Ethnic Cleansing/Genocide Has Always Been The Goal— It Is The Glue That Holds Israeli Society Together
A response to Ramzy Baroud
I have just read Dr Ramzy Baroud’s ‘Netanyahu’s Shin Bet Scandal: who holds the power?’ on Savage Minds’ Substack page. I wanted to comment, but only paid subscribers can comment on Savage Minds, so I decided to re-stack the article with a comment, which is a way around not being able to comment on an article directly.
Once I started to write, the comment became quite long, so I thought it might be worth posting it here as an essay. Baroud’s article looks at Netanyahu’s status in Israel, and at the way the Israeli public is responding to him. While everything he says is true—and I recommend you read the article—I think that Baroud’s perspective may be too narrow.
First I wanted to say that it’s never been “war-turned genocide in Gaza”. It’s always been ethnic cleansing—meaning that genocide was always the goal.
As for what Baroud says in the article about Netanyahu’s chaotic and impulsive way of governing, it is true and it is also consistent with the fact that Netanyahu is a narcissist. I have written about the chaos and impulsiveness of narcissists, which has been evident throughout history whenever narcissists have been in power.
That Netanyahu’s primary interest is staying in power is also completely true. Once he loses his job as PM he will have to go to prison. However, he also has an ego the size of a planet, and like all narcissists he has grandiose fantasies. It is important to not overlook Netanyahu’s aspiration to be the one who will complete the Zionist settler-colonial project. This is the glory he covets. Netanyahu was brought up by a ferocious and fanatic Zionist father, and his Zionist indoctrination must not be overlooked.
The Jewish Israeli population may oppose Netanyahu, as Baroud correctly observes. But Israeli society, by and large, is also united behind the goal of completing the settler-colonial project, which is to eliminate all Palestinian presence in historic Palestine.
The Jewish Israeli majority has been voting for successive PMs they had hoped would finally carry out the ‘final solution’ to Israel’s ‘Palestinian problem’, securing their coveted exclusively Jewish state. However, over the past seventy-six years, one PM after another have discovered that getting rid of millions of people is not a simple or easy task. Israeli society has tolerated Netanyahu’s narcissistic antics and excesses, and his ruthless capitalist economics, while they still hoped he would be the one to solve their ‘problem’. (That’s why he has been boasting more and more openly about what he is going to do to the Palestinians. He needs to do this to try to convince the Israeli public that he is still ‘on the job’).
Israeli Jews oppose him because he has not delivered on his promises, and they are growing impatient. In Israel what happened on 7th October 2023 is perceived as an intelligence failure that is Netanyahu’s failure. Not only has he not ‘solved the problem’, Israeli society perceives him as having put them under existential threat. After Netanyahu, they are likely to pick someone even more ruthless, and psychopathic. It is likely to be someone from the religious Right, who will try to usher in a ‘State of Judea’, as Ilan Pappé calls it. That is a state governed by Jewish law—as these Messianic Zionists perceive it. If this happens, there will be no checks and balances, no inhibitions, no civil courts, and a full blown genocide, far worse than what we are seeing now, will be perpetrated.
The Israeli military has already been infiltrated by the Messianic religious, ‘settler’-types. The trend started decades ago, and has been accelerating. The only reason Netanyahu has given the religious Right so much power in his Administration is because they have supported him, and he has perceived them as essential to his political survival. However, their aim is to oust not just him, but all secular institutions. They are using Netanyahu as a ticket to power, and they have always had a clear goal in mind.
There are many secular Israelis who don’t like this, and many with dual citizenship are already leaving the country. But their choice should not be misunderstood. They are not leaving because they object to the elimination of the Palestinian people, but because they don’t want to be forced into living under a religious regime.
Most Israelis who cannot leave are completely supportive of the elimination of the Palestinians. They would go to any length, and tolerate any regime to try to achieve that goal. They live in pathological fear that Jews are under existential threat of annihilation from the Palestinians. No matter how ludicrous this might appear to outsiders, and how much it flies in the face of the evidence, the average Jewish Israeli believes it with all their heart.
This belief has been fed into people from early childhood and all through life. It is in Israeli society’s very ‘DNA’. Jewish Israelis think of the Palestinians in the same way they think about the historical Nazis. This is a powerful belief that has been cultivated and pushed by all of Israel’s Zionist governments on the Left and on the Right.
I doubt there will be civil war in Israel. Most secular Jews who cannot leave Israel will succumb to living under religious rule in the new ‘state of Judea’. The danger to the Palestinian people should not be underestimated. We are facing a single-minded genocidal plan that can only be stopped from the outside.
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Dear Avigail, this is an essential response to those who still hold on to "Jewish State has a right to exist", "two-state solution" and "coexistence" myths. I did not know Ramzy was one of them. Perhaps he has a Chomsky-style Western indoctrination or is afraid to speak more clearly so he is not accused of antisemitism and deplatformed.
It is really strange that people who are supposed to know the history of Zionism and the erasure of Palestine still believe that it is all Netanyahu's fault and that it is antisemitic to condemn Zionism as a whole. There are also opinions that "the past is the past" and we must focus on current events and analyze them without connecting them to any events in the past, because suggesting a long-term planning and continuity of atrocities is a "conspiracy theory", or even worse "Jewish conspiracy trope".
Your view, coming from a thinker who has been inside Zionism and experienced its monstrosity and barbarism, is more "radical" and much more honest than the views of those who want "peace". Also other Israeli dissidents who have tasted what Zionism is, are on that side: Miko Peled, Ronnie Barkan, David Sheen, Aaron Turgman, Alon Mizrahi. And yes, sadly, Israel can only be dismantled from outside, in cooperation with Palestinian resistance. We all know how the outside regime change cooperating with local resistance works for evil: it is UK-US regime changes. So finally ONE REGIME CHANGE should be organized FOR THE GOOD: Dismantle Israel. That would create panic in the world Zionism and it would be easier to remove Zionists from power in the West as well.
Like others commenting here, to me, these next few lines capture the essence - the root - that go a long way to explain all other derivatives of israeli citizens' (and thus israel's) behaviour :
"They [most israelis] live in pathological fear that Jews are under existential threat of annihilation from the Palestinians. No matter how ludicrous this might appear to outsiders, and how much it flies in the face of the evidence, the average Jewish Israeli believes it with all their heart.
This belief has been fed into people from early childhood and all through life. It is in Israeli society’s very ‘DNA’."
As commenter @LenaBloch said - your writing and analysis is uniquely radical and honest - and in that sense - the only others who parallel that critical meta-awareness of israeli jewish society are Alon Mizrahi and Ori Goldberg. Kudos and thanks.!