Haim Bresheeth: ‘Israel has turned the people of the book into the people of the tank’

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When we log on to Zoom for the interview, Prof. Haim Bresheeth has just returned from a pro-Palestinian student rally, one of many he has been invited to in recent months, in the UK and elsewhere. Ever since the Israeli army began its genocidal operation on Gaza, Prof. Bresheeth has been going out of his way to explain and contextualize what is happening as part of a long colonial project; however, his voice as an anti-Zionist Israeli Jew is not finding any interest among the mass media. “The BBC interviewed me four times during the demonstrations in London. None of them were aired. They don't want to hear what Jews like me have to say.”

There are plenty of reasons why Prof. Bresheeth’s perspective deserves to be taken seriously. A retired professor of media and film, filmmaker, photographer, historian and author of a number of books about Israel and Palestine, he has spent the past 50 years building bridges between cultures, working at British and Israeli universities, most recently at the School of Oriental and Asian Studies (SOAS) in London.

He was born in Rome in 1946, in a refugee camp where his parents found shelter, Polish Jews who had survived Auschwitz. “But as stateless people they could not get a visa, either to stay or to go to other countries. The only solutions offered to us were to return to Poland, where anti-Jewish sentiments had not diminished, or go to Israel. Ever since the Evian conference, Zionists like Ben Gurion had opposed visa policies for Jewish refugees. We had no choice.”

Prof. Bresheeth and his parents arrived in Israel shortly after the founding of the state. “Like many of the newcomers, my parents were not Zionists. My father was a pacifist and was imprisoned as soon as we got off the ship for refusing to join the army. Later he was drafted as a doctor.” He recounts how the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) became a form of education for his father, as for thousands of others. The IDF was the topic of Prof. Bresheet’s last book, An Army Like No Other (Ed. Verso, 2020), with a telling subtitle: “How the Israel Defense Forces made a nation.”

The central point of your book is that the IDF is not merely an army, but the very essence of the Zionist project. What do you mean by that?

I think one needs to understand this institution and its role in Israel’s social structure to understand what is happening in Gaza, and what has been happening since 1948. Israel was born with the Nakba, the expulsion of 800,000 Palestinians from their homes, their camps, towns, villages. Without understanding what the IDF is, one would not be able to grasp what happened afterwards. The IDF is Israel, pure and simple.

Primo Levi, a moderate Jew, called Israel a “military state.” What are its defining traits?

The identity of this people and the identity of the state are a product of the IDF. In most other states, it’s the other way around: it is the state that creates an army and the army serves the state. In the case of Israel, it was the army that created the state and defined its Zionist identity. Many of those who went to Palestine in 1948 did not speak Hebrew and were not Zionists either. In those early years, Ben Gurion, Israel's first political leader, used to say: “we have a state, we have an army, but we don’t have a people.” Gurion used the army to turn a population with many different identities into a nation. The army taught them Hebrew, created their identity, and it also taught it to their children, in the villages of the newcomers, at least until the mid-1960s.

It was a social engineering project.

That's right: a great social engineering project that was enacted at the cost of the identities and cultures that people brought with them. For example, like my parents, ninety percent of the Jews who arrived from Europe spoke Yiddish, but that wasn’t right for the new state. In the 1950s, the production of plays in Yiddish was not allowed, and newspaper and book publications in Yiddish were subject to a special tax, a punitive tax. Many Israelis today are still ignorant about this.

What were the consequences of the role of the army for Israel's history?

Israel has succeeded in turning the people of the book into the people of the tank, the rifle, the missile. In my book, I try to analyze the role played by the IDF, focusing on the social, political, cultural and racial particularities of the Israeli colonial project – because that’s what it is, a colonial project taking shape at a time when colonialism was on the wane everywhere else. Through the use of biblical myths, it succeeded in creating an ultra-militaristic and oppressive society, and the consequences are what we’re seeing today.

Ilan Pappe thinks the war on Gaza will lead to the downfall of the Zionist project, Do you agree?

