Bernard Spiegal

Perhaps. Just perhaps…Israel, in unleashing its genocidal fury on Gaza, and now on Lebanon, has, unwittingly, fostered and spread the corrosive agents that are eating away at its legitimacy as a specifically Jewish, Zionist state. This is happening at the fundamental level of ideas, of ideologies, of ethics and of morality. Of what can be said, and what cannot – the boundaries are shifting. For Israel, this is dangerous – ideas, ethical orientations, do not succumb to bullets and bulldozers. They endure beyond the finite lives of the bodies and minds that carry them.

At a gathering pace, the legitimacy of the apartheid state is being eroded. International civil society, countries of the global south, and even some countries of the north are turning away from Israel. That there is now talk of removing Israel from the UN is a harbinger of this.

Israel’s justificatory framework has all but collapsed under the weight of its exterminatory actions. The justifications it and its allies deploy in respect of its actions, and indeed its legitimacy as a Jewish ethnonationalist state, have less and less purchase.  

The claims Israel makes about itself – democratic, the most moral army in the world, etc – are now hollowed out for all to see, making mockery of the qualities to which it claims adherence. For example:

• The oft-repeated claim ‘Israel has the right to defend itself’ is countered by the common-sense judgment that what Israel is doing ‘is not what legitimate defence should look like’.

• The attempts to prohibit the drawing of analogies between aspects of Nazi Germany’s behaviour and Israel’s actions in Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem have lost their credibility. There are too many, and too easy, analogies to be drawn between aspects of Nazi Germany’s behaviour and that of the Israel Defence Force, and indeed that of the settlers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Israel’s actions have thoroughly discredited the IHRA’s[1] criterion – ‘Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis’ – as automatically demonstrating antisemitism.  

Israel’s insistence that it is and must be a specifically Jewish state, that it has a right to be such a state, increasingly no longer functions either as shield against criticism, nor as censor restraining Israel-critical speech. 

As consequence of its virulent ethnic cleansing endeavour – as a rabid dog let lose – Israel besmirches the very word Jewish, decoupling it from the varied, pacific, non-territorial, non-colonising richness that is both a faith and a culture – to the danger and detriment of Jews everywhere.

Israel’s watchdogs

Israel’s UK watchdogs, however, continue to snarl and pounce on any individual or organisation showing the least interest in, or sympathy with, pro-Palestine sentiment. And often, the victim-individual or victim-organisation will feel obliged to curtail the public display of, for example, an allegedly deeply threatening Palestinian flag badge, or that of an inert Keffiyeh scarf clearly guilty of uttering menaces.

These watchdogs – for example, the Campaign Against Antisemitism (CAA); UK Lawyers for Israel (UKLfI) – in a tactical sense are currently successful; they have the funds to pursue their prey, whereas their prey is bounded by a range of constraints, not least having limited or no funds to fend off accusation. 

The structural weakness that afflicts the watchdogs, however, is simply that it is not possible to make a credible case in support of Israel: what has been seen, cannot be unseen; what has been heard, cannot be unheard; what is known, cannot be unknown.

In the light of the loss of general credibility, the watchdogs pursue campaigns directed at curtailing freedom of expression, this by characterising virtually any pro-Palestine, anti-genocide public expression as a threat to public order notwithstanding all the evidence to the contrary.  This represents a major assault on our wider political liberties, reflected in recent legislation and police actions against journalists. For more on this click here, here, here, and here.

In working to curtail legitimate political expression the watchdogs assault our individual and group liberties, for which they have no care. 

Israel: self-entrapped

So, we come to the question asked a number of times before: Does Israel have 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 7^th October, and is perhaps even more the case now.

As suggested in a previous article, Israel has created a world in which it can never find for itself a place and state of psychological and spiritual quietude. In that sense, Israel is fundamentally a failed project, one that, paradoxically perhaps, generates self-harm. The source of that harm being the very ideology – Zionism and Jewish supremacism – that form the justificatory foundations of the Israeli state.

Jews have a place in the land between the river and the sea, but not as overlords or by virtue of the oppression of Palestinians and theft of their land. Israel, the state, must begin the work of dissolving itself. 

It will be dissolved, sooner or later, whether Israelis will it or not.

[1] IHRA: International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance