Tag: hasbara

MiddleEastPizzaTalks from GazaFreedomMarch on Vimeo.

As a proponent for one state with equal rights for all, Ali Abunimah is being targeted by the noxious zionist lobby for censorship. He challenges the absurd anti-democratic methodology used against him:

Typically, they throw in everything to try to defame and tar me: Hamas, Hizbullah, anti-Semitism, making Jewish students feel uncomfortable — all the usual defamatory silencing tactics to try to suppress debate and discussion about Israel’s apartheid and the alternatives that respect everyone. As they surely know, I have been an unflagging advocate of full equality and human rights for all Palestinians and Israeli Jews and others living in historic Palestine, and am guided by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Why do they not want students at the University of New Mexico to hear this message?

As Ali has said, memorably: “Zionists tend to regard equal rights for all citizens in a nonracial nonsectarian state roughly the way Dracula views garlic.”

For political zionists, there is not enough pizza for all, nor should the cooks and kitchen staff sit at the same table with them. Like all racist ideologies, zionism can’t survive in the light of day – with the institution of full equal rights.

Further, political zionism is a form of fascism, with censorship of opposing ideas just one symptom of a larger nauseating recipe – super-nationalism, Blut und Boden, syncretised mythologies of past and future glory, nation and race/ethnicity placed above all else, promotion of a cult of unity, strength and purity, atomisation of the working class, belligerent expansionism for lebensraum, sexism, corporatism, perpetual warfare, militarism, violence, dominance of the petty bourgeois class, social darwinism, authoritarianism, rejection of cultural pluralism and multiculturalism, indoctrination, propaganda, newspeak, unegalitarian regulation of private property primarily for the benefit of the community not individuals, selective populism, unegalitarian social welfare, attack of intellectuals, disagreement is treason, racist loyalty oaths, strategic victimhood and sense of besiegement, scapegoating, contempt for the weak, contradictory narratives of weakness and strength, xenophobia, and a cult of heroism. All these are expressed in Israel’s political zionism, projected externally by the ubiquitous, bullying Israel lobby, and pandered to by other invasive settler colonial and imperialist miscreants for whom questioning and censuring the zionist entity would bring into focus their own brutal crimes against Indigenous people. Israel perpetrates the crimes of settler colonialism and apartheid, propelled by the fascist ideology of political zionism.

Each form of fascism as it arises takes aspects of existing culture and grows a unique poisonous plant.

Relevant Links

Eternal Fascism: Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Blackshirt (Umberto Eco) (.pdf)
Italian Fascism between Ideology and Spectacle (Federico Caprotti)
Marxists on Fascism
The palingenetic core of generic fascist ideology (Roger Griffin) [.pdf]
The 14 Characteristics of Fascism (Lawrence Britt)
It’s Barak’s fault
A Spectre is Haunting Israel
Israel embraces fascism and where is the Zionist Diaspora?
The eugenicist racism of religious zionism: ‘Gentile sperm leads to barbaric offspring’
Between moral outrage and historical analysis
The Boycott Law is Fascism: it is a categorically anti-democratic law whose goal is to annul any possibility of legitimate protest.
Mob defending the territory of the tribe : Jewish Women as scapegoats and targets for sexism [Google tr] [Heb]

Everywhere it seems extreme racist, nationalist and religious radicalization merger also appears.

Etan Bloom, Arthur Ruppin and the Production of the Modern Hebrew Culture, PhD. dissertation, Tel Aviv University, 2008 [.pdf]

What is Fascism?
Studying the U.S. Political Right
Conspiracism
What are the Different Sectors of the Right?
A vile logic to Anders Breivik’s choice of target : Slavoj Zizek deconstructs Breivik’s fascist ideology, with particular reference to the anti-semitism implicit in zionism and Breivik’s own anti-semitism.

Ilan Pappe “Israel, the Holocaust and the Nakba”:

‘The Israelis went the other way in two directions that complemented each other. On the one hand, they felt secure from any Western pressure and continued the dispossession of the Palestinians – until today. The limits to their actions in the past, and quite probably in the future, were well defined by the late Israeli journalist Aryeh Caspi: as long as the Israelis do not do to the Palestinians what the Nazis did to the Jews, they are within the legitimate and moral boundaries of civilised behaviour. The repertoire of actions within those limits was, and still is, quite horrendous, as the latest Israeli actions in the Gaza Strip testify. The other direction was to Nazify the Palestinians so as to justify further the actions against them. ‘

General definitions of fascism of Robert Paxton:

“Fascism is a system of political authority and social order intended to reinforce the unity, energy, and purity of communities in which liberal democracy stands accused of producing division and decline.”

