Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel

 

23 October 2013
The Palestine Center
Washington, DC

 

Max Blumenthal:
I was up late writing my response to Eric Alterman, so you will have to forgive me for being a little bit winded. A big waste of energy actually, but anyways Welcome to the “Hamas” book club. Friends of “Hamas” [sarcastically]. It’s good to be here among friends and well-wishers. My tour has been really interesting. This is actually my first extended talk on the tour, I just did a great event at UPenn, my alma mater, with Ian Lustick which was really well-attended and refreshing, Since I was at UPenn over ten years ago, and the only protest they had on campus when I was there was against the temporary ban on beer. And now you are seeing an active Students for Justice in Palestine chapter really defining the atmosphere and debate around this issue. And we are seeing that on campuses across the country. We just saw at UCLA an anti-divestment resolution struck down. And we are going to continue to see these resolutions get struck down. But at the same time, Yousef mentioned my last book which was a best seller, and it was a best seller because I was able to get fresh air in the main stream media. Terry Gross hosted me, and within five minutes of her hosting me on NPR the book was up at number eight on Amazon, ahead of Glenn Beck and Michelle Malkin, who are basically being bulk bought so that right wing billionaires could insulate the walls of their homes with these books. But this time Terry Gross has explicitly refused to host me.

The New York Times solicited a video, I might have time to show later, a documentary I did with David Sheen. They actually called and asked me to make this video about Israel’s abuse of non-Jewish refugees, but when they actually saw it and saw the real footage, they rejected it without explanation. So we went to The Nation, which didn’t, unfortunately, I mean they were nice to excerpt a bit from my book, but they buried the video, so Ali Abunimah promoted it.  And now it’s up at over a quarter of a million views, and people who have been exposed to this issue for the first time are incredibly shocked, especially African-Americans. I hope that mainstream African-American media will begin to cover this issue and wonder why the son of Africa and the first African–American president Barack Obama has said nothing about this.

My book, I think, will have a long shelf life, it might be an evergreen book hopefully, even if it doesn’t get the attention it deserves. Because it is one of the first books to paint a portrait of the state of Israel, Israeli society, and Israel/Palestine, this one state with no defined borders under a regime of ethnic separation.  At the culmination of a transitional phase that began after the second intifada and the collapse of the Camp David talks, and really the collapse of the peace process,  what we are seeing right now is the state of Israel, Jewish state acting out the terminal phase of Zionism.

There was a really interesting article in the New Yorker that me and Yousef were just talking about, about the ethnic cleansing of Lydda, by Ari Shavit, who is kind of the Thomas Friedman of Israel. I don’t know why he is the one who gets published to talk about the Nakba, but it is still nice to see some kind of recitation of the history even if he gets the history slightly wrong.

I just want to focus on one point in Shavit’s piece, which really relates to some of the backdrop that I set in my book, which is that Lydda was the “black box of Zionism.” In other words, the Zionist project required the ethnic cleansing of Lydda. And this is an ongoing and continuous project, and as long as Zionism in its current form is sustained, it requires this kind of ethnic cleansing in order to sustain this project. And Shavit concludes that this is too immense of a point for him to grapple with. Which is a new way of saying “eh, it’s complicated.”  In other words he can’t come to a clear conclusion about whether this can continue. He can only say, “This is the reason why I was born and why I’m here, but it’s too big to deal with, so let’s just maintain the status quo.”

Now in my book, I enter the book after kind of establishing the right wing government that has come into power at the culmination of the transitional phase after the 2009 national elections that were carried out against the backdrop of Operation Cast Lead. With Israelis going up on Parash hill, which is a hill above the Gaza Strip,  to actually watch the killing take place, to watch the bombing take place, to cheer it on, and meanwhile they were electing the most right wing government in their history; 75 to 80 members of the 120 member Knesset were from right wing parties. And so I enter the book, and of course I enter it at Ben Gurion National Airport. When you fly there you fly to Tel Aviv, it says “TLV” when you fly in, but you are not actually flying into Tel Aviv.  You are really flying into what was once Lydda. The airport belonged to the British colonial authorities at the time, and the area around the airport, and the airport itself, were conquered, or brought under control, during the process of ethnic cleansing known as Operation Danny. And Shavit gets this wrong in his account, he misnames the operation.

