In a couple of earlier blog articles I wondered whether Israel has the internal resources – ethical, psychological, imaginative, political – to reflect upon itself critically; to shed its self-imposed, self-defeating burden of maintaining and justifying a state founded on Jewish Supremacism.
All the indications are that it has not. This was the case prior to the events of the 7th October, and appears to be the case now in the wake of Hamas’s audacious and lethal breakout from what Israel believed was the hermetically-sealed prison that was and is the Gaza Strip.
The breakout punctured Israel’s supremacist self-image, struck at the heart of it, as Hamas treated as naught the notionally sophisticated and extensive barrier that had penned 2.3 million Gazans within its seemingly unyielding grip. Everything Israel believed about itself, and indeed everything its Western backers believed about it, was no longer certain, was subject to doubt.
The breakout took a terrible toll of Israeli life and limb, coupled with Hamas’s taking of hostages. In addition, severe allegations of torture, rape and executions are made against the 7th October insurgents, all subject to contestation as to the veracity of at least some of the allegations. At some point, all this has to be subject to an independent enquiry, as will Israel’s actions in Gaza.
Attempt at justification
Israel seeks to justify its actions against Gaza since the 7th October by praying-in-aid the Hamas attack of that date. It’s declared mission is to eliminate Hamas entirely. But some want to go further. At least one Knesset MP, Ariel Kallner, a member of Netanyahu’s Likud party, seek to repeat the 1948 mass expulsion of Palestinians from their lands and property:
Right now, one goal: Nakba! A Nakba that will overshadow the Nakba of 1948
And lest there be room for doubt, Israel’s defence minister, Yoav Gallant, ordered a complete siege of the Gaza Strip with ‘no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed.’ Adding, ‘We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly.’
On a daily basis we have seen on our screens and on social media what ‘Accordingly’ means in practice.
Resources of the state
In formulating its response to the 7th October, Israel draws, as would any state, on the resources available to it, tangible and intangible.
In tangible terms this includes, for example, military forces, technological capabilities, support of allies with arms supplies and so forth; in intangible terms, what will weigh in judgment are attitudes, ethical perspectives, values. The nature and extent of the deployment of the former, is critically dependent on Israel’s relationship with the latter, to the intangibles.
The intangibles are constitutive of Israel’s worldview, how it interprets the world, what actions it judges are permitted, and what is impermissible.
What Israel deems permissible in Gaza, is almost beyond words to describe. We are witnessing the indiscriminate slaughter of infants, children, men and women along with the calculated destruction of the means to life: water and power supplies; medical supplies and medical facilities.
The OCHA (UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs) reports that, according to the Ministry of Health in Gaza, between 7 October and 3 December afternoon, at least 15,523 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza. The Gaza Government Media Office (GMO) reported more than 6,150 children killed to 2 December. Many more are missing, presumably under the rubble, waiting rescue or recovery.
That’s 6,150 children killed. This does not include children maimed and injured: the eight-year-old whose leg and arm had to be amputated, or the infants covered in burns. To kill children at this industrial scale is to kill twice: once, the child in the here-and-now; second, to kill the future.
No justification
Nothing that happened on the 7 October in any way justifies Israel’s subsequent, and continuing, actions. Israel’s blood-thirsty, callous assault on the civilian population of Gaza may be new in terms of magnitude, it is not new in terms of content; that is, Israel has always used disproportionate force against Palestinians, be they child or adult.
Israel’s intoxication with violence creates a permissive regime such that, for example, settler violence in the West Bank has increased from three incidents per day in 2023 to seven a day now.
During this period, OCHA recorded 171 settler attacks against Palestinians, resulting in 26 different casualty incidents, damage to 115 Palestinian properties, and some 30 reported incidents of both property damage and casualties.
The reservoir
This propensity to violence draws on a deep, long-established reservoir of dangerous, dehumanising and racist ideas: Palestinians ‘are human animals.’ This toxic reservoir is fed by two attitudinal tributaries: Jewish Supremacism – the ideology of the Israeli state, Zionism; and, paradoxically perhaps, Israelis perpetual sense of Victimhood.
