Max Blumenthal :Politicide in Gaza: How Israel's Far Right Won the War

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At the end of the fifty-day Israeli offensive on the Gaza Strip, neither Israel nor Hamas had achieved their stated goals there: the armed resistance was still standing (despite the massive damage the territory and its people sustained) and the crippling Israeli siege was not lifted. Rather, this essay argues, it was Israel’s far right that emerged the victor. Not only did religious nationalists and secular extremists outflank the right-wing establishment, they justified the brutality of their actions in the military battle zone with messianic pronouncements, and fanned the flames of genocide in the public arena. The far right’s wartime success represented the culmination of a strategy Israeli sociologist Baruch Kimmerling has called “politicide,” a coinage denoting the partial or total destruction of a community of people with a view to denying them self-determination.

SINCE SIGNING a one-month cease-fire, Hamas and the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have both struggled to explain to their constituents what they accomplished during the fifty days of fighting. Hamas’s leadership cast the war as a battle of national liberation, promising residents of the Gaza Strip the loosening of Israel’s punishing eight-year siege.1 Yet after seeing 25 percent of Gaza reduced to ruins, over twenty-one hundred killed, and the transfer of control of its border crossings to the Palestinian Authority (PA), Hamas settled into an agreement that appears to offer none of the demands it sought at the onset of war. For his part, Netanyahu and his allies vowed to shatter Hamas’s political infrastructure, eliminate its network of tunnels, and transform Gaza from a bastion of armed resistance into a defanged Ramallah-on-the-sea.2 But after losing over seventy soldiers, evacuating much of its southern kibbutzim for weeks, and compounding its international pariah status, Israel had achieved little more than the consolidation of the status quo.

Beyond the stalemate, however, the war concluded with a clear winner. It was Israel’s radical right, the post-Oslo generation of religious nationalists and secular extremists who have begun to supersede the established right wing represented by Netanyahu. During the war, these elements influenced events to an unprecedented degree, from the public squares of Tel Aviv, where organized thugs violently crushed antiwar protests, to the killing fields of Gaza, where an officer corps infiltrated by religious nationalists orchestrated a series of astoundingly brutal slash-and-burn assaults. The far right’s wartime success represented the culmination of the strategy the Israeli sociologist Baruch Kimmerling called “politicide,” or the calculated destruction of part of—or an entire—community of people in order to deny them self-determination.

In his classic 2003 biography of Ariel Sharon, the warrior-politician he cast as the architect of the practice, Kimmerling wrote, “Murders, localized massacres, the elimination of leadership and elite groups, the physical destruction of public institutions and infrastructure, land colonization, starvation, social and political isolation, re-education, and partial ethnic cleansing are the major tools used to achieve this goal.”3

Kimmerling concluded that the application of politicide against the Palestinian people had transformed Israel into “a Thatcherist and semi-fascist regime” hostile to dissident expressions, resentful of the other, and repelled by democracy.4 Since his book’s publication, the apocalyptic trends he outlined have intensified dramatically and brought into positions of power figures that make the draconian, famously secretive Sharon seem like a cautious moderate. Calls for ethnic cleansing and incitement to genocide have become a familiar feature of mainstream Israeli discourse, while a clear majority of Israelis favor a broad array of policies aimed at forcible segregation. Once one of the Likud party’s radical young Turks, Netanyahu suddenly finds himself at the hollow center of Israeli politics, under unrelenting pressure from incipient extreme-rightist forces to pursue the most drastic measures at his disposal to shatter the Palestinian national struggle. With genuine political opposition forced to the extreme margins, limits on Israel’s malevolent capacity have been virtually erased.

After decades of politicide, Israeli society has been sapped of the capacity to counter the narrative or agenda scripted by hyper-nationalists of either the secular or theocratic variety. In such a combustible atmosphere, only a small spark was needed to light the flames that would eventually devour Gaza.

A Shallow Grave

At 10:00 P.M. on 12 June 2014, at a busy crossroads in the occupied West Bank, near the Jewish settlement of Kefar Etzion, three Israeli hitchhikers disappeared. Naftali Frenkel, Gilad Shaar, and Eyal Yifrach, all teenagers, entered a car with two strangers only to realize that they had been kidnapped by Palestinians. 

The kidnapping occurred against the backdrop of the collapse of the U.S.-led framework negotiations between Israel and the PA. The talks broke down in April when Economy Minister Naftali Bennett of the religious nationalist Jewish Home party threatened to bolt from the coalition government if Netanyahu agreed to U.S. and PA demands to release a batch of Palestinian prisoners.5 Throughout the talks, Netanyahu approved thousands of new settlement units, but the pressure from his right remained unrelenting. Finally, Netanyahu cancelled the prisoner release, blaming the move on plans by Fatah and Hamas to form a unity government, and then proceeded to freeze the negotiations.6 After vacating his luxury suite in Jerusalem, U.S. negotiator and longtime pro-Israel lobbyist Martin Indyk took the unusual step of publicly blaming the Israeli government for sabotaging the deal.7 Next, the United States recognized the Palestinian unity government, prompting Israeli comments that described the American move as aiding and abetting terrorism.8 The outraged prime minister was determined to reverse the diplomatic setback by any means.

Deprived of a political means to secure the prisoners’ freedom, a rogue Hamas cell decided to take matters into its own hands, staging a kidnapping without the knowledge of the organization’s leadership. Marwan Qawasmeh and Amer Abu Aysha set out from Hebron toward Kefar Etzion in search of Israelis to kidnap as collateral for Palestinian prisoners. The plan quickly unraveled when Gilad Shaar phoned the Israeli police to report his abduction. Qawasmeh and Abu Aysha shot the teens to death almost immediately, then buried their bodies in a shallow grave on property Qawasmeh had purchased adjacent to his family’s home near Hebron.9 After nearly four months in hiding, the two were assassinated by the Israeli military in Hebron this September. 

