This is Part 4 of a series, “Monsters and Machines: The Political Language of Fascist Imperialism,” part of my Little Book/Long Essay (LB/LE) series.
To listen to Part 4, click here.
To watch Part 4, click here.
Read Part 1: “To Make Lies Sound Truthful”: Orwell on Political Language
Listen to Part 1 here.
Watch Part 1 here.
Read Part 2: The Monster Method: Defining Fascism
Listen to Part 2 here.
Watch Part 2 here.
Read Part 3: When Monsters Make Empires: What is Fascist Imperialism?
Listen to Part 3 here.
Watch Part 3 here.
By: Andrew Gavin Marshall
One sentence summary: How the combination of an Orwellian political language of euphemism with a brutal language of fascism manifested in the genocide in Gaza.
In part 1, we examined George Orwell’s concept of ‘political language’ which is “designed to make lies sound truthful, murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” It is a language which hides and justifies the brutality of states and empires through the use of vague and euphemistic words and phrases that can make its speakers sound like machines. While political language can be used in many areas and contexts, for the purpose of this essay, I am focusing on the use of the language of machines when the machinery is that of empire. Thus, for the purposes of this essay and my argument, the language of machines is the language of empire. But I also introduce another form of political language, more evocative and emotional, a language of brutality – of hate, fear, and violence – with its fascist dialect, the language of monsters.
In part 2, we attempt to address one of Orwell’s main concerns about using clear and direct language. In his 1946 essay, he identified the term fascism as having already become almost meaningless. Eighty years later, it is likely that most people would be hard-pressed to express anything beyond a superficial or largely symbolic understanding of the term. For that reason, we took some time and effort to explore what fascism is, and subsequently, what fascist imperialism is, which was the focus of part 3. And then we applied our definition of fascism to the present day Israel and United States governments, and establish that they are, indeed, fascist regimes.
Now, in part 4, we get to the main focus: the language of fascist imperialism; the language of monsters and machines. We have established the nature and role of the political language of machines (and empire), as well as the political language of monsters (fascism), and now we explore how they are combined in order to support each other in the endeavour of building or expanding an empire through fascist imperialism. The first and most extensive focus is on Israel, since it has had a fascist government for roughly two years longer than the United States (since the end of 2022), and has been waging its wars of fascist imperialism since 2023. The United States gained its fascist government at the start of 2025 and launched its initial wave of fascist imperialism at the start of 2026 in Venezuela. These two regimes are at different places in their internal fascist development, as well as in their external empire-building, and may differ on overall interests and objectives, but they came together in an alliance of fascists to launch a war of aggression against Iran. This part focuses on the language of monsters and machines (fascist imperialism) in Israel from the start of the Gaza War in October 2023 to the joint US-Israel war on Iran (February 2026 – June?).
For those who have long followed the subject of Israel’s repression, colonization, and occupation of the Palestinians, the language of machines and monsters have always existed alongside each other. Racist, discriminatory, dehumanizing, and violent rhetoric has often accompanied the dry, lifeless, euphemistic language of occupation. In particular, the occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip that began with the 1967 war, nearly sixty years ago, put millions of Palestinians under Israeli military rule, with no civil or political rights. It established the occupation, and with it, an Israeli empire. This shaped the political language inside Israel, and among its allies in the West, and a shared language of empire – the language of machines – took hold in Israeli and western political systems. But born of this same occupation was a settler movement of religious extremists who had a vision of a future ‘Greater Israel’ to meet the promise of Biblical prophecy, to cleanse the land of non-Jews, to colonize, to settle, to expand. The settler movement in occupied Palestinian lands became a laboratory for right-wing religious extremist movements.
One such movement came to be identified as the Kahanists, named after a right-wing extremist rabbi, Meir Kahane (who had previously founded a paramilitary racist group in New York, the Jewish Defense League, which was eventually outlawed). After he moved to Israel and founded the Kach party and broader Kahanist movement, he generated a following of people who believed, as he did, that the Arabs (they never use the name Palestinian) must be expelled from all of the land, or turned into a people with slave status; that segregation and apartheid structures must be expanded beyond the barriers of the occupation and across Israel as a whole; that the liberal democratic political system must be replaced with an authoritarian religious theocracy. He was explicitly racist, imperialistic, and fascist, and he and his party were deemed to be beyond the pale even for mainstream Israeli society. Even the right wing Likud party, then led by Menachem Begin, a former Zionist terrorist leader in pre-Israel Palestine, refused to engage with Kahane or his ideas, and he along with virtually all other parties would stand and leave the Israeli Knesset (Parliament) when Meir Kahane would stand to speak during his very brief duration as a member of the Knesset, before he was ultimately banned for hate speech. And as I am sure you could imagine, to surpass the bar for hate speech against Arabs in Israel was surely a feat. But it was also a different time, many decades ago.
Kahane himself was assassinated in New York in 1990. But his legacy lived on in the actions of Jewish terrorists, such as Baruch Goldstein, who massacred Palestinians at prayer in an ancient mosque in Hebron in 1994, or the settler who assassinated the Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995, for having agreed to peace talks with the Palestinians. After several high-profile terrorist acts, the Kach party and Kahanist movement were outlawed as terrorist organizations. But its ideas lived on among a group of extremist settlers in the West Bank, and over time they founded organizations and parties that sought to pursue Kahanist ideals, and trained Israeli youths to become child soldiers in a paramilitary army inside the occupied West Bank (known as the ‘Hilltop Youth’ – these are the racist teenage boys that you see harassing and attacking Palestinian farmers and villagers on a daily basis), who have also engaged in numerous acts of terrorism, such as burning Palestinian families alive, including a baby, while they slept in their home. The Kahanists would agitate and frustrate even the Israeli army, let alone the Palestinians.
After years as a young activist getting arrested dozens of times for various provocations and racist acts, one prominent Kahanist even became a lawyer, and would go on to represent the Hilltop Youth and other Jewish terrorists. Over time and after several failed attempts, this lawyer would enter the Israeli Knesset under a new party, the Jewish Power party, the modern incarnation of the racist and fascist Kach party. Soon after, Benjamin Netanyahu would engineer this party into a coalition government under his leadership, and the party’s leader, a man named Itamar Ben-Gvir, would be given the cabinet position of National Security Minister with responsibility to oversee the police and prisons.
Thus, the political system and language of empire and occupation (the machines) created the conditions for the extremists and fascists (the monsters) to rise, explicitly from inside the occupation, but then to expand outward and take power in Israel itself. So, while there has long been a conversation between the language of machines and monsters in Israel, it took an increasingly dark turn after the establishment of the new government in late December 2022. Fascist language and fascist politics were now explicitly mainstream and in power, no longer relegated to the margins or dismissed as fringe. Fascism had taken political power. And after the Hamas attacks of October 7th, 2023, fascist imperialism would be the default response. As such, the language of monsters and machines became more entangled than ever before; the conversation had become a monologue, but one delivered by a deranged psychopath. It would appear as if the language of machines and monsters has become inseparable in Israel, and thus, that the project of empire is now inextricably linked to the project of fascism.
