I haven't seen anything quite like this in recent years from a a major media outlet.
The picture we are painted of Israel both by our politicians and in the U.S. media is one of a bravely struggling democracy, beset upon by threatening, radical autocratic regimes dominated by anti-democratic, militant Islamic ideologues. Israel is the faithful guardian of human rights in this telling, a bastion of hope standing strong against tyrannical hordes at their border eager to snuff out this noble Western experiment.
U.S. Congressmen--Jewish and Gentile alike--are regularly feted with all-expense paid trips to the Holy Land, some to pay homage to their culture at the Wailing Wall, others to see the pathways where Jesus trod, still others to bathe naked in the sea of Galilee. When they return, egged on by an enormously powerful political and religious lobby, they continually vote vast sums of US taxpayer money to flow to Israel, funding its defense and bolstering its economy.
So it's not every day that we see the New York Times, of all publications, publish such a damning illustration of the current political climate in this so-called pluralistic democracy when it comes to tolerating dissent on the issue of Palestinian rights and sovereignty.
The situation inside of Israel for those who dare to speak out against the state's tactics against the Palestinians is nothing short of dire:
On July 12, four days after the latest war in Gaza began, hundreds of Israelis gathered in central Tel Aviv to protest the killing of civilians on both sides and call for an end to the siege of Gaza and the Israeli occupation of the West Bank. They chanted, “Jews and Arabs refuse to be enemies.”
Hamas had warned that it would fire a barrage of rockets at central Israel after 9 p.m., and it did.
But the injuries suffered in Tel Aviv that night stemmed not from rocket fire but from a premeditated assault by a group of extremist Israeli Jews. Chanting “Death to Arabs” and “Death to leftists,” they attacked protesters with clubs. Although several demonstrators were beaten and required medical attention, the police made no arrests.
The same thing happened at another antiwar protest in Haifa a week later; this time, the victims included the city’s deputy mayor, Suhail Assad, and his son. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made no statement condemning the violence, even though he had previously stated his primary concern was the safety of Israeli citizens.
The article is written by Mairav Zonszein, an activist and former Executive Director of the Union of Progressive Zionists. Her op-ed piece, appearing in today's
Times, recounts the intimidation, terrorizing and blacklisting of public figures, actors, and musicians in Israel who have spoken out in favor of Palestinian rights, or even expressed the mildest of sympathies towards Palestinian suffering. Zonszein calls this the "latest manifestation of an us-versus-them mentality that has been simmering for decades."
Zonszein will doubtlessly be vilified and marginalized by those offended by her accounting of the situation, but she is not alone in bringing this new, virulent strain of Israeli national intolerance to light. This recent article by David Shulman in the New York Review of Books details Israeli right-wing violence against Palestinians living in the state of Israel at the time the most recent hostilities between Hamas and Israel began:
In the weeks since then we have seen organized lynch mobs of Israeli youths prowling the streets of Jerusalem at night in search of Palestinians who have the misfortune to be passing by. Many restaurants and bars in downtown Jerusalem employ Palestinian waiters and kitchen staff; they tend to get off work around midnight or 1 AM, when they have to go home to their neighborhoods. Those are the dangerous hours. Dozens have been attacked. On July 25, two Palestinian men, Amir Jalal Shweiki and Samir Mahfuz, both twenty, were beaten unconscious near the northeast Jerusalem neighborhood of Neve Yaakov. They are still in the hospital. There have also been unconfirmed reports of incidents where the police either stood by or joined in with right-wing thugs, for example on July 24 when two Palestinians, Amir Mazin Abu Eisha and Laith Ubeidat, who were delivering bread to stores on Jaffa Road in downtown Jerusalem, were savagely attacked.
A particularly terrible case occurred in early July when a train of the Light Rail, the electric tram, was surrounded in the border between east and west Jerusalem by an Israeli mob screaming “Death to Arabs!” A Palestinian Ph.D. student in Islamic studies at the Hebrew University, a woman well known to my colleagues, was caught in the tram and witnessed passengers trying to shove another Palestinian woman, a young mother with her baby, out of the carriage, into the hands of the mob. Most of the passengers, as so often in such cases, watched passively.
They
watched passively. Shulman's article also notes a remarkable, enforced intolerance even among Israel's higher educational institutions towards even the mildest expressions of sympathy for the Palestinians. Israeli citizens on social media sites call for the "execution of all dissidents and leftists." So it's not particularly hard to understand the attitude of Israel's "silent majority" towards those who would protest the state's tactics against the Palestinians:
After so many years of repressing those who stand in the way, the transition to targeting “one of your own” isn’t so difficult. Now it is the few Jewish Israelis who speak the language of human rights who are branded as enemies.
Zonszein believes that the visible upsurge in efforts to silence dissent stems from a myopia affecting all Israeli citizens, including liberals. While liberal Israelis challenging the state's aggressive tactics tend to focus on the propagation of settlements and possibilities of a two state solution, Zonszein sees the problem as more intrinsic to the nature of Israel itself--a state essentially founded upon a religion, rendering it unable to separate affairs of religion from affairs of state:
Israeli society has been unable and unwilling to overcome an exclusivist ethno-religious nationalism that privileges Jewish citizens and is represented politically by the religious settler movement and the increasingly conservative secular right. Israel’s liberal, progressive forces remain weak in the face of a robust economy that profits from occupation while international inaction reinforces the status quo. In their attempt to juggle being both Jewish and democratic, most Israelis are choosing the former at the expense of the latter.
I suspect this article will spawn pushback, because it's not what the Israeli government or its proxies and representatives want the American public to see. The
Times deserves to be commended for publishing it.