Somehow, despite Israel’s 20-month carnage in Gaza, and the attempted “judicial coup” before it, the stubborn myth persists in the Western public imagination that these events can’t really be happening, and that Israel, the so-called “only democracy in the Middle East” cannot be turning to fascism. We are often asked a variant of this: how can Jews, as personified by Israel, having suffered so horribly over the years, possibly perpetrate atrocities like those in Gaza and so completely put the lie to Israel’s (undeserved) reputation as “a light among the nations.”

In 1995, the Italian author Umberto Eco published an essay based on his experience growing up under Benito Mussolini. According to Eco, unlike Nazism, Italian fascism was less of a cohesive or coherent ideology. It had its contradictions. But it was the granddaddy, or the “Ur” of all subsequent forms of authoritarianism. Eco put forward 14 characteristics of Ur-Fascism.

As we ponder today’s political scene, it is well to remember at least some of these characteristics: a reliance on tradition, real or imagined; a rejection of modernism (everything since the Enlightenment is a descent into depravity); the cult of action and violence for its own sake; subsuming one’s self-identity in the group, or nation; treating disagreement or contrarianism as treason; fear and hatred of foreigners and immigrants; appeal to a frustrated middle class beset by cultural and economic change; the hyping-up of enemy threats and plots; contempt for the “weak”; glorification of heroes and death, preferably death of your enemies; machismo; selective populism and the notion of a common will with the leader as the interpreter of that will; the use of empty slogans.

Philosopher Jason Stanley recently left a good job at Yale to escape to Canada with two colleagues. In his book, How Fascism Works, he concurs with many of Eco’s features, but argues that fascism is less a set of definitive political beliefs and more a group of techniques used to achieve power.

Who can be a fascist? Or a better question is: is any group of people inoculated against fascism, who can’t “catch” or succumb to it? Like Jews, perhaps? As the child of a survivor of Auschwitz, and as a founding member of Independent Jewish Voices, I am especially interested in this question.

And my answer has always been the same: Jews are no different than any other group of people. Suffering under fascism in no way immunizes any group against falling for it.

“Essentialism,” or the idea that a group of people have certain inbred behavioural characteristics, is at the heart of all racism. The idea that Jews are essentially anti-fascist is just as toxic and false as any negative stereotype. Jews are neither better nor worse than anyone else; some of us can be fascists, some of us can be anti-fascists, and some of us can “whistle dixie” (bury our heads in the sand) just like any other people—although whistling dixie is much harder nowadays as Israel perpetrates a genocide against the Palestinians.

Truth be known, in the heyday of fascism in the 1920s and 30s, quite a few Jews were fascists.

I’m not talking about Nazi Germany, where the fascist movement was antisemitic right from the start and would not accept Jews. If we go back to the primal Italian version, however, we can learn some important lessons.

In 1991, Italian-American journalist and author Alexander Stille published Benevolence and Betrayal: Five Italian Jewish Families Under Fascism. It is one of the first and only non-academic treatments of this period of Jewish history.

Becoming a unified country only in 1861, Italy quickly moved to a level of tolerance toward its Jewish minority way ahead of its European counterparts. Jews across the country had helped raise money for, and served in, the liberation movement for Italian unification, or risorgimento (resurgence), led by Giussepe Garibaldi. Garibaldi’s sponsors, the liberal Savoyan royal family that had long been friendly to its Hebraic countrymen, came to rule the united country. Subsequent to the risorgimento, Stille says:

…in a few decades Italian Jews achieved a level of acceptance without parallel in any other country. While France was bitterly divided over the fate of Captain Dreyfuss, Italian Jews were acting as generals, cabinet ministers and prime ministers. By 1902 six Jewish senators had been appointed by the king, out of a total of 350. By 1920, the number had risen to nineteen. Luigi Luzzati, a Venetian Jew, became prime minister in 1910… Clearly there were no impediments.

When, 50 years later, Italy’s nationalism morphed into fascism, many Jews resisted. But many other Jews followed, seeing support for the authoritarian turn as a natural progression of their nationalist passion. As Stille, scion of a Russian-Jewish family that migrated to Italy in 1922, says:

What distinguishes the story of Italian Jews from that of Jews elsewhere in Europe was the long co-existence of Jews and fascists in Mussolini’s Italy. Italian fascism was in power for sixteen years before it turned antisemitic in 1938. Until then, Jews were as likely to be members of the Fascist Party as were other conservative-minded Italians.

And Jews were welcomed into the Italian Fascist Party until Mussolini’s Hitler-prompted “Racial Laws” just before the war. Indeed, although Jews represented only one percent of the Italian population, their proportion in the Fascist Party was three times that.

