Wish You Orwell

IDF Spokesman major expresses political opinion. Problem: That’s forbidden to soldiers

Everyone who had the misfortune to serve in the IDF – most Israeli Jews are forced to – has heard, time and time again, the slogan that “soldiers are not allowed to deal with politics.” Naturally enough, this was never true in the higher levels of the army: The Chief of Staff is generally a uniformed politician-to-be. When Dan Halutz said, as deputy CoS, that “[the soon-to-be evacuated settlements] Ganim and Qadim are home”, he was making a clear political statement. But, as a rule, the IDF attempted to apply the regulation to lesser ranks.

As Lisa Goldman showed earlier today, IDF Major Peter Lerner twice expressed political opinions – in his official Twitter account, no less. Lerner promoted a tweet by a Jews for Jesus organization which considered the anti-NGO laws to be “a blow to foreign influence in its politics.” He further wrote that “IMHO, there should be full disclosure by orgs for ppl 2 know.” This sentences endorses the right wing fantasy – popularly promoted by the deceitful campaigns of Im Tirzu – that human rights NGOs hide their sources of income. Not only isn’t this true, Haaretz noted today that right wing NGOs get far more foreign money than human rights NGOs – and are much less open about it (Hebrew).

Major Lerner is an IDF Spokesman officer – to be precise, he is the spokesman for the Central Command. I asked the IDF Spokesman whether the prohibition against soldiers expressing political opinion is still in force; they said it was. I therefore asked what action does the IDF Spokesman intend to take against Major Lerner.

When the fact that Yair Netanyahu, son of the PM, wrote political comments in his Facebook page came to light, Sgt. Netanyahu was ordered to remove all of the political content written after he was drafted from his page (Hebrew). Sgt. Netanyahu’s infraction was relatively minor as, again, this was a private page. The same cannot be said for Major Lerner, who used his official account.

I’ll update when the IDF Spokesman replies. Naturally, this will probably take some time.

(Yossi Gurvitz)

 

Many Israelis claim the memory of the Holocaust will fade away if it’s not actively protected. British memories of WWI paint a different picture. Am attempt at an essay

One of the most common claims in Israeli discourse is that if we don’t actively maintain the memory of the Holocaust, it’s just a question of time until the holocaust deniers win. The witnesses will die off, the physical evidence will crumble, and in a short while the Holocaust will turn from history to myth. Ironically, the source of this notion comes from Orthodox preachers and “soul hunters”, who – out of an attempt to make people lose their critical faculties, which they call “making tshuva” – attempted claiming the mythical event of Mt. Sinai was as historical as the Holocaust.

The underlying argument of this claim is that there is something particularly dangerous in the Holocaust turning into a myth. It hints that if it is forgotten, or its historical veracity doubted, then this will pave the way to the next Jewish holocaust – other cases of genocide does not seem to matter to Zionists, who for decades went out of their way to deny the Armenian Holocaust. This concept clashes with the other popular one, that the Jewish genocide was a unique, a-historical event; these do not repeat themselves and are impossible to predict. This is not the issue of this post, however.

The First World War (WWI) ended today, November 11^th, 93 years ago. The allies have won, but it’s doubtful whether there was more bitter victory since the days of Pyrrhus of Epirus. The French victory march began with a sight no viewer would ever forget: A march of the war invalids. Casualties were horrendous: France’s military college, St. Cyr, shows a plaque noting simply the entire class of 1914 fell in combat. After the war, it was common in Britain to speak of the lost generation. France did not recover: When the next war broke out in 1939 it did not have the spirit for a second war. In Britain, Lloyd George – who, as prime minister, gnashed his teeth as he saw Douglas Haig, the butcher of Passchendaele, throw the lives of hundreds of thousands of boys onto the withered hills and shredded woods, attempted to remove him from command and failed – begged his country to kneel before Hitler rather than fight again. Six years earlier, in 1933, Oxford’s debating club decided that “this house will not fight again for King and country.”

As everyone knows, the end was different. As Churchill would later write, the young men of Oxford would be the few to whom “never have so many owed so much”, who brought about Britain’s greatest hour and who, for a year, would stand alone in the struggle for a free world, until Hitler would betray his partner, Stalin.

The British remember WWII, of course, but anyone traveling in Britain would be surprised to find just how strong is the memory of the earlier, terrible war, which could be said to be their country’s lowest hour. Orwell, writing about the English and their aversion to militarism, noted that they were always more interested in their defeats than in their victories. And, as time passes, WWII, for all its victories – for all its still living witnesses – is fading away, and the pain of WWI returns and takes its place.

