Haaretz: Netanyahu’s Speedy Absolution for Austria’s neo-Nazis

Establishing ties with Germany remained a sensitive issue for decades. The deal with Adenauer included not only financial reparations (and secret arms deals) but also a speech to the Bundestag in which the chancellor acknowledged Germany’s sins against the Jews. Ben-Gurion also made sure that the Israeli government was not alone in making peace with Germany; his moves were coordinated with World Jewish Congress President Nahum Goldmann, who was a partner to the negotiations with Bonn. The ground rules for atonement were established. For a state or a political entity to absolve itself of its anti-Jewish past, it would have to publicly repudiate its sins and prove itself to be pro-Israel. Jerusalem’s stamp of approval would not be sufficient; it would need the blessing of the Diaspora as well. 

These standards would remain. When, in 1986, 53 percent of Austrian voters chose as their president the former Wehrmacht officer Kurt Waldheim, who had been tainted by his Nazi-era associations with the SS and war crimes committed in the Balkans, Israel downgraded its diplomatic relations with Vienna. The same happened in 2000, when the Freedom Party became part of the ruling coalition.[...]

TIn his meeting with the Visegrad Group (Hungary, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia) in July, Netanyahu felt comfortable enough among friends to describe the EU’s policy towards Israel as “a joke” and “actually crazy.” He was relying on the leaders of these four countries to help Europe “decide if it wants to live and thrive or if it wants to shrivel and disappear” and the way to do that was “a different policy toward Israel.” To get these nations to stand by Israel in the European forums, Netanyahu has been prepared to overlook the inclusion of racist politicians and Holocaust revisionism of the Polish government and the anti-Semitic tone of the Hungarian government’s campaign against Jewish financier George Soros. Israel’s silence under Netanyahu has been in contradiction to that of major local and international Jewish organizations – just as he has ignored the distress of American Jewish over U.S. President Donald Trump’s embrace of anti-Semitic white supremacists. Now he is looking to the new Kurz-Strache government in Vienna to add Austria to his pro-Israel coalition in the EU.

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Quartz: Italy’s neo-fascism is what happens when you normalize extremism

Then things changed. Today, political parties with fascist sympathies are growing fixtures (paywall) in Italian politics, and a number of publicly fascist actions have troubled Italian society: During a soccer match last month (Oct. 22), a group of football fans gave out stickers of Anne Frank dressed in their arch-rival’s jersey. Earlier in the year, an Italians-only beach decorated with fascist symbols and paraphernalia had opened near Venice. Near Rome, a town mayor erected a statue to a fascist general.

Fascism’s rebirth and insidious spread in Italy is the result of a political process that has progressively whitewashed extremism, assisted by the confluence of recent historical factors: By the early 1990s, new generations had grown disconnected from the country’s history of resistance against fascism, as partisans and victims of racial laws aged and died. The fall of the USSR and the dissolution of the Italian communist party also meant a drop in funding to some of the country’s main anti-fascist educational organizations.

More importantly, something happened in the right at the same time. Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a professor of Italian history at New York University, calls it the rise of “fuppies,” or fascist yuppies. “Fuppies” were typically members of, or politically aligned with, Alleanza Nazionale (AN), a rightwing party that publicly rejected antisemitism and other fascist principles, such as violence.

“Fuppies” used articulate, tolerant language and showed respect for democratic institutions. Founded in 1994, AN was led by Gianfranco Fini, who entered politics with the belief that deposed fascist dictator Benito Mussolini was “the greatest statesman of the 1900s,” the Fuppies positioned themselves as modern, successful conservatives. The party’s newspaper, Il Secolo d’Italia, describes AN as aiming to (Italian) move “from the ghetto to the governing right, become ‘presentable,’ scrap nostalgias, acquire moderates who are no longer scared of neofascism.”

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