Gideon Levy: What will happen to Palestine?

Sometimes it is best to get the cards on the table and know where the other party stands, racist warts and all, argues Gideon Levy.

On a cross-Canada speaking tour, courtesy of Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East, the Israeli columnist forHa'aretz told one Hamilton audience that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu displayed his true colours in the run-up to the March 17 Israeli election.

Netanyahu both publicly rejected a Palestinian state and thus a two-state solution, and warned Israeli voters that minority Arab citizens in the Jewish state were streaming to the polls "in droves."

Against the war: the movement that dare not speak its name in Israel

Gideon Levy doesn't want to meet in a coffee bar in Tel Aviv. He is fed up with being hassled in public and spat at, with people not willing to share the table next to him in restaurants. And now he is fed up with the constant presence of his bodyguards, not least because they too have started giving him a hard time about his political views. So he doesn't go out much any more and we sit in the calm of his living room, a few hundred yards from the Yitzhak Rabin Centre. Rabin's assassination by a rightwing Orthodox Jew in 1995 is itself a sobering reminder of the personal cost of peacemaking in Israel.

In his column in Haaretz, Levy has long since banged the drum for greater Israeli empathy towards the suffering of the Palestinians. He is a well-known commentator on the left, and one of the few prepared to stick his head above the parapet. Consequently, he is no stranger to opposition from the right. But this time it is different. Yariv Levin, coalition chairman of the Likud-Beytenu faction in the Knesset, recently called for him to be put on trial for treason – a crime which, during wartime, is punishable by death.

Israeli Journalist Gideon Levy on the Escalating Talk of a Military Attack on Iran

Could Israel launch an attack on Iran before the U.S. election in November? On Friday, Israel’s largest-selling daily newspaper, Yedioth Ahronoth, published an article suggesting an Israeli attack could be imminent. The article reported: "Insofar as it depends on Binyamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak, an Israeli military strike on the nuclear facilities in Iran will take place in these coming autumn months, before the U.S. elections in November." To discuss the situation in Israel and the possibility of a military confrontation with Iran, we’re joined by Israeli journalist Gideon Levy, a columnist at the Haaretz newspaper.

Video
Source: Democracy Now!
Author: ---

Boycotting the settlements is justified

I don't buy merchandise that comes from the settlements and I never will. To my way of thinking, those are stolen goods and, like any other goods that have been stolen, I try not to buy them. Now perhaps the South Africans and the Danes also will not buy them; meanwhile their governments have merely requested that products from the settlements be marked so as not to deceive their customers. Just as there was no need in the past to label merchandise from the British colonies as British products, so there is no need to mark products from Israel's colonies as Israeli. Anyone who wants to support the Israeli colonial enterprise can buy them; those who are opposed can boycott them. As simple as that, and as necessary.

Israel, which boycotts Turkey's beaches and Hamas, should have been the first to understand that. Instead we have heard heart-rending cries and angry rebukes. Not yet to the Danes, who are nice, but to the South Africans, who are less nice in our eyes. The decision was labeled "a step with racist characteristics" by the Foreign Ministry spokesman, referring to the country that waged the most courageous war against racism in the history of mankind.

Sparta is heading to the polls

The only democracy in the Middle East is heading to the polls again. The elections will be democratic, what else? On paper, they were called because the Supreme Court found fault with the Tal Law on draft deferrals for the ultra-Orthodox. And Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman is promoting a draft-everyone bill.

In reality, the prime minister wants the Israeli elections to precede the U.S. presidential election; this order will be more conducive to an Israeli strike on Iran. Either way, events revolve around the military, war and belligerence. Sparta (the Israeli version ) is going to the polls again.

Those who thought that last summer we finally moved on, matured and sobered up have been proved wrong by the election campaign, even at its very early stage. A nonmilitary agenda is nowhere to be seen. Early symptoms were apparent on Independence Day last month; once again, it was a military festival. Most newspapers looked like old issues of IDF magazine Bamahane, filled with tales of bravery on the battlefield. U.S.-made fighter jets zoomed through the sky, one of our nation's few sources of pride.

Nothing has changed in Israel since 1948

After we are done being appropriately and understandably shocked by the Ulpana neighborhood affair, by the cabinet's scandalous conduct, the absolute impotence of its attorney general and the unthinkable position of the State Attorney's Office, which volunteered its services in support of breaking the law; after we have finished reeling from the depiction of land swindlers as "normative people" and from the undermining of the High Court of Justice, we must ask: How is this anything other than business as usual in the State of Israel?

