Daniel Klein: Why I left Judaism and The West Bank

 

Daniel Klein was born in Jerusalem in 1991 and raised in a West Bank settlement his family settled before his birth. He grew up deep inside the religious-Zionist world, moving through its institutions, youth movements, schools, yeshiva, and the IDF as a tank commander. He holds degrees in business and law from Reichman University and an MBA from Yale.

After nearly thirty years inside, he began telling the truth about what he witnessed and what he inherited. He writes about ideology, betrayal, accountability, and transformation, and the love, connection, and freedom that become possible when hiding ends.

EXPOSED: Israeli Settlers Attacking Palestinian Families

 

BBC Documentary Reveals SUPREMACIST Ideology of Israeli Settlers

 

 I have a lot of love and respect for Glen.

Israelis 'Flooding' Into Cyprus to 'Buy Anything In Sight'

 

Dimitri Lascaris travels to Cyprus to investigate reports in the Israeli and Cypriot media that Israelis have been 'flooding' into Cyprus and 'buying anything in sight'.

In the course of his investigation, Lascaris visited resorts and other business that quietly cater to an affluent Israeli clientele.

Lascaris also examined the little-discussed fact that the earliest Zionists viewed Cyprus as a stepping stone to the colonization of Palestine.

Ta-Nehisi Coates on Visit to Israel/West Bank: “An Immoral Apartheid Regime”

 

Award-winning journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates says he must confront the truth, no matter how difficult. He is doing exactly that in his new book "The Message," in which he journeys to Senegal, Israel, and the occupied West Bank. The author joins the show to discuss what he found.

Hebron: The Reality of Israeli Settlement in Palestine // Behind The Wall

 

It’s widely known that there are Jewish settlements in Palestinian territory, but very few people know what the lives of people are actually like in these isolated districts.This vlogger traveled to Hebron, a Palestinian city that has Israeli settlements right in the middle of the city itself, and managed to enter a Jewish neighborhood surrounded by barbed wire fences and checkpoints.
he shares what he saw and experienced in this controversial section of Hebron.

East Jerusalem 2011: Sharing our house with Israeli settlers in Sheikh Jarrah

‘A Ghastly Future’? Israeli Apartheid, Biden, Starmer, Assange And Mass Extinction

 

From the excellent Media Lens:

One of the most egregious recent omissions by BBC News was last week’s groundbreaking report by leading Israeli human rights group B’Tselem naming Israel as ‘an apartheid state’ and ‘a regime of Jewish supremacy’:

‘In the entire area between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, the Israeli regime implements laws, practices and state violence designed to cement the supremacy of one group – Jews – over another – Palestinians.’

Apartheid in the Palestinian Territories has long been recognised. For example, in 2004, a prominent South African professor of international law, John Dugard, then UN special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories, wrote that there is ‘an apartheid regime’ in the territories ‘worse than the one that existed in South Africa.’

Noam Chomsky concurred:

‘In the Occupied Territories, what Israel is doing is much worse than apartheid. To call it apartheid is a gift to Israel, at least if by “apartheid” you mean South African-style apartheid.

‘What is happening in the Occupied Territories is much worse. There is a crucial difference. The South African Nationalists needed the black population. That was their workforce…

‘The Israeli relationship to the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories is totally different. They just do not want them. They want them out, or at least in prison.’

All this was damning enough. But the publication of the new B’Tselem report was the first time that Israeli human rights and legal experts had publicly stated that apartheid exists not just in the Occupied Territories, but throughout the whole region that Israel claims for itself.

As the Israel-based British journalist Jonathan Cook observed:

‘By calling Israel an apartheid state and a “regime of Jewish supremacy”, B’Tselem has given the lie to the Israel lobby’s claim – bolstered by a new definition promoted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance – that it is antisemitic to suggest Israel is a “racist endeavour”.

‘B’Tselem, a veteran Israeli Jewish organisation with deep expertise in human rights and international law, has now explicitly declared that Israel is a racist state. Israel’s apologists will now face the much harder task of showing that B’Tselem is antisemitic, along with the Palestinian solidarity activists who cite its work.’

