Understanding the relationship between Zionism and Fascism

 

Despite the mutual admiration between Zionists and fascists, they are usually seen as separate political movements. However, when viewed through the lens of Western racism, colonialism, and imperialism, the connections become clear.

Despite the mutual admiration of Zionists and fascists, both historically and in the present, it is generally considered unhelpful to characterize Zionism as fascism. However, viewing fascism from the perspective of the Black radical tradition, with its emphasis on racialism, colonialism and imperialism, rooted in supremacist ideas of western civilization, helps make fascism a useful concept for understanding Zionism.

In popular definitions of fascism it is detached from nationalism and associated most strongly with authoritarianism. Israel’s self-presentation as a liberal democracy, the result of a national self-determination project, and even an anticolonial Indigenous manifestation, conflicts with dominant ideas of what fascism is. But this approach to fascism is elusive by design.The history of fascism is dominated by liberal historians who mainly do not see racialism, colonialism and imperialism as central to it. Rather, they tend to see fascism as an aberration of the European/western political project.

In contrast, the revolutionary Black imprisoned intellectual, George Jackson, wrote in 1972 that the definition of fascism is not settled because of ‘our insistence on a full definition… looking for exactly identical symptoms from nation-to-nation.’ In fact, fascism is still under development. For the Black radical political scientist, Cedric Robinson, speaking in 1990, because Black political thought is treated as derivative, Black theories of fascism have generally not been considered ‘worthy of investigation’. Rather, popular culture and mass media are informed by mainstream academic fascist studies which constructs fascism as ‘right-wing extremism’ and ‘neurotic authoritarianism’, and ‘fascism proper… restricted to Europe between the First and Second World Wars.’ These western theorists found it very difficult to see fascism as anything other than the ‘dark side of Western civilization’, briefly flirted with but ultimately rejected.

Black theorists, Robinson goes on to say, based themselves on the experiences of the Black masses. They therefore did not see fascism as the ‘inherent national trait’ of Spain, Italy or Germany, but as ‘composed from the ideological, political and technological materials’ of the entirety of Western civilization. Their approach to fascism was shaped by the ‘crushing defeats’ Black people had already sustained in Cuba, Haiti and Liberia well before Mussolini invaded Libya and East Africa. Indeed, they mobilized en masse against Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 because, as the Black radical intellectual, W.E.B. Du Bois wrote they recognized that ‘other nations have done exactly what Italy is doing’. Italy wanted a slice of the colonial pie that other European powers had kept for themselves. Italian colonization of East Africa was seen as the latest in a litany of attacks on Black life up to and including enslavement which many descended from directly. ‘Anti-fascism,’ Robinson remarks, ‘was thus spontaneously extended throughout the Black world.’  (more...)

Understanding the relationship between Zionism and Fascism