The Zionist project is on its last legs, but it will not run out of steam by tomorrow, or next year. On the contrary, historians and activists are now seeing that Zionism has outdone itself: Israel is the only country that is being investigated by the International Court of Justice, the International Criminal Court, the UN and many other organizations all at once. This has never happened before with any other country. It is an outcome that highlights the severity of the crimes committed, to the point that we are talking about Jews being involved in a case of genocide. For someone like me, that is the worst thing imaginable: Jews involved in genocide! There is nothing Jewish about genocide, there is nothing Jewish about apartheid, and nothing Jewish about colonialism. And there is nothing Jewish about the Jewish state. Judaism has seen 2000 years of history, experiences, traditions, living conditions in the Diaspora. The Jewish communities in Europe and Arab countries were not militarized. This is a deviation from Jewish history!

You are insisting on the history, but the public discourse around the current events is limited to October 7.

In the West, the media and public discourse have focused on October 7, but there is a trajectory, a history behind it, and this has implications for young people as well. When I meet with students, I ask them: when did you decide that Palestine was a cause worth committing to? Some say December 2023, others March 2024, after some Westerners were killed. They are stunned to hear an Israeli Jew talk about the history of these issues. No one told them, for example, about Ben Gurion's infamous hand gesture. In a cabinet meeting, they asked Gurion, “What do we do about the Arabs?” and he made a hand gesture indicating “out with them.” This is how things have gone; what we’re witnessing did not start with October 7.

What would be a way out?

A ceasefire is only the first step – necessary, but only the first step. A political solution is needed. This situation has been going on for 76 years. But Zionism will not allow a political solution, because its goal is to empty Palestine of its indigenous Arab inhabitants. That has been its goal all along. But it has failed. By committing genocide, it has turned itself into a pariah state.

At the same time, there is no shortage of critical views within Israel.

The country is very divided, between old and new elites. We are on the brink of a civil war. Many are saying these things and writing about them openly, but that doesn’t make it out of Israel and it’s an uncomfortable topic even among Israel's critics. It’s not a purely political division, although, broadly speaking, one can describe two camps: the Ashkenazi “left” on one hand and the religious right on the other. These two realities cannot coexist in the same country: they have different values and visions, and the only thing that unites them is hatred for the Palestinians. They are armed factions, and I fear that as a result of this internal conflict, the Palestinian territories will once again be the ones to pay the price. With the focus being on what is happening in Gaza, terrible crimes are being committed in the West Bank on a daily basis. If the international community doesn't curb Israel's crimes, we will have a Nakba 3 after this Nakba 2. Nakba 2 has already claimed three times the number of victims of the first Nakba.

So you are not optimistic that internal pressure could lead to an end to the war?

The genocide Israel is carrying out is perfectly democratic, because almost all the Jews in Israel support it. A Tel Aviv University poll found that only 3.2% of Israeli Jews don’t support the genocide. Even the academics are supporting it, and writing about it. To me, a society that commits genocide is not sustainable, it has no future. In Israel, they’re actually talking about continuing the war for decades; and if the rest of the world allows it, that is exactly what they’ll do.

What do you think about the Western media's double standards in reporting on the war in Ukraine and the war in Gaza?

I started out as a media historian, but nowadays I have a hard time listening to the Western media, to all their lies. It's awful, but it's not that hard to explain. There is a NATO war going on in Ukraine. Although Ukraine is not formally part of it, NATO is what keeps this war going. Within a week of the Russian invasion, there was a blockade agreed by the entire West. Once you call Russia a terrorist state, everything you can do against it becomes justifiable. None of this happened in the case of Israel: no sanctions, no boycott, full Western support for the genocide! A frightening example of double standards by the Western media.

What about Gaza?

Israel is not a NATO member, but it is an important part of the Western camp; it is seen as a Western outpost in the Middle East. What we are seeing is a conflict between the West and the rest of the world. Italy, Germany and the UK are all among Israel's major arms suppliers; of course, together with the US. The West is supporting Israel with weapons, money, diplomacy and lies – most of all with lies. All the mainstream media are lying, because they’re defending Israel, which is not hard to understand. Gaza is not only under attack by Israel – it is an attack by the West against the most disadvantaged people on the planet, to teach them a lesson: “Don't even dream of resisting us!” Like other operations by the West, this is brutal and unjust, and it is doomed to failure.

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Originally published at https://ilmanifesto.it/israele-ha-trasformato-il-popolo-del-libro-in-quello-del-carro-armato on 2024-06-28