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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.
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.
What a great idea, that of taking Palestinians out of Palestine to teach them how to cultivate other lands! How had it not occurred to them before?
“Uruguay aims to ‘bring some young Palestinians from the West Bank’ to train them in agriculture through a FAO program, said Lubetkin” (Channel 12, Uruguay, June 6, 2025)
On Monday, May 12, 1919, the British Minister of War, future Prime Minister and hero of World War II Winston Churchill, referring to his own practice of gassing Arab protesters and rebels, wrote:
I do not understand this squeamishness about the use of gas. We have definitely adopted the position at the Peace Conference of arguing in favour of the retention of gas as a permanent method of warfare… I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes. The moral effect should be so good that the loss of life should be reduced to a minimum. It is not necessary to use only the most deadly gasses: Gasses can be used which cause great inconvenience and would spread a lively terror…
Of the Hindus, he said they were animals who worshipped elephants. Consistent with this, he was directly and knowingly responsible for the famine that killed millions in Bengal in 1943, shortly before he signed an alliance agreement with Stalin in Iran to fight against Nazism.
These words from the British hero and defender of freedom and human rights, these supremacist ideas and actions were not new at the time and did not provoke any scandal. Supremacist and messianic racism, like the “Manifest Destiny” of John O’Sullivan and “The White Man’s Burden” of Rudyard Kipling, which in the 19th century justified and promoted the slaughter of “uncivilized peoples” and “inferior races,” were the precursors to Hitler and Nazism. Hitler plagiarized entire paragraphs from Madison Grant for Mein Kampf and thanked him for the inspiration. The popularity of Nazism in countries like England and the United States was deep and widespread, especially among wealthy businessmen and powerful politicians, until they began to lose World War II, and suddenly the Nazi criminals were just a handful of lunatics, not a complicit and cowardly mass of beautiful and superior civilized people with sudden amnesia.
A hundred years later, the history of suppressing the uncivilized, inferior races and peoples cursed by God is a thousand times worse, and, as then, it seems like it’s not such a big deal. But the real-time information available is also a thousand times greater, so the responsibility and shame (or shamelessness) are multiplied a thousandfold.
Beyond the murky conscience of Uruguay’s Foreign Ministry, many do not understand or imagine that in Palestine there are thousands of bilingual professionals and academics whose schools and universities were bombed to rubble.
Currently, Uruguay is one of those examples that do not quite reach the level of tragedy solely due to its military and propagandistic inability to do much harm. Not because we are a superior people, as our government so kindly insists on making clear with its own example. Which does not exempt us from the shame of the cowardice of denial or moral wavering in the face of the most tragic events of contemporary history. Cowardice and denial from which are exempted those Uruguayans who do not bow tremblingly before the fascists of the moment—those fascists who terrorize with total impunity from right to left—in that order.
After Uruguayan President Yamandú Orsi refused his party’s (the left-wing coalition Frente Amplio) request to define the massacres in Gaza as genocide, he defended himself by saying that his focus is on actions, not words, and that he prefers not to talk about “the war” and instead offer “concrete solutions,” such as sending powdered milk and rice to Gaza… The Israeli Embassy in Uruguay labeled the Frente Amplio’s criticism of the genocide in Gaza as “expressions of disguised hatred” and warned of “dangerous consequences.” B’nai B’rith called the FA’s brief statement a “grave moral failure.”
Due to prior criticism from artists and left-wing activists regarding the wavering of their own government, the president once again tried to put out the fire with more fuel. In a new statement to the newspapers, he said he condemned the “military escalation” and that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s offensive “fuels antisemitism” and generates “weariness” in “important sectors” of the Israeli people.
It is quite obvious that the Zionist genocide can fuel, among other things, antisemitism, as it has always been the Zionists themselves who, for political, geopolitical, and ideological reasons, have strategically confused and identified Zionism with Judaism (like identifying the KKK with Christianity), which is why even the hundreds of thousands of Jews who actively oppose the massacres of Palestinians and apartheid in Israel can end up being blamed for something they condemn.
