Plainclothes police officers are filmed beating an Arab man in the middle of Tel Aviv in broad daylight. What would you have done if you were there?

How would Jewish Israelis react if they saw a group of men starting to beat an Arab man to a pulp, breaking his bones right next to us? How many of us would rush over to help him, just as some of Maysam Abu-Alqiyan’s friends did in central Tel Aviv Sunday — friends who paid the price after they too found themselves on the receiving end of police brutality, returning to the supermarket where they worked together bruised and shocked?

How many of us would automatically assume that if a young Arab man is being beaten, there is probably a good reason for it? That perhaps the man is a terrorist and we are actually witnessing the police bravely “neutralizing” him?

How many of us would have tried to call the police, despite the fact that the attackers identified themselves as police? How many of us would quietly — or frightened — remove our children from the scene so that they couldn’t see, so that they aren’t terrified by the violence? How many of us would have taken out a camera and start filming?

I assume that most of our responses would fit somewhere on this spectrum. Apartheid limits the ways both sides can act. A segregation regime traps even the white person in role built for her or himself. What else is there to do?

There is something else to do. It is possible to resist the very idea that this country is made up of landlords and their tenants. One can admit that the good will of the landlords is not itself a guarantee of a democratic regime. One can openly admit that this vicious attempt has not worked, that its inner logic only serves to create more and more Maysams. This is what has been done for nearly 70 years.

We can put aside enlightened supremacy and talk about real, full equality — not about kind gestures toward an indigenous minority. We can understand that we have a choice between shaking our heads at the physical, political, and economic violence that is part and parcel of daily life of Palestinians in Israel, per definition, and giving up some of the privileges granted to us by a destructive regime in...

Defense Minister Ya’alon has been heralded as the Left’s newest spokesperson after repeatedly speaking out against Israel’s political leadership. Let’s not forget that this is the same guy who called Breaking the Silence ‘traitors.’

After reserving a spot among the “left-wing pragmatists” for openly stating that executing a dying man, and especially while on camera, is not such a good idea, Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon continues to excite the Israeli peace camp. “Keep speaking your mind — even if it differs from the positions and ideas voiced by senior commanders or the political leadership,” Ya’alon told IDF officers. His summons to the Prime Minister’s Office on Monday for a “clarifications” only strengthens the defense minister’s veneer as an “ethical” person who does not shy away from confrontation with his boss when it comes to issues of principle — such as the Israeli army’s moral character.

Both parts of Ya’alon’s remarks are unclear. As a rule, “to speak your mind” at all times is a poor piece of advice to give adults. Adults are expected to think and weigh their words carefully before saying them in the public sphere. But this advice seems even stranger when given to the people charged with carrying out violent policies: why must I or any other average citizen need to hear what IDF officers have “on their mind?” Why must I be forced to take part in their group therapy session?

Whatever these officers have on their mind does not interest me in the slightest. I am interested in what they do in real time, nothing more. I do not care about their pangs of conscience when they may be taking part in war crimes of any kind. I care about putting them on trial. If they have pangs of conscience, they should refuse orders.

As for the second half of the sentence — one of the problems is that in Israel there is no such thing as “positions of the political echelon.” The political leadership is a weather vane that changes according to the public’s barometer, all while conveying at least five different messages to that public. After all, even the IDF’s ethical code changes according to the trends set by some of Israel’s most violent, extreme right figures, while the political echelon has developed the amazing ability to spout oxymorons as long as they serve its political interests. So which positions...

The Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem is one of the most sacred places in the world for Christianity. Yet Israel does not officially recognize it as a holy site, a new report reveals.

Last Saturday the Eastern Churches marked Holy Fire, the Saturday after Good Friday, when Easter begins. Thousands of pilgrims visited the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in the Old City of Jerusalem to watch what they believe is the annual miracle of fire in Jesus Christ’s tomb in the Sepulchre chapel. The place was packed, and all the churches throughout the entire Old City were blocked due to the overcrowding.

The Church of the Holy Sepulchre is one of the most sacred places in the world for Christianity. Yet Israel does not officially recognize it as a holy site. Why?  Because the State of Israel does not recognize any holy site that is not Jewish in the territories under its control, as is demonstrated in a new report called Selectively Sacred: Holy Sites in Jerusalem and its Environs, published by the Emek Shaveh organization, written by Attorney Eitay Mack.

Neither Israeli law nor international law clearly defines what constitutes a holy site. Not even the Protection of Holy Places Law that was legislated after the occupation of the West Bank and annexation of East Jerusalem in 1967 – ironically, in order to placate international criticism of the annexation. However, the law doesn’t offer a clear definition of what a holy site is, it only determines that “The Holy Places shall be protected from desecration and any other violation and from anything likely to violate the freedom of access of the members of the different religions to the places sacred to them or their feelings with regard to those places.”

