It is that shared ground that today makes Israel an ally and friend to Trump and his political constituency in the US and to Europe's far-right parties.
In fact, Israel is revered by a new breed of white supremacists and anti-semites in the US known as the alt-right. Their leader, Richard Spencer, has termed himself a "white Zionist," saying he wants the US to become a "secure homeland" to prevent "the demographic dispossession of white people in the United States and around the world" in the same way Israel achieved for Jews.
Making racism respectableIsrael preserved the model of ethnic nationalism and is now seeking to help make it respectable again among sections of western public opinion.
Just as historically there were different varieties of ethnic nationalisms in Europe, so there are among the popular and political movements in Israel.
At the most disturbing extreme of the spectrum are the religious settlers who have actively taken up the task of once again uprooting the native Palestinian population, this time in the occupied territories. Such settlers now dominate the middle ranks of the Israeli army.
In a handbook for further dispossession known as the King's Torah, influential settler rabbis have justified the pre-emptive killing of Palestinians as terrorists, and their babies as "future terrorists." This worldview explains why settlers massed outside a court in Israel last month taunting a Palestinian, Hussein Dawabshe, whose 18-month-old grandson, Ali, was among family members burnt alive by settlers in 2015. As the grandfather arrived, the settlers jeered "Where is Ali, Ali's dead" and "Ali's on the grill."
Even more common, to the extent that it passes almost unnoticed in Israel, is the structural racism that keeps the fifth of the population belonging to a Palestinian minority apart from the Jewish majority. For decades, for example, Israeli hospitals have been separating women in maternity wards based on their ethnicity. Last month, in a familiar pattern, it was revealed that a municipal swimming pool in the Negev was quietly segregating Jewish and Palestinian bathers -- all citizens of the same state -- by offering different hours.
At least the pool accepted Palestinian citizens. Almost all communities in Israel are segregated, with many hundreds using admissions committees to ensure they bar Palestinian citizens and remain exclusively Jewish.
There have been weeks of angry protests among Jewish residents of the northern city of Afula, after the first Palestinian family managed to buy a home in a neighborhood. Deputy mayor Shlomo Malihi observed: "I hope that the house sale will be cancelled so that this city won't begin to be mixed."
The "danger" of intermarriageLast month Miki Zohar, a legislator in the ruling Likud party, observed not only that there is a "Jewish race," but that it represents "the highest human capital, the smartest, the most comprehending."
At the same time, the government's education minister, Naftali Bennett, noted that the future of the Jewish people in countries like the US kept him awake at night. "If we don't act urgently, we're going to be losing millions of Jews to assimilation," he told a conference in Jerusalem.
This is a common refrain on the Israeli left too. Isaac Herzog, the former leader of the supposedly socialist Labour party and the new chair of the Jewish Agency, shares Bennett's tribal impulse. Last month he warned that Jews outside Israel were falling victim to a "plague" of intermarriage with non-Jews. He bewailed that on a visit to the US last year: "I saw the children of my friends marrying or living with non-Jewish partners." He concluded: "We have to rack our brains over how to solve this great challenge."
An ethnic fortressBut the problem is not restricted to the prejudices of individuals and communities. It has state sanction, just as in Europe a century ago.
That can be seen not only in rampant institutional racism in Israel -- some 70 laws that explicitly discriminate based on ethnic belonging -- but in Israel's obsession with wall-building. There are walls sealing off Gaza, and the densely Palestinian-populated parts of occupied East Jerusalem and the West Bank.
In another indication of the ethnic fortress mentality, Israel has built a wall to block the entry of African asylum seekers through the Sinai peninsula as they flee wars. Israel has been deporting these refugees back to Africa -- in violation of international conventions it has ratified -- putting their lives in danger.
And while western liberals have grown exercised at the separation of children from their parents by the Trump administration, they have ignored decades of similarly brutal Israeli policies. In that time, thousands of Palestinian children have been seized from their homes, often in night-time raids, and jailed in trials with a near-100 percent conviction rate.
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