by Ferenc Laczó
Following the shocking crimes committed on October 7 last year, the leadership of the State of Israel has unwittingly walked into the terrifying trap set by Hamas. Its counterattack, which has resulted in mass casualties among Palestinians and the destruction of Gaza, has raised the Palestinian question to a whole new level while bringing the State of Israel’s international reputation to a nadir. Underlying the current cataclysm is Israel’s growing inability to reconcile the fundamental contradiction between its Jewish identity and its democratic claims. Meanwhile, right-wing illiberal and radical leftist responses in the West bear clear marks of the spiral of radicalization in the Middle East, hampering the urgently needed process of reconciliation and the emergence of a viable long-term settlement.
Ferenc Laczó is assistant professor in history at Maastricht University and co-managing editor of the Review of Democracy.
The mass murder Hamas committed against Israeli civilians one year ago (re-)traumatized many. The strong, devastating, but in many respects ill-considered Israeli military response has brought the already fraught conflict in global politics to an unprecedented intensity.
Not since the Holocaust have such heinous crimes been committed against Jewish people as on October 7, 2023. The victims of this Palestinian act of mass terror were civilians. Its perpetrators have therefore also shaken the belief in the State of Israel as a guarantor of security and protection for Jews.
The ensuing massive retaliation and one-sided conflict, which has already cost tens of thousands of lives in Gaza in the early months after October 7, has resonated loudly on a global scale. The unprecedented escalation of violence in Israel/Palestine has polarized public opinion virtually worldwide.
One year later, the outcome of the ongoing conflict remains utterly unpredictable. What is clear is that the main preconditions for further escalation — a regional or even global conflagration, one pitting Iran, Hezbollah, and Hamas against Israel and the United States — are now all in place.
The Four Key Arguments
This article is not written primarily to commemorate the innocent victims of the past twelve months in Israel and Palestine — something many other articles will do today (and rightly so, of course). Rather, I want to reflect on the causes of the grave crisis of the State of Israel and the Western reactions over the past year by making four main points.
First, I shall underline that the State of Israel is less and less able to conceal the fundamental tensions, even contradictions, between its Jewish character and its democratic claims. Second, I will argue that following the shock of October 7, its leadership carelessly walked into the trap set by Hamas, for which the civilian population of Gaza is paying an extremely heavy price.
Third, the reactions to these unprecedented, if asymmetrical, escalations of violence also highlight a peculiar shift in Western political culture: the far right is now Israel’s most outspoken supporter while the radical left is its most vocal critic. Fourth, I shall argue that the reactions of these Western political and intellectual forces both bear the hallmarks of the Middle Eastern spiral of radicalization, hampering reconciliation and the emergence of a workable long-term settlement.
But let me begin by briefly outlining the developments of the past twelve months.
A Terrifying Trap and the Sinister Ambition of Permanent Security
The developments since last October may be summarized as follows: under the most right-wing government in its history, the State of Israel has given an extreme response to the large-scale and most brutal Islamist terror attack committed by the forces in control of Gaza.
The war of retaliation against Hamas, legitimate in itself, has as its basic objective the elimination of this complex, socially embedded organization.
In A. Dirk Moses’ fitting phrase, Israel currently pursues the deeply sinister ambition of permanent security: under the guise of the ill-defined—and hardly definable—objective of eliminating Hamas, the Israelis have been persecuting the two million inhabitants of the Gaza Strip.
One could say that Israel’s right-wing political elite—either in a state of shock or to conceal its own considerable responsibility for the surprise Hamas attack—has, in any case, carelessly walked into the trap set last fall. A crucial development is that the most destructive counterattack it launched, with its masses of Palestinian casualties, has raised the profile of the Palestinian question in an unprecedented way, while Israel’s reputation has plummeted to unseen lows. The widespread online dissemination of authentic images of the destruction in Gaza in particular has deeply tarnished Israel’s reputation among members of younger generations.
It is also clear—and much more important—that the civilian population of Gaza has paid the ultimate price for this terrifying trap, with Israel falling into it more deeply than had been feared in our worst nightmares.
