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Gideon Levy

Netanyahu Deserves the Israeli People, and They Deserve Him

 

If after everything, the Israeli phoenix succeeded in rising from the ashes and getting reelected, something is truly broken, possibly beyond repair.

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Gideon Levy
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Zionist Union supporters wait for the appearance of Isaac Herzog at party headquarters in Tel Aviv after exit poll results March 17, 2015. (Photo: Reuters/Baz Ratner)

The first conclusion that arose just minutes after the announcement of the exit polls was particularly discouraging: The nation must be replaced. Not another election for the country’s leadership, but general elections to choose a new Israeli people – immediately. The country urgently needs that. It won’t be able to stand another term for Benjamin Netanyahu, who emerged last night as the man who will form the next government.

If after six years of nothing, if after six years of sowing fear and anxiety, hatred and despair, this is the nation’s choice, then it is very ill indeed. If after everything that has been revealed in recent months, if after everything that has been written and said, if after all this, the Israeli phoenix succeeded in rising from the ashes and getting reelected, if after all this the Israeli people chose him to lead for another four years, something is truly broken, possibly beyond repair.

Netanyahu deserves the Israeli people and they deserve him. The results are indicative of the direction the country is headed: A significant proportion of Israelis has finally grown detached from reality. This is the result of years’ worth of brainwashing and incitement. These Israelis voted for the man who will lead the United States to adopt harsh measures against Israel, for the man whom the world long ago grew sick of. They voted for the man who admitted to having duped half the world during his Bar-Ilan speech; now he has torn off his mask and disavowed those words once and for all. Israel said “yes” to the man who said “no” to a Palestinian state. Dear Likud voters, what the hell do you say “yes” to? Another 50 years of occupation and ostracism? Do you really believe in that?

On Tuesday the foundations were laid for the apartheid state that is to come. If Netanyahu succeeds in forming the next government in his spirit and image, then the two-state solution will finally be buried and the struggle over the character of a binational state will begin. If Netanyahu is the next prime minister, then Israel has not only divorced the peace process, but also the world. Piss off, dear world, we’re on our own. Please don’t interfere, we’re asleep, the people are with Netanyahu. The Palestinians can warm the benches at the International Criminal Court at The Hague, the Israel boycotters can swing into high gear and Gaza can wait for the next cruel attack by the Israeli army.

The battle for all these has yet to be officially decided. The next prime minister will be crowned by Moshe Kahlon and the heads of other small parties. At the time of this writing, Kahlon has yet to declare his intention. The ball is in these parties’ court; they will decide if Netanyahu continues. Most of them despise him, but it’s doubtful whether they will have the courage to turn their backs on the public. That will be their test. That will be the test of their courage and integrity. Moshe Kahlon and Aryeh Dery, do you truly believe Netanyahu is better than Isaac Herzog for the society and social welfare you purport to care for? Does the country’s decent and courageous president, Reuven Rivlin, believe Netanyahu will be a better prime minister than Herzog? There is a lot resting on his shoulders now – but the fact that a figure like Netanyahu and a party like Likud succeeded in maintaining power as the country’s leading faction already says a great deal.

Netanyahu is threatening to surpass David Ben-Gurion as Israel’s longest running leader. He is already in second place, and yet it’s hard to think of one significant achievement on his part. The list of damage he has done is long. But he is the nation’s, or much of the nation’s, chosen one. That choice must be respected, even if it makes it difficult to hope for a good outcome. The only consolation is that another Netanyahu term will prompt the world to act. That possibility is our only refuge.

source © 2015 Haaretz

Gideon Levy is an Israeli journalist, writing opinion pieces and a weekly column for the newspaper Haaretz that often focus on the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories. A notable journalist on the Israeli left, follow him on Twitter: @levy_haaretz

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What it’s like to be the most hated man in Israel

 

Gideon Levy finds it impossible not to wonder: How did one journalist – and not the country’s most widely read or most widely distributed – become an object of such rage and hatred?

