After complaints from Israel supporters, a youth speaking competition in England disqualified Leanne Mohamad, 15, as delivering “propaganda,” because she described the Nakba and continuing occupation of Palestine and asserted that 30,000 Palestinian children have been killed during the conflict.
Jonathan Ofir shares a tale of two idioms. Israel’s Chutzpah is shouting “help! Help!” to the world whilst beating Palestinians up. But Palestinians have demonstrated their own tradition, of sumud, or steadfastness, in refusing to buckle to ethnic cleansing and occupation and human rights abuses, “This is the fight that Palestinians are to endure with Sumud, if they are to remain. Israel may consider efforts to confront its subjugation as a Chutzpah in itself – how dare they resist? – whilst it engages in ever more inventive stratagems of deceit, to be able to continue its adventurism in the frontier of Greater Israel.”
If all Jews must be identified by an inevitable connection to Israel, as the state seeks, then it may be that Israel, and its actions in the eyes of the world, will become their greatest peril.
The scandal over anti-Zionism in the Labour Party in Britain is an effort by atavistic Zionists to cast Zionism as Judaism and therefore all critiques of Zionism as anti-Jewish. We must fight this ideological sleight-of-hand.
Netanyahu claims that Israeli killings of Palestinians wielding knives are in self-defense and not extrajudicial executions. So why do Israelis treat a knife-wielding Jewish killer so differently?
“When a midwife delivers an Arab baby she is asked ‘Did you bring us another terrorist?’ I heard it with my own ears”. Lena Kassem of Doctors for Human Rights on the segregation of Palestinians and Jews in Israeli hospitals.
The Hebron execution of a wounded Palestinian by an Israeli soldier wasn’t a murder, and wasn’t an error either. Because the Palestinian was considered a “terrorist.” An introduction to Israeli Newspeak
Zionism took the myth of the ‘Jewish nation’ from Jewish religious culture. It extrapolated the nationalist stream inherent in Judaism, and made it into an ostensibly ‘secular’ national movement. But the nationalist element depends upon the religious ‘counterpart’ to exist.
Israel tells the world that its citizens have Israeli nationality, but on internal documents it insists that Jews have Jewish nationality. Because it is the Jewish state, and thereby justifies discrimination against non-Jewish nationals who are citizens of Israel.
Jonathan Ofir explains how he, an Israeli expatriate in Europe, came to be so critical of his country. “I came to realise that ‘fighting for my country’ meant something very different than winning ideological and physical battles for the State of Israel. It meant dismantling Zionist propaganda.”