Last Friday, the Israeli ‘leftist’ party The Democrats (a merger of the Labor and Meretz parties) hosted the yearly conference for the commemoration of the late Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s death. More than anything, the event demonstrated the deeply genocidal nature of the Israeli left.
It has been 30 years since he was murdered by a right-wing activist on November 4, 1995, and the conference took place at the Kibbutzim Seminary in Tel Aviv, a place signifying Rabin’s labor Zionism. The guest list was a who’s who of those considered the Israeli opposition, and most are deeply implicated in the Gaza genocide.
There is no better example of this than one of the stars of the event: Giora Eiland. The retired general, former head of the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS), was a featured guest and is probably best known now for calling for the intentional starvation of Gaza in November 2023, including through encouraging the spread of epidemics. However, he is now best known as the author of the “General’s Plan,” which became Israel’s blueprint for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza over the past two years.
Normally, people would consider Eiland to be a fascist right-winger, but in Israel, he is considered on the left. His affiliation with the Israeli Zionist Labor ‘left’ comes from his agricultural background on the moshav (agricultural settlement) of Kfar Hess. The most defining aspect of his career has been in security (militarism), which is probably the most defining feature of the Israeli Zionist left. Eiland was a negotiator under the so-called ‘peace process’ led by Shimon Peres in the years 2001-2003, when Peres served under Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.
Interestingly, the Democrats did receive some pushback to Eiland’s presence at the event, given his role in the genocide. In response, party head Yair Golan just claimed the general had apologized for his various genocidal statements, a claim which cannot be verified, and accused critics of being “purists.” One activist briefly disrupted the event over Eiland’s participation, but the show quickly resumed.
The event included a recorded message by Israel’s President, Isaac Herzog. Herzog is not merely a racist liar, who has called ‘intermarriage’ in the U.S. ‘a plague’ and then said that people misunderstood him – he has also incited genocide, by pushing the notion that there were no ‘uninvolved’ in Gaza, in October 2023. When it was pushed back against, and also became part of the ICJ genocide case, he again claimed that people misinterpreted him. At least Itamar Ben-Gvir, the more openly fascist National Security Minister, stands by his words.
Herzog is, on the one hand, an ‘apolitical’ figure, as the President’s position in Israel is officially ceremonial, and yet his legacy is as a left-leader, a former leader of the Labor Party.
Then we have Ehud Barak. Israel’s “Mr. Security”, the most decorated soldier, a former chief of staff, Defense Minister, and Prime Minister. Barak has boasted about the occupation of 1967 being a “liberation of these parts of the land”, and bemoaned that “leftists”, including Rabin, were not sufficiently credited for the “achievements of settlement in Judea and Samaria”. A real leftist.
And then there’s Yair Golan, the leader of The Democrats. Golan rose to political power after a not-so-successful stint with Meretz (which didn’t make the electoral threshold in the 2022 elections). Later, following October 7, 2023, he gained popularity both due to his one-man rescue missions on the day, but also due to his open advocacy for genocide. Earlier this year, he said on a Haaretz podcast that “we’d all like to wake up one spring morning and find that 7 million Palestinians who live between the sea and the river have simply disappeared.” Who are “we” you ask? The Democrats, of course, and the rest of the Zionist spectrum, one would assume.
And finally, Rabin, the man being honored. Rabin exemplifies the “peace” that left Zionists are working to create, and it is no peace at all. Although remembered for his role in the Oslo Accords and for promoting a path towards a “two-state solution”, just a month before his assassination, Rabin promised that the accords would result in a “Palestinian entity” that is “less than a state”. “We will not return to the 4 June 1967 lines”, he stated firmly, a point that Benjamin Netanyahu has quoted several times. And of course for Palestinians, Rabin is remembered rather as a master ethnic-cleanser from 1948, as well as a bone-breaker from the first Intifada (1987-93).
And that really puts this whole conference into its true light. The legacy of ethnic cleansing, occupation, apartheid, and genocide is central for Israel, even for its “left.” This is the prism through which to see the more recent accords – the Abraham Accords (first signed in 2020), are about ‘economic peace’ or the recent ‘ceasefire’ with Gaza, both of which are aimed at cementing the Israeli colonization of Palestine, not ending it.
Netanyahu promises that Israel that “we will forever live by the sword,” and this appears to be the case. In another recent Rabin commemoration, Yair Golan claimed the opposite: “Anyone who is looking for real security must understand that there is no existence for a state that lives by the sword alone – and peace is the only way to ensure that young men and women in Israel will no longer have to pay the price of its absence.”
Those are nice words. But the Democrats’ event shows that Israel does live by the sword, and not by its word. And the Israeli “left” plays a central role in this.
The insoluble problem for what’s left of the Left is Israel’s intrinsic “blood and soil” Fascistic character. The kibbutz movement has elements of socialism – even of Soviet style collectivism – but its widespread rejection of Palestinian rights damns it. Kibbutzes and other settlements built on top of the ruins of ethnically cleansed villages and fields are antithetical to anything socialist.
“The legacy of ethnic cleansing, occupation, apartheid, and genocide is central for Israel…”
On that topic this interview of Nathan Thrall by the New Yorker is must-read – I’m not sure this is available to all but if you can get hold of it:
New Yorker: In terms of the broader Israeli-Palestinian conflict, what has changed most in terms of the way you thought about it on October 6, 2023, versus today?
Thrall: The largest change that has happened in the past two years is that the possibility of large-scale ethnic cleansing has become very real. Of course, we’ve already seen large-scale ethnic cleansing within Gaza. But what I have seen over the past two years is an Israeli society that is powerful, that faces very few obstacles, and that has the ability, and, in the right circumstances, the willingness, to expel huge numbers of Palestinians and, in the view of many Israelis, resolve the Palestinian issue once and for all….There’s a distinction between ethnic cleansing within the occupied territories—what we’ve seen both in the West Bank and on a much larger scale in Gaza over the past two years—and what might come next, which is the possible expulsion of large numbers of Palestinians to areas outside of historic Palestine….what has really changed is that ethnic cleansing has become a part of the mainstream public discourse. It is something that I had previously thought was not unimaginable but very unlikely outside of some major regional war. Now it is discussed. People are polled on it. One poll found that eighty-two per cent of Israeli Jews favored expelling Gazans. You can quibble with one poll or another, but you have clear Israeli Jewish majorities in favor of pushing Palestinians outside of Gaza. At some level, many Israelis feel that their basic predicament, the predicament of Zionism, is unresolved so long as there are millions of Palestinians living in the territory under their control….
What Palestinians and Israelis Have Learned Since October 7th | The New Yorker
Two years ago Jesse Rosenfeld, asked about the Israeli peace camp, said it was a few hundred people. Probably even less now.
People talk about the anti-Netanyahu demonstrations. Those have nothing to do with Palestinians.
off topic- someone from mondoweiss should write about tucker carlson and nick fuentes. to a zionist like me, the confluence of mamdani’s refusal to condemn “globalize the intifada” and the carlson-fuentes hatefest towards the organized international jew are part of a theme that Jewish power has not redeemed us, but Jewish powerlessness was a situation that required remedying. what does an anti zionist make of this flare up of jew hatred on the right. (assuming you feel that jew hatred in the anti zionist movement is minor or unworthy of comment) it behooves mondoweiss to express an opinion or an analysis.