Endsieg Zionism
Written by Rosa Mezerich with important contributions from Em Cohen, Francis Locklin and Elle Zangfoygl
Introduction
The throughline of Nazi ideology in Zionist policy, rhetoric, and military strategy could not be any more obvious. Today, Hitler’s ideological grandchildren hold power in nearly all of white euro-Amerika and its colonial outposts- notably, in so-called Israel. This essay analyzes some of the ideological linkages between Nazism and one facet of its post-holocaust form, Zionism. Of course, Hitlerism dominates the politics of all of white euro-Amerika, in its continued commitment to maintaining a white supremacist world, through anti-Blackness, eugenics, anti-immigrant sentiment, anti-Roma sentiment, transphobia, etc. This essay will particularly focus on how this manifests with respect to so-called Israel.
Endsieg in German means “final victory”. For the Nazis it was the idea that the racial and military power of the German Reich would conquer all enemies, both internal and external, an end of history as such, and the beginning of a thousand-year Reich. As Operation Barbarossa began and the Fascist military forces moved East to drive a killing blow at the beating heart of Global Communism, and rapidly extended beyond their supply line capabilities, the Nazi high command assured soldiers and the population in general of this “final victory”, that it was right around the corner, merely one more short offensive away. As the fascists marched East, beyond the reach of their supply lines, at every point undermined by partisan resistance behind them and ongoing fight with the Red Army ahead of them, the fascist forces reached the outskirts of Moscow and Stalingrad, and already had Leningrad under siege. At last, the final victory! But of course, this was not to be; at Stalingrad fascist forces would be surrounded and wiped out, at Moscow they would be turned back and Leningrad would hold them until it could be relieved by a Soviet counter-offensive. The Nazi leadership would still insist that the Endsieg was at hand, merely the battles they were “winning” were closer and closer to Berlin every week. As German forces were rapidly defeated and the manpower reserve grew smaller, the Nazis implemented the Volkssturm, a vast militia raised to prepare for a Soviet invasion, primarily made up of old men and young boys often given older weapons to train with, if provided familiarity with weaponry at all before engagement with the enemy. Joseph Goebbels would use this phrase two months before the end of the war, 3 days after Germany called up 15 and 16 year-olds for service, a week before the Red Army launched an offensive in Upper Silesia, and 12 days before Hitler made his final appearance in public. The idea of Endsieg was by then, to many, a joke. It is hard to not see parallels in Israel, where every day from Palestine, we hear of Brigadier generals in their early 20s being killed by the Resistance, a new round of reservist mobilization, or of a Zionist plan for a new offensive to fix all the other failing military offensives.
Comparisons between Israel and Nazi Germany are easy to make, even if controversial to liberals. Both are racist and highly militarized societies looking for “living space” at the cost of indigenous people. Both received great support politically and economically from Anglo-Amerikkkan capitalist imperialists, though Nazi Germany’s relationship with its early backers soon went sour while Israel’s relationship with its Anglo-Amerikkkan backers remains strong despite a failed attempt to pivot globally during the Obama years. Both, because of their structural weaknesses, were forced to fight Blitzkrieg (German for “Lightning War”) style, defeating their enemy in quick and decisive military confrontations, because culturally, economically and militarily, they could not withstand extended combat and all it entailed. Aside from these comparisons, the specific purpose of this essay is to advance an analysis of Israel as not only settler colonial and racist, but a fascist state mirroring Nazi Germany, and that based on these similarities we can better understand the cultural, military and political collapse of the Zionist entity. To truly understand the unraveling at the end, though, we must return to the construction of the Zionist entity.
