To better “Understand the Israeli Settler Mindset,” per the article below, even more important is to read and/or listen to, the “Leader” of the National Conservative Movement, Israeli Settler Yoram Hazony. With it and he making up the essential core of the "New Right” that The American Conservative and its ideological allies are all so enthusiastic for, and promote so zealously (forgive me for having shared this previously, but it goes to the “essence” of Hazony, the “New Right,” National Conservatism, and “Universal Fascism” [I repeat myself]), and as well, it's revealing of the “American Mindset,” of both parties, that we not only rule the world, but are entitled to kill and destroy any one or any country which contests that claim, as the Settlers and IDF believe they’re entitled to with the Palestinians"
How an Israeli thinker became one of Trumpism’s foremost theorists
"The Israeli writer Yoram Hazony is one of the American right’s most celebrated thinkers — and the personification of a quietly influential Israel-American right-wing world of ideas.
"It is a peculiar irony that one of the most influential theorists of President Donald Trump’s “America First” style of conservative nationalism is an Israeli citizen.
"Yoram Hazony, president of the Herzl Institute think tank in Jerusalem, has become a mainstay of the American right. Michael Anton, a conservative academic who served as one of Trump’s senior advisers from 2017 to 2018, drew on Hazony’s vision of nationalism in formulating what Anton describes as “the Trump doctrine” in foreign affairs. Hazony’s new American organization, the Edmund Burke Foundation, held a 2019 conference that featured speeches from Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO), Tucker Carlson, Peter Thiel, and then-National Security Adviser John Bolton.
. . .
"Hazony, perhaps the paradigmatic case of an Israeli whose worldview has been shaped by time in the States, has been a player in Tikvah-world. The organization provided early funding for perhaps his most influential creation, Jerusalem’s Shalem Center — a right-wing think tank that has morphed into Shalem College, Israel’s first American-style private liberal arts college.
. . .
"Leiter had a more positive view of Hazony, describing him as “an intellectual force to be reckoned with.” At the same time, he agreed with Inbar that his influence was greater outside of Israel than within. “I don’t think his book on nationalism has drawn the same interest in Israel as it has in the United States,” Leiter said.
"Hazony’s career arc, then, is something like a boomerang: the American conservative project of strengthening the Israeli right coming back home to the States.
"When Donald Trump became the Republican presidential nominee in 2016, it became clear that the old conservative paradigm did not adequately represent what the Republican Party had become.
"The party of free markets had been taken over by a trade skeptic who (disingenuously) promised to protect Medicare; the party of American empire had been taken over by a man who (disingenuously) claimed to oppose America’s wars in places like Iraq and Libya. There was an urgent need to explain what he really stood for and how he had won — a task that the old American conservative elite, steeped in pre-Trump conservative dogma, wasn’t well-equipped to do on its own.
"Enter Hazony. In a September 2016 essay in Mosaic (a Tikvah-funded conservative journal), he argued that Trump’s ascendance, together with the Brexit vote, represented an emergent divide in global politics — between nationalists, who believe countries should be free to choose their own destiny, and liberal imperialists, who wish to dissolve national borders and impose their secular, deracinated vision on an unwilling world.”
And disingenuously uphold ‘International Law,” when it’s in “our interests,” which Netanyahu, Hazony, the Republican Party, Likud, took exception to when the EU tried to hold Israel to International Law standards, as the Republican Party and Conservatives do when attempts are made to do the same in regard to our own war crimes.
To Understand the Israeli Settler Mindset, Read This Eulogy - Haaretz.com
“Frame and hang,” television journalist Amit Segal wrote in the wake of the unusual decision by the editors of the Hebrew-language weekly newspaper Makor Rishon to devote the cover of their March 3 magazine not to a photograph but to a text: the eulogy delivered by Rabbi Eliezer Melamed at the funeral of Hallel and Yagel Yaniv, the two brothers who were murdered in a terrorist attack in the West Bank town of Hawara on February 26. The CEO of Makor Rishon, Doron Bainhorn, noted that “the rabbi’s eulogy should be studied in the schools” – and he’s right.
It’s an exemplary text, not only in the sense that it is well-written and moving, but also because it is a stellar example of the settler way of thinking, which is also becoming the general Israeli way of thinking, certainly that of the government. Anyone who wants to understand Israeliness – where it came from and where it’s headed – should read this text.
Rabbi Melamed stated: “Every Jew who is killed simply for being a Jew is holy.” In other words, the only reason for terror attacks is fathomless hatred of Jews, which is not related to the deeds of the Jews or their behavior, or to the perpetrators’ feeling that Jews have wronged them. In Melamed’s world, there is no dispossession of people from their land, no expulsion, no acts of violence against innocent Palestinians, no damage to property, no acts of humiliation. Palestinian attacks cannot be seen as revenge for actions of Jews, in the way that Jews avenged the Yaniv brothers’ murder in Hawara.
According to Rabbi Melamed, such acts are driven by pure antisemitism: Jews are being murdered solely because of their Jewishness. This of course does not explain why Palestinians don’t customarily murder Jews in other places in the world. The division is simple and sharp: The Jews are victims, the Palestinians are offenders.
