There are two things I'd like to comment on, the first being the recent press that developed when a fascist/nazi group was uncovered in Israel, as well as a recent movie that I watched... and you know, if I think of something else along the way, I'll probably just throw that in too.
but before I start, the hills of the Nablus Region, as they probably look right around now
So, first to the recent media buzz... did you know that there are Neo-Nazis in Israel?
Police Break Up Israeli Neo-Nazi Ring
By ARON HELLER – 1 day ago
JERUSALEM (AP) — Police said Sunday they have broken up a cell of young Israeli neo-Nazis accused of a string of brutal racist and anti-Semitic attacks, videos of which were played on television to a stunned national audience.
The eight suspects, all immigrants from the former Soviet Union in their late teens or early 20s, are seen in the videos kicking victims on the ground to a bloody pulp, hitting a man over the head with an empty beer bottle and proclaiming their allegiance to Adolf Hitler with a Nazi salute.
Sixty years after the Nazi Holocaust killed 6 million Jews, incidents of anti-Semitism continue to outrage Israelis and the discovery of such violence in their own country dominated morning radio shows and made the front pages of newspapers with headlines such as "Unbelievable."
Ironically, Israel doesn't specifically have a hate crimes law, and the case has also drawn calls for new legislation.
"The tragic irony in this is that they would have been chosen for annihilation by the Nazis they strive to emulate," the ADL said.
This is of course a horrible thing to see anywhere, and it gives me no joy whatsoever to point it out; hate is hate, and racism is racism, and of course, no one should be subjected to the violence that they inflicted on others.
But I think it is important to discuss this incident, which has been boiling below the surface for some time, and has now finally hit the mainstream (I remember reading about this at least a year ago, before any arrests were made, I'll have to look for that link in a bit). It brings up many crucial issues concerning Israeli society and government, such as
-hate crimes
-the law of return
-the 'demographic issue,' ie racism as public policy
some would say that this is just a bunch of arcane hooey that we Americans should not concern ourselves with; but me, well, I disagree, I'd say that the country we give the most military and economic and diplomatic aid to should be scrutinized, especially when the debate over Israel's influence and our national interests is firmly in the mainstream (as well as that nagging A word as well).
So let's start with this choice quote;
Olmert warned that the acts of the few should not tarnish the great achievements of the Russian immigrants, who include doctors, professors, scientists and Cabinet ministers. "I stress that we should not implicate an entire community and engage in generalizations," he said.
hummm, well, I can't disagree with that, now can I; could any one? I mean, that would be racist and bigoted to say such things about the entire Russian community based on just a small cell of marginal immigrants... but I seem to remember a lot of generalizations made by leading Jewish Israelis about other communities...
Haifa University not only condones racist utterances and pronouncements by its faculty, but also provides institutional sponsorship and thus legitimacy to the activities of academics engaged in scholarship that has been widely characterized as racist or inciting to racism and ethnic cleansing against the Palestinians of the occupied territories and the Palestinian citizens of Israel itself. This legitimacy is conferred by the university through its sponsorship of academic departments and research centers under whose aegis racist work is carried out.
It provides institutional support to racist academics and their research activities. The most notorious of these academics is Arnon Sofer, chair of geo-strategy at Haifa University and vice-chair of its Center for National Security Studies. He is also known in Israel as the prophet of the "Arab demographic threat." He takes credit for the route of the Israeli apartheid wall -- declared illegal by the International Court of Justice in the Hague, on July 9, 2004 -- saying, "This is exactly my map." [5]
Prof. Sofer, who views the high birth rate of the Bedouin Palestinian citizens of Israel as a "tragedy," and has no patience for "democracy and pretty words," [6] has for many years openly advocated "voluntary transfer" -- or soft ethnic cleansing -- of Palestinians in the occupied territories as well as Palestinian citizens of Israel, in order to guarantee "a Zionist-Jewish state with an overwhelming majority of Jews." In one particularly telling prediction, Sofer says, "When 2.5 million [Palestinians] live in a closed-off Gaza, ... those people will become even bigger animals than they are today, with the aid of an insane fundamentalist Islam. ... So, if we want to remain alive, we will have to kill and kill and kill. All day, every day. If we don't kill, we will cease to exist. The only thing that concerns me is how to ensure that the [Jewish] boys and men who are going to have to do the killing will be able to return home to their families and be normal human beings." [7]
And we can jump back to the founding of the state, and the words and racism of Zeev Jabotinsky
According to Ze'ev Jabotinsky, European Jews have little in common with the "Orient":
"We Jews have nothing in common with what is called the 'Orient,' thank God. To the extent that our uneducated masses have ancient spiritual traditions and laws that call the Orient, they must be weaned away from them, and this is in fact what we are doing in every decent school, what life itself is doing with great success. We are going in Palestine, first for our national convenience, [second] to sweep out thoroughly all traces of the 'Oriental soul.' As for the [Palestinians] Arabs in Palestine, what they do is their business; but if we can do them a favor, it is to help them liberate themselves from the Orient.'" (One Palestine Complete, p. 151) It should be noted that the renaissance of Judaism was among the Muslim Arabs in Andalusia in southern Spain. Click here to learn more on Spanish Jews under Muslim Arab rule.
