4 April 2026

Israel is to the 21st Century what Nazi Germany was to the 20th Century – The Death Penalty Law for Palestinians is Just One More Sign of Zionism’s Sickness

From Ethnic Cleansing to Genocide, Apartheid to Extermination, Child Killing to Starvation, Torture & Rape, There is No War Crime Israel Doesn’t Excel In 



The Horrifying Torture of a One Year Old Baby by the 'most moral army in the world - Sky TV

Though one should note that the only complaint of Adam Langleben of the Jewish Labour Movement is the offence given to the Jewish religion. He has nothing to say about the Death Penalty for Palestinians legislation itself.

Even hardened Zionists and Genocide supporters have become uncomfortable at the pictures of Itamar Ben-Gvir and fellow Judeo-Nazis celebrating the passage of a law that reserves the death penalty for Palestinians whilst Jewish murderers are immune from even the mildest reprimand.


Under Labour Zionist governments only one law explicitly discriminated again Israel’s Palestinians – the Law of Return. All subsequent discrimination built upon that one law. Discrimination was indirect. Today the far-right is more explicit and also more honest.

Israel liar liar pants on fire


So we should thank Israel’s Judeo-Nazi Police Minister for making explicit that which was implicit. As the Times of Israel said

The law effectively enshrines capital punishment for Palestinians alone, as it explicitly excludes Israeli citizens or residents, and only Palestinians are tried in military courts. Israelis are tried in civilian courts.


Knesset Members voted 62-47 to mandate death by hanging as the punishment for Palestinians convicted of ‘terrorist’ acts by military courts. Judges can opt for life imprisonment under “special circumstances” which are undefined but otherwise the death penalty is mandatory and will be carried out within 90 days of sentencing without appeal.

Avigdor Lieberman’s Yisrael Beteinu, a secular far-right party that is not part of the government, voted in favour of the bill. The Ultra-Orthodox United Torah Judaism, which is part of the government was split. Its Degel HaTorah (Lithuanian non-Hasidic) faction voted in favour wheres its Agudat Yisrael (Hasidic) faction voted against.

Settler Attacks on Palestinian Homes – BBC

Unlike Israeli settlers who are tried in civilian courts Palestinians are tried in military courts where there is a 99.74% rate of conviction. Confessions under torture are admissible. Even the Nazi Peoples’ Courts had a higher rate of acquittal. In 1940 it was 7.3%, falling to around 5% until 1944, when it rose to almost 12% They were set up by Hitler to bypass the ordinary court system to try political offences.

'I want to kill more, more, more' - Israeli female soldier boasts of having killed 2 Palestinians


So we have a situation whereby even the Nazis treated its accused more fairly than Israel’s rubber stamp military courts.

West European countries issued a pro forma statement condemning the passage of the law, whilst doing nothing to countermand it such as sanctions. The Trump Administration didn’t even do that. Instead the State Department issued a statement saying that:


The United States respects Israel’s sovereign right to determine its own laws and penalties for individuals convicted of terrorism.” 

The Death Penalty Law for Palestinians reflects the fact that Jewish terrorism is not a crime in the eyes of the Israeli police and army which are often complicit in the attacks.

Burnt out Palestinian home after a settler attack

Mua’yyad Sha’ban of the Colonisation and Wall Resistance Commission (CWRC) stated that settlers had carried out 192 attacks in the first two weeks of March, resulting in the murder of 6 Palestinians. This is in addition to the murder of Palestinians by the military. However no settler or soldier has been punished for killing a Palestinian since 2020.

Israeli soldier throws bike into trash bin

In other words settlers have a license to kill Palestinians but if Palestinians strike back then they will be hanged as ‘terrorists’ and the US administration will support it.

This is not so different from Nazi Germany and before that Czarist Russia where authorities only intervened if Jews defended themselves. What happened to the Jews in Europe is now taking place in Greater Israel to the Palestinians. As Primo Levy was reputed to have remarked, the Palestinians are the Jews of Israel.

Settler attack in Tayasir 30 3 26

Israel has had a policy of extra judicial executions for the years. The law that has just been enacted will simply put what Israel has already been doing on a ‘legal’ footing. As the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights observed:

Extra-judicial execution is a policy which is not new or exclusively used since 2000. It is an old, bloody policy that had been implemented by the Israeli army against Palestinian civilians for decades.

Israeli Police Violently Break Up Anti Genocide protests in Arab TOWN

Adalah, the Legal Centre for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, wrote that:

Politicians and senior police officers have also openly called for the extra-judicial killing of suspects, and have urged civilians to carry guns in statements that effectively endorse the extra-judicial execution of Palestinians. 

