In the past year, I have been trying to decipher what happened to most Israeli Jews. What clouded their minds and hardened their hearts to what Israel’s armed forces are doing in their name to Palestinians and Lebanese? Answering these questions, I do not intend to justify Israel’s alleged war crimes, but rather to portray the Israeli mindset and suggest its political ramifications.
Of course, Israel’s severe mortal and material losses, the war crimes allegedly committed by Hamas and Hezbollah forces along with those carried out by Gaza Strip residents that on 7 Oct followed Hamas forces, play a part, as does the unprecedented occupation and evacuation of Israeli settlements and towns. These have created a traumatised and insecure society that believes its very existence is undermined. Fearing a sudden attack from Hamas, many central Israel citizens carry weapons. But, in my view, these are only partial explanations.
Most Israelis do not remember the hope that the Oslo Accords aroused in 1993 or the overall collective shock hearing in 1995 about Rabin’s assassination. For present Israelis, these are distant historical events that do not shape their consciousness. After all, they occurred more than a generation ago. Since 2001, the right wing has ruled Israel. If we do not fall for their political rhetoric but examine their actions, we see that the Sharon, Olmert and Bennett-Lapid governments were not left-wing governments. Indeed, they were a more polite and restrained right wing than the current coalition, but still right wing with the short exception of the dead-on-arrival Olmert-Abbas peace talks in 2008. Compared to Netanyahu, their terms as prime ministers did not last long. Even outside Israel, many Jews seem to believe that without a right-wing government in general and a Netanyahu leadership in particular, Israel would fall into the hands of its enemies.
We must acknowledge that up to 7 Oct 2023 right wing governments had succeeded in suppressing the Palestinians and removing them from Israel’s consciousness and public sphere. Most Jews saw Palestinian political activity and the terrorism that occasionally accompanied it as a minor nuisance that could be managed while living wonderful, prosperous lives, as sweet as an Israeli cherry tomato. Human rights organisations and left-wing NGOs failed to bring the severity of the Palestinians’ situation to Israeli public awareness.
A regime of Jewish supremacy emerges after 2001
The reports they sent to Western capitals filled folders in foreign ministry cabinets but did not initiate effective political pressure on Israel. At the United Nations, Abu Mazen achieved an upgrade to the Palestinian delegation status, and the number increased of countries that recognised Palestine as a state or whose parliaments called on their governments to do so. But Palestinian independence and the end of Israel’s de facto annexation did not come any closer. On the contrary, it moved farther away. The achievements of the BDS movement are also modest though it succeeded to raise Western awareness to the Israeli occupation and annexation. A new regime emerged. From 2001-2002, right-wing governments created a single regime spreading all over historic Palestine from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. It captures Palestinians within it at various levels of detention and discrimination. I suggest defining this regime as one of Jewish supremacy.
The Jewish supremacy regime did not create itself nor is it a different version of Zionist militarism. It gradually developed from the Zionist militaristic identity that since 1948 constructed the state’s main identity. Indeed, both regimes value force and violence (what Israeli Jews call security measures) not only as necessary means but also as definitions of collective identity. However, Zionist militarism offered an alternative identity to Orthodox Judaism[1], even if it did not disown it as one of its sources.
While Zionist militarism was ethnocentric, for the purpose of obtaining Israeli citizenship it greatly stretched the definition of who is a Jew beyond the Jewish orthodox law limits. In contrast, the present Jewish supremacist coalition works to reshape Israel along an orthodox ethno-nationalistic doctrine. Already before the current Gaza war, schools taught pro-settler religious nationalism[2] Since October 2023 it succeeded not least because of the psychological shock that the Hamas attack caused. Jewish supremacism is much more violent towards Palestinians than its predecessor[3]and considers its Jewish opponents as traitors.[4] Its tendency to being an authoritarian regime is much sharper than that of Zionist militarism.[5]
In the last four years, the two identity groups managed a cold civil war over Netanyahu’s Government’s judicial reform legislation, ultra-orthodox men’s exemption from army service and the Prime Minister’s corruption trial. Even before the current Gaza war, Zionist militarism had lost large parts of its base. Jewish supremacy took control of the police, grossly encroaching on the justice system, government bureaucracy, mainstream media, the army, security services and academia. Some of these institutions surrendered quickly, some willingly, and some out of weakness. Others were conquered after a struggle. As Jewish supremacy becomes more established in power, resistance to it weakens.
