To take the measure of urban violence pitting Arabs against Jews, localized but unprecedented, which has lasted in Israel since May 11 against a backdrop of conflict in Gaza, we must focus on the verbal violence that preceded these clashes. Weigh the symbolic brutality of the words of Israeli politicians who, from election to election, trivialized the division of “them” against “us”, the vocabulary of the enemy, of the irremediable rival.
Such violence traces a wake over time. Whatever part of calculation, of cynicism that guides it step by step, it brings actions behind it. The recent history of Israeli power is that of a right that has been slipping, for a decade, into a stiffening of identity. His bursts of language echo others, inflammatory and also excluding, deputies and Arab community representatives, who are not in power.
“No loyalty, no citizenship”
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, head of government since 2009, has long left this adventurous path to his former chief of staff, Avigdor Lieberman. By his unvarnished language and his simple, brutal logic, this ultranationalist revolutionized the Israeli political space, after the second Intifada (2000-2005). “No loyalty, no citizenship. ” This slogan, during the legislative elections of 2009, discredited the loyalty to the Jewish state of the Arab minority, which represents 20% of the population.
To his Russian-speaking audience, Mr. Lieberman still offers today a “Exchange of populations” between Israel and a future Palestinian state. It is not sovereignty over the Holy Land that counts for this layman, but the homogeneity of each place. The Palestinians of Israel, outside. Mixed cities, which these days concentrate most of the violence: a mistake.
The speech of Mr. Netanyahu experienced a clear shift in this direction in March 2015. The Prime Minister then rallied his voters at the polls, urging them to resist the Arabs: “The right-wing government is in danger. Arab voters flock to the polling stations in droves. Left-wing NGOs take them there by bus. “ Suddenly, the democratic game is summed up in a binary balance, necessarily unequal.
Runaway for two years
This line, Mr. Netanyahu reactivates it in spurts, according to the campaigns and the circumstances. It also finds an outlet in Parliament, in texts or proposals supported by its far-right allies. These culminated in 2018 with a constitutionally valid law defining Israel as the “National home of the Jewish people”, which degraded the status of the Arabic language and considered “National value”, seventy years after the birth of the State, the “Development of Jewish communities”.
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