The irony of a fascist Israel or a Nazi Zionism has proven too great for cartoonists, critics of Israeli policies, and anti-Semites to pass up. Certainly, many of Israel’s policies are questionable at best, but “fascism” is a term that has been frequently abused since the end of World War II, denigrated to a mere synonym for “bad.” Fascism is a very specific kind of authoritarianism, but defining it is notoriously difficult. It is secular, but mystical and Romantic; it is obsessed with ethnic purity, and unites people of one “race” in hatred of an “inferior race”; it is obsessed with nationalism and the “heroic” mythology of the nation. All nationalist ideologies have a certain predisposition towards fascism, and Zionism is not immune to that. In the history of Zionism, there has been a consistent element pulling it further towards fascism, sometimes through unexamined contradictions, sometimes through Romantic notions of nationalism, and sometimes through naked ambition. Israel is not a fascist regime, but it does harbor a fascist element that would like very much to change that, to the ruin of Judaism and the Jewish people.

This is a difficult topic to discuss openly, because it is mired in a centuries-long tradition of anti-Semitism and bigotry. This same fascist element preys on that, denouncing any who dare to criticize them as anti-Semites. Further complicating the issue are actual bigots for whom an opposition to Zionism is merely a “lite” form of anti-Semitism. The crimes of Israel’s fascist elements have been the fodder of anti-Semites, fanning flames of bigotry and hate against all Jews based on the authoritarian ambitions of a few. Because of all this, I am compelled to begin with a disclaimer that should not be necessary at all.

I live in a heavily Jewish neighborhood. Jews are my friends and neighbors. Judaism itself has long fascinated me; I’ve read the Talmud (in English translation), I’ve attended Shabbat services (admittedly, Reform), and I even know a smattering of Hebrew. If I had taken a Hebrew class in college, I would have graduated with a certificate in Jewish Studies. My wife is a non-practicing, secular Jew. When I was young, I suffered from what you might call “pro-Semitism”; someone told me that memorization of the whole Torah was a prerequisite for bar mitzvah, which led me to believe that all Jews are far smarter than any Gentile could hope to be. I was later disabused of that notion, and came to realize that even though Jewish culture cultivates a respect for learning and education, and Jewish philosophy is a deep, rich tradition promoting lofty ideals, Jews themselves come in every shape and size. There are tall Jews and short Jews, light Jews and dark Jews, African Jews and Chinese Jews, nice Jews and mean Jews, smart Jews and stupid Jews. There are few people I earnestly look up to, but many of them are Jews: take, for example, Albert Einstein. But such Jews are not the cause of problems in the world, and they do not require articles to expose their activities. There is such a thing as bad Jews, I eventually learned: vindictive, power-hungry Jews, even Jews with fascist ambitions. And why not? If these things plague all other peoples, why would they not also afflict the Jews? I hope my readers can see that I am no anti-Semite here, but the subject at hand is perhaps the darkest corner of the Jewish community: its fascists.

Zionism’s Tragic Flaw

Few groups have been subject to greater racism and abuse than the Jewish people. The ancient Romans were suspicious of Jews. Their tightly-knit communities seemed “cliquish” to the Romans, their refusal to worship the emperor seemed seditious; their laws, customs, and references to themselves as “chosen” made them seem haughty and arrogant. These were the reasons Romans gave for their general distaste for Jews, but the Romans never made any policies explicitly against the Jewish population, and even offered them many cultural concessions, ultimately treating them very much the same as any other conquered population in the empire.¹

Under the Romans, in the Second Temple period, Judaism was divided into many sects, sects that each proclaimed itself to be the one, true form of Judaism, and all others to be terrible sinners damned to hell. When the Romans burned down the Temple in 70 CE, the Sadducees were destroyed. The Essenes were self-eliminating.² It was the Pharisees who went on to become the Talmudic scholars and ultimately Judaism as we know it today,³ while another of those sects—Christianity—went on to become the official, state religion of the Roman Empire. In its early years, both the Talmudic rabbis and the early Christians tried to define themselves in terms of how they differed from the other, just the same way that Catholics and Protestants tried to distance themselves from one another after the Reformation. Today, there is greater cultural and religious distance between Greek Orthodoxy and Lutheranism, or between Hasidic and Reform Judaism, than there is between Lutheranism and Reform Judaism (Reform Judaism was patterned quite consciously after Lutheranism, and they share much in common).

Despite their shared history and close relationship—or, more likely, because of it—the sectarian rhetoric of the Second Temple was writ large. While Judaism remained relatively small in the Diaspora, Christianity conquered Europe, and the sectarian barbs the evangelists wrote into the gospels⁴ (just like the similar barbs against Christianity that appear in the Talmud⁵) were combined with sentiments similar to the Romans’ into a virulent anti-Semitism. Pogroms, inquisitions, murders and torture were inflicted upon the Jewish population. Banned from all “reputable” careers, Jews in Europe were forced into liminal, marginal occupations, like banking; when they became good at those trades and flourished, anti-Semites took that as signs of some grand Jewish conspiracy.⁶ When the fighting men of Christendom went off on Crusade, they made sure to stop in Germany to massacre the Jews.⁷ The Inquisition rooted out Jews, tortured them, and put them to death. Jews were expelled from most countries in Europe at least once.

In the late 1800s and early 1900s, much of Europe was bursting with nationalism. The concept of the “nation” owes much to the printing press,^{8, 9} and the illusion it creates of a shared world among speakers of a common language, however far removed they might be. Reading the same stories and news can make a man in Dover think he has more in common with a woman he’s never met in York, than a fisherman he sees once a week from France. Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand of Spain were the first to capitalize on this, inventing the concept of “the nation,” a mythological union of people and land that became a centerpiece of Romantic philosophy: the mystical bond of a single “race,” and the mystical bond of that “race” to a given land. The most important part of such a mythology, of course, was how easily it complemented the ambitions of the ruling class.

Zionism developed in this period of time, and can be understood as nothing more or less than a form of Jewish nationalism. Zionism was largely a project of secular Jews; Jews who defined thesmelves in terms of culture and heritage, but may be agnostic or even atheist. They appealed to the concept of a Jewish nation, bound together as a single “race,” and demanded a nation of their own. Where that nation would be, what land the Jewish “race” had a mystical bond to, was fairly obvious: the Promised Land.

Jews have lived in the Promised Land contiuously since the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE. The Bar Kochba revolt, the Arab invasion, the Crusades and the Ottomans were all, to one degree or another, a blow to what we might retroactively call the “Zionist” ideal, but none of them entirely removed the Jewish population. Due to Ottoman mismanagement, Palestine was reduced to an unproductive wasteland with no economy and few inhabitants. Throughout this, the dream of Israel reborn remained a uniting theme for Jews the world over. Every seder ended with the call, “Next year in Jersualem!” But Judaism moved on in the centuries of Diaspora, and the return to Jerusalem came to be understood in a spiritual, rather than a physical, sense. Judaism began to teach that only G-d would be able to bring the Jews back to Israel, and would do so in the Messianic Age. With the advent of secular, cultural Judaism that rationale ceased to be effective. Anti-Semitism in Europe (most famously the “Dreyfus Affair“), and the already secular understanding of Judaism, prompted a nationalistic appeal for a Jewish homeland.

One of the major motivations for Zionism was the belief that the Jews needed to return to their historic homeland, not just as a refuge from anti-Semitism, but also to govern themselves as an independent nation. Some Zionists, mainly socialist Zionists, believed that the Jews’ centuries of being oppressed in anti-Semitic societies had reduced Jews to a meek, vulnerable, despairing existence which invited further anti-Semitism. They argued that Jews should redeem themselves from their history by becoming farmers, workers, and soldiers in a country of their own. These socialist Zionists generally rejected religion as perpetuating a “Diaspora mentality” among the Jewish people.¹⁰

Religious Jews tended to reject Zionism as blasphemous: men presuming to accomplish a task that only G-d could undertake.

God—he reports the orthodox account—did not give the land of Israel to any race or ‘people’ in our sense of these words. He gave it to those who obeyed him, who lived by the Torah and His commandments, and only so long as they did so. In this sense alone did He give it to the Jews. And God was no mere stickler for what we may think of as the trivialities of ritual. ‘His’ people had sinned deeply, and for their sins they were in exile. To undo this exile was to compound the sin. No greater defiance of God and corruption of Jewish religion was conceivable. The Jews would return to Israel if and when they returned to God’s ways, not before. Those who came back under the power of the gun—no matter how religious—were no Jews at all, but apostates and enemies of God. And this is why Zionism, which preaches redemption without repentance, and which trusts in armies and nation-states rather than God, is the enemy and destroyer of Judaism, of the Jews. Israelis have been known to revel in their pride, even their arrogance. Orthodox Jews preach humility and see strength, not in tanks or missiles, but in the very demanding, very difficult business of accepting suffering and God’s will.¹¹

Nor was objection to Zionism among Jews purely religious in nature. Secular Jewish thinkers saw that marrying Judaism to nationalism would subvert and diminish Judaism.

