We have heard much in the past year
about Secretary of State John Kerry’s push to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict and bring about a two-state solution. But aside from the fact that no
progress whatever has been made, the situation within Israel itself suggests
that even were Kerry able to bring off a miracle, the growing power of the
radical right inside Israel would never allow it (Israeli officials have
recently severely criticized Kerry for warning Israel about increasing pressure
from the BDS, or boycott movement). For while most of the world has been
focused on the violations inflicted by Israel on the Palestinian territories
under occupation, i.e., in the West Bank and Gaza, the plight of Palestinians inside
Israel—Israeli citizens all—has been
largely ignored. Max Blumenthal’s recent book, Goliath: Life and Loathing Inside Greater Israel, goes a long way
towards correcting that omission. What Blumenthal demonstrates, with scores of
recorded interviews with Israeli politicians and activists, is that the current
Israeli Knesset is controlled by right-wing racists and proto-fascists whose
announced aim is to reduce even further the “rights” of Palestinians in Israel,
forcing them into ever narrower and more hostile places to live and work, and
finally to force them out of Israel altogether. While this has been the aim of
Zionism from its founding—as Blumenthal demonstrates with his accounts of early
massacres and forced evictions of Palestinians from land Israel wanted for
itself: “95 percent of new Jewish communities were established on ‘absentee’
[i.e. confiscated] Palestinian land”—it has gained virulent strength in recent
years due to the immigration into Israel of Russian Jews and the concomitant
rise of Russian Jewish leaders like Avigdor Lieberman. These are the immigrants
who are induced to live in the illegal settlements that have been condemned by
the international community and the UN, and which form such a bone of
contention in all “peace” talks, and who form the shock troops of the Israeli
demonstrations against Arabs that are becoming more and more common in Israeli
cities like Tel Aviv and Jaffa. It is the latter that are so shockingly
portrayed in Blumenthal’s book.
Here is what
Blumenthal writes about Lieberman and his fellow immigrants:
As the home of the world’s largest population of
racist skinheads, Russia exported its neo-Nazi plague to the Jewish state.
Starting in 2007, mobs of Russian teens who received automatic citizenship
under Israel’s Law of Return began spray-painting swastikas on synagogue walls
and attacking Holocaust survivors, reportedly screaming “Heil Hitler!” during
several attacks. (24)
This is almost too shocking to
believe, but Blumenthal’s statement is confirmed by his interview with Zalman
Gilichenski, identified as “a Russian immigrant teacher who ran a hotline for
victims of neo-Nazi attacks in Israel.” According to Gilichenski, “They
distribute cassettes and written material. They began with graffiti and then
graduated to beatings” (24). In the city of Jaffa—itself largely cleared in 1948 of
Palestinians, many of them orange farmers whose farms were expropriated to
become the source of Israel’s famous “Jaffa oranges”—these shock troops of the
Israeli right wing began to attack the remaining Palestinians, confined, since
1951, to the “ghetto of Ajami”. Blumenthal calls them part of the right-wing’s
“building in the heart” campaign,
which
aimed to create a bloc of settlements in the center of mixed Arab-Jewish cities
that would be impossible to dislodge, and to use them as citadels for the
incitement of ethnic conflict…In the event of a two-state “solution” requiring
the evacuation of ideological settlements in the West Bank, many of the most
hardline settlers planned to relocate to mixed cities like Jaffa and Acre..(49).
In one Jaffa incident in 2010,
Blumenthal tells us, these thugs entered the yard of Zeinab Rechayel, a local
Palestinian woman, chanting “This is our land!” and “Yafo is just for Jews.”
Not long after, another group attacked the Al Nozha Mosque with rocks, shouting
“Death to Arabs!” Police standing by did nothing. Similar violence against
Israeli Arabs followed the Mavi Marmara
massacre, wherein Israeli commandos had boarded a ship from Turkey bringing
relief supplies to the Gaza strip, killing nine unarmed peace activists. When
Israeli peace activists demonstrated to protest the killings, the
government-linked student group Im Tirtzu organized a counter-demonstration, with
right-wing students screaming that peace demonstrators were terrorist lovers,
Nazis, or smolinim (leftists.) At the
same demonstration, another group of Im Tirtzu supporters attempted to drag
famed Israeli peace activist Uri Avnery from his taxi. Moreover, the chant
“Death to the Arabs!”, according to Ben Gurion professor of behavioral sciences
and leading expert on racism in Israel, Amir Ben-Porat, “has become a common
chant in almost every football stadium in Israel” and throughout the culture (247).