Historical Background
Anyone who has heard any liberal zionist or labor/”socialist” zionist speak for any amount of time knows the line that “Israel was founded by Socialists!” The important detail here is that the “socialism” of the labor or “socialist” zionists was far closer to the “socialism” of the National Socialist German Worker’s Party than it was to the socialism of the Bolsheviks. Prior to the October Revolution, European socialism/social democracy encompassed people and positions ranging from the revolutionary and internationalist politics of eagles, like Lenin, Luxembourg, Liebknecht or Gramsci, to the national chauvinist, class-collaborationist, militarist and pro-colonial and even proto-fascist politics of opportunists, like Noske, Lensch, Sorel, Bietry and Ebert. The labor Zionists, Ben-Gurion chief amongst them as the founding father of the Zionist entity and his party Mapai (Worker’s Party of the Land of Israel), were of the latter school. Slightly to the left of Mapai, the leading party of labor Zionism, there was Mapam, who upheld international support for the Soviet Union, but domestically were just as racist and colonialist as Mapai, who they tailed on every issue. These leading “socialists” subscribed to a concept of socialism far closer to the Nazi Volksgemeinschaft, that of German/Aryan people’s community, wherein National Socialism was an expression of the collective will of the superior race. On Nazi “Socialism,” Hitler said, “Socialism is the science of dealing with the common wealth. Communism is not Socialism. Marxism is not Socialism. The Marxians have stolen the term and confused its meaning. I shall take Socialism away from the Socialists. Socialism, unlike Marxism, does not repudiate private property. Unlike Marxism, it involves no negation of personality, and unlike Marxism, it is patriotic… We are not internationalists. Our socialism is national. We demand the fulfillment of the just claims of the productive classes by the state on the basis of race solidarity. To us state and race are one.” To draw a parallel I offer a passage from Founding Myths of Israel, which sums up the similarity between Hebraic National Socialism and its German kin: “Ben-Gurion … also thought that no program would be realistic without a solution of the Arab question … Socialism and cooperatives were in his view only means to the goal of transforming “the Jewish people … into a single political unit.” In addition to domination by the bourgeoisie and the dictatorship of the proletariat (both of them equally absurd, in Ben-Gurion’s opinion), there was also, he thought, a third possibility, “the dictatorship of the Jewish people.” To those paying attention, this narrative of “neither bourgeois, nor proletarian, but national” will sound familiar to the rhetoric of German National socialism, with Hitler saying in 1922, “The movement which will no longer be proletarian and may no longer be bourgeois, but will be simply German. The movement which unites those that strengthen this Germanism (Deutschtum) day by day, not only in words but in all the thousandfold deeds of human activity….In them lies the eternal fountain of the strength of our people. In them lies the future of our race. Whoever divides them strikes at Germany. Whoever unites them is National. Finally, only that movement is national which does not bind this strength in order to lame it, but binds it in order to cast it as a solid block into the battle for victory for our own race.”
We also see in the Kibbutzim, the supposed heart of the “socialist” sector in Israel, not an idyllic network of self-sustaining communes, but rather the violent speartip of colonialism. To quote at length from the book The Other Israel: The Radical Case Against Zionism, a collection of essays and statements by Israeli Socialist Organization, a joint Jewish-Arab anti-zionist New Left organization:
“(1) The kibbutz is usually a one-party affair. People voting Communist were expelled from kibbutzim of Hashomer Hatzair and those voting Mapam from kibbutzim run by Mapai, etc. There is little political tolerance on the kibbutz. (2) The kibbutz is part of a whole ideological setup, namely, “From the Commune to Communism.” Let us fill the country with kibbutzim (communes), the refrain goes, and eventually the majority of the population will live communally and the economy will switch over, too — i.e., there will be a peaceful transition to communism. Reality has proved this to be a fallacy. All the kibbutzim are in debt to the government; private firms and the banks. Without constant subsidies from Zionist organizations, they would be unable to exist. Fuels, fertilizers, water, electricity, machinery have to be bought outside the kibbutz, and kibbutz products have to compete on the market with goods produced by others — sometimes by Arab fellahin. In short, the kibbutz has proved to be economically unfeasible and must be kept alive by private enterprise. (3) Faced with this reality, many kibbutzim have turned to industrialization, at first processing their own agricultural products and then gradually moving into other fields such as plastics, crockery, furniture and a host of other light and medium industrial products. But the small population of the kibbutz (normally only a few hundred) cannot provide the labor force for both agriculture and industry. Since giving up agriculture would mean betrayal of the principles of Zionist socialism, the kibbutzim have been forced to employ hired labor from nearby towns. Thus the communal kibbutz society becomes a communal exploiter of labor. Usually the kibbutz members act as overseers in their factories while the hired men do the less professional jobs. When work is over, the hired men go back to town. For them the kibbutz is an employer like any other capitalist, except that capitalists don’t preach socialism. At present about half of the workers in kibbutz enterprises are hired from the outside. (This does not include hired labor in enterprises jointly owned by several kibbutzim with or without other owners.) When a strike occurs in a kibbutz factory, the owners do not hesitate to call in the police.”
