Before the recent war between the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) and Israel, which increased pressure on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and exacerbated the political crisis in Tel Aviv, Netanyahu was living his happiest days. He became the longest-serving Israeli prime minister since the establishment of the Zionist occupation state in Palestine, surpassing David Ben-Gurion, who remained in his position as prime minister for 8,475 days. Netanyahu also succeeded in overcoming the accusations against him, being the first Israeli prime minister to be accused of crimes while at the helm of his cabinet, while his predecessor, Ehud Olmert, was forced to resign, before charges were brought against him that put him in prison for more than a year. (1)
Netanyahu
Alof Benn, editor-in-chief of Haaretz newspaper, described the “deal of the century” as “fulfilling most of Netanyahu’s political dreams. The main renewal was the American recognition of Israel’s demands in the West Bank, with legal, security and historical justifications that, for the first time, legitimize the White House to impose Israeli Law on Settlements and the Jordan Valley.
With the start of the “normalization” train in 2013, as well as the start of counter-revolutions in the Arab region, led by Egypt, with a military coup, it seemed that Israel, led by Netanyahu, was achieving some kind of great political influence in the region and the world, and it even came to the extent that former US President Donald Trump described Israel is one of the most successful democracies in the world. (3) But the reality has agreed with the warning, written by Nahum Barnea, that “Netanyahu’s achievement, with the enthusiastic assistance of Kushner and Friedman, is a troubling gift; it leads to the end of the Jewish-democratic state, and to the end of Zionism.”
Many Israelis and Americans, and some Arabs as well, have long claimed that Israel is an oasis of “democracy” in the desert of Arab despotism. However, over the years it has not proven this so much as it has proven to be based on the apartheid between Arabs (the people of Palestine whose roots go back over the centuries) and Jews brought from abroad through waves of settlement accompanying European colonialism, without connection to the original Middle Eastern Jews. In fact, Israel was nothing but an extension of a colonial “settler” pattern.
On July 19, 2018, the Israeli Knesset passed the “nation-state of the Jews in Israel” law, which states that “the State of Israel is the nation-state of the Jewish people, and that the realization of the right to national self-determination in the State of Israel is a matter for the Jewish people.” The state will work to ensure the safety and security of the Jewish people, and to preserve its cultural, historical and religious heritage among the Diaspora Jews In addition, legalization of the process of racial segregation and exclusion of the Palestinian people inside the occupied territories. (4)
But the most dangerous of all is that the State of Israel views Jewish settlement as a national value, and therefore works to encourage and promote the establishment and development of settlements, meaning that the law has transformed the settlement movement and the building of settlements in occupied Palestine into a legal movement that enjoys parliamentary legislation from the Knesset. (4)
This law came within the framework of rebuilding the legal and legal basis for the Jews inside the occupied Palestinian territories (the State of Israel), and they are made up of discordant groups who came from all over the world to inhabit and have citizenship in the State of Israel, and this was based on ideological mobilization around their claims to the land of Palestine , to create a kind of homogeneity for a “Jewish people” that gathers around its modern state with a missionary and civilized message according to its claim. (5)
But the problem with this project is that it clearly contradicts the alleged democratic face of the State of Israel, which has proven that it only excludes the Arabs and the Palestinian people from within and around it, and prevents them from returning to their homes and lands stolen nearly a century ago. This is what the author Jean-Claude Milner explains in his book “The Criminal Tendencies of Democratic Europe.” Milner explains that peace in the Middle East can only be achieved “with a peaceful solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a peace that can only mean one thing: destruction.” Israel”. (6) While European democracy succeeded in achieving its peace, it took a path that also rids it of the burden of the Jewish question and erases the guilt complex associated with the sin of the Holocaust at the same time by establishing a state for them in Palestine. (6)
Milner’s book presents a belief opposite to what is prevalent in the West about Israel’s democracy. The virtue of Israel – according to Milner – is that it embodies the antithesis of the European democratic principle, and an external extension of its project at the same time. Totalitarianism, which means that the state devours society, and which contradicts the concept of Western democracy, has become itself the characteristics of “Israeli democracy” as a project that devours and replaces the Palestinian people. This made “Jacques Rancier” say in his book “The Hate of Democracy” that “Jews and democracy are in radical opposition.”
