Idée Fixe
Holocaust trauma and Zionist exterminationism
Jake Romm
Why has it come to this? It’s a difficult question to ask while the genocide continues, while losses mount, while the enemy regroups, expands its assault, and may still emerge victorious. It is, at best, secondary to the question of how: how do we bring this to an end? At worst, to pose the question of why entails a too-early postmortem on Zionism: the ideology is at its exterminationist zenith—though even this might be wishful thinking—and, in any event, history contains no guarantees.
Still, beginning the work of examining the road to genocide—unpacking the internal dynamics that continue to deepen the catastrophe at every turn—can help us to make sense of a present that seems increasingly moved by madness alone. I say “begin” because a full accounting is well beyond the scope of the present moment: Palestine is not past-tense, not a historical object lesson, but a living present. It is a service to the enemy to cast Palestine into the past—to presume that there is a pre-given, finalized totality to be examined—as much as it is a disservice to those fighting and surviving on the ground: they still believe in a future; there is no “after,” not yet. To capture the still unfolding totality of the contemporary Zionist death-machine, it is best to approach from an angle—with stabs at defining this inchoate moment. The task is vast. Even though Israeli soldiers have been documenting and publishing their crimes with a hitherto unknown brazenness and glee, we have only seen an exceedingly small fraction of the horrors.
The task is vaster still. This is not only because there is a significant amount of historical and archival work to be synthesized, but also because, like the Shoah before it, the genocide of the Palestinians is a rupture in world history. It’s not a rupture in the sense of a break with that which came before. The present Nakba breaks open the earth, one which exposes the tectonic movements and geological composition of the present order, so to speak. In a condensed period of time, we are experiencing a moment which crystallizes so much of the exterminatory logic that has for so long dominated the globe, revealing the full potential of the industrial capacities that genocidal colonial plunder helped to create in the first place. As Zygmunt Bauman writes in Modernity and the Holocaust:
“The truth is that every ‘ingredient’ of the Holocaust—all those many things that rendered it possible—was normal; ‘normal’ not in the sense of the familiar, of one more specimen in a large class of phenomena long ago described in full, explained and accommodated (on the contrary, the experience of the Holocaust was new and unfamiliar), but in the sense of being fully in keeping with everything we know about our civilization, its guiding spirit, its priorities, its immanent vision of the world—and of the proper ways to pursue human happiness together with a perfect society.”
The fundamental barbarity of civilization has remained the same—“normality” reigns—but it has taken on new forms, both material and ideological. A full accounting of the road to the genocide of the Palestinians will have to account for these changes along with the specificities of the genocide itself.
So, a stab from an exact angle. Reference to the Shoah does not mean it should be utilized as the measure against which other genocides are measured, as Zionists so often assert, nor does this reference entail a direct continuity of the tactics of historical interrogation. Moreover, genocide against the Palestinians should not only become legible for many in the West when considered in reference to violence against Western subjects. Rather, reference is made here to the Shoah because of its similar place in world history and because of its centrality to the Zionist worldview, especially as it pertains to the present genocide.
“It is a service to the enemy to cast Palestine into the past—to presume that there is a pre-given, finalized totality to be examined—as much as it is a disservice to those fighting and surviving on the ground: they still believe in a future; there is no ‘after,’ not yet.”
At the time of writing, Israel has recently invaded Syria, seizing territory, and it has continually violated its ceasefire with Hezbollah: murdering civilians returning to their homes in southern Lebanon, conducting airstrikes, and refusing to withdraw from Lebanese territory as per the agreement, among other violences. Even the long-awaited ceasefire in Gaza, the first stage beginning on January 19th, expires after 42 days unless an agreement can be reached on the second and third rounds. There is reason to hope. But Israel’s persistent shootings, delays, murders, and bombings during the nascent ceasefire—as well as increasingly bellicose rhetoric from Israeli officials as the expiration date looms—suggest that the ceasefire will ultimately fall apart. As of this writing, one month after the implementation of the deal, “at least 132 Palestinians, including 26 who succumbed to their wounds, and more than 900 people [have been] injured as a result of Israeli gunfire and raids” in Gaza, and Israel has violated the agreement 266 times and counting. Understanding the way the Shoah figures into the Zionist worldview, even in the partial sense sketched here, can help explain the extremity of the present violence as well as Israel’s continued refusal to make even temporary peace.
