The Old Testament allowed rape of women during battle, and Eyal Qarim, who has been appointed the chief rabbi of the Israeli army, seemed to endorse that code in 2003 when he said that soldiers were permitted to succumb to their “evil urge” for the cause of the army’s success.
After UNRWA criticized Israeli house demolitions in Qalandiya refugee camp as collective punishment, Israeli centrist Yair Lapid challenged UNRWA over its protection of refugees and the very definition of refugees. Jonathan Ofir takes him on.
The leader of the Israeli political party the Joint List, Ayman Odeh, referred a demand Thursday to the Government Judicial Advisor to open an investigation against the Minister of Defense Avigdor Lieberman due to suspicion of incitement to violence, when he referred to Member of Knesset Hanin Zoabi as a terrorist.
A man who had a heart attack at the wheel and crashed into a Tel Aviv restaurant and then was beaten to death while unconscious was thought by his assailants to be “not a good person.” I.e., a Palestinian terrorist. This is not the first mistaken lynching in Israel, and it disturbs the Israeli narrative, we’re the victims.
The condemnation that Israel demands for the Tel Aviv murders last Wednesday is a card of sympathy for its violent policies of collective punishment, and general terrorizing of a whole population. I am concerned that I will end up supporting Israeli terrorism, by condemning the Palestinian version.
Gov. Cuomo’s order opposing BDS shows that the powerful are willing to sell out democracy. So maybe BDS does stand for something else: Be Damn Sure, that if this current of anti-democratic acts is not countered, it will continue.
Jonathan Ofir writes: I focus on extremist elements in Israel because the country needs radical change. This is not the kind of change that is bound to come from Israeli ‘democracy’, because that ‘democracy’ has been conditioned by ethnic cleansing and Apartheid to serve the needs of its ruling majority, with a minor ‘permission’ for representation of the ‘others’ on strict condition that they do not challenge the Jewish State. That is not democracy.
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.