By Gideon Levy | Aug. 27, 2014 | 7:25 PM |  40

Gideon Levy speaks at Haaretz's Israel Conference on Peace, July 8, 2014. Photo by Tomer Appelbaum
Gideon Levy speaks at Haaretz’s Israel Conference on Peace, July 8, 2014. Photo by Tomer Appelbaum

By Gideon Levy | Aug. 27, 2014 | 11:32 AM |  1

It was four years ago. The British newspaper The Independent published an interview under the title: “Is Gideon Levy the most hated man in Israel or just the most heroic?” The question was groundless – I wasn’t the most hated, and certainly not the most heroic. In the summer of 2014 the answer would be more succinct – I’m the most hated, second only to Khaled Meshal. Unpleasant, but not too terrible, at this point. The narrator must not become the story; a journalist is always the means, not the end.

And yet, it’s impossible to ignore the troubling question: How did one journalist – and not the most widely read or the most widely distributed – become an object of such rage and hatred? How is one small cracked mirror, a tiny pocket flashlight, capable of evoking so much fury? How is it that one voice made so many Israelis, from left and right, north and south, blow their top?

It can only be that even the last of the inciters are conscientious people. They too feel, apparently, that something is burning under their feet, under the rugs of justifications and defenses they laid for themselves. Otherwise, why are they seething with such rage? And why are they no longer sure they’re in the right?

The truth is, I’m very proud of what I wrote in this wretched war and I’m ashamed of the responses – which said more about Israeli society than they did about anything I wrote. It’s a society that is denying itself to death, fleeing from the news and lying to itself in its propaganda and its hatred.

No other war had turned my stomach, every day and every hour, like this one did. The horrific pictures of Gaza haunted me. They were almost not shown in the Israeli media, the greatest voluntary collaborator of this war. I thought it was impossible to not be appalled by the crimes in Gaza, that it was okay to express compassion for its residents, that 2,200 killed people are an outrageous matter – regardless whether they’re Palestinians or Israelis. I thought it was okay to be ashamed, that it was necessary to remind ourselves that some people bear responsibility for the brutality, and these people aren’t only Hamas, but first and foremost the Israelis, their leaders, commanders and even their pilots.

For the average Israeli, who has become accustomed to blame the Arabs and the whole world for all his country’s wrongs, it was too much, certainly at a time of war. I thought it was my duty to express my sentiments in real time, in the time of truth. I knew it wouldn’t make much difference, but I felt the things had to be said. The absolute majority of Israelis thought otherwise. They thought that comparing between the blood of Israelis and Palestinians is a sin. That feeling dismay is treason, compassion is heresy and that placing responsibility is an inexpiable crime.

Well, dear friends, history has proved long ago that the brainwashed majority isn’t always right, certainly not when it falls on the negligible minority with such ferocious aggression.

I’ve been covering the Israeli occupation for some 30 years. I’ve seen possibly more occupation than any other Israeli (excluding Amira Hass). That’s my original sin. That is also what forged my awareness more than anything else. I’ve heard all the lies, seen the ongoing injustices from point-blank range. Now they’ve reached another of their ignoble nadirs in this damned war. That’s what I’ve written about and that’s what Haaretz reported, thus becoming another target of hatred. It wasn’t only our right; it was our professional obligation.

The spiteful looks in the street, the curses and attacks have made no difference. Nor will they. The thuggish right wing, the complacent, indifferent, doubt-free center, even the always smug so-called left, which claimed that I was “ruining the left,” all joined in one shrill choir, proving that the differences between them are smaller than they had appeared.

There were enough people who wrote and spoke, ad nauseam, about Israel’s right of way, which is always absolute and about the Jewish victim, which is the only victim in the world. I wanted to say something else as well – and the majority opinion almost went berserk. So let them get angry, let them hate me,  let them attack and ostracize me – I’ll go on doing my thing.

 

By Haaretz | Aug. 18, 2014 | 7:06 PM

 

 

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The difference between children

 

It is human that the killing of an Israeli boy, a child of ours, would arouse greater identification than the death of some other child. What is incomprehensible is the Israeli response to the killing of their children.

