Panayiotis Achniotis

Far-right parties and governments from all over the world support the genocidal policy of the State of Israel. From Georgia Meloni, Javier Millay, the far-right Trumpists, to the German AfD and ELAM; social democratic governments or otherwise right-wing, from the US, to the UK, Germany and France, everybody contributes to Israel’s political/commercial/military operations. The unconditional support for Israel from the vast majority of governments and the political spectrum creates a two-way political relationship: while Israel receives money, weapons, legitimacy, diplomatic support from its allies, it gives back – among other things – an entire model of governance and power. This model is not, of course, applied in the same way, but it de facto leads a large part of the political spectrum to fascism, as it is now the dominant paradigm of what political governance looks like. As in the past, the tendency towards fascism is carrying the entire liberal order along.

Israel is not just an authoritarian regime, a corrupt government, an undemocratic political administration like many other states on the planet, including of course the Republic of Cyprus. In the context of a world in constant crisis and on the brink of a generalised war, the far right everywhere sees in the State of Israel both the ideological paradigm and the practical model for managing unwanted populations and building the industrial-militarist state. The foothold that Zionism now has on the global far right does not only lie in an opportunistic Western alliance against Arabs/Muslims. What turns Zionism into a mold of fascism is the combining of the following elements and practices in a totally systematic and organized manner:

1. Application of racial segregation onto the population in geographical, legal and political terms.
2. Dehumanisation of an entire population (the Palestinians) both in discourse and in practice.
3. Extermination of the population using methods of industrial scale and depth – such as the use of AI to locate targets, the use of drones and the dropping of huge power bombs – combined with more traditional methods such as blockade and starvation.
4. Almost total national consensus on genocidal policies, with almost non-existent domestic opposition.
5. Establishment of authoritarian practices in legislation (e.g. bans on media and humanitarian organisations like UNRWA, legalisation of juvenile detention, deportation to relatives of “terrorists”, constitutional aberration, etc.)
6. Intertwining the expansionist project for a Greater Israel with narratives that refer to colonial binaries, such as civilisation/barbarie, and to conditions of defending white supremacy and Western hegemony in the world.

The fact that these are organised and systematic practices is very important. They promise a comprehensive and final solution, they promote a political governance supposedly based on scientific data and technocratic analysis, they govern the social fabric from top to bottom. Despite the confusion attempted from above, fascism is not a vague patchwork of regressive values, conservative tendencies or abusive attitudes by a government or some individuals. Fascism is a very specific social formation with a real political purpose within the modern social world. The identification of the far right with Israel lies in the fact that the latter has become a social formation that sums together all of the above elements and has the potential to be exported and consumed as such.

In the context of the general and chronic collapse of the post-war condition at a global level (financial crisis of capitalism and disintegration of the welfare state, collapse of the so-called “international community” and the security system through the UN, climate change and disasters, refugee crisis), Israel appears as the example to follow by those who seek an authoritarian national management of all the symptoms of this collapse. Coupled with the generalised turn against the Arab and Muslim world initiated by the war on terror and anti-immigration policies, the anti-Semitism that historically characterised some tendencies of the far right – whether overt or subliminal – can now be carefully hidden under the support for the State of Israel, which appears as the universal representative of all the Jews of the world. The external and internal enemy now wears a hijab and speaks Arabic. It is in this context that the State of Israel becomes a project of white supremacy and even ideologically can speak to far-right audiences.

The anti-fascism of our time or why the keffiyeh has become the global symbol of anti-fascism

The above demonstrates that the Palestinian issue is not simply a case of an anti-colonial liberation struggle, or a case of a political conflict for sovereignty and control where one ethnic group oppresses another, a civil war, or a war between two or more nation-states. The fact that in the last year the Palestine solidarity movement has become a multifaceted intersectional node – bringing together decolonialism, feminism, anti-fascism, anti-capitalism, ecology – is indicative of the fact that the issue really goes far beyond Palestinian national self-determination and the genocide carried out against them. Surely the supporters of genocide are uncomfortable that the Palestinians manage to still exist, and for decades have resisted assimilation and exile from their land. They are also uncomfortable that a growing portion of the world’s Jews manage to articulate anti-Zionist discourse and separate themselves from the state of Israel. Finally, they are uncomfortable that Palestine manages to function as a vector of political consciousness on a global level and a messenger of a wider collapse that goes far beyond the Middle East.

Gaza is a picture from the future. What has been happening over the last year sketches the geographies of domination and power, in their most brutal form, that we will have to face in the next several years. The fact that a genocide has occurred in live broadcast without anyone having been able to stop it has irrevocably changed the terms on which any political struggle for social emancipation at the local and global level will be fought in the immediate and medium term. When I say paradigm, I do not necessarily mean that what is happening in Gaza will be repeated in the same way everywhere. But it does set the bar and the horizon for both the choices of power and governments, and also the framework in which social movements will have to exist and mobilise.

In Cyprus, and given its rapid transformation into Israel’s backyard, these new terms appear even more voluminous. When we shout in the streets that Gaza is too close to us, it is necessarily implied that Tel Aviv’s power is also above our heads and in our neighbourhoods. The genocidal situation seems to encapsulate the total perversion of totalitarian and belligerent neoliberalism: technological death machines, global supply chains of apartheid and war, multinationals’ super-profits, a constant drift to authoritarianism within society and the political system, the criminalisation of solidarity, fake news and the control of information by old and new methods. It will certainly take a new Nuremberg – indeed a much broader one this time, not limited to the political and military administration of Israel – to bring about any anti-fascist justice for all that is happening in the Middle East.

But the uncomfortable observation is that this time there is no Red Army to enter Berlin. An even more uncomfortable observation, at least for social movements, is that those who have so far credilbly resisted the genocide are Hezbollah and the Houthis. It is obvious that the empire will have to be fought from within if we can hope to build a new condition of struggle. Directly, this translates into a political and social struggle to erode both the political and economic support given to Israel as well as the national unity that is built around such support – this struggle is a class/anti-fascist one.

In the context of the generalised repression and silencing of solidarity in most North Atlantic states, those political spaces and organisations that still refuse to actively participate in this effort are doomed either to political non-existence or to a de facto shift towards liberal forms of thought. The latter is roughly what is happening across almost the entire spectrum of the German left, from social democracy to its most radical parts. Fortunately, in our geography there is (yet) no organised expression of any explicit or implicit support for Zionism by anything that identifies itself on the left side of the world. Such a tradition though, filtered first from the Greek space, still faintly washes up on the Cypriot shores. However, the inaction of some groups in relation to the genocide that is taking place – hidden behind various theoretical analyses and vague anti-war positions, even in good faith – is indicative of the confusion that prevails in some parts of the anti-fascist space with regard to what is currently at stake in/through Palestine.

The mass extermination and total destruction of a population of several million by an all-powerful apartheid state does not constitute either a conflict of two bourgeois classes, nor a conflict of two nationalisms, nor a conflict of two nation-states, logics which we have rightly learned (especially in Cyprus) to deconstruct and reject. What is happening in Palestine follows a similar logic to the EU’s thanatopolitics at its borders. At their core is the violent devaluation of human life of all members of a defined population – not as a side effect but as the result of a systematic and organised process. The anti-fascist struggle in the 21st century will necessarily face the model of fascist governance exported by Israel to the world, both in the form of military technology (e.g. talk of introducing iron dome in Europe) and in the form of ideology and management. If to the dilemma of proletarian or national struggle the answer is of course the former, then what follows is that if Palestine is lost the sun of genocidal capitalism that has already risen will come to shine in the hearts of many proletarians and non-proletarians around the world.