India’santi-terror agency has raided 53 sites across seven states and union territories in a crackdown on what it says are “terrorists” and “gangsters,” some of whom it alleges have links to Sikh separatist groups.
The National Investigative Agency (NIA) said Wednesday it had seized pistols, ammunition and a large number of digital devices during the raids, and that among those it had detained were several people with suspected links to “pro-Khalistan” groups.
“Khalistan” is a reference to a separatist movement that seeks to create a homeland for Sikhs in the Punjab region of India.
News of the raid comes as India remains in a tense diplomatic standoff with Canada, following allegations by Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau that India may have been involved in the killing in British Columbia of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a Sikh Canadian who was a vocal advocate of Khalistan.
India, which has strenuously denied Trudeau’s claims, has previously accused Nijjar of being a terrorist with links to the Khalistan movement and of “trying to radicalize the Sikh community across the world.”
But it has long accused multiple foreign countries of harboring what it describes as Sikh militants within their diaspora communities.
The NIA said Wednesday the latest raids “relate to conspiracies of targeted killings, terror funding of pro-Khalistan outfits, extortion, etc. by the gangsters, many of whom are lodged in various jails or are operating from various foreign countries, including Pakistan, Canada, Malaysia, Portugal and Australia.”
“Many of the criminals and gangsters who were earlier leading gangs in India have fled abroad in recent years and are now pursuing their terror and violence related activities from there, as per NIA investigations,” the statement said.
“These criminals have been engaged in planning and commissioning serious crimes, including contract and revenge killings, in association with criminals lodged in jails across India,” it added.
The operation spanned the states of Punjab, Harayana, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Uttarakhand, and also included the union territories of Delhi and Chandigarh.
New Delhi has responded angrily to Trudeau’s claims and the deepening spat has seen both nations expel senior diplomats in reciprocal moves, raising the prospect of an awkward rift between key partners of the US.
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Things escalated further when India suspended visa services for Canadian citizens over what it said were “security threats” against diplomats in Canada.
Though Modi is yet to speak publicly about the growing dispute, Indian authorities last week announced an “intensified crackdown” on what it says is a “Khalistani terrorist campaign.”
Last week, the NIA promised a cash reward for five individuals who they accuse of “spreading terror” in the state of Punjab.
Donald Trump has to be stopped. The man is a menace to democracy with an insatiable appetite for debauchery, a geriatric career gangster with a rap sheet longer than his Freudian phallic tie. The bastard has left a gruesome trail of mutilated corpses in shallow graves from Atlantic City to Jerusalem and has grievously molested nearly as many institutions as he has teenage sex workers with his greasy little orange pussy grabbers. His crimes have all been absurdly well publicized and flamboyantly brazen, yet somehow all the available polls seem to indicate that this Hammer House monster of a political supervillain could very well take the White House back with a vengeance again in 2024. The mind boggles at such madness. How? How could any sane human being possibly justify voting for such an unapologetically revolting sewer mutant?
The answer is actually pretty simple, because Joe Biden has to be stopped. After all isn’t he also a geriatric career gangster with an insatiable appetite for debauchery? Pretty much every mortal sin that Donald Trump has ever committed, Joe Biden has committed at least twice. The man is a barely veiled racist sexual predator and serial plagiarist who has built a seemingly endless career pushing Black children in front of armored police trucks before posing for selfies with Bono and telling a crowded Baptist church that he was the first white member of the Jackson Five.
And now that crusty old bitch has added full-blown dementia to his routine. This is why the Democrats store him in a warehouse freezer in Delaware for most of the year and only cart him out when the wreckage of his administration needs to be publicly surveyed in order to prevent an all-out riot. The reasonably dire need to stop a creature like Donald Trump is the only reason why a creature like Joe Biden is even in the White House and the equally reasonably dire need to stop Joe Biden is simultaneously making Donald Trump’s seemingly unthinkable return to the scene of the crime a very real possibility.
This, ladies and gentlemen, is American democracy in 2024 and everybody is doing it. While polls show the two grabbiest perverts in the convalescent home neck in neck in their crawl to the White House, they also show a country horrified by these options with CNN finding more people who despise both of these candidates than anybody who actually likes either one of them. This is the rotten fruit of the lesser of two evils, that despicably American fetish shoved down ever bored teenager’s throat by jingoistic civics teachers since Jefferson was in nipple clamps.
