 Hi everyone, welcome to this discussion and conversation with Professor Heimberg-Schied Zabner on the launch of his book published by Verso and Army Like No Other, the Israeli Defence Force. The discussion will be between myself and Professor Gilbert Asperg, Professor in Development Studies at the University of London. I'm Dina Mütter, I'm the Chair of the Centre for Palestine Studies at SOAS and I also work in the Centre for Media and Communication. So we will have about ten minutes of the author whom I'll introduce in a minute talking for about ten minutes and then we will have some a conversation with Gilbert and myself and the author. Without further ado, just to give a brief introduction about the author, Professor Heimberg-Schied Zabner is a filmmaker, photographer, film studies scholars and a researcher at the School of Oriental and African Studies at SOAS. He has edited many collections with other authors and he has written, he is the author of introducing the Holocaust which he has written with Stuart Hoot and Lisa Jans. His films include a very well known and well-reviewed State of Danger, which is a BBC documentary about the First 50 Father, and London is Burning about the 2011 riots. He has also published in The Carrots and the La Hround. But I've known Heimberg-Schied Zabner for quite a while and his work is really impressive that it's very broad. And I'm looking forward to hearing what he has to say about the book. You've got ten minutes Heim now, but in terms of the audience, you will have to put your comments, there's a comments page where you put your comments there and questions which we will collect and then we will pose them to Heim at the end of the discussion around 10 to 6 of something around that. So hopefully everything will go smoothly in terms of the technology and looking forward to hearing Heimberg-Schied talking about the book. Heimberg-Schied. Thank you very much, Dina, for your kind words and I'm very lucky and very honoured to have the two of you leading academics on the Middle East to discuss the book with. And of course I have used the work of Gilbert when I was writing about the Lebanon Walls. It was crucial for me. I want to thank for everyone who worked on arranging the launch. This was not an easy one. Now, the first thing to say is that what the book isn't, hello? Yeah, I can hear you. I don't think I'm connected. Can you hear me? I can hear you. Okay, yeah. For a minute I thought I was not connected. What the book isn't is a book of military history. It is a book of social history of Israel through the perspectives of the IDF. Now, why did I choose to do that? You can look at Israel through many perspectives and people have done so. And Israel has changed enormously in the seven plus decades that it has existed. So you can look at, you know, the changes from the left to the right. For two thirds of its history of Zionism, the left was in control. And in 1977 it moved to the right. And it hasn't really changed since then. It's been 42 years of control of the right. It changed from a country and a society that exported oranges and avocados to one of the largest arms traders in the world. It changed from a secular society to an increasingly religious society. And it changed from a socialized society to a privatized society. You can discuss this society through many, many lenses. What I wanted to do is to see what is the most constant institution and the most constant variable that hasn't changed in the 72 years of Israeli history. And when I looked at all the possible variables, the idea came up as the one thing that was set up in 1948 just before the state was set up. It was the one institution that has been at the center of Israeli society ever since. And its importance has only increased. It's the only institution in Israel that is normally supported by more than 96% of the population. Wouldn't all leaders want an institution like this in their country that they can actually control? Only some communist countries achieved such percentages. Arguably, Israel has never been as divided as it is today. But that division is not actually featuring a division on the IDF. The IDF is the only trusted institution in the country, despite its many and substantial failures over the years. Those failures are always forgiven and forgotten. Why? Well, for a number of reasons. First of all, the IDF is the institution that was chosen in 1948 by Ben-Gurion, the first prime minister, to shape a nation out of a rag tag of different people from different societies with different languages with different beliefs. And therefore, he had to choose an institution where the level of partnership was very high. And of course, in 1948, the Israeli army arrived at 120,000 men and women. If you remember that the whole population of Israel then was less than 650,000, then most of the adults were part of this institution. So it makes a lot of sense to choose the widest membership club to base it on. There are some results to such a choice. In a sense, if you choose the army as the institution of identity and identity formation, as they did in Sparta, you end up with a Spartan society. And this is what Ben-Gurion wanted and he achieved it. Interestingly, he points out, and I quote him in the book numerous times on this topic. He pointed out between the years 1949 and 1954. In other words, for almost six years, he has been drumming the story, the narrative, that there is a state, that it has an army, but that there is no nation. And the last time he's recorded on saying there is no nation is in 1954. So while he was using an expression