The Secret Corners Of The Zionist Mind

Dec 2nd, 1948. With the nightmare of the holocaust fresh in their minds, twenty-eight prominent Jewish intellectuals (including luminaries like Albert Einstein and Hannah Arendt), send a letter to the New York Times to warn about a new danger:

Among the most disturbing political phenomena of our times is the emergence in the newly created state of Israel of the "Freedom Party," a political party closely akin in its organisation, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties. It was formed out of the membership and following of the former Irgun Zvai Leumi, a terrorist, right-wing, chauvinist organisation in Palestine.

Founded in 1931, the Irgun Zvai Leumi spent most of their time killing Arabs, the British, and even Jews. But as the state of Israel took shape, their membership began to dissolve.

Some joined the newly created Israeli Defence Force (IDF), some pursued their love of terrorism with atrocities like the Deir Yassin massacre, where they killed over 100 Palestinian men, women and children, and some, like their leader, Menachem Begin, sought political power.

But wherever they roamed, their ultimate goal remained the same: total control over Eretz Israel, the biblical land of Israel that includes Gaza, the West Bank, and Transjordan.

And the founder of this maximalist interpretation of Zionism, Ze'ev Jabotinsky, was surprisingly honest about what that meant:

We cannot offer any adequate compensation to the Palestinian Arabs in return for Palestine. And therefore, there is no likelihood of any voluntary agreement being reached [...] Zionist colonisation must either stop or else proceed regardless of the mood of the native population [...]

That is our Arab policy; not what it should be, but what it actually is, whether we admit it or not.

Of course, for millions of Jews, this wasn't their Arab policy.

As Judah Magnes put it in Like All The Nations?, “the Jewish People, thank God, will never be successful conquerors and colonisers. Neither the hostile world nor their own soul will let them.”

But sadly, some souls aren’t so easily restrained.

So the Irgun Zvai Leumi became the Freedom Party, the Freedom Party (along with various other right-wing groups) merged to form Likud, and Likud became the majority stakeholders of Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition government. A government that has long advocated the same “river to the sea” Zionism that seeks total control over Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

But unlike Menachem Begin, Hamas gave Netanyahu’s expansionist goals an almost perfect justification.

As Eton’s answer to Tommy Robinson, recently pointed out, once you adjust for population size, Hamas’ attack on October 7th was equivalent to “about6000 Canadians being massacred and burned in their homes” (it’s closer to 4,500 but who’s counting). If you live in the U.K., imagine 8,000 of your compatriots being killed in a single day. For Americans, think of thirteen 9/11s.

How could Netanyahu not respond after such brutality?

How could he not destroy the housing, hospitals and civilian infrastructure in Gaza to such an unprecedented degree that it’ll be uninhabitable for over a decade?

How could he not almost immediately sell gas exploration rights to oil companies in areas that are currently (wink, wink) within Gazan territory?

How could he not kill more than 500 Palestinians in the West Bank, stealing vast swathes of their land in the process, even though Hamas isn’t in power there?

If these actions seem more concerned with expansionism than defeating Hamas, it’s probably because you’re an antisemite.

And sure, if you wanted to replicate the devastation the Israeli response has caused in Gaza over the past eight months, you’d need to kill nearly seven hundred thousand Canadians. In the U.K., you’d need to kill every man, woman and child in Edinburgh and Brighton. And in the United States, you’d need to repeat 9/11 more than 1,900 times.