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Tag Archives: Apartheid

The illusion of Israeli democracy has been shattered

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Palestinians have been excluded from recent Israeli demonstrations. (Ilia Yefimovich, APA images)

Haim Bresheeth-Žabner, The Electronic Intifada, 20 February 2023

People across the world have watched the thousands of Israelis demonstrating against their government with at least some bemusement. After 75 years of Israel denying its own agency in the terrible catastrophe it has inflicted on the Palestinians, its new government is now blamed for doing something most Israeli governments have never done – openly discussing the aim of controlling the whole of Palestine through an exclusive Jewish apartheid state.

That this aim requires a less-than-democratic society seems obvious, and arguably Israel has never been democratic in any real sense. But now that Jews will also face some loss of rights, the old elites responsible for the Nakba – the 1948 ethnic cleansing of Palestine – and all that followed are out on the streets.

They wish to defend their “Jewish democracy,” in which Palestinian flags and self-determination are outlawed.

The recent ructions present Jews abroad with a painful dilemma: Do they – as many do – continue to support Israel in an unqualified and unquestioning manner? Or is it a time for a somber, self-searching reflection – a rethink of their identity, no less?

Not something they would normally choose to embark on, and most seem to be shying away from the need to look in the mirror.

Exceptionalist strategy

The face of Jewish Zionism is hardly an appealing sight. The new Israeli government has been in power for nearly two months and the number and severity of Jewish terror attacks and anti-Palestinian pogroms by settlers and the army have climbed to terrifying heights.

Israel’s exceptionalist strategy has proved a success, allowing it to continue its occupation, its construction of illegal settlements and its denial of rights and the continued oppression of the indigenous people of Palestine.

The United States, Israel’s major funder and mentor, remains strongly wedded to the continued denial of Palestinian rights, even in the face of the current unrest. US President Joe Biden has perhaps proven himself to be even more damaging than Donald Trump to the Palestinian cause, which must be some kind of record.

Such uncritical and shameful US support for Israel has protected it from any sanctions. As long as Israel’s leaders sporadically mention their commitment to the two-state solution, this process of taking over Palestine has gone on mainly unnoticed.

The Western democracies – such as they are – are placated by this meaningless lip service, accepting it as the normative, required noise about the settler-colonial conflict in Palestine.

Terrifying plans in store

This went swimmingly for over five decades and would have continued for another five if Israel had not grown tired of the long series of elections and went on to elect the most right-wing government in its history. This was a government prepared to say aloud that Israel considers the whole of Palestine its own.

This claim is now a new one. Bezalel Smotrich, finance minister and ideological force behind the current right-wing Israeli administration, outlined in a 2017 article titled “Tipping the Scales” the options facing Palestinians (though he refers to them as “Arabs,” since the nationality of Palestinians is denied by his ilk). They may either accept that all of Palestine is rightly Jewish and live there as residents without citizenship, or simply leave the country.

For those who resist this generous offer, Smotrich reserves the promise of “decisive treatment by the security forces, with stronger intensity than is done currently and in conditions favoring us.”

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What’s Behind the Calls for “Democracy” in Israel?

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Hundreds of thousands of protesters have taken to the streets in the last few weeks to rally against the Israeli government’s plans for so-called judicial reform.


In Jerusalem on February 20, 2023, Israelis protest outside Israel’s parliament against plans by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s new government to overhaul the judicial system. (Ohad Zwigenberg / AP Photo)

Meron Rapoport and Oren Ziv, The Nation, FEBRUARY 24, 2023

EDITOR’S NOTE: This article was produced in collaboration with +972 Magazine and Local Call, two media outlets run by Palestinian and Israeli journalists.

It is almost inconceivable for Palestinians to describe Israel as a “democracy.” That is also the case for many Israeli human rights activists. Seventy-five years of ethnic cleansing, military rule, Jewish-only settlements on Palestinian-owned land, an established system of discrimination that amounts to apartheid have all rendered, in their eyes, the terms “Israel” and “democracy” incompatible. The latest Israeli raid in Nablus, in which 11 Palestinians were killed by Israeli soldiers is just another flagrant example.

Yet, in the last few weeks, Israeli society has been torn apart by the question of democracy. Hundreds of thousands of protesters, the vast majority of them Jews, have filled the streets of Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Haifa, Be’er Sheva, and other cities and towns in “defense of democracy,” calling for mass civil disobedience and even “rebellion” should the new far-right government implement its plans for so-called judicial reform. The term “civil war” (or in the Hebrew version, “a war of brothers”) has become a mainstay in the collective political vocabulary, alongside explicit warnings of potential bloodshed in the clash between the government and Jewish citizens.

