Fascism Needs an Enemy [Israel]
by Ran HaCohen
http://original.antiwar.com/,
July 20, 2009
Critically thinking Israelis - a negligible
minority - already know the pattern: no matter how extreme our
new prime minister is, it won't take more than a couple of months
for the media to portray him as the sane, moderate, and pragmatic
leader of the political center. If even the warrior General Sharon
could be reborn as "a Man of Peace," why can't Netanyahu?
The landmark was his "Bar Ilan Speech" of June 14, after
which mainstream Israeli columnists, lead by the pathetic Ari
Shavit (Ha'aretz) and his lowbrow twin brother Ya'ir Lapid (Yedioth
Achronot), all resorted to ludicrous narratives of Rebirth, Revolution,
and Rubicon for the allegedly new leader of peace-loving Israel.
One can expect little else from the Israeli
mainstream, blinded as it is by decades of indoctrination and
vested interests, or from Israel's President Peres, whose political
lexicon never included the T of Truth. But the world should be
warned. Unlike Lebanon or Iran, Israel has not moved a single
step forward in the Obama Era. On the contrary: With the rogue
triumvirate of Netanyahu, Barak, and Lieberman, Israel is now
ruled by the most nationalist, racist, and fanatical government
it has ever had. On top of that, the main opposition party, led
by the ultra-nationalist Livni and the opportunistic professional
soldier Mofaz, offers yet another duplicate of the government's
narrative, so that the ever narrower public discourse is framed
by two ideological and political twins, offering no alternative
whatsoever. In fact, the Israeli far Right has now more than 80
percent of the seats in the Knesset - the rest being the Arab
parties, Meretz, and a dubious dissenting faction within Labor.
Thus the Israeli media consumer is not even exposed to anything
but nationalist at best, racist at worst, anti-Palestinian, anti-peace,
pro-occupation brainwashing.
Make no mistake: Netanyahu is a man of
the occupation, as he always has been. Listen to Netanyahu's ideological
mentor, his father Prof. Benzion Netanyahu, who openly said his
son would never agree to a Palestinian state; as Netanyahu told
his father, he placed so many conditions on his offer at Bar Ilan
in order to make it unacceptable to the Palestinians. It is yet
to be seen whether Netanyahu's anti-peace tactic will be eternal
peace talks that go nowhere or whether he will attempt Barak's
"unmasking" gambit. But giving up the occupied territories
and ending Israel's colonialism is clearly not on the agenda.
Just two weeks before Netanyahu's "historic" two-states
speech, the Knesset endorsed a decision against a Palestinian
state, which enraged Jordanians by claiming Jordan is the Palestinian
state. Indeed, the initiator did not come from within Netanyahu's
coalition but from a fascist party on the further Right, but his
bill, overwhelmingly endorsed 53-9, was raised just a few days
after a Knesset conference on "alternatives to the two-states
solution" organized by a member of Netanyahu's Likud Party.
Therefore, expecting Israel to stop or
even freeze settlement activity just because President Obama says
to is just as unrealistic as expecting al-Qaeda to lay down its
arms for the same reason. Israel's most dishonest minds - above
all Defense Minister Barak - do their best to find a "formula"
that will enable them to continue the organized Israeli land-robbery
in the West Bank - be it "natural growth," "settlement
blocks," "temporary freezing," or similar lies.
The dispossession must not be stopped. After all, the settlements
are by far the most central project of the state of Israel, and
they have been so for the past four decades, that is, for two-thirds
of Israel's history, to the extent that Israel has clearly become
the tail wagged by its own colonialism.
The Old-New Target: Israeli Palestinians
Ignoring the new winds blowing from Washington,
the Israeli zealots are so self-confident that they consider the
occupation a fait accompli: they have no doubt that just as Israel
has managed to dupe the world and double the number of illegal
settlers since the Oslo "Peace Process" began, it will
succeed in keeping the occupied Palestinians - caged and impoverished
in the West Bank, enslaved and starved in Gaza - under Israel's
abusive boot for decades to come. Their optimism may be justified:
Obama has a very long way to go to prove he is serious.
Given this self-confidence, and given
the fact that the Palestinian armed struggle has been contained,
Israel's energies of hatred are now turned toward another enemy:
the Israeli Arabs, the approximately 20 percent-strong minority
of Palestinians with Israeli citizenship. Israel is engaged in
a full-fledged campaign aimed at delegitimizing and further excluding
the Israeli Palestinians. The trend did not begin with Netanyahu,
but it can now rely on a highly supportive parliament and leadership.