“There are only two monsters to choose from and you have to vote for whichever one nauseates you the least, otherwise you forfeit the right to bitch about getting raped by one of them at your local drinking hole for the next four years.” Fuck you, Mr. Fitzgerald, stop living in my skull. This is the twisted reasoning that has led us to a contest between the two most hated and depraved plutocrats since the last two war criminals who ran for Duce and Americans are beginning to resemble what they vote for.
In every living room, bar, and hair salon across the country you will find perfectly decent working-class human beings mounting passionate defenses for increasingly heinous crimes in the name of American democracy. You will find loving stay-at-home moms defending Donald Trump’s attempts to shred the votes of other loving stay-at-home moms because Joe Biden had his flunkies in the media kick sand over the latest escapades of his crackhead son. You will hear hippie peaceniks justify Biden sending cluster munitions to Ukraine because Trump sold worse to the Saudis. This is sick and it just keeps getting worse. The lesser of two evils is nothing more than a mask of sanity to place on the face of an insatiable imperial beast, the kind of moral parlor trick that serves as the cornerstone for any psychopath and that is precisely the path that Americans have chosen.
We are a country of descent people living comfortably in a spacious ranch house in the suburbs of the first world but there are bodies rotting in the basement and they have been there for a very long time. The imperial killer who built this house for us has done a masterful job of keeping its occupants detached from the crimes committed in our name across the globe but the chickens always come home to roost and the killers we sanction with our votes are increasingly bringing their work home with them, behaving like the dictators they sponsor in the third world while we all smile politely and wash the blood from our dishes before shouting “Everything’s fine!” over the screams and power tools. We are living in a horror movie. We aren’t the victims in this story yet, but we will be shortly if we don’t find a way to flip the script and retake our dignity.
Had they stuck to politics, Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacy would have had a running shot at winning this game by 2028. After all, Ted was a handsome and charming Rockefeller Republican who worked as an assistant to the chairman of the Wahington state Republican Party and Gacy was a successful Chicago businessman whose work for the local Democratic Party earned him an audience with then First Lady Rosalyn Carter. So, which is the lesser evil? I’m fucking serious here, this is the system, isn’t it? If it’s Bundy vs Gacy 2028 then which is the responsible choice for American democracy? Bundy is great on taxes but pretty vile on women’s lib but hey, at least he’s straight and most of his victims are over the age of consent and somebody has to stop that killer clown.
Do you feel sick yet? Are you ashamed of yourself? Good, that’s a start. It’s a sign that you still have a functioning conscience but mark my words, you won’t for long if we continue to use democracy as an excuse to avoid the uncomfortable fact that America is a fundamentally evil institution, one built on genocide and slavery, one that exports mass murder and fascism to every corner of the globe, and both parties are in on it. The candidates are irrelevant. They all serve the same masters, but they are getting worse because America is getting worse, and America is getting worse for the simple reason that evil is not sustainable. Human beings are not designed to live in an amoral cesspool indefinitely. We all crack eventually beneath the weight of our sins.
So, what do we do? Who do we vote for? Here’s a radical idea, how about no one? This is a rigged system, and we all know it, so, let’s stop justifying its increasingly demented existence by refusing to participate in it. Even if some knight in white shining armor from a third party managed to jump the barricade, what difference would it make? You could put Eugene goddamn Debbs in charge of a slaughterhouse, and it would still be a fucking slaughterhouse. So, let’s boycott the slaughterhouse and demand something better as loudly as humanly possible. Let’s protest the debates. Let’s hold sit-ins outside the polling stations and demand direct referendums on the war in Ukraine and the runaway police state instead of ferrying these responsibilities out to known psychopaths.
Or just simply stop engaging the American government at all. Use your campaign donations to buy a patch of dirt in the sticks and start your own goddamn government. Turn the nearest abandoned box store into a squat and turn that squat into a commune. Do what the real hippies and the Amish did, drop out of a sickening system and start living like human beings again. But whatever you do, stop making excuses for people that we all know are evil just because the other guy sickens you more. That kind of relationship is abusive and believe it or not, you deserve better than to be governed by a democracy of psychopaths. We all do.
