Six months ago, I wrote: For ethno-nationalists, Israel is a shining light of what a determined people can accomplish, but I guess if Jews develop an ethno-state, that’s a good thing, but if goyim attempt to similarly develop their own ethno-states, that’s bad.
“Fascist” is usually thrown around as a slur, but I fail to see why it is any less valid than any other form of government. Anthropologist Peter Frost writes: “Fascism is defined here in opposition to liberalism, the belief that individuals should be free and self-determining.”
If you ask Google, “Is Israel fascist?”, you will get over a million results. Here’s the first result, a book review of the 2013 book Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel:
Max Blumenthal’s sprawling portrait of contemporary Israel is far more a work of journalism than political theory. It largely avoids sustained argument or analysis, allowing its main points to be inferred through the words of Israelis and Palestinians and short contemporary or historical descriptions, presented in several dozen vignette-like chapters. This is nonetheless a bold and shocking book, presenting persuasively a major theoretical and polemical argument about Israel almost completely at odds with the image most Americans have of it.
In Goliath, America’s foremost partner in the Middle East is not the humanistic and ever resourceful “David” using guile to vanquish surrounding brutes, but a militaristic and racist state whose electoral majorities have set it on a trajectory towards fascism, if it isn’t there already. Even those generally well-informed about Israel and its occupation of the Palestinian territories will have their views challenged by Blumenthal’s sharp eye and deadpan factual presentations.
Goliath eschews the standard liberal Zionist position that a relatively virtuous and democratic Israel was driven off course by some combination of the post-1967 occupation of territory won in the se-Day War, the burgeoning political power of the settlers, the authoritarian political culture of Russian immigrants, or the swelling political clout of Jews from North Africa and the Arab world. For Blumenthal, Israel’s 1967 victory was not a turning point so much as a new opportunity to implement the ethnic-cleansing ideology present at the state’s creation.
To a degree that has no clear equal among American journalists who cover the Mideast, Blumenthal is versed in the history of the 1948 war that created Israel, with its multiple expulsions of Palestinians from their towns followed by wiping those towns off the map. His narrative makes regular connections between this past and the present. For instance, a section on security procedures in Ben Gurion Airport is introduced by a description of the massacre of civilians in the Arab town of Lydda in 1948 that was followed by a forced march of 55,000 survivors to Ramallah, the so-called Lydda Death March. Lydda was then Hebraicized to “Lod,” site of the international airport where visitors to Israel and the occupied territories are now sorted by ethnicity before interrogation, their electronic devices often searched or seized.
Another episode: during the 1970s, the Jewish National Fund planted fir trees to cover the ruins of three Palestinian towns Israel had bulldozed in the aftermath of the 1967 war. The trees were nonindigenous to the region, though they reminded some Israelis of Switzerland. Three years ago, they burned in a huge forest fire Israel could not control. Some who fled the conflagration came from nearby Ein Hod, which once was an Arab town built of stone houses. In the 1950s, an Israeli artist lobbied for Israel to preserve the houses as studios instead of bulldozing them as planned, and the town was turned into a tourist destination. When Blumenthal visited, a young woman acknowledged that the bar in which they were sitting was in fact a converted mosque. “Yeah, but that’s how all of Israel is … built on top of Arab villages. Maybe it’s best to let bygones be bygones.”
Such a sentiment may have some practical utility and might be spoken in good faith, but from a citizen of a country where so much national culture is derived from remembrance of wrongs done to Jews, its lack of self-awareness is remarkable.
Not all the past memories are bitter. Blumenthal tells the story of Benjamin Dunkelman, a Canadian officer who volunteered to lead troops in Israel’s War of Independence. After signing a local peace pact with the notables of Nazareth, a cultural and economic center of Palestinian Christians, Dunkelman received a general’s orders to expel the inhabitants. He refused. When the general sought a formal written order to override Dunkelman, David Ben Gurion, who had given such orders before with a wave of the hand, balked at putting them in writing. So Palestinian Nazarenes, both Christian and Muslim, continue to live in Israel today.
A story of one of them, Hanin Zoabi, is told in one of Goliath’s pivotal chapters. Blumenthal arrived in Israel shortly before the Mavi Marmara affair, when a flotilla of boats sailed from Turkey with provisions to alleviate the blockade Israel had imposed on Gaza, the strip of territory it had evacuated settlers from in 2005 and then pulverized three years later. Israeli officials joked that Gazans, a majority of whom were suffering from what the United Nations called “food insecurity,” were having “an appointment with a dietician” and emailed to journalists sarcastic remarks about the menus of Gazan restaurants. As the flotilla approached, the Israeli military and Hebrew-language press ginned up a great panic about the boats, with their crews of aging European peace activists and a few Palestinian politicians. While the organizers assumed that Israel would relent and allow the provisions through, Israel sent commandos on helicopters and attack dinghies to storm the ship.
When some passengers resisted by throwing bottles and debris at the boarders, Israeli commandos replied with live ammunition. Nine passengers were killed, including a 19-year-old Turkish-American, shot in the face execution-style while lying wounded on the deck. Israel eventually apologized to Turkey for the incident and will probably pay compensation. But Blumenthal recounts with some astonishment that an overwhelming majority of the Israeli public felt their country’s brutal treatment of unarmed peace activists on the high seas was perfectly justified.
In the aftermath, the IDF went into public-relations mode. Israeli soldiers gathered up knives from the boat’s kitchen and laid them out in a photographic display with several Qurans, supposedly evidence the Mavi Marmara was leading an Islamist terror convoy. Israel jailed the surviving passengers and confiscated their laptops and electronic equipment. The IDF doctored a sound clip to make it appear that flotilla organizers were crazed anti-Semites. Outside the Turkish embassy, Israeli demonstrators railed against Turkey. Blumenthal interviewed several of them, who ranged from self-described peaceniks to Meir Kahane supporters. “The longer I spoke with the demonstrators,” he relates, “the more likely they were to merge their nightmare visions of the flotilla activists as hardcore agents of the Islamic Republic of Iran and al Qaeda with Holocaust demons. ‘Everything is against the Jews and we have the right to defend ourselves.’ ‘No matter what we do everything is against us—everybody. And we know we’re right’.”
This sentiment was echoed in the Knesset, when Hanin Zoabi, a 38-year-old Palestinian representative from Nazereth, elected by one of the Arab parties, instigated a virtual legislative riot by challenging Israel’s right to board the Mavi Marmara on the high seas. Zoabi holds a master’s degree from Hebrew University and had been a feminist activist prior to her election in 2009. She was on the boat, and after the assault began she grabbed a loudspeaker and used her Hebrew to try to get soldiers to stop killing unarmed passengers. Returning to the Knesset two weeks after the incident, she was interrupted by shouts of “terrorist” and “go back to Gaza” while the Likud speaker of the legislature tried in vain to restore order.
