Israeli security forces and left-wing protesters face off during a rally against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s new hard-right government in Tel Aviv on January 14, 2023. | Jack Guez/AFP via Getty Images
It’s also not a huge departure from previous ones.
Nationalist, exclusionist, and far, far right: The most extreme Israeli government in the nation’s history has taken shape.
The human rights defenders and experts in Israeli politics I spoke with emphasized that this government is not a departure from previous ones — indeed, it’s Netanyahu’s sixth time leading the country. Rather, it’s a culmination of Israeli politics drifting farther and farther to the right, and decades longer of policies that amount to de facto annexation of the occupied West Bank, and policies of Jewish supremacy. What’s different now, however, is how clearly these ideas are stated in the new government’s coalition guidelines and by prominent ministers about the fundamentals of how the country runs.
As US national security adviser Jake Sullivan meets Israeli and Palestinian leaders this week, there are serious questions of how the Biden administration will cooperate with an Israeli government that has scratched off its liberal veneer and thrown away any pretense of negotiations toward a Palestinian state. (Secretary of State Antony Blinken is due to travel to the Middle East soon, too.)
The new Israeli government is a turn from a brief centrist government last year, now seekingto implement policies that are anti-Palestinian and anti-liberal. But it’s certainly not the first Israeli government to do so.
“It’s key not to pretend, as many seem to already be doing, that it’ll somehow be a sudden departure from Israeli quote-unquote ‘democracy,’” says Hagai El-Ad, executive director of the Israeli watchdog B’Tselem. “What worries me is that even this level of clarity will not be sufficient to trigger an adequate international response.”
The new Israeli government is shaping up to be as extreme as anticipated
Israel’s parliamentary system of many fragmented parties has spelled collapsing governing coalitions and electoral turmoil, with five national elections since 2019. The “Change” government in 2021 brought together opposing parties last year to oust Netanyahu. But that fell apart last summer, and in the ensuing elections, Netanyahu built a coalition of ultra-Orthodox and religious Zionist parties that returned him to power, leading an even more extreme government.
It was easy to foresee how the coalition would act: The new government’s ministers have made longstanding attacks on LGBTQ communities, religious freedom, Israeli and Palestinian civil society, and who can even call themselves a Jew. Above all, there will be drastic implications for Palestinians living in the occupied West Bank and for civil liberties for Israeli citizens, in large part because Netanyahu’s internal coalition negotiations have brought settlers into key ministerial posts.
“They don’t have a lot of cracks in the coalition that could potentially derail some of the things that they want to do, and they have Netanyahu over a barrel,” says Jeremy Ben Ami, the president of the pro-Israel and pro-peace advocacy group J Street. “They passed a bunch of laws already before they were even sworn in as a government. They rearranged the way in which the occupation is run.”
Days into the government’s swearing in, there are already signals of how these personalities will rule.
Justice Minister Yariv Levin has introduced legislation that would weaken judicial review and the power of Israel’s supreme court to strike down legislation. Another proposal would revamp and politicize the country’s longstanding process for selecting judges.
Amir Cohen/AFP via Getty Images
Itamar Ben Gvir, leader of Israel’s Jewish Power party and new minister of national security, congratulates Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as the new government is sworn in, in Jerusalem on December 29, 2022.
Gil Cohen-Magen/AFP via Getty Images
Israeli mounted police watch as Bezalel Smotrich, head of the Religious Zionism party, visits the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of the Israeli-annexed East Jerusalem on May 10, 2021.
Or look at the first moves from the national security minister Itamar Ben Gvir, of the Jewish Power Party. A provocateur whose political ideas are inspired by the late radical iconoclast Rabbi Meir Kahane, Ben Gvir has stepped into a role tailor-made to oversee the police both within Israel and the occupied West Bank. He’s already, in a dangerously escalatory move, visited the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. And in early January he, on dubiously legal grounds, directed the police to tear down any Palestinian flag in public spaces.
There’s alsoFinance Minister Bezalel Smotrich. The head of the Religious Zionism party, he is a settler whose anti-gay rhetoric is legion. He has already seized customs revenues that belong to the Palestinian Authority, an entity he’s called a “terror-abetting body” that he thinks should fall. He also holds newly created authorities that give him oversight of the West Bank occupation through a role crafted for him in the Defense Ministry.
These rapid moves, particularly Levin’s judicial reform proposal, speak to the political infrastructure on the right that has been built over the last decade, largely funded by Republicans in the US. The Kohelet Policy Forum, a nationalist, libertarian Israeli think tank backed by right-wing American billionaires, reportedly drafted the legislation. As Ben Ami told me, “It’s not fully understood that this is being driven ideologically and professionally by a machinery that has its roots right here in the United States.”
Further clues to how Netanyahu and his partners will govern are apparent in the coalition agreement that sets out the new government’s guidelines. Though it is not legally binding, it states plainly its ideology: “The Jewish people have an exclusive and inalienable right over all areas of the Land of Israel. The government will promote and develop the settlement of all parts of the Land of Israel — in the Galilee, the Negev, the Golan and Judea and Samaria,” the latter referring to the occupied West Bank.
This goes further than any previous agreements. The government has made “explicit the coalition parties’ long-standing intent to further entrench Jewish supremacy and Palestinian repression throughout the State of Israel and the occupied West Bank through a two-tiered system of governance on all levels,’’ Israeli human rights organization Adalah writes in a report.
