Likud’s Fascist Roots

Published at 08:59 on 29 August 2014

I’ve long known about things like the King David Hotel bombing, which proves that the Zionist side in the Israel/Palestine conflict is itself no stranger to the use of terrorist tactics.

But until recently, I never realized how creepy the roots of the Israeli Right — which has held power in that country for basically the past quarter century — really are. It’s far worse than your garden-variety greed-based conservative movement.

The Stern Gang actually saw a natural affinity between its values and those of the German Nazis and the Italian Fascists (at least initially, before the full magnitude of the Final Solution became known), and tried to ally itself with the Axis powers circa 1940.

And Menachem Begin, the founder of the modern Likud Bloc, was the leader of a right-wing party called Herut or Tnuat Haherut, whose methods were so fascistic that in 1948 Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt, and about two dozen other prominent Jewish intellectuals wrote a letter to the New York Times denouncing Begin and encouraging him and his movement to be shunned.

It’s pretty shocking stuff that’s detailed in the letter, and well worth a read. And it probably all helps explain why the present-day right-wing Israeli government acts like it does.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.