Over the decades there have been two main lines of argument in the western world in favor of the Zionist settler-colonial project in Palestine. One I shall call moderate and the other I will call hardline.
By Chris Green
March 17, 2024
Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.
Image by Saleh Najm and Anas Sharif, Creative Commons 4.0
The moderate line, coming from more progressive forces among ruling elites, has given unwavering support to Israel’s genocidal bombing and blockade of Gaza while adopting a measure of rhetorical recognition of Palestinian humanity. The prime example of this tendency recently has come from the Biden administration. The administration continues to sanction the massive, unhindered flow of weapons from the US facilitating Israel’s genocidal slaughter in Gaza and has vetoed UN resolutions that might begin the process of stopping Israel’s massacres. They have also furthered the genocide by defunding the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), the Gazan population’s last remaining resource for significant humanitarian aid, based on very thin Israeli accusations that a handful of UNRWA employees were involved with Hamas’s crimes on October 7th. At the same time Biden has decried Israel’s “indiscriminate” bombing of Gaza; Vice President Kamala Harris has made noises about the need for another temporary “humanitarian” pause to the bombing similar to the one last November; the administration has leaked numerous reports that Biden is very upset with Netanyahu’s savagery; and the administration, for public relations purposes, has facilitated aid drops in Gaza, which are totally meaningless and puny compared to the scale of the problem. The Biden team has also sometimes uttered fine words about achieving a two state solution for the realization of Palestinian rights. However the idea of a Palestinian state has long been a sick joke as Israel has continued to massively expand its settlement blocks in the occupied West Bank and integrate them within Israel proper.
The hardline argument, launched mostly by Republicans, is openly racist and leaves little room for accepting Palestinians as fully human. For example, Florida Republican congressman Brian Mast has insisted that there are no “innocent” Palestinian babies in Gaza. His colleague, Andy Ogles of Tennessee, said “kill em all”–Ogles’s spokesperson later claimed he was referring to Hamas, not Palestinian children, although he made his shocking statement as a direct response to a pro-Palestinian protestor who was belaboring him about the deaths of Palestinian babies caused by Israel.
Jason Rantz: A Hardline Zionist
Purveyors of the hardline argument dispense with the slightest nuance. Israel is completely good and the Palestinians are barbarians: many ordinary Palestinians are indistinguishable from Hamas rapists and baby killers. Last month, Seattle right wing talk radio demagogue (and Fox News contributor) Jason Rantz explained that “Palestinians are not synonymous with Hamas. But only a fool pretends there’s no overlap for a significant portion of the Palestinian people in Gaza.” Rantz dismisses the idea that Palestinians are oppressed by Israel as a total fantasy, one constructed out of thin air by infantile twenty-something left wing activists looking to relieve boredom and make themselves appear important. Rantz says:
“Seattle activists…created marginalized Palestinian people suffering from Jewish oppression because they see Jews as white, thus easy to demonize. Their marches give them something to do on weekends when they’re otherwise alone…. waiting for the next Starbucks shift to start.”
Rantz implies that he believes that Palestinians have absolutely zero justice on their side. He asserts that the settlement of Palestine by Zionist settlers in the early 20th century was not a settler-colonial enterprise because:
“Jews have deeply rooted ties to Israel that date back over 3,000 years. Zionism was not about colonizing a foreign land but about the return to an ancestral homeland as recognized by the Balfour Declaration of 1917 and later by the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine in 1922.”
Furthermore, opines Rantz, it is false to say that, prior to October 7th, Israel was conducting a military occupation of Gaza. That ended in 2005.
According to Rantz, Seattle homosexual activists expressing solidarity with Palestinians are motivated by “blatant anti-semitism, historical ignorance or both.” They ignore Hamas’s homophobia, as well as deny or downplay the atrocities like the mass rapes it supposedly carried out on October 7th. Like fellow Seattle right wing talk radio host Ari Hoffman, Rantz has been busy using his radio show to doxx and incite harassment against pro-Palestinian Seattle area high school teachers, college students and professors, particularly those who question Israel’s mass rape narrative about October 7th. In typical Zionist fashion, he has been recklessly throwing around accusations of anti-semitism.
Meanwhile, according to Rantz (himself a gay man doing a bit of pinkwashing), while gay Seattle activists side with the Palestinians, “Israel is the only Middle East country with constitutional, employment and other codified LGBT rights.”
