Executive Summary
Israel’s new far-right government: Unprecedented challenges and opportunities
Supporting the recent pogrom by fascist Jewish-Israeli militias against Palestinians in Huwara near Nablus in the occupied Palestinian territory and overtly inciting state terrorism, senior Israeli government minister, Bezalel Smotrich, a self-declared “fascist,” said, “I think Huwara needs to be erased. The state should be the one to do that.”
Israel’s new far-right government is the most racist, fundamentalist, sexist, corrupt, authoritarian and homophobic ever—without masks. It constitutes simultaneously an escalation in Israel’s ongoing settler-colonial and apartheid policies against Indigenous Palestinians and a potentially radical departure in its far-reaching plans for judicial, social and cultural “reforms” affecting Jewish Israeli society, and most likely Israeli economy. This provides advocates of Palestinian rights worldwide, particularly in the BDS movement, an even more urgent responsibility and an opportunity that is unprecedented in 74 years.
Fierce and radical reactions from within the Israeli political-military-economic establishment, supported by stronger rhetoric from Israel’s anti-Palestinian Western funders, enablers and defenders, are setting precedents that can potentially help to expose the foundations of Israel’s regime of settler-colonialism, apartheid and military occupation to much wider audiences worldwide.
But opportunities alone do not lead to change but only provide the fertile ground for it. The anti-racist BDS movement for Palestinian freedom, justice and equality, led by the largest Palestinian coalition ever, has a special responsibility to push the limits even further in exposing Israel’s regime of oppression and holding it accountable while, at the same time, carefully, accurately and effectively analyzing the current realities to help guide our human rights campaigning. If ever there was a time to get out of our comfort zones and further grow our intersectional movement and mainstream BDS pressure, it is now!
1. Introduction
Supporting the recent pogrom by fascist Jewish-Israeli militias against Palestinians in Huwara near Nablus in the occupied Palestinian territory and overtly inciting state terrorism, senior Israeli government minister, Bezalel Smotrich, a self-declared “fascist,” said, “I think Huwara needs to be erased. The state should be the one to do that.” Smotrich, however, is not the first Israeli leader to publicly embrace or threaten genocidal acts against Indigenous Palestinians. Labor Party leader Matan Vilnai in 2008 threatened Palestinians with “a bigger shoah [Holocaust]” if resistance groups did not stop their armed retaliation to Israel’s criminal siege and violent attacks on Gaza. A recent error by Israel’s censors has accidentally revealed secret documents exposing David Ben Gurion’s support for “wiping out” Palestinian villages during the 1948 Nakba, with a minister in his first government admitting, “Let us say that instances of rape occurred in [the ethnically cleansed Palestinian city] Ramle. I can forgive instances of rape, but I will not forgive other acts,” such as forcibly removing “jewelry from women.”
Still, Israel’s new far-right government is the most racist, fundamentalist, sexist, corrupt, authoritarian and homophobic ever—without masks. It constitutes simultaneously an escalation in Israel’s ongoing regime of colonial oppression against Indigenous Palestinians and a potential rupture with the status quo in its far-reaching plans for judicial, social and cultural “reforms” affecting Jewish Israeli society, and most likely Israeli economy as well. Nothing less than a reconfiguration of the Zionist settler-colonial project is beginning to take shape. This provides advocates of Palestinian rights worldwide, particularly in the BDS movement, an even more urgent responsibility and an opportunity that is unprecedented in 74 years.
Opportunities alone, though, do not lead to change; they only provide the fertile ground for it. We still need to maximize our morally-consistent and strategic movement building efforts to have enough people’s power to realize a qualitative change in exposing the true face of Israel’s regime of oppression and holding it to account, as a contribution to the Palestinian liberation struggle. The anti-racist BDS movement, led by the largest Palestinian coalition ever, has a special responsibility to push the limits even further in this respect while, at the same time, carefully, accurately and effectively analyzing the current developments to help guide our evolving, context-sensitive human rights campaigning. Following is an analysis of the main changes happening in Israeli society and their potential impact on the struggle for Palestinian liberation in general and the BDS movement in particular.
2. Different in kind or in degree?
This far-right Israeli government constitutes simultaneously:
(a) A difference in degree vs. the Indigenous Palestinians, as it is merely a more fanatic, unmasked continuation of Israel’s 74-year-old regime of settler-colonialism and apartheidi, and
(b) A difference in kind vs. Israel’s settler-colonial society, as it is the most corrupt, authoritarian, fundamentalist, sexist and homophobic ever.
Where this government’s plans differ in kind is in the social, cultural and judicial policies that predominantly affect Jewish-Israeli society, where corruption and populism are assuming an unprecedented role in guiding radical change in governance. This is already impacting Israel’s economy and leading to a beginning of a “capital flight” that deeply worries Israeli economic planners.
