Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Tzipi Hotovely, a noted Jewish supremacist, was hoisted by her own petard today, and Prime Minister Netanyahu has been reported as “checking the procedure” for firing her. For those of you unfamiliar with Israeli constitutional law, the procedure is not arduous – Netanyahu has to write Hotovely a note, containing the words “I hereby fire you from your position,” date it and sign it. Hotovely’s sin is that she committed a classic gaffe: she was caught on tape saying what she thought. About American Jews. In English.
Basically, Hotovely claimed US Jews are softies who don’t serve in the military, don’t know what it means to face terrorism, and don’t actually care about the Western Wall. I don’t usually like to do the piss contest about military service – a dominance ritual common among Israeli primates – but as Hotovely cast the first stone, I’ll oblige.
Hotovely is a draft dodger, who used her sector’s privileges to enter the so-called “National Service” so as to avoid military service. While her peers ate sand and were under the authority of 20-years-old power-besotted mini-tyrants, Hotovely did some time as a “guide” in the Rabbi Cook House in Jerusalem. Later she “sacrificed” a year of her life in some job at the Jewish Agency in Atlanta. Must have been hard, avoiding all those mortar attacks and IEDs in downtown. Hopefully she got paid for hazard duty.
But that’s peanuts. That’s just Hotovely at her pompous vacuousness, her natural mode of existence. The truly vicious stuff is her following words: “[American Jews are] people who never sent their children to fight for their country. Most Jews don’t have children who serve as soldiers, in the Marines, or serve in Afghanistan or Iraq.”
Newsflash, Tzipi: the good news is that you won’t be considered a draft dodger in the US, as they abolished the draft. Some 40 years ago. The bad news is that that while Jews may be under-represented in the army, this is not related so much to their religion as to their social-economic status. While it is true most Jewish Americans didn’t “send their children” to the army (leaving aside the fact that it’s actually the kid’s choice), the same is true for most American families. One of the main problems with the professional army is that it’s becoming a class apart from the citizenry. Which is always dangerous to a republic.
Which, while interesting, isn’t the issue. Hotovely’s gaffe exposes a classic anti-Semitic trope: that Jews don’t care about their country and that they’re dodging service to it – which, coming from Hotovely, is a bit of a projection. The first time this claim was made officially was probably in the “Jew count” held by the Kaiser’s army in 1916; this backfired, as the army found to its embarrassment that Jews were actually significantly over-represented in the Imperial Army both in number, number of officers, and number of decorated veterans. Naturally, the facts did not prevent the Nazis from using the myth of the draft-dodging Jew as a major weapon in their hasbara arsenal.
So why did the Deputy Foreign Affairs use an anti-Semitic libel against American Jews? Well, you see, Hotovely is what we call here a Judeo-Nazi: someone who uses extreme Orthodox and Zionist views (generally, fused together) to promote a Jewish-oriented neo-Nazi agenda.
The term was coined by Israeli philosopher Yeshayahu Leibowitz in the 1980s. He noted that since the 1967 occupation Israel was holding millions without political and civil rights, and that the very need of Israel to maintain its military dictatorship, will create a Nazi mentality. That mentality, he noted, exists everywhere; and in Israel it will have a Jewish face, and will acquire Jewish arguments; and, as the regime will have to become more radical so as to maintain its military dictatorship, more and more leaders will embrace a juxtaposition of Jewish and Nazi values. Originally, Leibowitz used the term to refer to the acceptance by the Supreme Court of the legality of torture; at the time he used the term, torture was still able to stir a debate. No longer. The term is considered offensive, and quite possible cost Leibowitz the Israel Prize. And yes, it is often used with abandon and carelessness. But I will argue it applies in Hotovely’s case.
Hotovely has notoriously invited to the Knesset (in 2011) Benzi Gupstein, a well-known leader of a Judeo-Nazi gang, LHVH. An actual gang: several of its members were indicted and convicted for arson and other racist crimes, most common of which is assault on Palestinian or African men suspected of “sullying the purity” of Jewish woman. Gupstein himself has been recently indicted for racist incitement – the prosecution didn’t want to prosecute, but was forced to by a court decision.
Hotovely was then Chairperson of the Women’s Empowerment Committee. Her reason for inviting Gupstein to speak? Well, she said that “One of the most important functions of the Women’s Empowerment Committee is Jewish identity. Sadly, the issue of miscegenation happens mostly on the female side, when Jewish women marry Muslims.”
