The Goals of Israel's Far Right

Israel may not have a strategy in its actions, but it does have an endgame: the Israeli right's long-held ambition to utterly smash its enemies with overwhelming force

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The always worthwhile Adam Shatz has a very good piece at the London Review of Books looking at the development of the clash between Hezbollah and Israel since October 7 and the threat it poses to the entire region. It provides a very good compliment to my own piece this week on the opportunity that exists for the United States to change course in the Middle East, an opportunity that neither the current president nor either of the candidates for the job from the two major parties is paying any attention to.

There is one element, though, that I would add to Shatz’s analysis, and it’s an element that tends to be missing from many views of the current state of affairs in the region. That element is the radical change in Israel that has made everything about this moment—from the genocide in Gaza to the repeated mass protests in Israel to the greatest threat of regional war ever—decidedly different from any that has come before.

The uber-nationalist Jewish state

Most people understand this is the most right-wing government Israel has ever had. But there is not enough appreciation of how massive a departure it really is from Israel’s prior governments, even under Benjamin Netanyahu.

Of course, Netanyahu is motivated by maintaining his hold on his office and avoiding the consequences of the crimes of corruption he has committed for which his trial in Israel is ongoing. But Israel’s orientation and motivations go well beyond Netanyahu’s venal interests.

The current government is not anomalous or unrepresentative of its citizens. Americans can sometimes see ourselves in Israel, and this can mean we see Israel’s radical right wing as representing a vocal minority, as it does here. But in Israel, there is no electoral college nor is there a Senate, institutions that were intentionally set up with the express intention of allowing racist slaveholders to have a disproportionately strong voice in government.

On the contrary, Israel’s system of coalition governments and proportional, rather than winner-take-all voting has brought out a majority view that is distinctly on the right. That radical right is not limited, as is sometimes portrayed to the Otzma Yehudit and Religious Zionism parties of Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, respectively.

Radical, highly nationalistic, and bigoted right-wing views dominate the government and have a strong presence in the opposition. The view of Palestinians as less than human is well represented in the Likud, and the rest of the government, and in opposition parties like Avigdor Liberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu, Gideon Sa’ar’s New Hope (which is now joining the government), and even Benny Gantz’s Blue and White party. The slightly more moderate Yesh Atid party calls back to the more moderate racism of Israel’s earlier days, as does Yair Golan’s Labor party, which is now joined at the hip with the only Zionist party that might stake a claim to a somewhat contrasting character, Meretz.

That certainly does not mean agreement on every policy, or even fundamental issues in the country. The protests over the past two years demonstrate this. Some Israelis support the fascist tendencies of this government; many oppose it, even if many of those people still support Jewish supremacy in the state. There are many divisive issues in Israel that have nothing to do with its apartheid nature or its policy toward the Palestinians and the rest of the region.

Similarly, many Israelis fully support continuing the genocide in Gaza even if it means risking the lives of the remaining hostages; others, as we are seeing in the streets now, want a ceasefire and are willing to end the genocide to bring the hostages home. Voices who oppose the genocide for its own sake are a distinct, though visible, minority.

The Israeli body politic has become increasingly radicalized. This process long preceded October 7, though that horrific day certainly accelerated it.

Many Palestine advocates insist this is Israel showing its true face. There is truth in that; the idea that Arabs are lesser people is baked into the European nationalism that spawned Zionism. But the blanket statement obscures real changes in Israeli consciousness and political thinking over the last quarter century.

“The Iron Wall” ubiquity

In his still-relevant work from 2000, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World, Israeli historian Avi Shlaim persuasively argued that Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the ideological father of Revisionist Zionism, which later became the ideological core of Netanyahu’s Likud coalition, inspired Labor Zionist and later Israeli strategy.

In Shlaim’s view, while many political differences remained between Labor and Revisionist Zionism, Labor adopted Jabotinsky’s basic idea that Israel needed to thoroughly defeat Palestinian nationalism.

The split in Likud under Ariel Sharon over the withdrawal of settlements from Gaza in 2005 removed the center-right elements of the party. Over the past two decades, it has become ever more radicalized, while Netanyahu came to personally dominate it. Ironically, that meant that the major Israeli political party that descended from Jabotinsky adhered less to his vision—which included a sort of junior partnership for “the Arabs” after they had been forced to acknowledge Jewish dominance—than the more centrist (sometimes even laughably called “left”) parties in Israel.

In his LRB piece, Shatz makes the case that Israel thrives on endless war. He writes, “[T]he line between tactics and strategy may not be so useful in the case of Israel, a state that has been at war since its creation. The identity of the enemies changes – the Arab armies, Nasser, the PLO, Iraq, Iran, Hizbullah, Hamas – but the war never ends, because Israel’s entire existence, its search for what it now brazenly calls ‘living space’, is based on a forever war with the Palestinians, and with whoever happens to support Palestinian resistance. Escalation may be precisely what Israel seeks, or what it is prepared to risk, since it views war as its destiny, if not its raison d’être.”

That’s not wrong, but it doesn’t entirely explain the thinking in the current Israeli right. This Israeli government believes it will always be on a war footing, but not necessarily always against the Palestinians. They believe Israel can, through its military might, destroy the Palestinians as a national movement that is capable of fighting Israel in any way. They will thus be fighting enemies, but no longer fighting an enemy that can, by its very existence, call Israel’s self-legitimization into question.

What passes for strategy among the modern Israeli right

Americans often reduce Israel’s decisions to Netanyahu’s corruption and self-interest. That is a mistake, but it would also be wrong to minimize the role Netanyahu’s personal interest plays.

