Israeli Liberalism, Denial, and Genocide

Avi-ram Tzoreff

Translated by Orit Schwartz

n January 2024, following South Africa’s petition to the International Court of Justice in The Hague—filed weeks after initially accusing Israel of genocide—Israeli Supreme Court President Aharon Barak was appointed to serve as Israel’s representative judge on the panel hearing the petition. Israel’s right-wing government did not hesitate to appoint as its representative a person it had recently proclaimed a sworn enemy in the context of the judicial reform initiated by Justice Minister Yariv Levin in January 2023. Barak, for his part, readily accepted the role assigned to him and set about constructing a liberal legal framework to justify Israel’s annihilatory actions.

The role Barak played draws on a legacy of legal justifications for the Israeli occupation and reflects the central position occupied by Israelis who identify and define themselves as liberal in carrying out the genocide in Gaza and justifying it. In actively mobilizing to destroy the Gaza Strip; in creating the discourse that framed the crimes against humanity committed by Hamas on October 7, 2023 as exceptional and devoid of context; and later, in upholding denial, the liberal camp was an active partner in the acts of annihilation. All the while, this camp sought to clearly distance itself from the Right, whose support for genocide liberal circles marked as “messianic” and driven by “delusions.” The Israeli liberal camp, based their definition of the devastation of Gaza as a “just war” led by representatives of “civilization,” precisely in their commitment to liberal values, to the global liberal order, and to decent emotional conduct. This commitment established Jewish-Israeli moral superiority over those described as “human animals” and “barbarians.” For the liberal camp, Palestinians were worthy of compassion only as long as they remained a humanitarian issue, trapped behind the walls Israel constructed around the Gaza Strip. This compassion posed no threat to Jewish supremacy. The violence that erupted on October 7, 2023 rendered undeniable the political nature of Palestinian existence and exposed the limits of liberal compassion. From that moment on, the Palestinians had “lost us”—now it became necessary to “close the heart” to their suffering.

What enables Israeli liberalism to support the ongoing genocide? As Yagil Levy and Arie Krampf have shown, the rise of the Zionist Right to power and the adoption of capitalist policies amid increasing globalization during the 1980s prompted Israel’s secular middle class to question the civic contract that tied civil rights to military service. This questioning manifested in challenges to military policy and even in legitimation of conscientious objection—triggered, in part, by the Lebanon War, which was explicitly defined as a “war of choice” and involvedincluded new patterns of warfare involving massive and brutal killing of civilians. Popular culture, primarily representing the secular middle class, gave expression to this questioning and challenge, With contributions from some of the most popular artists at the time. Shalom Hanoch called Defense Minister and architect of the Lebanon War Ariel Sharon a “murderer” in “Doesn’t Stop for Red.” Palestinian construction and janitorial workers, ubiquitous in Tel Aviv whose buildings they built, found their way into popular songs, such as Ehud Banai’s “Mix the Plaster” and Si Heyman’s “Shooting and Crying.” Nurit Galron’s “After Us, the Deluge” juxtaposed Tel Aviv’s indifference with the burning Gaza Strip of the First Intifada. The rock band Mashina sang, “the enemy no longer scares [us], he only needs mercy”—a pronouncement that captured the politics of liberal Israelis during the intifada years.

This liberalism deviated from the boundaries of traditional Zionist discourse, but it remained delimited by the conceptual grounding from which it emerged—late capitalism. It ignored questions of political economy and the distribution of capital, and shifted the discussion about Palestinians from the distribution of power and material resources to issues of humane emotions and strictly symbolic aspects of the national question. The liberal camp’s questioning of the army’s use of force did not stem from recognizing the need to end the occupation, or the imperative to find a political solution to Palestinian oppression, which is rooted in the 1948 expulsions. On the contrary, this emergent liberal position reflected primarily a new sense of self, a new portrayal of the secular middle-class person as a sensitive subject. Emotional responsiveness to Palestinian suffering was a key feature of this portrayal, but did not manifest as a demand to change the existing power structure. The foregrounding of this emotional alertness occurred alongside this group’s growing aspirations to integrate into the global bourgeoisie and move freely around the world as citizens of a democratic state defined by the ’67 borders.

For Israelis, the Oslo Accords fulfilled the aspirations of the middle class—opening new markets and tourist destinations and reaffirming their liberal self-consciousness. The discourse about the agreements organized much of the internal debate in Israel as taking place between liberals interested in withdrawing from Palestinian urban areas as a basis for “separation,” and the settlers who sought to deepen Israeli colonization of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. However, even the liberal camp did not see the agreement as a basis for realizing the Palestinians’ right to self-determination or for recognizing Israeli oppression beyond limited symbolic manifestations. The Israeli refusal to include in the agreements a halt to settlement construction, and PLO leader Yasser Arafat’s compromise on this issue, underscore the degree to which the agreement exploited Palestinian weakness while maximizing Israel’s advantages. Indeed, there was a surge in settlement construction following the signing of the agreement.

