Using Arabs as Window Dressing for Israeli Apartheid is Standard Hasbara (propaganda)

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!

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.

Chokehold on diplomat exposes Israel’s special type of apartheid

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.

Israel’s Education System Teaches Jewish children to Hate Palestinians

What religious and nationalist indoctrination in schools means for Israel's future

It is a common myth assiduously propagated by Israel’s supporters that whereas Israel inculcates respect in its Education system for Arabs, the same is not true of the Palestinian education system.  A typical example is the article by neo-conservative Elliot Abrams for the Council on Foreign Relations entitled Teaching Palestinian Children to Value Terrorism. 

Abrams writes that ‘A new study of Palestinian textbooks finds that Palestinian children are being taught to glorify and value terrorism and violence.’ The assumption behind this is that Palestinian resistance to the Occupation, classified as ‘terrorism’ would not occur but for Palestinians being taught to hate their occupier. Indeed over time Palestinians would come to love the Occupation and the continual theft of their land, the attacks by settlers, the military checkpoints etc.  This is part of the process of normalising the Occupation (which is never called that) and demonising the victims.  It is on a par with the Nial Fergusson/Andrew Roberts view of British history.

There are a few mixed private schools in Israel run by the Max Rayne Foundation.  Hand in Hand Schools can be found in the Galilee, Beer Sheva and Jerusalem.  The Jerusalem school was  the victim of an arson attack in November 2014 by members of the fascist Lehava group, which has not been proscribed or declared a terrorist organisation.  Two brothers received 32 and 38 months.  Sprayed on the walls were slogans such as “There is no coexistence with cancer” and “Kahane was right” 

But this doesn’t of course explain why Israel’s high school students are so racist and right-wing..  Nearly half of Israel's high school students do not believe that Israeli-Arabs are entitled to the same rights as Jews in Israel, according to the results of a survey in 2010.  Poll: Half of Israeli High Schoolers Oppose Equal Rights for Arabs 11.3.10.

The same poll revealed that more than half the students would deny Arabs the right to be elected to the Knesset.  At the same time 48 percent said that they would refuse orders to evacuate outposts and settlements in the Palestinian territories although nearly one-third - 31 percent - said they would refuse military service beyond the Green Line.

Prof. Daniel Bar-Tal, of Tel Aviv’s School of Education was quoted as saying that "Jewish youth have not internalized basic democratic values,"

There was nothing abnormal or erratic about this poll.  Almost exactly the same conclusions were reached in another poll taken six years later which found that nearly half of Jewish Israeli high school students believed that Arabs should not have the right to vote.

The poll, conducted by New Wave Research for the Israel Hayom daily, asked Jewish Israeli high school students in grades 11-12 a variety of questions intended to probe their opinions on current affairs and political identity. Half of Jewish high schoolers say Arabs shouldn’t vote – poll 13.4.16.

Nearly half (48%) of those polled answered “no” to the question: “Do you think Arab Israelis should be represented in the Knesset?”  52% said yes

military values are instilled in Israeli Jewish children from an early age

According to Reuven Harari, the CEO of pollster New Wave, most of the figures in the poll “were not surprising,” as they matched numbers pollsters have found for Israeli adults. Hariri told Army Radio that the research had two important and interconnected findings. First, youths in Israel are more right-wing than their parents. Second, while “the trend around the world is for youth to be more left-wing than their parents, in Israel we are special in that our youth is more to the right of their parents.”

60% of those polled also said they believed medical treatment should not be given to an injured terrorist and 82% said there was no chance at all of achieving a peace deal, while just 18% said an agreement was possible.  In addition 59% of high school students considered themselves right-wing and only 13% identified as left-wing.

But then it’s not altogether surprising. Jamal Zahalka, a member of the Knesset and Balad demanded an investigation into the training sponsored by the Israeli police and the education ministry, which he said “prepares students psychologically to kill Arabs.”

One photo shows a person – most of their body blurred with a black marker – using a paintball gun to fire at cutouts of men and women wearing checkered kuffiyeh headscarves that are associated with Palestinians. See Israeli police teach schoolchildren how to shoot Palestinians.