Some uncontroversial facts should be noted at this point in response to Rantz’s arguments. At the time of the Balfour Declaration, Palestine was nearly 90 percent Palestinian and most of the territory’s indigenous Jewish population was anti-Zionist. The latter were Haredim, ultra-Orthodox Jews, who believed it was unscriptural to create a Jewish state before the coming of the messiah It is true that Israel evacuated its settlements from Gaza in 2005 but in 2007 also launched an air, sea and land military blockade of Gaza, tightly limiting the flow of goods and people in and out of the territory. Under such conditions, the Gazan economy was non-existent and the territory was completely dependent on outside aid, with its civilian infrastructure regularly destroyed every few years by Israeli bombardment. It is true that Israel has codified LGBT rights but it is also true that Palestinians have had no civil rights whatsoever under Israeli military rule since 1967, enduring constant extrajudicial killings, torture, detention without trial, mass destruction of housing and agricultural resources like olive trees, massive theft of land and KKK type pogroms from Jewish settlers. Even within Israel’s pre-1967 borders, the country’s Palestinian citizens (nearly 20 percent of Israel’s total population) face substantial institutionalized discrimination.
With rare exceptions, both moderates and hardliners refrain from endorsing Israel’s massacre of civilians, with moderates expressing much more rhetorical concern about civilian deaths while the hardliners demonize Israel’s victims as terrorists. Both moderates and hardliners deny the obvious fact that Israel deliberately kills civilians and has done so on a massive scale long before October 7th. Both claim that Israel only kills civilians because Hamas hides its military command centers, weapons and other features of its sinister terror operations among civilians in hospitals, schools, refugee caravans and the like. Before October 7th, Israel could never provide substantial evidence that Hamas (or the PLO before it) was using “human shields” and the evidence it has presented since its latest attack on Gaza began has been shown to be very flimsy by the Washington Post, among others. Prominent Israel supporters have also floated pernicious and transparently false claims such as that there is currently no starvation in Gaza.
Whitewashing Israel:1930’s-40’s
Throughout the history of the Zionist presence in Palestine there have also been a hardline and moderate line of argument defending that presence. The hardline variant saw Zionist settler colonialism as an outpost of western civilization amongst brown-skinned savages in the Middle East. Winston Churchill was an example of this tendency–he advocated for Zionism on the ground that it was an iteration of European settler colonialism. In 1937, he testified before Britain’s Peel Commission about his role as a cabinet minister two decades earlier in formally establishing Zionist colonization of Palestine under British oversight. When asked if Palestinains had a right to have a voice in the future of their land as the British facilitated the takeover of it by Jewish settlers, Churchill replied:
“I do not admit that right. I do not admit, for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America, or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, or, at any rate, a more worldly race, to put it that way, has come in and taken their place.”
Similar social darwinist thinking was evinced by the prominent American newspaper columnist and social critic H.L. Mencken in the 1942 publication of Heathen Days, the third volume of his autobiography. In the book Mencken recalled his 1934 journey to Palestine. He wrote that “the Arabs of the Holy Land, like those of the other Mediterranean countries, are probably the dirtiest, orneriest, and most shiftless people who regularly make the first pages of the world’s press.” Mencken contrasted Palestine’s modern, flourishing farms (“broad and smiling fields”) operated by Jewish settlers against the territory’s Palestinian farmers living in extreme poverty, residing in “squalid huts” and working their lands with stone age tools. Mencken noted that Zionist propaganda had portrayed Jewish settlement in Palestine as having a beneficial civilizational effect on the backward Arabs. Jewish settlement was supposed to help turn Palestine’s Arabs into “competent and successful farmers,” Mencken wrote. However this did not happen except in a handful of cases. Palestinians were stuck in “ancient shiftlessness and imbecility.” Their violent resistance to Jewish settlement was due to their “congenital unfitness” to compete with “their betters,” the Jewish settlers.
