Latest news with #IsraeliJewish
Al Manar
26-05-2025
- Politics
- Al Manar
Thousands of Settlers Storm Al-Aqsa Mosque, Perform Provocative Rituals Ahead of ‘Flag March'
Thousands of Israeli settlers entered Al-Aqsa Mosque compound on Monday under Israeli security forces' protection, performing religious rituals that Palestinians view as provocative. Local observers documented large crowds of settlers within the compound, with one woman raising an Israeli flag during the incursion. Video footage showed thousands more gathered at the Western Wall plaza adjacent to the site. An Israeli Jewish settler attempts to break into Al-Aqsa Mosque compound in occupied Jerusalem, bringing in Torah-related items to perform Talmudic rituals in its courtyards. The mosque, located in the Old City of Jerusalem, is considered the third holiest place of worship for… — Quds News Network (@QudsNen) May 26, 2025 Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir visited the compound accompanied by Negev and Galilee Minister Yitzhak Wasserlauf and members of the Otzma Yehudit party, including Knesset Member Yitzhak Kroiz and Rabbi Yehuda Kroiz. The Israeli minister of national security Itamar Ben Gavir storms Al Aqsa mosque. — Eye on Palestine (@EyeonPalestine) May 26, 2025 Meanwhile, the occupation established security barriers around Damascus Gate and throughout the Old City, restricting Palestinian residents' movement amid heightened military presence. In a display of support for Israel, U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, performs rituals at the Al-Buraq Wall, the western wall overlooking Al-Aqsa Mosque compound in occupied Jerusalem. — Quds News Network (@QudsNen) May 26, 2025 These incidents come after increasing settler visits and confrontations with worshippers in recent days, with settler groups encouraging larger turnouts for Monday's activities. The annual 'Flag March,' set to proceed from Al-Buraq Square through Damascus Gate and the Al-Wad neighborhood—areas with significant Palestinian populations—marks what Israelis call 'Jerusalem Unification Day.' The Flag March, also known as the 'Flag Dance,' is one of the most prominent manifestations of the Judaization policies of Jerusalem. It is an annual event attended by tens of thousands of settlers and right-wing Israelis. A group of Israeli Jewish settlers under police cover break into the courtyards of Al-Aqsa Mosque in occupied Jerusalem, in violation of the sanctity of the holy site. The mosque is the third holiest place of worship for millions of Muslims worldwide after Mecca and Medina. — Quds News Network (@QudsNen) May 26, 2025 It takes place on the 28th of the eighth month according to the Hebrew calendar, which falls on Monday. This day is known in the Zionist entity as 'Jerusalem Unification Day,' which commemorates Israel's control of Jerusalem and its occupation of its eastern part during the June 1967 war, known in the Arab world as the 'Naksa.' Dances, songs, and prayers of the settlers whilst breaking into Al Aqsa mosque. — Eye on Palestine (@EyeonPalestine) May 26, 2025
Al Jazeera
06-04-2025
- Politics
- Al Jazeera
Palestinian-US teen killed by Israeli settler in the occupied West Bank
A Palestinian-American teenager has been shot and killed by an Israeli Jewish settler in the occupied West Bank, Palestinian authorities have said. Palestinian officials identified the 14-year-old as Omar Mohammed Rabea and said he was near a settlement in Turmus Aya when the settler opened fire. There have been sharp rises in settler violence, incursions, attacks and arson against Palestinians and their property in the territory since Israel's war in Gaza began. The Israeli army has also been carrying out a sustained assault on the territory in various cities and towns. Rabea was shot along with two other teenagers by the settler, said the town's Mayor Adeeb Lafi. Palestinian officials condemned the shooting. 'This is yet another example of the ongoing Israeli settler violence against Palestinians, with impunity,' one official said. The victim's family has not yet made a public statement, but they have expressed their grief over their loss. International criticism of Israeli settlement expansion and Jewish settler violence has been mounting, drawing condemnation from human rights groups worldwide. Israeli forces have opened an investigation into the killing, but there has been no immediate comment from authorities. The Israeli military and settlers operate for the most part without fear of judicial repercussions in Palestinian areas. There have been several cases of US citizens being killed by Israelis in the occupied West Bank. In 2024, Aysenur Ezgi Eygi, a 26-year-old Turkish-American activist, was shot in the head by an Israeli soldier while protesting against illegal Israeli settlements, according to witnesses. Shireen Abu Akleh, a Palestinian-American journalist for Al Jazeera, was also killed by the Israeli military in 2022 while reporting in the occupied West Bank, despite being clearly identified as a member of the press.
