The assassination of Count Bernadotte - and the death of peace

Israel's forgotten hero: The assassination of Count Bernadotte - and the death of peace; He was charged by the UN with bringing peace to Palestine– but died at the hands of Jewish assassins. Now, 60 years after his death, the memory of the Swedish aristocrat Folke Bernadotte is dividing Israel.

By Donald MacIntyre

Thursday, 18 September 2008

Brief honour: the body of Folke Bernadotte, assassinated in Jerusalem on 17 September 1948, begins the journey back to Sweden

Sitting in the back seat, the blue-blooded Swedish aristocrat and the decorated French hero of two world wars had begun to relax from the tension of the journey as the big Chrysler, the last of a three-car convoy, started its final ascent up the narrow road through the now Jewish-occupied district of Katamon, towards Rehavia and the house of the Jerusalem military governor. No one in the first car, a DeSoto, least of all the Israeli captain assigned to escort the VIPs, showed much concern when a new-looking Israeli army jeep slewed across the road to bring the convoy to a halt: just another temporary checkpoint. As three soldiers in standard Israel Defence Forces khaki shorts, fingers on triggers, approached the DeSoto; the three young Swedes and a Belgian in the passenger seats, groped for their papers. "It's OK boys," the Israeli officer explained. "Let us pass. It's the UN mediator."

At that moment, one of the three men ran to the Chrysler, pushed the barrel of his German-made Schmeisser MP40 sub-machine gun through the open rear window, and pumped six bullets into the chest, throat and left arm of the aristocrat and another 18 into the body of the French colonel sitting on his left. Rushing out of the first car, the Israeli captain, Moshe Hillman, ran back to the Chrysler. Aghast at the sight of the copiously bleeding bodies he kept repeating: "My God, oh my God," before jumping in beside the driver, a UN security man recruited from the FBI, and telling him to head straight for the Hadassah hospital. But Count Folke Bernadotte, the UN mediator officially charged with bringing peace to a Holy Land at war, and his chief UN observer Colonel Andre Serot, who had only swapped places with Hillman at the last minute so that he could personally thank the count for saving his wife from a Nazi concentration camp three years earlier, were dead on arrival.

The assassination of Bernadotte by Jewish militants disguised as regular soldiers on 17 September 1948, was commemorated in a series of Swedish and UN ceremonies in Jerusalem, Stockholm and New York yesterday. But no blue Israeli plaque marks the spot, as it does for so many military and Jewish underground exploits of the period. It is still the same September sunshine as it was that day, and the contours of the land do not change, of course. You can see how the ambush took place, just where the road starts to level out before climbing more steeply to the north west and what is now the Islamic Museum and Rehavia beyond. But the road, now Palmach Street, is wider and what was then a semi-rural suburb is now a busy middle-class West Jerusalem neighbourhood built up with its five-storey apartment blocks, and a row of little shops opposite the junction with Ha'gdud Ha'ivri Street where Bernadotte was shot. Today, only those Israelis with long memories, such as passing local resident Abraham Yinnon, who was a 16-year-old soldier at the time, even know what happened here. "It was madness," he says now. "A political murder. Madness. Maybe it stopped something happening, but...."

Although it would be 30 years before any of its personnel admitted it, the "madness" was perpetrated by the most extreme of the Jewish nationalist underground groups, Lehi, more commonly known to the British as the Stern Gang, ordered by a three-man leadership which included the future Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Shamir. What cost the life of the count who ran the Swedish Red Cross during the Second World War and was the nephew of King Gustav V, was not the two Arab-Jewish truces he had managed to negotiate – the second of which was close to collapse when he was killed. It was the longer-term peace plan which sought, however vainly and perhaps naively, to tackle the very issues which still lie at the heart of the world's most intractable conflict today: borders, Palestinian refugees and the status of Jerusalem. It was on the last point that Bernadotte had most incensed Israeli opinion, by recommending first that the city should be in Arab territory, and then, in a report heavily influenced by Britain and the US and submitted to the UN Security Council the very day before his death, that it should be under international supervision.

Geula Cohen, a former Knesset member on the nationalist far right who in 1948 was a 17-year-old broadcaster on Lehi's clandestine radio, recalls the chilling threats she personally directed at Bernadotte over the airwaves in the weeks before the assassination. "I told him if you are not going to leave Jerusalem and go to your Stockholm, you won't be any more." Did she still think, 60 years later, it was right to kill him? "There is no question about it. We would not have Jerusalem any more."

