By Philip Giraldi
Israel’s new government is still taking shape, but the U.S. media—even though it is prone to cover-up the war crimes and human rights violations by the Jewish state—has begun to sound the alarm over the direction the country is heading in.
Click the Link Below to Listen to the Audio of This Article
To be sure, the response has been largely focused on only one major issue as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has surrounded himself with ministers who come from what are regarded as extremist backgrounds, and that has been Bibi’s attempt to change the makeup and functioning of the country’s judiciary by weakening the power and reach of existing courts. He is doing so for reasons of self-interest, according to most observers, because he is still facing significant corruption charges if the status quo system, which gives the judges great independence from political interference, is not altered. The proposals for change are currently on hold, but it is also widely believed that if they are initiated they will also impact disproportionately on disadvantaged communities, like the Palestinian Christians and Muslims.
Beyond that, some in the U.S. and European media have begun to be less cautious in how they describe Israel and its system of government. The word “apartheid” has become acceptable, even among some progressive Jewish groups and rabbis. The government itself is often described in the press as the “most extremist or right wing in Israel’s history,” though what exactly that means is left to the perception of the reader. Several government ministers have even at times been excoriated for some of their extreme views inclusive of encouraging genocide or ethnic cleansing in the form of the complete removal of all non-Jews by force from the country and occupied territories.
The driving force behind many of the zealots in the government is Zionism, the political philosophy coined in the 19th century which can be as simple as seeking a Jewish homeland or as complicated as a formula endorsed by God for a “chosen” people who are and should be superior to and dominant over all other human beings. In 1920, at the time when the victors of WWI were deciding on the future of Palestine, one of the founding fathers of Zionism, Polish-born chemist Chaim Weizmann, wrote:
We will establish ourselves in Palestine whether you like it or not. … You can hasten our arrival or you can equally retard it. It is however better for you to help us so as to avoid our constructive powers being turned into a destructive power which will overthrow the world.
This hubristic view has led to the success of what are described as right-wing parties in Israel like the Jewish Power Party, which unashamedly flaunts its claimed superiority over the captive and largely defenseless Palestinians.
The Biden administration, in which nearly half of all senior appointments are Jews, as well as nearly everyone who deals with foreign policy, is doing its part to comply with traditional White House submission to Israel’s perceived interests. Israel is in the driver’s seat, and Biden knows it, declaring himself personally as a Zionist. Much has been made of the fact that Biden has not invited Netanyahu to the White House to congratulate him on his latest electoral victory over concerns relating to the proposed judiciary changes and increasing settlement expansion, but it is clear that Israel and America’s Jewish lobby are fully in control of both the White House and Congress.
On June 5, Secretary of State Antony Blinken addressed the annual American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) summit in Washington. This is what he had to say: the U.S.-Israel partnership “touches on every aspect of our lives, from security to business, from energy to public health. And the depth and breadth of that partnership between our governments are matched only by the strength of the ties between our peoples. This partnership between the United States and Israel is indispensable.”
Blinken chose not to acknowledge that the “indispensable ties” between the U.S. and the Zionist state is attributable to the large-scale corruption of America’s political system by Israel and its lobby to achieve such a status. And inevitably, Blinken made sure his friends in AIPAC understood that the Biden administration places the “blame” for the unrest in the Middle East just as the government of Netanyahu does: Iranian and Palestinian “terrorists” are largely at fault and Israel is the perpetual victim.
Blinken recalled how “over the past several years, we’ve seen a rising tide of horrific violence.” He continued:
That violence must end; its perpetrators must face equal justice under the law. The recent acts of terrorism—including nearly 1,000 rocket attacks launched at Israel over just three days, some of them targeting Jerusalem—demonstrate the daily threat under which Israelis are forced to live. The fatal event at the border with Egypt—which resulted in the deaths of three Israeli soldiers—is another tragic reminder of these daily dangers.
