"Israel’s ‘Total War’ Strategy in Gaza First time in recent history a nation waged a war of extermination in urban environment"
Putting aside Likud’s distant founding as a successor to the fascist party “Herut” which Menachem Begin founded as the political arm of the fascist/terrorist group, the Irgun, and that Arendt, Einstein, et al., openly, and correctly, denounced as “fascist” (I can easily imagine Traditional Conservatives/National Conservatives denouncing Einstein as "stupid” for his use of that term! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herut# -:), that "Total War Strategy”isn’t an accident! It’s what fascists do when waging war! When they can get by with it! Even though this current version of Israeli fascism (the “Radical Right”) is more recently developed, its “genealogy” goes straight back to the “Origins” of Israeli Fascism in the ideas of Begin, et al. And before that, to Mussolini and Polish fascist, General Pilsudski.
But with the increasing right-wing radicalization of the U.S., with 22 + years of war fever and Republican policies of torture opening the door for a torture advocate like Trump to win election against his only slightly less right-wing radical, Goldwater Girl opponent, their “time has come” for Israeli Fascists to completely “unmask.” And the same for their like-minded American “Network,” now fully mobilized in the Republican Party, as one hears on Newsmax and reads in, amongst many “Conservative” media platforms, the “Right-wing Peacenik” Heritage Foundation’s war incitement articles and policies, like these (war propaganda alert!): https://www.heritage.org/middle-east/commentary/the-us-must-oppose-premature-cease-fire-gaza;
So please forgive me if I shared this before, though I found it in my “Drafts Folder.” The article came up in a search today of Ben Gvir, Yoram Hazony, and Kohelet, but behind a paywall, and as a penurious old retiree, I hesitate to subscribe to too many publications. But I knew I’d seen this before, given my interest in fascism, and of tracking it’s ideologues and their “networks,” for the purpose of “fascist network analysis,” and fortunately I found it amongst my drafts. It speaks for itself:
Israel in the grip of hardline religious nationalism
Influential rightwing ideologue Yoram Hazony believes in the supremacy of Jewish values. That precept has now been enshrined in Israeli law. (TP-correction; “fascist values,” which excludes non-fascist Jewish values, like those of JVP, Bt’selem, etc.)
Keeping watch: Israeli settler in Dolev, West Bank, 1984
Chanania Herman · GPO · Getty
On 1 November Israel will hold its fifth general election in just over three years. Polls confirm that the momentum is with the nationalist right and its allies in religious Zionist parties, especially among voters aged 18-25. Opinion polls predict a large majority — 71 out of 120 seats — for Binyamin Netanyahu’s coalition (1). Within it, Bezalel Smotrich’s Religious Zionist Party and Itamar Ben Gvir’s Otzma Yehudit (Jewish Strength) party (2) are expected to win between 11 and 14 seats.
This development is partly the result of religious nationalist ideology becoming entrenched in parts of Israeli society. One of its main proponents is the Israeli American Yoram Hazony, who has spread it among the American and European far right. His book The Virtue of Nationalism attracted attention in conservative American circles as soon as it was published in September 2018; it became a bestseller and was translated into some 20 languages. He had been inspired to write it two years previously by seeing nationalism rise after the UK’s Brexit vote and Donald Trump’s election victory in the US. Hazony has become a key figure for many ultra-nationalists around the world and may have inspired the foreign policy known as the Trump Doctrine (3). He’s on good terms with Hungary’s president Viktor Orbán, who regularly quotes him.
My goal in life is to demonstrate that the Marxist-Zionist concept has failed in Israel ... Now we have to fight for the future of how we think about the Jewish people as a whole - Yoram Hazony
Minus its antisemitism and updated for the present day, Hazony’s position contains most of the elements of integral nationalism as theorised by the rightwing French thinker Charles Maurras (who said, ‘a true nationalist places his country above everything’): rejection of universalism, Enlightenment ideals and the principles of the French Revolution. Hazony sees the European Union as embodying a form of imperialism that seeks to recreate the Holy Roman Empire and he regards Hitler as an imperialist rather than a nationalist. (Just like his fellow Settler Fascists/National Conservatives. And see Hazony’s more recent book: "Conservatism: A Rediscovery.")
