstrations against what they called an insult to their religion, overlooking that Jews also have claims  to those places, and that nothing in the declaration about Israel’s heritage sites threatened Muslim rights. Now Palestinians and other Muslims are going another step too far by protesting the resanctification of a historic synagogue in the Jewish Quarter of the Old City which Jordanians had destroyed.

The White House does not monopolize American media or public opinion. Several commentators have accused the president and his advisers of going a step too far. Prominent among them is an editorial in the Wall Street Journal that contrasts the administration’s shrillness toward Israel with its softness on Iran and Syria. http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3862914,00.html
 
There is tinder afoot. The Passover holiday is only two weeks away. It is a time for Jews to come to Jerusalem and visit the Old City. Two thousand years ago it was the occasion when Jesus went a step too far when he challenged Jewish and Roman authorities in the same season. Josephus describes mass pilgrimages that entailed sacrifices of a quarter million birds and animals on the altars of the Temple. It was not a time for proclaiming ideas that would unsettle all those people crowded together in a context of religious fervor.

Palestinian and other Muslim leaders are inciting their communities with the claim that the consecration of the synagogue is a step in the direction of destroying their holy mosques and building a Jewish Temple on their site. Their justification, for what it is worth, is that a fringe element, more nationalistic than religious, has proclaimed an “International Temple Mount Awareness Day”, in order to celebrate their plans to build a Temple. For the nth time, Israeli authorities have rejected their application to lay a cornerstone, and prominent rabbis have repeated their theological prohibition against Jews visiting the Temple Mount.

Hopefully the dust will settle, with outcomes less profound than on another Jerusalem Passover all those years ago.

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Sharkansky is professor emeritus of political science at Hebrew University.

German court to decide on declassification of Eichmann files

(WJC)–Germany’s Federal Court of Justice has been asked by a journalist to decide whether 4,500 pages of secret documents relating to Nazi criminal Adolf Eichmann’s escape to Argentina and his capture there by Mossad agents in 1960 should be declassified. Campaigners believe the Eichmann files may prove German and Vatican officials colluded in his escape from Europe after World War II, according to the British Daily Mail.

According to the newspaper, the BND, Germany’s foreign intelligence service, wants the documents to remain out of the public domain. Journalist Gabriele Weber is challenging the secrecy order before the Federal Court of Justice. The BND maintains that secrecy is necessary because “much of the information contained in the files was provided by an unnamed foreign intelligence service” and would, if released, damage the BND’s future cooperation with other intelligence agencies, the Daily Mail reports.

Critics suspect that the files could reveal that officials provided Eichmann and other senior figures of the Nazi regime assistance in fleeing to South America after Germany was defeated by Allied forces in 1945.

The SS officer Adolf Eichmann was one of the chief architects of the Nazis’ ‘Final Solution of the Jewish question’ and in charge of facilitating and managing the logistics of mass deportation of Jews to the ghettos and death camps. After the war, he fled to Argentina  using a laissez-passer issued by the International Red Cross and lived there under a false identity working for the German car manufacturer Mercedes. He was captured by Mossad operatives in 1960 and tried in Israel on charges of crimes against humanity and war crimes. Eichmann was executed in Jerusalem in 1962.

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Preceding provided by World Jewish Congress

Corrie trial brings more inconsistencies

By Judy Lash-Balint

JERUSALEM–A news release from the Corrie family after yesterday’s (Sunday’s) court session in Haifa notes testimony that Rachel Corrie “arrived dead at the hospital.”

If she was already dead, why were doctors at An Najah Hospital “treating” her ?

 Here’s the caption from the ISM: Rachel in Najjar hostpital, Rafah, Occupied Gaza. Rachel arrived in the emergency room at 5:05PM and doctors scrambled to save her. By 5:20PM, she was gone. Ha’aretz newspaper reported that Dr. Ali Musa, a doctor at Al-Najjar, stated that the cause of death was “skull and chest fractures”. (Mohammad Al-Moghair)

As I have reported before, ISM Media Coordinator in 2003, Michael Shaik stated definitively both to me and in other media:” An ambulance rushed her to A-Najar hospital where she died.”

So–let’s get this straight. Your daughter repeatedly kneels in front of an Israeli military bulldozer on a demolition mission; she gets injured and taken to an Arab hospital where doctors testify that she’s dead but make a show of treating her anyway and have a propaganda field day with their new martyr.

 So, whom do you sue? Why, the Israelis–of course!

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Balint is a freelance writer and author based in Jerusalem

Jewish nationalists urge Israeli model not to marry Leonardo Di Caprio

 

(WJC)–Members of a Jewish ultra-nationalist group have urged the Israeli model Bar Refaeli not to marry her non-Jewish boyfriend, the American actor Leonardo DiCaprio. “Your grandmother and her grandmother did not dream that one of their descendants would one day remove the family’s future generations from the Jewish people,” Baruch Marzel wrote in a letter on behalf of the Lehava organization, which is dedicated to preventing assimilation. “Assimilation has forever been one of the enemies of the Jewish people,” Marzel writes, adding: “Come to your senses, look forward and back too – and not only the present. Don’t marry Leonardo DiCaprio, don’t harm the future generations.”

The call comes after DiCaprio hinted in interviews earlier this month he was thinking of getting married and starting a family. Refaeli recently denied rumors that she was engaged to the actor after wearing a ring on her ring finger.

The model was born in 1985 to an Israeli Jewish family in Hod HaSharon. In 2007, she caused some controversy when it became known that she had married a family acquaintance and divorced him soon after in order to avoid military service  in the Israel Defense Forces.

According to the ‘Jewish Chronicle’, Marzel has a record of violence in Israel, including assaults on a Palestinian, an Israeli police officer and the journalist Uri Avnery. He has also declared “holy war” against homosexuals in Israel..

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Preceding provided by World Jewish Congress

Holocaust memorial near Krakow desecrated by vandals

 

KRAKOW, Poland–Anti-Semitic graffiti has been sprayed on monuments at the site of the former Nazi concentration camp of Plaszow, near the city of Krakow. Slogans including “Hitler Good!” were found in red paint on a large monument at the former Nazi camp. A smaller memorial plaque was also painted with a swastika and “Jude Raus.” The desecration happened on the eve of a march commemorating the 67th anniversary of the liquidation of the Krakow Jewish ghetto in World War II. According to the Polish press agency PAP, police have launched an investigation.

“This is a disgrace not only to all Jews but also to the Just Poles who risked their lives to save them,” Zvi Rav-Ner, Israel’s ambassador to Poland, told the 1,000 people who gathered at the site a day after the desecration.

On 13 March 1945, a German SS operation targeted Krakow’s Jewish quarter. About 8,000 people were transferred to the Krakow labor camp and around 2,000 killed on the streets, or taken to the nearby Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp. The Plaszow camp featured in Steven Spielberg’s 1993 award-winning film ‘Schindler’s List’, which chronicled efforts by German businessman Oskar Schindler to save Jews by having them work in his Krakow factory.

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The preceding provided by World Jewish Congress.