At the outset, many Jews opposed Zionism. Thinkers like Simon Dubnow acknowledged that Jews form a distinct nation, but he distinguished between nation and state, arguing that a nation can achieve social and cultural autonomy even if it lacks political independence. Opposed to both separation and assimilation, Dubnow argued that Jewish creativity was due to the fact that Jewish nationality is spiritual rather than territorial and thrives in autonomous Jewish communities. Others disliked the nationalism and particularism of Zionism. In 1918, Hermann Cohen, a leader of the Marburg school of neo-Kantianism, spoke of a parallel between Kant’s call for a federation of nations under law and the universalism of Judaism, arguing that the latter would be compromised if Judaism took on nationalistic overtones. Not only does Zionism insult the patriotism of Jews who feel at home in their countries of birth, but to think that the teachings of Judaism are reserved for the Jewish people alone effectively denies the “One God of Messianic mankind.” Israel’s chosenness must be regarded as history’s means to accomplish the divine chosenness of mankind. A year later, the American philosopher Morris Cohen echoed Dubnow by contending that Jews contributed the most to civilization when they were mixed with other peoples. The key to resolving the Jewish problem lay not in nationalism but in the liberal tradition of tolerance and pluralism. The Zionist call for a state “founded on a peculiar race, a tribal religion, and a mystic belief in a peculiar soil” is “profoundly inimical to liberal or humanistic civilization.”¹²

The First World War showed that the ultimate result of nationalism is carnage; the Second World War revealed the depths of nationalism’s horrors. The term has become severely negative throughout most of the world, now that its inherently racist implications have been exposed. Two notable exceptions remain: in the United States, which was largely shielded from the first-hand horrors of the war, “patriotism” is still considered a value rather than condemned as one of the worst forms of bigotry, and Zionism.

All nationalist philosophies are based in a myth. “The nation” is a myth. Nationalism supposes some mystical bond that unites a “people,” based in outdated, obsolete theories of “race” that have since been utterly discounted. Race exists solely as a cultural construction, and only because so many of us remain ignorant of its spurious biological foundations.¹³ Likewise, the mystical bond of some given “race” or “people” to a specific land is also entirely mythological. Cultures do develop in a given ecological context, adapt to that context, and can thus thrive maxmally only in that context, but that is the reality of the connection between a culture and a given land. There is a great deal of difference between a culture and a “race.” The essential nonsense of the idea of a “Jewish race” is underscored by the fact that people can convert to, or from, Judaism. If you can end life as a different “race” than you began, how useful is that concept?

At its core, all Zionism is just a classic variation of that closed nationalism which appeared in Europe at the turn of the century, just as the liberal nationalism that emerged from the Enlightenment and the French Revolution was on the wane.

Jewish nationalism is scarcely any different from the nationalism of Central and Eastern Europe: ethnocentric, religious and cultural, immersed in the cult of an heroic past. It has no difficulty in refusing to others the same elementary rights which, in all tranquillity, it demands for itself. Thus Zionism, confident of its right to reclaim all the historic land of our kings and prophets, was unable to conceive that there could be any other legitimacy in the land of the Bible.¹⁴

All nationalist philosophies are inherently racist. In order to promote one “nation,” all other “nations” must be demoted. This is a zero-sum game, due to its relative nature; one cannot hold all “nations” as equal, and hold one’s own “nation” in higher regard, simultaneously. This is why most of the world has repudiated nationalism already: the world wars exposed it as the inherently racist, supremacist ideology it truly is, and that even in its most benign forms, it provides an easy stepping stone to fascism.

Like “patriotism” in the United States, Zionism is a form of nationalism that managed to survive, in part because of the unique nature of the Diaspora, but moreso because it was also offered as a solution to the problem of anti-Semitism, and in its own nationalistic fervor, the Germans had chosen the Jews to be their scapegoat. The horrors of the Shoah shamed the Western world, and offered a powerful argument that a “Jewish homeland” was needed. Zionism survived on the idea that an equal and opposite type of nationalism could help undo the horrors of a different nationalism before it. Thus, the United Nations formed the state of Israel.

Even the early leaders of Zionism recognized, however, that the nationalist nature of Zionism was at odds with their more universal ideals.

Sternhell explains how the avowedly socialist leaders of the dominant labor party, Mapai, especially David Ben Gurion and Berl Katznelson, never really believed in the prospects of realizing the “dream” of a new society, even though many of their working-class supporters were self-identified socialists. The founders of the state understood, from the very beginning, that not only socialism but also other universalistic ideologies like liberalism, were incompatible with cultural, historical, and territorial nationalism. Because nationalism took precedence over universal values, argues Sternhell, Israel has not evolved a constitution or a Bill of Rights, has not moved to separate state and religion, has failed to develop a liberal concept of citizenship, and, until the Oslo accords of 1993, did not recognize the rights of the Palestinians to independence.¹⁵

Aristotle’s theory of tragedy revolves around a tragic hero, who possesses a tragic flaw. The tragedy is the story of how that flaw works out to the hero’s undoing. We might see Israel as a kind of tragic hero. Zionism’s tragic flaw is the racism inherent to all nationalist ideologies, the very same racism that led the Germans to commit the terrible crimes of the Shoah. We know that abused children tend to grow up to abuse their own children; it can be tempting to see a metaphor in that pattern, and wonder if the state of Israel, born from the unspeakable atrocities that followed from insane dreams of “racial purity,” might have been predisposed to follow in the same path. It would be a terrible overreaction to call Israel a fascist state at present, and yet there is a dark shadow at the very heart of Zionism, a predisposition towards fascism that is inherent to the very nature of Zionist—of nationalist—philosophy. The nationalist fervor can never be seperated from it. To maintain Israel as a “Jewish state” means the maintenance of an ethnocracy; Israel is compelled to remain loyal to a dream of racial purity, just like the Nazis’ dream of an Aryan nation. A multiethnic, pluralist society is anathema to the dream of Zionism: in such a setting, Israel may cease to be Jewish, and anti-Semitism could sprout again. Thus, Israel is compelled to keep non-Jews out of Israel, or accord them only a second class citizenship.

For six decades the Palestinian refugees have been refused their right to return home because they are of the wrong race. “Israel must remain a Jewish state,” is an almost sacral mantra across the Western political spectrum. It means, in practice, that Israel is accorded the right to be an ethnocracy at the expense of the refugees and their descendants, now close to 5 million.

Is it not understandable that Israel’s ethnic preoccupation profoundly offends not only Palestinians, but many of their Arab brethren? Yet rather than demanding that Israel acknowledge its foundational wrongs as a first step toward equality and coexistence, the Western world blithely insists that each and all must recognize Israel’s right to exist at the Palestinians’ expense.¹⁶

This in itself does not make Israel fascist, but it provides a foundation for fascism that will always remain. Zionism’s tragic flaw is the tragic flaw of all nationalist ideologies: a predisposition to authoritarian, totalitarian domination, propelled by myths of mystical nationalism and the purity of the nation. From its very beginning, there has been a struggle for Israel’s soul, between those who wish to minimize that fascist tendency, and Israel’s fascist element: those who wish to turn Israel into a fascist state.

The Fascist Roots of Revisionist Zionism

Ze’ev Jabotinsky was one of the most important figures in the early history of Zionism. A Russian Jew born in Odessa, he began as a writer, publishing his first stories in an Odessa newspaper at 16, then becoming a journalist in Switzerland, then Italy. It was in Italy that Jabotinsky was swayed by the Romantic nationalist ideology of Giuseppe Garibaldi. Jabotinsky began to cultivate an idea of nationalism as the highest human achievement, patterned on Garibaldi’s views.¹⁷ Jabotinsky was elected to the Sixth Zionist Congress—the last congress attended by Theodor Herzl. During World War I, Jabotinsky formed the “Jewish Legion,” which fought alongside the British against the Ottoman Empire that then controlled Palestine. After the war, Jabotinsky was elected to the executive council of the Zionist Organization, later the World Zionist Organization.

Jabotinsky broke with other Zionist leaders like David Ben Gurion to form “Revisionist Zionism,” because he saw their “pragmatic Zionism” focusing on social services, immigration, and causes more aligned to socialist ideals as distractions from what he considered the true Zionist enterprise: the attainment of political power and the establishment of a Jewish state.

Like his fellow believers, Shamir was attracted to Jabotinsky’s sweeping vision: his magnetic oratory, ideology of integral nationalism and monism, distaste for socialism, obsession with ceremony, and particularly his cult of power. Much has been written on the political and cultural environment in post-World War I Europe that nurtured such ideas and on the tragic paradox of Jabotinsky, the Jewish liberal who was influenced by those cultural trends. Shamir’s attachment is merely emotional, for he and most of his Jewish colleagues in Palestine exposed Jabotinsky’s inherent contradiction: he wanted to achieve a Jewish state in the whole land of Israel (including Transjordan) by a show of strength and military power—while under the patronage of Great Britain.¹⁸

Jabotinsky’s dream was a Jewish state occupying all of the British Mandate: not only what is now the state of Israel, but also what is now the kingdom of Jordan. Laying claim to the whole British Mandate was an essentially irridentist claim: it relied on appeals to ethnic rights, and the same Romantic notions of nationalism that he had learned from Garibaldi in Italy.

Revisionist Zionism emphasized many of the fascist tendencies in Zionism even further: the “ideology of integral nationalism and monism, distate for socialism, obsession with ceremony, and particularly his cult of power,” were all traits common to the fascist regimes of the twentieth century. The territorial ambitions of Revisionist Zionism that offered some of its foundational causes provided another element of fascism: a Romantic, irredentist appeal for, as Hitler put it, Lebensraum.

Jabotinsky was by no means a fascist; he advocated a liberal democracy based on Britain’s. He was charismatic, but refused to play the role of fascist “Leader,” despite the attempts of the more fascist elements of Revisionist Zionism to turn him into such. He condemned such elements in Revisionist Zionism in no uncertain terms, threatening to bar their writing from Revisionist newspapers. However, the tendencies and contradictions in his views provided the context for much more blatantly fascist heirs to his tradition. The early history of Revisionist Zionism is replete with many alliances with Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Germany.

