The IDF clarifies that instead of removing an illegal outpost, it prefers to defend it – and Palestinian farmers pay the price.

By Yesh Din, written by Yossi Gurvitz

In January 2001, as most of us were busy with the events of the Second Intifada, several outlaws built the Tapuach Ma’arav outpost in the West Bank. The outpost is about two kilometers away from the settlement of Kfar Tapuach, famous mostly because it was created by the supporters of Rabbi Meir Kahane, and also provided refuge (Hebrew) for the murderer Eden Nathan-Zada, who in 2005 killed four Israeli Palestinians in an attempt to halt the Gaza Disengagement Plan.

Tapuach Ma’arav was partly built on the lands of the village of Yassuf, and as an outpost its logical purpose is to prevent the access of Palestinians to their lands, so that later – through manipulation of the land laws – they can be dispossessed of their property. We examined this method in our report about the outpost of Adei Adi. As part of their dispossession attempt, the settlers erected an earth rampart blocking the road leading the farmers to their lands.

Yesh Din is assisting the villagers in their appeal to the Israeli High Cout of Justice, filed in December 2010. In response, the state announced its intention to change the situation on the ground, and lo and behold, it has. Instead of the piratical roadblock built by the settlers, the state installed – Israeli readers take note: this was done with your tax money – a massive steel gate, which is a much more effective barrier between the Palestinians and their lands. From now on, the army decided, Palestinians who want to work their lands will have to receive a permit in advance. So, if prior to the army’s involvement the Palestinians had their rights denied by settlers, now this denial is official policy of the sovereign forces — the Israeli army.

It’s important to note that Israel’s armed forces – whether they take their orders from the local military commander or from the Civil Administration – do not deny that Tapuach Ma’arav is...

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Anyone who’s been to a checkpoint or a protest in the West Bank knows how arbitrary military rule can be. For the activist on the ground, some specific knowledge of the occupation’s byzantine legal framework can make a real difference.

By Raghad Jaraisy

Youtube is rife with videos of daily life in the West Bank – home demolitions, violent suppression of protests, unchecked settler violence, arbitrary arrests, etc.  But this video, from the organization Ta’ayush, is a little different. If other videos play out like action films, this one is more of a drama. No fisticuffs, no bulldozers, no tear gas or rubber bullets. It’s just talking. The army personnel barely even raise their voices. So what’s happening in this video?

A soldier walks up to a group of activists and tells them they are in a closed military zone. An activist asks, “Who issued the order?” and the commanding officer answers, “the general.”

“The general?”

“My mistake,” says the commanding officer, “it was the brigade commander. There’s an order-”

“I’d like to photograph the order.”

“You can’t photograph the order. You can see the order.” The commander then tells the group they have five minutes to leave the area because it’s a closed military zone. The activists ask to see the order, and the officer shows it to them (and us). It’s signed by “Dan.”

“Who’s Dan?” the activist asks.

“I signed [it].”

“You signed [it]? You’re job is… a captain?”

“Yes.”

“Dan what?”

“Dan.”

“That’s your name?”

“That’s the name.”

Captain Dan shows the activists the map, but only for a few seconds and doesn’t really give anyone an opportunity to understand where exactly the area becomes a closed military zone.

“Do you know the order is illegal?” the activist asks.

“There’s an order.”

“Do you know it contravenes the directive of the Military Legal Advisor?”

By now Dan and the other soldiers are walking away. “Do you know the directive of the Military Legal Advisor? Let me read it to you. The soldiers walk further into the distance. They pause for a second when the activist calls them lawbreakers, and then continue on. The video...

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A profile of one of the most influential people in the struggle for social justice in Israel. Although he was kept out of academia, perhaps it was for the better. Who knows how much we would have lost had he wasted his days trying to sneak an article into the American Journal of Sociology.

