Discussion for the Israel-Hamas War: A thread in the Pit

[Kimstu]

@Left_Hand_of_Dorkness

At the beginning of this war, I was absolutely convinced that Israel’s military and government held moral superiority over the murderous Hamas terrorists. I no longer believe that to be true, and welcome prosecution of leaders on both sides for their crimes against humanity.

What is especially concerning to me is the prospect, described in detail in this recent New York Times Magazine article “The Unpunished”, of the ongoing rightward shift in Israeli views enabling continued radicalization of, and impunity for, anti-Palestinian extremists.

[…] This system, with its gaps and obstructions, allowed the founders of groups advocating extreme violence during the 1970s and 1980s to act without consequences, and today it has built a protective cocoon around their ideological descendants.

Some of these people now run Israel. In 2022, just 18 months after losing the prime ministership, Benjamin Netanyahu regained power by forming an alliance with ultraright leaders of both the Religious Zionism Party and the Jewish Power party. It was an act of political desperation on Netanyahu’s part, and it ushered into power some truly radical figures, people — like Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir — who had spent decades pledging to wrest the West Bank and Gaza from Arab hands. […]

The I.D.F. refused to allow [Hebron massacre terrorist Baruch] Goldstein to be buried in the Jewish cemetery in Hebron. He was buried instead in the Kiryat Arba settlement, in a park named for Meir Kahane, and his gravesite has become an enduring place of pilgrimage for Jews who wanted to celebrate, as his epitaph reads, the “saint” who died for Israel with “clean hands and a pure heart.”

One ultranationalist settler who went regularly to Goldstein’s grave was a teenage radical named Itamar Ben-Gvir, who would sometimes gather other followers there on Purim to celebrate the slain killer. […]

In October of [1995], Ben-Gvir spoke to Israeli television cameras holding up a Cadillac hood ornament, which he boasted he had broken off the prime minister’s official car during chaotic anti-Oslo demonstrations in front of the Knesset. “We got to his car,” he said, “and we’ll get to him, too.” The following month, Rabin was dead. […]

In 2005, the Jewish Department of Shin Bet received intelligence about a plot to slow the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza by using 700 liters of gasoline to blow up vehicles on a major highway. Acting on the tip, officers arrested six men in central Israel. One of them was Bezalel Smotrich, the future minister overseeing civilian affairs in the West Bank. […]

Benjamin Netanyahu’s determination to become prime minister for an unprecedented sixth term came with a price: an alliance with a movement that he once shunned, but that had been brought into the political mainstream by Israel’s steady drift to the right. Netanyahu, who is now on trial for bribery and other corruption charges, repeatedly failed in his attempts to form a coalition after most of the parties announced that they were no longer willing to join him. He personally involved himself in negotiations to ally Itamar Ben-Gvir’s Jewish Power party and Bezalel Smotrich’s Religious Zionism Party, making them kingmakers for anyone trying to form a coalition government.

ISTM that people like Ben-Gvir and Smotrich are not easily dismissable as accidental one-off failures of governance. They seem to represent an ongoing pattern of “extremification” that is committed to ever more catastrophic oppression of Palestinians, in the service of ever more radical views of Jewish destiny in Israel.

Even if Netanyahu and Smotrich and Ben-Gvir are indeed summarily banished from the political scene within the next few months, what happens next? Will they be replaced with more moderate leaders representing an Israeli consensus against ongoing oppression of Palestinians? That consensus, if it exists, doesn’t seem to have been able to stop Netanyahu and Smotrich and Ben-Gvir from getting into power in the first place.