Israel, Palestine and Iran

[sne]

[peterms]

Depressing account of the slow slide of Israel into ever more right wing politics.

Quote

"Kahane Lives"

Netanyahu, who went into the Israeli elections promising to annexe the West Bank, looks likely to be a fifth term Prime Minister, in open coalition with Kahanists.

Overwhelmingly, the Israeli electorate pitched to the hard, hard right in this election. Benny Gantz's 'Blue and White Party', the last hurrah of liberal Zionism, drew level with Likud at 30 per cent of the vote. But it did so by hoovering up almost all left-of-Netanyahu votes. Israeli Labor, which ruled the country unchallenged for decades, appears to have just six seats, and five per cent of the vote. 

This betokens the ongoing recomposition of the Israeli state. The imposition of Israeli civil law in the West Bank settlements by way of annexation, the racist Nation-State Law, the criminalisation of left-wing groups, the attempt to proscribe NGOs with overseas funding, the banning of books as part of a  "war on culture", and so on, all indicate the direction in which the Israeli polity has been going.

Only about half of the Palestinian minority in Israel seem to have turned out. In this election, Netanyahu called his opponents Arab-lovers, claimed that Gantz would take power with the backing of the Arab parties, fatidically warned of Arabs flooding to the polls, and even sent Likud monitors with body-cameras to polling stations in Palestinian areas. "It's Us Or Them," as the Likud poster (above) says. Jewish Home, agitating in the city of Ramle (below), which has a sizeable Palestinian minority, warns of "conversions", and pledges to keep the place Jewish. Jewish Power is overtly Kahanist, its leadership has openly called for genocide, and its leading member Itamar Ben-Gvir is an open admirer of Baruch Goldstein, the murderer of twenty-nine Palestinians. Yet it is the Blue and Whites and Labour who are on the defensive over their associations. Gantz ran a mile from any association with 'Arabs', while Labour's Avi Gabbay announced that he would never form a government with any of the Arab parties. 

In policy terms, while Netanyahu spoke of annexation of settlements, the opposition merely proposed the colonial status quo. While Netanyahu spoke of a united Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, Gabbay hastened to agree and stipulate that this had always been Labour's policy. By the way, this cravenness, as Ha'aretz's flattering profile shows, has been sold as a political genius for seducing right-wing voters. The results don't bear that out, but at least there will be no hypocritical warnings about "fascization" from him. 

There is perhaps nothing shocking in this, coming from a state that has been at war with Palestinians for seventy years. And it is a state whose law now spells out with brutal clarity: "the right to exercise national self-determination in the State of Israel is unique to the Jewish people". Nonetheless, it is not surprising that the Arab parties lost three seats in this election.

The statist old guard, the generals and the judiciary, are clearly worried, not by the fate of the Palestinians but by the far-right drift. Netanyahu is a corrupt embarrassment, who has been indicted on charges of bribery and fraud. He is threatening Israel's relationship with diaspora organisations -- even AIPAC can't defend Netanyahu any more -- and its long-term strategic relationship with the Pentagon. Rather than try to preserve that system of alliances, with the risk that it will result in recognition of a Palestinian state, Netanyahu has instead built a series of links with the global far-right, from Orban to Bolsonaro, and is now their major patron in Israel itself.

The judiciary has put up some resistance to Netanyahu's plans, including banning Jewish Power's candidate Michael Ben-Ari on the grounds of "incitement to genocide". The generals largely lined up behind Gantz's Blue and White Party, itself stuffed with generals. The latter have very little in the way of an articulated programme, but have focused their propaganda on defending democracy, attacking Netanyahu with the slogan "Kahane Lives" (below). But it's telling that civil society opposition to Netanyahu and the far-right is so weak that it relies on the armed forces leadership for its self-defence. Israel is a society in which, today, "the Left" is a term of abuse, linked in a chain of equivalents with "the Arabs". In this context, Kahanism is just not as controversial as a Palestinian state.

The revival of Kahanism as a political force in Israel, one that now enters into government and helps set policy, is a salient moment. Kahanism is more than sectarian religious nationalism. It is more than anti-Arab racism. It is a comprehensive, catastrophist political theology. Its predicate is that the foundation of the State of Israel was an act of G_d, a holy revenge against Gentiles who had humiliated and crushed his people. Meir Kahane argued that such oppression was profane, hillul hashem, and that it would require violent revenge, the physical humiliation of Gentiles, to redress the damage. G_d, he said, was planning a redemption for the Jewish people. If they repented, expelled the Arabs from Israel, built a military force capable of destroying all enemies, enacted revenge, He would hurry it. If they did not, then redemption would take the form of a catastrophe: perhaps even another holocaust. Notably, Kahane's most catastrophist writings followed years of violence by the Kach party, and the Jewish Defence League, both of which he founded. They were the programmatic and theological expression of such violence. Kahanism bent itself toward the disaster that it vaticinated about.

