Zionism’s leaders: From left, Theodor
Herzl, Vladimir Jabotinsky and David Ben Gurion.
"We
shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring
employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it employment in our
own country."
-Theodor Herzl in his diary, 1895.
"As long as
there is the faintest spark of hope for the (Palestinians) to impede us, they
will not sell these hopes – not for any sweet words nor for any tasty morsel,
because this is not a rabble but a people, a living people. And no people makes
such enormous concessions on such fateful questions, except when there is no
hope left.
- Vladimir 'Ze'ev' Jabotinsky in “The Iron Wall', 1922.
"The Arabs will have to go, but one needs an opportune
moment for making it happen, such as a war".
-David Ben Gurion in a letter to his son Amos,
1937.
The
present scenes of wide-spread starvation in the Gaza Strip alongside plans to
construct a large concentration camp complex in Rafah has finally brought home
to most but the most hardened deniers that the State of Israel has since the
aftermath of the October 7th, 2023 attack by militant Palestinian
militias being embarked on an enterprise designed to purge Gaza of its
inhabitants. But this draconian state-backed policy of mass murder and the
intended expulsion of an indigenous population is not a state of affairs which
has haphazardly developed out of the events of October 7th. Neither
is it an original idea conceptualised by the Kahanite members of Binyamin
Netanyahu’s cabinet. On the contrary, the idea of purging Palestine of its
non-Jewish inhabitants lies at the core of the ideology which undergirds
Israel. Each of the early key figures who defined the objectives of Political
Zionism emphasised the requirement of “transfer”, this the euphemism for
removing the Palestinian people from their homeland in order to make way for a
geographically contiguous landmass that would constitute a Jewish state. The
ethnic cleansing of Palestine did not end with what the Palestinians refer to
as the Nakba of 1948. It continued after the seizure of the West Bank, Gaza and
the whole of Jerusalem following the Six Day War of June 1967. While the West
Bank has been incrementally colonised and Gaza continually besieged, the
right-wing extremist drift of Israeli society as represented by largely
religious fundamentalist Mizrahi Jews –but also including the settler class and
Revisionist Zionists- have in recent years become frustrated at what they
perceive as the ‘uncompleted’ Zionist project begun by mainly ‘Liberal Zionist’
Ashkenazi Jews, and have agitated for the establishment of what they consider
to be ‘Israel proper’ on the Land of Israel (Eretz Yisrael), which in its maximalist expression exceeds the area
between the proverbial ‘river and the sea.’
The theory
While the phrase “A land without a people for a people without a land”
became one of the founding maxims upon which the adherents of Political Zionism
sought to justify the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine, the reality was
altogether more different. Even the Balfour Declaration, the letter written in
1917 by Lord Arthur Balfour and sent to Lord Walter Rothschild which Zionists
hold as one of the sacred foundational texts of the Israeli state, referred to
“existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine”. The land of Palestine, which is
located in the Levant, has been inhabited by human beings for over half a
million years. Zionism’s leaders were fully aware of the towns, cities and
villages settled by indigenous dwellers and they consistently explained a
necessary precondition to creating a state for Jews would involve the uprooting
and resettlement of what had become over the centuries an Arabised population.
Such an endeavour would necessarily involve ethnic cleansing.
The word “transfer” was the euphemism used by the leaders of Zionism and
such transfer was aimed to be achieved by both voluntary and involuntary means
that ranged from inducements to forceful methods. While Theodor Herzl wrote
about finding employment for the natives outside of the Judenstaat he had envisaged, David Ben Gurion, although initially
projecting what was disingenuously referred to as a policy of “accommodation”,
remained wedded to the idea of removing the Arabs from their land. In June
1938, Ben Gurion told a meeting of the Jewish Agency in Palestine, the
organisation which he headed, that “with compulsory transfer we (would) have a
vast area (for settlement). I support compulsory transfer. I don’t see anything
immoral in it.” The previous year he had privately written that the transfer of
the Arab population on a desired scale would have to be accomplished
opportunely under the cover of war.
But Ben Gurion’s public utterances were more guarded, and others had
begun developing other expressions of Zionism which were more explicit in
outlining how a Jewish state would have to be achieved. Vladimir Jabotinsky,
the key figure of what came to be known as Revisionist Zionism, articulated the
inevitable use of force if Zionism was to achieve its ultimate goal.
In his essay, “The Iron
Wall”, Jabotinsky called on Zionists to drop all pretence about reaching
an accommodation with the Arab population of Palestine, insisting that in
attaining the goal of transforming Palestine “from an Arab country to a country
with a Jewish majority” a militaristic policy of colonisation had to be
pursued.
It is important to note that all Zionists regardless of whether they are
designated as secular "liberal Zionists", "revisionist Zionists"
or "religious fundamentalist Zionists" are united in the belief in
the idea of the Land of Israel, an area of land that is larger than the modern
Israel created in 1948 and expanded in 1967.
Maximalist expression of Eretz
Yisrael encompasses a swathe of land between the brook of the River Nile in
Egypt and the River Euphrates in Iraq. It includes the whole or parts of the
modern states of Jordan, Syria and Saudi Arabia. Zionist land claims extending to
Lebanese territory south of the Litani River were made by Ben Gurion at the
Paris Peace Conference after the First World War.
But while the precise extent of the territory of what is also referred
to as “Greater Israel” may differ, among Israelis and Zionist Diaspora Jews,
there is unanimity, for instance, in a belief that the West Bank approximates
to the biblical region of Judea and Samaria.
The founding charter of the mainstream Likud
Party of current Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu explicitly states that
“Between the sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty.” Likud
is the successor party of Herut, the political party which was effectively the
reconstituted Mandate era terrorist organisation Irgun. Led by Menachem Begin,
a disciple of Jabotinsky, Irgun’s claim of territory extended to Trans-Jordan.
The claim to Jordan is no longer publicly insisted upon, but in 1977, the year
in which Likud broke the hold of Labor Zionist parties by coming to power, a
key mantra of its electoral campaign was that “Judea and Samaria” would “not be
handed to any foreign administration.”
The implication that the native Palestinians do not have a right to
inhabit the West Bank is clear. And although the specific means of how they
would be transferred was never publicly articulated, it is clear that the
overarching goal of their removal remained. Indeed, while researching a
biography on the late Lieutenant Colonel Yonatan Netanyahu in the 1970s, the
English writer Max Hastings overheard the young Binyamin Netanyahu invoke Ben
Gurion’s calculation that war presented a useful means for ejecting the
Palestinian population. “If we get it right,” Hastings recalled Netanyahu
saying, “we'll have a chance to get all the Arabs out …
We can clear the West Bank and sort out Jerusalem."
