{"article":{"id":177519,"heading":"How Israel failed its Arab citizens before, during and after war","author":"Report, I'lam","created":"2006-09-08 23:45:19","modified":"2006-09-13 18:26:54","last_modified":"Thu, 14 Sep 2006 01:26:54","article":"

the Lebanon wHow Israel failed its Arab citizens before, during and after war

Report, I'lam, 7 September 2006

I'lam, the only media centre for the Arab minority in Israel, issues a monthly \"Alternative News Briefing\" to journalists and others interested in the region as a corrective to the distorted coverage of events affecting Israel's Arab citizens by the Israeli media.

Also in this Briefing

# Court overturns Haifa University's discriminatory policy on student dorms



During the five weeks of fighting between Israel and Hizbullah this summer, the north of Israel took a battering from some 4,000 rockets. According to the Foreign Ministry, the civilian fatalities from the rockets numbered 43, including 18 Arab citizens.

Of course, rockets don't discriminate between Jew and Arab, as public officials were quick to point out. But unfortunately, the Israeli government does.

There were many reasons why a high number of Arabs died in the war, a fact that has surprised many observers, including apparently the Israeli government, as it was widely assumed that Hizbullah would not endanger the lives of fellow Arabs.

Before the war:

One of the most important is that, unlike their Jewish neighbours, Arab communities had not been helped by the government to prepare for the war with Hizbullah, a war that according to reports in the American media had been planned by Israel for more than a year.

The most notable failure was to provide Arab communities with any protection from the rockets. Almost all Arab towns and villages lack public bomb shelters, even though they have been constructed in most Jewish communities in the north.

A few shelters have been built in border Druze villages like Hurfeish (the Druze serve in the army), and there are shelters in some mainly Arab neighbourhoods in Haifa, although according to a BBC report they remained locked during the war. The other 120 or so Arab communities in Israel, the majority of them in the north, had no public shelters in which residents could seek safety.

Similarly, the civil defence authorities failed to ensure that Arab communities had air raid sirens to warn inhabitants of incoming fire. Rabia and Mahmoud Taluzi, two children killed by a rocket in Nazareth on July 19, were out playing when the rocket struck because there were no sirens to warn them to take cover. Only after their deaths did Nazareth, the largest Arab town in Israel, receive a siren. But most other Arab towns and villages went through the whole war without any warnings.

Israeli officials claimed that they had not installed sirens in Arab communities because most Arab citizens do not wish not to mark the Holocaust and Memorial Days, the latter commemorating Israel's fallen Jewish soldiers, including those who died expelling the overwhelming majority of the Palestinian people from their homeland in 1948.

However, this excuse hardly stands up to scrutiny. The primary point of air raid sirens is not to force Israeli citizens to stand to attention when the state so desires but to protect them in times of war. The failure to put in place warning systems before or after the outbreak of war is a disgrace.

Similarly, civil defence officials also issued emergency instructions to families about how to protect themselves -- on the radio and television, and in brochures -- only in Hebrew. Many Arab citizens speak Hebrew, their second language, poorly and a few, particularly older women who do not work, know very little Hebrew. Arabic is one of the state's official languages and all material from the civil defence authorities should have been translated as a matter of routine.

During the war:

A separate reason why the number of Arab casualties was high was that Israel has positioned many of its military installations inside or next to Arab communities, compounding the problem of not offering these same communities protection, such as bomb shelters. In fact, few northern Arab towns and villages do not have a Rafael weapons factory, army camp or munitions store close by.

As well as these permanent military bases, several Arab towns and villages in the north also found that the army chose to locate artillery batteries next to them that fired on Lebanon during the fighting.

According to reports in Haaretz, for example, the Arab village of Fassouta had such a battery stationed next to it throughout much of the war. Similarly, according to the Nazareth welfare organisation the Laborer's Voice, Majd al-Krum also had an artillery battery firing from the outskirts of the town. Both Fassouta and Majd al-Krum were hit on several occasions by Hizbullah rocket fire.

In other Arab communities, including Jish, Shaghour, Kfar Manda and Lid, the army requisitioned areas for training soldiers for the ground invasion of south Lebanon. According to the Human Rights Association in Nazareth, army officials justified their decision on the grounds that \"The landscape of Arab towns [in Israel] is similar to Arab towns in Lebanon.\"

This led one Arab Knesset member, Abbas Zakour, to accuse the Israeli government of turning Arab communities into \"human shields\". He added: \"During a short visit to offer condolences to the families of victims killed in Hizbullah's rocket attacks, I saw Israeli tanks shelling Lebanon from the two towns of Arab Al-Aramshe and Tarshiha, which are predominantly populated [by] Arabs.\" Three residents of Tarshiha were killed in a rocket strike, and two died in Arab al-Aramshe.

