As Uncle Tom Diplomat Ishmael Khalidi discovered,
being a Collaborator does not make you immune from being beaten up by Israeli
Security
You have to sympathise.
Ishmael Khalidi is Israel’s first Bedouin diplomat. Studying by candlelight in his tent (because
most Bedouin villages being ‘unrecognised’ don’t get supplied with electricity
or water) he nonetheless passed his exams and graduated. He even served in the
notoriously racist killer squad, the Border Police.
Then someone in the
Foreign Office talent spotted Ishmael. Clearly here was someone who would be
able to present Israeli ‘democracy’ to gullible
audiences in America and speak out about BDS. Who better than an Israeli Arab to tell White
Americans that sanctions would hurt the Palestinians more than anyone and to
put over the lie that Israel is the land of equal opportunity. After all it is their concern for Palestinians
which leads Israel to oppose BDS!
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| Ishmael Khalidi - beaten up by Israeli security goons |
Sure enough he was posted
to London and San Francisco. Not, of
course as Ambassador but senior enough to be someone who could be held up as an
example of how Arabs are not discriminated against in Israel.
None of that stopped 4 security
guards in Jerusalem pulling him to the ground, kneeling on his neck until he
was shouting ‘I can’t breathe’. After all, in the eyes of these goons, once an
Arab always an Arab.
Israel Hayom, a right-wing
pro-Netanyahu free sheet funded by billionaire Sheldon Adelson report
that ‘Khaldi rejected any comparisons to George
Floyd, the black American man whose death at the hands of Minneapolis
police has sparked
protests around the world. He also said he understands that Israeli
security guards have a job to do.’
The security guards
claimed that Khalidi had refused to show his ID and Israeli police spokesman,
Micky Rosenfeld, backed
this up. The security establishment are, of course, all pulling together.
No doubt the waste of
space that is Labour’s new leader, Sir Starmer, will think this is all an ‘anti-Semitic
conspiracy theory’.
Below is an article by
Jonathan Cook in Mondoweiss.
Jonathan
Cook 23 June 2020
An Israeli diplomat filed a complaint last week with police
after he was pulled to the ground in Jerusalem by four security guards, who
knelt on his neck for five minutes as he cried out: “I
can’t breathe.”
There are obvious echoes of the treatment of George Floyd, an
African-American killed by police in Minneapolis last month. His death
triggered mass protests against police brutality and reinvigorated the Black
Lives Matter movement. The incident in Jerusalem, by contrast, attracted only
minor attention – even in Israel.
An assault by Israeli security officials on a diplomat sounds
like an aberration – a peculiar case of mistaken identity – quite unlike an
established pattern of police violence against poor black communities in the
US. But that impression would be wrong.
The man attacked in Jerusalem was no ordinary Israeli
diplomat. He was Bedouin, from Israel’s large Palestinian minority. One fifth
of the population, this minority enjoys a very inferior form of Israeli
citizenship.
Ishmael Khaldi’s exceptional success in becoming a diplomat,
as well as his all-too-familiar experience as a Palestinian of abuse at the
hands of the security services, exemplify the paradoxes of what amounts to
Israel’s hybrid version of apartheid.
Khaldi and another 1.8 million Palestinian citizens are
descended from the few Palestinians who survived a wave of expulsions in 1948
as a Jewish state was declared on the ruins of their homeland.
Israel continues to view these Palestinians – its non-Jewish
citizens – as a subversive element that needs to be controlled and subdued
through measures reminiscent of the old South Africa. But at the same time,
Israel is desperate to portray itself as a western-style democracy.
So strangely, the Palestinian minority has found itself treated
both as second-class citizens and as an unwilling shop-window dummy on which
Israel can hang its pretensions of fairness and equality. That has resulted in
two contradictory faces.
On one side, Israel segregates Jewish and Palestinian
citizens, confining the latter to a handful of tightly ghettoized communities
on a tiny fraction of the country’s territory. To prevent mixing and
miscegenation, it strictly separates schools for Jewish and Palestinian
children. The policy has been so successful that inter-marriage is all but
non-existent. In a rare survey, the Central Bureau of Statistics found 19 such
marriages took place in 2011.
The economy is largely segregated too.
Most Palestinian citizens are barred from Israel’s security
industries and anything related to the occupation. State utilities, from the
ports to the water, telecoms and electricity industries, are largely free of
Palestinian citizens.
Job opportunities are concentrated instead in low-paying
service industries and casual labour. Two thirds of Palestinian children in
Israel live below the poverty line, compared to one fifth of Jewish children.
This ugly face is carefully hidden from outsiders.
On the other side, Israel loudly celebrates the right of
Palestinian citizens to vote – an easy concession given that Israel engineered
an overwhelming Jewish majority in 1948 by forcing most Palestinians into
exile. It trumpets exceptional “Arab success stories”, glossing over the deeper
truths they contain.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, Israel has been excitedly
promoting the fact that one fifth of its doctors are Palestinian citizens –
matching their proportion of the population. But in truth, the health sector is
the one major sphere of life in Israel where segregation is not the norm. The
brightest Palestinian students gravitate towards medicine because at least
there the obstacles to success can be surmounted.
Compare that to higher education, where Palestinian citizens
fill much less than one per cent of senior academic posts. The first Muslim judge,
Khaled Kaboub, was appointed to the Supreme Court only two years ago – 70 years
after Israel’s founding. Gamal Hakroosh became Israel’s first Muslim deputy
police commissioner as recently as 2016; his role was restricted, of course, to
handling policing in Palestinian communities.
Khaldi, the diplomat assaulted in Jerusalem, fits this mould.
Raised in the village of Khawaled in the Galilee, his family was denied water,
electricity and building permits. His home was a tent, where he studied by
gaslight. Many tens of thousands of Palestinian citizens live in similar
conditions.
Undoubtedly, the talented Khaldi overcame many hurdles to win
a coveted place at university. He then served in the paramilitary border
police, notorious for abusing Palestinians in the occupied territories.
He was marked out early on as a reliable advocate for Israel
by an unusual combination of traits: his intelligence and determination; a
steely refusal to be ground down by racism and discrimination; a pliable
ethical code that condoned the oppression of fellow Palestinians; and blind
deference to a Jewish state whose very definition excluded him.
Israel’s Foreign Ministry put him on a fast track, soon
sending him to San Francisco and London. There his job was to fight the
international campaign to boycott Israel, modelled on a similar one targeting
apartheid South Africa, citing his own story as proof that in Israel anyone can
succeed.
But in reality, Khaldi is an exception, and one cynically
exploited to disprove the rule. Maybe that point occurred to him as he was
being choked inside Jerusalem’s central bus station after he questioned a
guard’s behaviour.
After all, everyone in Israel understands that Palestinian
citizens – even the odd professor or legislator – are racially profiled and
treated as an enemy. Stories of their physical or verbal abuse are
unremarkable. Khaldi’s assault stands out only because he has proved himself
such a compliant servant of a system designed to marginalise the community he
belongs to.
This month, however, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu himself chose to tear off the prettified, diplomatic mask represented
by Khaldi. He appointed a new ambassador to the UK.
Tzipi Hotovely, a Jewish supremacist and Islamophobe,
supports Israel’s annexation of the entire West Bank and the takeover of Al
Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem. She is part of a new wave of entirely undiplomatic
envoys being sent to foreign capitals.
Hotovely cares much less about Israel’s image than about
making all the “Land of Israel”, including the occupied Palestinian
territories, exclusively Jewish.
Her appointment signals progress of a kind. Diplomats such as
herself may finally help people abroad understand why Khaldi, her obliging
fellow diplomat, is being assaulted back home.
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