Comparisons between Israel and Nazi Germany are NOT anti-Semitic – Israelis do it all the time!

What is the difference between Israelis who chant ‘Death to the Arabs’ and Nazis who shouted ‘Death to the Jews?’

The IHRA definition of anti-Semitism states that ‘Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis’ could be anti-Semitic. But the strange thing is that anti-racist Israelis are the first to draw such comparisons. Are they also anti-Semitic under this dumb definition of anti-Semitism?

Perhaps Professor Zeev Sternhell who is emeritus head of the department of political science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and one of the world’s leading experts on fascism is also anti-Semitic? Perhaps Caroline Lucas, Green MP for Brighton Pavilion or Daniel Yates, New Labour Head of Brighton and Hove Council, both of whom support the IHRA, can tell us?

But before they do I should tell them that Zeev Sternhell is a child survivor of the Holocaust. At the age of 7 he was smuggled out of the Przemyśl ghetto in Poland into Lwow. He was cared for by a Polish Catholic family and baptised.  He is one of the few Zionists who isn’t a racist which is perhaps why in September 2008 he was the victim of a pipe bomb attack by Zionist terrorists.

Sternhell poses a rhetorical question. How will future historians judge when it was that the Israeli state had devolved into a ‘true monstrosity for its non-Jewish inhabitants’. Sternhell is, as I said a Zionist who has illusions in a period when Israel was not a racist entity. Nonetheless it is to his credit that he now accepts that racism in Israel today is akin to that in pre-Holocaust Germany. I would go further.  All the evidence is that racism in Israel today is far higher than ever anti-Semitism was in Nazi Germany.

Ian Kershaw described how in Bavaria, the state-sponsored Kristallnacht pogrom on November 2^nd 1938 not only met with little sympathy but that it was ‘condemned deep into the ranks of the Party.’ Just 5% of the population approved as opposed to 63% who displayed disgust and anger.  It was in rural Catholic Bavaria that the most vociferous condemnation of the pogrom was heard.  Kershaw notes,

another, more appealing, side of the popular reaction to the pogrom was its rejection on grounds of Christian compassion and common humanity.  Jewish eye-witness accounts abound with references to the kindness of ‘Aryan’ and ‘Christian’ neighbours who are anxious to point out the overwhelming rejection of the pogrom by the vast majority of the population. 

Jews in Munich ‘were lavish in their praise of the sympathetic response they encountered among non-Jewish people.’[Ian Kershaw, Popular Opinion and Political Dissent in the Third Reich, pp.257-277].   This despite living in a police state unprecedented in its viciousness. 

Isaac Herzog, Israeli Labour leader explains why he doesn't want a Palestinian Prime Minister of Israel

Compare this with the Israelis who set up armchairs and coffee machines on a hilltop in order that they could get a better view and cheer on the ongoing destruction taking place in Gaza. [‘Israelis gather on hillsides to watch and cheer as military drops bombs on Gaza, People drink, snack and pose for selfies against a background of explosions as Palestinian death toll mounts in ongoing offensive.’ http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/20/israelis-cheer-gaza-bombing Harriet Sharwood, The Guardian, 20.7.14].  

 The only effect of the holocaust has been to reinforce the self-righteousness and moral turpitude of Israel’s Jews and to enable them to justify their own vicious racism.

The Nazis had to try very hard to instil anti-Semitism in the German population. The Nazis came to power not because of but despite their anti-Semitism.

Sternhell speaks of ‘the toxic ultra-nationalism that has evolved here, the kind whose European strain almost wiped out a majority of the Jewish people.’ Anyone familiar with Israeli society will know that the levels of racism in it are far higher than any equivalent Western society.

When we have, in the Labour Party, group like the Jewish Labour Movement going on about anti-Semitism whilst saying nothing about the horrific levels of racism in Israeli society, then we can accuse them of complicity. The JLM describe themselves as the ‘sister’ party of the Israeli Labour Party yet not once have they called out the visceral racism of the ILP. Israel claims to be the nation state of Jews, all Jews, yet the JLM and  their supporters keep silent, apart from smearing their Jewish opponents.

As Sternhell quite correctly says, the Jewish Nation State Law which explicitly denies Israeli Palestinians any right to be considered part of the same nation as Israeli Jews, because there is no Israeli nationality, is no different in principle from the Nuremburg Laws which changed the status of German Jews from citizens and nationals into subjects.

