The present era in Israel is one in many members of the Jewish majority are expressing anti-Arab race-hate more openly and more frequently than ever before. But there are also courageous Israelis– Jewish and Palestinian– who try to counter this trend.
See this film clip shot by Ashira Ramdan, who went with a group of Israeli leftists to mount a counter-protest against an extreme nationalist gathering in Ashdod.
Ashira is amazing there: Calm, courageous, principled. Her assailants– not so, at all.
6 thoughts on “See the racist hate in today’s Israel”
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People so paralyzed with fear for their own survival that they swallow a one dimensional demonization of the other side that allows them to accept a massacre of innocent bystanders, be they humanitarian activists or ordinary Gaza residents. I thought this description particularly applied to the first hardliner speaking about how all the Gazans are terrorists bombing Sderot.
Regime change can happen in Israel, through elections. If they majority has embraced hate enough to put Netanyahu/Lieberman in power, effort must be made to break that embrace. Pressure should come from the outside through a withdrawal of blanket support, and sanction. It must come from inside through the activism that Ramdan is doing. The Israeli majority needs to reconnect with reality to acknowledge the other side as human beings, and realize the deprivation it’s forcing those humans to endure.
I sometimes think there is a collective kind of PTSD, and both the Israelis and the Palestinians have been traumatized. Flashbacks are not a good basis for domestic or foreign policy. The blockade needs to end. This is a scary clip, Helena.
Now two days later, we have one American citizen murdered with four bullets including the back of the head and one American peace activist blinded. Obama’s reaction? None, nothing nada. So far just his assurances to Netanyahu that the White House love fest is still on, just postponed. Naomi Klein has pointed out the ironic signifigance of Israel actually blinding peaceful witnesses to their violence!
Always a good question for the JWN Debating Society:
Is there a difference between racism and anti-semitism?
I’ve always taken anti-semitism to be a subset of racism, specific to a particular community.
The term ‘anti-semitism’ is rooted in C19 racial theory. The equation of practitioners of Judaistic rites with a race called semites would be problematic if there was such a ‘race.’ But there isn’t.
Had there been, of course, there is not a scintilla of evidence to suggest that Europe’s jewish people had any connection with it.
An interesting aspect of the matter is that the Zionist idea conforms with those attempts to de-legitimise north America’s First Nations by suggesting that they were recent immigrants who had driven out or massacred a whiter, non-asiatic race.
It was a constant refrain of the South African racists that the ‘Bantu’ were not South Africans and had no more claim to the land than the Afrikaaner.
Alexno raises an interesting question: the problem is that while we all understand what racism is, it is very difficult to demonstrate that it has anything to do with race.
All very muddled, I’m afraid but the bottom line, which is extremely alarming, is that in much of the world a deep anger at the State of Israel, which seems emblematic of the colonialism from which so many nations have suffered greatly, is growing up.
No doubt those who make a living from it will call it ‘anti-semitism’ but any resemblance between the old european hatred of jews and the resentment that the wretched of the earth demonstrate towards their persecutors (and the persecution of innocents) is coincidental.
One thing is certain if there is anti-semitism, of the classical semitic race theory sort, it is manifested in the extraordinary cruelty which has been practised against the Palestinian population. It is no coincidence that the treatment of Gaza puts one in mind of that meted out to the Warsaw ghetto.
ant-arab hate..otherwis called antisemitism…