The new government’s approach to the occupied West Bank constitutes the illegal annexation of Palestinian land, according to a coalition of leading human rights groups in Israel. The government plans to legalize illegal outposts built on private Palestinian land. The likely result, writes the coalition: “Palestinians stripped of rights and protections” and left “more vulnerable to violence and exacerbating the hardship they already endure.”
“These changes” — to the judicial system, and bestowing ministers like Smotrich with new authorities over the occupation — “threaten civil rights and individual rights in Israel, but it is mainly going to be a big, big issue against the national minority, the Palestinian citizens of Israel” who make up about 20 percent of the country, said Aida Touma-Suleiman, a member of the Knesset from the Hadash party. “We will be the first and the most severely damaged by those changes.”
“This government has all the components of fascist groups,” Touma-Suleiman added.
The Biden administration has so far stepped cautiously. “We will gauge the government by the policies it pursues rather than individual personalities,” Secretary of State Blinken said last month at advocacy group J Street’s annual conference.
Yet the US alsoappears to be holding out hope that it can work with Netanyahu and his ministers. “The prime minister, as he’s told all of us, has his hands very firmly on the wheel,” US Ambassador to Israel Tom Nides told Israeli TV recently. “He’s assured me we’ll work with the US government. Obviously, we have shared values. He understands the position of the United States, which is: we want to keep the vision of a two-state solution alive.”
But the idea of shared values and of the two-state solution are in essence untenable with this new government. There are no negotiations happening between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization, and the prospects for a sovereign and viable Palestinian state are further away than ever. Not just because of this new Israeli government, but in large part because of its many predecessors.
How the new government builds on old ones — and what, if anything, the US can do about it
It’s worth emphasizing that Israel has been violating Palestinians’ human rights with impunity for decades, and this new government just illustrates the most brutal intentions with greater clarity.
“The hypocrisy is denying that Palestinians have already been living for many years under extreme, organized, criminal Israeli state violence, underwritten by the US,” El-Ad of the human rights group B’Tselem told me. “And the lack of accountability and the acquiescence of the international community is to a great extent responsible for driving this.”
Last year was the most deadly for Palestinians living in the occupied West Bank since the United Nations began recording deaths in 2005, and it was also the year the most Palestinians have been held in administrative detention. The attacks on Palestinians throughout the center-right government of Yair Lapid and Naftali Bennett cannot be understated. Beloved Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, a US citizen, was reportedly gunned down by Israeli authorities while reporting in the West Bank. Israeli authorities raided the offices of six Palestinian NGOs, showing the limits of free expression in the country.
The US has had a role here, too, as it continues to supply Israel with billions of dollars of military aid — and has failed to publicly criticize Netanyahu’s new political allies.
Israeli Government Press Office Handout/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
National security adviser Jake Sullivan meets with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem on January 19, 2023.
“There’s no way that Netanyahu, as desperate as he is, would have gone to form this kind of coalition if it wasn’t for years and years of US abdication of responsibility for what happens here,” says Mairav Zonszein, an analyst covering Israel and Palestine for International Crisis Group. “He just wouldn’t have felt that he could do it. It would have been too outlandish.”
Meanwhile, the US government carries on with some of former President Donald Trump’s Middle East policies, like building a new embassy in Jerusalem on land owned by Palestinians and pursuing further normalization deals with Arab states like Saudi Arabia.
The Biden administration will only be able to carry on with a wait-and-see approach for so long. When US military materiel or dollars are being used to advance the policies so far only described by Israel’s new ministers, what will the State Department do?
In a new commentary, Carnegie Endowment researchers Matthew Duss and Zaha Hassan recommend consequences for the Israeli government’s choices. That might include withholding US aid to Israel and avoiding acting on Israel’s behalf in international forums like the United Nations and International Criminal Court.
The Biden administration is “clearly aware of the problem,” says Ben Ami of J Street. “But are they going to actually back it up in any way?”
Touma-Suleiman, the Palestinian member of the Knesset, is not optimistic. “I have to tell you the truth. I don’t have a lot of expectations,” she told me. The Biden administration “might criticize, they might give messages, but I don’t see them doing more than that.”
Carrying signs reading, “Together against fascism and apartheid” and “Democracy in danger,” thousands of Israelis on Saturday marched in protest of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right coalition government, which less than a week after being sworn in has already threatened to strip the country’s judiciary of power and announced punitive measures against Palestinian people and leaders.
According toHaaretz, about 20,000 people attended two different marches—one organized by the grassroots group Standing Together and calling for equality and partnership between Palestinians and Israelis, and another focusing on Netanyahu’s threats to the Israeli justice system.
The protests came days after Netanyahu’s new national security minister, Itamar Ben Gvir, angered Palestinians and the Israeli opposition by entering the Al-Aqsa mosque compound in East Jerusalem, which was seen as a provocation and an escalation of Israel’s attacks on Palestine.
