This week's postings at JfJfP.com
This week, August 3-August 9, 2015 , is likely to be as determining of Israel’s image as was the onslaught on Gaza a year ago. The media have shone a shocked and shocking light on the violence in Israeli society which has been there since before its actual foundation but which US publications in particular would prefer not to have seen.
The Israeli press was less surprised. Op-Eds from Ynet:
Call these murderous wreckers what they are: Jewish terrorists
The NY Times published a piece by Etgar Keret which suggests that Israel is now so riven with disagreements that there are no common bonds of sympathy holding it together.
Israel’s fragmented heart
The killing of one Palestinian youth is so ‘ordinary’ it rarely gets into the news. But the massive publicity for the killing of Cecil the lion allowed the Palestinian Animal League to decry the killing of a boy called Laith (lion in Arabic) who was connected to animal welfare.
Unnoticed killing of a Palestinian ‘lion’
The death toll of the arson attack mounts; Israeli security shot dead a young Palestinian who was protesting about the arson making him the fifth Palestinian to be shot dead by Israeli forces in the last month.
Fifth Palestinian shot dead in July 2015
None of the forces licensed to use violence – IDF, border police, Israeli prison service… is held to account for the deaths and suffering they cause. Yesh Din has analysed the results of complaints made about these forces – and most of them are dismissed without investigation.
Immunity for Jewish terrorists
Some people and organisations (including Shin Bet) have been warning for years that the fanatical ‘religious’ beliefs of young settlers are dangerous for Israel (others, not posted, admire them as acting out the true spirit of Israel).
Murder made in Israel
Those who grasp how the Occupation and denial of Palestinian rights has given the green light to Jewish terrorists can only mourn the senseless killing of a baby and try to make sense by looking at the whole apparatus for demeaning Palestinians. David Grossman is one.
After years of treating Palestinians as rubbish how come THIS arson is wicked?
Palestinians have been disappointed by the gap between the Arab states’ rhetoric about them, and any action. Will the murder of Ali Dawabasheh, or the outcry about it, or the creation of the ICC spur them to a more active role?:
Arab League to ask UN to protect Palestinians
Ynet news, whose coverage of this crisis has been excellent, reveals the fantasy world of settler youth, to whom conservatives like President Rivlin and PM Netanyahu are effectively Nazis.
‘A whole lot of Jews not bound by state laws’
Historians know how terrorism has been a constant strand of Israel’s strategy for recognition. And the depth of the denial by Israel and the US that violence is the essential part of the strategy for the inclusion of Israel in the world order of civilised nations. Richard Silverstein on the blindness to right-wing violence of the security services:
They wouldn’t know a Jewish terrorist if they fell over one
Once again, PM Netanyahu is torn between keeping pro-settler Jewish Home, his coalition partner, on side and demonstrating to the US he is tough on racist thugs.
If it’s ‘terrorist’ it’s not Israeli policy
But people who actually know actual Israel can trace the tracks of pro-settler violence through all levels of Israeli society.
Holy orders
What effect the demonstration of racist thuggery will have on the US love affair with Israel has yet to be found out.
Settler thugs shock the US
The power of the right-wing in Israel does not depend on the government. There are extremely nasty NGOs (unmentioned by NGO Monitor) at work in Israeli politics:
The NGO that supports right-wing violence
There are other issues apart from the west’s discovery of Jewish racist violence. Greece is the least protected, least assimilated, country in the EU. Eastern Europe is the last redoubt of antisemitism. Syriza is pro-Palestinian. But for many Greeks, Jews are associated with wealth and power, not vulnerability. It is a view based on caricatures.
Is Greece really ‘the most antisemitic country in Europe?