It’s the big AIPAC conference this weekend, and many left-wing and progressive Democrat politicos have decided to stay away from the gathering of the main Jewish pro-Israel lobby. This has already prompted screams of ‘anti-Semitism!’ by Israel’s outraged supporters, including Donald Trump. However, as Trump is himself a racist supported by the Alt Right, including a former cabinet minister, Steve Bannon, who was himself anti-Semitic, these screams should carry little weight. Especially as one of the Democrat politicos staying away was Bernie Sanders, who’s Jewish. Not that race or religion really matters to the Israel lobby in this – Jewish critics of Israel have complained that they’re attacked and smeared as anti-Semites more viciously than non-Jews.
Just to remind people how criticism of Israel isn’t anti-Semitism, but an entirely reasonable, moral response to a state that viciously persecutes its indigenous people and has no crimes against committing war crimes against them and the surrounding nations, including women and children, I found this little video on YouTube of Irish MP Richard Boyd Barrett reading out horrifically vile statements from Israeli ministers from 2014 and 2015. The video was posted in 2015, and comes from the Questions to the Taoiseach in the Dail, the Irish parliament. I assume this is the equivalent of the British Prime Minister’s Questions in the UK parliament.
Mr Barrett begins with Defence Minister, Moshe Yalon, ‘Israel is going to hurt Lebanese civilians to include kids of the family. We went through a very long discussion. We did it then, we did it in the Gaza strip, we are going to do it in any round of hostilities in the future.’
The military chief of staff, Benny Ganz, ‘The next round of violence will be worse, and see this suffering increase’. Ganz led the last two military assaults on Gaza.
The Minister for Education: ‘There will never be a peace plan with the Palestinians. I will do everything in my power to make sure they will never get a state’, and ‘If you catch terrorists, you simply have to kill them. I’ve killed a lot of Arabs in my life, and there’s no problem with that.’
The Minister for Justice: ‘Palestinians are all enemy combatants. This also includes the mothers of the martyrs. They should follow their sons. Nothing would be more just. They should go, as should the physical homes in which they raised the snakes, otherwise more little snakes will be raised there.’
The Deputy Minister for Defence: ‘Palestinians are beasts. They are not human.’
The Minister for Foreign Affairs: ‘My position is that between the sea and the Jordan river there needs to be one state only, the state of Israel. There is no place for any agreement of any kind that discusses the concession of Israeli sovereignty over lands conquered in 1967’.
Barrett makes the point that these are official statements of the-then current government of Israel, including the advocacy of genocide, including children, and calling them snakes. He asks the Taoiseach that if they’re defining terrorism whether he does not think that this is the language and thinking of terrorists. He passionately states that this is absolutely unacceptable in civilised politics and civilised international relations for the heads of government of a state that Ireland carries on normal relations with, and whom the Taoiseach met in Paris, to advocate those sort of views, when people know that they have led to the deaths of thousands of civilians, innocent men, women and children. He asks him what he has to say about those sort of views expressed by the Israeli government.
The quotes from the Israeli officials aren’t just genocidal and that of terrorists themselves, they are extremely similar to remarks made by the Nazis to justify the destruction of those whole communities in occupied Europe that resisted them, such as Lidice in Czechoslovakia. They stated that they were also going to kill those communities’ children so that the sons and daughters of the people they murdered would not seek revenge on them.
The complete intransigence of the politicians quoted to accept a Palestinian state also shows the hollowness of the two-state solution being touted by the Israelis and their puppets, like Labour Friends of Israel to the conflict with the Palestinians. They have absolutely no interest in allowing the establishment of a Palestinian state in reality, something that is very clear if you read the works of critical historians and political commentators like Ilan Pappe and Tony Greenstein. Given this, it is no wonder that Joan Ryan, the organisation’s chair, threw a strop when she was asked about what would happen to the Jewish settlements in Palestine if the two-state solution became a reality at the 2017 Labour Party conference, and why she later smeared the woman who asked her as an anti-Semite.
These quotations are an indictment of Netanyahu’s government and the foreign politicians, who support it. They provide ample proof that the real anti-racists this weekend are the Democrat politicos, like Bernie Sanders, who are staying away from the AIPAC conflab.
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