Boston Globe
21-03-2025
- Politics
- Boston Globe
Trump is using antisemitism as pretext to attack higher education, undermine democracy
Meanwhile the Department of Education has threatened Advertisement There is no question that campus protests at Columbia and other universities have included serious antisemitic incidents. I've spoken with students and faculty members at Columbia — my alma mater — and elsewhere who have been harassed for wearing kippot or other visible Jewish symbols, who have encountered swastikas or graffiti reading 'Death to Zionists' and 'Death to Jews,' and who have been pushed out of clubs and campus spaces for their refusal to disavow any connection to Israel. Columbia University Apartheid Divest, the primary organization behind the protests, has openly celebrated violence against Israeli Jewish civilians and distributed material glorifying Hamas. I have also spoken with students who took part in campus encampments, including Jewish students, who joined out of a sincere desire to end the war in Gaza. Columbia, like any university, should both allow for free speech on campus, including antiwar protests, and resolutely address episodes that cross the line into antisemitism according to its own codes of conduct and disciplinary policies — just as it should take action in cases of racism, homophobia, Islamophobia, or other bias. It's reasonable for Jewish students, faculty, and staff to demand that school administrations do more to ensure their safety on campus. Advertisement But when the federal government withholds funds primarily intended for scientific research and tries to expel campus protesters without due process, the true aim is to force universities to accommodate whatever the government wants. If this administration can get away with enforcing demands on universities under the guise of fighting antisemitism, it can subsequently use that same power against universities over any issue — such as teaching the history of racism in America, allowing transgender students to live in dorms that match their identities, or offering reproductive health care in affiliated hospitals. If the government can deport or strip visas from students and faculty without due process (a Brown University medical school professor was It's no surprise that Trump, an aspiring autocrat, would set his sights on universities. As strongholds of critical inquiry and free speech, universities play a crucial role in maintaining democracy. In Hungary, Prime Minister Orbán's government forced Central European University to Advertisement Jewish communities understand well the value of democracy and the dangers of restrictions on speech. It is America's liberal democracy, including First Amendment protections, that have allowed Jews to flourish in the United States. At the same time, efforts to limit speech in the United States have often had a disproportionate impact on the Jewish community. These have included the 1919 and 1920 Trump is now using the Jewish community as a wedge to dilute free speech protections, control university curricula, and override immigration law. For some in the Jewish community, the short-term gains of shutting down anti-Israel protests may seem like a worthy tradeoff. But in the long term, the weakening of democracy will make Jews and others less safe. Once a government establishes the power to shut down discourse, it tends to use it to silence any critics or opponents. If Trump were actually interested in protecting Jewish students, he would not be slashing the Department of Education's Advertisement Rather than protecting Jews, the Trump administration is fanning the flames of antisemitism by attempting to pit Jewish communities against others. Historically, antisemitism has thrived by making Jews into scapegoats in moments of political, cultural, or economic instability — conditions that this administration's policies threaten to produce. Anyone committed to stopping the alarming growth of antisemitism must recognize the Trump administration's attempts to use the Jewish community's legitimate concerns as a pretext for undermining democracy, and must reject attempts to drive a wedge between Jews and other Americans. The most important way to protect democracy, as well as the Jewish community, is to work together to ensure a strong democracy for all.