Daniel Blatman whose book The Death Marches: The Final Phase of Nazi Genocide won the Yad Vashem International Book Prize for Holocaust Research in 2011is a Holocaust researcher at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Blatman wrote an article earlier this year International Holocaust Remembrance Day: An Israeli Hypocrisy. Moshe Machover in Why Israel is a Racist State quotes Blatman as saying that “Deputy Speaker Bezalel Smotrich’s admiration for the biblical genocidaire Joshua bin Nun leads him to adopt values that resemble those of the German SS.”

According to Blatman, the blueprint of the Deputy Speaker of the Knesset, Bezalel Smotrich and Miki Zohar, a Likud MK, for the Palestinians, both inside and outside Israel, would be akin to Jews under the Nuremburg Laws.

As Sternhell observes, Smotrich and Zohar don’t wish to harm Palestinians, as long as they do what they are told of course, merely to ‘deprive them of their basic human rights, such as self-rule in their own state and freedom from oppression’.

The late Professor Amos Funkenstein, Head of the Faculty of History at Tel Aviv University when referring to the controversy over the refusal of soldiers to serve in the Occupied Territories, compared them to soldiers in the German army who refused to serve in concentration or extermination camps. [HOLOCAUST ANALOGIES - Repaying the Mortgage Return 2 March 1990] To those who asked how it was possible to compare the actions of Nazi soldiers with Israelis, Funkenstein replied,

“As a historian I know that every comparison is limited. On the other hand, without comparisons, no historiography is possible. Understanding a historical event is a kind of translation into the language of our time. If we would leave every phenomenon in its peculiarity, we could not make this translation. Every translation is an interpretation and every interpretation is also a comparison.”

It is not only anti-Zionists and anti-racists who make the comparison between Israel and Nazi Germany.  The racists also make the comparison.

The liberal left are often reticent about comparing Zionism to Nazism. Gilbert Achcar for example found it a ‘terrible comparison’ [Arabs and the Holocaust, pp.228. 234] and Shami Chakrabarti, in her report on racism in the Labour Party, argued that ‘it is always incendiary to compare the actions of Jewish people or institutions anywhere in the world to those of Hitler or the Nazis or to the perpetration of the Holocaust.’[The Shami Chakrabarti Inquiry, http://www.labour.org.uk/page/-/party-documents/ChakrabartiInquiry.pdf ]  By this logic one should not compare the settlers of Hebron, who daub the walls of Palestinians with the slogan ‘Arabs to the gas chambers’ with the Nazis. [See for example Donald Macintyre, Breaking silence over the horrors of Hebron, 22.6.04. The Independent, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/breaking-silence-over-the-horrors-of-hebron-5355569.html]  Only Zionists should be allowed to make such comparisons.

If the Holocaust is to serve any purpose it is as a warning against the repetition of such horrors. Even Israel’s Deputy Chief of Staff Yair Golan recognised this when he said, at the 2016 Holocaust Remembrance Day, that

"If there's something that frightens me about Holocaust remembrance it's the recognition of the revolting processes that occurred in Europe in general, and particularly in Germany, back then – 70, 80 and 90 years ago – and finding signs of them here among us today in 2016."

When Israeli rabbis talk about the justified murder of children and infants in war time, as Rabbis Yitzhak Shapiro and Josef Elitzur did in Torat HaMelech, a 2011 book which was a guide to how Jews could legally kill non Jews, they are laying the basis for a future genocide.  As American journalist Max Blumenthall observed, Torat HaMelech is:

a virtual manual for Jewish extremist terror designed to justify the mass slaughter of civilians. And in that respect, it is not entirely different from the Israeli military’s Dahiya Doctrine, or Asa Kasher and Amos Yadlin’s concept of “asymmetrical warfare.” The key difference seems to be the crude, almost childlike logic the book’s author, Rabbi Yitzhak Shapira, marshals to justify the killing of non-Jewish civilians.

Nazism didn’t come from nowhere.  In Mein Kampf Hitler cites, with approval, the American practice of eugenics. Nazism wasn’t an aberration. It was supported by many of the West’s leaders, Churchill included, when it first took power. The destruction of the German Labour Movement met with approval by these people. It was only when Nazi Germany turned against British interests that the British ruling class opposed Hitler.

However the racism of the British Empire was not altogether different from the racism of the Nazis which is why the Colonial Office vetoed propaganda aimed at Africans which condemned the racism of the Nazis. [see Smyth, Rosaleen; Britain's African Colonies and British Propaganda during the Second World War, Journal of Imperial & Commonwealth History 14,1 October 1985]

Isaac Herzog, Israeli Labour Party leader denies the party is 'Arab loving'

There can be little doubt that the edict of the Chief Rabbi of Safed, Shmuel Eliyahu, endorsed by dozens of other rabbis, to ban the renting of rooms or apartments by Jews to Arabs, bore a distinct resemblance to similar measures in pre-Holocaust Germany.  Safed Rabbi Boasts That anti-Arab Edict Worked

Or the mobs who in ‘liberal’ Tel Aviv chanted, during the attack on Gaza in 2014 that ‘‘There is no school tomorrow; there are no children left in Gaza’ resembled similar mobs in Berlin.

