Source: Haaretz

What’s anti-Semitic about persons of conscience who believe that an apartheid state deserves to be boycotted?

The Bundestag has defined the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement against Israel as anti-Semitic. Benjamin Netanyahu and Gilad Erdan rejoiced. Germany ought to be ashamed.

From now on, Germany will consider every supporter of BDS to be a Jew-hater; saying “the Israeli occupation” will be like saying “Heil Hitler.” From now on, Germany cannot boast of its freedom of speech. It has become an agent of Israeli colonialism. While some are indeed anti-Semites, the majority of BDS supporters are persons of conscience who believe that an apartheid state deserved to be boycotted. What’s anti-Semitic about that? The majority of parties in the Bundestag supported the resolution, including that of Chancellor Angela Merkel, the conscience of Europe. How sad. So paralyzing are the guilt feelings, so effective the propaganda.

Does Merkel think that Daniel Barenboim – the musical director of the Berlin State Opera and the principal conductor for life of its orchestra, the Staatskapelle, a prime example of an artist who is committed to conscience and morality, a proud Jew and embarrassed Israeli, the co-founder of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, an Israeli patriot, yes patriot, who fears with every fiber of his being for the future of the country of his youth – is also an anti-Semite? Barenboim may not explicitly support BDS, but for years he has quietly boycotted Israel’s concert halls. He cannot bring himself to play for Israelis when, less than a one-hour drive from the auditorium, a nation is groaning under the occupation. That is his noble way of expressing his protest. Merkel is his friend. She undoubtedly admires his sense of justice. What will she say to him now?

What will the German legislators say about those who call to boycott the products of sweatshops or of the meat industry? Will they criminalize them as well? What about the sanctions on Russia, over its invasion of Crimea? Why is one occupation worthy of a boycott and another of cheers? What did Germans think about the sanctions on South Africa? What is the difference?

It’s permissible to call for a boycott against a tyrannical regime; in fact, it’s obligatory. It’s also permissible to think differently, to think there is no Palestinian people and no occupation, only a chosen people in the promised land. But to criminalize justice-seeking Germans as anti-Semites? I know a few of them, and they have absolutely nothing in common with anti-Semites. One more push from the Erdans, and BDS will be designated as a terrorist organization.

Guilt feelings are always a bad counselor. This time they turned out to be a particularly terrible one.

Germany is not a country like any other. It carries a deep obligation to the state of the Jews. It is duty-bound to contribute to its security and its growth, but that duty must not be allowed to include moral blindness and automatic license for Israel to do whatever it wants and to scorn the resolutions of the international institutions that were established in the wake of the war that Germany instigated.

Germany has a duty to support Israel, but like any true friend it must also do everything possible to prevent it from being an evil state. Fighting opposition to the occupation is not friendship.

Germany may supply Israel with submarines, but it must also place ethical demands on the state. On the margins of its guilt toward the Jews, it also carries an indirect moral responsibility for the fate of the people that lives in the land to which the Jews fled from Germany in terror and in which they created a state. Germany also has an obligation to those who would not have been deprived of their land and their rights if not for the Holocaust. This people has been living for decades under the Israeli boot. Germany must aid in its liberation.

In passing this resolution, the Bundestag did not do right by Israel, by justice or by international law. Only the Israeli occupation profited from it. The Bundestag does not have to support BDS, it’s permissible to object to the boycott movement, but to criminalize it as anti-Semitic, especially in Germany? The “other Germany” betrayed its duty to its own conscience-driven civil society, to the Palestinians and also to Israel.

Source: Middle East Eye

No other country enjoys the same level of military, economic, diplomatic and moral support, no strings attached.

For decades now, Israel has continually spat in the face of the rest of the planet – with casual disdain for international law, and with complete disregard for the explicit decisions and detailed policies adopted by global institutions and by most of the world’s national governments.

