‘Leftist’ Israeli general–a 'good Jew'–threatens to ‘tear the Palestinians apart’ and ‘toss them across the Jordan’

Mondoweiss

Amiram Levin, a retired Israeli general, is a strong supporter of Labor leader Avi Gabbay.

Recently Levin unfurled his murderous views about Palestinians in an interview with Maariv (Hebrew), which will be published in full this coming weekend. In it, he opined that “the Palestinians deserved the occupation”. He said that “we justly conquered Judea and Samaria [sic]. They did not accept the partition borders [referring to UN Partition plan 1947] and opened a war. They don’t deserve anything”.

Levin speaks about ‘peace process’, saying that “peace is hope”: “We need to conduct strict negotiations and not return to 1967 lines”. He speaks of a time after Palestinian President Abbas, about a young Palestinian leadership that “sat in jail and saw that we [Israel] can’t be defeated.”

“We’ll give it a carrot in the form of a state, and if it doesn’t want it, we’ll tear it apart. I would also have wanted the whole of Israel [referring to the whole of historical Palestine]. Many times I have said that if they violate agreements, the next time we’ll fight here they will not remain, we will toss them across the Jordan. That’s how you need to fight. We were way too nice in ‘67”.

Yes, that’s right – that’s a Zionist ‘leftist’ saying those things. They are not very different from what Likud minister Tzachi Hanegbi said recently, that the Palestinians may be bringing a “third Nakba” upon themselves.

It’s not so strange either, that these words come from Levin. In the past, he has said about Palestinians, that “most of these people are born to die anyway, we just need to help them to it.”

What may appear strange to some, is how such a person can be considered a ‘leftist’ and a ‘liberal’. Indeed, Levin has come out in defense of Breaking the Silence, an organization that gathers stories and testimonies from Israeli soldiers, stories which amount to evidence of prima facie war crimes. He apparently enjoys the notion of ‘shooting and crying’. But he really hasn’t got much tears to spare for Palestinians.

His position resembles much the Israeli historian Benny Morris, who opines that “there are circumstances in history that justify ethnic cleansing”, that if David Ben-Gurion “was already engaged in expulsion, maybe he should have done a complete job”, that “something like a cage has to be built” for the Palestinians, because “there is a wild animal there that has to be locked up in one way or another.”

Haaretz has also noticed this today (Hebrew). In the weekend, Maariv, which merely summarized parts of the interview, will publish the full interview. We can already imagine what it will say. It may be shocking, but how surprising is it?

And will it surprise Israelis at all? After all, this is only the ‘left’, and there are equally murderous expressions from the right. (Can it really get any worse?)

This is ‘liberal Zionism’ at its best. Certainly not ‘Arab-loving’ (as former Labor leader Isaac Herzog warned followers not to be). It’s militant and aggressive – because a Jewish State can’t have anything else than ‘strong Jews’.