The racist brutality of the rhetoric of conservatives like Churchill and Mencken was in contrast to the progressive veneer of the rhetoric of most supporters of the Zionist project in the 1940’s. Those supporters were predominantly on the liberal-left end of the political spectrum, although the nature of their pro-Zionist rhetoric sometimes varied, incorporating both a hardline and moderate tone. Sarah Kaplan discusses the nature of this support in her 2018 book Our American Israel: The Story of an Entangled Alliance. She describes the composition of the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry launched by the British and American governments in 1946 to study the problems of Palestine. One member of the Committee was Frank Buxton, editor of the Boston Herald, who described Jewish settlement of Palestine as similar to the European subjugation of the American Indian–a process of what he felt was a superior people displacing a more primitive one. Another member was Bartley Crum, civil rights activist, journalist and lawyer for the Hollywood Ten. Crum prattled about the great civilizational benefits Jewish settlement had brought Palestinians; the Zionists were guilty of no maltreatment of Palestinians. According to Crum, the only reason the latter opposed Jewish colonization of Palestine was that they were manipulated to do so by feudal Arab lords and the British government.
Other American progressives in the 1940’s were impressed by Israel’s partially socialist economic experiments such as the kibbutz collective farms and moshav cooperatives. Kaplan notes that one of these was I.F. Stone of The Nation magazine. Stone became a harsh critic of Israel after the 1967 war but in 1948 was a staunch Zionist. He was oblivious to the ethnic cleansing of 750,000 persons that Israel carried out against Palestinians during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. Stone was somewhat vague in his thinking on Palestinian refugees but it appeared he accepted at face value Israel’s claim that Palestinians fled not because of ethnic cleansing but because the Arab armies attacking Israel had ordered them to do so. As Israel was getting on its feet as an independent nation, he lauded the Jewish state’s “mixed economy, voluntary farm collectives, {and] network of cooperatives.” Israel was a state where “socialist devices and democratic method could be combined, social justice achieved without sacrifice of individual freedom.”
Within Israel itself, the classic moderate Zionist was the country’s first prime minister David Ben Gurion. Ben Gurion, Tom Segev notes in his 2019 biography of the man, shared the belief present in the Zionist movement from the late 19th century onward that Palestine had to be emptied of as many Arabs as possible and Jews settled in their place. As secretary of the Histadrut, Palestine’s Jewish Agency’s labor union, in the 1920’s, Ben Gurion led in advocating the policy of Hebrew Labor, intimidating Palestine’s Jewish employers into hiring only Jewish workers and excluding Arabs.
Ben Gurion liked to juxtapose the civilized, mainstream Zionist movement he headed with the fascist, hardline revisionist Zionists. The latter included Irgun and the Stern Gang, two terrorist groups led, respectively, by future Israeli Prime Ministers Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir. When Irgun and the Stern Gang massacred 250 Arab villagers at Deir Yassin in April 1948, Ben Gurion condemned the atrocity–but later refused his Justice Minister’s request that the perpetrators be prosecuted. In other cases, he was privately distressed by reports of Israeli forces carrying out murder, rape and looting against Palestinians during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War and ordered war crimes tribunals set up to try the perpetrators. Similarly Ben Gurion privately indicated to his cabinet his desire to see a proper criminal prosecution of those members of Israel’s Border Police who massacred 48 Palestinian citizens of Israel in the village Kafr Qasim in October 1956. A number of the perpetrators received prison sentences ranging from seven to seventeen years but all were out of prison by the end of the 1950’s, assisted by pardons from Israel’s President Yitzhak Ben Zvi.
By Segev’s description, Ben Gurion’s ideal ethnic cleansing operation was the removal of Palestinian inhabitants from the towns of Lydda and Ramle during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. Ben Gurion personally ordered this operation and it was carried out in what he thought was a civilized manner. The inhabitants packed up their belongings, got on buses or were forced to walk toward the front lines of the Arab armies, being spirited away from their homes forever, with no physical violation of their persons by Israeli soldiers
Gaza vs. Dresden
Some–like former Israeli Prime Minister Neftali Bennett in his venomous, thuggish way–have sought to defend Israel’s slaughter in Gaza by comparing it to the Allied carpet bombing of German cities like Dresden during World War II which killed hundreds of thousands of civilians. The argument goes that the Allies killed civilians en masse in retaliating against Germany for starting a murderous war just as Israel is retaliating against Hamas for the atrocities of October 7th.
