Mick Hall @ Organized Rage flags up the concerns of former  senior members of Shin Bet that Israel is sunk in incremental tyranny.    


Ami Ayalon.

Ami Ayalon and Carmi Gillon speak out ahead of 50th anniversary of occupation of Palestinian territories:

Two former heads of Israel’s powerful domestic intelligence service, the Shin Bet, made an impassioned and powerful intervention ahead of events to mark the 50th anniversary of the country’s occupation of the Palestinian territories in June.

One of the pair warned that the country’s political system was sunk in the process of “incremental tyranny”.

Ami Ayalon and Carmi Gillon were speaking ahead of a public meeting at a Jerusalem gallery which is threatened with closure for hosting a meeting organised by the military whistleblowing group Breaking the Silence, one of the main targets of the rightwing government of Benjamin Netanyahu.

During his recent visit to the UK, Netanyahu also asked Theresa May to cut UK government funding to the group – a request that baffled diplomats as no direct UK funding exists.

"Incremental tyranny [is a process] which means you live in a democracy and suddenly you understand it is not a democracy any more,” Ayalon told a small group of journalists, including the Guardian, ahead of the event. “This is what we are seeing in Israel. The tragedy of this process is that you only know it when it is too late.”
Ayalon cited recent moves by ministers in the Netanyahu government to change the laws to hit groups such as Breaking the Silence by banning them from events in schools and targeting their funding, while also taking aim at the country’s supreme court and independence of the media.

Issues of freedom of speech and expression have become one of the key fault lines in Israeli society – in everything from the arts to journalism – under the most rightwing government in the country’s history.

The Babur gallery is under threat of closure after being censured by the country’s culture minister, Miri Regev, for holding an event with Breaking the Silence on publicly owned property, a group which Regev claimed “hurts Israel’s image”.

Gillon was equally bleak in his analysis of Israel’s trajectory, saying: "The country was being driven by this occupation towards disaster”. He added:

This country was established on the values of liberal democracy, values written in the only kind of constitution we have – which is our declaration of independence – values we don’t fulfil any more. You can analyse what happened to us in the last 50 years, but everything is under the shade of occupation. It has changed us a society. It has made us an unpleasant society.

The comments by Ayalon and Gillon come amid a growing and heated debate between the right and opponents of the occupation over the historic legacy of the six-day war, in June 1967, which marked the beginning of the occupation. Rightwing ministers celebrated the occupation on Thursday as the “liberation” of the occupied territories.


Gillon continued:

I am here, because I think that Breaking the Silence and groups like it are completely legitimate organisations. Sometimes I don’t like what they say, but the mission they took on themselves, through interviews with soldiers, should give a better understanding [about] what it means to occupy another people.

The decision by Ayalon and Gillon to make such a public show of support for Breaking the Silence was seen as a coup for the human rights group which has been facing increasing official efforts to limit and censor its activities.

The two men also criticised the unwillingness of the Israeli media and senior opposition politicians to speak up for freedom of speech, in particular concerning the moves against groups like Breaking the Silence:

They do what they do because they understand it is their moral duty. They are soldiers who serve and like every gatekeeper they hold up a mirror image of the Israeli reality in the occupied territories. What they see is very ugly. So we hate the mirror and blame the mirror and don’t hear what they say,” said Ayalon.

They added that they were also deeply concerned about a growing apathy in Israeli society where, after so many years, an occupation justified by the Israeli courts and legal system as temporary had come to defy the meaning of the word.

Ayalon suggested an Orwellian dynamic that left Israelis in a state of fear for political ends:
What is necessary to pave the way for this concept of incremental tyranny is an ongoing war. It is like 1984. There is always an enemy.

Just days ago Regev, a controversial rightwing minister, said that Breaking the Silence and others who supported it:  “Had no place in Israel.”

The two former Shin Bet chiefs were speaking as it was revealed that one of Israel’s main official ceremonies to mark the anniversary of the six-day war would controversially take place in the settlement of Gush Etzion in the occupied West Bank.

The two ministries will spend a total of 10m shekels ($2.74m) on events marking the anniversary of what the education minister, Naftali Bennett, and Regev described as:

Israel’s glorious victory in the six-day war, and the liberation of Judea and Samaria [the West Bank], the Golan Heights and the Jordan Valley.

While the vast majority of the world's population regard this as an illegal land grab which stole this land from its rightful owners the Palestinian people.

UN United Nations Security Council resolution 446, adopted on 22 March 1979, concerned the issue of Israeli settlements in the "Arab territories occupied by Israel since 1967, including Jerusalem".[1] This refers to the Palestinian territories of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip as well as the Syrian Golan Heights.

In the Resolution 446, the UN Security Council determined:

that the policy and practices of Israel in establishing settlements in the Palestinian and other Arab territories occupied since 1967 have no legal validity and constitute a serious obstruction to achieving a comprehensive, just and lasting peace in the Middle East.


* This article came from a number of sources including the Guardian and Breaking the Silence.

Former Senior Members Of Shin Bet Claim Israel Sunk In Incremental Tyranny

Mick Hall @ Organized Rage flags up the concerns of former  senior members of Shin Bet that Israel is sunk in incremental tyranny.    


