An Israeli Border Police officer assaulted medics and journalists at a well known junction in the West Bank Friday, according to photojournalist Fadi Arouri.

The incident took place near the Al-Bireh checkpoint, which abuts the Israeli settlement of Beit El— a spot known for frequent clashes between Palestinian youth and Israeli security forces. But Arouri says that journalists and medics were at a significant distances from the protestors when the incident he photographed (below), took place.

“He [the officer in the photo - LG) was chasing photographers, even struggling with some of us. He took the gas masks off some journalists to spray them directly in the face," recounted Arouri. "He did it to two of them right in front of me." Arouri added that he saw the officer "dragging a journalist and beating him."

Arouri, who posted the photos on his professional Facebook page, noted that this particular member of Border Police — known as Magav — was well known to journalists who have been covering West Bank demonstrations over the past few years. He has been "among the worst" of security forces at Qalandiya, Bil'in, and Nabi Saleh — all places that are scenes of frequent Palestinian demonstrations. There have been many reported incidents of Israeli security forces using excessive or inappropriate force to stop demonstrations, many of which have been reported by +972 Magazine.

http://972mag.com/the-incitement-netanyahu-doesnt-want-to-talk-about/113321/

The Israeli prime minister casts blame on Arab MKs and long-dead clerics but won’t talk about the messianic incitement coming from his own government. And forget about a discussion on the occupation’s role in inciting violence.
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Palestinian worshippers walk toward the Dome of the Rock at Al-Aqsa Mosque compound before Friday prayers, the Old City of Jerusalem, November 14, 2014. (Faiz Abu Rmeleh/Activestills.org)
Palestinian worshippers walk toward the Dome of the Rock at Al-Aqsa Mosque compound before Friday prayers, the Old City of Jerusalem, November 14, 2014. (Faiz Abu Rmeleh/Activestills.org)
Member of Knesset Basel Ghattas entered the Haram al-Sharif/Temple Mount on Monday in direct contradiction of instructions from Benjamin Netanyahu. The Israeli prime minister barred all MKs from entering the compound earlier this month in hopes of preventing provocations that are fanning the flames of violence that swept through Israel and Palestine over the past month.

The provocations Netanyahu was hoping to prevent, however, were not those made by Palestinian members of Knesset. With all due respect to Mr. Ghattas, he is far from a household name among either Israelis or Palestinians, and he does not hold enough sway to influence or provoke anything significant enough that might demand the prime minister’s attention.

The provocations Israel’s prime minister was hoping to prevent when he barred lawmakers from ascending the holy esplanade are those being made by ministers and officials in his own government. In one such provocation just this week, which Netanyahu wasn’t able to prevent, was when his own acting foreign minister, Tzipi Hotovely, said in a television interview that she dreams of seeing the Israeli flag fly over the Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif, calling the site the “center of Israeli sovereignty.”

http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4717769,00.html

"He hadn't been neutralized," Cohen said. "The first thing that came to my head was that he has a weapon and that he was making a move to take something out. I kicked him in the back of the neck and then sat next to him. I didn't touch him.
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"The guy that tried to protect the terrorist didn't tell me that he wasn't a terrorist," Cohen continues. "He attacked me. I've been in the security forces for 13 years and I do not have a single record of attacking someone. I came to work in order to beat someone?

"I could have escaped. I've sworn allegiance to the State of Israel, so if I see a terrorist that hasn't been neutralized, I will neutralize him," Cohen adds. "If a similar situation happens again in two weeks, I will behave in the same way."

Cohen belatedly realized that Zerhom was not the terrorist. "I felt great pain, but let's tell the truth: He died from the shooting," said Cohen. "There was no lynching. The only lynching was the one in October 2000," Cohen told Ynet, alluding to the lynching of two IDF reservists by a Palestinian mob in Ramallah in the early stages of the second intifada. "I am subject to messages of hate, I'm told I'm a murderer, but I am not sorry for what happened."

http://mondoweiss.net/2015/10/netanyahus-ancestors-association

As for a strategic alliance, al-Husayni and Hitler never hashed out a deal, though they did maintain an acquaintanceship. When it comes to Nazism, guilt by association goes a long way, and there’s no reason for history to be kind to al-Husayni. (Accurate would be nice, though.)