Jabotinsky’s fury, however, knew no limits. He angrily complained that such articles about Hitler were “a stab in the back for me personally and for all of us.” He ridiculed those who found elements of “a national liberation” movement in Nazism.¹⁹

Jabotinsky abhorred wanton killing and condemned terrorism, but his disciples in Palestine believed that only acts of terror directed against the British occupiers would free the land and establish a Jewish state. Shamir and Menachem Begin, the leader of the Irgun Tzvai Leumi, the largest underground group and Lehi’s main competitor, planned their revolt against the British despite the objections of Jabotinsky. The underground therefore was both an indirect challenge to Shamir’s mentor and a direct challenge to the elected bodies of the Yishuv, the pre-1948 Jewish community in Palestine. David Ben Gurion, the doughty Labor leader who would become Israel’s first prime minister, and the leadership of the Yishuv “had the habits of settling for immediate, if deceptive, calm,” writes Shamir, adding a fat hint about his feelings on Labor’s current politics. Then, as now, his leftist opponents displayed “a kind of pessimism inappropriate to the daring concepts that were both Herzl’s and Jabotinsky’s.” Shamir is not concerned in the least that those “pessimists” represented the overwhelming majority of the Yishuv, and that they correctly assumed that the real threat to Jewish statehood was Arab belligerence, not British intransigence. Ben Gurion and his allies opposed terrorist acts against the British on moral and political grounds. Strained relations with the British jeopardized military preparations for the inevitable confrontation with the Arabs, which of course came when six Arab armies immediately invaded Israel after it declared its independence on May 14, 1948. One shudders to think what would have happened had the “dissenters”—Shamir and Begin—been directing Jewish political activity during the crucial years before 1948.²⁰

One branch of Revisionist Zionism that emerged in the 1930s was the national-messianist or “Lehi” group, known to Britain as the “Stern gang.” Led by Avraham “Yair” Stern, they openly described themselves as terrorists. They took to Jabotinsky’s nationalism and the need for political power, but they did not share his Anglophilia, and instead launched a terror campaign against the British, whom they accused of an illegal occupation of Palestine. Lehi was guided by spiritual and philosophical leaders Abba Achimeir and Uri Zvi Greenberg.

Greenberg believed that the Covenant with Abraham, later renewed with the Jews at Sinai, is the basis of Jewish being. There is no denying that Divine election, and everything the Jew does must, in the spirit of messianic redemption, act to further and realize the sense of chosenness. The past is the basis of the future, and the Kingdom of Israel, which reached its zenith under King David, will be revived. Hence Greenberg’s antipathy towards a humanistic or universalistic approach to Judaism; on the contrary, being Jewish means being different and distant from non-Jews. For Jews to ignore their path can only lead to a continuation of the violence against them that has marked much of their history, and while Greenberg blamed the world for its silence during the Holocaust, he faulted the Jews as well for their own blindness. In settling the land of their forefathers, Zionism helps Jews realize their promised redemption, and for Greenberg, the role of Hebrew poetry is to express the messianic vision.²¹

As for Abba Achimeir, he, like many of the leaders of Revisionist Zionism, was attracted to fascist ideologies—particularly that of Benito Mussolini—for its anti-Communist ideology, and its emphasis on the glorious national past. Perhaps owing to the relationship between their leader Jabotinsky and Garibaldi, or perhaps influenced by their own conflict with socialist Zionism, these leaders saw fascism as an excellent example of how to defeat Communism. More importantly, the invocation of a glorious, mythological and “heroic” past of the Italian nation was seen as an easy parallel to the glorious, mythological and “heroic” past of the Jewish nation.

Abba Achimeir’s ideology was based in Oswald Spengler’s monumental study on the decline of the West, but his Zionist orientation caused him to adapt its ultimate conclusions. Achimeir’s basic assumption was that liberal bourgeois European culture was degenerate, and deeply eroded from within by an excess of liberalism and individualism. Socialism and communism were portrayed as “overcivilized” ideologies. Fascism on the other hand, like Zionism, was a return to the roots of the national culture and the historical past. According to Achimeir, Italian Fascism was not anti-Semitic or anti-Zionist, whereas communist ideology and praxis were intrinsically so.

He also developed a favorable attitude toward fascist praxis and its psycho-politics, such as the principle of the all powerful leader, the use of propaganda to generate a spirit of heroism and duty to the homeland, and the cultivation of youthful vitality (as manifested in the fascist youth movements). Achimeir joined the Revisionist movement in 1930, but before joining he wrote a regular column entitled “From the Notebook of a Fascist” in the unaffiliated but pro-Revisionist magazine Doar Hayom. He crafted his pro-fascistic views in these columns, and also wrote an article in 1928 titled “On the Arrival of Our Duce” to celebrate Jabotinsky’s visit to Palestine, and propose a new direction for the Revisionist movement, more in line with Achimeir’s views.

When Achimeir was on trial in 1932 for having disrupted a public lecture at Hebrew University, his lawyer, Zvi Eliahu Cohen, argued “Were it not for Hitler’s anti-Semitism, we would not oppose his ideology. Hitler saved Germany.” Tom Segev has remarked, “This was not an unconsidered outburst.” An editorial in the Revisionist newspaper Hazit Haam praised Cohen’s “brilliant speech.” It continued, that “Social Democrats of all stripes believe that Hitler’s movement is an empty shell (but) we believe that there is both a shell and a kernel. The anti-Semitic shell is to be discarded, but not the anti-Marxist kernel. The Revisionists would fight the Nazis only to the extent that they were anti-Semites.”

In 1933, when Hitler came to power, the newspaper, whose editors were Revisionist Party members, praised Nazism as a German national liberation movement and said that Hitler had saved Germany from Communism. Jabotinsky responded by threatening to have the newspaper’s editors expelled if they repeated such “kow-towing” to Hitler.

The national messianist wing (which inspired Lehi) differed from the ideological vision of Jabotinsky to the extent that on 9 August 1932, Jabotinsky wrote to tell Abba Achimeir that his romantic ideas and the zeal of his followers were considered excessive. Ha-Zohar, he wrote, was a democratic political movement of a patrician rather than populist or Romantic kind. As a consequence, he argued, the behavior of Achimeir and his friends threatened Jabotinsky’s own movement. He also argued that if Achimeir’s views were indeed similar to those which he expressed in his articles and letters, there was no room for the two of them in the same political camp.²²

This was the ideological basis of Lehi; so it should come as no surprise that it tried to collaborate with the Fascists in Italy, and the Nazis in Germany. Stern himself was killed by British police in 1940, after which Lehi was led by a triumvirate of Israel Eldad, Natan Yellin-Mor, and Yitzhak Shamir, called “Michael,” for Yitzhak Shamir’s hero, Michael Collins, the founder of the IRA (Shamir later went on to become Israel’s second Likud prime minister as Menachem Begin’s successor). Under the leadership of “Michael,” Lehi proposed intervening in World War II on the sides of the Nazis, against the British. Their proposal was simple: Lehi and the Axis powers would cooperate in expelling the British from the British Mandate, which would become a Jewish state. Lehi would help “evacuate” Jews from Europe, arguing that “common interests could exist between the establishment of a new order in Europe in conformity with the German concept, and the true national aspirations of the Jewish people as they are embodied by the NMO.”²³ An NMO representative, Naftali Lubenchik, went to Beirut in late 1940 to meet a German official, Werner Otto von Hentig, and deliver a letter from NMO offering to “actively take part in the war on Germany’s side” in return for German support for “the establishment of the historic Jewish state on a national and totalitarian basis, bound by a treaty with the German Reich.” We know that the letter was delivered to the German embassy in Ankara, but there is no known official response from Berlin. Lehi attempted to contact the Reich again in December 1941, but were again apparently ignored.

Irgun—derived from the Revisionist youth movement, Betar—were another terrorist group to develop in Revisionist Zionism from Jabotinsky, but they maintained slightly less enthusiasm for Hitler and Mussolini than Lehi. While Lehi continued its attacks against the British during the war, Irgun suspended its attacks while Britain was fighting the Nazis. Irgun was founded on Jabotinsky’s principles: “every Jew had the right to enter Palestine; only active retaliation would deter the Arabs; only Jewish armed force would ensure the Jewish state.” Irgun defied Jabotinsky by attacking the British, but also fighting the Arabs. Jabotinsky’s own views on Arabs were mixed: sometimes he said that they could co-exist in the liberal democracy he envisioned, at other times he said that Eretz Israel should be settled by Jews and the Arabs ignored until sheer demographics created the Jewish state, and at still other times he called for the expulsion of the Arabs from Eretz Israel, by force. It was this last option that inspired Irgun, which began a series of attacks against the Arab population, hoping to drive them from Eretz Israel to create a racially pure Jewish state.

In 1944, Irgun’s leader was killed on a dangerous mission for Britain against the Axis powers. In February, Irgun elected a new leader: Menachem Begin.

Menachem Begin

Menachem Volfovich Begin was born in Brest-Litovsk (a.k.a., Brest or Brisk), in Belarus, a town famous for its Talmudic scholars; his father was an ardent Zionist and follower of Theodor Herzl, but both of his parents were murdered in the Shoah. It was in the 1930s, while training as a lawyer in Warsaw, that he discovered Jabotinsky’s work. He joined Betar—the Revisionist Zionist youth movement—in the Czechoslovak Republic, escaping to Poland just ahead of the Nazi invasion.