Prime Minister Netanyahu and his National Security Council received news of the kidnapping the following day from the Shin Bet and police investigators. They huddled together and listened to the phone call Shaar placed to police, in which the sound of gunshots and the kidnappers’ celebratory singing were audible. Then they examined evidence gathered from inside the burned remnants of the kidnappers’ stolen car—blood, bullets, DNA.10 All signs pointed to a case of triple homicide. Yet instead of announcing that the teens had likely been killed, or releasing the names of the suspects, which they had in hand, then ordering a police action to catch them, Netanyahu deployed a stunningly cynical deception that would send violence spiraling out of control.

According to Bat Galim Shaar, the mother of Gilad, police investigators deliberately deceived herinto believing her son was still alive, insisting that the gunshots she heard in the recorded call he placed to police were actually blanks, and that no DNA was found in the kidnappers’ burned car, when blood and bullets were present throughout the vehicle. “I was naive,” Shaar recalled, “I told everyone Gilad would be home before Shabbat.”11

Not only had Netanyahu and the investigators concealed key facts from the mothers of the teens, they concealed the details of the case from the entire Israeli public, setting themup for a catastrophic reaction when the truth was finally revealed. The Israeli military imposed a gag order on the investigation, threatening journalists with penalties that included jail time.12 Netanyahu was not about to allow the facts of the case interfere with what seemed like a prime opportunity for politicide. His target was not the teens’ killers, but the new Palestinian unity government.

On 17 June, the day Israel rolled out its #BringBackOurBoys social media campaign, pleading for sympathy from Western diplomats and Jewish groups around the world, it thrust thousands of troops into the West Bank, raiding towns and cities far from the scene of the crime under the guise of a rescue campaign called Operation Brother’s Keeper. The army claimed to be targeting the organization it held collectively responsible for the crime—Hamas—rounding up hundreds of its members, including scores of prisoners released under the 2011 prisoner swap for the captive soldier Gilad Shalit. (Khader Adnan and Samer Issawi, two prisoners not affiliated with Hamas who earned hero status in Palestinian society for their successful hunger strikes following rearrest after the Gilad Shalit swap, were among those that were detained in the West Bank sweep.13) In the process, Israel closed off the entire area around Hebron, preventing some twenty-three thousand from traveling to jobs inside Israel.14

As the raids in the West Bank continued with overt cooperation from PA security forces, Hamas leadership watched with consternation. Their political cadres were being herded into prison cells without criminal charges, and all they could do was watch. Yet even as splinter factions launched periodic rocket salvos into southern Israel from Gaza, Hamas’s al-Qassam Brigades held its fire. On 29 June, Netanyahu authorized airstrikes on Gaza, announcing, “We are ready to expand this operation as per need.”15

All along, the bodies of the three murdered Israeli teens lay in a shallow grave on the Qawasmeh property in Halhul, only ten kilometers from the site of the kidnapping. They lay there for twelve days, somehow eluding the advanced monitoring capabilities of Israeli satellites, surveillance cameras, police investigators, and the vast informant network the Shin Bet operates in the West Bank. The longer the teens’ bodies decayed, the more rapidly Israeli society lost its composure. A spontaneously-created Facebook page demanded the execution of one Palestinian prisoner for each hour the teens remained missing, while another called “The People of Israel Demand Revenge” garnered more than thirty-five thousand “likes” from mostly young Israelis in just a few days.16 When a volunteer search team happened upon the bodies on 30 June at 6:00 A.M., the bloodlust seething just below the surface of Israeli society exploded into the open.

Hunting for “Human Animals”

Netanyahu had earned highmarks fromthe Israeli public for his handling of the operation in the West Bank—or at least, what they knew of it. Behind the scenes, however, he was under mounting pressure. Economy Minister Bennett, an articulate tech industry millionaire who had almost singlehandedly brought the pro-settler Jewish Home party out of the margins and into the mainstream, was gaining in polls by mocking Netanyahu’s hardline security cabinet as “leftist.”17 For his part, Foreign Minister Lieberman had begun drumming up support for a full reoccupation of the Gaza Strip, a scenario the military-intelligence establishment considered a recipe for disaster. Having already set the stage for the crisis by blocking the release of Palestinian prisoners, the two would remain a thorn in Netanyahu’s right side for its duration, provoking him relentlessly toward inflammatory rhetoric and escalated violence.

When Netanyahu issued his first official statement on the discovery of the teens’ bodies, he revealed how deeply the far-right agitation had aroused his latent radicalism. Referring to the teens’ killers as “human animals,” Netanyahu went on to declare that “Hamas is responsible and Hamas will pay,” foreshadowing the full-scale assault on Gaza.18 Then, in an appeal to the basest sentiments of the Jewish Israeli public, Netanyahu proclaimed, “Vengeance for the blood of a small child, Satan has not yet created.”19

Netanyahu’s words were an excerpt from the Hebrew poet Chaim Bialik’s “On the Slaughter,” a biblically-inspired lament that dramatized a brutal 1903 pogrom incited by the Russian tsar, which left scores of Jews dead in the town of Kishinev. Bialik’s poetry helped radicalize thousands of young Jews across Eastern Europe, inspiring the formation of self-defense committees and winning waves of adherents to the militant philosophy of Zionism. Among those most influenced by Bialik was Vladimir Jabotinsky, the right-wing Zionist activist who would later become a political benefactor of Netanyahu’s father, Benzion. In Netanyahu’s demagogic appropriation of Bialik’s verse, the “human animals” of Palestine had inherited the genocidal spirit of the tsar’s mobs and would repeat their crimes unless Jews were prepared to fight to the finish. Having manipulated the public into believing the teens were alive, the prime minister now spurred them to blood vengeance. Within hours, mobs of Jewish youths filled the squares of central Jerusalem to chant, “Death to Arabs!” and search for Palestinians to assault. The “ultras,” who comprised the hardcore fan base of Jerusalem’s Beitar soccer club, provided experienced muscle to the demonstrations. As active duty Israeli soldiers took to Facebook to demand revenge, posting photos of themselves with the weapons they were aching to use, political upstarts rushed to issue calls for blood vengeance and the “annihilation” of Hamas.

