This article uses two recent BPP webinar/screenings – Omer Bartov’s discussion of Israel: What Went Wrong? and Gillian Mosley’s film Planet Israel – to examine the nature of the State of Israel and the question of whether it could ever have become a “normal” liberal democracy. It engages with Bartov’s distinction between Zionism as a rescue project and Zionism as a settler-colonial project, while questioning whether the absence of a defined constitution, settled borders and equal citizenship made the liberal democratic route less likely but not impossible after 1948. Seen from the perspective of Palestinians, “the neck rather than the sword”, the decisive turning point lies not in the current war on Gaza, but in the earlier fusion of rescue, settlement, displacement and hegemony from the Mandate period through the Nakba and beyond. Israel is best understood as a hegemonic security state: one in which continuous war, legal exception, apartheid, settler expansion and administrative normalisation of violence operate together. The article concludes that the Greater Israel project is not a recent aberration, but the cumulative outcome of a political order in which domination over Palestinians has been repeatedly translated into security, legality, nation-building and a sense of historical entitlement which echoes manifest destiny.
The Britain Palestine Project hosted two fascinating webinar/screenings recently that engaged with the central question of the nature of the State of Israel.
For an organisation like BPP, which works for a Just Peace for Palestinians and Israelis, it is a central and recurrent question. Israeli Government spokespeople are fond of saying that they have no one on the Palestinian side to talk to about peace. Palestinians, excluded from Trump’s Board of Peace, ignored in reconstruction planning for Gaza and constantly undermined by United States-Israeli collusion when talks used to happen, as at Oslo, say not only is there no peace camp to speak to in Israel but the absence of parity of esteem means any talking that does happen is pre-fixed against them.
Omer Bartov, one of the greatest living historians of genocide, unique in the sweep of his historical vision but also in the depth of his analysis of specific sites of the holocaust like Galicia, is that rarest of writers: in Tolstoy’s view of historians, he is both a fox who knows many things and a hedgehog who knows one big thing.
He has collected a series of his essays in his new book, Israel: What went wrong? It echoes some of the themes on the nature of Israeli society he explored in his essay “Apocalyptic Visions”, from his classic collection Mirrors of Destruction, but presents a much more extensive argument on contemporary events, especially with respect to the question of genocide in Gaza, than he has collected before. Bartov spoke about his book in a webinar with BPP you can listen to here.
In this piece I want to look at Bartov’s view of the nature of the Israeli state. One of the most welcome features of his new volume is the way Bartov weaves his own family story into the story of Zionism.
His family first came to Palestine to join a Zionist colony (early Zionist communities were called colonies) in 1882, fleeing the terrible pogroms in Russia that defined the term. Their arrival combines the two strands of Zionism that Bartov discusses, the colonial settlement project and the rescue project.
Bartov argues that you cannot ignore rescue in the earlier period of the Zionist project any more than you can in the mandate period. It is the inter-relationship and conflicts between these strands of Zionism – or ideological currents – and within the Zionist movement in general that seem, overtime, to have been resolved into the Greater Israel project we see today. Bartov asks the critical question: why?
The settlement strand, which Zionists would argue was resettlement or return, is rooted in biblical archaeology. This is archaeology as a tautological practice of going to look for places that might be places that were described in the disparate and random collection of books collected in the Old Testament then saying they were the places described and they have been since biblical times those places and now they have been discovered again and can be Jewish again so they belong to the state of Israel.
The place of Jewish refuge was not empty and those already there had to be displaced or killed
The rescue strand supports the settlement project but was not always fixed on Palestine as the place of safety. Kenya had been suggested by an earlier generation of Zionists, as a possible refuge from persecution. Rescue and the pursuit of safety from Russian and Eastern European antisemitism and then from the western European Nazis’ eliminationist project, were the drivers for the ever-increasing numbers of arrivals in Palestine. As Bartov makes clear, the problem was that the land was not empty and the people that were there had to be displaced or murdered to make way for rescued Jews.
Despite this reality, culminating in the displacement amid extreme violence of 100,000s of Palestinians before 1948 and 750,000 during the Nakba of 1947-1948, Bartov argues for the possibility of a different kind of Israel. He rejects the inevitability of the development of the kind of state that was born out of the Nakba.
He argues that if the Declaration of Independence had been the basis for a Constitution that enshrined equal rights and if the borders of the State of Israel had been defined and respected, then the Israeli train leaving the station of 1948 might have taken a track toward being a liberal democracy. The ethnonationalism of Zionism might have evolved as other European ethnonationalist movements evolved into political parties and not state defining projects.
A polity could have developed that would have formed the basis of what he calls a “normal state”. (I assume that the electoral system used under this constitution would also have been different? This is not a subject for this essay but an important element of the polarisation of Israeli politics is derived from the pure PR electoral system).
The second webinar we featured recently was a screening and a Q and A on the new film by Gillian Mosley – you can follow the link for the Q and A, there are screenings around the country. –see here. Mosley made the BPP film From Nakba to Camp David and the wonderful Tinderbox. She grew up in a Zionist household in London and comes from a long line of Rabbis.
Her new film is called Planet Israel. It takes her on a journey through contemporary Israel which becomes a quest to discover why a majority of Israelis, 73 per cent, support the war on Gaza. Mosley looks at collective psychology and the steps that a democratic state takes on the road to becoming an authoritarian state. She asks herself what has happened to the people of Israel that has allowed the extreme ethnonationalist ideology to take such a stranglehold on the State.
