Prefatory Note This post is a much modified, updated version of my responses to questions posed Murat Sofuoglu, a Turkish journalist associated with TRT World. The dehistoricizing and decontextualization of the Hamas attack of October 7 was spread around the world by the most influential global media platforms and political leaders of the liberal democracies, and led to widespread sympathy for Israel and some months of tolerance of their response despite its legally and ethically unacceptable character. As such the Israeli response was initially sanitized by regarding Palestinian grievances in Gaza as irrelevent, and also by uncritically accepting Israeli hasbara that its response to the Hamas attack was solely motivated by security and counter-terrorist considerations, and thus disconnected from the Greater Israel priority and preoccupations of the Netanyahu coalition that came to power at the start of 2023 or more than nine months before the attack.]
1. Has the Israeli model to secure Jews a homeland in Palestine failed?
I think it is misleading to refer to the Zionist Project in the singular and by reference to ‘a homeland’ as originally pledged in the Balfour Declaration issued in 1917. The minimum pre-1948 goal of world Zionism was to create a Jewish supremist state in Israel with an unlimited right of returns for Jews from anywhere in the world, and the denial of such an equivalent right to the Palestinians who were the native majority population. The Nakba that accompanied the 1948 War involved the forced expulsion from Palestine and permanent refugee/exile status for of at least 700,000 non-Jewish residents of the portion of Palestine set aside for Israel by the partition resolution of 29 November 1947 UN GA Res. 181. Israeli expulsion politics exhibited the Zionist intention in the fog of war was to ensure a long-term Jewish majority settler population that would enable Israel to claim credibly in its early years to be both Jewish and democratic, the latter proving to become
overwhelmed by the apartheid regime that was convincingly delimited as such over the course of the last decade. The occupation was fully documented as a type of apartheid violating the 1973 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid. This assessment was validated by comprehensive reports, filled with data, prepared by ESCWA, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and the Israeli NGO, B’Tselem.
Prefiguring the response of the governments of most liberal democracies was the failure to express any adverse reactions to Israeli apartheid despite their earlier support for the global anti-apartheid movement that exerted so much pressure on the South African government that it pleasantly surprised the world by releasing Nelson Mandela from prison and proceeding rapidly to become a constitutional democracy incorporating legal commitments to racial equality. Why was there no negative international response to Israeli apartheid? At the very least the apartheid assessments should have led to a demand that Israel withdraw from Gaza, West Bank, and East Jerusalem.
Even earlier, the most that the US Government could manage to say about the relentless expansion of unlawful settlements that ‘it was unhelpful.’ At first, Western governments were reluctant to be even mildly critical of Israel because of their own failure to do more by way of opposition to the Holocaust, inducing a debilitating sense of guilt made more potent by Israel’s domination of the public discourse subtly facilitated by a racist dehumaniization of the Palestinian other as an Orientalized inferior people when compared to the rapid modernizing prevailing temperament in the new Jewish state.
The UN contributed to the Palestinian tragedy by initially proposing partition of a previously colonized national entity without bothering to consult the Arab majority population residing in Palestine that would have certainly been opposed to lending legitimacy to such a fracturing of their homeland. But the Palestinians were never given a chance to vote in a referendum on partition, which itself was an ahistorical imposition of UK colonial interest and methods of control by a logic of ‘divide and rule.’
This post-1945 tragedy was compounded and prefigured the future ordeals of the Palestinian people by the failure to at least secure the promised Palestinian state of equal status to Israel before legitimating Israel’s claims to statehood by diplomatic recognition and admission to the UN as a member sovereign state. The 1967 War aggravated Palestinian grievances by. establishing Israeli de facto control by way of conquest over the Palestinian territories of East Jerusalem, West Bank, and Gaza, again given unregulated de facto control by way of the doctrine of Belligerent Occupation, supposedly within a temporary and regulative international law framework set forth in the 4th Geneva Convention and the First Additional Protocol. Israel massively violated its terms of occupation in numerous fundamental ways from Day One. Perhaps, the most flagrant early expression of Israeli territorial unilateralism was its incorporation of East Jerusalem into sovereign Israel as ‘its eternal capital.’ This symbolic and substantive land-grabbing that included Islamic sacred sites has never to this day been accepted by the majority of states, and the Israeli move to establish Jerusalem as the Israeli capital was declared ‘null and void’ in an 2017 Emergency Session General Assembly Resolution (ES-1019) supported by a super-majority of Member states but opposed and then ignored by the US and the main states of NATO [the vote was 129-9-35 (abstentions).
