Jew World Order

Throughout my childhood in Israel, there was a word that had a distinctly frightening aura: “terrorists” – “mehablim” in Hebrew (literally meaning “sabotagers”). I knew they were invariably Arab, long before I understood that Palestinians even existed, and I somehow knew they were out to get us, but that courageous soldiers would protect us.

In my young mind, all of the enemies were all one thing. They were Arabs, surrounding us and even in our midst, and we were Jews trying to fight for our survival in this jungle. Ehud Barak called it a “villa in the jungle”. They, the Arabs, were always somewhere out there in the dark jungle. Thank God we had those soldiers, always at the ready to shoot a Mehabel – an Arab terrorist.

I didn’t learn the stories of our massacres of civilians in school. Not the Kafr Qasim massacre (on the eve of the 1956 war), nor the Qibya massacre of 1953, nor the various massacres of the 1948 Nakba. The 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacres were happening as I was attending fifth grade, but that invasion of Lebanon was for me just “Operation Peace of the Galilee”, that was meant to eradicate what Defense Minister Ariel Sharon kept calling “terrorist nests” (of the exiled PLO).  

So in some general way, the wars for me, as a child, were always wars against terror. We were being terrorized and had to fight back.

Sometimes our leaders acknowledged the appeal of “terrorist organizations”. Thus, Ehud Barak told Gideon Levy in 1998:

If I were a Palestinian at the right age, I would have joined one of the terrorist organizations at a certain stage.  

That statement shouldn’t be understood as any sort of endorsement, and it can easily be understood as a special kind of mockery. But it’s interesting to reflect that Barak saw himself as likely becoming a “terrorist” if he were on the other side – in the “jungle”, rather than in the “villa”.

So who are these “terrorist organizations” really? Recently, our Defense Minister Benny Gantz revealed it: These are six outstanding human rights and civil society organizations. I know these people personally, I’ve visited them and had conversations with them, been on tour with them in the occupied West Bank. My God! I’ve mingled with the terrorists!

I’m nearly 50 now. I’m just too old for this shit. Why isn’t Gantz too old for it? Because he’s a bully, who boasts of flattening whole neighborhoods in Gaza and returning them to the “stone age”. Just like Sharon aimed to eradicate the PLO “terror nests” in Lebanon in 1982 because they were mounting a “peace offensive” (a two-state solution), now Gantz is aiming to crush the remaining pillars of Palestinian civil society human rights, because they are also challenging Israel’s domination and holding it accountable for its violations.

Those are the “terrorists” we are fighting now. And it’s not just hyperbole. Such designations by Israel may entail a 25-year prison sentence for a leader of a “terror organization”. And all of that is so that a real terrorist like Gantz, who has punished, humiliated and terrorized the Gazan civilian population (and boasted of it), would be able to go free and not suffer the consequences of his war crimes and crimes against humanity.

You know what? I understand the people who hate us so much that they want to kill someone. I understand people who want to kill me – not as a person they know, but simply as a Jewish Israeli, a representative of the master race that terrorizes them daily. I’m not echoing Barak, I don’t really want to go there. But I understand the anger, even the wish to avenge all that with blood. I think it’s unfortunate to end up going that way, but I understand it.

Yet while the armed response is condemned by so many Israelis, I think we must regard with awe the ability of so many Palestinians to respond with steadfastness – Sumud – to this oppression. To simply stand one’s ground. Those human rights orgs are part of that Sumud, and Israel wants to crush them. It also seeks to crush the non-violent movement for Boycott, Divestments and Sanctions (BDS) though legislation worldwide because that, too, is a kind of “terrorist movement”. Israel offers no relief, only further strangulation of Palestine, Palestinians and their civil society.

In July 1973, Moshe Dayan said to Time Magazine:

“There is no more Palestine. Finished.”

That was just before the October 1973 war, when Dayan was at the height of his hubris. On the one hand it was wishful thinking. But on the other, it was an expression of the Zionist mindset, where Palestine just doesn’t exist, and really, it doesn’t as far as Israel is concerned. As far as Israel is concerned, it will never exist, not as a state anyway. Since Israel sees “Palestine” just as a radical and subversive idea that must be kept under unending military occupation, it seeks to crush any resistance as “terrorist”. Any suggestion of Palestinian national coherence is terror.

And that’s the crux of it, because Israel didn’t come to live with Palestine, it came to replace it. This is the settler-colonialist eliminationist strategy, which for all the sugar-coating of the liberals, is at the heart of Zionism.

The way towards that freedom, justice and equality, needs to involve some kind of resistance to oppression. It’s just way too naïve to think that it will just go away on its own. And if you criminalize even the non-violent resistance, then you are encouraging an explosion of unbridled anger, and people will die.

Our model is flawed – to put it mildly. I know that Ariel Sharon regarded the “Bantustan model” as “the most appropriate solution to the conflict,” as he said so to the former Italian Prime Minister Massimo D’Alma in 2003 (D’Alma specified that this was a precise quotation). That model was also Ehud Barak’s model, even if he didn’t say it to anyone. I mean, it’s obvious that proponents of Apartheid think like that. Is that what anyone wants to maintain?

Obviously, that Apartheid needs to be abolished. Alas, Israel is so entrenched in it, that for it, abolishing apartheid appears to it to be an elimination of the whole state, the “Jewish state”, giving in to the “terrorists”.

The “terrorist” designation is arguably a grand projection of our fears. The greatest fear of a settler-colonialist who has engaged in massive ethnic cleansing, is that the native will revenge the act and seek to “replace” the colonialist as the colonialist did unto the native. That’s the zero-sum logic of Zionism. It is afraid to go the other way. That’s the terror. Not Al-Haq, not Defense for Children International – Palestine, nor any other of the six human rights organizations that Gantz has recently designated as “terrorist”.

The terror for Israel is accountability for its colonialist crimes. People like Gantz know it, and they are afraid. So many Israelis are afraid. Not of the Palestinian terrorists, but of losing their privilege.

H/t Ofer Neiman     

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