I am surprised that the announcement by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that he is dissolving his war cabinet did not get much attention in social media. I am not aware that any of my social media friends shared the story – I certainly didn’t. Yet, on reflection, this news is both highly significant and very ominous. It marks, I believe, a critical juncture in the State of Israel’s War on Gaza and points to a grim future.
Netanyahu created the war cabinet five days after the start of the War on Gaza, bringing political rivals like Benny Ganz and Gadi Eisenkot into his government as a show of national unity. The Israeli prime minister said then that the time had come to put aside political differences “because the fate of our state is on the line.”
It was not an unprecedented step. Throughout history, many governments have reached across the floor to create national unity governments at times of national emergency. Republican Abraham Lincoln ran as a National Union nominee in the 1864 US presidential election, with the southern Democrat Andrew Johnson as his running mate. Following Neville Chamberlain’s resignation, Conservative Prime Minister Winston Churchill assembled a coalition government that included Labour leader Clement Atlee as deputy prime minister and which governed Great Britain from 1940-1945.
These wartime coalitions have always signaled a state of exception, where a government brings together all of the components – the “stakeholders” in the jargon of neoliberalism, “corporations” in the language of fascism – of the national community to ratify extra-constitutional means to meet the emergency and legitimize the suspension of normal rights and governance. Needs must, after all, and the gathering of the “sovereign people” in this way justifies the circumvention of law and rights.
Who is excluded from the wartime “national unity” government is always significant, however; Britain’s Liberal Prime Minister David Lloyd George invited Conservative and Labour members of parliament into his war cabinet, while explicitly ignoring the 102 Irish nationalist MPs in the House of Commons. And it is worth noting that Netanyahu’s war cabinet did not include a single member from an Arab party, or from the Labor rump in the Knesset. The communities that they represent are clearly not part of what the Israeli prime minister – and his “moderate” colleagues – regard as the “sovereign people” whose authority he needs to circumvent the rule of law.
Netanyahu has dissolved his emergency government has even though the emergency for which it was created is not over. The war continues, the impossible goal of “eliminating Hamas” has not been met, the State of Israel remains on a war footing, with its armed forces in a state of mobilization, yet the Israeli prime minister has determined, after the high-profile defection of Gantz, that he no longer needs to appeal to the “sovereign people” to circumvent the rule of law. This includes both domestic Israeli law, international law and, of course humanity.
This portends a dark future.
One can see the State of Israel as a permanent, non-constitutional state of exception. It is an ad-hoc state which lacks a constitution and fundamental principles of governance, which has an electoral system that empowers extremists, and is constantly on the brink of legal and legislative chaos. In just the past years, this (non-)constitutional mayhem has brought the State of Israel’s democratic institutions to the brink of extinction – a precipice that Israelis may yet vote to plunge over.
And the necropolitics of the Occupation, where the State of Israel has steadfastly recognized no legally binding geographical borders to its power and ethnonationalist ambition, has only served to consolidate the state of exception within Israeli society and politics. Israeli extra-legal, extra-constitutional, extra-humane expansionism is predicated on dominating a whole community of people who cannot be integrated into the political system and which, conversely, demands their non-integration. Or, perhaps, their dis-integration.
The innate chaos of Israeli political culture demands the brutalization and dehumanization of the Others within territory it regards as its own (despite all historical and legal evidence to the contrary), and the brutalization of Palestinians produces the chaos of Israeli politics. This is no “normal” country because it cannot be a “normal” country – by design – and this has always been the case. It has been in a constant state of flux since 1948, and only seems to have settled into a coherent form with the national consensus that what defines the contours of the State of Israel, and perhaps Israeli identity as well, is the abjection of Palestinians and Palestine.
The oppression and degradation of the Palestinian people is not incidental to Israeli nationhood today, it is the point of it. That has been the “genius,” if you will, of Israeli Zionism since 1967 which has silenced or liquidated any other possibilities for an Israeli statehood that might have allowed for the creation of a normal state, or at least coexistence with Palestinians.
The War on Gaza did not signal a change in the state of exception so much as its intensification; the emergency of 7 October 2023 allowed the Israeli state to mobilize greater resources than ever before, both at home and among the Diaspora Jewish Community, to legitimize its anti-constitutional chaos and ratify the Netanyahu regime’s vision of “national unity.”
The state of emergency that demanded the creation Netanyahu’s war cabinet – a state of exception to a state of exception – denoted a significant, indeed tectonic, shift in the Israeli state and Zionism. The dissolution of the war cabinet indicates that the exceptional has now become normal, the state of exception has been institutionalized at a higher intensity, and that the war is now “business as usual.”
