Critics have labeled the current Israeli Likudnik government that is comprised of right-wing as well as religious parties, as the most extreme in that nation’s history. It features a Justice Minister (sic), Ayelet Shaked, a Deputy Foreign Minister, Tzipi Hotovely and a Minister of Culture and Sport, Miri Regev who are all far out of step/out of line with international law and in fact the international consensus essentially of what should be the “rules of the road” for the long, arduous, and likewise seemingly neverending Israeli occupation of Palestine. Moreover, all of these personages/individuals that occupy these positions in the Israeli government, of course, just happen to be women. And in truth, these ladies can certainly be said to be the hateful sirens of Netanyahu’s disturbed apartheid vision!
Ayelet Shaked’s “claim to fame” is, of course, her now deleted Facebook posting in which, she declared the entire Palestinian people the enemy, “…including its elderly and its women, its cities and its villages, its property and its infrastructure.”1 Notwithstanding an extensive detailing of all of the sanction of war crimes that is implied by the potential policy implementation of that statement, in an actual Israeli military campaign — and particularly when considering perpetrating that type of military/war-related activity upon an illegally (for 48 years) occupied population — but it also seems to be reminiscent of Israel’s terroristic Dahiya doctrine.2 A doctrine that it has employed in Beirut, Lebanon, the title of which refers to the Dahiya neighborhood of that city, and an incident that took place there in August 2006 in which large numbers of civilians were either directly killed by bombs or crushed, as they huddled in the debris of their freshly destroyed homes.3
Considering that there is no foreign minister in the current government, the deputy then is the de facto one. Tzipi Hotolvely defends the annexation by Israel of the whole of the West Bank, and as part and parcel of a plan that is widely supported in the Netanyahu government of a Jewish one-state solution.4 This is not at all the same as the secular and democratic one-state solution that is supported by such courageous Jewish Israeli people as Ilan Pappe and Miko Peled. That proposal calls for equal rights for Palestinian and Jewish citizens, antithetical by all means to the nefarious as well as diabolical desires/designs, indeed, of the Netanyahu sirens.
The present culture minister of Israel, makes no pretensions about a two-state solution. In an interview that she gave in 2013 she said, “When the prime minister delivered the (June 2009) Bar Ilan speech in which he expressed support for the two-state doctrine, that was not ok with me. My opinion has not changed. In the end, when you consider the two states for two nations…”5
Most if not all of these people — those cut from the same Likudim cloth as the three sirens — use the incendiary and irresponsible rhetoric of Judea and Samara (with the implication being that it was given to the Jews by God and no one else) to refer to the West Bank. (The West Bank that will, of course, be the major part of the future Palestinian state, at least under the two-state rubric.) And so, the bigoted rhetoric of Judea and Samara is clearly not helpful at all for anyone who is even the slightest bit serious or concerned about ever achieving peace, which these women clearly are not!
Palestinians are repeatedly harangued by the Western and US media, to recognize Israel’s right to exist. But aggressive promotion of the illegal settlements and complete abandonment — and even thumbing one’s nose at — the two-state solution essentially amounts to not recognizing the Palestinians’ right to it (existence). Save perhaps as second, third, or fourth-class citizens within the ranks of a fascist regime, quite literally! And although, it’s no surprise that in the Zionist-occupied media that there’s a total absence of any sort of hue and cry about this; nonetheless, the reactionary, scofflaw and international pariah nature, at least according to any sane/reasonable international institutions (as well as governments), of the Netanyahu Likudnik administration can no longer be abated! And indeed, these three disagreeable women most assuredly represent a dark cadre that exists within it.
- “Israeli lawmaker’s call for genocide of Palestinians gets thousands of Facebook likes,” by Ali Abunimah, Electronic Intifada, July 7, 2014.
- “Debunking Israel’s Self-Defense Argument”, by John Dugard, Al Jazeera, July 31, 2014.
- “Israel’s Assault on Gaza is An Expression of the Dahiya Doctrine,” by Eamonn McCann, Irish Times , August 21, 2014.
- “Israelis Lean Right Toward One-State Solution,” by Daoud Kuttab, Al-Monitor, August 10, 2015.
- “Likud’s Miri Regev Challenges Netanyahu’s Grip on the Party,” by Mazai Mualem, Al-Monitor, June 20, 2013.