15 dec 2015
Group Breaking the Silence giving a tour in the Old City of Hebron
Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Ya'alon said, on Tuesday, that he had banned Israeli veteran group Breaking the Silence from participating in any official activities with Israeli forces, Israeli media reported.
Ya'alon's statement was made on social media, where he called the left-wing veteran group hypocrites spreading "false propaganda" against Israeli forces and the state of Israel in attempt to "delegitimize" them, according to Ma'an.
Breaking the Silence responded to the comment on social media, saying that the group has been under attack for the past several months, "through a pre-meditated campaign, in which members of the extreme right-wing, including Israeli parliamentarians and elected officials, along with public figures and right-wing organizations, are trying to silence both us and every debate related to the 48-year-long occupation."
Breaking the Silence is an organization comprised of Israeli veterans who served in combat "and have taken it upon themselves to expose the Israeli public to the reality of everyday life in the Occupied Territor(y)."
The group produces videos, collects testimonies and gives lectures -- mostly within Israel, but sometimes abroad -- on war crimes committed by Israeli leadership through its military since 1967.
The heated debate follows the brief detainment of an Israeli soldier as he entered the UK, last week, for alleged war crimes committed against Palestinians during Israel's 2014 Gaza offensive.
Pro-Palestinian groups across the world have collected names of those involved in the 50-day offensive, which resulted in the death of over 2,100 Palestinians in Gaza, most of whom were civilians, as well as 64 Israeli soldiers and six Israeli civilians. The names were reported to various international justice systems as war criminals under international law.
Following the offensive, international groups such as the United Nations and Amnesty International conducted investigations into the campaign dubbed "Operation Protective Edge" and found that the Israeli military and Palestinian militant groups were both responsible for war crimes.
Following the UK's detainment of the soldier, who has not been identified, Israel's Defense Ministry and leaders within the Israeli forces contacted the UK government and arranged his release.
Earlier this month, right-wing Knesset members from the Likud party proposed a bill that would limit foreign-backed NGOs from working within Israel. The purpose of the bill is reportedly an attempt to curb the influence of left-wing NGOs on Israeli policy and public opinion, both domestically and abroad.
The proposal is one of several bills which have been criticized by Israeli rights' groups such as Breaking the Silence, B'Tselem and Peace Now.
Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Ya'alon said, on Tuesday, that he had banned Israeli veteran group Breaking the Silence from participating in any official activities with Israeli forces, Israeli media reported.
Ya'alon's statement was made on social media, where he called the left-wing veteran group hypocrites spreading "false propaganda" against Israeli forces and the state of Israel in attempt to "delegitimize" them, according to Ma'an.
Breaking the Silence responded to the comment on social media, saying that the group has been under attack for the past several months, "through a pre-meditated campaign, in which members of the extreme right-wing, including Israeli parliamentarians and elected officials, along with public figures and right-wing organizations, are trying to silence both us and every debate related to the 48-year-long occupation."
Breaking the Silence is an organization comprised of Israeli veterans who served in combat "and have taken it upon themselves to expose the Israeli public to the reality of everyday life in the Occupied Territor(y)."
The group produces videos, collects testimonies and gives lectures -- mostly within Israel, but sometimes abroad -- on war crimes committed by Israeli leadership through its military since 1967.
The heated debate follows the brief detainment of an Israeli soldier as he entered the UK, last week, for alleged war crimes committed against Palestinians during Israel's 2014 Gaza offensive.
Pro-Palestinian groups across the world have collected names of those involved in the 50-day offensive, which resulted in the death of over 2,100 Palestinians in Gaza, most of whom were civilians, as well as 64 Israeli soldiers and six Israeli civilians. The names were reported to various international justice systems as war criminals under international law.
Following the offensive, international groups such as the United Nations and Amnesty International conducted investigations into the campaign dubbed "Operation Protective Edge" and found that the Israeli military and Palestinian militant groups were both responsible for war crimes.
Following the UK's detainment of the soldier, who has not been identified, Israel's Defense Ministry and leaders within the Israeli forces contacted the UK government and arranged his release.
