Zionism’s Alibi: Itamar Ben – Gvir, Bezalel Smotrich, and Israel’s Genocide in Gaza

26 September 2025

“These are my mistakes (unapologetically – M.D.)”

Interview with David Grossman, Educational TV, 15 December 2014.

“The embassy also offered a second possible explanation: The bombs were meant to influence well-off Jews in Iraq who wished to stay there, to get them to change their minds and come to Israel, too.”

Tom Segev, “Now it can be told”, Haaretz, 6 April 2006.

Itamar Ben – Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich reflect the true heart and spirit of David Ben Gurion’s Zionism lacking until recently the power to realize their objectives having no genuine control over Israel’s military, other security services, and governing institutions. Political sanctification of land with no sound historical or legal basis, political exclusivity, and illegitimate use of force to realize political ends known as terrorism characterize the supposedly distinct political figures. These are essential components of Zionism’s and Israel’s colonial and apartheid essence reflected since before the country’s formation in laws and policies. The idea of a state of Israel in Palestine has never been a legitimate one. It is no less repugnant today. The settlers of the 1967 occupied Palestinian territories (East Jerusalem, West Bank, and Gaza) who for decades carried an illegal status under international law enjoying the blessing of Shimon Peres and consecutive Israeli governments are the mirror image of Zionism’s origins.

Settlers from Misgav Am in the north to Eliot in the South who lost their nationalist socialist ideology and agricultural finances generate meaning by harboring military and security personnel perpetrators of illegal activities targeting civilians regionally that can easily be traced in Haaretz, Yedioth Ahronoth, and Israel Ha-Yom have shaped Israel’s land regime that is a main source of Israel’s apartheid system throughout historic Palestine. They have been eulogized by Anita Shapira with regular omissions about their ‘security’ role and their threefold expropriation of the country’s resources: one by active participation in land grab in the land of Palestine, the second given their bail out by the Israeli government following their economic collapse, and the third by bequeathing land rights for their descendants notwithstanding their lack of title from a Palestinian perspective and an Israeli legal one. Their only source for a claim over the land is longing to the ‘Land of Israel’ affirmed by Meron Benvenisti at Van Leer Institute even after his purported political awakening. Yossi Sarid endorsed both in 2012: the allegation and its enforcer turned compassionate.

Aware of its nihilist population, conspiratorial Tel-Aviv has routinely collaborated with residents of the Kibbutz and Moshav forming an intolerable regional menace.  Israel’s peculiarity is completed by messianic intelligence in Jerusalem engaged in archeological excavation to discover origins to sustain normalcy inwards and to combat formidable Palestinian intellectuals in exile particularly in Lebanon and the United States.  

Ben – Gurion’s colonial mindset was revealed in June 1915 in a speech he delivered in New York when Jews in Palestine constituted less than 10% of the population. His ambition was for the entirety of the country when he and his fellows were entitled to none.[1] Ambitious and sensitive to world politics Ben - Gurion emphasized the need to obtain the support of colonial powers in the wake of World War One that involved the Ottomans, but stressed that Palestine’s occupation would be by expanding and settling on the ground. In 1916 speaking in New York again, Ben Gurion expressed a classic orientalist perception of Palestinians and Arabs that could not shame Bernard Lewis’s. He despised both urban and rural Palestinians noting their looks and concluding their origins presuming their lack of political rights in their homeland under the Ottoman empire. Alternatively, Ben Gurion assumed that some could be the descendants of ancient Jews who inhabited Palestine at a certain time in history.

A year later in November 1917, also in New York, Ben Gurion was exhilarated by the colonial British Balfour Declaration about a Jewish homeland in Palestine when the total Jewish community in Palestine reached 10% of the general population. He indicated, however, that the right for the entirety of the land of Israel is not derived from the “greatest of nations” rather from expansionism and settlements that could realize the biblical right of the people of Israel to its ancient land. In 1918 Ben Gurion laid out in New York of course his purported sophisticated legal understanding to the rights of the two communities in Palestine. The ‘non-Jewish’ one has property rights owned by wealthy outsiders that can be purchased while the Jewish community has a political and historical right to Palestine. Ben Gurion’s lecture reported in Davar newspaper in 1922 and his article from 1924 understood the task of the Jewish worker in Palestine as a central element in national Jewish revival that does not contradict the potential class struggle within the Jewish Yishuv / Jewish community in Palestine. It is not clear whether Ben – Gurion had a coherent universal vision about class divide and exploitation.     

Following the orchestrated ethnic cleansing of more than two thirds of Palestinians by Zionist forces in 1948, those who managed not to be ethnically cleansed or internally displaced formed a group of people lacking any sense of national direction or awareness of rights. They were fearful of the newly established military regime and many aligned themselves with the occupying and colonial forces of Mapai politically and opportunistically. The more politicized individuals were persecuted and projected their predicament in the literary form of poetry in the language they were familiar with.

