The Future’s Uncertain and the End is Always Near!
Zionism and Fascism
Glen Filson
Ethnic Cleansing by Massacre and Starvation
The gravity of the violent situation in Israel and Palestine begs the question of the extent to which Zionism is fascist in the context of this capitalist crisis/stagnation. On June 8th in Nuseiret, Gaza Shrouq Aila reports that
“As the Israeli forces withdrew with four hostages in tow, they left death and destruction in their wake. The authorities in Gaza announced that 274 people, including 64 children and 57 women, had been killed, with more than 400 injuries, and that 89 inhabited homes or residential buildings had been bombed during the raid” (Aila, June 10, 2024).
Another attack in early June, 2024 which killed about 50 people in a “safe” area in central Gaza, was conducted ostensibly to kill two members of Hamas.
Shortly thereafter the IDF bombed a school claiming that Hamas was using the school though the dead were once again mainly women and children. At the same time, some West Bank Jewish settlers are actively blocking humanitarian aid bound for Gaza, attacking trucks and even shooting Palestinians minding their olive trees. This defies the International Court of Justice’s May ruling that
“Israel must immediately halt its military offensive, and any other action in the Rafah Governorate, which may inflict on the Palestinian group in Gaza conditions of life that could bring about physical destruction in whole or in part” (Husseini, May 24, 2024).
Not all Israelis are Zionists but recent polling results show that, despite their misgivings about their war criminal Prime Minister Netanyahu, most Israelis support the war against Palestinians. A May 20, 2024 poll revealed that “65% of Israeli Jews oppose the existence of a Palestinian state and a shocking 68% oppose humanitarian aid for Gaza”. There is huge Israeli support for Zionist colonialist control of occupied Palestine. 79% of Israel’s Jews will not accept a Palestinian state. “Therefore, the only way to get a Palestinian state is through military force.” And 800,000 Jewish settlers on the West Bank won’t accept it either, let alone the recently approved UN Security Council ceasefire resolution (Lederer, June 11, 2024).
Max Blumenthal claims that
“Zionism thrives off anti-Semitism. Zionist organizations rely on anti-Semitism to pay their bills. Look at the Anti-Defamation League. Without anti-Semitism which they constantly inflate to the point where more than 50% of their documented cases of anti- Semitic incidents since Oct. 7th are simply pro-Palestinian rallies, peace rallies. Israel is actually an engine of anti-Semitism so I see Zionism as a kind of cult that is not only hostile to Muslims and Christians that live within its realm but to Jews who live across the world and who just want to be normal Jews here. Zionism thrives on anti-Semitism” (May 30th, 2024).”
Even the Liberal version of Zionism such as espoused by likes of the American J Street plus the right wing, orthodox theocratic Zionists are variations of fascist, colonizer ideology which attempt to justify hierarchical, undemocratic apartheid Israel. At present both Palestinians and Jews within Greater Israel exist in similar numbers of over seven million each yet many Jews want the Palestinians to leave so that they will have a “pure Jewish State” though not all Israelis want Palestinians to leave.
The IDF’s ongoing Gazan massacres have continued even after the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) charged Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and Defence Minister Gallant with war crimes and crimes against humanity. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) had already ruled that the IDF must immediately stop the attack on Rafah or else be perceived as continuing their genocide. Additionally,
“The court’s prosecutor, Karim Khan, said in a statement that he was applying for arrest warrants for Yahya Sinwar, Mohammed Deif and Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas because he had “reasonable grounds to believe” that they were responsible for war crimes and crimes against humanity, which included “the killing of hundreds of Israeli civilians” in the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attacks in Israel, and the taking of at least 245 hostages” (NYT, May 20, 2024).
Hamas is the face of Gazan resistance even though Netanyahu supported Hamas’s development in the early 2000s so Israel could divide and conquer the Palestinians between them and the Palestinian Authority which holds sway in the West Bank. Whether one supports the Muslim Brotherhood’s Hamas as resistance fighters and the elected Government of Gaza since 2006, or alternatively, thinks of them as terrorists, it must be understood that the war between the Israelis and Palestinians did not begin with the Hamas attack on Oct. 7, 2023 but goes back to the 1948 Nakba when 750,000 Palestinians were forced out of the occupied territories as their villages burned and their land and property stolen. So, what ever we think of them, Hamas is providing a highly organized struggle for Palestinian sovereignty at a huge costs to its members and supporting families (Omar, May 31, 2024).
