How
Netanyahu’s embrace of the Israeli far right unmasked Zionism
The Israeli
political elite has long tried to cover up its fascist views and practices.
Today it no longer cares to.
Tony
Greenstein
Tony
Greenstein is a Jewish anti-Zionist and a founding member of Palestine
Solidarity Campaign.
Published On
4 Mar 2019
4 Mar 2019
Michael Ben
Ari Reuters File
In 1984,
Rabbi Meir Kahane, the founding leader of the openly racist Kach party, managed
to enter the Knesset after securing some 26,000 votes. Despite his rising
political profile, however, the far-right rabbi was not welcomed with open arms
in the Israeli parliament – whenever he spoke, all the other 119 members of the
Knesset (MKs) would walk out.
MKs were so
disturbed by Kahane’s presence in the parliament that in August 1985 they even
passed a revision to the Electoral Law which banned parties “inciting racism” –
including Kach – from participating in future elections.
The problem
was that this amendment also disqualified parties which opposed the existence
of the Israeli state as a Jewish state. The second anti-racist law in 1986 was
even worse. It exempted discrimination on the grounds of religion resulting in
Kahane voting for it and the left in the Knesset voting against it!
However, the
MKs’ vocal opposition to Kach had nothing to do with the racist ideology that
was guiding the party. They were simply concerned about the damage Kach’s
success could inflict on Israel’s image on the international arena – before the
Supreme Court’s election ban, polls were predicting that the party could gain
up to 12 seats in the 1988 elections.
Nevertheless,
even if it was mostly for cosmetic reasons, back then, overt racism was still
unacceptable in Israeli politics.
However,
much has changed in the last 35 years.
Today, heirs
of Kahane are being welcomed in by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. What was
trefa (forbidden) yesterday, has become kosher today.
Netanyahu’s
political calculations
As part of
his ongoing election campaign, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has openly
encouraged the far-right Jewish Home party to unite with smaller, even more
extremist right-wing parties, including Otzma Yehudit – the party of Kahane’s
disciples. The Jewish Home central committee recently approved the merger,
paving the way for at least one member of Otzma Yehudit – its leader Michael
Ben Ari – to secure a seat in the 21st Knesset in the upcoming April election.
Ben Ari, an
avowed Kahanist, was a member of the Knesset between 2009 and 2013. Apart from
inciting a pogrom against African refugees in South Tel Aviv, he is famous for
tearing up a copy of the New Testament and putting it in a rubbish bin and for
referring to Jewish left-wingers as “germs” that need to be eradicated.
In September
2010, in response to being told that for every Israeli killed, six Palestinians
had died over the previous 10 years, Ari remarked that “For every one dead on
our side, we need to kill 500 and not six.” During 2012’s Operation Pillar of
Defense, he stated that “there are no innocents in Gaza…mow them down! Kill the
Gazans without thought or mercy!”
This is who
Netanyahu has made sure will enter the new Knesset in April.
The reason
the prime minister has so eagerly supported Otzma Yehudit – and other extremist
parties like it – is because the far-right in Israel commands up to 250,000
votes but is divided between at least four parties. He believes that a failure
of these parties to unite could lead to many of them not crossing the electoral
threshold (which was raised from 2 percent to 3.25 percent in 2013 in order to
exclude the Arab parties from parliament), making way for the rise of a
left-wing coalition in the Knesset.
Unlike his
predecessors, who had once likened Rabbi Kahane’s racist policy proposals to
Nazi Germany’s Nuremberg laws, Netanyahu seemingly has no qualms about dealing
with the far right. There are no waters too polluted for the prime minister to
fish in.
Some on the
Israeli left are acting as if this signals a major shift in Israeli politics.
Yet Israel’s Arab population is undoubtedly asking, “What’s new?” After all,
they have always suffered violence and institutional discrimination.
What we are
witnessing today is not a major shift in Israeli politics, but the public face
of Zionist ideology finally catching up with decades of Zionist practice.
Israeli Labour governments of the past spoke the language of social democracy
as they practised ethnic cleansing. Netanyahu’s new, openly fascist right-wing
government, however, has taken the hypocrisy out of Zionism.
Zionism
exposed
When Kahane
preached that Israel could either be a Jewish state or a democratic one, he was
stating a truth that generations of “left-wing” Zionists have glossed over. The
Zionist ideology had always given prominence to the state’s Jewish identity
over democracy. This is why, when it was founded in 1948, Israel expelled over
750,000 Palestinians, and successive Zionist governments, Labour and Likud
alike, opposed mixed marriages and personal relationships between Jews and
Arabs.
In this
context, the only real difference between mainstream Zionist Israeli parties
and the likes of Kach or Otzma Yehudit is that what the former whisper in muted
tones, the latter shout from the rooftops.
