As awareness of Palestinian dispossession and persecution grows around the world, we keep waiting for a more sophisticated Israeli response to that record.
Now we’ve gotten an answer from the Israeli minister of hasbara, or public diplomacy, Galit Distel Atbaryan, and it’s a rehash of the most Jewish-supremacist tropes of Zionist ideology.
There is no occupation. Jews were here first by biblical “deed” and were thrown off their land. Then by a “miracle” Jewish sovereignty was restored. Palestinians have no right to this land because they’re not an “ancient people.” So anything we do to Palestinians on our land is justified.
Atbaryan, a member of Netanyahu’s Likud Party, and former novelist and pundit, made the remarks on Facebook on September 11. (Translated by the Israeli Apartheid account).
Efforts to distract the world’s attention from the “occupied elephant in the room” by talking up Israeli technology have been a failure, Atbaryan said:
“Imagine a pack of thieves invading a home, expelling the family that’s been living there by law and then asking the neighbors to accept it as the most equal pack of thieves in the world because it’s innovative and it invented Waze and the cherry tomato and it holds the coolest gay pride parades in the stolen living room.
No neighbor will feel sympathy for this pack of thieves no matter how successful it is.
This is exactly where Israeli Hasbara has missed the mark time after time – when there’s an inherent moral flaw in our very existence on this land, then it really doesn’t matter how successful we are. A thief is a thief and an occupier is an occupier.
Atbaryan explained how she would take on the occupation frontally, by denying it:
[W]e haven’t stolen anything…. This house is ours by deed.
We were expelled from it by force.
And we have returned to it but almost by miracle…
I will clarify that Palestinian consciousness is a late development and that this is not about an ancient people that lived here as a nation before we came back home.
These are Zionist myths. The “deed” refers to God’s promise to Abraham— biblical mythology blown up by Shlomo Sand in “The Invention of the Jewish People.” The claims about Palestinians not being indigenous are reminiscent of Golda Meir and Sheldon Adelson saying that there are no Palestinians. Or of Judith Peters’s tract, “Of Time Immemorial” (1984), which said that Palestinians only arrived after Jewish settlers made the desert bloom–and cited population data that Norman Finkelstein exposed as dishonest.
Such myths cannot be the basis of citizenship in the modern age. Civil rights do not derive from one’s belonging to an “ancient” people. That is straight out of the Nazi idea of herrenvolk– and Atbaryan has been called a Goebbels in recent months. The Nazi charges against her rain like “confetti,” she said.
The crime here is that Atbaryan is a government minister. She is Netanyahu’s faithful subordinate. And she has long advocated for Jewish sovereignty in the entire land between the river and the sea because Israeli Jews want it, as she said in this article in Israel Hayom in 2020:
Applying sovereignty and extending Israel’s legitimate borders is a dream most in the Israeli public has been longing for. This dream will come to life only… with a real right wing government at the head, chaired by the one person who paved the way to acknowledging this vision [Netanyahu].
The real question for us in the States is, who will report and condemn these racist remarks by a Netanyahu minister? The press and leading American Jewish organizations were all over Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’s bigoted history of the holocaust that he offered last week. Atbaryan has more power over the people of Israel and Palestine than Abbas and way more traction in U.S political life than Abbas. She marched up Fifth Avenue in June with the Israel parade.
Will American groups issue condemnations of Atbaryan? Don’t hold your breath. Almost all mainstream Jewish organizations are openly or silently siding with Netanyahu right now. J Street was an anti-Netanyahu organization in recent years but its congressional delegation of liberal Democrats met with Netanyahu in February. It did so because Joe Biden has made it clear that he wants the Democratic Party to kiss up to Netanyahu for the 2024 election cycle. And everyone’s going along.
All these actors are acceding more or less passively to Netanyahu’s “vision” to extend Jewish sovereignty throughout the land that God deeded to the Jews.
If Americans oppose those policies, there is one answer: vigorous opposition, including condemning racist speeches and supporting boycott and divestment targeting Israel’s apartheid policies.
Of course the Palestinians are an ancient people, the current estimate for the age of Homo Sapiens is about 300,000 years.
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“She marched up Fifth Avenue in June with the Israel parade.”
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And what a parade it was!
A YouTube video of the 2023 Celebrate Israel parade in NYC presents a viewer with a wilderness of puzzlements: it seemed that the first segment of marchers was made up entirely of uniformed NYC police and fire department personnel, followed by the NYPD marching band. I wondered if they were on the clock and being paid to be there?
Also fascinating was the presence of a robust and boisterous contingent of anti-Zionist Jews from Neturei Karta who clustered opposite the Apple store on Fifth Avenue and presented large banners and posters with captions such as “Jews Worldwide Condemn Unending Israeli Brutality” and “Authentic Rabbis Always Opposed Zionism and the State of Israel”. I wondered what the boys and girls from the various Jewish schools and camps made of those folks and their signs.
A fire truck from Monsey, NY blasted its siren and was rewarded, for some reason, with hearty cheers. Further along a line of low slung Batmobile-like super-hot sports cars raced their engines throatily represented I know not what. Governor Hochul, sporting a bright-yet-practiced smile marched behind a banner with the slogan “New York State and Israel Forever United”. At her shoulder, bless his heart, was Congressman Jerry Nadler for whom, I imagine, this was not his first rodeo.
I was born and raised in NYC and have always celebrated the mind-boggling-mixed-matchedness of its people, cultures, neighborhoods, traditions and dialects.
I viewed this parade – admittedly a paltry shadow of the pro-Israel parades of yesteryear – as something both more and less than it might appear to one from outside NYC.
That an unabashedly pro-Israel parade could take place with moms with strollers, school marching bands, senior elected officials, a Nefesh-B’Nefesh aliyah float and countless thousands of Israeli flags was, to me, a sign of a Jewish community demonstrably at home and comfortable with the municipal order.
At the same time I read it as an irrefutable measure of how brittle, in-bred and isolated the pro-Israel sensibility has become, even in NYC, the largest Jewish city in the world with a population of more than one and a half million Jewish residents – more than the Israeli cities of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem combined. Yes, this parade was a celebration of Israel and Zionism but it was also a revealing display of just how irrelevant Israel has become to normal, ordinary Americans.
(CONT.)
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Yes, a sitting Congressman and Governor were in attendance however the presence of both can be explained as part of their job descriptions and as efforts to remain in office. Unlike earlier times, when Hollywood titans such as Frank Sinatra, Kirk Douglas and Paul Newman gladly carried water for Zionism there was not a single Hollywood celebrity at the 2023 Celebrate Israel parade. Gone are the days of Exodus and Cast A Giant Shadow. Gone also is the social conditioning that saw Marilyn Monroe refuse to meet with the Shah of Iran until David Ben-Gurion gave her permission to do so.
I wondered if any of those celebrants had any idea of what it meant that there were so few spectators. Do any of them see that the parade demonstrates Zionism’s links are almost exclusively (entirely?) with political, governmental and corporate institutions…and not to ordinary people?
Question for Any Zionist: Is it antisemitic according to IHRA to argue that Zionism is intrinsically harmful both to the Jewish people and the American Constitutional system?
View here 1000+ Palestine posters related to prisoners and prisons
Really? Then how do such Zionist originalists explain what the Old Testament repeatedly describes: Israelites turning up in Canaan claiming a mandate from Yahweh to slaughter the inhabitants and steal their land? This childish “but we were here first” is, obviously, no solution.
And even IF it were so, this doesn’t give israel the right to treat Palestinians worse than dogs. For shame, israel…for shame.