Ami Ayalon.

Ami Ayalon and Carmi Gillon speak out ahead of 50th anniversary of occupation of Palestinian territories:

Two former heads of Israel’s powerful domestic intelligence service, the Shin Bet, made an impassioned and powerful intervention ahead of events to mark the 50th anniversary of the country’s occupation of the Palestinian territories in June.

One of the pair warned that the country’s political system was sunk in the process of “incremental tyranny”.

Ami Ayalon and Carmi Gillon were speaking ahead of a public meeting at a Jerusalem gallery which is threatened with closure for hosting a meeting organised by the military whistleblowing group Breaking the Silence, one of the main targets of the rightwing government of Benjamin Netanyahu.

During his recent visit to the UK, Netanyahu also asked Theresa May to cut UK government funding to the group – a request that baffled diplomats as no direct UK funding exists.

"Incremental tyranny [is a process] which means you live in a democracy and suddenly you understand it is not a democracy any more,” Ayalon told a small group of journalists, including the Guardian, ahead of the event. “This is what we are seeing in Israel. The tragedy of this process is that you only know it when it is too late.”
Ayalon cited recent moves by ministers in the Netanyahu government to change the laws to hit groups such as Breaking the Silence by banning them from events in schools and targeting their funding, while also taking aim at the country’s supreme court and independence of the media.

Issues of freedom of speech and expression have become one of the key fault lines in Israeli society – in everything from the arts to journalism – under the most rightwing government in the country’s history.

The Babur gallery is under threat of closure after being censured by the country’s culture minister, Miri Regev, for holding an event with Breaking the Silence on publicly owned property, a group which Regev claimed “hurts Israel’s image”.

Gillon was equally bleak in his analysis of Israel’s trajectory, saying: "The country was being driven by this occupation towards disaster”. He added:

This country was established on the values of liberal democracy, values written in the only kind of constitution we have – which is our declaration of independence – values we don’t fulfil any more. You can analyse what happened to us in the last 50 years, but everything is under the shade of occupation. It has changed us a society. It has made us an unpleasant society.

The comments by Ayalon and Gillon come amid a growing and heated debate between the right and opponents of the occupation over the historic legacy of the six-day war, in June 1967, which marked the beginning of the occupation. Rightwing ministers celebrated the occupation on Thursday as the “liberation” of the occupied territories.


Gillon continued:

I am here, because I think that Breaking the Silence and groups like it are completely legitimate organisations. Sometimes I don’t like what they say, but the mission they took on themselves, through interviews with soldiers, should give a better understanding [about] what it means to occupy another people.

The decision by Ayalon and Gillon to make such a public show of support for Breaking the Silence was seen as a coup for the human rights group which has been facing increasing official efforts to limit and censor its activities.

The two men also criticised the unwillingness of the Israeli media and senior opposition politicians to speak up for freedom of speech, in particular concerning the moves against groups like Breaking the Silence:

They do what they do because they understand it is their moral duty. They are soldiers who serve and like every gatekeeper they hold up a mirror image of the Israeli reality in the occupied territories. What they see is very ugly. So we hate the mirror and blame the mirror and don’t hear what they say,” said Ayalon.

They added that they were also deeply concerned about a growing apathy in Israeli society where, after so many years, an occupation justified by the Israeli courts and legal system as temporary had come to defy the meaning of the word.

Ayalon suggested an Orwellian dynamic that left Israelis in a state of fear for political ends:
What is necessary to pave the way for this concept of incremental tyranny is an ongoing war. It is like 1984. There is always an enemy.

Just days ago Regev, a controversial rightwing minister, said that Breaking the Silence and others who supported it:  “Had no place in Israel.”

The two former Shin Bet chiefs were speaking as it was revealed that one of Israel’s main official ceremonies to mark the anniversary of the six-day war would controversially take place in the settlement of Gush Etzion in the occupied West Bank.

The two ministries will spend a total of 10m shekels ($2.74m) on events marking the anniversary of what the education minister, Naftali Bennett, and Regev described as:

Israel’s glorious victory in the six-day war, and the liberation of Judea and Samaria [the West Bank], the Golan Heights and the Jordan Valley.

While the vast majority of the world's population regard this as an illegal land grab which stole this land from its rightful owners the Palestinian people.

UN United Nations Security Council resolution 446, adopted on 22 March 1979, concerned the issue of Israeli settlements in the "Arab territories occupied by Israel since 1967, including Jerusalem".[1] This refers to the Palestinian territories of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip as well as the Syrian Golan Heights.

In the Resolution 446, the UN Security Council determined:

that the policy and practices of Israel in establishing settlements in the Palestinian and other Arab territories occupied since 1967 have no legal validity and constitute a serious obstruction to achieving a comprehensive, just and lasting peace in the Middle East.


* This article came from a number of sources including the Guardian and Breaking the Silence.

2 comments:

  1. Incremental tyranny is hardly exclusive to Israel.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Are these people for real? They really do have a brass neck. These people actively participated in creating the monster that is Israel, by murder and theft, and now that the monster no longer answers to them they complain!!!!!

    ReplyDelete