The Israeli government and military can surely now be reasonably described as explicitly fascistic, genocidal and exterminatory with regard to Palestinians in Gaza, and Palestinians more generally. Can this be denied in week six of this event? Huge assaults on Al-Shifa hospital were legitimised because this was alleged to be Hamas’ central base. After it was occupied, patients wheeled other patients in wheelchairs along broken roads.
The subsequent proof of this command centre? A cache of AK-47s and some magazines, which the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) appears to have rearranged. A single video of hostages being brought in by a few gunmen. A claim that Hamas’ command centre is mobile, though Al-Shifa was earlier said to be the centre of a network of tunnels, with the IDF release of two videos, one of which appeared to have been filmed by a drone and shows parts of a metal spiral staircase and a fortified tunnel. A longer video, which appeared, as The New York Times reported, to have been recorded by a robot or “a camera carried by an animal”.
Is the slapdash nature of Israeli propaganda deliberate, a sort of mockery of the idea of legitimising its actions? Hamas may well have used this large hospital complex for military purposes. Nothing the IDF has shown rises to the level sufficient to justify its evisceration.
With the final occupation of the hospital, patients and others were told to move south. Then it was announced that the southern city of Khan Younis is to be a target, because Hamas’ base is now there, and people were instructed to move again. To where? There is only Rafah south of that, on the border. Which is convenient. One, one-and-a-half, two million people in makeshift camps, with disease pullulating, a lack of food and water and minimal medical care? According to the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), there is one toilet for every 150 people taking refuge in southern Gaza, and there is no water available at all in the north. The aim surely is to make expulsion to the Sinai appear as the humane option.
In circumstances of total war, between matched enemies and with a claim of defence, the IDF’s actions and warnings would be justifiable. In this sick parody of a war of defence, they serve as a mark of the utter cynicism of Israeli politics.
A beleaguered right-wing government suffers an incursion due to security laxness still to be explained by a political-military group long in a clientelist relationship to successive Israeli governments. Two hundred and forty hostages are taken. Getting them back is then used to justify the carpet bombing of areas where they will have been held. Families and relatives protest the government in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, accusing it of absolute indifference to their fate in a rush to bury their political miscalculations under rubble.
Together with the larger protests demanding that the government focus on obtaining a hostage release — which unquestionably played a part in obtaining today’s hostage deal and associated pause — there have been outright anti-war protests. You wouldn’t want to exaggerate their size, but they’re there. This goes almost unreported outside Israel, the lapdog global media unable to cope with the complex idea that this torrent of killing is just politics.
In the West Bank, emboldened settlers with the connivance of the IDF terrorise Palestinian farming communities out of their villages. Ben Gvir, the national security minister from the fascist Jewish National Front party, a follower of the exterminatory Zionist fascist Meir Kahane, begins to arm the settler population, even though settlers are the main source of the violence, making the whole thing reminiscent of Latin American death squads. In Jerusalem, settlers have occupied parts of the 1,600-year-old Armenian quarter to try to enforce a rescinded land sale of a section of the gardens at its centre. This is part of an increasing assault on the Christian heritage of Jerusalem.
As all this is happening, the talk of numerous government officials has become explicitly exterminatory. Jewish National Front’s Heritage Minister Amihai Eliyahu has mused about using nuclear weapons on Gaza (Israel is believed to have numerous tactical and battlefield nuclear weapons). Deputy speaker of the Knesset, Likud member Nissim Vaturi, has made a call to “Burn Gaza now!”. An op-ed calling for using starvation, disease and thirst as a weapon on the Gazans, in the right-wing Yediot Ahronot has been endorsed by Israel’s Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, head of the Religious Zionist Party.
The Netanyahu government, from which all this bilge is coming, is said to be falling in the opinion polls. In Israel there is vast clamour for it to go, assailing it for its cynicism, extremisms and recklessness. This is not just in Haaretz, but across the media, and it shows a disconnect between Israel and its lapdog global supporters who simply affirm Netanyahu as the leader of plucky little Israel. That said, “opposition” leader Benny Gantz is in the war cabinet, and supports the open-ended waging of the war. The repeated exterminatory comments by government ministers are ignored by Israel’s global supporters who fret about slogans on posters, given a pass by a compliant mainstream media.
The history of Zionism has become that of all alternatives to hard right Zionism falling away, with Zionist fascism now dominant. The movement had a problem with the fact of an existing population from the start. “First wave Zionism” from the 1890s to the 1920s entertained various ideas of cooperation, purportedly “benevolent” colonialism or the like. A radical socialist movement, Hashomer Hatzair, advocated and developed collective Arab-Jewish kibbutzes and shared political parties. This survived even the horrors of 1948, but it is now all but vanished as a movement of any size. And its historical possibilities can be exaggerated in retrospect.