Few Israelis outside the ranks of Lehi veterans would say that now. But the assassination remains a problematic episode in the country's early history. It was swiftly and almost universally condemned in the Israeli press of the time. David Ben-Gurion, Israel's first prime minister, used it to crack down on – and effectively eliminate – Lehi and arrest hundreds of its volunteers; if anything, the murder made it easier to integrate most of the Lehi and Irgun forces into the Israeli mainstream. But no one who carried out the killing was ever found or brought to trial; the historian Benny Morris says that Ben-Gurion probably had "internal political reasons" for not wanting them found. The police investigation did not begin until 24 hours later and was at best, according to Bernadotte in Palestine 1948, the authoritative and admirably objective account by Israeli historian Amitsur Ilan, "amateurish" when it did. It was not until 1995 that Shimon Peres officially expressed "regret that he was killed in a terrorist way". And, finally, had the assassination and the motives for it, helped to obstruct the recognition due to Bernadotte for his rescue of large numbers of people held in Nazi concentration camps, including several thousand Jews, in 1945?

The story of the Swedish "White buses", so called because the vehicles were painted white with red crosses to protect them from allied bombing, which between March and May 1945 conducted the largest – if woefully late – rescue operation from Nazi concentration camps in the Second World War, is a complex one. But it brought to Sweden perhaps 21,000 people, and another 10,000 in the month after the end of the war. Of that total, the most recent historical assessment is that around 11,000 were Jews. And it is for ever – including by the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial Museum in Jerusalem – associated with the name of Bernadotte, who was running the Swedish Red Cross at the time and who negotiated the releases from camps still in Nazi hands with Heinrich Himmler (whose secret, unfulfilled, ulterior motive was to negotiate a separate peace with the Western allies but not with Stalin).

Miriam Akavia, the distinguished Polish-born Israeli writer and her husband Hanan, who would become an Israeli diplomat in both Sweden and his native Hungary, have never wavered in their gratitude to Bernadotte. Both were holocaust survivors, almost all of whose families were killed in the Second World War, and who suffered as teenagers the unimaginable horrors of Auschwitz and Bergen Belsen – neither weighing more than 25 kilos when they left – and who were given the care they desperately needed thanks to the Bernadotte mission.

Unlike the majority of those rescued, Hanan and Miriam Akavia were both separately brought to Sweden (where they met) after the liberation of Bergen Belsen. To realise how significant this still was, it's worth realising that such was the condition of the inmates that 10,000 of them died after the British troops arrived. Miriam, who also survived the death march to Bergen Belsen, has written about that "sad liberation": "I myself was lying on a heap of dead bodies and beside me was my sister Lusia, our mother was there with us, but she was no longer alive. For her, the war ended too late... Sweden chose the weakest and sickest. Nothing was demanded of us. They sanitised us... dressed us, checked us, fed us vitamins and cod liver oil and sent us to pretty localities, most of us to hospitals." Hanan Akavia, who today describes Count Bernadotte as a "saviour", says that he was so thin and ill that: "If I had not been saved by Sweden I cannot imagine how I would have survived. It meant recovery, a new life." And his wife points out of this period: "I did not then know who Ben-Gurion was. But I knew about Count Bernadotte."

But Miriam Akavia also described how her friend Rina Fried, then 16, who was still in Nazi hands, and like the Akavias would later come to start a new life in Israel in 1946, was on a train, "crammed with the barely living skeletons of women" from her concentration camp travelling to seemingly certain death when she was rescued by the mission. As the train stopped, the "emaciated women" were approached by foreigners with food and drink. "Vi aker till Sverige. We are going to Sweden," they said. "Your enslavement is over."

The Akavias would very much like to see the count named by Yad Vashem among the "Righteous among the Nations", a title which has been awarded over the years to 22,000 non-Jews from 44 countries who helped to save Jews from the holocaust. Hanan Akavia, who has kept in touch with the count's relatives over the years, was the first Jewish survivor to write to the family in the Seventies in thanks to the count. While a file was opened on the subject at Yad Vashem, the case has never been formally considered by the independent commission which adjudicates on who should be so honoured – a source of continued frustration to Akavia.

