Max Blumenthal :Politicide in Gaza: How Israel's Far Right Won the War
FULL TEXT
At
the end of the fifty-day Israeli offensive on the Gaza Strip, neither
Israel nor Hamas had achieved their stated goals there: the armed
resistance was still standing (despite the massive damage the territory
and its people sustained) and the crippling Israeli siege was not
lifted. Rather, this essay argues, it was Israel’s far right that
emerged the victor. Not only did religious nationalists and secular
extremists outflank the right-wing establishment, they justified the
brutality of their actions in the military battle zone with messianic
pronouncements, and fanned the flames of genocide in the public arena.
The far right’s wartime success represented the culmination of a
strategy Israeli sociologist Baruch Kimmerling has called “politicide,” a
coinage denoting the partial or total destruction of a community of
people with a view to denying them self-determination.
SINCE SIGNING a one-month cease-fire,
Hamas and the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have both
struggled to explain to their constituents what they accomplished during
the fifty days of fighting. Hamas’s leadership cast the war as a battle
of national liberation, promising residents of the Gaza Strip the
loosening of Israel’s punishing eight-year siege.1 Yet after seeing 25
percent of Gaza reduced to ruins, over twenty-one hundred killed, and
the transfer of control of its border crossings to the Palestinian
Authority (PA), Hamas settled into an agreement that appears to offer
none of the demands it sought at the onset of war. For his part,
Netanyahu and his allies vowed to shatter Hamas’s political
infrastructure, eliminate its network of tunnels, and transform Gaza
from a bastion of armed resistance into a defanged Ramallah-on-the-sea.2
But after losing over seventy soldiers, evacuating much of its southern
kibbutzim for weeks, and compounding its international pariah status,
Israel had achieved little more than the consolidation of the status
quo.
Beyond the stalemate, however, the war
concluded with a clear winner. It was Israel’s radical right, the
post-Oslo generation of religious nationalists and secular extremists
who have begun to supersede the established right wing represented by
Netanyahu. During the war, these elements influenced events to an
unprecedented degree, from the public squares of Tel Aviv, where
organized thugs violently crushed antiwar protests, to the killing
fields of Gaza, where an officer corps infiltrated by religious
nationalists orchestrated a series of astoundingly brutal slash-and-burn
assaults. The far right’s wartime success represented the culmination
of the strategy the Israeli sociologist Baruch Kimmerling called
“politicide,” or the calculated destruction of part of—or an
entire—community of people in order to deny them self-determination.
In his classic 2003 biography of Ariel
Sharon, the warrior-politician he cast as the architect of the practice,
Kimmerling wrote, “Murders, localized massacres, the elimination of
leadership and elite groups, the physical destruction of public
institutions and infrastructure, land colonization, starvation, social
and political isolation, re-education, and partial ethnic cleansing are
the major tools used to achieve this goal.”3
Kimmerling concluded that the
application of politicide against the Palestinian people had transformed
Israel into “a Thatcherist and semi-fascist regime” hostile to
dissident expressions, resentful of the other, and repelled by
democracy.4 Since his book’s publication, the apocalyptic trends he
outlined have intensified dramatically and brought into positions of
power figures that make the draconian, famously secretive Sharon seem
like a cautious moderate. Calls for ethnic cleansing and incitement to
genocide have become a familiar feature of mainstream Israeli
discourse, while a clear majority of Israelis favor a broad array of
policies aimed at forcible segregation. Once one of the Likud party’s
radical young Turks, Netanyahu suddenly finds himself at the hollow
center of Israeli politics, under unrelenting pressure from incipient
extreme-rightist forces to pursue the most drastic measures at his
disposal to shatter the Palestinian national struggle. With
genuine political opposition forced to the extreme margins, limits on
Israel’s malevolent capacity have been virtually erased.
After decades of politicide, Israeli
society has been sapped of the capacity to counter the narrative or
agenda scripted by hyper-nationalists of either the secular or
theocratic variety. In such a combustible atmosphere, only a small spark
was needed to light the flames that would eventually devour Gaza.
A Shallow Grave
At 10:00 P.M. on 12 June 2014, at a busy
crossroads in the occupied West Bank, near the Jewish settlement of
Kefar Etzion, three Israeli hitchhikers disappeared. Naftali Frenkel,
Gilad Shaar, and Eyal Yifrach, all teenagers, entered a car with two
strangers only to realize that they had been kidnapped by Palestinians.
The kidnapping occurred against the
backdrop of the collapse of the U.S.-led framework negotiations between
Israel and the PA. The talks broke down in April when Economy
Minister Naftali Bennett of the religious nationalist Jewish Home party
threatened to bolt from the coalition government if Netanyahu agreed to
U.S. and PA demands to release a batch of Palestinian prisoners.5
Throughout the talks, Netanyahu approved thousands of new settlement
units, but the pressure from his right remained unrelenting. Finally,
Netanyahu cancelled the prisoner release, blaming the move on plans by
Fatah and Hamas to form a unity government, and then proceeded to freeze
the negotiations.6 After vacating his luxury suite in Jerusalem, U.S.
negotiator and longtime pro-Israel lobbyist Martin Indyk took the
unusual step of publicly blaming the Israeli government for sabotaging
the deal.7 Next, the United States recognized the Palestinian
unity government, prompting Israeli comments that described the American
move as aiding and abetting terrorism.8 The outraged prime minister was
determined to reverse the diplomatic setback by any means.
Deprived of a political means to secure
the prisoners’ freedom, a rogue Hamas cell decided to take matters into
its own hands, staging a kidnapping without the knowledge of the
organization’s leadership. Marwan Qawasmeh and Amer Abu Aysha set out
from Hebron toward Kefar Etzion in search of Israelis to kidnap as
collateral for Palestinian prisoners. The plan quickly unraveled when
Gilad Shaar phoned the Israeli police to report his abduction. Qawasmeh
and Abu Aysha shot the teens to death almost immediately, then buried
their bodies in a shallow grave on property Qawasmeh had purchased
adjacent to his family’s home near Hebron.9 After nearly four months in
hiding, the two were assassinated by the Israeli military in Hebron this
September.
