Israel: the end of all illusions

Where there’s smoke - by Mr. Fish

"Netanyahu, who is charged with fraud, breach of trust and accepting bribes in three corruption cases, is determined to politicize the judiciary. He and his coalition partners will further curtail the rights of Palestinian citizens of Israel who are already second-class citizens.

They will continue to push aggressively for a war with Iran.

They will support efforts to seize the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, which Jewish Israelis call the Temple Mount, the supposed site of the Second Temple, destroyed by the Romans in 70 A.D.

Jewish extremists have long called for the Al-Aqsa mosque, the third holiest shrine for Muslims, to be torn down and replaced by a “Third” Jewish temple, a move that would set the Muslim world alight. Ben-Gvir, who considers Baruch Goldstein, the Jewish settler who in 1994 massacred 29 Muslims worshipers in Hebron, “a hero,” has announced an imminent visit along with other Jewish extremists to the site of the mosque.

When Ariel Sharon, then Israel’s opposition leader, went to the mosque site in September 2000, it ignited the Second Intifada."

JVL Introduction

Chris Hedges is in no doubt that the new government in Israel represents a seismic change.

It is one thing to argue that the logic of a liberal “Jewish and democratic” Zionist state tends towards inequality, oppression, supremacy.

It is another to recognise that that moment of Zionism has run its course.

What has happened is not more of the same, but much worse. It is a step change, says Chris Hedges, on the way to a “despotic theocracy”.

He pulls no punches when he says that “Ben-Gvir and Smotrich represent the dregs of Israeli society, one that promotes ‘Jewish identity’ and ‘Jewish nationalism’ in a Zionist version of fascism’s call for blood and soil.

It is these Jewish fascists who are now calling the tune.

And we can expect the war against the Jewish “traitors within” to go hand in hand with increased violence and death meted out to Palestinians as a matter of daily routine…

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