Waving flags of Netanyahu’s Likud party, some 20,000 protestors marched through Tel Aviv, the site of the largest anti-government protests over the last few months. “The nation demands legal reform!” chanted some of the demonstrators in the counter-protest.
The right-wing Im Tirtzu group organized the “March for Freedom” with the aim of “being freed from the restraints of the High Court,” declaring that the people “have chosen judicial reform.”
Feindsender (‚Enemy radio station‘) was a term used in Nazi Germany to describe radio stations broadcast by enemies of the German Reich before and during World War II, such as the United Kingdom or the United States. It also referred to radio stations in Germany which broadcast anti-Nazi material. The term has not been in general use since the downfall of the Third Reich.
That was my introduction to the political phenomenon known as Antideutsche – anti-Germans. It started in the late 1980s as an exotic offshoot of the Maoist left, whose members denied the very legitimacy of a German nation after Nazism, under the slogan, “Germany, never again.” But for the past two decades, Antideutsche has had one primary focus: an unrestrained attack on anyone who is critical, even a bit, of Israeli policy. According to their amazingly simplistic approach, anti-Semitism is the source of all evil, Israel is the answer to anti-Semitism, and thus constitutes absolute good. Hence, at demonstrations and in Facebook posts of this left-wing group, there have even been calls to drop a nuclear bomb on Gaza – that is, calls for genocide.
Being a mentally sovereign human means constructing your own understanding of this weird reality based on your own investigations and your own reasoning, which means constructing it from the ground up. Even your most basic assumptions about reality itself must be rigorously cross-examined with complete skepticism. Nothing must be taken on faith.
Its Declaration of Independence guarantees “complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex,” as well as a guarantee of freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture.
Theodor Herzl, Chaim Weizmann, Zeev Jabotinsky, David Ben Gurion and Golda Meir always emphasized the need to combine Jewish nationalism with universal humanism. So now, when Israel’s government appears to be tarnishing the sacred value of equality, many supporters feel it is turning its back on Jewish heritage, the Zionist ethos and the Israeli spirit.
World Jewish Congress chief and former Netanyahu confidant urges Israeli leaders to ‚rethink their destructive actions‘ in New York Times op-ed