Early warning signs of fascism - how many apply to Israel?

Yeah Israel is probably the most evil nation on this planet.

Powerful and controlling nationalism

Disdaing for human rights

Identification of enemies as a unifying cause

Supremacy of the military

Rampant sexism

Controlled mass media

Obsession with national security

Religion and government intertwined

Corporate power protected

Labor power suppressed

Disdain for intellectuals & the arts

Obsession with crime & punishment Rampant cronyism & corruption

Fraudulent elections.




This list is from a Holocaust museum. Irony!

To be honest, this is relevant to all Middle Eastern countries - the Muslim ones (especially Iran & Saudi Arabia) and the Jewish one. It's anti-Semitic to single out the only Jewish country in the region when the other countries are equally bad, if not worse.

Didn't take long to whip out the anti-Semitism card.

Tell me, are the other Middle East countries undertaking ethnic cleansing?

Saudi Arabia and Iran are waging a civil war in Yemen; tens of thousands of Yemeni civilians have died and are dying as a result of bombardment and famine.

So yes.

Israel has its faults - and I'm no fan of the Israeli government - but it is not committing atrocities on that scale.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saudi_Arabian-led_intervention_in_Yemen

No, Saudi Arabia is committing genocide in Yemen. Iran might fund the Houthi rebels but their is little to no proof saying they have any direct operational control over them. To detract any of the blame from Saudi Arabia and erroneously place it on Iran is an unforgivable error.

Israel on the other hand is an expansionist and arguably genocidal state which treats the rule of law and the intl community with a disdain that would make Stalin dribble. But a few examples are its occupying Jerusalem, the Golan Heights, Southern Lebanon. Not to mention its whole scale slaughter of civilians through assassination and war which has been repeatedly outlined by the UN. To defend such a state is beyond the pale, imho.

I am not defending Israel; I am simply saying that it is no worse than its Muslim neighbours who a certain type of left-wing people rarely seem to care about. The energy & focus with which people attack Israel - the only Jewish country in the world, let alone the region - reeks of anti-Semitism; plus, they don't just condemn the actions of the government, they say that the country itself has no right to exist and that the people there should return to lands that their grandparents and great-grandparents fled from and they themselves have never visited.

Jonathan Freedland expresses it far better than I'll ever be able to...

"Let’s imagine for just a moment that a small but vocal section of the left was consumed with hatred for one faraway country: barely an hour could pass without them condemning it, not just for this or for that policy, but for its very existence, for the manner of its birth, for what it represented. And now let’s imagine that this country was the only place in the world where the majority of the population, and most of the government, were black.

You’d expect the racist right to hate such a country. But imagine it was that noisy segment of the left that insisted it would be better if this one black country had never been created, that it was the source of most of the conflict in its region, if not the world. That its creation was a great historical crime and the only solution was to dismantle it and the people who lived there should either go back to where they – or rather, their grandparents or great-grandparents – had come from; or stay where they were and, either way, return to living as a minority once more. Sure, living as a minority had over the centuries exposed them to periodic persecution and slaughter. But living as a majority, in charge of their own destiny – well, black people didn’t deserve that right.

And now imagine that the people who said all these things insisted they had nothing against black people. On the contrary, they were passionately against all forms of racism. In fact it was their very anti-racism that made them hate this one black country. Their objection was only to this country, its conduct and its existence, not to black people themselves. You surely were only inventing this horrible accusation of racism to divert attention from the wicked black country and its multiple crimes.

Most on the left would give such a view short shrift. They would be suspicious of this insistence that loathing of the world’s only black country was separate from attitudes to black people in general, especially because most black people had a strong affinity with this country, seeing it as a constitutive part of their own identity. The left would not be swayed by the fact these critics could point to a handful of black activists who shared their loathing of this country and wished it gone. They would want to listen to the mainstream black community and be guided by them."

Rather than go through this, I want to make an alternative analogy.

Imagine it was proposed that, as a result of the constant persecution of the Roma and Sinti people all over Europe for centuries, the only solution is to create an ethnically Romani state in which they will be the majority of the population and dominate the government. As it's generally accepted that the Romani originate from the Northwest of the Indian subcontinent, creating the state somewhere there seems a nice choice - how about Indian Punjab as a potential site?

What of the millions of Punjabis who live there, and know no other home? Well, they'll just have to either leave, or stay but only as non-citizens, because obviously their rights are secondary to the need of the Romani to have their own majority ethno-state set aside for them. Unsurprisingly, the Punjabis are horrified at such an idea, and resist it vociferously and even violently. And now imagine that, seeing this resistance, the Western world, having about-faced and now proclaiming how much it loves the new Romani state, declares that the real underlying problem is just how antiziganist the Punjabis are for opposing the Romani state, because obviously if they weren't so racist they'd realise that their homes and rights don't really matter in comparison to the Romani's persecution.

Creating an ethnic majority state where there isn't a majority inherently implies depriving the current inhabitants.

Rather than go through this, I want to make an alternative analogy.

Imagine it was proposed that, as a result of the constant persecution of the Roma and Sinti people all over Europe for centuries, the only solution is to create an ethnically Romani state in which they will be the majority of the population and dominate the government. As it's generally accepted that the Romani originate from the Northwest of the Indian subcontinent, creating the state somewhere there seems a nice choice - how about Indian Punjab as a potential site?

What of the millions of Punjabis who live there, and know no other home? Well, they'll just have to either leave, or stay but only as non-citizens, because obviously their rights are secondary to the need of the Romani to have their own majority ethno-state set aside for them. Unsurprisingly, the Punjabis are horrified at such an idea, and resist it vociferously and even violently. And now imagine that, seeing this resistance, the Western world, having about-faced and now proclaiming how much it loves the new Romani state, declares that the real underlying problem is just how antiziganist the Punjabis are for opposing the Romani state, because obviously if they weren't so racist they'd realise that their homes and rights don't really matter in comparison to the Romani's persecution.

Creating an ethnic majority state where there isn't a majority inherently implies depriving the current inhabitants.

First of all, being Jewish isn't an ethnicity - it's a religion. There are hundreds of thousands of Ethiopian, Moroccan, Iraqi, Yemeni and Persian Jews in Israel.

Secondly, your "alternate analogy" is not relevant to the point in question - I am not arguing that the nature of the Israeli state's creation was not problematic. It was certainly very poorly handled by the British government of the day; had their actions been different, an effective 2-state solution could very possibly have been achieved.

I am simply saying that you cannot blame the Jewish people living there now who were born there (whose parents and grandparents were born there too) for whom Israel is as much their home as it is the Palestinians'. You can no more expect them to return to the countries of their ancestors then you can Americans or Australians of non-Native American origins to do the same.

You also need to be able to distinguish between the Israeli state, and the Israeli people.

It is the government carrying out the suppression of the Palestinian people; many ordinary Israeli citizens are horrified by their government's actions. I stated before that I am no supporter of the Israeli government.

So in summary, my argument is...

- The nature of the creation of the Israeli state was indeed problematic, but you cannot blame the Jews living there today for that.

- The actions of the Israeli state are no worse than its Middle Eastern counterparts; it reeks of anti-semitism to condemn the Jews as 'fascists', as OP does, when you are unphased by the Saudi warcrimes in Yemen or Iran's brutal persecution of many of its own people.