It is important to remember that this ultimate goal was not limited to
the Israeli political right. Israel’s founding father Ben Gurion was a Labor
Zionist who did not believe in the right of a state of Palestine to exist. And
those on the now virtually extinct Israeli political left did not manifest a
sincere belief in co-existing with a viable Palestinian state as even the Oslo
accord was an agreement predicated on a Palestinian entity which would amount
to something much less than full statehood.
Moreover, both Israeli left and right have deliberately refrained from
declaring what they consider as Israel’s final borders, an omission at the
heart of Ben Gurion’s proclamation in 1948 of what he referred to as Eretz Yisrael.
The only logical inference from this perpetual state of affairs is a
universal belief among past and present Israelis in the statement by Yosef
Weitz, the head of the Colonisation Department of the Jewish Agency and known
as the “Architect of Transfer,” who said that “There is no room for both
peoples in this country.”
The practice
For the early Zionist settlers who were known as the Yishuv, the acquisition of land was
undertaken through land purchases under the auspices of the Jewish National
Fund (JNF) which by 1945 amounted to 5.6% of the total land area of the
Mandate. The JNF worked closely with the Zionist Settlement Department (ZSD),
an organisation charged with evicting Palestinian tenants from land sold to the
Zionists. But it was clear that the objective of acquiring a substantial
contiguous area of land within which a new state would be birthed could only be
achieved by force of arms. This would necessarily involve removing the British
administrators from Palestine and then ejecting a large swathe of Palestinian
Arabs from their homesteads.
The British officially withdrew from Palestine on May 15th,
1948 after a terroristic campaign
spearheaded by Irgun and Lehi. The former, which specialised in bomb attacks, notably
carried out the King David Hotel atrocity in
Jerusalem on July 22nd 1946, while the latter, more widely known as
The Stern Gang, developed an expertise in assassinations such as that of Lord Moyne, Britain’s Middle East envoy who was
gunned down in Cairo on November 6th, 1944.
The British withdrawal signalled the commencement of a war between the
military wing of the Jewish Agency and Arab armies. The primary objective of
the Arab militaries was not to liberate Palestine but to hold onto territory
apportioned to the Arab Palestinians under the UN Partition Plan, an endeavour
which was null and void because it was rejected by the Security Council which
sent it back to the General Assembly for further deliberation. The Partition
Plan, which proposed to unfairly take tracts of agricultural land and sea ports
from the Arab Palestinian population, who were the overwhelming majority, was
an initiative which Ben Gurion outwardly pretended to accept, but which he
privately rejected.
The idea that the Jewish Agency would accept the division of Palestine
along the lines of the UN Partition Plan and be content with establishing a
Jewish state within such borders in perpetuity simply does not stand the test
of historical data. Acceptance would also have been inconsistent with the
fundamental belief held by all Zionists in the concept of the god-promised land
of Eretz Yisraeli, which Ben Gurion
explicitly mentions in his speech declaring the coming into existence of the
State of Israel.
The truth is that Ben Gurion and other Zionist leaders had a
longstanding plan to ethnically cleanse as much of Palestine as they could of
its Arab inhabitants. This evidence, found in the state archives of Israel has
come to be known as the “Village Files”. Compiled over the course of several
decades by Haganah-trained intelligence officers, the “Village Files” consisted
of detailed information on Palestinian villages garnered through aerial
photographs, topographical maps and records on individuals living in each
village. The files recorded things such as the arability of land and access to
water sources. They were not created merely to provide information to the JNF
about purchasing Arab land, they explicitly functioned as vital sources of intelligence
which would be used in the war of conquest and expulsion envisaged by Zionism.
While most of the massacres and expulsions of Palestinians occurred
after May 1948, it is wrong to presume that no actions were taken by Zionist
militias against Palestinian populations before the official withdrawal of
British troops and the incursions in Palestine by Arab armies. The ethnic
cleansing of Arab inhabited villages and towns had already begun in December of
1947 with a series of massacres in places such as Al-Tira, Yehiday, Qazaza and
al-Muwaylih in Jaffa. Thus, it was the case that the completion of the
withdrawal of British troops in May was the prompt for the Jewish militias to
intensify the course of ethnic cleansing through what was earmarked as Plan
Dalet.
The main goal of Plan Dalet was for the Haganah, the main army, and the
Palmach, its special forces, to seize as much land from the Arab Palestinians
in order to create a contiguous area of territory -including the water
resources of the Galilee area- in which Jews would be in the overwhelming majority.
The Haganah were given operational orders to uproot Palestinian villagers,
expel them and demolish the villages. The village files were extremely useful
since they contained the names of males between the ages of 16 and 60. They
also identified the families with members who participated in the Arab uprising
between 1936 and 1939 and pinpointed those Palestinians who were political
active and needed to be shot on the spot. When Jewish militias entered a
village all male inhabitants would be lined up and a Palestinian collaborator,
who would usually have a sack over their head, would pick out those who had
been earmarked for execution.
The terrorist militias, Irgun and Lehi also played a crucial role in
purging Palestinian settlements, most infamously at Deir Yassin. At Deir Yassin
where Palestinian women were raped, pregnant women’s foetuses were cut open and
babies decapitated, the horrors were recorded by a range of independent sources
including representatives of the Swiss Red Cross; Richard Catling, a British
inspector general in Mandate-era Palestine; and a doctor and nurse from
Government Hospital, Jerusalem. There the murders and mutilations inflicted on
non-combatant women, children and old men proved to be an effective
psychological operation designed to instil fear into neighbouring communities.
The Jewish militias used vehicles travelling with megaphones to broadcast to
other Arab villages urging their inhabitants to flee. Most heeded this and fled
in terror –something Menachem Begin himself acknowledged in his book The Revolt when writing “The Arabs began
fleeing in panic shouting ‘Deir Yassin’.”
This reality stands in stark contrast to the Zionist propaganda
narrative which falsely claimed that the Arabs left their villages in order to
clear a path for the advancing Arab armies. Indeed, the existence of Plan
Dalet, the village files and the atrocities at Deir Yassin, as well as those
that occurred in places such as Khinsas, Balad al-Shaykh, Sa’sa, Tantura, Lydd
and Safsaf have been written about by Ilan Pappe and Benny Morris, both Israeli
historians who based much of their work on the programme of ethnic cleansing
from documents contained in the state archives of Israel.
The Zionist claim that war was forced onto the Jews of Palestine and
that the subsequent atrocities and population displacement occurred under the
“fog of war” is one of many myths associated with Israel’s formation. It was
the fulfilment of Ben Gurion’s dream of effecting depopulation and mass
expulsion under the cover of war. His goal, as was that of other Zionists
spanning the spectrum of his Left Labor and Jabotinsky’s Right Zionist
Revisionism, was to acquire maximum territories with majority Jewish populations.
Zionists did not want to live alongside Palestinians and the act of purging
them was seen as one of Tihur, the Hebrew
word for “purification.”
