Israel’s Prime Minister delivers a fascistic speech for Memorial Day

Today is Israeli Independence Day. It takes place the day after Memorial Day, officially titled “Memorial Day for the Fallen Soldiers of the Wars of Israel and Victims of Actions of Terrorism” (Palestinians are generally not considered victims of the massive Israeli state-terror). This annual one-two-punch is strategically designed– first emphasizing the dramatic and emotional effect of victimhood, before celebrating the exalted sense of “independence” and victory that comes the next day (a sequence that is only amplified by Israeli Holocaust Remembrance Day, which took place last week).

Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, Israel’s historically most right-wing premier (despite being embraced as a kind of liberal by the “just not Netanyahu” movement), delivered a blood-soaked, fascistic speech yesterday at the Mt. Herzl cemetery in Jerusalem:

The battlefield has its own rules, but unfortunately, in Israel, the nation is part of the front. Since the dawn of Zionism and the return of Zion, our enemies have not come to terms with our existence here. They think if they kill us, we’re going to break at some point. How wrong they are… If only our enemies invested in building their futures even a tenth or a hundredth of the energy they put into hurting us, their situation would be completely different. But time after time they choose the sanctification of death, which leaves them to wallow in poverty, squalor, and a constant sense of victimhood.  

These words need to be deciphered for the international audience. We’re reading these words in English, but they mean something totally different to what an international reader would usually make of them. You have to read these words like an Israeli, because they are strategically and essentially made for Israelis to consume.

The “nation” that Bennett speaks of is supposedly all of “Israel”, that is all Israeli citizens – that’s what we would normally make of it. But it’s not really like that. “Israel” here is not a country. It is The Nation State of the Jewish People, as anchored in the basic law of that name that was passed in 2018.

This racist law was featured high up in Human Rights Watch’s report on Israeli Apartheid from last year (p. 6 of the full 224 page report):

Intent to Maintain Domination

A stated aim of the Israeli government is to ensure that Jewish Israelis maintain domination across Israel and the OPT [occupied Palestinian territories]. The Knesset in 2018 passed a law with constitutional status affirming Israel as the “nation-state of the Jewish people,” declaring that within that territory, the right to self-determination “is unique to the Jewish people,” and establishing “Jewish settlement” as a national value. To sustain Jewish Israeli control, Israeli authorities have adopted policies aimed at mitigating what they have openly described as a demographic “threat” that Palestinians pose.

So, “Israel” in Bennett’s speech is really, essentially, only Jews (reflecting the traditional usage of the name in Judaism, “Am Israel” or “Nation of Israel”). One has to understand this in romantic religious terms. You might think Bennett is talking like a secular prime minister, but he’s not, he’s a religious fundamentalist, and his supporters, especially from the religious-Zionist camp, understand his thinly veiled codes very well.

In this understanding, the “nation of Israel” is essentially Jews, even internationally so. Thus, “our enemies” are not other countries as such – that’s what a normal international reader would understand, but that’s not what it means for Israelis. “Our enemies” are essentially the non-Jews – particularly Palestinians. So “our enemies” are not just an enemy without, they are also within. And they are just troublemakers, they bring their misery upon themselves, instead of just politely accepting their Apartheid fate – they could be making so much more with their lives. Bennett says that their “poverty” and “squalor” is just what they chose.

In the U.S. when this type of racist talk is used to refer to Blacks no further comment is needed. Everyone already knows that this is a vile example of blaming the victims of systemic racism. But Bennett can supposedly hide it as talk about patriotic values of ‘defense’. This talk is akin to Trump’s “shithole countries”, but Bennett is not really talking about other countries, he’s talking about Palestinians under Israel’s control, in their Apartheid enclaves.

Bennett says that “they choose to sanctify death” – unlike “us”. The irony is incredible, because he’s talking on Memorial Day, where we glorify those who killed Palestinians by the hundreds. The thousands of massacred Palestinians do not even deserve a mentioning, even if they are a whole obliterated family of 30 from Gaza, whom “the best” Israeli pilots bombed. The “sanctification of death” is a much-repeated Israeli hasbara point: these people simply don’t love life like “we” do, and if they only would care about life as much as they glorify death, they would have a better and less hateful life. When you think like that, nothing that you do is a cause of Palestinian suffering. If you keep them in an illegal and draconic siege in Gaza for decades, that’s just because they don’t love life. It’s just because they made bad choices.

Bennett chides “our enemies” for their “constant sense of victimhood”. You need some real chutzpah to do that, and Bennett certainly doesn’t lack it. Israel knows a thing or two about that sense of victimhood, and the whole strategy of aligning the memorial days like that, is meant to accentuate the victimhood, so that the “independence”, the final victory over “our enemies” is portrayed as nothing but a response to oppression. Keeping people under siege in the Gaza concentration camp can never be measured against the Holocaust, the Apartheid is never real Apartheid when it’s a Jewish Israeli Apartheid.  

So when Palestinians show a sense of sumud (steadfastness) in the face of constant Apartheid oppression and dispossession, they are just being ungrateful, and they should be so happy.

Bennett continued on:

Honored people, we cannot affect what they will think, we can take responsibility for ourselves, for our own decisions. And our basic decision remains: We remain steadfast on our land in the Land of Israel. Nothing and nobody will break the spirit of the Nation of Israel. Nothing will move us from here, because the eternal one of Israel shall not lie.

So Jewish steadfastness is great. Not so with Palestinian steadfastness, that’s just terror. When Bennett says “the Land of Israel” (Eretz Israel in Hebrew) he means it in the biblical sense, it’s with “Judea and Samaria” (the biblical names for the West Bank) and all the rest of it. When he says “the eternal one of Israel shall not lie”, it is a biblical citation from Samuel 15:29, and it’s also an allusion to the Zionist spy ring NILI (Hebrew acronym Nezah Israel Lo Yeshaker from the bible citation) which operated on behalf of the British in 1915-17, a time when the British were plotting to take over Palestine from the Ottoman Empire with Zionist collusion.

This speech by Bennett was heckled for many minutes by bereaved parents who shouted at him for not doing enough – that is, for not being nationalist and militant enough. Bennett has been under pressure from the right since he formed a government last year, and the (also right-wing) opposition has been chipping at his support, which now appears to be crumbling over supposed lack of “Jewish identity”, as ironic as it may sound. Bennett was in fact standing and ‘absorbing’ the shouts for almost five minutes before he began his speech. He managed to portray himself as patient, forgiving and magnanimous, saying in response to the shouting: “I love you with a great love, and I hear the pain”.

A lot of Israelis, I believe, will buy this image – of a mature and wise man who is sober and prudent. They will not register the inciteful racist talk that comes later, or understand it as unhinged nationalist propaganda. On the contrary, Bennett is just brushing up his credentials rhetorically and showing that he’s not weak, as it were.

And that’s the sad, sad reality of Israel – it’s all about shades of Apartheid. There’s the more crass and overt kind, then there’s the polite kind, there are fifty shades of it if not more. But it’s always the same – we are the victims, Palestinians are just playing victims but are really bloodthirsty enemies. There’s endless love for Jews, even if they shout at you and tell you to shut up, but just hate for Palestinians, who can’t manage their lives and only want to kill us.

What a “government of change”, eh?

H/t Ofer Neiman