During his
stint in the Knesset, Kahane proposed a series of laws which would make Israel
a true “Jewish state”. These proposals included, among others, revocation of
citizenship rights of non-Jews, the eventual imposition of slavery on Arabs and
other non-Jews, banning non-Jews from living in Jewish neighbourhoods, the
expulsion of non-Jews from Jerusalem and eventually Israel, prohibition of
sexual relations between Jews and Arabs and forced dissolution of all
inter-faith marriages.
While many
of these proposals, such as the prohibition of sexual relationships between
Jews and Arabs and the forced dissolution of intermarriages, come straight from
the 1935 Nazi Nuremberg Laws and appear extreme and unrealistic on the surface,
they offer little more than further codification of the existing practices of
the Israeli state.
There is no
civil marriage in Israel and since religious authorities do not perform
interfaith marriages (between a Jew and a member of another religion), they are
not permitted in Israel. Kahane’s proposition to ban non-Jews from living in
Jewish neighbourhoods is also already a reality. Hundreds of communities in the
country are already Jewish only; non-Jews residing in Jerusalem are facing
expulsion for the most trivial reasons.
Kahane
represented the hidden face of Zionism. Members of the Knesset, both from the
left and the right, denounced his ideas and words to keep up appearances, while
tacitly supporting the very same racist policies he promoted.
Kahane may
have died at the hands of an assassin in 1990, but his ideas have thrived in
his absence. Israel’s government no
longer feels the need to hide the fact that it embraces the open racism of
Kehane’s modern-day followers.
Liberal
anxieties
The upcoming
election is likely to mark the demise of the so-called Zionist “left” – and the
decades-old lie that mainstream Zionists are fundamentally different from
racists like Kahane.
This is
causing apoplexy among Zionism’s liberal supporters. Batya Ungar-Sargon,
opinion editor of the left-wing Jewish-American periodical The Forward,
recently published a commentary headlined Netanyahu Just Invited Israel’s
Equivalent Of The KKK To Join The Government.
“These are
the David Dukes and the Richard Spencers of the Jewish State, people who
believe that Jewish sovereignty depends on the oppression, ethnic cleansing and
even murder of Israel’s Arab population,” she explained.
The American
Jewish establishment has clearly been shaken by Netanyahu’s open association
with proud fascists and racists, but above all by his shamelessness.
Most
American Jews have long suffered from political schizophrenia – they are
progressive on everything bar Palestine. For decades they have turned a blind
eye to all sorts of racist atrocities committed by the Israeli state and its
leaders.
And what
appals them today is not the ideas Otzma Yehudit representatives would bring
into the Knesset – which, in fact, are just a vocalisation of accepted Israeli
practices. They are just concerned about the political consequences of the
Israeli prime minister’s open support for shamelessly racist political forces.
In an
interview with Israel’s Haaretz newspaper, Susie Gelman, a prominent
Zionist-American donor, recently expressed this sentiment, saying, “Netanyahu’s
actions are feeding the estrangement of young American Jews from Israel”. Many
other Jewish American leaders have voiced similar concerns.
In response
to the deal between Netanyahu and Kahanists, Anti-Defamation League CEO
Jonathan Greenblatt tweeted: “There should be no room for racism and no
accommodation for intolerance in Israel or any democracy. […] It is troubling
that they are being legitimized by this union.”
Where, one
wonders, was Greenblatt when the Chief Rabbi of Safed Shmuel Elihayu issued an
edict in 2010 that Jews were forbidden to rent rooms and apartments to Arabs?
Or when Rabbis Yitzhak Shapira and Yosef Elitzur published the King’s Tora,
which explained how Jews could legally kill non-Jews, even children and
infants?
In this
context, members of the Jewish American establishment can be likened to the MKs
of the 1980s who protested Kahane’s racist speeches while voting for similar,
but more polite, policies themselves. The liberal Jewish establishment’s main
concern today is not the institutional racism rampant in Israel or the ethnic
cleansing that is taking place before their eyes, but that his “move will hurt
Israel’s image and create a rift with Jewish Americans”.
It is clear
that Zionism has now come full circle. There was always a tension within
socialist Zionism – between their professed universalism and their actual
practice. Zionism today has no such dilemmas.
The logic of
a Jewish state is that non-Jews are there on sufferance. Just as Jews were not
welcome in the ethno-nationalist states of 1930s Europe, so too are
Palestinians excluded from the Jewish state today.
There is a
large section of Israeli society, in particular, the religious Zionists, for
whom the Palestinians represent the Jews’ mythical biblical enemy, the
Amalekites. In Exodus 17:14, God told Moses: “I will utterly blot out the
memory of Amalek from under heaven.”
Today these
passages are being brought back to life. For those who are aware of the story
of Esther, Netanyahu is indeed the Jewish Haman.
The views
expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect
Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
Tony
Greenstein
Tony
Greenstein is a Jewish anti-Zionist and a founding member of Palestine
Solidarity Campaign.
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