There is only one solution to the Ascendancy of Ben Gvir and Smotrich – an end to a Jewish Supremacist State

Jonathan Freedland’s Inability to Understand Israel’s Present Crisis is Symptomatic of Liberal Zionism’s Refusal to Accept that a Jewish Democratic State is an Oxymoron

Whatever the situation and whatever the crisis, Jonathan Freedland can be relied on not to understand it. So it is with his latest essay on [Netanyahu is leading a coup against his own country. But the threat is not only to Israel, Guardian 31 March 2023]

No one quite beats Freedland, the Guardian's Zionist gatekeeper, when it comes to the ability to write at length and say nothing

Freedland is the man who waged a war against Jeremy Corbyn’s ‘anti-Semitism’ whilst failing even to mention Boris Johnson’s own, genuine anti-Semitism. Jonathan Freedland’s journalism is representative of the collapse in the Guardian’s own journalistic standards. Its representation on the D-Notice Committee, its publishing of fake stories on Julian Assange and the sheer trivialisation of every issue that he touches. Freedland truly has a Midas touch in reverse. In a very real sense the Guardian has been ‘freedlandised’.

West Bank settler at a new outpost

True to form Freedland neither understands Israel’s present crisis nor where it comes from. The very real threat to Jewish democracy, because there is no democracy for Palestinians, including Israeli Palestinians, does not come out of thin air but from the poison injected by the settlement project in the West Bank. Freedland barely mentions the fact that the West Bank settlement project has now gained critical mass with over 700,000 settlers and a corresponding political influence, especially when allied to that of the Orthodox religious parties, Shas and United Torah Judaism and Likud.

The conquest of the West Bank and Gaza resulted in Religious Zionism, which till 1977 had formed coalition governments with the Israeli Labor Party, transforming into support for political messianism whose ultimate goal could only be the ethnic cleansing of Palestine and its coronation in a Third Temple.

But who was it who sponsored the original settlement of the West Bank, including the ultra-nationalists of Hebron, if not Israeli Labor? It was the stalwarts of the Israeli Labor ‘left’, Yigal Allon, Yisrael Galili and Yitzhak Tabenkin, who helped found the Greater Israel movement because they saw, quite correctly, that the settlement project in the Occupied Territories was but an extension of the internal colonisation of pre-67 Israel itself.

The Jewish Nazi Who is Israel's Police Minister

It wasn’t Itamar Ben Gvir or Bezalel Smotrich who first Who up the Judaisation (in Nazi Germany this was called Aryanisation) of the Galilee, Negev and then East Jerusalem. This was all the work of the Israeli labor movement.

Jerusalem - Ongoing Ethnic Cleansing and House Demolitions

In a very real sense the demonstrations that we have seen in Israel are the rage of Caliban at seeing his own face in the mirror. There is nothing that Smotrich and Ben Gvir advocate, including the wiping out of Harara, that the Israeli Labor movement did not pioneer in the Nakba.

Freedland has no problem in justifying the Nakba and demonising anyone, which was Corbyn’s ‘crime’, for advocating for the right of return of the Palestinian refugees.

The Mothers of the Plaza

No-one is more devoted to a ‘Jewish’ state than Freedland. What Freedland cannot or will not understand is that Israel is not a refuge from anti-Semitism. Quite the contrary. Zionism has always thrived on anti-Semitism as Argentinian Jews found to their cost during the years of its neo-Nazi Junta (1976-1983 ) when Israel collaborated with the Junta and refused to say anything about its torture and murder of up to 3,000 Jews. Israel had a profitable strategic, political and military relationship with that junta.

Nor does Freedland understand why the sticking plaster of the Good Friday agreement in Northern Ireland worked, up to a point, in securing a frozen peace whereas the Oslo Accords were an abysmal failure. Ulster Unionism no longer had the political strength to fight for a Protestant State for a Protestant People (James Craig) whereas Zionism had lost none of its appetite for colonisation and a Jewish Supremacist State. All it needed was time to consolidate. Yet even in Northern Ireland the question of  Partition looms large as we have seen over Brexit and the Northern Ireland Protocol.

