Al Jazeera has removed this article from its website. Al Abunimah reports: “Massad told The Electronic Intifada that he had ‘received confirmation’ from his editor at Al Jazeera English that ‘management pulled the article.’ OK. I guess that means I’ll have to repost the whole article.

By Joseph Massad

Jewish opponents of Zionism understood the movement since its early age as one that shared the precepts of anti-Semitism in its diagnosis of what gentile Europeans called the “Jewish Question”. What galled anti-Zionist Jews the most, however, was that Zionism also shared the “solution” to the Jewish Question that anti-Semites had always advocated, namely the expulsion of Jews from Europe.

It was the Protestant Reformation with its revival of the Hebrew Bible that would link the modern Jews of Europe to the ancient Hebrews of Palestine, a link that the philologists of the 18th century would solidify through their discovery of the family of “Semitic” languages, including Hebrew and Arabic. Whereas Millenarian Protestants insisted that contemporary Jews, as descendants of the ancient Hebrews, must leave Europe to Palestine to expedite the second coming of Christ, philological discoveries led to the labelling of contemporary Jews as “Semites”. The leap that the biological sciences of race and heredity would make in the 19th century of considering contemporary European Jews racial descendants of the ancient Hebrews would, as a result, not be a giant one.

Basing themselves on the connections made by anti-Jewish Protestant Millenarians, secular European figures saw the political potential of “restoring” Jews to Palestine abounded in the 19th century. Less interested in expediting the second coming of Christ as were the Millenarians, these secular politicians, from Napoleon Bonaparte to British foreign secretary Lord Palmerston (1785-1865) to Ernest Laharanne, the private secretary of Napoleon III in the 1860s, sought to expel the Jews of Europe to Palestine in order to set them up as agents of European imperialism in Asia. Their call would be espoused by many “anti-Semites”, a new label chosen by European anti-Jewish racists after its invention in 1879 by a minor Viennese journalist by the name of Wilhelm Marr, who issued a political programme titled The Victory of Judaism over Germanism. Marr was careful to decouple anti-Semitism from the history of Christian hatred of Jews on the basis of religion, emphasising, in line with Semitic philology and racial theories of the 19th century, that the distinction to be made between Jews and Aryans was strictly racial. Continue reading →

Geoffrey Wheatcroft writes: Over the last months before his much-lamented death in August 2010, Tony Judt talked at length with Timothy Snyder, his friend and fellow historian. Their conversations, published after Judt died as Thinking the Twentieth Century, were about “the politics of ideas,” the subject of the book on which Judt had embarked after Postwar, his splendid history of Europe since V-E Day, but which he knew he would not live to write. Some of these political ideas had affected him personally, in particular Zionism. As a schoolboy in London and a Cambridge undergraduate, Judt had been not only a committed supporter but also an energetic activist in Dror, a small socialist-Zionist group. He spent summers working on a kibbutz and in 1967 flew to Israel in the hour of peril as the Six-Day War began.

The story of Judt’s disenchantment with Israel and Zionism is well known, culminating in a 2003 essay in the New York Review of Books in which he concluded that Zionism, as a version of late nineteenth-century nationalism, had itself become anachronistic in a twenty-first century of open borders and multiple identities. In Thinking the Twentieth Century, Judt talks again at some length about these questions, and there is one particularly arresting passage. Despite his own early indoctrination in the socialist variant of Zionism, “I came over time to appreciate the rigor and clear-headed realism of Jabotinsky’s criticisms.”

Today there are perhaps not many readers of the New York Times or the Washington Post, let alone most other Americans, even if they warmly support Israel, who could identify Vladimir Jabotinsky by name. “Jabo” died in 1940 at a training camp near New York City and might seem a remote historical figure. And yet, as a South African historian once wrote, although his pages told of distant events, “they are also about today.” While such essays as Akiva Eldar’s fascinating “Israel’s New Politics and the Fate of Palestine” in this magazine give much insight into the here and now, that in itself cannot be understood without the there and then. What Jabotinsky once said and did is acutely relevant now, ninety years after he founded his “Revisionist” New Zionist Organization.

