All alone on Israel island

[luckytxn 2,265]

There's one in Colorado. It's called Castle Pines

Cool. Beautiful country up there. I lived further south for 3 years in Colorado Springs.

[Sofiyya 1,687]

Cool. Beautiful country up there. I lived further south for 3 years in Colorado Springs.

I like the Springs so much better than Denver, despite all the Christian fundies. I received an invitation in the mail yesterday from John McCain's favorite Zionist reconquistador, Pastor Hagee, inviting me to attend a spectacular fund raising event honoring Israel. I just may don my finest hijab and take him up on it

[luckytxn 2,265]

I like the Springs so much better than Denver, despite all the Christian fundies. I received an invitation in the mail yesterday from John McCain's favorite Zionist reconquistador, Pastor Hagee, inviting me to attend a spectacular fund raising event honoring Israel. I just may don my finest hijab and take him up on it

LOL. I have had dealings with many of the Focus on the Family people when I had a business there. Most were good people but some will rot in hell.

If you go please take pics and post them. The look on their face will be priceless.

[Sofiyya 1,687]

LOL. I have had dealings with many of the Focus on the Family people when I had a business there. Most were good people but some will rot in hell.

If you go please take pics and post them. The look on their face will be priceless.

I doubt I'll go. I'm not crazy

[luckytxn 2,265]

I doubt I'll go. I'm not crazy

Oh well. It would have been cool to read in the news the developments. I could have told everyone I know that I knew the crazy lady.

[Hilarious Clinton 452]

Israel..... the only place an Arab can freely vote in the middle east.

Goooo Israel!!

[scandal 951]

Israel..... the only place an Arab can freely vote in the middle east.

Goooo Israel!!

Not only that, a sitting member of Knesset, Ahmed Tibi, is coming to the UN this week to support the Palestinian statehood bid while at the same time other MK's are traveling to NY in opposition to the move. Arabs not only vote in Israel, they have organized political parties, members of Knesset, and take independent stances on controversial issues. Who knew.

[Sofiyya 1,687]

Israel..... the only place an Arab can freely vote in the middle east.

Goooo Israel!!

Not only that, a sitting member of Knesset, Ahmed Tibi, is coming to the UN this week to support the Palestinian statehood bid while at the same time other MK's are traveling to NY in opposition to the move. Arabs not only vote in Israel, they have organized political parties, members of Knesset, and take independent stances on controversial issues. Who knew.

All this freedom while their government is engaging in Arab displacement, genocide and lobbying to keep Israel Jewish and unfettered by a Palestinian state next door.

Whoo hoo! Colonialist democracy at work! Dem Ay-rabs kiss massa's feet every day.

I'm trying to imagine your jubilation if the scenario was the other way around. Voting and their own political parties is the least Israel can do. In the US, Blacks didn't think it was enough. They started the civil rights movement.

Edited September 19, 2011 by Sofiyya

[Sofiyya 1,687]

Oh, gee, all those lucky Arab voters couldn't stop this:

Israel: New Laws Marginalize Palestinian Arab Citizens

Measures Threaten Discrimination; Chill Freedom of Expression

March 30, 2011

(Jerusalem) - Two new Israeli laws affecting Israel's Palestinian Arab residents would promote discrimination and stifle free expression, Human Rights Watch said today. One would authorize rural, Jewish-majority communities to reject Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel and other "unsuitable" applicants for residency, and the other would chill expression regarding a key moment in the history of Palestinian citizens, Human Rights Watch said.

"These laws threaten Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel and others with yet more officially sanctioned discrimination," said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East director at Human Rights Watch. "Israeli parliamentarians should be working hard to end glaring inequality, not pushing through discriminatory laws to control who can live where and to create a single government-approved view of Israel's history."

The Knesset passed both laws on March 23, 2011. One officially authorizes "admissions committees" in about 300 Jewish-majority communities to reject applicants for residency who do not meet vague "social suitability" criteria. The measure anchors in law a practice that has been the basis for unjustly rejecting applications by Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel as well as members of socially marginalized groups such as Jews of non-European ancestry and single-parent families.