As far as we are aware, there was no mention of the report on any of the flagship BBC News at 6 or 10 television programmes. Nor was there anything to be found on the BBC News website. Presumably, the BBC deemed it unworthy of the public’s attention. We challenged BBC foreign editor Andrew Roy, BBC world affairs editor John Simpson, BBC chief international correspondent Lyse Doucet and BBC digital news editor Stuart Millar for a response. Not one of them replied. It is perhaps significant that Millar moved to the BBC from the Guardian where, as deputy editor of Guardian US, he had scoffed at Julian Assange:

‘I like to think that #Assange chose the Ecuadorean embassy because it’s so convenient for Harrods’

This is the archetypal sneering ‘mainstream’ journalist’s view of anyone who seriously exposes the truth and challenges power.

As for B’Tselem’s landmark report detailing the reality of the Israeli state as an apartheid regime, it is possible that there were sporadic brief mentions in some outlying parts of the BBC. Longtime readers will recall that the BBC infamously buried revelations by Scott Ritter, a former chief UN weapons inspector, that Iraq had been fundamentally disarmed of any weapons of mass destruction, at 3am on the BBC World Service.

In response to the B’Tselem report, John Pilger pointed out via Twitter:

‘Israel is top of the league for vaccinating its own people [against coronavirus]. The accolades say Israel is the “example”. False. Israel is denying the vaccine to Palestinians whose land and lives it controls. WHO has pleaded with Israel: to no avail. Apartheid in action.’

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How Israel is 'cleansing' Palestinians from Greater Jewish Jerusalem

 Israel is putting in place the final pieces of a Greater Jewish Jerusalem that will require “ethnically cleansing” tens of thousands of Palestinians from a city their families have lived and worked in for generations, human rights groups have warned.

The pace of physical and demographic changes in the city has accelerated dramatically since Israel began building a steel and concrete barrier through the city’s Palestinian neighbourhoods more than decade ago, according to the rights groups and Palestinian researchers.

Israel is preparing to cement these changes in law, they note. Two parliamentary bills with widespread backing among government ministers indicate the contours of Jerusalem’s future.

One bill intends to annex to Jerusalem some 150,000 Jews in illegal West Bank settlements surrounding the city. As well as bolstering the city’s Jewish population, the move will give these additional settlers a vote in Jerusalem’s municipal elections, pushing it politically even further to the right.

Full article

The Empire Files: Inside the Hotbeds of Israeli Settler Terror

3 Myths about Israeli Settlements

The Birthright Agenda

I went on a Birthright trip when I was 20. I didn’t know anything about Israel or Palestine, and I kind of wanted to keep it that way rather than delve into what appeared to be an endlessly complicated, exasperating web of politics. I did not want to have an opinion on this; it seemed to be a subject too hopeless to be worth wading through all the controversy. But Birthright didn’t seem particularly political, and it blatantly claims not to be; it’s ten free days of traveling, fun and cultural learning in Israel for Jewish young adults. So many people I knew were coming back from these trips saying that it was the best experience of their lives. How could I say no?

What became abundantly clear – even after experiencing and seeking out so much from the pro-Israel side of things – is that Israel enacts many layers of systemic oppression and human rights violations upon the Palestinian people on a daily basis. There are sometimes violent acts of retaliation from Palestinians – in the form of Hamas rockets, stabbing attacks, all of those things the news publicizes- and these acts of violence are obviously worthy of full condemnation. But unlike what I’d assumed before, this was not a case of two sides with roughly equal power and resources that just hate each other and just hopelessly can’t coexist. In reality, this is one colonial power – a group with large sums of money and resources (largely in the form of $3.5 billion of annual aid from the U.S.) – claiming ownership over a piece of land and ethnically cleansing the population that had been there for, at the very least, many generations prior. Not only are the death tolls(especially civilian death tolls) exponentially higher when it comes to Palestinians killed by Israel than the other way around, but the actual power structure is similarly skewed. This is what the term “Israeli Occupation” refers to. It encompasses genocide, rampant violations of international law, large-scale racism, colonialism and de facto grand apartheid. All of that is the undeniably relevant context in which Birthright trips take place.

