The current Knesset is probably the most right-wing in Israel’s history, with the right and the far-right together holding over 70% of the seats. When it comes to the Palestinians, even this grim picture is an understatement, since the Labor Party shares the rejectionism of the right and both Labor and Meretz supported the Gaza massacre.
Most Israelis blamed the global outcry against the massacre not on their political and military leadership but on pervasive antisemitism and treacherous human rights organisations. The past year has seen a "systematic crackdown" on dissent within Israel, with senior government ministers branding human rights organisations "enemies ... from within" (Deputy Prime Minister Moshe Ya’alon), guilty of "aiming to destroy Israel" by "undermining the Zionist enterprise" (Interior Minister Eli Yishai). Israeli leftists face routine harassment and violence, and nonviolent activism against the occupation is being repressed with increasing brutality. Needless to say, special venom is reserved for Palestinian citizens of Israel, those remnants of the ethnic cleansing in ‘48 whose mere existence is perceived as a threat to the "Zionist enterprise" itself.
Israel’s governing coalition includes Yisrael Beiteinu, a far-right party that ran on an explicitly anti-Arab platform whose leader, a former Kahanist, has called for mandatory "loyalty oaths" and the criminalisation of the ‘Nakba’. But the persecution of Israeli-Palestinians is not confined to the ‘right wing’. As Ha’aretz observes, "dangerous incitement" against Israel’s Palestinian minority is supported by "most of the parties in the Knesset", with the "enthusiastic encouragement of most ministers". Last year both Labor and Kadima voted with the ultra-nationalists to ban Israel’s two leading Arab parties, in a move described by Meretz as a "declaration of war on Israel’s Arab citizens". It was former Kadima Prime Minister Ehud Olmert who described – to no detectable demurral - Israel’s Arab minority as a "manageable problem", and it was his Kadima administration that threatened to de facto criminalise opposition to zionism in an attempt to thwart the "strategic threat" presented by the existence of Israeli Palestinians.
Thus, it was no surprise that Israeli outrage at the Freedom Flotilla’s attempt to break the siege of Gaza and deliver humanitarian aid to its population was trained in particular on its Israeli-Palestinian participants. Israel’s assault on the aid convoy was perceived within Israel, through the usual prism of racism and perpetual victimhood, as a legitimate exercise of ‘self-defence’. As Chomsky explains, this reversal of ‘victim’ and ‘aggressor’ is "a constant refrain of imperialism":
"You have your jackboot on someone's neck and they're about to destroy you."
With the world united in revulsion at the massacre, Israeli society was equally outraged - at the victims, and at the Palestinian victims in particular. MK Haneen Zoubi of the Arab nationalist Balad party was one of the Palestinian citizens of Israel aboard the convoy. Even before the attack on the flotilla Israel’s most popular newspaper asked whether Zoubi was an "MP in the service of Hamas". Afterwards, MK Danon of the ruling Likud party led calls for her to be "tried for treason". A Facebook group was set up demanding her execution while other Arab MKs likewise received death threats. The Interior Minister Eli Yishai announced his intention to strip Zoubi of Israeli citizenship for leading a group of "terrorists" against IDF soldiers. The Knesset House Committee voted 7-1 to revoke Zoubi’s parliamentary privileges, in a move condemned by the Knesset Speaker as a step towards "tyranny and the nullification" of the Arab population. The process leading up to the vote was farcical, with the "evidence" presented against Zoubi including a quote from the Balad party website in which she ‘identifies as a Palestinian’.
In a parliamentary session she attempted to address the Knesset but was continually interrupted with cries of "Go back to Gaza, traitor!", "terrorist", "Hamas", and "Trojan horse", while one MK from the governing Yisrael Beiteinu party actively chased her around the room to prevent her from speaking. "The mood was so hostile", Zoubi recounts, "that, had MPs been allowed to carry guns, I am sure someone would have shot me". Notable again is that the persecution of Zoubi was not confined to the Likudnik right. As Gideon Levy writes, Kadima members "shouted the loudest against Zuabi", while Kadima head Tzipi Livni, often contrasted with the Evil Netanyahu by American and European liberals, stayed silent throughout. "Israel has no opposition", Levy concludes, just "a random bunch of nationalist, McCarthyist, militarist, chauvinist, loudmouthed bawlers, raising anti-democratic proposals in the Knesset as if it were the last radical right-wing party".
Here is the video of the session, with English subtitles:
The scene is strongly reminiscent of Malalai Joya’s courageous speech before the Loya Jirga in Kabul. One important difference between the two incidents, however, is that few liberals in the US and Europe would be so cowardly, so unprincipled, and so inconsistent in their application of basic moral principles as to pretend that the warlords who shouted down Joya were anything other than a bunch of thugs or to take the "democratic" pretensions of the regime they represented as anything other than vulgar propaganda. Would that they showed the same integrity in the case of Israel's brutal repression in the Occupied Territories and its progressive descent into fascism at home.
Apologists for Israel in the US and Europe often respond to criticism of the occupation and other crimes by trumpeting its alleged "democratic" and "liberal" character. In fact, by defending the Israeli state’s oppression of the Palestinians, both outside and within the Green Line, they are enabling the most illiberal, undemocratic elements of Israeli society. As Noam Chomsky has observed, most "supporters" of Israel are in fact supporters of its degeneration into barbarism.
Cross-posted at The Heathlander