Among Israel’s diverse population, the Druze are a truly unique minority. They trace their ancestry back to the biblical figure Jethro, but left the Sinai deserts a millennia ago when the Muslim mainstream rejected their distinctive brand of Islam. Instead, they settled in the highland areas of Lebanon and northern Israel, where they have managed to survive centuries of Muslim persecution.

Today, the Druze community in Israel numbers about 120,000 people living on the Carmel range, the Golan Heights and other scattered villages throughout the Galilee. Most have tied their fate to the Jewish state, although relations become strained from time to time for Druze towns along the border with Syria, who have relatives on the other side of the fence.

Druze loyalty to Israel includes a communal decision to accept mandatory induction into the IDF. This stems from the pre-states years, when the Druze were caught up in the Jewish-Arab struggle over the land and the Jewish underground, the Haganah, assisted the Druze in creating self-defence networks against recurring attacks by Arab marauders.

Their consent to compulsory draft into the IDF is a great source of pride for the Druze, and these young adults are currently integrated into all IDF units. Yet the full equality that exists for every Druze soldier within the IDF does not extend back to civilian life, where the Druze do not always receive the same rights and benefits as other sectors.

So despite their patriotism, the Druze have not had easy lives in Israel and are in need of outside assistance to help level the playing field and pave the way to a better future. Thus, the ICEJ has decided to help the community financially, so that young Druze can have better chances of success in the areas of education and work.

To accomplish this goal, ICEJ AID has partnered with the Lt.-Col. Saleh Falah Association to provide support for Druze schools. This association was founded by retired Druze IDF officers in 2008 with the goal of investing in Druze youth before their enlistment in the IDF. It also helps demobilised Druze soldiers to become integrated back into civilian life, through academic scholarships and job and housing placement. It also assists poor families, along with the elderly and disabled in the Druze community.

The association has several dozen activists, mostly volunteers, and is financed solely by private donations.

ICEJ AID joined the association in its efforts to improve education in Druze public schools by raising an initial amount of NIS 100,000 (US$ 30,000). Half of this donation was invested in the main elementary school of the mixed Druze/Christian town of Maghar.

The project’s main aim is to raise the number of Druze teenagers acquiring a marketable diploma and continuing on to higher education. Key elements of the program include capital investments in computers and science labs and regular informal activities during the school year. Ten special study spaces were also built in Maghar, each equipped with a computer and book stand.

Meanwhile, some NIS 30,000 was donated towards university scholarships and the remaining NIS 20,000 was dedicated to social assistance.

Please join with us in continuing this very worthwhile outreach to the loyal Druze community of Israel. Give to ICEJ AID today at http://int.icej.org/

The Jewish Agency for Israel has requested special assistance from the International Christian Embassy Jerusalem to help accelerate the return of the last 8,700 Ethiopian Jews to Israel by sponsoring direct aliyah flights over coming months.

According to Howard Flower, ICEJ Director of Aliyah Operations, JAFI officials say the need is urgent given the current drought and political turmoil in the region, as well as the growing medical problems of the Jewish community still in camps in the mountainous Gondar area.

Years of intense debate ended last November when the Israeli government and rabbinic authorities finally approved the aliyah requests of over 8,000 Jews left in Ethiopia who are known as Falash Mura. These are Jews whose ancestors were pressured to convert to Christianity about 150 years ago for economic reasons but still sought to retain in part their Jewish identities and traditions.

The Jewish Agency has been flying them to Israel at the rate of 200 per month in special flight groups of 100 passengers each. At the current rate, however, it will take up to four years to complete this unique aliyah initiative

"With concerns growing over their deteriorating conditions, the Jewish Agency is eager to speed up the process, and due to budget cuts they are very thankful for the help from the Christian Embassy", said Flower. "We are a long-time partner with JAFI in the great modern-day aliyah and this provides us with another amazing opportunity to assist in the final Ingathering of the Jews to the land of their forefathers."

Jewish children in a Gondar school awaiting their turn to come home to Israel (JAFI)

Some of the Falash Mura require urgent medical treatment which they cannot receive in Ethiopia, as a number of clinics have been closed due to funding shortages. Many also have been separated for years from close family members already in Israel.

"Children are growing up away from their grandparents, who are now well advanced in age", Flower explained.

Additionally, the severe drought that has been plaguing northern Africa has caused food shortages around Gondar, where most of the Falash Mura live.