Prime Minister Netanyahu and his
National Security Council received news of the kidnapping the following
day from the Shin Bet and police investigators. They huddled together
and listened to the phone call Shaar placed to police, in which the
sound of gunshots and the kidnappers’ celebratory singing were audible.
Then they examined evidence gathered from inside the burned remnants of
the kidnappers’ stolen car—blood, bullets, DNA.10 All signs pointed to a
case of triple homicide. Yet instead of announcing that the teens had
likely been killed, or releasing the names of the suspects, which they
had in hand, then ordering a police action to catch them,
Netanyahu deployed a stunningly cynical deception that would send
violence spiraling out of control.
According to Bat Galim Shaar, the mother
of Gilad, police investigators deliberately deceived herinto believing
her son was still alive, insisting that the gunshots she heard in the
recorded call he placed to police were actually blanks, and that no DNA
was found in the kidnappers’ burned car, when blood and bullets were
present throughout the vehicle. “I was naive,” Shaar recalled, “I
told everyone Gilad would be home before Shabbat.”11
Not only had Netanyahu and the
investigators concealed key facts from the mothers of the teens, they
concealed the details of the case from the entire Israeli public,
setting themup for a catastrophic reaction when the truth was finally
revealed. The Israeli military imposed a gag order on the investigation,
threatening journalists with penalties that included jail time.12
Netanyahu was not about to allow the facts of the case interfere with
what seemed like a prime opportunity for politicide. His target was not
the teens’ killers, but the new Palestinian unity government.
On 17 June, the day Israel rolled out
its #BringBackOurBoys social media campaign, pleading for sympathy from
Western diplomats and Jewish groups around the world, it thrust
thousands of troops into the West Bank, raiding towns and cities far
from the scene of the crime under the guise of a rescue campaign called
Operation Brother’s Keeper. The army claimed to be targeting the
organization it held collectively responsible for the
crime—Hamas—rounding up hundreds of its members, including scores of
prisoners released under the 2011 prisoner swap for the captive soldier
Gilad Shalit. (Khader Adnan and Samer Issawi, two prisoners not
affiliated with Hamas who earned hero status in Palestinian society for
their successful hunger strikes following rearrest after the Gilad
Shalit swap, were among those that were detained in the West Bank
sweep.13) In the process, Israel closed off the entire area around
Hebron, preventing some twenty-three thousand from traveling to jobs
inside Israel.14
As the raids in the West Bank continued
with overt cooperation from PA security forces, Hamas leadership watched
with consternation. Their political cadres were being herded into
prison cells without criminal charges, and all they could do was watch.
Yet even as splinter factions launched periodic rocket salvos into
southern Israel from Gaza, Hamas’s al-Qassam Brigades held its fire. On
29 June, Netanyahu authorized airstrikes on Gaza, announcing, “We are
ready to expand this operation as per need.”15
All along, the bodies of the three
murdered Israeli teens lay in a shallow grave on the Qawasmeh property
in Halhul, only ten kilometers from the site of the kidnapping. They lay
there for twelve days, somehow eluding the advanced monitoring
capabilities of Israeli satellites, surveillance cameras, police
investigators, and the vast informant network the Shin Bet operates in
the West Bank. The longer the teens’ bodies decayed, the more rapidly
Israeli society lost its composure. A spontaneously-created Facebook
page demanded the execution of one Palestinian prisoner for each hour
the teens remained missing, while another called “The People of Israel
Demand Revenge” garnered more than thirty-five thousand “likes” from
mostly young Israelis in just a few days.16 When a volunteer search team
happened upon the bodies on 30 June at 6:00 A.M., the bloodlust
seething just below the surface of Israeli society exploded into the
open.
Hunting for “Human Animals”
Netanyahu had earned highmarks fromthe
Israeli public for his handling of the operation in the West Bank—or at
least, what they knew of it. Behind the scenes, however, he was under
mounting pressure. Economy Minister Bennett, an articulate tech industry
millionaire who had almost singlehandedly brought the pro-settler
Jewish Home party out of the margins and into the mainstream, was
gaining in polls by mocking Netanyahu’s hardline security cabinet as
“leftist.”17 For his part, Foreign Minister Lieberman had begun drumming
up support for a full reoccupation of the Gaza Strip, a scenario the
military-intelligence establishment considered a recipe for disaster.
Having already set the stage for the crisis by blocking the release of
Palestinian prisoners, the two would remain a thorn in Netanyahu’s right
side for its duration, provoking him relentlessly toward inflammatory
rhetoric and escalated violence.
When Netanyahu issued his first official
statement on the discovery of the teens’ bodies, he revealed how deeply
the far-right agitation had aroused his latent radicalism. Referring to
the teens’ killers as “human animals,” Netanyahu went on to declare
that “Hamas is responsible and Hamas will pay,” foreshadowing the
full-scale assault on Gaza.18 Then, in an appeal to the basest
sentiments of the Jewish Israeli public, Netanyahu proclaimed,
“Vengeance for the blood of a small child, Satan has not yet created.”19
Netanyahu’s words were an excerpt from
the Hebrew poet Chaim Bialik’s “On the Slaughter,” a biblically-inspired
lament that dramatized a brutal 1903 pogrom incited by the Russian
tsar, which left scores of Jews dead in the town of Kishinev. Bialik’s
poetry helped radicalize thousands of young Jews across Eastern Europe,
inspiring the formation of self-defense committees and winning waves of
adherents to the militant philosophy of Zionism. Among those most
influenced by Bialik was Vladimir Jabotinsky, the right-wing Zionist
activist who would later become a political benefactor of Netanyahu’s
father, Benzion. In Netanyahu’s demagogic appropriation of Bialik’s
verse, the “human animals” of Palestine had inherited the genocidal
spirit of the tsar’s mobs and would repeat their crimes unless Jews were
prepared to fight to the finish. Having manipulated the public into
believing the teens were alive, the prime minister now spurred them to
blood vengeance. Within hours, mobs of Jewish youths filled the squares
of central Jerusalem to chant, “Death to Arabs!” and search for
Palestinians to assault. The “ultras,” who comprised the hardcore fan
base of Jerusalem’s Beitar soccer club, provided experienced muscle to
the demonstrations. As active duty Israeli soldiers took to Facebook to
demand revenge, posting photos of themselves with the weapons they were
aching to use, political upstarts rushed to issue calls for blood
vengeance and the “annihilation” of Hamas.
