I find it interesting that people are happy to excuse the behaviour of Ben Gvir and the like, saying he doesn’t represent all of Israel. I read this in the Guardian today. It’s quite chilling.
Last month, the former head of Israel’s national security council, Giora Eiland, pointed out the fact that Israel’s acceptance of Donald Trump’s 15-point plan was a matter of temporary military tactics, rather than long-term peace. “Israel has no interest in Gaza being rebuilt, it’s better for us that it be destroyed for generations to come,” he said.
Moshe Feiglin, previously a “far-right outcast” according to the Times of Israel, is now within reach of a cabinet position as a result of an alliance with the finance minister Bezalel Smotrich’s Religious Zionist party. In a recent interview, Feiglin said that those who didn’t want to leave Gaza should be compelled to by “every way possible. We’ll shut off his water pipes, for example.”
This sort of talk, from within the very ranks of government, is often dismissed as unrepresentative of the Israeli state and, as there are elections ahead, is written off as the lurid but ultimately unserious rhetoric of electioneering. But people such as Ben-Gvir and Katz are not fringe voices, they are ministers with high-impact executive briefs – security and defence – that they have indeed used to push policy that matches their statements.
And if some of the more extreme statements are just electioneering, what does that say about the parameters of discourse in the country if your campaign is mass ethnic cleansing? What does that say about not only the future of Gaza, but all Palestinians in occupied territories who are labouring under home demolitions, militant settlers and the de facto annexation of the West Bank?
Even if these figures are a minority, both in terms of the seats held in the Knesset and the relative number of people who have voted for them, they still hold the levers of power, there is no substantial domestic mobilisation against them, and the rest of the system is unable or unwilling to stop them. The distinctions around how big their constituency may be or how representative they are of Israelis in general matters not a jot to the fate of Palestinians over whom they have been given executive dominion.
The question now is, why are these people not being taken at their word? Why is there no sense of urgency and outrage. Why are these policies and stated goals from the Israeli state not taken seriously and met with appropriate sanctions, trade and arms embargos, and international censure? There is a wild asymmetry when it comes to the perceived potency of Israeli rhetoric and action. “From the river to sea”, for example, as expressed by Palestinians and their supporters has become stigmatised and its use censured. But the most extreme interpretation of that phrase, that it means only one* *sovereign people in the mentioned land, is commonplace in Israel.
The founding charter of Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party states that “between the sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty”. Netanyahu himself last week attended a gathering at a religious-Zionist yeshiva, nodding along to a Kahanist song belted out by the attenders. “Remember me, please, give me strength just this time, O God, to take revenge, if only for one of my two eyes, on Palestine,” they sang, adding “May their name be erased!” “There are no more red lines,” was how a Haaretz writer described the scene.
The international community has averted its eyes as red lines are trampled over. This can only be a combination of cowardice and acceptance, barely obscured by feeble statements of condemnation here and there, and grounded in the belief or resignation that Palestinian lives shall be consigned to hell. The facts are clear and plentiful. The Israeli right has a plan and a sense of direction, one that it has nursed for a very long time, and now given nourishment by the 7 October attacks.