Earlier this month, right-wing Knesset members from the Likud party proposed a bill that would limit foreign-backed NGOs from working within Israel. The purpose of the bill is reportedly an attempt to curb the influence of left-wing NGOs on Israeli policy and public opinion, both domestically and abroad.
The proposal is one of several bills which have been criticized by Israeli rights' groups such as Breaking the Silence, B'Tselem and Peace Now.
24 oct 2015
By Shlomo Sand
During the first half of the 20th century, my father abandoned Talmudic school, permanently stopped going to synagogue, and regularly expressed his aversion to rabbis.
At this point in my own life, in the early 21st century, I feel in turn a moral obligation to break definitively with tribal Judeocentrism. I am today fully conscious of having never been a genuinely secular Jew, understanding that such an imaginary characteristic lacks any specific basis or cultural perspective, and that its existence is based on a hollow and ethnocentric view of the world.
Earlier I mistakenly believed that the Yiddish culture of the family I grew up in was the embodiment of Jewish culture. A little later, inspired by Bernard Lazare, Mordechai Anielewicz, Marcel Rayman and Marek Edelman – who all fought antisemitism, nazism and Stalinism without adopting an ethnocentric view – I identified as part of an oppressed and rejected minority.
In the company, so to speak, of the socialist leader Léon Blum, the poet Julian Tuwim and many others, I stubbornly remained a Jew who had accepted this identity on account of persecutions and murderers, crimes and their victims.
Now, having painfully become aware that I have undergone an adherence to Israel, been assimilated by law into a fictitious ethnos of persecutors and their supporters, and have appeared in the world as one of the exclusive club of the elect and their acolytes, I wish to resign and cease considering myself a Jew.
Although the state of Israel is not disposed to transform my official nationality from “Jew” to “Israeli”, I dare to hope that kindly philosemites, committed Zionists and exalted anti-Zionists, all of them so often nourished on essentialist conceptions, will respect my desire and cease to catalogue me as a Jew. As a matter of fact, what they think matters little to me, and still less what the remaining antisemitic idiots think. In the light of the historic tragedies of the 20th century, I am determined no longer to be a small minority in an exclusive club that others have neither the possibility nor the qualifications to join.
By my refusal to be a Jew, I represent a species in the course of disappearing. I know that by insisting that only my historical past was Jewish, while my everyday present (for better or worse) is Israeli, and finally that my future and that of my children (at least the future I wish for) must be guided by universal, open and generous principles, I run counter to the dominant fashion, which is oriented towards ethnocentrism.
As a historian of the modern age, I put forward the hypothesis that the cultural distance between my great-grandson and me will be as great or greater than that separating me from my own great-grandfather. All the better! I have the misfortune of living now among too many people who believe their descendants will resemble them in all respects, because for them peoples are eternal – a fortiori a race-people such as the Jews.
I am aware of living in one of the most racist societies in the western world. Racism is present to some degree everywhere, but in Israel it exists deep within the spirit of the laws. It is taught in schools and colleges, spread in the media, and above all and most dreadful, in Israel the racists do not know what they are doing and, because of this, feel in no way obliged to apologise. This absence of a need for self-justification has made Israel a particularly prized reference point for many movements of the far right throughout the world, movements whose past history of antisemitism is only too well known.
To live in such a society has become increasingly intolerable to me, but I must also admit that it is no less difficult to make my home elsewhere. I am myself a part of the cultural, linguistic and even conceptual production of the Zionist enterprise, and I cannot undo this. By my everyday life and my basic culture I am an Israeli. I am not especially proud of this, just as I have no reason to take pride in being a man with brown eyes and of average height. I am often even ashamed of Israel, particularly when I witness evidence of its cruel military colonisation, with its weak and defenceless victims who are not part of the “chosen people”.
