Netanyahu’s judicial coup and the dead end of Zionism - World Socialist Web Site
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right government passed
legislation Monday giving itself untrammeled power, in the face of mass
popular opposition unprecedented in Israel’s history.
The new law
ends the Supreme Court’s power to strike down the decisions of elected
officials on the grounds of “unreasonableness,” granting the Knesset the
power to overturn the Court’s ruling with a simple majority. At a
stroke, this removes any separation of powers between the legislature,
the executive and the judiciary.
From now on the government can
politicize the selection of judges, appoint convicted criminals to the
highest offices of the state and allow Netanyahu, currently on trial on
corruption charges that could put him behind bars for years, to evade
conviction.
In the Supreme Court, Netanyahu is targeting an
institution that has repeatedly colluded in the brutal suppression of
the Palestinians, shielded settler violence and presided over the 2018
Nation State Law defining Israel as “the national home of the Jewish
people” and confirming its Arab population as second-class citizens.
Even
this is not enough for Netanyahu’s government of ultra-nationalists and
religious Zionists. Their aims are the total annexation of the Occupied
West Bank, ethnic cleansing throughout Israel and the imposition of
authoritarian rule over a society characterized by acute social
inequality, stepped up militarism and cultural reaction.
The
prospect of such measures has sparked an existential crisis for the
State of Israel, igniting seven months of demonstrations, mobilizing
hundreds of thousands of people amid scenes of vicious police attacks on
demonstrators. Speaking on Britain’s Channel 4 television, former Prime
Minister Ehud Olmert now warns, “This is a serious threat. It’s never
happened before, and we are going into a civil war now.”
A
striking feature of the oppositional wave is the announcement by more
than 10,000 army reservists that they will refuse to serve if the
judicial coup goes ahead, saying they are unwilling to continue risking
their lives for a government that is no longer democratic.
The
army demands several years of military service for young Jewish Israelis
and annual reservist duty. For 56 years, military service has meant
enforcing Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestinian and Syrian land,
carrying out search and arrest raids, forced evictions, demolitions and
other punitive measures as well as providing cover for settlers carrying
out vigilante attacks.
The reservists’ refusal to serve reflects
growing concern among workers and professional middle-class layers over
the far-right and extremist settlers’ efforts to provoke an all-out war
against the Palestinians, even as Netanyahu steps up the covert war
against Iran and its allies in Syria and Lebanon. It takes place under
conditions where Israel is a social and political powder keg and the
entire Middle East has been destabilised by the deepening global
economic crisis, the pandemic, climate change and US-led plans to
escalate the war against Russia in Ukraine and its regional allies, Iran
and Syria, with Tel Aviv as its chief attack dog. This prompted IDF
Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi to warn that without “a strong and united
defence force,” Israel would “no longer be able to exist as a country in
the region.”
These
are the concerns animating the self-proclaimed leaders of the
opposition to Netanyahu’s judicial coup—former ministers, generals and
security and intelligence chiefs. The opposition leaders are no less
committed to the expansion of Israel’s borders at the expense of the
Palestinians, but they fear the turn to open dictatorship will
jeopardise the interests of Israel’s corporate and financial elite and
have begged Netanyahu to “compromise.”
Israel has long depended
for its survival on massive economic and military support from the
United States, particularly after its success against the Arab armies in
1967, in return for acting as US imperialism’s policeman in the Middle
East. Now, instead of being an effective policeman, Netanyahu’s actions
have undermined Washington’s protracted efforts to secure alliances with
Arab regimes in the Middle East, threatening its plans to isolate and
crush Iran and exposing the fraud of its claim to be upholding democracy
in waging its de facto war against Russia in Ukraine.
In
addition, the prospect of protracted social upheaval in Israel and
throughout the region has spooked international investors, with Morgan
Stanley cutting its sovereign credit to a “dislike stance” and credit
rating agency Moody’s warning of “negative consequences” and
“significant risk” for Israel’s economy and security.
The vast
outpouring of opposition to the government has, crucially, politically
discredited the fraudulent claims of those equating criticism of Israel
with antisemitism. This has undermined a global witch-hunt of the left
to silence and discredit opponents of Israel’s repression of the
Palestinians and the broader war aims of the state’s imperialist
backers.
It has at the same time refuted the central tenet of the
Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Campaign blaming all Israelis for the
crimes of their government. Citing the pro-Zionist leadership of the
protest movement, numerous pseudo-left and liberal publications have
insisted that all that is happening is a fall-out between rival Zionist
cliques and that Jewish workers can never be won to united struggle with
the Palestinians because they are loyal to the “settler colonial state”
which provides them with a supposedly privileged existence.
