But maybe the West Bank residents will still be governed by more modern secular martial law, as has been the case since 1967.
Sunday, November 30, 2014
It's official: Israel now a theocracy
The new upgrade that has been made to the state of Israel's Basic Law (which functions in lieu of a constitution) says:“Jewish tradition” and “the prophets of Israel,” will be the primary source of legal and judicial authority. Saudi Arabia and Iran have the Koran, now the 20% of Palestinian Israeli citizens and the 99% of West Bank dwellers who are Palestinians are officially ruled over by Jewish Theocratic law.
But maybe the West Bank residents will still be governed by more modern secular martial law, as has been the case since 1967.
But maybe the West Bank residents will still be governed by more modern secular martial law, as has been the case since 1967.
Israeli Palestinians now "officially" have no rights
Jonathan Cook
November 26, 2014
Middle East Eye
Last Sunday, Israel passed the Jewish State Bill, which according to human rights activists “upgrades discrimination.” Arabic, spoken by Palestinians, a fifth of the population, will no longer be an official language, and “Jewish tradition” and “the prophets of Israel,” will be the primary source of legal and judicial authority. It defines Israel as belonging to Jews around the world rather than to its citizens, which includes 1.5 million Palestinians.
Jamal Zahalka, was one of two Palestinian members of the Israeli Knesset ousted Monday for lambasting the proposed Jewish State Law., El H1N5 (from ouiquipaidia),
There could hardly have been a more fitting piece of political theatre this week as Palestinian legislators in the Israeli Parliament criticised a controversial new bill defining Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people.
The proposed legislation, which was approved by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government on Sunday, is expected to get its first reading in the parliament, or Knesset, next week.
It is designed to demote Arabic - spoken by the fifth of the population who belong to the country’s Palestinian minority - from its current status as an official language, and makes “Jewish tradition” and “the prophets of Israel” a primary source of legal and judicial authority.
More specifically, it formally defines Israel as belonging to Jews around the world rather than to its citizens, which includes 1.5 million Palestinians.
Critics, including the Israeli President, Reuven Rivlin, and the government’s chief legal adviser, Yehuda Weinstein, have warned that the legislation will undermine democratic safeguards protecting the rights of Israel’s Palestinian citizens.
In explaining the need for the bill, Netanyahu told his ministers it was important that “there are national rights only for the Jewish people – a flag, anthem, the right of every Jew to immigrate to Israel and other national symbols”.
In a raucous parliamentary debate on Monday, two Palestinian members of the Knesset were ousted from the chamber by Deputy Speaker, Moshe Feiglin, as they lambasted the legislation.
One of them, Jamal Zahalka, had tried to quote from Hannah Arendt, a Holocaust survivor and philosopher, who had foreseen that a Jewish state would be incapable of offering its Palestinian minority proper rights or citizenship.
When Feiglin, a far-right member of Netanyahu’s Likud party, raised doubts about the source material, Zahalka observed that Arendt was the “opposite” of Feiglin, whom he called a “fascist.” On Feiglin’s orders, Zahalka was summarily ejected by ushers.
“As I was being escorted out, I called to Feiglin that he had the honour of being the first one to put the Jewish nation-state law into practice,” Zahalka told Middle East Eye.
Clashing worldviews
The Knesset clash was a graphic illustration of the opposing worldviews at the heart of the struggle over Netanyahu’s proposed Basic Law on Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people.
Few human rights activists doubt that the new legislation, if passed, will severely harm the prospects for Israel’s Palestinian minority of ever living in peace or equality with their Jewish compatriots. In the words of Menachem Klein, a professor of politics at Bar Ilan University in Tel Aviv, the bill “upgrades discrimination.”
In protest, hundreds of Palestinian citizens changed their Facebook profile photos this week to one stamped “Second-class citizen."
The law also risks sabotaging any hopes of reaching a peace agreement to resolve the decades-old regional conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.
“This bill means that a right of return [for Palestinian refugees from the 1948 war] has been ruled as out of bounds by Netanyahu and the right wing before any negotiations take place on the matter,” said Zahalka. “Instead, it becomes the nation-state of Jews around the world. The state belongs to a Jew in Brooklyn more than a Palestinian citizen in Nazareth.”
The significance of the proposed nation-state law lies more in its political than legal ramifications – a fact that has been widely misunderstood by Israeli and international observers.
Most commentators have suggested Netanyahu’s legislation will endanger equality between the Jewish majority and Israel’s 1.5 million-strong Palestinian minority, downgrading the latter’s status to second-class citizens.
Echoing that view, the US State Department urged Israel “to stick to its democratic principles," adding: "Israel is a Jewish and democratic state and all its citizens should enjoy equal rights.”
The common assumption is that, aside from the occupation, Israel is a normal, Western-style democracy that is now under threat from Netanyahu’s bill. However, nothing could be further from the truth, according to Saleh Mohsen, a lawyer at Adalah, a legal human rights organisation representing Israel’s Palestinian minority.
“There is no principle of equality in Israeli law, and Netanyahu’s proposed law will do nothing to change that,” he told MEE. “Legally, it simply consolidates the existing discrimination, making it even harder for us to challenge and try to reverse the many already discriminatory laws in Israel.”
Worse than inequality
Israel lacks a constitution but its declaration of independence and several of its foundational laws - called Basic Laws - are already premised on the idea that Israel is a Jewish state.
Such laws, as well as countless administrative practices, privilege the rights of the Jewish majority over the country’s Palestinian minority - most clearly in the Law of Return, effectively a citizenship law for the Jewish population and one that restricts immigration to Jews only. (Palestinians gets their citizenship from a separate and inferior law, the Citizenship Law of 1952.)
“The problem is already worse than simply a matter of inequality,” said Sawsan Zaher, another Adalah lawyer. “Because Israel defines itself as a Jewish state, the Palestinian minority is assumed from the outset to be a security threat, or even an enemy.”
In practice, only Jewish citizens enjoy national rights, with Palestinian citizens solely able to claim inferior individual rights. Adalah has compiled a database documenting more than 55 laws that explicitly confer on Jewish citizens’ superior legal rights based on their national belonging.
Even in the parliament, the supposed cradle of Israeli democracy, where the ruckus between Feiglin and Zahalka took place, no Palestinian party has ever been invited to join one of the many complex coalitions that have ruled Israel. The platforms of the Palestinian parties have also been tightly constrained by the requirement to recognise Israel as a “Jewish and democratic state,” added Mohsen.
The paradox, observed Aeyal Gross, a law professor at Tel Aviv University, is that Netanyahu’s bill would settle the inherent tension in these two concepts by resolving the difficulty in favour of Israel being Jewish.
It “reinforces [Israel’s] status as an ethnocracy, not a democracy,” he added.
Fight for right-wing camp
So why are Netanyahu and his right-wing coalition partners so keen to pass this law now, and what do they hope to achieve by it?
Part of the reason is related to an internal political wrangle between the Israeli centre and right over who best represents the Israeli Jewish public’s interests and how Israel presents itself to the outside world.
Naftali Bennett, a settler leader and the economics minister, recently used a commentary in the New York Times to argue that Israel should formally end the peace process and annex the entire West Bank.
Netanyahu has found himself being increasingly outmanoeuvred by political challengers on his right as his coalition wobbles, threatening a general election, said Bar Ilan University’s Klein. “He needs to show he is the true leader of the right-wing camp.”
In advancing the Jewish nation-state bill, Netanyahu has usefully put clear water between himself and the centrists in his cabinet, Yair Lapid and Tzipi Livni, both of whom have publicly opposed the measure.
He is also making good on the hard line he adopted during the peace negotiations that collapsed in the spring. During the talks, Netanyahu stirred controversy by demanding that the recognition of Israel as a Jewish state by Mahmoud Abbas and his Palestinian Authority become a key condition for an agreement.
Zahalka pointed out that Netanyahu had faced much criticism domestically: “There were those who said ‘How can we ask the world to recognise us as a Jewish state, when we ourselves aren’t clear what we mean by a Jewish state?’
“This helps to silence such critics,” Zahalka added.
Implications of disloyalty
In addition, Netanyahu appears to have adopted a political strategy of intentionally aggravating relations between the state and the Palestinian minority, in part, it seems, to position himself as the true champion of an Israeli public moving ever further to the right.
According to Jafar Farah, director of Mossawa – the Advocacy Centre for Arab Citizens in Israel - Netanyahu’s bill is “aimed at increasing the tension between Jews and Arabs.”
Shortly before his ministers voted to approve the measure, Netanyahu suggested that it was needed because two areas of Israel with large Palestinian populations posed a threat to the state. “There are some who wish to form autonomies in the Galilee or Negev and thus reject our nationality,” Netanyahu said.
The implication of disloyalty echoed inflammatory comments the prime minister made earlier this month in the wake of violent protests that followed the screening of a video showing police shooting dead a Palestinian youth in Israel as he fled.
Netanyahu suggested then that the protesters should be stripped of their citizenship and “move to the Palestinian Authority or to Gaza … Israel will not put any obstacles in your way.”
Further rationale for the law is a perception on the right that legal challenges from human rights groups like Adalah over the past two decades have threatened to gradually reverse the achievements of Zionism and erode the founding principles of the Jewish state.
The state’s Achilles’ heel – on this reading – is the country’s Supreme Court, the highest judicial body, which the right wing views as a bastion of liberalism and judicial activism.
Yariv Levin, chairman of the current ruling coalition and one of the drafters of the nation-state legislation Netanyahu has adopted, justified the bill on the grounds it would “return Israel to its Zionist roots, after years of ongoing damage done by the justice system.”
Crisis of Zionism
Yoram Hazony, head of the Herzl Institute, a Jerusalem-based research centre guided by traditional Zionist thinking, identified in a recent blog post the moment of crisis for Zionism: a hearing before the Supreme Court in 2000.
In that case, the Kaadan family appealed against its rejection from Katzir, one of the hundreds of Jews-only communities in Israel. The Kaadans had been barred by an admissions committee, whose chief function since Israel’s founding has been to block Palestinians from gaining access to most of the habitable land in Israel.
Although the court spent years trying to avoid making a clear-cut ruling, its hesitation provoked great concern on the right that the judges might eventually overturn one of Zionism’s core principles: “Judaisation” of the land in Israel. So fearful of this was Netanyahu’s government that it passed a law in 2011 giving a statutory basis to the admissions committees.
In Hazony’s words, the new ‘Jewish State’ bill’s purpose is “to re-establish the previous status quo on issues of Jewish national self-determination.”
A related concern on the right is the Supreme Court’s interpretation of earlier legislation – specifically The Basic Law on Human Dignity and Liberty, passed in 1992 - as implying a right to “equality.” The court has argued, even though equality is not mentioned in the law, that it is a precondition of human dignity.
Despite the implication, however, Zaher said that in practice the Supreme Court has been loath to use the principle of equality implied in the 1992 Basic Law to overturn the structural discrimination against Palestinian citizens.
She noted that when the court heard a petition in September against the Admissions Committee Law, it narrowly upheld the legislation, arguing that the court did not have the resources to investigate “hypothetical and theoretical claims.”
“That was after the admissions committees had been operating for decades, ensuring that Arab citizens are excluded from hundreds of communities across Israel,” she said.
Enemy agents
According to Klein, Netanyahu’s need to strengthen the discriminatory basis of legislation, giving it a constitutional status, has a more fundamental motivation related to Israel’s wider conflict with the Palestinians.
He pointed out that, in rejecting any partition of the territory of ‘Greater Israel’ which includes the occupied territories, Netanyahu and the right faced a demographic challenge. Half the population under their rule would be non-Jews.
“Palestinian citizens are part of that 50 percent. They support the creation of a Palestinian state, making them in Netanyahu’s eyes part of the enemy camp. They put the identity of an enlarged state at risk.”
He added: “This bill puts ethnicity above citizenship, and is one tool to circumvent this threat. It means anyone who identifies with the Palestinians is a traitor. That is why Netanyahu tells Palestinian citizens to move to the occupied territories. Because in his view most of them are enemy agents.”
Haaretz warned this week that, if Netanyahu’s measure passed, it would remove Israel “from the community of democratic nations, and give it a place of honour instead beside those dark regimes in which minorities are persecuted.”
The reality, however, may be somewhat different. As Palestinian lawyers and human rights groups in Israel explain, Israel has long dwelt among such dark regimes. Netanyahu’s bill simply helps to shine a light on that fact.
[Jonathan Cook, is a British journalist based in Nazareth since 2001. He is the the author of three books on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and a past winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His website and blog can be found at: www.jonathan-cook.net]
Multiculturalism? Not for the Jewish-only state: taking air at the Arabic language
from RT
Arabic Language at Heart of Israeli 'Nation State' Bill Debate
Nov 25 2014 / 10:42 pm
The US has already slammed the whole idea of the Israeli nation-state law. (RT)
Arabic could be stripped of Israel's official second language status if a 'tougher' version of the controversial nation-state bill is passed. The language is already subject to discrimination.
Examples of Arabic being unwelcome in Israel are plenty, according to Dadi Komem, director of education programs at the Abraham Fund Initiatives, an NGO promoting peaceful coexistence between Israelis and Palestinians.
"We see more and more working places for instance that ask their employees not to speak Arabic in front of customers, or not to speak Arabic at all, or in shopping malls," Komem told RT. "Sometimes in the Knesset itself we hear Knesset members speaking against using Arabic in the Knesset."
Eliminating the status of Arabic as an official language is part of a nation-state law, proposed by a right-wing member of the Knesset, Zeev Elkin. If it's passed, Arabic could be downgraded to a language with a "special status".
The bill approved by the Israeli government on Sunday included Elkin's tough wording.
