Het spreekt voor zich dat het journalistiek verwerpelijk is om uitgesproken zionistische propagandisten als de ‘journalist’ Leonard Ornstein te blijven opvoeren als onafhankelijke ‘duiders’ van wat zich in Israel en de bezette c.q. belegerde gebieden voltrekt. Het zou lachwekkend zijn als er niet zoveel Palestijnse burgers werden vermoord en verminkt, inclusief nu al 55 dode Palestijnse kinderen, door de expansionistische, zelf benoemde, ‘Joodse staat,’ die in strijd met de geest en de letter van het internationaal recht daarbij wordt gesteund door het neoliberale Westen.
Maar goed, de gecorrumpeerde ‘journalist’ Ornstein dus, die over elk gesprek inzake Israel de schaduw van de holocaust weet te trekken. Een significant voorbeeld van zijn zionistische houding gaf hij toen in november 2007 het opzienbarende boek ‘The Israellobby and U.S. Foreign Policy’ in het Nederlands verscheen en de auteurs, de gezaghebbende Amerikaanse hoogleraren John J. Mearsheimer en Stephen M. Walt, in Amsterdam hun uitgebreid gedocumenteerde boek kwamen toelichten. Leonard Ornstein was -- om mij onduidelijke redenen -- gevraagd als gespreksleider op te treden. Omdat ik uitgenodigd was en de dag daarop beide hoogleraren, die aan prestigieuze universiteiten doceerden, zou interviewen, was ik die avond aanwezig, en noteerde destijds het volgende:
‘The Israeli's rhetorically accepted it, and the Palestinians rejected it. We now know that the Israeli's had in 1937 and 1947 no intention of partitioning Palestine…'
Ornstein op hoge toon: 'How do you know? How do you know!'
Mearsheimer: 'Because there has been an extensive documentation…’
Ornstein: 'You have the documents?'
Mearsheimer: 'Yes, and…’
Ornstein onderbreekt opnieuw op bevelende toon: 'Explain!'
Gegeneerd gelach in de zaal om zoveel onbeschofte woede en onkunde.
Mearsheimer: 'This is dangerous for Leonard to ask us to go into it. I would suggest that anybody who has any doubts about this should get a book by Avi Shlaim, who teaches at Oxford. Avi Shlaim.'
Vervolgens spelt Mearsheimer de naam, en voegt hieraan toe:
'His book is called "Collusion across the Jordan: King Abdullah, the Zionist Movement and the Partition of Palestine." And all you have to do is spend 20 minutes thumbing through it.’
Ditmaal maakte Ornstein het zo bont dat het jonge publiek zich aan hem begon te ergeren. Mearsheimer, die ik naderhand interviewde, vergeleek Ornstein met fanatieke Amerikaanse Israel-lobbyisten. 'Ik vond de moderator in wezen vijandig tegenover ons,' verklaarde hij. 'Maar dat gebeurt vaker.' Professor Walt vond ‘dat de bijeenkomst in het Amsterdamse Arena Hotel opmerkelijk veel leek op die in de VS, want naast een zeer hoge opkomst is het publiek altijd geïnteresseerd, en is er altijd wel de onvermijdelijke pro-Israel lobbyist die zich groen en geel ergert. Maar dat dit nu juist de voorzitter Ornstein moest zijn, is natuurlijk merkwaardig.’
Zelfs het ‘doorbladeren’ van essentiële documentatie doen de Nederlandse lobbyende pro-Israel journalisten niet. Israel is voor hen ideologie, en feiten tellen domweg niet in een ideologische wereldbeschouwing. Uitgebreid gedocumenteerde feiten, aangedragen door onder andere vooraanstaande Joods-Israelische historici die de archieven van de Israelische Strijdkrachten naplozen, kennen ze niet. En toch zien we elke keer weer in Nederland de Leonard Ornstein's opduiken zodra het over Israel gaat. Het gruwelijke is dat zijn propaganda voor hemzelf consequentieloos blijft, maar niet voor de talloze slachtoffers van de propaganda, de gedode kinderen, vrouwen, bejaarden, jonge mannen.