The US now supports a ceasefire despite having earlier vetoed ceasefires at the UN’s Security Council, all the while supplying (along with Germany) all the military ordinance Israel seeks and utilized against the 37,000+ Palestinians killed in Gaza so far. This is due to the strong Israel American Israeli Policy Action Committee (AIPAC) which funds only House of Representative and US Senators who support Israel. On the Fall, 2024 American elections, AIPAC will spend more than $100 million. In fact, it often appears that despite providing Israel with weapons and money to fight the war, Israel tells the US what to do, not the other way around (Aria, June 12, 2024).
By comparison, it’s worth recalling that, in the NATO proxy war with Russia, it’s also no accident that the US assisted coup in Ukraine came about with American collaboration with Ukraine’s Far Right neo-fascist elements despite weak electoral support for ultra-nationalism. Ukrainian pro-Stepan Bander neo-Nazis had been outed by Western journalists routinely since the coup in 2014 but archived versions must be sought to see the Telegraph's "Ukraine Crisis: the neo-Nazi brigade fighting pro-Russian Separatists," and the BBC's "Ukraine underplays the Far Right's role in Conflict" (Dec. 2014) (when Azov Battalion leader Andrei Biletski became National Corp leader). 'Azov, Ukraine's Most Prominent Ultranationalist Group, Sets its Sites on Europe, US" Radio Free Europe Nov. 14, 2018.
At that time, the US was providing military training, Javelins, etc. to the AFU but it banned them from participating in US training at that time because of its fascist ideology. Canada did train them, however, and the US recently reversed its policy and it allows the Azov Battalion to use its missiles to strike deep within Russia (Berletic, Feb. 18, 2024; Lauria, June 19, 2024; Dersimonian, June 11, 2024).
Given the US support for the Far Right in both Israel and Ukraine, we need to dissect the connections between fascism and the dominant mode of production in the United States led by Finance Capitalism.
Both Israel and Ukraine have laws that give special rights to either Jews or Ukrainians, respectively, so in that sense they are both racist, ethnocentric and even religious-centric societies. Ukraine, for instance, enacted a Law which banned the use of Russian geographical names for settlements, streets and landmarks in Ukraine. Ukrainian language must predominant in schools even though at the time of the 2014 coup, a third of Ukrainians spoke Russian. Yet the US (Finance Capitalism) supports both Israel and Ukraine’s ultra-nationalist governments.
Are the many Zionist/fascist connections accidental or significant? Their national and class contradictions must be scrutinized in addition to their relationship with US Finance Capitalism. This article looks at contributing economic factors, such as the capitalist business cycle, fueling the present Finance Capitalist crisis and its consequences in the Middle East war.
Early Zionism
Theodor Herzl, the author of The Jewish State, contended that the Zionist enterprise required the reconquering of the “Promised Land” that had once belonged to the Jews by asking whether “even if we obtained the land with supremacy over it, the poor only would go with us? It is precisely the poorest [Jews] whom we need at first. Only the desperate make good conquerors” (1896: 271). Thus Herzl fully understood that he was proposing a colonization of Palestine, something that European nations had been doing for a couple of hundred years.
In response to this Zionist appeal and speaking on behalf of Canada’s Jewish Voice for Peace, renowned Univ. of British Columbia author Naomi Klein said recently that
“It might come as a surprise that Neo-Nazis and the far right, who have a long history of stoking anti-Semitism, are joining anti-Palestinians demonstrations, but for those familiar with the long-standing alliance between Zionists and anti-Semites, this is disturbingly predictable” (JVP, May 24, 2024).
The following quick overview of the Zionist history explains what she meant.
Herzl recognized that moving “unassimilable” Jews to the “promised land” would require the support of powerful Gentiles like the Czar of Russia and the British Prime Minister:
“The Jews must previously acquire economic power sufficiently great to overcome the old social prejudice against them. The aristocracy may serve as an example of this, for in its ranks occur the proportionately largest numbers of mixed marriages. Jewish families which regild the old nobility with money become gradually absorbed. But what form would this phenomenon assume in the middle classes, where (the Jews being a bourgeois people) the Jewish question is mainly concentrated?” (Herzl, 1896: 2).
So Zionism emerged as a social movement in the late 19th century with the aim of establishing and maintaining a Jewish homeland in the historic “promised land” of Israel which Herzl called Zion. As the founder of this movement, Herzl, attempted to solve the ongoing problem of hatred, persecution and discrimination against Jews by promoting the creation of a Jewish state which would allow Jews to live safely. This included both secular and religious Jewish ideologies.
