The recently inaugurated Israeli government, the Coalition-for-Change, the wet dream of Israeli and American liberals, Biden-approved-and-blessed after fifteen years of Bibi Netanyahu’s tyranny and four rounds of elections in the last two years – barely surviving a vote of confidence in cliffhanger-fashion – 59:59. It came to power on a slim ‘majority’ of 59.5:60.5 in the 120-members-strong Parliament. The delightful story of its almost-fall allows an insight into the inner workings of the Jewish state, for the members were fighting over their captive Gentile population’s right to marry and live in blessed matrimonial conjugation. Practically all Jewish MKs were against this right, but they acrimoniously argued over whether the current limitations were sufficient or should be intensified.
What is it all about? Anton, a young man from Nazareth met a girl, Sophia from nearby Jenin; they fell in love and got married. They are both Palestinians; Nazareth and Jenin are cities in Palestine; but they are not allowed to live together because Nazareth was conquered by the Jews in 1948 and Jenin in 1967. It sounds crazy, but that is Israeli reality.
Israel today is probably the most racist country in the world. The comparisons with South African apartheid or Jim Crow don’t even come close. Israeli racism is not even a distant relative of what you may call ‘racism’ in your country. A ‘racist’ American cherishes the names and traditions of his ancestors, or rejects the affirmative action that discriminates against him. An Israeli Jewish non-racist wants to keep the numbers of Goyim down, and he would be angry if called ‘racist’ because there are other Israeli racists who call for the total expulsion of non-Jews.
Under Israeli law, if an Israeli citizen marries a Palestinian, the young couple cannot live together. In our example, Anton is an Israeli citizen and he has a blue ID; Sophia has no citizenship, despite being a native of the land, and she has an orange ID. They can’t live together in Israel proper, for a Palestinian woman cannot be brought into Israel-48 even if she is the legally wed wife of an Israeli citizen. They can’t live together in the occupied territories of Israel-67 either, for Israel does not allow its citizens to live in the occupied territories unless they live in a racially segregated settlement, and Palestinians aren’t allowed into such a settlement. Thousands of such impossible marriages, mostly between Palestinian citizens of Israel and Palestinian non-citizens of Israel, have taken place despite the prohibition. These married couples break the law every day of their lives, living illegally, without medical care and without the right to work or travel together. They are often stopped by the police and usually spend months in jail. For years they have been demanding the right to ‘family reunion’, government permission to live together legally on a permanent basis, but they aren’t even allowed to apply for it.
Older people perhaps remember how Soviet Jews demanded to be allowed to reunite with their beloved aunt in Tel Aviv, and how the wicked Bolsheviks prevented this. They remember Nobel Prize winners and humanists around the world demanding that the Kremlin let the families be reunited. Perhaps, if you are old enough, you even marched at the Soviet consulate demanding Let My People Go! Well, how can you compare? This is totally different! Then it was for the sake of Jews, and now it is for the sake of Gentiles, and that is not the same.
The law forbidding the reunion of Palestinian families is so revolting to modern sensibilities that Israel came up with a clever way of obscuring it. They call it “temporary” and renew it once a year (and have so since 2003) so they could wring their hands and say, oh, it is only a temporary measure. Other nasty and racist regulations like the Emergency Laws are renewed annually in the same way.
And now they have failed to renew the law, and it has lapsed. Not because they felt this unjust racist law should be removed from their books. No way! The new Prime Minister Naftali Bennett is such a desperate racist that the KKK would ban him as too much of a good thing, and the Proud Boys would call him a Hollywood Nazi. He hates Goyim with all his heart, as all good Lubavitcher disciples do; he boasted that he killed many Arabs in his life; he was angry with Bibi Netanyahu because Bibi didn’t kill enough Arabs in Gaza for his liking. Despite such a background, Bennett was branded ‘traitor” by the nationalist camp, for he came to power by joining forces with the remnants of the once-powerful Left (Labour and Meretz) and a small Arab Islamist party. Now he feels he has to prove his racist credentials; otherwise in the next elections his party Yamina (“Rightwards”) will be decimated by its nationalist voters. The vote on extending the reunion law gave him this opportunity. He wanted to extend the law, but in his zeal he overdid it.
He correctly assessed that the left wing of his unwieldy Coalition for Change, Meretz, would vote against the extension, and so he turned the vote for extension into a vote of confidence, expecting that this tactic would thwart all resistance. With this ‘smart’ decision he kicked his own ass, because the whole opposition mobilised against the renewal. In addition, two Palestinians from the Islamist party abstained and one deputy of his own party crossed the party line.
