Zionism, Fascism, Nazism for Dummies

Often I state definitions of Nazism and fascism in order to relate these ideologies to Zionism, but I have not done such a good job of explaining the ideological details clearly and simply. Except for confusing fascism with Nazism, Shingo recently described the ideological congruence of (Jabotinskian) Zionism with German Nazism almost to perfection in a recent comment on Mondoweiss:

1. Zionism is indeed a political/secular philosophy and movement.
2. Israel absolutely exalts nation and ethnicity above the individual, no question. Can anyone say, right of return? Israel is never described a state of individuals, but a collective belonging to the Jewish people and thereby qualifying the rights of individuals as secondary.
3. Israel is a militaristic state, where the military lives by it’s own rules. The government is indeed centralized. One need only read the charter of all political parties to realize they are one and the same.
4. Israel does not have an autocratic leader but does exercise severe economic and social regimentation as well as forcible suppression of opposition, in this care, the Arab parties.
5. Suppression of non-violent opposition? Can anyone say Gaza, Fatah? Does shooting demonstrators not qualify as suppression of non-violent opposition?
6. Politicized ethnic fundamentalism is rampant and unambiguous. All political parties are unanimously dedicated to the maintaining of Jewish state and to only recognizing the right of return of Jews. As the saying goes, the right are unabashed about wanting to remove the Arabs. The left will agree as long as the buses are air conditioned.
7. Extremist organic nationalism is blatantly obvious. Israel has moved so far to the right that it will soon pop up on the left.
8. Whether there are Jews of every race is irrelevant because Israel practices racial and bigoted discrimination against non-Jews.
9. Social Darwinism might not have been a component of Zionism, but it has become embedded in Zionist ideology. [Actually both Herzl and Max Nordau were unabashed social Darwinists.]
10. Biological determinism is a component of Zionism because rights (and presumptive character) of individuals are ideological determined according to birthright. Over half of the Jewish population in Israel believes the marriage of a Jewish woman to an Arab man is equal to national treason.
11. Essentialism is the very foundation of Zionism. It is the belief that Jews are unique and as such, will never be accepted into wider society.
12. Primordialism. Most Jews are not related in any way to the Biblical Israelites but are in fact the descendants of relatively recent converts to the religion.
13. Perverted eugenic theory is indeed a fundamental aspect of Zionism. Zionism is based on the belief that all Jews and the descendants of Biblical Israelites even though the claim is founded in scientic impossibility [and explicitly contradicted by the Bible in the Book of Esther.]
14. Opposition to race mixing: Over half of the Jewish population in Israel believes the marriage of a Jewish woman to an Arab man is equal to national treason. Many if not most Jewish Zionists believe that Jews who intermarry are self-hating Jews.
15. If there is any state that exemplifies the belief in national revival through racial purity, Israel is it. Israel believes a piece of land belongs to Jews, which only makes sense in the context of Jews being genetically related to one another and descended from Biblical Israelites.

If German Nazism is substituted for Zionism, if German Aryan is substitued for Jew, if the German State is substituted for Israel, if Jew is substituted for Arab, and if ancient Teutons is substituted for Biblical Israelites, the above analysis applies almost exactly to German Nazism. [Note that Hitler was not nearly as autocratic as Western historiography tends to depict him especially because the obvious contemporary comparison would be the far more autocratic Joseph Stalin.]

In contrast, fascism, which is a revision of Marxism, attempts to demonstrate that class conflict can be transcended via national revival. In fascist thinking, the nation need not be defined according to racist or voelkisch principles, but when it is (especially in the German context), the precise terminology is Volkssocialism, and Chaim Arlosoroff expounded the fascist principles of Labor Zionism in book entitled Der juedische Volkssozialismus. The Strasser faction of German Nazism could also be described as Volkssocialist. The Zionist political scientist Zeev Sternhell dishonestly identifies Labor Zionism as national socialism, which he distinguishes from Nationalist Socialism or Nazism, in order to obscure its true voelkisch racist fascist of Volkssocialist nature.

The definitions of fascism and Nazism can be applied to the basic Zionist political categories as follows:

1. Herzlian or Congress Zionism (both political and cultural): voelkisch (proto-Nazi) theoretically racist Imperialist — reformulated in the USA by Brandeis as Refugeeism.
2. Labor Zionism: properly identified as voelkisch or racist fascism (Volksocialism) and comparable to the Nazism of the German Nazi Strasser faction.
3. Jabotinskian/Revisionist Zionist: historically comparable to the spectrum from mainstream to extreme Right German Nazism with the Zionist version in many ways far more extreme and irrational — especially today.
4. Voelkisch occult mystical Zionists: comparable to a minor current of thought within the German Nazi movement.

Today mainstream American Zionism, which developed from Refugeeist Zionism, is a full-fledged form of Nazism with an important currents of voelkisch occult mystical Nazism while J-Street and American Friends of Peace Now as remnants of Labor Zionist fascism represent a minor insignificant internal opposition to Jabotinskian Zionist Nazism.

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