Smotrich - Head of West Bank Military Administration - called for the 'wiping out' of the Palestinian town of Huwara

The only solution in Israel is a state of all its citizens as opposed to a Jewish state. However the abolition of Israeli Apartheid is the one solution that Freedland will not countenance because he is a Jewish chauvinist. As the Israeli government prepares legislation that will ban Israel’s Arab parties, thus ensuring that the only governments Israel will know in the future are those of the far-Right, Freedland fails to perceive that a ‘Jewish’ state, like all ethno-nationalist states, can only go in one direction.  If you want a state of racial purity then who better to carry it out than those who will complete the project and not stop halfway?

Lapid & Biden

All Zionist parties are committed, in Yair Lapid’s phrase to ‘maximum Jews, maximum land and minimum Palestinians.’ Who better to carry it out than those who believe in there being no Palestinians rather than ‘minimum’ Palestinians (other than slaves and hewers of wood and drawers of water?

The irony of Freedland is that when faced with finding a genuine Jewish hero during the Holocaust to eulogise he was forced to choose an anti-Zionist, Rudolf Vrba, since the Zionism movement had distinguished itself by its collaboration with the Nazis!

Tony Greenstein

The Right & Far Right Will Almost Certainly Win the Israeli Elections

The Last Fling of Left Zionism

Herzog and Netanyahu - Spot the Difference

Moshe Kalon of Kulanu -  A Likud offshoot

The late Shulamit Aloni who founded Meretz and drifted away from Zionism

The last time that the Israeli Labour Party (flying under the Zionist Union flag today in alliance with Tsipi Livni's Hatnuah) won an Israeli General Election it was in 1992 under Yitzhak Rabin.  The only comparison with today is that Israel, under a far-right Zionist administration (then led by Yitzhak Shamir who had proposed a pact with Nazi Germany as one of the leaders of Lehi) had come into conflict with the US Administration.  George Bush Snr. had then frozen $11 billion in export credit guarantees.

Haneen Zoabi of Balad/Joint List attacked

Israeli woman and Aida Touma-Suliman joint list

Today Netanyahu's administration, which is further to the right than Shamir's, has aligned himself with a powerful section of the US political establishment against Obama.

The Ogre

Israel's fascist foreign minister - Avigdor Lieberman

The arithmetic however is completely different.  Rabin gained 44 seats and Meretz, the left-Zionist civil rights party (which included Shulamit Aloni, who was barely a Zionist) gained 12 seats.  Today the Zionist Union will gain about 24 seats and Meretz 5 seats at most.  In 1992 Labour and Meretz nearly had an overall majority and with the Arab parties and Hadash couldn't be overthrown.  Today they will be at the mercy of all sorts of 'centrist' Zionist parties if they try to form an administration.

Yair Lapid - of the opportunistic 'centre' Yesh Atid

Below is the unexpurgated version of an article I wrote for the Weekly Worker 1048 Polarisation continues to grow

Israeli General Election 17^th March 2015

Polarisation but no change

Israel is due to go the polls on 17^th March 2015.  The above table is based on the latest 3 opinion polls and they differ only slightly.  The Israeli Labour Party, running with Tsipi Livni’s Hatnuah, has high hopes of forming the next government.  It is likely to be disappointed.

The Joint List Press Conference

Naftali Bennett - leader of the racist far-right settler's party Jewish Home (Habayit HaYehuda)

The previous General Election was held in 2013.  Netanyahu dissolved the Knesset two years early as a result of the refusal of Yair Lapid of Yesh Atid and Tsipi Livni of Hatnuah to agree to proposals to entrench, as a basic (constitutional) law, the definition of Israel as a Jewish state.  Accompanying Arabic would have been removed as the second official language in Israel and there would have been a failure to even pay lip-service to the equality of all Israeli citizens, regardless of national/religious affiliation, in law.

Zahava Galon - leader of Meretz/Mapam

There have, of course, never been any disagreements within the Zionist parties about Israel being a Jewish state.  What the disagreement focused on is the wisdom of putting this into law and thus making it clear that Israeli Palestinians are the equivalent of gastarbeiters (guests), tolerated strangers at best, within this state.

Zionist Union leaders Herzog and Livni

The context for this has been a raft of legislation specifically targeting Israel’s Palestinian minority.  Teachers are banned from teaching about the Nakbah, the expulsion of Palestinians in 1947-8.  Discrimination against Palestinians in terms of the right to lease ‘national land’ has been reinstated after the decision of the High Court in Kadan in 2000.

