Fun in ths Sun, in Gaza.

Kaiserguard said:

If this wasn't in only the Daily Fail but say, the Guardian as well, the Left would be Pro-Israel too.

Click to expand...

classical_hero said:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2340591/Summer-camp--Palestinian-style-Chilling-images-children-young-firing-guns-staging-mock-kidnapping-Israeli-soldier.html

I am sure that when you were younger you went to Summer camp. I just don't remember mine ever being like this. Just imagine how much more fun it would have been had we'd been playing kidnap the Israeli. Or learning how to use an assault rifle. Well the pictures tell a story.

Click to expand...

Ziggy Stardust said:

Are these Palestinians as well?

Click to expand...

albie_123 said:

I checked the Crickett Firearms accessories page, couldn't find Enemy Combatant uniforms or barbed wire anywhere.

Click to expand...

Mouthwash said:

No, no. You see, the Jews stole the land. It's totally OK for the oppressed Arabs to kill them.

Inb4 you-know-who posts a retaliatory article about right-wing Jewish camps in Israel in order to put his universe at ease.

Click to expand...

above article said:

Some 130,000 Ethiopians, most of them Jewish, live in Israel. The community experiences higher poverty and unemployment rates than the rest of the country’s Jewish population. In the past decade, the birth rate among Ethiopian-Israelis has declined by at least 20 percent. Advocacy groups now claim this decline is the result of a birth control regimen forced upon Ethiopian immigrant women.

Click to expand...

Mouthwash said:

Inb4 you-know-who posts a retaliatory article about right-wing Jewish camps in Israel in order to put his universe at ease.

Click to expand...

Jewish-American teenagers can sign up for an eight-week training course run by the Israel Defense Forces where they fire weapons, live in military barracks and saunter around in an Israeli military uniform.

October 16, 2007
|
If you are a young Muslim American and head off to the Middle East for a spell in a fundamentalist "madrassa," or religious school, Homeland Security will probably greet you at the airport when you return. But if you are an American Jew and you join hundreds of teenagers from Europe and Mexico for an eight-week training course run by the Israel Defense Forces, you can post your picture wearing an Israeli army uniform and holding an automatic weapon on MySpace.

The Marva program, part summer camp part indoctrination, was launched in Israel in 1981. It allows participants, who must be Jewish and between the ages of 18 and 28, to fire weapons, live in military barracks in the Negev desert and saunter around in an Israeli military uniform saluting and taking long hikes with military packs. The Youth and Education Corps of the Israel Defense Forces run four 120-strong training sessions a year.

"Upon arrival, the participants experience an abrupt change into army life: wearing uniforms, accepting army discipline, and learning the programs and lessons integral to the program," the Let Israelis Show You Israel Web site reads. "The program includes military content such as: navigation, field training, weapons training, shooting ranges, marches and more, as well as educational content such as: Zionism, Jewish Identity, history and knowledge of the land of Israel. All of this is taught in Hebrew in an intensive eight weeks."

"The participants finish the program after completing a short, intensive, exhilarating military experience that allows them to taste Israel in a way that they never could before -- as part of the Israel Defense Forces," the site reads. "They leave the program with a feeling of belonging and a strong connection to Israel, and many return to Israel to continue the connection that was created in the framework of the Marva course."

There are, of course, gushing testimonials about the program.

"I spent the first few days of Marva doubting my decision, wondering why I had come, wondering if there was any way out. With all of the running, yelling orders, discipline and Hebrew, I felt horribly out of place, writes Canadian David Roth of his summer. It was a completely different world from the one I was used to. All that changed, though, by the end of the first week. We had our first ‘Masa’ (Hike). It was very hard, but at the end, we all knew, our M16s were waiting for us at the ‘tekes’ (Ceremony). We got through the 8 kilometers and had our ‘tekes’ and got our guns. It felt amazing, and from that point on Marva was incredible.

How have we reacted when we discovered that American Muslims were being taught in a foreign country to fire machine guns at paper figures and simulate military maneuvers? And what about the summer schools in Gaza organized by Islamic Jihad designed to train young Palestinians in the basics of military life? These Gaza camps, uncovered in 2001, were widely denounced by Israel as proof that the Palestinians were teaching their children to hate and kill.

The argument in favor of camps in Israel, as opposed to camps in Pakistan, is that these young men and women are not going to come back and use what they have learned to harm Americans. They are not terrorists. Muslims, however, have not cornered the market on terrorism and violence. Radical Jews have also been involved in terrorist attacks in Israel and the United States.

