A bad disease requires a strong cure, Hatim Kanaaneh writes. Israel’s nation state of the Jewish people law is legal apartheid, and it requires Palestinian politicians and civil society to rise up and say, We seek a democratic binational state between the river and the sea.
I’d made up my mind to attend the demonstration in Tel Aviv against the new nation-state of the Jewish people law, Hatim Kanaaneh writes. Then I reconsidered. I don’t trust the Israeli security services. The same extreme nationalist religious factions whose compatriot killed Rabin, have pushed for the new law for years.
Hatim Kanaaneh reads two articles on the detention and denial of entry into Israel of Columbia University law professor Katherine Franke and is outraged by the lack of outrage from Israeli law professors.
The Irish artist Jim Fitzpatrick of Che Guevara black and red portrait fame has done it again: He has painted a minimalist poster of the Palestinian resister Ahed Tamimi, in jail for 2 months for slapping a soldier. And the world should pay attention, because Ahed Tamimi’s life is at risk, with Israelis calling for crimes against her person.
Hatim Kanaaneh writes: Haaretz has allowed an advertisement on its website in support of the international Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. It is a milestone event, the beginning of the swing of the pendulum away from mounting fascism and toward a less racist Israeli public opinion. It is the start of Israel’s return to sanity, slow and decades-long as it is likely to be.
Israeli democracy performs its excited dance around the Ahed Tamimi case. A poet is slammed for comparing her to Anne Frank. Commentators call the judge’s ruling “hysterical.” But nothing changes at the heart of the case: a 16-year-old is in prison indefinitely for slapping an occupying soldier.
A peek at the archives of the Israeli Labor Party confirms that its founders and early political figures prepared the ground for Israel’s current slide into fascism. David Ben-Gurion and other leaders vacillated between relating to Palestinian citizens as dogs or as donkeys. Moshe Dayan looked forward to the opportunity of expelling the remaining 170,000 Palestinians, and Ben-Gurion said if differences between the people were eliminated, “the Jewish people” would be eradicated.
The power of Ahed Tamimi’s slap in the eyes of Palestinians: “Your slapping of those soldiers speaks for all of us,” Hatim Kanaaneh writes. “Israelis slapped us in 1948 and in 1967 and innumerable times since. By slapping their faces, you are telling those aggressors to permit the return of the exiled Palestinian Refugees and to end the apartheid their state forces on us under the dogma of ‘the Jewish State.’”
“Youthquake” has been selected by Oxford Dictionaries as the 2017 word of the year. It is defined as “a significant cultural, political, or social change arising from the actions or influence of young people,” we are told. Hatim Kanaaneh says they should have chosen, “intifada.”
The Telegraph’s recent travel article about Israel didn’t mention Palestinian Arabs once. They make up two thirds of the population of Western Galilee, the region extolled in the article as the “Tuscany of the Middle East.” Culture in Israel is Ashkenazi Jewish. Anything else, even if occasionally present, is seen and interpreted from that perspective.