The outrage of Israel’s “secular” Zionist, predominantly Ashkenazi establishment (represented by ranking politicians, bankers, high-tech executives, military-security leaders, academics, media personalities, economists, jurists, cultural figures, and others) and its supporters in the colonial West’s liberal mainstream revolves around (b) not (a). In their analyses, angry attacks on the “coup regime,” and their proposed “solutions,” they strive to at once erase Palestinians from the equation and whitewash the ongoing regime of oppression against us.ii
i An excellent resource on apartheid as a tool of Israel’s settler-colonial regime since 1948 is the report published in November 2022 by Al-Haq, the leading Palestinian human rights organization. A historical reference document is the January 2023 Call for a Global Front to Dismantle Israel’s Regime of Settler-Colonialism and Apartheid, authored by the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) Anti-Apartheid Department, in partnership with the BDS Movement, the Palestinian NGO Network (PNGO), the Palestinian Ministry of Justice, and the Palestinian Human Rights Organizations Council (PHROC), with the participation of legal experts, journalists, political activists, academics and supporters. Even the Haaretz editorial board now says that the Israeli government is advancing a “full-fledged apartheid” in the OPT.
ii As B’Tselem’s Hagai El-Ad writes, “The current debate in Israel is not about the actual oppression of Palestinians—a matter of broad consensus—but about how and to what extent their rights should be trampled.”
3. Defending Settler Democracy
A quick examination of the main accusations this establishment opposition throws at the new government, or parts of it, underlines this conscious and persistent erasure of the Indigenous Palestinians: “fascist,”i “fascistic messianic,”ii “authoritarian,” “attacking freedom itself,” “naked illiberalism,” even a “threat to world peace.” Former Israeli political, military, judiciary and even financial leaders are shouting in mass protests that the government plans may “cripple the economy,” incite a “civil war,” lead to “constitutional and social collapse,” ignite a “legal intifada,” cause a “mortal wound to democracy,” “kill Israel’s media,” “override human rights,” etc.
The fascist tendency that is now commonly mentioned in the Israeli mainstreambeing undermined now has always been integral to political Zionism. But it is now stronger and more audacious than ever in the current Israeli government, where senior ministersiiiopenly advocate, cheer or otherwise embolden genocidal or extremely violent and racist theories or “solutions” to the Indigenous Palestinian “problIlan Pappe calls item.”
Kahanismiv, which a Haaretz chief editor calls “the Jewish variant of fascism,”v is now squarely in the mainstream and in senior government positions, and this provides us with an important opportunity to expose the structures of oppression. Any state that is supposedly democratic and respects international law, no matter how hypocritical it may be, will find it significantly more difficult than ever, when faced with organized, effective resistance by the growing solidarity movement, to defend its warm – complicit – relations with Israel based on the pretense of “common democratic values.” But again, opportunity alone will not end complicity. An effective, strategic and principled mass solidarity movement can, or at least can be a major catalyst, as happened in several Western states against apartheid South Africa.
The elephant in the room that the Israeli opposition and its anti-Palestinian supporters are intentionally ignoring is that the real, overarching goal of this Israeli government, like all previous ones, is to entrench settler colonialism by accelerating de facto and de jure annexation of more of the occupied Palestinian territory. The High Court/Supreme Court, despite supporting and enabling Israel’s illegal settlement enterprise and shielding its war crimes from international accountability for decades, is still accused by the far-right, led all along by Likudvi, of hindering the completion of Israel’s settler-colonial project that the coalition sees as its most fundamental goal, as Netanyahu admitted in his infamous but honest tweetvii.
These attacks on a sitting Israeli government from within the Israeli establishment reflect genuine fear that its “irrational” and “irresponsible” plans may expose the true face of Israel’s regime of oppression and unravel fundamental aspects of Israel’s colonial settler democracy.viii You “cannot square the circle of ‘Jewish democracy,’” after all. Israel has indeed been a relatively vibrant democracy for its Jewish colonial settlers while simultaneously maintaining a brutal regime of oppression over the Indigenous Palestinian Arabs, including refugees. As Ilan Pappe calls it, Israel is a “herrenvolk democracy, democracy only for the masters.” It is this herrenvolk democracy, or what Peter Beinart calls “liberal democracy for Jews” only, that is being undermined now.
Daniel Blatman, a prominent Israeli scholar of fascism, Nazism, and the Holocaust, says Israel has “a populist government that is approaching fascism.” Yet in a long interview, in which he fails to mention Palestinians once, he focuses on the government’s “judicial reforms” saying:
If these judicial ‘reforms’ are implemented, in a reality as complex as that of Israel, it will lead to disaster. We are not Poland. In Poland, there will be an election in half a year. Whether or not the government is replaced, the people there will live with it. But in the place where Israel is, with its domestic social composition, with the occupation, with a minority [Arab] population of 20 percent, with such a complex state of affairs in terms of security, society, the economy – populism is a recipe for ruin. Not only of moral values, but of the country’s entire existence. ...
