For Years, Israel’s Leaders Have Cultivated Ethnic Hatred. This Is on Them | Opinion
▻https://www.newsweek.com/years-israels-leaders-have-cultivated-ethnic-hatred-this-them-opinion-1591
No one was truly surprised when Hamas and Israel resumed vicious fighting again this week, trading rockets and air strikes, generally terrorizing Israeli and Palestinian civilians alike.
But something more insidious is happening: Perhaps inevitably, though still shockingly, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has bled into Israel’s cities and citizens. [...]
Both Jews and Arabs have been attacked and have done the attacking. In a snapshot of the last 48 hours, it would be hard to assign blame.
But in Israel, one party is in control: Jewish Israelis have the most influential pulpits in the country—the national government, prime time news—and they—we—control myriad social institutions from the army to the education system, defining the worldview of Israelis from the start.
After recently watching the Oscar-nominated film Quo Vadis, Aida, about the genocide perpetrated by Bosnian Serb forces against Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica in 1995, the greatest question of that horrible war came roaring back to my mind: How did people who lived side by side, who shared schools and communities, wake up one day and kill each other?
The answer is that they didn’t wake up one day. Teaching and cultivating ethnic rage takes time. And for years in Israel, the leadership entrusted with serving its citizens has been pumping hatred into the air.
It’s not one person. In 2009, Avigdor Lieberman ran a political campaign with the slogan “No loyalty, no citizenship!” explicitly referring to Arab citizens. From that year, against a backdrop of structural discrimination against Arab-Palestinian citizens from the start of statehood, Lieberman’s party, under Netanyahu’s Likud government, passed a salvo of laws or debated bills targeting Arab Palestinian Israelis.
Since then, the prominence of racist Israeli Jewish politicians, and the brazenness of their political programs, has only increased.