Those who seek to deflect from these comparisons by raising the bogey of ‘anti-Semitism’ are actively colluding in Israel’s Nazi like racism. We only have to look at the Pew Research Centre’s Survey Israel’s Religiously Divided Society which found that a plurality of Israeli Jews want to physically deport Israel’s Palestinian citizens.

Nazi like? Well expulsion of the Jews was the programme of the Nazis until 1941.

Tony Greenstein

See also

Are there any limits to Corbyn’s ritual self-humiliation? Being a Leader means standing up to your opponents not appeasing them

Nazi Zionist Comparisons – Israel’s metaphor for a disturbed conscience

Professors Ofer Cassif & Daniel Blatman of the Hebrew University, Jerusalem Compare Israel to Nazi Germany

Israel’s Occupation Forces Have Learnt Well from the Nazis

In Israel, Growing Fascism and a Racism Akin to Early Nazism

Zeev Sternhell

19.01.2018 02:00

They don’t wish to physically harm Palestinians. They only wish to deprive them of their basic human rights, such as self-rule in their own state and freedom from oppression

Israeli border police arrest a Palestinian in the West Bank, December 22, 2017Nasser Shiyoukhi/AP

I frequently ask myself how a historian in 50 or 100 years will interpret our period. When, he will ask, did people in Israel start to realize that the state that was established in the War of Independence, on the ruins of European Jewry and at the cost of the blood of combatants some of whom were Holocaust survivors, had devolved into a true monstrosity for its non-Jewish inhabitants. When did some Israelis understand that their cruelty and ability to bully others, Palestinians or Africans, began eroding the moral legitimacy of their existence as a sovereign entity?

The answer, that historian might say, was embedded in the actions of Knesset members such as Miki Zohar and Bezalel Smotrich and the bills proposed by Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked. The nation-state law, which looks like it was formulated by the worst of Europe’s ultra-nationalists, was only the beginning. Since the left did not protest against it in its Rothschild Boulevard demonstrations, it served as a first nail in the coffin of the old Israel, the one whose Declaration of Independence will remain as a museum showpiece. This archaeological relic will teach people what Israel could have become if its society hadn’t disintegrated from the moral devastation brought on by the occupation and apartheid in the territories.

The left is no longer capable of overcoming the toxic ultra-nationalism that has evolved here, the kind whose European strain almost wiped out a majority of the Jewish people. The interviews Haaretz’s Ravit Hecht held with Smotrich and Zohar (December 3, 2016 and October 28, 2017) should be widely disseminated on all media outlets in Israel and throughout the Jewish world. In both of them we see not just a growing Israeli fascism but racism akin to Nazism in its early stages.

Israeli Labour Party leader Herzog welcomes Trump to power

Like every ideology, the Nazi race theory developed over the years. At first it only deprived Jews of their civil and human rights. It’s possible that without World War II the “Jewish problem” would have ended only with the “voluntary” expulsion of Jews from Reich lands. After all, most of Austria and Germany’s Jews made it out in time. It’s possible that this is the future facing Palestinians.

Indeed, Smotrich and Zohar don’t wish to physically harm Palestinians, on condition that they don’t rise against their Jewish masters. They only wish to deprive them of their basic human rights, such as self-rule in their own state and freedom from oppression, or equal rights in case the territories are officially annexed to Israel. For these two representatives of the Knesset majority, the Palestinians are doomed to remain under occupation forever. It’s likely that the Likud’s Central Committee also thinks this way. The reasoning is simple: The Arabs aren’t Jews, so they cannot demand ownership over any part of the land that was promised to the Jewish people.

According to the concepts of Smotrich, Zohar and Shaked, a Jew from Brooklyn who has never set foot in this country is the legitimate owner of this land, while a Palestinian whose family has lived here for generations is a stranger, living here only by the grace of the Jews. “A Palestinian,” Zohar tells Hecht, “has no right to national self-determination since he doesn’t own the land in this country. Out of decency I want him here as a resident, since he was born here and lives here – I won’t tell him to leave. I’m sorry to say this but they have one major disadvantage – they weren’t born as Jews.”

