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January 11, 2009

Israel: no freedom of speech for Arabs

Buried part way through a really excellent report from the Israeli side of the Gaza border called Why Israel's war is driven by fear, which I strongly recommend reading in it's entirety, is this chilling sentence:

Israeli Arabs who protested against the war have been arrested for undermining national morale.

There's no mention of any Israeli Jews having been arrested "for undermining national morale" even though the very next sentence in the article clearly points to the existance of Jewish critics too.

1. Someone please explain to me how arresting Arab dissenters, but not Jewish dissenters, is not racism in action. And don't even try to make up some fantastical tale about the Arabs having been arrested for dissenting violently or anything along those lines. If that were the case then they'd have been arrested for disrupting the peace of something along those lines. That is NOT what this says. It says they were arrested "for undermining national morale."

2. Without freedom of speech do you really have a "democracy"?

A primary theme in the report is how desensitized most Israeli Jews have become to the human suffering among non-combatant civilians on the other side of the Gaza border. A few like Yeela Raanan are refreshingly honest about it, but most appear unwilling to even do that.

"If you do open your heart to the fact that 40 completely innocent people in a United Nations school were killed you have a very hard time. It's difficult to open your heart to that place and also hold on to wanting the soldiers to succeed. It's a very hard split in personality. I think it's necessary but it's a difficult thing to do." Raanan says Israelis have dehumanised Palestinians to such an extent that they are no longer sensitive about who they kill. "It's so difficult for them to put themselves in the place of someone who lives in Gaza. I guess you have to be able to dehumanise to be able to accept this type of war," she said.

"Israelis think of Hamas as a terrorist group and therefore anything we do to Hamas is OK. But the question is, why do we think it's OK also to kill civilians while we're killing or destroying Hamas? We rationalise; they do it to their own people. That's the rhetoric in Israel. It makes it OK to do what we're doing. In Israel we're brought up to be afraid of Arabs. It's a short step to hating them. It's unusual for people not to have hostile feelings toward Arabs, and it's racist feelings because it's a whole group."

A particularly good example is the public justifications that the Israeli government has used to rationalize the deaths of innocent Gazans.

You might not know there was a war on while visiting Jerusalem's restaurants, Tel Aviv's frantic bars or the Azrieli shopping centre. The mall is one of the largest in Israel. Next door is the Kirya military headquarters, which houses Israel's defence ministry and the country's top military officers. The two buildings are linked by a bridge.

Through the Gaza war, Israel has accused Hamas of endangering civilians by establishing military installations in populated areas. It has been a central justification by the army for the killing of Palestinian civilians. The shoppers at the Azrieli mall see no contradiction between that claim and Israel building its defence headquarters next door to a shopping centre. "They might have a point if they attacked it," said Yoni Ahren, a computer engineer sipping coffee. "But they don't. Instead they send suicide bombers to blow us up in the mall. The Palestinians set out to kill any Jew. The Israeli army sets out to kill Hamas and, yes, innocent Palestinians get killed. But that is not why the army is in Gaza."

See how easily swept aside the rationalization is? There is no questioning of it, no wondering what other moral figleafs the government might be disseminating. Tt's all just swept aside when pointed out and a new justification which also utterly evades the question of civilian casualties is dropped in it's place.

And all of it represents a huge distraction from Israel's ongoing theft of Palestinian land in the West Bank.

When Ariel Sharon pulled Jewish settlers out of Gaza in 2005, he called it a painful sacrifice for peace. Another view was that he had run out of political options and the pull-out was a way to stave off international pressure to talk to the Palestinians. What the dismantling of the Gaza settlements did not do was end the expansion of colonies on the West Bank. Shilo has grown by about 25% since 2005. The "outposts" around it, which are illegal even under Israeli law, have been expanding so fast that the "Shilo block", with about 10,000 residents, is now as large as the main settlement that was dismantled in Gaza.

If Israel does not have a genuine peace partner among the Palestinians, the reverse is just as true - the Palestine does not have a genuine peace partner among the Israelis.

Meanwhile innocent civilians ON BOTH SIDES continue to pay a steep price for the moral and ethical bankruptcy of their "leaders".

Posted by Kevin at January 11, 2009 02:34 AM