Earlier in my life I had a fleeting utopian dream that a Palestinian Israeli should feel as much at home in Tel Aviv as a Jewish American does in New York. I struggled and sought for the civil life of a Muslim Israeli in Jerusalem to be similar to that of the Jewish French person whose home is in Paris. I wanted Israeli children of Christian African immigrants to be treated as the British children of immigrants from the Indian subcontinent are in London. I hoped with all my heart that all Israeli children would be educated together in the same schools. Today I know that my dream is outrageously demanding, that my demands are exaggerated and impertinent, that the very fact of formulating them is viewed by Zionists and their supporters as an attack on the Jewish character of the state of Israel, and thus as antisemitism.
However, strange as it may seem, and in contrast to the locked-in character of secular Jewish identity, treating Israeli identity as politico-cultural rather than “ethnic” does appear to offer the potential for achieving an open and inclusive identity. According to the law, in fact, it is possible to be an Israeli citizen without being a secular “ethnic” Jew, to participate in its “supra-culture” while preserving one’s “infra-culture”, to speak the hegemonic language and cultivate in parallel another language, to maintain varied ways of life and fuse different ones together. To consolidate this republican political potential, it would be necessary, of course, to have long abandoned tribal hermeticism, to learn to respect the Other and welcome him or her as an equal, and to change the constitutional laws of Israel to make them compatible with democratic principles.
Most important, if it has been momentarily forgotten: before we put forward ideas on changing Israel’s identity policy, we must first free ourselves from the accursed and interminable occupation that is leading us on the road to hell. In fact, our relation to those who are second-class citizens of Israel is inextricably bound up with our relation to those who live in immense distress at the bottom of the chain of the Zionist rescue operation. That oppressed population, which has lived under the occupation for close to 50 years, deprived of political and civil rights, on land that the “state of the Jews” considers its own, remains abandoned and ignored by international politics. I recognise today that my dream of an end to the occupation and the creation of a confederation between two republics, Israeli and Palestinian, was a chimera that underestimated the balance of forces between the two parties.
Increasingly it appears to be already too late; all seems already lost, and any serious approach to a political solution is deadlocked. Israel has grown used to this, and is unable to rid itself of its colonial domination over another people. The world outside, unfortunately, does not do what is needed either. Its remorse and bad conscience prevent it from convincing Israel to withdraw to the 1948 frontiers. Nor is Israel ready to annex the occupied territories officially, as it would then have to grant equal citizenship to the occupied population and, by that fact alone, transform itself into a binational state. It’s rather like the mythological serpent that swallowed too big a victim, but prefers to choke rather than to abandon it.
Does this mean I, too, must abandon hope? I inhabit a deep contradiction. I feel like an exile in the face of the growing Jewish ethnicisation that surrounds me, while at the same time the language in which I speak, write and dream is overwhelmingly Hebrew. When I find myself abroad, I feel nostalgia for this language, the vehicle of my emotions and thoughts. When I am far from Israel, I see my street corner in Tel Aviv and look forward to the moment I can return to it. I do not go to synagogues to dissipate this nostalgia, because they pray there in a language that is not mine, and the people I meet there have absolutely no interest in understanding what being Israeli means for me.
In London it is the universities and their students of both sexes, not the Talmudic schools (where there are no female students), that remind me of the campus where I work. In New York it is the Manhattan cafes, not the Brooklyn enclaves, that invite and attract me, like those of Tel Aviv. And when I visit the teeming Paris bookstores, what comes to my mind is the Hebrew book week organised each year in Israel, not the sacred literature of my ancestors.
My deep attachment to the place serves only to fuel the pessimism I feel towards it. And so I often plunge into despondency about the present and fear for the future. I am tired, and feel that the last leaves of reason are falling from our tree of political action, leaving us barren in the face of the caprices of the sleepwalking sorcerers of the tribe. But I cannot allow myself to be completely fatalistic. I dare to believe that if humanity succeeded in emerging from the 20th century without a nuclear war, everything is possible, even in the Middle East. We should remember the words of Theodor Herzl, the dreamer responsible for the fact that I am an Israeli: “If you will it, it is no legend.”
