Matti Friedman, a contributing writer for the New York Times op-ed page, is back in print today putting forward propaganda about the country he moved to from Canada. Titled, “The One Thing No Israeli Wants to Discuss,” his column says that the suicide bombings of the Second Intifada are a “repressed memory” no one can talk about, but they transformed Israeli politics and when Netanyahu says he will keep “Israel an island of stability and safety,” he is playing his strongest card in the election campaign.
The repression:
As a psychiatrist might tell us, the deeper something is repressed, the more power it exerts…. This repression of memory has helped the Palestinian leadership pretend that none of it ever happened…
That repression explains everything: “Why are moderate Israelis afraid to pull out of the West Bank? Why has the once-dominant left become a meager parliamentary remnant?”
This is utter bullshit. People constantly talk about how the suicide bombings killed the Israeli left. It is one of those commonplaces that as soon as you engage this question you are told about. Hasbarists say it all the time. From Daniel Gordis’s book, “Saving Israel” (2009):
One of the things that is most amazing about Israeli life, particularly after the Palestinian Terror War of 2000, is that some very intelligent people remain unwilling to admit what is sadly undeniable: there is no peace to be had…
“Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor,” by Yossi Klein Halevi (2018), states at the outset that the “moment that changed Israeli society, and changed me” was when the “human bombs detonated in the early 2000s.”
The second intifada exhausted my capacity for outreach…
Worse, there is not one word in Friedman’s column about Palestinian deaths. That part of history really is repressed.
The attacks picked up in the mid-1990s, as Israel pursued a peace deal and ceded land, but the worst came between 2000 and 2004. Though other forms of violence persist, the last Israeli fatality in a Palestinian suicide bombing was in 2008.
B’Tselem says that about 6000 Palestinians died in the Second Intifada, and 1000 Israelis. Gershom Gorenberg gives the same total in his book, “The Unmaking of Israel.” Alan Dershowitz even acknowledges the vast difference in his book, “The Case for Israel.”
But Palestinian deaths go unmentioned in a column by an Israeli propagandist, and his editor– not surprisingly, Bari Weiss — does not call on him to put that fact into his column. This bias is so obvious it is insulting to anyone with any understanding of the conflict.
Now that Israel has gone full apartheid, the New York Times is determined to make it entirely the fault of Palestinians.
Comments are now allowed on the article. Most of the NYT picks are sympathetic to the Israelis and ignore the Palestinian deaths.
It really is like being back in the 19th century and listening to one-sided laments about (genuine) acts of Native American atrocities committed against white settlers. How stupid and racist do you have to be in the 21st century not to see the similarity?
PS. Last year Matti Friedman justified the slaughter of Palestinian demonstrators in Gaza, said that Israel was the victim, of a Palestinian-driven international news story, and suggested that Israel should have adopted an even more aggressive response to the demonstrators.
Even if you want to talk about Israels ‘security’ in the narrowest terms what Friedman says is – to borrow a phrase from the article – utter bullshit. Consider the wall, which Friedman mentions in his article – Israeli economist Shir Hever quotes General Yair Golan:
And, in fact, the wall, even though Israel calls it the security barrier officially, in a meeting in which I was present, the brigadier general Yair Golan, the former commander of the Israeli forces in the West Bank, told the people present that in fact the wall [was] not built in order to provide security. It was–his orders that he received from the Israeli government were that the wall’s first purpose is to separate between people, meaning that the wall’s true intention is to prevent Israelis and Palestinians from meeting each other, becoming friends, getting married, and its secondary purpose is to provide security. And that’s one of the reasons also why the wall is moving all the time, because they’re trying to incorporate as many Jews as they can on the Israeli side of the wall, but at the same time trying to exclude [as many] Palestinians as they can on the other side, on the east side of the wall. This is the reality.
https://therealnews.com/stories/shever1105israelborder
Elsewhere Golan has said that the suicide bombings are prevented by intelligence, not the wall. So much of the Hasbara discourse is directly contradicted by people in Israels own security establishment. It’s weird.
