Israel’s new front with Iran signals the Netanyahu government’s willingness to induce terror in its own public, writes Miko Zeldes-Roth from Jerusalem.
Jerusalem’s Western Wall Plaza under evacuation orders on June 13 after Israel began attacking Iran. (Y/Wikimedia Commons/CC0)
By Miko Zeldes-Roth
in Jerusalem
Common Dreams
I arrived in Jerusalem last Thursday evening.
Twelve hours later, I awoke to the news of the Israeli military’s attack on Iran — having slept through the sirens in the night.
I am an American Jewish activist and researcher; I have spent time on and off in Israel/Palestine throughout my life. But this visit has been unlike any other. Four days in, I have found my eyes opened by the breathtaking recklessness of the current Israeli government.
The attacks on Iran are but the latest action by a political leadership that, lacking public legitimacy since the Oct. 7 attacks, seems determined to use terror to re-secure a public mandate for its otherwise vulnerable project of Jewish supremacy.
Power and violence, the political theorist Hannah Arendt argued, are negatively correlated. “Rule by sheer violence comes into play where power is being lost,” she noted in her 1969 treatise, On Violence.
“To substitute violence for power can bring victory, but the price is very high; for it is not only paid by the vanquished, it is also paid by the victor in terms of his own power.”
Arendt’s argument rests on the insight that a government’s power is constituted through public support and participation. Violence can sustain regimes that otherwise lack public legitimacy, but at tremendous cost.
If the cost of Israeli state violence has been borne by Palestinians for decades — and with untold brutality since the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks — Israel’s new front with Iran signals the Netanyahu government’s willingness to use its own public as bait for Iran, in a desperate bid to re-secure legitimacy with that very public.
By initiating this confrontation, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government are knowingly courting a situation in which Israelis will be terrorized by Iranian missiles.
?? The Iranian missile moments ago as it appears in the skies of Jordan pic.twitter.com/t2gtxRE5FX
— Middle East Observer (@ME_Observer_) June 18, 2025
Less than a week ago, this same government narrowly survived a vote of no-confidence; now, that threat has been preempted by the war. Yet the dynamic at hand runs deeper than electoral politics. To understand this, it’s worth considering past episodes of mass anti-Palestinian violence and expulsion.
For instance, the late historian Alon Confino argues that in the run-up to 1948, there emerged in the Jewish public a “shared conception of Jewish sovereignty with fewer Palestinians.”
By conditioning Jewish sovereignty and self-determination on Jewish ethnic homogeneity, the Zionist movement created a Jewish public appetite for the Nakba.
Jaramana Refugee Camp in Damascus, Syria, established after the Palestinian Catastrophe, or Nakba, 1948. (Public domain, Wikimedia Commons)
There is a similar, but shifted, logic at play today. As in 1948, there is apparently widespread Israeli-Jewish support for anti-Palestinian expulsion and killing.
But today, this support is modulated through the neoliberalization of Israeli society — a shift Louis Fishman identified back in 2021.
Jewish sovereignty may still be the rationale of the state, but it is also now at least partially instrumental for ideals of personal safety, material comfort, and enrichment. (Fishman notes that the entrenchment of these ideals into the Israeli-Jewish political imagination is one of Netanyahu’s signal accomplishments.)
As such, I think it is worth considering how ideals of Jewish sovereignty and supremacy are more limited in their ability to induce the kind of active support the current Israeli government would need to fully implement its extremist vision of anti-Palestinian dispossession and removal.
If in 1948, as Confino argues, the “dream of an ethnonational state” was a strong enough incentive to induce Jews into expelling their own neighbors, now a stick is needed to complement the carrot of Jewish sovereignty. It seems clear that the current “stick” is Israeli experiences of terror, induced by the Iranian missile attacks.
As in the aftermath of the Oct. 7 attacks, the Israeli government is apparently hoping that these missile attacks will induce sufficient terror and trauma amongst its own public to underwrite support for both an extended campaign in Iran and continued mass violence in Gaza.
