Settlements

Expert on settlers settles at Oxford University

Simon Rocker — Fri, 24 May 2013 09:30:59 +0100

The Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies has finally filled a prestigious academic post after a previous candidate pulled out because of new immigration rules.

Dr Sara Hirschhorn, a post-doctoral fellow in Israel studies at Brandeis University in the United States, is due to become the new Sidney Brichto Fellow in Israel studies in September.

An expert on the settler movement, she will combine the role with a research lectureship at Oxford University.

Israeli academic, Dr Hizky Shoham, from Tel Aviv University, had initially been appointed to the post. But, according to the centre’s president, Dr David Ariel, regulations introduced by the UK Border Agency had meant it was “impossible” to obtain a work permit in time for him to start the job in January.

The university had then been required by the Border Agency to re-advertise the post. “At that point, Dr Shoham decided not to reapply and accepted a position in Israel,” Dr Ariel said. “This allowed the selection committee to consider a strong pool of new applicants, of which Dr Hirschhorn was the first choice.”

He said: “We are confident we have, at last, found the right candidate and look forward to her arrival in Oxford.”

Israel quietly agrees to settlement freeze

Anshel Pfeffer — Thu, 09 May 2013 18:00:43 +0100

The Israeli government has unofficially frozen settlement building in the West Bank following a request from US Secretary of State John Kerry.

Mr Kerry has visited Israel twice in the past two months and has since held two more meetings with Justice Minister Tzipi Livni, who is in charge of talks between Israel and the PA.

While the talks have been frozen for more than two years and no date has yet been set for their renewal, Israeli officials said that the “temporary freeze” was an attempt to assist Mr Kerry in his efforts to lay the foundations for new rounds of negotiations.

In return for Israel committing to the freeze until mid-June, the PA has agreed to put on hold its attempts to gain further unilateral recognition for a Palestinian state.

Israel announced last November it would begin planning for 3,000 new homes in the West Bank following the vote at the UN General Assembly that upgraded the Palestinians’ status.

Originally, the work was put on hold two months ago before the visit of President Barack Obama but, following Mr Kerry’s request, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered a freeze on all work for a two-month period.

This is the second time in as many months that Mr Netanyahu has bowed to the wishes of the Obama administration. His previous concession came at the end of Mr Obama’s visit when he agreed to call the Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and apologise for the deaths of nine Turkish citizens during the clashes on the Mavi Marmara ferry bound for Gaza three years ago.

The building freeze has angered the settlers and could cause the coalition’s first crisis. The pro-settler party Habayit Hayehudi has warned that it will not vote for the new state budget if there is no building.

Further complicating matters is the fact that Housing Minister Uri Ariel, himself a settler and a senior member of Habayit Hayehudi, is in charge of implementing the freeze.

One of the housing projects now frozen is the plan to build 800 homes in the E1 area to the east of Jerusalem.

Over 2,000 members of the Bedouin Jahalin tribe have been told that they will be evicted from the area to allow the building to go ahead. Israel claims that the Bedouin are there illegally.

West Bank stabbing, pinpoint strike in Gaza but ‘no escalation’

Anshel Pfeffer — Thu, 02 May 2013 13:45:44 +0100

Evyatar Borovsky, an actor and security guard from the settlement of Yitzhar, who was stabbed to death on Tuesday, was the first Israeli killed in a terror attack in the West Bank in nearly two years.

Hours later, Israel carried out the first “targeted killing” of a terror operative in Gaza in five months.

Although both incidents marked the end of significant lulls in certain kinds of violence, neither are seen by Israeli security officials as signs of an escalation in the West Bank or on Israel’s southern border.
Mr Borovsky, who was 31 years old, was killed at the Tapuach Junction near the town of Ariel while waiting for a lift.

The murderer, Salam Azuol from Tul Karm, grabbed Mr Borovsky’s pistol and started shooting at a Border Police post. He missed and, when the police returned fire, was shot and severely wounded.