Israel has not been an exemplar for democratic or republican government since it was founded, which did not stop Blinken from enthusing that “Israel was founded—our partnership was built—on democratic values which include equal access by all people to their rights.”
Some Palestinians might disagree with that assessment, but Blinken went on to praise the billions of dollars of U.S. taxpayer money that flow to Jerusalem each year, enhancing Israel’s “ability to defend itself, and advancing our national interests.”
America is more secure when Israel is strong,” Blinken ludicrously declared.
To be sure, Blinken’s nonsense notwithstanding, Israel is certainly a nice place if one likes to feel racially and morally superior while shooting Arab children. This move of the Israeli government rightwards is reflected in a shift in popular sentiment. A recent poll by the Israel Democracy Institute revealed that a record-high 62% of Israeli Jews place themselves on the right wing of the political map.
The shift is best appreciated by examining the profiles of several of Netanyahu’s new ministers.
The one most cited is Itamar Ben-Gvir of the Jewish Power party. Ben-Gvir has been charged with crimes 50 times, and convicted on eight occasions, including once for involvement in a Jewish terrorist group. He is a devotee of the deceased right-wing fanatic Meir Kahane, and, like Kahane, envisions an Israel that is centered exclusively on Jewish interests. He has called for deporting Arabs who aren’t loyal to a Jewish Israel, annexing all of the West Bank and exercising full Israeli sovereignty over the Temple Mount, where the venerated Al-Aqsa mosque is located. He supports legislation defying international agreements to “divide” the Al-Aqsa site to permit regular Jewish worshippers and there have been suggestions that the Israeli government will seek to rebuild the so-called Biblical Second Temple, destroyed in the 1st century A.D. by the Romans, in that location.
Ben-Gvir is notorious for his provocations directed against Palestinian Muslims and Christians. He has led marches of armed settlers flaunting Israeli flags through Arab quarters of cities and towns and has even brought settlers and other extremists to the Al-Aqsa mosque during Ramadan to interrupt Friday prayers. To cap the irony, he has been since November 2022 the national security minister, which gives him authority over the police, to include the so-called border police as well as the police forces in the illegally occupied West Bank.
Indeed, as a practical matter, Ben-Gvir is seeking to have the Knesset pass legislation explicitly conferring legal immunity on all Israeli soldiers for any and all killings of Palestinians. He has also pressed the parliament to institute a formal, judicially administered death penalty for “terrorists,” which would mean any Palestinian who physically resists the Israeli occupation.
Another extremist who has obtained a major ministry in the Netanyahu government is Bezalel Yoel Smotrich who has served as the minister of finance since 2022. He has recently completed a controversial trip to the U.S. where he met with American Zionist leaders. Smotrich is the leader of the Religious Zionist Party, and lives in an illegal settlement in a house within the Israeli-occupied West Bank that was built doubly illegally outside the settlement proper.
Smotrich supports expanding Israeli settlements in the West Bank, opposes any form of Palestinian statehood, and even denies the existence of the Palestinian people. He demands a state judiciary that relies only on Torah and Jewish traditional law. Accused of inciting hatred against Arab Israelis, he told Arab Israeli lawmakers in October 2021 that “it’s a mistake that David Ben-Gurion didn’t finish the job and didn’t throw all of you out in 1948.”
Though Israel’s internal enemies, such as they are, are frequently characterized as Muslims, the dwindling ancient Christian community in Israel and what remains of Palestine has also been under increasing pressure as Israel becomes less multi-cultural and more a state designed only to accommodate Jews, and, as far as that goes, even resistant to legally legitimizing what are referred to as Reformed Jews, the majority of Jews in countries like the U.S.
Increasing illegal settlement growth in largely Christian areas has also threatened the survival of many Christian villages and towns. Nevertheless, Israel remains a home to 185,000 Christian Palestinians, most of whom reside in Nazareth, Haifa, and Jerusalem. Tens of thousands of people of partial or full Christian ancestry, some of whom are married to Jews, live in Israel as well. Beyond that, there are many Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant churches, institutions, holy places, and cemeteries in Israel.