While the oppression of the Palestinian people has been the business of the State of Israel for generations, so now too is their wholesale slaughter by the tens of thousands, and their complete abjection. And this is what I find so ominous: The War on Gaza is now normal, a part of the Israeli culture and psyche. The war is now necessary for there to be a State of Israel at all, and it will endure for as long as it is a fixture of Israeli political culture and identity. It will never end but, as the fuel of Palestinian lives and misery is depleted, it will have to escalate once again.
… And we are now hearing calls from the Israeli extremist right which, we must conclude, for an expansion into Lebanon, the full Anschluss of the West Bank, and beyond. This, Giogio Agamben notes, is the practice of “modern totalitarianism,” the creation of a “permanent state of emergency” that “appears as a threshold of indeterminacy between democracy and absolutism.” The state of exception mutates as necessary, but it persists as a technique of government which alters “the structure and meaning of the traditional distinction between constitutional forms.”
And all that I can think about is the state of perpetual war upon which Big Brother’s totalitarian rule was founded in George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four:
“’Look me in the eyes. What country is Oceania at war with?’
“Winston thought. He knew what was meant by Oceania, and that he himself was a citizen of Oceania. He also remembered Eurasia and Eastasia; but who was at war with whom he did not know. In fact he had not been aware that there was any war.
“’I don’t remember.’
“’Oceania is at war with Eastasia. Do you remember that now?’
“’Yes.’
“’Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia. Since the beginning of your life, since the beginning of the Party, since the beginning of history, the war has continued without a break, always the same war. Do you remember that?’
“’Yes.’”
23 June 2024
***
It is disorienting to see photos and videos of happy, attractive young Israelis – almost to the point of cognitive dissonance. Their counterparts in the United States and Canada incline strongly to the left, or at least to progressive and liberal politics, embracing environmentalism, gender equality, reproductive justice, Black Lives Matter, and a broad acceptance of non-traditional life choices, from veganism to polyamory. They are deeply skeptical of capitalism and traditional forms of authority and, perhaps most significantly at this moment of history, overwhelmingly pro-Palestinian.
Young Israelis share much with the young people of the United States and Canada. They listen to the same music, watch the same movies, go to the beach, cheer for many of the same sports teams. They are as likely to be vegans and vegetarians – more, in fact – and they are just as concerned about the future of the planet. They are just as inclined to challenge gender hierarchies and rigid gender categories.
They are just like the young people I see every week on the college campus where I teach in New Jersey… except they are not. While in terms of culture and even social issues they are similar to young Americans and Canadians, young Israelis incline far, far to the right politically. In recent polls (2022 and 2023) 60 percent of Israelis as a whole identified as “right wing,” but some 70 percent of those between the ages of 18 and 24 identify as “right wing.” And, when you consider that there really is no left in the State of Israel, and even the most moderate politicians are hawkish militarists, that means that they are very much to the right. And these young people voted overwhelmingly for extreme right-wing parties in the 2022 election.
Suffice it to say that, while their opposite numbers in the United States and Canada trend strongly pro-Palestinian and anti-Zionist, young Israelis are just as strongly pro-war and anti-Palestinian. The war has widespread support in the State of Israel, a Pew Research study found that about 73 percent of Israelis believe their government’s actions have either been perfectly right – or not severe enough. The numbers are even higher for Israelis 18-24; something verging on unanimity.
There is no reason why liberal or progressive social or cultural views should correspond to liberal or progressive ideas like pacifism, anticolonialism, and anti-racism. There are a good many left-wing feminists who, for what they conceive of as feminist reasons, are nonetheless toxically transphobic. There are a good many misogynistic self-described socialists. As a friend of mine once pointed out, being a vegetarian and committed to animal rights did not prevent Adolf Hitler from being the most horrific monster the right has ever produced.
So, there is no reason why a young Israeli cannot be just as green, vegetarian, feminist, and gender-fluid as any of my students while, at the same time, slavering over the opportunity to slaughter Palestinians and clear them from what little land they have to call their own. And this is why, when I see images of happy, attractive young Israelis in the bloom of their youth – the kind of picture that are meat and potatoes to the Israeli and Zionist propaganda machines – I can only shudder. I can only see young, smiling butchers taking time out from the nightclubs of Tel Aviv and the beaches of Eilat and Ashkelon to commit atrocities in Gaza.
22 June 2024
***
The fork is my chosen utensil. Except when eating soup. Or lo-mein. Or spreading peanut butter.
“Chosenness” can be complicated.
21 June 2024