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Back in November last year with a shocked world already witnessing horrifying images and videos of Israel’s savage bombardment of Gaza, a poll was conducted of Israeli opinion – it found that less than 2% of Israelis believed that the IDF’s use of firepower was ‘too much’. This was not an unexpected result.
In 2014 Israel bombed Gaza and entered the strip, 1523 Palestinian civilians were killed, including 519 children – 95% of Israelis polled afterwards approved of the operation.
During the peaceful ‘right to return’ marches by Palestinians in 2018 – unarmed civilians were gunned down and maimed by Israeli snipers. 214 Palestinians, including 46 children, were killed, and over 36,100, including nearly 8,800 children were injured many deliberately maimed for life – over 90% of Israelis approved of this ‘open fire’ policy at the border with Gaza. As Abby Martin makes passionately clear in this interview – Netanyahu and his cronies are not an aberration foisted on an unwilling Israeli society – they are the norm and indeed Israeli society taken as a whole, is now more demonstrably fascist than its current government. Israel should now be viewed as a supremely dangerous cult.
Not everyone living within its geographical boundaries is a cult member and many courageous Jews and Israelis oppose the cult both in Israel and around the world, but taken all in all, this state has unquestionably become toxic and irrational. Israel is a state born out of ethnic cleansing, it will never rest until the Palestinians are removed / eradicated and the settler colonial project to create a pure ethno state is complete.
I am not saying that Judaism is the cause or conflating Judaism with Zionism or with the crypto-fascist Israeli state. I can think of dozens of inspiring, thoughtful, passionate, loving and gentle Jews off the top of my head, people who are rightly celebrated for their contributions to the world. While the modern day cult of Israel does wrap itself in the star of David and the torah, these are vehicles of propaganda – not the cause.
While one could easily ascribe the descent of Israel simply to Zionism, I think that risks concealing more than it reveals. While any ideology and historical narrative can be deployed in service of a cult – what really matters is not the detail of the narrative but the underlying dynamics that drive them.
Let’s look at what defines a cult.
- Extreme authoritarianism that seeks to avoid and undermine structures of accountability
- Zero tolerance for criticism or questions
- Deeply paranoid fears and theories of past, present or threatened victimhood
- Lurid conspiracy theories (often based on fear) used to recruit and pressure members into action
- A belief that dissenters are always wrong and traitors – particularly ex-members who leave or reject the cult’s ideology.
- Abuse and repression of members (especially those who dissent or just ask questions) and outsiders.
- Documented abuses of the leader and the group
- Followers feeling they are never able to be “good enough”
- Absolute faith in the cult’s leader.
- A belief that the cult is the sole path to “truth” and affirmation as a “good” person.
To take those in turn:
(1) We see in Israel a true despot in Netanyahu whose attempts to remove all judicial and journalistic accountability are well documented and include the mass murder of journalists, aid workers and medical staff – anyone in fact who might be in a position to critique him or his regime. All classic moves of a cult leader and their followers.
(2) If you watch Israeli apologists and propagandists like:
- Erlon Levy (now sacked)
- Mark Regev
- Levy’s bizarre replacement, the former director of Labour Friends of Israel David Mencer
- The far right Israeli ambassador to the UK Tzipi Hotovely,
- Alan Dershowitz
- The Guardian, BBC etc
The one thing they cannot tolerate is criticism or questions about their preferred narrative. If you do attempt to ask questions, or try to represent the questions of others, they ignore you, shout over you and go on the attack.
Within the cult of Israel everything is black and white – you either wrap yourself in the Star Of David or become the enemy. There is no space in their mindset where criticism of Israel might be legitimately considered, all criticism is rejected out of hand and all critics smeared as useful idiots, terrorist sympathisers or anti-Semites.
Media portals like The Guardian or the BBC do not tolerate criticism of the cult of Israel amongst its staff or commentariate – your loyalty to the narrative has to remain steadfastly within set boundaries.