Following the Irgun’s retaliation against Arab targets in November 1937, Begin and others in Poland published the manifesto of the “Activist-Revisionist Front,” an unequivocal attack on Jabotinsky’s policies. Yet Jabotinsky was not disavowed, but selectively endorsed. His inspiration rather than his policies was embraced.

In September 1938, the famous confrontation between Begin and Jabotinsky took place at a Betar conference in Warsaw. Begin proposed an amendment to the Betar oath, which Jabotinsky had formulated in 1934. Instead of “I will train to fight in the defense of my people, and I will only use my strength for defense” - Begin proposed: “I will train to fight in the defense of my people and to conquer the homeland.” …

Although this effectively reversed Jabotinsky’s understanding of the Iron Wall, Begin’s speech was greeted by tumultuous applause. Jabotinsky, however, was considerably irritated; he had interrupted Begin several times during his speech. He said that “there is no place in Betar for this kind of nonsense” and compared Begin’s speech and its reception to the sound of a squeaking door.²⁴

In 1939, Begin led Poland’s Betar into the USSR as the Nazi blitzkrieg raged. It was in the USSR that Begin was arrested by the NKVD on suspicion of being a British spy, and sent to Siberia where he spent two years in a Soviet prison that proved formative for his attitudes and outlook.

In 1941, under the Sikorski-Mayski Agreement, Begin was released, and joined the Polish army of Anders. As the Nazis were invading Russia, he was sent with the army to Palestine via the Persian Corridor. Once there, he deserted, and joined Irgun.

Where the previous leader of Irgun had called for a cease-fire with the British while they were at war with the Nazis, Begin issued a “Declaration of Revolt” as soon as he took command in 1944. In defiance of Zionist governing bodies, Begin launched an all-out war against the British, even while the British were helping to liberate Nazi concentration camps. David Ben Gurion, later Israel’s first prime minister, denounced Begin as an “enemy of the Jewish people.” Begin’s Irgun committed mass murder at Deir Yassin, and waged a terrorist campaign against the British, blowing up the British military, police, and civil headquarters at the King David Hotel. His campaign was costly, though, resulting in the arrest, conviction, and hanging of many Irgun members. In 1948, Britain offered its partition plan, which included a state for Israel.

The partition plan was rejected out of hand by the leadership of the Palestinian Arabs and by most of the Arab population. Most of the Jews accepted the proposal, in particular the Jewish Agency, which was the Jewish state-in-formation. Numerous records indicate the joy of Palestine’s Jewish inhabitants as they attended the U.N. session voting for the division proposal. Up to this day, Israeli history books mention 29 November, the date of this session, as the most important date leading to the creation of the Israeli state.

Several Jews, however, declined the proposal. Menachem Begin, Irgun’s leader, announced: “The partition of the homeland is illegal. It will never be recognized. The signature by institutions and individuals of the partition agreement is invalid. It will not bind the Jewish people. Jerusalem was and will for ever be our capital. The Land of Israel will be restored to the people of Israel. All of it. And for ever”. His views were publicly rejected by the majority of the nascent Jewish state.²⁵

In 1948, Irgun was officially dissolved, and became part of the Israeli Defense Forces, or IDF, though the transfer was not altogether voluntary. The Altaleena Affair was a violent showdown between Irgun and the newly-formed IDF that resulted in the siezing of a shipment of weapons to Irgun, and ultimately, the true dissolution of Irgun. More importantly, it set the tone for the animosity between Begin and Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben Gurion.

Shortly after the founding of the state of Israel, the Irgun formally disbanded. However tensions with the IDF persisted over Ben-Gurion’s uncompromising insistence on the Irgun’s total surrender to the provisional government which he headed. These culminated in the confrontation over the Altalena cargo ship, which secretly delivered weapons to the Irgun in June 1948. The government demanded that the cargo be handed over to it unconditionally, however Begin refused to comply. Rather than negotiating, Ben-Gurion was determined to make this event an exemplary demonstration of the state’s authority. He eventually ordered the IDF to take the ship by gunfire, and it drowned off the shore of Tel Aviv. Begin, who was on board as the ship was being shelled, ordered his men not to retaliate in an attempt to prevent the crisis from spiralling into civil war. The Altalena Affair established Ben-Gurion as Israel’s indisputable leader, condemning Begin to political wilderness for almost thirty years to come.²⁶

In 1948, Begin founded Herut, a political party that would challenge the dominance of Ben Gurion’s Mapai party. When Begin visited the United States in December of that year to gain support for his new party, nearly two dozen prominent Jewish intellectuals—including Albert Einstein—took out a full-page ad in the New York Times to express their views on Begin and his party.

Among the most disturbing political phenomena of our times is the emergence in the newly created state of Israel of the “Freedom Party” (Tnuat Haherut), a political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties. It was formed out of the membership and following of the former Irgun Zvai Leumi, a terrorist, right-wing, chauvinist organization in Palestine. …

Within the Jewish community they have preached an admixture of ultranationalism, religious mysticism, and racial superiority. Like other Fascist parties they have been used to break strikes, and have themselves pressed for the destruction of free trade unions. In their stead they have proposed corporate unions on the Italian Fascist model.²⁷

Herut, like Irgun before it, promoted the same cult of power and appeals to mystical nationalism, the mythology of Israel’s “heroic” past, and the racial purity Irgun had previously fought for. They also maintained the Revisionist dream of a “Greater Israel,” encompassing the entire British Mandate—meaning the conquest of Jordan—as part of their territorial ambitions based on irredentist, ethnic appeals for, essentially, Lebensraum.

Begin’s major confrontation with Ben Gurion occurred in 1952, when Ben Gurion was negotiating a war reparations agreement with West Germany. Begin violently dissented, claiming that the agreement was tantamount to pardoning the Nazis for the Shoah. While the Knesset debated the agreement, Begin led a major demonstration in Jerusalem, attacking the government, calling for civil disobedience, and ultimately inciting a riot. The crowd marched on parliament, throwing stones at the general assembly, injuring dozens of police and several Knesset members. Begin was held responsible for the violence and barred from the Knesset for several months, but even more strikingly, the testimony of Eliezer Sudit linked Begin to a failed assassination attempt on West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer that same year. Roundly condemned, Begin gained the image of a provacateur and demogogue willing to use the Shoah for his own political ends. The episode also clearly exhibits a disdain for normal electoral process, appealing instead to the pathos of the mob and a charismatic leader: essential elements of fascist ideology.

Ben Gurion’s Labor (Mapai) party continued to dominate Israel’s government for decades, while Begin consolidated his power, forming alliances and coalitions with other parties. First, an alliance with the Liberal Party formed Gahal failed to displace Mapai, leading a young Ehud Olmert to challenge him and call for his resignation. Begin agreed, but reversed his decision when he was acclaimed by the crowd that begged him to stay. During the 1967 “Six Days’ War,” Gahal joined Mapai to form a unity government, and Begin served on the cabinet for the first time as a Minister Without Portfolio. By 1970, the unity government was dissolved, but in 1973, Menachem Begin joined Ariel Sharon to form a new alliance, made up of Gahal, the Free Center Party, and other, smaller groups. The tenuous alliance was called “Consolidation,” or, in Hebrew, Likud.

The Yom Kippur War led to public disillusionment with Mapai: disillusionment that the new Likud party helped fan.

Anti-intellectualism, combined with a mystic-nationalism that regarded populating the West Bank (Judea and Samaria) and Gaza as the absolutely supreme policy of Likud governments (and by the way gave the Arabs to the poor as a scapegoat for their problems), appealed to the underclass that was incited to hate the ‘Alignment’—the Labor-Left alliance as it was known in its final days in power before, during and after the Yom Kippur War—which was slapped with the accusation that since it was so omni-powerful in the early days of the state, was responsible for poverty and discrimination against ‘Sephardim.’²⁸

To consolidate his power, Begin played mercilessly on ethnic differences, gaining support among Mizrahi Jews by pointing to the failures of the Ashkenazi elites. In contrast with the secularism of Mapai, Begin was openly Jewish, appealing to the more religious Mizrahi community. While genuine mistreatment of Mizrahi Jews had been part of Israeli policy, Begin’s appeal to the lowest common denominator, fanning intolerance and bigotry, made him the first non-Mapai Israeli prime minister in 1977.

Likud’s victory in the 1977 elections, which made Begin the first non-Labor prime minister of Israel, marked a turning point in Israeli history. … The Likud’s economic policies, which caused running inflation and hurt economic growth, nevertheless contributed to the emergence of Israeli nouveaux riches and the opening of the affluent society to many members of the weaker classes. The gap between the haves and the have-nots grew, but in contrast with the past, the haves were no longer only Ashkenazim. The massive influx of new government officials led to protectionism, inefficiency, and even corruption. Yet it improved the Sephardim’s self-image and helped consolidate a confident new elite. One could see this as the consummation of the Likud’s historical purpose, which was no longer based so much on the Jabotinskyite creed as it was on venting frustration and rage against the Ashkenazi establishment that had disadvantaged the Sephardi masses.²⁹

Ironically, one of Begin’s first achievements—and what he is perhaps best known for, and what he recieved the Nobel Peace Prize for—was signing the Camp David Accords with Egypt’s president, Anwar al-Sadat. Yet observers noted that the diplomacy was mostly the work of U.S. President Carter, who noted in his memoirs that “there could have been peace between the Arabs and the Israelis had it not been for the bigoted, Nazi-like racial views”³⁰ of Prime Minister Begin. Within Likud, the treaty was seen as a betrayal of the party’s principles—particularly the conquest of Greater Israel. Yitzhak Shamir (one of the “Michael” triumvirate of Lehi) and Ariel Sharon led the objection, abstaining from the Knesset session where it was ratified.

