“The fear of that woman is the fear of every Palestinian today living both inside Israel, in the West Bank, and occupied Jerusalem.”
Last week, the streets of Brooklyn looked like those of the occupied West Bank, with pro-Israel extremists chasing, harassing, and even threatening to rape a woman they thought was part of a pro-Palestine protest, all under the watchful eye of the NYPD.
On the heels of this mob attack, foreign policy analyst Rula Jebreal has an in-depth conversation about Zionism in the US with Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter (and Brooklyn resident) Spencer Ackerman, who starts by reading a statement he received from the victim of the attack herself.
“A group of at least 100 Orthodox Jewish men encircled me. They threatened me with rape and hurled vile insults like, ‘you are a waste of semen’ and ‘you are failed abortion.’ I moved closer to the long line of police officers standing nearby, but they did nothing to intervene or protect me,” the victim’s statement read, a testimony that is eerily similar to what Palestinians living in the occupied territories regularly endure.
“We are witnessing the Israelization of the United States of America, brought to you by fanatics,” says Rula in response to the statement, adding that it won’t stop there. “This is the tip of the iceberg of what's coming to America and what's being normalized in the United States, which is fascism.” The two point out the hypocrisy in the state’s response to the attack, and how different it would’ve been had Arabs committed such a violent act, but Spencer takes it further.
“It makes a lot of sense to talk about hypocrisy, but I would put it in a slightly different context. Institutionalized hypocrisy has a name. It's called exceptionalism,” he says, with a sobering message to the American Jewish community to which he himself belongs.
“Many, if not most, mainstream Jewish organizations believe that taking this turn toward accommodation of where Zionism is right now gets them a seat at the table. It puts them on the menu. And I think that's got to be understood very, very clearly. This is not going to protect American Jewry. “
A central figure in the conversation is Israel’s National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, whose recent visit to the US served as an accelerant to the violence discussed in the video above. Spencer and Rula dive into Ben-Gvir’s extremist ideology and put into context the drivers behind the violence unfolding against Palestinians and those who support them, as well as the role of the media in keeping it all under the radar.
Paid subscribers can watch the full interview above to hear Spencer talk about seeing this latest attack take place in the neighborhood he grew up in, perpetrated by people who are likely his neighbors, and to hear Rula talk about the CNN interview that left her stunned.
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