Special Place in Hell / Rebranding Israel as a state headed for fascism

[azurnoir]

No one knows fascism better than Israelis. They are schooled, drilled in the history, the mechanics, the horrendous potential of fascist regimes. Israelis know fascism when they see it. In others.

They might well have expected when fascism began taking root here, it would arise at a time of a national leadership of galvanizing charisma and sweeping, powerfully orchestrated modes of action.

But that would have been much too obvious to deny. And it would take denial, inertia, selective memory, a sense that things – bad as they are - can go on like this indefinitely, for fascism to be able gain its foothold in a country founded in its very blood trail.

Wrote Boaz Okun, the mass-circulation Yedioth Ahronot's legal affairs commentator and a retired Israeli judge, of Israel's ban on Noam Chomsky: "The decision to shut up Professor Chomsky is a decision to shut down freedom in the state of Israel.

"I'm not speaking of the stupidity of supplying ammunition to those who claim that Israel is fascist," Okun wrote, "rather, of our fear that we may actually be turning that way."

http://www.haaretz.com/blogs/special-place-in-hell/special-place-in-hell-rebranding-israel-as-a-state-headed-for-fascism-1.290977