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In a 1983 article, “Israel and the Trauma of the Mass Extermination,” German-Israeli historian Dan Diner argued that, for Israelis, the conflict with the Palestinians has been “completely overlaid by historical metaphors” such that they “tend to place their own current history into a transhistorical continuity and thus to overlook specific characteristics.” The historical metaphor is to the Shoah whereby, in the Israeli psyche, each event in the colonization of Palestine occurs within this same line of continuity. The continuity rebounds anachronistically: the colonization of Palestine, which began prior to the Shoah, becomes retroactively justified and even motivated by the Shoah itself. For the Zionist, the spatial-temporal displacement means that colonization is not only justified as a means for securing a safe haven for the Jews from their Nazi (and other European) murderers, but from the Palestinians as well. Due to their presence in the “redeeming” land and their historical antecedence to the Shoah, the Palestinians have come to stand in for the Nazi threat.
Indeed, as Palestinian sociologist and anthropologist Honaida Ghanim notes, “statistics indicate that a large percentage of those enlisted in the Zionist forces in 1948 were Holocaust survivors; according to Hanna Yablonka (1997), they made up nearly half the total number of conscripts.” It remains a well-known and uncomfortable fact: the victims of the Shoah, in turn, helped perpetrate the Nakba and, thus, per Israeli genocide scholar Yair Auron, “the Holocaust was present through the tens of thousands of Holocaust survivors who reached Palestine after 1945 and participated in the war of 1948, in which some of them were killed.” The Palestinian and broader Arab armed resistance to Zionism was, then, also seen as violence against recent survivors of the Shoah and in line with the Nazi violence that drove many of them to Palestine in the first place. For the Zionist, the war against the Palestinians and the Arab armies was also a stand-in for the (failed) fight against the Nazis: now, finally vengeance could be wrought, but only by proxy, made to do the work of standing in.
In the work of Abba Kovner—Jewish partisan in Nazi-occupied Lithuania, poet, IDF Givati Brigade information officer, and co-founder of the group Nakam, which abortively conspired to murder millions of Germans as revenge for the Shoah in the immediate post-war period—two contradictory and symptomatic mutations occur with respect to the Arab enemy. First, as Professor Hannan Hever writes,
“in order to provide external justification for the brutal war fought by the Givati Brigade against the Egyptian Army, Kovner, in his combat pages, draws an analogy between the Egyptian enemy and the Nazis, settling his score against the Nazis of the Holocaust period with the Egyptians of the present. Using revenge against the Nazis to represent and justify revenge against the Egyptians is based precisely on the internal act of the trampled Jewish subject seeking to constitute himself through revenge, as a Zionist way of resolving the ‘Jewish Question’ in Europe.”
Simultaneous to the transformation of the Arab enemy into the avatar of the Nazis, however, Kovner also adopted a position of positive identification with the Nazis themselves—an identification premised on the Zionists’ drive for conquest and settlement, murder, and expulsion. Hever notes a line from Kovner’s poem “Smooth Stone”: “Torn and scattered—a sea of fallen helmets—hilltops / and Guernica on every hill. // “Guernica on every hill!” we listened to David.” Hever writes that “in evoking this image, Kovner appears to compare the wanton cruelty of Israeli soldiers against the Palestinians of Beersheba to that of Nazi forces against the inhabitants of Guernica. The line ‘Guernica on every hill’ makes this analogy even stronger because the word ‘hill,’ givaa in Hebrew, refers directly to ‘Givati,’ the name of the brigade.”
The Shoah was present for the early Zionist perpetrators of the Nakba both as the crime to be avenged and the model for the barbarity—and efficacy—required to carry that vengeance out. In the present day, this identification has remained a part of the Israeli-soldiers’ psyche: in a recent article for Israeli paper Haaretz, one soldier is quoted as saying, regarding his actions against the Palestinians during the First Intifada, “I felt like, like, like a Nazi ... it looked exactly like we were actually the Nazis and they were the Jews.”
