The following is an expanded version of my contribution to a group blog post by +972 writers, in response to Israel’s refusal to take in a group of Eritrean refugees who were left to bake in the desert sun for a week without food or medical help, while the army prevented activists from bringing food or a physician to examine them.

In 1977, Prime Minister Begin authorized citizenship for 66 Vietnamese refugees. The captain of an Israeli freighter in the South China Sea found them huddled on a leaky boat, low on food supplies, and took them in, bringing them to Israel after they were denied refuge in Taiwan. Begin granted the refugees citizenship in his first act as newly-elected prime minister. He was leader of the Likud party, which won Israel’s national elections after 29 years of uninterrupted rule by the rival Labor party.

At my Jewish day school in Canada, we were told by our teachers, who tended to represent the National Religious point of view, that Begin had done a mitzvah. The narrative we were taught was that the Jews, who had lost six million in the Holocaust because none of the countries that convened at the Evian Conference agreed to take them in, would behave differently now that they had their own state.

Prime Minister Begin greeting Vietnamese refugees in Israel in 1977 (photo: Government Press Office)

This is how Begin reportedly explained to President Carter his decision to take in the boat people:

Over the next two years, Israel took in approximately 300 Vietnamese refugees and gave them citizenship. Vaan Nguyen, the daughter of one of those refugees, was born, raised and educated in Israel. Today she is a published poet, journalist and actress who lives in Tel Aviv. A few years ago, she appeared in a documentary film about her family in Israel and her journey to visit her father’s village in Vietnam.

Today, websites that celebrate Jewish life and religion boast about Israel’s generosity to the Vietnamese refugees, which is compared to the many stories we were raised with – about Jewish refugees who committed suicide within site of the Swiss border after they were denied entry,...

The following is the translation of a speech delivered by prominent Israeli author Sami Michael at a conference in Haifa in June 2012. It is a ‘cri de coeur’ that is full of love and grief.

Born and raised in Iraq, Mr. Michael was a political activist and member of the Communist party; when a warrant for his arrest was issued in 1948, he fled to neighboring Iran. Unable to return to Iraq, he immigrated to Israel in 1949. After working as an engineer and as a journalist for the Haifa-based Arabic newspaper Al Itihad, he became an acclaimed novelist who has been nominated for the Nobel Prize in literature. He is still a human rights activist and is today the president of ACRI – the Association for Civil Rights in Israel.

For many years Mr. Michael described himself as not a Zionist, but a patriotic Israeli. He identifies proudly as an Arab Jew and an Iraqi.

In his controversial speech last month, he said he was too old to emigrate but envied those who could. Although he insists he is still a patriotic citizen, he no longer feels that Israel can be his spiritual homeland:  It has turned its back on “humanistic values and the rights of mankind.” Racism, fanatical religiosity and the occupation are destroying the state, he says. We are liable to lose it all.

I first met Mr. Michael at his Haifa apartment in the summer of 2006, during what Israel calls the Second Lebanon War and Lebanon calls the July War, when I accompanied a European journalist as a translator. That interview was interrupted a couple of times by the siren announcing incoming rockets. In my  blog post about the meeting I embedded a brief video clip of Mr. Michael speaking Arabic. Looking at it now, I feel as though six years is a very, very long time. A lifetime. It’s a strange thing to say about a meeting that took place in wartime, but I think he was more optimistic then. I am pretty sure I was.

***

Sami Michael in his Haifa apartment, July 2006 (photo: Lisa Goldman)

Israel is the most racist state in the industrialized world

By Sami Michael

I was born in...

“Our children are ready!” 

The Temple Institute, an ultra-nationalist Jewish organization that is obsessed with rebuilding Solomon’s Temple exactly on the spot where the Dome of the Rock is located today in Jerusalem’s Old City, released the video below just in time for Tish’a b’Av (the Ninth of Av according to the Jewish calendar). On this day, Jews traditionally spend the day fasting and mourning the destruction of the ancient temple – as well as a long list of other tragedies that are alleged to have befallen the Jewish people on that day. Or they gather to greet Mitt Romney at the Western Wall.