Remembrance Day, in Britain, in November 11^th – not May 8^th. In 1915, a Canadian military surgeon, Lt. Col. John McCrae, wrote what would become the most famous poem of the war, “In Flanders Fields”:

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

The poem became so popular, poppies became a sign of dead soldiers and memorial days. Anyone walking the streets of London in the last few weeks, could see a large number of people wearing a poppie, or an imitation of it, on their lapels. “In Flanders Fields” contains three stanzas; The third one, the combative one (“Take up our quarrel with the foe…”) is often omitted; It goes contrary to the popular memory of the war.

The British remember WWI as a loss, a senseless waste of human life, and a yearning to a bygone age. It is also, essentially, an anti-establishment sentiment: It adopts anti-war poets like Wilfred Owen and his “Hymn for Doomed Youth”:

What passing bells for those who die as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries for them from prayers or bells,
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.

The British think of the soldiers of WWI in the words of, of all things, a German general (Erich Ludendorff, though the expression may be older): “Lions led by donkeys.” Needless to say, the percentage of donkeys, Ludendorff himself included, in the German High Command was not noticeably lower than the percentage in the British one. The last, bitter, poignant season of “Blackadder” displays the war as an asylum, from which Captain Blackadder attempts to escape at all costs. Every chapter mocks the generals more than the last one; The season ends, appropriately, in the pointless death of all the characters – generals excluded.

The politicians were not much better: The years 1916-1917 are the most bitter proof of the inability of leaders, on all sides, to end the bloodshed. Owen puts it well:

Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps,

and builded parapets and trenches there,

And stretchèd forth the knife to slay his son.

When lo! an angel called him out of heaven,

Saying, Lay not thy hand upon the lad,

Neither do anything to him. Behold,

A ram, caught in a thicket by its horns;

Offer the Ram of Pride instead of him.

But the old man would not so, but slew his son,

And half the seed of Europe, one by one.

Look at the picture above. The monument is in Chancery Lane, in central London, and it dedicated to the memory of the 22,000 (!) dead of the Royal Fusiliers, a London regiment, in WWI. The name “Royal Fusiliers”, of course, evokes “The Wall” immediately:

It was dark all around, there was frost on the ground,

When the Tigers broke free;

And no one survived from the Royal Fusiliers,

Company C.

They were all left behind,

Most of them dead, the rest of them dying;

And that’s how the High Command

Took my daddy from me.

But that was “just” one company. 22,000 dead is very close to the total of IDF combat deaths in all its wars – and it is the number of one British regiment’s losses in four years. A regiment contains, give or take, a thousand men; The Royal Fusiliers lost their full compartment some 22 times. And for every dead soldiers, there were several who were wounded and invalided.

This is the official monument; There are also private ones, like the one above, erected by a London insurance firm to honor its dead employees. The official one still clings to the “ardor to desperate glory”, mentioned by Owen as precursor to “The old Lie: dulce et decorum est pro patria mori” (“it is sweet and proper to die for one’s country.”). The private monument has none of this. We have a slumped soldier, more asleep than dead, surrounded and defended by angels. The war, and its memory, emerge from many other fragments of British cultural memory. You don’t need Roger Waters’ angry defiance for it – you find it also in that Beatles paean to suburban life, Penny Lane:

Behind the shelter in the middle of the roundabout,

The pretty nurse is selling poppies from the tray

And though she feels she’s in a play

She is anyway.

Events, particularly traumatic ones like a world war, stay in public memory – but that memory changes, blurs, fits itself for the needs of the people who remember; It then recedes into its own limited corner, and then fades away, no longer a part of life but the province of historians and antiquarians. Which is as it should be: The dead should have no possession of the living. Traumas should pass on or be repressed, or they leave us with no breathing space. The fact that an event like WWI left such an indelible mark on Britain, 93 years after it ended, should not surprise; It is the claim that somehow, the most documented and researched genocide in history, whose perpetrators have condemned themselves, that it in particular would fade away into myth – this is the claim we should be incredulous of.

Yet for some reason, this claim is very common, almost a truism, in Israeli society. Why? This is not, unfortunately, a question for historians, but rather for those dealing in national psychosis.

The military tries to paint the blocking of two unarmed ships as a major success – and highlights its own faults in the process

Our brave troops have raided, at dawn, two unarmed ships, filled with dangerous and enthusiastic peace activists, and have managed to carry out the operation without casualties. The operation actually had a name – Ruah Kalah, “Light Wind” – and was overseen by the commander of the Israeli Navy himself, Admiral Ram Rotberg (Hebrew).

