Video: Everyday Israelis express support for genocide

Ali Abunimah 2 October 2017

“I don’t think there’s any answer to it, there’s only one way, I would carpet bomb them,” a young man offers as a solution for Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians.

“The Jews should have the right to hate [Arabs],” the man adds. “I think we have the right to hate them.”

He’s one of a number of everyday Israelis in the streets of Jerusalem interviewed in the video above by Abby Martin, for TeleSUR’s The Empire Files.

Many of them are immigrants, or the children of immigrants, from the United States.

“I think that we need to … kick out the Arabs,” says a young woman who, struggling to express her genocidal thoughts in English, turns to a friend for help.

“We need to kill Arabs,” she manages to say in English, as she and her friend giggle.

“Islam is a very bad disease, not just for Israel, all around the world,” says one man, who later boasts about Israel’s “gentle” treatment of Palestinians and its respect for human rights.

No mixed marriages

Martin interviews a youth from Lehava, an extremist religious organization whose members act as vigilantes against miscegenation, and rampage through Jerusalem harassing Palestinians.

Lehava’s leader has called for the burning of churches and mosques.

The youth explains why the group is opposed to mixed marriages: “Jews is a special nation and we don’t want Jews to get mixed up with a different nation.”

“Israelis have to take over and they have to kick them away,” another man suggests. “It will be better not to kill them, just to go back to Arab countries,” he adds offering what he might consider a note of mercy.

“You can’t deal with these people, there’s no need to try, there’s no need to talk to them,” says another youth. “What we can do is that when they do enough harm, we retaliate. That’s war and that’s the situation that any Jew in Israel has to deal with.”

“The Arabs, may their name and memory be obliterated,” says a religious youth, repeating a phrase habitually heard from Israeli extremist mobs terrorizing Palestinian neighborhoods.

An elder explains that God is punishing Jews for their sins: “He sent the Nazis, and now he sends the Palestinians.”

Feeling the hate

Martin’s film is reminiscent of Feeling the Hate in Jerusalem, a 2009 video made by journalist Max Blumenthal. The video documented young Jews in Jerusalem, many of them Americans, expressing virulently racist views about Barack Obama, who had recently taken office as president of the United States.

After garnering hundreds of thousands of views on YouTube, the streaming service banned the video, and Israel lobby groups claimed it offered a distorted picture.

But there’s plenty of evidence that the views expressed in that film and in Martin’s new one reflect a reality in which roughly half of Israeli Jews consistently say they favor the outright expulsion of the Palestinian population.

And it is perhaps precisely because such views are so popular that the European Union recently hired Avishai Ivri, a “comedian” who openly advocates the mass slaughter of Palestinians, as the face of one of its promotional videos aimed at the Israeli public.

Israeli leaders and lawmakers openly cater to these views by inciting and putting forward their own plans for genocide.

Zionist indoctrination

Many of the people Martin speaks to repeat familiar themes of Zionist propaganda: that “the Arabs” were invaders, that Palestinians have no rights to the land, that Jews “returned” after thousands of years in exile to find a barren and desolate land.

All of these claims are used to rationalize violent state policies that have the avid consent of the people in this extraordinary video.

Martin also speaks with Israeli anti-Zionist activist Ronnie Barkan, who explains the indoctrination Israelis go through from an early age that leads to this kind of violent hatred.

“The need to segregate and not to interact with Palestinians is part of the Israeli identity,” Barkan states. “Israeli identity depends on denying Palestinian identity.”

According to Barkan, much of Israel’s so-called left are liberal Zionists who “speak the language of peace and human rights,” but whose views differ little in substance from those deemed more right wing.

Illustrating this, Martin hears from a man in the street whose opinions are tame compared to others. “I think the occupation does have a role, a big role,” he says. “I don’t think there should be no occupation at all, but in the occupation, things need to be more humane.”

When asked how he identifies politically, the man answers, “Yeah, I am a leftist.”

Action not despair

Watching this video could lead to despair that the situation will ever change, given the extremism characterizing so many on the vastly more powerful side.

But Barkan emphasizes action.

“The views of Israelis about the situation are totally irrelevant to the question of how we change the situation,” Barkan states. “Did it matter what white people think about apartheid at the time? The question is how we end apartheid.”