Ayelet Shaked, the telegenic,
thirty-eight-year-old poster girl of the right-wing Jewish Home party,
earned thousands of Facebook likes from mostly young Israelis with her
genocidal call for the mass slaughter of Palestinian women to prevent
them from giving birth to “little snakes.” Though more restrained than
Shaked, the Labor Party’s grand old man Shimon Peres used the funeral of
the three teens as a platform to call for the Israeli army to “act with
a heavy hand until terror is uprooted.”20 Joining Peres at the dais was
Netanyahu, who bellowed, “A deep moral divide separates us from our
enemies. They sanctify death. We sanctify life. They sanctify
cruelty. We sanctify compassion.”21
Rabbi Noam Perel, the secretary general
of Bnei Akiva, the world’s largest religious Zionist youth movement,
upped the ante on incitement when he called for turning the
Israelimilitary into an army of avengers “which will not stop at three
hundred Philistine foreskins.”22 (Akiva’s appeal alluded to the first
book of Samuel, in which the biblical character David kills two hundred
Philistines and brings back their foreskins as evidence that he has done
so.)
With ultranationalist mobs gathering in
cities across Israel, a small car entered the back streets of Shu‘fat, a
Palestinian neighborhood in East Jerusalem. Behind its darkened windows
were three young men hunting for Arab boys.
Over the Cliff
The stately stone homes of Shu‘fat line a
four-lane boulevard that serves as the main artery between settlements
like Pisgat Ze’ev and central Jerusalem. The steel tracks of Jerusalem’s
light rail system bisect the road, shepherding thousands of settlers
through the Palestinian neighborhood each day, along with the private
security guards hired to protect them. Shu‘fat’s light rail stop
bristles with security cameras installed by the Jerusalem municipality,
another reminder of the endless occupation. To ease the settlers’ path
through the neighborhood, the municipality has begun to build a new
access road that slices directly through the olive groves lining the
hillsides of Shu‘fat. Local residents suspect it is the first step
toward the seizure of their land and perhaps their expulsion as well.
On a corner of Shu‘fat’s main road,
across a narrow lane from the local mosque, is the home of the Abu
Khdeir family. Mohammed Abu Khdeir, a sixteen-year-old student at the
Amal high school, wandered from inside his home and perched himself on a
stone wall facing the road. It was early in the morning on 2 July, just
hours after the conclusion of the three Israeli teens’ funeral. Three
young men approached Abu Khdeir to ask the wiry teen for directions. As
soon as he was within reach, they grabbed him and threw him in their
car, then sped away. A group of locals attempted to give chase but
failed to reach the vehicle or summon help to stop it. Later that day,
Abu Khdeir’s burned body was found in the woods near Givat Shaul. He had
been bludgeoned unconscious, doused with gasoline, and burned alive.
The crime bore all the signs of a Jewish
nationalist revenge killing. However, the Israeli police proceeded to
insinuate otherwise, planting slanderous disinformation with the
national media that suggested Abu Khdeir was the victim of an honor
crime—killed by a member of his own family for supposed homosexual
activity. According to several members of the Abu Khdeir family
I interviewed, Israeli police threatened to “ruin the lives” of the
young men who attempted to chase down the killers’ car, then sought
interrogation sessions with members of Abu Khdeir’s immediate family.23
When Amir Peretz, a former Labor Party stalwart serving as a minister
in Netanyahu’s coalition, appeared uninvited at the family’s mourning
tent, he was subsequently bombarded with death threats and hate mail by
Israeli Jews. While Netanyahu expressed shame over the murder, it was
too late to contain the violence he helped inspire.
Under the cover of another gag order
imposed on the Israeli media, the ringleader of the three killers, a
thirty-year-old resident of the nearby settlement of Adam, Yosef Chaim
Ben David, confessed to the crime. He had been arrested along with five
other suspects on 6 July, yet his name and the details of the crime to
which he had confessed remained concealed behind a gag order for eleven
days. It was only on 17 July that the public received confirmation of
the killers’ nationalistic motives, learning that the men had been
active participants in the anti-Arab revenge rallies that spilled out
into the streets of Jerusalem after the teens’ bodies were discovered;
and that they vandalized twenty cars in nearby Beit Hanina and attempted
to kidnap a seven-year-old Palestinian boy before abducting Abu
Khdeir.24 When Ben David appeared in the courtroom for his arraignment,
he was flanked by lawyers from Honenu, a radical settler outfit
notorious for defending Jewish terror suspects. “I am the Messiah!” he
bellowed, reinforcing the insanity plea his defense team had filed.25
(The Abu Khdeir family told me with dismay that they had no
hope whatsoever of receiving justice in the Israeli court.)
Once again, the Israeli government’s
manipulations had deepened the chaos spreading peripatetically
throughout the Holy Land. By the time Ben David finally faced a judge,
rioting had exploded in Shu‘fat, leaving in ruins the light rail station
that served as a conduit for settlers. At Mohammed Abu Khdeir’s
funeral, gunshots were fired in the air by young men displaying weapons
openly for the first time since the second intifada.
From then on, a provocative
around-the-clock police detail would occupy the sidewalk outside the Abu
Khdeir family’s home. Among the numerous family members thrown in jail
since the chaos began26 was Tariq Abu Khdeir, a fifteen-year-old
Palestinian–American teen beaten into a coma by Israeli police. (His
cousins’ home in Shu‘fat would be ransacked by Israeli police following
his eventual release.) An hour after my first visit with Abu Khdeir’s
parents this August, police burst onto the property to arrest a
nineteen-year-old cousin of their murdered son.
