A speech given in Wakatū/Nelson

Kia ora koutou, asalamu alaykum.

I want to talk today about the growth of fascism and the death of humanity in Israeli society.

With the passage this week of a draconian death penalty law that is effectively designed only to applied to Palestinians, more people around the world than ever are noticing that Israelis are in a very dark place. The scenes from the Knesset following the vote were not of solemnity, nor determination, nor regret. We saw instead scenes of glee, scenes of great pleasure at the prospect of the horrific form of violence. We saw unabashed, unhidden, unafraid displays of joyous sadism. Many of us here will know that this is not new. Shocking words and acts of racial hate have been increasingly easy to find among Israelis in recent decades.

In 2015 a settler called Amiram Ben-Uliel murdered 3 members of the Dawabsheh family. 18 month-old Ali Dawabsheh burned to death, an innocent dying in intense agony and helpless terror. His parents lived for some weeks before each in turn died of the burns they had received. Hussein Dawabsheh, Ali’s grandfather, was taunted by Jewish settlers outside the court proceedings. They chanted in Arabic “Where’s Ali? There’s no Ali. Ali is burned. On the fire. Ali is on the grill”

A settler called Limor Son Har-Melech called the murderer a “saint”. She was also a co-sponsor of this death penalty bill. She has openly said that Palestinians must be executed if they kill Jews but Jews should only be imprisoned for killing Palestinians. When 8 soldiers were indicted for raping a prisoner she said that those who prosecuted Israeli personnel for such acts would themselves be “charged and prosecuted as the lowest of traitors.” In the knesset she angrily berated a doctor for saying that a 4 year-old Palestinian should have pain killers when their arm is amputated. On another occasion, 18 months into the holocaust waged on Gaza, she was angered by mention of starving children, calling it “horrific” to address the issue when Israeli children were killed on October the 7^th. There is also a video of Son Har-Melech from 2005 encouraging her then 2-year-old son as he vowed to “kill the Arabs”.

A settler called Itamar Ben Gvir was in court the day his fellow settlers taunted a grieving man of over the cruel murder of his son, daughter-in-law, and grandson. Ben Gvir was the defence lawyer for the murderer, whom he still openly supports. Ben Gvir at that time had a portrait of Baruch Goldstein in his living room. Goldstein committed a brutal mass-murder in 1994, killing 29 Muslim Palestinians who were praying during Ramadan, before himself being beaten to death by survivors. His grave is treated by Jewish fascists as a shrine. Ben Gvir is reported to have taken his wife to the graveside on their first date.

People may have seen Itamar Ben Gvir recently pouring champagne to celebrate the passage of the death penalty act. He is Israel’s current minister for National Security. He loves to yell at and bully those he calls “terrorists”. He visited prisoners taken from the Gaza Freedom Flotilla in international waters. He taunted and yelled at these people who had been abducted on the high seas and held illegally, calling them “terrorists” but he himself has criminal convictions for inciting racial hatred and supporting a terrorist organisation.

A settler called Bezalel Smotrich is Ben Gvir’s close political ally. He is the current Minister of Finance, and Minister of Transport, and he is a Junior Minister of Defence. He is the main perpetrator in the ongoing ethnic cleansing and annexation of the West Bank which is a flagrant violation of international law and innumerable resolutions by the UN Security Council and the UN General Assembly. He has what he calls a “decisive plan” of flooding the West Bank with settlers. As a journalist wrote “When this happens, the Palestinians are supposed to understand that they have no chance to get a state of their own, and they would have to choose between one of the three options – a life of subjugation under Israeli rule, emigration, or death.” He also supports the genocidal cleansing of Gaza saying in 2024: “There are no half measures … [only] total annihiliation. ‘Thou shalt blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven.’ There is no place for them under heaven.”

Smotrich is another vocal supporter of Ali Dawabsheh’s murderer. He refused to call the attack terrorism which he claims can “only be violence carried out by an enemy within the framework of war against us”. He supports a shoot to kill policy for Palestinian stone throwers. When 17 year-old Ahed Tamimi was arrested he tweeted that she “should have gotten a bullet, at least in the kneecap”.

I could also mention Smotrich’s violent and obscene homophobia, or the time Ben Gvir told Beduoins “we will mow you down. We are the landlord here!” I could list evidence of their fascist nature all day, but I will spare you that.

Smotrich and Ben Gvir combined their two parties into one for election purposes so that neither party risked falling below the threshold in their proportional system. This was an idea suggested by Benjamin Netanyahu. Together the parties polled 10%, yet these two junior coalition partners seem at times to almost run the country. It is almost as if the main ruling party and its leader uses their open extremism as a cover and a source of deniability for his own extremism. Not that we could ever relate to that in our own country, right?

Settlers like Limor Son Har-Melech, Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir provide this cover for all Israelis. They want to pretend that this is not who they are, but it is. There is a German saying from WWII: “If a Nazi is sitting at the table, and ten others are sitting there chatting with him, you have eleven Nazis at the table.” It is not just the 10% who voted for these extremist parties who support their extremism, it is those who voted for Likud which has openly supported them and for the other parties that are willing to work with them. Their settler extremism is actively supported by every Israeli that is not opposed to the settlements in the occupied territories and every Israeli who believes Palestinian resistance is a form of terrorism. Almost every adult Israeli is at that table, the table that means they are the Nazis.

Jewish Zionists inside and outside of Israel will be very offended to be called Nazis, but my answer to them is that if they are so hurt by being called Nazis then they should stop being Nazis. It is not as if I invented the idea that Zionists are Nazis, David Ben Gurion himself called the revisionist leader Zeev Jabotinsky “Vladimir Hitler”. A little over a decade later, though, Ben Gurion spearheaded the Nakba, doing everything that he had once called Jabotinski a fascist for advocating. Nothing illustrates better than this that the table of Nazis is Zionism itself.

This new law shows the world that behind the racialised and Islamophobic excuses about self-defence, Israel is a society in the grip of racial hatred and now is the time that we must hammer that home to the public so that they ask more of their politicians and more of the media too.

Thank you all for listening. Kia Kaha!