“Israel: Ministers of Chaos”
“Ministers of Chaos,” profiling Itamr Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich,
takes a deep look at the tentacles of racism and ethnonationalism in today’s state of Israel.
“Ministers of Chaos,” profiling Itamr Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich,
takes a deep look at the tentacles of racism and ethnonationalism in today’s state of Israel.
Common threads are apparent worldwide. The populist right stokes economic fears, nationalism, and anti-immigration sentiment, mixed with “culture war” talking points, to foster an environment of ongoing turmoil. These approaches are combined with attacks on checks and balances, freedom of the press, and scapegoating specific groups.
Three months later, the film accompanies Liat to Yad Vashem, where she leads her class through an exhibit on the Warsaw Ghetto. She focuses on the separation wall that divided the Jews from the Poles and the Germans. It obviously has a specific meaning for her.
With a call to recognize a “shared humanity” as a basis for moving forward, Green repeated the oft-stated phrase: “No one is going anywhere.” Which led back to Lander’s question, “What kind of relationship do we want to be in with each other?”
“We need to go back to the Judaism of our prophets,” Maoz told me. “The opposite of what Israel is now. We can’t wait for the prophets. Where is Shalom?”
Clearly, it will be the people who can hold two narratives simultaneously that will lead the fight for change in the “Holy Land.”
For many readers, the text will be a primer on unfamiliar names and coalitions, and the first “criticisms” of Zionism from the Jewish left in the 1930s and 1940s.
A long-time fixture in New York politics and former President of the human rights organization, American Jewish World Service, Ruth Messinger, told me, “I’m here because Torah states we can’t stand idly by. Starvation is not an appropriate weapon of war.”
Reading Postcards to Hitler: A German Jew’s Defiance in a Time of Terror during the first one hundred days of the Trump regime, it was impossible not to see the equivalencies to America and to feel inquietude at the parallels.
Levy last visited Gaza eighteen years ago, before the government prohibited Israeli journalists from entering. He had been a regular visitor from 1987 through 2006. His goal was to serve as an interlocutor on “life and death under Israeli occupation—where freedom and basic human rights were denied.”