By Yossi Dahan (Translated from Hebrew by Aviel Lewis, edited by: Ami Asher)

My first encounter with the name Shlomo Swirski was in the early 1980s as a student reading his book, Not Backward but Made Backward (1981). The rumor about the underground, green-covered book travelled by mouth among Mizrahi student activists. For many of us, reading the book was a formative event, a shaking intellectual, emotional and political experience which led to a political and perceptual turning point. After reading the book, Israeli society looked totally different. Shlomo’s class-oriented accounts of the Mizrahim’s socioeconomic status, the oppressive and exploitative relations that characterised their assimilation by the Ashkenazi establishment, and the idea they were not backward but made backward, coincided with our own and our families’ experiences of exclusion, marginalization and injustice. The clear and sharp picture Shlomo depicted matched raw, dim, and powerful intuitions we did not have the ability or tools to express at the time. Life experiences and feelings which were in striking contrast to the sociological explanations we heard in lectures, the academic texts we read, and the conventional established wisdom that explained and justified the Mizrahi Jews’ inferior status in Israeli society – by the cultural gaps between the traditional societies our families had originated from and the modern Israeli society they joined. The traditional society with its anti-modern culture, which was responsible for the Mizrahim’s corrupt values and limited rationality.

Not Backward but Made Backward gave our objection to the unequal reality, and the problematic and insulting explanations justifying it, a clear and sharp map for deciphering Israeli society, as well as an action plan for combatting injustice. It instilled confidence that the claims regarding ethnic inequality which were viewed with such contempt were not due to the speaker’s troubled personality, nor to the Mizrahim’s natural tendency to grumble, that it is not the case of an inferiority complex disguised as political demands, but rather legitimate demands rooted in values of universal justice. For the students and activists of the time, the book became a weapon loaded with arguments for instant...

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For an Israeli who has only known occupied, subdued and desperate Middle Eastern cities, there is something exciting about rediscovering the cultural world of a confident, proud Levant, cognizant of its traditions and histories.

By Amos Noy / Café Gibraltar (translated by Matan Kaminer)

To ‘Amar, with fond remembrance.

Between the demand for “authenticity,” which, while conscious of itself, is impossible (and has something petty and repressive about it), and the option of assimilation, or “self-effacing imitation” – one form of cultural oppression (which is, of course, a form of political oppression) – there is also third option: cultural sovereignty.

I imagine that many visitors to cities such as Istanbul and Cairo have experienced, like me, the wonder that grows into a sort of joy at encountering a confident, proud city of the Levant, cognizant of its traditions and working within them. For an Israeli (that is, for me) who has only known occupied, subdued, desperate Middle Eastern cities and impoverished ghost towns sadly longing to be transported to the American Midwest, there is something about this experience – about the naturalness, the self-respect, the self-evidence of a language, music and poetry which have been denigrated by the dominant culture under which we have grown up – something exciting about the rediscovery of a cultural world, as well as of a hidden personal level, obscured, denied, deep within. A sensation of sovereignty.

Umm Kulthum performs “Enta El-Hobb”:

Or: sitting in an Algerian (Kabyle) bar in Paris, in a diverse, cosmopolitan space which is not the product of a flattening globalization, but that of a multicolored counterculture of “others.” There is solidarity between immigrants, where the soundtrack features Idir, Billie Holiday, Salif Keita, Janis Joplin, Anouar Brahem, Ilham Al-Madfai, Misia, Paco Ibañez doing Brassens and Rachid Taha covering The Clash, until it ends in tears when Umm Kulthum’s “Enta El-Hobb” (“You are the Love”) comes on. Not because we are at a conference on multiculturalism at the Tel Aviv Cinematheque or watching some gluttonous “Taverna” TV show [1], and not as part of a world-embracing declaration or a polemical demonstration or a damning statement, but just so – for no reason. Because that’s what...

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More worrying than the institutional instruments that enable censorship are the multiple forms of self-censorship that are deeply ingrained in the journalistic practices and conventions of Israeli media.

