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Israel: The Road to Cementing Jewish Fundamentalism | ASHARQ AL-AWSAT English Archive 2005 -2017
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People hold up a giant Israel flag during a pro-Israeli demonstration supporting Israel. (Reuters)


Cairo – Racing the clock ahead of US President Donald Trump’s visit, Israel’s Knesset and government advanced the bill declaring its state once-and-for-all a Jewish nation.

The Knesset, or the Israeli parliament, had on May 10 given the preliminary approval to a bill draft proposed by the Likud party member and Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee chairman Avi Dichter.

Despite being given the initial green light, it needs to be debated by a parliamentary committee and voted on three more times in the plenum before it becomes part of the country’s so-called “basic laws”, which are similar to a constitution.

In and of itself, the bill calls for stark discrimination against Arab minorities, while paradoxically maintaining Israel’s alleged “democracy.”

Declaring Israel a Jewish state loudly disagrees with principles of holding a democracy and would shift the occupying force’s administration to an Iran-styled theocracy.

The bill aside, Jewish fundamentalism is a reality in Israel and what Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the government are embarking on is to merely give Jewish fanaticism a legal definition. Shoring up Israel’s presence as a theocracy in the world.

Dichter’s bill not only encroaches on genuine rights of the original landowners, the Palestinians, but also announces Hebrew as the sole official language, devaluing Arabic from a primary language to merely holding “special status.”

The bill also confiscates the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination. It stipulates that the right of self-determination is enjoyed only by Jews … A term at which one must stop and ask how can racism be more explicit than this?

This glows beyond the fog of politics– it is a fundamentalist narrative at its finest. Self-declared right to supremacy over others, and self-given right to deprive, isolate and eliminate counterparts cannot better define zealotry. Such a bill promotes legal preference in a push to erase their trace from both geography and history.

Understanding the reality of Israel’s internal politics is directly tethered to ultra-conservative support to Zionism weaved throughout its social fabric.

The nationalist bill is nothing more than an illustrious reflection of the reality of fundamentalism within occupied territories.

Human rights activists and Holocaust survivor Israel Shahak and outspoken anti-Zionist and distinguished Professor Emeritus at the Central Connecticut State University Norton Mezvinsky co-authored a book detailing the world, “Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel,” on how swayed Israel truly is.

The book shows how deep rooted religious extremism is and to what consequences it leads. More so, it draws a clearer image on how Zionism is devoted towards aligning the stars and circumstances needed to provoke the emergence of the savior, the messiah.

Shedding light on commitment to a prophesied Israel, the Shahak and Mezvinsky work sets out to explain how the contours of an Israeli state is painted in Jewish ways prevailing across the land, sea and air, mind and soul, even at the cost of drafting Judeo-nationalist laws.

By no means is Jewish fundamentalism fresh news, it can easily be traced down history, but it surely has – hazardously – picked up significant momentum over the past few decades.

Increasingly dangerous, zealotry has flourished after the Six-Day War. Jewish fundamentalism has crystalized as a one-side track on which Israel hardwires its vision to in hopes of reviving a pure sematic linage.