She seeks answers from Israeli experts and academics on how the peace party in Israel disappeared and how the country now faces a choice in its forthcoming election between different personalities expressing the same extreme right-wing ideology. It is a fascinating film that has been described as brave. It is brave in the sense that at this time for a Jewish intellectual and film maker to produce such a work of reflection will invite a backlash of criticism and abuse but the point is that it should not be brave to make such a film about a polity if that polity is, or ever was, a liberal democracy.
It should be commonplace, it should be a badge of honour that such a film is made and debated. That it is not cuts to heart of the matter. If you are looking at the world from the perspective of Planet Israel then this film becomes part of the existential threat to the State itself. And that is the problem. We need to stop seeing these questions from the perspective of the sword and its problems and see it from the perspective of the neck that sword is aimed at.
One of the greatest adverts of all time was the 1986 Guardian advert, Points of View.
If you change the perspective the skinhead running towards the man with the briefcase is not a threat but a saviour. The story told depends on the position you are sitting in.
Or as Ghassan Kanafani put it: you are talking about a conversation between the sword and the neck.
Seen from the perspective of the neck rather than the sword – from those subjected to power rather than those wielding it – the decisive turning point comes far earlier than the genocidal war on Gaza. And all that follows is not shocking but inevitable.
The Zionist aim to provide rescue and safety, which must form a key part of the history, became inseparable from a project of hegemony over the land and people of Palestine, and later from a wider assertion of power across the region. This occurred as the Great Powers began their long collaboration with this project in the Balfour Declaration and the suppression of the Arab Revolution 1936-39 and in the terrorist campaign for and realisation of the State of Israel 1945-48 culminating in the Nakba.
The capacity of a constitution or a defined border to outweigh these historical forces, in the forging of the State of Israel as a hegemonic project both internal and external, are, in my opinion, so limited as to be almost meaningless. And, a sense of surprise that 73 per cent of the Israel population supported the eliminationist project of the Israeli state in Gaza, and supported the war on Iran and still supports the elimination of Gaza, given the history, is itself surprising. Why is it surprising?
Hegemony persists and survives when its assumptions are embedded in law, institutions and culture
Hegemony is not a single act of domination, but a continuous process through which the exercise of power makes itself appear natural, necessary and administrative. Gramsci argued that hegemonic domination depends on more than direct repression. A ruling order survives when its assumptions become embedded in law, institutions, culture and common sense.
In the Israeli-Palestinian context, this means that control over Palestinians is not maintained, from the mandate period onwards, only through military force, but through courts, land administration, planning regimes, permits, labour regulation, infrastructure, demographic discourse and the presentation of settlement as both security and nation-building. Coercion becomes hegemonic when it is translated into “normal” government; a state created by one nation through the displacement of another nation cannot therefore ever become a “normal” state.
The idea of continuous war sharpens this argument and is based on old and familiar ideas that we seem reluctant to apply to Israel.
Hobbes sees war as a condition rather than only an episode of active combat; Clausewitz argued that war is an instrument of policy; and Foucault shifts attention from the battlefield to the management of populations, bodies, movement and conduct. Taken together, these approaches suggest that the line between war and peace has been systematically blurred from the suppression of the Arab Revolution of 1936-1939, through to the Nakba and beyond.
Raids, siege, detention, zoning, checkpoints, biometric systems, work permits, land registration and settlement-building are not separate mechanisms. They form a connected apparatus of control in which war is institutionalised through complete mobilisation of the population.
The IDF is an instrument of nation building but also the instrument of hegemony. The Israeli state therefore appears not simply as a state that periodically goes to war, but as one in which military dominance through administration and through the self-identify of citizens has become a normal mode of rule.
The concept of the state of exception explains how this condition is legally and politically sustained. Agamben’s argument that law may be suspended in order to preserve the legal order is the basis for a system in which emergency powers, military governance and unequal legal statuses become permanent.
In the Israeli case, the absence of a fully entrenched constitution, the absence of finally defined borders, and the occupation of the State of Palestine by the State of Israel have allowed exceptionality to become part of ordinary governance–but if they had been present would they have stopped these processes? Security is continually invoked to justify the apartheid of differentiated citizenship, administrative detention, demolitions, surveillance, movement restrictions and territorial control. The exception, beginning in the counter-insurgency of 1936-39, is the method by which a particular order is produced and reproduced.
Settler-colonial theory adds the territorial and demographic dimension. Patrick Wolfe’s formulation that settler colonialism is “a structure, not an event” clarifies why the issue is not simply occupation in a narrow military sense, but the cumulative production of irreversible facts on the ground.
Settlement expansion, land declarations, planning monopolies, restrictions on Palestinian construction, limits on family unification, and the legalisation of illegal settlements all point to a state project in which sovereignty remains elastic and the frontier remains open.
Continuous war, settler expansion and Israeli rule present Israeli domination as order and security
Add the Palestinian body as the site of torture, physical control and mutilation and we see that viewed through these combined frameworks, the nature of the State of Israel is that of a hegemonic security state: a state in which continuous war, legal exception, settler expansion and administrative normalisation work together to block Palestinian sovereignty while presenting domination as order, security and historical entitlement.
The question inherent in the new book by Bartov and the new film by Mosley is whether or not the drive for hegemony that, in my opinion, defines Zionism and the policy of the state of Israel, is a recent development and not the inevitable destination of that train leaving 1948?
Implicit in both works is an idea that Israel, despite the manner of its creation, despite the legacy of the mandate, despite the epochal destruction of the Holocaust, could have become a “normal state”, a functional liberal democracy.
Much as I hugely admire and learn from the work of Bartov and enjoy and learn from the films of Mosley, I do not believe that there was another road or that we have recently come to a different Israel. The genocide in Gaza was present at the creation, in my opinion, because the Nakba is not an event, any more than hegemony is an event: it is a process and it is rooted in the mandate and has continued since 1948.