The killing of Abu Khdeir and the
subsequent revolt in East Jerusalem was a trigger point in the events
leading up to war in Gaza. On 7 July, three days after Abu Khdeir’s
funeral, armed factions in the Gaza Strip launched a heavy barrage of
rockets into southern Israel, prompting Israeli airstrikes that killed
eight Hamas members.27 The following day, Hamas retaliated for the first
time, authorizing a salvo of long-range M75 rockets toward Tel Aviv and
Jerusalem.28 In Shu‘fat, the launch was widely understood—and
celebrated—as Gaza’s reply to Abu Khdeir’s murder.
Across town, at the prime minister’s
residence, the rockets were received as a pretext to initiate the
punishing assault the army had been planning on the Gaza Strip. Referred
to as Protective Edge, the operation’s name translated literally from
Hebrew as “Firm Cliff.”
The Fog of Holy War
Col. Ofer Winter is among the most
prominent and widely admired officers in the Israeli military. He is a
graduate of Bnei David, a pre-army yeshiva that has played a central
role in filling the ranks of the officer corps with religious
nationalists committed to a messianic perspective on society and combat.
This August, Winter reportedly prevented the Israeli pop singer Sarit
Haddad from performing for his troops over his religiously-rooted
objection to women singing in public.29 As one of the religious Zionists
who now comprise anywhere from 30 to 50 percent of the army officer
corps,30 Winter is among the vanguard of Israeli society’s most
respected institution.
On 10 July, as Israeli forces prepared
for a ground invasion of the Gaza Strip, Winter issued a letter to the
Givati Brigade troops operating under his direct command. “History has
chosen us to be the sharp edge of the bayonet of fighting the terrorist
enemy ‘from Gaza’ which curses, defames and abuses the God of Israel’s
battles,” he wrote.31 At the conclusion of the letter, which was shot
through with biblical fundamentalism, Winter repeated his call for a
holy war against the blasphemers in Gaza: “God, the Lord of Israel, make
our path successful, as we are about to fight for Your People, Israel,
against an enemy who defames your name.”32
Winter channeled the attitudes of the
new generation of citizen soldiers rising through the ranks of the
military. Among the army’s rank and file, belief in battlefield miracles
have become common, with soldiers exchanging tales of divine protection
from enemy gunfire, rainbows signaling deliverance from the grip of
evil, and the appearance of biblical patriarchs as guardians.33
(Israel’s former chief rabbi, Mordechai Eliyahu, claimed in a 2009
sermon that “Mama Rochel,” or the biblical matriarch, Rachel, appeared
on the battlefield in Gaza to shield soldiers from enemy fire.)34 The
transition from secular nationalism to a rearmed Jewish messianism
infused the longstanding strategy of politicide against the Palestinian
people with a sense of apocalyptic destiny—dominion would arrive as soon
as the army “finished the job.”
When Winter thrust his troops into
Khuza, a border town just east of Khan Yunis, no one was spared from his
righteous wrath. I found the entire area in ruins when I visited the
town during a cease-fire on 17 August, discovering hideous details
inside almost every home. In the house of Hani Najjar, for instance, I
entered a bathroom drenched in dried blood and the remnants of burned
flesh. Winter’s soldiers had executed six handcuffed men there with the
knives Najjar used to slaughter his chickens, riddled their bodies with
bullets, and blown them to pieces with grenades.35 Members of Najjar’s
family described to me being used as human shields, forced to stand on
corners of their roof while soldiers sniped at their neighbors
attempting to escape from the six-day siege of their town.
Down the street, in another home
half-destroyed by artillery shells and missiles, the parents
of sixteen-year-old Adir Rjeila described to me how their epileptic
daughter straggled behind during their flight to safety and was blown
out of her wheelchair by a tank shell. Throughout Khuza, I found
reminders of the Givati Brigade’s presence in the form of abandoned
antitank rocket launchers and stars of David spray-painted on walls of
homes and schools the soldiers had occupied. (In the destroyed city of
Shuja‘iya, I found more stars of David, along with graffiti displaying
the Beitar soccer team’s logo beside the phrase, “Price Tag.”) At least
some of the young Israelis who had taken to Facebook to clamor for blood
vengeance had fulfilled their fantasies.
In the southern city of Rafah, Winter’s
impact was no less destructive. It was there, on 1 August, that an elite
division of the Givati Brigade breached a humanitarian cease-fire by
occupying homes on the city’s outskirts. When an al-Qassam ambush team
emerged from a tunnel to attack the soldiers, killing two and attempting
to capture another who had likely been fatally wounded—Lt. Hadar
Goldin—Winter issued an order that would have fateful consequences.
“Hannibal!” he boomed into a handset,
ordering troops under his command to open fire not necessarily on the
al-Qassam ambush team, but on the entire circumference of the
area surrounding the alleged capture in order to ensure that Goldin was
killed.36 Winter had invoked the Hannibal Directive, a longstanding
policy designed to prevent politically painful prisoner swaps by
immediately eliminating captured soldiers and anyone in the vicinity of
their captors. His order triggered a hailstorm of Israeli ordnance on
the civilians of Rafah, from five-hundredpound “dumb bombs” dropped by
F-16s to artillery shells, mortar rounds, and drone missiles that killed
at least 190 and wounded many more.37 When Israeli forces threatened to
bomb the city’s al-Najjar Hospital, scores of wounded were forced to
evacuate to a small dental and ob-gyn clinic nearby. There, Dr. Samir
al-Homs told me he performed amputations in hallways and on
waitingroom floors, and was forced to store the dead bodies of small
children in ice cream coolers.
The application of the Hannibal
Directive in Gaza should have provoked widespread controversy in Israel,
regardless of whether Jewish Israelis cared about the lives of
Palestinian civilians. After all, it was designed to kill Israeli
soldiers to spare their government the political cost of securing
their release in a prisoner swap. The parents of active duty soldiers
would undoubtedly prefer to have their children released at any cost, so
long as they were returned alive. Yet Israeli society met revelations
of the policy with general silence, even as it was invoked on multiple
occasions during Operation Protective Edge.
