09.11.23
Editorial Note
In a recent article, the British historian Dr. Simon Sebag Montefiore of the University of Buckingham, titled “The Decolonization Narrative Is Dangerous and False,” discussed how Western academics and activists celebrated the atrocities by Hamas against the Israeli civilians in the South. He wrote that Western academics and activists “have denied, excused, or even celebrated the murders by a terrorist sect that proclaims an anti-Jewish genocidal program. Some of this is happening out in the open, some behind the masks of humanitarianism and justice, and some in code, most famously ‘from the river to the sea,’ a chilling phrase that implicitly endorses the killing or deportation of the 9 million Israelis. It seems odd that one has to say: Killing civilians, old people, even babies, is always wrong.” Sebag Montefiore explains that the fashionable ideology of “decolonization,” comes from “leftist intellectuals who supported Stalin, and those aristocratic sympathizers and peace activists who excused Hitler.”
Sebag Montefiore argues that those “Hamas apologists and atrocity-deniers, with their robotic denunciations of ‘settler-colonialism,’ belong to the same tradition but worse: They have abundant evidence of the slaughter of old people, teenagers, and children, but unlike those fools of the 1930s, who slowly came around to the truth, they have not changed their views an iota. The lack of decency and respect for human life is astonishing: Almost instantly after the Hamas attack, a legion of people emerged who downplayed the slaughter, or denied actual atrocities had even happened, as if Hamas had just carried out a traditional military operation against soldiers. October 7 deniers, like Holocaust deniers, exist in an especially dark place. The decolonization narrative has dehumanized Israelis to the extent that otherwise rational people excuse, deny, or support barbarity. It holds that Israel is an ‘imperialist-colonialist’ force, that Israelis are ‘settler-colonialists,’ and that Palestinians have a right to eliminate their oppressors.”
Presenting Israel as a Fascist or Nazi-like state is not new, but the Palestinians and pro-Palestinian activists recruited those who pushed this narrative. In particular, Israeli Jewish academics have helped to cement the demonization of Israel.
Verso Books is a popular platform for academic activists who support the Palestinian false narrative. It recently published an article by Dr. Alberto Toscano, the co-director of the Center for Philosophy and Critical Theory at Goldsmiths, University of London, titled “The War on Gaza and Israel’s Fascism Debate,” he claims that “Western critics of Israel’s apartheid policies and far-right government are frequently accused of antisemitism, but leftist and left-liberal Israelis have been decrying the country’s descent into fascism for years.” Toscano argues that “fascism is embedded in the logic of Israel’s colonial project.”
For Toscano, Israel’s retaliation against Hamas’s Al Aqsa Flood October 7 attack shows Israel’s “genocidal intent.” To prove his point, he claimed “prominent intellectuals like the renowned historian of the far Right Ze’ev Sternhell, who wrote of ‘growing fascism and a racism akin to early Nazism’ in contemporary Israel… The likes of Hannah Arendt and Albert Einstein signed a letter to the New York Times in the wake of the Deir Yassin massacre in 1948 decrying Herut (the predecessor to Netanyahu’s Likud party) as ‘akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties.”
He then quoted a recent interview with Israeli Holocaust historian Daniel Blatman of the Hebrew Univsrsity who “observed” the biggest threat to the continued existence of the State of Israel. “As a historian whose field is the Holocaust and Nazism, it’s hard for me to say this, but there are neo-Nazi ministers in the government today. You don’t see that anywhere else – not in Hungary, not in Poland – ministers who, ideologically, are pure racists.”
The extent of antisemitism on campus is skyrocketing. In Canada, Laura Barkel, a student at the Toronto Metropolitan University, encountered a cover-faced student who told her: “Hitler didn’t finish the job… You wouldn’t be here.” Barkel is a StandWithUs Canada Fellow and the vice president of the TMU Hillel executive committee. Another student, Zach Rusonik, also a StandWithUs Fellow, said “I had one person say to me, ‘Take your Kippah off, you are not Jewish, you are Zionist.’” He told a story of a time when 50 pro-Palestinian supporters surrounded four Jewish students. One of the protesters followed him and his friends, saying, “I wanted to kill you.”
In Sydney, Australia, large posters appeared, showing a doctored image of Hitler behind a masked photo of Benjamin Netanyahu.
Antisemitic, pro-Hamas expressions are not limited to students. Some academics, including Israeli ones, joined in: Dr. Matan Kaminer, an anthropologist at the Buber Institute, Hebrew University, expressed his thoughts on Twitter, “I, an Israeli Jew, would very much like to live in a Palestine that is free from the river to the sea.” He wrote on November 4, 2023. Surely, Kaminer does not realize that the slogan means cleansing Palestine of Jews.