In my opening chapter, in my “Book Number One,” I talk about how 55,000 people were sent eastward to Ramallah, this was when the population of Ramallah spiked, on the Lydda death march. There was a young doctor who was trapped while people were being marched out. There was an Israeli imposed curfew and he was inside Lydda hospital, and he is overcome with horror at what he had witnessed. His sister died in front of his eyes. Because of the curfew, he couldn’t bury her, so he went out in the yard with his bare hands and dug a grave for her. He treated dozens and dozens and dozens of patients who literally died in his arms. His name was George Habash. He went on to found the PFLP.

Riding into Lydda in an armored car he dubbed the “Terrible Tiger” at the helm of the 89th Commando Battalion was a little known career soldier. His name was Moshe Dayan. And after Dayan’s blitz into the city, an embedded reporter from the New York Herald Tribune surveyed the damage. (Thank god Ethan Bronner or Jodi Rudoren wasn’t there.) “The corpses of Arab men, women, and even children were strewn about in the wake of the ruthlessly brilliant charge. Practically everything in their way died.” A Chicago Sun Times reporter wrote of the Israeli forces, describing Operation Danny as a “blitzkrieg.” This was just three years after WWII ended. More than 170 Palestinian Arabs instructed to take shelter in the Dahmash mosque near Ramleh were slaughtered by forces under Yitzhak Rabin and Yigal Allon’s command and then left to rot in the July heat. About 20 to 50 more Palestinian men, sent into the mosque by Israeli forces to extract the corpses and bury them, were shot dead in the graves they had just dug. Some soldiers robbed fleeing Palestinians of their gold jewelry. Others, according to Amos Kenan, a famous Israeli writer in “Bon Vivant,” who participated in the conquest of Lydda took further liberties. “At night,” Kenan casually recalled, in a 1989 article for The Nation, “those of us who could not restrain ourselves would go into the prison compounds to fuck Arab women.  A few soldiers caught up in the orgy of violence succumbed to psychological trauma.” As Rabin later recalled, prolonged propaganda activities were required after the action, to explain why we were obliged to take such a harsh and cruel action.”

This is sort of absent from Shavit’s account. But this is what Shavit maintains was necessary to birth the Jewish state.  And he says, justifying it, that the Holocaust was in the background, something I’m going to get into later. David Ben Gurion was asked for instruction by Yitzhak Rabin, and Yigal Allon said, “What do we do? There are all of these Arabs in Lydda, what do we do?” Ben Gurion understood that there had just been a series of trials over the crimes committed in Europe, and the evidence used in these trials relied on written transcripts and written records of orders, the Germans kept meticulous records of their orders obviously, and so Ben Gurion said nothing. According to Rabin he went [waves hand]. And so that stern wave of his hand was what brought Lydda under Israeli control and transformed it into the Ramleh/Lod municipal district. It is also what turned Lod airport, or Lydda airport, into Ben Gurion National airport.

This cavernous glass and steel edifice that from external glance looks like any other airport in the Western world. But once you land and seek to depart from Israel you are immediately classified in ethnicity, your religion, even your gender. These masquerades are presented as security measures, but in fact, they are just crude ethnic profiling. Which I like everyone else, was subjected to. And when you get there, or when you leave, you are given a number. You are assigned a number from one to six based on your ethnicity. And your ethnicity is of course linked to some kind of security threat. I’m number one because I have J-positive blood. Others are assigned a different number, like Nour Joudah, who had attempted to reach her students in Ramallah at the Quaker school she was teaching at. Who was an American just like me. Who is a good friend of many of my friends in Ramallah, but she doesn’t have the same ethnicity. And so she was given the number six. First, she was held at the Allenby border and then told to reenter in Ben Gurion. It was from there she was sent away and banned for ten years.

