A week ago, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu told Likud officials that “occupation is nonsense”. This is a continuation of a right-wing spinning of history that says that Israel is not an occupying power.
Then Netanyahu went further, to speak with clear fascist eliminationist undertones:
“Occupation is nonsense. Empires have conquered and replaced entire populations and no one is talking about it”.
This line was reported by the Israeli Yediot Aharonot, yet didn’t make too many headlines otherwise. One might have thought that Israel apologists would ignore this line as too overtly fascist, but here is the Israel apologia site United with Israel openly quoting it.
Middle East Monitor rightly observed that “[t]he comments appear to support the claim made repeatedly by Israel’s critics who insist that Israel’s policies in Palestine have more in common with the past when settler colonialism and empire building was the norm and racist attitudes towards native population was used to justify the denial of their basic human rights.”
MEMO also reminded us of another chilling statement by Netanyahu from 2-1/2 months ago, which echoed Hitler:
“The weak crumble, are slaughtered and are erased from history while the strong, for good or for ill, survive. The strong are respected, and alliances are made with the strong, and in the end, peace is made with the strong.”
While those Hitleresque statements were made in the context of his September visit to Dimona and the nuclear center, the recent ones were made in the general context of relations with Arab countries:
“Power is key. Power changes everything in our policy with Arab countries,” he said. “Aligning [Arab] interests with Israel, based on Israel being a technological superpower must lead the way”.
This view of power politics is consistent with Israel’s intensifying campaign to create a strong alliance with Arab countries aligned with Saudi Arabia. Last week Netanyahu spoke openly about how the Saudi Prince should get a pass for the murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi, in order that Saudi Arabia relations remain strong:
“What happened in the Istanbul consulate was horrendous and it should be duly dealt with. Yet at the same time I say it, it is very important for the stability of the world, for the region and for the world, that Saudi Arabia remain stable”.
Netanyahu is basically mainstreaming a fascistic rhetoric, the maintenance of a supposed ‘necessary evil’ against the supposed ultimate evil, Iran.
But it is important to note that this kind of fascist thinking is actually quite compatible with Zionism to begin with. And this pertains not only to Netanyahu, or Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked, it comes also from the left when it is being honest about its intentions. Thus the self-declared ‘leftist’ Israeli historian Benny Morris, who says that “there are circumstances in history that justify ethnic cleansing”, also celebrates the American genocide (which supposedly made America great):
“Even the great American democracy could not have been created without the annihilation of the Indians.”
It is important to cite these supposed ‘liberals’ so to avoid being lured to think that this is just Netanyahu, that this is just the extreme Israeli right etc. Zionism did indeed grow from a colonialist anachronism, carrying it into our age at a time when colonialism was in global decline. But just because you oppose someone who is considered evil and racist doesn’t mean you aren’t such a person yourself.
One stark example of this is Winston Churchill, who somehow managed to write himself into history as a great liberal. “For my part, I consider that it will be found much better by all Parties to leave the past to history, especially as I propose to write that history”, he said. And he did so, when he told the Palestine Royal Commission in 1937:
“I do not admit for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly-wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place.”
These words very similar to those of Netanyahu and Morris. It is not considered very politically correct these days to utter such overtly racist, colonialist, fascist words. They tend to shock the liberals – and they should.
“I know that this stuns the Arabs and the liberals and the politically correct types”,
Benny Morris said to Ari Shavit, just after saying that
“If [Ben-Gurion] was already engaged in expulsion, maybe he should have done a complete job”.
(That interview in Haaretz, from 2004, is titled ‘Survival of the Fittest’).
But with the increasing rise of right-wing and fascist leaders in what is generally considered the West and beyond, these expressions seem to survive with little condemnation, and the fascists even rejoice in their rejection of ‘political correctness’, and in the belief that now one may be more honest about one’s racism and genocidal policies.
This explains very well the bromance between Netanyahu and ultra-nationalists such as Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban (who has engaged in Jew-baiting and praise of Nazi collaborators), Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte (who compared himself to Hitler), or the newly elected Brasilian President Jair Bolsonaro. Bolsonaro has his own indigenous people, about whom he says:
“Minorities have to bend down to the majority … The minorities [should] either adapt or simply vanish”.
All of this is a kind of Darwinist-racist “survival of the fittest”, which is more precisely “survival of the fascists”. Opposition to such ideologies is always discouraged and dismissed by these people; they see themselves as “respected” because they are “strong”, as Netanyahu says; and anyone who opposes their chauvinism is destined to “crumble, [be] slaughtered and [be] erased from history.” Because the “strong” are the only ones worthy of survival.
