From a Jewish Ghetto to a Ghetto Jewish State

Netanyahu plans fence around Israel to protect it from 'wild beasts'

Israeli PM says proposed barrier would also solve problem of Hamas tunnels from Gaza, but plan already has critics in his own cabinet

You might be forgiven for thinking, following Netanyahu’s announcement that his reason for wanting to build a wall surrounding Greater Israel, because of the danger of ‘wild beasts’, that lions, tigers, elephants etc. were common species in the Middle East.  Unfortunately I have to disappoint you.  They are completely absent from the Middle East.

What Netanyahu was referring to was human beings – Arabs to be precise.  And not only the Arabs outside Israel but the Palestinians inside Greater Israel are also ‘wild beasts’.  According to Deputy Defence Minister, Eli Dahan, Palestinians are animals of the non-human variety.  [see New deputy defense minister called Palestinians ‘animals’, Times of Israel 11.5.15.]

Rabbi Dahan when asked what he would do if a law permitting gay marriage was proposed in the Knesset responded ‘under no circumstances. A Jew and a goy [non-Jew]can also not marry.”   He explained that “In any case, a Jew always has a much higher [level] soul than a goy, even if he is a homosexual ... ‘The hierarchy of the human species as told by Eli Ben Dahan

Dahan’s ministerial responsibilities include the Civil Administration i.e. Military Rule over the Palestinians in the West Bank.  As far as he is concerned, the Palestinians he rules over are human animals, which was precisely the attitude of the Nazis to the Jews.  They were ‘human cattle.’  Which was why Jews were deported to the extermination camps in cattle trucks.

Politicians such as David Cameron have nothing to say about this overt racism.  And why should they?  They have signed up to support the Jewish state come what may and includes turning a blind eye to its racism, its theft of Palestinian land etc.

We might expect someone like Jeremy Corbyn to have something to say about the matter but he too has gone AWOL on the question of Palestine.

But it is one of life’s ironies that Israel is the living antithesis to the major act of liberation of European Jews in the 19^th Century, the Emancipation of Jewry.  Contrary to the assertion of academics like Rumy Hasan [see Dangerous Liaisons: The Clash between Islamism and Zionism (NG Publishing, 2013), see my Review in the Journal of Holy Land Studies] Zionism isn’t so much a  product of the Enlightenment as a reaction against it.  Just as the Dreyfuss Affair was a reaction against the French Revolution and the Emancipation of French Jews so Zionism began from a rejection of the Enlightenment.

A Palestinian girl walks in front of a section of the Israeli barrier in al-Ram in the West Bank on the outskirts of Jerusalem, May 25, 2011. The government is planning to surround the entirety of Israel with security barriers.

As Max Nordau, the Vice-President of the Zionist Organisation explained at the first Zionist Congress in 1897 Emancipation was the consequence of the “geometric mode of thought of French rationalism” By this he meant that there hadn't been a sincere change in the attitude of non-Jews to Jews but that the logic, the rationale of the French Revolution, with its call for liberty, equality and fraternity, dictated that the Jews too must be given their freedom.

For Nordau Zionism was an attempt “to transform millions of physically degenerate proletarians” i.e. the Jews of E Europe. Nordau’s only doubts regarding Zionism were that the Jews might not be “anthropologically fit for nationhood.” [Complete Diaries of Theodore Herzl p. 275/276].

Zionism hated the Enlightenment and the emancipation of Jews because the ghetto kept Jews together, prevented marrying out and assimilation.  In this they were at one with the Orthodox Jews also saw their power disappear as the walls of the ghetto crumbled.  The ghetto and anti-Semitism kept Jews together, which is the secular purpose of Zionism.  Emancipation, free thought, inter-mixing allowed Jews to live with non-Jews and ‘disappear’ into them.

