Showing posts with label Israel. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Israel. Show all posts

Tuesday, December 5, 2023

Hell’s architects by Zarrar Khuhro

 

Hell’s architects by Zarrar Khuhro 

GAZA wasn’t always what it is today. Gaza wasn’t always a giant prison that has now been transformed into a death camp; a hellscape of broken bodies and buildings and butchered babies.

 

Before 1948, Gaza was a wealthy territory in Mandatory Palestine. Located on the coast, it benefited from trade and fishing and was also blessed with fertile land, which led to a strong agricultural economy. Then came the Nakba, with Zionist terror militias — which later coalesced into the Israeli army — killing, looting and raping across the territory. The first Arab-Israeli war saw Egypt occupy the territory, which remained in Egyptian control even after Israel prevailed in the conflict as part of the treaty that ended the war.

 

 

For a brief period during the Suez crisis, when Israel, France and the United Kingdom jointly attacked Egypt, and Israel occupied both the Sinai and the Strip, Egyptian military rule continued till the 1967 war, which saw the comprehensive defeat of the Arab armies and the military occupation of the Strip by Israel.

 

The usual formula of apartheid and Jewish settlements — under the guard of the Israeli army — began, and continued until 2005, when Israel’s then prime minister Ariel Sharon withdrew its forces and dismantled the settlements. This is presented by pro-Zionist circles as a magnanimous step towards peace that was ‘typically’ spurned by the Palestinians, but it is instructive to see what the actual architects of that move had in mind.

 

Israeli geo-strategist Arnon Soffer is considered to be the originator of the separation and withdrawal plan, and he is clear that Israel underwent this process not out of a desire for peace — a word he says he despises — but because the alternative would be the end of Israel as a Zionist state with Jewish supremacy as its cornerstone, because — if Gaza were to be integrated into Israel proper — the Jews would eventually be outnumbered.

 

For many Israelis, Gaza is just the start.

 

And so, it was considered better to fence Gaza off from the world, with that fence eventually becoming a wall and with everything going in and out being at the whim of the Israeli authorities. The minimum daily caloric intake for a human being to survive on was calculated so that the average Gazan permanently remained on the brink of starvation.

 

This too was by design, because as Soffer himself says in a 2004 interview with Jerusalem Post titled ‘It’s the demography, stupid’: “It’s a fence that we will be guarding on either side. Instead of entering Gaza, the way we did last week, we will tell the Palestinians that if a single missile is fired over the fence, we will fire 10 in response. And women and children will be killed, and houses will be destroyed. After the fifth such incident, Palestinian mothers won’t allow their husbands to shoot Kassams, because they will know what’s waiting for them.”

 

Soffer knew the consequences, and welcomed them. He continues: “When 2.5 million people live in a closed-off Gaza, it’s going to be a human catastrophe. Those people will become even bigger animals than they are today, with the aid of … fundamentalist Islam. The pressure at the border will be awful. It’s going to be a terrible war. So, if we want to remain alive, we will have to kill and kill and kill. All day, every day … If we don’t kill, we will cease to exist. The only thing that concerns me is how to ensure that the boys and men who are going to have to do the killing will be able to return home to their families and be normal human beings.”

 

When asked what the end result of all this killing would be, Soffer says: “The Palestinians will be forced to realise that demography is no lon­ger significant, becau­­se we’re here and they’re there. And then they will begin to ask for ‘conflict management’ talks — not that dirty word ‘peace’. Peace is a word for believers, and I have no tolerance for believers — neither those who wear yarmulkes nor those who pray to the God of peace.”

 

For Soffer and those who agree with him — the majority of Israelis one would presume — Gaza is just the start.

 

He continues to say, a full 19 years before today’s ongoing atrocity: “The population increase of Israeli Arabs is going to present a major problem. But, if we no longer include the Palestinians, and we begin embracing immigrants, foreign workers, Druze, and Christians — who are now on our side, because they see what … radical Islam is — then there won’t be an Israeli Arab problem. While we’re on the subject, you tell me what you need East Jerusalem for. Why do you need 300,000 Arabs as Israeli citizens? What’s holy there? Anything that is holy we should annex.”

 

This has always been the plan and now it is one step closer to fruition.

 

The writer is a journalist.

 

X: @zarrarkhuhro

 

Published in Dawn, December 4th, 2023

Saturday, December 2, 2023

Documents expose Israeli conspiracy to facilitate October 7 attack By Andre Damon

 

Documents expose Israeli conspiracy to facilitate October 7 attack By Andre Damon 


 

On Friday, the New York Times published a report establishing conclusively that Israel was fully informed, in detail, of plans by Hamas to attack its border that were executed on October 7. These revelations make clear that Israeli officials, knowing full well where and how Hamas would strike, made a deliberate decision to stand down in order to facilitate the attack.

These revelations mean that the Israeli government allowed and abetted the killing of their own citizens and that the Israeli government is responsible for the deaths that took place that day. This criminal conspiracy was aimed at establishing a pretext for a long-planned genocide against the people of Gaza.

Moreover, it is impossible to believe that the United States was uninformed of Hamas’s plans, under conditions where not only Israeli intelligence but also Egypt, had advanced warnings of the attack. Everything points to a plot that involved Israel, the Biden administration and likely British and European intelligence agencies.

