Israeli teachers paid for military recruitment

RT | January 21, 2013

Israel is encouraging and financing a new form of patriotism by offering bonuses to high school teachers who succeed in motivating students to do their army service. The move has sparked a wave of criticism of the Ministry of Education.

­The initiative by the Ministry of Education that circulated in schools last year outlined the new policy of granting end of year bonuses to full-time teachers in Israel’s schools based on “achievements in learning”, ”social achievements”, and “achievements in values”.

The top 40 per cent of schools with a “high rate of enlistment for military, national or civil service” will receive funds to award their teachers with bonuses, according to the circular obtained by the Christian Science Monitor.

Those ranked among top ten percent will receive funds to grant bonuses in the amount of $2,160, while an equivalent of $1,620 will be paid for the next 10 per cent.

Critics of the move by the ministry say the militarization of the education system infringes on the future generation’s ability to participate in Middle East peace-making. Supporters say recuitment must remain high to ensure the security of the nation, citing army complaints that the percentage of young people taking up military service has dropped in recent years.

Those who oppose the pay scheme say that military propaganda comes at the cost of student education.

“Educating to prepare for the army and to encourage enlistment comes at the expense of regular education, which is meant to educate for democracy and citizenship,” Sharaf Hassan, educational director for the Association for Civil Rights in Israel told the Monitor.

Such an approach can also result in xenophobia, argues the former education minister Yossi Sarid.

“The ministry of education is taking Israel in a more militaristic, more nationalistic, more xenophobic, and more chauvinistic direction. It’s not education, it’s a sort of indoctrination,” Sarid said.

The education ministry claims that the bonus program is “designed to develop excellence among teachers and pupils.”

To survive, surrounded by enemies and threats, says a spokesman for former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, Raanan Gissin, “everyone has to take part in defense and that means three years of military service.”

Related article

• Israel offering bonuses to teachers who boost student enlistment (csmonitor.com)

The long road to Bab al-Karama

International Solidarity Movement | January 20, 2013

Bab al-Karama, Occupied Palestine – The road to Bab al-Karama, the new tent neighborhood created by Palestinians on land that will be separated from the village of Beit Iksa by the Apartheid wall, exposes a landscape of Apartheid.

To reach Bab al-Karama from Occupied Ramallah one needs to take the “Palestinian only” road that runs under the “Israeli only” 443 Highway between Ramallah and Beir Naballah.

Beir Naballah used to be a suburb of Jerusalem. Affluent Jerusalemites built their homes in Beir Naballah to escape from the housing crisis imposed on Palestinians by Jerusalem’s municipality housing polices. It sits on a road that connected the villages in the area with Jerusalem and continued on to Latrun. Now Beir Naballah is completely surrounded by an Israeli wall. The old road was widened and transformed into an Israeli highway called 443. The highway now connects Jerusalem to Tel Aviv and the Palestinian residents of the area are barred form using it. The Jerusalemite residents were forced to abandon their homes and many businesses dependent on clientele from Jerusalem have closed.

We exit Beir Naballah through a second tunnel that connects the Beir Naballah enclave to another enclave where 8 Palestinian villages are also isolated by Israeli walls. This tunnel is even more surreal than the first. Not only does it run under two Israeli only roads but as well as under the Apartheid wall and through the Givaat Zeev settlement bloc. High cement walls with razor wire on top of them hug the sides of the road.

We drive in Biddu and drive through the villages that had been since their creation connected to Al Quds but are now cut off from it and artificially connected to Ramallah. True to the Orwellian tradition of Israel’s military language they call the Palestinian network of roads they have built under their highways “fabric of life roads”. The landscape is beautiful and almost idyllic. Goats grazing on green hills, old stone houses…, but this ideal setting is surrounded by walls, gates and settlements.

The last village we reach, the one closest to Jerusalem is Beit Iksa. But to enter it we need to pass a military checkpoint. At the edge of the village we finally reach Bab al-Karama overlooking a network of Israeli highways and the city of Jerusalem. In the valley right below Bab al-Karama one can see two tunnels that will be connected by a bridge on which a fast track train connecting Jerusalem to Tel Aviv will run. The train will run on the village’s land but not only will the villagers be barred from accessing it, Israel’s Apartheid wall will be built between the village and the train separating the villagers from over 4500 dunams (60%) of their agricultural land. More than 1300 dunams had already been taken in the 70s for the construction of  Ramot Allon settlement.

Checkpoint at the entrance of Beit Iksa

Related articles

• ‘Gate of Dignity’ built on lands of Beit Iksa north of Jerusalem (alethonews.wordpress.com)
• Army Invades Bab Al-Karama (imemc.org)
• Palestinians Establish a new Village, Bab Alshams, in Area E1 (alethonews.wordpress.com)

Morris Sadek: Useful Idiot or Tool of Zionism?

