The Neglected History of the State of Israel [View all]

[Celerity]

https://prospect.org/world/2024-02-21-neglected-history-state-of-israel/



I begin with fulsome praise: Isaac Chotiner of The New Yorker is the greatest interviewer alive. He asks the most terrible people alive, or sometimes just conspicuously dodgy people, the bluntest questions imaginable. They evade; he follows up—ruthlessly. They’re reduced to puddles of incoherence. We get to peer inside the mystery of moral failure—an accomplishment few other writers can manage. Just as valuable are his straightforward informational interviews, especially these past months in which Chotiner has been methodically flushing out all-too-shrouded facts of the inhumanity on the ground in Israel and Palestine, from all sides. One of Chotiner’s best interviews ran this past November. A leader of the militant West Bank settlement movement told him that Jews have a sacred duty to occupy all the land between “the Euphrates in the east and the Nile in the southwest,” that nothing west of the Jordan River was ever “Arab place or property,” and that no Arabs, even citizens, should have civil rights in Israel. Stunning stuff, and extremely valuable to have on the record, especially given the settler movement’s close ties to Benjamin Netanyahu’s government.

I praise Chotiner, however, as a bridge to a separate point: Even the most learned and thoughtful observers of Israel and Palestine miss a basic historic foundation of the crisis. Return to that November interview. Chotiner asked, “So rights are not some sort of universal thing that every person has. They’re something that you can win or lose.” The settler answered, “That’s right.” He followed up: “When you see Palestinian children dying, what’s your emotional reaction as a human being?” She replied: “I go by a very basic human law of nature. My children are prior to the children of the enemy, period. They are first. My children are first.” Chotiner responded with incredulity: “We are talking about children. I don’t know if the law of nature is what we need to be looking at here.” The settler, nonplussed, repeated herself: “I say my children are first.”

It’s a remarkable thing to hear such horrifying sentiments, unadorned. But it is also remarkable how surprised we are by them. I’ve been reading an outstanding 2005 study, The Jewish Radical Right: Revisionist Zionism and Its Ideological Legacy, by historian Eran Kaplan. You should too. One of the things you’ll learn: That settler is repeating almost word for word the doctrines of one of Zionism’s original political traditions—the faction that ended up winning, and whose foundations were literally fascist. I use the word “fascist” in the literal sense. Do not flinch from it. The founders of Revisionist Zionism certainly didn’t. Respect them enough to take them at their word.



In 1928, a prominent Revisionist named Abba Ahimeir published a series of articles entitled “From the Diary of a Fascist.” They refer to the founder of their movement, Ze’ev Jabotinsky (his adopted first name is Hebrew for “wolf”), as “il duce.” In 1935, his comrade Hen Merhavia wrote that Revisionists were doing what Mussolini did: “establish a nucleus of an exemplary life of morality and purity. Like us, the Italian fascists look back to their historical heritage. We seek to return to the kingdom of the House of David; they want to return to the glory of the Roman Empire.” They even opened a maritime academy in Italy, under Mussolini’s sponsorship, for the navy they hoped to build in their new Israeli state. “[T]he views and the political and social inclinations of the Revisionists,” an Italian magazine reported, “are absolutely in accordance with the fascist doctrine … as our students they will bring the Italian and fascist culture to Palestine.”

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