Though the explicitly fascist party – Jewish Power (Otzma Yehudit) – and its leader Ben-Gvir are not by far the most popular party or political leader in Israel, its ideas are increasingly part of the mainstream, and it becomes increasingly hard to distinguish political leaders based upon their rhetoric. The language of monsters and machines (fascism and empire) blends and becomes mutually reinforcing, as do their political projects and methods.
Israel’s fascist war began following the events of October 7th, 2023. It was clear from the start that this was going to be a different kind of war, with an unprecedented level of intensity and brutality. The Israelis were not simply aiming to address the threat posed to them by a militant armed resistance group inside the besieged territory of Gaza, but they were aiming to exact a punishment upon all of Gaza and its population, to impose a system of collective punishment (which is a war crime) on 2.3 million Palestinians trapped in a small and isolated territory. The Israelis were not only pursuing imperial objectives related to security and defense, but they were pursuing violent emotional objectives related to vengeance and brutality.
In the first days of the war, when Israel ordered roughly half the population of Gaza, some 1.1 million people, to flee south to the bottom half of the Strip, it was evident that mass displacement was going to be a prominent feature of this war. The order of displacement, or ethnic cleansing, was called an “evacuation,” and Israel warned that anyone who remained in the north of the Strip would be seen as “an accomplice in a terrorist organization.” In other words, Israel was determining that by virtue of your geographic location inside an enclosed territory, you would be designated as a terrorist and thus, your murder would be officially justified. This is the language of machines, of empire: when ethnic cleansing and mass displacement can be called evacuation. When Orwell described this same act with the political language of eighty years ago, he said mass displacement was translated into transfer of population. The Israeli version is even more cynical than this euphemism, since by framing it as an evacuation, they imply that it is being done for the good of the population, that it is a moral imperative, that they are saving the people from the death and destruction (that the Israelis are about to unleash). Such language is stated by the Israelis and then repeated by their allies and the media. The language of machines has always served to hide monstrous acts. As one Israeli military official put it, “This evacuation is for your own safety.”
It became quite clear, quite fast, that mass displacement was not the only threat to the Palestinians; Israel’s political language and actions had entered a genocidal stage. I do not intend to litigate the case for why Israel’s war on Gaza constitutes genocide: the case has been made and largely settled by others. Numerous human rights organizations, international bodies, and experts have come to the conclusion that Israel was and has been committing a genocide in Gaza, including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Israel’s own human rights groups B’Tselem, Physicians for Human Rights-Israel, and various UN bodies and experts, along with numerous scholars of genocide studies, including several of the top experts in the field. There is also an ongoing case against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) for committing genocide, and arrest warrants from the International Criminal Court (ICC) for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense minister, Yoav Gallant, for committing the crime of starvation. Establishing the case for genocide is not the focus of this essay; I continue on the assumption that the case has been made and settled.
But I want to provide the legal definition of genocide, as outlined in the UN Genocide Convention of 1948, that “genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such,” with the acts identified as: “(a) killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; and (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.” Important to keep in mind is the centrality of the “intent to destroy,” but also that this is qualified with the phrase, “in whole or in part.” In other words, genocide – and the intent to destroy a people – is not dependent upon the aim or actions to destroy the entire population, but could be aimed at “part” of the wider population or group, so long as it meets other aspects of the criteria, such as the fact that the “intent to destroy” is aimed at “a national, ethnical, racial or religious group” and specifically because they are members of that group. Thus, genocide is not something that can be identified only when it has succeeded in theoretically destroying or killing an entire group of people.
Genocide must be understood as a process, not an event or single outcome. Similar to how we defined fascism, we can also understand genocide as a method of politics that is concerned with issues of war, domination, nation, and empire. It, too, exalts in violent depraved fantasies made real, and is fuelled by a sense of victimhood, humiliation, and revenge. It aims to mobilize and incite significant segments of the population, and to take or consolidate power through mass death and destruction. The Nazi Holocaust is the most famous genocide, and the one that prompted attempts to define and prosecute the crime. That genocide was undertaken by the Nazis for both national and imperial objectives and rationales. They wanted to ‘cleanse’ their nation of Jews and other ‘undesirables,’ but there were limitations to how far the Nazis could initially go. When they came to power in 1933, they attempted to implement a boycott of Jewish businesses. It was a rapid and dramatic failure. The majority of Germans simply didn’t share the same Nazi zeal for anti-Jewish ideas and actions. German society had to be further radicalized, and the most extreme racial policies and objectives had to be less in the public view.
Initially, the Nazis simply wanted the Jews gone, to deport them to other countries and places. But the war changed everything. As Germany’s borders grew and its empire expanded, it found itself the ruler of many more millions of Jews and other ‘undesirable’ elements. Nazi policy during its fascist wars of conquest and subsequent occupations unleashed violence and brutality against the Jews and all those deemed enemies. The Nazis built up their vast system of concentration camps across Eastern and Central Europe, largely designed as labour or detention camps, at least initially. But as the war went on, and the number of Jews under German rule increased, the intentions and actions became explicitly genocidal, and concentration camps became death camps. The Holocaust was thus designed and implemented at an industrial scale. German fascism was concerned with issues of nation and empire; so too was the genocide it undertook, to cleanse the nation and rule the empire.
While this is the most famous genocide, it is far from the only one. Probably the vast majority of genocides in modern world history were perpetrated through imperial and colonial wars. The decimation of indigenous peoples across the Americas over the course of centuries is perhaps one of the most striking examples of understanding genocide as a method and process, rather than as a single event or objective. Imperial and colonial wars are most violent in the early stages of building the empire or the final stages of trying to keep it from falling apart. In these situations, they can often take on genocidal proportions. The French in Algeria, and the British in Kenya are two notable examples in the post-World War II period of imperial decline leading to wars approaching or reaching genocidal proportions. They were wars waged in response to armed movements resisting colonial governments and racist settler societies. While the tactics of the resistance was often described as terrorism, the response of the imperial powers was to resort to mass killing, displacement, and even corralling into concentration camps, ultimately murdering many hundreds of thousands. But in the end, they lost their colonies, which became new and politically independent nation states.