He may have died long ago, but his soul went marching on. In 1946–1948, the Irgun, the Revisionist armed force — “terrorists” to the British and the New York Times at the time — practiced violence against British and Arabs. It was led by Menachem Begin, who in 1977 would become the first Israeli prime minister from the Right, ending almost three decades of Labor hegemony. Two more recent leading Israeli politicians, Ehud Olmert and Tzipi Livni, a former prime minister and a one-time foreign minister, respectively, are children of Irgun activists. Jabo’s portrait hangs at Likud party meetings, and Benjamin Netanyahu, the present Likud leader and prime minister, has a direct personal connection with him. As for the Jewish Americans who continue to support the Jewish state, they may never have read a word of him, but they might be troubled if they did. Jabo is very much about today. [Continue reading…]

Ian S. Lustick asks: How close is Israel to pariah status? Quite close. Americans know that ratings for Congress are now in the single digits: below traffic jams, colonoscopies and cockroaches, though still above North Korea and telemarketers. If Israel were included in that survey it would of course do better than Congress — among Americans. But not in the world at large.

In a 2003 European Union-sponsored poll, Israel was seen as more dangerous to world peace than any other country. In 2006, an Israeli government poll conducted in 35 countries found Israel had the worst public image in every category it tested. In 2012, the BBC reported that 50% of 24,090 people polled worldwide thought Israel had a “mostly negative” impact on the world, tied with North Korea and exceeded only by Pakistan and Iran.

Worried about “delegitimization” as an “existential threat,” the Israeli government and its U.S. friends have funded a host of rebranding PR efforts. But Israel’s image has suffered more from repeated outrages to the world’s sense of fairness than from bad public relations.

Israeli leaders have repeatedly threatened to attack Iran, a signatory to the nuclear nonproliferation treaty, for developing nuclear technology with weapons potential, even as they refuse to join the NPT or acknowledge Israel’s own immense nuclear force. Israeli governments have launched several onslaughts against the Gaza Strip and Lebanon, inflicting collateral damage to innocents that has hugely exceeded Israeli casualties. In response to the United Nation’s decision to recognize Palestine as an observer state, the Israeli government announced radical expansion of Jewish settlement in sensitive areas of Jerusalem and the West Bank. Jews living in Palestine thousands of years ago are cited to justify a right of 21st century Jews to “return,” while Palestinian demands to return after 65 years of exile are deemed absurd.

Such policies and actions have shaped the international image of the Jewish state as defiant rather than courageous, belligerent rather than reasonable, dangerous rather than reliable.

Netanyahu and his allies can be blamed for many of Israel’s current excesses. But there are much deeper forces at work. One of them is the still-unrecognized reality of post-Zionism. Israel’s founding ideology has not adapted gradually to a changing world, and the American colossus has protected it from the consequences. When adaptation cannot occur gradually, it occurs suddenly. It is wrenching and disorienting. This is the sort of change in store for Israel. [Continue reading…]

Joseph Levine writes: I was raised in a religious Jewish environment, and though we were not strongly Zionist, I always took it to be self-evident that “Israel has a right to exist.” Now anyone who has debated the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will have encountered this phrase often. Defenders of Israeli policies routinely accuse Israel’s critics of denying her right to exist, while the critics (outside of a small group on the left, where I now find myself) bend over backward to insist that, despite their criticisms, of course they affirm it. The general mainstream consensus seems to be that to deny Israel’s right to exist is a clear indication of anti-Semitism (a charge Jews like myself are not immune to), and therefore not an option for people of conscience.