The Times published this report Monday as Israel launched a new wave of attacks on Gaza during a visit by Antony Blinken. The presence of the US Secretary of State was meant not only to express the United States’ support for the renewed onslaught but to manage the response to the exposure of this conspiracy.

The Times reported that                                                

The approximately 40-page document, which the Israeli authorities code-named “Jericho Wall,” outlined, point by point, exactly the kind of devastating invasion that led to the deaths of about 1,200 people.

The document obtained by Israeli intelligence forces “meticulously described the attack method, mirroring the actual events,” the Times reported. “It outlined an intense assault aimed to breach Gaza Strip fortifications, seize Israeli cities, and target key military bases. This plan was implemented with alarming accuracy, involving a coordinated use of rockets, drones, and ground forces.”

The Times reports, 

Hamas followed the blueprint with shocking precision. The document called for a barrage of rockets at the outset of the attack, drones to knock out the security cameras and automated machine guns along the border, and gunmen to pour into Israel en masse in paragliders, on motorcycles and on foot—all of which happened on Oct. 7.

Moreover, the Times reported, Israeli military and intelligence officials knew Hamas carried out an exhaustive, day-long training mission to practice the plan in detail just three months before the attack. The Times states, 

The training included a dry run of shooting down Israeli aircraft and taking over a kibbutz and a military training base, killing all the cadets. During the exercise, Hamas fighters used the same phrase from the Quran that appeared at the top of the Jericho Wall attack plan.

Even while acknowledging that Israel was fully informed of Hamas’s plans, the Times seeks to package the revelations with an alibi, asserting, without any substantiation, that Israeli officials simply made a mistake. The Times writes,

Underpinning all these failures was a single, fatally inaccurate belief that Hamas lacked the capability to attack and would not dare to do so. That belief was so ingrained in the Israeli government, officials said, that they disregarded growing evidence to the contrary...

The failures to connect the dots echoed another analytical failure more than two decades ago, when the American authorities also had multiple indications that the terrorist group Al Qaeda was preparing an assault.

No, Israel’s stand-down on October 7 was not a failure to “connect the dots” because there were no dots to connect. The Israeli intelligence forces had obtained the entire operational plan of the October 7 attack, then witnessed Hamas carry out a major, high-level training exercise for that plan. They knew exactly what was planned and decided to let it go ahead.

The Times writes, “Israeli military and intelligence officials dismissed the plan as aspirational, considering it too difficult for Hamas to carry out.” It adds, “It is unclear whether Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu or other top political leaders saw the document.”

This presentation is absurd. It is impossible to believe that information of this character could come into the possession of the intelligence agencies without provoking the most intense analysis. The idea that, after 9/11, such high-level plans would be kept from the prime minister is unbelievable.

Such a document would have come from a source at the highest levels of Hamas. Once this valuable information was obtained, it would have been vital to take action to protect the source, including countermeasures to make Hamas believe Israel did not possess the information. The stand-down could have been a means to send a signal that Hamas’s plan had not been exposed.

Ultimately, a choice was made to allow Hamas’s operation to go ahead, in order to provide Israel with a pretext for a massive, long-planned military assault on Gaza. Only Netanyahu could make such a decision. The United States, meanwhile, instantly sent a massive military force to the region, announcing the deployment of its largest aircraft carrier and escort ship to the region within 24 hours of the attack.

The Times’ claim that Israel’s stand-down was an “intelligence failure” makes no sense because it is a lie from beginning to end. No, the events of October 7 were not an intelligence failure: Israel was remarkably successful in exactly predicting Hamas’s military operation. Instead of acting on this intelligence, Israel orchestrated a stand-down of troops and intelligence-gathering at the precise moment when the attack took place.

Four days after the October 7 attack, veteran journalist Seymour Hersh reported that in the days ahead of the attack, “local Israeli military authorities, with the approval of Netanyahu, ordered two of the three Army battalions, each with about 800 soldiers, that protected the border with Gaza to shift their focus to the Sukkot festival” taking place near the West Bank.

Hersh quoted a source who told him, “That left only eight hundred soldiers … to be responsible for guarding the 51-kilometer border between the Gaza Strip and southern Israel. That meant the Israeli citizens in the south were left without an Israeli military presence for ten to twelve hours. They were left to fend for themselves.”

The stand-down not only left the border vulnerable to attack, it created the conditions where military forces had to be transferred to intercept Hamas attackers in civilian areas, creating conditions in which Israeli tank and helicopter forces shot indiscriminately into civilian areas, further swelling the Israeli death toll. 

In addition to the military stand-down, Israel made a decision to put its vaunted 8200 signals intelligence unit off duty on weekends, meaning that the signals intelligence unit that detected the training exercise three months ago was not on duty at the time of Saturday’s attack.

The exposure of Israel’s advanced foreknowledge of the attack likewise exposes the US media and political establishment, which have fully embraced Israel’s claims to have been caught by surprise by the attack, and claimed that the events of October 7 justify the genocide now being unleashed in Gaza.

These revelations expose the Gaza genocide to be a criminal conspiracy by the Netanyahu regime and its imperialist backers, whose victims include not only 20,000 slaughtered Palestinians but the Israeli population itself. 

