For the ISE blog: Mason Herson-Hord explains the unfolding genocide against Palestinians in Gaza through the history of Israel's radical right's ascension to power. "Over the course of these decades, there was a resulting shift in Israeli political consciousness where the historical necessity of the Nakba for the creation of the Jewish state transitioned from a truth to be masked or denied to one to be embraced and carried forward into Israel’s expansionist future."
I am hesitant to suggest a “descent into fascism” narrative about Israel. The State of Israel has always been fascistic in relation to its Palestinian subjects. In the entirety of Israel’s modern history, there were only a scarce few months where at least hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were not living under its martial law and military dictatorship: between the end of apartheid military rule over the subject class of Palestinians remaining after the Nakba in what became Israel (1949-1966) and the capture of the other Palestinian territories and the creation of the Israeli Military Governorate (1967 onwards).32 These systems of Israeli military rule over Palestinians can only be adequately described as totalitarian: through 1994, they entailed complete bans on any Palestinian political activity or freedom of expression; incarceration (often without trial or even charges) at rates far exceeding anything seen in Soviet gulags or the American prison-industrial complex; and state control over all areas of life through checkpoints, secret police, kangaroo courts, torture, and surveillance.33 Taken together with the racial ideology of the state, it is difficult to draw clear boundaries between the Israeli occupation regime and other fascist states historically.
That being said, a qualitative shift in Israeli civil society and political life has nevertheless been underway, as the fascism that characterizes the occupation has metastasized within the body politic on the other side of the Green Line. A campaign is being waged to eliminate checks on the government’s power, criminalize dissent, and strip so-called “enemies of the state” of civil and political rights. Netanyahu has led this effort with increasingly dark and fascistic language, moving the needle towards dictatorship ever further. In 2018, for example, Prime Minister Netanyahu declared that “In the Middle East, and in many parts of the world, there is a simple truth: There is no place for the weak. The weak crumble, are slaughtered and are erased from history while the strong, for good or for ill, survive. The strong are respected, and alliances are made with the strong, and in the end peace is made with the strong.”
The evidence at this point is, in my view, unmistakable: Israel is a fascist society, in the classical sense. It is not merely governed by populist right-wing would-be authoritarians, or fond of dog whistle racism, or other qualities characterizing the right-wing nationalist resurgence internationally that is often loosely given the label “fascist.” It is the real deal. Fascism in Israel has a mass character—there are violent street movements attacking enemies of the state while carrying out the settler project of ethnic cleansing block by block with the state’s simultaneous approval and (im)plausible deniability. And the end goal of this fascism is the expulsion of all Palestinians, killing all who refuse to leave, and the violent suppression of all democratic elements of Israeli society who would object to this.
