What the Jewish Left Doesn’t Need is Advice that It has No Responsibility for What Zionism and Israel Has Done In Their Name

 A Reply to Shaul Magid’s Argument for Jewish Indifference to Genocide and an Evasion of Responsibility

Shaul Magid is a rabbi, Visiting Professor of Modern Jewish Studies at Harvard Divinity School, and Distinguished Fellow in Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College. Magid is also an opponent of Jewish anti-Zionism which he argues is irrelevant. Jews opposed to Zionism should turn in on themselves and ignore what is happening in their name.

In his article What Does the Jewish Left Want?, which is reprinted by Jewish Voice for Liberation, Magid argues that the Jewish left should ‘no longer focus on opposition to a state that many in the Jewish Left no longer support.’ In my response below I explain that if it doesn’t focus primarily on Zionism and the Israeli state, then this Jewish left is not only not a genuine left but it has no real purpose.

Shaul Magid

At a time when US and Western Imperialism is using Jewish people as its human shield, its moral alibi for support of the genocide in Gaza, to pretend that solidarity with the Palestinians and opposition to Zionism should be deprioritised is to do exactly what the Zionists want us to do.

It is to argue that Jews should become the bystanders to the slaughter in Gaza. Raul Hilberg excoriated, in Perpetrators, Victims and Bystanders, the ‘dull awareness’ and passive indifference of those who looked on as the Jews were exterminated in the holocaust, be they individuals or the Allied countries.

Hilberg spoke of the ‘human wall’ that bystanders had erected, of indifference and social isolation. What Magid is arguing is that Jews on the left should adopt a similar approach today. It is profoundly immoral.

Magid argued, in opposition to Jewish Voice for Peace’s statement adopting an explicitly anti-Zionist position, that they had ignored

a series of real “Zionist” possibilities where “justice and equality” were paramount.

What Magid really wants is to have his cake and eat it. His article is an exercise in self-indulgence. The real question is whether Jewish intellectuals have the courage and honesty to call Zionism out for what it is. Clearly Magid doesn’t possess that courage. Magid says

Many Jews who define themselves as anti-Zionist do not think the state of Israel should cease to exist. Rather, they contest Zionist hegemony.

If that is the case then they are not anti-Zionists and that is Magid’s problem.

For Magid the internal battle within the Jewish community takes precedence over genocide and ethnic cleansing. Is it any wonder that Palestinians get tired of this Jewish preciousness at a time when Palestinian children are being starved to death in the name of Zionism’s Jewish redemption?

If you are an anti-Zionist then Israel as a Jewish state must disappear. Not the people but the state. Israel must become normalised, like any other state. It must be a state of its own citizens, regardless of ethnicity or religion.

Magid accepts that Jewish anti-Zionists reject the idea that ‘Zionism is a requirement for legitimate Jewish identity in the twenty-first century.’’ But then he indulges in a semantic frivolity when he makes:

 ‘an important distinction... between Zionism and Israel. Israel is a country; Zionism is an ideology.’

No.  Zionism is the ideology of the Israeli state. It dictates the imperatives of Zionism, such as ethnic cleansing, Jewish racial purity, Jewish settlement at the Palestinians’ expense. This is a distinction without a difference.

What Magid demonstrates is that he rejects the special characteristic of Zionism as a settler colonial ideology whose aim was to achieve as pure a Jewish state as possible. In the words of Israel’s opposition leader, Yair Lapid:

“My principle says maximum Jews on maximum land with maximum security and with minimum Palestinians”

Quite amazingly Magid goes on to say, without so much as a flicker of awareness, that:

Like most countries Israel will choose how to govern according to will of its citizens, in Israel’s case, mostly, but not exclusively, its Jewish citizens (as those living under occupation have no political agency in the national polity), how to treat its minorities, how to deal with questions of justice and domination.

The whole point of anti-Zionism is that Israel is not like most countries. It is sui generis. Actually most countries don’t govern according to the will of their citizens but their elites and the capitalist ruling class. But let this pass. Magid is not a socialist.

