Revisionist Zionists Dare the U.S. To Pull the Plug on Their Nakba Agenda
America is trapped. The power-brokers are unhappy, but impotent.
Israelis have been deeply divided these last years, unable to coalesce around a government. After five general elections, they decided to dismiss the Lapid/Gantz team and to put a new coalition – formed around Netanyahu and small Jewish supremacist parties – into power.
However, soon after the formation of the new government, there occurred an severe outbreak of ‘buyers’ remorse’, with a substantial segment of Israelis seemingly ready to contemplate almost anything to oust their government.
Demonstrations have occurred regularly throughout Israel to prevent the country from becoming – in the words of one former Mossad director, “a racist and violent state that cannot survive”.
But it is probably already too late.
Most people outside Israel tend to lump together different, and often opposing views in Israel, solely through the reductive perspective of seeing all these diverse actors as being Jews and Zionists of slightly differing hues.
They couldn’t be more wrong. There is an existential divide; there are diverse forms of Zionism: The divisions go to the very meaning of what it means to be a Jew. Benjamin Netanyahu is a ‘revisionist Zionist’ i.e. a follower of Vladimir Jabotinsky (for whom his father Benzion Netanyahu served as private secretary): ‘Revisionist Zionism’ is the polar opposite to the cultural Zionism of the World Jewish Congress.
As a young man, Netanyahu professed that Palestine is “a land without a people for a people without a land”. He was consequently in favour of expelling all Arab ‘blow-ins’ (as he saw them). Furthermore, he advocated the idea that the State of Israel extends “from the Nile to the Euphrates”.
However, during his 16 years as prime minister, Netanyahu was perceived as having moderated (become more pragmatic), but still devious. With hindsight, maybe he simply adapted to the times. Or possibly, he was practicing Straussian ‘double-truth’ – the practice which Leo Strauss taught his followers as the only means of preserving ‘true’ Judaism within the encompassing ‘liberal-European’ (largely Ashkenazi) ethos. Strauss’ ‘esoterism’ (drawn from Maimonides, the early Jewish mystic), was one of outwardly professing a ‘worldly thing’, whilst inwardly preserving a completely contrasting esoteric reading of the world.
Just to be clear: Revisionist Zionists (of which Netanyahu is one), include Menachem Begin and Ariel Sharon who demonstrated that of which they were capable with the Nakba (the mass expulsion of Palestinians) in 1948.
Netanyahu is of this ‘line’ – and so is a key dominant faction in Washington.
The ‘war’ with Washington, post-7 Oct
At first, Washington reacted with unreflective and immediate support for Israel, vetoing various UNSC ceasefire resolutions and fully provisioning Israel’s military needs for the destruction of the Palestinian enclave in Gaza. It was unthinkable in the U.S.’ Establishment eyes, to do anything other than support Israel. Israel’s Qualitative Military Edge (QME) is enshrined as being one of the foundational structures supporting the brittle branch on which U.S. hegemony rests.
Ordinary Americans (and some in the Administration) however, were watching the horrors of genocide ‘live’ on their cell phones. The Democratic Party started to fracture badly. The ‘power-brokers’ in the backroom began to put pressure on the Israeli war cabinet to negotiate the release of the hostages and conclude a ceasefire in Gaza – hoping for a return to the status quo ante.
But Netanyahu’s government – in various tautological ways – said ‘no’, unashamedly playing on the 7 October trauma of its citizens, to assert the need to destroy Hamas.
Washington somewhat belatedly came to understand that 7 October was now the pretext for Jabotinsky’s followers to do what they had always wanted to do: To expel the Palestinians from Palestine.
The Israeli message was perfectly ‘
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