Out there in the world, however, all that spittle somehow passes for raindrops. The election came and went with no discernible effect on the blindly automatic support for Israel by European governments and, of course, by the Americans too: unconditional, without reservations, apparently unchanged. Evidently what was is what will be.

Israel, though, has changed during the course of Netanyahu’s long reign. This talented Israeli statesman is leaving his mark on the profile of his country, with deep and lasting effect – more so than anticipated or even apparent.

Yes, it’s true that leftist governments in Israel also did their utmost to preserve the Israeli occupation forever and had no intention, not for one moment, of ever bringing it to an end – but Netanyahu is taking Israel much farther afield, to places even more extreme.

He is damaging what constitutes acceptable governance within Israel’s recognised sovereign territory, even with respect to its Jewish citizens. The very face of the “only democracy in the Middle East”, which has long functioned mainly to the benefit of Jewish Israelis who comprise its privileged class, is being altered now by Netanyahu and company.

Darling of the West

Meanwhile, incredibly, the response of the world is to alter nothing in the support it has been extending to Israel during all the years of Netanyahu’s rule, as if in this latest round he were changing nothing, as if the shifting positions taken by Israel will neither augment nor diminish that support.

With or without Netanyahu, Israel remains the darling of the West. No other country enjoys the same level of military, economic, diplomatic and moral support, no strings attached. But the next Israeli administration, the fifth Netanyahu government, is getting ready to announce a change that the world will finally find difficult to ignore.

The new government is poised to rip the last layer of mask from its real face. Israel’s main asset, in casting itself as a liberal democracy that shares values dear to the West, is about to be demolished.

Will the West continue supporting it, then? The West, which demands that Turkey adopt deep changes before according it full admission, which levies sanctions on Russia the moment it invades Crimea, will this West go on supporting the new Republic of Israel that Netanyahu and his governing partners are preparing to launch?

A radical change

The degree of change expected cannot be overstated. Israel will look different. Where the previous government lit fires, this one will fan the flames as they spread. The judicial system, the media, the organisations defending human rights and the rights of Arabs in Israel will soon feel a scorching  sensation.

Op-ed articles will soon be denied publication in Israeli media, by law, if they criticise Israeli soldiers, for example, or support a boycott of Israel. Ben-Gurion Airport will deny entry more broadly to critics of the Israeli regime.

Civil society organisations will be stripped of legal standing. Arabs will be more thoroughly excluded en route to actualising the vision of a Jewish state all of whose legislators are Jews. And of course there’s the annexation currently waiting in the wings.

The new government will be the Israeli annexation government. If the anticipated backing from Washington is forthcoming – American recognition of the annexation of the Golan Heights was the first step, the trial balloon – then Netanyahu will take the step he has refrained from taking throughout his reign thus far.

He will announce the annexation of at least part of the occupied territories.

The import will be unequivocal: Israel will admit for the first time that its 52-year military occupation of the West Bank is here to stay; that it is not, as long claimed, a passing phenomenon.

Dramatic policy changes

The territories are not “bargaining chips” in negotiations for peace, as was claimed at the outset of the occupation, but rather colonial holdings meant to remain under Israeli rule permanently. There is no intention that the territories annexed now, which could then be expanded, would ever be returned to the Palestinians.

Thus the new Netanyahu government will declare two dramatic policy changes. First will be an end to the two-state solution which even Netanyahu supported and which all global leaders have declared themselves as favouring.

That option will be declared dead. At the same time, Israel will declare itself an apartheid state, not just de facto but now, for the first time, also de jure.

Since none of those favouring annexation intend to grant equal rights to Palestinians in the territories to be annexed, and since targeted annexation of the land on which the settlements sit is patently deceitful, the world’s statesmen will have no choice but to acknowledge that under their radar, in the 21st century, a second South Africa-style apartheid state has been declared.

Last time around, an apartheid regime was miraculously brought down without all-out bloodshed. Will the world rally around this time and effect a repetition?

