Israel elections – even more racism and even nastier fascists

It is a truism that the inhumanity of zionism knows no bounds. The inhumanity of its adherents is matched only by their immense stupidity, and by the unflinching certainty that their Israel project will fail and fall.

Before the most recent Israeli elections, many people assumed that the zionist government could not get any more right-wing than it already was. But, somehow, they have managed it, for the list of candidates on the ‘Religious Zionism’ (RZ) slate made huge gains and took 14 seats in the Knesset.

These join 32 ‘Likud’, 11 ‘Shas’ and seven ‘United Torah Judaism’ members to form a hard core of intolerance and fascism in the next Israeli government – a government that will claim to be independent (some of its members may actually believe this), but which, in reality, will exist, as all Israeli governments have existed since 1948, solely to do the bidding of US imperialism.

The Mondoweiss website listed the 14 likely seat-takers for ‘Religious Zionism’ and furnishing some of their vile beliefs and activities. As we go to press, the appointees for most of the seats have not yet been announced, since the various coalition partners were haggling over who should get which job. (Israeli election results: Netanyahu stronger than ever, and he’s bringing the far-right with him by Jonathan Ofir, 1 November 2022)

The position of finance minister, however, has been determined: it has been given to Bezalel Smotrich. Regarding the Palestinian citizens living in what the zionists call Israel, Smotrich has gone farther than even the scoundrel Benjamin Netanyahu, who warned on the eve of the 2015 that “the Arabs are coming to vote in droves”.

In 2016, Smotrich, responding to newspaper headlines about the de facto policy of racial segregation in Israeli maternity wards, tweeted: “It’s natural that my wife wouldn’t want to lie down [in a bed] next to a woman who just gave birth to a baby who might want to murder her baby twenty years from now.”

His equally repugnant wife, Revital, publicly backed up his racist views. She had no problem telling a reporter for Israel Channel 10 that she had “kicked an Arab obstetrician out of the [delivery] room. I want jewish hands to touch my baby, and I wasn’t comfortable lying in the same room with an Arab woman.” She continued spouting her vitriol: “I refuse to have an Arab midwife, because for me giving birth is a jewish and pure moment.”

In 2017, Smotrich announced his ‘Decision Plan’, which demanded that Palestinians either explicitly accept living as apartheid second-class subjects in ‘the jewish state’ (officially relinquishing their “national aspirations”), or be expelled from the territory.

Also appointed is Itamar Ben-Gvir, who has been put in charge of ‘national security’. A member of the Jewish Power party, Ben-Gvir is a convicted terrorist, the disciple of another zionist terrorist Rabbi Meir Kahane, and an ardent admirer of Baruch Goldstein, the perpetrator of the 1994 Al-Khalil (Hebron) massacre, who killed 29 Palestinian worshippers at the Al-Ibrahimi mosque.

While Netanyahu has been the public face of Israeli inhumanity for the many years of his premiership, he does almost seem to pale in comparison to Smotrich and Ben-Gvir. Just like Smotrich, Ben-Gvir also has a plan for expelling what he terms “disloyal” Palestinian citizens.

His popularity is enhanced both by his visits of support to violent kibbutzes and his waving of guns while encouraging others to shoot Palestinian stone-throwers in the occupied East Jerusalem neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah. It would be easy to label Ben-Gvir as an extremist, but it’s important to note that his views are not supported by an extreme minority alone – these views are what passes for mainstream in the Israeli polity.

In preparation for his transformation into a ‘respected’ knesset member, Ben-Gvir has slightly toned down his racist and murderous rhetoric. The traditional chants of the youths in his base have changed from “Death to the Arabs” to “Death to the terrorists”. Of course, all Arabs are by definition terrorists according to Ben-Gvir and his ilk, so no real change there. As ‘minister of internal security’, Ben-Gvir will be ideally placed to make those chants even more of a reality than they already are.

The third of this nasty bunch is expected to be Ofir Sofer, touted for the post of immigration minister. He was on a previous Religious Zionism list under its former name Tkumah (‘Revival’), and was appointed its secretary general in 2014. He moved through the Yamina (‘Rightwards’) party into Likud, whose ticket he ran under last year, before moving back to Religious Zionism this summer.

Sofer is a former army major and is of the same opinion as his colleagues: that is, that Palestinian ‘citizens of Israel’ are seeking to “undermine the foundations of the jewish state from within”.

Irony clearly doesn’t exist in the festered minds of these people.

The highest-ranking woman on the Religious Zionist list is Orit Strook, coming in as the probable fourth seat. She founded the ‘Judea and Samaria human rights organisation’ in 2002, which works to bring back biblical names to towns and areas of occupied Palestinian territory in the hope that the original names might be forgotten.

As its name suggests, this organisation exists to protect the ‘human rights’ of the invading zionist colonisers against those occupied Palestinians who object to their dispossession, brutal treatment, lack of rights, internment and/or murder.

The fifth member of this depraved gang is also the youngest, at just 30 years old. Yitzhak Wasserlauf is the chairman of the Jewish Power faction. He calls for the deportation of ‘disloyal’ Palestinians, as do his running mates, but Yitzhak also demands the deportation of x asylum seekers. He doesn’t state whether these would be only those of the non-jewish variety or all immigrants from Africa.