What was once extreme right is today center. Ideas that were once on the fringes have become legitimate. As a historian whose field is the Holocaust and Nazism, it’s hard for me to say this, but there are neo-Nazi ministers in the government today. You don’t see that anywhere else – not in Hungary, not in Poland – ministers who, ideologically, are pure racists. [Emphases added]
What Blatman and his ilk are really terrified of is that this “fascism,” which has always been a genuine and organic component of Zionist settler-colonialism directed against Indigenous Palestinians, is reaching its logical conclusion: morphing into a serious threat to the Jewish-Israeli establishment itself, potentially unraveling some of its foundations.ix A racist regime of oppression cannot prevent the racism that is inherent in its system of injustice against the oppressed from spreading to its own society of oppressors, as some honest Israeli commentators now admit.x
The fact that Israel’s Supreme Court has consistently been a pillar of the settler-colonial system that provides an indispensable “legal iron dome” shielding Israeli war criminals from international accountability does not register on the Zionist establishment opposition’s radar. Of its many crimes against Palestinians, for instance, the High Court in 2021 upheld the 2018 Jewish nation state law, which declared that “the right to exercise national self-determination” in Israel is “unique to the Jewish people.” It thus formally defined Palestinian citizens of Israel as second-class citizens, a status that they’ve always had. In 2022, the High Court – one of whose justices resides in an illegal settlement in the 1967 occupied Palestinian territory (OPT) – greenlighted the forced expulsion of 1,000 Palestinians from their homes in Masafer Yatta in the occupied West Bank to make way for an army “training zone.” The decision explicitly rejected the principle that international law is “customary and binding” in the OPT.
Orly Noy, the Chair of B’Tselem, reflected on this court complicity saying, “I won’t go to a protest in Tel Aviv where there are military figures on stage, saying that we must fight the judicial reforms because otherwise the international community will have grounds to send our people to the international criminal court. The focus should be on not committing war crimes in the first place. I can’t demonstrate to protect the status quo.”
i Primo Levi, a prominent Jewish-Italian expert on fascism, famously wrote that fascism was “very far from being dead. It was only hidden … keeping quiet, to reappear later under a new guise, a little less recognizable, a little more respectable.” Fascism has never before been used as extensively in the hegemonic Western mainstream and the Israeli media as it has in the last few months to describe key tendencies in the new Israeli government, with the focus being almost exclusively on Jewish Israelis as the perceived victims of these tendencies. See, for instance, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here. This more than anything else has the potential to undo Israel’s carefully and quite effectively projected propaganda image of being “the only democracy in the Middle East.”
ii In a precedent, a senior government minister recently said, "I'm a fascist homophobe.” Regardless, while it is important to highlight this fascist tendency, particularly in the West, describing the whole government as fascist is – until now – inaccurate and may unnecessarily alienate potential allies.
iii The Israeli minister of propaganda (hasbara), for instance, in trying to justify Israeli war crimes refers to Palestinians as being “brainwashed murderers programmed to seek Jewish blood since age zero.”
iv Rabbi Meir Kahane famously repeated in his popular rallies in Israel, especially in mixed Palestinian-Jewish towns, that while there is only one Kahane who speaks out, there are a million Kahanes who remain silent. Now there are more than a million Kahanes, voters of the fascist parties, that are emboldened to overtly defend their genocidal plans, while millions of other Kahanes remain silent. According to the most authoritative survey of Jewish Israeli opinion, 62% define themselves as being on the “Right,” which is equivalent to the far-right elsewhere by international standards; almost 50% believe that “Jewish citizens of Israel should have more rights than non-Jewish citizens;” 43% prefer to see Israel more Jewish than democratic; 66% think that human rights organizations cause damage to the state; and the institution they trust the most is the Israeli army (88% trust on average).
v Ironically, Meir Kahane used to call his “leftist” Jewish opponents who tried to cancel him, “fascists.” In a presentation in the US in 1984, for instance, he pointed at his Jewish opponents shouting, “Don't talk to me, you leftists, about love of Jews. I know what you are! Fascists? Those are the fascists!”
vi Likud’s Central Committee voted overwhelmingly in 2017 to support the full annexation of the OPT.
vii English translation of Netanyahu’s tweet: “The Jewish people have an exclusive and unquestionable right to all areas of the Land of Israel. The government will promote and develop settlement in all parts of the Land of Israel — in the Galilee, the Negev, the Golan, Judea and Samaria.”
