Yossi Gurvitz says that as long as we focus on occupied territories, of land, we are bound within the rules of occupation, where the occupier and his “security needs” will always win. Instead he proposes we should start speaking of the Israeli Military Dictatorship: “Avoid all discussions of sovereignty. They’re useless. Speak of night raids intended only to terrify people, of invading houses without warrants, of indefinite imprisonment without trial; speak of the horror lurking beneath all this. Speak, in short, not of territories but of people.”

On April 3rd, settlers executed a wounded Palestinian, Muhammad ‘Abd Al Fatah. Then the Israeli army destroyed video evidence of the killing; and Israeli media are indifferent. Though B’Tselem has exposed the killing and the successful effort to cover it up. This is the true legacy of the Ezor Alaria case, in which an IDF militant killed a wounded Palestinian.

Following the fire that nearly destroyed the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, prominent settler rabbi Shlomo Aviner was asked whether the burning of the church was a reason for sorrow or to rejoice. The rabbi replied, “There is no mitzvah to seek out churches abroad and burn them down. In our holy land, however, the issue is more complicated.”

The Israeli public relations firm Kaizler Inbar claimed credit for dispatching 1350 volunteers with cameras in a post on Facebook today, stating they were “guilty” of suppressing Arab voter turnout and alluded to coordinating with the Likud party. 

Liberal Zionism is dead. The main story of the 2019 elections is the wiping out of the democratic camp, at best it has 10 seats in the Knesset between the Labor and Meretz parties. Anyone who still thinks Israel “shares values” with the West ought to wake up and smell the coffee. Liberal Israeli Jewish activists must understand that they won’t be able to ever win elections without working with Israeli Palestinians.

Soldier’s lives are more precious than civilian lives in Israel, and soldiers’ bodies the most precious human form of all. Which explains what a boost Putin gave to Netanyahu in the last week of the election by providing to him the remains of an Israeli soldier killed in Lebanon in 1982.

The Israeli election has dissolved into toxic masculinity as the Netanyahu campaign suggests that Benny Gantz lacks strength because he reportedly once saw a psychologist. Gantz promptly denied the report as if it were a stain on his honor. The worship of force and contempt for weakness by would-be Rambos threatens all society with destruction, Yossi Gurvitz writes.

Israeli politician Benny Gantz raised the specter of dual loyalty of Jews in other nations when he said yesterday, “If there is one Jew in danger, anywhere in the world, then our mission is unfinished.”

Memo to Tom Friedman: Israel is not your “ancestral homeland,” that is a Zionist myth. There was never an exile from Judea. Jews were all over the Roman Empire as converts; and your ancestors were surely among them. And mythical Jewish history doesn’t convey rights to someone born in Minnesota.

By stating that Arab voters in Israel can “shake the security of the state,” Benjamin Netanyahu undermined decades of Israeli p.r. and exposed the bluff of “Israel is a democratic country.” The politician who embraced Kahanists to hold on to power is now parroting Kahane.