Israelis have been deeply divided these last years, unable to coalesce around a government. After five general elections, they decided to dismiss the Lapid/Gantz team and to put a new coalition – formed around Netanyahu and small Jewish supremacist parties – into power.
However, soon after the formation of the new government, there occurred an severe outbreak of ‘buyers’ remorse’, with a substantial segment of Israelis seemingly ready to contemplate almost anything to oust their government.
Demonstrations have occurred regularly throughout Israel to prevent the country from becoming – in the words of one former Mossad director, “a racist and violent state that cannot survive”.
But it is probably already too late.
Most people outside Israel tend to lump together different, and often opposing views in Israel, solely through the reductive perspective of seeing all these diverse actors as being Jews and Zionists of slightly differing hues.
They couldn’t be more wrong. There is an existential divide; there are diverse forms of Zionism: The divisions go to the very meaning of what it means to be a Jew. Benjamin Netanyahu is a ‘revisionist Zionist’ i.e. a follower of Vladimir Jabotinsky (for whom his father Benzion Netanyahu served as private secretary): ‘Revisionist Zionism’ is the polar opposite to the cultural Zionism of the World Jewish Congress.
As a young man, Netanyahu professed that Palestine is “a land without a people for a people without a land”. He was consequently in favour of expelling all Arab ‘blow-ins’ (as he saw them). Furthermore, he advocated the idea that the State of Israel extends “from the Nile to the Euphrates”.
However, during his 16 years as prime minister, Netanyahu was perceived as having moderated (become more pragmatic), but still devious. With hindsight, maybe he simply adapted to the times. Or possibly, he was practicing Straussian ‘double-truth’ – the practice which Leo Strauss taught his followers as the only means of preserving ‘true’ Judaism within the encompassing ‘liberal-European’ (largely Ashkenazi) ethos. Strauss’ ‘esoterism’ (drawn from Maimonides, the early Jewish mystic), was one of outwardly professing a ‘worldly thing’, whilst inwardly preserving a completely contrasting esoteric reading of the world.
Just to be clear: Revisionist Zionists (of which Netanyahu is one), include Menachem Begin and Ariel Sharon who demonstrated that of which they were capable with the Nakba (the mass expulsion of Palestinians) in 1948.
Netanyahu is of this ‘line’ – and so is a key dominant faction in Washington.
The ‘war’ with Washington, post-7 Oct
At first, Washington reacted with unreflective and immediate support for Israel, vetoing various UNSC ceasefire resolutions and fully provisioning Israel’s military needs for the destruction of the Palestinian enclave in Gaza. It was unthinkable in the U.S.’ Establishment eyes, to do anything other than support Israel. Israel’s Qualitative Military Edge (QME) is enshrined as being one of the foundational structures supporting the brittle branch on which U.S. hegemony rests.
Ordinary Americans (and some in the Administration) however, were watching the horrors of genocide ‘live’ on their cell phones. The Democratic Party started to fracture badly. The ‘power-brokers’ in the backroom began to put pressure on the Israeli war cabinet to negotiate the release of the hostages and conclude a ceasefire in Gaza – hoping for a return to the status quo ante.
But Netanyahu’s government – in various tautological ways – said ‘no’, unashamedly playing on the 7 October trauma of its citizens, to assert the need to destroy Hamas.
Washington somewhat belatedly came to understand that 7 October was now the pretext for Jabotinsky’s followers to do what they had always wanted to do: To expel the Palestinians from Palestine.
The Israeli message was perfectly ‘received and understood’ by Washington’s ruling strata: The Revisionist Zionists (who represent about 2 million Israelis) intended cynically to impose their will on the Anglo-Saxons; to threaten them with igniting war with the world, in which the U.S. would ‘burn’: They would not hesitate to plunge the U.S. into a wide regional war, should the White House try to undercut the neo-Nakba project.
In spite of the absolute support Israel has across Washington, it seems that the ruling class decided that the ‘Revisionist stratagem’ ultimatum could not be tolerated. A crucial U.S. election was in train. U.S. soft power around the World was collapsing. Anyone around the globe watching events unfold understood that killing 40,000+ innocent people had nothing to do with eliminating Hamas.
Understanding the Background
To understand the nature of this occult war between the Revisionist Zionists and Washington, it is necessary to revisit Leo Strauss, a German Jew, who had left Germany in 1932 under the auspices of a Rockefeller Foundation grant, finally to arrive in the U.S. in 1938.
The point here is that the ideas at play in this ideological struggle are not just about Israelis and Palestinians. They are about control and power. The essence of the present Israeli government’s agenda – particularly its controversial Legal Reform – are pure Leo Strauss derivatives.
The concern amongst U.S. rulers was that Netanyahu’s agenda was becoming an exercise in pure Straussian power – at the expense of secular American power.
That is to say that the Revisionist notions are shared by the influential group of Americans that formed about this Professor of Philosophy – Leo Strauss – at the University of Chicago. Many accounts report that he had formed a small inner group of faithful Jewish students to whom he gave private oral instruction: The esoteric inner meaning to politics was centred, hearsay recounts, on asserting political hegemony as the means to guard against a new Shoah (holocaust).
The core of Strauss’s thought – the theme to which he would return time and again – is what he called the curious polarity between Jerusalem and Athens. What did these two names signify? On the surface, it would seem that Jerusalem and Athens represent two fundamentally different, even antagonistic, codes or ways of life.
