Jonathan Freedland’s Inability
to UnderstandIsrael’s Present Crisis is Symptomatic of Liberal Zionism’s Refusal
to Accept that a Jewish Democratic State is an Oxymoron
Whatever
the situation and whatever the crisis, Jonathan Freedland can be relied on not to
understand it. So it is with his latest essay
on [Netanyahu is leading a coup against his own country. But the threat is not
only to Israel, Guardian 31 March 2023]
No one quite beats Freedland, the Guardian's Zionist gatekeeper, when it comes to the ability to write at length and say nothing
Freedland
is the man who waged a war against Jeremy Corbyn’s ‘anti-Semitism’ whilst
failing even to mention Boris Johnson’s own, genuine anti-Semitism.
Jonathan Freedland’s journalism is representative of the collapse in the
Guardian’s own journalistic standards. Its representation
on the D-Notice
Committee, its publishing of fake
stories on Julian Assange and the sheer trivialisation of every issue that
he touches. Freedland truly has a Midas touch in reverse. In a very real sense
the Guardian has been ‘freedlandised’.
West Bank settler at a new outpost
True
to form Freedland neither understands Israel’s present crisis nor where it
comes from. The very real threat to Jewish democracy, because there is no
democracy for Palestinians, including Israeli Palestinians, does not come out
of thin air but from the poison injected by the settlement project in the West
Bank. Freedland barely mentions the fact that the West Bank settlement project has
now gained critical mass with over 700,000 settlers and a corresponding
political influence, especially when allied to that of the Orthodox religious
parties, Shas and United Torah Judaism and Likud.
The
conquest of the West Bank and Gaza resulted in Religious Zionism, which till
1977 had formed coalition governments with the Israeli Labor Party, transforming
into support for political messianism whose ultimate goal could only be the
ethnic cleansing of Palestine and its coronation in a Third Temple.
But
who was it who sponsored the original settlement of the West Bank, including the
ultra-nationalists of Hebron, if not Israeli Labor? It was the stalwarts of the
Israeli Labor ‘left’, Yigal Allon, Yisrael
Galili and Yitzhak
Tabenkin, who helped found the Greater
Israel movement because they saw, quite correctly, that the settlement
project in the Occupied Territories was but an extension of the internal
colonisation of pre-67 Israel itself.
The Jewish Nazi Who is Israel's Police Minister
It
wasn’t Itamar Ben Gvir or Bezalel Smotrich who first Who up the Judaisation
(in Nazi Germany this was called Aryanisation) of the
Galilee, Negev and then East Jerusalem. This was all the work of the Israeli
labor movement.
Jerusalem - Ongoing Ethnic Cleansing and House Demolitions
In
a very real sense the demonstrations that we have seen in Israel are the rage
of Caliban at seeing his own face in the mirror. There is nothing that Smotrich
and Ben Gvir advocate, including the wiping out of Harara, that the Israeli Labor
movement did not pioneer in the Nakba.
Freedland
has no problem in justifying the Nakba and demonising anyone, which was Corbyn’s
‘crime’, for advocating for the right of return of the Palestinian refugees.
The Mothers of the Plaza
No-one
is more devoted to a ‘Jewish’ state than Freedland. What Freedland cannot or
will not understand is that Israel is not a refuge from anti-Semitism. Quite
the contrary. Zionism has always thrived on anti-Semitism as Argentinian Jews found
to their cost during the years of its neo-Nazi Junta (1976-1983 ) when Israel
collaborated with the Junta and refused
to say anything about its torture and murder of up to 3,000 Jews. Israel had
a profitable strategic, political and military relationship with that junta.
Nor
does Freedland understand why the sticking plaster of the Good Friday agreement
in Northern Ireland worked, up to a point, in securing a frozen peace whereas
the Oslo Accords were an abysmal failure. Ulster Unionism no longer had the political
strength to fight for a Protestant State for a Protestant People (James Craig)
whereas Zionism had lost none of its appetite for colonisation and a Jewish Supremacist
State. All it needed was time to consolidate. Yet even in Northern Ireland the
question ofPartition looms large as we
have seen over Brexit and the Northern Ireland Protocol.
Smotrich - Head of West Bank Military Administration - called for the 'wiping out' of the Palestinian town of Huwara
The
only solution in Israel is a state of all its citizens as opposed to a Jewish state.
However the abolition of Israeli Apartheid is the one solution that Freedland
will not countenance because he is a Jewish chauvinist. As the Israeli government
prepares legislation that will ban Israel’s Arab
parties, thus ensuring that the only governments Israel will know in the future
are those of the far-Right, Freedland fails to perceive that a ‘Jewish’ state,
like all ethno-nationalist states, can only go in one direction.If you want a state of racial purity then who
better to carry it out than those who will complete the project and not stop
halfway?
Lapid & Biden
All
Zionist parties are committed, in Yair Lapid’s phrase
to ‘maximum Jews, maximum land and minimum
Palestinians.’ Who better to carry it out than those who believe in there
being no Palestinians rather than ‘minimum’ Palestinians (other than slaves and
hewers of wood and drawers of water?