On January 11th, Jonathan Zimmerman, professor in the University of Pennsylvania’s history and education departments, referenced the Gaza-Dresden connection in an opinion piece in the Philadelphia Inquirer. He gave his opinion as to whether Israel was committing genocide in Gaza:
“No. A thousand times no. Saying that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza is like saying the Allies committed it in Dresden. It confuses actions with motives. And it makes a mockery of the real genocide Jews and so many others — including Armenians and Cambodians — have suffered.”
In denying that Israel is committing genocide, Zimmerman shows he is blind to many things. But being a moderate as opposed to a hardline thinker, he allows that it is “entirely reasonable” to believe that the level of killing Israel has perpetrated is “disproportionate to its own suffering in the Oct. 7th attack by Hamas.” And he notes that although the Allied terror bombing of German cities during World War II was intended to undermine the support of ordinary Germans for Hitler, it actually increased that support. He fears something similar is happening in Gaza with support for Hamas and similar groups hardening under Israeli bombardment and blockade.
The Israeli military has a set of principles similar to the World War II policy of the Allies of deliberately bombing enemy civilians and civilian infrastructure on a massive scale. It is called the Dahiya doctrine, which describes how the Israeli military deliberately harms civilians so as to compel the latter to pressure their leaders to bow to Israel’s demands. In responding to the utilization of Allied World War II bombing of civilians as a defense for Israel’s crimes, it is important to point out a few things. As British journalist Geoffrey Wheatcroft points out in his 2021 book Churchill’s Shadow: The Lives and Afterlife of Winston Churchill, the Allied bombing of German civilians and civilian infrastructure had no effect on German warmaking prowess. German industrial output of weapons and munitions increased steadily until the end of 1944. Even after that point, German industrial plants still operated at 80 percent capacity. Also, the deliberate targeting of civilians and civilian infrastructure by military forces was codified as war crimes by the four Geneva Conventions signed by Western countries (and Israel) in 1949.
The apocalyptic war crimes Israel has visited upon Gaza have been thus far counterproductive to Israel’s stated goals of destroying Hamas and securing the release of the hostages Hamas took on October 7th. Hamas has suffered no visible dent in its operational capacity and a majority of the hostages are still captive.
Of course, Israel’s primary goal in making war upon Gaza’s people is not to protect its own civilians but to ensure Zionist supremacy over all of Palestine and to terrorize Palestinians into submission, forcing them to abandon their quest for dignity and nationhood.
Image by Saleh Najm and Anas Sharif, Creative Commons 4.0
The moderate line, coming from more progressive forces among ruling elites, has given unwavering support to Israel’s genocidal bombing and blockade of Gaza while adopting a measure of rhetorical recognition of Palestinian humanity. The prime example of this tendency recently has come from the Biden administration. The administration continues to sanction the massive, unhindered flow of weapons from the US facilitating Israel’s genocidal slaughter in Gaza and has vetoed UN resolutions that might begin the process of stopping Israel’s massacres. They have also furthered the genocide by defunding the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), the Gazan population’s last remaining resource for significant humanitarian aid, based on very thin Israeli accusations that a handful of UNRWA employees were involved with Hamas’s crimes on October 7th. At the same time Biden has decried Israel’s “indiscriminate” bombing of Gaza; Vice President Kamala Harris has made noises about the need for another temporary “humanitarian” pause to the bombing similar to the one last November; the administration has leaked numerous reports that Biden is very upset with Netanyahu’s savagery; and the administration, for public relations purposes, has facilitated aid drops in Gaza, which are totally meaningless and puny compared to the scale of the problem. The Biden team has also sometimes uttered fine words about achieving a two state solution for the realization of Palestinian rights. However the idea of a Palestinian state has long been a sick joke as Israel has continued to massively expand its settlement blocks in the occupied West Bank and integrate them within Israel proper.
The hardline argument, launched mostly by Republicans, is openly racist and leaves little room for accepting Palestinians as fully human. For example, Florida Republican congressman Brian Mast has insisted that there are no “innocent” Palestinian babies in Gaza. His colleague, Andy Ogles of Tennessee, said “kill em all”–Ogles’s spokesperson later claimed he was referring to Hamas, not Palestinian children, although he made his shocking statement as a direct response to a pro-Palestinian protestor who was belaboring him about the deaths of Palestinian babies caused by Israel.