Ze'ev Jabotinsky stated in a letter to one of his Revisionist colleagues in the United States dated November 1939:
"We Jews, thank God, have nothing to do with the East. . . . The Islamic soul must be broomed out of Eretz-Yisrael. . . . [Muslims are] yelling rabble dressed up in gaudy, savage rags." (Expulsion Of The Palestinians, p. 29)
But let's stay in the now, shouldn't we? A quick sampling of racist attitudes, mostly revolving around the idea that Israel may be in the East, but it is not OF the East...
first, the wonderful Avigdor Liberman (froma 2004 Haaretz article, no longer an active link);
"I don't want to be part of the 'New Middle East,' I want to be a representative of Europe in this region. I am not excited by eating hummus in Damascus but rather prefer walking around in Paris and London."
"If Saudi Arabia does not understand that it is worthwhile investing money in the settling of refugees where there are now living, I will agree to explain this to them in Russian. And I am certain they would then understand," Lieberman said.
and this gem, his wonderful support of Transfer of certain whole communities;
Former minister Avigdor Lieberman said Thursday he supports the transfer of some of Jerusalem's Arab neighborhoods and Israeli Arab communities in Wadi Ara over to Palestinian control in conjunction with the establishment of a Palestinian state.
Ehud Barakgot in the game, building from Begin's description of Palestinians as "two-legged beasts," and Eitan's comparison of them with "drugged cockroaches in a bottle," or when in 1994, Rabbi Yaacov Perin openly declared, "One million Arabs are not worth a Jewish fingernail" (and let's not forget Dan Gillerman, the Israeli ambassador to the UN, Hezbollah are "ruthless indiscriminate animals")...
Barak himself, in domestic discussions, often used a telling metaphor: Israel is "a villa in the middle of a jungle". Meaning: we are an island of civilization surrounded by savage animals. This is remarkably similar to old-established colonial attitudes, and, indeed, a variation of Herzl's metaphor of the "wall against barbarism"...
"They (the Palestinians, and especially Arafat) are the products of a culture in which to tell a lie...creates no dissonance. They don't suffer from the problem of telling lies that exists in Judeo-Christian culture. Truth is seen as an irrelevant category...The deputy director of the US Federal Bureau of Investigation told me that there are societies in which lie detector tests don't work, societies in which lies do not create cognitive dissonance (on which the tests are based)."
But nothing compares to the Israeli Envoy to Australia, telling it like it is;
Foreign Ministry slams envoy's comments about 'yellow race'
By Charlotte Halle, Haaretz Correspondent
The Foreign Ministry on Friday condemned remarks by the Israeli ambassador to Australia in which he told Haaretz that the two countries are white sisters amid "the yellow race" of Asia.
"If the article is accurate, this is a grave and unacceptable remark," the Foreign Ministry said in a statement. The ministry said it will not return to business as usual if an internal examination confirms that the ambassador, Naftali Tamir, in fact made the comments attributed to him.
Tamir said that due to what he characterized as the racial similarities between Israel and Australia, the two countries should work together to enhance ties with other Asian countries.
"Israel and Australia are like sisters in Asia," Tamir said in an interview with Haaretz during a visit to Israel this week. "We are in Asia without the characteristics of Asians. We don't have yellow skin and slanted eyes. Asia is basically the yellow race. Australia and Israel are not - we are basically the white race. We are on the western side of Asia and they are on the southeastern side."