Full article

How I became Pro-Palestinian and why it matters

 

I began doing some research and, about a year later, discovered Gideon Levy. Seeing an Israeli eloquently defend Palestinians and criticize Israeli policies and actions made it clear to me that there was not an Israeli and a Palestinian side to this “conflict,” but a right side and a wrong side.

Now I was determined to go see for myself. After a work opportunity appeared and a few months later, I was in Palestine. Like so many visitors, I was simultaneously overwhelmed by the friendliness, hospitality, thoughtfulness and gentleness of the Palestinian people and horrified by the excruciating injustice of their situation.

I was also stunned to see just how much I had been lied to all my life. The gates of Auschwitz were etched in my mind, yet I had never seen the gates, walls, guard towers and barbed wire that now surrounded me. “Bypass roads,” “flying checkpoints,” Kafkaesque permits required for seemingly everything wove a reality of which I had been told nothing. The Settlements looked less like “Little House on the Prairie” than like massive state-sponsored condos.

The infuriating stories every Palestinian had to tell were matched by the stories of foreign aid workers as well as my own observations. The taxi drivers at Ben Gurion (basically the only Israelis I spoke with), oblivious to the reality they drove through daily, spouted ignorance and stereotypes, even as the Palestinian drivers at work educated me on the complexities and nuances of Israeli society.

One of my first realizations was that Israel did not want peace; they wanted the land, and they did not want the local inhabitants. The map of the West Bank in my Palestinian boss’s office read like a death certificate for the two-state solution. The “Peace Process” was all process and no peace. This was a Colonial conquest in full swing, very calculatingly waged to balance attainment of the goal (“Greater Israel”) with dampening of foreign criticism. Furthermore, this was not confined to single administration, but intrinsic to Israeli policy, both Right and Left, going back for decades.

Full Article

Israel’s ultranationalist right: settlers on the march

Sickening American Colonialist's ethnically cleansing Palestine.

Two Different Views On Israeli Settlement In East Jerusalem

Berlin Wall vs Apartheid wall

Hebron Under Siege

Twenty years ago, on 25 February 1994, Baruch Goldstein, an American Jewish settler from Brooklyn, New York, walked into the Ibrahimi Mosque in the Palestinian city of Hebron, in the occupied West Bank.

It was during the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan.

He opened fire, killing 29 Palestinian men and boys and injuring dozens more, before his victims overwhelmed him and beat him to death.

Killer praised as hero

Mohammed Abu al-Halawa, now 53, a survivor who was left paralyzed by Goldstein, told Ma’an News Agency this week, “I remember the massacre at every moment and am physically still affected by it … I’m still in a lot of pain and need regular medical treatment.”

“It pains me whenever I see settlers dancing next to the grave of the criminal who left me disabled.”

For years afterwards, the mass murderer’s grave became “a pilgrimage site” for admirers.

Even recently, Israeli settlers have celebrated Goldstein as a hero, teaching their children to revere him for his murderous act, especially during the Jewish festival of Purim.

Goldstein had lived in the settlement of Kiryat Arba and had been a member of the violent extremist Jewish Defense League, founded by Meir Kahane.

On 6 April 1994, Palestinians carried out the first ever suicide bombing targeting Israeli civilians, killing eight people in the northern town of Afula. Hamas, which claimed responsibility for the bombing, said it was in retaliation for the Hebron massacre.

Punishing Palestinians

In the days immediately after the Hebron massacre, Israeli occupation forces took action not against the settlers but against Palestinians: Israeli forces killed and injured dozens more unarmed Palestinians protesting the massacre across the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

This set the pattern: instead of cracking down on the settlers, Israel escalated its persecution of Palestinians, especially in Hebron, gradually allowing the settlers to take over more of the city.

The Ibrahimi Mosque was forcibly partitioned with settlers being given most of the space – a precedent many Palestinians fear the Israeli occupation will one day try to repeat at Jerusalem’s al-Aqsa Mosque.

In 1997, settlers were rewarded even further for Goldstein’s massacre when the Palestinian Authority agreed to allow the occupation to partition Hebron itself into two zones: “H1” and “H2.”