The callousness employed in achieving the objective of what was declared
by Ben Gurion to be the modern state of Israel proved unnerving to some Zionist
leaders. Aharon Zisling, the Minister of Agriculture under the Provisional
Government established by Ben Gurion wrote:
"Now the Jews have behaved like Nazis and my entire being is
shaken".
Post Nakba: The
strategy for ethnic cleansing and Land Usurpation.
Palestinian villages continued to be purged as were larger population
centres. A prime example of this was the expulsion of tens of thousands of
Palestinians from the towns of Lydda and Ramleh, both of which lay on the road
between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Once conquered, the properties of Arabs were
then registered under the trusteeship of bodies such as the Haganah-created
Committee for Arab Properties in Villages and those designed to cater to major
Palestinian towns and cities. Then another Haganah-created body, The Committee
for Abandoned Arab Property, was charged with disposing of Arab property to
members of the Yishuv.
The seizure of Palestinian property by the newly created State of Israel
was given the veil of legality by the passage of several pieces of legislation.
In late 1948, the Emergency Regulations Relative to Property of Absentees was
issued. This was followed by the Law of the Acquisition of Absentee Property.
They were designed to deprive Palestinians who had been expelled beyond the
Armistice Line and those who remained within the borders of Israel.
By the end of 1948, over 80% of the Palestinian inhabitants of what
became Israel were expelled. But the twin policies of expulsion and
expropriation did not end after the Nakba. The conquests of Gaza, the West Bank
and Jerusalem after the Six Day War of June 1967 provided Israel with the
opportunity to continue its quest to ethnically cleanse Palestine. In the West
Bank a great expanse of land within the Jordan Valley was taken over for Jewish
settlement and more than two-thirds of the Palestinian population of 300,000
was displaced.
After 1967, the strategy of incremental colonisation lay at the heart of
Israeli state policy. Jewish settlements were inserted into both Gaza and the
West Bank. However, the density of the Palestinian population in Gaza led to
the dismantling of Jewish settlements and an Israeli withdrawal in August 2005.
This was followed by the policy of besiegement which led to Gaza being turned
into what many considered to be an open air concentration camp. On the West
Bank, the policy of incrementally expropriating Palestinian land and water
resources while increasing Jewish settlements continued. Settlers, backed by
soldiers of the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF), are able to take land by force
without legal consequences. The settler communities are connected by highways
which can only be used by Jews, while Palestinian communities have steadily
become more constricted and isolated in pockets of territory which some declare
to be akin to the Bantustans of Apartheid-era South Africa.
Jerusalem, which the Jewish militias had failed to take in whole in
1948, has also been the target for gradual settler colonisation. Ben Gurion had
described the initial failure as “a lamentation for generations.” In the
eastern part of the city, efforts geared towards ethnically cleansing
non-Jewish communities have been focused on implementing residency laws which
make it difficult for those who leave to return. A three-part test has to be
passed lest a Palestinian will have their residency permit revoked. Firstly,
the Palestinian must not live more than 7 years abroad and must not receive
permanent residency or citizenship from a country abroad. Secondly, the onus is
on a Palestinian to prove that their “centre of life” must be in Jerusalem, and
thirdly, Palestinians must not breach their “allegiance “to Israel”. In all,
the Israeli authorities have revoked almost 15,000 residency permits of
Palestinians since 1967.
Many did not understand at the time of its happening that far from being
a defensive war in which Israel pre-emptively struck at its Arab adversaries to
forestall an attack, the June War of 1967 was in fact engineered by Israel. Ben
Gurion’s lamentation about 1948 went further than the failure to conquer all of
Jerusalem. The dream of establishing Eretz
Yisrael meant that the Palestinian West Bank, known to Zionists as Judea
and Samaria, had to be wrested from the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. Other
territories within what would come to be described as Greater Israel would also
be conquered. After the war Egyptian-controlled Gaza, Egypt’s Sinai and Syria’s
Golan Heights –in addition to the West Bank came under Israel’s control.
A 1948-style Nakba was not possible because Israel was given a limited
timeframe by its benefactor the United States to conduct its war. A prolonged
war in which Israel seized even larger swathes of territory from Egypt and
Syria risked provoking a response by the Soviet Union which supplied arms to
Egypt and Syria.
So although up to 325,000 Palestinians fled eastwards into Jordan,
Israel was left with a large population of Palestinians to administer through a
military government. The same applied to Gaza, while the Golan Heights was
eventually annexed in 1981.
It
is clear that the present quest to purge both Gaza and the West Bank of Palestinians
is not the finite goal of the contemporary inheritors of Zionism. Political
Zionism intrinsically seeks to expand Israel further from the territories it
was able to seize in 1948 and 1967.This reach for “Greater Israel” was
explicitly alluded to by Netanyahu who in an interview
conducted with i24 TV News in August 2025 said that he believed himself to be
on a “historic and spiritual mission” and that he was very much attached to the
vision of the Promised Land and Greater Israel. The attempts by Israel to
occupy south Lebanon up to the River Litani and its expansion of occupied
Syrian territory after the fall of the Assad government testify to this.
The
quest for Greater Israel is a long term plan embedded in the ideology of
Zionism. It is designed to be accomplished under the cover of war and through
the destabilisation efforts of Israel’s allies and proxies working to achieve the
balkanisation of
Israel’s neighbours.
Balkanisation
has a twin objective. The first is that weakening such states provides Israel
with a greater level of long-term security, and secondly, the breaking up of
such a state provides it with the opportunity for territorial acquisition. The
former has been explicitly alluded to in policy documents such as the “Yinon
Plan” from 1982, the “Securing the Realm” policy
paper from 1996 and various papers by the now defunct U.S.-based Project for
the New American Century. Indeed, PNAC’s overarching goal of destroying
Israel’s Arab and Muslim enemies found expression in the aftermath of the
September 11 attacks of 2001 when retired General Wesley Clark revealed
that he had seen a policy paper at the Pentagon which aimed to “take out” seven
Arab and Muslim states over a five-year period beginning with “Iraq, then
Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and finishing off with Iran”. A
“hardnosed” group of persons Clark would explain had “hijacked” U.S. foreign
policy without a debate. He was referring to the resolutely pro-Zionist
neoconservative ideologues who proliferated the administration led by President
George W. Bush.
These policies go back to Israel’s founding. As mentioned earlier, Ben
Gurion made a claim on south Lebanon where he hoped that a Christian state
could be carved out. But this was not predicated on benevolent feelings towards
Lebanon’s Christian community. The diaries of Moshe Sharett, an early prime
minister of Israel, reveal the cynicism behind this goal. Sharett recalled that
Moshe Dayan sought to profit from Lebanon’s interdenominational rivalries by
using a Christian proxy army of defectors from the Lebanese National Army who
would declare a Christian state which would be eventually annexed by Israel.