To become law the bill will have to be passed by the Knesset. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is drafting a "softened" version of the law to take to the parliament. In it, the current status of the Arabic language will likely not be challenged.
It's not yet clear which version of the law - the tougher or the softer one - is going to be voted on by the Knesset.
Spearheading the campaign for the tougher version to be passed is parliamentarian Shimon Ohayon, who is also member of the Knesset education committee.
"It is a declaration," Ohayon told RT. "It has meaning on a cultural and national level. It sends a message to the Arab residents - that they live in the state of Israel which is the state of the Jewish people."
The US has already slammed the whole idea of the Israeli nation-state law.
"Israel is a Jewish and democratic state and all its citizens should enjoy equal rights. We expect Israel to stick to its democratic principles," the State Department said.
The author of the controversial bill's extreme version, Zeev Elkin, is not impressed.
"We can keep the foundations of democracy even without the help of the partner over the ocean," he said, according to Yisrael Hayom, as cited by Haaretz.
Human rights advocates believe that even a softer version of the bill is too much.
"The government's support for both these proposed laws conveys a negative message to Arab citizens in Israel regarding their affinity to the State," the Abraham Fund Initiatives said in a statement.
Wahiba Ziad, who teaches Arabic in a Jewish elementary school in Nazareth, hopes the language spoken by a fifth of Israel's citizens will not lose its current status.
"First of all, it's a proposal, the proposal might be approved and it might not be approved, but if - god forbid - it is, I think it might have a bad impact," Ziad told RT.
Tensions between Israelis and Palestinians have been exceptionally high lately, triggered by disrupted access for the Arabs to a landmark place of worship, the Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem.
The last several weeks have seen attacks launched by both sides almost every day and many wondering if the current stand-off could be described as the "Third Intifada".
Five people have been killed and 7 wounded in one of the bloodiest attacks a week ago, when two assailants attacked synagogue worshipers with knives, axes and a pistol.
(RT.com)
Arabic Language at Heart of Israeli 'Nation State' Bill Debate
Nov 25 2014 / 10:42 pm
The US has already slammed the whole idea of the Israeli nation-state law. (RT)
Arabic could be stripped of Israel's official second language status if a 'tougher' version of the controversial nation-state bill is passed. The language is already subject to discrimination.
Examples of Arabic being unwelcome in Israel are plenty, according to Dadi Komem, director of education programs at the Abraham Fund Initiatives, an NGO promoting peaceful coexistence between Israelis and Palestinians.
"We see more and more working places for instance that ask their employees not to speak Arabic in front of customers, or not to speak Arabic at all, or in shopping malls," Komem told RT. "Sometimes in the Knesset itself we hear Knesset members speaking against using Arabic in the Knesset."
Eliminating the status of Arabic as an official language is part of a nation-state law, proposed by a right-wing member of the Knesset, Zeev Elkin. If it's passed, Arabic could be downgraded to a language with a "special status".
The bill approved by the Israeli government on Sunday included Elkin's tough wording.
To become law the bill will have to be passed by the Knesset. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is drafting a "softened" version of the law to take to the parliament. In it, the current status of the Arabic language will likely not be challenged.
It's not yet clear which version of the law - the tougher or the softer one - is going to be voted on by the Knesset.
Spearheading the campaign for the tougher version to be passed is parliamentarian Shimon Ohayon, who is also member of the Knesset education committee.
"It is a declaration," Ohayon told RT. "It has meaning on a cultural and national level. It sends a message to the Arab residents - that they live in the state of Israel which is the state of the Jewish people."
The US has already slammed the whole idea of the Israeli nation-state law.
"Israel is a Jewish and democratic state and all its citizens should enjoy equal rights. We expect Israel to stick to its democratic principles," the State Department said.
The author of the controversial bill's extreme version, Zeev Elkin, is not impressed.
"We can keep the foundations of democracy even without the help of the partner over the ocean," he said, according to Yisrael Hayom, as cited by Haaretz.
Human rights advocates believe that even a softer version of the bill is too much.
"The government's support for both these proposed laws conveys a negative message to Arab citizens in Israel regarding their affinity to the State," the Abraham Fund Initiatives said in a statement.
Wahiba Ziad, who teaches Arabic in a Jewish elementary school in Nazareth, hopes the language spoken by a fifth of Israel's citizens will not lose its current status.
"First of all, it's a proposal, the proposal might be approved and it might not be approved, but if - god forbid - it is, I think it might have a bad impact," Ziad told RT.
Tensions between Israelis and Palestinians have been exceptionally high lately, triggered by disrupted access for the Arabs to a landmark place of worship, the Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem.
The last several weeks have seen attacks launched by both sides almost every day and many wondering if the current stand-off could be described as the "Third Intifada".
Five people have been killed and 7 wounded in one of the bloodiest attacks a week ago, when two assailants attacked synagogue worshipers with knives, axes and a pistol.
(RT.com)
Friday, November 28, 2014
“Eternal, Undivided Jewish Capital”? A Brief History of Jerusalem
from Counterpunch
by GARY LEUPP
The most recent Zionist reiterations of the claim to “eternal” Jewish ownership of East Jerusalem—as part of an “undivided, eternal capital of Israel” as specified by a “Basic Law” passed by the Israeli Knesset in 1980—make me want to review the Bible tales about Israel and specifically the city of Jerusalem.
I find those stories of more than mere literary and religious interest; they carry profound contemporary political meanings. And having first encountered them as a child, and having sincerely believed them (as I was taught to do at the time), they still retain for me a childlike charm. I revisit them regularly.
So here goes. Our story begins with the “call of Abraham” (originally Abram), a key figure not only in Judaism but also in Christianity and Islam. He hails from the land of “Ur of the Chaldeans”—somewhere in what’s now Iraq. In around the year 2000 (if we follow the rough biblical chronology), God (Yahweh, or “Jehovah” in the King James Bible) instructs him to leave Ur. The text suggests that the communication between Yahweh and Abraham was verbal.
“Now the Lord said to Abram: ‘Go from your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you’ (Genesis 12:1).” (By the way, this command from God follows the death of Abram’s father Terah, whom the Bible tells us had lived to the ripe old age of 205.)
At age 75, Abraham leaves Ur with his wife Sarai (later Sarah) for a place called Haran in what is now Syria, where he acquires possessions (including “persons”) before God leads him on into Canaan. There were at that time “Canaanites” in the land (Genesis 6:6-7), but their presence notwithstanding, God promises to give Canaan to Abraham’s offspring. (This is the inception of the “Chosen People” and “Promised Land” concepts in the Hebrew Scriptures, so fraught with ramifications for world history.)
When famine strikes the land, Abram leaves for Egypt for a time, but then returns to the land of Canaan, which God again tells him will be his, and that of his descendants forever (Genesis 13:14-16; 15:8).
Sarah has an Egyptian handmaiden, Hagar, by whom Abraham (whom apparently enjoys wide license in these matters) sires a child, called Ishmael. Thereafter (when Abraham is 99) Sarah becomes miraculously pregnant and gives birth to Isaac. (The postmenopausal Sarah understandably finds the whole situation quite amusing; see Genesis 18:11-15). After giving birth to Isaac, Sarah requests that her rival Hagar be cast out into the desert along with her little boy Ishmael.
Abraham after some hesitation does indeed expel them into the wilderness of Beersheba, God having assured him that, since Ishmael is his son, he will make of him “a great nation” too. (Thus Arabs have traditionally claimed descent from this figure, who appears in the Qur’an as Ismail, a prophet and ancestor of the Prophet Muhammad.)
When Sarah dies, Abraham purchases from the local people (Hittites) what is now termed the “Tomb of the Patriarchs” at Hebron. He thus acquires the right to govern the area (Genesis 23:1-16), and establishes Isaac as his heir. (Isaac later marries a kinswoman and his inbred descendants inherit Abraham’s covenant with God.)
(I will omit the episodes in which God destroys Sodom and Gomorrah and turns Abraham’s nephew’s wife into a pillar of salt [Genesis 19:1-24] and the one in which he asks Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac alive as a burnt offering, sparing him at just the last minute [Genesis 22:14]. These tales while extremely interesting aren’t necessarily relevant to the topic at hand.)
Anyway, Isaac has twin sons, Esau and Jacob. The latter, who cunningly cheats Esau out of his birthright (Genesis 27:18-29), is later renamed “Israel” by God. He has 12 sons by four wives, including the famous Joseph, whom Jacob/Israel favors over the others. (Recall the story of the “coat of many colors” in Genesis 37:3-4). Jealous, the brothers sell Joseph into slavery in Egypt (Genesis 37:19-28), where after various trials and tribulations be becomes a powerful official esteemed by the pharaoh himself. Indeed, due to his brilliance, he becomes “governor of the whole land of Egypt” (Genesis 41:43).
During a drought in Canaan, Israel and his others sons come to Egypt to purchase grain. Joseph receives them (probably, you’d think, still annoyed with them for selling him into slavery), initially concealing his identity. He finally reveals himself, and forgives his brothers, who settle in Egypt where their descendants thrive. Referred to as “Hebrews” or “Israelites,” they become a significant, affluent minority, but are eventually enslaved due to a pharaoh’s allegation that “the Israelite people are more numerous and more powerful than we” (Exodus 1:14).
One year the pharaoh orders that all newborn Israelite boys be killed; the mother of the infant Moses hides him and he’s eventually adopted by an Egyptian princess. Raised as an Egyptian nobleman, he eventually learns of his Hebrew parentage. He flees to the land of Midian on the Arabian Peninsula, and encounters the “angel of the Lord” in the form of a burning bush (Exodus 3:2). Through the angel, God tells him to lead his people out of slavery. Moses does so, famously demanding of the pharaoh, “Let my people go” (Exodus 8:1).
When the pharaoh refuses, God sends plagues and pestilences on the Egyptians; after many such miracles, the Egyptian ruler relents and allows the Hebrews to leave. But as the former slaves approach the Red Sea, the pharaoh sends his troops after them. God causes the sea to part; Moses leads his people through it on dry land, and the pursuing Egyptians are drowned as the waters gush back over them (Exodus 14:41-43) The Israelites proceed into the Sinai, where God causes them to wander around for 40 years (Numbers 32:13).
(This long peregrination seems odd, since the Sinai is a relatively small—23,000 sq. mile—triangular peninsula, and Joseph’s brothers had apparently crossed it rather quickly. Today it’s a three-hour drive from Egypt to Israel across Sinai’s Mediterranean coast. But I digress.) During this period of confusion, including a lapse into idol-worship, God appears to Moses on Mt. Sinai. There he gives him the Ten Commandments and the massive body of religious law (the model for the Muslim Sharia) that one finds in the Old Testament, especially the books of Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy.
Jerusalem Conquered (as the Sun Stands Still)
Sometime around 1200, then, Joshua leads the Hebrews into the land of Canaan, now inhabited by a welter of peoples including Amorites, Jebusites, Philistines, Edomites, Perizzites, Hittites etc. God instructs Joshua to exterminate almost all of them. (See for example Joshua 8:1-25.) The conquest is achieved through various miraculous events, such as the parting of the River Jordan (Joshua 3:14-16) and the Battle of Jericho, during which the city’s walls fell when the Hebrews blow their trumpets. Afterwards on God’s command the victors slaughter every man, woman and child in the city (Joshua 6:21).
In the Battle of Gibeon Joshua defeats the “king of Jerusalem” (Joshua 10:5). This is the first appearance of Jerusalem in the biblical narrative. In this decisive engagement that brings Jerusalem under Hebrew control, Joshua asks God to cause the sun to stand still, so that the fighting might be concluded in daylight. God indeed makes the sun and moon remain stationary for as long as it takes for the victory (Joshua 10:12).
(I can’t help mentioning here that Thomas Jefferson, in a famous letter to his nephew Peter Carr in 1787, mentioned this passage. He noted that “millions believe it. On the other hand you are astronomer enough to know how contrary it is to the law of nature that a body revolving on its axis as the earth does, should have stopped…” He advocated a skeptical approach to scripture and urged the seventeen-year-old to “question with boldness even the existence of God.” But again I digress.)
To continue: having conquered the Promised Land, including the previously pagan city of Jerusalem, the Hebrews spend generations under the governance of “judges” such as Deborah, Gideon, Samson and Samuel. They then decide to appoint a king. (This is a controversial move, as 1 Samuel indicates, since some interpret it as an affront to God—and his direct rule over them via these divinely inspired judges, whom we might define as shamans).
But a man named Saul becomes king, governing according to the biblical chronology from around 1082 to 1010 BCE. His son-in-law, David succeeds him, governing first from Hebron, for seven years, then from Jerusalem for 43 years (2 Samuel 5:5). Under David’s son Solomon (who supposedly reigns ca. 970-931) the kingdom of Israel reaches its height and the great temple in Jerusalem is built. (This is referred to as the “First Temple” since it was later destroyed and then rebuilt.)
After Solomon’s reign, his domain splits into the two kingdoms of Israel and Judah. The northern kingdom, Israel, is attacked by the Assyrian Empire in 732 and again in 720, its population (according to the Bible) entirely dispersed. Ten (of the twelve) tribes of Israel are thereby “lost.” (This tale has produced numerous theories and outright bunk about “lost tribes of Israel” in Afghanistan, Myanmar, Ethiopia, Japan, the Americas and pretty much any place you can imagine.)
Judah, with its capital in Jerusalem, fares better: its king, Hezekiah, negotiates peace with the Assyrians. But Judah falls to the Neo-Babylonian Empire in 597. The conquerors destroy the First Temple, and deport much of the population, who spend decades in exile (“the Babylonian Captivity”). (During this period, the Judeans likely became exposed to Zoroastrian concepts such as heaven, an afterlife, and a messianic savior. What we now call “Judaism” was enriched by this cross-cultural encounter.)