Anti-Semitism is not the same as anti-Zionism though many anti-Semites are also anti-Zionists. While the idea of a Jewish homeland contained within Zionism is not necessarily racist, Herzl’s conception of Zionism did open the door to what has become the apartheid State of Israel. Zionism’s model of a Jewish state reestablished after the Exodus, an ostensibly guaranteed safe and free State for Jews but it required the colonization of the Holy Land.
By definition and in practice, this Jewish State is antithetical to a multiethnic, multicultural state of Jews and Gentiles where all national and ethnic groups have equal status before the law. Instead Zionist ideology requires the establishment of an apartheid state akin to South Africa’s which provided privileged rights to whites and confined non-whites to Bantustans with dramatically reduced civil rights and state services, a blatantly racist segregation of people based on their biological identity. But must this Jewish Israeli State be fascist?
Fascism is an authoritarian, militaristic, nationalist ideology promoting the control of all aspects of social life. It seeks to dispense with democratic institutions which fascists consider weak instead privileging a supreme leader and/or ruling party. Censorship, propaganda and a police state with control of media are used to keep people in line with fascism’s dominant ideology.
I also hypothesize that Zionism’s fascistic expression now is related to but not itself the cause of the ongoing capitalist crisis/stagnation that we’ve been experiencing since the 1990s. The reason is that, based on analyses of how the Nazis and other forms of European fascism ascended to power during the disintegrating effects of the Great Depression in the 1930s, parallels now exist between Israel’s Zionist policies and our contemporary Finance Capitalist stagnation/depression. Israel’s war against Gaza is an expression and extension of the collapse of the unipolar US hegemonic world, but not its cause.
Crisis/Depression and the Rise of Fascism
In the West, Finance Capitalism led by the Americans’ dominant mix of Wall Street, military industrial complex (MIC) and fossil fuel extraction industries reached its peak in the 1990s followed by “the two largest crises in the history of capitalism in 2008 and 2020” (Roberts, May 8, 2024; Resnick and Wolff, 2006). Historically, capitalist crises have exacerbated fascist tendencies and this prolonged capitalist crisis of the past two decades, is little different from what happened during the 1930s capitalist depression (see Guerin, 1973).
During international economic crises, capitalists attempt to restore their prosperity by increasing (a) absolute profits (lowering wages below inflation, intensifying labour, such as by using cheaper migrant labour); (b) increasing relative profits (new technologies such as artificial intelligence are introduced) and (c) by increasing foreign trade (Marx, 1959).
Readers will recall the State’s role, when much of Wall Street was on the verge of bankruptcy, in the crisis of 2008/09, that the State (d) rescued the banks, forcing the masses to pay for it, while the subprime mortgage homeowners were thrown out of their homes. This did not, however, resolve the long term tendency of the rate of profit to fall, triggering recessions and exacerbating class tensions while giving rise to ultra-nationalism within Ukraine, Israel and elsewhere.
“The profitability of capital in the core of Europe has slumped badly since the end of the Great Recession and through the Long Depression of the 2020s and with no recovery after the pandemic slump of 2020” (Roberts, June 9, 2024).
Similar things happened in post-WWII capitalist crises. During the post-OPEC crisis of the mid 1970s, capital experienced a declining rate of profit and both the Reagan and Thatcher regimes in the US and UK respectively, acted to increase the rate of exploitation in favour of capitalists. It dealt with these downturns by privatizing state corporations, attacking organized labour and reducing wages. This was followed by the off-shoring of manufacturing jobs through ‘globalization’ (Roberts, May 27, 2024).
The three waves of globalization were from 1850-1880; 1944-1970 and 1985-2,000 (Roberts, Sept. 9, 2023). Even though the West’s foreign trade is instead now being reduced via sanctions imposed on over 50 countries, a new foreign trade policy has developed known as friendshoring. This is the present US government’s attempt to rescue the military industrial complex (MIC) and its Wall Street backers via (e) huge private sector defense contracts with the government, raising the US national debt.
The replacement for the old manufacturing economy which had been off-shored earlier prior to the friendshoring of today, functions within an even smaller market. As always happens during a prolonged recession and rebalancing, there is the destruction of excess capital, which is being accomplished particularly in Ukraine and Israel as we enter a new and more dangerous phase of international class warfare and ultra-nationalism which is being used to justify massive new military spending paid for by workers while increasing national debts.