This retroactive transubstantiation is bolstered by the national-racial element in Zionist thought, just as the historical colonization of Palestine prompted armed resistance on the part of the native Palestinians. Early Zionists like Ze’ev Jabotinsky were quite lucid about the inevitability of armed Palestinian resistance to Zionist colonization. As he famously wrote: “[t]he native populations, civilized or uncivilized, have always stubbornly resisted the colonists, irrespective of whether they were civilized or savage.” Because this was a conflict between natives and a settler colonial entity, Diner argues that “its ramifications include a moment of mutual extermination … [of] the very collective existence of Israeli-Jews and of Palestinian Arabs.” Diner is correct that to assert the Zionists’ failure to colonize Palestine—in whole or in part—would entail the extermination of the existence of “Israeli-Jews,” but crucially, only qua Israelis as a political formation and not qua Jews as a people—i.e., political dissolution, not physical extermination. (Even though Diner had lucidly diagnosed this symptomatic sleight of hand in the 1980s, he nevertheless continues to perpetuate this same deadly misidentification.) In other words, the Zionists were attempting to fashion a national polity on, and inextricable from, a specific piece of land, but defeat at the hands of the Palestinians and the Arab armies would have entailed not “extermination,” as Diner states, but the failure of an ideological project.
Indeed, both before and after the founding of the State of Israel, Palestinian resistance and national leaders insisted on the inclusion of Jews in any future Palestinian or Pan-Arab state. The same cannot be said for Zionist attitudes towards the Palestinians. As Diner states, Zionism reacted to European persecution “with a negative acceptance of the antisemitic image of Jews,” which “assumes that the causes of antisemitism are to be found among the Jews themselves and thinks it possible to eliminate antisemitism through a ‘civilizing’ transformation or even a territorial concentration of the Jews in their own communal entity.” Or, as Fayez Sayegh argues in Zionist Colonialism in Palestine, the Zionists’ negative-acceptance of antisemitic racial ideology entailed the participation in the construction of a Jewish race as separate from the various so-called European races.
This racial thinking, in turn, transformed the negative-acceptance of the Europeans’ antisemitic denial of Jewish entry into the national polity into a positive refusal to assimilate—or, in other words, a desire for self-segregation from other national polities. In the context of Europe, this meant emigration to Palestine. In the context of Palestine, Sayegh argues, “the fundamental Zionist principle of racial self-segregation also demands racial purity and racial exclusiveness in the land in which Jewish self-segregation is to be attained.” Zionist colonialism in Palestine was not a case of a pre-existing national polity acquiring new territory but was itself coextensive with the nation-building project. As stated by Chaim Weizmann—president of the World Zionist Organization and later the first president of Israel—this was a project that would entail the creation of “a Palestine that would be ‘as Jewish as England is English’ … [and] ‘a nationality which would be as Jewish as the French nation was French.’” Accordingly, Zionists set out to realize an imagined pre-existing unity between blood and soil where Palestine was and will be Jewish. In order to complete the historical picture, the native must not only be removed from the land, but their very claim to existence on the land, past, present, and future must be negated as well. Indeed, the idea of “unity” already contains within itself the implicit threat of expulsion: one blood for one soil.
This drive for racial self-segregation goes some way toward explaining the dynamics of expulsion, but it does not necessarily lead to extermination. Diner, however, fills in a missing element in his explication of the distinction between persecution and extermination as it pertained to the Jewish experience in Europe. Prior to the Shoah, he argues, Jews in Europe faced persecution both as individuals and as a collective. This persecution existed both in terms of semi-regular state and non-state violence alongside the denial of full rights granted to other members of their respective polities. To the Zionists, such persecution was (correctly) interpreted as a problem of political power. The most obvious solutions were either Jewish autarky, emigration to a place in which the persecution and oppression of Jews was a non-issue, or the political liberalization of the persecuting polity. Neither of these solutions necessarily pointed toward the colonization of Palestine, even though autarky could be and was (to an extent) realized through just such a means.
As a project of extermination, the Shoah, however, was qualitatively different from classical European antisemitic persecution. According to the Zionist interpretation of history, per Diner, “a sovereign Jewish state is an absolute necessity if Jews are to be guaranteed a refuge in case of persecution. Had such a possibility existed before the mass extermination, then more Jews would have been able to save themselves.” But, as Diner argues, the Nazi policy of the total extermination of the Jews wherever they may be made the territorial concentration of Jews ill-suited to the problem at hand. “In fact,” he continues,
“European Jews who immigrated to Palestine were able to escape persecution by the Nazis. But those Jews able to flee to other lands in which the Nazis could not reach them also escaped persecution… Palestine was even a place where the endangerment of the Jews by the Nazis lay within the realm of the possible—quite apart from the independently existing conflict with the Arabs. In the course of the war the German army stood at the gates of Egypt.”
