The goal of the Israeli war is increasingly clear: it is to create conditions that will make it impossible for the Palestinian people to continue to live in Gaza or the West Bank, and perhaps also in southern Lebanon.
Along with its indiscriminate killing of people, Israel is systematically destroying hospitals, universities, electric grids, water systems, and most permanent buildings. There can be no other term for this war’s goal other than genocide—Israel is purposely destroying the infrastructure that undergirds a society’s capacity to exist. The fact that “only” a small percentage of the Palestinian population has been killed does not alter the fact that Israel intends to make much of what is now Palestinian territory unlivable.
While “only” 40% of Israelis openly embrace the full Israeli annexation of these territories, the war that will accomplish that goal is incredibly popular, with 81% support. Israeli society has radically shifted to embrace what had only a generation ago were ideas associated with a miniscule radical fringe.
As the war grinds on, Israel is becoming more and more isolated in the court of world public opinion. But in the face of global condemnation, Israeli Jews are more and more defiant and determined to go it alone. Just last week, when three Israeli hostages were rescued by the IDF, seemingly all of Israel rejoiced, despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that the IDF killed or injured over a thousand Palestinian civilians in a refugee camp during the rescue operation.
We are witnessing, in a few short months, not only a genocidal war but the remaking of Israeli society, which is embracing a radical new stage of Zionism. The world is watching with horror the fact that the very people whose ancestors were the victims of the Holocaust are now cheering on a genocidal war against Palestine.
How did a country that a generation ago prided itself on its social democratic achievements and was seemingly on the verge of acknowledging a Palestinian nation become what Israel is today?
It would be far too simple to just start in the 1980s, when a rightwing settler movement first began to use violence to take over Palestinian land in Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza, a movement that produced the current leadership of the country. I think we must start at the beginning, with the establishment of Israel as a Jewish homeland.
The problem, of course, is that the creation of a Jewish homeland in a region largely populated by Arabs required a clear answer to one question: would Jews coexist with Arabs or displace them? The very act of creating Israel firmly answered this question: in 1947, the United Nations mandated the establishment of a Jewish state but not a Palestinian state and authorized the expulsion of Palestinian Arabs from the most productive land—the legal basis for the Nakba. The UN Mandate was universally opposed by every Arab and Muslim majority country. But even this mandate was not enough for many Zionist leaders. Calling the UN Mandate a “tactical compromise,” Israel’s first President David Ben Gurion openly declared his intention to annex all of Palestine land in the future.
Despite this origin, many early Israelis were refugees from countries where they had participated in socialist and communist parties and believed that the new Zionist state had to be committed to democratic principles, including equal rights for Palestinian and other non-Jews in Israel. For the ensuing seventy years, Zionists were divided into a left wing and a right wing based on their differing ideas about the society they were building. Left wing Zionists sought to create a European-like social democracy and saw the kibbutzim as the utopian communities of their movement. Rightwing Zionists—a distinct minority of the population– sought to build Yisrael Hal-Shlema, Greater Israel, which they believed to be the Biblical mandate for the Jewish peoples’ homeland, which required the expulsion of all non-Jews from what is now Southern Lebanon, Gaza and much of Jordan.
But from the beginning, the die was cast in favor of rightwing Zionism. First and foremost, the creation of the Jewish homeland was accompanied by the Nakba– the forceable mass expulsion of over a million Palestinian people (Arab, Muslim and Christian alike) from their homes and land. This act alone guaranteed an irreconcilable conflict between Zionists and Arabs. (Not a single Arab state recognized Israel when it was founded). The Nakba also fatally compromised left-wing Zionists’ dreams of building a social democracy in the Middle East.
Secondly, the Zionist movement resurrected Hebrew as a secular language to replace what was at that time the far more popular secular Jewish language, Yiddish. The adoption of Hebrew as Israel’s official language polarized specifically with Yiddish-speaking left-wing and anti-Zionist Jews around the world who had come to their conclusion that assimilation of Jewish workers into the working classes of different nations was their best hope for a democratic future.
And third, when facing the inherent contradiction of Zionism with democratic, secular values, Israel steadily opted to build its military into what it is today: the largest military force per capita in the world, complete with nuclear weapons.
For all these reasons, Zionism has consistently bent toward righting expansionist ambitions. But rightwing Zionism faced an uphill fight for as long as Israel was ruled by social democrats, an era that came to a brutal end with the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin in 1995. In the 2000s, Israeli social democracy, like everywhere else, could not survive. As financial globalization rewarded the wealthiest Israelis (and Arabs) at the expense of everyone else, nation-states trimmed social spending. And like in Europe and the U.S. the populations of all Middle East countries became disenchanted with governments that failed to meet their needs and became susceptible to radical politics. In the Arab world, this radicalism was mostly captured by Muslim extremism (after the failure of the Arab Spring in 2010-2012).
In Israel, radicalization meant the rise of rightwing Zionism to power. The influx of virulently anticommunist Russian Jews and rightwing American religious zealots reshaped Israel in the late 20th Century. In 2018, rightwing Zionists achieved their complete victory with the passage of the Basic National Law, which proclaimed Israel as the nation of the Jewish people alone, a law that completely ended once and for all left-wing Zionists hope for a democratic, secular Israel in which Palestinians and Jews and others could co-exist peacefully with equal rights for all.
All of this is to say that the ‘new’ Zionism is simply the resolution of the contradictions of a Jewish state formally committed to democratic rights but formed by the forced expulsion of over a million Palestinians from their homes, a contradiction that has haunted Israelis since 1948. This resolution also has profound religious implications, as Israel now sees itself not only as a refuge for Jews seeking protection from antisemitism but as the Holy Redeemers, who are gathering the chosen people in Greater Israel as proclaimed by Scripture. (This fanaticism also relegates all other Jews in the world into morally questionable Jews for refusing to “return from exile,” let alone for rejecting either the political or religious implications of Zionism.)
The ‘new’ Zionism is simply the resolution of the contradictions of a Jewish state formally committed to democratic rights but formed by the forced expulsion of over a million Palestinians from their homes, a contradiction that has haunted Israelis since 1948.
What will happen to Israel under this extremist Zionist rule? Netanyahu is clearly counting on a Trump victory and anticipates getting an American green light to continue its destruction of Gaza and the West Bank and perhaps also to invade Lebanon. But, as a Thomas Friedman has pointed out, the cost of the continual state of war will inevitably sap the Israeli economy and demoralize both the IDF and the Israeli public. Further, the militarization of Israel and its transformation into an open theocracy will lead many intellectuals and high-tech industries (especially biotech) to relocate in Europe or the U.S. At the end, Israel will become a poor military dictatorship ruled by religious zealots, completely isolated in the court of world opinion, a nation at war with all its Arab neighbors. That is, Israel as a self-proclaimed shining beacon of Western civilization and democracy in the Middle East will be no more.
This emerging reality is extremely challenging for most American Jews, many of whom were raised to believe that support for Israel was a core element of being a Jew. To these Jews, the anti-Israeli protests are a source of much angst, especially because Jews have always been sympathetic to anti-war causes. These Jews will face an increasingly difficult choice as the war, with all its dreadful human rights violations, drags on.
But the emergence of a blood-thirsty Zionism bent on genocide has also opened up a new space within Judaism for anti-Zionist Jews to claim their legitimate place as Jews for the first time since 1948, a space I have written about in previous posts. The emergence of a genocidal Zionism has challenged Jews to finally realize that there is can be and indeed must be a Jewishness liberated from the dead weight of Zionism.
The long view 