How does a place become holy?

Israel loves to boast about the freedom of worship it enables all religions in the territories under its control. But without clear criteria, the directives are, at best, a bad joke. Tens of thousands of Muslims who are routinely prevented from entering the Al Aqsa Mosque for Friday prayers under varying circumstances can attest to that.

In 1981, as “Basic Law: Jerusalem Capital of Israel was being legislated, Israel presented a list of 16 holy sites as part of its Regulations for the Preservation of Holy Places for Jews. All of them were strictly for Jews, including, among...

The Palestinian member of Knesset Israelis love to hate and the IDF deputy chief of staff make harsh but nearly identical statements invoking 1930s Germany. The statements are received very differently.

IDF Deputy Chief of Staff Yair Golan raised a small storm when he said at a Holocaust Remembrance Day ceremony Wednesday evening:  ”If there’s something that frightens me about Holocaust remembrance it’s the recognition of the revolting processes that occurred in Europe in general, and particularly in Germany, back then – 70, 80 and 90 years ago – and finding signs of them here among us today in 2016.”

A few weeks earlier, MK Haneen Zoabi said in response to an invitation to attend a Holocaust Remembrance Day ceremony: “How can you teach the lessons of the Holocaust when you don’t discern the frightening similarity between what is happening today all around us and what happened in Germany in the 1930s?”

It’s possible that they are both right. It’s possible that they are both wrong. What is certain is that what they said is almost identical.

The first, a Jewish man in uniform, was officially recognized as a brave hero in my Facebook feed full of left-wing Israelis. The other, a female Palestinian Knesset member, was at best ignored, but more commonly, my feed joined the chorus of public criticism against her.

There is something brave in saying such things while wearing a uniform, that’s for sure. But to say the same thing as a representative of an oppressed minority who is forced to fight again and again for her very right to speak and act in the public sphere requires no small valor. Perhaps it requires even more bravery than saying them in a position of power granted by a position and uniform.

Isaac Herzog’s plea to the Labor Party to shed their ‘Arab-loving’ image is the latest in a series of pathetic attempts to pander to the right. Might offering a viable political and moral alternative to the right do the trick?

By Orly Noy

Labor leader Isaac Herzog was absolutely right when he said on Tuesday that his party is a fountain of endless and unremitting Arab loving. As the following (very partial) selection of quotes may attest, adulation of Arabs is a long-held Labor Party tradition:

In 1981, during an election rally in Beit Shemesh, former Chief of Staff and then Labor MK Mordechai Gur told Mizrahi hecklers: “We will screw you just like we screwed the Arabs. Their crying didn’t help when we screwed them, nor will yours when we screw you.”

Or take the feted diplomat and politician Abba Eban, who said in 1960: “One of our greatest concerns of late, when we review the state of our culture, is that a growing number of immigrants from Middle Eastern countries will equate our cultural level to that of our neighbors.”

And here’s Shimon Peres, a Labor party bigwig like no other: “The injustice we do by expropriating the land is not nearly as flagrant as the injustice the Arabs do to us by preventing peace.” Or Golda Meir, another founding mother, who came up with this gem: “We will never forgive the Arabs for making our children kill them.” And last but not least, let’s not forget Yitzhak Rabin, who instructed Israeli soldiers to “break their bones” as a measure against Palestinian protesters during the first Intifada.

As you can see, love of Arabs is all around. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

What’s more, throughout its history the party showed their love in more concrete way than this kind of sweet talk. In the early state years, and even before that, it was Labor’s forebears who determined Israel’s relationship with its Arab citizens. The military administration of Israel’s Palestinian community, abolished only in 1966, wasn’t the brainchild of the right. And as Balad MK Jamal Zahalka pointed out, right-wing government built settlements alongside Palestinian villages, while the spiritual leaders of the Labor Party built theirs on the ruins of the villages that were depopulated and demolished in 1948.

And we must not think it’s all...

A mass rally in support of Sgt. Elor Azaria, who was filmed shooting a wounded Palestinian, has stirred a heated debate on social media about the future of the rule of law and the status of the IDF. But nobody wondered how the Palestinians should be factored in.

By Orly Noy

The Israeli soldier who was caught on camera shooting a wounded Palestinian knifeman has been indicted for manslaughter, the military prosecution said on Monday.