It quoted Jerusalem District Police Commander Moshe Edri as saying:

Anyone who stabs Jews or hurts innocent people is due to be killed.

Note that the Police Commander was not concerned about anyone stabbing non-Jews.

Try as they might to deny it, the Zionists were the favourite Jews of the Nazis - as even Zionist historian Lucy Dawidowicz proves

There are those who decry the comparison between Israel and Nazi Germany yet the similarities are striking. The level of racism against Palestinians in Israel is far higher than the level of anti-Semitism in Germany which was largely confined to the Nazi party. See for example Ian Kershaw’s "Popular Opinion and Political Dissent": whose central thesis was that the German public's reaction to the persecution of Jews was characterized by "indifference" rather than fanatical hatred.

Although it is played down today, Hitler came to power despite, not because of his anti-Semitism and unlike the far-right in Israel, which command a clear majority in the Knesset of about 80 seats, the Nazi party never gained more than 37% of the German electorate in a free election (July 1932).

David Bankier concluded that most of the German public:

“did not attribute to antisemitism the importance that it had in the eyes of the National Socialist Party, and placed it in a secondary place in its order of priorities....

The decreased hopes of victory and the fear of the retaliation of the Jews or the Allies led many ordinary Germans to distance themselves from the propaganda, and particularly from the subject of the Jews. The attempts of the Nazis to incite antisemitic feelings did not only fail to calm the fears of the public but actually increased them, and thus the more the information about the mass extermination filtered through the more the public wished to be less involved in the Final Solution.

The level of racism in Israel against Arabs is staggeringly high. According to Dahlia Schendlin, a survey conducted by Professor Tamir Sorek of Pennsylvania State University examined "eliminatory" attitudes among Jewish Israelis and their theological roots.

It found that 82% of Israeli Jews supported the transfer of Palestinian residents of the Gaza Strip to other countries. 56% supported the expulsion of Arab citizens of Israel. When asked whether they agreed with the idea that the IDF,

when conquering an enemy city, should act in a manner similar to the way the Israelites acted when they conquered Jericho under the leadership of Joshua, namely, to kill all its inhabitants? 

nearly half, 47 percent, agreed. Polls such as these have been remarkably consistent over the years.

An opinion poll (27.3.07) found that over half the Jewish population believed that marriage to an Arab was ‘national treason’. Note that they didn’t oppose inter-marriage on religious but racial and national grounds. Many religions historically, whether Jewish or Catholic, have frowned upon inter-marriage. This is religious chauvinism not racism but when that becomes the policy of a state then that is racism. It becomes a quest for racial purity.

Over 75% of participants did not approve of apartment buildings being shared between Arabs and Jews. 60% said they would not allow an Arab to visit their home. About 40% agreed that “Arabs should have their right to vote for Knesset revoked”. Over half agreed that Israel should encourage its Arab citizens to emigrate from the country and a similar percentage said they would not want to work under the direct management of an Arab. 55% said “Arabs and Jews should be separated at entertainment sites”. 31% said they felt hatred, while 50% said they felt fear in the company of an Arab.

The Nazi concept of Lebensraum 'Living Space' is Alive & Well in Israel

Over 56% of participants said they believed that Israel’s Arab citizens posed both a security and a demographic threat to the country, in other words that the Arab presence in a Jewish state caused them to fear that one day there might be more Arabs than Jews. When asked what they thought of Arab culture, over 37%replied, “The Arab culture is inferior.”

YNet described how the annual 2006 Democracy Index found that 62% of Israelis wanted the government to encourage Arabs to leave the country.

Only 14% of respondents said ties between Arabs and Jews are good, while 29% said a Jewish majority is required for decisions of crucial national significance.

This was 20 years ago. Today the situation is that much worse. Zionism has embarked on a one-way journey which, left to its own devices, will end up in further genocide and further ethnic cleansing. The role of liberal Zionists is to prettify and justify what is happening in the name of ‘the only Jewish state in the world’, the ‘only democracy in the Middle East’ and other self-serving, meaningless tropes.

Why has Zionism and Israel morphed into a 21st century version of Nazi Germany? It is because a ‘Jewish’ ethno-nationalist state was based on race, not religion. It was not intended to be a theocracy but an ethnocracy, although it may also end up as a theocracy. The one thing that Israel won’t become is a democratic state of its citizens. Being a Jewish state precludes that.

This is why, from the very start of the Israeli state, the Zionist militias ‘cleansed most of the areas they controlled of its Palestinians. Without that there could not have been a Jewish majority state. The Nakba was a precondition for the formation of their ‘Jewish’ state and everything since has flowed from that.