“Extremists are starting to deploy their forces and it’s not the majority,” a protester named Omer toldFrance24 at a march in Tel Aviv.
u201cThousands of Israeli citizens marched in Tel Aviv today to protest Israel’s new extremist government (Photo credit: Yair Palti)u201d
Netanyahu’s government, which has been called the most right-wing in Israel’s history, also announced that it would expand settlements in the occupied West Bank. The prime minister’s office indicated on Friday the punitive measures are being taken in retaliation for Palestinians’ call for the International Court of Justice to render a legal opinion on Israeli’s policies in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Despite the opposition of Israel and the U.S., the United Nations General Assembly voted last week in favor of a resolution calling for an opinion.
One U.S.-based observer noted that language describing Israeli’s violent anti-Palestinian policies as “apartheid” was prevalent at Saturday’s demonstration. The term has long been rejected by supporters of Israel and used by human rights advocates and experts.
u201cWhat was surprisingu2014in a good wayu2014about the protest in Tel-Aviv was the amount of people who said the word #Apartheid to describe #Israel, and acknowledged the frightening place we are in in history, see photo:u201d
The protests were held days after Netanyahu’s newly appointed justice minister, Yariv Levin, announced reforms that would allow lawmakers to override Supreme Court decisions. Members of Netanyahu’s Cabinet have also made derogatory claims about LGBTQ+ people and reportedly plan to roll back laws allowing gay couples to adopt children.
“We can see right now many laws being advocated for against LGBTQ, against Palestinians, against larger minorities in Israel,” Rula Daood of Standing Together toldABC News. “We are here to say loud and clear that all of us, Arabs and Jews and different various communities inside of Israel, demand peace, equality, and justice.”
In addition to the expansion of illegal settlements, Netanyahu’s government announced last week that it would withhold $39 million from the Palestinian Authority and use the funds to compensate the families of Israeli victims of the conflict and said on Sunday that it had revoked Palestinian Foreign Minister Riad Malki’s travel permit.
Carrying signs reading, “Together against fascism and apartheid” and “Democracy in danger,” thousands of Israelis on Saturday marched in protest of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right coalition government, which less than a week after being sworn in has already threatened to strip the country’s judiciary of power and announced punitive measures against Palestinian people and leaders.
According toHaaretz, about 20,000 people attended two different marches—one organized by the grassroots group Standing Together and calling for equality and partnership between Palestinians and Israelis, and another focusing on Netanyahu’s threats to the Israeli justice system.
The protests came days after Netanyahu’s new national security minister, Itamar Ben Gvir, angered Palestinians and the Israeli opposition by entering the Al-Aqsa mosque compound in East Jerusalem, which was seen as a provocation and an escalation of Israel’s attacks on Palestine.
“Extremists are starting to deploy their forces and it’s not the majority,” a protester named Omer toldFrance24 at a march in Tel Aviv.
u201cThousands of Israeli citizens marched in Tel Aviv today to protest Israel’s new extremist government (Photo credit: Yair Palti)u201d
Netanyahu’s government, which has been called the most right-wing in Israel’s history, also announced that it would expand settlements in the occupied West Bank. The prime minister’s office indicated on Friday the punitive measures are being taken in retaliation for Palestinians’ call for the International Court of Justice to render a legal opinion on Israeli’s policies in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Despite the opposition of Israel and the U.S., the United Nations General Assembly voted last week in favor of a resolution calling for an opinion.
One U.S.-based observer noted that language describing Israeli’s violent anti-Palestinian policies as “apartheid” was prevalent at Saturday’s demonstration. The term has long been rejected by supporters of Israel and used by human rights advocates and experts.
u201cWhat was surprisingu2014in a good wayu2014about the protest in Tel-Aviv was the amount of people who said the word #Apartheid to describe #Israel, and acknowledged the frightening place we are in in history, see photo:u201d
The protests were held days after Netanyahu’s newly appointed justice minister, Yariv Levin, announced reforms that would allow lawmakers to override Supreme Court decisions. Members of Netanyahu’s Cabinet have also made derogatory claims about LGBTQ+ people and reportedly plan to roll back laws allowing gay couples to adopt children.
“We can see right now many laws being advocated for against LGBTQ, against Palestinians, against larger minorities in Israel,” Rula Daood of Standing Together toldABC News. “We are here to say loud and clear that all of us, Arabs and Jews and different various communities inside of Israel, demand peace, equality, and justice.”
In addition to the expansion of illegal settlements, Netanyahu’s government announced last week that it would withhold $39 million from the Palestinian Authority and use the funds to compensate the families of Israeli victims of the conflict and said on Sunday that it had revoked Palestinian Foreign Minister Riad Malki’s travel permit.
With the inauguration of Israel’s new far-right government, Zionism has finally embraced the fascist ideology that inspired major sections of the movement during its formative years a century ago.
Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu chairs the weekly cabinet meeting in Jerusalem on January 3, 2023. (Atef Safadi / Pool / AFP via Getty Images)
Last month, Israel inaugurated what is, in effect, the first fascist government in its history.
The State of Israel was the product of the Jewish nationalist movement that originated in the mass antisemitic violence of Tsarist Russia of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Much of the world, including European Jewish communities, stood by helplessly as organized Cossack militias and other pogromists rampaged through Ukrainian Jewish shtetls raping, pillaging, and murdering tens of thousands of helpless Jews.
An idealistic Hungarian journalist developed a plan to save endangered Eastern European Jewry. Theodore Herzl envisioned the Jewish homeland would become a thriving nation for these millions, who were otherwise destined for penury, privation and death. Rather than wait for the tsar and his henchmen to seal these Jews’ fate, Herzl foresaw a mass Jewish exodus from these lands of affliction to a vibrant new state awaiting them.