The historic protests are growing not only in size but also in influence, as large sections of the Israeli elites—entrepreneurs, bankers, lawyers, intellectuals, security personnel, diplomats, former Supreme Court justices, and state prosecutors—have joined. Most remarkable among the protesters is Israel’s high-tech and cyber industries, responsible not only for some 20 percent of state revenues from taxes and 40 percent of its exports, but also for Israel’s internal and external image as a “start-up nation.” As of today, dozens of high-tech companies, in addition to hedge funds, have announced that they will withdraw their investments and bank accounts from Israel, if they haven’t already done so. Hundreds of renowned economists, including the sitting and past heads of the Bank of Israel, have warned of the implications the reform will have on Israel’s standing in the global economy, as have international banks and credit rating agencies.

Put together, these represent the most considerable threats to Israel’s economy in decades.

The government is also meeting fierce opposition from the heart of the civil service: In an extremely rare political statement, the chief justice of the Supreme Court of Israel, Esther Hayut, called the reform “a plan to crush the judicial system” and threatened she would quit if it were to pass. She is joined by legal advisers to the government and the Knesset, as well as high-ranking officers in the army and the police, who are concerned with the government’s plans.

WHY REFORM NOW?
The reform that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is advancing was largely masterminded by two relatively lesser known Israeli politicians: Justice Minister Yariv Levin and Simcha Rotman, a member of Bezalel Smotrich’s extreme-right Religious Zionist Party and chairman of the Knesset Constitution, Law, and Justice Committee. Both Smotrich and Rothman are lawyers who have led a years-long campaign against Israel’s judicial system, and particularly against its high court, claiming that it “took over” as part of a “deep state” run by the elites that continues to impose its liberal ideas on a mainly conservative Israeli public, and denies power to this public’s legitimate representatives in the Knesset and government.

Their reform is supposed to “heal” Israel’s democracy by returning power to the executive and legislative branches. Its first stage consists of four main elements: granting the ruling coalition total control over the appointment of new judges, making it almost impossible for the high court to invalidate new laws that infringe on human rights, allowing the Knesset to overrule such decisions in the rare cases that they are made, abolishing the courts’ ability to review decisions made by national or local authorities on the basis of their “plausibility,” and allowing ministers to ignore the guidance of their legal advisers. In Israel’s unicameral system of government—in which the Knesset is de facto controlled by the governing coalition, where there is no Constitution, and where the courts are currently the only check on the executive branch—such reforms would give the government near-unfettered powers. The next steps were not detailed yet, but they expect to further weaken the judicial system vis-à-vis the executive branch.

Yet knowing how enfeebled Israeli democracy is in the first place, and how the very same high court failed to defend the rights of Palestinians and other underprivileged groups over the years, one must wonder why Netanyahu chose his sixth term in office to push through these dramatic reforms.

The first and most obvious answer lies with his own legal predicament. Netanyahu is on trial on four charges of bribery, fraud, and breach of trust. If convicted, he is likely to serve years behind bars. He therefore has every reason to seek to control the legal system, appoint judges that may deal with any future appeals, or appoint a new general attorney who will magically make his trial disappear. Pure and simple revenge against the legal system that put him on trial is also a motive.

The same personal motivations go for Aryeh Deri, leader of the Haredi Shas party and one of Netanyahu’s senior coalition partners, whose past convictions for bribery and tax evasion led the high court in January to disqualify him from serving as a minister. Deri has even more immediate reasons to weaken the court and overrule its decisions.

Deri is also a representative of a large community that has regarded the court as one of its principal enemies for decades, especially since it invalidated laws that run contrary to one of Israel’s Basic Laws (which act as quasi-constitutional). For example, the court quashed exempting yeshiva students from military service, one of the most sensitive core issues pertaining to Israel’s Haredi population. Other rulings by the courts, especially those concerning LGTBQ rights or allowing commercial activities on Jewish holidays, were criticized by Haredi parties.

The settler movement and its political supporters on the far (and not so far) right also have a long history of animosity toward the the judicial system. In 1979, the court ruled that land expropriations from Palestinians under the auspices of “security reasons” could no longer be used to build new Jewish settlements in the West Bank, as had been the case until that point. In 2020, the high court invalidated a law allowing the state to expropriate private Palestinian land upon which thousands of illegal settler homes had already been built.

With the rise of far-right extremists, it was clear that one of their goals would be to get rid of legal obstacles that prevent, or at the very least slow down, the implementation of an even deeper, and more long-lasting, apartheid system in the West Bank.

