Opinion | 

This Is Poetic Revenge on Israelis Silent About the Occupation

An Israeli protester hold a sign that reads “Do you know what is truly unreasonable? The occupation,” at a protest against the judicial coup

The gods are taking poetic revenge on Israelis who continue living in peace and harmony, or mere indifference, with the dispossession and oppression of the Palestinians – Israelis who have eagerly embraced the security-related excuses for this state of events. The rug has been pulled from under their feet.

The kingdom of Judea and Samaria, as Haaretz Editor-in-Chief Aluf Benn explained two weeks ago, has taken control of your lives when you were sure that this kingdom was somewhere over there, somewhere else, and you were here. The holy kingdom of wild, thuggish youths is turning its back on you after your years of active service defending it and silently collaborating with it.

Now you’re in the sights of this evil government, because like any environmental pollution that knows no borders, the government must remove every obstacle to realize its plans to purify the Nation and the Soil. And no, this isn’t gloating, because we’re in this together.

The revenge is particularly poetic considering that a main target is the judiciary, whose officials are being denigrated as leftists and even traitors. How ungrateful the Israeli right and settlement movement can be!

After all, consider everything that the Supreme Court and lower-court judges, along with a long string of state prosecutors and attorneys general, have done to sustain the state’s criminal actions in their rulings, their advice, their turning of a blind eye, their enthusiastic defenses. With their rulings and kosher certificate they have raised generations of Israelis who are sure that it’s completely normal to rule over and tyrannize another people deprived of its most basic rights.

The settler colonial enterprise wouldn’t have thrived as it has without all their learned legal opinions and “solutions,” and now they’re writhing under the guillotine that they helped build. They sleep poorly at night, but not because they admit that they cultivated the seeds of Jewish fascism with their own hands.

A little gloating at the expense of the judicial caste (and the silent academia) would be appropriate here if we weren’t all hurt, the Palestinians above all. In its deliberate harassment of the Palestinians, this malicious government is no different from its predecessors. It’s only proving that things can always be worse.

We, the tiny and feeble left, shouted the warnings until we were hoarse: A nation that occupies another can’t be free. We shouted and warned, while you just kept going to concerts, bars and reserve duty. The irony bores itself. The list of Israelis who benefited from the oxymoron called a democracy for Jews only is long, even though they had the family background and all the necessary historical tools to understand that there is no such thing.

The benefit and gratification from ruling over the Palestinians intoxicated and numbed you. How banal. And now this adjustment to and support for this oppression is coming back to bite you, the finest of the middle and upper-middle class, or whoever is on their way there: voters for the center-right (for Yair Lapid’s and Benny Gantz’s parties), for Labor, for the liberal Dash party in all its historical incarnations, for the secular nationalist parties that represent former victims of Soviet oppression.

Now you’ve discovered that the Holy Reich can never be sated. It’s no coincidence that the three heavy bulldozers propelling the Jewish dictatorship – Simcha Rothman, Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir – all live in settlements. They didn’t invent the kind of arrogant, smug and aggressive approach that couldn’t care less about (international) law, the (Palestinian) majority, Palestinian history and property, or the basic values of justice (which we once boasted that Judaism possessed).

The copyright for all this belongs to the state authorities, to all the country’s leaders, bureaucrats and ideologues. But the trio mentioned above and their Judeo-Samarians honed this deceit to sabotage any chance that Israel would forgo any aspect of its founding settler-colonial character for a fair and decent future for the two peoples. Now, suddenly, you’re terrified (rightly so) by this camp’s smug aggression.

The civil revolt by Israel’s liberal-militarist class is impressive, even though so far it has only met with failure. These failures will only increase if the insurgents, with maddening consistency, continue to ignore the sources of the inspiration and practice of the Jewish dictatorship. This is your opportunity to right the course.

Don’t block roads in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, and don’t disrupt the lives of people who aren’t yet convinced that the judicial overhaul will hurt them too. You’ve seen that it has no effect on Justice Minister Yariv Levin or Rothman or the Rottweilers of the Kohelet Policy Forum. Don’t focus on the ultra-Orthodox. They only joined the orgy of tyrannical legislation for the benefit of their constituents and because of their leaders’ narrow horizons. But they’re not responsible for it.

Bottom of Form

Leaders of the revolt, in your thousands, cross the imaginary separation line and help escort Palestinian farmers and shepherds and protect them from the Jewish pogromists who attack them every day at dozens of locations. Before you apply for a Portuguese or Polish passport and pack your bags, prove that this place is dear to you by sustained and focused resistance that will thwart the plans of this government and its Kahanist vanguard: another Nakba; that is, a war that will make it possible to expel most or all of the Palestinians between the river and the sea.

You’ve proved your persistence and courage at the Kaplan Street protests in Tel Aviv and the Balfour Street protests in Jerusalem. Now is the time to show these things where it will truly hurt the instigators of the coup.