Initially, Herzl saw this state as a haven for Eastern European Jews facing the gravest threat. But later Zionist leaders developed a far more sweeping vision of the future, in which all Jews would either choose or be forced by systemic violence to seek refuge and build a state in Palestine.
Zionism, in effect, negated the entire existence of a Jewish Diaspora by claiming Jews were doomed to destruction in the face of overwhelming hatred from “gentiles.” This principle came to be known in Zionist ideology as “negation of exile.” Its corollary was a “return to history,” meaning that Zionism represented a return of the Jewish people to their rightful physical and spiritual place in the biblical land of Israel. It also signified a normalization of Jews, so that instead of being weak, hopeless, and on the margins of diasporic societies, they could be at the center and in control of their fate. That project would soon become successful — so successful that, in many ways, it would come to resemble fascism.
Zionism and Socialism
Almost from its inception, the Jewish national movement offered a response to the question of governing the new Jewish polity. The approach that dominated the first eight decades of the movement reflected the socialist model, which had been prevalent in post-tsarist Russia and much of Eastern Europe.
The revolutionary ferment that preceded the 1917 Bolshevik revolution had a profound impact on Jews who joined the Zionist movement. They embraced socialist values and sought to incorporate them into the new Hebrew colony: namely, the overarching value of work and the worker; or, in the terminology of the day, “Hebrew labor.” Perhaps the foremost example of this was the agricultural collectivist kibbutz movement. They also called for the formation of state enterprises and nationalization of the economy, including major industries.
The opposite of socialist Zionism was Revisionism. Its founder, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, advocated a form of militant Jewish nationalism.
The opposite of socialist Zionism was Revisionism. Its founder, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, advocated a form of militant Jewish nationalism. Like the socialists, Jabotinsky was a child of Eastern European Jewry. But he rejected the tenets of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Instead, he took as his model the rising populist, fascist movements in Italy and Germany. Benito Mussolini was especially to his liking: he didn’t espouse explicitly antisemitic ideas, as Adolf Hitler clearly did. Like his Italian idol, Jabotinsky projected Jewish power and a united Jewish nation intent on achieving it.
He understood that the “Palestinian Arabs,” as they were called, wanted no part in the new Jewish colony. He acknowledged that the Jews were colonizers and that it would be necessary to use force to quell their opposition. Nothing could, to his mind, stand in the way of the Jewish national project.
In “The Iron Wall” (1923), he expresses his disdain for the indigenous inhabitants:
Culturally they [Palestinian Arabs] are five hundred years behind us, they have neither our endurance nor our determination; but they are just as good psychologists as we are. . . . We may tell them whatever we like about the innocence of our aims, watering them down and sweetening them with honeyed words to make them palatable. But they know what we want, as well as we know what they do not want. They feel at least the same instinctive jealous love of Palestine, as the old Aztecs felt for ancient Mexico, and the Sioux for their rolling Prairies.
In the essay, he suggests there are only two ways to create the state he envisions: either imposition by colonial powers like the British, who promulgated the Balfour Declaration, calling for creation of a “Jewish homeland,” or by the Zionists themselves through force, in the form of a Jewish army. He further argues that it is futile to attempt to come to terms with the Palestinians. No compromise, no understanding, is possible. This has been the policy of Israel’s right-wing Likud governments of the past fifty years.
Jabotinsky went on:
Zionist colonization must either stop or else proceed regardless of the native population. Which means that it can proceed and develop only under the protection of a power that is independent of the native population — behind an iron wall, which the native population cannot breach. . . .
We cannot offer any adequate compensation to the Palestinian Arabs in return for Palestine. And therefore, there is no likelihood of any voluntary agreement being reached. So that all those who regard such an agreement as a condition sine qua non for Zionism may as well say “No” and withdraw from Zionism. . . .
In this matter there is no difference between our “militarists” and our “vegetarians.” Except that the first prefer that the iron wall should consist of Jewish soldiers, and the others are content that they should be British.
By 1939, two months after World War II broke out, Jabotinsky envisioned a chaotic postwar order in which millions would be uprooted from their centuries-old homes and forced to live in ethnic states. He — along with David Ben-Gurion, who wrote a 1937 letter to his son advocating population transfer (i.e., ethnic cleansing) — argued, “They [Palestinian Arabs] will have to make room for the [surviving] Jews and leave, perhaps to Saudi Arabia with the support of an international loan.”
Less than a year after Jabotinsky’s death in 1940, the Revisionist armed militia that had been created as part of his movement splintered. The more violent and radical branch founded Lehi, or the National Military Organization of Israel (NMO), which proposed a deal with the Nazis in which Palestinian Jewry would become a German ally. In return, Germany would recognize an independent state in Palestine.
Lehi’s Ankara Document envisioned an alliance between the new state and the Nazis predicated on the latter’s victory in the war:
The NMO, which is well-acquainted with the good will of the German Reich government and its authorities toward Zionist activity inside Germany and toward Zionist emigration plans, is of the opinion that:
Common interests could exist between the establishment of a new order in Europe in conformity with the German concept, and the true national aspirations of the Jewish people as they are embodied by the NMO.
