Issue #12 - Israel's new terrorist government
Zionism's revolving door of racism.
I appreciate everyone who sent me well-wishes after hearing about my imposed week off due to illness. I’m feeling much much better now thanks.
The main story this week is the new Israeli government, which was voted in with a razor thin majority on Sunday night. There has already been a lot of ink spilt on this. (Can you still spill ink in the digital era? Can you spill pixels?) There are a lot of delusions being peddled about a supposed new era in Israeli politics.
Britain’s foreign minister Dominic Raab said he looked forward to “working together to secure peace in the region” with the new Israeli government. Laughable. Sleepy Joe Biden said he was “fully committed to working with the new Israeli government to advance security, stability, and peace for Israelis, Palestinians, and people throughout the broader region.”
But in reality, as my EI colleague Ali Abunimah told Turkish TV station TRT World, for the Palestinians, the new Israeli government is a case of “same axe, different executioner.”
The reality is that Israel’s new Prime Minister Naftali Bennett is even further to the right than his predecessor Benjamin Netanyahu.
This is a man who, for the last decade has campaigned against Netanyahu from the right. The name of his party (Yamina) is literally “Rightwards”. His previous party, Jewish Home, was explicitly set up to represent the interests of the West Bank settlers.
Not only did he participate in the notorious Qana massacre of 1996, ending the lives of more than 100 Lebanese civilians and peacekeepers who had been sheltering in a UN base, but he openly boasts about the people he’s killed.
“I have killed lots of Arabs in my life — and there is no problem with that,” he notoriously declared in 2013.
Long before Netanyahu, Jared Kushner and Donald Trump proposed striking the “Deal of the Century” — the formal annexation of the majority of the West Bank to Israel — Bennett was concocting a very similar plan. He called it the “Stability Initiative” — ironic, considering how much instability its implementation would bring to the lives of the Palestinians who would be expelled to make way for such “deals.”
To the West, in his American-accented English, Bennett promotes the expulsion of the Palestinians from the West Bank to make way for Israeli settlements in explicitly Islamophobic terms, peddling the tired old “Clash of Civilizations” narrative.
In this video of his from 2015, which EI reported on at the time, he said:
Israel is in the forefront of the global war on terror. This is the frontline between the free and civilized world and radical Islam. We’re stopping the wave of radical Islam from flowing from Iran and Iraq all the way to Europe.
When we fight terror here, we’re protecting London, Paris and Madrid. If we give up this piece of land and hand it over to our enemies, my four children down there in Raanana will be in harm’s way. It’s just one missile away from hitting them.
As my colleague Ali Abunimah explained at the time: “While Bennett markets himself as a lover of freedom and democracy in English, in Hebrew he boasts about how many Arabs he has killed.”
Finally, there is also the fact that Bennett’s ramshackle coalition government — with a Knesset majority of only a single seat — is so fragile that it could be unseated at any time. As my EI colleague Omar Karmi put it in his analysis yesterday, it is “a placeholder government going nowhere.”
My articles this week
As well as a new prime minister, Israel has a new head of state. Despite the nonsense being spewed about incoming president Isaac Herzog, he is every bit as racist as his colleague and fellow Zionist Naftali Bennett. In fact, Bennett tweeted welcoming his appointment, calling him “a Zionist with a big heart.”
I wrote this article explaining why, to Palestinians, Herzog has anything but a “big heart.” In fact, he has a long history of anti-Palestinian and anti-Arab racism and violence, just like Bennett.
In my MEMO column from the weekend, published before the vote bringing the new Israeli government in on Sunday, I give my analysis of Israeli politics. You can’t discount the possibility of Netanyahu making a return to government.
TRT World appearance
I told TRT World that to Palestinians, it makes little to no difference which set of Zionist parties leads the apartheid system that runs their lives. It is still apartheid.
British Muslim TV appearance
I spoke to presenter Mohammed Shafiq and his live callers about the latest Israeli war on the people of Gaza and the British media coverage of it. You can watch the video back on their Facebook page. Click here and forward the video to time code 01:03:30.
Tweet of the Week
“In my opinion I think they’re all terrorists” — Mohammed El-Kurd on the incoming Israeli government.