'Losses' to assimilation, i.e. the voluntary loss of Jewish identity is equated in the racist Zionist mind to physical destruction in the gas chambers

That is why Zionists compare assimilation, the free decision by Jews not to retain their Jewish identity, because they marry non-Jews etc. to the holocaust, which involved the physical destruction of millions of Jews.  Likewise the existence of abortion was also compared to the losses incurred in the holocaust by former Chief Rabbi Emmanuel Jakobovitz. [see an article in the Settlers News 

Agency Arutz Sheva Op-Ed: The Silent Holocaust]

It is therefore one of life’s ironies that the Jewish Ghetto, one of the most infamous of social institutions in Europe, has now been recreated in the Jewish State of Israel.  The Jewish Ghetto was first created in Venice in 1516 and the Roman ghetto, created by Pope Paul IV in 1555, was the last ghetto to be abolished, when the Italians took Rome from the Pope in 1882.

But whereas the Jews of Europe didn’t have much choice about having to live in a ghetto Israeli Jews are now going to erect their own ghetto walls to keep the non-Jewish beasts at bay.  Having already sealed off much of the West Bank with their Separation Fence, the Zionists are now going to complete the job.

Tony Greenstein

Binyamin Netanyahu inspects the new fence at the border between Jordan and Israel near Eilat, saying: ‘In our neighbourhood, we need to protect ourselves from wild beasts.’ Photograph: Marc Israel Sellem/Pool/EPA

Netanyahu plans fence around Israel to protect it from'wild beasts'

Binyamin Netanyahu has announced his intention to “surround all of Israel with a fence” to protect the country from infiltration by both Palestinians and the citizens of surrounding Arab states, whom he described as “wild beasts”.

The Israeli prime minister unveiled the proposal during a tour of the Jordan border area in Israel’s 

south, adding that the project – which would cost billions of shekels – would also be aimed at solving the problem of Hamas infiltration tunnels from Gaza, a recent source of renewed concern.

He called the border project a part of a “multi-year plan to surround Israel with security fences to protect ourselves in the current and projected Middle East”.

Describing the need for new walls and fences on Tuesday, Netanyahu said: “In our neighbourhood, we need to protect ourselves from wild beasts.

“At the end of the day as I see it, there will be a fence like this one surrounding Israel in its entirety. We will surround the entire state of Israel with a fence, a barrier.”

Netanyahu said the Israeli government was also examining ways of sealing gaps in the existing separation wall that runs along large areas of the occupied West Bank.

That separation wall – ordered to be built at great cost by former prime minister Ariel Sharon – was originally credited with a drop in the number of violent attacks by Palestinians in Israel, not least suicide bombings, a key feature of the second intifada in the first few years of this century.

That judgment has been undermined by the apparent ease with which Palestinians assailants have managed to enter Israel in the current wave of violence since October.

The war in Gaza in 2014 also demonstrated how easy it was for Hamas to tunnel beneath the barriers surrounding the coastal enclave into Israel itself.

“If you’re thinking of erecting a fence there you have to take into account that they could tunnel underneath it,” Netanyahu said. “The people who said that there is no significance to [retaining] territory in the modern age should go to Gaza.”

The proposal was, however, criticised by one of Netanyahu’s own cabinet ministers, education minister Naftali Bennett of the hard-right Jewish Home party, who has been embroiled in a series of recent disagreements over security policy with the prime minister.

Commenting on the proposal, Bennett said: “The prime minister spoke today about how fences are needed. We are wrapping ourselves in fences. In Australia and New Jersey there is no need for fences.”

Netanyahu’s use of the phrase “wild beasts” – also translated as “predators” – recalled his use of equally incendiary language about Israeli Arabs on the eve of last year’s elections whom he described as “coming out in droves”.

The prime minister made his comments as he visited a section of approximately 18 miles of fence being built from the Red Sea city of Eilat to near where Israel is constructing a new international airport. That alone is costing $77m (£53m). In 2013, Israel also completed a five-metre-high fence along its border with Sinai.