The Useless words of British Diplomacy - Since Israel's Government is Sponsoring the Settler Terror What is Needed is Sanctions & No More Arms Shipments

Today the Palestinians are not willing to vacate Palestine which is why Zionism has turned to terror, pogroms, violence and genocide. The same was true of Nazi Germany. From 1933 to 1939 the policy of the German state was one of ethnic cleansing. It was only when this became impossible that the Nazis turned to genocide.

Israel and anti Arab incitement –Mosques

What we are seeing in the West Bank, with the settler pogroms, is another stage in the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. I have little doubt that if these pogroms are unsuccessful in stimulating an exodus of the Palestinians then the Zionists will increasingly turn to genocide there too.

Israel has derived enormous political advantages from the Nazi holocaust which at the time they consciously played down. The Zionist leaders used the Nazi holocaust to maximum advantage in order to demonise the Arabs as anti-Semites. This ruse has been increasingly hard to maintain as the spotlight has turned on their actions.

Elli Valley Captures the Victim-Perpetrator Syndrome of Israeli society

As Idith Zertal, an Israeli New Historian wrote in her book The Politics of Nationhood

‘The transference of the holocaust situation on to the Middle East reality… not only created a false sense of the imminent danger of mass destruction. It also immensely distorted the image of the holocaust, dwarfing the magnitude of the atrocities committed by the Nazis, trivializing the unique agony of the victims and the survivors, and utterly demonizing the Arabs and their leaders.

Meir Kahane (Centre) voting in the Knesset

Ben Gvir comes from the tradition of Meir Kahane, the rabbi who was the leader of Kach. In 1984 he was elected to the Knesset. The other Zionist parties immediately boycotted him and walked out of the Knesset whenever he spoke.

Kahane was elected on a programme calling for the expulsion of Israeli Arabs and the deportation of the Palestinians in the West Bank. He called for five year prison sentences for Arab men who had sexual relations with women, which was straight out of the Nuremberg Laws.

However Kahane, who was an embarrassment to the Zionists then, has been proved right in terms of Zionism. Kahane had no time for those who spoke of Israel as a Jewish-Democratic state. He said, quite correctly, that Israel could be a Jewish State or a Democratic State but it could not be both. It was the hypocritical ‘left’ Zionists who maintained that Israel could be both Jewish and democratic when the essence of a Jewish state was that Jews not Palestinians had the power.

Today virtually the whole political scene in Israel has been Kahanised and Kahane lives on in Itamar Ben Gvir, the Police Minister who had on his wall until recently a picture of the mass murderer Baruch Goldstein, who opened up with an automatic weapon killing 29 worshippers in the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron.

It should therefore be no surprise that Ben Gvir’s proposal for a racially selective death penalty commanded a majority in the Knesset.

The Dehumanisation of the Palestinians and the murder of their children

All forms of racism dehumanise their victims. But some societies dehumanise them so completely that ethnic cleansing and genocide is the logical outcome.

This is as true of Israel as it was of Nazi Germany. There have been many examples of this in the Gaza genocide but one particular characteristic of it is the dehumanisation of Palestinian children.

Zionist rabbis in Israel have emphasised that the extermination of the Palestinians will only be complete if their children are also killed.

In 2009 a book Torat Hamelech was published by two Chabad Rabbis Yitzhak Shapira and Yosef Elitzur with an introduction by Rabbi Yitzhak Ginsburgh. It was a guide to how to legally kill non-Jews according to Jewish religious law, Halachah.

It also justified the killing Palestinian children. Torat Hamelech argued that:

1.          children may be killed if it is believed they will "grow up to harm us".

2.          Harming the children of a "wicked leader" is permissible if it exerts enough pressure on that leader to stop fighting.

3.          Harming innocents, including infants, is allowed if their "presence and their killing is actually beneficial and helpful" to the war effort.

4.        ‘Ruthless acts’ of revenge to create a "correct element of fear" among enemies.

The book said that “The prohibition ‘Thou Shalt Not Murder” applies only “to a Jew who kills a Jew”. This is because non-Jews are “uncompassionate by nature” and attacks on them “curb their evil inclination,” while babies and children of Israel’s enemies may be killed since “it is clear that they will grow to harm us.”

Israel's Judeo-Nazi Rabbi Dov Lior

The book was endorsed by dozens of Israeli rabbis including Sephardic Chief Rabbi Ovadia Yosef and his son Ya’akov Yosef, who were both influential in Shas, a Sephardic party in Netanyahu’s coalition as well as the most influential rabbi of all, Dov Lior.