Nicky Reid is an agoraphobic anarcho-genderqueer gonzo blogger from Central Pennsylvania and assistant editor for Attack the System. You can find her online at Exile in Happy Valley.
Jericho does not belong to the Palestinians alone. It belongs to the whole of humanity.
For Israel, however, the recognition by UNESCO of Jericho as a “World Heritage Site in Palestine” complicates its mission of erasing Palestine, physically and figuratively, from existence.
The decision was described by Israel’s foreign ministry as a “cynical” ploy by the Palestinians to politicize UNESCO.
This is ironic, as Israel has politicized history by removing anything that could be interpreted as part of Palestinian historical heritage, while elevating a self-centered, and largely fabricated, view of history that supposedly belongs to Israel, and Israel alone.
Though Israel has succeeded, thanks to its massive military power, in dominating the Palestinian physical landscape, it has largely failed in dominating Palestine’s history.
Apartheid walls, military checkpoints and illegal Jewish settlements are easy to construct. Constructing a historical narrative that is dotted with lies, half-truths and omissions, however, is almost impossible to sustain for long.
All of this is part of a protracted Israeli-US war on UNESCO. In 2019, the US and Israel officially withdrew from UNESCO, citing anti-Israel bias. This followed repeated threats by various US administrations, and a cut of funding by the Obama Administration in 2011.
But why such a fierce and determined war against an organization that describes itself as a promoter of “world peace and security through international cooperation in education, arts, sciences and culture”?
In fact, UNESCO is one of very few UN-linked international institutions that is the least politicized, based on the belief that the past, and whatever remains of it, is a common heritage that belongs to all of us.
As acceptable as such a claim may be for many countries around the world, for Israel UNESCO’s innocuous gestures to the Palestinians are simply heretical.
Not only Jericho – and, specifically, Tell Es-Sultan – belongs in the list of World Heritage Sites, the two should top the list. This is not grandstanding or another ‘cynical’ utilization of history but simply because Jericho is the “oldest inhabited city in the world” and Tell Es-Sultan is the “oldest town in the world” as it dates back to the 10th millennium BCE.
For example, the Pre-Pottery Neolithic Era Tower, circa 8300 BCE, is believed, by recent studies, to mark the summer solstice. It was, for nearly 6,000 years, the tallest human-made structure in the world. This is just one of numerous astonishing facts about Tell Es-Sultan.
All of Palestine is rich with such history, which traces our common ancestry to ancient civilizations that have merged or fused into other cultures, giving us the fascinating tapestry that is humanity.
And, because the history of Palestine is the history of humankind, serious Palestinian historians, archeologists and intellectuals rarely display any ethnocentric ownership over that history, thus refusing to claim any ascendency over other cultures.
“All archeological and historical evidence shows that Palestine was inhabited by many people,” wrote respected Palestinian archeologist, Dr. Hamdan Taha, in the recently-published volume ‘Our Vision for Liberation’.
Palestinian history spans a period starting from the “Homo Sapiens until the 21st century and, over this history, marked by many wars, invasions and conversions, (..) the indigenous population was never completely eliminated,” Taha writes.
A careful reading of Taha’s comments is enough to explain Israel’s fears, bordering on panic, whenever Palestine and the Palestinians are linked to a credible historical narrative.
Two points are worth a pause: one, all the “wars, invasions and conversions” did not succeed in interrupting the demographic flow and continuity of the “indigenous people” of Palestine, culminating in today’s modern Palestinians; and two, those indigenous people, though some invaders have tried in vain, were “never completely eliminated”.
Israel has done more than attempt to rewrite history and to marginalize the main actors of Palestine’s historical narrative. It has also actively and continuously tried to eliminate the natives altogether.
But it failed. The number of Palestinians living in historic Palestine today at least equals, and in some estimates is even higher than the number of Israeli Jewish immigrants from Europe and elsewhere.
Failing at the ‘elimination’ part of history, Israel is now resorting to the two-pronged strategy of ethnic cleansing and racial separation, or apartheid. The latter practice is now increasingly recognized by international human rights groups, including Amnesty, Human Rights Watch, and many others.
The ghosts of the past are another problem facing Israel. A brilliant cadre of Palestinian historians and archeologists, like Taha, joined by courageous and equally brilliant Israeli historians, like Ilan Pappé, are determined to unearth the truth on Palestine’s history and on Israel’s meddling in history.
