Israel‘s aggressive policies in the Gaza war, the West Bank, Lebanon and Syria flow from explicit beliefs and strategies held by the parties making up its far-right government. In the name of Zionism as a Jewish nationalist ideology, these parties seek full control of Israel, the West Bank and Gaza and oppose Palestinian sovereignty. They want to clear as many Palestinians as possible to Egypt, Jordan and other surrounding states, joining refugee communities there, then normalise relations with the region on that basis.
This week’s decisions to escalate the war, privatise humanitarian aid and permanently occupy Gaza as part of the aim to defeat Hamas put those beliefs into practice, after they have been clearly articulated in public discourse. This reality has too often been overlooked or ignored in commentary on the destructive and genocidal effects of Israel’s utterly disproportionate response to Hamas‘s reprehensible October 7th, 2023, murders of 1,195 Israelis and the taking of 250 hostages.
Deep disagreements in Israel on the priority given to hostage releases over the defeat of Hamas expose divisions between secular Zionist and neo-Zionist religious currents, notwithstanding their agreement on military and security issues. These strains, together with growing economic difficulties and increasing international and regional isolation due to its conduct of the war, put Binyamin Netanyahu‘s coalition in a potentially vulnerable position domestically. His famed opportunism in maintaining office to avoid corruption charges is bolstered by a ruthless guile in political timing at home and abroad.
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The successful operations against Hamas, Hizbullah in Lebanon, and against their Iranian sponsors last autumn, boosted his popularity. They play into Donald Trump‘s agenda for the region. Trump urged Netanyahu to “get the job done” in his first debate with Joe Biden in June last year. The nature of that job was revealed at his meeting with Netanyahu in March, when he said the US would take over Gaza, which should be developed as the Riviera of the Middle East. That would allow regional normalisation between Israel, Gulf and other states in line with the 2020 Abraham accords.
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Saudi Arabia has refused to discuss normalisation during Trump’s Gulf visit next week. Its regime, like the Egyptian and Jordanian ones, might not survive popular anger were they to endorse such an agenda without Israeli commitment to a Palestinian state and an end to the war in Gaza. The US nuclear negotiations with Iran hang in the balance, even if Houthis have stopped attacking US shipping because of his bombing campaign. He proposes to begin referring to the Persian Gulf as the Arabian Gulf.
Netanyahu has played Trump effectively and says there has never been a more pro-Israeli US president. His long-term objective to destroy Iran’s nuclear potential and topple its regime with US support remains in play. This would profoundly alter the region’s balance of power.
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Whether it would secure his aim of normalising Israeli relations in a Middle East without a Palestinian state or people is much more debatable. This is because the assertion of such sheer neo-imperialism, with the support of the US, is a step too far even for its authoritarian regimes, for democratic states in Europe and more powerful large and middling states in other parts of this emerging multipolar world, in which China competes for influence with the US.
Netanyahu’s Israel is disenchanting influential members of world Jewish communities with its settler-colonial brutality in the West Bank, military maximalism in Gaza, destruction of civil liberties at home and zealous pursuit of external critics spuriously accused of anti-Semitism.
That Israel’s policies increasingly align with new right movements drawing on fascist tropes and Islamophobia is an ultimate horrifying irony, given the deadly real anti-Semitism of fascism historically. More far-seeing Jewish critics question whether such an Israel can still convincingly present itself as a safe haven for Jews or a protector of their interests and values internationally. If not, we may well be witnessing the end of Zionism as a project for Jewish protection and liberation. Conceived by Theodor Herzl in the 1890s at the height of European imperialism, Zionism depended on such power to establish a national state based on the expulsion of Palestinians. Most Jews opposed Herzl’s approach then, preferring to find more universal ways to represent themselves in the transition to modernity. It took the horrors of European fascism and imperial nationalism, and the failure to protect and defend them as a minority, to convince most of those who survived the Holocaust that Israel should be their home.
If the Zionist project has indeed run its course, Netanyahu’s far-right cabinet has certainly accelerated such a historic transition.