The attempt to accomplish this during Israel’s occupation of south
Lebanon in the 1980s when it allied with the Christian officer-led South
Lebanon Army ended in failure as did the effort of Gush Emunim, a now defunct
ultranationalist religious Zionist settler organisation, to settle Jews in
south Lebanon.
Zionist colonial mentality and amorality
Vladimir
Jabotinsky was honest in his assessment that Zionism was a “colonising
adventure”. He also asserted in “The Iron Wall” that it would stand or fall on
the question of armed force. Implicit in this prerequisite for the creation of
a Jewish state on Palestinian land was an accompanying morality in which the
Jewish resolve for self-determination was a “sacred principle” which had
primacy over everything else, including the rights of the native Arab
population.
“The
Ethics of Zionism” which he published a week after “The Iron Wall” made vague
and contradictory references to Arabs also enjoying rights. But this did not
deviate from the fact that he identified Zionism as fundamentally a settler
colonial movement in which coercion, not consent, would be the dominating factor
in the relationship between Jew and Arab.
Political
Zionism, it should be reminded, emerged during the 19th century at a
time when European forms of nationalism which were xenophobic and explicitly
anti-Jewish were developing. It was a period also of expansion and
consolidation of European empires in Africa and Asia. The parallels between
Zionism and Western European colonialism are stark. It has mirrored those
European settler colonialist projects which created apartheid societies and
ethnically cleansed indigenous populations.
Both
forms of colonialism mandate that a group of people have total political,
economic and cultural domination over a territory inhabited by a native
population. Zionism also insists that the goal must be to eventually expel the
indigenous population. Under these circumstances, it was inevitable that a
brand of racism and ethno-supremacism would evolve.
Anti-Arab
racism was apparent from the start. In his essay “Truth from Eretz Israel”
which was published in 1891, Ahad Ha’am (born Asher Ginsberg), the purveyor of
“Cultural Zionism”, wrote that the Jewish settlers “treat the Arabs with
hostility and cruelty; trespass unjustly, beat them shamelessly for no
sufficient reason and even take pride in doing so.” He also noted that Jews thought of Arabs as
“primitive men of the desert” and as a “donkey-like nation.” Jabotinsky himself
thought that “Culturally they are five hundred years behind us. They have
neither our endurance nor our determination.”
This
view of Arabs, largely those of European-originated Ashkenazi Jews, was
transferred to those Jews of North African and Middle Eastern origin (referred
today as Mizrahi) even as they sought to elevate them above their Arab
counterparts. For Ben Gurion, “Even the immigrant of North Africa, who looks
like a savage, who has never read a book in his life, not even a religious one,
and doesn’t even know how to say his prayers, either wittingly or unwittingly,
has behind him a spiritual heritage of thousand years.”
Political
Zionism was after all a movement created by European Jews for European Jews,
and the racism towards Arab Jews embodied in the “Yemenite Children Affair” in
the years following the creation of Israel has been recounted by numerous Arab
Jewish figures such as Avi Shlaim. According to Shlaim, the vast majority of
Arab Jews arriving in the “Promised Land” were sprayed with the
insecticide DDT before being herded to
transit camps where the living conditions were dire.
The
superiority complex of Ashkenazis who form the traditional ruling class of
Israeli society in contrast to the underclass status of Mizrahis was, Max
Hastings observed, reflected by the likes of the young Binyamin Netanyahu.
Referring to the Golani Brigade, an infantry force which was composed of many
Jews of North African and Yemenite origin, Netanyahu joked that “They’re okay
as long as they’re led by white officers.”
This
backdrop of anti-Arab racism has for long formed a central part of of the
indoctrination of children in the Israeli education system. In a 2007 article
titled “The
portrayal of Arabs in textbooks in the Jewish school system in Israel”,
Ismael Abu-Saad identified what he determined as the three dominating
influences in the portrayal of Arabs in Ministry of Education-approved
textbooks. First is Orientalism, the belief that Zionism’s mission was to
establish a civilised state in the midst of culturally inferior people. Second
is that the territory encompassing historic Palestine belongs exclusively to
the Jewish people by virtue of their presence on the land in biblical times, and
third is that Palestinian objections to the Zionist project is a continuum of the
ages-long persecution of Jewry.
In
her book Palestine in Israeli School Books: Ideology and
Propaganda in Education, Professor Nurit Peled-Elhanan examined a range of
Israeli textbooks and concluded that right from the start of their education,
children are inculcated with a belief system that accepts the “Israeli policy
of expansion”, and that the textbooks are consistent in this objective
regardless of whether “they were published during leftist or right-wing
(education) ministries.” As many examinations in this area have shown, Peled-Elhanan
argues that Palestinians are often portrayed in Orientalist ways, noting that
“all (the books) represent (Palestinians) in racist icons or demeaning
classificatory images such as terrorists, refugees and primitive farmers – the
three ‘problems’ they constitute for Israel.”
Israeli
children internalise negative feelings about Palestinians who are depicted as
stone-throwing miscreants and gun-wielding terrorists who present a perpetual
menace to Israeli life. This stands in contrast to the often used accusation by
Israeli figures and their Western supporters that Palestinians teach their
children to hate, an argument that on reflection is projection.
This
dehumanisation of Palestinians during the education process provides the
backdrop for the norms and values displayed by in Israeli society and the armed
forces that represent it. In truth, it is merely perpetuating the old attitudes
of Zionism’s original colonisers whose leaders, beginning with Ben Gurion have
placed little value on the lives of Arabs. Far from being the “world’s most
moral army”, the IDF and its precursor Jewish militias have traditionally shown
little restraint when contemplating the fate of Palestinian and Arab
non-combatants, including women and children. In fact there is ample evidence
that demonstrates purposeful attacks on Arab civilians as a permanent feature
of Israeli military doctrine.
A
starting point for an examination could be Ben Gurion’s words in his
Independence War Diary in 1948 in which he wrote that Israel must “strike
mercilessly, women and children included. Otherwise the action is inefficient.
At the place of action there is no need to distinguish between guilty and
innocent.” One soldier who famously abided by this principle was Ariel Sharon.
In 1953, Major Sharon, a favourite of Ben Gurion’s, was in command of Unit 101,
which massacred Palestinian villagers –most of them women and children- during
a reprisal raid on the West Bank village of Qibya.
Writing
for Ha’aretz newspaper in 1978, the
military analyst Ze’ev Schiff summed up an interview given by IDF Chief of the
General Staff Lieutenant General Mordechai Gur to Al HaMishmar about a key strategy employed by his troops during an
invasion of Lebanon:
In
South Lebanon we struck the civilian population consciously because they
deserved it … the importance of Gur’s remarks is the admission that the Israeli
army has always struck civilian populations, purposefully and consciously …
even when Israel’s settlements had not been struck.