Reaching for a possible explanation, and recalling that in 1995 when a ceremony commemorating the White Buses was held in Tel Aviv, the Israeli press divided over its appropriateness – given the controversy surrounding the 1948 Bernadotte peace plans, he adds: "This is speculation and I have no reason to know, but I think it may be because he was killed." Akavia also speculates that such recognition might prompt the King and Queen of Sweden to do something they have never done, almost certainly because of the murder of their kinsman, and visit Israel. Asked about this, a senior Swedish diplomat did not disagree. And he linked – less tentatively than Akavia – the fact that the count has not been honoured as a Righteous among the Nations with the assassination 60 years ago, saying: "I don't think the recognition will happen while [Yitzhak] Shamir is alive."

Any such link is vigorously denied by Yad Vashem, which notes that Count Bernadotte is not ignored in the museum – indeed, it includes one of the White Buses. It notes, too that the Commission on the Righteous among the Nations is an independent body, chaired by a Supreme Court Justice, which rigorously examines evidence; and perhaps most importantly that Count Bernadotte, who achieved his rescue through negotiations with the Nazi regime, does not fulfil a key criterion, namely that someone so honoured should have risked his or her own life to save Jews.

Bernadotte's mission was not without risk, according to most historians, though very different from the kind most associated with most of the all too few gentiles who protected Jews in the Second World War. Travelling through Germany as it was facing defeat was hazardous enough. Kati Marton notes in her book Death in Jerusalem that Bernadotte, who frequently drove behind the convoys and whose own car was strafed by Allied bombers, took "meagre precautions for his own safety" at a time when allied bombers hit the convoys three times, killing 16 newly freed inmates. He would later insist on exposing himself to the same dangers as his UN observers in Jerusalem. And Ilan says that Bernadotte's repeated travels between Germany, Sweden and Denmark in the spring of 1945 were "sometimes at considerable risk".

Yehuda Bauer, a leading Israeli Holocaust historian, also believes there are "precedents" for Righteous among the Nations who did not necessarily risk execution by the Axis powers. He cites the case of the Japanese consul in Chiune Sugihara, who issued visas to desperate refugees in Soviet-occupied Lithuania and was subsequently promoted to other posts in Prague and Bucharest. Professor Bauer, who has the highest regard for the integrity of the adjudication process at Yad Vashem, points out that Bernadotte did not to set out with the goal of rescuing Jews, but Scandinavian non-Jews. He had then rescued Jews. "I would be in favour [of him becoming Righteous Among the Nations] but I am not sure I could convince others," he says.

More people were involved than Bernadotte credited in his own account of the mission. These included a friend, Hillel Storch, Stockholm representative of the World Jewish Congress, and a probable driving force behind Bernadotte's rescue of Jews, and Felix Kersten, Himmler's quasi-medic who also influenced the 1945 release of Jews. But Kersten's embittered attempt to discredit Bernadotte as having little role in the mission and – by means of a forged document – for being an anti-semite, did not stand the test of time. And despite the attempts of Lehi veterans to use the latter, and now discredited, accusation as a retrospective means of justifying his assassination, more rigorous historical analysis has left his reputation intact on both points.

Bernadotte – "quite a decent fellow" as Professor Bauer put it – was not perfect. Ilan sums up his characteristics after the 1945 mission as "simple, well- meaning, energetic, bold, shallow, capable of leadership but limited in his capacity to orient himself in complex situations without good counsel".

His mission was instrumental in saving several thousand Jews. That is not in doubt. Which is why, among others, Hanan and Miriam Akavia, both 81, travelled yesterday from Tel Aviv to the Jerusalem YMCA, where the mediator's office was, where his and Colonel Serot's bodies lay in state on that September night in 1948, and where, yesterday, there was a small official commemorative ceremony and a lecture on the life of Bernadotte, by Mats Bergquist, the former Swedish ambassador in Tel Aviv and London. They do not intend to bury his memory.

Righteous Gentiles

Oskar Schindler

(28 April 1908 – 9 October 1974)

German industrialist Schindler is believed to have saved 1,200 Jews by employing them in his enamelware and ammunition factories in Poland and the Czech Republic. His story was immortalised most famously in Steven Spielberg's 1993 film Schindler's List.

Schindler initially tried to profit from Germany's invasion of Poland in 1939. He acquired an out-of-use factory from a bankruptcy court in Krakow and employed 1,000 Jews to work there. But after watching many of his Jewish employees being rounded up and transported to a concentration camp outside Warsaw in 1942, Schindler began going to great lengths to protect his employees. He convinced the Germans that his staff, as well as their wives, children and the handicapped were necessary to his operations and should be saved. He ended his life in relative poverty, being cared for by Jewish charities until his death.