When I was in Grade 5 our religious studies teacher had us create a model of the ancient temple out of popsicle sticks and cloth remnants, following the very precise instructions in Leviticus.  I recall our teacher telling that us the temple would be rebuilt when the messiah arrived – someday. Yes, he tarried, but we were admonished never to lose faith in his ultimate arrival.

The talented brother and sister in this video seem to want to pre-empt the messiah. They startle their father into dropping his copy of the Jerusalem Post when he sees the remarkably accurate model of the temple they managed to create out of sand in the time it took him to read a single article about the civil war in Syria. As the sun sets over the sea, he leads his two children away and the camera pans out to allow the viewer a wide-angle view of the spectacular sand temple.

“Our children are ready too!”

Not to be outdone, Hamas created a video of its own. In the Hamas version, below, a loving father takes his two children to the beach in Gaza. Like the Jewish children at the beach just a half-hour’s drive up the coast – assuming no checkpoints or walls, of course – the children are an adorable brother and sister who frolic fully clothed at the beach, for some reason eschewing bathing suits despite the summer heat.

After he pauses briefly to pray, the Gazan father watches fondly as his children construct a replica of the Dome of the Rock out of sand. The father tears a piece off his newspaper, writes something on the slip of paper, attaches it to a matchstick and plants it...

Just Vision‘s latest film is a moving snapshot of the Palestinian plight with Israeli settlement policies in an East Jerusalem neighborhood –  and the Israeli Jews that raised awareness about the issue by protesting there. While there is no happy ending, the movie introduces audiences to some of the Palestinians and Israelis who found themselves taking part in a common struggle. 

On several occasions during the winter of 2009-2010, I joined a small group of Israeli protesters who walked on Friday afternoon from downtown West Jerusalem to a demonstration in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah. They carried red flags, held signs advocating freedom for Palestine in general and Sheikh Jarrah specifically; and they chanted in Arabic and Hebrew, accompanying themselves with drum-rolls that often ended with them crying in unison “enough with the occupation!”

On the pedestrian mall of Ben Yehuda Street in West Jerusalem, passersby jeered or stood open-mouthed at the site of unabashed leftists in that very right-wing part of what is basically a very right-wing city. Once, a young soldier on his way home for a weekend furlough walked over to a female protester, reared his head back and hawked a gob of phlegm at her. He was wearing a yarmulke and the insignia of an elite combat unit. As we made our way along Hanevi’im Street, a trio of 20-something, well-heeled Palestinian East Jerusalemites stopped to point and giggle as they exchanged comments in Arabic. They were sorry for the families that had been evicted from their homes, they told me, but they did not see the point in protesting and were amused by the anarchist-grunge sartorial style of the Jewish demonstrators.

Protesters walking toward Sheikh Jarrah in West Jerusalem, January 2010 (Photo: Lisa Goldman)

Once in Sheikh Jarrah, the activists stood across the street from a cluster of houses that had been invaded by settlers. Palestinians had lived in them since the 1950s, but the Israeli courts had ruled that those houses had once belonged to Jews, or that the state could nationalize the homes so the Palestinian owners would henceforth be tenants – even though they were not citizens of Israel. In any case, either because they refused to pay rent for...

During Sunday’s Jerusalem Day events, a Palestinian boy, perhaps 10 years old, was chased down an East Jerusalem street by a very angry officer of the Border Police. The boy tripped and fell, then picked himself up just as the Border Police officer reached him and tried to grab him. But a 22 year-old female Israeli activist prevented the boy’s arrest by throwing herself between the two, allowing the Palestinian boy to flee.

