Israel: a war among brothers
JVL Introduction
In a wide-ranging conversation Orly Noy, chair of B’tselem and journalist and editor at the Hebrew-language news magazine Local Call, and Michael Omer-Man, the Director of Research for Israel-Palestine at DAWN, reflect on the current crisis of Israeli Jewish society.
Nor describes it as a war among brothers, an intra-Jewish affair in which Palestinians are singularly absent.
Despite the incredible resilience of the protest movement, she is pessimistic about the outcome. Everyone understands that the refusal of soldiers to serve is not a real threat to the army, but only to its prestige. Whatever the differences the large majority remain within a consensus about maintaining some kind of Jewish supremacy.
The so-called progressives are the most conservative; they are trying to restore the old rules of the game. The ultra-Orthodox and the settlers are the revolutionaries, offering a radically different vision of a real Jewish supremacy with no fig-leaves attached.
This article was originally published by Dawn (Democracy for the Arab World Now) on Thu 3 Aug 2023. Read the original here.
A waramong brothers: journalist Orly Noy on the 'Abyss' Dividing Jewish Israelis
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Orly Noy seems a very wonderful and committed woman. My only comment is on the last point where she quoted an Orthodox youth as saying why, if you don’t believe in God’s covenant, did you think you had the right to conquer this land and steal it from the Arabs.
It is a good question and secular Zionism has no answer other than to state the truth which is, we conquered it because the imperialist powers and the Christian Evangelists wanted a Jewish state in a strategic area of the world, next to the Suez Canal.
The Achilles heel of the original Labour Zionists was that they asserted the Jewish right to conquer Palestine because the god whose existence they deny gave it to them! That is the contradiction running through Zionism. Secular Zionism was always a lie and that is why Ben Gurion was so fond of quoting chunks of the bible to back up his claims to more territory.
Today these same secular Zionists are meeting with the Frankenstein they have created in the form of a large and politically powerful settler lobby. But let it not be forgot that it was the ‘left’ of the Labour Zionist movement – Tabenkin, Yisrael Galili, Allon who were responsible for the creation of the Greater Israel movement and what became the settler lobby