Haaretz journo: 'Israel is only a democracy for those who fall in line'

Don't just take my word for it, listen to an Israeli Jewish journalist, who recounts how Israel's public discourse has been deformed and coarsened by decades of government aggression against Palestinians and official censure of any Israeli citizen who questions that aggression.

Gideon Levy echoes my words from last week about how Israel's government and media have effectively dehumanized the Palestinians, leaving them open to whatever punishment they "deserve" from the IDF and its supplier of deadly weapons, the United States [emphasis mine]:

But the biggest problem is not the marginal extremist who cheers for the killing of Palestinian children in Gaza, or applauds every Israeli bomb that falls on a private residence. The biggest problem is the Israeli mainstream, which spoke with one voice during this war, and which had zero tolerance for any kind of dissent, or even the simplest human compassion with Palestinian sacrifice, suffering and bloodshed.

It is all about dehumanization. As long as Israelis don't perceive Palestinians as equal human beings, there will never be a real solution. Unfortunately, dehumanizing the Palestinians has become the best tool to strengthen the occupation, to ignore and deny its crimes and enable the Israelis to live in peace, without any moral dilemmas. If the Palestinians are not human beings, there is no question about human rights. This process climaxed in this war and this is the real basis for the moral blindness which has covered Israel.

American sympathizers with Israelis' plight and the cause of Zionism must be aware: Israel is not a democracy as we know it. It's a system where something more brutal than Jim Crow is codified in law and justified by self-serving morality:

Israel likes to describe itself as "the only democracy in the Middle East," but it's really only a democracy for its Jewish citizens who are quick to fall in line with the mainstream every time Israeli tanks roll across the border.

Americans should not express kinship with that kind of democracy. Eventually, we Americans rejected the physical and cultural genocide of native Americans, expressed our sorrow and made reparations. Eventually, we rejected the codified injustice of slavery, Jim Crow and "separate but equal," and we are a better nation for it. 

We Americans mustn't stoop down now after having passed through all that and commiserate with a nation that exceeds our worst historical sins, simply because we abhor the Holocaust and support the idea of a Jewish homeland. We must push Israel hard to listen to its better angels, its liberal dissenters, and transcend the original sins of its founding, just as the U.S. has done.  

Why Israel is its own worst enemy

By Gideon Levy

August 8, 2014 | CNN

URL: http://edition.cnn.com/2014/08/08/opinion/israel-own-worst-enemy-levy/index.html?hpt=hp_mid

Many Israelis don't know a single Palestinian (NPR)

This report by NPR is well worth reading or listening to. I did not realize before it just how segregated Israeli Jews are from their Palestinian neighbors.  And considering the disinformation that Israeli Jews receive about Arabs in schools and the Israeli media, it's entirely possible that many Israelis know LESS about Palestinians than informed Americans do.  

I emphasize this because often I have heard in the U.S., usually from a conservative pundit, something like the following: "Just ask and Israeli what Arabs are like," or "We should take Israel's word for it how to deal with the Palestinians."  This report shows why this cannot be true.  Most Israelis are more isolated from Palestinians than any resident of a major U.S. city is from Arabs and Muslims.  Israelis live in a bubble of hatred and fear that they themselves created.

This story reminds us that the main purpose of ghettoization -- be it by Nazis Germans or Israeli Jews -- is to separate the citizenry of the oppressor from the oppressed, to minimize all human contact from which common ground and natural empathy might spring. Segregation makes the job of propaganda much easier: citizens can be convinced those in the ghetto are the "other" with all sorts of evil intent, and essentially sub-human, without the same human qualities as you and I. Ergo they deserve whatever bad treatment they get from the oppressor state.

Is There Any Empathy Left In The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict?

By Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson

August 4, 2014 | NPR

URL: http://n.pr/1pzbiI5

Watch 'Jaffa: The Orange's Clockwork' (2010)

This documentary by Israeli filmmaker Eyal Sivan is excellent and fair-minded.  I haven't been able to find the whole thing in English yet, only this shortened version. For my francophone friends, the entire film is on YouTube with French subtitles: http://youtu.be/gxTAxIPxeGM 

The film gives the lie to a lot of myths about Palestine, Zionism and the founding of the Israeli state, foremost that Palestine was a desert wasteland, "A land crying out to the West, 'Come, save me. Come, conquer me.'"  It's especially important now to remember real history, as Israel has killed more than 800 Palestinians and injured more than 5000, many of them civilians, in occupied Gaza in revenge for the murder of three Israelis.

