Israel’s Doom Loop for Our Democracy

Article and photographs by Skip Kaltenheuser

The country holding captive  the birthplace of the religion I grew up with, Christianity, of the ethics that shaped me, has withered beyond redemption. It seems hell-bent on withering spirituality throughout the world.

In 1999, I was a guest of Israel, there to write on adventure travel. While traveling at night on camels across the Negev desert to a Bedouin-staffed luxury camp for tourists, news comes of Ehud Barak’s defeat of Benjamin Netanyahu and the Likud party. The guides, members of Bedouin tribes long displaced and discriminated against, were ecstatic. They chattered away on cell phones, hopeful for reforms that might improve their lives. That was not to be.

Shortly after that excitement, I’m in a luncheon in Jerusalem. I’m sitting next to Netanyahu’s outgoing Minister of Tourism, Moshe Katsav. No backwater, this cabinet post. For a time, Barak served simultaneously as both Prime Minister and Minister of Tourism. The post is not just central to bring in income but for propaganda, which is ladled thick on visiting journalists.

I asked Katsav why, instead of arguing with Jordan about which side of the river Christ was baptized on, the countries didn’t join together in joint tourism projects, enlarging the tourism pie.

Even better, I added, why not include the Palestinians? Give them skin in the game and a stake in stability?

Katsav stared at me like I’d just emerged from a twenty year coma.

“The Palestinians, (pause), they are our N-words!”

Katsav didn’t say “N-words”. He said the word. Drawn out, emphasized. No KKK Imperial Wizard could outdo his sneer.

Katsav assumed I’d grasp terms a white American would understand. No concern of insulting African-Americans any more than Palestinians. Or of offending me, someone there on their dime. Scales dropped from my eyes. The supremest racism underpinning Israeli society and policy winked at me.

An outlier? Katsav was later elected President.

At least he didn’t give the common scripted response, “It’s complicated”. It isn’t. It’s never been more complicated than people, even the non-god fearing, waving real estate deeds from God to steal what they coveted of what little Palestinians had left.

Another Minister of Tourism, Rehavam Ze’evi, appointed in 2001 by Ariel Sharon, remained a pal of Netanyahu. He described Palestinians working in Israel as a cancer that should be gotten rid of as if they were lice. He wanted to ethnically cleanse Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank by making life miserable for them. He envisioned Jordan as part of a Greater Israel.

A proponent of Israel’s strategy of assassinating “potential” terrorists, even calling for the death of Arafat, he later met that fate.

Current Likud Minister of Tourism Haim Katz has long pushed for Israeli colonization in the Gaza Strip and developing tourism in the occupied West Bank, via illegal settlers, measures preventing a Palestinian state. During a prior government post Katz obtained parliamentary immunity on charges of corruption.

Nice crowd, beckoning travelers to the Holy Land.

Spirituality that hasn’t withered runs deep in groups like Jewish Voice for Peace, with whom I had the pleasure of marching on Capitol Hill. Damned impressive, they hold up under despicable insults to their character and identity. As are Code Pink and anyone else who’ve let me string along demonstrating for a ceasefire. Revealing how deeply the fix is in, Nancy Pelosi called for FBI investigations to see if those calling for a ceasefire are doing Putin’s bidding. Honest, Nancy, Putin hasn’t called.

Israel has manipulated America, founded on the separation of church and state and on free expression, into creating a doom loop for our democracy. We do carte blanche funding of an apartheid foreign power which then purchases and threatens both our legislative and executive branches, Federal and state. Would it go over if any other foreign country’s minions publicly announced they’d spend a hundred million dollars to defeat a handful of US Representatives who opposed ethnic cleansing? If they offered bribes of 20 million dollars to people to primary those they want removed?

What about if their US legislative minions pushed to throw our First Amendment rights under the bus by threatening fines of a million dollars and prison sentences of twenty years if one advocates BDS – boycott, divestment and sanctions – for Israel’s violations of international law? That’s what “liberal” Maryland US Senator Ben Cardin tried to pull off in 2017. Chuck Schumer made Cardin head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee after Senator Bob Menendez – Senator Mendacity – another Israeli favorite, crossed too many gold lines. Lately we have the spectacle of legislatures across the country twisting our language so that criticizing Israel and Zionist genocide is equated with anti-semitism. The irony of course is that there is no greater cause of anti-semitism throughout the world than Israel’s actions. No justification for anti-semitism, but impacts are there. As it is now for Americans before the shocked eyes of the world.

Legal pushback didn’t happen when people boycotted apartheid South Africa. The editorial page cry for our First Amendment rights would have been deafening if it were tried. Not loud now. That should terrify us.

The NY Times recently told reporters to mostly shutter the terms “genocide,” “ethnic cleansing,” “occupied territory,” “Palestine” and “refugee camps.”

Orwell looks wiser every day.

Better to support tourism to nations not cowed, that call out Israel’s war crimes and my own country’s tragic hypocrisy. The forced complicity of the parade of depravities we’ve seen is unforgettable and unforgivable. Yes, nothing justifies attacks on innocent civilians, even by the occupied against occupier, even in return for attacks continuously done on Palestinians, including in the West Bank. Should never have happened, even if past non-violent demonstrations were greeted by snipers. Just a line one can’t cross and maintain one’s moral high ground. But most Palestinians, including men, had nothing to do with it. The horrors of collective punishment, including on children, women and other innocents, did not begin after Oct. 7th, despite the illusions of PR machinery. It began with the systematic, long-haul dehumanization and annihilation of a culture and people. I can easily do without the country behind that, as well as its apologists and enablers. I guess that’s something of a personal boycott.