Despite Mussolini’s eventual turn against them, Italian Jews ultimately fared better in the Holocaust than most of their European co-religionists. Even after the Racial Laws, Italians were relatively reluctant to hand Jews over to their Nazi allies. Only in 1943, when Mussolini was deposed and German troops occupied the northern part of the country did the mass deportation and slaughter of Italian Jews begin. We know well the brutality of this campaign from the iconic books of Primo Levi, a Turinese anti-fascist Jew who joined a band of partisans, was captured, survived Auschwitz and became among the most thoughtful and famous analysts of the Nazi genocide (and also a critic of Israeli nationalism). And yet, the vagaries of Italian politics and official dithering about full-blown Nazism meant that only about 7,000 of the 43,000 Italian Jews were massacred (or eight percent), one of the lowest proportions in Europe, compared to Poland at 90 percent, Hungary at 61 percent and France at 23 percent.

Among the Jews notable in Italian fascism was Margherita Sarfatti, Mussolini’s girlfriend from 1911 to 1930 and a close advisor until 1938. In 1925 she wrote a flattering biography of the Italian dictator. Other Jews in the fascist hierarchy included Gino Arias, a philosopher of Italian corporatism, Renzo Ravenna, mayor of Ferrara and Paolo Salem, mayor of Trieste.

Featured in Stille’s book is a leading Jewish supporter of the fascists, Ettore Ovazza, who helped finance the party and participated in the 1920 coup called the “March on Rome.” From a wealthy Turinese family, Ovazza fought for Italy in the First World War and, like some other rich landowners and business people, was alarmed by the threat of a communist revolution after that war and decided Mussolini and his Blackshirts were the ones to stop it. Ironically, he and most of his family were executed by the German SS near the end of the Second World War. Ovazza’s passion for Mussolini is clearly reflected in his memoir of meeting Il Duce:

He welcomes us affably with a slight smile. He is serene, seated at his desk. He motions to us to advance as we stand hesitatingly on the threshold. It was the first time I was to see the face of Il Duce up close…

On hearing my affirmation of the unshakable loyalty of Italian Jews to the Fatherland, His Excellency Mussolini looks me straight in the eye and says with a voice that penetrates straight down to my heart: “I have never doubted it.”

As disproportionate as they were on the fascist side, Italian Jews like the aforementioned Primo Levi, also punched above their weight as anti-fascists. Some were jailed. Some, like communist physics professor Eugenio Curiel, were murdered. Some, like doctor and writer Carlo Levi, were sent into internal exile by the Mussolini regime. The latter wrote the now-famous book, Christ Stopped at Eboli, about the impoverished southern town where he spent his banishment years. Others took their own lives, like publisher Angelo Formiggini, who leapt from the bell tower of the Modena Cathedral.

So, yes, Jews can be fascists too. Not only in Italy, but in Israel too.

Elements of fascism and outright fascism in the politics of Jews in pre-1948 Palestine, and subsequently Israel, is nothing new. Indeed, Israel’s present Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu comes from a political tradition that began in the early 1900s by embracing Italian fascism. Bibi’s father’s mentor was Vladimir (Ze’ev) Jabotinsky. In the words of Israeli historian Lenni Brenner:

It was inevitable that Jabotinsky’s ‘Legionist’ [advocating a Jewish section in the British army to help capture Palestine from the Ottomans] militarism and hyper-nationalism would attract those who sought a Jewish version of Fascism within the camp of Zion. Whatever his temperamental reservations about the leader, the combination of the pressures from his ranks and the inner logic of his own increasing extremism inexorably led him and Revisionism into the orbit of Italian Fascism.

All of Israel’s founding parents were nationalists who believed in and practised ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians from the earliest days. But Jabotinsky was well to the right of Labour, Israel’s party of power for the first years of its growth and independence. Jabotinsky’s political acolytes included Ben-Zvi Netanyahu (Benjamin’s father) and Menachem Begin, leader of the terrorist Irgun Zvai L’Umi, who later helped found the Herut (or Freedom) Party, which later transformed into Likud.

Unlike Labour, which favoured social democracy, a more pragmatic diplomatic approach to territorial conquest, and reluctantly accepted some Palestinian citizens of Israel, Jabotinsky and his heirs were much more hawkish and territorially aggressive, as well as free-enterprise champions with little or no tolerance of Palestinians. I have argued elsewhere in Canadian Dimension that, especially since after the 1967 Six-Day War Israel has split sociologically, militarily and professionally, into two broad political elites: the kibbutzniks (largely secular, Ashkenazi, politically social democratic, and more modest in their territorial aims) and the mithnachlim (more Mizrachi, more religious, arguably fascistic, inspired by removal of Palestinians and rapid settlement). Due to demographics and growing Israeli isolation, the latter have become increasingly dominant, while many members of the former are voting with their legs.

When I was growing up in Toronto, in the 1950s and early 60s, it was normal for us in the mainstream Jewish organizations to call Herut’s youth wing, Betar, “fascists” and even “Nazis” with little or no exaggeration. Today, Betar, true to form, is behind much of the denunciations of pro-Palestine campus radicals to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in the United States.

In 1948, Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt and 26 other prominent Jewish intellectuals wrote a now-famous letter to the New York Times warning Americans to beware of Herut and its leader Menachem Begin, whose party, they said, “openly preached the doctrine of the Fascist state. It is in its actions that the terrorist party betrays its real character; from its past actions we can judge what it may be expected to do in the future.”