Archbishop Damaskinos Papandreou

(3 March 1891 – 20 May 1949)

Papandreou was the head of the Greek Orthodox Church from 1941 until his death. After Germany's invasion of Greece in October 1940, the Nazis began persecuting the country's Jews and deporting them to concentration camps. The Archbishop's main act of protest was to write a public letter condemning the act of racial discrimination; such a move is believed to be a unique war-time demonstration by Jewish organisations. "In our national consciousness, all the children of Mother Greece are an inseparable unity," read the plea. "They are equal members of the national body irrespective of religion... Our holy religion does not recognize superior or inferior qualities based on race or religion." He wrote the letter despite the threat of execution from local Nazi commanders, although escaped recrimination. In addition, the churches over which he presided were ordered to distribute Christian baptismal certificates to Jews fleeing the Nazis, thus saving thousands.

Feng-Shan Ho

(10 September 1901– 28 September 1997)

Known as the "Chinese Schindler", Ho was a high-ranking diplomat in Austria when the country was annexed by the Nazis in 1938. After their mass deportation and murder in that year's Kristallnacht, the country's 200,000 Jews needed to provide a visa from a foreign country in order to cross international borders and escape. Acting against orders, Ho began issuing Austrian Jews visas, allowing them to travel to Shanghai. As a result, many Jews escaped to the Chinese city before moving on to Hong Kong and Australia. Ho continued issuing visas until he was ordered to return to China in May 1940. It is believed he issued close to 2,000 visas during one six-month period, although the total number of those he saved are unknown. He continued to work as a diplomat for the Chinese in Egypt, Colombia, Bolivia and Mexico before settling in the United States until his death.

Irena Sendler

(15 February, 1910 – 12 May, 2008)

Sendler was a Polish Catholic social worker and prominent activist in Warsaw's anti-Holocaust resistance. As early as 1939, she helped Jews by offering them food and shelter. Working with a team of "helpers", Sendler created about 3,000 false identity documents to help Jewish families. She spent much time visiting ghettoes in the Polish capital, even wearing a Star of David (despite not being Jewish herself) to show solidarity with the people she was trying to save. She additionally helped to smuggle children out of the city's ghettos (in ambulances, and even hiding them in boxes), before placing them with orphanages and convents until the end of the war. In 1943, Sendler was arrested by the Gestapo, tortured, and sentenced to death, although her colleagues from the Polish resistance bribed guards for her freedom. She lived in hiding until the end of the war. She was nominated for last year's Nobel Peace Prize, although she did not win.

profiles by Rob Sharp

Raoul Wallenberg

(4 August, 1912 – 17 July, 1947 [assumed date of death])

Wallenberg was a Swedish diplomat posted in Budapest during the Second World War. He is believed to have saved up to 15,000 Jews from concentration camps by issuing them with passports that identified them as Swedish nationals awaiting repatriation. Although the documents were not legally valid, they appeared official enough to fool the German and Hungarian authorities – who at times were also bribed. He also reportedly climbed aboard a train full of Jews bound for Auschwitz, and began distributing passports to its passengers. Although the exact circumstances of his death are not known, it is believed that he was executed by the Soviet Union; it is rumoured they believed him to be a spy for the United States.

My TAGS: *9 Sweden 1948 UN peacekeepers anniversary killing ZionistTerroristAtrocity assassination Israel Palestine Jews peace terrorism ;MacIntyre Sep'08 :Independent Jerusalem


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Racism in the name of religion

Racism in the name of religion

Sep 23, 2008 19:53
By ELANA MARYLES SZTOKMAN

There are moments when I find myself truly ashamed to be part of Israeli society. I had a moment like that recently as I stood outside the Supreme Court with women from Ahoti, a Sephardi feminist organization, waiting for a ruling on the religious girls' school in Emanuel where racism is so entrenched that parents will do all it takes to keep antiquated Jim Crow-like separations in place.

What is happening in the Beit Ya'acov school is nothing less than the formalization of racism. Here the school implements a policy in which Sephardi girls are not allowed to be in a class with Ashkenazi or Hassidic girls, and they have

• different teachers,
  

• different classes and even
  

• different recess times and
  

• a fence between their yards just to ensure that the two groups do not mingle during the breaks.