All this plays
into the hands of, and is an expression of the right-wing politics that has
taken over Israel and the Knesset under Benjamin Netanyahu. Laws, such as the
Nakba Law, subject anyone (i.e. a Palestinian) participating in commemorating
what Palestinians refer to as the Naqba or catastrophe (the 1948 founding of
Israel and the resultant forcing of Palestinians out of their villages, lands,
and homes) to criminal fines and imprisonment for up to three years. The law
was meant to be part of Avigdor Lieberman’s larger program, “No loyalty, no
citizenship.” In other words, if Arabs want to commemorate their catastrophe
instead of what Israelis call Independence Day, according to Lieberman, then
they are disloyal and should not have Israeli citizenship. According to his
plan for ending the conflict,
Israel would unilaterally establish permanent borders
along demographic lines, bringing the major settlement blocs into “Israel
proper” while leaving remote settlements out…In turn, at least twenty-five
thousand Arabs would be stripped of their citizenship and transferred into the
hands of the Palestinian Authority (25).
Everything is being done to
convince and coerce Israeli Palestinians into believing that this would be best
for them. We have all heard of the bulldozing of Palestinian homes in the West
Bank—indeed, since 1967, Israeli bulldozers have destroyed well over 26,000 Palestinian
homes (and killed at least one American, activist Rachel Corrie). But now, with
a state campaign of “Judaization,” such demolitions are taking place within
Israel proper, for example, in the Lod ghetto 15 minutes to the east of Tel
Aviv. There, on December 13, 2010, a 17-year-old named Hamza Abu Eid was told
by his principal that bulldozers were destroying his home. He rushed home but
was only in time to see that Israeli bulldozers had already demolished all
seven homes belonging to his extended family, with 74 people, including 54
children, left homeless. The family—Israeli citizens all—had been trying for
years to get permits to improve their land, but the state rejected all of them.
It now plans to build a road through the one-time Lod ghetto, and add a yeshiva
for good measure. And to deal with other communities where Israeli Arabs might
want to live, the Knesset recently passed the “Acceptance to Communities Act.”
This legally authorizes Israeli towns to reject Palestinian Israelis as
residents for alleged “social unsuitability.” Does no one there remember? Well,
there’s memory and there’s memory, or so one Rabbi Aviner would have us
believe: according to the good rabbi, Israel is called “to be holy, not moral,
and the general principles of morality, customary for all mankind, do not bind
the people of Israel, because it has been chosen to be above them” (230). Very
convenient.
There is much more
in this shocking book, but it might best be summarized in the words of Lia
Tarachansky, a Russian Israeli born in the (illegal) settlement of Ariel, and then
educated in Canada. Blumenthal’s interview with this peace activist and
reporter elicited this:
"To explain the fascism in Israel,
it’s not that easy, because honestly I don’t let myself think about it that
much. It’s so depressing and so terrifying that I usually repress my thoughts
about it. But if you really want me to define it, then I’d tell you that it’s
not just the anti-democratic laws, it’s not the consensus for occupation, it’s
not the massive right-wing coalition government, it’s not watching the people
who ask questions and think critically being interrogated by the Shabak [Shin
Bet, Israel’s secret police]. What it really is, is a feeling that you have
sitting on a bus being afraid to speak Arabic with your Palestinian friends.
It’s a feeling when you are sitting there having dinner—what you feel when
you’re alive here. It’s the essence of what this society is. And the closer we
get to the brink—and everyone is feeling that we’re getting to the breaking
point—the worse it gets." (120).
In sum, we have a state claiming to
be a democracy while it methodically bulldozes its way to racial/religious
purity. Now haven’t we heard of that somewhere before?
Lawrence DiStasi