Over the years I came to question this consensus and to see that the general fealty to it has seriously constrained open debate on the issue, one of vital importance not just to the people directly involved — Israelis and Palestinians — but to the conduct of our own foreign policy and, more important, to the safety of the world at large. My view is that one really ought to question Israel’s right to exist and that doing so does not manifest anti-Semitism. The first step in questioning the principle, however, is to figure out what it means.

One problem with talking about this question calmly and rationally is that the phrase “right to exist” sounds awfully close to “right to life,” so denying Israel its right to exist sounds awfully close to permitting the extermination of its people. In light of the history of Jewish persecution, and the fact that Israel was created immediately after and largely as a consequence of the Holocaust, it isn’t surprising that the phrase “Israel’s right to exist” should have this emotional impact. But as even those who insist on the principle will admit, they aren’t claiming merely the impermissibility of exterminating Israelis. So what is this “right” that many uphold as so basic that to question it reflects anti-Semitism and yet is one that I claim ought to be questioned?

The key to the interpretation is found in the crucial four words that are often tacked on to the phrase “Israel’s right to exist” — namely, “… as a Jewish state.” As I understand it, the principle that Israel has a right to exist as a Jewish state has three parts: first, that Jews, as a collective, constitute a people in the sense that they possess a right to self-determination; second, that a people’s right to self-determination entails the right to erect a state of their own, a state that is their particular people’s state; and finally, that for the Jewish people the geographical area of the former Mandatory Palestine, their ancestral homeland, is the proper place for them to exercise this right to self-determination.

The claim then is that anyone who denies Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state is guilty of anti-Semitism because they are refusing to grant Jews the same rights as other peoples possess. If indeed this were true, if Jews were being singled out in the way many allege, I would agree that it manifests anti-Jewish bias. But the charge that denying Jews a right to a Jewish state amounts to treating the Jewish people differently from other peoples cannot be sustained. [Continue reading…]

Mustafa Akyol writes: Last week, during a visit to Vienna, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan initiated an international controversy by condemning “Zionism,” albeit in passing. “As is the case for Zionism, anti-Semitism and fascism,” he said, “it is inevitable that Islamophobia be considered a crime against humanity.”

Soon objections came. U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon found the comment “unfortunate” and “hurtful and divisive.” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was expectedly sharper, by defining Erdoğan’s words as “a dark and mendacious statement, the likes of which we thought had passed from the world.”

The issue surfaced during the U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry’s trip to Turkey as well. Kerry, on his first trip to a Muslim country since taking office, found welcoming hosts in Ankara, but he noted that he found Erdoğan’s comments “objectionable.”

But why did Erdoğan create such a fuss? And what did he really mean?

As a longtime observer of the Turkish prime minister, here is my humble advice for anyone who would like to find an answer to such questions: Erdoğan is a very Turkish politician. He, in other words, thinks and speaks in very local terms, not international ones. Therefore when he speaks of “Zionism,” what he has in mind is what most Turks have in mind, rather than what Ban Ki-moon, Netanyahu and Kerry have in theirs.

And there is a big gap between these two. Zionism, by international definitions, is a form of Jewish nationalism that is focused on founding and securing a Jewish state in what Jewish sources call “the Land of Israel.” Of course, Arabs call the same land “Palestine,” and the ones who used to live there, the Palestinians, have conflicted with Zionism from the beginning. In return, Zionists have taken various attitudes against Palestinians, ranging from moderate views which hope to co-exist with the Arabs to radical views which want to “transfer” all of them to other countries, which is a euphemism for ethnic cleansing. [Continue reading…]

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, in a speech on Wednesday at the UN’s Alliance of Civilizations forum said:

Unfortunately the modern world has not passed the test when it comes to Syria. In the last two years, we have seen close to 70,000 people lose their lives, and every single day we see innocent children, women, civilians, killed. And the fact that the world has not reacted to this situation seriously injures the sense of justice. In the same way, rising racism in Europe is a serious, problematic area, vis-à-vis the Alliance of Civilizations project.

