Meet the Zionist Ubermenschen

Of course, you won't have seen this in the rags:

"Yesterday, Israeli Channel 13 aired video recordings by rabbi educators at the state-sponsored military prep-academy Bnei David in the West Bank settlement of Eli. The rabbis hail Hitler's Nazi racist ideology as '100% correct', only criticizing it for not being applied to the right people - that is, the Jews should be the master-race, and non-Jews the 'untermenschen'.

"The statements are jaw-droppers. The full coverage with subtitles can be seen in a video prepared by journalist David Sheen.

"These educators send young men to the army, and have been advocating these ideas for years. They have close ties to lawmakers, specifically to Rabbi Rafi Peretz, now head of the Union of Right Wing Parties, the notorious merger with the Kahanist party Jewish Power, who is now the leading candidate for Minister of Education. The academy is also tied to a Yeshiva, to which many students come after their military service.

Slavery Should Return

"It starts out with Rabbi Eliezer Kashtiel, who bemoans that slavery has been abolished:

Abolishing legal slavery has created deficiencies. No one is responsible for that property. With God's help it will return. The goyim (non-Jews) will want to be our slaves. Being a slave of the Jews is the best. They must be slaves, they want to be slaves. Instead of just wandering the streets, being foolish and harming each other, now he's a slave, now his life is beginning to come into order.

"The 'goyim' in this context is to be understood as Palestinians.

"He says it's because they have 'genetic problems', and posits that they want to be under occupation:

There are around us people with genetic problems. Ask any average Arab where he wants to be. He wants to be under occupation. Why? Because they have genetic problems, they don't know how to run a country, they don't know how to do anything - look at the state of them.

Yes, we are racists

"'Of course there is racism', Kashtiel continues:

Are we unaware that there are different races? Is it a secret? Is it untrue? What can you do? It's true. Yes, we are racists, we believe in racism.

"Kashtiel suggests that because Jews are a superior race, they can 'help' the inferior ones:

Correct, there are races in the world, nations have genetic characteristics, so we [the Jews] must consider how to help them. Racial differences are real, and that's precisely a reason to offer help.

"A student asks the rabbi: 'Who put you to decide who is who?' Kashtiel:

I can see that my accomplishments are much more impressive than his.

The Holocaust is humanism and pluralism

"Another rabbi, Giora Radler, says that the Holocaust is not what you think, it's not about killing Jews. It is humanism and pluralism that is killing us for real:

The Holocaust for real is not about the killing of Jews - that's not the Holocaust. All of these excuses claiming that it was based on ideology or that it was systematic, this is ridiculous. Because it was based on ideology, to a certain extent, makes it more moral than if people murdered people for no reason. Humanism, all the secular culture about us believing in the human, that's the Holocaust. The Holocaust, for real, is being pluralist, believing in 'I believe in the human'. That's what's called a Holocaust. The Lord (blessed be his name) is already shouting for many years that the [Jewish] exile is over, but people don't listen to him, and that is their disease, a disease which needs to be cured by the Holocaust.

"In other words, the Holocaust was there to teach Jews a lesson - drop pluralism, isolate yourself in the Jewish State and let go of the diaspora 'illness'.

"These remarks were made in a lesson titled 'relating to the Holocaust'.

The Nazi logic was right

"Radler:

The Nazi logic was right unto themselves. Hitler says that a certain group in society is the seed of all calamity for all humanity, that because of it all of mankind will go to oblivion, that they harm humanity, and therefore must be exterminated.

"Radler asks a student: 'Does this ideology sound illogical to you? Very bad?'

"Student answers: 'It doesn't sound moral.'

"Radler: 'Was Moses as bad as Hitler?'

"Student: 'No.'

"Radler:

Why not? There is one thing in the world that is truly evil and that is to be a hypocrite. Does it make a difference to you if they killed you now with a knife the way they did to Agag [the Amalekite king whom the prophet Samuel 'hacked in pieces'] or if they kill you in a gas chamber?

"Student: 'Not'.

"Radler:

[Hitler] is the most righteous person. Of course he is right in every word he utters. In his ideology he is right. There is a male world which fights, which deals with honor and the brotherhood of soldiers. And there is the soft, ethical feminine world [which speaks of] 'turning the other cheek'. And we [Nazis] believe that the Jews carry on this heritage, trying, in our words, to spoil the whole of humanity, and that's why they are the real enemy.' Now, he [Hitler] is 100% correct, aside from the fact that he was on the wrong side.

"So here, Radler was emulating Hitler, mouthing Nazi arguments approvingly. The only fault of the Nazis, per Radler, was that they didn't know who the real master race was, and who the real 'untermenschen' were. The Nazis couldn't be right, because only Jews could be the superior ones. But if Jews now apply this race theory and ideology currently - that is, essentially upon Palestinians, then they would really be '100% correct' - maybe even '101%, because they got it even more right than Hitler." (From Israeli rabbi educators at military prep-academy are caught on video congratulating Hitler, Jonathan Ofir, mondoweiss.net, 30/4/19)

Apartheid Israel Speaks

It's Friday again, and as we await today's body count of dead and wounded Palestinians in the Gaza Ghetto, contemplate these appalling (and telling) statistics:

"Israelis overwhelmingly back the shooting of peaceful Palestinian protesters at the Gaza border and US President Donald Trump's plans to relocate the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Occupied Jerusalem, a new poll has found. Conducted by Tel Aviv University and the Israel Democracy Institute, the poll shows that... 83% of Israelis say they support the shooting policy. Since March 30, 44 Palestinians have been killed, including 5 minors, and over 6,000 others injured in aggressive attacks by the Israeli military on the great March of Return protests staged at Gaza's border... The poll [also] shows that 63% of all Israelis say the embassy move benefits Israel." (Israelis strongly back shooting Palestinians at Gaza border, english.palinfo.com, 3/5/18)

That Was Then. This Is Now

Compare and contrast:

"His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people... it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine... " Balfour Declaration, November 2, 1917

"Over 50 Christian and Muslim sites have been vandalized in Israel and the West Bank since 2009, but only 9 indictments have been filed and only 7 convictions handed down, according to Public Security Ministry data. Moreover, only 8 of the 53 cases are still under investigation, with the other 45 all closed." (53 mosques & churches vandalized in Israel since 2009, Yotan Berger & Nir Hasson, Haaretz, 24/9/17)

Israel: The World's Greatest Gerrymanderer

Israel gets creative to counter its demographic disadvantage (thenational.ae.com, 31/8/17) is a must-read from Nazareth-based journalist Jonathan Cook:

"Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu offered a crushing rebuke to the perennial optimists roused to hopes of imminent peace by the visit to the Middle East last week of Donald Trump's adviser and son-in-law, Jared Kushner. At an event on Monday in the West Bank celebrating the half centenary of Israeli occupation, Mr Netanyahu effectively admitted that US efforts to revive the peace process would prove another charade. There would be no dismantling of the settlements or eviction of their 600,000 inhabitants - the minimum requirement for a barely feasible Palestinian state. 'We are here to stay forever,' Mr Netanyahu reassured his settler audience. 'We will deepen our roots, build, strength and settle.'

"So where is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict heading if the two state solution is dead? The answer: back to its origins. That will entail another desperate numbers battle against the Palestinians - with Israel preparing to create new categories of 'Jews' so they can be recruited to the fray. Demography was always at the heart of Israeli policy.

"During the 1948 war that founded a Jewish state on the ruins of the Palestinian homeland, 750, 000 Palestinians were expelled in a campaign that today would be termed ethnic cleansing. By the end, a large native Palestinian majority had been reduced to less than a fifth of the new state's population. David Ben Gurion, the country's founding father, was unperturbed. He expected to swamp this rump group with Jews from Europe and the Arab world.

"But the project foundered on two miscalculations.

"First, Ben Gurion had not factored in the Palestinian minority's far higher birth rate. Despite waves of Jewish immigrants, Palestinians have held fast, at 20% of Israel's citizenry. Israel has fought a rear guard battle against them ever since. Studies suggest that the only Israeli affirmative action program for Palestinian citizens is in family planning.

"Israeli demographic scheming was on show again last week.

"An investigation by the Haaretz newspaper found that in recent years, Israel has stripped of citizenship potentially thousands of Bedouin, the country's fastest growing population...

"Meanwhile, another Rubicon was crossed this month when an Israeli court approved revoking the citizenship of a Palestinian convicted of a lethal attack on soldiers. Human rights groups fear that, by rendering him stateless, the Israeli right has established a precedent for conditioning citizenship on 'loyalty.' Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked underlined that very point this week when she warned the country's judges that they must prioritise demography and the state's Jewishness over human rights.

"The second miscalculation arrived in 1967. In seizing the last fragments of historic Palestine but failing to expel most of its inhabitants, Israel made itself responsible for many hundreds of thousands of additional Palestinians, including refugees from the earlier war. The 'demographic demon' as it is often referred to in Israel, was held at bay only by bogus claims for many decades that the occupation would soon end. In 2005, Israel bought a little more breathing space by 'disengaging' from the tiny Gaza enclave and its 1.5 million inhabitants.