But guess who else reached out to the Nazis looking for a partnership? A group known as Lehi (or the ‘Stern Gang’), a Zionist militia which had split from the Irgun – itself a splinter of the main Jewish army, the Haganah – in 1940. (Each breakaway militia felt the tactics of its parent group weren’t aggressive enough.)

The Zionist militias were looking for help seizing Palestine from the British, so it made sense to align themselves with Hitler. They offered to help fight on Germany’s side, in exchange for the transfer of Europe’s Jews to Palestine and Hitler’s support of a ‘totalitarian’ Jewish state. As Tel Aviv University history professor Yaacov Shavit writes, when a Lehi representative met with a Nazi diplomat in Beirut in January 1941, “he proposed a political as well as military cooperation leading to the establishment of a Jewish state on a nationalist and totalitarian footing, that would be linked by a treaty to the German Reich.”

Hitler didn’t respond to the overtures – as Shavit explains, “All that Lehi could in effect have offered Germany as its contribution to the Nazi war effort, was to act as a fifth column and try to place obstacles in the way of the British in Palestine“ – and the deal stalled.

Israeli military exports this year could decline to just 53% of their level in 2012 and “less desire for Israeli-made products” is a key factor, according to a letter from Israel’s four largest military companies.

Industry leaders are warning that military exports have steadily fallen since they reached $7.5bn in 2012. Sales in 2014 decline to $5.5bn and could drop to as low as $4bn this year, according to media reports about the letter.

The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement has been running highly visible campaigns against military trade with Israel that have seen 12 banks and pension funds exclude Israeli arms company Elbit Systems from their investment portfolio. Israeli owned arms factories have been blockaded, and a growing number of political parties and trade unions have called for an end to military ties with Israel.

The governments of Norway and Turkey have both announced military embargo policies against Israel in recent years.

“I think it’s the center of Israeli sovereignty, the capital of Israel, the holiest place for the Jewish people,” Likud lawmaker and Deputy Foreign Minister Tzipi Hotovely said in an interview with the Knesset channel. “It’s my dream to see the Israeli flag flying on the Temple Mount."

Some have now called for Hotovely’s resignation. One Israeli leader said that she was “messianic” and threatening a holy war.

Next, there’s the video below, featuring prominent Israelis, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s minister of Agriculture, calling for the replacement of the Dome of the Rock with the third temple. The video is two years old but was linked in an article two days ago in Haaretz by Dan Caspi on the 20th anniversary of Rabin’s assassination. The piece and the video are in Hebrew. But you can see the temple’s planned outline in blue in the video; and Cantor Michael Davis sent along a summary and partial translations:

They use slick interactive graphics to imagine destroying the Muslim shrine in order to build a Jewish temple. The first speaker is Member of Knesset and Minister of Agriculture Uri Uriel. The second is Avshalom Kor who is a state radio personality – supposedly, as apolitical as you can get. The third is an archaeologist. It seems to me that, in light of the mainstreaming of the Jewish claims on the Haram el Sharif, this is very relevant right now. It used to be just a fringe group who talked about this. But Avshalom Kor is respectable. This production is slick.

http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-1.682374?date=1445899669786

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Monday that although he doesn't want a binational state, "at this time we need to control all of the territory for the foreseeable future."

MKs who took part in the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee meeting — where the prime minister spoke — told Haaretz that Netanyahu turned to the politicians and said, hinting at the anniversary of Yitzhak Rabin's assassination: "These days, there is talk about what would happen if this or that person would have remained. It's irrelevant; there are movements here of religion and Islam that have nothing to do with us." Netanyahu then turned to opposition MKs and said: "You think there is a magic wand here, but I disagree. I'm asked if we will forever live by the sword — yes."

Habayit Hayehudi MK Betzalel Smotrich asked Netanyahu: "Why do you even talk to (Palestinian President Mahmoud) Abbas? Why pull the world's leg?" Netanyahu responded by saying that Israel "is not talking to bin Laden or ISIS, but I will talk to whoever isn't calling for our destruction."

Netanyahu said that contrary to what many of his colleagues on the right are saying, he is ready for territorial concessions. He added, however, that the problem is that the other side is unwilling to go down that path. "Half of the Palestinians are ruled by extreme Islam that wants to destroy us; if there were elections tomorrow, Hamas would win."

