In Both Israel and the U.S. Congress, Lunatics Are Taking Over the Asylum - Israel News - Haaretz.com
In the last two weeks, with the forming of a coalition government in Israel and the election of a Republican House speaker in the United States, you couldn’t avoid comparing the two populist authoritarian right wings acting as super-agents of chaos. Before drawing any analogy, let me offer one crucial caveat: In Israel they’re in power, while in the United States they’re in the opposition, except for a narrow majority in the House.
Political and cultural differences abound when comparing Israeli right-wing illiberal populism and authoritarian tendencies with the American variant, currently embodied by the Trumpist/Freedom Caucus majority of the Republican Party.
The first difference is structural: The United States is a federal presidential system with a constitution and a myriad of checks and balances with varying efficacy. Israel is a parliamentary democracy without a written constitution and increasingly weakened checks and balances and ineffective guardrails. Significant demographic trends distinguish the American and Israeli electorates from each other, but that’s a different story.
On the face of it, it would be a fallacy to even begin the analogy, which is why Israel’s contemporary trajectory is immediately compared to Hungary, Poland, Turkey and Jair Bolsonaro’s Brazil. Yet the confluence of the two political processes, the forming of Benjamin Netanyahu’s new government and the farcical election of Kevin McCarthy as House speaker, on top of a “Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight” insurrection attempt in Brazil, illuminates a very similar antidemocratic, demagogic threat to democracy from the right.
The ingredients are almost identical: delegitimization of government, dismissal of facts or fake facts, denial of election results, xenophobia, caustic anti-elite rhetoric, nationalism and fear.
- The giant headache Kevin McCarthy now shares with Netanyahu
- Ben-Gvir is leading Israel to hell
- Democracy in Israel will end before a civil war erupts
In 1995, Italian historian and philosopher Umberto Eco wrote his “Ur-Fascism” essay listing 14 “typical features” of fascism. Many of them, he wrote, are contradictory and therefore can’t be integrated into a coherent system. Some are typical of other forms of despotism and authoritarianism, but it’s “enough that one of them be present to allow fascism to coagulate around it.”
The following are very brief descriptions of these features. Do your own analysis and consider how many apply to Israel’s governing coalition and the majority of the current GOP in the United States.
1. The cult of tradition via the fascist movement’s “syllabus” and political discourse.
2. The rejection of modernism, the Enlightenment and the Age of Reason is the beginning of modern depravity.
3. The cult of action for action’s sake, meaning that action substitutes for a thinking process.
4. Disagreement is treason.
5. Fear of difference, which is racism and xenophobia by definition.
6. Appeal to social frustration during an economic crisis and/or a political sense of humiliation.
7. The obsession with a “plot” is at the root of fascism psychology and usually is projected outward to an alleged international plot with domestic accomplices.
8. The enemy is both strong and weak. By shifting the rhetorical focus, both notions can cohabit.
9. Pacifism is trafficking with the enemy. Life is lived for struggle and the nation is a fighting unit.
10. Contempt for the weak. Elitism is a typical aspect of reactionary ideology, with a new twist invented in the United States and Israel: the anti-elite elite.
11. Everybody is educated to become a hero.
12. Machismo and weaponry, which implies disdain for women and homosexuality.
13. Selective populism. A select group is presented and accepted as “the voice of the people” and the exclusive arbiters of the people’s will.
14. Newspeak. Ur-fascism wields a purposely impoverished vocabulary that limits complex and critical reasoning. This includes spin, sound bites, half-truths and outright lies.
Take Lauren Boebert, Matt Gaetz, Paul Gosar, Scott Perry, Marjorie Taylor Greene and the phenom just called up from the GOP’s minor league team on Long Island, George Santos. They’re just six of approximately 53 members of the Republican Party's Freedom Caucus sect that makes up 25 percent of the party in the House. But most of the other 75 percent are Trumpists, of which nearly 140 are election deniers, including incoming committee chairs.
They call Joe Biden and illegitimate president, they call Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a “traitor,” they call Donald Trump their president, they blame Italian satellites and “Jewish laser guns” for America’s problems. And they love guns, God and spewing lies and disinformation. Black people, Hispanics and Jews they love less.
Now take Itamar Ben-Gvir, the (53-time-indicted and eight-time convicted) singer of the song “Death to Arabs,” who is, no less, “national security minister.” Take Finance Minister (and half-defense minister) Bezalel Smotrich, who has said that Jewish women shouldn’t be in the same room with Arab women in maternity wards, and that Arabs should be expelled.
Take Zvika Fogel, a member of Ben-Gvir’s party who demanded that opposition leaders Yair Lapid and Benny Gantz – the previous prime minister and defense minister, respectively – be tried for treason. Take Avi Maoz, the theologian-philosopher who says “we are against any ‘progress,’” while LGBTQ people shouldn’t be recognized and women shouldn’t serve in the Israel Defense Forces.
Take Limor Son Har Hamelech, a rising talent in Ben-Gvir’s party who says that an Arab murderer should be executed but a Jewish murderer imprisoned. And of course there’s Orit Strock of Smotrich’s party, who strongly believes that doctors shouldn’t assist someone if it interferes with their religious principles.
The political settings and circumstances are very different, but the language underlining the assault on democracy is similar around the world. In all cases, the virulent antidemocratic, anti-liberal rhetoric is identical: anti-elites, anti-education, anti—-science, anti-diversity, anti-multiculturalism, anti-gay, anti-women, anti-anything different. But they’re for white supremacy, or Jewish supremacy, and uber-nationalism wrongly defined as patriotism.
In some places it’s a rearguard battle over the character of society and the cultural zeitgeist. In some cases it represents fears about immigration, an advanced economy and the future of the workplace, a deep sense of cultural marginalization.
Politically, the phenomenon is expressed by the disappearance of center-right parties. Devoid of ideas and constituencies, they merge, but in reality they’re incorporated by the hard right – as has happened with the GOP in the United States and Likud in Israel, with a similar process taking place in Italy, France, the Netherlands and elsewhere. But the most striking similarity remains the language, the outrageous lying, the simplemindedness and the reduction of political discourse to incendiary, menacing, antidemocratic populist slogans.
With all due respect for the differences, all have been abundantly expressed in Washington and Jerusalem this week.