Dov Lior is famous for having said that

“There is no such thing as enemy civilians in war time. The law of our Torah is to have mercy on our soldiers and to save them … A thousand non-Jewish lives are not worth a Jew’s fingernail.”

Dov Lior is the spiritual mentor of Itamar Ben Gvir. This is an example of how Israeli rabbis act as the ideological and religious enablers of Israel’s neo-Nazi politicians. Today in Israel, and to a large extent outside Israel, the Jewish religion has become a religion of genocide.

If an Arab cleric were to publish such a book he would suffer the same fate as Raed Salah, who was demonised by Zionist groups in this country. Salah denied that his comments at a demonstration even applied to Jews but was gaoled for ‘incitement to racial hatred’. But when it came to the rabis who wrote Torat HaMelech, the Attorney General refused to prosecute and Israel’s High Court said ‘there was no basis’ for such a prosecution.

Limor son Hamelech - who dressed up as an Executioner for Purim (right) with settler leader Daniella Weiss

In Israel the laws against racial incitement are only applied to non-Jews. Jews can say whatever they wish.

In the current genocide in Gaza Orthodox Rabbis have played a key role in legitimising the murder of Palestinian civilians including children.

Prime amongst them was Rabbi Eliyahu Mali, head of the Shirat Moshe yeshiva in Jaffa, who called during a conference on 8 March for the Israeli army to kill ‘all residents of Gaza’. When asked whether this included babies he said:

“Those who create the terrorists” should also be killed, in reference to Palestinian women. Despite these genocidal remarks Israel’s police recommended dropping the case. Elderly people were also legitimate targets, according to Mali.

"There is no such thing called innocent creature. By the way, the elderly man is capable of carrying a rifle and shooting. Therefore, the Torah is very clear in the ruling."

And who was it who placed Israel’s racist rabbis in a position of power in Israel if not David Ben-Gurion, its Labour Zionist Prime Minister. As Adam Shatz wrote in his review of Tom Segev’s biography, Ben-Gurion

gave the Orthodox rabbinate considerable authority over religious affairs.... the rabbis were given the power to define who was and wasn’t a Jew, and which marriages would be recognised. (His own feeling was that Jewish women shouldn’t be allowed to marry Arab men ‘because as I see it an Arab is still not on the human level that I would want for a man who marries a Jewish woman.’)


We see the Nazi behaviour of the Israeli military in Lebanon today. The IDF has decreed that Shi’ite Muslims cannot live in the south of Lebanon.

Some have taken shelter with Christians in neighbouring villages. This has resulted in the Israeli military going into Christian villages, searching for them and warning Christians of dire consequences if they harbour Muslims.

Lying Ruth Justifies Murder of Journalists

Such behaviour was reminiscent of the Gestapo who warned non-Jews of the consequences of sheltering Jews.

The law reserving the death penalty for Palestinians has its roots in the ‘socialist’ Zionism that European social democrats embraced. Ben Gvir and Netanyahu did not come out of nowhere. Labour Zionism gave birth to the monstrosity that is the Israeli state today.

Tony Greenstein

See

‘War crime’: Global condemnation as Israeli ministers celebrate death penalty law targeting Palestinian prisoners

Israel’s death penalty law marks a new phase in its dehumanisation of Palestinians

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24 March 2026

Will the State of Israel Survive? Does Israel Deserve to Survive?

Are we seeing the beginning of the end of Zionism?


How will Israel Collapse?

One of the most common tropes is that Israel has ‘a right to exist’. It is as if any state has a right to exist. Only people have that right.

What Israel is really saying is something entirely different. Israel is an illegitimate state and therefore it fears those who question its legitimacy. From 2009 onwards the Reut Institute, Israel's ‘premier strategy policy group’, devoted itself to what it called the 'delegitimization' of Israel.

The Reut Institute defined 'delegitimization' as the "convergence of seemingly unrelated movements and associations” that delegitimised the Jewish nature of the Israeli State.

Israel’s founding myth (the Jewish ‘return’) does not stand up to scrutiny. Israel was founded on the dispossession of another people who ironically are the real descendants of the ancient Hebrews.

How the Jews of Judea Became the Arabs of Palestine

However much Israel portrays itself as just another hi tech western state it is a state with a difference. It is a ‘Jewish’ ethno-nationalist state. What does this mean?

Is Israel like for example Britain which is nominally a Christian state? Absolutely not. In 1858 Parliament passed the Jews Relief Act which removed restrictions that prevented Jews entering Parliament. It was the beginning of Jewish Emancipation.

No longer were the rights of British citizens dependent upon their religion. This was a rejection of the medieval model whereby the identity of a state was based around a particular religion and those not of that religion were discriminated against.

