Isn't the threat of axe beheading voter intimidation?
Israel has been increasingly an intolerant, racist apartheid-practicing theocracy rather than a genuine democracy. Palestinians comprise >20% of the population, with a higher birth rate than other demographic groups, yet they are consistently under-represented in both the Knesset and in the Israeli court system.
In the face of looking likely to lose the election, conservatives are lashing out against anyone who dares to vote their preference rather than conforming to the increasingly militant and extremist right, including Likud, reminiscent of southern Jim Crow. Netanyahu and the Israeli Jewish conservatives long have been accused of bigotry and apartheid conduct. As noted here, from noted professor and middle east expert Juan Cole via Truth Dig:
Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, under extreme pressure over the real possibility that he will lose the March 17 elections, has made a powerful appeal to his far right wing constituency by openly admitting that he will never allow a Palestinian state and that he intends to flood Israeli squatters into East Jerusalem and its environs to make sure this Occupied territory never returns to the Palestinians.So far today we have these accounts of threats and intimidation reported from Israeli news media and US media.
Millions of Palestinians whose families were violently expelled from their homes by Jewish settlers in Mandate Palestine in 1947-48 remain stateless. These include the people of Gaza, the West Bank (four million) and a million or more in diasporas in Lebanon, Syria, and other countries. A million Palestinians are now citizens in Israel, and others have rights of citizenship in far-flung places like Chile and Honduras, as well as the United States. But I figure five million at least remain stateless.
The Palestinians are the last major stateless population. Stateless people do not have rights as most people understand the term. Their situation in some ways resembles slavery, since slaves also were denied the rights of citizenship. Stateless people’s property is insecure, since people with citizenship rights have better access to courts and to ruling authorities. Palestinians never really know what they own, and Israeli squatters routinely steal their property with impunity. Squatters dig tube wells deeper than those of the Palestinian villagers, lowering aquifers and causing Palestinian wells to dry up. Squatters go on wilding attacks, chopping down entire olive orchards (a prime source of Palestinian income) or beating up Palestinians. If Palestinians assemble peacefully to protest the loss of their farms to ever-expanding squatter settlements, the Israel army arrests them, including, often, children, who are taken away from their families and put in jail. Palestinians can be held for long periods without being charged. The prisoners are sometimes tortured.
Netanyahu and the Israeli right-of-center say they want to keep Palestinians homeless and without citizenship rights in a state because they fear a Palestinian state will make claims on Israel and present a security challenge. Netanyahu said Sunday that if Israel relinquished the West Bank it would become a bastion of Muslim radicalism (but West Bankers are substantially more secular than the Jewish population of West Jerusalem).
But in fact, Netanyahu and the right are dedicated to Greater Israel, to annexing the West Bank territory and finding a way to expel the Palestinians from it. The Palestinians are not a security challenge– they are like the guard at a bank getting in the way of bank robbers. The bank robbers feel a need to knock him out or kill him, remove him from the scene.
But it is shameful to have Israel preside over 4 million stateless people forever. This is Apartheid.
From the AP via MSN:
Meanwhile, police said they arrested an Israeli soldier on suspicion of incitement of violence. The soldier wrote on Facebook that if a leftist were to rise to power, the soldier would follow in the footsteps of Israeli extremist Yigal Amir, who assassinated dovish Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995.and we have threats of right wing Jews beheading Palestinian Israelis as well, from Haaretz, by way of the ibtimes:
Lieberman, leader of the Yisrael Beitenu party that is based on Russian immigrants, has a long record of inflammatory statements toward Arab Israelis, including a recent comment that suggested Israeli Arabs with sympathies toward Palestinian Authority be beheaded. “Those who are with us deserve everything, but those who are against us deserve to have their heads chopped off with an ax,” he said last week. (bold is my emphasis added - DG)
The Zionist Union, a center-left alliance between the Labor and Hatnuah parties that represents Likud’s main opposition, said Netanyahu’s statement amounted to racism. “No other Western leader would dare utter such a racist remark,” wrote high-ranking Zionist Union member Shelly Yachimovich on Twitter, according to the New York Times. “Imagine a warning that starts, ‘Our rule is in danger, black voters are streaming in quantity to the polling stations.’”