Are Jewish fundamentalists more dangerous than the secularists? Ask their Palestinian victims
An election billboard featuring coalition party leaders (L-R) Itamar Ben-Gvir, Benjamin Netanyahu, Bezalel Smotrich and Arye Dery, March 2019
Joseph Massad writes in Middle East Eye:
For decades now, secular Zionists and even anti-Zionists have been hectoring us about the danger of Zionist Jewish fundamentalism. Their voices have become more trenchant in the last few months with the accession to power of Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing government, which includes the largest number of Jewish fundamentalists ever in an Israeli cabinet.
Most of the secular Zionists worry that Jewish fundamentalists are very dangerous to Israeli Jews, others that they are also dangerous to Palestinians, while some, including anti-Zionist secularists, insist that they threaten the entire gentile world.
Yet, it has always been secular Zionists who commit the most horrific massacres of Palestinians, who conquered and colonised their lands, who discriminate against Mizrahi Jews, and who remain friends with antisemitic regimes and forces around the world – from Hungary’s Viktor Orban and other right-wing European political movements to American evangelical fundamentalists.
It is also secular Zionists who continue to use military censorship on all media in Israel, and who have continued to rule the country under Emergency Regulations since 1948. It is also the secularists who enacted all the racist laws for which Israel is so infamous. What, then, makes the Zionist Jewish fundamentalists more dangerous than secular Zionists?
Secular fundamentalism
Many of the anti-Jewish fundamentalist disquisitions are, in fact, akin in tone and bias to the anti-Muslim – let alone the anti-Islamist – treatises published by Islamophobic westerners, and Arab and Muslim secularists.
Indeed, what the anti-Jewish fundamentalist tracts have in common with the anti-Muslim and anti-Islamist tirades is an unreserved commitment to white Protestant European liberal secularism, deployed as the main “enlightened” reference with which Islam, Islamism and fundamentalist Judaism (if not Judaism itself) are always compared, and which leaves all the others wanting.
A relevant example is the long interview that the Israeli newspaper Haaretz ran a couple of weeks ago about the influence of the American-born Israeli fundamentalist rabbi, Yitzchak Ginsburgh. The interview was conducted with the Israeli-educated and US-based professor of religion Motti Inbari, a scholar of Ginsburgh and his movement. As a secular Zionist, Inbari warns readers that Ginsburgh wants to transform Israel into “Iran”, as he seeks:
“To uproot the Zionist-secular spirit and to topple the government, until a Torah-based regime can be established. The Supreme Court, with its criminal decisions, must be crushed. The army does not need to be crushed, only subjugated. In this context, it’s important to draw comparisons, and this must be stated explicitly: This is the way of thinking of ISIS and Al-Qaida.”
Inbari adds that Ginsburgh is also dangerous to Palestinians and other gentiles as he believes that “Jewish blood is worthier than gentile blood”, and that “the Jews are above nature, and therefore, in a situation in which a gentile intends to kill a Jew, the gentile must be liquidated in order to protect the Jew”.