Former Israeli PM Naftali Bennett has been all over US media calling for an attack on Iran and assassinating Hamas leaders. But his views are fascistic. He praises war and how it transforms society, saying that World War II made the U.S. an economic power and October 7 will restore Israeli toughness and patriotism.
In a breakthrough for mainstream media, Amna Nawaz of PBS grilled former Israeli PM Naftali Bennett, and observed that Israel is not a democracy because 5 million Palestinians can’t vote.
Expect Biden to parrot conservative pro-Israel writers in the New York Times who hail the lately-fallen Israeli government as a model for the United States in its inclusion of an Arab party. Shmuel Rosner calls it “thrilling.” Too bad that NPR also salutes the “hell of an experiment.” All these positive reviews leave out Israeli apartheid.
NYT columnist Tom Friedman painted the past year in Israel—the first Netanyahu-free year since 2008—as an icon of democracy, where Israeli Jews and Palestinian citizens of Israel danced together under the blue and white flag, in harmony and happiness. That is a contemptible piece of fiction which erases apartheid, blames Palestinians for their own ongoing oppression, and praises those who would abandon their cousins under occupation.
The successful effort by the Israeli government and its American friends to overturn the Ben & Jerry’s boycott of the settlements as a supposed “antisemitic” action shows that it is pointless for activists to selectively boycott the illegal settlements. No– boycotts should be aimed at Israel. There is no such thing as a good Israel on one side of the Green Line and a bad one in the occupation. It is all one apartheid state.
Support for apartheid is the one thing that unifies Israeli Jewish parties. The prime minister likens the separate-and-unequal law in the West Bank to Solomon’s baby, while the leader of the left Zionist Meretz Party says that a Palestinian colleague who voted against extending the law “was malicious and unfair… despicable.”
The Bennett/Lapid “government of change” has collapsed under pressure from Benjamin Netanyahu and the Likud party. New elections are set for October, but there is no alternative to apartheid on the Israeli horizon.
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.
Naftali Bennett’s Israel Memorial Day speech must be deciphered to understand the racist message it was truly sending.
After Russia’s Foreign Minister said that Hitler had Jewish blood, Israeli leaders have condemned him angrily, with the Prime Minister saying he was justifying “the oppressors of Israel.” Wait, when did this become about Israel? There is in fact a plausible theory that Hitler’s father’s father was Jewish. Not that that would in any way justify Russian or Israeli propaganda.