From this one may assume that even if they all converted, grew side-curls and studied Torah, it would not help. This is the situation with regard to Sudanese and Eritrean asylum seekers and their children, who are Israeli for all intents and purposes. This is how it was with the Nazis. Later comes apartheid, which could apply under certain circumstances to Arabs who are citizens of Israel. Most Israelis don’t seem worried.

International Holocaust Remembrance Day: An Israeli Hypocrisy

If a racism survey were held in Western countries like the one on anti-Semitism, Israel would be near the top of the list

Daniel Blatman

Ha’aretz, Jan 28, 2018 9:03 PM

As happens every year, a few days before International Holocaust Remembrance Day (January 27), the Diaspora Affairs Ministry releases a report on the state of anti-Semitism in the world. This is a fixed ritual.

The report details the number of cases in which gravestones in some remote Jewish cemetery in Ukraine or Germany were vandalized and how many hooligans spat in the faces of Jews wearing kippot in London or Munich, as if they were a threat to Jewish existence, almost like an SS unit operating in Lithuania in 1942.

On Sunday, Education Minister Naftali Bennett, wearing his other hat as diaspora affairs minister, presented the report, whose data – as Ofer Aderet showed in this paper – answer the accepted description of fake news, to say the very least. Worried, Bennett pointed out the rise in the number of anti-Semitic incidents in Britain – 30 percent more than last year! – and stated, based on the figures from the French police, that one out of every three hate crimes in France targeted Jews. The other two out of three of course targeted Muslims and blacks, but that is less important.

"Anti-Semitism is the dangerous fuel that has inflamed our enemies forever," said Bennett. "We must ensure that every Jew everywhere in the world can live their lives in safety and pride. We must act in every way we can to fight modern anti-Semitism in order to guarantee the safety of the Jewish people, in Israel and in the Diaspora."

Since the UN General Assembly unanimously passed Resolution 60/7 in 2005, which designates January 27 – the date the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration and death camp was liberated – as International Holocaust Remembrance Day, it provides another opportunity for the chorus of hypocrites and the self-righteous in Israel, who get another day to spread their regular messages on anti-Semitism, the Holocaust and the security of the Jewish people.

The winter Holocaust Remembrance Day has been added to the one in the spring – Israel’s “Holocaust and Heroism Remembrance Day” – as an occasion to blather on and cover up the injustice Israel is carrying out here and now. Israel opens its commemoration of International Holocaust Remembrance Day 2018 with a breathtaking campaign of racist expulsion of African refugees.

It would be appropriate to go back to the wording of the resolution and examine how much of the General Assembly’s decision is upheld in Israel. In its very first section, Resolution 60/7 mentions the connection between the resolution and the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, “which proclaims that everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth therein, without distinction of any kind, such as race, religion or other status.”

Resolution 60/7 continues: “Recalling article 3 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which states that everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person; Recalling also article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and article 18 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which state that everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion.

“Bearing in mind that the founding principle of the Charter of the United Nations, ‘to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war,’ is testimony to the indelible link between the United Nations and the unique tragedy of the Second World War.”

The resolution mentions explicitly, in this context, the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which was adopted in 1948 “in order to avoid repetition of genocides such as those committed by the Nazi regime.”

Later, Resolution 60/7 mentions the Jewish tragedy, but here too the distance is great between the resolution and Israel’s manipulation of what it says: “Reaffirming that the Holocaust, which resulted in the murder of one third of the Jewish people, along with countless members of other minorities, will forever be a warning to all people of the dangers of hatred, bigotry, racism and prejudice.”

The resolution then calls on the UN member countries to “develop educational programs that will inculcate future generations with the lessons of the Holocaust in order to help to prevent future acts of genocide; rejects any denial of the Holocaust as an historical event, either in full or part; condemns without reserve all manifestations of religious intolerance, incitement, harassment or violence against persons or communities based on ethnic origin or religious belief, wherever they occur.”

Israel, which is about to send tens of thousands of African refugees on a long journey of wandering that will put their lives at risk, is the least appropriate country to speak in the name of the principles of UN General Assembly Resolution 60/7.

An endless number of examples prove that the debate in Israel is based on hypocrisy, ignorance and evil, and completely contradicts the principles set down in Resolution 60/7. Remember, Culture and Sports Minister Miri Regev described the Sudanese refugees as “a cancer in the body of the nation.” This is explicit incitement on an ethnic basis, the type that the UN resolution explicitly comes out against.

Deputy Knesset Speaker MK Bezalel Smotrich (Habayit Hayehudi) presented his phased plan, according to which the Palestinians in the occupied territories (and possibly Israeli citizens, too) would become, in the best case, subjects without rights with a status that reminds us of German Jews after the passage of the Nuremberg Laws in 1935. To the extent that they do not agree to the plan, they will simply be cleansed from here. If they refuse to leave, they will be uprooted violently, which would lead to genocide.