Meanwhile, a mini brouhaha erupted over a solidarity concert for the soldier, who following the indictment can be named as Sergeant Elor Azaria, that is scheduled to take place at Tel Aviv’s Rabin square on Tuesday.

The rally comes in the wake of massive support Azaria received from right-wing circles, who see him as a hero who confronted a terrorist (the fact that the Palestinian man, 21-year-old Abdel Fatah Sharif, lay severely wounded and posed no risk was apparently immaterial to them). They say that he is being scapegoated by the IDF bigwigs who are eager to clear their conscience at his expense.

Among the billed artists were initially David D’Or, whose claim to fame, ironically, was a joint tour with the Lebanese singer Lubna Salame, and the incredibly popular Eyal Golan, who was recently embroiled in a large-scale statutory rape scandal, involving dozens of teenagers, and escaped by the skin of his teeth. They have both succumbed to public pressure and cancelled their participation, but the controversy has yet to subside.

Most people lamented the decline of Israeli democracy, the eternal Titanic that keeps on sinking, which the direct affront to the rule of law that an overt support for a murderer represents.

But some, interestingly, thought that siding with the soldier in his campaign against the army was a welcome jab at the military juggernaut. These people, who don’t exactly position themselves in the far-right fringes of the Israeli discourse, said that if they were to choose between Azaria and the army, they’d opt for the former, in protest of the army’s penchant to scapegoat junior soldiers in order to allow the higher-ups get away with it.

There is, of course, more than an element of truth in what they say. The army’s decision-makers need scapegoats like Azaria to convince themselves that they are morally superior to any other army in the universe. But this sort...

Our collective moral compass has become so fundamentally twisted that even the most decent of people, those who are not considered extremists, believe that there is nothing wrong with shooting a man as he lies dying on the ground.

One of the more dangerous and frustrating aspects of the fascism taking over the Jewish-Israeli public, led by its elected officials, is the way it is fed by every single thing that happens here. Nearly every piece of news pushes this process forward — even events that should serve as a warning sign.

Take, for example, Netanyahu’s comments on the Mufti. On paper, it seemed like a crazy slip of the tongue by a leader who can no longer tell between reality and imagination and is willing to twist one of the darkest chapters in his people’s history for political gain. But Netanyahu knew exactly what he was doing: in the Israeli reality, comparing Palestinians to Nazis (and putting the blame for the Holocaust on the Palestinians rather than the Nazis) works. Netanyahu knows that once the noise dies down, he will have convinced a good portion of the population that the Palestinians were the ones responsible for the Holocaust — that they were the ones who incited Hitler to massacre the Jews. He knows that in the current climate, of all the dirt thrown at the Palestinians — no matter how baseless — something is bound to stick. The public could rise up against the lies, but instead it internalizes it.

A similar thing happens every time the public deals with another horrifying piece of news from the occupied territories. The effect is almost always the opposite: instead of being shocked, the public gives its stamp of approval — sometimes even an official one. The public was not horrified when it found out the extent of the killing of Palestinian civilians who were uninvolved in the last Gaza war. Instead, it led to a change in the IDF’s “ethical code” as formulated by Israeli philosopher and linguist Asa Kasher. Rather than shaking us to our core, we have come to accept that our soldiers’ lives come before the lives of Palestinian civilians — a notion that goes against international humanitarian law, not to mention most basic morality.

WARNING: GRAPHIC VIDEO

This is exactly what is taking place in the...

Instead of calling Breaking the Silence ‘traitors,’ Israel’s defense minister should listen to what they have to say — just for once.

Dear Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon,

How are your Purim celebrations going? Are you having fun? Did you dress up? Any chance you happened to watch the video shot in Hebron on Thursday? The one where an Israeli soldier executes a man as he lies bleeding on the ground?

Do not roll your eyes, dear minister. The video may make your insides churn, but you, after all, have a stomach of steel. So watch the video over again, Minister Ya’alon. What you see happened in real life.

Had it not been for the camera that captured the murder, the only way we could have possibly heard about it would be through a testimony given to Breaking the Silence. Perhaps one of the soldiers present at the scene would have come to the offices of the organization, where he or she would give their testimony after being unable to deal with the nightmares. Just like many other soldiers who could not bear the silence — both their own and Israeli society’s — and opened their mouth.

You know, the ones you accused of committing treason.

Watch the Hebron video over and over again, and ask for forgiveness from Breaking the Silence, whose name you have besmirched. There will not be a camera to document every horrific thing that takes place as a result of your policies. But there will almost always be those who still hold on to the concept of decency, and they will let their voice be heard.

Instead of calling them traitors, listen to them. At least today. Then you can go back to the lies and incitement. But at least today, for one single Purim holiday, shut up and listen to them.