The
irony of Freedland is that when faced with finding a genuine Jewish hero during
the Holocaust to eulogise he was forced to choose an anti-Zionist, Rudolf
Vrba, since the Zionism movement had distinguished itself by its
collaboration with the Nazis!
Those Who
Think Israel is Becoming a Fascist State do Not Understand What Fascism is
To paraphrase Rudyard
Kipling, when all those around you are losing their heads, it’s a good idea to
keep a firm grip on your own head! Never has so much hysterical nonsense been
written by so many as in the past few weeks following Netanyahu’s unexpected triumph
in Israel’s elections.
The election of the
new coalition government, including the far-right messianic settler party
Religious Zionism, itself made up of 3 parties, does not herald the dawn of
Israeli fascism. Israeli democracy is not under dire threat if only because
such a beast never existed.
This pogrom against Palestinians in East Jerusalem was allowed to go ahead by Israeli Labor Party's Omar Bar-Lev
Of course liberal Zionists
find it difficult to defend the street thug and criminal Kahanist Ben Gvir as
Police and Security Minister. It would be far better for Israel’s image if the
Labor Party’s Omar Bar Lev was still in place. But let us remember, it was Bar
Lev who, last May, gave the
green light for Gvir and his settler mob to rampage through East Jerusalem
chanting ‘death to the Arabs’, ‘may their villages burn’ and other
delightful ditties from the settlers’ prayer book.
According
to Richard Silverstein, ‘Zionism
has finally embraced the fascist ideology that inspired major sections of the
movement… a century ago.’ It is true that fascism did indeed inspire the
Revisionist Zionist movement but it was untrue, even then, to say that the
Revisionists were fascists, despite the taunt
‘Vladimir Hitler’ that Ben Gurion regularly
hurled at its leader Vladimir Jabotinsky.
One thug inspects other thugs
If anything the
opposite was true. It was the ‘Socialist’ not the Revisionist Zionists who most
resembled the National Socialists. It was Labour not Revisionist Zionism that had
cordial relations with the Nazis and which negotiated a trade agreement
Ha'avara with the Nazis and whose agent, Feivel Polkes, offered
to spy for the Nazis.
Labour Zionism saw the
role of Labour as a national not a class force. The late Ze’ev Sternhell, a
Zionist and holocaust survivor, described Labor Zionism in The Founding Myths of Israel as ‘nationalist socialism’. He would have used the term ‘national
socialism’ but it ‘has been contaminated
by association with the Nazis.’
It was the Revisionist
movement which opposed Ha'avara and it was Revisionists Peter Bergson and
Shmuel Merlin who campaigned for the rescue of Jews, wherever their destination
and who led the campaign which led to the US setting up the War Refugee Board in
January 1944 against the bitter opposition of the Labour Zionists.
Palestinian demonstrator in Beit El near Ramallah 8.10.15
Let us put it another
way. Was the America of Andrew
Jackson and the Indian
Removal Act
a fascist state? Was it any less terrible for the Indians that it was not
fascist? Was South Africa a fascist state?
Fascism is a specific
political phenomenon that seeks the atomisation and destruction of working
class organisations. Nazi Germany, Mussolini’s Italy and Franco’s Spain are the
most obvious examples. In more recent times Chile under General Pinochet and
the military Junta in Argentina bore a close resemblance to fascism.
Israel on the other
hand, like South Africa and the United States before it is a settler colonial
state. The key difference between fascism and settler colonialism is that the latter
involves an alliance of the settler working class with its own ruling class.
Rather than the destruction of working class organisations, it is the settler
working class which is usually the most racist and chauvinist section of
settler society as for example in Northern Ireland.
Ben Gvir - a Genuine Jewish neo-Nazi
Ben
Gvir and Smotrich Do Not Represent a Break with Previous Zionist Governments
Gvir and Smotrich
represent the logical outcome of decades of rule, by Labour Zionism and Likud. They
do not represent a fascist break
from Zionism. The agreed
platform of the coalition was:
“The Jewish
people have an exclusive and unquestionable right to all areas of the Land of
Israel. The government will promote and develop settlement in all parts of the
Land of Israel – in the Galilee, the Negev, the Golan, Judea and Samaria.”
How is this different
from previous governments? Support for ‘Jewish settlement’ has always been the
policy of both wings of the Zionist movement. It was not a Likud/Religious
Zionist government which began the policy of Judaisation of the Galilee.
The 1976 Koenig
Memorandum, named after Yisrael Koenig, a member
of the Israeli Labor Alignment and Director General of the Northern District
outlined the policy. It was a nakedly racist document which spoke of the
Israeli Arabs having a "Levantinistic
Arab character" whose "imagination
tends to exceed rationality."
Koenig advocated
denying work, educational opportunities and benefits to Israel’s Arab
population and the thinning out of the Arab population through Jewish
settlement. It took for granted that Israel’s Arab population were a threat to
Israel’s Jewish character.
The document put
forward a number of strategic goals and tactical steps aimed at reducing the
number and influence of Arab citizens of Israel in the Galilee region. The Memorandum
was the first publicly available document to outline some of the policies of
discrimination and containment that Palestinian citizens of Israel had been
subject to since 1948, reflecting “planning
and deliberations at the policy-making circles.” See The Koenig report and
Israeli policy towards the Palestinian minority, 1965-1976: old wine in new
bottles.