It's not just Emanuel, but in other religious girls' schools around the country, such as Elad, where parents protested to ensure that a Sephardi girl would not be allowed in to the class. Protested! There have been reports from around the country of girls being rejected or ejected from schools because of the colour of their skin or their last name. And even though the High Court ruled last week that the apartheid has to end, the school and parents are refusing to comply, thus rejecting civil as well as moral obligations. This is not the post-Civil War South, but Israel of 2008, where I would have expected more people to be outraged by this blatant racism.

"WHAT'S HAPPENING in the Beit Ya'acov is outrageous," said Yael Ben-Yefet, one of the leaders of Ahoti. "The girls get the message that they are deformed, that they are less good, that there is something inherently wrong with them. This happens everywhere in Israel, but it is the most prominent in this school."

This story comes on the heels of a similarly shocking exposure of racist practice in a religious school in Petah Tikva. Earlier this year, in a state religious school, the school physically and academically separated the Ethiopian girls from the rest of the school - separate teachers, separate curricula, separate rooms, separate recess.

My kids and I spent some time last year at a predominantly Ethiopian preschool in Mevaseret Zion, shortly after the Petah Tikva events came to light. One morning, as the kids all played together in the sand, the teacher said, "This community is very hurt. It just doesn't understand how such a deep-rooted hatred can exist in the country that its members dreamed of coming to."

The teacher suggested that as a form of healing, kids from around the country come and play with Ethiopian kids in preschool. It sounds so basic, and yet that basic sense of morality and equality is so profoundly lacking.

It's no coincidence that many these stories of racism take place in religious schools. Religious schools are drenched with practices that created social hierarchies between those who are "more" and those who are "less," or those who are "in" and those who are "out." Indeed, for my doctoral research on religious school culture, I discovered multiple hierarchies intersecting and intertwining in religious schools via a discourse that takes for granted Ashkenazi culture as morally, intellectually and religiously superior to Mizrahi or Sephardi culture.

The demeaning of Mizrahi kids is sometimes subtle, but often strikingly overt. Discrimination may take the form of teachers casually referring to "Ashkenazi intellect," and "Mizrahi emotion," or where the highest tracks become predominantly Ashkenazi and the lowest tracks predominantly Sephardi, based presumably on "intelligence." Mizrahi students are typically penalized and suspended more often than Ashkenazi students; they are reprimanded for the same offenses that Ashkenazi kids get away with, and are lectured on how to avoid things like dropping out, getting pregnant or turning on a light switch on Shabbat. Mizrahi students are assumed to be "problems," on the margins of society, teetering on the edge of an abyss or at high risk of being deemed the worst of all - non-religious.

Indeed, in religious schools, as opposed to state schools, discriminatory practices are rationalized on the basis of "religiousness." That is, whereas in non-religious schools, discrimination revolves primarily around academics and class, in religious schools, there is an entire extra level of patronizing in which Mizrahi kids are assumed to be less religious. Thus, for example, United Torah Judaism MK Avraham Ravitz, in an attempt to "explain" the events in Emanuel and Elad, said that "the ethnic discrimination stems first and foremost from the desire to maintain the school's educational atmosphere... We educate on internal and external values and there are differences among the different ethnic groups."

IN OTHER words, Sephardim have different "values" that threaten the "educational atmosphere." Mizrahi students are thus viewed as being on the margins educationally, economically and morally - and in religious schools, these hierarchies ultimately conflate into the view of Mizrahi students as less "religious."

This language of Sephardi culture as "threatening" to religiousness is rampant. Yair Sheleg, in his book Dati'im Hadashim (The New Religious), documents Ashkenazi fear of "contamination" by Mizrahi families. He writes that the 21st-century version of "white flight" is among Ashkenazi religious families. That is, as soon as parents see that Mizrahi students are entering "their" schools, they open up a new elitist "torani" school in the name of creating a "higher" religious level, but is in fact simply Mizrahi-free.

These religious hierarchies are the latest version of 19th-century colonialist racism of the "Great Chain of Being" and "Social Darwinism." Shlomo Deshen and Moshe Shokeid brilliantly write in Dor Hatemura (Generation in Transition) that Mizrahi and Ashkenazi religious identities take different forms - not superior and inferior, but simply different. Mizrahi religiousness is transmitted via people, families and traditions, while Ashkenazi religiousness is transmitted via the written word.