On another front, for several decades, Dr. Alon Liel of Tel Aviv University has been comparing Israel to apartheid South Africa. His influence is undeniable. Earlier this week, the South African Cabinet decided to recall all diplomats from Tel Aviv for consultation. Minister in The Presidency Khumbudzo Ntshavheni said, “The genocidal airstrikes by the government of Israel on the people of Palestine continue… The disparaging remarks of [Israeli] Ambassador Belotsercovsky are contrasted by the statements of two former Israeli ambassadors to South Africa (Illan Baruch and Dr. Alon Liel), who have been consistent in describing the actions of their government against Palestinians as apartheid. The disparaging remarks against those speaking up against the atrocities and the country’s leaders make Ambassador Belotsercovsky’s position more and more untenable.“
The Israeli Haim Bresheeth-Zabner, Professor of Film Studies at SOAS, University of London, took the demonization of Israel even further. In his article “Genocidal Israel: J’Accuse…’I accuse’ !” he stated that “The terrifying bombing of Al-Ahli Hospital and the murder of over 500 people sheltering there, is but the latest war crime in an incredibly long list; Israel’s lies about this terrifying crime were soon disproved. Israel is out of control in its brutal attempt to exact retribution for the humiliating defeat that the IDF was dealt by Hamas on 7 October. After the atrocities committed by some of the attackers against Israeli civilians in border communities, far greater atrocities have been committed by the IDF bombing and targeting 2.3 million helpless, and half of them now homeless, Palestinian civilians in Gaza.”
For Bresheeth-Zabner, Israel, just like “other colonial regimes,” is mainly “invested in separating the indigenous population from its land, and such projects are essentially militarized real estate operations, as seen in North and South America, Ireland, Nazi Germany, South Africa, Algeria and many other places. Indigenous populations have no choice; it is fight or die in most situations, clearly so in Palestine. Colonial projects do not define their boundaries, but, on the contrary, surpass and extend their control, avoiding clearly drawn and accepted borders. So it is with Zionism; as its population grows, Israel advances to grab more land, in the fashion and rationale described by Adolf Hitler as Lebensraum, ‘the territory which a group, state, or nation believes is needed for its natural development.’ (OED) The national ‘living space’ achieved by violent military means, linked to expulsion, ethnic cleansing or genocide. Most people would assume that such violent enterprises were all abandoned after 1945 and the defeat of Nazism. The facts prove otherwise: Israel may be an untypical colonial project, which started during the early 1900s, but its ethnic cleansing stage got going in 1947.” Since then, according to Bresheeth-Zabner, Israel “has used every conceivable means to dislodge the remaining Palestinians from their land: land theft, illegal settlements, daily brutalities, mass arrests, arbitrary killings, mass expulsion of villages and towns, holding thousands of Palestinians without charge under ‘administrative detention’, extra-judicial executions, and a cruel apartheid state controlling the whole of Palestine and using the Palestine Authority as its indigenous police force to subjugate the Palestinians.”
Bresheeth-Zabner spoke in a Zoom meeting on October 27, 2023, titled “Stop the Genocide – Stop the ethnic cleansing. Israel’s Food & Water Blockade of Gaza is a Nazi Tactic.”
The events on the Black Sabbath of October 7, 2023, serve as a reminder of the Nazi-era atrocities against the Jewish population. Supporters of Hamas understand it very well. To fight this equation, they mounted a counteroffensive to portray Israel as a Nazi evil. To this end, they flout spurious accusations of apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and now, genocide.
REFERENCES:
WARMINGTON: Jewish student told ‘Hitler didn’t finish job’ on TMU campus
Published Nov 07, 2023 • Last updated 8 hours ago
Article content
When Laura Barkel graduates from Toronto Metropolitan University next year, she will leave with some cherished memories.
Hitler didn’t finish the job,” and added, “You wouldn’t be here.”
It’s a heinous thing to say to anyone, let alone someone who’s great-grandparents were Holocaust survivors.
And since they survived the horrors inflicted by Hitler’s Nazis, Laura now lives in a free country where she is entitled to go to school without being dehumanized and terrorized. That’s not her experience right now.
While there are repercussions for someone like a conservative-leaning Don Cherry for something he did not say but is perceived to have said, there are no repercussions for statements like this on Canadian university campuses.
Many Jewish students say they do not feel safe on university campuses after the Oct. 7 Hamas massacre of 1,400 Israelis – many young people like themselves – and the kidnapping of 240 others. For some students, the university experience includes being swarmed, spit on, belittled and threatened.
It’s not easy being Jewish on campus at this time. In fact, it’s terrifying.