Dana Shalala, the former Clinton labor secretary or health secretary, (she made such an impact on me that I can’t remember), is a Lebanese-American. She was on her way to a conference in Israel for university presidents, she was the president of University of Miami, on fighting BDS on campus. And she was held and interrogated at the airport for well over two hours in a humiliating interrogation that really was a form of poetic justice. Anna Lekas Miller, who is a journalist friend of mine, was on her way, had already been handed out a peculiar visa because of her ethnicity. That only limited her to two weeks and only within what the Israelis call Judea and Samaria in the occupied West Bank. And she had wanted to reenter and take a real trip around the Holy Land, and so she signed up for what was basically a hasbara, or propaganda conference, presenting Israel to journalists which was sponsored by groups linked to the Israeli government at the IDC Herzliya. So on her way in, she was held for five to ten hours, I think, then she was sent away, and banned for ten years on the basis of her ethnicity. She is actually a writer for “Open Zion”, which is Peter Beinart’s blog at Newsweek. Leaving aside the fact the Newsweek’s blog on the Middle East is called Open Zion, you would think that would have been something that worked in her favor, but it didn’t because it’s all about your ethnicity. And everything flows peripatetically from Ben Gurion Airport into Israeli society and to all the territory that Israel controls, where one ethnicity is privileged above all others.

What I found when I went on my first sustained reporting trip in May 2009, by immersing myself immediately in the key institutions of Israeli life, was an attempt by these right wing forces to bring apartheid out in the open, to strip away the veneer of democracy, and get it over with. Because the mood of the Israeli public, particularly young Jewish Israelis was one of frustration with an endless peace process. They regard it as a joke. Frustration with the idea that the West Bank can’t be annexed.

Of course, They have been taught that this is their land. Frustration with the fact that the Palestinians will simply not go away. They are taught that these people are the occupiers of their god given land. And so why not just get it over with?

Its why Avigdor Lieberman won high school elections in 2009 by an overwhelming majority. Actually the Meretz party didn’t even register, their vote count was so low. And so these laws started being passed in the Knesset, which Lieberman campaigned on. His campaign was “No loyalty, no citizenship.” And one of the first laws was the loyalty oath. Which was actually not proposed by Lieberman, but by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. This was an amendment to Israel’s Citizenship law, which requires new citizens to swear loyalty to the Jewish and democratic state, which relates completely to Jerusalem, where Palestinian residents who live in occupied East Jerusalem are offered the option of taking citizenship, but this is an attempt to pretty much rule that out.

The Acceptance to Communities Law was a new law proposed in the Knesset, which passed, allowing discrimination on the basis of religion or ethnicity, or sexuality, in communities of under 500. This was an attempt to upend or nullify the Kadan ruling by the Supreme Court, which had allowed one Arab family to take up residence in one of the mitzbeh communities, which are small all-Jewish communities built in the north of Israel surrounding Palestinian towns and cities to limit their natural growth. This is a huge controversy. And just by allowing one Arab family to purchase property inside one of these towns, inside of Israel, who are citizens of Israel, necessitated this law.

Then Avi Dichter, the former head of the Shin bet, and part of Tzipni Livni’s Kadima party proposed a law defining Israel’s Jewish character as above, or preeminent, or superior to its democratic charter, and would make Hebrew the official language and strip Arabic of its official language status. This law did not pass, but it has been reintroduced by Naftali Bennett and Ayelet Shaked, who is his deputy from the Jewish Home party, which has done very well in recent municipal elections.

There was the Anti-Incitement law which was proposed by the Jewish Home party, during the last Knesset, which would have imprisoned people for one year for convincing another person to be disloyal to the Jewish state. This has not passed yet. Haneen Zoabi, the most visible representative from the Balad party which advocates a state for all of its citizens, was banned by the Israeli Central Election Committee from running again. The Supreme Court overturned the ban, as it always does with the Central Committee rulings. And this leads into another law!

I interview Zoabi in my book and I write about how she was almost nearly physically assaulted in the Knesset but more interesting than that was the fact that no prominent Israeli liberal that I can think of, except for maybe one or two, stepped up to defend her which stood in remarkable contrast to what happened when Tawfik Toubi faced a similar incident. He was the first Palestinian to serve in the Knesset in the 1950s and Ben Gurion had called for him to be banned from the Knesset.  Ben Gurion’s closest friend, one of his closest friends, Nathan Alterman, who was considered the poet of the establishment, this hero of Labor Zionism, said that Toubi serves by right and not grace. And that we are supposed to be a democracy after all. Of course he mainly served in a mainly symbolic capacity. No Nathan Alterman rose their voice for Zoabi. And she still faces this campaign of incitement.

