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

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

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/

Tea Parties are ending with a neocon hangover

This article is long but very cogent and well documented.

I said before that if the Tea Parties won't agree on what they stand for, they'll fall for all the old GOP canards.

Exhibit A, perhaps, was when the Tea Parties went after their small-government libertarian spiritual father, Rep. Ron Paul of Texas.

We're now down to like Exhibit W: one of the new Congressional Tea Party Caucus's first actions was a resolution "explicitly endorsing Israel's right to strike Iran's nuclear program."

Exhibit X: Michael Prell, ghost writer for Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu and a member of the Tea Party Patriots (TPP), has written a book called Underdogma about, in part, criticizing the "underdog" Palestinians's grievances. It's been called "the first great Tea Party book" and endorsed by old school neocons like Amb. John Bolton and pundit Charles Krauthammer, not to mention Palin and Gingrinch.

Really?!? Is this what all you teabaggers signed up for?

If all you fiscal conservatives believe the GOP got away from you at some point, realize that the Tea Parties are slipping from your grasp even faster. Do something about it.

Richard Edmondson: The Tea Party's Emerging Zionst Face

January 7, 2011 | Veterans Today

URL: http://www.veteranstoday.com/2011/01/07/richard-edmondson-the-tea-partys-emerging-zionist-face/