Netanyahu's Bar-Ilan speech was symptomatic,
introducing a central new demand from the occupied Palestinians
as a condition for letting them have a (castrated) state: they
must first recognize Israel "as a Jewish state." This
sounds idiotic: Does Israel need an outside entity to define its
own character? But the real targets behind this condition are
the Israeli Palestinians. Demanding the occupied Palestinians
to recognize Israel's Jewishness plays them off against the Israeli
Palestinians: You want your own state? First turn your back on
your brothers inside Israel and thwart their demands to full equality
within Israel. If even Abu Mazen states Israel is "a Jewish
state," Arab Israelis cannot demand full equality, and if
they do, we'll tell them to piss off across the border. As a precondition
to discuss ending their colonization, the Palestinians must submit
themselves to the classic colonialist strategy of divide-and-rule.
But Netanyahu's new condition is aimed
predominantly at Jewish-Israeli ears: it turns the attention from
the occupied territories to Israel proper, implying that "our
real problem" is on the inside, with those inherently disloyal
"Israeli Arabs." That's where Netanyahu meets and carries
out Lieberman's fascist election slogan "No loyalty, no citizenship."
Netanyahu's speech is just the tip of
the iceberg. The war against the Israeli Palestinians is much
wider than that. It is felt in the judicial system, where for
example a Jewish farmer who shot Arab burglars in the back while
they were fleeing from his farm, killing one and wounding another,
was acquitted (and is now celebrated as a national hero). As Orly
Noy writes (YNet, in Hebrew), "given the judicial and public
atmosphere in Israel these days, nothing is more predictable than
the acquittal of a Jew who exercised violence, even extreme, against
an Arab citizen." In another case, a Jewish man who murdered
a taxi driver just because he was Arab was deemed "unfit
to face trial." A senior army officer who ordered his soldier
to shoot a handcuffed, blindfolded Palestinian at point-blank
range was merely accused of "improper conduct." This
accusation was found unreasonable even by the Israeli Supreme
Court.
The discrimination against Israeli Arabs,
of course, is not new; even the official Israeli Or Commission
stated in 2003 that "government handling of the Arab sector
has been primarily neglectful and discriminatory." But whereas
the early 2000s could give the impression the discrimination was
diminishing, the last years show an opposite movement. The landmark
seems to be the amendment to the naturalization law of December
2003, which bars Palestinians from the occupied territories from
obtaining any residency status or citizenship in Israel through
marriage to an Israeli citizen, thereby preventing them from living
in Israel with their spouses. Heavily criticized by Israeli and
international human rights groups, the law is aimed exclusively
against Israel's Palestinian minority, whose members often marry
across the Green Line.
The flow of laws and regulations against
Israeli Arabs increased exponentially. A year ago, a forgotten
British Mandate regulation from 1939, banning the import of books
printed in enemy countries, was suddenly revived, closing the
import gates on Arabic schoolbooks and all kinds of literature
printed in Lebanon (a major publishing center in Arabic) and other
Arab countries. No security issues are at stake: all imported
books are subject to censorship anyway.
A similar provocation is the transportation
minister's recent order to wipe Arabic place names off road signs,
replacing them with their Hebrew names. Thus place names, including
those of mixed or Arab towns like Yaffa (Jaffa) or Shafa'amr,
should be publicly spelled in Arabic (!) according to their Hebrew
form - Yafo or Shefar'am. While all over the world, from Canada
to Australia, former colonialist nations recognize and respect
the cultural heritage of, the rights of, and the evils done to
indigenous minorities, colonialist Israel is eager to wipe them
out - politically, culturally, and physically.
A further attack on the Israeli-Palestinian
minority is the suggested law to ban the commemoration of the
Nakba, the catastrophe in 1948 in which hundreds of Palestinian
villages were destroyed and hundreds of thousands became refugees.
Though its original form, including jailing individuals who do
commemorate it, has been softened to a formulation forbidding
only public-supported organs from commemorating the event, the
intention is clear - as was that of the (currently rejected) law
demanding a declaration of loyalty from every Israeli citizen.
The attack on Israel's Palestinian minority
has deep ideological roots in extreme nationalistic purism, but
it is mainly politically motivated. The Israeli Arabs, despite
six decades of discrimination, have been an incredibly loyal minority.
The Israeli right-wing clearly wishes to put an end to this loyalty,
hoping the incitement will lead Israeli Arabs to some form of
violent resistance, from street violence to terror attacks. This
would create the desired atmosphere of suspicion, fear, and hatred
that fascism always needs in order to flourish. An Arab-Israeli
Intifada is the wet dream of many Israeli right-wingers: nationally
and internationally, it would enable them to present Israel once
again as a threatened victim of Arab/Muslim/Gentile persecution,
not as the rogue colonialist regional power it actually is.
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