The new fascism: Israel is the template for Trump and Europe’s war on freedom

The wide-ranging crackdown on political speech is being framed as a 'war on antisemitism'. But fascism was always going to return in disguise, calling its opponents, not itself, the Nazis

[First published by Middle East Eye]

The virus of fascism only ever lay dormant in the West after its apparent destruction during the Second World War.

Early indicators are everywhere that fascism – an ideology that espouses racist hierarchies of human value, of who should have rights and who must not – is reasserting itself in the United States and across large parts of Europe.

There is an intensifying distrust and fear of foreigners. Immigrants are seen as destroying the West from within – irreconcilable with, and antagonistic to, a “superior” civilisation and culture.

In the US, a permanent resident – apparently the first of many – has been disappeared into the US prison system, pending his deportation.

Political speech in opposition to western governments and their crimes is being stigmatised and crushed with old laws and new. Supposedly liberal academic institutions are rolling over as they are menaced with legal and financial sanctions. There is little reason to assume that judicial systems will provide any meaningful check on executive power.

The West is taking the first formal steps down a different political path – one whose final destination we know from our own relatively recent history.

The far right is now setting the agenda with the same Cheshire Cat grin, whether it’s billionaire TV star Donald Trump in the US, or Westminster’s glorified used-car salesman Nigel Farage in the UK.

There are fascist-leaning parties inside the governments of Italy, Hungary, Finland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, the Netherlands and Croatia. Openly far-right parties are jostling for power in France, Germany, Austria, Sweden and, for the first time, Britain. That trend was reflected in a surge of ultra-nationalist delegates elected to the European Parliament last year.

The only available bulwarks are bloodless technocrats like Prime Minister Keir Starmer in Britain, President Emmanuel Macron in France, and former Vice President Kamala Harris in the US, offering more of the same failed policies that opened the door to the fascists in the first place.

Hiding in plain sight

These developments have not come out of the blue. They have been decades in the making.

This should come as no surprise, because the main repository for the West’s fascist ideas since the Second World War has been hiding in plain sight: Israel.

The West’s undisguised crackdown on the most fundamental of rights, such as political speech and academic freedom, is being carried out in the name of protecting Israel and those western Jews who cheerlead its crimes.

Fascism is stepping out of the shadows in the US and Europe as Israel, armed and given diplomatic cover by its western patrons, ostentatiously commits a genocide against the Palestinians of Gaza.

Israel has continued, with the West’s conspicuous backing, to do the very things that western states themselves found it impossible to justify in the wake of the Second World War.

When the West was reluctantly forced into decolonisation processes in Africa and Asia, Israel was given licence and endless support to grow a violent ethno-nationalist project on another people’s homeland.

Jewish supremacism was respectable, even as white supremacism fell out of favour.

Israel became ever bolder in its expulsions and segregationist policies. It herded Palestinians into ever-smaller enclaves, where they were stripped of rights and subjected to constant military abuses.

All of this continued even as, in the mid-1960s, the civil rights movement in the US finally overturned the Deep South’s segregationist Jim Crow laws. And it continued as, in the 1990s, the white leaders of apartheid South Africa, another western colonial project, were forced into a truth and reconciliation process with the black majority.

Israel remained the West’s most favoured ally, even as it pushed firmly against what was presented elsewhere as the inexorable tide of progressive change.

Monstrous behaviour

Fascism’s ascendancy across much of Europe through the 1930s and early 1940s was a wakeup call that led western leaderships to bolster international institutions, whose watchword was human rights.

The United Nations, created in 1945, was supposed to embody these values, issuing its Universal Declaration of Human Rights three years later, and spawning legal bodies such as the International Court of Justice and International Criminal Court to hold rogue regimes to account.

The aim was to prevent a return to the horrors of the Second World War, from the Nazi death camps to the Allies’ fire-bombings of German and Japanese cities.