You can be sure that the general Israeli public, its soldiers and pilots – the citizen army – its shopkeepers and entrepreneurs, people in their workplaces and in their homes, are good to their children, caring of their pets, supportive of their friends. How comes it, then, that they can permit, even urge, the unleashing of hell upon Palestinian infants, children, teenagers, parents, grandparents? It is here that the two attitudinal tributaries converge.
Worldview
For Israel, by its own definition, adheres to and actively pursues the ideology of Jewish Supremacism. The Israeli state declares it is exclusively the state of the Jewish people, they alone are able to exercise the right to self-determination.
It’s a racist ideology, one might even say theology for the mutant gene of Zionism has burrowed itself into some versions of Judaism where it should have no place.
It is simply a logical consequence of holding supremacist views of one’s religion, or one’s ethnicity or class that such an orientation requires defining oneself against an Other. An Other who, by virtue of not being a member of the supremacist group, is always inherently lesser. A human being, yes, but minus some key attributes that have magically been bestowed on the ‘superior’ group.
Have this worldview, and it does not take many steps before the Other is seen as of inherently less worth than oneself, most especially when one lusts after their land – Palestinian land – as part of a wider settler-colonial project. In such circumstances, it somehow comes to make sense that the ethics, values and sensibilities that would normally prevail, can be set aside, are in fact an impediment to the achievement of total dominance over the Other – in Israel’s case, dominance over Palestinians. The need for dominance is the inevitable and logical consequence of Israel being a settler-colonial project.
Victimhood
Underpinning and reinforcing Israel’s sense of victimhood is its treatment of the Holocaust. It deploys the Holocaust in a highly instrumental way, designed to support the Zionist ideology of the Israeli state.
This instrumentalization serves two purposes: one, to seed the belief that Jews are always and everywhere victims, or potential victims; second, to characterise Palestinians as actual, or potential, antisemites.
Professor Nurit Peled-Elhanan, a professor of language and education, researches this area. She finds that the Holocaust is taught, not to further understanding, but to inculcate a sense of perennial existential threat, one that underpins a militaristic ethos such that pupils and students are always preparing for military service.
Professor Norman Finkelstein observes:
My parents [Holocaust survivors] often wondered why I would grow so indignant at the falsification and exploitation of the Nazi genocide. The most obvious answer is that it has been used to justify criminal policies of the Israeli state and US support for these policies.
Israeli textbooks teach students that Israel exists primarily to prevent another Holocaust. Jews are the only ones ever presented as victimised. The curriculum commands students to actively ignore other victims, and that it ‘Nazif[ies] Arabs’. Palestinians are ‘Othered’. Not one photograph in hundreds of school books depicted an Arab as a ‘normal person’.
The original question
I return to my original question: Whether Israel has the internal resources – ethical, psychological, imaginative, political – to reflect upon itself critically; to shed its self-imposed, self-defeating burden of maintaining and justifying a state founded on Jewish Supremacism?
In response to the question, this article has a relatively narrow, yet significant, focus. It addresses only two key elements of the Israeli worldview: Jewish Supremacism; Victimhood. It has not looked at the divisions and coalescences within other aspects of Israeli society, for example, the rise of Jewish religious fundamentalism, the general rightward drift of the younger generation. Nor has it highlighted the role of ‘dissident Jews’, some of whom work towards the possibility of One Democratic State; others focus primarily on ending the Occupation.
Most lacking of all in this article, is any reference to Palestinian thinking and political formations. For all these reasons and more, it would be foolhardy to attempt a definitive answer to the question I posed.
But one can say that for as long as Israel holds to its present worldview, indulges itself in its sense of victimhood, no meaningful progress can be internally generated by Israeli society.
It is to Palestinians we need to turn for hope of progress towards a just and equitable resolution of the current bloody impasse. But this, too, can only come about with the emergence of a new and united leadership.
It is, after all, Palestinian’s who call ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’. As it will, and must be.
Zionists, on the other hand, find bitter any talk of justice or equality. That will be their nemesis.
Bernard Spiegal 
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