Israeli Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir at the one-year celebrations of the settlement of Ramat Arbe, an illegal settlement in the Lower Galilee, West Bank. Photo courtesy Itamar Ben-Gvir/X.

Somehow, despite Israel’s 20-month carnage in Gaza, and the attempted “judicial coup” before it, the stubborn myth persists in the Western public imagination that these events can’t really be happening, and that Israel, the so-called “only democracy in the Middle East” cannot be turning to fascism. We are often asked a variant of this: how can Jews, as personified by Israel, having suffered so horribly over the years, possibly perpetrate atrocities like those in Gaza and so completely put the lie to Israel’s (undeserved) reputation as “a light among the nations.”

In 1995, the Italian author Umberto Eco published an essay based on his experience growing up under Benito Mussolini. According to Eco, unlike Nazism, Italian fascism was less of a cohesive or coherent ideology. It had its contradictions. But it was the granddaddy, or the “Ur” of all subsequent forms of authoritarianism. Eco put forward fourteen characteristics of Ur-Fascism.

As we ponder today’s political scene, it is well to remember at least some of these characteristics: a reliance on tradition, real or imagined; a rejection of modernism (everything since the Enlightenment is a descent into depravity); the cult of action and violence for its own sake; subsuming one’s self-identity in the group, or nation; treating disagreement or contrarianism as treason; fear and hatred of foreigners and immigrants; appeal to a frustrated middle class beset by cultural and economic change; the hyping-up of an enemy threats and plots; contempt for the “weak”; glorification of heroes and death, preferably death of your enemies; machismo; selective populism and the notion of a common will with the leader as the interpreter of that will; the use of empty slogans.

Philosopher Jason Stanley recently left a good job at Yale to escape to Canada with two colleagues. In his book, How Fascism Works, he concurs with many of Eco’s features, but argues that fascism is less a set of definitive political beliefs and more a group of techniques used to achieve power.

Who can be a fascist? Or a better question is: is any group of people inoculated against fascism, who can’t “catch” or succumb to it? Like Jews, perhaps? As the child of a survivor of Auschwitz, and as a founding member of Independent Jewish Voices, I am especially interested in this question.

And my answer has always been the same: Jews are no different than any other group of people. Suffering under fascism in no way immunizes any group against falling for it.

“Essentialism,” or the idea that a group of people have certain inbred behavioural characteristics, is at the heart of all racism. The idea that Jews are essentially anti-fascist is just as toxic and false as any negative stereotype. Jews are neither better nor worse than anyone else; some of us can be fascists, some of us can be anti-fascists, and some of us can “whistle dixie” (bury our heads in the sand) just like any other people—although whistling dixie is much harder nowadays as Israel perpetrates a genocide against the Palestinians.

Truth be known, in the heyday of fascism in the 1920s and 30s, quite a few Jews were fascists.

I’m not talking about Nazi Germany, where the fascist movement was antisemitic right from the start and would not accept Jews. If we go back to the primal Italian version, however, we can learn some important lessons.

In 1991, Italian-American journalist and author Alexander Stille published Benevolence and Betrayal: Five Italian Jewish Families Under Fascism. It is one of the first and only non-academic treatments of this period of Jewish history.

Becoming a unified country only in 1861, Italy quickly moved to a level of tolerance toward its Jewish minority way ahead of its European counterparts. Jews across the country had

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