Smotrich, now finance minister, is the author of Israel’s Decisive Plan, in which he offered the Palestinians three options: accept Jewish supremacy, immigrate, or “be dealt with by the security forces with a strong hand.” Ben Gvir, who is playing a crucial role in Netanyahu’s new government as national security minister, was a member of the racist Kahane movement and an admirer of Baruch Goldstein, a settler who murdered Palestinian worshipers in Hebron in 1994. They both regard the presence of representatives of Palestinian citizens of Israel in the Knesset as “a mistake” that requires mending.

Thus, it is no wonder that the various elements of the new government perceive the results of the last elections, which gave them a comfortable 64-seat majority, as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to change the balance in Israeli society. Beyond making the Israeli occupation of the West Bank irreversible, the government has a whole barrage of illiberal goals it hopes to advance, which it is saving for the day after the courts are defanged: increasing the reach of the Chief Rabbinate; deporting African asylum seekers; shutting down the country’s public broadcaster and changing the landscape of Israeli media; reshaping the education system; and curtailing labor unions. Still, perhaps the most dangerous and far-reaching of them all is the plan to outlaw most of the Palestinian parties in Knesset. Such a move would essentially rob more than 20 percent of citizens of the right to vote, and would ensure the far right’s eternal rule.

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The theft of Harun Abu Aram’s body, home, and life

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Harun was born into, paralyzed, and killed by Israel’s colonial system. The struggle to dismantle it begins in the cave where he spent his final years.


Harun Abu Aram in his village of Al-Rakeez in Masafer Yatta, West Bank. (Emily Glick)

Yuval Abraham, +972 Magazine, February 16, 2023

Harun Abu Aram is dead. For two years, he lay completely paralyzed in a dirty cave, without running water, plagued by pain. This was his life from the moment an Israeli soldier arrived in the South Hebron Hills, in the occupied West Bank, to confiscate an electric generator and shot Harun in the neck in January 2021. The army refused to allow his family to build a home for him, despite the fact that the family was on their privately-owned land, and so they were forced to live in the cave. This is what Israeli expulsions and ethnic cleansing look like in the region of Masafer Yatta.

On Tuesday morning, at 26 years old, Harun took his final breath. His mother, Farisa, who goes by the nickname Shamiya, never left his side. She bathed his immobilized body with a bucket of water. She stayed awake with him as he writhed in pain during the nights. His sisters loved him deeply, holding the phone to his face whenever relatives would call to ask about him.

I met his mother for the first time at the end of 2020, when Israeli bulldozers arrived to demolish the family home. She built it for Harun, who was meant to get married and raise a family in one of its rooms. An inspector from the Civil Administration, the military body that governs the occupied territories, berated Shamiya not to retrieve any of the family’s belongings.

The bulldozer plowed through the home with everything inside, including kitchen cabinets. Doha, Harun’s youngest sister, cried as she watched her home torn to shreds. I remember how the dust stuck to her hair, and how her mother, a proud woman, said: “They demolished, we’ll continue to build.”

Weeks later, Harun was shot after he attempted to prevent Israeli soldiers who had arrived at his village of Al-Rakeez from confiscating a communal generator.

Harun Abu Aram in his village of Al-Rakeez in Masafer Yatta, West Bank. (Emily Glick)

Harun Abu Aram in his village of Al-Rakeez in Masafer Yatta, West Bank. (Emily Glick)

‘Geographic terrorism’

The last years have seen armed soldiers aggressively trying to block Palestinian construction by confiscating their tools, often at the behest of Israeli settlers living nearby. Sometimes, settlers themselves try to stop Palestinian construction, as they reportedly did last Saturday in the town of Qarawat Bani Hassan, where they shot and killed 27-year-old Methqal Abd al-Halim Rayan. Other times, soldiers fly drones to take aerial photos and send them to the Civil Administration, whose inspectors then arrive. This is one part of Israel’s vast colonial system, one that systematically prevents Palestinians from building their homes in areas such as the South Hebron Hills.

The dreadful hum of these drones buzzed overhead during the countless times I visited Al-Rakeez, one of the smallest villages in Masafer Yatta. Drones that peered into the homes of the poor farmers, forcing them to build at night, in secret.

Harun’s killing is a result of this colonial system, and more specifically, of the sick worldview that deems Palestinian construction as a form of “terrorism,” thereby creating a pretext for the army to “counter” it with military might.

