The other night at dinner in Manhattan, a realist friend said to me, “Things are changing. When I tell people we’ve handed over our foreign policy to a fascist foreign country, they don’t look at me like a lunatic, they consider the idea and even agree somewhat.”
The next day in Brooklyn, I asked an anti-Zionist friend whether it is possible to rebrand Israel as a fascist country. He considered the idea and nodded.
“Right now in New York you get overwhelming majorities of people in polls saying that they disapprove of the stop-and-frisk tactics [which target minority youth]. A lot of what goes on in the Occupied Territories is worse than that police conduct. So I think, potentially, Yes.”
I told him that the day before my mother sent me this MoveOn.org petition to sign, to “block the racist Florida voter purge.”
This year, Florida Governor Rick Scott has challenged more than 180,000 voters–more than half of whom are Latino–by accusing them of not being citizens. … Attorney General Eric Holder… has the authority to sue the state and block the purge program because of how it harms Latino voters.
By the same standard, I could argue that Israel is enacting racist and apartheid policies not just in Palestine but all over Israel.
On the train home from the city, I met an old friend, a hardboiled capitalist, and asked him about rebranding Israel as fascist.
He said, “Well I do wonder about the disappearance of the Israeli left from the political sphere. If you vote in Israel now, there’s just one party. They’ve solidified. You don’t have a choice. And wasn’t that the criticism we always had of dictatorships? There was no choice. So in my view, Israel is just another middle eastern authoritarian state.”
When I got home, I asked my old friend and political guru James North the question. He said, “The answer is yes, and you should reread the post I did on this subject two years ago.”
I did. It was a review of Robert O. Paxton’s book, The Anatomy of Fascism. North wrote:
Toward the end of the book, Paxton looks at the possibility of fascism in “Other Times, Other Places” outside its peak in Europe between the two World Wars. Among several examples, he says that “. . . one must address the potential – supreme irony – for fascism in Israel.”
“The suicide bombings of the second intifada after 2001 radicalized even many Israeli democrats to the right. By 2002, it was possibly to hear language within the right wing of the Likud Party and some of the small religious parties that comes close to a functional equivalent to fascism. The chosen people begins to sound like a Master Race that claims a unique ‘mission in the world,’ demands its ‘vital space,’ demonizes an enemy that obstructs the realization of the people’s destiny, and accepts the necessity of force to obtain these ends.”
North concluded:
The Western mainstream devotes a great deal of time and energy to every Islamic extremist statement, and the word “Islamofascism” has even been used by an American president. But their Israeli extremist equivalents, who have only gotten louder and more powerful since Paxton’s book appeared, hardly ever appear in U.S. news reports. The unstated assumption is that the “Israelo-fascists” like Avigdor Lieberman are only crazy uncles hidden up in the attic, not worth paying attention to.
That was two years ago. The picture hasn’t gotten any prettier since.
did i miss something? hasn’t the US turned into a fascist country that has been israelified? a president running death squads, assassinating american citizens, bombing countries with which we are not at war, repressing dissent, surveilling the populace?
the only dissent i see is on the blogs. the mainstream media serves up propagandistic confections. at least in the old USSR most russian people knew that they were being lied to; americans don’t.
” The picture hasn’t gotten any prettier since”
They just can’t help themselves, can they ?
Every year that passes intensifies the drift to wards the darkness in Israel. Back in 2000 who expected Israel to bomb Gaza with white phosphorous? Who in 2010 would have said that the Government wouldn’t even be able to clear an outpost like”Ulpana” or that videos of Jews shouting “Death to the Arabs” would go viral?
Nobody ever stopped them when it was important. Now it is too late. Israel has managed to buy off all meaningful dissent with economic growth that is in part driven by the dispossession capitalism that defines the occupation.
Markus Haefliger in the NZZ “die Finanzkrise hat uns gezeigt wie rasch das scheinbar Undenkbar eintreten kann”
The Financial Crisis has shown us how quickly what (previously) appeared to be unthinkable can occur.
Hmm, I disagree(not on moral principles but on practical ones).
Here’s why:
1. Israel has an armada of PR. The most effective attack on Israel isn’t the full frontal attack but rather the slow, poisonous venom that is seeping into the discourse, asking uncomfortable questions if the nation really do ‘share our values’ whenever there is an incident(like the recent bloodthirsty pogroms against undocumented migrants from Africa). However, whenever the heat gets turned up, the response is massive. Remember Mayor Bloomberg’s attack and all the NYC candidates for election the coming year? Israel is still more mainstream.
2.