This marked the transition from a state which accorded rights depending on one’s religion to a secular state. Except for the fact that no-one Jewish can become the monarch Jews face no disability in the UK.

Israel is not just a state where Judaism is the official state religion. In Israel one’s rights and privileges are related to one’s religion or rather race. In Israel a Jew can be recorded in the Population Registry as being of no religion but is still recorded as being of Jewish nationality. There is no Israeli nationality. There are dozens of other nationalities, none of them entitling anyone to anything.

This was spelt out in the Jewish Nation State Law 2018 which states:

1.B  The State of Israel is the national state of the Jewish people, in which it exercises its natural, cultural, and historic right to self-determination.

1.C    Exercising the right to national self-determination in the State of Israel is unique to the Jewish people.

7.    The state views the development of Jewish settlement as a national value.

Netanyahu described what this meant when he said that

“Israel is not a state of all its citizens... Israel is the nation state of the Jewish people – and only it."

In Israel state land is Jewish state land - that is why half the Arab villages in Israel are 'unrecognised'. They have no right to be on state land and like Umm al Hiran they face demolition - something that never happens to a Jewish settlement

In Israel there are two categories of citizen – Jewish and non-Jewish. From this flows one’s rights and privileges. This is the basis of Israel as a Jewish Supremacist State. Israel is a throwback to medieval times.

For example 93% of Israeli land is controlled or owned by the Jewish National Fund in conjunction with the Israeli Lands Authority. The JNF by its constitution only leases land to Jews not non-Jews. The JNF is not some voluntary charitable organisation. It is a para-state body established by the 1953 JNF Law.

In Adalah v. The Israel Lands Administration the JNF argued that it was entitled to lease land to Jews. 80% of its landholdings, 13% of total land in Israel, was confiscated from the Palestinian refugees who were expelled in 1948.

It is as if 93% of English land were owned by the Christian National Fund and when I sought to rent a flat built on its land I was told that I couldn’t because I wasn’t a Christian.

This is why Israel is so sensitive when anyone questions its legitimacy. Apartheid and discrimination against non-Jews is part of Israel’s constitutional DNA. All else is hasbara (propaganda).

Brian Berletic: Iran War - A Gateway to War with China & Russia

October 7, Expansion & Israel’s Forever Wars

When you are in the middle of great historical events it is difficult to see which direction things are heading in or  what is happening with any great clarity. This is especially true of Israel today, with the current war with Iran.

It is not helped by having an imbecile as the US President. Trump’s inability to outline his goals reflects not just his own inadequacies but US imperialism’s arrogance of power, its ‘manifest destiny’ and the belief that might is right. It is not helped by the fact that each statement of Trump contradicts his previous utterances.

Trump is not unique. He reflects the dilemmas of the United States as its ambitions to remake the world fall foul of reality and its waning influence.

However we should not believe that but for Trump all would have been well. Trump reflects a political consensus that ‘something must be done’ about Iran. The question is what. Why? Because Iran’s insistence on being politically independent falls foul of US plans. It also obstructs Israel’s desire for political hegemony in the region.

It is also worth emphasising the point that Marx made in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, that people make history, but not of their own time or choosing.

This is particularly true of Hamas. When it launched the uprising on October 7, little did it realise that it would have the consequences that we are seeing today, both inside and outside Gaza. The whole world order and the US’s role as the world’s hegemon is being challenged and thrown into doubt.

NATO countries are reluctant to join in with Netanyahu and Trump’s attack on Iran. Even as servile a creature as Starmer has had his doubts about the Mafioso boss who doubles as President of the US and his zombie assistants although he has since fallen into line.

There are those who see the war against Iran in terms of Netanyahu having dragged Trump into it. This is a fundamental misconception. If Trump hadn’t wanted to go to war he wouldn’t have. Rather I see the situation as analogous to the Suez War where Israel’s attack on Egypt was the pretext for Britain and France’s invasion of Egypt.

When Hamas planned the break-out on October 7 it clearly misjudged Israel’s reaction. It didn’t aim to bring down the Zionist entity. Rather it wanted to capture Israeli hostages in order to exchange them for Palestinian captives.

What it failed to understand was the profound political changes taking place in Israel itself. In particular the rise of the Messianic Religious Nationalist Right led by Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar ben Gvir. These are Jewish Nazis. Even Moshe Yalon, the former Likud Defence Minister said so.

From 1948 to 1967 Israel consolidated what it had seized when it was established. Although it wanted to expand (for example the Suez War) it had to give back its ill-gotten gains. Israelis look back at this period as one when Israel was relatively ‘normal’ despite Israeli Palestinians living under military rule until 1966.