I discovered an American in Israel in 1989 named Robert Manning. A huge, burly man, Manning was living in the West Bank Jewish settlement of Kiyrat Arba. When I found him he was carrying a pistol, a large knife strapped to his leg and an M-16 assault rifle. He was part of a Jewish terrorist group called Committee for Protection and Safety of the Highways that set up ad hoc roadblocks and pulled Palestinians from cars to beat and often shoot them. He was a follower of Meir Kahane, the leader of the Jewish Defense League, who was implicated in terrorist attacks in the United States and Israel. Manning served as a reservist in the Israel Defense Forces in the West Bank.

Manning was wanted in California for murder. He had been charged in a 1980 mail-bomb killing as part of his involvement in the Jewish Defense League. The bomb was intended for the owner of a local computer firm, but the package holding the device was opened by the firm’s secretary, Patricia Wilkerson, who was killed instantly by the blast.

Manning, full of bluster and a bitter racism toward Arabs, used as his pseudonym the name of the FBI agent in charge of his case, a bit of humor that backfired on him by confirming my suspicion of his identify. I obtained the picture from his California driver’s license and showed it to his neighbors at Kiyrat Arba. They identified him from the photo. I wrote an article affirming that Manning, heavily armed and an active member of the Israeli army, was living in a Jewish settlement. The Israeli government, until that moment, said it had no information about his location. He was extradited in 1993 and sentenced the next year to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole for 30 years. He is in a maximum-security prison in Florence, Colo.

Those who go through the Marva summer program are indoctrinated as thoroughly as Muslims who go overseas and are told they are part of a greater jihad for Islam. The results, given Israel’s close alliance with the United States, may not be negative for those in power in the United States, but it may be very negative for those Americans defined as the enemy, especially Muslims, should we suffer another 9/11. The program inculcates hatred and a belief in the efficacy of violence to solve the problems in the Middle East. It identifies Israel with militarism. It feeds the idea that a Jew born in Brooklyn has a birthright to settle in Israel that is denied to an American of Palestinian descent.

Jerusalem, aside from being one of the most beautiful cities in the world, is one of the most literate, creative and intellectual. Do these young men and women really know the best of Israel by spending eight weeks playing soldier and glorifying the military? Is the cause of Israel advanced by mirroring the twisted militarism of Islamic fundamentalists?

Terrorists arise in all cultures, all nations and all religions. We have produced more than our share. Ask the people of Vietnam or Iraq. The danger of a military program such as these is that it solidifies a mind-set of us and them. It romanticizes violence. It widens the divide that leads to conflict. It makes dialogue impossible. There are great Israeli institutions, from the newspaper Haaretz to the courageous Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem to Peace Now. A summer working for them, rather than wearing an army uniform, unleashing bursts of automatic fire in the desert and singing Israeli patriotic songs, might actually help.

Click to expand...

On July 31, I published a piece about a group of high school age Israelis who helped the Israeli police level the Bedouin Arab village of al-Arakib. Since publishing the story, “The Summer Camp of Destruction,” I have received unconfirmed accounts from witnesses that the youth volunteers sang “Am Yisrael Chai,” while police bulldozers destroyed homes. Nothing is unbelievable at this point.

Based on the impressions of a friend who counsels members of the IDF and Border Police on coping with human rights violations they committed, I identified the youth volunteers as members of the Israeli police civil guard. However, their vests read “Reshet Biatachon. According to the Tarabut blog, which is published in Hebrew, the teens were working for a security outsourcing firm for minimum wage. This fact makes the story no less disturbing.

The background of the youth is perhaps more significant than the identity of the entity they were working for. Most appeared to be Mizrahi (Jews of Arab descent), while the rest appeared Ethiopian, and Russian. These are, of course, the three most marginalized, victimized groups within Jewish Israeli society, and are therefore the most inclined to prove their loyalty as front line soldiers in Border Police units battling the only caste lower than them: the Arabs.

A Mizrahi friend who has worked in Kiryat Gat, a city in Southern Israel inhabited by mostly North African and Russian Jews, was not surprised when he looked at my photos of the youth volunteers in action. He remarked that their parents probably did not have the resources to send them to a proper summer camp, so they turned to Reshet Bitachon for a means to prevent their children from languishing during the hottest months of the year in a violent, impoverished environment like Kiryat Gat. Thus the teens were thrust into the “Summer Camp of Destruction,” where the demolition of Arab villages took the place of canoe trips and horseback rides.


Well-off Israeli kids signed up for "Camp Palmach"

As in any socially stratified society, summer camp in Israel is generally reserved for the middle and upper classes. But this does not insulate the children of the most liberal Ashkenazi elite families from the ravages of ultra-nationalism and military indoctrination, as a program called “Camp Palmach” in Kfar Tavor reveals.

Kfar Tavor is a Ashkenazi community in the North famous for producing the cream of the Zionist movement for over three generations, from Air Force pilots to legendary paratroop commanders like Yigal Allon. Some Israelis joke that the children of Kfar Tavor are routinely born with blond hair and blue eyes because when they were conceived their mothers were looking at the sky and their fathers were looking at the hay. The gilded offspring of Kfar Tavor receive a first-rate education and often participate in Hanoar Haoved Vehalomed, a left-wing Zionist youth movement of the Labor and Meretz parties.

