Extermination and Expansion : Is Israel’s Genocidal War On Gaza the Beginning of the End Zionism?

“What’s your take on what’s happening in Gaza?” a dear friend asked me recently.

I shared my profound sadness and anger about the ongoing genocide, especially Israel’s sadistic acts of starving children and destroying buildings, even tents housing displaced Palestinians. We are all complicit, I told her, by not doing enough to stop the flow of American weapons to Israel, even after Israel had made its intentions clear. 

She nodded in agreement. “But what about Hamas? They took all of the aid money over the years for themselves and built tunnels. Now, they are stealing all the food when ordinary Gazans are starving.”  

My friend was unwittingly articulating the stereotypical Israeli come-back: Falsely suggesting that those who are critical of Israel’s war against Palestinians are being “one-sided.” Such is the power of the Zionist lobby that too many Americans still seem to think that what Israel is doing to Gaza is justifiable retribution for the brutal Hamas terror attacks of October 7, 2023. 

But the tide is finally turning. We are seeing thousands of people around the world, Jews and non-Jews, protesting Israel’s war on Gaza, with Palestinian flags and keffiyeh as symbols of the growing resistance. Clearly, Netanyahu has managed to put Zionists on the defensive.

I’m writing this essay in the hope that it can help fill some of the information gap in mainstream media about the real stories behind the founding of Israel and the dispossession of Palestinians in 1948 and since, which are vital to understanding the Palestinian mind and achieving long term peace with justice for Israel and Palestine.   

Extermination and Expansion

Unfortunately, saner voices within Israel are being drowned out by those who support Netanyahu’s genocidal policy in Gaza: A recent poll found that a whopping 82% of Israelis support forcibly driving out all Palestinians from Gaza and Israel, and more than half of Israelis support killing all the Palestinians in Gaza! 

It’s no wonder that Zionists are unabashedly declaring that Extermination [of Palestinians] and Expansion [of borders] are their key objectives:

Moshe Feiglin, Israeli politician: “Every child, every baby in Gaza is an enemy. The enemy is not Hamas… We need to conquer Gaza and colonize it and not leave a single Gazan child there. There is no other victory.”

Zvi Sukkot, a far-right politician, who recently led a mob of extremists to Jerusalem’s Haram al-Sharif (Temple Mount), boasts that they were able “to storm Al-Aqsa Mosque complex without any consequences.” The mob later indulged in violence and harassment of Palestinians with cries of “death to Arabs” and “may your village burn.”

Bezalel Smotrich, Israeli Finance Minister talks about the expansion of Israel’s borders, and “complete redemption and the construction of the Temple…”

These are not the voices from the fringe, as they used to be. Prime Minister Netanyahu himself alluded last year to the Biblical story of the Amalek (“Now go forth and smite Amalek and destroy all they have and spare them not”) in an effort to link calls for total annihilation of Palestinians in Gaza to the Torah. It’s ominous that at the time of his Amalek speech, Israel had already killed 8,000 Palestinians, but since then it has killed 52,000 more Palestinians.

It’s important to understand that when far right Zionists talk about building the Third Temple, they are also talking about taking over the entire Noble Sanctuary and destroying the Al Aqsa mosque, a goal not shared by a majority of Jews.

I think it is utterly shameful that despite a mountain of evidence on Israel’s crimes against humanity, Western nations as well as Arab countries are unable or unwilling to do what it takes to stop Netanyahu, before his rule threatens world peace. 

It is worth noting that India was in a very similar situation in 1992 when mobs of Hindu extremists from Prime Minister Modi’s party and its allies destroyed the 400-year old Babri Masjid, unleashing a spate of violence against Muslims, which has killed thousands of people since, mostly Muslims. The violence eventually brought Modi’s Hindu supremacist party to power and secular India began to unravel.

Since then, Hindu supremacists in the U.S. have been closely aligning themselves with the Zionists, and in turn, both have tried to make inroads into the MAGA Right. In my view, if this “axis of supremacy” is allowed to succeed, it poses a mortal danger to American, Israeli, and Indian democracies. This is the reason why Hindus for Human Rights, the organization that I cofounded, non-violently opposes all three supremacist movements.