In Israel’s case it pays no heed whatsoever to its Palestinian citizens. In Netanyahu’s words, ‘Israel is a state of its Jewish citizens not all of them’. That is why, being a Jewish state, it continues to dispossess what it calls Arab Israelis from their homes, in particular the destruction of the unrecognised villages of the Bedouin of the Negev such as Umm al-Hiran and Ras Jraba. Has Magid never heard of the policy of Judaisation of the Galilee and Negev, the Koenig Memorandum and Prawer Plan?

Does Magid think that there’s nothing of special interest in the fact that those living under occupation have no civil or political rights despite it being made clear that the West Bank will always remain part of Israel? Has he lost the ability to spell or even recognise the word Apartheid?

Magid quotes Joel Swanson’s assertion that

Historically, Zionism has never been one single concept. It has been a family of arguments, ... To say ‘Zionism’ without adjectives is already to erase its internal diversity.’

Here we really come to the crux of the argument. Shaul Magid’s illusion that there is a nice as well as a nasty Zionism. It is part of a ‘family’ that somehow along the way as it lost its focus or direction.

So let us spell it out for Shaul Magid who is blind to Zionism’s  racist reality. Zionism is what Zionism does. Zionism does not exist in the minds of a fragrant Jewish American Princess who still believes in fairy tales but in the settler attacks on Palestinian villages in the West Bank or the Death to the Arabs riots in Jerusalem each year.

Is there any difference between Herzog and Netanyahu, between Labour and Revisionist Zionism or did they merely argue about the means of achieving and maintaining a Jewish Supremacist state beholden to the West as an armed watchdog?

Magid clings to a Zionism that never existed. In fact cultural and socialist Zionism long ago disappeared in their own contradictions. Socialism is universal. Zionism is particularist. I realised that when I was 16 but Magid has yet to achieve political adolescence.

Magid points to a recent poll in which only a third of American Jews identify as Zionist whereas 88% support the concept of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state. Clearly there is confusion among American Jews as Israel has proven beyond doubt that it cannot be both Jewish and democratic. Always it is forced to take the former path and jettison the latter, as the Jewish Nation State Law has proved.

The reality is that this was always a dishonest slogan of the hypocritical Zionist ‘left’. When confronted with a choice Zionism always preferred the Jewish to the democratic. In the words of Ahmed Tibi, an Arab member of the Knesset, Israel is Democratic for Jews and Jewish for Arabs.

It is this which has allowed Jewish neo-Nazis to become the third largest bloc in the Knesset and for Itamar Ben Gvir to become Police Minister in Israel. It is this which has led to Israeli Police acting like SS storm troopers against Israel’s Palestinian citizens. Israel is a state where torture is the norm (for Palestinians).

Yes there is massive confusion among American Jews but rather than offering clarity Magid seeks to take advantage of that confusion with his ridiculous essay.

Magid says that ‘Zionism served as an escape mechanism for Jews trying to escape a Europe collapsing around them.’ No that is absolutely not true. Haganah sent Feivel Polkes to Nazi Germany to persuade the Gestapo not to allow Jewish emigration to any place but Palestine. In exchange he offered to collaborate with them.

As a result Professor Franz Six, a senior SS official and head of Department II in the SD Main Office, who was sentenced to 20 years imprisonment for war crimes in April 1948 wrote:

Pressure is being exerted on the Reich Deputation of the Jews in Germany in order to compel Jews emigrating from Germany to head only to Palestine and not to any other country.” [The Secret Contacts, Zionism and Nazi Germany, 1933-1941, Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol. 5 3/4 Spring/Summer 1976]

Ha’avara, the trade agreement between Nazi Germany and the Zionist movement, agreed in August 1933, not only broke the world-wide Jewish Boycott of Nazi Germany but it worsened the position for Jews trying to escape to other countries.