It was only due to the Nazi defeat in North Africa that the Jews in Palestine “who had prepared themselves for a battle to the end with the German army” were spared the fate of the Jews of Europe. Jews in Palestine were spared from extermination not because of Zionist maneuvering but in precisely the same way as Jews elsewhere: “because of the military efforts of the allies.” (This is to say nothing of Zionist passivity in the face of the extermination of the Jews, as well as their active scuttling of efforts to resettle Jewish refugees anywhere but Palestine.)[1]
“Contesting Zionist historiography leads to an understanding of Zionism as separate from Jewish self-rescue, weakens its claims to historical necessity or justification, and severs one of the primary ideological ties between Zionism and global Jewry.”
The Shoah, then, is not a confirmation of the historical necessity of the Zionist project, but rather a refutation of its territorial aspect. And yet, the “causal linkage of Palestine, the Holocaust and salvation” in Zionist ideology remains ironclad. Zionist ideological hegemony within the Jewish community, in particular, has fashioned the founding of the State of Israel into an act of collective self-emancipation in the wake of catastrophe, but the “notion of having been saved from extermination accidentally and not by Zionism,” Diner writes, “can lead to a deep shock to Jewish self-understanding after the Holocaust.” Contesting Zionist historiography leads to an understanding of Zionism as separate from Jewish self-rescue, weakens its claims to historical necessity or justification, and severs one of the primary ideological ties between Zionism and global Jewry. Zionists have attempted to fuse these two distinct entities into one—with great (though not total) success, it must be sadly acknowledged. This latter consequence disturbs a key aspect of mainstream contemporary Zionist self-conception—premised in large part on masculinist and violent conceptions of self-reliance—and indeed, can collapse this identity altogether. The falsity and instability of Zionism’s conception of its own place vis-à-vis the Shoah—as well as the centrality of this falsehood to the Zionist self-conception—means that it must be insisted on that much more vociferously in order to stave off the psychic damage that would come from the realization of a repressed truth: Zionism was not the savior of the Jews from the Shoah—and thus the savior of the Jews in hypothetical future attempts—but rather a miscalculation at best and an accomplice in their extermination at worst.
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Such a worldview yields morbid results. The idea of territory-as-salvation entails its opposite: for the Zionist, loss of territory was, in the first instance, the cause for Jewish suffering. Any further loss of territory now would entail the same. Through this primacy of territory in the Zionist eschatology, Palestinian resistance to Zionist colonialism has been anachronistically refashioned into a historically false Palestinian exterminationism against the Jews. In 2015, in one extreme example, Benjamin Netanyahu outrageously claimed that Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Palestinian former Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and a figure of obsession by Zionists, convinced Hitler to implement the Final Solution.
This refashioning elides the distinction between antisemitism and antizionism, the latter becoming yet another manifestation of the unbroken line of historical antisemitic persecution against the Jews. Indeed, within a paradigm in which land plus racial self-segregation equals salvation, those most directly resisting the Zionist colonization of the land become the primary avatar of this history of persecution. Their mere presence disturbs Zionist self-segregation. The Nazis were, despite their larger territorial ambitions, a European phenomenon. They remain associated with a continent from which the Zionists had already sought departure, though, crucially, this departure was only territorial. Pre-state Zionists, both Jewish and not, were quite clear about their desire to maintain and foster cultural, political, and economic ties between the future “Jewish State” and the U.S. and Europe as against the Arab Other. Residing in the ostensible land of redemption for all Jews, the Palestinians, paradoxically, take on the aspect of the extra-territorial dimension of Nazism and of the drive to exterminate everywhere because of their rootedness within this specific territory. There can be no salvation without the land and, thus, the existence of Palestinian claims to the land threatens every Jew, everywhere.
The specter of the shadowy global conspiracy of antisemitic thought haunts the Zionist image of the Palestinian, who, in turn, becomes the conspiracy’s director. Each village, each olive tree is refashioned into a node for a global anti-Jewish (read: Zionist) conspiracy. The Zionist blood-and-soil conception of national identity all but ensures that this will be the case: those Jews who remain outside the national territory are simply inchoate Jews. So long as they remain outside, they remain at perpetual risk of destruction as Jews in the Zionist-Nationalist sense: destruction by assimilation, conversion to antizionism, or by physical destruction—any of which, for the Zionist, means death. Antizionism becomes refashioned as a threat of extermination not just of a national ideology, but also of a people who the Zionist has sought to make coextensive with that ideology.
