APN's daily news review from Israel

Sunday July 7, 2019

 

Revealed Exchange of the Day:
Lev Tov: “We’re talking about a population – women and children?”
Peled: “All, all. Yes.”
Lev Tov: “Don’t you distinguish between them?”
Peled: “The problem is very simple. The war is between two populations. They come out of their home.”
Lev Tov: “If the home exists, they have somewhere to return to?”
Peled: “It’s not armies yet, it’s gangs. We’re also actually gangs. We come out of the house and return to the house. They come out of the house and return to the house. It’s either their house or our house.”
Lev Tov: “Qualms belong to the more recent generation?”
Peled: “Yes, today. When I sit in an armchair here and think about what happened, all kinds of thoughts come to mind.”
Lev Tov: “Wasn’t that the case then?”
Peled: “Look, let me tell you something even less nice and cruel, about the big raid in Sasa [Palestinian village in Upper Galilee]. The goal was actually to deter them, to tell them, ‘Dear friends, the Palmach [the Haganah “shock troops”] can reach every place, you are not immune.’ That was the heart of the Arab settlement. But what did we do? My platoon blew up 20 homes with everything that was there.”
Lev Tov: “While people were sleeping there?”
Peled: “I suppose so. What happened there, we came, we entered the village, planted a bomb next to every house, and afterward Homesh blew on a trumpet, because we didn’t have radios, and that was the signal [for our forces] to leave. We’re running in reverse, the sappers stay, they pull, it’s all primitive. They light the fuse or pull the detonator and all those houses are gone.”
--A segment of an interview that a special Israeli unit, Malmab, decided to conceal from the interview that historian Boaz Lev Tov conducted with Maj. Gen. (res.) Elad Peled. An Israeli historian revealed that since early last decade, Israel's Defense Ministry teams have scoured local archives and removed troves of historic documents to conceal proof of the Nakba and that it was Israel's military operations against the local Arabs that caused them to flee - and not their leaders.*

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Front Page:

Haaretz

Yedioth Ahronoth

Maariv This Week (Hebrew links only)

Israel Hayom

Top News Summary:

A man was suspected of setting fire to the home of a kindergarten owner, the latter who was charged today with child abuse, which, in the wake of the violent protests of the Ethiopian-Israelis,’ raised concerns that people were taking the law into their own hands, while leaders of the Ethiopian-Israelis’ protest warned that if the police officer who shot dead Solomon Teka, whose death sparked their protest, is not charged with murder the protests will be renewed, making top stories in the Hebrew newspapers, which also marked the fifth year anniversary of the 2014 Gaza War, ‘Operation Protective Edge.’

Also, five Israeli soldiers were lightly or moderately wounded when a Palestinian hit them with his car near a checkpoint late Saturday night. The military said it was deliberate and arrested the suspect and his father hours later. Ynet and Israel Hayom noted that the soldiers were busy examining something on the road between Hizmeh and Anatot checkpoints when it happened. Earlier Saturday night a Palestinian driver [allegedly - OH] tried to run over a policeman near Hazofim Square in the West Bank, Ynet reported. No one was hurt and the driver fled the scene. [NOTE: Even in cases when the Israeli security forces believe that the Palestinian driver mistakenly hit Israelis in the West Bank - usually in the dark - the Palestinians flee from the scene out of fear that they will be identified as ‘terrorists’ and be killed on the spot. - OH]


Elections 2019 News:
Ehud Barak Unveils the Name of His New Party - Former prime minister's party will be called 'Yisrael Democratit,' meaning democratic Israel. (Haaretz+)
Moshe Ya'alon: "Kahol-Lavan will not join any other party" - Former defense minister and chairman of the Telem party referred to Ehud Barak's entry into politics and the establishment of a unity government: "Only Gantz can replace the government." (Maariv)
'Women can do anything, even be prime minister' - Former Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked responds to religious Zionist rabbi's statement that no woman should ever serve as leader of a political party in Israel; Habayit Hayehudi stresses that women play an "important role" in political activity. (Israel Hayom)

Quick Hits:

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Features:

*Burying the Nakba: How Israel Systematically Hides Evidence of 1948 Expulsion of Arabs
Since early last decade, Defense Ministry teams have scoured local archives and removed troves of historic documents to conceal proof of the Nakba. (Hagar Shezaf, Haaretz+)
Families of fallen lone soldiers follow their sons to Israel
Parents of Staff Sgts. Max Steinberg, Jordan Ben-Simon, and Sean Carmeli were overwhelmed by the tens of thousands of Israelis who attended their sons' funerals, and realized they would never have the same kind of support for their bereavement in the Diaspora. (Adi Hashmonai, Israel Hayom)
Gideon Levy: Abdallah, 15, Dreamed of Praying at Jerusalem's Al-Aqsa Mosque. He Was Shot Dead on His Way
The Palestinian teen's father dropped him off near the separation barrier, but Israeli Border Police shot him as he tried to pass through. (Gideon Levy, Haaretz+)
 