“The living see in the Jew a dead person, the people of the country see him as a stranger, an idler and a beggar, the poor and the exploited see him as a millionaire, and the patriots see him as a man without a homeland,” wrote Leo Pinsker, the Polish Zionist activist in 1882. Pinsker only expressed in his saying that The feelings that swept Europe towards the Jews at the time, as they were an isolated group working for the benefit of the feudal lords and the lords of power, and these feelings were repeated again in 1946 in one of the sayings that expressed the Europeans’ fears of the Jews: “The Jew can be the embodiment of everything we despise, fear and despise, He is the harbinger of a Bolshevik revolution against social and political conditions, but at the same time, and herein lies a strange paradox, a symbol of the liberal spirit of corrupt Western democracy. On the economic level, the Jew was considered a symbol of both capitalism and socialism. The Jew was accused of being a lazy pacifist, but also of chance. The strange thing is that he is the eternal instigator who ignites the fires of war.” (7)
It was then settled in the Western conscience that the Jews are a major obstacle to the flourishing of democracy and its corrupt spirit that must be uttered. Anna Zuke, a professor at Lublin University, explains this “Jewish obstacle” in a recent study describing the Jews as a “mobile class” within Europe, “understanding the subject of the feelings and emotions of the upper social classes towards the lower classes, and they are also the subject of the feelings and emotions that they express. Lower classes towards higher classes. (7)
Zuk deals in fine detail with the conflict of perceptual images in Poland during the eighteenth century as a model that reflects a general social phenomenon and important in explaining anti-Jewishness within Europe. This means that the Jews formed ‘intermediate groups’ and ‘protective shields’ for the real landowners in the psychological and social senses. (7)
On the other hand, the landlords treated the Jews as they treated all servants from the lower classes of society, “and they looked at the Jews, as they looked at the peasants and the common people from the urban, as people characterized by barbarism, filth, ignorance and greed, and thus the Jews were completely isolated. With the Jews absolutely impossible because of the importance of their economic roles, there was careful and strict observance of the rules of their social separation.” (7)
On the other hand, the peasantry and the urban common people viewed the Jews in a completely different way. The function that the Jews performed for the owners of the land was not originally just an economic service, but a preventive service represented in protecting the nobles and landowners from popular anger and agitation. Instead of the disaffected taking revenge on the real oppressor, they mobilized themselves and poured their wrath on the Jewish mediators. As for the lower classes, they saw the Jews as their enemies; They are the only exploiters they know personally. Those classes did not taste direct injustice except the Jewish injustice, and therefore they saw that the Jews and the classes are friendly, and therefore it is not surprising that the Jews of the same low status have become the target of aggression directed towards the higher classes of society. “The Jews were put to the gun as unfamiliar mediators, and thus became a prime target of the violence of the downtrodden classes.” (7)
Nevertheless, the European community did not see that the Jewish peculiarity differs in any way from the peculiarities of Europe during the Middle Ages, and the modern states sought to dismantle and integrate it into the homogeneous modern European society. But European modernity in its quest to dismantle cultural idiosyncrasies began to eliminate the economic interests of these groups, destroying the fence of their isolation and reintegration into modern industrial society. Therefore, the Jews came out of their isolation and acquired property and rented real estate in purely Christian neighborhoods in which they had previously been unable to exist; They became part of European daily life.