NATO member countries, pressured by the US, are forced to raise their national debts for the purchase of military ordinance, usually manufactured by United States’ military corporations like Raytheon and McDonald-Douglas. Despite declining productivity due in large part to the loss of cheap Russian oil and gas, the NATO proxy war with Russia has forced NATO’s EU countries to raise their defense spending by an average of 7% further weakening workers’ access to goods and services in other areas contributing to the decline of Europe’s share of world GDP from 15% to 1% (Roberts, June 9, 2024). Moreover, “The US economy is slowing down from the ‘sugar rush’ burst after the end of the pandemic and the end of Biden fiscal stimulus” (Roberts, June 1, 2024)
When regime change of dominant Finance Capital’s primary competitors doesn’t work, Capital can push their war solution to the point of fascism (Guerin, 1973). As an incognito Nazi business insider, Alfred Sohn-Rethel had a chance to witness the relationship between German Nazis and big business, first hand. Before escaping Germany to Britain Sohn-Rethel concluded that
“Fascism is the mobilisation of a counter-revolutionary mass movement during a period of capitalist crisis. The participants in this mass movement tend to be drawn from those sectors of society—notably the lower-middle-class, unorganized workers, the peasantry and backward sections of the ruling class—which are facing a relative and progressive worsening of their economic and social position, but who nonetheless see no future in an alliance with the organised proletariat” (Sohn-Rethel, 1978: 158).
Sohn-Rethel noted that during the 1930s the “Ideas of liberalism [were] presented as being invented and propagated by Jews only to disorganise and demoralise gentiles” (Sohn-Rethel, 1978: 156). So, in his view, the essence of fascism is a counter-revolutionary, late capitalist effort to survive “when the standards of bourgeois society are utterly discredited” (Sohn-Rethel, 1978: 155). With the rise of homelessness, drug dependency, and hopelessness, these Western capitalist standards are once again threatened in 2024.
Ethnicity and Fascism in Israel and Ukraine
When far-right Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, at the end of April, 2024 Passover, —called for the total annihilation of Gaza and Israel’s enemies arguing that “There are no half measures. The Gazan cities of Rafah, Deir al-Balah, Nuseirat—total annihilation. You will blot out the remembrance of Amalek under heaven—there is no place under heaven.” (Haaretz, Apr. 30, 2024). He and theocratic Israelis like to quote the book of Isaiah about the need to destroy Israel’s enemies. Rabbis have backed up the relevance of this Talmudic Law that says that the Amaleks and all their animals must be killed or they will kill Israelis in a new Holocaust (Crooke, May 20,2024).
Seasoned Israeli/Hamas negotiator, Alastair Crooke says that a plurality of Jews in Israel today “see this as akin to what they experienced in Germany. They see it as a slowly unfolding Holocaust. It’s kill or be killed. We’re in extreme danger!” On the other hand, others’ primary interest is getting the hostages from the Oct. 7th Hamas attack, released (May 12, 2024).
Blumenthal reminds us that Carthaginian General Hannibal took poison rather than be captured by the enemy so, first practiced in 2014 and known as the Hannibal Directive, the IDF is now required to kill their own soldiers if they’re taken captive in order to prevent a prison swap from taking place. Many of the 1200 killed on Oct. 7th were therefore actually killed by Israeli tanks or helicopter gunships (Nov. 23, 2023).
When a Zionist mob attacked a pro-Palestinian encampment on the campus of UCLA on May 1st, 2024, typically fascist methods of violent attacks on peaceful demonstrators occurred.
“At one point, a student stepped out from behind the encampment walls to confront the mob, which quickly swarmed the student and brutally attacked him while he was on the ground attempting to shield his face from the blows…Members of the pro-Israeli mob used explicitly genocidal language as they ripped down encampment barriers, yelling “Second Nakba”
–a reference to the forced displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homes in 1948) (Johnson, May 1, 2024). In Israel, then and now, your rights depend on your ethnicity.
By contrast, the same is true of Ukraine. Those demonstrating for the Svoboda (Freedom) Party and the far right explained that they wanted an “ethnically pure Ukraine”. That was reflected in the Ukrainian Rada’s Law of Indigenous People which was adopted on the July 1, 2021. It says that people from different parts of Ukraine have different rights. The rights you have are based on ethnicity and race. A spokesperson for President Zelensky’s The Servant of the People political party explained that from the time of this Law’s passing, Russian Ukrainians ceased having the same rights as Ukrainians. That explains the splits within Ukrainian society which have increasingly been divided by ethnic criteria after 2014. And the Russians, many of whom have family in Ukraine, know that about ethnic Russians within Ukraine as well.