Thus, a favorite phrase of professional Hasbarists—“we have nowhere else to go”—should be understood as an insistence upon Zionist historiography with respect to the land-as-savior and the idea of the nation as defined by blood and soil (we are only Jews insofar as we are on, or have exclusive access to, the soil). The phrase is, likewise, an attempt to refashion every threat as one of extermination to continually reenact that primary ideological moment. The spatial-temporal displacement is buttressed as well by Israeli-sponsored or -aligned Holocaust education trips for Israeli youths. As Ghanim writes,
“one of the demonstrations of the centrality and instrumental use of the memory of Holocaust in shaping contemporary Zionist identity and justifying the legitimacy of Zionism in Palestine and its measures and policies against the Palestinians is the organized week-long school trips taken by Israeli teens to Poland. These trips, which mark the end of high school years and the beginning of compulsory army service, are supposedly designed to raise Holocaust awareness and provide thorough understanding of the atrocities of World War II, while in fact they feed and nourish Zionist, nationalistic, and exclusionary sentiments.”
Similar trips, like the March of the Living or those organized by private Jewish high schools, fulfill an identical ideological function. The sickening and ubiquitous sight of Jewish teenagers draped in the Israeli flag at Auschwitz gives visual form to the displacement: we were killed because of this flag, and because of this flag we must kill in turn—lest this history repeat. In turn, a new commandment: Let the history repeat.
Temporalities and geography mix and collapse in the ruins of the crematoria and emerge, reformed, from the barrel of a gun in Gaza. The inability to bury Jewish dead now is mirrored in the intent to prevent the gathering of the scattered remains of Palestinians. October 7th made this paranoid worldview even more explicit and pushed its material consequences into overdrive. A few illustrative examples, all taken from the indispensable Zionism Observer database:
“As Hitler, may his name be erased, once said: ‘I cannot live in this world if there is one Jew left in it,’ we could not live in this land if even one such Islamo-Nazi remains in Gaza, and not before we return to Gaza and turn it into Hebrew Gaza.”—Former Likud MK Moshe Feiglin.
“The whole Gaza Strip needs to be empty. Flattened. Just like in Auschwitz. Let it be a museum for all the world to see what Israel can do. Let no one reside in the Gaza Strip for all the world to see, because October 7 was in a way a second Holocaust.”—David Azoulai, Head of Metula Council.
“‘There are 2 million Nazis in Gaza.’”—Finance Minister Bezalel Yoel Smotrich.
“The UN breaks the Guinness World Record for rewarding terrorism. And if Hitler were alive, he would praise the UN, which is considering recognizing a Palesti-Nazi terror state. I criticized the idea and said that if this happens, the UN will be remembered as a body that has been hijacked by dictators and human rights violators. A body that rewards Nazi-like monsters.”—Former Representative of Israel to the United Nations Gilad Erdan.
Even before October 7th, however, this worldview predominated, wherein even slight political transformation became confused with physical extermination: one cannot admit even modest changes to the character of the state when those changes are to the benefit of a Nazi-like entity. Such a dynamic guarantees that Palestinian efforts to effect political change or compromise will be met with violence, because these efforts are already perceived as violence in the first instance. This in turn creates a situation in which armed struggle against Zionism becomes both a political inevitability and a political necessity. “Things one fears for no real reason, apparently obsessed by an idée fixe,” Adorno writes in Minima Moralia, “have an impertinent tendency to come about.”
The inability to bury Jewish dead now is mirrored in the intent to prevent the gathering of the scattered remains of Palestinians.