Israeli politicians like to call this the “battle for Area C.” During hearings in the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee at the time, Likud MK Avi Dichter referred to Palestinian building as “geographic terrorism”; right-wing MK Gideon Sa’ar argued that it will “determine the future borders of the country”; and far-right MK Bezalel Smotrich, who today serves as finance minister, said that the Israeli army is responsible for the “battle.”

Palestinian residents from the village of Al-Majaz look on as the Israeli army trains in Masafer Yatta, June 21, 2022. (Oren Ziv)

Palestinian residents from the village of Al-Majaz look on as the Israeli army trains in Masafer Yatta, June 21, 2022. (Oren Ziv)

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You Can’t Save Democracy in a Jewish State

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Protesters in Tel Aviv hold placards that say “Israeli students fighting for democracy” and “Without democracy there is no academy.” (Jack Guez/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images)

Peter Beinart, New York Times, Feb. 19, 2023

The warnings come every day: Israeli democracy is in danger.

Since Benjamin Netanyahu’s new government announced plans to undermine the independence of Israel’s Supreme Court, hundreds of thousands of Israelis have demonstrated in the streets. All of Israel’s living former attorneys general, in a joint statement, have warned that Mr. Netanyahu’s proposal imperils efforts to “preserve Israel as a Jewish and democratic state.” Liberal American Jewish leaders are cheering on the protests. Earlier this month, Alan Solow, the former head of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, said he and other American Jewish notables “share the concerns of tens of thousands of Israelis determined to protect their democracy.” In a public declaration, Mr. Solow and 168 other influential American Jews warned that “the new government’s direction mirrors anti-democratic trends that we see arising elsewhere.”

On the surface, the battle between Mr. Netanyahu and his critics does indeed look familiar. In recent years, from Brazil to Hungary to India to the United States, anti-government protesters have accused authoritarian-minded populists of threatening liberal democracy. But look closer at Israel’s political drama and you notice something striking: The people most threatened by Mr. Netanyahu’s authoritarianism aren’t part of the movement against it.

The demonstrations include very few Palestinians. In fact, Palestinian politicians have criticized them for having, in the words of former Knesset member Sami Abu Shehadeh, “nothing to do with the main problem in the region — justice and equality for all the people living here.”

The reason is that the movement against Mr. Netanyahu is not like the pro-democracy opposition movements in Turkey, India or Brazil — or the movement against Trumpism in the United States. It’s not a movement for equal rights. It’s a movement to preserve the political system that existed before Mr. Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition took power, which was not, for Palestinians, a genuine liberal democracy in the first place. It’s a movement to save liberal democracy for Jews.

The principle that Mr. Netanyahu’s liberal Zionist critics say he threatens — a Jewish and democratic state — is in reality a contradiction. Democracy means government by the people. Jewish statehood means government by Jews. In a country where Jews comprise only half of the people between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, the second imperative devours the first.

To understand just how illiberal the liberal Zionism championed by Mr. Netanyahu’s leading opponents is, consider the actions of Yair Lapid, his predecessor as prime minister. Last month, Mr. Lapid penned a nearly 2,000-word essay in which he wrote, “If this Netanyahu government does not fall, Israel will cease to be a liberal democracy.” It didn’t include the word “Palestinian.”

That becomes less surprising when you realize that as foreign minister, in 2021, Mr. Lapid implored the Knesset to renew a law that denies Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza Strip who are married to Palestinian citizens the right to live with their spouses inside Israel proper. The law is blatantly discriminatory; Jews can immigrate to Israel and gain immediate citizenship whether they have relatives in the country or not. And far from denying the legislation’s discriminatory nature, Mr. Lapid celebrated it. The law, he explained in a tweet in July 2021, “is one of the tools meant to ensure the Jewish majority in the State of Israel.”

When Tucker Carlson and Viktor Orban employ this kind of logic — when they promote policies designed to ensure that the percentage of white Christians in their countries doesn’t dip too low — American Jewish liberals recognize it as anathema to the principle of equal citizenship on which liberal democracy rests. Yet many now see Mr. Lapid as liberal democracy’s champion because he opposes Mr. Netanyahu’s judicial changes.

Another major figure in the anti-Netanyahu movement is former defense minister Benny Gantz, who last month urged Israelis “to protest for safeguarding Israeli democracy.” But as defense minister in 2021, Mr. Gantz designated six leading Palestinian human rights groups as terrorist organizations in what the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem called “an act characteristic of totalitarian regimes.” Israeli troops later forced their way into the organizations’ offices, seized documents and then welded shut the doors. Do those sound like the actions of someone interested in “safeguarding” democracy?

