Former US Navy analyst, Jonathan Pollard – who spent 30 years in a US prison for selling top-secret US intelligence to the Israeli government – arrived in Israel in December of 2020 and was greeted on the tarmac, in person by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Pollard was born and raised in Galveston Texas, yet he kissed the ground upon arrival to what he calls his ‘real home.’
“We are ecstatic to be home at last after 35 years,” Pollard, 66, said after landing at Ben Gurion Airport, where he and his wife, Esther, were welcomed with open arms by the Israeli government.
In June of 2021, Netanyahu was unseated as prime minister. Foreign Minister Yair Lapid and Prime Minister Naftali Bennett succeeded in cobbling together a government in the aftermath of Israel’s fourth consecutive election in two years.
Now, after a year in opposition, former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has re-taken control of the state. Netanyahu’s decisive election victory comes with significant support across the far-right spectrum, including both Religious Traditionalists and Secular Nationalists.
Netanyahu’s party, Likud, fits largely within the latter grouping. While most Likud supporters are, at least, nominally religiously Jewish, they are primarily motivated by fanatical ethnonationalism and tend to hold Hebrew Law at a distance. Nevertheless, they are closely aligned with Jewish traditionalists who make up a large swath of the Israeli electorate. After this month’s election, The Religious Zionist Party is now the Knesset’s third-largest political force.
The party’s leader, Bezalel Smotrich, is a vehement supporter of Jewish expansionism in the region and strongly opposes social liberalism. For instance, Smotrich once boasted of being a “proud homophobe” and lead a so-called “beast parade” with goats and donkeys as a counter-demonstration mocking Jerusalem’s Pride March.
In 2021, Smotrich told an Israeli Arab lawmaker – “You’re here by mistake, it’s a mistake that Ben-Gurion didn’t finish the job and didn’t throw you out in 1948.” Unsurprisingly, Smotrich is also a vehement opponent of “mixed marriages” between Jews and Arabs and notes that “Whoever wants to let Jews live a Jewish life without non-Jews is not a racist.” If this didn’t shock the Western sensibility enough, Smotrich also states that he “believe[s] in God’s words” regarding Jewish ownership of the holy land and thus “wouldn’t sell a house to Arabs.”
Of course, Religious and Secular Zionists differ on important issues akin to those that divided the European Far-Right during the Twentieth Century. Yet, both stand against peace-seeking moderates and are united by the conviction that the Land of Israel belongs solely to the Jewish people. These forces most recently descend from the thought of Ze’ev Jabotinksy who is regarded as the founder of Revisionist Zionism.
Born in 1880’s Odessa, Jabotinsky joined the Zionist movement as a young man and took the name “Ze’ev” which means “Wolf” in Hebrew. He was elected to the 6th Zionist Congress in 1903 and later fought for the British Army in Palestine to free it from Turkish rule during World War One. After the conflict, Jabotinsky founded Hatzohar – an organization centered around the ideology of Revisionist Zionism.
Importantly, the revisionists broke with mainline Zionists by focusing on so-called territorial maximalism (i.e Jewish Lebensraum). Indeed, they saw the prevailing Zionist tradition, represented by figures such as David Ben-Gurion and Chaim Weizmann, as too moderate, and boldly claimed the entire Eretz Yisrael (Land of Israel) for the Jewish people.
After its foundation, Jabotinsky’s movement quickly gained steam. In 1937, he founded the Irgun – a Zionist paramilitary organization dedicated to achieving an independent Jewish state. The group would later commit numerous terrorist attacks against Arab and Western targets including the infamous King David Hotel Bombing which killed nearly 100 British officials.
