A voice outside the embrace of Israeli tyranny

The time will come later to present many pieces of evidence regarding the behavior of most of what is known as the “Israeli left” during the fierce war that has been ongoing for more than a month on the Gaza Strip, in terms of people and geographical space. These are pieces of evidence that have been proven again, among countless times, as a previous judgment on this left, leading to its deviation, first of all, from the universal values of the left, which more and more consolidates the fact that this “left” can be called by any name, except to be called a left according to those universal concepts. .

At the level of the relationship with the Palestinians in the recent period, it can be said that the lightness with which the “Israeli Left” accepted the excuses of the former Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Barak, when he was head of the (left-wing) Labor Party, regarding his failure in the Syrian-Lebanese negotiation track and the Palestinian track, in 2017. 2000, and the consequences of all of that, were the first testimony to his fragility. What later became clear, according to the bare facts, is that the majority of Israelis who take pride in bearing the title of “leftists” are nothing more than “doves tweeting within the Zionist flock,” not “doves with universal values.” They support the peace process with the Palestinians from the standpoint of pragmatic considerations that refer only to what falls within the framework of the interest of the Jewish people, such as the demographic balance, ensuring Israel’s security, or advancing its economic prosperity. As for the type that supports peace with universal moral motives, it has become a rare type that does not seek refuge in the embrace of blind patriotism, nor in situations of national consensus. It may soon be proven that this rare type is diminishing after this war, but without losing the value of what was issued during it, which this article will stop at, because it contains something that sheds light on a current process even from the perspectives of space and time.

While media reports talk about an unprecedented campaign of intimidation and harassment against Palestinians in the 1948 territories, it is also worth paying attention to a parallel campaign against members of that rare breed of the Israeli left, including researcher and academic Nurit Bild Elhanan, who has completed numerous studies on educational curricula in Israeli schools. For the most part, I used the metaphor of gardening to address the discourse of victims and authority in textbooks circulating in Israel, and how this discourse works, systematically, to legitimize the occupation of Palestine. According to these researches, this discourse instills in people the fear of the goyim (the Gentiles), consolidates the principle of the sovereignty of the Jewish majority, and contributes to the formation of the Israeli identity based on plunder and plunder.

Hours after posting a message in an internal WhatsApp group that included lecturers at the college where she teaches, Bild Elhanan received an email informing her of her dismissal on the pretext of “expressing support for and justifying Hamas’ terrorist acts.” In detail, Bild Elhanan commented in that group on a film that was published, which compared the attack by fighters from the military wing of the Hamas movement on military sites and settlements adjacent to the Gaza Strip to Nazi practices, by quoting a saying by the French philosopher Sartre, which appeared in an introduction he wrote to one of Frantz Fanon’s books, by paraphrasing it. In line with the context of the Israeli occupation. It said: “After all those long years in which the occupier’s neck was strangled under the heels of your sandals, and he was suddenly given the opportunity to raise his eyes to the light, what look do you think you would have seen there?” (Originally, the word black was used instead of the word occupier.) “This outlook is exactly what we saw on October 7, 2023,” she added.

But it seems that what aroused the most anger among the tyrants of Israel, as Bild Elhanan describes them, is its assertion that comparing the actions of Hamas to the actions of Nazism is not correct at all, as the latter was the ideology of an authority that decided to exterminate minorities under its rule, and this situation does not exist in our case, because we are not under Hamas authority never.