Hotovely also had a plan for solving the Palestinian issue. For starters, she needs a million American Jews to emigrate to Israel so as to serve as demographical cannon fodder, and then she would grant Palestinians (only those living in the West Bank, mind you – Gazans will ruin her demographic calculus) the rights of gerim toshavim, i.e. second class citizens. They will not have political rights, but they can have economic rights. As long, of course, they don’t inconveniently hold title to land unfortunately taken by an illegal settlements.
And, as soon as the pigs fly back home with Elvis, some Palestinians will also get actual citizenship, as long as they swear fealty to Israel as a Jewish state.
So, okay, she’s a Judeo-Nazi. Why is she an anti-Semite? Ah.
Because Judeo-Nazis are a variation of Nazis. Note the following characteristics: effeminacy, rootlessness, lack of loyalty, homosexuality, Communism, lack of faith in God, implacable greed, the willingness (derived from rootlessness and greed) to sell your country for a fistful of gold, cosmopolitanism, loving foreigners/blacks/Arabs/Muslims.
All of these characteristics were once associated with Jews and Judaism. When the anti-Semitic right had to put its anti-Semitism out of view, after the Holocaust, it made a cultural shift. He attached them to “liberals.” You just had to speak of “New York liberals”, and the dog whistle was heard loud and clear.
The American Jews who so annoy Hotovely – for starters, they frustrate her fantasies for a Jewish majority in Mandatory Palestine – are mostly liberals. Accordingly, she attributes to them disloyalty, rootlessness, lack of faith in God (while pretending to have it) and love of luxury. She doesn’t know the number of American Jews serving in the armed forces; it doesn’t matter. The anti-Semitic trope was in her mind, and it slipped out.
Classical gaffe: a politician accidently saying what she actually believes.
Judeo-Nazis have a problem. They desperately want to be Nazis. Strong, tough, brutal, uncomplicated, reveling in being holding power derived simply from being born Jews. But, until recently, the Nazis weren’t interested. Some still aren’t. Then there was the issue of shame. Jews are not supposed to be Nazis. Some ancient sentimentality tells them it’s somehow improper.
The unholy alliance between white supremacists from all nations has grown immensely strong in the last couple of years, and in the flames of Islamophobia Jews, too, may be forged as “defenders of the West.” They, too, may now be counted as honorary whites. The two sides are now closer than ever. Those who watched Hotovely last year, saw how excited she was about the election as president of the US of a man who said he wanted only yarmulke-wearing Jews to count his money.
The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
You have summed her racist self up quite nicely. Thank you!
You put your right foot in, you put your left foot out, you says “I hereby fire you from your position,” three times, and turn yourself about. Done!
I always avoided criticism of Israel’s right-wing as nazis or fascists as it creates the illusion that they are an aberration, a deviation from “the good old Israel”. But this is ridiculous, like two inmates in a mental institution who call each other “crazy”. After all, what is the difference between her and the Zio left, the supposedly “humanists”? Both support Jewish supremacy, both believe in racial separation and demographic policies and both unanimously support war crimes and the violation of basic human rights since Israel’s creation. The right wing is just a cruder manifestation of the same ideology.
You chalk up Jewish under-representation in the American military to socio-economic status without making an argument or dissecting the statistics that would prove this to be so.
Sure you’re not just saying this as it would not be “good for the Jews” is it were not true?
Hard to find stats, but from anecdotal evidence it appears that Jews serve in the IDF in high numbers, either as American volunteers or by moving to Israel.
I suspect (again, real hard to get hard data) that Jews are over-represented in their socio-economic status when you include those serving in Israel.
There is an intersection between Zionism and some Nazi ideas, in that life in the Diaspora was seen as morally enervating for Jews, and lack of ‘manliness’ or militarism is mentioned, rather unfairly in the light of Jewish experience in WW1, as a problem in Leo Strauss’ memoir of ‘the Zionism of Max Nordau’ published in 1923. There was thus a measure of agreement between the Zionists and the anti-Semites. Both disagreed with the liberal idea that Jewish people could be completely themselves and completely active morally in a non-Jewish political environment. Al the same, I would hesitate to call this, whether in Strauss or in Hotovely, anti-Semitism. There is no belief that Jewish people are damaging to the society where they live, quite the contrary.