The generation of 1948 is disappearing, but its spirit has never diminished. In 1948, new immigrants were brought straight from the ships into abandoned Palestinian homes with pots of food still simmering in the kitchen, and no one asked too many questions. In 2012, the Israeli government is trying to whitewash the theft of Palestinian lands, all the while scorning the law. A single straight line - a single, perpetual mode of conduct - runs from 1948 to 2012: Palestinian property is ownerless, always abandoned property, even when this is demonstrably not the case, and Israeli Jews are free to do whatever they want with it. It was catch-as-catch-can with regard to Palestinian property in 1948, and it's catch-as-catch-can in 2012, in a never-ending game. Now, as then, the arrogation is authorized and sanctioned. Now, as then, a crime is a crime.

Israel must remember the Holocaust's refugees, forever changed

Dr. Heinz Loewy was not your classic Holocaust survivor. He did not go through any of the camps, and so did not have a number tattooed on his arm. He was a refugee, and he was my father. It seems to me that he lived most of his life as a refugee, even though he would have vehemently denied it. He lived in Israel for 60 years, but never arrived here, not really.

It's true that on Independence Day he made sure to take out the folded flag and hang it on the balcony. It's true that he had a good life here. But looking back, it seems to me that he never really found his place here. It wasn't that he was trying to relive the Europe he had left behind but it's doubtful that he found a replacement for it here. He stored his suits and ties in the closet, his Bermuda shorts replacing them in the hot summer. He also left behind the Latin he had learned, save for one proverb that he would repeat to us. Even his doctorate in law from the University of Prague was unused here.

When he arrived here, alone, after being flung about at sea for a couple of long months on an illegal immigrant ship and being jailed in Beirut, he was forced to become a door-to-door salesman, going by bicycle from house to house in Herzliya, offering the Central European pastries that he made in the bakery he owned with his sister. He looked good, baked well, and had a doctorate to boot, but surely that life was not the life he'd dreamed of as a youth.

Today, as we remember the Holocaust, we must also remember those who may not have experienced all its horrors but still had their lives changed beyond recognition, or even destroyed. The Holocaust led to the establishment of the State of Israel and the ingathering of a great many survivors to it, but not all of them felt at home. They were doomed to a life of exile in their new homeland. My father was one of them.

Between France and the Malha mall

The voice on the other end of the phone was clearly very upset. Its owner had rung late at night to talk about the "pogrom," as he called it, at Jerusalem's Malha shopping mall a few days before. As the former head of one of the state law enforcement agencies he was particularly outraged that the incident had attracted no media attention and that no arrests had been made.

On Friday the full, terrible truth of the incident came to light. Oz Rosenberg reported in this newspaper that last Monday night hundreds of Beitar Jerusalem soccer fans rampaged through the mall, chanted racist slogans, spat at female Arab workers and attacked dozens of male Arab workers with their fists, their feet and with sticks.

"They caught some of them and beat the hell out of them," Rosenberg quoted one shop owner as saying. "They hurled people into shops, and smashed them against shop windows."

Mall director Gideon Avrahami said he had never seen such a "disgraceful, shocking, racist incident." On Tuesday he took the praiseworthy step of calling a meeting with the shopping center's Arab employees and apologizing to them. "How could you see such a thing and do nothing?" one asked.

Living in Bamba Land

For four consecutive days and nights, millions of citizens of this country once again lived under conditions of fear and terror. The innovation was that, this time, no one tried to whitewash things. The mass terror was to be expected and it stemmed directly from an Israeli act of violence. Nevertheless, no one thought of expressing opposition. Better not to even ask whether indeed a terror attack had been foiled; whether the secretary general of the Popular Resistance Committees was one of those rare people in human history for whom there is no replacement; or whether indeed his assassination was beneficial or legal.

The assassination and the revenge were seen here as a divine edict, as a force majeure, as a storm in the southern skies - a quick strike that would blow away with the wind. The south was scared, the north turned a blind eye, and all together were amazed at the way Iron Dome successfully intercepted the missiles. And at times like these, there is no opposition in Israel.

