Netanyahu gave religious Zionists power. In Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon and beyond, they now feel they are enacting God's design for His chosen people. This will not end well
David Hirst
Bezalel Smotrich, finance minister and - in all but formal title – governor of the West Bank, had long been fond of citing this verse from the Book of Joshua to illustrate what he called his decisiveness, or subjugation, plan for Judea and Samaria, the biblical name of that territory.
Thus it was, Smotrich explained, that just as Joshua had warned the Canaanites of what would befall them should they stand in his way, so now he warned the Palestinians of what his plan would entail for them. They faced three choices: remain in situ as "resident aliens" with "inferior status in accordance with [ancient] Jewish law"; emigrate; or remain and resist.
If they chose the third course, he told them, the "Israeli defence forces" would know what to do. And what might that be? "Kill those that need to be killed." What, whole families, women and children? he replied: "In war as in war."
The Israeli settlers’ so-called "pricetag" (reprisal) attacks on West Bank Palestinian communities - uprooting their age-old olive trees, stealing their livestock and poisoning their wells and the like - had been steadily escalating over the years, but within two months of the ministership of this far-right, so-called Religious Zionist, they took a huge, both qualitative and quantitative, leap.
Some 400 of them, in late February last year, accompanied by regular soldiers in a supposedly disciplinary role, rampaged unimpeded through Huwwara, a town of some 7,000 souls, setting fire to 75 homes, torching nearly 100 vehicles and, among other wanton cruelties, butchering or beating to death family pets, the cat or the dog, in front of the children - and only pausing the while to say the Maariv, the Jewish evening prayer, as they went about it.
"It was Kristallnacht" murmured a dazed young conscript who, willy nilly, had witnessed it all, referencing the nationwide Nazi pogrom of November 1938.
An Israeli columnist, Nahum Barnea, writing in Ynet, came to the same conclusion. "Kristallnacht was relived in Huwwara," he wrote.
Smotrich had not ordered it, but it was their champion's sudden, surprise elevation to high office that had emboldened his followers to undertake it. And no sooner was it over than he enthusiastically applauded it - except as regards one essentially procedural matter. "Yes," he said, "I think Huwwara should be erased, but that the state, not - heaven forbid - private citizens, should do it." And -he went on- he would in due course be calling on the "Israeli defence forces" to "hit Palestinian cities with tanks and helicopters - without mercy and in a way that conveyed that the landlord has gone mad".
For many, the Huwwara mayhem smacked of the Smotrich plan to come; and no more so, one imagines, than for historian Daniel Blatman, who, noting that Smotrich was modelling himself on Joshua, the genocidaire of antiquity, suggested a more appropriate, more contemporary candidate for such an honour - Heinrich Himmler, chief architect of the Holocaust.
Lunatic fringes
In much of the world, likening Israelis, or Jews in general, to Nazis is taboo, verboten, antisemitism at its vilest.
That is presumably why the distinguished French-Israeli sociologist, Eva Illouz*, finds it so very "ironic" that citizens of "the Jewish state" cite Hitlerian parallels in their everyday discourse "like no other society would dare".
In other words, to put it more bluntly, Israelis are constantly calling one another Nazis tout court, or, more commonly, decrying what they see as their Nazi-like conduct.
Take, for example, Itamar Ben Gvir, the leader of the far-right Jewish Power party in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet. He began his so-to-speak "political" career as a common-or-garden Jerusalem street hoodlum and has been subsequently indicted some 50-odd times and convicted eight times on such charges as incitement, racism and supporting a terrorist organisation.
He first achieved something like nationwide notoriety in 2015, when a video of him at a settlers’ wedding went viral. In the film, young male guests engaged in the ritual stabbing of the image of an Arab infant, Saad Dawabsha, whom one of their comrades had recently burnt to death in an arson attack - in "the Messiah's" name - on a house in the sleeping West Bank village of Duma.
Ben Gvir lauded them as "sweet kids", "salt of the earth" and the "best of Zionists".
For all his sudden, new-found celebrity, however, in the public mind - at least - he remained stuck, as did Smotrich, on the lunatic fringes of Israeli politics.
Even Netanyahu, no bleeding-heart liberal or leftist himself, persisted in shunning him like the plague - until, in his sheer desperation to form a government, he decided that the only way he could do so was not merely to invite the pair to join it, but to submit, as well, to their extortionate conditions for doing so.
Smotrich demanded overlordship of the West Bank, formerly the prerogative of the military, and Ben Gvir stipulated the creation of a whole new so-called National Security Ministry, under whose auspices, in addition to his control of the regular police, he would create a national guard under his own, exclusive command.
Which, no sooner had he begun to do than some of those familiar with the history of Nazi Germany – and of whom, in all probability, there are more per capita in Israel than anywhere else but Germany itself - took to dubbing it the Sturmabteilung, or Brownshirts, the vast, vicious paramilitary organisation on which Hitler relied during his rise to power and - until it was superseded by the even more vicious Schutzstaffel, or SS - his subsequent, dictatorial rule.
