Racism thrives at Israel's Herzliya conference

[Resistance]

by Arjan El Fassed, The Electronic Intifada

Speaking at the third annual Herzliya conference, Israeli Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told his audience: "It is not the Palestinians who pose a demographic threat, since one day they will benefit from self-determination, but the Israeli-Arab population. The most important thing is maintaining the Jewish majority in the country and improving the economy to encourage more Jews from the Diaspora to immigrate." If the Palestinians in Israel "reach 35 to 40 percent of the Israeli population, Israel will become a state with two nationalities," he said. Palestinians currently represent more than 20 percent of the total population in Israel.

The Israeli daily Ha'aretz reported that Yitzhak Ravid, a senior researcher at Rafael, an Israeli manufacturer of arms proposed that Israel implements a stringent policy of family planning in relation to its Muslim population, claiming that "the delivery rooms in Soroka Hospital in Be'er Sheva have turned into a factory for the production of a backward population."

At the first annual Herzliya conference in 2000, Israeli scholars, academics, demographers and security officials proposed a number of racist solutions to the so-called "demographic threat", including controlling the Arab birth rate, deportation, and other measures to reduce the number of Palestinians living in Israel.

[Dookus]

1. Sigh....

and this is the problem with ANY nation based on a religious identity. At some point in this century (I hope) we'll just have to give up on that idea.

[Muddleoftheroad]

3. Let's give up the idea starting in the Muslim world

How many Muslim states are there? How many Jewish?

[Dookus]

4. I think ALL

nations should give it up. Fair enough?

[Muddleoftheroad]

6. When all the others have, let's talk.

[Dookus]

8. Then it seems

you're willing to admit Israel is no better than the theocracies around it.

Israel is ostensibly a democracy - but you can't have a religious democracy. That is, unless you're willing to do whatever it takes to ensure that a majority of your citizens adhere to the state religion. And I don't see how you can do that within the confines of modern democracy.

[Muddleoftheroad]

23. Not so

Israel can't trust the nations around it to choose peace. They outnumber it in a massive way and have fought it in numerous wars and have funded terror for decades.

[Resistance]

28. The outnumbering and the fighting

doesn't have anything to do with what was assumed that you admit: that Israel isn't any better than nearby theocracies

[Muddleoftheroad]

31. Israel is absolutely better

How well do Jews fare in nearby nations?

Compare that to Muslims who can serve in the Israeli Knesset.

[Gimel]

24. The Jewish State

is not a religious democracy. Religion plays no part in the democratic funtioning of the state of Israel.

[Resistance]

30. in actual practice,

Religion has alot to do with public policy planning. No? Why else are millions of non-Jews kept imprisoned in the huge ghettos of PalestineIsrael we have come to know as the West Bank and Gaza?

[newyorican]

2. It's clear this hate doesn't shame anyone...

very sad.

[Jack Rabbit]

5. It seems to have shamed the editors of Ha'aretz

Here is the discussion of the Ha'aretz editorial on Netanyahu's speech before the conference.

[The Magistrate]

7. Netanyahu's Remarks Are Indeed Disturbing, My Friend

If the Arab citizens of Israel pose any threat to it, that is solely the result of the second-class treatment they are in many ways subjected to, and the way to remove any such threat is to cease such treatment. While some of it results from personal bigotry, against which government is powerless, some portion of it comes from governmental policy, over which government has full authority, and which it could readily alter.

[Saudade]

9. Racism

To see just how anachronistic the supposedly "liberal democracy" of Israel really is, imagine the leaders of America or any western European country saying the sort of things that were said at the Herzliya conference.

Dr. Yitzhak Ravid, a senior researcher at the Israeli government's Armaments Development Authority, called for Israel to "implement a stringent policy of family planning in relation to its Muslim population." In case his meaning wasn't clear, Ravid added: "the delivery rooms in Soroka Hospital in Be'ersheba have turned into a factory for the production of a backward population."

This is exactly the rhetoric of racists and neo-nazis like David Duke and Le Pen in France, yet in this case, to point this out ironically exposes one to the charge of "anti-semiticism".

Netanyahu told those gathered that the 1.3 million Israeli citizens of Palestinian origin (rather than the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories who can simply be fenced in) represented the true "demographic threat" to the Jewish state, and that if this population grew from its current 20 percent to 35-40 percent, Israel would become a "binational country."

How ironic that the term "binational country" should have the horrific connotation that it does in Israeli culture, because all it really means is "democracy," i.e., equal rights for all citizens regardless of ethnic identity. Yet in "the only democracy in the middle east," the possibility of becoming a binational country is unthinkable.

