Juan Cole, ScheerPost:

Netanyahu thought that although this was a horrible situation, that the Gaza problem and the Hamas problem were were contained and that Hamas would be happy running its little fiefdom in Gaza and Netanyahu could concentrate on stealing the rest of the Palestinian West Bank. And he brought into his government when he came back to power late last year, the most extreme. I mean, this is beyond fascism, the most extreme parties in Israel, the religious Zionists and the Jewish power. I mean, these people are terrorists and they some of them actually have been on the State Department terrorism watch list, not allowed in the United States in the past. And he brought them into the cabinet. He made one of these guys, the minister of national security. It put the other in the finance ministry and then gave him responsibilities as a civilian for overseeing the Palestinian West Bank. And both of these ministers who are extremists were also squatters on Palestinian land in the West Bank and wanted to steal the rest of it to bring in more settlers.

„beyond fascism“. In 2015-2016 I became quite aware that while I was reading people like Sheldon Wolin, Chalmers Johnson, Chris Hedges, Noam Chomsky and nodding my head in agreement I didn’t have as much theoretical knowledge as I’d like of some of the concepts I was reading about. When Wolin writes of „inverted totalitarianism“ what, really, do we mean by „totalitarianism“? What does Robert Paxton mean by „fascism“? Happily there is no shortage of material to read on this.

Less happily I found it difficult – no here really „impossible“ is much more fitting – to even begin to discuss anything like this with coworkers, family, acquaintances. Even to attempt discussion on „fascism“, like „capitalism“ immediately makes it clear that one is to be avoided. Also clear was that the part of Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here which was obviously fantasy was the idea of any significant resistance posed to American political movements which cheerfully wrap themselves in a US flag while stamping the bloodied corpse of democracy into the mud. A vapid obese American public is alternately captivated/bored. Thank God Trump is not in the White House! What else is on Netflix?

Now Americans watch „beyond fascism“ commit genocide day after day in Gaza. At a Palestine demonstration yesterday I asked two young Italian women what properly to call Meloni. They were surprised at the question: she’s a fascist, of course. They quickly proceeded to explain the background for this, how appropriate the term is given her associations, backers, platform, actions.

Public political discourse in Germany, as in the US, is extremely narrow, and shows no signs of broadening. The question of whether dystopia will manifest as more 1984 or more Brave New World has become moot. We are the beneficiaries of a world where we can have both. „Can have“? We wouldn’t have it any other way, this seems daily apparent.

Berliner Zeitung:

Als Nächstes spricht auf der Demonstration Udi Raz, eine Vertreterin des Vereins „Jüdische Stimme für gerechten Frieden in Nahost“. Der Verein hatte für sein Engagement 2019 den Göttinger Friedenspreis erhalten, wird vom Zentralrat der Juden aber für seine Nähe zur Boykottbewegung BDS kritisiert. Udi Raz, selbst in der Hafenstadt Haifa im Norden Israels geboren und aufgewachsen, trägt ebenfalls eine Kufiya um den Hals und spricht in ihrer Rede von Israel als einem „rassistischen System“, in dem Muslime nicht die gleichen Rechte hätten wie Juden. „Unsere Vorfahren, die den Holocaust in Deutschland überlebt haben, haben uns sehr klar gemacht, was es bedeutet, wenn eine Bevölkerungsgruppe sich als die herrschende Klasse geriert.“

Raz wurde vor ein paar Tagen vom Jüdischen Museum entlassen, wo sie Führungen für Touristen anbot, weil sie von Israel als einem „Apartheidstaat“ sprach. Der Vorwurf wird seit einigen Jahren von Organisationen wie Amnesty International gegen Israel erhoben, von der amtierenden israelischen Netanjahu-Regierung aber als „falsch, einseitig und antisemitisch“ zurückgewiesen.

Franco “Bifo” Berardi, delivering lecture „How Will We Live?„, September 2023.

This is where I was last night. When you hear the police announce „The cries of ’stop the murder! stop the war!‘ are not allowed“ this is not a joke. This is the police force in a liberal democracy telling demonstrators they may not shout „Stop the murder! Stop the war!“

What’s even more striking is the replies to this tweet. There are dozens of people saying in more or less coarse reflexive Gleichschaltung that the police are correct, that „Stop the war!“ is anti-Semitic, pro-Hamas. Here is the stereotype of Germans being unquestioning rule-following robots come to life.

ACLU-Open-Letter-to-U.S.-College-and-University-Presidents-Embargoed-PDF

The Islamophobia today reminds me of post-9/11, but the fear in the US today is not from Iraqi Anthrax, Iraqi nuclear weapons, „the terrrorists“, but fear of other Americans, from those others, from the political and intellectual polarization which shows no sign of abating. In 2001-2003 when the US National Guard was stationed on the Golden Gate Bridge there was open discussion of people afraid to cross bridges, afraid to travel near national landmarks, for fear of The Terrorists™. I remember family members afraid to travel to central Philadelphia for fear of the Anthrax that might be sprayed by Iraqi drones launched by the Iraqi Atlantic fishing fleet prowling just off the coast. The potential threats as explained to me were absolutely laughable, however the fear was very real: a mushroom cloud might only be minutes away for many. Americans angrily and fearfully called for revenge on the Iraqis who, while perhaps not having anything to do with 9/11, seemed to hate us for our freedoms.

Today I don’t feel a German fear of Palestinians when Berlin police rip down posters, just as last night when the Kurfürstendamm was lined with police — I thought for a bit that there were more police vans than there were demonstrators until I saw the mass of largely women and younger people — the sense I get is that Germans aren’t afraid of demonstrators with Palestinian flags any more than they are afraid of college-age kids with buckets of orange paint. The flags and the paint are not approved, however, thus making their carriers other, and so fair game for attack and abuse, like the Letzte Generation young woman thrown by a policeman to the pavement on Monday.

Lashing out in fear, having a helpless population to visit rejection on, seems a way to take some sort of action as well, both in Germany and the US. Universal fears, about the destruction of the planet’s ability to sustain human civilization, fear of the out of control concentration of wealth, fear of escalating numbers of immigrants, have some outlet.

Srećko Horvat, Paul Stubbs, Dubravka Sekulić:

In other words, the stance of socialist Yugoslavia and the NAM on Israel-Palestine is a good demonstration of how one can be both against Zionism and for the existence of the state of Israel, while at the same time supporting the people of Palestine in their fight against racism, colonialism and apartheid.

This, obviously, is a point of view that is not much considered or at all welcome in Germany today. When it comes to Israel-Palestine, Germany and, indeed, the rest of the West appear to be suffering from what the Germans themselves aptly brand as “Denkverbot”, which means the prohibition to think.