Three
years later Abba Eban, Israel’s former foreign minister and UN ambassador,
wrote in the Jerusalem Post a
response to a letter written by Menachem Begin, the serving Prime Minister:
The
picture that emerges (from Begin’s letter) is of an Israel wantonly inflicting
every possible measure of death and anguish on civilian populations in a mood
reminiscent of regimes which neither Mr. Begin nor myself would dare mention by
name.
The
next invasion of Lebanon in 1982 provided ample evidence of Israeli targeting
civilian populations through bombing campaigns conducted by its air force. Most
of the 20,000 people killed during the conflict were civilians and many were
far removed from the battle sectors, something acknowledged by Lieutenant
General Yitzhak Rabin who the Jerusalem
Post recorded in 1988 as noting that Israeli raids in remote Lebanese
villages inflicted civilian casualties which “is precisely our aim.”
The
Lebanese civilian population also bore the brunt of many operations carried out
by the Front for the Liberation of Lebanon from Foreigners (FLLF), a phantom
terror organisation established by Israeli military intelligence in 1979. The
purpose of the FLLF was to cause chaos among the sectarian communities in
Lebanon. A Mossad officer quoted in Ronen Bergman’s book Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted
Assassinations said, “We are speaking here about mass killing for killing’s
sake, to sow chaos and alarm among civilians.” The FLLF carried out a series of
indiscriminate bombings in the country between 1979 and 1983 which resulted in
the deaths of hundreds of innocent Lebanese citizens.
The
punitive rationale of attacking civilians is undergirded in the military
doctrines the Israeli military has developed over the decades. The “Dahiya
Doctine”, which was drawn up in 2006 by then Major General Gadi Eisenkot, a
future IDF Chief of the General Staff, which specifically promotes the
targeting of civilian populated areas when Israel takes military action against
Lebanon. Parallel to this is the “Mowing the Grass Doctrine” employed in Gaza
which involved the physical destruction of a portion of Gaza’s civilian
population and civil amenities alongside the task of degrading the
capabilities of Hamas during the periodic conflicts that ensued prior to
October 7th, 2023.
One
of the practices employed by Israeli forces during the occupation of has been
the use of Palestinians as human shields under the so-called Neighbour
Procedure. This has meant that people picked at random on the basis that they
are “the terrorist’s non-dangerous neighbour” are forced to approach the
residences of suspected militants to attempt to persuade the designated
militant to surrender.
All
of the aforementioned, which stem from a pattern of behaviour and national
mentality which the early Israeli Prime Minister Moshe Sharett referred to as
Israel’s “Sacred Terrorism”, utterly contradict the “purity of arms” doctrine,
a purported core value of the IDF. A central tenet of the “Spirit
of the Israel Defence Forces” is that an Israeli
soldier “will not use their weapon or power to harm uninvolved civilians and
prisoners and will do everything in their power to prevent harm to their lives,
bodies, dignity and property.”
This
clearly has not been the experience of Palestinian and other Arab civilians who
have lived under Israeli occupation or have shared the same ethnicity or
nationality with a militia or national armed force in conflict with the IDF.
Neither have captives of the IDF been spared the sadistic techniques employed
by Israeli soldiers on Arabs in captivity.
The
post-October 7th conflict with Hamas can no longer be doubted to be
a campaign of mass murder of Gaza’s Palestinian population as a prelude to
their removal from the territory. In seeking to destroy all vestiges of civil
amenities, the IDF has routinely and systematically targeted homes, hospitals,
institutions of education, desalination plants and places of worship.
IDF
snipers, aided by foreign mercenaries from the United States, have targeted
Palestinian men, women and children queuing for food at Israeli designated
depots, a continuum of the practice of maiming and killing unarmed civilians
during the Palestinian “Right to Return” marches of 2018.
Israeli
soldiers were also involved in widespread looting of Palestinian property in
Gaza whose authorities claimed that up to $25 million had been stolen in the
form of cash, gold and valuables during the first three months of the invasion.
The
conflict has also revealed an industrial scale level of torture and rape of
Palestinian prisoners. When questions were raised over the routine sodomizing
of Palestinian captives, protests erupted to protect the soldiers involved in
one of the dungeons Sde Teiman in the Negev Desert and they were widely
celebrated in the Israeli media as doing the right thing.
In August of 2024, the author of the IDF’s code of ethics, Asa Kasher,
told Ha’aretz that the IDF was
disregarding the code, saying that “many thousands of non-involved Gazans have
died, a fact which has to be considered by anyone whose principles include the
sanctity of human life.”
Kasher was clear in his assessment of gross shortcomings of the Israeli
army:
Every aspect of intentional harm to non-combatants is wrong. It violates
the duty to preserve human dignity, it violates the principle of distinguishing
between hostile forces and non-combatants according to the just war theory, and
violates the IDF’s value of the purity of arms.
Kasher toned down his criticism in an interview conducted with Kan Reshet Bet in early
August 2025 when asserting that while he had reviewed hundreds of films sent to
him of soldiers in Gaza falling short of the standards set by the code of
ethics, he remained unconvinced about the claim that they were committing
genocide.
However, in an opinion piece published in Ha’aretz on August 18th 2025,
he reiterated his criticism of the overall moral bearing of the IDF. Dismissing
the frequent claim that the IDF was the “most moral army in the world” as
“dangerous” sloganeering, Kaher’s six point examination of this claim could
only find it to be substantively justified in regard to demonstrated efforts of
the Israeli Air Force’s tactical rescue unit in evacuating wounded soldiers
from the battlefield to hospitals. He was clear that statements made by a high
ranking military officer, cabinet ministers and members of the Knesset that there
were “no non-combatants in Gaza” opened the door to what he saw as “blatantly
immoral conduct.”
The question of morality and Israel is crucial because the Zionist state
styles itself as the “Jewish state”. And while the religion of Judaism posits
its creed, as other religions do, as a bastion of moral and ethical principles,
Judaism has been invoked by Jewish rabbis as condoning the slaughter of
non-combatants and rape. For instance, during a Passover sermon delivered in
2001, the late Rabbi Ovadia Yosef who once served as Chief Rabbi for Israel’s
Serphardic community, called for the annihilation of Arabs. His words were:
It is forbidden to be merciful to them. You must send missiles to them
and annihilate them. They are evil and damnable…waste their seed and
exterminate them and vanish them from this world.
And Manis Friedman the rabbi who famously re-directed Bob Dylan to Judaism
after his flirtation with born-again Christianity offered the following counsel
in response to a question posed in Moment
magazine’s “Ask the Rabbis” column:
The only way to fight a moral war is the Jewish way: destroy their holy
sites. Kill men, women and children (and their cattle).