Such sentiment has led to incidents like the death in East Jerusalem of Fadi Alloun, suspected of a knife attack but shot by police as they had him surrounded. Sometimes, it backfires: This month, a Jewish vigilante near Haifa stabbed a fellow Israeli Jew who he thought was an Arab. Late Wednesday, soldiers killed an Israeli Jew whom they mistook for a Palestinian attacker.

The low point (so far) was last Sunday night’s lynching of 29-year-old Eritrean asylum seeker Haftom Zarhum, mistakenly identified as a perpetrator of a terrorist attack in Beersheba. Zarhum was shot by a security guard then beaten to death by a mob of passers-by in a predictable response to the incitement from our own politicians to kill as revenge. And the increasingly intolerant, boiling, racist tone of the Israeli conversation is — there is no other way to put this — a result of 48 years of occupying another people: of Israelis receiving a message (or at least understanding it as such) that we are superior to others, that we control the fate of those lesser others, that we are allowed to disregard laws and any basic notions of human morality with regard to Palestinians.

The cumulative effect of this recent mindless violence is hugely disturbing. We seem to be in a fast and alarming downward swirl into a savage, unrepairable society. There is only one way to respond to what’s happening in Israel today: We must stop the occupation. Not for peace with the Palestinians or for their sake (though they have surely suffered at our hands for too long). Not for some vision of an idyllic Middle East — those arguments will never end, because neither side will ever budge, or ever be proved wrong by anything. No, we must stop the occupation for ourselves. So that we can look ourselves in the eyes. So that we can legitimately ask for, and receive, support from the world. So that we can return to being human.

Whatever the consequences are, they can’t be worse than what we are now grappling with. No matter how many soldiers we put in the West Bank, or how many houses of terrorists we blow up, or how many stone-throwers we arrest, we don’t have any sense of security; meanwhile, we have become diplomatically isolated, perceived around the world (sometimes correctly) as executioners, liars, racists. As long as the occupation lasts, we are the more powerful side, so we call the shots, and we cannot go on blaming others. For our own sake, for our sanity — we must stop now.

https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/articles/middle-east/21875-israeli-self-inflicted-hate

Haftom Zarhum, a 29-year-old Eritrean, was lynched by Jewish Israelis simply because he looked different. After being shot in the legs, a mob circled him like hyenas over a bleeding prey throwing a bench over his head and chanting the unofficial Zionist’s anthem of hate: “Death to Arabs, Arabs out!” and “Am Israel Hai”.

Disowning culpability and playing the traditional victim, Israeli foreign ministry spokesman Emmanuel Nashon blamed the incident on the “terrible situation we are in.”

At a similar scene, a week earlier, a video showed a despondent Palestinian child lying in a pool of blood. A puzzled appearance engulfed the child’s face as he gazed at a Jewish racist who was screaming “Die, you son of a whore, die.”

Had Mr Zarhum been an innocent Palestinian bystander, it would have been a different story. Of the approximately 50 Palestinians, who were murdered by the Israeli army, police or Jewish vigilante in the last three weeks, at least 20 were allegedly threatening Israeli life.

http://972mag.com/the-real-problem-with-netanyahus-mufti-speech/113138/

By calling the Palestinians Nazis, the Israeli prime minister was saying they can never be negotiated with — that Israel must fight them to the bloody end.

Despite the festival of mockery taking place on social media, Benjamin Netanyahu clearly does not believe that Grand Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini is more responsible than Hitler for the Holocaust. (Although that is exactly what the prime minister said in his speech at the World Zionist Conference on Tuesday.) Netanyahu is a smart guy who knows World War II history better than most of his critics. The idea that the mufti is responsible for the extermination of European Jewry is completely absurd, and Netanyahu knows that. Just like he explained the next day, he wasn’t even talking about the Nazis, and he certainly never meant to absolve them for the Holocaust. The prime minister was trying to make a statement about the Palestinians and that’s the real problem.

Saying that the Palestinians are Nazis — very much like the comparison between Israel and the Nazis — has no place in a fact-based or historically accurate discourse. That should go without saying. The only reason to do so would be to illustrate that it is impossible to negotiate, or even speak with, the other side — that they must be fought to the bloody end. That is the historical historical context and significance of comparing somebody to the Nazis. They are one of the few regimes in all of history whose illegitimacy is absolute — to everyone in the world. Even those who had the most remote ties with the Nazis, even those who tried to make deals with them to save Jews, were later classified as traitors. Because one wages only war against Nazis. Look at every WWII film ever made — there is no such thing as a good Nazi.