Zionist Neocons And Their Delusional "Villa In The Jungle"

middleastmonitor |  Twenty-five years before Israel was established on the ruins of historic Palestine, a Russian Jewish Zionist leader, Ze'ev Jabotinsky, argued that a Jewish state in Palestine could only survive if it exists "behind an iron wall" of defence. Jabotinsky was speaking figuratively, but Zionist leaders after him who embraced his teachings eventually turned the principle of the iron wall into a tangible reality. Israel and Palestine are now disfigured by endless walls, made of concrete and iron, which zigzag in and around a land that was meant to represent inclusion, spiritual harmony and coexistence.

Gradually, new ideas regarding Israel's "security" emerged, such as "fortress Israel" and "villa in the jungle", an obviously racist metaphor used repeatedly by former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, which depicts Israel falsely as an oasis of harmony and democracy amid Middle Eastern chaos and violence. For the Israeli "villa" to remain prosperous and peaceful, according to Barak, the state needed to do more than merely maintain its military edge; it had to ensure that the "chaos" does not breach the perimeters of Israel's perfect existence.

Israelis want to be able to kill, without being killed in return; subdue and occupy Palestinians militarily without the least degree of resistance, armed or otherwise. They want to imprison thousands of Palestinians without the slightest protest or even the most basic questioning of Israel's military judicial system. And yet these colonial fantasies, which have satisfied and guided the thinking of successive Zionist and Israeli leaders since Jabotinsky, work only in theory.

Even the Iron Dome missile defence system — an "iron wall" of a different kind — has been a failure in terms of its ability to intercept crudely-made Palestinian rockets. Professor Theodore Postol of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has argued that the success rate of the system is "drastically lower" than what the Israeli government and army have reported.

Even the Israeli "villa" was compromised from within when the popular Palestinian uprising of May 2021 demonstrated that Israel's native Palestinian Arab citizens remain an organic part of the wider Palestinian community. The violence meted out by police and right-wing militants, that many Arab communities inside Israel had to endure for taking a moral stance in support of their brethren in occupied Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza, showed that the supposed "harmony" within Barak's "villa" was a fragile construct that shattered within a few days.

Nonetheless, Israel still refuses to accept what is both obvious and obviously inevitable: a country which exists solely due to "iron walls" and military force will never be able to find true peace, and will always suffer the consequences of the violence it inflicts upon others.