Ayelet Shaked, the telegenic, thirty-eight-year-old poster girl of the right-wing Jewish Home party, earned thousands of Facebook likes from mostly young Israelis with her genocidal call for the mass slaughter of Palestinian women to prevent them from giving birth to “little snakes.” Though more restrained than Shaked, the Labor Party’s grand old man Shimon Peres used the funeral of the three teens as a platform to call for the Israeli army to “act with a heavy hand until terror is uprooted.”20 Joining Peres at the dais was Netanyahu, who bellowed, “A deep moral divide separates us from our enemies. They sanctify death. We sanctify life. They sanctify cruelty. We sanctify compassion.”21

Rabbi Noam Perel, the secretary general of Bnei Akiva, the world’s largest religious Zionist youth movement, upped the ante on incitement when he called for turning the Israelimilitary into an army of avengers “which will not stop at three hundred Philistine foreskins.”22 (Akiva’s appeal alluded to the first book of Samuel, in which the biblical character David kills two hundred Philistines and brings back their foreskins as evidence that he has done so.)

With ultranationalist mobs gathering in cities across Israel, a small car entered the back streets of Shu‘fat, a Palestinian neighborhood in East Jerusalem. Behind its darkened windows were three young men hunting for Arab boys.

Over the Cliff

The stately stone homes of Shu‘fat line a four-lane boulevard that serves as the main artery between settlements like Pisgat Ze’ev and central Jerusalem. The steel tracks of Jerusalem’s light rail system bisect the road, shepherding thousands of settlers through the Palestinian neighborhood each day, along with the private security guards hired to protect them. Shu‘fat’s light rail stop bristles with security cameras installed by the Jerusalem municipality, another reminder of the endless occupation. To ease the settlers’ path through the neighborhood, the municipality has begun to build a new access road that slices directly through the olive groves lining the hillsides of Shu‘fat. Local residents suspect it is the first step toward the seizure of their land and perhaps their expulsion as well.

On a corner of Shu‘fat’s main road, across a narrow lane from the local mosque, is the home of the Abu Khdeir family. Mohammed Abu Khdeir, a sixteen-year-old student at the Amal high school, wandered from inside his home and perched himself on a stone wall facing the road. It was early in the morning on 2 July, just hours after the conclusion of the three Israeli teens’ funeral. Three young men approached Abu Khdeir to ask the wiry teen for directions. As soon as he was within reach, they grabbed him and threw him in their car, then sped away. A group of locals attempted to give chase but failed to reach the vehicle or summon help to stop it. Later that day, Abu Khdeir’s burned body was found in the woods near Givat Shaul. He had been bludgeoned unconscious, doused with gasoline, and burned alive.

The crime bore all the signs of a Jewish nationalist revenge killing. However, the Israeli police proceeded to insinuate otherwise, planting slanderous disinformation with the national media that suggested Abu Khdeir was the victim of an honor crime—killed by a member of his own family for supposed homosexual activity. According to several members of the Abu Khdeir family I interviewed, Israeli police threatened to “ruin the lives” of the young men who attempted to chase down the killers’ car, then sought interrogation sessions with members of Abu Khdeir’s immediate family.23 When Amir Peretz, a former Labor Party stalwart serving as a minister in Netanyahu’s coalition, appeared uninvited at the family’s mourning tent, he was subsequently bombarded with death threats and hate mail by Israeli Jews. While Netanyahu expressed shame over the murder, it was too late to contain the violence he helped inspire.

Under the cover of another gag order imposed on the Israeli media, the ringleader of the three killers, a thirty-year-old resident of the nearby settlement of Adam, Yosef Chaim Ben David, confessed to the crime. He had been arrested along with five other suspects on 6 July, yet his name and the details of the crime to which he had confessed remained concealed behind a gag order for eleven days. It was only on 17 July that the public received confirmation of the killers’ nationalistic motives, learning that the men had been active participants in the anti-Arab revenge rallies that spilled out into the streets of Jerusalem after the teens’ bodies were discovered; and that they vandalized twenty cars in nearby Beit Hanina and attempted to kidnap a seven-year-old Palestinian boy before abducting Abu Khdeir.24 When Ben David appeared in the courtroom for his arraignment, he was flanked by lawyers from Honenu, a radical settler outfit notorious for defending Jewish terror suspects. “I am the Messiah!” he bellowed, reinforcing the insanity plea his defense team had filed.25 (The Abu Khdeir family told me with dismay that they had no hope whatsoever of receiving justice in the Israeli court.)

Once again, the Israeli government’s manipulations had deepened the chaos spreading peripatetically throughout the Holy Land. By the time Ben David finally faced a judge, rioting had exploded in Shu‘fat, leaving in ruins the light rail station that served as a conduit for settlers. At Mohammed Abu Khdeir’s funeral, gunshots were fired in the air by young men displaying weapons openly for the first time since the second intifada.

From then on, a provocative around-the-clock police detail would occupy the sidewalk outside the Abu Khdeir family’s home. Among the numerous family members thrown in jail since the chaos began26 was Tariq Abu Khdeir, a fifteen-year-old Palestinian–American teen beaten into a coma by Israeli police. (His cousins’ home in Shu‘fat would be ransacked by Israeli police following his eventual release.) An hour after my first visit with Abu Khdeir’s parents this August, police burst onto the property to arrest a nineteen-year-old cousin of their murdered son.