As a scion of the persecuted who emerged from the European hell of the 1940s without having abandoned the hope of a better life, I did not receive permission from the frightened archangel of history to abdicate and despair. Which is why, in order to hasten a different tomorrow, and whatever my detractors say, I shall continue to write.
During the first half of the 20th century, my father abandoned Talmudic school, permanently stopped going to synagogue, and regularly expressed his aversion to rabbis.
At this point in my own life, in the early 21st century, I feel in turn a moral obligation to break definitively with tribal Judeocentrism. I am today fully conscious of having never been a genuinely secular Jew, understanding that such an imaginary characteristic lacks any specific basis or cultural perspective, and that its existence is based on a hollow and ethnocentric view of the world.
Earlier I mistakenly believed that the Yiddish culture of the family I grew up in was the embodiment of Jewish culture. A little later, inspired by Bernard Lazare, Mordechai Anielewicz, Marcel Rayman and Marek Edelman – who all fought antisemitism, nazism and Stalinism without adopting an ethnocentric view – I identified as part of an oppressed and rejected minority.
In the company, so to speak, of the socialist leader Léon Blum, the poet Julian Tuwim and many others, I stubbornly remained a Jew who had accepted this identity on account of persecutions and murderers, crimes and their victims.
Now, having painfully become aware that I have undergone an adherence to Israel, been assimilated by law into a fictitious ethnos of persecutors and their supporters, and have appeared in the world as one of the exclusive club of the elect and their acolytes, I wish to resign and cease considering myself a Jew.
Although the state of Israel is not disposed to transform my official nationality from “Jew” to “Israeli”, I dare to hope that kindly philosemites, committed Zionists and exalted anti-Zionists, all of them so often nourished on essentialist conceptions, will respect my desire and cease to catalogue me as a Jew. As a matter of fact, what they think matters little to me, and still less what the remaining antisemitic idiots think. In the light of the historic tragedies of the 20th century, I am determined no longer to be a small minority in an exclusive club that others have neither the possibility nor the qualifications to join.
By my refusal to be a Jew, I represent a species in the course of disappearing. I know that by insisting that only my historical past was Jewish, while my everyday present (for better or worse) is Israeli, and finally that my future and that of my children (at least the future I wish for) must be guided by universal, open and generous principles, I run counter to the dominant fashion, which is oriented towards ethnocentrism.
As a historian of the modern age, I put forward the hypothesis that the cultural distance between my great-grandson and me will be as great or greater than that separating me from my own great-grandfather. All the better! I have the misfortune of living now among too many people who believe their descendants will resemble them in all respects, because for them peoples are eternal – a fortiori a race-people such as the Jews.
I am aware of living in one of the most racist societies in the western world. Racism is present to some degree everywhere, but in Israel it exists deep within the spirit of the laws. It is taught in schools and colleges, spread in the media, and above all and most dreadful, in Israel the racists do not know what they are doing and, because of this, feel in no way obliged to apologise. This absence of a need for self-justification has made Israel a particularly prized reference point for many movements of the far right throughout the world, movements whose past history of antisemitism is only too well known.
To live in such a society has become increasingly intolerable to me, but I must also admit that it is no less difficult to make my home elsewhere. I am myself a part of the cultural, linguistic and even conceptual production of the Zionist enterprise, and I cannot undo this. By my everyday life and my basic culture I am an Israeli. I am not especially proud of this, just as I have no reason to take pride in being a man with brown eyes and of average height. I am often even ashamed of Israel, particularly when I witness evidence of its cruel military colonisation, with its weak and defenceless victims who are not part of the “chosen people”.
Earlier in my life I had a fleeting utopian dream that a Palestinian Israeli should feel as much at home in Tel Aviv as a Jewish American does in New York. I struggled and sought for the civil life of a Muslim Israeli in Jerusalem to be similar to that of the Jewish French person whose home is in Paris. I wanted Israeli children of Christian African immigrants to be treated as the British children of immigrants from the Indian subcontinent are in London. I hoped with all my heart that all Israeli children would be educated together in the same schools. Today I know that my dream is outrageously demanding, that my demands are exaggerated and impertinent, that the very fact of formulating them is viewed by Zionists and their supporters as an attack on the Jewish character of the state of Israel, and thus as antisemitism.