Not just at times like these. It is possible to imagine a situation in which Israel would have continued with another ground invasion of the Gaza Strip. And would anyone have raised his voice against that? Of course not. Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee's chairman Shaul Mofaz would be in favor of course, and so apparently would opposition leader Tzipi Livni (whose voice was once again not heard this week ); Labor Party leader Shelly Yachimovich is busy to the hilt with the tycoons; Knesset hopeful Yair Lapid would have made do with another ideological "okay, bye!"; the summer protest movement leader Daphni Leef is traveling across the seas to explain that Israel is not an apartheid nation; on the Facebook page of Meretz leader Zahava Gal-On there is no mention of what happened in the south; and the Arab members of the Knesset are isolated as usual from the public discourse.

Way to go, IDF!

Here we go again - a targeted killing; retaliation; retaliation to the retaliation. Here we go again - The reflexive act; the harsh rhetoric; the blindness. The Israel Defense Forces carries out a targeted killing. The Palestinian organizations avenge it - and it's the Palestinians instigating war and terrorism. MK Danny Danon (Likud) has, of course, already called for "all of those in possession of weapons in the Gaza Strip" to be targeted because of the "million people living under fire."

Those million people, in case you failed to get it, are the residents of southern Israel. Only they live under fire. By yesterday afternoon, the bodies of 15 Palestinians were already laid out on the other side of the Gaza border. There were eight people injured on this side, and the Iron Dome antimissile system chalked up the successful interception of 25 rockets.

This cyclical ritual of bloodletting always prompts two questions: "Who started it?" and "Whose is bigger?" It's as if both questions were straight from some preschool playground. The response to the first question is always mired in uncertainty, while the answer to the second is always razor-sharp.

Who started it? The IDF and the Shin Bet security service did. The impression is that they carry out the targeted killings whenever they can, and not whenever it is necessary.

Arab justice's 'Hatikva' silence was a song of protest

The refusal of Justice Salim Joubran, the first Arab to win a permanent appointment to the Supreme Court, to sing 'Hatikva' was an instructive lesson in Israeli democracy.

It was so moving on Tuesday at the President's Residence and so stately; another celebration of Israeli democracy, which so loves to effusively praise itself. The honorable Supreme Court justices posing for a group photo; the retiring court president taking leave with tears in her eyes; the incoming court president making an emotional speech - everyone complimenting one another, praising one another and lauding our exalted democracy.

And then, suddenly, something went wrong. Who was that man whose lips remained sealed during the singing of "Hatikva?" Why did the words remain stuck in his throat? And how, for God's sake, did he dare?

What are your thoughts on this issue? Follow Haaretz.com on Facebook and share your views.

Justice Salim Joubran, the first Arab to win a permanent appointment to the Supreme Court, didn't sing about how "the soul of a Jew yearns." Even the words, "We have not lost hope ... to be a free people in our land, the land of Zion and Jerusalem," he refused to sing.

Enemies, a hate story

It is impossible to ignore what is happening to us: Palestinian children die in an accident, and many Israelis are happy about it - and are no longer even ashamed of it.

The all-clear was sounded as soon as the news came that the school bus was Palestinian.

Only the most perceptive viewers of Thursday's accident - in which nine children and one adult were killed when their bus collided with a truck north of Jerusalem - could make the distinction. But something in the manner of the coverage intimated at it immediately.

Then the reports and images started flowing in. The coverage was workmanlike overall, if faceless and depersonalized. It is not difficult to imagine how such a horrific accident would have been treated had the children been Jewish: with a lot more blood and tears. There is no disputing that, as the Talmud says, "Every person is partial to himself" - and to his own people, we might add. One can also excuse the ridiculous way the Jerusalem-Ramallah road by Aram, near the north side of the capital, suddenly became "beyond the Israeli border," in the language of reporters - the Green Line springs to life when it suits us.

But what came next cannot be excused. The Internet roiled - not with the usual anonymous comments, the last refuge of boors and perverts. This time they revealed their names and their Facebook photos, spewing forth nauseating, hate-permeated racism that seemed to exceed anything seen here previously.

"Relax, these are Palestinian children," Benny Dazanashvili wrote on Twitter. To which Tal Biton responded, "It seems these are Palestinians ... God willing." Itai Viltzig offered up a prayer: "I hope every day there is a bus like this." Dozens, if not hundreds, of Internet surfers said a prayer of thanks - for the terrible death by fire of young children on a school field trip - and the responses were featured on the web pages of the prime minister and the Israel Police and the Walla! web portal.