Rather than communes attempting to be self-sufficient and peacefully create utopias in opposition to capitalism, as the utopian socialists of the pre-Marxian era envisioned, they are the violent speartips of Zionist colonization which are unable to function without subsidy from private enterprise. In fact, they often recreate hyper exploitative capitalist and colonial relations, with there only being a collective among foremen and overseers to form a people’s democratic boss body. This resembles far more closely the ideals of the Hitlerian romantic ideal of the Waffen SS military-feudal outposts planned for a post-extermination Eastern Europe than a left-wing Commune. Further cementing this parallel to the imagined military feudal outposts of the SS, far from being peaceniks, Kibbutzniks made up disproportionate part of the military leadership by a factor of 10, with Israel Shahak finding, “When Beirut, the Palestinian refugee camps, and so many other localities in Lebanon were being mercilessly destroyed, kibbutzniks were 25 percent of the air force pilots and 30 percent of the army officer corps. The percentage of kibbutzim in the Jewish population of Israel is only 3.4.” Furthermore, the pattern of racial segregation remains the same as the SS military-feudal outposts, namely that in 1984 there was a single non-Jewish Israeli citizen who was a member of a Kibbutz, and he had completed service in the IOF and was only allowed to reside in the Kibbutz under the condition that he “not to attempt to marry a Jewish girl before converting to Judaism, to observe the Jewish holidays, not to be conspicuous in observing Druze ceremonies, and several others of a similar nature.”
Not only were the labor Zionist communes a violent expression of settler colonialism and thoroughly racist and anti-socialist, so too is the main “trade union” in Israel! To quote more extensively from Matzpen, “the Histadrut, which owns a giant industry, banks, shipping, airline companies, the largest construction firm and the largest health insurance system in Israel (there is no national health insurance). In short, it controls a major piece of the Israeli economy. One out of every three Israelis pays membership fees to the Histadrut (those who do not lose their health insurance). Ninety per cent of the Jewish workers are members of trade unions that are run by Histadrut……….The main instrument of this campaign was the Histadrut. The organization was “for Jews only,” as the name (General Federation of Hebrew Workers in the Land of Israel) in Hebrew clearly stated. Arab workers were not accepted as members. Jewish workers were called upon to make sacrifices, work harder, earn less for the sake of establishing and strengthening the Jewish state. When the capitalists complained that Jewish labor was more expensive than Arab labor, the Histadrut often paid the difference out of its own funds. With other Zionist organizations it launched a “Buy Jewish” campaign and implemented a boycott on Arab products. When some socialist Zionists feebly objected to this negative policy toward Arab workers, they were reminded that Arab workers were unorganized and it was the duty of a trade union to fight against employment of unorganized labor. It is not often that the Histadrut behaves like a trade union. It does not defend the class interests of the Jewish workers, but rather calls upon them continually to make sacrifices for the sake of the state. The membership card of every Histadrut member reminds him of his duties, not the least important of which is to teach Hebrew to new immigrants — hardly a task for a common trade union, but typical for a nationalist organization. The Histadrut is probably the only trade union that has a “Department for Trade Unions,” necessary because its activities as owner and employer outweigh its activities as a trade union. Actually the Histadrut owns the trade unions much as it owns the health insurance program. In many unions Histadrut officials appoint union officers. Where they are elected, they must first be approved by Histadrut officials before they can be recognized by the employers as official representatives.”