According to the initial investigation, Azuol, a member of the Fatah movement, acted on his own initiative. His motive, aside from killing Israelis, could have been an attempt to “clear” his family’s name after his brother was accused of collaborating with Israel.

Following the murder, settlers in the area embarked on a widespread rampage which included burning Palestinian-owned fields and stoning their cars.

The settlers’ Yesha Council said the murder was “a direct continuation of the Palestinian Authority’s incitement and the forgiving attitude [of the Israeli authorities] towards stone-throwing attacks”.

While there has been an increase in stone-throwing against Israeli vehicles in the West Bank, and in “local” terror attacks, security officials say that the co-ordination with the Palestinian Authority security apparatus remains “close and useful” and that the main terror organisations have so far not succeeded in rebuilding their networks in the West Bank.

A couple of hours after the stabbing, a pinpoint airborne attack took place on the Gaza Strip coastal road, close to a Hamas training camp. The death of Hitham Mishal, 29, who was hit while riding his motorbike, was the first “targeted killing” carried out by the Israeli Air Force and the Shin Bet in the five months since the end of Operation Pillar of Defence last year in Gaza.

According to IDF sources, Mishal — who worked as a police officer — supplied rockets to jihadist groups operating in Gaza and Sinai and had provided the Grad rockets that were fired at Eilat two weeks ago.

Defence Minister Moshe Ya’alon said following the attack that Israel “will not allow a trickle of rockets from the Gaza Strip, and we will certainly not allow terrorists to leave Gaza and attack Eilat”.

Over the past five months, the ceasefire around Gaza has generally been observed but there have been sporadic attacks by jihadist groups which flout the authority of the Hamas government. One of these groups fired five mortar rounds in retaliation to Mishal’s killing but none of them hit targets in Israel.

Israeli security sources said that, due to Mishal’s “freelance” role, they did not expect any major retaliation.

We must take a stand against settler violence

Simon Rocker — Sat, 27 Apr 2013 11:43:37 +0100

Acouple of months ago a young Arab woman from Qalansuwa in central Israel set off to do what we would consider a mitzvah. She was a teacher of Arabic in a Jewish school and she went with a Jewish friend to go to the shivah of a colleague in Jerusalem.

But when they left the shivah, they were confronted by a gang of local yeshivah students. “They cursed her, they spat on her, they threw oranges at her,” said Israeli religious activist Dr Gadi Gvaryahu. “They said to her friend ‘How dare you come with an Arab woman to our neighbourhood’. And then they damaged her car, broke the window, let down her tyres.”

When Dr Gvaryahu and his friends heard about the incident, their response was to organise a delegation to see the woman to apologise for what had happened. They also asked new Education Minister Rabbi Shai Piron to join them.

“He said he could not come but that he’d surprise us,” Dr Gvaryahu said. “The day before we came to Qalansuwa, he took his team to her class in her school and he, the minister of education, gave a lesson to her students on how Jews and Arabs can live together in the land of Israel. She was touched.”

Such acts of reconciliation have become a sad necessity for Dr Gvaryahu, a leading Orthodox campaigner against Jewish extremism. A year and a half ago he helped to set up an organisation to counter the “price taggers”, militant young settlers who carry out revenge raids for Palestinian attacks or government attempts to uproot West Bank outposts.

Sometimes the price taggers may be content with spraying graffiti. But they have also engaged in physical asssaults and arson. And whenever they strike, members of Dr Gvaryahu’s organisation will go to the place to talk to the victims and offer help, sympathy and sometimes compensation. “In a [Palestinian] village called Jabba, where extremists tried to burn down the mosque, we met many children,” he said. “One father said he was happy that we’d come because his child had started saying that all Jews are evil.”

His group is called Tag Meir,“tag of light”, a punning riposte to “price tag” in Hebrew, tag mechir. “They want to create damage, we want to create light,” he said.

Although most religious Zionists and most settlers oppose price tag attacks, he notes, enough extremists exist to cause trouble. “One person can create an enormous amount of damage,” he said. “You just need one Yigal Amir to kill a prime minister, and one Baruch Goldstein to kill 29 innocent Muslims at prayer.”