It is because of such respected individuals, a parallel history to the one invented by Israel following the Nakba has emerged.
Another Tell – the Arabic word for ‘hill’ – aside from Tell Es-Sultan, was recently unearthed. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz said earlier this month that the excavations of Tell Qedesh is “the first-of-its-kind project” uncovering a not so distant past.
In this Palestinian village near the Lebanese border, war crimes were committed, and the hapless villagers, after doing their best to resist Zionist militias, were forced to flee.
To ensure the villagers never return, Israeli authorities bulldozed the village entirely.
“The dig is the first in Israel specifically dedicated to archaeologically exploring the legacy of what Palestinians remember as the Nakba,” Haaretz wrote.
For decades, Palestinians have been doing just that. Several generations of Palestinian archeologists have helped reanimate much of that history, ancient and modern. “The rule of archeology is to reconstruct the past in order to build the future,” according to Taha.
Unlike Israel, however, Taha’s vision aims to “incorporate the voices of all peoples, groups, cultures and religions that have lived on the land of Palestine.”
This inclusive vision is at direct odds with Israel’s exclusivist, selective, and often fabricated ‘vision’, predicated on military domination and cultural erasure.
In its Extended 45th Session of the World Heritage Committee in Riyadh on September 17, UNESCO has just confirmed the validity of the Palestinian vision. Naturally, Israel is angry because invaders hate the truth.
SARAJEVO (Reuters) - Lawmakers in Bosnia's autonomous Serb Republic on Thursday passed a draft law that labels non-profit groups funded from abroad as "foreign agents", despite criticism from the opposition, civic organisations and Western diplomats.
The legislation provides for establishing a special registry of non-profit organisations working in the region that are funded from abroad, where they would be enlisted as "agents of foreign influence", and requires transparency of their work.
Civic organisations have said the bill was modelled on a 2012 Russian law that Moscow has used extensively to crack down on civil society and independent media.
Serb Republic Justice Ministry Pero Bukejlovic said that without such legislation the region's legal system and constitutional structure would be undermined.
The law was proposed by the ruling Alliance of Independent Social Democrats (SNSD) led by Bosnian Serb nationalist leader Milorad Dodik, which forms a parliament majority along with their coalition partners. It will be a subject of public discussion for 30 days before it comes into effect.
Opposition MPs said the bill was anti-democratic and would push the country in an increasingly authoritarian direction.
The European Union and the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) have urged the lawmakers to reject the bill, saying it aimed to "intimidate and suppress civil society organisations by branding their representatives as 'foreign agents'".
Under the bill, the NGOs are banned from involving in any political activity, including proposing any kind of policy papers or legislation changes to institutions or political representatives.
Pro-Russian Dodik dismissed the allegations that the law is modelled on Russia's legislation. He said the rules were based on the United States' Foreign Agents Registration Act, which primarily covers lobbyists working directly for foreign governments.
The Serb Republic, which along with the Bosniak-Croat federation makes up Bosnia following its 1992-1995 war, passed a law in July that re-criminalised defamation despite protests by journalist associations and international criticism.
Adopting this new draft law would bring the Serb Republic closer to authoritarian regimes than to the European democracies, the EU said, warning that it contradicts the region's commitments to advance European integration and priorities on civil society and media freedoms.
(Reporting by Daria Sito-Sucic; Editing by Ros Russell)
PRISTINA, Kosovo (AP) — Kosovo’s interior minister on Thursday accused Serbia of direct involvement inweekend clashesand was investigating the possibility of Russian involvement in the violence that left four people dead and further strained relations between the former wartime foes.
One Kosovo police officer and three gunmen were killed in Sunday’s shootout between Serb insurgents and Kosovo police. Eight people were initially arrested, but four of them have been released from custody because of a lack of evidence.
Kosovo Interior Minister Xhelal Sveçla told The Associated Press in an interview that investigators were looking at evidence linking Russia, an ally of Serbia, to the armed assault. Russian weapons, other equipment and documents suggesting Russian involvement were discovered after the daylong gunbattle, he said.
