I just read Yossi Gurvitz’s chilling account of the attack that a right-wing mob in South Tel Aviv unleashed against his girlfriend Galina, and him, during the anti-African-refugees demonstration held there Tuesday. The main speaker at the demo was Michael Ben-Ari, an elected MK.
Gurvitz writes:
- 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.”
I urge you to read the whole account– and to see some of the video that David Sheen made of the encounter.
Gurvitz has worked for many years as an economics/financial reporter. He makes this point in his article:
- Neither the government not the Tel Aviv Municipality invested in their slums the resources necessary to improve them. Once, more than 30 years ago, Menachem Begin led the Neighborhood Reconstruction project, which held great promise before Begin abandoned it in favor of another, the occupation of the West Bank.
The government announced this week it will raise the VAT, the most regressive tax, most harmful to the poor, to 17 percent, and that it would also place VAT on fruit and vegetables. Which means the expenses of the Hatikva residents is about to skyrocket. On the same day, the Knesset approved a bill providing tax cuts to people contributing to settlements. Yesterday, the Knesset approved NIS 161 million to ultra-Orthodox institutions, NIS 1.7 million for the bureau of convicted rapist Moseh Katzav – WTF? – but declined to give NIS 4.2 million to centers aiding victims of sexual assault, which may lead to their closure.
With the exception of the years of the second Rabin government, this has been the government’s policy for 35 years: create a welfare state – in the West Bank. The government of Greater Israel does not have the money for welfare in old Israel, it is busy making facts on the ground beyond the Green Line. And if you want to make facts on the ground, you need settlers. The ideological base is limited. You need to entice people to go there. You want a welfare state? Better move to Beit El.
The behavior of the people in Ben-Ari’s demonstration, as seen on Sheen’s video and in the great still photos in Gurvitz’s piece, is clearly that of a proto-fascist mob. Many people on Twitter have been calling this a Kristallnacht– and indeed, the shopfronts of many S. Tel Aviv businesses associated with the African refugees were broken during the mob’s rampage.
Some western media have taken to calling the African residents there “migrants”– as though they were birds, not humans? Or, as though they were on their way someplace else?
What most of the international community calls them is refugees. Most of them have fled great violence and repression in their home countries and have made their way across daunting (and often lethal) obstacles, to try to find a refuge where they can. Refugees who can register a credible claim of fearing serious harm if they return to their homelands are afforded special protections under international law. I need hardly add that in the past, many Jewish people have been refugees, and have benefitted from these protections.
But for many of the Jewish citizens in today’s Israel, the term “refugees” reminds them less of the vulnerabilities that members of their own community have suffered in the past– which might excite some compassion from them?– than of the very numerous Palestinian refugees still awaiting the full respect of their rights, from Israel. Thus, treating the African refugees as, essentially subhuman beings not endowed with full, normal human rights, is all of a piece with the fact that Israel has treated the Palestinian refugees like that for 64 long years now.
Then, there are the calls that arise from the mob and its leaders for “expulsion”. In what other even half-way civilized country in the world do we ever hear elected politicians and the mobs that support them openly voicing such a call?
None.
The ethnic (indigenous) Palestinians who make up 20% of the citizenry of Israel have long feared that rightwing Israeli politicians may some day start yet another campaign of ethnic cleansing, designed to “finish off” the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from their land that was started in late 1947. The 4.2 million Palestinians of the areas that have lived under Israeli military rule since 1967 also fear the same fate.
From this point of view, the pro-expulsion campaign being whipped up by so many ultra-nationalist politicians against the African refugees in Tel Aviv can be seen as a way of “grooming” the Jewish-Israeli public, to be ready to set aside any remaining inclination some of its members (like Gurvitz and the truly heroic Galina) may have to treat non-Jews as fellow-humans and to resist any campaign to demonize, attack, and eventually expel or kill them.
It’s like pedophiles, who will spend long months “grooming” their young victims to commit acts that, without the grooming, they would almost certainly find distasteful and demeaning. The dedicated pedophile will spend that time pushing the child’s moral limits ever further and further, until the child finds the acts s/he is then forced or “encouraged” to commit no longer so distasteful or abnormal…
The government of Israel must take the full responsibility for bringing these vile acts of hatred and incitement to an end. The African refugees in Israel are deserving of, and must receive, full protection of their physical security and their basic wellbeing.
If the government does not do this, it should be vilified around the world. Certainly, other governments everywhere should withhold their support from a government that does not clamp down hard on the racist inciters, and that refuses to offer basic protections to the refugees.
There has long been a broad discussion over whether Zionism itself constitutes racism. (It turns out that a lot of the answer that people give to that question hangs on whether they think racism deals only with differences in skin color– which most US citizens seem to think– or whether, as the other 95% of the world’s people believe, it also deals with other forms of ethnic difference.) But the actions of the mob– and its leaders– in Tel Aviv this week were clear, unabashed, and definitely proto-fascist racism.
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… What was Peter Beinart’s argument, again, about Zionism being “democratic and liberal” inside 1948 Israel, and only undemocratic and illiberal in the occupied territories?