This, together with Netanyahu’s “forever live by the sword“, is the Spartan nature of Zionism. “Leftist” Ehud Barak calls the country a “villa in the jungle”. But who cares how they choose to characterize colonialism? If they want to channel Churchill and write up their history as a “light unto the nations” and “survival of the higher-grade race”, let them do so. I’m not buying. I’ve already seen the Zionist light, with all its darkness.
H/t Mick Napier
Bombing continues in Gaza. Tonight the al-Aqsa tv station builďing has just been bombed.
” Empires have conquered and replaced entire populations and no one is talking about it”.”
Yup, “empires” have gotten away with a lot. A tiny Zionist remittance colony in Palestine, on the other hand, doesn’t quite have the same options.
“All of this is a kind of Darwinist-racist “survival of the fittest”, which is more precisely “survival of the fascists” ”
this lecture in Denmark by Isa Blumi, many thanks Mr. T, is really excellent in that it approaches the vocabulary of ‘conflict’ in the west in respect of the Yemen genocide and how this is all normalized just as it has been for a hundred years in Palestine and even longer elsewhere, it does appear that everything one knows is wrong, well worth an hour.
https://youtu.be/01NVz5MAOIg
ATTENTION Philip Weiss, et al. The author of this article, Professor Bruce Robbins, makes two complimentary comments regarding Mondoweiss.
https://www.thenation.com/article/on-boycotts-academic-freedom-and-the-struggle-for-justice-in-israel-palestine/
“On Boycotts, Academic Freedom, and the Struggle for Justice in Israel-Palestine,” The Nation,
Nov.1/18 by Bruce Robbins
Bruce Robbins is Old Dominion Foundation Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University.
“The big story in the United States is the growing support for the Palestinian cause, and for a just and viable Israel that gives equal rights to all its citizens.”
“When the young Palestinian-American Lara Alqasem was finally allowed to enter Israel after being detained at the airport and threatened with deportation, who won? Liberal Zionists, many of whom had championed her case, felt they had cause to celebrate. You see, they could now tell the world, Israel is not (yet) the bastion of build-the-wall intolerance that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, like his buddy in the White House, has wanted to make of his country. On October 16, two days before the Israeli Supreme Court’s decision, Jeremy Ben-Ami, president and founder of J Street, had an op-ed in Haaretz under the title ‘The Ban on Lara Alqasem Is a Gift for BDS, and a Disaster for Israel.’ J Street, which opposes the movement for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS), was naturally pleased that Alqasem had distanced herself from her earlier activities on behalf of BDS. It took the court’s decision to let her in as ‘a strong sign of the continued vitality of pro-democratic forces in Israel.’
“How much vitality there is or isn’t among pro-democratic forces in Israel is, indeed, a crucial question. When I interviewed the Israeli historian Shlomo Sand, of Tel Aviv University, he said that he himself had initially opposed BDS, and had written an op-ed in Haaretz to say so. He had changed his mind, he told me, when he realized how very weak the Israeli left is, and is likely to remain for the foreseeable future. If the Israeli left was not getting its act together, if there was no prospect of its persuading Israel even to end the occupation of the West Bank, this was not just a sad judgment on the left. It meant something much more important: It meant that the Palestinians had no chance of receiving justice from any pro-democratic swing inside Israel. It was that realization, Sand said, that pushed him over into the pro-BDS camp. Only international pressure, he concluded, can possibly move Israel to change. Domestic pressure is effectively nonexistent. No doubt that was why Palestinian civil society had decided in the first place to launch BDS, a direct appeal to international opinion.
“My interview with Sand was conducted before Israel passed its infamous nation-state law this past summer, which enshrines Jewish identity at the expense of 20 percent of Israel’s citizens and, of course, at the expense of democracy. Sand’s argument has only gotten stronger.
“The extreme mutedness of Israeli voices demanding justice for Palestinians is also a specific argument for the academic boycott of Israel. Many progressives in the United States tend to imagine that Israeli universities are embattled islands of enlightenment and dissidence in a sea of thuggish Israeli xenophobia à la Donald Trump, and that boycotting the Israeli universities is therefore unfair and counterproductive. Nothing could be further from the truth. Aside from the routine discrimination against Palestinian students in 1948 Israel, not to speak of the harassment of anyone with an Arabic-sounding name who seeks affiliation with a Palestinian university in the occupied territories as a teacher or researcher, active academic complicity in the occupation and Israel’s military attacks on Gaza is broken only by lethargic silence. Where are the protests? Where are the signs of dissidence? How different is study at an Israeli university from the weaponized Zionist propaganda tours of Birthright Israel? While there are principled, progressive, and even radical professors scattered throughout Israeli higher education, neither the collective voice of the professoriate nor the universities as institutions have spoken out against the occupation.