The developments between 1967 and 2024 consolidated Israeli territorial ambitions in occupied Palestine by way of the extensive unlawful settlement movement, a coercive apartheid occupation regime that subjugated Palestinians living under prolonged occupation that culminated in the genocidal and ecocidal assault on Gaza that killed many in real time and totally devastated Gaza as a livable habitat. The settler colonial assessment of Israel disposing the majority native population resembled the pattern of the breakaway British colonials (US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand) each of which, although New Zealand less so, implemented their colonial encroachments by genocidal tactics in response to resistance, and succeeded in establishing their flourishing and enduring state.
In retrospect, it seems obvious that Zionism, and since 1948, Israel itself pursued a two-track strategy: first, a public hasbara discourse that claimed moderation and pretended to seek a democratic polity and engage in a search for a political compromise on land rights, democracy, and human rights with the native population; secondly, a political strategy that opportunistically advanced by stages to realize the hard core Zionist Project of restoring Jewish exclusive control over the Biblically ‘promised land’ of Jewish tradition at a given time for what it could get by way of an expansionist vision with respect to Israel itself, neighboring countries, and regional geopolitics. Not only did the shadows cast by the Nazi Holocaust in the early years of Israel’s existence inhibit criticism of the settler colonial aspects of Israel’s approach to the indigenous non-Jewish residents of Palestine but Israel’s first political leader, David Ben Gurion a committed secularist, cynically declared ‘Let the Bible be our weapon,’ and in the process claimed a religious entitlement to all of historic Palestine as ‘the promised land’ of Jewish tradition, which has prevailed over the prime norm of colonial decline, that of the right of sef-determination.
After the 1967 War Israel became itself a partner in ‘colonialism after colonialism’ in the Middle East. There emerged a strategic relationship with the United States and Europe that embraced regional security, safeguarding oil and gas reserves for the West, and cooperating with respect to the containment of political Islam, especially after the Islamic Revolution in Iran (1979). This US led geopolitical limitations imposed on regional autonomy were highlighted by the unprecedented US political commitment to ensure that Israel possessed a military capability to defeat any combination of regional adversaries. Such a willingness to indulge ‘Israeli exceptionalism’ with respect to regional security was dramatized by looking away while Israel covertly, with European active complicity not only became the sole nuclear weapons state in the Middle East but assumed the role of guardian of non-proliferation when it came to Iran. As Israel gained in strength and regional acceptance via the Abraham Accords reached in 2020 during the last months of the Trump presidency it seemed on a path that would end with a one-state solution under its sole and uncontested dominion.
As Israel gained in political acceptance and self-confidence it became less shy about revealing its nationalist agenda. The 2018 Basic Law, with a quasi-constitutional status, was forthright in claiming Israel as a Jewish State, with the Jewish people exclusively entitled to exercise the right of self-determination (ignoring the rights and relevance of the 20% of its population that was non-Jewish, and Hebrew was confirmed as the only official language. Even extreme Israeli apologists seemed reluctant to any longer claim, what was never true, that “Israel was the only democracy in the Middle East.” The net result as of late 2024 is that it is the Palestinians who have become unwelcome strangers in their own historic homeland. Israeli democracy, such as it has become, was clearly in practice and law ‘for Jews only.’ And again the Western patrons of Israel watched from the sidelines as Israel kept enlarging and disclosing its zero-sum vision of conflict resolution, and disregard of the US role as intermediary in the search for a diplomatic resolution of the conflict.