In the early 2000s, the narcissism of Israeli liberalism was again evident in blaming the Palestinians as solely responsible for the outbreak of the Second Intifada, which also saw the police killings of 13 Palestinian citizens of the Israeli State in October 2000. Palestinian motivations for using violence during and since the Second Intifada have been explained as annihilationist aspirations and as testimony to the fact that they had no interest in implementing the Oslo Agreements from the start. The same narcissistic logic continued with the withdrawal of Israeli military forces from the Gaza Strip and the evacuation of settlements as part of the disengagement plan. These were executed without an agreement, while maintaining Israeli control of entry and exit routes to the Strip. Discussions about the disengagement plan ignored the Palestinians and proceeded as if the conflict was entirely between the Israeli “left” and the settler right. These discussions led primarily to further articulation of the liberal camp’s self-consciousness, while there was no discussion at all about how the settlements impacted Palestinian lives in the Gaza Strip. The fact that the Gaza Strip is an enclave into which hundreds of thousands of refugees were crammed following the 1948 Nakba, or the meaning of refugee camps for Palestinians, were topics never to be mentioned. 

The disengagement was perceived as a fault line for the religious-Zionist right, but in fact it heralded its total victory in the political discourse in Israel. In the liberal discourse that crystallized after the Second Intifada, there was no longer room for challenging control over the Palestinians or the use of military force. Instead, liberal discourse shifted its focus to the individual rights of Israeli Jews—women, LGBTQ people—and to opposing the rabbinical establishment. In all these issues, military service provided a key platform for advancing these rights. Although these processes began in the 1990s, the prominence they gained in the public eye, and their complete detachment from the issue of occupation, took on greater significance in the period after the Second Intifada. As portrayals of female combat pilots and LGBTQ army officers came to stand for feminism and LGBTQ rights, the connection between these struggles and the rights of Palestinians, which had a considerable presence in the 1990s, was pushed to the margins. These developments paved the way for legitimizing a racist rights discourse—the demand for equality became equality in the right to oppress and kill Palestinian women and men.

This discourse also characterized the “liberal camp” protests against the judicial reform in 2023. The rallying cry “de-mo-cra-tia” reflected an aspiration for liberal self-preservation, and the centrality of the Supreme Court and sound governance to the self-consciousness of this group. The occupation and siege of Gaza, as well as class oppression within Israel—the core issues of the “democracy” that never existed between the river and the sea—were almost completely excluded from the main stages of protest. Thus, the protests revealed that the domain of Israeli liberalism is opposition to the Right, without actually opposing it. 

So too in the moment before October 7, 2023: Israeli liberalism did not criticize the right wing’s actions, but the manner in which they were taken, demanding civility instead of overt cruelty. These were the conditions that enabled the formation of genocidal liberalism in Israel. This moment marked the completion of the transformation that began following the emergence of Israeli liberalism in the 1980s. Initially, despite all its limitations, Israeli liberalism saw the issue of Palestinian existence and the occupation as central to its liberal conception, even if out of instrumental considerations and fear of the potential prices Israelis would pay in the global arena. When it became clear that the global costs were not so high, and that the Arab countries were also prepared to throw Palestinians under the wheels of normalization and global capitalism, the vision of separation embodied in the formula “we are here, and they are there,” which emerged out of the Oslo era, was abandoned. Liberal narcissism begot a distinctly blind liberalism, to which the very notion of a political dimension—namely, the demand to end the occupation—is foreign.

For the liberal camp, Hamas’s attack and the crimes committed as part of it are nothing more than another instance of violence for the sake of violence directed at Jews as such. Thus, they have mobilized enthusiastically to fulfill the government’s orders to bomb and destroy Gaza. From calls for democracy, the liberal camp’s resources were redirected toward denial, and blaming the “messianics” for the continuation of the “war” and the abandonment of the hostages. Understanding the role of Israeli liberalism in creating the infrastructure for justifying genocide is vital to finding ways to stop it. It teaches that the political horizon must move beyond the boundaries of narcissism and liberal blindness embedded in the demand for separation, and toward comprehensive recognition of Palestinian national rights, of the need for the redistribution of power and material resources, and of the demand for shared bi-national existence.

Avi-Ram Tzoreff is a historian who teaches at the Open University, Sapir College, and Ben-Gurion University. He is a member of the Academia for Equality committee, and a member of the Land for All movement, Mizrahi-Civil collective, and the Zochrot association.

 

Additional Reading:

Arie Krampf, “Israel’s Neoliberal Turn and its National Security Paradigm“, Polish Political Science Yearbook 47:2 (2018): 227-241. 

Lev Luis Grinbeg, Politics and Violence in Israel/Palestine: Democracy versus Military Rule. New York: Routledge, 2010.

Orly Noy, “At The Hague, Aharon Barak will play Dr. Jekyll to Israel’s Mr. Hyde,” +972 Magazine, January 10, 2024.

Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, “A Peace Without Arabs: The Discourse of Peace and the Limits of Israeli Consciousness”, in After Oslo, edited by G. Giacaman and D. J. Loenning (London and Chicago: Pluto Press, 1998), pp. 59-76.

יגיל לוי, יורים ולא בוכים: המיליטריזציה החדשה של ישראל בשנות האלפיים. רעננה: למדא, 2023.

אמנון רז קרקוצקין, “תהליך שלום המבוסס על הפרדה אינו הפיתרון“, שיחה מקומית, 26 באוקטובר, 2020.