By Johnny Spooner |  September 17, 2012

“Every kind of inter-Arab confrontation will assist us”

Oded Yinon, World Zionist Council, 1982.

On the third of September one of the central figures behind “Innocence of Muslims” also released a statement on the National American Coptic Assembly website calling for the balkanisation of Egypt into five states one of these being a Coptic state with Alexandria as it’s capital.

It was released by Morris Sadek, who incidentally would become the new state’s Vice President.  Sadek is an extremist, Coptic-Zionist who is denounced by mainstream Copts in Egypt as an anti-Islam fanatic who dishonestly pushes his extremist agenda. However, in the US Sadek, has forged alliances in his anti-Islamic crusade with the lunatic fringes of the Christian-right and the Zionist-funded anti-Islam propagandists such as Brigitte Gabriel of ACT! For America and Robert Spencer of Jihadwatch.

A September 1st Arabic News article suggested that there are moves afoot in Egypt to charge Sadek and his Coptic co-conspirators for treason.

So it may come as no suprise that Sadek’s vision for the Middle-East neatly parallels “The Zionist Plan For The Middle-East”  The following is a section from a report written in 1982 by Oded Yinon who worked The Foriegn Ministry of Israel and was published by The World Zionist Organisation:

17
In the course of the Nineteen Eighties, the State of Israel will have to go through far-reaching changes in its political and economic regime domestically, along with radical changes in its foreign policy, in order to stand up to the global and regional challenges of this new epoch. The loss of the Suez Canal oil fields, of the immense potential of the oil, gas and other natural resources in the Sinai peninsula which is geomorphologically identical to the rich oil-producing countries in the region, will result in an energy drain in the near future and will destroy our domestic economy: one quarter of our present GNP as well as one third of the budget is used for the purchase of oil.9 The search for raw materials in the Negev and on the coast will not, in the near future, serve to alter that state of affairs.

18
(Regaining) the Sinai peninsula with its present and potential resources is therefore a political priority which is obstructed by the Camp David and the peace agreements. The fault for that lies of course with the present Israeli government and the governments which paved the road to the policy of territorial compromise, the Alignment governments since 1967. The Egyptians will not need to keep the peace treaty after the return of the Sinai, and they will do all they can to return to the fold of the Arab world and to the USSR in order to gain support and military assistance. American aid is guaranteed only for a short while, for the terms of the peace and the weakening of the U.S. both at home and abroad will bring about a reduction in aid. Without oil and the income from it, with the present enormous expenditure, we will not be able to get through 1982 under the present conditions and we will have to act in order to return the situation to the status quo which existed in Sinai prior to Sadat’s visit and the mistaken peace agreement signed with him in March 1979.10

18
(Regaining) the Sinai peninsula with its present and potential resources is therefore a political priority which is obstructed by the Camp David and the peace agreements.

(…)

19
Israel has two major routes through which to realize this purpose, one direct and the other indirect

(…)

Israel will not unilaterally break the treaty, neither today, nor in 1982, unless it is very hard pressed economically and politically and Egypt provides Israel with the excuse to take the Sinai back into our hands … Israel will be forced to act directly or indirectly in order to regain control over Sinai as a strategic, economic and energy reserve for the long run.

(…)

20
Egypt, in its present domestic political picture, is already a corpse, all the more so if we take into account the growing Moslem-Christian rift. Breaking Egypt down territorially into distinct geographical regions is the political aim of Israel in the Nineteen Eighties on its Western front.

(…)

21
The vision of a Christian Coptic State in Upper Egypt alongside a number of weak states with very localized power and without a centralized government as to date, is the key to a historical development which was only set back by the peace agreement but which seems inevitable in the long run.

The report fantasizes over the the establishment of Israel as an expanded regional superpower ruling over weak and defenseless, Muslim mini-states ravaged by internal strife.  Coincidentally or not this process has already begun – Sudan has been split, Somalia and Libya aren’t actually controlled by a central government and the two other main focuses/threats (Syria and Iraq) have been destroyed or are in the process of being destroyed.

World’s 100 richest earned enough in 2012 to end global poverty 4 times over

RT | January 20, 2013

The world’s 100 richest people earned a stunning total of $240 billion in 2012 – enough money to end extreme poverty worldwide four times over, Oxfam has revealed, adding that the global economic crisis is further enriching the super-rich.

“The richest 1 percent has increased its income by 60 percent in the last 20 years with the financial crisis accelerating rather than slowing the process,” while the income of the top 0.01 percent has seen even greater growth, a new Oxfam report said.

For example, the luxury goods market has seen double-digit growth every year since the crisis hit, the report stated. And while the world’s 100 richest people earned $240 billion last year, people in “extreme poverty” lived on less than $1.25 a day.