Ondertussen hebben Leonard Ornstein en zijn Nederlandse zionistische lobbyisten als joodse Nederlanders meer recht op Israel en het bezette gebied dan een Palestijnse ingezetene ervan. Eerst genoemden claimen het recht op terugkeer dat etnisch gezuiverde Palestijnen niet bezitten. Voor deze joodse Nederlanders geldt datgene wat de joods-Israelische hoogleraar Benjamin Beit Hallahmi over joodse Amerikanen schreef:
In ruil voor de onbeperkte politieke steun aan Israël hebben de Amerikaanse joden gekregen waaraan het ze het meest ontbreekt: een ideologische inhoud om de leegte van hun identiteit te vullen.
Om zichzelf een identiteit te verschaffen zijn ze bereid om leugens te verspreiden. Veel oprechter was David Ben-Goerion, de grondlegger van de staat Israel, die in alle eerlijkheid het probleem aldus samenvatte:
Iedereen kan de ernst van de problemen in de relaties tussen Arabieren en Joden zien. Maar niemand ziet dat er voor deze problemen geen oplossing is. Er is geen oplossing! Hier is een afgrond, en niets kan de twee kanten met elkaar verbinden… Wij, als volk willen dat dit land van ons is; de Arabieren als volk willen dat dit land van hun is.
Het citaat is uit het Amerikaanse tijdschrift Time van 24 juli 2006. Het internationaal recht schrijft voor dat Israel geen recht heeft op de Westbank en Gaza. De kern van de strijd is een territoriaal probleem. Israel weigert zich te houden aan het internationaal recht dat bepaalt dat de Westbank en Gaza Palestijns eigendom is. Desondanks blijven joodse en christelijke pro-Israel journalisten als Anet Bleich, en haar dochter Natascha van Weezel, Leonard Ornstein, Bernard Hammelburg etcetera sympathiseren met een uiterst agressieve koloniale staat, of zoals Beit Hallahmi tegenover mij verklaarde: ‘Hoewel overal in de moderne wereld het kolonialisme verworpen is, is Israël nog steeds een koloniale garnizoensstaat.’ Als hoogleraar psychologie aan de Universiteit van Haifa, die in de VS, Engeland en Frankrijk doceerde, en als auteur van talloze boeken waaronder Original Sins. Reflections on the History of Zionism and Israël (1998) stelt hij:
En:
Diep (of niet zo diep) is iedere zionist zich bewust van de fundamentele immoraliteit van de manier waarop het zionisme de oorspronkelijke bewoners heeft behandeld.
De mainstream media, zeker in Nederland, spelen dit corrupte spel moeiteloos mee. Het ontbreekt hen aan waardigheid en zelfrespect, zoals ook tijdens de Tweede Wereldoorlog bleek toen Hilversumse omroepen en bijvoorbeeld de NRC collaboreerden. Diezelfde collaboratie met terreur demonstreerde het CIDI tijdens de Israelische inval in Gaza eind 2008, begin 2009, waarbij meer dan 300 Palestijnse kinderen werden gedood. Het CIDI sprak van een ‘gerechtvaardigd antwoord,’ hetgeen demonstreert dat eveneens de zionistische ideologie begint en eindigt met terreur.
Het buitensporig zionistisch geweld gericht tegen een burgerbevolking vloeit voort uit een simpel territoriaal conflict, waarbij geen enkele sprake is van een langdurige strijd tussen Joden en Hamas, maar een strijd tussen zionistische machthebbers en de Palestijns bevolking, die weigert haar rechtmatig bezit nog verder etnisch te laten zuiveren door een koloniale macht, militair, economisch en politiek gesteund door Washington, Wall Street en Brussel.
Nogmaals, deze etnische zuiveringen, die zowel door linkse- als rechtse zionisten rond 1948 werden begonnen, zijn niet het gevolg van een religieus conflict, maar het resultaat van het feit dat extremistische zionisten zich weigeren neer te leggen bij de VN-uitspraken, de uitspraak van het Internationaal Gerechtshof in Den Haag, en het internationaal recht in het algemeen. Maar door propagandisten als de 66-jarige VPRO-medewerker Leonard Ornstein, geholpen door onder andere de Hilversumse staatsomroepen, blijft de ware reden verzwegen.