There was a long period of time during which Kahanism was banned in Israel, its official party listed as a 'terrorist organisation' by the US State Department. Now its advocates are acceding to power, in a coalition guided to fruition by Benjamin Netanyahu. In their platform, they promise: "War against the enemies of Israel will be total, without negotiations, without concessions and without compromises."

 

[Villaphan04]

i think that this clip of bernie just shows how 'conservative' pretty much all of the US government is in regards to Israel/Middle east and the Israeli conundrum

 

[Brumerican]

Munich reboot starring The Rock any day now.

[Xann]

Evicted to make way for Israeli settlements.

It's really kicked off. Too many horrendous images out there right now.

A prolonged Israeli blockade wound up the locals, who then fired off their shite rockets.

They had a lot of shite rockets this time and have caused Israeli casualties.

We know what happens next.

[peterms]

 

[peterms]

Sick.  A sick, evil little man.

Siding with the racists, the ethnic cleasers, the apartheid state, the murderers.

 

[choffer]

On 06/05/2019 at 13:27, Xann said:

A prolonged Israeli blockade wound up the locals, who then fired off their shite rockets.

Sure they're not Shiite rockets?

 

Horrible situation for which "we" share an element of the responsibility. We should be ashamed of our complicity.

[Xann]

12 minutes ago, choffer said:

Sure they're not Shiite rockets?

Boom Boom. 

Unfortunately.

[Xann]

Guess who hacked Whatsapp?

[OutByEaster?]

On 14/05/2019 at 10:35, Xann said:

Guess who hacked Whatsapp?

Imagine the fuss if it had been Huawei instead of the Israelis. 

 

[peterms]

 

[chrisp65]

I hope you don't use whatsapp. I think you might be a terror threat.

As Israel has declared itself the Nation State of the Jewish people, I think you might have just contravened point 6 of the IHRA definition of anti semitism, to suggest the Israeli state and zionist militia have been involved in ethnic cleansing to the benefit of Israel.

 

 

[peterms]

 

[peterms]

 

[chrisp65]

ouch, can't really give that a 'like'

 

In a shout out to the Icelandic entry to Eurovision, my youngest had only the very vaguest idea there was something not quite square about Israel. But since that little Palestine flag wave, there's been a learning curve and we now have a nascent activist on our hands.

[peterms]

2 minutes ago, chrisp65 said:

ouch, can't really give that a 'like'

 

In a shout out to the Icelandic entry to Eurovision, my youngest had only the very vaguest idea there was something not quite square about Israel. But since that little Palestine flag wave, there's been a learning curve and we now have a nascent activist on our hands.

Well done to your little 'un.

I've seen various comments on twitter from apparently intelligent, supposedly "woke" people who seem not to know why they are asked to boycott the eurovision farce.

It's fair to say there's also a lot of Palestinian comment that entering the event,  taking the money, and waving a flag, is a poor token gesture.

[chrisp65]

Agreed.

I'd decided to sit here quietly during Eurovision and let them all enjoy it. Equally, I do think that once you've decided you will do the Tel Aviv Eurovivion you should really just do it and not pull schoolboy stunts. But then, they only looked like school boys and I was young and dumb once. 

It's possibly a generational thing, but I enjoyed Bobbie Gillespie on Newsnight saying Madonna was a prostitute, then qualifying that with a quick 'no disrespect to prostitutes'. That made me laugh.

Anyway, once the question was asked though, I gave them a couple of things to look up and genuinely tried to be balanced AND warned against it flipping in to being anti anybody. Not all Israeli's are bad, not all Paelstinians are good. Gave the full 'just be aware, get educated' speech.

 

[peterms]

Oh, Madonna.  Singers holding hands in an entirely false gesture of harmony, while soldiers off camera shoot limbs off unarmed civilians using banned armaments, which curiously goes unreported, unremarked.

Bibi meets Benjamins, with the seal of approval of the meeja.  Sick.

[bickster]

17 minutes ago, peterms said:

Oh, Madonna.  Singers holding hands in an entirely false gesture of harmony, while soldiers off camera shoot limbs off unarmed civilians using banned armaments, which curiously goes unreported, unremarked.

Bibi meets Benjamins, with the seal of approval of the meeja.  Sick.

Yeah but worse than any of this is that she posted her performance on Yowtube after autotuning her horrendous live vocals to be in perfect pitch (I'm joking of course - but she did that anyway)