[The prediction that these divisions could undermine the Israeli
state from within seems premature at this stage. But there is no doubt
that they have exposed serious cracks in the Zionist edifice – ones
that may well widen over the coming years.]
[[link removed]]

FANTASIES OF ISRAEL  
[[link removed]]


 

Ilan Pappe
April 19, 2023
Sidecar [[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ The prediction that these divisions could undermine the Israeli
state from within seems premature at this stage. But there is no doubt
that they have exposed serious cracks in the Zionist edifice – ones
that may well widen over the coming years. _

Israeli protesters carry placards depicting Benjamin Netanyahu as
Julius Caesar during a demonstration against his new hard-right
government, Tel Aviv, 21 January 2023, AFP

 

Watching the news in Israel this month, you’d think the country was
under attack from all sides. Three Anglo-Israeli settlers were killed
by guerrillas in the West Bank; an Italian tourist was killed and
seven others injured in Tel Aviv, in what may have been a car accident
but was widely presented as a terrorist incident; and the IDF claimed
to have intercepted the largest salvo of rockets fired from Lebanon
since 2006. As is usually the case, these reports studiously ignored
the killing fields of the occupied territories, where Israeli soldiers
are murdering young Palestinians in ever growing numbers, either
execution-style or by bombing their houses into the dust. Yet what was
novel about the media coverage was its air of bewilderment: how could
Israel’s hard-right government fail to provide security – or at
least a sense of security – for its Jewish citizens? Who was to
blame for this lapse?

For Benjamin Netanyahu, responsibility lay with the ongoing protest
movement. Since early January, demonstrators have turned out in their
hundreds of thousands to oppose his judicial reforms – which would
enable the political takeover of the courts, allow the Prime Minister
to escape conviction in his corruption trial, and increase the
influence of Orthodox Judaism in both public life and the legal
system. Netanyahu has accused his critics of dividing and weakening
the nation, while lashing out at the reserve soldiers who threatened
not to show up for duty were the measures passed. People close to him
have also spread the rumour that the US was bankrolling the
demonstrators (this was fake news, but it carried water given
President Biden’s public condemnation of the reforms).

Judging by the recent polls, Netanyahu’s message has failed to cut
through. For many Israelis, it was the PM himself who created such
security risks. His popularity has reached a historic nadir, and he
would likely lose elections were they held today. Having bungled his
attempt to regain the trust of erstwhile supporters – bringing them
into the warm embrace of the Zionist consensus under the threat of war
supposedly emanating from Iran and its allies – he must now choose
between two unappealing options: either jettison the reforms and quell
the street-level resistance, or push ahead with them and deepen
divisions among Jewish citizens. The prediction that these divisions
could undermine the Israeli state from within seems premature at this
stage. But there is no doubt that they have exposed serious cracks in
the Zionist edifice – ones that may well widen over the coming
years.

If social breakdown is not on the immediate horizon, that is largely
because of the country’s mammoth security apparatus. Israel is still
very much an army with a state rather than a state with an army. There
can be no substantive changes to security policy without the assent of
leading military figures – whose hand will not be forced, even by
the new authoritarian government. This stratum has clearly signalled
its investment in maintaining the current framework. In essence, that
means continuing the indiscriminate killing of Palestinians, the
practice of home demolitions and the sanctioning of settler pogroms.
It means enforcing institutionalized discrimination against
Palestinian citizens of Israel, who are denied the right to free
speech and assembly. And it involves the regular bombardment and
besiegement of Gaza, as well as almost weekly air raids on Syria.

The apparatchiks who design and execute these activities comprise the
core group behind the recent demonstrations. Military officials who
have committed countless war crimes in the Gaza Strip, and before that
in the West Bank and Lebanon, are now playing a crucial role in the
emerging opposition bloc. They form part of a wider Ashkenazi
(European Jewish) elite, which views Netanyahu’s policy as an attack
on their power bases within the state: not just the security
apparatuses, but also the financial institutions, the judicial system
and academia. They sense that the reforms would weaken their hold on
these institutions, while empowering an insurgent coalition of
orthodox Jews, settlers and Mizrahi (Eastern Jewish) Likud supporters
who wish to make Israel more religious, more nationalist and more
expansionist. As they see it, the triumph of this neo-Zionist
coalition would threaten their secular lifestyle, compromise the
state’s security and further tarnish its international image.

