What is it about Israel that makes it so attractive to anti-Semites, fascists and racists such as Trump, Bolsonaro and Duterte?
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| Tony Greenstein 15/09/2019 |
Israel is proof that any group of people, including Jews, can, given the right set of circumstances become racists and fascists.
Racism is not biologically inherited. It is a product of society not genetics. Just as Germans today have not inherited a Hitler gene, so the same is true of Israeli Jews. They have no inherited the mantle of the oppressed Jews of Europe but what Israel has done is to transform the traditional image of Jews from the oppressed to the oppressor.
Norman Finkelstein, in a recent interview, quoted Ze’ev Sternhell, a former professor at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, a childhood survivor of the Nazi ghetto of Przemyśl in Poland and a world authority on fascism.
According to Sternhell fascists and anti-Semites, amongst whom I include Trump, don’t see Israel as Jewish. The Zionist dream was always to create a nation like all other nations. They succeeded only too well. The settler nation that they created is the most right-wing and racist of any nation on Earth.
