From the moment Otzma Yehudit joined the union of right-wing parties and people began warning "Bibi or Tibi," the public opinion industry has been teeming: Israeli racism is rearing its ugly head. They compare Otzma Yehudit – to borrow a reference from the United States – to the Ku Klux Klan, which espouses white supremacy. The refusal of Zionist parties to strike coalition agreements with Arab parties indicates apartheid, and they wish, with moralistic kitsch, for the day our leaders remember that "all people are born equal."
I will allow myself a moment of racism, and borrow from an Arabic expression coined by a renowned Arab publicist: "Words don't cost money." Because accusing people of racism isn't just easy, it also pays off. It's easy because there's no real need to prove someone else is racist; they will deny it regardless, and their denial is akin to flailing around in quicksand: It will only make their situation worse. And it pays off, because who, other than a racist, would endeavor to refute such an accusation and effectively mark himself as an ally of racists, that is to say, a "racism denier?"
However, the ease with which establishment moralists accuse rivals of racism today doesn't end with their transparent virtue signaling. On a more profound level, it embodies the campaign of semantics to blur the essence of the Arab-Jewish rift in Israel.
There is no point in denying that as in any Western society, in Israel, too, racism exists. But the analogy between the hatred of blacks in the U.S. to the hatred of Arabs in Israel, for example, is baseless and manipulative. The mutual hostility between Jews and non-Jews in Israel is neither founded in racism nor religion, rather it is nationalistic.
This false equation inflicts cultural and historic injustice on the victims of pure racism in America and other places, and for Israelis, it creates a distorted picture of the Arab-Israeli conflict. The bad blood in our region doesn't stem from attitudes of racial supremacy, supposedly held by white Jews against Arab people of color. It stems from a conflict between two national movements over control of the land that we and they call our "national home."
The attempt to explain this national fissure in terms of "racism" – like the attempt to brand Israeli control of the territories in terms of "colonialism" and "apartheid" – is steeped in imbecilic simplicity. Above all else, it paints one side of the conflict as a remaining vestige of pure evil in the world, and indirectly absolves the violent resistance waged against it.
In actuality, those accusing the Right of "racism" are superficializing Israeli-Arabs as a separate (and exceedingly homogeneous) ethno-religious unit, and are marginalizing their political leadership as mere community leaders empowered to negotiate over crumbs from the empire.
Paradoxically, the right-wing leadership almost completely ignores the religious and ethnic essence of the non-Jewish citizens of Israel and their political leadership, approaching them instead as a citizenry with a clear national-political agenda. They certainly aren't treated as the "weak minority" that privileged Jews who compulsively virtue signal need to empower and handle with kid gloves.