More than just acting as essentially a corporatist nationalist organization, the nature of the Histadrut is named explicitly by those involved in it, with Pinchas Lavon, general secretary of the Histadrut, saying in 1960, “The General Federation of Workers was founded forty years ago by several thousand young people wanting to work in an underdeveloped country where labor was cheap, a country which, rejected its inhabitants and which was inhospitable to newcomers. Under these conditions, the foundation of the Histadrut was a central event in the process of the rebirth of the Hebrew people in its fatherland. Our Histadrut is a general organization to its core. It is not a workers’ trade union, although it copes perfectly well with the real needs of the worker.” This self-conception and outward action by the Histadrut aligns with the principles and goals of the German Labor Front, the Nazi class collaboration organization which said in its Appeal to all Working Germans, “The German Labor Front is the grouping of all working men without difference of economic or social status. It should include the worker and the employer, who will not be separated any longer by associations and leagues serving the interests of specific economic or social groups.The value of the personality, whether he is a worker or employer, will be the determining factor in the German Labor Front. Trust can be won from one man to another, not from one organization to another. According to the wish of our Fuehrer Adolf Hitler the German Labor Front is not the institution that will decide on material problems of workers daily life or the natural contrasting interests of individual workers. Within a short time the forms for the regulation of working conditions will be established in a manner that will assign the leader and the followers in an enterprise the appropriate positions dictated by the National Socialist ideology. The supreme goal of the Labor Front is to educate all working Germans towards a National Socialist state and in the spirit of National Socialism. It will act especially to educate those people who have decisive roles in the organizations dealing with social conditions, labor courts and social security. It will see to it that the honor of the leader of the enterprise and his followers will become a real motivating power in the new order of society and economy. Thus today we call on all German workers, those who work with their heads and those who work with their hands, to join the German Labor Front so that all will gather forces to `accomplish the enormous challenges.”
The cross-textual pattern of class collaborationist and racialist rhetoric is hard to ignore, but it is also important to recognize that this pattern of class collaboration and racism did not remain only at the top of the Zionist state, trade union, or kibbutz administration. The Zionist project engendered an all-around proliferation of class collaboration and racism, with Kanafani saying in 1972, “The policy that raised the slogan of “Jewish labor only” was to have grave consequences, as it led to the rapid emergence of fascist patterns in the society of Jewish settlers.” This fascist pattern in Jewish labor is further explained by Sumya Awad and Daphna Thier, namely, “Israeli workers continue to be committed to apartheid and the racist ideology enabling it…. This is the nature of labor in an apartheid economy. Almost complete separation means that, by design, Jews and Palestinians rarely work alongside one another as coworkers. Instead, they are segregated in ways that entrench racism and ensure that national loyalty trumps class consciousness…. Palestinians occupy the lowest rungs of the economy, making less than minimum wage with no benefits or pensions. Attempts by Palestinian workers to organize for better conditions are met with the threat of permit revocation. Undocumented workers are in even more precarious situations…. Desegregation of the Israeli labor market would mean competition for jobs, the return of stolen wealth, and potentially economic free fall for many Jewish Israeli workers. The end of occupation threatens these workers’ material standing. This is why the majority of Israeli workers oppose democratic rights for all: Zionism prevents working-class solidarity.” This fascist pattern is clearly seen in the fact that, as said by Israeli Communists Moche Machover and Akiva Orr, “a single example of Israeli workers being mobilized on material or trade-union issues to challenge the Israeli regime itself; it is impossible to mobilize even a minority of the proletariat in this way. On the contrary, Israeli workers nearly always put their national loyalties before their class loyalties. Although this may change in the future, this does not remove the need for us to analyze why it has been so”. Whereas in Nazi Germany, the resistance to Nazism was strongest amongst the class conscious proletariat, because of the colonial character of the Hebrew Reich, the Jewish labor aristocrats and labor bureaucrats have been more than just amenable to Israeli fascism, but have been the vanguard force in the colonization of Palestine. Eventually the Histadrut would officially desegregate and allow Arabs to join it, but, rather than doing so to empower Arab workers, Matzpen reports “the Histadrut brought the Arab laborers under its stranglehold in order to stem their infiltration into the Jewish economy and nip in the bud any organizing effort that might be taking place. This was a crucial role for the Histadrut to play in implementing Zionist policies toward the Arab population.” The goal of the Histadrut is not to build power for workers, but to secure the power of the Zionist entity, much as the role of German Labor Front was to secure the power of the Nazi regime rather than empower the working class.