By Gideon Levy | Aug. 24, 2014 | 4:16 A

 

After the first child, nobody batted an eye; after the 50th not even a slight tremor was felt in a plane’s wing; after the 100th, they stopped counting; after the 200th, they blamed Hamas. After the 300th child they blamed the parents. After the 400th child, they invented excuses; after (the first) 478 children nobody cares.

Then came our first child and Israel went into shock. And indeed, the heart weeps at the picture of 4-year-old Daniel Tragerman, killed Friday evening in his home in Sha’ar Hanegev. A beautiful child, who once had his picture taken in an Argentinean soccer team shirt, blue and white, number 10. And whose heart would not be broken at the sight of this photo, and who would not weep at how he was criminally killed. “Hey Leo Messi, look at that boy,” a Facebook post read, “you were his hero.”

Suddenly death has a face and dreamy blue eyes and light hair. A tiny body that will never grow. Suddenly the death of a little boy has meaning, suddenly it is shocking. It is human, understandable and moving. It is also human that the killing of an Israeli boy, a child of ours, would arouse greater identification than the death of some other child. What is incomprehensible is the Israeli response to the killing of their children.

In a world where there is some good, children would be left out of the cruel game called war. In a world where there is some good, it would be impossible to understand the total, almost monstrous unfeelingness in the face of the killing of hundreds of children – not ours, but by us. Imagine them standing in a row: 478 children, in a graduating class of death. Imagine them wearing Messi shirts – some of those children wore them once too, before they died; they also admired him, just like our Daniel from a kibbutz. But nobody looks at them; their faces are not seen, no one is shocked at their deaths. No one writes about them: “Hey Messi, look at that boy.” Hey, Israel, look at their children.

An iron wall of denial and inhumanness protects the Israelis from the shameful work of their hands in Gaza. And indeed, these numbers are hard to digest. Of the hundreds of men killed one could say that they were “involved”; of the hundreds of women that they were “human shields.” As for a small number of children, one could claim that the most moral army in the world did not intend it. But what shall we say about almost 500 children killed? That the Israel Defense Forces did not intend it, 478 times? That Hamas hid behind all of them? That this legitimized killing them?

Hamas might have hidden behind some of those children but now Israel is hiding behind Daniel Tragerman. His fate is already being used to cover all of the sins of the IDF in Gaza.

The radio yesterday already talked about “murder.” The prime minister already called the killing “terror,” while hundreds of Gaza’s children in their new graves are not victims of murder or terror. Israel had to kill them. And after all, who are Fadi and Ali and Islaam and Razek, Mahmoud, Ahmed and Hamoudi – in the face of our one and only Daniel.

We must admit the truth: Palestinian children in Israel are considered like insects. This is a horrific statement, but there is no other way to describe the mood in Israel in the summer of 2014. When for six weeks hundreds of children are destroyed; their bodies buried in rubble, piling up on morgues, sometimes even in vegetable refrigeration rooms for lack of other space; when their horrified parents carry the bodies of their toddlers as a matter of course; their funerals coming and going, 478 times – even the most unfeeling of Israelis would not allow themselves to be so uncaring.

Something here has to rise up and scream: Enough. All the excuses and all the explanations will not help – there is no such thing as a child that is allowed to be killed and a child that is not. There are only children killed for nothing, hundreds of children whose fate touches no one in Israel, and one child, just one, around whose death the people unite in mourning.

source

 

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Our wretched Jewish state

Now we know: In the Jewish state, there is pity and humane feelings only for Jews, rights only for the Chosen People. The Jewish state is only for Jews.

A price tag attack in Beit Hanina, northeast Jerusalem. June 24, 2013. Photo by Olivier Fitoussi
A price tag attack in Beit Hanina, northeast Jerusalem. June 24, 2013. Photo by Olivier Fitoussi

By Gideon Levy| Jul. 6, 2014 | 5:34 AM |  21

A price tag attack in Beit Hanina, northeast Jerusalem. June 24, 2013. Photo by Olivier Fitoussi

 

By Haaretz | Jul. 6, 2014 | 4:26 AM |  10

 

The youths of the Jewish state are attacking Palestinians in the streets of Jerusalem, just like gentile youths used to attack Jews in the streets of Europe. The Israelis of the Jewish state are rampaging on social networks, displaying hatred and a lust for revenge, unprecedented in its diabolic scope. Some unknown people from the Jewish state, purely based on his ethnicity. These are the children of the nationalistic and racist generation – Netanyahu’s offspring.

