What does fascism look like from the standpoint of its racialized victims? My question here is inspired by Edward Said’s key 1979 essay, “Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Victims,” and Ella Shohat’s own important adaptation in 1988, “Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Jewish Victims.”[1] So I want to draw a parallel from the start between Zionism and fascism, and to consider the ways in which fascism functions not only as an ethno-nationalist ideology but also as a kind of libidinal disposition to see, narrate, and desire the world, your world, in a particular way. I’m interested in the psychic operation of fascism: how fascism traffics in phantasmatic images of rebirth, organic wholeness, unity, rooted in a stable ontological order; how it locates the inevitable instability that threatens these images not in ontology itself, in the inconsistency of the symbolic order, but in disturbing figures of otherness. In the fascist playbook, such figures are often racialized, dehumanized, and animalized agents of disorder, spiritual decadence, and corruption, so that a natural harmonious system is, in principle, always retrievable, once the source of the excess or discord has been located and neutralized or exterminated.

In drawing this parallel between fascism and Zionism, I want to ask, How does fascism become operative in political regimes not readily understood as fascist? How might we interrogate the liberal position in the US in relation to its complicity with and enabling of fascist politics? And how might we imagine anti-fascist resistance? Compared with the sympathy they expressed for the Black Lives Matter movement, for example, liberal elites have been far less understanding and generous in their reaction to the Palestinian solidarity movement sparked by Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza after the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023. The anti-Zionism of the pro-Palestine activists didn’t sit well with the liberal center. America’s liberal political class and media outlets have all embraced the same talking points as the Israeli state: denouncing the students’ protests and encampments as anti-Semitic, as endangering the lives of Jews all around the world.

There is an ease with which Israeli fascism resonates with America, and not only with the Islamophobic, warmongering, or populist Right but also, and more disturbingly, with its liberal center. A Zionist Israel, which claims to be Jewish and democratic, displays its fascism primarily in its mistreatment of its minoritized Palestinian citizens (over 20 percent of the Israeli population) and, far more flagrantly, in its Occupation of Palestinian territory. Fascist states craft their nation’s birth as a moment of jubilation, and work to repress any signs of dissent, anything that might induce a crisis of legitimacy. Israel’s illiberal 2011 Nakba Law attempts to do just that. The Nakba Law withholds state funds from cultural and educational institutions that mark the horrors visited on the Palestinian people in 1948. Anything that draws attention to its Zionist colonial beginnings must be thwarted. If you’re a Palestinian citizen of Israel, for example, you do not learn about your Indigenous culture and history in school. The state denies Palestinian students this right of cultural empowerment; it divorces Palestinians from their past. In Gaza, this approach is taken to a grotesque level through scholasticide.

Talks of ethnic cleansing, the prelude to annexation and territorial expansion, are no longer confined to the obscene underbelly of Israeli society, to the fringe of Zionist politics. A normalization of fascist desires releases Israel even more from the restraints of national and international laws. This fascist Zionism generates its appeal by substituting a politicized feeling of nationalism for a depoliticized feeling of guilt. A fascist Zionist libidinal economy taps into an immanent possibility for all of us, into the “latent monstrosity of being-human.”[2] Its eliminationist desires are not so much engineered or manufactured by Israel’s fascist regime as they are brutally unleashed. This “diabolical dimension”[3] of being human erupted in Gaza for the world to see. Fascist Zionists succeeded in channeling our most destructive energies toward the annihilation of Palestinians, disavowing their cruelty (a manifestation of the inhuman core of being human) and projecting it onto all Palestinians. When you turn Palestinians into creatures of evil, you ideologically prep the judgment of eradication, that a people deserve genocide; only a permanent erasure can prevent future harm to the Jewish people. A fascist Zionist libidinal economy routes the desires and fears of Jews, teaching Israel’s nationals what and who to desire, hate, and identify with.

Xenophobic attitudes are fully naturalized, as in the settlers’ reflexive chant, “Death to Arabs.” In their full-blown hatred, settlers do not see Palestinians, only Arabs, a homogenized, mystified, and Orientalized enemy that must be eliminated. And let’s not overlook the murderous jouissance that fascist Zionism produces and mobilizes in its zealots. There is material and affective enjoyment in the spoils of the Occupation, in thwarting the will of the United Nations. Without a fascist Israel, there is no possibility of a Greater Israel. The Zionist injunction, “Make Israel Greater Again,” requires the vilest of racisms coupled with an ethnic politics and a feeling of racial superiority. Fascism is up to the task.

