On July 12, a mob attacked a left-wing rally in Tel Aviv, with several participants seen beating pro-peace demonstrators before order was restored. In present-day Israel, it was perhaps more noteworthy that there was a coherent peace demonstration at all, even if it was completely futile, than that there was a violent response.
But as the Israeli daily Haaretz reported on Tuesday, there was another striking detail about the confrontation: Some of the right-wing agitators were wearing T-shirts bearing neo-Nazi insignia.
The shirts showed a man throwing a bicycle at a figure lying on the ground with a tag line reading, "good night left side". The logo is intrinsically associated with white supremacist groups such as Stormfront, which operate in the US and Europe, and was formulated as a response to the leftist slogan, "good night white pride".
There is something particularly gruesome about Israelis, for whom the Holocaust is ingrained as part of their national identity, to be sporting neo-Nazi symbols, but of course there is no monopoly on imbecility. Just recently in Thailand, a group of young people posted a photo of themselves with swastikas drawn on their foreheads, enthusiastically displaying Sieg Heil salutes, apparently as a World Cup tribute. Never mind that most present-day Germans would be horrified, while Third Reich-era Nazis would have treated Thais much as they treated Jews.
As Israel pounds the Gaza Strip for a 13th consecutive day, its far-right radical shift is a glaring new feature of the conflict. Many other aspects of this asymmetric assault on Gaza are depressingly familiar — although the faces of the hundreds of victims, many children, are also new of course.
Since its withdrawal from the territory, Israel has twice punished Gaza to this extent, with a full-scale ground invasion in 2008-09 and an air assault in 2012. Israel's propaganda machine, known as the hasbara, is now treading a familiar path. It says its "military operation" is being conducted through "targeted" strikes to “demilitarise” Hamas.
This is doublespeak. A military operation becomes something entirely different when dealing with a captive, blockaded enclave. Targeted strikes are impossible in one of the most densely populated areas on Earth; and decades have shown that Israeli repression fosters militancy, not the opposite.
Hamas also has blood on its hands, although very little of it is Israeli in the current conflict. The militant group and by extension its Qatari backers have refused ceasefires that would end the bloodshed, partly to spite the Egyptian military regime that has tried to broker a truce, but mostly to burnish Hamas’s “resistance” credentials that are its raison d’etre.
This is cold-blooded politicking at the expense of Palestinian lives. It is also daft — resistance against the Israeli blockade and occupation has always been weakest on the battlefield. It is time to champion other tactics through the United Nations, the International Criminal Court and peaceful protest.
Palestinians are also fighting a losing battle by relying on Washington’s mediation. The recent US peace initiative didn’t cause this conflict, but it certainly hasn't helped. President Barack Obama used the White House iftar dinner last week to berate his Muslim guests about Israel’s right to defend itself. Certainly it has that right, but killing little children on the beach, as Israeli artillery did a few days later, is not defensive.
The apologists in the American media, many of whom are well-meaning liberals, wring their hands at the Palestinian death toll, but fail to hold Israel to account. As Israelis line up on hills overlooking Gaza, munching on popcorn and cheering at each air strike, the outside world is watching a country sliding towards blind extremism.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is on the record saying he will not negotiate in good faith with the Palestinians, is considered too soft by many colleagues in his cabinet. Ayelet Shaked, a charismatic MP from the Jewish Home Party, wrote a screed on Facebook earlier this month saying Palestinian mothers should be killed before they can give birth to “little snakes”. Too many Israelis now countenance this kind of genocidal thinking.
International diplomats and even friends of Israel must recognise this state of affairs, not only to secure justice for Palestinians, but also to save Israel from itself. History teaches something those young men wearing neo-Nazi T-shirts should know, but perhaps do not: Repressive, chauvinistic regimes will always fail, whether in this generation or the next.