Zionist militarism put the 1948 war with its internationally recognised borders at the centre of its ethos. For it, the settlements beyond that border are temporary or do not constitute an obstacle to a two-state solution. Thus, Zionist militarism insistently denies the reality that prevails in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, despite having a founding share in the de-facto annexation project. In the struggle that Zionist militarism waged in the past four years against the Jewish supremacy coalition, it failed to identify the essential link between the Government’s judicial reform legislation, the privileges enjoyed by the ultra-Orthodox; and the reality Israel has constituted in the Palestinian territories.
Myth of temporary occupation; reality of Jewish rule
What is the connection, it asked in bewilderment, between equality in the burden of military service and the expansion of settlements, and between Netanyahu’s corruption cases and having no peace process with the non-existent partner? Zionist militarism too, in its own way, did not count the Palestinians. Apartheid? What nonsense! It is just a temporary occupation. Meanwhile, Jewish supremacy was good at seeing that half the population it rules between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea is not Jewish. For it, Jewish supremacy is an existential imperative.
The 7 Oct attack created a sharp dissonance among Israeli Jews from which they have not recovered to this day. The attack exposed a huge gap between their imagined absolute power and Hamas’s capacity to inflict casualties. The complacency that Israelis had enjoyed was completely shaken. Instinctively, they turned to brutal force to restore the Jewish supremacist imperative shattered by the attack. Dehumanisation of Palestinians, killing and destruction on an industrial scale, uprooting over a million Gaza Strip civilians from their homes, and the systematic destruction of Palestinian community institutions in the Gaza Strip became common war practices.[6] Recently, Israel has also employed them in Lebanon for the same cause.[7]
This war completed the defeat of Zionist militarism. Zionist militarism had a substantial weakness. It is militaristic. It cannot resist war. The war in Gaza and even more so the special operations against Hezbollah followed by the war in Lebanon brought Zionist militarism to stand behind the Government and use it to establish Jewish supremacy. Thus, Zionist militarism is dissipating. Its place is being taken by Jewish militarism. Part of it is messianic and part fascist, a merger that threatens taking Israel to a dark future.
The Palestinian public is divided between those living in the diaspora and those living under the Israeli regime. The Palestinian diaspora, especially the young educated elite within it, are more radical in their political objectives and discourse than their compatriots in the homeland. The latter are mostly more sober, understanding that victory will not be achieved through military means but by forcing their collective existence and right to self-determination on Israel. Young Palestinians who choose armed resistance do so out of despair or with the aim of exacting a price from the oppressor. The oppressor and the oppressed are choking each other to death.
As far as can be estimated, there is no way back to managing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as was done prior to 7 Oct. From the perspective of the Jewish supremacist regime, only harsher and more violent enforcement of Jewish lordship can ensure its survival. It offers Palestinians no model of collective existence alongside or within a Jewish state. It demands that they surrender or expect expulsion. Therefore, for Palestinians too, this is an existential war. For many of them, it is a struggle for physical survival, and for all of them, a war for collective existence. Even before 7 Oct, they experienced firsthand how cruel and harsh Israel is, after that day they learned how far it was willing to go.
Striking out at the new Iran-based ‘Axis of Evil’
Jewish supremacy was formed to respond Palestinian demographic and political challenges. As the war developed without effective international or domestic limitations, Israel’s ambitions expanded. Driven by its successful intelligence operations against Hezbollah leaders and functionaries, Israel expanded its war from Gaza Strip to Lebanon. Unrestrained, Israel implements in its north front similar aerial and ground destructive war methods it uses in her south front with Gaza.
Thus, Israel signals that it seeks to impose Jewish superiority beyond the Palestinian arena and determine South Lebanon’s future and Hezbollah’s military and political power. Moreover, it aims to limit Iran’s regional power if not to overcome it. Israel debates with the United States over measures and targets in Iran, but not on strategy. Both Israel and the US wish to strike the Iran-Hezbollah-Hamas “Axis of Evil”. Within this cooperation, the Jewish supremacist regime aspires to lead the regional counter Axis of Evil coalition bypassing the Saudi Arabian version that until now has led the anti-Iranian alliance.