…

“a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.”

Excerpts from the book “Anatomy of Fascism” (Robert O. Paxton)

Would there be a State of Israel without Hitler?

Studying Fascism in a Postfascist Age. From New Consensus to New Wave?

Imperialism and Settler Colonialism in West Asia: Israel and the Arab Palestinian Struggle – useful class analysis of zionism a dictatorship of the petty bourgeoisie from Europe

Nutanyahoo seizes dictatorial powers :

Seeing as the PM controls the cabinet’s agenda, he will be able to run his proposals repeatedly until they are approved or conversely “bury” decisions made by ministers, pending further discussion.

The Prime Minister’s Office’s legal advisor Attorney Shlomit Barnea Fargo expressed reservations over the clause which she said enables the PM to undermine the decisions of government-appointed committees.

She also raised concerns over the uncertainty created by the fact that no time limit was given to the option of scheduling additional discussions on ministerial committee decisions.

Syncretism of language:

Secular Jewish thinkers articulated pragmatic strategies for harnessing memory and tradition in the pursuit of a national project of self-redemption: “Zionism was a bold revolution with one foot leaping backwards.” Borrowing a coinage from the philosopher Walter Benjamin, Chowers writes that many Zionists “saw themselves as creating a new nowtime, a new constellation in which the ancient Hebraic times and their own epoch become profoundly attached and transform each other.”

Israel: The Logic of a Settler State

A single Palestine on the basis of secularism, democracy, and socialism would be transformed from a cornerstone of the capitalist-imperialist world order into a cornerstone of an emancipatory one. The prerequisite for this possibility is the defeat of Israel as a Zionist entity, the defeat of its inherent settler logic (and Zionism is historically just one example of settlerist ideology), and thereby the dissolution of its current social formation into one that is not irredeemably anti-emancipatory. There can be no ‘Zionist left’, no ‘liberal Zionism’, and so forth, for such propositions are incompatible with the practical logic of the settler state. The concept of Israel must die so that a Palestine may live for Jews and Arabs, Druze and Bedouin alike.

On the fascist role of the Histadrut:

Being “general to its core,” the Histadrut has effectively become the central force of the Jewish community in its many aspects. It organized the Zionist armed forces, sometimes in collusion with the British occupation, and sometimes secretly against British wishes; it created a system of social security, the only one in existence in Israel, which has become an important weapon in the domination of the Jewish masses and the organization of the workers under the authority of the Histadrut; it has opened recruitment offices everywhere, thus reinforcing its domination, while at the same time regulating tihe right to work; it possesses its own school network, its own promotion societies and its own production and service co-operatives; as an organization it completely dominates the kibbutzim and collective farms of the whole country. It is not for nothing that the Histadrut was considered the central pillar of the Zionist enterprise from its beginning, or as the Zionists say, “the state in embryo.”

On the contradictory narratives of weakness and strength:

“‘Shahar Burla, a political scientist at the University of New South Wales, argues in “Political Imaginations in the Diaspora” (Resling, 2013) that Israel presents a two-faced image to Diaspora Jews to maximize the “ultimate goal” – extracting as much financial support as possible from Jews living overseas.

On the one hand, he says, Israel portrays itself to Diaspora Jews as a strong homeland in order to elicit financial support as an “insurance policy” against another Holocaust.

But on the other hand, he says, Israel casts itself as weak, especially in the face of the Iranian nuclear threat and Islamist terror, also to trigger financial support. Burla argues that these two seemingly contradictory narratives, both underpinned by the premise of anti-Semitism, have helped ensure Diaspora Jews continue to donate vast sums via the United Israel Appeal, the Jewish National Fund and other Zionist organizations. ‘”

Israel: The Logic of a Settler State

‘It is no coincidence that as Israel has become stronger and its logic has expressed itself more fully, it has become ever more fascist and less concerned even with formal equality and democracy – as shown most recently by the restrictive laws forbidding even the commemoration of the Naqba (the original ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians), the exclusion of anti-Zionist groups from parliamentary representation, and the unification between Likud and the fascist organization of Avigdor Lieberman. As I have argued, this trend of the capital-state relation to move away from formal liberalism and into a fascist siege mentality is characteristic of a settler state frustrated in its normalization process. For settler states, this normalization process can only occur on the basis of the destruction of the social formation of its rivals, of the original inhabitants; the US and Australia only even considered reforming the racial ladder system after their physical-demographic security as a settler state and their destruction of all rival social formations was complete. So it is with Israel also, and therefore Israel as a state does not and cannot want peace, whatever individuals within it may fervently hope.’