AxisMundi Jerusalem
Inside Israel and the Palestinian Territories
“Big Brother” bumbles into West Bank
It’s a reality television show whose contestants are isolated from the outside world, but “Big Brother” in Israel has managed to set off yet another controversy over Palestine policies.
Cameras at the studio-cum-commune outside Jerusalem caught Edna Canetti, a 54-year-old liberal activist, telling fellow residents over the weekend she wanted to see a peaceful popular campaign against Israel’s West Bank occupation.
“It bothers me that you’re silent. What’s needed is a revolt,” she declared after refusing to play along with a challenge in which contestants were divided into two groups — “rich” versus “poor” — with a plexiglass barrier between them.
Shifting to Middle East politics, Canetti said Palestinians should similarly tell Israel: “Shove your laws … We’re not going through that checkpoint and we’re not showing you IDs … This is our land.”
The remarks were in themselves unremarkable for Big Brother, an international franchise whose dramatic formula is based on the premise that very different people, cooped up together for weeks, will grow fractious. Yet while Canetti’s assertions met with bored or exasperated shrugs inside the Big Brother house, they found a far angrier audience on the Israeli far-right.
Michael Ben-Ari, a lawmaker from the National Union party who has himself been the subject of public censure after urging Israeli military conscripts to refuse orders to evacuate Jewish settlers from the West Bank, accused Canetti of sedition.
“Mrs. Canetti is, in effect, encouraging Arabs to rise up against the State of Israel, the violation of Israel Defence Force (IDF) troops’ orders, and even open insurrection,” Ben-Ari wrote in a complaint that his spokesman said had been mailed to the Justice Ministry along with a demand for a criminal investigation.
A Muddy Journey: Sewage Tunnel becomes transit point to Jerusalem
Ordinary women and men, wearing plastic bags on their feet, pulling pants up to knee level, clutch their children to their chests and roam along a 110-metre dark tunnel of sewage to cross from the Israeli-occupied West Bank to East Jerusalem.
Erected under a barrier that Israel is building in the West Bank in defiance of a World Court ruling, the tunnel serves as a gateway connecting Palestinians from the West Bank to East Jerusalem, a centre for medical, social, religious and other services for the Palestinians.
The passage goes from the village of Old Beit Hanina in the West Bank to the area also called Beit Hanina in what Israel has annexed as part of its Jerusalem municipality. It was first used in early 2004, locals say, when Israel erected the barrier between the two Beit Haninas. What was originally essentially one village became physically divided in two. The tunnel was last used during the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan in late September by people anxious to visit family or to pray in Jerusalem’s al-Aqsa mosque. Israel restricts entry for Palestinians to the city. Since then Israel has blocked off the passage — not for the first time.
Scenes of people’s legs sinking up to the knee in sewage are depicted in ”Journey 110″ by Palestinian artist Khaled Jarrar, who spent six hours capturing the 12-minute-long clip last year.
Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip can only enter Jerusalem, which the Palestinians want as a capital for their future state, with often hard-to-get permits from Israeli authorities. In 1967, Israel captured the territories including Arab East Jerusalem.
Local officials in Old Beit Hanina estimated the number of people who crossed the passage at up to 150 per day while it was open. “People are not doing it for fun and this is may be the only way to get to Jerusalem,” said Saleh Daajneh, an official in the village.
God Bless Israel in their struggle against these palestinian squatters in their land.
The Mysterious Mr. Mitchell’s MacGuffin
It’s a bit like a Hitchock thriller. Nobody knows where he is — not even the U.S. State Department — and nobody knows when he will show up in Israel. All we know is, suspense is building and it’s time to watch out for surprises.
President Barack Obama’s Middle East peace envoy Senator George Mitchell is somewhere in transit — probably – and expected in Israel and the Palestinian Territories next week – sometime.
A State Dept. spokesman at Wednesday’s regular briefing could not say much at all about Mitchell’s movements beyond he has left Washington. Could he be in London meeting the Syrian foreign minister? Don’t know. Is he going to Turkey as well? We will try to find that out. When is he going to be in Israel? Can’t say exactly.
Mitchell is famous for playing his cards very close to his vest and his vest very close to his skin. He gives out very little information when he is engaged in high-stakes mediation.
There is an unmistakable aura of mystery about what is going on at this delicate stage of talks with Israel and the Palestinians to get stalled peace negotiations started again, by resolving what looks like a standoff between Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over Israel’s settlement activity in the occupied West Bank and Washington’s demand that it cease.
Insulting the intelligence
Good morning, children.
Today we are going to learn about two common rhetorical tricks that help greatly with the cynical manipulation of arguments.
First, disingenuousness. The Oxford Shorter English Dictionary defines disingenuous as “lacking in frankness, insincere, morally fraudulent”, in the sense of pretending not to know what you in fact know very well.
Second, the straw man argument. Wikipedia defines this as misrepresentation of an opponent’s position, to create the illusion of having refuted a proposition by substituting a superficially similar proposition (the straw man) and refuting it, without ever having actually refuted the original proposition.
Today, thanks to Mr Netanyahu, we have one handy slice of well-worn rhetoric to illustrate both rhetorical tricks.
I often wonder if the anti-Israel propagandists at Reuters like Douglas Hamilton and Alistair MacDonald sit around the table at Starbucks on Oxford Street sipping on lattes and dreaming up new and contemptible ways to slander Israel and its leaders.
At various points in their histories, sovereignty over New York, London, Paris, and Rome was also in dispute. The same holds true with Prague, Toronto, Istanbul, Pittsburgh, and today, Belfast, Gibraltar, and Jerusalem.
