No one knows fascism better than Israelis. They are schooled, drilled in the history, the mechanics, the horrendous potential of fascist regimes. Israelis know fascism when they see it. In others.
They might well have expected when fascism began taking root here, it would arise at a time of a national leadership of galvanizing charisma and sweeping, powerfully orchestrated modes of action.
But that would have been much too obvious to deny. And it would take denial, inertia, selective memory, a sense that things – bad as they are – can go on like this indefinitely, for fascism to be able gain its foothold in a country founded in its very blood trail.
In fact, it has taken the most dysfunctional, the most rudderless government Israel has ever known, to make moderates uncomfortably aware of the countless but largely cosmetized ways in which the right in Israel and its supporters abroad have come to plant and nurture the seeds of fascism.
It’s worse, in principle, (not numbers, of course), than fascism. As genocide is a legal term, it must be logical to use the legal definition, not the short hand definition preferred by zionasties. This must surely be the definition as used, in legal reference books, in every country that is a signatory, to the international laws on genocide. So killing people for racial reasons, is an act of genocide. Killing them for being the wrong kind of Semites, that zionasties want not to have land, that can be taken from them after their removal, is also, genocide. What, then, is an appropriate term, for the state practitioners, of genocide. Is it a neo version of an earlier manifestation. What would that be ?
John, I think it has to be seen in the context of the position taken by some Zionists that nothing short of the holocaust (defined as murder of 6 million JEWS; forget about the other 5 or 6 million non-Jews murdered by the Nazis) qualifies as “genocide.” A few months back, Nadia Hijab published an article titled “When does it become genocide?” which looked at that international definition and came to the conclusion that genocide has been happening in the OPT for quite some time.
Arguing over names is not likely to result in any change. The issues of dispossession, arbitrary treatment, denial of democratic rights, intimidation, and ghetto-ization are crimes against international law and human decency committed by any state whatever name it chooses for itself.
Call Israel a theocracy and its actions are still despicable. See what you get when no separation of church and state is maintained?