Oxfam is a leading international philanthropy organization. Its new report, ‘The Cost of Inequality: How Wealth and Income Extremes Hurt us All,’ argues that the extreme concentration of wealth actually hinders the world’s ability to reduce poverty.

The report was published before the World Economic Forum in Davos next week, and calls on world leaders to “end extreme wealth by 2025, and reverse the rapid increase in inequality seen in the majority of countries in the last 20 years.”

Oxfam’s report argues that extreme wealth is unethical, economically inefficient, politically corrosive, socially divisive and environmentally destructive.

The report proposes a new global deal to world leaders to curb extreme poverty to 1990s levels by:

- closing tax havens, yielding $189bn in additional tax revenues

- reversing regressive forms of taxation

- introducing a global minimum corporation tax rate

- boosting wages proportional to capital returns

- increasing investment in free public services

The problem is a global one, Oxfam said: “In the UK inequality is rapidly returning to levels not seen since the time of Charles Dickens. In China the top 10 percent now take home nearly 60 percent of the income. Chinese inequality levels are now similar to those in South Africa, which is now the most unequal country on Earth and significantly more [inequality] than at the end of apartheid.”

In the US, the richest 1 percent’s share of income has doubled since 1980 from 10 to 20 percent, according to the report. For the top 0.01 percent, their share of national income quadrupled, reaching levels never seen before.

“We can no longer pretend that the creation of wealth for a few will inevitably benefit the many – too often the reverse is true,” Executive Director of Oxfam International Jeremy Hobbs said.

Hobbs explained that concentration of wealth in the hands of the top few minimizes economic activity, making it harder for others to participate: “From tax havens to weak employment laws, the richest benefit from a global economic system which is rigged in their favor.”

The report highlights that even politics has become controlled by the super-wealthy, which leads to policies “benefitting the richest few and not the poor majority, even in democracies.”

“It is time our leaders reformed the system so that it works in the interests of the whole of humanity rather than a global elite,” the report said.

The four-day World Economic Forum will be held in Davos starting next Wednesday. World financial leaders will gather for an annual meeting that will focus on reviving the global economy, the eurozone crisis and the conflicts in Syria and Mali.

Former mayor put in administrative detention

Ma’an – 20/01/2013

NABLUS – A former Palestinian mayor detained by Israeli forces this week will be held in administrative detention for six months, a prisoners group said Sunday.

Sheikh Jamal Tawil, who had held the mayoral post in al-Bireh, a neighborhood of Ramallah in the central West Bank, was detained on Tuesday.

The Solidarity Foundation for Human Rights said Ofer military court gave the former mayor six months in detention without charge.

Tawil was arrested by Israeli forces during the first intifada and held for several months under administrative detention at the time.

As of December, 178 Palestinians were being held without charge in Israeli jails, including seven elected members of the Palestinian parliament, according to prisoners rights group Addameer.

Related articles

• Prisoner Omar Barghouti: A Story of a Life Behind Bars (occupiedpalestine.wordpress.com)
• Detainees In Eshil Go On Hunger Strike (altahrir.wordpress.com)

Knesset candidate calls for bombing Aqsa Mosque’s Dome of the Rock

Palestine Information Center – 20/01/2013

NAZARETH — A Knesset candidate from the Habayit Hayehudi (Jewish house) party called for blowing up the Aqsa Mosque’s Dome of the Rock and building the alleged Jewish temple in its place.

According to Hatnua, a rival party, Habayit Hayehudi’s candidate Jeremy Gimpel, publically discussed the destruction of the Dome of the Rock and its replacement with a Jewish temple, during a recent lecture he gave in Florida.

A video of the lecture was broadcast on the Israeli channel 2 on Friday. Gimpel is heard asking those attending the lecture to imagine a scenario in which the Dome of the Rock “was bombed” to make room for the alleged Jewish temple.

Hatnua party filed a petition with the central election committee to disqualify candidate Gimpel because his remarks on the Dome of the Rock could trigger widespread violence in the region.

In another incident, the Israeli newspaper Jerusalem said the Israeli municipal council issued last week demolition orders against two Palestinian Mosques in Tur town and Bab Al-Amoud neighborhood east of Jerusalem.

It added that that the orders were issued after Aryeh King, director of the Israel land fund and a noted right-wing figure, filed a complaint about the two Mosques.

The newspaper quoted Meir Margalit, head of the Israeli committee against house demolitions, as saying that this move is an attempt by the municipal council to ignite the middle east and please the Zionist right-wing forces and their supporters.

Related articles

• 11 thousand settlers and soldiers raided Al-Aqsa Mosque in 2012 (alhittin.com)