Israel's "mutation" of Jewishness, through the eyes of a secular Israeli Jew
Palestinians walk along Israel's controversial barrier in the occupied West Bank town of Bethlehem on December 21, 2019. (Credit: AFP)
by Amira Hass, reposted from Ha’aretz
Our eyes gleam: Money. One million and a million more. We salivate a little. Let’s take some more from them. This time, let’s say 149 million shekels ($43 million). It doesn’t matter how it’s calculated. The main thing is that we can. Just as we can, and do, shrink their economy, so they’ll remain dependent on handouts and our whims.
A contemporary anti-Semitic plot is being written before our eyes: A Jew, blue-eyed and standing tall, with a dirty-blond forelock and a turned-up nose, counts real bills with virtual fingers, and sends them down the drain, aka to the Israeli treasury. Turn the page: A Palestinian girl from Hebron doesn’t get a vital treatment because the Jews, as they explain in the government hospital, stole the money that pays for the medicines.
Another page: The reconstruction of a main road in the town of Yatta was postponed for the same reason. The next page: Parents tell their children they can’t pay their college tuition for the next semester; their wages were halved once more after Israel once more stuck its long arm deep into the pockets of the Palestinian Authority.
Who are you, European countries, says the young man with the handsome forelock in the modern plot, to tell us it violates international agreements and the Paris Protocol on Economic Relations? If you claim that, we’ll respond that you’re anti-Semitic. If you make even the weakest of protests (such as recalling ambassadors for consultations), we’ll say your people are direct descendants of the Nazis. Then your parliaments will shake in fear, as they should, and rush to pass condemnations of the Palestinians.
Is it a law of nature, that the descendants of an oppressed, persecuted minority will become the persecutors and the oppressors, sneaky disinheritors, expellers and mega-robbers, as the Jewish mutation that grew up in Palestine/the Land of Israel has become? I don’t know. But I know that it’s a law of nature that every persecuted group will rise up against its persecutors. In waves, with lulls, with ups and downs, alone and together. Out of hope or out of despair.
It is permissible and necessary and essential to discuss the wisdom, the feasibility, the efficacy or the morality and the congruence to liberation philosophies of certain acts of resistance and defiance carried out by the persecuted. One can question a particular tactic or reject the use of another, but the very struggle, the very resistance, are not up for discussion. They are self-evident, a law of nature.
And besides, the active partners in the disinheritance and the oppression have no right to be shocked by the way the resistance is waged and to tsk-tsk in disapproval. The same is true of those who, by their silence, indifference and disregard, collaborate with the oppressor’s ongoing violence. The immorality and the scorn for justice, which have become the bedrock of our existence, cry out from every settlement and checkpoint in the West Bank, from every soldier who surveils the concentration camp that is the Gaza Strip, from every Taglit-Birthright Israel tour and from every so-called family farm in the Negev.
The Jewish mutation is operating full throttle to advance a program that is not enunciated in public: another expulsion, as massive as possible, of Palestinians from the West Bank. The code of the program is revealed in the de facto policy, which is in evidence every day in confiscation and demolition orders, in the edicts imposed by the czar – sorry, the defense minister – and in the lies propagated in the schools and in the co-opted media.
The Israeli hasbara (propaganda) machines, the Strategic Affairs Ministry and, in the spirit of privatization, the sleuthing and slander nonprofit organizations and social media campaigns labor to depict Israel as persecuted and the Palestinians as persecutors. Israel, with all its plots and conspiracies, does whatever it wants not only in a vain attempt to repress every natural desire to resist, but also to portray resistance to its oppression as a crime and every activist as a criminal: if he wrote something on Facebook, if she marched in a demonstration, if they called for sanctions or stopped buying calves from Israelis.
And then, as much as the techno-military power, the miserable persecuted victim, desires, it not only punishes the “criminals” but takes collective revenge on their entire surroundings. That, because all is permitted to the mutation.