Beinart’s latest book, The Crisis of Zionism, is very good in its analysis of the dysfunctionalities within the American Jewish community and the complete unrepresentativity of the community’s self-proclaimed “leadership”. That is a story that he knows well, and understands. The real story of Israel is one that, evidently, he does not yet really understand.
When power is separated from responsibility, there is no predicting how far people will go, only that it will be in a bad direction. The best way to make people irresponsible is to guarantee that they will not suffer any consequences from their behavior.
We can see the result of power and responsibility separated with the many Catholic priests who preyed on children, fully protected by the hierarchy above them from whatever they would do.
Israel has a guarantee, proven time and again and never more blatantly than in the past few years, that the United States will cover for it, not only militarily but diplomatically at the highest level. Israelis know that they have a chorus of powerful supporters in the U.S. that will not question anything they do and will readily attack anyone who does dare to criticize.
It shouldn’t be surprising that Israelis think they are a very special exemption – because clearly it’s true. At the top it has resulted in unrestrained arrogance on the part of Netanyahu but the common Israeli on the street knows that almost anything is allowed when it comes to the treatment of non-Jews; why not when even the army doesn’t have to answer for what it does? Even the high court must nag and nag to get its ruling obeyed, if obeyed at all. Laws are as flexible as a wet noodle when it comes to treatment of the outsider, even if that outsider is officially an Israeli citizen.
Israel will go down in the history books as a unique case, made possible only by the combination of the history of the Jews, the guilt of the West from the 20th century treatment that Jews received and the unchecked willingness of Zionists to play every card they could, and can, to further their agenda of ethnic cleansing.
That Israelis should feel free to run wild against African immigrants should be expected. They have been running wild against the Palestinians for some time. Only when Israel’s grip on the United States is weakened will Israel be a country that is accountable and, because of that, responsible.
The concept of homeland is one of the most amazing and also, perhaps, one of the most ruinous of the modern era, says Prof. Shlomo Sand. In his new book, “When and How Was the Land of Israel Invented?” (Kineret, Zmora-Bitan Dvir, Hebrew), Sand examines the attitude of the Zionist movement toward that territory since its inception. More particularly, he is out to discover how Zionism adopted the idea of the “historic right” to that land, and consolidated an ethos based on the memory of an ancient people whose ancestors were Hebrews who lived in the Kingdom of Judah in the First and Second Temple periods. According to Sand, the Land of Israel was not the historic homeland of the Jewish people.
“Zionism plundered the religious term ‘Land of Israel’ [Eretz Yisrael] and turned it into a geopolitical term,” he says. “The Land of Israel is not the homeland of the Jews. It becomes a homeland at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th − only upon the emergence of the Zionist movement.”
Author of ‘The Invention of the Jewish People’ vents again
The concept of homeland is one of the most amazing and most ruinous of the modern era, says Prof. Shlomo Sand.
Author of ‘The Invention of the Jewish People‘ vents again
The concept of homeland is one of the most amazing and most ruinous of the modern era, says Prof. Shlomo Sand.
The concept of homeland is one of the most amazing and also, perhaps, one of the most ruinous of the modern era, says Prof. Shlomo Sand. In his new book, “When and How Was the Land of Israel Invented?” (Kineret, Zmora-Bitan Dvir, Hebrew), Sand examines the attitude of the Zionist movement toward that territory since its inception. More particularly, he is out to discover how Zionism adopted the idea of the “historic right” to that land, and consolidated an ethos based on the memory of an ancient people whose ancestors were Hebrews who lived in the Kingdom of Judah in the First and Second Temple periods. According to Sand, the Land of Israel was not the historic homeland of the Jewish people.
“Zionism plundered the religious term ‘Land of Israel’ [Eretz Yisrael] and turned it into a geopolitical term,” he says. “The Land of Israel is not the homeland of the Jews. It becomes a homeland at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th − only upon the emergence of the Zionist movement.”
The Invention of the Jewish People
The concept of homeland is one of the most amazing and also, perhaps, one of the most ruinous of the modern era, says Prof. Shlomo Sand. In his new book, “When and How Was the Land of Israel Invented?” (Kineret, Zmora-Bitan Dvir, Hebrew), Sand examines the attitude of the Zionist movement toward that territory since its inception. More particularly, he is out to discover how Zionism adopted the idea of the “historic right” to that land, and consolidated an ethos based on the memory of an ancient people whose ancestors were Hebrews who lived in the Kingdom of Judah in the First and Second Temple periods. According to Sand, the Land of Israel was not the historic homeland of the Jewish people.
“Zionism plundered the religious term ‘Land of Israel’ [Eretz Yisrael] and turned it into a geopolitical term,” he says. “The Land of Israel is not the homeland of the Jews. It becomes a homeland at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th − only upon the emergence of the Zionist movement.”
http://www.haaretz.com/weekend/magazine/author-of-the-invention-of-the-jewish-people-vents-again.premium-1.432371