that makes no sense whatsoever, he said that we have turned from a nation that existed for 2,000 years into a state without a nation, and therefore we need to create a nation. Of course, the Jews were never a nation for 2,000 years and there is no nation on earth that existed for 2,000 years. But he was not frightened of saying there is no nation and he chose the army. And by choosing the army, he has created a number of institutions and institutional results. The first one was that as opposed to say the public school in Britain, which is controlling where people are educated to be ruling the society, this has happened in the IDF in Israel and still happens. So IDF became the validating institution in Israel. It was the club that you must belong to and it was the measure of any other social body. Now, the IDF is not like any other army and that's why I call the book that. How many years past since any of you have seen a British soldier? Now, in Israel, this will never happen. There will not be a day where you will not see Israeli soldiers. You don't have to be a Palestinian. You will see the army everywhere because, like God, it's everywhere. It is in education. It is in higher education. It is in industry. It is in the judiciary. It is the judiciary in the territories. It is the law. It is in broadcasting, in the theater, in film, in the radio. It has a number of radio stations since 1948. It controls cultural production to an incredible degree. For example, if you want to work in the media at 18, you do all you can to get into the army radio, the army channels of troops, theatrical troops, etc. Because this is the training ground for the Israeli media. Hardly anyone in the Israeli media has not trained and not passed through these seats. Now, because we are academics and I'm concerned about what academics do, I just also want to say that higher education in Israel is unthinkable without looking at the army. The main research income is related to programs that the army or another range of institutions connected to it are running for many years. Security, there is, of course, a whole raft of programs that are developing hardware and software. But I'm talking much further than that. There are army camps. For example, there is an army camp in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem to which only the soldiers can enter. It's on the campus. It's highly secret and it is training the intelligence corps and other related organizations. All Israeli universities do army training. In other words, the whole system of education from school to university has to train the future soldiers. And those soldiers, once they have been trained and been through the machine, will continue to feed in the results of their research and to actually enjoy research income from the army. Now, of course, this is not an accident. If you put the army as the machine of social engineering creating a nation, then that's the result you get. There is another aspect I want to point out which I deal with in the book quite substantially. Together with the social engineering task, there was the task of rewriting history. Zionism was deeply opposed to Jewish history. Jewish history is not a history militarized history. For 2,000 years, Jews lived in positions which were not enviable in positions which were difficult. Suffered racism, anti-Semitism later on. They were not in control of their lives for most of this period. Zionism is trying to replace 2,000 years of history with a myth history, as Shlomo Zandt calls it. The myth history of the book of Joshua, the story of Masada, in other words, mythologies of heroism that are supposedly the foundation of the IDF. It was important for me to actually map the development of this huge project of social engineering and its results. This is a history of Israel since 1948 and some period before also is dealt with through the lens of the IDF, scanning how it changes and shapes and forms every aspect of Israeli life and also creates a situation whereby peace and just peace are actually impossible and Israelis are more afraid of peace than they are afraid of war. I think this is what I wanted to say to start with. Thank you very much. Now that is really interesting. We've got some questions from the audience, but first of all, can I bring in Michel Beret to come up with a few questions or with the key question and then I have a couple of questions myself. Michel Beret, would you like to come in and begin some questions? Thank you. Sure. Thank you, Dina. And thank you, Haim, for writing this book, which is a very useful and very needed contribution to the literature and I would say more specifically also to the left-wing literature because to my knowledge, this is the only book written from a left-wing perspective on this topic, on the centrality of the Israeli army and dedicated to the Israeli army, to the study of the Israeli army. There are books on the market on the same topic like the book by Patrick Tyler's Fortress Israel, which you quote in your book and you even use it at the beginning of a couple of chapters. But that's a New York Times journalist who did a very interesting job. But here we have a book that is from a radical perspective or a radical critic from a person or a radical critic of Zionism and that gives it a special importance and originality. And I think that, I mean, in some way, the best or the clearest illustration of Haim, what you are saying about the centrality of the military in Israel, in the Israeli society and state is the fact that through, I mean, your book is actually not only about the Israeli army