That is a position supported by evidence. White South Africans overwhelmingly rejected calls to give up their power up until almost the day a democratic transition to a nonracial state took place.

What mattered in the end was that apartheid South Africa was isolated and could not carry on with a racist system in the face of growing internal and global resistance.

The call from Palestinians today is inspired by that history: boycott, divestment and sanctions are the way to increase the pressure on Israel and change the shocking reality revealed in this video.

Tags

Comments

picture

Ramy Abdel-Azim replied on

What exactly is an "everyday" Israeli? I don't think that painting all Israelis with such a broad brush is very helpful to our cause.

picture

Ali Abunimah replied on

Everyday Israelis are Israelis you can find in any street. Martin explained she just went to “Zion Square” and interviewed people. And as my article explains, there’s lots of evidence that similar views are fairly common.

picture

Lidia replied on

If this is non-Palestinian "Israeli" , 99,99% of them areZionists, ie colonizers. They could be "leftist" colonizers, or "rightist" ones, and to all of them Palestine is their and Palestinians are just obstacle to their "Jewish" state.

picture

John Costello replied on

99.99% Lidia? Remember Hillary's gaff about Trumps voters being a "basketful of deplorables"? She wished she could take that back because the consensus was that it turned fence sitters away.
By your reckoning, Ronnie wouldn't even be able to fill out a good hand of poker with like-minded anti-Zionists.
People who're looking in on us from outside, don't necessarily listen as much to what we're saying as how we say it and you say it a lot like those people in the street. Which BTW, I think also represented an exaggeration of racist Israeli views and perhaps even a complete waste of time.

picture

Artemis replied on

Really 'hot-headed hyperbole'? I doubt it. According to Haaretz Gideon Levy 70% of young Israelis define themselves as right-wing. Israelis who have left Israel say that young people are so thoroughly indoctrinated by an anti-Palestinian narrative that they have become blindly racist.

picture

karen replied on

The job is not to please Israelis so they like being told the truth - the job is merely to tell the truth to the world (the American public in my case) so they stop blindly supporting it. Young people I talk to are very interested, and Abby Martin is terrific.
And even if the strategy were merely to win over a few million colonizers and talk them out of it, I don't know how you call out ethnic cleansing in a "nice" way! It's not nice!
I also don't see why Americans need to have their truth about themselves sugar-coated...

picture

Arby replied on

Israelis, like people everywhere, are mentally and spiritually ruined and their 'leaders' have a great deal of responsibility for that.

Evil is goodness and violence is peace for ruined Israelis. God, who has no use for anti-god nations like Israel (which is all of them), will soon wipe Israel and those who believe in it, off the map. How that will look, I don't know. It's easy to project onto God our own imperfection, including the idea that resorting to violence and terror (with or without giggles) is okay. I don't know how Armageddon will look, but I firmly believe it will come. It has to. The darkness is more than a few well-intentioned, normal people can deal with. The darkness in this anti-God world is very powerful, primarily because it believes in power and sectors profit from trading in weapons (power) and is willing to break rules that normal people wouldn't break in order to crush the weak. As self- modified people (which we are free to do, but not without consequences), those who willingly and knowingly embrace this dark world's paradigm of 'riches for the strongest' now view violence and deceit and inequality as positive values. Crushing those who are weaker than they gives those self-modified people a thrill. Normal people talking sanity and facts and history won't change that. It will take a higher power.

picture

John Costello replied on

Arby, along with facts and history (which is really a specific realm of proven fact), you speak of normal people and sanity (which is really a pattern of behavior that maximizes survivability). Okay, I'm for fact based survival but are you?
You've tied everything you've postulated to God; belief and disbelief. What about me Arby? I fancy myself fairly normal and I agree that there is a growing darkness over the land but I reject your implication that not believing is disbelieving.
To me it's a non-issue. My favorite color is blue and yours is red say but does that mean we necessarily disagree? How do I know my blue doesn't look red to you? Or maybe we both love blue but for different reasons. What matter.
Must I be WRONG if I see stones and clouds and stars as God, or just as wonderful? What am I missing, what must I know that I don't, to be a part of the world so wisely waiting for God to save us from ourselves?

picture

Sadness replied on

I watched these people telling us the way Israel is teaching their children to be good Jews because. Earlier today I had read about Israel’s major Arab opposition explaining to readers how they were teaching their children to be good Muslims because. Both were teaching exactly the same mantra but both say we are the way since who knows when. Huh?

