Why Israel is an Apartheid State

Why a settler colonial Jewish State is Inevitably a Racist State

   

A few years ago ex-President Jimmy Carter was pilloried for suggesting that Israel was pursuing a policy of Apartheid in the Occupied Territories.[i] Today even ex-Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak says that without a peace agreement Israel will become an apartheid state.[ii] Yet this should not blind us to the differences between Zionism in Israel and Apartheid in South Africa in terms of political economy. Whereas Apartheid sought to exploit the labour power of Black South Africans, Zionism seeks to exclude it altogether. 

The other major difference is that, until recently, Israel did not engage – at least openly – in ‘petty Apartheid’. There were no signs saying ‘Jews Only’. Institutional and state discrimination remained hidden beneath the surface although it was just as real. Even today in the West Bank there are no 'Jews only' signs on the road.  It's just that the Army doesn't need a sign to enforce what is Military Law.

Flags of the Apartheid States

Racial segregation ‘separate development’ was integral to the political and legal doctrine of South African Apartheid.[iii] There is however more than one way of skinning a cat. In Israel, the same principles that Apartheid South Africa stood for have been achieved, without the need to declare them openly. 

In a survey of 400 teenagers, 35% of Jewish youth had never spoken to an Arab teenager and 27% of Arab youth had never spoken to a Jewish teenager.[iv] Israeli Jews and Palestinians are educated separately, live separately and socialise separately. The instruments of power in Israel are in the hands of the Jewish majority not the Palestinian minority.

The reaction of the JNF in 2005 to the decision in Kadaan that you could not refuse to sell land to Arabs

The roots of Israeli Apartheid go back to before the British Mandate. The JNF bought land and then expelled the peasants who were farming it. The policies of the Zionist colonisers were Jewish Labour, Land and Produce. First the Zionists expelled the Arabs from the economy and then from the country altogether. It was this which caused the riots of 1929. As the Hope-Simpson Report reported:

‘the result of the purchase of land in Palestine by the Jewish National Fund has been that land has been extra-territorialised. It ceases to be land from which the Arab can gain any advantage either now or at any time in the future. Not only can he never hope to lease or to cultivate it, but, by the stringent provisions of the lease of the Jewish National Fund, he is deprived for ever from employment on that land. … It is for this reason that Arabs discount the professions of friendship and good will on the part of the Zionists…’

‘That this replacement of Arab labour by Jewish labour is a definite policy of the Zionist Organisation is also evident from the following quotation, taken from A Guide to Jewish Palestine, published by the Head Office of the Keren-Kayemeth Leisrael –The Jewish National Fund – and the Keren-Hayesod, in Jerusalem in the 1930s…

The Arab population already regards the transfer of lands to Zionist hands with dismay and alarm. These cannot be dismissed as baseless in light of the Zionist policy described above….

The policy of the Jewish Labour Federation is successful in impeding the employment of Arabs in Jewish colonies and in Jewish enterprises of every kind.’ ^[v]

The Jewish Labour Federation was Histadrut, founded in 1920 as the General Federation of Hebrew Labour. It was a Jewish only ‘trade union’.

In South Africa the Group Areas Act 1950 forbade Black people from living in the same town as Whites. In Israel the same objective was achieved through indirect means. Land in towns such as Kiryat Shmona was owned by the JNF and could not therefore be rented by non-Jews. Legislation was not needed to prevent Arabs from renting flats in Safed. An edict by its Chief Rabbi, Shmuel Eliyahu, that Jews were forbidden to rent apartments to Arabs, was sufficient.^[vi]

In 2000 Israel’s Supreme Court ruled in the case of Ka'adan that it was illegal to refuse to sell state lands, including those owned by the JNF, to non-Jews. The Court hadn’t wanted to reach this ruling, however it was left with no choice.^[vii] In 2005 Attorney General Mazuz decided that the 93% of state land which is controlled by the Israel Lands Administration, including that owned by the JNF, could be sold to non-Jews.^[viii] This undermined the whole basis on which the Zionist movement had colonized Palestine.^[ix]

