Israel's extreme right uses European terror to promote racial agenda
Op-ed: Israel has undergone tragic change: As right grew in power it was able to isolate Israel from the outside and weaken and disintegrate society from within.
Here is the greatest absurdity of the recent terrorist attacks in France: Extreme right Israeli politicians and columnists use them to advance an ethnocratic, racial agenda - the same agenda that fans the fires in Europe, the same discourse that the same politicians and columnists warn against every time it turns against Israel.
An outside observer might find it hard to discern the racist-extremist process that Israel is undergoing. The Western world is so busy condemning Israel - mainly because of the occupation but also, unfortunately, for reasons that are not quite pure - that it can not understand the depth of the racist radicalization sweeping Israeli society.
This process was not born in a vacuum. It stems from fear and the feeling of a dead-end. Until 1995, after the signing of the first and second Oslo Accords, the air was full of the promise of normalization and even peace. It was clear to most Israelis that the conflict with the Palestinians was largely the result of a territorial and national struggle. But then, two things happened: Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated by a young man wearing a skullcap who was educated in the spirit of the messianic nationalist settler movement, and radical Islamists in the West Bank landed murderous terrorist blows on the Israeli population.
The result was soon to follow - the furious right, led by Benjamin Netanyahu, came to power and rejected any political understandings. The influence of the settler leaders, among them the most radical of rabbis, on politics and society grew. In the Palestinian Authority, extremist Islamist forces weakened the status of the moderate Palestinian stream.
I do not know the processes within Palestinian society, but I can certainly attest to the tragic change that occurred in Israeli society. As the right’s power rose, it was able - through a brutal combination of rampant neo-liberalism and political separatism spearheaded by the settlement expansion in defiance of the US, the UN and the EU - to isolate Israel from the outside and weaken and disintegrate society from within. The existential, economic, political and security fear factor did the trick. After "Operation Protective Edge" of the past summer, things are clear: Israel has never been so strong, yet weak, frightened and shaky.
Operation Protective Edge threatened Israelis in the heart of Tel Aviv and proved to them that their government cannot deal with Hamas as it once boasted, wiped out the last vestiges of political correctness, and worse - accelerated the collapse of the democratic elements in Israel.
One event followed another: a Palestinian child burned alive, violent demonstrations against mixed marriages, shouting "Death to Arabs" on city streets and incitement against Arabs and against "Arab lovers" on the Internet - all passed almost without comment. With weary, perhaps discouraged indifference. In retrospect, these events were given tacit legitimacy.
This legitimacy is what allows the far-right to complete the process of redefining the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: from a national-territorial conflict that can be solved by political means to an eternal ethno-cultural and religious war. The terror attacks in France played straight into the hands of the crooked logic of this dangerous process, and are used by the Israeli right in cooking its bland porridge - all Muslims and all Arabs are placed in the same black pot.
The Israeli far-right propagandists mark all of the Muslim world as a danger, throw terrorism and Islam together and determine, without any need for proof, that Islam wants to conquer Europe and destroy it.
This nasty propaganda, which uses the tragedies of others and the already fragile image of millions of European Muslim citizens, is mobilized in two stages: First, to bury the any possible territorial compromise between Israel and the Palestinians and to establish Israeli control of the territories; and the second stage - to drive out the Arab citizens of Israel.
And so the Israeli right connects to the darkest elements of European racism (even here among the academic elite, Marine Le Pen, for example, has many supporters).
While the leader of the nation which exterminated six million Jews, Angela Merkel, stands with rare boldness at the side of Muslim citizens and announces that Islam is part of Germany - the leaders of the Jewish people in their sovereign state choose to embrace the lowest level of racist demagoguery, against all the values of democracy and humanity, against their own citizens - Arabs and Jews.
Avirama Golan is an Israeli writer and journalist. She is the head of the Center for Urbanity and Mediterranean Culture, in the town of Bat Yam.
This article originally appeared on i24 News