Finally, there is concern that the chaotic revolutions in the Arab world might spread to Ethiopia, forcing Israel to consider yet another emergency airlift of Ethiopian Jews.

The request for ICEJ assistance came on the 20th anniversary of "Operation Solomon", when nearly 15,000 Ethiopian Jews were brought to Israel in a dramatic airlift involving 34 round-trip flights in 36 hours. Rebels opposed to the Marxist regime in Addis Ababa were

Ethiopian Jewish immigrants arriving at Ben-Gurion (ICEJ)

closing in on the capital, forcing the country's military ruler to flee. With diplomatic intervention from the United States, Israeli leaders convinced the rebels to allow them to bring the throngs of Jews home in a swift, massive operation over one weekend in late May 1991.

A half decade earlier, "Operation Moses" had rescued an initial wave of thousands of Ethiopian Jews who had fled the nation's bitter civil war and were trying to journey to Israel by foot via Sudan.

This current group of more than 8,000 Falash Mura represents the last contingent of Ethiopian Jews who will be able to come home to Israel under the Law of Return, thereby realising this isolated community's ancient dream of returning to Zion one day.

The Christian Embassy has committed to helping with this urgent humanitarian mission as we work to hasten their rate of return to Israel. The first ICEJ-sponsored flight in this accelerated aliyah initiative will make the journey to Ben-Gurion Airport in August with 100 Ethiopian Jews on board.

"We plan to be waiting with a festive reception", said Flower.

Please act now to help us meet this urgent need. Make your most generous donation today »

"Do not be afraid, for I am with you; I will bring your children from the east and gather you from the west. I will say to the north, 'Give them up!' and to the south, 'Do not hold them back.' Bring My sons from afar and My daughters from the ends of the earth - everyone who is called by My name, whom I created for My glory, whom I formed and made." 

Isaiah 43:5-7

 

When he was only six years, Reuven Bronzberg recalls that Joseph Mengele paid a visit to the beleaguered Warsaw Ghetto. That day, he witnessed the evil Nazi doctor rip a new-born Jewish infant apart with his bare hands. Such are Reuven’s childhood memories.

Soon after, the rest of Reuven’s family were deported and he suddenly found himself all alone. He fled before the Warsaw ghetto uprising and was taken in by some partisans operating in the Polish forests. They quickly put him to use.

The partisans were planning to bomb a nearby train station on a line where Jews were being transported to concentration camps. They tied a pistol to Reuven’s hand and taped his finger on the trigger, to make sure he would fire it properly. Then he was told to walk up to an unsuspecting German guard and shoot.

“I raised the gun, pulled my finger back and started running. I did not stay around to see if he was shot”, said Reuven. “But I heard an explosion and that meant no more trains for a while.”

This was all too heavy for young Reuven, so he was hidden with a Christian woman in the basement of her farm house.

“I was eight years old and finally had the first taste of real milk in my life”, he recalled. “Without that lady, I would have died. I owe my life to her and to God.”

He spent months on end in the basement, cooped up with ducks and other farm animals and sleeping in a pile of hay until the end of the war.

Even with Germany defeated, Reuven experienced hostility against Jewish refugees in post-war Poland. Still only eleven years old and on his own, he survived by taking food handouts from the Joint Distribution Committee and selling it on the black market. Somehow, the JDC was also able to locate his parents alive in a Soviet camp in faraway Siberia and they were reunited.

Reuven made aliyah to Israel on a ship from Italy in 1948 and immediately joined the fight against Egyptian forces at Yad Mordechai, near Ashdod.

Today, Reuven is 78, retired, and lives in Haifa near the survivor’s home. He comes daily to eat lunch and be with fellow survivors. He was recently given a joyous bar mitzvah ceremony at the home’s synagogue – some 65 years late. He hopes to soon become a full-fledged resident of the Haifa Home.


Sarah Zamir
Haifa Home resident Sarah Zamir was born under the name Ilse Böhm in January 1928 near Breslau, Germany (part of Poland today). Sarah’s family were observant Jews and her father worked as an attorney.

In 1939, Sarah, her parents, her brother, her grandmother and one of her aunts fled Nazi persecution for Belgium. They arrived in Antwerp as refugees, and thus were not allowed to work. They were even arrested for a while. With hostilities already declared against Hitler’s regime, Sarah’s father was transferred to a camp in southern France because he had fought on the German side in World War I. Sarah never saw him again.

The German army invaded Belgium in May 1940, and Sarah and other local Jews were eventually put into forced labour camps. One could survive in these camps, Sarah recalls, but there was little food and many workers starved to death.