In 2011 the government responded to the concerns of those who believed that selling ‘Jewish’ land to non-Jews undermined the very basis of Zionism by introducing the Reception Committees Law. This allowed small communities, under 500, (now increased to 700) to determine whether or not someone ‘fitted in’ to their community based on a set of social criteria. Instead of direct discrimination there would be what we know as indirect discrimination. Ostensibly Arabs would be rejected, not because they were non-Jews but because they didn’t fit in with existing Jewish communities. It is a distinction without a difference. This is how racism in Israel has traditionally operated. Instead of following the example of Apartheid South Africa and introducing legislation that forbade Arabs from leasing or buying ‘Jewish’ land, , Israel left it to the good sense of Jewish communities to reject Arabs who wanted to access Jewish land and to the regulations of para-state groups like the JNF.^[x]

In the United States, the Supreme Court in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, ruled that racially separate facilities did not violate the Constitution.^[xi] Segregation, the Court said, was not discrimination. In practice separation has always meant inequality, otherwise why have it? It was not until Brown v Board of Education 1954 that the ruling in Plessy was overturned. In Israel separation is not decreed in law but comes about as the consequence of administrative practices, regulations, land, social and employment policies that are guided by Zionism, which is a state ideology.  A Jewish state cannot be other than a racist state because of the settler colonialist context in which it was established. Being Jewish in Israel is as important as being White was in South Africa.

In the 2006 Democracy Institute Survey, 62% of Israelis wanted the government to encourage local Arabs to leave the country ^[xii] and 75% of Jews didn’t approve of sharing apartments with Arabs. Over half of Israeli Jews believed that the marriage of a Jewish woman to an Arab man is equal to national treason, according to a survey by the Geocartography Institute. 55% said “Arabs and Jews should be separated at entertainment sites”.’^[xiii]

In 2014 the Democracy Institute found that 62.9% Jews disagreed with the statement that ‘Jewish citizens of Israel should have greater rights than non-Jewish citizens.’ But when it came to more concrete questions, such as whether it was acceptable for Israel to allocate more funding to Jewish localities than to Arab ones, then 47.2% agreed compared to 47.5%; who disagreed.

In the 2016 Pew Opinion Survey a plurality (48%) of Israeli Jews wanted Israeli Palestinians to be expelled from the country. 79% believed that Jews are entitled to preferential treatment.^[xiv]

An official policy of apartheid and racial segregation would be problematic because of Israel’s political dependence on the West. It would also create difficulties for diaspora Jews. How could one support apartheid in Israel and oppose anti-Semitism in one’s own country? The problem for Zionism is how to achieve an apartheid society without being seen to do so.

Zionism has therefore deployed a number of different strategies to achieve a Jewish supremacist society. One method was the use of para-state organisations such as the JNF to implement discrimination, another was the use of indirect discrimination – using an ostensibly neutral policy that in practice is discriminatory.  For example in order to get a job in many areas you have to have served in the army! In Israel Arabs, with the exception of the Druze, do not serve in the Army.^[xv]

In Israel all families with more than four children received a special grant. The problem was how to restrict this to Jews. The innocuously titled Discharged Soldier’s (Reinstatement in Employment) (Amendment No. 4) Law 1970 achieved this purpose by restricting such benefits to those who had served in the army or whose relatives had served. Uri Avneri, a member of the Knesset, in a speech opposing the law stated that:

‘The intention is to encourage births among one part of the population of Israel and to effect the opposite among the other part, to pay grants to the hungry children of one part of the population and withhold them from the hungry children of another part, the distinction… being an ethnic one…’

However the Haredi section of Israeli society also didn’t serve in the Army. The solution to this ‘problem’ was to pay a grant equivalent to the benefit directly to the Ministry of Religion which then disbursed it to Orthodox Jews.