“It’s extremely difficult coming into that hostile environment,” said Barkel, who is a StandWithUs Canada Emerson Fellow and vice-president of the TMU Hillel executive committee.
Second-year student Zach Rusonik, also a StandWithUs Fellow, called it intimidating. “I had one person say to me, ‘Take your Kippah off, you are not Jewish, you are Zionist,’” he said.
He told a story of a time when four Jewish students were surrounded by 50 pro-Palestinian supporters.
One of the protesters followed him and his friends, saying, “I wanted to kill you.” But then the protester relented and said he realized that he had been fed anti-Jewish propaganda and has softened his position to one of more understanding.
It was a strange, confusing set of circumstances for kids who should just be focusing on their studies.
None of this should be happening. But it is.
While some law students were admonished for their anti-Semitic statements, more than 400 lawyers have signed a letter standing up for their right to be anti-Semitic. It has resulted in tense times – and not just on the campus, but in classrooms and lecture halls, too.
Barkel said since protesters cover their faces, she often wonders “is this a person, who wanted me dead this morning,” sitting next to her?
It’s a fair question because the situation on many Canadian campuses is untenable, said Jesse Primerano, executive director of StandWithUs Canada and a graduate of TMU when it was still known as Ryerson University.
He loves that place. There are many great things happening, too.
In fact, it’s Holocaust Education Week with speakers and displays organized by Hillel which are unimpeded and protected. But there are troubling things as well that cannot be ignored.
He compiled a list of what Jewish students are facing at TMU:
— Swarmings by protesters at Jewish or pro-Israel events on campus;
— Threatening messages, including “My advice for you is to stay undercover on campus”, and “your time here is almost up;”
— Professors cancelling class or using class time to criticize Israeli “apartheid”, “colonialism”, “genocide” and more;
— Having their names and photos shared in large group chats with peers, in order to mock and criticize their support for Israel;
— Being told that their “claims about Oct. 7 are as valid as their claims about the Holocaust;”
— Being followed around campus after leaving Chabad;
— Being spat on;
— Receiving statements from school-affiliated groups, such as student unions, that amplify misinformation in a way that demonizes and isolates Jewish students on their campuses;
— Being called “Islamophobic” for speaking positively about Israel;
— Being doxed in social media groups of their classmates for their support of Israel;
“We are hearing about things like this at institutions right across the country,” said Primerano.
With a homicide investigation into the death of Jewish protester at a pro-Palestinian rally in sourthern California and the firebombing of a synagogue in Montreal, any escalation of hate toward Jewish people needs to be taken seriously.
“The hate that we are seeing on campuses started when weak-kneed administrators allowed Israel Apartheid Week to have public space,” said Toronto Councillor James Pasternak.
“This event was nothing but a hatefest lead and attended by people who spread conspiracy theories and disinformation,” he added. “The universities hid behind the Charter. Conversely, when a Jewish group would try to hold a peaceful event, the anti-Israel mob would riot and the administration would shut down the event for safety reasons.”
For its part, Toronto Metropolitan University issued a statement saying that following “recent events on campus,” the institution hired Chief Justice J. Michael MacDonald to “assist in reviewing certain recent events to determine if any of these incidents are in breach of university policies and procedures to facilitate a fair and thoughtful process that recognizes a culture that supports diversity and understanding.”
In addition, TMU said, the university will launch a series of “supportive initiatives for all students, staff, and faculty, including education, trauma and well-being supports, and facilitation.”
Barkel and Rusonik, meanwhile, say they won’t quit, no matter how difficult anti-Semites make it for them.
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https://content.api.news/v3/images/bin/5124db67cee06c2341d3c2f4e3888bfd
Hitler/Netanyahu composite posters in Sydney
November 5, 2023 by J-Wire Newsdesk
Large posters showing a doctored image of Hitler behind a mask bearing a photo of Benjamin Netanyahu have appeared in Sydney’s Eastern Suburbs and the CBD.
Poster hanging from the footbridge spanning the Syd Einfeld Drive. Photo supplied by The New South Wales Jewish Board of Deputies
The Australian reports that MPs and community leaders have condemned the posters.
The newspaper
NSW Jewish Board of Deputies president David Ossip told The Australian: “The individuals who put up these sinister posters knew exactly what they were doing, choosing images that would inflict maximum trauma and placed them in the heart of Sydney’s Jewish community.
It is devastating to recognise that Holocaust survivors and their descendants would have this morning confronted prominent images of Hitler as they undertook their normal activities.”
Executive Council of Australian Jewry co-CEO Alex Ryvchin was also interviewed by The Australian]n.