Senior brass have told Ynet they were “deeply satisfied” with the results of the operation, though they admit that the success was also derived from “the passivity of the 27 activists.” Which is to say, the IDF is satisfied that when its armed forces met unarmed activists, it managed to carry out a routine mission, as they did not bother to resist. The IDF also notes that the reason there were no casualties is because the lessons of the earlier flotillas were implemented, and the troops were strictly ordered not to use violence against the (again, passive) activists. One assumes that without those orders, and the presence of no less than an admiral on the scene, the passive activists would have suffered some violence. This, to say it mildly, is not very encouraging.

But wait, it gets worse. Ynet has “found out” – read: It received a communiqué from the IDF Spokesman, and asked to publish it under the name of the reporter, a common and deplorable practice – that two of the commandos who participated in the intrepid naval engagement against the two ships, a combat which will surely be listed among such notable naval battles like Salamis and Trafalgar, were wounded during the assault on the Mavi Marmara. The commandos, we are told by the IDF Spokesman, consider this engagement to be a “closing of a circle”.

Oy. Now, I realize the IDF has no successes to report lately. I also understand that, by definition, the IDF cannot win: Its main activity since 1967 is the suppression of a popular uprising. This does not make for rousing battle tales. Since 1982, when the IDF last clashed with the Syrian army – and, shall we say, did not emerge from the encounter wreathed in glory – its soldiers saw enemy soldiers only in pictures. And, since no one except Dick Cheney and his menagerie of sycophants takes pride in torture; And, since the IDF’s normal battle drill (one platoon + air support facing two Palestinians, most likely semi-armed teenagers, often promoted to “wanted person” status after their demise) will not ignite feelings of pride in anyone but gang members, the IDF has to somehow pump any casualty-less engagement as a great success. After all, when the Chief of Staff publicly says Gilad Schalit is a “hero”, the naval commandos – an elite unit which once took pride in truly daring raids on enemy ports and fortified positions, and which now serves as glorified checkpoint troops – must be worthy of a medal, or something.

When we keep repeating the old axiom that “the occupation corrupts”, we must bear in mind it corrupts, first of all, its enforcers. They first become garrison troops, a blunt tool which is ill-suited for any other purpose, but the corruption does not end there. Long years of occupation, the perception that it “fights for its home,”, turn it into a potential putschistic element against a government which may decide to end the occupation. The classic example is Algiers, where the army joined the French colonists in terrorist acts against the local population – they were honest enough not to use the bleached term “price tag” – which were intended to break the fragile ceasefire between the French government and the local rebels; in the end, it led an armed mutiny against its elected government. France had De Gaulle and a long republican tradition on its side; Both of them lacking here, it’s not at all clear what will stand between Israel and such a fate.

 

Jewish terrorism enjoys quiet support from the government

Brigadier General Nitzan Alon, who left the command of the AYOSH (West Bank) Division yesterday, spoke candidly during his replacement ceremony, and called the “price tag” actions by their true name: Jewish terrorism. Alon, who was repeatedly harassed by the settlers, demanded that more be done in the battle against it (Hebrew). One could, of course, ask why didn’t Alon himself (who as the “military commander” in the WB wields the combined powers of a British occupying general and a Turkish pasha) commence this battle; why didn’t he order the destruction of the houses of suspected Jewish terrorists as the IDF destroys the houses of the families of Palestinian suspects; why didn’t he put rebellious settlements under curfew, as many Palestinians towns and villages so often were.

But this is just being ornery. The questions answer themselves. The apartheid regime Israel created in the WB for decades, and the political power of the terrorists and their supporters, prohibits an effective fight against them. The apartheid system, the double legal system – military for the natives, Israeli for the invaders – has been described often enough. Let’s focus on the fact that many prefer to avoid: Jewish terrorism in the territories is directly supported by the Israeli government, and to a large extent is also funded by it.

Case in point. Ha’Kol Ha’Yehudi, the site which promotes the “price tag” pogroms, published on Monday an article by Yossi Elitzur, in which Elitzur called for the murder of terror suspects instead of their arrest (Hebrew). Elitzur further said that even if a suspect is already bound, and is no longer a threat, he is still affected by Din Rodef since “he may try [carrying out a terrorist attack] again tomorrow.”