viii Israeli journalist Meron Rapoport writes, “Like other settler colonies, such as the United States, Canada, and South Africa, Zionism boasted that it had established a ‘model society’ in Palestine — for the settlers, of course, not for the indigenous population. One of the manifestations of this ‘model society’ was the internal democracy that the Zionist movement established between the river and the sea.” Israeli sociologist Eva Illouz writes, “Like many other examples of settler nationalism, the history of Zionism is a chronicle of force that is required to overcome an indigenous population. The history of Zionism is also the history of the mythologizing of that force.”
ix Yossi Klein writes in Haaretz, for instance: “For 75 years they dribbled fascism in the schools without calling it by name. ‘Love of country,’ ‘settlement,’ ‘far right.’ They taught us that we are better than the whole world, but also its victims. Thanks to the connection between self-pity and arrogance, we did what democracy rejects and fascism accepts. Every education minister contributed to the advancement of fascism. Every curriculum reinforced it. They diluted it with ingredients meant to cloud its essence; ‘our right to the land’ gave us the right to expel refugees and torment the occupied. Parents rubbed their eyes in disbelief: They went to sleep with good kids and woke up with shock troops. If they really want to know where their children got this evil from, they should go to their school and read the curriculum, check what they’re learning and especially what they’re not allowed to learn.”
x Israel Frey writes in Haaretz, “It’s over. This is no longer our state. It has been occupied by fascist forces. Now it’s time to think like opponents of the regime. And the new regime's opponents don’t fight for “sanity” and good government. They fearlessly represent the bloc of full equality, which will likely undermine the foundations of Jewish supremacy.” B’Tselem’s Hagai El-Ad criticizes the dishonest “nostalgia” of the anti-government camp saying, “Israel didn't only occupy the territories, it implemented the practices ‘there’ that it [had] implemented ‘here’ starting in 1948. Such practices include the imposition of a military government and the promotion of ‘Jewish settlement’ – a Jewish takeover of Palestinian land and a reengineering of political power, geography and demography. Everything began ‘here,’ and since 1967 it has also been implemented “there” – the same ideology, the same policy.”
4. Reforming the Settler Colony
Though headed by Benjamin Netanyahu, Mr. Neoliberalism, the coalition includes key fundamentalist parties (Shas and United Torah Judaism) that are fed up with the establishment’s neoliberalism and austerity and that advocate for growing the “welfare state,” even if only for Jewish Israelis. Though Shas has also in the past addressed internal Israeli racism (against Arab/Mizrahi Jews, Haredi/fundamentalist Jews, etc.), this issue was not prominent in their electoral program in the last election. Still, fundamentalist parties partially blame the demographic “corruption” of Jewish society on the hundreds of thousands of “fake” Jews (the absolute majority of settlers who came from former Soviet republics) and on the cultural corruption of Jewish society by the “alien bodies” and “degenerate” Western thought, especially Christian thought coming from churches in Europe. In parallel, violent Israeli attacks on Christian Palestinians, their churches, cemeteries and monuments, accompanied by chants of “Death to the Christians” and “Death to Arabs and gentiles,” have been on the rise.
From the other side, the “secular” establishment blames the ultra-Orthodox for being a “burden” on the state’s coffers without contributing much to them (on average, a non-Haredi Israeli pays six times the taxes paid by a Haredi, per capita) and for being “corrupt” and “fanatical.” Eran Yashiv, a professor of economics at Tel Aviv University, sees judicial reform as a kind of resource grab by the ultra-Orthodox and the religious Zionist far-right. He says, “It’s a redistribution from the high-tech sector to religious and nationalist minorities. … it would turn Israel into an illiberal country.” Furthermore, the “secular” establishment and its intellectuals are increasingly reciting the philosopher Karl Popper’s famous paradox of tolerance -- “in order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must be intolerant of intolerance.” They blame the secular ruling elite's seemingly limitless “tolerance” of patently intolerant views and acts of the large and influential Haredi and ultra-nationalist religious Zionist communities for the coercive reality today. Again, the consensus-based Zionist “intolerance” to Indigenous Palestinians, to put it mildly, does not figure in such debates.
No longer satisfied with reforming the Zionist “secular” establishment, these ultra-Orthodox parties allied with ultra-nationalist religious parties are determined to overhaul it or reinvent it altogether, the “secular” establishment fears, to further institutionalize their exclusionary notion of “Jewish identity.” Maintaining the settler-colonial structures of oppression intact against the Indigenous Palestinians would still remain the common denominator between both sides of the settler-colonial coin.