Iran uses terror to target civilians, and so does Israel

A great miracle happened in Tbilisi, New Delhi and Bangkok, and alongside that miracle there was ineptitude that flies in the face of Iranian pretentions and ambitions. But the intentions were clear and grave: to take Israeli lives, especially diplomats and other official representatives of the state. That is terror.

The assassinations of the Iranian scientists were no less terrorist, let's admit it. Terror is terror, against diplomats exactly like against scientists, even if the latter are developing nuclear weapons. There is no great difference between an attempt to kill a representative of Israel's Defense Ministry and a strike on an Iranian nuclear physicist. There are nuclear physicists in Israel too and if, God forbid, someone tried to assassinate them, that would rightly be considered cruel terror.        

  

And so anyone who uses these deplorable assassination methods cannot be critical when someone else tries to emulate them. And why should the world denounce Iran's terrorist acts - as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said yesterday - and not denounce others? Are there special countries that are allowed to assassinate at will, and others who are not?          

Both kinds of countries should be denounced. The methods this time were even amazingly similar. Magnetized explosive devices were stuck on cars, like in underworld hits; not blind mass attacks, but the kind that are directed against the occupants of one car, whose fate is sealed unless miracles and operational incompetence prevail.          

              

People who were impressed with the assassination of the Iranian scientists - and there are many such people in Israel - those who say with a typical Israeli wink that "they shouldn't be mourned" ignore the fact that another harsh, unnecessary bloody cycle has been launched. What possible use can there be in killing one scientist, who is then replaced by three others?

What good was it at the time to kill a key Palestinian terrorist when his place was taken by 10 others? The killer of Dr. Thabet Thabet in cold blood in 2001, a Tul Karm dentist and peace activist who did not deserve to die, also laid the groundwork for the assassination attempt in New Delhi.

The killer of Hezbollah's Imad Mughniyeh, an avowed terrorist who deserved to die, may have saved the lives of many Israelis, but put the lives of many others at risk.

That's the way it is in the cruel cycle of assassination wars. But in Israel people who dwell in glass houses are keen to throw stones. Here people are impressed by and cheer Israeli assassinations and no one has questions or doubts, either about their morality or their efficacy. We are allowed.

Here people are shocked by attempted assassinations by Arabs or Iranians, but divorce them completely from the context of Israeli assassinations. How did a columnist in Israel Hayom put it this week? "Attacking Israel is in their DNA." Theirs? And what about us? The writer forgot, and made us forget, our DNA. It, too, supports assassinations, including sometimes of the innocent.

Assassinations of Palestinians have scaled down in recent years and have been carried out mainly in Gaza, and so the hit lists of the Shin Bet security service and the Israel Defense Forces are now shorter. That's a good thing.

But according to the data of the human rights group B'Tselem, Israel targeted and killed no less than 232 Palestinians in the territories between the beginning of the second intifada and Operation Cast Lead, a period of about eight years. During those attacks,approximately 150 innocent bystanders were killed, including women and children.

These assassinations, most of which did not target "ticking bombs," were acts of terror. They are not much different from the criminal Iranian attempts in far-off Asia. The representative of the Defense Ministry in New Dehli does not deserve to die, but neither did Dr. Thabet Thabet. The Iranian scientists probably did not deserve to die either.

In February 1990, then-Commerce and Industry Minister Ariel Sharon asked the delegates to the Likud Central Committee convention: "Who's for stopping terror?" A sea of hands flew up. Today the question should be: Who is against terror? We will all devotedly raise our hands. But people who are truly against terror must also say: against all terror, against any terror, be it Iranian, Palestinian or Israeli.          

Original Article
Source: ha'aretz 
Author: Gideon Levy 

Mount Hermon's pure snow can't hide Israel's dark past

These are wonderful days at Jabal al-Shaykh. It's high season, ideal conditions and the visibility is excellent. Thousands of Israelis spent their weekend there, and the weather forecast for the next few days is promising. It's just the name, Jabal al-Shaykh, that sounds so unfamiliar. Where did you say it was?