Then there was the BDS law, or the boycott law, introduced by Ze’ev Elkin, who is currently the acting Foreign Minister in place of Avigdor Lieberman, who goes on trial in two weeks for his mafia connections. This law has been passed and it allows lawsuits to be filed by settlers against anyone they feel has harmed their business by calling for a ban on the business that they carry out in occupied territory. So it’s basically an attack on free speech.

I interviewed David Rotem, who is the author, or co-sponsor of most of these laws, at his home in Efrat, the Israeli settlement, mega settlement, in the West Bank. And Rotem is a fascinating character. He is from Lieberman’s party but unlike Lieberman, who’s an atheist, he’s a religious nationalist who was one of the original Gush Emunim settlers, he was a lawyer for the Gush Emunim. He constantly brought our conversation back to the Holocaust to justify everything he was doing and all these laws, which in my mind resembled the early inception of Nuremberg laws, stripping the ethnic out class of their legal rights. He said, “I have chip on my shoulder and a tick in my brain, and it’s called the Holocaust”.  I said,  “I can’t debate you on that anymore,” I said, “But you know what, what we are looking at here, what you are doing is something that we reject in the United States, what Thomas Jefferson called is the ‘tyranny of the majority’.”  He shot back at me immediately, “The tyranny of the majority is the essence of the democracy.”  I think that that’s the essence of what we are witnessing from this current government.

And so, I think we have been looking at these laws, a lot of these laws are opposed by liberal groups inside Israel like the Associations for Civil Rights in Israel. But how far are these groups willing to go, because  a lot of these laws are actually amendments to laws that were passed right after the establishment of the state of Israel in order to limit the rights and freedom of movement of Palestinians who had been expelled, in particular the Anti-Infiltration Act which was passed in 1954 to prevent the thousands and thousands of  Palestinian refugees who had been  expelled from reuniting with their family members, returning to their farms, returning to their land. Ninety percent of them according to, according to Benny Morris were trying to return for economic reasons because they are Fedayeen. I write about this expensively about this history, about the communities around the Gaza border, in attempts to limit what was known as infiltration. This law has been updated or amended because there are currently sixty thousand non-Jewish Africans in Israel right now. Been denied work permits, they are not allowed to work, and so many of them are living in desperate conditions, in south Tel Aviv, one of the poorest neighborhoods in Tel Aviv, one of the poorest areas in Israel, many of them are sleeping in Levinsky Park, because they can’t make a living. Many of them rely on donated food. The reason isn’t because they are immigrants, they are not citizens, the reason is because they are not Jews. They cannot be absorbed into the state because as Benjamin Netanyahu said, “They threaten the Jewish character of the state.”

And so, there has been a concerted attempt to expel 100 percent of them including those who are asylum seekers who have fled from janjaweed in Darfur, who have fled from repression in Eritrea, who fled from genocide and war and poverty, thinking that if they have arrived a Jewish state, a state that claimed to represent the legacy of the Holocaust and the deliverance of people who have experienced a genocide that they would be rescued and they found, of the asylum seekers 0.07 percent have been granted asylum, the lowest of any industrialized nation in the world. There is actually no path to asylum for non-Jews in Israel.

And so the Anti-Infiltration Act Amendment mandated, allowed their arrest without trial and detention for three years in a newly constructed facility called Saharonim in the Negev desert, which former Speaker of the Knesset Reuvin Rivlin of the Likud party identified as a concentration camp. And they are currently thousands of non-Jewish Africans sleeping in shipping containers there right now including entire families. As we speak, four Israeli Jews are outside the gates protesting, determined to climbthe gates and be continually arrested until the Africans are released. One of them Ido Naveh put out a call for a mass demonstration and four people arrived. We see in France that when Roma Gypsy children are arrested in their schools that school children go on strike by the hundreds and by the thousands and even set up flaming barricades outside their school. We see no such thing in Israel and as you’ll see in this documentary, instead we see an entire mob turning on these outcasts. Actually Saharonim, although it’s a new facility has been built on the top of Katsiot where thousands of Palestinian political prisoners were held during the first intifada, by prison guards including Colonel Jeffrey Goldberg and so we have to see the continuous process here from Palestinians to non-Jewish Africans as Palestinian movement and presence is limited inside the Green Line.