And last but not least, a small sampling of the work of the Israeli government-backed settlers of Hebron and their handiwork
With ideological settlers (a minority even of the settlers) doing such hateful things in Hebron and elsewhere (Itamar, Elon Moreh, etc), it kind of makes sense that there are no hate crime laws in Israel, since they would then be prosecuted and jailed by such laws, instead of being funded and protected by the Israeli army and prominent political parties. Now, this is just a small sampling of my personal photos. check out the reports of CPT in Hebron for much more.
So, it seems that in Israel & with the media, this is the game. If you are a small gang of immigrant thugs, and you use Nazi ideas and symbols to express your rage and cloak the violence you purvey, well, the press will focus on you and all the right people will decry the hate and the violence. How could they be so racist, and please, don't let the actions of just a few Russians tarnish the good reputation of the majority, who truly mean well.
But when it comes to Palestinians, Arabs, Muslims, those of the East and the Orient alike, Zionism and the state of Israel takes a slightly different turn, and then it becomes perfectly acceptable to say the most outrageous and racist things, to paint a whole nation, religion, people, you name it, with a broad brush of bigotry and ignorance. Is this distinctive to Israel? Well, yes and no; Zionism and its particular ideology and racism expressions, yes, they are somewhat particular, just as the racism towards African Americans is something very particular to the United States. But, most of the legal trappings (but by far not all) have been struck down and dismantled in the US, whereas, not so in Israel. To this day, any Jewish person, anywhere in the world, can benefit from the Law of Return, which guarantees Israeli citizenship to an immigrating Jew. This is exactly how the many Russians became Israeli citizens in the first place, and many of them were and still are not even Jewish. Let's let the BBC explain;
About one million former Soviet Jews have immigrated to Israel since the 1990s, under the country's "law of return", which allows entry to anybody who is Jewish or has Jewish ancestry (defined as having at least one Jewish grandparent).
Some of the immigrants are thought to have only the most tenuous links to Judaism, and experts say a small minority have embraced Nazi beliefs. The discovery of a violent anti-Semitic cell among young people, whose immigration to Israel was based on their having Jewish roots, has caused particular outrage in the Israeli media and public, sparking calls for action."We obviously have to change immigration policies, not to take in everyone who wants to come," Mr Gilichenski said.
There have also been calls for the law to be changed to permit the revocation of Israeli citizenship and deportation for neo-Nazis.
Other experts say it would be against the state of Israel's strategic interests as Israel needs to encourage immigration because of the demographic challenge to the Jewish state from a growing Israeli Arab and Palestinian population.
read that last paragraph again, and let the implications sink in. Israel needs immigration; preferably Jews, but non/quasi-Jews, even to the point of a few of them becoming Neo-Nazis, well that's ok, because, you see there are more important threats. Now would that be violence, terror, rockets, that sort of thing? Nope, it's that threatening "Israeli Arab and Palestinian" birth rate, that is the real threat. It's all about the numbers, and these two populations (which are both Palestinian Arab, Muslim, Christian and Druze for that matter) need to be at a certain proportion to the Jewish one, or else, well, the apartheid nature of Israel is laid bare for all to see; a minority of Jews, mostly of European/Ashkenazi background, are lording over and oppressing the Palestinian majority, reserving power and privilege for themselves at the expense and suffering of the other.
Some commentary on this by Jonathan Cook, author of Blood and Religion
One of the main forecasts of my book was that Palestinians on both sides of the Green Line -- those who currently enjoy Israeli citizenship and those who live as oppressed subjects of Israel’s occupation -- would soon find common cause as Israel tries to seal itself off from what it calls the Palestinian "demographic threat": that is, the moment when Palestinians outnumber Jews in the land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River.
I suggested that Israel’s greatest fear was ruling over a majority of Palestinians and being compared to apartheid South Africa, a fate that has possibly befallen it faster than I expected with the recent publication of Jimmy Carter’s book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. To avoid such a comparison, I argued, Israel was creating a "Jewish fortress", separating -- at least demographically -- from Palestinians in the occupied territories by sealing off Gaza through a disengagement of its settler population and by building a 750km wall to annex large areas of the West Bank. It was also closing off the last remaining avenue of a Right of Return for Palestinians by changing the law to make it all but impossible for Palestinians living in Israel to marry Palestinians in the occupied territories and thereby gain them citizenship.
