JERUSALEM NEWS
NEWS AND INFORMATION
Events, happenings, and Opinions Concerning
Israel, Israelites, Judah, and Everyone Else
Jerusalem News-755
Jerusalem News-755
Date 8th April 2008, 3 Nissan 5768
Contents:
1. 69% of Israeli Jews won't eat
Chametz
on Passover
2. Erekat:
Olmert
to Grant Amnesty to 10,000 Arab Illegal Aliens (54,000 already here)
3. Study: 64% of Israeli Jews won't enter Arab towns
4. Yemen: Empty Jewish homes destroyed
5. The jihad against the Jews
1. 69% of Israeli Jews won't eat
Chametz
on Passover
From: imra@netvision.net.il
Subject: Poll: 69% of Israeli Jews won't eat Chametz on Passover
Poll: 69% of Israeli Jews won't eat Chametz on Passover
Dr. Aaron Lerner 7 April 2008
Market Watch poll of adlt Israeli Jews carried out for Matzot Aviv and
published in today's issue of yediot Ahronot:
69% Eat only matza on Passover and do not eat chametz the entrie holiday
18% Eat both matza and chametz on Passover
06% Eat only chametz on Passover
05% Eat matza only the evening of the seder
2.
Erekat:
Olmert
to Grant Amnesty to 10,000 Arab Illegal Aliens (54,000 already here)
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/125828
by Nissan Ratzlav-Katz
Extracts:
(IsraelNN.com) Prime Minister Ehud Olmert agreed Monday to grant amnesty to
10,000 Arab illegal aliens residing in Judea and Samaria, according to
Palestinian Authority (PA) negotiator Saeb Erekat. The move would grant the
illegals permanent resident status.
Approximately 54,000 Arabs in Judea and Samaria fall into this category.
The amnesty, if enacted, would apply to those Arabs who entered the country
legally, on foreign passports, and then remained in Judea or Samaria beyond the
terms of their visas. According to various estimates, approximately 54,000 Arabs
in PA-controlled areas of Judea and Samaria fall into this category. 12,000 have
already received residency rights through conventional requests submitted to
Israeli authorities. Israel has been more restrictive on Arab immigration since
the beginning of the Oslo War in 2000.
3. Study: 64% of Israeli Jews won't
enter Arab towns
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1207486216552&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
By RUTH EGLASH
More than half of Israel's Jewish and Arab populations believe that the two
communities are not on good terms and that relations are likely to deteriorate
in the future, according to the annual Arab-Jewish Relations Index for 2007.
The study was published by Professor Sami Sooha, Dean of the Faculty of Social
Sciences at the University of Haifa on Monday, one day ahead of the second Haifa
Conference on Social Responsibility set to take place at the university on
Tuesday and Wednesday.
According to the index, which assesses Jewish-Arab relations in Israel, 62
percent of the Jewish public expressed concerns that the local Arab population
would eventually engage in civil disobedience, with 64% saying they refused to
enter Arab towns.
The index also revealed that the Arab public has their own suspicions towards
the Jews here. A total of 62% said they were worried about eventually being
transferred and 76% said they believed that the state could one day sponsor
violence against them.
Despite the negative feelings expressed by both sides, the majority of the
Jewish population (86%) and 75% of the Arabs said they believe Israel is a good
place to live, with 85% of Jews and 71% of the Arabs saying they prefer Israel
over any other nation in the world. A total of 58% of the Arab public believes
that Israel is democratic enough for them, too.
In terms of trusting the other side, less than half (48%) of the Jewish public
said it does not trust Arab citizens, while 60.2% of the Arab public feels the
same way about Jewish citizens.
Slightly over a third (37%) of the Jews said they believe in encouraging Arabs
to leave Israel and a further one third supported stripping them of their voting
rights. The poll found 18% of the Jewish public deny the right of existence to
the Arabs as a minority in Israel, compared to 16% last year.
The study also shows that 62% of the Jewish public believe Arab citizens to be a
risk to national security because of their high birth rate and 80% are
suspicious of Israeli Arab support for the Palestinian national struggle. A
total of 80% of the Arabs fear that their civil rights may be harmed and 83% are
worried about major land expropriation.
As for the Arab sentiment, the percentage of those that deny Israel's right to
exist as a Jewish-Zionist state rose slightly from 62.6% last year to 64% this
year, as did the percentage of Arabs who deny Israel's right to exist (from 15%
last year to 20% this year). Support for the use of violence to advance the
interests of the Arab minority also rose from 9.5% to 10.8% this year.
4. Yemen: Empty Jewish homes destroyed
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1207486208257&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
By HAVIV RETTIG
In the latest attack targeting Yemen's few remaining Jews, rebel Houthi
militiamen destroyed several homes that had belonged to the now-absent Jewish
community in the northwestern Saada province.
"The Houthis destroyed part of my house and looted it," Rabbi Yehia Youssuf told
Reuters in the capital, San'a.
All 67 members of Saada's Jewish community fled following threats from the
Houthis, the rabbi says. Some locals say the Jews were threatened because they
had been selling wine to Muslims - an accusation the Jews deny, according to
Reuters.
A local said the Shi'ite rebels attacked the houses of other Jews after looting
the rabbi's.
Around 400 Jews remain in the majority Sunni state, the remnant of an ancient,
close-knit community that, while remaining connected to Jewish intellectual and
legal developments outside Yemen, managed to insulate itself culturally until
the 20th century.
According to Dr. Dov Levitan, a scholar of Yemenite Jewry at Bar-Ilan University
and the Academic College of Ashkelon, the Houthi clan targets Jews to embarrass
the government internationally.