Judaisation
of the Galilee was the policy and practice of Israel even
before the conquest of East Jerusalem in June 1967. This began under a Labour
not a Likud or Religious Zionist government.
On 24 June 2013, the
Israeli Knessetapprovedthe Prawer-Begin Plan
for the mass expulsion of the Arab Bedouin community in the Naqab. It proposed
the destruction of 35 ‘unrecognized’ Bedouin villages and the forced
displacement of up to 70,000 Bedouin citizens of Israel, and the confiscation
of their historical lands.
It is clear that the
new government in Israel represents a continuation
of the policies of previous Israeli governments not a break with them.
Those who talk of the destruction of democracy speak exclusively to Israel’s Jewish
society. As Ahmed Tibi MK once noted,
when Zionists talk of a Jewish Democratic state this is an oxymoron. Israel is
Jewish towards Arabs and Democratic towards Jews.
No-one doubts that the
accession to government of Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, two Jewish neo-Nazi
settlers, will result in an intensification of repression in the West Bank
although it is hard to see how much further the repression of the military
dictatorship in the West Bank can be intensified.
It was not under Gvir
and Smotrich that 6 Palestinian human rights groups were banned
as ‘terrorists’ but under the ‘Change Government’ that included the Labor Party
and Meretz. When Smotrich described
human rights organisations as an ‘existential
threat’ he was simply picking up from where Merav Michaeli of the ILP and
Nitzan Horowitz of Meretz left off.
The real threat of the
new government is two-fold. Like in South Africa we are going to see an erosion
of the democratic rights of Israeli Jews. It is this which has produced panic
in what is left of the Israeli left. The settlement of the West Bank is coming
home.
This will involve an
erosion of the difference between Palestinians in Israel and those on the West
Bank. In its eyes they are all ‘Arabs’.
Desecration
of Christian graveyard
Only a few days ago we
saw the open
desecration of a Christian graveyard in Jerusalem.
Imagine the howls of protest if this took place in Britain with the desecration
of a Jewish graveyard? Attacks on churches, mosques and graveyards are a
regular occurrence in Israel.
As the platform
of the Coalition outlines, the Golan Heights, the Negev, the Galilee and the
West Bank are considered the same. In all these areas the demographic threat of
the Arabs is a problem.
And not only in these
areas. Gvir led the way in May 2021, with the support of
the Israeli Police, in pogroms and attacks against Israel’s Arab
citizens in the mixed cities of Bat Yam, Lod etc. Their intention is to
recolonise these cities and drive their Arab inhabitants out.
It is Jewish
‘Democracy’ which is now under threat
At the weekend largely
Jewish demonstrations
of 20,000 in Tel Aviv reacted with alarm at the judicial reform proposals of
the present coalition because they saw that it was their rights which were now under attack. Former Defence Minister
Benny Gantz, who
took pride in bombing Gaza back to the stone age warned
of civil war in Israel.
Israeli Gays, who have
been complicit in pinkwashing
Israeli colonisation, have reacted with alarm to the inclusion of the anti-gay Noam party and
leader Avi Maoz in government. Those who were happy to collude in the
repression of Palestinians now realise that Messianic Zionists have no place for
alternative sexual lifestyles either. It is hard to work up much sympathy for
these pink racists.
Racist? Perish the thought!
The protestors in Tel
Aviv were divided on the question of Palestinian rights. A large section was
extremely unhappy about mixing up the threat to Jewish rights with the threat
to Palestinian rights. Assaf Agmon, a leader of one group, was particularly upset:
“The
protest on Saturday night is led by extreme leftist groups that are not
prepared to move one millimeter from the ‘stop the occupation’ and Arab rights,
which are super-important issues but they are on the agenda after we leave
ourselves a democracy to advance them in."
"People
may come and find themselves surrounded by Palestinian flags and stop the
occupation flags and that is how [Netanyahu’s supporters] will brand all of our
protests as pro-Palestinian and anti-Zionist.”
Stav Shaffir, an ex-member of the Knesset was concerned that:
Netanyahu
and his mouthpieces will lie afterward and say the protest was organized by the
treasonous left and funded by foreign money and supports our enemies. Let them
say it.
This resulted in there being 2 separate marches.
The real fear of liberal Zionists is the coalition’s proposals for reform
of Israel’s judicial system. Israel’s Supreme Court is their pride and joy. It
is the symbol of Israeli Democracy. What is proposed is an override clause
whereby any legislation that is rendered unlawful by the Supreme Court can be
overridden by a majority in the Knesset. The Judicial Appointments Committee
will be stacked with government appointees. They fear the death of Jewish democracy.
This is a battle that liberal Zionism is going to lose. There is nothing
democratic about unelected judges not having the power to veto legislation. Of
course Israel, being an ethno-nationalist state, is not a democracy anyway.
Arabs have always been excluded from power and that includes the last ‘Change’
government in which an Arab party was nominally part of the coalition.