Zionism and the Jewish Question
I will take a brief aside before moving forward to reflect not only on the Hitlerian internal dynamics of the Zionist entity, pre- and post-official statehood, to reflect on the Hitlerian essence of the Zionist “answer” to the “Jewish Question”. The idea of the “Jewish Question” is specifically a European question, where Jews were legally discriminated against and kept out of official state institutions on the basis of their religion and, with the popularization of “race science”, a racist pseudoscience, racialized into semites. The Jewish Question was, essentially, “what to do with the Jews of Europe with the advent of modern European nation states?”
The answer by the left ranged from the sort of cultural nationalism of the Jewish Labour Bund, which advocated socialist and secular cultural autonomy for Jews in their own homelands, to the doctrine of emancipation and assimilation of thinkers from Marx to Luxembourg, wherein the legal equality of Jews would allow them to fully assimilate into the nations that they lived. More are familiar with the European right’s answer to the “Jewish Question”, most commonly understood as the road to Auschwitz, with the reasoning that Jews were parasites living on the bodies of the nations they resided within and the presence of an “alien nation” was detrimental to the “host” nation, and so, in one way or another, the “parasitical Jew” had to be removed. Hitler says as much in his work “On the Jewish Question”, “The world has sufficient space for settlements, but we must once and for all get rid of the opinion that the Jewish race was only created by God for the purpose of being in a certain percentage a parasite living on the body and the productive work of other nations. The Jewish race will have to adapt itself to sound constructive activity as other nations do, or sooner or later it will succumb to a crisis of an inconceivable magnitude.” The Zionists, right wing and racist in essence, while opposing the road to Auschwitz, still takes as its fundemental assumption that Jews are an alien, even parasitic, on the body of Europe and must exit from it; but for Zionists, the exit is Palestine instead of the gas chamber. And to be clear, many Zionists did feel that the existence of Jews in diaspora was parasitic, with foundational labor Zionist A.D. Gordon, a leading early Labor Zionist thinker, founder of Hapoel Hartzair (The Young Worker), which later merged with Ben-Gurion’s Ahdut HaAvoda (Labor Unity) which would lead to creation of Mapai (Worker’s Party of the Land of Israel) which would politically dominate the country for the first several decades of its existence, saying “We are parasites living on the handiwork of strangers and we do not feel it, for we have been parasites exploiting the minds of strangers, the souls of strangers, and the lives of strangers.” The acceptance of European antisemitism by Zionists was not just limited to content, but also to form!
The first answer to the Jewish Question by Hertzl, before his formulation of Zionist colonization, was that of a mass conversion of the Austrian Jewish population to Catholicism. Hertzl would formulate a different plan, but still retained his fundamental belief that Jews could not coexist with other peoples, saying “I achieved a freer attitude toward anti-Semitism, which I now began to understand historically and to pardon. Above all, I recognized the emptiness and futility of trying to ’combat’ anti-Semitism.” Why fight anti-semitism when you can do a favor to the antisemitic ruling classes of Europe by leaving to go form, as Hertzl said, “a portion of a rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism”? Another benefit of Zionism to the reactionary ruling classes of Europe, that Hertzl mentions explicitly, is the smothering of European Jewish radicalism, with Hertzl explicitly saying to famous antisemite and pogromist Count Von Plehve, “Help me to reach the land [Palestine] sooner and the revolt [against Czarist rule] will end.” More than just vague promises, Hertzl made the terms of this collaboration explicit to Jewish Social Revolutionary Chaim Zhitlovksy: “I have just come from Plehve. I have his positive, binding promise that in 15 years, at the maximum, he will effectuate for us a charter for Palestine. But this is tied to one condition: the Jewish revolutionaries shall cease their struggle against the Russian government. If in 15 years from the time of the agreement, Plehve does not effectuate the charter, they become free again to do what they consider necessary.” Of course, Hertzl was rebuffed by Zhitlovksy, as any earnest revolutionary would rebuff this sort of narrow nationalism and class collaboration. As so important in understanding the fascist essence of Zionist, it is not enough to understand that Zionism was premised on a fascistic, racist, colonial, corporatist state in Palestine, but also required the Jews in diaspora to submit to antisemitic and fascist race ideology and give up their struggles for freedom and equality in order to aid the development of their “nation” in the Zionist project in Palestine. Zionism does not only exist in opposition to the native Palestinians and Syrians who the Zionist entity colonizes, but it also exists in opposition to the Jewish diaspora and its heretical ideas of multi-culturalism, anti-racism, and class struggle. Therefore, Palestinians confront Zionism in the front, with the Zionist entity receiving support from Euro-Amerikan imperialism in its rear, and the revolutionary Jewish diaspora confronts Euro-Amerikan fascist imperialism in the front, with Zionism in its rear.
