Juan Cole 05/03/2024
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Going back to the late nineteenth century, Zionism has had a complex and storied history, and there have been many strains of the ideology. Some early Zionists did not insist on colonizing Palestine, while others did (and colonizing it was the word they used). All agreed that the Jewish religion should be made a platform for erecting a nation-state, though where and how was initially a somewhat open question. Some Zionists were socialists and early some Zionist labor organizations were open to having Palestinian members, as Zachary Lockmanshowed. Before the 1940s, most Jews were offended by Zionist ideas, insisting that their religion was not a national ideology and they were loyal citizens of their countries of birth, a loyalty on which they feared the Zionists would cast doubt. Leftist Jews decried Zionism as a form of nationalist chauvinism. Some American Jews say they are Zionists in the sense of just being proud of the considerable accomplishments of the Jewish people, without necessarily buying into feelings of ethnic superiority or entitlement.
In the first quarter of the twenty-first century, however, there is only one politically successful tendency in the Zionist movement in Israel. The people in power adhere to forms of right wing Zionism. These are a witches brew of virulent ethno-nationalism and open hatred of the Other. They differ mainly in whether they are secular, as with the Likud Party of Benjamin Netanyahu or Yisrael Beitenu of Avigdor Lieberman, or whether they are rooted in Jewish fundamentalism, as with Religious Zionism and Jewish Power or Shas.
Right wing Zionism has many resemblances with the MAGA movement spearheaded by Donald J. Trump (or spearheaded by him when he was not engaging in massive real estate fraud or shtupping porn stars and then buying their silence).
1. Both are ethno-nationalist supremacy movements. Trump may be the least likely leader for white Christian nationalism, but that is the mantle he has managed to assume. He routinely denigrates Hispanics. He called COVID-19 the “Chinese flu” and got ordinary Chinese-Americans mugged over it. He referred to the non-white countries of the global south as sh*thole countries. He excoriates immigrants as a criminal class. But some 14% of Americans are foreign born, most immigrated legally, and the success of the US economically and geopolitically depends on them.
If Trump is about white Christians being on top, Netanyahu is all about Jewish supremacy. He has made a career of fomenting anti-Palestinian racism, smearing an entire people as terrorists. He characterized social expenditures on a fifth of Israeli citizens by his predecessor, Naftali Bennett, as giving away millions of shekels to “Arabs.” One of the reasons given for wanting to neuter the Supreme Court by Netanyahu’s Justice Minister Yariv Levin was that “Arabs are buying apartments in the Galilee and causing Jews to leave.” They back the squatter movement of Israelis to move into the Palestine occupied territories and steal privately-owned Palestinian farms and orchards, building Jewish-only settlements on them and going wilding in Palestinian towns, shooting them up and setting fires at will.
Netanyahu takes this line even though 21% of Israelis are of Palestinian heritage and they make up about a quarter of Israeli physicians. But that includes the elderly. In the younger generation, Palestinians are a much bigger proportion of the medical sector. In 2021, nearly half of all new physicians’ licenses were granted to what I term Palestinian-Israelis (on the model of Italian-Americans).
The Hill Video: “Netanyahu Threatens REVENGE If Charged With War Crimes”
2. Both movements use apocalyptic and violent language. Running for president the first time, Trump said of oil fields in Syria controlled by the ISIL terrorist movement, “I would bomb the s— out of them. I would just bomb those suckers. And that’s right: I’d blow up the pipes, I’d blow up the refineries. I would blow up every single inch. There would be nothing left.” He asked one of his policy advisers what the point was of having nuclear weapons if we can’t use them. Of Gaza, Trump says he is impatient for Netanyahu to “finish the job.”
Netanyahu’s finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, recently insisted on genocide in what is left of Gaza: “No half jobs. Rafah, Deir al-Balah, Nuseirat, total and utter destruction.” Netanyahu had already invoked the “Amalek” doctrine, of wiping out the enemy root and branch. He has dropped more than an atomic bomb’s worth of munitions on the civilian apartment buildings of Gaza.
3. The leaders of both movements put on messianic airs. Trump tells campaign rallies “I am the only one that can save this nation.”
Netanyahu characterizes himself as the only one who can prevent a Palestinian state, the only one who can “handle” the Americans, the only one who can create prosperity in Israel through his Neoliberal policies.
4. Both MAGA and right wing Zionism are built on a tissue of lies. Trump has told thousands of lies. He says he won the 2020 election. He says he never slept with Stormy Daniels. He says climate change is a Chinese hoax. He says wind turbines cause cancer. Virulent nationalist ideologies require daily duplicity, since people are all the same and there are no real races in the 19th century sense, so a doctrine of racial supremacy is always in danger of being revealed to be illusory.
Zionists have likewise erected a vast tissue of lies. Palestine was “empty,” at a time in the early twentieth century when there were a million Palestinians and a few tens of thousands of Zionist colonists. “A land without a people for a people without a land.” Honest Zionists like Ahad Ha’am (Asher Hirsch Ginsberg) came out to Palestine and saw that it was full of people, and warned that their rights must not be violated. Other Zionists privately acknowledged that the plan was to render an entire people homeless. Nur Masalha writes, “In June 1938, Ben-Gurion told a meeting of the Jewish Agency, ‘I support compulsory transfer. I don’t see anything immoral in it.'” More recently Zionists have maintained that the Israeli army is the most moral in the world, despite its role in slow-motion ethnic cleansing in the Palestinian West Bank and in rapid ethnic cleansing, not to say genocide, in Gaza. They have said that the UN Relief and Works Agency that provides aid to Palestinians is a terrorist organization, and the world community cut UNRWA off during an investigation that discovered the Israeli government to be lying. These were precious weeks in which an Israeli-imposed famine began in Gaza. In the US, Zionists falsely allege that mere oral critiques of Zionism make them feel physically “unsafe,” in an attempt to manipulate outsiders.
One could go on.
Both movements are lawless, with Trump vowing to act unconstitutionally and Netanyahu vowing to gut the Israel Supreme Court. Both are corrupt, with both leaders on trial for various forms of corruption.
No wonder there is a budding love fest between Smotrich and Trump, once Trump rejected the two-state solution and renounced the idea of a Palestinian state.
Both movements depend on hogging all the rights for their ethnic group, and reducing others to second- or third-class citizens.