That is why President Putin argues that there was no point in differentiating Ukrainians from Russians, ethnically. The Western media have not explained this Ukrainian Law and in addition of the inexorable advance of NATO up to Russia’s borders, that another reason why Russians see the war as being existential. Retired Swiss Colonel Jacques Baud says that if you fail to understand that you can’t understand this important basis of the conflict (Alkorshid, May 26, 2024).
This says a lot not just about race and ethnicity, as well as social class but also about the nature of internal, racist apartheid in Israel where the Ashkenazi (or European) Jews have traditionally dominated and have often segregated the Sephardic Jews from the elite positions in Israeli society despite the fact that most of the latter are also Zionists who believe part of their identity is as a chosen and therefore superior people to the Palestinians.
Crooke says that when the Mizrahi (Morrocan and North African) Jews came to live in Israel—brought in especially by Prime Minister Menachem Begin to bolster the Likud Party—they had three main objectives.
(1) “Establish Israel on the land of Israel.” That means from the River to the Sea but it may include to the Litani River and some of the Sinai. (2) “Then, build the Temple.” Crooke explains that means first eliminating the Al Aqsa Mosque. (3) “And the third one was to institute Halakhah (Talmudic or Biblical) Law which means to fight against the Amalek (May 12, 2024).”
Contrary to ‘liberal Zionists’ like the American group J Street, as Crooke points out, there is really no secular liberalism in Israel’s Zionist platform at all (see Solomon and Solomon (May 22, 2024).
Now that Mizrahi Jews’ numbers have increased, they’ve taken on more powerful positions within Government. Whereas the Ashkenazi were about 80% of the Israeli population earlier, the Mizrahi are slightly more than 50%. Now that they’re the majority and have prominent cabinet positions, they clearly have more sway within Israeli politics (May 12, 2024).
Settler Colonialism
North African Mizrahi Jews overlap with Sephardic Jews with Iberian heritage expelled during the Inquisition. Though they exist in all socio-economic groups many are working class in Israel. Cultural influences include Ladino (a medieval Spanish Hebrew mix, spoken by Sephardic Jews) or Hebrew and Moroccan Arabic. They often do the most repressive Israeli work of front line infantry in wars unlike most of the Ashkenazi people. The latter often speak Yiddish (Hebrew influenced German) and tend to direct the former to do their bidding vis-a-vis Palestinians. The latter have typically had to work to ensure that Israel’s colonial occupation of Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem despite the fact that some Mizrhai's leftist critique of Zionist apartheid and class/ethnic segregation of human rights within Israel (Crooke, May 12, 2024; Ganz, Apr. 24, 2024).
The first period of worldwide colonialization occurred following World War II against the Dutch, British, German, American colonial powers but now there is a growing international backlash against colonialism and especially Israeli settler colonialism. As Crooke points out although in most cases the colonial powers did not have a very amicable relation with the indigenous populations, in Brazil the Portuguese had the policy of marrying into the indigenous population whereas in other parts of South America the Spanish killed the indigenous people.
Many now see the Israeli form of settler colonialism like that of the Spanish in earlier colonial times, of eliminating the indigenous population (May 12, 2024). Israelis following Netanyahu and Defence Minister Gallant see their next task as annihilating Hamas. On October 9, Gallant said “I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel; everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we act accordingly” (Schumann, May 28, 2024).
Israel’s ruling party, Likud's ideology seeks maximalist territorial objectives for the creation of a Greater Israel with special rights for Jews so it is not democratic. According to Crooke
“Zionism means that Jews have special rights “over and above those that share the same land base who have inferior rights, political, legal and administrative and in terms of security and who have no basis in law as such” (May 20, 2024).
This differs little from the Nazis’ quest for nationalist land expansion known as Lebensraum, living space, a leading Nazi motivation for initiating WWII. Naomi Klein emphasizes that
“We [Independent Jewish Voices] don’t need or want the false idol of Zionism. We want freedom from the project that commits genocide in our name” (Solomon and Solomon, May 22, 2024). As Solomon and Solomon point out, “The essential fight against anti-Semitism cannot mean ongoing degradation and suppression of another people” (May 22, 2024).