Also during this time, someone composed Psalm 137, which begins by referring to how the exiles sat and wept “by the rivers of Babylon,” remembering Jerusalem. “If I forget you, Jerusalem, may my right hand wither!”
May my tongue remain stuck to my palate
if I do not keep you in mind,
if I do not count Jerusalem
the greatest of my joys.
The poem alludes to how the Edomites (supposedly descendents of Esau), allies of the Chaldeans (Babylonians), had urged the leveling of the Temple following the conquest of 597. It concludes:
a blessing on anyone
who treats you as you treated us
a blessing on anyone who seizes your babies
and shatters them against a rock!
Jerusalem had obviously by that time already become a very emotional issue.
Only at around this point do we actually arrive on relatively firm historical ground. The existence of King Hezekiah (r. ca. 715-686 BCE) is attested in non-Biblical (Assyrian) sources. The Bible depicts him as a king who established the worship of the one god (Yahweh) and banned the worship of pagan deities from the Temple (2 Chronicles, chapter 29-31).
Josiah, Hezekiah’s great-grandson and king of Judah from ca. 640 to ca. 610 BCE, is thought by many scholars to have codified the Hebrew scriptures (see 2 Chronicles 34:14-16). In any case, most Old Testament texts are thought to date from the seventh century at the earliest. Quite likely, Judaism itself, in something like its modern form, dates from this period.
So, note that the composition or compilation of these scriptures occurs about 1400 years after the (supposed) life of the patriarch Abraham, and around 600 years after the putative Exodus and conquest of Canaan. The oldest fragments in the Paleo-Hebrew alphabet itself only date from the tenth century BCE. There is some (thin) evidence for a “House of David” ca. 800 BCE, but very little evidence for a monarchy based in Jerusalem prior to that point. The archeological record suggests that Jerusalem was a pagan Phoenician Canaanite city for over a thousand years before Hebrews appeared. (The Canaanites fortified it with massive walls by around 1700 BCE.) And it is likely that the Hebrews themselves congealed from a mix of Semitic tribes with ancestral legends about their Egyptian, Arabian and Mesopotamian connections.
It seems (to me) that over centuries an emerging priestly class settled on a narrative that drew on Sumerian and later Mesopotamian myths (including the myth of the Great Flood), and segued into the familiar mythic genealogy of Abraham, and grand stories about a national experience of bondage in Egypt, miraculous exodus, parting of the Red Sea, and the heroic genocidal conquest of Canaan.
But as Rabbi David Wolpe of Sinai Temple in Los Angeles has gently explained, the idea that that there was a substantial Israelite presence in ancient Egypt—or that the Israelites threatened the Egyptian ruling class, or ever became enslaved, or departed en masse after a series of plagues and disasters—has no historical foundation.
Those who give credit to the Biblical account have no idea when the “Exodus” actually occurred; dates vary from the fifteenth to thirteenth centuries, and the pharaoh in power at the time cannot be identified. Egyptian records make no mention at all of these dramatic events.
The Israelite Joseph was never “governor of the whole of Egypt.” The Israelites never became “more powerful” than Egyptians in Egypt. There is no evidence that Israelite infant boys were ever mass-murdered by a pharaoh. This is all fiction.
Some Real, Actual History
Turning to some actual history: in 539 BCE the Persian king Cyrus, having conquered Babylonia, allowed the exiled Judeans to return home and to rebuild their temple. (Not all accepted the offer; many stayed and throve in their adopted country.) The land we can now call “Judea” fell under Persian rule (to 332 BCE) when Alexander the Great conquered it; it then remained under the Greeks to 167 BCE. There was a temple (the “Second Temple”) in Jerusalem, center of an evolving Jewish religion, but no independent “Jewish state” until the advent of the Hasmonean Kingdom that lasted a mere century (140-37 BCE), followed by the Herodian line. This dynasty accepted Roman over-lordship in 63 BCE and gave way to full Roman rule in 92 CE.
Meanwhile, huge Judean communities flourished from Mesopotamia (where perhaps a million Jews lived by 100 CE) to the Egyptian metropolis Alexandria (where maybe a quarter of the population was Judean at that time) to Cyrenaica (Libya) and beyond. There were around 7000 Judeans in the city of Rome at the time of Julius Caesar. There was apparently even a Judean community in Spain. When St. Paul (a Judean born in Tarsus, in what is now Turkey) undertakes his missionary journeys in the 40s and 50s CE, he visits synagogues in what is now northern Turkey and in Greece and possibly beyond. He dreams of visiting Spain (Romans 15:24). This is before the Diaspora. Judeans were already dispersed, in large part due to voluntary migration and trade, or previous deportations as were so common and affecting so many nationalities in the ancient world.
In Jerusalem itself there lived a very international crowd of Jews and non-Jews (“Gentiles”). According to the New Testament Book of Acts, there were in Jerusalem at the time of the Pentecost (immediately after Jesus’ death), Jews who were “Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asis, Phrygia and Pamphlyia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabs…” (Acts 2:8-11). Acts 8:26 mentions an Ethiopian on pilgrimage in Jerusalem. It was already a diverse, multicultural city at the time this text was written.
The First Jewish-Roman War (66-73 CE)—a massive Judean revolt against Roman rule—resulted in the destruction of the Second Temple, and the forced exile or enslavement of tens of thousands. It was a major diaspora—some see it as the Diaspora—but not yet a wholesale expulsion. The Kitos War (115-117) and Bar Kokhba Revolt (132) produced more expulsions. Judeans (including Christians, considered a sect of the Judeans’ religion) were banned from living in Jerusalem (which thereafter became a fully pagan city). Judeans became a minority in a Roman province with a highly diverse population of Syrians, Greeks, Romans and many others.
So to recap: Jerusalem was (maybe) the capital of a “Jewish” state—or at least tribal confederation—from ca. 1000 BCE to ca. 597 BCE. Thereafter, from 539 BCE, it was the site of the Second Temple to the disaster of 70 CE. For all but two centuries after the time of the Persian king Cyrus it was under Persian, Hellenistic, or Roman administrative control. Then it was under Byzantine, Arab, Egyptian, Ottoman and British control until 1948 when the western part was won by force by the Israelis.
Thus to call Jerusalem—at this point in history—the “eternal capital” of “Israel” or any sort of Jewish state is more than a stretch. It’s simply erroneous.
Post-Diaspora Jerusalem
Who were the people living in Jerusalem during these many centuries, following the Roman Diaspora? Surely by the fourth century CE, when Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire, many Judeans had embraced the new faith. That is, while ethnically Judean, they lost their identity as the “Chosen People,” the progeny of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, entitled by God to a Promised Land. They accepted St. Paul’s notion that in Christ “there is no longer Jew or Greek” (Galatians 3:28).
Jerusalem became a thoroughly Christian city, marked by such monuments as the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, built in the fourth century; the Greek Orthodox Church of St. John the Baptist, and the sixth century Church of St. Mary built by the emperor Justinian. Some of these Jewish Christians converted to Islam after the Arab conquest in the 630s. Quite likely, many modern Palestinian Arabs share more DNA with the ancient Judeans than do many European Jews.
After the Arab conquest Jerusalem became a quintessential Muslim city, indeed after Mecca and Medina the third most sacred city in the Islamic world. The magnificent al-Aqsa mosque, built on the Temple Mount in the eighth century and the third holiest Muslim site, is the most powerful symbol of the long period of Muslim rule over Jerusalem, which lasted over twelve centuries.
(It was interrupted by the mainly Frankish Christian Crusaders’ occupation of the city as part of their “Kingdom of Jerusalem” from 1099-1187, which Friedrich Engels considered “the most classic expression of the feudal order.” In this interval, as conflicting Frankish factions aligned with the Vatican, Armenians, the Holy Roman Empire and Byzantium made a huge mess of everything, the population of Jerusalem became once again mainly Christian. The gallant Saladin, a Muslim Kurd celebrated even in European literature, by William of Tyre [1130-1138)] as an unusually pious and honorable man, ended this interlude. He allowed the Crusaders a dignified retreat. He confirmed the Christians’ rights to visit Jerusalem on pilgrimage, restored the rights of the Greek Orthodox community that had been suppressed by the Roman Catholics, and received a message from the Byzantine emperor thanking him for his protection of Orthodox churches.)
During the Muslim period the rulers consistently protected Jewish and Christian holy sites in the city and generally allowed pilgrims of these faiths to visit Jerusalem. While European monarchs were encouraging anti-Jewish pogroms and expelling Jews, the Muslim world was by comparison religiously tolerant. The Ottoman Empire happily accepted Jews expelled from Ferdinand and Isabella’s Spain in 1492. Ottoman sultans positively encouraged Jews to settle throughout their empire.
The Palestinian Jewish population probably never really disappeared. According to the online Jewish Virtual Library, there were 5000 Jews in what is now the state of Israel in 1517, out of a population of about 300,000. An Ottoman taxation register of 1553 lists 1,958 Jews in the city of Jerusalem. In 1851, when the region was under Ottoman Turkish role, a census showed 13,000 Jews out of a total population of 327,000 (4%). Thereafter a wave of immigrants from Eastern Europe and Yemen (the First Aliyah) brought around 30,000 more. Jewish population rose to 47,000 out of 522,000 in 1895 (8%).
Thus even before Theodor Herzl initiated the modern Zionist movement in 1896, by publishing his book Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State), there was already a significant Jewish community in what had once been Judea. There had been a Jewish minority with recognized rights in Jerusalem for many centuries.
Jews Outside Judea (and the “Birthright” Issue)
And what was going on in the long interval, in the global history of Jewry, as Jews concluded their Passover Seders with the words, “Next Year in Jerusalem”?
It is widely believed that Jews dispersed in Europe and elsewhere during the Diaspora of the Roman period comprise a cohesive, identifiable population thrown out of their homeland by the oppressive Romans, doomed to roam the earth, harassed at every turn by bigoted religious majorities. Some Jewish and Christian theologians cite Deuteronomy 25:28, a passage in the Laws of Moses in which Yahweh states that his people do not obey his voice they will flee in all directions to “all the kingdoms of the world.” Thus the diasporas are viewed as God’s punishment on his people for their sins.
Many people who don’t necessarily accept such religious ideas assume that the Jewish people concentrated in Roman Judea were expelled suddenly, violently soon after the time of Christ, and then were widely scattered. But able to maintain their “pure” bloodline, dating back to Abraham and Isaac, and by avoiding intermarriage, and preserving their unique culture against all odds, they were able, after untold horrors, able to return home.
This concept of “returning,” one must observe, is quite special. My own ancestral homelands include Switzerland, Norway, Sweden, Germany, Ireland, Scotland and Ukraine. I might harbor some sentimental feelings about some of these places, and imagine that in visiting them I reconnect with my genetic history. But I don’t feel entitled—by anyone—to be in any of those places, or settle down in them. This concept of “return” is rather a religious concept. It ultimately rests on belief in God’s promise to Abraham.
There are of course atheistic Zionists. Many, in fact! One study puts atheists at 15% of the Israeli Jewish population, and agnostics at 37%. Their allegiance to, and justification for, the Jewish state is not based on belief in Bible stories. They instead espouse a secular spirit of nationalism, and perhaps the belief that only the establishment of modern Israel can guarantee the survival of the Jewish people in the face of globally rampant anti-Semitism, and prevent a second Holocaust. Still, belief in the Bible stories energizes the settlers’ projects, steers Israeli politics, and fires the crucial U.S. political support for Israel including its claims on Jerusalem.
Without a belief in a divine entitlement, how can one justify as a “return” to a land of people whose (possible) ancestors left it two thousand years ago?
It is one thing for a Palestinian in a Jordanian refugee camp, perhaps with land title documents, to insist on a right to return to his or her parents’ home village (even if it has been leveled as part of the Israelis’ effort to erase inconvenient history). It is another for a U.S. college student to visit Israel, all expenses paid, convinced that this is just his or her right in this life as a Jew.
But this is the concept behind the “not-for profit educational” project, “Birthright Israel,” which sponsors free ten-day visits to Israel by Jewish students in the U.S. and many other countries. It encourages them to immigrate and endeavors to persuade them that they indeed were born with the God-given right to “return” to the land promised to Abraham. (Quite a number of my own students have accepted the offer, and I can’t blame them. But some return appalled at what they’ve seen.)
In fact, of course, Jewish history is much more complicated than the “birthright” narrative suggests. The notion of a horrible eviction 2000 years ago, followed by centuries in painful exile, followed by a “return” (and reassertion of birthright) does not square with the facts.
Again— Jews were already widely dispersed as of the early first century CE, in both the Roman and Parthian empires. There were also likely Jewish merchants at that time in Ethiopia, southern Arabia, and India. (By the seventh century there were even Jews in China.) Some were born and raised outside of Judea; some were of part non-Jewish descent or married Gentiles. Meanwhile Gentiles not so infrequently converted to Judaism, strange though that might seem to some today, when Jewish religious authorities tend to discourage intermarriage and conversion.
Jews as of the time of St. Paul (as his epistles and the New Testament Book of Acts make clear) welcomed interested, sympathetic Gentiles into their midst, referred to as “God-fearers.” (See Acts 10:22, 13:16, 13:26, 13:43, etc.) These were allowed to attend synagogue services, and sometimes became converts (proselytes). They were valuable, since they could serve as liaisons between the synagogue community and surrounding society.
A Jew in the early first century CE, in Corinth (a great Greek city that Paul visited repeatedly to preach his version of the gospel) might have had no Middle Eastern blood at all. Quite likely he or she, as part of the Jewish community, would contribute some DNA to someone was in fact of Judean extraction. Thus that person’s descendants might say, “I’m a Jew, and my ethnic origins lie, in part, between the Mediterranean coast and the Jordan River.”