The Zionist movement consistently opposed rescue to any country bar Palestine. Magid fails to understand what has been called ‘cruel Zionism.’  See my book Zionism During the Holocaust (to purchase it contact me at tonygreenstein104@gmail.com).

Magid cites Yehiam Weitz’s article, “The Positions of David Ben Gurion and Yitzhak Tabenkin Vis-A-Viz the Holocaust of European Jewry” but has failed to understand it. Weitz cites Ben-Gurion on the Jewish refugee problem thus:

‘Both during the 1930s ... and during the second half of the 1940s, after the war's end - his position on this question was determined and indisputable; Ben-Gurion definitively and often crudely opposed ameliorating the position of Jewish groups by means other than their transfer to Palestine. He felt that any 'solution of the national problem outside of Eretz Israel, or ... solving the individual's distress by ignoring the national problem ... [means] undermining the foundations of Zionism and acting  as a temptation  which  every  Zionist  must  learn to  withstand completely.'

When it came to priorities Zionism and building the Jewish state came first. Weitz quotes Ben-Gurion’s notorious statement in the wake of Kristallnacht that if:

'it would be possible to save all the [Jewish] children in Germany by transferring them to England and only half of them by transferring them to Eretz Israel, I would choose the second possibility, because before us is not only the account of these children but the historical account of the Jewish people.’

In other words the interests of building the ‘Jewish’ state took precedence over saving Jewish children from Germany. Magid could also have mentioned Boas Evron’S, Jewish State or Israeli Nation and the fierce opposition to the Evian Conference, called by Eisenhower to solve the Jewish refugee question. Of course it did no such thing but the Zionist leadership were nonetheless frightened.

What Magid didn't mention was the identification with Israel of the far and even neo-Nazi right

Evron quotes the minutes of a meeting of the Jewish Agency Executive of 26 June 1938. Ben-Gurion was unremittingly hostile as he declared that

No rationalizations can turn the conference from a harmful to a useful one. What can and should be done is to limit the damage as far as possible.

A Russia member of the Zionist Executive Menachem Ussishkin was even more forthright

He hoped to hear in Evian that Eretz Israel remains the main venue for Jewish emigration. All other emigration countries do not interest him… The greatest danger is that attempts will be made to find other territories for Jewish emigration. [my emphasis]

These positions are quite clear in the essay he referred to yet Magid scrupulously refrains from mentioning the attitude of the Zionists to saving the Jewish refugees.

Magid asks Can the Jewish Left move beyond Zionism and anti-Zionism?’ and queries whether it can ‘no longer focus on opposition to a state that many in the Jewish Left no longer support?’

Thus missing out the whole point of why Jews on the left make opposition to Israel and Zionism a central focus of their work. Of course Magid knows the reason but refrains from spelling it out. Everything Israel does is in the name of the mythical ‘Jewish people’ and Jews. It is after all a self-proclaimed Jewish state.

It is therefore incumbent upon Jewish socialists and those who are genuinely on the Jewish left to say ‘Not in My Name’. The fact that Magid resiles from this suggests that his membership of the Jewish left is ephemeral.

Of course the Jewish left can do many other things but when being Jewish is one of the primary justifications given for imperialism’s support for Israel’s genocide and ethnic cleansing it is rank hypocrisy and cowardice not to make that a priority. If the Jewish left cannot focus on Zionism and its claim to represent Jews then it has no relevance.

Magid says that ‘One of the fundamental differences between liberal Zionism and Jewish anti-Zionism is the exceptionalism that underlies the case of Israel’. That is of course true.  Liberal Zionists can, in theory, hold progressive positions on domestic American affairs but for Palestine there is an exception (Progressive Except Palestine). But that is increasingly untenable.

What Magid seems to be doing is providing a new way for this exceptionalism to operate by suggesting that Jews on the left simply avoid the issue altogether.

Why would Jews seek to avoid the one area where they have a contribution to make? Does he find it too uncomfortable? The difference between Magid and a self-declared Zionist is that he doesn’t openly defend the Apartheid state whereas ‘liberal’ Zionism does. Instead he makes excuses for it.

