American Politico Calls Netanyahu Racist

According to today’s I, for 9th April 2019, the American Democrat politician, Beto O’Rourke, has called Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a racist, citing CNN. The article, ‘Israeli PM racist, says top Democrat’, runs

Democratic White House hopeful Beto O’Rourke has branded Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a “racist” and an obstacle to peace in the Middle East. He made the remarks while discussing the US-Israel relationship and the Israeli leader’s vow to annex Jewish settlements in West Bank, said CNN (P. 2).

Now I have my doubts about how true this statement is. There have been allegations that CNN has deliberately misquoted Democrat politicos to make them look bad, and I think some of them involve supposed comments about Israel. But there should be absolutely no doubt that Benjamin Netanyahu is racist, and that the Israeli state, contra to the I.H.R.A. definition of anti-Semitism, really is a deeply racist endeavour. It defines itself as the Jewish state so that all Jews, everywhere, are citizens of Israel. This excludes Israel’s indigenous people, the Palestinians, from citizenship. Netanyahu has declared that the Palestinians are treated equally, but this equality really exists only on paper. In practice there is a system of rigid apartheid. Jews live under Israeli law, Palestinians under military law. 95 per cent of Israeli land is held by the Jewish National Fund, which will not lease it to non-Jews. There are separate roads for Jews and Arabs, some municipalities will not allow Arabs to live in their areas. Arabs have suffered their land being confiscated to build new settlements for Jewish settlers, IDF squaddies cut down their olive trees, a vital source of income, and throw pollutants in their wells and cisterns to make the water undrinkable. Palestinian homes and villages are demolished. There are economic restrictions intended to stifle Palestinian farming and business, while Jewish farms, settlers and businesses receive generous support from the state. The tourist trade too is subject to strict regulations privileging Jews. Non-Jews are legally forbidden from working as tour guides, even when they are Christians taking tourists to the country’s great Christian monuments. I assume the same situation applies to Muslims, who also wish to visit their religious sites. Netanyahu’s governing coalition now includes a viciously racist party for Jewish settlers, the remnants of the terrorist movement Kach, which demands the cleansing of all non-Jews from Israel. Naturally, not all Jews support this, and ‘racist’ is one of the kinder epithets I’ve heard applied to Netanyahu. I’ve heard one Jewish professor refer to him as ‘that bastard Netanyahu’.

The American political establishment, and especially the Republicans, firmly supports Israel. There have been a long line of senior American politicos turning up to pledge their support to Israel at AIPAC’s conventions. This year a number of Democrats, including Bernie Sanders, who is Jewish, refused to go. And there is still controversy raging about the comments by Minnesota Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, who said that Congress had been bought by the Israelis. She was right, AIPAC and other Zionist organisations, like Ted Hagee’s Christians United For Israel, are able to purchase American support for Israel by generously funding individual politicians. Just like the various parliamentary Friends of Israel groups within the British parties obtain Israeli funding and trips to Israel from the Israeli government and Zionist donors.

And the Israel lobby also responds to its critics in America exactly the same as it does over here: it smears them as anti-Semites. So we’ve seen Trump, who’s had genuine anti-Semites from the Alt Right, like Steve Bannon and Sebastian Gorka, in his coalition, now declare that the Dems are now the anti-Semitic party. Just as the Republicans and corporate Democrats smeared Omar as a Jew hater for her comments.

If Beto O’Rourke did make that comment about Netanyahu – and that’s a big if, as Congress has previously given the wretched bigot a massive standing ovation – then it means that the Israel lobby in America is losing its grip. People are turning away, including the Jewish community. One of the contributors to Lobster stated in an article published back in the ’90s that the Israeli delegates in Washington are not liked. Privately, many American politicians and staffers loath them. And it looks like that pent up hatred of official Israeli racism may now be coming out, as leading American politicians get sick of them and their intransigence towards the Palestinians.

The result is that as the Israelis’ grip on western politicos loosens, we can expect more accusations and smears of anti-Semitism. Ireland has already passed a law banning Israeli goods from the Occupied Territories. And according to the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, Jeremy Corbyn and Jackie Walker are the #2 threat to Jews around the world(!) This is nonsense, except in the very limited sense that Corbyn and Walker are genuine supporters of the Palestinians and are serious about finding a just solution to the Israel/Palestine conflict. We’ve already seen Gabriel Pogrund, the soulless hack from the Sunset Times, launch an attack on the Labour party as a whole, as well as the Jewish Labour Movement declaring a vote of ‘no confidence’ in Corbyn. We can expect a further storm of angry, lying denunciations as the Israel lobby tries to scare politicians on both sides of the Atlantic into line.

 

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