But I suspect that in the case of many self-identifying Jews, the DNA trail leads to Poland most readily, or to the region around the Black Sea, and that the links to ancient Judea are quite negligible. Between the seventh and tenth centuries the Khazars, a people of Central Asian origin—a Turkic people with no relationship to Semites—established an empire around the Black and Caspian seas, covering most of the Caucasus region. In the eighth century its ruling elite converted to Judaism. (They did not claim to be descended from Abraham, but positioned themselves as the progeny of the biblical Noah’s son Japheth.) They invited Jews from Byzantium (where they were intermittently persecuted) to trade and settle in their empire, and they freely intermarried with them.
The Khazar empire, beset by attacks from Kievan Rus (the first Russian state) and then the Mongols, collapsed by the early thirteenth century. Many of its Jewish subjects are thought to have fled west into what is now Poland. (Otherwise it is hard to understand why the Jewish population of that region expanded so dramatically in the Middle Ages.) A significant percentage of Ashkenazi Jews are likely to share Central Asian Turkic and Slavic blood. It’s likely that some have negligible DNA connections to anyone ever living in Palestine. If lineage determines “birthright” (not that I think it should!) they have no more right to settle in that region than I do.
The Modern Jewish Population in Jerusalem
But let’s return to the modern demographic history of Palestine. From the 1890s to 1918 the Jewish population in Palestine hovered around 8-9%. The surge came in the 1920s—an increase from 10 to 20%. Anti-Semitism in Poland was a factor (or, some contend, calculated alarmism and far-mongering by Zionist proponents of Palestine settlement), and exclusionary U.S. immigration laws. By this time Palestine had passed from Ottoman to British imperialist rule, and the British authorities influenced by powerful Jewish figures in England (such as Baron Walter Rothschild) were willing to facilitate immigration organized by the Zionist Federation of Great Britain and Ireland.
The Balfour Declaration of November 1917, authored by British Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour and addressed to Rothschild (as a representative of the British Jewish community) vaguely expressed the British government’s support of “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people…it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine…” This became internationally recognized as a British policy statement.
Between 1930 and 1940 the Jewish population in the British Mandate of Palestine doubled from 200,000 to 400,000. By 1940, 29% of the population of Palestine was Jewish. The figure was still around 30% when the state of Israel was established by force in 1948.
No credible historian will these days quarrel with the well-documented fact that as the Zionists created their future living-space that year, around 750,000 Palestinian Arabs fled their homes in fear for their lives. Palestinians call it al-Nakba, the Catastrophe. It was a clear, effective instance of ethnic cleansing. The UN General Assembly Resolution 194 (Dec. 11, 1948) recognized the “right of return” to their homes of those forced to flee at that time, and also the right of their descendants to do so. The Israeli government rejects this, pointing out (rationally enough) that such a return would alter the demographics and threaten the Jewish character of the state.
One can of course ask, Why should there be a specifically “Jewish state,” built on settlement, and the dispossession and ongoing suffering, oppression and occupation of non-Jews? What would be wrong with a secular, multi-ethnic, multi-cultural state?
But even as one raises that (forbidden) question—can’t you hear, rising in the background, the sound of the trumpets bringing down the walls of Jericho as Joshua’s troops slaughter all the inhabitants of the city? (Let me reference again Joshua 6:21.) And can’t you hear the sound of those Edomite babies’ heads smashing against the rocks, as referenced in Psalm 137?
After all—in the minds of many powerful people at least—God made Israel, and God justifies Israel, and however many non-Jews the Israelis kill (2,200 Palestinians in this year’s attack on Gaza, over 70% civilians, including 513 children—supposedly to avenge the deaths of three Israelis), the very godly U.S. Congress can be counted upon to produce a near-unanimous resolution re-confirming the “eternal friendship” between that Promised Land and this one.
Today, in the Israel of the 1967 borders, Jews constitute 75% of the total population, while Arabs comprise 21%. But when you look at what some Zionists call “Greater Israel” (including the occupied West Bank and the Golan Heights, plus the vast concentration camp which is Gaza), Jews are currently just 50%, and Arabs 47% of the population. The Palestinian population is growing at a more rapid rate than the Jewish. If there were to be a “single state solution” to the Israel-Palestine problem, the “Jewish state” would be doomed by demographics. (Palestinian women give birth on average to 2.6 children, Jewish Israeli women to 1.7. Immigration is down, and many Jewish Israelis are emigrating to safer, more affluent, more hospitable countries.)
In 1967 Israel seized the West Bank, including East Jerusalem. In the “united” city of Jerusalem, Jews are now around 62% of the population, Arabs around 45%. In the tensely occupied East, where the Israelis thumbing their noses at the world relentlessly build new, illegal Jewish-settler housing projects, the figures are about 43% (200,000 illegal settlers) versus 57%. The Zionists want to reduce the Palestinian majority. This year, 25% of new homes Israeli built in Jerusalem were constructed in the eastern, occupied portion of the city.
Some Jewish settlers now live in property in East Jerusalem confiscated from Palestinian Arabs, like the properties of the al-Hanoun and al-Ghawi families in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood. These are now occupied by Israeli Jews following a far-right driven Israeli Supreme Court decision condemned by the United Nations and (even) the U.S. State Department. There is no end of horror stories of Zionists armed with legal documents evicting people from East Jerusalem homes and tossing their belongings out onto the street.
The U.S. and most of the world have never recognized Jerusalem including the occupied east as the Israeli capital; they continue to accord Tel Aviv that status and maintain their diplomatic missions there. But in deference to the powerful Israel Lobby—and anyone who denies its intimidating, destructive power is just not paying attention—U.S. politicians routinely toe the Israeli line about the “united, eternal capital.”
The Israeli claim is simply illogical. It would make more sense to state that the ancient city has been intermittently, and at most, the capital of a Hebrew/Judean/Jewish state or dependency of some sort for at most 1100 years out of the last 4000, and a mainly pagan, Christian or Muslim city for the other 2900. (It was divided from 1948 to 1967, during which time—perhaps for the first time since the first century CE—the Jewish population in the western part came to exceed the combined non-Jewish populations.) In short, let us all acknowledge that Jerusalem has a complicated history.
U.S. Politicians and Biblical Mythology
While campaigning for the presidency in 2008, Barack Obama gave the (mandatory) talk to the American Israel Political Affairs Committee (AIPAC). In an address—probably authored by his senior advisor Rahm Emanuel who (as a dual U.S.-Israeli national) served in the Israeli Defense Forces in 1991, and whose father was born in Jerusalem—Obama declared his support for Jerusalem as “Israel’s undivided capital.”
It was a naked appeal for votes. His staff later clarified that Obama actually supported the U.S. State Department’s longstanding position that the status of Jerusalem was an issue to be decided through negotiations. (In other words, give him a break; he was just reading a script.) But then in 2012, the Democratic Party platform included the language, “Jerusalem is and will remain the capital of Israel… It should remain an undivided city.” Even though an obvious majority at the party convention voted this down in a clamorous voice-vote, it was hammered through. It was an extraordinary display of Israel Lobby impunity, stunning many delegates present.
How to explain this? How to explain this decision to ignore the universal recognition that Jerusalem is in fact divided? And how to explain the fact that, despite the longstanding position of the U.S. State Department (and practically every other foreign ministry everywhere) that the 1967 Israeli annexation of East Jerusalem was illegal and Jewish settlements there also illegal—and despite the universal understanding that a final peace accord between the Israelis and Palestinians hinges on East Jerusalem as capital of a Palestinian state—U.S. politicians vie with one another to endorse this concept of Jerusalem as the united, eternal capital of the Jewish state?
I don’t want to say it’s a religious decision. It’s a political decision, a mercenary decision. But it’s rooted in the indebtedness that both Democratic and Republican parties feel to the large section of the electorate that literally believes in the Bible stories. Such people truly believe that God gave the land of Israel to the Jews, and that the establishment of the modern state in 1948 came in fulfillment of biblical prophecy. Some Christian politicians are thus obliged to support Israel—and will frankly confess they do—on a specifically religious basis, just as they oppose abortion or gay marriage on the grounds of faith.
As Karl Marx (a German Jew and descendent of rabbis) famously put it, “religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.” The desire of the Christian to believe in the End Times, a triumphant return of Jesus, is at least as appealing as the attractions of crack or crystal meth. And Jerusalem is at the heart of his or her apocalyptic yearnings.
The Book of Revelation specifies that Jesus, when he returns, will appear in Jerusalem. Building on ambiguous prophesies in the Old Testament book of Ezekiel, it posits a “New Jerusalem” from which the Messiah will first preside over a very bloody punishment of sinners and then a long rule of heaven-on-earth. It is a beautiful, horrible vision that exercises an appeal on a certain sort of religious mind. The scenario posits Jewish control over Jerusalem prior to the Second Coming and the “Rapture.”
The bottom line: U.S. support for Israel—virtually unconditional, vowed by every politician allowed high office in this country—is rooted in a mythical-religious narrative.
Biblical Myth and Zionist Racism
It’s understandable that the myths retain their power. As Marx put it (referring to Greek mythology, although he might have been alluding to the Hebrew folklore): “A man cannot become a child again, or he becomes childish. But does he not find joy in the child’s naïvité, and must he himself not strive to reproduce its truth at a higher stage? …Why should not the historic childhood of humanity, its most beautiful unfolding, as a stage never to return, exercise an eternal charm?”
It is delightful to engage stories about awesome events in a distant past when people talked directly to gods, lived hundreds of years, and got pregnant in ways defying modern biological understanding. It’s moving to read about Jesus’ “triumphal” entry” into Jerusalem on donkey back, his meditations on the Mount of Olives and ascent into heaven from there (Acts 1:9).
Myths about Jerusalem have boundless appeal in this country. Jerusalem figures prominently in Negro spirituals, as in “I Want to Be Ready” (“to walk in Jerusalem, just like John”). But I especially love Joan Baez’s version of that 1970s Delaney and Bonnie song “Ghetto” that ends:
Well if there is such a thing as revolution
And there will be if we rise to the call
When we build—we build, we build, we build—a New Jerusalem
There won’t be no more ghetto—ghetto at all
No there won’t be no more ghetto—ghetto at all.
Like Bruce Springsteen’s deployment of the “Promised Land” trope, this usage dissociates the symbol from any real history. Jerusalem simply means, like the Obama campaign in 2008, “change and hope.” But here, in that period in the early seventies, it meant real change and hope. Actual revolution.
Unfortunately, when these colorful Bible stories motivate powerful people in this county—including irreligious, secularist politicians or policy-makers who don’t honestly even believe this stuff but need political and financial support from those who do—to support, at every turn, the Israelis versus the Palestinians they’ve displaced, abused, provoked and slaughtered (as though they’re trying to rival the genocidal fury of the mythical Joshua or Samson), one has to re-tell tell them as I’ve tried to do here. And hope that their charming irrationality—and the horrible danger of literal belief in them—is self-evident.
The Biblical Jerusalem storyline is a tall tale, currently in the service of Israeli brutality and impunity. The Zionist inclination to humiliate the indigenous Arab population is limitless, even extending to an insistence that all new applicants for Israeli citizenship pledge allegiance to the definition of the presently multinational, multicultural construct as a “Jewish state.” (This is basically a demand that all citizens of whatever nationality or religion accept any future measures to insure Jewish hegemony, regardless of demographic shifts. It is a deliberate humiliation of the would-be citizen, a demand for abject submission to an ethnocentric concept of the state.)
It is like U.S. immigration officials demanding that all immigrants into this country accept the definition of he U.S.A. as ultimately a “white Christian country” whatever its future evolving structure. Former Israeli Justice Minister and current Knesset member Tzipi Livni has condemned this new law, and some members of parliament have condemned it as “fascist.” But there’s a good chance it will pass.
From 1975 to 1991, the United Nations upheld Resolution 3379, declaring Zionism a form of racism. It passed by a vote of 72 to 35, with 32 abstentions. It was revoked in 1991, following the U.S. triumph against Iraq in the first Gulf War, and as the Soviet Union was falling apart. Geopolitically, the U.S. (temporarily) held all the cards. Through unprecedented arm-twisting and threats the U.S. forced the UN to revoke the resolution (111 to 25, with 13 abstentions.) The new resolution provided no explanation for itself; it just stated: “The General Assembly decides to revoke” the earlier, fairly lengthy and detailed, statement.
At this point in history, brute force and threats determine these things. And they powerfully shape what people believe about history. The brute force, ranging from the Israeli missiles deployed to kill Gaza children, or the U.S. drones used to kill Pakistanis, or the militarized cops who have descended on Ferguson, Missouri, are all in the service of capitalist imperialism. There is no way that the corporate media in this country in the service of that system—which provided such expert propaganda support in the build-up to the war on Iraq based on lies—is ever going to challenge the AIPAC talking-points on Israel. Belief in it, and the system in general, is just another indulgence in myth-based religious faith.
***
I have a colorful (green, red, black and white) Palestinian keffiyah with an image of the al-Quds mosque. As winter comes I will wear it around my neck, a statement to anyone who notices of my own minority opinion—in this “free” country that generally bars debate on such matters—that Jerusalem is surely not united, and not eternally “Jewish.” And that we need an intifada here, against the neocon-led, AIPAC-driven warmongers who tirelessly work to remold the Middle East, slaughtering hundreds of thousands in real life as mercilessly as any forces in biblical myth.