He said: “It is intended to intimidate and harass Jewish Australians, many of whom are Holocaust survivors or their descendants. But if these thugs and cretins want to know who resembles Hitler in the context of the war with Hamas, they should look to the savages who went house to house hunting Jews with sadistic pride, raping, torturing and burning alive.”
NSW Vaucluse MP Kellie Sloane said: “These targeted attacks on Sydney’s Jewish community must stop and the full force of the law must be applied to those who practise or incite race hate.”
Federal Wentworth MP Allegra Spender told The Australian: “Many in our Jewish community have told me they feel scared to be openly Jewish in our streets. That is heartbreaking for us all – no matter what your faith. We must all stand for compassion and empathy, and stand up against fear and intimidation.”
NSW Police are investigating.
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https://www.alquds.com/en/posts/98601
Mon 30 Oct 2023 9:43 am – Jerusalem Time
Jewish Scholar| Genocidal Israel: J’Accuse…”I accuse” !
Haim Bresheeth-Zabner
For people far from Gaza, the past fortnight remains mostly beyond comprehension. The myth of the invincibility of the Israel Defense Forces has been one of the most enduring ever spun. To see the images of Israelis running for their life; of Kibbutzim taken over and bodies on street corners; to hear of Israeli soldiers and civilians taken as hostages; and to realize that the army was missing in action, these are a further nail in the coffin of the myths about colonial Israel, with multiplying reports on IDF responsibility for killing some of the Israeli victims.
The terrifying bombing of Al-Ahli Hospital and the murder of over 500 people sheltering there, is but the latest war crime in a an incredibly long list; Israel’s lies about this terrifying crime were soon disproved. Israel is out of control in its brutal attempt to exact retribution for the humiliating defeat that the IDF was dealt by Hamas on 7 October.
After the atrocities committed by some of the attackers against Israeli civilians in border communities, far greater atrocities have been committed by the IDF bombing and targeting 2.3 million helpless, and half of them now homeless, Palestinian civilians in Gaza. There is a distinct feeling of a step-change, as the tanks encroach and the aircraft, artillery and drones crush Gaza into rubble. What is the game-plan, apart from mass-murder? Is there one? Many of Israel’s former military leaders are warning against this latest genocidal act, which is more than one can say for the leaders of the West queuing up to cheer Israel on in its indiscriminate, illegal murder of civilians.
The truth is, as I argue in my recent book An Army Like No Other (Verso, 2020) that the Israel Defense Forces have never won a battle clearly since 1967, and never fought against another regular army since 1973. When fighting small resistance groups, like the PLO (1982, Lebanon) Hezbollah (2006, Lebanon) or Hamas (2008/9, 2012, 2014 Gaza, and numerous other battles) the IDF’s success was rather limited, proving that a small guerrilla group numbering a few thousand fighters can delay, hamper, harm or even defeat a huge modern army equipped with the latest technology.
Such small, highly motivated and innovative organizations know the territory, while the IDF is technology-reliant, too cumbersome to negotiate successfully small theatres of war like the Shouf Mountain range in Lebanon or Gaza City, dependent on complex supply lines, and despite the great investment in personnel, armaments, communication and logistics, clearly unprepared for fighting against armed groups; this army has been turned into a huge and brutal colonial police force, and like many before has fought unarmed men, women and children for too long. It is no longer trained to fight a war, and continuously underestimates the ability of its enemies, like it did in 1973, exactly five decades ago. The attitude of its military and political masters, combining Jewish supremacism with extreme Islamophobia, certainly does cloud judgement. Ironically, the IDF proved unable to protect Israeli Jews from attack; the so-called Jewish State is the only one in which Jewish life is in mortal danger.
Then again, Israel itself is not in great shape after almost two decades of Netanyahu’s rule. At least half the population has been opposing the government and its judicial coup, accurately describing the other half as fascists, although arguably both sides share such an identity, both being devoted to what is clearly an illegal apartheid state and to the subjugation of the Palestinians. The pilots and officers who marched against Netanyahu since January are now bombing civilians in Gaza or waiting in their armored vehicles to attack and destroy the enclave.
So, whatever divides Israelis – the judicial coup, government corruption, the disappearance of human rights, turning Israel into a religious state – they are united in their approach to Palestine and its people: settle, subjugate, confiscate (the land) and expel; get rid of as many Palestinians as possible, whenever possible. This was clear from the first moment of the Hamas attack, when the so-called Israeli Left criticized Netanyahu for being soft on Hamas, not for the brutal occupation, settlements and cruel illegal blockade. This should not surprise anyone. After all, Israel was built on colonial violence led by a left-wing army.
