From their mouths to God’s ear

This 20-minute video from 2017 features a series of person-in-the-street interviews with Jerusalem residents, expressing their opinion of the living situation in the West Bank, for themselves and the Palestinians.

Israelis Speak Candidly to Abby Martin About Palestinians by Empire Files (YouTube)

Abby Martin Interviews people of various ages, at least half are English, but a few are in Hebrew or a mix of Hebrew and English. They express pretty strong opinions about the reality, advantages, and disadvantages of various racial characteristics and their relation to viability or qualification as human beings.

In particular, there are a few American transplants that positively do humanity and their origin country proud. It brought a tear of pride to my eye to see them having so successfully transplanted and adapted their native racism to a foreign environment.

It’s an interesting case study in listening to people who are comfortable in their own environment, unaware that the culture in which they’re steeped, the assumptions they have about how life has to be, their ideas about race and culture, are not shared elsewhere.

Abby Martin is like a stoic anthropologist here, simply holding a microphone and watching her subjects hang themselves with their own statements. She doesn’t even use leading questions; her interview subjects are eager to expound, eager to make sure she understands that Arabs are just … Untermenschen.

Ronnie Barkan (Wikipedia) swam against the current, describing the reality of Israeli life and culture, although a bit more pessimistically than I would—but what do I know? He says that there is no left to speak of in Israel, that there are just the right-wing Zionists without conscience who want to eradicate or remove the Palestinians—and those Zionists who are still interested in reconciling what they consider to be their own basic morality with their desire to live in a racially pure country.

For this, the second group is willing to give up land, whereas their counterparts are not. As Barkan puts it: they both want the same thing; they just differ on how big the country will be when they’re finished.

2021-05-14: Israel-Palestine control map

I think there is a peace and reconciliation movement. When he was still alive, I read everything that Uri Avnery (Wikipedia)[1] wrote for the last couple of decades of his life, and learned much about the peace organization he’d founded: Gush Shalom (Wikipedia). There are many more[2], I think, but the ones I know who express what seem like humanistic opinions are Gideon Levy and Amira Hass[3], both columnists at Ha’aretz, a highly respected, if oppositional newspaper in Israel.

“Barkan has described himself as “among the group of the over-privileged in this struggle for Palestinian rights, acting against a system that has at its very core the Zionist principle of differentiation.” He describes the Israeli treatment of Palestinians as apartheid, identifies himself as “anti-Zionist,” and refers to Israel as “the Jewish-supremacist entity…founded on the basis of ethnic cleansing and ethnic segregation.””