By John Pickard
It is the darkest of ironies, given that no-one knows better than Jewish people the meaning of the word pogrom, that extreme right wing Israeli Jews have been participating this week in mob violence against Arabs in Israel. Extreme right wing Jewish mobs have attacked Arab property and Arabs. For many Israelis the communal conflict is itself more threatening and more serious that the danger of rockets fired from Gaza.
This week has seen a series of demonstrations by Israeli Arabs against the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from East Jerusalem and the invasion of the Muslim site of Haram Esh Sharif by Israeli police and the bombing of Gaza. One Israeli Arab told the Guardian, “We wanted to send a message to the international community to protest what happened in al-Aqsa and Jerusalem”.
But clearly, Arabs in Israel are not supposed to express their solidarity with their co-religionists in East Jerusalem, the West Bank or Gaza and their protests have become a pretext for anti-Arab mob violence, answered by anti-Jewish violence by Arab youths. Although Arab youth have been involved in outrages against Jews, there is not the slightest justification for Netanyahu’s claim that the communal violence is “Arab on Jew” violence. But that is no doubt how it will be interpreted by the Israeli state authorities.
Far-right Jewish groups chanting ‘death to Arabs’
According to a Guardian report (May 13), in Bat Yam, a southern suburb of Tel Aviv, “young far-right Jews, some dressed in black and chanting “death to Arabs”, had gathered after a callout on social media that explicitly threatened violence.” After smashing Arab-owned businesses, they attacked Arabs in passing cars, beating one man in full view of television cameras and leaving him for dead. The TV anchor of Israel’s Channel 11 noted “there are no police here.”
This was not an isolated incident, as violence between groups of young Jews and Arabs was reported in a dozen towns and cities. In response to attacks from Jews, young mobs of Arabs have likewise attacked Jewish-owned property, and in one case, burning a synagogue.
The responsibility for the communal violence across Israel lies squarely with the Israeli political right and those open racists who have long been out of the woodwork and are in some cases in the very heart of government. For years now there have been politicians right at the centre of Israeli politics, including in the government, who have expressed outright racist views against Arab-Israelis, who constitute a fifth of the population.
Extreme right wing ‘legitimised’ by Netanyahu
Netanyahu himself won the election before last by claiming that hundreds of Arabs were bussing into polling stations to cast their votes. The extreme right-wing party of Jewish settlers has been represented in government for years. The politics of Netanyahu has legitimised racism in Israel, no less than Donald Trump did the same in the USA.
As an Israeli political analyst, told the Guardian, “This is more than a reaction to Hamas’s rockets. There’s something deeper going on under the surface.” What is going on is the rise and rise of the Israeli far right.
As the Guardian explains, “There has been a resurgence in recent weeks of the activities of overtly anti-Arab groups such as Lehava, racist football hooligans known as La Familia, and far-right settler groups, who have reportedly been involved in the violence”.
Fundamentalists and settlers have powerful Knesset position
“One recent message sent by La Familia, described by the Haaretz journalist Bar Peleg, called on supporters to head to Jaffa, where it said there was a minimal police presence, naming the streets where it might be possible to enter Arab homes and stab occupants.”
By any measure, right-wing religious fundamentalist and settler parties now dominate in the Knesset, with over 70 seats out of 120, although they squabble over ministerial portfolios and dividing up the patronage that comes with them. The Religious Zionist Party, just to take one example, is a re-working of the former Kahanist movement outlawed as a terrorist group even by Israel and the US, for its incitement to violence against Arabs. This party has six seats, after winning over 5% of the vote.
“an intifada of Arab Israelis…”
The deputy mayor, of the mixed city of Lod, Yosi Harush, did his best to inflame Jewish opinion, caught on video at a council meeting as saying that “hundreds of people were coming from the West Bank settlements to protect Jewish houses” and to “help with the security”. He warned Arab residents not to leave their homes. “This is a huge event”, he is recorded as saying, “an Intifada of Arab Israelis”,
The answer of the government to the communal violence is itself telling. Despite his strictures against lynching of Jews “or Arabs” – that is only for the cameras and the world’s press – Israeli Prime Minister, Netanyahu treats Israeli Arabs as the ‘enemy within’. “We are dealing with a campaign on two fronts”, he said late last Thursday, “in Gaza [and] in Israel’s cities.”
