Fascism was never going to return to Europe or the US dressed in Nazi garb. It was never going to arrive wearing jackboots and brandishing swastikas.
In fact, it was all too predictable that it would arrive in disguise, dressed in suits, telegenic, and characterising its opponents, not itself, as the Nazis.
That is where Israel has been so helpful once again: for it has not just served as a template for fascism, preserving and rejuvenating ideas of racial superiority, colonisation and genocide. For decades, it has also allowed western states to invest Israeli fascism with a moral legitimacy.
Support for Israel’s racial hierarchies, in which Palestinian lives are entirely expendable, has been sold as necessary to “protect Jews”.
That premise has, in turn, allowed genocide to become a respectable, moral cause. It is precisely why Starmer felt able to say that Israel had a “right” to deny more than two million Palestinian men, women and children all food, water and fuel. A genocide that he would have rejected in other circumstances – indeed, has rejected – was apparently okay so long as Israel was doing it.
This is why a UN report earlier this month on Israel’s “genocidal acts” received barely any traction in western media. The report shows how Israel has routinised sexual assault and rape against the Palestinians it arbitrarily detains as bargaining chips for the hostages held by Hamas in Gaza.
And it is why Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a wanted war criminal and fugitive from justice, is still welcome in western capitals, as are his generals who have been carrying out the genocide in Gaza.
The West’s endless indulgence of Israel’s variety of fascism – Zionism – has allowed its ideas to quietly seep back into our own societies, where Zionism is still treated with near-reverential respect.
If racial hierarchies are a good thing in Israel, why are they not a good thing in the US and Europe too? This is why a large section of Trump’s base proudly call themselves “white Zionists”. They see a Jewish fortress state of Israel as a model for the US as a white fortress state against their “Great Replacement” fears.
If “protecting Jews” in Israel can justify any crime by the Israeli state against Palestinians, why can “protecting Jews” not also justify illegal behaviour by western states towards their own populations?
“Protecting Jews” means that speech critical of Israel must be outlawed, even as Israel commits war crimes and genocide, because that criticism risks offending domestic Jewish organisations that cheerlead Israel.
Academic freedom must be crushed too, to protect the feelings of those Jewish students and professors who think the mass slaughter of Palestinian children is an acceptable price to pay for Israel reasserting its military deterrence.
And with a self-rationalising logic, any western Jews who do not prostrate themselves before Israel enthusiastically enough are deemed to be “the wrong sort of Jews” – or “Palestinian”, in the new slur Trump has levelled against Chuck Schumer, the Jewish US Senate minority leader.
In this warped, self-serving calculus of human rights, the sensitivities of Zionist Jews are placed at the apex, and the right of Palestinians not to be murdered at the bottom.
From Journalist Jonathan Cook Published in Middle east eye 24.03.2025. Cook was a freelance sub-editor with several national (UK) newspapers from 1994 until 1996. He was a staff journalist at The Guardian and The Observer between 1996 and 2001. He is an Israeli Citizen and lives with his wife and their two daughters in Nazareth. Jonathan Cook - Wikipedia
The new fascism: Israel is the template for Trump and Europe’s war on freedom | Middle East Eye