Muslim, Christian graves in Jaffa defaced with racist slogans

[European blood]

Adjacent cemeteries in South Tel Aviv desecrated with graffiti saying ‘Death to Arabs’ over the Yom Kippur holiday.

Two cemeteries in Jaffa were desecrated on Friday, the eve of Yom Kippur, when headstones were smashed and racist slogans were spray-painted on graves. The two cemeteries, one Muslim and the other Christian, were vandalized by graffiti that said “Death to the Arabs”, and “Price Tag”, Channel 10 reported.

President of the Islamic Movement in Jaffa, Sheikh Ahme Abu Ajwa, said, “This is an attempt by extremists to incite the Arab masses,” calling for calm. United Arab List-Ta’al party leader MK Ibrahim Sarsur called upon the perpetrators, whoever they may be, “to end the racist attacks.”

Recently, there have been numerous attacks on Muslim places of worship in Israel and the West Bank.

A mosque was burned in the Galilee Bedouin village of Tuba-Zangariyya on Sunday night. The entire interior of the mosque went up in flames, causing heavy damage, and holy books inside the mosque were burned. Graffiti with the words “price tag” was found on the wall of the mosque.

A mosque in the West Bank village of Qusra, south of Nablus, was set on fire in early September. According to Palestinian sources, a group of settlers arrived at the village mosque at approximately 3 A.M., threw burning tires toward it, and broke several of its windows.

That attack occurred only hours after Israel security forces evacuated buildings in the Jewish settlement of Migron.

A suspected 'price tag' attack took place in Maghayer village near Ramallah in June. An initial investigation showed that Jewish settlers rolled burning tires into the mosque, which caused some rugs to catch fire. The mosque was also sprayed with graffiti.

The village is located near the Alei Ayin outpost, where the Israeli security forces demolished illegal structures the week previous.

In December 2009, a mosque was torched in the West Bank village of Yasuf, and Jewish settlers were suspected in the attack. In that attack, it was alleged that the perpetrators were angry over the 10-month construction freeze on Jewish settlements in the West Bank.

According to the Shin Bet, the right-wing extremists no longer appear to need a "trigger" to take action, while the targets of the violence are also widening - military vehicles at an IDF base near Ramallah have been vandalized, and threatening graffiti has been sprayed onto the apartment door of a left-wing activist.

Attacks on Arabs and their property are carried out when the opportunity arises, the Shin Bet officials added.

http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomac...ttack-1.388822


Mosque Set on Fire in Northern Israel

JERUSALEM — A mosque in an Arab village in northern Israel was set on fire early Monday in what the police called an arson attack, and an outside wall was defaced with Hebrew graffiti.

The attack followed a series of similar assaults on mosques in the West Bank by arsonists suspected of being radical settlers as part of a campaign known as “price tag,” which seeks to exact a price from local Palestinians for violence against settlers or from Israeli security forces for taking action against illegal construction in Jewish outposts in the West Bank.

The attack on Monday was in the village of Tuba-Zangariya, in Galilee, where calm had prevailed for years.

The mosque was seriously damaged, said Micky Rosenfeld, a police spokesman. Images showed burned carpets and holy books and charred walls.

Mosque Set on Fire in Israeli Arab Village, Tuba-Zangariya - NYTimes.com


Israel copes with bout of extremist violence

JERUSALEM (AP) — A new rogue element has emerged in the Israeli-Palestinian gallery: Unknown assailants, widely assumed to be Jewish extremists, have vandalized Muslim cemeteries, mosques and farmlands in a spate of attacks that have put the country on edge.

These attacks, which in recent days have spread from the West Bank into Israel proper, have stoked fears of heightened violence and sparked increasingly agitated calls to find and punish the assailants. On Sunday, Israeli leaders chimed in with condemnations, and police said they were stepping up efforts to halt the violence.

"It's against everything that the Jewish people stand for, as a country and as a democracy," said President Shimon Peres, a Nobel peace laureate. "I am sure that our police will apprehend all the people who did this, the criminals, and we shall not let them walk free."

In the latest incident, vandals sprayed-painted "Death to the Arabs" in Muslim and Christian cemeteries in the Jaffa section of Tel Aviv. The rampage, discovered late Saturday after Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar, followed a mosque burning last week in an Arab village in northern Israel. The torching set off violent clashes between residents and police in a town that has historically been a model of coexistence.

The two incidents were among the first to take place inside Israel, where Arab residents, in contrast with their Palestinian brethren in the neighboring West Bank, are citizens.

For several years, Israeli settlers have frequently attacked Palestinian targets in the West Bank, vandalizing mosques and uprooting olive trees.

These attacks are meant to protest Israeli government policies seen as sympathetic to the Palestinians, who hope to make the West Bank part of an independent state. Nationalist settlers oppose a Palestinian state on what they say is land promised to the Jews in the Bible.

On Sunday, some 100 settlers attacked a group of Palestinian villagers in their olive groves near Nablus in the northern West Bank with sticks and stones, witnesses said. The army said it rushed to the scene and broke up the clash, allowing the farmers to harvest their crop.

At times, the Israeli army itself has become a target of the settlers, with vandals stoning or slashing the tires of military vehicles. Last week, a crowd of settlers erected a makeshift roadblock to stop a military patrol and clashed with soldiers who got out of a vehicle to clear the road.

The latest bouts of violence appear to be connected to Israel's decision last month to demolish several illegally built structures in the unauthorized West Bank settler outpost of Migron. Settlers are also furious over the death of an Israeli settler and his infant son in a car accident caused by Palestinian stone throwers.

But the spike in West Bank violence has been growing for some time. According to United Nations figures, the number of incidents of settler violence resulting in Palestinian injuries or property damage has risen to 333 this year, compared with 217 in the same period last year.

Israeli human rights groups say the settler violence is the result of years of Israel's unwillingness or inability to take action. The Yesh Din advocacy group, for instance, found that in 642 police complaints filed by West Bank Palestinians between 2005-2010, less than 10 percent resulted in indictments.

Sarit Michaeli of B'Tselem, another rights group, accused Israel of fomenting a "sense of impunity" among settlers.

That may be changing now that the violence is spreading to Israel proper.

It took a matter of hours for Israeli police to make an arrest in last Monday's mosque burning. The suspect, who denied involvement, was identified as an 18-year-old man who until recently, studied at a Jewish seminary in an ultranationalist West Bank settlement. Another suspect was arrested Sunday, Israel Radio reported.

Officials from the police, army and Shin Bet internal security service all said they take the violence extremely seriously. Police said they have stepped up patrols around Arab villages in Israel and are in contact with local Arab leaders to calm tensions.

Settler leaders condemn the violence and say it is the work of a fringe minority.

On Sunday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel would not tolerate vandalism against any religious site. "I have instructed the security forces to bring those responsible to justice. We will act against to the fullest extent of the law," he told his Cabinet.

Israeli historian Gershom Gorenberg, whose book "The Unmaking of Israel" deals extensively with settler extremism, said the shift to Israel could mark a change in tactics.

"They are carrying out symbolic actions intended to cause wider conflict between the Palestinian and Jewish populations," he said. "They know this is an escalation, and their goal is to incite that conflict."

http://news.yahoo.com/israel-copes-b...180603798.html