One of the few Israeli public figures to
protest it was Uri Arad, a 1973 war veteran who was held captive by the
Egyptian army. According to Arad, the Hannibal Directive represented “a
radical change from this way of thinking that propped up the value of
human life.”38 It was a disturbing sign of the dominance of an
explicitly authoritarian right wing, he insisted. “Now, in place of
the government serving its citizens,” wrote Arad, “it is the citizens
who are forced to pay with their lives in order to serve the interests
of government. This is simply called fascism.”39
On 15 August, after the conclusion of the ground invasion, the same paper that published Arad, Yedioth Aharanoth,
profiled Winter in a lengthy puff piece. The Givati brigadier freely
admitted to invoking the Hannibal Directive after the alleged capture of
Goldin. “I announced on the communication system the word that no one
wants to say—‘Hannibal,’” Winter told his interviewer. “In other words,
there had been an abduction. I instructed all the forces to move
forward, to occupy space, so the abductors would not be able to move.”40
Winter then boasted, “We shredded them.
We can do it much worse, and it’s best for them that we not do it. We
gave them a much stronger beating than in Cast Lead.” He went on to hold
the entire population of Gaza collectively responsible for all the
casualties they suffered: “In almost every home there is a son or other
relative that is a partner in terror,” Winter declared. “How do
you raise children in a home with explosives? In the end, everyone gets
what they choose.”41
Winter had become the hero of the war (“there is no officer currently in the [army] who is as admired,” Yedioth
noted) and a household name.42 Beyond his iron-fisted approach in Gaza,
it was Winter’s unabashed expression of Jewish fundamentalism that had
earned him reverence from his countrymen. Recalling a mission to destroy
rows of civilian homes where Palestinian fighters had supposedly taken
shelter, the commander conjured a hallucinatory vision of
godly intervention, claiming that he and his troops were protected by
“clouds of glory,” covered by a fog that accompanied them throughout the
attack.43
As Winter’s troops emerged from the fog of holy war, Jewish nationalists back home turned their wrath on the enemies among them.
Good Night, Left Side
The climate of repression that blankets
Israeli society grows heavier and more comprehensive with each
successive operation against the Gaza Strip. The voices of dissent have
become fainter against a climate of officially sanctioned intimidation,
while the media has merged almost seamlessly with the military. The
dynamic has cemented the practice of politicide against Gaza as
a bonanza for right-wing mobilization, catalyzing the ultranationalist
march through the institutions of the Jewish state. During the latest
episode of fighting, the right demonstrated the fruits of its long-term
efforts with a frightening show of street muscle.
Yoav Eliasi is not only one of Israel’s
most prominent rap artists, he was also a leading organizer of the far
right during Operation Protective Edge. Eliasi, whose stage name is
“the Shadow,” emerged during the second intifada as a pioneer of Israeli
rap alongside his childhood friend, Kobi Shimoni, aka Subliminal,
mimicking the sound and aesthetic of American hip-hop, but with a unique
spin. Over the sound of gritty break beats and stirring string samples,
the Shadow and Subliminal defended cops, lionized army service, and
taunted leftists and Palestinians, upending the anti-authority
sensibility that defined traditional rap culture. “Fuck you if you
badmouth Zion,” Subliminal boomed during a performance that immediately
followed one by his former friend, the Palestinian-Israeli rapper Tamer
Nafar. “You’re in Zion, in Tel Aviv, in Israel, you asshole!”44
This June, following the abduction of
the three Israeli teens, Subliminal took to Facebook to lash out at
Palestinian-Israeli member of the Knesset (MK) Haneen Zoabi, who had
objected to her interviewer’s characterization of the kidnappers as
terrorists. “I’m not ashamed to say that I hope she’ll be run down [in
an auto accident] and die, or slip in the bath and rip her head off, or
eat a rotten egg and die of food poisoning, or anything the IDF can
‘arrange’ for her, the quicker the better,” Subliminal wrote, earning
thousands of “likes” from his fans.45 Then, when Operation Protective
Edge began, the Shadow issued a spontaneous call for his Facebook
followers to assault a 12 July antiwar demonstration in Tel
Aviv—“Looking for Traitors,” the post was titled. The response was so
overwhelming, the rapper promptly transformed his Facebook page into a
central node of anti-leftist activity, summoning the angry young men he
dubbed his “Lions” to action with the command used to send reservists to
battle: Order Number 8. 46
Lia Tarachansky, an Israeli journalist
who closely followed the antiwar demonstrations in Tel Aviv, noticed
that the Shadow was organizing alongside Michael Ben-Ari, a key leader
of the settlement movement’s most violent elements.47 Known for wild
antics like tearing up a New Testament in his Knesset office, Ben-Ari
was a former MK and ex-lieutenant of Rabbi Meir Kahane, the
assassinated founder of the banned terrorist group, Kach. While in the
Knesset, Ben-Ari transformed his south Tel Aviv office into an
organizing center for the campaign against non-Jewish African refugees
in Israel and to support Lehava, a radical right group dedicated to
preventing romantic relationships between Jews and Arabs.48 United by
hatred of leftists and Palestinians, the tattooed rapper joined forces
with the bearded settler to wreak as much havoc as possible.
The Shadow and Ben-Ari’s forces stormed
the 12 July antiwar demonstration with reinforcement from the “Ultra”
soccer hooligans of Beitar Jerusalem and Maccabi Tel Aviv. When police
fled the vicinity during a rocket warning siren, the rightists promptly
set in on the protesters, attacking anyone they could find with chairs,
sticks, rocks, eggs, and their bare fists. “It was really
scary,” reflected the left-wing Israeli journalist Haggai Matar.
“Something like this has never happened here before, but it is crystal
clear to me that it will again.”49 Five days later, right-wingers
assaulted an antiwar rally in Haifa, bombarding the gathering of
Palestinians and radical leftists with a hailstorm of stones while
police stood by and watched.50 Among those attacked was Suhail
Assad, the deputy mayor of the city, beaten by right-wing thugs simply
for looking like an Arab. The next day, MK Haneen Zoabi was momentarily
handcuffed during a protest, then speciously accused of assaulting a
police officer. Soon after, she was suspended from the Knesset for
six months for her comments on the three kidnapped teens51—another wish
of the right wing fulfilled.
