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Anyone who wants to find out what is happening in the Middle East already knows that the Netanyahu government is guided by the goal of Greater Israel, which is so cherished by religious Zionism.

Anyone who wants to find out what is happening in the Middle East already knows that the Netanyahu government is guided by the goal of Greater Israel, which is so cherished by religious Zionism. The Kingdom of Israel would be extended from the Nile to the Euphrates, just as in the time of King David. Israel invading southern Lebanon is no novelty, nor is it a defensive move. Israel already occupied Lebanon from 1982 to 2000. Its goal is to annex the entire country and move towards Syria and Iraq – areas of interest to Washington’s neoconservatives. In this regard, it is highly recommended to read Alastair Crooke’s texts right here in SCF.

Well, another thing that has already been noted is that there is no necessary relationship between the misfortune of the Palestinians and the success of Israel. The Zionist project must fail; even so, the Palestinians can continue in a bitter suffering – especially if we consider that Gaza is now just rubble, and that a Marshall Plan would be necessary to make the place habitable. However, Israel has long had the project of making Gaza uninhabitable in order to reduce its population (whether by being forced to emigrate, or by dying from the poor sanitary conditions). As long as Israel controls the place, the Palestinians will be treated as “human animals”, to use Yoav Gallant’s expression. Israel may fail in its expansionism, but it may manage to hold on to Gaza and the West Bank.

Even so, Israel’s expansionist enterprise has made its bestiality increasingly visible, and its cause increasingly difficult to support. Gone are the days when all bloody images were dismissed as “Pallywood” fiction. Now, no one has the courage to say that children are not dying; that Palestinians carry dolls instead of corpses; that they smear themselves with ketchup to pretend to be victims. Now, people say (and fewer and fewer people say) that it is all Hamas’ fault, because Israel has the right to defend itself. The dead bodies of children are always collateral damage of a “surgical operation.”

In their isolation, the Palestinians could be portrayed as otherworldly beings, who drool with anti-Semitic hatred 24 hours a day and have been terrorists since their earliest years. Suddenly the world saw the Lebanese included in the same class of ETs, since Israel destroys residential buildings and bombs children in the same way, with the same justifications. It is harder to lie about the Lebanese, because they have not spent most of their time under Israeli control, and because they have a huge and successful Christian diaspora throughout the Americas.

If there is hope for the Palestinians, it lies in the resounding failure of Zionism. A resounding failure that makes clear not only its brutality against innocent civilians (which is already very clear), but also the expansionist and genocidal nature of its doctrine. It must be made clear that Netanyahu is similar to Hitler, since he intends to achieve Lebensraum while reducing the few surviving natives to misery and servitude. It must be remembered that Hitler did not intend to simply eliminate the Slavs, but rather to reduce them to misery and servitude, destroying any trace of a glorious past. This is what is happening to the Palestinians today, and this is what the Zionists want for all the Gentiles between the Nile and the Euphrates.

If Israel only suffers a moderate failure; that is, if it only withdraws from Lebanon and gives up attacking Iran, the lives of the Palestinians could continue as they were, only with a worsening of the quality of life bequeathed by the retaliation for Operation Al-Aqsa Flood.

Anyone who has understood Zionism knows that this is a delusion, but Bassem Youssef’s most recent interview with Piers Morgan made me believe that the liberal establishment already has a ready-made escape route for a moderate failure of Zionism: blaming the far-right. Since it is a global phenomenon of arbitrary classification, this is, in the end of the day, a way of saying that the blame for the Palestinian genocide lies with anyone who thinks that women do not have penises. After all, isn’t it a far-right thing, to be against gender ideology?

Piers Morgan has been a sort of gatekeeper to the discussion about Palestine since Operation Al-Aqsa Flood. He has even listened to Norman Finkelstein, and his willingness to listen to even the most hated anti-Zionist Jew in the U.S. (who is also the world’s leading expert on Gaza and an online audience phenomenon since the operation) was offset by his insistence on the question: “Do you condemn Hamas?”

Yet the one who managed to dismantle Piers Morgan, and went viral, was the Egyptian comedian Bassem Youssef, whose wife is Palestinian. With his sarcastic humor, he said that he tries to kill his wife, but fails; that he tries to catch her, but she uses the children as a human shield. He complained about his brother-in-law in Gaza, who lied that the IDF does not warn before bombing, contrary to what Ben Shapiro and Ron De Santis say. When asked whether he condemned Hamas, Youssef lamented the deaths of Israeli civilians – but presented a graph comparing the deaths of Palestinians to those of Israelis over the years, and asked Piers Morgan to give him an estimate of the value of Palestinian lives in relation to Israeli lives.

Since then, Piers Morgan has invited him back twice more, both times in person, because Youssef complained about being in a cubicle without seeing him. The second time was due to the huge repercussion of the first. The third time, on October 23, 2024, was practically a celebration of the anniversary of the first. Bassem Youssef once again did very well by avoiding Piers Morgan’s provocations (who even insinuated anti-Semitism) and defending the Palestinian cause with facts (denouncing, for example, the fake news about beheaded babies and the mass rape invented by the New York Times). As if that weren’t enough, he also managed to get Piers Morgan to admit that Israel is occupying Palestine and denounced the lack of freedom of expression in the U.S. Every time Piers Morgan asked him to speak badly of Hamas, he would say very emphatically that they are horrible, that they are vampires, because he didn’t want the FBI to show up at his door.

This is a good argument, and it’s a liberal argument. Bassem Youssef is a liberal. He left Egypt, where he was a doctor, after the Arab Spring. He went to the U.S., obtained citizenship and always expresses horror at Putin and solidarity with Ukraine. I believe that this is the main reason why he received the third invitation: to give visibility to a liberal critique of the State of Israel and a liberal defense of the Palestinian cause, and to begin to clean up the reputation of the overwhelming liberal majority that interpreted Israel vs. Palestine as Civilization vs. Barbarism. In addition, there is the fact that right-wing Zionism is religious – and we can even ask ourselves to what extent the strength of religion in Israel is due to the presence of Arab Jews and Russian Jews. This could then lead liberals back to the opposition between Civilization (secular Americans and Western Europeans) and Barbarism (religious Russians and Arabs).

In the liberals’ fondest dreams, the Israeli right would be replaced by woke Zionists who would be totally obedient to Washington, and who, when invading and occupying Arab territories, would do so in the name of LGBTQIA+ rights and female empowerment. The problem is that no regime has ever managed to legitimize itself based on these causes. The founder of Zionism himself, Theodor Herzl, was an atheist. In Der Judenstaat he proposed a secular state to welcome Jews, defined as victims of anti-Semitism and not as a chosen people or practitioners of a religion. For Zionism to attract masses of poor Jews, anti-Semitism was not enough; it had to become religious.

It is possible to make a liberal critique of Zionist expansionism. However, all liberal criticism can be directed against popular and sovereign regimes that are religious, such as that of Iran and that of a possible free Palestine governed by Hamas. For this reason, it is necessary to show the similarities between Zionism and Nazism, since the latter was secular and had a strong scientific component that brought it closer to liberalism (it is worth remembering that the Rockefeller Foundation subsidized eugenics in Germany even before the rise of Nazism). Furthermore, a look back in time will show that Zionist ethnic cleansing began with the very founding of the State of Israel, under the leadership of the secular socialist Ben Gurion, whose expansionist intentions are very well recorded in his diaries.