Do you really think that was one of the Shin Bet’s goals? Secretly detaining a Palestinian journalist who has just returned from Lebanon? Baseless accusation of ‘contact with a foreign agent,’ as they put it?
No. It was simply incidental to the detention. As far as the Israeli establishment is concerned, all contact between ‘48 Palestinians and the Arab world is criminal and a danger to national security. Their goal is to intimidate and try to cut us off from the Arab sphere in which we live; they really do not want us to be in contact with our brothers abroad.
Why? They fear it will hurt their efforts to integrate us in their mainstream of Israeli security-patriotism? It will hurt our ‘loyalty’?
No doubt. They are afraid of setting a precedent. They do not want more journalists or activists to travel. We were educated as a Palestinian minority that the Shin Bet wants to scare us through persecution, as if they “decide” when and how to haunt us. But what we do not understand is that the Shin Bet has no will, they cannot see us as anything a security threat. It’s a clearly inflexible mechanism; you cannot change its character, thinking and modus operandi. There isn’t a government decision to prevent Arabs from traveling to Lebanon; that’s not the Israeli government’s policy so we do not have a problem of policy. Other problems, occupation and settlements, are not resultant from a flexible, changeable policy. The problem is of a racist regime, so it does not really matter if Netanyahu or someone else is running the show, it’s all the same.
So how was detention? How you were treated?
I’ll surprise you. They were very nice, and therein lies their racism.
Nice and racism don’t not sound like two things that go together.
On the surface, but every behavior has a reason, and here, the reason is conceptual: how they see me. In front of them sits a “white boy” with green eyes from an educated family, and in their understanding, I am closer to them on the human scale, the same Zionist scale that categorizes people in Israel. Though I’m not a whole person like them, I’m more of a person than a detainee or a prisoner who arrived from Gaza or the Occupied Territories, for example. Think of the “not-so-nice” attitude the rest of our people get from them and there you have racism at its best.
A law school graduate, David Lange transitioned from work in the oil and hi-tech industries into fulltime Israel advocacy. He is a respected commentator and Middle East analyst who has often been cited by the mainstream media
A law school graduate, David Lange transitioned from work in the oil and hi-tech industries into fulltime Israel advocacy. He is a respected commentator and Middle East analyst who has often been cited by the mainstream media
