Yosef Kuzkovski

Yosef Kuzkovski, Painter. b. 1902, Russia. Immigrated 1969. Studies: Painting Academy, Kiev.  Died 1970, four months after immigration.

Self Portrait at Home

His painting, "The Last Road - Babi Yar", hangs in the Knesset.

Kurdish-Iraqi Writer: The Palestinians Should Extend A Friendly Hand To Israel

Kurdish-Iraqi writer Mehdi Majid 'Abdallah 

"According to a UN report, in 2008 Israel, which the Palestinians claim murders innocent children, took in 144,838 Palestinians for purposes of medical treatment. In 2009 this figure grew by 20%, reaching 172, 863, in 2010 it reached 175,151, in 2011 it grew by 13%, reaching 197,713, and in 2012 it reached 210,469. I wonder if any Arab country would do the same for Israelis?"




http://www.memri.org/report/en/0/0/0/0/0/0/8532.htm#_ednref1

winter war finnish antisemitic leaflet regarding general Grigori Stern

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grigori_Shtern
Grigori Mihailovich Shtern (Russian: Григорий Михайлович Штерн, 24 July (6 August) 1900 – 28 October 1941) was a Soviet officer in theRed Army.

finns in ss viking dev     from YLE

WILL HOLOCAUST CRIMES OF FINNISH VOLUNTEERS IN UKRAINE GO UNPUNISHED?

Can the ICC go after settlements as war crimes?

Expert says ICC could go after some settlements retroactively, on the basis that maintaining existing settlements was an ongoing crime.

One of the most speculative ideas going around as the PA’s accession to the International Criminal Court Rome Statute is due to go into effect on Wednesday is whether the ICC can go after the settlements as war crimes and how? Legal considerations aside, the PA reportedly will delay pushing forward with the ICC as part of an informal deal with Israel to receive its custom tax revenue which Israel was withholding and general diplomatic pressure may prevent the Palestinians or the ICC from moving any real cases forward. But what if shortly after June 29, when the UN Commission of Inquiry into Gaza releases its report on the summer Gaza war, the PA and the ICC move forward against Israelis on the settlement issue? The Jerusalem Post consulted with a wide range of top experts on the issue who speculated about what might follow.

Some, like former Foreign Ministry legal adviser Alan Baker were confident that the ICC will ultimately choose not to get involved beyond reviewing a variety of jurisdictional issues, but agreed to some speculating anyway.

 The first question is: who would be the defendants? All of the experts agreed that individual house-owners would not be defendants, but at most potentially political, financial and military officials involved on a broader level on promoting the settlement enterprise.

They all also agreed that the ICC Prosecutor has said her starting point would be settlements started or built after November 29, 2012 when the UN General Assembly declared a State of Palestine.

This excludes most of the roughly 350,000 West Bank settlers’ settlements, though some experts theorized ways the ICC might decide to go after earlier built settlements on the basis of being “continuing” war crimes. Most of the experts also said that there was no ICC or other international court precedent for actually prosecuting issues of population transfer and none of them could name a precedent.

Hebrew University Professor and former Foreign Ministry legal adviser Robbie Sabel said he had “no idea who” specifically the PA or ICC might try to target specifically (the ICC makes the final decision, but much of its information comes from whoever files complaints), but that theoretically local planning officials could have some risk. What would evidence look like and what would happen if Israel refused to cooperate as with the UN inquiry into the summer Gaza war? Sabel said that most documents for approving different stages of building settlements were publicly available and that there was no block to the ICC from obtaining them.

But Sabel did not believe the ICC was likely to get that far because of both its backlog of more conventional cases and the many jurisdictional issues stopping Palestinians complaint at the door to the court.

 Sabel said that the issue was ultimately more political than legal and would be highly cumbersome for the court to handle using standard legal analyses.

He pointed out that the court would have to accept the ICC Prosecutor’s recognition of Palestine as a state, a conclusion they may disagree with as they are an even less political body than the prosecutor’s office.

 Sabel said they would need to go far beyond their normal mandate by having to define the borders of a State of Palestine which on the ground has no borders and define messy issues like east Jerusalem’s status and “effective control,” while the West Bank and Gaza are essentially ruled by two different Palestinian regimes.