2. What is Israel trying to achieve with its ongoing war campaign across the Middle East?
Again, we are challenged to deal with Israel’s mainly undisclosed intentions and what is disclosed is not trustworthy or a small part of the Israeli policy agenda motivating the enlargement of the combat zone. For greater insight we are forced to rely on conjecture to produce some kind of illuminating, yet plausible, interpretation. As with Gaza, Israel claims a right of self-defense. It seeks extra weight by insisting that its enemies are all sponsors or guilty of ‘terrorist’ violence’ and proxy engagements determined to undermine Israeli security, Even if we accept this line of argument Israel’s use of force in Lebanon is disproportional and indiscriminate, self-acknowledged and operationalized as an inflammatory application of the Dahiya Doctrine originally set forth in the Lebanon War of 1982. The Dahiya Doctrine was enunciated by a leading Israeli general, expressing the intention to retaliate disproportionately against security provocations threatening Israeli interests. The Gaza genocide can be viewed as a grotesque and maximal example of Dahiya thinking and practice, although specifically motivated by Israeli extraterritorial security priorities, ethnic cleansing, economic ambitions, regional paranoia, as well as its invariable dismissal of the genuine grievances and armed resistance of adversaries as invariably of a terrorist character.
In certain ethical respects the Dahiya Doctrine is an Israeli adaptation of the logic of deterrence that guided security policy of both US and USSR during Cold War. Its most salient feature was known as Mutual Assured Destruction (or to critics as MAD). Israel’s adaptation consisted of substituting the threat of genocide for that of nuclear retaliation. The core idea of deterrence is a credibly threatened unacceptably disproportionate response to any fundamental threat to strategic interests or to homeland security of the nuclear antagonists and their close allies.
There is no mutuality in Israel’s approach to deterrence, which is a generalized warning to its regional adversaries of dire results if they dare to attack or provoke Israel. Any regional state purporting to balance Israel hegemonic nuclear capabilities is projected as such a threat, which presupposes a geopolitical right to maintain Israel’s regional nuclear supremacy.
3. Do you think with the current campaign, the Netanyahu government aims to resolve once and for all the Jewish question, fixing Israel’s place in the Middle East?
It seems as though Israel has been expanding its combat objectives initially justified as retaliation against Hamas for the October 7 attack by adopting a proclaimed goal of exterminating Hamas. While pursuing this goal Israel engaged in such excessive and indiscriminate violence that its behavior was widely perceived as a transparent instance of genocide committed in real time and including a growing and increasingly activist minority in the civil societies of the Western countries, including many Jews, whose governments most ardently support Israel. Israel has suffered a near total loss of legitimacy as a normal state and is increasingly viewed as a pariah or rogue state to an extent exceeding the condemnation of even overtly racist and oppressive South Africa. This ended when the Pretoria government surprised the world by abandoning apartheid in the mid-1990s, apparently for pragmatic reasons associated with debilitating sanctions that limited South Africa’s participation in world society, including cultural and sporting boycotts that curtailed the freedoms of the ruling white minority.
Israel has handled this international hostility differently and more defiantly than South Africa, partly because it has had the benefit of strong geopolitical support from the governments of the Global West, especially the all-important US. Israel’s security is a matter of strategic importance to the West as a beachhead in the Middle East for the related purposes of ensuring access to oil and gas reserves of the region and containing the spread of political Islam. Thus, the increase of Israel’s war objectives to include Hezbollah, the Houthis, and of course Iran has also become a battleground in the Clash of Civilizations within the region and is a potent source of instability parallel to the incipient Second Cold War with China and Russia. Whether Israel, with Washington’s backing and probable participation will provoke war with Iran is one of the great uncertainties of this historical moment. Part of this uncertainty involves assessing the relevance of Netanyahu’s personal survival agenda and whether the Religious Right in the governing coalition will push these wider objectives to the point of regional war with dangerous geopolitical risks. An ethical imperative is also continues to be present– not to shift attention away from the ongoing acute human catastrophe entrapping the civilian population of Gaza in deliberately induced death threatening traumas of mass hunger and widespread disease.
What Israel does and refrains from doing in the next few weeks will have a major impact on the prospects for a peaceful future responsive to growing ecological challenges. This in turn may reflect the outcome of the US presidential elections, and how the new leadership handles this dangerous, fragile global situation that combines a prolonged humanitarian catastrophe, ethical and legal gross abuses of civilian innocence, and hazardous neglect of heightened risks of geopolitical encounters and ecological collapses.
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Global Justice in the 21st Century 