Cooperation between the new Germany and a renewed folkish-national Hebraium would be possible and,
The establishment of the historic Jewish state on a national and totalitarian basis, bound by a treaty with the German Reich, would be in the interest of a maintained and strengthened future German position of power in the Near East.
Proceeding from these considerations, the NMO in Palestine, under the condition [that] the abovementioned national aspirations of the Israeli freedom movement are recognized on the side of the German Reich, offers to actively take part in the war on Germany’s side.
The italicized term above in the original German, völkisch-nationalen Hebräertum, has been translated as popular-national Hebrewness. But I suggest that the Lehi authors of this proposal sought to align their own national vision with Nazi Germany and that one could translate the phrase as a Hebrew national socialism. Though unstated, this new militantly nationalist state would treat the indigenous Palestinian population in a similar fashion to the Nazi treatment of German Jewry before the explicit policy of genocide was promulgated.
The Germans failed to pursue the offer. But that did not dent Lehi’s ambition to strike against its imperial enemy. In 1943, future prime minister Yitzhak Shamir directed a plot leading to the assassination of Britain’s leading diplomat in Cairo, Lord Moyne.
As opposed to European partisans (including Eastern European Jews) who were killing German soldiers, the Revisionists saw their only enemy as the British. The Nazis, as far as they were concerned, were a way to end the mandate and gain national independence.
But as they saw the war shift in the Allies’ favor, Lehi turned increasingly toward another totalitarian state: Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union. In fact, the Judeo-militants began using the phrase “Hebrew national Bolshevism” (a reverse echo of völkisch-nationalen Hebräertum) to describe their own vision for the future Zionist state. This strand of Revisionism had no absolute allegiance to either ideology. It embraced whichever one appeared likely to emerge victorious in the postwar era: the winner would be the one that could best advance Revisionism’s aim to establish a state.
But there was one underlying principle common to both systems: a totalitarian model of state control in the political, economic, and even personal spheres.
Religion and Fascism
Twentieth-century iterations of fascism varied in their approach to religion. Hitler and Mussolini did not especially seek to incorporate it into their own political philosophy. On the other hand, Francisco Franco’s Spain, the Croatian Ustaše, and the Romanian Iron Guard were — and Vladimir Putin’s Russia today is — Christo-ethnic-nationalist states. Similarly, a form of theocratic fundamentalism now reigns in parts of the incoming Israeli government.
Revisionism, like Mussolini’s brand of fascism, was an entirely secular movement. In fact, it, and much of the Zionist movement, rejected Judaism as a relic of the Diaspora and the suffering of the Jewish past. “Hebrew,” as a reference to the New Jewish Man, was meant to replace it.
But after 1967, the Greater Israel movement, inspired by the messianic nationalism of Rabbi Avraham Kook, integrated religious supremacy with secular nationalism. This in turn gave birth to the settler movement, the single most influential political movement since the founding of the state. The two combined became a vastly more powerful phenomenon than they were separately. Thus, the Israeli forces that emerged victorious in the latest election represent a combination of Jewish Talibanism and European fascism.
Zionism and the Holocaust
The claim of early-twentieth-century Zionism, that the Jewish Diaspora was doomed due to the historic antisemitism of the nations, foreshadowed the Holocaust. It was prescient in its warning against relying on the Diaspora as a safe place for Jewish life.
But shockingly, the Yishuv, the prestate governing authority in Palestine, did little to rescue European Jews during this catastrophic period. As opposed to American and British Jewry, the Yishuv focused on building the Palestinian colony and preparing it for independent statehood. Even when the Zionists attempted to save Jews (as in the Haavara Agreement to bring German Jews to Palestine), they did so only when it could directly benefit the Yishuv.
Why were Zionists in Palestine essentially willing to leave European Jewry to its fate? Zionism argued that a nation-state offered the means to end diasporic Jewish suffering and ensure the survival of the Jewish people. But it was more than a means — for Zionists, it was the only means. Jewish life outside that state, they believed, was doomed to annihilation or disappearance via assimilation. The ingathering of the exiles meant, in effect, the withering away of all Jewry outside it.
Such a rigid ideological construct was, in itself, a form of Israel supremacism and diaspora denialism — a dictation from the center of the Jewish world that it was the only path to survival. All others were at best a distraction from the Jewish sovereignty and at worst an impediment and thus a danger to it.
The Israeli forces that emerged victorious in the latest election represent a combination of Jewish Talibanism and European fascism.
Zionists made an exception to this principle. They saw one key benefit to maintaining a relationship with the diaspora. Leaders like founding prime minister Ben-Gurion relied on wealthy countries like the United States to fund costly military projects such as the nuclear weapons program. They also understood the need for powerful allies to arm them and offer political support in the face of their Arab enemies. The founding of the Israel lobby with the incorporation of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) in 1953 was another critical development for Israel-Diaspora relations.
Nevertheless, Israel has never seen the Jewish Diaspora as a full partner. Rather the diaspora has always been a stepchild, a sideshow of Jewish peoplehood. This foundational conflict between the two key factions of world Jewry was, for decades, papered over by protestations of love and loyalty to the Zionist enterprise by many Diaspora Jews.
But over time, it has become a growing and perhaps irreparable rift, as Israel turns away from the liberal democratic values of much of world Jewry and embraces Judeo-supremacy, a version of Judaism advocating naked power and triumphalism over the values of the biblical prophets.
