Summary
In Alberto Toscano’s Chapter 25 of From the River to the Sea, the fascist potentials specific to settler-colonialism: a fascist logic at the heart of the Zionist project of dispossession, which liberal Zionism disavows by treating fascism as an exception (From the River to the Sea: Essays for a Free Palestine, lines 1934-2012).
Details
- Abraham Serfaty, in his prison writings, analyzed a “fascist logic” at the heart of the Zionist settler-colonial project of dispossession, domination and displacement; Smadar Lavie links it to a regime of racial domination combining apartheid practices against Palestinians with the oppression of Mizrahi and other non-Ashkenazi Jews (lines 1968-1972).
- In settler-colonial and racial fascist regimes, Ernst Fraenkel’s “dual state” appears: a “normative state” for the dominant population and a “prerogative state” for the dominated, exercising “unlimited arbitrariness and violence unchecked by any legal guarantees” (lines 1966-1968).
- Avishai Ehrlich’s 1978 Khamsin argument: Israel must maintain the formal facade of a democracy because permanent war characterizes its existence, so the specificity of its racial project required not crossing the threshold of formal fascism (lines 1992-1996).
- Toscano’s variation: “Whoever is not willing to talk about settler-colonialism should be quiet about fascism.” (line 1998) European fascisms were not just a boomerang of colonial violence but were themselves marked by settler histories, from the German genocide of the Herero and Nama peoples in 1904-8 to Italian colonization in Libya, Somalia and Ethiopia (lines 2000-2002).
- Albert Memmi, quoted at lines 2004-2006: “every colonial nation carries the seeds of fascist temptation in its bosom. What is fascism, if not a regime of oppression for the benefit of a few?”
Related pages
From the River to the Sea: Essays for a Free Palestine, Alberto Toscano, Settler Colonialism, Apartheid, Imperial boomerang, Zionism