but about Israel to Kour. I mean, in some way, most aspects of what Israel is are discussed and including a whole history of Israel. I mean, if you write a book on many other countries' armies, you will, of course, you'll have to deal with the wars in which these armies were engaged and maybe in the changes that these armies went through. But here, in this case, you are writing a book on the army but this is a book that goes into every single aspect of the Israeli society. So that is the clearest illustration of how central this institution has been and including this, I mean, it covered everything of role and function in society, including the shift after 1967 into more and more police-like activities in controlling the occupied territories. So, I mean, when you engage in writing the book, I presume this is something that you are very conscious of and became even more conscious of while writing it. Sorry, I missed this because something, could you repeat the question, please? My question is that I'm assuming that when you started writing the book, when you embarked on writing the book, you had, of course, a clear idea about this centrality and the fact that writing a book on the Israeli army will lead you to deal with everything in Israel practically. And this is something that certainly developed while you were writing the book, when you have to absolutely tackle everything. You're totally right, I wanted to write a book that will explain Israel to people who are not usually in contact with it. Now, a lot of people in the West might visit Israel. They might go to a lot or they might go to look at birds or they might go to Jerusalem or in the past they might go to Kibbutz. But the idea that they understand the society is like the idea that a group of blind people are trying to decide what an elephant is by touching different parts of it. And as you have experienced this, I did, people in Britain, in Europe, in the United States do not understand Israeli society. And I thought for many years, what can I do to explain it in totality, not this part where the Kibbutz has changed but the totality of Israeli society. And indeed, I found that the only way I can do that, the only way I can deal with everything in Israel is through the army, because the army is the gateway to everything in Israel. It is the gateway to the rewriting of the history. It's the gateway to the creating of national identity. It is the one institution that every Jewish Israeli, practically, of course, there are a few people who are saner than that. But every Jewish Israeli normally is identifying with the army. That's not very surprising. They've been to the army for two or three years. They have suffered. They have made others suffer. This is a formative experience. But of course, people from outside can't understand it. So, yes, I was looking for the one institution that offers the widest possible perspective on the Israeli army. And as I started reading and researching, it became clear that I am not going to write military history. I'm going to write a history of Israeli society through the army. Yeah, absolutely, yes. And that comes out very, very clearly in the book. And that actually adds to the importance and usefulness of the book, since it's not dealing with some kind of marginal institution, but really the institution that is the most defining of what the Israeli state is. Here I have a question about what you said in your introduction. You mentioned 96% of support in the population, you said. I presume you were meaning the Jewish population, right? Yes, I should have said the Jewish population, of course. And in the book, I may make a point of always saying of 96% of Jewish Israelis, it actually is worse than that. When a war starts, say 2014, they attack Gaza. They don't even ask the Arab citizens of Israel, Palestinians, what they think. Their models are actually built in such a way that they are built on the Israeli Jewish society. So when they publish it, they don't say 96% of Jewish Israelis. But that's basically what it is. 96% of Jewish Israelis supported their attacks on Gaza. 95% of Jewish Israelis supported their attacks on Lebanon. This is an incredible level of identification that they show with the most brutal acts that society can take. And 96% of Israelis are brutal. This is the question we must ask. Different people will have different answers for it. But the question must be posed. Why do 96% of Israelis, and that includes, by the way, academics, the percentage of academics supporting those wars, what's the same? It was 96% or 95%. So this is very worrying. And we should ask this question. How is it possible that automatic support is given to all acts of aggression? Now there are a number of answers to this. And they are complex. First of all, there is what is called by Gabriele Nouri, an Israeli researcher, a war normalization discourse. This war normalization discourse is very complex. It starts in the school and ends up in the cemetery. So all your life, you are told that there is no other way. We are surrounded by enemies. The whole world is against us. Nobody wants to make peace with us. And this is still going on despite the fact that Netanyahu is very proud to say that he's now signed a peace agreement with this country and with that country. The war normalization discourse continues. When Israelis are asked, as a result, when Israelis are asked that peace, most of them are frightened of it. They do not understand what peace could mean. Yes, it's a good idea to sign a peace agreement, but that doesn't mean to say there will be meaningful