Re: [Salon] America must face up to Israel’s extremism

[Todd Pierce <todd.e.pierce@icloud.com>]

Pardon my heavy highlighting below in the "Israel’s extremism” article, but it’s for my personal reference. Adding to that article however, is the Le Monde article which draws the logical and necessary conclusion: "The third political force in Israel represents what we must reluctantly call 'Jewish fascism.’'

Which is indisputably what we see in Israel today. And consequently, under the “equality relation” of logic, ideologically like-minded supporters, must too be seen as this variety of “fascism.” 

Though the word “fascist” isn’t used to describe “Israel’s extremists,” the author of this Le Monde piece doesn’t hesitate to correctly do so: 

https://www.lemonde.fr/en/opinion/article/2022/11/16/the-third-political-force-in-israel-represents-what-we-must-reluctantly-call-jewish-fascism_6004446_23.html
"After all, Mr. Netanyahu has been inciting hatred between Jews and Arabs for two decades, undermining the legitimacy of the judicial system and making religion the basis of national identity. But there is an important difference here. Mr. Netanyahu is a "conventional" right-wing populist, similar to Mr. Modi, Mr. Orban or Mr. Trump. Itamar Ben-Gvir, the leader of Religious Zionism, is beyond populism. He represents what we must reluctantly call "Jewish fascism."

"For those who, like me, define themselves as Zionists – believing that, despite its iniquities, the creation of a Jewish national home was legitimate and necessary – writing these words – Jewish fascism – is shocking. But a number of facts leave no choice."

My only quibble is her failure to see the “'conventional" right-wing” populists, like Netanyahu, as the same, except as differently located points on the same spectrum of “Democratic Fascism.” 

What they have in common, along with Yoram Hazony and his “National Conservative Movement,” is they’re all “interlinked" by way of the Tikvah Fund, Kohelet Forum, the US Federalist Society, CPAC, etc., as “Third Force” or “Third Way” Movements, as described here:

https://brill.com/view/journals/fasc/11/2/article-p187_3.xml?language=en

"Within the field of fascism studies the trope of the ‘third way’ has served as an invaluable asset in terms of granting fascism ideological autonomy and originality; and this is why it is now widely recognised as one of the core ideological components of generic fascism.6 Yet, in presenting fascism as the ‘third way’ of interwar politics—a canonical post-liberal alternative situated either between or beyond revolutionary left and conservative-authoritarian right—we may have inadvertently narrowed down and flattened a prodigious, heterogeneous, and supremely volatile field of political interplay and rogue alchemy. These dissident thirding processes not only predated the historical emergence of fascism but also stretched much further than the relatively narrow field of ni droite-ni gauche ‘national socialists’ or angry interwar radical nationalists. They also continued to drive fresh ideological/political mobilities within and across seemingly bounded categories throughout the 1920s and 1930s, with diverse third-way propositions appearing as native solutions but then circulating across national boundaries and constantly interacting with context-specific ingredients to produce a constant stream of new thirding revisions and syntheses. Therefore, rather than approaching fascism as the outcome of particular genealogies of left-right dissident intermediation, rather than seeing it as the product of either dissident synthesis or total rejection of existing ideological binaries, I see instead ‘thirding’ processes as one of the key drivers of fascism’s continuous ideological and political reinvention, reproduction, mobility, and protean adaptability.8Studying these complex processes, rather than simply their assumed outcomes, can shed invaluable light on fascism’s continuous interactions with a host of contemporary ideological and political projects stretching from the authoritarian and the conservative right to the liberal centre, within and across different local contexts.” (Emphasis added.) 

As we saw with Netanyahu and Trump, being at the “center of Universal Fascism” of the last decade, when SCL Corporation or other “election interference” specialists of private “Influence” firms, like Cambridge Analytica under Steve Bannon and Peter Thiel’s Palantir, or “private” Israeli intell firms specializing in election interference; whenever they succeeded in bringing about the election of a new Israel friendly “Authoritarian, like Modi or Bolsonaro, Netanyahu and Trump were quick to welcome them into the “Democratic Fascist Club.” 

https://www.ips-journal.eu/topics/foreign-and-security-policy/america-must-face-up-to-israels-extremism-7268/

25.01.2024 | Michelle Goldberg

America must face up to Israel’s extremism

The resettlement of Palestinians from Gaza is slowly becoming a key official policy of the Israeli government

picture alliance / REUTERS | Evelyn HocksteinThe Biden administration condemned Ben-Gvir and Smotrich’s endorsements of ethnic cleansing. But in doing so, it acted as if their provocations are fundamentally at odds with the worldview of Netanyahu, to whom America continues to give unconditional backing.

Two far-right members of Israel’s Cabinet – the national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, and the finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich – caused an international uproar this week with their calls to depopulate the Gaza Strip. ‘If in Gaza there will be 100 000 or 200 000 Arabs and not 2 million the entire conversation on “the day after” will look different’, said Smotrich, who called for most civilians in Gaza to be resettled in other countries. The war, said Ben-Gvir, presents an ‘opportunity to concentrate on encouraging the migration of the residents of Gaza’, facilitating Israeli settlement in the region.