The second law would heavily fine any government-funded institution, including municipalities that provide health and education, for commemorating the "Nakba" - the Arabic term to describe the destruction of Palestinian villages and expulsion of their residents after Israel's declaration of independence - and for expression deemed to "negate the existence of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state."

The "admissions committee" law requires anyone seeking to move to any community in the Negev and Galilee regions with fewer than 400 families to obtain approval from committees consisting of town residents, a member of the Jewish Agency or World Zionist Organization, and several others. The law empowers these committees to reject candidates who, among other things, "are ill-suited to the community's way of life" or "might harm the community's fabric."

There are more than 300 such small communities in the Negev and Galilee, either small cooperative "kibbutzes" with some shared property, farming communities called "moshavs," or small rural "community towns," on land leased by the state. These communities already have admissions committees established under regulations of the Israel Land Authority, the state agency that leases them their land. But the committees and screening procedures had not been specifically authorized under national laws.

Although Palestinian Arabs are in the majority in the Negev and Galilee, the state has never allocated lands to allow these Israeli citizens to establish small communities there. All of the towns and communities to which the new law applies were established for and have a majority of Jewish residents.

Parliamentary statements indicate that the law's sponsors intended it to allow majority-Jewish communities to maintain their current demographic makeup by excluding Palestinian Arab citizens, an act of discrimination on the basis of their race, ethnicity, and national origin.

One of the law's sponsors, David Rotem of the Yisrael Beiteinu (Israel Our Home) party, told the Knesset in December 2009 that such a law would allow towns to be "established by people who want to live with other Jews." In a radio interview that month, Rotem said the law would codify screening procedures so that Jewish Israelis could "establish a place where everybody is an army veteran, a Yeshiva alumni, or something of that sort."

Another sponsor, Yisrael Hasson of the Kadima party, said in December 2010 that "the bill reflects the Knesset's commitment to work to preserve the ability to realize the Zionist dream in practice in the state of Israel" through "population dispersal," which the government had begun "thirty years ago ... [with] a string of small communities in the Galilee and Negev."

"Realization of these goals obliged us as legislators to ensure the existence of a screening mechanism for applicants to these communities," he said.

Late in negotiations over the law, legislators added a clause that nominally forbids committees to discriminate on the basis of race, religion, gender, nationality, or disability. However, the law's exclusion criteria threaten to do exactly what is supposedly prohibited, allowing admissions committees to mask discrimination under the vague criteria that a candidate is "unsuitable" to the community's "social characteristics," Human Rights Watch said.

Israeli opponents of the law argued that it would effectively bolster the legal and political standing of admissions committees and allow them to bypass a previous Supreme Court ruling against discrimination in property rights. In the case that led to that ruling, a village rejected an Arab-Israeli couple because the village was established on land that Israel had leased to the Jewish Agency, which did not lease land to non-Jews. Most of the land in Israel is state-owned and leased for 49- or 98-year periods.

The couple petitioned the Supreme Court, which ruled in 2000 that allocating land to citizens solely on the basis of their religion constituted prohibited discrimination, including cases in which the state first leased land to third parties that would not then lease it to non-Jews. However, the court limited the ruling to the specific case and stated that it might not make the same ruling in unspecified "special circumstances." The village committee then rejected the couple because they "did not fit its character." After further legal action, the couple was able to lease the land in 2007.

The law states that each community's unique "characteristics" will be "codified," and that rejected candidates are entitled to an explanation. However, in a February 2011 Supreme Court hearing regarding two couples whom admission committees rejected, the petitioners argued that many small rural communities are not designed exclusively for particular social groups with unique ways of life, such as ultra-Orthodox religious communities. The chief justice stated that the town in question "does not have any unique characteristics," and called the screening process an "invasion of privacy." But the court has yet rule in this case.

In a petition to the Supreme Court against the new law that has yet to be ruled on, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, a nongovernmental group, cited court cases brought by Palestinian Arabs and other families whom village acceptance committees rejected because they did not "socially fit." In one case, a kibbutz justified its rejection of an Arab-Israeli couple because its admissions criteria required residents to be eligible for membership in the World Zionist Organization and to have served in the Israeli army. Few Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel perform military service.

