Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, October 2018, pp. 33-34, 48
Special Report
By Delinda C. Hanley
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP CONTINUES to stun the world with his tweets and racist, denigrating remarks. In fact, The New York Times published a list of “487 People, Places and Things President Donald Trump Has Insulted on Twitter.” Trump decried the migration of citizens from “shithole countries,” and worked hard to ban Muslims from entering America. As a candidate, he said he would consider surveillance of mosques—shutting some down—and suggested the establishment of a national database to register Muslims. During a June 2015 speech announcing his candidacy, Trump referred to some Mexican immigrants as “rapists.” He’s disparaged women, almost every ethnic or racial group, and regularly dehumanizes his enemies by using canine insults.
His tweets on Aug. 14, regarding Omarosa Manigault Newman, his former reality TV protégé and White House staffer, author of a tell-all book, Unhinged, hit a new low: “When you give a crazed, crying lowlife a break, and give her a job at the White House, I guess it just didn’t work out.” Trump added, “Good work by General Kelly for quickly firing that dog!”
Washington Post correspondent Philip Rucker noted, “Animalistic slurs come easily to Trump, who over the past few years has likened a long list of perceived enemies to dogs—including former FBI director James B. Comey, former acting attorney general Sally Q. Yates, former chief White House strategist Stephen K. Bannon, 2012 Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), journalist David Gregory and conservative commentator Erick Erickson….
“The president’s calling a woman a dog—and not just any woman, but the highest-ranking African American who has served on his White House staff—drew stern condemnations,” Rucker continued.
Rep. Elijah E. Cummings (D-MD) tweeted: “Mr. President, it is beneath you and the office of the presidency to call any woman a dog…It is degrading and demeaning, and I pray that you will stop this vulgar behavior. Our country is better than this.”
Rucker quotes David Livingstone Smith, a philosophy professor who studies dehumanization and racism and wrote a book on the subject, Less Than Human: “In the fascist style of politics, one of the crucial elements is distinguishing ‘us’ from ‘them.’ We are intrinsically good; they are intrinsically bad, defective, subhuman, etc.” Rucker paraphrases Smith who says leaders use dehumanizing rhetoric to elicit fear and solidarity against some perceived existential threat from “others.”
So many Americans believe that our president has crossed the threshold as he divides our country into “us” and “them.” They’re writing, blogging and running for office. They’ll register their dismay at the ballot box.
At what point do the slurs, violence and racist legislation that have taken place in Israel since its inception cross the threshold for American supporters? Many Jewish Americans criticize Israel, but too many non-Jews hang back for fear of the “anti-semitic” accusation. U.S. taxpayers and leaders continue to bankroll and support Israel, turning a blind eye to stomach-turning statements. A longer list will be printed on our website, but here are just a few:
Prime Ministers of Israel
Ehud Barak, prime minister of Israel 1999-2001:
“The Palestinians are like crocodiles, the more you give them meat, they want more.”….speech on Aug. 28, 2000, reported in the Aug. 30, 2000 Jerusalem Post
Menachem Begin, prime minister of Israel 1977-1983:
“[The Palestinians are] beasts walking on two legs.” Speech to the Knesset in June 1982
David Ben-Gurion, the first Israeli prime minister, 1948-1953:
“We must expel Arabs and take their places.” 1947
“We must do everything to ensure they [the Palestinians] never do return.” 1938 letter
Assuring his fellow Zionists that Palestinians will never come back to their homes: “The old will die and the young will forget.” 1948
“What matters is not what the goyim say, but what the Jews do.” Recorded in the Jerusalem Post, May 22, 2009
Golda Meir, Israeli prime minister, 1969-1974:
“How can we return the occupied territories? There is nobody to return them to. We can’t send it to Nasser by parcel post.” March 8, 1969
“There is no such thing as a Palestinian people…It is not as if we came and threw them out and took their country. They didn’t exist.” A statement to The Sunday Times, June 15, 1969
“We can forgive [them] for killing our children. We cannot forgive them from forcing us to kill their children. We will only have peace with [them] when they love their children more than they hate us.” 1969 press conference in London.
Bibi Netanyahu, prime minister, 1996-1999, 2009 to present:
“[The way to deal with Palestinians is to] beat them up, not once but repeatedly, beat them up so it hurts so badly, until it’s unbearable.” Caught on video speaking to Israeli settlers, 2001
“Will we surround all of the State of Israel with fences and barriers? The answer is yes. In the area that we live in, we must defend ourselves against the wild beasts.” Haaretz, Feb. 9, 2016
“Israel should have exploited the repression of the demonstrations in China, when world attention focused on that country, to carry out mass expulsions among the Arabs of the territories.” Speech to students at Bar Ilan University in 1989
Yitzhak Rabin, prime minister 1974-1977, 1992-1995:
Nobel Laureate who instructed soldiers to break the arms and legs of Palestinians when they began their popular uprising against the Israeli occupation in 1987. Israel will “create in the course of the next 10 to 20 years conditions which would attract the voluntary migrations of Palestinians.”
Yitzhak Shamir, prime minister 1983-1984, 1986-1992, speech to Israeli settlers:
“[The Palestinians] would be crushed like grasshoppers…heads smashed against the boulders and walls.” Speech quoted in the New York Times, 1988
Ariel Sharon, prime minister 2001-2006:
“Every time we do something you tell me America will do this and will do that…I want to tell you something very clear: Don’t worry about American pressure on Israel. We, the Jewish people, control America, and the Americans know it.” Oct. 3, 2001, to Shimon Peres, as reported on Kol Yisrael radio.
