Naomi Klein, climate-justice professor at the University of British Columbia, is the author of “How Israel has made trauma a weapon of war,” a 6000-plus-word essay in the October 5 Guardian. Back in 1990 in The Varsity, a University of Toronto publication, Klein authored “Victim to Victimizer,” subtitled “What Israel has become: Racism and misogyny at the core of its being.” As the author explains:
When I speak out on issues of misogyny in Israeli culture – of Israeli soldiers’ brutality towards Palestinian women, of the escalating incidents of battery and rape of Israeli women by Israeli men, of the abusive treatment of women who dare to protest the occupation, and of the servile attitude of the diaspora, it is only other Jews who come after me, as they have been known to condemn the many voices of dissent in our community. I am asked to believe that this country which silences me is going to save me. On the contrary, I wish to be saved from Israel.
Jews made the shift from victims to victimizers with terrifying ease. Military service is compulsory in Israel. It is the backbone of the Israeli economy. Although women are also drafted, they are mainly channeled into secretarial jobs. Every Israeli man from the age of 18 to 21 serves in the army. They are taught the siege mentality and to hate Arabs. This hatred makes these lost years meaningful.
These young men, who begin to feel their own strength and the strength of their country with a machine gun in their hand, are reported to go into Arab villages and gratuitously scatter garbage and broken glass for Palestinians women to pick up with their bare hands. This is above and beyond the sanctioned bulldozing of Palestinian homes, the closing of their schools, and the shooting of their children. After all, Israelis are stronger; they have guns. Israeli men reach maturity by brutalizing and degrading Palestinians, particularly Palestinian women.
The effect the violence in the Israeli male’s life has on Israeli women is worsening. As the brutality of the intifada escalated, so does the brutality in Israeli homes and reports of rape. In the army, brute force rules and it appears to be crushing Israeli women.
By far the most disturbing development in Israeli men’s misogyny towards Israeli women is something known to Israeli women as “Holocaust pornography” where images of emaciated women near ovens, shower heads, cattle cars, and the like are used to sell clothing and other products: “Jewish women are sexualized as Holocaust victims for Israeli men to masturbate over… the themes are fire, gas, trains, emaciation, and death,” writes Andrea Dworkin in October 1990 Ms. Magazine.
So long as Israel continues to usurp Palestine, it will be a country with racism and misogyny at the core of its being. Until this brutality ends, Israel is a country with blood on its hands and on its profile.
And so on. For further information see “The Strange, Enduring Rage of Naomi Klein,” by Hillel Neuer, from September, 2009.
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