To return to Arendt’s parlance, we might reckon with how the government is ceding violence against its own people in order to obscure its lack of political power.
This is a depraved gamble by the Netanyahu government that rests on the dehumanization of Palestinians. Gaza may now be a “secondary arena” for the Israel Defense Forces, but continued mass violence against Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank is the implied byproduct of the war with Iran.
The current 37th government of Israel on Dec. 30, 2022. (Avi Ohayon / Government Press Office of Israel/ Wikimedia Commons/ CC BY-SA 3.0)
But this approach endangers Israeli Jews, too, even if the scale of destruction between Tel Aviv and Gaza is not remotely comparable.
Growing numbers of Israelis have already been injured and killed in the missile attacks. Those numbers may seem small from afar, especially in comparison to the IDF’s crimes in Gaza.
But there is no guarantee that those numbers won’t rise dramatically over the course of the war. The currency of the Netanyahu government’s military gambles are human lives across the Middle East.
As I walked towards a bomb shelter on Saturday night, I saw the glowing streaks from missile interceptions: it felt like the sky itself had come alive.
Within the shelter, kids and parents slept in the corners. Others sat refreshing their phones amid intermittent cell service. Jerusalem, at least as I have known it in the past, now feels like it is in a suspended state.
Continued escalation is not inevitable — although it can certainly feel that way to me here. But to change direction, I think we as Jews in both Israel and the Diaspora have to overcome investments in the current frameworks of Jewish supremacy and sovereignty.
[See: Abandoning the Role of Conqueror]
This is no small feat in a moment when the Israeli political leadership is invested in mobilizing Israeli and global Jewry toward precisely those ideals.
But an alternative is always possible. Even now.
Miko Zeldes-Roth is a PhD candidate in political theory.
This article is from Common Dreams.
Views expressed in this article and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
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Israel is an apartheid state. US needs to stop supporting it.
The question is, how could Israelis be so stupid as to think they could take someone else’s country by genocidal force with a policy of exterminating or expelling the native people of the land they had stolen and get away with it? The entire concept of Israel was always illegal, immoral, unjust and pure evil.
I agree.
The Iranian campaign is an American — NOT an Israeli — war for regime change and expansion of our own sphere of influence that our national intelligence agencies and military industrial complex have been waging through administrations both Republican and Democratic ever since 9-11, and which Donald Trump, all the abject nonsense that he is fighting the Deep State to the contrary, is almost gleefully prosecuting at their behest. Far from “directing” our foreign policy, Israel is doing absolutely nothing — in Iran, in Gaza, in the West Bank, or in southern Syria and Lebanon — that our security establishment doesn’t want them to be doing. They are our proxies in the Middle East as much as the Ukrainians are in eastern Europe — a sort of 21st century version of a Crusader State which the West can use as a platform for power projection in the region. The bombing of Iran is not to foment terror and secure popular support for war among the Israeli citizens, who have long supported such a move, but to secure the support American citizens who are naturally inclined to eschew foreign wars but have been whipped up into a hysteria over fears that Iran will obtain the Bomb, something our own intelligence services have said as late as last March that it was not even attempting and that their capability of doing so was still a long way off. Zionism is so useful to the aims of our neo-lib/con foreign policy establishment that if it did not exist, they would have had to invented it.
you got it..thumbs up for agreeing with my view on facts witnessed as of today…now dig deeper to expose the ones who are really pulling the strings of politicians and their brain washed populations in the capitalist colonial relentless pursuit of limitless profit, walking across mountains of dead if necessary, namely the creators and maintainers of the capitalist financial system, the, dare I suggest, Zionist supremacy preferring bankers and money lenders collecting never ending interest income and asset wealth from the ruthless exploitation, raping, and stealing of worldwide resources, located in the financial centre of London and New York, mainly..the ones who remain in the shadow preferring not to be in the headlines as all evil hates to be in the spotlight of truth..unless the power of the capitalist financial system imposed upon us all is broken, nothing will essentially change in our torturous exploited societies, the tiny minority of the immensely rich rulers continue laughing all the way to the bank, unfortunately!? Just my humble view any which way!