There can be no voluntary agreement between ourselves and the Palestine Arabs. Not now, nor in the prospective future. I say this with such conviction, not because I want to hurt the moderate Zionists. I do not believe that they will be hurt. Except for those who were born blind, they realized long ago that it is utterly impossible to obtain the voluntary consent of the Palestine Arabs for converting ‘Palestine’ from an Arab country into a country with a Jewish majority.
My readers have a general idea of the history of colonization in other countries. I suggest that they consider all the precedents with which they are acquainted, and see whether there is one solitary instance of any colonization being carried on with the consent of the native population. There is no such precedent.
The native populations, civilized or uncivilized, have always stubbornly resisted the colonists, irrespective of whether they were civilized or savage.
And it made no difference whatever whether the colonists behaved decently or not. The companions of Cortez and Pizzaro or (as some people will remind us) our own ancestors under Joshua Ben Nun, behaved like brigands; but the Pilgrim Fathers, the first real pioneers of North America, were people of the highest morality, who did not want to do harm to anyone, least of all to the Red Indians, and they honestly believed that there was room enough in the prairies both for the Paleface and the Redskin. Yet the native population fought with the same ferocity against the good colonists as against the bad.
Every native population, civilised or not, regards its lands as its national home, of which it is the sole master, and it wants to retain that mastery always; it will refuse to admit not only new masters but, even new partners or collaborators.
Arabs Not Fools
This is equally true of the Arabs. Our Peace-mongers are trying to persuade us that the Arabs are either fools, whom we can deceive by masking our real aims, or that they are corrupt and can be bribed to abandon to us their claim to priority in Palestine , in return for cultural and economic advantages. I repudiate this conception of the Palestinian Arabs. Culturally they are five hundred years behind us, they have neither our endurance nor our determination; but they are just as good psychologists as we are, and their minds have been sharpened like ours by centuries of fine-spun logomachy. We may tell them whatever we like about the innocence of our aims, watering them down and sweetening them with honeyed words to make them palatable, but they know what we want, as well as we know what they do not want. They feel at least the same instinctive jealous love of Palestine, as the old Aztecs felt for ancient Mexico, and the Sioux for their rolling Prairies.
To imagine, as our Arabophiles do, that they will voluntarily consent to the realisation of Zionism, in return for the moral and material conveniences which the Jewish colonist brings with him, is a childish notion, which has at bottom a kind of contempt for the Arab people; it means that they despise the Arab race, which they regard as a corrupt mob that can be bought and sold, and are willing to give up their fatherland for a good railway system.
All Natives Resist Colonists
There is no justification for such a belief. It may be that some individual Arabs take bribes. But that does not mean that the Arab people of Palestine as a whole will sell that fervent patriotism that they guard so jealously, and which even the Papuans will never sell. Every native population in the world resists colonists as long as it has the slightest hope of being able to rid itself of the danger of being colonized.
That is what the Arabs in Palestine are doing, and what they will persist in doing as long as there remains a solitary spark of hope that they will be able to prevent the transformation of ‘Palestine’ into the ‘Land of Israel.’
Arab Comprehension
Some of us have induced ourselves to believe that all the trouble is due to misunderstanding — the Arabs have not understood us, and that is the only reason why they resist us; if we can only make it clear to them how moderate our intentions really are, they will immediately extend to us their hand in friendship.
This belief is utterly unfounded and it has been exploded again and again. I shall recall only one instance of many. A few years ago, when the late Mr. Sokolow was on one of his periodic visits to Palestine, he addressed a meeting on this very question of the ‘misunderstanding.’ He demonstrated lucidly and convincingly that the Arabs are terribly mistaken if they think that we have any desire to deprive them of their possessions or to drive them our of the country, or that we want to oppress them. We do not even ask for a Jewish Government to hold the Mandate of the League of Nations.
One of the Arab papers, ‘El Carmel,’ replied at the time, in an editorial article, the purport of which was this:
The Zionists are making a fuss about nothing. There is no misunderstanding. All that Mr. Sokolow says about the Zionist intentions is true, but the Arabs know that without him. Of course, the Zionists cannot now be thinking of driving the Arabs out of the country, or oppressing them, not do they contemplate a Jewish Government. Quite obviously, they are now concerned with one thing only: that the Arabs should not hinder their immigration. The Zionists assure us that even immigration will be regulated strictly according to the economic needs of Palestine. The Arabs have never doubted that: it is a truism, for otherwise there can be no immigration.