"Now, in killing hopes of Palestinian statehood, Mr Netanyahu has made public his intention to realise the one settler state solution. Naftali Bennett, Mr Netanyahu's chief rival in the government, is itching to ignore international sentiment and begin annexing large parts of the West Bank. There is a problem, however. At least half the population in Netanyahu's Greater Israel are Palestinian. And with current birth rates, Jews will soon be an indisputable minority - one ruling over a Palestinian majority.

"That is the context for understanding the report of a government panel - leaked last weekend - that proposes a revolutionary reimagining of who counts as a Jew and therefore qualifies to live in Israel (and the occupied territories).

"Israel's 1950 Law of Return already casts the net wide, revising the traditional rabbinical injunction that a Jew must be born to a Jewish mother. Instead, the law entitles anyone with one Jewish grandparent to instant citizenship. That worked fine as long as Jews were fleeing persecution or economic distress. But since the arrival of one million immigrants following the fall of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, the pool of new Jews has dried up.

"The United States, even in the Trump era, has proved the bigger magnet. The Jerusalem Post newspaper reported last month that up to one million Israelis may be living there. Worse for Mr Netanyahu, it seems, that at least some are included in Israeli figures to bolster its demographic claims against the Palestinians. Recent trends show that the exodus of Israelis to the US is twice as large as the arrival of American Jews to Israel...

"With a pressing shortage of Jews to defeat the Palestinians demographically, the Netanyahu government is considering a desperate solution. The leaked report suggests opening the doors to a new category of "Jewish" non-Jews. According to Haaretz, potentially millions of people worldwide could qualify. The new status would apply to 'crypto Jews' whose ancestors converted from Judaism; 'emerging Jewish' communities that have adopted Jewish practices; and those claiming to be descended from Jewish 'lost tribes'... "

Elor Azaria: Gun Zionism in Action

Despite the efforts of Zionist propagandists to con the gullible into believing that Israel is all about inclusion, pluralism, democracy, sweetness and light, the fact of the matter is that almost from its inception the Zionist movement set out, in the words of one of its founding fathers, Chaim Weizmann, to establish in Palestine a state that was "as Jewish as England was English."

The problem was that, at the time (1919), Palestine was 90% Arab. For the Zionists to achieve their goal of a 'Jewish' state, therefore, the Arab inhabitants would have to go. As the rate of Jewish immigration into Palestine was insufficient to outstrip the natural increase of the Arab population, the only option for the Zionists was to reach for the gun and drive the Arab majority out, a solution duly implemented in 1948. What British historian David Hirst refers to as 'gun Zionism' was therefore integral to the success of the Zionist project. And, as long as Palestinian Arabs are still to be found in Palestine, desperately clinging on to this or that remnant of their historic homeland, gun Zionists will have work to do.

Which is why the current case of Israeli soldier/death squad thug Elor Azaria is nothing new. As Israeli activist and author, Neve Gordon explains:

"It is no coincidence that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu - who was then followed by a slew of ministers and Knesset members - has called for a presidential pardon for Israeli soldier Elor Azaria. Azaria was found guilty of manslaughter after he shot and killed Yusri al-Sharif as he lay wounded on the ground. This striking mobilisation to exonerate Azaria, which cuts across party lines and includes MKs from Labor, should actually come as no surprise, since the desired pardon is not really about absolving one lone murderer, but rather an effort to vindicate Israel's 50-year occupation. Consciously or unconsciously, each and every government official calling for such absolution understands that Azaria is in no way an aberration of Israel's colonial project, but rather a clear symptom of its very structure.

"The bystanders are testimony to the structure's effect. The video released by the Israeli human rights organisation B'Tselem first depicts al-Sharif lying on the ground, wounded, as scores of soldiers and settlers stand near his body chatting, talking on the phone and taking pictures. Several medics are at the scene, but they, too, are oblivious to the injured Palestinian. Indeed, one of these medics is the killer. Following the execution, not one of the bystanders appears surprised; no one grabs Azaria and pushes him away from the scene, no one runs to al-Sharif to see if he can be resuscitated; rather, the bystanders simply continue to chat. The laid-back everydayness of those standing just metres away from an execution can certainly be understood as a manifestation of what Hannah Arendt has called 'the banality of evil'. Yet, it also profoundly captures something crucial about the structure of Israel's colonial project.

"Azaria is a soldier in the Kfir Brigade. This brigade, as John Brown recently exposed [972mag.com], has been responsible for killing many Palestinians, among them Mustafa Tamimi who was shot in the head with a long-range tear gas canister during a weekly demonstration in his village, Nabi Salah. The soldier who killed Tamimi in 2011 was sitting in a military jeep 5 metres from Tamimi when he aimed and fired his gun. Two months ago, four other soldiers from the same brigade were indicted for electrocuting a Palestinian; evidence emerged that they had taken pictures of him as he begged for his life. Two other soldiers were charged with beating Palestinian children, sticking an electric heat blower in the face of one of them. John Brown cites yet another confession made by a soldier from the same brigade: 'We would go on a patrol, and if we even saw a child looking at us in a not nice way - he would receive a slap on the spot. On one of these patrols, some threw stones at us. We caught one of the children who we knew saw the stone-thrower. We beat him so bad until he was willing to identify the thrower. We then took [the 14-year-old stone thrower] from his bed outside. We pointed to some holes in the ground while we stuck the barrels of our rifles in his mouth and said to him: 'Do you want to die here? Just choose a place where you want to be buried'.'

"Azaria, in other words, is not a rotten apple. Rather, his actions must be understood as part and parcel of the larger structure that constitutes and shapes Israel's colonial project. Azaria was merely unlucky because he was caught executing a Palestinian on video. Indeed, large parts of the Israeli public realise this and therefore do not perceive Azaria as an outlier, which helps explain the widespread report he has garnered. Thus, it would be a grave mistake to conclude, as the Israeli press has done, that the politicians are simply pandering to the mob. Netanyahu recognises that Azaria is a cog in the machine, as does Defence Minister Avigdor Lieberman, and it is for this reason that they are calling upon the president to pardon him. They also know that if Azaria is handed down a 20-year sentence, the structure that produces the likes of Azaria and the everyday taken-for-granted violence needed to sustain Israel's colonial endeavour could well be challenged from within.

"However, it is also crucial not to lose sight of what they are consciously supporting. For Azaria and those who were standing by him on the Hebron streets, as well as for all of his fans - citizens and politicians alike - Palestinians like Yusri al-Sharif are never victims or fully human beings; they are prey. Thus, they can not only be legitimately hunted, but killing them is never a crime, and more often than not, it is not even considered a misdemeanor." (Azaria exposed the reality of Israel's colonial project, al-jazeera.com, 5/1/17)

I would go even further. Not only is killing Palestinians not a crime in Israel; it is what Zionism, properly, gun Zionism, is all about. For gun Zionists, Azaria is a patriot.

The Return of the Desert God

Israeli blogger, Adam Keller (Crazy Country), begins his latest post, The Return of the Desert God (23/4/16), with a reflection on Passover, the Jewish Holiday of Liberty - based, of course, on the Biblical Book of Exodus - but, Israel being Israel, sees nothing to celebrate:

"In one particular Israeli home, this year's celebration of the Holiday of Liberty, reached a high peak. Sergeant Elor Azaria, who last month in Hebron shot a wounded Palestinian, lying on the ground, in the head and was photographed in the act by a human rights activist, was given leave from detention to spend the Passover holiday with his family. As opinion polls indicate, a majority of Israeli Jews think that anyone considered a terrorist should be killed, even if disarmed and no longer posing any threat. They concluded, therefore, that Sgt Azaria should not be charged with either murder or manslaughter. Rather, he should be released and perhaps even given a citation and a medal.

"In order to understand the deep roots of the present situation in Israel, it might be worth taking a look at another part of the Bible, a far less enticing one, the story of the Conquest of Canaan. After the great liberation from bondage in Egypt, the freed Hebrew slaves wandered in the desert for 40 years. They were reluctant to undertake the mission which God sought to impose upon them, namely to conquer the Promised Land. For that reluctance the Bible brands them cowards. The mission fell to their children, who did not remember the time of slavery in Egypt. Under the command of Joshua, son of Nun, they ferociously attacked the Land of Canaan and conquered city after city. God ordered them to slaughter all the inhabitants, men, women and children, and in some places, even the domestic animals. After they'd finished, they proceeded to divide and parcel out the land which had been emptied of its inhabitants.

"At least, that is how it is described in the Book of Joshua. Many modern historians and researchers doubt the veracity of this depiction. If so, then this Book, which gained a sacred status as part of the Jewish scriptures, must have been authored by someone with a particularly morbid cast of mind. This text was taken up by Christianity and broadcast around the world, serving as a source of inspiration for European settlers in North America and South Africa to identify with Joshua's Hebrew warriors and see Native Americans and Blacks as the new Canaanites.