Israel’s
Supreme Court and Torture
The position of Israel’s Supreme Court on torture is instructive. It has ruled that
torture is allowed under the ‘ticking timebomb’ scenario.
In 1987 the Landau Commission into
the use of torture the use of torture, but it accepted
their argument that physical pressure was necessary for efficient
interrogation.
The Landau Report
recommended psychological pressure and "a moderate amount of physical pressure" i.e. torture against
Palestinian detainees. Israel was thus the only state in the world to legalise
torture. HaMoked, the Centre for Defence of the Individual, found
that 85% of Palestinians were tortured.
In 1994 the Public Committee Against
Torture in Israel petitioned the High Court to protest Shin Bet interrogation
tactics. The following year the Association
for Civil Rights in Israel petitioned
the High Court demanding an end to vigorous shaking of prisoners.
In 1999 the High Court ruled that Shin
Bet can't use violence in interrogations, but interrogators could use the "necessary defense" argument if they
used torture in "ticking bomb"
situations. Thus the Court allowed Shin Bet to continue to use torture because
every case of torture and abuse uses the same ‘ticking bomb’ excuse.
Israeli actor in torture session
It was the ‘liberal’ Supreme
Court President Aharon Barak who presided over this decision. Fast forward 23
years and we find Barak so enraged by the plans to reform the Supreme Court
that he has offered to go
before a firing squad if that would prevent the enactment of the new
legislation! If I was Netanyahu I would take Barak up on the offer! Barak
explained that:
he sought to be neither overly activist
nor overly conservative and to deliver verdicts that took heed of Israel’s
history, Zionism and the country’s security needs.
Barak claimed that ‘the rights of everybody — Jew, Arab,
ultra-Orthodox, not ultra-Orthodox — are in grave danger.” This is a lie.
Not once has the Supreme Court used its powers to overturn nakedly racist
anti-Arab legislation. Always it has bowed the knee to Zionism’s concern about
a Jewish demographic majority. In the West Bank /Gaza it has explicitly
disregarded international law and the Fourth Geneva Convention.
stress and torture position
The Supreme Court has refused to override the 1950 Absentee Property Law
which allowed the confiscation of thousands of dunums of Arab land for Jewish
settlement since the establishment of the Israeli state. Jewish land has never once
been confiscated for the benefit of Arabs but the Supreme Court had no problems
with its racist intent. The Supreme Court also approved the use of
this law to confiscate Arab homes in East Jerusalem in order that they could be
handed over to the right-wing Ateret Cohanim settler group.
In the West Bank the Supreme Court has openly
connived in the use of fraud and trickery in the theft of Palestinian land,
including private land that was stolen in ‘good faith’. A thousand Palestinians
are, at this very moment facing eviction from their homes in Yasafer Mata yet
the Supreme Court happily allowed the Israeli army to establish a firing range
on peoples’s land and next to their homes in order to facilitate yet more
ethnic cleansing.
In the process the Supreme Court dismissed
evidence proving that Palestinians had lived in these homes for generations.
They preferred the lies of the State that Palestinians had only lived in the
area recently. Not once did they ask why it was only in Arab villages, not Jewish
settlements, that the Israeli Army established firing zones.
Likewise in the Negev the Supreme Court approved the destruction
of the village of Umm Al-Hiram to make way for a Jewish only town of Hiram.
Never, not once, was it the other way round.Not once were they asked to approve the confiscation of Jewish land for
the benefit of Arabs.
Israel detains hundreds of Palestinians, including Israeli citizens,
under Administrative Detention without any trial whatsoever. When used by the
British under the Emergency Regulations future Israeli Justice Minister Ya’acov
Shapira remarked
that ‘Even in Nazi
Germany, there were no laws like this.’
Not
once has the Supreme Court overturned such a detention, even though the
Defendant cannot challenge the ‘evidence’ because the Defendant and their
lawyer are unable to see it. Every scrap of rumour by Shin Bet is accepted in
good faith by the Supreme Court.
On 8 July 2021, the Supreme Court in a 10 to
1 decision, upheld the 2018 Jewish
Nation-State Basic Law, which enshrines Jewish supremacy and racial segregation
as a Basic Law with constitutional status in the State of Israel. The only
dissenting opinion was issued by the only Arab justice on the court, Justice
Kara.
As a matter of course the Supreme Court has failed over the
years to challenge or even scrutinise the openly anti-Arab evidence of the Shin
Bet secret police. The Supreme Court has colluded in the State’s refusal to
open the archives and release information concerning the Nakba. There can be no
possible national security reason for not releasing 70+ year old files other
than a refusal to countenance evidence of Zionist ethnic cleansing.
This deference to Shin Bet even extended to the Court’s refusal
to order the release of evidence concerning the State’s suspected involvement
in the murder of Nazi collaborator Rudolf Kasztner in 1957, 62 years previously.
The Supreme Court accepted Shin Bet’s rationale – ‘national security and lack of resources’. How could national
security possibly be damaged by the revelation that Shin Bet had murdered an
Israeli citizen over 60 years ago?
