WASHINGTON, D.C. — In what supporters are calling "the most popular executive action since bringing back the McRib," President Donald Trump signed an executive order Thursday formally authorizing citizens to shoot obnoxious hooligans on those motorized bikes.

It is generally known that, until now, the only serious opposition to the Netanyahu government in Israel were the secret services, Mossad and Shin Bet. Netanyahu has now decided to finally bring them under his control, so he proposed as the head of Mossad Roman Gofman, an IDF colonel known for his brutal oppression of the Palestinians in the West Bank, a guy with no intelligence experience who doesn’t even speak English. I was understandably surprised when I learned that my writing provided the intellectual grounding for his activity:

“Gofman has been accused on several occasions of misleading his commanders and acting without authorization. As an IDF colonel in the occupied West Bank, he ran Palestinian agents in unsanctioned, rogue activities. And he firmly believes he has the right, no matter the rules. During his military studies, Gofman wrote that a commander must at times act even without formal authority, exceeding his mandate to fulfill the perceived will of policymakers—even when that will has not been explicitly defined. He claimed to have drawn intellectual grounding for this approach from the writings of the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, a neo-Marxist philosopher and author known for peppering his many books, articles and speeches with obscene jokes and politically incorrect provocations. In Gofman’s adaptation, a military commander operates within a “discursive space,” identifying an external “anchoring point” beyond himself and the system and acting accordingly—in other words, outside the lines.”1

I didn’t have to wait long for the malevolent reactions. Joerg Lau (who attacked me back in 2003 as a theorist who supports terror2) wrote: “Stunning: The next Mossad chief draws inspiration from – yes, you guessed it – Slavoj Žižek!”3 Plus there is Scott Long: “The new head of Mossad says he takes his ‘intellectual grounding’ from Slavoj Žižek. IMPOSTOR, THAT JOB IS RIGHTFULLY MINE.”4 As for myself, I am not sure how to take Gofman’s reference to me – seriously, as a joke, with irony (“I use the very theorist who is known as a supporter of the Palestinians”)? So I’ll take it literally, in all naivety.

It is obvious that Gofman tries to provide a justification of how the IDF and settlers systematically break the (Israeli!) law to oppress Palestinians – so it is not those who resist Israeli occupation who violate the imposed Israeli law, it is the organs of the Israeli state themselves who violate their own laws. Gofman is thus the military counterpart of Daniella Weiss, the “godmother” of the West Bank settlers who has, for decades, organized the occupation of Palestinian land. When, in an interview with Louis Theroux, she explains the strategy of expanding settlements, her description of how settlers relate to Israeli state power cannot but strike us as pure and simple truth:

“We do for governments what they cannot do for themselves. Even if you take Netanyahu now, who is very happy about what we do here and also [about] our plans to build a Jewish community in Gaza. He’s happy about it but he cannot say it. He says the opposite. It’s not realistic. Good! We will make it realistic. It’s not forcing the government. It’s helping the government. It’s step number one in politics. You don’t force the government. You [give] the government the ability, the courage, the public support, the political support.”5

Crucial here is the duplicity between the civic movement (of settlers) and the official public policy of state organs: the civic movement does what the state officially denies it wants and even condemns, and in this way gradually creates conditions for the state to accept what is already a fact. Gofman admits that the state is now doing the same – the masks of law and order are falling: the “external ‘anchoring point’ beyond himself and the system” is the ethnic cleansing of Gaza and the West Bank. This is now the reality of Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East… This is why Netanyahu has to make sure that Mossad and Shin Bet are under his control: from the Israeli secret services, we often hear quite a different message. Efraim Halevy, the ex-chief of Mossad, said immediately after October 7:

“We don’t have the luxury to wait. We have to have a viable policy which would deal with the presence in this area of the Jews and the Palestinians. And we are doomed to live together. I don’t want to say we are doomed to die together. And if our approach is that we are doomed to live together, we can’t simply live together with one part of the equation having the upper part and ignoring the aspirations of the other side. There has to be the beginning of a meeting of minds.”6

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