All this takes place within a segregated education system, one for Jews and another for Arabs.  Arab schools get a fraction, somewhere around a quarter per capita of the funds allocated for Jewish schools. 

Israel's warrior baby

Ha'aretz gave the example of two Jerusalem schools with nearly equal numbers of children, 782 pupils in the Beit Hinuch Jewish High School in western Jerusalem and 783 in the Ras al-Amud Arab boys’ high school in East Jerusalem. Both are municipal high schools, meaning that their budgets come from the municipality and the Education Ministry. The total budget allocated by the city for Beit Hinuch in 2016 is 16.3 million shekels ($4.3 million,) while the Arab school, with the same number of pupils, will be getting only 2.9 million shekels ($766,993).  In other word the Arab high school is receiving only 17%, one sixth, per pupil compared to the Jewish school. The number of teaching positions approved for Beit Hinuch is 70.8, while for Ras al-Amud it is only 21.7. 

There are those propagandists for Israel - the Joan Ryans, Margaret Hodges and Emily Thornberries - who still maintain that Israel is 'the only democracy in the Middle East'. Segregation and institutionalised discrimination is not, however, compatible with democracy. Except for a handful of mixed private schools Jews and Arab students go to separate schools. Arab Students in Jerusalem Get Less Than Half the Funding of Jewish Counterparts 

Israeli youth relive mock gunbattles

An important article Jewish and Arab pupils talk of unity, but Israel has never been so divided by Peter Beaumont in The Guardian (4.6.16) describes the introduction of a new civics textbook – To Be Citizens in Israel – produced by the Education Ministry, whose Minister is Naftali Bennett a member of the far-Right religious settlers party, Habayit HaYehudi (Jewish Home). Beaumont described how it had been accused of editing out Israeli Arabs and their experiences. He quoted an editorial in Ha’aretz Israel's New Civics Textbook Was Born in Sin and Must Be Opposed

“The book’s message is impossible to mistake: Jewish identity, as expressed in the state’s definition of itself and in the public sphere, takes priority over civic identity. This mainly reflects the views of an orthodox, conservative, rightwing strain of Judaism.

Beaumont wrote that ‘The furore over the book – which superseded one that rightwing parties such as Bennett’s complained was too critical of the state – has not been an isolated incident. In December, Bennett’s ministry removed a book, Dorit Rabinyan’s Borderlife, that depicted a love story between an Israeli woman and a Palestinian man, from the curriculum of Israeli secular state schools.

Not one Arab participated in the writing of the civics book.

“The text contains no model of shared life between Jews and Arabs. The Jews’ rights are clear; the Arabs’ place is restricted; and the walls separating them are only raised even higher. The racism that is ripping Israeli society apart receives almost no mention.”

But of course it suits the media here and in the United States to portray Israel’s education system as fostering mutual tolerance unlike the Palestinian education sector which is seen as responsible for ‘terrorism.’

Tony Greenstein

How fascism Is Creeping Into Israel's Education System

Shaul Arieli

Jun 20, 2018 7:40 PM

An Israeli classroom (illustrative). Tomer Appelbaum

If we look at Israel’s education system through the prism of PISA – the Program of International Student Assessment – the situation looks bleak. Every three years, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development conducts these exams to check the skills of 15-year-old students the world over in reading, mathematics and science. Consistently, the results for Israel suggest that the percentage of high-school graduates who will find it difficult to integrate into their society and economy is one of the highest among the more than 70 countries in which the PISA surveys are conducted. The achievements of Israel’s teachers, which the test also evaluates, also leave much to be desired.

The situation is even worse, considering that between 2006 and 2016, the local education budget actually grew by 30 billion shekels (about $7 billion) and has continued to increase apace since. But the investment of all those billions resulted in improvements of only another 13 points in the PISA science tests and another 28 points in math section.