Present Period
Zionist Endsieg in the period of writing this piece has become literal, with Netanyahu beginning to say, starting on February 7th, the phrase “Total Victory”, that is to say, declaring the goal of Endsieg. These comments have become even more chilling, as he has said that once Israel enters Rafah, it will be an Endsieg. On its face, this rhetorical turn is horrific; Netanyahu saying that upon advancing into the final stretch of Gaza, right up on the Egyptian border where millions of Palestinians have been forced to flee, Israel will achieve its Endsieg is clearly an indication he plans further mass slaughter in Rafah not only from bombing, but possibly with the engagement of ground military forces. Netanyahu speaks just like Hitler did in 1941, “I place my confidence in the best army in the world, in the best army which the German nation has ever possessed. It is numerically strong, it has the finest weapons and is better led than ever before.” But despite almost a year of genocide, the position of Israel has only weakened, and every day it works to over extend itself by inviting retaliation from Iran and Yemen and threatening a war in Lebanon. And this is not the blind speculation of an anti-zionist Communist Jew; this is drawn from the public testimony of members of the Zionist regime! Herzi Alevi, an IOF Army Chief, described the IOF as “an exhausted army.” Israel has also opened up a new reserve of manpower by removing military exemptions for the ultra orthodox, an act unprecedented in Israeli military history. Lastly, as of July 1st, it was being widely reported that after 8 months of genocide, Israel has only made combat ineffective 3 brigades out of the 24 Resistance Brigades in Gaza. It may be confusing, in the context of an unfavorable and unsustainable military situation in Gaza, why the Zionist entity would ramp up the violence and escalate with the rest of the Axis of Resistance, but given the fascist structure of Israel, it should then make sense why the end of Israel would, in a horrific irony, parallel the “Endsieg” of Germany.
Many people are confused by the actions of Nazi Germany, Israel, and South Africa, and decide that because these states are not interacting within a framework of liberal internationalism, they must be insane and illogical. Those who today are confused by Israel’s insistence on antagonizing other regional players and possibly starting a regional war suffer from the same confusion as those who saw South Africa’s opening up of another front in Namibia or Nazi Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union. The source of this confusion is a fundamental lack of understanding of the Endsieg ideology, namely, that anything less than complete and total victory sets the stage for defeat and collapse. This collapse is a combination of economic and social factors that varied from regime to regime in their particularities, but who in all instances come to form the strategic outlook of Endsieg. In the case of Germany, while they had conquered the continent, they remained at war with the United Kingdom, but still chose to declare war on the Soviet Union, which they knew was a risky move in which victory was premised on the population overwhelmingly supporting the Germans as liberators, the Red Army totally collapsing and the Germans conquering Moscow within the year. This risk was taken because the Germans and Soviets alike understood that the Germans lacked oil, among other raw resources, and that Soviet military and industrial capacity would only increase. The Germans understood that their only hope of victory was one that was total, and the Nazis were quite open about this with Hitler saying in 1942, “Nature is cruel; therefore we are also entitled to be cruel. When I send the flower of German youth into the steel hail of the next war without feeling the slightest regret over the precious German blood that is being spilled, should I not also have the right to eliminate millions of an inferior race that multiplies like vermin?” The reason why the Nazis felt they had to open up this second front, fight the war against the Soviets so rapidly, overextending their manpower and supply lines on the gamble they could seize Leningrad, Moscow, and Stalingrad in around a year’s time was because the longer they waited the longer they would be blockaded by the British, face resistance from the nations they occupied, and face domestic unrest from their own population. Like a cancer, the rationale of the fascist and colonial state is expand or die.