“You buy from Arabs. For this they piss on you.” Quote recalled by Haaretz columnist Kobi Niv
“Everybody has to move, run and grab as many hilltops as they can to enlarge the settlements because everything we take now will stay ours…Everything we don’t grab will go to them.” Agence France Press, Nov. 15, 1998
“No one will touch Judea and Samaria [the occupied West Bank]! Or Gaza either! They belong to us. They have been ours for thousands of years, eternally.” The Guardian, 1982
“I am for the expulsion of anyone who throws a stone in the occupied territories.” March 16, 1988
“Israel may have the right to put others on trial, but certainly no one has the right to put the Jewish people and the State of Israel on trial.” BBC News Online, March 25, 2001
Members of the Knesset and Other Public Officials
MK Rabbi Eli Ben-Dahan, deputy minister of religious services 2013-2015, currently deputy minister of defense, responsible for the IDF’s civil administration running government affairs in the West Bank:
“[Palestinians] are beasts, they are not human.” Aug. 1, 2013
“To me, they are like animals, they aren’t human…The Palestinians aren’t educated towards peace, nor do they want it.” 2013 radio interview, reported in The Times of Israel, May 11, 2015
“A Jew always has a much higher soul than a gentile, even if he is a homosexual.” Reported in Maariv, Dec. 27, 2013
Naftali Bennett, minister of education since 2015 and minister of diaspora affairs since 2013:
“If you catch terrorists, you have to simply kill them…I’ve killed lots of Arabs in my life—and there’s no problem with that.” Said at a July 2013 Knesset meeting, reported by Yedioth Ahronoth
Rafael Eitan, Israeli general, former chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces, and later a Knesset member:
“We declare openly that the Arabs have no right to settle on even one centimeter of Eretz Israel…Force is all they do or ever will understand. We shall use the ultimate force until the Palestinians come crawling to us on all fours.” April 13, 1983
“When we have settled the land, all the Arabs will be able to do about it will be to scurry around like drugged cockroaches in a bottle.” April 14, 1983
MK Moshe Feiglin, 2013-2015:
“Gaza is part of our Land and we will remain there forever…Subsequent to the elimination of terror from Gaza, it will become part of sovereign Israel and will be populated by Jews.” July 2014 op-ed on Arutz Sheva website
“Our soldiers are the only innocents in Gaza. Under no circumstances should they be killed because of false morality that prefers to protect enemy civilians. One hair on the head of an Israeli soldier is more precious than the entire Gazan populace, which elected the Hamas and supports and encourages anyone who murders Israelis.” Feiglin’s Facebook page, July 2014
Theodor Herzl, founder of the World Zionist Organization, speaking of the Arabs of Palestine:
“Spirit the penniless population across the frontier by denying it employment…Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly.” Complete Diaries, June 12, 1895 entry
MK Tzipi Hotovely, deputy minister of foreign affairs since 2015.
“[There are] 92,000 families in Israel in which one of the partners is not Jewish—we have a real problem that we have to deal with.” The Jerusalem Post, Feb. 11, 2011
Ze’ev Jabotinsky, spiritual father of the Likud Party:
“The Islamic soul must be broomed [swept, ethnically cleansed] out of Eretz-Yisrael.”
“Arabs must make room for Jews. If it was possible to transfer the Baltic peoples, it is also possible to TRANSFER the Palestinians.”
“If we desire that Israel should become and remain a Jewish State, we must first of all create a Jewish majority [by expelling Arabs.]” Expulsion of the Palestinians, p. 29
Sagi Kaisler, then director of Samaria Residents’ Committee:
“Wherever there are Arab villages, there is fraud. This is the way they work…it is in their nature…the [Arab] Joint List united in order to pass the electoral threshold, but primarily because they are evil parties that want to overthrow the right-wing government…We are in a battle for the future of our state, against Arabs….” March 2015
Moshe Katsav, Israeli president 2000-2007:
“There is a huge gap between us (Jews) and our enemies, not just in ability but in morality, culture, sanctity of life, and conscience. They are our neighbors here, but it seems as if at a distance of a few hundred meters away, there are people who do not belong to our continent, to our world, but actually belong to a different galaxy.” The Jerusalem Post, May, 10, 2001
Yisrael Koenig, author of the April 1976 “The Koenig Memorandum,” a confidential internal Israeli government document. Koenig served as the Northern District Commissioner of the Ministry of the Interior for 26 years:
“We must use terror, assassination, intimidation, land confiscation, and the cutting of all social services to rid the Galilee of its Arab population.”
Avigdor Lieberman, Israeli foreign minister, 2009-2012 and 2013-2015, and currently minister of defense, on Arab Israelis:
“Those who are against us, there’s nothing to be done—we need to pick up an axe and cut off his head. Otherwise we won’t survive here.” March 2015
Rabbi Yaacov Perrin, in his Feb. 27, 1994 eulogy for American-born Dr. Baruch Goldstein, who massacred 29 Palestinians praying in Hebron’s Ibrahimi Mosque:
“One million Arabs are not worth a Jewish fingernail.”
Miri Regev, (Likud), the former IDF spokeswoman, current minister of culture and sport:
“The Sudanese are a cancer in our body. We will do everything to send them back where they came from.” May 2012
MK Ayelet Shaked, current justice minister:
Posted on Facebook in the summer of 2014 the text of an article by the late Israeli writer/Netanyahu aide Uri Elitzur that called Palestinian children “little snakes” and argued that it was justified to bomb civilians when they give shelter to “evil.”
Eli Yishai, Israeli Interior Minister, Nov. 2012:
“The goal of the operation [Pillar of Defense] is to send Gaza back to the Middle Ages. Only then will Israel be calm for forty years.”
Delinda C. Hanley is news editor of the Washington Report.