The explanation for this is neither new nor surprising. “We need to understand that we are educating students for their future, and not for our past,” says Andreas Schleicher, coordinator of the PISA and in essence the OECD’s “minister of education,” in regard to the low achievements in Israel. As he told Haaretz (Hebrew edition) last month, “Pedagogy in Israel is very traditional and standard. It is not directed toward developing the student’s skills, it does not emphasize creative thinking and problem solving. There is too much rote learning It doesn’t work like that anymore. In the modern world you are not rewarded for what you know, but for what you can do with the knowledge you have accumulated.”

There is nothing new about all this. In 2005, I published an article in the wake of an announcement by a senior Education Ministry official, in which I wrote: “We have been informed that henceforth part of the matriculation grade in Bible will include memorization of verses and reciting them aloud. The goal underlying this decision by the coordinating supervisor of Bible studies is ‘to draw the students close to the Bible and to improve their ability to read texts aloud.’

“How lovely that in the age of information and technology, innovation in the Education Ministry takes the form of placing the emphasis not on the ability to understand a text, nor on critical thinking or even on the sheer ability to find one’s way through the recesses of the Bible, but on the ability of Israeli students to present an appropriate Zionist response to church choirs by chanting a number of selected verses according to biblical cantillation.”

And, continuing: “Judaism’s cultural richness was born from criticism and wonder, from disputes and from daring, and not from memorization and reading aloud It’s essential to create intellectual curiosity.”

We should not be surprised by the politicization of the education system. In September 2016, Education Minister Naftali Bennett chose to declare, at an event saluting the TALI (Hebrew acronym for “enriched Jewish studies”) education fund, that,

“The study of Judaism and excelling in it is more important to me than the study of mathematics and science.” Not for the first time, Bennett also rejected criticism that was leveled at this approach. One such critique was voiced at the time by Rachel Elior, professor of Jewish philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem: “What is most important are studies about human dignity, according to which the sanctity of life is universal and is not conditional on religion and nationality.”

It’s worth recalling that the education clause in the platform of Bennett’s Habayit Hayehudi party ignores societal diversity and advocates foisting a religious-Zionist (nationalist) education on all Jewish children. The love of homeland that the party seeks to teach involves annexation of the West Bank, continued rule over another people and the international isolation of Israel until “we accustom the world” to this policy. Its educational model ignores such biblical imperatives as “you shall love the stranger.” It evokes the educational approach about which Yeshayahu Leibowitz wrote a searing warning: 

“A person who accepts the opinion that ‘the state,’ ‘the nation,’ ‘the homeland,’ ‘security’ and so forth are the supreme values, and that unconditional loyalty to those values is an absolute and sacred duty, will be capable of perpetrating every abomination for the sake of that sacred interest, without any pangs of conscience.”

Bennett’s approach is reflected in the allocation of resources to nationalist-religious-messianic education, in which, it must be said, the two previous education ministers, Gideon Sa’ar and Shai Piron, were also complicit. According to Education Ministry data, between 2012 and 2016, the ministry increased the per capita budget for students in state-religious high schools by the highest percentage of all the educational streams: Totalling 33,000 shekels (about $9,500) per student per year, the sum allotted was 22 percent higher than that for students in the secular state education system, and 67 percent higher than for students in Arab high schools.

Bennett knows that by shaping the political outlook of the country’s youth it will be possible to influence the political system, and with it Israel’s character and regime, in the years ahead. This insight is shared by all of those who wish to “settle in the hearts,”and promote nationalist and messianic ideas among the larger public.

But the educational disaster currently being experienced by Israeli society runs deeper: It is tainted by signs of fascism. “Anti-intellectualism” has always been a symptom of fascism. The persecution of liberal intellectuals for their supposed betrayal of tradition or of authoritarian ideology was an obligation for the thinkers of the elite in such places as fascist Italy. Discussing this, the poet and author Lea Goldberg noted that intellectuals and creative artists pose a threat to dictatorships and to worldviews that deny human liberty, when they (the artists) teach “humanity to say ‘no’ with bitter derision when the time demands it.”