In the 1950s Israel was still too weak to expand and it lacked the settlers. That didn’t stop Israeli leaders entertaining many ideas of how to expand and destabilise their neighbours.

Livia Rokach published a book ‘Israel’s Sacred Terrorism’ based on the Diaries of Moshe Sharrett Israel’s second Prime Minister. It described how on February 25, 1954, Syrian troops stationed in Aleppo revolted against Adib Shishakly's regime.

After lunch Lavon [Defence Minister] took me aside and started trying to persuade me: This is the right moment to act this is the time to move forward and occupy the Syrian border positions beyond the Demilitarized Zone. Syria is disintegrating. A State with whom we signed an armistice agreement exists no more. Its government is about to fall... This is an historical opportunity, we shouldn't miss it.

I was reluctant to approve such a blitz-plan and saw ourselves on the verge of an abyss of disastrous adventure. I asked if he suggests to act immediately and I was shocked when I realized that he does. ... He repeated that time was precious and we must act so as not to miss an opportunity which otherwise might be lost forever. Again I answered that under the circumstances right now I cannot approve any such action.... (25 February 1954, 374)

The next day the Shishakly regime actually fell. The following day, February 27, Sharett was present at a meeting where Lavon and Dayan reported to Ben Gurion that what happened in Syria was - "a typical Iraqi action." The two proposed again that the Israeli army be put on the march. Ben Gurion, "electrified," agreed. Sharett reiterated his opposition, pointing to the certainty of a Security Council condemnation, the possibility of the use against Israel of the Tripartite Declaration of 1950, hence the probability of a "shameful failure" The three objected that "our entrance [into Syria] is justified in view of the situation in Syria. This is an act of defense of our border area." Sharett closed the discussion ...

Lavon's face wore a depressed expression. He understood this to be the end of the matter. (27 February 1954, 377)

On Sunday, February 28, the press reported that no Iraqi troops had entered Syria. The situation in Damascus was under the complete control of President Hashem Al Atassi. The cabinet approved Sharett's position and rejected Lavon's vehement appeal not to miss a historical opportunity. ...

On December 12, 1954, however, a Syrian civilian plane was hijacked by Israeli war planes shortly after its takeoff, and forced to land at Lydda airport. Passengers and crew were detained and interrogated for two days, until stormy international protests

It must be clear to you that we had no justification whatsoever to seize the plane,... I have no reason to doubt the truth of the factual affirmation of the U.S. State Department that our action was without precedent in the history of international practice. ..... What shocks and worries me is the narrow-mindedness and the shortsightedness of our military leaders. They seem to presume that the State of Israel may or even must-behave in the realm of international relations according to the laws of the jungle. (22 December 1954)

All the madcap schemes that Sharrett prevented in the 50s have come to pass today.

Israel's Two Jewish Neo-Nazi Ministers - Ben Gvir & Smotrich

In 1967, the Labour government of Levi Eshkol launched a war against Syria, Jordan and Egypt. The genie was out of the bottle. The conquering of the West Bank and Gaza gave rise to a messianic settler movement. Many on the ‘left’ of the Zionist movement – Yitzhak Tabenkin, Yisrael Galili and Yigal Allon – were to the fore of the settler Greater Israel Movement.

Settlement in the West Bank started with very few settlers at first but by 2021 they had grown to 720,000 when Ben Gvir of the Jewish Nazi Otzma Yehudit was elected to the Knesset.

The break-out on 7 October 2023 took place less than a year after the 2022 elections which brought Ben Gvir and Smotrich into the Israeli government. They took full advantage of October 7 to destroy Gaza, with a view to colonising it and also launched an open reign of terror in the West Bank.

Their viewpoint was summed up on October 9 by Yoav Gallant who described the Palestinians of Gaza as ‘human animals’. The very same phrase used by Heinrich Himmler about non-Aryans in his address to senior SS Generals:

I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we act accordingly.”

Israel's Protests Against the Judicial Reforms

Throughout 2023 there had been massive protests in Israel against the judicial reforms with sections of the military, in particular the airforce, saying they would refuse to serve.

It must have seemed to those planning October 7 that the contradictions within Zionism were leading to a fundamental breakdown in Israeli society. What they did not understand was that the whole basis of the Judicial Protests was they had been launched on the basis of protecting Israeli Jewish democracy whilst ignoring the occupation of Gaza and the West Bank.

Although Israeli activists made efforts to inject those issues into the protests the campaign allowed only token representation for Israeli Palestinians and anti-Occupation groups.

