Power Suits 4 June 2025
Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s national security minister, marched through the Muslim Quarter of the Old City in occupied East Jerusalem on 26 May.
ZUMAPRESSThe fascist Israeli organization Im Tirtzu on Monday of last week brought an enormous sign reading “No victory without Nakba” to the apartheid state’s religious nationalist Jerusalem Day “Flag March.” The Israeli newspaper Haaretz later referred to the day as an “annual, state-sponsored pogrom.”
According to a different Haaretz article, this year new chants and songs were “added to the mix, including: ‘There’s no school in Gaza, there’s no children left,’ ‘Let the IDF fuck the Arabs,’ and ‘Flatten Gaza,’” the latter likely being a favorite of US Senator Lindsey Graham who has called to “level the place.”
The newer Nakba language – referring to the catastrophic ethnic cleansing of some 800,000 Palestinians around the time of the formation of the state of Israel – meshed with old favorite racist chants such as “Death to the Arabs” and “May your village burn.”
These are open calls for genocide in the midst of a genocidal Israeli onslaught against Palestinians in Gaza.
Right-wing Turning Point USA leader Charlie Kirk, who The Electronic Intifada reported spoke to an Im Tirtzu crowd in 2019, has not tweeted his opinion of the Im Tirtzu sign. He is, however, busy stirring anti-Black hate with deceptively edited video and attacking a Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduation student speaker for daring to support campus efforts to, as she put it, “cut ties with the genocidal Israeli military.”
Journalist David Sheen pointed out that “a decade ago this Israeli fascist group’s slogan was ‘Nakba is bullshit.’ Now it’s ‘No victory without Nakba.’”
Eytan Meir, speaking as the group’s director of external relations, can be seen here calling the Nakba “nonsense” and failing to note that hundreds of thousands of Palestinians had already been forced out – never to be allowed back – even prior to the establishment of the state of Israel.
Efforts to take al-Aqsa mosque
Finance minister Bezalel Smotrich, a self-described “fascist homophobe,” injected even more of a religious element to the day of ethnonationalist triumphalism with his call-and-response speech at the Western Wall in occupied East Jerusalem, calling for the construction of a temple, clearly meaning in place of al-Aqsa mosque.
“God willing, with the unity of Jerusalem, with the holiness of Jerusalem, with the joy of Jerusalem, we will be blessed with the opportunity, God willing, to expand the borders of the land of Israel, to complete redemption and to the rebuilding of the Temple, here, soon, in our days,” Smotrich stated.
Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s national security minister, made similar inflammatory comments. Walking at the holy site that day, he repeatedly stated, “The Temple Mount is in our hands.”He was joined there – as he was earlier this year during his intentionally antagonistic visit to the US – by Yishai Fleisher, a spokesperson for settlers in Hebron in the occupied West Bank. Fleisher called for the building of a “third temple here.”
Ben-Gvir has made similar comments previously and found support at the time from Randy Fine, now the most anti-Palestinian congressman in the US House of Representatives.
Fine, just last month, speaking of Gaza, said, “We nuked the Japanese twice in order to get unconditional surrender. That needs to be the same here.”
US support
Israeli leaders are intensifying their threats against Palestinians and al-Aqsa mosque and finding new support in the US Congress. Ratcheting up religious tensions can be expected to bring unknown, but dangerous consequences.
US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee is contributing to tensions – and celebrating anti-Palestinian hatred – with his support for Jerusalem Day. He tweeted on 25 May: “Beginning this evening is Yom Yerushalayim – also known as Jerusalem Day. The United States is proud to join our close ally Israel in celebrating the 58th anniversary of the reunification of Jerusalem.”
Choosing to applaud a day the ambassador surely knew would be full of racism directed against Palestinians is unsurprising from a man who has claimed that “there’s really no such thing as a Palestinian.”He has also stated: “There is no such thing as a West Bank. It’s Judea and Samaria [the territory’s biblical name]. There’s no such thing as a settlement. They’re communities, they’re neighborhoods, they’re cities. There’s no such thing as an occupation.”
Huckabee can be expected to oversee worse Israeli abuses in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem even as he backs Israel’s war crimes in Gaza, now belatedly acknowledged by smirking Biden administration State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller.
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