It is when egotistic politicians get besieged by their failed policies, they resort to bigotry that generates hate and brutality — the tools of demagoguery — to shift the focus of their public. The present Israeli Right-wing government led by the Likud Party is doing just that to shift the blame on the Palestinians, the very victims in this case. The Likud coalition is, in fact, demonstrating to all that the fundamental apartheid principles of Zionism are more important and enduring than the basic principles of democracy which are crucial and indispensable to the very survival of any political state in our world.
The colonial occupation of Palestine is increasingly drawing worldwide boycotts and condemnation, especially from quarters long considered loyal friends of Israel in the recent past. The clear truth that the very cause of the decline of Israel internally and externally is its racist policies that are expanding the theft of Palestinian lands through building mushrooming colonies to eventually kill the two-state solution. The Zionist entity that is ruled by the bigots of the ultra-religious and ultra-nationalist right has resorted to have its racist policies codified by laws passed by their Knesset (parliament) to enforce them upon the Palestinians — especially those in the Palestine of 1948, who hold Israeli citizenship and who are now considered by the colonists as “a fifth column” and a “knife in the gut” of the Zionist state!
The current trend in Likud politics is to focus attention coupled with hate upon the active Palestinian Islamic movement, declaring it an illegal entity. Fearing Muslims generates Israeli hatred against them, which ushers in official Israeli brutality to keep the Palestinians under military occupation without an end in sight. The Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, is blaming the Northern Branch of the Islamic Movement for “encouraging terrorism against Jews”, while his government is daily stealing Palestinian lands. Such a religious fabrication is exactly being matched by the claim and toxic waste of Daesh (the self-proclaimed Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant). The Jewish religious Right has picked the call for prayer from the mosques as a factor “disturbing the peace of Israeli Jews” that must be halted. The next likely step will be stopping the bells of Christian Churches from ringing. Furthermore, the government has been targeting Palestinian schools and social networks as “centres advocating violence against Jews”, while funding religious Ashkenazi Jewish schools that are producing thugs or ‘the price taggers’ as graduates who vandalise mosques, churches and burn alive Palestinian families with absolute immunity. The Likud government is now drafting laws “to ensure absolute loyalty to the Jewish state”. These laws require every Israeli citizen “to take an oath of loyalty to defend and support the Jewish state against all its domestic or foreign enemies”. Otherwise, the Israeli citizenship would be revoked to those who fail to take this oath. To a Palestinian from 1948 areas, holding Israeli citizenship, pledging loyalty to the Jewish state would in effect be stripping him or her of Muslim faith that does not believe in a “Jewish state”, and it would strip them of their national Arab-Palestinian identity, as well.
Upon outlawing the Northern Branch of the Islamic Movement, the Israeli human rights movement declared the action as illegal, “taken under laws that are exclusively applicable during a declared national state of emergency, which is not the case now”. “Such illegal action,” the movement announced, “geared to stifle free speech protected by law in a democracy, is null and void and outlawing Islamic political activities while funding and encouraging Jewish political activities undermines the democratic foundation of the state of Israel”.
It is within this context that Israeli pundits have spoken of “the inability of Netanyahu to rid himself of his shameful tendency to spread fear and hatred against the Arab minority to cover up his failed policies and to gain more and more control over the Israeli public. Using tragedies to gain political advantage by blaming the whole Palestinian population, instead of the individual culprits, is degrading the way to govern the nation that claims high moral values”. The very brave Israeli political activist, Gedeon Levy, addressing the Jewish public, wrote, saying: “Just imagine yourself a Palestinian walking the streets of Tel Aviv. Fear and hopeless feelings are your constant companions. In [occupied] Jerusalem, you may be shot on sight and you may be driven out of your home at the whim of any Jewish [colonist]”. He went on to say, “You live on borrowed time and expect no help when in need from any Israeli authority. You will never find justice in any Israeli court and the Knesset will racially target you in its enacted bills and the news media will always scorn you without end”.
Israel has been transformed into a racist apartheid state, which depends upon the United States’ veto at the United Nations to protect it from being censored and isolated. Nevertheless, Israel is facing now a united Europe that ardently supports the two-state solution, which Likud is about to bury. The destructive policies of Netanyahu are leading the Middle East to an abyss. We can only call upon world leaders to rise up and take a firm stand now before a humongous catastrophe hits us all.
Professor As’ad Abdul Rahman is the chairman of the Palestinian Encyclopaedia.