GARY LEUPP is Professor of History at Tufts University, and holds a secondary appointment in the Department of Religion. He is the author of Servants, Shophands and Laborers in in the Cities of Tokugawa Japan; Male Colors: The Construction of Homosexuality in Tokugawa Japan; and Interracial Intimacy in Japan: Western Men and Japanese Women, 1543-1900. He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Po
Thanksgiving: Celebrating the Genocide of Native Americans
NOVEMBER 26, 2014
from Counterpunch
by GILBERT MERCIER
The sad reality about the United States of America is that in a matter of a few hundreds years it managed to rewrite its own history into a mythological fantasy. The concepts of liberty, freedom and free enterprise in the “land of the free, home of the brave” are a mere spin. The US was founded and became prosperous based on two original sins: firstly, on the mass murder of Native Americans and theft of their land by European colonialists; secondly, on slavery. This grim reality is far removed from the fairytale version of a nation that views itself in its collective consciousness as a virtuous universal agent for good and progress. The most recent version of this mythology was expressed by Ronald Reagan when he said that “America is a shining city upon a hill whose beacon light guides freedom-loving people everywhere.”
In rewriting its own history about Thanksgiving, white America tells a Disney-like fairytale about the English pilgrims and their struggle to survive in a new and harsh environment. The pilgrims found help from the friendly and extremely generous Native-American tribe, the Wampanoag Indians, in 1621. Unfortunately for Native Americans, the European settlers’ gratitude was short-lived. By 1637, Massachusetts governor John Winthrop ordered the massacre of thousands of Pequot Indian men, women and children. This event marked the start of a Native-American genocide that would take slightly more than 200 years to complete, and of course to achieve its ultimate goal, which was to take the land from Native Americans and systematically plunder their resources. The genocide begun in 1637 marks the beginning of the conquest of the entire continent until most Native Americans were exterminated, a few were assimilated into white society, and the rest were put in reservations to dwindle and die.
When Christopher Columbus “discovered” the Americas in 1492, on his quest for gold and silver, the Native population, which he erroneously called Indians, numbered an estimated 15 million who lived north of current day Mexico. It was, by all considerations, a thriving civilization. Three hundred and fifty years later, the Native American population north of Mexico would be reduced to less than a million. This genocide was brought upon the Natives by systematic mass murder and also by disease, notably smallpox, spread by the European colonists.
Columbus and his successors proto-capitalist propensity for greed was foreign to Native Americans. They viewed the land as tribal collective ownership, not as a property that could be owned by individuals. “Columbus and his successors were not coming to an empty wilderness, but into a world which, in some places, was as densely populated as Europe, and where the culture was complex, where human relations were more egalitarian than in Europe, and where the relations between men, women, children and nature were more beautifully worked out than perhaps in any other places in the world.” wrote Howard Zinn in his masterful A People’s History of the United States.
In many ways, the US’ celebration of Thanksgiving is analogous to setting aside a day in Germany to celebrate the Holocaust. Thanksgiving is the American Holocaust. The original crimes of genocide and slavery are not limited to US early history but have found an extension in the policies of modern-day US. The systematic assault on other nations and cultures still goes on under various pretenses or outright lies. United States wars of empire are going on today more than ever before. These wars have left millions of people dead across the world in the course of American history, and they are still fought for the same reasons behind the Native American genocide and slavery: namely, to expand the wealth of the US elite.
Defenders of Thanksgiving will say that whatever the original murky meaning of the holiday, it has become a rare chance to spend time with family and show appreciation for what one has. For most Americans today, however, it is hard to be thankful. As matter of fact, unless you belong to the 2 percent who represent the US ruling class you should not be thankful at all. How can you be appreciative for what you have if you have lost your house to foreclosure, don’t have a job and can’t feed your family? How can you be appreciative if you are a homeless veteran? How can you be appreciative when you are poor or sick in a society without social justice? On this Thanksgiving day, rich celebrities and politicians will make a parody of what should be real charity by feeding countless poor and homeless. This will ease their conscience, at least for a while. Charity, however, should not be a substitute for social justice. Just to ruin some people’s appetites before they attack that golden turkey: keep in mind that today we are celebrating a genocide.
Gilbert Mercier is the Editor in Chief of News Junkie Post.
from Counterpunch
by GILBERT MERCIER
The sad reality about the United States of America is that in a matter of a few hundreds years it managed to rewrite its own history into a mythological fantasy. The concepts of liberty, freedom and free enterprise in the “land of the free, home of the brave” are a mere spin. The US was founded and became prosperous based on two original sins: firstly, on the mass murder of Native Americans and theft of their land by European colonialists; secondly, on slavery. This grim reality is far removed from the fairytale version of a nation that views itself in its collective consciousness as a virtuous universal agent for good and progress. The most recent version of this mythology was expressed by Ronald Reagan when he said that “America is a shining city upon a hill whose beacon light guides freedom-loving people everywhere.”
In rewriting its own history about Thanksgiving, white America tells a Disney-like fairytale about the English pilgrims and their struggle to survive in a new and harsh environment. The pilgrims found help from the friendly and extremely generous Native-American tribe, the Wampanoag Indians, in 1621. Unfortunately for Native Americans, the European settlers’ gratitude was short-lived. By 1637, Massachusetts governor John Winthrop ordered the massacre of thousands of Pequot Indian men, women and children. This event marked the start of a Native-American genocide that would take slightly more than 200 years to complete, and of course to achieve its ultimate goal, which was to take the land from Native Americans and systematically plunder their resources. The genocide begun in 1637 marks the beginning of the conquest of the entire continent until most Native Americans were exterminated, a few were assimilated into white society, and the rest were put in reservations to dwindle and die.
When Christopher Columbus “discovered” the Americas in 1492, on his quest for gold and silver, the Native population, which he erroneously called Indians, numbered an estimated 15 million who lived north of current day Mexico. It was, by all considerations, a thriving civilization. Three hundred and fifty years later, the Native American population north of Mexico would be reduced to less than a million. This genocide was brought upon the Natives by systematic mass murder and also by disease, notably smallpox, spread by the European colonists.
Columbus and his successors proto-capitalist propensity for greed was foreign to Native Americans. They viewed the land as tribal collective ownership, not as a property that could be owned by individuals. “Columbus and his successors were not coming to an empty wilderness, but into a world which, in some places, was as densely populated as Europe, and where the culture was complex, where human relations were more egalitarian than in Europe, and where the relations between men, women, children and nature were more beautifully worked out than perhaps in any other places in the world.” wrote Howard Zinn in his masterful A People’s History of the United States.
In many ways, the US’ celebration of Thanksgiving is analogous to setting aside a day in Germany to celebrate the Holocaust. Thanksgiving is the American Holocaust. The original crimes of genocide and slavery are not limited to US early history but have found an extension in the policies of modern-day US. The systematic assault on other nations and cultures still goes on under various pretenses or outright lies. United States wars of empire are going on today more than ever before. These wars have left millions of people dead across the world in the course of American history, and they are still fought for the same reasons behind the Native American genocide and slavery: namely, to expand the wealth of the US elite.
Defenders of Thanksgiving will say that whatever the original murky meaning of the holiday, it has become a rare chance to spend time with family and show appreciation for what one has. For most Americans today, however, it is hard to be thankful. As matter of fact, unless you belong to the 2 percent who represent the US ruling class you should not be thankful at all. How can you be appreciative for what you have if you have lost your house to foreclosure, don’t have a job and can’t feed your family? How can you be appreciative if you are a homeless veteran? How can you be appreciative when you are poor or sick in a society without social justice? On this Thanksgiving day, rich celebrities and politicians will make a parody of what should be real charity by feeding countless poor and homeless. This will ease their conscience, at least for a while. Charity, however, should not be a substitute for social justice. Just to ruin some people’s appetites before they attack that golden turkey: keep in mind that today we are celebrating a genocide.
Gilbert Mercier is the Editor in Chief of News Junkie Post.
Israel violates terms of Gaza cease-fire
from Al Monitor
BEIT LAHIYA, Gaza Strip — Ibrahim al-Muslimi, a 60-year-old farmer, is repeatedly exposed to gunfire in his farmland in the northern Gaza Strip, less than a kilometer from the Israeli border.
Summary⎙ Print Israel is still not abiding by the terms of the cease-fire deal that ended the Gaza war in August, and still harasses and fires at Palestinian farmers and fishermen.
Author Mohammed OthmanPosted November 25, 2014
Translator(s)Sami-Joe Abboud
Muslimi, who owns more than 40 dunams (10 acres) planted with vegetables and fruits, told Al-Monitor that farmers in the entire agricultural area adjacent to the border see gunfire on an almost daily basis.
“Ever since the end of the Israeli war and the signing of the truce agreement, we have not felt any kind of security in our territory,” Muslimi said. “Whenever we are there, we feel like we are waiting for death and that we will be exposed to a bullet or an Israeli shell at any moment. Israel is shooting us for the sake of scaring us, driving us to leave our territory and emptying border areas of any Palestinian.”
Israel closed its border crossings with Gaza on Nov. 24 to prevent the export of vegetables from the Gaza Strip to the West Bank and some Arab countries, in clear violation of the truce agreement signed between the Palestinian factions and Israel under the auspices of Egypt. One of the most important points of the truce was the opening of the crossings and providing guarantees to lift the siege on Gaza.
The general manager of marketing and crossings at Gaza’s Ministry of Agriculture, Tahseen al-Sakka, told Al-Monitor that the Israeli occupation is not doing what it agreed to with respect to opening the crossings for export. Israel abided by the agreement for a total of three weeks.
Sakka said, “Since the start of the export through Israeli crossings until the beginning of the ban, we exported around 250 tons of various vegetables, but we were surprised [Nov. 17] when Israel prevented farmers from exporting their vegetables and denied dozens of trucks that were supposed to go to the West Bank and a number of Arab countries, under the pretext that they were unsafe and noncompliant with the specifications, which led to heavy losses for farmers.”
Israel is also preventing Palestinian fishermen off the coast of Gaza from accessing the agreed-upon area of six nautical miles in the truce agreement. It either shoots them or destroys their boats and arrests them out at sea.
Rashad Farhat, a fisherman from the town of Rafah, complained about the frequency of the Israeli navy attacks within the small zone, which is still well within the 20 nautical miles agreed to in the 1993 Oslo Accord. Farhat accused Israel of violating their rights.
Farhat told Al-Monitor, “None of the fishermen have crossed the six miles, but the Israeli warship known as the Corvette always haunts us and shoots us to scare us and make us retreat to distances close to the beach. Many of the boat-destruction operations occurred during the past two or three months, while many fishermen were arrested and a number of boats were confiscated and towed to the port of Ashdod.”
Farhat said that the agreement to allow them six nautical miles was only talk, because Israel continues to restrict the fishermen to a distance of three or four at most.
Harassment of farmers and fishermen forms just a part of Israel’s continued violations of the cease-fire deal that ended the Gaza war. On the morning of Nov. 23, Israel killed a Palestinian hunter near the border with Israel, east of the city of Jabaliya in northern Gaza. In the evening of that day, Israel seriously injured a child in the village of al-Shawka, southeast of Rafah, according to a statement Al-Monitor secured from the Palestinian Center for Human Rights.
A spokesman for the Interior Ministry in Gaza, Iyad al-Bozom, said that Israel has routinely violated the Palestinian-Israeli truce agreement since it was signed on Aug. 26. In October alone, there were more than 15 cases of Israeli shootings, mostly against fishermen, in addition to three injuries and five cases of arrests at sea, Bozom said.
“According to the agreement, the blockade would be lifted, the crossings would be opened and reconstruction materials would be allowed to enter in exchange for a cease-fire between the Palestinians and the Israelis. Unfortunately, however, since the first day of the signing of the agreement, the occupation has not abided by its terms and until this very moment, the agreed upon reconstruction materials failed to enter,” he said.
“The occupation made several breaches by frequently attacking fishermen and trying to consolidate a specific area for fishing as a fait accompli,” Bozom said. “The shooting operations also sometimes affect border areas and farmers.”
Bozom warned that in light of Israel’s violations and its noncompliance with the terms of agreement, the conditions are ripe for an explosion.
The latest Israeli violations of the new truce agreement and Israel’s attempt to evade many of its provisions seem to be quickly paving the way for the termination of the cease-fire deal and setting the stage for war instead.
Read more: http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2014/11/israel-breach-gaza-truce.html?utm_source=Al-Monitor+Newsletter+%5BEnglish%5D&utm_campaign=1f2f3c13c6-November_26_2014&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_28264b27a0-1f2f3c13c6-93105777#ixzz3KNMT7Za2
Thursday, November 27, 2014
The 'nation-state' bill: Jews should know exactly where it leads
from Haaretz
One need not be a historian to see the resemblance between the controversial bill and nationality laws of in 1930s Europe.
By Daniel Blatman | Nov. 27, 2014 | 10:23 AM
Quite a few states in the 20th century passed, or tried to pass, nationality laws, through efforts that share certain similarities. All took place in countries with at least one national minority (sometimes more than one) that sought full equality in the state or in a territory that had become part of the state and in which it had lived for generations.
Nationality laws were passed in societies that felt threatened by these minorities’ aspirations of integration and demands for equality, resulting in regimes that turned xenophobia into major tropes.
Nationality laws were passed in states that were grounded in one ethnic identity, defined in contrast to the identity of the other, leading to persecution of and codified discrimination against minorities. Jews were the first victims of these regimes, in which phobias and suspicion replaced the principles of social and political pluralism.
In 1937, the Polish economist Olgierd Górka wrote that the Polish state was an economic asset whose legal owners could do as they pleased with it. Decisions on national issues were thus similar to the choices made by a factory owner. The state belonged to the major group that shaped its essence and spirit, and which exercised its ownership of it — the ethnic Poles. Polish Catholicism gave the Poles the right to own the national asset known as the Polish state.