Aryeh Deri of the religious sephardic Shas party

To emphasise their Zionist credentials, the Israeli Labour Party has stood as the Zionist Union for the purpose of the elections.  It wishes to make it clear that it is not ‘soft’ when it comes to the Arabs. 

The Zionist ‘left’ has always hidden behind the formulation of Israel as a Jewish and Democratic state, whereas the Right has always been clear.  In the words of Moshe Feiglin, a right-wing libertarian Likud MK ‘Not one of the dreamers and pioneers… who returned to our holy Land after 2000 years of exile did so in order to establish another democratic state. … Those who came to Israel wanted a Jewish State.’  Or as the Jewish Nazi MK, Rabbi Meir Kahane put it, you can have a Jewish state or a democratic state but you cannot have both.  A democratic society could vote that the state was no longer Jewish, something no Zionist could accept.

Mohammed Barakeh and Dov Khenin of Hadash/Communist Party

As is normal in Israeli elections, parties suddenly spring up for no other reason than there is an election.  The two new parties are Kulanu, a ‘centrist’ party (in Israeli terms) and hard-line on security and Yachad, formed by the former leader of the Ultra-Orthodox Sephardic Shas Party, Eli Yishai, which is on the Zionist Right.  This rapid formation and disappearance of political parties, usually based around a single individual, is a by-product of Israeli settler-colonialism  and its distorted class politics.

The racist Tsipi Livni - co-leader of Zionist Union

If the Israeli Labour Party were even the equivalent of a European social-democratic party and Israel was a normal bourgeois-democracy, it would be romping home.  Whilst the cost of housing continues to soar (provoking the Tent protests 3 years ago) and poverty and low wages affect even the Jewish sector of the population, billions of shekels are spent on the settlements.  Coupled with this there are now revelations that Netanyahu and his wife, Sara, spent enormous amounts of public money on take-aways, cleaners and they even transferred garden furniture from the Prime Ministerial residence to their own private home in Caesaria.  Netanyahu is a good example of the marriage of racism and corruption yet Israeli Labour cannot land a blow.

Meretz's Issawi Frei - the sole Arab MK for a Zionist party

The other major feature of this election has been the effect of the decision to raise the threshold level which a party needs to gain representation.  Previously in Israeli elections, you needed to gain 2% of the vote but the fascist leader of Yisrael Beteinu, Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, raised it to 3.25% specifically to exclude the Arab/Palestinian parties.  However this has backfired as it forced them to form a joint list of the United Arab List and Tal, the Southern Branch of the Islamic Movement, the nationalist Balad party and the Arab Movement for Change - Hadash, the Communist Party.  The number of seats for Arab parties is expected to increase from 11 to 13.

Ayman Odeh of Hadash/Joint List

It is, however hard to see the Israeli Labour Party forming the next government since it is a cardinal rule of Zionist politics that you do not form a coalition with Arab parties, or even rest on their support to form a government coalition.  Assuming the Zionist Union gain 23 seats and Yesh Atid, the rightward looking ‘centrist’ party of Yair Lapid gains 12 seats and Meretz and Kulanu gain 14 seats that is still a total of 49  seats.  It is normal for the ILP to include an Orthodox Jewish  Party in a government coalition and Shas would take such a coalition to 57 seats on current forecasts.  But if Shas joined the coalition then a peace settlement would be all but ruled out.

Benny Begin - Netanyahu's retread

Likud (22) plus Yisrael Beteinu (6) Jewish Home (12) and Yachad (4) total 44 seats but the Ultra-Orthodox parties have 14 seats between them making a total of 58 seats.  Kulanu, which might form a coalition with Israeli Labour has a hard-line security policy.  Another Likud coalition seems the likeliest outcome.