The Camp David Accords also called for establishing autonomous Palestinian self-rule in the occupied territories siezed in 1967. On this, Begin simply did not keep his word. Under international law, both the West Bank and Gaza are legally occupied territories, placing them under the Geneva Conventions, which forbid moving populations into an occupied territory. This is precisely what Ariel Sharon, under Begin, began to do. Rather than settling in peripheral territories, Begin planned Jewish settlements right in the middle of existing Palestinian communities, specifically to disrupt, disband, and drive off the Palestinian population.

Begin also established Israel’s policy of unilateral, pre-emptive attacks with the bombing of Iraq’s Osirak reactor in 1981. The action was condemned by many governments, including the United States, as well as the United Nations in resolution 487. Begin also ordered the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, describing it as a war of survival, even comparing Yassir Arafat to Hitler.

Within a matter of weeks into the war it emerged that for the first time in Israeli history there was no consensus over the IDF’s activity. Public criticism reached its peak following the Sabra and Shatila Massacre in September 1982, when tens of thousands gathered to protest in Tel Aviv. The Kahan Commission, appointed to investigate the events, found the government indirectly responsible for the massacre, accusing Defense Minister Ariel Sharon of gross negligence. The commission’s report, published in February 1983, severely damaged Begin’s government, forcing Sharon to resign. As the Israeli quagmire in Lebanon seemed to grow deeper, public pressure on Begin to resign increased.

Begin’s disoriented appearance on national television while visiting the Beaufort battle site raised concerns that he was being misinformed about the war’s progress. Asking Sharon whether PLO fighters had ‘machine guns’, Begin seemed worryingly out of touch with the nature and scale of the military campaign he had authorized. Almost a decade later, Haaretz reporter Uzi Benziman published a series of articles accusing Sharon of intentionally deceiving Begin about the operation’s initial objectives, and continuously misleading him as the war progressed. Sharon sued both the newspaper and Benziman for libel in 1991. The trial lasted 11 years, with one of the highlights being the deposition of Benny Begin, Menachem Begin’s son, in favor of the defendants. Sharon lost the case.³¹

Forced to retire because of the situation in Lebanon, Begin retired from public life in 1983, handing over the office of the prime minister to “his old friend-in-arms,” the man who had once sought to help the Nazis in World War II: Yitzhak Shamir. At the end of his life, Begin sunk into depression deepened by the death of his wife while he was on a state visit to Washington, D.C. He went into seclusion, and died in 1992.

Ariel Sharon

Ariel “Arik” Scheinermann was born in Palestine to Shmuel and Dvora, Russian Jews who had come to Eretz Israel in the Second Aliyah, fleeing the Red Army. They were Mapai supporters who lived and worked at the Kfar Malal agricultural moshav (”village”).

Dvora (Vera) and Shmuel Scheinerman were the odd couple out. They were too educated and quoted too much Russian poetry. He was an agronomist and she once a medical student. They made Ariel and his older sister Dita do their homework and take violin lessons (which Arik quickly quit). Their house was full of books but extremely poor. Dvora worked barefoot in the fields, citrus grove, tobacco patch, cow barn and goat shed. Instead of buying herself shoes, she saved for the children’s education. Unlike most their neighbors, the Scheinermans insisted their kids attend high school.

But such differences were only background for the Scheinermans’ eventual ostracism. It followed the 1933 Arlozorov murder when Dvora and Shmuel refused to endorse the Labor movement’s anti-Revisionist calumny and participate in Bolshevic-style public revilement rallies, then the order of the day. Retribution was quick to come. They were expelled from the local health-fund clinic and village synagogue. The cooperative’s truck wouldn’t make deliveries to their farm nor collect produce.

In his will, Shmuel Scheinerman requested that no one from Kfar Malal eulogize him and that his body not be driven to the cemetery in the communal pick-up.³²

“Arik” joined the Gadna in 1942 at the age of 14, a paramilitary youth battalion, and later joined the Haganah, the underground paramilitary force that Irgun left for its policies of “restraint.” In 1948, when Israel was founded, the Haganah became the IDF, and “Arik” become a platoon commander in the Alexandroni Brigade. Name changes were common for Jews when they came to Israel, and sometimes required for Israelis in positions of military or civil command. While “Arik” was an officer in the IDF, he changed his last name, for the Sharon region he was born in, to become Ariel Sharon.

Ariel Sharon rose quickly through the ranks of the IDF, and by 1950 he was an intelligence officer in Central Command. After a brief time at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem studying Middle Eastern culture, Sharon returned to active duty at the rank of Rav Seren (Major), as the leader of the newly-formed Unit 101.

Unit 101 was Israel’s first special forces unit, formed on David Ben Gurion’s orders in August 1953. Recent Palestinian violence had convinced Ben Gurion of the need for retaliation; such retribution was the purpose of Unit 101.

Immediately after the foundation of Unit 101 in 1953, it began a series of retaliatory operations targeting bases and villages which served as bases for the infiltrators. On one of its first missions, the unit attacked the refugee camp in El-Bureij in Gaza Strip. The mission was aimed at Col. Mustafa Hafez, the chief of Egyptian intelligence in the Gaza Strip (and according to some, the Strip’s de-facto ruler) who stood behind many of the early violent infiltrations into Israel.

According to the local UN officer Vagn Bennike, hand grenades were thrown into houses while the inhabitants were sleeping, and those trying to escape were mowed down with machine guns.

Only two months later, in October, a heavy shadow was cast on the unit, following its raid into the village of Qibya, in the northern West Bank then a part of Jordan. Up to 70 innocent civilians were killed in this operation. The mode of operation was similar to that of El-Bureij, but on a larger scale.³³

Unit 101 was known for deliberately targeting Palestinian civilians, and the Qibya massacre carried out by Sharon was one of Israel’s first atrocities. In the midst of the international condemnations Israel recieved for the massacre, then Major Sharon had his first audience with the prime minister, Ben Gurion. Sharon recalls the consequences of the massacre in the documentary, Israel and the Arabs: 50 Year War:

I was summoned to see Ben Gurion. It was the first time I met him, and right from the start Ben Gurion said to me: “Let me first tell you one thing: it doesn’t matter what the world says about Israel, it doesn’t matter what they say about us anywhere else. The only thing that matters is that we can exist here on the land of our forefathers. And unless we show the Arabs that there is a high price to pay for murdering Jews, we won’t survive.”

Shortly thereafter, Unit 101 was merged into the Paratroopers’ Brigade, with Sharon as its commander. Under Sharon, the Paratroopers’ Brigade continued to carry out attacks against both military and civilian targets, ultimately culminating in the attack on the Qalqilyah police station in autumn 1956. That same year, in the Suez War, the Paratrooper Brigade was deployed to the Mitla Pass in the Sinai, but was given orders not to take the pass. Sharon was permitted to send in scouts, however; when his scouts were met with heavy fire, he took his unit into the pass. The battle was won, with 38 casualties, and the pass was taken. Sharon was criticized by his superiors for failing to obey orders, and because the Egyptians were expected to withdraw from the pass in the next day or two, Sharon’s actions were deemed strategically reckless. Years later, several IDF officers came forward to allege that Sharon had sent the scouts into the pass in bad faith, specifically to instigate an Egyptian response that would excuse his attack.

The Mitla incident put Sharon’s rise through the IDF’s ranks on hold for several years, during which time he obtained a law degree from Tel Aviv University. When Yitzhak Rabin became chief of staff in 1964, Sharon resumed his rise, and by the time of the 1967 Six Days’ War, he had reached the rank of Aluf (Major General).

Sharon’s political aid for Menachem Begin’s new coalition was instrumental in creating the Likud party, though most of the political work in those years was seen to by Begin.

Sharon’ s military career was not over, however. At the start of the Yom Kippur War on 6 October 1973, Sharon was called back to duty and assigned to command a reserve armored division. His forces did not engage the Egyptian Army immediately but it was Sharon who helped locate a breach between the Egyptian forces, which he then exploited by capturing a bridgehead on 16 October and throwing a bridge across the Suez Canal the following day. He violated his orders from the head of Southern Command by exploiting this success to cut the supply lines of the Egyptian Third Army, located to the south of the canal crossing, isolating it from other Egyptian units.

The divisions of Sharon and Abraham Adan (Bren) passed over this bridge into Africa advancing to within 101 kilometers of Cairo. They wreaked havoc on the supply lines of the Third Army stretching to the south of them, cutting off and encircling the Third Army, but could not force its surrender before the ceasefire. Tensions between the two generals followed his decision, but a military tribunal later found his action was militarily effective. This move was regarded by many Israelis as the turning point of the war in the Sinai front. Thus, Sharon is viewed by some as a war hero who saved Israel from defeat in Sinai. A photo of Sharon wearing a head bandage on the Suez Canal became a famous symbol of Israeli military prowess.³⁴

Sharon’s military career ended because of his inability to follow orders, but because his actions had met with such military success, he was nonetheless set in Israeli imagination as a war hero. Despite his early commitment to Mapai, inherited from his parents’ agrarian politics, Sharon became a major force in the creation of Likud. In the 1970s, Sharon was a member of the Knesset and a special aide to prime minister Yitzhak Rabin.