And we have to see the same rhetoric that Meir Kahane used against Palestinians in the 1980s now being deployed against non-Jewish  Africans. Miri Regev, the former spokesperson of the Israeli Army, who is now a leading figure in Likud, a cabinet level  figure in Likud, who is the one of the “Young Turks” of Likud. Netanyahu kind of has to kind of hold off because they are so right wing. At a rally on May 23rd, 2012 before about a thousand people said that Africans are a cancer in Israel’s body. And hours later hundreds of Israelis rioted through the neighborhood of Hatikva smashing the windows of African store fronts and attacking any African they could find. Obviously, words have consequences. A poll reported in the Times of Israel found that a majority of Jewish Israelis agreed with Miri Regev’s statement that Africans were a cancer in Israel’s body.  I have been accused of being biased but I haven’t been able to find a scientist to determine if this was true, if they are a cancer or not but it seems to me this is incredibly dangerous rhetoric and it’s hard to be balanced about it.

After I arrived I settled down for a few months in Jaffa which is another mixed city like Lod, where you have Jews and Arab are living among each other, it is a site of ethnic cleansing. And  I was living in Ajami on Doctor Erlich Street which  used to be named Doctor Fuad Dajani Street. Because Fuad Dajani ran the local hospital which has been renamed Yakub Zaholin Hospital after a 17th century Italian physician. So, all this was there before under different names. It’s now a mental facility. There is another geriatric ward for mentally ill patients but it used to be a first class Palestinian hospital. And it was basically seized during the Nakba. The streets’ names were all changed and the remnants of the Palestinian community that was ethnically cleansed, who were literally thrown into the sea under artillery fire and forced to take boats to Gaza and Lebanon and elsewhere are what remains there.  Jaffa was incorporated into the Tel Aviv Municipality. The incumbent mayor who, Ron Huldai who was just reelected last year has refused to allow any Arabic writing to be on the symbol of the Tel Aviv Municipality because as he says, their numbers are so low they only represent about four percent which is actually fascinating to consider how much their growth has been deliberately limited by state planning and the extent to which Tel Aviv is religiously homogenous. Actually there are fewer Arabs are living in Tel Aviv, a city in the Middle East than the biggest city in the Midwest, Chicago.  How did that happen? Tel Aviv requires the iron wall.

So I would go jogging to Tel Aviv frequently and I jogged through this park known as Charles Clore Park named after a British Jewish financier. These big grassy dunes people like to barbeque on, and I realized that these dunes are actually the former neighborhood of Manshiyya.  And that they weren’t dunes before, they were actually artificially created because the dunes are basically the rubble of hundreds of Palestinian homes that were bulldozed, 75 percent of the area was bulldozed in 1948. And it was then that I finally began to understand the Nakba as a continuous process.

I notice the one remaining house near Charles Clore Park, the one remaining Arab home had been converted into the Etzel Museum.  The Etzel was the right wing militia affiliated with the Stern Gang, which carried out the Deir Yassin massacre and this is a state run museum so think about next time Nathenyahu talks about memorials to Palestinian terrorists in Ramallah. And you would think that by this time after such an extensive process of ethnic cleansing and limiting the Palestinian presence in  Israel that there would be a level of confidence if this was the kind of state they wanted to create. But instead as I continued to visit the Knesset, I continued to experience the deep insecurity that animates Israeli life. Especially when I visited with Alex Miller who was the top, who was at the time deputy of Avigdor Lieberman in the Knesset, walked into his spartan office, the only picture on the wall was a picture of Lieberman, the dear leader, he was playing mine sweeper. He was 28 years old, wearing a fine tailored suit, smoking a cigarette, there wass one book on his shelf, it was Bill Clinton’s My Life. I don’t know what advice he took from him. And he was an immigrant from Moscow. His Hebrew was not as good as my translator’s and he had a young men named Sa who was a Tel Aviv University political science grad student, who would rush up and deliver him notes of talking points. When he would attack the United States for imposing pressure on Israel, he would rush with a talking point and he would read it: “ Israel’s relationship with the U.S. is strong.”

And Miller was the author of the Nakba law which I think is one of the most remarkable laws of this battery of anti-democratic laws because this law actually sought to, in its original form, send Palestinian citizens of Israel to jail, anyone to jail, for participating in observances of the Nakba on May 15th which is also Israel’s Independence day, when Israeli Jews go out to places like Canada Park which is an artificially built forest constructed over three destroyed Palestinian villages in the Latrun pass.