Setting such a trap also highlights the utter immorality of radical Islamists, if anyone still doubted it. The killing of Gaza since last October remains the responsibility of the State of Israel, of course.
The Growing Self-Contradiction of Israeli Ethnic Democracy
How has this historical low point been reached?
Almost all parties can agree that the violent conflict, ongoing for generations, was initiated by the other side. Such claims, of course, reveal a symmetrical refusal to compromise. Perhaps we should not revisit antiquity this time, not even the first half of the twentieth century, however relevant these prehistories may seem to many.
The escalating series of conflicts in our times has a relatively easily identifiable starting point: 1967, when the Israeli army won a landslide victory and suddenly occupied all the territory between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River. It then placed under military occupation the parts destined for a Palestinian state. Soon afterward, it also began to support Jewish settlers, many of them religious fanatics, who wished to move there.
As a result, for more than half a century now, the State of Israel has operated as an ethnic democracy that is trying to balance being a democratic state based on equality for its predominantly Jewish citizens while—similar to previous colonial powers—systematically excluding the non-Jewish inhabitants of the territories it has occupied.
In the more optimistic moments of the 1990s, Israel’s leadership nominally accepted the so-called two-state solution, i.e., the future creation of a Palestinian state, which it had previously boycotted. However, it has since made that solution virtually impossible, citing existential security concerns. (I should refrain here from entering into futile debates about who might have been primarily responsible for the demise of the hopes of the 1990s.)
The Israeli army did withdraw from Gaza in 2005, dismantling local Jewish settlements. Shortly afterward, in 2007, the Islamist radicals of Hamas, who cooperated with Israeli authorities on certain common interests while remaining extremely hostile to them, gained power in the Strip.
Meanwhile, in the West Bank, Israel has continued to support the settler movement and growing discrimination against local Palestinians. Its leadership, with its highly problematic settlement policy, has undermined the very possibility of a two-state solution, unless it is prepared to withdraw from these occupied territories, in accordance with international law, and even use force to dismantle its own fundamentalist movement there. If it is prepared to do so, it has certainly hidden that intention well until now…
However, Israel’s undermining of the two-state solution did not alleviate its fundamental dilemma—in Micah Goodman’s merry phrase: its catch-67. Quite the contrary.
If Israel, which possesses dominant, even overwhelming power in the area, does not wish to accept the creation of an independent Palestinian state, it should grant citizenship to the Palestinian masses living under its rule. However, by doing so, it would risk its very raison d’être, that of being a state with a Jewish majority. If, on the other hand, it continues to deny equality to those under its authority and runs a grossly discriminatory regime, it will be exposed to the charge of maintaining an apartheid-like regime.
Its decades-old rule over Palestinians—who are roughly equal in number to Jews ‘between the river and the sea’—has left the state, originally conceived as a Jewish ethnic democracy, at a crucial crossroads: does it want to remain a Jewish exclusivist state, or does it prefer to accept a multi-ethnic democracy with equal citizenship for all?
There is no doubt that Israelis have preferred the former in recent years. Nor is there any doubt that their preference has even been reinforced in the wake of October 7.
Unexpected Challenges Amid a Global Geopolitical Turn
It has been predictable that the political culture of a country that has gradually tried to extend its borders and has operated such a discriminatory dual regime in the occupied Palestinian territories would shift to the far right. So much so that right-wing populist PM Benjamin Netanyahu, who has dominated Israeli politics in recent decades, in fact returned to power in 2022 in a coalition with extremists. In 2023, Netanyahu was preparing “reforms” together with them which, if implemented, would have amounted to an anti-democratic coup. He thereby provoked a series of mass demonstrations, triggering perhaps the worst internal crisis in Israel’s history since 1948.
Despite the cyclical upsurge of violence with its rather typical scenario—i.e., Palestinian terror attacks followed by significantly more destructive Israeli counter-attacks—and a marked decline in sympathy in authoritative Western circles for it, the state of Israel was long quite effective in marginalizing the Palestinian question. So much so that not even the mass opposition demonstrations of 2023 sought to address the open oppression of the Palestinians in any meaningful way—despite the rather obvious link between this oppression and the turn of Jewish democracy to the far right.
