The Best Show in Town
by Uri Avnery

The most talented director could not have done better. It was a perfect show.

Television viewers all over the world saw heroic Israeli soldiers on their screens battling the fanatical settlers. Close-ups: faces twisted with passion, a soldier lying on a stretcher, a young woman crying in despair, children weeping, youngsters storming forward in fury, masses of people wrestling with each other. A battle of life and death.

There is no room for doubt: Ariel Sharon is leading a heroic fight against the settlers in order to fulfil his promise to remove "unauthorized" outposts, even "inhabited" ones. The old warrior is again facing a determined enemy without flinching.

The conclusion is self-evident, both in Israel and throughout the world: if such a tumultuous battle takes place for a tiny outpost inhabited by hardly a dozen people, how can one expect Sharon to remove 90 outposts, as promised in the Road Map? If things look like that when he has to remove a handful of tents and one small stone building - how can one even dream of evacuating real settlements, where dozens, hundreds or even thousands of families are living?

This must have impressed George Bush and his people. Unfortunately, it has not impressed me.

It makes me laugh.

In the last few years I have witnessed dozens of confrontation with the army. I know what they really look like.

The Israeli army has already demolished thousands of Palestinian homes in the occupied territories. This is how it goes: early in the morning, hundreds of soldiers surround the land. Behind them come the tanks and bulldozers, and the action starts. When despair drives the inhabitants to resist, the soldiers hit them with sticks, throw tear gas grenades, shoot rubber-coated metal bullets and, if the resistance is stronger, live ammunition, too. Old people are thrown on the ground, women dragged along, young people handcuffed and pushed against the wall. After a few minutes, it's all over.
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THE NEW THOUGHT POLICE
The campaign to criminalize criticism of Israel

We hear constantly about the supposed rise of anti-Semitic sentiments in Europe: this is not neo-Nazi activity, or the "old" anti-Semitism of the Protocols, but the "new anti-Semitism," which boils down to criticism of Israel and its supporters. As officials of the Anti-Defamation League recently put it in the Denver Post:

"Today's strain of anti-Semitism usually targets Israel in some form. The most socially acceptable way to vent anti-Semitism today is to criticize Israel, the only state controlled by Jews, by holding Israel to standards not applied to any other country. Of course, it is not anti-Semitic to express sympathy with the Palestinian people or to disagree with Israeli government policies. But a hateful bias is revealed when critics subject Israel, and Israel alone, to invective and demonization, while human-rights abuses of other countries are overlooked or excused."

If you criticize "the only state controlled by Jews" you aren't necessarily anti-Semitic – but you probably are. And just what are these standards that Israel alone is held to? Any other country that separated out the majority of the population on the basis of ethnicity, and subjected them to draconian controls, controlling their movements, and keeping them penned up in special ghettos, would long ago have been declared an international pariah. How has Israel managed to get away with it – and, not only that, but how have they managed to go on the offensive, and target their critics as "bigots"?
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  thanks to Yolanda Flanagan