As empires declined and decolonization spread across much of the world in the post-World War II period, nearly one hundred new nations were formed out of the colonies of collapsed or declining empires. Just as genocide had its own unique characteristics during the imperial and colonial era of the 19th to early 20th centuries, so too would it take on distinct characteristics in the age of the nation-state, which became the predominant political unit of the global system. Nations that sought to create homogeneous societies often defined along ethnic, religious or racial lines, would frequently turn to violent and brutal tactics of domination, ethnic cleansing, expulsion, or mass killing and genocide. The method and process of genocide became a method of building and consolidating nations and states, of ‘cleansing’ the communities within their borders, of establishing their control over their territory and populations, of addressing threats to their power and enacting efforts to expand and consolidate that power. The Rwandan genocide of 1994 is an example of this post-colonial nation-state genocide, pitting one ethnic group against another, and in the context of an invasion and civil war, allowed them to wage a campaign of extermination framed as an act of self-defense.
Genocides can be understood as most common in the actions of colonial empires, or in the actions of states that used to be colonies. Nation and empire are linked in acts of genocide, even if indirectly and at a distance. War is central to the methods and process of both fascism and genocide; and whatever their motives, it is the methods that matter more. But in analyzing the uses of political language – both machines and monsters – we gain a better understanding of both.
The formula for interpreting political language is actually rather simple. Orwell warned that certain words and terms were “often used in a consciously dishonest way,” which, he explained, manifests when “the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different.” To identify and try to translate political language, you look at what is said, and then you look at what is done. If they do not align in a meaningful way, and yet the policy does not change over time, then you can assume that the policy is correct, but the description or justification of it is wrong or deliberately misleading. Yet, if the language does not change, and the policy does not change, then they are both assumed to be correct in the eyes of the policymakers. Therefore, when words and phrases do not align with actions and outcomes, and yet both continue uncorrected, those words and phrases have a unique meaning to the person saying them, and we can translate them based upon their effect.
For example, Israel’s use of the word “evacuation” to describe the policy of ordering the population of northern Gaza to flee south for their own safety, often presented as a kind of ‘humanitarian’ action as evidence of Israel’s ‘moral’ superiority, is understood and translated best by what it looks like on the ground: mass forced displacement through violence and the threat of violence; ethnic cleansing, mass killing, spreading fear and terror. That, then, is the definition of evacuation when used by Israel in the context of dealing with the Palestinians. To those policymakers who use the term “evacuation,” they understand the true context in which it is implemented: the mass killing, displacement, and terror. But because neither the language nor the policies change, we are left with the assumption that “evacuation” simply means something different to those who say and advocate it in this context, versus many who listen and think it is representative of Israel’s “moral” methods of waging war. The reality, is of course, relentlessly immoral and wrong. The machine language hides monstrous policies. But with fascist imperialism and genocidal mania gripping the country of Israel and guiding its government’s actions, the monstrous was immediately mainstream and heavily empowered. The language wasn’t simply hiding or obscuring monstrous actions, it was openly and blatantly encouraging monstrous acts.
Typically, one of the greater challenges of litigating a case of genocide is to prove intent, precisely due to the reasons we have discussed – political language obscures rather than enlightens, and especially when it comes to committing monstrous crimes for fanatical reasons, people are unlikely to be so explicit in explaining their intent to commit such horrifying crimes. Most criminals try to avoid publicly incriminating themselves. But there has to be enough said publicly to help facilitate dehumanization of a target group and to incite fear, humiliation, and desires for vengeance in other population groups – reflected through the language of monsters. And that is where you have to try to decipher the intent. But in the case of Israel and the Palestinians of Gaza, intent was quite clear from the beginning.
A non-profit group, Law for Palestine, published an open, online database of over 500 statements made in the aftermath of October 7th 2023, which could constitute incitement to genocide, and which were said by numerous Israeli cabinet ministers, the prime minister, Knesset members (parliamentarians), military leaders, security officials, former government and security officials, journalists, and others. Then-defense minister Yoav Gallant memorably announced the “complete siege on the Gaza Strip,” declaring: “There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed… We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly.” Gallant on numerous occasions announced that, “I have removed all restraints” on Israeli military actions in Gaza, warning that, “Gaza will not return to what it was.” He also stated, “We will eliminate everything.” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu proclaimed that, “Gaza is the city of evil, we will turn all the places in which Hamas deploys and hides into ruins. I am telling the people of Gaza – get out of there now. We will act everywhere and with full power.” Netanyahu also frequently employed religious rhetoric, saying, “We are the people of the light, they are the people of darkness,” and invoking the Biblical enemy of the Jews, Amalek, who God apparently called upon the Jews to commit a genocide against, to kill every man, woman, child and animal. Netanyahu early on stated, “You must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible.” Netanyahu also stated, “We’re facing monsters… This is a battle not only of Israel against these barbarians, it’s a battle of civilization against barbarism.” Statements also came from the more centrist, respected political figure of Isaac Herzog, the president of Israel (a largely ceremonial position), who declared in the immediate aftermath of the October 7 attacks that, “It’s an entire nation out there that is responsible. This rhetoric about civilians not aware, not involved, it’s absolutely not true.”
Various Israeli cabinet ministers and members of the Knesset showed little restraint in their choice of words. Revital Gottleib of Netanyahu’s Likud party posted on twitter: “Bring down buildings! Bomb without distinction!” and called to “Flatten Gaza. Without mercy!” Another Likud Knesset member, Ariel Kallner, called for a “Nakba,” using the term used by the Palestinians to describe the 1948 ethnic cleansing and expulsion of Palestinians from their land when Israel was established, posting online: “Right now, one goal: Nakba! A Nakba that will overshadow the Nakba of 48.” The education minister, Yoav Kisch, said of those he described as his enemies in Gaza, “I relate to them like Amalek… Those are animals, they have no right to exist. I am not debating the way it will happen, but they need to be exterminated.” Other politicians called to “Erase Gaza,” while a military official responsible for managing Israel’s occupied territories stated, “You wanted hell, you will get hell.” Many lawmakers invoked the Biblical enemy of “Amalek,” while calling for “no mercy,” while some called for resettlement of Gaza by Israelis, that the borders of Gaza will change, and called for “razing Gaza” to the ground, to “expel them all.” There were also politicians who called for imposing a system of “hunger and thirst among the Gaza population,” and many supported the withholding of any aid for the people of Gaza.
Itamar Ben-Gvir, the National Security Minister and the most extreme of Israel’s government ministers, said, “the only thing that needs to enter Gaza is hundreds of tons of explosives by the Air Force, and not an ounce of humanitarian aid.” Another Knesset member said, “Erase all of Gaza from the face of the earth… Gaza should be erased,” and warned that the “Gazan monsters” could try to escape into Egypt “or they will die.” Another Likud member said, “The war will never end if we don’t expel them all.” One Knesset member and a minister in the government (from Ben-Gvir’s fascist Jewish Power party) even suggested that, “One of the options is to drop an atomic bomb on Gaza.” Another minister said on television that, “We’re doing a Gazan Nakba 2023.” The deputy speaker of the parliament, from the Likud party, complained, “We are too humanitarian,” adding, “We have to burn Gaza now, nothing less!” Another Knesset member declared, “There are no innocent people in the Gaza Strip.” Minister Ben-Gvir stated: “Let it be clear, when they say that Hamas has to be eliminated, it also means those who celebrate, those who support, and those who give away candy, all of these are terrorists. And they also need to be eliminated!”
