The shock of Netanyahu’s deal with the Kahanist Jewish Power party is that it shows there is growing establishment support in Israel for a final ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people: “The right-wing doesn’t speak about it openly, but the Kahanists do. Some 10% of the Jewish population of Israel have been speaking about “a second Nakba” even as they denied the first; now Likud joins them.”
The unprecedented criticism of an Israeli prime minister by AIPAC and the splitting of the Palestinian parties into two lists may represent Israeli centrist Benny Gantz’s only road to knocking off Benjamin Netanyahu in April elections. Netanyahu is already calling Gantz an “Arab-lover” while Gantz has criticized Netanyahu for endangering Israel’s crown jewels, its ties to the U.S. government.
Yossi Gurvitz explains what to expect from the upcoming Israeli elections, where Benjamin Netanyahu faces a challenge from Gen. Benny Gantz, but liberal parties do not stand a chance. “Gantz is right on at least one point: there is no longer left or right. The vast majority of Israeli Jews are now Jewish supremacists,” Gurvitz says. “Some embrace this supremacy eagerly, others cling to it while bemoaning cruel fate has brought them, good liberals that they are, to this low state.”
The BDS campaign doesn’t want to destroy Israel but to end its Zionist regime, Yossi Gurvitz explains. No people have the right to self-determination in another people’s homeland. Yet this is precisely what happened in Israel, and this is precisely what Zionists are defending: a country based on denial of the rights of others.
Today, the Knesset voted down the Basic Law: Equality bill by a margin of 71-38. The text of the bill was clear and concise: “The State of Israel shall maintain equal political rights amongst all its citizens, without any difference between religions, race and sex.” With the vote the Knesset told 20% of the country’s citizens that it would demand their loyalty, but would not grant them equality.
On Thursday, Moshe Feiglin, a rightwing political figure in Israel, went on television and explained his plan for the Gaza Strip: ethnically cleansing it, and those who survive the IDF can then ask for refugee status in the EU. Yossi Gurvitz has written to the government’s counsel demanding an investigation under the law of preventing or punishing the crime of genocide.
Palestinian flags will have to be part of the reform the Israeli state will have to go through, Yossi Gurvitz writes. And Tchernichovsky’s poem, Sachki, Sachki could be the national anthem. “A generation will arise, They’ll remove their iron shackles, And see daylight with their eyes.”
There is no way for anyone in Israel to marry in a civil service. Judges and mayors do not have the power to marry you. You need your local rabbi, priest or qadi. If you want to intermarry, you have to fly to a foreign country and then hope that Israel will recognize the marriage. That’s why there’s a cottage marriage industry in nearby Cyprus. A guide to the perplexed, by Yossi Gurvitz.
Because he wrote a blogpost justifying armed resistance to armed settlers in 2011, Yossi Gurvitz was charged with the crime of incitement by Israeli government prosecutors. Then the case was purposely left open with no action and hung around his neck, and career, for 7 years till it was finally closed. The writer reflects on the painful experience.
Isaac Herzog’s belief that intermarriage is a “plague” reflects Zionism’s inability to imagine a Judaism apart from Orthodoxy. Palestinians have already paid the price for Zionism. Israeli women are likely to be next. If Israelis want a way out of this labyrinth, they would have to dismantle the Zionist state.