RIGHTWARD LURCH

LIBERAL DEMOCRACY IS UNDER SIEGE WORLDWIDE. IN ISRAEL, THE THREATS COME FROM WITHIN AND WITHOUT. AND WESTERN “PROGRESSIVE” ACTIVISTS ARE PARTLY TO BLAME.

When you hear Israel accused of “genocide,” this is the face you should see.

I was in the Gaza envelope a week ago and the Israeli military was already clearly preparing for the resumption of the conflict that is all over the news this morning.

As I have said, this Substack is not a “breaking news” source. I am putting in context some of the world’s events. Before getting into today’s post, I would simply reiterate these facile but nonetheless absolutely core truths …

War is horrible. Every civilian death is a universe of tragedy.

Also: Hamas started this war. Hamas could have ended this war at any moment since October 7, 2023, by releasing the hostages and surrendering.

The world can (and, oh, it will) condemn Israel for its responses to Hamas.

But peace will come when the Palestinian leaders and their people are prepared to live in coexistence with Jewish neighbors.

The following post was scheduled for today before the latest news. Headlines add to its relevance.

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Liberal democracy is in peril.

Far-right, radical right, authoritarian and similarly described forces govern or are part of coalitions in governments in Russia, Hungary, Italy, Finland, Turkey, Argentina and the United States, among other places.

Israel is no exception. The coalition of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu includes some radical extremists — and as Netanyahu’s own career has progressed, it is fair to say he has moved from mainstream right to extreme right. (These terms are not a science and to call them an art gives them too much cachet.)

Although every instance is unique, there are a few things that set Israel’s adventures in illiberal democracy apart from the other examples.

For one thing — and this will seem to critics like a justification and maybe it is — Israel’s lurch to the right began during the Second Intifada, when the Palestinian leadership proved that it was not interested in coexistence. It was committed to eradicating the existence of a Jewish state. All of Yasser Arafat’s posturing was just that.

Right-wing politics are often described as “reactionary” partly because they are reacting to (real or perceived) situations and threats.

Often, in history, the “threats” to which reactionary forces are reacting have been Jews. Scapegoating is a form of reactionary behavior — setting up a straw man, an imagined enemy, and then mobilizing the masses against it.

The Nazis accused Jews of aiming to destroy the German people. The architect of the Holocaust, Heinrich Himmler, among other senior Nazis, justified the Holocaust by claiming that, had they not perpetrated genocide against the Jews, the Jews would have done it to the Germans.

(This is the precise — precise — case being made today to justify the Hamas “resistance.” Activists on North American campuses justify the ongoing attempted genocidal struggle of Hamas by claiming Israel is perpetrating genocide against Palestinians. Every time you hear Israel accused of “genocide,” you should see the face and hear the voice of Himmler.)

At other times, the threats are real. The economic crisis of the 1930s was real — and far-right extremist reactions to it were, in some cases, attempts to find answers to economic realities. Again, in Germany, it was a lethal combination of forces. The economic realities were scapegoated on Jews.

Fast-forward to the 21st century.

Since September 28, 2000, at the latest, Israelis have had no partner for peace. A few Israelis I spoke to recently believe that, once Hamas is eliminated, the Palestinian Authority can become, again, a vessel for some sort of political arrangement. (Others see this idea as yet another doomed trap.)

For 25 years now, Israel has been in an existential battle against jihadist enemies. That makes voters seek security. Voting for peaceniks, in the minds of many Israelis, is voting for weakness in the face of genocidal enemies and invites an endless repetition of October 7s.

That is, by definition, “reactionary” politics.

But, given the threats to the Israeli state and its citizens, not just on and since October 7, but since September 28, 2000, (and, really, since before the proclamation of the State of Israel, in 1948) how would you react if you were an Israeli voter?

These (very real) external threats help explain Israel’s seeming lurch to the right. (I say “seeming” because the structural and political realities of Israel’s system mean the tail in Israeli politics too often wags the dog. Far-right extremists like Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich have gained far more power than their numbers warrant. They represent a segment of Israeli society, but their power outweighs their popular support. Again — this may be a justification on my part.)

There is a more important way Israel’s situation differs from the erosion of liberal democracy in other places, though.

In all those other examples, including the scary growth of Germany’s AfD, the neo-fascist Alternative for Germany party, the threat to liberal democracy comes from the inside — from voters, who have, for various reasons, chosen to support far-right movements.

In Israel, this is also partly true. Too many voters have chosen far-right parties.

What makes Israel’s situation different from these others is that threats to Israel’s liberal democracy does not only come from voters.

Israel’s liberal democracy is under threat from external forces. Hamas, the other jihadist forces and range of enemies hate Israel because it is a Jewish state. But they hate it, too, because it is a liberal democracy. These things are all wrapped up in one another.

Jews, liberalism, progress, egalitarianism, pluralism — these are the enemies of far-right and reactionary forces worldwide. In Israel, these characteristics coalesce like nowhere else. So while October 7, and the longer war on Israel it was a part of, is a war on Jews, it is also a war on liberal democracy.

When Palestinians and their allies chant “From the river to the sea,” you can be certain that they are not calling for elections in which Jewish and Arab interests will be considered in anything we would recognize as part of a democratic process.

It is a call for a state in which not only Jewish interests are subverted, but liberal democracy itself is overthrown.

There is precisely no history of or foundation for liberal democracy in Palestine or most of the rest of the region.

Anti-Zionists like to refer to Israel as an “alien imposition” on the region and, in this respect, they are absolutely correct. Never mind the whole Jew thing. Israel imposed a tiny oasis of pluralist, liberal democracy in a region where it has little to no roots.

Israel represents an alien imposition of legalized equality for women and gay people and the panorama of human rights taken for granted in most countries in Europe and North America.

That’s one of the reasons it’s hated by its neighbors.

When the pioneering, back-to-the-land Zionists began kibbutzim and building a proto-state, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the comparative equality (for the times) of women among the early Zionist chalutzim (pioneers) was part of the reason for Arab alarm. The Arab men did not want their women getting any foolish ideas from the egalitarian Jews.

But here is what makes the threat to liberal democracy in Israel completely different from all other examples: Every time a Palestinian or their overseas cheerleaders chant “From the river to the sea” or otherwise call for the eradication of the Jewish state, they are also calling for the eradication of the tiny seedling of liberal democracy in the Middle East.

That would be, in so many ways, an unthinkable tragedy (even if Israel were not the national embodiment of Jewish peoplehood and the sole guaranteed refuge for imperiled Jews).

But here is what makes this scenario especially repellant.

It is the very activists in Canada and elsewhere in the West who lament the threats to liberal democracy in Russia, Turkey, America and elsewhere who are the very people calling for the extermination of liberal democracy from the Middle East.

That’s what “From the river to the sea” means.

And that is yet another example of how progressive activists betray everything we claim to cherish when it comes to Israel and Jews.

Leftists worldwide have championed a scenario in which the Jews of Israel feel forced to vote for a strongman. And then we accuse them of militarism, warmongering and bloodthirst.

We justify, defend and endorse those who behead, immolate, rape, kidnap and mass murder Jews.

And when those bestial actions lead to the war we see today, we blame the Jews.

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