“There’s no school tomorrow, there are no children left in Gaza!” gleefully chanted a mob of Israelis in the streets of Tel Aviv on July 26 , celebrating the assault on the Gaza strip that has left hundreds of Palestinian children dead.
Less than three weeks earlier, a leading parliamentarian from Economy Minister Naftali Bennet’s Jewish Home party, an important coalition partner in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, called for the slaughter of Palestinian mothers. Ayelet Shaked wrote on her Facebook page: “They are all enemy combatants … this also includes the mothers of the martyrs, who send them to hell with flowers and kisses … they should go, as should the physical homes in which they raised the snakes. Otherwise, more little snakes will be raised there.”
On July 21, Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman called for a boycott of Arab-owned businesses in retaliation for an informal general strike protesting the massacre in Gaza. On July 7, Lieberman had announced that his party was breaking its alliance with Netanyahu’s Likud party because the Prime Minister had not escalated the aerial bombardment into a full-fledged ground invasion quickly enough.
On July 29, an Arab member of the Israeli parliament was expelled from the legislature for calling for non-violent protest and publicly questioning the government’s account of the kidnapping of three settler youth that was initially used as a pretext for the war.
These are just a few examples of the rising tide of fascism in Israel, which has been greatly accelerated by the genocidal assault on Gaza.
Because of the unscientific nature of bourgeois academia, the term fascism gets thrown around a lot in a way that’s conducive to hyperbole. Communists have a more precise definition – fascism is the political form taken by a capitalist state when it is facing an existential threat and is determined to hold onto power through naked brutality.
Usually, the existential threat comes from the exploited classes ruled by the capitalist state in question. However, Israel is not your typical capitalist state. It is a colonial regime inserted into the Middle East on top of an indigenous (Palestinian) people.
That means that one of the main engines of the Israeli economy is what’s sometimes called “accumulation by dispossession” – plunder, often facilitated by mass murder. Instead of exploiting wage labor, the Israeli capitalists can simply steal the already-existing wealth of the Palestinians.
This is probably most apparent in the case of the settlements and the infamous “Apartheid Wall.” These illegal outposts are strategically located to claim water resources, the most fertile agricultural land and the most commercially viable real estate.
Israel also has features of a more advanced capitalist economy, like mature high-tech and finance sectors, but these are far less politically volatile. Because of the nearly unanimous support for Zionism among the Israeli working class and the tenacity of the Palestinian resistance, the question of how to maintain the process of accumulation by dispossession is by far the most important in the minds of the rulers of Israel.
Israel’s growing international isolation, economic anxiety among the middle classes and the declining hegemony of its traditional patron – U.S. imperialism – have given rise to a strong and growing fascist current in mainstream Israeli politics. A July 9 opinion poll showed that the fascist bloc (if we exclude Netanyahu’s Likud and count Lieberman’s Israel Our Home and Bennet’s Jewish Home) would win 25 percent of the seats in parliament.
They want to take what they think is their last, best opportunity to crush the Resistance before it’s too late.
It is also remarkable how the fascists have been able to pull all other political forces in Israel far to the right. Opinion polls this week found that 95 percent of Israeli Jews think the assault on Gaza is just, and 87 percent want to continue the attack. Netanyahu enjoys an 85 percent approval rating.
There has historically been a faction of the Israeli ruling class that prefers to focus on suppressing resistance by cultivating Palestinian collaborators and giving them nominal powers, much in the same way that the rulers of apartheid South Africa created “Bantustans.” But even the
leader of the opposition and supposed standard bearer of this trend, Isaac Herzog of the Labor Party, is fully behind the massacre. He recently stated, “I speak often with Netanyahu; he has taken a restrained and reasonable position, bearing in mind the pressure on him. Had I been prime minister, I would have also hit Hamas as hard as possible.”
Netanyahu and his fascist allies have been able to establish a national consensus around the strategy of the right wing: bomb playgrounds, shell schools, murder as many Palestinians as possible.
On Aug. 2, thousands will gather in Washington, D.C., for a national march against the massacre in Gaza. Despite cosmetic “humanitarian truces” that they always violate, the Israeli regime is betting that their ability to endure global outrage is stronger than the combined forces of international solidarity and the Resistance. Let’s prove them wrong.
