compiled by Cem Ertür | Featured Writer | Dandelion Salad | 25 March 2010
The UN Human Rights Council has roundly condemned Israel in resolutions tabled under the agenda item 7, “Human Rights Situation in Palestine and Other Occupied Arab Territories”.
Five resolutions have been adopted against Israel, amounting to the greatest number of condemnatory resolutions on a single country:
- Human rights in the occupied Syrian Golan
- The right of the Palestinian people to self-determination
- Israeli settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and in the occupied Syrian Golan
- The grave human rights violations by Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem
- Follow-up to the report of the United Nations Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict ...
March 21, 2010
On March 17, the following note appeared on the Promised Land blog:
And this also happened this week: the office of the minister of education forbade distributing a booklet for kids about the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, because it didn’t like two articles in the declaration, as well as some of the illustration in the booklet.
The relevant link was to an article in Hebrew. I asked Noam which two articles had been specified, and he replied that the nrg.co.il article implied Article 14 and Article 18. These two articles are as follows:
"Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution." (Article 14)
"Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance." (Article 18) ...
Jewish couple lose court battle to help Bedouin friends | By Jonathan Cook in Nevatim
March 22, 2010 "Information Clearing House" -- The Zakai and Tarabin families should be a picture of happy coexistence across the ethnic divide, a model for others to emulate in Israel.
But Natalie and Weisman Zakai say the past three years -- since the Jewish couple offered to rent their home to Bedouin friends, Ahmed and Khalas Tarabin -- have been a living hell.
“I have always loved Israel,” said Mrs Zakai, 43. “But to see the depth of the racism of our neighbours has made me question why we live in this country.”
Three of the couple’s six dogs have been mysteriously poisoned; Mrs Zakai’s car has been sprayed with the words ”Arab lover” and the windows smashed; her three children in school are regularly taunted and bullied by other pupils; and a collection of vintage cars in the family’s yard has been set on fire in what police say was an arson attack.
To add to these indignities, the Zakais have spent three years and thousands of dollars battling through the courts against the elected officials of their community of Nevatim, in Israel’s southern Negev desert, who have said they are determined to keep the Tarabins from moving in.
Last week the Zakais’ legal struggle looked like it had run out of steam. The supreme court told the two families the Tarabins should submit to a vetting committee of local officials to assess their suitability – a requirement that has never been made before by the Negev community in the case of a family seeking to rent a home.
“The decision of the committee is a foregone conclusion,” Mr Tarabin said.
Chances for Jews and Arabs to live together -- outside of a handful of cities -- are all but impossible because Israel’s rural communities are strictly segregated, said Alaa Mahajneh, a lawyer representing the Zakais.
Israel has nationalised 93 per cent of the country’s territory, confining most of its 1.3 million Arab citizens, one-fifth of the population, to 120 or so communities that existed at the time of the state’s creation in 1948.
Meanwhile, more than 700 rural communities, including Nevatim, have remained exclusively Jewish by requiring that anyone who wants to buy a home applies to local vetting committees, which have been used to weed out Arab applicants. ...
A December 2009 Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Network "Monitoring Report on Freedom of Association in the Euro-Mediterranean Region" assessed it in EU and Middle East countries, including Israel and Occupied Palestine, the topic of this article.
Freedom of Association in Israel
Instead of improving in 2009, it deteriorated even though Israel's Supreme Court recognizes it as a fundamental human right. However, three statutory law types restrict it, the first includes the 1980 Law of Associations that regulates the formation and operation of NGOs, corporations, and cooperative associations, and the 1999 Companies Law.
The second involves criminal laws, including the 1948 Prevention of Terrorism Ordinance, the 1994 Law Implementing the Interim Agreement on the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and 2005 Law on the Prohibition of Terror Funding.
...
Israel ratified all core international human rights conventions relating to free association rights, including the 1966 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR). It requires signatories to respect the right to life, due process, judicial fairness, fair elections, and freedoms of expression, assembly and religion.
...
During the Gaza war, 832 mostly Israeli Arabs were arrested for protesting, one-third of them minors, often violently. In Kufr Kanna, for example, armed police attacked demonstrators with tear gas, rubber bullets and beatings. During and after the conflict, General Security Service (GSS) officials threatened dozens of Israeli Arab political leaders and activists with criminal prosecutions for breaching public order, thus infringing their free expression and assembly rights, including ones to organize and demonstrate.
