Israel’s Racist in Chief
Published Monday, April 13, 2009 by TruthDig.com
by Chris Hedges
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/04/13-0
It was unthinkable, when I was based as a correspondent in Jerusalem two
decades ago, that an Israeli politician who openly advocated ethnically
cleansing the Palestinians from Israeli-controlled territory, as well as
forcing Arabs in Israel to take loyalty oaths or be forcibly relocated
to the West Bank, could sit on the Cabinet. The racist tirades of Jewish
proto-fascists like Meir Kahane stood outside the law, were vigorously
condemned by most Israelis and were prosecuted accordingly. Kahane's
repugnant Kach Party, labeled by the United States, Canada and the
European Union as a terrorist organization, was outlawed by the Israeli
government in 1988 for inciting racism.
Israel has changed. And the racist virus spread by Kahane, whose thugs
were charged with the murders and beatings of dozens of unarmed
Palestinians and whose members held rallies in Jerusalem where they
chanted "Death to Arabs!" has returned to Israel in the figure of
Israel's powerful new foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman. Lieberman
openly calls for an araberrein Israel-an Israel free of Arabs.
There has been a steady decline from the days of the socialist Labor
Party, which founded Israel in 1948 and held within its ranks many
leaders, such as Yitzhak Rabin, who were serious about peaceful
coexistence with the Palestini ans. The moral squalor of Prime Minister
Bibi Netanyahu and Lieberman reflects the country's degeneration. Labor,
like Israel, is a shell of its old self. Lieberman's Yisrael Beiteinu
Party, with 15 seats in the Knesset, is likely to bring down the
Netanyahu government the moment his power base is robust enough to move
him into the prime minister's office. He is the new face of the Jewish
state.
Lieberman, a former nightclub bouncer who was a member of the Kach
Party, has the personal and political habits of the Islamic goons he
opposes. He was found guilty in 2001 of beating a 12-year-old boy and
fined by an Israeli court. He is being investigated for
multimillion-dollar fraud and money laundering and is rumored to have
close ties with the Russian mafia. He lives, in defiance of
international law, in the Jewish settlement of Nokdim on occupied
Palestinian land.
Lieberman, as did his mentor Kahane, calls for the eradication of
Palestinians from Israel and the territories it occupies. During the
massive Israeli bombardment of Gaza in December and January he said that
Israel should fight Hamas the way the United States fought the Japanese
in World War II. He noted that occupation of Japan was unnecessary to
achieve victory, alluding to the dropping of atomic bombs on Nagasaki
and Hiroshima. When he assumed his position as foreign minister he
announced that the 2007 Annapolis peace agreement was dead. He said in
2004 that 90 percent=2 0of Israel's Palestinian citizens "have no place
here. They can take their bundles and get lost." This statement was
especially galling since Lieberman, unlike the Palestinian majority who
can trace their ancestry in the region back generations, immigrated to
Israel in 1978 from Moldova and retains a heavy Russian accent.
Lieberman, from the floor of the Knesset, openly fantasized three years
ago about executing the handful of Palestinian Knesset members.
"We requested that in the government guidelines it would say explicitly
that all the inciters and collaborators with terrorism that sit in this
house should bear the brunt of the penalty for those actions," Lieberman
said from the Knesset plenum in May of 2006. "All those who continue to
meet freely with Hamas and Hezbollah-who go on monthly visits to
Lebanon. Those who declared Israel's Independence Day to be Nakba
[Arabic for catastrophe] Day and raised black flags. ...
"World War Two ended with the Nuremberg trials. The heads of the Nazi
Party went to be executed-but not just them, also those who collaborated
with them. Just like [prime minister of Vichy France during WWII Pierre]
Laval was later executed, I hope that this is the fate of the
collaborators in this house."
He has suggested bombing Egypt's Aswan Dam, an act that would lead to a
massive loss of Egyptian lives. As Ariel Sharon's minister of
transportation he offered to bus several hundred Palestinian prisoners
to the20sea and drown them. He recently told the president of Egypt,
Hosni Mubarak, one of Israel's few Arab allies, to "go to hell." And,
along with Netanyahu, he advocates massive airstrikes on Iran's nuclear
facilities.
Hamas, the Iranian government and the Taliban have been condemned by
Washington for advocating policies that mirror those expressed by
Lieberman toward Palestinians. Ahmed Tibi, an Arab deputy in the
Knesset, has called on the international community to boycott Israel as
it did Austria when far-right leader Jorg Haider joined that country's
government. This seems a fair request. But I expect the hypocrisy and
double standards that characterize our relations with the Middle East,
along with our obsequious catering to the Israel lobby, to prevail.
Racism, as long as it is directed toward Arabs, does little to perturb
our conscience or hinder our support of Israel.
The Israeli leadership, following the assassination of Rabin by a Jewish
extremist with ties to Kach, never again sought a viable settlement with
the Palestinians. Successive Israeli prime ministers talked the language
of peace and negotiations largely to placate the international community
and Washington while they vigorously expanded Jewish settlements on
Palestinian land, seized huge tracts of the West Bank, including most of
the aquifers, and imposed a brutal collective punishment on the 1.5
million Palestinians in Gaza. Palestinians have become, by Israeli
design, impoverished, reduced to a level of bare subsistence and
dependent on the United Nations for food assistance. They live ringed by
Israeli troops in a series of pod-like ghettos in the West Bank and in
Gaza, which is a massive, fetid open-air prison. And when these little
Bantustans become restive, Israel swiftly turns off the delivery of
basic food and supplies or uses F-16 fighter jets or heavy artillery to
bomb the squalid concrete hovels.
The public embrace by a senior Israeli official of a policy of ethnic
cleansing, however, is ominous. It signals a further evolution of the
Israeli state from one that at least paid lip service to equality to one
that increasingly resembles the former apartheid regime in South Africa.
Racism, once practiced in private and condemned in public, has become to
many Israelis acceptable.
© 2009 TruthDig.com
Chris Hedges writes a regular column for Truthdig.com. Hedges graduated
from Harvard Divinity School and was for nearly two decades a foreign
correspondent for The New York Times. He is the author of "American
Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America."