Herzog To Knesset Security: No Visitor IDs; ‘Jews Don’t Label Jews’

He invoked the identifying badges or garments Jews were forced to wear at various times and places in history.

Jerusalem, December 29 – Opposition leader Isaac Herzog objected today to the current security measures in place at the parliamentary compound, by which non-dignitary visitors are issued a special sticker designating their status for security purposes, saying that such a policy violates the important principle of Jews not labeling other Jews.

Herzog made his remarks after the cabinet approved legislation requiring representatives of NGOs receiving more than half their funding from foreign government entities to wear a tag indicating that status whenever they have official interactions with State officials or institutions. Herzog and his political allies on the Israeli Left, especially human rights organizations, have compared the law to the unsavory policies of fascist regimes, and accused the government of attempting to silence dissent. In opposing the legislation, which still must pass several votes in the Knesset plenum to become law, Herzog invoked the identifying badges or garments Jews were forced to wear at various times and places in history, and declared that Jews should know better than to subject one another to such labels. As such, he stated, the security policy requiring visitors to apply an identifying sticker to their clothes smacks of the same discrimination and must cease.

“Jews do not label other Jews,” he averred, as he and other Opposition legislators wore a tag with the same slogan on it. “Any policy of requiring them to bear an indication of their difference from those around them recalls some of the darkest periods in our past, and blackens the name of Israeli democracy. The practice of degrading visitors by forcing them to wear such badges should never have been adopted to begin with, and must end immediately.”

Opposition figures say they will seek to turn the legislation into a rallying cry to push Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and his Likud Party out of power. “This is but the latest in a long series of antidemocratic policies Netanyahu has pushed,” charged Meretz MK Michal Rozin. “I remember visiting once as a student, and being made to wear a shameful badge,” she recalled. “Things have hardly improved, and Bibi continues to use every trick in the book. Most egregiously, he has repeatedly exploited the democratic system to get reelected, by the simple device of getting the most votes, and the people must be sick and tired of such shenanigans. But the latest law takes the cake. Here he goes, identifying foreign governments that seek to interfere in Israel’s internal political affairs, as if a democracy should genuinely be concerned about anything but the Occupation.”

“Wait, I only mentioned the word ‘Occupation’ twice,” she added. “I have a quota I need to meet. Occupation. Occupation. Occupation. Occupation. Occupation. OK, you can run your story now.”