Virtually every section of Israeli society – from manufacturing and trade, education (except universities), teaching, the civil service – is segregated. Arab areas of society, be it education or local government are underfunded compared to their Jewish counterparts. For the year 2013/14, per-student funding in high schools was 35 percent to 68 percent higher for Jews than for Arabs.^[xvi]  Fewer Arabs per head of population go to university.

However when it comes to poverty then Arabs are the winners! As the Jerusalem Post noted, the Annual Poverty Report ‘relayed a startling gap between different population groups in Israel. The incidence of poverty among Arab families in 2012 was a staggering 53.4% compared to 14.1% among Jewish families. 36.6% of poor families in Israel today are Arabs. ^[xvii]

Because of the Occupation Israel is becoming an openly apartheid society. In the West Bank there are two systems of law – one for Jewish settlers and another for Palestinians. Even in pre-1967 Israel, the calls for an openly apartheid society are increasing. At the ‘peace talks’ Tsipi Livni MK, a “moderate” Zionist, tried to include the areas where Israel’s Arabs live in the areas that would be exchanged for the settlement blocs of the West Bank.^[xviii] There has been a whole raft of legislation, such as the 2011 Nakba Law, specifically targeted at Israel’s Arabs. The Zionist Right wish to go from the implicit to the explicit, from hidden to overt discrimination.

Police violence against Israeli Palestinians is another area of inbuilt and systemic discrimination. When demonstrations took place in Kafr Kanna in response to the killing of 22-year-old Khir Hamdan by the Police, Netanyahu called for the withdrawal of citizenship from Israeli Palestinians who he alleged had rioted. Those taking part in Jewish riots have never been threatened with the loss of citizenship, because Israel is a Jewish state.^[xix] The Police killing was captured on video and showed the Police had lied and deliberately murdered an Arab teenager.  About this Netanyahu had nothing to say.

By way of contrast, when an Ethiopian soldier was captured on camera being beaten up by the Police, there were riots. Netanyahu’s reaction to this was to invite the soldier to his residence and hug him whilst denouncing anti-Ethiopian racism.^[xx] 

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[i]            Jimmy Carter: Israel's 'Apartheid' Policies Worse Than South Africa's, Ha’aretz 11.12.06.,

[ii]           Netanyahu policies may turn Israel into apartheid state – former Israeli PM, RT, 17.6.16.

[iii]           http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apartheid

[iv]           In the survey of 400 Jewish and Israeli teens, 27% of Arab Israelis reported never having spoken with a Jewish youth.   http://www.jpost.com/Arab-Israeli-Conflict/Survey-35-percent-of-Jewish-Israeli-teens-have-never-interacted-with-Arab-peers-404831

[v]           Palestine: Report on Immigration, Land Settlement and Development, SIR JOHN HOPE SIMPSON, October 1930 http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/hope-simpson-report.

[vi]           Poll: 55% back rabbis' anti-Arab ruling, http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3998010,00.html Dozens of top Israeli rabbis sign ruling to forbid rental of homes to Arabs, http://www.haaretz.com/news/national/dozens-of-top-israeli-rabbis-sign-ruling-to-forbid-rental-of-homes-to-arabs-1.329312, Ha’aretz 7.12.10.

[vii]          Battling against Israeli 'apartheid', BBC News, Lucy Ash, 23.12.04., http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/4111915.stm

[viii]         Ha’aretz, 27.1.05. AG Mazuz Rules JNF Land Can Now Be Sold to Arabs , http://www.haaretz.com/ag-mazuz-rules-jnf-land-can-now-be-sold-to-arabs-1.148348

[ix]           For hostile reactions see for example Is This Land Still Our Land? The Expropriation of Zionism, Azureonline, No. 36, Spring 2009, Golovensky and Gilboa, http://azure.org.il/article.php?id=492

[x]           'Laws won't help get rid of Arabs’, YNet, 29.11.10., 'Laws won't help get rid of Arabs, http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3990861,00.html

[xi]           It was not finally overturned until Brown v. Board of Education 1954.

