Israel, still touted as “the only democracy in the Middle East,” is now almost fully fascist. Its leaders include declared fascists. Its actions are what the late scholar Yeshayahu Leibowitz characterized as “Judeonazi.” Netanyahu and his clique are indisputably Judeonazi, racking up at minimum 39,000 deaths in Gaza (The Lancet estimates the deaths to total more like 186,000).
This nazism has been a long time coming. I witnessed its earlier beginnings in periodic trips to the West Bank where, in Hebron, I saw scrawled on a wall the graffiti, “Arabs to Gas Chambers,” and in Tel Aviv first heard the cry, “Death to Arabs” screamed by hundreds of demonstrators at a Menachem Begin rally. I interviewed the daughter of anti-occupation friends, then thirteen years old, and she told me that the younger the Israeli, the more right-wing, by comparison with the opposite trend in the United States.
So now the wheel has come around full circle, and we saw the war criminal, genocidaire Benjamin Netanyahu, addressing the US Congress to waves of applause and standing ovations. A more shameful day in American history would be hard to come by. Israel’s fascism thus has our “representatives” by the scruff of the neck, their full-throated accolades commandeered by AIPAC. It is incumbent on all people of conscience to resist this hideous reality, to vote out of office the Zionist protagonists, and to join the world in making Israel a universal pariah state.