5. Key indicators of the Difference In Kind
There are many changes that the new Israeli ruling coalition is planning to enact, some based on the coalition’s consensus platform and others voiced by some but not all of its ministers. Some of these plans de facto target or can affect basic pillars of the state’s power structures:
- Giving the Knesset the power to override decisions by the High Court of Justice and “politicizing” the composition of the Judicial Selection Committee, main demands of the powerful settlers’ movements in the OPT, threaten to undermine the relative separation of powers between the executive and legislative branches (both controlled by the ruling coalition) on one hand and the judicial branch on another. The latter has always enjoyed relative independence from intra-Jewish Israeli parliamentary politics despite its consistent and fundamental role as a pillar in the settler-colonial structure against Palestinians.i The current massive power of the High Court is considered the fundamental guarantor of the system of “checks and balances” in a state that has no constitution and only one parliamentary chamber.ii Their potentially drastic impact notwithstanding, these reforms enjoy strong support in the Jewish-Israeli public.
- Creating a separate Ministerial position in the Ministry of Defense, appointed by Bezalel Smotrich, controlling Israel’s so-called “Civil Administration” in the OPT, which rules over Palestinians and illegal settlers there, is unprecedented. In parallel, Itamar Ben-Gvir, the “national security minister,” is to take on direct control over the entirety of the Border Police, a force that has been operating under “IDF” command in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem. This in effect could “shatter the IDF’s entire strategy,” warned Giora Eiland, a retired Israeli general and former national security adviser.
Several high ranking Israeli military commanders have warned that these changes could “dramatically change the face of the IDF” or even lead to “dismantling [its] chain of command” and weakening its combat readiness. Some have expressed fears that these reforms would further entrench de facto and de jure annexation of the West Bank, “complicating” relations with Israel’s Western funders and enablers, implicitly pointing to the growing impact the solidarity movement can have.
Other plans include bringing apartheid Israel’s policy of “Judaization” to a qualitatively new level. Beyond its consistent use as a settler-colonial strategy to forcibly displace Indigenous Palestinians and steal their land,iii “Judaization” is becoming a policy that threatens – albeit to a lesser extent – also sectors within the dominant Jewish Israeli society:
- The government is pushing for a Basic Law on Legislation that states that any Basic Law (a law with constitutional power) previously passed with a majority of fewer than 61 members of parliament will lose its status as a Basic Law and become a “regular” law. The main objective is to demote the Basic Law on Human Dignity and Liberty, passed in the 12th Knesset by a majority of 32 members to 21.
Retired Supreme Court Justice Ayala Procaccia commented, “turning the Basic Law [on Human Dignity and Liberty] into a regular law means negation of the supremacy of human rights and subjecting them to the will of any passing government, and it also compromises the ability of the court to protect the individual or the minority from disproportionate harm to their most fundamental rights.” She added that the harm may apply to “all aspects of life in which we have human rights: Equality and nondiscrimination, freedom of expression, private property rights, the right to privacy, to movement and the right to freedom of religion and from religion.” Again, her statement refers, without any sense of irony, to the fundamental rights of Jewish Israelis, surely not those of Indigenous Palestinians. Israel’s High Court has consistently rejected calls for full equalityiv for Palestinian citizens of Israel, with leading justices arguing that such equality would undermine the state’s “Jewishness.” For obvious reasons, equality is not enshrined in Israel’s Basic Laws to start with.
- According to the coalition agreements, about $500 million will be allocated for “strengthening Jewish identity” in Israel — a phrase that is understood by the “secular” establishment to mean Orthodox religious indoctrination. There are also plans to make studying Torah a value equal to military service, which would allow the government for the first time to pass a law exempting yeshiva students from military service, making this exemption de jure, not just de facto as it has always been.v
- MK Avi Maoz (Noam party), deputy minister in the PM’s office responsible for establishing the “authority for identity security” and for extra-curricular education programs, is committed to deeply “judaizing” education, emphasizing Jewish law (halacha) and Jewish supremacy. He says, “Our flag is an unequivocal war on progressiveness. The status quo needs to be changed, and we need to make sure that Judaism is recognized in every corner. Israel will be a state that observes Shabbat in public. LGBT families will not be recognized, and women will not serve in the IDF. Their contribution will be getting married and raising a family.”
- The coalition’s plans include “increasing the powers of religious courts that discriminate against women, increasing gender segregation in the public sphere, and resisting initiatives combating violence against women in the name of preserving male authority in the home.” The coalition’s “misogyny” is being regularly attacked by the opposition.vi In Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and Haifa, dozens of Israeli women protested dressed up as handmaids from Margaret Atwood’s book “The Handmaid’s Tale” about a fictional fundamentalist society that oppresses women.
