Israeli Racism?

by Hagai Segal


During the month of February, 138 terror attacks were recorded throughout Judea and Samaria. The monthly report of the Shabak [Israeli Security Agency] notes 15 bomb explosions, an incident of fire from light firearms, two stabbings, a single incident of a driver targeting and running into a person or persons and 119 petrol bombs. By the way, this impressive list of attacks does not include stone throwing, perhaps because the Shabak was not able to keep tracking  this very common phenomenon statistically. Who can keep track of stone throwing in the "territories"? The Israeli media certainly don't. And they don't use the term "racist" or "racism" when describing attacks carried out by Palestinians. Since the establishment of the state, no independent Hebrew radio station or newspaper has reported about a "racist attack" of Jews by Arabs. This blatantly derogatory term is reserved only for attacks of the opposite sort. When an Arab attacks a Jew he attacks for nationalistic reasons; when a Jew attacks an Arab he is first and foremost a racist.

The meticulous verbal distinction between the two situations is intended to stain us all as racists, not just the attackers themselves, and this is part of the ongoing leftist campaign of "look what the occupation has done to us". A few of unrelated incidents of recent attacks, no more than a few, has been getting media attention lately as if it were on the scale of  an organized mass attack. The wall-to-wall condemnations of the attacks didn't help, and neither did the cracks that were discovered here and there in the version of those who were attacked. Someone wanted, and succeeded, to create an impression that the State of Israel is experiencing a tremendous wave of racism in the spirit of the famous warnings of Yishayahu Leibowitz, obm.

It is needless to say, but we'll say it anyway, that attacks on Arab passersby are villainous and outrageous in all respects. They are motivated by ethnic hatred, but not all cases of ethnic hatred are rooted in racism. Usually it is simply a hatred of the "Other", meaning anyone who is different; for example, the well-known and common hatred of the French for English speakers. Racism, on the other hand, is hatred that stems from a feeling of superiority, and ever since the years of the thirties of the previous century it is also a synonym for Nazism. In the Even Shoshan dictionary, it is written that racism is "the opinion that the peoples of the world are divided into a superior race (the master race) and all the other races, which are inferior; racism was one of the principles of Nazism in Germany and served as a foundation for ruthless anti-Semitism and the destruction of the Jews.

The  philosophical inheritors of Even Shoshan want to plant in peoples' hearts the idea that the Palestinians are the new Jews and that the Jews are behaving as the Nazis. And if not all the Jews, then at least the religious Jews. Last week, in an Internet post of Zeev Raz, who is one of the men who destroyed the nuclear reactor in Iraq, the nauseating ruminations of David Giladi, lieutenant colonel in the reserves, were published, that warn about a religious-Zionist kristelnacht : "Prepare for the great return, prepare for the coming of kristallnacht. History does not repeat itself. So instead of brown shirts and hobnailed boots we will have yarmulkes the size of an acre, ritual fringes flying in the breeze and uzis crossed over their chests.  And the constantly reproducing females, with their hats and long skirts that trail on the ground, will be there too. And there is another significant difference: the victims will indeed be Semites - but Arabic speaking Semites. Antisemitism has not disappeared from the world. The glaziers rub their hands with open enjoyment, waiting. It may be delayed but come it will."

Raz wrote me that these slanderous words do not express his personal opinion, but in a more moderate version they express the view of the main-stream media as an overall  group. The libel of racism continues to spread. Don't be surprised if it seeps into the Holocaust Day ceremonies this month in Yad Vashem.


Translated from Hebrew by Sally Zahav

Hagai Segal

Source: Makor Rishon Hebrew newspaper, issue 814 from Diokan Magazine

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.