For five years now, they have been hearing nothing but incitement, scaremongering and supremacy over Arabs from this generation’s true instructor, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Not one humane word, no commiseration or equal treatment.

They grew up with the provocative demand for recognition of Israel as a “Jewish state,” and they drew the inevitable conclusions. Even before any delineation of what a “Jewish state” means – will it be a state that dons tefillin (phylacteries), kisses mezuzot (doorpost fixtures with prayer scrolls), sanctifies charms, closes down on the Sabbath and keeps strict kashrut laws? – the penny has dropped for the masses.

The mob was the first to internalize its true significance: a Jewish state is one in which there is room only for Jews. The fate of Africans is to be sent to the Holot detention center in the Negev, while that of Palestinians is to suffer from pogroms. That’s how it works in a Jewish state: only this way can it be Jewish.

In the Jewish state-in-the-making, there is no room even for an Arab who strives his utmost to be a good Arab, such as the writer Sayed Kashua. In a Jewish state, the chairman of the Knesset plenary session, MK Ruth Calderon (from Yesh Atid – the “center” of the political map, needless to say), cuts off Arab MK Ahmed Tibi (United Arab List-Ta’al), who has just returned all shaken up from a visit to the family of the murdered Arab boy from Shoafat, impudently preaching to him that he must also refer to the three murdered Jewish teens (even after he did just that).

In a Jewish state, the High Court of Justice approves the demolition of a murder suspect’s family home even before his conviction. A Jewish state legislates racist and nationalist laws.

The media in the Jewish state wallows in the murder of three yeshiva students, while almost entirely ignoring the fates of several Palestinian youths of the same age who have been killed by army fire over the last few months, usually for no reason.

No one was punished for these acts – in the Jewish state there is one law for Jews and another for Arabs, whose lives are cheap. There is no hint of abiding by international laws and conventions. In the Jewish state, there is pity and humane feelings only for Jews, rights only for the Chosen People. The Jewish state is only for Jews.

The new generation growing in its shadow is a dangerous one, both to itself and its surroundings. Netanyahu is its education minister; the militaristic and nationalist media serves as its pedagogic epic poem; the education system that takes it to Auschwitz and Hebron serves as its guide.

The new sabra (native-born Israeli) is a novel species, prickly both on the outside and the inside. He has never met his Palestinian counterpart, but knows everything about him – the sabra knows he is a wild animal, intent only on killing him; that he is a monster, a terrorist.

He knows that Israel has no partner for peace, since this is what he’s heard countless times from Netanyahu, Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman and Economy Minister Naftali Bennett. From Yair Lapid he’s heard that they are “Zoabis” – referring dismissively to MK Haneen Zoabi (Balad).

Being left wing or a seeker of justice in the Jewish state is deemed a crime, civil society is considered treacherous, true democracy an evil. In a Jewish state – dreamed of not only by the right wing but also by the supposed center-left, including Tzipi Livni and Lapid – democracy is blurred.

It’s not the skinheads that are the Jewish state’s main problem, it’s the sanctimonious eye-rollers, the thugs, the extreme right wing and the settlers. It’s not the margins but the mainstream, which is partly very nationalistic and partly indifferent.

In the Jewish state, there is no remnant of the biblical injunction to treat the minority or the stranger with justice. There are no more Jews left who marched with Martin Luther King or who sat in jail with Nelson Mandela. The Jewish state, which Israel insists the Palestinians recognize, must first recognize itself. At the end of the day, at the end of a terrible week, it seems that a Jewish state means a racist, nationalistic state, meant for Jews only.

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‘Bethlehem’ is yet another Israeli propaganda film

Before lavishing praise on co-director Yuval Adler, critics should stop to consider his film’s message: the Israelis are the good guys, the Arabs the bad guys.