In one of the worst confrontations since Kosovo declared independence from Serbia in 2008, about 30 masked men opened fire on a police patrol near the village of Banjska early Sunday. They then broke down the gates ofa Serbian Orthodox monasteryand barricaded themselves inside with the priests and visiting pilgrims.
The violence furtherraised tensions in the Balkan regionat a time when European Union and U.S. officials have been pushing for a deal that would normalize ties between Serbia and Kosovo. A NATO bombing campaign on Serb positions in Kosovo and Serbia led to the end of their 1998-99 war.
“What we know for sure is that they (the insurgents) came from Serbia,” Sveçla said. “Some of them are Kosovo Serbs, who have dual citizenship, Kosovo and Serbian citizenship, that, by our intelligence information, were trained in camps in Serbia.”
“We found some documents which lead us to a suspicion that there were individuals coming from Russia too,” he said. “For the equipment, we have evidence, but for the people we still have only suspicion.”
There are fears in the West that Russia, acting through Serbia, may want to destabilize the Balkans and shift at least some of the attention from Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Russia has voiced support for Serbia over the clashes, blaming the West for allegedly failing to protect Kosovo Serbs.
Serbia’s president, Aleksandar Vučić has denied claims that Serbia was involved in the clash, saying the gunmen were local Kosovo Serbs “who no longer want to withstand the terror” of Kosovo’s ethnic Albanian authorities. Vučić's statements have portrayed the gunmen as heroes, and a national day of mourning was held for the three killed Serbs in both Serbia and northern Kosovo where they represent a majority.
After a meeting on Thursday with Danish Foreign Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen, Vučić described the situation as “the most complicated and dangerous so far,” blaming the tensions on the policies of Kosovo’s government and urging international help to protect ethnic Serbs.
Serbia’s chief negotiator with Kosovo, Petar Petković, demanded an independent investigation into the killing of the three Serb gunmen, saying they were “brutally” executed after surrendering to Kosovo police. He said that Belgrade has witnesses and evidence, including photographs, but didn’t make them public.
Sveçla said that based on the gathered evidence and drone footage, some of the assailants, who he referred to as “terrorists,” wore face masks throughout the operation.
“Even the members of the group who were arrested didn’t know who they were,” he said. “So they are either high officials from the security sector of Serbia or they might be directly coming from Russia itself.”
The interior minister said that the aim of the operation appeared to be the seizure of northern Kosovo with the ultimate goal of seceding from the rest of the country.
“They had a 100 more uniforms,” Sveçla said. “They were planning to recruit more people within (the communities) where Serbs live ... Kosovo institutions would have to deal with the few hundred terrorists in a scenario which they planned.”
He said that judging from a large cache of weapons found at the scene of the clash, the attackers planned to heavily arm at least a couple of hundred people.
“Uniforms, personal armor, Kalashnikovs, sniper rifles, pistols. All this tells us there was equipment for a couple of hundred people together with logistics. It was equipment and weapons for a whole battalion,” he said.
The danger of a new insurgency isn’t over, Sveçla said.
“We don’t have clashes, but we have information that training of these terrorists continues in Serbia,” he said. “There are still people in Kosovo who are part of this group.”
Serbia and Kosovo, a former province belonging to Belgrade, have been at odds for decades. Their 1998-99 war left more than 10,000 people dead, mostly Kosovo Albanians. Kosovo unilaterally declared independence in 2008, but Serbia has refused to recognize the move.
Though this line may echo Leonard Cohen’s famous words “First we take Manhatten, then we take Berlin”, it is not a take on a popular song.
Instead it is a master plan meticulously designed by the religious Zionist community over the years – a plan now implemented using the political power of two parties within Israel's government: Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich’s Religious Zionism and National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir’s Jewish Power.
Do not make the mistake of thinking “take Tel Aviv” is a metaphor. It is an elaborate programme to seize the one city in Israel that has become a symbol of liberalism and openness, and change it to its core.
The best way to describe the nature of this far-reaching plan is to compare it to the ongoing process of Judaisation – where Jewish citizens are sent to the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem to settle and chase out Palestinian residents, a process that later targeted mixed Palestinian-Jewish cities in Israel in a bid to change the demographics there too.
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The case of Tel Aviv is of course different, since most of the residents are Jewish, but, crucially, mainly secular or religious liberals. That, Smotrich and Ben Gvir’s cadre believe, needs to change, spreading instead a creed of religious Zionism that is nationalistic, homophobic, xenophobic and racist.