Commentary/Analysis:
The Nakba Isn’t Going Away (Haaretz Editorial) The establishment of Israel involved the destruction of the Palestinian society that existed here until 1948. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians became refugees, their villages destroyed and their land confiscated, with Jews settling on it instead. These events, called the Nakba (Catastrophe) ever since, and fueling the fire of the conflict, are a great taboo in the Israeli consciousness. They are not taught in schools, only a few historians study them, and mention of them in the media immediately sparks efforts to silence them along the lines of “the Arabs rejected the partition plan and brought destruction on themselves.” The description of war crimes committed by Israeli soldiers in 1948 – expulsion, looting, murder and rape – are shunted aside, and publishing information on them is seen as undermining the justness of the national project. But the state does not suffice with the callousness common in Israeli society toward the events of 1948. Rather, it strives to hide evidence of the Nakba. Hagar Shezaf’s investigative report in Haaretz over the weekend has uncovered actions by the Defense Ministry’s security department, known by its acronym Malmab, that have gone on for about a decade now, to conceal documents and testimony about war crimes in 1948 in public and private archives, even in cases where the information has already been published. Malmab, whose authority to censor the past is dubious and controversial, ignores the opposition of historians and archive directors who support exposing the events of the past as they happened. The goal of concealing them is to blur the evidence and strengthen the mendacious Israeli narrative that “the Arabs fled of their own free will, encouraged by their leaders.” This is the Malmab that hid a detailed document describing the abandonment of the Palestinian cities and villages up to June 1948 and showed that most of the Palestinians left because of Jewish military actions…Israel at age 71 is strong enough to address the moral failings of its past. The Nakba won’t go away… Instead of censoring and concealing things, the history of Israel’s establishment and the Palestinian society that was uprooted should be studied and taught. Commemoration signs should be put up at the sites of destroyed villages, and the moral dilemmas that have accompanied Israel since 1948 should be faced. Such recognition won’t resolve the conflict, but it will place dialogue between Jews and Palestinians in Israel on a foundation of truth instead of lies, shame and concealment.
Israel’s Border Police, Murderers Among Us (Gideon Levy, Haaretz+) At home they're surely regarded as heroes who have defended their country. In Israel they’re even seen as people with values, because they’re fighters. They stand behind you on line and sit alongside you in traffic, in restaurants, on airplanes and at theaters. Innocent blood is on their hands. Israel’s unseen murderers are everywhere. Such is the border policeman who shot the youth Abdallah Gheith on May 31. Youth? Actually, a boy; he was 15. As his Uncle Halaf says: “He never even saw the sea.” After the Haaretz article about the killing of the youth came out the other day, the Border Police spokesman drew my attention to a few errors in it. As he put it, the youth was shot while climbing the fence, not while he was on the ground, and the border policemen shot him from an ambush and didn’t run toward him.
Boiling Point: The shooting of Solomon Teka lit the "Black Rebellion"; the IsraEthiopians have no strong political backing (Nathan Zehavi, Maariv) On the night between Monday and Tuesday, hundreds of ultra-Orthodox attacked the police forces of Beit Shemesh. The "blacks" of Beit Shemesh are ultra-Orthodox Jews who wear black and, like their brothers in (the Jerusalem ultra-Orthodox neighborhood of) Mea Shearim, they don’t pay any attention to the police and in their confrontations they attack the policemen with rocks, iron bars, burning garbage cans, bags full of feces, bottles and eggs. In short, whatever comes into hand. The attack on the security forces in Beit Shemesh endangered the lives of the policemen, one policeman was wounded and hospitalized. No policeman or officer drew his weapon and fired into the air. No policeman opened fire in order to cause harm, even though they were in real danger…At the same time, Israeli-Ethiopians demonstrated angrily against the Israel Police, one of whose officers shot and killed Solomon Teka, 18, a resident of Kiryat Haim, who dreamed of joining the paratroopers and later serving in the Israel Police's motorcycle unit. The joke of fate…The "blacks" of Beit Shemesh, like the blacks of Jerusalem and like the residents of the illegal settlements who beat up the security forces, know that no policeman will dare to use weapons against them. They have a strong political backing. The Isra-Ethiopians don’t. Their leadership is weak and fragmented, their religious ‘Qais’ leaders are anemic, and the heads of their organizations are engaged in internal conflicts and do not constitute a significant force. Solomon Teka entered the statistics of young Isra-Ethiopians shot dead by police officers. One of the dominant young persons in the community called me and said angrily, "If they don’t care about us and eliminate us, we will also act with the same methods."
Ethiopian Israelis, Just Be Thankful You’re Not Arabs (Odeh Bisharat, Haaretz+) One can only imagine what would have happened if Arab protesters had closed the Ayalon Highway for hours, stranding tens of thousands of people in a traffic jam. Rather than the onslaught by social and political analysts on our television screens to offer insight into the stormy protests by Ethiopian Jews, we would have been regaled by an arsenal of military and security analysts and spokespeople for the various intelligence organizations. The front page of Yedioth Ahronoth would have featured a huge picture of a Palestinian teen with a bunch of stones he was about to use to bring down the Jewish state. Then we would have heard about “the incited mob,” “the hatred in their eyes” and “the cries of ‘slaughter the Jews’” that only seem to be heard by the well-trained ears of patriotic reporters about lynchings of Jews that never took place.