By Gideon Levy | 05:22 06.10.13 |

Yuval Adler is a talented director, but he has made an outrageous film. “Bethlehem,” his debut feature, has garnered acclaim and prizes – a critics’ award in Venice, first prize at the Haifa Film Festival, six Ophir Awards (Israel’s national film awards) and high praise from The New York Times.

Along with his writing partner Ali Wakad, Adler created a very well-made action movie. He also created (another) Israeli propaganda film.

Before everyone starts to praise him, they should pay heed to his messages – the overt, but, especially, the covert ones – and not just the direction, acting, editing and impressive attention to detail. But the plethora of details makes it so you can’t see the forest for the trees, and it’s the same poison forest. Or should we say enchanted sea – the Israelis are the good guys, the Arabs the bad guys.

This film, like many before it about the conflict, is guilty of the sins of distortion and concealment: the context is missing, as if it weren’t there. The film is meant to depict complexity – the misery of the collaborator; the humanity of the agent – but in reality, the film paints a picture without context, and without context there is no truth.

“Let’s make a movie that won’t deal with the political conflict,” Adler said to Wakad, according to an interview he gave to Mike Dagan in Haaretz’s magazine. But Adler’s refusal to make a “political movie” is deceit and sleight of hand. It is in itself a political statement unlike any other. Adler did not make a film about the Sicilian Mafia, but rather a film about the intifada, which has a political context that he deliberately ignores. This blurring is the movie’s powerful, outrageous statement.

What is the film about?  Violent, power-hungry intifada fighters, motivated by greed, and in conflict with one another; cynical, corrupt, lying Palestinian Authority figures; and European donation money going to terror, of course. There is not a single word about what they’re fighting against, what they are dying for. There’s no occupation, no oppression, only a Mafia, which this time speaks Arabic. Against it stands the Shin Bet security service, pure of heart, and its merciful agent with the support of his wife and secretary (which the Palestinians don’t have, of course). The agent always takes care of his pet informant, lying to save his life, until the latter rises up to kill him by shooting him and bashing his skull in, ungrateful wretch that he is. The Israelis will love this. They already do. All of the images they teach about are in this film. Black and white, with 50 shades of gray that just need to be accounted for – the collaborator.

Adler’s avoidance of the issue is abominable. An Israeli who makes an action movie about the intifada without taking a stand is a coward. He knows the subject will attract viewers at film festivals abroad, but at the same time doesn’t want to anger Israeli viewers.

It is impossible to make a movie about the intifada without revealing what motivated it. Adler, educated in philosophy, made an excellent  gangster film, a spaghetti Western, but like a true Western movie, to hell with the historical truth. Of course such a film can be enjoyable, but in the 21st century it’s no longer possible to buy a story that paints the cowboys as good and the Indians as bad. That’s “Bethlehem” as well: the good, the bad, and the ugly. The Shin Bet agent, the collaborating terrorist, no Clint Eastwood, but with covert propaganda, which is worse than the overt kind.

In Bethlehem, the city, I met many armed and wanted men during the intifada. Some of them perhaps even fit the stereotypes presented in this film, but there were many others as well, who sacrificed their lives during their just struggle for freedom. None of them appear in “Bethlehem,” the film.

I’ve also met Shin Bet agents and heard about their exploits, and they certainly don’t look or sound like Razi from the film. Where’s the evil, torture, blackmail and lies? Adler acknowledges a few Shin Bet agents at the end of the movie; the Shin Bet should be grateful for this free promotional film. Adler chose to paint a one-dimensional picture, which will once again pat the Israelis on the back. Hey, look how right you are. Hey, look how they victimize you. Hey, look how hopeless the situation is. Go see “Bethlehem” and you’ll understand why.

Gidéon Lévy Haaretz.Com

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Echoes of German darkness in today’s Israel

Powerful Gideon Levy column in yesterday’s Haaretz:

What do dogs remind you of? And what do German shepherds remind you of? And what about armed soldiers who sic German shepherds on people trying to sneak through a border in order to earn a living?