This article was first published in Hebrew on Local Call. Read it here.

In a special meeting with members of Knesset from the Joint List, a group of Mizrahi activists present a manifesto calling for Palestinian-Mizrahi solidarity against racism and discrimination.

“Facing a reality of fear, discrimination, separation, and incitement we have joined together to form alliances, to cross barriers of ethnicity, gender, and consciousness.”

Those are the words that open the vision statement by a group of Mizrahi activists who support the Joint List, which was ceremoniously presented to members of the Joint List earlier this week.

The decision to do so, which began with a group of friends who were joined along the way by dozens of other activists, stemmed from last year’s election. That period was not an easy one for many Mizrahi activists: on the one hand, the elections took place as the Mizrahi discourse, especially as it relates to Mizrahi culture, began flourishing once again after years of ostensible silence. A group of young poets with a Mizrahi consciousness began making waves, and suddenly the Mizrahi discourse was everywhere.

Meanwhile it seemed that as election season began, this discourse failed to make gains politically: aside from Shas, which understandably could not serve as a political home for many of us, Mizrahiness as political consciousness was simply nonexistent in the elections. Candidates such as Eli Ohana in Jewish Home or Avi Dabush in Meretz, whose Mizrahi identity is a fundamental part of their public persona, were simply not enough to get them into the Knesset. Finance Minister Moshe Kahlon, like many Mizrahim before him, preferred to run on the “all-Israeli” ticket, and did not use his Mizrahi identity as part of his campaign.

But for many of us whose political socialization took place through the prism of Mizrahi identity, the ethnic component simply could not be expressed through voting alone. Thus, a group of secular and masorati (a term describing those who perceive and describe themselves as neither strictly religious nor secular) Mizrahi activists joined the ultra-Orthodox Shas party and established the “Civil Advisory Council.” Today, some of the former council members are part of a new Mizrahi initiative, “Tor Hazahav.” Others chose to go with Kahlon in order to strengthen a Mizrahi who heads a party that claims the mantle of social justice, in order to help a Mizrahi politician climb as high as he can. Among all these activists, one often hears a phrase that has come...

The struggle against women’s oppression is one thing, but painting an entire group as barbarians in the name of ‘enlightened’ ideas is another thing. 

One can argue over whether asking a woman to move seats so that an ultra-Orthodox man does not have to sit beside her is a legitimate request. Clearly, the trend to remove women from public spaces has to be resisted. But to characterize this confrontation as “the war between light and darkness” is wrong.

The incident in question, which took place on El Al flight 028 from Newark to Tel Aviv was seemingly minor: a flight attendant asked an adult woman to upgrade to a better seat because the person who was to sit in the adjacent seat, a Haredi man, would not agree to sit next to a woman. The woman acquiesced and moved elsewhere. Despite this, the woman later decided, with the help of the Movement for Progressive Judaism, to sue El Al for gender discrimination. That’s when the story made headlines.

The exposure given to this story is not altogether surprising: it is firmly rooted in the attitude in which the “sons of light” are fighting a war against the “sons of darkness,” which the Israeli media loves to parade in connection with the ultra-Orthodox. How does one construct such a polarizing narrative? It’s simple. First of all, one publishes details about the poor woman who was asked to surrender her seat in order to accommodate the ultra-Orthodox man. Haaretz and The Marker chose to translate and publish the New York Times report, according to which Rina Rabinowitz is “a retired attorney who holds a doctorate in educational psychology, and who in her youth escaped the Nazis along with her family.”

It is not clear how her academic degrees and the fact that she escaped Nazi horrors are relevant to this story. “I am a mature and educated woman, I traveled the world,” Rabinowitz says about herself, as if it would have been less shocking had the woman in question been a small-town shopkeeper. Perhaps this is why the lawsuit, an insignificant affair, turns into an “intellectual, ideological and legal issue.”

But since one needs more substance to justify the article, we are talking about a “phenomenon” — a real epidemic. The ultra-Orthodox refuse to sit next to women, delay flights, and suddenly there is news about an ultra-Orthodox man creating a disturbance because the movie shown on the plane is not modest enough. These Haredim have become real airborne pests.

Struggle...

It seems that Israelis only pay attention to Palestinian lives when a left-wing activist is accused of sending Palestinians to their death.

For the past two weeks, the country has been in an uproar around the fate of one Palestinian, Abu Khalil, whose death has been pinned on Ezra Nawi, an Israeli left-wing activist. Nawi was the recent subject of a right-wing sting operation, which showed him disclosing information to the Palestinian Authority about a land swap between Abu Khalil, a resident of the South Hebron Hills, and an Israeli settler. According to the PA, selling land to Jews is considered a capital offense.