 Further, he and Baker noted that the court’s history was focused on crimes of the utmost gravity like genocide, mass murder, mass rape and mutilation, not on population transfer questions and defining borders. Rather, Baker said, at most population transfers had been declared to be illegal, but with little follow-up beyond encouraging them to cease and for persons transferred to return to their homes. Sabel quoted the Rome Statute’s preamble which talks about crimes which “deeply shock the conscience of humanity,” as opposed to the settlements, which he said were inextricably intertwined with resolving border disputes.

Baker added that the entire addition of the “war crime” of direct or indirect population transfer was a last minute political exercise add-on. He said he was there at the negotiations when the issue was raised and that many realized “the absurdity” of the issue, but that the Western powers played ball with the Arab states to insert the item in order for the Arab states to agree to leave the death penalty out of the Rome Statute.

Baker argued that the issue of complimentarity, that the ICC cannot get involved on an issue unless the national courts are unable or unwilling to investigate the issue, could be raised.

He stated that Israel as a general matter holds to the settlements legality and does not build on private Palestinian land.

Moreover, in those cases where Israel does build on private Palestinian land, the Attorney-General and the High Court of Justice review cases and return the land to the Palestinians if they prove their case. Despite that, Baker said he thought that Israel still had a strong chance of triumphing on the legal arguments that there is no State of Palestine and that even with the Rome Statute including indirect transfers as being a war crime, an expanded standard from the Geneva Conventions which refer to forcible or direct population transfers, the crime could not be applied to voluntary settlers like the Jewish settlers.

He said he expected the ICC Pretrial Chamber would overrule Bensouda and ignore the “political” non- binding UN General Assembly vote on the question of Palestinian statehood if they were true to the law, including the Oslo Accords, though he noted that judges are appointed by their countries, which injects some politics into the issue.

ICC expert and post-doctoral fellow at Haifa University Dr. Sigall Horovitz and international law expert Shlomi Zacharyah took a different approach.

Also emphasizing that all discussions were theoretical and speculative, they said that local planning council and mid-level IDF commanders could be on the defendants list if a case went forward.

Horovitz said that if the ICC through a wider net, it could try to include leaders who indirectly contributed to moving Jews into the settlements, including even leaders of propaganda for furthering that cause.

Zacharyah said that a range of ministers, including Israel’s housing minister, defense minister and others substantially involved in facilitating the settlement enterprise could be on a theoretical ICC list.

Adolf Eichmann hoped his ‘Arab friends’ would continue his battle against the Jews

http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/coffeehouse/2015/01/adolf-eichmann-hoped-his-arab-friends-would-continue-his-battle-against-the-jews/

The Jewish master of Arabic Most revered for his Arabic to English translation of the Koran, Nessim Joseph Dawood

NJ Dawood was an Iraqi-Jewish translator whose lively and poetic English translation of The Koran has never been out of print.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/11287854/NJ-Dawood-obituary.html

Karl Marx about Jews in Palestine & Jerusalem in 1854

http://daledamos.blogspot.nl/2012/05/karl-marx-confirms-jews-were-majority.html

Karl Marx Confirms Jews Were A Majority In Jerusalem in 1854

Shlomo Avineri writes about Karl Marx and his days as a journalist.

While working for Horace Greeley's New York Daily Tribune back in 1854, Karl Marx wrote about the Ottoman Empire which at the time stretched deep into Eastern Europe. Marx wrote not only about the demographics, but also about the minorities who lived under Muslim rule.

Among the topics Marx wrote about was the situation in Jerusalem--and notes that in 1854 Jews were the majority population in Jerusalem:

He begins by stating that its "sedentary population numbers about 15,500 souls, of whom 4,000 are Mussulmans [Muslims] and 8,000 Jews." He goes on to say that "the Mussulmans, forming about a quarter of the whole, consisting of Turks, Arabs, and Moors, are, of course, the masters in every respect." After this dry recitation of facts, what follows is somewhat surprising. Marx goes on:

Nothing equals the misery and the suffering of the Jews of Jerusalem, inhabiting the most filthy quarter of the town, called hareth-el-yahoud . . . between the Zion and the Moriah . . . [They are] the constant objects of Mussulman oppression and intolerance, insulted by the Greeks, persecuted by the Latins [Catholics], and living only on the scanty alms transmitted by their European brethren.