Far from the Supreme Court being the last ditch defender of
Israelidemocracy, it is a supine
creature in all but one respect. It is the decisions of the Supreme Court to challenge
the monopoly of Orthodox Jewry, such as conversion by other strands of Jewry,
which has antagonised Religious Zionism and Orthodox Jewry. The current proposals
have nothing to do with Netanyahu’s legal problems.
The Supreme Court has rejected
every petition aimed at forcing the Israeli state to reveal which repressive
states it arms and equips. Arms to Ukraine’s neo-Nazi Azov Battalion? In a
ruling on 27 June 2021 the court ruled that no future appeals would be discussed in court. As lawyer
Eitay Mack commented:
“It’s
incredible that in a state which defines itself as Jewish and democratic, it
was decided that preventing aid to genocide, to crimes against humanity, to war
crimes and to severe violations of human rights is not a topic with which
courts should engage,”
Since
2007 the Israeli government has approved
every single arms deal brought to it. The Supreme Court was happy to allow
Israel to equip every mercenary, fascist and genocider. This is the figleaf for
Jewish supremacy that liberal Zionists fear will be stripped away.
If I was a member of the Knesset I would have no hesitation
in voting for the reforms proposed by the governing coalition. The Supreme
Court is a Zionist body complicit in the colonisation of Palestine.
Another proposal, which I would support, would be to remove
the ‘grandfather’ clause from the 1950 Law of Return which allows the partner
of someone whose grandparent was Jewish to obtain entry to and citizenship of
the State of Israel.
Given the racist nature of the Law of Return, in allowing
Jews who weren’t even born in Israel to claim citizenship as of right whereas
Palestinian refugees have no such rights, I can see no possible objection to
this proposed law. It is the logic of racial supremacy that the racists are
always seeking to redefine who is and who is not part of the ubermenschen. That is why the question Who is a Jew has for Israel been an
insoluble question ever since its inception.
In so far as this proposal furthers the already existing
breach between American Jewry, most of whom are not Orthodox Jews, and Israel, then
this legislation can only be welcomed.
Of course there is much reactionary legislation proposed by
the coalition such as a refusal to ratify the Istanbul Convention against
violence to women.
Budgets will be increased to strengthen “Jewish settlement in Arad,” a city in the Negev. The planning
procedures for the city of Kasif, a future planned ultra-Orthodox city in the
Negev region, will continue and approximately 14 settlements in the Negev will
be continued and accelerated and NIS 800 million ($227M) will be budgeted each
year.
In compliance with Smotrich’s demands regarding
human rights associations, the government will dissolve organizations financed
by external parties and international funds. This will severely harm
Palestinian Arab civil society and will further entrench human and civil rights
violations against minorities in the country.
This is a government of open racists. In a 2018 radio interview, Likud MK
Miki Zohar claimed that the Israeli public will never
believe that Netanyahu is guilty of corruption because he “belongs to the Jewish race, and the entire Jewish race is the highest
human capital, the smartest, the most comprehending.”
But how is this different from ‘centrist’ Prime Minister Yair Lapid’s declaration that “My principle says maximum Jews on maximum land with maximum security
and with minimum Palestinians”?
If I had any doubt about my position then arch-Zionist and Trump
supporter, Alan Dershowitz, laid them to rest when he said
that:
“It will make it much more
difficult for people like me who try to defend Israel in the
international court of public opinion to defend them effectively, It would be a
tragedy to see the Supreme Court weakened.”
But it is Aharon Barak, who has provided the definitive argument
in favour of the legal reforms. Barak said that
the
High Court has acted as a kind of legal “Iron Dome,”. Without a credible
independent court, deemed as ensuring Israel’s democratic functioning,
including in its treatment of the Palestinians, “our chief of staff and government ministers will immediately be
arrested when they travel overseas… The
leaders of the country will be put on trial in the International Criminal Court
in The Hague.”
Could there be any more persuasive argument for giving Justice Minister
Yariv Levin’s proposals our full support?
The Elections
Are Not All Bad News As the Hypocritical Zionist ‘Left’ is All But Eliminated and
Meretz Loses Its Last Representatives
It’s an ill wind that
blows no good and so it is with Israel’s recent elections. While no one can be
happy with the increase in the number of seats for Religious Zionism/Jewish
Power from 6 to 14, making it the third largest bloc in the Knesset, at least
now there can be no hiding behind the pretence of peace negotiations to justify
the Occupation of Palestinian territories.
Apologists for Zionism,
like the Board of Deputies will claim that what has happened is an aberration
and that they are ‘gravely
concerned’ at the election of Otzma Yehudit. In one sense they are gravely
concerned but only at the damage to Israel’s reputation.
Labour Friends of
Israel have gone one better in rationalising that
it was ‘only’ 10% who voted for the
fascists or that Israel is suffering from the same growth in the far-right as
other countries and we should therefore not be surprised. This is a common
phenomenon.
Keir Starmer, a ‘Zionist
without qualification’told
Jewish News that the rise of Israeli far-right
would not alter his belief in a 'strong
relationship between Britain and Israel'. For once I think he is telling
the truth.