H1 is nominally administered by the Palestinian Authority and is home to more than 120,000 Palestinians.

H2, under full Israeli military rule, includes Hebron’s historic Old City as well as the Ibrahimi Mosque.

Israeli occupation forces severely restrict the movement of more than 30,000 Palestinians in H2 while Israeli settlers move about freely under army protection.

Since then, settlers have aggressively seized Palestinian properties in the Old City, leaving much of the city center a ghost town.

A 2006 survey by the Israeli rights group B’Tselem found that at least 1,014 Palestinian homes in the Old City of Hebron had been vacated by their occupants and more than 1,800 businesses had shuttered due to the Israeli takeover.

This represented 42 percent of the housing units in the district and more than three-quarters of the businesses.

Hebron still under siege

In the beautifully shot 5-minute documentary above, Hebron Under Siege, Palestinian filmmaker Nizar Abu Zayyad visits some of the residents of old Hebron’s main thoroughfareShuhada Street, shut down by Israeli occupation forces since the massacre.

Zuleekha Mohtaseb’s tells us how the front door of her house, opening onto Shuhada Street, has been welded shut by order of the Israeli army

“We are barred from using the street in any way,” she says.

“To the right and to the left of us, we are surrounded by settlement outposts that harass us constantly.”

Settlers can go where they like and often throw things at Palestinians and curse them.

“You feel you are under house arrest, a prisoner in your own house,” Mohtaseb adds.

“By what right? What right grants him [the settler] freedom of movement and takes it away from me? Is it because I’m Palestinian and he’s Israeli? He is the one coming from the far end of the world and claiming ownership of the land. But I am the one born here.”

Bader Syoori, a businessowner, talks about the economic devastation caused by the closure of Shuhada Street

After the massacre, things changed totally, he explains. Israel closed the area to Palestinian vehicles before it became strictly off limits in 2002.

Samah Brewesh, 15, talked about the daily ordeal and harassment children like her face because of the settlers, while the settlers enjoy every advantage.

“Their children live in luxury, they have a place to play in. In my neighborhood, children have none.”

Abdul Halim Syoori, also a businessowner, says he wishes that things will return to how they once were, “that we live just like we used to in the old days. We work and earn a living for our children.”

Zuleekha Mohtaseb wants to use her front door. “We want the settlers gone,” she says.

Source

Israeli settler attacks on Palestinians quadruple, says UN

Footage of the settlers surrounded by an angry crowd led the TV news in Israel that day, with commentators saying serious bloodshed was averted by Palestinians who shielded the settlers.

Seven Israelis were questioned and placed under house arrest, police said. Israeli defence minister Moshe Yaalon warned he would show zero tolerance, but Palestinians are sceptical.

So far there have been at least two cases of vandalism in apparent response to the Qusra incident. Today residents of a village in the area reported that the door of a mosque was set on fire and graffiti read “Blood for blood, Qusra.”

Settlers have damaged hundreds of trees in Qusra, killed 18 sheep, torched six cars and set fire to a mosque in dozens of attacks, said mayor Abdel Azim Wadi. The village has lost half its lands to settlements.

The mayor said Israeli soldiers either stand by during settler attacks or fire tear gas, rubber bullets and occasionally live rounds at Palestinians if the attacks escalate into stone-throwing clashes. A Qusra man was killed by army fire and dozens were wounded by settlers and soldiers, he said.

Palestinians say “price tag” is part of Israel’s policy of cementing control over the West Bank, the largest of three war-won areas the Palestinians want for a state. They note that Israel has been providing practical support for outposts even though they were set up without formal government permission.

Full article:

Settlement building to ramp up as punishment for UNESCO vote

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the forum of eight senior ministers decided on Tuesday to initiate a new wave of settlement construction in the West Bank. The move is part of a broader set of sanctions against the Palestinian Authority in response to its acceptance as a member of UNESCO Monday.

The announcement was Israel's first real response to the Palestinian application in September for membership in the United Nations.

On Tuesday, the Prime Minister's Office said the construction of 2,000 housing units planned in East Jerusalem, Gush Etzion and Ma'aleh Adumim should be expedited.