Ben Gvir’s first appointment - that of his chief of staff - did little to allay these apprehensions. Chanamel Dorfman, now a mellow 72-year-old, had been one of the "sweet kids" as well as bridegroom and stabber-in-chief at the "wedding of hate", as it had come to be known. In one of his first reported utterances upon taking office, he told his detractors that his "only problem with the Nazis" was that he would have been "on the losing side of them".
'Neo-Nazi' event
Throughout much of 2023, and until 7 October, when the Hamas rampage through southern Israel brought it to a screeching halt, Israel had been sunk in ever-deepening turmoil over Netanyahu’s plans for so-called "judicial reforms”.
One participant, historian Yuval Noah Harari, in an anti-reform, pro-democracy demonstration, recounted how struck he was by a song which nearby pro-reform, pro-regime demonstrators were singing.
It had such a "catchy tune", he said, that he all but started humming it to himself - until, that is, he looked it up on You Tube where it had garnered thousands of views, and found, to his disgust, that it went as follows:
Who is going up in flames now? Huwwara! / Houses and cars! Huwwara! / They are evacuating old ladies, women and young girls; it is burning all night! Huwwara! / Burn their trucks! Huwwara! / Burn their roads and cars! Huwwara!
Not so completely vile, obviously, as the song "When Jewish blood splashes the knife......", which the Einsatzgruppen, or SS killing squads, used to sing - and which an Israeli commentator likened it to - but not so very different in spirit either.
As for another fascist institution is the annual Flag March, which celebrates the capture of Jerusalem in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war.
It is a festival of triumphal bombast and bellicosity in which the country’s youth, virtually all settlers, parade through the ancient, Arab heart of the city. As they push and shove their way down its narrow alleyways, to ecstatic chants of "death to the Arabs" or "may their villages burn", they threaten, curse and spit upon any Palestinian unlucky or foolhardy enough to get in their way; and sometimes knock them to the ground to beat up and kick at will. Occasionally, even Jewish journalists or photographers meet that fate too.
The flag march is a festival of triumphal bombast in which the country’s youth parade through the Arab heart of the city to ecstatic chants of 'death to the Arabs'
A "neo-Nazi" event, wrote campaigning journalist Gideon Levy in Haaretz, with "too great a resemblance to those pictures of Jews in Europe being beaten up on the eve of the Holocaust."
So where was this "Judeo-Nazism" at its most pernicious - and perilous? Perilous of course - and most immediately, obviously and drastically so - to the prime, Palestinian targets of it. But ultimately, as time would tell, to the state of Israel itself.
Physically and operationally, it lay mainly in the West Bank; that being where, famously and prophetically, the late Professor Yeshayahu Leibowitz, a much-loved philosopher, had first identified the phenomenon and gave it its name.
Morally and emotionally, it dwelt in the hearts and minds of the Ben Gvirs and Smotriches, the religious settlers, and their many collaborators in government, army and the public at large; most of them religious too, but some of them secular ultra-nationalists who shared their grandiose ambitions but not their faith.
The phenomenon first arose in the wake of the 1967 Arab-lsraeli war. Here’s why.
Zionism, on the face of it at least, was a stoutly secular, even anti-clerical credo. For the rabbis of the diaspora, or most of them, it was an aberration, a sin, even a "rebellion against God".
But in Israel-Palestine itself a movement espousing a wholly religious interpretation of Zionism had been steadily gaining ground. It was a radical and revolutionary one indeed, with aspirations for "the Jewish state" exceeding those of the secularists.
In the all-important territorial domain, for example, it was to encompass the whole of Eretz Israel, or Land of Israel, as promised by God in his covenant with Abraham and his descendants; and at a minimum, sages down the ages had ruled, Eretz Israel included Judea and Samaria (the West Bank) and Gaza, as well as substantial swathes of what is now Lebanon, Syria and Jordan.
Message from God
For these religious Zionists, Israel’s historic victory in the 1967 Six-Day War, miraculous in their eyes, had been a "message from God": go forth, seize and settle on these newly conquered, sacred spaces, where the Jewish kingdoms of antiquity once stood.
Various tasks faced them on this, their road to "redemption" and the coming of the Messiah. Perhaps the most daunting, not to say apocalyptic, of them being the rebuilding of the ancient Jewish temple in the place where the Dome of the Rock and al-Aqsa mosques now stand. But, for the time being, this settling of the land had now become the most immediately feasible of them.
Their road to redemption, however, risked becoming Israel’s road to ruin. So, at least, argued Moshe Zimmermann, a scholar of German history, currently participating in a research project on the topic of "Nations That Go Mad". Germany, he said, did so in 1933 with the rise of Hitler; Israel "started" doing so in the aftermath of the 1967 war, with precisely that settling of the West Bank and Gaza as the principal manifestation of it .
For religious Zionists, Israel’s historic victory in the 1967 war had been a message from God: go forth, seize and settle on these newly conquered, sacred spaces
For this was a "Judeo-Nazi" kind of project par excellence, presided over by that historically new, militant breed of cleric, the convert to Zionism. Steeped in their new-fangled "theology of violence and revenge", they justified almost anything that might further the now-holy cause.