But what about the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians massacred, mutilated, traumatized, and starved? Are they not the direct victims of the hatred and violence that insists that “in Gaza there are no innocents, not even children,” which justifies exterminating them before they become “terrorists”? Could it be that the European settlers who claim to be descendants of a man named Abraham who lived 4,000 years ago in what is now Iraq are the real antisemites? A man who first had a child with his slave at the request of his infertile wife. But the son of Abraham and the slave produced the lineage of the Arabs. When something went wrong, Sarah had her son at the age of 90 by a miracle of the Lord, the one who produced the lineage of the Israelites (according to the same tradition that identifies those Israelites from 3,000 years ago with the current ones) as an improved version of his brother’s race. But let’s leave this surreal line of reasoning, which is only obvious to fanatics in perpetual trance.
The mere idea of sending milk and rice to Gaza under the slogan of “actions, not words” hides a profound ignorance of what happens with humanitarian aid in Palestine or, more likely, denialism and a well-known fear of criticizing the powerful who are committing genocide—let’s say massacre, so as not to offend the sensitivity of the killers and their apologists.
Of course, if you mention it, the automatic argument is “I haven’t seen you condemn the October 7th attack.” Which is false and paradoxical, since it is always said by those who have never condemned and will never condemn the repeated massacres and systematic violation of human rights against Palestinians and other neighbors since World War II, when the same Zionists proudly identified themselves as terrorists.
Uruguayan Foreign Minister Mario Lubetkin (former director of institutional communication for Food and Agriculture Organization in Latin America) has come out to put out the fire (now a blaze) of criticism from his political base by announcing plans to allow “some young Palestinians from the West Bank” to come to the country to train in sustainable agriculture. In another radio program, he stated that the Palestinian youth could “think about the day after” by becoming entrepreneurs and starting their own start-ups.
The day after what? Why do we, the Western masters, have to tell them what they must do to civilize themselves, how to indoctrinate themselves and adapt to progress and submission to Anglo-Saxon capitalism? Of course, to exile them again, far from their land and their own sovereign decisions as individuals and as a people.
Beyond the murky conscience of Uruguay’s Foreign Ministry, many do not understand or imagine that in Palestine there are thousands of bilingual professionals and academics whose schools and universities were bombed to rubble. In Israel, they are considered beasts of burden, and in the West, they believe they can teach them how to plant olive trees.
At the beginning of 2024, I met with the International Affairs officers at my university in the United States to propose the creation of “humanitarian scholarships” for students affected by armed conflicts. While the idea was very well received, it sank into the apathy of donors. But what a great idea, that of taking Palestinians out of Palestine to teach them how to cultivate other lands! How had it not occurred to them before? It’s not about giving scholarships to the youth who lost everything under the bombs so they can prepare and wage an international struggle for the sovereignty of their people, but so they can learn to cultivate the land, other lands that have nothing to do with their own, which they know like the back of their hand and have cultivated for thousands of years in a more than sustainable way.
Where is the mantra we Western professors hear with toxic frequency about the need to “train global leaders”? Every time I criticize this colonialist slogan in a meeting, many struggle to understand me.
Displacing Palestinian youth to learn “sustainable agriculture” in Uruguay is such a good idea that it resembles the “Final Solution,” which members of Netanyahu’s cabinet—and the majority of Israelis—talk about so much; according to a survey by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, 82% of the population supports the forced expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza.
At this point, I don’t know what’s worse, having a Trump in Argentina or a Biden in Uruguay.
The murder of two Israeli embassy employees in Washington, D.C. has all the elements to enable increased persecution of U.S. citizens and residents who advocate for the safety and rights of Palestinians.
On November 7, 1938, Polish Jew Herschel Feibel Grynszpan shot diplomat Ernst vom Rath in the German embassy in Paris.
Grynszpan’s family had been made stateless by German and Polish governments, and were stranded in miserable conditions along with thousands of Jewish refugees at the Polish-German border.
