by Harley Schlanger, EIR News Service:
As the brutal siege of Gaza by Israel Defense Forces (IDF) continued through a second year, world opinion of the Netanyahu regime’s relentless slaughter of Palestinians was nearly universally negative. The vast majority of the world’s population agreed that Israel was committing genocide against those whose land it has occupied since 1967. However, polls of Israeli citizens showed that the majority in Israel remained supportive of Netanyahu’s self-proclaimed ethnic cleansing policy, while Greater Israel extremists in his coalition called for mass starvation of Palestinians, to force those who survived the IDF onslaught to leave the Zionist state “voluntarily.”
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How could Israelis, whose nation was created to defend the Jewish people under the slogan “Never Again Genocide!,” support an extremist regime committed to killing or driving into exile those who refused to submit to an Apartheid regime run by Zionist racists? Anyone who questioned the supremacist ideology of the Greater Israel extremists in government ministries, such as Itamar Ben-Gvir, Bezalel Smotrich and Netanyahu himself, risked being denounced as a Hitler-loving anti-semite, a slander used by Netanyahu, to intimidate and silence the growing number of Jews in the U.S. and western Europe opposed to Netanyahu and seeking a peaceful resolution.
There were exceptions who criticized the course taken by Netanyahu. Israeli historian and author Avi Shlaim, who has long been critical of the anti-Palestinian racism of the Greater Israel ideology and the “Iron Wall” policy which justified it in the name of national security, published a book of essays, Genocide in Gaza: Israel’s Long War on Palestine, driven by what he identified as his sense of “moral duty to speak truth to power and to stand by the Palestinians in their hour of need.” He dropped his initial reluctance to identify Netanyahu’s policy as “genocide” as it became impossible for him to ignore the hypocrisy of the “Jewish state” committing mass murder. He spoke out against the concept of “Israeli exceptionalism,” the widely accepted belief among the Zionist population, that having been the victims of Nazi genocide, Jews defending Israel cannot be accused of genocide.
As a Jew, he said in an interview posted in March 2025 by Novara Media, seeing the “genocidal assault on Gaza” made him want “to move closer to Judaism because its core values are altruism, truth, justice and peace….The Netanyahu government is the antithesis of these core Jewish values. The essence of Judaism is non-violence, but the current regime is the most violent government in Israel’s history…. My new book is my modest personal contribution to the fight against Zionist fascism, backed by American imperialism.”
Another powerful voice challenging Israelis and the Jews of the diaspora to reject the Netanyahu rampage is that of Avrum Burg, who served as Speaker of the Knesset from 1999 to 2003. In an October 12 post on his Substack page, Burg wrote, “There are moments in history when not only states change but entire nations. It is not borders that are redrawn but consciousness itself; not governments that are replaced but the collective soul that undergoes transformation [emphasis added]…. The war in Gaza is such a moment for the Jewish people. It is not another round in the endless cycle of Middle Eastern violence but a historic turning point. It is a moment in which we must look in the mirror and recognize what we have become. And it is ugly.”
In a follow-up post, Burg poses the question that is not supposed to be asked: “[H]ow could the Jews, a people who once saw themselves as a moral messenger for all humanity, commit such horrific crimes in Gaza? It is a question that cuts to the rawest nerves of our identity, our faith in our righteousness, and our understanding of who we are.”
His answer targets the core of the Zionist state, which includes a “mental structure in which moral questions are always postponed for later; because ‘now there is a war,’ and that ‘later’ never comes.
“But when you look at the accumulated results, the truth can no longer be denied. Tens of thousands of dead. Entire cities erased. And all in our name, in the name of a state that presents itself to itself as a bastion of morality and enlightenment, yet remains blind to what it has done in Gaza.”
Burg, like Shlaim and others, including prominent Haaretz columnist Gideon Levy, is clearly agonizing over the transformation of Judaism under the leadership of Netanyahu and his extremist coalition from “a spiritual and intellectual tradition nourished by debate, by thought, by the sanctity of life, and by love of the human being,” into a nation which believes its salvation comes from applying overwhelming physical force to exact revenge, while abandoning any commitment to justice.
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