Addressing recent anti-government demonstrations in Tel Aviv, Israeli President Isaac Herzog accused the world of hypocrisy: pushing Israel to allow humanitarian aid into Gaza while failing to pressure Hamas.
His words captured not only the opposition’s mood, but also the success of the current government in creating a new Zionist ethos – one that relies on raw force, without even the pretence of moral justification.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu echoed this sentiment in an i24 interview, when asked about the idea of “Greater Israel”. His reply was blunt: “We are here.”
These statements reflect a broad Israeli consensus: military force is the answer to every challenge, not just in diplomacy but in daily life.
This militarism has spilled into cultural spaces such as football. During a match in Hungary this month, Maccabi Haifa fans raised a banner reading “Murderers since 1939”, aimed at Poland’s Holocaust history. Even the Israeli embassy condemned it.
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Hapoel Be’er Sheva fans went further, unfurling a banner declaring: “Two things must be destroyed: Hamas and UEFA”, referring to the Union of European Football Associations.
This, despite UEFA never sanctioning Israel as it did Russia after the invasion of Ukraine. Instead, during this year’s Super Cup, UEFA approved a banner reading: “Stop killing children. Stop killing civilians” – a humanitarian message carefully stripped of political context. The outrage from Israeli fans highlights a culture that sees force as the only logic.
Military dominance
Historian Yuval Noah Harari has described this moment as a spiritual turning point for Jews – perhaps the most significant since the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE. Jews, he argued, have survived catastrophe after catastrophe, but never faced a spiritual threat of this magnitude.
Israel’s current path, Harari warned, risks dismantling 2,000 years of Jewish thought and culture. In his view, Israel could end up ethnically cleansing Palestinians, dismantling democratic structures, and replacing them with a system built on Jewish supremacy, military dominance and glorification of violence.
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Harari pointed to the alarming ease with which many of his peers endorsed the idea of population transfer in Gaza, floated recently by the US president. When his interviewer noted that a minority of Israelis politically support the extreme right, he replied that history is often dictated by the 10 percent who advocate for change, while the majority remains passive.
These assumptions should be challenged. Israel was never as democratic or moral as his narrative suggests: its founding involved the expulsion of around 750,000 Palestinians, and for nearly eight decades, it has built a judicial system that champions Jewish supremacy. Since the Partition Plan, Israel has never stopped expanding.
The government knows exactly what the war is about: not just Gaza, but the future character of Israel itself
But Harari is right about the transformation of the Israeli Jewish ethos. What was once framed as a state struggling to survive, is now a state openly seeking expansion, with no moral rationale beyond military might.
This struggle is playing out in the streets. Hundreds of thousands of people turned out for a recent demonstration to demand an end to the war. But the protests revealed something deeper than politics: a fracture within Zionism.
On one side are those who want to return to the old survivalist ethos; to end the war and restore Israel’s standing as a state that does not abandon its captives and aligns with the West. On the other side are those embracing an expansionist Zionism that glorifies power and territorial growth. The hypermilitaristic mindset within the Israeli opposition suggests that the new Zionist ethos has won.
Contrary to Harari’s assertion that Israel is reshaping Judaism, the real transformation is internal to Jewish politics.
‘They need a Nakba’
From the beginning, Israel expanded geographically while erasing Palestinians. Within Jewish society, however, it gradually widened equality to include Jews from Arab and Muslim countries, women, and eventually LGBTQ communities, albeit only to a certain extent. That inclusiveness, however, stopped at the borders of Jewish identity.
The current protest movement reflects this contradiction. At best, it ignores the catastrophe unfolding for Palestinians in Gaza and the occupied West Bank. This silence is not an exception, but a constant feature of Zionism, which has consistently denied human rights to Palestinians.
As a former head of Israeli military intelligence, Major General Aharon Haliva, put it: “For everything that happened on 7 October, for every person who was killed on 7 October 7, Palestinians must die … They need a Nakba every now and then to feel the price.”
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The inability of protest leaders to grasp that the events of 7 October 2023, horrifying as they were, cannot justify genocide and mass starvation, underscores their moral blind spot.
Much international support and sympathy has ignored the wider context of the Palestinian struggle before 7 October, as Israel’s allies have continued to arm and finance the genocide. By failing to acknowledge this dependence, the protest movement has allowed the government to continue pursuing its real agenda: reshaping Israeli politics and culture, with Gaza merely comprising one stage in a larger project of regional expansion.
Unlike some of its opponents, the government knows exactly what the war is about: not just Gaza, but the future character of Israel itself.
And now, as we approach a possible ceasefire, it is important to remind those who are betting on the protest movement to present a meaningful alternative to the current government that they will be disappointed.
As thousands of demonstrators took to the streets this month, another video surfaced from from Gaza, showing an Israeli missile striking a young girl for no discernible reason. As with countless other images emerging from Gaza, it inspired no criticism of the army, nor any acknowledgment of Palestinian suffering.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