Middle East Eye
17-03-2025
- Politics
- Middle East Eye
Israeli accusations of rape are confessions of their own crimes
Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported last week that Israeli soldiers sexually abused two Palestinian brothers they had captured and tortured on the streets of the West Bank last January. This is hardly an exceptional occurrence. The UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and in Israel, has just released a report on systematic Israeli sexual violence against Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank since 7 October 2023. The chair of the commission asserted that the report, entitled "More than a Human Can Bear", provides such incontrovertible evidence of Israeli crimes that "[t]here is no escape from the conclusion that Israel has employed sexual and gender-based violence against Palestinians to terrorise them and perpetuate a system of oppression that undermines their right to self-determination." Yet despite the extensive accounts of Israeli rapes and sexual abuse of Palestinians since 1948, the western media remains filled with stories of Israeli allegations of Palestinian rapes of Israelis. New MEE newsletter: Jerusalem Dispatch Sign up to get the latest insights and analysis on Israel-Palestine, alongside Turkey Unpacked and other MEE newsletters The Israeli army has, in fact, systematically used physical and sexual torture against Palestinians since at least 1967, as human rights groups revealed years ago. How, then, does this reality square with Israeli and western propaganda? The answer often lies in the foundational anti-Palestinian racism that informs these accounts, which are premised on the understanding that Palestinians, unlike white Europeans - including Israeli Jews - are barbarians. This is especially the case when it comes to the alleged sexual lasciviousness of the predatory Arabs, particularly Palestinians, and the supposed necessity of protecting Israeli Jewish womanhood from them. Rape allegations Following 7 October, the Israelis swiftly alleged mass Palestinian rape of Israeli Jewish women, alongside outright fabrications about the decapitation of babies and their bodies being baked in ovens - pictures of which former President Joe Biden claimed to have seen - an assertion the White House later denied. To date, not one Israeli woman has come forward to allege she was raped on 7 October, and despite the existence of hundreds of hours of video footage of the operation, not one video has surfaced. Western media readily adopts unverified Israeli claims as fact while neglecting verified Israeli and UN reports on Israeli sexual assaults and rapes of Palestinians Nevertheless, the UN issued a report last year claiming that sexual crimes were committed on that day, despite acknowledging the lack of video evidence and the absence of claimants who came forward to make allegations to the UN mission. While Hamas denied that any such rapes had occurred by its fighters, the Israeli government's claims remain unverified to this day. This does not mean, of course, that cases of rape did not occur on 7 October. It means that Israel has not provided incontrovertible evidence to prove it. Yet the allegations have been readily accepted as incontrovertible truth in Israel and western capitals, to the extent that any attempt to question the Israelis on these allegations renders one complicit - either in denying that these presumed atrocities occurred or in exhibiting a sexist failure to believe raped women, even though not one Israeli woman has come forward claiming to have been raped on that day. Zionist anxiety The western media's readiness to adopt unverified Israeli claims as factual should be contrasted with its neglect of verified Israeli and UN reports on Israeli sexual assaults and rapes of Palestinians, which are often unreported or underreported in the western press. Israel's allegations of mass rapes of Israeli women on 7 October are informed by decades of anxiety about the supposed threat of Palestinian manhood to Jewish womanhood. This preoccupation has perturbed many Zionists since the inception of Jewish colonisation. Analysing this Zionist anxiety, Hannah Arendt described its manifestation after Israel was established in 1948 as follows: "Israeli citizens, religious and nonreligious, seem agreed upon the desirability of having a law which prohibits intermarriage [between Jews and Palestinians], and it is chiefly for this reason… that they are also agreed upon the undesirability of a written constitution in which such a law would embarrassingly have to be spelled out," relying instead on rabbinical and religious law to protect against it. Hamas 'mass rape': How Israel weaponises fear of Muslim men to fuel violence in Gaza Read More » Arendt found it ironic that in the context of the 1961 Adolph Eichmann trial, "the prosecution denounced the infamous Nuremberg Laws of 1935, which had prohibited intermarriage and sexual intercourse between Jews and Germans. The better informed among the [newspaper] correspondents were well aware of the irony, but they did not mention it in their reports". Zionist opposition to miscegenation increased measurably after 1948, reaching an apoplectic level in the 1970s with the rise to political prominence of the American Jewish settler rabbi Meir Kahane, the founder of the Jewish Defense League. The American-born Kahane, an FBI consultant and convicted terrorist who moved to settle in Israel in 1971, was horrified by Jewish-Palestinian miscegenation, echoing American white racist society's laws against interracial marriage, particularly between white women and Black men, which clearly impressed him while growing up in the white supremacist USA. These racist directives were not confined to the Nazi Nuremberg laws, with which Arendt compared them, but were also standard across most European colonial settler societies, which also banned interracial marriages. In the US, it was only in 2000 that Alabama repealed its anti-miscegenation law, the last such law on the books. Myth of the predator But the rapacious desire that Palestinian men are said to have for Jewish womanhood is so deeply ingrained in the Israeli imagination that even when they do not commit rape, it seems that they do. This was made evident in a 2010 Israeli