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Tobias Gisle

Tim Snyder Understands Fascism, But not Israel

When I heard Timothy Snyder was going to speak about the Israel-Hamas war, I was excited. This polyglot professor of the Holocaust, Nazism, Communism, and the Ukraine-Russia war has offered stunning insights into the nature of fascism, populism, and modern authoritarian systems, particularly Russia. 

To say I was disappointed is an understatement. This highly sophisticated professor gave us, in place of analysis, a ten-minute lament on the state of things where even the Jews—even the Jews, I tell you!—the victims of the Holocaust, could now cause such suffering. It is not really an analysis at all; it is a metaphor, deep in Western culture, reminiscent of the words of Tacitus: “We created a desert and called it peace.” The Tacitus quote is fitting due to its habitual unthinking focus on the “we.” Just as with Israel and her many enemies, the thought is never really about the victims of such wars; they are merely props destined to suffer. What Snyder and Tacitus are really doing here is saying that “we” are corrupt, decadent, cruel, and violent. As in the Greek tragedies of ancient times, the terrorized become the tyrant—such is human nature! Alas! What deep insights into human nature from the ivory tower of knowlage. 

 This line of thinking is not only Greco-Roman but also deeply Christian, focusing on the idea that the first must become last, the oppressed as the truly righteous, and the suffering, pain, and sacrifice that reveals something sacred and Christ-like about the one who suffers. Guilt is also central to Christianity. That is, if we repent our old ways, we may receive salvation. In many anti-Israel texts, Israeli cruelty is central. These texts actually underline much mainstream reporting, suggesting that Israel enjoys seeing Gazans suffer, that the deaths of civilians are deliberate and calculated, and that dehumanization is a key theme in Israel. There is also the unavoidable question of antisemitism, where Israel is the Jew of nations, the Christ-killers, the makers of matza with the blood of children, the baby-killers of Gaza. Of course, I am not calling the great Tim Snyder an antisemite; it is just an unavoidable ingredient in the bucket of pro-Palestinian views that saturate the airwaves. 

Endlessly speculating about the Israeli psyche may be a fun pastime in a university dorm. However, it shouldn’t be elevated as a serious explanation for the causes of the war. These kinds of lamentations reveal an awful lot about Western culture and a deep strand of antisemitism. They do not, however, provide the kind of serious consideration the war deserves, even on a theoretical and ideological level. 

Now, this is not entirely Snyder’s fault. Don’t get me wrong—he should know better. But if you go into any Middle Eastern department at any given university, you will find the pro-Palestinians ruling the roost, with names like Lila Abu-Lughod, Joseph Massad, and Rashid Khalidi laying the basis for how most people in these departments think about Palestine and Israel. In turn, these academics with Middle Eastern roots have as a basis for their understanding that Israel is a colonial or a settler-colonial implant in the Middle East and that it is fundamentally foreign and illegitimate.  

What is under-researched and under-discussed is the implication of all this for the Palestinians and other Arabs of the region. If Israel is the colonial aggressor (it’s not, but that is a discussion for another time), constantly vying for dominance over its Arab subjects, the Palestinians must fit the role of the passive, innocent victim, predestined to be on the receiving end of the Israeli colonial war machine. The only way forward is the steadfastness of the resistance to the colonial yoke. The eternally innocent nation, constantly being harassed and harangued by outside forces, never having any real agency, and never bearing any responsibility for what the nation actually does. Now, who on earth may have discussed these matters at length? Who, on earth, may have identified the eternal innocence of the nation as one of the central ingredients of fascism? This after an exceptionally productive career and many fascinating books discussing fascism and Nazism? Ah yes! A certain professor Timothy Snyder. 

