Bradley Burston Opinion The Israel You Know Just Ended. You Can Thank Netanyahu
Look around. The country looks the same. But it doesn't feel the same. Not even close.
The Jewish mourning day of Tisha B'Av came early this year.
The date marks two
tragic occasions in the past during which the Jewish people effectively
lost the Holy Land. Sages taught that the ancient Temples were destroyed
on that date because of Sinat Hinam on the part of Jews - gratuitous
hatred, hatred without just cause, hatred which does nothing but take a
place of conflict, despair, bigotry, violence, and make it worse.
Why is this year's Tisha B'Av different than the
others? Because this year, in an explosion of legalized, governmentally
weaponized Sinat Hinam, it marks the week that this country, as we have
known it, effectively ended as well.
- On
Sunday and Monday, Benjamin Netanyahu publicly promised Israel's LGBTQ
community - among them his own voters and a Likud lawmaker - that he
supports surrogacy rights to same-sex couples. Two days later, with
religious and Russian-immigrant-supported politicians opposing the
measure, Netanyahu led his coalition in voting to kill the bill.
Sinat Hinam.
- Also on Sunday, security services at Tel Aviv's Ben-Gurion Airport's departures area took aside and interrogated at length
and with pronounced incredulity a prominent Jewish-American
philanthropist who chairs Brandeis University's Board of Trustees, is
Orthodox, and has close family in the settlement city of Maaleh Adumim.
The reason? His suitcase had been searched, and guards had found a pro-
Palestinian pamphlet in his luggage, left over from coexistence meetings
the philanthropist had attended between Jewish-American community
leaders and Palestinians.
Sinat Hinam.
- In the dead of
night early Thursday, Netanyahu led the government in passing the
Nation-State Bill, a law which effectively repealed and superseded the
equality and democracy provisions of Israel's Declaration of
Independence as a guide for the future of the country. Gone is any
mention of equality. In its place, directives that veer Israel towards
genuine apartheid, including a downgrading of the status of the Arabic
language and therefore of Arab citizens of Israel.
The wording of the
law, though diluted down from an outright endorsement of Jim Crow-type
housing segregation, retains an element of implied support for what are
commonly Jews-only communities.
Sinat Hinam.
Sinat Hinam.
- Still later on
Thursday, in a direct slap in the face of Hungarian-born Israeli
survivors of the Holocaust and of the anti-Semitism-besieged Jewish
community of Hungary, Netanyahu hosted a love-fest welcome for Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who based his recent re-election campaign on dog-whistle encouragement of Jew-hatred.
And Tisha B'Av doesn't even start until Saturday night.
And, this beginning this year, it may go on indefinitely.
This is what Netanyahu's new Israel feels like.
On Thursday, Israelis
woke up to a country in which Netanyahu's hand-picked goon squad -
politicians who mock and shout down bereaved parents, politicians who
mock and denigrate disabled colleagues - posed grinning with him for a
victory selfie after effectively repealing Israel's Declaration of
Independence, passing the single most gratuitously hateful legislation
in the nation's history.
This, then, is Netanyahu's legacy: He has taken
the Israel of the Start Up Nation and turned it into the Israel of the
Shithole Nation State.
Call it irony or call
it inevitability, this man who has spent every waking minute of the
last decade warning Israelis about the dangers of the Iran of the
ayatollahs and the Revolutionary Guard, also spent that same time
turning Israel into the Iran of the Rabbinate and the rogue settler.
Back when he was
called King Bibi, back when he was lip-servicing peace, back when he had
an overwhelming Knesset majority and American backing for far-reaching
diplomacy, for enhanced democracy and equality in Israel, he could have
done anything he damn well chose to do. His legacy was his to create.
His legacy could have
been coexistence, flexibility, humanity, respect, diplomacy, 21st
century education for all, a good life for all people who share this
land.
After all these years, Benjamin Netanyahu's legacy is finally clear, clear enough to be summed up in two words:
Sinat Hinam.
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