Richard Spencer supports apartheid Israel again

…by Jonas E. Alexis

If you don’t think that Richard Spencer and the Zionist state of Israel are ideologically two sides of the same coin, then think again. The Knesset in Israel has recently passed a law which basically states that Israel belongs to the Jews (or to people who call themselves Jews but are liars).

If Israel belongs to the Jews, then the question is this: what do you do with millions of Palestinians who have been living in Israel for centuries? Or how did the Jews get to possess the state of Israel in the first place?

Those questions need serious answers, and the historical record shows us that Israel has been involved in ethnic cleansing for more than sixty years. But Richard Spencer isn’t interested in finding those answers.

For Spencer, Israel has been doing a great job in weeding out what Israeli officials themselves have called “beasts” and “grasshoppers.” In fact, Spencer suggests that he would love to model Israel’s nation-state law. He has recently tweeted:

“I have great admiration for Israel’s nation-state law. Jews are, once again, at the vanguard, rethinking politics and sovereignty for the future, showing a path forward for Europeans.”[1]

“Israel’s nation-state law”? Does Richard Spencer mean to tell us that he has no clue of how Israel got that “nation-state law”? Is he that stupid? Has this man even crack-opened scholarly studies such as The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited, The Forgotten Palestinians: A History of the Palestinians in Israel, and even Jewish Terrorism in Israel?[2] Or has even watched David Duke’s own videos about Israel?

The story gets interesting here because Duke, a white nationalist, is no friend of the Zionist state of Israel and “Jewish supremacism.” Spencer, a new white nationalist kid on the block, virtually screws everything by starting to love “Israel’s nation-state law.”

“Israel,” said Duke in a video endorsing Charles Barron in 2012 for his anti-Zionist stand, “is the worst rogue terrorist state on earth. Israel has even committed terrorism against the United States.” Duke also mentioned the Levon Affair as well as the USS Liberty incident as indictments against the terrorist state. Duke is right here.

Duke is apparently deconstructing the Zionist state, but Spencer is obviously prostrating before the same terrorist state because Spencer aspires to do for white nationalism what Zionism is doing for Israel. (I was told that Duke has recently scolded Spencer for his categorical mistake on his radio show.)

Yet how did Israelis end up stealing Palestinian lands?  Perhaps it is pertinent to bring in Benny Morris, one of Israel’s eminent and prolific historians. Morris declared unequivocally:

“A Jewish state would not have come into being without the uprooting of 700,000 Palestinians. Therefore it was necessary to uproot them. There was no choice but to expel that population. It was necessary to cleanse the hinterland and cleanse the border areas and cleanse the main roads. It was necessary to cleanse the villages from which our convoys and our settlements were fired on.”[3]

If Spencer didn’t know any of this, then he can be forgiven. If he is that ignorant, then he should shut his mouth and withhold judgment about “Israel’s nation-state law” because he is certainly making a fool of himself.

But if Spencer knows about Israel’s genocidal history and continues to praise the apartheid state, then there is one conclusion one can draw: the so-called Alternative Right is once again another movement that seeks to produce an essentially Zionist view of the world under a different name. In other words, the Alternative Right is ideologically a Zionist sect.

Israel succeeded by eliminating the Palestinians and establishing a law which now prohibits the Palestinians to even return to their homeland, and that’s enough for Spencer to praise Israel. Spencer’s statement even shocked flaming Zionist outlets such as Newsweek, which stated:

“There are 1.8 million Arabs in Israel—around 20 percent of the country’s population. Spencer appears to have dismissed their opinion in the same way as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu…”[4]

In other words, Spencer and Netanyahu are strange bedfellows. Perhaps that’s why Spencer calls himself “a white Zionist.”

Israel and Genocide

Let’s go back to Morris for a moment. When the interviewer proceeded to ask him whether Israel committed genocide in 1948, he responded: “No.” The interviewer moved on to say: “They perpetrated ethnic cleansing.” Interestingly, Morris replied:

“There are circumstances in history that justify ethnic cleansing. I know that this term is completely negative in the discourse of the 21st century, but when the choice is between ethnic cleansing and genocide – the annihilation of your people – I prefer ethnic cleansing.”[5]

Interviewer: “And that was the situation in 1948?”