Like in the Wadi Salib riots: Once the Mizrahim suffered from institutional racism, today they are Ethiopian immigrants (Keren Ozen, Maariv) The scenarios we saw this week are the same as those seen in the Wadi Salib riots [a series of street demonstrations and acts of vandalism in the Wadi Salib neighborhood of Haifa in 1959, which were sparked by the police shooting of a Moroccan Jewish immigrant. Demonstrators accused the police of ethnic discrimination against Mizrachim (Jews from Arab countries]. So, instead of admitting it, the establishment chose to use the excuse of "state that is still being established.”
Did the Ethiopian protest lose you? You cannot lose something that was not yours (Ron Kaufman, Maariv) Humanity is racist, especially against blacks - and reality will not change. The white man will always see the black man as inferior, certainly in Judaism, which defines itself as the chosen people.
A Very Israeli Protest (Haaretz Editorial) The protests by Israelis of Ethiopian descent are a badly needed wake-up call for every Israeli. A large number of the demonstrators are youths born in Israel, into a reality of discrimination. Every one of them can tell you at length and with pain in their eyes about the racist epithets they hear at work, in leisure or while walking on the street. On this backdrop come the latest protests, even if the immediate catalyst behind them was the police killing of Solomon Teka in Kiryat Haim.
Not anarchy, a call to integrate (Michal Aharoni, Israel Hayom) The Ethiopian Israeli protests this week are not political and not left-wing. They are a cry by a frustrated group that is sick of being marginalized and wants nothing more than to integrate into mainstream society.
Arrested, Imprisoned, Shot: Police Violence Is Pushing Ethiopian Israelis to Fear, Fury and Despair (Pnina Agenyahu, Haaretz+) We Ethiopian Israelis want to belong. Our parents taught us to love this country. But when the police kill our youth, we see Israel is indifferent to our pain.
Human shields for BDS are complicit in its transgressions (Asa Kasher, Yedioth/Ynet) When the Boycott, Sanctions and Divestment Movement singles out Israel for occupying land but does not do the same to China for over Tibet or Russian over Crimea, they can and should be branded racist - and racism against Jews is called anti-Semitism.
For Progressive Jewish American Activists, 'Never Again Is Now' – and Israel Is Yesterday’s News (Allison Kaplan Sommer, Haaretz+) Never Again Action has put hundreds of young Jewish activists onto the streets – and some into jail – in the span of a week, going into battle against Trump's migrant policy.
The appointment of Brig. Gen. Ofer Winter as commander of the division raises questions about the General Staff's decision-making (Tal Lev-Ram, Maariv) The military secretary of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, whose promotion was delayed by former chief of staff Gadi Eisenkot, was advanced by present Chief of Staff Aviv Kochavi. How has the picture has changed from one end to the other? And also, an escalation in the level of tension with Syria.
The ceasefire between Gaza and Jerusalem proved the high level of planning among Hamas leaders (Jackie Khougy, Maariv) The terrorist organization demands salaries for officials and additional electricity and medicines in order to decide whether to stop balloon terrorism. The politics behind the current calm do not bode well for both sides.
Silence, not caution, is the problem (Yossi Beilin, Israel Hayom) It is time for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to give Israelis an explanation about what his government is doing in Gaza – and the best explanation is the truth: that Israel is, in fact, holding intensive negotiations with Hamas.
The Gaza perimeter is burning, and noone making someone pay a price (Rafi Carasso, Maariv) No country was willing to burn its fields and bomb its houses for so long. We are afraid of what the Gentiles will say. In the meantime, I feel, in this battle, they are winning.
The Path From Bank to Cabinet (Friday Haaretz Editorial) This week, when Israeli Ethiopians’ rage erupted over the killing of 18-year-old Solomon Teka by a policeman, actually began with good news when it comes to Israeli diversity. Dr. Samer Haj-Yehia was selected as chairman of Bank Leumi’s board, becoming the first Arab to be appointed to such a senior position in the Israeli banking world. In recent years, Knesset member Ahmad Tibi has spearheaded a campaign to integrate men and women from the Arab community into the public service, and now many Israeli Arabs can be found in key positions at the Finance Ministry – the place where the greatest influence is wielded on Israeli society and the Israeli economy.
Thus, Ambassador Friedman eliminated the chances of the Deal of the Century being accepted (Shlomo Shamir, Maariv) David Friedman, who took part in the ceremony of the opening of the wall inside the tunnel in Silwan, blocked the way to peace and shattered the US position as a mediator in the conflict. You don’t advance peace by waving a hammer.
No talks, no war: For some Washington hawks, one Iran strategy remains (Amos Harel, Haaretz+) 'Regime collapse' is being pushed as an approach with little cost in human lives or U.S. dollars ■ At recent war games in Israel, Trump becomes main hurdle ■ Why Chinese tech will likely not be part of Israeli 5G infrastructure.
Why London BDS should be falling down (Tamara Berens, Israel Hayom) While we cannot always change the minds of anti-Zionist protesters, professors and administrators, we can stand up for our rights as Jews to host Israeli speakers and celebrate Israel and our Zionist beliefs. [NOTE: Tamara Berens is a writer for the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA), a right-wing Israel propaganda organization that targets journalists. - OH]
With his good pal Trump in the White House, Erdogan's conquests will be much easier (Zvi Bar'el, Haaretz+) Although Trump's heart goes out to the Turkish president, the question now is how far Erdogan intends to stretch the limits with his American counterpart.