Which Israel do you still support?

This question must be posed first of all to the leaders of Europe, from Angela Merkel to Emmanuel Macron, including Theresa May – to all the EU leaders. They have endlessly repeated the mantra that their support for Israel and its right to exist in security are firm and unchangeable.

They have continually declared their support for a negotiated two-state solution. So whom do you support now? What do you support? Which Israel, exactly? What world do you imagine you are living in? Perhaps in a dream world you evidently find comfortable, but which has less and less of a connection to the real world.

Will Europe manage to continue claiming that Israel shares its liberal values, when civil society organisations are banned in Israel? When nearly all the Zionist politicians in Israel declare that they have nothing whatever to discuss with the elected Arab legislators in parliament?

Try to imagine a European diplomat declaring that the Jewish members of his nation’s parliament cannot be party to any political dialogue whatever. Or that a European diplomat would declare the Jewish citizens of his country to be traitors and a fifth column.

This sort of thing is politically correct in Israel, across party lines. And what of freedom of speech, so sacred in European discourse, when the 2019 World Press Freedom Index from Reporters Without Borders already ranks Israel as number 88 – behind Albania, Kyrgyzstan, and Viktor Orban’s Hungary.

This is the Israel you are supporting.

Two-state solution is dead

The West’s automatic support for a two-state solution also demands updating. Do you really believe, dear statesmen and stateswomen, that this Israel has any intention whatever of implementing such a solution, ever?

Has there ever been a single Israeli politician who wanted to, or could, displace some 700,000 settlers, including from occupied East Jerusalem?

Do you believe that without a withdrawal from all of the settlements, which represents a minimum of justice for Palestinians, there is any prospect that such a solution would take hold and turn into a reality

One could note that most Western diplomats who are well-informed about what is going on have already known for a long time that such a solution is dead, but none of them has the courage to admit it.

Admitting it would require them to reconfigure all their positions on the conflict in the Middle East, including support for the existence of a Jewish state.

With the advent of the new Netanyahu government, the Western world cannot just continue to turn a blind eye and claim that everything is just fine. Nothing is just fine.

So the question is now: are you prepared to go along with this? Will you remain silent, stay mute, lend your support, and turn a blind eye to reality?

Those of you who are most concerned for Israel’s future should be the first to wake up and draw the required conclusions. Indeed, every person of conscience ought to be doing that.

Gideon Levy is a Haaretz columnist and a member of the newspaper’s editorial board. His new book, The Punishment of Gaza, has just been published by Verso.

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Israel has never apologised for anything. It has never shouldered the slightest bit of moral responsibility for its actions.

In Jewish tradition, these are the Days of Awe. Judaism holds that, right as this article is being written, God is considering who will live and who will die in the coming year in light of people’s deeds over the last year. Jews repent of their sins that transgress their obligations to God and beseech God to forgive them.

But for their sins against their fellow men, the path to God’s forgiveness is different. The Mishnah [Code of Jewish law in the Talmud] says that for such sins, there is no forgiveness from God on Yom Kippur unless one has first sought and obtained forgiveness from those against whom one has sinned.

These are the high holy days in Israel, and the atmosphere among the faithful is steeped in a kind of dread as God’s judgment nears. But almost no one in Israel stops for a moment to seek the forgiveness that is greater than all, and which their country ought to have sought 70 years ago: the day after the Nakba, the catastrophe of the Palestinian people perpetrated by Israel. Even more so for the last 51 years, day after day, hour by hour, during the entire period of the occupation after 1967.

Israel has yet to even begin the crucially important process of opening a new chapter; it has yet to turn over even a single page in its quest for atonement – seeking the forgiveness of the occupied for the occupier, of the conquered for the conqueror, of the imprisoned for the jailor, of the victim for the thief – and yet, without that, nothing will happen.