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/12/02/klox-d02.html?pk_campaign=newsletter&pk_kwd=wsws

Wednesday, June 14, 2023

US BID TO CONVINCE ALLIES TO NORMALIZE TIES WITH ISRAEL IS FLOUNDERING By Abdul Rahman

 

US BID TO CONVINCE ALLIES TO NORMALIZE TIES WITH ISRAEL IS FLOUNDERING

By Abdul Rahman,  

June 10, 2023

 

Despite Repeated High-Level Visits, US Officials Have So Far Failed To Convince The Saudis To Normalize Relations With Israel.

The recent visit by US Secretary of State Antony Blinken also confirms speculation that Gulf Cooperation Council countries are striving for more autonomy.

 

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken concluded his three-day visit to Saudi Arabia on Thursday, June 8. He was the second top US official to visit the kingdom in less than a month, after National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan. His visit was widely seen as a desperate attempt by the Joe Biden administration to hold on to its “closest ally” in the West Asian region.  

 

Before Blinken started his tour, he had stated that normalization of Saudi-Israel relations was one of the top priorities of his government. However, reports indicate that Blinken not only failed to get any assurance from the Saudis on that front, but had to concede some crucial ground on significant regional issues.

 

During his tour, Blinken met with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman on June 6, attended a Gulf Cooperation Council foreign ministers’ meet in Riyadh on June 7, and a meeting of a so-called Global Coalition to defeat ISIS on June 8. 

 

Normalization with Israel is stuck?

Hours before he traveled to Saudi Arabia, Blinken addressed a meeting of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), a pro-Israel lobbying group in the US, claiming that the Biden administration “has a real national security interest in promoting normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia.” He also noted that there are no real prospects of a two-state solution in the near future and that his government will not push for it. 

 

On June 8, before leaving Saudi Arabia, Blinken addressed a press conference jointly with Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan in Riyadh, where he reiterated his government’s resolve to work for Israel-Saudi normalization. However, Blinken was contradicted by Faisal bin Farhan who pointed out that “normalization of ties with Israel will have limited benefit without a pathway to peace for the Palestinians.” 

 

Earlier, Blinken ended up committing to work for the resolution of the conflict in Palestine and the creation of a Palestinian state along the 1967 borders in a joint statement issued a day after his meeting with the GCC foreign ministers.

 

The statement, without naming Israel, underlined “the need to refrain from all unilateral measures that undermine a two-state solution and escalate tensions, to preserve the historic status quo in Jerusalem’s holy sites.”

 

Two of the GCC members, Bahrain and the UAE, have already “normalized” their relations with Israel under the so-called Abraham accords mediated by the US. 

 

Autonomous foreign policy

The statement indicated that the US may have conceded crucial geopolitical ground on other issues as well. For example, while it raised the issue of “freedom of navigation and maritime security in the region,” hinting at alleged Iranian threats, it welcomed the restoration of diplomatic relations between Iran and Saudi Arabia in a reversal of the US’ earlier cautious tone.

 

The statement also supported the ongoing peace efforts in Yemen and expressed the need for an inclusive intra-Yemeni political process. This is despite the fact that the Biden administration has maintained that the Houthis are Iranian allies and the war in Yemen is a proxy war. Successive US governments since Barack Obama have provided billions of dollars of weapons to Saudi Arabia and its coalition partners to be used against the civilian population in Yemen. 

 

In another significant development, the US seems to have toned down its objections to Arab countries’ normalizing their relations with Syria. The joint statement expressed support for the Arab countries’ “efforts to resolve the [Syrian] crisis in a step-for-step manner.” The statement reiterated that peace in the country should be on the basis of the UN resolution 2254 (2015) and expressed commitments to Syria’s unity and sovereignty.

 

This is despite some GCC countries, such as Qatar and Kuwait—close allies of the US — expressing their dissent at the normalization with Syria. The US had earlier stated that the US does not “support normalization with Damascus” or “others normalizing this.” 

 

The outcome of Blinken’s visit to Saudi Arabia is similar to the outcome of President Joe Biden’s visit to the Kingdom last year when he failed to convince MBS to increase oil production to ease global prices. It fits into growing speculations about the GCC becoming more autonomous and no longer toeing the US line.

Thursday, June 1, 2023

BURNING THEIR DRAFT ORDERS By Oren Ziv,

 

BURNING THEIR DRAFT ORDERS By Oren Ziv,  :May 26, 2023:

Resist!

 

On April 1, in the midst of one of the weekly mass demonstrations in Tel Aviv against the Israeli government’s judicial overhaul plans, a group of around 10 teenagers gathered to burn their military draft orders, after announcing that they would refuse to serve in the army in protest of the occupation and apartheid. This symbolic act gained a great deal of attention, perhaps buoyed by the recent wave of refusal threats by hundreds of reservist soldiers as part of the protest movement against the government.

 

From conversations with several of these high school students and young people, it is clear that the protests against the judicial overhaul and the political awareness that it has brought about has accelerated the process of radicalization. Moreover, they feel that other young people are becoming more willing to hear about the occupation, while the issue of army refusal in various forms is growing much more widespread.

 

“People are getting more into politics because there is no choice,” says Sofi Or, a 17-year-old from the northern town of Pardes Hanna, and an activist with Mesarvot, a network that guides young people through the process of conscientious objection. Before the protests, she says, most young people did not think much about politics. “Now, young people who were not in the political scene are open to hearing about politics — and not only ideas from the mainstream. Even within the protests themselves it is easy to start conversations.”

