A movement against Jewish supremacy?
JVL Introduction
Peter Beinart’s latest podcast follows immediately on the Knesset’s passing the Supreme Court overhaul bill.
Here he explains his pessimism about the prospects of the opposition movement because it has largely accepted the ethno-nationalist rules of the game.
He joins with Ayman Odeh, Palestinian Israeli leader who told Israeli President Herzog on his recent visit to the United States that right-wing ethno-nationalists wouldn’t be defeated with some version of liberal ethno-nationalism.
“You have to join with us in a movement for equality, in a struggle that is not a struggle of Jews against Jews, but a struggle that pits Jews and Palestinians against those groups who are invested in the maintenance of apartheid.”
Can the protest movement be steered in that direction? Where else can hope be found?
This article was originally published by the Beinart Notebook on Wed 26 Jul 2023. Read the original here.
Can the movement against judicial overhaul become a movement against Jewish supremacy?
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Whatever his merits, Peter Beinart is not a Marxist, by which I mean he doesn’t have a materialist analysis or understanding. So he can imagine a broad movement against ethno nationalism between Palestinians and liberal Zionists. Except of course there are no liberal ethno nationalists, which is why Yair Lapid and Benn Gantz are constantly out manouvered. They accept, as do the vast majority of anti-overhaul protesters, the concept of a Jewish state. Even if they don’t like its direction.
Nor is the final defeat of the Lapids and Gantzes merely a matter of demography, which is a consequence, a symptom, not the cause of what I think Beinart rightly sees as the triumph of the pro-judicial overhaul side.
Beinart is right when he tentatively suggests that ‘ it also may just be that there’s something inherent in the nature of ethno-nationalism that given the profound authoritarianism that Israel expresses vis-a-vis Palestinians,’ although I don’t think it’s authoritarianism that is the cause. After all Labour Zionism could be equally as authoritarian if not more so.
Rather it is inherent in ethno nationalist states, states based on racial purity, that there is an ever present dynamic to making the state ever purer by demonising the other. Society is cleaved, not by class but by ethnicity so there is no possibility of any joint alliances between a section of the oppressed and oppressor.
The examples abound – Algeria, South Africa , Europe’s Christian ethno-nationalist states – where change only came through force, either internally, externally or both. So Aymen Odeh’s appeal to Herzog to abandon ethno-nationalism misunderstands the nature of the internal battles of Zionism.
Of course some of the protesters will be radicalised and see that the fight against the judicial overhaul and the fight against jewish supremacy are or should be part of the same fight. The problem is that Herzog and co. are first and foremost Zionists. The problem with Aymen Odeh is that he and Hadash are not anti-Zionist hence their continued support for a 2 state solution.