A Decade of Pogroms and Jewish Terror: Welcome to the 60th Year of Occupation / In Israel’s Army, Murdering a Child Is Fine, but Having an Affair Is Reason to Be Fired

After 59 years of occupation, apartheid and Jewish terror, it’s obvious that, as with mold – plastering or a government of change will not uproot the blight without treating the root cause: racism

Michael Sfard

According to the human rights group B’Tselem, 24 Palestinian communities were completely uprooted and forcibly transferred from their place of residence in the 59th year of the occupation. Another 11 communities were partly displaced. 489 families, consisting of 2,700 individuals, lost their homes, their communities, their place on this earth. Jews in masks and Jews in uniform united their forces in evil in order to make 1,300 minors homeless. And this was only in the West Bank. In the 59th year of the occupation, the Israel Defense Forces demolished tens of thousands of structures in the Gaza Strip, thus destroying the living space of hundreds of thousands of Gazans.

Congratulations. The occupation commences its 60th year. What a lousy age, not young by any standard anymore, but also not yet retirement age. It only indicates that time is passing and that what was meant to be a temporary deviation from the sacred principle that people are entitled to participate in the decision-making processes that govern their lives was exploited to launch a storm of crimes against them.

We have now entered the last year of the worst decade in the history of the occupation. A decade of pogroms and Jewish terror, enjoying political backing, public funding and various degrees of official cooperation by security forces. A decade of rampaging apartheid, official and unmasked, implemented by tens of thousands of Israelis, all of whom are accomplices to a crime against humanity. This was mainly a decade in which, following a horrific and unforgivable massacre committed against us, we embarked on a dreadful war of annihilation, no less unforgivable, in which we stooped to a blood-chilling moral abyss, which painfully made us resemble those who persecuted and killed us throughout history.

Truth be told, there is nothing left to say. For almost two decades, I’ve been publishing articles in Haaretz ahead of the anniversary of the war, which made us occupiers of millions of people who lack any citizenship or political rights, people who are entirely dependent on our grace. For almost two decades, I searched every year for words, I struggled hard to be precise in using the most appropriate concepts, I was trying with language to break through the wall of indifference and Israeli cruelty. But it’s not working, at least not yet.

It’s difficult to keep running away from the unbearable conclusion, from the unavoidable insight that no matter how we turn the indifference, in the rotten basis of this wall, there is, let’s call a spade a spade, racism. A suffering Palestinian child just doesn’t do it for most Israelis. That’s why even the most “liberal” news program in Israeli media will have no interest in it (I put the word liberal in quotation marks since this term has been twisted in Israeli discourse, and if Yair “I’m a Zionist and a patriot not a leftist” Lapid is a liberal, then apparently, I didn’t understand a thing when I learned about liberalism at university).

Yes, no matter how we turn and how much we blame the conflict, terrorism and violent attacks on us, honesty obliges us to admit: naked, distilled racism, the concept of our supremacy and their inferiority, has spread through our bodies, residing everywhere. We (as a collective, obviously this is a generalization), do not see those who are not Jewish as our equals. We don’t consider a community that was uprooted from a wadi on the desert’s edge, with their pathetic belongings and strange clothes, as human beings equal to us. As people who deserve happiness no less than we do.

And I’m not talking about the Kahanists. I’m talking about those who perceive themselves as liberals, about journalists and jurists and high-tech people and politicians, including those in the “center” and “center-left.” How much does Israeli society really care? How much does it truly feel the pain of what is happening to the Ein Samiya and Ein Auja and Umm al Khair communities, as well as dozens of other communities in which the Jewish state, directly or through emissaries, beats, terrorizes, and dispossesses helpless Palestinians? Yes, once in a while, there’s a shock over the latest footage of Jewish terror, but this is a temporary interruption that leads to no deep reflection or accounting, no Tikun. It is a performance of shock, a ceremony meant to preserve one’s self-image, a correction of smeared makeup.

But during this decade, something else happened: The impulse of oppression has spread and has begun attacking inward. And all of a sudden, Jewish Israelis have also found themselves in the crosshairs and as targets of consolidation of power, of a process aimed at depriving them of their rights, of a dictatorship in the making. Being Arab is bad, but it turns out that being a leftist (or what the deep right wing labels as “leftist”) is also bad. Palestinians are the enemy, but so are the leaders of supremacy, determined, the Jews who wish to remove the military boot from the Palestinians’ neck. And so, the rivers of the occupation are the sources that fill the lakes of the constitutional coup, and the day when weapons that, today, West Bank farm outposts sheriffs are aiming at their Palestinian neighbors will be directed at their domestic political rivals, is not far.