No ‘Misunderstanding’
This Arab editor was actually willing to agree that Palestine has a very large potential absorptive capacity, meaning that there is room for a great many Jews in the country without displacing a single Arab. There is only one thing the Zionists want, and it is that one thing that the Arabs do not want, for that is the way by which the Jews would gradually become the majority, and then a Jewish Government would follow automatically, and the future of the Arab minority would depend on the goodwill of the Jews; and a minority status is not a good thing, as the Jews themselves are never tired of pointing out. So there is no ‘misunderstanding.’
The Zionists want only one thing, Jewish immigration; and this Jewish immigration is what the Arabs do not want.
This statement of the position by the Arab editor is so logical, so obvious, so indisputable, that everyone ought to know it by heart, and it should be made the basis of all our future discussions on the Arab question. It does not matter at all which phraseology we employ in explaining our colonizing aims, Herzl's or Sir Herbert Samuel's.
Colonization carries its own explanation, the only possible explanation, unalterable and as clear as daylight to every ordinary Jew and every ordinary Arab.
Colonization can have only one aim, and Palestine Arabs cannot accept this aim. It lies in the very nature of things, and in this particular regard nature cannot be changed.
The Iron Wall
We cannot offer any adequate compensation to the Palestinian Arabs in return for Palestine. And therefore, there is no likelihood of any voluntary agreement being reached. So that all those who regard such an agreement as a condition sine qua non for Zionism may as well say "non" and withdraw from Zionism.
Zionist colonisation must either stop, or else pive population. Which means that it can proceed and develop only under the protection of a power that is independent of the native population – behind an iron wall, which the native population cannot breach.
That is our Arab policy; not what we should be, but what it actually is, whether we admit it or not. What need, otherwise, of the Balfour Declaration? Or of the Mandate? Their value to us is that outside Power has undertaken to create in the country such conditions of administration and security that if the native population should desire to hinder our work, they will find it impossible.
And we are all of us, without any exception, demanding day after day that this outside Power, should carry out this task vigorously and with determination.
In this matter there is no difference between our ‘militarists' and our ‘vegetarians.’ Except that the first prefer that the iron wall should consist of Jewish soldiers, and the others are content that they should be British.
We all demand that there should be an iron wall. Yet we keep spoiling our own case, by talking about ‘agreement’ which means telling the Mandatory Government that the important thing is not the iron wall, but discussions. Empty rhetoric of this kind is dangerous. And that is why it is not only a pleasure but a duty to discredit it and to demonstrate that it is both fantastic and dishonest.
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/quot-the-iron-wall-quot
De misdadige expansionistische politiek die Netanyahu nu voert, is die van zowel David Ben-Goerion als die van Ze’ev Jabotinski. Vandaar dat dit feit zo angstvallig door zionisten als Anet Bleich, Natascha van Weezel, Leonard Ornstein, Leon de Winter, en al die andere opiniemakers die het Israelisch Recht op Terugkeer bezitten, zo angstvallig geheim houden. Het feit dat kritiekloze zionisten van de polderpers zoveel ruimte krijgen, terwijl anderen de mond wordt gesnoerd, demonstreert hoe corrupt de huidige massamedia zijn. Zij allen wassen hun handen in bloed. Meer daarover later.
Het zal geen van de lezers kunnen verbazen dat geen van mijn zionistische collega's publiekelijk met mij hierover in discussie durven, desondanks roep ik ze nogmaals op met mij hierover in gesprek te gaan. Jullie weten me te bereiken: stanvanhoucke@gmail.com
From left to right: John Mearsheimer, Stephen Walt and the pro-Israel moderator Leonard Ornstein.
Israel's big lie: This isn't self defense — it's a war crime, aided and abetted by the U.S.
