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dir="ltr"> <font size="-2"><a id="reader-domain" class="domain"
href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/11/29/the-real-link-between-israels-forest-fires-and-muezzin-bill/">http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/11/29/the-real-link-between-israels-forest-fires-and-muezzin-bill/</a></font>
<h1 id="reader-title">The Real Link Between Israel’s Forest
Fires and Muezzin Bill</h1>
<div id="reader-credits" class="credits">by <span
class="post_author" itemprop="author"><a
href="http://www.counterpunch.org/author/jonathan-cook/"
rel="nofollow">Jonathan Cook - </a></span><span
class="post_date" title="2016-11-29">November 29, 2016</span></div>
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<p><em>Nazareth.</em></p>
<p>Israeli legislation ostensibly intended to tackle noise
pollution from Muslim houses of worship has,
paradoxically, served chiefly to provoke a cacophony of
indignation across much of the Middle East.</p>
<p>Prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared his support
this month for the so-called “muezzin bill”, claiming it
was urgently needed to stop the dawn call to prayer from
mosques ruining the Israeli public’s sleep. A vote in
the parliament is due this week. The use of loudspeakers
by muezzins was unnecessarily disruptive, Mr Netanyahu
argued, in an age of alarm clocks and phone apps.</p>
<p>But the one in five of Israel’s population who are
Palestinian, most of them Muslim, and a further 300,000
living under occupation in East Jerusalem, say the
legislation is grossly discriminatory. The bill’s
environmental rationale is bogus, they note. Moti Yogev,
a settler leader who drafted the bill, originally wanted
the loudspeaker ban to curb the broadcasting of sermons
supposedly full of “incitement” against Israel.</p>
<p>And last week, after the Jewish ultra-Orthodox lobby
began to fear the bill might also apply to sirens
welcoming in the Sabbath, the government hurriedly
introduced an exemption for synagogues.</p>
<p>The “muezzin bill” does not arrive in a politically
neutral context. The extremist wing of the settler
movement championing it has been vandalising and
torching mosques in Israel and the occupied territories
for years.</p>
<p>The new bill follows hot on the heels of a
government-sponsored expulsion law that allows Jewish
legislators to oust from the parliament the Palestinian
minority’s representatives if they voice unpopular
views.</p>
<p>Palestinian leaders in Israel are rarely invited on TV,
unless it is to defend themselves against accusations of
treasonous behaviour.</p>
<p>And this month a branch of a major restaurant chain in
the northern city of Haifa, where many Palestinian
citizens live, banned staff from speaking Arabic to
avoid Jewish customers’ suspicions that they were being
covertly derided.</p>
<p>Incrementally, Israel’s Palestinian minority has found
itself squeezed out of the public sphere. The “muezzin
bill” is just the latest step in making them inaudible
as well as invisible.</p>
<p>Notably, Basel Ghattas, a Palestinian Christian
legislator from the Galilee, denounced the bill too.
Churches in Nazareth, Jerusalem and Haifa, he vowed,
would broadcast the muezzin’s call to prayer if mosques
were muzzled.</p>
<p>For Ghattas and others, the bill is as much an assault
on the community’s beleaguered Palestinian identity as
it is on its Muslim character. Netanyahu, on the other
hand, has dismissed criticism by comparing the proposed
restrictions to measures adopted in countries like
France and Switzerland. What is good for Europe, he
argues, is good for Israel.</p>
<p>Except Israel, it hardly needs pointing out, is not in
Europe. And its Palestinians are the native population,
not immigrants.</p>
<p>Haneen Zoabi, another lawmaker, observed that the
legislation was not about “the noise in [Israeli Jews’]
ears but the noise in their minds”. Their colonial
fears, she said, were evoked by the Palestinians’
continuing vibrant presence in Israel – a presence that
was supposed to have been extinguished in 1948 with the
Nakba, the creation of a Jewish state on the ruins of
the Palestinians’ homeland.</p>
<p>That point was illustrated inadvertently over the
weekend by dozens of fires that ravaged pine forests and
neighbouring homes across Israel, fuelled by high winds
and months of drought.</p>
<p>Some posting on social media relished the fires as
God’s punishment for the “muezzin bill”.</p>
<p>With almost as little evidence, Netanyahu accused
Palestinians of setting “terrorist” fires to burn down
the Israeli state. The Israeli prime minister needs to
distract attention from his failure to heed warnings six
years ago, when similar blazes struck, that Israel’s
densely packed forests pose a fire hazard.</p>
<p>If it turns out that some of the fires were set on
purpose, Netanyahu will have no interest in explaining
why.</p>
<p>Many of the forests were planted decades ago by Israel
to conceal the destruction of hundreds of Palestinian
villages, after 80 per cent of the Palestinian
population – some 750,000 – were expelled outside
Israel’s new borders in 1948. Today they live in refugee
camps, including in the West Bank and Gaza.</p>
<p>According to Israeli scholars, the country’s European
founders turned the pine tree into a “weapon of war”,
using it to erase any trace of the Palestinians. The
Israeli historian Ilan Pappe calls this policy
“memoricide”.</p>
<p>Olive trees and other native species like carob,
pomegranate and citrus were also uprooted in favour of
the pine. Importing the landscape of Europe was a way to
ensure Jewish immigrants would not feel homesick.</p>
<p>Today, for many Israeli Jews, only the muezzin
threatens this contrived idyll. His intermittent call to
prayer emanates from the dozens of Palestinian
communities that survived 1948’s mass expulsions and
were not replaced with pine trees.</p>
<p>Like an unwelcome ghost, the sound now haunts
neighbouring Jewish towns.</p>
<p>The “muezzin bill” aims to eradicate the aural remnants
of Palestine as completely as Israel’s forests
obliterated its visible parts – and reassure Israelis
that they live in Europe rather than the Middle East.</p>
<p><em>A version of this article first appeared in the
National, Abu Dhabi.</em></p>
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