Jerusalem Day is meant to be a celebration of the city’s ‘reunification’ following Israel’s victory in the 1967 war. In practice, it is a day for Israeli nationalists, draped in flags, dancing in circles, singing and chanting (including the popular Israeli nationalist chant, ‘death to Arabs’) as they march through the streets of East Jerusalem and the Old City. Many of the Jewish demonstrators are bused in from right-wing yeshivas in Israel and the West Bank.

Marching toward the old city on Jerusalem Day (photo: Activestills)

East Jerusalem resident Aziz Abu Sarah writes that the Israeli police ‘suggest’ to the Palestinian merchants that they close their shops early on Jerusalem Day, in order to ‘reduce tension’; in previous years, the yeshiva students attacked Palestinians in the Old City and vandalized their property. The police issue an outright order to Palestinian merchants to clear away any merchandise that is displayed outside the shop. In the same post, Aziz describes the year he was prevented by a police officer from returning to his own home on Jerusalem Day, even though his identity card showed he was a resident, because his presence – in his own neighbourhood – might disturb the celebrations.

In recent years, a few Israeli left-wing activists have staged small counter-demonstrations outside the old city’s gates, as the celebratory marchers stream past. Generally, the counter-demonstrators hold small signs with slogans like “East Jerusalem is occupied Palestinian territory,” and the like. A few Palestinians hold a vigil, too, usually with Palestinian flags in their hands.

This year, an Orthodox Jewish man grabbed the Palestinian flag from the hands of a 10 year-old boy and refused to return it. The boy, enraged, tried to prise it out of the Jewish man’s hands. A Border Police officer, seeing the struggle between a 10 year-old...

On Monday, the eve of Nakba Day, I attended a book launch for the memoirs of five elderly Holocaust survivors who emigrated from Europe to Canada after the Second World War. The event took place in the main sanctuary of a large, well-established Conservative synagogue in a prosperous area of Toronto, very much like the one I attended as a child in Vancouver. Canadian and Israeli flags hung from flagpoles at either side of the pulpit. The director of the non-profit foundation that edits, publishes and distributes the memoirs gave an eloquent speech; this was followed by a series of short documentary films that featured interviews with each of the authors, all of whom were in the audience.

These elderly Jews recounted disparate experiences of surviving the Holocaust. A Czech woman and a Hungarian woman survived as children because their parents sent them away to live as Christians – one in a convent, the other with a non-Jewish family in a different town. Another woman survived because she escaped from Poland to the Soviet Union and was sent at age 16 to a forced labour camp in Siberia. A man escaped occupied France as a 16 year-old by swimming a freezing river and climbing the Pyrenees, only to be arrested by Spanish police and interned in a labor camp under extremely harsh conditions. And another was shipped from Lodz to Auschwitz-Birkenau when he was 15, but survived the death camp due to remarkable good fortune. They told their stories with unusual candor and a notable lack of sentimentality. One of the men, Max Bornstein, said the extreme loneliness of being the only survivor of his family precipitated a nervous breakdown after the war, and that he had never really recovered emotionally.

But these five survivors were unanimous about one thing: The experience of writing their memoirs and seeing them published was immensely cathartic and meaningful. Their history was recorded now; it would not be forgotten after they died.

While I watched the films about these amateur authors who had survived, as one of them put it, due to a combination of sheer luck and the willingness of total strangers to risk their lives for them, a little part of my mind was busy worrying about the post I had promised to write about the Nakba – the Palestinian dispersal and dispossession of 1948.

Like so many conventionally educated Jewish children,...

Cancellation of the commercial deal between private Egyptian and Israeli entities has more to do with Egypt’s own internal confrontation with corporate governance and transparency than with the peace treaty with Israel.

According to several news reports, Egypt has terminated a deal to supply Israel with natural gas. Egyptian sources say that the deal was canceled over a legal dispute, as well as Israel’s failure to pay for the gas over the past four months; Israeli government sources, meanwhile, insist they have paid all the money they owe. Several Israeli officials, including Kadima leader Shaul Mofaz and Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz, have expressed deep concern, with Mofaz calling the unilateral termination of the gas supply a “blatant violation of the peace treaty” that “requires an American response,” and Steinitz saying it was a dangerous precedent that threatens bilateral ties between Egypt and Israel.

