The Israeli Ministry of Education dropped an explicit prohibition on racist answers by students on civic exams. So if they answer, Different population groups should be allowed to live in separate neighborhoods, thereby justifying apartheid, teachers should let it go.
Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced he will approve a bonanza of new settlements in the West Bank in the coming days, bringing the year-end total to 6,500, nearly three times the number of settlements approved in all of 2016.
Jonathan Ofir responds to Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to the UN where he said he wanted to visit Antarctica because he heard penguins are enthusiastic supporters of Israel: “Those Penguins, they would completely know what’s what. Black and white. Obey – get a fish. Resist – no fish. Nowadays you are congratulating the far right ‘Decision Plan’ for annexing the West Bank, which is also black and white: Accept Apartheid, leave, or face the wrath of Israel. Palestinians might not like this, they might prove difficult. Penguins will be much easier. Fish will do the trick. They’ll stay, and you can become the Caesar of the Caesar penguins! It will be glorious!”
Bezalel Smotrich, a member of the Israeli Knesset from the Jewish Home party, has delivered his plan for the annexation of Palestinian territories. It’s called the ‘Decision Plan’, but its real name is Apartheid, and its message is: Surrender or be transferred.
Reviewing Mya Guarnieri Jaradat’s book “The Unchosen: the lives of Israel’s others,” Max Ajl writes, “In her reporting, Jaradat has shown clinically how the social structure produces racism with such mechanical regularity. She shows a picture of Israeli society which not merely exposes its brutal racism and colonialism, but also how racism and power function within the dominant Jewish sector. It so doing she undermines an important myth of the Ashkenazi elite, which is that the racism which courses through Israel is somehow not the fruit of colonialism, but is primarily the fault of Russians, Mizrahi, or others–tainting what had been untainted. This is important work, and where The Unchosen makes its most important contribution.”
Israeli Communications Minister Ayoub Kara is supposedly following the line of Arab states in his effort to shut down Al Jazeera, but really, he’s Netanyahu’s puppet. Netanyahu intervened this week to prevent Al Jazeera Jerusalem Bureau chief Walid al-Omari from appearing on a government panel on the limits of free speech.
Almost one month after Israeli forces shot him seven times during a night raid in Deheisha refugee camp, 22-year-old Raed al-Salhi succumbed to his wounds on Sunday in Jerusalem’s Hadassah hospital. Israeli forces had warned Raed al-Salhi in late July that they were coming for him. “They called him and told him ‘we will shoot you in front of your mother’,” Khaled, 24, one of Raed’s four older brothers told Mondoweiss. Two weeks after the call, on August 9, 2017, Israeli forces shot Raed in the courtyard behind his home at 4 a.m, as his mother sat inside the family’s living room just feet away.
The discussion over the essential racism of Zionism is in the open. Israeli Justice minister Ayelet Shaked made it clear, and Israeli journalist Gideon Levy thanks her for her candidness. Levy published a column in Haaretz yesterday that all but says Zionism is racism. He calls it a movement that “contradicts human rights, and is thus indeed an ultranationalist, colonialist and perhaps even racist movement, as proponents of justice worldwide maintain”.
Israeli Education Minister Naftali Bennett made a genius triple breakthrough in the fields of psychology, psychiatry and sociology on Friday, offering a new term for the old idea of Jewish self-hatred: “Auto-anti-Semitism is a social-psychological phenomenon in which a Jew develops obsessive contempt and hostility towards Jewish tradition, customs, and observant Jews,” he wrote.
Israel is making a big effort to strengthen its diplomatic ties in Africa. Netanyahu told his ambassadors to Africa, “The first interest is to dramatically change the situation regarding African votes at the UN and other international bodies from opposition to support.” But Tel Aviv’s history and its policies today mean it will fail in this effort.