Another village committee requires applicants to embrace the values in the village's charter, including "Zionism" and "Jewish tradition." Other communities rejected Jews of North African and Middle Eastern descent and a disabled veteran. In these cases, the parties compromised or the court ordered the committees to re-evaluate the application, with the result that the courts have not explicitly ruled the committees' actions to be discriminatory.

In an affidavit submitted by the civil rights group, the former chairperson of one acceptance committee stated that the committee often rejected applicants on the basis of committee members' personal preferences, and that in most cases the evaluation process merely rubber stamps a decision to reject applicants.

As originally drafted, the law would have applied to communities across Israel, but after a compromise, the final law, which passed after 2 a.m. on March 23 by 35 to 20, applies only to the Negev and Galilee regions. Longstanding Israeli policy seeks to "Judaize the Galilee," and Israeli officials have promoted plans to encourage large-scale Jewish immigration to the Negev. In 2010, several rabbis in the Galilee, who are government officials, campaigned for Jewish Israelis not to rent apartments or sell land to Arab-Israelis; and the Knesset gave preliminary approval to a parliamentary inquiry into alleged purchases of Israeli land by "foreign governments" for the benefit of Arab-Israeli citizens. Arab citizens of Israel have sought to move into Jewish communities in part because of a lack of housing for Palestinian Arab citizens. While Israeli planning authorities have established hundreds of Jewish towns and villages, Israel has not allowed Arab citizens to establish any new towns since 1948, except for seven communities that the state planned for Bedouins from the Negev, whom the government urged to relocate from their traditional lands or forcibly evicted from them.

Since the 1990s state planning bodies have approved "expansions" for Jewish towns, rezoning adjacent agricultural lands for residential construction. An Israel Lands Authority administrative decision from 1993 granted local residents and their children "preferred access" to the newly expanded residential areas, and authorized the towns to create admissions committees to review outside applicants. By contrast, Human Rights Watch has documented [3] cases [4] in which Israeli planning authorities consistently rejected the petitions of Arab-Israelis to rezone "agricultural" lands for residential purposes.

In 2007 the United Nations committee that oversees states' compliance with the Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination recommended that Israel examine the role of admissions committees, "ensure that state land is allocated without discrimination, direct or indirect," and "assess the significance and impact of the 'social suitability' criterion in this regard." Under the convention, Israel is obliged to prohibit and eliminate racial discrimination in all its forms and to guarantee the right of everyone, without distinction as to race or ethnic or national origin, to freedom of movement and residence, and to housing.

"Countries should seek to end the segregation and negative treatment of minority communities, yet Israel is moving in the other direction," Whitson said. "A state that deliberately promotes the residential rights and privileges of one ethnic group while diminishing those of another is practicing illegal discrimination, pure and simple."

The Knesset passed, 37 to 25, the law that allows the government to penalize any state-funded institution that commemorates the "Nakba," the Arabic term meaning "catastrophe" and referring to the historic episode in which hundreds of thousands of Palestinian residents of what is now Israel fled and hundreds of villages were destroyed during the conflict after Israel declared independence in 1948. The penalty could also be imposed on an institution that "denies the existence of the State of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state," an action the law does not define.

Palestinian Arab members of Israel's parliament, community leaders, and civil society groups have frequently stated their view that definitions of Israel as a "Jewish state" marginalize and exclude them.

The law, formally an amendment to the Budget Principles Law, enables the finance minister to cut government funding to such institutions by three times the amount that the institution spent on the "illegal" activities. The law does not distinguish cases in which institutions spent non-government funds on such activities. The finance minister would need the approval of other budgetary officials to cut the funds.

The law does not define "institution," but states that it applies to any state-funded entity. Entities at risk include not only municipalities, but also theaters and schools that stage plays or screen films about the Nakba or cultural organizations that hold "coexistence" activities for Jewish and Arab Israeli students to commemorate both Israel's independence day and the "Nakba" as a form of mutual learning.

