Israel’s steady lurch to the right is a predictable outcome for a country founded on Jewish supremacy and discrimination against Palestinians. 

This election could also be viewed as the outcome of longstanding antidemocratic forces, an inheritance from fascistic leaders like Vladimir “Ze’ev” Jabotinsky, rabbis like Meir Kahane,  the unwillingness of sequential Israeli governments (left to right) to control a violent and rabid settler movement, and even the consequences of the Zionist movement itself which preached not only Jewish nationalism, but Jewish supremacy. 

Michael Koplow, an Israel promoter, sees a philosophical distinction between two Zionist concepts, Barak’s villa in the jungle, and Jabotinsky’s iron wall. But both are colonialist conceits about the surrounding non-Jewish societies, and there is no significant difference between them.

Peter Beinart is so important in Jewish culture because he insists on humanizing Palestinians, and refuses to use the Holocaust lens of perpetual victimhood when considering Palestinian resistance. Palestinians are not driven by Jew hatred, as so many pro-Israel leaders argue, but by a natural response to dispossession and occupation.