The occupied territories siezed in 1967 became the keystone of Sharon’s political life. Though the Geneva Conventions make it a war crime to move populations into an occupied territory, Israel did precisely this after 1967. The mystical, nationalist rhetoric of Likud dovetailed easily with the teachings of Jewish mystics to create a “messianic settlers” movement, led by Gush Emunim.

Gush Emunim beliefs are based heavily on the teachings of Rabbi Abraham Kook and his son, Rabbi Tzvi Yehuda Kook. The two rabbis taught that secular Zionists, through their conquests of Eretz Israel, had unwittingly brought about the beginning of the “messianic age”, which would end in the coming of the Jewish messiah. Gush Emunim supporters believe that the coming of the messiah can be hastened through Jewish settlement on land they believe God has allotted to the Jewish people as outlined in the Hebrew Bible.³⁵

Sharon gained a reputation as the settlers’ main political patron within Likud, tinging his rhetoric with Palestinian racism, xenophobia, and talk of ethnic purity.

When Sharon joined Begin’s government he had relatively little political experience. During this period, Sharon supported the Gush Emunim settlements movement and was viewed as the patron of the messianic settlers’ movement. He used his position to encourage the establishment of a network of Israeli settlements in the occupied territories to prevent the possibility of the return of these territories to Palestinian Arabs. Sharon doubled the number of Jewish settlements on the West Bank and Gaza Strip during his tenure.

On his settlement policy, Sharon said while addressing a meeting of the Tsomet Party: “Everybody has to move, run and grab as many (Palestinian) hilltops as they can to enlarge the (Jewish) settlements because everything we take now will stay ours… Everything we don’t grab will go to them.”³⁶

Rewarding Sharon for his role in creating Likud, Begin made him defense minister, placing him in charge of the IDF during the 1982 invasion of Lebanon. Begin had hoped to resolve the conflict with a peace with Bachir Gemayel, splitting the country between a Maronite Christian north, and a south controlled by Israel. Gemayel was assassinated in 1982 by a Syrian operative, however, shattering Begin’s plans for Lebanon.

Ariel Sharon and Rafael Eitan then reportedly invited Lebanese Phalangist militia units to enter the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps to clean out the PLO fighters. Under the Israeli plan, Israeli soldiers would control the perimeters of the refugee camps and provide logistical support while the Phalangists would enter the camps, find the PLO fighters and hand them over to Israeli forces.

However, ultimately no persons were handed over to Israeli forces and there was little fighting. However, Schiff and Ya’ari report that over the next 10 days “huge quantities of ordnance—including twelve cannons, eight heavy mortars, Katyusha-mounted vehicles, and 520 tons of ammunition—were indeed removed from dozens of caches in West Beirut.”³⁷

The number of victims of the Sabra and Shatila massacres varies, but numbers as high as 2,000 are plausible. The Phalanges militia that Gemayel had once led was directly responsible for the massacre, but the Kahan Commission found that Ariel Sharon, specifically, was personally responsible through complacency and negligence. The charge continues to hang on Sharon as a major war crime, earning him the ephithet, “the Butcher of Beirut.”

We have found, as has been detailed in this report, that the Minister of Defense bears personal responsibility. In our opinion, it is fitting that the Minister of Defense draw the appropriate personal conclusions arising out of the defects revealed with regard to the manner in which he discharged the duties of his office—and if necessary, that the Prime Minister consider whether he should exercise his authority under Section 21-A(a) of the Basic Law: the Government, according to which “the Prime Minister may, after informing the Cabinet of his intention to do so, remove a minister from office.”³⁸

Charges began to arise that Begin was being mislead about the progress of the war in Lebanon by Sharon, as well. With pressure mounting from the massacre, Begin dismissed Sharon.

Sharon remained a force in Israeli politics, however, particularly among the elements he had helped instigate who now followed his xenophobic, warmongering rhetoric. In such circles, massacres and civilian casualties were entirely justified, and Sharon was a war hero who protected Israel from its enemies—enemies that were increasingly seen as sub-human monsters incapable of reason or peaceful co-existence that could only be exterminated.

After being dismissed from the Defense Minister post because the Kahan Commission found him “personally responsible” for his “disregard of the danger of a massacre,” Sharon remained in successive governments as a Minister without portfolio (1983—1984), Minister for Trade and Industry (1984—1990), and Minister for Housing Construction (1990—1992). During this period he was a rival to then prime minister Yitzhak Shamir, but failed in various bids to replace him as chairman of the ruling Likud party. Their rivalry reached a head on the “Night of Microphones” in February 1990, when Sharon snapped the microphone from Shamir, who was addressing the Likud central committee, and famously exclaimed: “Who’s for wiping out terrorism?”. The implication was that only Sharon knew how to destroy the scourge and whoever deemed this as important should support him. The incident was widely viewed as an apparent putsch attempt against Shamir’s leadership of the party.³⁹

When elected prime minister of Israel in 2001, Sharon promised to keep Israel safe from the Palestinians, but his xenophobic rhetoric created a firestorm that got well beyond his ability to control. His visit to the Temple Mount was blamed by Palestinians as the cause of the al-Aqsa Intifada, though the Mitchell Report point out evidence that the intifada had been planned months in advance. However, the report also mentioned:

The Sharon visit did not cause the “Al-Aqsa Intifada.” But it was poorly timed and the provocative effect should have been foreseen; indeed, it was foreseen by those who urged that the visit be prohibited. More significant were the events that followed: The decision of the Israeli police on September 29 to use lethal means against the Palestinian demonstrators; and the subsequent failure, as noted above, of either party to exercise restraint.⁴⁰

In 2004, Sharon began a unilateral disengagement plan to remove settlers from the Gaza strip. This was experienced as a deep betrayal by the messianic settlers who looked to Sharon as their patron, a major setback in the territorial ambitions that will pave the way for the messiah. The Likud party saw it as a betrayal of the dreams of “Greater Israel” that Revisionist Zionism was founded on. Sharon himself saw it as key in “freezing” the peace process.

“The significance of the disengagement plan is the freezing of the peace process,” said Sharon’s closest adviser, Dov Weissblas. “When you freeze that process, you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state and you prevent a discussion on the refugees, the borders and Jerusalem. Disengagement supplies the amount of formaldehyde that is necessary so there will not be a political process with the Palestinians.” Sixteen months on, the analysis looks prophetic: the Quartet has fallen silent and the EU has buried its report on the annexation of East Jerusalem. Nobody is bothering Israel about the roadmap any more.⁴¹

The domestic ramifications of the decision, however, were so severe that Sharon was forced to create a new party: Kadima, the Hebrew for “Forward”.

Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s new party bears the exact same name as fascist Italian dictator Benito Mussolini’s, Shinui Chairman Yosef Lapid claimed on Thursday.

“Sharon is said to have clever campaign managers, and they chose for him the name of the Duce’s party. The name was Avanti, which means forward, like Sharon’s party, which is named Kadima (forward in Hebrew),” Lapid said.

“They either don’t speak Italian, or know nothing about history,” he added.⁴²

Given the influence of Italian nationalism on Jabotinsky, and of Italian Fascism on many early Revisionist Zionists, the coincidence is certainly striking, even if it is not meaningful.

Benjamin Netanyahu succeeded Sharon as Likud party leader. The xenophobia Sharon had helped instigate to propel him to power had taken on a life of its own, and could not be defied, even by Sharon himself.

Sentiments that Sharon had betrayed the messianic settlers were so strong that Rabbi Yosef Dayan led a group of Right-wing rabbis in placing an ancient curse on Sharon, the Pulsa diNura, calling on the Angel of Death to claim him. A few months later, on 18 December 2005, Ariel Sharon suffered a minor ischemic stroke. He recovered, but on 4 Janaury 2006, he suffered a massive hemorrhagic stroke at his ranch, Havat Hashikmim, in the Negev region, and slipped into a coma. He is now in a persistent vegetative state, and doctors do not expect him to ever wake up. In recent days, his condition has worsened.

Mystic Nationalism

There is an inherent mysticism to all nationalist ideologies. It is a product of Romantic philosophy, like the Noble Savage or the Cult of Youth.

Nationalism, of course, originated in Europe. But what nationalism came to mean or embody to any particular people varied over time and place, and its articulation had much to do with specific historical circumstances. As a result, two highly antithetical forms of nationalism eventually emerged: the one, rooted in the Enlightenment, was aligned with liberal and “rationalist” thinking; the other, child of Romanticism, came to embody everything primordial: race, “blood,” language, culture, and religion. Consider, for example, the different sorts of nationalisms espoused by France and Germany. In France, nationalism was connected with concepts of individual liberty, rational cosmopolitanism, and citizenship. Germany’s later nationalism was built almost purely on a sentimental regard for the supposedly heroic past and the mystic blood-ties of the volk.

Thus nations like Germany put more emphasis on the volk than on the citizen, and on the geist, the unique, defining “spirit” of the people, than on civic rights or political structures. …

As to why German nationalism developed along these lines, two considerations are important. First, when threatened, a people often find solace by withdrawing into solidarity with others who share a same common background—racially, linguistically, culturally, theologically, and historically—while viewing all who do not share in these common primordial bonds as the dreaded “Others.” Conveniently enough, during the birth of German nationalism, there was in fact another hostile Other — the French.⁴³

As threatened as Germans felt in the wake of World War I, it pales next to the centuries of persecution that the Jewish people have faced. Zionism developed as a Romantic type of nationalism, developing the ideal of a Jewish nation defined in terms of language, culture, religion, and an ephemeral, mystical bond that united all Jews as a single “people.” All the same, we can see an attempt at a more Enlightenment-inspired Zionism by the original Zionists, the secular Jews who tried to infuse Zionism with universalistic, socialist ideals.