As the beleaguered antiwar forces
regrouped in Tel Aviv on 26 July, the violence against them intensified.
Photos of key radical left organizers, many snapped by right-wing thugs
during the previous rally, had been circulating on the Order 8 Facebook
page. When the latest protest concluded, small groups of rightists
followed demonstrators home and attacked them at their doorsteps. A
detail of cops grabbed one of the right-wing assailants leading the
assaults, but not to arrest him. Instead, according to Tarachansky, the
cops rewarded the young tough with a high five. Burrowed within the
rightist mobs were a few Maccabi ultras sporting T-shirts
emblazoned with the phrase, “Good Night Left Side,” a slogan popular
among European neo-Nazis.52
After besieging the antiwar
demonstrations, Order 8 followers proceeded to supply the names
of purported leftists to their employers, pressuring companies and
government agencies to fire the traitors burrowing within their ranks.
Dozens lost their jobs, most of them Palestinian citizens of Israel who
had taken to Facebook to protest the army’s actions in Gaza. When a
postal employee put up a call for sending leftists to gas chambers,
however, his employer defended the statement on the grounds of free
speech.53
The violent onslaught startled even
themost experienced Israeli leftists. “One of the effects of this war is
the loss of Tel Aviv.We used to think of Tel Aviv as this liberal
bubble, but that’s gone,” Kobi Snitz, a math professor and veteran
activist from Anarchists Against the Wall, remarked to me. “There is
simply no space left for us to organize in, and it’s because there is
official approval and even encouragement for the people beating us in
the streets.”54
Bewildered by the well-choreographed
assaults on their demonstrations, the ragtag faction of radical leftists
regrouped under the banner of “Antifa,” or antifascist action,
gathering in semiunderground fashion to plan protests and train in Krav
Maga, an Israeli hand-to-hand combat style taught to frontline soldiers.
Many Israeli leftists I know told me that they were making plans to
leave Israel for good. Some said the only thing preventing their
immediate exodus was the lack of a second passport or adequate finances.
As Minister of Internal Security Yitzhak
Aharonovich moved to ban all public demonstrations against the war, and
the Israeli police forcibly removed antiwar demonstrators from
public squares in Tel Aviv, arresting those who attempted to hold their
ground, the right wing zeroed in on the media. Gideon Levy, one of only a
handful of major Israeli columnists to have written forcefully against
the assaults on Gaza, faced such an overwhelming deluge of death threats
and attacks from fellow media figures for his criticism of the Israel
Air Force that his employers at Haaretz were compelled to hire
him a bodyguard.55 According to Israeli reporter Orli Santo, a few major
news personalities were nearly assaulted after emerging from their
broadcast studios, but only for perceived expressions of opposition to the war—most of them had actually supported the attack on Gaza.56
With rocket sirens sounding around the
country, calls for genocide by Israeli public figures grew more frequent
and forceful. Moshe Feiglin—one of ten deputy speakers of the Knesset
so extreme that Likud employed a series of legal tricks to boot him from
its 2009 electoral list—issued a detailed plan to “exterminate” or
“concentrate” all residents of Gaza.57 Dov Lior, the chief rabbi of the
religious nationalist settlement, Kiryat Arba, issued an edict declaring
that Jewish law supported taking “crushing deterring [sic] steps to
exterminate the enemy.”58 Meanwhile, Mordechai Kedar, a lecturer on
Arabic literature at Bar Ilan University, opined in an interview on the
day after the bodies of the three Israeli teens were found that the only
way to deter young Palestinian men from militant activity was to rape
their sisters and mothers. “It sounds very bad, but that’s the Middle
East . . . [y]ou have to understand the culture in which we live.”59
Incitement at the top emboldened Israeli
teens flooding social media to spin genocidal fantasies of their own.
David Sheen, an independent Israeli journalist, translated dozens of
frightening Twitter posts by adolescent Israeli women alternating
between revealing selfies and annihilationist rants. “Kill Arab children
so there won’t be a next generation,” wrote a user called
@ashlisade.60 Another teenage female Twitter user, @shirzafaty,
declared, “Not just on summer vacation we hate stinking ugly Arabs, but
for the rest of our lives.”61 On a mortar shell that was to be launched
into a civilian area in Gaza, a young Israeli soldier complained about a
boy-band concert that was scrapped because of the fighting: “That’s for
canceling the Backstreet Boys, you scum!” he wrote.62
Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman did
his best to answer the teenagers’ summertime blues, proclaiming, “To the
best of my understanding, it is not possible to ensure summer vacation,
a normal summer for our kids, without a ground operation in Gaza.”63
Lieberman was struggling to keep his finger on the pulse of a Jewish
Israeli public that supported the war in Gaza at levels of 95 percent,
with at least 45 percent complaining that the army had not used enough
firepower.64 When he was not demanding an intensification of violence
against Gaza, Lieberman was urging a boycott of Palestinian businesses
inside Israel, or clamoring for the revocation of Al Jazeera’s broadcast
license.65 But he could not keep up with the Jewish Home party’s
Bennett, who emerged from the war as the major political victor. Having
battered Netanyahu from the right, demanding the overthrow of Hamas
while playing up his elite military background to identify with the
soldiers serving in Gaza, Bennett surged in the polls. If elections were
held today, Bennett’s party would gain seven seats, making it the
second largest party in Israel, with nineteen seats overall.66 The right
wing in general stands to gain massively in the wake of the war and
will likely consolidate its dominance in the next election cycle.
For Israel’s right-wing rulers and the
future leaders of its military, there was no doubt as to what the
practice of politicide achieved during Operation Protective Edge: Haneen
Zoabi had been silenced; the leftists were leaving; Gideon Levy could
not walk through Tel Aviv without a bodyguard; Palestinians of East
Jerusalem were too terrified to travel outside their neighborhoods; and
Gaza had been literally flattened. The “people of Israel” had gotten
their revenge. Meanwhile, Colonel Winter re-armed and readied for the
next round. “I cannot promise you, like the song does, that this will be
the last war,” he declared, “but I promise that this war, which is so
just, will push the next war a good few years away.”67
________________________________________________
About the Author:
Max Blumenthal is a journalist and the author of Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel (New York: Perseus Books Group, 2013) and Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement That Shattered the Party (New York: Nation Books, 2009).