What an utter destructive dead end. Both say because we are better than them, we’ll throw them out and kill the b**teds. No one can see we are all the same? We all want&need the same things? That therefore we are killing ourselves....while the planet and few sane animals that have survived despite our best efforts become a wasteland.

Well done humans, you’ve been at this forever, you have only a past, not a future. So sorry.

picture

tom hall replied on

This is not a contest between two opponents who function as mirror images of one another. Israel is a settler colonial state whose establishment from abroad required the carefully planned dispossession of a native population and involved repeated episodes of mass ethnic cleansing. Israel is a wealthy nuclear power backed by the U.S. and E.U., openly engaged in absorbing the entirety of historical Palestine. Israel's conquest and military occupation of the remaining Palestinian territory and implantation of civilian colonies relegates the Palestinians under their control to the status of a fragmented, impoverished and defenseless people. The difference in terms of power and freedom of action could not be greater. And international law is very clear as to which party bears the primary responsibility for this terrible state of affairs. You really owe it to yourself to acquire some basic knowledge of the conflict before pronouncing the old "plague on both their houses" verdict.

picture

Zionism Is Not Judaism replied on

Besides the malevolent destructive nature of Zionism what this also shows is that there are no shortage of FOOLS, who are most willing (with very little hesitation) to impart their FOOLISHNESS upon their children.

picture

Ty Ebright replied on

The NAZI Party 1935. - Israel Today. - Memory becomes Reality

The Nuremberg laws (1935) institutionalised many of the racial theories of Nazi ideology. The laws excluded German Jews from Reich citizenship and prohibited them from marrying or having sexual relations with persons of “German or related blood.”

"At the annual party rally held in Nuremberg in 1935, the Nazis announced new laws which institutionalized many of the racial theories prevalent in Nazi ideology. The laws excluded German Jews from Reich citizenship and prohibited them from marrying or having sexual relations with persons of "German or related blood.""

https://www.ushmm.org/outreach...

Recently, The Knesset renewed a contentious law that prevents Palestinians who marry Israelis from both receiving Israeli citizenship and from living within the Jewish State. The law was first adopted by Israel’s parliament in 2003 as an emergency security measure.

http://www.tabletmag.com/scrol...

The highest court in the land ruled that an amendment passed in 2003 to the Nationality Law barring Palestinians from living with an Israeli spouse inside Israel — what in legal parlance is termed “family unification” — did not violate rights enshrined in the country’s Basic Laws.

https://electronicintifada.net...

The court added, the harm caused to the separated families was outweighed by the benefits of improved “security”. Israel, concluded the judges, was justified in closing the doors to residency for all Palestinians in order to block the entry of those few who might use marriage as a way to launch terror attacks.

https://www.haaretz.com/jewish...

picture

R Davis replied on

All the young people who speak English with heavy accent are born in Israel - right ? - surely the Israeli education system teaches fluent English as a second language in Israeli schools ?
I have met African migrants to Australia who speak English fluently - French - German - Italian - Greek -
Swiss - etc - & the radiology technician at Brunswick Hospital B'wick speaks 13 different African languages.
Arabs who are multi lingual - & the Jews in Israel can only manage broken English - if Israel spent money on it's citizens & not on bombs - hey.

picture

Joanna replied on

This video reminds me of the time I visited some of Israeli kids I met on their Holocaust trip to Poland, where they had a meeting with local teens. I spent two weeks with them, establishing myself as their friend and they shared their views with me, about how they cannot wait to join the army, their need to protect their country with any means necessary. It wasn"t until I decided to actually go for a walk myself to the Old City of Jerusalem that I've experienced some darker sentiments myself. I had the nerve to talk to some Palestinians on the way, visiting their shops and actually listen what they had to say. When I got back I was met with disgust and hateful words like "why do you even want to talk to THESE people? They are liars. They are dangerous.". I feel like I', spending there only two weeks, had more meaningful contact with Palestinians than those privileged kids from Jewish suburbs had their whole lives (which did not stop them from lecturing me how naive I am for actually being nice to Arabs).

Ali Abunimah

Co-founder of The Electronic Intifada and author of The Battle for Justice in Palestine, now out from Haymarket Books.

Also wrote One Country: A Bold-Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse. Opinions are mine alone.