The corollary of this Jewish fortress, I suggested, would be a sham Palestinian state, a series of disconnected ghettos that would prevent Palestinians from organizing effective resistance, non-violent or otherwise, but which would give the Israeli army an excuse to attack or invade whenever they chose, claiming that they were facing an "enemy state" in a conventional war.
and Finkelstein for good measure, on the constant tension between Apartheid and Transfer;
In fact the comparison is a commonplace among informed commentators. From its initial encounter with Palestine the Zionist movement confronted a seemingly intractable dilemma: How to create a Jewish state in a territory that was overwhelmingly non-Jewish? Israeli historian Benny Morris observes that Zionists could choose from only two options: "the way of South Africa"--i.e., "the establishment of an apartheid state, with a settler minority lording it over a large, exploited native majority"--or "the way of transfer"--i.e., "you could create a homogeneous Jewish state or at least a state with an overwhelming Jewish majority by moving or transferring all or most of the Arabs out." (2)
During the British Mandate period (1917-1947) Zionist settlers labored on both fronts, laying the foundations of an apartheid-like regime in Palestine while exploring the prospect of expelling the indigenous population. Norman Bentwich, a Jewish officer in the Mandatory government who later taught at the Hebrew University, recalled in his memoir that, "One of the causes of resentment between Arabs and Jews was the determined policy of the Jewish public bodies to employ only Jewish workers.This policy of 'economic apartheid' was bound to strengthen the resistance of Arabs to Jewish immigration." (3)
Ultimately, however, the Zionist movement resolved the dilemma in 1948 by way of transfer: under the cover of war with neighboring Arab states, Zionist armies proceeded to "ethnically cleanse" (Morris) the bulk of the indigenous population, creating a state that didn't need to rely on anachronistic structures of Western supremacy. (4)
Before moving on, here are a few points that the Guardian makes that other sources tend to gloss over;
More than a million people from the former Soviet Union have emigrated to Israel, which has a population of seven million, since 1990, taking advantage of Israel's Law of Return which allows anyone to claim citizenship if they have a Jewish grandparent. Many of the new immigrants have little connection to Judaism and emigrated for economic reasons.
Many Russians live in large communities in Israel's cities in which they have little interaction with other Israelis.
They have their own supermarkets where pork is available, unlike in the majority of stores. Russians feel they are victims of discrimination in Israel and many are denied the right to marry by the Jewish authorities... Israeli politicians reacted with anger to the revelations and proposed several changes in the law to prevent a repeat of neo-Nazi actions. Effi Eitam of the National Religious Party said he would propose a bill in the Knesset that would restrict the rights of non-Jews to emigrate to Israel.
Ahmed Tibi, an Arab Israeli member of the Knesset, said that the case illustrated the absurdity of Israeli laws which give extensive rights to newcomers from Russia while denying them to Arab residents who had lived in the region for generations.
I would like to end this diary by commenting on a film I just watched recently, called Sallah Shabati, an Israeli film from 1965, here's the basic jist
After immigrating to the promised land -- the new state of Israel -- Sallah clashes with government officials and his kibbutz community in this 1964 comedy directed by Ephraim Kishon and starring Topol. Disgusted by overbearing bureaucracy and what he feels are unrealistic communal expectations, Sallah (Topol) butts heads with leaders and neighbors as he tries to acquire housing for his family. Gila Almagor and Arik Einstein also star.
I really do reccomend watching it, I found out about the film while watching the documentary Forget Baghdad, and was very pleased to be able to see the whole thing. It is a satire, and makes fun of Israeli society and politics in many interesting ways, and even more importantly, in the ways in which it does not. For example, in one scene the poor Sephardic/Mizrahi Jews that have immigrated to Israel are put to work planting trees in new forests, while the Kibbutz man is welcoming one wealthy Jewish couple after another, promising (for money of course) to name the forest after them. Despite this indictment of political corruption in Israel, one important thing goes unmentioned; why and where are they planting those forests?
The fact is that JNF, in its operations in Israel, had expropriated illegally most of the land of 372 Palestinian villages which had been ethnically cleansed by Zionist forces in 1948. The owners of this land are over half the UN registered Palestinian refugees. JNF had actively participated in the physical destruction of many villages, in evacuating these villages of their inhabitants and in military operations to conquer these villages. Today JNF controls over 2500 sq. km of Palestinian land which it leases to Jews only. It also planted 100 parks on Palestinian land.