The problem runs deeper than just these politicians. When American Jewish leaders like Mr. Solow express solidarity with those “Israelis determined to protect their democracy,” they are not only deluding themselves about Mr. Netanyahu’s leading opponents. They are deluding themselves about Jewish statehood itself.


A protester holding a Palestinian flag in Tel Aviv at a demonstration against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right government. (Tsafrir Abayov/Associated Press)

For most of the Palestinians under Israeli control — those in the West Bank and Gaza Strip—Israel is not a democracy. It’s not a democracy because Palestinians in the Occupied Territories can’t vote for the government that dominates their lives. When Mr. Gantz sends Israeli troops to shut down their human rights groups, West Bank Palestinians can’t punish him at the ballot box. They can complain to the Palestinian Authority. But the P.A. is a subcontractor, not a state. Like other Palestinians, its officials need Israeli permission even to leave the West Bank. In Gaza, too, Israel determines, with help from Egypt, which people and products enter and exit. And Gaza’s residents, who live in what Human Rights Watch calls “an open-air prison,” can’t vote out the Israeli officials who hold the key.

This lack of democratic rights helps explain why Palestinians are less motivated than Israeli Jews to defend Israel’s Supreme Court. As the Israeli law professors David Kretzmer and Yael Ronen note in their book, “The Occupation of Justice,” “in almost all of its judgments relating to the Occupied Territories, especially those dealing with questions of principle, the Court has decided in favor of the authorities.” Enfeebling the court would undermine legal protections that Israeli Jews take for granted but most Palestinians did not enjoy in the first place.

To be fair, roughly 20 percent of the Palestinians under Israeli control enjoy Israeli citizenship and the right to vote in Israeli elections. Yet it is often these Palestinians who protest most vociferously against Israel’s democratic credentials. In 2009 the Palestinian Knesset member Ahmad Tibi quipped that Israel was indeed “Jewish and democratic: Democratic toward Jews and Jewish toward Arabs.” To many liberal Zionists, that might sound churlish. After all, Mr. Tibi has now served in Israel’s Parliament for almost 25 years. But he understands that the Jewish state contains a deep structure that systematically denies Palestinians legal equality, whether they are citizens or not.

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A Massacre Took Place in Jenin

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January 26, 2023

This morning, Israeli forces murdered at least 9 Palestinians in the occupied West Bank city of Jenin. They bombed homes, tear-gassed a hospital children's ward, shot at residents, and prevented access to medical aid. This unhinged massacre is the most violent Israeli invasion of the Jenin Refugee camp since 2002.

This Sunday, Secretary Blinken is going to Palestine to meet with the new Israeli government. Rather than another photo op with empty political slogans, it’s incumbent upon him to use this trip to announce a shift in US policy toward Israel.

We demand President Biden and Secretary Blinken make a clear public statement that the actions of the Israeli government will not be tolerated or funded by our tax dollars. It’s time for the U.S. to stop its foreign aid to Israel. 

2022 was the deadliest year for Palestinians in the West Bank in nearly 20 years, with the most deaths since the United Nations began recording fatalities in 2005. The new, far-right Israeli government and its forces remain adamant about continuing, if not increasing, their brutality. We're only 26 days into 2023, and Israel has already killed 30 Palestinians, including five children—setting a pace to double the murder of Palestinians in 2022.

While the brutal invasion of Jenin’s refugee camp is not an exception to the new Israeli Knesset, its outward, right-wing extremism, and determination to violence against Palestinians should be an immediate trigger for the United States to finally take a firm stand against the apartheid government. 

AMP unequivocally condemns the United States’ absurd and tone-deaf call to Palestinians to continue security coordination instead of condemning Israel’s crime and massacre. If the Israeli government expects this massacre to pave the way for annexations within the West Bank, they must rest assured that it will not be accepted by the Palestinian people, by Americans, and nor should it be accepted or enabled by the U.S. government. It’s overdue for the United States to stop enabling Israel's violence against the Palestinian people, and put an immediate end to Israel's settler-colonial, apartheid system.
 

Rights Advocates Alarmed Over Israel’s New ‘Fascist, Racist, and Settler’ Government

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“The occupation and apartheid in the occupied Palestinian territories have made Jewish supremacy the de facto law of the land and the new government seeks to adopt this into their official policy”


Israelis carry banners and flags as they gather in front of the the Knesset to protest Israel’s new far-right government in Jerusalem on December 29, 2022.(Mostafa Alkharouf, Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)

JESSICA CORBETT, Common Dreams, Dec 29, 2022

Global concerns about the new Israeli government—especially what it means for Palestinians—continued to grow Thursday as Benjamin Netanyahu took the oath of office to again serve as prime minister, this time leading the most far-right and religiously conservative coalition in the country’s history.