However, the voices of Arab citizens were silenced during the war. In Haifa, for example, Arab and Jewish demonstrators were attacked by right-wing groups as police looked on. When the police did intervene, it was to arrest the anti-war demonstrators.

Arab citizens were rarely given the chance to appear on Israeli television or radio, or their journalists to write for the Hebrew-language newspapers, and their protests were barely covered by the Israeli media.

Their elected representatives were also silenced, with Knesset members regularly being ejected from the chamber during debates on the war. A complaint by MK Ahmed Tibi about incitement from cabinet minister Rafi Eitan, who compared him to Hitler, were ignored. In another disturbing incident, the Interior Minister Roni Bar-On asked the Attorney-General to investigate the possibility of stripping an Arab MK, Wasel Taha, of his citizenship over his comments about the war. Several Jewish MKs also demanded that their Arab colleagues have their citizenship revoked.

Walid Hamis, the Arab deputy mayor of Haifa, a city often praised for being a rare model of coexistence inside Israel, was forced to resign on 4 September, saying the Jewish majority on the municipality were plotting to dismiss him over his comments against the war. He had been subjected to a campaign of intimidation and incitement, as well as being physically attacked. He observed: \"This will be the first political dismissal in the city of Haifa as a result of expressing an opinion.\"

After the war:

Following the war, at a cabinet meeting on 20 August, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert promised to make reconstruction in the north of Israel his top priority.

Throughout the fighting, however, the Israeli government refused to declare a state of war -- apparently for cynical technical reasons. If it had done so, businesses in the north of Israel that were forced to close, and their workers, would have been entitled to automatic compensation. Instead officials have implemented an ad hoc system of compensation which is being used to deprive Arab communities and residents of the levels of compensation being paid to Israeli Jews.

Entitled to full compensation for lost income are businesses and residents who belong to what have been called \"confrontation line\" communities. The Finance Ministry, which has been put in charge of drawing up the list of such communities, has not included a single Arab town or village. The communities included on this list are located up to 10km from the border with Lebanon, an area full of Arab villages that nonetheless have been excluded.

Lesser compensation is available for residents and businesses of other northern communities in a new category called the \"area of limitation\", according to criteria agreed by the Finance Ministry, the Histadrut labour federation and employers. Because Arab businesses and workers are included in this category, they will not be entitled to full compensation.

In addition, according to a Nazareth-based welfare organisation the Laborer's Voice, which is running a mobile advice centre in Arab communities, most Arab workers and business owners, as well as victims of the rocket attacks, have not been approached by government officials or given information about their entitlements.

When officials have been contacted, they have either denied that compensation is available or misinformed applicants about what they are entitled to. One homeowner in Majd al-Krum, for example, was encouraged by the National Insurance Institute to sign up for compensation for his damaged home that was a fraction of what he should have received.

In a similar vein, Arab businesses are also being discriminated against by the MATI business development centre, which is offering loans to businesses in the north under the auspices of the Ministry of Trade and Industry. Interest-free loans of up to $10,000 are available, but only to Jewish businessmen or those who have served in the Israeli army, which excludes almost the entire Arab population.

This week Israeli schoolchildren went back to school, as the Israeli government promised to invest money to rehabilitate the education system in the north as part of its reconstruction programme. Education has suffered from years of budget cuts, but the separate Arab system has been particularly underfunded, with a large shortage of classrooms, crumbling buildings, and a lack of books and equipment.

During a cabinet meeting to discuss the new education programme for the north, the Environment Minister Gideon Ezra observed that Arab communities should not be included. \"A distinction must be drawn, and it must be seen to that Arab communities do not receive the money for the education program.\" What were his grounds for justifying such discrimination? Because during the Lebanon war, Arab \"residents there behaved as per usual, as if nothing had happened\" -- a presumed reference to the fact that they did not flee their homes like many Jewish residents. This seemed a perverse claim as most Israeli leaders justify the continuing dispossession of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians of their homes and property because they fled, or were expelled by, the Israeli army during the 1948 war.

One of the most pressing problems faced by Arab schools is a shortage of counsellors and psychologists to deal with the trauma suffered by children from the rocket attacks. Three-quarters of Arab schools have no access to counselling for their pupils.