 

“If young people learn about the committee for the appointment of judges [which the government is trying to control], maybe they will also learn about apartheid in the occupied territories,” explains Tal, a 17-year-old from Tel Aviv.

 

Ayelet Kobo, another 17-year-old from Tel Aviv, is also active in Mesarvot. “People around me have really changed,” they say. “At the beginning of the protests, I organized students to come to the ‘anti-occupation bloc’ [a group of protesters at the sidelines of the main demonstration who hold banners and chant slogans against occupation and apartheid, and wave Palestinian flags]. I met people who in the past might have spoken about politics, but were not active. Now they are joining many protests and coming every week.”

 

Kobo says the change is due to the fact that the demonstrations are accessible to everyone. “It is expected that young people will be more radical,” they explain. “The problem is that you hear about terrible things but then don’t know about left-wing organizations and how to join them. The [current] protests are so big that you do not need to get to the other side of Israel to see them. You can just leave the house on Saturday and find people who will speak to you. This knowledge gave people the courage to join in.”

 

Many of the high schoolers who spoke to +972 are not sufficing just with the weekly anti-government demonstrations in Tel Aviv, but are also participating in civil disobedience and direct action. Some are joining Palestinian-led protests in the neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah in occupied East Jerusalem, against the eviction of Palestinian families by settlers and the state.

 

Iddo Elam, a 16-year-old from Tel Aviv and a member of Banki, the youth wing of the Israeli Communist Party, says that he has been politically active since the age of 14. “Suddenly, I see friends who never cared about such matters making throw-away comments like ‘It’s so terrible what [the government] is doing.’ Many come to the demonstrations every week and are open to hearing about issues such as occupation and apartheid. Many friends come to the radical bloc and wave the Palestinian flag for the first time, when a year or two ago they would ask me why I’m waving it.”

 

Elam claims that it was the power of the protest that brought about this change – “you can’t ignore them.” What’s more, he says, other young protesters who are not part of the anti-occupation bloc pass by it on their way to the main demonstration — “they see what we’re talking about, they ask their parents, and they watch the news,” Elam explains. He also believes that the need “to fight against more fascist people like [National Security Minister Itamar] Ben Gvir and [Finance Minister Bezalel] Smotrich makes it illogical to ignore the occupation.”

 

Defying Their Elders

In February, Uri Lass, the principal of Tel Aviv’s Ironi Dalet High School, was reprimanded by the Education Ministry for calling on his students to join a youth demonstration against the government’s judicial overhaul. The day before the demonstration, Lass sent a message demanding that students refrain from waving Palestinian flags; some of his students defied him, forming their own anti-occupation bloc within the youth march.

 

At the demonstration, one of the administrators asked a student to stop waving the Palestinian flag. When the latter refused, the administrator asked the police officer supervising the demonstration to forbid the anti-occupation bloc from entering the main square with the rest of the protesters, where the speeches took place.

 

Kobo views that demonstration as a great success. “We appealed to young people we know, and the response was amazing,” they say. “I didn’t think there were more than five or six left-wing kids in my year. But I started talking and sharing things in the [student] WhatsApp group and realized that we have a presence in the school — that we have a voice. A few months ago, [students] didn’t know how to organize, and now they send me selfies from [demonstrations in] Sheikh Jarrah. It’s really impressive.”

 

Kobo was offended that the teachers denounced the bloc, but was ultimately unsurprised. “In the end, the teachers’ job is to preserve the establishment. They teach us history and civics with the aim of making us think that Israel is the most moral country in the world and that we need to enlist in the army.”

 

While Kobo and Elam were active in left-wing groups before this wave of protests began, Tal became active only recently. “I was raised on values of respect for other people, but I never went out to protest,” he says. “At the first demonstration [on Jan. 7, organized by the Jewish-Arab socialist movement Standing Together], I went with my mom and listened to the speeches. The speech by Ayman Odeh [head of the left-wing Hadash party] was amazing.”

 

At the next mass demonstration a week later in Tel Aviv’s Habima Square, Tal was already looking for Palestinian flags. “When I arrived, someone asked me if I wanted to hold a flag,” he recalls. After he took one and started waving it, he says he experienced “verbal and physical violence,” but that this only strengthened his desire to go out to the streets and protest.

 

“Going to protests means experiencing radicalization every time afresh. Police violence, tours in Hebron — every time I go out to protest it strengthens my opinions,” he says.

 

‘People Are Getting Used To Our Presence’

The anti-occupation bloc, which has grown to around 1,000 people each week, has become a meeting point for left-wing youngsters. A significant number of them are members of the youth wing of Banki, coming to demonstrations after meeting earlier at the Left Bank — the organization’s headquarters in the city center.

 

“A lot of young people are joining,” says 18-year-old Einav Zipori, secretary of Banki’s Tel Aviv branch. “There is a lot of interest. The protests helped young people who might have been aware of these issues to enter and do things.”

 

Zipori says that at the beginning there were arguments among the leftist youth about whether to join the big demonstrations at all. “In the first weeks it was problematic, but little by little connections were made with other organizations and new people, the [anti-occupation] bloc was formed, and people joined other activities as well.”