An eighth-generation Jerusalemite on his mother’s side — who has a doctorate in animal behaviour — he was inspired by the religious values of his father, a Holocaust survivor. “For him, anything that sounded like racism or hate crime was a sin,” he said.

Tag Meir is not his first venture into activism. He is also a founder of the Yud Bet Cheshvan Foundation, named after the yahrzeit of assassinated Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin. “Yigal Amir was unfortunately a religious Zionist. And we feel a kind of responsibility for what he did. He received our education,” he said.
Amir was thought a model student at Bar Ilan University and also studied at the respected Keren B’Yavneh Yeshivah. “You cannot say he was not part of us, that he was crazy,” Dr Gvaryahu said.

The foundation has established a number of schools and also a youth movement. “We decided we need to bring more values of tolerance and open-minded pluralism. As we say in Hebrew, derech eretz kadma l’Torah, you need to be a human being before you practise your religious obligations.”

Whereas Orthodox Zionism was once a liberal, even left-leaning movement politically, he noted, it swung right after the 1967 War, gripped by messianic idealism which viewed settlement in Judea and Samaria as holy work. But that sense of divine mission has also spawned among a small, but dangerous, minority, a disregard for democratic norms.

The struggle against extremism is not just for Israelis. “Our religion is under attack and not only in Israel. If you let extremists burn mosques and churches all over Israel, tomorrow someone will do it with a synagogue,” he said.

Which is why his just he paid his first visit to London, as a guest of the New Israel Fund, which supports his work in Israel. He addressed a Yom Ha’atzmaut lunch at Golders Green Synagogue and spoke to groups from two other United Synagogue communities, Muswell Hill and South Hampstead.

If the religious Zionist sector were slide to the extreme right, it could spell disaster for Israel. “Because they serve in the army, they know how to use guns. They can destroy the country,” he said.

Instead, if it regained a more moderate voice, it could play a major bridge-building role in Israeli society, he believes. “I think at the end of the tunnel, we’ll win the battle. But there is a long way.”

EU backs further labelling of Israeli settlement products

Marcus Dysch — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 10:53:24 +0100

European Union foreign ministers – including British Foreign Secretary William Hague – have backed plans to implement further labelling of products from Israeli settlements in the West Bank.

Britain was one of 12 states to write to EU foreign policy chief Baroness Ashton pledging to assist the union in the “important work” of labelling.

The step follows the publication of labelling guidelines by the EU last year and ongoing discussions in member states over the issue.

Israel has repeatedly said that special labelling of West Bank goods would be discriminatory and a form of boycott.

In the letter to Baroness Ashton the foreign ministers of countries including France, the Netherlands, Spain, Ireland and Austria wrote that the policy would be “an important step to ensure correct and coherent application of EU consumer protection and labelling legislation”.

Baroness Ashton is yet to respond to the letter, which was sent earlier this month and made public last week.

In 2009 the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs issued voluntary guidance to stores stating that labels on items imported to Britain from the West Bank should differentiate between “Israeli settlement produce” and “Palestinian produce”.

Last October 22 NGOs released a report recommending the EU stop importing Israeli settlement goods.

EU foreign ministers in settlement product labelling drive

Zoe Winograd — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 10:29:04 +0100

EU foreign ministers have shown their support for labelling products from Israeli settlements.

In a letter obtained by AFP on Friday, 13 ministers, including William Hague, told foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton: "We warmly welcome your commitment to work with fellow commissioners to prepare EU-wide guidelines on the labeling of settlement produce."

"This is an important step to ensure correct and coherent application of EU consumer protection and labelling legislation, which is in fulfillment of our previous commitments and is fully consistent with long-standing EU policy in relation to Israeli settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territories."

Ministers of Britain, France, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Spain, Finland, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, Portugal, Ireland and Slovenia make-up the signatories of the letter.

