In preparation for April elections, Israeli prime minister and right-wing icon Benjamin Netanyahu has sought to increase his chances of forming a majority government by finagling a merger of extremist party Otzma Yehudit — Jewish Power — with Jewish Home, another far-right party whose ideology is more palatable to mainstream opinion.
Otzma Yehudit subscribes to the worldview of Meir Kahane, the New York-born rabbi — assassinated in 1990 — whose movement was banned from Israeli politics in the 1980s and classified as a terrorist group in the United States. Among the many charming ideas inherited from Kahane are that the occupied Palestinian territories should be annexed to Israel and Palestinians should be expelled.
The New York Times notes that Netanyahu has “enraged Jewish leaders in Israel and the United States by striking a bargain with a racist anti-Arab party whose ideology was likened by one influential rabbi to Nazism.” And it’s not just the usual liberal Zionists wringing their hands at the perceived sullying of Israel’s image.
AIPAC — pillar of the Israel lobby in the United States — retweeted a condemnation of Otzma Yehudit by the American Jewish Committee, seconding the conviction that the party is “racist and reprehensible.” (This didn’t stop AIPAC from tweeting the very next day that it was “honored to announce” Netanyahu’s impending attendance as a speaker at its 2019 policy conference.) Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Zionist Anti-Defamation League (ADL), also took to Twitter to lament that the Otzma Yehudit leaders and their “hate-filled rhetoric” were “being legitimized” by the Jewish Home-Jewish Power union: “There should be no room for racism & no accommodation for intolerance in Israel or any democracy.”
But while the ostensibly antiracist uproar no doubt comes off as noble, the fact is that Israel is fundamentally a racist and anti-Arab state that has carried out an uninterrupted flow of reprehensible behavior.
Where, pray tell, are all of the concerned curators of Brand Israel when the country opts to undertake one of its regular bouts of slaughter in the Gaza Strip? Where are the paeans to tolerance and democracy when Israeli Arabs are deemed second-class citizens and non-Israeli ones are treated as either terrorists or collateral damage? READ MORE AT JACOBIN.