The current Israeli war against Gaza has yielded horrific pictures of its physical impact: Entire towns and neighborhoods with buildings leveled. Desperate, hungry, injured refugees streaming toward unsafe relocation. Unrelenting violence.
With all this right-minded depiction of devastation and carnage, not as much attention has been focused on the effects of the war on the Israeli perpetrators and executors. It is certainly of secondary concern to the brutality inflicted. But it is necessary for what it tells and suggests about the aggressor society.
Zeteo’s Israel’s Reel Extremism attempts to flesh out this picture in film. Zeteo is a new media organization founded by award-winning journalist Mehdi Hasan. The outspoken Hasan, a British-American political writer, columnist and commentator, had been squeezed out of MSNBC when his The Mehdi Hasan Show was a victim of “re-organization.” Hasan went independent and assembled the team that now comprises Zeteo, promising “hard-hitting interviews and unsparing analysis that you won’t find elsewhere.”
So far Hasan is living up to his goal through Zeteo, the Greek verb meaning to seek, enquire and desire to find out. Zeteo’s work is available to subscribers streaming on Substack.
The look that Zeteo has provided is startling. We listen and watch soldiers torture subdued prisoners, government apologists rationalize their deadly policies, and ordinary citizens remorselessly call for death for all Palestinians, including non-combatants, women and children. Schools, libraries and hospitals are blown up without regard to innocent victims. Families are wiped out. A culture is expunged.
Is this a campaign of revenge for the specific Hamas attack of October 7 or something much darker and more dangerous? Israeli Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked angrily defends the Israeli army. “Israeli Defense Force soldiers are the most moral soldiers in the world,” she tells us as we watch the Israelis brag about how they crush Palestinians with their tanks and humiliatingly torture prisoners. The soldiers explain the attitude that gives them the right to treat Palestinians as subhuman. “I feel my superiority to them every day,” explains a commander.
The contagion of battlefield dehumanization infects domestic life in Israel. Israeli media underwrite the de facto ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. Criticism of wartime atrocities has virtually disappeared. Radicalized citizens explain that “if you need to kill a million Palestinians, you kill a million.” War-agitated citizens have increased their attacks on Palestinians living inside Israel. Vigilante settlers use the war fervor to foment terror, driving non-Jews out of their generational towns to seize their property.
The militarizing of Israeli’s citizen population is seen as right-wing Kahanist would-be settler youth try to invade Gaza to seize land for development, and Israeli women’s groups attempt to block even humanitarian aid to Gaza.
Israel’s Reel Extremism is much too brief a compilation to delve deeply beyond the scenes of destruction. They are in essence telling us, “You do the math.” But it is important for showing the corrosive damage to Israeli society that the war has exacted. In their quest for and beyond revenge, the Israelis have poisoned their own backyards. The political rot of the right-wing government has nurtured not only corruption, but toxic racism. Certainly guilt over how Ashkenazi Jewish settlers in the founding of Israel displaced long standing Arab communities is being displayed and re-visited as they seek to complete what amounts to genocide.
Even as the war and punishment continue, American weapons providers and enablers must be called to account. Those who have questioned the United States role in Israel’s extremism, like Congressional Representatives Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman, have been ousted by Israel’s American supporters, particularly the flood of primary campaign money to their opponents from American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).
Films like Israel’s Reel Extremism need to find as broad an audience as possible in order to stop the contagion of this war from further contaminating the American political fabric, as well as protect life in the Middle East.
Zeteo’s Israel’s Reel Extremism is available streaming on Substack.
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