Reconciliation through repentance

Symbolic acts should not be denigrated. Sometimes they have tremendous significance. On 7 December 1970, West German Chancellor Willy Brandt visited the monument to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in the Polish capital during his first trip to Poland since the end of the Second World War.

Willy Brandt kneels at Warsaw Ghetto memorial

Brandt laid a wreath and then made a gesture that will never be forgotten: he dropped to his knees and in one of the most impressive physical displays of its kind in human history, paused there for half a minute in a spontaneous expression of repentance.

He explained afterwards to the surprised observers around him that he had felt the need to ask forgiveness of the millions of victims of Nazism. This simple human gesture was worth a thousand words. It opened people’s hearts, and touched them deeply.

We need not compare anything from our own time to the Nazi era in order to understand that the path to reconciliation is through accepting moral responsibility, through repentance and atonement.

Likewise with the Truth and Reconciliation Commissions in South Africa which, after the Apartheid era, taught us so much about the process of opening a new chapter in relations between peoples, between races and between enemies. In South Africa, the victims forgave their victimisers and this, too, was of importance to the reconciliation process.

A sinless occupation

Israel has never apologised for anything. It has never shouldered the slightest bit of moral responsibility for its actions. A review of its responses to events presents a fixed pattern that repeats itself time after time, with discouraging sameness: the Arabs are responsible.

Disappearing Palestine

It is always the Arabs who are responsible. For everything. Israel has no shred of responsibility for anything, never mind guilt. The Arabs bear the guilt for the Nakba, since they did not accept the partition plan and went to war instead. They bear the guilt for the occupation, which they brought on themselves by going to war again. They bear the guilt for all the futile killing in the occupied territories – because of terrorism. You know how it is, Israel’s self-defence and the security of its citizens always justifies everything.

Israel has never sinned and Israelis have never sinned. From the original massacre at Lydda through the innocents slaughtered at Sabra and Shatila, and on through the killing of unarmed protestors at the Gaza fence in recent months – not one word of repentance, no apology, not even an expression of sorrow.

Not when an old man defending his home is beaten in Khan al-Ahmar, the Palestinian Bedouin village in the Judean desert that Israel is displacing in order to build another Jewish settlement, without shame and without mercy.

Not when Israeli army snipers take aim and fire lethally on a legless amputee in his wheelchair, a nurse in her white uniform, children waving their hands in the air, journalists in vests marked PRESS alongside the Gaza fence – not a word of repentance, atonement or apology. Never.

Never saying sorry for the occupation. Never saying sorry for the giant land grab and the settlement building. Never saying sorry for turning the Gaza Strip into the world’s biggest prison. Never saying sorry for apartheid in the West Bank, which is now out in plain sight and can’t seriously be denied. Never saying sorry for all those decades of being the overlord controlling, exploiting, expelling, oppressing and abusing, starting in 1948 until now.

And even when Israel ostensibly began a new chapter with the Palestinians, exactly 25 years ago with the signing of the Oslo Accords, even then when the signature in Washington took place around Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur and the Days of Awe, even then it never occurred to anyone to ask forgiveness, to say we are sorry.

Crying out for atonement

It should have begun in 1948. The day after the big ethnic cleansing was put in effect, Israeli Prime Minister David Ben Gurion should have stood up and said: There was a war, both sides shed blood, some 700,000 human beings fled or were expelled from their homes and not permitted to return. They cannot become refugees forever, they and their descendants. To open a new chapter in the lives of both peoples, we want first of all to say we are sorry for the expulsions, which were intentional and a sin, we want to take moral responsibility and to resolve the problem immediately. We are prepared to extend a hand to the refugees, to allow some of them to return to their homes, insofar as possible, and to provide compensation and rehabilitation for the others.

It could have been done then, and it also could and should be done now. One could ask for pardon from those hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who have been falsely imprisoned throughout the occupation. Hundreds of thousands, some of them political prisoners, some never brought to trial. It is only right that one should ask for their pardon.

