Are Israel’s Jews, some of them, on their way to becoming Nazis?
“Maybe now the Likud will return to its roots. I hope that the two unified parties will guard the settlements and the entire Land of Israel, and that the vision of a Jewish State on both banks of the Jordan River will be fulfilled.”
Under the sub-heading of Israel’s place in the international club of fascists, Avnery offered an observation which I think is spot on.
“This (the wave of fascism) is not a uniquely Israeli phenomenon. All over Europe and America, overt fascists are raising their heads. The purveyors of hate, who until now have been spreading their poison at the margins of the political system, are now arriving at the centre. In almost every country there are demagogues who build their careers on incitement against the weak and helpless, who advocate the expulsion of ‘foreigners’ and the persecution of minorities. In the past they were easy to dismiss, as was Hitler at the beginning of his career. Now they must be taken seriously.”
In Netanyahu’s case there is scope for wondering how seriously we should take him. Yes, he is most definitely committed to a Greater Israel and denying the Palestinians a state on any terms (land and other) they can accept; but on other matters is he the master of bluff? Does he really believe, for example, that an Iran armed with a few nuclear bombs could and would pose an existential threat to the Zionist state (if he does, he’s mad); or did he decide to play the Iran threat card to get Palestine off the agenda, in order to allow Israel to continue its colonization and slow ethnic cleansing of the occupied West Bank without fear of sanction by the major powers?
There is, however, every reason to take Lieberman seriously, and the key to understanding why is in his party’s description of itself – “a national movement with the clear vision to follow in the brave path of Zev Jabotinsky.”
In the first and still existing Western draft of the history of the making of the conflict in and over Palestine that became Israel, Jabotinsky is described as being not only the founding father of the Haganah and thus the Israeli army but also the founder of “Revisionist Zionism”.
As I explain at length in my book Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews, “Revisionist Zionism” is actually HONEST Zionism. Those who in 1897 proclaimed the coming into existence of Zionism (sometimes described as “practical Zionism” and/or “socialist Labour Zionism”) were DISHONEST.
They agreed not to go public with their real goal – a Jewish state in all of Arab Palestine. Instead they talked and wrote for public consumption about the need for Jewish settlement, by obvious implication something far short of statehood; and they pretended they could come to an agreeable accommodation with the Arabs. Simply stated, they didn’t want the world and their fellow Jews especially to even think about the probability that the creation of a Jewish state would require some and perhaps many Palestinians to be dispossessed of their land, their homes and their rights.
It was to anaesthetize the Jewish conscience that Zionism’s pre-Jabotinsky leaders came up with the monstrous, wicked propaganda lie that Palestine was “a land without people for a people without land.”
Enter Jabotinsky. His book The Iron Wall: We and the Arabs was published in 1923. Its main thrust was that Zionism had to take Palestine from its Arab owners by force or not at all. (Two years later Adolf Hitler published Volume One of Mein Kampf).
Jabotinsky’s book became the main inspirational text for most Jewish nationalists who became Israelis. (In my view The Iron Wall was to Zionism what Mein Kampf was to Nazism).
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