But five years after the 1917 Balfour declaration committing the UK and the League of Nations to establish a Jewish homeland in Palestine, the lack of progress saw a split and the emergence of “revisionist” Zionism. Led by Ze’ev Jabotinsky, revisionists were at least clear-eyed about the situation: the Arabs would never give up their homeland, so it must be taken. The aim was both sides of the Jordan (i.e. current Israel, the West Bank and Jordan). Arabs would be expelled, or a permanent minority.
Revisionism emerged in the 1920s when force and will politics — whether of the Bolsheviks or Mussolini — had triumphed, showing that a small group of people (with some substantial backing) could create “facts on the ground”. The UK maintained control over Palestine in order to maintain control of the Suez Canal and the region, and by the late 1920s revisionism had sprouted a “maximalist” faction, led by Abba Ahimeir, an intellectual who had passed through Bolshevik and Spenglerian stages.
In 1929 he identified himself publicly as a fascist, and argued that Zionism was necessarily a totalitarian movement. In 1933 he argued for total separation from the Zionist mainstream movement, and praised ultra-nationalists who had made similar separations from larger movements: “Attaturk, Mussolini, De Valera, Hitler.” Everyone praised Mussolini in the ’20s, but Ahimeir’s piece marks the first appearance of a strange mirroring between revisionist Zionism and Nazism.
The maximalists briefly took over the revisionist faction, then collapsed when members were involved in the assassination of a mainstream Zionist Haim Arlosoroff. By then, however, their ethos had passed into revisionism proper. In 1931, the Irgun militia was formed, and by 1936 had adopted terrorism tactics against Arab communities.
To say this is all complicated is to understate it somewhat, since these groups were also involved in getting tens of thousands of Jews out of Europe — Jews refused entry by almost everyone, Australia included. This strategy increased Arab resistance, and in turn the Irgun ratcheted up targeted terrorism.
This strange period produced its most prophetic figure, Avraham Stern. An Irgun commander, Stern was portrayed as a gangster by the British, but he was a poet and mystic who joined the notion of the Old Testament promise of Israel to the Jews, with a modern Nietzschean notion of will, and a celebration of death in service of the cause. This was the full inversion of the positive, if naïve, movement Zionism had started as. When WWII began, the Irgun announced a ceasefire against the British. Stern rejected this, and split, starting his own group, the Lehi (which the British labelled “The Stern Gang”).
Adopting Amiheir’s arguments about totalitarian Zionism, Stern sought several times to make a deal with Nazi Germany, arguing that establishing a Jewish homeland faithful to Nazi interests would contribute to the world’s New Order. This was something more than flattery to create a Jewish transfer from Germany, a reasonable enough goal. It was an offer to fight against the British, for the Nazis, in 1941, when it was becoming clear that control of North Africa would determine the war.
The Lehi kept up guerrilla and terrorist activities throughout the war, and were part of the systemic “Plan D” massacres of Arab villages that ethnically cleansed central Palestine in 1948, creating a territorialised Israel. They faded rapidly in post-establishment Israel (becoming fervently pro-Stalin; there really isn’t space to explain that), and Shamir eventually joined Likud. (It’s necessary to note here that there have been strong and explicit Nazi currents through Arab nationalist politics. But they’re not the ones currently threatening disease as a weapon.)
What’s happened now is passing strange. Revisionism was successful in becoming a powerful faction because it understood that the Arab claim to Palestine was equally legitimate. Its leaders were secular or atheistic East Europeans; its politics was a transplanted form of Russian Narodniki terrorism, with a heavy dose of Nietzsche. Its ruthlessness came from will not hate, an abandonment of the appeal to universal morality and the commitment to creating an unarguable fact. Old Testament Judaism entered it as a prophetic form of that will, but it was not overpowering. This was essentially a modern, right-Jacobin movement with fixed goals.
After 30 years of Labor leading Israel, revisionist politics reemerged in 1978 with the election of Menachim Begin (ex-Irgun) and then Yitzhak Shamir (ex-Lehi), and a modified form of “both sides of the Jordan” politics: to the Jordan by way of Jewish settlements in the West Bank. The mystically violent politics returned with the settlers, their political parties — and Benjamin Netanyahu.