How ironic that the kinds of statements made against Jews in Europe in the 1930s can now be freely uttered in a supposedly "modern" and "liberal" Israel, without a peep from those fretting loudest about what they consider is a resurgence of anti-Semitism in Europe.

The 1951 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide defines that crime to include "imposing measures intended to prevent births" within a specific "national, ethnical, racial or religious group." Not only is committing such acts considered genocide under international law, so too is "direct and public incitement to commit genocide."

Israel is an ethnically defined nation state engaged in an ongoing colonial endeavor characterized by institutional racism, contempt for international law and all norms of civilized behavior, and mass violence, with a failing economy that is completely dependant on handouts from its single ally while the rest of the world looks on in horror and disgust.

It is a backward anachronism that has placed itself on the wrong side of history, and the only real "existential threat" to its continuing viability is from within.

[Resistance]

29. wow

that was a great post saudade

:thumbsup:

[dudeness]

10. these remarks just about sum it up for me

"Between the Jordan and the Mediterranean there is no longer a clear Jewish majority. And so, fellow citizens, it is not possible to keep the whole thing without paying a price. We cannot keep a Palestinian majority under an Israeli boot and at the same time think ourselves the only democracy in the Middle East. There cannot be democracy without equal rights for all who live here, Arab as well as Jew. We cannot keep the territories and preserve a Jewish majority in the world's only Jewish state -- not by means that are humane and moral and Jewish."

[Resistance]

11. what sums it up for me

is the bigot who says "the delivery rooms in Soroka Hospital in Be'er Sheva have turned into a factory for the production of a backward population."

This is the attitude that justifies the daily murders which the IDF engages in.

[The Magistrate]

12. Arafat Should Demand A Royalty

"My greatest weapon is the womb of the Arab woman."

[tinnypriv]

14. Not quite true

Distasteful, but an analogous comment would be:

"Their greatest weakness is the wombs of their women, who produce (slowly) a backward population"

[The Magistrate]

15. It Seemed Close Enough For Government Work, My Friend

The same phenomenon, just that one misogynistic bigot was looking at the muzzle and one looking at the breech, so to speak, of the objectified weapon in question.

Or is the quote itself disputed?

[tinnypriv]

16. Who knows

It is probably accurate. It sounds like something Arafat would say.

I'm sure some googler can whip up a webpage to "prove" the truthfulness of it in five minutes though, gleefully repeating the first thing they find. Same goes for anybody "refuting" it.

[The Magistrate]

17. It Had The Ring Of The King's Silver To Me As Well, Sir

Perhaps the women should do a Lysistrata and bollix up the whole works, eh?

[bemildred]

18. That was my thought.

What a bunch of misogynist bastards. What a bunch of humanists.

My greatest weapon is what a bunch of pricks all the men are.
:puke:

Edit: for clarity, the second sentence in sarcasm.

[The Magistrate]

19. Many A Truth Is Spoke In Jest, Sir

[Violet_Crumble]

20. It wasn't close at all...

What you've done is display the words of one who is a misogynistic bigot, and the other, who is a misogynist, but nothing in his words you quoted displayed the bigotry that the other saying: 'a backward population' did....

Personally, I don't care enough to find out if the quote from Arafat exists or not. All this seems like to me at this point is yet another attempt to go off on a tangent with a 'Look Over There!' tactic...

Violet...

[The Magistrate]

21. Misogynism, Ma'am

Strikes me as a species of bigotry, and therefore it seems right to me to describe a person who displays it as a bigot.

[Violet_Crumble]

22. Most if not all male Western leaders are bigots then...

But what you did was compare two quotes, one which contained bigotry against women plus bigotry towards an entire group of people, and the other which contained bigotry towards women, and held them up as being comparable. Of course they weren't....


Violet...

[The Magistrate]

25. It Struck Me, Ma'am

That these two fellows are profoundly alike in regarding Arab women as mere incubators....

[Saudade]

13. Racism

"the bigot who says "the delivery rooms in Soroka Hospital in Be'er Sheva have turned into a factory for the production of a backward population."

One can find this sort of rhetoric in the writings of various neo-nazi groups who worry about white people becoming a minority in America.

Here, they aren't taken serious; in Israel, they speak for the Government.

It is to be expected, however; has there ever been a colonial endeavor that wasn't fundamentally based on racism?

Zionism has always been a colonialist project, according to its founders.

[Gimel]

26. I don't think so

Comments like this are common in the US as well. You can't outlaw bigotry and freedom of speech defends his right to say this. It is better said and challanged than unsaid and festering in the unconscious.

If anything is an impetus for soldiers in the IDF combat units to carelessly fire their weapons, mistaking civilians for combatants it's two things:

1) fear of being shot first
2) images of family and friends being blown to pieces.

[drdon326]

27. kick

figured id save you time