It has been thirty years since Baruch Goldstein carried out his massacre of Palestinian worshippers in Hebron. His legacy of bloodshed continues in Gaza and the West Bank as his followers are now in power.
Even as Israel slides further into religious fascism, and chants of “death to the Arabs” become commonplace, there are still those who say “I’ll wait and see.” It is time for them to speak up.
Settler violence in Hebron exposes the true colonial face of the Zionist project, and the world cannot sit idly by while it continues.
Shaul Magid’s biography of Meir Kahane is timely because Kahane is an icon for the messianic Jewish leaders who are pushing the country further right. The book is Magid’s “attempt to understand his worldview.” But Kahane’s worldview is easy to understand: Jews must forever rule the Promised Land. And that extremist religious Zionism now sets the agenda for the country.
Even now, 25 years after the assassination, the majority of the Israeli center and left cannot divest itself of the Oslo Accords and of the chimera of a two-states solution. They are, after all, sacred. They are what Oseh Shalom Bimromaiv planned. Any attempts to deviate from it is denying scripture. And so the devotees of Oslo and Rabin become the equivalent of monks, dead to the world and singing the sacred hymns. The divine plan has long lost any connection to reality, but anyone challenging it quickly becomes anathema.
Jonathan Greenblatt of the ADL will always cut Zionists a break on the standards he applies to others. Today he said of New Zealand mosque killings, “This act of violence really doesn’t have a precedent as far as we know, murdering people in a mosque.” He conveniently forgot the slaughter of 29 Muslims in Palestine by a Jewish settler in 1994.