Yeshayahu Leibowitz's Prophecy for Israel

The Ghosts of Israel's Future, Part I

In 1968, the Israeli Jewish philosopher Yeshayahu Leibowitz (1903-1994) wrote an essay entitled "the territories" in which he described the future of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem:

The Arabs would be the working people and the Jews the administrators, inspectors, officials, and police—mainly secret police. A state ruling a hostile population of 1.5 to 2 million foreigners would necessarily become a secret-police state, with all that this implies for education, free speech and democratic institutions. The corruption characteristic of every colonial regime would also prevail in the State of Israel.

The haunting quality of that text stopped me from writing on this topic for a long time. In fact, I first discussed Leibowitz's piece exactly a decade ago, in 2014, as the Apartheid state was bombing Gaza then. In retrospect, I think many of us knew that a genocide was going to happen at some point. It was not a difficult conclusion to reach as the Israelis at the time were already using genocidal language against Palestinians. Ayelet Shaked, then justice minister of the apartheid state, shared a text by Netanyahu's former chief of staff Uri Elitzur in which he argued that the mothers of martyrs "should follow their sons, nothing would be more just." He then added that their physical homes should also be raised as that is where "they raised the snakes." If the Israelis don't bomb the homes of Palestinian mothers after murdering them for the crime of raising Palestinians, Elitzur wrote, "more little snakes will be raised there."

This sort of language was very common then, and it is even more common now. Any genocide requires the victims to be dehumanized. I think this is fairly understood by now, including by a general public. The Tutsis called the Hutus they were massacring "cockroaches", Serbs called Bosnians "beasts" or "filth" and, of course, the Nazis called Jews "rats" and "vermins." In order to be unbothered with children being massacred en masse, Israelis had to first sever the bonds of humanity they share with Palestinians. As a result, it has become the norm in Israeli politics to call for genocide. The very notion that the children being bombed deserve life is treated as blasphemous. As Meron Rapoport recently wrote for 972mag, "hundreds of thousands of Israeli soldiers have fought in Gaza over the past 10 months, and yet the moral debate is almost non-existent."

Shortly after October 7, Yoav Gallant, the Apartheid state's defense minister, gave a speech. As he announced a total siege of Gaza, blocking electricity, food, water, fuel and medicine from entering the already-blockaded strip, he described his enemies as "human animals." Soon after, Netanyahu declared that Israelis must remember what "Amalek has done," a reference to the Book of Samuel in which God orders King Saul to kill every person in Amalek, a rival kingdom to ancient Israel. In that aforementioned 1968 essay, Leibowitz warned against "the transformation of the Jewish religion into a camouflage for Israeli nationalism." Later, in the 1990s, Leibowitz described the elements of Israeli society that endorsed collective punishment as 'Judeo-Nazis.'

Leibowitz, clearly, was right about the occupation. In fact, I'd argue that he didn't go far enough. He was still invested in being a figure from 'within' the society he criticizes. I am not saying this is in itself wrong, but rather that it's a positionality that comes with its own limitations. He was speaking as an Israeli Jew to an Israeli Jewish audience already predetermined by a specific nationalist myth-making. Leibowitz based his predictions on the post-1967 status quo which saw Israel occupy what's now called the Occupied Palestinian Territories (Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem). In fact, one of Leibowitz's predictions was that the IDF, which he described as a "people's army" until 1967, risked "being transformed into an army of occupation, degenerate, and its commanders." The issue is that the people's army was the one that committed the Nakba, the forced mass exodus of hundreds of thousands of indigenous Palestinians, my grandfather included, in 1948. This is why it's useful to compliment a reading of Leibowitz 's 1968 essay with a reading of Edward Said's 1979 essay "Zionism from the Standpoint of its Victims." Incidentally, my co-conspirator from the From The Periphery media collective, Ayman Makarem, recently released a video entitled just that. You can continue reading without watching it, but I think it is useful to do so, especially for part 2.