The shooting of vom Rath provided the trigger for the Nazi pogrom across Germany of Kristallnacht, the “Night of Broken Glass”—attacks of Jewish homes, businesses, and synagogues. This date is thought to mark the progression from German persecution of Jews to the beginning of the Holocaust.
The poisonous identification of Jewish identity with the Jewish supremacist state of Israel—with its knee on the neck of Palestinians—to proclaim Judaism cognate with murderous nationalism—has its victims.
Today’s moment, the murder of two Israeli embassy employees in Washington, D.C. at an event sponsored by the American Jewish Committee (AJC), has all the elements to enable increased persecution of U.S. citizens and residents who advocate for the safety and rights of 2 millions residents of Gaza, and the rest of occupied Palestine.
Just as with Grynszpan’s crime, the effect of this killer’s decision will be out of his hands, and the cause of his desperation will only matter to those who already care.
The wretched, amoral lunatics who have command of the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) will have a clear field to “investigate” the curriculum of universities that host Palestinian studies, and criminalize the slogans “Free Palestine” and “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be Free.”
We can count on crimes being committed by Pam Bondi (DOJ) and Kash Patel (FBI) in exploitation of this moment. The crocodile tears of this Proud Boy-aligned Christian nationalist government as they express solidarity with Jews against “antisemitism” will challenge our gag reflex.
The conflation of protesters for Palestine with “terrorists,” already in full force by the Departments of State and Education with expulsion of international students who have spoken out and organized, will be untrammeled by due process. Or due process will be twisted with the power of a state unbound by ethics in their determination to “make an example.”
The day following the Washington shooting, the AJC’s Ted Deutch was on MSNBC’s afternoon “Dateline White House” program, instructing that permitting campus demonstrations for Gazans’ right to live allows us to “tolerate hatred and antisemitism that leads to this violence.” Deutch made the rounds of Fox and CNN also.
In his morning MSNBC program appearance, he said, efforts must “double down” to insure that “what we saw last night never happens again and that words of antisemites, incitement that we’ve seen at too many places around the world, be treated as it is, that this could be the deadly result if we don’t act.”
The AJC, once fully cognizant of the dangers of turning the heterogenous Jewish people spread across the world in to a nationality, made sure in the aftermath of these pointless deaths that suppressing “delegitimization” of Israel was the focus, not Jewish rights to safety in their countries.
Since October 7, 2023, the world has watched the methodical torture of 2 million people in Gaza by the Israel Defense Forces, month after month of civilian displacement; destruction; hunger; disease; and killing by bomb, artillery, drone, and bullet. U.S. Air Force member Aaron Bushnell, in February 2024, immolated himself in front of the Israeli Embassy in Washington to protest America’s assistance in the misery. In December 2023 and September 2024 fatal self-immolations were enacted in front of Israel’s consulates in Atlanta and Boston.
The world watching—protesting, agonizing in helplessness—the horror of premeditated and systematic destruction of the people of Gaza has the obvious hazard of endangering Jews. A gossamer sense of object permanence is exhibited when Zionist advocacy at one moment proclaims Israel the state of the Jewish people, and the next decries hostility to Israel a symptom of some mysterious eternal human disease of antisemitism.
It is certain that the Washington killings will be used to maximize the sense of dread and siege in Jewish spaces, shaped to legitimize the Zionist stance that Israel is rational and her opponents crazed, irrational, bloodthirsty.
After the 9/11/2001 attacks, journalist James Bennett contacted Benjamin Netanyahu, then out of office.
That evening, I tracked down Benjamin Netanyahu, the once-and-future Israeli prime minister, to ask what the attack meant for U.S.-Israeli relations. “It’s very good,” he replied, with startling enthusiasm. Then he caught himself. “Well, it’s not very good, but it’s going to generate immediate sympathy.”
The poisonous identification of Jewish identity with the Jewish supremacist state of Israel—with its knee on the neck of Palestinians—to proclaim Judaism cognate with murderous nationalism—has its victims. Today, Zionist partisans in the United States of America, in and out of government, have their “bloody shirt.” Mazel tov!