This would easily be the most important essay on Jews and Israel in the year that is coming to an end as I type. In the West, Alexander Dugin is often cast as Putin’s philosopher. Those who do so, underestimate Putin. Putin’s philosophy is eclectic, multi-angular, with a great deal of historicism, as many of his speeches and interview testify. It is an underestimation of Dugin, equally. Dugin is his own man, known to scholars of Russia, from his early dissident activities. We are talking the mid-1980s. Then, before the Perestroika, all oppositional dissident forces appeared all the same to a Westerners’ eyes. All were perceived to be ‘against the Soviet regime’, which gave them the status of the righteous and the differences between them did not matter. In truth, because the whole activisation of the civil and political life, outside of the Communist Party limits, was such a new phenomenon, dissidents of different shades did not feel like they were in opposition to each other either. To add an illustration , and some spice, Dugin’s first wife, Evgenya Debryanskaya, was an eminent and effective LGBT activist. (Parenthetically, if this piece of information puts you into a mindset ‘I do not understand how this is possible’ or ‘ oh, my G-d, how does it all works…?’, then -not a big deal-but try not to exercise any judgement on the Russian political realities then and now; just do not do it, let this be your litmus test). More on this -at some point in the future. To finish off, the best English language intro into Dugin is Millerman’s Inside Putin’s Brain: Alexander Dugin’s Philosophy, a remarkable composition, for which Millerman, a true intellectual, is yet to pay a full price of academic cancelling, silencing an what not.
But in the meantime – something different. A few days ago Alexander Dugin published an essay about Jews and Israel in the aftermath of the 7 October. That essay was promptly translated into Hebrew and distributed widely, as far as I can judge. It is unclear if it was ever translated into English. I have done it now. It deserves the widest dissemination. Why? It is a summary of the mainstream, I am tempted to say moderate, Russian nationalist position on the Gaza war, packed in analytical language. It is a view of the events and their consequences, seen through the prism of nationalism, Soviet education and Dugin’s romantic spirit. That is the way-and you will spot a few contradictions there-the war will be seen by a significant swath of the Russian politically aware public.
So far so good. I will not offer here a detailed commentary on the content. This may come but not just this moment. In the meantime, the essay needs to be ‘consumed’ and ‘comprehended’, as they say in Russian. Big things in life are seen from far away, spatially and temporally, and Dugin is certainly looking at Jews and Israel from a far away place at least.
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Alexander Dugin
The Great Israel and the attacking Messiah
20/12/2024
A great change in the entire image of Israel is under way. Possibly, it is also a change of image for Jews. In the aftermath of the Holocaust, through which Jews went under Hitler and during the Second World War, they invoked sympathy, compassion, genuine empathy. This facilitated the establishment of the State of Israel. The Holocaust, the Shoa, i.e. horrors and persecution experienced by Jews, became a foundation on which a consensus could be built: there is no doubt that Jews need a state of their own. This became a moral capital of Jews and a reason for the sacralization of the Holocaust.
Philosophers of the Frankfurt school declared Auschwitz to be a new point of departure in social theory. This meant that, from now onwards, philosophical, political and moral thinking should take into account the scale of crimes committed by the Europeans, and mainly Germans, against Jews. The West, and humanity as a whole, had to repent.
The key image of a Jew was an image of a victim. This also resulted in a degree of their sacralization as a nation. All others were asked to repent and not to forget their role (in Jewish history). Antisemitism became a punishable crime, not to mention Holocaust revisionism or revisionism with respect to the Jews’ sacred status.
Gradually, Israel’s increasingly tough policy towards the Palestinians and Muslim nations around it, have been eradicating, dissolving this image-at the very least in the eyes of the Middle Easter societies, which , parenthetically, were not involved in the crimes of the European Nazis. Further, unceremonious attitudes of the Zionists towards locals caused direct protests amounting at their peak to an antizionist Intifada.
At the same time and also gradually, self-image, self-perception of Israelis and Jews living in the Diaspora has also been changing. The desire to project power, to demonstrate forcefulness increased, as did the orientation towards the creation of the Great Israel. In parallel, the messianic ideas increased and developed-the waiting for the Messiah, the beginning of the building of the Third Temple (for which the Al-Aqsa mosque, sacred for Muslims, will have to be destroyed), the expansion of Israeli control over the territories between the seas, the final resolution of the Palestinian question (to the point of direct calls for deportation and genocide of the Palestinians). These ideas are today supported by Benjamin Netanyahu and some of his friends in arms, such as Ben Gvir, Bezalel Smotrich etc. In its open form, this programme exists in the ‘Torat ha-Melech’ of Itzhak Sharipo, sermons of Rav Kook, Meir Kahane and Dov Lior. Strategically, this was described in the early 1980s by Oded Yinon, the advisor to General Sharon. The core feature of Yinon’s plan was destruction of the existing Arab regimes espousing Baathist ideology, causing bloody chaos in Arab countries and creation of the Great Israel.
Now, after a decade of the Arab Spring, and especially after a terrorist attack by Hamas against Israel in October 2023, we are witnessing a speedy realization of these plans.
Netanyahu flattened Gaza, mercilessly annihilating hundreds of thousands of civilians. That was followed by the attack on Lebanon and extermination of the Hezbollah leadership. Then, an exchange of rocket fire with Iran and preparations for a bigger war, including the nuclear option. Then, a capture of the remaining parts of Golan Heights and strikes against Syria. A month prior to that, Smotrich declared that Damascus will become part of Israel, and Ben Gvir hinted directly that Al-Aqsa will be destroyed. With the departure of Bashar Asad, the last Baathist regime fell. The Arab world is in the state of chaos.
The Great Israel and extermination of the Palestinians are unfolding in front of our eyes.
That is the important point. The politics of the Right-wing Zionists turns the page in the book of Jewish history…the Holocaust page. Moral capital of a victim has been spent in full. It covered the price of Israel’s powerful take off, its new, terrible, almost biblical greatness. Jews are no longer a subject of pity. They are feared, hated, admired-all those but most importantly, they are taken into account as an overwhelming and ruthless force.
And Jewish identity has changed.
It is no longer about suffering and humiliation. It is about dominance and triumph.
Auschwitz is no longer a point of departure. Gaza is.
The Jewish tradition offers not one but two prophecies about the Messiah: the suffering (Ben Yosef) and the victorious (Ben David). Following the European Holocaust, the emphasis was on the suffering Messiah, a ritual sacrifice of sorts. Today, this pattern is discarded and the victorious, triumphant, attacking Messiah is on the rise.
This is of course about Israel, first of all. But this is not the end of the story. The change of the Messianic type is taking place among Jews on the global scale.
And it is in this climate that Donald Trump, a staunch supporter of the Right-Wing Zionism and a friend of Netanyahu, is coming to power in the United States. His is surrounded by the Christians Zionists that will support Israel at any cost. A capital of sympathy was ‘converted’, again, into the capital of an assault.
This is very seriousness and will become more serious still.
But let us not be too hasty with the conclusions. This new situation has to be though through very well, we ought to put together countless facts and phenomena, attempting to create a coherent picture, free of contradictions.