This hardly constitutes the machine-like political language that Orwell described as consisting “largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness.” Instead, this language is quite blunt, direct, overtly dehumanizing, violent, and highly incriminating. With explicit calls for brutal vengeance, mass displacement, mass destruction, and even elimination, this clearly constitutes a language of monsters. This language, so much of it coming from government officials, politicians, and military and security elites, reflected a genocidal and fascist transformation taking place in Israeli society, unleashing a political force that was about to be expressed most brutally and directly in the Gaza Strip. Israel’s burgeoning fascism has collided with an imperial (“security”) crisis, and the result is a genocidal war in Gaza and a wider unleashing of fascist imperialism across the region. And this would require a constant, evolving conversation between both of these forms of political language, that of monsters and machines (fascism and empire). In the immediate aftermath of October 7th, however, the language of monsters was most prevalent. In fact, the widespread use of openly genocidal language began to raise eyebrows abroad and concern at home. Israel’s attorney general, hardly an ally of the sitting government (who wants her fired), warned as early into the war as November 2023 that government officials should be cautious when using incendiary language, saying in a television interview that, “These remarks give support to those who wish us ill because they [the statements] are against the rule of international law and are interpreted as a war crime.” Prime Minister Netanyahu warned his ministers directly, “you need to learn to keep quiet and to not say things you regret a day later.”
It’s worth asking the question that, if this language is so direct and violent, can it be considered a form of political language at all, which Orwell defined as consisting of “euphemism” and “sheer cloudy vagueness”? Well, it is political language by definition, since it is language used by political elites and helps to shape political decisions and outcomes. Does that mean, then, that Orwell’s definition of political language no longer applies? Has it become outdated? Have we now returned to a time of direct and honest political communication? Of course not! So we have to differentiate between the kinds of political language. There is the vague and euphemistic language that Orwell described, which I have otherwise referred to as the language of machines – or the language of empire, but it perhaps even better to think of it as the common tongue of the political establishment. I generally use the term empire throughout this essay because my focus is on the imperial aspects of political language, but it is more broadly representative of the language of political elites.
But then there is that other category of political language we have identified, which spreads hate, fear, racism, discrimination, extremism, and violence. We have a language that hides these things, and a language that celebrates them. We can broadly identify this latter category as a language of brutality, and it serves as the basis for our more specific category related to fascism and genocide, the language of monsters – a language which seeks to incite, justify and glorify monstrous acts to make monstrous fantasies a reality. When this language enters the mainstream of politics, it does not replace the language of machines, but it coexists alongside it. In our previous attempt to define fascism, we examined how when fascists entered power, they did so in cooperation with existing, usually conservative, establishment elites. Perhaps as a linguistic reflection of this process, the political language of monsters must accommodate itself to and integrate itself with the language of machines. One does not replace the other so long as both sources of political language remain empowered. If fascism continues to exist as a form of cooperation with other elites, we should expect both forms of political language – that which is extreme and that which is vague and detached – to persist alongside each other.
If the language of monsters ever becomes the singular political language of a society, than it is likely that a genocidal and/or fascist regime is in the last stages of its radicalization, and is approaching a violent self-destruction. If the language of machines becomes once again dominant and pushes the other to the margins, it is likely to reflect a political reality in which the establishment has effectively asserted control over or removed and sidelined the extremists. But the language should not simply be understood as a response or reaction to political processes, it is also central to driving them. Orwell emphasized this point when he observed that, “if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.” Fascist language fuels fascist politics, advancing fascist objectives, which legitimizes fascist language. It’s not simply a matter of language reflecting the political reality, but that it is actively helping to shape it.
The willingness of elites to cooperate with fascists in power is reflected in how the language of machines coexists and interacts with the language of monsters. And just as the power-sharing deals between fascists and elites serve mutual purposes, so too does the mixing of language. For the fascists, they gain entry to power and wider political legitimacy. For the establishment, they gain a legitimacy that comes with a more popular appeal that fascists bring. Because the language of machines is deliberately vague, misleading, and empty of meaning, it inspires little among the public, even when hiding monstrous and horrifying things. But that is its purpose, it is designed to satiate and obfuscate, not instigate and inspire. Fascist language appeals to evocative images and emotions, which can generate a popular appeal, and thus, a degree of political legitimacy. For elites and institutions – for the machine politics of the establishment – their dedication to sounding like machines has made them detached and lacking in legitimacy among the wider public. To embrace fascist politics – and the language of monsters – alongside their machine-like mother tongue, can be understood as an attempt to gain legitimacy by attaching themselves to the mass base of support that fascist movements attempt to develop. This helps to explain why, when many establishment politicians find themselves struggling to connect with the public and maintain legitimacy, they sometimes turn to racism, xenophobia, transphobia, misogyny, and homophobia.
The languages of monsters and machines can therefore be mutually reinforcing, each providing the other with a degree of legitimacy and access to power. But their combination can create the basis for a fascist and/or genocidal government, state, and society. Israel is a clear example of this. But Israel has long experienced a combination of both of these forms of political language, a reflection of – and support to – the political realities of settler-colonialism, occupation, and domination over millions of Palestinians without political or civil rights. A language of brutality long predated fascism’s rise in Israeli politics, but it helped to make its rise more rapid. And once fascism assumed power, the language of brutality became even more explicitly monstrous. The language of monsters and machines has made possible the rule by monsters and machines.
The effects of this language, and the ideas and actions that propel it and result from it, are clear to see in the ruined landscape that was once the Gaza Strip, now largely, as Netanyahu had promised in those first days of the war, turned into a city “of ruins.” The population has been subjected to endless terror, bombings, starvation, decimation, and genocide. The details of death and destruction are beyond the scope of this essay, but needless to say, Israel has largely carried out – or is still carrying out – many of the wishes and objectives articulated in those first days and weeks of war, to flatten Gaza, to re-occupy and settle the land, and to do all it could to expel and ethnically cleanse the Palestinian people from their land. But to some degree, the language of those first few weeks and months has followed the advice of Netanyahu when he told his ministers to “learn to keep quiet.” Especially with a criminal case going to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) accusing Israel of genocide, and International Criminal Court (ICC) arrest warrants out for Prime Minister Netanyahu and his then-defense minister Yoav Gallant for various war crimes, it was seen as important to better manage their use of political language.
