Guest Post: Israel at 70: An Alarming Growth of Racism And Intolerance By Allan C. Brownfeld

THIS ARTICLE APPEARS IN THE JUNE-JULY 2018 ISSUE OF THE WASHINGTON REPORT ON 

      MIDDLE EAST AFFAIRS 

Israel at 70: An Alarming Growth of Racism And Intolerance

By Allan C. Brownfeld

As Israel commemorates its 70th anniversary, and Likud and its far-right allies consolidate their hold on power, it confronts an alarming growth of racism and intolerance.

Writing in the April 4 edition of the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Bradley Burston notes that, “It hurts me to write what I’m about to. But it also hurts me to have to live in this place today...This is Zionism as racism. This is Israel at 70...As a public servant, as an Orthodox rabbi, as a settler, you’re free to say anything you want, as long as it’s anti-Arab, anti-black, anti-Muslim, anti-Palestinian, anti-immigrant, and, for good measure, anti-Ashkenazi, anti-North American Jew, anti-New Israel Fund.....”

In Burston’s view, “For sheer, unadulterated...Zionist bigotry and hatred...no one can touch Binyamin Netanyahu. In recent years he’s hammered away with racist and mendacious incitement against Arab citizens of Israel and African asylum seekers...I understand where this comes from. Jews of all ethnicities bear the scars of every manner of heinous racism, up to and including genocide. It’s all too true, at the same time, that in a tragic given of human nature, the abused is at great risk of becoming an abuser. In the case of Zionism, can’t the victims of anti-Semitism come to acknowledge their—our—own bigotry, our own ingrained prejudices, our own sense of superiority and entitlement, our own history of injustice to the minorities in our midst?”

Even a brief look at the growing racism and intolerance shows the direction in which contemporary Israel is headed. In March, for example, during his weekly sermon to the nation, Israel’s Sephardic chief rabbi called black people “monkeys.” Rabbi Yitzhak Yosef mentioned a blessing uttered upon seeing an “unusual creature,” citing the example of a black person who has two white parents on the street in America. According to Ynet, Yosef referred to black people by the derogatory Hebrew word “kushi,” and then went on to call a black person a “monkey.” Yosef’s fellow chief rabbi, Yisrael Lau, had already used this term to describe black people—on his very first day in office.

Dov Lior, chief rabbi of Hebron and Kiryat Arba and head of the “Council of Rabbis of Judea and Samaria,” issued a religious edict saying “a thousand non-Jewish lives are not worth a Jew’s fingernail.” He said that Arabs arrested for terrorism could be used for medical experiments, and ruled that Jewish law forbids employing Arabs or renting homes to them. Ovadia Yosef, a former Sephardi chief rabbi, said that the sole purpose of non-Jews “is to serve Jews.” This declaration was later endorsed by some 250 other Jewish religious figures.

According to the ideologies which underlie Gush Emunim and other West Bank settler groups, non-Jews have “satanic souls.” One of the rabbinic leaders of this movement, Yitzhak Ginsburgh, speaks freely of Jews’ genetic-based spiritual superiority over non-Jews: “If you saw two people drowning, a Jew and a non-Jew, the Torah says you save the Jewish life first...If every simple  cell in a Jewish body entails divinity, it  is a part of God. Therefore, something is special about Jewish DNA...If a Jew needs a liver, can you take the liver of an innocent non-Jew passing by to save him? The Torah would probably permit that. Jewish life has an infinite value.”

Jews who are not white have also been subjected to widespread discrimination. Today, 81,000 Israelis were born in Ethiopia, while 38,500 of the community were born in Israel. When Ethiopians protested that blood donations from their community were thrown out, they were told that it was not because they were black, but because of HIV in Africa. In 2010, Israel was accused of a “sterilization policy” aimed at Ethiopian Jews. They were frequently prescribed contraceptive drugs like Depo-Provera, which is long-lasting. The agencies involved in immigration denied that Ethiopian women were guided toward this drug. But Dr. Yifat Bitton of the Israeli Anti-Discrimination Legal Center “Tmura” said that 60 percent of the women receiving this contraceptive are Ethiopian. Noting that Ethiopians made up only 1 percent of the population, Bitton added that “the gap here is just impossible to reconcile in any logical manner that would somehow resist the claims of racism.” In 2012, Israeli public television featured a documentary in which 35 Ethiopian women who had immigrated to Israel reported that they had been told they would not be permitted into the country unless they agreed to the shots.