Saner Voices

Thankfully, more and more Jewish leaders, Holocaust survivors, journalists, students, and human rights defenders in and out of Israel are condemning the Netanyahu government’s actions in Gaza. And, some Jewish leaders are even boldly predicting that this may be the beginning of the end of Zionism:

Ehud Olmert, Former Prime Minister of Israel: “What we are doing in Gaza is a war of annihilation, indiscriminate, unrestrained, brutal and criminal killing of civilians…Yes we are committing war crimes.” 

Yair Golan, Democrats Party: “Israel is on the way to becoming a pariah state, like South Africa was, if we don’t return to acting like a sane country….a sane country does not fight against civilians, does not kill babies as a hobby, and does not give itself the aim of expelling populations.”

Gideon Levy, Israeli historian and academic: “I don’t recall one occupation in which the occupier presented itself as the victim, the only victim.” He refers to the Zionist tactic of projecting their guilt upon their victims by citing Golda Meir’s notorious statement, “We will never forgive the Arabs for forcing us to kill their children.” 

Katie Halper, an American Jewish political commentator: “Israel was never truly about protecting Jewish people, and explains how it exploited the Holocaust to justify the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, while showing deep contempt for Holocaust survivors and Mizrahi Jews.” In her view, “Zionism is inherently antisemitic.” 

Eran Efrati, an Israeli Army Veteran dissenter who uses the moniker “I’m the terrorist”: “I [could] do whatever I [wanted] with the Palestinian, who’s under my military rule, but I [couldn’t] touch the settler even if he [was] attacking a Palestinian.” 

“Diaspora Jewry and friends of Israel abroad must realize that present Israeli policy is doomed to reproduce over and over again the cycle of violence…whether the hand that perpetrates it detonates a bomb or fires a pistol.”

Ilan Pappe, Israeli Historian: “I’m willing to say with some caution that this is the last phase of Zionism.” 

With such a broad spectrum of opposition to Israeli actions, and hundreds of thousands of people around the world protesting, it’s only a matter of time before Israelis get to see the graphic images from Gaza that the rest of the world is seeing, especially the unprecedented horrors that children are being subjected to. 

The American Divide

Americans have been on the streets for weeks and months, demanding an end to U.S. arms supply to Israel, which has contributed to the murder of over 60,000 Gazans, including 18,000 children, and has caused more child amputees per capita than anywhere else in the world.

University students are leading the movement, both on campuses and on the streets, risking retribution from the Trump administration as well as disciplinary action by university authorities.

They are on the streets because our lawmakers, beholden to the Zionist lobby, are so structurally tied to unconditional support for Israel that even a genocide has not altered their stance.

Also, notably absent are voices from the Biden administration, which virtually handed over our Israel policy to Netanyahu, at a time when the whole world knew that civilians were indeed Israel’s primary targets in their pursuit of Hamas. Our past Presidents, who share the responsibility for where we are today by allowing Israel to play by different rules than any other ally, haven’t said a word about Gaza.

At a broader level, the all-powerful Zionist lobby has made sure over the years to shut down any and all human interest stories about Palestinians by smearing them as anti-Israel or antisemitic. In effect, Americans have been unconditionally supporting Israel for years without making any effort to listen to stories of dispossessed Palestinians. 

In my three decades of activism on Israeli-Palestine peace efforts, I have seen Zionists shutting down academic courses on Palestinian history; employing subterfuge to stop Jewish-Palestinian dialogue on US campuses; stopping pro-Palestinian documentaries from airing; and intimidating even Holocaust survivors who stand up for the rights of Palestinians.

But today, I honestly believe that Israel’s total destruction of Gaza and talk of exterminating all the Palestinians have forever changed the perception of Zionism, even among its believers. The world can now stop walking on eggshells, unafraid of being labelled antisemitic, when they speak up for the legitimate rights of both Israelis and Palestinians. But they must first boldly call out Israel’s long record of brutality against the Palestinians and shout from the rooftops that opposition to Zionism and Israeli policies are not antisemitic.

