An ‘upgrade’ in extremism

About this time in November in 1938, the Nazi Party was getting ready to launch a major anti-Jewish terror campaign throughout Germany and Austria.  We recall with horror the two days of violence on November 9th and 10th as Kristallnacht.  The shattered glass at synagogues and Jewish stores marked the beginnings of the horror of the manic hysteria of the Nazis to address "the Jewish question" to which the Holocaust became their "final solution."

Jai Chakrabarti's novel brings together the final days at an orphanage in the Warsaw ghetto, Jewish immigrants in New York, and a fictional village in India's Bengal.  Before you conclude that this post is a book report or a review, well, it is not.

This post is about the political developments in Israel, and about the rapid emergence of the far right in Israel and in other democracies.

Given the sheer horror of the holocaust, I would imagine that the children and grandchildren of the survivors would certainly want to protect themselves.  Israel as a high security state is completely understandable. 

But, I also imagine that those who remember the horrors would also be welcoming towards the other.  Or, at least tolerate the other.

The results of the recent elections in Israel suggest that Israeli politics has swung to the far, far right of the political spectrum.

The third largest party in the Israeli parliament is a party that derives its ideological inspiration from the most extreme strand. Now, the leader of one element of this party is Ben Gvir, who everyone in Israel considers to be the big winner of the election. He’s a lawyer who tends to represent Jewish murderers of Palestinians, who commit terror acts, not in uniform, as civilians. Just before [Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak] Rabin’s assassination [at the hands of a Jewish extremist in 1995], he appeared in a famous TV clip with the emblem of Rabin’s car, and he said, “We got to his car, and we’ll get to him, too.”

More on Gvir and his party:

He has, for instance, proposed that Palestinian citizens of Israel and Jewish leftists be stripped of their citizenship. 

He is a serial inciter. He’s the one who would lead the marches where there are chants of “Death to the Arabs.” Last night, at the gathering was “Death to the Terrorists” with a smirk. They’d replaced the Arabs with terrorists, but that’s how they define terrorists, so it’s pretty much the same there. 

However, it’s important to not fall into the trap of just seeing this as an aberration. It might be an “upgrade” in extremism, but I think it’s correct to place this on a continuum of the absorption into Israeli politics of the most extreme.

It is beyond my understanding how the descendants of the Holocaust can engage in ultra hateful rhetoric towards people who do not look and think like them.

There are a number of worrying areas where the newly powerful Israeli far right still stands out. Among them: Calls to expel Arabs who do not support Israel; intolerance of Israel’s large LGBT community and other nonobservant Jews; and a seeming acceptance of the necessity of violence.

There is no rational way that I can begin to understand this.  Israeli politics has swung so right that the Labor Party "is on the threshold of extinction."  The party that had leaders like its Golda Meir, Yitzhak Rabin, and Shimon Peres.  Now, the Labor Party has become irrelevant in Israel!

In India too the far right has become so powerful and mainstreamed that the traditional Congress Party barely wins any electoral victory and has an insignificant presence in the federal Parliament.  In Israel, the far right rhetoric resembles Jewish supremacy; the far right rhetoric here in America is White Christian supremacy; Hindu supremacy defines the far right rhetoric in India.  In France, Hungary, and even in Warsaw's Poland, far right politics have become powerful.

The far right here in the US launched a violent assault on the Capitol, and yet voters apparently are ready to give more power to the party that is home to these supremacists.  Many of these supremacists are anti-Semitic too.  

It is almost as if we did not learn any lessons from the Nazis and the Holocaust.  It does seem like we are actors on a stage in, as Jai Chakrabarti has titled his book, A Play for the End of the World.