Neo-Zionism takes aim at liberal democracy
For more than two decades, Israel's political landscape has been inching further and further to the right. The fact that Benjamin Netanyahu's new government, his sixth, includes several right-wing extremist politicians as ministers can be seen as a logical consequence of this development.
The deeper reasons behind the ongoing shift were already addressed back in 2012 by the German-Israeli historian Tamar Amar-Dahl, a native of Israel who teaches at the FU Berlin, in her study "Zionist Israel and the Question of Palestine: Jewish Statehood and the History of the Middle East Conflict".
Her analysis of the Israeli point of view on the conflict was based on the concept of "civil militarism", an attitude that Israeli sociologist Baruch Kimmerling declared a central feature of the country's political culture back in in 1993.
According to Kimmerling, the fact that the government and its elites consistently rely on military options ultimately runs counter to the pursuit of a peaceful solution to the conflict with the Arabs.
Kimmerling's thesis quickly became popular in academic circles, even though the rapidly ensuing about-face in Israeli's Palestinian policy seemed to contradict it: the Oslo Peace Accords were concluded in 1993-95 by Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin – a former general and war hero.
However, as Tamar Amar-Dahl now points out in her new book, "The Triumph of Neo-Zionism: Israel in the New Millennium" (currently available in German only: "Der Siegeszug des Neozionismus: Israel im neuen Millennium"), the heyday of "peace ideology" at that time would have been short-lived anyway.
This is because even Rabin and his fellow politician Shimon Peres were already under the sway of civil militarism, as evidenced by their refusal to green-light the establishment of a Palestinian state.
Their successors as well – whether Netanyahu of the right-wing Likud or Rabin's and Peres's party colleague Ehud Barak – deemed such a move to be out of the question, citing security concerns.
With regard to Barak's policies, Amar-Dahl repeats the claim, commonly heard in leftist circles in Israel, that during the peace negotiations at and shortly after the Camp David summit, he deliberately made the Palestinians an offer that was generous but that they would never have accepted.
The presumption is that Barak's true aim was to put an end to the peace process. The offer made it easy to blame Arafat when the peace talks broke down.
Military thinking quickly regained the upper hand
In the spirit of civil militarism, whose proponents see the Arabs as an eternal enemy, Israel then spun a version of events that cast Palestinian President Yasser Arafat as deliberate instigator of the Al-Aqsa Intifada in 2000 – a notion that has since been refuted by historians.
In the new millennium, military thinking then quickly regained the upper hand in Israel. The army responded with brute force to the Palestinian uprising, unleashing what the author refers to as a "war". For Amar-Dahl, the forced occupation of the Palestinian territories, which was only cemented further by the Israeli response to the Al-Aqsa Intifada, constitutes the continuation of that war to this day.
That peace was no longer an alternative for Israel from that time forward – under the right-wing Zionist governments of Ariel Sharon, Ehud Olmert and Netanyahu – is, however, incorrect with respect to Olmert.
Because, despite the detailed and solid chronicle of the conflict in those years that Amar-Dahl's book provides, it omits any reference to the Israeli-Palestinian peace talks in Annapolis in 2007. Both parties were close to reaching an agreement at the time, but it ultimately failed to materialise when Olmert was forced to resign over a corruption scandal, leaving Mahmoud Abbas without a real partner in the dialogue.
Jewish exclusivity more important than democracy
Amar-Dahl's observations on Israel's ideological shift to the right during Netanyahu's long term in office (2009–21) are revealing. In addition to the still strong factors of civil militarism and occupation – combined with a continuing "colonisation" of the Palestinian territories – "neo-Zionism" became increasingly dominant in Israeli policy during this period.
The term was coined by Israeli sociologist Uri Ram in 2005 and has been the subject of controversy ever since. Amar-Dahl introduces readers to this debate, but does not commit to a specific definition of the term.
The distinguishing features of neo-Zionism for her seem to be not only the right's increasingly uncompromising aspiration to achieving "Eretz Israel", a deliberately rather vague concept in territorial terms, but also the religious connotations of that concept. Neo-Zionist is hence notable for its increased tendency toward Jewish exclusivity, which has more and more gone against the grain of liberal democracy as it had long been understood by left-wing Zionists.
The latter direction can be presumed based on a series of laws passed since 2011, culminating in the Nation-State Act of 2018. This act places the Jewish nature of the state above democracy, a concept that does not even appear in the text of the law, and reaffirms the claim to "Eretz Israel" as the homeland of the Jewish people.
Amar-Dahl vividly traces the fierce Israeli debate surrounding this law and also the charges launched against it before the Supreme Court. Mention is made as well of the attack by then Knesset Speaker Yariv Levin against Supreme Court President Esther Hayut.
Levin wrote Hayut a letter in 2020, a highly unusual act, in which he refused to accept the court's authority to rule retroactively on the Nation-State Act passed by parliament – a prelude to Levin's current, hotly contested campaign in his capacity as justice minister in the new Netanyahu government to curtail the powers of chief justices.
Netanyahu's decisive role
With the adoption of an amendment to the Israeli Basic Law on the judiciary on 24 July of this year, the first step has now been taken to alter the jurisdiction of the courts. The new law prohibits all courts, including the Supreme Court, from overturning government decisions on grounds of unreasonableness.
Netanyahu's decisive role in the successive shift to the right is the subject of the last chapter of Amar-Dahl's book. For her, he is not only a "neo-Zionist" but is also "obsessed with power". In her brief biographical sketch, she draws on the picture painted of Netanyahu by his Israeli biographers.
The long-standing prime minister has not only taken advantage of crisis-ridden Israeli politics with its increasing divisions to style himself as the only capable unifier and leader, she asserts, but has even deliberately deepened the rifts between the camps.
According to the author, Netanyahu's success lies not least in his ability to make strategic use of the resentment of Sephardic-Oriental Jews toward the Ashkenazi establishment. She does not however provide any empirical evidence that he has succeeded in disempowering the "left-wing Zionist elites".
On the other hand, Amar-Dahl's diagnosis that Netanyahu has succeeded in pushing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict off the agenda of Israeli politics rings true. Nevertheless, this "historic contribution" by Benjamin Netanyahu to the rise of neo-Zionism seems to owe far more to the Israelis' acquiescence to the occupation than even critical observers of the conflict would care to admit.
© Qantara.de 2023
Translated from the German by Jennifer Taylor
Tamar Amar-Dahl: "Der Siegeszug des Neozionismus: Israel im neuen Millennium", published in German by Promedia, 222 pages