The Lies of LFI - Israel's 'founding principles' were based on ethnic cleansing
I suspect
that if Israel were to announce a policy calling for the killing of Palestinian
first-borns that Starmer’s faith in Britain’s relationship with Israel would be
as strong as ever. Indeed he would probably praise Israel’s moderation in allowing
the remainder of Palestinian children to live!
The
phenomenon we have seen in Italy, Sweden and other European countries of a
growing far-Right has nothing whatsoever to do with what we are seeing in Israel.
LFI fall back on the idea that Israel's neo-Nazis are just part of the same phenomenon as Europe's far-Right
The
growth of the European far-Right is caused by the influx of refugees, a result
of Western wars in the Middle East and elsewhere and the resulting
determination of to scapegoat them. It is compounded by the severe economic
crisis affecting Europe, partly as a result of the war in Ukraine and the
energy crisis, which results in a competition for resources such as housing.
There is no connection whatever
between Israel’s far-Right, whose origins lie in Zionism, Jewish Supremacy and settler
colonisation and the growth of the far-Right in Europe and America.
This thug, who is now an MK, boasted of his torture of a Bedouin family
Although it is always
easy to label parties ‘fascist’, far-Right parties in Europe are, with some
exceptions, not fascist. On this I disagree with those like Richard Silverstein
who argues
to the contrary. Fascism comes to power in order to defeat and destroy the
organisations of the working class. It is accompanied by fighting squads. In Hitler’s
Germany the first concentration camp Dachau was set up in March 1933 for communists and trade unionists. The trades unions themselves were abolished and their offices occupied. In its place was established the Nazi Labour Front whose purpose was to control and discipline workers not to represent them. Likewise in Italy Mussolini came to power
in order to smash the working class.
All the evidence in Europe
is that a large section of a depoliticised working class is voting for the
far-Right. Where once the Communist
Party dominated Paris’s suburbs today their place has been taken by
Marine Le Pen.
Whilst figures such as
Le Pen and Giorgia Meloni are hostile to trade unions and working class struggles
there is no indication that they are intent on setting up a police state which
will abolish the unions and conscript the working class.
Noam, is a vehemently anti-gay component of Religious Zionism
Israel’s far right is
likewise not a fascist right. Indeed arguably it is worse than fascist. Its
support comes to a large extent from Israel’s Jewish working class. Zionism like
all forms of settler colonialism involves an alliance between the settler working
class and ruling class. Ben Gvir is not advocating making Histadrut, the Jewish
trade union illegal. Saying something is abhorrent or evil is not the same as fascism.
The racism directed
against migrants, as we have seen with Suella Braverman over migration to
Britain and the calamities at Manston, are not of the same order as Israeli racism.
There has been a very welcome pushback
against what has happened and Braverman visited
the facility with her tail between her legs yesterday, chastened at the
response to the appalling conditions there.
We do not have
thousands of Italian or Swedish people chanting ‘death to refugees’. Yet this is a regular
occurrence in Israel and when it does happen, as with the pogrom
in Jerusalem last May, the Police attack the victims and defend the
perpetrators.
Racism in Israel doesn’t
originate in antagonism towards outsiders or refugees but from Zionism itself,
the founding ideology of the state. That is why the position of the BOD and LFI
is totally hypocritical. For years they
have consciously ignored the racism inherent in an ethno-religious state.
Ben-Gvir celebrates his electoral triumph
It wasn’t Ben Gvir of
Otzma Yehudit who said
that ‘Israel is the nation
state of the Jewish people – and only it.’ but Prime Minister Netanyahu. It wasn’t Bezalel
Smotrich of Jewish Home who said
that Palestinians ‘are like animals, they aren’t human.’ but Rabbi Eli Dahan, who later became
Israel’s Deputy Defence Minister and ran on the Likud ticket (albeit as a
member of Jewish Home).
Racism in Israel is a consequence
of settler colonialism not an influx of refugees or a legacy of past
colonialism. Every single Zionist party from the ‘left’ Meretz to Likud
subscribes to the idea of a Jewish state. People need to understand that the
very concept of a ‘Jewish’ state is inherently racist. Zionist settler
colonialism had, from its very foundations, ethnic cleansing built into it. How
else to create a ‘Jewish’ state in a land where the majority of inhabitants
were non-Jewish other than to expel the indigenous population?
It wasn’t Otzma
Yehudit or Religious Zionism which drew up plans to ‘Judaise’ the Galilee, Jerusalem
and the Negev but the Israeli Labor Party who subscribed to the Koenig
Plan and the Judaisation (in Germany it was called Aryanisation) of the
Galilee or the Prawer
Plan in the Negev.
A comparison between 2021 and 2022 results
Both ‘left’ and ‘right’
Zionism were agreed about the fundamentals of Zionism. Where they differed were
on tactics. In general the Labour Zionists understood the need to say one thing
to their sponsors in the West whilst saying and doing different things in Israel
itself.
There
was an almighty row when Bezalel Smotrich called
for the separation of Jewish and Arabs in maternity wards and all the hypocrites
condemned him. It later turned out that a majority of Israeli hospitals do
exactly what Smotrich was condemned. They too separate
Jewish and Arab mothers in maternity wards.