[xii]          http://en.idi.org.il/tools-and-data/guttman-center-for-surveys/the-israeli-democracy-index/ http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3248693,00.html

[xiii]         ‘Marriage to an Arab is national treason’ 27.3.07, YNet. http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3381978,00.html Roee Nahmias

[xiv]         Israel’s Religiously Divided Society, Pew Research Centre, https://tinyurl.com/y38wdrnv

[xv]          The definition of indirect discrimination is where a policy, criteria or practice is imposed, which is ostensibly neutral, but which in practice a whole class of people (for example women) find it more difficult to achieve.

[xvi]         For Jews and Arabs, Israel’s School System Remains Separate and Unequal, Ha’aretz 7 July 2016,

            http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-1.729404

[xvii]         Annual report shows 1.7 million Israelis living below poverty line, 17.12.13. http://www.jpost.com/National-News/Annual-report-shows-17-million-Israelis-living-below-poverty-line-335255

[xviii]        Palestine Papers, Permanent Revolution, Autumn 2011 see Clayton Swisher, Al Jazeera: Introducing the Palestine Papers, https://leaksource.wordpress.com/2011/01/24/al-jazeera-introducing-palestine-papers-live-updates/

[xix]         Netanyahu: Those who call to destroy Israel should have citizenship revoked, +972 Magazine, 8.11.14., http://972mag.com/bibi-those-who-call-to-destroy-israel-should-have-citizenship-revoked/98537/ Meet the Arab-Israelis living in fear of expulsion, Residents in the flashpoint Israeli town of Kafr Kana fear mass expulsion if a controversial new law designating the country a Jewish state is approved, The Telegraph, 1.12.14, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/israel/11263845/Meet-the-Arab-Israelis-living-in-fear-of-expulsion.html

[xx]          Netanyahu hugs black Jewish soldier who was assaulted by Israeli police officers sparking riots by Ethiopian Jews, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3067010/Israeli-president-says-Ethiopian-protest-exposes-wound.html

If there were any doubts that Zionism is a Racist Enterprise then the Knesset has just buried them

By 71 votes to 38 the Knesset rejects Equal Rights Bill – Jewish MKs vote by 71-25 to reject equality between Jews and non-Jews

According to the idiots’ guide to ‘anti-Semitism’ otherwise known as the IHRA definition ‘Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavour’ is anti-Semitic. Leaving aside the fact that the two parts of this sentence are a non-sequitur, since you can support a Jewish right to self-determination and still claim that Israel is a racist state (and vice versa) the existence of something can’t be an endeavour. The language is deliberately obscure and clumsy but it is a fact that Israel and Zionism is racist.  If it is anti-Semitic to tell the truth then that can only mean that anti-Semitism is justified!

The proof however is in the pudding. Last Wednesday Israel’ Knesset voted by 71-38 to reject a bill which was based on Israel’s Declaration of Independence.  The Bill was based upon The Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel which stated that the State of Israel ‘will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex’.  This was preceded by the statement that ‘The State of Israel will be open for Jewish immigration and for the Ingathering of the Exiles; it will foster the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants; it will be based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel’ which of course contained the same contradiction that is embodied in the description of Israel as a ‘Jewish and Democratic state.’

The Knesset

A state based on racial domination cannot be democratic. Likewise if you say that the State will only be open for Jewish immigration, i.e. colonisation, then you cannot have equality. Nonetheless if this sentence had been incorporated in Israeli law then it would have given Israel’s non-Jewish citizens a right to equality.

Not only did all the government members vote for the Bill but the 11 MKs from the ‘centrist’ Yesh Atid. 6 members of Yisrael Beteinu, the far-Right party of ex-Defence Minister Avigdor Lieberman abstained, as did 4 members of the Israeli Labour Party.