By Ido Liven

As the Hebrew proverb goes, “be a tail among lions rather than a head among foxes.” In Freedom House’s latest report, Israel’s state of press freedom demonstrates just that. In the organization’s 2012 report, Israel scored 30 on a scale of 10 to 97, putting its press freedom status at the bottom of the better “free” category. In the 2013 report, released on May 1, the country lost one point, enough to downgrade it to the top of the next lower category of “partly free,” together with Chile, Namibia and South Korea.

Several recent developments have rattled the country’s press freedom status, and have helped to raise important questions regarding both institutional censorship and self-censorship.

At least in the legal sense, Israel’s relationship with the press would seem to put it at odds with other modern democracies. 65 years since its establishment, Israel has never put into law either freedom of expression or freedom of the press. Moreover, a Press Ordinance, inherited from the pre-state days, stipulates that newspapers and their chief editors require a license, and even empowers the state to shut down publications at its discretion. A number of new laws and bills – such as an anti-boycott law, and a proposed amendment to the libel law – have been called a further threat to freedom of expression and the press.

***

Internationally, Israel is known as a major news hotspot, but those reporting from the country, predominantly on the longstanding Israeli-Palestinian conflict, are at times restricted. Press freedom and human rights advocates often point to Israel’s conduct in the occupied Palestinian territories as inhibiting journalists – Palestinian and international alike – from operating freely. Moreover, Palestinian groups as well as the Foreign Press Association have accused the Israeli army of harassing, arresting and attacking reporters and avoiding carrying out thorough investigations into such incidents. Recent press freedom assessments harshly criticized Israel for targeting media personnel during Operation Pillar of Defense in Gaza in 2012, specifically for killing a crew from Hamas’...

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The High Court of Justice had some sharp words for one settler who invaded private Palestinian lands and then perverted the law to prove they were his. So why did the prosecution close the case for ‘lack of public of interest?’

By Yesh Din, written by Yossi Gurvitz

Several years ago – the precise date is disputed – a settler by the name of Michael Lessens began invading private Palestinian lands in the village of Qaddum (near his settlement of Kedumim), and fenced them for his private needs. As Lessens would later explain, he wasn’t acting on his own initiative; he received directions from the council of Kedumim to seize and till the lands, so that the settlement may later expand onto them. In documents which would come before the High Court of Justice, and which were originally presented to the Civil Administration’s appeals committee at the Ofer Military Court, Lessens stated that he had council officials sign documents allowing the land grab.

In 2007, Lessens began fencing the lands, that is, he attempted to stake his claim and prevent the legal owners from accessing them. The result was a legal process in which the owners of the lands were represented by Yesh Din’s legal team. At the same time, the police began an investigation against Lessens and others on suspicion of criminal trespassing. At first, Yesh Din turned to the chief of the Civil Administration, who ordered Lessens to stop using the lands. Lessens appealed, showing the appeals committee statements saying he was instructed to take over the lands. The committee accepted the appeal in a majority vote. However, the chief of the Civil Administration rejected the decision, ruling that the eviction order against Lessens is valid. Lessens, in response, appealed to the High Court, which was also dealing with an appeal by the residents of Qaddum, represented by Yesh Din, who demanded Lessens’s eviction.

Lessens had the nerve to claim that since he held the lands for more than a decade, that according to Ottoman land law – or  Lessens’s perverted version of it – the lands belong to him by virtue of possession and tilling. The High Court rejected Lessens’s appeal on March 30, 2012, and accepted the petition of the residents of Qaddum. The court had some choice words for Lessens:

One part of the case ended well: Lessens was evicted from the lands he occupied in...

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The Prawer-Begin Plan is not the first time the state has displaced Bedouins in the Naqab (Negev). But it is a sign of how, 65 years after the state’s establishment, Israel still treats thousands of its Palestinian citizens no differently than those in the territories.

By Amjad Iraqi

On April 25, a bus carrying Bedouin residents of Al-Araqib drove from the Naqab (Negev) in Israel to the Palestinian village of Susiya in the West Bank. The people were meeting for the first time to watch a screening of a new film by Adalah (the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel), documenting the two villages’ stories of eviction and violence by Israeli authorities and Jewish civilians.