As a political ideology, fascist Zionism imposes and enforces a fixed ontology; under its horizon, Zionism’s identitarian claims about Jews and Arabs have an ineluctable force, seemingly unimpeachable, because they are theologically sanctioned. Fascist Zionism amplifies both the psychic attachment to the contested land and the lustful hatred of “Arabs”: those bodies who must be subjugated, whose presence, or rather unsanctioned Indigeneity, represents a scandal. Unhappy with any check on their power, fascist politicians not only defy international law but also yearn for more authoritarian control over the law at home—whence Netanyahu’s “judicial coup.” Fascism rouses in Israeli nationals a fervor to attack dissenting voices, a passion and will to purge, an aggressive sense of patriotism. It interpellates you in its settler-colonial projects and compels you to expose and condemn those agents putting at risk the Jewish homeland.

Education is the site of struggle for all fascist regimes. Alberto Toscano rightly stresses “the extreme importance of the nexus of education and fascism today.”[4] In this “battleground,”[5] right-wing governments decry the ways students are subjected to leftist indoctrination. They purport to intervene in the name of students. In Israel, this is where you root out anti-Zionists, leftist brainwashers who corrupt the young by making them hate their nation. Disharmony lies exclusively in Israel’s detractors not in Israel’s settler-colonial system. University students pick up on this fascist vibe. Some (along with faculty) resist any encroachment on academic freedom; others agitate in the opposite direction. The national student union, for instance, is pushing a law, with the backing of the Israeli education minister, that would effectively criminalize dissent and fire faculty for “supporting terror.”

We clearly see parallels in America. From the start of his term, Donald Trump went to work implementing his fascist agenda, issuing executive orders, and setting his sights on all those deemed to be infecting or weakening America: “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” (DEI) programs, woke gender ideology, illegal immigrant invaders, and haters of America. Unsurprisingly, Trump also seized on the awful lie of equating anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism, calling pro-Palestinian supporters “Hamas sympathizers,” subjecting international students and non-citizens to further and needless scrutiny, visa cancellation, and potential deportation.[6]

Republican states have already been at work whitewashing American history, eradicating the teaching of Critical Race Theory (CRT), redefined to mean anything pertaining to race and racism, in both K-12 education and state-funded universities. We see two clearly demarcated “sides”: on one side we find the Democratic Party and liberal media outlets, who adopt a pro-CRT and BLM stance, and on the other we find the Republican Party and conservative-cum-fascist media, who loudly denounce “oppressive” woke ideology, promote patriotic education, and affirm that all lives matter, meaning white and blue lives matter more. And yet such division does not exist when it comes to anti-BDS legislation; leaders of both parties partake in demagoguery and consider the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement anti-Semitic. Both parties blame BDS for Israel’s degraded global reputation. The basically “bipartisan consensus” on anti-BDS legislation should give us pause. A post on X from the progressive Jewish organization IfNotNow makes visible the shared animosity of Democratic and Republican leadership toward Palestinians. IfNotNow delineates the true stakes: “The fanatical anti-CRT and anti-BDS movements are one and the same: a desperate attempt to hide historical and current reality, to police free speech when it threatens nationalism.” The ultra-nationalism of the Right finds a receptive ear in the liberal center. IfNotNow ties Black and Palestinian struggles together, arguing that CRT and BDS share a common enemy: the gatekeepers of a nationalism.

I’m interested here in the ideological ways nationalism relates to fascism in America and Israel. I’m not saying that anyone who objects to CRT and BDS is a card-carrying fascist (well, maybe “fascist curious”). My point is that Palestine casts the liberal commitment to racial justice in a critical light. The liberal support for CRT might be more performative than actual. Liberals are not really invested in fighting anti-Blackness, in working to undo its structural presence in American life. Rather than embracing an anti-fascist and anti-racist Left, what liberals typically prefer is the woke enjoyment that comes from hating the haters, the generic fascists who disturb the hegemonic liberal order. Liberals are especially prone to fetishist disavowal: I know very well that Blacks are mistreated and surveilled, but all the same I believe in America’s ethical core and that Trump is an anomaly. Liberals are happy to blame supremacists and fascists without imagining anything more or effectively reckoning with racial capitalism. Operating according to the current model of DEI, they endorse change without change. As Ilan Kapoor pointedly discerns, corporate capitalism appears unaffected by DEI, as wealth and income disparities in the US have only increased over the period of its rise. Kapoor adds: “DEI is. . . a way of putting a human face on corporate inequality. The often-tokenistic inclusion of minorities under the guise of ‘equity’ provides the illusion of creating greater equality. But it doesn’t and hasn’t.” Minority faces in high places has not succeeded in humanizing and pacifying a predatory and voracious capitalism simply because DEI cannot; its reformist ideology is ill-equipped to tackle the deep structural imbalances plaguing our socio-economic system.