There is a civil war going on within Israel between those with an Ashkenazie, Western, European ‘liberal’ view on Israel connected with the kubutzes, who live near Haifa and Tel Aviv and have never been through a check-point in the occupied territories like the West Bank, on the one hand, and then on the other hand, the Mizhari, Middle Eastern Jews who consider themselves to be under attack. The latter tend to see Israel in biblical terms. They want to go back to the Talmud and the founding of Israel “as it is put in the Bible.” And the latter version of Israel is what Netanyahu and the far right support, as do “a plurality of Israelis“ (Crooke, May 20, 2-24).
The Origin and Consequences of Zionism
Therefore, Zionism shares many classically fascist forms of ideology which is why Zionist Jews, many of whom have ancestors who were victims of the Holocaust, could wind up putting Palestinians in the open air concentration camp of Gaza, stealing their land, colonizing them, driving them out of Palestine (the Nakba) and carrying out a genocide on them.
Faris Glubb’s Zionist Relations with Nazi Germany was largely ignored when published in 1978 (Beeley, Apr. 29, 2024). Glubb shows is that Zionists were always closely associated with fascism, so killing 37,000+ civilian Gazans as of June 14, 2021 is consistent with a century of Zionist behaviour.
Zionism emerged in the late 19th Century as a Jewish nationalist political ideology compaigning for a Jewish state. Starting with Theodor Herzl’s The Jewish State (1896) and the subsequent 1897 Zionist Congress, Zionists have justified Israel as the safe home for Jews. Though initially opposed by most Jews, Zionism became dominant among Jews by the 1920s.
Glubb explains why Herzl argued that “the governments of all countries scourged by anti-Semitism will be keenly interested in assisting us to obtain the sovereignty we want” (Allday and Al-Saleh, Oct 31, 2023). “The European phenomenon of “anti-Semitism” maintains that the Jews of Europe are an unassimilable, alien element in European society and which should be removed from Europe” (Glubb, 1978: 1). Though not religious, Herzl, who died in 1904, argued that the Jews should be able to obtain sovereignty because Zionism’s objective of a sovereign Jewish State was consistent with the prevailing views of European anti-Semitism which wanted to get rid of what they thought were unassimilable Jews. With this in mind, Herzl met with leaders of anti-Semitic pogroms in Czarist Russia who also supported Zionism as a way of removing Jews from Russia.
While the President of the British Zionist Federation, after Herzl’s death, Chaim Weizmann, campaigned for Zionism based, support emerged from Lord Balfour, Lord Robert Cecil and Prime Minister Lloyd George whose imperialist interests in taking over the Ottoman Empire coincided with their anti-Semitism to generate the Balfour Declaration of Nov. 2nd, 1917. Weizmann used the imperialist argument that “a Jewish Palestine would be a safeguard to England, in particular in respect to the Suez Canal.” (Glubb, 1978: 12).
After the Balfour Declaration anti-Semitism rose in Europe, “culminating in Hitler’s Holocaust. This in turn was followed by the dispossession of the Palestinian people” (Glubb, 1978: 12). At that time, the World Zionist Organisation was based in Berlin. There was an increase in Jew-baiting policies in Germany along with the rise of Nazism as they began a reign of terror against Jews including kidnapping and attacks on Jewish people particularly if they were Socialists or Democrats similar to the pogroms that had happened against Jews in Czarist Russia (1978: 13).
With Nazis in control, on Apr. 12,1933, a new German Civil Service Law was passed barring
“all non-Aryans (except those who fought at the front or who lost a father or son in the World War) from any position in Federal, State or Municipal Civil Service…Matriculated Jews could not be members of the student body. On the same day, the Government barred Jewish political editors from its press conferences…” (Glubb, 1978: 14).
All Jewish judges and lawyers were removed. Then, no Jewish children were allowed in Christian schools and Jewish doctors were prohibited from treating Christian children. So, from the moment the Nazis gained power, Jews were no longer considered “part of Gentile society” (1978: 15).
The Zionist Movement in Israel from the 1950s to the 1970s focused on erasing from memory the relationship that had existed between the Nazis and Zionists, partly “to rebrand Israel as a progressive, anti-fascist project representing an antithesis to Nazism” including to deny their cordial relationship with Nazis like Adolph Eichmann who had even supplied Zionists with farm implements to settle in Palestine. Among Jews, only Zionists were able to negotiate with the Nazis.