100s of Palestinian minors aged 13-18 are locked up in Israeli prisons

And one could ask for pardon from everyone who was beaten, or tortured, or humiliated for no reason, everyone whose home was invaded by Israeli forces in the dead of night just to abuse them in front of their children and show who’s boss, everyone who lost precious time and – especially – precious dignity at the checkpoints, everyone who lost their present and their future because the occupation stole them.

One could ask for pardon from the innumerable bereaved Palestinian families, the vast majority of whose murdered relatives were innocent of any wrongdoing whatsoever. One could ask for pardon from the families of children who threw stones, who should not have been summarily executed as they were, and from the families of fishing folk and farming folk and passersby who were killed for no reason.

And of all those families of the wounded who have been left disabled for the rest of their lives. They ought to be asked for pardon by those who have done all of that to them.

Brainwashed

The occupation cries out for repentance and for atonement. Nothing of this has ever been heard, and will not be heard any time soon.

Israel has no brave leader who will take this upon his or herself and there is no modicum of moral awareness to allow for an understanding of the enormity of the transgressions that are, still, ongoing.

Israel is too brainwashed, too full of hatred and fear, drunk on power and blinded by self-righteousness, too invested in repeatedly playing the victim, and life in Israel is too good to prompt people to engage with trifles like asking for forgiveness from the Palestinian people, not even during the Days of Awe, which Jews are taught by their faith to see as the most solemn and holy days of repentance.

Some further generations will evidently pass before Israelis will seek pardon from Palestinians. Perhaps someday an Israeli Willy Brandt will appear and fall to his knees in repentance. That will be a great day indeed. I dream of it.

Until then, the status quo will persist, on the way to the establishment of the apartheid state between the Jordan River and the sea.

That Israel should ask forgiveness this year of its victims, now, during these Days of Awe? What does the Israel of 2018 say to that? It says: surely you jest.

Source: Middle East Eye. Gideon Levy is a prize winning Israeli author and journalist

if Gazans are not human beings, no war crime, disaster or victimisation will evoke in Israel even one iota of horror, one glint of moral uncertainty, one gram of human solidarity – and certainly no protest or opposition.

The demonstrators were unarmed and did not threaten the lives of the soldiers beyond the fence. What’s been happening is a massacre; there’s no other word to describe it.

Israel has responded to these events with its typical lack of interest. Only the thick black smoke from burning tyres, which may have drifted towards Israeli communities along the fence, threatened the serenity of their Passover holiday.

No collective sense of horror

The extent of the violence against unarmed civilians, coupled with the fact that Israel has non-lethal options for dealing with demonstrations, has failed to evoke a significant public discussion in Israel.

Even some of the most disturbing footage – such as the clip of a protester rising from his prayers only to be met with a bullet, or the woman holding a flag and nearing the fence and falling to the ground from a sniper’s shot – have failed to evoke a collective sense of horror.

When a Palestinian journalist was shot by a sniper despite wearing a vest clearly marked “Press,” Israelis were quick to brand him as a “Hamas activist” or a “terrorist with a drone”.

Israel remains untroubled by an army that shoots demonstrators and journalists, and is even proud of it, rationalising that these are not innocent protesters but rather terrorists threatening its sovereignty and security. Politicians from across Israel’s political spectrum, except the radical left, have competed among themselves to see who could salute the army the most.

And then the media got hold of a short video, just a minute and 24 seconds long. Once again, it showed a blurry image of an unarmed Palestinian approaching the fence, only to be shot by a soldier before falling to the ground. We’ve already seen other similar videos, and Israel did not get upset. But in this one, there was a soundtrack that made a difference: In the background, soldiers can be heard cursing and expressing overt, vulgar enthusiasm as the unarmed victim falls to the ground.