Several months ago, the head of the Roman Catholic church in Israel, Pierbattista Pizzaballa, said that Christians have faced difficult challenges since the formation of Netanyahu’s far right-wing government last December. According to Pizzaballa, his government has emboldened ultra-nationalist religious activists, many of whom are armed settlers, and some of whom have harassed male and female members of the clergy and vandalized religious property. Pizzaballa observed:
The frequency of these attacks, the aggressions, has become something new. These people feel they are protected … the cultural and political atmosphere can now justify, or tolerate, actions against Christians.
A colleague, Francesco Patton, the custodian of the Holy Land, elaborated how, “We are horrified and hurt in the wake of the many incidents of violence and hatred that have taken place recently against the Catholic community in Israel.”
Three weeks ago, dozens of Israeli extremists, primarily Orthodox Jews, disrupted a Christian prayer event for pilgrims near the Western Wall. Jerusalem Deputy Mayor Aryeh King, and a leading rabbi, Avi Thau, led the protesters. Denouncing the Christians as “missionaries” trying to convert Jews, the extremists spat at and cursed the pilgrims, many of whom were ironically normally strongly pro-Israel evangelical Christians from the United States. King said that Christians should enjoy freedom of worship “only inside their churches.”
Christians have been subjected to increasing persecution. A recent report details how Palestinians have been targeted by what it calls settler-colonialism, which is a series of measures intended to destroy their communities and drive them from their land. It identifies seven policies that Israel uses against Palestinians throughout the whole of Mandatory Palestine (1948 Palestine, Gaza, the West Bank including East Jerusalem) and also to punish those in exile: “denial of residency; land confiscation and denial of use; discriminatory planning; denial of access to natural resources and services; imposition of a permit regime; fragmentation, segregation and isolation; denial of reparations; and suppression of resistance.”
The report concludes: “Whether these policies are considered separately or taken together, they amount to forced population transfer, a grave breach of international humanitarian law.”
Recently, these essentially genocidal measures have included the outright theft of their historic buildings and land by the government, and denial of other rights, including refusal to permit gatherings of the faithful at the existing churches on major holidays like Christmas and Easter. There have also been many physical attacks on individual Christians carried out by extremist Jews as well as desecration of Christian religious sites and destruction or defacement of Christian relics and statuary.
A conference in Jerusalem held recently to address the issue of increased violence against Christians attracted a number of diplomats, scholars, and representatives of religious groups, but it was boycotted by the Israeli foreign ministry. The U.S. embassy also did not send a representative or observer, indicating clearly that it was not interested in the plight of Christians in Israel, or rather that it did not even want to admit that there was a problem.
So, there you have it. The new Israeli government is not very interested in human rights for anyone who is not a Conservative or Orthodox Jew. It is, in fact, essentially hostile to all Palestinians and foreigners, be they Muslim, Christian, or even irreligious.
They denigrate such people as what Germans in the 1930s would have referred to as “Untermensch” meaning subhuman, a word then used to describe Jews, ironically enough. That the U.S. ignores all of Israel’s war crimes and human rights violations is disgraceful, but par for the course as American Jews who are advocates for Israel have corrupted and taken firm control of the political process.
And do not think for a second that Israel’s leaders give a darn about the United States and its people. Recall for a moment how former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon referred to Americans in a discussion with Foreign Minister Shimon Peres: “Every time we do something you tell me Americans will do this and will do that. I want to tell you something very clear: Don’t worry about American pressure on Israel. We, the Jewish people, control America, and the Americans know it.”
And more recently Netanyahu said, “America is a thing you can move very easily, move it in the right direction.”
That is in reality what they really think of us.
Philip Giraldi is a former CIA counter-terrorism specialist and military intelligence officer and a columnist and television commentator. He is also the executive director of the Council for the National Interest. Other articles by Giraldi can be found on the website of the Unz Review.
Ariel Sharon. Israel rules America and Americans know Israel rules America..