This, too, was how many perceived the “code of ethics” for university lecturers drawn up last year by philosopher Asa Kasher at Bennett’s request. And MK Tzipi Hotovely, later to become Israel’s deputy foreign minister, wrote on her Facebook page in September 2014 in reference to the creative backbone of Israel’s high-tech industry, the engine of the growth of the country’s economy:

“The refusal of officers in [IDF intelligence unit] 8200 [to serve in the reserves] is a social explosive belt and reflects the moral bankruptcy of the education system in which they grew up. They are not worthy to serve in the world’s most moral army. The chief of staff must start the process of their dismissal immediately.”

Israel’s failure in the PISA literacy tests also attests to the “degeneration of language” that we see in many elected officials. Still, no one even comes close to the minister of culture in this regard. All fascistic textbooks used throughout history have made use of a minimal lexicon and the most basic grammar, with the aim of depleting the tools for critical and complex thinking. In a five-minute speech that then-Likud MK Miri Regev delivered to high-school students while appearing on a panel of politicians in 2012, she asserted that Labor MK Shelly Yacimovich voted for Hadash (the communist, Jewish-Arab party), and activist Stav Shafir (who later became an MK from Labor) was a communist.

In such a culture, we may find it difficult to follow and understand a process that unfolds across many years – until the moment when a particular slice of reality reflects the full force and implications of such a process. This is not the first time the naked truth about Israel’s teachers has been exposed. It happened two years ago, too, in the episode of the survey of teachers regarding the history of Zionism and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Suddenly we were confronted with the gloomy picture: A survey conducted in September 2015 by the newspaper Israel Hayom found that 69 percent of the country’s school teachers do not know what happened on November 29, 1947, and 57 percent do not know what the Green Line is or how it was determined. The material that must be memorized is chosen carefully – the prayer for rain, for example, because according to the Education Ministry this can influence rainfall – but it does not include formative events in the history of Zionism.

There’s nothing accidental about this ignorance concerning issues that determine our fate. It is the result of the fact that in recent years the Education Ministry has been led by figures from the nationalist and messianic-religious camp.

The process that is occurring in the state education system has become exacerbated mainly due to two important trends, which are instrumental in creating the political culture and the greater social culture that exists in the public domain.

The first, and more important, trend guarantees – in the absence of knowledge of Israel’s major milestones – that the school curriculum will not include certain concepts and facts, and outlines of historical processes, that could serve as the basis for a fuller understanding of the history of Zionism and the conflict with the Arabs. It is easier to introduce “historical truths” into this knowledge vacuum and to change them according to various political needs – as seen, for example, in the prime minister’s remarks about the Jerusalem mufti Hajj Amin al-Husseini’s supposed responsibility for proposing the Final Solution to Hitler.

The second trend involves the introduction of nationalist, religious and messianic content into the curriculum, which Bennett manages to do clandestinely; it’s easy and convenient when there is no other solid base of knowledge to be contended with. This is a manifestation of the education minister’s main mission, based on his statement that for the sake of the Land of Israel it is necessary to change the people of Israel and the State of Israel. He and his colleagues are now focusing on “settling in people’s hearts,” following a series of traumas deriving from the shattering of messianism on the rocks of reality: the Gaza withdrawal, the evacuation of the illegal Migron and Amona outposts, and the containment of the building momentum in the settlements as a result of international pressure.

This evil wind that is blowing through the country’s education system is in total contradiction to the spirit of the country’s founders. They sought to ensure the future more than to preserve the past – as David Ben-Gurion and Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, Israel’s second president, wrote in their 1918 book, “Eretz Yisrael”: “If we wish to determine the borders of the Land of Israel of today, [it is] mainly if we see it not as the preserve of the Jewish past but as the land of the Jewish future.”

Indeed, if these trends are not halted and the process not reversed, Israel will end up realizing the warning of Lord Nathaniel Rothschild, who wrote to Theodor Herzl in August 1902,

“I tell you very frankly that I should view with horror the establishment of a Jewish colony pure and simple. it would be a Ghetto with the prejudices of a Ghetto; it would be a small petty Jewish state, orthodox and illiberal, excluding the Gentile and the Christian.”