peace. Of course, there can't be a meaningful peace because Israel is a colonizing country which is suppressing 6 million Palestinians, 4 million without any rights, and 2 million with some rights which are disappearing as we speak all the time. So a country like this, hey, cannot be democratic of course the Arabs are not citizens of Israel in the usual sense. No Palestinian is allowed full citizenship with Israel. And actually Netanyahu has made that point. He said to a very famous actress that wanted to say that Israel is a country of its citizens, he said, no, Israel after we signed the nation state law is a country of the Jewish people. So Israel is not a country of its citizens. It's a country of a people that doesn't exist actually because the Jewish people is not a nation. It's an aggregate of people living in different countries. They don't even speak the same language. They don't share very much, and actually young Jews in the States are not even sharing in Zionism nowadays. So this is quite a job of arguing that your state is not a state of your citizens. So the war normalization discourse normalizes war rather than normalizing peace. So that because of the fact that Israel has fought more wars since 1948 than any other country on Earth, that it is spending per capita more on wars and security than any other country on Earth, about twice the US, which is number two. So that it is actually having one of the largest armies despite the fact it's a small country. It's one of the smallest countries on Earth or the state, but it has a large army because the army includes more or less all the adult citizens. It has a market in arms and other security products which is huge for the country this size. So basically this is how it's possible to, if you want to recruit such percentages into behind your army and behind state. Right. Sorry Dina. Do you want to have, can I come with one question? Sure, you're the chair, of course. Yeah, so you mentioned it just now which is the way that you structured the book which I thought was very interesting which is around the role of the army in the events, the kind of key events that have defined what we call normally as the Palestinian-Israeli context. I want you to elaborate on that because it's quite interesting. But I've got another question which has really been... Hello. Hello. Hello. A big issue, a big kind of, a big entity in the lives of the Palestinians. So, you know, so in a sense, I was wondering whether you also... I didn't see you engaged with that in the book. So in a sense, as a Palestinian myself, you know, the pan-Israeli soldier does bring a lot, immediately brings a lot of memories and ideas and concerns. But I wanted you to comment on the structure of the book and why did you choose these events as a way to try and think of the relationship between the ideology of the state and the army? Right. I mean, about half of the book is dedicated to the different wars and conflicts that Israel has fought since 1948. Again, this is not military history. This is, you know, social history of Israel. And I included those in great detail because it's important to understand the role, the historical role of each of the wars. I haven't got time to actually go into all of them, so I'll give you just a few examples. 1948, the most important of such wars is the colonial war of taking over most of Palestine and getting out, expelling by force, most of the Palestinians, taking most of the land, getting rid of most of the people, two-thirds of the land, more than two-thirds of the land and two-thirds of the people have been expelled. And what this war has done, apart from what I just described, is actually established the impunity of Israel from UN and international action. The UN has decreed that Israel must take back the refugees, must let them return to their homes. Israel did no such thing. It just rough-shouldered. And that was an interesting thing. The UN could do something about it, but the UN was a weak, new, and actually very faulty organizations because the UN has created the problem in the first place. It is the UN that has decreed the division of Palestine, the partition. So the UN proved in 1948 that it wasn't better than in 1947. First, it created the problem. It led to the Nakaba, and then it didn't do anything about the Nakaba. And when it didn't do anything about it, it created a precedent that Israel continued to use all the time. So 1948 is setting a tone and actually creating a very important precedent. 1956, for example, is a very important war. Here is Israel, a small insignificant country in the Middle East, which is in a sense enticing the two large ex-empires, Britain and France, into a post-colonial war to get rid of President Nasser and to continue Egypt again after having lost Egypt to the British Empire control. And they failed. Israel has not failed because it has taken Sinai. If not for the only time that the two superpowers came together to demand that the three, the tripartite states, leave Sinai and Egypt, Israel would still be there. But what this war has done is prove to the Americans that the French are right in supporting Israel. The French and British were the armament suppliers of Israel at that point. And therefore, the next empire that will support Israel is the only one that comes. That's the US. So in a sense, if you want, 1956 was not just a colonial war. Of course, it was that. But the colonies were, sorry, the colonials were a thing of the past. One has to say that Israel starts colonizing very late. At the point where colonialism is not very popular, actually. It has very bad press. And it's the only colony of the 20th century, new colony of the 20th century. But because it has the support of the ex-colonials and the empire, it can continue. 