On April 26, 2009, six New Profile members, an Israeli feminist/pacifist organization were arrested, their homes searched, and computers seized. Five were then released on condition they have no contact with other organization members, and 10 others were subsequently investigated.
Police made arrests for violations of Article 109 of the Israeli Penal Law pertaining to "incitement to evade military service," which carries up to five years in prison. The Attorney General claimed "offenders" aided and abetted draft-dodgers who lied to the IDF to receive exemptions from mandatory military service. The criminal probe was the first ever on this charge, following Defense Minister Ehud Barak and IDF Chief of Staff General Gabi Ashkenzi's "war on draft evasion."
Since early 2009, Israel also prohibited numerous Palestinian East Jerusalem cultural and educational activities, notably ones organized to mark the declaration of Al Quds (E. Jerusalem's Arab name) as the "Capital of Arab Culture 2009." Events were banned under the Law Implementing the 1994 Interim Agreement on the West Bank and Gaza Strip. ...
Discrimination Against Disabled Israeli Arabs
The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel (Adalah) addressed the problem of individuals designated "handicapped," "disabled," "people with special needs," "people with unique needs and challenges," and "people with capabilities and various impairments." These terms reflect confusion and the degree of exclusion affecting the disabled.
Israel signed the December 2006 UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities on March 30, 2007 but hasn't ratified it. It uses the term "persons with disabilities" for people with physical, sensory, mental, and/or emotional ones. It needs redefining to express greater equality, fairness and justice.
About 1.5 million Israelis have moderate to severe disabilities, but the percent of afflicted Israeli Arabs is double the level for Jews - 17.2% compared to 8.7% of their adult populations. In addition, disabled Arabs are greatly disadvantaged given that 19% of them didn't complete elementary school compared to 5% for Jews, and only 21% are employed compared to 49% for Jews.
Overall, disabled Israeli Arabs face multiple discriminations - for their faith as well as physical or emotional limitations. As a result, the quality of services provided them is poor and in some cases unavailable. For example:
-- documents are seldom translated into Arabic (including application forms for essential services) even though it's an official Israeli language along with Hebrew;
-- many services aren't provided in Arab areas, so burdensome travel is required to get what's available;
-- although Israeli law mandates that public places be accessible to disabled persons, few buildings in Arab communities comply, including National Insurance Institute (NII) branch offices providing services for the disabled;
-- many NII diagnostic committees have no Arabic speakers;
-- lacking medical services, Arabs with chronic disabilities eventually risk more severe ones;
-- most employed disabled Arabs work in subsidized or special work environments, limiting their potential development;
-- disabled Arab women are worse off than men with the added burden of gender discrimination; and
-- less educated disabled Arabs are disadvantaged in the labor market, making them more vulnerable to poverty, isolation, dependency and low self-esteem. ...
Rabbi Abraham Kook, the religious mentor of the settler movement, taught that “the difference between a Jewish soul and souls of non-Jews — all of them in all different levels — is greater and deeper than the difference between a human soul and the souls of cattle.”
The teachings of Kook are based on the Lurianic Cabala (Jewish mysticism), which teaches the absolute superiority of the Jewish soul and body over the non-Jewish soul and body. This means, according to one Rabbi who is member of the Chabad Lubovitcher sect, that “every simple cell in a Jewish body entails divinity and is part of God.” (taken from)
The ‘mob’ remained at the site 24/7 for weeks not allowing any work to proceed on the bridge, until the city of Jerusalem finally agreed to give in to their demands and make new plans which would move the bridge a few metres away from the graves in question, leaving them in tact.
In another part of Jerusalem, work is under way today to build a ‘Museum of Tolerance and Human Dignity’…. on the site of a Muslim cemetery. Relatives of the deceased have gone as far as petitioning the United Nations to find an alternate site. A number of human remains have already been crushed and destroyed during construction, but the city Fathers have turned a deaf ear to the protests of the living relatives, unwilling to even discuss the matter with them.
The museum is meant to be a tool to educate the locals in Tolerance and Human Dignity. It has, so far, only demonstrated the arrogance of zionism and its contempt for humanity. Only Jews have a say about anything in the so called Jewish State…. even if they are dead.