The information about the sale was given to a relative of Abu Khalil, but as far as is known it was never transferred over to the Palestinian Authority. Abu Khalil reportedly died of a stroke shortly thereafter, but the truth of Abu Khalil’s death mattered little to the Israeli public.

All of a sudden the entire country has come together, concerned about the possible wrongdoing to a Palestinian from the occupied territories. All of a sudden Abu Khalil’s life — and death — have become meaningful for Israelis. All of a sudden the Israeli public cares about a dead Palestinian.

Meanwhile a Palestinian journalist is starving to death. Muhammad al-Qiq has been on hunger strike for over 60 days, causing him to lose consciousness; who knows whether he will make it to his High Court hearing — set for Wednesday — alive. As opposed to Abu Khalil, al-Qiq’s slow, painful descent does not interest many Israelis. Perhaps because they cannot blame his death on left-wing activists. Al-Qiq is on hunger strike to force the Israeli government and its vaunted legal system to tell him exactly what he is being charged with, why they are holding him in administrative detention, and why soldiers needed to blow up his front door on November 21 and hold him for over three weeks in isolation.

Perhaps we can find the answer in what Yael Marom and Noam Rotem wrote Monday on Local Call, +972′s Hebrew sister site: “Al-Qiq, 33, is a resident of the village Dura near Hebron, a member of Hamas (according to the Shin Bet), a journalist for the Saudi news channel “Almajd,” and a critic of the Palestinian Authority. This is likely the reason he was arrested, with the Israeli army carrying out...

When will the Jewish Left wake up and come to terms with the fact that the rules of the game have changed?

It seems that even the most skeptical of radical left-wing activists in Israel were taken by surprise by the aggressive, relentless, and mounting attacks that we have witnessed over these past few days against left-wing activists.

This madness refuses to die down. Day after day we hear about arrests of left-wing activists, who disappear into their cells without ever being informed of what they are being accused. The police slap a gag order on the entire story, preventing us from even publishing their names.

We know these people from years of working together. We go, time after time, to stand outside the courthouse in order to make sure they hear our cries of support and solidarity. We see them being led in handcuffs, disappear into closed-door court hearings, wait for the results — which are generally known from the get-go — and return to the silence that surrounds these organized kidnappings. Because the gag orders are so sweeping, we cannot speak of the political context of these arrests, about the connection between one arrest and the other, about what is happening before our eyes — we are prevented from speaking about openly.

The public has almost completely consented to the gag orders, leaving the police room to frame the discussion. Thus, while not a single person can actually publish the name of the first activist who was arrested last Sunday, and despite the fact that nearly everyone knows his identity, the police have managed to convince the public that they captured him as he tried to flee the country. Were we able to talk about the man and the reason for his arrest, we could debunk this absurd claim. But we cannot, so we remain silent.

We remain silent when another Israeli activist, a dear friend to many of us, is arrested — even when many of us suspected that this would be the next step. Anyone who was aware of the circumstances surrounding the first arrest won’t be surprised. So we know, and we remain silent. We return to the courthouse and wait outside during the hearing, return home and continue to remain silent. Then we guess who will be next in line.

We are silent even when the police continue trying to keep the...

In their search for the suspect in the Tel Aviv shooting attack, police are ‘visiting’ the homes and dorms of Palestinian students at Tel Aviv University. Joint List chair asks whether the university gave police info on innocent students.

As part of the manhunt for Nashat Milhem, the suspect in the deadly Tel Aviv shooting last week, a significant number of young Arab men and women are reporting police raids and searches of their apartments near Tel Aviv University and even in student dormitories.

Muhammad Abdel Kader posted the following status on his Facebook wall Sunday:

“I don’t know how they knew that Arabs live in this apartment, Abdel Kader told me. “But I don’t think that they have any particular problem finding us,” he joked wryly.

According to Abdel Kader, the police officers showed up at around 2 in the afternoon on Sunday. They didn’t show him a search warrant or their badges or any identifying documents. The search, according to Abdel Kader, wasn’t aggressive: the police went into each room, asked who lives in the apartment, how much they pay in rent, where they are from, and more questions along those lines.

“I’ve lived here in this apartment for half a year and this was the first time that the police came for any reason. I know at least 13 other cases like this in the area,” he added. Abdel Kader managed to photograph the police cars outside his building before they went on to the next Palestinian home.

Why are you so sad?

Another of the police “visits” took place Sunday morning in Khavier Sidawi’s apartment, in north Tel Aviv’s Ramat...