Bradley Burston When Israel threatens Palestinians with a new Nakba, it threatens itself with extinction
When Israel threatens Palestinians with a new Nakba, it threatens itself with extinctio
***
haaretz.com
What does it say about Israel that a senior
cabinet minister, who is also bland as mush, feels it necessary at a
time of edge-of-war tensions with the Palestinians to take to Israeli
television and to Facebook to deliver a message of pure, weapons-grade
incitement?
Minister of Regional
Cooperation Tzachi Hanegbi, a key Netanyahu ally who often enunciates
and defends the policies of the prime minister, has long been seen as a
force of relative moderation in the most fiercely hard-line government
in the nation's history.
Nonetheless, this
week, as Israel faced eruptions of violence at home and with its
neighbors, Hanegbi used one of the most incendiary terms possible to
warn Palestinians of the possible consequences of the brutal Friday night murders of three Israelis, a 70-year-old man and two of his adult children:
"This is how a 'Nakba' begins," Hanegbi warned the next day on his Facebook page.
"Exactly like this," he wrote, citing the Arabic word for "catastrophe," which has become synonymous with the Palestinian experience
of the 1948 war, in which hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled or
were expelled by Israeli forces from the homes in the Holy Land.
"Remember
'48," he then wrote. The war, which gave rise to the State of Israel,
also created nearly three-quarters of a million Palestinian refugees.
The Nakba is an event of profound trauma for Palestinians. The pain and
anger surrounding the Nakba has been indirectly recognized by the
Netanyahu government in efforts to keep the Palestinian narrative from being taught in Arab schools in Israel.
"Remember
'67," Hanegbi continued. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, some of
them refugees of the 1948 conflict, were displaced by the Six-Day War
in which Israeli forces captured East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza.
Hanegbi, who said in
an interview earlier in the day that the violence was headed not toward a
third Palestinian uprising, but toward a third Nakba, emphasized the
point in the Facebook post: "When you want to stop it, it'll already be
lost. This will be already be after the third 'Nakba.'"
Hanegbi's scrupulous
use of quotation marks to modify – more precisely, to diminish – the
word Nakba was certainly not lost on Palestinian readers. Nor was the
significance of his conclusion:
"This is twice now
that you've paid the price for the insanity of your leaders. Don't test
us again because the outcome won't be any different.
"You have been warned!"
Hanegbi's post came at a point when the social media-borne ash and molten rage issuing from that sacred volcano in the heart of Jerusalem were inflaming passions half a world away.
It also comes during a
period when Israeli officials, from Benjamin Netanyahu down, are
spending a tremendous amount of their precious time talking about
incitement.
They talk about how
incitement can become weaponized, translated into acts of murder and
terror and escalation and intransigence and revenge and war. And they
have no shortage of examples, as social media in Arabic carry countless
examples of terror threats and vile anti-Semitic caricatures.
But there is an
entire enterprise of incitement which Israeli officials have failed to
address or even acknowledge for decades. It is the virulent hate-talk
which begins at home. Flagrantly bigoted verbal attacks on Palestinians.
Statements by Israeli officials and civil-servant rabbis branding all
Arabs as murderous animals, sub-humans, a race of blood-lusting
terrorists.
Aided and abetted by
cooperative, tabloid-oriented news media, the thin-margin, brittle
coalitions of Israeli politics have only accelerated Israeli incitement,
as politicians scramble all over social media to show how destructively
they can profess their willingness to change things for the more
unbearable.
Thus it was that
instead of working to calm the explosive atmosphere of the past week,
hard right politicians vied for air time to push for measures to further
deprive Palestinians of rights to worship at Al-Aqsa Mosque, at the
same time lobbying for a green light for Jews to worship at the Temple
Mount, part of the same complex. In a tone that may have been serious
and may not have been, far-right MK Bezalel Smotrich suggested in a tweet that a synagogue should be erected immediately on the Mount.
As militant Muslims
accused Israel of planning to take over the site for their exclusive
use, militant Jews seemed only too pleased to confirm the allegations.
At the same time, as
cabinet ministers called for imposition of the death penalty, a
backbencher from Netanyahu's Likud party went them one better.
"I want to tell the truth without, heaven forbid, sounding too extreme," MK Oren Hazan said in a video posted over the weekend.
"But if it were up to
me, I would have gone to the murderer's family house last night,
grabbed him and his family, and executed all of them. Yes, just like
that. Without any shame. Executed them."
What does it say
about Israel? That if you want your voice to be heard, you can say – and
get away with saying – "I'll see your house demolition and your death
penalty, and I'll raise you mass execution of non-combatants."
What does it say
about Israel's leaders? That for the sake of preserving the illusion
that they're tougher than the next guy, they can make threats that
amount to warnings of mass expulsions and ethnic cleansing – a new
Nakba. The exact kinds of threats that in a world like ours could
ultimately provide the pretext to threaten Israel itself with
extinction.
***
haaretz.com
Tzachi
Hanegbi, a close ally of Netanyahu, threatens Palestinians with ethnic
cleansing in response to the latest round of violence. A senior minister
in the…
972mag.com|Di Mike Schaeffer Omer-Man
Commenti
Posta un commento