Knesset member Yariv Levin’s explanations of his nationality bill suggests that he is following Górka’s path. According to Levin, the state’s Jewish expressions reflect the fact that Israel is not only the Jews’ nation-state, but also a state whose very lifeblood is Judaism — a situation that is unique in all the world. A unique situation in the Western, democratic world, but it has a historical precedent in the Poles’ attempt to create a state that pushed its minorities out of the national partnership.
Romania, too — a state with many minorities, including a large Jewish one — was gripped by a fervor to be defined as the Romania nation-state.
In an essay, the national historian Constantin Giurescu wrote that the ideal of the resurgent Romanian nation was to ensure the optimal development of the most eminent population group, the Romanians. The Romanian nation-state must advance the dominant ethnic group, he wrote, while the minorities were a “problem” that should be seen as “guest groups” or groups under the protection of the true citizens. He did not specify the rights that would be granted to such groups.
Romania’s policy toward minorities became clearer after Ion Antonescu came to power. During World War II it went from attempting an “ethnic cleansing” of the Bulgarians to the expulsion and annihilation of the Jews and the Roma, also known as Gypsies. But few believed the debate over nationality laws in the interwar period would end in an effort to solve the nationality question by purging the nation of its minorities.
The proposed nationality bill does not refer explicitly to the rights of minorities living in Israel and does not explicitly guarantee their equal rights. The version proposed by Levin (Likud) and MK Ayelet Shaked (Habayit Hayehudi), and presumably that of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as well, say that Israel will be Jewish and democratic and it guarantees, in a general manner, the equal personal rights of every citizen, in accordance with the laws of the state.
But alongside this lip service, the bill specifies that national minorities are to have no say regarding the character of the state of which they are supposedly citizens with equal rights.
Minorities have no right to any national expression in their own country. All obligatory state symbols are Jewish ones. Only Jews have the right to immigrate freely and receive citizenship. The state will cultivate only the Jewish heritage and traditions; Jewish law is to serve as inspiration for laws, and so on.
One need not be a historian to see the resemblance between the Israeli nationality bill and nationality laws of 80 years ago. Like them, it delineates the boundaries between the most important, dominant group of citizens and the rest, who are turned into guests of a sort in their own country — tolerated ones, for the present.
At the extreme nationalist fringe of the bill’s promoters, efforts are already under way to define its final goal. The followers of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane and members of Lehava will not settle for formulas specifying Israel’s Jewish character and the Jews’ sole claim to national privilege in the state. Their model for the nationality law is the Nuremberg Laws. Their main goal is to preserve Jewish racial purity and to wage war on marriages or romantic relationships between Jews and members of minority groups.
Lehava’s website states: “Intermarriage is forbidden according to the will of God, who gave severe warnings in his Torah against mixing the seed of the living God with other nations and against losing the special uniqueness of the Jewish people.”
No, they say, this is not racism. The goal is only to protect our nation. In 1936, two Nazi jurists, Bernhard Lösener and Friedrich Knost, published a book about the Jewish question in Germany that spoke about the Nuremberg Laws. The purpose of these laws, they wrote, was not to cause racial hatred. On the contrary, it was to ease and regulate the relationship between Jews and Germans over the long term.
What can we learn from all the efforts to pass nationality laws? Mainly that we know what they lead to. We also know that many of the individuals who laid the ideological foundations for such legislation or who supported then never envisioned that they had set in motion a process whose end they could not have imagined.
The author is a professor of Holocaust-era history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
One need not be a historian to see the resemblance between the controversial bill and nationality laws of in 1930s Europe.
By Daniel Blatman | Nov. 27, 2014 | 10:23 AM
Quite a few states in the 20th century passed, or tried to pass, nationality laws, through efforts that share certain similarities. All took place in countries with at least one national minority (sometimes more than one) that sought full equality in the state or in a territory that had become part of the state and in which it had lived for generations.
Nationality laws were passed in societies that felt threatened by these minorities’ aspirations of integration and demands for equality, resulting in regimes that turned xenophobia into major tropes.
Nationality laws were passed in states that were grounded in one ethnic identity, defined in contrast to the identity of the other, leading to persecution of and codified discrimination against minorities. Jews were the first victims of these regimes, in which phobias and suspicion replaced the principles of social and political pluralism.
In 1937, the Polish economist Olgierd Górka wrote that the Polish state was an economic asset whose legal owners could do as they pleased with it. Decisions on national issues were thus similar to the choices made by a factory owner. The state belonged to the major group that shaped its essence and spirit, and which exercised its ownership of it — the ethnic Poles. Polish Catholicism gave the Poles the right to own the national asset known as the Polish state.
Knesset member Yariv Levin’s explanations of his nationality bill suggests that he is following Górka’s path. According to Levin, the state’s Jewish expressions reflect the fact that Israel is not only the Jews’ nation-state, but also a state whose very lifeblood is Judaism — a situation that is unique in all the world. A unique situation in the Western, democratic world, but it has a historical precedent in the Poles’ attempt to create a state that pushed its minorities out of the national partnership.
Romania, too — a state with many minorities, including a large Jewish one — was gripped by a fervor to be defined as the Romania nation-state.
In an essay, the national historian Constantin Giurescu wrote that the ideal of the resurgent Romanian nation was to ensure the optimal development of the most eminent population group, the Romanians. The Romanian nation-state must advance the dominant ethnic group, he wrote, while the minorities were a “problem” that should be seen as “guest groups” or groups under the protection of the true citizens. He did not specify the rights that would be granted to such groups.
Romania’s policy toward minorities became clearer after Ion Antonescu came to power. During World War II it went from attempting an “ethnic cleansing” of the Bulgarians to the expulsion and annihilation of the Jews and the Roma, also known as Gypsies. But few believed the debate over nationality laws in the interwar period would end in an effort to solve the nationality question by purging the nation of its minorities.
The proposed nationality bill does not refer explicitly to the rights of minorities living in Israel and does not explicitly guarantee their equal rights. The version proposed by Levin (Likud) and MK Ayelet Shaked (Habayit Hayehudi), and presumably that of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as well, say that Israel will be Jewish and democratic and it guarantees, in a general manner, the equal personal rights of every citizen, in accordance with the laws of the state.
But alongside this lip service, the bill specifies that national minorities are to have no say regarding the character of the state of which they are supposedly citizens with equal rights.
Minorities have no right to any national expression in their own country. All obligatory state symbols are Jewish ones. Only Jews have the right to immigrate freely and receive citizenship. The state will cultivate only the Jewish heritage and traditions; Jewish law is to serve as inspiration for laws, and so on.
One need not be a historian to see the resemblance between the Israeli nationality bill and nationality laws of 80 years ago. Like them, it delineates the boundaries between the most important, dominant group of citizens and the rest, who are turned into guests of a sort in their own country — tolerated ones, for the present.
At the extreme nationalist fringe of the bill’s promoters, efforts are already under way to define its final goal. The followers of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane and members of Lehava will not settle for formulas specifying Israel’s Jewish character and the Jews’ sole claim to national privilege in the state. Their model for the nationality law is the Nuremberg Laws. Their main goal is to preserve Jewish racial purity and to wage war on marriages or romantic relationships between Jews and members of minority groups.
Lehava’s website states: “Intermarriage is forbidden according to the will of God, who gave severe warnings in his Torah against mixing the seed of the living God with other nations and against losing the special uniqueness of the Jewish people.”
No, they say, this is not racism. The goal is only to protect our nation. In 1936, two Nazi jurists, Bernhard Lösener and Friedrich Knost, published a book about the Jewish question in Germany that spoke about the Nuremberg Laws. The purpose of these laws, they wrote, was not to cause racial hatred. On the contrary, it was to ease and regulate the relationship between Jews and Germans over the long term.
What can we learn from all the efforts to pass nationality laws? Mainly that we know what they lead to. We also know that many of the individuals who laid the ideological foundations for such legislation or who supported then never envisioned that they had set in motion a process whose end they could not have imagined.
The author is a professor of Holocaust-era history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Monday, November 24, 2014
Israel and Mississippi: Racist Plans for Second Class Citizens and Religious Legislation
Truthdig Posted on Nov 24, 2014
By Juan Cole
This post originally ran on Juan Cole’s Web page.
The Guardian reports that
“A controversial bill that officially defines Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people has been approved by cabinet despite warnings that the move risks undermining the country’s democratic character.
Opponents, including some cabinet ministers, said the new legislation defined reserved “national rights” for Jews only and not for its minorities, and rights groups condemned it as racist.
The bill, which is intended to become part of Israel’s basic laws, would recognise Israel’s Jewish character, institutionalise Jewish law as an inspiration for legislation and delist Arabic as a second official language.”
Netanyahu’s measure is much worse than that of Mississippi fundamentalists who want to declare Mississippi a principally Christian state and want to celebrate the white-supremacist Confederacy as part of the state’s heritage.
I wrote earlier of this kind of development when Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu was planning it out:
“So either way Netanyahu defines Jewishness, it disenfranchises substantial numbers of self-identifying Israeli Jews. If it is a matter of maternal descent, it leaves 300,000 or so out in the cold. If it is a matter of belief and observance, it leaves nearly 2 million Israeli Jews out of the club.
In addition, of course, 1.7 million Israelis, about a fifth of the population, are Palestinian-Israelis, mostly Muslim but some Christians. They are, in other words, a somewhat greater proportion of the Israeli citizen population than Latinos are of the US population (Latinos are about 17% of Americans). If current demographic trends continue, Palestinian-Israelis could be as much as 1/3 of the population by 2030.
Saying Israel is a “Jewish” state in the sense of race would be analogous to insisting that the US is a “white” state and defining Latinos as “brown.”
And saying Israel is a Jewish state in the sense of observant believers would be like asserting that the United States is a Christian state even though about 22% of the population does not identify as Christian (roughly the same proportion as non-Jews in Israel). The point of the US first amendment is to forbid the state to to “establish” a religion, i.e. to recognize it as a state religion with privileges (the colonists had had bad experiences with Anglicanism in this regard). While we can’t stop other countries from establishing state religions, we Americans don’t approve of it and won’t give our blessing to it, as Netanyahu seems to want. In fact our annual State Department human rights report downgrades countries that don’t separate religion and state.
While some countries have a state or official religion, that is different from what Netanyahu is demanding. Argentina’s constitution says Roman Catholicism is the state religion. But Argentina is not a “Catholic state” either in the sense of being mainly for people of Catholic religious faith (only 20% of Argentines are observant) or for being for persons descended from traditionally Catholic populations. Indeed, Argentina has about half a million Muslims, who are not discriminated against in Argentine law the way Palestinian-Israelis are discriminated against (their villages not ‘recognized’) in Israel. Anyway, as I said, in the U.S. we don’t approve of that part of the Argentine constitution. If all Netanyahu wanted was that Judaism be the ‘state religion’ of Israel, that could surely be achieved by a simple vote of the Knesset. He wants something much more, something that requires that outsiders assent to it.
Netanyahu’s demand is either racist or fundamentalist and is objectionable from an American point of view on human rights grounds either way (and I’m not just talking about the human rights of Palestinian-Israelis).”
Elsewhere I pointed out that Israel is moving in the opposite direction from Morocco, Tunisia and other more successful Middle Eastern states, which have new constitutions affirming citizen equality and freedom of conscience and avoiding specifying Islamic law (sharia) as the main source for law, in the way this new Israeli measure specifies Jewish law (halakha) as the inspiration for Israeli legislation. Netanyahu’s Israel looks more and more like the Muslim Brotherhood Egypt of now-deposed President Muhammad Morsi.
“Netanyahu is also moving in the opposite direction from the more positive developments in the Middle East itself. Iraq’s old Baathist Arab nationalism (qawmiya) had racialized Arabness (which is really just a linguistic group) and had excluded the Kurds, who speak an Indo-European language, from full membership in the Iraqi nation. Interestingly, many Arabic-language news items on Netanyahus speech translate his use of “national” by the Arabic qawmiya, which has overtones of extremist nationalism of a racist sort. The new Iraqi constitution rejects that kind of racist nationalism. It recognizes Kurdish as a national official language (and Turkmen and Aramaic as provincial ones). Without denying the Arab or Muslim identity of the majority, it recognizes the right of the minorities to their own ethnic identities within the nation. It doesn’t say that Iraq is only a homeland for the Arab-Shiite majority.
And Morocco suffered deep political divisions between its Arab majority and Berber/ Amazigh minority in earlier decades. But its new constitution finally recognizes Berber/ Amazigh as an official language and celebrates Amazigh identity as one of the key heritages of all Moroccans, including Arabic speakers. The constitution does say that Islam is the religion of state, while guaranteeing freedom of belief and religion to the country’s Jews and adds:
… the Kingdom of Morocco intends to preserve, in its plenitude and its diversity, its one and indivisible national identity. Its unity, is forged by the melting together of its Arab-Islamic, Berber [amazigh] and Saharan-Hassanic components, nourished and enriched by its African, Andalusian, Hebraic and Mediterranean influences.”
So could we really expect Netanyahu to say that Judaism is the religion of the Israeli state and that:
… Israel intends to preserve, in its plenitude and its diversity, its one and indivisible national identity. Its unity is forged by the melting together of its Jewish and Palestinian components, nourished and enriched by its Hebraic, Arab and Mediterranean influences.”
No. Netanyahu is talking of an indivisible national identity, but its unity is achieved by exclusion, not by melting and inclusion. He does not celebrate Israel’s Arab heritage, but wants to exclude it from any claim on the national homeland, wants to make it lesser. (Arabic is an official language of Israel, but Netanyahu’s rejection of the idea of a binational state makes it clear he thinks it is very much a de facto and unfortunate component of Israel, not something to be celebrated).