Despite foreseeing the cataclysm that befell European Jewry, Zionism did get one thing very wrong: the Diaspora was not a dead end.
Despite the murder of six million Jews, the Diaspora not only survived but thrived. And it survived not by suppressing Jewish identity in order to assimilate with the non-Jewish world but by embedding itself, its traditions, and its values within (non-Jewish) society and popular culture.
That is a triumph that flew in the face of Zionist dogma. It has led to a schizoid relationship: the Diaspora, according to classical Zionism, will eventually disappear. Even if it survived, Israel should be independent of it and stand on its own two feet. Yet the Diaspora thrives and even offers hundreds of billions to Israel via communal philanthropy and US aid.
Meanwhile, Diaspora Jewry has staked out an independent identity, increasingly at odds with Israel, both politically and religiously. The former is largely secular, liberal, and democratic — values that have become anathema in the new fascist Israel. The latter’s new agenda of homophobia, mass violence, and Judeo-supremacy confronts foreign Jewish communities with a troubling dilemma. While communal leaders are chained to their traditional support of Israel, rank-and-file Jews will be driven farther away from a phenomenon that repels and disgusts them.
Israel: Fascism Reascendant
Fascism finds its origins in suffering. Germany was vanquished in World War I and burdened with a treaty of surrender that imposed punitive debt leading to economic collapse. As a result, Germans nurtured a deep grievance against France and the other European powers, who had imposed an unbearable burden on them. The Nazi movement exploited this resentment and offered Germans pride and hope, along with a desire to seek revenge for their national humiliation.
Like Hitler’s early years in the political wilderness filled with imprisonment and obscurity, Revisionism too was reviled by the dominant Zionist socialist faction before 1948. It spent decades thereafter in the shadows, largely viewed as a historical relic. Those slights rankled and nursed a sense of grievance against Labor’s governing elite. However, Revisionism did not die.
The flame of Jabotinskyism remained lit in the hearts of disciples like Benzion Milikovsky, who served as Jabotinsky’s personal secretary in the United States until Jabotinsky’s death in 1940. After, Milikovsky returned to Israel. But Menachem Begin had taken political leadership, and Milikovsky had no role to play. He returned to self-imposed exile in America as an academic, living a life filled with grievance at the thwarting of his ambitions. But his two sons changed the family name to Netanyahu, and a new Hebrew legend was born.
Kahanism in the Israeli Mainstream
The most influential Israeli fascist political figure of the past half-century, however, was Brooklyn-born Rabbi Meir Kahane. He began his political career taking up the cause of the Soviet Jewry movement in the 1960s, which sought to allow persecuted Jews to emigrate. The Jewish Defense League (JDL), which he founded in 1968, became the first Jewish terrorist group in US history. It trafficked in weapons and prepared explosive devices, using extreme violence to dramatize its cause: the JDL conspired to bomb Soviet buildings in the United States and sent a letter bomb to the office of a Jewish impresario who produced events for Russian artists, killing an office worker.
The other major thrust of the JDL was a racist campaign against a group of largely African American and Puerto Rican parents in the Ocean Hill–Brownsville area of Brooklyn that sought “community control” of its local public schools in 1968. The teachers’ union responded by calling a strike. Most of the teachers and union leaders were white and Jewish, which provoked antisemitic attacks from the community. Kahane, though hardly a champion of the labor movement, was determined to go to war, seeking to transform the political battle into the equivalent of a guerilla campaign.
After JDL activists were arrested on weapons charges and the FBI dismantled its criminal network, Kahane fled the United States to Israel. There, the principal target of his racism moved from African Americans to what he called “the Arabs.”
In the 1980s, he founded the political party Kach, whose agenda mirrored many of the Nuremberg Laws. He faced scores of arrests by Israeli police for incitement to terror and was jailed a number of times. After winning a seat in the Knesset, Kahane was expelled, and Kach was outlawed as a terrorist organization in 1988, a status maintained by the US government until this year. Ironically, the United States removed Kach from the blacklist because it hadn’t existed for several decades. But shortly after it did so, the avowedly Kahanist party, Jewish Power, won an astonishing victory in national elections.
Kahane was assassinated by an Egyptian Islamist in New York in 1990. But instead of fading into obscurity, he became a prophet of Israeli fascism. The agenda of the incoming Israeli government closely mirrors Kahane’s political philosophy.
Kahane was obsessed with Jewish racial purity and urged strict separation between Jews and “Arabs.” He especially inveighed against “mixed-race” sexual relations. The Nazis too defended the purity of the “Aryan race” by forbidding sexual relations between Germans and Jews. Leaders of some of the most extreme Israeli religious parties similarly inveigh against “Arabs” who, in their telling, lure impressionable Jewish women into sexual relationships in order to convert them and their children to Islam.
The state prosecutor routinely refuses to prosecute soldiers and police who execute Palestinians — sometimes militants but often unarmed civilians as well.
Kahane viewed Israeli Palestinians as a fifth column whose goal was the destruction of the “Jewish state.” This parallels the Nazis who, prior to the 1943 Wannsee Conference, supported the emigration of Jews from Europe as a solution to the “Jewish problem.” Kahane too urged mass expulsion of Palestinians from Israel. Itamar Ben Gvir, on the other hand, differentiates himself from his mentor, Kahane, by calling for the expulsion of only “disloyal” Palestinian citizens.