Like other colonial regimes, Israel is mainly invested in separating the indigenous population from its land, and such projects are essentially militarized real estate operations, as seen in North and South America, Ireland, Nazi Germany, South Africa, Algeria and many other places. Indigenous populations have no choice; it is fight or die in most situations, clearly so in Palestine.
Colonial projects do not define their boundaries, but, on the contrary, surpass and extend their control, avoiding clearly drawn and accepted borders. So it is with Zionism; as its population grows, Israel advances to grab more land, in the fashion and rationale described by Adolf Hitler as Lebensraum, “the territory which a group, state, or nation believes is needed for its natural development.” (OED) The national “living space” achieved by violent military means, linked to expulsion, ethnic cleansing or genocide.
Most people would assume that such violent enterprises were all abandoned after 1945 and the defeat of Nazism. The facts prove otherwise: Israel may be an untypical colonial project, which started during the early 1900s, but its ethnic cleansing stage got going in 1947, just after the UN resolved to divide Palestine, offering the Zionists 55 per cent of the country, an outrageous injustice.
Israel, though, fought to take over 78 per cent of Palestine, expelling 750,000 Palestinians in the process, and in 1967 gained control of the whole country, expelling another 250,000 Palestinians. Since then, it has used every conceivable means to dislodge the remaining Palestinians from their land: land theft, illegal settlements, daily brutalities, mass arrests, arbitrary killings, mass expulsion of villages and towns, holding thousands of Palestinians without charge under “administrative detention”, extra-judicial executions, and a cruel apartheid state controlling the whole of Palestine and using the Palestine Authority as its indigenous police force to subjugate the Palestinians.
In Gaza, this became much worse as early as 1971, but even before 1967 Israel subdued the people of the enclave by brutal military excursions throughout the 1950s and 1960s (250 Palestinians killed by the IDF in Khan Yunis in 1956, for example). Now has come the latest phase of the Zionist project, under the most extreme right-wing, brutal and Islamophobic government Israel has ever elected.
Zionism has always been incendiary – intentionally inflaming situations and using outbursts as casus belli – and this looks to have been the case on 7 October. We have heard from various corners, especially the Egyptian security services, that urgent, numerous and specific warnings were delivered to the Israeli intelligence services about Hamas intentions, but all were ignored. Netanyahu is under fire from leftist circles for this, but it is unlikely to have been an error of judgement, like in 1973. More and more voices are sharing a more sinister but likely narrative, that Netanyahu chose to ignore the warnings because he welcomed a surprise attack which could be used as casus belli for taking over the whole Gaza Strip.
The truth may be discovered after the war, as this is a live wire for many of his political opponents in Israel, but in the meantime, the Nakba 2.0 genocidal bandwagon is in full swing, with US and UK navy strike groups sent to support Israel and its increasing number of war crimes. Of the more than half a million refugees who moved to the south of the enclave under pain of death, how many will ever see their homes in Gaza City again? It is rather likely that those who survive will never be allowed back but will be pushed further south into the Sinai desert.
This plan has been discussed openly even before January this year, and is now referenced daily by the Israeli government; there they are, without food, water, fuel, medicines, as so many Jews were during the Holocaust, and they are likely to die from bombing, starvation, illness and epidemics in the largest ever refugee camp. If Israel succeeds in this genocidal enterprise, the West Bank is likely to follow, with the extreme neo-Nazi settlers just waiting in the wings to go on a murderous rampage. As opposed to the Holocaust, this is done in the full view of everyone on earth, with the West cheering Israel forward, as Western media aids and enables the atrocities.
Western reactions are themselves a war crime – US President Joe Biden and his western colleagues are braying for Palestinian blood by cheering on Israel’s attack and invasion of Gaza, by referring to “Israel’s right to defend itself”, as if this mighty militarized power, with total support from NATO and the West, is some tiny enclave suffering a sudden and unprovoked attack by a superior military power for no apparent reason. Such dishonest narrative inversions have been used numerous times before, but never so flagrantly.
There has been much talk in the past two decades about the non-existent “Judeo-Christian civilization” or “tradition”.
The only such relationship which is evident historically is that of anti-Semitism, historical Christian racism and hatred towards Jews. But now we are witnessing the rise of a real Judeo-Christian alliance, that of Islamophobia, focused on Palestine and the Muslim world, long being fingered for Islamic extremism and harboring terrorists. In the UK, the leaders of such Islamophobic partnership are very evident, from Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, sending the Royal Navy to protect Israel, to Labour leader Kier Starmer, who forbade his MPs to partake in pro-Palestine action: they face the sack if they participate in demonstrations, the largest of which to-date was held in London last Saturday, when more than 350,000 people marched for an end to the slaughter in Gaza.