The Jewish supremacist regime must fall before a Palestinian-Israeli political settlement can be established and the region moves toward a better place. The end of Jewish supremacism would also decrease worldwide antisemitism. Obviously, Israel’s war crimes do not justify antisemitic attacks. However, Israel’s leaders should not escape from their indirect responsibility for the rise of verbal and physical anti-Jewish attacks by combining Jewish identity with Israel’s actions as well as by expecting every Jew to express loyalty and commitment to both the right of the self-determination of the Jewish people and the specific political and military practices that the Jewish state employs. Antisemitism is also a consequence of this “you are either with us or against us” rhetoric.
The Jewish supremacist regime is a result of interconnected current and events: Jewish militarism, the judicial reform that the current right-wing coalition gradually promotes to take Israel away from its few liberal-democratic foundations, and Netanyahu’s personal and political in escaping conviction and establishing an authoritarian rule. Moreover, the current coalition shares different sectorial and factional interests, especially based in Jewish orthodoxy and middle- and lower-class identities and socio-economic policy preferences. The Jewish supremacist regime carefully nurtures those classes.
In the international arena, Israel does not face real pressure to halt its killing and destruction machine. On the contrary, it co-operates with the United States against a Chinese-Iranian- Hezbollah axis. Israel also enjoys financial reserves and international prestige which it accumulated during years of prosperity. However, as Israel continues fighting those reserves will run dry. Domestically, Jewish superiority deters Palestinian citizens of Israel from expressing their anti-war voice, violates their citizenship rights and delegitimises any cross-ethnic Jewish-Arab political co-operation.
It is hard to predict which bricks will fall first and when a serious collapse will occur. But without a collapse, without internal upheaval that may be accompanied by external pressure, there will be no better future for the residents living from the river to the sea. This future needs to be prepared for now. Against the horrific regime of Jewish supremacy, proposals for Jewish-Arab partnership must be prepared. It can take different forms. But each and every one of them must oppose the current reality.
[1]Menachem Klein, A New Judaism? Logos, 23 Non 2, 2024 in https://logosjournal.com/article/a-new-judaism/
[2] Noga Brener Samia, Israeli Schools Te ach Pro-settler Religious Nationalism Is the Only Way to be Jewish, Haaretz October 31, 2019 in https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2019-10-31/ty-article-opinion/.premium/how-israeli-schools-teach-religious-nationalism-as-the-only-way-to-be-jewish/0000017f-f408-d47e-a37f-fd3c8fb80000 ; Ruth Margalith, How the Religious Right Transformed Israeli Education, The New Yorker, August 23, 2019 in https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-jerusalem/how-the-religious-right-transformed-israeli-education
[3] Peter Beaumont and Quique Kierszenbaum, National Religious Recruits Challenge Values of IDF Once Dominated by Secular Elite, The Guardian, 18 July 2024, in https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/jul/18/national-religious-recruits-challenge-values-of-idf-secular-elite
[4] Foundation for Middle East Peace, Israeli Left Viewed as ‘Traitors’ – Poll, December 7, 2016 in https://fmep.org/media/reading/left-israel-labelled-traitors/
[5] The Israel Democracy Institute, The Judicial Overhaul, in https://en.idi.org.il/tags-en/47383 ; Michal Ben-Yosf Hirsch, As Hamas War Drags On, Israeli Democracy Weakens Further, The Conversation, https://theconversation.com/as-hamas-war-drags-on-israeli-democracy-weakens-further-234339
[6]Forensic Architecture, A Cartography of Genocide, in https://forensic-architecture.org/investigation/a-cartography-of-genocide
[7] Christiaan Treibert Riley Mellen and Alexander Cardia, Israel Demolished Hundreds of Buildings in South Lebanon, Videos and Satellites Show, The New York Times, October 30, 2024 in https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/30/world/middleeast/israel-lebanon-border-photos-video.html
Menachem Klein is professor emeritus of Political Science at Bar Ilan University. He was an adviser to the Israeli delegation in negotiations with the PLO in 2000 and was one of the leaders of the Geneva Initiative. His most recent book is Arafat and Abbas: Portraits of Leadership in a State Postponed. This article first appeared in Logos, a Journal of Modern Society and Culture.