The killing of Abu Khdeir and the subsequent revolt in East Jerusalem was a trigger point in the events leading up to war in Gaza. On 7 July, three days after Abu Khdeir’s funeral, armed factions in the Gaza Strip launched a heavy barrage of rockets into southern Israel, prompting Israeli airstrikes that killed eight Hamas members.27 The following day, Hamas retaliated for the first time, authorizing a salvo of long-range M75 rockets toward Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.28 In Shu‘fat, the launch was widely understood—and celebrated—as Gaza’s reply to Abu Khdeir’s murder.

Across town, at the prime minister’s residence, the rockets were received as a pretext to initiate the punishing assault the army had been planning on the Gaza Strip. Referred to as Protective Edge, the operation’s name translated literally from Hebrew as “Firm Cliff.”

The Fog of Holy War

Col. Ofer Winter is among the most prominent and widely admired officers in the Israeli military. He is a graduate of Bnei David, a pre-army yeshiva that has played a central role in filling the ranks of the officer corps with religious nationalists committed to a messianic perspective on society and combat. This August, Winter reportedly prevented the Israeli pop singer Sarit Haddad from performing for his troops over his religiously-rooted objection to women singing in public.29 As one of the religious Zionists who now comprise anywhere from 30 to 50 percent of the army officer corps,30 Winter is among the vanguard of Israeli society’s most respected institution.

On 10 July, as Israeli forces prepared for a ground invasion of the Gaza Strip, Winter issued a letter to the Givati Brigade troops operating under his direct command. “History has chosen us to be the sharp edge of the bayonet of fighting the terrorist enemy ‘from Gaza’ which curses, defames and abuses the God of Israel’s battles,” he wrote.31 At the conclusion of the letter, which was shot through with biblical fundamentalism, Winter repeated his call for a holy war against the blasphemers in Gaza: “God, the Lord of Israel, make our path successful, as we are about to fight for Your People, Israel, against an enemy who defames your name.”32

Winter channeled the attitudes of the new generation of citizen soldiers rising through the ranks of the military. Among the army’s rank and file, belief in battlefield miracles have become common, with soldiers exchanging tales of divine protection from enemy gunfire, rainbows signaling deliverance from the grip of evil, and the appearance of biblical patriarchs as guardians.33 (Israel’s former chief rabbi, Mordechai Eliyahu, claimed in a 2009 sermon that “Mama Rochel,” or the biblical matriarch, Rachel, appeared on the battlefield in Gaza to shield soldiers from enemy fire.)34 The transition from secular nationalism to a rearmed Jewish messianism infused the longstanding strategy of politicide against the Palestinian people with a sense of apocalyptic destiny—dominion would arrive as soon as the army “finished the job.”

When Winter thrust his troops into Khuza, a border town just east of Khan Yunis, no one was spared from his righteous wrath. I found the entire area in ruins when I visited the town during a cease-fire on 17 August, discovering hideous details inside almost every home. In the house of Hani Najjar, for instance, I entered a bathroom drenched in dried blood and the remnants of burned flesh. Winter’s soldiers had executed six handcuffed men there with the knives Najjar used to slaughter his chickens, riddled their bodies with bullets, and blown them to pieces with grenades.35 Members of Najjar’s family described to me being used as human shields, forced to stand on corners of their roof while soldiers sniped at their neighbors attempting to escape from the six-day siege of their town.

Down the street, in another home half-destroyed by artillery shells and missiles, the parents of sixteen-year-old Adir Rjeila described to me how their epileptic daughter straggled behind during their flight to safety and was blown out of her wheelchair by a tank shell. Throughout Khuza, I found reminders of the Givati Brigade’s presence in the form of abandoned antitank rocket launchers and stars of David spray-painted on walls of homes and schools the soldiers had occupied. (In the destroyed city of Shuja‘iya, I found more stars of David, along with graffiti displaying the Beitar soccer team’s logo beside the phrase, “Price Tag.”) At least some of the young Israelis who had taken to Facebook to clamor for blood vengeance had fulfilled their fantasies.

In the southern city of Rafah, Winter’s impact was no less destructive. It was there, on 1 August, that an elite division of the Givati Brigade breached a humanitarian cease-fire by occupying homes on the city’s outskirts. When an al-Qassam ambush team emerged from a tunnel to attack the soldiers, killing two and attempting to capture another who had likely been fatally wounded—Lt. Hadar Goldin—Winter issued an order that would have fateful consequences.

“Hannibal!” he boomed into a handset, ordering troops under his command to open fire not necessarily on the al-Qassam ambush team, but on the entire circumference of the area surrounding the alleged capture in order to ensure that Goldin was killed.36 Winter had invoked the Hannibal Directive, a longstanding policy designed to prevent politically painful prisoner swaps by immediately eliminating captured soldiers and anyone in the vicinity of their captors. His order triggered a hailstorm of Israeli ordnance on the civilians of Rafah, from five-hundredpound “dumb bombs” dropped by F-16s to artillery shells, mortar rounds, and drone missiles that killed at least 190 and wounded many more.37 When Israeli forces threatened to bomb the city’s al-Najjar Hospital, scores of wounded were forced to evacuate to a small dental and ob-gyn clinic nearby. There, Dr. Samir al-Homs told me he performed amputations in hallways and on waitingroom floors, and was forced to store the dead bodies of small children in ice cream coolers.

The application of the Hannibal Directive in Gaza should have provoked widespread controversy in Israel, regardless of whether Jewish Israelis cared about the lives of Palestinian civilians. After all, it was designed to kill Israeli soldiers to spare their government the political cost of securing their release in a prisoner swap. The parents of active duty soldiers would undoubtedly prefer to have their children released at any cost, so long as they were returned alive. Yet Israeli society met revelations of the policy with general silence, even as it was invoked on multiple occasions during Operation Protective Edge.

