When the far right perpetrates mass murder on the cusp of world war, comparing is not a provocation but a duty

Netanyahu seems greyer every day. A face caked in makeup, with dull eyes that sometimes carry the faintest of glints. Like a puppet.

Puppets are uncanny, tells us Thomas Ligotti. We know they only simulate life, but their wrongness still makes us look back at ourselves from the inside, raising dim alarm about that conceit we call a ‘self’.

Now imagine such a puppet, only it’s being double-fisted by two Judeo-Nazis.

A death cult has taken over Israel, pushing settler militarism from apartheid to genocide. Holding up Netanyahu’s own crowd of opportunists, buffoons and evil rejects, the ethno-nationalist far right is calling the shots.

The minister of finance, head of Religious Zionism, is a consistent extremist within settler politics and has been inciting dispossession and repression his entire career, and now fantasises about starving two million Gazans.

The minster of police, head of Jewish Power, is Israel’s most far-right politician ever, a Kahanist who’s greatest admirers are the urban fash (La Famiglia) as well as the ‘countercultural’ vanguards of frontierist brutality in the southern Hebron hills (except for those who don’t vote because only a theocratic ethno-state is legitimate).

So how is this not an anti-fascist struggle? Does it really matter that the messianic theo-fascists don’t control the ministry of defence, but only a large proportion of the army command? Does it make a difference that the genocide is in full swing before the abolition of formal democracy for Jews, or that we are still in the low-intensity phase of the world war in question?

Rather than the differences, it’s the similarities that are at the same time compelling and horrifying. Because Gaza really is like a Ghetto, Sde Teiman really does remind us of a concentration camp, and Israeli officials and journalists really have uttered genocidal provocations during the war.

I don’t know exactly what it means to make anti-fascism our explicit reference point in resisting Israeli apartheid and genocide. It’s certainly not meant to get at Jews or to suggest that Jewish Israeli fascism is anything but a metastasis of Christian American fascism. But I do know that a messianic cult of death-eaters has taken over Israel, and that the epochal traumas of Hiroshima, the Holocaust and the Nakba now have their living-memory substitute.

In the UK, Labour is in effect playing the same waiting game as Netanyahu, awaiting the US elections as Gaza starves. A Harris victory may make it easier for the UK government to align with the International Court of Justice and International Criminal Court, as well as with an increasing number of EU governments, in imposing more significant sanctions and divestment.

Meanwhile the government’s focus is domestic, where it’s the same old carrot and stick – a limited ban on arms exports, and terrorism charges against those who cause direct economic damage to the same companies. But who can expect the British state to resist fascism abroad when it won’t even foil it domestically?

This torn reality will never heal. Along with its predecessors the Gaza massacre marks the turning point we are living through, the true apex of civilisation’s his-story. It comes just as we realise the magnitude and inevitability of the biospheric crash, that runaway climate change is too late to avoid, and that the trend is not towards peace and prosperity but towards totalitarianism and extinction — or worse. The settler militarist project in Palestine has finally fulfilled its purpose: sounding the keynote of a world in collapse, just there past Africa’s outer gateway, where extractivism and domination first took hold.

~ Uri Gordon