Interestingly, the Israeli left has a different objection. They mind the idea of Israeliness, of the Israeli national identity (akin to the Moroccan national identity in the constitution, quoted above) being demoted in favor of a Jewish identity. Haaretz’s Hebrew edition wrote on May 5:
“Yesterday Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu explained why he is promoting a new Basic Law: ‘The Nation State of the Jewish People’: ‘Israel’s status as the nation-state of the Jewish people is not given sufficient expression in our Basic Laws, and this is what the proposed Basic Law is meant to do’… For 66 years now ‘Israeliness’ has attempted to gain recognition and win independence, and has been rejected repeatedly by the establishment. It has been described as the ‘slivers of people-hood’ whose existence has not been proven, while at the same time, no one seeks to enact a law that will define and protect it. Again and again it is forced to bow before its ‘big sister’, the Jewish state… The creation of Israeli literature, Israeli art, Israeli music, Israeli theatre, Israeli humour, Israeli politics, Israeli sports, an Israeli accent, Israeli grief – are these not enough to speak of an ‘Israeli people’…?” [From [Hebrew language] editorial of left-of-centre, independent broadsheet Ha’aretz]. – [Trans. via BBC Monitoring]
By Juan Cole
This post originally ran on Juan Cole’s Web page.
The Guardian reports that
“A controversial bill that officially defines Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people has been approved by cabinet despite warnings that the move risks undermining the country’s democratic character.
Opponents, including some cabinet ministers, said the new legislation defined reserved “national rights” for Jews only and not for its minorities, and rights groups condemned it as racist.
The bill, which is intended to become part of Israel’s basic laws, would recognise Israel’s Jewish character, institutionalise Jewish law as an inspiration for legislation and delist Arabic as a second official language.”
Netanyahu’s measure is much worse than that of Mississippi fundamentalists who want to declare Mississippi a principally Christian state and want to celebrate the white-supremacist Confederacy as part of the state’s heritage.
I wrote earlier of this kind of development when Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu was planning it out:
“So either way Netanyahu defines Jewishness, it disenfranchises substantial numbers of self-identifying Israeli Jews. If it is a matter of maternal descent, it leaves 300,000 or so out in the cold. If it is a matter of belief and observance, it leaves nearly 2 million Israeli Jews out of the club.
In addition, of course, 1.7 million Israelis, about a fifth of the population, are Palestinian-Israelis, mostly Muslim but some Christians. They are, in other words, a somewhat greater proportion of the Israeli citizen population than Latinos are of the US population (Latinos are about 17% of Americans). If current demographic trends continue, Palestinian-Israelis could be as much as 1/3 of the population by 2030.
Saying Israel is a “Jewish” state in the sense of race would be analogous to insisting that the US is a “white” state and defining Latinos as “brown.”
And saying Israel is a Jewish state in the sense of observant believers would be like asserting that the United States is a Christian state even though about 22% of the population does not identify as Christian (roughly the same proportion as non-Jews in Israel). The point of the US first amendment is to forbid the state to to “establish” a religion, i.e. to recognize it as a state religion with privileges (the colonists had had bad experiences with Anglicanism in this regard). While we can’t stop other countries from establishing state religions, we Americans don’t approve of it and won’t give our blessing to it, as Netanyahu seems to want. In fact our annual State Department human rights report downgrades countries that don’t separate religion and state.
While some countries have a state or official religion, that is different from what Netanyahu is demanding. Argentina’s constitution says Roman Catholicism is the state religion. But Argentina is not a “Catholic state” either in the sense of being mainly for people of Catholic religious faith (only 20% of Argentines are observant) or for being for persons descended from traditionally Catholic populations. Indeed, Argentina has about half a million Muslims, who are not discriminated against in Argentine law the way Palestinian-Israelis are discriminated against (their villages not ‘recognized’) in Israel. Anyway, as I said, in the U.S. we don’t approve of that part of the Argentine constitution. If all Netanyahu wanted was that Judaism be the ‘state religion’ of Israel, that could surely be achieved by a simple vote of the Knesset. He wants something much more, something that requires that outsiders assent to it.
Netanyahu’s demand is either racist or fundamentalist and is objectionable from an American point of view on human rights grounds either way (and I’m not just talking about the human rights of Palestinian-Israelis).”
Elsewhere I pointed out that Israel is moving in the opposite direction from Morocco, Tunisia and other more successful Middle Eastern states, which have new constitutions affirming citizen equality and freedom of conscience and avoiding specifying Islamic law (sharia) as the main source for law, in the way this new Israeli measure specifies Jewish law (halakha) as the inspiration for Israeli legislation. Netanyahu’s Israel looks more and more like the Muslim Brotherhood Egypt of now-deposed President Muhammad Morsi.
“Netanyahu is also moving in the opposite direction from the more positive developments in the Middle East itself. Iraq’s old Baathist Arab nationalism (qawmiya) had racialized Arabness (which is really just a linguistic group) and had excluded the Kurds, who speak an Indo-European language, from full membership in the Iraqi nation. Interestingly, many Arabic-language news items on Netanyahus speech translate his use of “national” by the Arabic qawmiya, which has overtones of extremist nationalism of a racist sort. The new Iraqi constitution rejects that kind of racist nationalism. It recognizes Kurdish as a national official language (and Turkmen and Aramaic as provincial ones). Without denying the Arab or Muslim identity of the majority, it recognizes the right of the minorities to their own ethnic identities within the nation. It doesn’t say that Iraq is only a homeland for the Arab-Shiite majority.
And Morocco suffered deep political divisions between its Arab majority and Berber/ Amazigh minority in earlier decades. But its new constitution finally recognizes Berber/ Amazigh as an official language and celebrates Amazigh identity as one of the key heritages of all Moroccans, including Arabic speakers. The constitution does say that Islam is the religion of state, while guaranteeing freedom of belief and religion to the country’s Jews and adds:
… the Kingdom of Morocco intends to preserve, in its plenitude and its diversity, its one and indivisible national identity. Its unity, is forged by the melting together of its Arab-Islamic, Berber [amazigh] and Saharan-Hassanic components, nourished and enriched by its African, Andalusian, Hebraic and Mediterranean influences.”
So could we really expect Netanyahu to say that Judaism is the religion of the Israeli state and that:
… Israel intends to preserve, in its plenitude and its diversity, its one and indivisible national identity. Its unity is forged by the melting together of its Jewish and Palestinian components, nourished and enriched by its Hebraic, Arab and Mediterranean influences.”
No. Netanyahu is talking of an indivisible national identity, but its unity is achieved by exclusion, not by melting and inclusion. He does not celebrate Israel’s Arab heritage, but wants to exclude it from any claim on the national homeland, wants to make it lesser. (Arabic is an official language of Israel, but Netanyahu’s rejection of the idea of a binational state makes it clear he thinks it is very much a de facto and unfortunate component of Israel, not something to be celebrated).
Interestingly, the Israeli left has a different objection. They mind the idea of Israeliness, of the Israeli national identity (akin to the Moroccan national identity in the constitution, quoted above) being demoted in favor of a Jewish identity. Haaretz’s Hebrew edition wrote on May 5:
“Yesterday Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu explained why he is promoting a new Basic Law: ‘The Nation State of the Jewish People’: ‘Israel’s status as the nation-state of the Jewish people is not given sufficient expression in our Basic Laws, and this is what the proposed Basic Law is meant to do’… For 66 years now ‘Israeliness’ has attempted to gain recognition and win independence, and has been rejected repeatedly by the establishment. It has been described as the ‘slivers of people-hood’ whose existence has not been proven, while at the same time, no one seeks to enact a law that will define and protect it. Again and again it is forced to bow before its ‘big sister’, the Jewish state… The creation of Israeli literature, Israeli art, Israeli music, Israeli theatre, Israeli humour, Israeli politics, Israeli sports, an Israeli accent, Israeli grief – are these not enough to speak of an ‘Israeli people’…?” [From [Hebrew language] editorial of left-of-centre, independent broadsheet Ha’aretz]. – [Trans. via BBC Monitoring]
Sunday, November 23, 2014
In Israel, Only Jewish Blood Shocks Anyone
By Gideon Levy
November 23, 2014 "ICH" - "Haaretz" - There was a massacre in Jerusalem on Tuesday in which five Israelis were killed. There was a war in Gaza over the summer in which 2,200 Palestinians were killed, most of them civilians. A massacre shocks us; a war, less so. Massacres have culprits; wars don’t. Murder by ax is more appalling than murder by rifle, and far more horrendous than bombing helpless people trying to take shelter.
Terror is always Palestinian, even when hundreds of Palestinian civilians are killed. The name and face of Daniel Tragerman, the Israeli boy killed by mortar fire during Operation Protective Edge, were known throughout the world; even U.S. President Barack Obama knew his name. Can anyone name one child from Gaza among the hundreds killed?
A few hours after the attack in Jerusalem, journalist Emily Amrousi said at a conference in Eilat that the life of a single Jewish child was more important to her than the lives of thousands of Palestinian children. The audience’s response was clearly favorable; I think there was even some applause.
Afterward Amrousi tried to explain that she was referring to the way the Israeli media should cover events, which is only slightly less serious. This was during a discussion on the ridiculous question: “Is the Israeli media leftist?” Almost no one protested Amrousi’s remarks and the session continued as if nothing had happened. Amrousi’s words reflect Israel’s mood in 2014: Only Jewish blood elicits shock.
Israeli deaths touch Israeli hearts more than the deaths of others. That’s natural human solidarity. The bloody images from Jerusalem stunned every Israeli, probably every person.
But this is a society that sanctifies its dead to the point of death-worship, that wears thin the stories of the victims’ lives and deaths, whether it be in a synagogue attack or a Nepal avalanche. It’s a society preoccupied with endless commemorations in the land of monuments, services and anniversary ceremonies; a society that demands shock and condemnation after every attack, when it blames the entire world.
Precisely from such a society is one permitted to demand some attention to the Palestinian blood that is also spilled in vain; some understanding of the other side’s pain, or even a measure of empathy, which in Israel is considered treason.
But this doesn’t happen. Aside from exceptional murders and hate crimes by individuals, there is total apathy — and the obtuseness is frightening. Killings (we dare not say murders) by soldiers and policemen will never shock Israel. The propaganda machine will whitewash everything, and the media will be its mouthpiece. No one will demand condemnations. No one will express shock. Few will even consider that the pain is the same pain, that murder is murder.
How many Israelis are willing to give a thought to the parents of Yousef Shawamreh, the boy who went out to pick wild greens and was killed by an army sniper? Why is it exaggerating to be upset by, or at least give some attention to, the killing of Khalil Anati, a 10-year-old boy from the Al-Fawar refugee camp?
Why can’t we identify with the pain of bereaved father Abd al-Wahab Hammad, whose son was killed in Silwad, or with the Al-Qatari family from the Al-Amari refugee camp, two members of which were killed by soldiers within a month? Why do we reserve our horror for the synagogue and not consider these killings disturbing?
Yes, there is the test of intent. The typical Israeli argument is that soldiers, unlike terrorists, do not intend to kill. If so, then what exactly is the intent of the sniper who fires live bullets at the head or chest of a demonstrator a distance away who poses no threat? Or when he shoots a child in the back as he’s running for his life? Didn’t he intend to kill him?
The attack in Jerusalem was a horrendous crime; nothing can justify it. But the blood that flowed there is not the only blood being spilled here murderously. The degree to which it is forbidden to say that is incredible.
November 23, 2014 "ICH" - "Haaretz" - There was a massacre in Jerusalem on Tuesday in which five Israelis were killed. There was a war in Gaza over the summer in which 2,200 Palestinians were killed, most of them civilians. A massacre shocks us; a war, less so. Massacres have culprits; wars don’t. Murder by ax is more appalling than murder by rifle, and far more horrendous than bombing helpless people trying to take shelter.
Terror is always Palestinian, even when hundreds of Palestinian civilians are killed. The name and face of Daniel Tragerman, the Israeli boy killed by mortar fire during Operation Protective Edge, were known throughout the world; even U.S. President Barack Obama knew his name. Can anyone name one child from Gaza among the hundreds killed?
A few hours after the attack in Jerusalem, journalist Emily Amrousi said at a conference in Eilat that the life of a single Jewish child was more important to her than the lives of thousands of Palestinian children. The audience’s response was clearly favorable; I think there was even some applause.
Afterward Amrousi tried to explain that she was referring to the way the Israeli media should cover events, which is only slightly less serious. This was during a discussion on the ridiculous question: “Is the Israeli media leftist?” Almost no one protested Amrousi’s remarks and the session continued as if nothing had happened. Amrousi’s words reflect Israel’s mood in 2014: Only Jewish blood elicits shock.
Israeli deaths touch Israeli hearts more than the deaths of others. That’s natural human solidarity. The bloody images from Jerusalem stunned every Israeli, probably every person.
But this is a society that sanctifies its dead to the point of death-worship, that wears thin the stories of the victims’ lives and deaths, whether it be in a synagogue attack or a Nepal avalanche. It’s a society preoccupied with endless commemorations in the land of monuments, services and anniversary ceremonies; a society that demands shock and condemnation after every attack, when it blames the entire world.
Precisely from such a society is one permitted to demand some attention to the Palestinian blood that is also spilled in vain; some understanding of the other side’s pain, or even a measure of empathy, which in Israel is considered treason.
But this doesn’t happen. Aside from exceptional murders and hate crimes by individuals, there is total apathy — and the obtuseness is frightening. Killings (we dare not say murders) by soldiers and policemen will never shock Israel. The propaganda machine will whitewash everything, and the media will be its mouthpiece. No one will demand condemnations. No one will express shock. Few will even consider that the pain is the same pain, that murder is murder.