As Yiftach Golov, spokesperson for Brothers and Sisters in Arms said: “(while) it’s important to one day solve the [Israeli-Palestinian] conflict, this is not an immediate threat” to Israeli democracy.’

Moshe Yaalon, ex-Likud Defence Minister describes Smotrich & Ben Gvir as 'Mein Kampf reversed'

Hamas failed to understand that the protests against the judicial reforms, a product of the ascendancy of the messianic fascists, took place within Israeli Jewish society and on the basis of an acceptance of the position of the Palestinians.

When October 7 happened, the protests folded as Israeli Jewish society came together. The Israeli state was now prepared to embark once more on a program of expansion with the full support of all wings of Zionism.

During the course of the Genocide in Gaza, Israel occupied both Lebanon and Syria. The ‘left’ Zionists, in so far as they existed, fully accepted all Netanyahu’s wars. Yet when Iranian missiles hit Israeli civilian areas, Israelis - without a hint of irony - complained bitterly at these 'war crimes' - having done their best to discredit the International Criminal Court and all international law.

How will Israel Collapse

In the video How will Israel Collapse? five factors are listed that will lead to Israel’s collapse. They are:

1.           The weakening of United States Support

2.           The weakening of support from American Jews

3.           The breakdown in Social Cohesion

4.           The Fight for Survival

5.           The Economy

Although all of these are important, the most important is the first factor, US support. Today we are seeing a fracturing of the political alliance in support of Israel with sections of the Democrats splitting off coupled with a division in the MAGA base. In particular there has been a sea change in American political opinion such that a majority of the population now sympathise more with the Palestinians than the Israelis. This is true of the West as a whole.

However we haven’t seen any significant diminution in the support of corporate America and establishment opinion, not least the military-industrial base in support of Israel.

It is important that public opinion is now moving against Israel and no longer buys into the idea that Israel is the ‘only democracy in the Middle East’. However we should not forget that US foreign policy has never depended on public support.

It will take a concerted campaign from below to force US corporations to disinvest and withdraw support from Israeli apartheid. What may happen is that the US will reduce its support for Israel and refuse to automatically support every Israeli adventure that Netanyahu or his successors propose.

The aftermath of an Iranian missile strike

What the video doesn't mention, but which the Iran war is demonstrating,  is the elephant in the room - the corrupt and authoritarian Arab regimes. Their overthrow are key to the US dropping its support for the Zionist state. They are Israel's junior allies. What is missing is the Arab masses themselves who have tolerated or acquiesced in the maintenance of these regimes.

The weakening of support from American Jews, although welcome, is not a decisive factor for the simple reason that contrary to the propaganda of the imperialist politicians and the anti-Semitic Right, US support has never depended on Jewish support for Israel. Jews provided the moral alibi and political shield for that support. They have never been the reason for that support.

Israel is a settler colonial state that is bound together by its antagonism to the Palestinians. War and expansion are part of the Zionist DNA. Without the Palestinians and external enemies Israel may already have been engulfed in a civil war.

Israel's War for Survival Means Endless Wars and the Dehumanisation of Non-Jews

That is why Israel will never be a ‘normal’ capitalist state. It sees itself as the bulwark of the West in a hostile region. As Joe Biden said, if Israel did not exist it would have to be invented. Israel will never be content with its existing borders. Israel is the only state in the world not to define its borders.

However we should not fool ourselves that Israel will be destroyed or collapse from within. Rather there will be an incremental erosion of democratic rights even for Jews. It will be increasingly intolerant even for Jews.

The days of a steady stream of immigrants from the Jewish diaspora via Aliyah are over. The direction of migration is out of the country not into it.

As Israel moves further to the neo-Nazi right and increasingly theocratic under the influence of halachic rather than civil law, coupled with the never ending wars, so we can expect an increasing number of Jews to emigrate. Emigration today is at a record high. Israel will more and more come to resemble a theocracy with religious nationalists in the driving seat.

The Zionist organisations invested heavily in capturing diaspora Jewish organisations like the Board of Deputies. Increasingly, despite the weaponisation of anti-Semitism, they will have greater difficulty in controlling Jewish opposition to the Israeli state, not least amongst the young. Already today it is clear that the Board is to the right of most Jews in Britain.

As we see in the war against Iran, the further Israel extends itself the weaker it will become. Expansion has its downside and those Zionists who dream of a Jewish Empire should remember the fate of all empires.

Western politicians will continue to pretend that Israel is a democracy. In so doing they ignore the genocide in Gaza, the apartheid and settler terror on the West Bank and the open racism such as the ‘Death to Arabs’ marches. To say nothing of the racism and apartheid within 1948 Israel.