Apparently, “Jewish groups were embroiled in the fiercest historical conflict, the struggle of the pre-modern world with the world of advancing modernity. This struggle revealed itself for the first time in the practical resistance of the classes of the old order when the new social order was about to uproot and deprive them of their roots. From the inheritance, and uprooting it from its safe lands.(7) But the matter became more complicated with time, as joining the train of modernity and technical modernization did not proceed simultaneously throughout all of Europe, and therefore Western European Jews preceded their peers in Eastern Europe with regard to integration and social progress. The failure of Eastern European Jews to integrate and emancipation from isolation, and then their migration to the West, a threat to the privileges of Western European Jews and the social balance within those societies.
In the midst of this conflict, Theodor Herzl appeared among the assimilated Jews of the West, discovering the need of the West and the Jews of the West to quickly get rid of the Jews of Eastern Europe. However, he discovered a fact that many missed: the inevitability of moving within the framework of Western colonialism, which is the only way out to move the Jews out of Europe and employ them for its benefit in return for their support and protection. Herzl succeeded in formulating an organic national discourse expressing the Jewish people, as described by the Egyptian thinker Abdel Wahhab El-Messiri. European colonialism, the Zionist project in action. (8)
Despite the clear presence of the Jewish religion in the Zionist idea, Zionism is essentially a secular, utilitarian, materialistic idea, says El-Messiri, despite the Christian or romantic preamble that surrounds it. In the end, it sees the Jews as a useful substance that has no sanctity, and views the presence of Jews in the Western world in a negative light, and believes that it must be put to an end. Therefore, this formula was devised that calls on the Jews to end religious passivity and turn towards Palestine in a materialistic, secular project that is not bound by or awaits the divine command according to the Jewish faith. The Zionist project was therefore incompatible with the doctrines of Catholic Christianity and Orthodox Judaism at the same time.” (8)
The key to Europe’s acceptance and adoption of the Zionist project was that it offered it a solution to the problem of the unintegrated Jews, i.e. the useless Jewish human surplus, just as the Zionist project was consistent with the colonial doctrine that all European countries embraced in the first half of the twentieth century. The magic formula of the Zionist project has become: “a useful, outcast, organic people who are transferred outside Europe to be employed for the benefit of the West. It is a complete secular formula that does not recognize the sanctity of land or people and does not recognize any morals. It is an ordinary colonial project, like any Western colonial project aimed at solving some problems.” The social structure that emerged within the Western political civilization formation by exporting it to Asia and Africa. (8)
In this context, Zionism does not differ from many of the ideologies of white settlement, or even from Nazism. The white settlers in South Africa “had a deterministic biological racial ideology that excluded blacks, using Christian preambles to justify their actions despite their apparent conflict with their values. Likewise, the Nazis, espousing a pagan ideology that tried to resurrect German pre-Christian history, pre-dating the penetration of non-Aryans.” (8)
The Zionist movement fully understood itself as a colonial solution to the Jewish question. This 1921 publication of the Zionist Organization in Great Britain, titled Zionism: A Response to the New Criticism, clarifies that the publication begins by endorsing the truism established by subsequent developments, that “Zionism does not agree with the principle of self-determination, because this principle simply means Acceptance (the current racial makeup in each county and town)”. Then the publication asks: “Has it ever been recognized that the colonization of a backward territory can only take place with the consent of the majority of the real population there? If that were the case, hardly any country in the world would be colonized.” The pamphlet then defends his idea, saying: “If the principle of self-determination were implemented to its abstract logical conclusion, and the local population were consulted, all expansion would be impossible, and the European masses would roam free and roam this side of the Atlantic, while a handful of American Indians are still roaming free in the expanses of America without borders. Ben-Gurion likened the violent battles waged by the Zionist settlers against the Palestinians to those waged by the white settlers against the savage nature and the most savage Indians. (8)
Al-Masiri quoted Oscar Rabinovitch as saying that the Zionist project aims to solve the Jewish question by diverting “the stream of Jewish immigrants from England to Africa and Asia,” and that it aims to strengthen Britain by “establishing a Jewish center of government” overlooking the vital British road (London). – Singapore – Melbourne). El-Messiri also quoted Herzl as describing the Zionist idea as a “colonial idea.” (8)
Most of the Zionists realized the colonial, settler-substitution nature of the Zionist project, according to El-Messiri’s expression. The slogan “A people without a land for a land without a people” was an expression of these features. In addition, the substitutionary tendency is evident in Herzl’s writings from the beginning, when he talks about using “natives” to kill large snakes and other predators, and then giving them jobs in other countries to reside temporarily until they disappear completely.