“The Zionists too believed that “dissimilation’ combined with the emigration to Palestine of Jewish youngsters and they hoped, Jewish capitalists, could be a ‘mutually fair solution” (Glubb, 1978: 16).
Nazis also helped to strengthen kibbutzim in 1938. which had begun as amalgams of socialist and Zionist Jewish farming settlements. Meanwhile the Nazis worked with the Zionists to weaken the anti-fascist movement. Whereas this helped the Zionists, the consequences of their interaction with the Nazis contributed to ruining the Jewish masses in Europe (Allday and Al-Saleh, Oct. 31, 2023; Glubb, 1978).
While Glubb praised Jewish anti-fascist resistance in Poland early in the war, he noted that revisionist Zionist Jacob Gens, Police Chief in the Vilno ghetto, helped suppress Jewish resistance at the time that their horrendous fate was becoming increasingly obvious. At the order of the Nazis, Gens used blackmail to coerce the communist leader of the resistance, Itzik Witenberg, to turn himself in to the Nazis. On Zionism’s opposition to militant resistance in the face of Nazism, Glubb adds: “[h]istory records no proclamation of revolt by the Zionist movement against Nazism in Europe (Allday and Al Saley, Oct. 31, 2023).
And now Zionist Israelis have established an apartheid state, criticized by some South Africans as worse than the form that afflicted their nation before it was abolished by Mandela, the African National Congress and other friends in Cuba, Russia and elsewhere. This has happened by way of land confiscation, unequal access to services and other resources, restrictions on the movement of Palestinians and the construction of illegal settlements on land stolen from the Palestinians.
Zionism has helped Israel construct apartheid policies within the occupied territories in order to steal Palestinian land and deny Palestinians the same freedoms, rights and privileges that Israelis enjoy. Despite their military checkpoints, separate roads for Israelis compared to the inferior roads, infrastructure and forms of communication they even grudgingly allow Palestinians, the Israelis deny they’re system is apartheid and falsely claim that Israel is the only democratic state within the Middle East, as is constantly reiterated by the West, especially the US.
Allday and Al-Saleh summarize Glubb’s conclusion: “that the fascist concept of a “superior race” is present in Zionist ideology, especially give the Zionist movement’s “neglect of the elderly who could not make such a contribution to building Zionist statehood; that collaboration between Zionists and Nazis “was not an individual aberration but a reflection of official Zionist policy”; that the Zionist movement never organised sustained resistance to Nazism, as “it was the non-Zionist Jewish individuals and organisations who took the initiative and burden of that struggle on themselves” (Oct. 23, 2023).
Israel has largely controlled the US for decades through the Israeli lobby, AIPAC (the American Israeli Policy Action Committee) which funds senators and the House of Representative members willing to vote to defend Israel through the provision of hundreds of millions of campaign dollars. So, given the extent of apartheid within Israel (not just Greater Israel including the occupied territories) and the relative degrees of absence of human rights for non-Jewish citizens, Israel is clearly not a democracy. But its control of the US shows that America is not either. Both mainstream candidates for President are controlled by Israel, as it invades Rafah and continues its wonton destruction of Palestinians with the aid of American weapons.
Glubb (1978) observes that the 1930s agreements that the German Zionists had with Hitler to enable Zionists to be agriculturally trained and sent to Palestine lapsed when Hitler opted, after the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, for the Final Solution, the complete physical extermination of the Jews.
“By accepting the fatal principal of common interests and consequent co-operation with Nazism, however limited its scale in the 1930s, the Zionists set themselves on their own parallel steep path downwards. The two phenomena of anti-Semitism and the Zionists’ alliance of convenience with it, in the hope of using it as the “propelling force” they needed, cannot be separated completely. They reacted mutually on each other, as inevitably happens with any two political forces whose relationship is one of close contact, whether in confrontation or co-operation” (1978: 34).
In Upper East Silesia, for example, a ‘council of elders’ comprised mainly of Zionist activists helped the Nazis identify Jews among the masses who should be exterminated. That decision was left up to the ‘council of elders’
“with the enforcement of kidnappings and arrests also placed in the hands of the Jewish police (kapos). By this shrewd method, the Nazis were highly successful in accomplishing mass murder and poisoning the atmosphere of the ghetto through moral degeneration and corruption” (Glubb, 1978: 46).