On the question of rape the present head of the Military Rabbinate of
the IDF Brigadier General Eyal Krim implied in 2002 that it was permissible to
rape non-Jewish women during wartime. He later claimed that his words were
taken out of context as he was referring to the pre-modern era. Yet, there is
scepticism over the rabbi’s clarification given the blessing given by another
rabbi to one of the Israeli soldiers accused of gang-raping Palestinian
detainees at Sde Teiman. Rabbi Meir Mazuz told the soldier that he had done
“nothing wrong.” This was the feeling of
the group of ultra-nationalists who stormed two detention centres in protest at
the arrival of military police to question the suspects. The justification for raping
Palestinian prisoners found support among some MPs in the Knesset including
Likud’s Hanoch Milwidsky, as well as from Itamar Ben Gvir, the Kahanist cabinet
member.
The inevitability of Resistance
Zionism’s core objective of establishing a state on already inhabited
land was opposed by many Jews who could foresee the turmoil which would be
caused. Ahad Aham predicted it when he wrote that the Arabs would “not easily
step aside”. Jabotinsky also understood this when noting that they were not “a
rabble” who were “ready to be bribed or sell out their homeland for a railroad
network.” They were to the contrary what he termed a “living people” who would
not voluntarily cede their land until “there is no longer any hope of getting
rid of us.”
Yet, the default position of the defence of the Zionist project has been
to portray the Palestinian people as being unreasonable for refusing to vacate
their land. But in what is reputedly the defining speech of Zionism,
Lieutenant General Moshe Dayan acknowledged the inevitability of Palestinian
resistance after the ambushing and killing of Roi Rotberg, a Jewish settler,
near Gaza in 1956. In his eulogy for Rotberg, Dayan therefore reminded Israelis
that they must forever be alert to the inevitability of attacks and embrace the
ethos of the sword:
Let us not be deterred from seeing the loathing that is inflaming and
filling the lives of the hundreds of thousands of Arabs who live around us. Let
us not avert our eyes lest our arms weaken. This is the fate of our generation.
This is our life’s choice – to be prepared and armed, strong and determined,
lest the sword be stricken from our fist and our lives cut down.
What
is more, many military officers have gone on record to assert that had they
been Palestinian they would have taken up arms against Israel. Consider the
words of Ami Ayalon a former naval commander who headed the Shayetet 13
commando unit:
As
far as the Palestinians are concerned, they lost their land, which is why when
people ask me, what would you do if you were Palestinian? I say that if someone
came and stole my land, the land of Israel, I would fight him without limits.
And
Ehud Barak, the former IDF Chief of the Genera Staff and former Prime Minister,
caused a stir in 1998 when he told the journalist Gideon Levy in an interview
that had he been a Palestinian he “would have entered one of the terror
organisations and fought from there.”
The
issue of land dispossession caused by the buying of land by Jewish migrants was
a key cause of the Arab Revolt of from 1936 to 1939. That along with fears of
the consequences of continued Jewish immigration, as well as their political
disenfranchisement prompted the resistance which was ultimately put down
through a counterinsurgency strategy devised by then Captain Orde Wingate, a
British officer with strong Zionist convictions. Wingate’s units of Special
Night Squads (SNS) included Jewish members, some of whom like Moshe Dayan would
go on to become key figures in the IDF.
Palestinian
resistance must also be seen from the prism of what Moshe Sharett of Israeli
contrived violence. By this it is meant that Israel has from its inception
deliberately orchestrated incidents which it knows will provoke a response and the
excuse for responding with disproportionate force. Sharett termed this a “provocation
and retaliation strategy”.
In
his diary which was posthumously published in 1979, Sharett bemoaned what he
claimed as “the long chain of false incidents and hostilities we have invented,
and so many clashes we have provoked.”
The
prelude to the Six Day War which led to Israel acquiring more Arab land in the
form of the West Bank and the Golan Heights testifies to this. Many Israeli
generals including Yitzhak Rabin, Haim Bar-Lev and Matetiyahu Peled admitted
that Egypt had no intention of attacking Israel in 1967. And politicians who
were brought into the government of national unity such as Menachem Begin and Mordechai
Bentov also confirmed this. Indeed, Bentov dismissed the propagandised myth of
an imminent threat of an Egyptian invasion and of genocide. In an interview
with Al-Hamishmar newspaper in April,
1971 he said the following:
All
this story about the danger of extermination has been a complete invention and
has been blown up a posterior to justify the annexation of new Arab
territories.
Moshe
Dayan was candid in a conversation he
had with the journalist Rami Tal in 1976. He admitted that taking the Golan
Heights was based on the need for farmland and not security.
Along
the Syrian border there were no farms and no refugee camps. There was only the
Syrian army … The Kibbutzim saw the good agricultural land … and they dreamed
about it … They didn’t even try to hide their greed for the land … We would
send a tractor in to plough to get the Syrians to shoot. If they didn’t, we
would advance further and further until they did shoot. Then we would use
artillery and air force.
Duplicity
is also part and parcel of the manner in how Palestinian resistance is
portrayed. Not only is it claimed that Palestinian groups invariably initiate
attacks to which Israel is “forced” to respond, the frequency of such attacks
is also distorted. The figures produced by the Foreign
Ministry of Israel testify to a gross imbalance of attacks by
Palestinian militant groups on Jewish Israelis in comparison to those of Israel
against Palestinian communities. Figures from August 2000 to April 2023 show
672 attacks –many of them being “revenge attacks” against Jewish settlers on
the Palestinian West Bank. Of the 672 attacks, 105 are attributed to Hamas. In
fact, just 25% are attributed to specific Palestinian groups and 75% are
nameless. So far as the body count is concerned, over the 23 year period,
Palestinian violence claimed 1,455 Israeli lives while the Israelis killed
7,065 Palestinians between 2000 and 2013.
The
low figures of Israeli-recorded Hamas attacks prior to October 7th,
2023 belie the bloodthirsty reputation built up by both Israeli and Western
media. This tendency of characterising it as an ISIS-type body is not only
hypocritical given Israel’s support of Islamist death squads during the Syrian
“dirty war”, it is a continuum of a multi-decade strategy of distorting the
conflict as one based on an irrational “Mohammedan” foe rather than one which
is fundamentally about land dispossession. While Hamas was formed by adherents
of the Egyptian-originated Muslim Brotherhood, it has functioned as a
legitimate manifestation of Palestinian national resistance, a resistance which
historically has drawn from secular groups and from Christian figures such as
George Habash and Waddie Haddad.
Renewed Messianism
Any
explanation of the rationale behind Israel’s present quest to annihilate a
substantial proportion of Gaza’s population prior to executing their total
expulsion cannot be complete without addressing the political, social and
religious evolution of Israeli society. Substantive demographic changes have
paved the way for the rise in political influence of the Mizrahim, many of who
support Israel’s right-wing political parties. They, alongside the Revisionist
Zionists of the Likud Party and the religious nationalists who constitute the
settler class in the occupied West Bank, have become the most influential political
bloc in contemporary Israeli politics.