Shortly after his book appeared, Hazony founded the Edmund Burke Foundation in Washington to strengthen ‘the principles of national conservatism in Western and other democratic countries’. The Irish-born British statesman Edmund Burke was a leading critic of the French Revolution and the Declaration of the Rights of Man in 1790. The foundation’s co-chair, David Brog, is the former executive director of the American organisation Christians United for Israel, which claims to have ten million members.
In June 2022 the Burke Foundation set out its ideology in a manifesto, ‘National Conservatism: A statement of principles’ (4). The introduction reads, ‘We see the tradition of independent, self-governed nations as the foundation for restoring a proper public orientation toward patriotism and courage, honour and loyalty, religion and wisdom, congregation and family, man and woman, the sabbath and the sacred, and reason and justice. We are conservatives because we see such virtues as essential to sustaining our civilisation.’ And article 4, ‘God and Public Religion’, reads, ‘Where a Christian majority exists, public life should be rooted in Christianity and its moral vision, which should be honoured by the state and other institutions both public and private. At the same time, Jews and other religious minorities are to be protected.’
Meir Kahane’s influence
Hazony’s religious and ideological journey began as an undergraduate at Princeton. One evening in 1984, Meir Kahane came there to give a talk to 250 Jewish students. Kahane, the rabbi who founded the far-right Jewish Defense League (JDL), had been found guilty of terrorism in the US and imprisoned several times in Israel for attacks against Palestinians. In 1984 he had just been elected to the Knesset as part of an overtly racist list. His speech opened Hazony’s eyes: ‘We were mesmerised ... Rabbi Kahane was the only Jewish leader who ever cared enough about our lives to actually come around and tell us what he thought we could do. He was the only one who seemed to understand how much we wanted a good reason to stay Jewish’ (5).
Hazony, writing just after Kahane’s assassination in 1990, made clear that he never subscribed to his violent political views, but he did adopt Kahane’s neo-messianic brand of theology: ‘Let us never forget that we came here to the Land of Israel to build a Jewish, not a western country. It is Jewish values that are true, not western values (or eastern, for that matter). What is right and true is not to be determined by liberalism or democracy or progressive circles’ (6).
Five years after the Princeton talk, Hazony moved with his wife and four children to the Eli settlement in the central occupied West Bank. While working on his thesis in political philosophy, he began writing for the Jerusalem Post, Israel’s main English-language daily, which had just been acquired by a Canadian press group and moved to the right. David Bar-Ilan, its executive editor, liked the young Israeli American settler’s writing and introduced him to Binyamin Netanyahu, chairman of Likud.
Hazony helped edit Netanyahu’s A Place Among the Nations, the book which set out the future prime minister’s programme; it was published in English in 1993 and a Hebrew version followed in 1995. There were already signs of Hazony’s trademark approach to history. For example, the claim — highly contested by historians — that it was not the Romans who expelled the Jews from Palestine after the Jewish revolt under Bar Kochba in 135 AD, but the Arabs in 636, in the early days of Islam (7).
Another example of how Hazony may have influenced the book occurs when Netanyahu asserts (in the Hebrew edition) that ‘the Israeli left may be suffering from a chronic disease that has affected the Jewish people for a century: the Marxism that impregnated the Jewish leftist, far-left and communist movements in Eastern Europe.’ An affliction that might explain why, after the June 1967 war, some leftwing Israelis wanted to give back the conquered territories.