Herzog

If Likud and the Zionist Right do lose a number of seats and the Zionist Centre gain a few, then the second most likely outcome is a repeat of the 2009 general election when Israeli Labour went into a coalition with Likud and virtually destroyed itself.  There is, after all, no difference of principle between Likud and Labour.  Isaac Hertzog, the new Labour leader, made that clear when Israeli Labour representatives on the Central Elections Committee voted along with Likud and the Zionist Right to ban Haneen Zoabi of Balad from standing in the election (Ms Zoabi successfully challenged this in the Supreme Court).  It probably didn’t occur to the ILP that existing racist members of the Knesset, such as Ayelet Shaked, who advocated the murder of all Palestinian  mothers, because they will only give birth to Palestinian ‘terrorists’ or ‘snakes’ in her description, might be a more suitable candidate to bar.  Racism and Israeli Labour have always gone hand in hand and that is why, whatever the mathematical outcome, Israel’s General Elections heralds no change.

Haneen Zoabi - the Arab MK the Zionists love to hate - a secular Palestinian woman is too much for the Zionists

The last time the Israeli Labour Party won a convincing majority was in 1992.  Yitzhak Rabin’s victory was primarily on account of the freezing by George Bush of export credits by the United States.  Despite recent differences, there is no sign that Obama is thinking of similar moves.

Tony Greenstein 

When White Zionists Take Offence at the question 'Who is a Jew?'

Mark Elf’s Jewsansfrontiere has a nice post pointing out the racism and hypocrisy of the Western Ashkenazi Jews in Israel.  When Shas, a Misrahi Orthodox Party, which is certainly extremely racist, had an election broadcast in which an Arab Jew asked his bride if she were Jewish, all hell broke loose.  This is racism.  Only in Nazi Germany was there an examination of someone’s Jewishness etc. etc..

Of course this is total nonsense.  Israel is founded as a Jewish state, i.e. a state that gives privileges to Jews.  The question the courts and Knesset have had to grapple with from Israel’s inception is ‘Who is a Jew’.  Why is it racist when an Arab Jew asks the question of a white Jew?

Tony Greenstein

 If Shas is racist Israel is racist.... 

 cross post from 

And Shas is racist.

Here's Kobi Niv in Ha'aretz. No, hold on a sec. Check out this post and then read on:

An image from the Shas ad. Photo by Screen shot

Waves of righteous indignation from the stratosphere of Israeli enlightenment were heaped on Shas' innocent election broadcast against fake conversions, which was not just declared benighted and racist, but even Nazi-like, heaven forbid. Why? What was in that video that so incensed the enlightened ones?

All that it showed was a short, not particularly handsome guy of North African origin under the wedding canopy with a beautiful, tall, blonde Russian woman who suddenly discovers that his intended is not Jewish and that her conversion was not done according to Jewish law. True, once again the Mizrahi is portrayed as inferior and stupid, and the Ashkenazi as tall and beautiful, but so what? How does that differ from the usual Israeli racism? What was all the fuss about? What racism did the enlightened ones see here? What Nazism?

African Jews - just above Palestinians on the racial ladder

Perhaps the illuminati saw racism against Russians, Ashkenazim, one of their own? Perhaps they felt that the Russians were presented as too tall and too attractive, or as not Jewish enough? It's possible. But why is presenting Russian immigrants as tall and not necessarily Jewish worse or more racist than presenting Mizrahim as short and not necessarily bright? What's the problem here, really?

It seems that what really sparked the precious dears' outrage was the question the brown groom asked his white bride: "What, you're not Jewish?" This question, this careful examination of the blonde's pedigree, was the straw that broke the progressive camel's back. What would we say, the annointed ones cried, if in any country - some of the real sticklers hinted grossly at Nazi Germany - they would ask the woman, the bride, if she was Jewish or not? And the approved response is, of course, Racism! Shame! Nazism! Disgusting!

But of course, this is the essence of a religious wedding, the only kind permitted by Israeli law, which permits marriage only between people of the same religion. Didn't you, your parents and your children get married this way? Didn't you check before the ceremony whether the other party was Jewish? If so, what was wrong with the campaign ad

Shas ex-leader Aryeh Deri - imprisoned for corruption

The unsurprising explanation came from the heart of the civilized gloom. "If there won't be two states here," warned the sage Amos Oz, "there will be an Arab state here." This is the real danger seen by the so-called left. Not that there will be, God forbid, a racist, benighted, undemocratic state, but that there will be a non-Jewish state, and worse, an Arab state.