"This effort to punish the peaceful expression of opinions by Israelis who receive state funding is an insult to Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel and a threat to freedom of expression," Whitson said. "Since when does the Israeli government have the right to tell Israeli citizens what they're not entitled to say about history?"

The Nakba law's threefold financial penalty threatens to harm the rights of citizens - for example, by cutting federal funds that municipalities need to provide health, housing, education, and other services, Human Rights Watch said. For example, according to an Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development report on Israel, local governments are responsible for providing basic social services but receive 75 percent financing from the central government to procure those services. The predictable result of the law's severe penalties and the vagueness of the acts and institutions that could be penalized is that it will broadly chill freedom of expression by preventing various institutions from commemorating the Nakba at all, Human Rights Watch said.

"The government is telling Arab-Israeli municipalities and other institutions that if they don't shut up about the Nakba and anything else that bureaucrats may deem anti-Israeli, they'll have to shut down programs and services for lack of funds," Whitson said. "Democracies shouldn't quash expression even if it's unpopular, and in this case, what's unpopular to some legislators is central to the historical narrative of a million and a half citizens."

[Sofiyya 1,687]

Democracy in Israel is, for Arabs, like 1940's and 50's democracy for Black Americans. If you've lived long enough, this article will sound familiar.

For Israel's Arab Citizens, Isolation and Exclusion

Ahmad and Fatina Zubeidat, Arab citizens of Israel, were not allowed to move into a Jewish community on state land.

By Scott Wilson

Washington Post Foreign Service

Thursday, December 20, 2007

Ahmad and Fatina Zubeidat, Arab citizens of Israel, were not allowed to move into a Jewish community on state land. (By Scott Wilson -- The Washington Post)

KARMIEL, Israel -- Fatina and Ahmad Zubeidat, young Arab citizens of Israel, met on the first day of class at the prestigious Bezalel arts and architecture academy in Jerusalem. Married last year, the couple rents an airy house here in the Galilee filled with stylish furniture and other modern grace notes.

But this is not where they wanted to live. They had hoped to be in Rakefet, a nearby town where 150 Jewish families live on state land close to the mall project Ahmad is building. After months of interviews and testing, the town's admission committee rejected the Arab couple on the grounds of "social incompatibility."

They petitioned Israel's high court to end such screening, claiming discrimination, a charge town officials are challenging.

"We can't just be good citizens," said Fatina, 27, who is expecting the couple's first child. "If they won't develop our villages, then we will choose where we want to live. The problem lies not with us, but with Jewish society that does not accept the other."

The Zubeidats are players in a wider ethnic clash unfolding in the Galilee, a northern region where Arabs, those who remained in Israel after its creation in 1948 and their descendants, outnumber Jews. Israel's policies have deepened the gulf between Arab and Jewish citizens in recent years, through concrete walls, laws that favor Jews, and political proposals that place the Arab minority outside national life.

This process of separation within Israel's original boundaries mirrors in many ways the broader one taking place between Israelis and Palestinians in the occupied territories.

With most of Israel's land controlled by a government agency, Israeli Arabs have long had more trouble acquiring property than Jews, who outnumber them five to one in a population of about 6.5 million people. In response, Arab lawmakers joined a Jewish parliamentary majority this year in endorsing the construction of a new Arab city in the Galilee, where demographic rivalry and ethnic separation are most pronounced. Arabs say it will be the first city built on their behalf since the state's founding.

But some Jewish political leaders have suggested that Israel's Arabs, who commonly refer to themselves as Palestinian citizens of Israel, should eventually live in a future Palestinian state, the subject of peace negotiations inaugurated last month in Annapolis, Md. Israel's foreign minister and lead negotiator, Tzipi Livni, said before the meeting that such a state would "be the national answer to the Palestinians" in the territories and those "who live in different refugee camps or in Israel."

Arabs and Jews study in separate schools in Israel -- the Arab system receives fewer resources -- and learn Israeli history in different ways. Israel's Jewish education minister, Yuli Tamir, ordered this year that Arab third-grade textbooks note that Arab citizens call Israel's 1948 War of Independence "the catastrophe." Many Jewish lawmakers reacted with scorn.