Elections 2019 Commentary/Analysis:
Netanyahu's Out of Luck, but He's Hoping a Photo-op With India's Modi Will Help (Yossi Verter, Haaretz+) Netanyahu is stuck between the Ethiopian community's protest and Gaza firebombs, and Lieberman is breathing down his neck. Can a strategic trip to India save him?
Barak put Jerusalem on the concession map (Nadav Shragai, Israel Hayom) Now, more than ever, is the time to remind people how, as Israel's 10th prime minister, Ehud Barak betrayed the trust of his constituents and Jerusalem.
The left insists on saving Netanyahu from his voters (Ben-Dror Yemini, Yedioth/Ynet) Likud voters are a diverse group, fearful of a binational state that would lose Israel's Jewish majority, critical of funds handed out to ultra-Orthodox parties to secure their support and accepting of many of the positions held by centrist parties.
Why Israel’s ultra-Orthodox Prefer the Right (Tomer Persico, Haaretz+) With members of the ultra-Orthodox parties constantly saying they’ll support Benjamin Netanyahu for prime minister, one would expect the notion of them as the ones who can tip the scales would fade, yet it stubbornly persists. It’s not clear, for example, how anyone can seriously argue that all Benny Gantz’s party needs to do to win the ultra-Orthodox seal of approval is to part ways with Yair Lapid, or that Ehud Barak is someone with whom the ultra-Orthodox could tango.
Ehud Barak intends to charge for the Russian vote (Anna Riva Barsky, Maariv) The former prime minister is building his political commando with his strategic adviser, Lior Horev. And also: the connection between the protest of Ethiopian immigrants, the police violence, the immigrants from the Soviet Union and the second round of elections.
A call for humility (Dr. Haim Shine, Israel Hayom) TThe Likud must act responsibly and not try to take votes from other right-wing parties. A demand for unity on the Right is inconsistent with an attempt to steal votes.
Why Kamala Harris and Ehud Barak are oceans apart yet strikingly the same (Chemi Shalev, Haaretz+) Both have emerged as the only candidates tough and sharp enough to confront Trump and Netanyahu head-on — and humiliate them in the process.
Trump Rolls Out the Big Guns for pro-Israel Evangelicals' Confab Ahead of 2020 (Amir Tibon, Haaretz) In a sign of evangelical voters’ importance to his campaign, the U.S. president is sending five senior advisers to a Christian pro-Israel gathering.
 

Prepared for APN by Orly Halpern, independent freelance journalist based in Jerusalem.