That was precisely what Revisionist Zionism rejected. Jabotinsky was deeply influenced by the Romantic nationalism of Garibaldi in Italy, and invoked the “heroic past,” with irridentist claims to the whole British Mandate for Jewish Lebensraum. Yet, the conflicts and paradoxes of Jabotinsky’s thinking show through clearly in his preparatory notes for his speech in Dublin in January 1938.

Inevitably, therefore, the question must arise of ‘transferring’ those Arabs elsewhere so as to make at least some room for Jewish newcomers. But it must be hateful for any Jew to think that the rebirth of a Jewish state should ever be linked with such an odious suggestion as the removal of non-Jewish citizens.⁴⁴

Unfortunately, the paradoxes of Jabotinsky’s thought provided fertile ground for more ardent fascists, who stripped down those contradictions through a selective reading of Jabotinsky. Revisionist Zionism under Jabotinsky’s disciples pursued further the fascist tendencies of Romantic nationalism.

Begin’s objective was nothing less than the hegemonic establishment of a new Zionist paradigm, supported by a new history of the independence struggle, a new relationship between religion and politics, and a new emphasis on the Land, people, and Bible of Israel, rather than on the boundaries, citizens, and laws of the State of Israel. If in the first decade following the 1967 war a set of hegemonic conceptions which had protected the power of the Labor establishment for two decades was displaced, after 1977, those whose ideas had been trivialized by formerly hegemonic notions sought to do the same to their anti-annexationist opponents. The heroes and honored myths of one Zionist subculture represented the villains, falsehoods, jealousies, and bombast of the other.⁴⁵

Revisionism had always focused on power as a main instrument in international relations, and neo-revisionism has further developed this perception and the emphasis on national greatness. Neo-revisionism promoted the dream of grandeur and national power to enormous, abnormal proportions. Starting with the recognition of Jewish political weakness and total dependence on others, the neo-Revisionist over-compensated by developing a dream of Jewish superiority, political greatness and total domination over others.⁴⁶

The Likud’s current party leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, has continued the same line of rhetoric.

Serious psychological barriers worked against the peace process, not only for militant right-wingers, but for a large number of “ordinary” Jewish citizens. Ethnocentric nationalism, deeply rooted in Israeli society, played an important role in determining electoral behavior, and had more of an effect on the vote than the traditional divisions of “left” and “right.”

A “liberated” promised land became a symbol of national pride. A second pivotal idea was that of Jewish dominance in an ethnically diverse society.

The established patterns of collective self-perception portrayed an image of an heroic people struggling every day to defend their children, their state, and their way of life. This struggle was perceived as emanating from the higher, eternal struggle of Jewish people for their existence. This mythological self-perception helped to legitimize both the occupation and ethnic stratification in the eyes of many Israeli Jews.

It was not enough to believe in your “spiritual” right to the “promised land”; to justify building comfortable villas on the site where the Palestinian peasant, his father and grandfather used to graze their cattle. You had to believe that this peasant represented the hostile, outside world, and that his major objective was to ruin your life.⁴⁷

The mythology of Romantic nationalism offered by Jabotinsky thus led naturally under the Likud to its obvious consequence: the demonization of the “Other.” To create a heroic national mythology in which the Jewish people are the “Hero,” a “Villain” is needed. That villain, naturally, was provided by the Palestinians.

A major area of neo-Revisionist radicalization (of the original Revisionist stands) is in its perception of the attitude of the rest of the world (beyond the Arab or Moslem world) toward Zionism, Israel, or the Jewish people in general. While Jabotinsky had a fairly positive perception of the outside world, the neo-Revisionists see it not only as attitudinally hostile and politically indifferent to Israel’s fate, but often as actively involved in efforts to destroy it. For neo-revisionism anti-Israeli positions are almost invariably reflective of anti-Semitism, now applied to the Jewish state rather than to Jewish individuals or communities. The fundamental negation of the world is one of neo-revisionism’s distinguishing characteristics: the perception is of a world which employs double standards in dealing with Israel and is actively influenced by a long-held anti-Semitic tradition. Thus for Begin the mere question of Israel’s responsibility for the Sabra and Shatila massacres was considered “blood libel,” and European initiative for a Middle East settlement were immediately and routinely linked to the Holocaust in Europe, etc.⁴⁸

The Likud party has consistently invoked racist, xenophobic rhetoric to turn the Palestinians into a scapegoat for all of Israel’s problems. Ze’ev Boim, a former Likud (now Kadima) Knesset member, provided an excellent example of such racist rhetoric in 2004, when he asked, “What is it about Islam as a whole and the Palestinians in particular? Is it some form of cultural deprivation? Is it some genetic defect? There is something that defies explanation in this continued murderousness.”⁴⁹ This is a common, even a defining, trait of fascism: the glorification of the heroic nationalist mythology, and the consequent scapegoating of all failures on an “inferior” race. The myth is at once compelling and paradoxical: the superior, heroic race is kept from its destiny through the sneaky, cowardly, and underhanded actions of the inferior race. The paradox arises from the simple question, if the heroic race is so superior, how can the inferior race present such an obstacle to it? Ironically, of course, it was the Jews themselves who played this role in Hitler’s Germany. The Likud party has tried to construct a very similar narrative, where it is the Palestinians, rather than the Jews, who play the scapegoat.

This line of rhetoric and extension of mystic nationalism was largely devised by Ariel Sharon, but as it got away from him later in life, he found himself founding the Kadima party specifically because his own creation had gone too far.

A study of the voter profile of Kadima indicates that contrary to media descriptions of the party, it is not “centrist” in the traditional meaning of the term. Kadima’s voter base is made up largely of those who have found ideology or mystic nationalism an inadequate foundation upon which to make public policy. Instead, the party’s supporters are seeking a rationalist debate with the ideologists that could lead to a consensus on policy.⁵⁰

Inside Likud, the racist implication of nationalism is only now beginning to reach its final manifestation, as a few of the most ardent, radical members of the party have begun to openly suggest ethnic cleansing as the way forward.^{51, 52, 53, 54, 55} That this is a small, fringe idea at the moment offers little comfort; as Israeli Arab Knesset member Ahmad Taibi said, “It is not important what the result will be. The important thing is that they are going to dignify a fascist proposal like this by discussing it in a formal meeting.”⁵⁶

It’s a simple principle: In the past, nationalism included a belief that there was intrinsic value to a lot of living space, even to territorial expansion. Today, leaders of the radical right are prepared to forego land, on condition that we conduct ethnic cleansing in our smaller territory.⁵⁷

The term “fascism” has been abused and misapplied, to the end that it has ceased to carry much meaning at all. Because of the genocidal crimes of the Nazis, we’ve come to associate the term fascism solely with governments responsible for such atrocities, but similar atrocities were committed by non-fascist governments even at the same time, such as in Stalin’s Russia. Fascism refers to a political philosophy—a philosophy that is predisposed to such acts, but still a philosophy, not an act. The fascist philosophy is, among other things, a celebration of the heroic mythology of the nation, in precisely the manner Jabotinsky espoused. The natural implication of such mythology, however, is the demonization of the “Other,” such as Begin and Sharon indulged in. The final result of such demonization is the genocide we so often associate fascists with. Israel is not a fascist state, but we have already seen many fascist elements in the Likud party, and it is only now that this final step in the progression is being heard in that party, just as Begin himself was once a lone radical on Revisionist Zionism’s Right fringe. Such is the natural trajectory of any nationalist enterprise, until it reaches its final culmination in which the “nation” is shattered, shamed, and reversed from a great victim of history to a great villain of the same.

Anti-Intellectualism

Fascism is the ultimate, undiluted form of mystical nationalism, but it is defined by more than just that. Fascism is a veritable worship of power, and of the unity of “the nation,” that ultimately runs anti-intellectual in its adulation of pathos at the expense of reason.

Fascist ideology thus took on the character of an anti-intellectual reaction which pitted the powers of feeling and emotion, and irrational forces of every kind, against the rationality of democracy. It was the rediscovery of instinct, the cult of physical strength, violence, and brutality. This is, of course, what explains the attention paid to scenarios, the care lavished on decor, the great ceremonies, the parades—taken together, they made up a new liturgy where deliberation and discussion were supplanted by song, torches, and march-pasts. Viewed in this way, fascism appears as the direct descendant of the neo-romanticism of the 1880s and 1890s, only now the revolt had taken on dimensions commensurate with a mass society whose advent the fin-de-siecle generation had Scarcely even foreseen.

This mystical, romantic, anti-rationalist fascism was as much a moral and aesthetic system as a political philosophy: it constituted a complete vision of man and the community. Usurping the place occupied by revealed religion, its aims were to create a world of fixed criteria, a world freed from doubt and purged of all foreign accretions; to give back their authenticity to man and the community; and reestablish the compromised unity of the nation. Once all this had been achieved, all the members of the national community, being of one body with it and existing through it alone, would react as one man and respond identically to the problems confronting it; and once this unanimity had been forged, political and social problems would be reduced to matters of detail. Moreover, the proletariat would now be an integral part of a nation which had become a community governed by a unified system of values, a purified and disciplined unit sufficiently well armed to compete with hostile communities in the struggle for existence. The nation’s decline into decadence would be halted, action and heroism would become the respected virtues, and in consequence the vitality of the nation, which would now have a foundation.⁵⁸

The legalistic and scholastic basis of Judaism, as well as the marginalization of Jews in Europe into professional careers over the centuries, has had the effect of creating a Jewish culture that very strongly promotes intellectual achievement. Thus, the anti-intellectualism that is so essential to fascism is ill at ease in Jewish culture in general. Nonetheless, the disproportionate professional specialization of Jews has been attacked by Zionists as a “Diaspora mentality,” and the Likud party in particular has begun to develop a distinctly Jewish strain of anti-intellectualism.

