Bernard Spiegal

The 7^th October 2023 punctured Israel’s belief in its inherent superiority. Disorientated, it knows only one mode of reaction: indiscriminate violence fuelled by a toxic fusion of fear and blood-lust revenge.  And a belief that Palestinians and indeed Arabs – witness the Gaza-like decimation being visited upon Lebanon – are not fully human.

And so the world watches aghast as Israel’s cruel and inhuman rampage through the region strips away any illusions as to Israel’s true nature.

Israel has taken itself outside the ambit of international law but also, and more profoundly, taken itself to a dark and ultimately lonely place. Widely loathed, it has become a virtual pariah state, certainly among the peoples of the Global South, and sizeable sections of the civil societies of the West.

Israel is essentially weak and vulnerable, save that it is sustained by the material power of the USA, UK and Germany in particular. Support that is ultimately conditional, susceptible to change in response to wider geo-political, and domestic exigencies which, by their nature, are unpredictable. 

We can see shifts in attitude among some European countries, for example Belgium, Ireland, Luxembourg and Spain are among the sharpest critics of Israel’s actions in Gaza, with some such as Spain’s Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez, calling for international recognition of a Palestinian State. Some 146 countries recognise the State of Palestine, with Norway, Spain and Ireland recently joining the list.

Disquietude

 The accoutrements of Israel as a Western-style, democratic state have fallen away, revealing the raw, embedded, annihilatory, colonialist worldview underpinning Israel’s foundation and expansionist intent.

But now Israel has gone mad. Its inherent psychosis has been released: what it believed to be true turns out not to be true. Palestinians have not succumbed to Ben-Gurion’s prophesy: The old will die and the young will forget.

As an ethno-religious Jewish state, Israel can never achieve for itself a sense of moral or practical quietude. For to commit to a racist-infused worldview, to predicate one’s survival on the oppression of another people, is to commit to a relentless obsession with purity – how to keep one’s in-group, in this case Jews, uncontaminated by foreign bodies, down to the genetic level. This is constant work. The constant work of delineation and categorisation – of whom to include, whom to exclude.  

Pursuing the goal of racial or religious purity, prevents a society from ever settling down, content to enjoy the richness of difference – the prerequisite for creating a society at ease with itself.

Israel is not at ease with itself. Centrifugal forces pull it away from ever cohering around a common self-conception. Except in one regard: Israel, by virtue of the nature of its existence, and the manner in which it realised itself as a state, necessarily created its own enemies. The one thing most Israelis agree about, is the rightness of the relentless assaults it inflicts on its enemies – actually, its victims.  Israel realises itself most cohesively via the application of violence against those it considers other, but also lesser: Palestinians. 

Fascist tendencies

Israel has always placed the needs of the state above the needs of the individual, a feature of a fascist orientation.  One can see this through a number of lenses. Ben-Gurion, a founding father of the Zionist State and its first prime minister, said in 1938 that:

“If I knew that it was possible to save all the children of Germany by transporting them to England, and only half by transferring them to the Land of Israel, I would choose the latter, for before us lies not only the numbers of these children but the historical reckoning of the people of Israel[1].”

There is a modern-day echo of this state ethos in the Hannibal Directive. It directs that Israeli forces should kill another Israeli if they are in danger of being captured by opposing forces.  This accounts for some of the Israeli deaths on the 7^th October 2023.

In a further variation on the same theme, we see how the Israeli hostages held by Hamas and, possibly, other resistance groups, are not a priority for rescue by the Israeli government. They have been relegated to a secondary concern. Hamas in fact agreed to release the hostages in exchange for a ceasefire, but this did not suit Israel’s ethnic cleansing purpose in Gaza, as it does not now. 

Speculation

Let’s speculate. Imagine Israel ‘wins’ in its own terms. Were this to be the case, it is likely that, at the very least, Southern Lebanon would be under Israel’s control, either by a direct military presence, or some other means.

In Gaza, the north is occupied by Israel. Settlements will be established there. Palestinians removed. The South of Gaza, beyond the Netzarim Corridor, if Ben Gvir and his supporters get their way, will be cleared of Palestinians, or so they propose. Whatever the specific outcome, Israel will maintain a ‘security presence’.

The West Bank is being cleared as you read this. This is not new. It has been happening for years. But since 7^th October displacement of Palestinians and land grabs have expanded and intensified. The degree to which the Palestinian population is directly forced to move, or decides to move out of the West Bank remains to be seen. Whatever the outcome, Israel will, via the IDF and settlers, hold the West Bank under its thumb.

East Jerusalem, similarly, will see an intensification of settlers, supported by IDF, confiscating homes and removing the Palestinian residents.

The details of the speculation above are not assured. But where I think they are accurate, is in highlighting Israel’s direction of travel if, by its lights, it ‘wins’ in Gaza, and the OPT generally.

I leave to one side that the notion of Israel ‘winning’ is not a category with a foothold in the real world. Israel cannot ‘win’, it can only sink further into the mire of its own misconceptions, taking it further down the road to its ultimate dissolution.

For Israel to realise the perverse vision of the future envisaged by Gvir, Smotrich, Lieberman, Netanyahu and others – Greater Israel and Jewish supremacy – requires an exacerbated form of militarism to sustain it.  Palestinians will not go away.  Their resistance, armed and otherwise, will be a feature of Israel’s future.

In these circumstances, Israel’s fascist tendencies will be amplified. The state will become even more militarised as the IDF, and para-militarised settlers, work to hold down Palestinians on multiple fronts: Gaza, West Bank, East Jerusalem. 

Israelis will feel themselves to be under siege – a cruel paradox that won’t be lost on Gazans – more so than they do now.  This will amplify the paradoxical tendency for Israelis to see themselves as at once tough, mighty, and smart, at the same time as feeling themselves to be victims, perpetual victims. 

Above all, Israel is, and will continue to be, locked-into the belief that might-is-right. Israel is most eloquent in the language of violence.

Geo-politically, Israel will be more reliant than ever on the support of the USA in particular.  From the USA’s perspective, current interests are served by maintaining strong links with what amounts to a very needy state. But state interests can change, so current dispensations are ultimately more subject to potential change than may at first appear. 

A dark place

The accumulation of factors adumbrated above, and others not enumerated here, point to a society incapable of self-awareness, and therefore lacking the means to look beyond the dark place it has created for itself.

If self-awareness is the prerequisite to admitting the possibility of change, then Israel has been ill-served by its friends, very much including Israel-supporting Jewish citizens of other countries. To the extent that they’ve uncritically allowed Zionist doctrine to colonise the religion, Judaism, usurping it, distorting it, for as long as that stance continues, we are part of the problem, not the solution.

[1] Address at the Mapai’s Central Committee (December 1938) as quoted in Shabtai, Teveth, Ben-Gurion: The Burning Ground, 1886-1948.