In addition to indifference vis-à-vis the Muslim countries, we also see harsh, offending, insulting behavior towards Muslims who live in countries other than their own, and this continues to be an unconscionable act that has been ongoing around the world. We should be striving to better understand the beliefs of others but instead we see that people act based on prejudice and exclude others and despise them. And that is why it is necessary that we must consider — just like Zionism or anti-Semitism or fascism — Islamophobia as a crime against humanity.

Not surprisingly, the only part of that statement that has drawn attention is to equate Zionism with fascism. That’s a claim that never goes down well.

Max Fisher writes:

Does condemning Zionism make you anti-Semitic? Not in Erdogan’s mind, it seems. That’s not a question for me to parse, but it’s worth noting that a lot of people seem to perceive any condemnation of Zionism as a condemnation of, if not all Jews, then certainly the ones living in Israel.

Not a question to parse? Meaning, that’s not territory into which a humble blogger at the Washington Post wants to venture. But let’s be clear, this really isn’t such a perilous issue that it can’t be clarified with a few facts.

Firstly, it might come as news to Fisher and some others, but a significant proportion of Jewish Israelis are not Zionists. Neither of course are the 20% of Israel’s population who are not Jewish.

But what is Zionism? The neatest definition I’ve heard came from an American rabbi at J Street: Zionism means having a country where Jews are “in charge.” (The rabbi describing Zionism this way seemed to think it perfectly reasonable that many Jews would want to live in a country run by Jews.) Liberal Zionists like to characterize this as a form of self-determination — a desire for Jews not to be ruled over by non-Jews. But this skirts around the utterly obvious and inevitable consequence of Jewish rule: that it involves non-Jews be ruled over by Jews. In other words, it is the practice of Jewish supremacy.

Zionists never tire of warning about “demographic threats.” In the simplest terms, the demographic threat would become insurmountable if Jews became a minority in the territory controlled by the state of Israel. Still, the demographic threat looms large even before that point is reached.

What this concern with a demographic threat makes clear is that Zionism is untenable in a state where Jews and non-Jews are treated as equals.

Demography hinges on numbers. How large does the Jewish majority need to be to sustain a Jewish state, and how many of them need to be Zionists?

Does Zionism’s intrinsic refusal to treat human beings as equals, constitute a crime against humanity? I’m not sure because that’s a technical term with a legal application. What should be beyond debate is that Zionism is a form a racism.

Yet Zionism enjoys a unique status: anyone who criticizes it gets swiftly vilified by the Western political and media establishment and few people even have the courage to question its meaning.

Tony Karon writes: Mowing the lawn. That’s how some Israeli securocrats described their recent air-strike campaign in Gaza. Periodic bombardment won’t eliminate Hamas or resolve the conflict, but they hope to re-establish a temporary deterrent against militant rocket fire.

Callousness aside, the metaphor shows that Israel has no political strategy for dealing with the challenge posed by Hamas in Gaza. Nor, for that matter, does it have any strategy for dealing with the efforts of President Mahmoud Abbas, who tomorrow takes his quest for UN recognition of Palestinian statehood to the General Assembly.

The Israelis may not drop bombs on Ramallah, but neither have they offered Mr Abbas any credible pathway for ending the occupation through diplomatic petitioning.

Pathological as it may seem, Israel’s leaders are following a long-term survival strategy based on blasting the Palestinians into temporary submission, while strengthening their defences for a renewal of hostilities they see as inevitable.

On the wall of prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office hangs a portrait of Zeev Jabotinsky, ideological forefather of his Likud Party. In his 1923 pamphlet The Iron Wall, Jabotinsky warned that it was Israel’s fate to be perpetually at war. “That the Arabs of the Land of Israel should willingly come to an agreement with us is beyond all hopes and dreams,” Jabotinsky wrote, because native peoples have always resisted the arrival of foreign settlers to claim their land. “As long as there is a spark of hope that they can get rid of us, they will not sell these hopes, not for any kind of sweet words or tasty morsels, because they are not a rabble but a nation, perhaps somewhat tattered, but still living.”