Jason Rantz: A Hardline Zionist
Purveyors of the hardline argument dispense with the slightest nuance. Israel is completely good and the Palestinians are barbarians: many ordinary Palestinians are indistinguishable from Hamas rapists and baby killers. Last month, Seattle right wing talk radio demagogue (and Fox News contributor) Jason Rantz explained that “Palestinians are not synonymous with Hamas. But only a fool pretends there’s no overlap for a significant portion of the Palestinian people in Gaza.” Rantz dismisses the idea that Palestinians are oppressed by Israel as a total fantasy, one constructed out of thin air by infantile twenty-something left wing activists looking to relieve boredom and make themselves appear important. Rantz says:
“Seattle activists…created marginalized Palestinian people suffering from Jewish oppression because they see Jews as white, thus easy to demonize. Their marches give them something to do on weekends when they’re otherwise alone…. waiting for the next Starbucks shift to start.”
Rantz implies that he believes that Palestinians have absolutely zero justice on their side. He asserts that the settlement of Palestine by Zionist settlers in the early 20th century was not a settler-colonial enterprise because:
“Jews have deeply rooted ties to Israel that date back over 3,000 years. Zionism was not about colonizing a foreign land but about the return to an ancestral homeland as recognized by the Balfour Declaration of 1917 and later by the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine in 1922.”
Furthermore, opines Rantz, it is false to say that, prior to October 7th, Israel was conducting a military occupation of Gaza. That ended in 2005.
According to Rantz, Seattle homosexual activists expressing solidarity with Palestinians are motivated by “blatant anti-semitism, historical ignorance or both.” They ignore Hamas’s homophobia, as well as deny or downplay the atrocities like the mass rapes it supposedly carried out on October 7th. Like fellow Seattle right wing talk radio host Ari Hoffman, Rantz has been busy using his radio show to doxx and incite harassment against pro-Palestinian Seattle area high school teachers, college students and professors, particularly those who question Israel’s mass rape narrative about October 7th. In typical Zionist fashion, he has been recklessly throwing around accusations of anti-semitism.
Meanwhile, according to Rantz (himself a gay man doing a bit of pinkwashing), while gay Seattle activists side with the Palestinians, “Israel is the only Middle East country with constitutional, employment and other codified LGBT rights.”
Some uncontroversial facts should be noted at this point in response to Rantz’s arguments. At the time of the Balfour Declaration, Palestine was nearly 90 percent Palestinian and most of the territory’s indigenous Jewish population was anti-Zionist. The latter were Haredim, ultra-Orthodox Jews, who believed it was unscriptural to create a Jewish state before the coming of the messiah It is true that Israel evacuated its settlements from Gaza in 2005 but in 2007 also launched an air, sea and land military blockade of Gaza, tightly limiting the flow of goods and people in and out of the territory. Under such conditions, the Gazan economy was non-existent and the territory was completely dependent on outside aid, with its civilian infrastructure regularly destroyed every few years by Israeli bombardment. It is true that Israel has codified LGBT rights but it is also true that Palestinians have had no civil rights whatsoever under Israeli military rule since 1967, enduring constant extrajudicial killings, torture, detention without trial, mass destruction of housing and agricultural resources like olive trees, massive theft of land and KKK type pogroms from Jewish settlers. Even within Israel’s pre-1967 borders, the country’s Palestinian citizens (nearly 20 percent of Israel’s total population) face substantial institutionalized discrimination.
With rare exceptions, both moderates and hardliners refrain from endorsing Israel’s massacre of civilians, with moderates expressing much more rhetorical concern about civilian deaths while the hardliners demonize Israel’s victims as terrorists. Both moderates and hardliners deny the obvious fact that Israel deliberately kills civilians and has done so on a massive scale long before October 7th. Both claim that Israel only kills civilians because Hamas hides its military command centers, weapons and other features of its sinister terror operations among civilians in hospitals, schools, refugee caravans and the like. Before October 7th, Israel could never provide substantial evidence that Hamas (or the PLO before it) was using “human shields” and the evidence it has presented since its latest attack on Gaza began has been shown to be very flimsy by the Washington Post, among others. Prominent Israel supporters have also floated pernicious and transparently false claims such as that there is currently no starvation in Gaza.