Sunak and Starmer were joined by the Archbishop of Canterbury, who has rejected the description of Israel as an apartheid state, despite the leading Israeli and international human rights organizations saying that the state has passed the legal threshold for such a label to be appropriate, including B’Tselem, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International. Such deluded politicians and public figures are likely to legislate against any further demonstrations for Palestine and peace, as Germany and France have done already.
Thus, as these lines are typed, in the cold light of day, and covered by all world news networks, we are watching this massive operation of genocidal ethnic cleansing roll forward, with no political leader in the west calling for a ceasefire, let alone for stopping the carnage altogether. Most of my own family was murdered in the Nazi Death Camps in Poland, mainly in Auschwitz and Treblinka, without anyone doing much to stop it. But then, it was all done in great secrecy and where no one could intervene.
This current exercise of genocide is public and includes all of us as hypnotized by-standers, unwilling and distressed witnesses to the criminality of the West and its stranglehold over international politics. I wish I could believe in future justice, and the prosecution of this line-up of war criminals, from Netanyahu to his Western partners, but how likely is that? Blair and Bush have never faced justice for their crimes in Iraq twenty years ago, have they? The heart cries in agony and despair over such cruelty and indifference of the so-called political leaders of humanity, as we can but stand by and watch helplessly.
Source: Middle East Monitor
Israeli Professor Haim Bresheeth-Zabner is a founder member of Jewish Network for Palestine (UK)
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https://azvsas.blogspot.com/2023/10/the-israeli-state-is-hitlers-bastard.html
From Ethnic Cleansing to Genocide There Can Be No Solution Until Zionism and the Israeli State are Eradicated From the Face of the Earth
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Let me clear before the Zionist howls become deafening. I want the Israeli state to disappear, just like the Nazi and Apartheid State of South Africa disappeared. The Jewish inhabitants of Israel have every right to stay, but no right to stay in a Jewish Supremacist State.
When I attended Palestine Expo in July 2019 I spoke at a workshop. For some reason the Jewish Chronicle singled out my contribution at this two day event when I said that:
Nazi Germany in a sense built the state of Israel at a crucial time and you can actually say that the state of Israel today is Hitler’s bastard offspring because the ideology that permeates Israel, Jewish racial supremacy, originated in the fascist states of Europe
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Matan Kaminer
I, an Israeli Jew, would very much like to live in a Palestine that is free from the river to the sea.
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https://www.sanews.gov.za/south-africa/sa-recalls-diplomats-israel-consultation
SA recalls diplomats in Israel for consultation
Monday, November 6, 2023
Cabinet has decided to recall all South African diplomats from Tel Aviv for consultation.
“Cabinet is disappointed by the refusal of the Israeli government to respect international law and its continued undermining of the United Nations resolutions for the implementation of a ceasefire with impunity,” Minister in The Presidency Khumbudzo Ntshavheni said on Monday.
Addressing a media briefing in Pretoria, Ntshavheni said the humanitarian corridors for the people of Palestine remain closed, with dire consequences for children, women and innocent civilians.
“The genocidal airstrikes by the government of Israel on the people of Palestine continue, with a rising death toll that includes women and children.
“In the last two days, the world has sat helplessly and watched as intensifying airstrikes on Gaza and the West Bank have destroyed schools, health facilities, ambulances and civilian infrastructure, and supposedly safe roads travelling to the South of Gaza,” the Minister said.
“For these, the Cabinet has decided to recall all South African diplomats from Tel Aviv for consultation.”
According to the latest data, the Department of International Relations and Cooperation (DIRCO) said at least 9 227 Palestinian civilians have been killed in Israeli attacks on Gaza since 7 October.
Meanwhile, more than 1 400 Israelis, including settlers and soldiers, have been killed in Israel.
Cabinet also noted with disquiet the continuing disparaging remarks of the Israeli’s ambassador to South Africa, Eliav Belotsercovsky, against South Africans, the leadership of South Africa both in and outside government, including civil society, who are speaking against the holocaust being committed by the Israeli government against Palestinians.
“The disparaging remarks of Ambassador Belotsercovsky are contrasted by the statements of two former Israeli ambassadors to South Africa (Illan Baruch and Dr. Alon Liel), who have been consistent in describing the actions of their government against Palestinians as apartheid.
“The disparaging remarks against those speaking up against the atrocities and the country’s leaders make Ambassador Belotsercovsky’s position more and more untenable.
“As such, Cabinet has directed the Department of International Relations and Cooperation to convey the South African government displeasure with the ambassador formally through diplomatic channels,” the Minister said.