As a result, Jabotinsky warned, Israel would have to be created unilaterally, behind an impregnable “iron wall” of military force – only once it had been brutally demonstrated to to the Palestinians that resistance was futile and that they had been utterly defeated, he argued, would they be willing to accept the diminished status Israel could then offer them. “A living people makes such enormous concessions on such fateful questions only when there is no hope left.”

In that spirit, Israeli military doctrine has long rested on aggressive “deterrence”, unleashing overwhelming force against any challengers. From the raids on nationalist Palestinian villages that made Moshe Dayan an Israeli hero in 1948 to Ariel Sharon’s Unit 101, which bludgeoned Palestinian villages suspected of housing fedayeen fighters in the 1950s, “deterrence” has meant imposing a prohibitive cost on the entire Palestinian population for any resistance. The same logic has driven recent Israeli policy on Gaza. [Continue reading…]

Miko Peled, author of The General’s Son, whose father was the renowned Israeli general Matti Peled, speaking in Seattle, October 1, 2012.

Henry Siegman writes: The Middle East peace process is dead. More precisely, the two-state solution is dead; the peace process may well go on indefinitely if this Israeli government has its way.

The two-state solution did not die a natural death. It was strangulated as Jewish settlements in the West Bank were expanded and deepened by successive Israeli governments in order to prevent the emergence of a viable Palestinian state. The settlement project has achieved its intended irreversibility, not only because of its breadth and depth but also because of the political clout of the settlers and their supporters within Israel who have both ideological and economic stakes in the settlements’ permanence.

The question can no longer be whether the current impasse may lead to a one-state outcome; it has already done so. There is also no longer any question whether this government’s policies will lead to what can legitimately be called apartheid, as former prime minister Ehud Olmert and other Israeli leaders predicted they would. Palestinians live in a one-state reality, deprived of all rights, and enclosed in enclaves surrounded by military checkpoints, separation walls, roadblocks, barbed-wire barriers and a network of “for-Jews-only” highways.

Until now, Israel’s colonial project has been successfully disguised by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s pretense that he is pursuing a resumption of talks for a two-state solution with President Mahmoud Abbas. It has also been strengthened by the pretense of President Obama and EU leaders that they believe a resumed peace process can still produce a Palestinian state. But these pretenses cannot be sustained for long, if only because of the inability of settlers to restrain triumphalist pronouncements of their achievement of Greater Israel and their defeat of the Palestinians’ hopes for statehood—as Dani Dayan did recently in the op-ed pages of the New York Times and Haaretz, in which he proclaimed that because of the settlements’ irreversibility there will be only one sovereignty west of the Jordan River.

But paradoxically, the triumph of the settlement project contains the seeds of its own reversal—or of the demise of the Zionist project. [Continue reading…]

Marc Zell, an American-born settler living in Tekoa in the occupied territories who was formerly the law partner of neoconservative Doug Feith, in an interview with Philip Weiss presents what could be called Zen Zionism — the paradoxical idea that the only way Jews can continue making a positive contribution to the world is by being able to live separately from non-Jews.

The Financial Times reports: Yitzhak Shamir, who has died at the age of 96, is most likely to be remembered as a terrorist against British rule in Palestine during the 1940s and as a man whose aggressive Jewish settlement policy on Arab lands may have stymied Middle East peace for a generation.

Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, said Shamir “belonged to the generation of giants that established the state of Israel and fought for the freedom of the Jewish people in its land”.

In the New York Times, Joel Brinkley writes: Under [Shamir’s] leadership [in 1942 the Stern Gang] began a campaign of what it called personal terror, assassinating top British military and government officers, often gunning them down in the street.

To the Jewish public, and even to the other Jewish underground groups, Mr. Shamir’s gang was “lacking even a spark of humanity and Jewish conscience,” Israel Rokach, the mayor of Tel Aviv, said in 1944 after Stern Gang gunmen shot three British police officers on the streets of his city.