There
are complex problems in developing a genuine socialist opposition to
Netanyahu’s fascistic agenda. But the working class—Israeli and
Palestinian, Jewish, secular, Muslim and Christian—is being objectively
driven into struggle against the ruling class and its state apparatus.
What
is necessary is for the working class and its younger generation to
draw the central political lessons of the history of Israel since its
foundation.
The central myths of the Zionist project have been
dealt a body blow from which they will never recover. Nothing is left of
the insistence on “national unity” on which Zionism rests. The claim
that its establishment 75 years ago through the forcible expulsion of
the Palestinians would provide a democratic haven for the Jewish people
after the horrors of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust has turned into a
nightmare.
Zionism emerged as a right-wing ethno-nationalist
movement in the 19th century based on exclusivist conceptions of racial,
religious and linguistic separatism to justify the establishment of a
Jewish capitalist state. The growth of its influence among a people
deeply rooted in the Enlightenment and then the socialist movement was
due to the catastrophe that overtook European Jewry in the 1930s and
1940s, culminating in the extermination of 6 million European Jews in
the Nazi Holocaust. This defeat of the European working class by fascism
was facilitated by the Stalinist degeneration of the Soviet Union and
the Communist International, and the Soviet bureaucracy’s betrayal of
the struggle for world socialism.
Zionism
politically exploited the widespread political disillusionment among
Jews to urge the creation of a Jewish state through emigration to
British-controlled Palestine. Israel was established in 1948 through the
forcible and brutal expulsion of almost a million Palestinians and the
seizure of their land.
A state founded on this basis and the
ongoing repression of the Palestinians was always incapable of
developing a genuinely democratic society. Its evolution as a garrison
state for US imperialism, repeatedly at war with its Arab neighbours and
in perpetual war with the Palestinians; pursuing an expansionist
“Greater Israel” policy; resting ever more firmly on the right-wing
settler population in the Occupied Territories and US military
subventions to offset the destabilising impact of acute levels of social
inequality among the highest in the world, is what has paved the way
for the Frankenstein monster of Netanyahu’s government.
The
conditions have now emerged for a successful struggle to win the entire
working class, Jewish and Palestinian, to a unified socialist struggle
against their common oppressor. This perspective has been fought for
solely by the Fourth International, represented today by the
International Committee.
At the outset of the ongoing wave of protests the World Socialist Web Site
drew attention to the prescient response by the Fourth International to
the partition of Palestine in 1947 by the United Nations that led to
the creation of Israel, in a statement, “Against the Stream.” This
warned:
The Fourth International rejects as utopian
and reactionary the “Zionist solution” of the Jewish question. It
declares that total renunciation of Zionism is the sine qua non
condition for the merging of Jewish workers’ struggles with the social,
national and liberationist struggles of the Arab toilers…
By
partition a wedge is driven between the Arab and Jewish worker. The
Zionist state with its provocative lines of demarcation will bring about
the blossoming forth of irredentist (revenge) movements on either side.
There will be fighting for an “Arab Palestine” and for a “Jewish state”
within the historic frontiers of Eretz Israel (the Land of Israel). As a
result, the chauvinistic atmosphere thus created will poison the Arab
world in the Middle East and throttle the anti-imperialist fight of the
masses, while Zionists and Arab feudalists will vie for imperialist
favours.
The WSWS explained:
The
dead-end of Zionism is only one manifestation of the failure of all
national movements and the states they have created to resolve any of
the fundamental questions confronting the mass of working people. The
same issues are posed to all the peoples of the region, where the
working class is subject to brutally repressive forms of bourgeois rule
amid grotesque levels of social inequality.
Nor is there anything
unique in the eruption of opposition. Israel is a significant expression
of the far-reaching political consequences of a global upsurge of the
working class, from Sri Lanka to France.
As
elsewhere, the turn by Israel’s ruling elite toward dictatorship is
rooted fundamentally in the extreme growth of social inequality and the
escalation of war that are the twin products of capitalism in its death
agony. It will be halted not through the “negotiations” between rival
capitalist factions, but by developing the expanding class struggle
throughout the world into a conscious political movement for socialism.
The
critical task facing workers and youth is the building of independent
revolutionary parties, sections of the ICFI, including an
Israeli-Palestinian section, to provide the political leadership to
overthrow the Zionist state and the Arab bourgeois regimes and build a
United Socialist States of the Middle East.