Documentaries about Scientology reveal the same approach to criticism as Israel, they abrasively invert reality (gaslighting), they hector and interrupt, they smear the questioner, invoke victimhood and position all criticism as morally beyond the pale.
Scientology’s Tommy Davis vs Panorama’s John Sweeney is a classic and now watch David Mencer using Scientology’s media tactics in this rant on Talk TV and in this aborted interview with Channel 4 News. Same approach exactly.
(3) Fear and paranoia run rife in cults and so they do in the cult of Israel. One needs to distinguish between that which drives cult members and cult leaders.
Netanyahu and his zionist cronies have become very expert at weaponising the Holocaust to deflect criticism away from Israel – but more importantly to recruit new members to the cult, bind them to their aims and rule them with fear. Arabs are tacitly (and sometimes directly) misrepresented in Israeli schools and throughout Israeli society as sub-human animals, as Nazi stormtroopers, ever eager to inflict a new Holocaust.
Many (most?) Israelis believe they are surrounded by jew hating fanatics on every border and that if they relax their oppression and group coherence for an instant they risk mass slaughter. Such rampant paranoia crowds out the thinking mind and breeds hatred. As Israel has built ever more settlements on Palestinian land and visited ever more oppression and murder upon the Palestinian people, the Palestinian resistance is then used as further evidence of threat, creating s death spiral which is self-radicalising.
It hasn’t helped that western defenders of Israel (a defence based on the geo-political utility of Israel for the west) constantly lionise Israeli society as a beacon of ‘western values’ surrounded by nations portrayed (none too subtly) as barbaric and backward religious theocracies. This has merely added to the internal Israeli sense that Israel is both under siege and morally beyond reproach. There is a reason indeed why western news agencies never put microphones in front of ordinary Israeli citizens – if they did you would see the pandemics of fear and racism that beset Israeli society.
Far from an off-the-wall outlier – Netanyahu is pursuing too moderate a policy for many in Israel and is partly blamed for the October 7th attacks and the inability of Israel to return the hostages. Netanyahu is afraid too, for having helped to create the dynamics of fear that swept him to power, he must now serve them just to survive.
(4) Many commentators have noted with a mixture of exasperation and fury that Israel simply cannot be relied upon to tell the truth about its actions.
It is symptomatic of a cult for it to have a quixotic relationship with factual truth and for cult members to slavishly believe bizarre ideas and conspiracies that support the cult’s views and to reject all external evidence that might break the hypnotic spell of its mythology about itself.
After the October 7th attacks it was illuminating how Israel luridly invented fictional atrocities and attributed them to the Hamas attackers. Beheaded babies (a lie), raped women (a lie), babies thrown in ovens (a lie) and so on. The atrocities were grisly enough but Israel still had to radically embellish them almost out of instinct.
In pointless online interactions with apologists for Israel these lies have become concrete facts and if one questions them, then one is instantly accused of delighting in the slaughter of babies.
Israel has subsequently told all manner of bizarre lies including:
- the idea that Al Shifa hospital had a massive bunker Hamas bunker underneath
- that aid trucks were merrily ferrying more food into Gaza than before October 7th
- that a labyrinthine network of Hamas tunnels was somehow connected to every residence in Gaza
- that they didn’t bomb al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City (they concocted laughably obvious fake audio footage to support their narrative)
- that the ongoing execution of aid workers and journalists are all ‘mistakes’
- and the over-arching fiction that dropping over 45,000 bombs on one of the world’s most densely populated strips of land is somehow ‘targeted’, proportionate and within international law.
The sheer gap between Israel’s lies and reality is so indicative of a cult – perhaps the reason so many struggle to see that is that citizens of the western empire themselves live in another cult of lies called The West and their media.
(5) and (6) In Israel there is a saying “Arabs are like the common cold and leftists are like AIDS – you can’t get rid of the cold until you get rid of the AIDS”.