That was why Israel’s ethnic project to colonise Palestine – by removing or killing Palestinians to replace them with Jews – found itself in continuous confrontation with the new watchdog bodies, violating dozens of UN resolutions. Washington was always ready to protect it from repercussions.

It was not that other countries did not commit terrible crimes too. After all, in its struggle to remain the global top dog during the Cold War, the US destroyed swathes of Southeast Asia in bombing campaigns related to the Vietnam War.

But unlike western states, Israel did not even pay lip service to the supposed principles of the post-Second World War international order. Its organising principle was directly opposed to the UN declaration. Israel explicitly rejected universal human rights, and its Basic Laws, amounting to a constitution, excluded the principle of equality.

Meanwhile, Israel’s constant military oppression of the Palestinian people was in flagrant violation of the Geneva Conventions. Similar to South Africa’s apartheid era, there has not been a day since Israel’s founding in 1948 when it was not committing structural violence against the native people it seeks to replace.

There was not a day when it was not segregating Palestinians, destroying their communities, forcing them off their lands, eradicating their crops, blocking their roads, putting them in torture camps, isolating them from the world – or killing them.

It would have carried out this eradication process earlier, faster and even more shamelessly, had it not been for the restraining hand of international law and the difficult optics for the US and Europe of supporting this monstrous behaviour.

But even those restraints have all but evaporated. The current genocide in Gaza, all too visibly sponsored by the West, can only happen in a political climate where the idea of universal human rights has been hollowed out; where the idea that human life is sacrosanct has lost its meaning.

Stretched and warped

Israeli politics has ostentatiously divided itself between a so-called “liberal” faction and rightwing Zionism, as if there was some grand ideological struggle going on. But in truth, all Israeli politics is fascist in nature.

Both wings of Zionism are premised on the notion that Israeli Jews – most of them recent immigrants – have superior rights over the Palestinian natives, and that any Palestinian who refuses to submit to permanent servitude should be punished.

The debate within Zionism is not about whether this should happen. It is about where fine lines should be drawn. What is the extent of the territory in which Jews unquestionably enjoy superior rights, and how extreme should the punishments be for Palestinians who disobey?

These arguments have largely reflected secular and religious splits within Israel, with parts of its society prioritising western concerns about Israel’s reputation on the international stage.

Over decades, confronted by the fact that Palestinians refuse to cooperate with its organising principle – submit or be punished – the Israeli majority shifted from a liberal Zionism obsessed with appearances to an unapologetic, triumphalist, far-right Zionism. That is why self-declared fascists proudly sit in the current government.

And it is why last month, Israel’s ruling party, Likud, became an observer member of Patriots for Europe – an alliance of Europe’s far-right parties, often with Nazi and neo-Nazi ties. At an inaugural conference in Madrid, Likud was warmly welcomed, with alliance leaders highlighting their “shared values”.

None of this happened discreetly. Israel is the West’s last major colonial outpost. It is the place where the West’s military industries test their might on Palestinians, who serve as lab rats.

It is where the strength of international law is stress-tested, its principles stretched and warped by endless abuse, and then flagrantly disobeyed.

And it is where a narrative of victimhood, of Jewish and Christian “civilisation”, has been crafted to justify a war on the Palestinian people and, more generally, Muslims.

Perfect cover story

All of this is supposed to carry on, immune from criticism or objection. The West has developed a perfect cover story for cocooning its fascist offspring: those who oppose the subjugation and brutalisation of the Palestinian people are denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination. They are thus “antisemites”.

In parallel, any Palestinian who resists subjugation and brutalisation is a terrorist. Ergo, those who ally with Palestinians are in league with terrorists.

In a further leap, because the West has cast Palestinians as part of the Muslim masses of the Arab world – even though there are many Palestinian Christians and Druze – Palestinian resistance to Israeli oppression can be presented as an adjunct of a supposed Islamist threat to the West.

In truth, no Palestinian group is fighting to conquer the West, or to impose sharia law on Europe and the US. Palestinian resistance groups are seeking only to liberate their homeland from decades of colonial oppression and ethnic cleansing.

