Israel Defense Forces "Netzah Yehuda" battalion | TOI |
On the Struggle Between the Founding Colonialists and the New Colonialists of Israel | Arab Center Washington DC - March 2023 |
Israel today is witnessing an unprecedented internal struggle that has split Israeli society into two contentious groups separated by what is, at least at the present time, an unbridgeable gap. These two groups are organized into two conflicting camps. The first is the neo-rightist camp that currently controls the government and that comprises different strands, including populists, Kahanists, nationalist and religious ultraconservative Zionists, and Haredim who have undergone continual nationalist Judaization. The second camp is the opposition that is currently protesting against Israeli Minister of Justice Yariv Levin's plan for a judicial coup, which includes parties from the center, the left, and the statist right. Each of these two camps has its own class, social, and ethnic attributes, as well as its own vision of the nature of the state. Both, however, agree on the Jewish nature of the state of Israel and on Zionism.
The right considers the opposition to have failed in realizing "true Zionism," despite having monopolized governance by employing the elite. Meanwhile, the opposition views the right as destroying Zionism and taking the state that it once built to the brink of the abyss by transforming it from a democratic Jewish state into a dictatorship. The new extreme right is moving in the direction of rebuilding the Zionist project on new foundations that replace soft Israeli secular Zionism with another type of Zionism, one that emphasizes Jewish nationalism, the values of conservatism, Jewish supremacy, exclusive rights for Jews between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, and achieving full Jewish sovereignty over the "Land of Israel" (Eretz Yisrael).
This article seeks to study the current situation by linking it with the relationship the two groups have with the Zionist colonialist project and the struggle over symbolic colonialist capital. Accordingly, the paper will study the current dispute as a multi-class disagreement--with social, historical, and psychological dimensions--between the founding colonialists and the new colonialists in Israel.
I would have added the ultra-religious right as the ME conflict from Israel's view is religious with emphasis on Moses, the Promised Land and gentiles (goyim), outsider who have no right to participate in the Jewish State. IDF cruelty has nothing to do with the international liberal order or law of conduct in war. To much religious symbolism fuels hate for Palestinians who have a right to live on their land.
Amalek comparison ... the wrath of Bibi Netanyahu goes over corpses, indiscriminate killings for political gain in next "democratic" election ... the true face of Jewish led statehood revealed in last 57 years.
Netanyahu Map Eretz Yisrael - River to the Sea
The master of provocation and humiliation of political opponents and the Palestinian people alike.
The UN’s acquiescence to erasing Palestine | UN General Assembly - New York 22 Sept 2023 |
Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu under fire for holding up map erasing Palestine | Oneindia News |
Erasing Palestine is what the Zionist colonial project is about. At the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA), Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu illustrated the aim by showing a map of Greater Israel – completely eliminating the existence of Gaza and the occupied West Bank – the only remaining fragments of Palestinian land. “The Abraham Accords heralded the dawn of a new age of peace,” Netanyahu said in his address to the UNGA.
My earlier writing …
Torah and Bible Leads Palestinian Oppression | 7 Feb 2023 | … 8 months later ⚠️
Brig. Gen. Avi Bluth gave his brigade commanders ’Ours in Tabu: The Secrets of Land Redeemers From Our Father Abraham to the Young Settlements' saying it would help them better understand the status of the land.
To save Israel: The US is destroying the international system it once constructed | MEMO - 14 Apr 2024 |
[Link: https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2023/2/22/the-problem-with-israels-so-called-crisis-of-democracy]
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In a conversation in 2020 with Princeton Professor Emeritus, Richard Falk, he told me that historically, colonised nations that have won the legitimacy war have always won their freedom.
Palestine is unlikely to be the exception. The Gaza war, however, is confronting the world with an unprecedented challenge, specifically to governments’ relationship with international law, their obligations to international institutions, such as the United Nations, the International Court of Justice, the International Criminal Court and others.
“The government is not legitimate unless it is carried on with the consent of the governed,” English philosopher, John Locke, said in the 17th century. This is not a mere theory, and it will always be applicable.
Consent, however, does not always reflect itself in the form of transparent and democratic elections. Legitimacy and loyalty to governments can be expressed in other ways as well. Those who do not respect this maxim could easily find themselves embroiled in political upheavals and violent rebellions resulting from popular dissent.
To maintain a degree of international consensus, the United Nations was founded in 1945. It was obvious, from the very start, that the UN did not truly reflect the universal desires of all people. To the contrary, it was structured based on a hierarchical power paradigm, where the victors of World War II emerged as the masters, assigning themselves veto rights and permanent membership at the UN Security Council. As for the serfs, they were assigned with far less consequential seats in the General Assembly.
The UN provided the absolute minimum platform of international legitimacy, but its unequal structure spurred yet another conflict, expressed in the words of British scholar, Adam Groves, who described the “privileged status of the permanent five” in the UNSC not only “as a Western-centric relic of the past, but worse, a means for the status-quo powers to limit the influence and development of other states”.
The EU build on Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms
The problem with Israel’s so called ‘crisis of democracy’ | Al Jazeera Opinion |
Is the new Netanyahu government really on course to ‘destroy Israeli democracy’?
Since the start of the new year, reading about Israel in the Hebrew-language press has been an unnerving experience.
One article described a maternity ward in which a Palestinian woman from Nazareth was persuaded to move rooms after a Jewish woman complained about sharing the same space with a non-Jew.
Another article revealed that the Israeli military commander responsible for the West Bank recently distributed to his officers a messianic pamphlet – “The Secrets of the Land Redeemers, from Abraham our Father to the Young Settlers” – on how to seize Palestinian land.
A third reported that the number of Palestinians killed by Israeli military fire in the West Bank in 2022 has been the highest in 18 years.
A fourth explained how Israel’s Supreme Court approved the expulsion of Palestinians from their homes in eight villages and the Israeli military’s demand to hold regular training exercises in that same area.
Domestic news stories like these, which inadvertently expose the grim everyday realities of Israel, seldom make it into international news bulletins.
One likely reason why international media outlets do not cover these stories is that if they did, such reports would profoundly challenge the current narrative the very same outlets have long been peddling about Israel: that Israel’s otherwise well-functioning and robust democracy is being threatened by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s new far-right government.
Work in progress ... more to follow 😅 ⚠️ 🌈