Netanyahu certainly wants to maintain a state of war so he can avoid his corruption trial and what is still almost certain to be the end of his political career. That will bring with it the loss of the protection his office affords him.

To that end, Netanyahu has embraced the ideology of figures like Ben Gvir and Smotrich even more than he has in the past. That ideology not only allows him to keep the war machine churning, but it also gives him a conceivable way out of his troubles if the beliefs of the Israeli far right can be proven correct.

Netanyahu shares the far-right ideology of his government of extremists, though he is more of a politician than an ideologue. The Smotrich-Ben Gvir ideological camp has long believed that Israel should disregard world and even American opinion and simply destroy its enemies. That camp wants a confrontation with Iran, but it needs to ensure that the US will be a full partner and that Arab states will be either active or at least tacit partners in it.

That takes time to develop, and it requires that Iran or its partners take more actions that enrage Americans. To that end, Israel has been ramping up the war on Hezbollah, the conflict with Ansar Allah in Yemen and taking increasingly provocative steps directly against Iran. The assassination of Hassan Nasrallah was a major step in that direction.

Meanwhile, Israel continues working to absorb the West Bank and destroy Gaza. All of this revolves around the theme of ridding Israel of restraints from the west, especially the United States and claiming what the Israeli right believes is theirs: a hegemonic Greater Israel.

That view was once considered extreme and unrealistic (though desirable) by mainstream Israel. Like Jabotinsky’s Iron Wall theory, it has now become the Israeli mainstream.

The American accomplices

This radicalization has been aided by a shift in the United States’ approach to Israel. Through the administration of Barack Obama, Israel treasured liberal American support, and the bipartisan consensus in Washington. The price was American boundaries on Israeli behavior.

Washington didn’t need to do much to exert its will on Israel. George W. Bush, for example, threatened to withhold loan guarantees, as his father had, when he wanted Israel to make alterations to the route of its apartheid wall in the West Bank in 2004. The threat of loan guarantees was hardly a huge hammer; it would have been a minor inconvenience to Israel. But the implied threat of American action was enough to persuade Israel to cooperate.

Obama similarly made it clear that when he took office, he expected Israel to end its bombardment of Gaza, dubbed “Operation Cast Lead,” in 2009. Netanyahu complied. Bill Clinton, angered by Netanyahu’s foot-dragging in implementing the Hebron agreement and Wye River Accord in the late 1990s made his displeasure known, which many analysts believe helped lead to Netanyahu’s electoral defeat to Ehud Barak.

But both Donald Trump and Joe Biden, long before the October 7 attacks, adopted a much more permissive, bear-hugging attitude not just to Israel but specifically toward Netanyahu. Whatever their occasional personal disagreements, both presidents had few guardrails around Israeli behavior, and it showed. Whether it was Trump partying with a gaggle of Islamophobes and antisemites at the new site of the US embassy in Jerusalem embassy while Israeli troops were gunning down Palestinian women and children during the Great March of Return or Biden pulling out all the stops to bury the murder of Shireen Abu Akleh by Israeli troops, Netanyahu continued pushing the envelope and finding Washington acquiescent no matter how far he pushed.

October 7 presented a golden opportunity for the Israeli right. The rage in Israel was ubiquitous, and there was little pushback from the west or the western-aligned Arab states when Defense Minister Yoav Gallant explicitly announced genocidal measures against the people of Gaza in the wake of Hamas’ attack.

The serious war crimes committed on October 7, and the fact that the President of the United States was reinforcing false claims of additional war crimes that had not actually been committed, opened the door for the right to finally do what it had always wanted to do: use Israel’s superior military might and virtually bottomless well of American support to destroy the Palestinian national movement and, eventually, to confront Iran.

Right now, it seems like Israel is succeeding. While the world wags its finger and clucks its tongue, Israel has successfully destroyed Gaza, killed much of Hezbollah’s senior leadership, and gotten away with serious provocations in assassinating Iranian generals, a Hamas leader in Tehran and another in Beirut, and even bombing an Iranian embassy while suffering no significant retaliatory actions.

This apparent success is undoubtedly fueling further adventurism not only in Jerusalem but in Washington as well. That it is hardening hatred of and opposition to both Israel and the United States throughout the world, and especially in the Mideast, does not seem to concern either the Netanyahu or Biden governments.

But there is no victory here for Israel or the United States. Even if they engage Iran and win, as Netanyahu seemed to brag would happen “sooner than people think” on Monday, all it will accomplish is to set the stage not only for more October 7s but also more September 11s in the future. The cost of defending against those will, as we have seen in the wake of those attacks, be out own freedom, our own security, and our own decency.

Moreover, as we have seen in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and elsewhere, wars for regime change do not end well for anyone. They only create more ISILs, breed more right-wing fascists and white supremacists, and lead to a more hateful future.

Israel is committed to this course. There is no good reason for the United States and Europe to follow it into the abyss, and we shouldn’t.

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News Roundup

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By Tareq S. Hajjaj and Qassam Muaddi, Mondoweiss, September 30, 2024

Drunk with power, Israel's 'victory' opens the gates for war without end

By Lubna Masarwa, Middle East Eye, September 30, 2024

New Report: Israel Systematically Attacked Aid Workers

By Schuyler Mitchell, Dropsite News, September 30, 2024

Meet the First Tenured Professor to Be Fired for Pro-Palestine Speech

By Natasha Lennard, The Intercept, September 26, 2024

Yes, Antony Blinken Should Resign. But He’s Not the Only One.

By Jeet Heer, The Nation, September 27, 2024

‘Immoral, Disproportionate’ – Pope Francis Slams Israel’s aggression on Gaza and Lebanon

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Moody's cuts Israel's rating, warns of drop to 'junk'

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