Jewish Supremacy Without the Masks - Opinion - Haaretz.com
Early in the morning, before all the votes were counted, the “The Arabs are to blame” chorus, conducted by Uri Misgav and in concert with the anyone-but-Bibi singers, reprised a familiar tune: blaming the Arabs for the election results. This time, not only for Benjamin Netanyahu’s return to power, but also for transforming Israel from a democratic, liberal, secular oasis into a messianic, Jewish, halakha state. After all, that is what matters to the Arab citizen who faces discrimination in every area of life, or to the Palestinian living under occupation: exactly who is going to kill and dispossess us – secular, democratic Zionists; kippah-wearing Zionists or a draft-dodger with a criminal, Kahanist record.
What worries this bloc isn’t what the far right might do in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, but how Itamar Ben-Gvir and the right-wing bloc will affect the desert oasis known as Greater Tel Aviv. These are the civic matters they really care about: Will they still be able to host the Eurovision Song Contest? Will there be public transportation on Shabbat? Civil marriage? Recycling? Feminism (particularly, female combat pilots)?
Actually, they’re right. They recognize that there is no essential difference between them and the right. The past year clearly demonstrated that the “government of change,” with the support and approval of the leaders of the leftist democratic camp in the Knesset, was more lethal than all its predecessors since the 2000s.
With the campaigns of all the parties in the Jewish center-left camps resembling a lifestyle ad, as if there were no malignant cancer called the occupation ravaging the body of the nation and no apartheid regime to which they are a party, it’s no wonder that Arab Israelis don’t see them as partners, not to a vision of the future, and not to their suffering and problems.
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The truth hurts: The left cannot obtain a majority without the votes of the Palestinians. Without them, it can scream “Anyone but Bibi” and seek to replace him with more of the same. On one hand there’s a problem: This camp is Jewish. It cannot recognize Palestinian Israelis as equal citizens because it doesn’t want this. It doesn’t recognize the possibility of a state of all its citizens. The very demand threatens it.
It is not even willing to do the minimum, to make a statement. Not about collective equality, revoking the nation-state law, about true equal funding. Only threats and accusations. It doesn’t suit you? Ben-Gvir will come. And then what will you do? Wouldn’t you be better off listening to us and doing what we want?
So, you deserve Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich. They support Jewish supremacy openly, without squirming and without masks.
The far right doesn’t frighten you because of what it will do to the Palestinians, but because of what it will do to you. How it will curtail your liberty, your customs, your way of life. So it’s only right that the Zionist center ended up with Ben-Gvir. Perhaps that will force it to really look at the reality that it tries so hard to deny.
There is no solution that can skip the most basic things: recognition that a regime of ethnic supremacy is not a legitimate regime. Hiding at the end of every sentence about Israel being “Jewish and democratic” is Rabbi Meir Kahane, even if you imagined something closer to Zehava Galon or Merav Michaeli.
It is time to realize that this situation is not decreed by fate. This resounding defeat could actually mark a new beginning, the beginning of taking responsibility for dismantling the regime of Jewish supremacy. A new start for building an alternative. One that is leftist, egalitarian and democratic.