After Hawara, we are beginning to see the occupation and the settlement enterprise for what they are – fundamentally undemocratic, racist, uncompromising and violent
Haaretz | Bradley Burston | Mar 19, 2023
What would it take to radicalize a critical mass of a deeply conservative, hope-deprived Jewish community?
For my Grandma Aashi (Aashi was short for Anna), it was a pogrom. Trained as a little girl to hide in the dark of a woodshed at the approach of rioters, she experienced the smells and hoofbeats and terrified screams of three separate pogroms in a village on the outskirts of Pinsk, then Czarist Russia, now Belarus.
To the end of her days, she never healed.
It was that rotting empire which gave the world the word pogrom, literally wanton destruction, but a term which came to describe violent rampages and massacres targeting Jews, mainly in Eastern Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries. That empire, and those pogroms, made her who she was. A lifelong anarchist.
Though a tiny woman, Aashi was tough as spikes. If she ever smiled, it wasn’t around me. I knew, though, that she came by her unflinching radicalism honestly. A pogrom can do that to a person. And to a country.
Consider the vicious onslaught by 400 settler zealots in the West Bank village of Hawara. For decades, Israelis turned a collective blind eye to innumerable settler pogroms targeting Palestinians. They were always smaller in scope, but they’ve been going on for years, and usually with neither consequences nor notice. Until Hawara.
For the first time, the reaction of many Israelis was profound shock, anger, shame, and, for some, even the radical realization that the Hawara pogrom embodied the very meaning of occupation – a vulnerable Palestinian population deprived of the most basic rights and protections, oppressed and under direct attack by state-supported and state-shielded Israeli settlers.
“I’m done doing reserve duty in the territories,” a reserve soldier in his 30s serving among the charred ruins and the traumatized villagers, said out loud this week. “What happened that night to me and my friends is something that will stay with us the rest of our lives. It was Kristallnacht.”
For the first time, there was broad sympathy for the Palestinian victims. There was disgust and disgrace over the enormity of the onslaught, the savagery of the destruction, the wholesale failure of Israeli security forces, and, no less, the sight of pogromists taking a break to gather and say their evening prayers, silhouetted against the background of burning buildings, only to resume incinerating homes and assaulting scores of innocent people.
“Since the Sunday attack on Hawara, I’m having a tough time sleeping,” author Etgar Keret, one of Israel’s best-known authors, wrote in Yedioth Aharonoth, one of Israel’s most well-read newspapers, several days later. “This time, something feels different. More threatening. As if all the ground under my feet is shuddering.”
Then, on the festival of Purim, zealots launched another attack on Hawara. Mainstream media, which in the past had rarely covered settler assaults on villagers, now focused on the violence. We all saw how, after settlers had injured several villagers, one a two-year-old girl, soldiers joined the pogromists in a ghoulish circle of holiday dance and song.
The assailants grinned and howled, safe in the correct belief that there would be no arrests, no punishments, no consequences. After all, the prime minister had put their man, Itamar Ben-Gvir in charge of the police.
Moreover, during the recent election campaign, Ben-Gvir and the other extremists who have since taken over the government, hinted at their long-range solution for a one-state solution and the millions of non-Jewish residents of the West Bank: Girush. Expulsion. The ultimate trigger word for both Jews and Arabs.
Unaccustomed to the etiquette of elected government, the extremist leaders made the mistake of speaking honestly about the Hawara pogrom. And, by implication, expulsion. Far-right lawmakers voiced understanding and sympathy and high praise for the pogromists. And in a direct hint at expulsion, the extremist Finance Minister Betzalel Smotrich declared that Hawara needed to be wiped out altogether, and that “the State of Israel needs to do that – not, God forbid, private individuals.”
Smotrich later tried to walk back the comment. But on Sunday, soon after the second Palestinian terror shooting of Jews in Hawara in three weeks, a spokesman for far-right MK Limor Son Har-Melech amplified the call, Israel Channel 12 reported, quoting him as tweeting, “Hawara needs to be wiped out – Now!”
Remember, pogroms spurred the emigration of millions of Jews from the Russian Empire. If it worked for czars who wanted to solve what they saw as their “Jewish problem,’ why shouldn’t it work for Jewish settlers seeking to scare off Palestinians?
Meanwhile, the process of radicalization has gained momentum, driven in part by outrage over profane demonization of such opponents of the judicial overhaul as former heads of the Mossad, the Shin Bet, army chiefs, air force and El Al pilots, and the reservists without whom the military cannot function. Rightists have also attacked peaceable protesters with pepper spray, eggs, metal cans, spit and fists and curses, kicks to the gut and face, and side-swipes from motorcycles.
The protests have kept pace with the outrage, growing in size by the week. When Ben-Gvir ordered his police to storm protesters in Tel Aviv with charging horses and stun grenades – one of which ripped a protester’s ear from his head – Netanyahu, infuriating a broad sector of the public, then equated the demonstrators to the pogromists who had devastated Hawara.
As a young girl growing up in a village near Pinsk, my Grandma Aashi came to fear holidays and loathe religion. She lived in a place where holidays were often spent in hiding from pogroms. A place where arrogance and corruption went hand in hand with oppression. Where state religion and state bigotry, divine right and hatred went hand in hand with hopelessness.
A place where nothing would change until everything did.
A place, shockingly, not unlike this one.
Something has, in fact, shattered here. Still, one thing remains true. To a great degree, everyone in Israel is on their own to make and act on moral decisions. To defend human rights or trample them. To fight for democracy or to vote for dictatorship.
After Hawara, we are seeing, at long, long last, the beginning of signs of a reckoning. Demonstrators took police aback by chanting “Where Were You in Hawara?” Rooted in our genes are the memories and the wounds of pogroms against Jews, and of police and soldiers who stood by and let homes burn to ashes and the blood of innocents run in the streets.
After Hawara, we are beginning to see the occupation for what it is. To see the settlement enterprise for what it is – fundamentally undemocratic and authoritarian, Orthodox-dictated, racist and macho in tone, bullying and uncompromising in practice, and, at its worst, willing to take advantage even of the assassination of a prime minister if that meant permanent dominion over the West Bank.
That enterprise that could always have curbed the zealots in its midst, but chose not to. That could have fostered chances for peace, but instead exterminated them.
We’re finally seeing the occupation’s leaders and their agenda in a horrible and accurate light. Because they’re now our leaders. They have begun to bring the occupation here, to our doors. They are beginning to rule over us the way they lord over the Palestinians, with contempt, violence, supremacism and denial of rights. And we hate it.
Those hundreds of thousands of everyday people in the streets are beginning to sing “Demokratia O Mered” (Democracy Or Revolt).
Grandma Aashi would not have smiled at this. But she would have sung those words as loud as anyone.