Israeli foreign ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor told the AFP: "This whole labelling initiative is fundamentally discriminatory as it singles out one country and one area for labelling,"

"Surely the EU feels strongly about quite a wide number of areas in controversy around the world and indeed in Europe itself."

In February, the EU formally recommended that its 27 member states “prevent” activity in Israeli settlements.

Settlers hand out chametz to Arabs

Ben Hartman — Thu, 04 Apr 2013 22:00:30 +0100

For a third consecutive year, last week Israeli settlers gave their chametz to their Arab neighbours as part of an effort to build bridges between Israelis and Palestinians.

Settlers from seven West Bank settlements gave their leavened bread to a group that distributed the food to Palestinian families. The bread would otherwise have been burned ahead of Passover, in keeping with tradition.

The initiative was the creation of Eretz Shalom, a pro-peace movement whose head, Nachum Pachenik, said he works from within “the hard core of the conflict [the West Bank] to strengthen the forces of dialogue and tolerance and good neighbourly relations”.

On the subject of Passover, the Hebron native said: “It’s a holiday that celebrates our freedom, but there is a people on the other side that also deserves freedom.”

Mr Pachenik said that for the most part, the Palestinians are open to the group’s activities, although there is always a minority — on both sides — who view their actions with a skepticism.

The group was inspired by the controversial late rabbi of the settlement of Tekoa, Menachem Froman. He was known for efforts in bringing Palestinians and Israelis together and his stated desire to remain in Tekoa even if it were to come under Palestinian rule.

Mr Pachenik said he also drew inspiration from a visit to Northern Ireland, where he “saw how they managed to make peace without separating people, and this is one of our goals — to make peace without transferring or expelling people from either side”.

Price tag attack staged by Palestinians say police

Anna Sheinman — Fri, 01 Mar 2013 13:23:20 +0000

Israeli police announced on Thursday that an alleged settler “price tag” attack in the Arab village of Kusra in the West Bank last week was in fact staged by Palestinians.

The Shai District police has confirmed that what they were told was an attack by settlers on an Arab village , in which six cars were burned and an Israeli ID card left on the scene, was not in fact a price tag attack.

Discrepancies were found in testimonials from those who claimed their cars were burned and the ID card was found to belong to a soldier who had recently reported that he had lost it in the village.

UK envoy signs ‘darkest’ report on settlements

Thu, 28 Feb 2013 12:50:11 +0000

The British envoy to East Jerusalem, Sir Vincent Fean, has joined 27 European Union heads of mission in signing a damning report on Israeli settlement activities.

A British official told the Telegraph this week that this was “the darkest” report that the EU has ever produced on the conflict.

The document recommended that the EU limit trade with settlements and block investment in areas beyond the Green Line.

It said that the EU should “prevent, discourage and raise awareness about problematic implications of financial transactions, including foreign direct investments, from within the EU in support of settlement activities, infrastructure and services.”

Recommendations included ensuring that existing legislation on the labelling of settlement-made products was enforced, to allow consumers to make “an informed choice”.

The report also urged Brussels to enforce the EU-Israel free trade agreement, which requires that goods from the settlements do not receive preferential treatment over goods from within the Green Line.

The report was compiled in January following Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s announcements late last year that Israel would embark on several new settlement-construction projects in sensitive areas of the West Bank.

East Jerusalem EU consul recommends settlements divestment

Anna Sheinman — Wed, 27 Feb 2013 12:20:40 +0000

European Union officials based in East Jerusalem and Ramallah have recommended that the EU limit trade with settlements and block investment in them.

In a report sent to all 27 member states and seen by Haaretz, the EU consul recommended that states should: “Prevent, discourage and raise awareness about problematic implications of financial transactions, including foreign direct investments, from within the EU in support of settlement activities, infrastructure and services.”

This is stronger language than has previously been used to express the EU’s opposition to settlements.

The report urged Brussels to strictly enforce the EU-Israel free trade agreement, which ensures that goods from the settlements do not receive the preferential treatment that goods from within the Green Line do. It also recommended that the EU cease investment in any research done by Israeli organisations based in settlements.