________________________________________________
ENDNOTES:
1 Al Jazeera,“Hamas Demands End to Siege before Truce,” 30 July 2014, http://www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/2014/07/hamas-armed-wing-no-tru....
2 Allison Deger, “With Ceasefire Set to
Expire, Palestinians Aim to Lift the Siege While Israel Wants to Turn
‘Gaza into Ramallah,’” Mondoweiss, 18 August 2014, http://mondoweiss.net/2014/08/ceasefirepalestinians-ramallah#sthash.W9ft....
3 Baruch Kimmerling, Politicide (London; New York: Verso, 2003), pp. 4–7.
4 Kimmerling, Politicide, pp. 4–7.
5 Gil Hoffman, “Bennett Privately Threatened PM to Quit Coalition,” Jerusalem Post, 4 April 2014, http://www.jpost.com/Diplomacy-and-Politics/Bennett-privately-threatened....
6 Herb Keinon,“Israel Cancels Fourth Prisoner Release,” Jerusalem Post, 4 April 2014, http://www.jpost.com/Diplomacy-and-Politics/Israel-cancels-fourth-prison....
7 Nahum Barnea, “Inside the Talks’ Failure: US Officials Open Up,” Ynet, 2 May 2014, http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4515821,00.html.
8 Attila Somfalvi, “Israel Caught off Guard by US Support of Palestinian Unity,” Ynet, 3 June 2014, http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4526668,00.html.
9 Amos Harel, “Israel Offers Hamas One Last Out before Hitting Hard,” Haaretz, 4 July 2014, http://www.haaretz.com/mobile/.premium-1.603017?v=C471B57C976541877D9D2D... C6D.
10
Max Blumenthal, “Netanyahu Government Knew Teens Were Dead as It
Whipped Up Racist Frenzy,” Electronic Intifada, 8 July 2014, http://electronicintifada.net/content/netanyahu-government-knewteens-wer....
11 Blumenthal, “Netanyahu Government Knew,” 8 July 2014.
12 Tia Goldenberg, “Gag Orders Silence Israeli Press in Digital Age,” AP, 13 February 2013, http://bigstory.ap.org/article/gag-orders-silence-israeli-press-digital-age.
13 “Khader Adnan Returns to
Administrative Detention amid Ongoing Mass Arrests and Massacres in
Gaza,” Samidoun: Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network, July 2014, http://samidoun.ca/2014/07/khader-adnan-returns-to-administrative-detent....
14 “A Vicious Circle Speeds Up Again,” Economist, 5 July 2014, http://www.economist.com/news/middleeast-and-africa/21606288-murder-thre....
15 Robert Tait, “Israel ’Ready’ to Launch Major Offensive on Gaza Militant Groups,” Daily Telegraph, 29 June 2014, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/israel/10934078/Isr....
16 Blumenthal, “Netanyahu Government Knew,” 8 July 2014.
17 Yossi Verter, “Bennett Slams Netanyahu after Minister Booted from Cabinet Meeting,” Haaretz, 25 June 2014, http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/.premium-1.601247.
18 “Israel Vows to Make Hamas Pay for Alleged Murder of Three Teenagers,” Guardian, 30 June 2014, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/01/israel-vows-hamas-pay-murde....
19 Blumenthal, “Netanyahu Government Knew,” 8 July 2014.
20 Ori Lewis, “Israel Mourns Teenagers, Strikes Hamas in Gaza,” Reuters, 1 July 2014, http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/07/01/us-palestinians-israel-idUSKBN....
21 Lia Tarachansky, “Inside Israel’s Pro-War Nationalist Camp,” The Real News, Real News Network, 3 August 2014, http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php/index.php?option=com_content&task=vi....
22 Blumenthal, “Netanyahu Government Knew,” 8 July 2014.
23 Allison Deger, “Identities of Minors Who Admitted to Killing Mohammed Abu Khdeir to Be Revealed Monday,” Mondoweiss, 19 October 2014, http://mondoweiss.net/2014/10/identities-admittedmohammed#sthash.wU3Ta7q....
24 Omri Efraim, “Suspects in Murder of Palestinian Teen Attempted to Kidnap Young Boy Day Earlier,” Ynet, 7 June 2014, http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4538687,00.html.
25 Lazar Berman, “Suspect in Abu Khdeir Killing Says He’s ‘the Messiah,’” Times of Israel, 27 July 2014, http://www.timesofisrael.com/man-suspect-in-abu-khdeir-killing-i-am-the-....
26 “State Dept. Says Israel Appears to Be Targeting Abu Khdeir Family in Arrests,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 21 August 2014, http://forward.com/articles/204480/state-dept-says-israel-appears-to-bet....
27 Nida al-Mughrabi, “Six Palestinian
Militants Killed in the Gaza Strip, Hamas Blames Israeli Air
Strikes,” Reuters, 7 July 2014.
28 Yaakov Lappin, “Hamas Rockets Reach Jerusalem and Tel Aviv,” Jerusalem Post, 8 July 2014, http://www.jpost.com/Operation-Protective-Edge/Iron-Dome-intercepts-seco....
29 “Why Wasn’t Israeli Singer Sarit Hadad Invited to Entertain the IDF Troops?” Haaretz, 11 August 2014, http://www.haaretz.com/news/national/1.610049.
30 Eyal Press, “Israel’s Holy Warriors,” New York Review of Books, 29 April 2010, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/apr/29/israels-holy-warriors/.
31 Ali Abunimah, “Israeli Commander Declares ‘Holy War’ on Palestinians,” Ali Abunimah’s Blog, Electronic Intifada, 11 July 2014, http://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/israeli-commander-decla....
32 Ali Abunimah, “Israeli Commander,” 11 July 2014.
33 Stuart Winer, “Senior Infantry Officer Describes Divine Protection in Gaza,” Times of Israel, 31 July 2014, http://www.timesofisrael.com/senior-infantry-officer-describes-divine-pr....