court case in which a Palestinian man was convicted of "rape by deception" for allegedly pretending to be Jewish in order to engage in consensual sex with a Jewish woman. When the woman discovered his identity, she sued him, and an Israeli district court found him guilty of rape. Meanwhile, multiple Jewish lynchings of Palestinian men in Jerusalem and other parts of Israel - based on mere suspicion that they were dating or seeking to date Jewish women - have been on the rise over the past two decades. At the same time, organisations dedicated to preventing miscegenation and "protecting" Jewish women from the so-called depravity of Palestinian men have proliferated. Angela Davis explained decades ago in the US context that the myth of the Black rapist "has been methodically conjured up whenever recurrent waves of violence and terror against the Black community have required convincing justifications". Israel's rape allegations amid its genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza fit the pattern Davis describes perfectly. What went unreported in the US was that the rape of Black women by white policemen was a common occurrence alongside the myth of the Black rapist in the 1960s and 1970s and beyond - a legacy of the white masters' rape of enslaved Black women that survived abolition - especially in the form of KKK gangrapes of Black women after the Civil War. History's horrors The anti-Palestinian Israeli historian Benny Morris details many instances of Israeli rapes of Palestinians from 1948 and beyond. Among the cases he recounts: "Four soldiers of Carmeli's Twenty-second Battalion raped an Arab girl and murdered her father." In Safsaf, "52 men [were] tied with a rope and dropped into a well and shot. 10 were killed. Women pleaded for mercy. [There were] 3 cases of rape... A girl aged 14 was raped. Another 4 were killed [sic]." Despite this horrific record, Israeli perceptions of the war were shaped by widespread racism and a sense of western superiority over Palestinians At Jish, "a woman and her baby were killed". In Deir Yassin, where "[a]ltogether some 250" Palestinians, "mostly non-combatants, were murdered; there were also cases of mutilation and rape". Despite this horrific record, which only increased exponentially in the following decades, Israeli perceptions of the war were shaped by widespread racism and a sense of western superiority over Palestinians. According to Morris: "The Israelis' collective memory of fighters characterised by 'purity of arms' is…undermined by the evidence of rapes committed in conquered towns and villages. About a dozen cases - in Jaffa, Acre, and so on - are reported in the available contemporary documentation and, given Arab diffidence about reporting such incidents and the (understandable) silence of the perpetrators, and [Israeli military] censorship of many documents, more, and perhaps many more, cases probably occurred. Arabs appear to have committed few acts of rape. Altogether, the 1948 War was characterised, in relative terms, by an extremely low incidence of rape." The right-wing Morris adds: "After the war, the Israelis tended to hail the 'purity of arms' of its militiamen and soldiers and to contrast this with Arab barbarism, which on occasion expressed itself in the mutilation of captured Jewish corpses. This reinforced the Israelis' positive self-image and helped them 'sell' the new state abroad; it also demonised the enemy. In truth, however, the Jews committed far more atrocities than the Arabs and killed far more civilians and POWs in deliberate acts of brutality in the course of 1948." Systematic strategy Morris's accounts of rape during the 1948 war are hardly exceptional, as rape remained standard practice for Israeli soldiers against Palestinian refugees expelled by Israel during the 1948 war attempting to return to their homes inside Israel between 1948 and 1955. For example, in August 1949, Israeli soldiers captured two Palestinian refugees. They killed the man, and 22 soldiers took turns raping the woman before killing her. Why raping Palestinians is legitimate Israeli military practice Read More » In March 1950, Israeli soldiers abducted two Palestinian girls and one boy from Gaza across the new border. They killed the boy and then raped the two girls before killing them. In August 1950, four Israeli policemen raped a Palestinian woman picking fruit from her family's orchard across the West Bank border. After the 1967 occupation, the use of rape and sexual abuse became increasingly systematic. Last year's scandal of the gang rape of Palestinian male hostages in Israeli dungeons was merely the latest instance of this ongoing savagery. What the latest UN report demonstrates yet again is that Israel's sexual crimes against Palestinians of both sexes are not isolated incidents but part of a systematic strategy to humiliate, abuse, and, principally, "dominate, oppress and destroy the Palestinian people in whole or in part". Yet western and Israeli racism and superiority remain impervious to these facts. The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
Shafaq News
03-03-2025
- Politics
- Shafaq News
Israeli arrested over links to Iranian intelligence
Shafaq News/ On Sunday, Israeli police arrested an individual on charges of offering to sell sensitive information, including access to a nuclear research facility. The Israeli Attorney General filed an indictment with the Be'er Sheva District Court against an Israeli citizen, Doron Bokobza, accusing him of security offenses related to espionage with Iranian intelligence in exchange for money, being fully aware that he was communicating with an Iranian operative. According to a joint statement from the Shin Bet and Israeli police, among the tasks attributed to Bokobza were photographing facilities and transferring information; the defendant allegedly presented himself to Iranian intelligence as capable of gaining access to the 'sensitive and secret facility' at the Dimona reactor and providing known details about it. In light of repeated similar cases involving Israeli Jewish citizens, the statement warned, 'Israeli citizens and residents against merely communicating with foreign entities from enemy states or unknown parties, especially engaging in tasks on behalf of these entities for money or any other reason.'