The gas deal in fact has nothing to do with the Israel-Egypt peace treaty of 1979. It is a commercial deal that was negotiated between private Egyptian and Israeli business concerns in 2005; the deal was renegotiated in 2009, in the most opaque manner imaginable. No tenders were issued and the terms of the deal were not made public. The Egypt-Israel natural gas deal is resented by most Egyptians, who view it as a sleazy arrangement that allowed Hosni Mubarak, his sons and their cronies to pocket billions of dollars by selling one of Egypt’s most valuable natural resources at a price that is now well below market value – and to Israel, which is deeply unpopular in Egypt.

Egypt’s natural gas pipeline has been sabotaged 14 times since Hosni Mubarak was deposed in February 2011.

Egyptian economist Mohamed El Dahshan does an impressive job of armchair investigative journalism in this blog post, in which he demonstrates the extent to which the natural gas deal was, as he puts it, “a barely concealed cesspool of clientelism, personal relationships and private interests, breaches of government procedure, of transparency rules, and of corporate governance.”

The name Hussein Salem appears several times in El Dahshan’s investigative piece about the gas deal. Salem, 77, is a wealthy businessman who was close to Hosni Mubarak; he was also one of the main Egyptian players in the negotiation of the gas deal with Israel. A few days before Mubarak was forced to resign, Salem fled Egypt for Spain. A month...

Last Monday, a mob of Beitar Jerusalem football fans rioted at the Malcha Shopping Center. Notorious for their racism, the fans’ chants often include “MAH-vet l’araVEEM” – death to Arabs; this can be heard in the amateur video below, starting from 2:36.

As Haaretz reports, hundreds of  Beitar hooligans swarmed into the mall following a game at the nearby Teddy Stadium. They “hurl[ed] racial abuse at Arab workers and customers and chanting anti-Arab slogans, and filled the food hall on the second floor.” Then they mobbed three Arab women eating with their children in the food hall, yelling epithets and spitting on them. Some Arab men employed as cleaners came to the women’s rescue; they had only their broomsticks as weapons, but succeeded in chasing the hooligans away – albeit temporarily. But then…

Gideon Avrahami, the director of the mall, called the riot “…disgraceful, shocking, racist incident” and apologized in person to the Arab workers. Avi Biton, the mall’s security director, promised to increase security measures when the next Beitar game was played at the nearby stadium.

Meanwhile, amongst the Israeli media only Haaretz newspaper published a report about this incident – even though it occurred five days ago. One would think that a major race riot in Jerusalem’s largest shopping mall, patronized by Jews and Arabs alike, would garner some significant local media attention. But no.

More shocking and insidious is the...

In his response to Jeffrey Goldberg’s enthusiastic description of Ben Gurion Airport’s security procedures, my colleague Noam Sheizaf makes some salient points about historical accuracy and racial profiling. Particularly resonant is the final point – that Jeffrey Goldberg, a Jew born and raised in the United States, is treated far better by Israel’s airport security personnel than Israeli citizens with Arab names.

Over the past few years, there have been several cases of prominent Israeli citizens with Arab names who were subjected at Ben Gurion Airport to humiliating procedures so egregious that they were widely publicized in the media.

Sayed Kashua, a well-known Haaretz columnist, creator of the critical and popular hit television series Arab Labour  and author of three critically acclaimed novels (in Hebrew), has written several times about the onerous security checks to which he has been subjected, including having a member of the security staff escort him not just to the gate, but all the way to his seat on the airplane. In one recent column he writes: “I know I have written about this a million times, and I will probably write about it another million times. Because it’s simply humiliating.” The column is about his journey to Switzerland, where he was to read at a literary event. He was also a dinner guest of the Israeli ambassador and his wife. And yet a 20-year-old woman took it upon herself to take apart his suitcase and humiliate him with intrusive questions at Ben Gurion Airport.