34 Gruntig2008, “Jerusalem - Former Chief Rabbi: Mama Rochel Gaza Miracle Story True,” YouTube, 20 January 2009, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-eGYOJP2_U.
35 Jesse Rosenfeld, “Who Is Behind Gaza’s Mass Execution?” Daily Beast, 1 August 2014, http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/08/01/who-is-behind-gaza-s-ma....
36 Karin Laub, “Israeli Assault That
Killed 190 in Gaza over Feared Capture of Soldier Raises War
Crimes Claim,” Associated Press, 31 August 2014, http://www.foxnews.com/world/2014/08/31/israeli-assaultthat-killed-10-in....
37 Laub, “Israeli Assault,” 31 August 2014.
38 Uri Arad, “Hannibal Directive is the Beginning of Fascismin Israel,” Ynet, 12 August 2014, http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4557951,00.html.
39 Arad, “Hannibal Directive,” August 12, 2014.
40 Rania Khalek, “Israeli Officer Admits
Ordering Lethal Strike on own Soldier during Gaza Massacre,” Electronic
Intifada, 10 September 2014, http://electronicintifada.net/blogs/rania-khalek/israeliofficer-admits-o....
41 Khalek, “Israeli Officer Admits Ordering,” 10 September 2014.
42 Khalek, “Israeli Officer Admits
Ordering,” 10 September 2014: “[Winter] cannot walk around today without
being halted, hugged, asked for a photo opportunity.”
43 Winer, “Senior Infantry Officer,” 31 July 2014.
44 Mark Levine, Heavy Metal Islam: Rock, Resistance, and the Struggle for the Soul of Islam (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2008), p. 127.
45 Richard Silverstein, “Israeli Hip Hop Celebrity Says Palestinian MK ‘Fucks Us in the Ass,’” Tikun Olam, 30 June 2014, http://www.richardsilverstein.com/2014/06/30/israeli-palestinian-mk-gets....
46 Tarachansky, “Inside Israel’s Pro-War Nationalist Camp,” 3 August 2014.
47 Tarachansky, “Inside Israel’s Pro-War Nationalist Camp,” 3 August 2014.
48 Max Blumenthal, “Why the Israeli Elections Were a Victory for the Right,” Nation, 23 January 2013 http://www.thenation.com/article/172398/why-israeli-elections-were-victo....
49 Haggai Matar, “The Night It Became Dangerous to Demonstrate in Tel Aviv,” +972 Magazine, 13 July 2014, http://972mag.com/the-night-it-became-dangerous-to-demonstrate-in-tel-av....
50 Roy (Chicky) Arad, “Right-Wingers Beat Haifa Deputy Mayor during Anti-War Protest,” Haaretz, 20 July 2014, http://www.haaretz.com/news/national/.premium-1.606240.
51 “Hanin Zoabi Suspended from Knesset for Six Months,” Times of Israel, 29 July 2014, http://www. timesofisrael.com/hanin-zoabi-suspended-from-knesset-for-si....
52 Ofer Aderet, “Right-Wing Demonstrators in Tel Aviv Wore Neo-Nazi Shirts,” Haaretz, 15 July 2014, http://www.haaretz.com/news/national/.premium-1.605234.
53 Orli Santo, “How Freedomof SpeechWas Crushed During Protective Edge,” +972 Magazine, 31 August 2014, http://972mag.com/how-freedom-of-speech-was-crushed-during-protective-ed....
54 Kobi Snitz, interview by the author at demonstration in Lod, Israel, August 2014.
55 Gideon Levy, “Opinion: Why Israel Is Its Own Worst Enemy,” CNN, 8 August 2014, http://www.cnn.com/2014/08/08/opinion/israel-own-worst-enemy-levy/.
56 Santo, “How Freedom of Speech Was Crushed,” 31 August 2014.
57 Ali Abunimah,
“’Concentrate’and‘Exterminate’: Israel Parliament Deputy Speaker’s Gaza
Genocide Plan,” Electronic Intifada, 3 August 2014, http://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/concentrate-andextermin....
58 “West Bank Rabbi Dov Lior: Jewish Law Permits Destruction of Gaza,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 24 July 2014, http://www.jta.org/2014/07/24/news-opinion/israel-middle-east/west-bank-....
59 Or Kashti, “Israeli Professor’s ‘Rape as Terror Deterrent’ Statement Draws Ire,” Haaretz, 22 July 2014, http://www.haaretz.com/news/national/.premium-1.606542.
60 David Sheen, “Terrifying Tweets of Pre-Army Israeli Teens,” 10 July 2014, storify.com, https://storify.com/davidsheen/israeli-army-the-next-generation.
61 Sheen, “Terrifying Tweets,” 10 July 2014.
62 Jenn Selby, “Message on ‘Israeli Shell to Gaza’ Reads: ‘That’s for Cancelling the Backstreet Boys, You Scum!’” Independent UK, 1 August 2014, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/message-onisraeli-shell-to-gaza....
63 Joe Coscarelli, “Israel Says It May Invade Gaza to Save Its Summer Vacation,” NY Magazine, 16 July 2014, http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/07/israel-may-invade-gaza-to-s....
64 Yifa Yaakov, “Over 90% of Jewish Israelis Say Gaza Op Justified,” Times of Israel, 29 July 2014, http://www.timesofisrael.com/over-90-of-jewish-israelis-say-gaza-op-just....
65 Lucy Westcott, “Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman Seeks to Ban Al Jazeera from Operating in Israel,” Newsweek, 21 July 2014, http://www.newsweek.com/israeli-foreign-minister-avigdor-lieberman-seeks....
66 Tzvi Ben-Gedalyahu, “Poll: Netanyahu and Bennett Benefit fromWar at the Expense of Lapid,” Jewish Press, 14 August 2014, http://www.jewishpress.com/news/breaking-news/poll-netanyahu-andbennett-....
67 Khalek, “Israeli Officer Admits Ordering,” 10 September 2014.
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