We saw after October 7 how those who considered themselves part of the Zionist ‘left’ accepted the narrative of the Israeli Right. Over 60% of Israeli Jews support the extermination of the Palestinians of Gaza and 56% support the expulsion of Israel’s Palestinians.

The Israeli Jewish working class will play little or no part in opposing these things. In a settler colonial state the working class sacrifices its class interests for what it sees as its national interests. The Israeli working class has never broken from Zionism.  Mechanical and economistic Marxists who reduce everything to a sociological definition of class will continue to be baffled as to why their predictions of working class unity with the Palestinians never come to pass.

The Israeli working class has never been able to create its own independent political organisations. Its ‘trade union’ Histadrut was at one and the same time the largest employer after the state itself. It was a colonising agency not a trade union except in the narrowest sense. Zionism is an alliance between the settler working class and the settler capitalists.

The Israeli working class, like the White South Africa working class, is on the right of Israeli politics. If South Africa is any guide, the first sections of the Israeli population that will be prepared to abandon Zionism will be its capitalists and middle class not the Israeli working class.

Israel sees itself as in an existential battle for survival as in the slogan of Israel’s ‘right to self defence’. ‘Self defence’ means Israel’s right to attack anyone who challenges its hegemony.

It is an essential component of Israeli settler identity that it is always the victim, even when it’s the aggressor. This is true of all settler colonialism. It was the ‘left’ Zionists of Mapam (long since disappeared) who talked of ‘shooting and crying’. Today the Zionists don’t cry when they kill – that is the main difference between ‘left’ and ‘right’ Zionism.

This self pity is a characteristic of colonialism in general. The British Empire according to Rudyard Kipling’s poem had to:

Take up the White Man's burden—

And reap his old reward,

The blame of those ye better,

The hate of those ye guard

Israel’s economy is bound up with Israel’s role as a projection of US power. Whatever the strain of war on Israel’s economy it will survive as long as it is bailed out by the United States.

Also missing from How will Israel Collapse is any mention of the solidarity campaign outside of Israel, BDS or Arab and Palestinian agency. It presupposes that Israel will just collapse.

What will Happen to the Settler State?

The Palestine solidarity movement rarely discusses what will happen to the settlers if there is a solution. There are approximately 7 million Israeli Jews. This question is vital to the de-Zionisation and decolonisation of Israel. It may be crucial to achieving a settlement along the lines of apartheid in South Africa.

It is naive to suppose that all Israel’s Jews will emigrate to Europe or the USA. For many Israeli Jews there will be nowhere to go. As Israel becomes increasingly a theocratic police state under the Ben Gvirs and Smotrichs, social tensions will be exacerbated within the settler community. The question how to take advantage of these tensions and divisions is crucial.

Between early 2022 and mid-2024, more than 125,000 Jewish citizens left Israel than entered. The trend is believed to have continued through 2025. The current war with Iran is almost certain to ensure that emigration increases.

Knesset Immigration Committee chair MK Gilad Kariv warned that

this is no longer a trend — it’s a tsunami. Many Israelis are choosing to build their future outside the State of Israel, and fewer and fewer are returning.”

If this emigration continues Europe and the USA may raise their immigration barriers and prevent Israeli Jews coming.

Israel has now become a state of permanent war. If Iran is defeated then it will look for a new enemy such as Turkey. Israel cannot survive without an external enemy.

It is essential that any movement for decolonisation holds out the promise that Israeli Jews who wish to live in peace and equality will be able to do so. That is why the old PLO call for a Democratic, Secular State is more relevant now than ever. Those who call for the expulsion of all the Jews in Israel are holding up a mirror to the Ben Gvirs and Smotrichs.

Israel is an artificial state that is not destined for a permanent place in the sun. With the rise of the messianic settler right it is going to be increasingly uncomfortable for secular Israelis.

The aftermath of an Iranian missile strike in Arad

Israel’s existence is a temporary one. I doubt that it is even going to last for the first 100 years. There is no going back from the forever wars as Israel expands into Lebanon, Syria soon to be followed by Jordan and possibly Egypt.

It is important that anti-Zionists abroad enters into a close relationship with that section of the Israeli Jewish population, however small, that is prepared to reject either Zionism, Jewish Supremacy or apartheid. It is possible that a small section of Israeli Jewish workers will realise that their class interests and Zionism do not coincide.

My fear is that Israel, like South Africa before the end of apartheid, is going to have a very bloody end before Zionism is finally ended. Many people both in Palestine and the wider Middle East region, are going to have to pay a very heavy price for its demise.

Tony Greenstein

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