Here the tale comes full circle. Netanyahu’s grandfather Nathan Mileikowsky was a leading revisionist, who protected the assassins of mainstream Zionist Arlosoff in 1933. Netanyahu’s father, Benzion, was also a leading revisionist who was a friend of Abba Ahimeir, and advocated against the 1947 UN partition plan (in favour of Greater Israel). Netanyahu himself, raised in Israel and the US, is a confluence of maximalist revisionism and American corporatism, having had a first career at the Boston Consulting Group. In 2018 he channelled Ahimeir and Stern with this bizarre tweet from the prime ministerial account:
Which was followed three weeks ago, by the since-deleted tweet, that this conflict was a:
… struggle between the children of light and the children of darkness, between humanity and the law of the jungle …
while also invoking the biblical story of Amalek in speaking to IDF troops before the Gaza invasion. Mentioned in Deuteronomy, Amalek is a king whose people ambushed the Jews escaping from Egypt, and stands as a generic everlasting enemy of the Jews. Crossing the Mosaic law of retribution (“an eye for an eye”) is permitted to achieve total annihilation. Netanyahu uses this stuff cynically to play to both Israeli and US fundamentalists. But the people he has made a government with take it literally.
So what is now driving Israel is not merely the spirit of Stern and Ahimeir, but a supercharged, apocalyptic version of such. The horror of the Hamas raid, and of its (strange) ease, has created the trauma for it. But it has now been continued, not by angry citizens or columnists, but by government ministers publicly luxuriating in fantasies of extermination and prolonged suffering of the Palestinians.
Incredibly, it is in some ways worse than the fevered politics of the 1930s and ’40s. There seems little doubt that Irgun, Lehi and Haganah terrorist atrocities in 1948 had a degree of “surplus horror”. The Lydda death march is one such example. In July 1948, tens of thousands of Arabs were marched by Zionist militia from the destroyed city of Lydda (now Israeli Lod) to the Jordan, without water or food, pushed on by gunfire and beatings and with women raped. The death toll is estimated in the high hundreds. The strategic exigency of expulsion cannot explain this cruelty. It is hard not to believe that was transplanted revenge for Nazi death marches from camps, and that something of this spirit is present in the Gaza operation today. The tradition of thought around this in Israel argues that this strand of Zionism is a Judeo-Nazism, which strikes me as exaggerated. But it has been a longstanding debate.
Indeed there is a living connection. Incredibly, Ezra Yachin, the 95-year-old who “re-enlisted” and was taken around to give motivational talks to IDF units, was not only a member of the Lehi in 1948, he took part in the Dair Yassin massacre in which 105 Arab villagers, including children, were slaughtered to start the process of terrorising the Arabs into fleeing. (Yachin’s account hyperlinked here is, compared with all accepted accounts of Deir Yassin, a self-serving farrago.)
The Zionists’ mass terrorism in 1948 was ruthless, atrocious — there is nothing not done then that was not done on October 7 — but rational in cold terms, tipping sometimes into moral squalor. The current Israeli government and the Gaza destruction appear to be nothing but moral squalor. It is some ghastly 1948 carnival-of-death re-enactment, a machine for subjecting a sequestered people to unending abjection and suffering, to reduce them to desperation, the caprice of sudden extinction, to control them like cattle with airborne sniper drones.
It now equals and exceeds the similarly squalid Hamas raid in its remorseless apportionment of horror and suffering. It brings together all the dark waters of the maximalist revisionist current, the musing on control by hunger, disease and thirst, the fantasies of nuclear annihilation, the burning bush joined to the mushroom cloud, biblical vengeance fused to Nazi cold efficiency, grey death moving forward block by block.
The Jewish people’s real historical status as victims has essentially made possible a sort of historical wormhole in which Israel’s wanton destructiveness, now permitted to no other settler movement, is left morally unexamined and infinitely permitted. The brutal exterminism of the 1930s is delivered up to us fresh. Its perpetrators claim exception, an excusement from all means-ends moral assessments, on account of their victim status. Zionists become, paradoxically, the only people left permitted to act like Nazis.
It is so obviously different in moral character from anything resembling defence, yet liberal Zionists here, those with a platform, have gone silent. They witter on about posters, feels, what this chant means or that, and they are silent on deaths being notified to us tweet by tweet. Some of them are the same people who lent their credibility to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and when that place became a chaotic death factory and a pre-modern Islamic Sharia republic, had nothing to say but whoops. They never learn, because they feel no moral duty to. The gentile Zionists among them are tagging along for the ride. The Jewish Zionists are following their movement into fascism, exterminism and the valley of death.
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