Eyal Warshavsky/SOPA Images/Sipa USA via AP Images
Former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his wife Sarah with supporters in Jerusalem, November 2, 2022
When formerly democratic countries descend into fascism, can they come back? In the case of Germany and Italy, both of which had only weak democratic institutions, it took the catastrophic loss of a war and an occupation.
This chilling question has been haunting me as I contemplate two momentous elections in two increasingly beleaguered democracies, Israel and the United States.
Tom Friedman, who often gets globalization wrong but is an astute analyst of the Middle East, began his recent column, “Imagine you woke up after the 2024 U.S. presidential election and found that Donald Trump had been re-elected and chose Rudy Giuliani for attorney general, Michael Flynn for defense secretary, Steve Bannon for commerce secretary, evangelical leader James Dobson for education secretary, Proud Boys former leader Enrique Tarrio for homeland security head and Marjorie Taylor Greene for the White House spokeswoman.”
This, Friedman goes on to say, is about what has just happened in Israel. Benjamin Netanyahu, who presided over relatively shifting coalitions and frequent inconclusive elections between 2009 and 2021, has at last managed to win a stable governing majority. And he has achieved that by throwing in with people far to his own right—notably Itamar Ben-Gvir, who talks and acts like a full-on fascist.
This coalition will try to destroy what remains of Israel as a liberal democracy, including its independent courts and press; and if it has four years of power, it could well succeed. Meanwhile, the voting base of ultranationalists, anti-Arab racists, religious fanatics, and settlers determined to destroy what remains of the Palestinian West Bank could well grow at the expense of liberal secular Jews of the sort who founded the State of Israel.
The U.S. bears heavy responsibility for the current Israeli realities in several respects. Washington defends Israel with several billions of dollars of support, but the kind of settler/apartheid state that Israel has become could take root only because Washington did not challenge the first settlements in the occupied territories in 1968—or their steady expansion.
Though the Israeli far right is comprised of many groups, a core element is made up of ultra-Orthodox and ultranationalist emigrants from the United States. Ben-Gvir is a follower of Meir Kahane.
It’s also the case that AIPAC and its related donor groups have refused to criticize the Israeli government, no matter how outrageous its acts, and have tried to brand critics as antisemitic. That in turn has played into the hands of the American far right, which has taken to arguing that Christian fundamentalists are more philosemitic than American Jews, as if slavish support for Israel were tantamount to religious tolerance. This is nothing but the flip side of the dual-loyalty charge that is a favorite weapon of real antisemites. And AIPAC’s politics and related political spending continue to corrupt the Democratic Party.
The Biden administration shows signs of distancing itself from the extremism of Netanyahu’s incoming government. But this will be harder to do unless mainstream Jewish organizations break with their habit of defending Israel right or wrong.
Both the U.S. and Israel have been described as promised lands. In both countries, the deeper problem is that if fascists gain control of governing institutions, and if we lose support for democracy in the hearts of a majority of the people, getting it back takes something close to a miracle.