The Declaration of Independence, which is often quoted by Zionists when arguing that Israel is a democratic, non-racist state was never incorporated into Israeli law. Instead we have the recently passed Jewish Nation State Law which says the the right to national self-determination is "unique to the Jewish people". .

It is because a Jewish State means a state which gives privileges to one section of inhabitants (Jews) and denies them to another section (non-Jews/Palestinian Israelis) that a Jewish state is inherently racist.  The belief amongst the 80% of Israelis that it is ‘their’ state is what lies behind the visceral and open racism of the majority of Jews.

The Israeli flag flies with the Western Wall in the background

This is manifested in popular opinion as measured in a poll by Israel’s Channel 10.

Over three-quarters of Israeli Jews said they would object to their child forming friendships with Palestinian youth of the opposite sex, and more than half said they would be disturbed if their child formed friendships with Palestinian youth of the same sex.

43% of respondents said that they were disturbed or very disturbed to hear people conversing in Arabic in a public space, and 42% said they believe that Jews should be hired for work over Arabs.

Exactly 50 % of respondents said it would bother them to have a Palestinian neighbour; half of respondents also said they would not rent an apartment to a Palestinian citizen of Israel.

37% of respondents reported discomfort over a high number of Palestinian pharmacists, and 40% reported discomfort over the prominence of Palestinian doctors and nurses.

Let us contrast this with a similar poll in YNet, the internet version of Israel’s largest paper, Yediot Aharanot in an article ‘Marriage to an Arab is national treason on the 27^th March 2007, quoting a survey by the Geocartography Institute, over half of Israeli Jews said they believed the marriage of a Jewish woman to an Arab man was ‘national treason’. Note that they didn’t oppose such liaisons on religious but racial and national grounds. 

Over 75% of participants did not approve of apartment buildings being shared between Arabs and Jews. 60% of participants said they would not allow an Arab to visit their home. About 40% of participants agreed that “Arabs should have their right to vote for Knesset revoked”. Over half of the participants agreed that Israel should encourage its Arab citizens to immigrate from the country and a similar percentage said they would not want to work under the direct management of an Arab. 55% said “Arabs and Jews should be separated at entertainment sites”. 31% said they felt hatred, while 50% said they felt fear.

Protest against Israel's Nation State Bill

Over 56% of participants said they believed that Israel’s Arab citizens posed both a security and a demographic threat to the country, in other words that the Arab presence in a Jewish state caused them to fear that one day there might be more Arabs than Jews.

When asked what they thought of Arab culture, over 37%replied, “The Arab culture is inferior.”

In an article on YNet in September 2006 Poll: 62% want Arab emigration, which was based on the the Israel Democracy Institute’s democracy index s total of 62% of Israelis wantrf the government to encourage local Arabs to leave the country.

Only 14% of respondents said ties between Arabs and Jews are good, while 29% said a Jewish majority is required for decisions of crucial national significance.

Yair Lapid of the 'centrist' Yesh Atid (left) and Netanyahu

Israeli Knesset rejects bill to ‘maintain equal rights amongst all its citizens’

Mondoweizz, Yossi Gurvitz on December 12, 2018

The Knesset voted down today, by a margin of 71-38, the Basic Law: Equality bill, tabled by MK Mossi Raz (Meretz). The text of the bill was clear and concise: “The State of Israel shall maintain equal political rights amongst all its citizens, without any difference between religions, race and sex.” This is a direct quote from Israel’s Declaration of Independence.

Following the resignation of Defense Minister Lieberman a few weeks back, the governing coalition has a razor-thin margin of one vote: it controls 61 votes out of 120. However, the coalition enjoyed the support of Yesh Atid, led by Israel’s Trump wannabe, Yair Lapid. Its eleven votes are unlikely to have delivered victory to the opposition, however, as many members of the Zionist Camp fled the hall before the vote.