She was 14 years old when her family was finally deported. Her mother and brother later died in a concentration camp, most likely in Auschwitz. But Sarah had been hidden by Belgian Catholics who helped her secure a new identity. She had blonde hair and blue eyes, making it easier for her to pose as a non-Jew. But she was always afraid of being ‘discovered’, especially after her foster family began receiving hate mail warning, “We know you are hiding a Jewish girl!”

So Sarah was enrolled in a private boarding school for girls, where she remained until the Germans were driven out of Belgium in autumn of 1944.

As the Second World War came to an end, Sarah was still only a teenager and decided to stay on with her Catholic foster family and work in their business. But some of the fellow workers were anti-Semitic and berated her host family for helping Jews. The Catholic family offered to adopt Sarah but she did not want to change religions. So some Jewish friends advised her to move to Eretz Israel.

Sarah registered for aliya and arrived in Mandate Palestine in late 1945 as part of a Zionist youth group. In 1953, Sarah married Asher Zamir. Before he passed away, the couple had six children, numerous grandchildren, plus four great grandchildren at last count.

At least once a month, family members now come to visit Sarah in the Haifa Home for Holocaust survivors. She moved into the home because her small retirement and widow’s pensions could not meet all her living expenses and medical bills.

Sarah is quite comfortable and happy to be living at the Haifa Home. “The most important thing is to have people around you and that you get help”, she says.
 

The special ICEJ AID project to renovate and expand the Haifa Home for Holocaust Survivors is still on-going, so please consider what you can give to help further enlarge the survivors’ facility and cover its operating costs. To make your best donation today, please CLICK HERE!
 

When word broke on May 2nd that an elite team of US Navy commandos had finally caught up to al-Qaida terrorist leader Osama bin Laden in the Pakistani town of Abbottabad, relieved Americans erupted in spontaneous celebrations. Israelis were thrilled as well, but could not show it at the time, as the news came on Yom Hashoah – the annual day for remembering the six million Jewish victims of the Holocaust.

By custom, it is a solemn occasion. There’s no “entertainment” on television. No bars, restaurants or dance halls are open. Radio stations switch for the day to classical music.

Yet the subdued Israeli reaction also stems from their own bitter experience with such targeted killings of terror chieftains. They know that taking out the head may be a setback to terrorist organizations, but they always seem to spring back and sometimes under even more militant leaders.

More bark than bite
Israel’s history with bin Laden and his al-Qaida network is one of being a prime target of its ideological rage but having a lower priority in terms of its actual operations.

“Israel, as part of the Judeo-Crusader front, remained a very high target mostly in the field of propaganda, through the Internet, but not in fact,” Dr. Reuven Paz, an Israeli expert on Islamist movements, told The Christian Edition in the wake of bin Laden’s death.

“In the past decade, the threat to Israel inside its borders was quite low, and was mostly from very small jihadist groups in Gaza,” Paz explained. “They launched mortars and missiles over the borders, with or without the approval of Hamas. But attacks inside Israel were low in the list of priorities of the global Jihad, following good [Israeli] security measures and operational difficulties, in addition to the low support for al-Qaida among the Palestinians and their preference of supporting Hamas and Hizballah.”

In contrast, Paz noted, there was a greater threat to Israeli and Jewish interests abroad, including an attack against an Israeli civilian airliner over Mombasa, Kenya in November 2002 and a simultaneous assault against an Israeli-owned hotel there. Other attacks against Jewish targets included the bombing of an historic synagogue in Djerba, Tunisia, and the targeting of popular Jewish sites in Morocco and a synagogue in Istanbul in 2003, stated Paz, an associate of the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya.

Nevertheless, Israel has been heavily involved in the fight against al-Qaida and its affiliated jihadist groups for decades.

Contact with the enemy
According to Israeli journalist Ronen Bergman, it was the Mossad which first identified the growing global threat of the terrorist network in 1995, after the CIA and Egyptian intelligence came up empty while investigating an attempted hit on President Hosni Mubarak during his visit to Ethiopia that year. After receiving a joint request for help, Israeli intelligence traced the operation back to a group called “the Base” in English and led by a wealthy Saudi businessman turned Muslim holy warrior.

The Mossad was also the first to attempt, unsuccessfully, to assassinate bin Laden: In 1995, it recruited his secretary to poison him, claims Bergman.