After the war, the Education Ministry hired extra psychologists to work with Jewish children and issued counsellors with special kits on how to identify and deal with post-traumatic disorders. The same services were not offered in Arab communities. The Ministry said it could not hire Arab psychologists because there were not enough qualified candidates among the Arab population.

Dr Bilha Noy, head of the Ministry's counselling service, however, observed in the Haaretz newspaper that the shortage reflected discrimination by the universities in refusing to accept Arab applicants for courses.



I'lam Media Center for Arab Palestinians in Israel is a non-profit organization based in Nazareth. It was founded in 2000, by a group of Arab journalists and academics. As the only Arab Palestinian media organization in Israel, I'lam is deeply committed to the democratization of media policies, media practices, and the media landscape in Israel. <\/p>\n","contact":"","link":"","address":"","phone":"","parent_id":0,"mime_type":"text\/plain","summary":"After the war, the Education Ministry hired extra psychologists to work with Jewish children and issued counsellors with special kits on how to identify and deal with post-traumatic disorders. The same services were not offered in Arab communities. The Ministry said it could not hire Arab psychologists because there were not enough qualified candidates among the Arab population.\r\n","numcomment":6,"fileurl":"\/uploads\/","filesize":null,"article_url":"\/news\/2006\/09\/177519.php"},"attachments":[],"comments":[{"id":177520,"heading":"Zionism is Racism","article":"Zionism is Racism","author":"Zionism is Racism","parent_id":177519,"mime_type":"text\/plain","created":"2006-09-08 23:46:13","modified":"2006-09-08 23:46:13","fileurl":""},{"id":177727,"heading":"AL-QAEDA CALL ON HERSH, GALLOWAY & FISK","article":"AL-QAEDA CALL ON HERSH, GALLOWAY & FISK\r\n\r\nIn a much underreported segment of the most recent al-Qaeda video, released on September 2, 2006, Osama bin Laden\u2019s second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, together with an American member of al-Qaeda, call on The New Yorker\u2019s Seymour Hersh, the British MP George Galloway (who also writes for The Guardian) and Robert Fisk of the Independent to \u201ccome over to the side of truth.\u201d\r\n\r\nAdam Yehiye Gadahn, an American convert to Islam who is now a senior member of al-Qaeda, calls on \u201cinvestigative journalists like Seymour Hersh to reveal the extent of\u2026 the cowardice of the [American] regime.\u201d\r\n\r\nIn a later section of the 48-minute video Gadahn says: \u201cAs for those who have expressed their respect and admiration for Islam, and acknowledged that it is the truth, and demonstrated their support and sympathy for the Muslims and their causes \u2013 like George Galloway, Robert Fisk and countless others \u2013 I say to them: isn\u2019t it time you stopped sitting on the fence and came over to the side of truth?\u201d (i.e. converted to Islam).\r\n\r\nThis is not the first time Robert Fisk has been mentioned in an al-Qaeda video. For more, please see \u201cOsama Bin Laden praises Robert Fisk (& other items)\u201d (Nov. 4, 2004). \r\n\r\nAL-QAEDA TERRORIST HAS JEWISH ROOTS\r\n\r\nAdam Yehiye Gadahn, the American convert to Islam who starred in the video released by al-Qaeda\u2019s deputy leader Ayman al-Zawahri, is of Jewish ancestry, and is originally from Orange County, California. Wearing a white robe and turban, and speaking in both English and Arabic, he urged Americans to convert to Islam. Gadahn said that those working for President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair are invited to embrace Islam, but they \u201cshould hurry.\u201d\r\n\r\nHe was born Adam Pearlman on September 1, 1978, the grandson of a prominent Jewish surgeon and the son of the musician Phil Pearlman, who converted to Christianity and changed his name to Gadahn.\r\n\r\nIn 1995, Gadahn posted an essay on the USC website describing his conversion, it was titled \u201cBecoming a Muslim.\u201d According to his family, Gadahn moved to Pakistan in 1998 where he married an Afghan. \r\n\r\nThis is Gadahn\u2019s second appearance in an al-Qaeda video. In a video marking the one-year anniversary of the July 7, 2005 London transport bombs, Gadahn urged Muslims not to \u201cshed tears\u201d for Westerners killed in al-Qaeda attacks. He is wanted by the FBI in connection with possible terrorist threats against the United States. The FBI believes he attended al-Qaeda training camps in Pakistan and served as an al-Qaeda translator and English-language spokesman.