The recent recognitions of a Palestinian state and the October 10 ceasefire have been followed by a flurry of calls to “deradicalize” Palestinian society. The New York Times editorial board went so far as to compare this deradicalization project to the denazification of Germany after the Second World War.

These calls have the situation backwards to the point of farce.

It is not the Palestinian people, victims of decades of apartheid, internationally recognized illegal occupation, and now putative genocide, that need to be deradicalized. It is Israel, a society led by a political movement Albert Einstein and a group of prominent American Jews once called “closely akin… to the Nazi and Fascist parties.”

Einstein and his co-authors were writing in response to what they saw as the legitimation of Menachem Begin’s Nazi-like revisionist party Herut, a political formation they explain “formed out of the membership and following of the former Irgun Zvai Leumi, a terrorist, right-wing, chauvinist organization in Palestine.”

Even David Ben-Gurion, the first prime minister of Israel and no stranger himself to the project of ethnic cleansing (he oversaw the Nakba, after all), repeatedly compared Begin and his political movement to the Nazis. Begin, who was considered a terrorist by the British government in the 1950s, burst out of the political fringes in 1977 when he took power at the helm of the Likud coalition (Likud would become a political party in 1988). His principle political position at the time was his opposition to ending the occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, which Israel seized in 1967, and to the idea of a Palestinian state in those territories.

Benjamin Netanyahu’s political work began in 1984 after he returned to Israel from the United States, where he had worked for the Boston Consulting Group (the same firm hired to set up the infamous Gaza Humanitarian Foundation earlier this year). He was ambassador to the United Nations for a Likud coalition government from 1984-1988, became chair of Likud in 1993, and has helmed the party on and off ever since.

Today, Netanyahu presides over a government that fuses the long-standing ethno-nationalist ideology of Revisionist Zionism—exemplified by his repeated UN performances featuring maps of an expanded “Greater Israel”—with the even more extreme, millenarian current of Kahanism, represented by Ministers Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir.

Kahanism is named for the late Rabbi Meir Kahane, the founder of the Jewish Defense League, a North American organization that the FBI considers a right-wing terror group. In 1994, Baruch Goldstein, a member of Kahan’s Kach movement in Israel, killed 29 Palestinians and injured 125 more at a mosque in Hebron. Ben-Gvir, whose political party today is called “Jewish Power,” was a Kach youth activist in his early days and remains a committed Kahanist. In 1995, a year after Goldstein’s massacre, Ben-Gvir dressed up as Goldstein to celebrate the Jewish holiday Purim; he also proudly hung a photo of Goldstein in his home for years.

Ben-Gvir’s Jewish Power party holds six seats in Israel’s parliament and plays a pivotal role in Netanyahu’s Likud-led coalition. Smotrich leads the equally far-right National Religious Party–Religious Zionism, which holds another seven seats. Together with the ultra-nationalist Noam party, these factions control more than 10 percent of the Knesset.

Over a third of Israeli voters selected either Likud or the far-right electoral alliance—all of which have been compared, in various ways, to Nazism, and all of which espouse, to varying degrees, ideologies of Jewish supremacy and violent expansionism.

But these electoral figures don’t fully communicate the degree to which Israeli society is radicalized against Palestinian humanity. Polling conducted earlier this year by Tamir Sorek and summarized in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reveal astonishing levels of genocidal intent among the Israeli population.

According to the study, 82 percent of Israelis polled support the forced expulsion of the two million residents of Gaza; 56 percent support the expulsion of Palestinian citizens of Israel (around two million people); 47 percent support the statement, “when conquering an enemy city, the Israel Defense Forces should act as the Israelites did in Jericho under Joshua’s command—killing all its inhabitants”; and 65 percent believe there is a “modern-day incarnation of Amalek,” a biblical enemy that, according to scripture, was annihilated by the Israelites—a reference Netanyahu has repeatedly invoked during the assault on Gaza.

These sentiments hold even among secular Jews in Israel: 69 percent support the forced transfer of Gaza’s population and 31 percent consider the biblical story of Joshua’s assault on Jericho to be a model the IDF should follow.

Critics have challenged that survey by presenting another, conducted by Tel Aviv University, which found only 53 percent (rather than 82 percent) of Israeli Jews support forced population transfers of the people of Gaza.

Read that again: even the more optimistic study found that more than half of Israeli Jews support ethnic cleansing.

Israel is a society gripped by genocidal fervour and led by a convergence of a secular Jewish supremacist ideology that has long been the beating heart of Zionism and a newer millenarian religious ideology. There is no path to a lasting peace that does not address this reality.

Palestinian political movements have long been open to peaceful coexistence: the Palestinian Liberation Organization began calling for a single democratic state with equal rights for all in 1971. Hamas specifically has been willing to accept a Palestinian state within 1967 borders since 2017.

Israeli society and its leaders are openly unwilling to accept either of these solutions.

Western leaders are calling to “deradicalize” Gaza, where Israel has, according to a UN commission, an ever-growing list of human rights organizations, and the vast majority of experts, just committed genocide, while refusing to say a word about the increasingly fanatical nature of Israeli society.

It is the moral equivalent of demanding the deradicalization of the Warsaw Ghetto while arming Nazi Germany.

Nick Gottlieb is a climate writer based in northern BC and the author of the newsletter Sacred Headwaters. His work focuses on understanding the power dynamics driving today’s interrelated crises and exploring how they can be overcome. Follow him on X @ngottliebphoto.