And Miller told me that, “In the United States you would forbid some people from burning the American flag, why can’t we do that here?” And I said, “Actually that’s not true, we don’t do that. You don’t understand democracy.” So we had this uncomfortable confrontation or discussion. Many of my interviews were pretty uncomfortable, if you read the book. And I kind of walked out somewhat depressed and I ran into Ahmad Tibi, the veteran Palestinians legislator in the Knesset.  And he said, “Oh, so you met with Alex Miller,  you know this is a classic example, Israel is a Jewish and democratic state for Jews it’s democratic and for Arab it’s a Jewish.”   I thought that was kind of a nifty quip that really summed up my feelings about this encounter. Unfortunately the Nakba law passed in a diluted form and now it is possible for the government to strip funding from NGOs that participate in these commemorations  of the Nakba. And then there is also a street level campaign that’s accompanying it where the Israeli group  Zohot which means  memory goes out every May 15th, a few Israelis will read out the names of the destroyed Palestinian villages and they will basically be set on by mobs who have to be held back by the border police, by riot squads.

This law has passed on the same night at midnight as the Acceptance to Communities Law. One of the things I do in my book is I break down the votes of these laws and I show how Labor Party, at the time, stood aside and generally didn’t vote against these laws.  How Kadima under Tzipni Livni and we always hear Tzipni Livni in the Western media and English media condemning the ill-wind of anti-democratic laws passing through Israel. She would rarely vote against these laws. She said nothing about Haneen Zoabi  being attacked by a bunch of men who used these kind of insults about her being single woman. She said she has rarely voted against these laws in fact members of her own party voted for them. So it’s not just a right wing campaign, it’s also a capitulation of the Zionist left in the face of this campaign.

I moved from Jaffa to Jerusalem to this little apartment that was filled with a kind of young Israeli dissidents, along with my journalistic colleague Joseph Dana. The Oz unit, which is the immigration enforcement unit of the Israeli police, had just visited this apartment before I arrived looking for an activist who had spent the night there. I don’t know how they knew she had spent the night there, she was from the ISM, the International Solidary Movement, but this is a new thing you see a lot. The Oz unit, which is supposed to be going after migrants, is also going after activists. I’ve even been held in a Tel Aviv bus station for reasons I can’t explain.

And so in Jerusalem on the night before Barack Obama’s historic speech to the Arab world in Cairo, a speech where any promise he made to the Palestinians, he has completely reneged on, especially on respecting nonviolent resistance. We went out into Jerusalem, and did some man on the street interviews and our now infamous “Feeling the Hate in Jerusalem” video was produced,  showing mostly young American Jews but also young Israelis calling for Obama’s assassination, calling him the “N” word, calling for white power, without knowing who the Israeli Prime Minister was, just ignorance and hatred on display for mostly American Jews from the Five Towns area of Long Island. It went viral, half a million hits in a few hours. YouTube banned it, Vimeo banned it. The Huffington Post banned it, The Huffington Post prevented me from even referring to it. Thank God they’ve been sold to AOL because, now I actually can go on HuffPost Live and mention it, which I recently did.

And, what we were trying to do is kind of send out a warning. There was a serious message in this video which was that words have consequences. And just a few months after that video, a young man named Hussam, was walking home through central Jerusalem, a Palestinian resident of East Jerusalem, he was set on by two Jewish youths wearing Beitar Jerusalem scarves, most of you are familiar with Beitar Jerusalem, it’s the favorite football team of the far-right Israel and the fanatics of this team chant “Death to Arabs” pretty much after every goal. I have a whole chapter on them in my book, it’s also favorite team of Avigdor Leiberman. They stabbed Hussam in the neck he walked into a restaurant, packed restaurant, pleading for help. I think someone offered him a napkin. And he bled to death in the street. And his killers were let off maybe with a few years. Few months after that, Jamal Julani, in a more widely publicized incident, was set upon by a mob of Israeli youths, mostly teenagers, adolescents, and he was beaten into a coma while they chanted “A Jew is a soul and an Arab is a son of a b***”, which is a Beitar Jerusalem chant.

