What’s behind the Israeli right’s renewed war on Palestinian citizens?
JVL Introduction
In a fascinating analysis, Meron Rapoport looks at the ideology and actions of the far-right Zionist movement in Israel today.
He describes it as being like a return to the pre-state, pre-sovereign phase of Zionism.
Instinctively distrustful of the actually existing right-wing government, these fundamentalists fear a sell-out at any moment – the government might actually give some rights to Arabs!
And within Israel, noch!
There the far right is now fighting what it calls its “War for the Negev”, with, for examples, the JNF’s tree planning programme described as “seiz(ing) the open spaces near Bedouin settlements through afforestation, designed to block land takeover.”
In other words, a return to the settler Zionism of pre-state Israel where Judaization was the watchword, the Palestinians having to be excluded at every turn at whatever cost.
The fact that Mansour Abbas, head of the Islamist Party, sits in the government is a sign of the paralysis of the ultra-Zionism of the settlers.
That enough Israelis want some sort of peace with their fellow Palestinian citizens is evoking panic among them.
“The only two options that remain to the right,” says Rapoport, “are formalized apartheid or a second Nakba.”
Neither look likely in the foreseeable future, believes Rapoport, but the far right are willing to press hard to provoke either outcome.
This article was originally published by +972 Magazine, Local Call on Thu 10 Feb 2022. Read the original here.
What’s behind the Israeli right’s renewed war on Palestinian citizens?
Having moved on from its failed bid to formally annex the West Bank, the Israeli right has trained its sights back on an old target.
Loading article text…
Meron Rapoport is too optimistic. It may be true that the Zionist right in Israel fears a loss of Jewish power and control in Israel but there really is no evidence for these fears. The settler right in all such states have such fears.
Abbas may be nominally a part of Israel’s government but he exercises no power, controls no Ministry and is merely left begging for the crumbs on the table.
He says that the Zionist Right fear that Israel will become a state of all its citizens. I’m sure they do but there is no possibility of it happening. There is a wall to wall consensus on that. Meretz certainly hasn’t issued such a demand nor would it.
Even the possibility that Israel will or could reform itself is a fantasy. The ethnic cleansing in Jerusalem and the Negev demonstrate that that is not the case. The eagerness of the Police and state forces to violently attack those opposed to the demolitions and evictions testifies to that.
Shin Bet announced after the protests in the Negev that it was investigating them for ‘nationalist’ motives. The actuality on the ground doesn’t concern them but resistance is anti-national i.e. anti-Jewish national because Israeli Palestinians aren’t part of the only nation that counts in Israel.
Of course it is welcome that Israel’s Arab citizens are becoming mobilised as in the protests against the attack on Gaza but the determination of mainstream Zionism to continue the fight for as Jewish a state as possible is no less than it was at its foundation
The gap in both Greenstein’s and Rapoport’s pieces is how we – in the Galut also – can assist the development of power of Palestinians and of such progressive forces as exist in Jewish Israel; this is not ‘discrimination against Jews in favour of Palestinians’ but a recognition that all Palestinians under Israeli state rule are oppressed. Can any such road forward exist without working class leadership?