Who can save Israel now?

[R. Daneel Olivaw]

http://mondoweiss.net/2015/03/save-israel-now

But I was right about this being a hugely clarifying election. All has been revealed to a watching world. Netanyahu’s reversion to racism in the last days of a desperate campaign, his explicit denunciation of “Arab voters” on Facebook so as to get his people out, along with his repudiation of the two-state solution—and the huge reward delivered to him by Israelis for these statements — should be clarifying revelations to the American political class. This is Israel. Everything you have been told about the “Jewish democracy” by the Israel supporters: it is wrong. It may be Jewish, but it is no democracy, this is a white settler society where a fearful privileged group of Jews holds on to its power in ever-expanding colonies by reelecting a strong leader, now in his tenth year as premier, who will use threats and violence against the Palestinians. This place is what Ali Abunimah and Max Blumenthal told us it was years ago. Blumenthal’s video Feeling the Hate in Jerusalem was censored just about everywhere he put it up six years ago. MJ Rosenberg, a liberal Zionist, said that Blumenthal had caricatured the Israeli public by quoting a few yokels.

Well today those yokels have spoken, and they are Israel.

At a polling place in south Jerusalem yesterday, a woman told me how upset she got that morning when her neighbor blurted, “Bloody Arabs,” during an election conversation. But a friend who was with her jumped in to justify the comment. “We are right to be afraid.” Jerusalem can never be divided because the Arabs already destroy the trainline that runs through East Jerusalem, they learn hatred as schoolchildren. So we need a strong leader who will not allow them to have a state. This woman was a child psychologist in her 60s, who has worked in the U.S. and Europe. She wore a chic purple fleece and gray slacks, as sophisticated as they come; and she speaks like a South African haut bourgeois during apartheid.

I had just walked through East Jerusalem to get to the German Colony. There are no polling places in the Nablus Road or on Salah ad-Din Street. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who are governed by Israel, who according to Israel live In Israel, cannot even vote because of the color of their skin. If this is not apartheid, what is? And if this is your idea of a Jewish democracy, why would your children want to be Jewish?

[Scootaloo]

1. What does that mean, "save Israel?"

Sounds like pablum to me

[R. Daneel Olivaw]

2. Well, scootaloo, the article obviously rests on the present disillusionment of the right-wing

and bigoted Likud win. The question being asked is not "Who can save Israel(?)", as in who in Israel will ride in to save the day, but who (big ? there) will help from the outside?

“Nothing will change. We need a Mandela. The only thing that can help us is for more pressure to come.”

...

But they are missing the point. The Israeli people have spoken. Noam Sheizaf explains at +972:

There is symbolic significance to the fact that Netanyahu openly campaigned on his opposition to Palestinian statehood. It means that he is backed by a majority of Israeli voters, and an absolute majority of the Jewish vote. There needs to be, and I think there will be, a debate on the implications of this decision by the Jewish public. For years we have been hearing that Israel will either end the occupation or cease to be a democracy. Could it be that the Jewish public has made its choice?

---

So this is Israel’s crisis; it has now lost all political cover in the west among liberals. I said on a radio show a couple of months ago that Zionism began with cries of Death to the Jews in Paris in the 1894 that motivated Herzl and ended with cries of Death to the Arabs in Jerusalem. Bernard Avishai said I was wrong, and Jane Eisner and Beinart were silent. But Netanyahu proves the point. This is how Zionism ends.

Israel has now entered into interesting times, my friend, and I am not so sure that this Netanyahu win will be the triumph he expects it to be. Possibly it will be a Pyrrhic victory.