In Israel, we see confusion over Netanyahu’s refusal to pull out of Gaza, military and settlement escalation in the West Bank, military strikes in Southern Lebanon, and assassinations in Lebanon and Iran of Axis of Resistance leaders. Some commentators blame these choices on Netanyahu’s personal political career, namely his desire to remain prime minister and in doing so, stay out of jail for corruption charges. And while there are protests of Jewish Israelis against Netanyahu, Netanyahu still is the head of government and if the ruling clique of the Zionist regime or its Amerikkkan master wanted him out, he would be out of office. But he is not because the Endsieg worldview of him and his government represent the majority or at least plurality of the Jewish Israeli population. Like Hitler, Netanyahu and his government and the parties behind him believe that if they are to send the flower of Jewish youth into Gaza that they must exterminate or expell the Palestinians living there and colonize it. Already in late January of 2024, a few months after the Al Aqsa flood operation, several ministers of Netanyahu’s government attended an event called “Settlement Brings Security and Victory” where Knesset members issued statements such as, ““If [we] don’t want another October 7, we need to return home and control the land.” by National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, and “There is no way to win that war without the rebuild[ing] of Gush Katif and the Gaza Strip. It should be flourished with Jewish villages and Jewish cities,” from Mose Feiglin, a former Knesset member. The Israeli volk demand Lebenstraum! The Israeli government and ruling class understands that, as settlers, their hold on power and land is always under threat by the indigenous population, and they fundementally do not believe that they can have peace other than total conquest and victory; Lebenstraum or death is the slogan of every colonial regime.
With regards to Hezbollah of Lebanon and its allies in Iran and Yemen, Endsieg ideology also explains the violent and provocative actions by Israel, despite not even being able to subdue the resistance in Gaza. The reality is that beyond the colonialist ideology of many in government in Israel, who imagine a “Greater Israel” — that stretches from the Nile in the West, to the Euphrates in the East and encompassing Lebanon — is that Israel is already experiencing several crises and anything less than an Endsieg, or total victory, would mean a set up for a long term defeat. For a fascist colonial power, it is always a zero sum game. If Israel fails to secure continued land for settlement and respond with overwhelming force to every challenge to their authority, they set the conditions for their collapse; but in order to meet these conditions, they are forced to engage in conflicts that can also bring about their demise.
Aside from the political analysis of how Israel, like a cancer, has a pathological need to expand, there are also the military realities that come with being a fascist colonial outpost, which is that the whole colony needs to be mobilized to defend the settler garrison against the numerically superior indigenous populations, and that the colony is surrounded by the indigenous population it works at all times to displace. In the West, because our view of war is fundementally shaped by World War II, people generally work under the assumption that the difference between war and peace is a binary one: either a country is at war and mobilizes its entire economy and population for war or it is at peace and not doing that. But in the fascist state and settler colony, war is a constant and differences are quantitative rather than qualitative, because the colony is always fighting and being resisted by the natives. Far too many in the West think that Israel is only really fighting a campaign in Gaza, rather than Gaza being another front to which Israel is perpetually committed, the other fronts include the West Bank and the border with Lebanon. This is because Israel is not a regular country, it is a settler garrison where every border is in fact a military front where there is conflict constantly over the expansion of the settler and resistance of the native. In the rest of the world, we react to the possibility of an Israeli invasion of the West Bank or Lebanon in rightful horror, but also with a degree of unwarranted suprise. The Israeli sees merely an advance on an existing front.
For the Endsieg ideologist, total war is inevitable, and it is better to dare to enter into an open final conflict where the fascist state or colony has the possibility of winning in the field of open combat, rather than slowly be bled by a thousand cuts. Currently, Israel is bleeding out. Despite almost a year, Israel has not achieved a military victory in Gaza, whereas the resistance in Gaza reports recuperation of its forces. In addition to the failure of the Zionist garrison to secure a military victory, according to a UN Watch report on July 2nd, there are 30,000 internal refugees from the “Gaza envelop”, ie the Israeli settlements surrounding Gaza. Furthermore, there are an additional 80,000 refugees from the North of the country which is currently evacuated due to the fear of retaliation from Hezbollah, which is to say, almost the entire northern 1/3rd of the country. In the South, the blockade of the Red Sea by Ansar Allah has resulted in the Israeli port of Eilat going bankrupt, with the blockade stopping shipping to the port by 85%. At home, the Netanyahu government faces manpower shortages that have necessitated the conscription of the ultra orthodox, an action unprecedented in Israel’s history. This also is paired with the ongoing protests against the Netanyahu government, which, although not particularly radical and certainly not anti-Zionist in any meaningful way, do represent a political crisis in the country.