Except for a relatively small Druze population, Arabs are excluded also from military service mandatory for all but ultra-Orthodox Jews, an essential shared experience of Israeli life and a traditional training ground for future political leaders. Arab lawmakers have lined up now against a new proposal for Arabs to perform "national service" in lieu of time in the army, an institution they hold responsible for enforcing the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories.

"We have lost the Arab citizens of Israel," said Amir Sheleg, 63, who is head of security for the Jewish community of Nir Zevi on Israel's coastal plain. "They no longer want to be a part of the state, and I am sorry for it."

Sheleg, burly and bald, patrolled in a black pickup truck along a concrete wall that rises along the town's edge. The 15-foot-high barrier, funded by the government, divides the leafy streets of Nir Zevi from the adjacent Arab community of Lod. Rising crime, he said, prompted his town to begin building the wall four years ago.

"It only adds hatred," said Rifat Iliatim, 39, an Arab resident of Lod who sells horses for a living. "All our lives we lived together and there was respect on both sides. Do they want this part of Israel to be like Jerusalem or Gaza where Jews and Arabs are separate?"

ACRE

Acre is a city of 52,000 Arab and Jewish citizens, many living in mixed neighborhoods along a sweep of Mediterranean coast.

Arabs dominate the seaside Old City, a U.N. World Heritage Site of crenellated stone walls possessed over the centuries by Greeks, Egyptians and Crusader kings. A single crowded high school just outside the ancient walls serves the entire Arab population, 27 percent of Acre's total. The city's five mosques, including el-Jazzar, the second largest in Israel and the territories after al-Aqsa in Jerusalem, are also concentrated in the area.

Jews live in the newer, outlying neighborhoods that ring the Old City. For more than two decades, Jews rising into the middle class left the older neighborhoods and Arabs filled in behind them.

In the past year, conflict between Arabs and Jews -- over business hours, the right to open mosques, and an increasing Jewish presence in Arab-majority areas -- has flashed through neighborhoods running between the two largely ethnically distinct parts of the city.

Yeshiva Hesder-Acco is dwarfed by decrepit apartment buildings with laundry hanging from balconies. Once populated by new Jewish immigrants, the apartments are filled now by Arabs. Young girls walk the streets in head scarves. Arab boys play soccer on the asphalt court next to the yeshiva.

"It's just background noise, part of the scenery," said Mordechai Behar, a 22-year-old yeshiva student, referring to his Arab neighbors. "We try not to interact with them."

Yossi Stern, a 35-year-old rabbi, runs the yeshiva with a bustling energy. He arrived in 2001 from the West Bank settlement of Elon Moreh, one of the earliest and most radical in the territories, where he was a teacher.

His move reflected a shift in his focus from settling the West Bank to promoting a larger and more politically aware Jewish majority within Israel's original boundaries. He has grown the yeshiva from 20 to 120 students since then.

"Inside the Green Line, people have not awakened to their role of the last 100 years," Stern said, referring to the 1949 armistice line that marked Israel's boundary until it seized the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and the Golan Heights in the 1967 Middle East war. "If we fall asleep here, we will wake up to an Arab majority."

His students volunteer in public schools and direct tours of the Old City, where a state-run development company is buying Arab property and selling it to Jewish businessmen.

Stern works with the city government, led by a Jewish mayor, on projects designed to attract Jews to Acre, including a recently approved housing development designated for Jewish military families. Built on state land, the development will include a new, 350-student yeshiva that Stern advertises as "the center for Jewish identity in the Galilee."

"We're not trying to build a settlement in this city," he said. "Here we're mature enough to see this as a long process."

But Ahmad Odeh, an Arab member of the city council, calls Stern precisely that -- "a settler" trying to make Arab neighborhoods more Jewish. Odeh's family fled from the Galilee village of Shaab during the 1948 war, eventually settling in a neighborhood not far from Stern's yeshiva. Odeh has sued the Jewish-majority council successfully six times for violating Arab rights to education and property.

Odeh, a slight, wiry man with spiky hair, has been lobbying the council to reopen a mosque outside the Old City that the government closed decades ago. It sits among some of the city's more than 50 synagogues.

