Haaretz published an article on Wednesday highlighting the growing number of hate crimes against Palestinians in Israel, and how they are being blamed on the Palestinians.
The article by Yair Abur-Reuven, a professor of political science at Tel Aviv University, points out that the recent wave of violence in the West Bank and Gaza is being framed as an attempt to “rescue” Israel from the Palestinians, rather than as an attack on the Jewish state.
“The Israeli government has blamed the recent violence on the West and Palestinian terrorism,” he wrote.
“In reality, the Palestinians are the primary aggressors in the conflict.”
“In the midst of this, a new generation of Israeli politicians has been forced to confront the reality of the occupation,” he continued.
“They are confronted with the reality that their policy of ‘rescue’ is working.”
The Israeli public is being told to forget about the existence of the Palestinians as a people, and instead blame them for the violent attacks on their homeland, he said.
This, Abur.-Reuvel said, is the same tactic used by many Israeli politicians in the past to gain public support for their policies.
“We are not just trying to blame the Palestinians for this.
We are trying to change the public perception of the conflict, and that means to use it against them,” he said in an interview.
The same strategy has been used to achieve political and public support among the Israeli public for a number of years, Abul-Reun said.
This is why there is an increasing amount of violence directed at the Palestinians in recent years, even as the situation on the ground has improved.
He argued that the public is still very sensitive about the fact that Palestinians are living under occupation and in a state of permanent military occupation, and therefore their continued existence is not only unacceptable, but also dangerous.
Abur- Reun said the current wave of attacks are part of a larger campaign by Israeli leaders to discredit the Palestinian struggle, as part of an effort to delegitimize it and justify its continuation.
Abul- Reuven said that in the last five years, Israeli leaders have tried to present the occupation as a peaceful occupation.
While the occupation has been under the protection of international law, Israel has carried out numerous illegal acts against the Palestinians and they continue to be subject to arbitrary and punitive measures by Israel.
Abu- Reuch, who has written several books on Israeli politics, said that the current discourse is trying to use the Palestinians’ struggle against Israel as a pretext to further their own policies.
Abud said that he has also noticed a trend among Israeli politicians to dismiss the Palestinian people and the Palestinian cause, as “stupid.”
“The only reason that people who are not Israelis or have no connection to the Israeli establishment want to attack us is because they want to save Israel,” he told The Jerusalem Report.
“They do not want to see the real story, which is the truth about the occupation, the systematic killing of the Palestinian population in Gaza, the continuing occupation, which includes all kinds of acts against them, which are against the international law,” he added.
“This is a strategy to deflect attention from the reality, which shows the systematic killings, the inhuman treatment of the Gazans, and the destruction of their infrastructure.”
Abu Reun, who is currently a visiting fellow at Tel Hashomer Institute of National Security Studies at Tel Ben-Gurion University, said he is currently working on a book that will examine the “tactics of the Israeli government and the public in order to justify its policies.”