Al-Araqib and Susiya epitomize the injustice experienced by thousands of Palestinian Arabs both inside Israel and the occupied West Bank. Although they live on opposite sides of the border, the two villages are targets of the same Israeli policy of forced displacement. The destruction of homes, police and settler violence, and denial of basic services are all employed by the state to drive these villagers off their land.

Even in Israel proper, the legal structures that are supposed to defend Arab citizens from such discrimination are erased by the state’s belief that Arab rights can be violated at any time in order to maintain superior rights for Jews. Because of this ideology, the displacement of Palestinians is carried out with no regard for citizenship or human rights on either side of the border – as if the Green Line does not exist.

The last week alone has shown that this practice is pervasive and continuing. Political parties in the Israeli government are eagerly preparing their plans to demolish unrecognized Bedouin villages in the Naqab as harshly as possible. The Jaradat family in Jerusalem lost their homes to Israeli bulldozers after years of the municipality rejecting their requests for permits. The Adei Ad outpost demonstrated the creeping dispossession and theft of occupied lands and their damage to Palestinian livelihoods. Israeli citizenship, Jerusalemite status and Palestinian residency failed to protect these Arabs from the same discriminatory...

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The time has come to allow ourselves to see this country not only as the battleground of a national struggle but as a shared homeland, which with painful concessions and tremendous confidence-building efforts on both sides, we can turn into a good place where our children will want to live.

By Ron Gerlitz

As Israel’s Jewish citizens celebrated the Passover holiday last month, its Arab citizens commemorated Land Day. Land Day is a commemoration of the death of six Arab demonstrators in 1976 while protesting massive government land expropriations in the Galilee for the purpose of building new Jewish communities. It has also become a day of protest against discrimination and inequality.

Coverage of Land Day events in Israel’s Hebrew-language media was very limited and reported only on the demonstrations; it ignored the content of the day and the demands being made by Arab citizens. This seems to attest to the the Jewish majority’s reluctance to make a genuine effort at dealing forthrightly with Arab citizens on land issues.

Almost 40 years after the Land Day events, an examination of government policy toward Arab citizens reveals a complex picture. Alongside prolonged and systematic discrimination that encompasses almost all aspects of state allocations, there has also been a positive trend that includes a government effort to close gaps between the Jewish and Arab sectors in certain areas. This effort has been translated into government programs that have led to somewhat of an improvement in Arab citizens’ socio-economic situation. The pace of narrowing gaps is excruciatingly slow, but there is great potential in this positive trend.

But in one area, the state has demonstrated almost total refusal to bring about change, namely the land issue. It is important to recap the background: Immediately after the establishment of the state in 1948 there was a massive expropriation of land belonging to internal refugees, who became landless citizens. Later on, until the 1970s, the state expropriated large amounts of land in order to develop Jewish communities.

Since 1948, the two groups’ populations have grown at similar rates (eightfold to tenfold) but the government has built 700 (!) new communities for Jews (including new cities) and not...

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When Israeli politicians talk about land swaps, they rarely consider the rights of those affected – or at least the Palestinian ones. As personal as it is political, the entire situation shows the lack of civil discourse in so-called peace negotiations.

By Muhammad Jabali

I will never forget that night at a birthday party in Jaffa when a drunken friend began approaching guests with the question: “What’s your address as registered at the Interior Ministry?” He then joked that everyone should change their residency to Tel Aviv as soon as possible before they find themselves on the other side of the separation wall, suffering segregation in the West Bank.

Those who answered “Nazareth,” or anywhere in the Galilee, were met with humorous replies: “Oh, you’re okay, your turn hasn’t come yet!” Next, he demanded that the bunch of us from Taybeh, Tira, Umm al-Fahm and other parts of the Triangle region show our ID cards. After checking where we were registered, he declared those who had already changed their addresses to Tel Aviv-Jaffa or Haifa were “the smart ones.” Anyone who was still registered in our hometowns and villages was told: “I’m checking your IDs next week and I want them to read ‘Tel Aviv’ or ‘Haifa.’ I’m not even gonna make the effort to visit you if it involves crossing checkpoints and separation walls.” Without a doubt it was the joke of the night. Our kind of black humor.