Frankly…I don’t give a hoot about israel. It should reap that which it has sowed.
So be it.
Why would a person invest in Jewish Supremacy? They certainly do not have to. Especially in the “diaspora.” If they have made such an investment, they paid for it willingly.
We are free human beings who can make choices. We do not have to accept this stuff. For me, I grew up in a place where Christian Tradition was a KKK cross burning. My answer to that was to let them see my 17 year old butt planted on a motorcycle getting the heck out of there faster than the legal speed. Since then, I’ve seen a fair bit of the world, and met some interesting people. Many of which would have blown the minds of the small minded people stuck in their tradition that I left in the exhaust trail of that old motorcycle.
Each of us is free to abandon our upbringing and go find better. If someone has invested in Jewish Supremacy, they did so willingly. Nobody is forced into such things. We can each decide with our hearts what to believe. Motorcycles still exist, they didn’t go away after Che left Argentina or I fled hillbillyland.
“Free yourself from mental slavery” – Bob Marley
Polls have generally shown support in the 70 to 80 percent range inside Israel for the horror of the last few years. Like in America, there is a political dispute about who should hold power in their hands, but broad agreement on what has been going on. So, excuse me if I don’t cry for the snowflakes now that some of the Karma is coming back home to roost. Like the Good Germans before them, they’ve earned their places huddling in bomb shelters.
Remember, the “opposition” in Israel is led by the General who killed thousands in Gaza when Obama was permitting a “mowing of the grass.” Like in America, there is no peace movement or peace party or anything that looks or sounds like a Partner for Peace. If someone wants to start one in either place, I wish them well, as it would be sorely needed.
Note, this is not a statement about race nor religious choice. It is a statement about what the people who live in Israel have been saying and doing for the last several decades. And pretty much the same goes for the Good Americans, who claim to oppose Trump but who love wars, police, bombings, prisons and other horrors.
in this lukewarm article asking for a moderation of brutal Zionist Jewish supremacy – I suppose – I am nevertheless sorely missing the unequivocal condemnation of the attempted genocide and continued murder of any anti Zionists all over the middle East and worldwide, over the last few days most viciously perpetrated against Iranian people… a rather weak attempt by the admittedly Jewish author to excuse and kind of rationalise the deranged murderous psychopathic Zionist Jewish supremacy regime in Israel?! Disappointingly not standing up for humanity, cooperation, compassion and humility towards all human beings not just in the middle East but everywhere on this tortured planet! A regime change in Israel (and of course it puppet master state USA) is needed desperately now as it is long overdue.
Jewish supremacy is the weapon being used to establish sovereignty. But it has no basis in reality other than belief to support it. They are no better than any other race, they never were, and never will be.
So Israel cannot use a belief system to become a legitimate sovereign state on stolen land. Delusion and theft don’t work well together.
I see it as a double-bind, neither helping the other, and both leading nowhere. Since the vast majority of the world recognises neither, the Jewish people face an impossible quandary, and as the author says the only way out is to give up these objectives, and learn to live in peace with their neighbours, or face eventual destruction from within or without.
By the way, one excellent very recent development is the widening of the Overton Window to allow in many outlets the use of the term “Jewish supremacy.” This used to be strictly verboten. I’ve seen over roughly the past year its open acceptance in more sources.
I know the great Norman Finkelstein has relatively recently taken to using “Jewish supremacist billionaire class” which is fitting.
(Of course not all Jews are Jewish supremacists.)
A lot of them are.
This comes out in comments by Jews asserting that Jews are the moral conscience of Christians—or even the whole world.
It is also the source of humor in the punchlines of many Jewish jokes.
A lot of them are not.