"It should be noted that Judaism itself... has, over the centuries, increasingly distanced itself from this text. The distant descendants [?] of those savage nomads, they who had emerged from the desert with swords dripping with blood and destroyed the cities of Canaan, had become the quintessential urbanites in the many countries in which they lived. Above all, they admired scholars and sages, and kept their distance from warlike activities... Also, the god in which Jews believe, a universal God who holds eternal sway 'from end to end of the world', was far removed from the bloodthirsty tribal God of the ancient nomads. Jews also abandoned the blood sacrifice of animals, which had turned the temples of the ancient world into veritable slaughterhouses, and replaced it with public prayer, a custom also adopted by Christians and Muslims. But the Book of Joshua and other bloody verses remained part of the Bible. Observant Jews must not omit even one letter from the scriptures, let alone a whole book. But it is permitted to provide softening interpretations and glosses. It was also possible to put off dealing with such issues until the coming of the Messiah, when they would be irrelevant to the actual lives of Jews in the here and now... For centuries this was not the focus of Jewish faith and tradition; among the many sacred dates and holidays in the Jewish calendar no date was set to commemorate Joshua and the Conquest of Canaan.

"It wasn't until the rise of the Zionist movement in 19th century Europe, which even before reaching the Promised Land and meeting the Arabs face-to-face had already begun to cultivate dreams of a 'muscular Judaism'. In 1899, Saul Tchernichovsky... who was destined to become one of the main Zionist poets, wrote one of his most memorable poems: The people have grown old - their god with them/ Passions, stifled by unmanly folk/ Have arisen from a thousand years of slumber!/ I bend the knee to life, to beauty, to power/ To all the wondrous glories, of which/ Corrupt and degenerate walking corpses/ Have robbed the mighty God/ Of the vast, uncharted deserts/ The God of the conquerors/ Who took Canaan by storm/ But these have bound him up in straps, in phylacteries!

"One hundred and seventeen years have passed since a passionate young poet wrote those words. A hundred and seventeen years, during which the Zionist movement and the state of Israel have been engaged in the task of releasing the God of the Conquerors of Canaan from his chains. The ultimate fruit of these efforts, the visage of the rampant God of the Desert, can be seen in the video released this week containing footage from a demonstration in Tel Aviv, an enthusiastic rally called in support of the aforementioned Sgt Azaria, who had aimed his rifle and fired point blank at the head of the injured Palestinian lying on the ground. 'Muhammad is dead! Muhammad is dead!' chanted the crowd, and then 'We will burn down your village! Burn, village, burn!' and 'A Jew has a soul, an Arab is the son of a whore!' followed by 'A Leftist is the son of a whore!' and 'Fuck the media!' and concluding with a plain 'Death to the Arabs! Death to the Arabs!'

"Undoubtedly, the God of the Conquerors of Canaan is now rampaging throughout the state of Israel and the territories under its ongoing military rule. And where are we going to find, these days, someone to try binding him up again?"

Pew's Portrait of Fugly Israel

What a surprise that 48% of the citizens of a sectarian (Jewish), apartheid (Jewish/non-Jewish) state, founded on a monstrous act of ethnic cleansing, expulsion and larceny, dressed up as a 'War of Independence', want the remnant native, non-Jewish population OUT NOW!:

"Most Israeli Jews [48/46%] want to expel Palestinian citizens of Israel... This documentation of racism... inside Israel is contained in a new in-depth survey of Israeli attitudes by the Pew Research Centre." (Most Jews want to expel Palestinians - Pew's ugly portrait of Israel, Philip Weiss and Adam Horowitz, 8/3/16, mondoweiss.net)

Not "Pew's ugly portrait of Israel," guys: Pew's portrait of fugly Israel.

'Die You Son of a Whore. Die! Die!'

Well worth reading: Israel, the Media & the Anatomy of a Sick Society by Eric Draitser, counterpunch.org, 15/10/15. Here's an extract:

"The video of 13 year old Palestinian Ahmed Manasrah bleeding to death on the pavement of an East Jerusalem neighbourhood has been described as 'shocking,' 'disturbing,' and 'painful to watch.' The callous verbal abuse and insults from Israelis watching the child writhe in agony are variously characterized as 'heartless' and 'cruel'; and indeed they are. 'Die you son of a whore. Die! Die!' the Israeli onlookers can be heard shouting in the video which has since gone viral on social media.

"What the Ahmed Manasrah video laid bare for the world to see is the inhumanity of Zionism, a Jewish supremacist ideology which necessarily places non-Jews in an inferior relation to Jews, which places less value on the life of the non-Jew. It is not simple hatred that motivated the disgusting comments from the onlookers, it is an ingrained, inter-generational sense of superiority bred of dehumanization of the Palestinian, and the Arab generally. This fundamental fact is only very rarely discussed, but it lies at the heart of the Palestine conflict. By seeing Arabs as subhuman, many Israelis are able to justify, often on an unconscious level, all forms of brutality, violence, and oppression."

Israel: A Light Unto the... Far Right

Here's just a snippet from an edited extract from Shlomo Sand's new book, How I Stopped Being a Jew. Sand is an Israeli historian and author of those two myth-busting must-reads, The Invention of the Jewish People (2009) and The Invention of the Land of Israel (2012):

"I am aware of living in one of the most racist societies in the western world. Racism is present to some degree everywhere, but in Israel it exists deep within the spirit of the laws. It is taught in schools and colleges, spread in the media, and above all and most dreadful, in Israel the racists do not know what they are doing and, because of this, feel in no way obliged to apologise. This absence of a need for self-justification has made Israel a particularly prized reference point for many movements of the far right throughout the world, movements whose past history of antisemitism is only too well known.

"To live in such a society has become increasingly intolerable to me, but I must also admit that it is no less difficult to make my home elsewhere. I am myself part of the cultural, linguistic and even conceptual production of the Zionist enterprise, and I cannot undo this. By my everyday life and my basic culture I am an Israeli. I am not especially proud of this, just as I have no reason to take pride in being a man with brown eyes and of average height. I am often ashamed of Israel, particularly when I witness evidence of its cruel military colonisation, with its weak and defenceless victims who are not part of the 'chosen people'." (Shlomo Sand: 'I wish to resign and cease considering myself a Jew', theguardian.com, 11/10/14)

James Carleton's Israel Meets the Real Thing

The fact that a typical ABC interview on the subject of the Middle East conflict invariably reveals as much about the interviewer's entrenched Zionist prejudices and ignorance as it does about the matter under discussion never ceases to amaze me.

A particularly glaring example was Wednesday's interview with Israeli academic, activist and author Marcelo Svirsky by Radio National's current Breakfast presenter James Carleton (Racism becomes the new norm in Israel: Political scientist, 23/7).

For Carleton, Israel's is always the default position. Typically, he begins the interview, with the premise that Hamas, a mere symptom of Israeli occupation, is the problem:

JC: Unfortunately, the firing of rockets into Israel and the strong response of the Israeli military into Gaza is nothing new. Hamas has been at war with Israel since it was first elected 8 years ago. Yet, in spite of that history of violence that stretches way back before Hamas, our next guest says something new is happening in Israel. Dr Marcelo Svirsky is a political scientist. He's an Israeli Jew who now lives in Australia, and teaches at the University of Wollongong in NSW. He's just returned from Jerusalem and he says that the hatred and racism he's witnessed towards Arabs has become the norm in Israeli society, something he's never seen before.

[But it gets worse. Next comes Carleton's 'understanding' of the Middle East conflict from 1948 to the present.]

JC: Before I get you to substantiate that claim, and because it is a big claim, why would it be so given in the past Arab armies have nearly destroyed Israel in 1948, and there've been wars of survival up to 1973, there've been intifadas, the current situation, relatively speaking in terms of Israel's security, is rather mild, why should there be hatred now but not then?

[It has to asked: Is it a qualification for work at the ABC that the employee have experience in peddling Zionist propaganda? Svirsky, of course, is not impressed]:

MS: Well, to begin with, I don't think the narrative of 1948 is right as you expose it. Israel was not under threat of destruction in 1948, but [again] this is something we perhaps need to discuss in another program. I think that the present situation [in Israel] is special and different in the sense that we're witnessing a further crystallization of violence and racism in Israeli society not yet seen. I'm not talking about the regular, more familiar structure of racism and settlerism we [already] know about, but something new, and I'm talking about 3 particular forms of behaviour or social patterns. The first is the total recruitment of the media, not just biased reports and commentaries on TV and radio, but more important, actually calling on the government to escalate the conflict. This is [inaudible] so far. I mean, the marginal spaces that the Israeli media had in the past for some alternative voices are being shrunk, not to say, totally cleansed.

JC: But there's Haaretz. That's a very pro-Palestinian newspaper. It's a free and diverse media.

MS: Well, I don't think Haaretz is pro-Palestine, although it has a few, brave journalists such as Gideon Levy and Amira Hass. But I would like to tell you that (only) last week in Ashkelon Gideon Levy was physically attacked, and what is more, yesterday Matti Golan, a well known publicist working for the daily financial newspaper Globes called on the government to put Gideon Levy and Amira Hass in administrative detention for what he claims to be the use of freedom of expression that [inaudible]. So I think that these kinds of calls are pretty much new in the Israeli media.

