Yair Golan revitalized his floundering political career when he started making genocidal statements and telling the people of Gaza, “you can die from starvation, it’s totally legitimate.”
My friend the late writer Yossi Gurvitz was an apikoros in the best sense of the word, the Jewish term for a freethinker. His heresy led him to support BDS. Educated in yeshivas, he broke out as a teen when he discovered Plutarch, reading real not bible history. That independence led him in time to become “Israel’s first serious anti-occupation blogger” and to point out the vicious ethnocentrism in the basement of Jewish religiosity that Israel was awakening– “and every demon that was pushed into the basement is up and has an M16.”
The racist mobs who lynched Palestinians in May 2021 are now a major political force in Israel. The mask is off for Israeli apartheid.
The Gaza attack has heightened Israel’s rightwing political tilt as it approaches its next election. “The only place where you can see real energy is on the far right among young people,” Chemi Shalev says of the surprising support among the young for the fascistic racist Religious Zionism party.
How can you blame Zionist left political parties for embracing Israeli generals, despite their assorted war crimes, when Israeli human rights organizations are doing the same?
In a dramatic day for the Israeli parliament, legislators failed to renew the extension of an emergency order that affords Jewish Israeli settlers in the West Bank civil governance, while Palestinians in the same area are governed by military rule. This is one of the most blatant Apartheid laws, regularly renewed every five years since Israel began its 1967 occupation. When Palestinian lawmaker Mazen Ghanaim voted against it Nir Orbach of Prime Minister Naftali Bennett’s party charged at him and shouted that “the experiment with you has failed!” “You” is of course Palestinians in general, and the experiment is the idea of including Palestinians in government.
Israel’s rightwing parliament overwhelmingly passed a permanent law barring the naturalization of Palestinians from the West Bank or Gaza married to Israeli citizens yesterday. The law in earlier forms has been cited as an “apartheid” law by human rights organizations, but even Israeli centrists voted for it with “a heavy heart.” While the Interior Minister Ayelet Shaked celebrated the law as a triumph of the Jewish state.
If there was no other way to have Judaism exist without Apartheid Israel, I would have to go against Judaism, Jonathan Ofir writes. But that’s not the case. There is a way out. Judaism and Jews can exist without Apartheid – and therefore, I fight against Apartheid and for Judaism simultaneously.
Israel has just approved a plan to double the roughly 25,000 settlers on the occupied Syrian Golan heights. Because Biden refused to reverse Trump’s decision on the illegally-acquired territory. And because leftwing Meretz, a government coalition party, went along too, saying the matter was “complicated.” Only Ahmad Tibi says the truth: the Golan belongs to Syria.
Israel’s designation of 6 Palestinian civil society organizations as terrorist was an “act of tyranny” aimed at the “backbone” of Palestinian society, but the designation is “completely shattered at the moment, completely in shatters” due to widespread repudiation of the so-called evidence against the groups, says Israeli human rights attorney Michael Sfard. And the U.S. has the power to make Israel back down. But the State Department has said it’s studying the evidence.