Whitewashing Israel:1930’s-40’s
Throughout the history of the Zionist presence in Palestine there have also been a hardline and moderate line of argument defending that presence. The hardline variant saw Zionist settler colonialism as an outpost of western civilization amongst brown-skinned savages in the Middle East. Winston Churchill was an example of this tendency–he advocated for Zionism on the ground that it was an iteration of European settler colonialism. In 1937, he testified before Britain’s Peel Commission about his role as a cabinet minister two decades earlier in formally establishing Zionist colonization of Palestine under British oversight. When asked if Palestinains had a right to have a voice in the future of their land as the British facilitated the takeover of it by Jewish settlers, Churchill replied:
“I do not admit that right. I do not admit, for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America, or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, or, at any rate, a more worldly race, to put it that way, has come in and taken their place.”
Similar social darwinist thinking was evinced by the prominent American newspaper columnist and social critic H.L. Mencken in the 1942 publication of Heathen Days, the third volume of his autobiography. In the book Mencken recalled his 1934 journey to Palestine. He wrote that “the Arabs of the Holy Land, like those of the other Mediterranean countries, are probably the dirtiest, orneriest, and most shiftless people who regularly make the first pages of the world’s press.” Mencken contrasted Palestine’s modern, flourishing farms (“broad and smiling fields”) operated by Jewish settlers against the territory’s Palestinian farmers living in extreme poverty, residing in “squalid huts” and working their lands with stone age tools. Mencken noted that Zionist propaganda had portrayed Jewish settlement in Palestine as having a beneficial civilizational effect on the backward Arabs. Jewish settlement was supposed to help turn Palestine’s Arabs into “competent and successful farmers,” Mencken wrote. However this did not happen except in a handful of cases. Palestinians were stuck in “ancient shiftlessness and imbecility.” Their violent resistance to Jewish settlement was due to their “congenital unfitness” to compete with “their betters,” the Jewish settlers.
The racist brutality of the rhetoric of conservatives like Churchill and Mencken was in contrast to the progressive veneer of the rhetoric of most supporters of the Zionist project in the 1940’s. Those supporters were predominantly on the liberal-left end of the political spectrum, although the nature of their pro-Zionist rhetoric sometimes varied, incorporating both a hardline and moderate tone. Sarah Kaplan discusses the nature of this support in her 2018 book Our American Israel: The Story of an Entangled Alliance. She describes the composition of the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry launched by the British and American governments in 1946 to study the problems of Palestine. One member of the Committee was Frank Buxton, editor of the Boston Herald, who described Jewish settlement of Palestine as similar to the European subjugation of the American Indian–a process of what he felt was a superior people displacing a more primitive one. Another member was Bartley Crum, civil rights activist, journalist and lawyer for the Hollywood Ten. Crum prattled about the great civilizational benefits Jewish settlement had brought Palestinians; the Zionists were guilty of no maltreatment of Palestinians. According to Crum, the only reason the latter opposed Jewish colonization of Palestine was that they were manipulated to do so by feudal Arab lords and the British government.
Other American progressives in the 1940’s were impressed by Israel’s partially socialist economic experiments such as the kibbutz collective farms and moshav cooperatives. Kaplan notes that one of these was I.F. Stone of The Nation magazine. Stone became a harsh critic of Israel after the 1967 war but in 1948 was a staunch Zionist. He was oblivious to the ethnic cleansing of 750,000 persons that Israel carried out against Palestinians during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. Stone was somewhat vague in his thinking on Palestinian refugees but it appeared he accepted at face value Israel’s claim that Palestinians fled not because of ethnic cleansing but because the Arab armies attacking Israel had ordered them to do so. As Israel was getting on its feet as an independent nation, he lauded the Jewish state’s “mixed economy, voluntary farm collectives, {and] network of cooperatives.” Israel was a state where “socialist devices and democratic method could be combined, social justice achieved without sacrifice of individual freedom.”
Within Israel itself, the classic moderate Zionist was the country’s first prime minister David Ben Gurion. Ben Gurion, Tom Segev notes in his 2019 biography of the man, shared the belief present in the Zionist movement from the late 19th century onward that Palestine had to be emptied of as many Arabs as possible and Jews settled in their place. As secretary of the Histadrut, Palestine’s Jewish Agency’s labor union, in the 1920’s, Ben Gurion led in advocating the policy of Hebrew Labor, intimidating Palestine’s Jewish employers into hiring only Jewish workers and excluding Arabs.
