War in Israel has caused an increase in Incendiary rhetoric

The Gaza Crisis: An Example of How Israel and the Right to Live in a Land of People’s Enclaves: Rabbits, Dehumanization, and Discrimination

Last week, I gave a lecture at the University of California at San Diego about politics and social justice. Afterward, as I was signing books, a young Black woman approached my table and whispered a question, asking me what I thought about the horrors playing out in Gaza.

The older woman in line told me that Jewish people had always stood up for civil rights and she wanted me to do whatever I could to change people’s opinions.

Both women are individual, not speakswomen for their entire communities. But even so, those brief conversations were a small example of how the war between Israel and Hamas has strained perceptions and relationships in this country among key groups in the progressive coalition and how so many feel as if they’re obligated to declare where they stand.

But Mr. Sfard warned that Israel’s dehumanization of the people of Gaza could open the door to further discrimination and mistreatment of Palestinian citizens in Israel. It will also make Israelis more inured to the civilian death toll in Gaza, which has isolated Israel around the world, he added. A civilian death toll of 10,000 or 20,000, he said, could seem to “the average Israeli that it’s not such a big deal.”

He believes that people are asking if Israel has the right to exist as a Jewish state or if it has the right to create a state of everyone’s citizens. As Hill sees it, “It would be like asking Native Americans if America has a right to exist.” He said his critique was about political Zionism.

In the dispute over definitions, where both sides of the issue stand for righteousness, there is a chance that those on the other side will see them as standing for hate and callousness.

People in debates on Zionism rarely seem to be clear about which form they are for or against. Political Zionism? Is there a culture of cultural Zionism? Religious Zionism? Some combination of them? Does it matter?

The journalist and scholar, who is co-author of “Except for Palestine: The Limits of Progressive Politics”, told me he doesn’t think we should be harming Israel because all countries deserve their territorial integrity honored and respected. He thinks that the question is flawed because it presumes that Israel has the right to exist even if other states do not.

Greenblatt and Hill do agree on something: there is discrimination against Arabs in Israel. Greenblatt said there was definitely discrimination there.

Palestinians living in Gaza, East Jerusalem and the West Bank are being treated as an inferior group and deprived of their rights by Israel, according to a recent assessment by the human rights organization.

Concerns about the spread of extremist rhetoric are an extension of a political battle within Israel that has been raging all year between Mr. Netanyahu’s ultraright government and a civic opposition, some of whom now worry that it will inure Israelis to the civilian toll in Gaza as the war goes on.

There is no way that smart people who seem to want to do the right thing can’t find common understanding on these issues and pull out of a cycle of recriminations.

The idea of a nuclear strike on Gaza was raised last week by another right-wing minister, who told a radio station there was no such thing as noncombatants in Gaza. Mr. Netanyahu suspended Mr. Eliyahu, saying that his comments were “disconnected from reality.”

Mr. Netanyahu says that the Israeli military is trying to prevent harm to civilians. But with the death toll rising to more than 11,000, according to the Gaza health ministry, those claims are being met with skepticism, even in the United States, which has pressed Israel to allow daily four-hour humanitarian pauses in the combat.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu referred to the ancient enemy of the Israel in the Bible as a call to destroy their men and women, children and infants.

Michael Sfard is an Israeli human rights lawyer and author of The Wall and the Gate: Israel, Palestine and the Legal Battle for Human Rights.

Yehuda Shaul, co-director of Ofek, a think tank in Jerusalem, has collected 286 statements since Oct. 7 that he classifies as having the potential to incite unlawful behavior. His list includes Eyal Golan, an Israeli pop singer; Sara Netanyahu, the wife of Mr. Netanyahu; and Yinon Magal, a host on Israel’s right-wing Channel 14.

“I don’t call them human animals because that would be insulting to animals,” Ms. Netanyahu said during a radio interview on Oct. 10, referring to Hamas.

Mr. Magal wrote on X in October that it was time for the second “nakba”, referring to the mass displacement and flight of Palestinians before and after Israel’s creation.

