Rick’s Weekend Wrap: Your Holyland news digest

What makes the boycott law a cowardly act? What is the tent protest all about? And why does the IDf shoot at fishermen? Rechavia “Rick” Berman gives you the week’s top stories as they ought to be told. A new weekly feature on +972

By Rechavia “Rick” Berman

Welcome ladies and gentlemen to the first flight of Rick-ochet Airlines, bringing you the Weekend Holyland Update, that tour of the macabre which has been taking you on relatively safe trips to the edge of the abyss in the Land of the Prophets since 2008, now in syndication with 972Mag!

Today on our tour we shall have craven abdication, stark racism, a severe case of Islamophobia, working people refusing to take shit, an environmental disaster, an act of thuggishness, a sweet stroke of irony, and a dirty old man who just does not know when to stop, among other things. Confused? You won’t be by the time we get done. Please fasten your seatbelts and make sure you’re not turning Muslim on the way to passport control – That’s liable to scare folks round these parts…

We shall begin with something fresh from Thursday night. Some people got fed up and put up a tent encampment in the middle of fashionable Tel Aviv, to protest the skyrocketing price of housing (folks are paying over $1,500 a month for crappy 2 bedroom apartments, and doing it on household incomes of maybe double that, often less). As one protester said on the news, “Used to be they’d sell us the lie of working hard to eventually buy our own apartment. OK, we’ve given up on that one, but let us rent at a bearable price.” So these folks in the tents made a little trip up Rothschild Boulevard to King George St., and threw cups of cottage cheese at the “Ze’ev Citadel” – the famous HQ of our ruling party, Likud. This of course is only funny if you’ve heard about the fabled Cottage Cheese Protests which took place last month.

The tent protesters are facing a problem anyone who ever tried to be active on anything in Israel knows only too well: Whether to tie this with opposition to occupation, as part of a coherent holistic world view, or make the occupation a sort of taboo in the organization, so as not to alienate the ones who may be nationalist but are willing to protest with you.

The inevitable lies are bound to come here. Soon, they’ll say the left has radical hijacked this protest. The truth is that those lefties who are an integral part of each and every protest against exploitation, poverty and social issues – even though the people for whom they are protesting are often deeply traditional, right-tending folks who are astounded to find the “treacherous hippies” from scorned Tel Aviv coming to fight alongside them. So when you’ll hear about those people “that ruined the protest by politicizing it,” know the score.

On to the weeks top event, the boycott law: This law makes it a “civil injury” as the bill terms it, to “call for the economic, cultural or academic boycott of a person or other entity, solely due to its association with the State of Israel, any of its institutions or a territory under its control, in a way that is capable of hurting them economically, culturally or academically.”

The law goes on to specify that Judea and Samaria (i.e. the occupied West Bank) qualifies for the purposes of the law, and that anyone who calls for a boycott and is considered likely to be heeded by anyone, commits a “civil offense” for which anyone purporting to be hurt by the call to boycott can sue. The brave legislators then go on to instruct the judiciary to award “damages” to plaintiffs without the need to prove any, uhhm, actual damages.

Then the law goes on to say that anyone doing such a nasty, nasty thing will also not be allowed to contend for any government bids, contracts or grants. The thing to watch in this law is its overt cowardice. It’s as if the government is saying: “We really want to persecute those who dare boycott the settlements, but we know that even the most craven legal counsel won’t sign off on the government doing it – so we’ll make it a matter of financial ruin and let the settlers themselves do the grunt work for us!”

Even as it is, and after the original bill was amended to drop the $8,500 award provided for in the first draft, the entire top brass of the Ministry of Justice is distancing themselves from this thing.  The government’s legal counsel has grumbled that he will deign to defend this law in court when the time comes, but made it clear that he expects to lose: “The law has significant constitutional flaws”, he says.

This is of course slightly ironic since Israel has no constitution. What Adv. Yehuda Weinstein is referring to is Israel’s “Basic Laws”, which serve as the weak stump foundations of a constitution – which we don’t have because the religious would never stand for the codification of personal and religious freedoms that would naturally feature in such a document. These “Basic Laws” (freedom of speech isn’t one of them, by the by, but that’s partially rolled into “Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty”) are so solid, all it takes is 61/120 Knesset members to amend or completely overturn it. But the government doesn’t want to be that obvious about its enmity to basic civil liberties that interfere with the occupation, so it doesn’t do it that way. Yet.

The all-but-assured court overturn is of course the real point of this entire exercise. The hardcore right wing in Israel constantly panders to the most basic emotions of its flock, promising things they know aren’t possible. They especially delight in “passing” laws that are bound to be struck down by the court, only to turn around and say “See? The unelected tyranny of the judiciary is thwarting the Will of the People!”

Tellingly, neither Bibi nor his henchman, Defense Minister (and currently devoid of an electoral base) Ehud Barak were present for the vote, and other notable failures to vote on this minor little issue of free speech include Labor Chief contender Yitzhak “Boojie” Herzog, some still-sane Likud absences (including Speaker Reuven Rivlin, who pointedly announced “present but not voting”) and all of Barak’s “Independence” silly phantom party, who sent the creepy Einat Wilf to explain their principled stand, which boiled down to “we’re hoping to weasel into Likud’s next list of candidates for Knesset. Obviously we can’t buck coalition discipline.”