In this respect, we must see and remember that the liberal elite constitutes the first counterinsurgency to both BLM and Palestinian solidarity movements. It has become clear that liberal democracy does not keep fascism at bay. As Toscano argues, liberalism’s entanglement with colonial fascism runs much deeper: “The ascendance of fascism might initially appear as a break or an exception, but it is deeply rooted in and enabled by a colonial liberalism that will never countenance true liberation.” The student protests and encampments for Palestine exposed this internal division within the Left and its implication in a fascist formation. Both CRT and BDS trouble a collective psychic investment in the existing ultra-nationalist order of things. This is of course why we see right-wing furor over it. But while racially sensitive liberals are happy to publicly decry anti-CRT legislation, they are often quite willing to endorse the same guardians of white nationalism in supporting anti-BDS bills. I believe that we need to read the generalized liberal hostility toward BDS not simply as delusion or ignorance about the subject matter but rather as confirmation of liberal complicity with reactionary regimes and collusion with an unjust world. Time and again, white liberals have favored superficial alterations over radical change, gestures that pacify rather than enhance insurgent possibilities. Liberals can openly and passionately talk about Black suffering, celebrate and honor Black history as much as they want, but don’t ask them to support the internationally sanctioned right of armed struggle against oppressors. Don’t ask liberals to give up on American exceptionalism or to put an end to police brutality and the mass incarceration of Black, Brown, and Indigenous bodies. For the liberal left, America, not unlike Israel, is not a racist state or project. Liberals are not ready to see America as the New Jim Crow nor as partners with a genocidal Israel. In the end, they are by no means hostile to the racialized “Law and Order” narrative. A racialized caste system can exist under a white liberal democracy. Their easily tapped white anxiety about the intrusion of “thugs,” of racialized and criminalized Black and Brown bodies, into the order of their lives makes them candidates for fascist capture.

“The liberal centre,” as Žižek notes, “is at the root of our crises.”[7] I agree. Palestinian genocide, the fissures of the healthcare system, the permanent unemployment of a segment of society, and police brutality (this list is far from exhaustive) all index the failures of the liberal Left to take a meaningful and principled stand. An insurgent politics is the last thing on the mind of Democratic leaders. As Žižek stresses, it was Trump that “stood for politics,” announcing fascist changes to the system, albeit an impossible return to white times. Trump weaponized the energies of the disappointed, abandoned, and resentful whites who felt that the liberal system has failed them. Trump points to a real suffering, but his fascist remedy will only compound the problem. In contrast, the liberal Left “stood for non-politics.”[8] They spoke in platitudes without an agenda for a better America for all. The Democratic agenda was at its core counter-revolutionary.

In America’s supremacist rebirth, Trump calls for a new set of ideals—Merit, Excellence, and Intelligence—to restore the nation’s greatness and save us from DEI, which he blames for the decline of the American way of life, for anything bad happening, including the collision between a passenger jet and an Army helicopter over D.C. in January. While I unflinchingly condemn Trump’s trafficking in racist tropes, the current framework of DEI is not without its political limitations either. If universities were truly serious about DEI initiatives and not concerned exclusively with window-dressing diversity, they could have embraced rather than suppressed the students protesting against the Gaza genocide and settler dominance, boldly identifying with the excluded, in order to unsettle society’s skewed distribution of care and dignity. A leftist critique of DEI clearly diverges from the racist rightist version. A DEI with teeth could have mounted a far better defense of the protest movement; it could have linked America’s imperial violence to the injustice taking place at home. The student protests staged for the world what speaking truth to power looks like. For a younger generation of student-activists there is no going back to a liberal Israel. The challenge now is who will stand with Palestinians and their supporters. Palestine helps delineate the fault lines; it shows us the failings of the current DEI model. From a Palestinian standpoint, to put it bluntly, academic institutions, liberal media, and the Democratic Party have been on the side of genocide. All have played a sinister part in manufacturing public consent for genocide, suppressing and minimizing Palestinian perspectives, hampering the Palestinian right to narrate their colonial situation, and operating according to the ingrained and naturalized colonial belief that Israeli lives count enormously more than Palestinian ones. Call it racial superiority.