Morris: “That was the situation. That is what Zionism faced.”

Interviewer: “The term `to cleanse’ is terrible.”

Morris: “I know it doesn’t sound nice but that’s the term they used at the time. I adopted it from all the 1948 documents in which I am immersed.”

Interviewer: “What you are saying is hard to listen to and hard to digest. You sound hard-hearted.”

Morris: “I feel sympathy for the Palestinian people, which truly underwent a hard tragedy. I feel sympathy for the refugees themselves. But if the desire to establish a Jewish state here is legitimate, there was no other choice. It was impossible to leave a large fifth column in the country. From the moment the Yishuv [pre-1948 Jewish community in Palestine] was attacked by the Palestinians and afterward by the Arab states, there was no choice but to expel the Palestinian population. To uproot it in the course of war.”

Interviewer: “And morally speaking, you have no problem with that deed?”

Morris: “That is correct. Even the great American democracy could not have been created without the annihilation of the Indians. There are cases in which the overall, final good justifies harsh and cruel acts that are committed in the course of history.”[6]

One cannot escape the fact that Israel was built on the blood of innocent Palestinians. If Spencer wants to skip all that history and continues to perpetuate his own ideology, then it is safe to say that the Alternative Right is beyond saving.

As I have argued in the past, Spencer is trapped in a topsy-turvy world, and this world represents the intellectual and philosophical death of the Alt-Right. Spencer wants his movement and people to thrive and flourish; he wants his followers to have meaning and purpose, but he is theoretically imbibing an ideology which essentially ends up advancing the idea that might makes right.

The Alternative Right is morally and intellectually failing, not because it was unable to produce people who understand the political climate, but rather because its metaphysical principle is built on shaky foundations. How can Alt-Right advocates fight Zionism when Spencer starts calling himself “a white Zionist”? It just doesn’t add up.

Whether Spencer likes it or not, he is inevitably articulating the views of the oligarchs, which assume that justice, as E. Michael Jones has recently put it in his recent assessment on Gaza, “is the opinion of the powerful.” Jones writes:

“UN human rights spokesman Rupert Colville criticized the Israelis for their indiscriminate use of lethal force, but the Israelis remained unmoved at the slaughter they wrought, characterizing Palestinian women and children, some of whom were shot in the back while running from the live fire, as the aggressors in the situation.”7

Spencer obviously has a lot of rethinking to do.

• [1] “White Nationalist Richard Spencer Backs Israel’s Contentious Nation-state Law,” Haaretz, July 22, 2018.
• [2] Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Illan Pappe, The Forgotten Palestinians: A History of the Palestinians in Israel (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011); Ami Pedahzur and Arie Perliger, Jewish Terrorism in Israel (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011).
• [3] Ari Shavit, “Survival of the Fittest? an Interview with Benny Morris,” Counterpunch, January 16, 2004.
• [4] “White supremacist Richard Spencer is a fan of Israel’s nation-state law,” Newsweek, July 23, 2018.
• [5] Shavit, “Survival of the Fittest? an Interview with Benny Morris,” Counterpunch, January 16, 2004.
• [6] Ibid.
• [7] E. Michael Jones, “Apocalypse in Gaza: Is the Twelfth Imam about to return from the State of Occultation? Will Jesus be at his Side?,” Culture Wars, July/August 2018.

Jonas E. Alexis, Senior Editor

Jonas E. Alexis has degrees in mathematics and philosophy. He studied education at the graduate level. His main interests include U.S. foreign policy, the history of the Israel/Palestine conflict, and the history of ideas. He is the author of the book, Kevin MacDonald’s Metaphysical Failure: A Philosophical, Historical, and Moral Critique of Evolutionary Psychology, Sociobiology, and Identity Politics. He teaches mathematics in South Korea.

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