This is, in part, why the Zionist war against the Palestinians has always been as much about demography as about territory. Indeed, even supposedly “liberal” Zionist policy institutions conceive of the Palestinians as a demographic threat. Much has been made in the Israeli press about the findings of Israeli geographer Arnon Soffer, whose repeated warnings about a demographic shift in Israel have finally materialized as of 2022: “According to Soffer, there are 7.45 million Jews and others along with 7.53 million Arab Israelis and Palestinians living in what he termed the Land of Israel, meaning Israel plus the West Bank and Gaza Strip.” Even worse, from the Zionist perspective: “although the birthrate has been higher among the Jewish population in recent years, so too is the death rate, meaning the Arab population, which is far younger on average than the Jewish population, is growing faster.” Soffer, nevertheless, maintained a belief in a two-state solution to Israel’s “demographic problem” (though it’s unknown whether that belief has weathered October 7th). But sequestration on ever-smaller swaths of non-contiguous, politically and economically neutered territory—i.e., the so-called two-state solution—has long been dead as a political possibility, due in large part to the constant encroachment of the state-sponsored settler movement and the total immiseration of Gaza. Even on ideological grounds, Zionists who advocate for a two-state solution have definitively lost the battle. Two states were never a solution, only a deferral. If Palestinians remain on the land, they will be conceived as a threat. A Palestinian state does not change this fundamental aspect of the Zionist worldview; indeed, it may even solidify it.
Such fears have been festering for decades. As Lawrence Davidson noted in a 1978 article for the Journal of Palestine Studies, the intensity of the fear of the “demographic threat” can be seen in the phrases, once more laced with paranoia, that they use to describe it: “a demographic holocaust,” and “extermination without war.” The mere existence of the Palestinian people is itself conceived as a “holocaust” or “extermination”—again, due to the conflation of the Jewish people with the Israeli political identity. The threat is, ironically, only enhanced by Israel’s territorial ambitions. As Davidson also notes, the “realization of Eretz Israel [i.e., the conquest of territory in the 1967 War] is also the realization of the ‘ingathering’ of ever greater numbers of non-Jews.” Each new conquest and annexation of Palestinian or other Arab lands further amplifies the “demographic threat” and, thus, moves the Zionist toward ever greater paranoia: if these Palestinians weren’t so hell-bent on killing us, the deluded thinking goes, then why would they insist on remaining on our land? (A similar dynamic, per Bauman’s gloss on the functionalist school of thought in Holocaust studies, partially accounts for the Nazis’ ultimate decision to adopt extermination as opposed to expulsion as the answer to the “Jewish problem.”) As Davidson writes, according to former Prime Minister Menachem Begin’s public statements, Palestinians are “merely a contemporary version of Nazi landgrabbers. Actually, such statements sound uncomfortably similar to the wild accusations made by Hitler and Goebbels against their East European victims before forcibly expropriating their land.”
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As in 1948, the Zionist is left with only two options: expulsion or extermination—a mixture of both inevitably ensues. The Greater Israel movement has, since October 7th, been gaining popularity, and settlers can barely contain their excitement at the destruction of Gaza, Lebanon, and Syria. In the case of the latter, rudimentary encampments—precursors to larger settlements—have already been planned or constructed in the wake of advancing Israeli soldiers; in the case of the former, settlers bring their children to the border to imagine their future homes among the rubble. These expansionist ambitions, however, can no longer be satisfied by conquest and expulsion: the threat of Palestinian life has, as we have seen, taken on an extraterritorial dimension for the Zionist. The existence of Palestinians is a threat, and this remains true, wherever they may be. The epithet “terrorist,” which the Zionist applies to the Palestinian people as a whole, has an amorphous, global dimension: the global conspiracy aspect of antisemitic thought rearing its head in a new constellation. Palestinian populations residing outside of Palestine—and, thus, outside of direct Israeli control—are equally threatening to the Zionist psyche (remembering the heyday of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s alternatively Jordan- or Lebanon-based armed resistance). Wherever the Palestinian resides, their presence renders the population within which they are embedded a latent enemy, waiting to be activated. As we have seen in the case of Lebanon, the Zionist acts offensively and ensures that the “threat” becomes activated—all the better to claim self-defense after the fact.
Instead of cutting against the predominant ideological grain in increasingly untenable material circumstances, the exterminationist camp in Israeli politics has won the day in no small part because their prescription works in harmony with Zionism. Since October 7th, Israeli officials—from Netanyahu to Ben Gvir to Smotrich to Minister of Communications Shlomo Karhi to various members of the Knesset—have all spoken with one voice: there will not be a Palestinian state, ever. Smotrich, in particular, has proven instructive. In January 2024, he stated: “There is a broad consensus in Israel against a Palestinian state and the division of the land. Israel’s friends should understand that the push for the establishment of a Palestinian state is a push for the next massacre, God forbid, and the risk of the existence of the State of Israel.”