This is a thorny issue, which needs examining. Din Rodef is the Jewish law mandate on how to deal with a person presenting danger to human (i.e., Jewish) life. It is refined: It says that every man has a duty to a harm a “rodef” (literally, “pursuer”, someone who is actively out to harm someone else), but first, he should try to subdue him without killing him. If this is impractical, however, then “you save the life of the pursued by the life of the pursuer.” However, once a person stops being a pursuer, i.e. stops actively risking life, he is no longer considered a pursuer. What Elitzur does here is twisting classical Jewish law.

This particular twist isn’t new. I heard it first some 26 years ago, as a yeshiva student in Nehalim. Some preacher was brought over for Shabbat from Kiryat Arba and he chose this particular theme as for his sermon; he said you should open fire at pursuers even as they flee. My class’s rabbi, Menashe Rashovski, was an old-school ultra-Orthodox rabbi, and he was scandalized. He summoned the class afterwards, which was highly irregular on a Friday night, and then he explained to us at length – he was, in fact, screaming, shouting at us – that what we just heard was a corruption of the truth; that “pursuer” is a temporary title, which is derived from the clear and present danger; that once a pursuer puts down his weapon, he reverts back into a human being, with all that entails. Most of us stared at him, not understanding what he was so agitated about; but he knew, even then – those were the days of the first Jewish underground, when the leaders of the national-religious pretended to be shocked and to conduct agonizing soul-searching – where we are headed. He knew Halachaic dynamite when he saw it primed.

Zoom out. Elitzur is a rabbi in the Yitzhar yeshiva. He is one of the two writers of the notorious “Torat Ha’Melekh”, which permits the deliberate killing of gentile children “if there is reason to believe they may some day harm us.” Ha’Kol Ha’Yehudi is a legal association of Yitzhar yeshiva students. The Yitzhar yeshiva is an ideological hothouse of Jewish terrorism – certainly not the only one, but one of the most prominent. Ha’Kol Ha’Yehudi functions as the equivalent of Rwanda Radio, passing out the message in easily-digestible bits to the masses.

There is, in fact, a third arm in this triangle: The Honenu Association. Its mission is to represent Jews suspect of terrorism – against Palestinians or Jews. They represent Hagai Amir, one of the conspirators in the Rabin assassination plot, and they represented Jack Teitel, who carried out several attacks against liberal Jews (and a bombing attack against a Jewish family which converted to a form of Christianity.)

Honenu is linked to Yitzhar and Ha’Kol Ha’Yehudi. Its spokesman is Elhanan Gruner (Hebrew), who is also a Yitzhar Yeshiva student and a very active writer (Hebrew) in Ha’Kol Ha’Yehudi. He was shortly detained by the Jewish Division of the ISA, but – as usual for this division – was freed soon afterwards, and was not indicted.

Despite pleas from the ISA, the Yitzhar yeshiva is funded by the Ministry of Education. Yossi Elitzur is for all practical reasons a government employee, kept on the payroll so he can spread his poisonous creed. Honenu is tax-exempt, i.e. is subsidized by the government. It should be noted that of some 15,000 non-profits in Israel, only 3,800 have been exempt from tax. Such exemption requires the approval of the Ministry of the Treasury as well as the Knesset’s Budget Committee. Honenu, doing such stellar work, received it.

So, on one hand, the government funds Yossi Elitzur’s hate speech, and with the other it funds the legal defense of his pogromchiks. Its army and security service find themselves ground between them. Assuming the very active Gruner is paid by Honenu, to a certain extent Israel also funds the activity of Ha’Kol Ha’Yehudi.

Here is the infrastructure of Jewish terrorism. It is funded by Israel. Keep that in mind, next time the government demands the Palestinians do something about their own terrorism infrastructure. Do as they say, not as they do.

 

Fine her, she’s a witch! And no, it’s not Monty Python

The rabbinical court of Haifa decided against a woman whose husband claimed practiced witchcraft in their home. The court acquitted the woman of refusing to cook for her husband, as the latter committed adultery, which the court found to be mitigating circumstances in the woman’s dereliction of culinary duties. (Hebrew)

The woman denied being a witch, but she failed a polygraph test – which is not accepted as evidence in regular Israeli courts. Presumably the duck test was unavailable. The court, composed of rabbis Yitzhak Shmuel Gamzo, Michael Bleicher, and Meir Kahan, admitted they found no legal precedent for reducing the woman’s ktuba – the money her husband pledges her in case of divorce – presumably since the Halachaic punishment for witchcraft is death. They nevertheless relied on the dubious book of Rabbi Nachman of Breslau, which is not generally considered to be law book (much more of a moral tale) to deprive her of some 90,000 NIS. Impressive.