1967, of course, is the war of a very different nature. And I think I will only relate to one other. And I don't think I need to talk about 1967 in great detail, because we all understand that this is the first time that the whole of Palestine was under Israeli control. Of course, Sinai and, you know, part of Syria and so on and part of Lebanon, that the whole of Palestine for the first time was under Israeli control. And within two weeks of the war ending, they started, you know, first of all, their next Jerusalem. Then they didn't annex the other territories, but they started annexing them in reality. You know, the reality is also important, not just, you know, what people are pretending, like Netanyahu with his annexation saga. So basically, they started annexing the West Bank and, of course, Gaza and the Syrian Heights by building settlements there immediately, not waiting. Each of those wars has provided another set of opportunities to extend the Zionist project. I just want to say a few words about 1973. This is a war that Israel was surprised by. Actually, they believe this is not possible. They believe that they're totally safe from a war until somewhere in the mid-70s or the late-70s. This was the conception. And they almost lost. They lost a lot of people. They lost a lot of grounds. And in the end, they lost Sinai as well as a result of the peace agreement. What is interesting about that war is that all that Israel has said that they must sit on the waterline because it is a safer border. They had a safe border both with Egypt and according to them. And with Syria, it didn't matter. It didn't matter at all. They almost lost the plot and they couldn't actually come back for over 12 days. It took 14 days for them to turn it a bit. This is a very interesting war because it was not popular in Israel because it wasn't an IDF war. The IDF did not invent it. There was in Lebanon, I would like to talk about later on, probably, Gilbert can also relate to that. Each of those wars is playing a very different role in the rolling project of controlling Palestine and the Palestinians. Since 1967, of course, Israel is controlling 6 million Palestinians. Then it was about 4 million. And those Palestinians are not offered anything. Anything whatsoever apart from living under apartheid without rights, without a state, without an area of contiguity. Basically, the Palestinian Authority is existing on the internet because on the ground, it doesn't exist. And where it exists, is an appendage of Israel. So about half of the book is about that. And the other half of the book is about Israeli society around the arm, if you will, about the differences of class and ethnicity in Israel, and, of course, nationality. About the fact that Israel cannot, by definition, be democratic because it is a Spartan racial colony. At least the Spartans were not racist. Not in this way. And this is making it impossible for Israel to be a democratic state, not to talk about a peaceful state at all. And different ways in which Israel makes peace and a safe peace and a just peace, impossible. And some people I saw before commented on, is it possible... Many readers that have read the book said, I agree with everything, but it's actually very pessimistic. Well, I agree that it is pessimistic and you just need to listen to the news recently to realize that despite every single mistake that Netanyahu has made and his government has made, they are not going to lose control very quickly because of the things I have explained at the beginning, because of the IDF. It's the IDF that is in control rather than just a government. Can I come back to Shobat to come in with some more questions before we go to the comments from the audience? Yeah, thank you, Dina. I mean, Haim, you covered a lot of ground now in your presentation of the book. So let me just go back in some way to the guys of conclusion because after that we have to leave time for questions from the audience and we have five minutes. So this support of the Israeli Jews to the army, I would say that actually it's more than support. It's an identification with the army, isn't it? In the sense that, of course, I mean, the Israeli society like any society on earth is not monolithic and even if you let aside marginal differences but sometimes you have major splits in the Israeli public opinion but these are not splits between who is pro-army and who is against army. These are split within the army because everybody is the army. Everybody identifies with the army and that's why you see generals, you know, I mean, in the political arena. It's well known that if you look at the personnel, the Israeli political personnel, they all have a military pedigree and some of them are very high military people like Barak or Gantz or whoever. So you have this identification and you discuss it. It's related to the settler-colonial nature of the Israeli society. This is a nation in arms but not a revolutionary nation. It's a settler-colonial community in arms. So this is very specific and let me add one point and then you comment on that. There was the smith of the purity of the army which of course you discuss is well known and this has been very much affected by the invasion of Lebanon which made even the name Israel Defense Force something quite illusory and then the repression of the anti-father and other issues and yet this identification doesn't stop which