Jewish identity post-war has been forged in the crucible of Zionism. Jewish identity has changed for many a substitute religion. Without an alternative explicitly anti-Zionist Jewish identity Jewish identity become at best a self-indulgence and at worst an identity with genocide and racism.

Magid quotes Adi Ophir in his support:  “to become non-Zionist one first must become anti-Zionist.” I wonder if Magid ever thought this through? How about saying that to become a non-racist one must first become an anti-racist. Perhaps our goal is to abstain from confronting racism? This is meaningless nonsense, verbal masturbation.

The fact is that for Jews non-Zionism is, at best, a half-way house to anti-Zionism. Of course being an anti-Zionist also means taking a position against US imperialism and its use of Jews as its moral alibi.

As a final flourish Magid says that

The land between the river and the sea remains the Jewish homeland and the Palestinian homeland. But the domination of one over the other will never yield the flourishing of either.

In this Magid could not be more wrong. He equates the oppressed with their oppressors. Palestine is the home of the Palestinians. It is not a Jewish homeland. My home is where I live, Britain. The United States is the home of millions of Jews. Israel is a settler colonial state that calls itself Jewish only in the racial and ethnic sense. Israel is a state of Jewish Supremacy where Jews, not Palestinians, exercise domination.

The eventual choice that Israeli Jews face is between becoming Jewish Palestinians or leaving. That was the choice that White South Africans faced and we should not make any exception for the Zionist settlers whose crimes far exceed those of White South Africans.

Tony Greenstein

Israeli Terror in the Jenin & the West Bank Attracts No Criticism from Western Leaders

Go Fund Me Has Frozen Donations to the Al Tafawk Children’s Centre in Response to Israel’s Attacks on Jenin – all Palestine solidarity Activists Should Boycott GFM

For nearly five years, from April 2020 until the present day, The Brighton Trust has run a crowdfunder on the Go Fund Me platform for the Al Tafawk Children’s Centre in Jenin. In fact we have been raising money for the Centre since December 2018.

It made sense originally to transfer our haphazard appeals to a Crowdfunder and GFM seemed as good as any. In that time we have raised over £65,000 of which GFM took approximately 3%.

In recent years all payments from the crowdfunder have gone via PayPal’s charitable arm. It was a convenient and simple way of raising money. For nearly 5 years the appeal ran without a hitch.

Indeed the major problem we had in the past year or so was transferring money to the Centre. Originally we had done this via Western Union but since Israel smashed up their offices in Jenin this had not been possible. We were relying on couriers at one stage.

Go Fund Me is a billion dollar American corporation and I was under no illusions that one day it might pull the plug. This is exactly what has happened. Fortunately I made preparations for what might happen by taking care to collect donors emails.

On 5 January 25, out of the Blue, ‘The GFM team’ sent me an email which couldn’t even get my name right. It was clearly disingenuous. It began thanking me ‘for your efforts to help those affected by the conflict in the Middle East.’ Jenin is under occupation by the Israeli state. It is not part of a ‘conflict’ in the Middle East.

The email then said that ‘Due to recent developments within the region’ presumably Israel’s Genocide in Gaza,

we’re carefully reviewing fundraisers related to this conflict. This is an important step to help ensure fundraisers are in compliance with all applicable laws and strictly enforced policies from our payment partners and our Terms of Service.

A totally meaningless word salad.

‘Because of this, we’ve temporarily placed your fundraiser under review as we gather more information on your plan to help those abroad. [their emphasis] During this review, although transfers from your fundraiser are paused, your fundraiser remains visible to the public and can continue to receive new donations.

In other words it would continue to accept money but it wouldn’t pay it out. It gave no reason for freezing our funds.

The email then proceeded to ask a series of questions, the answers to most of which they already had when I set up  the Crowdfunder and some of which were none of their business. A clue to the real purpose of the attack on the Crowdfunder was in the additional question which asked:

‘if the funds raised will be used for exit/evacuation purposes, please also provide the following:

A detailed plan on how the funds will be used to ensure a secure departure out of Gaza. If available, please include the full names of any known coordinators, organizations, travel agents/agencies, or regions that may be involved in the passage.