And no, this isn’t mythical medieval England. This is Israel, 2011. And the court is funded by the state.

(Yossi Gurvitz)

A reporter exposes the fact that the Eilat attacks had nothing to do with Gaza; the IDF has nothing to say

Do you remember the Eilat attacks of two months back? How we were told, while the attack was still going on, that the attackers were the Popular Resistance Committees, and that therefore we have to attack Gaza? That such an attack took place, and also killed a child? Do you remember how, a month afterwards, we were quietly told that actually, all of the attackers were Sinai residents, not Gazans?

So last weekend, without much fanfare, Yediot’s Alex Fishman published the central findings of the IDF event investigation. They are very clear: Under the headline of “mistaken enemy”, Fishman brings in the facts. All of the attackers lived in Sinai and were members of a Jihadi terrorist cell, termed by the Israeli security apparatus “Sinawis.” The apparatus erred in thinking the attack was a PRC operation, says Fishman, since the ISA warned the PRC was liable to attack in the same sector. Oops. This is the new semi-official version, the one the IDF shows to the public by way of the military correspondents. You don’t actually think Fishman broke in the Kirya and stole some confidential documents, do you?

And they are confidential. I asked yesterday for the response of IDF Spokesman’s Lt. Col. Avial Leibovitz, who misspoke and then adamantly said the attackers were Gazans on Fishman’s article. This morning I received a reply: The whole investigation is embargoed, i.e. the IDF can’t say anything about it. I therefore asked the IDF Spokesman whether they intend to being a leak investigation and find the person who leaked the secret document to Fishman; after all, for doing much the same, Anat Kam is now being charged with severe espionage. I was told to talk to the Defense Ministry.

So: Two months ago, the IDF was publicly adamant that the attack came from Gaza. Now it is using private channels to leak contrary information and won’t comment. Before the investigation, it was loquacious; After it, it is dumb. It’s a bit strange, isn’t it? Somewhat upside down?

This looks like a conspiracy to cover up the fact that the Defense Minister misspoke, and that as a result an attack on Gaza took place, which led to a counter-attack, which in turn led to an escalation, in which an Israeli citizen (and 27 Gazans) died. Look, we did attack Gaza for no reason, but we had reason to think that….

The most disturbing aspect of this spin is that it came when the media was on full alert (at least, its alternative parts were). It’s unsettling to think how many of the IDF’s strident communiqués, about how we were attacked and were obliged to strike back hard, went down in precisely the same way.

Oh, and there was the usual cheerleaders of the IDF, who said that the attackers did come from Gaza, and that the fact no one mourned there was the proof – it meant Hamas clamped down on the mourners. Expect them to parrot the party line during the next round of hostilities, as well. They’ll say the same thing: Quiet, there’s shooting going on – and, hey, it’s just Ay-rabs.

(Yossi Gurvitz)

The secretary general of the CPI, Muhammad Naffa, stands by his support of the Assad regime – and turns out to be a hardline Stalinist

I’ve covered recently the strange behaviour of the secretary general of the Communist Party of Israel, Muhammad Naffa, who participated in a rally supporting the Assad regime.

If anyone thought, however, that criticism following this rally – and there has been criticism aplenty – will make Naffa change his mind, he’s in for a disappointment. In an aggressive article in the CPI’s Arabic newspaper, Al Ithihad (translated into Hebrew here), Naffa openly proclaims support for the Assad regime, saying this is the position of the rest of the communist parties, and blames his opponents of breaking rank with them.

Of interest is the fact that Naffa comes out as a supporter of Stalin, possibly the deadliest tyrant in history. He attacks Khrushchev, who exposed Stalin’s crimes, and reverts to a claim that Stalin “have erred” but that he was nevertheless a great Communist leader.

Shockingly, as an afterthought, Naffa says that “five years ago, the group of Zionist doctors in the Soviet Union admitted it has, in fact, attempted to poison Stalin.” Naffa is referring here to the Doctors’ Plot, Stalin’s last planned show trial, in which he intended to blame Soviet Jews of being a part of a global Zionist plot, culminating in an attempt by his Jewish doctors to murder him. There is reason to believe Stalin planned to either exterminate or expel Soviet Jewry into the gulag system.

The plot was utter nonsense, though it had a beneficial effect: Since Stalin’s doctors were in prison, they were not at hand to heal him when he suffered a deadly stroke in early 1953, and so, after causing untold suffering for 28 years, he finally croaked. A month after Stalin’s death, the Soviet Union released the detained doctors, admitting their confessions (there were, of course, confessions) were coerced out of them.