Ben Gurion liked to juxtapose the civilized, mainstream Zionist movement he headed with the fascist, hardline revisionist Zionists. The latter included Irgun and the Stern Gang, two terrorist groups led, respectively, by future Israeli Prime Ministers Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir. When Irgun and the Stern Gang massacred 250 Arab villagers at Deir Yassin in April 1948, Ben Gurion condemned the atrocity–but later refused his Justice Minister’s request that the perpetrators be prosecuted. In other cases, he was privately distressed by reports of Israeli forces carrying out murder, rape and looting against Palestinians during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War and ordered war crimes tribunals set up to try the perpetrators. Similarly Ben Gurion privately indicated to his cabinet his desire to see a proper criminal prosecution of those members of Israel’s Border Police who massacred 48 Palestinian citizens of Israel in the village Kafr Qasim in October 1956. A number of the perpetrators received prison sentences ranging from seven to seventeen years but all were out of prison by the end of the 1950’s, assisted by pardons from Israel’s President Yitzhak Ben Zvi.
By Segev’s description, Ben Gurion’s ideal ethnic cleansing operation was the removal of Palestinian inhabitants from the towns of Lydda and Ramle during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. Ben Gurion personally ordered this operation and it was carried out in what he thought was a civilized manner. The inhabitants packed up their belongings, got on buses or were forced to walk toward the front lines of the Arab armies, being spirited away from their homes forever, with no physical violation of their persons by Israeli soldiers
Gaza vs. Dresden
Some–like former Israeli Prime Minister Neftali Bennett in his venomous, thuggish way–have sought to defend Israel’s slaughter in Gaza by comparing it to the Allied carpet bombing of German cities like Dresden during World War II which killed hundreds of thousands of civilians. The argument goes that the Allies killed civilians en masse in retaliating against Germany for starting a murderous war just as Israel is retaliating against Hamas for the atrocities of October 7th.
On January 11th, Jonathan Zimmerman, professor in the University of Pennsylvania’s history and education departments, referenced the Gaza-Dresden connection in an opinion piece in the Philadelphia Inquirer. He gave his opinion as to whether Israel was committing genocide in Gaza:
“No. A thousand times no. Saying that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza is like saying the Allies committed it in Dresden. It confuses actions with motives. And it makes a mockery of the real genocide Jews and so many others — including Armenians and Cambodians — have suffered.”
In denying that Israel is committing genocide, Zimmerman shows he is blind to many things. But being a moderate as opposed to a hardline thinker, he allows that it is “entirely reasonable” to believe that the level of killing Israel has perpetrated is “disproportionate to its own suffering in the Oct. 7th attack by Hamas.” And he notes that although the Allied terror bombing of German cities during World War II was intended to undermine the support of ordinary Germans for Hitler, it actually increased that support. He fears something similar is happening in Gaza with support for Hamas and similar groups hardening under Israeli bombardment and blockade.
The Israeli military has a set of principles similar to the World War II policy of the Allies of deliberately bombing enemy civilians and civilian infrastructure on a massive scale. It is called the Dahiya doctrine, which describes how the Israeli military deliberately harms civilians so as to compel the latter to pressure their leaders to bow to Israel’s demands. In responding to the utilization of Allied World War II bombing of civilians as a defense for Israel’s crimes, it is important to point out a few things. As British journalist Geoffrey Wheatcroft points out in his 2021 book Churchill’s Shadow: The Lives and Afterlife of Winston Churchill, the Allied bombing of German civilians and civilian infrastructure had no effect on German warmaking prowess. German industrial output of weapons and munitions increased steadily until the end of 1944. Even after that point, German industrial plants still operated at 80 percent capacity. Also, the deliberate targeting of civilians and civilian infrastructure by military forces was codified as war crimes by the four Geneva Conventions signed by Western countries (and Israel) in 1949.
The apocalyptic war crimes Israel has visited upon Gaza have been thus far counterproductive to Israel’s stated goals of destroying Hamas and securing the release of the hostages Hamas took on October 7th. Hamas has suffered no visible dent in its operational capacity and a majority of the hostages are still captive.
Of course, Israel’s primary goal in making war upon Gaza’s people is not to protect its own civilians but to ensure Zionist supremacy over all of Palestine and to terrorize Palestinians into submission, forcing them to abandon their quest for dignity and nationhood.
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