How is demolishing an illegal, probably unsafe addition to an existing building Apartheid? Could you please explain that inter-galactic leap of non-logic to us?

There's no racism, inequality, apartheid or segregation in Israel. Every person in Israel is equal. It's just that some people are more equal than others.

Israel is THE reason the US is so hated by Muslims.

Is anyone surprised? Not me. I'm surprised they ever allowed Arabs actually.

Won't it be great when the day comes when this sort of story is not newsworthy.

Good work. Keep it up.

AngeL:

It’s only ”newsworty” because one poster hates Israel. He finds stories that can’t be confirmed in Israeli papers, makes misstatements, takes events out of context and generally spins the facts to fit his opinions.

In this case, there’s nothing in Israeli papers about this at all– and there always is when destructions are carried out.

What he doesn’t mention about this case is that the destruction order had been in appeal courts for the past 4 years, during which both sides presented their sides of the story.

Another thing he doesn’t mention is that there have been 11 destructions of illegal Jewish homes or additions so far this year, as well. Those weren’t ”newsworthy” for the poster, because they disprove his claims.

All in all, it’s a good idea to look at the agenda the original poster had...

“Those Arabs were there first, where are they supposed to go? The houses may have been unsafe, but they had to be better than living in the street! If the houses built without permits are to be torn down, build some place for the tenants to live first.” – Nuya Bidness

First of all, do you have any proof for your opening statement that “those Arabs were there first”? Whether they were or not is irrelevant. Whether they are Arab or Jew is irrelevant. What IS relevant is that they built illegally.

Second, you say that now, but if the addition had collapsed and people injured or killed, you would be among the first to blame “the Israelis” for it. There is a process for building new additions to existing houses in most countries, and it includes presenting a building plan signed by an architect and/or a civil engineer. Such plans are evaluated by the local authority’s engineering department and approved or not approved on the merits or lack thereof. Circumventing this process is a felony in most countries. How would the local authority in Birmingham react to your adding several rooms to your home without permits? Why should anyone in Israel, Arab or Jew, be exempt from the same penalties?

Third, who should do the building? If the case is one of “eminent domain”, where the local authority takes over the house and land, the law is clear: equivalent housing or a fair market price for the existing building and land must be paid. This is a case where an individual decided to add unlicensed living area to an existing building. The only thing destroyed was the addition, not the previously existing structure (the picture accompanying the article has no relation to the building addition that was destroyed). Do people deserve a reward for breaking the law?

Congratulations on not answering a single question of mine, but asking more of your own in an accusatory manner with an emotional harangue not supported by any facts. Is this the way you debate things?

“You live in a place that you have no business being in, you are there only by the good graces of countries that tried to find a place for you when no one else would have you. Now you want to displace the very people you encroached upon.”

How do you reach this conclusion? If anyone has a “right” to live in Israel, it is the Jews, who have more than 3,500 years of unbroken residence in the land, despite the colonial ambitions, depredations and oppressions of the Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire, the Islamic Empire, the Crusaders, the Ottoman Empire and the British Empire.

“The law that was broken was in denying them the permits in the first place.”

Neither of us can say whether that’s true or not, since neither of us has seen any building plans that may have been submitted and rejected or approved. You’re making an assumption with no facts to base it on, just opinion. There’s no law or rule requiring that every plan submitted must be accepted, there are engineering and safety criteria that a plan has to meet. If it doesn’t meet those requirements, then it won’t be approved, and it won’t matter whether the submitter is Jewish, Muslim, Christian or whatever.

“18,000 Arab homes destroyed!
The whole world knows that those building code violations are 100% lies and nothing more than a cover for discrimination.”

Do you have documentation for that number? Do you have proof that can meet the Rules of Evidence in a court of law? Or is this another assumption without facts to back it up? Are you sure you’re not mixing “administrative house destructions” (a policy I despise and disagree with totally) together with the destruction of illegal additions (which I do agree with)?

“The whole world” once knew that the world was flat, that the sun revolved around the earth and that it was impossible to fly, but all of these “facts” were false. Any statement starting with the expressions, “Everyone knows” or “The whole world knows” should be treated with the utmost suspicion, since it will almost certainly be proven false. If you can not offer proof, you are just wasting the time of everyone who reads your posts. Claiming that “the whole world knows” is not proof.