The background was this: earlier that same day, Shimon Peres had made some kind of statement about the possibility of exchanging the Arab Triangle region – a mainly Palestinian-populated area inside Israel – for the “settlements blocs” in a future agreement with the PA. That was six or seven years ago. Today, such proposals have become a relatively common part of various proposed “resolutions” for the conflict; some are short-term plans, some are designs for a “final resolution.” Each plan has its own definition of what constitutes the West Bank and what level of independence the almighty and generous Israel grants the Palestinians “over there” in the West Bank. Territorial swaps and population exchanges have clearly become a routine part of the terminology used by a wide range of politicians, from Avigdor Lieberman to Tzipi .

I couldn’t help but think of that birthday party while taking the train from Kfar Saba to Tel Aviv last Wednesday to DJ at my...

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Even if bringing the Herodium exhibit to the Israel Museum is not identical to wielding physical violence against Palestinians, it seems that in everything that pertains to the West Bank, those in charge exploit resources for their own needs, be it for exhibition or settlement expansion. 

By Yonatan Mizrachi

The exhibition “Herod the Great – The King’s Final Journey” is the largest archaeological exhibit ever showcased at the Israel Museum. In order to stage the exhibit, 30 tons of archaeological findings were transferred from the sites at Herodium and Jericho. The tremendous investment led to a successful portrayal of the glory of Roman culture, identified with the days of King Herod. Museum director James Snyder was careful to explain that exporting the findings into Israel from Herodium and Jericho, located in the West Bank, was carried out legally, and in accordance with the Oslo Accords.

In another location, ostensibly without any connection to the above-mentioned case, the Tel Aviv University Institute of Archaeology decided to conduct excavations in the East Jerusalem village of Silwan, at a site known as “City of David.” Even before excavations began, the archaeologists and their spokespersons declared that work would be conducted in accordance with scientific guidelines and would not contribute to strengthening the settlements in East Jerusalem.

According to today’s international standards, heritage sites are not a national possession, but rather part of a place’s history, and as such, must be accessible to residents and remain under their jurisdiction. However, the prohibition on the removing findings from occupied territories enshrined in international law, and the Oslo Accords, under which archaeological sites in Area C are to be transferred to the Palestinian Authority, have long become meaningless in the Israeli discourse.

Both Tel Aviv University and the Israel Museum are fastidious in presenting their activity as separate from the “unpleasant” deeds and sights of the occupation. The university claims that the violence, arrests, land theft and house demolitions in Silwan are completely unrelated to the excavations that it conducts there, as if the excavations constitute a spiritual bubble of positivity in the heart of a contested and wounded land. The museum even went to great lengths to declare that the findings transferred from Herodium and Jericho will be returned immediately...

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In a recent article, seasoned veteran of the Zionist Left Uri Avnery claimed that the influx of Russian-speaking immigrants to Israel, living in self-imposed ghettos, is what pushed the country to the right politically. Lia Tarachansky counters that the Russian-speaking community never ‘mingled’ with other Israelis because it was never invited to do so, and that Avnery is ignoring the many contributions the immigrants made to the country.

By Lia Tarachansky

I was born in Kiev into a shifting, uncertain reality. While I was only learning to read, my parents split, the Chernobyl nuclear reactor blew up and the Soviet Union collapsed. I was too young to understand what was happening when we evacuated the city and prepared for what would turn into years of economic devastation.

One night my mother woke my sister and I and told us to pack only what we absolutely couldn’t live without because we were moving to Israel. She told us Tel Aviv was lined with promenades where banana-eating monkeys sit in palm trees and that there we will no longer be “The Jews” because in Israel, everyone is Jewish.

