Israel’s extreme right is normalising the unthinkable

Before I go any further, I should say that you don’t need to lecture me about anti-Jewish prejudice. I have written whole books about the endorsement of radical Islam and Arab dictators by sections of the left. There is nothing a reader of the Jewish Chronicle can tell me about the double-standards antisemitism induces that I do not already know.

The point that needs shouting from the rooftops is that, from the perspective of suffering Palestinians, none of the arguments about antisemitism or the pact between Islamists and leftists matter. They are an irrelevance.

Nor does the outcome of the Israel-Iran conflict affect them. To see why imagine that Israeli forces demolish Iran’s nuclear capabilities. Imagine then that neocon fantasies finally come true and Israeli attacks lead to the collapse of the Shia theocracy. None of these desirable outcomes would alter the fact that extreme right-wing elements in the Israeli government are flirting with the obscene idea of ethnically cleansing the West Bank and Gaza.

It is the worst kind of wishful thinking to give the Netanyahu administration the benefit of the doubt. The record already shows that its finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, says freeing hostages from Hamas captivity is “not the most important goal”. Rather he continued in language that was frankly fascistic, Israel “needs to eliminate the Gaza problem” by storming the strip and proving to “the whole world and the people of Israel that there is a military solution to terror”.

Not to be outdone, his colleague, the national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, declared that his and his family’s “right to move around freely on the roads of Judea and Samaria [the West Bank] is more important than the right of movement of Arabs”.

I cannot overstate how rapidly the extreme right is changing the debate.

Jewish friends have been fighting the accusation that Israel is an “apartheid state” for years. The charge was malicious, they said, and provably false given that Arabs enjoyed full democratic rights in Israel proper.

But on the West Bank something like apartheid or the Jim Crow states of the American deep south is coming as Israeli settlers harass and drive out Palestinian villagers with the support of government ministers.

Perhaps worse will follow. Gaza now looks like Dresden or Hamburg after the allied bombing campaign. In places there is barely one brick left on top of another. Supporters of the Israeli government have no difficulty with this comparison with the Second World War. They say that just as Churchill and Roosevelt had no choice but to order the destruction of the cities of Nazi-controlled Germany, so Israel must destroy Hamas-controlled Gaza.

But then they stop and fail to follow the comparison through. After achieving the unconditional surrender of Nazi Germany, Britain, America and France offered West Germans a democratic state. Even when Soviet armies conquered east Germany in 1945, Stalin offered a communist state. It was a horrific dictatorship, but a state of sorts.

From Israel and from the Trump administration there are no offers whatsoever. Instead, we have ominous hints of a crime far worse than occupation: the mass ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian population.

Last week the British government joined with Australia, Canada, New Zealand and Norway in imposing sanctions on Ben-Gvir and Smotrich for their “repeated incitements of violence against Palestinian communities”. But singling out a couple of ugly extremists risks missing the wider danger. The policy of the entire Israeli government is to expand settlement and dismiss the possibility of any kind of Palestinian state. The logic of that dismissal leads to ethnic cleansing.

Repeatedly now you hear far-right politicians playing with the idea. Friends tell me not to take them seriously. But one of the lessons of history is that if you do not stamp on the discussion of great crimes right away, then the idea of getting away with them becomes normalised.

We can see this pattern today. In February Donald Trump said he wanted to “take over” the Gaza Strip, move out the population and turn it into “a big real estate site” with a Mediterranean beach front. Many thought he was just shooting his mouth off.

But last week the Trump administration demanded that Western governments boycott a UN conference on organising a two-state solution.

The logic of Trump’s rejectionism is the same as the logic of Ben-Gvir and Smotrich and of the Netanyahu government. Instead of two states you have two tiers of citizenship: one for Israelis and one for Palestinians. Or you drive people into exile.

Up to 90 per cent of Gaza’s population has already been displaced by the war. But to date only a few have become international refugees. Increased destruction, death and violence will surely change that.

At the end of the Second World War, there were plans to impose a vicious peace on Germany. After hesitating Churchill and Roosevelt decided it was wiser to be magnanimous and treat defeated Germans as partners.

Israeli government spokespeople often say that there are no partners for peace among the Palestinians. The same charge can be levelled at them.

No one in authority is offering Palestinians a way out. The only way out the Israeli right will countenance is forcing Palestinians out of their homes and out of their country.