Director's statement

Jaffa, The Orange’s Clockwork is a political essay unfolding the story of the invention and the visual history of the world’s wide famous citrus fruit originated in Palestine and known around the world as "Jaffa oranges". While the orange become the symbol of the Zionist enterprise and the state of Israel, for Palestinians it symbolises the lost of their homeland and its destruction. Through a careful reading of the visual representation of the brand, the film reflects on western phantasms related to the ‘Orient’ the ‘holy land’ and the State of Israel and unveils the untold story of what was ones a commune symbol and industry to Arabs and Jews in Palestine.

The oranges of Jaffa, the fruits, the orchards, the brand name and the city - that gave to the fruit its name, are the backdrop of the commune Jewish-Arab life in Palestine before the establishment of Israel, the colonial covetousness, the account of obliteration, nationalization, then repudiation in order to propose a joint historical narrative.

Watch it!

http://www.eyalsivan.info/index.php?p=fichefilm&id=10#&panel1-7

What 'recognizing Israel' really means

I know another place that insisted on putting one's ethnic background in one's passport: the Soviet Union. Israel is in good company.

Israel is not a free and democratic country by Western standards.

Recognising the Jewish state

By Charlotte Silver

October 10, 2013 | Al Jazeera

URL: http://aje.me/15qBxYd

Israeli security chiefs may surprise you

"After retiring from this job, you become a bit of a leftist."  Hmm....

In "The Gatekeepers," Israeli Security Chiefs Say What US Leaders Can't

By Asawin Suebsaeng

February 22, 2013 | Mother Jones

"What's unnatural is the power you have to take three people, terrorists, and take their lives in an instant," says Yuval Diskin, the 12th director of the Shin Bet, Israel's internal security service, during the opening sequence of The Gatekeepers. His blunt testimony sets the grave and mournful tone that defines the rest of this illuminating and devastating film.

The Oscar-nominated documentary, directed by Israeli filmmaker Dror Moreh, uses interviews with all six living ex-directors of the Shin Bet to paint a stark portrait of the agency and how it figures into the Jewish state's past, present, and future. For those who haven't heard of this security service, here are a couple lines from my crib sheet: Imagine the FBI, only tremendously more efficient, brutal, and terrifying. Now, imagine if the war on terror were half a century old, and if we had drone strikes and black sites in Florida and Montana.

That's what the Shin Bet is like for Israelis.

It's a juggernaut of counterterrorism and intel gathering. Shin Bet directors answer directly to the prime minister. The agency's greatest blunder was their failure to protect Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli leader who came closest to making peace with the Palestinians, from being murdered by a right-wing Israeli terrorist.

"I didn't want any more live terrorists in court," explains Avraham Shalom, who led the organization from 1980 to 1986. "In the war against terror, forget about morality." He's talking about the agency doctrine of targeted assassination against Islamic militants. (For what it's worth, Shalom now looks like your average adorable grandpa in dark-red suspenders, and yes, he has blown up his fair share of people.)

It goes without saying that these men have street cred. None of them has anything to prove when it comes to battling Muslim extremism or waging war on violent anti-Semitism. Avraham Shalom was even part of the team that captured Adolf Eichmann and flew his Nazi ass back to Israel to stand trial in 1960. These are guys who know perhaps better than anybody else what it means to orchestrate the ruthless killing of jihadists and Hamas terrorists.

And yet not one of them could make it through a Senate confirmation hearing. In fact, the most fascinating thing about The Gatekeepers is that so much of what these hardened agency dons say about the Israeli-Palestinian crisis is completely interchangeable with what many American pundits and politicians might assail as anti-Semitic rhetoric.

Here are six examples of things said in the film that could get you pilloried in American politics:

1. "Talk to everyone, even if they answer rudely. So that includes even Ahmadinejad, [Islamic Jihad, Hamas], whoever. I'm always for it. In the State of Israel, it's too great a luxury not to speak with our enemies…Even if [the] response is insolent, I'm in favor of continuing. There is no alternative. It's in the nature of the professional intelligence man to talk to everyone. That's how you get to the bottom of things. I find out that he doesn't eat glass and he sees that I don't drink oil."—Avraham Shalom (1980-86), on negotiating with the enemy.