- Legislation is being proposed giving service providers, including doctors, the right to deny service to anyone if providing such a service would conflict with their religious beliefs. This is largely interpreted as empowering Israelis of all walks of life to deny services not only to Palestinians (Muslims and Christians), but also to Jewish LGBTQI+ people and Jewish women in immodest dress, etc. Like all religious fundamentalisms, Jewish fundamentalism is exclusionary and promotes racial hatred and violence.vii Throughout, however, as a consistently anti-racist movement, BDS calls for avoiding any generalization or analysis that may unintentionally evoke antisemitic tropes.
- Other than its obvious impact on Palestinians, another important aspect of the rising power of Jewish fundamentalism in the Israeli government is the expected further restriction on Israel’s definition of Jews to exclude those converted by non-Orthodox rabbis. Ben-Gvir has called for revoking state recognition of non-Orthodox conversions. This, and similar measures, will likely infuriate millions of non-Orthodox Jews, particularly in the US where Reform Judaism remains the largest Jewish denomination, providing further opportunities for progressive anti-Zionist Jewish groups – whose role in the movement is crucial and more important than ever – to grow support.
- In a precedent, a senior government minister recently said, "I'm a fascist homophobe,” dealing a heavy blow to Israel’s well-oiled pinkwashing strategy.
- Following the deadly attack on Israeli settlers in occupied East Jerusalem on 27 January 2023, settlers were chanting not only their anthem – “Death to the Arabs!” – but also “Death to the leftists!” The Israeli far-right has always detested what it regards as “leftist” Jewish-Israelis, mostly hard-core establishment Zionists (like Labor leaders as well as the likes of Shimon Peres, Yitzhak Rabin, Yair Lapid, key High Court justices, etc.). Their fault is that, though they wanted to strengthen the regime of settler-colonialism and apartheid, which they had built to start with, they were ready to relinquish some control over a tiny piece of historic Palestine to cage millions of Palestinians in bantustans/ghettos in order to maintain the necessary propaganda mask of democracy and liberalism. To those Zionist “leftists,” Gaza is the perfect settler-colonial model of how to deal with the “problem” of Indigenous Palestinians across historic Palestine–“maximum land with a minimal number of Arabs.” This establishment “left” has one ultimate and overarching goal: safeguarding the settler-colony by prolonging Israel’s Jewish demographic majority and supremacy for decades to come.
While not new, the attack by far-right settlers on “leftist” Jewish-Israelis, equating them with the dehumanized natives, is now emboldened by support from senior government ministers.
This establishment “left” has one ultimate and overarching goal: safeguarding the settler-colony by prolonging Israel’s Jewish demographic majority and supremacy for decades to come. While not new, the attack by far-right settlers on “leftist” Jewish-Israelis, equating them with the dehumanized natives, is now emboldened by support from senior government ministers.
On the contrary, true Jewish Israeli leftists, who are by definition anti-colonial and support dismantling settler-colonialism and apartheid, are beyond the pale in this establishment debate.viii
i As Kohelet Policy Forum, Israel’s most influential think tank that is guiding the current coalition’s “reforms,” repeatedly says in defending this diminution of the courts’ power, Israel is the only OECD state in which the politicians don’t choose the judges, and where Supreme Court judges have the power to repeal laws passed by politicians.
ii Investments in dictatorships, like the UAE and Saudi Arabia, do not seem to be affected by the utter lack of democratic checks and balances there. What is omitted in discussions about the peculiar volatility of Israel’s economy, despite its unquestionable power – mainly a factor of Western colonial complicity and ideological commitment, not simply “innovation” – is the impact of Palestinian resistance and international solidarity (particularly BDS) on it. Israel’s economic leap, after all, came as a direct result of the Oslo Accords with the PLO and all the tens of markets that were opened up to Israeli products and services as a result. During the first and second Palestinian intifadas, Israel witnessed its most severe flight of capital and talent to North America and Europe. Following Israel’s 2014 massacre in Gaza and the qualitative leap in BDS activism that followed, Israel’s economy took a hard hit, and major financial think tanks, like Rand Corporation, and credit rating agencies acknowledged the impact of BDS on it.
iii In 2012, for example, UN Special Rapporteur on the right to adequate housing described Israel’s “strategy of Judaization” as aimed at controlling Palestinian land saying, “In very different legal and geographical contexts, from the Galilee and the Negev to East Jerusalem and the West Bank, the Israeli authorities promote a territorial development model that excludes, discriminates against and displaces minorities, particularly affecting Palestinian communities.”