Jerusalem has been invaded, conquered, and colonized over a longer period of time than any other city in the world but only one nation can lay original claim to sovereignty and that is the Jewish nation. Despite numerous bloody conquests and expulsions, there has always been a Jewish presence in Jerusalem and the city has had a majority Jewish population since the 19th century. The fictitious “city” of East Jerusalem – which Reuters correspondents guilefully capitalize in an effort to demarcate as separate from the rest of the city – is home to the most sacred Jewish antiquities and, despite ethnic cleansing by Jordan between 1948 and 1967, 42% Jewish by population.
Of course, neither Douglas Hamilton nor any of the other Reuters crop will tell you the above nor will they explain that the 1947 UN resolution to internationalize Jerusalem was to be followed 10 years later by a vote among the city’s residents on the issue of sovereignty – a vote it is clear the Jewish majority in Jerusalem would have held in favor of Israel.
In these willful refusals to report the truth, it is Hamilton who is guilty of “insulting the intelligence”.
Settlements, statehood and speechifying
Benjamin Netanyahu’s much-anticipated policy speech on Sunday was lavishly covered by the Israeli press, though pundits sounded reservations about the significance of the prime minister’s chief concession to the Palestinians.
“We would agree to a demilitarised Palestinian state,” the choicest quote from Netanyahu’s half-hour address, served as the banner headline for Israel’s biggest-selling newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth. Its rival daily Maariv was more coy: “A Palestinians state – BUT”.
Writ big, Netanyahu’s declaration merely brought him into line with the peacemaking policies of several of his predecessors. But being so heavily girdled in preconditions, and overlayed by Zionist historicity, it drew near-instant rejection from the Palestinians.
The sense of fresh deadlock was noted by Israeli commentators. Akiva Eldar of the left-leaning Haaretz newspaper said the speech was “not how one brings down a wall of enmity between two nations”.
Maariv’s Ben Caspit accused Netanyahu – who long refused to countenance a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and who is still balking at international demands to halt Jewish settlement construction despite Washington’s displeasure — of being terminally behind the times.
Few doubted that Netanyahu’s remarks were mainly intended for U.S. President Barack Obama, who has made Palestinian statehood a centrepiece of his Middle East policy.
I have always respected Israel’s right to exist. Until recently I respected their military and government, as they were truly fighting for survival. Now that they are so strong, Israel is becoming the monster it was formed as compensation for. Quotes from ‘settlers’ when asked why they settle in Palestinian territory and they reply ‘because they aren’t strong enough to stop us’. The ‘natural expansion’ of settlements is another way of saying ‘lebensraum’, the Nazi expansion of settlers into eastern europe for ‘good germans’. Israel has lost its moral compass, and gone from being the victim to being the bully. Sensitivities or not, they need to be shown that their actions in displacing palestinians and taking over their homes and land is no different to the forced expulsions they endured under the Nazis.
More about money
In the latest story in our investigative series on fiscal governance and transparency in the Palestinian Authority, we highlight the debate over the workings of the Palestine Investment Fund – which in 2002 consolidated the various and secretive holdings of former President Yasser Arafat into a fund which was initially managed by PA government ministers.
In 2006, to keep the fund out of the hands of the Islamist Hamas movement which won Palestinian legislative elections that year, President Mahmoud Abbas severed government control of the Fund and his chief economic adviser took over running the fund along with a board comprised of private businessmen.
Although Hamas is no longer in power in the West Bank, Abbas has not handed back control of the fund, which has assets of nearly one billion dollars, to the government.
Some say this is the best way to maximise the fund’s long-term impact on the Palestinian economy – but critics charge that this arrangement lacks transparency and public oversight.
PHOTO CREDIT: A money changer waits for customers in the West Bank city of Ramallah in this June 2008 file photo. (REUTERS/Fadi Arouri)
Pushing back cricket’s boundary for Israel’s bedouin
For decades, the small number of cricket followers in Israel has been trying to clear up what is so far an unsolved mystery: Why the sport never took off in the country after the British lowered the Union Jack on pre-state Israel in 1948.
Cricket, along with golf, is probably the most enduring bequest of the British Empire to its former colonies, but definitely not in the Jewish state.
Because it was seen as such a complicated sport that needed so much explaining, for many years Israeli newspapers and radio and television stations preferred to deliberately ignore cricket.
Often you would get people trying to show that they understood something about the sport by saying to the frustrated and infuriated cricket follower: “ah cricket, that’s like baseball, isn’t it?”
On more than one occasion, I was questioned as to the identity of the rabbi in the framed picture on my living room wall: no prizes for guessing that it was actually this caricature of W.G. Grace, the father of modern cricket and with little doubt the sport’s most enduring and most recognisable figure.
Power Play
If you were an investor in the power plant above and you saw a picture of it engulfed in flames after being bombarded from the air by a fighter jet you might worry about your future ROI, right?
Well – as we explain here in our latest story on fiscal transparency and governance in the Palestinian Territories - it’s not always that simple.
The picture above is of the power plant in Gaza after it was bombed by Israeli jets in June 2006 following the abduction by Palestinian militants of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit.
But despite the bombing, subsequent fuel shortages and other woes, this power plant keeps generating handsome dividends for investors even if its not generating power for Gaza.
Click here for earlier stories in the transparency and governance series.
lolol, gotta love that “only symbol of freedom and liberty in the middle east” israel. what a “great” shinning light of democracy. all paid for by the american tax payer.