Since Benjamin Netanyahu, after being shown a map of a so-called “Greater Israel” during a television interview last year, voiced his support and sentimental attachment to the “historical and spiritual concept,” we have seen a series of additional statements and events pointing in the same direction.
This dangerous stance and the others like it that have followed do not, in and of themselves, validate the Resistance Axis’s conclusion, drawn using their standard methodology, that there is a premeditated and permanent plan for how Israel will steadily annex the territory of other countries. This narrative predates Netanyahu’s remarks by several decades. There are, nonetheless, good reasons to raise the alarm about the sick current climate in Israel- a climate that is not short of supporters. One immediate reason for this climate is the Israeli prime minister’s need to court and appease the rabid religious parties as he seeks to keep them in his coalition. Another is the torrent of criminal proceedings against him that demands anxious vigilance, which the interventions of the American president have failed to relieve him of. On top of that, there is his sense that the current regional balance of power and global context allow him to take his desires or delusions as far as he wants.
However, this climate does not only feed on immediate political factors, as is plainly visible on the ground. The actions of the nationalist–religious rulers of Israel cannot be placed in the realm of changing regimes or policies, rectifying a particular situation, or clipping hostile actors’ “fangs” or what Israel is as fangs. Rather, it is channeled, or meant to be channeled, toward changing nature itself. We can now, without exaggeration, argue that Israel is entering a geological phase as it seeks to reshape land, the environment, and perhaps people as well- especially in Gaza, but also in southern Lebanon.
It is said that Israel, having been attacked from Gaza and Lebanon, has gone from exercising its right of self-defense to outright genocidal actions, but what could one say about its behavior in the West Bank, where Israel recently decided to annex vast swaths of Palestinian territory now classified as “state property,” and to recruit staff and allocate a budget for the implementation of this policy that is without precedent since the West Bank was first occupied in June 1967?
This comes amid ongoing land seizures, expulsion, roaming sieges, the confiscation of the Palestinian Authority’s tax revenue, the increasing enforcement of Israeli law, and deliberate cuts to electricity, to say nothing of the explicit and relentless effort to bring down the authorities in Ramallah toward collapse.
As in comparable moments in modern history, we encounter the sorts of phenomena engendered by revolutionary actions of a struggle to radically change nature. We find absolute moral certainty, which Netanyahu, Smotrich, Ben Gvir, and some of their army’s top brass never miss an opportunity to affirm. We also find their insistence that there is a void and only they, the saviors, can fill it; and they are determined to oversee radical social engineering, implement purges dictated by their duty to conduct ethnic cleansing, and of course, call on others to accept suffering in the present as their only path to the future they promise.
The erosion of international law and the decline of norms encourage and legitimize this trajectory, and its advocates constantly seek to present it as an inevitable- a natural process as inherently inevitable as the earth’s orbit around the sun and the tides following the laws of gravity.
One long-standing revolutionary theory holds that societies are governed by “natural laws.” Once these laws are discovered and applied, life can be reoriented toward what we consider to be the correct direction of travel.
Society can thereby be rendered socialist, as Karl Marx argued, for example, and we could turn it into a stage for the survival of the fittest, as Herbert Spencer envisioned. It could be molded into anything, so long as the laws present it as inevitable.
In truth, the founding of Israel contains, among many others, a sharp geological dimension that has been manifested in the deracination of the Palestinian population since 1948 and the broad transformation of lived reality. When religious actors add spiritual conceptions to this dimension, the divine becomes a part and parcel this vast transformative mission.
The bitter experiences of history, conflict, and impossibility were the soil on which powerful geological impulses of various kinds have taken root and grown. Each side came to imagine the eradication of the other to a “liberation” of the land and its restoration to what it once had been- or to what they claim it had once been. It was no coincidence that the Israeli side was, and remains, the party capable of imposing its ambitious and audacious geological program.
However, Israel’s geological force does not strengthen its opponents’ argument, nor does it lessen their responsibility or mitigate their wanton resistance, for the course of events that have taken and continue to take. The fact that they deal with these coercive geological transformations carried out by the Jewish state through denial, however, does not oblige anyone to fawn over the deadly earthquakes, floods, and volcanoes produced by Israel’s actions.
