Unspeakably revolting

How awful do you have to be for Israel’s right-wing fellow traveler, our American ambassador Mike Huckabee, to call you a terrorist (if you are a Jewish Israeli)?

Personally, my perpetual anger at right-wing offenses on our eastern side has turned to outright revulsion. I am a nauseated at the thought of a nurse getting shot through the spine by rampaging settlers, by families in the village of Qusra under siege and barricaded in their homes, by the army removing villagers from their homes rather than arresting and removing the offending settlers, thus preventing them from returning to their new “settlement.”

Our government has made it ever-so-clear that the upcoming elections and pandering to their parties’ “bases” are more important than either human rights or international opinion. They remove the settlers, send the army in to do the unpleasant job, and then turn their backs when the settlers return, like bloodthirsty locusts, to other people’s doorsteps. Led by Bibi, they refuse to condemn the settlers’ actions, or to offer real protection to villagers.

How destructive do you have to be for the Israeli army to send whole units after you, for the army’s major general to repeatedly warn lawmakers of the danger to our entire country and its society being unleashed by these settlers?

The defense minister, who fancies himself prime minister material, came up with a sly plan: Make settler violence a police issue, thus keeping the blowback flying away from his jowly face. The current Internal Insecurity minister, responsible for one of the most dysfunctional police departments we’ve seen, and who would have been ordering the arrests of people from his own political base, said “No thanks!” While the discussion wafts back and forth over who is ultimately responsible for dealing with Jewish terrorists, those terrorists continue to walk – and rampage – freely up and down their neighbors’ land.

Marauding settlers are, therefore, both a security issue – one currently dealt with, with studied ineffectiveness, by the army – and a political issue for a government coalition that tries to blue-and-whitewash the crimes of these murderous hooligans.

They are no longer the acts of a few extremist individuals

Pogrom, rampage, pillage. Those words, for us, no longer belong to history, nor to distant regimes that may or may not currently perpetuate human rights violations. It’s hurtful and shocking when those words are used against Israeli Jews, but they are, to my sorrow, the only ones that describe the violence.

They are no longer the acts of a few extremist individuals. They are the acts of a mob, sanctioned by the government that has thrown all notions of human rights to the hamsin winds. They are the acts of young people hopped up on propaganda, rumors and fake news, who are given a lit match and told to run with it through August-dry fields.

Should the US call us out on the violence? I mean, talk about holier than thou. But yes, even Jared Kushner, scion of slumlords, should be calling us out on these shameful acts. Everyone should be calling us out. It is no longer a matter of hasbara, no longer an image issue. It is a matter of a real crime against humanity that needs to be stopped. And if internationally screened footage of the violence is what it takes to stop it, then we need the world to see and condemn the actions.

Will it fuel antisemitism, fuel the simplistic, distorted image much of the world has formed of our country? My answer to that is that we should have thought of that before letting these violent, impudent pillagers and vigilantes loose on West Bank villages.

It will not be enough to arrest a couple of young men and send them to jail for the night. It is not enough to send the army to dismantle a few rickety caravans and leave them where they can be returned in a few hours. It will not be enough to bring every one of the people caught on video in for questioning. Because these people are a sign of real rot – the black crumbling bits on the wall that, when probed, reveal your support beams are shot through with corrosion.

Somehow, we need to not just stop the wars, but stop the war mentality. We need to get back to the understanding that the people we live among and who live among us are just that: people. Human beings. They are not better or worse than us, they are not all Hamas, Jihad Islami or Hezbollah. They are not all terrorists. We do not have the right to harass or displace them. We do not have the right to shoot them, burn down their property or prevent them from leaving their front doors.

We do not have the right to treat them as anything less than human beings. And if Jewish Israelis are perpetrating acts that take away from someone’s humanity, we need, in the name of the Jewish country, to put a swift and incisive end to the acts.