Last week, 70 third and fourth grade students from Hanoar Haoved Vahalomed went to “Camp Palmach,” where they impersonated fighters from the Palmach. The Palmach was an elite Israeli military strike force that carried out raids against the British during the days of Mandate Palestine, helped expel Palestinians from entire regions of the Galilee, and spearheaded the ethnic cleansing of Lydda and Ramla. Here is Palmach founder Yigal Allon describing his use of psychological warfare to drive out the Palestinians of the Galilee:

“The confidence of thousands of Arabs of the Hula [Valley] was shaken…We had only five days left…until 15 May [1948]. We regarded it as imperative to cleanse the interior of the Galilee and create Jewish territorial continuity in the whole of the Upper Galilee…I gathered the Jewish mukhtars [Kibbutz chiefs], who had ties with the different Arab villages, and I asked them to whisper in the ears of several Arabs that a giant Jewish reinforcement had reached the Galilee and were about to clean out the villages of Hula, [and] to advise them as friends, to flee while they could. And rumour spread throughout Hula that the time had come to flee. The flight encompassed tens of thousands. The stratagem fully achieved its objective.”

Click to expand...

At Camp Palmach, nine-year-old kids are taught that following in Allon’ footsteps is “cool.” According to Hadar Saks, a coordinator for Hanoar Haoved Vehalomed, the campers are learning “the Palmach values” in order to build “a good and model society.” From Ha’aretz:

“The campers complete a variety of tasks, including acting as brigade commanders, forming factions and serving as go-betweens,” said Hadar Saks, a youth group coordinator and counselor. “During the week we inculcate the Palmach values – which are geared toward developing a good and model society, and not just creating a soldier who is an effective fighter.”

“The children of Kfar Tavor grow up on the legend of Yigal Allon, who was a native son of the village and a Palmach commander, but they don’t know much about that period of time or the values of the Palmach,” Saks said.

In the three days leading up to the camp, the children studied the history of the Palmach. They were given quizzes and held campfires that hearkened back to the days of the Palmach, during which they sang songs and told stories that glorified the kibbutz movement.

Some children were initially unsure of whether they wanted to attend the camp. “I had to decide between going to camp or staying in front of the television, going to the pool and playing with friends,” Moatti said.

This past weekend, though, there was Moatti: on the ground, near the thicket on Nahal Hashiva, which is named after the seven Palmach members killed in the battle for Beit Keshet. The eucalyptus trees stand adjacent to the Kadoorie Agricultural High School, many of whose graduates enlisted in the Palmach – including Yigal Allon, Eli Ben-Zvi (the son of former president Yitzhak Ben-Zvi ), Yitzhak Rabin, Haim Gouri and others.

“We’re proud to be from the town where Yigal Allon was born,” said one camper, Noah Pivnik. “It’s really cool.”

Click to expand...

As shocking as the al-Arakib incident was, it was not an isolated affair. The military is hijacking the minds of Israeli youth to such a comprehensive degree that the phenomenon is hardly questioned — just look at how the liberal Haaretz reported on Camp Palmach. Nor are youth instructed to question their military. If anything, they are taught to place the Israeli military on a plane above all other social institutions, to view it as “pure” and unfailingly moral.

In his 1953 essay, “After Qibya,” Yeshayahu Leibowitz called the retaliatory massacre of dozens of Palestinian women and children in the village of Qibya by Ariel Sharon’s Force 101, “a consequence of applying the religious category of holiness to social, national and political values and interests — a usage prevalent in the education of young people as well as in the dissemination of public information.”

Referring to Israelis’ near-religious reverence of their military, Leibowitz continued: “If the nation and its welfare and the country and its security are holy, and if the sword is the ‘Rock of Israel’ — then Qibya is possible and permissible.”

Leibowitz prefaced his warning about the deification of state institutions with a question that is at least as relevant today as when he posed it: “What produced this generation of youth, which felt no inhibition or inner compunction in performing the atrocity when given the inner urge and external occasion for retaliation? After all, these young people were not a wild mob but youth raised on and nurtured on the values of a Zionist education…”

What produced the generation of youth who during Operation Cast Lead massacred the al-Samouni family and shot women waving white flags? What produced the generation who will commit atrocities during the next war, which is likely to break out any moment on Israel’s northern border? Who will carry out Ehud Barak’s promise to “hit any target that belongs to the Lebanese state, not just to Hezbollah?”