Religion here is just a tool to achieve a greater, political cause. Young religious Zionist families collaborate to move en masse to locations chosen by political leaders behind the scenes. Just like Jewish settlers in the occupied Palestinian territories and mixed cities, they settle in the heart of Tel Aviv’s secular population.
The process is spreading rapidly. Today there are more than 80 groups pursuing religious Zionist settlement in majority-secular communities across Israel. Some representatives of these groups have made their way into several municipal councils, with the intention of changing the very nature of their carefully picked place of residence.
Religious men read from a book on Tel Aviv's shore (AFP)
They are on a mission. In fact, they are missionaries, a local version of Jewish Crusaders, now openly empowered by their representation in the government. Many of them come from the illegal settlements in the West Bank, having accomplished their demographic mission there. It’s time to move on.
The same people who expropriate Palestinian land now expropriate Israel’s liberal public sphere. Like in the West Bank, these settlers have state backing. Minister of Settlements and National Missions Orit Strook secured 600m shekels from the budget just for this cause. Her office also has 1.6bn shekels allocated to spread and impose Judaism by other means.
There are other ministers in the government dedicated to the same mission, holding portfolios with names like “Jewish tradition” and “Jewish identity”. In essence it all boils down to Jewish supremacy. And Jewish supremacy needs more nationalist religious Jews.
Settlers turn inwards
It’s an intricate religious-political operation. “Judaising” secular Jews is part of their messianic vision, one necessary step towards salvation.
And while it happened in the periphery, Tel Aviv’s indifferent residents were able to largely ignore it. Then it erupted out of the blue in the heart of their city at the most unexpected time: the eve of Yom Kippur, the Jewish day of atonement and the holiest day in all Judaism.
This is also the one day when religious customs are obeyed in Israel with no coercion - no cars, no commerce, no entertainment. Everyday life is put on hold. Most secular Jews respect the tradition and do not even eat or drink in public, showing respect to the high percentage of those who do fast on this day.
For several years now, parallel to prayers in all synagogues there have been organised public prayers. These laid-back affairs draw many non-observant Jews and have become a much-loved ritual.
All that changed dramatically this year when an organisation called Rosh Yehudi (Jewish Head) organised a public prayer promising gender segregation, in accordance with strict Orthodox Judaism.
Gender segregation has become a sensitive issue under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s nationalist-orthodox government, which is almost women-free itself. Women are now finding themselves sent to the back of buses, publicly reprimanded to “dress properly” and literally removed from the public sphere, where images of women are torn down and ripped to shreds.
Cyclists ride on a car-free highway during the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur in Tel Aviv, 25 September (AP)
Some liberal groups filed a petition against the gender segregation at the prayer Rosh Yehudi organised in the heart of Tel Aviv, and the high court ruled in their favour. The organisers went ahead and segregated men and women anyway, then all hell broke loose.
In a second, on the holiest of all days, a physical confrontation erupted between religious Zionists gathered by the organisers and secular protesters. There were no casualties, but everyone was soaked in hate.
Neither side had really come to pray. It was a carefully preconceived provocation, answered by rage fuelled by months of Israelis watching their country changing in front of their eyes. Tel Aviv is secular Israel’s Bastille. It cannot fall.
Netanyahu responded by saying “left-wing demonstrators rioted against Jews during their prayer” - which to many was taken as insinuating that liberal Israelis are not actually Jewish.
For many religious Zionists, this is indeed the case. And they want to fix it.
Jewish Crusaders
Israel Zeira is the owner and CEO of Be Emuna, a real estate company. He’s also head of Rosh Yehudi, the NGO that organised the Tel Aviv prayer and describes itself as dedicated to spreading and deepening of Jewish values and identity.
The organisation was established in the Jewish settlement in the West Bank city of Hebron, post-Oslo Accords. Its main aim was then to prevent the Jewish settlement, which is in the heart of the city, from being evacuated.
Yet Zeira and other Rosh Yehudi leaders decided their mission would be better served from Tel Aviv rather than Hebron, defining its base of operations as a “centre for self-consciousness” that “provides an answer to the growing demand for Jewish identity”.