 

And whereas members of the bloc initially faced a lot of aggression from other protesters, the level of violence toward them decreased as the weeks went on. “Many people who come to fight are also ready to listen,” Zipori continues. “People are getting used to our presence. More people are reaching out to us, and there is more awareness that Banki exists.”

 

“The message we are conveying is that there is no democracy if it is not for all,” says Or. “The current protests, which are supposedly about democracy, are really a struggle to preserve the status quo — returning to what we had before, where democracy was granted to Jews only. We want to remind this protest movement of the occupation, the oppression that Palestinians are experiencing, and their flag.”

 

“We oppose the reform, but we don’t only want to settle for that,” says Kobo. “The mainstream protests demand a return to the values of the Declaration of Independence. But we know that there has never been a democracy here. Not only because of the occupation; before that there was the Nakba, when people were deliberately expelled to create a Jewish state.

 

“The protests say that if the laws are passed, Israel will not be a democracy,” Kobo continues. “We say that if the laws are passed, they will serve Israel’s anti-democratic essence since 1948. The weakest people will be harmed: Palestinians in the West Bank, Mizrahim, Ethiopians, and immigrants from the former Soviet Union.”

 

Kobo is conscious, however, that while the anti-occupation bloc has managed to assert itself as a legitimate voice in the protests, change doesn’t only take place at demonstrations. “Protests are not the place to change people’s opinions,” they say. “That happens in more intimate forums, such as tours or ceremonies. The idea of a joint [Jewish-Palestinian] ceremony [such as the joint Memorial Day ceremony that took place at the end of April] appeals even to non-radical youth.”

 

Tal’s experience shows that the anti-occupation bloc is sparking conversations with other young people in the crowd. “There have been countless discussions,” he recalls. “People are surprised by what we think. At first they approach us aggressively. When we explain that we just want everybody to live in equality, we don’t want to throw the Jews into the sea, and that there is no reason for one people to rule over another people, they will say: ‘That’s not so bad.’”

 

But despite the optimism, Or is aware that most young people do not accept these positions. “The majority of young people in Israel are right-wing. It has to do with the society we grow up in — a society filled with militaristic, nationalist, and inflammatory messages, which we are fed from a young age. There is still so much work to be done before the message ‘democracy for all’ is seen as normal.”

 

‘We’ve Reached The Mainstream’

One of the issues preoccupying the radical youth in these protests is conscientious objection. Some are preparing to go to military prison as a result of their refusal, while others hope to get exemptions for health reasons. The protests in Tel Aviv have seen future conscientious objectors addressing the crowd in the anti-occupation bloc. And according to those who spoke to +972, the fact that army reservists are now openly talking about refusing has made it easier for them to speak to other young people about refusing to be enlisted altogether.

 

The first conscientious objector to be sent to military prison since these protests began was Yuval Dag, 20, who is now serving his third term behind bars. I met Dag twice — once right after the elections in November 2022, and a second time after the protests started.

 

During our second meeting, he explained how the reactions to his decision to refuse had shifted over the past half year. “I feel that there is more support [for my decision]. You see many more people who go to the main demonstration with Israeli flags, and then encounter the anti-occupation bloc and say, ‘Well done, we are with you.’ This has given me more strength.”

 

Dag attributes this change to the extremism of the current government. “It has become clear to everyone that there is a deeper connection between Israel and the occupation. There is a tangible example of what the government allows, what it lends a hand to, and what it consists of. Suddenly people are talking about Palestinians in the middle of Tel Aviv.”

 

Elam, who plans to refuse, says that the issue came up at school: “We are now having a discussion in civics class about conscientious objection, and many friends who may still want to enlist now understand why people refuse to do so,” he explains. “They also see conscientious objection by reservists and understand that the army and militarism are not some supreme value, but something that should be doubted to a certain extent and even rejected.”

 

Or, who graduated high school this year, will likely be sent to prison in the coming months upon declaring her refusal to enlist. “I am not refusing as part of the protest movement, like the reservists. I am refusing because of the occupation and apartheid,” she says. “But the general discussion about conscientious objection has allowed us to reach the mainstream. People are far more willing to hear it, despite the fact that there is still a lot of hatred.”

Monday, April 17, 2023

Confronting problematic tenets of religious law: In Judaism

 


JAMES M. DORSEY:APR 17 2023;

 

 In the case of Judaism, that has become more evident. This is not just with the rise of the most far-right, ultra-nationalist, and religiously ultra-conservative government in Israel's history.

 

It has also become more evident in how Israel confronts the reality that a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has no shelf life and that a one-state solution is all that remains on the table and is already a reality.

 

That reality is unlikely to change. It is not temporary; it is permanent. So what needs to be decided and what is at the core of today's struggle is what the nature of that state should and will be.

 

Scholars Michael Barnett, Nathan Brown, Marc Lynch, and Shibley Telhami argued in a recent Foreign Affairs article entitled ‘Israel’s One-State Reality: It’s Time to Give Up on the Two-State Solution’ that “a one-state arrangement is not a future possibility; it already exists, no matter what anyone thinks. Between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, one state controls the entry and exit of people and goods, oversees security, and has the capacity to impose its decisions, laws, and policies on millions of people without their consent.”

 

Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s vision of Israel may be grounded in militant nationalism rather than militant religion. This is despite paying lip service to a two-state solution and trying to project himself as the moderate voice in the extremist government he heads.