Another elected official from the ruling coalition, Likud's Miki Zohar, did not hesitate to state that the Arabs have a problem that has no solution – they are not Jews and therefore their fate in this land cannot be the same as that of the Jews. Where is Resolution 60/7 and where are Smotrich and Zohar? Prof. Zeev Sternhell wrote in this paper earlier this month that this racism is “akin to Nazism in its early stages.” I think it is Nazism in every way and fashion, even if comes from the school of the victims of historical Nazism.

But this is not just a dialogue between minor political figures. When Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu dehumanizes his own citizens and treats them as if they are the “huge quantities” flocking to the polls to bring down the right-wing government, he loses the right to speak in the name of Resolution 60/7. Of course, we must not forget the statements and comments of the religious leadership, which are a symbol and example for large parts of the national religious community in Israel.

This community has turned the Holocaust into one of the central components of its identity, but its treatment of its lessons is the most hypocritical and disgusting. There are hundreds of examples of this, if not thousands. One is Rabbi David Batzri, who in 2006 came out against the establishment of an Arab-Jewish school, saying the “establishment of such a school is an act of impurity and contamination. It is impossible to mix the impure with the pure. They are a blight, an evil Satan, a plague. The Arabs are donkeys so the question must be asked as to why God did not create them walking on four legs? So the answer is they must build and clean.”

Rabbi Dov Lior, one of the most important rabbis of religious Zionism, whose racist teachings are followed by thousands, said in 2013 that he did “not know how to get rid of [the Arabs]. We believe the day is not far off when we will achieve the cleaning of our entire land from the terrorists and their supporters, and they should go to Saudi Arabia.”

Books and pamphlets praising the murderers of Arabs or permitting the shedding of their blood, such as “Baruch Hagever” and “Torat Hamelech,” are legitimate literature among a number of those who wear knitted kippot. Many other Jews agree with the opinions appearing in these books, even if they have not read them or do not even know of their existence.

More than anything else, the thundering silence of the Yad Vashem World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem is disappointing and embarrassing. Precisely now, in the face of the beginning of the deportation campaign for asylum seekers, the institution entrusted with preserving the lessons of the Holocaust should have come out loudly in the name of the principles of Resolution 60/7.

It should stand at the head of the campaign being organized in various circles in an attempt to revoke the decree, which casts a great stain on Israel’s right to speak in the name of the victims of the terrible disaster that befell the Jewish people and the human race in general. But it seems this is not going to happen. Yad Vashem is known for its silence on moral questions, unless they touch on what happened during the Holocaust.

And this is how Israel has become the Western country in which the most extreme, racist discourse is being conducted against ethnic minorities, whether they are refugees from Africa or Arabs. If a racism survey was conducted in the West, similar to the report on anti-Semitism that the local chorus of hypocrites bandies about every January 27, Israel would find itself near the top of the list.

Daniel Blatman is a professor of history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Israeli Soldier and National Hero Elor Azaria Goes on Trial For Executing Palestinian Lying Prostrate

I have already posted about Elor Azaria, the soldier who was named by Israel’s most popular free paper, Israel Hayom, as Israeli of the year. THIS IS Israel – Call to Kill All Arabs at Tel Aviv Rally in Support for Killer Soldier

 What did Elor do to earn this accolade?  In most countries it might be rescuing a group of people in danger of their life.  Going into a fire and rescuing a child or some such act of bravery.  Not in Israel.

Elor’s accolade was earned by murdering Abdel Fattah al-Sharifa, who was only a Palestinian, who had already been badly wounded in the settlers’ terrorist enclave in Hebron.  Abdel Fattah al-Sharif was already lying face down in the street as a Magen David ambulance tended to a soldier lightly wounded.  Thus Israel’s ambulance service ignored the first and basic rule of triage, to ascertain who is in most need of medical attention first.   This is practiced in all British hospital A&E’s as a queueing system might lead to someone badly injured or hurt dying.

Not in Israel though.  Arabs do not fit into a triage system where the priority is on the Jewish race.  In the occupied territories this is doubly so.  An Arab wounded by the security forces, is automatically deemed a ‘terrorist’ and receives attention last, if at all.

Our Elor, who is a supporter of the late neo-Nazi Rabbi Meir Kahane, was seriously disturbed by the wounded Palestinian.  Why is he allowed to live he was saying and he took a rifle and nonchalantly shot him in the head.   Normally this would go unpunished by the army.  Indeed it is in the rules on dealing with ‘terrorists’ (people who resist the occupation in normal language).  It is called ‘confirming the kill’. 