So a kid who spends Shabbat with her family and flicks a light switch is keeping the faith in Sephardi culture, whereas a kid who spends Shabbat all alone but does not flick the light switch is keeping the faith in Ashkenazi culture. But in state religious schools, only the Ashkenazi version of religiousness counts, and those who don't abide by the Ashkenazi culture are just inferior outsiders.

"FOR A girl to make it in this system," said Vardit of the organization Tmura, "girls in Beit Ya'acov are expected to give up their entire culture, everything they know and love from at home. They have to accept that their food, their customs, even their pronunciation of Hebrew, are wrong. They have to be willing to reject their entire spiritual and cultural heritage as inferior. It's horrible."

In the Beit Ya'acov in Emanuel, Vardit explained, Sephardi girls who want to enter the "regular" track are told to actually sign a written contract to the effect that they will conduct themselves according to Ashkenazi expectations - and, by the way, pay an extra school fee. "So far, no girls have agreed to sign," she said.

As I discussed these events at home, my 11-year old daughter was dumbfounded. "Why won't they let the girls into class?" she demanded. She could not get her head around this racist reality. Kids can be very wise - wiser, in fact, than many adults. My daughter understands how such practices violate our basic humanity.

The writer is an educator, writer, researcher and activist and blogs regularly for JPost.com at A Woman's Own

My TAGS: *9 racism apartheid Supreme.Court female Sephardi feminist Ashkenazi civil.rights moral.values Israel equality :JPost Sep'08 Mizrahim class elitism academic ethnicity education economics




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Rise in violence against Messianic Jews and Christians

.




Sep 23, 2008 22:44 | Updated Sep 24, 2008 20:50
By MATTHEW WAGNER

US report: Rise in violence against Messianic Jews and Christians


Violence against Christian evangelical and Messianic Jewish communities in Israel increased significantly during the period between July 1, 2007 and June 30, 2008, according to the US State Department's Annual Report on International Religious Freedom. The report, released last week, put blame for the "tensions" on "certain Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities." But except in one case, the report, which noted numerous incidents of discrimination or violence against Christian or Messianic Jewish communities or individuals, failed to prove that the perpetrators were Orthodox or ultra-Orthodox.