With a vote of 59:59, the government barely survived the no-confidence vote, and the anti-reunion law’s extension did not pass. And this means that 15,000 Palestinian couples will be able to apply for reunion. And that’s great, because preventing couples from reunion is murder, akin to genocide, as the Talmud rightly says. Now everyone in Israel is looking at each other, confused.
- Racist Prime Minister Bennett helped the Palestinians reunite, even though he put his government on the line to prevent it.
- The Israeli left – Meretz and Labour – voted for the racist law, showing that they are only interested in Jewish LGBT rights. Their favourite topic, the right of Jewish gays to use substitute mothers to create children, was much more important for them than the most elementary rights of non-Jews.
- The Islamist Palestinians voted for the racist law because they did not want to bring down the government. They were eager to join any government, be it with Netanyahu or Bennett or the Devil himself, as they think this is the only way to save Palestinians from losing more homes to Israeli demolitions. They were intimidated into supporting this racist law.
- The Likud, Netanyahu’s party, as racist as anybody, voted against the racist law against their own beliefs, for they wanted to take advantage of the no-confidence vote and send Bennett packing.
- The far-far-right and nationalist Religious Zionist Party led by Smotrich torpedoed Netanyahu’s chances to form a government, because it didn’t want to sit in government alongside Islamists. They voted against the racist bill for they want to unseat Bennett, and furthermore they feel the bill is not enough: they want to enshrine in law a permanent ban on Arab citizenship. They proved that racists are too stupid for politics: no government can be formed without the small Islamic party tipping the balance. Netanyahu and Bennett both realised that, but Smotrich’s people are too stubborn for their own good.
- Only the Communists voted in accordance with their conscience against the racist law. In short, almost all parties (except the Communists) kicked themselves in the groin, and hard!
Let us at least hope that these long-suffering couples can be reunited. “We shall have fifteen thousand applications for citizenship tomorrow”, wailed Ms Ayelet Shaked, the Interior Minister and member of Naftali Bennett’s party. Alas, she is likely to deny these applications, or to let them languish for years. For the very idea of the law, keeping Jews in and Palestinians out, is still the one thing that all the Jewish parties of Israel, left or right, agree upon. Just ahead of the final vote, Foreign Minister and alternate Prime Minister Yair Lapid tweeted this:
There’s no need to hide from the purpose of the law. It’s one of the tools meant to secure a Jewish majority in Israel. Israel is the nation-state of the Jewish people, and our goal is that it will have a Jewish majority.
Americans and Europeans are not allowed to harbour such sentiments. When the Italian prime minister tried to stop the massive illegal immigration of Africans, he was called ‘Nazi’, sued for ‘kidnapping’ (actually, stopping transgressors) and lost his job. In the US, Americans are obliged to welcome illegals. Jews are on the frontlines fighting for population displacement in Europe and the US, while their brethren in Israel are going the opposite way.
A similar process is taking place now in Poland, where the government is trying to impose a 30-year statute of limitations for claims of property. Yair Lapid demanded that the Poles refrain from such a step until the last house has been returned to the Jews. So Poles are not entitled to the same consideration Lapid allows Jews in Israel. Before WW2, Jews owned an immense amount of real estate in Poland. Some of the property was lost during the war, other properties were nationalised by the post-war Communist government. Now, Israel and the US are demanding that Poland restore all Jewish property to the heirs of the previous owners; and in their absence, it must be handed over to the ‘Jewish Community’. Israel and the US are angry about Poland’s 30-year statute of limitations. Jewish rights must be preserved forever. But if a Palestinian’s house was taken over by Jews after 1948, his house has become Jewish forever. There is no way to return it to the previous Gentile owner. This is the law of the Jewish state, and the US is happy with it. The laws for Jews and Gentiles are completely different, even within the great American Empire.
This difference is felt strongly in Belarus, the state that suffered the greatest losses in WW2. 25% of its population perished during the war. While Jews received billions in reparations from Germany, Belarus got only sanctions. These sanctions continue to suffocate this small (10 million population) North European state. The West has banned flights to and from Belarus; its exports and imports are blocked in an effort to collapse its economy and buy on the cheap its industry and resources. Speaking on their National Day, Lukashenko said, referring to the actions of Nazi Germany during WW2, that there had been a “Holocaust of the Belarusian people”. But who counts Gentiles? “We didn’t want to offend anyone and so we came to be insulted; while the Jews have succeeded in bringing the whole world to its knees before them and no one will dare to raise their voice and deny their Holocaust”. It is hard to argue against President Lukashenko, while at the same time US President Biden actually kneels before the Israeli president.
Israel Shamir can be reached at adam@israelshamir.net