Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By admin on November 21, 2020

This article was published on the 1995 bulletin of the St. Ives Association in Jerusalem in Hebrew after the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, who was killed on November 4, 1995 by Yigal Amir, after Rabin initiated the Oslo Peace Accords. It was translated into English by Ofra Yeshua-Lyth and is reprinted with permission from the author.

The flash of shots that pierced Yitzhak Rabins body shed a cold and cruel light upon the abyss opened as a result of the clash of social and political forces whose mutual contradiction reached its climax with this murder the contradiction between democracy on the one hand, and a Jewish state on the other. This deep contradiction has existed in Israeli society at least since the founding of the state of Israel. The Zionist movement, agent in the settlement process here in the East, attempting to turn the various ethnic groups that adhere to the Jewish religion into one nation, could not find any other cohesion for its purpose except for that very religion. Thus, Zionism created the Gordian knot between religion and state and rendered a special status to the practitioners of that religion and especially to those who find their livelihood in it.

These social and political elements received perpetual nurture from all Israeli governments. Not only the settler-colonists and their rabbis, but a thick layer of sacristans namely kosher-legitimacy supervisors, officials of religious councils, religious judges, butchers, rabbis in towns, kibbutzim, settler-colonies and institutions, all being paid their salaries not by the actual believers but especially by the secular crowds tax money. This parasitic layer consists of tens of thousands of people whose religious studies are their artisanship, including yeshiva students and mystics who specialize in cursing secular citizens. The Zionist left, in its support of the apartheid mentality of a Jewish state, lost any ability to struggle towards the separation of religion and state and for the democratization of Israeli society. Thus it, too, is responsible for nurturing this parasitic layer and for the intensification of Jewish fundamentalism.

The contradictions in Israeli society were exacerbated after the conquests of 1967, when the states leaders decided to prevent any chance of Palestinian sovereignty in the occupied Territories. To this end, these areas had to be populated by Jews, just as in pre-1948 Palestine. The human resources of the Zionist left had already dwindled, just like its spiritual ones, and the need arose to find new social forces. Gush Emunim, a neocolonial-messianic trend, was most suitable for this purpose, and enjoyed massive support of all Israeli governments in order to found about 150 new settler-colonies in the newly acquired occupied territories. The settler-colonists became an integral part of the security system and the tip of its spear for oppressing Palestinians. However, after the Gulf War the U.S. succeeded in pressuring Israel to act towards stabilizing a new order in the Middle East. The quick about-face carried out by the Israeli oppression system towards this new order was very partial and in fact consisted only of its head. Thus, the executor of the new order in the Middle East was assassinated by a member of the old order. The murderer, bound both to messianic fundamentalism and to the security system when he served as a combat infantry soldier, gladly carrying out Rabins orders at the time to Break their bones! opposed the later change according to which Arafat would now be responsible for breaking Palestinian bones on behalf of Israeli security. The tail of the Israeli oppression system, like the tail of a gigantic monster that includes both the settler-colonists and loyal transferists, now gave its head a lethal blow.

The shots that killed Rabin were in fact aimed at the heart of democracy. The campaign of incitement and de-legitimization against Rabin leaned upon those growing layers of Israeli society, not only on right-wing factions. The fact that Rabin was willing to rely on a democratic majority that included Arab citizens of the state in order to retain the Jewish nature of the state through an agreement with Arafat doomed him with those racists who had regarded him as a democrat.

Naturally, these were not the opening shots of a civil war they merely exposed its hidden existence: Rabin is the last victim so far, in a long line of victims Arabs murdered by Jewish settler-colonists, people murdered by the Jewish underground, Arab workers who were shot, and Emil Grunzweig (Jewish Israeli peace activist murdered during a demonstration).

Note that like most apartheid supporters, the organizers of the demonstration where Rabin was assassinated accepted the basic assumptions of the Zionist right regarding the illegitimacy of Rabins leaning on the support of Palestinian citizens of Israel. Thus the head of the demonstrations organizing committee prevented Arab mayor of Nazareth, Ramzi Jaraisi, from delivering a speech on this occasion. Ironically, while Rabin thought his plan to preserve a Jewish state by controlling the most area with the least Arabs would grant him the support of the settler-colonists, they regarded him as a traitor. Rabin and the Israeli secret service did not conceive of the possibility that a Jew would assassinate the Prime Minister, because like separation supporters they believed the lie disseminated by Jewish fundamentalists about the sanctity of Jewish blood.

The sorrow that is now being expressed by the Judea and Samaria Council members, yeshiva students and various transferists is a hypocritical political guise. It is totally obvious to them that all their power and monetary resources are derived from the very fog concealing the abyss that lies between a Jewish state and a democratic one. Exposing this abyss would clearly mobilize the supporters of democracy against them.

The key question now is whether the country holds strong enough forces to counteract the fake consensus, and struggle towards a democratic solution of the national question. Any other way would be a mere attempt to maintain these contradictions until the next blow-up.

Read the original:
The anniversary of Rabin's assassination and its significance - Mondoweiss

Category: Zionism
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