Middle East Focus: That Other Middle East Russian Mafia? A Jewish Dichotomy?.................

Arabia Deserta

That Other Middle East Russian Mafia? A Jewish Dichotomy?.................

“More ominously, the ruling coalition in Israel reflects a reshaping of Israeli society that has fortified right-wing designs on the West Bank and strengthened resistance to a peace agreement. To be sure, this is not the first time Israel is dealing with a right-religious-settler-Russian coalition pushing a reactionary agenda. The difference is that this political alignment could be dominant in Israel for some time to come……… Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition almost seems programmed to provoke. The Internal Security and Foreign Affairs portfolios are in the hands of Yisrael Beiteinu (Israel Is Our Home), the Russian immigrant-based party whose leader, Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, is known for his Arab bashing and is himself under investigation for corruption. Housing is in the hands of Shas, a party based in the low-income Sephardic Orthodox community — hence the housing construction in places like Ramat Shlomo in East Jerusalem, where land is cheap………If 80 percent of the students in Israeli religious high schools want to disenfranchise the Arab citizens of Israel (one-fifth of the population), as a recent survey found, their schools must be teaching them something very wrong. If the spiritual head of the Shas party, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, can tell his huge flock, as he did late last year, that the Muslims’ religion “is as ugly as them,” and provoke little but embarrassed smiles, it is because Shas is a member of the governing coalition….…..”

That also partly explains some of the antagonism toward Obama. It is that not-so-covert Russian racism that comes from living in a society where one doesn’t see people of other colors, at least not many shades darker. Certainly not in positions of authority. All this is an anomaly to Jewish Americans who thrived in urban areas on the two coasts and have always been the major supporters of civil rights, and even to West European Jews many of whom have spoken against Islamophobia, mainly because they remember.
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