Minister Ntshavheni was briefing the media on the outcomes of the Cabinet meeting held on 1 November. – SAnews.gov.za
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https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/blogs/news/the-war-on-gaza-and-israel-s-fascism-debateThe War on Gaza and Israel’s Fascism DebateWestern critics of Israel’s apartheid policies and far-right government are frequently accused of antisemitism, but leftist and left-liberal Israelis have been decrying the country’s descent into fascism for years. In this article, Alberto Toscano argues that fascism is embedded in the logic of Israel’s colonial project
Alberto Toscano19 October 2023
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Green-lit by Western governments and described by myriad human rights law experts as demonstrating clear ‘genocidal intent’, the State of Israel’s retaliation against Hamas’s Al Aqsa Flood October 7 attack has also elicited talk of fascism in multiple quarters. In a collective statement, the Birzeit University Union of Professors and Employees has spoken of ‘colonial fascism’ and of the ‘pornographic call to death of Arabs by settler Zionist politicians across the political lines’; in their own declaration, the Communist Party of Israel (Maki) and the left-wing coalition Hadash ‘put the full responsibility on the fascist right-wing government for the sharp and dangerous escalation’; meanwhile, Colombia’s president Gustavo Petro described the onslaught on Gaza as the ‘first experiment to deem all of us disposable’ in a ‘global 1933’ marked by climate catastrophe and capitalist entrenchment. Even quoting these lines probably falls foul of the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism, which has served as an important instrument in efforts to curtail peaceful international solidarity activism against Israeli apartheid, especially in the guise of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement.
And yet the recognition of an incipient fascism in the latest Netanyahu government and even Israeli society at large seems, if not mainstream, certainly prominent in public discourse in Israel itself, not least in the wake of protests against the recent judicial reforms aimed at eviscerating the vaunted autonomy of Israel’s Supreme Court. Four days before the Hamas attack, the newspaper Ha’aretz published an editorial under the heading ‘Israeli Neo-Fascism Threatens Israelis and Palestinians Alike’. One month earlier 200 Israeli high school students declared their refusal to be conscripted thus: ‘We decided that we cannot, in good faith, serve a bunch of fascist settlers that are in control of the government right now.’ In May, a Ha’aretz editorial opined that the ‘sixth Netanyahu government is beginning to look like a totalitarian caricature. There is almost no move associated with totalitarianism that has not been proposed by one of its extremist members and adopted by the rest of the incompetents it comprises, in their competition to see who can be more fully full fascist,’ while one of its editorialists described an ‘Israeli fascist revolution’ ticking off all items in the checklist, from virulent racism to a contempt for weakness, from a lust for violence to anti-intellectualism.
These recent polemics and prognoses were anticipated by prominent intellectuals like the renowned historian of the far Right Ze’ev Sternhell, who wrote of ‘growing fascism and a racism akin to early Nazism’ in contemporary Israel, or the journalist and peace activist Uri Avnery, who escaped Nazi Germany at age ten, and who, not long before his death in 2018, declared that the discrimination against the Palestinians in practically all spheres of life can be compared to the treatment of the Jews in the first phase of Nazi Germany. (The oppression of the Palestinians in the occupied territories resembles more the treatment of the Czechs in the “protectorate” after the Munich betrayal.) The rain of racist Bills in the Knesset, those already adopted and those in the works, strongly resembles the laws adopted by the Reichstag in the early days of the Nazi regime. Some rabbis call for a boycott of Arab shops. Like then. The call ‘Death to the Arabs’ (‘Judah verrecke’?) is regularly heard at soccer matches.
There is nothing new in the analogy, of course. The likes of Hannah Arendt and Albert Einstein signed a letter to the New York Times in the wake of the Deir Yassin massacre in 1948 decrying Herut (the predecessor to Netanyahu’s Likud party) as ‘akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties’.
Avnery also singled out the current Minister of Finance, Bezalel Smotrich, as a ‘bona fide Jewish fascist’. Smotrich, who has happily referred to himself as a ‘fascist homophobe,’ has laid out the theological bases for his own genocidal intent to ‘abort’ any Palestinian hopes for nationhood, and repeat the Nakba. In an interview, he declared:
When Joshua ben Nun [the biblical prophet] entered the land, he sent three messages to its inhabitants: those who want to accept [our rule] will accept; those who want to leave, will leave; those who want to fight, will fight. The basis of his strategy was: We are here, we have come, this is ours. Now too, three doors will be open, there is no fourth door. Those who want to leave – and there will be those who leave – I will help them. When they have no hope and no vision, they will go. As they did in 1948. […] Those who do not go will either accept the rule of the Jewish state, in which case they can remain, and as for those who do not, we will fight them and defeat them. […] Either I will shoot him or I will jail him or I will expel him.