Hence, Western media’s depiction of the protests – as an attempt
to save Israeli democracy from political overreach – is hopelessly
distorted. The movement is not seeking to protect the rights of
minorities (the first duty of any democracy) let alone the rights of
the Palestinians on either side of the green line. During the first
hundred days of the new administration, while secular Israeli Jews
fought to preserve their hegemony, almost a hundred Palestinians –
many of them children – were killed by Israeli forces. This killing
spree did not feature in any of the demonstrations. Those who tried to
raise Palestinian flags alongside the Israeli ones were forcibly
ejected. Arabs evidently have no place in this feud between the Jewish
families of Israel.

Instead, the protesters are motivated by what one might call the
_fantasy of Israel_: that of a secular democratic state with enough
moral capital to justify its occupation of Palestine at home and
abroad. They are happy to be seen as exceptional nation – which must
subjugate the Arabs to preserve the dream of a Jewish homeland – but
they are also desperate to conform to the ‘civilized’ standards of
the Global North. Their liberal Zionism is founded on a series of
oxymorons: Israel as an enlightened occupier, a benevolent ethnic
cleanser, a progressive apartheid state. Thanks to Netanyahu’s
government, this image is now under threat; its contradictions are no
longer containable. The state’s reputation is being damaged not only
domestically, but also among the ‘international community’ that
typically hails Israel as the only democracy in the Middle East and
Tel Aviv as the LGBT capital of the world, while ignoring the besieged
Gaza ghetto a few miles south.

This is why half a million Jews – mostly liberal, mostly secular,
mostly of Western origins – have taken to the streets to defend the
apartheid regime. Though they have forced Netanyahu to delay his
proposed changes, their ultimate chances of success remain uncertain.
Even if the reforms are scrapped, Israel will still be constitutively
divided, with a secular Tel Aviv existing alongside a religious
Jerusalem. How this tension might play out politically is anyone’s
guess. But one thing is clear: it will have little concrete effect on
state policy towards the Palestinians. For all their differences, the
two Israeli camps are united in their support for the settler-colonial
project on which the nation was built. Settler colonialism invariably
entails the dehumanization of colonized peoples, viewed as the
principal obstacle to political harmony. It is based on the wish to
eliminate the native population – either through genocide, ethnic
cleansing, or the creation of enclaves and ghettos. In Israel, every
Palestinian must be perceived as a savage or potential terrorist,
every Palestinian territory as a theatre of war.

This underlying logic means that the Palestinians have nothing to gain
from a return to the _status quo ante_. Indeed, the previous
government, led by the ‘centrist’ Yair Lapid, was just as
committed to maintaining the violent occupation. Its inclusion of an
Arab party brought no tangible benefits for Israel’s Palestinian
minority. They were still liable to be shot by the criminal gangs or
trigger-happy police officers while the state turned a blind eye;
still designated second-class citizens under the 2018 apartheid law;
still subject to legal and financial discrimination; and still
spatially strangled by the proliferation of Jewish towns and
settlements. By extolling ‘democracy’ while ignoring such abuses,
the current protest wave has highlighted Israel’s fundamental
paradox: it cannot be both democratic and Jewish. It will either be a
racist Jewish state, or a democratic one for all its citizens. There
is no middle ground.

For precisely that reason, Israel is now viewed unfavourably by large
sections of the global population. Although it has so far managed to
maintain strategic alliances with governments in the West, the Arab
World and occasionally the Global South, it risks becoming
internationally isolated. The protesters rightly fear that if the
country cannot sustain its fantasy image, it could suffer a fate
similar to that of apartheid South Africa: a gradual decline in
credibility, such that politics from below gains the ability to
influence politics from above. In that case, Israel may still be
viable on account of its military strength – but nothing more. This
in turn could seriously jeopardize the Zionist project; yet, as with
South Africa in the 1980s, it may also be the moment when the regime
attempts to save itself by resorting to the worst forms of brutality.

One of the main differences between opponents and supporters of the
current government is that the former care what global civil society
thinks of Israel while the latter do not. The Ashkenazi elite are
defending a form of ‘Zionism with a human face’ which the
far-right administration is increasingly willing to abandon. The
outcome of this conflict will partly determine whether Israel can
preserve its aura of immunity and exceptionalism. During the recent
history of Israel–Palestine, world opinion has often been diverted
by other developments: first the Arab Spring, now the war in Ukraine.
But the cause of the Palestinians has endured despite this wavering
attention. Can it exploit the present moment to turn Israel into an
international pariah?

===

* Protests in Israel; Netanyahu; Internal Israeli Divisions;
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]

Manage subscription
[[link removed]]

Visit xxxxxx.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]