would mean that we have such a shift to the right in the Israeli society that now there is a kind of cynical attitude that is okay even if we do very ugly things then we are in our right against the barbarians. Well first of all I want to read one sentence which I quote from Moshe Dayan. He says this is very ironic and actually funny but I don't think he noticed that it is funny. Dayan said that the Israeli Defense Force is a decidedly aggressive assault army in the way that it thinks the way that it plans the way that it implements aggression is in its bones and its spirit. He should know and he made it what it became. So first of all I want to say something about this identification with the army. This was a very long process because the army was led to begin with by officers from the Kibbutz movement. They were the great majority of the officers and they were supposedly left wing though the most left wing movement actually was also in different times the most aggressive. So there is no easy formulation here but in terms of identification Mizrachi Jews could not easily identify with the army with this type of army with these officers from the Kibbutzim. They actually didn't like the Kibbutzim at all because it was well known. So actually what has happened over the last 50 years is that the army has become much more representative of the Jewish Israeli society that Mizrachi people are better represented there on the office of all. It started as a secular army because the society was secular and now it is very much a religious army and the officers are very important. So this is the first thing that we need to consider how the army changes and how it is more representative of the society but also as you said the society identifies better and more closely with that army so that army can achieve its identification because it is now more representative in the old days it would be a job to achieve 80% support or even 75% support. Now it's easy. The whole Jewish population is supporting the army because it is its army. It is representing Israeli society after many years of working on Israeli society so that it represents the army agenda. So this is the process. The army is presenting an agenda educating a public, creating a nation. That's what educating a public is and in many instances this takes generations. It takes hundreds of years to create a nation normally but this is a fourth process under enormous pressure with an enormous machine pushing the process towards that identification and this is why it has become impossible and why it has become so popular in Israel the more right-wing the society is the more right-wing the army is it is representing society. So this is totally democratic in that sense. Okay. Gilbert, do you have another quick question or shall I move on to questions from the audience? Gilbert, here you are. Very little time is left. Of course we can spend hours discussing the army. Particularly what Gilbert referred to the IDF, the name of the army is quite interesting. The IDF, the Israeli Defence Force So I think some of the questions from the audience you've already answered and Gilbert very succinctly put together the questions around the settler, colonial and colonial nature of Israel in one of his questions. But I think a couple of questions that I would pose to you that came from the audience one of them is around the question of resistance and refuelling. Not only with the army but also the issue of resistance. How can you how can you how do you deal with this machinery the military the army and the political kind of complex how does it work in that context? So that's one question and the related question people wanted to know the relationship between the army most had and also to the question around the colonial, the ideological the ideological colonial rules of the army how it started and I think you explained that but maybe that's one of the questions which is the role of the colonialist ideology in the formation and expansion of the IDF. Sure. The resistance is very interesting. When I was in the army between 1964 and end of 1967 there was the beginning of resistance. I think the beginning of resistance was in 1965 and there was one very famous draft which resisted Giora Neumann who actually spent three years in jail. I was very impressed by his morality and stance that at the time at the age of 18 and this is not to justify it but I just lacked the moral courage to follow him and to resist the draft and so did many others there where every draft resistor was well known the names were posted and actually Yeshaiau Lebovich a very famous critic of Israeli fighting and especially of the occupation and of the army said that the minute there will be two thousand draft resistors the occupation will be over this is probably the only optimistic thing that he has ever said he was a pessimist like me but this was optimistic the army never had two thousand or one thousand or even two hundred draft resistors it wasn't like Vietnam there wasn't a movement this was you know drops here and there and this is still going on there are men and women courageous, moral principled we should all support him but we should understand one thing very quickly Israel is not going to change from within it is moving to the right and the few people of the left are leaving it rather than moving towards some kind of control anything else and you make a political mistake if you think that Israel will change itself will become humane you are making a very serious political error this will never happen South Africa did not change from inside it changed