Revisionist Zionism's Italian Model
In the wake of 2023’s Operation Al-Aqsa Flood and Israel’s subsequent genocidal actions against the people of Gaza, many anti-Zionist activists – largely drawing on the work of Trotskyist historian Lenni Brenner – doubled down on the talking point that the ideology of the Jewish state is essentially identical to that of Fascist Italy or National Socialist Germany. While these well-meaning commentators exaggerate the relationship and mischaracterize the nature of the totalitarian governments of the twenties, thirties, and forties in doing so, the affinity of the Revisionist Zionists in particular for Mussolini’s Italy was real. In the early twentieth century, Jewry was widely synonymous with crime, revolution, and regicide, and Zionist leaders were at pains to distinguish themselves from the bad Jews – the Bolsheviks. At Versailles, consequently, “Zionism offered itself to the assembled capitalist powers as an anti-revolutionary movement,” Brenner writes in Zionism in the Age o...