It bears noting that in Melamed’s eyes, every Jew who is killed for his Jewishness is called holy, with the emphasis on “every.” In other words, even murderers, rapists, thieves and other sinners rise to the level of holiness simply as a consequence of the circumstances of their death, and it makes no difference if in their lives they were miscreants. Melamed extends the classification of holiness to the entire settler population: “If this is what is said about every Jew, surely it should be said about the settlers living on the front line of settlement of Judea and Samaria.”
<Cars torched during the settler pogrom in Hawara last month., Credit: Moti Milrod>
Cars torched during the settler pogrom in Hawara last month.Credit: Moti Milrod
And what is the meaning of holiness, according to Melamed? “They ascended and became sanctified in the holiness of the whole of Israel, to the point where no living being can stand as tall in their presence.” Which is to say that holiness is the supremacy of the holy over those who are not holy, of settlers over those who are not settlers.
This is a critical point at a time when Jewish supremacy in Israel is being transformed into Jewish-religious and Jewish-settler supremacy over secular Jews, certainly over those on the left. It explains why Hardalim (ultra-Orthodox nationalists) do not feel guilt or shame when they demand additional resources from the state (such as a higher allocation per student), while insisting on contributing less – via property tax reductions, tax benefits, abridged military service for hesder-yeshiva students, or total exemption from military service and from work for Haredi men.
From the point of view of the Hardalim, there is no undercutting of equality here in the broad sense. Equality calls for equal treatment for equals, but in their view Torah students and settlers are simply more equal, and therefore deserve more. This is the underlying reason for what many secular individuals see as greed, piggishness, lack of solidarity, looting and plundering of the public coffers in budgetary deliberations, or in discussions about the obligation to serve in the Israel Defense Forces and participate in the labor market. According to these religious Jews, whoever contributes more deserves more – an argument that, by the way, is in contradiction to the criticism they level at the high-tech personnel who are opposed to the regime coup, claiming that “Just because you pay more taxes, doesn’t mean your voice is worth more.”
However groundless it may be, it’s necessary to understand that the feeling of supremacy among these religious Jews is authentic, even and indeed especially in places where it reaches absolute absurdity. “We did not return to our country to dispossess Arabs of their homes,” Rabbi Melamed explains, “but rather, to add goodness and blessing to the world. The Arabs could also benefit from this.”
In this disjointed world, the Arabs living in the territories, who do not even possess the status of citizens with equal rights, are supposed to count the presence of the settlers among them as a blessing. Rabbi Melamed, who heads the Har Bracha Yeshiva, doesn’t enumerate what blessing, exactly, the settlers have brought to their neighbors. The right of the Arabs, like the right of every person, to reject a blessing that is offered them has no place in Melamed’s world. By this logic, secular society too must accept the learning community’s occupation with the Torah as a blessing that protects them and their identity, and also finance it, even if the secular public thinks, “mistakenly,” that they have no need for it.
<The eulogy on the cover of the Makor Rishon magazine.>
The eulogy on the cover of the Makor Rishon magazine.
The left-wingers must advance, and with appreciation, the settlements they are opposed to, because the settlers “continue to settle our holy land, and protect the people and the land with their very bodies.” Here too, Melamed does not bother to explain how children, the elderly and women who do not bear arms and settle in the midst of a hostile Arab population are defending the land. Nor how a project that is tearing the people apart is actually protecting the people. It’s a given, a basic assumption that will receive no examination precisely because it’s flagrantly mistaken.
Toward the conclusion of the eulogy, Rabbi Melamed reiterated the anachronistic cliché to the effect that the settlers “will continue to build the land and make the wilderness bloom,” as if nearly all the construction taking place in the land was not being done by Arab workers and other gentiles. As though the land were an empty wilderness. As though the bulk of building and of the working of the soil done by Jews – almost all of it, in fact – was not done long ago, at the hands of secular, socialist pioneers who rebelled against Jewish law.
The title given to Melamed’s eulogy, “To Die and to Conquer the Mountain,” is a paraphrase of Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s Betar movement hymn, “To Die or to Conquer the Mountain.” The secular Jabotinsky at least recognized the possibility of loss and failure, which in turn is liable to end in disaster, as happened during the period of the revolt against the Romans: “To die or to conquer the mountain – Yodfat, Masada, Betar.” But in Rabbi Melamed’s text, the word “or” is replaced by “and.” According to Melamed, “If we need to live, we will live; and if we need to die, we will die, and after us, our friends will continue to conquer the mountain.”
Even if we die, as did the Jews on Masada in the year 73 or 74 C.E., the mountain will be conquered. It will be a success. And why all this? Because true success is not measured in this world, but in the next: “All the holy Jews appear to be dead, but in the world of truth, they are very much alive… By dying for the sanctification of Hashem [God], they connected to the source of life.” What is important is the world of truth, not the world of the lie, which is to say, the reality in which we live and from which so many settlers are worryingly disconnected.
What we need is not to conquer the mountain, but to descend from it, and fast.