Myths and Realities of Israel

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict didn’t begin on October 7^th, 2023. It started many years before the U.N. approval of the partition of Palestine in 1947 and Israel’s unilateral declaration of independence in 1948. 

Ben Gurion, the future Prime Minister of Israel, in a 1938 speech, had openly acknowledged the injustice of dispossessing the Palestinians, after the approval of the U.N. Partition Plan in 1947: “Every school child knows that there is no such thing in history as a final arrangement — not with regard to the regime, not with regard to borders, and not with regard to international agreements…After the formation of a large army in the wake of the establishment of the state, we will abolish partition and expand to the whole of Palestine.”

In other words, even as Israel was ostensibly ‘accepting’ the U.N. plan, it was already preparing to ignore it completely and occupy more land and expel more Arabs. Those who still cling on to the Zionist narrative that Israel accepted the partition and the Arabs rejected it are simply repeating Zionist propaganda.

In his ground-breaking 1987 book (“The Birth of Israel, Myths and Realities”), Israeli scholar and peace activist, Simha Flapan, meticulously takes apart persistent myths about the creation of Israel: “The myths of Israel forged during the formation of the state have hardened into this impenetrable, and dangerous, ideological shield.” 

Flapan based his book on freshly declassified documents, which showed that several Israeli leaders were in private ‘busting’ the myths they themselves had helped create. 

(“In Their Own Words: Israeli Leaders on the Expulsion of Palestinians During Israel’s Establishment”) 

For example: 

Chaim Weizmann, Israel’s first President: “[Palestinians were akin] to the rocks of Judea, as obstacles that had to be cleared on a difficult path.”

Moshe Sharett, Israel’s second Prime Minister: “We have forgotten that we have not come to an empty land to inherit it, but we have come to conquer a country from people inhabiting it.” 

Yosef Weitz, Jewish National Fund: “there is no room in the country for both peoples… Not one village must be left, not one tribe.”

Ariel Sharon, once Prime Minister of Israel: “there is no Zionism, colonialization, or Jewish State without the eviction of the Arabs and the expropriation of their lands.” 

Moshe Dayan, Minister of Defense: “What cause have we to complain about [their] fierce hatred to us. For eight years now, they sit in their refugee camps in Gaza, and before their eyes we turn into our homestead the land and villages in which they and their forefathers have lived….”

Unfortunately, Flapan’s revelations were unable to dislodge the myths about the creation of Israel. Perhaps, with Zionists on the backfoot these days, there may be new possibilities for mainstreaming Flapan’s conclusions, which are still relevant nearly forty years later.

Is This the End of Zionism? 

In his seminal 1985 book “The Tragedy of Zionism,” Prof. Bernard Avishai, an early Zionist himself, sums up the “struggle between two diametrically opposed visions of Israel—an enlightened, democratic state or a fundamentalist, militarist one—will have a significant effect on the future of the Palestinian people as well as on peace in the region.” How prescient! We now know which version of Israel is driving the genocide in Gaza.

Avishai also addresses Jews outside Israel: “Diaspora Jewry and friends of Israel abroad must realize that present Israeli policy is doomed to reproduce over and over again the cycle of violence…whether the hand that perpetrates it detonates a bomb or fires a pistol. The collective revenge of an army for the murder of one of its citizens is no more righteous or admirable than the individual revenge of a desperate youth for the murder of one of his people. It is only propaganda and distorted vision that labels one ‘terrorism’ and the other ‘national defense.’ 

Avishai concludes by suggesting that “It may finally be time to retire everybody’s Zionism, time for democracy, for what some Zionists used to call ‘normalcy’.”

MIT denied him tenure for his book, but forty years later, his call has become more urgent than ever. 

The genocide in Gaza has made sure that the era of weaponizing Jewish victimhood to shield the Israeli state violence is over. But does that presage the beginning of the end of Zionism? I sincerely hope so. 

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Raju Rajagopal is co-founder of Hindus for Human Rights, whose mission is to oppose all forms of supremacy — Hindutva, caste, racism and Zionism – and to speak up for civil and human rights of minorities.