Face it. The alternative matters. Whatever we can say about the Arab world in general, we cannot say it has a good PR reputation. And for good reason. According to the UN even Sub-Saharan Africa grans more rights to women on average than the Arab world. In fact, of all the major regions in the world, the Arab world is most medieval on this issue of all the major regions of the world.
Or as a piece recently on +972 put it: “better pinkwashing than pinkstoning”.
Fatah is a collaborationist regime, which all of you know. So even if they are moderate to a fault, they are non-democratic. And Hamas and/or somekind of islamist coalition would probably do very well in a hypothetical election. And one thing liberals often do is constantly overestimate the soothing siren song of islamists to Western ears. Hamas cannot be defended and is by a longshot worse than the Israeli alternative(and that’s saying quite a bit).
This leaves liberals in a bind. While Hamas and assorted parties are a nightmare, Fatah is a collaborationist regime, surely the alternative cannot be to support the status quo? And add to this the, by now, very well-run islamophobic machine, which Hollywood has greased, which will be rolled out every single time it’s time to smear the Israeli opposition. And you know what, the reason why that campaign is so effective isn’t merely because of cash, although it helps. The reason is that there is simply a lot to attack. The Palestinian people may be suffering, but they are not by and large liberals. Just like the Egyptian people were suffering under oppression but held deeply misogynic, homophobic and anti-Semitic views(as well as a deep-seated hostility to Christianity).
So what gives? Until a truly appealing opposition emerges in the broader swathes of society(I think Dr. Barghouti would be a good candidate, but 15 % isn’t 55 %), Israel and it’s defenders will credibly be able to point to the other side and say “oh really? And what about those?”. The left’s silence and/or even defence(!) of these islamists will be met with scorn, as well as it should be.
3.
Therefore I think that the process will take time, and it will also depend on the Pals getting their act together politically. There are already many unsung heroes but they are disconnected and disjointed. Even Khader Adnan(spelling?), the hunger striker was a member of the Islamic Jihad which is a deeply homophobic(like: let’s stone gays! kind of homophobia), anti-women and in many ways even anti-Semitic organization.
Again, liberals are in a bind. Defend the indefensible on the Israeli side or on the Palestinian side? We all know that the moral case rests with the oppressed but once people ask the inevitable questions such as “okay, but what then?”, then it’ll be harder. People didn’t ask those questions in Egypt that much, in part because it went so fast and there wasn’t much skin in the game for Western elites. When it comes to the Jewish state, no such luck. Fair or not, the onus will be on the Palestinians to come with an alternative that can’t be credibly smeared and as much as some liberals will scream bloody murder, defending Islamists or collaborationist regimes isn’t going to work in the long run.
4. Therefore I think we won’t have a “re-branding of Israel” into something you describe. Rather, I think, unless there is a lot of pressure, Israel won’t be viewed in a favorable light but most people will just ignore the area and think of Israel “as no better or worse than any other”. Under such circumstances, when people will laugh at those who try to glorify Israel but also ignore those who keep pushing for boycott/action, what you will have is a behaviour of benign neglect. Give Israel what it wants, but not anything crazy. Whatever they do with the Arabs isn’t our concern.
That could probably go on for quite some time. And the only thing that can change that is first and foremost a viable, strong (40 %+ liberal vote, at least) alternative and much more pressure from activists abroad.
Ultimately, I think Israel, if staying on the current path, will be faced with impossible odds but I also think they could, in an area of benign neglect, continue on the status quo for a very long time indeed unless those two conditions are met and I don’t see anything on the horizon soon. True, a lot have happened in the past 5 years but that was also mostly low-hanging fruit. The discourse on Israel was beyond ridicule just a few years ago, and to some extent is even today, but now the debate is a little more measured. It will be much harder to go from “yes Israel has problems” to “Israel is an international pariah who control our congress(on Israel/Palestine issues) via AIPAC”. That later meme has picked up but is so long only background noise. To truly get it into mainstream will be much harder than the last 5 years of just changing a debate which had tons of flaws in it.
There are politicians like Lieberman in many Conservative Parties in Europe, the leaders of these parties usually keep the ‘backwoodsmen’ out of any influence on policy or as North says “hidden up in the attic”. In Israel these types are traversing the globe on hasbara missions.
speaking of extremists..sorry to go OT but i read this morning at 972..yossi gurvitz
Ministers and general to honor Rabbi charged with incitement
http://972mag.com/ministers-and-general-honor-inciting-rabbi/17918/
that would be Dov Lior, the rabbi who endorsed the gentile-slaying manual