“Netanyahu has succeeded in overturning the principle that the state exists for the sake of its citizens and putting in its place the Fascist belief that the citizens exist for the state.”
Zvi Barel in Haaretz, as quoted by David Shulman in The New York Review of Books Blog Section. (David Shulman is the Renee Lang Professor of Humanistic Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and an activist
in Ta’ayush, Arab-Jewish Partnership.)
Earlier this afternoon David Shulman's
"Blog" version of a longer article scheduled to appear later in the
New York Review of Books bore the title
"Israel: The Ugly Truth."" For reasons unknown, its title has since been changed to a less accusatory,
"Israel: The Stark Truth" (you can find it linked as originally titled through
Trendolizer, proving yet again that the Internet never forgets).
Shulman's piece should have retained his original title. Benjamin Netanyahu's resounding victory will bring with it ugly consequences to Israel that may not matter to those who voted for him, or to the cheering American conservatives whose real-world relationship to Israel is a contrived marriage of convenience cultivated to placate Evangelicals and Neo-conservative Zionists high within the ranks of the Republican Party. But, as cogently and eloquently argued by our own David Harris Gershon here, what Israel's citizens voted for this week will have a far-reaching impact both in Israel itself as well as here across the pond where much of Israel's life support system, both morally and financially, is based. Along those same lines, the New York Times Magazine this week features a lengthy piece titled "Do the Democrats and Israel Have A Future Together?" Both Israel's fate as a functional Democracy, as well as its future as the largest beneficiary of American largesse, are now on the table, it would seem.
Shulman's prognosis for Israel following last week's election is bleak, to say the least:
[T]here will be more hypernationalist, antidemocratic legislation, more deliberate and consistent attempts to undermine the authority of the courts, more rampant racism, more thugs in high office, more acts of cruelty inflicted on innocents, more attacks on moderates perceived as enemies of the state, more paranoid indoctrination in the schools, more hate propaganda and self-righteous whining by official spokesmen, more discrimination against the Israeli-Arab population, more wanton destruction of the villages of Israeli Bedouins, more war-mongering, and quite possibly more needless war.
Godwin's law precludes too liberal usage of the term "fascist" on this site, particularly in connection with Israel, so it's striking that Shulman doesn't hesitate to use the term twice in what is indeed a "stark" assessment of what the world can expect as the new normal in Israel:
What really counts is the fact that the Israeli electorate is still dominated by hypernationalist, in some cases proto-fascist, figures. It is in no way inclined to make peace. It has given a clear mandate for policies that preclude any possibility of moving toward a settlement with the Palestinians and that will further deepen Israel’s colonial venture in the Palestinian territories, probably irreversibly.
Shulman sees four immediate consequences from Netanyahu's victory. The first involves the most immediate victims--the Palestinians living in the Occupied Territories:
First, the notion that there will someday be two states in historic Palestine has been savagely undermined. We have Netanyahu’s word for it. If he has his way—and why shouldn’t he?—Palestinians are destined for the foreseeable future to remain subject to a regime of state terror, including the remorseless loss of their lands and homes and, in many cases, their very lives; they will continue to be, as they are now, disenfranchised, without even minimal legal recourse, hemmed into small discontinuous enclaves, and deprived of elementary human rights.
Second, Shulman sees a new Intifada rooted in the West Bank, and the rise of more militant organizations such as Hamas (or others) assuming a greater role there, shunting aside the Palestinian Authority:
It seems ridiculous to have to write this, but in case anyone has any doubt: there is no way a privileged collective can sit forever on top of a disenfranchised, systematically victimized minority of millions. We can expect mass violent protests of one sort or another (maybe, with luck, some large-scale nonviolent protest as well). Sooner or later, the territories will probably explode, and the Palestinian Authority may be washed away. At that point Netanyahu will complain loudly that you can never trust the Arabs.
Thirdly, he expects Palestinians to seek further redress through the International Criminal Court at the Hague, and, implicitly, he expects that body to be responsive. While he gives some credence to the (doubtful) possibility that the US will withdraw its veto from the Security Council, he assumes (probably correctly) that the international boycott of all things Israel will intensify "to a level far beyond what we have seen." He believes this boycott may roil Israel's own society to such an extent that changes may result from it alone, as the moral legitimacy of Israel as a state collapses in the view of most outside its borders except those directly beholden to the likes of Sheldon Adelson, e.g., the U.S. Republican House of Representatives.
And finally, he sees the moral fiber of internal Israeli society unraveling with a clear bent towards fascism, a mortal danger to Israel he considers far worse than any external threat:
The danger from within—to who we are and how we live in the world—is infinitely greater than any external threat. The corruption (I am not talking about money) is already far advanced. Israel has, in effect, knowingly moved further toward a full-fledged apartheid system.
The
New York Times article is more concerned with the impact of Netanyahu's victory on Israel's standing with the Democratic Party, and most particularly, the Democratic base. The majority of Jewish voters in the U.S. have historically voted Democratic, and the circumstances of Netanyahu's victory with its overt appeal to racism and complicity in that victory by the American Republican Party presents an unprecedented existential crisis in loyalty for a vast segment of American Jews.
While a deepening polarization among American Jews about Netanyahu puts Obama’s potential successor, Hillary Rodham Clinton, in a politically uncomfortable position, it is the transformation of Israel into a partisan issue that fills Democratic Jewish officials with dread. Clinton’s advisers can always take solace knowing that the Democratic base will vote for a Democratic candidate no matter what. But Jewish Democrats worry about the prospect of keeping liberal support for Israel a viable long-term position for a party base that is overwhelmingly non-Jewish and increasingly critical of the country.
While the article quotes the current Israeli ambassador (Ron Dermer, a "close Netanyahu confidante"), among others, who try to minimize what is clearly a generational shift among young peoples' attitudes to Israel, AIPAC sees the trend quite clearly and is sounding the alarm:
After all, many younger Americans know Israel only as a nuclear-armed force that is the dominant power in its region. On college campuses, pro-Palestinian groups like Students for Justice in Palestine have long framed the Israeli occupation as the civil rights issue of our time. A Pew Research Center poll over the summer showed that 29 percent of voters under the age of 30 blamed Israel more than Hamas for the war in Gaza, while only 21 percent blamed Hamas more. African-Americans and Hispanics were also more likely to blame Israel.
This trend has clearly frightened the Jewish establishment. The powerful American Israel Public Affairs Committee has sought to improve its engagement with progressives and college students, calling on, among others, Ann Lewis, a confidante of Clinton, to assist in progressive outreach. And Malcolm Hoenlein, the head of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, told me he was reaching out to Hispanics and Hollywood. “We have now taken several trips of movie stars to Israel,” he said. “We have had the stars of ‘Avatar,’ ‘Twilight,’ ‘Baxter’” — he presumably meant “Dexter” — “‘House M.D.’, ‘Hollywood 202101 whatever.’”
If Shulman's forebodings about Israel's future are correct, it's going to take a lot more than publicity photo-ops by Millennial movie stars to re-establish Israel's place in the eyes of the world after this election.