Ynet manufactures new threat to promote Ben White book

Israel’s self-delegitimization campaign intensifies as Ynet, the website of Israel’s second largest daily, publishes a news article headlined, “Zoabi Endorses Anti-Semitic Author.”

The article, which also appears in print in Hebrew, is a shocking exposé that reveals that Palestinian-Israeli Knesset member Haneen Zoabi actually wrote a four-page foreword to Ben White’s new book, Palestinians in Israel: Segregation, Discrimination and Democracy.

My God, it even says so on the book’s cover:

Ynet reporter Yaniv Halili explains that Ben White is “a British author considered an anti-Semite” by “Jewish leaders” who remain unnamed in the article (Ben White has responded to the article on his EI blog).

According to Halili, Zoabi’s foreword refers to the Israeli settlement enterprise as “racist” and premised on “ethnic cleansing.” The Ynet article places “racist” and “ethnic cleansing” in quotes, though Zoabi does not use the term “ethnic cleansing” in her foreword. On the other hand, Ynet does not enclose “anti-Semite” in quotes, presumably because the unnamed Jewish leaders transcend quoteness.

Furthermore, writes Halili, Zoabi “refers to Israelis as the people who took away Arab land.”

Not revealed in the Ynet report is that Zoabi’s foreword employs other offensive words such as “full equality among citizens” and “justice”—words antithetical to the state she purports to serve.

MK Haneen Zoabi, whose fight for equality is the latest threat to Israel’s existence

The Ynet report is catergorized as news, perhaps because the opinion section has enough Zoabi-bashing articles, such as “Clear and Present Danger,” which proclaims Zoabi a “grave threat to our security;” and “Punish Zoabi the Traitor,” which explains that “we may end up being wiped off the face of this earth, because we helped our enemies [Zoabi and her comrades] destroy us.”

In these articles, notice the frequent use of words such as “we,” referring to “we” Jews, and “our,” referring to “our” Jewish country, which is contrasted with the traitorous Arab Zoabi, who is not one of “us” and does not belong here (despite being an Israeli citizen with deeper roots to the land than most Israeli Jews).

A Ynet opinion piece published the same day, “Beware the Humanitarian Racist,” does not relate to Zoabi, but nevertheless links to the Zoabi/White piece under the heading “Humanitarian Racist?”

According to the opinion piece, “humanitarian racists” refers to people who defend the actions of non-whites against whites. (Defenders of Israel are fond of coining new terms because there are so few existing words that can be used to defend Israel’s actions.) In this case, the “whites” are presumably the white Jews of Israel, and the non-whites are those who threaten Israel.

Meanwhile, other Israeli news outlets, such as Channel Two and the financial news site Globes, have picked up on the Ben White “scandal,” demonstrating just how desperate the Israeli press is to come up with new threats to frighten Israel’s Jewish population. Recall that last month, Haaretz reporter Barak Ravid conjured up a story of how “every week, hundreds of pro-Palestinian activists” protest at an imaginary “Jewish supermarket located in Brooklyn.”

Just looking through Ynet’s opinion page reveals all sorts of hitherto unknown threats against Israel. Thus it was fitting that at the same time that Ynet was featuring Zoabi’s foreword of doom, the Ynet opinion page looked like this:

When I saw this, my eye was immediately drawn to the second article, “The Threat of the Weak,” which I mistakenly (but not inaccurately) read as, “The Threat of the Week.”

(h/t: Boom-Boom)