We have seen many videos of what happens to the few leftist dissenters in Israel right now, the teacher threatened menacingly by his own students and then arrested for sharing a post on social media that called for a ceasefire, Israeli protestors against the genocide beaten up and arrested by the police, the condemnation and imprisonment of conscientious objectors who refuse conscription because they will not kill Palestinians.
Any Jew or Israeli around the world who defers even mildly from Israel’s proffered narratives is instantly attacked as a traitor and a self-loathing anti-Semite, they risk career ruin and a blizzard of ongoing abuse. Every cult that ever existed has treated external dissent and ex-members (particular vitriol is reserved for ‘lapsed’ zionists) with the same violence and contempt.
(7) Where on earth would one begin with the abuses of Netanyahu and the other leaders of the cult?
On trial for fraud, bribery and breach of trust, Netanyahu’s response was to try to cut a deal, essentially dismantling the power of the judiciary so he could remain in office and dish out favours. Mrs. Netanyahu was convicted of misusing public funds and for abusing public servants.
Aryeh Deri the former interior and health minister served two years in prison for bribery, Ben Gvir the current minister of National Security was convicted of incitement to racism, destroying property, possessing a “terror” organisation’s propaganda material and supporting a “terror” organisation (when these things were less fashionable, on paper at least, in Israel) – he was also implicated in the assassination of Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin. Current finance minister Bezalel Smotrich describes himself as a “proud homophobe”, he believes Jews and Arabs should not have to mingle and aspires to impose biblical law on all – he dodged his own military service.
It is clear that Netanyahu is the autocratic and authoritarian nexus of widespread corruption and abuses of power. A typical cult.
(8) and (10) It is extraordinary that despite living in one of the most heavily armed and materially prosperous nations on earth that Israeli society appears..uneasy, restless and dissatisfied.
I think the reasons for this are doubtless over determined, but like the members a doomsday cult waiting for an oft prophesised doomsday that never arrives, those that pivot their self-worth around the idea that they are a chosen people promised exclusive dominion over all of Palestine… must be endlessly frustrated to have share the promised land with 3 million Palestinians in the West Bank and 2.2 million in Gaza. (this is why the two-state solution will never work)
Most normal people find other pleasures in life like gardening and going on holiday – Israelis seem as fixated on Zionism and race hatred as Scientologists are with the ‘bridge to total freedom’ – it has become their shared identity, their reason for living, their evidence they belong and the thing that brings them together.
For the most part this has nothing with Judaism or even a belief in God, a recent poll revealed that God only played ‘a big part’ in the lives of 31% of Israeli’s but 69% said Zionism was pivotal, leading Ilan Pappe to remark that “Most Zionists don’t believe that God exists, but they do believe that he promised them Palestine”.
(9) Clearly all Israelis don’t have blind faith in Netanyahu, but they have near universal support for the zionist project and the people that lead those mantras are the real cult leaders of Israel – this is why it is doubly important not to allow the western political and media establishment to rinse their bloodied hands of complicity in Israel’s genocide by pinning the blame for Israel’s atrocities on to Netanyahu, for he in many ways he is but a figurehead for a more sinister societal-wide cult.
Conclusion:
Israel IS a cult. Israel IS a fascist cult. Israel IS engaged in a genocide in Gaza. The only way to ever really stop Israeli atrocities is to stop appeasing the idea that a fascist cult has a right to exist and a right to kill us many people as it wants in order to satisfy its own internal demons.
The time for appeasing the deranged cult of Israel is over – it has no more right to exist in its current zionist format than Nazi Germany, the Khmer Rouge, the Bosnian Serbs responsible for Srebrenica or the Myanmar state that committed genocide against the Rohingya Muslims.
States that engage in genocide forfeit their right to exist as before – the world must intervene to stop the slaughter and hold those responsible to account.
It doesn’t say much for the contemporary West that we are providing weapons, money and political / media cover for a genocide – but then the West is also a cult – one with much a longer history of ethnic cleansing and settler colonial atrocities than Israel.
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