The Bible, Strauss held, presents itself not as a philosophy or a science, but as a code of law; an unchangeable divine law mandating how we should live. In fact, the first five books of the Bible are known in the Jewish tradition as the Torah and ‘Torah’ is perhaps most literally translated as ‘Law’. The attitude taught by the Bible is not one of self-reflection or critical examination – but of absolute obedience, faith, and trust in Revelation. If the paradigmatic Athenian is Socrates, the paradigmatic biblical figure is Abraham and the Akedah (the binding of Isaac), who is prepared to sacrifice his son for an unintelligible divine command.
‘Yes’ western liberal democracy brought civil equality, tolerance, and the end to the worst forms of persecution. Yet at the same time, liberalism required of Judaism – as it does of all faiths – to undergo the privatization of belief, the transformation of Jewish law from a communal authority to the precincts of individual conscience. The result, as Strauss analysed it, was a mixed blessing.
The liberal principle of the separation of state and society, of public life and private belief, could not but result in the “Protestantisation” of Judaism, he suggested.
To be clear: these two antagonistic ways of being express fundamentally different moral and political points of view. This is the essence of what divides the two ‘camps’ that inhabit Israel today: Democratic ‘cultural Judaism’ versus the Judaism of faith and obedience to divine Revelation.
Setting the Trap for the U.S.
The U.S. Straussians began forming a political group half a century ago, in 1972. They were all members of Democratic Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson’s staff, and included Elliott Abrams, Richard Perle and David Wurmser. In 1996, this Straussians trio wrote a study for the new Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. This report (the Clean Break Strategy) advocated the elimination of Yasser Arafat; the annexation of the Palestinian territories; a war against Iraq and the transfer of Palestinians there. Netanyahu was very much a member of this circle.
The Strategy was inspired not only by the political theories of Leo Strauss, but also by those of his friend, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the founder of Revisionist Zionism, to whom Netanyahu’s father served as private secretary.
For the avoidance of confusion, the American Straussians – today usually called ‘neo-cons’ – are not in principle opposed to the Netanyahu government’s Nakba agenda. It was not Gazans suffering that exercised them; rather, it was the threats by the Revisionist Zionists to launch an attack on Iran and on Lebanon. For, were this war to be launched, the Israeli army – for certain – would not be able to defeat Hezbollah on its own. And for Israel to wage war on Iran would amount to certifiable madness.
Thus to save Israel, the U.S. undoubtedly would be forced to intervene. The balance of military power has shifted considerably towards both Hizbullah and Iran since the Israeli-Lebanese war of 2006 and any war now would be a fraught and risky undertaking.
Yet – this was of the essence to the Israeli government’s unspoken ‘esoteric’ (inner) agenda.
Washington tries to Push Back, but finds itself Check-Mated
The only alternative for the U.S. would be to encourage a military coup in Tel Aviv. Already, some senior officers and non-commissioned Israeli officers have come together to suggest this. In March 2024, General Benny Gantz was invited to Washington (against the wishes of the PM). He did not, however, accept the invitation to overthrow the Prime Minister. He went to make sure that he could still save Israel, and that his allies in the U.S. would not turn against the Israeli military cadre.
This may seem odd. But the reality is that the IDF feels undermined, even betrayed. The agreement struck at the outset of the government between Netanyahu and Itamar Ben-Gvir (of Otzma Yehudit) – was the outlier to this anxiety.
The governmental accord provided for Ben-Gvir to head an autonomous armed force in the West Bank. He was given charge not only of the national police, but also the border police, which until then, had been the responsibility of the Ministry of Defence.
The accord also provided for the creation of a large-scale National Guard and a reinforced presence of reserve troops within the border police.
Ben-Gvir is a Kahanist, meaning a disciple of Rabbi Meir Kahane, who demands the expulsion of Palestinian Arab citizens from Israel and the Occupied Territories and the establishment of a theocracy, and he makes little secret of wanting to use the border police to expel the Palestinian populations, be they Muslim or Christian.
Ben Gvir’s official forces represent, as Benny Gantz noted, a ‘private army’. But that is the half of it – for he separately holds the allegiance of hundreds of thousand West Bank settler-vigilantes over whom the radical Rabbi, Dov Lior and his coterie of radical Jabotinsky Rabbi influencers, have control.
The regular army fears these vigilantes – as we saw at Sde Teiman military base – when Ben Gvir’s militia vigilantes stormed the base, to protect soldiers accused of raping Palestinian prisoners.
The anxiety of the Israeli military echelon at the reality of this ‘Jabotinsky army’ is evidenced by former PM Ehud Barak’s warning that:
“Under cover of the war, a governmental and constitutional putsch is now taking place in Israel without a shot being fired. If this putsch isn’t stopped, it will turn Israel into a de facto dictatorship within weeks. Netanyahu and his government are assassinating democracy … The only way to prevent a dictatorship at such a late stage is by shutting down the country through large-scale, nonviolent civil disobedience, 24/7, until this government falls … Israel has never faced such a serious and immediate internal threat to its existence and future as a free society”.
The IDF élite want a ceasefire/hostage deal, primarily to ‘stop Ben-Gvir’ – not because it resolves Israel’s Palestinian issue. It doesn’t.
But Netanyahu’s ultimatum is that if the Haniyeh assassination isn’t sufficient to plunge the U.S. into the Big War that will give him (Netanyahu) the Great Victory, he can always trigger a bigger provocation: Ben Gvir also controls the Temple Mount security – there is always the Temple Mount/Al-Aqsa escalatory ladder available for climbing (through threatening the destruction of Al-Aqsa Mosque).
America is trapped. The power-brokers are unhappy, but impotent.