❶ ‘Kill Palestinians to get closer to God,’ Israeli rabbi says

• background from Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal Of Jewish Studies

❷ Israeli forces injure 15 Palestinians in Dura with live fire, rubber bullets
❸ Police allowed to shoot stone throwers: Botched redaction reveals rules of engagement

• background from Journal Of Community Psychology

❹ “We’ll never give up”
❺ POETRY by  Dalia Taha
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❶ ‘KILL  PALESTINIANS  TO  GET  CLOSER  TO  GOD,’  ISRAELI  RABBI  SAYS
Days of Palestine
July 5, 2016
An Israeli Jewish rabbi described on Sunday the Palestinians as “monsters,” calling for slaughtering them to “get closer to God.”
___Chief Rabbi of Safed and Member of the Israeli Chief Rabbinate Council Shmuel Eliyahu said: “The Palestinians are monsters and killing them is a religious duty.”     MORE . . .

from Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal Of Jewish Studies
. . . .  The restraint policy regarding inciting rabbis was sustained up until 2006. Then the Legal Advisor to the Government, Menachem Mazuz, ordered pressing charges against Rabbi Shmuel Eliyahu, Chief Rabbi of the city of Safed.
[. . . .]  Eliyahu published statements on the internet site Moriah. . .  saying that the members of the Jewish terror underground that was operating during the 1980s and that had killed Arabs were “completely righteous.” He also said, “I don’t think they are lowly murderers. Heaven forbid! They have already paid their price to society.”
[. . . .]  Rabbi Eliyahu made a plea bargain with the state to avoid trial on incitement to racism charges, and promised to make a public announcement refuting a number of previous slanderous statements made against Israeli Arabs.
[. . . .] Rabbi Eliyahu had no reason to change his views. . . .  In 2008, Rabbi Eliyahu called on the government to carry out “state-sanctioned revenge” against Arabs in order to, in his words, “restore Israel’s deterrence.” . . . . Rabbi Eliyahu wrote: “It’s time to call the child by its name: Revenge, revenge, revenge. We mustn’t forget. We have to take horrible revenge . . .”
[. . . .] The Eliyahu saga continues at the time of this writing [2013]. In November of 2011, Legal Advisor to the Government Yehuda Weinstein ordered the opening of a criminal investigation against Rabbi Eliyahu as he continues with his racist and inflammatory diatribes against Arabs.

• Cohen-Almagor, Raphael. “Religious, Hateful, And Racist Speech In Israel.” Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal Of Jewish Studies 31.2 (2013): 95-117.    ARTICLE.

❷ ISRAELI  FORCES  INJURE  15  PALESTINIANS  IN  DURA  WITH  LIVE  FIRE,  RUBBER  BULLETS
Ma’an New Agency
July 6, 2016
Five Palestinians were injured with live fire and ten others with rubber-coated steel bullets, while several more suffered from tear gas inhalation on Wednesday as Israeli forces raided the city of Dura after midnight in the southern occupied West Bank district of Hebron.
___Sources at the Palestinian Red Crescent told Ma’an that ambulances carried dozens of Palestinians to hospitals in the Hebron area who suffered from light to medium injuries, with one sustaining critical injuries.      MORE . . .   

❸ POLICE  ALLOWED  TO  SHOOT  STONE  THROWERS:  BOTCHED  REDACTION  REVEALS  RULES  OF  ENGAGEMENT
+972 Magazine
July 5, 2016
Israel Police revealed its live-fire rules of engagement Monday in response to a court petition filed by civil rights group Adalah. Parts of the document were redacted with a black marker, but was done so sloppily that large parts of the redaction is still readable.
___The Israel Police’s rules of engagement and escalation of force regulations, which were secret until Monday, were written and implemented last December, coinciding with increased violence in Jerusalem and the West Bank. The document dictates when a police officer can draw his or her weapon, when he or she can fire it, and in what manner.  MORE . . .

From Journal Of Community Psychology
This is a classic “limit situation.” As noted, there is resistance, and although this has in part been armed, it is overwhelmingly nonviolent. Most Palestinians have never handled a gun. The two intifadas (uprisings) used economic boycotts, strikes, and civil disobedience as well as the more widely reported violent tactics. However, in certain areas there is a celebration of martyrs of the struggle that emphasizes military prowess, for example, with photomontages that add heavy calibre weapons to their photographs. At the same time there is a rich use of other imagery, for example, the keys that symbolize return, and the murals depicting villages from which people were expelled or fled. One consequence is the overwhelming definition of Palestinian identity in terms of the collective struggle. Although this has its valuable side, there is also a cost in terms of positive personal narratives. . .
[. . . .]   . . . there is no real boundary between political and community psychology. The political is ultimately about community and the community is itself political, both internally and in its external relations that are reflected in the social psychological life of its members. Community psychological praxis is different in different contexts, but is always concerned with questions of power, belonging, amelioration, and transformation.

• Burton, Mark. “Community Psychology Under Colonial Occupation: The Case Of Palestine.” Journal Of Community Psychology 43.1 (2015): 119-123.  SOURCE.

❹ “WE’LL NEVER GIVE UP”
The Electronic Intifada
Patricia de Blas
1 July 2016
“We love our land and we will fight.”
___So reads a mural painted on a wall in Kafr Qaddum, a Palestinian village in the northern occupied West Bank.
___The slogan, adorned with butterflies in the color of the Palestinian flag flying over a barbed wire fence, is the backdrop to the regular demonstrations against the Israeli occupation held in the village since July 2011.
___For five years now, villagers have protested every week, demanding access to the main road leading to the city of Nablus and other nearby towns.
___The Israeli military closed that road in 2003 during the height of the second intifada under the pretext of providing security to the approximately 4,000 settlers living in nearby Kedumim.     MORE . . . 

“FACE,” BY DALIA TAHA
A sky fell into
the braid
of the little girl who was killed.
Her face
is a wind in the shadows
of the garden,
blowing without colour
or blushing
when the air rushes through.

As if she knew,
when the jackals emerged
from her shadow and the river widened
in the disappointment
of whiteness.

As if she knew, when the sparrows
ate her eyes
and the sidewalk walked
in her blood.

The woman treads on dead
jasmine, searching
the minutes
for her hand.
She hides half her face,
and the air is filled with
the fingers of nothingness.

She pokes a hole in the poem
so the sidewalks can
wander into it.

The little girl’s hand withers and her blood
slumbers in
the lake.
When God passed over
her name,
she buried her hands in the heights of the jasmine
and covered her nakedness
with the corpses of the invaders.
―Translated by Allison Blecker

From Banipal 45: Magazine of Modern Arab Literature. Winter 2012. WWW.banipal.co.uk
Dalia Taha is a Palestinian poet and playwright. She was born in Berlin 1986 but grew up in Ramallah-Palestine. Her first play “Keffiyeh/Made in China” was produced by the Flemish Royal Theater [and] was premiered in Brussels in 2012, then brought to Palestine where it toured 7 Palestinian cities across the west bank.  (More. . .)
An Interview with Dalia Taha