Ravit Hecht Analysis It’s No Crime to March for Peace
The demonstration Saturday night against the nation-state law
was marvelous, full of hope and inspiration. The people who were there
know. The people who were there know that the heart of the matter is not
a tally of Palestinian flags or the handful of people singing songs of
incitement, but rather the tens of thousands of Jews and Arabs who want
peace, equality and democracy, who marched together warmly and
hopefully.
Those who were there
– at one of the most gentle, dignified and quiet demonstrations ever
seen here – opened Israel’s popular newspapers on Sunday, to see the lie
splashed across the page in giant headlines. The lie that reverberates
shamefully through the Israeli media, repeating caricatures of fascism
that are the ministers in Israel’s government. The shocking headlines
screamed,“Palestinian flags in Tel Aviv.” So what if some people raised
Palestinian flags? There were Israeli flags and gay pride flags and red
flags too.
A Palestinian flag was placed in the
prime minister’s official residence in Jerusalem when the Palestinian
president visited. There’s nothing wrong with that. The headlines
screamed despicable slogans shouted by a few extremists. History will
recall the disgrace of those ministers and that so-called “journalism,”
the disgrace of the shameless inciters and their loyal servants, the
cowards of the herd.
Where are the
families that marched together, parents and children, hand in hand?
Where are the Holocaust survivors who marched, the women who stood
silently holding signs, the gay people with their flags, the drummers,
the young people? Where are all of those, who were the sane, vast,
peace-seeking majority, trying to flee with the last of their strength
the burden of racism imposed on them by this government?
I
was there. I saw them with my own eyes. I saw and heard them, and not
those who shouted: “In blood and fire we will free Palestine.” At the
very least, they have to be mentioned too, if we’re dealing with
truthful reporting (we have had no expectations of Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu’s shoe-shiners for some time now).
But in the current
atmosphere of fear and ideological corruption, it’s a crime to march for
peace. It’s a crime to consider the Arabs human beings. Even the Tel
Aviv municipality issued a panicked statement that it had not lit up the
municipality building in the colors of the Palestinian flag. How much
fear the right wing has unleashed here. What violent psychological
terror it is inflicting.
Look at the
embarrassed heads of the opposition, who are abandoning their friends
who came courageously anyway. Look at Yesh Atid chairman MK Yair Lapid,
who wondered in a tweet “what would happen to someone who tries to march
through the center of Ramallah with Israeli flags.” Such figures,
beyond how pathetic they are – after all, no right-winger is going to
vote for such a grotesque figure – have been defined in history as
destroyers of democracy. Lapid’s contribution to the destruction of
Israel’s democracy is no less than that of Netanyahu, Justice Minister
Ayelet Shaked and far-right activist “The Shadow.”
When will they
understand, all those lickers of right-wing boots, that the Smotriches
and the Netanyahus will never stop tarnishing their image. It doesn’t
matter how far away they move from the shadow of an Arab in the street.
When will they understand that the right wing will always know better
how to incite, to target and to skewer with short messages lacking
complexity or truth.
The issue is the nation-state law
– the despicable race law blackening Israeli democracy, splitting
Israeli society and removing Israel from the family of nations. This is
the issue and this is the debate. Anyone who cooperates with the attempt
to turn the gaze away from this, cooperates with the destruction of
Israel and its transformation into a horrible place.
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