One of the few Israeli public figures to protest it was Uri Arad, a 1973 war veteran who was held captive by the Egyptian army. According to Arad, the Hannibal Directive represented “a radical change from this way of thinking that propped up the value of human life.”38 It was a disturbing sign of the dominance of an explicitly authoritarian right wing, he insisted. “Now, in place of the government serving its citizens,” wrote Arad, “it is the citizens who are forced to pay with their lives in order to serve the interests of government. This is simply called fascism.”39

On 15 August, after the conclusion of the ground invasion, the same paper that published Arad, Yedioth Aharanoth, profiled Winter in a lengthy puff piece. The Givati brigadier freely admitted to invoking the Hannibal Directive after the alleged capture of Goldin. “I announced on the communication system the word that no one wants to say—‘Hannibal,’” Winter told his interviewer. “In other words, there had been an abduction. I instructed all the forces to move forward, to occupy space, so the abductors would not be able to move.”40

Winter then boasted, “We shredded them. We can do it much worse, and it’s best for them that we not do it. We gave them a much stronger beating than in Cast Lead.” He went on to hold the entire population of Gaza collectively responsible for all the casualties they suffered: “In almost every home there is a son or other relative that is a partner in terror,” Winter declared. “How do you raise children in a home with explosives? In the end, everyone gets what they choose.”41

Winter had become the hero of the war (“there is no officer currently in the [army] who is as admired,” Yedioth noted) and a household name.42 Beyond his iron-fisted approach in Gaza, it was Winter’s unabashed expression of Jewish fundamentalism that had earned him reverence from his countrymen. Recalling a mission to destroy rows of civilian homes where Palestinian fighters had supposedly taken shelter, the commander conjured a hallucinatory vision of godly intervention, claiming that he and his troops were protected by “clouds of glory,” covered by a fog that accompanied them throughout the attack.43

As Winter’s troops emerged from the fog of holy war, Jewish nationalists back home turned their wrath on the enemies among them.

Good Night, Left Side

The climate of repression that blankets Israeli society grows heavier and more comprehensive with each successive operation against the Gaza Strip. The voices of dissent have become fainter against a climate of officially sanctioned intimidation, while the media has merged almost seamlessly with the military. The dynamic has cemented the practice of politicide against Gaza as a bonanza for right-wing mobilization, catalyzing the ultranationalist march through the institutions of the Jewish state. During the latest episode of fighting, the right demonstrated the fruits of its long-term efforts with a frightening show of street muscle.

Yoav Eliasi is not only one of Israel’s most prominent rap artists, he was also a leading organizer of the far right during Operation Protective Edge. Eliasi, whose stage name is “the Shadow,” emerged during the second intifada as a pioneer of Israeli rap alongside his childhood friend, Kobi Shimoni, aka Subliminal, mimicking the sound and aesthetic of American hip-hop, but with a unique spin. Over the sound of gritty break beats and stirring string samples, the Shadow and Subliminal defended cops, lionized army service, and taunted leftists and Palestinians, upending the anti-authority sensibility that defined traditional rap culture. “Fuck you if you badmouth Zion,” Subliminal boomed during a performance that immediately followed one by his former friend, the Palestinian-Israeli rapper Tamer Nafar. “You’re in Zion, in Tel Aviv, in Israel, you asshole!”44

This June, following the abduction of the three Israeli teens, Subliminal took to Facebook to lash out at Palestinian-Israeli member of the Knesset (MK) Haneen Zoabi, who had objected to her interviewer’s characterization of the kidnappers as terrorists. “I’m not ashamed to say that I hope she’ll be run down [in an auto accident] and die, or slip in the bath and rip her head off, or eat a rotten egg and die of food poisoning, or anything the IDF can ‘arrange’ for her, the quicker the better,” Subliminal wrote, earning thousands of “likes” from his fans.45 Then, when Operation Protective Edge began, the Shadow issued a spontaneous call for his Facebook followers to assault a 12 July antiwar demonstration in Tel Aviv—“Looking for Traitors,” the post was titled. The response was so overwhelming, the rapper promptly transformed his Facebook page into a central node of anti-leftist activity, summoning the angry young men he dubbed his “Lions” to action with the command used to send reservists to battle: Order Number 8. 46

Lia Tarachansky, an Israeli journalist who closely followed the antiwar demonstrations in Tel Aviv, noticed that the Shadow was organizing alongside Michael Ben-Ari, a key leader of the settlement movement’s most violent elements.47 Known for wild antics like tearing up a New Testament in his Knesset office, Ben-Ari was a former MK and ex-lieutenant of Rabbi Meir Kahane, the assassinated founder of the banned terrorist group, Kach. While in the Knesset, Ben-Ari transformed his south Tel Aviv office into an organizing center for the campaign against non-Jewish African refugees in Israel and to support Lehava, a radical right group dedicated to preventing romantic relationships between Jews and Arabs.48 United by hatred of leftists and Palestinians, the tattooed rapper joined forces with the bearded settler to wreak as much havoc as possible.

The Shadow and Ben-Ari’s forces stormed the 12 July antiwar demonstration with reinforcement from the “Ultra” soccer hooligans of Beitar Jerusalem and Maccabi Tel Aviv. When police fled the vicinity during a rocket warning siren, the rightists promptly set in on the protesters, attacking anyone they could find with chairs, sticks, rocks, eggs, and their bare fists. “It was really scary,” reflected the left-wing Israeli journalist Haggai Matar. “Something like this has never happened here before, but it is crystal clear to me that it will again.”49 Five days later, right-wingers assaulted an antiwar rally in Haifa, bombarding the gathering of Palestinians and radical leftists with a hailstorm of stones while police stood by and watched.50 Among those attacked was Suhail Assad, the deputy mayor of the city, beaten by right-wing thugs simply for looking like an Arab. The next day, MK Haneen Zoabi was momentarily handcuffed during a protest, then speciously accused of assaulting a police officer. Soon after, she was suspended from the Knesset for six months for her comments on the three kidnapped teens51—another wish of the right wing fulfilled.

