Sderot, Gaza border – The very last thing one expects when arriving at Israel’s international airport during a war in which the nation founded by Holocaust survivors is accused of committing genocide is a young Jewish man giving the stiff-armed Hitler salute to a friend.
He is tall, about twenty-three with a thin black first-timer’s beard, dressed all in black: black yarmulke, black T-shirt with a black cardigan draped over it Ivy-League style, and black combat pants, but instead of boots, a pair of black brothel-creepers. Perhaps just a student with poor taste in humour, but then unalloyed Jewish neo-fascism has been given a boost by last October’s Hamas attack on Israel.
As such, I need to define what I mean by “fascism”, not as a polemical insult, but as an exact political descriptive. Prof Robert O. Paxton of Columbia University, author of The Anatomy of Fascism, cites the following elements: “a sense of overwhelming crisis”, dread of decline under liberal individualism and “alien influences”, and victimhood that justifies and valorises “exclusionary violence” “without legal or moral limits” by an authoritarian in-group which exerts primacy over its members and supremacy over outsiders, seeking the “closer integration of a purer community”, and ultimately led by “a national chieftain” of infallible instinct “incarnating the group’s historical destiny”.
British scholar Roger Griffin’s more succinct definition is of a politics with a “mythic core” based on “a palingenetic form of populist ultranationalism”, that is, a crudely crowd-pleasing myth of ultranationalist regeneration. I believe all these elements are demonstrably present in both Israeli and Palestinian ultra-right parties that I thus describe here as neo-fascist.
Calm
“Here things are calm,” my introductory guide, Josh Koonin, a South African-born former Israeli deputy prime ministerial adviser, tells me, “but the war is only an hour and a half to the south, and only two and a half hours to the north.”
There’s the rub: lacking strategic depth, only 15km wide at its narrowest, and ringed by enemies that vocally demand and periodically attempt its total extinction, Israel evolved a permanent war-readiness culture of full conscription and bomb shelters, and a war economy that produces everything from the assault rifle on which the SANDF’s R4 is based to its own barely mentioned nuclear arsenal.
To call the current near-obliteration of the Gaza Strip in overzealous response to the Hamas-led terrorist invasion of Israel which killed 1,143, and the kidnapping of some 253 hostages on October 7 a “war,” however, is a gross distortion.
Hamas, having lost more than a third of its 30,000 fighters and its ability to fire rockets into Israel, is cowering in bunkers with its remaining 93 hostages (41 others are believed killed), while the brunt of the unprecedented assault on Gaza is being borne by unprotected civilians, of whom at least 26,700 are now dead, 92,400 wounded, and 10,000 still missing under rubble. British medical journal The Lancet estimates that if deaths due to war and blockade conditions are included, the toll may top 186,000.
I have experienced first-hand Israeli aerial bombing before, during the “Summer War” in 2006 in which the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) invaded southern Lebanon in an attempt to crush jihadist Hezbollah forces who had rocketed the north of Israel – and it is a terrifying experience.
Buzzing
There was no air-raid warning, just the buzzing of a targeting drone so high in the blinding-white sky as to be invisible. Then the creeping dread in the pit of my stomach generated by the oncoming sound of the jet-bombers as sweat dripped down my neck in the 37°C heat.
Then the harrowing tunnelling sound of incoming rockets. I just hoped the target wasn’t close, but in Dagieh, south Beirut, the first detonation one day came from only a few hundred metres away and a pall of black smoke rose from an apartment block.
This was the bunker-buster munition that scythed down into the basement where terrified residents had gathered for safety, cleaving a huge wound in the building, with bedrooms and kitchens chopped in half, hanging in mid-air. Then a second later, another deafening detonation of the follow-up smart-bomb that dropped the entire building, sending up a thundercloud of pale grey cement dust.
Clambering over the moonscape ruins of what used to be the homes of scores of families, I came across rescuers, desperation carved into their faces, scrabbling often with their bare hands in the dust. But all they found were the awful grey remains of children that I could not bring myself to photograph.
The experience deeply marked me; to this day I suffer post-traumatic stress disorder from those days; each dead Gazan child I see online affects me profoundly. But because it is impossible to get into Gaza today unless one is an Israeli munition or token aid package, my experience of the slaughter of the innocents of Dagieh will have to stand in for Gaza.
Extremists
But I get as close as I can, taking the road south, to the town of Sderot, just across from northern Gaza, which was hard-hit on October 7. The roads are dotted with concrete boxes that serve as shelters whenever Gazan extremists rocket Israel’s south, and there I meet reservist Lieutenant-Colonel Eyal Hagbi, who has the deeply shrunken cheeks of Boris Karloff in the 1932 classic horror movie, The Mummy.
A former commando critically wounded in the 1982 Israel-Lebanon War, Hagbi was the senior Gaza commander for 18 years, often working personally with Yasser Arafat of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO). He then served as the northern border district’s chief security officer for the past 12 years. So, the intelligence and response failure of Israel to October 7 somewhat falls on his shoulders. Perhaps that is why, as he speaks in Hebrew, his demeanour is bashful.
“They caught us with our pants around our ankles,” he admits to me, his assault rifle close to hand. For though the October 7 assault started with the accustomed, almost yawn-worthy rocket barrage, it was followed by jihadis flying across the border by microlight, machine-guns in their hands and mass murder on their meth-addled minds.
