person:naomi chazan

Israel’s Message to U.S. Jews: If You’re Against the Occupation, You’re Not Welcome
Libby Lenkinski Sep 20, 2017 4:39 PM
▻http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/1.813422
With the Jewish Agency now surrendering to the extremist right-wing witch-hunt, more and more of Israel’s institutions are closing their doors to U.S. Jewish progressives. We must refuse to be excluded

(...) This week the Jewish Agency for Israel withdrew its funding for Achvat Amim, a Masa-funded program overseen by Hashomer Hatzair based on spurious allegations by a shadowy group called Ad Kan.

Ad Kan is an arm of the most extreme elements of Israel’s settler movement. It has been called “Israel’s volunteer thought police,” a group that recruits Israelis to become citizen-spies, reporting on their fellow Israelis in a two-bit McCarthyist attempt to weed out anyone who doesn’t fit their vision of an Israel for Jews only.

Armed with hidden cameras and microphones, Ad Kan members lie about their identities, join left-wing organizations and try to capture “gotcha” moments with members. Other times they scrutinize and “investigate” individual activists and then offer their deceptive material to Israel’s mainstream news.

In this case, Ad Kan was incensed that Jews would participate in nonviolent activism alongside Palestinians in the West Bank. So they got to work identifying individual activists to name, shame, and blame.

This is the settler-Right’s tried and true tactic: guilt by association. Ad Kan and other extreme right-wing organizations like it understand that when the public conversation focuses on how policies like the occupation affect people’s lives, they lose. So instead, they create bogeymen and come up with convoluted chains of association among them to imply some nefarious cabal.

Sound familiar? These are the same types of fantasies about power and treason that anti-Semites used for generations to target Jews. It’s eerily similar to the implication of the cartoon posted by Yair Netanyahu to Facebook – for which he has been embraced by neo-Nazis in America.

Ad Kan and its settler-Right allies, like Im Tirtzu and the Samaria Settlers’ Committee, have been reading from the same anti-Semitic playbook for some time. In 2009, Im Tirtzu created a campaign designed to topple the New Israel Fund using imagery of NIF’s then-president, Naomi Chazan, with a horn on her head.

The attacks on NIF by Im Tirtzu and others did nothing to hamper our activities to promote democracy and equality for all Israelis. But this time, guilt-by-association tactics led the Jewish Agency to withdraw funding from a Hashomer Hatzair-affiliated volunteer program.

This is a disappointing surrender to the settler-Right, and not just because of its underhanded and dishonest tactics. These decisions determine what kind of Zionism is acceptable in today’s Israel, and the answer is far narrower than ever before in Israel’s history. The incremental witch-hunting that attempts to mark and silence undesirable elements often starts in organizations like Ad Kan. But dropping the Hashomer Hatzair program is just the latest example of how these actions influence policy.

There can be no mistake: the Jewish Agency canceled its support of Achvat Amim because of the leaders’ progressive political perspective – though plenty of right-wing programs receive Jewish Agency support.(...)

#inter_israéliens

Israel
Nouvelle réflexion sur l’impossibilité de voir émerger un jour un Etat palestinien. Naomi Chazan, ancienne vice-président de la Knesset, est convaincue que si un Etat binational venait à voir le jour, il est douteux qu’Israël puisse continuer longtemps à se prévaloir d’être la seule démocratie du Proche Orient. D’ici là, la colonisation des territoires palestiniens - phénomène irréversible - aura contredit l’idéal sioniste fait de liberté, justice et paix. Le gouvernement Netanyahou prouve par sa politique que l’ultranationalisme juif et le post-sionisme sont les deux faces d’une même monnaie. Naomi Chazan énumère les techniques mis en œuvre par le gouvernement actuel pour consolider la domination juive sur l’ensemble de tous les territoires, israéliens et palestiniens.

The Times of Israël
▻http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/israels-new-post-zionists

Israel’s new post-Zionists
NAOMI CHAZAN June 2, 2013, 2:44 pm 14

Forty-six years after the Six Day War of 1967, the continued Israeli occupation of the West Bank no longer appears temporary. These territories, with the exception of Jerusalem, have not been annexed; they have, however, gradually become an integral – albeit decidedly unequal – part of Israel. A one-state reality is taking shape: one which flies in the face of the democratic and Jewish values of the founders of the state. The present government is the first in the country’s history that, by its dedication to making the current situation permanent, is directly contravening the Zionist dream and replacing it with a messianic vision which leaves little room for “the precepts of liberty, justice and peace” or the ideals of “full social and political equality of all…citizens, without distinction of race, creed or sex,” embedded in Israel’s Declaration of Independence.

The third government of Binyamin Netanyahu, sworn in a few months ago, is also Israel’s most avowedly nationalist. Both its composition (it includes all the parties on the right of the political spectrum) and personal make-up underline its ethnocentric orientation. The prime minister’s own Likud, virtually devoid of the liberal followers of Jabotinsky (such as Dan Meridor, Benny Begin and Michael Eytan), is now represented by the likes of Moshe Feiglin, Danny Danon, Tzipi Hotobeli and Miri Regev – all declared one-staters. Naftali Bennett and his Jewish Home alliance are committed to the retention of the entire Land of Israel. Even the seemingly moderate Yair Lapid is proving to be a sheep in wolves’ clothing. Together, under Netanyahu’s guidance, they are systematically demonstrating that Jewish ultra-nationalism and post-Zionism are two sides of the same coin.

Five techniques are being used by the government and its allied institutions, think-tanks and NGOs to further the agenda which will solidify a Jewish-dominated bi-national reality. (…)
#occupation, #one_state, #zionist-dream, #Netanyahu, #Meridor, #Begin, #Eytan, #Feiglin, #Danon, #Hotobeli, #Regev, #Bennett, #Lapid, #procrastination, #compartmentalization, #promotion, #vilification, #transformation #Peres, #World_Economic_Forum, #Kerry, #negotiations, #Arab_Peace_Initiative, #two_state_solution, #settlements, #self_determination, #zionism, #post_zionism