2. "We are making the lives of millions [of Palestinians] unbearable, into prolonged human suffering, [and] it kills me."—Carmi Gillon (1994-96).

3. "We've become cruel. To ourselves as well, but mainly to the occupied population." Our army has become "a brutal occupation force, similar to the Germans in World War II. Similar, not identical."—Shalom, who clarifies that he is referring to the Nazis' persecution of non-Jewish minorities.

4. "We don't realize that we face a frustrating situation in which we win every battle, but we lose the war."—Ami Ayalon (1996–2000), regarding the wisdom of Israel's counterterrorism measures.

5. "To them, I was the terrorist.… One man's terrorist is another man freedom fighter."—Yuval Diskin (2005-11), candidly discussing the very first time he considered his profession from a Palestinian perspective.

6. "We are taking very sure and measured steps to a point where the State of Israel will not be a democracy or a home for the Jewish people."—Ayalon

But the film's contribution to any political discussion on the topic goes way beyond its quotable shock value. It's the culmination of a personal saga for these six warriors, packaged in one raw, brilliantly paced film with stunning visuals. "After retiring from this job, you become a bit of a leftist," Yaakov Peri, who ran the Shin Bet during the First Intifada, says with a sad smirk. The narrative unfolds as a modern tragedy where the characters' career highs are forever marred by a sense that they've retired only to become Cassandras. And for all their tactical successes on the battlefield, they see an Israel poised to lose the war if it continues to give up on peace.

Check out the trailer below:

Chomsky: What's really happening in Gaza

In case anybody in America cares about what's really happening in Gaza.... Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz....

What the American Media Won't Tell You About Israel

The savage punishment of Gaza traces back to decades ago.

By Noam Chomsky

December 3, 2012 | AlterNet

URL: http://www.alternet.org/world/noam-chomsky-what-american-media-wont-tell-you-about-israel

Jews now a minority in Israel

I know, I know, most American's eyes glaze over when somebody mentions the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But this is worth a look.

It reminds me of what Gary Brecher always says about war: "birthrate wins."  So Israeli Jews are now officially a minority in their own "democratic Jewish" state.  Now, Israel cannot even justify its apartheid state on the basis of a Jewish racial majority. 

Non-Jewish majority: The beginning of the end or the end of the beginning?

Security has been a "primary justification" for Zionist policies of land expropriation and removal of Palestinians.

By Mark LeVine

October 25, 2012 | Al Jazeera

URL: http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/10/2012102371318854170.html

Review of: After Zionism: One State for Israel & Palestine

Yeah, come to think of it, the banal "two-state solution" is so early 20th century. Jeff Sparrow sums it up: 

The Zionist colonial project was based on expectations from a different age, taking for granted that homicidal anti-Semitism lurked ineradicably in the West, so that Jewish people would be relentlessly persecuted unless they lived under a Jewish state.

Those assumptions were wrong.

In the developed world, anti-Semitism has become an ideology of a crackpot fringe. And has Israel become a place of safety, a magnet for Jews the world over? On the contrary. Most Jews in the West have no intention of moving. Why would they? Omar Barghouti quotes former speaker of the Knesset, Avraham Burg, about Israel: 'Few of us know any other existential reality apart from our unrelenting war with everyone, all the time and over all issues.'

By contrast, the underlying assumptions of the one-state solution are much more compatible with contemporary democratic sensibilities.

If the U.S. has a role to play in this conflict, it should be to support democracy, equal rights and inter-ethnic tolerance.  A one-state solution in a democratic, multi-ethnic Israel meets those criteria.

After Zionism

By Jeff Sparrow

August 16, 2012 | Overland

URL:  http://overland.org.au/blogs/new-words/2012/08/after-zionism/

GOP Rep.: Only a corpse & a vegetable can restart Mideast peace process

When foreigners tell me that they're worried about American hyper-power, I remind them that the most powerful nation the world has ever known is run by guys like Rep. Joe Pitts (R-PA).  I don't know if that makes them feel better or worse....

'Arafat, Sharon must do more for peace'

Republican Representative Joe Pitts responds to a constituent with a rather outdated statement

By Michal Shmulovich

May 15, 2012 | Times of Israel

URL:  http://www.timesofisrael.com/against-all-odds-congressman-recommends-arafat-and-sharon-restart-peace-talks/