Apparently unrelated intertribal fighting in the province killed at least 15
people in recent days as the Houthi tribe continued its intermittent violence,
begun in June 2004, against the central government and its allies.
Since the early 1990s, the Yemeni government "has been very conscious of its
international image," explains Levitan. "So important is the country's image to
its government that the Jews have excellent government protection."
When their situation in Saada became precarious about a year ago, "they were
flown out in a government plane to San'a. They receive a small stipend and live
in a compound protected by state security forces. This kind of concern would
have been unimaginable just 15 years ago," he says.
The government's concern for its image, together with pressure from American
Jewish groups and US legislators, led Yemen in the early 1990s to permit most of
the remaining 2,000 Jews to emigrate to Israel and elsewhere, continuing a
centuries-long trickle of aliya from the country. At the founding of the Jewish
state in 1948, around 35,000 Yemenite Jews lived in Israel. Another 50,000 came
in the immediate aftermath of the War of Independence.
Most of the 1,600 Jews who left Yemen during the 1990s now live in Rehovot.
The question of why Jews remain in Yemen remains.
"We have contact with these Jews. They're not the Jews who came 60 years ago,"
the large wave of poor refugees who fled pogroms in Operation Magic Carpet,
Levitan says. "They're more educated, they're better dressed, they wear watches
and drive cars. Some of them have traveled overseas. They have property there,
and they are connected historically. They don't want to leave a place that has
been their natural environment for generations."
The Yemenite Jewish community claims to have existed since the time of the First
Temple, 2,600 years ago. While this claim has not been verified, "we know with
certainty that they were there for at least 1,500 years," says Levitan.
Despite its unique customs and liturgy, Yemenite Jewry was never disconnected
from the broader Jewish world. "For example, we know that the letters of the
[medieval Jewish philosopher and legalist] Maimonides arrived in Yemen. We know
from the 14th to the 16th centuries they were connected enough to receive the
Shulchan Aruch [halachic codex]. And in the 18th and 19th centuries they
received printed Jewish prayer books and Talmuds from abroad when there was no
Jewish press in Yemen," he said.
Other pressures also affect the decision of Jews to remain. The anti-Zionist
Satmar hassidim work to persuade the community not to move to Israel. "They give
the remaining Jews money and holy books, take them to New York and London -
anything to keep them from going to Israel," says Levitan.
Also, the government's concern and protection are seen as complete and genuine
by the community, he says.
5. The jihad against the Jews
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/970653.html
By Bradley Burston
The jihad has a problem with the Jews.
Not just a problem with Israel. Not just the occupation. Not just the policies
of the Israeli government, the actions of the Israel Defense Forces, the support
by Washington and the West for Israel's embargo against Hamas-ruled Gaza.
Islamists don't care who knows it anymore. They hate the Jews. And, not to put
too fine a point on it, they want the Jews dead.
Some of it one has grown to expect. "Today there is no room for he who says that
we should only fight the Jews in Palestine," Osama Bin Laden's second-in-command
Ayman al-Zawahri said after Israel's incursion into Gaza last month. "Let us
strike their interests everywhere, just like they gathered against us from
everywhere."
Some of it is becoming better known. In a groundbreaking article in The New York
Times this week, Steven Erlanger details, among other elements of Gaza life, the
tides of Jew-hate washing over the Strip with the Hamas seal of approval.
There is imam and legislator Sheik Yunus al-Astal, who, citing a Koranic verse
indicating that "suffering by fire is the Jews' destiny in this world and the
next," concludes that "we are sure that the holocaust is still to come upon the
Jews."
There is imam and legislator Marwan M. Abu Ras, chairman of the Palestinian
Scholars League and a religious authority who anchors Hamas policies in Koranic
sanction, branding Jews "the brothers of apes and pigs."
This dovetails nicely with programming decisions taken by Hezbollah's Al Manar
Television, which broadcast a Syrian-produced mini-series that showed a Jew
killing a Christian child to obtain blood for baking Passover matza.
And then there is the case of the much anticipated, widely feared new film by
Dutch lawmaker Geert Wilders, "Fitna." Officials across Europe and throughout
the Muslim world have braced for the possibility of violent protests,
demonstrations on the model of those sparked by Danish cartoons of the Prophet
Mohammed, which protesters saw as a grave insult to Islam.
But the initial reaction has been muted, despite, or because of, an emphasis on
footage such as Islamic clerics voicing virulent attacks against Jews, urging
that Jews be killed and even beheaded, clips of a little girl quoting Allah in
the Koran terming Jews "apes and swines," and of demonstrators promising
"another Holocaust" and praising Adolf Hitler.
It is worth noting that, in an initial response to the release of the film on
the Internet at the end of last week, the attorney representing the umbrella
group for Dutch Muslims said that at first glance, "Fitna" does not constitute
an insult to their religion.
One has to wonder, why not? Are calls to kill Jews as Jews not considered an
insult?
And while we're asking questions, it would be worth inquiring of Hamas officials
that if, as they often declare, their conflict is with Zionists and not Jews,
their charter cannot be amended to remove references to the Protocols of the
Elders of Zion, statements that Jews have "control of the world media [and use
their] wealth to stir revolutions."
There will be those who will counter that critics of Israel are often mistakenly
and/or derisively termed anti-Semitic. That is too often true. But it is no
justification for letting true Jew hate slide.
Quite clearly, there are those for whom the existence of the Jews is
intolerable. That they feel free to spread the message - and teach it to
children - must be condemned as intolerable by the rest of us, Jew or not.
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