The Real News, Really Wrong

Well, the Real News is getting it all wrong all over again... How they manage to interview Jewish Israelis and still get the Israeli stories screwed up is beyond me. Just in case anyone is interested in the truth, and few people are, not a small part of the truth is the facts.

I'm not going to try to pretend Israel isn't a racist society. I have worked hard against this racism...but it bothers me to see so many realities dishonestly represented. Let's be frank, the USA is a very racist society and does a lot more damage to the middle east than any country in the world. Yet bizarrely American and European leftists put Israel under the strangest of magnifying glasses: ones that distorts and creates illusions.

Shir Hever asserts you can see the so called Israeli apartheid five seconds after you land, not because it's predominantly Arab and Ethiopian workers cleaning the airport mind you...because foreign travelers are taken aside and interrogated. As Hever points out they are the highest risk group for political activism. Activism usually perpetrated by young Western Europeans who take up activites like standing on hills and screaming "1,2,3,4; Israel no more!" Not exactly charming behavior for a people who ran a genocide against Jews less than 100 years ago. At times activism-tourist behavior hints they are planning more than obnoxious incitement; and in such cases it's probably better for everyone, Israelis, Palestinians and tourists if they are found sooner as opposed to later. Bombs have a way of not discriminating by ethnicity when they blow up. And I should know having lived through some bombings myself...But let's make something clear, taken to its logical end Hever is asserting that Israel, at least in airports, is practicing apartheid against foreigners who are by the numbers mostly Europeans....

But then Hever goes on to assert that it's those of us with darker skin who are being targeted by apartheid. He goes on to assert it's a racial problem. He therefore perpetrated one of the biggest lies repeated by misinformed anti-Israel activists. There is a myth of Jewish-Israel as a homogenous white society oppressing dark skin native peoples...Perhaps due to hundreds of years of Western history that ran on exactly that model there are few other models of nation building in large tracts of the world. But people like Hever seem to conveniently forget that Israel was born out of a national liberation movement largely against Western oppression, not a classic Western colonialist enterprise. Ironically Jews sometimes displaced Palestinians because they wanted to do the work classically relegated to native classes- i.e. low level agricultural work. But there are many different stories of how the land and peoples came to be where they are; and reducing it to any one narrative is misleading. Calling the past and present a racial problem is however more than misleading, it is simply non-factual.

 I'd like to see Shir Hever stand in Haifa or Jerusalem and pick out who is a secular Arab versus a secular Jew. He can't and no one can, for several reasons. Most Jews here are Mizrachi Jews- Middle Eastern Jews who look phenotypically like the Middle Eastern societies they come from. On top of that by all accounts whether mythological, linguistic or even genetic we came from the same people. Many Jews call Arabs our cousins, and that is linguistically, culturally and even genetically true. To put it bluntly, to the extent you can call Jewish a "race" we share it with the local Arab populations...but of course we aren't a race, now are we?...which makes the whole racism argument absurd. 

After spending some time in Jerusalem recently, I've come to see how much more conflicted the Israel/Palestine divide is IN JERUSALEM than I imagined. Poltics and cultural differences in this particular area can make one feel like Arabs and Jews are not just different races, but different species. The slightest gestures are politically charged. When I bought vegetables on the old conflict line by the old city, how I was treated by the local Arab vendors changed dramatically when I spoke in Arabic (even broken bad Arabic) as opposed to Hebrew. These guys clearly had an allergy to even listening to Hebrew...they had a linguistic protest going on they were going to make me aware of...and I respect the fact that they want to hold on to their identity. But at the same time, economic advancement of West Bank Arabs may mean eventual changes against Palestinian nationalism. I personally think the fastest solution to alleviating the dire misery of some of the West bank might be to simply spread citizenship with complete equal rights over the whole West bank...and Israelis who say this would create a demographic problem are probably a little bit racist at least (remember the political situation in the West bank is very different from Gaza, a subtlety lost on Western leftists more concerned with stories than reality)

I would never defend segregated buses. Such a policy is absurd. And I'm part of the Israeli public that IS outraged...EVERY SINGLE DAY. Not just that this policy was on the table...but at so many policies it would take years of blogging to cover...but I'm outraged about real things, not imaginary ones like a supposed racial difference between Arabs and Jews. 

And just FYI, I've been taking my dark skinned self right by those security guards in the Jerusalem bus station and they have yet to stop me...no different than anyone who looks like Shir Hever. For comparison, I've had trouble at times even entering a cynagogue in swanky New York neighborhoods because I supposedly look "suspicious" to American police who took the opportunity to harass me.