Israel cannot now proceed with the routine of denial and repression. It became impossible to go on defending soldiers when they were heard expressing themselves in that manner. The contemptible work of Israeli snipers, who aim and fire at protesters, suddenly acquired a repellent soundtrack. Suddenly, it was a scandal.

Media collusion

But even this minor tempest quickly subsided. The army initially tried to shrug off all responsibility for the clip, and then hastened to announce that it was actually from last December – as if this would make the horror of it obsolete.

The media, as usual, swiftly colluded with this denial and repression. Within a day, the clip was forgotten. Defence Minister Avigdor Lieberman, who is among the most extreme, cynical and despicable of Israeli politicians, proclaimed that the sniper should get a citation, but the soldier who filmed him should be demoted. Education Minister Naftali Bennett, leader of the Jewish Home party, rushed to support the soldiers in the clip, as did many other politicians from across the political spectrum.

In truth, Israel should have been horrified a long time ago – long before the first “March of Return” commenced, when it was already clear that soldiers were prepared to shoot protesters with live fire. The Israeli army boasted that “100 snipers” and tanks were waiting for the marchers. A healthy society would have reacted at the outset, forcing them to hold their fire.

Israelis should have been horrified at the first massacre on Land Day, when more than a dozen Palestinians were killed and hundreds more wounded; then at the massive army attacks the following Friday; then at the video clip of the cheering soldiers. But Israeli society has lost its moral compass and is numb to these things.

The case of Ahed Tamimi

A society that does not get agitated at the arrest of Ahed Tamimi – a teenage girl stood bare-handed, facing soldiers who had invaded her backyard, and tried to kick them out as they deserved, after other soldiers shot her cousin in the head a short while earlier – will not be upset by anything.

Ahed’s image has become an icon all over the world, and two million people have signed a petition calling for her release. Only in Israel is her fate of no concern to anyone. Ahed remains in prison, and Israel has lost interest. There’s no solidarity from Israeli parents of children Ahed’s age, and no jurists have come forward to decry the brutality Israel demonstrates in its arrests of minors.

Women’s organisations did not step up to oppose the embarrassing arrest of Ahed and her mother, who was also sent to jail for having filmed her daughter slapping a soldier in the face. There was no mass outrage from artists, intellectuals or ordinary citizens living under a regime that jails minors only because they are Palestinians opposed to the occupation. None of that happened when Ahed was arrested, and it most certainly did not happen after those scenes along the Gaza fence.

Two million people live in Gaza, the world’s largest open-air prison, victims of a dreadful experiment on human beings. The UN has already said that by 2020, this cage will not be fit for human habitation. It is now 2018, but Israel averts its gaze from Gaza – does not see, does not want to see and is not interested.

Dehumanisation of Palestinians in Gaza

Israelis have become accustomed to thinking that Gaza is a nest of terrorists, and that its residents have no rights whatsoever – that Gazans are actually not human beings. And if Gazans are not human beings, no war crime, disaster or victimisation will evoke even one iota of horror, one glint of moral uncertainty, one gram of human solidarity – and certainly no protest or opposition.

No remnants of a collective conscience remain in Israel insofar as Palestinians are concerned. A long, ongoing, systematic process, led by politicians and generals with the collusion of the Israeli media, is now reaching its peak. Never in memory has there been such extreme cold-heartedness evident in Israel, which already has a very impressive record of cold-heartedness towards Palestinians, from the time of the 1948 Nakba right up to the present day.

In Gaza, the blood of civilians is being shed in vain, and Israel, whose soldiers are shedding that blood, is unmoved. Certain segments of Israeli society even find this cause for happiness, pride, gratification.

The voices of the soldiers in that repellent video are the voices of a large proportion of Israelis – though not all of them, of course. The soldiers were expressing authentic, if covert, sentiments harboured by a broad segment of the Israeli public, much broader than it would appear. Watch the video and see the Israel of 2018; some of it, anyway.

Palestinian shot by Israeli sniper to sound of oldiers’ cheers