Imploding the Myth of Israel

The Israeli lie was trumpeted while every camera, video and tape recorder, computer and cellphone of the activists on board was seized and destroyed -- or in a few cases sold by Israeli soldiers when they got back to Israel -- while those on the boats were towed to an Israeli port and detained in isolation. The ceaseless stoking of fear and racial hatred -- given full vent by the Israeli government and media in the days after the Mavi Marmara incident -- has served to empower racist political demagogues such as Netanyahu and Avigdor Lieberman, a camp follower of Meir Kahane. It has also effectively snuffed out Israel's old left-wing Zionist establishment.

"In Israel you have three systems of laws," the Israeli Arab politician Ahmed Tibi observes in the Blumenthal book...

"One is democracy for 80 percent of the population. It is democracy for Jews. I call it an ethnocracy or you could call it a Judocracy. The second is racial discrimination for 20 percent of the population, the Israeli Arabs. The third is apartheid for the population in the West Bank and Gaza. This includes two sets of governments, one for the Palestinians and one for the settlers. Inside Israel there is not yet apartheid but we are being pushed there with ... new laws."

As Blumenthal documents, even Israeli Jews no longer live in a democracy. The mounting state repression against human rights advocates, journalists and dissidents has reached the proportions of U.S. Homeland Security. The overtly racist cant of the political elite and the masses -- "Death to Arabs" is a popular chant at Israeli soccer matches -- has emboldened mobs and vigilantes, including thugs from right-wing youth groups such as Im Tirtzu, to carry out indiscriminate acts of vandalism and violence against dissidents, Palestinians, Israeli Arabs and the hapless African immigrants who live crammed into the slums of Tel Aviv. 

Israel has pushed through a series of discriminatory laws against non-Jews that eerily resemble the racist Nuremberg Laws that disenfranchised Jews in Nazi Germany. The Communities Acceptance Law, for example, permits "small, exclusively Jewish towns planted across Israel's Galilee region to formally reject applicants for residency on the grounds of ' suitability to the community's fundamental outlook.' ... And all who denounce the steady march of Israel toward fascism -- including Jewish academics -- are attacked in organized campaigns as being insufficiently Zionist. They are branded as terrorists or collaborators with terrorists." As a headline in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz read: "The settlers are the real government of Israel."

Blumenthal writes...

"Woody [a law school graduate from New York] became my initial liaison to Tel Aviv's radical left, introducing me to a loose-knit band of a few hundred anarchists, disillusioned ex-soldiers, disaffected children of ultra-Zionists, queers, academics, and generally idealistic and disillusioned young people who came of age during the Second Intifada when the liberal Zionist 'peace camp' closed ranks with the militaristic right wing. This tiny band of social deviants comprised the only grouping of people I met who sincerely embraced multi-culturalism and who took concrete action against the discriminatory foundations of their country's political apparatus. Right-wingers and many Jewish Israelis who considered themselves part of the social mainstream referred to members of the radical left as smolinim, which simply means 'leftists,' but the word carried a deeply insulting connotation of an unacceptable caste, an Other. As branded social outcasts, inflexible in their principles, disdainful of ordinary politics, and brazen in their racial liberalism they resembled nothing so much as the pre-Civil War abolitionists."

The late Amnon Dankner, the former editor of Maariv, one of Israel's major newspapers, Blumenthal notes, denounced "neo-Nazi expressions in the Knesset" and "entire parties whose tenor and tone arouse feelings of horror and terrifying memories." David Landau, the former editor-in-chief of Haaretz, has called on Israelis to boycott the Knesset "to stand against the wave of fascism that has engulfed the Zionist project." And Uri Avnery, a left-wing politician and journalist, says: "Israel's very existence is threatened by fascism."

The disillusionment among idealistic young immigrants to Israel dots the book. As one example, Canadian David Sheen is recorded as saying that everything he had known about Israel and Palestinians was, in Blumenthal's words, "a fantasy cultivated through years of heavy indoctrination." But perhaps what is saddest is that Israel has, and has always had, within its population intellectuals, including the great scholar Yeshayahu Leibowitz, who sought to save Israel from itself.

Leibowitz, whom Isaiah Berlin called "the conscience of Israel," warned that if Israel did not separate church and state it would give rise to a corrupt rabbinate that would warp Judaism into a fascistic cult.

"Religious nationalism is to religion what National Socialism was to socialism," said Leibowitz, who died in 1994. He understood that the blind veneration of the military, especially after the 1967 war that captured the West Bank and East Jerusalem, was dangerous and would lead to the ultimate destruction of the Jewish state and any hope of democracy. "Our situation will deteriorate to that of a second Vietnam, to a war in constant escalation without prospect of ultimate resolution." He foresaw that "the Arabs would be the working people and the Jews the administrators, inspectors, officials, and police -- mainly secret police. 

A state ruling a hostile population of 1.5 million to 2 million foreigners would necessarily become a secret-police state, with all that this implies for education, free speech and democratic institutions. The corruption characteristic of every colonial regime would also prevail in the State of Israel. The administration would have to suppress Arab insurgency on the one hand and acquire Arab Quislings on the other. There is also good reason to fear that the Israel Defense Force, which has been until now a people's army, would, as a result of being transformed into an army of occupation, degenerate, and its commanders, who will have become military governors, resemble their colleagues in other nations." He warned that the rise of a virulent racism would consume Israeli society. He knew that prolonged occupation of the Palestinians would spawn "concentration camps" for the occupied and that, in his words, "Israel would not deserve to exist, and it will not be worthwhile to preserve it."

But few, then or now, cared to listen. This is why Blumenthal's new book is so important.