In his book “The History of Zionist Thought,” Al-Masiri divides the types of colonialism in the modern era into three types, which differ according to the degree of distortion that the colonizer inflicts on the oppressed people as a result of the colonial invasion. In the first place comes the “neo-colonialism”, which is that the colonial superpower controls the fate of the people and their wealth through puppet governments and international organizations subject to their domination, in the second place is traditional colonialism, where the invading country sends its armies and occupies a country to exploit its population as a source of cheap labor, and to seize its resources Natural, transforming it into a market for surplus goods, and to benefit from its strategic position (as was the case with British colonialism). The third and most severe level is “settler colonialism”, as the occupation here takes the form of a settlement group, with all its social, economic and cultural institutions, that casts a heavy shadow over the indigenous population, turning them into second-class residents or slaves, or worse, eliminating them completely. (8)
After Herzl and Belfort, the “Jewish” state became part of the basic Zionist formula. The State of “Israel” has replaced the Jewish “ghetto”, which was transferred from Europe to the Middle East. Al-Mesiri summarizes the similarity between the Jewish ghetto and the state of the “Zionist entity” in several points, the most important of which are: First, the residents of the ghetto viewed the outside world with a deep suspicious view based on dualism The sharpness that characterizes the functional groups’ vision of the world, and Zionism adopts this view based on the dualism of Jews and Gentiles, which is evident in the Israeli security theory, as well as in all Israeli strategic thought (and Gentiles today are represented by Arabs in the Zionist cognitive map).
Second, Israel inherited the role of the ghetto in the Middle East. The ghetto was not only productive in economic terms, but also played a mediating role in the social structure. The role played by the Jewish functional community as a mediator between the owners of the land and the common people was the same that Israel plays between the Western countries and the Arab world today.
Since the Camp David agreement between Egypt and Israel and then the Oslo agreement, Israel has begun to invest in this situation, linking its presence and political influence with the authoritarian Arab regimes, so Tel Aviv has become an agent of the United States of America in the region, and then it has continued to colonize Palestine and oppress its people through international and Arab cover at the same time. One. However, the outbreak of the Arab revolutions at the end of the first decade of the new century represented a serious threat to that situation, and raised great concern in the Israeli political, security and intelligence circles (9). Therefore, Israel took the position of remote monitoring while its allies fell, and did not engage politically in the scene as long as the slogans of the Arab revolutions were far from the “Palestinian cause” and directed towards issues of corruption and internal Arab tyranny. https://www.youtube.com/embed/1B7gP1uU0uI?version=3&rel=1&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&fs=1&hl=ar&autohide=2&wmode=transparent
This situation changed completely on the night of September 9, 2011, after thousands of Egyptian demonstrators surrounded the Israeli embassy in Cairo, and then a number of them stormed it after the concrete security wall surrounding the building collapsed. (10) After that incident, the “counter-revolution” began to take a clear line of cooperation with Israel, and work began to bring down the revolutions in the Arab countries through a series of military coups with all kinds of support for the remnants of the old regimes that constituted the “strategic treasure” of the occupying state.
In this context, Milner’s statement that “Jews and democracy are in radical opposition”, which is meant by the current form of Jewish existence associated with colonialism and settlement, is confirmed again. El-Messiri’s analysis confirms that Zionism is, in essence, a colonial project in conflict with the principle of self-determination on which democracy is based. And that the only possible response to this project is to resist it so that its cost to the Western countries sponsoring it would rise, and it would become worthless in their eyes, and therefore without a future.