Here we can see a core aspect of the development of the logic of extermination. Not only is no compromise possible, but also one cannot admit any manner of coexistence with a perceived existential threat, one which, the deluded thinking goes, is bent on destruction beyond all reason. As genocide scholar Raz Segal noted in an article from the summer of 2024, “this weaponization [of the Shoah], then, provides justification for Israel’s genocidal assault on Palestinians in Gaza, for a war against Nazis necessitates, in Israeli minds, the lifting ‘of all restrictions,’ as Defense Minister Yoav Gallant explained on October 10.” The “demographic problem” of Palestinian existence, then, cannot be solved through isolation, and this is for the same reason that territorial self-segregation was not a tenable response to Nazi exterminationism. The situation becomes Manichean, zero-sum. The response to threatened extermination becomes extermination in turn.
Any military defeat, then, exposes the mistaken logic of territorial concentration and gives lie to the entire Zionist self-conception: that this is the only haven for the Jews, without which all of world Jewry would be destroyed. October 7th was this kind of defeat that exposes a mistake—as was Hezbollah’s successful repulsion of the Zionist invasion back in 2006, as is the Houthis' seemingly undaunted and unabated military solidarity campaign. None can be forgiven. The only way to stabilize affairs is to neutralize such threats via military means—diplomacy manifests, for the Zionist, as mere delay. But when the nation qua political entity becomes confused with the people as such, then the very idea of a Palestinian nationalism or a Palestinian majority within the Jewish state looks like extermination as well. Thus, neutralization does not only mean military defeat of one’s enemies, but their extermination as a demographic bloc as well—either completely, or to a point where the “demographic threat” can be settled, on a purely numerical basis, for a significant amount of time. In late January, Itmar Ben Gvir remarked on the images of Palestinians returning to what was left of their homes in northern Gaza, “Our soldiers did not fight or sacrifice their lives in Gaza to allow these images and we must return to war.” Even life among the rubble cannot be countenanced.
To stave off the realization of the truth of Zionism vis-à-vis Jewish safety, constant violence must be enacted on Israel’s enemies. If we are, indeed, always under threat of extermination, the reasoning goes, then vigilance is not enough: action is demanded at all times. A self-defeating situation arises in which one must always be on the offensive. Constant offensive violence, however, breeds material resistance from the targets and creates new threats in turn—either due to the expansion of theaters or, as we’ve seen in the case of the Houthis, due to genuine commitments to the Responsibility to Protect (in practice, if not in name) on the part of previously untargeted blocs. Attempts to secure safety continually create danger: this is the paradoxical crux of the doctrine of permanent security, a geopolitical paradigm defined by anticipatory (i.e., “defensive offensive”) responses to constant paranoiac threat perception. As Mary Turfah recently wrote in Protean Magazine,
“Israel exists … in a state of perpetual lawlessness in the name of amorphous ends—namely, Security—whose means can only be scrutinized once Security is established, once Peace arrives.… ‘Security’ for Israel remains a euphemism that grants Israel carte blanche to reinforce its foundational right to dominate, to massacre and dispossess, unimpeded.”
The “defensive offensive” paradigm is perhaps best articulated by the Israeli concept of “mowing the grass”—the intermittent blitz destruction of Gaza, a means of destroying lives and infrastructure as a means of reasserting control over the restive Strip: a periodic reminder of the right to dominate. Such offensive destruction, as we saw on October 7th, generates defensive violence in turn, which the Zionists inevitably refashion into an un-prompted attack, reversing the murderous order of operations.
Seen in this light, any ceasefire with Hezbollah in Lebanon is almost certain to prove temporary. Israel, for its part, began violating the ceasefire from the very first moments. Moreover, the recent Zionist expansion into Syrian territory is unlikely to stop with a “buffer zone,” one which would, almost certainly, continually breed violence on its periphery. Hezbollah, due to its support for Palestinian armed resistance and its manifest ability to defeat Israel militarily, has become caught within the Zionists’ delusional web of projection—a Hitler to the North, exactly like the Hitler in Gaza. Likewise, the ceasefire in Gaza, already temporary, was immediately seized upon by the Israelis as an occasion to escalate violence in the West Bank. Each defensive operation by the Palestinians and their supporters retrenches the Zionists’ offensive efforts.
“Zionism becomes—like other racial-expansionist ideologies before it—a negation of coexistence with the Other.”