\r\n\r\nThe reason I mention that Gadahn is of Jewish origin is that the public and journalists on this list should be aware of the phenomena of a few psychologically disturbed Jews or people of Jewish origin, who are making it their goal to attack Israel, the West and fellow Jews.\r\n\r\nThese often highly intelligent Jews and former Jews at work in media and academia are often used to justify anti-Semitic opinions by others. It is important to realize that just because they are of Jewish origin, they do not represent other Jews. \r\n\r\nFor example, discussing the Parliamentary All-Party Enquiry on Anti-Semitism in the UK (see yesterday\u2019s dispatch titled \u201cPinocchio, Tom Sawyer and Heidi convert to Islam in Turkey\u201d), the flagship BBC program \u201cToday\u201d yesterday invited on as their leading guest commentator a well know leftist Jewish extremist, Professor Steven Rose, to denounce his fellow Jews for causing anti-Semitism. For more on him, see Adloyada and normblog.\r\n\r\nThe other BBC guest expert on anti-Semitism was Inayat Bunglawala. For more, see: Reuters employee issues \u201cZionist pig\u201d death threat, (May 30, 2006),.\r\n\r\nThere are a number of prominent self-hating Israelis too. See, for example:\r\nelectronicintifada.net\/v2\/article5656.shtml.\r\n\r\nRUMSFELD: TERRORISTS MANIPULATE THE MEDIA\r\n\r\nU.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said last week that \u201cthe thing that keeps me up at night,\u201d is terrorist groups \u201cmanipulating the media\u201d to influence Westerners.\r\n\r\nHe told 200 naval aviators and other navy personnel at a training base: \u201cWhat bothers me the most is how clever the enemy is. They are actively manipulating the media in this country\u201d by, for example, falsely blaming U.S. troops for civilian deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan, he said. \u201cThey can lie with impunity,\u201d he said, while U.S. troops are held to a high standard of conduct.\r\n\r\nLater on the same day, at a convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars in Reno, Nevada, Rumsfeld said, \u201cThe enemy lies constantly \u2013 almost totally without penalty\u2026 They portray our cause as a war on Islam when in fact the overwhelming majority of victims of their terrorism have been the thousands and thousands of innocent Muslims \u2013 men, women and children \u2013 that they have killed\u2026\u201d\r\n\r\nAP HEADLINE PROTECTS FATAH TERRORISTS\r\n\r\nThe Associated Press was up to its usual tricks in a headline on September 4, 2006, which proclaimed that \u201cPalestinian teachers\u2019 strike hurts boy.\u201d Newspaper readers who only read headlines (which is most people) would be forgiven for thinking that Palestinian kids were being hurt because the teachers didn\u2019t turn up.\r\n\r\nWhat really happened, as we learn from reading the whole article, is that: \u201cMasked militants trying to keep students away from school during a politically charged Palestinian teachers\u2019 strike on Sunday shot and wounded a 12-year-old boy.\u201d\r\n\r\nMeanwhile, it is not until the eighth paragraph that the reader can ascertain that the \u201cmasked militants\u201d are from Fatah, the party repeatedly referred to as \u201cmoderate\u201d in articles in The New York Times, and on the BBC and so on.\r\n\r\nThe 12-year-old boy, who was seriously wounded, was shot in the West Bank city of Nablus. Western human rights groups, apparently, have nothing to say since they are too busy attacking the U.S. and Israel.\r\n\r\nCORRUPTION OF THE MEDIA: THE \u201cQANA\u201d INCIDENT\r\n\r\nAll summer long, keen-eyed bloggers have exposed the duplicitous use of photos and text, particularly when it comes to casting Israel in a bad light, by the mainstream media.\r\n\r\nFor a very good overview of this, I would suggest reading the following: \r\neureferendum.blogspot.com\/2006\/08\/corruption-of-media.html.\r\n\r\nHITLER, HIZBULLAH AND USEFUL IDIOTS\r\n\r\nSome have asked me how supposedly intelligent journalists can be so easily taken in by the enemies of western democracy. The answer is easily. We only have to look at how many western journalists were taken in by the Nazis and some were positively gushing about Hitler.\r\n\r\nThe Israeli-American novelist (and subscriber to this email list) Naomi Ragen points to this article from \u201cHome and Garden Magazine\u201d in November 1938 (at the same time as Kristallnacht) and suggests that journalists have always been duped by fascist dictators. According to the magazine Hitler was a great interior decorator. \r\n\r\n\u201cThe colour scheme throughout this bright, airy chalet is light jade green. The F\u00fchrer is his own decorator, designer and furnisher, as well as architect... [Hitler] has a passion about cut flowers in his home.