Elor Azarya had “endured a lot”, said an Israeli military spokesman, announcing Chief of Staff Gadi Eisenkot’s decision to cut four months off the soldier-medic’s already lenient 18-month sentence for killing a wounded, immobile Palestinian alleged attacker by a bullet to the head at point blank on the street in Hebron in 2016.
Jonathan Ofir responds to Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to the UN where he said he wanted to visit Antarctica because he heard penguins are enthusiastic supporters of Israel: “Those Penguins, they would completely know what’s what. Black and white. Obey – get a fish. Resist – no fish. Nowadays you are congratulating the far right ‘Decision Plan’ for annexing the West Bank, which is also black and white: Accept Apartheid, leave, or face the wrath of Israel. Palestinians might not like this, they might prove difficult. Penguins will be much easier. Fish will do the trick. They’ll stay, and you can become the Caesar of the Caesar penguins! It will be glorious!”
Two Gaza musicians were barred from participating in the West Bank tour of the Palestinian Youth Orchestra, and the Israeli Supreme Court affirmed the ban. But a technicality in the Israeli bureaucratic apparatus meant they could participate in the West Bank anyway– and the world did not end, as the rights group Gisha, which fought for the musicians, noted.
Bezalel Smotrich, a member of the Israeli Knesset from the Jewish Home party, has delivered his plan for the annexation of Palestinian territories. It’s called the ‘Decision Plan’, but its real name is Apartheid, and its message is: Surrender or be transferred.
Haaretz columnist Gideon Levy has opined that Israeli Justice Minister Shaked’s words about Zionism being in opposition to individual rights, are true. His colleague Rogel Alpher opines she is a fascist comparable to Mussolini. The combined logic of these two assertions is, Zionism is a fascist ideology.
Israeli Communications Minister Ayoub Kara is supposedly following the line of Arab states in his effort to shut down Al Jazeera, but really, he’s Netanyahu’s puppet. Netanyahu intervened this week to prevent Al Jazeera Jerusalem Bureau chief Walid al-Omari from appearing on a government panel on the limits of free speech.
In the wake of an Israeli Supreme court decision limiting to some degree the state’s ability to imprison refugees indefinitely and to send them by force to a third country, Israeli leaders incite against African refugees. “Those families and their children” have taken over south Tel Aviv from real Israelis, says Interior Minister Aryeh Deri.
The discussion over the essential racism of Zionism is in the open. Israeli Justice minister Ayelet Shaked made it clear, and Israeli journalist Gideon Levy thanks her for her candidness. Levy published a column in Haaretz yesterday that all but says Zionism is racism. He calls it a movement that “contradicts human rights, and is thus indeed an ultranationalist, colonialist and perhaps even racist movement, as proponents of justice worldwide maintain”.
Israeli Education Minister Naftali Bennett made a genius triple breakthrough in the fields of psychology, psychiatry and sociology on Friday, offering a new term for the old idea of Jewish self-hatred: “Auto-anti-Semitism is a social-psychological phenomenon in which a Jew develops obsessive contempt and hostility towards Jewish tradition, customs, and observant Jews,” he wrote.
“The moment in which an Israeli soldier gets a gun and feels the power to kill and to defend with their own hands, is the moment in which a dream develops,” writes Israeli columnist Yoaz Hendel. And that means demonizing Palestinians; Israelis shouldy be applying the virtual-reality goggles, seeing a Nazi every time they see a Palestinian.