This was in the middle of Zion Square. If you have ever been there, this is a crowded place. By-standers  just stood there and watched and did nothing and the reason they attacked him was because they had heard from a fifteen year old Jewish Israeli girl that he had made a pass her. So, echoes of 1930s Alabama playing out in a place that many American Jews consider the spiritual home of the Jewish people.  And his attackers went to court, and boasted of what they did. They said, “I don’t regret a thing, I only wish I killed him.”I quoted him in my book. This is how they have been indoctrinated; they are being raised to be soldiers and this is play acting.

And so, we had done this video, we have been attacked by people, we have been attacked mercilessly by the Jewish press. We had been banned and now the consequences are playing out. Yedioth Ahronoth sent out one of its reporter to do basically our video, “Feeling the Hate”, which uncovered the exact same thing we uncovered. So I think it’s becoming clear, increasingly, that this is systematic and it’s not something that’s limited to drunk youth, that there is something going on here. I talk extensively in my book about the process of indoctrination that Israeli youth go through and why it’s so hard for dissidents, who reject the Zionist narrative and campaign for Palestinian equality emerge in Israeli society.  It’s not because of repression, not necessarily although many of my dissident friends have been interrogated by the Shin Bet. It’s indoctrination. I write about four year-olds in a preschool in Holon, the suburb of Tel-Aviv who were placed before a board, a diagram which start with the question: Who wants to kill us? And lines point to Arabs, Persians, and Nazis et cetera the historical enemies of the Jewish people with the Palestinians painted as the heirs of the Nazis. I talk about the trips to Aushwitz that Israeli high schoolers are increasingly taken on which culminate with a ceremony in a gas chamber where they’re asked to take on the personas of Jewish children who were slaughtered. I talk about the polls of those high schoolers after they emerge from these trips which were explicitly designed to prepare them for the Army and how they develop more nationalistic sentiments after these tours and a more favorable impression of the Army.

And so this explains why we see the anti-democratic attitudes rising among Israeli youth. A majority of them according to a poll by Camille Fuchs, the most reputable pollster in Israel, refused to sit with an Arab in a class room. And it’s we see why the future of Israeli politics embodied by people who have undergone this indoctrination process. People like Naftali Bennet, who recently boasted, “ I killed a lot of Arabs, that’s a good thing, so what?” who favors annexing the West Bank and basically bringing apartheid into the open. He recently endorsed a lobbying campaign by the anti-miscegenation group, Lehava, (in my book, I talk about its sponsorship by the Israeli government) to ban religious Jewish women from volunteering in hospitals after 9:00 pm because they could potentially date Arab doctors. This is a new bulletin that’s been issued by the civil service department of the Israeli government with the endorsement of Naftali Bennet.

The municipal elections were this week and we saw the further consolidation of right wing domination. A recent poll by Globes, the Israeli news publication, declared that there is nothing after Likud. In other words, Netanyahu has no rival or challenger, his only rivals or challengers are within his own party. The Young Turks, people like Tzipni Hotively, who held Knesset hearings on the dangers of miscegenation and assimilation and who favors annexing the West Bank.

So we see the right moving further to the right. We saw that in the Jerusalem mayoral elections, Nir Barkat, the architect of the settlers’ expulsion campaigns in East Jerusalem, specifically in Sheikh Jarrah, running against a further right wing candidate endorsed by Avigdor Lieberman and members of Israeli left cheering for Barkat’s victory, members of the Zionist left. This is all happened within the Green line. Everything I’ve talked about occurred within the area of Israel that will be legitimized under a two state solution. An area that is now almost entirely surrounded by walls and fortifications, a wall around the border of Gaza. Netanyahu has taken 200 million dollars out of the Israeli social budget to build a wall on the Sinai border to prevent African migrants from entering. He’s authorized funding 360 million dollars for a wall along the border with Jordan, which Israel enjoys a supposed peace treaty with. There is a 600 or more kilometer wall built in and around the West Bank which Netanyahu has said is designed to prevent demographic spillover. The Israeli occupied frontier with Syria is completely mined and then there are fences there. Israel is covered with an Iron Dome supplied by American tax payers to the tune of 200 million dollars. It’s a hermetically sealed dystopia that fulfills the prophecy outlined in the Book of Number that the people of Israel will dwell alone and not be reckoned among the nations.

 

This transcript may be used without permission but with proper attribution to The Palestine Center. The speaker’s views do not necessarily reflect the views of The Jerusalem Fund.