Despite one the greatest political cons in history – “Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East” – Israeli law never recognized equality between citizens. An attempt to enter an equality clause to the Human Dignity and Freedom Basic Law, back in 1992, failed – mostly due to the opposition of the religious parties. The Israeli Supreme Court, doubling as the country’s High Court of Justice, found – or, rather, invented – emanations of equality in Israel’s Basic Laws; doing so often required the court to fall back on the equality clause of the Declaration of Independence, claiming it was the expressed will of the Founders.

Doing so after today’s vote will require extraordinary powers of judicial juggling. And the court, which was never that great shining light its supporters portray it (see, for damning example after another, Michael Sfard’s superb “The Wall and the Gate”) is becoming less emboldened to face the government.

Formally there is equality between Arab and Jew in Israel

Following the tumult of the Nation State Law, when the Druze filled the streets in protest – claiming, correctly, the law made them second class citizens – Netanyahu promised them he’d grant them an exemption somehow. Perhaps he’d declare them honorary Jews. Today, Netanyahu closed the gate of equality before them.

He did so with the votes not only of his ultra-nationalist coalition, but also with those of Lapid, whose party claims to be a center party while serving as a gateway drug to the extreme right. And by the absent votes of the frightened members of Labour. Those 71 votes represent the hard core of practical Zionism – Zionism as it is, not as it may be – who decided Israel would be a Jewish country and not a democratic one.

The Knesset told 20% of the country’s citizens that it would demand their loyalty, but would not grant them equality. They would have second class citizenship, dependent on the whim of the Jewish majority. Next time the government of Israel tells you it “shares values” with the US, remember what that value is: 3/5 of personhood.

So it goes.

Israeli press review: New poll shows rampant racism in Israel

Middle East Eye, 10 December 2018

Meanwhile, bill calls for increasing size of villages that can implement 'admission committees' to keep out non-Jewish residents

A man in the Bedouin village of Abu Nuwar in the occupied West Bank with the Israeli settlement of Maale Adumim in the background (AFP/File photo)

Tuesday 11 December 2018

New poll shows racism rife amongst Israelis

A new poll by Israeli Channel 10 TV revealed that deep prejudice against Palestinians, including Palestinian citizens of Israel, is still the norm amongst Israeli Jews.

Over three-quarters of respondents said they would object to their child forming friendships with Palestinian youth of the opposite sex, and more than half of Israeli Jews in the study said they would be disturbed if their child formed friendships with Palestinian youth of the same sex.

Forty-three percent of respondents said that they were disturbed or very disturbed to hear people conversing in Arabic in a public space, and 42 percent said they believe that Jews should be hired for work over Arabs.

Exactly 50 percent of respondents said it would bother them to have a Palestinian neighbour; half of respondents also said they would not rent an apartment to a Palestinian citizen of Israel.

Some of Channel 10’s questions were designed to replicate those asked in a CNN poll and published in November in an attempt to measure levels of anti-Jewish racism amongst non-Jewish Europeans in Austria, France, Germany, Hungary, Poland, Sweden and the United Kingdom.

To mirror the CNN question of whether European respondents were fearful of Jewish prominence in certain professions, the Channel 10 poll asked Israelis how they felt about Palestinian prominence in the country’s health care industry.

Thirty-seven percent of respondents reported discomfort over a high number of Palestinian pharmacists, and 40 percent reported discomfort over the prominence of Palestinian doctors and nurses. By contrast, the CNN poll found that 28 percent of European respondents expressed discomfort over the prominence of Jews in global finance.

The Israeli government voted on Sunday to support a bill that would increase the size of villages that may legally implement “admission committees” to weed out Palestinian citizens of Israel and other individuals deemed undesirable, Israel’s Channel 13 Reshet reported.

