Noam Chomsky has said something that even Israeli officials haven’t – that Israel would use nuclear weapons to avert the Palestinian right of return. He refers to the “hishtaganu” policy of Israeli leaders, the threat to go crazy, which they have used to intimidate possible opponents. He is invoking that tactic to support boycott of only the settlements, and to question international law regarding refugees.
Even as he hesitates to blame white nationalists for Charlottesville killing, saying we don’t know the facts, Trump leaps on Barcelona killings and blames Islamists and disseminates a widely discredited myth about mass executions of Muslims in the Philippines as an effective deterrent to violence.
President Trump’s initial statement on Charlottesville, which blamed violence “on many sides,” has taken on a life of its own. All of this has made various Israeli leaders rather uncomfortable because while Israel is supposedly engaged in combatting anti-Semitism, it is more truly in an international ideological fight against the left. And Trump is making it difficult to make this argument without looking like a Nazi.
Jonathan Ofir compares Donald Trump’s weak and vague statement on the Charlottesville white supremacist attack with his earlier failure to address a specific question on anti-Semitism. Fir says Trump doesn’t notice bigotry because he fosters it.
Yossi Gurvitz wrote that when American Jews seek to influence Israel as Jews they are reinforcing the illiberal ethnocratic nature of the state. Jonathan Ofir disagrees and says it is possible to engage with Israel as both Jewish and a liberal.
Many have appraised Israel’s 1967 occupation as ‘Apartheid’. But it goes beyond 1967, and beyond Apartheid, to genocidal actions over 7 decades of the state’s existence. The actions are so egregious that many can hardly fathom them, and so they recoil to an apologetics that amounts to: “Don’t exaggerate.”
The EU embassy in Tel Aviv has launched a campaign to up its image and employs an outspoken advocate for genocide of Palestinians. Avishai Ivri, a well known rightwing pundit, has celebrated the spraypainted slogan “Death to Arabs” and said Israel should kill 5000 Palestinians for every Israeli killed.
A poll by the Israeli Democracy Institute shows that 2 out of 3 Jewish Israelis support the death sentence for Palestinian attackers, considered “terrorists,” even if they attack armed occupation soldiers. Israel has not officially used the death penalty since Adolf Eichmann was executed in 1962. Jonathan Ofir writes, “The potential enactment of the death penalty, especially in the case of Palestinian attackers, would be a grave matter, in view of the Israeli definitions of ‘terror’.”
The Israeli Supreme Court backed the state in only permitting Gazan music students to take part in the Jordanian part of a workshop and concerts – not the part in Ramallah. And it piously intoned, “[M]usical development…is not necessarily bound by location”.
Wednesday morning, Ariel Gold was broadcasting a live feed through her Facebook, in the midst of an assault on her by settlers in Al-Khalil (Hebron). It’s another glimpse into the reality wherein the settlers essentially run the game, and the soldiers are only there to protect them, and no one else – certainly not anyone who is not “standing with the Jews”, as it were, even if they are Jewish.