As the beleaguered antiwar forces regrouped in Tel Aviv on 26 July, the violence against them intensified. Photos of key radical left organizers, many snapped by right-wing thugs during the previous rally, had been circulating on the Order 8 Facebook page. When the latest protest concluded, small groups of rightists followed demonstrators home and attacked them at their doorsteps. A detail of cops grabbed one of the right-wing assailants leading the assaults, but not to arrest him. Instead, according to Tarachansky, the cops rewarded the young tough with a high five. Burrowed within the rightist mobs were a few Maccabi ultras sporting T-shirts emblazoned with the phrase, “Good Night Left Side,” a slogan popular among European neo-Nazis.52

After besieging the antiwar demonstrations, Order 8 followers proceeded to supply the names of purported leftists to their employers, pressuring companies and government agencies to fire the traitors burrowing within their ranks. Dozens lost their jobs, most of them Palestinian citizens of Israel who had taken to Facebook to protest the army’s actions in Gaza. When a postal employee put up a call for sending leftists to gas chambers, however, his employer defended the statement on the grounds of free speech.53

The violent onslaught startled even themost experienced Israeli leftists. “One of the effects of this war is the loss of Tel Aviv.We used to think of Tel Aviv as this liberal bubble, but that’s gone,” Kobi Snitz, a math professor and veteran activist from Anarchists Against the Wall, remarked to me. “There is simply no space left for us to organize in, and it’s because there is official approval and even encouragement for the people beating us in the streets.”54

Bewildered by the well-choreographed assaults on their demonstrations, the ragtag faction of radical leftists regrouped under the banner of “Antifa,” or antifascist action, gathering in semiunderground fashion to plan protests and train in Krav Maga, an Israeli hand-to-hand combat style taught to frontline soldiers. Many Israeli leftists I know told me that they were making plans to leave Israel for good. Some said the only thing preventing their immediate exodus was the lack of a second passport or adequate finances.

As Minister of Internal Security Yitzhak Aharonovich moved to ban all public demonstrations against the war, and the Israeli police forcibly removed antiwar demonstrators from public squares in Tel Aviv, arresting those who attempted to hold their ground, the right wing zeroed in on the media. Gideon Levy, one of only a handful of major Israeli columnists to have written forcefully against the assaults on Gaza, faced such an overwhelming deluge of death threats and attacks from fellow media figures for his criticism of the Israel Air Force that his employers at Haaretz were compelled to hire him a bodyguard.55 According to Israeli reporter Orli Santo, a few major news personalities were nearly assaulted after emerging from their broadcast studios, but only for perceived expressions of opposition to the war—most of them had actually supported the attack on Gaza.56

With rocket sirens sounding around the country, calls for genocide by Israeli public figures grew more frequent and forceful. Moshe Feiglin—one of ten deputy speakers of the Knesset so extreme that Likud employed a series of legal tricks to boot him from its 2009 electoral list—issued a detailed plan to “exterminate” or “concentrate” all residents of Gaza.57 Dov Lior, the chief rabbi of the religious nationalist settlement, Kiryat Arba, issued an edict declaring that Jewish law supported taking “crushing deterring [sic] steps to exterminate the enemy.”58 Meanwhile, Mordechai Kedar, a lecturer on Arabic literature at Bar Ilan University, opined in an interview on the day after the bodies of the three Israeli teens were found that the only way to deter young Palestinian men from militant activity was to rape their sisters and mothers. “It sounds very bad, but that’s the Middle East . . . [y]ou have to understand the culture in which we live.”59

Incitement at the top emboldened Israeli teens flooding social media to spin genocidal fantasies of their own. David Sheen, an independent Israeli journalist, translated dozens of frightening Twitter posts by adolescent Israeli women alternating between revealing selfies and annihilationist rants. “Kill Arab children so there won’t be a next generation,” wrote a user called @ashlisade.60 Another teenage female Twitter user, @shirzafaty, declared, “Not just on summer vacation we hate stinking ugly Arabs, but for the rest of our lives.”61 On a mortar shell that was to be launched into a civilian area in Gaza, a young Israeli soldier complained about a boy-band concert that was scrapped because of the fighting: “That’s for canceling the Backstreet Boys, you scum!” he wrote.62

Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman did his best to answer the teenagers’ summertime blues, proclaiming, “To the best of my understanding, it is not possible to ensure summer vacation, a normal summer for our kids, without a ground operation in Gaza.”63 Lieberman was struggling to keep his finger on the pulse of a Jewish Israeli public that supported the war in Gaza at levels of 95 percent, with at least 45 percent complaining that the army had not used enough firepower.64 When he was not demanding an intensification of violence against Gaza, Lieberman was urging a boycott of Palestinian businesses inside Israel, or clamoring for the revocation of Al Jazeera’s broadcast license.65 But he could not keep up with the Jewish Home party’s Bennett, who emerged from the war as the major political victor. Having battered Netanyahu from the right, demanding the overthrow of Hamas while playing up his elite military background to identify with the soldiers serving in Gaza, Bennett surged in the polls. If elections were held today, Bennett’s party would gain seven seats, making it the second largest party in Israel, with nineteen seats overall.66 The right wing in general stands to gain massively in the wake of the war and will likely consolidate its dominance in the next election cycle.

For Israel’s right-wing rulers and the future leaders of its military, there was no doubt as to what the practice of politicide achieved during Operation Protective Edge: Haneen Zoabi had been silenced; the leftists were leaving; Gideon Levy could not walk through Tel Aviv without a bodyguard; Palestinians of East Jerusalem were too terrified to travel outside their neighborhoods; and Gaza had been literally flattened. The “people of Israel” had gotten their revenge. Meanwhile, Colonel Winter re-armed and readied for the next round. “I cannot promise you, like the song does, that this will be the last war,” he declared, “but I promise that this war, which is so just, will push the next war a good few years away.”67

________________________________________________
About the Author:
Max Blumenthal is a journalist and the author of Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel (New York: Perseus Books Group, 2013) and Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement That Shattered the Party (New York: Nation Books, 2009).
________________________________________________

ENDNOTES:
1 Al Jazeera,“Hamas Demands End to Siege before Truce,” 30 July 2014, http://www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/2014/07/hamas-armed-wing-no-tru....