The embattled leader was sworn in following a 63-54 vote of confidence in his new government by the Knesset, Israel’s parliament. He has appointed 30 ministers and three deputy ministers from his Likud party as well as Noam, Otzma Yehudit (“Jewish Power”‘), Religious Zionism, Shas, and United Torah Judaism.

“It is already clear that the emerging coalition will be disastrous for human rights between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.”

The coalition finalized Wednesday features “a mix of an ultra-Orthodox and right-wing bloc,” with some of the most “right-wing politicians we’ve seen,” Al Jazeera‘s Sara Khairat reported Thursday from West Jerusalem, as protesters gathered. “They were on the fringes of politics and now here they are on the main stage.”

Some ministry appointments were only possible because of a pair of laws passed by the Knesset on Tuesday—one enabling Aryeh Deri of Shas to serve as minister of the interior despite his recent tax fraud conviction and another allowing Religious Zionism’s Bezalel Smotrich to take on multiple posts.

“These laws… dovetail with Netanyahu’s own attempt to escape potential liability for his long-running corruption/bribery trial,” wroteMondoweiss‘ Jonathan Ofir. “If such exceptions can be made for Smotrich and Deri and cemented into law, this paves the way for the same being done for Netanyahu, when the need arises.”


Another controversial pick is Otzma Yehudit’s Itamar Ben-Gvir, the new national security minister, who in 2007 was convicted of incitement to racism against Arabs and supporting a terrorist organization. As Common Dreamsreported last week, the government reached a deal to lift the ban on parliamentary candidates who incite racism.

In a joint statement Thursday, several advocacy groups said that “it is already clear that the emerging coalition will be disastrous for human rights between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.”


“Previous Israeli governments have already entrenched military control over millions of Palestinians, severely harmed their human rights, and made the possibility of a just future more difficult,” they continued. “The senior figures in this new government have made it clear that they intend to exacerbate this trend and advance dangerous measures.”

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January 3rd CODEPINK Capitol Calling Party

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CODEPINK.ORG

You are invited to join our Tuesday CODEPINK CONGRESS Calling Party to talk with special guests about what’s happening in Palestine and efforts to end US complicity in Israeli crimes.

Chat with peacemakers and experts Tuesday, January 3rd at 5 pm PT/7 pm CT/8 pm ET:

None

 

Israeli settler violence against Palestinians escalated in 2022 with West Bank settlers on the rampage, defiling mosques, vandalizing shops and assaulting Palestinians in Hebron and other Palestinian cities. Instead of stopping the settlers, the Israeli military turned on Palestinians, adding to the year’s death toll: 150 Palestinians killed, 33 of them children. Meanwhile, the most racist Israeli government returns to power with former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu – under criminal indictment – set to serve his sixth term. This new ultra-nationalist government stands in explicit – no longer implicit – opposition to a Palestinian state and threatens to strip the courts of their power.

US Secretary of State Blinken insists the US commitment to apartheid Israel is ironclad, despite whispers last month that the Biden administration might refuse to meet with some of the most reactionary members of the new Israeli government. 

Join us as we detail the situation on the ground in Palestine and examine US congressional and grassroots efforts to end US complicity in Israeli crimes. 

Featuring

Mazin Qumsiyeh is an activist, environmentalist and author. He is founder and director of the Palestine Institute for Biodiversity and Sustainability (PIBS) at Bethlehem University. He served on the faculties of the University of Tennessee, Duke University and the Yale University, and now researches and teaches at Bethlehem university. He is the author of hundreds of articles and several books including Sharing the Land of Canaan and Popular Resistance in Palestine.

Anat Biletzki is a professor of philosophy at Quinnipiac and past professor at Tel Aviv University. She is a steering committee member of FISP – The International Federation of Philosophical Societies. She also serves as Vice-Chair of the World Peace Foundation at Tufts University, and is co-founder and co-director of the Program for Human Rights and Technology at MIT. Born in Jerusalem, she was Chair of the Board of B’Tselem, the Israeli human rights NGO, from 2001 to 2006, having served as a B’Tselem Board member for several years before. Her most recent book is Philosophy of Human Rights: A Systematic Introduction (2019).

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How the Israeli government will turn its Jewish critics into dissidents

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The transformation of Israeli leftists into dissidents is a reminder that no one is safe from the attempts to turn the ‘wrong kind’ of Jews into enemies.

