The irony of this is not lost on me. The British colonial policy of indirect rule was a method of governance for multicultural states, and this had the effect of making colonial governance run more smoothly. History teaches that Israel have never tried to follow the British's colonial lessons about governing ethnically, religiously and legally plural regions.
I agree with a ban on incitement to religious hatred.As you know, I even agree with laws against hate speech. Some would argue that religions and their followers should receive no special protection from spoken hostility. That's not my opinion. With that being said, Katz's criticism of the Criticism of the government is a very different thing, and what happened to him is terrible, and definitely not a question of a mere "business thing" - as you said.
It's a political repression, clearly recognized by the New York Jewish Week. Orwell And Israeli Politics | Jewish Week
---Being that the law was widely seen as discriminatory against Israel’s non-Jewish citizens — it gave the Jewish people “an exclusive right to national self-determination,” declared Hebrew the state’s official language and elevated “the development of Jewish settlements” to a national value — Katz’s message seemed pretty straightforward.
...In light of recent headlines, Katz’s Orwellian allegory — both the cartoon and its creator’s dismissal — have an almost prophetic feel. Last week, ahead of Israel’s upcoming elections on April 9, Netanyahu announced a deal by which the extremist party Otzma Yehudit (Jewish Power) would merge with Jewish Home, the slightly more mainstream party of religious Zionists.An openly racist group, Otzma’s platform calls for annexing the occupied territories, rejecting any Palestinian state, expelling all “enemies” of Israel (Arabs) and “taking ownership” of the Temple Mount. If Netanyahu wins the upcoming election, the party will go from being an extreme fringe group to becoming part of the governing coalition.
For many Israeli-Americans, including a number I spoke with for this column, the deal represents another deeply alarming transition in a slow-but-sure Orwellian cycle, in which Israel appears to be morphing from a shelter against racial discrimination and violence to a perpetrator of those ills
I'm always suspicious of "non partisan" political analysts. Don't you have an opinion about anything? in fact many Israelis have the same opinion, and there's nothing wrong with clear political statements or political opinions. To agree with someone else's ideas is nothing extraordinary...
He also said, in a broader context,
In fact, Rivlin always criticized a law that would define "national rights" in Israel's as reserved for Jews only. In a democracy, individual civil rights and national rights are intrinsically connected.The law is our social and national moral code. The law is our common consent, by all parts of our society, to live together. It is the way that society turns its disorder into a success story
Let's go back to 2014, Israeli president opposes proposed law to give 'national rights' to Jew
Just a few hours ago, Israel president rejects Netanyahu comments about Arab citizens. A quarter of Israel’s population is not Jewish, and probably the most important item on the nation’s agenda should be their integration into the fabric of Israeli society and their participation in the Israeli economy. Giving them the feeling of being at home, of being equal citizens.”
Your personal testimony makes clear that this concept is foreign to a democratic mind, Jewish or not Jewish.Israel’s president has hit back at Benjamin Netanyahu after the prime minister said in reference to the country’s Arab minority that Israel was “not a state for all its citizens”.... “entirely unacceptable remarks about the Arab citizens of Israel”.
...not necessarily a nation with first and second class citizens.
Reflections By An Arab Jew - Ella Shohat - Professor of Cultural Studies and Women's Studies at Cuny
More,The same historical process that dispossessed Palestinians of their property, lands and national-political rights, was linked to the dispossession of Middle Eastern and North African Jews of their property, lands, and rootedness in Muslim countries.
The pervasive notion of "one people" reunited in their ancient homeland actively disauthorizes any affectionate memory of life before Israel.
Live Encounters | Professor Ella Habiba Shohat – Bodies and Borders- is Professor of Cultural Studies at the departments of Art & Public Policy and Middle Eastern & Islamic Studies at New York University.
An Interview
I grew up in Israel as a Jew, in a country that defines itself as a state for the Jews and as a Jewish state, which was presumably a solution for “the Jewish problem.” But for which Jews, and a solution for what?
In 1948, after the partition of Palestine, a huge number of Palestinians were dispossessed and became refugees.
It was no longer possible to simply be a Jew cohabiting with Arab Christians and Arab Muslims. But while Arab Christians and Arab Muslims could maintain their identity, Arab Jews could not.
Suddenly, we had to choose between a Jewishness that was equated with Israel, seen as virtually coterminous with the West and with Europeanness, versus an Arabness that was now equated with Islam and the East, and for the first time, an East without Jewishness.
It is also problematic when the history of Jews in Arab countries and in Islamic spaces is viewed as being identical to the history of Jews under Christianity—that is, as a history of relentless persecution. Today, this narrative has unfortunately become a dominant—and, I would argue, Eurocentric—mode of representing Jewish histories.
...In any case, Jews were not the only minority in a Middle East replete with ethnic and religious minorities; thus, our history cannot be discussed only in relation to Jews within Christian Europe, but must be discussed also in relation to the diverse minorities in the Middle East.
Because of a certain Eurocentric discourse, it has been difficult to articulate a Judaism embedded in Arab culture...With colonial domination in the Middle East and North Africa, certain institutions gained power, including Euro-Jewish institutions that were connected to colonial power, which were instrumental in our Westernization even before the arrival to Israel.
And therefore one can argue that there has been a kind of Aryanization and whitening of the Jew as a result of the experience of anti-Semitism.
Moreover, Israel was created with the idea that it would be a Western outpost—a Switzerland of the Middle East, as the phrase went—even though located in the Middle East, and even though the majority of Jews in Eastern Europe were called Ostjuden, and even though Israel ended up with many Jews from places like Yemen, Iraq, Syria, and Morocco.
It would be hard to describe Israel, then, as simply a Western entity. And, of course, this characterization ignores the Palestinians who are citizens of Israel.
..in recent times, largely because of the Arab/Israeli conflict, there has been a construction in the public sphere of Jews and Muslims as always already enemies.
In the media, journalists often appeal to the cliché that “this conflict goes back thousands of years.” But historically that is false; it largely goes back to the late 19th century and the emergence of Zionism.