US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo all but concedes that the famous “deal of the century” is “unexecutable,” in a closed meeting with Jewish leaders. “I get why people think this is going to be a deal that only the Israelis could love, I understand the perception of that.”
The centrist Blue White opposition to Netanyahu’s Likud organized a demonstration in Tel Aviv to ‘defend democracy’. But it was rife with militant symbolism and orientalist mockery, and it marginalized Palestinian voices, as usual. Notably, protesters wore fezzes to say Israel shouldn’t become Turkey. It was surely lost on the demonstrators that many Arabs wear fezzes, including Arab Jews.
The deal of the century in the 1900s was the Balfour Declaration, which recognized Zionist colonization of Palestine, and Trump’s deal of the 21st century only continues that process, by giving Israel the right to annex portions of the West Bank and confine Palestinians to Bantustans.
Madonna tried to offset criticism of her participation in the Eurovision song contest by incorporating a Palestinian flag into her final performance. “The most meaningful expression of solidarity is to cancel performances in apartheid Israel,” the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel responded in a statement.
The Jewish fascist group Im Tirtzu has a history of disrupting Nakba commemoration ceremonies at the Tel Aviv campus. This year they blasted the Eurovision-winning song ‘Toy’ over loudspeakers during a minute of silence for Nakba victims.
Israel is using its hosting of the Eurovision song contest for explicit political propaganda branding Palestinian and Syrian occupied territories as “Israel”.
In a recent musical promotion video for the Eurovision, the Israeli Public Broadcaster Kan has applied cringeworthy vulgarity, drawing upon anti-Semitic tropes, misogyny and various forms of racism and ultra-nationalism, clearly making the Eurovision political, for those who believed it wasn’t.
The ethos of Zionism from its inception was to create a new kind of Jew, disconnected from the Jew’s former alleged diasporic weakness. Jonathan Ofir contends that this basic notion represents the weakness of Zionism, which Zionists need to relinquish in order to move Israeli society toward any kind of peaceful coexistence with Arabs.
Jared Kushner recently claimed Palestinians have “gotten more aid than any group of people in history, and what we have to show for it is really not much”. But he missed Israel. Israel beats Palestine on this count, and it’s much worse.
Jonathan Ofir at a family seder in Israel, hearing the old stories of genocide: “You don’t want to throw away everything because some of it is rotten, you don’t want to make a family gathering political, but it’s hard to be part of it and reduce it to mere ‘tradition’. You’re wondering what you are enabling, indirectly, by not speaking out, or by saying too little, or by not opposing things more clearly.”