Yes, you read the headline correctly: I’m an incited Palestinian. Every day they incite me. My most prominent and significant inciters are the leaders, the commentators and most of the journalists of the State of Israel, and ordinary Israelis too. Social networks and the masses of online commenters in Israel comprise a volcano of incitement. It’s clear to me that they actually want to incite against Palestinians, but their words come back like a boomerang and incite the Palestinians, too.
A newscast on any given Israeli television channel is a proven recipe for angering and inciting Palestinian viewers. Analyses and predictions by Zionist commentators constitute aggression and provocations to Palestinians. The despicable verbiage of people who call themselves “experts on Arab affairs” is laden with slander and manipulations that arouse disgust toward Arabs, and when Arabs hear them they mainly feel dread and explode in anger.
Yes, it’s they who incite me and make me fume. Every time Israeli leaders talk about Arabs, Palestinians, or any other formulation drawn from these words, they express hostile, racist, patronizing, threatening and humiliating attitudes with alarming ease. There is no doubt that the current prime minister is a star in this context, but he hasn’t invented a thing. He may have improved the method and embellished the formulations, but he has no exclusivity over racism. We’re talking about his words and his actions these days only because he is the apex of the pyramid of the regime, not because he is exceptional or any more extreme than the prime ministers who preceded him.
This attitude toward Arabs in general and the Palestinians in particular is deeply rooted in Zionist thought. Although it is expressed in different ways, in diverse formulations and in various doses, at its base this is a consistent line that stems from a racist world view, whose seeds were planted with the crystallization of the idea of establishing a Jewish state in Palestine. In his book The Jewish State (1896), Herzl wrote: “We should there [in Palestine] form a portion of a rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism.” Which Israeli leader has not believed, expressed himself, or thought in a similar way?
The majority of Palestinians in Israel understand Hebrew. They sit watching the television screens in one of their ghettoes, in Galilee, in Wadi ’Ara, in the center of the country and in the Negev; they hear the threats and absorb the humiliations poured into their faces from the Israeli TV channels. They’re incited even more by the claim about the only democracy in the Middle East that they are benefiting from. This maddens them. Frustrated, they look out the window to seek and to feel the democracy that isn’t there.
The prime minister attacks us, preaches to us and wants to educate us, and each of these teaching sessions is one more dose of incitement, not only incitement against the Palestinians, but also incitement of the Palestinians. Each speech of his sounds like a call for an uprising. This kind of approach necessarily increases the impulse of rebelliousness. What incites us is everything that Zionism has created around us. Those who incite me are not the Arab leaders, not from the Palestinian Authority, not from the Islamic Movement, and not from Balad. For incitement, they’re unnecessary. Who needs them when we have the State of Israel, its leaders, its branches, its deeds, and a large number of its Jews?
Those who incite me are those who forced a Greek airline to remove two Palestinian Arabs from a plane, those who shout at a wounded Palestinian boy “Die, you son of a whore”, those who sing out “Death to the Arabs” in public and in front of the cameras, those who have destroyed the village of al-Araqib more than 90 times; the fact that people are living in the houses of Palestinian refugees in Ein Hod, in Talbiyeh, and in Be’er Sheva; those whose herds of cattle piss on the graves of Palestinians in Yalu (Canada Park), in Simsim (Gvaot Bar) and in Kafr Sabt (Sdeh Ilan); those who have built hundreds of new settlements for Jews and not one for Arabs; those who invest nine times more on a Jewish student than on an Arab student, those who are Judaizing the country, and those who are currently carrying out a revenge action in ‘Ar‘ara.
Israeli couples picnics near offensive graffiti sprayed on the ruins of the destroyed Palestinian village of Bir’am. (Oren Ziv / Activestills) (Oren Ziv / Activestills)
We’re encompassed by countless things and people that incite us at any given moment, and there’s no way of evading it all.
And yet, we manage to restrain ourselves.
Say Thanks
In exchange for this restraint, Israelis should invent a weekly custom of thanksgiving. From the prime minister to the ordinary citizen, through the ministers, the members of parliament, policemen, judges, educators, merchants and all the other Jews living in this country. Let them start their week, every week, every Sunday morning, preferably at the same time, with a prayer like this one:
“At the beginning of this week, before we start working, we want to once again express our thanks and appreciation to the sons and daughters of the Palestinian people: to those whom we conquered in 1948, most of whom we expelled and prevented their return; whose towns and villages and schools, prayer-houses and cemeteries we destroyed; whom we dispossessed of their land, on which we built hundreds of Jewish settlements, and to this day whom we continuing to oppress. And to those whom we conquered in 1967, some of whom we expelled, stifled their towns and their villages, dispossessed them of their lands, took control of their treasures, among whom we built new settlements despite their opposition, and to this day whom we continuing to oppress and persecute, to limit their movement, to enclose them and deny them their freedom. To all of you, male and female, villagers and city dwellers – in what remains, in the ghettoes and the refugee camps, we want to thank you for the fact that this week, too, you have continued to restrain yourselves and have not risen up and revolted against the Jewish dictatorship in your country, the land of your birth. Thank you very much.”
For the article in +972 Magazine click here
