Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, October 2014, pp. 16-17

The Nakba Continues

As Right-Wing Jews Attack Arab Citizens, Knesset Suspends Palestinian Lawmaker

By Jonathan Cook

ISRAEL’S LARGE Palestinian minority faced an unprecedented backlash of incitement and violent reprisals as Israeli Jews rallied behind recent military operations in Gaza.

Human rights groups and political activists noted that statements from public figures urging war crimes and genocidal actions in Gaza helped to stoke an especially dangerous atmosphere for Israel’s 1.6 million Palestinian citizens, who comprise a fifth of the population.

Palestinian citizens were accused of being “traitors” and a “fifth column” for criticizing Israeli operations in Gaza, in a surge of ethnic hatred by the Jewish majority not seen since the outbreak of the second intifada 14 years ago. Among the Jewish population, support for the attack on Gaza held at over 90 percent throughout, with most Israeli Jews disappointed that the army was not sent deeper into Gaza to rout Hamas.

“There has been an explosion of incitement against the Palestinian minority on Facebook and other social media,” said Basel Ghattas, a Palestinian member of the Israeli parliament. “Pages calling for violence get tens of thousands of ‘likes’ overnight.”

Jewish mobs had been patroling Jerusalem, Haifa and other cities with mixed populations looking for Palestinians to attack, and beating those participating in anti-war demonstrations, said Jafar Farah, director of Mossawa, an advocacy group for Arab citizens.

“These are no longer spontaneous or isolated attacks,” he said. “The gangs of Jewish extremists are organized, well-funded and backed by a campaign of incitement from government officials.”

Police, meanwhile, are reported to have arrested over the summer more than 1,500 protesters, many of them children and almost all of them Palestinians, in Israel and East Jerusalem.

Jerusalem has seen a wave of demonstrations since 16-year-old Mohammed Abu Khdeir was kidnapped by right-wing Jews and burned alive in early July. Reports suggest police have been using tactics violating Israeli law and more normally associated with the occupied West Bank: making night-time arrest raids to seize children and interrogating them without a parent being present.

Government ministers have been among those leading the campaign of anti-Arab incitement. Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman called for a boycott of Arab businesses after Palestinian communities staged a one-day general strike in July to protest the mounting carnage from Israel’s Gaza operation, dubbed Protective Edge.

Reprisals by companies followed, with a flood of reports of Arab workers sacked or disciplined for posting comments on social media against the military offensive. Several universities also punished Palestinian students for making critical comments or celebrating the deaths of Israeli soldiers.

Tal Hassin, a lawyer for the Association for Civil Rights In Israel (ACRI), said there were numerous reports of sanctions being imposed. “Only Arab students have been punished,” she pointed out, “even though the social forums are simmering with racist comments by Jewish students.”

She said university staff appeared to be acting like “thought police.”

In another worrying indication of the new mood, an Israeli court approved a protest in August by a Jewish anti-assimilation group, Lehava, at the wedding party of a Jewish and Arab couple. Morel Malka had converted to Islam to marry Mahmoud Mansour, as Israeli law forbids marriages between couples of different religions.

However, the celebration in the city of Rishon Letzion was marred by more than 200 right-wing Jews who shouted “Assimilation is a holocaust” and “Death to the leftists.”

The liberal Haaretz newspaper editorialized: “The threats against them are the kind that would happen in a fanatical theocracy in the developing world—not in a Western democracy that Israel pretends to be.”

Another lightning rod for growing intolerance has been Haneen Zoabi, a Palestinian member of the Israeli parliament, the Knesset (see August 2010 Washington Report, p. 17). In July she became the first MK in Israel’s history to be suspended for six months, the longest punishment possible.

She had refused during a TV interview to label as “terrorists” Palestinians behind the abduction in June of three Israeli teenage settlers in the West Bank. The youngsters were later found dead.

In August the police also recommended that Zoabi be indicted for incitement, for allegedly calling two Arab policemen from Nazareth collaborators.

Both Zoabi and Gideon Levy, the only Jewish journalist living in Israel regularly to write sympathetically about the Palestinians, admitted they had been forced to accept body guards to protect their safety.

The ugly mood prompted Sayed Kashua, a Palestinian writer whose TV comedy show “Arab Labor” became a huge hit with Jews, to declare that he was leaving Israel for good.

Kashua wrote: “Last week something inside of me broke. When Jewish youth parade through the city shouting ‘Death to the Arabs,’ and attack Arabs only because they are Arabs, I understood that I had lost my little war.”

According to Ron Gerlitz, co-director of Sikkuy, a Jewish-Arab organization promoting equality, Israel is entering a new and dangerous period. “The level of verbal and physical violence [from Israeli Jews] is on a scale we have never seen before.”

Calling Lieberman’s comments “unbelievable,” he asked, “How does he think such a boycott should be implemented? Should Arab shops be specially marked so Jews know how to avoid them? This kind of incitement gives legitimacy to ordinary people to go out on the streets and take the law into their own hands.”

