Amira Hass on Western Supported Jewish-Israeli Terror

Amira Hass

May. 31, 2022 4:29 AM

“The Arabs are raising their heads. They’re taking liberties,” complained Efrat Raz, a resident of the unauthorized, illegal outpost of Kida, to Prime Minister Naftali Bennett. Because he was killed, we know that her husband Noam Raz was a member of the Yamam police counterterrorism force that raided Jenin on May 13 and bombarded a house while its residents, including 11 children, slept inside. The armed men of the force also took a father and his daughter as human shields.

How many residents of the illegal settlements and illegal/unauthorized outposts serve enthusiastically, with devotion and high spirits in units that terrorize Palestinian children and induce trauma and fury in them for their entire lives? How many of their wives – and it’s reasonable to assume that they themselves – think “the Arabs are raising their heads?” How many of those wearing the white shirts that we saw in Sunday’s march of horrors in Jerusalem dream about joining the Yamam?

It would be important if they set the policy under which the role of the army and its policing branches is to protect and deepen the settlement enterprise. But the opposite is true: For over 50 years the messianic-nationalist stream has served as a convenient tool in the hands of secular Israeli governments, which worked diligently on advancing the Zionist project while grabbing the remnants of the Palestinian space, captured in 1967. A tool, let us repeat. A means.

The white shirts – since the dancing in Sebastia and the Purim celebrations in Hebron after the massacre carried out by Dr. Baruch Goldstein on Palestinian worshippers – would not have succeeded if they had not served so well the goals of all the Zionist governments and fitted into their plans. If not for the politicians (members of the Socialist International!) such as Shimon Peres and Yigal Allon who encouraged them, and planned very early the shattering of the West Bank as a Palestinian space; if the IDF had not demolished during the time of Levi Eshkol and Moshe Dayan three Palestinian villages at Latrun, and expelled their residents; if the police had not ignored, for decades, the violence of their “wild weeds”; if the army had not seized large areas for alleged military purposes and then passed them on to settlers; if the Israeli economists, architects and lawyers had not prevented Palestinian development – before and after the Oslo Accords.

The problem is that tools, like the Golem of the Maharal of Prague or of Walt Disney, tend to raise their heads. We saw this in the terrifying flag dance in Jerusalem on Sunday. Today, they are 50,000 wearing white shirts who marched in the heart of Palestinian Jerusalem. Yesterday they marched in Hebron and fulfilled there the vision of emptying it of Palestinians. Tomorrow they will be 100,000.

The violent outposts of the shepherds are also a registered patent of this holy white aesthetic. And as was confirmed by their patron, Ze’ev Hever from the colonizing movement Amana, these outposts have taken over a Palestinian space twice as large as the area of the lands the built-up settlements stole. How much will they succeed in stealing tomorrow? An area eight times the size, or only seven times? Today it is 2,600 dancing, pious Jews who went up on the Haram al-Sharif/Temple Mount. They have managed to expropriate almost completely the Ibrahim Mosque/Tomb of the Patriarchs from the Palestinian public. Tomorrow they will be 7,000. How many of them will sign a petition to build the Third Temple? And when will they have a democratic majority in the Knesset?

Is there now in all the world’s countries a single responsible adult who will say openly: “The hell with it, this Jewish mutation that is developing there in the Middle East – in other words, the State of Israel – has lost it. Freaked out, lost its mind, gone crazy. Because of its military, nuclear and high-tech power, combined with all the religious fervor, because of its alliance with the United States, this needs to worry us. Very much so.”

In our cynical world, it is an unfounded expectation that any international body will appear, that such a responsible adult will stand up and act to stop this process, in whose creation Israel’s Jewish citizens are full partners.