However, strange as it may seem, and in contrast to the locked-in character of secular Jewish identity, treating Israeli identity as politico-cultural rather than “ethnic” does appear to offer the potential for achieving an open and inclusive identity. According to the law, in fact, it is possible to be an Israeli citizen without being a secular “ethnic” Jew, to participate in its “supra-culture” while preserving one’s “infra-culture”, to speak the hegemonic language and cultivate in parallel another language, to maintain varied ways of life and fuse different ones together. To consolidate this republican political potential, it would be necessary, of course, to have long abandoned tribal hermeticism, to learn to respect the Other and welcome him or her as an equal, and to change the constitutional laws of Israel to make them compatible with democratic principles.
Most important, if it has been momentarily forgotten: before we put forward ideas on changing Israel’s identity policy, we must first free ourselves from the accursed and interminable occupation that is leading us on the road to hell. In fact, our relation to those who are second-class citizens of Israel is inextricably bound up with our relation to those who live in immense distress at the bottom of the chain of the Zionist rescue operation. That oppressed population, which has lived under the occupation for close to 50 years, deprived of political and civil rights, on land that the “state of the Jews” considers its own, remains abandoned and ignored by international politics. I recognise today that my dream of an end to the occupation and the creation of a confederation between two republics, Israeli and Palestinian, was a chimera that underestimated the balance of forces between the two parties.
Increasingly it appears to be already too late; all seems already lost, and any serious approach to a political solution is deadlocked. Israel has grown used to this, and is unable to rid itself of its colonial domination over another people. The world outside, unfortunately, does not do what is needed either. Its remorse and bad conscience prevent it from convincing Israel to withdraw to the 1948 frontiers. Nor is Israel ready to annex the occupied territories officially, as it would then have to grant equal citizenship to the occupied population and, by that fact alone, transform itself into a binational state. It’s rather like the mythological serpent that swallowed too big a victim, but prefers to choke rather than to abandon it.
Does this mean I, too, must abandon hope? I inhabit a deep contradiction. I feel like an exile in the face of the growing Jewish ethnicisation that surrounds me, while at the same time the language in which I speak, write and dream is overwhelmingly Hebrew. When I find myself abroad, I feel nostalgia for this language, the vehicle of my emotions and thoughts. When I am far from Israel, I see my street corner in Tel Aviv and look forward to the moment I can return to it. I do not go to synagogues to dissipate this nostalgia, because they pray there in a language that is not mine, and the people I meet there have absolutely no interest in understanding what being Israeli means for me.
In London it is the universities and their students of both sexes, not the Talmudic schools (where there are no female students), that remind me of the campus where I work. In New York it is the Manhattan cafes, not the Brooklyn enclaves, that invite and attract me, like those of Tel Aviv. And when I visit the teeming Paris bookstores, what comes to my mind is the Hebrew book week organised each year in Israel, not the sacred literature of my ancestors.
My deep attachment to the place serves only to fuel the pessimism I feel towards it. And so I often plunge into despondency about the present and fear for the future. I am tired, and feel that the last leaves of reason are falling from our tree of political action, leaving us barren in the face of the caprices of the sleepwalking sorcerers of the tribe. But I cannot allow myself to be completely fatalistic. I dare to believe that if humanity succeeded in emerging from the 20th century without a nuclear war, everything is possible, even in the Middle East. We should remember the words of Theodor Herzl, the dreamer responsible for the fact that I am an Israeli: “If you will it, it is no legend.”
As a scion of the persecuted who emerged from the European hell of the 1940s without having abandoned the hope of a better life, I did not receive permission from the frightened archangel of history to abdicate and despair. Which is why, in order to hasten a different tomorrow, and whatever my detractors say, I shall continue to write.
1 oct 2015
New Reports: Pro-Palestine Groups at U.S. Colleges Face Intimidation, False Charges
Two new reports were released today documenting a widespread campaign on college campuses across the U-S to stifle free speech on the issue of Israel and Palestine.
