Abby Martin Hears Ordinary Israelis’ Support for Ethnic Cleansing

This is another excellent video from Tele Sur’s Empire Files. In it Abby Martin interviews ordinary Israelis on the street in Jerusalem about the Palestinians and their country. She also talks to Ronnie Barkan, an Israeli human rights activists.

The attitude expressed by these Israelis, many of whom are young people, is that Israel is rightfully theirs by virtue of it being the Jewish homeland 2,000 years ago. The Palestinians have no history there. Some feel that they should be kept separate in their own settlements because they’re a terrorist threat. Others simply feel that they have no place in the Jewish state. Two young women talk about kicking them out in Hebrew, with one telling her friend that she can’t say that. One young man proudly states that he is a member of Lehava, a Jewish organisation set up to discourage mix marriages and interracial romance between Jews and Palestinians.

Several of the speakers claim that the Palestinians are actually well treated. A few deny that they have ever existed historically, and that Palestine was empty before they arrived. They also claim that it is Jews, who have built everything in Israel and improved the land. Israeli should build more settlements and houses for its own people. One young man says that it’s fitting that the Palestinians are suffering because 1,400 years ago it was the Palestinians who threw the Jews out of the country. It wasn’t the Romans. An elderly man believes that the Nazis and the Palestinians were sent to punish the Jewish people for their sins. Some advance the religious justification for Jewish possession of Israel: that God gave it to them. The Palestinians should go back to Iraq or wherever it is they came from. Other people deny that Israel is an apartheid state, with one saying that if you go to Jnin, you won’t see a Jewish face. They also claim that international criticism of Israel and the BDS movement is anti-Semitic, stating that Turkey doesn’t face the same criticism for its settlements in Cyprus and that North Korea, a far worse state, doesn’t experience the same international condemnation. Some state that it is occupation, and that the occupation is good, while others deny that Israel is occupied territory. They argue that it isn’t, because no-one talks about America being occupied because of the English presence in North America. Some people also state that the Palestinians are treated well. They have been given Gaza, and should go back there. And the Israeli state has treated them with restraint. If it were the Russians or Americans, within three days the Palestinians would be gone. One man, who believes the occupation should be more humane, says that he is abuse as a leftist, a terrible insult in Israel, for his views.

They’re all proud of their country, and say that people should come there to see how safe it is, and how well the Palestinians are treated.

Barkan states very clearly that Israel is an apartheid state, not quite like South Africa, but it certainly fits the definition of the crime of apartheid under international law. The debate about Palestinian rights is presented as a complex issue due to Israeli self-delusion. The Israelis see themselves, or want to themselves, as liberal and progressive, and so try to convince themselves that it is far more complex than simply Israelis oppressing Palestinians. Barkan states that everyone is brought up to believe this and to be a fighter in the IDF. He believed it, until he saw through it. He also states that there isn’t a left in Israel. Instead there are left Zionists, and the real debate isn’t about whether the Palestinians should have rights, but about whether they want a large Israel with no Palestinians or a small Israel with no Palestinians. They also hide the reality of the ethnic cleansing that occurred in 1948. Some, however, will admit it, but say it’s a good thing. He also points out that it wasn’t just Palestinian land and property that was seized, but also their culture. The Israeli National Library went around seizing books from vacated Palestinian homes. There is a concerted effort to erase the Palestinians and their culture from history. Barkan certainly doesn’t believe that Israel should be exclusively a Jewish state. It isn’t a Jewish state, except in the same sense that South Africa was a White state: through force. Palestinians rights should be non-negotiable, and the Israeli apartheid system dismantled.

Everyday Israelis Express Support for Genocide to Abby Martin – YouTube

This is shocking, though it’s not surprising that so many Israelis view Palestinians as terrorists or a security threat. It is also unsurprising that so many of them claim that the land is rightfully theirs based on God’s grant of the land to the Abraham and the Jewish people in the Bible. The Zionist pioneers were secular, but as Jewish authors and activists critical of Israel have shown, they have always cited the Bible as the basis of their claim. Some of the views they advance is just Israeli propaganda. It might have been Golda Meir who started the idea that before the Jewish settlers arrived in the 1890s or so the land was vacant and unoccupied – ‘a land without a people for a people without a land’, the slogan goes. This has been long refuted using land records from the Ottoman Empire, so it’s ironic that one of the speakers wonders where the Palestinians were during the centuries of Ottoman occupation. The simple answer is: there. Despite the fact that the Israeli claim has long been disproven, you still hear from American right-wing sites. As for the Diaspora and the Jewish exile, the Palestinians definitely weren’t responsible for that. Jews under Islam were generally better treated and suffered fewer restrictions than in Christian Europe. And you could also argue that the ultimate homeland of the Jewish people is also Iraq. Before he migrated to Canaan, Abraham and his father, Terah, lived in the city of Ur in ancient Mesopotamia.

I don’t believe that all Israelis hold these views. The Israeli human rights organisation, B’Tselem and others have been very critical of the Israeli state’s increasing encroachment on Palestinian land and the dispossession of its people. But it’s clear that such attitudes are widespread. And it is these genocidal views that the British establishment and organisations like the Board of Deputies, Chief Rabbinate, Campaign Against Anti-Semitism and celebrities like Rachel Riley and Tracy Ann Oberman are protecting and encouraging when they denounce even the mildest criticism of Israel as anti-Semitic. I dare say that some of them may genuinely believe that they are not supporting a form of apartheid, and that the Israeli state is serious about a two-state solution. But Barkan is probably right, and this is just a form a self-delusion.

I don’t doubt that this video is very much the kind of film the Board of Deputies would like to hide, because of the unflattering exposure of the horrendous views of some of the Israeli public. As Peter Oborne’s documentary for Channel 4’s Dispatches on the Israel lobby revealed way back in 2009, the Board tries to silence any critical reporting of Israel and atrocities committed by its armed forces, no matter how factual, objective and impartial, with charges of anti-Semitism and claims that it will cause people to hate Jews. But there are also many ordinary, self-respecting Jews that are deeply critical of Israel and its treatment of the Palestinians. And we’ve seen in the recent Labour suspensions of Moshe Machover and Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi, how these thoroughly decent people are being smeared and silenced in order to give the false impression of a united Jewish community four-square behind Israel.

Which is why films like this are necessary. They need to be seen and made to expose the carefully constructed and maintained lies of the Israeli state and the British establishment. And the people genuinely working for a just peace between Israel and the Palestinians, real anti-racist Jews and gentiles, who also fight anti-Semitism and Jew-hatred in Europe and the rest of the world, need to be supported.

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