More on “Third Way Fascism.” (Was it an “accident" that Quincy Institute favorite, “Third Way Foreign Policy” Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts chose that term to describe Heritage's fascist-like Project 2025?)
Quote: "The proposal for Israel to distribute aid sounds good at first, until considering Smotrich's three stated aims: first, permanent Israeli control over Gaza after the war; second, Israeli control will be implemented through a military regime; third, that this military government will have both military and civilian control.
. . .
"Smotrich is thus trying to leverage the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza, the orders of the International Court of Justice, and some American cajoling to get humanitarian aid in, as a launchpad for the future occupation-annexation of Gaza, with a high likelihood of mass Palestinian exodus in the meantime.
"He's not a member of the war cabinet – but consider the trickle-up effect. He plants the seed, and – as Haaretz reported today – Smotrich now claims that Netanyahu has asked the army to look into the possibility.” (Emphasis added, as underlining what is the embodiment of “Cognitive Operations.”
When Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich gave an interview on Channel 12 last week, it took him just a few split seconds to lay out the astonishing path Israel is – or at least some influential decision-makers are – forging for the future.
"We must not let the aid in through UNRWA… in order to comply with international law… we will get aid in and distribute it by ourselves."
When the hosts argued how dangerous it would be, he said, slowing down for effect: "Listen to what I'm saying: There. Will. Be. A military government in Gaza. Because everyone agrees that we need to stay in Gaza and control it militarily, and there's no military control without civilian control." That last part was spoken so fast, it's as if Smotrich hopes you'll miss it.
This roughly 10-second exchange contains multitudes. First, Smotrich asserts that Israel should comply with international law, by finding a means to get humanitarian aid to Gaza. The world will probably consider that a step in the right direction.
But what happens today sets the course for tomorrow; this is a rule of thumb regarding Israeli-Palestinian relations.
The proposal for Israel to distribute aid sounds good at first, until considering Smotrich's three stated aims: first, permanent Israeli control over Gaza after the war; second, Israeli control will be implemented through a military regime; third, that this military government will have both military and civilian control.
Displaced Palestinian women and gather on a sand dune above a makeshift camp on the Egyptian border, west of Rafah in southern Gaza in January.Credit: AFP
As I've observed before, there is no such thing in practice as Israeli military control over Palestinians that does not ultimately entail civilian control. The Areas A, B and C fiction in the West Bank – which holds that Palestinians control civilian affairs in about 40 percent of the region (A and B) as per the Oslo Accords – just means that Israel influences every aspect of Palestinian life, but declines to pick up the trash or provide health services and social welfare benefits.
Smotrich is thus trying to leverage the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza, the orders of the International Court of Justice, and some American cajoling to get humanitarian aid in, as a launchpad for the future occupation-annexation of Gaza, with a high likelihood of mass Palestinian exodus in the meantime.
He's not a member of the war cabinet – but consider the trickle-up effect. He plants the seed, and – as Haaretz reported today – Smotrich now claims that Netanyahu has asked the army to look into the possibility.
Earlier this week, leaks of a briefing by Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for the Knesset's Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee showed contradictory positions: the Kan public broadcaster reported that Gallant said a "Gazan actor" will run the Strip after the war. But Ynet reported he said: "It's totally clear that Hamas will not rule in Gaza, Israel will rule militarily, but not civilian rule." Maybe Gallant has convinced himself of the false separation. His office did not answer requests for clarification.
Defense Minister Yoav Gallant speaks at a press conference in November.Credit: Moti Milrod
This week, it became clear why fringe-radicals should never be dismissed. Historically, it was a bunch of dancing, divinely-inspired activists who moved into the Park Hotel in Hebron for a Passover seder in 1968 and formed the kernel of what later became Kiryat Arba, and the settlement movement.
But there's another phenomenon too often ignored in this conflict: the perfect partnership of ideological fringes and the institutions of the Israeli state. As Gershom Gorenberg has argued in his book "The Accidental Empire," which just never gets old, it was the heavy, if semi-tacit involvement of the Labor-led government in the first decade after 1967 that provided the support system to the whole project in its infancy.
Five decades later, the state-settler partnership has made the settlements almost irreversible, and the partnership is thriving. Recall that Smotrich holds a ministerial position in the Defense Ministry, together with Gallant. In that civilian perch, he has appropriated powers once held by the military to govern Jewish Israeli settlers; ending the fiction of the temporary military occupation, while institutionalizing unequal rule over Jews and Palestinians under civilian authorities.
An Israeli flag is painted on a wall surrounding the Jewish settlement of Migdalim near the Palestinian town of Nablus in the West Bank, 2022.Credit: Ariel Schalit /AP
And it's a two-way street: Lately, the army is also adopting settler tactics on the ground in the West Bank. Shira Livne, who directs the unit for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories at the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, told me that the IDF has recruited settlers to regional defense units after the war began, such that "the same settlers who attacked Palestinians are now the ones in charge, and can continue their attacks under the protection of the uniform."
Haaretz's Hagar Shezaf recently reported that about 5,500 residents of the settlements have been drafted into regional defense battalions since the war started. "They are now serving as part of the IDF in the West Bank," she explains in an article about reports of their violence against Palestinians.
According to Livne, "It has become increasingly hard to distinguish between settlers' violence and unlawful military operations."
Think of this as scenario planning. Allowing Israel to distribute humanitarian aid through the establishment of a military government is a straight shot to the replication of this West Bank nightmare, the merging of settler and military violence against Palestinians by an authoritarian state. Israelis: What further proof do you need to know that these practices will color Israeli governance over all the people it rules?
Policymakers, beware: Everyone wants humanitarian aid to reach Gaza, but today's policies will chart a course for the future.
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