Almost everything said in the U.S. about Israel's assault on the Palestinians is a lie — because we are implicated
By CHRIS HEDGES
PUBLISHED MAY 15, 2021
Nearly all the words and phrases used by the Democrats, Republicans and the talking heads on the media to describe the unrest inside Israel and the heaviest Israeli assault against the Palestinians since the 2014 attacks on Gaza, which lasted 51 days and killed more than 2,200 Palestinians, including 551 children, are a lie. Israel, by employing its military machine against an occupied population that does not have mechanized units, an air force, navy, missiles, heavy artillery and command-and-control, not to mention a U.S. commitment to provide a $38 billion defense aid package for Israel over the next decade, is not exercising "the right to defend itself." It is carrying out mass murder. It is a war crime.
Israel has made clear it is ready to destroy and kill as wantonly now as it was in 2014. Israeli defense minister Benny Gantz, who was the chief of staff during the murderous assault on Gaza in 2014, has vowed that if Hamas "does not stop the violence, the strike of 2021 will be harder and more painful than that of 2014." The current attacks have already targeted several residential high-rises including buildings that housed more than a dozen local and international press agencies, government buildings, roads, public facilities, agricultural lands, two schools and a mosque.
I spent seven years in the Middle East as a correspondent, four of them as The New York Times Middle East bureau chief. I am an Arabic speaker. I lived for weeks at a time in Gaza, the world's largest open-air prison, where more than 2 million Palestinians exist on the edge of starvation, struggle to find clean water and endure constant Israeli terror. I have been in Gaza when it was pounded with Israeli artillery and air strikes. I have watched mothers and fathers, wailing in grief, cradling the bloodied bodies of their sons and daughters. I know the crimes of the occupation — the food shortages caused by the Israeli blockade, the stifling overcrowding, the contaminated water, the lack of health services, the near-constant electrical outages due to the Israeli targeting of power plants, the crippling poverty, the endemic unemployment, the fear and the despair. I have witnessed the carnage.
I also have listened from Gaza to the lies emanating from Jerusalem and Washington. Israel's indiscriminate use of modern, industrial weapons to kill thousands of innocents, wound thousands more and make tens of thousands of families homeless is not a war: It is state-sponsored terror. And while I oppose the indiscriminate firing of rockets by Palestinians into Israel, as I oppose suicide bombings, seeing them also as war crimes, I am acutely aware of a huge disparity between the industrial violence carried out by Israel against innocent Palestinians and the minimal acts of violence capable of being waged by groups such as Hamas.
The false equivalency between Israeli and Palestinian violence was echoed during the war I covered in Bosnia. Those of us in the besieged city of Sarajevo were pounded daily with hundreds of heavy shells and rockets from the surrounding Serbs. We were targeted by sniper fire. The city suffered a few dozen dead and wounded each day. The government forces inside the city fired back with light mortars and small arms fire. Supporters of the Serbs seized on any casualties caused by Bosnian government forces to play the same dirty game, although well over 90 percent of the killings in Bosnia were the fault of the Serbs, as is also true regarding Israel.
The second and perhaps most important parallel is that the Serbs, like the Israelis, were the principal violators of international law. Israel is in breach of more than 30 UN Security Council resolutions. It is in breach of Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention that defines collective punishment of a civilian population as a war crime. It is in violation of Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention for settling over half a million Jewish Israelis on occupied Palestinian land and for the ethnic cleansing of at least 750,000 Palestinians when the Israeli state was founded and another 300,000 after Gaza, East Jerusalem and the West Bank were occupied following the 1967 war. Its annexation of East Jerusalem and the Syrian Golan Heights violates international law, as does its building of a security barrier in the West Bank that annexes Palestinian land into Israel. It is in violation of UN General Assembly Resolution 194, which states that Palestinian "refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date."
This is the truth. Any other starting point for the discussion of what is taking place between Israel and the Palestinians is a lie.
Israel's once-vibrant peace movement and political left, which condemned and protested against the Israeli occupation when I lived in Jerusalem, is moribund. The right-wing Netanyahu government, despite its rhetoric about fighting terrorism, has built an alliance with the repressive regime in Saudi Arabia, which also views Iran as an enemy. Saudi Arabia, a country that produced 15 of the 19 hijackers in the September 11 attacks, is reputed to be the most prolific sponsor of international Islamist terrorism, allegedly supporting Salafist jihadism, the basis of al-Qaida, and groups such as the Afghanistan Taliban, Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) and the Al-Nusra Front.
