Fanatic intolerance among Israeli youth

Many Jewish youth in Israel have ingrained impressions of racism towards Arabs. It leads them to think fanatically of every Arab as a lowlife, deceitful, ignorant, disloyal, greedy, terrorist and a killer. Racism against the Arab Palestinians is a done deal in Israel.

This fanatic intolerance against Palestinians covers all sectors of Israeli society that includes ultra-nationalistic political parties as well as the ultra-religious rabbinate authorities. The religious schools are run by the Ashkenazi Jews who are non-Semitic converts and absolutely never, ever had any biblical connection with the holy land of Palestine.

It is to be noted that in psychology, superiority complex is, in many cases, a mask that hides an inferiority complex raging inside the mentality of an individual portraying it publicly and in practice. Superiority complex is a mental sickness recognised by modern medicine. Someone said, “tell me what you hate in others and I will tell you what is eating you inside”.

All the afflictions attached to the Palestinian Arabs, as embedded in Israeli minds, used to be attributed to Jews for centuries by Christians and most Europeans regardless whether they were true or not. The same heinous attribution is now being made to the Palestinian Arabs by the very victims who suffered them for centuries.

In this context, Israeli ‘price taggers’ — youth trained in Ashkenazi religious schools — make an exact copy of ‘the Hitler Nazi Youth’ who tagged Jewish temple and shops in Germany with ugly racial writings which led in the end to the Holocaust. Racist laws enacted by the Knesset (Israeli parliament) are increasingly copying the racist laws of by the Third Reich.

An Israeli writer for the Haaretz newspaper spoke to Israeli students in secondary schools and found that they expressed extreme hostility to Palestinians and even advocated a ‘holocaust’ to get rid of them. He wrote that the Israeli ministry of education “has completely ignored this phenomenon”(of hate against the Arabs).

Scared teachers

Gideon Sa’ar from the Likud party, the minister of education in Israel for four years, has made sure that such extreme hostility flourishes and prospers in all sections of Israeli society. Israeli teachers who oppose this racist phenomenon are afraid even to discuss it with their students who, according to one teacher, “would turn the discussion into a shouting match with the teacher and refuse to hear anything about any human rights”.

Dr Paul Butler, a visiting professor in Georgetown University in Washington, DC, said in an article that “the increased child birth among the conservative Jews of the extreme right is giving them a greater demographic influence which is contributing to the increasing rate of intolerance in Israel. Israel is being identified as a state belonging to a singular race and religion which has created a second class citizen who does not belong to this singular religion which makes Judaism the dominant factor in the affairs of the state”.

This is the reason that the Israeli human rights organisation in its 2012 annual report warned of the danger of racist laws negatively affecting democratic principles and human rights.

The report further focused on racist Israeli policies being enforced against the Palestinians in the West Bank, occupied Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip. In the Naqab, Palestinian Arab bedouins are being uprooted from their ancestral lands.

Hard facts

After seeing the movie Lincoln, Bradley Pierson, an American who migrated to Israel in 1967, compared Abraham Lincoln’s era with what is going on in Israel today. He wrote that watching the movie on the American civil war reminded him of how Israel is now tearing itself into pieces in trying to disconnect itself from the Palestinians as human beings.

“I know now”, he said, “that the practical meaning of apartheid, is expressed in the slavery of occupation, which is being used to treat the Palestinians as chattels. They can be handcuffed and moved anywhere. They can be separated from their families, tortured, and denied the right to vote and buy properties.

“They can be shot on sight to subdue them and keep them under the control of their ruling masters who claim a divine right to dominate them. This is all to make them serve their masters in building residential areas and taking care of their farms without any right of ownership.”

Quoting Lincoln’s words that “those who deny others freedom, do not deserve any freedom”, Bradley ends his article by asking: “Isn’t it our right to conclude that what is happening in modern Israel is the intolerance of the majority, the intolerance of successive generations of Israelis, and not only the intolerance of the ruling political parties?”

This is a justified query about a steadily developing and dangerous phenomenon, which Israel must heed in terms of its dreadful impact on its people first, and on Palestinians foremost.

Professor As’ad Abdul Rahman is the chairman of the Palestinian Encyclopaedia.