The plot, with all its absurdity, caused a break within the Israeli left at the time. It appears almost incomprehensible sixty years later that the leader of the Israeli communist party can believe in a plot the Soviet Union itself denounced, but that seems to be the case. There are still a few dimwit supporters of Stalin. One does not expect them to lead responsible parties.

Aside from that, Naffa’s rhetoric is unbelievably stale, reeking of 1950s Communist propaganda – you know, the one which claimed to be anti-imperialistic yet never said anything about the Soviet occupation of eastern Europe, the Ukraine, and central Asia. This is ironic, considering that Hadash has managed to market itself to Hebrew speakers as the model of a hip party.

I Guess there’s a reason they don’t translate Naffa into Hebrew on their own. I guess the old Stalinists still don’t understand how the web works, and think they can use the usual doublespeak without fear. That age is over, and if the CPI wants to keep its Jewish voters, it had better realize this, and fast – and get itself through a deeply-needed purge.

(Yossi Gurvitz)

The police will not prevent segregation in Jerusalem this year – and the Chief of Police participates in a segregated event

The High Court of Justice (HCJ), no doubt with a stern visage, ruled today (Hebrew) that gender segregation in the streets of the ultra-Orthodox Jerusalem neighbourhood is no longer to be tolerated. The segregation continues unabated, despite a rather similar decision of the Court last year which the police does not enforce. The commander of the Jerusalem Police District, Major General Nisso Shaham, said that these are “shocking sights”, but his promise – that next year, “we’ll see far less harsh images” – is not precisely reassuring. One notes that the judges did not order the police to end the segregation, which reaches extraordinary levels during the Sukkot Holiday, right now.

I can understand the police, sort of. It is not actually interested in protecting the civil rights of women, or civil rights in general; it is interested in quiet, and emphasizes order much more than law. The last thing it needs is the headache involved in opening a fight with the most combative and least sane faction of the ultra-Orthodox. The police, it should be remembered, opposed a demonstration in Me’ah She’arim last year, a demonstration protesting this precise segregation policy.

The prosecution, which said it wants “dialogue,” is less understandable – until you are reminded this is Yaakov Ne’eman’s prosecution. Ne’eman, Liberman’s henchman in the Justice Ministry, was caught saying on record he wants to enforce the Talmud’s laws in Israel (Hebrew); his prosecutors have already adopted the ultra-Orthodox position on conversion (Hebrew), and told the HCJ the ultra-Orthodox ought to be protected “from modernity and the threats of enlightenment” (Hebrew).

The judges rejected the nonsense spouted by the prosecution, and noted the deterioration in this front. They actually sounded distressed. Not distressed enough, naturally, to actually order the police to remove the roadblocks by nighttime, arrest the ringleaders and charge them. They said segregation ought not to happen again next year. Next time, Chief Justice Beinish won’t be there for the annual gnashing of teeth.

The surrender to the ultra-Orthodox – the segregation, often by force, of bus lines; the violent segregation in Beit Shemesh – is not limited to Jerusalem and its environs. It made it to my hometown, Petah Tikva. MK Zahava Gal’on (Meretz) sent me the following placard, which was published before a feast of the Hassidic Rabbi of Mishkoltz in Petah Tikva. At the bottom of the placard, emphasized by me, it calls for segregation of women and men in what is still public territory in Petah Tikva. Men are urged to approach the place from the corner of Salant and Herzl streets; women are asked to arrive from the corner of Ehad Ha’am and Hafetz Haim streets.

Of particular notes are the guests of honor. The first, and somewhat reasonably, is the mayor, Yitzhak Ohayon. The second is… Chief Inspector Yohanan Danino, commander of the Israeli police. Gal’on noted that “the decision of the HCJ forbidding gender segregation in the public sphere is just a recommendation.”

And an apparently not an important one at that, if the Chief Inspector allows himself to simply ignore it. You know – these are just women. An unimportant minority of 51%.

(Yossi Gurvitz)

Sanctity and irrelevance: A large number of good leftist were shocked, shocked last morning when Shvuel Schijveschuurder sprayed “price tag” and “release Yigal Amir” near the Rabin Memorial in Tel Aviv. Schijveschuurder also splashed the memorial with white paint. The first comment by mayor Ron Huldai was that “we should cut off the hands which allow themselves to harm what is sacred and important to the people of Israel.”

