Why did the rhinoceroses, the rabbits and the hyenas get all upset? The Netanyahu/Ben-Gvir/Smotrich government represents an inevitable continuation of decades in which many Israelis in key positions could have demonstrated decency and responsibility, and chose not to do so. They inculcated and expanded concepts of abusive, exploitative Jewish supremacy, even when resistance and refusal to collaborate with these concepts would pose no danger to them.
Climate change deniers – oil magnates, the Bolsonaros and Trumps of the world, and their troops in research institutes and parliaments – continue to deliberately use the future of the planet as collateral in order to attain superfluous wealth and status. That is exactly what was done by the Jewish citizens of Israel, headed by those same people “in key positions.” They sabotaged the possibility of a beneficial future for the two peoples living between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea in order to benefit from ethnic segregation, calculated dispossession, the trade in weapons and science fiction-like means of surveillance, cheap villas, a career and a pension.
You don’t have to be an expert on the history of Ireland and Zimbabwe, or of Germany, Romania and Poland to realize that the oppression and exclusion of an entire people cannot end in quiet, security and prosperity. The People of the Book, and its elites in particular – those who enjoy social visibility and have political and economic influence – have been blessed with enough skills, years of study and family memories to know that. And still, there are far too many Jewish Israelis who deliberately participated, and continue to do so, in the dispossession of the Palestinians and attempts to subdue them.
The Moloch of security is a scarecrow that ceased long ago to serve as an excuse for policies of theft and expulsion. Those who provided the ideological justification for this protracted injustice were thus the experts at pagan, ultranationalist blather. The divine promises and specific verses from the Torah that they cited were served like a jar of Vaseline to all those who initiated and participated in the orgies of abuse against the Palestinians – secular, half-secular and religious Israelis. It is thus hypocritical to be now shocked by the fact that our victorious rulers are the leaders of Religious Zionism.
Their road was paved for them by architects who, for decades, shaped the apartheid, dystopian space that pushes Palestinians into suffocating enclaves (on both sides of the Green Line). Antisemitism researchers who have remained silent for the past 30 years in the face of increasing pogroms that were, and continue to be, perpetrated by Jews; senior legal scholars who have used Talmudic sophistry to avoid the directives of international law; and the judges of the district courts and the Supreme Court, which perused thousands of appeals against the built-in inequality experienced by Palestinians, and legitimized it through cowardly rulings; the heads of universities and school principals, who were scared by the threats of right-wing groups and silenced dissident voices; editors in media outlets who feed the lie that Israel is the party under attack, the victim.
It’s only natural the appetite for domineering possessed by the professional settlers from Noam, Otzma Yehudit and Religious Zionism has grown with each policeman and soldier who did not bother to stop or catch a Jewish rioter with tzitzit, with every violent and religiously observant shepherd’s settler outpost that expands and prospers despite demolition orders against it, and with every confiscation order signed by government officials and senior military officers so that the land of Nazareth and El Bireh, Yatta and Umm al Fahm can be settled by Jews. And it’s only logical that their Jewish supremacism was reinforced when the established Jewish communities, the bearers of historical memory in Cape Town and New York, London, Paris and Frankfurt, were alarmed by all the criticism of Israel’s policy of oppression and defined it as “antisemitism.”
Perhaps it’s not too late, and those shocked by Noam’s control of secular education will understand that there is a clear line stretched between this and the demolition of the villages of Masafer Yatta, for example; the unequal allocation of water; and widespread administrative detentions. Civil disobedience must not be limited to the schools.