News wires continue to churn out bad press about Israel
Israel often complains about bad press. The media is biased against Israel, the UN is anti-Israel, and human rights groups are overly critical of the Jewish state.
Every day it seems reams of news that do not reflect Israel in a good light roll off the news wires. Today is no exception, nor this week, or month. The bad news seems to be escalating. If it is not the claims of war mongering over Iran, the introduction of Palestinian-only buses, claims that Palestinian children are being mistreated in Israeli prisons, new claims about the mysterious Prisoner X and the possible abuse of other countries' passports, it is the increasing number of racist attacks against Arabs.
This of course is only from the last few days.
On Friday's Reuters wire, a story says a spate of epithet-laced attacks by young Israeli Jews against Arabs indicates anti-Muslim and anti-Arab bigotry is becoming more acceptable in many sectors of Israeli society.
Police have arrested four people, including two minors, over the bludgeoning last Saturday of an Arab Israeli citizen on holiday with his wife in the Israeli city of Tiberius, Israel's Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper reported this week.
That was at least the fourth attack in Israel in the last month targeting Palestinians and Arab citizens, about 20% of Israel's population.
On Wednesday, Israel's police commissioner, Yohanan Danino, called on his officers to be vigilant against such attacks, which he described as "despicable and criminal".
Although lacking statistics, Israeli rights groups and politicians told Reuters such incidents were on the rise because of the influence of ultranationalist Jewish parties in Israel's parliament over the last decade and xenophobic blowback from the nearly 46-year occupation of the Palestinian territories.
The attacks, which authorities have described as "nationalistically" motivated, seem to be carried out primarily by religious Jewish men in their twenties or younger.
Auni Banna, the director of the Arab minority rights department at Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI), partly attributed the violence to years of "institutionalised" discrimination against Arab citizens, who face restrictions on land ownership and access to housing and education not experienced by Jewish citizens.
Nadeem Shehadeh, an attorney at the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, or Adalah, told Reuters, attitudes of Jewish Israelis had increasingly become almost blase towards anti-Arab violence and discrimination.
"These sort of incidents have become common in the sense that nobody condemns you if you say or do something that's really racist, because there's this increasing sense of tolerance for this kind of stuff," he said.
The victim of last Saturday's attack, Nimer Sharkawi, said he was singled out after the attackers discovered his ethnicity, telling him "Arab, get out" before smashing his face with an unspecified object.
"They knew we were Arabs because I spoke Arabic to my wife. They started cursing and then attacked like maniacs. I asked them: 'Why? What did I do to you?'," Mr Sharkawi, 43, told Yedioth Ahronoth.
He was treated at a nearby hospital for a broken jaw.
The newspaper, according to Reuters, reported that two of the four suspects arrested by police were involved in another attack last month on an Israeli-Arab man, Hassan Usruf, a Tel Aviv street cleaner in his 40s.
As many as 20 Jewish youths reportedly beat Mr Usruf with glass bottles, sending him to hospital with wounds to his jaw, eye socket and head.
"'You're an Arab. You want a state? Is that what you want?'" Mr Usruf recalled of his attackers' threats from his hospital bed late last month to Israeli media.
Young men are not the only attackers. Last month, a group of Jewish-settler women were photographed beating a female Palestinian, Hana Amtir, on Jerusalem's light-rail train system.
"Four young women came to me and asked me whether I was Arab. I said yes, you can tell by my clothes. After that they spat on me and one of them started to shout 'Arab, Arab'," Ms Amtir told Israel's Channel 10 television on Sunday, adding that the assailants punched and kicked her in the stomach.
A day earlier Reuters ran a story about the mistreatment of minors being held in Israeli prisons. Palestinian children are subject to widespread, systematic ill-treatment that violates international law, a Unicef report was quoted as saying.
The global rights group says 700 Palestinian children aged from 12 to 17, most of them boys, are arrested, interrogated and detained by the Israeli military, police and security agents every year in the occupied West Bank.
According to the report, most of the youths are arrested for throwing stones.
Unicef's report said it had identified some examples of practices that "amount to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment according to the Convention on the Rights of the Child and the Convention against Torture".
Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor said officials from the ministry and the Israeli military had co-operated with Unicef in its work on the report,
"Israel will study the conclusions and will work to implement them through continuing cooperation with Unicef, whose work we value and respect," he said.
According to the report, ill-treatment of Palestinian minors typically begins with the arrest itself, often carried out in the middle of the night by heavily armed soldiers, and continues all the way through prosecution and sentencing.
"The pattern of ill-treatment includes ... the practice of blindfolding children and tying their hands with plastic ties, physical and verbal abuse during transfer to an interrogation site, including the use of painful restraints," Reuters quoted the Unicef report as saying.
It said minors suffered physical violence and threats during their interrogation, were coerced into confession and not given immediate access to a lawyer or family during questioning.
On Tuesday of this week Israel introduced separate bus lines for Palestinians and Israelis travelling into Israel's cities from the occupied West Bank.
The measure, spurred by pressure from Jewish settlers in the West Bank, was decried by Palestinian officials and Israeli human rights groups as racist and illegal. It immediately drew comparisons to one of the most hated fixtures of apartheid-era South Africa and segregation in the American South in the 1950s, wrote Vita Bekker in The National.