Many of their targets were precisely the sort of progressive kibbutz residents who worked alongside Palestinians in peace-building. The old Israeli left that had ruled from 1948 until 1977 had been too steeped in Zionism, but the First Intifada, the Palestinian national liberation uprising over 1987-1993, Koonin tells me, “created a new Israeli left that sees the Palestinians in their own right”.
Genuine sympathy for the frustrated dreams of the stone-throwing youth saw a new consciousness among Israelis that they had to give Palestine its freedom. This led to the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993 that created the Palestinian Authority under Arafat’s dominant Fatah component of the PLO coalition.
Even the 1995 assassination by a Jewish fascist of Arafat’s opposite, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, failed to derail the liberation process, which envisaged shared sovereignty on the Temple Mount – the fulcrum of confessional conflict in the region – as well as independence for the Gaza Strip and an initial 90% of the West Bank.
Fatal error
Yet unlike South Africa’s granting of independence to occupied Namibia, this was not to be achieved in one go, but was to be staggered. The delay turned out to be a fatal error that played into the hands of the outraged Palestinian secular and jihadi ultra-right and gave them time to plot sabotage.
The shock of the Second Intifada, with 141 successful suicide bombings in Israel that killed 1,193 people, 78% of them civilian, when Palestine was firmly on the path to statehood, destroyed all Israeli optimism for a peaceful settlement. In Palestine and the Arab world, emboldened by the mass-murdering spectacle of 9/11, jihadi groups with an outspoken genocidal intent towards Israel proliferated.
To talk of “terrorist organisations” in government on both sides of the border, whether Hamas or Jewish Power, misses the point: the ultras are in fact rent-seeking enterprises run by authoritarian elites whose mass-motivational ideology is the fascist death cult, whose insatiable maw is continually fed by “martyrs” sacrificed to a permanent existential adversary.
Terrorism, whether it is a Palestinian jihadi raping then executing Jewish girls or Jewish ultra-nationalist settlers burying Palestinian youths alive, is merely one organisational tool, alongside control of religious and social services, that maintains in power by fear in Rafah and Tel Aviv groups that would otherwise be neo-fascist nobodies and ensures their access to resources.
The international crime of genocide is unique in that unlike other first-tier crimes such as war crimes or crimes against humanity, it is necessary to prove intent: the “intent to destroy in whole or in part” a group based on their nationality, ethnicity, race, or religion.
Actual death tolls, horrific though they are on the Palestinian side and with several clear cases of war crimes, are not determinant: genocide can involve merely calling for extermination, as both Salafists and Kahanists have, or making a place unliveable, as has happened to much of Gaza and to parts of many border kibbutzes and towns, or the forcible removal of children from their parents, as has also occurred in both areas.
Zero-sum game
In a zero-sum game, the Second Intifada saw jihadi rockets rain down on Israel almost continuously, leading to the Iron Dome missile shield and the much-hated Gaza and West Bank apartheid border barriers being built; illegal Jewish settlements exploded. The occupied territories became a Kafkaesque patchwork of increasingly desperate alternate realities that I visit but struggle to comprehend.
Meanwhile, a large but faint pall of black smoke hangs over the devastated Gaza City suburbs of Jabaliyah and Beit Lahiyah, indicating the site of a previous Israeli airstrike, still burning.
Standing 3,9km away at the fence-line of kibbutz Kfar ‘Azza, I hear the regular sonic punches of Israeli artillery, followed by sporadic heavy machine-gun fire across the border, but after some time of quiet, a C130 Hercules transport plane made a slow circuit over the city, probably dropping aid further south.
With archaeology going back 5,000 years because it is sited on the main route from Egypt to Mesopotamia, Gaza is an ancient name. It is derived from ‘Azza, its meaning lost in the mists of time, but from it is, sadly given the current bombings of hospitals, derived the word gauze, for the dressing of wounds. And it was here that by biblical legend, a blinded Samson brought the Philistine temple down around his ears, just as Hamas has done to their own Palestine house today.
“This is the new playbook of terrorism,” petite dark-haired Kfar ‘Azza resident Chen Kotler says. She is fortunate her family narrowly survived the October invasion. At least 100 jihadis were killed in a three-day firefight with the IDF, which marked each building cleared with a yellow lozenge with a C inside, and a red circle with a red dot inside to indicate where 63 Israeli bodies were found; 19 were taken hostage.
Blackened ruins
In nearby Kibbutz Be‘eri, a libertarian communist commune that had excellent relations with its neighbouring Gazans, a blonde former Capetonian woman married to an Arab shows me around: “My husband is dark and was dressed in black, so the terrorists thought he was one of theirs.” This saved their lives.
But I stand in the blackened ruins of the home of Vivian Silver, 74, who ran a 50,000-member Jewish-Palestinian peace initiative, Women Wage Peace, which regularly transported Palestinians from the border to get hospital treatment. Silver suffocated to death from fires set by the killers and is among 97 Be‘eri dead, both Jews and Arabs.
“Our children are pulling their hair out from anxiety. They go into shock if they hear Arabic,” the woman says; as the ultras intended, the bonds of multinational friendship, carefully woven together over decades by Jewish and Muslim peace activists, have frayed and many have snapped. Close by, I hear the regular, heavy tread of vengeful Israeli artillery strikes in what remains of Gaza.
[Image: Michael Schmidt. Harmony: Two girls chat in the northern Israeli village of Peki’in, a settlement where Muslims, Jews, Christians, and Druze live peacefully side by side, the very image of a future based on good-neighbourliness that Israeli and Palestinian death-cults aim to destroy]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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