Leaving Huldai’s Saudi fantasies aside – my colleague Dimi Reider already dealt with them – we should deal with the other part og his comment. Is the Rabin Memorial truly “sacred and important to the people of Israel”? Only if you’re a devout member of the dwindling Rabin cult, which sprang into being immediately after the murder, and which was epitomized in a placard appearing days afterwards: A picture of the martyred prime minister, titled “Ose Shalom Bi’mromaiv”, “Peace maker in His heavens”. This epithet, as any Orthodox Jew will know, is reserved to Him who spoke and beget the world. The cultists put Rabin, so to speak, at the Lord’s right hand.

The Rabin worship was a grave error. The issue wasn’t Rabin; the issue was the murder. But to speak about the murder; about the incitement which came before it; about the rabbis who sanctioned it; about the conspiracy of yeshiva boys (three were convicted, four allowed to slip away) to murder him; about the yeshiva leaders who sent their students into the streets, so they can cry “We’ll banish Rabin/by blood and fire” on every corner – well, that was risky. This was the stuff which could, and with justification, take the country to a civil war.

So the good leftists spoke about the victim instead of the murderer and the public whose servant he was, and as a result the meaning of the murder faded away. In the last few years, the yearly rally – the main event in the cult’s calendar – is time and again on the brink of cancellation, because there’s a limit to the times people will come together in order to try and revive the diminishing memory of the old melancholy feeling and listening to sad songs. In a vibrant society, a political murder is a call for action; In Israel, it was an invitation to coil into a fetus position and whine. One may suspect the endless reminiscing is a way by which the mourners absolve themselves of the need to rethink the whole history of the Oslo Accords and the slowly-revealed meaning of Rabin’s slogan, “We’re here, and they [should be] over there.”

Rabin was no saint. His hands were full of blood. The only peace he made was with Jordan, which, let’s face it, wasn’t a monumental task. As Security Minister, he ordered the IDF to “break the hands and legs” of Palestinian protesters, and when the inevitable war crimes were committed, he adroitly avoided any responsibility. As prime minister, he approved Operation Accountability in Lebanon, which expressly targeted Lebanese civilians population, shelling it for days so that its cries of anguish may force the government in Beirut to rein in Hizbullah (the architect of this infernal policy was, natch, Ehud Barak). His grave is not “sanctified” (it takes a strange kind of perversion to consider yourself a secular person and yet consider a grave to be sacred), his memorial certainly not. Those who insisted on speaking about the man and not about the murder, who worship the memory of a kindly grandfather, should not be surprised that its day of mourning is quickly becoming less important than that of the fast day in memory of the Babylonian collaborator Gdalyah.

The silencing: The media quickly dubbed Schijveschuurder as insane. There’s no good reason to think he is, and people should be wary of the tendency to call political opponents (and Schijveschuurder is clearly a right-winger) insane. The practice has a sordid history.

Listening to Schijveschuurder himself, it seems he carried out the act while in compos mentis. He wanted to protest the release of the murderers of family as part of the Netanyahu Deal. He knew he had to break through a massive cone of silence by the Israeli media, who marginalized the opponents of the deal. His logic was clear: The mass support for the deal comes from the left, a provocation is needed – and what could be more provocative than the besmirching of the memorial of the left’s idol?

Yours truly does not support, generally, the defacing of monuments; but I was not at all shocked when someone, forgot his name, spilled paint on the Baruch Goldstein mausoleum in Kiryat Arba. On the contrary. The people living in former Soviet-occupied lands who pull down Stalin statues and Red Army monuments have my complete sympathy, and should someone blow the statue of that butcher, Sir Douglas Haig, sky-high, I’d donate to his defense fund. The pain of people hurt by the Netanyahu Deal ought to be expressed somewhere, and the mainstream media does not seem to cooperate. The Kahanists, outlawed after the Goldstein massacre, are fond of saying that “when you shut someone’s mouth, his hands talk, instead.” There’s some truth in that. Large segments of the population oppose the deal, and we don’t hear them because the media is busy in its Schalit orgy, and trying to convince us that anyone who opposes the deal is either a raving right winger or a raving loony.

Supporting the extreme right wing is still legal, or so I hear. Furthermore, Alex Fishman wrote yesterday in Yediot that of the terrorists Netanyahu is about to release, 279 were sentenced to life for killing 599 Israelis. The people released in the infamous Gibril deal of the 1980s have, in comparison, murdered “just” 178 Israelis. The ISA (AKA Shin Beth), according to Fishman, estimates that 60% of the prisoners will return to terrorism. Assuming they would be just as effective as before, the price of the Netanyahu deal can be estimated in 359 dead Israelis. Assuming the ISA would be supernaturally effective and will foil 99% of their plots – not bloody likely, particularly if relations with the PA will collapse – then we are dealing with four murdered Israelis. Last I checked, four is more than one. Statistically, we sacrifice four Israelis, at least, to the Schalit Moloch. Hamas, we are told, was not even willing to say it will refrain from capturing soldiers in the futures. Yes, Netanyahu was that firm, that resolute.