JC: OK, if that's the media, what are the other two?

MS: The second phenomenon is the organised counter-demonstrations of right-wing groups showing up at anti-war protests. I'm talking about thugs showing up at leftist demonstrations wearing neo-Nazi t-shirts, those used by European neo-Nazis, saying GOOD NIGHT LEFT SIDE, with an image of a man attacking a left-wing activist... They outnumber the leftist protestors...

JC: What do the t-shirts say?

MS: They say GOOD NIGHT LEFT SIDE.

JC: GOOD NIGHT LEFT SIDE? It's a contradiction in terms. A neo-Nazi is an Israeli?

MS: Well, sadly, it isn't if you introspect into the social patterns and behaviours of Israeli society. But what is happening is that they chase the leftist protestors chanting DEATH TO THE ARABS, DEATH TO THE LEFTISTS, and they beat them up while the police just look on. All they do is arrest Palestinian citizens at the end of the demonstration.

JC: What happened when the ambulance took some of the victims of these beatings away?

MS: This happened in Haifa. Two Palestinian citizens were beaten and taken by ambulance to hospital. Some of these thugs stopped the ambulance, opened the door and asked, 'Jews or Arabs?' with the intention of taking these people out of the ambulance, if they were Arab, just to finish the job. The third phenomenon is the enjoyment of the spectacle of war. Israelis are gathering on a hilltop close to Gaza to cheer and whoop as Israeli bombs rain down on Palestinians. They bring their tables, chairs and picnic baskets as if they were watching a football match, only they get excited if a player is the death of human beings. I think this is pretty appalling.

JC: You're talking about Sderot.

MS: Yes, near Sderot.

JC: Well, that town in the past two weeks, Hamas has launched 1,500 rockets in 14 days. They would say you're playing the victim.

MS: We can also quote in that respect President Obama and other western leaders claiming no country on earth would tolerate missiles raining down on its citizens from outside its border... but James, which nation would agree to be oppressed for nearly half a century of colonisation? Which nation would remain silent in the face of an ongoing ethnic cleansing? For instance, would Australian citizens peacefully agree to be stripped of their natural rights and their lives be dictated by an external power?

JC: So when the Israeli government says why do people single out Israel, you're saying why single out Palestine as the only nation to endure occupation?

MS: Exactly. And we need to contextualise the violence of Hamas. What is happening here is that the West blames the victims for fighting back. This is an absurdity.

JC: Israel says that resistance is a code word for terrorism.

MS: Resistance is the right of an occupied and oppressed people. It's a natural right.

JC: But not to individually target civilians.

MS: Well, this is something we need to ask the Israeli government about. After 600 Palestinian deaths, including more than 100 children, about 3,000 injured, with nowhere to go. I mean, the claim that Israel's violence is an act of self-defence is an oxymoron. No occupying power has a legitimate right of self-defence but [rather] an international obligation to withdraw.

JC: You are not a Zionist, are you?

MS: No, I'm not.

JC: Does that put you on the extreme of Israeli society?

MS: I think that puts me on making sense of reality.

JC: But it's a view not shared by many of your former countrymen?

MS: To say the least.

JC: Well, the argument then is, from an Israeli perspective, why should Australia get to have Australia, the Chinese China? We all have our own countries except why are Jews singled out to be denied their homeland in their historic birthplace.

MS: I think there are 3 answers to that. To begin with, the parallel between Australians, French or Japanese and Jews is not exact because we're mixing up here nation, religion, ethnic belonging, and other factors. The second answer is that if a country of Jews or Australians is [all] about privilege for a particular group, that's unacceptable.

JC: You mean anyone can come to Australia provided they apply to migrate, and once they're here, they're first class citizens?

MS: Well, it should be. Israel was established as a society built on...

JC: Well, if it's not true in Australia or Israel, why single out Israel?

MS: Well, it is the society I come from...

JC: Sure.

MS: ... and I have a particular interest in Israel because I have family and friends there and most of my past is there.

JC: But the other point is when you come to Australia you can take an Australian nationality fully but when you migrate or are the independent population of a Jewish state, if you are not a Jew either ethnically or in terms of religion that's more problematic.

[More problematic? Is this ignorance or sheer cussedness? Let me spell it out for Carleton: if you are a diaspora Palestinian you cannot return to your Palestinian homeland (stolen and renamed 'Israel') because you do not have a Jewish mother.]

MS: Well, here comes my 3rd answer, which is that the Jews or the Hebrew [-speaking] people are not the only, if we accept that claim, indigenous people of the land of Palestine. We cannot dismiss the fact that the Palestinian people are the more indigenous people of the land.

JC: So, you're calling for a one-state solution democracy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, but the Israeli Jewish fear is that that will necessarily mean an Arab majority and the best case scenario is a democracy where Jews are second class citizens. The worst case scenario is an annihilation or second holocaust.

[Can you believe this guy! A 'Jewish' majority is no problem for him, but an Arab majority, that's going too far.]

MS: This is all speculation, but we have now, as fact, that the so-called only democracy in the Middle East is a fascist regime with 1st, 2nd & 3rd class citizens acting as an occupying power for 50 years, and established on a basis of ethnic cleansing - 700,000 indigenous Palestinian people. So if you take the historical facts on the one hand, and a kind of suspect politics of pre-emption on the other, I'm not sure which one we should choose.

[Marcelo Svirsky's important new book on how Jewish-Israelis can and need to "divest themselves of Zionist identities by engaging with dissident rationalities, practices and institutions," is just out. It's called After Israel: Towards Cultural Transformation. Here's the opening sentence from the book's Statement: "Israel was a bad idea from its inception." I'm looking forward to reading it. Re the emerging Israeli fascism cited by Svirsky, I urge you all - as I have earlier - to read Max Blumenthal's recent expose, Goliath: Fear & Loathing in Greater Israel.] 

Sderot Cinema

The audience:

"Sderot cinema. Israelis bringing chairs to hilltop in Sderot 2 watch latest from Gaza. Clapping when blasts are heard." (July 9 tweet from Danish ME correspondent Allan Sorensen)

What they're watching:

"It is the fourth day of Israel's intensive bombing campaign of the Gaza Strip, and more than 100 Palestinians have been killed, many of them children. More than 670 are injured. Families here have settled into a tense wartime regime, a daily routine hard-learned from Israel's previous military campaigns of 2008-09 and 2012. Unlike Israel, there are no bomb shelters in Gaza. There are no sirens to warn of incoming missiles and no Iron Dome to shoot them down. The only warning, and one provided only intermittently, is that from those dropping the bombs - supplied by phone, text or a warning shot to the roof. Under the ever-present hum of circling drones, squeal of jets, bomb-blasts and the thud of naval gunfire from the sea, most women and children are stuck indoors, often in buildings without electricity. These families have been caught in a tragic catch-22. Afraid to leave their homes when the Israeli warplanes do drop their bombs on Gaza's neighbourhoods, it is the women and children sheltering in the buildings where they instinctively feel safest who are dying." (Ramadan in Gaza: life under missile-fire, Peter Beaumont, theguardian.com, 12/7/14)

Settler Haters Hate

One of the most common and tiresome of expressions tossed around by Israel firsters is hate speech. In practice, the term is usually aimed at anyone who dares to speak out against Israeli criminality. Presumably, for these tossers, only critics of Israel indulge in hate speech. Not so.

If it's the real thing you want, try beating the following vile rant by Netanyahu speechwriter, Dror Eydar, published in the Sheldon Adelson-owned Israeli tabloid, Israel HaYom (Israel Today).  It is, if you will, the textual counterpart of those flag-draped Israeli mobs currently roaming the streets of Jerusalem looking for Palestinians to do over.

Where did I find this gem? Tellingly, in this week's Australian Jewish News!

To spare you the full technicolour yawn, I've settled for extracts of same, interspersed with my own comments:

"What has the death culture that surrounds us sought to sell in the past 100 years? Look around: there are no Jews in Iraq and no 'territories' in Syria, and nevertheless the angels of death gleefully slaughter each other. No science and no industry and no inventions that will benefit humanity. Just death..." (Seeing our enemies for what they are, 4/7/14)

And why are there no Jews in Iraq? Because Israel, having rendered 78% of Palestine Arabrein in 1948, had homes and land to spare. The solution? Uproot Arab Jewish communities wherever possible. (Just click on the Arab Jews label below for details.)

As for "no 'territories'" in Syria, Eydar seems to have forgotten all about the Israeli-occupied SYRIAN Golan Heights.

"If we don't realise that the executioners who pack the condemned into cattle trucks and lay them by the dozens or hundreds in ditches and put them to death amid devilish ululations, and if we don't get that this bunch is operating on our borders, and that its successes encourage our own local death culture, we will have to pay heavier prices in the future."

Notice how Eydar has no compunction whatever in smearing the brutalised victims of Israel's occupation as cut from the very same cloth as takfiri executioners?

"We must employ full force against the emissaries of the death culture, those who aid them, their military and civilian infrastructure, their sources of funding, their families, their clans, and anyone who knows something but just nods his head and keeps quiet."