The tension that existed before the formation of Israel between some Palestinian communists and nationalist Palestinians regarding Zionism chronicled in Anis Sayigh’s memoire did not fade. Awkward discourse among politicized Palestinians in the newly colonial state developed directed at their ethnically cleansed people rather than the perpetrators of crimes against humanity. According to this version of events, the non-ethnically cleansed segment bears the heroic character because of their ‘steadfastness’ and ‘non-departure’.  Unconvincing narrative deconstructed already by the early songs of Fairuz and subsequently by Rosemary Sayigh’s The Palestinians: From Peasants to Revolutionaries. The monumental historical work of Walid and Rashid Khalidi practically reconstructed a people’s memory and historical presence almost unavailable to this day in the work of educated Palestinian elites in Israel who continue to miss Ibrahim Abu Lughod’s direction and Edward Said’s rigorous research as well as political sophistication and wit. Also unavailable from this bizarre academic research is Israel’s conduct in the 1967 occupied territories since then to this day failing to learn from effective union organization and protest. Similarly, Israel’s behavior in Lebanon throughout the years is part of this amnesia that mimics the limited ‘progressive discourse’ which adheres to the dictates of Mapai’s development.  

Mahmoud Darwish’s injured soul is scattered all over his poetry where he tries to metaphorically disavow the Israeli communist party which dominated and negated anti imperial and anti-colonial Arab and Palestinian nationalism in Israel while comfortably being part of Israeli and Zionist identity even if marginalized by Mapai, latter ruling governments, and the entire Israeli Jewish society. His alignment with the smaller Al-Ard group meant more than anything else a quest to maintain continuity with pre 1948 Palestine and not to disregard Israel’s actions during and after 1948 or trivialize them.

Central figure in this national drama is Emile Habibi who developed cynical defeatism influencing writers who worked for or sought to be employed at Al-Ittihad newspaper, the Arabic version of the Israeli communist party newspaper, and other figures in the local cultural scene. One probable explanation for Habibi’s sense of discouragement represented clearly in Dalia Karpel’s 1997 praising documentary about him titled “I Remained in Haifa” is his conduct during the 1948 war. Habibi failed a possible attempt for redemption through an interview of him By Darwish and outstanding Lebanese novelist Elias Khoury published in 1981 in the first edition of Al-Karmel Magazine edited by the melancholic poet where the comical literary questions constituted the essence of the interview directing the reader to understand the answers with the required caution. Habibi and the tradition of the Israeli Communist Party and most of its successors at Hadash generated research projects for the Khalidis and Seikalys to trace the Palestinian press in pre 1948 Palestine and the general political attitude among most political factions and faiths who opposed the 1917 Balfour Declaration and the formation of a Zionist state in Palestine.  

Doing justice to literary figures is rarely possible. But with Habibi this risk can be taken if we capture him by his 1974 novel The Secret Life of Saeed: The Pessoptimist replicated through his acceptance of a literary prize from Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir in 1992.

Tawfiq Zayyad’s poetry could not salvage the depths of control placed on Palestinians in Israel by the government, Israeli Jewish outdated values, and fellow politicians of Hadash, a developed version of dominating political Palestinian discourse and activities compared to the conventional Israeli Communist Party methodology. Holding the position of mayor was inherently counterproductive in the intrusive Israeli political reality. One of his famous confused slogans that mirrored his torment between the conflicting settings of repressed Palestine and Israel’s undesired presence was “we are the bulldozer”, meaning that Israelis fail to express gratitude for paving their streets and being their cheep laborers.

The rising politicized intelligentsia among Palestinians in Israel since the mid-1990s in the shape of Azmi Bishara’s tragic-comic intellectualism upgraded the audacity but failed colossally intellectually and politically to pose a real challenge to Israel’s apartheid and coloniality in all of historic Palestine and to connect his political agenda to the Question of Palestine. Too often Bishara stumbled and followed frivolous legal advice that can only trigger a deep sense of responsibility because of its contained knowledge, limited research, and shallow vision.   

In the United States Israel’s establishment was a result of the Israel lobby which pressured American president Truman to back the 1947 partition plan of Palestine. Supreme Court Justice Lewis Brandeis convinced president Woodrow Wilson to support the British 1917 Balfour Declaration regarding instituting a National Home for the Jewish People in Palestine. Since its creation Israel has been depicted in the United States either as a heroic country combatting evil or as the legitimate result of history’s most unbearable evil. Israel’s illegitimate installment and actions were metaphorically covered up by the admiration of Amos Oz in the New Yorker and the writings of Avishay Margalit in the New York Review of Books. Ironically, it was none other than Margalit that best deconstructed Oz, albeit meritoriously, in an essay in non-other than Haaretz revealing Oz’s epistemological configuration as a limited militarist man that at best is wholeheartedly indifferent to Israel’s constant and ordinary regional sabotage and accusatorial terrorist activities.[2] 

Hollywood’s fascination with early Israel was unwarranted and pathetic attributed by the Israeli Cinematic in Jerusalem to the directors’ Jewish identity. Later disproportionate representations of the Holocaust in American culture have raised genuine questioning given the lack of similar legitimacy for depictions of slavery and the atrocities committed against Native Americans.       