 

Even so, Mr. Netanyahu’s vision, at the very least, does not challenge militant religious Jewish claims to Palestinian lands. “Israel is not a state of all its citizens” but rather “of the Jewish people—and only it,” Mr. Netanyahu asserted in 2019, a year after the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, passed a law to that effect.

 

Moreover, the likelihood of the one state’s permanence has been decided by Israel’s self-defeating creation of facts on the ground, foremost among which Israeli Jewish settlements that make sustainable and legitimate Palestinian carve-outs impossible and lay the groundwork for the exercise of de facto Israeli sovereignty justified by an ultra-religious, nationalist, and supremacist interpretation of religious law.

 

When it comes to discriminatory and repressive policies towards the other, militant religious Zionism’s interpretation of Jewish religious law resembles in many ways the precepts of a militant Islamic state, even if it does not endorse or advocate the extremes of the Islamic State group whose murderous brutality, including beheadings and enforced slavery, shocked Jews and Muslims alike as well as adherents of other faith groups.

 

The religious Zionist concept of one state in Israel/Palestine is diametrically opposed to traditional notions of either a bi-national state in Israel/Palestine in which communities enjoy cultural autonomy or a civic state in which all have equal rights irrespective of ethnicity, race, or religion.

 

The religious Zionist approach to a one-state solution brings into sharp relief problematic tenets of Jewish religious law, the Halakha.

 

In effect, the emergence of a halachic approach reinforced by the rise of the current Israeli government is also a reflection of the failure of Zionism to create a state that caters to all Jews irrespective of their religiosity or social, political, and religious views rather than a state populated by a Jewish tribe that, perhaps necessarily, charts a course different from that of the majority of Jews who are not part of the state.

 

The focus on Jewish religious law further explains the seemingly arbitrary, humiliating, and unnecessary brutality and harshness of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands. This can only be understood by tracing its roots to religious Jewish legal concepts.

 

Like various forms of ultra-conservative Islam such as Wahhabism, jihadism in the shape of the Islamic State and Al Qaeda, and Hindu and Christian nationalism, militant, supremacist expressions of Judaism represented by religious Zionism in the way it is currently expressed demonstrate the risk of leaving unaltered problematic tenets in religious law.

 

"Language has weight. It matters," said Foundation for Middle East Peace president Lara Friedman. Ms. Friedman countered arguments that the persecution of Jews was exceptional rather than on par with the oppression of other religious and ethnic communities, including the Palestinians.

 

Failure to reform religious jurisprudence allows religious militants, irrespective of faith, to justify their militancy, supremacy, and violence in theology and religious law.

 

In a seminar on religious law's role in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Mohammed Abdelhafez Yousef Azzam, a Palestinian Sharia court judge, appeared to confirm Ms. Friedman's assertion that words matter.

 

Applying supremacist concepts, the judge, wearing a red-topped white felt hat of a graduate of Al Azhar, the Cairo-based citadel of Islamic learning, argued that Islamic law precluded concluding a peace deal with Israel.

 

“There is no way to asserts there is something in Sunni doctrine to make peace,” Mr. Azzam said.

 

The judge was criticising the title of the seminar, ‘Building Peace Between Palestine and Israel, on the Basis of Sunni Islamic Jurisprudence for a Global Civilization (fiqh al-hadara ahl al-sunnah wa'l-jamaa'ah) and Jewish Law (Halakhah)’, because of its reference to Sunni Muslim jurisprudence as a basis for peace.

 

Mr. Azzam quoted Verse 4 of the Al-Isra Sura, also known as Bani Israel, of the Qur’an, viewed by Muslims as the word of God, which says: "You will surely cause corruption on the earth twice, and you will surely reach (a degree) of great haughtiness."

 

The verse may refer to Jewish exceptionalism but prominent scholars interpreted it in starker terms.

 

Syed Abul A'la al-Maududi, a prominent 20th-century Islamist scholar, defined the Sura’s significance as admonishing disbelievers “to take a lesson from the miserable end of the Israelites and other communities and mend their ways within the period of respite given by Allah, which was about to expire….

 

"The Israelites…were warned, ‘Take advantage of the Prophethood of Muhammad (Allah's peace be upon him) because that is the last opportunity which is being given to you. If even now you behave as you have been behaving, you shall meet with a painful torment," Mr. Maududi said.

 

Like in the case of Mr. Azzam, whose views reflected problematic tenets of Islamic law, elements of the influence of equally problematic Jewish legal concepts were embedded in Zionist and Israeli attitudes towards Palestinians from day one. They also were entrenched in long-standing notions of Jewish identity.

 

“The Jewish people was always ethnocentric. It believes in the supremacy of its ethnic collective over other nations. This is a blatantly hierarchical conception, according to which the Jew is superior to the non-Jew. But throughout history, this was a supremacy that lacked the force of a state and an apparatus for wielding control over non-Jews,” said political scientist Menahem Klein.

 

Mr. Klein is one of several scholars who have charted the emergence of contemporary expressions of militant Judaism. Mr. Klein labels it Jewish messianism and categorises it as “a new Judaism.”

 

Mr. Klein argued that “this new Judaism was not shaped in the beit midrash (study hall of the Torah) as classical Judaism was, but within the framework of a dominant Israeli regime in general and rule over the Palestinians in particular. The ethnocentrism evolved from a form of self-awareness into a modus operandi, from a universal mission into oppression and occupation.”