Although it is often said that Palestinian suicide bombings killed the Israeli left, I don’t believe it’s that simple. Both happened at the same time, but that does not prove cause and effect. The decline of the Israeli left set in long before the suicide bombings started, and went on after they stopped.
I think the real reason for the decline of the Zionist left is that it has lost credibility. Young Jews who chose become either non-Zionist/anti-Zionist or right wing Zionist. Perhaps the suicide bombings contributed to the loss of credibility (they proved that Zionism was not so benign to the Palestinians), but there are other factors too, like the “New historians” who destroyed Zionist myths, or the ongoing colonisation of the West Bank, which is supported by the Israeli left, but also goes against its universalist values. That’s the problem with the Zionist left, it tries to combine contradictory values, particularism and universalism.
RE: Titled, “The One Thing No Israeli Wants to Discuss,” the column says that the suicide bombings of the Second Intifada changed Israel politically, but they are a “repressed memory” no one can talk about . . . ~ Weiss & Johnson
SEE: “The Dogs of War: The Next Intifada”, By Uri Avnery, Counterpunch, 9/03/11
ENTIRE COMMENTARY – http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/09/02/the-next-intifada/
The rapist may have kidnapped his victims, chained them in his basement and raped them but, dammit, those women failed to lie back and enjoy the ride so now pro-rapists are determined to make the kidnapping, the chaining and the raping entirely the fault of those victims. Who could argue with that sort of “logic“?
Reading his article (and subsequent comments) at the New York Times was like reading only half of a Tale of Two Cities.
It also reminded me of another tale, the End of Apartheid in South Africa, and exactly how different and far away the Israeli people are from making the right and hard decisions necessary for a peaceful, prosperous, and just end to Apartheid in Israel/Palestine.
I grew up in Apartheid South Africa. I was still in high school when it ended and missed conscription by only 18 months. I remember how violent things got during the final years. I remember my mom’s handbag getting searched for weapons and explosives at every shop, bank and public building. I remember the boom and thud of a mistimed ANC bombing at my sister’s high school mere blocks away from our house. I remember my brother’s friend getting stabbed in the back as he got off a bus to go surfing just weeks before writing his high school final exams. I remember the bombing at the night club where my sister and her friends would go. I remember the fear and tangible anger and despair coursing through the consciousness of the nation during that particularly bloody wave of resistance and terrorism.
Israel barely 12 year was different in only one way. The public and government reaction. The Apartheid government could have easily just clamped down harder, been more brutal and belligerent and the people would have fallen in line, the wave would have ultimately ended and the white population would have felt safer… for another 5 years, another 10 years, maybe even another 20 years. But they didn’t and the people didn’t. The “left” didn’t give up, cower in the face of un-forgivable terrorism, or fade into obscurity.
At the height of tensions and with negotiations on a knife edge, the government made a bold decision and held a referendum to end Apartheid. And even though the public was wrapped in fear, terror, anger, and uncertainty, sanity prevailed and they realized that the situation was unsustainable and untenable and they made the brave decision to vote to end Apartheid, end systematic oppression, and usher in equal rights and democracy for everyone!
Barely 15 years later Israel faced the exact same situation and in their fear, frustration, anger and uncertainty chose to double down on their ill deeds. Strongmen and hardliner leaders built walls, barricades, stamped down harder than ever with the jackboot of oppression and garnered a sense of hard fought calm and ‘almost normality’ in their wake, but what did that REALLY get the people of Israel? Another 13 years of relative quiet? A bigger bubble, that when it bursts, and it WILL burst, will be more catastrophic and deadly than both Intifadas combined?
Wrapping themselves in their warm security Bibi Blanket has done nothing to protect Israel and its people! All it has done is kick the can down the road for another decade while tensions simmer and inevitably start boiling again. In the aftermath of one of Israel’s darkest and terrifying periods, the Israeli people needed a de Klerk, instead they got the opposite. They got Netanyahu.
If they vote him into power again out of the same fear and sense of false security, they will have actively chosen not safety and security, but rather another guaranteed wave of inevitable violence. Making it even harder to disentangle themselves from the violent cycle of their own making. Proving yet again that they are incapable of making peace or hard decisions in either times of tension or times of calm.