We managed to delete Mount Hermon's original, Syrian name as if it had never existed. Precious few Israelis have ever heard the name, or are aware of the 200 towns and villages that were obliterated in the Golan Heights. Most Israelis, we might assume, aren't aware that they were ever there, since Israeli collective consciousness also erased the existence of their 120,000 residents - refugees that no one knows or cares about.

Their houses were almost all razed, in order to evade superfluous questions on the merry way to Mount Hermon. The only things left intact were the remains of army barracks, so that Israelis could believe that the Golan Heights were always about war and conflicts, not simple daily life.

On the way to Mount Hermon, the Golan Heights are Israeli, as are the inhabitants - despite the fact that most of them define themselves as Syrians. Israelis in the Golan aren't referred to as settlers. They reside in a city, in kibbutzim and moshavim - never in a settlement. On the other hand, the 20,000 Syrians still living there today are referred to as "Druze" - according to their religion, and pita bread, rather than their own definition as Syrians.

Israel's High Court doesn't deserve to be defended

The fight to defend the High Court of Justice from those who would bring it down must stop now. Enough self-righteousness, enough of this masquerade, in which we imagine that we are trying to protect the last beacon of justice and the last bastion of Israeli democracy. Not only is there no longer any point to the struggle - the last-ditch battle has already failed - it is also no longer justified. No more is there reason to defend an institution that issued the shameful rejection of the petition against the amendment to the Citizenship Law.

A court that vets this nationalistic and racist amendment, which discriminates against Arab citizens of Israel solely on the basis of their ethnicity, which in the name of security is prepared to deny basic rights and destroy the lives of thousands of Israeli families, which makes false use of security to try to cover up its racism - is an institution that must no longer be defended. Its name has been taken in vain, and defending it is misleading because it makes it seem to be an institution worth fighting for. It is better to tell the truth: It is not the guardian of the seal of democracy and human rights in Israel. The right wing can continue demolishing it to their hearts' content; they are only demolishing ruins.

Let's speak plainly: This is about transfer. Not by the army, the settlers or the extreme right, but expulsion under the aegis of the law and with the court's seal of approval.

The ruling of the justices in Jerusalem means breaking up thousands of Israeli families whose mother or father will be expelled. Vladimir can marry Yana, but Mohammed cannot marry Sana.

Among the justifications and pretexts of the majority of the bench, from Justice Eliezer Rivlin's "the damage is for a worthy goal" to Justice Hanan Melcer's "the law protects the security of the state," Justice Miriam Naor's diabolical reasoning stands out: "Protection does not extend to fulfillment of family life specifically in Israel." And just where will the people of this land who come from Taibeh or Nazareth go? And why should they go?

World must interfere in Israel's internal affairs

Of all of Israel's complaints against the world, one is especially brazen: Goodness gracious, the world is meddling in the Jewish state's internal affairs.

When U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said she understands what's happening here, and it reminds her more of Iran than Israel, the Zionist response has been: "It would be better for the public's representatives to direct their attention to what is happening in their own countries," as Environmental Affairs Minister Gilad Erdan put it.

When Europe becomes outraged over hate crimes in Israel, the brazen response is the Europeans adopted the lowest of resolutions in taking Israel to task. And when the world takes an interest in Israel's policy toward refugees and migrant workers, this prompts a demand for an end to foreign interference, as Ronen Shoval, the founder of the right-wing organization Im Tirtzu, said.

Israel may be the last country on earth with the right to be outraged over foreign interference. Since its founding, Israel has not ceased working around the world to bring Jews here; it has clandestinely carried out underground subversive activity among shady regimes; it has openly preached abroad for Jews to leave their native lands and immigrate here, or at least send financial support; and Israel has moved heaven and earth against manifestations of anti-Semitism and supports parallel alternative Jewish and Zionist educational systems around the world.

Israel is in the midst of a culture war

The right has been in power for a long time now, and now, in its 35th year in government, in the 64th year of the state, it has turned to the task of reshaping the country's character and faces almost no opposition

Anyone who says this is a matter of a few inconsequential laws is leading others astray; anyone who claims a reversible procedure is being deceptive; anyone who states reassuringly that this is a passing phase is trying to put one over. Even the person who thinks it's just an attempt at regime change is under a delusion. What we are witnessing is w-a-r.