Rania Jubran, the daughter of Israeli Supreme Court justice Salim Jubran, was a 26-year-old Israeli diplomat when she was subjected to humiliating security checks at Ben Gurion Airport, even though she presented her foreign ministry identity card. Ms. Jubran was the first Arab to be accepted to the foreign ministry’s cadet course. When Ms. Jubran resigned three years later for reasons she would only describe as “personal,” Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon described her as “extremely talented,” while another unnamed source in the ministry said that her departure was evidence of their “inability to retain quality personnel” (Hebrew link).

Ibtisam Mara’ana, a prominent, award-winning documentary film maker who lives in Tel Aviv, has represented Israel at many international film festivals. And yet she told me once that she turned down an invitation to one festival because she didn’t have the energy to face the...

The Arab Spring presents a conundrum for many liberal Jews. As liberals they feel compelled to advocate self-determination over tyranny and democracy over dictatorship. But as Jews they worry that the Arab dictators, particularly Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, held down the lid on a seething Pandora’s Box of popular anti-Semitism. On the contrary, though, I would posit that anti-Semitism festered in Egypt as a result of Mubarak’s policies, and that it will naturally fade away if Egypt succeeds in making the transition to a more transparent, democratic society.

Pro-Palestine demo at Cairo's Tahrir Square, April 2011 (photo: Lisa Goldman)

When anti-regime activists attacked and burned the Israeli embassy in Cairo in September, the violent images seemed to underline Jewish fears. It is also true that one hears quite a lot of old-fashioned anti-Semitic talk in Egypt — conspiracy theories about Jewish lobbies, Jewish bankers and Jews in the media. Amongst the secondhand books for sale by a sidewalk vendor at Tahrir Square last spring, I saw an Arabic translation of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. And an exhibition of political cartoons in downtown Cairo included some with caricatures of Israeli soldiers identified by their hooked noses, fang-like teeth and long, curly sidelocks.

Anti-Semitic cartoon at Cairo exhibition (photo: Lisa Goldman)

But Mohamed Abla, the artist and political activist who curated the exhibition said, in answer to my question, “We show cartoons that we disagree with, too.” Those anti-Semitic caricatures, he explained, were published in pro-Mubarak newspapers that presented the Egyptian revolution as an anti-Egypt conspiracy cooked up between the unlikely allies of Israel, Hezbollah and the United States.

Amr El-Zant, an Egyptian physicist and a columnist for Al Masry Al Youm, Egypt’s best-known independent daily newspaper, describes Mubarak as an old-fashioned anti-Semite who thought that by having a close relationship with the Jews, some of their power would rub off on him. “He couldn’t understand why Israel failed to save him from the revolutionaries at Tahrir Square,” said El-Zant, a former diplomat’s son who was once a postdoctoral fellow at Haifa’s Technion Institute.

The deposed dictator played...

An attack dog released on unarmed Palestinians by Israeli security forces sank its teeth into the arm of a Palestinian man and refused to release it for several minutes.

Soldiers released an attack dog on unarmed Palestinians at a Friday anti-occupation demonstration in the West Bank village of Kufr Qaddoum, report eyewitnesses that include an AP photographer. According to a report from Jonathan Pollack, a political activist, Border Police officers released an army dog at a group of protesters who were standing several dozen meters away. The dog chased the protesters, then locked his jaw on the arm of one of them – Ahmad Shtawi – sinking his teeth into the man’s arm. The dog refused for several minutes to respond to his handler’s order to release Mr. Shtawi’s arm.