How many Israelis are willing to give a thought to the parents of Yousef Shawamreh, the boy who went out to pick wild greens and was killed by an army sniper? Why is it exaggerating to be upset by, or at least give some attention to, the killing of Khalil Anati, a 10-year-old boy from the Al-Fawar refugee camp?
Why can’t we identify with the pain of bereaved father Abd al-Wahab Hammad, whose son was killed in Silwad, or with the Al-Qatari family from the Al-Amari refugee camp, two members of which were killed by soldiers within a month? Why do we reserve our horror for the synagogue and not consider these killings disturbing?
Yes, there is the test of intent. The typical Israeli argument is that soldiers, unlike terrorists, do not intend to kill. If so, then what exactly is the intent of the sniper who fires live bullets at the head or chest of a demonstrator a distance away who poses no threat? Or when he shoots a child in the back as he’s running for his life? Didn’t he intend to kill him?
The attack in Jerusalem was a horrendous crime; nothing can justify it. But the blood that flowed there is not the only blood being spilled here murderously. The degree to which it is forbidden to say that is incredible.
The latest round of violence in Jerusalem is reminiscent of the Second Intifada, sparked by then Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's provocative visit to the Haram al-Sharif compound (Noble Sanctuary/Temple Mount) in 2000.
Neve Gordon
November 20, 2014
The Nation
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. His claims that Tuesday's attack on Jewish worshippers in Jerusalem was due to incitement by Hamas and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas was rebuked by Israel's security chief. , 10 Downing Street,
There is a feeling of déjà vu as we witness the events currently unfolding in Jerusalem. Yet, like all déjà vus, some things are fundamentally different. The latest round of violence occurred on Wednesday, when a Palestinian teenager was critically wounded by police gunfire in East Jerusalem. On Tuesday, two Palestinians wielding meat cleavers, an ax and a gun murdered five people in a synagogue—four of them while praying, along with a police officer who tried to save them—before they were shot dead by an Israeli policeman. A day earlier, a Palestinian bus driver was found hanged in his bus, and while the Israeli pathologists claimed he had committed suicide, the Palestinian pathologist disagreed, maintaining that he had been murdered.
While these were just the most recent casualties in the Holy City, it is crucial to remember that other structural forms of violence directed against its Palestinian residents have been deployed without restraint over the past weeks. Jewish settlers have embarked on yet another round of expansionist real estate schemes in Arab East Jerusalem, taking over Palestinian houses. Simultaneously, Palestinian neighborhoods in the city have been blockaded, restricting the movement of thousands of residents, as the Israeli government decided yet again to build new apartment units on expropriated Palestinian land. The old British Mandatory practice of demolishing homes belonging to the families of suspected terrorists has been reinstituted as a form of deterrence. And, perhaps most importantly, Members of the Knesset and right-wing groups have launched a concerted campaign to nullify the existing status quo on the Temple Mount—whereby Jews pray at the Wailing Wall and Muslims at the Haram al-Sharif—by allowing Jews to assert their sovereignty over this sacred Muslim site.
This last bit is crucial for understanding one of the alarming transformations taking place in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. One might recall that the second intifada erupted immediately after Ariel Sharon’s provocative visit to the Haram al-Sharif compound in late September 2000. At the time, Palestinian demonstrators hurled stones at Israeli police, who fired back tear gas and rubber-coated metal bullets. Demonstrations rapidly spread to the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and it took several years and thousands of fatalities before Israel managed to quell the popular uprising.
This time around, events are influenced by other theaters of violence in the Middle East. Put differently, the nationalist discourse of Sharon—as well as Yasir Arafat—is now being successfully hijacked by a religious rhetoric. Members of ISIS are threatening to smash all national borders until they reach Jerusalem, while in our neck of the woods, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas is invoking religious tropes to condemn Israeli efforts to change the status quo at Jerusalem’s holy sites in the hope of garnering support among a constituency that has become more religious over the years.
Naftali Bennett, the right-wing economy minister in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Cabinet, retorts by calling Abbas “a terrorist because he said that Jews are contaminating the Temple Mount.” Bennett and his allies in government are thus playing into fears of Muslim fundamentalism in the West, even as they present Jewish fundamentalism as innocuous. This transformation is dangerous not necessarily because nationalist struggles are less bloody than religious ones—they are not—but because it is fueling extremism on both sides.
This, it should be stressed, is precisely what the Israeli government wants. It would like to present the conflict as a clash of civilizations à la Samuel Huntington, rather than as a Palestinian struggle against colonial domination. Alongside the government’s attempt to pit fundamentalist Jews against Palestinians, most Israeli politicians on the right, which now dominates the country’s electoral landscape, have been working overtime to bolster the “no partner for peace” myth as another justification for their ongoing refusal to resume negotiations with the Palestinian leadership. The Palestinians are not only part of a different and barbaric civilization, they claim, but their leaders are terrorists, or at the very least support terrorism.
A few hours after the synagogue massacre, Netanyahu maintained that the attack was “a direct result of the incitement lead by Hamas and Abu Mazen [President Mahmoud Abbas].” And in a televised address that echoed Bennett, he averred that the Palestinian leaders are “saying Jews are contaminating the Temple Mount, that we intend to destroy the holy sites and change the prayer routines there. These lies have already exacted a very heavy toll.
Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman added that “Abbas has intentionally turned the [Israeli-Palestinian] conflict into a religious one between Jews and Muslims, and the systematic incitement he leads against Jews—who he says cannot visit the Temple Mount because they are ‘impure’—is the ‘go-ahead’ for these despicable terror attacks.” Bennett concluded that “Abbas, one of the biggest terrorists to have arisen from the Palestinian people, bears direct responsibility for the Jewish blood spilt on tallit and tefillin while we were busy with delusions about the [peace] process.
This is the moment when the déjà vu becomes most apparent. Arrows just like these were shot at Arafat in the years and months before his mysterious death a decade ago. This time around, however, there was an unexpected intervention that exposed the lie behind the demagogic scare tactics: Yoram Cohen, the head of Israel’s secret services, also known as the Shabak, weighed in against Netanyahu and his cabinet members.
On the day of the attack on the synagogue, Cohen asserted that no one among the Palestinian leadership is calling for violence. “Abu Mazen is not interested in terror,” he explained, “and is not leading [his people] to terror. Nor is he doing so ‘under the table.’” The head of Shabak went on to blame the Israeli leadership for the religious turn. He warned that the Palestinian reactions in East Jerusalem were exacerbated due to “a series of confrontations centering around the Temple Mount—including the ascent to that holy site by MKs [Knesset Members], as well as proposed legislation that would change the status quo in the compound.”
Wittingly or not, Israel’s top security officer thus accused the prime minister and his comrades of incitement and spreading lies, exposing how these political leaders are fueling religious tensions as well as producing the “no partner” myth in order to sustain the strife. This is not a minor event, since it is the first time in Israel’s history that the head of the secret services—during his tenure in office—has contradicted the prime minister and has publicly revealed his duplicity.
If even the Shabak, the organization responsible for torturing and assassinating Palestinians during forty-seven years of occupation, thinks the Israeli leadership has gone too far, then matters are becoming really scary. Yes, there is a sense of déjà vu, only this time it seems that Israel’s political entourage has already fallen into the abyss.
[Neve Gordon is the author of Israel’s Occupation (2008) and recently completed, with Nicola Perugini, The Human Right to Dominate (forthcoming from Oxford University Press). Copyright c 2014 The Nation. Reprinted with permission. May not be reprinted without permission. Distributed by Agence Global. Please support the Nation's journalism. Get a digital subscription to The Nation for just $9.50!]
November 20, 2014
The Nation
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. His claims that Tuesday's attack on Jewish worshippers in Jerusalem was due to incitement by Hamas and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas was rebuked by Israel's security chief. , 10 Downing Street,
There is a feeling of déjà vu as we witness the events currently unfolding in Jerusalem. Yet, like all déjà vus, some things are fundamentally different. The latest round of violence occurred on Wednesday, when a Palestinian teenager was critically wounded by police gunfire in East Jerusalem. On Tuesday, two Palestinians wielding meat cleavers, an ax and a gun murdered five people in a synagogue—four of them while praying, along with a police officer who tried to save them—before they were shot dead by an Israeli policeman. A day earlier, a Palestinian bus driver was found hanged in his bus, and while the Israeli pathologists claimed he had committed suicide, the Palestinian pathologist disagreed, maintaining that he had been murdered.
While these were just the most recent casualties in the Holy City, it is crucial to remember that other structural forms of violence directed against its Palestinian residents have been deployed without restraint over the past weeks. Jewish settlers have embarked on yet another round of expansionist real estate schemes in Arab East Jerusalem, taking over Palestinian houses. Simultaneously, Palestinian neighborhoods in the city have been blockaded, restricting the movement of thousands of residents, as the Israeli government decided yet again to build new apartment units on expropriated Palestinian land. The old British Mandatory practice of demolishing homes belonging to the families of suspected terrorists has been reinstituted as a form of deterrence. And, perhaps most importantly, Members of the Knesset and right-wing groups have launched a concerted campaign to nullify the existing status quo on the Temple Mount—whereby Jews pray at the Wailing Wall and Muslims at the Haram al-Sharif—by allowing Jews to assert their sovereignty over this sacred Muslim site.
This last bit is crucial for understanding one of the alarming transformations taking place in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. One might recall that the second intifada erupted immediately after Ariel Sharon’s provocative visit to the Haram al-Sharif compound in late September 2000. At the time, Palestinian demonstrators hurled stones at Israeli police, who fired back tear gas and rubber-coated metal bullets. Demonstrations rapidly spread to the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and it took several years and thousands of fatalities before Israel managed to quell the popular uprising.
This time around, events are influenced by other theaters of violence in the Middle East. Put differently, the nationalist discourse of Sharon—as well as Yasir Arafat—is now being successfully hijacked by a religious rhetoric. Members of ISIS are threatening to smash all national borders until they reach Jerusalem, while in our neck of the woods, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas is invoking religious tropes to condemn Israeli efforts to change the status quo at Jerusalem’s holy sites in the hope of garnering support among a constituency that has become more religious over the years.
Naftali Bennett, the right-wing economy minister in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Cabinet, retorts by calling Abbas “a terrorist because he said that Jews are contaminating the Temple Mount.” Bennett and his allies in government are thus playing into fears of Muslim fundamentalism in the West, even as they present Jewish fundamentalism as innocuous. This transformation is dangerous not necessarily because nationalist struggles are less bloody than religious ones—they are not—but because it is fueling extremism on both sides.
This, it should be stressed, is precisely what the Israeli government wants. It would like to present the conflict as a clash of civilizations à la Samuel Huntington, rather than as a Palestinian struggle against colonial domination. Alongside the government’s attempt to pit fundamentalist Jews against Palestinians, most Israeli politicians on the right, which now dominates the country’s electoral landscape, have been working overtime to bolster the “no partner for peace” myth as another justification for their ongoing refusal to resume negotiations with the Palestinian leadership. The Palestinians are not only part of a different and barbaric civilization, they claim, but their leaders are terrorists, or at the very least support terrorism.
A few hours after the synagogue massacre, Netanyahu maintained that the attack was “a direct result of the incitement lead by Hamas and Abu Mazen [President Mahmoud Abbas].” And in a televised address that echoed Bennett, he averred that the Palestinian leaders are “saying Jews are contaminating the Temple Mount, that we intend to destroy the holy sites and change the prayer routines there. These lies have already exacted a very heavy toll.
Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman added that “Abbas has intentionally turned the [Israeli-Palestinian] conflict into a religious one between Jews and Muslims, and the systematic incitement he leads against Jews—who he says cannot visit the Temple Mount because they are ‘impure’—is the ‘go-ahead’ for these despicable terror attacks.” Bennett concluded that “Abbas, one of the biggest terrorists to have arisen from the Palestinian people, bears direct responsibility for the Jewish blood spilt on tallit and tefillin while we were busy with delusions about the [peace] process.
This is the moment when the déjà vu becomes most apparent. Arrows just like these were shot at Arafat in the years and months before his mysterious death a decade ago. This time around, however, there was an unexpected intervention that exposed the lie behind the demagogic scare tactics: Yoram Cohen, the head of Israel’s secret services, also known as the Shabak, weighed in against Netanyahu and his cabinet members.
On the day of the attack on the synagogue, Cohen asserted that no one among the Palestinian leadership is calling for violence. “Abu Mazen is not interested in terror,” he explained, “and is not leading [his people] to terror. Nor is he doing so ‘under the table.’” The head of Shabak went on to blame the Israeli leadership for the religious turn. He warned that the Palestinian reactions in East Jerusalem were exacerbated due to “a series of confrontations centering around the Temple Mount—including the ascent to that holy site by MKs [Knesset Members], as well as proposed legislation that would change the status quo in the compound.”
Wittingly or not, Israel’s top security officer thus accused the prime minister and his comrades of incitement and spreading lies, exposing how these political leaders are fueling religious tensions as well as producing the “no partner” myth in order to sustain the strife. This is not a minor event, since it is the first time in Israel’s history that the head of the secret services—during his tenure in office—has contradicted the prime minister and has publicly revealed his duplicity.
If even the Shabak, the organization responsible for torturing and assassinating Palestinians during forty-seven years of occupation, thinks the Israeli leadership has gone too far, then matters are becoming really scary. Yes, there is a sense of déjà vu, only this time it seems that Israel’s political entourage has already fallen into the abyss.
[Neve Gordon is the author of Israel’s Occupation (2008) and recently completed, with Nicola Perugini, The Human Right to Dominate (forthcoming from Oxford University Press). Copyright c 2014 The Nation. Reprinted with permission. May not be reprinted without permission. Distributed by Agence Global. Please support the Nation's journalism. Get a digital subscription to The Nation for just $9.50!]
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