Predictably, the longer that oppression has continued, with extravagant western backing, the more Palestinians facing Israel’s abuses have been drawn to less accommodationist militant groups, like Hamas, proscribed as a terrorist organisation in the UK and other countries.

No matter. Israel is presented as a small, heroic nation defending the West from the Muslim hordes. In a narrative that utterly inverts reality, Israel serves as the humanist rampart against Palestinian – and by extension, Muslim – barbarism.

It is this premise that makes it possible for Michael Gove, a former British government minister, to write an article in the midst of Israel’s genocide headlined: “The IDF [Israeli military] should be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize”.

It is this premise that allows a respected writer, Howard Jacobson, to demand silence at the killing and maiming of tens of thousands of Palestinian children in Gaza, because speaking in their defence supposedly amounts to a “blood libel” against the Jewish people.

It is this premise that means Melanie Phillips, a journalistic staple of BBC panel shows, can get away with writing: “If you support the Palestinian Arab cause today, you are facilitating deranged and murderous Jew-hatred.”

These are self-pitying, delusional narratives that our European forefathers – plundering Africa of its wealth, enslaving its “savage” peoples or killing millions who refused to accept the West’s civilisational “superiority” – would be only too comfortable espousing.

Arriving in disguise

Fascism was never going to return to Europe or the US dressed in Nazi garb. It was never going to arrive wearing jackboots and brandishing swastikas.

In fact, it was all too predictable that it would arrive in disguise, dressed in suits, telegenic, and characterising its opponents, not itself, as the Nazis.

That is where Israel has been so helpful once again, for it has not just served as a template for fascism, preserving and rejuvenating ideas of racial superiority, colonisation and genocide. For decades, it has also allowed western states to invest Israeli fascism with a moral legitimacy. Support for Israel’s racial hierarchies, in which Palestinian lives are entirely expendable, has been sold as necessary to “protect Jews”.

That premise has, in turn, allowed genocide to become a respectable, moral cause. It is precisely why Starmer felt able to say that Israel had a “right” to deny more than two million Palestinian men, women and children all food, water and fuel. A genocide that he would have rejected in other circumstances – indeed, has rejected – was apparently okay so long as Israel was doing it.

This is why a UN report earlier this month on Israel’s “genocidal acts” received barely any traction in western media. The report shows how Israel has routinised sexual assault and rape against the Palestinians it arbitrarily detains as bargaining chips for the hostages held by Hamas in Gaza.

And it is why Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a wanted war criminal and fugitive from justice, is still welcome in western capitals, as are his generals who have been carrying out the genocide in Gaza.

Warped calculus

The West’s endless indulgence of Israel’s variety of fascism – Zionism – has allowed its ideas to quietly seep back into our own societies, where Zionism is still treated with near-reverential respect.

If racial hierarchies are a good thing in Israel, why are they not a good thing in the US and Europe too? This is why a large section of Trump’s base proudly call themselves “white Zionists”. They see a Jewish fortress state of Israel as a model for the US as a white fortress state against their “Great Replacement” fears.

If “protecting Jews” in Israel can justify any crime by the Israeli state against Palestinians, why can “protecting Jews” not also justify illegal behaviour by western states towards their own populations?

“Protecting Jews” means that speech critical of Israel must be outlawed, even as Israel commits war crimes and genocide, because that criticism risks offending domestic Jewish organisations that cheerlead Israel.

Academic freedom must be crushed too, to protect the feelings of those Jewish students and professors who think the mass slaughter of Palestinian children is an acceptable price to pay for Israel reasserting its military deterrence.

And with a self-rationalising logic, any western Jews who do not prostrate themselves before Israel enthusiastically enough are deemed to be “the wrong sort of Jews” – or “Palestinian”, in the new slur Trump has levelled against Chuck Schumer, the Jewish US Senate minority leader.

In this warped, self-serving calculus of human rights, the sensitivities of Zionist Jews are placed at the apex, and the right of Palestinians not to be murdered at the bottom.