 

“Jewish messianism has undergone a transformation. Classic Jewish literature depicted the advent of a messianic age following a catastrophe or great crisis, the birth pangs of the Messiah, a war of Gog and Magog. All those elements are part of the messianic transition from the realm of history into one that transcends history,” Mr. Klein said.

 

“In contrast, the new Jewish messianism is a product of historical success, the achievement of Jewish sovereignty, and the wielding of power over non-Jewish surroundings,” the political scientist went on to say.

 

Israeli-born sociologist Gideon Shafir has charted what he describes as an evolution from a perceived secular Jewish privilege that justified a claim to Palestine based on religion, ethnicity, and/or race to notions of Jewish supremacy rooted in Jewish religious law as articulated by members of Israel’s current government and proponents of militant religious Zionism.

 

Both scholars' research is significant as religion and religious law take centre stage in Israeli claims to all of Palestine. The territorial claims and treatment of Palestinians shine a spotlight on Jewish religious legal precepts, much like the 9/11 attacks did with Islam.

 

For now, religious Zionism informs Israel’s militant nationalist, ultra-religious, and settler communities. The degree to which that reflects sentiments among a majority of the Israeli public remains unclear. This is even if recent mass protests against Prime Minister Netanyahu’s judicial overhaul failed to take into account Palestinian concerns.

 

A recent Israeli television Channel 13 opinion poll suggested that if elections were held today, Mr. Netanyahu’s Likud party would lose 12 of its 32 seats in parliament. Seventy-one percent of those polled said Mr. Netanyahu performed poorly as prime minister.

 

Ultra-nationalist and ultra-religious parties would fare better, losing only five of their 25 seats in parliament. In other words, they represent a committed minority of 20 per cent of the Israeli primarily Jewish public, a substantial minority but a minority.

 

Even so, according to the polls, Mr. Netanyahu’s coalition would not emerge from new elections with a parliamentary majority.

 

The numbers are significant beyond the perspective they cast on the trajectory of Israeli policies hardening on the occupied West Bank and Israel’s borders with Gaza, Lebanon, and Syria.

 

For now, the numbers suggest that religious ultra-conservatism has made significant inroads in reshaping religious Zionism but has yet to secure buy-in from Israel’s majority secular and traditional electorate.

 

It may also have yet to secure acceptance among more moderate religious Zionists. This is even though religious Zionists agree, in the words of Israeli religious Zionist writer Ehud Neor that “Israel is not a nation-state in Western terms. It's a fulfilment of Biblical prophecy that Jewish people were always meant to be in the Holy Land and to follow the Holy Torah, and by doing so, they would be a light unto the world."

 

Speaking to the author, Mr. Neor went on to say that “there is a global mission to Judaism. We've been forced to think of it that way because of the exile and the trauma of 2000 years of persecution. The idea is that there is an ideology behind this religious belief. It's a religious approach that is also a political ideology.”

 

Nevertheless, the emergence of religiously anchored concepts of Jewish supremacy has potentially far-reaching consequences for resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, particularly as the fiction of a possible two-state solution sinks in and Israelis and Palestinians accept that they are condemned to live in one state.

 

The question is what impact that realization will have on Israeli public opinion and, more importantly, what kind of state it will imagine.

 

“In the 21st century, the expansion of the settlements and the transformation of the Palestinian Authority into a subcontractor of Israel has resulted in a single regime between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. The settlements are not built ‘there,’ far away; they are ‘here.’ This is, in effect, a regime of Jewish supremacy. The number of Jews living under that system is roughly equal to or slightly less than the number of Palestinians,” Mr. Klein noted.

 

“Jewish supremacy is also the response to the challenge posed by Palestinians who are Israeli citizens. Their increasing integration into the Jewish-controlled public domain and labor market, even as they emphasize their indigenous Palestinian identity, and their collaboration with Jewish civil society organizations, are giving rise to a hybrid reality for them as well. This is an ethnic-civil hybridity,” Mr. Klein went on to say.

 

“Although these Palestinians are discriminated against, their citizenship is secure and thus threatens the ethnic underpinnings of the regime,” he added.

 

Men like Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich envision a religious Jewish state grounded in Jewish religious law where, ideally, Palestinians would disappear but, more realistically, be discriminated against, politically repressed, second-class citizens.

 

In hindsight, the evolution from secularism toward religiously justified Jewish supremacy may have been inevitable.

 

An evolving emphasis on different religious texts characterizes the evolution. The secular Labour movement and the left, which initially dominated Israel for its first several decades, sought religious grounding in the Talmud, the primary rabbinical source of religious law and theology.

 

In contrast to the Tanakh or Hebrew Bible, the Talmud focuses less on the history of Jewish life in the Land of Israel in Antiquity. The Hebrew Bible’s focus makes it more of a guiding text for religious Zionists and ultra-nationalists like Messrs. Ben-Gvir and Smotrich.

 

“A sovereign state with a large Jewish majority could not have existed without the ethnic cleansing carried out in the 1948 war and its aftermath. Back then, a new form of Judaism had already started to take on form and substance. That process was accelerated after 1967 with the establishment of the settlements. In school textbooks, the Books of Joshua, Judges, and Kings supplanted those of the prophets who had preached social justice and a moral regime – Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Amos,” Mr. Klein noted.