To be sure, the language of monsters was still part of the mainstream, and particularly from the more monstrous (fascist) political parties and politicians, but the language of machines reasserted itself at the center. Israel’s nation and empire has long employed a language of machines that was built around the concepts of security and defense, giving it a distinctly militaristic quality. This has been the case from the origins of the state in 1948 to the start of the occupation in 1967, right up until present – both nation and empire expressed and expanded through a dialectic of security and defense. This more than Hebrew is the mother tongue of the Israeli political and military establishment, and society more broadly. Thus, those who espouse the language of monsters – of hate and violence – are equally capable of adopting the standard dialect. What were in late 2023 open calls for ethnic cleansing and a new Nakba against the Palestinians in Gaza, to eliminate and destroy, have now largely (though not exclusively) become more sanitized, dulling, and vague discussions about “buffer zones” and “voluntary emigration.”
Israel had long been creating “buffer zones” inside occupied Gaza. As Israel occupied new territory in Gaza, it destroyed all the buildings and infrastructure that constituted Palestinian life and society. It was a forward trajectory of scorched earth policies, destroying all in its wake, making it unliveable. This strategy of destruction began with a so-called “buffer zone” along the inside of Gaza’s border with Israel, stretching into Palestinian, not Israeli territory. The Israeli foreign minister at the start of the war, Eli Cohen, said that Gaza’s territory would have to “decrease,” whereas former Shin Bet chief Avi Dichter said: “On the Gaza Strip all along, we will have a margin. And they will not be able to get in. It will be a fire zone. And no matter who you are, you will never be able to come close to the Israeli border.” In justifying these destructive operations, an IDF spokesman said, “the IDF is locating and destroying terror infrastructures embedded, among other things, inside buildings. This is part of the imperative actions that are needed in order to implement a defense plan that will provide improved security in southern Israel.” All actions, no matter how destructive, are justified as “destroying terror infrastructure.” This is a language all Israelis can understand and find legitimacy within.
Two Israeli authors actually wrote a book on the subject of language during the Gaza war, titled, “A Lexicon of Brutality,” focusing on how the language of the war finds its origins before the war, but collectively shapes the Israeli perceptions about Palestinians. The fact that IDF generals would say things like, “there are no uninvolved people in Gaza,” as in, implying that all Palestinians of Gaza are to be held responsible for the October 7 attacks, or that Palestinians were being displaced and relocated to so-called “humanitarian zones” that were anything but, or that Finance Minister Smotrich would call for the “depopulation” of Gaza and the “voluntary emigration” of its people, all filtered through the media and public discourse of the war and into the consciousness of Israelis. One of the authors of the book, a sociologist, commented that in normalizing such language, “we’re becoming a brutal society.” The second author, a historian, stressed that these rationales didn’t begin with October 7th, but have their origins in the 1948 Nakba, when “Israel deported hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, destroyed villages, allowed the public to loot the property of their former neighbors, to dry out orchards and fields, and to use great physical violence.” But he added that the current Israeli government was exceptional in how it stood out: “That is, there is an explicit policy of transfer, murder and starvation, and this is leading more and more people in Israel and around the world to blame Israel for perpetrating the crime of crimes: genocide.” The sociologist noted that the current war was notable for “the brutal use of words. There’s no longer any shame or desire to conceal… From the first moment, the leaders have been saying exactly what they’re going to do – and they do exactly that.”
In Gaza, Israel destroyed entire cities, such as Rafah in the south, turning it into a so-called “buffer zone.” For much of the war, Israel would order Palestinians in Gaza to “evacuate” (read: be displaced to) areas it called “humanitarian zones” or “safe zones.” These places turned out to be exceedingly dangerous, lacking in resources to sustain life, lacking the ability to house the numbers of displaced persons, subjected to ongoing Israeli attacks, including using massive bombs, and even locating them in areas that Palestinians could not go to. Eventually, Israel had made the concept of a “humanitarian zone” or “safe zone” so meaningless that it dropped its practice of using the terms altogether, instead just focusing on establishing “buffer zones” and “no-go zones.” Less euphemistically but perhaps more horrifyingly, Israel even established “kill zones” inside Gaza, where any Palestinian who crossed the boundary into often arbitrary and unmarked areas would be murdered, otherwise called a “combat zone.” A Gaza “buffer zone” would in effect become a “kill zone” for Palestinians. Notably, the new border buffer zone that Israel demolished into Gaza along the border with Israel became a permanent ‘kill zone‘ for Gaza’s residents.
Behind this euphemistic and sanitized, vague language of machines was a brutal reality of mass displacement, ethnic cleansing, genocide, and occupation. Gaza itself has been devastated beyond recognitions, with various reports indicating between 60% and 70% of all buildings in the Gaza Strip damaged or destroyed, including 89% of the buildings in the city of Rafah, 78% of Gaza City, and 84% of Northern Gaza. Israel has undertaken repeated attacks on healthcare facilities, infrastructure, and personnel, killing an average of two healthcare workers every day, over 1,700 by October 2025. Nearly 90% of Gaza’s schools have been damaged or destroyed. Israel has killed upwards of 200 journalists in Gaza since the war began, some counts put the number above 261, and that of the unprecedented 129 journalists killed around the world in 2025, Israel was responsible for killing two-thirds of them, most of them Palestinians, and of the 47 journalist and media worker killings that were classified by the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) as deliberately targeted, Israel was responsible for 81% of those murders. These realities are both obscured and made real by the uses of political language. The vast destruction wrought onto places like Rafah and northern Gaza were described as establishing buffer zones. Palestinians were displaced and ethnically cleansed into humanitarian zones, which the Israelis would then bomb. The language of machines hides monstrous actions.
By late 2025, after the ceasefire was announced, Israel controlled more than 50% of Gaza. The US military helped to devise a plan to divide Gaza into two areas: the “Green Zone” occupied by Israeli forces, which will be rebuilt, and the “Red Zone” in which Hamas rules, where the Palestinian population is crushed into crowded camps and tent cities. Between the two is a so-called “Yellow Line” that divides the territories. This colour-coded language sanitizes the reality on the ground: the so-called red zone is a wasteland of ruins in which most of Gaza’s 2 million residents are pushed into less than half of the Strip they had at the start of the war. The green zone is another wasteland, but one being cleared out by bulldozers so that US and other developers can come make shiny high-tech cities and ritzy resorts for their rich friends (the so-called “New Gaza”), and so that Israelis can realize their dangerous fantasies of resettling the land.
The red zone is a giant displacement camp, and the green zone is the area for the colonization that follows the destruction of Gaza’s society and the ethnic cleansing of its people. This so-called “reconstruction” is not taking place in the red zone, where all aid and rebuilding materials is severely restricted by the Israeli army, and where most of the population reside. The yellow line that separates the red and green zones is a “new border,” according to the top general in the IDF. But crossing the yellow line, if you are Palestinian, is a death sentence. As the Israeli defense minister stated, anyone who dared to cross the line would be “met with fire.”