These lines are being written in a hotel room in the capital of the Czech Republic, a country that knows a thing or two about occupation, oppression and struggles for liberation. In this city’s Museum of Communism, which is next door to a casino, one can view a photograph of East German soldiers siccing German shepherds on people trying to sneak into West Germany. The Nazi soldiers were replaced by Communist soldiers; the dogs remained.

A few days before my museum visit I was in the West Bank village of Beit Ula, near Hebron. I met a young man, Mohammed Amla, whose back and neck are scarred along their entire length from the bites of an Israel Defense Forces dog − a German shepherd, of course. Amla, married with two daughters, has worked in Israel for the past 12 years, doing manual labor.

When Amla has money he bribes his Israeli contractor, paying him a small fortune (NIS 2,000 a month) to obtain an Israeli work permit for him. When the family ran out of money because one of the daughters, who is deaf, needed an expensive ear operation, Amla sneaked into Israel. The result: a stay in the hospital with torn skin on his back and neck.

One evening last month masked IDF soldiers lay in wait near an opening in the separation fence. When Amla and two companions approached, before they crossed into Israel, the soldiers set their dogs on the trio. After it seemed that the IDF had stopped siccing dogs on “illegal residents,” the army has resumed the horrific practice of setting dogs on unarmed civilians. After all, the IDF’s storied Oketz canine unit must be kept busy during periods of relative calm.

One cannot ignore the historical connotations; one cannot remain oblivious to the unavoidable associations. Bullets are more deadly but less cruel than setting dogs on human beings. The very thought of Israeli soldiers doing this should have aroused more than a flicker of shock and shame. But it did not, not even when the connotation shrieks to the heavens. We’ll send our soldiers first to the March of the Living in Auschwitz, and then we’ll train them to sic dogs on people. The IDF Spokesman’s Office, which once at least made an effort to protect the reputation of “the most moral army in the world,” has apparently given up on that as well. Its arrogant, apathetic response to the story of that night of the dogs was the ultimate nonresponse: “The matter is being evaluated.”

While we wait for the “evaluation” to end − it never does, usually − we must honestly ask ourselves: Is this what we genuinely want? If an Israeli citizen’s sneaking into the Palestinian Authority were to end in his being set upon by dogs and hospitalized, as sneaking into Israel did for Amla, the entire country − and perhaps the world − would be in an uproar. The full weight of history would be brought to bear against the image of a Palestinian soldier siccing a dog, God save us, on a Jew. The Palestinians, those beasts, set dogs on human beings. But that (too) is of course permitted to the IDF.

For the meantime, Amla is at home recovering from his injuries. He cannot work yet. He says he won’t sneak into Israel again, as thousands of Palestinians looking for work do every night, out of fear of the dog that attacked him. When the dog gripped Amla’s neck in its jaws, he was sure he was about to die. Ostensibly, that’s a great accomplishment for Israel: Amla won’t return to renovate homes illegally. But from my hotel room in Prague − the city where I found the names of my murdered grandmother and grandfather engraved on a stone plaque, the city whose memories of the Nazi and Soviet occupations and of the “Prague Spring” echo in every corner − the thought of Israeli soldiers siccing their dogs on Mohammed Amla takes on an added meaning that is very disturbing and burdensome.

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Cliff Richard will come

When Stephen Hawking visited here in 2006 he received the royal treatment; but then he decided to criticize Israel.
 By Gideon Levy  |  May.19, 2013 | 6:30 AM    

 
This might be the most sensitive of Israeli nerves: Just try to touch it, and your fate is sealed. Anyone proposing to boycott an Israeli product, from Ahava’s skin creams to the Israeli Presidential Conference, is immediately sentenced to scorn, ostracism and a total smear campaign.

This Pavlovian response reached a nadir with the announcement by the esteemed scientist Stephen Hawking of his withdrawal from the birthday celebrations for President Shimon Peres. Instead of asking itself how it got to the point where even a celebrated figure like Hawking, who has never been accused of being anti-Israel, decides to boycott its gatherings, Israel is busy waging a slander campaign. Instead of listening to the synthesized moral voice of the paralyzed scientist, Israel kicks viciously at Hawking, in a manner that obviously only proves the lameness of its arguments.

