Joe Biden will land in Israel tomorrow, and meet and try to boost Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid; and Biden’s script has appeared in the New York Times: the “change” government that just fell, led by Naftali Bennett and now Lapid, has been a great step forward in inclusion and a model to America on how we should get along!
Tom Friedman led the way two weeks ago with a piece calling the governing coalition a historic breakthrough and shaming the Palestinians who don’t want to join a Zionist coalition as “irrelevant.”
Now it’s a parade. Two other conservative writers in the Times have saluted the government for its inclusivity, and National Public Radio has joined in with its own assessment lauding the government as “one hell of an experiment.”
These hosannas to Israel all reflect the fact that for the first time, a Zionist Jewish coalition included a Palestinian party: the four votes of the Islamist party Ra’am. Yes, historic. But this is still fairyland Zionism. Ra’am is a minority of the Palestinian community, most of whom can’t vote in national elections– including the East Jerusalemites Biden will be visiting. And all these appraisals leave out the fact that one human rights group after another has lately issued reports that Israel practices “apartheid.” The Bennett government only advanced that apartheid by demolishing more Palestinian houses in the West Bank and approving more illegal Jewish settlements.
But let’s look at the script.
In the New York Times, Shmuel Rosner (an apologist for Israeli war crimes) hails the government as “a new and thrilling possibility of cooperation” — that came under fire from intolerant leftwingers and rightwing racists too.
Rosner prescribes an ideal of coexistence in which Palestinians accept the existence of a Jewish state.
A dam has broken….Arab parties must ask themselves whether they are ready to embrace the state and accept its vision of Jewish national expression. They need to realize that cooperation and integration are the only ways to effect change for Arab Israelis, as we’ve seen, and in the future maybe also for Palestinians in the West Bank.
Suck it up, Arabs!
Also in the New York Times, Bret Stephens provided Naftali Bennett an exit interview and described the coalition as a “triumph” and a successful “experiment” and therefore a blow to all anti-Zionists: “an example of true diversity and inclusion that Israel’s critics rarely recognize.”
Stephens (who is a justifier of Israeli war crimes) went on that the government is a model for the United States– “a government that can still serve as a role model, in Israel and beyond.”
Daniel Estrin on NPR continued that theme. Israel is teaching the world how to coexist. He gave a platform to a philosopher to gush over the coalition.
ESTRIN: Micah Goodman, an Israeli philosopher who’s advised Israel’s leaders, says what matters was that three right-wing, Jewish party leaders were willing to partner with Mansour Abbas, the Muslim party leader.
MICAH GOODMAN: All three of them sat with Abbas, worked with Abbas and legitimized Abbas. That’s powerful, but it’s messy. It wasn’t smooth. Not all the people in the Arab community liked this. And not all the people in the right-wing communities really accepted this. But it’s the beginning of a dramatic shift in Israel.
ESTRIN: He says, for one year in Israel, the government went against the currents of history and against a worldwide trend of politics that polarized countries.
GOODMAN: And it was one hell of an experiment.
Expect Biden to parrot these talking points in Israel.
Friedman, Stephens, and company are either woefully uninformed as to Zionism’s long history of “including” Palestinian parties in Israel’s election machinations or they are being tactically coy on the matter. Consider this review of Hillel Cohen’s excellent book, Good Arabs:
“That did not mean, however, that the Israeli establishment was going to leave the choice of how to vote to the Arabs themselves. As Cohen shows, the Israeli military government—under which nearly all the country’s Arab citizens lived from 1948 until 1966—used its powers to issue or deny travel and work permits and to provide budgets for local projects to wheedle, induce, and compel Arabs to vote as the country’s establishment wished. The government, led by the Labor-Zionist Mapai party, wanted the Arabs to vote for satellite Arab parties it had founded and which were under its control. (It did not want them to vote for Mapai itself because it wanted to ensure the election of Arab community leaders who supported its policies.) And it wanted to prevent them from voting for the Communists, the major independent political force in the Arab community.”
Political Zionists have used hostage Palestinian individuals, parties and communities to further their own evolving agendas since the earliest days of the Zionist enterprise. Of course, Zionists did not invent election power manipulation, many governments including many US administrations, have done more and worse over the years. See: Vietnam, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Iran, Chile, etc., etc. A powerful example of just how normative and long-running was (is) the manipulation of Palestinian political parties consider this one Mapai poster from 1951 titled, “Towards A Secure Future With the Arab Lists” which minutely details, in the words of the the Mapai Party itself, just how cynical political Zionism was (is).
Of course, Friedman and Stephens will race to say that was then this is now or that politics is never pretty, etc. However, the point of this historical reminder is not to single out political Zionism as a uniquely corrupt political ideology but rather to challenge their claim that Israel’s currently “thrilling” government, or indeed any Israeli government, has ever treated the political identities and aspirations of the indigenous Palestinian people with anything other than barely concealed contempt.
Is it antisemitic according to IHRA to say such things?
View 351 Zionist/Palestinian election posters
Hats off to Daniel Estrin.