\u201d The magazine also adds that Hitler \u201cdelights in the society of brilliant foreigners, especially painters, musicians and singers. As host, he is a droll raconteur...\u201d\r\n\r\nThe Guardian has helpfully reproduced the article here. \r\n\r\nMOHAMMED\u2019S CARTOONS \u201cCAUSED\u201d GERMAN TERROR PLOT\r\n\r\nAn article published on September 2, 2006 by the leading French daily Le Monde claims that the publication of the Mohammed\u2019s caricatures in the Western press was the \u201cdetonating element\u201d behind the decision to carry out a terrorist attack on Germany\u2019s trains. \r\n\r\nThe director of Germany\u2019s federal police told the German weekly magazine Focus that Mohammed el Hajdib, one of the main suspects, interpreted such caricatures as an affront of the West against Islam. The caricatures were first published by the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten on September 30, 2005 and were then reprinted by several other European newspapers.\r\n\r\nAccording to the German police, the two men settled in Germany from Lebanon. But their radicalization only happened once in Germany through the propaganda of al-Qaeda on the internet, said investigators. The German daily Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung reported security services as saying that the two men initially wanted to carry out the attack during the soccer World Cup (June 9- July 9) but eventually changed their minds.\r\n\r\n","author":"friends indeed","parent_id":177519,"mime_type":"text\/plain","created":"2006-09-10 13:46:44","modified":"2013-11-11 00:44:09","fileurl":""},{"id":177742,"heading":"a castle of crap","article":"not bad for so many paragraphs to twist reality into a false association ( as per ' old school' fascism propaganda ) of resistance to kleptrocracy and. the usual bucket of lies from Langley.\r\n\r\nWhere did that shovel go?","author":"Sheepdog","parent_id":177519,"mime_type":"text\/plain","created":"2006-09-10 16:38:37","modified":"2006-09-10 16:38:37","fileurl":""},{"id":178213,"heading":"More on Cluster bombs","article":" CAIRO \u2013 The Israeli army has rained Lebanon with more than one million cluster bombs and used internationally banned weapons like phosphorous shells and imprecise weaponry during its33 -day war, a senior Israeli army officer has revealed.\r\n\r\n"What we did was insane and monstrous, we covered entire towns in cluster bombs," the head of the Israeli army's Rocket Unit said in a letter to Defense Minister Emir Peretz cited by the daily Haaretz on Tuesday, September12 .\r\n\r\nHe said the army fired around1 , 800cluster bombs, containing over 1 . 2million cluster bomblets, quoting estimates from his battalion commander.\r\n\r\nThe cluster bombs release small bomblets in midair, expected to fall to the ground and explode on impact across a wide area.\r\n\r\nThey are designed to penetrate thick armor as well as to kill or maim people within several yards.\r\n\r\nIsrael launched its wide-scale offensive on July 12 on the claim of seeking the release of two soldiers taken prisoner by Hizbullah in a cross-border operation to exchange with Lebanese prisoners in Israeli jails.\r\n\r\nThe onslaughts killed up to 1 , 200people, nearly all civilians, and left the country's infrastructure in tatters.\r\n\r\nIntensified\r\n\r\nThe Israeli commander complained that the highly inaccurate Multiple Launch Rocket System (MLRS) platforms were heavily used in the war in order to blanket Hizbullah fighters on the ground with smaller explosive rounds.\r\n\r\nMLRS is capable of firing a large quantity of unguided munitions, with a range of some 32 kilometers.\r\n\r\nThe commander said the vast majority of the said explosive ordinance was fired in the final 10 days of the war.\r\n\r\nThe United Nations accused Israel on August 30 of carpeting southern Lebanon with thousands of unexploded bombs in the final hours of its month-long war, when the stage was being set for a ceasefire.\r\n\r\nThe olive and vegetable fields in many southern Lebanese villages, the main source of income for thousands, have become no-go areas after being littered with unexploded cluster bombs and mines left behind by Israel.\r\n\r\nThe unexploded munitions continue to pose a deadly threat to the safety of Lebanese civilians retuning to their bombed-out homes in the south.\r\n\r\nMore\r\nhttp:\/\/islamonline.net\/English\/News\/2006-09\/12\/04.shtml","author":"General Cluster","parent_id":177519,"mime_type":"text\/plain","created":"2006-09-13 18:27:14","modified":"2013-11-11 00:44:15","fileurl":""}]}