These are the conditions that prevail under the “ceasefire” agreement between Israel and Hamas agreed in October 2025, the so-called “Gaza peace plan” negotiated by the Trump administration. The word ceasefire has a unique meaning when used by Israel. While for most, it means to cease firing, for Israel it means that the other party must cease firing back, but Israel itself can continue to bomb and kill at will, though preferably at a reduced rate. In the first six months following the October 2025 ceasefire, Israel had murdered over 750 Palestinians in Gaza, whereas Hamas or other armed groups killed four Israeli soldiers. In its first six months, Israel violated the ceasefire over 2,400 times, including with 1,100 bombings and 920 shootings resulting in the killing of over 750 people. While this is certainly a reduced rate of bombing and killing from that which prevailed prior to the “ceasefire,” it can hardly be described as having ceased the firing, at least on Israel’s part. By mid-May, over 850 Palestinians in Gaza had been reported to be killed by Israel since the ceasefire went into effect, and that this killing increased during the Iran war, and increased still further after there was a ceasefire declared between the US and Iran.
And the occupation itself expanded. In May of 2026, Prime Minister Netanyahu acknowledged that Israel now controlled roughly 60% of the Gaza Strip, a larger share than was permitted under the US-backed ‘ceasefire’ agreement. Netanyahu declared, “In the past two years, we have shown the world what immense power is inherent in our people, in our state, in our army, in our heritage… We rose like a lion, we roared like a lion. The greatest thing we did was break the barrier of fear. We brought all our hostages home, to the very last one. Today we control 60 percent.”
Just as numerous ministers and officials promised at the start of the Gaza war, Gaza’s borders will change as a result of the war, implying that Israel will seize more territory. The establishment of buffer zones is the method for pursuing this policy. The actions of violently expelling or killing a population, decimating and razing their homes, communities, cities and society to the ground, and then stealing the land is filtered through the political language of security and defense – the machine language of the Israeli political and imperial establishment – and comes out as phrases like establishing a buffer zone, building a security perimeter, or designating areas as part of the red zone or green zone. This is how political language makes ethnic cleansing and genocide sound vague and technocratic.
One is reminded of how the Jewish intellectual Hannah Arendt, who herself narrowly escaped Nazi Germany, wrote about the trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the top architects of the Nazi Holocaust against the Jews, when he was tried and subsequently executed in Jerusalem in 1961. In reflecting upon Eichmann’s last words, a kind of boiler-plate eulogy one would expect someone to give if it wasn’t their own funeral, Arendt wrote: “It was as though in those last minutes he was summing up the lesson that this long course in human wickedness had taught us – the lesson of the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil.” Arendt elaborated on the idea of the banality of evil, observing that for Adolf Eichmann, “Except for an extraordinary diligence in looking out for his personal advancement, he had no motives at all… He merely, to put the matter colloquially, never realized what he was doing… He was not stupid. It was sheer thoughtlessness – something by no means identical with stupidity – that predisposed him to become one of the greatest criminals of that period… That such remoteness from reality and such thoughtlessness can wreak more havoc than all the evil instincts taken together which, perhaps, are inherent in man – that was, in fact, the lesson one could learn in Jerusalem.”
Arendt’s concept of the banality of evil grasps at an important truth, that acts and objectives of evil can and often are filtered through a kind of technical, bureaucratic machinery. The Nazi Holocaust of Jews was not simply the violence and visceral brutality of gas chambers and massacres, but it was also the result of memos typed by secretaries for officials hundreds of kilometers away in Berlin, or discussions on the logistics of railway transportation systems, labour inputs, quotas, lodging units, and levels of industrial production. There is a scene in the award-winning film, The Zone of Interest, which tells the story of the family of Rudolf Hoss, the commandant of Auschwitz concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland. The film is a uniquely remarkable Holocaust movie in that it does not show any acts of violence on screen, nor does it even show anything inside the concentration camp. It takes place directly outside the walls of the camp, where the family – Hoss’s wife and children – built their dream home, with a large garden and small swimming pool for the children. All around them is the machinery of pure evil: the trains arriving in the background with new victims aboard, the constant ringing out of gunshots from inside the camp, the smokestacks burning the bodies of murdered Jews all through the night. But for the family, it was their own small paradise, inviting family and friends to visit for garden parties with kids at play in the pool. But the evil was an inescapable part of their lives. The father would return from “work” and have a concentration camp prisoner clean his boots. His wife would try on fur coats and lipstick plundered from murdered Jewish women, and hand out clothes once worn by murdered children to her housekeeping staff. And while the film did not show the horrors of the gas chambers killing thousands, it had a scene in which the industrial manufacturers of the gas chambers came to the Hoss household to discuss their designs for the updated model, walking Rudolf Hoss through the logistics of how the gas chamber works at such an efficient scale at handling “the loads.”
This film perfectly encapsulated Arendt’s concept of the banality of evil; that such monumental evil can coexist with and is even a product of such seemingly benign, technocratic and bureaucratic processes. When people conjure images of gas chambers, they understandably imagine those who are stripped and hoarded into them, left to await their fate in unbelievable fear as they peer at the shower faucets; they do not typically imagine a group of men sitting around a kitchen table pouring over engineering blueprints. People may imagine – as was portrayed in other films like Schindler’s List – visuals of women with their heads crudely shaven being lined up and walked into an underground chamber with a fuming smokestack above them; they do not typically imagine the commandant’s wife, Hedwig Hoss, standing in front of the mirror modelling her new fur coat or a trying out a new shade of lipstick taken from those women marching into the gas chambers. The banality of evil is not about a technocratic and emotionally detached form of evil replacing the more visceral, violent and fanatic depictions of evil with which we are more familiar; it is about recognizing that both coexist and mutually support one another. In this sense, Arendt was articulating something not unlike Orwell’s own discussion of political language. Arendt even referred to the role of language in her initial quote, writing that one of the great lessons of “human wickedness” was found in “the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil.”
