by Caitlin Johnstone, Caitlin Johnstone:
As Maya Angelou said, when someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.
One problem Israel keeps running into is how the institutionalized dehumanization of Palestinians which keeps the apartheid state operational also causes Israelis to say things that non-Israelis will find extremely shocking, which hurts Israel’s PR interests.
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We saw this illustrated in a recent New Yorker interview with Daniella Weiss, a leader of the push to build illegal Israeli settlements on Palestinian land. Weiss stated frankly and unapologetically that she supports apartheid, that she doesn’t believe Palestinians should have any sovereignty anywhere, that she doesn’t believe Palestinians should have voting rights, that she wants the population of Gaza to be replaced by Israeli settlements, and that she is untroubled by the killing of children in Gaza because she feels it’s being done in the interests of Israeli children.
Asked where the Palestinians in Gaza should go, Weiss replied, “To Sinai, to Egypt, to Turkey.” When the interviewer said the Palestinians are not Egyptian or Turkish, she contended that “The Ukrainians are not French, but when the war started they went to many countries.”
To the question “When you see Palestinian children dying, what’s your emotional reaction as a human being?”, Weiss answered, “I go by a very basic human law of nature. My children are prior to the children of the enemy, period. They are first. My children are first.”
Asked if she believes human rights are not universal and should not apply equally to everyone, Weiss replied “That’s right.”
But perhaps the most revealing statement Weiss made was her entirely truthful explanation of what drives the Israeli push to colonize Palestinian land:
“In Israel, there’s a lot of support for settlements, and this is why there have been right-wing governments for so many years. The world, especially the United States, thinks there is an option for a Palestinian state, and, if we continue to build communities, then we block the option for a Palestinian state. We want to close the option for a Palestinian state, and the world wants to leave the option open. It’s a very simple thing to understand.”
That one paragraph right there will teach you more about the present-day realities of the Israel-Palestine conflict than an entire year of watching CNN. It’s horrid, and it’s jarring to hear it spoken out loud in a favorable way… but it’s true.
This sort of thing has been happening for years. Israelis who’ve been marinating in a self-validating echo chamber of Zionist ideology which dehumanizes Palestinians and normalizes oppression and abuse don’t think twice about saying things that make Israel look bad on the world stage, because to them it’s just the standard status quo way of looking at things.
In 2021 a settler from New York named Yaakov Fauci made headlines around the world with his candid statements to a Palestinian family whose Sheikh Jarrah home he was squatting in.
Fauci, apparently fully aware that he was being filmed, famously replied to the family’s complaints that he was stealing their home by shamelessly telling them, “If I don’t steal it, someone else will steal it.”
And the thing is, he wasn’t lying. He was truthfully describing an abusive dynamic in apartheid Israel where Palestinians are being forced out of their homes in order to control ethnic demographics and advance the agenda outlined above by Daniella Weiss. If he’d been a trained propagandist for the Israeli state he never would have made such comments on camera, but because he was just a Zionism-indocrinated member of the Israeli public he saw no reason to hold his tongue.
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