As a news-junkie who has traveled throughout Israel and the West Bank a number of times, I can assure you that — despite the unchanging nature of their apartheid Zionist policies — the Israeli public is allowed to criticize their government in ways that will get you linched as an anti-Semite in the United States.
As exhibit A, simply recall the recent condemnation of Rep. Ilhan Omar who had the temerity to state the obvious on Twitter: AIPAC (the American Israel Public Affairs Committee) is a pro-Israel lobby that both facilitates and destroys political careers in Washington, D.C.
Read my posts about this subject here, here and here.
Below I have excerpted an interview from the Israeli daily newspaper, Haaretz, entitled “The Knesset Candidate Who Says Zionism Encourages anti-Semitism and Calls Netanyahu ‘Arch-murderer’.”
Israel’s political scene is preparing for national elections to be held in April. Dr. Ofer Cassif is running for parliamentary office (Israel’s Knesset) as the Jewish representative for the far-leftist Hadash party, a party that includes both Jews and Palestinians.
I have excerpted the interview below (with minor rearrangement of two paragraphs for continuity).
“Cassif, 54, who holds a doctorate in political philosophy from the London School of Economics, teaches political science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem,
Sapir Academic College in Sderot and at the Academic College of Tel Aviv-Yaffo. He lives in Rehovot, is married and is the father of a 19-year-old son. He’s been active in Hadash for three decades and has held a number of posts in the party.
“As a lecturer, he stands out for his boldness and fierce rhetoric, which draws students of all stripes. He even hangs out with some of his Haredi students [conservative Orthodox Jews], one of whom wrote a post on the eve of the Hadash primary urging the delegates to choose him…
“Cassif is third on the slate of Knesset candidates in Hadash (the Hebrew acronym for the Democratic Front for Peace and Equality), the successor to Israel’s Communist Party. He holds the party’s “Jewish slot,” replacing MK Dov Khenin. Cassif is likely to draw fire from opponents and be a conspicuous figure in the next Knesset, following the April 9 election…
“…Cassif, who was one of the first Israeli soldiers to refuse to serve in the territories, in 1987, gained fame thanks to a number of provocative statements.
The best known is his branding of Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked as “neo-Nazi scum.” On another occasion, he characterized Jews who visit the Temple Mount as ‘cancer with metastases that have to be eradicated.’…
“Is Netanyahu an arch-murderer?”
“Yes. I wrote it in the specific context of a particular day in the Gaza Strip. A massacre of innocent people was perpetrated there, and no one’s going to persuade me that those people were endangering anyone. It’s a concentration camp. Not a ‘concentration camp’ in the sense of Bergen-Belsen; I am absolutely not comparing the Holocaust to what’s happening.”
“You term what Israel is doing to the Palestinians ‘genocide.’”
“I call it ‘creeping genocide.’ Genocide is not only a matter of taking people to gas chambers. When Yeshayahu Leibowitz used the term ‘Judeo-Nazis,’ people asked him, ‘How can you say that? Are we about to build gas chambers?’ To that, he had two things to say. First, if the whole difference between us and the Nazis boils down to the fact that we’re not building gas chambers, we’re already in trouble. And second, maybe we won’t use gas chambers, but the mentality that exists today in Israel – and he said this 40 years ago – would allow it. I’m afraid that today, after four years of such an extreme government, it possesses even greater legitimacy.
“But you know what, put aside ‘genocide’ – ethnic cleansing is taking place there. And that ethnic cleansing is also being carried out by means of killing, although mainly by way of humiliation and of making life intolerable. The trampling of human dignity. It reminds me of Primo Levi’s ‘If This Is a Man.’”…
“Israel commits murder on a daily basis. When you murder one Palestinian, you’re called Elor Azaria [the IDF soldier convicted and jailed for killing an incapacitated Palestinian assailant]; when you murder and oppress thousands of Palestinians, you’re called the State of Israel.” (all emphasis is mine)
I need to keep him in mind Dr Ofer Cassif