In the Zone of Interest, not only was the banality of evil present in the depiction of the family home, but this was also a manifestation of the attempt of fascists (and genocidal mania) to try to make their fantasy worlds into a reality. Locations of great evil and brutality also became areas to experiment with and attempt to build a new society, a ‘new man’, a new empire, to make the fantasies that motivated this death and destruction into a reality. For the Hoss family, this was the dream home situated on the outside of the walls of Auschwitz. Behind those walls was an unending eruption of human wickedness; but on the outside, a paradise of flowers, parties and a pool. The Hoss family had wanted to move to the east – to Nazi-conquered and occupied territories – where they could realize their dreams, build a home they could never afford in Berlin, raise their family with great privilege and opportunity, have servants, host social events, and live their dream of having a country home. Shortly after she died in 2023, an interview was published with the daughter of Rudolf and Hedwig Hoss, who moved to their home outside Auschwitz camp at the age of seven. “I remember we had fun,” she recalled, “We had a little swimming pool in the backyard. And my mother had a beautiful garden house with flowers.” She described her mother as “a nice person” who was known as “the Angel of Auschwitz.” On her father, the camp commandant who managed the mass murder of roughly one million people, a huge percentage of which were children, she reflected: “He was a wonderful dad… He was a wonderful, absolute wonderful person… I couldn’t have wished for a better father,” and added that, “We didn’t even know what his work was really,” though acknowledged, “I’m sure my mom knew what was going on.” Both visceral and banal evil coexist and mutually reinforce one another, just as I have argued in this essay in terms of understanding the relationship between the language of monsters and machines.
In the context of Israel, we see the banality of evil in all the political language of machines that hide monstrous acts. And just as we see such banality behind words and phrases like “red zone” and “buffer zones,” hiding the realities of brutality, violence and destruction, we also see the construction of fantasy worlds. But we are also able to witness the fantasies of the fascists playing out, particularly in the motives and actions of the settler movement.
Almost as soon as the war began, a settler movement emerged that was advocating for the resettlement of Gaza following the war. This would imply a permanent Israeli settler and military presence inside Gaza, and an ongoing process of ethnic cleansing. In January of 2024, a few months into the war and genocide, a major settler conference was held bringing thousands of settlers and right-wingers together to propose and plan to build a host of new settlements in Gaza, including recruiting families to be among the first to go. Among those attending and speaking at the conference were 11 ministers of the sitting government, and 15 members of the Israeli parliament (the Knesset) who came from parties of the governing coalition. Those attending included two ministers from the Religious Zionism party, including its leader Bezalel Smotrich, finance minister and special minister inside the defense ministry with responsibility for the West Bank; and all the cabinet members from the overtly supremacist party, Jewish Power, with its leader Itamar Ben-Gvir, who was also invited as a special speaker. It also included five sitting ministers from Prime Minister Netanyahu’s Likud party. Smotrich declared, “God willing, we will settle and we will be victorious.” Ben-Gvir declared, “Without settlement, there is no security. And without security on Israel’s borders, there is no security in any part of Israel.” With endorsement of settlement came endorsement of expulsion of the Palestinian population of Gaza, though using the euphemism of encouraging “voluntary migration” to justify their vision of ethnic cleansing.
We see the ongoing use of political language here, even among the most fascist and extremist of political leaders. Ben-Gvir’s comment was particularly enlightening, saying, “Without settlement, there is no security.” This describes the process of settler-colonialism, of occupying and displacing the indigenous population (Palestinians) in order to build your own homes, communities and society – to clear and then settle, to colonize the land. The language of security of course invokes the language of empire, but it hides the brutality of what Ben-Gvir advocates. To settle is to colonize and displace – even through genocidal acts if need be, and from this process, security will be established. In this sense, security is understood as the absence of Palestinian resistance, to subdue, suppress, kill or otherwise remove the threat of Palestinian resistance (to Israeli occupation, siege, colonization, genocide, apartheid, etc.). But for Ben-Gvir, who embraces a Kahanist fascist ideology, and believes that “the Arabs” should be expelled or reduced to the status of a slave class, the problem is the existence and presence of the Palestinian people themselves. The threat is not their response or reactions to being repressed and killed, but the threat is their existence and presence, full stop. Therefore, security can only be achieved through removing the threat – removing the people. To ensure that they are removed and never return, Ben-Gvir and the other attendees at the conference believed that “settlement” – mass displacement and colonization – were the only answer. We might be reminded of history, when the Nazis imagined the solution to the “Jewish question” to be to expel the Jews from Germany. But when Germany’s borders expanded and its empire conquered new lands, to settle and build a vast “thousand year Reich,” the number of Jews under German control grew many times more. As expulsion became a harder policy to implement, with few countries in the world willing to take in Jewish refugees, the logic of genocide became official policy. “Without settlement, there is no security.” Without displacement, there is no control.
This logic plays out in Gaza. The state seeks to establish “security” through the construction of buffer zones, vast wastelands of destruction of Palestinian life and society, and create a newly occupied Israeli zone of interest (to borrow the title of the film referenced above). The settlers – an array of racists, religious extremists, and fascists – offer (unsurprisingly) settlement as the solution: to displace, destroy, kill, colonize and control the land, to make it Jewish and build their own communities there. They want to realize their fascist fantasies in the occupied Gaza Strip. But to do so would require a genocidal policy. They learned their techniques from the Jewish supremacist fantasy land of the occupied West Bank, where they are able to employ strategic uses of terror, violence and intimidation to displace dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of Palestinians from large swathes of territory, all with the active protection of the Israeli army. In Gaza, however, it requires overwhelming violence, destruction, and mass killing to remove hundreds of thousands or millions of people from even less land. In Gaza, Israel occupies a relatively small piece of land with a large concentration of Palestinians. If security – the absence of Palestinian resistance – is the goal, directly occupying and overseeing millions more Palestinians without rights makes Israel less secure, not more. Unless they are able to expel the Palestinian population to other countries, which is described with terms like “voluntary migration,” the logic of genocide will build, and the settlers get closer to realizing their fantasies.
Officially, Israel does not endorse the Jewish settlement of Gaza. Though nearly a third of Netanyahu’s government (11 of 37 cabinet ministers) attended the settlement conference, in addition to 15 members of the Knesset from the ruling coalition built around his party, the Likud, prime minister Netanyahu attempted to distance himself and Israel’s policy from the actions and statements of many of its ministers. While government ministers like Ben-Gvir took the stage and said, “We must encourage voluntary migration. Let them leave,” Netanyahu initially replied by saying that ministers were “entitled to their opinions.” But eventually Netanyahu was pressured to release a statement, in English (i.e., for a foreign audience), where he said he wanted “to make a few points absolutely clear,” that, “Israel has no intention of permanently occupying Gaza or displacing its civilian population, and we are doing so in full compliance with international law.”
While officially, the government did not embrace the settler designs for Gaza, the policy was largely aligned with helping to make such a reality more possible. Here again, we see the interplay of the language of machines and monsters. The settlement conference and its main leaders and participants best represent the language of monsters, even though as ministers they have learned to speak in both tongues at the same time. Thus, calls for ethnic cleansing become calls for voluntary migration. Smotrich and others calls for Israel to “permanently control the territory of the Gaza Strip” and to build settlements there. Ben-Gvir agreed that, “We cannot withdraw from any territory we are in in the Gaza Strip,” and that settlement was “an important thing.”