Demonstrating the group’s involvement in all fields of oppression of the Palestinian people, Simha Rothman comes in at number six. He is part of the ‘Temple Movement’ that seeks to destroy the Al-Aqsa mosque. He calls for jewish activists to conduct prayers at the compound against the status quo agreement, which he claims is ‘racist’. As we have already pointed out, irony does not exist in the brain of a zionist!

The seventh named anti-Palestinian racist on the RZ list is Almog Cohen. This ‘hero’ is the founder of a jewish supremacist vigilante team that patrols southern Israel, claiming to “fight crime among Bedouins”.

Cohen has publicly boasted that he assaulted Bedouins in 2013 while part of a police Swat team. It seems that an unidentified team violently beat a father and two sons who were peacefully protesting, urinated on them, and threatened them with a bullet to the head. The identity of the assaulting police officers could not be confirmed, of course, and so the case was closed.

At number eight, Michal Waldiger might seem to be the more ‘humane’ face of Religious Zionism. She is a lawyer focusing on mental health, drug abuse and women’s national service. Oh, and she is also, of course, an advocate for ultranationalist jewish supremacy and forcing Palestinians to ‘behave or be deported’!

At number nine is Amichai Eliyahu. The pseudo-science followed by this one wouldn’t have been out of place in the 1940s German Nazi party. His main focus is on “anti-miscegenation and Israel’s centrality in maintaining the jewish biology”, or, in simpler terminology, keeping the jewish supremacist bloodline ‘clean’.

He has recently targeted former Israeli transportation minister Merav Michaeli, treating her to his misogynist, ultrazionist bile by describing her having had a child through surrogacy as “someone who bought a child on Amazon” and accusing her of trying to “impose her values on us” (that lack of irony again!) by holding an event to inaugurate a new bus line that runs on Saturdays.

At number ten we have retired brigadier general, former head of the Israeli army’s Southern Command, Zvika Fogel marching in. The zionist parties like a big military name on their team, and this is really the only one that ‘Religious Zionism’ can lay claim to.

Many of the ‘leaders’ of RZ have only held lowly military positions, or, like Ben-Gvir, were deemed unfit for service owing to their political views. Fogel is an advocate of the formal annexation of the Jordan valley, has supported the call for the expulsion of ‘disloyal’ Palestinians, and is as unstable as the rest of RZ!

In number eleven, Avi Maoz, who has been confirmed as taking charge of school curricula, NZ have picked a team that leaves no stone unturned when it comes to recruiting their representatives. This one, leader of NOAM, an anti-homosexuality party, is no less rabid than the others regarding jewish supremacy, but believes some of his colleagues are a bit soft on homosexuality.

We can’t find any advocacy for homosexuality among the others on the list, so can only assume that when they come together to discuss their policies Avi Maoz goes a bit further than the others in his support of what he/they call traditional, jewish-orthodox, conservative family values!

In pre-election debates and analysis, it was expected that RZ would capture around ten seats, so Ohad Tal, coming in at number twelve, may have been a bit of a sop to those who worried about the extreme ultrazionism of the other candidates. Any ‘softness’ about this one, though, is only relative to the granite-like jewish supremacy of the others.

He was until recently head of the Bnei Akiva religious zionist youth movement, with all that entails regarding instilling hatred for Arabs into the heads of jewish youth. His stated willingness to compromise and consider other views extends only as far as other groups within the jewish diaspora and their relative animosity to the Arab people of Palestine.

The thirteenth on this possible list is Limor Son Har Hamelech – a ‘settler’ with the required vicious settler mindset. He was one of those evacuated from the Homesh settlement in 2005, when the Israeli government of the time were trying to make themselves look ‘peaceable’. Under the Gaza ‘disengagement’ deal, four Israeli colonies in the West Bank were also evacuated. Hamelech has called for the Israeli colonialists to return to all the areas they left in 2005.

Yitzhak Kroiser is the possible fourteenth person in the RZ knesset group. The son of Rabbi Yehuda Kroiser, who is the chief rabbi of the jewish colony Mitzpeh Jericho, Yehuda Kroiser heads a Jerusalem rabbinic study group called ‘The Jewish Idea’ and is a member of the Jewish Power faction.

Jewish Power’s overt advocacy for expelling Palestinian citizens is not just shared by a crazed minority. In the past, Israel Beitenu leader, and leading anti-Netanyahu voice, Avigdor Lieberman, advocated not just expelling them, but actually decapitating them with an axe. According to a 2016 Pew survey, Israelis were equally divided on whether Palestinians should be expelled, but a very clear majority among those who define themselves as religious supported it.

The scum that rises to the top of a cesspool is clearly indicative of what is happening under the surface, but rather than worry about just how obscene and totally inward-looking Israeli society has become, we must recognise this sign for what it is: an indication that this experiment that is Israel has but a short lifetime left to it.

Meanwhile, as was on glorious show during the Qatar World Cup, people from all the world over, even from the imperialist heartlands, are more and more standing up for Palestine and the right of its people to remove the zionist (thereby also the imperialist) chains from their lives and their lands.