Herzl’s concept of Zionism was not explicitly racist despite the discriminatory practices Israeli Zionists have instituted against Palestinians. These policies include stealing Palestinian land, abrogating Palestinian freedoms of movement, communication and speech and the Israeli formal introduction of unequal access to land resources between Palestinians and Israelis. Both the Palestinians and Israelis have approximately equal populations within what the Israel likes to call Greater Israel, but Palestinians have more children which scares Israelis when they think of Israel’s future.
Israelis have always opposed a two state solution and have consistently maintained ambiguous borders between Israel and the non-state of Palestine, which enables Israelis to appropriate the colonized Palestinians more easily with non-existent borders.
But the idea that Jews are a ‘chosen people’ predates Zionism significantly within other forms of Jewish ideology and religion. According to this interpretation of the Torah, in the five Biblical books, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy, God gave the Israelites a special purpose, an ethical and moral mission to accomplish in the world. Some particularly religious Jews see this as a justification for what Israel is trying to accomplish today. Others see this as an extremely dubious superiority myth, which is being used to subjugate the Palestinians.
Renowned ‘realist’ geopolitical scientist John Mearsheimer says that the only way the Israelis can get out of apartheid is to destroy Hamas and ethnically cleanse Greater Israel. He points out that they have already done ethnic cleansing in 1948 and 1967 and says that the reason they haven’t talked about how they will administer Gaza is that they intend to ethnically cleanse Gaza (May 18, 2024).
The International Court of Justice (ICJ) has just ruled that Israel may be committing genocide and must take action to prevent further genocide. According to the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide (1948) includes any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
“(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; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group” (Genocide Convention, Dec. 9 1948).
The ICJ judges ruled that at least some of Israel's acts against the Palestinians, as alleged by South Africa, which fall within the provisions of the Genocide Convention are genocide. Israel was ordered to stop these acts immediately including their attack on Rafah and have been told that it would be watched carefully to see that it doesnot commit further acts of these kinds. Israel has since done little to comply. South Africa’s latest approach to the ICJ has resulted in the ruling described above. By supplying the bombs and other military ordinance to Israel, President Biden and Chancellor Scholtz, among others in the West, are complicit in these genocidal acts.
Conclusion
The shift to the right revealed by the EU Parliament vote on June 9th by the EU may be a sign that once again Western capitalist countries, still emersed in a relatively long period of economic crisis and stagnation, face an existential moment including spreading fascism. The Israeli/Palestinian conflict and the West’s proxy war with Russia in Ukraine reveal just how barbaric this is.
The answer to the question of whether Israeli Zionism is fascist, is a definite yes. Zionism has a history of cooperating both with anti-Semites and Nazis, the consequence of which has been tragic both for Palestine and Israel.
But this happened during an earlier capitalist crisis and great depression as well with the rise of fascism in the 1930s. Guerin concluded that at that time, because fascism was funded by heavy industrialists and big landowners, “fascism merely aggravates the tendency of the whole capitalist system to national isolation and autarky” (1973: 286).
Substituting today’s ‘finance capital linked to the US military industrial complex and fossil fuel industries’ for ‘Germany’s big industrialists and landowners’, the parallels with the rise of fascism and its contemporary manifestations cannot be ignored. This is not to say that finance capitalism causes fascism. Rather, during capitalist crises, fascism can emerge as acute class and national contradictions threaten societal breakdown while capitalists attempt to resurrect their rates of profit by raising the organic composition of capital and the rates of exploitation.
US hegemonic finance capitalism has been in crisis-stagnation mode since the dot.com crisis of 2000, punctuated by the sub-prime mortgage crisis of 2008/09 and the pandemic crisis of 2021/22 with only short periods of prosperity in between. Unresolved contradictions have combined with the steady erosion of Western manufacturing competitiveness and a process of de-dollarization exacerbated by boomeranging sanctions and mushrooming debt to weaken US international dominance by the once dominant G7 countries who have seen their collective Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) decline relative to that of the expanding BRICS bloc. Simultaneously, national conflicts have worsened culminating in a proxy war in eastern Ukraine, an Israeli/Palestinian war in the Middle East and saber rattling in the South China Sea.
As indicated above, the last time fascism exploded along with crisis and depression in the 1930s, Guerin concluded that “any anti-fascism is a frail illusion if it confines itself to defensive measures and does not aim at smashing capitalism itself” (1973: 288). Despite the tragic loss of life accompanying these wars, a new synthesis is emerging of multipolarity as unipolarity reaches its denouement in Eastern Europe and the Middle East.
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