Good God, was it only 10 years ago that The Australian's foreign editor, Greg Sheridan, was singing the praises of his beloved thus?
"That Israel of the Western mind (and indeed of the Arab mind) is a hateful place: right-wing, militaristic, authoritarian, racist, ultra-religious, neo-colonial, narrow-minded, undemocratic, indifferent to world opinion, indifferent especially to Palestinian suffering. Yet the Israel I know is mostly secular, raucously, almost wildly democratic, has a vibrant left-wing, having founded the kibbutz movement, one of the only successful experiments in socialism in human history. It is intellectually disputatious; any two Israelis will have three opinions and be happy to argue them to a lamp post. It is multi-ethnic, there is a great stress on human solidarity, there is due process. And I've never heard an Israeli speak casually about the value of human life." (Israel still looks good, warts and all, The Australian Literary Review, 6/5/09)
As for that "vibrant left-wing", well here it is, 10 years on, barely alive:
"Several measures indicate that Israel's shift to the Right may be permanent. Around 63% of Jewish Israeli voters identify as Right-wing, compared with just 15% for the Left and 18% who consider themselves centrist." (Centrist looks to topple Netanyahu, Raf Sanchez, The Telegraph/ Sydney Morning Herald, 9/4/19)
And where's all that fabled "human solidarity"? What with the UN Commission of Inquiry into the 2018 Gaza protests finding "reasonable grounds to believe that Israeli snipers shot at journalists, health workers, children and persons with disabilities knowing they were clearly recognizable as such."
And what about those Israelis who've never "spoken casually about the value of human life"? Where are they now?
There's PM Benjamin Netanyahu, declaring that Israel is "the nation-state of the Jewish people - and of it alone."
There's the pretender, Benny Gantz, boasting that he'd returned parts of Gaza to "the Stone Age" and killed "1,364 terrorists" in 2014.
There's former defence minister Avigdor Lieberman, threatening to "chop off Palestinian heads with an axe."
There's Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked, describing Palestinian children as "little snakes" and "all Palestinians" as "the enemy."
Truth is, the Netanyahus, Gantzs, Liebermans and Shakeds of Israel were always there, in one form or another, and Sheridan's settler-colonial utopia has always been a nasty piece of work.
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2 comments:
Oh! Where have all the leftists gone.......long time passing? Where have all the leftists gone.....long time ago?
"having founded the kibbutz movement, one of the only successful experiments in socialism in human history"
As usual Sheridan is full of cr*p.
Here is Tony Judt (who spent a couple of years on a kibbutz) on kibbutzim - well worth reading in its entirety:
https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2010/01/18/kibbutz/
"... the care that left-wing kibbutz movements took to avoid employing Arab labor served less to burnish their egalitarian credentials than to isolate them from the inconvenient facts of Middle Eastern life. I’m sure I did not appreciate all this at the time — though I do recall even then wondering why I never met a single Arab in the course of my lengthy kibbutz stays, despite living in close proximity to the most densely populated Arab communities of the country."
"... my experience with the army on the Golan Heights after the Six-Day War. There, to my surprise, I discovered that most Israelis were not transplanted latter-day agrarian socialists but young, prejudiced urban Jews who differed from their European or American counterparts chiefly in their macho, swaggering self-confidence, and access to armed weapons. Their attitude toward the recently defeated Arabs shocked me (testament to the delusions of my kibbutz years) and the insouciance with which they anticipated their future occupation and domination of Arab lands terrified me even then."
Israel was always racist!
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