Snyder’s concept of eternal innocence was useful to me while describing populism in Israel for my Bachelor’s thesis. It was a fairly good fit for those furthest on the right in Israel, who will never admit any wrongdoing of the state and see it as eternally good. However, it took me a long time to realize that the only reason it worked was that I specifically focused on, you guessed it, those furthest to the right. If I brought in the whole spectrum of Israeli society, the people who would see Israel as doing no wrong would actually be quite a small minority. Quite the opposite—people in Israel love to complain about Israel! The only thing that a vast majority of people agree on is that there should be a state called Israel at all. 

On the other hand, if we only turn the spotlight around to the Arab and Muslim world, the thought of the Palestinians as helpless victims of foreign aggression is almost a given. This is the one thing that most people in the region can agree on. This came into sharp relief on the 7th of October, where the obfuscation, lies, and conspiracy theories in the Arab world only competed with the idea that the Jews had it coming. For the vast majority of Palestinians, Hamas never attacked civilians on October 7th, women were never raped, babies were never burned, and most people were killed by Israeli-friendly fire anyway. Whatever it was that actually did happen was just Palestinians lashing out against ill-treatment. In other words, the pogrom didn’t happen, but it should have happened at the same time. This is the same idea as the way many Palestinians think about the Holocaust. In The Road to Unfreedom, Snyder dismantles this kind of propaganda when it comes from the Putin regime in its war against Ukraine and the wider West. The idea is to send out mutually contradictory messages, sometimes hundreds of them. The intended result is not that there is an agreed-upon truth that is different from what your eyes are telling you, but that no one can really know the truth, that truth doesnt matter, and who the hell knows anyway. These are powerful insights, yet for the Middle East, no one outside Israel, or in pro-Israel groups, seems to talk about it. 

In another section of the book, Snyder discusses the importance of losing wars. It is not his idea, but it is an important one. Post war democratic Germany and Japan transformed their societies because of the catastrophe that the ideas of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan had brought to their societies. Snyder argues, less perfectly, that the European Union was born out of a need for a place where Empires were laid to rest after defeat in colonial war. Einat Wilf brings exactly this point to the Palestinians. What needs to be defeated for the Palestinians is this toxic nostalgia about being permanent refugees who simply want to return to the farm of their grandfather. This, in turn, means that Israel is illegitimate and that the state must be undone before six million Arab Muslims “return” to the land. Wilf argues that defeating the Palestinians in war might be the only way to drive home the point that there is no return and that they must accept Israel’s presence. Of course, we hope not, wars are awful. Either way, with or without war, somehow, they must find peace with this idea, just like everyone accepts that there is a country called Pakistan, and we can’t go back to having a united India. Yet Snyder just calls for an end to the war—no preconditions, no end to Hamas rule, just ending the war to end the suffering. Now, this is exactly the same argument the isolationist right in the U.S. makes about Ukraine: just end the suffering. There, in Ukraine, Snyder recognizes this as Russian talking points—using peace to regroup for more war. This is obviously what Hamas would like, that is what they call victory, no matter the devastation wrought on Gaza, the aim will be to continue the war at a later stage. 

Furthermore, because of the eternal innocence of the nation, the nation is simply defending itself even while massacring civilians. Snyder gives an appalling example of this in Bloodlands, where the perpetrators of the Holocaust saw themselves as defending their country against the ravages of the bloodlust of the cabal of international Jewry. He quotes a letter of a Nazi soldier to his wife when he was shooting babies and toddlers in the death pits. He wrote that although it was sometimes difficult, this was merely defending his country because, if the Jews came to Germany, they would be the ones killing the children. Yet for most academics speaking about Israel and Palestine, the idea of a nation in perpetual victimhood, simply fighting the good fight, is taken for granted. 

So, let us get this straight: for Europe, innocence is a central ingredient of fascism, but for the Middle East, it is simple justice. Now, that’s what I call orientalism.

About the Author
Toby Gisle is 47 years old, has a Masters in Middle Eastern Studies and is a trained circus performer who now works as an English teacher in Tel Aviv. He is from Sweden but raised in London. His writings have been published in Sweden and the UK in publications such as Unherd, Omvärlden, Ordfront and Fokus.