Gee, has anyone been left out? Every Palestinian man, woman and child is guilty in the eyes of this hate-monger.

"Instead of trying to understand..."

Who needs a brain?

"... we should look at it as a natural phenomenon. No-one negotiates with cancer cells - we fight to dig them out at the root. If new ones appear? We'll fight again. And if, heaven forbid, again? We'll fight again. That's our fate. In the past 150 years we have learned to grasp a scythe with one hand and a sword with the other."

"Cancer cells"? The chutzpah of it all:

Eydar's East European Jewish caliphate fanatics, under the patronage and protection of His Britanic Majesty's government, invade and colonise the poor, war-torn, non-European land of Palestine (1917-48).

By 1948, having reached critical mass and muscle, they send most of the natives packing.

Then, resting only long enough to digest their homes and lands, and beat their scythes into swords (1948-67), they snap up the rest of the natives' patrimony in 1967, sending yet more of them packing in the process.

Those who remained came under occupation, while bit by bit being relieved of their land, which was colonised by messianic American Jewish caliphate fanatics, who - immune to such subtleties as the phenomenon of psychological projection - took to referring to the natives as, among other things, "cancer cells."

"Aah, the accusers said, they're settlers, so it's understandable... but that's just it - we're all settlers. Not just in the hills of Samaria and Judea, but also in Tel Aviv. In the eyes of our neighbors and some parts of the world we are all people who stole a land that wasn't theirs."

You said it, Dror.

"This blood libel is spread every day by anti-Semites and haters of Israel, as well as by useful idiots among us."

Hm... So anything other than the official, albeit false, Zionist narrative is now a "blood libel."

Hey, here's an idea: maybe dissenters from the party line could be charged with the crime of  ZND.

ZND? Zionist narrative denial!

But wait, I'm sure the legislation is already in the pipeline.

"But this is the truth: We are settlers because we returned to settle our forefathers' inherited land. It's simple. This country was a wasteland that waited for its rightful descendants for 2000 years, like a mother keeping her milk for her true children, like a woman waiting endlessly for her lover who disappeared."

Oh, FFS, spare us!

Memo to Bob Carr: Israel is Occupied Palestine

In an opinion piece in yesterday's Sydney Morning Herald, former Labor foreign ministers, Bob Carr and Gareth Evans, slammed "Australia's new policy of refusing to describe East Jerusalem as 'occupied'":

"If East Jerusalem is not to be referred to as 'occupied', why not Nablus or Bethlehem? If the Australian government can say 'occupied East Jerusalem' is fraught with 'pejorative implications' what is to stop Ms Bishop applying this to the occupied West Bank as a whole?" (East Jerusalem stance will not aid peace process)

Point well taken, but perhaps it's time to broaden the discussion:

If East Jerusalem is to be referred to as occupied (which, if course, it certainly is), why not West Jerusalem?

If Nablus and Bethlehem are to be referred to as occupied (which, of course, they certainly are), why not Jaffa and Haifa?

The simple fact of the matter is that today's 'Israel' - taken by brute force force and ethnic cleansing in 1948 - is just as much occupied Palestine as the West Bank and the Gaza Strip - taken by brute force and ethnic cleansing in 1967.

Do Carr and Evans need to consult the shades of the Zionist architects of Israeli-occupied Palestine - from the River to the Sea - to understand the bleeding obvious? Namely, that every inch of Palestine is stolen land? That just about every Jewish Israeli is either a settler or the son and daughter of a settler or the grandson or granddaughter of a settler? That yesterday's kibbutzim and moshavim are today's West Bank settlements? That Israel is because Palestine isn't?

So be it then:

David Ben-Gurion: "If I was an Arab leader, I should never make terms with Israel. That is natural; we have taken their country. Sure, God promised it to us, but what does that matter to them? Our God is not theirs. We come from Israel, it's true, but that was two thousand years ago, and what is that to them? There has been antisemitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They only see one thing: we have come and stolen their country. Why should they accept that?"

Vladimir Jabotinsky: "Any native people... views their country as their national home, of which they will always be the complete masters. They will not voluntarily allow, not only a new master, but even a new partner. And so it is for the Arabs... They look upon Palestine with the same instinctive love and true fervour that any Aztec looked upon his Mexico or any Sioux looked upon the prairie..."

Moshe Dayan: "Let us not today fling accusations at the murderers. Who are we that we should argue against their hatred? For eight years now they sit in their refugee camps in Gaza, and before their very eyes, we turn into our homestead the land and the villages in which they and their forefathers have lived. We are a generation of settlers, and without the steel helmet and the cannon we cannot plant a tree and build a home... Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages. You don't even know the names of these Arab villages, and I don't blame you, because these geography books no longer exist. Not only do the books not exist, the Arab villages are not there either. Nahalal arose in the place of Mahlul, Gvat in the place of Jibta, Sarid in the place of Haneifa, and Kfar-Yehoshua in the place of Tel-Shaman. There is not one single place in this country that did not have a former Arab population."

Carr and Evans also wrote:

"Israeli realists know indefinite occupation of the West Bank will degrade their own country, maintaining its Jewish identity only at the price of compromising its democracy."

Can they tell us how maintaining the "Jewish identity" of Israel - at the expense of the non-Jewish Palestinians - is not as racist a project as that of White South Africans maintaining the White identity of South Africa - at the expense of non-White South Africans?

Maybe they need to sit down and listen, really listen, to the unashamedly Zionist, and hence unashamedly racist, Israeli mayor of Upper Nazareth, Shimon Gapso:

"I'm not afraid to say it out loud... Upper Nazareth is a Jewish city and it's important that it remain so. If that makes me a racist, then I'm a proud offshoot of a glorious dynasty of 'racists' that started with the 'Covenant of the Pieces' [that God made with Abraham, recounted in Genesis 15:1-15] and the explicitly racist promise: 'To your seed have I given this land' [Genesis 15:38]...

"The racist Theodor Herzl wrote Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State, not The State of All Its Citizens). Lord Balfour recommended the establishment of a national home for the Jewish people. David Ben-Gurion, Chaim Arlosoroff, Moshe Sharett and other racists established the Jewish Agency, and the racist UN decided to establish a Jewish state - in other words, a state for Jews. The racist Ben-Gurion announced the establishment of the Jewish State in the Land of Israel, and during the War of Independence even made sure to bring in hundreds of thousands of Jews and drive out hundreds of thousands of Arabs who had been living here - all to enable it to be founded with the desired racist character.

"Since then, racially pure kibbutzim without a single Arab member and an army that protects a certain racial strain have been established, as have political parties that proudly bear racist names such as Habayit Hayehudi - 'The Jewish Home'. Even our racist national anthem ignores the existence of the Arab minority - in other words, the people Ben-Gurion did not manage to expel in the 1948 war. If not for all that 'racism' it's doubtful we could live here, and doubtful we could live at all.

"In these times of hypocrisy and bleeding-heart sanctimoniousness, of the proliferation of flaky types who are disconnected from reality, in the relative security that causes us to forget the dangers we face, we can sit in north Tel Aviv and cry 'racism' to seem enlightened and good-hearted in our own eyes. We can be shocked at a mayor who prefers that his city, which is right next to the largest Arab city in Israel, retain a Jewish majority and not be swallowed up in the Arab area that surrounds it. There will not be a single Jew in the future Palestinian state, but that's all right. That isn't racism." ('If you think I'm a racist, then Israel is a racist state', Haaretz, 7/8/13)

First Blacktown, Then Hatikvah 2

Under Vic's expert guidance, "an inspirational corps of representatives dedicated to figuring out how best to engage their youth..." has at last emerged in Blacktown, and at the top of their wish-list, says Vic, is a "community centre." (A community shift takes shape out west, Vic Alhadeff, Sydney Morning Herald, 14/3/14)

Well done, Vic! I'm sure it'll be up and running before you can say 'If you will it, it is no dream'.

A community centre for African refugees in Hatikvah, however, seems to be the last thing on the minds of Israel's movers and shakers:

"At 1am on January 10, 2012, the Knesset passed an amendment to the 1954 Prevention of Infiltration Law, a bill originally authorized to consolidate the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians that began in 1947. The new law authorized the government to arrest and hold anyone the government deemed an 'infiltrator' - namely, non-Jewish asylum seekers and migrants - in internment camps for a period as long as 3 years and without being charged or receiving trial. Even the handful of Africans who managed to garner refugee status or permanent residency from the Israel government would now be labeled criminal 'infiltrators'. The bill passed by whopping majority of 37-8... The anti-migrant bill included substantial funding for the expansion of the Saharonim facility at Ketziot, a Negev Desert mega-prison that once held thousands of Palestinians detained during the First Intifada, and which was due to be renovated to hold around 8,000 Africans fleeing persecution - 'infiltrators' - for an indefinite period... The Independent, a British newspaper, wrote that Ketziot would amount to 'the world's biggest detention center.' Reuven Rivlin, the speaker of the Knesset, described the planned center in much starker terms. 'As a democrat and a Jew, I have a hard time with concentration camps where people are warehoused,' he remarked. But Netanyahu countered the critics by arguing that the desert prison was a 'humanitarian solution' that would prevent non-Jewish Africans from 'chang[ing] the character of the state'." (Goliath: Life & Loathing in Greater Israel, Max Blumenthal, 2013, p 336)

Still, it's never too late! In the land where the sword was once beaten into a ploughshare, I'm confidant that if he ever gets over there, Vic will set about beating the Ketziot concentration camp into a community centre.