In typical Soviet paranoia we weren’t allowed to tell anyone we were leaving. When we finally made it to the Romanian border after days on the train, we were stripped of our citizenship and promised we will never set foot again in the land where my parents and grandparents were born. My mother didn’t care. To this day she remains a dedicated Zionist even after learning that monkeys don’t sit in palm trees, that not only Jews live in Israel, and that indeed we are not all free.

I went from being the only Jew in my Soviet kindergarten to being the only Russian in my Israeli elementary school. My mother went from being a computer engineer to changing diapers in a retirement home. In the Soviet Union we were hated because of our “piatii punkt” or “fifth clause” after the first and last name, date and place of birth; our nationality clause would read “Jew” on our identity documents. This is why the cynicism that dominates our community...

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For years, Israeli police and the Shin Bet have complained that they can’t deal with ‘price tag’ attacks. Here’s a simple proposition.

By Yesh Din, written by Yossi Gurvitz

The phenomenon of “price tag” attacks has been with us for some seven years now, and during this period, Israeli authorities have failed utterly in dealing with them. Time and time again, we are told by the police and the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) that we’re dealing with an ultra-sophisticated group, which cannot be penetrated.

A new report in this genre was broadcast on Tuesday on Channel 10 (Hebrew). The police and Shin Bet seem to have made a great effort, if not in getting their hands on the terrorists, then at least in massaging their image: the reporter, the very able and honest Roey Sharon, received a copy of an internal Shin Bet document, as well as footage of detectives capturing “price tag” attackers red-handed.

No Shin Bet or police representative was quoted, but former General Avi Mizrahi spoke at length, saying you simply cannot recruit these guys as informers. Mizrahi bemoaned the fact that price taggers are irresponsible people who can easily set the entire sector on fire. You don’t say. Maybe Mizrahi ought to have thought about that when, as commander of the Central Command, he agreed to attend a ceremony honoring Dov Lior (the latter is considered to be one of the most extreme rabbis around, and at the time was wanted by the police for failing to show up for interrogation). If Mizrahi – a uniformed officer, and in fact the “stand-in for the sovereign” of the West Bank – decided to honor the man who penned his agreement with the Torat Ha’Melekh book, how seriously should his commitment to fighting price tag terror be taken?

We are told that the Shin Bet and the police have a hard time gathering human intelligence (HUMINT) among price taggers. That’s probably true. Then...

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While it will be a long wait for a safe consensus about this issue to emerge in Israel or in America, we need to treat the prospect of the end of the two-state solution as the five-alarm fire that it is. The question is whether the American administration has the political will to engage in muscular diplomacy.

By Ken Winikur and Ben Avishai

Addressing young Israelis in Jerusalem on March 21, 2013, President Obama discussed the imperative to reach a just peace with the Palestinians. Speaking like a community organizer, Obama laid out the challenge: “Political leaders will never take risks if the people do not push them.” It was a noble idea, but since then, those who agree have been left with a question: how?

The art of mobilizing citizens into action, of creating a voice that politicians actually hear, is the central theme a documentary we are making about J Street, the five-year old pro-Israel, pro-peace American-Jewish lobby group. J Street emerged shortly after Obama took office, rallying people from living rooms and synagogue basements across the U.S. around the progressive idea that to be pro-Israel means supporting a two-state solution, and that American involvement is crucial to making that happen. Its leaders soon found that the new administration was listening: when Obama convened an advisory session of Jewish leaders, he invited J Street founder and president, Jeremy Ben-Ami. And at J Street’s first national conference, National Security Advisor Jim Jones told a rapt audience that if he could solve any problem in the world, Israel-Palestine would be it.

We began filming J Street during the organization’s second year, curious to see if the it could make a difference. For the past three years, we have tracked its growth and witnessed its attempts to harness grassroots power to affect policy in Washington. J Street’s efforts have exposed a debate raging in the American Jewish community about how the U.S. government should act towards Israel, and have debunked the notion that American Jews are ideologically monolithic about that relationship. Criticized by the Right and the Left, we’ve watched as J Street has hunted for that elusive center – the sweet spot from which it...

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