 

The transition from privilege to supremacy, described by Mr. Shafir, the sociologist, was fuelled by Israel’s 1967 conquest of Arab lands and the rise a decade later of right-wing leader Menahem Begin who envisioned the occupied West Bank as the biblical lands of Judea and Samaria rather than the building blocks of a future Palestinian state.

 

The transition raised tricky legal questions for religious Zionist rabbis and scholars. While the harsh commandments of conquest codified in Maimonides’s 12th century Mishne Torah barred a return to Arab sovereignty of occupied land, the status of the territories’ inhabitants needed to be defined, according to Mr. Shafir.

 

Did they qualify as ger toshav, resident aliens, and on what conditions? Were they idolaters, or did they observe the seven commandments of the Sons of Noah that constitute principles imposed on non-Jews? Did residents need to recognise Jewish supremacy? If so, was it still necessary to make them ‘wretched and humiliated’ following Maimondes’ commandments, and how does one do that? What is the fate of the residents if they did not qualify as ger toshav and therefore had no right to remain on the territory?

 

Israelis evaded answering these questions before the capture in 1967 of the West Bank, Gaza, and Jerusalem. They were effectively fudged as Israel tried to figure out how to deal with a non-Jewish minority within its legal borders. The willingness and ability to continue to do so post-1967 was fundamentally altered by the demographics of the conquest of land that held great significance for religious nationalists.

 

Fudging issues was no longer an option. Instead, the conquest set off a process in Judaism not unlike the impact of Muslim religious forces’ political and social involvement in the search for a social order in Muslim-majority lands that accommodated both Islam and modernity with similar outcomes.

 

Militant religious Zionism's halakhic state is not that different from concepts of an Islamic state's notions of the caliphate, and political Islamic and jihadist thinking, regarding what it means for the majority of the population as well as minorities.

 

The process of building support for notions of a Jewish or an Islamic theocracy involved ensuring that a politicized religion played an ever more important role in identity.

 

Much like in the Islamic State, politicization involved territorial ambition. In militant religious Zionist views of a Jewish state grounded in the Halakha, this meant an Israel that controlled the land of ancient Israel in which there would be no place, indeed no equitable place, for non-Jews.

 

Opportunity and necessity beckoned militant religious Zionism with the 1967 war conquests because control was no longer a theoretical issue. The commandment to inherit and settle the land of Israel could no longer be shoved to the sidelines.

 

As a result, it became the battering ram in what was a struggle between religious Zionism’s halakhic notions of the Land of Israel versus the secular Zionist concepts of a State of Israel.

 

It was a battle that was fought, unlike discussions in Islam about the nature of an Islamic state, in which legal debate about the rules that govern statecraft, warfare, and policies towards minorities had stagnated for more than a millennium because they were of no relevance to a community that did not control a state and land of its own and was a minority in its own right.

 

“There is no precedent in Jewish history for the existence of a Jewish state that constitutes a regional power and rules another people. Never before has the Jewish people possessed a combination like this of sovereignty, power, and control, which are being exploited to oppress another people,” said Mr. Klein, the political scientist.

 

American Rabbi Brant Rosen, a co-founder of the Jewish Voices for Peace Rabbinical Council and former president of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association, noted that “Judaism was always a Diaspora-focussed religion. Jews have always lived throughout the Diaspora… The question is, how do we ensure Jewish safety? Is it through nationalism, through ethnic nationalism?... Jewish safety at the expense of safety of other people is not safety at all."

 

Religious Zionists had little, if anything, to help them come to grips with the immense changes in the structure and legitimacy of the state since Maimonides codified Jewish law in the 12th century.

 

The codification represented a worldview that did not bode well for Jews or non-Jews, certainly not in a 21st-century world. Yet, Maimonides' 14-volume magnus opus constituted legal ground zero for them.

 

Maimonides codified Jewish concepts that influenced Muslim legal thinking and have been retained in Judaism and Islam even though they were no longer appropriate or fit for purpose.

 

The halakhic notion of the ger toshav was not all that different from the notion of the dhimmi but suddenly had taken on a relevance it had not had for a thousand years.

 

Like the dhimmi, the ger toshav was expected to pay tribute. Also, like the dhimmi, the ger toshav did not enjoy equal rights.

 

Maimonides argued in favor of the subjugation of the ger toshav that needed to be “demeaning and humiliating.” Residents were not allowed to lift their heads against Israel or be offered preferential treatment.

 

The modern-day religious Zionist interpretation of these principles means that the Israeli government must demand that ger toshav or residents recognise Jewish sovereignty and Israel as a Jewish state. Refusal to do so would deprive them of the right to reside on the land, a principle creeping into Israeli policies.

 

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has become a zero-sum game; it's ‘us against them.’ A one-state solution with equal treatment and protection for all is no longer feasible if militant religious Zionism gets its way.

 

Common wisdom says what is needed is pressure on Israel, particularly from the United States and Europe. No doubt, pressure helps, but much like Nahdlatul Ulama has taken the lead in tackling head-on legal, ideological, and religious issues that make Islam part of the problem rather than the solution, Jews will have to do the same for Judaism.

 

9/11 put Islam’s problems on the front burner. Israel and Jews could face a similar situation as circumstances in the occupied territories, including East Jerusalem, as a result of Israeli policies spin out of control.