Israel’s War with Iran Exposes the Fragility of Jewish Supremacy
Netanyahu’s government is ceding violence against its own people in order to obscure its lack of political power.
I arrived in Jerusalem last Thursday evening.
Twelve hours later, I awoke to the news of the Israeli military’s attack on Iran—having slept through the sirens in the night. I am an American Jewish activist and researcher; I have spent time on and off in Israel/Palestine throughout my life. But this visit has been unlike any other. Four days in, I have found my eyes opened by the breathtaking recklessness of the current Israeli government. The attacks on Iran are but the latest action by a political leadership that, lacking public legitimacy since the October 7 attacks, seems determined to use terror to resecure a public mandate for its otherwise vulnerable project of Jewish supremacy.
Power and violence, the political theorist Hannah Arendt argued, are negatively correlated. “Rule by sheer violence comes into play where power is being lost,” she noted in her 1969 treatise, On Violence. “To substitute violence for power can bring victory, but the price is very high; for is not only paid by the vanquished, it is also paid by the victor in terms of his own power.” Arendt’s argument rests on the insight that a government’s power is constituted through public support and participation. Violence can sustain regimes that otherwise lack public legitimacy, but at tremendous cost. If the cost of Israeli state violence has been borne by Palestinians for decades—and with untold brutality since the October 7 Hamas attacks—Israel’s new front with Iran signals the Netanyahu government’s willingness to use its own public as bait for Iran, in a desperate bid to resecure legitimacy with that very public.
The currency of the Netanyahu government’s military gambles are human lives across the Middle East.
By initiating this confrontation, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government are knowingly courting a situation in which Israelis will be terrorized by Iranian missiles. Less than a week ago, this same government narrowly survived a vote of no-confidence; now, that threat has been preempted by the war. Yet the dynamic at hand runs deeper than electoral politics. To understand this, it’s worth considering past episodes of mass anti-Palestinian violence and expulsion. For instance, the late historian Alon Confino argues that in the run-up to 1948, there emerged in the Jewish public a “shared conception of Jewish sovereignty with fewer Palestinians.” By conditioning Jewish sovereignty and self-determination on Jewish ethnic homogeneity, the Zionist movement created a Jewish public appetite for the Nakba.
There is a similar, but shifted, logic at play today. As in 1948, there is apparently widespread Israeli-Jewish support for anti-Palestinian expulsion and killing. But today, this support is modulated through the neoliberalization of Israeli society—a shift Louis Fishman identified back in 2021. Jewish sovereignty may still be the rationale of the state, but it is also now at least partially instrumental for ideals of personal safety, material comfort, and enrichment. (Fishman notes that the entrenchment of these ideals into the Israeli-Jewish political imaginary is one of Netanyahu’s signal accomplishments.) As such, I think it is worth considering how ideals of Jewish sovereignty and supremacy are more limited in their ability to induce the kind of active support the current Israeli government would need to fully implement its extremist vision of anti-Palestinian dispossession and removal. If in 1948, as Confino argues, the “dream of an ethnonational state” was a strong enough incentive to induce Jews into expelling their own neighbors, now a stick is needed to complement the carrot of Jewish sovereignty.
It seems clear that the current “stick” is Israeli experiences of terror, induced by the Iranian missile attacks. As in the aftermath of the October 7 attacks, the Israeli government is apparently hoping that these missile attacks will induce sufficient terror and trauma amongst its own public to underwrite support for both an extended campaign in Iran and continued mass violence in Gaza. To return to Arendt’s parlance, we might reckon with how the government is ceding violence against its own people in order to obscure its lack of political power. This is a depraved gamble by the Netanyahu government that rests on the dehumanization of Palestinians. Gaza may now be a “secondary arena” for the Israel Defense Forces, but continued mass violence against Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank is the implied byproduct of the war with Iran.
But this approach endangers Israeli Jews, too, even if the scale of destruction between Tel Aviv and Gaza is not remotely comparable. Growing numbers of Israelis have already been injured and killed in the missile attacks. Those numbers may seem small from afar, especially in comparison to the IDF’s crimes in Gaza. But there is no guarantee that those numbers won’t rise dramatically over the course of the war. The currency of the Netanyahu government’s military gambles are human lives across the Middle East.
As I walked towards a bomb shelter on Saturday night, I saw the glowing streaks from missile interceptions: it felt like the sky itself had come alive. Within the shelter, kids and parents slept in the corners. Others sat refreshing their phones amid intermittent cell service. Jerusalem, at least as I have known it in the past, now feels like it is in a suspended state.
Continued escalation is not inevitable—although it can certainly feel that way to me here. But to change direction, I think we as Jews in both Israel and the Diaspora have to overcome investments in the current frameworks of Jewish supremacy and sovereignty. This is no small feat in a moment when the Israeli political leadership is invested in mobilizing Israeli and global Jewry toward precisely those ideals.
But an alternative is always possible. Even now.