"All of the mentioned areas are ones that would remain in Israeli control under any future peace agreement," the PMO said in a statement.

The "forum of eight" also resolved to suspend the transfer to the PA of tax remittances collected by Israel in October. More than NIS 300 million was to have been transferred to the PA before the Id al-Adha holiday, which starts on Sunday evening, to pay the salaries of PA employees.

During Tuesday's meeting Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz and Defense Minister Ehud Barak argues over whether to halt the tax transfers indefinitely. Barak argued that suspending the payments would jeopardize the future of security coordination with the Palestinians in the West Bank, while Steinitz supported the move.

Steinitz said Israel should also cut off its funding to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, as the United States has done. Israel contributes about $2 million a year to UNESCO.

The forum decided to start the process of revoking the VIP status of senior Palestinian officials, which allows them to pass through checkpoints between Israel and the West Bank. The ministers also decided to bar UNESCO missions from Israel and the PA and restrict the agency's activities here.

Nabil Abu Rudeineh, a spokesman for PA President Mahmoud Abbas, said on Tuesday that Israel had decided "to speed up the destruction of the peace process" by accelerating the construction of settlements on land where the Palestinians aim to found an independent state. Abu Rudeineh also described as "inhumane" the decision to suspend tax payments.

After obtaining full membership in UNESCO, the PA will now seek membership in the World Health Organization and 15 smaller UN agencies.

Among the bodies the Palestinians seek to join are the UN's World Intellectual Property Organization, International Telecommunication Union, International Labor Organization and International Atomic Energy Agency. Acceptance to these bodies would be mostly symbolic and have little practical effect for the residents of the West Bank.

The PA was optimistic that France would change its position and support accepting Palestine as a UN member after France voted in favor of accepting Palestine in UNESCO.

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Jewish settlers are terrorising Palestinians, says Israeli general

A senior Israeli army commander has warned that unchecked "Jewish terror" against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank threatens to plunge the territory into another conflict.

In unusually outspoken comments, Major General Avi Mizrahi took aim at extremist Israeli settlers, and said the yeshiva, or religious seminary, in Yitzhar, one of the most radical Jewish strongholds in the West Bank, should be closed, calling it a source of terror against Palestinians.

The general's comments are likely to put him at odds with Israel's pro-settler government, which has resisted US-led efforts to curb settlement expansion in a bid to revive stalled peace talks. The foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, himself lives in a West Bank settlement. All settlements are regarded as illegal under international law.

The army has anxiously watched an upsurge in violence by hardline settlers, who in recent months have set fire to a West Bank mosque, burned Palestinian olive groves, and vandalised Palestinian property. Settlers have killed three Palestinians this year.

"What's happening in the field is terrorism," General Mizrahi told Channel 2's Meet the Press, and it "needs to be dealt with." The Israel Defence Forces (IDF), he said, fears "terrorism against Palestinians is likely to ignite the territories."

The general's criticism points to frustration within the army's high command at their ability to check violent settlers.

Palestinians and Israeli NGOs frequently accuse the army of siding with settlers in conflagrations with Palestinians, prompting the army to respond that it is obliged to protect its citizens and does not set policy.

The number of violent incidents has spiked in recent months, partly because of the murder earlier this year of five members, including three children, from one Jewish family in Itamar, a settlement near Nablus. Two Palestinians were charged with the crime.

Human rights groups suggest that the more radical settlers, many of whom oppose a two-state solution on the premise that the whole of Israel is bequeathed to them by God, are agitating against Palestinian moves to seek statehood recognition at the United Nations in September.

Some fear that the surge in violent attacks against Palestinians could compound rising frustrations with the stalled peace process and trigger more violent riots.

"The army is very afraid that [action by settlers] at a critical moment could set off a Third Intifada," said Adam Keller, spokesman for Israeli human rights body Gush Shalom, referring to a mass Palestinian uprising.

"The fact that the army is nervous is making the settlers more aggressive," he said

The Israeli commander General Mizrahi blamed the courts for failing to rein in the most radical of the settlers – a small proportion of the roughly 500,000 Israeli settlers who are living beyond the Green Line in East Jerusalem and the West Bank.

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