Years later, however, Mr. Shamir contended that it had been more humane to assassinate specific military or political figures than to attack military installations and possibly kill innocent people, as the other underground groups did. Besides, he once said, “a man who goes forth to take the life of another whom he does not know must believe only one thing: that by his act he will change the course of history.”

Several histories of the period have asserted that he masterminded a failed attempt to kill the British high commissioner, Sir Harold MacMichael, and the killing in Cairo of Britain’s minister of state for the Middle East, Lord Moyne. When Mr. Shamir was asked about these episodes in later years, his denials held a certain evasive tone.

It was during his time in the underground that Mr. Shamir met Shulamit Levy, who was his courier and confidante, he wrote in his autobiography, “Summing Up.” The couple married in 1944, meeting at a location in Jerusalem and gathering people off the street as witnesses, said their daughter, Gilada Diamant. After a hasty ceremony in deep cover, each departed immediately for a separate city.

In addition to his daughter, Mr. Shamir is survived by a son, Yair, five grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren. His wife died last year.

For a brief period after World War II, the three major Jewish underground groups cooperated — until the bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem on July 22, 1946. Scores of people were killed, and Mr. Shamir was among those arrested and exiled to an internment camp in Eritrea. But he escaped a few months later and took refuge in France. He arrived in the newly independent Israel in May 1948.

Mr. Shamir was a pariah of sorts to the new Labor government of Israel, which regarded him as a terrorist. Rebuffed in his efforts to work in the government, he drifted from one small job to another until 1955, when he finally found a government agency that appreciated his past: the Mossad, Israel’s intelligence service.

President Obama: “Yitzhak Shamir dedicated his life to the State of Israel. From his days working for Israel’s independence to his service as Prime Minister, he strengthened Israel’s security and advanced the partnership between the United States and Israel. Our thoughts and prayers are with his family and the people of Israel.”

Ynet reports on a “tourist attraction” in the West Bank settlement block of Gush Etzion where visitors from the U.S. and around the world are taught by former IDF soldiers how to kill “terrorists.”

'First she cried, then she fired'

Michel Brown, 40, a Miami banker, chose to take his wife and three children to the range with the purpose of “teaching them values.”

Upon entering the range, his five-year-old daughter, Tamara, bursts into tears. A half hour later, she is holding a gun and shooting clay bullets like a pro.

“This is part of their education,” Michel says as he proudly watches his daughter. “They should know where they come from and also feel some action.”

Sharon Gat, the range’s manager, says all the instructors at the site have served in elite IDF units.

“This is a special program created due to popular demand,” he says. “Travelers from all over the world come here to meet former combat troops and hear stories about elite units. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime experience.”

“We heard on the news about shootings in the West Bank,” the mother, Olga, says. “We came to see it in person.”

Her son, Jacob, 24, puts down his rifle and exclaims: “This is an awesome experience. I learned how to stop a terrorist and how to rescue hostages. Now, when I find myself in distress, I will know how to deal.”

Davidi Pearl, who heads the Gush Etzion Regional Council, notes that this kind of experience turns the district into a world-famous “tourist gem.”

At the end of the thrill-filled day, the tourists get a diploma indicating they “completed a basic shooting course in Israel.”

“Boom, boom,” the 13-year-old Riley mutters on the way out of the range.

“Boom, boom!” Jacob responds, knowingly.

Haaretz reports: A former Israeli soldier, who was residing in the Deheishe refugee camp near Bethlehem, was recently arrested by Palestinian security forces at Israel’s request.

Born in the Soviet Union, Andrey Pshenichnikov, 24, moved to Israel eleven years ago. Pshenichnikov served in the Israel Defense Forces, including an extra 18 months as a career soldier.