Preparing the children for settlement life: Israeli settlers, 1980
Esaias Baitel · Gamma-Rapho · Getty
‘Jewish and democratic’
In 1994, with financial backing from wealthy Americans linked to Netanyahu, Hazony set up the Shalem Center in Jerusalem, a thinktank intended to tackle the ‘identity crisis’ that ‘the entire Jewish people is suffering from’. In Nekouda, the mouthpiece of the settler movement, he explained, ‘My goal in life is to demonstrate that the Marxist-Zionist concept has failed in Israel. No one believes in it any more, and now we have to fight for the future of how we think about the Jewish people as a whole and in Israel in particular’ (8). (TP- See Mein Kampf for the German version of this, or his later book: "Conservatism: A Rediscovery.")
Let us never forget that we came here to the Land of Israel to build a Jewish, not a western country. It is Jewish values that are true, not western values (or eastern, for that matter). What is right and true is not to be determined by liberalism or democracy or progressive circles
Meir Kahane
none
In The Jewish State: the Struggle for Israel’s Soul, published six years later, Hazony claims to reveal what he sees as the great conspiracy in which ‘culture makers renounce[d] the idea of the Jewish state’. It dates back to the 1920s, he writes, when the Hebrew University of Jerusalem was set up by great Jewish intellectuals, including Judah Leon Magnes, an American Reform rabbi, pacifist and opponent of nationalism, and the philosopher Martin Buber, an advocate of reaching an agreement with the Arabs and supporter of a binational state. Hazony accuses the historian and philosopher Gershom Scholem, who was a specialist in Jewish mysticism, of committing the crime of urging Zionist leaders to neutralise their movement’s messianic tendencies. According to Hazony, this ‘systematically strip[ped Zionism’s] Jewish basis of political pretensions’ (9).
Hazony also takes Asa Kasher, a philosopher at Tel Aviv University, to task for his definition of ‘a Jewish and democratic state’: ‘ “A Jewish state” in the full sense of the term is a state in whose social colouration there is found the clear _expression_ of ... the Jewish identities of its citizens. In a “Jewish and democratic” state this colouration is not created by force, nor in the law, but rather through the aggregation of the free choices of the citizens.’ To which Hazony responds, ‘Kasher claims that a “Jewish and democratic” state is one in which the people are Jewish and the state is a universalist democracy. In other words, a “Jewish and democratic Jewish state” is a non-Jewish state’ (10). According to this logic, the democratic principle would thus lead to the dejudaisation of Israel.
Hazony’s list of enemies of his vision of Israel is long. Top of that list are the Supreme Court’s justices and its former president, Aharon Barak, who oversaw the constitutional reform and defined Israel’s values as a Jewish state as ‘universal values common to the members of a democratic society’. Hazony criticises Israel’s leading writers too for rejecting the very concept of a Jewish state. Among them are the late Amos Oz, who considered nationalism humanity’s curse, and the late AB Yehoshua, who argued that Israel should be treated as a normal country. Also targeted is the writer David Grossmann, who ‘earnestly seeks to teach Israelis that it is weakness that gives birth to virtue [and yet] to embrace it is to demolish the foundation on which the entire edifice of the Jewish state rests’ (11).
Hazony, through his ties to the Republicans and the Jewish right in the US, is a central part of the religious Zionist ideological ecosystem of messianic rabbis and ultra-nationalist organisations that has built up over years. The Tikvah Fund, created in 1998, finances most of them through donations from wealthy Americans. The Kohelet Policy Forum, founded in 2012, is a religious Zionist thinktank which, according to the daily Haaretz, quietly runs the Knesset (12). Its lobbying helped have a discriminatory new basic law passed in July 2018. This stipulates, ‘The State of Israel is the nation state of the Jewish People in which it realises its natural, cultural, religious and historical right to self-determination. The realisation of the right to national self-determination in the State of Israel is exclusive to the Jewish People ... The State views the development of Jewish settlement as a national value, and shall act to encourage and promote its establishment and consolidation.’ Twenty-four years after he set up the Shalem Center, Yoram Hazony’s ideas have become the law of the land.