The only problem was that some annoying Palestinian, who was later threatened and severely harassed, had captured the scene on a camera kindly supplied by the Israeli civil rights group, Btselem, which is itself under attack for ‘supporting terrorism’.

The army therefore had to arrest Elor and the Minister of Defence, Moshe Yalon supported this.   So did Netanyahu until his far-right Minister of Education, Naftali Bennet started kicking up and condemning the attacks on Elor.  Soon a full scale public campaign was under way to make Elor a national hero.  A large demonstration was held in Tel Aviv under the banner ‘Kill them all’ (i.e. all the Arabs) and a lovely poster ‘My honour is my loyalty’ made up the occasion.  Probably the idiot who carried it was unaware that this was the slogan of the Nazi SS!

Now our Elor is coming up for trial.  My bet is that he won’t see gaol time and if, a big if, he is convicted of manslaughter he will soon have that downgraded to some minor offence.  Either way Elor will be free very soon at the very worst.

The article below seems to consist of a great deal of wishful thinking.

Tony Greenstein

Azaria’s conviction will end a totalitarian ideology

Sgt. Elor Azaria, surrounded by army friends 

This is one in a series of columns by Yakov Hirsch on Hasbara Culture, and its impact on discourse and politics in Israel and the U.S. You can see the other columns here.

In the beginning of January 2017, Israeli sergeant Elor Azaria is going to be found guilty for the execution of Abd al Fatah Al-Sharif lying prostate on the ground in Hebron last March 24. And the Israeli political reaction to that verdict will be transformative. It is then that the hasbara culture cultivated by Benjamin Netanyahu will at last be confronted by a sane Israel led by former Prime Minister Ehud Barak.

The discourse that will resound in Israel in defense of Azaria will be incoherent to anyone who is not an adherent of the hasbara culture that now permeates that society. Naftali Bennett, the education minister under Netanyahu, has already been saying that Azaria needs to be pardoned if convicted.

We have already heard from soldiers who say they will go “AWOL” or even desert should their fellow combatant be convicted of manslaughter charges by the military court.

Jeffrey Goldberg epitomizes Hasbara Culture (Photo: Riccardo S. Savi/Getty Images)

The saga of the Murdering Medic is so important because it has revealed the way that “hasbara” – or the Israeli tradition of spinning its actions to try and make them acceptable to the world – has so deeply affected the spinners themselves that hasbara has hardened into an Israeli construction of reality, so much so that the many participants in that reality no longer think it is necessary to even spin bad events.

Observers who think the Israel of 2016 is an Israel of Netanyahu “cowering before the settlers” are wrong in my opinion.

The real struggle in Israeli leadership is who can control a sacred ethnocentric discourse of Jewish persecution and innocence. That is what has shaped Israeli politics in recent years: the heavyweight battle between Netanyahu and Bennett over control of the reins of hasbara culture.

Let us recall the Israeli government reaction to the video of the killing when it came out last March. Here, after all, was irrefutable evidence of the IDF behaving as its worst critics around the world claim that it does. The whole scene in its hideous naked glory — with the indifferent Israeli soldier “bystanders” to the shooting, as well as the congratulatory hand shake for Azaria from his friend the settler leader Baruch Marzel at the end (as Larry Derfner revealed)—was a nightmare for the difficult business of hasbara.

The video gave the lie to the carefully cultivated image of the world’s most moral army.

We all braced ourselves for the Israeli effort to spin the video: if only to argue that it was an aberration from the IDF norms.

But that is not what happened. What happened is that high officials in the government said, we saw exactly what you saw in that video, and it is fine.

Let’s go back to the timeline. A couple of days after the killing, Amos Harel in Haaretz described it as a “coldblooded execution” and an inevitable one, but he anticipated official condemnation.

Scene of the murder

“The chief of staff, who was once a brigade and division commander of soldiers in the territories, knows [that]… Animal-like behavior like that seen in Thursday’s incident in Hebron can quickly become the unwritten procedure for units in the field. That is the reason that the shooter was immediately arrested, an unusual move for the IDF these days, and the reason for the sharp public condemnations issued by [chief of staff Gadi] Eisenkot and Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon…”

“Meanwhile, we’ve seen no right-wing campaign in support of the shooter.”

Even Netanyahu was on board at this point. He said

“that the soldier’s conduct does not represent the army’s values and even insinuated that the soldier failed to act in accordance with the military’s open-fire rules.”

This story might very well have ended there were it not for hasbara culture. Azaria would have been a bad apple. Even the most moral army in the world has a bad apple or two!