As we’ve witnessed in the Gaza carnage, a colonial mentality and a fascist disposition work hand in hand. Fascism’s racial matrix of the human predates its genocidal eruption in Europe. Attending to what Alberto Toscano names “fascisms before fascism” deepens our understanding of fascism’s political maneuvers and libidinal appeals.[9] The “longue durée” of fascism, a more expansive understanding of the concept, returns us to slavery and colonialism, and their crushing afterlives.[10] Taking up the perspective of the enslaved/colonized boldly recasts fascism as a fact of coloniality. Reading fascism from below, from the perspective of the colonized and internally colonized, as some of us are beginning to do, allows for a different image of fascism to emerge. In The Colonizer and the Colonized, Albert Memmi writes, “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?. . . . There is no doubt in the minds of those who have lived through it that colonialism is one variety of fascism.”[11] Fascism as a regime of oppression, with a long history of violence, has a simplistic clarity about it. And yet, here, we should resist the quick impulse to abstract from Memmi’s observation its racial dimension, not because we lose the particularity of the fascism experienced by the colonized, but because we overlook an account of fascism in its pure brutality, fascism minus what remains of the liberal order, meant to protect “us.” Racial fascism discloses how far human depravity can go. In Gaza, in the world’s first livestreamed genocide, we witness the true nature of oppression; Gaza is not just another example of a war-torn region, of mass civilian death and suffering. Rather, Gaza, like Auschwitz, has become a “concept-name.”[12] It exemplifies the devastating effects of a fascist logic when it is fully unleashed on a racialized people whose humanity has been permanently suspended and ontologically barred, and whose ecological environment has been deliberately turned to ruins. Our response to Gaza tells us something about who we are, and what we’re willing to leave with. It scrambles “our” pragmatic and reasonable priorities. The fact of Gaza pierces the order of our default ideals. It denotes disaster, a terrifying place where you are—where you have been historically rendered—genocidable in advance. To be Gazan is to be on “death row”; it is to await your annihilation.

We may, then, critically ask, Is fascism only truly considered fascism—and repulsive to the West—when white or European bodies are oppressed? In Discourse on Colonialism, Aimé Césaire weighs in and offers an anti-colonial rebuke to the Western outrage over the Holocaust, incisively reframing and exposing the subject of the outrage as “the very distinguished, the very humanistic, the very Christian bourgeois.”[13] The will to brutalize is constitutive of the European subject. According to Césaire, each subject “has a Hitler inside him, that Hitler inhabits him, that Hitler is his demon.”[14] This “inner Hitler” however is only allowed to express itself, be itself, in foreign lands. Nazi Germany morally erred by turning Hitler’s vicious will at fellow Europeans, at fellow humans:

What [the European subject] cannot forgive Hitler for is not the crime in itself, the crime against man, it is not the humiliation of man as such, it is the crime against the white man, the humiliation of the white man, and the fact that he applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the coolies of India, and the blacks of Africa.[15]

In the white cultural and libidinal imaginary, it is not a true crime to oppress an inferior race. Arabs, unskilled native laborers, and Blacks were/are a priori oppressable identities. Europeans reaped the benefits of Hitlerism abroad (colonialism or the legitimized violence of a superior race), but Hitlerism at home—the Shoah as “boomerang effect”[16]—was a betrayal (treating Europeans as non-Europeans) and deemed intolerable. Césaire’s mode of address—Hey Europe, you have a fascist problem dating from colonial times—finds a receptive ear in Fanon who is appalled and enraged by the West’s staggering historical crimes and murderous deeds. He writes in The Wretched of the Earth: “When I look for man in European lifestyles and technology I see a constant denial of man, an avalanche of murders.”[17] Remembering hearing a political speech by Césaire, Fanon cites him from memory:

When I switch on my radio and hear that black men are being lynched in America, I say that they have lied to us: Hitler isn’t dead. When I switch on my radio and hear that Jews are being insulted, persecuted, and massacred, I say that they have lied to us: Hitler isn’t dead. And finally when I switch on my radio and hear that in Africa forced labor has been introduced and legalized, I say that truly they have lied to us: Hitler isn’t dead.[18]

Today, we might say, When I turn on the news and hear that undocumented children are being targeted in their schools by Trump immigration raids, I say they have lied to us: Hitler isn’t dead. When I see that a disproportionate number of Blacks are being incarcerated and murdered by the US police, I say that they have lied to us: Hitler isn’t dead. And finally when I see that Gazans are being starved and bombed in hospitals, I say that they have lied to us: Hitler isn’t dead.

