Netanyahu’s violent fingerprint. By Gideon Levy. Haaretz, March 7, 2013. Also find it here.
Levy:
Benjamin
Netanyahu’s children attacked an Arab cleaning man on the seaside promenade in
Tel Aviv and caused him serious injuries. They attacked an Arab waiter in a Tel
Aviv restaurant with chairs and their fists. They attacked an Arab from Upper
Nazareth at the shore of Lake Kinneret because they heard him speaking Arabic.
Netanyahu’s children waved hate-filled signs against Muslim players of the
Beitar Jerusalem soccer team and set fire to its clubhouse. Netanyahu’s
children attacked an Arab woman on a Jerusalem light rail train just because she
was an Arab.
All
these events took place in Israel within a few days. The attackers were of
course not the prime minister’s biological children, but they all were the
creation of his spirit, students of his views and pupils of his government’s
policies. These Israeli skinheads are the fruits of the nationalistic and
racist atmosphere that has grown greatly in recent years, the Netanyahu years.
Such a
streak of anti-Arab violence is not just a coincidence of course. So many of
these kind of violent acts in such a short time never happened here before.
Their source is planted deep within the Israeli experience that Likud-led
governments have acted to nurture. A Jewish child grows up in Israel with the
feeling he is a member of the chosen people, one who is allowed to do almost
anything. He learns that only his people have rights to this land. This child
knows his country must be Jewish, and only Jewish.
During
the Netanyahu years the child grew up with a feeling of continual danger,
usually exaggerated and hollow. He hears all day long of the dangers lying in
wait for him, all at the hands of Arabs and Muslims. He learns he is the member
of a people who are always the greatest victims, there are no other victims.
There are those who repeat for him that the Arabs are not people like he is, it
is doubtful whether they are human beings at all; just suspicious objects,
terrorists. They all want to throw him into the sea, stab him, plant a bomb,
shoot a Qassam rocket at him or blow themselves up next to him. The child
learns that Israel’s Arab citizens are a cancer, a stab in the back of the
nation and a fifth column; and it is necessary to strip them of all their
remnants of rights. He learns that Israel “gives” the Arabs too much.
He sees
alongside the road a fancy house in an Arab village and tells himself: Look at
that. He hears Arab members of Knesset and tells himself: Look at us, what a
democracy. He sees a veiled woman or hears someone speaking Arabic and knows
this means danger. He doesn’t even think to compare the treatment of Jews in
Europe in the 1930s to the treatment of Arabs in Israel. He has never met an
Arab Israeli for a real conversation, and there is absolutely no chance of that
with a Palestinian from the territories.
This
child knows nothing about the Nakba, except that it is an invention of
Israel-haters and the very mention of it is treason. Of the hundreds of
villages that were destroyed and the fate of their hundreds of thousands of
residents, some of whom still live in Israel, torn away from their families,
banished from their lands and villages − he knows nothing at all and wants to
know nothing. He has no idea what it means to be an Arab child his age in
Israel who hears the prime minister of both of them describe the Arab child as
a demographic threat. The Jewish child has never heard a single good word from
the prime minister on a fifth of the citizens of his country, only condemnation,
threats, exclusion and danger. All this he learned in even more forceful terms
in recent years, the latest Likud years.
These
children have grown up now and become “youths.” They are the clear disciples of
what they were taught, and now they think they must act. To attack an Arab whom
they run across, to beat up a cleaner sweeping the streets of their city or to
attack a passenger wearing a head scarf. They know that they are allowed to do
so since no one will enforce the law against them. They even think they are
required to do so. And they are right: That is what they were taught during the
cursed Netanyahu years.