Netanyahu: we will “use force, a lot of force…”
Speaking in the town of Lod, where he had declared a state of emergency, Netanyahu vowed to quell rioting with “force, a lot of force”. He has raised the possibility of detention without trial – internment – and if it is introduced there is not the slightest doubt that it will barely touch a hair on a right-wing Jewish head; it will be directed overwhelmingly against Arabs in Arab neighbourhoods.
He has given a free hand to the police and border force, telling them, according to the Guardian report not to worry about “commissions of inquiry, investigations and checks.” In other words, no-one will check up on any brutality meted out.
The upsurge in violence has brought crocodile tears from the same Israeli newspapers that have in the past accepted with a non-committal shrug the vicious racism that swirls around Israeli politics. The Jerusalem Post refers to the end of the “delicate and vastly imperfect co-existence” that has existed between the two communities in Israel, “vastly imperfect” being the key element overlooked for decades.
Firmly on the road to a new apartheid
This intercommunal violence in Israel is the responsibility of all of those Jewish Israeli politicians who have set Israel firmly on the road towards a new apartheid. They have gone out of their way to make it clear that ‘their’ state is for Jews and only for Jews. What rights are granted to Israeli Arabs are given grudgingly and are hedged around with conditions and limitations making Arabs are second-class citizens in the land of their birth.
We have to place the responsibility also onto the shoulders of all those politicians in the west – not excluding the right wing of the Labour Party – who have turned a blind eye for years to the gathering momentum of anti-Palestinian racism and Jewish exclusivism in Israel.
It has become virtually impossible to criticise the policies of the Israeli state and still remain a member of the Labour Party. That has been the purpose of the anti-Semitism campaign in the Labour Party. The Israeli state conducts sophisticated and extensive lobbying operations in all the main political parties in the west, including the Labour Party, but within the Party, it is forbidden to talk about it or acknowledge it.
Western politicians have looked the other way
Prominent members of the Labour Party who are in the Labour Friends of Israel will jump up and down in fury at any criticism of Israel, but they maintain keep a strict silence over the crimes committed by Israel, over the open racism running through Israeli politics and to the plight of Arabs. They have looked the other way when members of the Israeli government have come out with the most outrageously racist statements. They merely sighed when Israel passed its exclusive ‘Jewish-nation’ law.
What Labour’s right wing and other Netanyahu apologists will simply not admit is that Israel, as it is presently constituted, and given the direction in which it is moving, is not capable of offering a safe and secure homeland for Jews any more than it can for Arabs. The current situation is simply not sustainable, except with regular explosions of opposition and violence.
The great tragedy of Israeli politics, and the cause of the almost permanent political impasse – there have been four indecisive elections in two years – is that there is no party on the left that offers a way out. There is no movement of any size that is based on the traditional values of socialism and the labour movement and which commands significant support among both Jews and Arabs.
There can be no Israeli capitalism without apartheid
Yet, there can be no future that seeks to create a state with rights and privileges exclusively for Jews or exclusively for Arabs. In fact, on the basis of capitalism there is no way out. If the basic desires of ordinary workers, Jewish or Arab, are for peace, security, a home, health, education and a decent future their families – and we believe that is the case – then these needs cannot be met for all communities on a capitalist basis. You cannot have capitalism without racism, and you cannot have Israeli capitalism without its apartheid.
It might need the intervention and pressure of the labour movement internationally, or it might be something that comes about from the bitter experience of violent struggle within Israel/Palestine itself, or both. But one way or another, it will need a coming together of Arab and Jewish workers, Palestinians and Israelis, to fight for a new society as the only way out of the monstrous impasse which currently exists.
The Labour Party leadership should end its unthinking support for the Israeli government and come into line with the sentiments and sympathies of its membership, as shown by resolutions passed in conference (see picture at the top, conference 2018). Instead of facilitating disaster, it about time the Labour leadership began to offer a programme for real change.