The answer is in Kiryat Gat, where underprivileged teenagers are dispatched to raze Arab towns for a meager hourly wage. And the answer is in Kfar Tavor, where well-off children too young to muster critical thoughts are urged to embody the legendary warriors who literally wiped scores of Palestinian villages off the map. Like the killers of Qibya, they too were raised on and nurtured on the values of a Zionist education.

Click to expand...

Spoiler :

AL-ARAKIB, ISRAEL — On July 26, Israeli police demolished 45 buildings in the unrecognized Bedouin village of al-Arakib, razing the entire village to the ground to make way for a Jewish National Fund forest. The destruction was part of a larger project to force the Bedouin community of the Negev away from their ancestral lands and into seven Indian reservation-style communities the Israeli government has constructed for them. The land will then be open for Jewish settlers, including young couples in the army and those who may someday be evacuated from the West Bank after a peace treaty is signed. For now, the Israeli government intends to uproot as many villages as possible and erase them from the map by establishing “facts on the ground” in the form of JNF forests. (See video of of al-Arakib’s demolition here).

One of the most troubling aspects of the destruction of al-Arakib was a report by CNN that the hundreds of Israeli riot police who stormed the village were accompanied by “busloads of cheering civilians.” Who were these civilians and why didn’t CNN or any outlet investigate further?

I traveled to al-Arakib yesterday with a delegation from Ta’ayush, an Israeli group that promotes a joint Arab-Jewish struggle against the occupation. The activists spent the day preparing games and activities for the village’s traumatized children, helping the villagers replace their uprooted olive groves, and assisting in the reconstruction of their demolished homes. In a massive makeshift tent where many of al-Arakib’s residents now sleep, I interviewed village leaders about the identity of the cheering civilians. Each one confirmed the presence of the civilians, describing how they celebrated the demolitions. As I compiled details, the story grew increasingly horrific. After interviewing more than a half dozen elders of the village, I was able to finally identify the civilians in question. What I discovered was more disturbing than I had imagined.

Arab Negev News publisher Ata Abu Madyam supplied me with a series of photos he took of the civilians in action. They depicted Israeli high school students who appeared to have volunteered as members of the Israeli police civilian guard (I am working on identifying some participants by name). Prior to the demolitions, the student volunteers were sent into the villagers’ homes to extract their furniture and belongings. A number of villagers including Abu Madyam told me the volunteers smashed windows and mirrors in their homes and defaced family photographs with crude drawings. Then they lounged around on the furniture of al-Arakib residents in plain site of the owners. Finally, according to Abu Matyam, the volunteers celebrated while bulldozers destroyed the homes.

“What we learned from the summer camp of destruction,” Abu Madyam remarked, “is that Israeli youth are not being educated on democracy, they are being raised on racism.” (The cover of the latest issue of Madyam’s Arab Negev News features a photo of Palestinians being expelled to Jordan in 1948 juxtaposed with a photo of a family fleeing al-Arakib last week. The headline reads, “Nakba 2010.&#8221

The Israeli civilian guard, which incorporates 70,000 citizens including youth as young as 15 (about 15% of Israeli police volunteers are teenagers), is one of many programs designed to incorporate Israeli children into the state’s military apparatus. It is not hard to imagine what lessons the high school students who participated in the leveling of al-Arakib took from their experience, nor is it especially difficult to predict what sort of citizens they will become once they reach adulthood. Not only are they being indoctrinated to swear blind allegiance to the military, they are learning to treat the Arab outclass as less than human. The volunteers’ behavior toward Bedouins, who are citizens of Israel and serve loyally in Israeli army combat units despite widespread racism, was strikingly reminiscent of the behavior of settler youth in Hebron who pelt Palestinian shopkeepers in the old city with eggs, rocks and human waste. If there is a distinction between the two cases, it is that the Hebron settlers act as vigilantes while the teenagers of Israeli civilian guard vandalize Arab property as agents of the state.

The spectacle of Israeli youth helping destroy al-Arakib helps explain why 56% of Jewish Israeli high school students do not believe Arabs should be allowed to serve in the Knesset – why the next generation wants apartheid. Indeed, the widespread indoctrination of Israeli youth by the military apparatus is a central factor in Israel’s authoritarian trend. It would be difficult for any adolescent boy to escape from an experience like al-Arakib, where adults in heroic warrior garb encourage him to participate in and gloat over acts of massive destruction, with even a trace of democratic values.

Click to expand...

HannibalBarka said:

War makes people bad. It brings the worst side in humans to flourish. Long wars like the one that has been going on between Israelis and Palestinians is even worse. It gives evil the time to grow form childhood. It made both societies grow a worrying indifference about things most societies would consider barbaric. The trouble is that I don't see any reason for hope. The conflict is so complicated that no peacefull solution seems to be achiavable to me now. I fear we're going to "watch" the same scene for generations to come

Click to expand...

Samson said:

There are pictures of people doing various activities that look like any conventional armed force

Click to expand...