This is the jewish democratic state! Fear and loathing: Palestinians pay the price of history Israel still claims it has no choice but to continue the policies of ethnic cleansing, dispossession and extermination that started with its foundation, as becomes clear from books by Max Blumenthal, Jean-Pierre Filiu, Ilan Pappe, Rashid Khalidi, Alison Weir, Ari Shavit and Shlomo Sand In November 1956, as recounted by the journalist Max Blumenthal in his shocking Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel (Nation Books, £15.99) and by Jean-Pierre Filiu, professor of Middle East studies at Sciences Po, the Paris Institute of Political Studies, in his monumental Gaza: A History (Hurst, £25): Israeli troops massacred 386 Palestinians in the refugee camps of Khan Younis and Rafah. Moshe Dayan, then southern commander of the Israeli army, ordered the massacre, in which men over the age of 15 were lined up and shot in the head. “Ein breira,” – “There’s no choice” – Dayan said. Fifty-eight years later Israel still claims it has no choice but to continue the policies of ethnic cleansing, dispossession and extermination that started with the foundation of the state of Israel. In a chilling premonition of the recent slaughter in Gaza, recounted by Blumenthal, the Haifa University demographer Arnon Soffer, an adviser to Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu known as the Arab counter, foretold what would happen. “When 2.5 million people live in a closed-off Gaza, it’s going to be a human catastrophe,” Soffer said. “Those people will become even bigger animals than they are today, with the aid of an insane fundamentalist Islam. The pressure at the border will be awful. It’s going to be a terrible war. ☆☆☆So, if we want to remain alive, we will have to kill and kill and kill. All day, every day . . . If we don’t kill, we will cease to exist.”☆☆☆ Israel veered sharply right in 2000, when it became apparent that the deeply flawed “peace process” used by Israel and the US since 1978 to consolidate Israel’s dominion over the Palestinians would not produce submissive bantustans acceptable to Israel. The atrocities of 9/11 and the suicide bombings of the second intifada convinced Israelis that Palestinians were part of a global jihad bent on the destruction of the Jewish state. In 2009, in the wake of Operation Cast Lead, which killed more than 1,400 Gazans, Israelis elected their most right-wing government ever. Blumenthal, the son of a former high-ranking aide to Bill Clinton, admits that he was able to report so fully on the racist rot in Israeli politics and society because of his US passport and Jewish heritage. He turns a pitiless spotlight on a country where human rights and anti-occupation activists are arrested and interrogated by the Shin Bet intelligence service, where hooligans shouting “death to Arabs” lynch Palestinian youths, where the bulldozing of Palestinian homes and the expropriation of their land continues both within the original borders of Israel and in the West Bank. We hadn’t realised it was this bad. Advocating deportation Avigdor Lieberman was a nightclub bouncer in his native Moldova, then a baggage handler at Ben Gurion airport. Today he is Israel’s foreign minister. His Yisrael Beiteinu party advocates the deportation of the survivors of 1948 and their progeny, 1.6 million Palestinians who hold Israeli citizenship. The party’s motto, “No loyalty, no citizenship”, has been translated into a law requiring new citizens to take an oath of loyalty to the “Jewish and democratic state”. At Yisrael Beiteinu’s 2009 convention, high-school students chanted “death to Arabs”. For Palestinians the foundation of the state of Israel was a nakba, or catastrophe. Since 2009 the Knesset has passed legislation that Blumenthal and the Israeli historian Ilan Pappe, author of The Idea of Israel: A History of Power and Knowledge (Verso, £16.99), label anti-democratic laws and apartheid laws. The nakba law, for example, criminalises public observation of the nakba. Another recent law revokes the citizenship of anyone accused of terror; support for the struggle against occupation is declared a terrorist act. The admissions-committees law allows Jewish communities to ban Palestinian citizens of Israel. The “law for prevention of damage to state of Israel through boycott” criminalises support for the international BDS Movement – the initials stand for boycott, divestment and sanctions. Modelled on the global boycott that helped end apartheid in South Africa, BDS demands an end to the occupation and continuing colonisation of Arab land.
Posted on: Wed, 17 Sep 2014 00:05:26 +0000
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