Hawking is permitted to decide that he wants no part of yet another Israeli propaganda fest, aimed at obscuring the goings-on in its backyard and presided over by that wizard of deceit, our president. It’s Hawking’s right, his duty. After four previous visits he said, it stops here, no more will he grace Israel with his presence, like some bauble.

Until he opened his mouth and dared to boycott, he was treated in a manner reserved on these shores for mega-celebrities. When he visited in December 2006, he received the royal treatment. He was interviewed on Yair Lapid’s talk show; the menus he was served in the presidential suite of Jerusalem’s King David Hotel featured in the local gossip columns; and a public service ad he shot for Access Israel – a nonprofit organization promoting greater access for people with disabilities – won the Golden Cactus Award of the Advertisers Association of Israel for Best Campaign and Best Creative Advertising Idea for 2007.

And then it all came crashing down. Overnight, the supporter became a saboteur, the lionized figure became loathed. Prof. Shlomo Avineri accused him of suffering from “severe moral blindness” and even said his decision “has a whiff of racism,” because he dared to boycott Israel but not the United States and Britain (“Stephen Hawking’s hypocrisy,” Haaretz, May 13 ).

The Wolf Foundation, which 25 years ago awarded Hawking its Wolf Prize in Physics, demanded its due, declaring that Hawking “chose to capitulate to irrelevant pressures.” Maybe the foundation will demand its cash award back, as well. The chairman of the Israeli Presidential Conference, Israel Maimon, described the physicist’s decision as “outrageous and improper.”

Attorney Nitsana Darshan-Leitner, the director of Shurat HaDin – Israel Law Center, an NGO that combats terror organizations, suggested that Hawking remove his tablet computer’s Intel Core i7 processor, an Israeli-made component that powers the computer-based system that allows him to communicate with the world. Darshan-Leitner was predictably joined in that inhumane proposal to silence Hawking, literally as well as figuratively, by the Israel Prize laureate in communications, Yaakov Ahimeir.

That’s how we like our international cultural and scientific figures: blind supporters of every Israeli action. And this is how we detest them: when they dare to criticize its policy. The day the world’s authority on black holes discovered the black hole in the heart of Israel, he was sentenced to be smeared. The day the author of “A Brief History of Time” came to the conclusion that it was time to shorten the history of the Israeli occupation, he became a victim of abuse.

How Israeli it is to accuse him of capitulating to “irrelevant pressures,” as though he were not a certified genius with independent opinions; how typical to accuse him now of hypocrisy. He has every right to boycott Israel and not to boycott the United States and Britain – it is ridiculous to draw a comparison. Even if the latter two countries committed war crimes in Iraq, their war crimes had an end. In any case, one may choose not to eat meat but to eat fish. The decision to choose Israel as a symbol of immorality is not blunted in and of itself by the fact that other states behave the same way.

Also ridiculous is the insinuation that it was Noam Chomsky who persuaded Hawking to withdraw from the conference: What is wrong with such a meeting of intellectual giants? Israel shut its doors to Chomsky, in one of its lowest moments. If Hawking seeks to return, albeit not for the Peres festival, he is likely to meet a similar fate. But do not despair, O Israel: Cliff Richard is on his way.

source

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Is Gideon Levy the most hated man in Israel or just the most heroic?

For three decades, the writer and journalist Gideon Levy has been a lone voice, telling his readers the truth about what goes on in the Occupied Territories.

Friday 24 September 2010

Gideon Levy is the most hated man in Israel – and perhaps the most heroic. This “good Tel Aviv boy” – a sober, serious child of the Jewish state – has been shot at repeatedly by the Israeli Defence Force, been threatened with being “beaten to a pulp” on the country’s streets, and faced demands from government ministers that he be tightly monitored as “a security risk.” This is because he has done something very simple, and something that almost no other Israeli has done. Nearly every week for three decades, he has travelled to the Occupied Territories and described what he sees, plainly and without propaganda. “My modest mission,” he says, “is to prevent a situation in which many Israelis will be able to say, ‘We didn’t know.’” And for that, many people want him silenced.

The story of Gideon Levy – and the attempt to deride, suppress or deny his words – is the story of Israel distilled. If he loses, Israel itself is lost.