Saw an item on the news past week about the segregation of Black Ethiopian Jews in the school system, and what chilled me was that there was at least one case where a school administrator went from the plain racism of not making an effort to help Ethiopian students meet the requirements, to the malicious go-out-of-your-way racism of actively failing dark-skinned students who were somehow ruining her pristine color scheme by passing their classes. “We were asked to lower [Ethiopians'] scores in English and literature,” one teacher admitted. If you understand Hebrew, you can watch the story here.

Israel was visited by a catastrophic natural disaster this week, dear readers. I refer not to the oil tanker that dumped crude on the coral reefs in Eilat, nor to the pipeline that burst and devastated flora, fauna and precious open water in the Zin Stream (Wadi al-Faqra to some of you) preserve in the Negev. I am talking about the extended exposure to one of the most toxic sources of blegh known to science – Yes, Glenn Beck was here. He has yet to make good on his threat to give a full blown revival show in which he will reveal himself to be Nehemaiah Scudder, but he spoke at the Knesset’s “Immigration Absorption and Diaspora Relations” committee. The neanderthal right have a big majority in this committee, and the whole thing was truly stomach-turning. The only non-right wing member of the committee, Labor’s Daniel Ben-Simon, chickened out and didn’t spoil the welcome wagon. I will admit, though, that it was amusing to see the trogs scream, in essence: “See? We got friends in the world too! POWERFUL ones!!” – While as an example displaying a man even Fox no longer wants to have anything to do with.

The state has climbed down from a particularly stupid tree it stuck itself on about a year ago. There’s this guy, Harald Fuller-Bennett. American Jew. Been to Israel as part of the “Birthright” tours, visited another time on his own, and was let in with no problem. But on May 2, 2010 he makes the error of reaching Passport Control at Ben Gurion airport with a passport sporting entrance stamps from Syria (gasp!) and Sudan (ewwww). So he’s pulled aside, interrogated, and denied entry. Reason? “suspicion of terror affiliation”. Huh? Source? “Secret information,” of course. “Also, we have knowledge of an anti-Israeli protest activity plaintiff has participated in, and the possibility has been raised that plaintiff intends to convert to Islam.” Oh, the horror.

This is what we in Israel call “the Matzliach Method”: Throw anything you can think of at the wall and see what sticks. Last week the state announced before court it does not insist on keeping the menacing Mr. Fuller-Bennett out of the country, admitting the “terror associations” charge proved false, yet insisting there was “fear of Islamization.” State was ordered to pay court expenses, and the plaintiff would like, if it’s not too much of a bother, to note that he is in fact an atheist.

Some fishermen from Gaza decided they would actually like to catch some fish, especially those of sufficient number and size to feed their families. Israel denies any vessels leaving the shores of the Gaza Strip the right to exceed 3 miles from shore. There are no fish in commercial quantity that close to shore. Fishermen finally had enough, defied the 3 mile barrier, and were fired upon by the Israeli Coast Guard. I know, Gilad Shalit could be smuggled away forever in a small innocent-looking fishing boat. But like with the blockade at large, inspections can be arranged. These are small vessels. The Gaza fishermen would likely have no personal problem with being checked for 20-30 minutes each way if it means they can actually, pretty please, go to cast nets where they are likely to come back full. I haven’t been able to find out the condition of the fishermen who were shot at.

Approaching landing, Karma proved to still have her wicked sense of humor, as she gave racist football (soccer) club Beitar Jerusalem and its “Death-to-Arabs”-chanting crowd the financial savior they had been praying for, to take the team off failed oligarch Arkady Gaidamak’s hands and enable it to purchase some players for the upcoming season. The twist? Meet Adam Levin and Dan Adler, a couple of do-gooder, lily-hearted lefty J-Street-type Jews, who promise not to get too involved in the business side, but do insist they plan to take on the “handful” who besmirch the name of this storied franchise. I wish them all the best, of course, but I hope they know that the “handful” is a good solid half of the fan-base, and by far the most emotionally and financially involved half. I can see a situation where the dyed-in-the-wool Kahanist element “secede” and start their own fan-owned club, after the model of two clubs from the other side of the political map recently (fans of the Hapoel clubs of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, in basketball and football respectively, restarted there teams under fan ownership and are doing nicely so far). The founder of the revisionist Beitar movement, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, must be rolling in his grave to see who runs his flagship now.

Finally, former President and convicted rapist Moshe Katzav is in the news again. After about a month of spreading rumors, the gag order was removed and it was revealed that Katzav’s legal team ordered illegal data acquisitions, phone tapping, witness tampering, like that. The actual crooks who did it are singing and implicating the former president as directly involved in everything. Katzav, dude, give it UP. Seriously.

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Previous installations of the Weekend Holyland Update can be found here.

Rick’s book, “Jewcy Story”, a popular history of the 2nd Temple Era, can be bought for Amazon Kindle, for cell phone or for PC here.