Doing so allows us to understand that an army may well be a "people's army" while still committing crimes against humanity. The way the army is organized, in other words, is not as important as what it actually does. Still, Leibowitz was not wrong to predict that turning that army into one of military occupation would inevitably corrupt the society from where those soldiers come, and to where they return. Fast forward decades later to 2024 and Israeli soldiers have raped, gang-raped, tortured, mutilated and executed Palestinian prisoners in torture camps throughout the Apartheid state - around 9,500 Palestinians arrested since October 2023, including hundreds of children. "Welcome to hell," one Israeli soldier told 45 year old Fouad Hassan from Nablus who was in one of the multiple torture camps operated by the Israeli state today.

Read: Welcome to Hell: The Israeli Prison System as a Network of Torture Camps by B'TSelem. 

As for Gaza itself, I cannot do justice to the scale of the horrors inflicted by the Israeli state on the population of children. I can share the hundreds and thousands of videos of parents mourning their children and children mourning their parents, of children being amputated without anesthesia, or of the premature babies transferred from one NICU to another with fewer and fewer resources each time (effectively guaranteeing their deaths). I can share the audio recording of Hind Rajab's final moments as the Israeli army murdered her and then murdered the two paramedics who went to try and save her, or the news of the 10 months old baby who contracted polio because Israel bombs water supplies throughout Gaza (which reduced the amount of water available in Gaza by 94% to 4.74 litres a day per person), or the footage of the father who went to register his newborn twins only to find out that his apartment was targeted by the Israelis who murdered them alongside their mother, his wife. There are so many stories like these that writing even a fraction of them down would take weeks, if not months. 

Hauntings have a way of coming back when we least suspect them. As mentioned, Netanyahu evoked the story of Amalek. This is how he wants his supporters to view the dehumanized population currently being murdered on an industrial scale, but there is a story from the Torah and especially the Book of Exodus that is much more well-known: that of Moses leading the Israelites to escape from Pharaoh's tyranny. The irony, of course, is that in this story the state of Israel is Pharaoh but, unlike in the book of Exodus, there is no God to split the sea in half and lead the Palestinians to freedom. To add insult to the irony, the modern Pharaoh, Israel, is backed by an even greater Pharaoh, the USA, and it is the Palestinians who are forced to go through exodus after exodus with no end in sight. There is no promised land waiting for them as they are already from that land. It is the state that named itself after the Israelites that converted the promised land, the holy land, into an open-air prison first and now into a concentration camp. 

I'll end part 1 with the below clip from 1992 featuring Leibowitz. As you can see a man (who I've since learned is Yair Lapid's father) is egging him on about Leibowitz's use of the term 'Judeo-Nazis' to describe elements of the Israeli establishment (see here). Lapid thinks he is challenging Leibowitz by asking, sarcastically, whether Israel has concentration camps. Leibowitz answers yes. What happens next is very revealing: Lapid doesn't challenge him and ask him "where?" because Leibowitz would have the answer. Instead, he escalates and asks Leibowitz whether Israel burns these Arabs in gas chambers. Lapid sought to corner Leibowitz by diverting the conversation to something he thought would be more difficult to respond to. After all, Leibowitz had made it very clear that the term 'Judeo-Nazis' applies to a mentality present in the Israeli establishment which views Palestinians as subhumans - in Nazi terms, as untermenschen. Anyone who has paid attention these past 10 months would recognise that this mentality is even more widespread now than it was then. Lapid, unable to challenge the existence of concentration camps, asks Leibowitz about gas chambers. He does this a few times until Leibowitz snaps and tells him "that is your prophecy. That is your future prophecy!" 

In other words, Leibowitz identified in Lapid a desire to implement the policy that he was using to divert attention away from the concentration camp accusation. Lapid was bringing up the gas chambers to try and argue against Leibowitz's use of the term 'Judeo-Nazis', but what Lapid did not realize is that this is not a good argument. After all, the Nazis were Nazis before building the concentration camps, let alone the gas chambers. So why would Lapid even bring that up? No one else did. He did not realize that he started his response by claiming that Israel had no concentration camps. After Leibowitz's response, Lapid was disoriented. Instead of using that opportunity to reflect on what just occurred, he doubled down and asks an even more outlandish question. There was no reason to ask that specific question. No one was saying that Israel was using gas chambers against Palestinians. This was not Leibowitz's argument. Lapid kept on egging him on, however, which led Leibowitz to conclude that Lapid was in fact prophesizing Israel's future as he saw it.

More on that in part 2.