It finished off by saying that ‘To complete our review, we need a direct response from you as soon as possible.’  The following day I sent an answer to their questions, with an accompanying message

I have now drawn up my response to your email.  In view of the genocide taking place in Gaza (please don't play with words) and the settler and military terror that has descended on the West Bank in the past year, which is entirely to do with settlers wanting to displace the native Palestinians, I find it difficult to judge your email in a neutral manner.

Your email has a hidden agenda and is not simply an information seeking exercise. Nonetheless I have supplied all the info that you requested.

Back came a response from ‘Brad’ of GFM Team asking a further set of questions and completely ignoring my response to the first set of questions. It talked about keeping your account safe when the only people endangering it were GFM.

‘Brad’ asked for Al Tafawk’s ‘beneficial ownership structure’ and ‘If any individuals have a 25% stake or greater in the organization, please also provide their full legal name.’  As if the Al Tafawk Children’s Centre was some piece of real estate in Manhattan rather than a wobbly building in the middle of a refugee camp. What possible reason would GFM have for asking this kind of information unless they were passing it on to the Israelis or their American sponsors? 

GFM clearly had a hidden agenda which they were intent on not revealing. I responded refusing to answer their stupid and illiterate questions. Instead I made it clear that Jenin is under military occupation. It is not a sleepy town in America’s mid-West. Normal civil society norms don’t pertain in such a situation.

By this time I had decided that GFM were highly unlikely to restore the Crowdfunder and even if they did I wasn’t sure we wanted to continue with this racist US Corporate Scum.  So I set up a new Crowdfunder with Chuffed, which I encourage people to contribute to. The situation in Jenin is not good. Whether there will even be a children’s centre to go back to after Israel has finished what it is doing in the Jenin Refugee Camp is open to question.

Three times in the past three years Israel has entered the Al Tafawk Centre and wrecked it. The first time was in July 2021, (see Question asked about this in the House of Lords). The second time was in November 2023 and the third time more recently when it also cut the power cables to the Centre in order to ensure that the children would freeze in the winter.

It has been very difficult to find out the exact situation in Jenin and in particular the Al Tafawk Centre. I have had messages from the headteacher Mona at the Centre, who along with her family has been evicted from her home.

On Mon, 20 Jan 2025 at 10:45, Mona wrote: 

Dear Tony 

Didnt hear from you since awhile hope u are ok. Here the situation is more and more strict from both sides ! The Israeli helicopters  over us all the time ready to bomb ! We are still able to be in the center in the mornings  

Again hope you are ok 

Wednesday 22 January 2025  

The words couldnt really describe the horrible situation we are facing here…. Hundreds of people cant survive inside the camp  

My father is missed from yesterday … we are here taking people and children who kicked from the camp 

Mater is Arrested" 

Thu 23 Jan, 04:35

Dear Tony 

I cant go to the bank right now! People are kicked from the camp ! They arrested all the men nacked for unknown places and we as women and children collected and stay in one place ! As now the center is still standing ! I gave karen my sister number if something bad happen to me ! But be sure the center is still there ! WE NEED YOUR VOICE TO SHOUT FOR ALL OF US TONY. WE are facing things we never believed could happen .

Mona

Fri 24 Jan, 11:35

Tony sadly the news is very bad 

We are (the families surround the camp) kicked from homes but we are not allowed to go farther about 200 people don't have a place. But there are a lot familes and children inside and use the center 

Thank you very much we cant reach the bank right now . Things are really horrible. We lost the connection with my father .

While we were walking outside we had to be each 5 people together and made picture for each one and then they arrested randomly or   

Send us to a place they decide.

MichaEL

11:38 25 Jan 25

Yesterday Mona informed me via WhatsApp that her family was forcibly evicted from their home in the Jenin Camp as part of the current IDF operation in Jenin. Mona's father is now missing. Her brother has been arrested. 