Then again, it’s always easier to identify with the person we know than with future victims, who by definition are unknown. The campaign of the Schalit cult was wildly successful: Every Israeli knows Schalit, and much of the public was convinced to treat him as a “child.”

Second, there are the families of the victims, who are now asked politely to shut up and ruin the celebration (Netanyahu’s lapdog, Hanoch Daum, wrote precisely that in Yediot this morning). Dvir Volk, a blogger who has reason to believe the murderers of his fathers are to be released, wrote on Twitter bitterly that “If I had a shekel for every year the people who murdered my father spent in jail, I would still not have enough money for toilet paper, to wipe away Bibi’s urine from my face.” One can assume thousands of people, who lost their dear ones and their friends to murderers about to be released feel like him, as do hundreds of thousand – if not millions – of people who think the Netanyahu Deal is both folly and crime.

And if the media shuts their mouth, it at least should not act surprised when their hands speak, instead.

The secretary general of the CPI and other apparatchiks still support the Assad regime

A few months back I wrote about the fact that the communists are at it again: Saying one thing in Hebrew and another in Arabic. The specific case was Syria and the fact that the secretary general of the CPI, Muhammad Naffa, defended the Assad regime. There was a minor storm, and MK Dov Henin made a point of telling me that the official position of the CPI is resistance to the Assad regime and the massacre it commits.

That was more than three months ago. Since that time, the number of victims of the regime has increased significantly, and Yossef Elgazi (a former long-time CPI activist who left the party in 1990 and has since diligently documented its deviations) stayed on the beat. He found (Hebrew) that Naffa kept expressing his support of the Assad regime and blaming its opponents of being agents of American imperialism. The CPI Arabic site published several articles supporting the regime, and even one supporting the Gadaffi regime, which is unusually bizarre.

Elgazi’s most interesting finding is that a quiet demonstration (it must have been particularly quiet, because the Israeli media missed it) took place in mid-September in Haifa, in front of the French consulate. The demonstration was reported in the Arabic media, and among the people present was Naffa, former MK ‘Issam Makhoul, MK Said Naffa (who was kicked out of BALAD) and other senior CPI apparatchiks. According to the demonstration’s manifest, it was intended “to show solidarity with Syria and its national leadership against the plots of imperialism, Zionism, and Arab reactionary forces.” In Hadash’s Arabic site’s description of the demonstration, Naffa was quoted as saying that “Arab reactionary forces, particularly the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the Emirate of Qatar, support every action intended to destroy any progressive action in the Arab world, whether we speak of the brave Lebanese resistance movement, the Palestinian resistance movement, the strong position of Iran, the strong position of Syria against the imperialistic plans of the US for the creation of a New Middle East.” I’m certain American right-wing nutjobs would be overjoyed to hear the leader of the CPI shares their fears of a “new Middle East.” Needless to say, none of this made an appearance in Hadash’s Hebrew sites and publications. Maybe it was too embarrassing.

So who represents the position of Hadash-CPI? Its official proclamations, or its SG’s statements? Communist parties are famous for their strict ideological purity, which made split time and time again, like amebas on PCP. A famous story, which may be apocryphal but makes the point, tells of an American communist who left the party and founded a Trotskist faction, left it in order to found a more pure one, and finally suffered from multiple personalities and split from himself. If the CPI wants us to take it seriously come elections day – and the options do look bleak – it can’t allow itself to keep Naffa as SG and keep his faction as part of the party. It can’t keep on writing, time and time again, one thing in Arabic and another in Hebrew.

I mean, it obviously can – but then it has to take into account that what happened to the communist parties in Europe after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia will happen to it. No Israeli of conscience may support a party strongly suspected its heart is with the Assad regime. After all, had Naffa showed up in a demonstration supporting not Assad but, say, Thatcher, or – heavens forbid – Netanyahu, he would have been kicked out of office so quickly, he wouldn’t have the time to utter “false consciousness”. If Hadash wants to be taken seriously, and not be suspected of being an agent of influence for the Assad regime or even (Flying Spaghetti Monster save and protest us) for the Gaddafi regime, then it needs to be purged.

And if it can’t, or won’t, then we have a problem.

(Yossi Gurvitz)