Meir Medical Center in Kfar Saba, told the reporter
that it couldn’t guarantee a segregated room but that the maternity staff
always tries to keep Jews and Arabs separate. “We try not to mix,” even when patients don’t request it, a
representative was recorded as saying.
The Board of Deputies,
Jewish Leadership Council and Labour Friends of Israel all call themselves Zionists.
In that case they, along with Keir Starmer should be honest and accept that
they are racists. The major difference between them and Ben Gvir is that for
all his vicious racism, he is at least an honest racist.
This is why we should
welcome the almost complete annihilation of the ‘left’ Zionist parties, the
Israeli Labor Party and Meretz, whose only role has been to sanitise Israel’s
ethnic cleansing. The ILP’s number of representatives has gone down from seven
to four and Meretz has been eliminated completely.
Both
Meretz and the ILP voted
for the Citizenship Law that prevents the spouses of Israeli Palestinians who
are from the West Bank obtaining Israeli residence and citizenship. Meretz voted
for the apartheid law that extends civil law to Jewish settlers whilst at
the same time putting Palestinians under military law. It even demanded that its
sole Arab Knesset member, Ghaida Rinawie Zoabi, who voted
against the law, resign from the Knesset.[1]
For the first 30 years
in Israel there were continuous Israeli Labour Party coalition governments. In
1949 Mapai (ILP) and Mapam, the forerunner of Meretz, obtained 65 out of a
total of 120 seats in the Knesset. As late as 1992 under Yitzhak Rabin they
gained 56 seats. Today they have just 4 seats. They prepared the way for the
Right and in the process lost any reason to exist.
Why do I welcome their
demise? Because it was the ‘left’ Zionists who kept alive the idea of a two
state solution. The right-wing Zionists were open about their desire to
colonise the whole of Mandate Palestine. Indeed before 1948 Herut, the
forerunner of Likud, claimed
both the West and East banks of the Jordan.
Member of a racist rabbinical tradition and Religious Zionism MK
Nothing has enabled
the settlement of the West Bank more than the illusion that a Palestinian state
might be established. This despite the fact that at no time did either the ILP
or Meretz call for an end to the Occupation or even the dismantlement of the
settlements. Meretz/Mapam was always implacably opposed
to Yesh Gvul and Israeli Jews who refused to serve in the Occupied Territories
(with the honourable except of their founder, Shulamit Aloni).
Whatever their other
virtues right-wing Zionists are at least honest about their intentions. They
openly declare that there is no place for a Palestinian state.
Zionists in the West
will mourn the disappearance of the Labour Zionists but they would do well to
save their tears. No longer will it be possible to pretend that a negotiated solution
is possible. No longer will an Israeli government be able to disguise its
ethnic cleansing behind a smokescreen of excuses for an eventual Palestinian
state.
The primary purpose of
Labour Zionism today is to kosher right-wing Israeli governments abroad. Labour
Zionism has been in steep decline since 1992 when it gained 56 seats. Even as
late as 2015 the ILP and Meretz gained 29 seats but since then the decline has
been meteoric.
No one who wishes to
see an end to Israeli Apartheid should mourn their demise. 40 years ago I wrote,
‘Begin & Sharon Have Done Nothing
that Labour Zionism didn't do before them’.[2]Thiswas no rhetorical flourish.
It wasn’t Herut (Likud)
who organised the Nakba, the expulsion of over three-quarters of a million
Palestinian refugees from their homeland nor was it right-wing Zionist militias
who perpetrated the majority of the massacres that ‘encouraged’ the Palestinian
refugees to flee. That was the Labour Zionist militias Haganah and Palmach.
In
November 1948, Eliezer Peri, the editor of Mapam’s Al Hamishmar,
received a letter describing a massacre at al-Dawayima on 29 October. Benny
Morris estimated that there were
hundreds dead.[3]
Agriculture Minister Aharon Zisling referred to a letter he had received
declaring:
I couldn’t sleep all night ...
Jews too have committed Nazi acts.’ [4]
‘The children they killed by breaking
their heads with sticks. There was not a house without dead.[5]
Mapam’s
Political Committee was briefed by former Chief of Staff of the Haganah terror
group, Yisrael Galili, about the killing of civilians during Operations Yoav
and Hiram. Aharon Cohen, head of Mapam’s Arab Department, led a call for an
independent inquiry.[6]
Their only problem was that the commanders of these operations were senior
Mapam members, Yitzhak Sadeh and Moshe Carmel.
Likud’s
crimes against the Palestinians were more than matched by their ‘socialist’ counterparts.
In 1956 it was the Labour Zionists who presided over the massacre at Kafr Qasim
when 53 villagers coming back from the fields were mown down with machine guns.
A curfew had been imposed on the first day of the Suez war but the workers had
not been informed before setting out for work.
The
criminals who carried out the massacre were pardoned within the year and the
Brigade Commander, Col. Shadmi was fined a symbolic 10 prutot, less than one
cent.