“Discrimination is illegal in America and circumventing that law is what is a felony here.”

Since the building codes apply to everyone, whether Muslim, Jew, Druse, Bahai, Christian et al, where is the “discrimination”?

“Who should pay? Who paid for the land you are living on now?”

My great-grandfather, along with a group of others, paid the absentee landowner living in Istanbul for the land now known as the city of Ra’anana in 1921. It was legally bought, registered in the British Land Office in 1922 and we have a title deed. Do you have any other questions?

As for “who should pay”, ask yourself this: if you want to live in a bigger house, who pays for it? Do you sell your present house, make up the price difference out of your own pocket and buy a larger house, or do you expect someone else to pay for your needs/desires? If you want to add rooms to your existing house, do you submit a plan to the local authorities, wait for approval and build according to the building codes, or do you just go ahead and build what you want without any permits or safety inspections to see if what you build conforms to the building laws? In either case, expecting someone else to pay for what you want is ridiculous, to say the least.

If you tried to build without permits in Birmingham, at the very least you would be dragged into court for building violations, fined, possibly jailed and certainly told to knock down the illegal addition. If you don’t knock it down within a reasonable time, defined in the court order, the city will do it for you and probably charge you for the destruction.

The building laws in Israel apply to everyone living under Israeli jurisdiction, just as everyone living in Birmingham is subject to the municipal building codes there. Jews get their illegal additions knocked down too… there have been 11 cases so far this year alone, according to Israeli court records. If it seems that more Arab additions are destroyed, maybe it’s because Arabs build more illegal additions in attempts to avoid the expenses of an architect’s plan, licensing fees, a supervising engineer at the building site, housing inspections, electrical, gas and water inspections, etc. Do you think building illegal additions should be rewarded?

Don’t play dumb, you know Jewish people were shipped wholesale from all over the world in 1947 and dumped on the Arabs who were living there. You are probably Polish or German, none of your ancestors ever set foot in the middle east.


As for the rest of the facts, there are newspapers all over the world documenting it every day, you can lie all you want to, but you are only lying to yourself.


Since the building codes apply to everyone, whether Muslim, Jew, Druse, Bahai, Christian et al, where is the “discrimination”?

Since it is only enforced against non Jews! That is where the discrimination is.


British land office? Hahahahahaha, good job on buying stolen land. I guess it is ok since the Brits stole it first?

If I want a bigger house, the government here will not bar me from building just because I am white, they will never ask me my religion or my sexual orientation, marital status or any other irrelevant fact before deciding to grant a permit, And they would not make me wait decades before they issued it unlike Israel.

I guess you are right, it is better for them to live in the streets with the stray dogs, God forbid someone trying get away without paying Israel the $100 for the water inspection permit.

I see that all we get is another rant, without any attempt at an honest dialog.

“Don’t play dumb, you know Jewish people were shipped wholesale from all over the world in 1947 and dumped on the Arabs who were living there. You are probably Polish or German, none of your ancestors ever set foot in the middle east.”

I am neither Polish nor German, and some branches of my family have lived in Israel for over 100 generations (documented). It’s a fact, whether you want to believe it or not, that there are census figures available dating back as far as 1845, that show the area of Jerusalem and other areas such as Zefat, Tiberias and Hebron having a clear Jewish population majority. Since these are Ottoman figures collected for tax purposes, there’s no reason to doubt them. Go and do some homework.

Even IF what you say were true, how does that give the Arabs who came to the Palestine Mandate from Egypt, Libya, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and other Arab states between 1920 and 1948 more “right” to live here than anyone else? British surveys in the late 1940s show that well over 60% of the Arab population residing in the mandate in 1947 were born in the surrounding Arab countries.

“As for the rest of the facts, there are newspapers all over the world documenting it every day, you can lie all you want to, but you are only lying to yourself.”

You should try going to a library and reading some real history books that don’t rely on sensationalism and blood to sell copy.

“Since the building codes apply to everyone, whether Muslim, Jew, Druse, Bahai, Christian et al, where is the “discrimination”?

“Since it is only enforced against non Jews! That is where the discrimination is.”