did change, not enough but it changed and ended up apart because it was under the most impressive pressure from outside and this pressure went on for 30 years and only then it started giving way Israel is much stronger than South Africa was in 1990 it is supported by the strongest nations and by most nations this is not what happened in the case of South Africa so in order to change Israel into a democratic society that will stop being a settler colonial racist state the most intense pressure I am not suggesting military pressure I am suggesting intense civic pressure of all societies everywhere and BDS is the beginning of that so resistance is important that we should see it in the right proportions we should support the resistance not because they are going to bring about a moral change in Israel now the IDF and the Mossad are basically a continuum and the Shabak and many other such dark organizations and they are working you know there is a revolving door between those organizations and people will from the army into the Mossad and from the Mossad into the army many army officers become the Mossad heads some people move from the Mossad into the army this is a real revolving door and of course the more technological the army becomes the more dependent it is on remote control systems of all kinds from drones to new technology of the web then this is the case even more so for example there are around 6000 students that spend the summer holidays working as trolls if you want inventing identities and writing comments maybe even to this talk I'm sure there will be quite a few comments by this unit in Central Israel that are created by imaginary people so there is enormous budgets that are put into fighting media fighting Palestine everywhere and this is you know both the Mossad the army the Shabbat of course all those feed into the government and to the ministries Israel is the idea ideologically that's an important question I wanted to start with saying that no no settler colonial state could operate without extreme violence it never happened it couldn't happen so one of the things that such societies need to do is to use arms to take territory and to either expel or kill millions of people how many millions of North American Indians were actually killed over two and a half centuries we don't even know but the numbers range between 15 million and 20 million so this is one of the largest holocausts and I would argue that this is the ideology behind America America was racist from the beginning and it's very interesting because these people were religious resistance fighters you know they suffered in Europe they went to America to run away from all kind of quite murderous campaigns against them by the time they came there they found the enemy and they spent the next two centuries of three centuries decimating it so that now we haven't got really the American they're not alive the real Americans they were killed so this was an ideology which most Americans are still behind but they're not actually understanding it is wrong and I think this is why a lot of Americans are supporting Israel especially the racist whites of the Christian born again group because they have never stopped being racist they are racist against blacks they are racist against Gicanos they are racist against Arabs Muslims they are racist against Jews because this is what their ideology requires you know all Jews will be going to hell when the second coming will appear but they have a role now and they have to play that role and Netanyahu is happy to play that role so ideologically it's very interesting the ideology of settler colonial states is actually quite simple it's about control now give it a number of ideological covers but that's what it is about and we need a project happening over 70 something years since the creation of Israel I think there was a question there was a question from which continues this topic which is around if you could comment on the central importance of the IDF in relation to the continuing settler colonial project and that is that not what makes it an indispensable institution settler colonial project is impossible without the IDF it wouldn't happen even it wouldn't last one day actually the only Israeli that most Palestinians meet are the IDF or the the IDF in civilian clothes which is the settlers who are basically part of the IDF and without that continuity between civic and military in Israel Israel could not survive as a colony that confusion that intentional confusion between the civic and the military which we see in the territories is essential for control there are in a sense no civilians in Israel in the sense that you and I are civilians you know there are no people like that in Israel in the Jewish community Palestinians are civilians most of them but not the Israeli Jews this is partly what we're talking about now of course without extreme violence extreme violence and I'm not just talking about extreme violence in terms of shooting people which happens every day I'm talking about the judicial violence the destruction of houses the judicial violence of not allowing people to build and destroying where they live the judicial theft of land the burning of trees the olive tree is the symbol of Palestine it's a very very old symbol it goes back before Jesus to burn olive trees is to burn Palestine is to burn Palestinian lives there are a number of apparitions and iterations of this violence not all of it is purely military but all of it is violent all of it is aggressive is illegal is immoral and this is the ideology and this is what