Twenty-nine years later, Begin became prime minister of Israel, followed by Yitzhak Shamir, another of his ilk.

In today’s Israeli Knesset (parliament) the left has shrunk to almost no presence, but right-wing parties abound. The extreme right is led by two parties, Jewish Power, helmed by Itamar Ben-Gvir, and the Religious Zionist Party headed by Bezalel Smotrich. These two parties received half a million votes (of 4.6 million cast) in the 2022 election, to become the third-largest group in the Knesset and key players in Netanyahu’s winning coalition government.

Don’t believe me, believe Smotrich, who describes himself thus: “I may be a far-right person, a homophobe, racist, fascist, but my word is my bond.” Even Menachem Begin, in his day, would never have dreamt of describing himself thus. Most shocking is not so much that Smotrich said it, but that he could say it and thrive in today’s Israel.

Ben Gvir is a follower of the late ultra-nationalist Rabbi Meir Kahane who advocated strict segregation between Jews and Arabs in Israel, expulsion of other Palestinians, and supported Nuremberg-like racial and miscegenation (inter-racial sexual relations) laws. Kahane was expelled from the Knesset for his views and was assassinated in the US in 1990. Until elected to the Knesset in 2021, Ben-Gvir featured a photo on his living room wall of Baruch Goldstein, who in 1994 murdered 29 Palestinians at prayer in the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron. So dangerous were Ben-Gvir’s right-wing ideas considered, that at the age of conscription the Israel Defense Forces refused to accept him.

Again, don’t take my word, let Ben-Gvir speak for himself:

We need a Memorial Day for Rabbi Kahane. A few weeks ago we stood in memory of [a left-wing politician], why not stand in memory of Kahane? Why does Rabin have a Memorial Day?

And, in reference to the three Jewish Israeli youth who, in 2014, beat 16-year-old Mohammed Abu Khdeir with a crowbar, poured gasoline down his throat and lit him on fire:

I am unequivocally against executing the [Jewish] murderer of Abu Khdeir and in favor of killing the [Arab] murderers of Jews… There is a difference between terrorism, between a situation where they want to annihilate a nation, and the acts of people with whom I disagree, and who I think made a very big mistake, they’ve committed a crime, they have to pay for the crime, but, and that’s a big difference, there’s no comparison, this [Jews killing Abu Khdeir] is not terrorism.

Smotrich and Ben-Gvir are not fringe irritants in an otherwise politically diverse Knesset. They are cabinet ministers with key portfolios, minister of finance and minister of national security, respectively. While the shaky Netanyahu coalition may eventually fall, these far-right parties and their political dominance in Israel will likely persist and dominate.

Fascism-wise, is Israel “there yet?” Even without a categorical answer, one would think that the killing of over 60,000 Palestinians should be enough to earn Israel deep disapprobation from the world community and from the Jewish diaspora. But somehow much of the world, and Jews ourselves, still believe in a double standard. Other peoples can do this. But we Jews cannot be doing this.

Of course we can, and we are.

Using his experience in South Asia, Indian essayist and novelist Pankaj Mishra dismisses the notion that a people who have suffered cannot turn inflictor:

I wasn’t so naive to think that suffering ennobles or empowers the victims of a great atrocity to act in a morally superior way. Dalits in India, probably the largest continuously persecuted group in history, had joined their upper-caste tormentors in killing and raping Muslims during the pogrom supervised by Narendra Modi in the state of Gujarat in 2002. Jews of Middle Eastern origin, once subject to racial abuse and discrimination by an Israeli ruling class of European ancestry, now dictated the terms of humiliation to Palestinians.

What are possible reasons behind the rising fascism in Israel, and the clear support for it among too many diasporic Jews?

One is that Jews who are increasingly also members of ruling classes, like Ettore Ovazza, may turn to fascism because it protects their class interests. Think of the iconic scene in Bernardo Bertolucci’s film 1900 where a group of wealthy Italian landowners and capitalists meet with the rising fascists and empower them to take care of the threat from the left.

Another reason might be about the common root of both fascism and Zionism in the rampant European ultra-nationalisms of the late-19th and early-20th centuries and the attempt by some Jews to fight exclusion through exclusion. Just as Italian nationalism twisted itself into tyrannical fascism and German nationalism distorted into murderous Nazism, so Zionism goes to extremes.

Yet another reason might be about the sense of safety, certainty, and predictability that people can find in fascism, even at the expense of personal freedom and the horrors inflicted upon others.

Also, perhaps, we must consider the seductive apocalypticism of fascism: “this is the final battle before our annihilation” combined with “the whole world hates us so let’s throw caution to the winds.”

Gideon Levy, columnist for the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz, has no doubts about the apocalyptic political direction of Israel in the wake of the Gaza war:

…this is a war to establish a fascist state.

The State of Kahane has risen in Israel. Benjamin Netanyahu’s criminal spinelessness made it possible. It wasn’t only the neo-Nazi right-wing parties: It was, above all, the prime minister’s own Likud party that brought Kahanism to power.

Larry Haiven is Professor Emeritus at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax and a founding member of Independent Jewish Voices Canada.