This is precisely why US federal authorities are seeking to set a precedent by abducting and deporting a permanent resident, Mahmoud Khalil, for helping to lead student protests against Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

He is being accused, without any evidence, of being “aligned with Hamas”, “supporting terrorism”, holding antisemitic views, and desiring the destruction of the West by Islamic extremism.

Just as Israel recruited AI to select its targets in Gaza for execution, using the broadest categories it could devise as algorithmic prompts, the White House is using AI to select as broadly as it can who is aligned with Hamas, who is a terrorist, who is an antisemite.

At the same time, US academic institutions are having their federal grants revoked on the grounds that they are supposedly not doing enough to tackle “antisemitism” by crushing the anti-genocide protests. Obedient universities are hurrying to join the government crackdown.

The Trump administration is framing these moves, and more are doubtless to come, as part of a “war on antisemitism” – the sequel to the “war on terror”.

In the process, Washington is creating grounds to demonise vast swathes of the US student population and large sections of the Jewish community, especially young Jews unwilling to let a genocide be committed in their name. All now face being vilified as having “aligned with terrorism”.

The Trump administration is far from alone. Starmer’s government in the UK, like its predecessor, has carefully cultivated a political climate in which journalists, scholars, students, protest organisers, politicians and activists – many of them Jewish – are being smeared as Jew haters, and their protests against genocide as antisemitic.

The British government has wheeled out draconian, vaguely worded terrorism legislation to investigate and charge those it accuses of expressing opinions, or stating facts, too critical of Israel – criticisms it suggests might thereby “encourage support” for Hamas.

Free speech, the right to protest and academic freedom – the fundamental tenets of liberal democracy – are being hastily jettisoned, now supposedly a threat to democracy.

Hierarchy of human worth

There is a pattern whose outline is coming ever more sharply into focus.

The Trump administration has resurrected the Alien Enemies Act, an obscure, 18th-century bit of legislation designed to give extraordinary powers to the executive to disappear foreigners during wartime without any due process.

It has only ever been invoked in three periods of history – the last time to imprison without trial tens of thousands of people of Japanese descent during the Second World War.

Trump first tested out this law on a group he assumes no one will seek to defend: people his officials are characterising as Venezuelan criminals. But one can be sure the administration is keen to stretch the legislation’s applicability far wider.

Trump’s previous administration dug out another arcane law, the 1917 Espionage Act, to use against a non-citizen, Julian Assange, treating his journalism exposing US and British war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan as “espionage”. The Act was hurriedly passed during the First World War.

Washington’s goal in targeting Assange was to set a legal precedent in which it could grab anyone, anywhere in the world, and lock them away indefinitely as a spy.

One can be sure Trump’s officials are rifling through dusty statute books looking for more long-overlooked laws that can be repurposed to repress dissent and imprison those who stand in its way. But the darkest of precedents already exist, supplied by Israel.

If Israel can exterminate the Palestinian people it has been oppressing for decades to prevent what it implausibly claims to be a future existential threat from a small armed group, while receiving vigorous western support, why can the US and Europe not do likewise? They can resort to similar claims of an existential threat to normalise internment camps, deportations, or even extermination programmes.

German Jews viewed themselves as German citizens until Adolf Hitler’s government decided they were an alien element to whom different rules would apply.

That did not happen overnight. It was a gradual, cumulative slippage in legal norms that eroded the ability of targeted groups to resist their scapegoating, and of their supporters to protest, while the majority blindly followed along.

In reality, fascism never went away. The West simply outsourced it to a client state whose job was, on the West’s behalf, to advance in the Middle East the same ugly ideas of a hierarchy of human worth.

We identify with Israel because we are told it represents us, our values and our civilisation. And the truth is, it does – which is why responsibility for 18 months of genocide in Gaza stops with us. This is our genocide. And before it’s even complete, it is coming back to bite us.

[Many thanks to Matthew Alford for the audio reading of this article.]

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