Freies Politikforum für Demokraten und Anarchisten

palestina libera · Beiträge: 1665

It’s not a big claim to fame but I have been saying for years that Israeli society is crazy. I escaped from Israel largely because of that… Phil Weiss’s analysis [Psst! Is Israel Going Crazy?] is correct except for one point and that is that those sentiments he describes have always been there. It’s not like it’s something new that just sprang up recently.

I have grown up with this all around me. I recognise the language. I was brought up (I was born in 1964) to believe that the ‘Arabs’ (the word ‘Palestinian’ was largely not used in my childhood) could not be trusted, that ‘they’ are not like ‘us’, that they are treacherous and would stab me in the back if I relaxed and trusted them. We were always kept apart from the Palestinian citizens of Israel, let alone the Palestinians living in the West Bank or in Gaza. Gaza in fact was a symbol of a cursed, hellish place. When someone annoyed you you said to them Lech le’Aza, ‘Go to Gaza’, the equivalent of ‘go to hell’. That was part of normal day-to-day Hebrew in my youth. Like I mentioned in the past, the first time I met a Palestinian as an equal human being was in Australia in my early thirties…

http://mondoweiss.net/2014/12/israel-always-crazy