If you can prove that, go ahead. If you can’t, go soak your head. As I mentioned in two other posts, 11 court orders for the destruction of illegal additions built by Jews have been issued in 2009 alone. The building codes apply to anyone who wants to build, regardless of what they want to build and who they are.

“British land office? Hahahahahaha, good job on buying stolen land. I guess it is ok since the Brits stole it first?”

Again, read some history. The British took over the Ottoman government in Palestine in toto, including the Turkish Land Registry. All purchases by Jews were closely scrutinized by the British, who had no interest in keeping the word of their own government or the word of the League of Nations to establish a Jewish state in part of Palestine. All transactions registered in the Land Registry plat books are legal. This has already been decided a number of times in international courts.

“If I want a bigger house, the government here will not bar me from building just because I am white, they will never ask me my religion or my sexual orientation, marital status or any other irrelevant fact before deciding to grant a permit, And they would not make me wait decades before they issued it unlike Israel.”

Nor will you be asked in Israel. Yes, the bureaucracy here is “heavy” but it’s that way for all of us—regardless of gender, religion or ethnicity. Again, IF you should build illegally in Birmingham, you will find the same fate awaits your illegal addition.

“I guess you are right, it is better for them to live in the streets with the stray dogs, God forbid someone trying get away without paying Israel the $100 for the water inspection permit.”

Did I say they should “live in the streets with the stray dogs”? However, I do think that if they want to take advantage of municipal services such as rubbish collection, street maintenance, sewage and drainage, etc. then those same people should pay the taxes required of them and obey the local laws, whether they are Jews, Muslims or whatever else they may be.

“In case you didn’t know Judaism is a religion and NOT a nationality or ethic designation.”

No, but Israeli is a nationality. I am Israeli and Jewish, just as you are whatever you are.

“They belong wherever they came from in 1947. Poland, Austria, Germany etc. Haven’t you noticed they are Caucasians and not Arabs? The only white faces in the Middle east. Religion is a choice, They CHOOSE to be Jewish, those Palestinians didn’t CHOOSE to be Arab. Why should should they have to pay the price for what someone else CHOOSES to do?”

Sad to say, you don’t even know that “Arab” is not a race, but an ethnic group within the Caucasian race. Your understanding of the population composition in Israel is even less knowledgeable. While none of the Palestinians chose to be Arab, neither did many Jews “choose” to be Jews. Judaism is not a proselytizing religion in principle. However, many Arabs from surrounding countries chose to become “Palestinian”. British studies from 1947 show that the residency of over 60% of the Arabs living in the Mandate post-dated the British Mandate for Palestine itself. That means, in plain words, that over 60% of the Palestinian refugees were not indigenous Palestinians at all, but Syrians, Iraqis, Lebanese, Egyptian, Libyan, Moroccan, Tunisian, Algerian, etc. They had come from all over the Arab world to take advantage of the prosperity offered in the Mandate by the British and by the Jews while their own countries stagnated economically.

According to the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics, fully 68% of the Jewish population of Israel is at least partly “Mizrahi”, meaning that one or both parents are indigenous to the Middle East (and, in many cases, physically indistinguishable from “pure” Arabs). Where will you send all those who were expelled from the Arab states between 1948 and 1970? They make up over half the country’s Jewish population. Will you agree that the Arab governments return the land, businesses, homes, bank accounts and other assets stolen from these Jews when they were expelled from the Arab states with one suitcase each and $50?

About 900,000 Jews were expelled from Arab states. This is almost 1.5 times the number of Palestinian Arabs who claimed refugee status. While Israel absorbed around 650,000 of these Jewish refugees, 21 Arab states refused to absorb even one Palestinian refugee. Contemporary estimates place the assets stolen from these Jewish refugees at well over $20 billion – much more than three times the collective Palestinian claim. Families who had lived in those countries for more than 2,500 years (more than 1,000 years before the Arabs came along in their conquering mania) were expelled by Arab who came 1,000 years after them. These expulsions were a “punishment” inflicted on the Jews from Arab states in a fit of spite by those Arab governments because they didn’t keep their promises to “throw the Jews into the sea” and “create a slaughter the like of which the world has never seen”.

