On Israel’s ideological and military support for apartheid South Africa.
Israel ousts Africans in 2018.
Israeli’s Racism “Outside of Language.”
The conflict between Israel and Sweden especially, though Israelis lump the Scandinavian social democracies together:
The Jerusalem Post has a whole official comms category, Racism in Sweden. It contains 14 articles dedicated to this topic. At the start of this series, it has a motivational guide for this Hasbara campaign’s participants, called Sweden and Israel: A Complex Relationship. This is a must read for anyone who is interested in the occasional corporate and social media flowering of arguments that social democrats, Swedes, and Scandinavians in general are racist Nazis, and I describe and quote it below. Israel has a massive Hasbara machine and massive motive for portraying Scandinavians as racist, reducing socialist, social democratic, Scandinavian, and especially Swedish international moral authority.
In 2016, the Jerusalem Post’s Daniel Schatz (a political scientist with successive appointments at Georgetown, Harvard and Stanford) outlined some of the features of the long-term conflict, arguing that Sweden has attempted diplomacy to reduce Israeli apartheid since Israel’s inception at the hands of the Anglo-American empire:
(A)s early as 1947…Swedish Justice Emil Sandström became chairman of the UN Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP), tasked with presenting a solution to the Arab–Jewish conflict. The engagement continued in 1948 with Bernadotte’s legacy as the first UN mediator in the conflict, and Swedish diplomat Gunnar Jarring’s subsequent largely unsuccessful mission in 1967-1990 as the UN secretary general’s special envoy to the Middle East peace process. The Scandinavian country made a subsequent fruitless effort to initiate a dialogue between the US and the PLO through initiatives taken in 1988 and facilitated the so-called “Beilin- Abu Mazen Understandings” in 1994.
As the UN’s first official mediator, Folke Bernadotte had been working with the US’s Ralph Bunche, attempting to secure an Israeli-Palestine confederation, but backed by the UK, Israeli leaders rejected anything but total annihilation of the Palestinians, and the Zionist organization Lehi assassinated Bernadotte in 1948. The assassins were not punished, and one became an Israeli Prime Minister.
Sweden’s de jure recognition of Israel was postponed until 1950 following Lehi’s assassination of Count Folke Bernadotte in Jerusalem in 1948…(But) in the two decades to come (1950-70), Stockholm came to express strong ideological sympathy for the Jewish state…the Nordic country became one of Israel’s major European supporters in the period leading up to the Six Day War.
This policy went through a radical change during the early 1970s with the rise of Swedish Socialist prime minister Olof Palme, which determined Stockholm’s position toward the Arab-Israeli conflict and its protagonists for the next quarter- century…He became the first Western prime minister to initiate direct contacts with the PLO in 1974, meeting with Yasser Arafat during a time when the organization was isolated…Stockholm soon became one of the major international supporters of PLO and was the only Western European country to vote with the Arab, Communist bloc and Third World states in support of UN General Assembly resolution 3326 (1974) and Security Council resolution 3327 (1975) which recognized Palestinian self-determination and the PLO as the legitimate representative of the Palestinians…Gradually Sweden became perceived as one of the Jewish state’s most vocal critics in Western Europe…”
You will note that Folke Bernadotte was assassinated by the Zionists in 1948.
Palme was assassinated in 1986.
Neoliberal Swedish Prime Minister Goran Persson supported Israel between 1999-2000, and Persson was the first Swedish PM allowed to visit Jerusalem since 1962. Sweden facilitated two rounds of secret, high-level negotiations between Israel and Palestine in 2000. This attempt to reduce Israeli destructiveness with affirmation did not bring about any substantive difference in results, and Persson’s government was rejected by the voters for its neoliberalism.
The Swedish-Israeli rapprochement was nonetheless short-lived. Stockholm’s new minority government reverted to the Palme tradition in 2014 by becoming the first EU member state to recognize a Palestinian state, notwithstanding that some Eastern European countries had done so during the Cold War. The recognition – which in Sweden’s eyes aimed to further the peace process” added to the enmity after Sweden’s “housing minister had been arrested in 2010 by Israeli authorities as a participant in the Mavi Marmara” humanitarian aid ship that Israel attacked in international waters, killing 9 people, beating many others, and stealing personal belongings. Israeli newspaper comments sections overflowed with derisive allusions to Swedes “appeasing the Mozzis.”
In a May 18, 2015, the Jerusalem Press published an article explaining that Israel opposed socialism in Europe, on the grounds that it would interfere with apartheid and recognize Palestine. The article called for Israel to attack Sweden to discourage other “socialist” European countries from supporting Palestine–in particular its author was worried about a Labour government in the UK. The article named several peace organizations that Sweden sponsored within Palestine. In addition to the Church of Sweden sponsoring BDS (Boycott Divest Sanctions),
The Swedish government funds numerous Israeli and Palestinian NGOs through the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA), the embassy in Tel Aviv, the representative office in Ramallah, and indirectly by outsourcing to Swedish aid organizations such as Diakonia and Kvinna till Kvinna.
In 2016 Swedish Social Democratic Foreign Minister Margot Wallström called for an investigation into Israeli sponsorship of extrajudicial killing. The Other Hot Mess of Imperialism, Israel responded to this proposal with its usual unfettered braying, bombast, threats, and strident demands to fire the offending Minister. As of 2018 Wallström is not, however, assassinated, and unlike in Anglo-America, where disloyalty to Israel is illegal, she is still able to do her work.
Unlike in Anglo-America, politicians in Sweden do not strive to outcompete each other to shove their faces under Israel’s ass. However, Israel still retains the power to oust less-central politicians in Sweden.