Filtered through a deepening paranoid delusion that turns on this dynamic, every offensive effort appears to the Zionist only as their own defensive warfare. This persecution-paranoia complex cannot, in any event, be satisfied, particularly when operating within a paradigm premised on racial self-segregation. Paranoia, as an interpretation mania, filters all stimuli through the lens of a perceived threat. When the threat of existence is one asymptotically reaching toward complete racial dominance and self-segregation, the Other as such falls under the heading of “threat.” Zionism becomes—like other racial-expansionist ideologies before it—a negation of coexistence with the Other.
As French theorist Paul Virilio writes in Bunker Archaeology, defensive ramparts
“owe their value to being constantly and totally manned and occupied—all the more so in the case of a hyper-structure engaged in the occupation of a continent. This was one of the weaknesses of the Third Reich, for, as Mao Tse-tung wrote in 1942, ‘If Hitler is obliged to resort to strategic defense, fascism is over and done with; indeed, a state like the Third Reich has from its inception founded its military and political life on the offensive. Put a stop to the offensive, and its existence ends.’”
This remains true of Zionism, albeit in a mutated fashion. Virilio and Mao were speaking of the Atlantic Ocean’s imposition of territorial limits on the Third Reich and its turn from offensive action to defensive entrenchment: for Virilio, the building of the Atlantic Wall was the beginning of the end for the Nazi project. While it is true that Zionism is, at its core, dependent upon territorial acquisition, this revanchism is at least hypothetically bounded by an understanding of ancient borders, though, it must be acknowledged, this ahistorical myth itself borders on psychosis. But, like a shark, Zionism must keep moving, or it dies. Here, however, constant territorial expansion is not the primary mode of motion, rather it is coequal with the need for constant external and internal violence. Territorial expansion and the need for offensive violence go hand-in-hand, but each may be the prime mover of the other depending on the situation. For those who can never feel safe, danger becomes a necessity: where it does not exist, it will be created.
The condition culminates in madness. In late February, a Jewish Israeli woman attacked another Jewish Israeli woman with a small axe, yelling “Christian, Christian!” as she swung. A week prior, two Jewish Israelis were shot in Miami by an American Jewish Zionist who believed the two men to be Palestinian. One of the victims took to social media to post “death to the Arabs” after being treated. Again, a case of mistaken identity. Zionists cannot recognize each other as common Volk outside the context of the land they stole. Even there, the intensifying paranoiac element of Zionist thought, which must continually seek out threats, hampers identification—unrelated stimuli, filtered through an increasingly detached paranoia, merge and become deindividuated as, simply, threat. It is not blood, or race, or religion, or even language that makes the Zionists legible to one another: it is domination, the common sneer of the checkpoint guard, that binds them. Blood and soil—fake on both accounts—becomes blind violence against the Other-as-such when its capacity for recognition becomes disrupted, when it takes on a global dimension. In the last analysis, Zionism finds its primary internal dynamic in the negation of the Other, and the limit of the Other remains the limit of Zionism: wherever it finds something unlike itself, it must root it out. Zionism, as a movement, cannot know psychic peace until the Other-as-threat is silenced; but it cannot thrive, cannot continue to buttress its own illusions without constantly fashioning the Other—particularly the Palestinian-Other and those who come to their aid—into a threat in the first place. And so peace will not, must not, come.
[1] Controversy remains regarding both the prominence and extent of Zionist collaboration with the Nazis, their efforts to scuttle efforts to resettle Jewish refugees outside of Palestine, and their passivity in the face of the Nazi threat; the fact of each remains as well, though we should be wary of overstating the case. As Diner writes, “Before the mass extermination, in 1938, when the National-Socialist policy with regard to Jews still appeared as traditional antisemitism and neither the Jews in Germany, nor those in annexed Austria had yet been in direct physical danger, the Jewish Agency tried to undermine even halfhearted political efforts to open other places of refuge for Jews, arguing that the admission of Jews to other countries would have weakened Zionist pressure to open up Palestine for Jewish immigration. Jewish suffering in Central Europe was seen by the leaders of the Jewish Agency as a lever of its policy concerning Palestine.” One can also reference Faris Yahya Glubb’s extended treatment of the topic in “Zionist Relations with Nazi Germany,” and the work of Yechaim Weitz on the shifting attitudes of the Zionist movement towards European refugees as more and more revelations of the extent of the Shoah came to light.