By his own admission, Israel’s new Finance Minister, Bezalel Smotrich, is a “fascist homophobe.” This declaration, which he made on January 16, should be enough to accentuate the violent nature of the new political concoction created by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last December. Though Smotrich is not the only politician in Netanyahu’s cabinet with…
There is what passes for a sick joke among those who watch the Israeli slaughter of Palestinians with increasing shock over what Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his thugs have been allowed to get away with. It goes something like this: Israel has succeeded in killing or driving out the remaining three million or so…
In his election campaign, far-right Israeli politician Itamar Ben Gvir, leader of the Jewish Power party, asked a question to which the then Israeli political establishment had no answer: “Who is in charge?” It was a taunt which tapped into the deep well of feeling that the Jews had lost control over the Palestinians living…
In a self-congratulatory article published in the Atlantic in 2017, Yossi Klein Halevi describes Israeli behavior at the just-conquered holy Muslim shrines in Occupied East Jerusalem in 1967 as “an astonishing moment of religious restraint.” “The Jewish people had just returned to its holiest site, from which it had been denied access for centuries, only…
Israel’s new national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, lost no time in demonstrating who is boss. On Tuesday, days after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government was sworn in, the ultra-nationalist politician marched straight in to the Al-Aqsa Mosque complex in the occupied Old City of Jerusalem – probably the most incendiary site in the Middle East. Ben-Gvir…
Israel’s new government is planning to give de facto operational control of the national police and heavily armed border police to Itamar Ben-Gvir, the leader of a party of right wing, racist extremists. It can perhaps be regarded as the prelude to the last phase in the uprooting and displacement of the Palestinian people. Those…