In addition, JNF has a long record of discrimination against Palestinian citizens of Israel as reported by the UN. JNF also extends its operations by proxy or directly to the Occupied Palestinian Territories in the West Bank and Gaza. All this is in clear violation of international law and particularly the Fourth Geneva Convention which forbids confiscation of property and settling the Occupiers' citizens in occupied territories. Ethnic cleansing, expropriation of property and destruction of houses are war crimes. As well, use of tax-exempt donations in these activities violates the domestic law in many countries, where JNF is domiciled.
According to the Palestinian historian Walid Khalidi, the village remaining structures on the village [of Lubya] land are:
The Lavi pine forest has been planted by the Jewish National Fund, the body of the World Zionist Organization in charge of land acquisition and development, on the western side of the site, and another forest has been planted nearby in the name of the Republic of South Mrica. The debris of houses is buried under these forests. Scattered wells (which formerly were used by the villagers for collecting rainwater) further mark the site
Up until a year and a half ago, the vast majority of visitors to Canada Park, one of the most popular hiking and picnic sites on the way to Jerusalem, had no idea that the park was built on the ruins of three Palestinian villages whose inhabitants were forced to leave in the wake of the Six-Day War. It was only after the Keren Kayemet LeIsrael-Jewish National Fund agreed to the demands of the Zochrot non-governmental organization and posted signs in the park about two villages, Yalu and Emmaus, that their existence first became known to hikers. But since their posting, someone has already made sure to tear down one of the signs and vandalize the other.
But the members of the NGO have not given up. The director of Zochrot, Eitan Bronstein, recently turned to the JNF and asked its director to examine the possibility of posting signs to mark abandoned Palestinian villages at all the sites it administers. The NGO offered its professional help in locating the remains of the villages and finding important details about life in them.
But really, the main ideological nasty in this film is the depiction of the Sephardic/Mizrahi Jew as the old Jew, as a racist Orientalist stereotype, one that the Modern European Ashkenazi Jewish state mist help uplift, civilize, and drag into the modern world, usually in such films via the intermarriage of the children with good Kibbutznik kids. The portrayal is so heavy handed, so over the top, it is just a thing to marvel at, really.
But, you might be wondering one thing... why the heck do I have Fiddler on the Roof in the title of this diary anyway?
Well, did you catch the name of the lead actor in Sallah Shabati?
Topol... and a few years later, he had a big role in a film you may have seen...
Do you see? he went from playing the 'uncivilized' old Jew of the Middle East and North Africa, straight to playing the 'old Jew' of the Shtetl, the place of my family's origins, both of which were to be 'civilized' by Zionism and the state of Israel. It is truly breathtaking the convergence of such racist and nauseating attitudes towards peoples that one ends up with, but in the end, that is Zionism. I'll end with a few words from David Shasha, the Director of the Center for Sephardic Heritage in Brooklyn, New York, a progressive advocacy group that promotes the study of Sephardic Jewish history and culture.
The Israeli propaganda machine has become a ubiquitous presence in the American Jewish community and any attempt to generate and promote alternative sources of information carries the crushing burden of threatening that merciless beast, a beast which can do great damage to its critics.
But a true Judaism, respecting the rhetorical conventions of its literary heritage, can and should not relent from a real understanding of the facts. Though traditional rabbinic culture promoted the idea of debate and dialogue, it did so from within a consensus that accepted certain principles. Rather than seeking to reinvent those principles, as we saw in the case of Nahmanides, the Sages stood firm to what they saw as the truth of their past and sought to discuss issues of application and transposition of the law and its requirements.
I have characterized the split between Ashkenazi and Sephardi Judaism as one between stringency in the formulation of the Law and of liberalism in the application of that Law. The Ashkenazi perspective has been to loosen the chains of the Law yet set its application in stone. In many ways this serves to parallel the way in which Zionism has evolved the lines of Jewish history: rather than accept the facts as they present themselves, Zionism has played fast and loose with those facts and then created a series of pseudo-liberal fictions that make Zionism appear benign. Rather than accepting the basic facts of history, Zionism has sought to refigure those facts and create multiple illusions; illusions that have blocked any sense of possible resolution.