Saudi Arabia and Israel worked closely together to back the 2013 military coup in Egypt, led by General Abdul Fattah el Sisi. Sisi overthrew a democratically elected government. He has imprisoned tens of thousands of government critics, including journalists and human rights defenders, on politically motivated charges. The Sisi regime collaborates with Israel by keeping its common border with Gaza closed to Palestinians, trapping them in the Gaza strip, one of the most densely populated places on earth. Israel's cynicism and hypocrisy, especially when it wraps itself in the mantle of protecting democracy and fighting terrorism, is of epic proportions.
Those who are not Jewish in Israel are either second-class citizens or live under brutal military occupation. Israel is not, and never has been, the exclusive homeland of the Jewish people. From the 7th century until 1948, when Jewish colonial settlers used violence and ethnic cleansing to create the state of Israel, Palestine was overwhelmingly Muslim. It was never empty land. The Jews in Palestine were traditionally a tiny minority. The United States is not an honest broker for peace but has funded, enabled and defended Israel's crimes against the Palestinian people. Israel is not defending the rule of law. Israel is not a democracy. It is an apartheid state.
That the lie of Israel continues to be embraced by the ruling elites — there is no daylight between statements in defense of Israeli war crimes by Nancy Pelosi and Ted Cruz — and used as a foundation for any discussion of Israel is a testament to the corrupting power of money, in this case that of the Israel lobby, and the bankruptcy of a political system of legalized bribery that has surrendered its autonomy and its principles to its major donors. It is also a stunning example of how colonial settler projects — and this is also true in the United States — always carry out cultural genocide so they can exist in a suspended state of myth and historical amnesia to legitimize themselves.
The Israel lobby has shamelessly used its immense political clout to demand that Americans take de facto loyalty oaths to Israel. The passage by 35 state legislatures of Israel lobby-backed legislation requiring their workers and contractors, under threat of dismissal, to sign a pro-Israel oath and promise not to support the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement is a mockery of our constitutional right of free speech. Israel has lobbied the U.S. State Department to redefine antisemitism under a three-point test known as the Three Ds: the making of statements that "demonize" Israel; statements that apply "double standards" for Israel; statements that "delegitimize" the state of Israel. This definition of antisemitism is being pushed by the Israel lobby in state legislatures and on college campuses.
The Israel lobby spies in the United States, often at the direction of Israel's Ministry of Strategic Affairs, on those who speak up for the rights of Palestinians. It wages public smear campaigns and blacklists defenders of Palestinian rights — including the Jewish historian Norman Finkelstein; UN Special Rapporteur for the Occupied Territories Richard Falk, also Jewish; and university students, many of them Jewish, in organizations such as Students for Justice in Palestine.
The Israel lobby has spent hundreds of millions of dollars to manipulate U.S. elections, far beyond anything alleged to have been carried out by Russia, China or any other country. The heavy-handed interference by Israel in the American political system, which includes operatives and donors bundling together hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions in every U.S. congressional district to bankroll compliant candidates, is documented in the Al-Jazeera four-part series "The Lobby." Israel managed to block "The Lobby" from being broadcast. In the film, a pirated copy of which is available on the website Electronic Intifada, the leaders of the Israel lobby are repeatedly captured on a reporter's hidden camera explaining how they, backed by the intelligence services within Israel, attack and silence American critics and use massive cash donations to buy politicians.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu secured an unconstitutional invitation from then-House Speaker John Boehner to address Congress in 2015 to denounce President Barack Obama's Iranian nuclear agreement. Netanyahu's open defiance of Obama and alliance with the Republican Party, however, did not stop Obama in 2014 from authorizing a 10-year, $38 billion military aid package to Israel, a sad commentary on how captive American politics is to Israeli interests.
The investment by Israel and is backers is worth it, especially when you consider that the U.S. has also spent more than $6 trillion during the last 20 years fighting futile wars that Israel and its lobby pushed for in the Middle East. These wars are the greatest strategic debacle in American history, accelerating the decline of the American empire, bankrupting the nation at a time of economic stagnation and mounting poverty, and turning huge parts of the globe against us. They serve Israel's interests, not ours.