In his classic book “Gideon’s Spies: the Secret History of the Mossad,” award-winning author Gordon Thomas also revealed that Israeli intelligence agents have been going toe-to-toe with al-Qaida operatives since the 1990s in dozens of countries around the world, quietly eliminating scores of terrorists who might otherwise have threatened not only Israel but the entire world.

In addition, Israeli-born security analyst Yossef Bodansky was one of the earliest to publicly sound the alarm about al-Qaida and other Salafi jihadist groups in his writings and work as a counterterrorism adviser inside the US Congress. His book “Bin Laden: The Man Who Declared War on America” was one of the first comprehensive exposes on al-Qaida, its deep ties to Pakistani intelligence, and its growing worldwide network of operatives trained in the group’s camps in Afghanistan and Pakistan. If anyone forewarned of planes being plowed into skyscrapers, it was Bodansky.

American fixation
After bin Laden’s volunteer mujahadeen helped drive the Soviets out of Afghanistan in the late 1980s, he shifted his base to Sudan and his focus to jihad against the West.

The 1991 Gulf War would channel that focus against President George Bush and Washington’s close relations with the Arab oil powers. From 1996 onwards, bin Laden rallied his troops around the primary goal of purging American soldiers from the holy soil of his native Saudi Arabia. In his 1998 fatwa declaring war on “Crusaders and Jews,” Palestine was mentioned only third, again after the American infidel presence in Saudi Arabia and UN sanctions on Iraq.

Only more recently did bin Laden assert that Palestine was “my nation’s pivotal issue.” It was, he declared, “an important factor in giving me since childhood… an overwhelming feeling that we must stand by the oppressed and punish the unjust Jews and their backers.”

This homage to the Palestinian cause may be a bit late and overstated, and more a product of al-Qaida setbacks on other fronts. But bin Laden’s followers have made a number of attempts to target Israel, while persistently railing against the Zionist enemy in order to raise funds and recruit operatives.

Border brushes
The most serious al-Qaida campaign against Israel was orchestrated by “al-Qaida Mesopotamia” – led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Known for its bloody operations against American forces in Iraq, the group also sought to establish operational footholds close to Israel’s borders.

The most dramatic sign of this was a barrage of Katyusha rockets fired from southern Lebanon in December 2005 which struck northern Israel. A videotape broadcast days later declared that the bombardment of “the sons of apes and pigs” was just a small sample of what bin Laden had in store for them.

Just weeks earlier, al-Zarqawi’s network also attacked three luxury hotels in Amman, killing dozens of civilians. The operation aimed to target Israeli and Western tourists in hotels the group claimed were “dens of Zionist spies.” At the time, militant Islamic websites warned: “After the attack in the heart of Jordan, it will soon be possible to reach Jewish targets in Israel.”

Had they succeeded, the most spectacular al-Qaida attacks against Israel would have been an operation targeting the landmark Azrieli Towers in Tel Aviv and a plot to steal a Saudi Air Force F-15 for a suicide run on an Eilat hotel. Several other large scale attacks on Israel by terror cells affiliated with al-Qaida have reportedly been thwarted, but smaller attacks have succeeded. The list of strikes and averted operations includes:

October 2004 – Al-Qaida elements infiltrated Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula and targeted Israeli tourists at Taba and other resorts.

July 2005 – Al-Qaida linked terrorists bombed a hotel in the Egyptian report of Sharm el-Sheikh in a bid to kill Israeli and Western tourists.

August 2005 – An al-Qaida cell fired Katyusha rockets from the hills above Aqaba into the neighboring Israeli port city of Eilat.

November 2005 – Al-Qaida suicide bombers struck three Jordanian luxury hotels in Amman, killing 60 persons.

December 2005 – An ‘al-Qaida in Iraq’ cell operating in southern Lebanon launched 10 rockets into northern Israel, wounding three people.

March 2006 – Two Palestinians from the West Bank were indicted on charges of belonging to al-Qaida and receiving funds to carry out a double bombing in Jerusalem.

June 2006 – The Army of Islam, an al-Qaida affiliate operating in Gaza, was among the three Palestinian militias involved in the cross-border abduction of IDF soldier Gilad Schalit.

January 2008 – Mohammed Najem, an Israeli Arab from Nazareth who was studying in Jerusalem, solicited al-Qaida help to shoot down George W. Bush’s helicopter during the US president’s visit to Israel.