Because the single Arab high school is overcrowded, Odeh's eldest daughter commutes to one in a village 45 minutes from town, reversing the rural-to-urban migration patterns of recent decades.

"This is all part of the project to Judaize the Galilee," said Odeh, 48. "We want to be partners in our city."

KARMIEL

This hilltop community with streets lined by date palms and split by lush grassy medians emerged in the 1960s as a Zionist response to the large Arab population in the Galilee. The Zubeidats are among a tiny fraction of Arabs who live here.

The couple considered building a home in Sakhnin, a nearby Arab town. But as with many Arab towns and villages, its public services pale next to those of Jewish ones. The prospects appeared better in Rakefet, and they applied to live there after marrying.

The Israel Land Administration controls 93 percent of the land in Israel, including the hilltop where Rakefet sits. The government agency has a say in who is allowed to live in such communities with a representative on the local "absorption committees" that weigh the applications.

For the Zubeidats, who speak Hebrew and Arabic fluently, the months-long process began in the summer of 2006. It included a series of interviews and tests, some taken with the dozen or so Jewish applicants also seeking to move in.

"All the questions had to do with how we would integrate into the community," Fatina said. "We have many, many Jewish friends. We spend our holidays with them, and they do the same. We're not from outer space, we're from here."

The rejection letter followed a conversation the Zubeidats had with an official from the Misgav Regional Council, which oversees Rakefet and dozens of other nearby towns. He told them, Fatina recalled, that although they were "very nice people," he would have to begin marketing Rakefet as a "mixed community" to possible buyers in Tel Aviv if they moved in. The designation would hurt sales.

"Obviously, this whole process was designed to push us back to Sakhnin," Ahmad said. "And the way these Arab towns are now, it's like a ghetto."

Maya Tsaban, a spokeswoman for the regional council that oversees Rakefet, said, "This decision was based on rules we didn't make," referring to regulations established by national government agencies. She declined to comment further.

The Israel Land Administration, which set the selection criteria, rejected the Zubeidats' appeal this year. An agency spokeswoman, Ortal Tzabar, said, "One aspect taken into consideration in deciding whether to accept someone is the homogeneity of the community."

The houses of Rakefet are set along steep, curving streets lined with pines and cedar. Nadav Garmi, a 35-year-old engineer, is building a home there. He makes a short drive each day from his neighboring community -- also populated only by Jews -- that falls under the same regional council.

"I'm very left-wing, but I think Arabs should live in one place, ultra-Orthodox Jews in one place, secular Jews in one place and so on," Garmi said. "If you want a good neighbor, you have to have a place for everybody. It's best not to mix too much."

[PalestineMyHeart 1,897]

Israel..... the only place an Arab can freely vote in the middle east.

Goooo Israel!!

Why are your contributions to any discussion of the Palestinian-Israeli debate always the same worn-out, empty talking points ?

Actually, international observers were on the ground watching the entire 2006 Palestinian election process from start to finish, and they agreed that it was carried out freely and fairly.

[mawilson 2,133]

Actually, international observers were on the ground watching the entire 2006 Palestinian election process from start to finish, and they agreed that it was carried out freely and fairly.

Soviet Union had free and fair elections too... unfortunately, they only had one Party and one candidate listed on the ballot.

[PalestineMyHeart 1,897]

Soviet Union had free and fair elections too... unfortunately, they only had one Party and one candidate listed on the ballot.

#1. Were these elections that you speak of in the Soviet Union certified by international observers as free and fair ?

#2. How many different parties had candidates in the Palestinian elections of 2006 ?

[mawilson 2,133]

#2. How many different parties had candidates in the Palestinian elections of 2006 ?

Hamas, Fatah and a bunch of nobodys.

Fatah was considered corrupt and incompetent and Hamas was valued as a better alternative.

[Sofiyya 1,687]

Hamas, Fatah and a bunch of nobodys.

Fatah was considered corrupt and incompetent and Hamas was valued as a better alternative.

Interesting. Sounds a lot like any debate about the GOP vs. the Dems, and pretty much sums up election politics in the US, too.