The first report, co-authored by the Center for Constitutional Rights and the group Palestine Legal, examined nearly 300 incidents of attempted suppression of pro-Palestine activism and rhetoric in the past 18 months.
The group Jewish Voice for Peace also released a report entitled ‘Stifling Dissent: How Israel’s Defenders Use False Charges of Anti-Semitism to Limit the Debate over Israel on Campus’.
The report documents efforts by Israel advocacy organizations to intervene in the debate over Israeli policies on college campuses.
Drawing on case studies over the last several years, the report documents how Israel advocacy organizations bully and intimidate Jewish students who speak dissenting views and refuse to unconditionally support Israel.
The report found that the Zionist organizations employ the following tactics to stifle dissent about Israel:
-Codifying criticism of the state of Israel as anti-Semitism,
-Intimidating faculty and students through blacklists, letters to administrators, and legal threats,
-Censoring political debate both inside and outside Jewish campus spaces
-Intervening in campus politics by directing external funds to pro-Israel student government candidates
The report recommends that campus administrators strive to create an open campus climate that is inclusive of all student perspectives by avoiding policies that conflate the state of Israel with Judaism or the Jewish people.
19 aug 2015
New Reports: Pro-Palestine Groups at U.S. Colleges Face Intimidation, False Charges
Two new reports were released today documenting a widespread campaign on college campuses across the U-S to stifle free speech on the issue of Israel and Palestine.
The first report, co-authored by the Center for Constitutional Rights and the group Palestine Legal, examined nearly 300 incidents of attempted suppression of pro-Palestine activism and rhetoric in the past 18 months.
The group Jewish Voice for Peace also released a report entitled ‘Stifling Dissent: How Israel’s Defenders Use False Charges of Anti-Semitism to Limit the Debate over Israel on Campus’.
The report documents efforts by Israel advocacy organizations to intervene in the debate over Israeli policies on college campuses.
Drawing on case studies over the last several years, the report documents how Israel advocacy organizations bully and intimidate Jewish students who speak dissenting views and refuse to unconditionally support Israel.
The report found that the Zionist organizations employ the following tactics to stifle dissent about Israel:
-Codifying criticism of the state of Israel as anti-Semitism,
-Intimidating faculty and students through blacklists, letters to administrators, and legal threats,
-Censoring political debate both inside and outside Jewish campus spaces
-Intervening in campus politics by directing external funds to pro-Israel student government candidates
The report recommends that campus administrators strive to create an open campus climate that is inclusive of all student perspectives by avoiding policies that conflate the state of Israel with Judaism or the Jewish people.
19 aug 2015
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Famous American linguist Noam Chomsky has described the actions of the Israeli occupation in Palestine as “worse than South African apartheid”.
“In the Occupied Territories, what Israel is doing is much worse than apartheid,” Chomsky says, according to Days of Palestine. “To call it apartheid is a gift to Israel, at least if by ‘apartheid’ you mean South African-style apartheid. “What is happening in the Occupied Territories is much worse. There is a crucial difference. The South African Nationalists needed the black population. That was their workforce... “The Israeli relationship to the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories is totally different. They just do not want them. They want them out, or at least in prison.” He described listening to the American mainstream media, such as CBS, like listening directly to the Israeli propaganda agencies. “It is a shameful moment for US media when it insists on being subservient to the grotesque propaganda agencies of a violent, aggressive state [Israel],” he said. Chomsky accused the United States of continuing to provide the decisive support for the [Israeli] atrocities against the Palestinians. “When what is called Israeli jet planes bomb defenceless targets in Gaza, that is US jet planes with Israeli pilots,” he said. “And the same with the |
high-tech munition and so on and so forth. So this is, again, sadism masked as compassion. Those are the actions.”
In a long interview with Democracy now, Chomsky insisted that the US is a violent state and is it exporting violence to other countries like the Israeli occupation.
In a long interview with Democracy now, Chomsky insisted that the US is a violent state and is it exporting violence to other countries like the Israeli occupation.