But hey, I've got an even bigger job for this miracle worker.

When he noted in his Herald piece that "some immigrants [to Australia] have arrived from countries where men in uniform are to be feared," that got me thinking. Israel's probably got more scary, trigger-happy men in uniform in the West Bank than is good for its fabled soul, right? So while he's over there beating concentration camps into community centres, why can't he also work his considerable magic and have them removed from the West Bank at the same time?

Just think of the applause, Vic. The Nobel Peace Prize. Even better, the Sydney Peace Prize!

C'mon, Vic, if anyone can end the occupation - although you probably wouldn't call it that - you can!

First Blacktown, Then Hatikvah 1

Where would Blacktown be without our new Baruch O'Farrell-appointed NSW Community Relations Commissioner (and CEO of the NSW Zionist - sorry, Jewish - Board of Deputies) Vic Alhadeff:

"The most poignant moment at a recent meeting of community leaders in Blacktown occurred towards the conclusion of the robust 2-hour exchange. A representative of the African Communities Council got to his feet and with more than a hint of angst and despair in his tone, pleaded: 'How do we get the rest of Australia to hear us? How do we get them to hear our voice?... The meeting was one of several that the NSW Community Relations Commission has convened in Blacktown in recent weeks following the alleged gang-rape of a 14-year-old girl in the area."  (A community shift takes shape out west, Vic Alhadeff, Sydney Morning Herald, 14/3/14)

Marvel as he talks the talk:

"As for the appeal of the African representative, if our various communities are to be the best they can, they need to - while proudly celebrating that culture - embrace equally their acquired Australian identity in as many forms as possible: respect for others, a fair go for all, equality of men and women, learning Australian history, familiarising themselves with the Anzac legend, volunteering and always acting within the law."

Now join in the applause: 

"When I put this to the most recent meeting, it was met with enthusiastic applause. Yet the appeal from the African representative hung in the air."

Right, now that Vic's managed to sort out Western Sydney's Blacktown (and said African and other representatives are busy brushing up on Australian history and Anzac), maybe it's time he moved on to bigger things in Israel - in South Tel Aviv's Hatikvah Quarter, to be specific. I hear the locals are also a tad toey there too:

"Throughout May 2012, a gang of about a dozen youths terrorized Africans in Tel Aviv, attacking then with clubs and iron chains, while robbing their stores... Their motive, the youths confessed after they were finally arrested at the end of the month, was to exact revenge for the horrible crimes the Israeli media claimed the foreigners had committed against the Jewish public. On May 22, following weeks of high-level government incitement, [Kahanist MK] Michael Ben-Ari and his minions returned to south Tel Aviv to arouse the angry, left-behind community with the message that the time for action had begun.

"The demonstrations began with Ben-Ari standing before a crowd of fifty at the front door of a small community center that provided services to asylum seekers, claiming without any evidence that Sudanese migrants had urinated on synagogues, desecrating the holiest sites of the 'Jewish people'. Another speaker declared that the greatest threat to Israel was African refugees, claiming they had been shepherded into Israel by the Arab states in a devious plot to upend the Jewish demographic majority. A young woman in the crowd sported a gold Star of David necklace and a white T-shirt emblazoned with the hand-scrawled phrase, 'Death to Sudanese'.

"With Ben-Ari standing a few meters away, a middle-aged man in the crowd took the megaphone and addressed a small group of leftists staging a counterprotest nearby: 'We want to remind you of the new protocol regarding women. If you are pretty, don't leave your home! You'll get fucked in the ass at night by a Sudanese man.'

"A woman in her 30s who was well known in the neighborhood for her activism against Africans charged across the street... There, they confronted two leftists sitting at the door of the community center. 'May you all get cancer! May the cancer spread!' the woman screamed at the two young women... 'May your entire family die in a car accident tomorrow! With the help of God, you piece of garbage! You spawn of Amalek!'

"When the demonstration ended, the protesters set themselves on Yossi Gurvitz, a widely read, left-wing blogger, and his girlfriend, Galina, who had dared to shout back at Ben-Ari. Comprised mostly of women, the crowd hectored Galina with graphic sexual and racial slurs... With Border Police standing by and doing absolutely nothing, an elderly man barked at Galina, 'Who are you married to? You're married to a nigger!'

"'A Sudanese man will rape you and then you'll cry,' said a bald man wearing aviator sunglasses... 'A Sudanese mam will rape you in the ass! May your mother be raped! A Sudanese man will fuck you! Then you will cry out in pain!

"'She wants some nigger dick. She's not getting any from her husband,' said an old woman with bright yellow hair, gesticulating wildly just inches from Galina's face. 'You know why she wants them here?' the old woman continued. 'She wants a man!'

"A young woman from the neighborhood added, 'What Israeli would want her? She wants a nigger!'" (Goliath: Life & Loathing in Greater Israel, Max Blumenthal, 2013, pp 342-43)

Of course, sorting that out should be a piece of cake for a man of Vic's talents. But that's just a start. I've got an even bigger job coming up for him! Tune in to First Blacktown, Then Hatikvah 2 tomorrow...

Buy This 'Vicious Anti-Israel Screed' NOW!

To warm you up here's Australia's leading Zionist comedian, Greg (Jerusalem Prize) Sheridan:

"[T]he Israel I know is mostly secular, raucously, almost wildly democratic, has a vibrant left wing, having founded in 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 Palestinian life." (Israel still looks good, warts & all, The Australian Literary Review, 6/5/09)

Now once you've picked yourself up off the floor, read this extract from Chapter 13 - Cut Off from the Tribe - of Max Blumenthal's new book Goliath: Life & Loathing in Greater Israel. The usual suspects are describing it as a "vicious anti-Israel screed" so you know it's good value:

"Over a plate of surprisingly decent bean curd sauce at the Chinese restaurant - one of only a handful I knew in [Tel Aviv] - [David] Sheen recalled how he arrived in Israel in 1999 from a solidly middle class, ultra-Zionist family from Toronto, Canada. At age 25, he was brimming with excitement about the earthy communal dream that awaited him: 'I saw Israel entirely through the frame of a Zionist education. I grew up in a very heavily Jewish environment, in a Jewish neighborhood, a Jewish school, synagogue - everything. The school was Zionist, and I was heavily immersed in the idea that we need Israel so there won't be another Holocaust, and that Israel needs us because it needs to be built up - it's surrounded with enemies so it needs our help to build itself. So when I first arrived in Israel I was thinking about the collective, and the concept of the Jewish people represented the strongest collective.'

"Though Sheen was heavily immersed in the tribalistic culture of Zionism, he had also cultivated strong leftist views through his participation in anti-globalization protests in Toronto. 'With every other issue besides Israel, I was on the left side of the spectrum,' he said. 'I was a PEP - a Progressive Except for Palestine.' Within a month of arriving in Israel, that began to change. He realized that everything he had known about Israelis and Palestinians was a fantasy cultivated through years of heavy indoctrination. His view of the occupation as a necessary, albeit unpleasant security measure was shattered after he spent long hours chatting with Palestinian workers who woke up at 4am each morning to slip into Israel from Nablus to work construction jobs for meager pay. 'Once I saw how the occupation created a permanent underclass and that it existed to promote exploitation - just by realizing that I broke with the PEP mentality.'

"Sheen's contact with actual Israelis undermined his idealized vision of the Zionist collective. 'Israelis were not exactly trying to pull together in the name of the Jewish people like I thought,' he said. 'It's a dog-eat-dog shark pool where you've got to swim to survive, and nobody has any idea of what civility means. People are manipulative and exploitative without any moral compunction or sense that there's anything wrong with that. They're not embarrassed about taking advantage of other people.'

"Alienated by the aggressive capitalism that was consuming urban life in Israel, Sheen retreated to a kibbutz in the Negev Desert called Kibbutz Samar. At first he thought he had finally found the slow-paced communal lifestyle he had been seeking. But then he peered beneath the kibbutz's socialist veneer: 'What broke me was they got workers from Thailand to work on the kibbutz for next to nothing,' Sheen recounted. 'I realized it wasn't really socialism they were practicing. It was socialism for Jews only. I grew up in multicultural Toronto where diversity was a positive thing. So it went against my values, and I tried to convince the kibbutz not to do this, to let the Thai workers live in normal apartments like everyone else - don't stick 6 of them in a fucking closet. Treat them like normal humans. Very few people even saw it as an issue worth discussing, let alone dealing with. They didn't see them as deserving of basic standards of living. They said, 'They're making more here than they would back in their country.' So that makes it okay? I wanted to get away from capitalism and away from exploitation, but I saw that kibbutz life was just that - it was segregationist Zionism. So I left.'