iv In its groundbreaking report on apartheid as a tool of Israeli settler colonialism since 1948, Al-Haq says, “In May 1948, the Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel announced a Jewish state.132 Although it guaranteed the right to “complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants”, this has not been given full effect through legislation, and the right has not been guaranteed in the Basic Laws, which act as constitutional documents in the absence of a written constitution. Across all the Basic Laws, legal provisions on equality are subordinated to those that privilege Jewish Israelis and establish the State of Israel as Jewish.” The Hight Court has consistently rejected petitions for recognizing an Israeli civic nationality that would provide guarantees for equality among all citizens as that would “endanger Israel's founding principle: To be a Jewish state for the Jewish people;” it has refused to allow discussion of full equal rights and the “state of all its citizens” bill in the Knesset; it has turned down appeals against the racist JNF’s massive power in running the Israel Land Authority; etc.
v Ultra-Orthodox (Haredi) children make up a quarter of all Jewish children in the Israeli school system and 40% of all its Jewish first-graders. The majority of ultra-Orthodox pupils — 74% — study in unofficial-but-recognized schools, which are meant to follow the majority of the secular core curriculum (though most do not) in exchange for 75% funding; another 22.5% study in “exempt” schools that teach a smaller portion of the core curriculum and receive a commensurate amount of state funding, while just 3.5% learn in fully state-run Haredi schools that teach the full core curriculum. Only half of ultra-Orthodox Israeli men work. The more secular Zionist Israeli establishment is expressing loud concerns that, with this government’s promise to increase funding for studying the Torah, the incentive for the ultra-Orthodox to pursue a secular education or to work will diminish significantly. This secular Israeli Ashkenazi establishment, which is obsessive about demographics, is deeply concerned that, with their much higher fertility rate (double the Israeli average), their unrelenting aspiration to separate from, not integrate into, Israeli society, and considering that their religious education leaves most of them ill-equipped to assume a functioning role in Israel’s modern economy, the threat to Israel’s future as a strong economy is looming larger than ever. The vast majority of ultra-Orthodox high school graduates do not meet the minimum university entry requirements. Prof. Yedidia Stern, president of the influential Jewish People Policy Institute, comments, “When the Haredim were a small group, that was OK. Now it’s impossible. To allow this to go on despite the large numbers of Haredim means the country won’t be able to function.”
vi While misogyny, structural patriarchy, and gender-based discrimination and violence have always existed in Israel’s hyper-militarized settler-colonial society, the new government is trying to impose more Orthodox/religious laws in the public sphere in ways that will further undermine women’s rights. As a self-declared “Jewish state,” Israel has never had a real separation between “church” and state, and the religious establishment has always played a critical role in suppressing women's rights.
vii See, for instance, the book authored by Israel Shahak and Norton Mezvinsky, Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel.
viii Acknowledging these anti-colonial Israelis as potential partners in the liberation struggle, the historic BDS Call of 2005, endorsed by the Palestinian political parties as well as the broadest cross-section among Palestinians in historic Palestine and in exile, explicitly says, “We also invite conscientious Israelis to support this Call, for the sake of justice and genuine peace.”
6. Key indicators of the Difference In Degree
For Palestinians, the ongoing policies of settler-colonialism and apartheid have become more brutal while long-term plans are accelerated with a far more arrogant approach to international relations that outrightly dismisses the genuine concerns expressed by Israel’s partners in crime in the US and Europe:
- This government is finally implementing the dream of the far-right: de facto and arguably de jure annexation on steroids of most, if not all, of the OPT by intensifying and “legalizing” colonial settlement everywhere, including in the occupied Syrian Golan Heights, in line with the Trump-Netanyahu Annexation Plan/“Deal of the Century.” The first official steps towards de jure annexation have already been taken.
- Successive Israeli governments, especially those ruled by Likud and its far-right partners, have gradually erased the so-called Green Line (1949 armistice border), in effect if not in law.[i] This has included the widespread treatment of Palestinians with Israeli citizenship (1948 Palestinians) as part of the “enemy” native Palestinian-Arab population, no longer as “Israeli Arabs” who must be differentiated from Palestinians elsewhere and effectively co-opted to accept as fate their second-class citizenship under the overall settler-colonial system of oppression. With the current Israeli government, this tendency will become much sharper and harder to hide, giving further impetus to the Palestinian unity that manifested itself most robustly during the May 2021 uprising across Historic Palestine. Kahanist or Kahane-inspired ideas of a “second Nakba,” heightened ethnic cleansing of 1948 Palestinian communities, or “static transfer,” which have for decades been popular among key Labor Party and Likud leaders, are now expected to gain even more currency in the mainstream.
[i] In fact, it was Israel’s Labor Party, which led the occupation of 1967, that initiated the literal erasure of the “Green Line” from maps and later on the ground in an official government decision in 1967. When Likud led by Netanyahu returned to power in 2009, it simply committed to a policy of “re-erasing” that line, by expanding settlements in the West Bank and legitimizing them internally among Jewish Israelis as well as on the international stage. On their part, Indigenous Palestinians through their resistance have also erased that line, uniting two main constituencies of the Palestinian people (67 and 48) in a joint liberation struggle with diverse manifestations and contexts.