We are forced to acknowledge that Hamas’s horrific act of terror a year ago exerted an enormous transformative impact in this respect. It not only plunged the State of Israel into the gravest crisis in its history, now both internal and external. Equally importantly, the overwhelming and devastating military response against Gaza has catapulted the Palestinian question into the very center of political attention practically across the globe.
We are living through years of a geopolitical turn, which is pointing toward the formation of new blocs. The West, which prefers to present itself as the democratic world opposed to Eurasian autocrats, is currently in fierce competition with what is sometimes called the “global East.” The latter powers, primarily China and Russia, combine illiberalism and declarations in favor of multipolarity with their own imperialism, as well as support for decolonial activism when it suits them. There are no lines left, only wires, as Giuliano da Empoli has written in his great novel The Wizard of the Kremlin.
The Western alliance system is known to have gained new strength with its effective, if precarious, opposition to Russian aggression against Ukraine. This is one of the reasons why Israel’s protracted war against Gaza is posing such a serious challenge to its self-representation and preferred interpretations of global politics.
For if the collective West strongly condemns Russia for its belligerent aggression against Ukrainian self-determination—and rightly so, of course—then it cannot, without self-contradiction, ignore the Palestinians’ yearning for self-determination. To say nothing of the conundrum that if the West wishes to portray warfare involving mass violence against civilians as characteristic of oppressive autocracies, how can contemporary Israel continue to be called an integral part of the democratic world?
Although there are notable domestic critics of its foreign policy intransigence, including courageous American Jews, the United States has remained steadfast in its political and military support for Israel. Geopolitical factors have been of decisive importance in this regard, since Israel’s main enemies—Iran and its Islamist proxies, Russia too, and to an extent China—are also its own main rivals.
It is also striking that, despite the successful insistence on Western unity, the global grand coalition has already been stymied when it comes to the condemnation of Russia’s blatant aggression. Currently, the U.S. has a much harder time finding partners for its effective support of the State of Israel.
The most strongly committed states in this regard are to be found in Central and Eastern Europe—with its permissive stance toward both Russia and Israel, contemporary Hungary practically offers a model of the rightist-illiberal formula that I return to below.
Among those who respect the fundamentals of international law and human rights more broadly, we see the exact opposite. For them, the urgent protection of the severely suffering peoples of both Ukraine and Palestine has become a crucially important cause.
These positionings also suggest that we might be dealing with an epochal realignment in Western political culture.
Trends in Western Political Culture: Right-Wing Illiberalism
Western far-right forces, including many post-fascist formations, have apparently transformed their fierce anti-Judaism into the rejection of Muslims. They now often declare themselves to be committed supporters of the State of Israel. On the left-liberal side in Europe, which has long been committed to self-critical forms of Holocaust remembrance and to the State of Israel on grounds of historical responsibility and a morality derived from that, there are growing signs of doubt and reassessment.
This peculiar turn of events is actually not so hard to understand, given that Israel—which was established three-quarters of a century ago as a peculiar left-wing ethnic democracy and as a refuge for Jews who had just been persecuted in Europe in an unprecedented way—has now become a global symbol of militant ethnic politics. As the Bulgarian political scientist Ivan Krastev put it a few years ago: with its staunch ethnic policies, impressive military might, international weight, dynamic neoliberal economy, and high technological development, Israel has virtually everything that right-wing nationalists can typically only dream of when it comes to their own state.
As part of this shift in political culture, two striking phenomena have unfolded over the past twelve months that we would ignore at our own peril.
One is that right-wing illiberals are now attacking progressive activists and critical intellectuals under the guise of fighting antisemitism.
