But Hertzl’s comments are typical of the internal dialectic of Zionism, which, really, is just a fashioning of Hegelian dialectic to imagine that Zionism is the historical culmination of God’s will, or in Hegelian terms, progress of God’s spirit in history, through sublimation of the”negative other” -the antithesis. This is why people like Smotrich and Netanyahu claim that Palestinians are the “negative other” of Jews.
However, instead of saying, “antithesis” because everyone who heard that would laugh uproariously at how childish such thinking is – how demonstrative of Israel’s arrested development such thinking is, they say “enemy.” Arabs and Palestinians are the “eternal enemy” of the Jews. And they try to convince people that this is inherent in Arabs and the Muslim religion, rather than Zionist constructed nonsense serving self-interested purpose.
The IDF is the “most moral army in the world,” while Arabs and Palestinians are all “terrorists” or “heavenly Israel” lives in a “bad neighbourhood,” these kinds of binary constructions are all extensions of the internal dialectic that Zionist ideology carries out as its “story.”
Their objective is erasure, or again in Hegelian terms, sublimation of the “negative other” in the “greater good,” which is God’s spirit (or the will of God). This is a highly intentional strategy. Hegel is considered to be sort of the peak of rationalist thought. He was thoroughly decimated by what is called the post-structural movement, which ended up being a reaction against Lacan and his deployment of Hegelianism.
Smotrich states in his manifesto that “discourse” (i.e. discourse analysis – which includes people like Derrida and Foucault, post-structuralists) presents problems to the Zionist “story.” Meaning, he doesn’t feel that Zionist historiography and the”master narrative” it seeks to create should be subjected to critical investigation. All things inconvenient should be suppressed and erased – sublimated as “negative other.” This is why critics of Zionism describe it as a secular religious heresy.
Of course, these people believe themselves to be “in touch” with God’s spirit and enacting God’s will on earth. And, of course, they have a large millenarian/eschatological echo chambre in the US and EU.
Like I said, this is why Biden stands up and describes Israel as a “light to the world” – because he is a Christian Zionist who believes in the Second Coming. This is why the US rejects a two-state solution, and especially rejects Jerusalem as part of Palestine. Of course the US is driven to erase Palestine, because Israel is the sign of the Second Coming. All pro-Israel religious kooks Biden appeals to with such comments, are a large enough constituency for him to calculate a political need to court them, so as to get elected. Biden has a long history as a senator who worked ‘across the table’ with White Supremacists (segregationists – as a senator he even gave the eulogy for one of the worst segregationists in the US). Kamala Harris herself announced Biden to be a Christian Nationalist after she became VP and spoke her endorsement: “He is a man of God.” The US is supposed to have separation of Church and State, and yet Harris announced Biden as a “man of God.” Everyone should have known that his presidency was going to be a terror campaign when she said that.
You know, in the end, Said was right. He published Orientalism in 1978. And he put his finger right on the mark.