Israelis are supporting because they know that without it they are not in control and without it they will have to go for a democracy not a Jewish democracy which means a democracy for Jews only but a democracy for everyone there are 12 million people in Palestine about half are Jews and half are not they are Palestinians if you actually pay for all of them Zionism will be dead Zionism doesn't want to die and doesn't want to give up control and ideologically that is more important than theft or right or any other kind of cover they may take every now and then the ideology is colonial is racist is apartheid this is the ideological basis and license to kill and to steal and to destroy and to expel so I have a couple of other questions which I think will be probably the last questions unless Bear wants to come back in at the end one of them from the audience is about if you could comment on a growing religious element in the army and the second one is to control the role of the IDF in controlling natural resources which is a big point of dispute so especially especially Walter how does the IDF control that these are questions from the audience and if you can just comment on them briefly I think these are very good questions I like them both Israel as I said started as a rather secular society and in a sense what they have managed to do is that the secular started believing in their propaganda and the propaganda was always based on the bible because what right do people from Europe and elsewhere have to remove Palestinians in their own country and then replace them they have no legal right or moral right to do that and so the bible was invented as the semi-legal background for this project of course the people that used the bible were not religious they were kind of a joke most Israelis don't believe in God they believe that God gave them the country and this is true about the people who have ran Zionism in 1948 and later for them this was just a ploy however because the educational system has used such toxic text like the book of Joshua I mean whoever didn't read the book of Joshua I ask you to do me a favor and do yourself a favor and read this toxic text it is about not just apartheid it is about genocide genocide not just of people but of animals of everything needs to be burned the seven people of Palestine need to be exterminated like vermin now historians doubt that this has ever happened but this is what we grew up on we grew up on these stories and believed in them and as a result we now have a majority of Israelis who are religious and the majority of Israelis who are religious about 54% now and grow by 50% every year are 90% against any rights for Palestinians 90% ok the Haredi are higher than 90% so they can't be a democracy in Israel because they will never allow even the Jewish democracy is not possible so this is about the role of religion in Israel and as I said the army represents Israel and reflects Israel so now the army is actually a religious organization as well religionized organization because of course this is serving its purpose so this is not very surprising it took few decades but it's not very surprising to see a way back because of the figures I mentioned about natural resources I have to say that you all know that colonialists are not friends of the environment imperialists are not friends of the environment but Israel is a very sophisticated colony it uses legislation about the environment for example to expel people from areas they want to build Jewish citizens so people who were in the case of one specific Um Hiran one community called Um Hiran they are Bedouins that were expelled to a certain territory in the Negev by the Israeli army in 1948 now they are expelled from their territory they were expelled too using all kind of legislation which is about the environment of course by the time they are gone they will build a Jewish city the plan of the Jewish city is already there and it is going to be called Hiran and they have done this almost everywhere almost everywhere they are actually flooding Palestinian neighborhoods with effluent this is what they do to the environment not just harming the Palestinian society but harming the land burning the trees millions of trees were probably burned in 1967 in the West Bank this is where they care about society and about the environment we've got maybe two more minutes Shalabab do you want to ask a final question or No I think I mean in two minutes it is too short and I think Haim gave a very comprehensive talk I would like just to end by saying that what is clear is that the IDF in Israel are not good for Palestinians this is not a high order to prove what I want to say is they are not good for Israelis they are not good for anybody they are not good for the environment full stop they are not good for rights they are not good for peace they are not good for the society in Israel and what this will lead to is probably a forced expulsion because this is what people are educated into people are educated into racism they accept it and they support it and I think it is up to the rest of us all around the world to stop this from happening this is our responsibility and we must take up this duty and do it like we did in the case of South Africa Yeah well thank you very much Haim that was really very interesting talk and a brilliant book I've got two copies actually if you need one I can send you one but otherwise thanks to Verso for posting this and thanks to all the questions that came through they would be very interesting and wish you a good evening good day bye thank you both