Israel, the original sin – 05/12/2023 – Demetrius Magnoli

Avi Shlaim served in the Israeli army before the 1967 war, but left afterward, calling it “the repressive police force of a brutal colonial power”. The Oxford historian applies the qualifier chosen by B’Tselem, the respected Israeli human rights organization, to Israel: “apartheid state”. On his 75th birthday, which coincides with the Palestinian Nakba, the opinion of others has become the main national security issue for the Jewish state.

Israel has fought three general wars against its Arab neighbors. Today, it benefits from an unprecedented level of geopolitical security, which derives from its economic strength, military superiority and diplomatic stabilization. Peace with Egypt (1979) and Jordan (1994) and the Abraham Accords (2020) with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan suppressed the specter of an anti-Israeli Arab alliance. The implosion of Syria and the internal storm in Iran complete the picture. Israel’s existential enemy is itself.

According to Shlaim, Israeli history is divided into two parts, separated by the Six Day War. The occupation of Palestinian territories spread the virus of colonialism throughout Israeli society, converting the state into a tool for the Jewish settler movement established in the West Bank. Israel was then infected with “intolerance, religious fanaticism, xenophobia and Islamophobia”.

The historian’s analysis suffers from inconsistencies. His thesis of a decisive inflection in 1967 coexists precariously with his proposition that Zionism was born as an expansionist movement of settlers. The notion of an “original sin”, which would push Israel in an inevitable direction, is a seductive explanation for the rise of the current Netanyahu government, with its entourage of Jewish supremacists and its project to destroy the independence of the Supreme Court. However, the easy method of rationalizing the past from the present is used there.

Shaim’s narrative tends to ignore the role played by leaders of Arab countries in Israel’s evolution and to downplay the value of Israeli democracy. Paradoxically, the Jewish state offers its minority Arab-Palestinian citizens political rights that do not exist in the tyrannies imposed by Palestinian administrations in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Netanyahu’s offensive against the Supreme Court is aimed, first of all, at canceling such rights – that is, at actually implementing an apartheid state.

Apartheid has a clear political meaning, arising from the trajectory of South Africa: it is the denial of citizenship rights to the citizens of a country. But Palestinians from the occupied territories are not Israeli citizens. The classification of Israel as an “apartheid State” conveys, in a hidden way, the objective of creating a single, binational State, from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean – that is, in fact, the elimination of the Jewish State. The rupture with the idea of ​​the coexistence of two sovereign States – Israel and a Palestinian State – is the patio where an active current of the left and the Zionist extreme right converge.

However, Shaim is right to emphasize the incompatibility between democracy and occupation. In the half-century of occupation of the Palestinian territories, Israel has become something of a “security state” and has experienced increasing challenge to its original legal framework. The shadowy extremists who sit in Netanyahu’s cabinet are not peripheral splinters of the Jewish state, but deep scars on its political identity. Their eventual dominance puts Israel’s future at risk.

The Auschwitz death camp was opened in 1945. Israel was born, in 1948, supported by the rock of moral legitimacy. 75 years later, the rock crumbles little by little.

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