Zeev Sternhell: "In Israel, a racism close to early Nazism is growing"

In an opinion piece in "Le Monde," the historian and specialist in fascism launches into a comparison between the fate of Jews before the war and that of Palestinians today.

[The announcement is as symbolic as it is internationally contested: on December 6, 2017, U.S. President Donald Trump decided to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. The U.S. Embassy, currently located in Tel Aviv, will open its doors before the end of 2019. The initiative was quickly welcomed by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Since then, in the Knesset, the parliament, the right has been waging an offensive on several fronts. On January 2, MPs voted on an amendment to the Basic Law, or constitutional law, making any transfer of part of Jerusalem impossible without a two-thirds majority vote. Several MPs also put forward bills aimed at redefining the city's boundaries, by rejecting entire Arab neighborhoods located beyond the separation wall, or by incorporating vast settlements. For historian Zeev Sternhell, these decisions aim to force Palestinians to accept Jewish hegemony over the territory without resistance, condemning them for eternity to the status of an occupied population.

Opinion. I sometimes try to imagine how the historian living fifty or one hundred years from now will try to explain our era. At what point, he will no doubt ask, did people in Israel begin to understand that this country, which became a state during the 1948 War of Independence, founded on the ruins of European Judaism and at the cost of the blood of 1% of its population, including thousands of Holocaust survivors, had become a monster for non-Jews under its domination? When exactly did Israelis, at least in part, understand that their cruelty toward non-Jews under their control in the occupied territories, their determination to crush Palestinian hopes for freedom and independence, or their refusal to grant asylum to African refugees, were beginning to undermine the moral legitimacy of their national existence? The answer, the historian might say, lies in microcosm in the ideas and activities of two prominent MKs from the majority party, Miki Zohar (Likud) and Bezalel Smotrich (Jewish Home), loyal representatives of government policy, recently thrust into the spotlight. But even more importantly, this same ideology underlies the so-called "fundamental"—that is, constitutional—bills that Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked, with the eager consent of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, intends to push through the Knesset quickly. Shaked, the number two in the religious-nationalist right, in addition to his extreme nationalism, perfectly represents a political ideology according to which an electoral victory justifies control over all organs of state and social life, from the administration to the judiciary, including culture. In the minds of this right, liberal democracy is nothing but infantilism. It is easy to understand the significance of such an approach for a country with a British tradition that has no written constitution, only rules of conduct and a legislative framework that a simple majority suffices to change.

"This is a harsh nationalist constitutional act, which Ms. Le Pen would not dare propose."

The most important element of this new jurisprudence is a piece of legislation known as the "nation-state law": this is a harsh nationalist constitutional act, which the Maurrassian integral nationalism of yesteryear would not have disowned, which Ms. Le Pen today would not dare propose, and which authoritarian and xenophobic Polish and Hungarian nationalism will welcome with satisfaction. So here are the Jews who forget that their fate, since the French Revolution, is linked to that of liberalism and human rights, and who in turn produce a nationalism in which the hardest chauvinists in Europe easily recognize themselves.

The Left's Powerlessness

Indeed, this law has the openly declared objective of subjugating the universal values of the Enlightenment, liberalism, and human rights to the particularist values of Jewish nationalism. It will force the Supreme Court, whose prerogatives Shaked is, in any case, working to curtail and break its traditional liberal character (by replacing, as much as possible, all retiring judges with jurists close to her), to render verdicts that always comply with the letter and spirit of the new legislation.

But the minister goes even further: she has just declared that human rights will have to bow to the need to ensure a Jewish majority. But since no danger threatens this majority in Israel, where 80% of the population is Jewish, the aim is to prepare public opinion for the new situation that will arise in the event of the annexation of the occupied Palestinian territories, as desired by the minister's party: the non-Jewish population will remain deprived of the right to vote.

Thanks to the impotence of the left, this legislation will serve as the first nail in the coffin of the old Israel, the one of which only the declaration of independence will remain, like a museum piece reminding future generations of what our country could have been if our society had not morally decomposed during a half-century of occupation, colonization, and apartheid in the territories conquered in 1967, now occupied by some 300,000 settlers. Today, the left is no longer capable of standing up to a nationalism that, in its European version, far more extreme than ours, almost succeeded in annihilating the Jews of Europe. This is why it is worth making the two interviews conducted by Ravit Hecht for Haaretz (December 3, 2016 and October 28, 2017) with Smotrich and Zohar widely read in Israel and the Jewish world. They show how not just local fascism is growing before our eyes, but a racism close to Nazism in its infancy.

Like any ideology, German racism, too, had evolved, and initially, it only attacked the human and civic rights of Jews. It is possible that without the Second World War, the "Jewish problem" would have resulted in the "voluntary" emigration of Jews from German-controlled territories. After all, virtually all the Jews of Germany and Austria were able to leave in time. It is not impossible that some on the right believe the same fate could be reserved for the Palestinians. All that would be needed is for an opportunity to arise, a good war for example, accompanied by a revolution in Jordan, which would allow a majority of the inhabitants of the occupied West Bank to be pushed eastward.

The Specter of Apartheid

The Smotrichs and the Zohars, let's be clear, have no intention of physically attacking the Palestinians, provided, of course, that the latter accept Jewish hegemony without resistance. They simply refuse to recognize their human rights, their right to freedom and independence. In the same vein, in the event of official annexation of the occupied territories, they and their political parties are already announcing without hesitation that they will deny Palestinians Israeli nationality, including, of course, the right to vote. As far as the ruling majority is concerned, the Palestinians are condemned to eternal occupied status.

For Miki Zohar, the Palestinians "suffer from a major shortcoming: they were not born Jewish."

The reason is simple and clearly stated: Arabs are not Jews, and therefore they have no right to claim ownership of any part of the land promised to the Jewish people. For Smotrich, Shaked, and Zohar, a Jew from Brooklyn, who may never have set foot on this land, is its rightful owner, but the Arab, who was born there, like his ancestors before him, is a foreigner whose presence is accepted only by the goodwill and humanity of the Jews. The Palestinian, Zohar tells us, “does not have the right to self-determination because he is not the owner of the land. I want him as a resident, and this is because of my honesty: he was born here, he lives here, I will not tell him to leave. I regret to say it, but [the Palestinians] suffer from a major shortcoming: they were not born Jewish.” Which means that even if the Palestinians decided to convert, started growing sideburns, and studying the Torah and the Talmud, it would be of no use to them. Nor would it be to the Sudanese and Eritreans and their children, who are Israeli in every way—language, culture, socialization. It was the same with the Nazis. Then comes apartheid, which, according to most right-wing "thinkers," could, under certain conditions, also apply to Arabs who have been Israeli citizens since the founding of the state. Unfortunately, many Israelis, who are ashamed of so many of their elected officials and despise their ideas, for all sorts of reasons, continue to vote for the right.

The left-wing Israeli daily Haaretz published an op-ed by the same author on this topic.

Zeev Sternhell (Historian, member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Letters, professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, specialist in the history of fascism)