Jonathan Ofir
Mondoweiss / June 28, 2023
A member of the steering committee for Itamar Ben-Gvir’s prospective private militia wants to eliminate the distinction between civilians and noncombatants — not just for Palestinians, but also between Israeli settlers and the army.
Since Monday a video has been circulating in the Israeli media of a lecture by Col. (ret.) Efraim Laor, one of about 15 steering committee members for forming a “national guard” that would be directly subordinate to the National Security Minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir. Palestinian rights groups have warned that this formation would essentially become a fascistic, Jewish supremacist private militia, since the minister who demanded it (Ben-Gvir) is himself convicted of supporting a terror organization and inciting violence against Palestinians. Now, the contents of Laor’s lecture, delivered at Bar-Ilan University in 2019, are only serving to confirm these fears:
“Whoever doesn’t want to be involved is not involved. Whoever is in a line of conflict is there because he chose it, or it was chosen for them. There should be no distinction between gender, sex or age. Whoever is in a line of conflict has one right — either to win or to die”, he said.
The enemy, in other words, is anyone who falls within that “line of conflict,” against whom a blanket shoot-to-kill policy is the only appropriate option:
“An enemy needs to be killed, you don’t shoot at [terror] cells, you shoot between the eyes – whoever can’t do that, 15 cm lower. Including those who are there and are not attacking. But you see an enemy – you do not find out with it whether he is involved or not — he’s involved — he needs to be eliminated.”
Laor’s genocidal advocacy also calls for Israelis to become civil combatants — creating civilian militias who would be given license to kill. The immediate threat inherent in this becomes evident in the context of the national guard, which in Laor’s own words, “Israeli civilians should have long ago started to do.”
At the heart of Laor’s claims is an intentional erasure of the distinction between combatants and civilians, deeming any Palestinian as a legitimate target: “the wars that occur around us are not between organizations, but between peoples, and the fighting is a total devotion of one people against another people.”
Laor is not bemoaning an existing reality, either. He is actually proposing it as a model to “resuscitate a corpse called civilian defense by ordinary civilians.”
Laor complained that “a lot of energy is exhausted by the defense establishment in order to avoid harming non-combatants,” and if the horrid Israeli record of harming civilians, including famous journalists, with impunity is his measure, then one can be sure that his program involves a lot of innocent blood. His boss, Ben-Gvir, recently called for killing “thousands of terrorists” during the same speech in which he told the most extreme settlers that “the Land of Israel is for the people of Israel, we are backing you, run to the hills, settle down — we love you.”
Ben-Gvir’s use of the term “terrorists” is itself a recent development for the convicted terrorist-minister — in the past, he led ultranationalist mobs that shouted “death to the Arabs” in the streets, but his more recent years have seen him playing the well-behaved politician, instead instructing the mob to chant “death to the terrorists.” Yet as Laor’s speech makes clear, “terrorist” has essentially become a euphemism for any Palestinian, and he is providing the ideological framework for it — deeming anyone who is a part of those other “people” as an involved militant worthy of extrajudicial execution.
According to Channel 13, which first aired the report digging up the 2019 lecture (which was not reproduced in full), there was some liberal opposition to Laor’s advocacy at the lecture hall. Laor is then seen responding to them:
“You want to talk about the daily Haaretz? Wipe [your ass] with it,” he says, mocking the liberal Israeli newspaper. “I am talking about what is necessary, not about what is the current [situation].”
But perhaps most pointedly, Laor is seeking to reconceive the idea of the army in terms of internal conflict. He claims that the army should solely be involved in operations in “enemy territory,” presumably in other countries, leaving the task of internal security, as it were, to civilians. He brings a hypothetical example of the northern Israeli town of Kiryat Shmona:
“Is it necessary to paralyze the whole country and activate the whole IDF because Kiryat Shmona was conquered? The answer is no. Kiryat Shmona needs to protect itself. There could be a situation that Kiryat Shmona was conquered, and everyone there was slaughtered. That shouldn’t paralyze our whole country”.
Ostensibly, Laor is differentiating between what is inside Israeli borders (for civilians to defend) and what is outside of them. Alas, Israel has de facto annexed the occupied Palestinian territory, thus treating them in many ways as part of itself while at the same time treating it as enemy territory.
Thus, the practical implementation of Laor’s ideas could mean allowing settlers to enact pogroms in supposed defense of their home territory — something we have seen unfold several times over the past few months, with the direct or tacit support of the army and top government ministers. When Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich called on Huwwara to be “wiped out,” his partial correction was that, although he did mean it, he meant that the state should do it — not civilians.
But Laor’s ideas more accurately reflect the attitude of the Israeli fascist right — which aims to formalize and permit civilians to act as militias. It is precisely this notion that informs Itamar Ben-Gvir’s national guard.
Liberal and right-wing cognitive dissonance
One thing that might shock people beyond the outright fascistic nature of Laor’s advocacy is that in the past years, he has held leadership positions in several organizations involved in disaster relief. This is a mind-boggling duality for most — to advocate such bloody devastation while working in the business of saving people’s lives. But this is merely an example of how liberal ventures are used by Israel and Israelis to balance out their starkly illiberal (sometimes genocidal) views and actions. Such duality shows itself across the political spectrum — both with extreme right-wingers like Laor, or with centrists like Gadi Eisenkot, author of the infamous “Dahiya Doctrine.”
I mention the Dahiya Doctrine because it is important to note that erasing the distinction between civilians and combatants was, in fact, introduced by liberals — Eisenkot is, after all, considered a liberal and a prominent opponent of the judicial overhaul. He is also the same army chief of staff who, in justifying the pummeling of the Dahiya quarter in Beirut in 2006, promised in 2008 that Israel would “apply disproportionate force” and “cause great damage and destruction” to every village from which rockets are fired into Israel, because “from our standpoint, these are not civilian villages, they are military bases.” (emphasis added) But the current right-wing government is taking the erasure of the distinction between civilians and the military even further — it is erasing the distinction for Israelis, too (between settlers and the army).
Still, it should surprise no one that supposed liberals like Eisenkot would simultaneously advocate such egregious war crimes. It turns out that even the liberal hero Golda Meir poisoned a Palestinian village in order to enact yet another settlement.
In that sense, Zionist liberals shouldn’t be so shocked at the pronouncements of Laor or Ben-Gvir. They are merely following the lead of their “mainstream” predecessors.
Jonathan Ofir is an Israeli musician, conductor and blogger/writer based in Denmark
