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The Israeli society of the 21st century (80% of Jews versus 20% of the Arab population), would be a melting pot of races, customs, languages and values that would only have in common their Hebrew origin and in which a silent blow would be produced by an ultra orthodox minority , the “haredim.”
Although they represent only 10% of its population, the ultra-orthodox would be a state within the state, ready to swallow all the sensitive areas of power of the Jewish state (Interior, Housing, Mossad and the IDF commanders or Jewish army) and try to impose the “Halacha” or Jewish law to more than 40% of the population that declares itself secular, segment of European filiation, immersed in Western culture and way of life and that wants to be governed by civil law as in other formal western democracies.
Einstein and Exclusionary Zionism
In 1938, the visionary Einstein warned of the dangers of exclusionary Zionism by stating:
“I would like a reasonable agreement to be reached with the Arabs on the basis of a peaceful life together as I think this would be preferable to the creation of a Jewish state.”
It is impossible to germinate in the twenty-first century given the absence on both sides of valid interlocutors to negotiate a lasting peace that implies the mutual recognition of the States of Israel and Palestine.
Thus, former President Jimmy Carter, who went down in history when he achieved the historic Camp David agreement between Israel and Egypt in 1979 in his book ‘Palestine, Peace not Apartheid’, denounces the “system of apartheid that Israel applies to the Palestinians.”
Likewise, in the aforementioned book he denounces “Israel’s non-compliance with the commitments made in 2003 under the auspices of George W. Bush“, which included demands for a total and permanent freeze on Jewish settler settlements in the West Bank as well as the right of return for the nearly 800,000 Palestinians who were forced to leave Israel following its statehood in 1948 (Nakba).
This roadmap was initially accepted by Israel and subsequently ratified by Olmert and Abbas at the Annapolis Summit (2007) with the requirement of “to put an end to the policy of building settlements in the West Bank and to relax the military controls that constrict the daily life of the Palestinians to a paroxysm”. This dystopian situation led the Jewish Civil Rights activist and Holocaust survivor, Israel Shakak to claim “The Nazis made me fear being Jewish and the Israelis embarrass me to be Jewish”.
Thus, according to the civil rights survey “Association for Civil Rights in Israel Annual Report for 2007” published by the newspaper Haaretz, the number of Jews who express feelings of hatred towards Arabs has tripled and about 60% of Israeli Jews would already oppose the equal rights of their Arab compatriots and in favor of the increase of the apartheid regime in the Palestinian ghettos of West Bank and Gaza.
In these ghettos, the Palestinian population would be subject to the military-juridical regime instead of relying on civilian power like the Israeli one, with which the vast majority of Israeli society would be silent accomplices and necessary collaborators in the implementation of xenophobic sentiment against the Arab-Israeli population.
Netanyahu and the Banality of Evil
The German-Jewish political theorist Hannah Arendt in her book “Eichmann in Jerusalem”, subtitled “A report on the banality of evil” coined the expression “banality of evil” to express that “some individuals act within the rules of the system to which they belong without reflecting on their actions”.
Consequently, the use by Israel of systematic torture, the apartheid of the Palestinian people, the surgical removal of Hamas terrorist elements and other evil practices, would not be considered on the basis of its effects or its final result provided that the orders to execute them come from higher echelons, leaving the Israeli government of Netanyahu as the only one responsible to history.
Arendt helped us to understand the reasons for the renunciation of the individual of his critical capacity (freedom), while alerting us to the need to be always vigilant before the foreseeable repetition of the “banalization of evil” by the rulers of any political system, including sui generis Jewish democracy.
If we extrapolate Arendt’s reflection on Adolf Eichmann to the current situation in the Gaza Strip,
“the military commanders of the Tzahal would not present the traits of murderous psychopaths, but would be mere bureaucrats who would carry out orders without thinking about their consequences and without discerning the good or evil of their actions”.
However, according to Maximilian Korstanje “fear and not the banality of evil, makes man renounce his critical will, but it is important not to lose sight that in that act the subject remains ethically responsible for his resignation” and Israeli commanders and soldiers would be complicit in human rights violations committed in the Gaza Strip under Netanyahu.
Netanyahu would be cornered by the international community’s revulsion at the violation of human rights in Gaza and by the growing disaffection towards his government of Israeli society that cannot forgive the security flaws in the Israeli defense that would have led to the murder of about 1500 Israelis and the kidnapping of 200 people by Hamas.
According to a survey by The Jerusalem Post, 80% of those polled say that “the Government is primarily responsible for the infiltration of Palestinian militias” and 56% think that “Netanyahu should resign at the end of the current war”.
In the event that Israeli society does not react against the barbarity of Netanyahu and demands his resignation and the initiation of a criminal trial for his negligent management, we will see the strengthening of the political figure of Netanyahu which would be the prelude to a subsequent totalitarian drift.
This involution could culminate in the establishment of a theocratic regime in the Israeli State in the next five years, which will mean that large sectors of lay and urban Israeli youth will have to choose to join the list of remote-controlled settlers by the Haredim or emigrate to the West to escape the theocratic-military dystopia.
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Germán Gorraiz López is a political analyst. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
