The Gaza massacre is a cautionary tale: it demonstrates in violent slow motion the trajectory of majoritarian nationalism. Israel is a democratic state: it has vigorously contested elections, a judiciary willing to disagree on occasion with the executive and legislative arms of the state, and it allows its Arab minority the right to practice its Muslim faith. It is, in short, a parliamentary democracy, not unlike ours.

But despite the surface similarities, the founding principle of the Israeli state is radically different from the idea that underwrites India: Israel isn’t a secular or a pluralist nation — it is a Jewish state, a state meant primarily for the Jews of the world. The need to sustain a substantial Jewish majority in as large a portion of historical Palestine as it can occupy determines the domestic, military and foreign policy of Israel. The relatively recent migration of Russian Jews into Israel in large numbers was important for the country because the Jewish state needs migrants to sustain its Jewish population. The need to use these and other migrants to colonize more and more land, to create facts on the ground before the chronically deferred territorial settlement with the Palestinians imposes a final limit on expansion, explains the unwillingness of Israel to offer Palestinians a state worth the name.

While the ‘international community’ — that is, western Europe and the United States of America — invokes the 1967 borders as a basis for a two-state solution, it has now become routine for them to add a rider: the 1967 borders plus the largest Israeli settlements on the West Bank, all of which are illegal. The land enclosed by Israel’s pre-67 borders already constitutes the lion’s share of historical Palestine; in the rump that remains, Israel wants another 10 per cent of the West Bank where it has systematically established Jewish settlements. The Palestinian state is to be built in the land left over; if the term, ‘bantustan’, is too frank, you could say that Israel proposes a state made up of little cantons, stripped of most of the attributes of sovereignty. This is the ‘historic’ deal that Bill Clinton hoped to seal, the poisoned peace that Yasser Arafat, after some vacillation, had the good sense to refuse.

It is widely accepted that right-wing politicians like Ariel Sharon were forced to retreat from their maximalist vision of Eretz Israel, an Israel that occupied all of historical Palestine, by brute demographic reality. If Israel claimed all of the West Bank and Gaza for its own, its Jewish majority, and thus its reason for being, would be threatened. In that demographic context, a Jewish state would formally mutate into a form of apartheid. Israel’s reworked policy had two principal goals: first, legitimizing the land grab that the West Bank settlements represent, and second, finding a way of minimizing the Arab population of Israel.

This isn’t to suggest that Zionism is a uniquely awful sort of nationalism. Modern nationalism as invented in Europe invokes a homogeneous People as its justification. Homogeneous People multiplied by Self-Determination = Nation. These self-determining Peoples are nearly always defined by language, religion and race — which, in contemporary usage, add up to ethnicity. Zionism established an ethnic state whose organic citizens were Jews. If the natural citizens of Israel are Jews, a Zionist state, by definition, will see non-Jews as a problem, as foreigners who dilute the People.

Avigdor Lieberman is an Israeli politician who advocates population transfers to consolidate Israel’s Jewish nature. He wants the Arabs of north-eastern Israel to be stripped of Israeli citizenship and their areas merged with a Palestinian statelet. In return, he wants Israel to annex large parts of the West Bank as territorial compensation. He is part of a far-Right fascist party and his political instincts are the same as those of Le Pen or Jörge Haider. When the contortions of Israeli politics forced the government to ally with Liberman’s party, Israel’s ruling coalition tried to distance itself from his ethnic cleansing prescriptions by describing them as his personal views, not those of the Israeli state.

When Lieberman argues that Israel should have no Arab citizens because a Palestinian state in the West Bank will have no Jews, he is saying openly what many Israelis privately believe. He is taking to its logical conclusion a policy of discrimination and dispossession that every Israeli government, Labour, Likud or other, has implemented. The creation of dense, Jewish settler enclaves on the West Bank, the systematically engineered changes in the demography of East Jerusalem, the restrictions placed on the entry of the relatives of Israeli Arabs, the self-evidently second-class status of Arab citizens, taken together make Lieberman’s prescriptions a logical consequence of ethnic nationalism, not an extremist aberration.

Benny Morris, one of Israel’s most respected historians, has demonstrated with detailed archival research that Palestinian Arabs did not leave their lands voluntarily or through the urging of neighbouring Arab states; they were terrorized into leaving by the Israeli army. But Morris, unlike Tom Segev or Ilan Pappé, is no dove: he accepts the logic of a majoritarian state. He has gone on record to say that the mistake made by the nascent Israeli state led by Ben Gurion in 1948 was not that it drove the Arabs out of partitioned Palestine; it was that it didn’t drive out enough of them. His justification for this view was that his research had taught him that Arabs have historically been unwilling to consider any form of co-existence with Jews in Palestine.

Consistent with this position, Morris wrote a column in The New York Times in justification of Israel’s most recent assault on Gaza. His argument was that Israel was in the grip of an existential insecurity that predisposed it to spasms of remedial violence. He offered many reasons for this anxiety: Iran’s bid to acquire nuclear weapons, a decline in Western support for Israel (!) and, most revealingly, the alienation of Israel’s Arab population, who, he wrote, identified increasingly with fellow Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank and not with the Israeli state of which they were citizens. “Most Jews see the Arab minority as a potential fifth column,” writes Morris matter-of-factly. And not only were they likely traitors, but they also bred too fast. Their birthrates constituted a threat to the Jewishness of Israel. He ends his piece thus: “Israel’s sense of the walls closing in on it has this past week led to one violent reaction. Given the new realities, it would not be surprising if more powerful explosions were to follow.”

This picture of a besieged state on extinction’s edge, defending itself (as which state would not) with terrible violence, and the cryptic warning about more violence to come, could be construed to mean many things: an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities, perhaps, or some new scheme to rid Israel of its traitorous Arabs. If the threat from Iran enjoins pre-emptive bombing, why would Israel not plan to purge itself of its false citizens? Benny Morris leaves the cleansing to our imagination while Avigdor Lieberman spells out his plans, but they share the same majoritarian logic, down to its vilest metaphors: the ungrateful fifth columnists, the aliens within who breed to win.

Gaza is a cautionary tale, but we’ve seen this murderous logic played out in this subcontinent: in Sri Lanka, after that country’s state tried to remake itself in the image of its Sinhala/Buddhist majority; in the persecution of Hindus in Bangladesh; and, most pertinently for us, in the attempt to construct a Hindu polity in India with Muslims cast as fifth columnists. Nowhere has it led to anything but chronic violence and civil war.