Emet m'Tsiyon writes that Karl Marx apparently used the French diplomat and historian Cesar Famin as his source for the Jewish majority in Jerusalem:

Marx brought much of Famin's information into his article, sometimes quoting directly at length, sometimes paraphrasing. Famin wrote several books, mainly on history...

Here are Famin's numbers for Jerusalem's population in 1853. They are the same as those Marx reported in his article of April 1854. First I will give the English translation of Famin's words, and then his words in the original French:

The sedentary population of Jerusalem is about 15,500 souls
"La population sedentaire de Jerusalem est d'environ 15,500 ames:"
Jews . . . . 8,000 . . . Juifs
Muslims . .4,000 . . . Musulmans
Christians 3,490 . . . Chretiens
- - - - - - -------
. . . . . . . 15,490

This is the place for the name and other data about Famin's book:
L'Histoire de la rivalite et du protectorat des Eglises chretiennes en Orient (Paris: Firmin Didot freres, 1853). The breakdown of Jerusalem's population is on page 49.

Karl Marx and Cesar Famin have lots of company, confirming those numbers.

In The Jerusalem Population in the 19th Century -- Part 3, Emet m'Tsiyon quotes "Political History of Ottoman Jerusalem" by Abdul-Karim Rafeq in Ottoman Jerusalem: The Living City, 1517-1917:

The book contains a number of articles on various aspects of life in the city during the Ottoman period, and includes a survey of Jerusalem's political history in the period under survey, written by an Arab, Abdul-Karim Rafeq.

Here are population counts and estimates from the 19th century that he cites:

1) F Bovet was a French Protestant minister. He was in the Holy City in 1858 and was given demographic figures by the Prussian consul:

_7,000 _ Jews
_5,000 _ Muslims
_3,400 _ Christians
_____
15,400 total

2) Baron M de Vogüé, an inquisitive French traveler who spent considerable time in Jerusalem, gave these estimates/counts for the Holy City's population as of 1872:

_14,000 _ Jews
4-5,000 _ Muslims
7-8,000 _ Christians
__________
26,000 total

3) Nu`aman al-Qasatli was an Arab from Damascus ("a Damascene traveller and member of the Palestine Exploration Fund's expedition" to Israel). He gave estimates for Jerusalem's population as of 1874:

22,000 __ Jews
_6,000 __ Muslims
12,000 __ Christians
_______
40,000 total

In another post, Emet m'Tsiyon gives further sourcing for the Jewish majority in Jerusalem in 1854.

He quotes Yehoshua Ben Arieh, Jerusalem in the 19th Century: The Old City

This entry will present Ben-Arieh's estimates based on counts, censuses, and estimates made in the 19th century. The advantage in Ben-Arieh's work is that he presents estimates for various times throughout the century.

The Population of Jerusalem by Communities (1800-1870) (approximate figures)

Year __ Jews __ Muslims ___ Christians __ All Non-Jews __ Total
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
1800 __ 2,250 __ 4,000 ____ 2,750 ______ 6,750 _____ 9,000

1836 __ 3,250 __ 4,500 ____ 3,250 ______ 7,750 _____ 11,000

1840 __ 5,000 __ 4,650 ____ 3,350 ______ 8,000 _____ 13,000

1850 __ 6,000 __ 5,400 ____ 3,600 ______ 9,000 _____ 15,000

1860 __ 8,000 __ 6,000 ____ 4,000 ______ 10,000 _____ 18,000

1870 __ 11,000 __ 6,500 ____ 4,500 ______ 11,000 _____ 22,000

The Jewish connection to Jerusalem, historically, religiously, politically--and geographically--is clear.

Palestinian Arabs may sit down with Israel and negotiate about Jerusalem, but in no way are they entitled to any part of Jerusalem on a silver platter.