July 2008 – The Shin Bet security agency announced the arrest of two Bedouins from the Negev who were in contact with al-Qaida in hopes of planning mass terror strikes in Israel, including against the 49-storey Azrieli Towers, perhaps using a hijacked plane. Other potential targets were Ben-Gurion Airport and IDF bases.

February 2009 – An al-Qaida linked cell claimed to have fired mortars into Israel from Gaza.

April 2010 – Rockets fired by an al-Qaida cell from the Sinai Peninsula target Israel’s southern resort city of Eilat. Two of the three rockets landed in neighboring Aqaba, Jordan.

June 2010 – Israel arrested a three-man cell from Jenin accused of murdering an Israeli taxi driver, planning to attack Christian pilgrims and attempting to travel to an al-Qaida training camp in Somalia.

July 2010 – A nine-man terror cell was uncovered in Nazareth with an arsenal of weapons and plans to murder IDF soldiers and slit the throat of visiting Pope Benedict XVI, all in the name of al-Qaida.

November 2010 – A group with avowed al-Qaida links issued a threat – for the first time in Hebrew – to avenge Israel’s killing of two Gaza terrorists who had planned to attack Israelis in the Egyptian Sinai.

Summer 2010 to Spring 2011 – Numerous rocket and mortar barrages were fired into Israel from the Gaza Strip by al-Qaida affiliated groups, some of which included gunman who had fought coalition troops in Iraq and Afghanistan and been smuggled into the Strip without the knowledge or permission of Hamas.

Haranguing Hamas
With the Middle East now in such chaos, the Israeli assessment is that al-Qaida elements will increase their efforts to strike at the Israeli heartland in the years to come. But the network’s estranged relations with Hamas also bear watching for its own reasons.

In fact, Salafist groups in Gaza have posed a growing challenge to the right flank of Hamas for several years now, criticizing the Sunni Islamist group for cooperating with Shi’ite Iran and its Lebanese proxy Hizbullah. They have also criticized Hamas for being too narrowly focused on the Palestinian struggle and not on the global fight for Islam, a charge they have also leveled at Hamas’s parent organization, the Muslim Brotherhood.

While al-Qaida preaches “jihad now” to achieve a worldwide caliphate without borders, the Muslim Brotherhood has taken a more long-term strategy to achieve the same goal, even participating in democratic elections in various Arab countries as a means to gradually accumulate power.

So after berating Hamas for forging ties to Iran, al-Qaida then blasted the rival Islamist terror militia for taking part in the 2006 Palestinian elections. Ever since, al-Qaida has repeatedly skewered Hamas over other perceived compromises, including its decision to invoke a “calm” with Israel following Operation Cast Lead.

On 14 August 2009, the criticism went beyond mere rhetoric when the leader of a small group of gunman from the Ansar Jund Allah militia took over a mosque in Rafah, in southern Gaza, and declared an independent Islamic state in Gaza to be ruled by strict shari’a law. The radical cleric also declared the Hamas civil authority in Gaza to be null and void, ordering all “true Muslims” to follow him instead.

Hamas responded by sending hundreds of militiamen, backed up by heavy weapons, against the mosque, killing the rebel leader and 23 of his followers. The incident cost Hamas support on both flanks, as moderate Arabs and Western sympathizers were shocked by the blunt use of force against fellow Muslims, while conservative Sunnis began peeling off to more radical groups.

Ever since then, Israeli security agencies have noticed a steady trickle of Hamas gunman joining Salafist groups in Gaza. The Salafist camp has also been swelled by recruits from Palestinian Islamic Jihad and other splinter groups disillusioned with the truce with Israel, as well as the “sharia-lite” social order currently prevailing in the Gaza Strip.

This might explain why Hamas rushed to condemn the US for killing bin Laden, in hopes of drawing back disaffected Palestinian Muslims.

With bin Laden dead, Israeli intelligence is concerned that such targeted killings, as often as not, reshuffle the deck in undesirable ways. The elimination of an organization’s leader tends to paralyze the group in the short term, but it sometimes results in the rise of an even more dangerous successor.

Ironically, Israel’s targeting of Hamas leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, a devout Sunni vehemently opposed to partnering with Iran, made way for the ascent of Khaled Mashaal, who had no such qualms and has used the ties with Tehran to bolster his group’s firepower to unprecedented levels.

With contributions by Yaakov Katz and Florence Bache.  This article first appeared in the June 2011 issue of The Jerusalem Post Christian Edition, published in partnership with the International Christian Embassy Jerusalem; www.jpost.com/ce