Israel’s hard-right turn has been decades in the making

There was a delicious moment on Q+A last year, when the question of Israel came up, and the key panellists — Mark Dreyfus and Andrew Bragg — responded, almost in unison, that Israel “is not an apartheid state”. Singing from the same songbook.

One wonders how long this will be possible with the formation of the new government, led, once again, by Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu, but this time drawing in parties of the extreme right. In the fifth general election in three years, parties once thought to be out of consideration for inclusion in government saw their votes double, sufficient to make it possible for Netanyahu to construct a wholly right-wing government, rather than another cobbled-together “national unity” government.

The new coalition thus includes the Jewish Power Party and the ultra-religious-right “Revival” Party; both groups have praised Zionist terrorism, and spruik various forms of Jewish supremacism in relation to Arabs. Their leaders, Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, respectively, are now in line for ministries: Ben-Gvir wants the police ministry; Smotrich wants defence. These parties have in the past urged permanent annexation of the West Bank, and expulsion of Arabs from Israel. Jewish Power’s Party chant was, until recently, “death to Arabs”, now modulated to “death to terrorists”.

Netanyahu has already offered to honour some key demands, including the legalisation of West Bank “outpost” settlements, and satellite start-up settlements currently illegal under Israeli law. These would further fracture what little territorial contiguity of Palestinian areas remains — which would be reinforced by a new massive road-building program connecting settlements directly to Green Line Israel. 

The success of these parties came after an unsatisfactory year of “change coalition” government, an eight-party coalition of left and right, including the much diminished Israel Labour Party and the hardline Yisrael Beiteinu Party — previously the last unacceptable right party, now firmly in the mainstream — and the Arab list. This coalition fell apart over issues ranging from social service cuts to leavened bread in hospitals, its failure coinciding with a rise in incidental crime, which saw voters rushing to the right, and travelling well beyond Likud. Their greater numbers gave Netanyahu — facing multiple investigations and likely charges on corruption grounds — the lifeline he needed.

Those diaspora Zionists who have commented on the new government — and many have gone vewwy quiet — are saying the same thing, encapsulated by Thomas Friedman’s plaintive headline wail in The New York Times: “The Israel We Knew is Gone”. This is true in one way. Though the creation of Israel involved the dispossession of the Palestinians, and terrorism used against them over decades, one could argue that a programmatic Jewish supremacism wasn’t part of it. Initial Zionism had been patronising and naive about how Arabs might relate to the carving out of a Jewish homeland; the “revisionist” Zionism, inaugurated by Ze’ev Jabotinsky in the 1920s, had been more brutal but also more clear-eyed about the Arabs. They’ll never let us in, Jabotinsky said, so we’ll have to take it. Both sides of the Jordan!

Yet in seeing Arabs as simply an obstacle to Israel’s creation, the revisionists — Likud being their current manifestation — renounced any consideration of what Arabs were like, positive or negative. Revisionism was Zionism’s Nietzschean moment, asserting the pure force of political and military will in the service of one’s own interests. The incidental chauvinism of many Zionist settlers wasn’t programmatic; it was generic European arrogance towards colonised peoples. 

So the Jewish supremacism that has developed towards the Palestinians is a new thing, at least in its mainstreaming. It arises, it would seem, from the collapse of meaning in the Zionist movement itself, something that has been occurring since the country abandoned social democracy and neoliberalism in its economy, thus creating unprecedented economic inequality between Jews and undermining the notion of a unified project. With a rise in homegrown ultra-orthodoxy, and an influx of American and other diaspora fleeing not pogroms in Cleveland but the anomie of modern Western life, the country’s political culture appears to have become a vicious circle of Jewish identity affirmation. Lethal fantasies of Arab extermination are where it has arrived. 

Yet finally, in its imperatives regarding the West Bank, it does join with the older minority tradition of fascist Zionism that emerged in the crises of the 1930s and 1940s. If “Jewish power” has a predecessor, it’s the short-lived party formed after 1948 by veterans of Lehi, led by Avraham Stern (and thus labelled by the British as the “Stern Gang”). Under its subsequent leader, Yitzhak Shamir, Lehi asserted that Zionism was a necessarily totalitarian movement, and made no sense in any other terms. When Shamir became prime minister in 1983, the settlement program in the occupied West Bank really got underway. Under the new government, it appears that its deep drive towards the extinguishment of Palestine continues. 

The situation is now completely impossible, of course. There’s not going to be a Palestinian exodus; Israel would use tactical nuclear weapons before it would yield to a one-state solution; a two-state solution will soon be impossible in territorial terms. But now there are parties in government who positively celebrate the idea that Palestinians should be permanently subjugated, even immiserated, as part of the realisation of a strong Jewish identity. That will surely draw things ever tighter. Will it produce a new intifada, based on the model of the revolt currently occurring in Iran? If so, will it gain the same praise and approval in the West? (Narrator: “No.”)

And how will our own dear Zionist lobby react? Hilariously, The Australian Jewish News has suddenly found an all-absorbing interest in local community issues, with Israeli matters well down the website. But it’s not an issue that can be avoided forever. Some are arguing that Israel is being unfairly judged, given that hard-right groups have entered government in Sweden and Italy. That does point to the continuities between Zionism and European political movements. But Italy and Sweden aren’t currently occupying anyone, so their new nativist-conservative governments can make a claim to right not accessible by Israel. Despite Jabotinsky’s urging, the country has never been able to shake off a moral claim to existence, and it has now entered a zone in which that question will become more urgent than ever. As the trumpets sound, we look forward to hearing the new songs to be sung.