While Begin had clearly won the election [in 1977], he needed a coalition. He turned to those who should have been the archenemies of his presumably purist Zionism—the ultra-Orthodox, non- (and anti-) Zionist Haredim. Thus began the rise of a second political force that derives its strength from anti-intellectualism. It began with decidedly un-Zionist concept that said anyone who wanted to study Torah instead of serving in the army, getting an education and going to work, would be subsidized by the state. From 400 Torah geniuses, hand-selected by the rabbis in 1949, after they reached their deal with David Ben-Gurion to allow Torah study exemptions from the army for their best students, within a year of Begin’s deal with the ultra-Orthodox, there were 4,000 Torah students. And the number has only increased yearly since. …

Where is this all leading? The best minds of the country (excerpt for those in the yeshivas and settlements) will leave. Why should they stay when two anti-Zionist forces have usurped Zionism? And what will happen as they leave? Mob rule, irrational thinking, will prevail.⁵⁹

“[A]nti-intellectualism, entrenched in the subculture of all the elite units of the Israeli army,”⁶⁰ appears also in the Likud leaders who tend to rise up out of military backgrounds—particularly given their celebration of Israel’s heroic military achievements.

Appeals to emotion, and the deliberate disregard of reason, have long been at the core of Likud policy, from Begin’s exploitation of ethnic tensions between Sephardim and Ashkenazim or the riot Begin incited in Jerusalem in 1952, to Sharon’s fear-mongering implications during the “Night of Microphones” with Yitzhak Shamir.

The Charismatic Leader

The weakest element in a comparison of the Likud party to fascism lies in its general lack of the charismatic leader, like Hitler or Mussolini, who embodies the principles of the fascist state. Jabotinsky was the original and most likely candidate, but his own rejection of the fascist ideal made that impossible. Even so, “portraits of him are ritually hung behind the speakers’ podium at the unruly Likud conventions for which he would have felt great distaste.”⁶¹ Jabotinsky was “Our Duce,” proclaimed in Abba Achmeir’s column, but Jabotinsky responded by threatening to have him cast off the paper. Even today, Likud party leaders continue to invoke Jabotinsky and use his image.

The old party leaders, Begin and Sharon, have been used in a similar fashion. When Sharon left Likud, the party pictures of him were destroyed, and typically replaced with images of Begin. However, neither Begin nor Sharon proved to be the charismatic figure necessary for such a movement.

“Enemy of the Jewish People”

In 1946, after his Irgun bombed the King David Hotel, Ben-Gurion denounced Begin as an “enemy of the Jewish people.” He never ceased to be such an enemy, nor his Herut party, nor the Likud party that followed. As part of the mystic-nationalist rhetoric of the party, Likud claims that any criticism of it, or Zionism, is anti-Semitism. In fact, it is the Likud party itself that is the greatest enemy of the Jewish people in the contemporary world.

For centuries, anti-Semites have cooked up hare-brained theories about an “International Jewish Conspiracy.” Such theories are, of course, utterly inane—or, until recently, they were. The Likud party, with its influential ties with Washington, throws fuel on this fire through irredentist ambitions, fascist rhetoric, and a subtle network of influence. The “International Jewish Conspiracy” is still poppycock, but the Likud party seems determined to emulate the myth.

Today, many Americans instinctively think of Germans as Nazis. It does not matter that very few Germans were members of the Party. It does not matter that most Germans lived in fear of the Reich. It does not matter that many Germans were members of the resistance, or helped Jews escape, or risked their lives to challenge the Nazi regime. These are all meaningless in the face of the Nazis’ crimes. We do not distinguish these things in the light of history; the Nazis were Germans, so all Germans are Nazis, forevermore. I have seen Germans weep openly for their guilt—guilt for crimes committed long before they were even born, by men their own fathers and grandfathers risked their lives to fight in the resistance—as the condemnations continued without cease or remorse.

Zionism is not synonymous with Judaism. As we saw above, many Jews from the beginning understood that Zionism, by virtue of being a nationalist enterprise, compromised the very ideals and ethics that make Judaism what it is. Jews who are opposed to specific Israeli policies, or even Zionism in general, are often called “self-hating.” Opposition to Zionism is turned into a form of anti-Semitism all its own, but no one can deny that many Jews are opposed to Zionism—leaving us with the anti-Semitic Jew.

This is a critical problem for Sharon and his backers. They need the illusion that they have the support of 100% of the world’s Jewish people so that they can deflect criticism by screaming “Jew hate” and “anti-Semite”. Sharon and his supporters cannot justify or explain their actions against Arabs or their continued defiance of the United Nations, or their buildup of weapons of mass destruction. Their only defense is to be able to brand critics as “hate groups”.

But those defenses all fall flat if Sharon’s critics are themselves Jewish. The “self hating Jew” label has never worked to silence critics of Sharon’s policies who are Jewish, and even Israeli. And the recent rampage of Sharon supporters engaging in hacking, threats, and obscene phone calls, is an admission that they know they have lost the argument on its merits. Only by blurring the line between criticism of Sharon’s policies and racial hatred of Jews can Sharon and his supporters continue to evade the world’s criticism for their war crimes. But as more and more Jewish people start to speak out against Sharon’s policies, that device will simply cease to work. And that is why Sharon’s supporters have reacted as strongly as they have to the suggestion that Jewish people are not in agreement with what is happening in Palestine.⁶²

Albert Einstein was in favor of cultural “Zionism,” but retained distinct doubts about the nationalist project. Jews Against Zionism opposes Zionism as a project to transform Judaism from a religion into a secular identity. Thus, they see Zionism as nothing less than an attempt to destroy Judaism. Neturei Karta is an organization of Orthodox Jews that has retained the original religious complaint against Zionism.

Zionism is wrong from the Torah viewpoint, not because many of its adherents are lax in practice or even anti-religious, but because its fundamental principle conflicts with the Torah.⁶³

With regards to his comic book V for Vendetta, writer Alan Moore noted:

As far I’m concerned, the two poles of politics were not Left Wing or Right Wing. In fact they’re just two ways of ordering an industrial society and we’re fast moving beyond the industrial societies of the 19th and 20th centuries. It seemed to me the two more absolute extremes were anarchy and fascism.⁶⁴

Judaism has always had an ill fit with fascism; its academic traditions of questioning, study, and debate, and the liberal ethics and ideals of the prophets and the Torah itself,⁶⁵ have seen to that. Instead, Judaism finds itself much more naturally aligned with the anarchist side of that spectrum.⁶⁶

But Zionism is not Judaism. Zionism is simply a type of nationalism, and as such, it will, by its very nature, always be supportive of fascism. It will always be inherently at odds with the universal ideals of Judaism. It need not necessarily go to the extreme of fascism, but that will always be its inclination: and Israel will always have fascists pulling it in that direction. In a very real sense, Judaism and Zionism are opposites—a Hebrew front in the 10,000 year tug-of-war between fascism, the purest form of civilization, and anarchy, the natural yearning of the human spirit. Thus, in a sense, what we see in Israel is the basic struggle of civilization vs. humanity, as well.

The Germans were once victims themselves; they turned to the Nazi Party like abused children, hoping to instead become the abuser. Today, the Likud party speaks to the darkest corners of the Jewish soul about racial superiority, Lebensraum, and the Romantic notion that every nation has its “time”—and this time belongs to the Jewish nation. Sixty years ago, Hitler told the Germans very similar things; that it was their “time.”

Already, the belligerent Israeli policies championed by Likud have fanned the flames of rising anti-Semitism throughout Europe. When Israel invaded Lebanon last month, the Jewish neighborhood I live in saw a massive police prescence to keep the peace. My Jewish wife lives in terror of what the reaction will be, when people realize the extent of the Likud party’s fascism: what will happen to her and her family, when the pendulum swings back, and she is held responsible for the crimes of others by virtue of her “race”?

Fascism always fashions itself the savior of its “people,” but in the end, it merely consumes those people. It subjects them to terror and intimidation, it makes them hated by the whole world, and in the end, damns them to generations of reproach and the lingering nightmare of such bigotry and hate. These things are antithetical to the ideals of Judaism, as so many Jews have already pointed out. The greatest threat to the Jewish people today does not come from Palestinians or Arabs: it comes from the small, fascist element inside Israel itself, that harbors ambitions to turn Israel into a fascist state, and drag the ethics of Judaism through the mud in an orgy of violence and the naked worhsip of power.

In the aforementioned comic book V for Vendetta, the protagonist broadcasts a televised message to Britons, in which he says:

And it’s no good blaming the drop in work standards upon bad management, either, though to be sure, the management is very bad. In fact, let us not mince words. The management is terrible! We’ve had a string of embezzlers, frauds, liars and lunatics making a string of catastrophic decisions. This is plain fact. But who elected them? It was you! You who appointed these people! You who gave them the power to make your decisions for you! … You have encouraged these malicious incompetents who have made your working life a shambles. You have accepted without question their senseless orders. You could have stopped them. All you had to say was “No.”

The power is ours. It always has been, and it always will be; we must never forget that.