“On Philip Weiss’s indispensable Mondoweiss website, Nada Elia took the opportunity of the Alqasem case to wonder what her liberal Zionist supporters would have said if Alqasem had applied to study or teach at a Palestinian university like Birzeit or Al Quds, which Israel routinely bars faculty from doing. As a smaller but telling index of Israel’s indifference to elementary rights, it also seems worth mentioning, as Molly Minta has in these pages, that the Israeli border officials who stopped Alqasem at the airport did so by consulting Canary Mission, an online Zionist blacklist that is privately run and does not screen those who supply their denunciations. Anyone with a grudge can enter your name and get you denied entry for your year of study abroad.
“Under the circumstances, what morally responsible faculty member would volunteer to write an enthusiastic letter of recommendation (as all letter-writers know, to say yes is to commit yourself to ginning up some enthusiasm) for a student who wanted to spend a year in Israel? It’s not hard to understand why John Cheney-Lippold, a tenured faculty member at the University of Michigan who also supports BDS, refused to write such a letter. What’s more puzzling is that the University of Michigan decided to punish him for not doing something that he was absolutely free not to do. This is a clear case of freedom of conscience as well as academic freedom. Where Israel is concerned, university administrations tend to forget the principles of academic freedom that they would otherwise claim they uphold. If the University of Michigan truly cares about non-discrimination, it will see that Cheney-Lippold is politely asking Israel to stop discriminating.
“So who won? Yes, Israel successfully bullied Lara Alqasem into backing away from her undergraduate role as president of a local chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine. Governments can always get recantations from the weak and vulnerable who have had a taste of imprisonment, whether they stand to lose a planned year of studying Hebrew and human rights or a great deal more than that. And yes again, even very progressive Democratic candidates in the midterms have backed off earlier statements about justice in the Middle East, fearful of being tagged as anti-Semitic or anti-Israel. But the big story in the United States is the growing support for the Palestinian cause, including support by those same candidates and by groups like Students for Justice in Palestine, most of which is also support for a just and viable Israel—not as a ‘Jewish state,’ but as a democracy with equal rights for all its citizens.
“When the Israeli Supreme Court decided to let Lara Alqasem in, democracy was not the winner. The court did not question Israel’s right to deny entry to supporters of BDS, and it probably could not have done so. Along with no recognized borders, Israel has no constitution that the law might violate. Except for refugees, international law does not guarantee anyone’s right to enter another country. Where anti-BDS legislation is almost certainly unconstitutional is in the United States (see, for example, this 2016 article in the Harvard Law Review). That’s where the real war for justice in Israel-Palestine is being waged.
“And in that war, BDS has had more than its share of high-profile successes lately. Just this month, Sarah Schulman and Jewish Voice for Peace talked Transparent creator Jill Soloway into deciding not to shoot, as planned, in East Jerusalem. And on October 23 Mondoweiss reported that more than 30 student groups at NYU had pledged non-cooperation with NYU’s study-abroad program in Tel Aviv. The reason they give for their stand is simple: In discriminating against Palestinian and Muslim students, among others, Israel has failed to respect the principles of academic freedom, principles to which NYU ought also to be committed. As the ever more corporate-style administrations of both NYU and the University of Michigan know well, study-abroad programs are money makers, popular with their student clients. As more pledges of non-cooperation with study-abroad programs accumulate, we will see whether BDS is really, in Jeremy Ben-Ami’s words, a ‘pesky but largely toothless challenge.'”
______________________________________________________________________________
“Correction: The text has been updated to reflect the fact that it was Nada Elia, not Philip Weiss, who wrote the article for Mondoweiss speculating about what would have happened if Lara Alqasem had wanted to attend a Palestinian university.”
If the six million Jews exterminated by the Nazis could rise from the dead, they would know how to deal with Netanyahu and his fellow murderous Zionist thugs.
https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/11/08/with-brazils-bolsonaro-israel-finds-another-natural-partner-on-the-far-right/
“With Brazil’s Bolsonaro, Israel Finds Another Natural Partner on the Far-Right” by Jonathan Cook, Counterpunch, Nov. 8/18
“The victory of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil’s presidential election last week has won Israel a passionate new friend on the international stage. The world’s fifth-most populous nation will now be “coloured in blue and white”, an Israeli official said, referring to the colours of Israel’s flag.
“The Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu immediately called to congratulate Bolsonaro, a former army officer with a pronounced nostalgia for his country’s 20-year military dictatorship. Critics describe him as a neo-fascist.
“According to Israeli media reports, it is “highly probable” that Netanyahu will attend Bolsonaro’s inauguration on January 1.
“The Brazilian president-elect has already promised that his country will be the third to relocate its embassy to Jerusalem, after the United States and Guatemala. That will further undermine Palestinian hopes for an eventual state with East Jerusalem as its capital. Bolsonaro has told Israel that it can count on Brazil’s vote at the United Nations, and has threatened to close the Palestinian embassy in Brasilia.