So if that's the case, what's the essential difference between Oz and Shas? Why is Oz's racism applauded by the high-minded ones, while Shas' apparent racism is condemned?

The answer is written in white on black. Racism in the eyes of urbane Israel is when Mizrahim, Arabs and all kinds of dark people say not-nice things about European white Ashkenazim. By contrast, when the European white Ashkenazim say terrible things about Mizrahim, Arabs and the other darkies, this is the height of anti-racism and democracy at its best.

One more thing all those cursing the Shas broadcast should consider: It's not just at Shas weddings that the Judaism of the parties is checked out. The existence of the State of Israel and its entire essence are built on this examination. The Law of Return, which is the foundation stone of our country, states that the single criterion for getting citizenship is that those requesting it be Jewish.

Thus, if we say that the Shas party is racist and Nazi, the same must be said of the State of Israel. The ugliness you see in the mirror is your own.

So there we have it. Shas is simply a zionist party restating zionist principles.  Below is an article from the BBC website on the Nazi-like statements of Ovadiah Yosef

Rabbi calls for annihilation of Arabs

former Sephardic Chief Rabbi Ovadiah Yosef Calls for the 'annihilation' of the Arabs

The spiritual leader of Israel's ultra-orthodox Shas party, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, has provoked outrage with a sermon calling for the annihilation of Arabs. 

"It is forbidden to be merciful to them. You must send missiles to them and annihilate them. They are evil and damnable," he was quoted as saying in a sermon delivered on Monday to mark the Jewish festival of Passover. 

The Lord shall return the Arabs' deeds on their own heads, waste their seed and exterminate them

Rabbi Ovadia Yosef

Rabbi Yosef is one of the most powerful religious figures in Israel, He is known for his outspoken comments and has in the past referred to the Arabs as "vipers". Through his influence over Shas, Israel's third largest political party, he is also a significant political figure.

 As founder and spiritual leader of the political party Shas, Rabbi Yosef is held in almost saintly regard by hundreds of thousands of Jews of Middle Eastern and North African origin.

The Palestinian Authority has condemned the sermon as racist and is calling on international organisations to treat the rabbi as a war criminal.
 
'Arab terrorists'

Rabbi Yosef said in his sermon that enemies have tried to hurt the Jewish people from the time of the exodus from Egypt to this day.

A person of Rabbi Ovadia Yosef's stature must refrain from acrid remarks such as these

Israeli Justice Minister Meir Sheetrit

"The Lord shall return the Arabs' deeds on their own heads, waste their seed and exterminate them, devastate them and vanish them from this world," he said.
Shas spokesman, Yitzhaq Suderi defended the rabbi, saying his remarks referred only to "Arab murderers and terrorists" and not the Arab people as a whole.

'Stirring up hatred'

Palestinian cabinet minister Hassan Asfur urged international civil institutions and human rights organisations to consider Rabbi Yosef a war criminal in future.
The utterances were "a clear call for murder and a political an intellectual terrorism that will lead to military terrorism", he said in remarks reported on Palestinian radio.

He added that no punishment would come from Israel "because its political culture and action are in line with [the rabbi's] racist statements". 

Israeli Justice Minister Meir Sheetrit also condemned the sermon, saying: "A person of Rabbi Ovadia Yosef's stature must refrain from acrid remarks such as these."

 And he added: "I suggest that we not learn from the ways of the Palestinians and speak in verbal blows like these."

Salah Tarif, the only Arab cabinet minister in the Israeli government, also criticized Rabbi Yosef, saying "his remarks add nothing but hatred".

Eritrean refugees protest in front of ministry of defense, Tel aviv

Israel – the ‘Light unto the Nations’ Treats Refugees as ‘Infiltrators’ and Terrorists

 Date: 18 October 2012 20:50:29 BST

Eritrean refugees living in Israel take part in a protest outside Ministry of Defense on October 18, 2012 in Tel Aviv,

The protesters were calling for the ousting of the dictatorship regime in Eritrea, and the release of all political prisoners. they wore demanding as well recognition as refuges and stooping the jailing policy of the Israeli government


Israel's government and its racist Minister Eli Yishai of Shas, refuses to recognise refugees as legitimate.  Zionism, with its demand for a pure Jewish state means that non-Jews shouldn't be admitted (unless they are rich and American/European)