The Zionist entity is already being bled in Gaza, on the Red Sea, in the West Bank and in the North near the border with Lebanon. IOF soldiers are already deployed, reserves are mobilized for military service, wreaking havoc on the economy as increasingly larger sectors of it are taken away for military service, and the settlers occupying the land near active fronts for colonization are already relocated and draining the economy and source of political discontent. The options of the Israeli regime are as follows: Option 1, surrender to the immediate demands of the Axis of Resistance, abandon Gaza, and hand over a bunch of Palestinian political prisoners, which would mean a military defeat that would induce a political and economic crisis in Israel, totally shattering its’ myth of Zionist invincibility and set it up for future defeats and concessions while also having to maintain a higher level of societal militarization with less international support, and less faith in their project by the global financial system, all while waiting for the next October 7th which will no doubt be more coordinated and bolstered by a successful precedent. Option 2, the Endsieg Zionist regime can risk it all now by taking the offensive on the fronts they are already engaged on, where their civilians are already evacuated and where they would have the initiative. Given that the first option would mean a slow drawn out death and collapse and the second offers the possibility of victory, with our Endsieg glasses on, we can see why the Israelis do not see escalation as the initiation of a life or death struggle, but of taking initiative in a crisis scenario that is already life or death. Given that these are the calculations and logic of the Zionist regime, we, therefore, should not be surprised as they further their offensives in the West Bank and Lebanon, up to and including a ground invasion, as at a certain point they will be unable to maintain stability through bombing and small unit tactical forrays, and will invade to push the existing front line far enough from population centers that the threats to the settler population can be sufficiently alleviated.
Conclusion
The Zionists, like their fascist forbearers, imagine that through pure will they can capture Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon, just as the SADF thought they could fight in Namibia, Zambia, and Angola and the Nazis thought they could seize Leningrad, Moscow and Stalingrad. I believe, however, that no matter the genocidal and fascist willpower of the Zionists, they cannot triumph over the Axis of Resistance and the desire of the Palestinian people to be free.
Post Scriptum
In the days since publishing this essay first on the Marxist Anti-imperialist Torah Study Organization, Moody’s Ratings has, “downgraded Government of Israel's long-term local and foreign-currency issuer ratings to Baa1 from A2. Concurrently, the local-currency and foreign-currency senior unsecured ratings were also downgraded to Baa1 from A2 and the foreign-currency senior unsecured shelf rating and the foreign-currency senior unsecured MTN rating were downgraded to (P)Baa1 from (P)A2.” and Israel has begun a horrific bombing in campaign in Lebanon named “Operation New Order” which is of course a parallel to the Nazi Neuordung (New Order) which Hitler declared in late January of 1941, which was meant to be a new order of Aryan racial hegemony and extermination of “inferior races”.
I have also changed “neutralized” which was used in a previous version of this essay to “made combat ineffective” as the first sounded to similar to Israeli rhetoric and removed a needless descriptor of the Palestinian resistance in Gaza.
Sources:
https://ratings.moodys.com/ratings-news/429502
https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/document/mideast/ironwall/02-ruszion.htm
https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/document/mideast/hidden/ch06.htm
https://decolonizepalestine.com/rainbow-washing/redwashing/
Shahak, Israel. “Israeli Society and the Kibbutzim.” Arab Studies Quarterly, vol. 7, no. 2/3, 1985, pp. 15–23. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/41857766. Accessed 25 Sept. 2024.
https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/document/mideast/toi/index.html
https://www.marxists.org/subject/jewish/schulman-socialist-zionism.pdf
https://www.marxists.org/archive/kanafani/1972/revolt.htm
https://rosselson.medium.com/theodor-herzl-visionary-or-antisemite-97bfbe92980