“Israel is on the way to becoming a full-blooded fascist country,” said Hadash MK Ofer Cassif last weekend, Saturday, November 23, during a conference held at the Marx Memorial Library in London.
Suspended Hadash MK Ofer Cassif speaks at the Marx Memorial Library on last Saturday, with trustee Professor Mary Davis (Photo: Marx Memorial Library)
Currently touring Europe to raise awareness of Israel’s worsening violence against Palestinians — in the West Bank as well as in Gaza — and deepening repression of dissenting voices at home, his reports to Saturday’s Communist Party executive committee and public meetings at the Marx Memorial Library that night made grim listening. “Israel was never a democracy — it was an ethnocracy because it defined itself as belonging only to the Jewish people, not only those who live in Israel by the way, but even those who live outside it. But now, it is already a fascist regime, and it is getting worse. The situation now in Israel is of a terrible, violent political persecution of anyone who raises an alternative voice.”
“The main victims among the citizenry are the Palestinian citizens of Israel, who make up about 20 per cent of the population; but also, democratic and radical Jews,” Cassif said. Over 100 separate bills are now proceeding through the Knesset restricting democratic rights; several are aimed at disenfranchising Arab-Palestinian citizens. Hadash, the coalition including the Communist Party that Cassif represents in the Knesset, is among those which will be barred from standing if the laws pass. According to Cassif, “These laws may seem tame compared to the genocide in Gaza, but they are all part of the same project: silencing protest and suppressing the peace movement in Israel facilitates its continued massacre of Palestinians.” The war in Gaza “has nothing to do with the security of Israel” he charges. “Definitely nothing to do with the release of the Israeli hostages.”
“The Israeli government, members of its coalition, of the opposition, not to mention people among the public, say ‘there are no innocents in Gaza,'” he says. “That reminds me of another era in another place, in which the attitude was the same with regard to my people, the Jewish people.” Given the evidence of wiped-out villages, the deliberate targeting of hospitals, the systematic starvation of people in the north, Cassif says he had no choice but to call it out as genocide. “How can you refer to it as anything else? You must be such a villain to try to justify this.”
And “under the smokescreen of the genocide, there is ethnic cleansing in the West Bank.” Over 20 small communities have been destroyed by settler violence in the last year, their residents forced to flee. Violent settlers routinely invade Palestinian homes. Some smash them up or burn them. Others just show up, take food from the fridge, and sit around smoking and drinking as a calculated humiliation of the occupants. Palestinians who try to stop them risk attack, not just by the settlers but by the occupying army. And lethal attacks are common enough.
The armed settlers, whose violence is routine, become “even more vicious” at the olive harvest, when they torch olive groves, attack and even shoot dead Palestinians harvesting them. One of the solidarity actions undertaken by Israel’s Communist Youth League is to send volunteers to help Palestinians with the harvest, and Cassif was on one such mission last month, an attempt to deter or at least document settler violence. The missions to help with the harvest are among multiple acts of defiance and resistance to Israel’s dispossession of the Palestinian people that Cassif relates.
Cassif dismisses the idea that there is much of a parliamentary opposition: besides Hadash, the Knesset is united in favor of occupation and the ongoing slaughter in Gaza. “When I ask about the fractiousness of Israeli politics, the shaky coalitions and the sacking of Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, he answers that however divided they may be on secondary questions the coalition and opposition agree in supporting the genocide.” But he stresses the significance of the opposition on the streets, the scale of marches for a ceasefire and the safe return of the hostages, many of which Hadash has been involved in mobilizing. These have met savage police violence, with even family members of hostages held by Hamas being beaten. “The government’s narrative is that opposition to the occupation amounts to support for terrorism.”
Cassif is unequivocal in condemning the Hamas massacre of October 7. He knew some of those killed that day; one, a close friend, texted him minutes before she and her husband were murdered. He has no political sympathy with Hamas, which he regards as a reactionary religious organization committed to Sharia Law; and he quotes Israeli fascist Bezalel Smotrich’s observation that “the Palestinian Authority is a burden, Hamas is an asset,” noting the long history of assistance to Hamas to divide the Palestinian movement by Israeli right-wingers including Benjamin Netanyahu.
At the same time, he notes that Hamas is a major player in Palestinian society, and it is not for Israelis to decide who represents them. The key point is Palestinian self-determination, which he argues is essential both as the right of every people and for the long-term future of Israel. The Communist Party of Israel, like the Palestinian People’s Party, remains committed to a two-state solution.
Asked about the hundreds of thousands of illegal settlers in the West Bank and how these might disrupt the creation of a Palestinian state, he counters with the successful repatriation of even larger numbers of French “pied-noir” settlers in Algeria, and notes that aside from a racist hard core, the majority of Israeli settlers are motivated by Israeli government policies making it cheaper to buy property in the occupied West Bank, and with suitable financial inducements could be convinced to leave.
Related: https://maki.org.il/en/?p=32264
