Jacobin interviews Nathan Thrall:

We’ve seen much of Israel’s political spectrum follow Netanyahu further rightward over the past decade. What was the response of other political leaders in Israel to this latest conflict? Were there notable voices of dissent, and how significant were they?

Although there has been a steady weakening of the Zionist left and strengthening of the Zionist right, these terms are rather misleading when used in a US publication. The Zionist left is ethno-nationalist and not progressive in any sense of the word. Israel’s “peace camp” does not call for Israel to ensure full equality for all its citizens but rather sees peace — defined as separation from Palestinians — as a means to preserve Israel as a Jewish ethnocratic state.

This framing of a “rightward shift in Israel” is not just misleading but serves as a whitewash of Israeli policy. It’s like blaming Donald Trump for structural racism in the United States. There are quotes from the so-called Left in Israel that are much worse than anything Netanyahu has said.

The media speaks as if the entire problem of Israeli ethnic domination over Palestinians started with Trump and Netanyahu, that just as Americans had to get rid of Trump, Israelis have to get rid of Netanyahu, and then all will be solved.
As I documented in a recent New York Review of Books piece, “A Day in the Life of Abed Salama,” the spiritual leader of Labor Zionism, Berl Katznelson, said, “Never before has the white man undertaken colonization with that sense of justice and social progress which fills the Jew who comes to Palestine”; three years after Israel’s establishment, the country’s founding father, David Ben-Gurion, referred to the new state’s takeover of Palestinian land as a “project of colonization far greater than all of the last seventy years.” After the 1967 war, a prime minister from Israel’s left expressed hope that, “precisely because of the suffocation and imprisonment there, maybe the Arabs will move from the Gaza Strip.” Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, the hero of the Israel “peace camp,” whose vision of peace is one of segregation, said, “It is better for the Arabs not to be swarming around here.”

And yet the whole media speaks as if the entire problem of Israeli ethnic domination over Palestinians started with Trump and Netanyahu, that just as Americans had to get rid of Trump, Israelis have to get rid of Netanyahu, and then all will be solved. [Continue reading…]