We have seen several blatant cases of this in the United States, where right-wing illiberal politicians have been targeting leading universities in precisely this way, with varying degrees of success. (To emphasize this is, of course, not to deny that there has been a notable increase in antisemitic incidents on many American campuses over the last twelve months.) We have also seen over these months that German institutions, which proclaim a policy of zero tolerance toward antisemitism, have been repeatedly sanctioning distinguished academics and thinkers—who may be, in fact often are, of Jewish background—for their ‘overly critical’ stance on Israel. Plus ça change…
All this is an absurd intensification of a political maneuver that started years earlier and is aimed at employing the concept of antisemitism not so much to mean the demonstrable expression of anti-Jewish prejudice, but in a rather peculiar way: to make people associate it with the inadmissibility of any and all criticism of the State of Israel. The political meaning of this rightist-illiberal recoding is thus the staunch defense of the policies and actions of a state, regardless of their actual content. Needless to say, while the former—ethnic and religious prejudices—are indeed unacceptable, in a democratic environment it is necessary to allow room for criticism of state policies.
There are admittedly quite a few people who hold Israel’s policies to a higher standard and criticize them more harshly than those of other states.
Double standards, however, also work the other way around: many people tend to condone or at least remain silent about obvious violations by the State of Israel that they would clearly condemn in other cases. It is easy to see that the latter is the greater problem—as opposed to accepting violations, the costs of applying ‘unrealistically high standards’ are much lower. They may even bring benefits.
Trends in Western Political Culture: The Radical Left
The other side of the story has been no less remarkable.
Over the past twelve months, the terrible suffering of the Palestinians has understandably become a prominent issue in many parts of the world. The rejection of the Israeli state, which has committed grave war crimes, is now able to mobilize masses of people in the West as well.
While sharp critics of Israel are right on many points—the colonial ambitions of the settlers, the state-run apartheid-like regime, and the ongoing mass violence against civilians have all been documented convincingly and in detail—it remains an important question to what extent the intense pro-Palestinian mobilization since last fall reproduces quasi-moral critiques of Judaism with antisemitic motives.
It is well known that radical antisemites try to portray Jews as quintessentially evil. Typically, they believe in a Jewish conspiracy to dominate, against the supposed immorality of which almost any ‘backlash’ can then seem justifiable. Several notable contemporary critics of Israel on the radical left draw—quite consciously or perhaps unwittingly, but in any case demonstrably—on this powerful, abhorrent tradition when they depict Hamas’s mass terror against civilians as justified.
I should add, though, that even vehement verbal attacks on the State of Israel are often fueled by genuine moral indignation these days. As the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism rightly emphasizes in connection with such cases, “the line between antisemitic and non-antisemitic speech is different from the line between unreasonable and reasonable speech.” In my assessment, many contemporary left-wing critiques may indeed be interpreted as a strong counter-reaction to earlier misguidedness, i.e., the former acceptance or even idealization of Israel’s militant ethnic politics.
That certainly nuances but does not substantially change what I see as major tendencies in Western political culture.
The far right, which tries to hide its profound antisemitic tradition, is now characterized by a disturbing pro-Israel bias, whereas—in a strange mirror image—we see cases of unprincipled pro-Palestinianism among those on the radical left.
The latter often project their progressive aspirations onto the Palestinian people, oppressed by both Israel and the Islamists, while preferring to ignore the darker aspects of Palestinian political culture and struggle. While the main motivation of such left-wing radicals is typically not antisemitic but rather the creation of a more just world, recent months have also starkly highlighted the lack of even the most basic empathy for Israeli citizens among quite a few of them.
As Adam Kirsch recently put it here at the Review of Democracy, for leftists who believe in the theory or even ideology of settler colonialism, Israel/Palestine offers dangerous hope: it appears to them to be that rare case where they might achieve their goal of decolonization. Notwithstanding all their factual and entirely legitimate criticisms of current Israeli crimes, when cherishing such fierce and unreflective desires, they themselves contribute to the spiral of radicalization.
These powerful new trends in Western political culture are, frankly, quite frightening.
Instead of those who articulate a realistic project of progress toward equality of rights and firmly reject the use of violence against civilians, it is the most pernicious forms of polarization in the Middle East—unprincipled and unjustly accusatory defenders of the State of Israel on the one hand, and blinkered, falsely idealistic supporters of the Palestinian cause on the other—that have become far more prominent in many Western discussions, just when there is a most urgent need for bipartisan de-escalation.
The original, Hungarian-language version of this article has appeared on Transtelex. A shorter version has been published on Eurozine.