When you demand “justice” for the Palestinian Arabs, be sure to demand the same justice for the Jewish refugees expelled from Arab lands purely for spite. Even before the expulsions, Arab countries enacted anti-Jewish laws that made the Nazi Nuremberg Laws seem tame.

There are always two sides to every story, and each side presents a rather different story. The truth lies somewhere in between the two versions, and it would be honest to attempt to find the truth, rather than believe one side or the other implicity.

Here are some links for you to learn about some of the things I mentioned here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_exodus_from_Arab_lands (Wikipedia)

http://www.americansephardifederation.org/sub/sources/jewish_refugees.asp (American Sepharadi Federation)

http://www.jimena.org/ (Jews Indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa organization)

http://www.jcpa.org/jpsr/jpsr-beker-f05.htm (Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs)

http://middleeastfacts.com/Articles/history-of-jews-in-arab-countries.php (Middle East Facts)

http://www.meforum.org/263/why-jews-fled-the-arab-countries (Middle East Forum)

You will not find the information on these sites in any pro-Palestinian book, magazine, website or pamphlet. Do you have the courage to read them and find out some truths that I guarantee you won’t like?

Once again, there are no responses to any of my comments, facts, references or arguments, just more rhetoric.

“Taxonomic nomenclature aside, the 3 scientific designations are Caucasoid, Mongoloid, and Negroid or the politically correct variation of European, Asian or African. Arab is not Caucasian it is Asian and I stated ethnic designation.”

Unfortunately, anthropologists disagree with you. Arabs are classified as members of the Caucasoid race.

‘The term Caucasian (or Caucasoid) race has been used to denote the general physical type of some or all of the indigenous populations of Europe, North Africa, the Horn of Africa, West Asia, Central Asia and South Asia. Historically, the term has been used to describe the entire population of these regions, without regard necessarily to skin tone.’
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caucasian_race

“Whatever, it is non-indigenous peoples occupying territory and displacing the inhabitants. And yes, it happens all over the world, I know.”

Unfortunately for your argument, both Middle Eastern and European Jews share a number of genomes that strongly indicate common ancestry. The entire group also shares certain “Middle Eastern” genomes with other ethnic groups indigenous to the Middle East. Geneticists have no doubts that Jews (all Jews, not just the “Mizrahim”) originated in the Middle East.

‘A study published by the National Academy of Sciences found that ”the paternal gene pools of Jewish communities from Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East descended from a common Middle Eastern ancestral population”’
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jew (see the section, “Genetic Studies”)

What we have is two groups of indigenous Middle Eastern people claiming the same piece of land, one with a far longer consecutive residence (more than double) in the area, rather than one indigenous and one non-indigenous, as you claim.

“It would be like harassing Native Americans to get them to move out of America and let the Caucasoid/Europeans have the country. Where would they go? They are Mongoloid/Asian, how far back do you go before you can say that there where no inhabitants so the land is up for grabs? One generation? Two generations, ten or maybe a thousand? How about ten thousand years?”

On the contrary, it would be more like one Native American tribe fighting another for a particular hunting ground. The basic fallacies of your comparison lie in the facts that: 1) the Native Americans had no concept of land ownership, and 2) your refusal to accept the fact that the Jews are also indigenous to the Middle East.

“By your faulty reasoning, anyone on the planet could claim ancestry and occupy any nation on Earth.”

Kindly explain how my reasoning is faulty. Genetic studies prove that Jews are of Middle Eastern origin. Historical censuses show us that there were Jews all over the Middle East as the result of several empires (Babylonian, Greek, Roman) dispersing them from their original homeland, Israel, as early as the 6th century BCE. The same censuses show a continuous, unbroken residency of Jews in Israel over a far longer period of time (since the 11th century BCE) than Arabs lived in the area after their expansion from the Arabian Peninsula (beginning in the 7th century CE). That’s a differential of 1,800 years. Unless you accept the Islamic claim that any land once conquered by Muslims must remain Islamic land for eternity, no matter who may re-conquer it from Muslims, it may very well be your logic that’s faulty.

”Genetic studies prove that Jews are of Middle Eastern origin.”


Hahahahaha, amazing that some people think religion can be found in DNA!