In the past three months, Andrey resided on Palestinian territory in the city of Bethlehem and in Deheishe refugee camp, “as part of the political struggle for Palestinian rights,” he explains.

“I wanted to prove that it’s possible to live with Palestinians, as long as you are not coming off as an enemy,” Pshenichnikov told Haaretz. He says that he wanted to “abandon the privileged Zionist life, and cross to the side of the occupied people as a sign of solidarity.”

Pshenichnikov stated he even tried to surrender his Israeli citizenship in order to apply for a Palestinian one; however, his request was not fulfilled.

Three months ago Pshenichnikov decided to move to Bethlehem, residing in Deheishe for the past three weeks. In this time, Pshenichnikov worked as a waiter and a construction worker in the Palestinian Authority.

Pshenichnikov’s new neighbors in Bethlehem accepted him, but moving to Deheishe was harder, since the “Arabs suspect any Israeli,” he says. However, Pshenichnikov says he never felt his life was threatened.

It seems Pshenichnikov went through a dramatic ideological shift over recent years, although he is not happy to admit it. “Since I arrived in Israel, I began analyzing reality, reading history. I cannot point at the exact moment, but there was a change,” he explained.

In the IDF, Pshenichnikov served as a computer programmer, but also performed guard duties in the West Bank. Today, Pshenichnikov rejects Zionism and says his views are close to those of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

Pshenichnikov’s stay in the West Bank ended three weeks ago, after Palestinian security forces arrested him, at Israel’s request. The Palestinian forces searched his home, interrogated him and transferred Pshenichnikov to the Israeli authorities. [Continue reading…]

As Israel implements a law aimed at stemming the flow of Africans entering the Jewish state from the south, Interior Minister Eli Yishai says Israel must protect itself from a demographic threat. Africans pose such a threat, Yishai says, because they don’t recognize that Israel belongs to “the white man.”

The new law will allow immigrants to be placed in a massive concentration camp (currently under construction) for up to three years.

Aryeh Eldad, one of Yishai’s colleagues in the Knesset, wants immigrants to be shot on sight if they attempt to cross the border.

Reuters reports: Tens of thousands of migrants, mostly from Sudan and Eritrea, have arrived in Israel in the past three years, and the pace has picked up to about 2,000 a month since December, for a total of 60,000 since the influx began.

Many migrants say they are fleeing persecution or war, but few have been granted formal asylum or refugee status, leaving many with temporary visas, subsisting on wages from menial jobs, swelling the ranks of the poor.

“The problem of the infiltrators must be solved and we will solve it,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said last month, in remarks aimed at calming protests against migrants in Tel Aviv.

Yishai, of the ultra-Orthodox Shas party, told the newspaper Maariv on Friday he saw the African arrivals, many of whom are Muslims or Christians, as a demographic threat.

“The infiltrators along with the Palestinians will quickly bring us to the end of the Zionist dream,” Yishai said, adding that Israel had its own health and welfare issues. “We don’t need to import more problems from Africa.”

“Most of those people arriving here are Muslims who think the country doesn’t belong to us, the white man,” Yishai said in the interview with Maariv.

Aryeh Eldad, a right-wing lawmaker, urged Israel to order its troops to open fire on any infiltrators who penetrated its borders, rather than only at those suspected of being armed.

Yousef Munayyer writes: I’m a Palestinian who was born in the Israeli town of Lod, and thus I am an Israeli citizen. My wife is not; she is a Palestinian from Nablus in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. Despite our towns being just 30 miles apart, we met almost 6,000 miles away in Massachusetts, where we attended neighboring colleges.

A series of walls, checkpoints, settlements and soldiers fill the 30-mile gap between our hometowns, making it more likely for us to have met on the other side of the planet than in our own backyard.

Never is this reality more profound than on our trips home from our current residence outside Washington.