Israel Moves Another Step Nearer Being a Police State – Even for Jews

Plan to Outlaw ‘Breaking the Silence’ the group which reveals Israel's war crimes

The reality of the most benign occupation in the world

Settler colonial societies, be it Israel, Algeria or South Africa, always created a certain democratic space for the settler population.  The indigenous population were always faced with a racist police state but Whites South Africans, French colons or Israeli Jews were always granted freedoms that resemble those that exist in Western bourgeois societies.

However the very nature of a settler colonial society leads to a situation where those members of the settler community who sympathise with and support the oppressed native population find that their democratic space is constantly being encroached upon.  So it was in South Africa that White opponents of Apartheid were also banned, detained, framed and deported.  So too in Israel, anti-Zionist Jews are increasingly coming under pressure, political and physical.  Not just anti-Zionist Jews but even those Zionists who are human rights activists and oppose the war crimes of the settler state.

How the Right see it - revealing human rights violations is a distortion of reality

I have had an argument with a good Israeli comrade, Ronnie Barkan, who tells me that ‘Breaking the Silence’ is no better than the rest of the Zionist population.  I disagree with him.  Although they, like Btselem, are undoubtedly liberal Zionists the fact is that the work they do is seen, rightly, as a threat by the Zionist regime – and not just the regime but most of the Zionist opposition too.  The 'centrist' Yesh Atid led by Yair Lapid has been one of the most hostile parties.

Israeli NGOs have already been the target of hostile legislation.  Last year they were forced to reveal prominently in their literature if they received more than half their funding from abroad.  [Israel passes law to force NGOs to reveal foreign funding]  The reason for this was in order to demonstrate that human rights activists are really traitors, who received their money from foreign governments.  Of course there was no obligation on other mainly right-wing groups or e.g. the most popular news paper Israel Hayom which is funded by US billionaire to reveal its funding.

Breaking the Silence speak out in Berlin

The aim of the new law is to ban organisations which seek to harm Israeli soldiers, whatever that means and which seek to put them on trial in international courts.  BTS which collects testimony from soldiers on the human rights violations of Israeli soldiers would be caught by this.

Yair Lapid of the 'centrist' Yesh Atid attacks Breaking the Silence alongside Israeli army officers

Netanyahu pushes for bill to ban Breaking the Silence, BDS NGOs

By Lahav Harkov,  Jerusalem Post, October 17, 2017 13:29

The bill would shut down Israeli groups that try to put IDF soldiers on trial in international courts.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pauses while addressing attendees during the 70th session of the United Nations General Assembly at the U.N. Headquarters in New York, October 1, 2015. . (photo credit:CARLO ALLEGRI/REUTERS)

New legislation supported by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would shut down any organization that seeks to harm IDF soldiers or try IDF soldiers in international courts.
The bill would also ban NGOs that promote a boycott of Israel or any area in its controls, meaning that it would apply to settlement boycotts, Channel 2 reported on Monday night.

The new details followed Sunday’s unanimous decision by the coalition to launch a two-pronged attack on foreign funding of political NGOs, consisting of a parliamentary commission of inquiry into “the involvement of foreign governments in the funding of political organizations and activities to harm IDF soldiers,” and legislation that will be more stringent than the current laws requiring organizations to report foreign funding and announce it publicly if more than half of their budget comes from a foreign political entity.

Israeli soldier poses with detainees

The vast majority of organizations that are mostly funded by foreign governments  – 25 of 27 NGOs listed by the Justice Ministry in 2016 – are left-wing.

Earlier this year, Netanyahu appointed Tourism Minister Yariv Levin to come up with a new bill on the topic, because he thought the existing laws are too permissive.

Closing Breaking the Silence, which collects testimony from former IDF soldiers claiming war crimes and airs them around the world, was reportedly specifically mentioned in discussions of what the legislation should entail.

Breaking the Silence Exhibition - Netanyahu wants to clamp down on such embarrassments

Breaking the Silence’s executive director Avner Gvaryahu said his organization “is here to stay, now and after Netanyahu,” and argued that the “persecution” of his NGO is a distraction from the investigations into alleged corruption by Netanyahu.