But then Education Minister Bennett came into the picture. Three days after the killing, he began lecturing Netanyahu in the very way Netanyahu lectures human rights groups.

“This soldier was sent by the State of Israel to defend against terror during war,” he said before entering the [Cabinet] meeting. “That some of this country’s leadership has jumped to conclusions before the trial is a mistake and are dancing to the tune of B’Tselem…”

Once the Azaria incident got defined as a story of “us” vs our “enemies,” Netanyahu had nowhere to go except to agitate with Bennett. Because it is Netanyahu himself who has cultivated the world view that the Palestinian on the ground should be killed.

Netanyahu can’t be on the B’Tselem side of this fight!

It should be stressed what the environment is in Israel since the so called “knife intifada” started.

Naftali Bennett states that “terrorists must be killed, not freed”; Yair Lapid clarifies, “You have to shoot to kill anyone who pulls out a knife or a screwdriver”; Bezalel Smotrich cries, “A terrorist who sets out to murder Jews, whatever his age, must not return alive”; and Gilad Erdan declares, “Every terrorist must know he won’t survive the attack he is about to commit.”

Bennett best summed up the government line on Azaria:

“Talk of a murder charge against a combat soldier during a combat operation is a moral mistake that blurs the lines between good and evil. I expect this mistake to be mended.”

Netanyahu then reversed himself. He called the parents of the accused medic, and described Azaria as “one of our children.” He later compared his empathetic call to calling a parent of an IDF soldier fallen in combat.

In Netanyahu’s Israel, hasbara culture is the only game in town. You’re either on the side of hasbara culture and all that’s good in the world, or you’re on the side of the devil. Remember what hasbara culture ideas Netanyahu most champions. From his speech at the teens’ funeral in 2014:

“A deep and wide moral abyss separates us from our enemies. They sanctify death while we sanctify life. They sanctify cruelty while we sanctify compassion.”

That statement and Bennett’s statement of “a moral mistake” in blaming Azaria is why I insist that we are dealing with hasbara culture.

Hasbara began as the need to make sense to outsiders, to spin reality. But these leaders are no longer concerned with that project: they will not convince unindoctrinated outsiders that Azaria doesn’t belong in prison with this type of talk. Any ordinary person seeing that video realizes that Elor Azaria does not represent “good” and his going to prison is not a “moral mistake.”

But for the indoctrinated these statements fall on fertile soil. Bennett is reflecting the Israeli experience of reality when he says that the idea of charging Azaria “blurs the lines between good and evil.” We are good, they are evil. Bennett is saying that the scene of the Azaria shooting of Abd al Fatah Al-Shari is “sacred.” It’s part of the us vs them, good vs bad, narrative that is at the heart of hasbara culture. Hasbara culture understands Jewish history as one long morality tale. It is the foundation of an extreme Jewish ethnocentric narrative, which in its telling, started over two millennia ago and runs through all of hasbara culture’s tendentious telling of Jewish history up to today.

We are going to be hearing a lot more of this kind of talk after the inevitable guilty verdict for Azaria in early January.

But we will also be hearing pushback from Israelis who understand how the rest of the world sees reality.

To understand the other side of this ideological battle, you must recall Gen. Yair Golan’s Holocaust memorial speech of last May, when, alarmed by the rising chorus of voices that excused Azaria’s conduct as the appropriate way to treat Palestinians, he warned that Nazi currents are alive in Israeli political culture today. The speech resulted in the sacking of Golan’s former boss, Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon, who had defended the speech to Netanyahu.

This duality is also what the whole circus surrounding the Amona settlement is about. Once Bennett agitates and defines the struggle on behalf of the Amona settlers as being the same as the sacred struggle in Jewish and Zionist history, Netanyahu becomes Bennett’s hostage.

Ideological moderation is no longer an option at this late date of Benjamin Netanyahu’s political career. His Manichean scorched earth holy wars against his “leftist” political and cultural enemies is Netanyahu’s signature use of toxic hasbara culture for his personal gain; for electoral success.

And Netanyahu’s big political problem these days is Bennett wanting to become the new overseer of hasbara culture. Netanyahu can never let that happen – or he is done.

This is not just about securing the support of the pro-settlement voters. It’s about securing the support of the entire political culture of Israeli society.

And Naftali Bennett is no ordinary right-wing politician. He has constantly been trying to wrest control of hasbara culture from Benjamin Netanyahu.  He knows that it is the key to Netanyahu’s success.

This also explains the state of the left in Israel today. The left in hasbara culture is on the side of “them” and the “bad” of Jewish history.