This fall a culture war, no less, broke out in Israel, and it is being waged on many more, and deeper, fronts than are apparent. It is not only the government, as important as that is, that hangs in the balance, but also the very character of the state. Our way of life is about to change, from cradle to grave. For this reason, it could be the most pivotal battle in the country's history since the War of Independence.

We always knew that a few years without an external threat could strain the delicate seams: When the guns go silent, the demons roar. But no one predicted such an outburst of demons of every kind, all at once. The assault on the existing order is an all-out war, on every front; a political tsunami, a cultural flood and a social and religious earthquake, all still in their infancy. Those who call this an exaggeration are trying to lull you to sleep. The defeats and the victories up to now will determine the course of events: In the end, we will have a different country. The pretension of being an enlightened Western democracy is giving way, with terrifying speed, to a different reality - that of a benighted, racist, religious, ultranationalist, fundamentalist Middle Eastern country. That is not the kind of integration into the region we had hoped for.

Israeli journalists are censoring themselves

Hundreds of Israeli journalists will gather in Eilat today for their annual professional conference. They have little to be proud of. It's true that threats hang over this conference, the threat of politicians to injure journalistic freedom, the threat of the economic crisis to harm the media and the threat of technology to eliminate print journalism, but Israeli journalism's dereliction of duty began long before this frightening twilight hour. And what they face today is entirely their own fault.

Before we declare war on those outside who would do us harm, we should first look deep within.

For many years, until just recently, Israeli journalism enjoyed great liberty. Military censorship contracted significantly; unacceptable institutions like the Editors' Committee effectively ceased to exist and the pressures placed on journalists were negligible.

In addition, most branches of the media were in good shape economically. It is ironic that Israeli journalism is falling down on the job precisely in such excellent circumstances. Come the day of reckoning it will be found wanting for these years of blindness, complacency and extreme nationalism.

Israel's rightist, religious camps mired in identity crisis

The right-wing and the religious camps are making a racket in Israeli politics. These are allegedly the factions that are getting stronger in Israeli society, but they are actually two groups in a deep identity crisis

Do you hear the noise all around? Two major, important political camps are making a racket. The religious camp is becoming more extreme and ultra-Orthodox. The right-wing camp is becoming more extreme and nationalistic, actually prefascist. The two camps are not only similar in their way of thinking. They are also similar in their vacuous emptiness. These are allegedly the factions that are getting stronger in Israeli society. They are actually two groups in a deep identity crisis.

Raise your voice since the arguments are weak, goes the saying - attributed, according to legend, to Benny Marshak of the pre-state Palmach underground (or perhaps it was Moshe Sneh of the pre-state Haganah underground) and the expression hasn't had such resonance in quite some time.

Emptiness has taken hold of the religious world. It has been decades since a major Torah figure or pillar of halakha (Jewish religious law) has arisen there, to say nothing of a moral paragon. Nothing but parched and withered ground. Running rampant and becoming more extreme is their pathetic substitute. Recent religious controversies over issues such as women singing in public, separation of men and women on bus lines and the so-called Jewish Taliban women of the Lev Tahor ultra-Orthodox sect reflect insecurity and a lack of direction. If the religious camp had direction, it would not need such dangerous pranks.

A new Israel in the making

One day not long from now we will wake up to a different kind of country, the country that's now in the making. It won't look like the country we know, which already has its share of flaws, distortions and ills. And when we become aware of this, it will be too late. At that point, the old Israel will be described in glowing terms, a model of democracy and justice, compared to the new version that is taking shape as we close our eyes to it, day after day, new law after law.

The way of life in the new Israel where we will live and die won't remind us in the least of the country we're used to. Even this article won't be publishable. Only proper opinions will be put into print, the ones approved by the new government-sponsored journalists' association, whose people will sit in every newsroom so there is no divergence from the accepted chorus of opinion.

Laws and regulations (clearly they will be passed as "emergency" regulations ) will bar publication of anything that could, in the eyes of the authorities, harm the state. A new law will bar defamation of the state, and the newspaper you will hold in your hands will be different. It will only report good news.

Radio and television broadcasts won't be what you're familiar with either. No media outlet will be able to go beyond the bounds of the law due to the draconian penalties for running afoul of them. The word "occupation" will be illegal, as will the expression "Palestinian state." Treasonous journalists will be pilloried or arrested, or at least fired. That day is not long in coming.