Read full article here

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ISRAEL’S NEW STATUS; THE MOST NAIVE AND RACIST COUNTRY IN THE WEST

June 1, 2012 at 07:08

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Racism has become the new political correctness in Israel.
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Some 1 million Russians came here, about half of them non-Jews, and Israel knew how to absorb them. They are white. Tens of thousands of Africans came here and they are the new enemy. They are black.

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Israel is the most naive and racist country in the West

The migrants are less of a danger than what people think. The real danger is the way they are being treated.

By Gideon Levy
Israel is both the most racist and most naive country in the West. Racist, because in no other country can politicians make remarks about migrants as they do here and still remain in office another day; naive, because only now has Israel discovered the problem that has been facing the “first world” for years. Only in Israel can a parliamentarian from the ruling party describe the migrants as a “cancer,” and, far worse, it is only in Israel that she could do so knowing that her contemptible racism would merely gain her support.

It is only Israel that does not have a migration policy; it is only in Israel that the migrants are still officially known as “infiltrators”; it is only in Israel that the government incites the weaker classes against them and after violence breaks out, the prime minister makes do with a weak remark that “there is no place for this.” In fact, there is place for violence against the migrants: After all, what did we think? That when they are described as a cancer and called out for their diseases, threats, and dangers that there would not be an outbreak of violent crimes against them? That after all the intimidation and incitement, fear would not emerge in the poor neighborhoods and give rise to violence?

The residents of the neighborhoods are scared because there was someone who frightened them. They show hatred because there was someone who sowed hatred in their hearts for foreigners, and in particular black people. These black people are less dangerous than the residents were told but it is too late now because the seeds of hatred have already sprouted.

The government is conducting this fear campaign like it conducted other fear campaigns because this is the way it diverts public attention and anger from its failures. In this manner, it adopts the bad old ways of dark regimes, inciting against foreigners and frightening people about imaginary or exaggerated dangers so it can evade responsibility. Just as with other fateful issues, so it is with the subject of migration: The government’s policy is a non-policy, it is a case of burying one’s head in the sand and then screaming hysterically when everything explodes in one’s face.

After Israel carries out this mass experiment with human beings – allowing then to stay here but not allowing them to work, while showing no regard for their fundamental rights – it pretends to be surprised at a few criminal acts. When dealing with migrants, all the masks are pulled off. Racism has become the new political correctness in Israel.

Some 1 million Russians came here, about half of them non-Jews, and Israel knew how to absorb them. They are white. Tens of thousands of Africans came here and they are the new enemy. They are black.

However, in this new world, Israel can no longer avoid contributing its part to the absorption of migrants and refugees, even if they entered the country without permission. Millions of migrants have flooded numerous countries and they knew how to deal with them. Tens of thousands of Jews “infiltrated” countries of refuge during the years of darkness; in 1948, Palestinian refugees flooded the surrounding countries, and since then the flow has not stopped. Jordan is swamped not only with Palestinian refugees from then but also with Iraqi and Syrian refugees of today, and Turkey, too, has absorbed thousands of refugees from Syria. France’s population is becoming blacker and Britain’s is becoming more Muslim. This is the rough way of the world and Israel is part of it.

The incitement against the migrants not only ignores Jewish history and global reality, it ignores the reality of the future as well. And what will happen if one day the government’s campaigns of fear turn out to be true, heaven forbid, and Israel indeed faces an existential threat and tens of thousands of Israelis try to escape from here? What shall we say then to the world if it closes its doors to Israelis just as the doors are now being closed in the faces of the African migrants, many of whom are fleeing for their lives? How long will this perverse claim go on – that “Israel’s situation is different.” No one believes Israel must open its doors to all those who are knocking at them. No country has such an obligation. The influx of refugees here must be regulated, the migrants who have already arrived must be classified according to their distress and the dangers they would face if they returned to their homeland. Those who have the right to remain, must be taken care of – not with violence and not with hatred, which will not solve a thing, but by giving them the possibility of a decent life. Meanwhile the migrants are less of a danger than what people think. The real danger is the way they are being treated.

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