“Apartheid Israel is Not Us”
A slogan for our times
November 12, 2022. American Jews need to adopt this headline as a motto. Formed by Jewish Zionists, loved by Christian Zionists, pampered by U.S. imperialism, regulated by an ultra-nationalist form of Jewish Orthodoxy, Israel is an apartheid, Trump loving society. Israel is alien to U.S. Jewish life. Jews in the U.S. are increasingly tolerant, progressive, willing to intermarry non-Jews, non-Orthodox, anti-Right and anti-fascist. Israel is not us and we should have nothing to do with its government. Of course, we should have warm relations with the anti-apartheid Israeli Left.
The latest example of the split between them and us is the victory of the so-called Religious Zionism party in the November ’22 election. Yes, the Religious Zionism party is "only" in third place. Netanyahu will be prime minister again, but political analysts realize that the party’s leader, Itamar Ben-Gvir, provided the real dynamism in the election.
Who is Ben-Gvir and what does he stand for? He represents a violent racist religious point of view pioneered by Rabbi Meir Kahane, a Brooklyn resident who emigrated to Israel, cherry-picked the most racist and violent teachings found in Jewish Orthodoxy and preached and practiced what he said. In the U.S. Kahane founded the “Jewish Defense League” which a 1986 report branded as one of the most “active terrorist” groups in the U.S. In Israel he formed a political party called Kach (“Thus”) and was elected to the Knesset in 1984 (and never reelected). To get a sense of how extreme Kahane was he called for all Arabs to be expelled from Israel (He wrote a book entitled “They Must Go”) and introduced a bill in the Knesset to ban sexual relations between Arabs and Jews. His venom and racism were so open and offensive to standards of those days that the Right-wing Likud party would not have anything to do with him. “Whenever he approached the podium to speak, Likud Prime Minister Yitzchak Shamir would lead the Likud faction in a demonstrative walkout. Kach never gained mainstream popularity – at its electoral height in 1984 it garnered 25,000 votes,” writes Calev Ben-Dor in the Fathom Journal. Kahane was assassinated in New York in 1990 by a Muslim later suspected of being part of al-Qaeda. Ben-Gvir joined Kach in 1992 when he was 16.
Itamar Ben-Gvir became an extremist, he says, in reaction to the first Intifada. His actions and provocations were so notorious that the Israeli military refused to let him enroll, a rare distinction. The Jerusalem Post noted in Sept 2022, “Ben-Gvir was indicted 46 times and convicted eight times, including for rioting, vandalism, incitement to racism, and support for a terror organization.” For decades he had a picture in his living room of Baruch Goldstein the Kach member, who murdered 29 Palestinians in the Ibrahimi mosque in Hebron in 1994. Ben-Gvir became a lawyer and became the go-to person for Jews accused of racist attacks against Palestinians. For instance he was lawyer for two teenagers were accused in the firebomb murder of three members of the Dawabshe family in 2015.
Ben-Gvir was never in any of Netanyahu’s ruling coalitions. While not the pariah that Kahane was, he and his party was considered too extreme. However, during Netanyahu’s failed run in February 2021 Netanyahu said he wanted Ben-Gvir in his Right-wing coalition, but that he was “unfit” to hold any ministerial post.
In February of 2022 Ben-Gvir opened an office in Jerusalem. Mohammed El-Kurd wrote in The Nation, “ Itamar Ben-Gvir decided to ‘move’ his office from the Knesset to a yard in Sheikh Jarrah, my neighborhood in occupied Jerusalem.” You can imagine the continuing turmoil. Yet far from struggling against his provocations Likud Party leader Netanyahu collaborated with him. Ben-Gvir’s party was quite small, but Netanyahu made sure that all the small far-right parties would unite into one for the election. Anshel Pfeffer wrote in Haaretz, “The zombie bastard that Benjamin Netanyahu created when he forced Haredi nationalists, neo-Kahanists and homophobes together on one slate – in order to prevent the loss of any votes of tiny far-right parties that failed to cross the electoral threshold – answered a demand no one knew existed.”
In a lead editorial in Haaretz bemoaned the fact that Likud leaders were not opposing any of the extreme ideas of Ben-Givr and his cronies like changing the court system so it could not overrule decisions of the Israeli government [no matter how racist or illegal under international law]. The editors wrote, “It sometimes seems as if all the Likud MKs are Ben-Gvir. “
In November election the Religious Zionist party received 14 seats in the Knesset almost triple that of Labour which had ruled Israel until the ‘mid ‘70’s. Ben-Gvir was the first candidate to declare victory Among his crowd of supporters many yelled “Death to the Arabs” or “Death to the terrorists” [coded language for “Death to the Arabs”]. On November 10 he attended the yearly memorial for Meir Kahane. [He was actually booed for saying he did not wish all Arabs to be deported.]
So, this is Israel 2022 where racism and homophobia and ideas of new expulsions not only of “Arabs”, but of Jews the government decides are not sufficiently loyal, will be mainstream in the new government. And leading the pack with Ben-Gvir will be Benjamin Netanyahu who is the friend of the ultra-right all over the world, who excuses their antisemitism as long as they profess love for Israel, and who when the U.S. suffered its worst antisemitic attack (Pittsburgh 2017) sent his Diaspora Minister to the U.S. for the purposes of defending Trump from charges that he incited hate!
Like most Jews in JVP I was raised to admire and even idolize Israel, particularly its welfare state and socialist-seeming attributes. Realize that is long gone. Israel is a Neo-Liberal apartheid state, and a key enforcer in the Middle East for the U.S. empire. Why should we American Jews respect that, post the Israeli flag in Jewish institutions, send children on Birthright Trips, and pretend that Israel will defend Jewish interests worldwide?
It's time for a clean break.