The Biden administration has joined countries all over the world in condemning these naked endorsements of ethnic cleansing. But in doing so, it acted as if Ben-Gvir and Smotrich’s provocations are fundamentally at odds with the worldview of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, to whom America continues to give unconditional backing. In a statement denouncing the ministers’ words as ‘inflammatory and irresponsible’, the State Department said, ‘we have been told repeatedly and consistently by the government of Israel, including by the prime minister, that such statements do not reflect the policy of the Israeli government.’ Rep. Jim McGovern, a Democrat who has called for a cease-fire, thanked the State Department in a social media post, saying, ‘it must be clear that America will not write a blank check for mass displacement.’

But it’s not clear, because we’re writing a blank check to a government whose leader is only a bit more coy than Ben-Gvir and Smotrich about his intentions for Gaza. According to The Times of Israel, Netanyahu told a Likud faction he is searching for countries that residents of the Gaza Strip can be sent to. ‘Our problem’, he reportedly said, is finding ‘countries that are willing to absorb Gazans, and we are working on it.’ The newspaper reported that ‘the “voluntary” resettlement of Palestinians from Gaza is slowly becoming a key official policy of the government, with a senior official saying that Israel has held talks with several countries for their potential absorption.’

Saying the quiet part out loud

Some in Israel’s government have denied this, mostly on grounds of impracticality. ‘It’s a baseless illusion, in my opinion: no country will absorb 2 million people, or 1 million, or 100 000, or 5 000’, one official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, told Israeli journalists. And Thursday, Israel’s defence minister, Yoav Gallant, released a plan for the day after the war that said that, contrary to the dreams of the ultranationalists, there would be no Israeli settlement in Gaza.

But with its widespread destruction of Gaza’s civilian infrastructure, including roughly 70 per cent of its housing, Israel is making most of Gaza uninhabitable for the foreseeable future. Disease is rampant in Gaza, hunger almost universal, and the United Nations reports that much of the enclave is at risk of famine. Amid all this horror, members of Netanyahu’s Likud party – such as Danny Danon, Israel’s former ambassador to the United Nations, and Gila Gamliel, Israel’s intelligence minister – are pushing emigration as a humanitarian solution.

Joe Biden often speaks of his 1973 meeting with Golda Meir, then the prime minister, and like many American Zionists, his view of Israel sometimes seems stuck in that era.

‘Instead of funnelling money to rebuild Gaza or to the failed UNRWA’, the United Nations agency that works with Palestinian refugees, ‘the international community can assist in the costs of resettlement, helping the people of Gaza build new lives in their new host countries’, wrote Gamliel in The Jerusalem Post. Right now, this is a grotesque fantasy. But as Gaza’s suffering ratchets up, some sort of evacuation might come to appear to be a necessary last resort. At least, that’s what some prominent Israeli officials seem to be counting on.

After Hamas’ sadistic attack on Israel on 7 October, Israel was justified in retaliating; any country would have. But there is a difference between the war Israel’s liberal supporters want to pretend that the country is fighting in Gaza and the war Israel is actually waging.

Pro-Israel Democrats want to back a war to remove Hamas from Gaza. But increasingly, it looks as if America is underwriting a war to remove Gazans from Gaza. Experts in international law can debate whether the forced displacement of Palestinians from Gaza can be classified as genocidal, as South Africa is claiming at the International Court of Justice, or as some lesser type of war crime. But whatever you want to call attempts to ‘thin out’ Gaza’s population – as Hebrew newspaper Israel Hayom described an alleged Netanyahu proposal – the United States is implicated in them.

But this attitude, which Israelis sometimes call ‘shooting and crying’, is now as obsolete as Meir’s Zionist socialism, at least among Israel’s leaders.

By acting as if Ben-Gvir and Smotrich can be hived off from the government in which they serve, US policymakers are fostering denial about the character of Netanyahu’s rule. Joe Biden often speaks of his 1973 meeting with Golda Meir, then the prime minister, and like many American Zionists, his view of Israel sometimes seems stuck in that era.

If you grew up in a liberal Zionist household, as I did, you’ve probably heard this (possibly apocryphal) Meir quote: ‘when peace comes, we will perhaps in time be able to forgive the Arabs for killing our sons, but it will be harder for us to forgive them for having forced us to kill their sons.’ There’s much to criticise in this sentiment — its self-regard, the way it positions Israel as the victim even when it’s doing the killing; still, it at least suggests a tortured ambivalence about meting out violence. But this attitude, which Israelis sometimes call ‘shooting and crying’, is now as obsolete as Meir’s Zionist socialism, at least among Israel’s leaders.

Among both American and European politicians, said my friend Daniel Levy, a former Israeli negotiator with the Palestinians who now heads the US/Middle East Project, there’s a ‘willful refusal to take seriously just how extreme this government is — whether before 7 October or subsequently.’ I’m tempted to say that Ben-Gvir and Smotrich said the quiet part out loud, but in truth, they just said the loud part louder.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.