Just as the Nazis used mass violence on their path to power, targeting Jews and other political enemies, Ben Gvir and his settler allies use the same tactics, including arson, desecration of Muslim holy sites, and even murder. Every year, he marches through Palestinian East Jerusalem with tens of thousands of religious extremists chanting “Death to Arabs.”
Before Labor prime minister Yitzhak Rabin’s 1995 assassination, Gvir boasted that he and his colleagues could “get to” the prime minister. Only weeks later, Yigal Amir, a far-right extremist who shared many of Ben Gvir’s nationalist ideological views, murdered Rabin.
Kahane denounced Western democracy and said Judaism was incompatible with it. He advocated instead a theocracy based on the supremacy of religious law. Israeli Orthodox parties, most of which will feature in the new Israeli government, prefer a theocratic state governed by religious law (halakha) to democracy. Though they were elected to and will serve in the Knesset, they exploit democracy to maintain the extravagant financial benefits showered on their followers from state coffers. They legislate to impose halakha on the country.
The Nazis transformed Germany into a one-party state with an SS police apparatus that ruthlessly suppressed dissent. It also rooted out “deviant” classes like homosexuals, communists, and Jews and shipped them to concentration camps. Germany’s legal system and judiciary were subservient to Nazism, having lost any semblance of independence.
The new Israeli government plans to approve a new law that will override any Supreme Court ruling it opposes. It will do so with a simple majority vote in the Knesset. This, Israeli political analysts have noted, will destroy the rule of law and in effect dismantle an independent judiciary.
Israel’s legal system enshrines impunity for crimes against Palestinians by state authorities. The state prosecutor routinely refuses to prosecute soldiers and police who execute Palestinians — sometimes militants but often unarmed civilians as well. Nearly all complaints of torture by Palestinians at the hands of police interrogators are dismissed. Palestinian security arrestees are convicted of security crimes in nearly 100 percent of cases.
Similar to the Nazi police state, Israel maintains a draconian system of mass surveillance against occupied Palestine which includes interception of all forms of communication, installation of thousands of CCTV cameras monitoring all towns, and nightly arrests of security suspects, often accompanied by the murder of Palestinians who protest the intrusions by Israeli troops.
Like Hitler’s terrorizing of German Jews with organized pogroms like Kristallnacht, which pillaged Jewish businesses and burned historic synagogues to the ground, Ben Gvir and many in the Israeli settler movement dream of destroying Islam’s third holiest shrine, Jerusalem’s al-Ḥaram al-Sharīf, and replacing it with a rebuilt Third Temple.
In fact, earlier this week, he fulfilled a campaign commitment to his followers, making a “pilgrimage” to what he deemed the Temple Mount. He stayed only thirteen minutes: long enough to film a video boasting of Israeli sovereignty over the holy site. Then, he was whisked away by security forces. In 2000, Ariel Sharon made the same visit, which incited rage among Palestinians. That commenced the Second Intifada, in which six thousand Israelis and Palestinians died.
The world has universally condemned Ben Gvir’s provocation. One of Israel’s closest Arab allies, the United Arab Emirates, has demanded a United Nations Security Council meeting to protest the visit. Jordan’s King Abdullah, the custodian of the Jerusalem holy sites, told CNN: “If people want to get into a conflict with us, we’re quite prepared. . . . We have certain red lines. . . . And if people want to push those red lines, then we will deal with that.” Joe Biden’s administration has, unfortunately, seen fit to merely express “concern” for a violation of the religious status quo at the holy site.
Israel’s New Fascist-Theocratic Government
The embers of Israeli fascism have smoldered under Israel for at least seventy years, if not longer. Turn-of-the-twentieth-century antisemitism may have lit a match that spurred the founding of Zionism. But today, Revisionist fascism, which accompanied and underpinned Zionism almost from its inception, has burst into flames with November’s resounding election victory.
Before November’s Israeli election, a gang of settler leaders formed the Jewish Power Party (the phrase “Jewish Power” hearkens back to the founder of Israeli fascism, Kahane) and won six seats in the new Knesset, running on a joint list with the far-right Religious Zionist and Noam parties; the list won fourteen seats total. This provided Benjamin Netanyahu a resounding victory and the votes needed for a majority. But the victory comes at a cost.
The leaders of these extremist parties are virtual political thugs. The Jewish Power Party’s leader, Ben Gvir, is a disciple of Kahane who refers to the late terrorist with the honorific “my rebbe.” Ben Gvir has been convicted of incitement to terrorism fifty times. He is also the leader of the most extreme of settler militias, Hilltop Youth, who have rampaged through Palestinian villages destroying property and even burning a family to death.
The new governing coalition will seek to dispense with as many remaining vestiges of democracy as it can.
His chief partner, Religious Zionist Party leader Bezalel Smotrich, was arrested by the Shin Bet with an explosive device in his car. He intended to perpetrate a terror attack to protest Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza.
Under the coming coalition agreement, Ben Gvir will become police minister, responsible for the very officers who investigated him for his past crimes. He will also command the Israel Border Police, among the most violent forces used to terrorize Palestinians.
Smotrich will be responsible for Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT), the military administration for the occupied territories. From his perch, he will manage all Israeli settlements including outposts that, until now, have been illegal. As a Haaretz columnist writes, they are not extremists — they are “political arsonists.”