"In 2006, Israeli forces simultaneously carpet-bombed the Gaza Strip and Southern Lebanon. Israel blanketed the Strip with more than 6,000 artillery shells and missiles, deliberately destroyed Gaza's main power plant, then bombed the access roads to prevent the plant from being repaired. Within the span of about two months, the army had killed at least 202 civilians including 44 children in an operation billed to Israelis as a search for the captured Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit. In Southern Lebanon, Israeli bombing turned 800,000 Lebanese citizens - over a quarter of the country's population - into refugees while killing more than 1,100 civilians, including at least 300 children. Summarizing the views of the Israeli military leadership at the time, columnist Yaron London, one of the most prominent television journalists in the country, wrote, 'There is no longer any need for complicated distinctions... In practical terms, the Palestinians in Gaza are all [Hamas leader] Khaled Meshal, the Lebanese are all [Hezbollah leader Hassan] Nasrallah, and the Iranians are all [President Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad.'

"Indignant at the disproportionate violence Israel had unleashed against civilians, Sheen joined up with the small but feisty bands of Israeli radical leftists who had dedicated themselves to direct action against their country's militaristic policies. During a gay pride rally in Tel Aviv called 'Queeruption', Sheen and a group of friends held signs reading, 'Stop the bombing.' They were immediately set upon by riot police who beat them with billyclubs before dragging them away.

"'I was shocked,' Sheen remarked. 'Nowadays everyone knows the police are brutal, but at the time I still couldn't believe that Israeli police would attack other Jews - and for simply holding signs.' At another anti-war protest in Tel Aviv, a prim-looking waitress burst through the door of a nearby restaurant and hurled a glass at the protesters. 'I watched that glass hit the ground and shatter. I can still hear the sound. It was when I realized that even in the heart of liberal Tel Aviv there is a seething hatred for anyone with humanistic values,' Sheen said.

"At the time, Sheen was living on a moshav (a collective farm) near the Gaza border. From his home, he listened to the thundering sound of bombs falling on Gaza all day and all night. 'The ground was literally shaking underneath my feet,' he recalled. Sheen ventured into town filled with revulsion at the shelling of Gaza. 'When I told people at the supermarket what I thought of the bombing, they would all say, 'What do you care? It's not going to hit you, it's hitting them.' I said back, 'It's hitting actual people. Doesn't that matter to you?' And they would get enraged and say, 'What are you, a fucking leftist? You don't care about the Jews.' That's when I realized that in Israel, you're either in favor of any level of violence unleashed on those people, no matter who they were, or if you're against it, you're with the terrorists. I was shocked that that attitude was so mainstream.'

"Sheen went on: 'To come out against these wars on civilians - you were cut off. You were not part of the tribe. You were not part of the Jewish people. You were alone. Once you have a personal experience like that, it etches those beliefs into your soul'." (pp 66-68)

Now do yourself a favour and go out and buy it!

Updating Shmaryahu Levin

I'm sure you've all heard Shmaryahu Levin's witty definition of a Zionist as a Jew who gives money to another Jew to send a third Jew to Palestine.

Well, in light of the following two news items, it's pretty obvious that matters have become a tad more complicated since Levin's day (1867-1935) - along the lines of the proverbial left hand having absolutely no bloody idea whatever what the right's doing:

"United Israel Appeal (UIA) continues to fund aliyah flights and assistance for Jews fleeing countries of distress. There are currently over 3,000 Ethiopians waiting to come to Israel and UIA is dedicated to completing this operation by October 2013. The smooth integration of these Olim into Israeli society through absorption centres is a paramount task. These centres provide critical initial housing, intensive educational programs and the cultural tools for them to become independent and contributing members of mainstream Israeli society." (The final Ethiopian aliyah, UIA 2013 Campaign Focus, The Australian Jewish News, 25/1/13)

"Israel has admitted for the first time that it has been giving Ethiopian Jewish immigrants birth-control injections, often without their knowledge or consent. The government had previously denied the practice but the Israeli Health Ministry's director-general has now ordered gynaecologists to stop administering the drugs. According to a report in Haaretz, suspicions were first raised by an investigative journalist, Gal Gabbay, who interviewed more than 30 women from Ethiopia in an attempt to discover why birth rates in the community had fallen dramatically." (Israel gave birth control to Ethiopian Jews without their consent, Alistair Dawber, The Independent, 27/1/13)

This somewhat surreal state of affairs suggests that it's time we updated Levin's definition with a view to factoring in some of the latest twists and turns in what it means to be a Zionist today, twists and turns which Levin himself couldn't possibly have foreseen - or even imagined in his wildest dreams. So here goes:

These days a Zionist is a white Jew who gives tax-exempt money to a 'charity' such as the UIA, which funds another white Jew to discover 'lost tribes', some of whom are black, uproot them, and send them  to occupied Palestine. Once there they are subjected to racist abuse  - Go home Cushi! - and their women injected with drugs to stop them from having any more black babies.

OK, so it's clunkier than Levin's original, but how else is one to capture the above nuances?

Apartheid Israelis

"Many readers were surprised, as I was, to read a headline in The Weekend Australian: Living under the cloud of Israel's cruel apartheid. The headline did an injustice to the story, which only used the word apartheid in reporting the comments of one person who was interviewed. The editor of this august journal has confirmed to me that the headline was a mistake, the sort that creeps into newspapers where staff are always battling the pressure of deadlines. The Australian believes, and certainly I personally believe, the word apartheid has no application to Israel, which is a democracy in good standing, which extends basic rights to all its citizens, whatever their race or creed. Too often the misuse of such a word is designed to demonise Israel, wholly unjustly. In this case, it was just a mistake." (Greg Sheridan, foreign editor of The Australian, writing in an addendum to his column EU piggies won't go to market, 10/5/12)*

A just-released Israeli survey based on a sample of 503 interviews, commissioned by the New Israel Fund's Yisraela Goldblum Fund and conducted by the Dialog organisation based at Tel Aviv University, has found that:

Most Israeli Jews support the establishment of an apartheid regime in Israel if it formally annexes the West Bank: 

74% of Israeli Jews favour separate roads for Israelis and Palestinians in the West Bank.
69% object to giving Palestinians the right to vote if Israel annexes the West Bank.
38% want Israel to annex the Palestinian territories with settlements on them. (48% object)

A majority of Israeli Jews explicitly favours discrimination against Israel's Arab citizens:

59% of Israeli Jews want preference for Jews over Israeli Arabs in admission to jobs in government ministries.
58% believe Israel practices apartheid against Arabs.
49% want the state to treat Jewish Israelis better than Arab Israelis.
47% want part of Israel's Arab population transferred to the Palestinian Authority.
42% don't want to live in the same building with Arab Israelis or have their children in the same class with Arab Israeli children.
36% support some transferring some Israeli Arab towns from Israel to the PA in exchange for keeping some West Bank settlements.
33% want a law barring Israeli Arabs from voting for the Knesset.

NB: Anti-Arab views were most extreme among ultra-Orthodox Jews, and least extreme among secular Israelis. Source: Israel's dark reality: majority support apartheid, according to new study, Gideon Levy, Haaretz, 23/10/12)

[*For the full story of the headline that got away, see my 11/5/12 post Magic Happens and the accompanying list of posts which relate to it. (It's as easy as clicking on the Israeli apartheid label below.) Needless to say this poll wasn't reported in The Australian. A report on it by Fairfax's Middle East correspondent Ruth Pollard, however, appeared in both the Sydney Morning Herald (Poll finds Jewish Israeli support for segregation, 25/10/12) and The Age.]

Israel: Jewish, Democratic... & White

Anti-African pogrom in Israel? What anti-African pogrom? To my knowledge, the only Australian ms media reference to Tel Aviv's anti-African refugee pogrom of May 23 came on SBS' World News program.

Briefly, after attending a rally in south Tel Aviv's Hatikva neighbourhood addressed by Likud MKs, one of whom described Israel's African refugees as a 'cancer in our society', a Jewish mob went on the rampage, smashing shop and car windows, and beating up any Africans they could find.

Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu had earlier set the scene by referring, at a cabinet meeting, to the refugees as "illegal infiltrators flooding the country," and adding that, "[i]f we don't stop their entry, the problem that currently stands at 60,000 could grow to 600,000, and that threatens our existence as a Jewish and democratic state." (Israel PM: illegal African immigrants threaten identity of Jewish state, Harriet Sherwood, guardian.co.uk, 20/5/12)

After viewing some of the video footage of the pogrom, I couldn't help but notice that the most frequent insult on the lips of the mob was the word kushi, generally translated from the Hebrew as 'nigger'. Written, web-based accounts, corroborate this:

"I went to a demonstration led by MK Michael Ben-Ari 2 days ago... and was joined by my girlfriend, Galina. Ben-Ari, a Kahanist, was inciting the crowd against the African refugees in a distinctly anti-Semitic manner, peppering his talk with incessant references to excrement and urine. At some point, Galina couldn't take it any longer, and shouted something back. Within minutes we were surrounded by an angry mob of about 20 people, composed mostly of women, who hurled curses at her. Someone pulled out a tear gas canister and waved it at her face. Racist and sexual slurs filled the air repeatedly. Time and time again, people expressed the wish she would be raped by Sudanese, and asked her if she was bedding them. A boy, between 10 and 11 years old, screamed at her point blank that what she needs is a 'nigger's cock'..." (Thoughts on an attack by a Jewish mob, Yossi Gurvitz, 972mag.com, 24/5/12)

Gurvitz reflects on the experience:

"And after the shock and fear, an attempt at understanding what took place. The legend that African refugees turned the paradise that was south Tel Aviv into a terrorized crime zone has to be rejected... Statistics proved time and time again the crime wave exists mostly in the minds of the politicians stoking the hatred, of which Ben-Ari is an ambitious competitor. I lived in Hatikva for 2 years; I've seen the people, the despair, the fear at nights, the absence of infrastructure, the flooding every winter when the sewage system collapsed - with my own eyes. Spare me the bullshit about a quiet neighborhood of happy poor workers. First there's the economic hardship, which prevents people from getting an education and getting the hell out of there. Above it, we find Jewish supemacism, the concept of a Chosen People, 'every Jew is the son of a King'. Proud Jews are often people whose Jewishness is the only thing they can be proud of. The blow I received came after I was asked if I am a Jew, and replied in the negative." (ibid)

The 'n' word is apparently in such frequent use that it (and worse) has even been internalised by the refugees themselves:

"I accompanied a group of asylum-seeking children to their homes tonight, as we also do on the days of protests with potential racist developments. As usual we got barraged with swearwords, but policemen advised us about safer routes. The kids sang along the way: 'I'm a nigger, I'm a nigger, nigger, and I clean Israeli homes'. ('What, you don't know it, Rami? Look it up on Youtube'.) Two 12-year-old girls asked me if I know that pretty soon the Sudanese will suffer the same fate as Jews did in Germany. One asked the other to tell her about that man, Korczak, who saved children. They asked if he was Jewish and if he would have saved all the children. One girl asked me: 'What's the opposite of free?' I had trouble finding the word: imprisoned? shackled? She said: 'OK, whatever it is, say shackled, we were born shackled and we'll die shackled'. The girls asked me why the Israelis want to deport them. I asked them: If the streets in your country would suddenly fill up with white people that speak a different language you don't understand, what would you feel? One girl said: 'I'd become a teacher and teach them my language!' Toward the end two 12-year-old girls asked me: 'Say, Rami, if you were in our place, what would you have done?'" (African kids in Tel Aviv: They'll do to us what they did to Jews in Germany, Dimi Reider, 972mag.com, 23/5/12)

Another Israeli, Uri Horesh, explains:

"When I was growing up, kushi was a perfectly neutral term for 'black person', more like 'negro' in the 1960s than 'nigger' ever was. However, nowadays, since more Hebrew speakers in Israel actually know black people, and there are indeed black people living in Israel who speak Hebrew (including migrant African laborers, but of course, Jewish immigrants from Ethiopia), the connotations of kushi have shifted towards the negative - perhaps not to the degree of the taboo that is associated with 'nigger' in the American context, but it is gradually moving in that direction." (Kushi didn't always mean 'nigger', tlvphl.blogspot.com.au, 23/5/12)

One might assume from the testimony above that the kind of anti-black/white supremacist racism, which finds vivid expression in the use of the word 'nigger' on the streets of south Tel Aviv today, is a relatively recent development in Zionist history. Not so, apparently. Given that political Zionism is primarily a European settler-colonial power-trip, it should come as no surprise to find that earlier  generations of Zionists were far from immune to an obsession with European 'whiteness'.

Here, for example, British Jew and Zionist, Redcliffe Salaman, Regimental Medical Officer to the 39th Royal Fusiliers, 2nd Judean Battalion, writes of the arrival in Cairo on July 13, 1918 of the Jewish Battalions' latest batch of volunteers from Palestine's pre-World War I Jewish colonies. Salaman refers to them as "the Palestinians":

"The moment they rolled into the station I spotted a nigger amongst them, and before the train stopped I cleared that question up - his mother was a negress, his father a Sephardi (these Sephardim are a fearfully mixed lot; give me Ashkenazim for blue blood!). Then the types varied from blue-eyed handsome pseudo-Gentiles to dark, purely semitic Yemenites - and scattered between were a dozen, perhaps, of semi-negroid but often very handsome Moroccan Jews." (Palestine Reclaimed: Letters from a Jewish Officer in Palestine, 1920, pp 24-25)

Salaman adds, some pages later, that:

"The Yemenites are for the most part undersized and rather poor-spirited natives. They are not racially Jews. They are black, long-headed, hybrid Arabs. Last Saturday I worked with J. M. in the library and we got hold of every authority we could, and, from the historical evidence, it is at once clear that they have but a trace of Jewish blood in them though they probably have rather more than the Falashas. The real Jew is the European Ashkenazi, and I back him against all-comers." (ibid, p 28)

The irony of the Hatikva pogrom is that many of the participants may well have been the descendants of the very Yemeni Jews that Salaman scorned as insufficiently white to be really Jewish.

The Muslim Brotherhood are Just Pussies!

Meet the 'ladies' of the Zionist Sisterhood:

The smug, smirking, ball-busting Israeli settler woman, loitering with (genocidal) intent on a street somewhere in Israeli-occupied Hebron, simply cannot resist the guy with the microphone:

Here it's great. This is Hebron Heights. We've got King David's palace, fresh air, olive trees, fruit trees. The entire Hebron landscape. It's the best.
-Do the Arabs here make trouble?
If they do, then we... That's the challenge. This is not paradise. There's still a lot of work to do and... From two of my windows you can see that side of town, all of Hebron. My neighbour calls it 'motivational windows'. You open them in the morning and see what else has to be done. Until we can return to there... That's it.
-It's Jewish or Arab...?
(Pointing to house in a wire cage) This house is still Arab. Another one here (pointing to door daubed with Hebrew graffiti and stars of David) used to be Arab and today it houses Jews. It will become more and more Jewish.
-(Palestinian woman standing on her doorstep inside the wire cage calls out to interviewer) She wants to lock us in!
(Zionist Sister marches towards her, barking orders) Get in the house!
-I won't close the door.
Close it! Close the door!
-Stay out of this!
Close the door!
-Stay out of this! I'm not closing the door.
Sit here, in the cage.
-I'm not closing the door.
Sit here. Close the door!
-I don't want to go inside.
Close the... (Zionist Sister notices she's being filmed by the woman's daughter) Get the camera out of here!
-Call the police.
Turn the camera off!
-It's early in the morning, what do you want from us?
Shut up!
-(Calling to Israeli soldier) Don't you see what she's doing?
Sharmoota (Whore), sharmoota.
-You are.
Sharmoota.
-You are. Go away.
Sharmoota.
-Look what she's doing. Go away!
Sharmoota.
-Go away, you bitch!
Sharmoota.
-(To soldier) Did you see what she did?
(Dragging it out for effect) Sharmooota. Sharmooota. You are a sharmooota. Your daughter is too. Don't you dare open this door!
-Don't you dare come here!
Sharmooota.
-I'll leave as I please.

(The complete b'tselem.org video - Orthodox Jewish woman harasses Palestinian - may be viewed at angryarab.blogspot.com, 13/11/11)

Meanwhile, across the seas, somewhere in Israel's nurturing motherland, her Sister*, Rachel Abrams, a woman with (genocidal) attitude, the wife of neocon Bush official Elliot Abrams, and Board Member of Bill Kristol's Emergency Committee for Israel (ECI), is so overcome by the news of Gilad Shalit's release that she just up and vomits it all into her blog, titled - but of course - Bad Rachel:

"He's free and he's home in the bosom of his family and his country. Celebrate, Israel, with all the joyous gratitude that fills your hearts, as we all do along with you. Then round up his captors, the slaughtering, death-worshiping, innocent-butchering, child-sacrificing savages who dip their hands in blood and use women - those who aren't strapping bombs to their own devils' spawn and sending them out to meet their 72 virgins by taking the lives of the school-bus-riding, heart-drawing, Transformer-doodling, homework-losing children of Others - and their offspring - those who haven't already been pimped out by their mothers to the murder god - as shields, hiding behind their burkas and cradles like the unmanned animals they are, and throw them not into your prisons, where they can bide until they're traded by the thousands for another child of Israel, but into the sea, to float there, food for sharks, stargazers, and whatever other oceanic carnivores God has put there for the purpose." (GILAD!!!!!!!!!! badrachel.blogspot.com, 18/10/11)

[* "To the Jews of Judea and Samaria whose every stud hammered and floor tile laid in that magnificent, empty lunar landscape summoned the disapproving scrutiny of allies and the menacing outrage of foes, and who must contemplate the possibility of expulsion - or worse - every day for the sake of a 'peace' with a people whose declared war against them has never abated: May it be a sweet year." (May it be a sweet year, badrachel.blogspot.com, 28/9/10)]