Vad händer i Israel nu?

En intervju med general Yossi Kuperwasser där den utmanande situation Israel befinner sig i diskuteras.

What Matters Now to Brig. Gen. Yossi Kuperwasser: Breaking the terror wave

After a bloody week, a leading intelligence expert analyses recent IDF successes in the West Bank, offers points for improvement and tells us what keeps him up at night

"...The mindset is much wider. Palestinians have a narrative. The incitement is the effort to instill this narrative in the minds of any Palestinian, from day one and to keep him committed to this narrative all along his life.

And this narrative says, first of all, Jews are not a people. That’s why they do not deserve a state, they are just a religion.

Secondly, Jews never had a sovereign history in this piece of land. That’s why they were fighting in the 1920s against the idea that the British Mandate was to reconstitute the Jewish national home in Palestine. They said there was never such a sovereign state, which is nonsense, of course, but of course, there was a Jewish state in so-called Palestine, in Eretz Yisrael [the Land of Israel].

And the third element in this narrative is that the Jews are terrible creatures. It’s a very antisemitic narrative. The Jews are terrible creatures. Nobody wanted them to live next to them, so they sent them away from Europe. The Europeans couldn’t stand them. They sent them away and they sent them to this place because they thought that this was going to help them keep the Muslims away from Europe. They are terrible creatures, according to all the lines of the antisemitic European versions of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and so on, so forth. And on top of that, there is the addition of the Muslim antisemitic approach to Judaism, that the Jews are the descendants of apes and pigs and all of that. And because of that, there is no justification for the Jews to live next to us. Why are we to suffer? Nobody wants to live next to the Jews. Why should we Palestinians live next to the Jews? And because the Jews are such terrible creatures, it is allowed to kill them.

And the fourth element in this narrative is that, if you want to be a good Palestinian, you have and you want to contribute to the struggle against Zionism that wants to bring the Jews to this place, you have to be struggling against it. You have to contribute to the struggle. And there are all kinds of ways in which you can contribute to the struggle. You can write poems, you can stick to your land, you can promote BDS, fight against the legitimacy of Israel abroad, you can use lower levels of violence and you can use higher levels of violence. All of them are parts of the struggle against Zionism. And everybody who participates in the struggle against Zionism should be appreciated and rewarded.

And the fifth element is that our struggle is not only national, it’s also religious. We are fighting for Islam and for the Palestinian Arab people. And there’s no way to separate the two. They’re totally intertwined. That’s why you always see that those who carry out the attacks they speak about, they turn into shahids and martyrs, religious martyrs, and they always speak on behalf of Allah. And they do that for Islam, not only for Palestinian nationalism.

And the sixth element, which is also very important, is that we, the Palestinians, are the only victims of this conflict. And the logic of victimhood, of course, justifies the ongoing terrorism.

And finally, the final element in this seven-point narrative is that we should never accept Israel as a Jewish state because of all of the above. We should never accept Israel as a Jewish state. That’s why the conflict perpetuates because they are not ready to accept Israel as a nation-state of the Jewish people, democratic and with full rights to its Arab citizens. It doesn’t matter. As long as it’s defined as a Jewish state, they are not ready to accept it like that.

And that’s why they make it clear that they fight for Palestine to be free, as they say, from the river to the sea. The existence of Israel is something that is not acceptable, Israel as a nation-state of Jewish people. Some of them can see, even some of Hamas can see, a certain interim stage in which there is something called “Israel,” which is not the nation-state of the Jewish people, but the nation-state, the state of all its citizens. That can be some sort of an interim stage, but it’s a stage on the way of liberating all of Palestine..."