Haaretz regularly and boldly runs articles that report the truth about Apartheid Israel.
A New Low: The Israelis Advocating to Starve the People of Gaza
An Orgy of Jewish Supremacy and Antidemocratic Euphoria, Encouraged by Netanyahu
Netanyahu’s Silence Is Paving the Way to Israel’s Ethnic Cleansing of Palestinians in Gaza
Ethnic Cleansing in God’s Name: The Only Israelis With a Plan for the ‘Day After’ in Gaza
These articles and countless more require few words to summarize what they describe. Only evil, hate filled, murderous, and racist can capture these intentions, voiced not only on the streets of the Apartheid state but at the very core of its governing regime.
Today, such words describing the nature of Israel will be viewed by most as extreme. Tomorrow, in a future that is sane, they will be seen as truth by everyone. Why did we not see the truth back then?
Fortunately, though they are still few in numbers, there are some who do see the truth today, courageously calling it out loud and clear. In a report in Haaretz, Israeli activist Netta Ben Porat uses the word as she recounts how she and other Israelis physically use their bodies to protect Palestinians from settler violence and ethnic cleansing:
“In 2021, I joined a group of people who were escorting shepherds in the West Bank. Two settlers on motorcycles showed up and drove through the flock to scare the sheep. I was stunned, I simply couldn’t believe it. Today something like that is almost amusing – it’s nothing. But the evil simply shocked me. After a little while, I began to go there once a week.”
If Ben Porat felt a mere terrorism with motorcycles was evil, what word can describe what we see today, and also what is intended in the headlines above?
The word evil appears four times on the article page in Haaretz: used once by Ben Porat in the article itself, and 3 times in the comments section by three different commenters. The word is unavoidable when witnessing what is being committed against Palestinians. It pops into the mind involuntarily and ineluctably, coming to consciousness unbidden, as easily and irrefutably as does the answer to 2+2. It is time to see the evil and name it for what it is.
In November of 2021, whilst harvesting olives with Palestinian farmers, Ben Porat was viciously attacked with a club spiked with a nail, wielded by a settler youth. She bled profusely and required several stitches to her head. She has been attacked many times since, and beaten on occasion by Israeli police. Haaretz asked why she continues her activism:
“I truly feel terrible guilt. In the name of my security, we are inflicting terrible wrongs on innocent people, simple people. We are destroying communities. Almost everyone I accompanied no longer lives in the place where I was with them. We are destroying an entire culture systematically and rapidly – finishing people off. And I am funding it. I earn a lot of money, and this is what the taxes I pay are doing. Everyone is mobilized for this purpose: the police, the soldiers, the judicial system, the state prosecution and the judges. This is the country. This is me.”
This is the country. This is Apartheid Israel. Clearly Ben Porat does not want to be part of it. “We are few and we are standing against the State of Israel. But I can’t do otherwise,” says Ben Porat. “I don’t do it out of pity or because I love Palestinians. I do it because it’s hard for me to accept what we [Israelis] are doing – it’s hard for me to accept what has become of us.”
This and many other testimonies remind us that it is not Jews who are calling for the massacre of a people whose Homeland was stolen in their name. The chilling eliminationist rhetoric and attempted extermination of Palestinians through occupation, bombing, starvation, exposure and disease come straight from the ideological heart of Israel, set beating 77 years ago by its Zionist founders. It is they, along with the Zionists who govern the Apartheid state today, and the Israeli citizens and violent settlers who support them, as well as the Israel-Zionist lobby in the USA, who alone are guilty of these crimes against humanity.
Jews all over the world must not allow the willful evil we see before us to sully their name. They must courageously raise their voice, joining those among them already raising their voices and denouncing Israel and Zionism, in some cases risking their lives as with Ben Porat. Jews as a collective must re-awaken to their ancient tradition of humanity and compassionate being, before their name is irrevocably smeared with the guilt of those who use it to justify such heartless crimes. That would be a disaster for Jews and Judaism, confirming in the minds of those who hate Jews that they were right all along.
The message should be made clear: Zionism is not Judaism, though it has tried very hard to make us believe that it is.