Edo Konrad, +972 Magazine, December 16, 2022

Israeli activists hold a protest in Tel Aviv against Israeli military rule over Palestinians in the West Bank, September 23, 2021. (Ahmad Al-Bazz/Activestills.org)
Israeli activists hold a protest in Tel Aviv against Israeli military rule over Palestinians in the West Bank, September 23, 2021. (Ahmad Al-Bazz/Activestills.org)

Most left-wing Israeli Jews do not generally think of themselves as political dissidents, and have likely never aspired to such a status. Despite the lavish praise they receive for their bravery, Israeli-Jewish leftists have the ability to speak out without suffering the consequences faced by Palestinians, not to mention activists in other undemocratic states. Leftist Jews have very often been afforded the privilege of being opponents of the right, rather than its enemies.

But all that seems like it may change, and far quicker than even the biggest pessimists in my camp anticipated. In just the last month, since Itamar Ben Gvir was appointed as presumptive national security minister, Bezalel Smotrich given the power to lord over the day-to-day lives of millions of Palestinians in the occupied territories, and Avi Maoz granted the power to implement his homophobic agenda in school curriculums, the shifts have been palpable for Jewish critics of the state and its occupation. The government has not yet been formed, but it is clear to everybody which way the wind is blowing.

Israeli police have since summoned Israel Frey, a left-wing Haredi journalist, for interrogation over a tweet praising a Palestinian who sought security forces, rather than civilians, for a planned attack (Frey has thus far refused to appear before the police). Israeli soldiers attacked and threatened leftists, some of them journalists, during a tour in occupied Hebron (a routine event for Palestinians in the city). Right-wing activists managed to pressure the Pardes Hanna-Karkur Local Council to cancel a screening of my colleague Noam Sheizaf’s new film on the occupation due to his politics. And on Thursday, during a hearing by the Knesset’s Constitution, Law and Justice Committee, Likud MK Hanoch Milwidsky interrupted Breaking the Silence Executive Director Avner Gvaryahu to call him a “traitor” and an “informant” who should “be imprisoned.”

The path to this moment was paved long ago. While loud and unabashed, there have been relatively few Jewish left-wing dissidents in Israeli history who have challenged the Israeli regime — from conscientious objectors, to nuclear whistleblowers, to groups such as the Israeli Black Panthers and the smattering of other independent left-wing groups — while most have focused on reforming specific policies. Meanwhile, Israel has an increasingly right-wing public that has become accustomed to managing an endless military dictatorship over the West Bank and a lethal siege on Gaza, and has little patience for anyone who criticizes it, or even speaks about it openly. The political right, from former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett — the hero of the “government of change” — to Smotrich and Ben Gvir, believe in forcing Palestinians to kneel before Israel (lest we forget that Bennett’s government dissolved over his coalition’s failure to re-authorize separate West Bank legal systems for Palestinians and Israeli Jews).

(From right) Members of Knesset Bezalel Smotrich, Itamar Ben Gvir, Dudi Amsalem, and Ofir Sofer seen during a vote for the new Knesset speaker, Jerusalem, December 13, 2022. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)

(From right) Members of Knesset Bezalel Smotrich, Itamar Ben Gvir, Dudi Amsalem, and Ofir Sofer seen during a vote for the new Knesset speaker, Jerusalem, December 13, 2022. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)

Meanwhile, much of the Zionist left no longer has anything of value to say about the occupation, and very often closes ranks with its opponents on the right in attacking Palestinians and the radical left. In Jewish-Israeli society, this has left behind a shrinking cadre of left-wing Jewish activists who recognize that dismantling apartheid and colonialism is the only way to move toward a more just future for Palestinians and Israelis.

Into that vacuum left by the Zionist left swept far-right groups with connections to the Israeli government that have made it their duty to seek out those Jewish Israelis who refuse to toe the party line. A little less than a decade ago, these organizations were behind a chillingly concerted bottom-up effort to delegitimize anti-occupation groups such as Breaking the Silence, B’Tselem, Ta’ayush, and others because they refused to remain silent in the face of Israel’s human rights abuses. What seemed like a novel phenomenon in 2015 is now part of the playbook for every single aspiring right-wing politician. In this sense, the attacks of the last month are not new, but they carry a great deal of weight given the makeup of the new government.

Over the last few weeks, we have witnessed how, time and time again, it is Palestinians who are repeatedly on the front lines of Israel’s repression, most prominently in the story of Dr. Ahmad Mahajna, who is still fighting for his job after he was falsely accused of handing sweets to a 16-year-old Palestinian who carried out a stabbing attack and who was in his care at Hadassah Medical Center. For over a month, Mahajna was ceaselessly attacked by the media and far-right activists for his so-called support for “terrorism,” until enough people came forward to put an end to the witch hunt. If left-wing Israeli Jews are being transformed into dissidents, Palestinians are always one false move from being labeled enemies of the state, simply by their very existence.