Mention of the Book of Joshua is notable as it also served as an ideological reference for the secular David Ben-Gurion in the early years of the State of Israel. The Old Testament paean to destruction echoes disturbingly today: ‘So Joshua smote all the country of the hills, and of the south, and of the vale, and of the springs, and all their kings: he left none remaining, but utterly destroyed all that breathed, as the Lord God of Israel commanded. And Joshua smote them from Kadesh-barnea even unto Gaza’ (Joshua 10:40-41).
But the fascism ‘godfathered’ by Netanyahu cannot just be reduced to fundamentalist settlers and their stratagems of dispossession (including the deep tendrils into the state of Smotrich’s settler NGO, Regavim, and its lawfare against Palestinian land and property rights); it is also firmly anchored in the business interests and legislative maneuvers of billionaires who, in Israel as in India or the US, are happy to combine national-conservative mobilisations against decadent metropolitan ‘elites’ with the ruthless defense of profit and privilege. In a recent interview, the Israeli Holocaust historian Daniel Blatman observed:
Do you know what the biggest threat is to the continued existence of the State of Israel? It’s not Likud. It’s not even the thugs who run wild in the territories. It’s the Kohelet Policy Forum [a reference to a conservative, right-wing think tank supported by wealthy U.S. donors]. […] They are creating a broad social and political manifesto which, if adopted eventually by Israel, will turn it into a completely different country. You say “fascism” to people and they picture soldiers cruising the streets. No. It won’t look like that. Capitalism will still be extant. People will still be able to go abroad – if they are allowed into other countries. There will be good restaurants. But a person’s ability to feel that there is something protecting him, other than the regime’s good will – because it either will or not protect him, as it sees fit – will no longer be there. Israeli society was ripe to receive the present government. Not because of Likud’s victory, but because the most extreme wing pulled everyone after it. What was once extreme right is today center. Ideas that were once on the fringes have become legitimate. As a historian whose field is the Holocaust and Nazism, it’s hard for me to say this, but there are neo-Nazi ministers in the government today. You don’t see that anywhere else – not in Hungary, not in Poland – ministers who, ideologically, are pure racists.
Its insights notwithstanding, this passage also painfully demonstrates what liberal Israeli polemics against the rise of fascism bracket. Namely, Palestinians. Soldiers do cruise the streets in Israel and occupied Palestine. Millions of people ruled by Israel cannot go abroad. Or indeed return home. The ‘pure’ racism voiced without compunction by the likes of Smotrich and Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir is a product of the racism that structures and reproduces colonial domination, for bad faith liberals as much as for giddy fascists.
Long traditions of Black radical and Third World anti-fascism, as well as of Indigenous resistance, have taught us that, as Bill Mullen and Christopher Vials observe: ‘For those racially cast aside outside of liberal democracy’s system of rights, the word “fascism” does not always conjure up a distant and alien social order.’ In settler-colonial and racial fascist regimes – such as South Africa, which George Padmore in the 1930s deemed ‘the world’s classic Fascist State’ – we encounter a version of that ‘dual state’ which the German-Jewish lawyer Ernst Fraenkel anatomised: a ‘normative state’ for the dominant population and a ‘prerogative state’ for the dominated, exercising ‘unlimited arbitrariness and violence unchecked by any legal guarantees’. As Angela Y. Davis showed with reference to what state racial terror presaged for the rest of the US population in the early 1970s, the border between the normative and the prerogative state is porous.
This is patent in Israel today, as government ministers use the pretext of war to ‘promot[e] regulations that would allow [them] to direct police to arrest civilians, remove them from their homes, or seize their property if [they] believe they have spread information that could harm national morale or served as the basis for enemy propaganda’. As the Moroccan Jewish Marxist Abraham Serfaty analysed decades ago in his prison writings on Palestinian liberation, there is a ‘fascist logic’ at the heart of the Zionist settler-colonial project of dispossession, domination and displacement. While it may be disavowed by liberals, unless its core mechanisms are dismantled for good, it cannot but re-emerge, virulently, at every crisis. As testified by its broadsides against the hypocrisy of those who claim that they want a two-state solution while never intending to bring it about, the governing Israeli far-Right is in many ways saying the quiet part very loudly. At a time when the occupation and its brutalisation of Palestinians has been normalised and treated to all intents and purposes as interminable, the fascistic settler and religious right has come to affirm and celebrate the structuring violence and dehumanisation that marks Israel as a settler-colonial project – one which liberals have thought to mitigate or minimise, but never truly to challenge. In Israel, as in too many other contexts today, the ascendance of fascism might initially appear as a break or an exception, but it is deeply rooted in and enabled by a colonial liberalism that will never countenance true liberation.
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