According to the US State Department, Jehovah's Witnesses representatives reported a significant increase in assaults and other crimes against their members over the past 12-month period. Violent incidents were up from one to two a month in early 2007 to eight to nine a month in early 2008. On October 23, 2007, suspected arsonists set fire to the Narkiss Street Baptist Church in Jerusalem. The pastor of a Russian Messianic Jewish congregation that meets in the church said that Yad L'Achim , a haredi anti-missionary organization, had threatened him and his congregation over the few years leading up to the attack. Yad L'Achim denied any connection to the attack
Rabbi Shalom Lifshitz, chairman of Yad L'Achim, said that his organization's legal advisor has sent a letter to the State Department warning that legal action will be taken unless Yad L'Achim's name is removed from the report. "If we have any connection with the incident, why is that no one has indicted us yet?" he said. "We are totally opposed to the use of any violence. It is counterproductive to our goal of fighting missionary activities." In a particularly violent incident that place on Purim (March 20) 15-year-old Ami Ortiz, a dual American-Israeli citizen and the son of a Messianic Jewish pastor, was seriously wounded when a bomb exploded in his home in Ariel. The bomb was concealed in a Purim gift basket placed on the doorstep of the boy's home. Christians close to the case said that the primary suspect was Jewish but police said they had not ruled out the possibility that the assailant was a Palestinian. Ortiz's father David was active as a missionary among Palestinians near Ariel. On May 15, in another religiously motivated incident, residents of the Tel Aviv suburb of Or Yehuda publicly burned hundreds of Christian Bibles distributed in the community by missionaries. Immediately after the incident, Or Yehuda Deputy Mayor Uzi Aharon, who represents Shas, told reporters that the burning fulfilled the religious commandment to "purge the evil from your midst." However, in an interview with The Jerusalem Post Tuesday, Aharon denounced the burning of the New Testament. "I condemn the burning of books that are holy to any religion, no matter which one it is," said Aharon. "We were only against the way Christian missionaries exploited the economic distress of Ethiopians and other poor citizens of Or Yehuda to proselytize." Aharon said that police have not detained anyone involved in the Bible-burning incident. "Everyone involved has expressed regret and we see the matter as closed," he said. Calev Myers, head of the Jerusalem Institute of Justice (JIJ), a legal advocacy group for religious rights that represents mostly evangelical Christians and Messianic Jews, said that Israeli authorities are not doing enough to fight violence directed against these groups. "Months after the bombing incident in Ariel against Ami the police still have no clue who is responsible," said Myers. In response, a spokesman for the Judea and Samaria Police, which is responsible for investigating the bombing, said that "no stones are being left unturned. "All relevant police departments are continuing to thoroughly investigate the incident," said the spokesman. "However, due to the nature of the crime, the success of the investigation depends on secrecy." The State Department also mentioned claims by the JIJ that the Interior Ministry refused to process immigration applications from persons entitled to citizenship under the Law of Return if it was determined such persons held Christian or Messianic Jewish religious beliefs. In a landmark decision dealing with 12 Messianic Jews who are eligible under the Law of Return for automatic Israeli citizenship but who are not Jewish according to Halacha because their mothers are not Jewish, the High Court ruled on April 16 of this year that the state could not deny them citizenship. In its ruling, the court said that individuals who are not halachicly Jewish are still eligible to immigrate to Israel, even if they embraced a faith other than Judaism. In contrast, the Supreme Court had already ruled that someone whose mother is Jewish is disqualified from Israeli citizenship if he or she embraces another faith. Nevertheless, according to JIJ's Myers, five months after the court ruling was hand down the 12 petitioners have still not received citizenship. Cohen, one of the 12 Messianic Jews who petitioned the Supreme Court and won, said that the Interior Ministry has so far ignored the ruling. He preferred to use only a last name out of concern that a high profile might hurt chances of receiving citizenship. "None of us have received citizenship so far," said Cohen. "We were told two months ago that in one month's time we would receive our citizenship. But so far nothing has happened. "In the meantime I cannot work and I have to pay full tuition at university, which makes it difficult for me to make ends meet." Cohen, who affirmed faith in Messianic Judaism, identifies as a Zionist. "I see myself as a Zionist. Why else would I give up a good job, family, friends, an incredible education and come here to be reduced to nothing?" he said. "I believe in the State of Israel and I want to raise my family here and I can't imagine myself elsewhere." The Interior Ministry's spokesperson said in response that "The Interior Ministry abides by Supreme Court decisions," and that Messianic Jews, like members of any other religion, are entitled to Israeli citizenship due to their familial relations with a Jew. However, the spokesperson refused to comment on the delay in providing citizenship to the 12 petitioners.

My TAGS: 9* USA State Dept blame Jews Haredi Orthodox Zionist violence against Messianic Christian fire church Rabbi threat legal bombing :JPost Sep'08



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Israel asked US for green light to bomb nuclear sites in Iran.

Israel asked US for green light to bomb nuclear sites in Iran

US president told Israeli prime minister he would not back attack on Iran, senior European diplomatic sources tell Guardian

• Jonathan Steele
• guardian.co.uk,
• Thursday September 25 2008 19:02
  

A view of the nuclear enrichment plant of Natanz in central Iran. Photograph: EPA

Israel gave serious thought this spring to launching a military strike on Iran's nuclear sites but was told by President George W Bush that he would not support it and did not expect to revise that view for the rest of his presidency, senior European diplomatic sources have told the Guardian.

The then prime minister, Ehud Olmert, used the occasion of Bush's trip to Israel for the 60th anniversary of the state's founding to raise the issue in a one-on-one meeting on May 14, the sources said. "He took it [the refusal of a US green light] as where they were at the moment, and that the US position was unlikely to change as long as Bush was in office", they added.

The sources work for a European head of government who met the Israeli leader some time after the Bush visit. Their talks were so sensitive that no note-takers attended, but the European leader subsequently divulged to his officials the highly sensitive contents of what Olmert had told him of Bush's position.

Bush's decision to refuse to offer any support for a strike on Iran appeared to be based on two factors, the sources said. One was US concern over Iran's likely retaliation, which would probably include a wave of attacks on US military and other personnel in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as on shipping in the Persian Gulf.

The other was US anxiety that Israel would not succeed in disabling Iran's nuclear facilities in a single assault even with the use of dozens of aircraft. It could not mount a series of attacks over several days without risking full-scale war. So the benefits would not outweigh the costs.

Iran has repeatedly said it would react with force to any attack. Some western government analysts believe this could include asking Lebanon's Shia movement Hizbollah to strike at the US.