As a recent poll has shown, nearly half of Israelis think the left are “traitors.”

In short, there is no place for the “left” in the totalitarian ideology of hasbara culture.

Jeffrey Goldberg by Steve Voss, Bloomberg

It is one thing for Netanyahu and Bennett to drag Israeli politics into the narrow and confined space of hasbara culture. The state of Israel must work these things out for itself.

But as an American and a Jew, my concern is the fact that hasbara culture also dominates our discussions of the conflict.

That is the achievement of Jeffrey Goldberg and his followers, who are ready to use the Holocaust and anti-Semitism and other smears against any mainstream voice that is out of line.

Goldberg has said that Jill Stein is crazy for supporting Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions. For the same alleged crime, going to a BDS rally, he has accused a Norwegian rock band of being Nazis.

What Netanyahu has done with hasbara culture in Israel Jeffrey Goldberg has done with it here: created a sacred discourse that no one in the mainstream can contradict. In fact, ever since Andrew Sullivan left the scene, no one has confronted hasbara culture directly here.

And therefore, the Elor Azaria case is a crisis for Goldberg, too. The video of the murdering medic set off a chain of events in Israel in which hasbara culture is NOW facing a serious confrontation. Leading figures have become dissidents, accusing Netanyahu and Bennett and others of fostering fascistic strains in Israeli society. This drama is only going to accelerate when as I believe, Azaria is convicted in January.

Goldberg has had almost nothing to say about Azaria. The reason is obvious. Azaria executing someone because the hasbara culture voice in his head told him to may not be a problem for Naftali Bennett and Israeli leaders, but it is a big Stop sign here. Azaria exposes Goldberg’s achievement: Because in the sacred and tribal socially-constructed reality Goldberg has created, all Palestinian resistance is motivated by hatred for Jews. That is why they attempt to stab soldiers.

But the video of the medic calmly killing an incapacitated Palestinian on the ground exposes what is really going on there. Haaretz’s Gideon Levy described the Israeli policy in the territories:

a policy – to kill, kill and kill. No taking prisoners, no arrest procedures, no rules of engagement. Every knife or scissors wielder, every stone or firebomb thrower and every car rammer – or anyone who is seen to resemble one – must die.

Jeffrey Goldberg has attacked Haaretz as a dissident publication, but his career ambitions do not allow him to say what he really thinks about the “plight” of the Israeli soldier while the world is looking at the Azaria video. Because what Elor Azaria thinks about Palestinian resistance is what Jeffrey Goldberg thinks about Palestinian resistance: It’s all about the Jews. Jeffrey Goldberg’s whole career has been one long tendentious effort to define opposition to Israel as opposition to Jews, as being motivated by a hatred of Jews. And that “social construction of reality” about Abd al Fatah Al-Sharif, which Elor Azaria experienced when he said “the terrorist must die” is what Jeffrey Goldberg has been preaching to the Jewish community and everyone else for the past twenty years.

But when even Israeli leaders have said that the case exposes fascism and Nazi currents in Israel, it is too dangerous for an ambitious “liberal” like Goldberg to say a word in Azaria’s favor.

It is not a surprise that the only thing Jeffrey Goldberg had to say about the case was to retweet a Shmuel Rosner article, whose only coherent message is that the Azaria trial is a PR disaster for Israel. Rosner repeated former defense minister Moshe Arens’s warning about the case:

“Elor Azaria’s Trial Should Never Have Become a Public Affair”

That is precisely Goldberg’s feeling. The case should never have become a public matter because it has only exposed the fact that Hasbara Culture is now run amok in Israel. And when Azaria is convicted, all hell will break loose. A broad segment of society will be outraged; a few sane Israelis will plead for the rule of law. Netanyahu will defend the medic. And Barak will try to unify an anti-Netanyahu coalition.

Goldberg must have felt like the luckiest person in the world when he got promoted to being editor in chief of The Atlantic two months ago. Who could expect the new editor with his huge workload to share his opinion about what was going on in Israel!

I have done my best to show how the Elor Azaria story and its reverberations in Israel have been spun by the hasbarists here. The people who have made a career out of obfuscation and obscurantism about all things Israel (from Max Boot to Bret Stephens to Eli Lake) continued to do so in our discourse. We will return after the Azaria verdict to assess how these “journalists” who claim to be the biggest experts America and the Jewish community have to offer on Israel did on their real life quiz about what the Azaria story was really about.

Meanwhile we can only cross our fingers and hope that Jeffrey Goldberg– “no greater journalist writing in the country today,” and our biggest expert on Israel– will take a break from his busy schedule and share his wisdom with the rest of us. What has Elor Azaria wrought?