In the closed and militarist Mapai Israeli society of ethnic cleansing, military regime, plain land theft, and constant regional terrorism Zionism’s apartheid and coloniality reigned as the natural order of things. It took even the late Tony Judt few decades to reach a limited conclusion in 2003 about the future path in Palestine after being a Zionist and a Kibbutznik in his youth, only to be subjected to to The Guardian’s Jonathan Freedland’s Zionist revisionism.

The Holocaust was indeed a significant event in the 20^th century. It was utilized by Ben-Gurion opportunistically as a minor characterless waiting in the corner diplomat. Those who immigrated to Palestine were perceived as an exemplary of the defeated diaspora Jew. Israeli schools commenced teaching about this calamity in 1979. Ben – Gurion accepted compensations from Germany in 1952 and established relations with the West German security services in 1956. In 1960 the New York Times interviewed Ben – Gurion about the decision to perform the Eichmann trial by an underdeveloped legal system. 

Israeli society has moved from Mapai elsewhere pursuant to a miserable warfare display on land during the 1973 war that has marked its military ever since. Mizrahi Jews resentment has traditionally fueled the Likud and other right-wing parties who traditionally opposed Mapai and its subsequent incarnations. The Mizrahi – Mapai divide has defined Israeli Jewish society for generations notwithstanding changes in the base of both. They remain in the realm of anti – Palestinian and anti – Arab framework articulated by the contents of the educational system, the culture, and the security services. Mizrahi Jews’ status has improved economically and they constitute the main foundation of Netanyahu’s government. Their resentment at Mapai has not declined even when filling much of the technical and maintenance positions in Israel’s arms industries, the lower and midlevel ranks of different security services, and every revolting fan of Beitar Jerusalem.   

Add the ultra-Orthodox communities that have been Israelized throughout the years and one can understand the despairing demographic composition of the Israeli Jewish society in ordinary times and its danger in the course of genocide: Mapai and its variants, Mizrahi Jews and their melodious complexities, religious Zionism, and the absolute blindness of ultra-Orthodox Jews.

Since 1948 Israelis have been in denial of Palestine and Palestinians only to be discovered in the aftermath of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s fatal decision to engage in the 1993 Oslo process that did not deliver any freedom or rights. On the contrary, during the 1990s the number of settlers in East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza doubled. Israeli Security Services introduced accusatorial terrorism as a means to counter Palestinian arguments about their history and rights in an attempt to secure fragile Israeli Jewish identity. Affiliates of the Israel lobby in the United States managed the Oslo process in bad faith.[3]The imaginary hopeful period of few years after 1993 faded quickly as a result of Israel’s and Zionism’s justified insecurity about their rights and identity in Palestine.

Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich represent religious Zionism that share all of Zionism’s key elements: supremacy of Zionist identity, messianic historiography, and mythical connection to the land. From adolescent political activists they rose to primary influence in the Israeli government. Ben Gvir’s excitement as Minister of Internal Security gave him the illusion of suppressing an already dominated Palestinian community in Israel large in number and potential. As Minister of Finance Smotrich was given sweeping powers over settlement planning in East Jerusalem and the West Bank with the aim of increasing the number of illegal settlers and realize de jure annexation of at least large parts of that territory, having already annexed East Jerusalem ‘administratively’ in 1967.

Smotrich and Ben – Gvir are guilty of genocide in Gaza because of their expressed intent and influential governmental positions. Smotrich called for annihilation in Gaza in April 2024, the starvation of Gaza’s population in August 2024, and in May 2025 he advocated for the enclave’s total destruction. In July 2025 Ben – Gvir and Smotrich demanded razing Gaza city, and Ben – Gvir justified not permitting humanitarian aid to Gaza asserting that it deserves bombs only. In August 2025 Ben Gvir proposed to occupy Gaza and ethnically cleanse its population ‘voluntarily’.  

There is nothing in common between Zionism, Zionists, and their sympathizers with Palestine and Palestinians. The Zionist experience has been successful mainly in the eyes of its executioners. Its cost remains untenable. Decency and basic democratic values require the abolishing of Israel and placing Zionism where it belongs: deep in the dustbin of history.   

 David Ben Gurion digging. Source: Israel Hayom, 10 December 2023.

Amos Oz (1939 – 2018) and David Grossman (1954). Source: Ynet, 15 March 2017.

Itamar Ben–Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich. Source: Jewish News Syndicate, 10 June 2025.

[1] Ben Gurion’s positions are available from the Ben Yehuda Project, an online Hebrew endeavor dedicated also to Israel’s founding father.

[2] See Avishay Margalit, “And Now for the Lavon Affair I Wrote about you that you are Levi Eshkol, you sold your soul”, Haaretz, 26 September 2019 (Hebrew).

[3] Clyde Haberman, “Dennis Ross’s Exit Interview”, New York Times, 25 March 2001; Israel Dismisses Arafat Visit to Holland Holocaust Museum, Jewish Telegraph Agency, 2 April 1998. Arafat’s visit may have been an attempt to tease Israel politically, given its accusatorial terrorism of the 1990s. Arafat’s initial proposal to visit the National Holocaust Museum in the United States was met with the resignation of its director. See also Stephen Walt, What Dennis Ross Gets Wrong About the ‘Israel Lobby’”, The Forward, 6 October 2017.