Israel is a society which has rejected genuine religious freedom. Non-Orthodox rabbis have no right to perform weddings, preside over funerals or conduct conversions. If a Jew and non-Jew wish to marry, they must leave the country to do so. Christianity and Islam are under constant attack. A senior Catholic spokesman, Fr. Pierbattista Pizzaballa, the Custodian of the Holy Land, says that a lack of police action and an educational culture in which Jewish children are encouraged to act with “contempt” toward Christians, has resulted in life becoming increasingly “intolerable” for many Christians (see p. xx). 

The Telegraph reports that Christian leaders feel that the most important issue Israel has failed to address is the practice of some ultra-Orthodox Jewish schools which teach children that it is a religious obligation to abuse anyone in Holy Orders they encounter in public: “Such ultra-Orthodox Jews, including children as young as eight, spit at clergy on a daily basis.” Ruling on the case of a Greek Orthodox priest who had struck a yeshiva student who spat near him, a Jerusalem magistrate wrote, “Day after day, clergymen endure spitting by members of those fringe groups—a phenomenon intended to treat other religions with contempt...The authorities are not able to eradicate this phenomenon and they don’t catch the spitters, even though this phenomenon has been going on for years.”

Racist From Its Earliest Days

Racism has characterized Zionism from its earliest days. Zionists used the slogan “a land without people for a people without land.” But the land of Palestine was not empty when the first Zionist settlers arrived there in 1882. This fact was known to the Zionist leaders even before the first Jewish settlers arrived from Europe. A delegation sent to Palestine by the early Zionist organizations reported back to their colleagues, “The bride is beautiful but married to another man.”

According to Israeli historian Benny Morris, the early Zionist settlers referred to the indigenous Arabs as “mules” and “behaved like lords and masters, some apparently resorting to the whip at the slightest provocation, a major source of Arab animosity.”

The Russian Jewish writer and philosopher Ahad Ha’am wrote in 1891 that the settlers “behaved toward the Arabs with hostility and cruelty, trespass unjustly upon their boundaries, beat them shamefully and even boast about it.” He reported in 1893 that, “The attitudes of the colonists to their tenants and their families is exactly the same as toward their animals...We are accustomed to believing...that the Arabs are desert savages, a people like donkeys, and they neither see nor understand what is happening around them. But that is a great mistake.” Ha’am surmised that aggressive settler attitudes stemmed from anger “toward those who reminded them that there is still another people in the Land of Israel that have been living there and do not intend to leave.”

Israeli historian Zeev Sternhell, one of the world’s leading authorities on fascism, laments that Israel is confronted with growing fascism and racism. He writes: “I frequently ask myself how a historian in fifty or one hundred years will interpret our period. When, he will ask. did people in Israel start to realize that the state that was established...on the ruins of European Jewry...had devolved into a true monstrosity for its non-Jewish inhabitants. When did some Israelis understand that their cruelty and ability to bully others, Palestinians or Africans, began eroding the moral legitimacy of their existence as a sovereign entity?”

Advocates of liberal democracy in Israel, he continues, are “...no longer capable of overcoming the toxic ultra-nationalism that has evolved here, the kind whose European strain almost wiped out the majority of the Jewish people...We see not only a growing Israeli fascism but racism akin to Nazism in its early stages...According to Likud leaders, the Arabs aren’t Jews, so they cannot demand ownership of any part of the land that was promised to the Jewish people. According to this view, a Jew from Brooklyn, who has never set foot in this country, is the legitimate owner of this land, while a Palestinian, whose family has lived here for generations, is a stranger, living here only by the grace of the Jews...This is the situation with regard to Sudanese and Eritrean asylum seekers and their children, who are Israeli for all intents and purposes. This is how it was with the Nazis...” 

Israel repeatedly refers to itself as a “Jewish state,” but its current direction represents a rejection of traditional Jewish moral and ethical values. Slowly, more and more American Jews, who believed Israel shared their values, are coming to the realization that it does not. 

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Allan C.Brownfeld is a nationally syndicated columnist and is editor of ISSUES, the quarterly journal

of the American Council for Judaism.