Israel’s war with Iran is a direct result of a political culture that depends for survival upon a permanent state of war, says Israeli academic and left-wing activist Idan Landau in the interview that follows. He observes that Israeli society on the whole has embraced a fascist mindset, “reflecting extreme paranoia and anxiety,” and thus intolerance for dissent. Subsequently, peace is a taboo and there is total indifference to genocidal acts and human casualties. Moreover, there is very little hope for a different trajectory, argues Landau, “as long as the U.S. and Europe continue to insulate Israel from the moral consequences of its actions.”

Landau is professor of linguistics and head of the department of linguistics at Tel Aviv University. He writes a political blog (in Hebrew) on Israeli affairs and has been imprisoned on several occasions for his refusal to serve in the Israel Defense Forces reserve.

Israelis live in a peculiar state of mind: total disbelief in the possibility of normal life, clinging on to the very ideology that perpetuates this state of mind.

Idan Landau: Netanyahu is the most able consolidator of all the dark impulses of Israeli society, but of course he didn’t make up anything on his own. If you go back to Begin’s speeches in the 1970s-1980s, they also constantly invoked the Holocaust as the ultimate justification for whatever Israel does. The Messianic drive to settle the greater Israel predates Netanyahu, as well as the overall brutal, racist degradation of Palestinians inside and outside Israel. You can go on and on – nothing is new here. At most, as you note, it is the subservience of the “opposition”; I don’t recall anything like it in the past. If you look at the governments that went to wars in 1973 and 1982, they faced considerable opposition, within the Knesset and outside of it, on the very issue of whether the war was justified (in 1973, it was clearly preventable; in 1982, it was pure imperial vanity). None of that is left today.

Which is why the temptation of permanent war is so strong: You’re guaranteed to make the willful silence of the opposition also permanent.

C. J. Polychroniou: In Lebanon, the Israeli armed forces are using Gaza tactics, attacking hospitals and killing medical staff, while in Iran they have engaged in what has been rightly described as chemical warfare on account of strikes on fuel depots. Isn’t the country concerned at all about its blatant assault on international law and that it has turned into a pariah state in the eyes of the overwhelming majority of the people across the globe? What happened to Israel’s labor party which combined socialism with nation-building?

Idan Landau: As to the labor party, I always say that one should not speak ill of the dead. A handful of members of Knesset (MKs) that are obsessed with displays of liberal values and with welfare legislation when genocide is in full force and Apartheid shifts from de facto to de jure. The other “opposition” parties are either led by generals (Golan, Eizenkot) who offer zero alternatives to military dominance, or by right-wing neoliberals (Bennet, Lapid). The only representatives of left values in the Knesset are the Arab MKs. As to International Humanitarian Law (IHL), my impression is that Israelis are unconcerned insofar as Uncle Sam is, and it sure looks like he is, thoroughly unconcerned. The Trump administration vindictively sanctioned the International Criminal Court (ICC) judges presiding over the Israeli case, and quite explicitly stated that IHL does not apply to the U.S. and its allies. There’s a lot of duplicity in Israeli discourse regarding the so-called “Principle of Complementarity”; the official response to the ICC described the “independent and robust judicial system” of Israel, which investigates any suspicions for wrongdoings. Most Israelis simply think that the rules don’t apply to us since they don’t apply to the Hamas (they do apply to both parties; I already said that Israelis are shrouded in........

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