Is Zionism Becoming a Form of Fascism?
Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
Ur-Fascism can come back under the most innocent of disguises.
Our duty is to uncover it and to point our finger at any of its new instances
—every day, in every part of the world.
– Umberto Eco, 1995
For nearly one year, the world has watched how a terrorist attack on October 7, 2023, slowly and systematically morphed into post-modern “race” genocide. The killing of some 1,200 innocent Israeli citizens and the kidnapping of 240 others by a radical political organization, Hamas, destabilized the Middle East and raised basic questions about U.S. foreign – and domestic — policies.
On October 9th, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu lamented, “This war was imposed upon us by a despicable enemy — by savages who celebrate the murder of women, children, and the elderly.” On October 16th he declared: “This is a moment of genuine struggle against those who have risen up against us to destroy us. Our goal is victory – a crushing victory over Hamas, toppling its regime and removing its threat to the State of Israel once and for all.”
Nearly one year after the October 7th attack, Netanyahu continues to call for a “total” or “crushing victory” against Hamas. In August 2024, Haaretz reported: “Netanyahu further said that ‘Israel has only one option: to achieve a decisive victory, which means eliminating Hamas’ military and governmental capabilities and freeing our hostages – and this victory will be achieved.’”
In a June interview with a French TV network, Netanyahu linked his military campaign to the race card, insisting, “Our victory is your victory! It’s the victory of Judeo-Christian civilization over barbarism. It’s the victory of France!”
Others within Israel’s political and military leadership have called for all-out war in Gaza. The national security chief, Tzachi Hanegbi, said that Israel could no longer accept Hamas as a “sovereign entity in the Gaza Strip.” Going further, he added, “Complete victory will be the only possible outcome of this battle. … We will not only collapse Hamas military and governmental capabilities but ensure that they will not be able to revive themselves afterward.”
The Guardian reports that as of August 31, 2024, at least 40,691 people have been killed and 94,060 wounded in Israel’s war on Gaza. And, sadly, the war seems far from over.
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Israel’s war campaign is based on five key features – occupation, ethnic cleansing, physical destruction, targeted assassinations and starvation. Brief considerations of each follow.
Occupation: the “Occupied Palestinian Territory” (OPT) was established in the wake of the Arab-Israel war of June 1967. Israel seized the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip, refusing to adhere to Security Council resolutions 242 and 338 that called for withdrawal from the occupied territories.
Ethnic Cleansing: this has involved a two-fold, complementary strategy of (i) reducing the Palestinian population through a campaign of “ethnic cleansing” and (ii) shrinking the territory into an ever-smaller land mass. This two-phased strategy seems the unstated goal of Netanyahu’s current war effort – and what “victory” really means.
Destruction: Israel’s war campaign is documented in the systematic bombings that have devastated much of Gaza. The Israel Defense Force (IDF) appears to have two “enemies” or targets – (i) “identified” targets and (ii) “general” targets. Identified targets include alleged sites of Hamas leader and other nebulous critical “military” locations; general targets include the vast number of non-military homes, hospitals, schools, religious centers, farms and highways as well as ordinary street life. Every Palestinian is an IDF enemy.
As vividly displayed in satellite image analyzed by Jamon Van Den Hoek (Oregon State University) and Corey Scher (CUNY Graduate Center) of the Decentralized Damage Monitoring Group (DDMG), reports that as of July 3, 2024, 169,700 buildings that have been destroyed.
Targeted Assassinations: The Israeli military has used Artificial Intelligence (AI) programs to targetidentified “enemies” and to destroy their housing. The Israel journals, +972 Magazine and Local Call have identified three AI programs being employed in the current war effort – “The Gospel,” “Lavender,” and “Where’s Daddy?” As +972 reported, The Gospel can “generate” targets almost automatically at a rate that far exceeds what was previously possible.
Starvation: The UN reports that as of May 30th at least 34 children have died of malnutrition. Israel’s starvation campaign began on October 9, 2023, when Defense Minister Yoav Gallant announced, “We are fighting human animals.” He added, “I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel; everything is closed.” Energy Minister Israel Katz issued an order “to immediately cut the water supply to Gaza.”
These distinct campaign features come together in the increasing spread of fatal illnesses and diseases. The most prominent is the growing spread of the poliovirus among some children and the desperate effort to vaccinate the 640,000-plus children in Gaza.
The increased presence of polio is a direct result of Israel’s military campaign to destroy Gaza’s health and sanitation infrastructure. The campaign has led to an ever-increasing number of malnourished children and the spread of cholera, measles and meningococcal meningitis as well as the rise in incidents of measles and whooping cough.
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Writing in Haaretz, David Ohana and Oded Heilbonner pose a disturbing insight: “Israel is currently undergoing a civil war reminiscent of Weimar-German.” Recalling post-WW-I Germany, the failed revolution of 1918-1919 (aka November Revolution or Spartacist Rebellion) helped undermine the Weimar Republic and set the stage for the rise of National Socialism (aka the Nazis). The authors go on to raise a far deeper concern: “… a strengthening of a radical ‘pre-fascist’ right-wing social base in Israel – neo-fascist groups (including some Likud voters, commonly known as “Bibi-ists”) that acquire a firmer and firmer hold over the lower classes.”
Ohana and Heilbonner then note:
“The nationalist radicalization in this social base facilitates an alliance between the political-cultural, conservative right and traditionalist, peripheral lower-class groups and religious and ultra-Orthodox groups that uphold values of blood, Jewish homeland, land, race, sacredness, sacrifice and death – an unarguably racist climate.”