Politics
in Israel has in recent years developed an unmistakably messianic quality which
is intolerant of what is considered as the stale, redundant state of Zionism
which, despite the incrementally increase in Jewish settlements in the West
Bank, has tolerated the total population of Arab Palestinians living between
the “river and the sea” to numbers that are roughly equivalent to the overall
population of Jewish Israelis.
The
question of maintaining a demographic balance in favour of Jewish settlers has
always loomed large in the thinking of Zionism’s leaders. It lay at the heart
of Ben Gurion’s calculations prior to launching Plan Dalet and in the policies
undertaken by Israel’s leaders after the acquisition of the West Bank and Gaza
in 1967. In subsequent decades, the calls by right-wing figures to expel the
Palestinians using the model of expulsions undertaken against the Ionian Greeks
after the Greco-Turkish War and that of the Sudeten Germans after the Second
World War were never taken seriously.
But
this has changed in recent years. A significant proportion of the right now
feel it to be the time to revive the ruthless form of Zionism which led to
Israel’s creation. The intent is to create what they deem as Israel proper on
the Land of Israel. The incorporation into Binyamin Netanyahu’s cabinet of Bezalel
Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir, both ideological descendants of Rabbi Meir
Kahane, signified a profound shift in Israeli politics. It was no accident that
on May 21st, 2023, Netanyahu’s coalition cabinet -the most
right-wing in Israeli history- met inside a tunnel under the Al-Aqsa Mosque.
The mosque, Islam’s third holiest site, was prior to the October 7th
attack, periodically invaded by religious fundamentalists who have ambitions of
building a Third Temple on Temple Mount.
The
divide in Israeli society can be characterised in essence as one between the
Europeanised and secular Liberal Zionists of Ashkenazi heritage and the largely
religiously-orientated Mizrahim alongside their religious fundamentalist settler
allies. The divide was clearly evidenced during the demonstrations against
Netanyahu’s proposed judicial reforms. Much of the support for the bid to limit
the powers of the Ashkenazi-dominated judiciary, have come from the Mizrahim.
The
divide sits at the heart of questions regarding the fundamental direction of
Israel and Zionism. Will the country continue what Joseph Massad wrote of
as its “commitment to cosmopolitan European gentile culture”, or will it become
more Messianic, looking to the Torah and the Talmud for its political,
spiritual and cultural basis?
Certainly,
the language and the deeds of Israel’s political leaders has since the
aftermath of October referenced the annihilation model of warfare found in the
Old Testament and the Talmud. On October 28th, 2023, Prime Minister
Binyamin Netanyahu himself invoked the biblical people known as Amalek as the
justification for the intended wholesale destruction of Gaza. His then defence
minister Yoav Gallant, a former major general of the IDF, referred to Gazans as
“human animals” when announcing on October 9th, 2023, that Israel
would impose a total siege on Gaza. Both Netanyahu and Gallant were subject to
the issue of arrest
warrants by the International Criminal Court (ICC) in November
2024 following an investigation of war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Isaac
Herzog, the Israeli president, was quoted as saying after October 7 that “it is
an entire nation out there that is responsible. It is not true, this rhetoric
about civilians who were not aware and not involved. It is absolutely not
true.” Herzog’s words were taken by the United Nation’s independent
international commission of inquiry took his words as “incitement to the
Israeli security forces personnel to target the Palestinians in Gaza as a group
as being collectively culpable for the 7 October 2023 attack in Israel.”
The
commission concluded in its
report released in September 2025 that Israel is committing
genocide in Gaza.
Expert
opinion that Israel is in fact committing genocide on the basis of legal analysis
and not of political propaganda has been voiced by organisations such as Amnesty
International, Human
Rights Watch, the
International Association of Genocide Scholars, B’Tselem
and Physicians
for Human Rights-Israel.
The
orgy of sadistic violence aimed at reducing Gaza into a wasteland has been
well-documented and the intention to make life unsustainable in Gaza is clear. The
strategy for accomplishing the removal of the Palestinian population from Gaza began
at the very outset when the Israeli military advised Gazans to evacuate
specific areas to find refuge in designated “safe zones”. The idea was to
subsequently destroy the area which had been evacuated so that the residents
would be unable to return. This pattern was repeated in a manner so that the
bulk of the population was being systematically moved from north to south. The
objective is to herd the remaining population into a reservation
area
pending their presumed expulsion into the bordering Sinai region of Egypt.
The
mass slaughter of Palestinians and their intended removal from Gaza has found
wide support among the Israeli public. Public opinion polls such as those
reported by Ha’aretz in May 2025 have consistently underlined
this. The survey
found that 82% of Israelis supported the ethnic cleansing of Gaza and that 65%
of Israelis consider Palestinians in Gaza as “Amalek” and that every man, woman
and child should be killed.
The
implications of this revelation are far reaching. It vindicates the concern
expressed by a group of Jewish intellectuals in 1948 who when writing to the New York Times predicted that the
establishment of Menachem Begin’s Herut as a political party would lead Israel
down a path which would legitimise “ultranationalism, religious mysticism and
racial superiority”. Herut is of course the precursor of Binyamin Netanyahu’s
Likud.
It
also signifies a critical juncture in the evolution of Zionism which will
determine the future of the Israeli state. It is useful to consider the views
of two figures who envisioned an evolution to this very state of affairs. For
Rabbi Meir Kahane, whose ideological disciples Smotrich and Ben Gvir exercise
considerable influence in the cabinet headed by Netanyahu, Israel could only
preserve its future existence by expelling all Palestinian Arabs from the West
Bank, Gaza and Israel itself. His writings and the avowed policy of his Kach
Party also called for Israel to be transformed into a theocratic state which
would codify Halakha, Jewish
religious law as set out by Maimonides, the revered Torah scholar of the Middle
Ages.
Professor
Yeshayahu Leibovitz, an Israeli public intellectual and a self-described
secular Zionist, decried messianism and what he considered to be Zionism’s
misappropriation of Judaism. Central to his thinking was Israel’s occupation of
the remnant territories of Palestine which he foresaw would morally compromise
Israel because it would be unable to reconcile its self conception as a liberal
democratic state with that of an occupier which did not grant the occupied
people human and legal rights. He posited an evolution in which the finite
stage would be Israel’s ultimate disintegration. Leibovitz wrote the following
in the late 1960s after the June War of 1967:
The
national pride and euphoria following the Six Days is temporary, and will carry
us from proud nationalism to extreme messianic nationalism. The third stage
will be barbarism, and the final stage will be the end of Zionism.
Israel’s
present resort to barbarism is not disputed by the writer Yossi Klein. In an
opinion article
written for Ha’aretz which was published in August 2025, he noted
that the “bloodlust in Gaza has been awakened by from the ancient myths of the
Torah by these messianic nationalists,” adding that “In their eyes, fear of God
is a license to kill.”