Sounds quite harmless. It is not. Just a month ago, Zeira was recorded giving a lecture. In it, he addressed his audience asking: “What does a national religious Zionist think when he sees a secular Jew?”
'We want all Jews to become religious. Every secular "fixed" Jew who becomes religious brings us closer to salvation'
- Israel Zeira, Rosh Yehudi
“To befriend him?” Zeira continued. “That stage belongs to the past… now we have reached the point when we want to befriend him in order to change him, to fix him. We want all Jews to become religious. Every secular ‘fixed’ Jew who becomes religious brings us closer to salvation.”
In recent years, Zeira has been offering a series of courses for graduates of the religious Zionist education system to prepare them for their mission: to move to Tel Aviv and plant roots in its society.
Smotrich himself came to bless recent graduates. He referred to those young missionaries as “our emissaries” and urged them not to fear, not to be embarrassed - just go and get as many souls as possible and make them “born again Jews”.
If that was not enough, as CEO of a construction company Zeira oversaw a building project for the religious Zionist community in the southern city of Kiryat-Gat. As part of an advertising campaign for the project, a short video was released showing a religious family cheerfully dining and celebrating. There’s a knock on the door, announcing an uninvited neighbour: loud, vulgar and - crucially - clearly Sephadric.
What a disaster for the quiet, well-behaved Ashkenazi family. A voiceover promoting Zeira’s new housing project appeals: “If you want to live surrounded by people like you.” Ashkenazi, of course.
This campaign was deemed too openly racist, and was forced to desist, but it is an excellent example of the discriminatory nature of the religious Zionist sector.
Existential questions
Thirty-eight weeks into the demonstrations against the government’s highly controversial judicial overhaul, Israel finds itself in an all-out clash of civilisations. Yet it’s not just a war for the future of Judaism, but for the future of Israel.
The state established on the principle that all Jews are bound by their shared fate now faces a major conflict defining its covenant of destiny and mission. What is Israel to be? Who are Israelis? Even, who is a Jew?
Before Israelis’ eyes, the equation they tried to adopt defining their country as a Jewish democratic state is crumbling before their eyes. There are some who believe Israel can be redeemed by redefining the state as one that gives Jews the right to self-determination. But that, too, cannot be realised amid domestic chaos where hate and violence prevail.
The incident in Tel Aviv on the eve of Yom Kippur is an integral part of the story of the anti-judicial reform protest movement. Holding gender-segregated prayers right where anti-government protests are held weekly was a knowing provocation, and provided a trigger.
The seeds of the next calamity are planted in the reaction of both sides of the political spectrum. Rosh Yehudi launched a campaign titled “Now more than ever Tel Aviv needs a Jewish head”.
Analysis: Why Israel's judicial crisis is part of a battle over its founding symbols
“Rosh Yehudi is at the frontline now. Help us grow, and thanks to you we will be able to spread the light of Torah and repentance in Tel Aviv,” the campaign’s website reads. It’s already raised over 1.5m shekels, and aims to double that.
This is exactly what worries the liberal camp, which is up in arms and ready to fight back. Many now regret the submissiveness they have long displayed when confronted with ardent believers.
However, there are others who look back at the Yom Kippur confrontation and fear their camp might have chosen the wrong cause and the wrong timing. Leading figures in the protest movement expressed concern that this aggressive approach might mark the first cracks in the unity of their cause.
There are worries in the other camp too. Itamar Ben Gvir cancelled the retaliatory Tel Aviv “prayer rally” he planned to hold on Thursday, under pressure from his coalition partners.
There is a lesson to learn for the liberal camp in Israel. Picking on the ultra-orthodox, focusing anger and frustration on this community, has always been a big mistake.
Liberals are offended by the amounts of money the ultra-orthodox demand and receive from the state. They are exasperated by the community’s refusal to serve in the army. But the ultra-orthodox do not want to change others, they just don’t want to change themselves. In truth, their cause is no real threat to the liberal and secular Israelis.
The true enemy of liberal Israelis are instead the settler movement and the religious Zionist sector behind it.
It is not a matter of strategy, it’s a matter of survival. Tel Aviv cannot become a Maginot Line and fall at the first test. Not because it is more important than other locations, just because it’s symbolic. Symbols do matter in this fight for the future.