With
the release of the transcripts of the trial of the soldiers involved it has
become clear that this was no rogue operation. The intention had been to ‘encourage’
another exodus of the Palestinians. Soldiers surrounded the village on three
sides. The fourth leading to Jordan was left open in accordance with Operation
Hafarperet, a plan to transfer the Arabs in the Little Triangle
area, in the event of war, to Jordan.[7]
Israel’s Palestinians had, since 1948, been treated as a hostile fifth column
and until 1966 they lived under martial law.
Rabbi Meir Kahane.
People
in the West are surprised at the election of Ben Gvir, whose hero is Rabbi Meir
Kahane. Kahane first gained a seat in 1984 standing for Kach, a Jewish Nazi
party. Kach was banned from fighting the 1988 elections to the Knesset. However
the reasons for the ban had nothing to do with his racism, quite the contrary.
Kahane was resented because he said aloud what others preferred to hide. Kahane
held up a mirror to the hypocrisy of both Labour and Likud.
Kahane
was the honest Zionist who dared to say what others would only whisper. In
August 1986 the Knesset passed, in response to Kahane’s election, an
Anti-Racism Law which Kahane voted for! The reason being that while the law
made ‘incitement to racism’ illegal, it exempted discrimination based on the
grounds of religion or which was intended to preserve
Israel's ‘unique character.’ [8]
It
is of course the ‘unique character’ of Israel as an ethno-religious state which
necessitates discrimination against the Palestinians. The law has mainly been applied to Israeli Palestinians.
Otherwise it has remained a dead letter.
Kahane
punctured the hypocrisy of the Labour Zionists who pretended that Israel could
be both a Jewish state and a democratic state. This oxymoron pretends that it is
possible to grant Jewish citizens privileges such as sole access to 93% of
Israeli land whilst at the same time maintaining a democratic society. Kahane
was clear. Israel could either be a
Jewish state or a democratic state, however it could not be both.
In
1985 the Knesset passed amendment 7A to the Basic
Law: The Knesset preventing parties that incite racism from standing for
election. It also prevented parties standing that denied the existence of the
State of Israel as a Jewish or a democratic state.[9]
The real reason for its passage had little to do with Kahane’s racism but with
the fact that Kach was forecast to gain up to 12 seats in the 1988 election.[10]
This would have been a public relations disaster.
There
is little doubt that we are entering a new stage with the election of a bloc of
14 Kahanists, overt racists and homophobes. Repression in the West Bank is
intensifying as the 700,000 settlers gain a critical mass. This year has seen a
massive
increase in settler attacks such as the burning of olive groves and attacks
on individual Palestinians.[11]
The Israeli army has not only refused to prevent such attacks but have
accompanied and indeed participated
in such attacks.
This
has been accompanied by army attacks and assassinations in Jenin, Nablus and
their closure. The battle for the land of Palestine is increasing as the
settlers seek to further expand. The goal is first to transform the
Palestinians into landless labourers, a long colonial tradition, and then to enact
their transfer. This is where support for Religious Zionism comes in. It is a
vote for ethnic cleansing, not only of the Palestinians of the Territories but
Israel’s Palestinian citizens.
One
of the major disappointments of the election was the decision
of Hadash-Ta'al to force Balad, an Arab nationalist party out of the Joint
list. Their primary reason was their desire to support from the outside the
anti-Netanyahu coalition of Zionist parties.[12]
It proved a disaster. Hadash/Ta'al gained 5 seats, down 1 from 2021, whilst
Balad just failed to clear the 3.25% barrier. Ironically it was this decision that
gave Netanyahu a clear majority.
The
number of seats gained by the ultra-Orthodox parties Shas and United Torah
Judaism increased from 16 to 18. As Israel becomes more overtly racist it is
also becoming more religious. The bible is used to justify expulsion and
racism. Traditionally seen as politically moderate, religious Zionists have now
become more overtly messianic with the demand for the demolition of the Dome of
the Rock and Al Aqsa Mosque and their replacement by a Third Temple.
The
presence of Religious Zionism in the governing coalition with a clutch of
senior cabinet posts heralds a new era in Israeli politics. Religious Zionism
is committed to expel Israel’s Palestinian citizens, which they disguise as the
expulsion of ‘disloyal’ Arabs.
There
will be those who will decry the description of Otzma Yehudit of Itamar Gvir as
a Jewish Nazi party. However the programme of Kach, from which they take their
inspiration, was clear. They called
for prison sentences for
“every Arab who has sexual relations with
a Jewish woman.” This is straight from the Nazis’ Nuremberg Laws. Also like
Hitler, who opposed the prosecution of Jewish women who had relations with
‘Aryan’ men, Kach did not consider sexual relations between Jewish men and Arab
women a crime.
The
reaction of Israel’s friends in the West to the accession to power of a
neo-Nazi party is one of open dismay. It is likely that pressure will be
exerted on Netanyahu to form a coalition with the National Unity party of
former chief of staff Benny Gantz and Gideon Sa’ar, ex-Likud, in order to keep
Religious Zionism at bay. The next few months will be devoted to the process of
forming a coalition.
[6] Benny
Morris, ‘Falsifying the Record: A Fresh Look at Zionist Documentation of 1948,’
Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol.
24:3. (Spring, 1995), pp. 44-62.