2 Allison Deger, “With Ceasefire Set to Expire, Palestinians Aim to Lift the Siege While Israel Wants to Turn ‘Gaza into Ramallah,’” Mondoweiss, 18 August 2014, http://mondoweiss.net/2014/08/ceasefirepalestinians-ramallah#sthash.W9ft....

3 Baruch Kimmerling, Politicide (London; New York: Verso, 2003), pp. 4–7.

4 Kimmerling, Politicide, pp. 4–7.

5 Gil Hoffman, “Bennett Privately Threatened PM to Quit Coalition,” Jerusalem Post, 4 April 2014, http://www.jpost.com/Diplomacy-and-Politics/Bennett-privately-threatened....

6 Herb Keinon,“Israel Cancels Fourth Prisoner Release,” Jerusalem Post, 4 April 2014, http://www.jpost.com/Diplomacy-and-Politics/Israel-cancels-fourth-prison....

7 Nahum Barnea, “Inside the Talks’ Failure: US Officials Open Up,” Ynet, 2 May 2014, http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4515821,00.html.

8 Attila Somfalvi, “Israel Caught off Guard by US Support of Palestinian Unity,” Ynet, 3 June 2014, http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4526668,00.html.

9 Amos Harel, “Israel Offers Hamas One Last Out before Hitting Hard,” Haaretz, 4 July 2014, http://www.haaretz.com/mobile/.premium-1.603017?v=C471B57C976541877D9D2D... C6D.
10 Max Blumenthal, “Netanyahu Government Knew Teens Were Dead as It Whipped Up Racist Frenzy,” Electronic Intifada, 8 July 2014, http://electronicintifada.net/content/netanyahu-government-knewteens-wer....

11 Blumenthal, “Netanyahu Government Knew,” 8 July 2014.

12 Tia Goldenberg, “Gag Orders Silence Israeli Press in Digital Age,” AP, 13 February 2013, http://bigstory.ap.org/article/gag-orders-silence-israeli-press-digital-age.

13 “Khader Adnan Returns to Administrative Detention amid Ongoing Mass Arrests and Massacres in Gaza,” Samidoun: Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network, July 2014, http://samidoun.ca/2014/07/khader-adnan-returns-to-administrative-detent....

14 “A Vicious Circle Speeds Up Again,” Economist, 5 July 2014, http://www.economist.com/news/middleeast-and-africa/21606288-murder-thre....

15 Robert Tait, “Israel ’Ready’ to Launch Major Offensive on Gaza Militant Groups,” Daily Telegraph, 29 June 2014, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/israel/10934078/Isr....

16 Blumenthal, “Netanyahu Government Knew,” 8 July 2014.

17 Yossi Verter, “Bennett Slams Netanyahu after Minister Booted from Cabinet Meeting,” Haaretz, 25 June 2014, http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/.premium-1.601247.

18 “Israel Vows to Make Hamas Pay for Alleged Murder of Three Teenagers,” Guardian, 30 June 2014, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/01/israel-vows-hamas-pay-murde....

19 Blumenthal, “Netanyahu Government Knew,” 8 July 2014.

20 Ori Lewis, “Israel Mourns Teenagers, Strikes Hamas in Gaza,” Reuters, 1 July 2014, http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/07/01/us-palestinians-israel-idUSKBN....

21 Lia Tarachansky, “Inside Israel’s Pro-War Nationalist Camp,” The Real News, Real News Network, 3 August 2014, http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php/index.php?option=com_content&task=vi....

22 Blumenthal, “Netanyahu Government Knew,” 8 July 2014.

23 Allison Deger, “Identities of Minors Who Admitted to Killing Mohammed Abu Khdeir to Be Revealed Monday,” Mondoweiss, 19 October 2014, http://mondoweiss.net/2014/10/identities-admittedmohammed#sthash.wU3Ta7q....

24 Omri Efraim, “Suspects in Murder of Palestinian Teen Attempted to Kidnap Young Boy Day Earlier,” Ynet, 7 June 2014, http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4538687,00.html.

25 Lazar Berman, “Suspect in Abu Khdeir Killing Says He’s ‘the Messiah,’” Times of Israel, 27 July 2014, http://www.timesofisrael.com/man-suspect-in-abu-khdeir-killing-i-am-the-....

26 “State Dept. Says Israel Appears to Be Targeting Abu Khdeir Family in Arrests,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 21 August 2014, http://forward.com/articles/204480/state-dept-says-israel-appears-to-bet....

27 Nida al-Mughrabi, “Six Palestinian Militants Killed in the Gaza Strip, Hamas Blames Israeli Air Strikes,” Reuters, 7 July 2014.

28 Yaakov Lappin, “Hamas Rockets Reach Jerusalem and Tel Aviv,” Jerusalem Post, 8 July 2014, http://www.jpost.com/Operation-Protective-Edge/Iron-Dome-intercepts-seco....

29 “Why Wasn’t Israeli Singer Sarit Hadad Invited to Entertain the IDF Troops?” Haaretz, 11 August 2014, http://www.haaretz.com/news/national/1.610049.

30 Eyal Press, “Israel’s Holy Warriors,” New York Review of Books, 29 April 2010, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/apr/29/israels-holy-warriors/.

31 Ali Abunimah, “Israeli Commander Declares ‘Holy War’ on Palestinians,” Ali Abunimah’s Blog, Electronic Intifada, 11 July 2014, http://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/israeli-commander-decla....

32 Ali Abunimah, “Israeli Commander,” 11 July 2014.

33 Stuart Winer, “Senior Infantry Officer Describes Divine Protection in Gaza,” Times of Israel, 31 July 2014, http://www.timesofisrael.com/senior-infantry-officer-describes-divine-pr....