The longer the mendacious Israeli narrative is embraced, the more empowered become the racists, bigots, conspiracy theorists and far-right hate groups inside and outside Israel. This steady shift to the far right in Israel has fostered an alliance between Israel and the Christian right, many of whom are antisemites. The more Israel and the Israel lobby level the charge of antisemitism against those who speak up for Palestinian rights, as they did against former British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, the more they embolden the real antisemites.
Racism, including antisemitism, is dangerous. It is not only bad for the Jews. It is bad for everyone. It empowers the dark forces of ethnic and religious hatred on the extremes. Netanyahu's racist government has built alliances with far-right leaders in Hungary, India and Brazil, and was closely allied with Donald Trump. Racists and ethnic chauvinists, as I saw in the wars in the former Yugoslavia, feed off each other. They divide societies into polarized, antagonistic camps that only speak in the language of violence. The radical jihadists need Israel to justify their violence, just as Israel needs the radical jihadists to justify its violence. These extremists are ideological twins.
This polarization fosters a fearful, militarized society. It permits the ruling elites in Israel, as in the United States, to dismantle civil liberties in the name of national security. Israel runs training programs for militarized police, including from the United States. It is a global player in the multibillion-dollar drone industry, competing against China and the United States.
It oversees hundreds of cyber-surveillance startups whose espionage innovations, according to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, have been utilized abroad "to locate and detain human rights activists, persecute members of the LGBT community, silence citizens critical of their governments, and even fabricate cases of blasphemy against Islam in Muslim countries that don't maintain formal relations with Israel."
Israel, like the United States, has been poisoned by the psychosis of permanent war. One million Israelis, many of them among the most enlightened and educated, have left the country. Its most courageous human rights campaigners, intellectuals and journalists — Israeli and Palestinian — endure constant government surveillance, arbitrary arrests and vicious government-run smear campaigns. Mobs and vigilantes, including thugs from right-wing youth groups such as Im Tirtzu, physically assault dissidents, Palestinians, Israeli Arabs and African immigrants in the slums of Tel Aviv. These Jewish extremists have targeted Palestinians in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood, demanding their expulsion. They are supported by an array of anti-Arab groups including the Otzma Yehudit Party, the ideological descendant of the outlawed Kach party, the Lehava movement, which calls for all Palestinians in Israel and the occupied territories to be expelled to surrounding Arab states, and La Familia, far-right soccer hooligans. Lehava in Hebrew means "flame" and is the acronym for "Prevention of Assimilation in the Holy Land." Mobs of these Jewish fanatics parade through Palestinian neighborhoods, including in occupied East Jerusalem, protected by Israeli police, shouting to the Palestinians who live there "Death to the Arabs," which is also a popular chant at Israeli soccer matches.
Israel has pushed through a series of discriminatory laws against non-Jews that echo the racist Nuremberg Laws that disenfranchised Jews in Nazi Germany. The Communities Acceptance Law, for example, permits "small, exclusively Jewish towns planted across Israel's Galilee region to formally reject applicants for residency on the grounds of 'suitability to the community's fundamental outlook.'" Israel's educational system, starting in primary school, uses the Holocaust to portray Jews as eternal victims. This victimhood is an indoctrination machine used to justify racism, Islamophobia, religious chauvinism and the deification of the Israeli military.
There are many parallels between the deformities that grip Israel and the deformities that grip the United States. The two countries are moving at warp speed towards a 21st-century fascism, cloaked in religious language, which will revoke what remains of our civil liberties and snuff out our anemic democracies. The failure of the United States to stand up for the rule of law, to demand that the Palestinians, powerless and friendless, even in the Arab world, be granted basic human rights mirrors the abandonment of the vulnerable within our own society. We are headed, I fear, down the road Israel is heading down. It will be devastating for the Palestinians. It will be devastating for us. And all resistance, as the Palestinians courageously show us, will only come from the street.
CHRIS HEDGES
Chris Hedges is the former Middle East bureau chief of the New York Times, a Pulitzer Prize winner, and a columnist at Scheerpost. He is the author of several books, including "America: The Farewell Tour," "American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America" and "War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning."
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