Tel Aviv’s Ben-Gurion International Airport is on the outskirts of Lod (Lydda in Arabic), but because my wife has a Palestinian ID, she cannot fly there; she is relegated to flying to Amman, Jordan. If we plan a trip together — an enjoyable task for most couples — we must prepare for a logistical nightmare that reminds us of our profound inequality before the law at every turn.

Even if we fly together to Amman, we are forced to take different bridges, two hours apart, and endure often humiliating waiting and questioning just to cross into Israel and the West Bank. The laws conspire to separate us.

If we lived in the region, I would have to forgo my residency, since Israeli law prevents my wife from living with me in Israel. This is to prevent what Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu once referred to as “demographic spillover.” Additional Palestinian babies in Israel are considered “demographic threats” by a state constantly battling to keep a Jewish majority. (Of course, Israelis who marry Americans or any non-Palestinian foreigners are not subjected to this treatment.)

Last week marked Israel’s 64th year of independence; it is also when Palestinians commemorate the Nakba, or “catastrophe,” during which many of Palestine’s native inhabitants were turned into refugees.

In 1948, the Israeli brigade commander Yitzhak Rabin helped expel Lydda’s Palestinian population. Some 19,000 of the town’s 20,000 native Palestinian inhabitants were forced out. My grandparents were among the 1,000 to remain.

They were fortunate to become only internally displaced and not refugees. Years later my grandfather was able to buy back his own home — a cruel absurdity, but a better fate than that imposed on most of his neighbors, who were never permitted to re-establish their lives in their hometowns.

Three decades later, in October 1979, this newspaper reported that Israel barred Rabin from detailing in his memoir what he conceded was the “expulsion” of the “civilian population of Lod and Ramle, numbering some 50,000.” Rabin, who by then had served as prime minister, sought to describe how “it was essential to drive the inhabitants out.”

Two generations after the Nakba, the effect of discriminatory Israeli policies still reverberates. Israel still seeks to safeguard its image by claiming to be a bastion of democracy that treats its Palestinian citizens well, all the while continuing illiberal policies that target this very population. There is a long history of such discrimination.

It’s worth reading in full the 1979 report by David Shipler that Munayyer cites. The fact that Rabin’s account of Jews driving Palestinians from their homes at gun point was censored could be assumed to indicate that it was an account of unusual candor. But even if was such an account it was also an example of what is called in Hebrew yorim u’vochim — we shoot and we cry.

Rabin writes: “Great suffering was inflicted upon the men taking part in the eviction action. Soldiers of the Yiftach Brigade included youth-movement graduates, who had been inculcated with values such as international brotherhood and humaneness. The eviction went beyond the concepts they were used to.

“There were some fellows who refused to take part in the expulsion action. Prolonged propaganda activities were required after the action, to remove the bitterness of these youth-movement groups, and explain why we were obliged to undertake such a harsh and cruel action.”

At a time when Israeli leaders and Israel’s supporters frequently bemoan the fact that Israel is subject to harsh criticism, we are told that Israel is unfairly being singled out in a world where injustice is pervasive. Even so, there truly is something unique about the sentiment that Rabin and others describe.

Their message to the Palestinians is this: when you hurt, we empathize with your suffering so much that it hurts us too. We are not guilty of unfeeling brutality. Our brutality is garnished with sensitivity. Indeed, we are so sensitive that it hurts us deeply when onlookers who don’t carry the same moral burden that we do, judge us harshly. That is perhaps the greatest injustice.

Contrast this with the brutality of those who shoot and don’t cry. Ostensibly that is a worse brutality because it is bereft of empathy. Sometimes so, but, I would argue, this unfeeling brutality is unfeeling for a reason: callousness is a way of protecting those who inflict pain from the power of their own conscience. They know that if they were to allow themselves to empathize with their victims they would cry and stop shooting.

What those who shoot and cry are expressing is a narcissistic form of brutality. Empathy, instead of serving as an antidote to cruelty makes cruelty easier. And this empathy is in truth no such thing; it is a form of vanity — a conviction of those who refuse to doubt their own virtue.