The authors are not alone in warning about the deepening political crisis taking shape in Israel. Writing in Forward on May 31st, Shira Klein and Lior Sternfeld worry, “This week, the country [Israel] took a big step toward full-fledged fascism.” They note, “One of fascism’s hallmarks is that it cannot tolerate any opposition. It brands dissenters as enemies, and persecutes them.” They are particularly concerned with the use of “elastic terms like ‘incitement,’ ‘racism,’ and ‘violence,’ … mak[ing] it theoretically possible to fire academics simply for questioning Israel’s war on Gaza, not to mention calling it genocide or supporting a weapons embargo.”
Klein and Sternfeld point out:
“The National Union of Israeli Students on Tuesday proposed a new law that would require universities to fire all academics who express dissent, including tenured professors. “Academic institutions will be obliged to immediately fire a lecturer, a teacher or researcher who expresses or acts in a manner that includes denial of the existence of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state, incitement to racism, violence or terrorism and/or support for an armed struggle or an act of terrorism against Israel,” the bill reads.”
Still other observers of the deepening military-political crisis gripping Israel have voiced their concerns, perhaps none more so than Ilan Pappé in a recent New Left Review piece. He warns: “More than 120 years since its inception, could the Zionist project in Palestine – the idea of imposing a Jewish state on an Arab, Muslim and Middle Eastern country – be facing the prospect of collapse?”
Pappé frames the current crisis as a struggle between two divergent popular societal and political camps. On one side are those supporting the “State of Israel,” consisting of “more secular, liberal and mostly but not exclusively middle-class European.” On the other side are those supporting the “State of Judea,” consisting of those who want “Israel to become a theocracy that stretches over the entirety of historical Palestine”; this is the Zionist camp and includes Netanyahu and “the upper echelons of the Israeli army and security services.”
In 1895, Theodor Herzl, the founder of the Zionist movement, asserted: “We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it any employment in our own country … expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly.”
In the wake of the establishment of the state of Israel, the UN identifies the first phase of the formal “expropriation and the removal” as the Nakba, which “means ‘catastrophe’ in Arabic, [and] refers to the mass displacement and dispossession of Palestinians during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war.”
Al Jazeera reports, “Between 1947 and 1949, at least 750,000 Palestinians from a 1.9 million population were made refugees beyond the borders of the state,” It adds, “Zionist forces had taken more than 78 percent of historic Palestine, ethnically cleansed and destroyed about 530 villages and cities, and killed about 15,000 Palestinians in a series of mass atrocities, including more than 70 massacres.”
The Nakba strategy underscores Israel’s current Gaza and West Bank strategy. Writing recently in CounterPunch, Yoav Litvin reflected on the October 7th attack, noting: “… the Israeli campaign sought to circumvent legal barriers to conquest by portraying the October 7th attacks as an existential threat and defense of hostages which warranted defensive aggression. In this manner, and throughout much of Zionist history, Jewish victimhood was used as a tool of oppression, apartheid and genocide of Palestinians, while enriching Zionist leaders and their benefactor in Washington.”
Going Further, Litvin insists:
“Their goal was to secure as much land with as few Palestinians as possible, using offensive tactics in concert with propagandized Jewish victimhood, so-called deterrence and dehumanization of Palestinian people to justify the brutality afforded by defensive aggression, i.e. self-defense – the ability to respond to threat by any means necessary, including lethal force.”
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In 1995, The New York Review of Books published Umberto Eco, a remarkably thoughtful reflection on his childhood under Mussolini’s fascist state, “Ur-Fascism.” In it, he outlines a list of 14 “features” defining fascism. Going further, he warns, “Fascism contained in itself, so to speak, in their quintessential state, all the elements of any later form of totalitarianism. On the contrary, fascism had no quintessence. Fascism was a fuzzy totalitarianism, a collage of different philosophical and political ideas, a beehive of contradictions.”
The Gaza war is having significant impacts on Israel, fueling a deepening social-political crisis that might contribute to the further rise of the Zionist right and fascism. This is evident in the growing scale of popular demonstrations in Tel Aviv, drawing an estimated 500,000 people, and another 250,000 demonstrated in other areas around the country.
Much media attention has focused on the significant split taking place among the military leadership. Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, backed by two former generals Benny Gantz and Gadi Eisenkot, has opposed Netanyahu over who will be left to run Gaza when the fighting stops.
Looking deeper, the Gaza war is putting a significant strain on the economy. Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics recently estimated that output grew by 2.5 percent (at an annual rate) in the first half of 2024, down from 4.5 percent in the same period last year. Making matters worse, the Bank of Israel estimates that war-related costs for 2023-2025 could amount to $55.6 billion – which will have to be secured through a combination of higher borrowing and budget cuts.
The Israeli business information company CofaceBDI estimates that the war has led to as many as 60,000 businesses shut down in 2024. As reported, many businesses are being “hurt by a high interest rate environment, more expensive financing costs, a shortage of manpower, a sharp decline in turnover and operations, logistic and supply disruptions, and insufficient government assistance.”
Making the situation even more problematic, a significant number of Israelis are fleeing the country. The Times of Israel estimates “permanently surged 285 per cent following 7 October” and Zman magazine reported that 470,000 Israelis have emigrated from Israel and “it is not known if they will return at a later point.”
And the Israeli public is deeply divided over the anti-Palestinian war and Netanyahu’s leadership. A Pew survey in the Spring of 2024 found that more than half (52%) of responders viewed the prime minister “unfavorably” while less than half (47%) viewed him favorably.
Looking at the war, Israelis were also divided. A separate Pew study found “that 39% of Israelis say Israel’s military response against Hamas in Gaza has been about right, while 34% say it has not gone far enough and 19% think it has gone too far.” Equally revealing, “68% say they are extremely or very concerned about the war going on for a long time.”
Sadly, there is no end in sight for the Gaza war, thus increasing the likely rise of the Zionist right and the potential for fascism.