- Nachman Shai, a former Israeli Minister of the Diaspora, said the coalition’s plans to deepen Orthodox Jewish domination in Israel would alienate non-Orthodox Jews worldwide, aggravating their rift with Israel.ii These plans include banning mixed-gender Jewish prayers in any part of the so-called Western Wall “plaza”iii (ethnically cleansed Mughrabi quarter in the occupied Old City of Jerusalem) and canceling the “grandson” clause in the settler-colonial “Law of Return,” effectively excluding from eligibility under this racist law the grandsons and granddaughters of a non-Jewish grandfather.
- The often censored discussion about the rising power of Jewish fundamentalist Zionism in Israel and its potentially fatal impact on Indigenous Palestinians is more public now under this government. For decades, leading Jewish fundamentalist Zionist figures have called for genocide and massacres against Arab (especially Palestinian) and other Muslims and Christians, using fanatic interpretations of Jewish law (Halacha) to justify them. For instance, Shmuel Eliyahu, the Chief Rabbi of Safad and father of a current government minister, has cheered the death of tens of thousands in Turkey and Syria as a result of the devastating earthquake in February 2023, calling it “divine justice” against the “enemies” of Israel.
- If Netanyahu’s previous, less fascist and less fundamentalist governments formed strong alliances with far-right, authoritarian and despotic parties, movements and regimes worldwide, almost all explicitly antisemitic, his new “most racist ever” government promises to take these alliances to a whole new level. His top diplomatic priority, for instance, is to normalize relations with the Saudi dictatorship.
- Israel’s current Minister of Strategic Affairs and former ambassador to Washington Ron Dermer said in 2021 that Israel should spend more of its energy reaching out to “passionate” American evangelicals than Jews. Christian Zionists, he said, are the “backbone” of US support for Israel whereas Jewish Americans are “disproportionately among [Israel’s] critics.” Israel’s close partnership with Christian Zionists, arguably one of the most powerful, deeply antisemiticiv communities in the world (in the West and increasingly in the Global South too), presents a bigger threat not just to the rights and lives of Palestinians, women, LGBTQI+, and other communities of faith, but also to Jewish safety worldwide, as many progressive Jewish groups have consistently warned.
i In fact, it was Israel’s Labor Party, which led the occupation of 1967, that initiated the literal erasure of the “Green Line” from maps and later on the ground in an official government decision in 1967. When Likud led by Netanyahu returned to power in 2009, it simply committed to a policy of “re-erasing” that line, by expanding settlements in the West Bank and legitimizing them internally among Jewish Israelis as well as on the international stage. On their part, Indigenous Palestinians through their resistance have also erased that line, uniting two main constituencies of the Palestinian people (67 and 48) in a joint liberation struggle with diverse manifestations and contexts.
ii Former Labor party minister Nachman Shai writes, “Israel may discover that bilateral relations are customary in this world. Those who seek the support of Diaspora Jews in the fight against BDS, in the fight against anti-Semitism or God forbid [against] lowering Israel's credit rating, will find that [Diaspora Jews] are not there. They don't have to. Now they do it out of love, out of appreciation, out of their own good will. When they see that the State of Israel does not count them, they will not count it either.” The Reform Movement, with about 2 million followers in the US, has called the bill “thuggery” and “an absolute shame,” saying the Western Wall “can’t be managed as if it’s a Haredi synagogue.” Reform and Conservative Jews constitute about 60% of Jewish Americans, whereas the Orthodox are merely 10%.
iii Without any sense of irony, former Israeli prime minister Yair Lapid reacted to this looming bill saying, “If this legislation passes, Israel will no longer be a free country. Rather than a symbol of unity, the Western Wall will become a symbol of the oppression of women, discrimination against secular people, and the dismantling of our alliance with world Jewry.”
iv Main fundamentalist Christian Zionist Israel lobby groups in the US have interpreted Armageddon as the return of Christ to salvage from eternal damnation only those who believe in him. Those who do not, who refuse to convert to Christianity, would all be “wiped out and sent to hell,” as there is no salvation for them. Christian Zionists have always normalized Zionist settler colonialism in Palestine and the ethnic cleansing in the 1948 Nakba and the ongoing Nakba, as a catalyst for the return of the Messiah.
Gershom Gorenberg, the Israeli-American author of “End of Days,” a widely referenced book about Christian Zionists, says: “The Jews die or convert. … [Christian Zionists] don't love real Jewish people. They love us as characters in their story, in their play, … and we never auditioned for that part, and the play is not one that ends up good for us. If you listen to the drama they're describing, essentially it's a five-act play in which the Jews disappear in the fourth act.”