18 aug 2015
Rabbis seek to challange assertion that US Jewry is united in its opposition to the deal as Iran said to acquire Russian air-defense missiles in new agreement.
More than 300 American rabbis wrote members of Congress Monday, urging them to support the international nuclear deal with Iran, signalling the US Jewish community is split over the historic but controversial accord.
The religious leaders come from across the spectrum, but hail overwhelmingly from Judaism's Conservative and Reform streams as well as other progressive Jewish movements, a spokesperson said. "We encourage the members of the Senate and the House of Representatives to endorse this agreement," the 340 rabbis wrote in the letter to Congress distributed by Ameinu, a progressive charitable Jewish organization.
"We are deeply concerned with the impression that the leadership of the American Jewish community is united in opposition to the agreement," the rabbis added. "We, along with many other Jewish leaders, fully support this historic nuclear accord." The agreement, finalized last month after more than a year of intense negotiations, would roll back Iran's nuclear program in exchange for an easing of crippling economic sanctions.
Russian missiles in Iran
Meanwhile, Iranian Defense Minister Hossein Dehghan said Tuesday morning that Russia is poised to sign a deal with the Islamic Republic for sale of the S-300 air-defense missile next week, and that the weapons would be delivered shortly thereafter.
Dehghan said that Iran wouldn't accept any restrictions on its defensive ballistic missile capabilities and that they are not designed or purposed for carrying nuclear warhead.
Israel has expressed concern in the past over Iran's attempts at purchasing the S-300, as the advanced system would make any military attempt at disabling the Islamic Republic's nuclear facilities even more difficult that before.
Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif arrived in Russia on Monday for talks with his counterpart Sergei Lavrov, dealing mostly with finding solutions to the continuing crisis in Syria.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is strongly opposed to the deal signed with Iran. He argues it will fail to block Iran's path to nuclear weapons that could be used to target the Jewish state.
Two weeks ago Netanyahu personally called on US Jewish groups to thwart the White House-backed deal. He made his appeal on a webcast hosted by Jewish American groups, which said it reached some 10,000 people.
More than 300 American rabbis wrote members of Congress Monday, urging them to support the international nuclear deal with Iran, signalling the US Jewish community is split over the historic but controversial accord.
The religious leaders come from across the spectrum, but hail overwhelmingly from Judaism's Conservative and Reform streams as well as other progressive Jewish movements, a spokesperson said. "We encourage the members of the Senate and the House of Representatives to endorse this agreement," the 340 rabbis wrote in the letter to Congress distributed by Ameinu, a progressive charitable Jewish organization.
"We are deeply concerned with the impression that the leadership of the American Jewish community is united in opposition to the agreement," the rabbis added. "We, along with many other Jewish leaders, fully support this historic nuclear accord." The agreement, finalized last month after more than a year of intense negotiations, would roll back Iran's nuclear program in exchange for an easing of crippling economic sanctions.
Russian missiles in Iran
Meanwhile, Iranian Defense Minister Hossein Dehghan said Tuesday morning that Russia is poised to sign a deal with the Islamic Republic for sale of the S-300 air-defense missile next week, and that the weapons would be delivered shortly thereafter.
Dehghan said that Iran wouldn't accept any restrictions on its defensive ballistic missile capabilities and that they are not designed or purposed for carrying nuclear warhead.
Israel has expressed concern in the past over Iran's attempts at purchasing the S-300, as the advanced system would make any military attempt at disabling the Islamic Republic's nuclear facilities even more difficult that before.
Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif arrived in Russia on Monday for talks with his counterpart Sergei Lavrov, dealing mostly with finding solutions to the continuing crisis in Syria.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is strongly opposed to the deal signed with Iran. He argues it will fail to block Iran's path to nuclear weapons that could be used to target the Jewish state.
Two weeks ago Netanyahu personally called on US Jewish groups to thwart the White House-backed deal. He made his appeal on a webcast hosted by Jewish American groups, which said it reached some 10,000 people.
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