“One might imagine that Netanyahu is simply being pragmatic in cozying up to Bolsonaro, given Brazil’s importance. But that would be to ignore an unmistakable trend: Israel has relished the recent emergence of far-right leaders across the Americas and Europe, often to the horror of local Jewish communities Bolsonaro has divided Brazil’s 100,000 Jews. Some have been impressed by the frequent appearance of Israeli flags at his rallies and his anti-Palestinian stance. But others point out that he regularly expresses hostility to minorities. They suspect that Bolsonaro covets Israel’s military expertise and the votes of tens of millions of fundamentalist Christians in Brazil, who see Israel as central to their apocalyptic, and in many cases anti-Semitic, beliefs.
“Not that this worries Netanyahu. He has been engaged in a similar bromance with Viktor Orban, the ultra-nationalist prime minister of Hungary, who barely veils his Jew-baiting and has eulogised Miklos Horthy, a Hungarian leader who collaborated with the Nazis.
“Netanyahu has also courted Poland’s far-right prime minister Mateusz Morawiecki, even as the latter has fuelled Holocaust revisionism with legislation to outlaw criticism of Poland for its involvement in the Nazi death camps. Millions of Jews were exterminated in such camps.
“Israel is cultivating alliances with other ultra-nationalists – in and out of power – in the Czech Republic, Italy, Switzerland, Germany and Austria.
“The conclusion drawn by Jewish communities abroad is that their wellbeing – even their safety – is now a much lower priority than bolstering Israel’s diplomatic influence. That was illustrated starkly last week in the immediate aftermath of a massacre at a Pittsburgh synagogue on October 27. Robert Bowers gunned down 11 worshippers in the worst anti-Semitic attack in US history.
“Jewish communities have linked the awakening of the white-nationalist movement to which Bowers belonged to the Trump administration’s hostile rhetoric towards immigrants and ethnic minorities.
“In Pittsburgh, huge crowds protested as Trump paid a condolence visit to the Tree of Life synagogue, holding banners aloft with slogans such as: ‘President Hate, leave our state.’
“Equally hard to ignore is that Israeli leaders, while they regularly denounce US and European left-wingers as anti-Semites for criticizing Israel over its abuse of Palestinians, have remained studiously silent on Trump’s inflammatory statements.
“Chemi Shalev, a commentator for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, noted the disturbing impression created by Ron Dermer, Israel’s ambassador to the US, escorting Trump through Pittsburgh. Dermer looked like a ‘bodyguard’, shielding the president from local Jewish protesters, Shalev observed.
“Meanwhile, tone-deaf diaspora affairs minister Naftali Bennett, leader of largest Israeli settler party, the Jewish Home, milked the local community’s pain over the Pittsburgh massacre to Israel’s advantage. At an official commemoration service, he compared Bowers’ bullets to rockets fired by Palestinians, describing both as examples of antisemitism
“In an online post before the attack, Bowers singled out the synagogue for its prominent role helping refugees gain asylum in the US
“Trump has rapidly turned immigration into a ‘national security’ priority. Last week, he sent thousands of US troops to the border with Mexico to stop what he termed an ‘invasion’ by refugees from Central America.
“Drawing on the histories of their own families having fled persecution, liberal Jews such as those at the Pittsburgh synagogue believe it is a moral imperative to assist refugees escaping oppression and conflict. That message is strenuously rejected not only by Trump, but by the Israeli government.
“In a move Trump hopes to replicate on the Mexico border, Israel has built a 250km wall along the border with Egypt to block the path of asylum-seekers from war-torn Africa.
“Netanyahu’s government has also circumvented international law and Israeli court rulings to jail and then deport existing refugees back to Africa, despite evidence that they will be placed in grave danger. Bennett has termed the refugees “a plague of illegal infiltrators”, while the culture minister Miri Regev has labelled them a ‘cancer.’ Polls suggest that more than half of Israeli Jews agree.
“Separately, Israel’s nation-state law, passed in the summer, gives constitutional weight to the notion that Israel belongs exclusively to Jews, stripping the fifth of the population who are Palestinian citizens of the most basic rights.
“More generally, Israel views Palestinians through a single prism: as a demographic threat to the Jewishness of the Greater Israel project that Netanyahu has been advancing. In short, Israel’s leaders are not simply placating a new wave of white-nationalist and neo-fascist leaders. They have a deep-rooted ideological sympathy with them.
“For the first time, overseas Jewish communities are being faced with a troubling dilemma. Do they really wish to subscribe to a Jewish nationalism in Israel that so strongly echoes the ugly rhetoric and policies threatening them at home?”