Liberal opinion notwithstanding, we still dwell in, and are affected by, the afterlife of Hitler. Hitlerism reimagined survives. Hitler stands for a colonial racial matrix that legitimizes and authorizes the will to subordinate and exterminate, and that generates beings who count and nonbeings who are exterminable. Commenting on Israel’s reception among Western nations, Franco Berardi points to the ontological upgrade of Jews, the no longer exterminable. In the past Jews were treated as enemies, part of the wretched, but now “they are no longer the enemy of our superior race, but a part of it. Therefore, they have been granted the privilege that we already have: the privilege of the colonizers, of the exploiters, of the exterminators.” The West authorizes Israeli Jews’ inner Hitler to brutalize the Palestinians. Europe’s colonial adventures continue vicariously via Israel’s genocidal campaign on the Palestinian people. Fascism and settler colonialism work in tandem: the face of this inner Hitler is the inner settler not only in Occupied Palestine but also in Israel proper. In this respect, Black Lives Matter chants and Palestinian Lives Matter chants are fundamentally anti-fascist, intended to jam the West’s racial privilege to incarcerate, police, deworld, demonize, colonize, exploit, starve, maim, and exterminate (unsettlingly, the list could go on). Blacks and Palestinians express a collective No! to a fascist agenda, a generalized and generalizable necropolitics; No! to murderous utopias, nostalgic visions of harmonious communities minus their hated Palestinian and Black others (and their comrades in resistance); and a collective Yes! to equality and freedom for all; a Yes! to a principled rage that opens to other wretched, never enamored with or exhausted by the intensity of their own suffering.

Following Césaire and Fanon, colonialism and anti-Blackness need a hearing in the West. But this is no endorsement of a zero-sum game, an Oppression Olympics that ultimately only satisfies the liberal center—change without change. Fascism read from below, from the standpoint of its racialized victims, can help us forge an anti-colonial and anti-fascist response that effectively breaks with the liberal center, resisting the lure of identity politics and an easy DEI in favor of an emancipatory universal politics. Understanding the Shoah as form of colonialism doesn’t minimize the unbearable force of Auschwitz. On the contrary, foregrounding a colonial racial matrix allows us to return to Europe’s earlier crimes, to read otherwise the colonial horrors of the past so as to better confront our present and future horrors. Against a futurology that forecasts more and more catastrophes, an anti-colonial Left insists on the belief that the generation of new anti-fascist desires remains both possible and indispensable. A hegemonic liberal order is not enough. Hitlers are multiplying. Fascists are emboldened. The world is burning. We need to ask for more. De-Nazification must undergo anti-colonial critique, and so must our resistance to fascism.[19]

Notes:

[1] Edward Said, “Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Victims,” Social Text no. 1 (1979): 7–58; Ella Shohat, “Sephardim in Israel: Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Jewish Victims,” Social Text no. 19/20 (1988): 1–35.

[2] Slavoj Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes (New York: Verso, 2008), 166.

[3] Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes, 166.

[4] Tyson E. Lewis, Silas C. Krabbe, and Alberto Toscano, “Late Fascism and Education: An Interview with Alberto Toscano,” Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies 46, no. 3 (2024): 534.

[5] Lewis, Krabbe, and Toscano, “Late Fascism,” 535.

[6] The war on pro-Palestinian campus activists does not end with international students. Green card holders are not spared either. The war on pro-Palestinian campus activists does not end with international students. Green card holders are not spared either, as the government’s abusive overreach in Mahmoud Khalil’s case clearly demonstrates.

[7] Žižek, Against Progress (New York: Bloomsbury, 2025), 53.

[8] Žižek, “After Trump’s Victory: From MAGA to MEGA,” e-flux Notes, November 13, 2024. https://www.e-flux.com/notes/641013/after-trump-s-victory-from-maga-to-mega.

[9] Alberto Toscano, Late Fascism: Race, Capitalism and the Politics of Crisis (New York: Verso, 2023), 148.

[10] Toscano, Late Fascism, 13.

[11] Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized (London: Earthscan, 2003), 106–7.

[12] Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes, 166.

[13] Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, trans. Joan Pinkham (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000), 36.

[14] Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 36.

[15] Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 36.

[16] Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 36.

[17] Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2004), 236.

[18] Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2008), 70.

[19] This is an expanded version of a talk given at New York University on March 12, 2025, “Slavoj Žižek in Dialogue with Zahi Zalloua: ‘What Kinds of Fascism Are There Today?’” I want to thank Avital Ronell, Zakir Paul, Xudong Zhang, and Liza Thompson for making this event happen, and Slavoj for his generous willingness to engage these timely questions.