Today Mona informed me that she and her family are in a 'safer place' near the camp, so presumably outside the camp itself. Mona said that she herself is "very sick" but she didn't go into detail. Possibly from all the stress.

So it is uncertain whether Mona and her family will be able to return to the camp, let alone reopen her Children's Centre. I hope you can help her in some way to give her some hope of opening her Centre again, if not in Jenin then somewhere else in Palestine.

Mona Jalamnh

16:26 25^th January 2025

Dear Tony 

I got inflammation from the gaze when we were going out side the camp . The situation is more than awful . There are too much people couldn't go out with us cause the ways are horrible so we lost connection with the families who are inside . I am staying near by the camp and we are not allowed to move farther . We called the ambulance to move me to hospital but sadly they are not allowed to come to the place me and my family . I didn't expect  this . I will update you. We are here moving from home to other home with the children and women .who could leave with us

See my articles in Al Jazeera

Why did Israel raid and wreck a children’s centre in Jenin? – 5 July 2021

Palestinian children in the West Bank are also under attack – 14 Nov 2023

 

Today the situation in Jenin is horrendous as you can gauge from the articles below.

Hundreds flee Jenin amid Israel’s deepening West Bank crackdown

At least 10 killed, dozens wounded in Israeli attacks across Jenin

Security operations in Jenin put spotlight on Palestinian Authority

 

It is clear that with the advent of the Trump Presidency Netanyahu and his far-right government intend to proceed to not only the annexation of the West Bank but a policy of subjugation and ethnic cleansing. Settler terror, aided and abetted by the Israeli army, is the rule now in the West Bank. Trump has withdrawn even the pathetically puny sanctions on violent settlers that Biden imposed.

How this plays out with ‘normalisation’ with the Saudi regime is anyone’s guess but I suspect that in the end we can rely on Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed Bin Salman to sell the Palestinians out. The Saud’s have no loyalty except to the American dollar.

Jenin was first softened up by the Quisling Palestinian Authority forces, which are funded by the West. It is a disgrace that Britain’s Palestine Solidarity Campaign has refused so far to call them out for what they are. The Anti-Apartheid Movement in this country never failed to call out a similar force in South Africa under Apartheid, Mangosuthu Buthelezi’s Inkatha Freedom Party which also attacked the liberation movement.

Although we are now in Phase 1 of the ceasefire it is highly unlikely that it will proceed to Phases 2 and 3. Netanyahu has already promised the fascist and ‘proud homophobe’ Bezalel Smotrich, the Finance Minister and Gauleiter of the West Bank, and his Religious Zionism party, that war in Gaza will be resumed. Zionism is now off the leash and it is clear that by themselves the Palestinians are not strong enough to throw them back, despite the magnificent resistance in Gaza to date which has resulted in a situation whereby the resistance forces and Hamas are now estimated to be as strong today as they were 15 months ago.

Israel is the only state in the world not to have defined borders. We saw what that meant with the fall of Assad when Israel promptly invaded Syria, grabbing more land and bombing Syrian forces  All of which happened without one word of criticism from the West’s leaders who only wake up when, as happened on October 7th, the Palestinians strike back.

Vladimir Jabotinsky - founder of the Revisionist Zionist movement

But if it was Syria today then we can be sure that if Israel succeeds in ethnically cleansing the Palestinians of the West Bank or subduing them that the Jordanian border will be the next place where Israel will feel bound to exercise its ‘right to self-defence’. After all the original slogan of the Revisionist Zionists was ‘the West Bank is ours and the East Bank too.’

It is long overdue for the Arab working class and the Arab street to wake up and remove the corrupt and repressive leaders of their countries who have squandered their oil wealth propping up the economy of the United States and the West.

Tony Greenstein

What is the Meaning of Ben Gvir, Smotrich and Israel’s Far-Right Government?

 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 Knesset approved the 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 Israeli  democracy, 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?

Tony Greenstein