“This is yet another pitiful witch-hunt from a right-wing government that knows its days are numbered,” he stated. “Yet again, Netanyahu chooses to use IDF soldiers, who have broken the silence and oppose the occupation, as a human shield, deflecting the consequences of his own criminal entanglements. Neither a commission of inquiry nor legislation will deter us. There is only one way to stop Breaking the Silence: end the occupation."

Opinion The Right-wing Assault on Israeli Democracy

A plan to outlaw Breaking the Silence is part of a campaign that aims to erase the liberal democracy that Israel once aspired to be

Chemi Shalev Haaretz, Oct 17, 2017 5:45 PM

The reported plan to declare the anti-occupation NGO Breaking the Silence illegal is an indication of Israel’s heavy-handed government and of its weakened democracy. It would be considered breaking news were it not for the fact that it is actually more of the same. The blacklisting of Breaking the Silence, which would surely serve as a gateway to banning more dissent, is part of the overall right-wing assault on the liberal democracy that Israel once aspired to be. Like the (apparently false) claim that a frog will tolerate water being heated up until it’s boiled to death, Israeli public opinion, including the part that was supposed to offer resistance, has adapted to the dismantlement in stages of the country’s democracy. If and when the public wakes up, it might very well be too late.

The onslaught is being executed on many fronts. It is a calculated and integrated campaign. To allow the government to enact anti-democratic laws as it sees fit, it must first revoke the authority of the High Court of Justice to nullify Knesset legislation. To diminish the stature of the court, the justice minister tries to clip its wings through legislation while her fellow coalition members delegitimize the High Court’s decisions and makeup. Without the threat of High Court nullification, right-wing lawmakers can start dreaming about remaking Israeli democracy into the Jewish ethnocracy they desire. To justify the required curtailment of equality and civil rights, Israeli Arabs are portrayed as a Fifth Column, opponents of the occupation become terrorist collaborators and demonstrators for the rule of law are dubbed anarchists and harassers. All the while, the government’s education commissar tries to edit academic freedom to make it conform to government policy and its culture czar threatens the livelihood of artists who challenge dogma and buck right-wing convention.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s efforts to save himself from what increasingly look like likely indictments only add fuel to the fire already consuming Israeli democracy. A frantic and haunted prime minister waging a personal vendetta against the media and the legal system for his own survival is a crucial element in the anti-democratic revolution. So the coalition stays silent when Netanyahu attacks the police just as they will look the other way when he will try to intimidate his potential Justice Ministry prosecutors, not to mention the ecstasy that engulfs right wingers whenever Netanyahu tries to torment the media. He launches bitter personal attacks on journalists, like Donald Trump on steroids, opens and closes public broadcasting stations, like Romania’s Nicolae Ceausescu or Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan, enforces regulations or relaxes the rules to send a message to reporters – but mainly to those who pay their salaries – that investigative exposés and biting criticism might not be the shortest avenue to fame and fortune.

The breaking and smashing frenzy, which is slated to peak in the Knesset’s upcoming winter session, is shared by cynical politicians and true fanatics. The former are looking for headlines that will grab their incited voters but the latter represent a comprehensive world view that derides Western and liberal values and seeks to replace them with an authoritarian regime in which Jews reign supreme. They want to discriminate between Jews and Arabs without knee-jerk liberals getting in their way, to grab Palestinian land while the High Court cowers in the corner, and to continue managing the occupation in darkness, without the rays of disinfecting sunlight occasionally shed by NGOs such as Breaking the Silence and B’Tselem.

This aggressive campaign is fed by the right wing’s perpetual self-victimization, orchestrated and conducted by Netanyahu himself, and by the arrogance of Likud politicians – and those from the national-religious Habayit Hayehudi (Jewish Home) Party even more so – who show no compunction about undermining the values that made Israel what it is today. Maybe their amok is a function of an urge to erase the last remnants of the Israel in whose creation and consolidation their political movements played only a minor role. After the mission is accomplished, the internal destroyers and demolishers of the Zionist revolution that created the state can continue pretending that they are its children and successors.

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?