It
is a genus of the unleashed bloodlust which the world has been consistently
reminded consumed the lives of millions of European Jewry during the middle
part of the 20th century. In the previous century, Heinrich Heine,
the German poet and thinker, wrote of his fear that the veneer of civilised
restraint which had been inculcated into the German psyche by centuries of
Christianisation, would be broken by the rise of a Germanic demagogue-thinker
who would be able to use his primitive powers to summon up the demonic forces
of German pantheism. Today, Israel’s homicidal rampage is the fruit of decades
of internal socialisation, the prevalence of varying species of extremist
Zionist ideology and the impunity granted to its present political leaders by the
military aid and diplomatic cover provided by the United States and its allies.
The
rationale for the episodes of mass murder in Israel’s history also posits a
psychological dimension. On his arrival to Palestine in 1934, Erich Neumann, a
student of Carl Jung in the area of psychotherapy, wrote the following in a telegram:
I’m
afraid that all of our repressed drives, all of our aspirations for government
and revenge, all of the hidden brutality within us, will be realised here. The
Jews in the Land of Israel, liberated from the pressures of other nations that
we have suffered from in Exile. This could cause, in the final analysis, the
bursting forth of “the shadow” here in Palestine, it will be seen and come
forth. And it will not be pleasant.
But
the key determinant of the present bloodletting lies in ideology. It is clear
to that the Zionist Revisionist philosophy that undergirds Netanyahu’s Likud is
found to be after all compatible with that of the religious nationalists – at
least in so far as territorial expansion and the unimpeded destruction of
Palestinian life is concerned. Begin’s Herut and Likud may have officially
stopped laying claim to Jordan as an inalienable part of the Jewish state, but
its members, as do the Kahanites, always believed in the eventual claim to Greater
Israel, which Netanyahu has finally acknowledged.
The
question now is whose vision of Israel will now prevail: that of Rabbi Kahane
or that of Professor Liebovitz. In other words, is Israel inexorably fulfilling
the idea of expanding to the maximalist territorial limits as it destroys Palestinian
and non-Jewish life in establishing a theocratic state? Or is its homicidal
rampage and continuous waging of war on many fronts the precursor to its own
destruction?
The
Netanyahu-led government points to Gaza’s destruction, the decapitation of
Hezbollah’s leadership and the fall of the Ba’athist Syrian state which has led
to Israel seizing further territory including the strategically important Mount
Hermon, as evidence of the victorious path Israel is taking.
But
what is not mentioned is the negative impact wrought on the economy, the
increasing refusal of reserve soldiers to answer the call to serve in renewed
battles and Israel’s increasing isolation among the world community of nations.
The threat that Israel has begun the process of becoming a pariah state is one
which looms large. And if such loss of support is not reflected by the
governments of nations, including Arab and Muslim ones, the same cannot be said
of the populations they represent. Support in Western European nations such as Britain
and crucially in the United
States is plummeting.
Leibovitz
argued that Israel could not escape a morally compromised trajectory after
opting to become the occupier of another people. During his life, he went so
far as to assert that Israel has undergone “nazification” and that Israel’s
soldiers had turned into “Judeo-Nazis”. But his alternate concept of “secular
Zionism” and his rejection of messianism proved to be futile competitors with
the spectrum of thinking within Political Zionism.
The
Religious Nationalist Zionists are spurred on by what they consider to be the
80-year curse which has afflicted Jewish kingdoms, a question acknowledged by
secular Israelis such as Ehud Barak who said the following in an interview with
Yedioth Ahronoth in May, 2022:
Throughout
Jewish history, the Jews did not rule for more than eighty years, except in the
two kingdoms of David and the Hasmonean dynasty, and in both periods, their
disintegration began in the eighth decade.
Barak
made his comments in the context of what he believed –and still believes- to be
the danger of his country disintegrating through a civil war because of deep
and widening fractures in Israeli society. This fracture between the
aforementioned “Liberal Zionists” and the “religious Nationalists” may play a
role in the demise of the present incarnation of a Jewish state.
The
basis of an internal war is based on the argument, not without substance, of
the development of a second parallel army within the IDF since the early 2000s.
This army as Yagil Levy put it in an opinion
article published in Ha’aretz
in 2016 consists of “units whose culture, operational logic and motivation are
very different.” This potential “Army of Judea” is composed of soldiers who
come from settler families who by default are dedicated to protecting settler
communities and backing up settlers when they steal land from Palestinians and
are violent towards them. Many of these soldiers belong to the Kfir Brigade,
the youngest and largest infantry brigade of the IDF. They are also well
represented in the Border Police.
It
was acknowledged in the past that the basis for a Jewish civil war would be
predicated on the question of settlements on the West Bank. Any attempt by the
IDF to enforce the dismantling of settlements in pursuance of an agreement to
create a Palestinian state was expected to be met by violent resistance by the
settlers and a segment of the Israeli military. The entrenchment of the
settlers and the development of the putative “Army of Judea” only reinforces
the inevitability of such an outcome. Thus, the denial of the Palestinians a
state of their own in order to avoid an internecine war forms the bedrock of
decades-long policies aimed at colonising the West Bank as a precursor to the
eventual expulsion of the Palestinian population.
While
Palestinian resistance has over the decades been characterised by the
Israeli-supporting Western media as been fuelled by malign ideologies of the
left and then by barbarous jihadist cults, there has been a steadfast refusal
to critically examine Political Zionism as a peculiar form of Jewish
nationalism which is inherently infected by the dogma of ethno-supremacism.
This
has meant that no government of Israel would ever contemplate a genuine
accommodation of a Palestinian state. The passage in 2018 of the Basic
Law on Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish
and Israel’s refusal to declare its final borders underscore this. Political
Zionism has meant that the default position of the Jewish state is that it can
only relate to the occupied Palestinian population by force as indeed is the
case with its neighbours who must live with the existential threat of Greater
Israel. Moshe Sharett decried Israel’s “sacred terrorism” which he noted
stemmed from a “provocation and retaliation strategy” which condemned Israel to
exist in a perpetual state of “endless wars.” He was aware that Israel would
strive to expand its borders, and in regard to Ben Gurion and Dayan’s designs
on south Lebanon wrote with prescience that such machinations would be “an
adventurous speculation upon the well-being and existence of others.”
They
are words which resonate in regard to Binyamin Netanyahu’s present goal of
“changing the face of the Middle East”. This is the manifestation of Political
Zionism, an ideology committed to the destruction of not only Palestinian life,
but also to others in the Levant and farther afield who contest Zionism’s goal of
outright regional hegemony.
It
is the implementation of this ideology which lies at the root of the allegation
of anti-Palestinian genocide, an accusation from which the State of Israel will
find it extremely difficult, if not impossible, to be exonerated.
©
Adeyinka Makinde (2025).
Adeyinka
Makinde is a writer based in London, England.
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