Iran's President : Israel should be deleted !

[Vladimir]

ahmedinejad's comment is so ironic when one considers that the israeli defense minister is rojhilatî kurd

Source:?

[cheryl]

ahmedinejad's comment is so ironic when one considers that the israeli defense minister is rojhilatî kurd

Source:?

common knowledge among isaelis/jews, Vladimir. and yitzhak mordechai, a former defense minister is also kurd, bashuri kurd. mofaz left iranian-occupied kurdistan when he was a small boy. . . i think he was around 8 years old.

i have seen articles referring to this subject. if i can relocate them later, i will post them for you.

[dyaoko]

i will post them for you.

please do it, for us too , what you say is so intresting .

[cheryl]

i will post them for you.

please do it, for us too , what you say is so intresting .

don't worry, dyaoko. i meant i would post the info here for all to see. here it is, and i made in bold letters the part about the two kurdish defense ministers.

January 27, 1999

JOURNAL

Divisions Among Israeli Jews Are Documented in Film

By DEBORAH SONTAG

TEL AVIV, Israel -- Every day, Elinor Nagar, a spunky teen-ager with long ringlets and a sweet giggle, is bused "uptown" from a run-down, working-class suburb to a high school in affluent North Tel Aviv.

The divide between North and South Tel Aviv is a geographic and cultural one, and given the city's intense traffic, it takes Miss Nagar two hours to cross it every day. Level-headed and ambitious, she seems bound to become one of the few success stories in a 25-year-old "integration" program that seeks to give poor Sephardic teen-agers from "the south" a shot at social mobility through education in quality high schools.

Most of her childhood friends dropped out long ago, undone by the stress of competing with classmates whose houses their mothers cleaned. But Miss Nagar, the daughter of Yemenite and Egyptian immigrants, is determined to escape her parents' fate as what her father calls "the blacks" of Israel.

One day at her North Tel Aviv school, Miss Nagar got a startling lesson. Her home-room teacher, a yuppie in khaki shorts and a polo shirt, stood before her class, fully aware that a filmmaker's cameras were trained on him. He then blamed the Sephardic community for dragging itself down.

"Kids from South Tel Aviv don't have the same motivation to succeed, or the capacity," he said. "It comes from the home. It's a question of upbringing."

For Senyora Bar-David, the filmmaker, who is also from the South Tel Aviv-Jaffa area, the moment was an "ace in the hole." Almost 20 years after she graduated from the integration program, she sought to explore the North-South divide through a personal documentary, "The South: Alice Never Lived Here," which is showing at the Jewish Film Festival in New York's Lincoln Center at 6:15 p.m. Wednesday.

The teacher, Ms. Bar-David felt, epitomized the denial by the Ashkenazi elite that Israeli society is capable of discrimination. Too little had changed since she was a child, she thought, and her melancholy permeates the film, a rough-hewn but lyrical portrait of three generations of Sephardic women: Ms. Bar-David, who is 35, her grandmother and Miss Nagar, 17, whom she sees as her mirror image in this generation.

The rift between the Ashkenazi elite -- Jews of Central and Eastern European descent -- and the immigrants from North Africa and Arab countries is a fact of Israeli life. But things actually have changed. It is emblematic that the former defense minister, Yitzhak Mordechai, an Iraqi-born Kurdish Jew, is the first Sephardic candidate for prime minister, and that Shas, an Orthodox Sephardic political movement, has grown into the third-largest party in the country.

Sephardic Jews constitute nearly half the population, and it is impossible to keep so many people marginalized. What used to be considered a taboo, intermarriage -- as it was called -- between Ashkenazim and Sephardim, has lost its shock value. Pop music from North Africa, which used to be sold only at cassette stands at bus stations, dominates the radio airwaves. A quarter of the university students are Sephardic. And the army has become a path of social mobility; Kurdish-born Shaul Mofaz is the new chief of staff.

But the divide lingers, and many Sephardic families still feel like outsiders, either in the barren development towns where the government resettled them decades ago, or in the housing projects of South Tel Aviv and Jaffa, where there are only vocational high schools -- and the busing program, with its checkered history.

Under a brilliant winter sun, Ms. Bar-David and Miss Nagar sat on Sunday in a concrete courtyard of Tel Kabbir, the fortresslike housing project in Jaffa where they both grew up. Like the tenements of South Florida or Los Angeles, those in Israel do not look too bad from the outside, especially with the old men playing dominoes outside. But inside, the cement block, pocked plaster, graffiti and litter are almost as depressing as in any inner city.

