Like most perpetrators of injustice, the Israeli government’s first defense is to deny that injustice is taking place. Its second is to convince people that the injustice should be taking place. It carries out the first measure by trying to hide its crimes from the world. It makes false reports which portray the Israeli army as “the most ethical in the world.” It denies all charges of ethnic discrimination, and accuses all critics of anti-semitism. It gets its ally the United States to only tell the Israeli side of the region’s history in schools, making many Americans ignorant of the Palestinian genocide that’s effectively going on.
But beneath the denials and whataboutisms that Israel’s defenders typically respond with when Israeli apartheid is brought up, there’s a large facet that’s been taught to openly embrace these policies. You just need to interview random Israelis on the street, as Abby Martin has done, to find an abundance of violently racist sentiments. Sentiments that are shared, according to a 2016 Pew poll, by the 48% of Israeli Jews who support ethnic cleansing.
The colonialist indoctrination that this population has been put through solidifies these popular beliefs in Israeli culture: hostility towards race mixing, views of Palestinians and Arabs as subhuman, an enthusiasm for the ethnic killings that are happening, and a belief that the theft of Palestinian land is wholly justified. The atrocities that the Palestinian and Arab sides also commit are used to propagate these views, as rhetoric about Israel is made demagogically simple.
This is what makes the denials of Israeli atrocities so empty, even when they’re put next to advertisements of concern for the Palestinian people. While most of Israel’s propagandists try to convince us that Netanyahu’s government represents equality and tolerance, many others in their camp openly acknowledge and endorse the atrocities. It’s why, as Abby Martin recently described in an appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience, Israel’s paradigm of brutality can’t sustain itself.
“The tide is turning,” said Martin. “I mean, Natalie Portman just signed on to boycott this conference in Israel. And they are running scared. I mean, they’re trying to revoke her citizenship because she’s basically participating in BDS. Because she says recent events have made her greatly disturbed, as it should disturb everyone. The fact that there’s this ongoing massacre, and if I could just explain to people what’s going on really quickly, it is horrifying.
“There’s a thing called the Great March of Return, and it’s been completely nonviolent on the side of Palestinians. It’s in Gaza, which is the open air prison where about two million people are housed and caged like animals, and they’re not allowed to leave. I can’t think of any other place in the world that refugees actually can’t leave. Otherwise they’ll be shot. So there’s like Israeli guard posts surrounding this place, they count their calories, they don’t let them have concrete, anything that can be construed as a weapon, etcetera. So anyway, they’re protesting this, right, because they have no dignity, no humanity, and no agency to live their lives. And so they’re protesting nonviolently, they’re going up to the fence, and just, thousands and thousands of them. And forty people have just been executed.”
As the outcry against this gets more defined, and as the issue is forced more into the open, ignoring the problem will become less of an option. Many people will have to take sides on whether these horrors should continue. In this environment, Israel will only have a small worldwide minority on its side.
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