There's Always Room for More Zionist Endless
Extremism
By Jeremy Salt
Palestine Chronicle, December 30, 2022
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Continuous Israeli theft of Palestinian lands, with impunity and
support from the ruling elite in the West, who oppose invasions
elsewhere! |
Continuous killing of Palestinians, to keep them subjugated
under the Israeli occupation, with impunity and support from the
ruling elite in the West, who oppose invasions elsewhere! |
Always Room for More: Zionism’s Endless Extremism
In the latest incarnation of Israeli politics, incoming
‘prime minister’ Benyamin Netanyahu has given the most extreme figures
on an already extreme spectrum the portfolios for ‘national security’
and settlement-building on the West Bank.
Itamar Ben Gvir, head
of the Otzma Yehudit (Jewish Power) party, who has been allocated the
national security portfolio, recently called on his settler followers to
shoot Palestinians who resist the takeover of their homes and land.
That can be taken as a portent of how he intends to do his job.
Ben Gvir’s portfolio gives him control over the police, including the
border police, who have been responsible for some of the worst massacres
in Zionist history. He lives in the Kiryat Arba settler colony
and, until his entry into politics dictated a modicum of prudence within
Israel at least, kept in his living room a portrait of Baruch Goldstein,
who massacred 29 Palestinians in Hebron’s Ibrahimi mosque in 1994.
Entering political life early, Ben Gvir belonged to the youth
movements of the Moledet (Homeland) party and the Kach and Kahane Chai
settler terrorist movements.
Ben Gvir’s equally ‘far right’
colleague Aryeh Deri, of Shas, has been allocated the
portfolios of interior and health but is expected eventually to be given
finance as well, irrespective of his conviction in 2000 for taking
$155,000 in bribes while interior minister. Sentenced to three years in
prison, he served 22 months being released in 2002. In 2018 the
prosecutor recommended that he be charged with money laundering, fraud,
breach of trust, tax evasion, and obstruction of court proceedings.
Eventually charged only with tax evasion, in 2022 he plea-bargained.
In return for resigning from the Knesset and paying a fine, he was given
a one-year suspended sentence. Before taking up his new portfolios, the
Knesset will have to pass a bill allowing convicted persons to hold
ministerial positions.
The third member of this unsavory trio is
Bezalel Smotrich, representing the Religious Zionist Party, who is
slotted to serve as an independent minister in the defense ministry, in
charge of West Bank settlements and Palestinian construction, which, as
an annexationist, he will block at every turn. Born on the occupied
Golan Heights, Smotrich now lives in a settlement outside the West Bank
settlement of Kedumin, which even the Zionist government regards as
illegal.
Smotrich has a long list of hatreds. Asked what he would
do to a Palestinian child throwing stones he replied “Either I will
shoot him, or I will jail him or I will expel him.” In 2021 he told
Palestinian members of the Knesset “You’re here by mistake. It’s a
mistake that Ben-Gurion didn’t finish the job and didn’t throw you out
in 1948.”
As part of the deal struck with Netanyahu, the new
regime is expected to retroactively legalize dozens of settlement
outposts that so far have been technically regarded as illegal under
Zionist ‘law.’ Other changes will include a broadening of
legislation that allows weapons to be used against Palestinian
resistance by soldiers and settlers and increased political control over
judicial appointments.
Shin Bet, the internal ‘security’ arm,
will be given an ethnically separate division to deal with ‘Arab’ crime
while further legislation is expected to introduce the death penalty for
‘terrorists’, to end the ban on individuals who incite race hatred
standing for the Knesset (already stuffed full of them) and to take
further measures to promote ‘Jewish identity, ’ of which these three MPs
are surely the most pernicious example.
They represent different
parties but insofar as the Palestinians are concerned they are one and
the same. Their shared goal, whatever it takes, is the extirpation of
all Palestinians from their homeland.
Mainstream Israel reacts
with rage to the accusation of apartheid. By contrast, these three
violent, racist Jewish supremacists are open in their demand for one
religiously purified Jewish state, with Palestinians who survive
the murderous demographic war launched against them more than a century
ago denied citizen rights but perhaps allowed to run their own municipal
services.
Zionism is a morally deplorable ideology. There can be
only worse words for an ideology based on the ejection of an entire
people from their homeland and the destruction or theft of all their
property. The ideology gave birth to a lawless, violent settler
state which has simply become more extreme over the years.
The
current regime is being described as the most rightwing or hardline in
Israel’s history. Will the trend stop here? Unlikely. The distinction
between 1948 Zionism and post-1967 Zionism is a delusion, an
escape from historical reality favored by secular Zionist liberals.
The Zionism of Ben-Gurion and the ‘labor’ prime ministers who followed
in his wake is no different in its impact on Palestine life than the
Zionism of Menahem Begin, Yitzhak Shamir, Ariel Sharon, and Benyamin
Netanyahu, which at least does not pretend to be what it is not.
The military wars of 1948 and 1967 were followed by a war of attrition
which has continued to the present but however, the war is fought it
remains a war on the Palestinian people.
Just as Netanyahu and
the Likud paved the way for the rise of Ben Gvir, so Ben Gvir opens the
door for someone even more extreme, hard as that might be to imagine.
Zionism is on a collision course with history, human rights, the
Muslim world, and with Judaism. It has put itself out on a branch
that is creaking under its weight and one day is likely to snap.
In its 19th-century origins, Zionism was rejected by Jews everywhere as
a fanatical splinter movement. Jewish groups such as Neturei Karta have
always taken a particularly strong stand. In the 1960s Moshe Menuhin,
the father of the great violinist Yehudi, summed up his feelings in a
book entitled ‘The Decadence of Judaism in Our Time.’ To this
enlightened author, the wickedness at the heart of Zionism was a malign
growth at the heart of his Jewish faith.
For more than 2000 years
Jews in the Middle East and North Africa lived peacefully with their
neighbors, whatever their ethnic or religious background. Many of them
flourished. They served sultans as advisers, they built great commercial
empires. All this was brought crashing down in the 20th century with the
advent of Zionism. Its goal of a Jewish Palestine put it on course
for a head-on collision with Arab nationalism. It deliberately set
out to destabilize Jewish life across the region, with the intention of
frightening Jews into packing their bags and coming to Palestine.
Its terror, propaganda, and spying sowed suspicion of Jews
everywhere and over decades Jewish life in Damascus, Baghdad, Sanaa, and
across North Africa ground to a halt. Now only a few remnants are
left. Empty synagogues and abandoned homes mark the wholesale
disappearance of an entire religious community from all Arab lands.
This has to be regarded as an enormous tragedy, staked on a doubtful
roll of the dice, against all odds, that the Zionist venture would
succeed. If it doesn’t, a possibility which in their arrogance
Netanyahu and his even more ‘extreme right’ partners would laugh off,
the cost will vie with the Nazi genocide as the most calamitous blow to
Judaism and Jews in their long history.
– Jeremy Salt taught at
the University of Melbourne, at Bosporus University in Istanbul and
Bilkent University in Ankara for many years, specializing in the modern
history of the Middle East. Among his recent publications is his 2008
book, The Unmaking of the Middle East. A History of Western Disorder in
Arab Lands (University of California Press). He contributed this article
to The Palestine Chronicle.
Always Room for More: Zionism’s Endless Extremism (palinfo.com)
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