"It's over ten years since Hizbollah's last terror strike outside Israel, when it hit an Argentine-Israel association building in Buenos Aires [killing 85 people]", said one official. "There is a large Lebanese diaspora in Canada which must include some Hizbollah supporters. They could slip into the United States and take action".

Even if Israel were to launch an attack on Iran without US approval its planes could not reach their targets without the US becoming aware of their flightpath and having time to ask them to abandon their mission.

"The shortest route to Natanz lies across Iraq and the US has total control of Iraqi airspace", the official said. Natanz, about 100 miles north of Isfahan, is the site of an uranium enrichment plant.

In this context Iran would be bound to assume Bush had approved it, even if the White House denied fore-knowledge, raising the prospect of an attack against the US.

Several high-level Israeli officials have hinted over the last two years that Israel might strike Iran's nuclear facilities to prevent them being developed to provide sufficient weapons-grade uranium to make a nuclear bomb. Iran has always denied having such plans.

Olmert himself raised the possibility of an attack at a press conference during a visit to London last November, when he said sanctions were not enough to block Iran's nuclear programme.

"Economic sanctions are effective. They have an important impact already, but they are not sufficient. So there should be more. Up to where? Up until Iran will stop its nuclear programme," he said.

The revelation that Olmert was not merely sabre-rattling to try to frighten Iran but considered the option seriously enough to discuss it with Bush shows how concerned Israeli officials had become.

Bush's refusal to support an attack, and the strong suggestion he would not change his mind, is likely to end speculation that Washington might be preparing an "October surprise" before the US presidential election. Some analysts have argued that Bush would back an Israeli attack in an effort to help John McCain's campaign by creating an eve-of-poll security crisis.

Others have said that in the case of an Obama victory, the vice-president, Dick Cheney, the main White House hawk, would want to cripple Iran's nuclear programme in the dying weeks of Bush's term.

During Saddam Hussein's rule in 1981, Israeli aircraft successfully destroyed Iraq's nuclear reactor at Osirak shortly before it was due to start operating.

Last September they knocked out a buildings complex in northern Syria, which US officials later said had been a partly constructed nuclear reactor based on a North Korean design. Syria said the building was a military complex but had no links to a nuclear programme.

In contrast, Iran's nuclear facilities, which are officially described as intended only for civilian purposes, are dispersed around the country and some are in fortified bunkers underground.

In public, Bush gave no hint of his view that the military option had to be excluded. In a speech to the Knesset the following day he confined himself to telling Israel's parliament: "America stands with you in firmly opposing Iran's nuclear weapons ambitions. Permitting the world's leading sponsor of terror to possess the world's deadliest weapon would be an unforgivable betrayal of future generations. For the sake of peace, the world must not allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon.''

Mark Regev, Olmert's spokesman, tonight reacted to the Guardian's story saying: "The need to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons is raised at every meeting between the prime minister and foreign leaders. Israel prefers a diplomatic solution to this issue but all options must remain on the table. Your unnamed European source attributed words to the prime minister that were not spoken in any working meeting with foreign guests".

Three weeks after Bush's red light, on June 2, Israel mounted a massive air exercise covering several hundred miles in the eastern Mediterranean. It involved dozens of warplanes, including F-15s, F-16s and aerial refuelling tankers.

The size and scope of the exercise ensured that the US and other nations in the region saw it, said a US official, who estimated the distance was about the same as from Israel to Natanz.

A few days later, Israel's deputy prime minister, Shaul Mofaz, told the paper Yediot Ahronot: "If Iran continues its programme to develop nuclear weapons, we will attack it. The window of opportunity has closed. The sanctions are not effective. There will be no alternative but to attack Iran in order to stop the Iranian nuclear programme."

The exercise and Mofaz's comments may have been designed to boost the Israeli government and military's own morale as well, perhaps, to persuade Bush to reconsider his veto. Last week Mofaz narrowly lost a primary within the ruling Kadima party to become Israel's next prime minister. Tzipi Livni, who won the contest, takes a less hawkish position.

The US announced two weeks ago that it would sell Israel 1,000 bunker-busting bombs. The move was interpreted by some analysts as a consolation prize for Israel after Bush told Olmert of his opposition to an attack on Iran. But it could also enhance Israel's attack options in case the next US president revives the military option.

The guided bomb unit-39 (GBU-39) has a penetration capacity equivalent to a one-tonne bomb. Israel already has some bunker-busters.

Map showing nuclear activity in Iran

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