Yet this transformation of Israeli leftists into dissidents is a reminder that no one is safe from Ben Gvir, Smotrich, and Maoz’s attempts to suss out the “wrong kind of Jews.” After they come for Palestinians — particularly in Area C of the West Bank, so-called mixed cities, and the Naqab/Negev — they will come for the anti-apartheid activists. After that, it could be anyone who resists the religious coercion of the agents of Jewish theocracy.

Jewish dissidents-to-be need to know the path will be fraught and often dangerous. Some of us will inevitably leave (plenty already have), while others, particularly those without anywhere to go, will either stay and fight alongside Palestinians, asylum seekers, the LGBTQ community, and any other group this government comes after, or step away from activism altogether. Those looking from the outside at what is transpiring on the ground at lightning speed need to know that we are only at the very beginning.

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Rise of Israel’s far right puts focus back on the West Bank occupation

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The Israeli-controlled checkpoint in Hebron (Bab al Zawiyah) divides Palestinians in their city. A new weapon placed on the side of checkpoint (upper right) was installed before recent Israeli elections. It can remotely shoot live ammunition as well as other special “crowd control” munitions. (Tanya Habjouqa/NOOR for The Washington Post)
The Israeli-controlled checkpoint in Hebron (Bab al Zawiyah) divides Palestinians in their city. (Tanya Habjouqa/NOOR for The Washington Post)


A new weapon on the right side of the checkpoint can remotely shoot live ammunition and special “crowd control” munitions. (Tanya Habjouqa/NOOR for The Washington Post)

Shira Rubin, The Washington Post, December 10, 2022

HEBRON, West Bank — Last month, as tens of thousands of right-wing Jewish pilgrims paraded through Hebron’s old city under the protection of the Israeli army, 18-year-old Aisha Alazza ventured onto her balcony to catch a glimpse. As she sipped coffee and watched the march spiral into violence, a gang of Israeli men approached from across the road, shouting “Whore!” at her in Arabic and throwing stones. She was struck in the face.

Since Palestinian cars are banned from this neighborhood, an ambulance was out of the question. Instead, Alazza’s four sisters took her inside, applied ice and oils to the swelling wound and waited for the men to go away.

Alazza knows she will see them again — after all, they are her neighbors. They are also directly linked to members of Religious Zionism, the once-fringe, far-right political bloc that has championed asserting Israeli sovereignty in the West Bank and will be the second largest force in the new Israeli government.


Aisha Alazza, 18, in her garden. (Tanya Habjouqa/NOOR for The Washington Post)

Even before Religious Zionism assumes office — taking on influential cabinet portfolios that will give them unprecedented control over this contested territory — their promises to set the stage for annexation are exacerbating the daily dangers and indignities of life in the occupied West Bank, residents say. Many warn that Hebron’s bloody, biblically tinged conflict, between its 800 hard line Israeli settlers and its 200,000 Palestinians, is a test case for the future of relations between the two peoples under the next government.

Some of the faces in incoming Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s new administration are familiar ones to Hebron. Both Itamar Ben Gvir and Orit Strook are residents of the nearby hard line settlement of Kiryat Arba and have harassed and assaulted Palestinians for decades.

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I’d like to you to meet Mahmoud and Emily, a Palestinian and foreigner couple who are thinking about taking the next big step in their relationship together.

Watch “Love Under Occupation,” a 2-minute short film by Mondoweiss.

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No relationships were harmed in the making of this video. But they will be soon.

While Mahmoud and Emily are a fictional couple, they represent real couples who will now be required to report their relationship to Israel, in an extremely invasive, oppressive process.

Under new Israeli discriminatory restrictions that went into effect in October, foreigners romantically involved with Palestinian people must declare their relationship to the occupying Israeli government as part of their permit or permit renewal application to visit or stay in the West Bank.

These Israeli restrictions on foreign entry into the West Bank threaten to separate Palestinian families, and isolate Palestinian society from the outside world.

The same laws do not apply to foreign nationals who are in a relationship with Jewish Israelis. Another clear example of anti-Palestinian discrimination under Israel’s apartheid system.

Learn how these Israeli apartheid regulations impact Palestinian people, their partners, and their families on our “Love Under Occupation” educational resources page.

WATCH THE FILM

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