According to a current Israeli law passed in 2013, municipalities with up to 400 families may form boards that may bar others from moving in. Without any requirement to be transparent about the criteria used, these committees can deny an applicant admittance by claiming that his or her lifestyle is incompatible with life in the village.

Under the new bill - proposed by far-right lawmaker Bezalel Smotrich and approved on Sunday by the Ministerial Committee on Legislation - villages with up to 700 families would be permitted to form such boards to keep out potential residents. The proposed number may drop to 500 or 600 before the bill is passed into law.

The legislation came under harsh criticism from Tamar Zandberg, leader of the liberal-Zionist Meretz party, who argued that the bill would result in more municipalities refusing to admit not only non-Jewish applicants, but also Jews of Arab ethnicity, disabled citizens and members of the LGBT community.

“Not only should acceptance committees not be expanded, but they must be abolished,” Zandberg told the ministerial committee.

Smotrich’s bill follows another recent effort to expand the scope of Jewish-only settlements inside Israel’s internationally recognised borders. The controversial Nation-State law, passed in July, originally contained language mandating the construction of Jewish-only communities, but the provision was dropped before the bill was voted into law.

The original admission committees law was passed in order to circumvent a decision by the Israeli High Court, which ruled in 2000 that the rights of a family of Palestinian citizens of Israel had been violated when an Israeli village refused to let them live there because they were Palestinian.

An senior Israeli minister and member of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s security cabinet says he is confident that once the Israeli army has a pretext for a war with its neighbour to the north, it “will return Lebanon to the Stone Age”, Channel 10 News reported.

Responding to a panelist who questioned whether the recent alleged discovery of tunnels on the Israeli side of the border with Lebanon might mean that Israeli deterrence power has decreased, Construction Minister Yoav Galant threatened to destroy Lebanon itself – not only Hezbollah.

“I presume that when we have the reasons, then we will know what to do,” said Galant, a former top general in the Israeli army. “I propose that we trust in the IDF and in its power; we know what to do. That doesn’t mean that we want a battle or a war everyday. But if, regretfully, we get to war, we will return Lebanon to the Stone Age – no less than that.”

Asked if he meant Lebanon, the country, or Hezbollah, Galant said: "Both of them. It is unacceptable [that] Israeli citizens, Israeli children, Israeli women are threatened in our cities, and in Lebanon, it’s business as usual. When I say to return the Stone Age, I mean what I say."

When the show’s host pivoted to Galant’s political patronage, the minister affirmed he was still number two on the list of the Kulanu faction of the government, but hinted that he might switch to Netanyahu’s ruling Likud party, since he shares its hawkish views on security.

"I never hid that my opinions on politics and security are identical to those of the Likud. And by the way, I’m the not the only one in the Kulanu party who holds those views," Galant said.

Israeli Transportation Minister Yisrael Katz similarly threatened to send Lebanon back to "the Stone Age" in 2014 and to "the age of cavemen" in April of this year, according to Israeli reports.

Five-thousand Bedouin citizens of Israel may be forced off their land so that an arms factory can be built on it, the financial journal Calcalist reported.

In the government’s zeal to remove the residents, it announced the plan to the press as a fait accompli, although it has yet to be officially approved.

Instead of waiting to consider complaints against the plan, including from residents who would displaced, the Israeli Authority for Resolving Bedouin Settlement in the Negev issued a statement to the press claiming that the objections had already been overruled.

The citizens who may be displaced currently live in unrecognised Bedouin villages, as well as in Abu Qureinat, Wadi al-Mashash, Wadi al-Na’am, Abu Talul and Sowaween.

Representatives of the 1,000 Bedouin families who currently live in the northern Negev desert area say the state-owned arms maker, Ta’as, known in English as IMI Systems, never presented its construction plans to them, or made any effort to find an alternate solution.

When the families pointed out that their grievances had not been heard, the government authority said “an error in transmitting information resulted in presenting the present stage as if the decision which is very likely to be accepted, was accepted".