In the West Bank last week, several academics and officials cited Mr. Eliyahu’s remark about dropping an atomic bomb on Gaza as evidence of Israel’s intention to clear the enclave of all Palestinians — a campaign they call a latter-day nakba.

Israeli officials point out that Hamas is active in the WestBank and that many of the clashes resulted from military efforts to wipe out militant groups. Three Israelis have been killed in attacks by Palestinians since Oct. 7.

Eran Halperin, a professor of psychology at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, argued that the use of inflammatory language by Israeli leaders is not surprising, and even understandable, given the brutality of the Hamas attacks, which inflicted collective and individual trauma on Israelis.

He said it was for the first time since the war of 1973, that Israel’s survival was at stake. The country is facing the prospect of a multi-front conflict against Hezbollah and Hamas, as well as a potential uprising in the West Bank.

Israel’s response to Israeli attacks on Hamas in the war effort and its consequences for the security and security of Israel, according to Professor Halperin

“People in this situation look for very, very clear answers,” Professor Halperin said. “You don’t have the mental luxury of complexity. You want to see good and bad people.

Casting the threat posed by Hamas in stark terms, Professor Halperin said, also helps the government ask people to make sacrifices for the war effort: the compulsory mobilization of 360,000 reservists, the evacuation of 126,000 people from border areas in the north and south, and the shock to the economy.

But the proliferation of such language by Israelis has opened a debate in Israel, where far-right and ultranationalist politicians were testing the boundaries of acceptable speech even before Oct. 7. Itamar Ben-Gvir, a right-wing settler who went from fringe figure to minister of national security in Mr. Netanyahu’s cabinet, has a long history of making incendiary remarks about Palestinians. He said that anyone who supports Hamas should be thrown in jail.

He stated that turning the wheel back requires a lot of education. The old Jewish proverb says that 100 wise men will struggle for a long while to take out a stone that a stupid person dropped into the well.

Yoav Gallant, the defence minister, spoke two days after the attacks and said that Israel was fighting human animals and would destroy Hamas in Gaza.

According to experts who track the statements, inflammatory language has also been used by journalists. According to a report by an Israeli group called FakeReporter, there had been 18,000 mentions of calls for Gaza to be flattened, erased, or destroyed in Hebrew since October 7. The phrases were only mentioned 16 times in the month and a half before the war.

The cumulative effect, experts say, has been to normalize public discussion of ideas that would have been considered off limits before Oct. 7: talk of “erasing” the people of Gaza, ethnic cleansing, and the nuclear annihilation of the territory.

Incendiary statements are not limited to Israel. Hamas will wipe out Israel as a country, boasted a senior leader of the group in an Oct. 24 speech. “We are not ashamed to say it with full force,” he said. “We have to teach Israel a lesson, and we will do it again and again.”

The Israeli-Palestinian Connection in the Confederation of the First Two-State Solution (Conference Report on ‘A Land for All‘)

Both sides have to accept certain conditions in order for the confederation to work, such as free movement of Israelis and Palestinians, the settlement of refugee claims and the authority of common institutions. Palestinians living in Israel would vote, while Israelis living in a future Palestine would not.

The answer, Ms. Pundak said, was neither a single state nor a simple division into two. It would be two states and part of a shared homeland. Her model is the European Union, which, as she noted, was composed of countries, like France and Germany, which had been at war with each other not so long before the bloc began to come together.

What has changed since the Oslo Accords, both women said, is the viability of a deal based on the principle of separating Israelis and Palestinians. They said that the two peoples were intertwined and that both of them had a vision of a homeland in land claimed by both.

Under the terms of the two-state solution, Israelis and Palestinians would live in sovereign states, divided along the 1967 borders of Israel, before it occupied the West Bank and Gaza. It has become more difficult to strike a deal as Jewish settlements have sprouted across the West Bank, as well as issues relating to allocating land to the Palestinians.

But, Ms. Pundak said, “It’s crucial to have those conversations right now, as they affect immediately what happens in Gaza. It will be harder to get anywhere in Gaza if we kill more civilians. She is the CEO of A Land for All, a group that has Israeli and Palestinian members.