Another rabbi who is part of the incoming government leads a party whose declared mission is to destroy LGBTQ rights. He specifically calls for canceling the annual gay pride parade. He will lead a new unit of the education ministry responsible for extracurricular activities like science and art programs. He will control access to schools and prohibit civil society NGOs from offering programming he finds objectionable.
The new governing coalition will seek to dispense with as many remaining vestiges of democracy as it can in order to replace them with a theocratic state governed by the Torah rather than secular law. It will fuse religious fundamentalism with naked political power to form the first Judeo-fascist government in the nation’s history.
Fascism and Palestinians
Though the founding of a state as a haven for persecuted Jews may have offered safety to hundreds of thousands of Jews subject to pogroms, early Zionism never reckoned with the indigenous Palestinian inhabitants of the land, which it intended as the Jewish homeland. This refusal led inexorably to conflict between the two peoples and eventually all-out war and the Nakba.
Seven decades of hatred and perpetual bloodletting has in turn soured Israelis on any agreement involving compromise of their country’s territorial ambitions. To the extent that they identified such a willingness to compromise with the Labor Party, they rejected the party and the political agenda it represented. This in turn led to the victory of the Likud in 1977 and its domination of the next four decades of Israeli politics.
During that period, the successors to Jabotinsky turned progressively farther to the right, until today they are almost a pure embodiment of classical fascism. As such, they hearken back to the most violent and totalitarian traditions of Lehi.
Fascism has won in Israel. Now, it will wreak holy havoc both on Israelis — who may not even realize its impact on them — and Palestinians, who are only too aware of that havoc in their flesh and bones.
As part of his bargain with the fascist blocs of Religious Zionism and Jewish Power, according to the Israeli newspaper Arab 48, incoming Prime Minister Netanyahu spoke of an “exclusive Jewish right” to expand settlements inside Israel proper, in Galilee and the Negev, as well as to plant squatters in the Palestinian West Bank.
An exclusive Jewish right to settle and live in the land implicitly announces that the 6.5 million Palestinians who live on it are there by suffrage and maybe have no right to be there at all. That right is exclusively Jewish, Netanyahu says.
A Jordanian newspaper called this plank of his platform “the execution of the Palestinian people.”
According to the Associated Press, Netanyahu announced that he will legalize those Israeli squatter-settlements on Palestinian-owned land that even Israel had considered illegal. He would vastly expand the number of Israeli squatters in the Palestinian West Bank. And ultimately, he pledged to annex the Palestinian West Bank entirely to Israel.
Since Netanyahu has no intention of ever granting Israeli citizenship to the 3 million Palestinians living under Israeli military rule, the formal annexation of their territory would cement Israel’s Apartheid system of racial difference.
According to Arab 48, the Adalah human rights organization denounced the platform as openly racist, discriminatory and Jewish supremacist, especially the language about exclusive Jewish rights to the land, which implies that Palestinian East Jerusalem will never be allowed to become the capital of a Palestinian state. Adalah called on the world to take a stand against this flagrant Israeli Apartheid.
The outline of Netanyahu’s governmental program ominously said that preference would be given to former soldiers in the Israeli army for admission to university departments of medicine, law, computer science, accounting, and engineering. Since the 21% of the population who are of Palestinian heritage are not permitted to serve in the military, this step would put them at a severe disadvantage in receiving admission to those departments. Only the small community of Druze are an exception to the ban on military service.
He wants to make reforms in the education system. The mealy-mouthed contradictions are apparent in his pledge both to treat all communities equally and to use the education system to “strengthen Jewish identity.”
Likewise, he will safeguard the Jewish character of the state, but not upset the status quo among the various religions in Israel. (Most of the 21% who are of Palestinian heritage are Muslim, but there is a vocal Christian minority that is increasingly upset about Jewish attacks on churches and attempts to take away church lands. Netanyahu’s new best friends on the fascist Right are for anything but treating non-Jews equally or maintaining the status quo regarding Muslim and Christian places of worship.
But of course Palestinian-Israelis are 21% of the population and sometimes they can have an impact on elections, so Netanyahu turned around and said in his platform that he would address issues in insecurity and crime in Palestinian-Israeli communities, and would invest in education and infrastructure for them. Very magnanimous of him, since apparently they are excluded from the exclusively Jewish right to even be there.
His platform made a sinister call for a “rebalancing” of the powers of the executive, the legislature, and the judiciary, with the implication that the judiciary would be cut down to size. Netanyahu is on trial for corruption before the courts. Netanyahu apparently wants to strike down the prerogative of judicial review of laws that appear to contradict organic laws that have a constitutional character. In short, the supreme court could not overturn a law of the parliament or Knesset that its justices believe to be unconstitutional.
It is sort of as though Steve Bannon were elected president and started rejiggering the U.S. constitution and racial relations, only in Hebrew.
Apartheid is more than the occupation, according to foundational analysis by Palestinian group.
Author Tony Greenstein talks about his new book “Zionism during the Holocaust.”
Biden-Lapid Joint Declaration Takes Aim at Bds Movement
Dave
Sat, 07/16/2022 – 19:05
Resistance fighters kill Israeli officer near Jenin.
My grandfather was forced out of his home village in 1948.