For Netanyahu, however, in responding to international pressure to come up with a “day after” plan for what Israel intended to do with Gaza after the war ends, released a one-page document in February of 2024, roughly six weeks after the settlement conference took place and four months into the war, with full-scale Israeli control of the Gaza Strip being envisioned. Israel would pursue its war to defeat Hamas in the near term, and the medium-term of the plan sought to build a “security area” that ran along the inside of the entire border of Gaza (a buffer zone). The document read: “The security perimeter being created in the Gaza Strip on the border with Israel will remain as long as there is a security need for it.” But as we have previously addressed, security implies the absence of Palestinian resistance, so in this concept, the security perimeter – or vast buffer zone of destroyed Palestinian society – will be occupied by Israel as long as Palestinian resistance persists. Of course, Palestinian resistance will continue for as long as there is a colonial and imperial system of domination over their lives, so Israel will therefore embrace permanent occupation, or seek to expel or otherwise “remove” the threat. So even in Netanyahu’s “security” plan for Gaza, a similar genocidal logic can play out as in the settler fantasies.
These fantasies go well beyond the deranged religious fanaticism of the settler extremists and their political allies, but extend across many political parties from right to center-left (there is no functional leftwing party in Israel) as well as the army and other power centers and opinion-shapers. It is the shared delusion of a Greater Israel. This goes back to the origins of Zionism and the establishment of the state of Israel. It is the belief in establishing a larger Israel. From the beginning, during the Nakba in 1948 – the mass ethnic cleansing of historic Palestine – Israel defined its frontiers through force of war. It has never truly settled its borders because it has never truly finished redrawing them through force. In 1967, Israel took over the West Bank and East Jerusalem (from Jordan), Gaza and the Sinai (from Egypt), as well as the Golan Heights (from Syria), and thereafter established long-term occupations and settlement programs in each region.
It was evident from the start that occupation breeds resistance and war. The Israelis occupied vast new territories with new populations under their control. And they quickly moved to begin the settlement enterprise. The Israelis controlled the Egyptian coastal city of Sharm El-Sheikh, in the then Israeli-occupied Sinai of Egypt. There had been ongoing discussions about the possibility of giving up occupied territory in return for peace agreements with Arab states. In 1969, two years after conquering the territory, defense minister and general Moshe Dayan told the Israeli Knesset, “I prefer to sit in Sharm el-Sheikh without peace than have peace and return Sharm el-Sheikh to Egyptian hands.” The question was thus one of empire: Israel can have peace, or it can have an empire. Israel can have peace, or it can expand its borders. It cannot have both. For officials like General Dayan, the decision was obvious: better to have more land “without peace” than less land with it. Eventually, Israel did negotiate with Egypt and returned the Sinai, along with Sharm El-Sheikh, to Egyptian hands in 1979, in return for a peace agreement, showing that returning stolen land can actually bring peaceful solutions. But that was not the lesson learned by the present-day Israeli government, or the Israeli establishment for that matter. Israel held onto the occupied Golan heights in Syria and officially annexed the territory, just as it did East Jerusalem; and maintained major military occupations and settlement enterprises in the West Bank and Gaza, eventually withdrawing from inside Gaza to its borders in 2004, after which it sealed it tight in 2007, imposing a blockade and siege that lasts to this day (though now in much more brutal fashion).
The vision of a Greater Israel prevails and gains in prominence. There are variations of this vision, of course, depending on who is speaking (or being spoken to). But its simplest is one that imagines an Israel that annexes the occupied West Bank and officially incorporates it into the State of Israel. A slightly extended version adds the Gaza Strip to this vision. And then we have those who advocate for taking over southern Lebanon, more of Syria, and potentially returning to the Sinai in Egypt. For the religious extremists, their vision extended to recreating what they perceive to be the Biblical borders of an ancient Israel. One of the most visible leaders of the settler movement, Daniella Weiss, told a journalist that her vision of a Greater Israel included not only Gaza and the West Bank, but Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, and parts of Saudi Arabia and Iraq.
Daniella Weiss said at a major settler conference in October 2024 that, “We know from the Bible that the real borders of Greater Israel are the Euphrates and the Nile,” referring to the major rivers in Egypt and Iraq, and said to eruptive applause in the conference hall. She added, “And the sooner we make this a reality, the better.” She claimed she would make the dream a reality within the year, telling a group of journalists, “You will see… Jews will go into Gaza and Arabs will disappear from Gaza.”
In an interview for the French-language channel Arte‘s documentary, “Israel: Extremists in Power,” Finance Minister Smotrich was asked whether he endorsed the vision of Greater Israel that viewed expanding Israel’s borders beyond the Mediterranean and Jordan River, to which he replied, “Okay, bit by bit,” adding that, “it is written that the future of Jerusalem is to expand to Damascus,” in Syria, stressing, “only Jerusalem, until Damascus.”
In August 2025, Prime Minister Netanyahu was interviewed by a reporter who handed him a gift to give to Netanyahu’s wife, Sara, a necklace of “a map of the Promised Land.” It was a map of an expanded, ‘Greater’ Israel. The reporter asked the prime minister, “Do you connect to the vision?” to which Netanyahu replied, “Very much… very much.” The reporter noted that the map was of “Greater Israel,” to which Netanyahu replied: “If you ask me, we are here… You know I often mention my father. My parents’ generation had to establish the state. And our generation, my generation, has to guarantee its continued existence. And I see that as a great mission.” When the reporter asked Netanyahu if he believed he was on a mission for the Jewish people, the prime minister responded that he is “on a mission of generations – there are generations of Jews that dreamt of coming here and generations of Jews who will come after us,” adding: “So if you’re asking if I have a sense of mission, historically and spiritually, the answer is yes.”
Fascist fantasies are played out in their most extreme forms in conquered territories. Israel’s form of fascism is distinctly imperialistic, seeking to expand its borders, conquer new lands, and build and extend a vast regional empire. The fact that the Greater Israel project is a vision shared by much of official society does not undermine the fascist vision of it, but it does mean that fascists are likely to find convenient allies among the establishment to pursue this goal. Wherever the Israeli army and state go, the settlers seem determined to follow. Fascism and empire merge their interests and their language in the pursuit of a Greater Israel. This process is made possible through war, and its methods of war have reached genocidal proportions. This is the fascist imperialism of Israel, expressed through the language of monsters and machines.
Andrew Gavin Marshall is a researcher and writer on issues of political and economic history, empire, war, oligarchies, and resistance movements. He has been studying in and out of school and writing for 20 years, published in various journals, papers, think tanks, and online publications, and is currently getting a degree in History and Political Science at the University of Toronto. His website is empireandeconomics.com, which has a YouTube channel, and you can listen to his podcast, ‘In This Mad World,’ or follow him on Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter.
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