Former Israeli Intel Chief: “If We Shall Not End This Occupation, We Shall Not Have Democracy”
Photo by screenshot of CNN's Amanpour
There has been a lot of truly terrible American journalism around Israel’s assault on Gaza. From the acceptable kind of antisemitism endorsed by our power centers to their stenographers dutifully pushing a defense of American empire and calling it journalism to our major news organizations outright publishing Benjamin Netanyahu’s lies about his murder of World Kitchen Workers, mainstream American media has broadly eschewed any kind of journalistic principles in order to aid an unhinged Israeli regime that most people in Israel don’t even support. This whole crisis is as good of an example you will see as to how a lot of mainstream media’s primary job is to protect the objectives of American empire.
Which is why it’s always a breath of fresh air seeing a Christiane Amanpour report. She is a capital-J journalist and she conducted a must-see interview with Ami Ayalon, the former head of Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security service. If you only got your news from stenographers like Jake Tapper who routinely spread misinformation that confirms their priors and misinforms the public, you would think Ayalon’s quotes came from some campus radical in a tent in the quad.
The reality is that many people in Israel like Ayalon are acutely aware of the depravity of the Israeli state, and his statements completely shatter the narrow worldview American stenographers have constructed around a country they prove time and time again they fundamentally do not understand. I urge you to watch the entire interview, but this is Ayalon’s thesis he returns to several times throughout Amanpour’s questioning.
“Unless we shall understand again and again, I’m saying it, that if we shall not end the occupation, we shall not have security. And if we shall not end this occupation we shall not have democracy…and this is the end of the Zionist dream because the Zionist dream is a state for Israel with a specific identity—a Jewish democracy. Our parents did not come from Arab states and Europe in order to create a totalitarian regime, and nobody will accept it. Palestinians are demanding freedom and they will fight for the end of occupation, and unless we shall understand that this piece of land is ours but it is not only ours—we have only two options—to divide it and to keep our identity or not to divide it and to lose our identity and to lose our security as well.”
In America, if you said, “this is the end of the Zionist dream for Israel,” you would be characterized as a radical extremist hellbent on spreading antisemitism. This is essentially the same argument Jamaal Bowman is making in his hotly contested Democratic primary where the Likud Party’s American election interference arm, AIPAC, has spent $23 million to unseat him (comprising a whopping 60% of all ad spending in the race), and Democratic operatives pretending to be journalists are slandering Bowman for saying essentially the same thing that Israel’s former head of internal security is asserting.