On Wednesday June 5th, during what is known as the Jerusalem Day Flag March, thousands of ultra nationalist Israel’s rampaged through occupied East Jerusalem. Chanting “Death to Arabs” and “May their villages burn”, they smashed up shops and businesses, attacking and injuring dozens of Palestinians. An Australian journalist was also attacked and intimidated by the far right marchers. The Israeli police, themselves in violation of international law simply through their presence in East Jerusalem, stood by and did nothing to stop them.
The image above is, in the words of a Haaretz editorial, “photographic documentation of the ugly, violent demonstrators during Wednesday’s parade of Jewish supremacy through the streets of Jerusalem”. Though such an image cannot in anyway compare to those documenting the horror of the genocide being carried out in Gaza, it does raise a profound question: who are these people?
They are of course ultra-nationalist Zionist Jews, specifically Kahanists – followers of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane, a notorious Arab hater who advocated violence against Palestinians and ethnic cleansing through forced transfer to neighbouring Arab countries. What might be shocking, however, is that few of them would deny or even object to being described in this way. Like Kahane, they are open about their beliefs and intentions, and indeed, as the images show, unafraid to openly act on them. What gives them the confidence to act this way, and how do they justify their violence?
As far as confidence, this is plainly obvious. They can act like this because they know no one will stop them. It is not only they who want rid of Palestinians from Palestine. Ever since Israel was imposed on the region in 1948, the Israeli establishment and an overwhelming majority of Israel’s citizens have wished the same. These fellows who we see beating and kicking a Palestinian are just the honest face of Zionism, doing the necessary work that everyone else knows must be done if they are to obtain a state purified of the natives.
Regarding their justifications for what most of us see as racial, supremacist violence, this too is simple to understand. They claim to be God’s chosen people, who also gave them the land. If you push a little and ask why would God choose them and why would he give them the land, their answer, which you will find in many a YouTube video, is that God chose them to be “a light unto the nations”. As for the territory, that simply goes with the job of being chosen.
Ultimately, then, these people do not justify their actions in terms of what they want. When it comes to justification, they pass the buck, claiming it is what God wants. This makes the racism and violence more palatable for some people to swallow, and much more difficult to oppose for those who who see it for what it is, including many secular and anti-Zionist Jews.
Caution however. It is not just these violent exponents of Zionism who maintain the claim of a God given right to the land, as well as sanctification by God of the violence required to obtain it. As a 2018 Haaretz poll uncovered, it is a general claim made by a majority of Israelis that they are chosen by God and favored in this way.
I shall not contest that claim. After all, who am I to question God’s preferences? What is of more interest is what this claim says about God.
The chilling implication is quite clear: if this is the treatment we might expect from His chosen carrying out His will, what might we expect from Him?
Those who know the Bible will know the countless examples of what God supposedly does to those who oppose Him. As Chomsky famously observed, the god of the Bible is an unrelenting “homicidal maniac”.
This then is Israel in its barest and most honest manifestation. It is a country built on a belief in the divinely sanctioned supremacy of one people over another, together with the divinely sanctioned violence of obtaining the goal of an ethnically cleansed land. That is exactly what we see in graphic detail in the images above.
Of course, the alternative to this belief is that the claim to divine right and favour is just a myth. What we see before us is not the manifestation of God’s will, but exactly what it looks like: racist, hate-filled violence of a settler colonial ideology that exploits an otherwise harmless ancient myth.
Within Judaism and among Jews prior to the rise of Zionism, the belief was indeed a benign myth, lacking any real world effects. Religious Jews may have believed they are the chosen people awaiting the Messiah, who will reconcile them again to God, but that is as far as it went. And in that, as for all of us, they are entitled to believe what they like.
The problem arose when Zionism reared its head, appropriating a central belief of Judaism and exploiting it for political purposes. As Gideon Levy notes in Haaretz: “Whereas belief in God is a private matter, the belief in a chosen people provides the outlines of policy that explains a great deal about Israel’s actions.” A private belief if not acted upon is benign, no matter what that belief is. Which comes under the general banner “as long as you keep your religion to yourself and your group, no harm done”. And such was the case for Judaism before the rise of Zionism.
With the advent of Zionism and its colonial ambitions in Palestine, the belief in a chosen people became instrumental to that colonisation. Down to this day, not only does it “inform the policy outlines of Israel” as Levy notes, it fuels and lends cover to those in Israel unafraid to openly use violence, with the aim of making the lives of Palestinians unbearable in the hope they will leave. Invoking God’s is seen as a thin veneer by many of us, but it is sufficiently thick as to provide the cover for most political purposes, particularly among a public – mainly in the West – already conditioned through Christianity to view the myth as God’s true word.
Returning finally to the violent parade of Jewish supremacy, we see who these people really are. Through Zionism, they have taken an otherwise benign, private belief of an ancient religion and turned it into an instrument that can justify violence, ethnic cleansing, and genocide.
Can these people be freed from the supremacist clutches of Zionism and redeemed?
That is another matter. First, they must be stopped.