IDF attack dog refuses to release his grip on Ahmad Shtawi's arm (photo: PSCC)

Although he was bleeding, in pain and in need of medical attention, soldiers decided to arrest Mr. Shtawi  after the dog finally released his arm. When Morad Shtawi, a member of the village’s popular committee, tried to reason with the commanding officer and convince him to release the wounded man, he was thrown to the ground, handcuffed and pepper sprayed – as documented in the video below.

Israeli human rights NGO B’Tselem has called several times for the Israeli army to stop using attack dogs on unarmed Palestinians. In February 2012, a 19 year-old Palestinian was attacked by an IDF dog; B’Tselem reported another five such incidents in 2011.

A photographer and two women, one reportedly a French national, were injured by rubber bullets and tear gas canisters at this Friday’s anti-occupation demonstration in the West Bank village of Nabi Saleh.

UPDATE: A video of the incident is now embedded, below

Three civilians were injured in the West Bank village of Nabi Saleh today and required hospitalization, according to reports from several eyewitness. A French national, whose name is reportedly Amissy (unconfirmed), was hit in the neck with a projectile – either a tear gas canister or a rubber-coated steel bullet. The Israeli army reports that a border police officer was injured in the head by a rock.

French national injured at Nabi Saleh Friday demonstration (photo: ActiveStills / Oren Ziv)

Although photos show the woman bleeding profusely and obviously in pain, IDF spokesman Major Peter Lerner tweeted that she had been ‘lightly injured’ by a rock thrown by a ‘non-violent’ Palestinian.

Major Lerner’s tweet provoked jeers from eyewitnesses, with several tweeting that they had seen the incident. In a video of the shooting (below), unarmed demonstrators are standing and chanting slogans when IDF soldiers shoot tear gas canisters directly at their heads. The French woman, who is on the right side of the frame, is hit and falls to the ground at around 12 seconds. Note that the soldiers continue to shoot, not stopping to help the injured woman.

After this video was uploaded to the internet and widely shared online, Major Peter Lerner changed his story and tweeted that the IDF would investigate the incident of a tear gas canister that he now claims ‘ricocheted off the ground’ and injured the woman.

Ofer Ron, an Israeli, tweeted a sarcastic response:

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Outsiders who wish for a return of the dictators are pushing against the inevitable tide of history. And Israelis who express a preference for Mubarak only contribute to the perception, widely held in Egypt, that the dictator was able to survive because he was supported by ‘the Zionists.’

Cairo democracy activist wrapped in an Egyptian flag (photo: Lisa Goldman)

The Egyptian election results are in, and two-thirds of the vote went to the Islamist parties. According to the New York Times, 47 percent of the votes went to the Freedom and Justice party, representing the 84-year-old Muslim Brotherhood, which invented political Islam; and 25 percent to the Nour party, representing the fundamentalist Salafists. My colleague Larry Derfner writes that if he had known what the results of this first post-Mubarak election would be, he would not have supported the revolutionaries. He describes Islamist parties’ victory as a “demoralizing defeat” for “we liberals” and concludes that the Middle East has taken a “giant leap backward.”

Well. “We liberals” are citizens of the democratic state of Israel, which freely elected, as the largest faction in its governing coalition after the Likud, the quasi-fascist Yisrael Beitenu party. The head of that party, Avigdor Lieberman, is now the foreign minister. He cozies up to Vladimir Putin and once said that Israel should bomb the Aswan Dam. In our Knesset, we also have Kahanists and a large contingent from Shas, which is quite similar to the Nour party. So I don’t think we have all that much credibility when it comes to commenting on the election results of our neighbours.

I am also pretty sure that the Egyptians don’t care whether Larry or any other non-Egyptian supports their revolution. They particularly don’t care whether or not Israeli liberals support or oppose their revolution. We Israelis can be quite vain, but really – this revolution is not about us. At all.

More to the point, we have no say in the Egyptian revolution. Israel is not part of the discourse about the Arab world – by choice and by default. We removed ourselves from the discussion by tacitly supporting oppressive dictators like Mubarak, who crushed civil society in his country over a period of thirty...