Prominent among them was Ben Gvir’s very own spiritual mentor, Rabbi Dov Lior, who once famously or infamously said of Israeli-American doctor Baruch Goldstein, who in 1994 machine-gunned to death 29 worshippers in Hebron’s Ibrahimi mosque, that he was "a martyr holier than all the holy martyrs of the Holocaust".
For Zimmermann, the "story of the settlements" was the story of a "biblical romanticism" that was "sweeping the whole of society to perdition"; and the only "logical" way to stop it was the "two-state solution" to the Arab-Israeli conflict and the full-scale Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories which that would entail.
"The alternative (was) either for us to execute a Nazi-like act against the Palestinians, or for the Palestinians to execute a Nazi-like act against us," he said.
A prescient warning indeed: for they - and the world - got both.
The 7 October attack was Israel's 9/11, a terroristic tour de force as complete a surprise, as brilliant [or almost] in execution, as murderous in intent, and as cataclysmic in consequences as had been Usama bin Laden’s hijacked American airliners crashing into New York’s Twin Towers on 11 September 2001. ">
Vengeance was doubtless an important motive behind Hamas' "Nazi-like act". But the attacks also represented something else: a spectacular demonstration of the "resistance" and "armed struggle" which it holds to be the only, or main, route to "liberation" - a goal which, officially at least, it continues to define as the recovery of the whole of Palestine, what is now the Israeli part of it included.
As for Israel’s "Nazi-like act", it was vengeance, too, but of a scale, duration and ferocity that was to render Hamas’s almost pitiful by comparison.
Israel's mutating objectives
Meanwhile, Israel's official objective - the destruction of 'a terror organisation' - was mutating, unofficially but effectively, into something quite other, into nothing less, in fact, than another great advance in God’s unfolding design for his chosen people – full Jewish rule over all of Palestine from the river to the sea, the erasure, or reduction to a minimum, of any Arab presence within it, and, ultimately, the transformation of the current, self-styled "Jewish and democratic" state of Israel into a "Jewish and halakhic" [theocratic] one, which would be governed - if Smotrich ever has his way – by the laws of King David’s time.
That, at least, is how the religious Zionists perceive the now one-year-long war - Israel’s longest and bloodiest by far since 1948 and the Palestinian Nakba - and they were rejoicing in it.
For these, or so their rabbis and other such luminaries proclaim, were "marvellous”, nay “miraculous”, times, and proof anew - for there had been doubts about it after Israel’s highly contentious withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 - of a God still as demonstrably bent as ever on their "redemption" - and commanding them to go back there.
And three months into the war, at a reportedly "joyful" so-called Conference for the Victory of Israel, they, and the host of ministers and Knesset members attending it, pledged themselves - amid all the singing and dancing - to do so, preferably in conjunction with the "emigration", "voluntary" or enforced, of the entire Palestinian population of the Gaza Strip. But, until that happened, without it.
Meanwhile, religious soldiers, sensing that "something wonderful" was at hand, were already setting up makeshift synagogues in "liberated" parts of the Strip.
In the West Bank, Smotrich was well into his massive new settlement projects, amid a surge in mini-Huwwaras, driving yet more Palestinians from their ancestral lands and villages.
And with full-scale war against Lebanon taking place, excited talk of occupying and settling southern Lebanon, also once part of Eretz Israel, all the way up to the Litani river, the supposedly "natural border" between the two countries.
Glorious times, then, these were for some Israelis; particularly, of course, for this far-right, fanatical minority of them whose leaders, with Netanyahu in their clutches, were now in good part running the country.
For others, among the more rational, secular or moderately religious - and now diminishing - section of the population, these were beginning to feel more like times of madness, the consummation - as one of them put it - of that “march of folly” which had first set out in the aftermath of the 1967 war. And it was quite striking: "left" or "right", "religious" or "secular", "rich" or "poor" are the stock-in-trade of political discourse anywhere, but in the Israel of today "sane" or "insane" was catching up with them.
So, when all is said and done, will this Israeli madness actually turn out to have been the equal of that which brought down Hitler’s Germany, as Zimmerman suggests? Whatever does transpire, I doubt whether future historians will find cause to quarrel with him overmuch on that score.
Interestingly, though, a contemporary one – none other, in fact, than the self-same Yuval Harari who was so shocked by those Nazi-like songs - points to another and, as it seems to me, altogether more fitting such historical analogy, and a purely Jewish one to boot: that of the Zealots and the Hellenes.
In mid-first century AD, the Zealots were, so to speak, the religious Zionists of their day. Fanatics of a truly maniacal and murderous kind, they were forever at daggers drawn with the Hellenes, those of their fellow-citizens who, touched by the dominant Hellenic ethos of that age and place, had apparently decided that there was more to life than the grim, inhumanly demanding servitude of the almighty.
It was a fundamental societal divide - not unlike the one that is taking shape in Israel today - and a critical contributor to the ultimate calamity: Roman conquest, the destruction of the Temple, and the final dispersal of the Jewish people into their “exile” for centuries to come.
And Harari is far from alone in such melancholy reflections.
* I cannot vouch for the 100 percent verbatim accuracy of this quote; I made a note of it two years ago, but have been unable to locate it since.
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