Gerlitz said Palestinian citizens of Israel were used to discriminatory and violent treatment by police, as occurred in October 2000, at the start of the second intifada. On that occasion police shot dead 13 Palestinian citizens and wounded hundreds more in a few days of clashes (see July 2001 Washington Report, p. 8).

“It was bad enough when the violence came from the police,” Gerlitz said, “but it is more dangerous when, as now, we see Jewish extremists taking to the streets to attack Arab citizens. This could quickly get out of control.”

Zoabi’s suspension in late July came as the parliament held a special meeting on incitement.

Within days, a hotline established by the Justice Ministry to report incidents of incitement had received more than 1,100 calls, according to ministry spokesman Moshe Cohen. “There has been a big rise in racist material published on sites like Facebook and WhatsApp,” he said.

But the Knesset committee hearing, led by Miri Regev, a hawkish member of Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s party, mostly focused on what it considered “incitement” by Palestinian citizens.

Much of the hearing was dedicated to Zoabi, who has faced a series of police investigations over comments critical of Israel’s policies in Gaza and the West Bank. A recent poll of Israeli Jews found 89 percent thought Zoabi’s citizenship should be revoked.

The Justice Ministry’s Cohen said no public figure apart from Zoabi was being investigated.

At the Knesset meeting, Tamar Zandberg, of the leftist Meretz party, noted Lieberman’s boycott comment and remarks by Ayelet Shaked, a rising star in the Jewish Home party of Economics Minister Naftali Bennett.

During Operation Protective Edge, Shaked quoted approvingly from an unpublished article urging the slaughter of relatives of Palestinian “terrorists,” including their mothers, to stop them raising another generation of “little snakes.”

ADVOCATING WAR CRIMES

Other prominent public figures also called for war crimes in Gaza.

Moshe Feiglin, a deputy Knesset Speaker from Netanyahu’s Likud party, called for the massive destruction of Gaza, with inhabitants to be starved of supplies and then expelled to the Sinai.

Danny Danon, until recently the deputy defense minister, demanded that Israel “stop providing fuel and electricity,” while Regev herself said action should be taken to “prevent the people of Gaza from receiving basic goods.”

In another incident, Mordechai Kedar, a Middle East expert at Bar Ilan university, told a radio program that nothing could deter Palestinian terrorists except “the knowledge that their sister or their mother will be raped.”

A feminist group wrote to Bar Ilan’s president, Daniel Hershkowitz, decrying comments that “grant legitimacy” to Israeli soldiers using rape as a weapon of war. The university backed Kedar, saying he had simply described “the bitter reality of the Middle East.”

Rabbis have also joined the fray. Dov Lior, influential among extremist settlers, issued a religious edict permitting soldiers to kill Palestinian civilians and for the defense minister to “order the destruction of Gaza.”

That followed a pronouncement from Noam Perel, head of the world’s largest religious Jewish youth movement, for an “army of avengers.”

Notably, Netanyahu did not speak out against such comments. He himself questioned the future of Palestinians inside Israel after widespread protests in early July at Abu Khdeir’s grisly murder in Jerusalem.

Netanyahu said: “There’s no place in the State of Israel for those who throw rocks at police.…You can’t enjoy social security payments and child subsidies on one hand and on the other hand violate the most basic laws of the State of Israel.”

A Haaretz columnist accused Netanyahu of being “the king of inciters.” “His whole government, his entire success at the polls, is based on the surefire recipe of incitement, hatred and fear-mongering,” wrote Nehemia Shtrasler.

Suhad Bishara, a lawyer with Adalah, a legal group for the Arab minority, said the Israeli attorney general was not being consistent. “There have been a lot more inciteful comments than what Haneen Zoabi said, but they are not being investigated.”

Human rights groups have been alarmed by the rapidly growing trend of Israeli firms and universities punishing workers and students for expressing political views on social media.

A nurse at a medical clinic near Tel Aviv was suspended for posting on Facebook that Israeli soldiers were war criminals, and a doctor in Jerusalem suspended for calling them “murderers.”

Hadassah college in Jerusalem revoked an Arab woman’s scholarship and banned her from campus over a Facebook post.

Bishara said: “This has become a serious attack on freedom of expression. But it reflects a general atmosphere of zero tolerance of dissent.”

Gerlitz, of Sikkuy, said the outburst of violence and incitement was not only provoked by events in Gaza, but reflected deeper trends in Israeli society. There was, he said, growing resentment and fear among Jews at the Palestinian minority’s greater success in integrating into the Israeli economy over the past decade.

“Jews think of Arabs as street cleaners or taxi drivers,” he explained. “Now they see they are doctors, pharmacists, teaching in the universities or working in hi-tech. The right wing wants them back in their place, where they were before.” 

Jonathan Cook is a journalist based in Nazareth and a winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His most recent book is Disappearing Palestine (available from Middle East Books and More).