34 Gruntig2008, “Jerusalem - Former Chief Rabbi: Mama Rochel Gaza Miracle Story True,” YouTube, 20 January 2009, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-eGYOJP2_U.

35 Jesse Rosenfeld, “Who Is Behind Gaza’s Mass Execution?” Daily Beast, 1 August 2014, http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/08/01/who-is-behind-gaza-s-ma....

36 Karin Laub, “Israeli Assault That Killed 190 in Gaza over Feared Capture of Soldier Raises War Crimes Claim,” Associated Press, 31 August 2014, http://www.foxnews.com/world/2014/08/31/israeli-assaultthat-killed-10-in....

37 Laub, “Israeli Assault,” 31 August 2014.

38 Uri Arad, “Hannibal Directive is the Beginning of Fascismin Israel,” Ynet, 12 August 2014, http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4557951,00.html.

39 Arad, “Hannibal Directive,” August 12, 2014.

40 Rania Khalek, “Israeli Officer Admits Ordering Lethal Strike on own Soldier during Gaza Massacre,” Electronic Intifada, 10 September 2014, http://electronicintifada.net/blogs/rania-khalek/israeliofficer-admits-o....

41 Khalek, “Israeli Officer Admits Ordering,” 10 September 2014.

42 Khalek, “Israeli Officer Admits Ordering,” 10 September 2014: “[Winter] cannot walk around today without being halted, hugged, asked for a photo opportunity.”

43 Winer, “Senior Infantry Officer,” 31 July 2014.

44 Mark Levine, Heavy Metal Islam: Rock, Resistance, and the Struggle for the Soul of Islam (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2008), p. 127.

45 Richard Silverstein, “Israeli Hip Hop Celebrity Says Palestinian MK ‘Fucks Us in the Ass,’” Tikun Olam, 30 June 2014, http://www.richardsilverstein.com/2014/06/30/israeli-palestinian-mk-gets....

46 Tarachansky, “Inside Israel’s Pro-War Nationalist Camp,” 3 August 2014.

47 Tarachansky, “Inside Israel’s Pro-War Nationalist Camp,” 3 August 2014.

48 Max Blumenthal, “Why the Israeli Elections Were a Victory for the Right,” Nation, 23 January 2013 http://www.thenation.com/article/172398/why-israeli-elections-were-victo....

49 Haggai Matar, “The Night It Became Dangerous to Demonstrate in Tel Aviv,” +972 Magazine, 13 July 2014, http://972mag.com/the-night-it-became-dangerous-to-demonstrate-in-tel-av....

50 Roy (Chicky) Arad, “Right-Wingers Beat Haifa Deputy Mayor during Anti-War Protest,” Haaretz, 20 July 2014, http://www.haaretz.com/news/national/.premium-1.606240.

51 “Hanin Zoabi Suspended from Knesset for Six Months,” Times of Israel, 29 July 2014, http://www. timesofisrael.com/hanin-zoabi-suspended-from-knesset-for-si....

52 Ofer Aderet, “Right-Wing Demonstrators in Tel Aviv Wore Neo-Nazi Shirts,” Haaretz, 15 July 2014, http://www.haaretz.com/news/national/.premium-1.605234.

53 Orli Santo, “How Freedomof SpeechWas Crushed During Protective Edge,” +972 Magazine, 31 August 2014, http://972mag.com/how-freedom-of-speech-was-crushed-during-protective-ed....

54 Kobi Snitz, interview by the author at demonstration in Lod, Israel, August 2014.

55 Gideon Levy, “Opinion: Why Israel Is Its Own Worst Enemy,” CNN, 8 August 2014, http://www.cnn.com/2014/08/08/opinion/israel-own-worst-enemy-levy/.

56 Santo, “How Freedom of Speech Was Crushed,” 31 August 2014.

57 Ali Abunimah, “’Concentrate’and‘Exterminate’: Israel Parliament Deputy Speaker’s Gaza Genocide Plan,” Electronic Intifada, 3 August 2014, http://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/concentrate-andextermin....

58 “West Bank Rabbi Dov Lior: Jewish Law Permits Destruction of Gaza,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 24 July 2014, http://www.jta.org/2014/07/24/news-opinion/israel-middle-east/west-bank-....

59 Or Kashti, “Israeli Professor’s ‘Rape as Terror Deterrent’ Statement Draws Ire,” Haaretz, 22 July 2014, http://www.haaretz.com/news/national/.premium-1.606542.

60 David Sheen, “Terrifying Tweets of Pre-Army Israeli Teens,” 10 July 2014, storify.com, https://storify.com/davidsheen/israeli-army-the-next-generation.

61 Sheen, “Terrifying Tweets,” 10 July 2014.

62 Jenn Selby, “Message on ‘Israeli Shell to Gaza’ Reads: ‘That’s for Cancelling the Backstreet Boys, You Scum!’” Independent UK, 1 August 2014, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/message-onisraeli-shell-to-gaza....

63 Joe Coscarelli, “Israel Says It May Invade Gaza to Save Its Summer Vacation,” NY Magazine, 16 July 2014, http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/07/israel-may-invade-gaza-to-s....

64 Yifa Yaakov, “Over 90% of Jewish Israelis Say Gaza Op Justified,” Times of Israel, 29 July 2014, http://www.timesofisrael.com/over-90-of-jewish-israelis-say-gaza-op-just....

65 Lucy Westcott, “Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman Seeks to Ban Al Jazeera from Operating in Israel,” Newsweek, 21 July 2014, http://www.newsweek.com/israeli-foreign-minister-avigdor-lieberman-seeks....

66 Tzvi Ben-Gedalyahu, “Poll: Netanyahu and Bennett Benefit fromWar at the Expense of Lapid,” Jewish Press, 14 August 2014, http://www.jewishpress.com/news/breaking-news/poll-netanyahu-andbennett-....

67 Khalek, “Israeli Officer Admits Ordering,” 10 September 2014.

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