South of Tel Aviv, just off the highway, Tel Kabbir, built in the 1950s and home to about 15,000 people, feels like a forgotten enclave, decorated with laundry lines. Ms. Bar-David and Miss Nagar, model integration students in different eras, have always felt torn between these stultifying projects, which were nonetheless home, and the more exciting North Tel Aviv, which they felt looked down its nose at them.

Theirs is a world rarely explored in Israeli film. During the editing, Ms. Bar-David said she asked herself several times "if I shouldn't just see a therapist," but continued out of a personal commitment to explore an untouched subject.

"It was easier when we made films about the Palestinians," said Ms. Bar-David, who collaborates with her Moroccan-born husband, David Benchetrit. "That's an acknowledged problem here. But the way that Sephardis feel exiled within Israel -- that's like too uncomfortable."

Now Miss Nagar is almost a woman, but in the film she is a precocious 15-year-old, swinging on a jungle gym in a desolate playground and uttering very self-aware thoughts, at once quintessentially adolescent and world-weary.

"Sometimes I feel as if I exist in a distant place, cut off from the world," she says in the film. "I have a lot of anger for people who look down on our neighborhood. And I am only 15. What do the older people think? What hate have they developed in their lives, and how do they live knowing such pain? It destroys you from within. It destroys me from within."

When she realizes her mother cleans the house of a fellow student, she trembles with fear that he will reveal her secret to the others. Both proud and ashamed of her parents, she is scared that Tel Kabbir will stamp her for life, closing doors and options.

"You are born to a place," she said. "You learn to love it. But you live the stereotype forever."

Her father, a laborer, upbraids her in the film for her yearnings to escape. "No matter where you go, you'll always be black," he tells her. "Tel Kabbir is where your roots are. And the fact that I have raised a daughter here to believe she can compete with the Ashkenazim only proves my point -- you don't really need to leave to succeed."

Since the film was shot, Miss Nagar has survived two more years of high school in North Tel Aviv. She is less angry, and more hopeful. The film itself created a miniature revolution within the school's society. The students were bused -- everyone, from both North and South Tel Aviv -- to a theater to see it, and it was like group therapy.

"No one ever thought we would make it in school," Miss Nagar said. "But we have, some of us. And because of the film, they understand us better. Now there is a kind of unity between North and South."

At these words, Ms. Bar-David's eyes opened wide. "Elinor, I didn't know that," she said. And flying off to the film festival in New York, she said she felt lighter than she had in years.

http://www.library.cornell.edu/colldev/ ... /isdiv.htm



Yitzhak Mordechai, Bashurî Kurdish Jew


Shaul Mofaz, Rojhilatî Kurdish Jew



and they were paratroopers too. . . just like i was

[cheryl]

i forgot to add that the article is old. it states that shaul mofaz is the army chief of staff, but that was in 1999. he is now the defense minister.

[Vladimir]

AH THANK YOU VERY MUCH GIRL!!

[dyaoko]

thanks cheryl for these information , by the way his face looks like kurds ! if he was in kurdistan wearing kurdish clothes, I wouldnt supsect he is jew . he is pretty kurdish .

again thanks for information.

[Diri]

thanks cheryl for these information , by the way his face looks like kurds ! if he was in kurdistan wearing kurdish clothes, I wouldnt supsect he is jew . he is pretty kurdish .

again thanks for information.

Being Jewish doesn't mean you have a special appearence...

[cheryl]

thanks cheryl for these information , by the way his face looks like kurds ! if he was in kurdistan wearing kurdish clothes, I wouldnt supsect he is jew . he is pretty kurdish .

again thanks for information.

Being Jewish doesn't mean you have a special appearence...

except for the horns

okay, Dîrî, since appearances are only interesting, you can decide whether i look jew, kurd, american, french--as the turks believe--or whatever else.

[Diri]

thanks cheryl for these information , by the way his face looks like kurds ! if he was in kurdistan wearing kurdish clothes, I wouldnt supsect he is jew . he is pretty kurdish .

again thanks for information.

Being Jewish doesn't mean you have a special appearence...

except for the horns

okay, Dîrî, since appearances are only interesting, you can decide whether i look jew, kurd, american, french--as the turks believe--or whatever else.

I think you look even better... You look like a Pêshmerge - a true fighter...

[cheryl]

gelek sipas, bira!

[Vladimir]

Cheryl.. sorry I just used your info in my blog

[cheryl]

Cheryl.. sorry I just used your info in my blog

what info?? not about my horns??!!!!

[heval]

Cheryl.. sorry I just used your info in my blog

what info?? not about my horns??!!!!

LOL