With a decidedly militant record, Jabotinsky’s revisionism would go on to exert considerable influence on the Israeli Right. Most of all, Jabotinsky’s thought was celebrated by the powerful Likud party and its founder, and first Prime Minister, Menachem Begin (1977 – 1983). Begin’s election represents the first great shift to the right in Israeli politics as the country had previously been dominated exclusively by the Labor Party. Incredibly, Labor has ruled for only eight years since Begin’s victory in 1977 and the party has not led the country at all since 2001. Today, Israeli politics is largely a battle between hard-right and moderate parties (who would all be viewed as racist and xenophobic if their views were applied to the American context).
Importantly, Begin and his right-wing successors have taken Revisionist Zionism even further than Jabotinksy originally intended. Many on the Israeli right today advocate not only for the annexation of the West Bank but also for the expulsion of Palestinians into neighboring Arab countries or, alternatively, a system of ethnic apartheid. Even when savvy politicians like Netanyahu avoid explicitly stating such controversial positions, they hold them in private and pursue policies with these ends in mind.
In recent decades, Israel has embarked on a vigorous settlement campaign across the West Bank. Now, over 465,000 Israeli settlers live in the territory and this number continues to increase with each passing year. Skillfully, Israel has sent many of these settlers to strategic locations deep within the West Bank, making a contiguous Palestinian state essentially impossible. Moreover, the Israelis maintain a vast wall that runs along the Jewish settler frontier in Western Palestine, while more remote settlements operate as militarized fiefdoms.
All in all, modern Israel is a nationalist’s dream – a militantly ethnocentric state adept at the art of settler-colonialism. One might ask, then, whether Jewish rightists are the natural allies of Western nationalists. Of course, many Western conservatives answer affirmatively and argue that they ought to only oppose Jewish leftists (who have certainly been the world’s most fanatical purveyors of anti-colonialism, liberalism, and socialism since the days of the Pharaohs).
Needless to say, this position is humorously naive. The issues inherent in a hypothetical alliance between Zionists and Western nationalists are well-symbolized by the recent photo of Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson enjoying a friendly gathering with Benjamin Netanyahu. After all, Shapiro and Peterson vehemently oppose ethnonationalism in the West. For instance, in 2019, Shapiro called for Congressman Steve King to be censured and primaried after he questioned the stigma surrounding White Nationalism in America.
Meanwhile, Peterson has repeatedly denounced White identitarian movements as part of his radical individualist crusade against so-called collectivism and tribalism. Moreover, Peterson and Shapiro do not simply oppose ethnonationalism in the West, but they go even further by arguing that it is grievously immoral. As a result, one might wonder how exactly they find themselves in bed with Netanyahu – a radical nationalist.
Here, we see exactly why there cannot be any alliance between Zionists and the Western right. Although Jewish Nationalists generally align ideologically with the far-right in Europe and America, they have no intention of ever allowing Westerners to have their own versions of Israel. Instead, these figures simultaneously support hard-right ethnonationalism in Israel and rootless classical liberalism (or worse) in the West. Accordingly, they shrewdly co-opt authentic right-wing movements by planting their own slavish puppets like Jordan Peterson in charge to divert nationalist energy to more kosher ground.
Incredibly, Ben Shapiro himself argues in favor of ethnic cleansing in Palestine and openly endorses Israeli politicians who favor Jewish expansionism while at the same time declaring that he supports America becoming a majority non-white country. While the latter position would make sense for an anti-Zionist Jewish leftist, it is hardly a consistent position to hold as a right-wing Nationalist. Rather than form an alliance based upon a shared opposition to liberal multiracial projects, Zionist Jews choose to stab us in the back and milk our country like a cow. In fact, Zionists openly align with the same left-wing Jewish groups that they fight in Israel in order to wage war on their common enemy – the Western Right.
Thus, Western Man finds himself embroiled in an unavoidable struggle with Israel. There is simply no way out of this conflict as peace is only possible when both sides seek a cession of hostilities. The Jewish people, however, have no desire for friendly relations with Europeans and Americans. Instead, they are fanatically pursuing the same goal which they have sought after for thousands of years – the final destruction of Western Civilization. It is today as it has always been – Rome against Judea and Judea against Rome.