Like dampness and mildew, no plaster or paint and no ‘government of change’ will uproot this scourge without addressing it at the source of our regime violence: the worldview of Jewish supremacy, the axiom that we’re eternally on the side of justice and a refusal to fully recognize the rights of the others living here.

The election has to be won and the Kahanist government must be removed from office. That’s a necessary condition for a future that isn’t the bleakest of darknesses. But we also need to realize that, although it’s a necessary condition, it is far from a sufficient one.

Welcome to the 60th year of the occupation.

Michael Sfard is a human rights lawyer who represents human rights organizations, Palestinian communities and Israeli and Palestinian activists.

Source: HAARETZ

***************

Gideon Levy; In Israel’s Army, Murdering a Child Is Fine, but Having an Affair Is Reason to Be Fired

Until Wednesday, the Israel Defense Forces and the State of Israel believed that Brig. Gen. Yisrael Shomer, the head of the army’s operations division, was a man of total integrity. He rose through the ranks to his current position, one of the most important during wartime. Reichman University awarded him an honorary doctorate in 2024 in a ceremony dubbed “Israeli Heroism.”

However, on Wednesday, we were informed that the chief of staff had decided to dismiss him from the army. A statement issued by the IDF spokesman stated that “Shomer’s request to step down was accepted,” a way of preserving what’s left of his honor.

Shomer is suspected of “exploiting power relationships” and “moral offenses.” In other words, he had a sexual relationship with a subordinate. So much for Shomer’s total integrity.

There are few times in life when you can take pleasure in someone’s downfall, and this is one of them. On Wednesday, belated justice was served. In a truly moral army, Shomer would have been dismissed 10 years and 11 months earlier.

Friday, July 3, 2015: Qalandiyah crossing, outside Ramallah. Shomer, the commander of the West Bank-based Binyamin Brigade, was stuck in traffic with his driver when a teenager from a refugee camp came up to his car and smashed its window with a large rock almost at point-blank range. Shomer was angry. He and his driver got out of the car and chased after the boy as he fled. Shomer fired his gun three times at the teen’s back at a distance of 6-7 meters and killed him.

It was, by any standard, an execution. The boy posed no immediate danger. Witnesses said that before leaving, Shomer turned the boy’s body over with his foot, the way one would the body of an animal, to make sure he was actually dead. It never occurred to him to call for medical help. Some later heard him boast about his shooting.

A year later, the chief military prosecutor ended the investigation on the grounds that the killing was an “operational accident.” The High Court of Justice, which gives carte blanche to war crimes, rejected an appeal by the boy’s family against the prosecutor’s decision in September 2020. Yair Lapid, of course, rushed to defend the cowardly officer who killed a fleeing boy. Then Chief of Staff Gadi Eisenkot, the last of the righteous, delayed Shomer’s further rise in the ranks. Eisenkot’s successors put Shomer back on the promotions track.

Shomer did not know who he had killed or showed no interest in finding out. Mohammad Kasba was 17 at the time of his death. He was the son of Fatma and Sami Kasba, their third son to be killed by the army. The other two, Yasir, age 10, and Samer, 15, were shot in the head within 40 days of each other in the winter of 2002.

When I visited their meager home for the first time in the Qalandiyah camp, I met their younger brother Mohammad, who was four years old at the time. Back then, no one could have known that Mohammad was fated to be killed 13 years after his two brothers, this time by a brigade commander.

Shomer’s success in avoiding all punishment foreshadowed the deterioration of the army’s standards. By deciding not to put him on trial and subsequently promoting him to top positions, the army was in effect saying to its soldiers, kill as you please – capital punishment for children throwing stones is legitimate, even desirable. The genocide in the Gaza Strip, the “Messiah” patches appearing on army uniforms and the collapse of moral boundaries were all born at the Qalandiyah crossing.

A member of Kibbutz Kfar Aza, who went out in running shorts and a knife to battle the terrorists who had invaded his community on October 7, Shomer was deservedly praised at the time for his act. But justice finally came on Wednesday, in particular regarding the memory of Mohammad Kasba. Once again, it revealed the distorted values of the most moral army in the universe.

Unjustified execution of a boy? Promotion. Forbidden affair? Fired.

Source: HAARETZ

++++++++++++

The Legitimization of Evil Will Remain with Israelis Long After the War in Gaza Ends

Dogs of war / New acronym in Gaza: WCNSF – Wounded Child No Surviving Family

Filmmakers, Activists, Israelis, Indians Condemn ‘Unlawful’ Ban on ‘The Voice of Hind Rajab’

Tearing up the Map

Imperial Decline in the Straits of Hormuz

Keyboard Warriors

Natalia Ginzburg: Our Monstrous Ideas

Biblical Archaeology and the Judeo-Christian legends / The Deconstruction of the Walls of Jericho

Zionism Breaks