It is the first time that Israel has, in effect, introduced Palestinian-only buses in the West Bank since taking over the territory in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, the rights groups were quoted as saying.
Israeli media reported that settlers have pushed for the segregated buses, claiming they felt unsafe with Palestinians on board.
The introduction of separate bus lines has only been advertised in Arabic-language leaflets distributed in Palestinian areas of the West Bank.
Palestinian officials, wrote Bekker, condemned the Israeli move. Hanan Ashrawi, a member of the Palestine Liberation Organisation's executive committee, told The National: "With eyes wide open, we're moving towards apartheid and racism. Everybody is complicit - the legal and political systems and the different Israeli ministries."
Yesh Din, an Israeli human rights group, said it was weighing a legal challenge to the separate buses in the Israeli High Court of Justice.
Emily Schaeffer, an attorney with the organisation, said the Palestinian-only buses were a "clear" violation of international humanitarian law.
Meantime the Australian government is coming to grips with claims it was kept in the dark over the jailing and mysterious death some 10 months later of Ben Zygier, a 34 year old married man and father of two children from Melbourne. "The key challenge is to establish two facts," former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said Thursday, saying there were two critical questions that needed to be answered. "Number one, why was this individual incarcerated by the Israeli authorities, that is important. We still do not know."
"Was there any connection between this case and that concerning the illegal use of Australian passports by Israeli intelligence services? I do not know the answer to either of those questions," Rudd told reporters in Melbourne.
The Syrian government meantime was fuming on Thursday when it claimed Israeli espionage equipment had been discovered in Syria by government forces. The equipment, which resembled that retrieved from an investigation in the past two years that netted more than 150 Israeli spies in Lebanon, was shown on Syrian state television.
According to The Jerusalem Post, Syrian state television quoted an official source as saying the equipment was found in the last few days at a coastal location not specified, and that the discovery highlighted the role Israel had played in the uprising against Syrian President Bashar Assad.
Over in Europe Friday, Israeli President Shimon Peres was trying to shore up relations with Brussels. Israel however is becoming increasingly frustrated at Europe's reluctance to name Hezbollah as a terrorist organization. The Bulgarian government's announcement that it believed the Lebanese militant group was behind the bus attack which killed 5 Israelis last year, and the current trial of a Hezbollah member in Cyprus, have failed to prod the EU.
Wednesday was the day the world learned Hugo Chavez, the Venezualan president who was vocal in his criticism of Israel, had died. There was no mourning in Israel just conjecture of what it meant for the Jewish state. "It is much too early to tell how this will affect us," one diplomatic official told The Jerusalem Post.
"Someone may take his place who will lead the country into the same direction. We simply do not know."
So in three days there is little good news about Israel. And as we churn out basically the same stuff week in week out, we're overlooking of course the heating up of the rhetoric on Iran and the possibility of military action by either the U.S. or Israel, or both, the Palestinian hunger strikes, and the daily occurrences of raids, incidents at checkpoints, and the announcements of plans for new settlements.
Of course if we looked hard enough we would find a positive story. And sure enough we got one from the Israel Defense Force. But just before we relay that there is news that the Israeli army last month rounded up a "terror cell." In conjunction with the Shin Bet the IDF "uncovered a terror cell consisting of Tanzim members that was responsible for assaulting an IDF soldier in December 2012."
"On December 21, members of the cell broke into the IDF's Ramah base, north of Jerusalem, assaulted a soldier guarding the base and stole his rifle," the report said.
According to the indictment filed against the five "terrorists," two of the suspects climbed the base's guard tower. After the guarding soldier told them to identify themselves, one of the suspects pulled out a plastic gun and pointed it at the soldier's head, while the other suspect tried to spray the soldier with a fire extinguisher. Eventually, one of the suspects managed to spray the soldier in the face with tear gas, and the suspect stole the soldier's gun while injuring him.
The indictment also stated that the "terrorists" sold the gun for money.
The suspects are being charged with assaulting a soldier and injuring him lightly and with armed robbery.
It is disturbing when it is learned Israel is being confronted by terrorists equipped with plastic guns and fire extinguishers, and tear gas. Perhaps that is why the U.S. is sending new American "Super" Hercules C-130J to the Israel Air Force next year to supplement the veteran Hercules aircraft, which will be overhauled and will stay in service, so as to further help Israel defend itself. The curious thing about this story is that if these guys were terrorists, why didn't they kill the soldier?
But now the good news. Ten days ago the Israeli army evacuated two prematurely born infant twins for medical treatment, together with their Sudanese-born mother.
The woman, according to the IDF website, had given birth to the twins, who weighed 900 grams, at Joseftal Medical Center in Eilat. Because of the infants' dangerously low birth weight, it was decided to transport them and their mother to Assaf Harofeh Medical Center in central Israel.
The IDF sent an Israel Air Force helicopter and soldiers of the 669 Airborne Rescue and Evacuation Unit to transport them. A medical team from Assaf Harofeh Medical Center including Hospital Director Dr. Benny Davidson and Dr. Eli Heyman, Head of the Department of Pediatric and Neurological Rehabilitation flew to Eilat in the IAF helicopter, together with the 669 crew. The patients were then flown north to Assaf Harofeh. .
Col. Dr. Abergel described the IDF's assistance to the patients as "a moment of Israeli pride the medical considerations trumped everything else."
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