If you want to hear a really good breakdown of the history of Judaism and the evolution of Zionism and the creation of Jewish Zionism, Rabbi Yaakov Shapiro is much more in depth than me https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/committing-high-reason/id1549088377?i=1000616323210 And the specific fascist connection https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/committing-high-reason/id1549088377?i=1000585480685

And that’s, of course, a peak at the book he wrote about Zionism as Jewish identity theft, but here is the two-cent version:

Judaism is a religion and Zionism is a political ideology. Jews represent the entire spectrum of the human experience, including the spectrum of political opinions. Zionists believe (or at least claim) the the State of Israel is the state and government of all Jews all over the world, that jews are entitled to the land by right of birth, and ultimately that all Jews should live there and nowhere else.

Longer version.

Jewish religion identifies certain people as Jews. According to the Jewish religion, the one god, who has a specific name so we call him HaShem (the name), gave the people who left Egypt during the exodus the Torah. These people were dubbed the Jews who were therefore “chosen” to fulfill the laws of the Torah. The laws of the Torah require these chosen people to obey 613 commandments while all others only have to obey 7. When all people on earth live by these commandments, HaShem will literally physically return to restore his terrestrial kingdom in Jerusalem with the resurrected King David sitting at his side.

The Jewish religion identifies the Jewish people as those who received HaShem’s laws at Mt. Sanai, their matrilineal descendants, and anyone who duly converts to the religion and their matrilineal descendants. The Jewish religion has been practiced by people all over the world for thousands of years. There are major Jewish ethnicities from certain places but prior to the adoption of Zionism by certain Jews in the late nineteenth century, Jews did not consider themselves separate political entities from the societies they inhabited nor did they consider themselves part of any united political entity with Jews from other countries.

Zionism is a political ideology that posits that there should be a state in the Levant that is specifically the “Jewish State.” The Zionist ideology necessarily posits that the Jewish people are a race or nation in the sense of modern political nationalism. That this nation needs a political entity and a piece of territory from which it can operate on behalf of all Jewish people, as defined by the state. It’s hard at this point not to draw the direct line between the European nationalist movements that otherwise collapsed in the 1940s (a German State for the German People, a French State for the French people, an English state for the English people, and a Jewish state for the Jewish people).

For hundreds of years, the ideology was more or less exclusively seen within Western European Protestant communities. The pilgrims at Plymouth, who thought of themselves as new hebrews, were Zionists. The Protestant idea of Zionism rests upon the reading of the New Testament as a prophecy that once the Jews reconquer Israel, the second coming of Jesus will occur. At which point the Jews will either convert to Christianity or die.

In the 19th century, particularly in Britain, Germany, and the US, this Protestant vision of the bringing of the end times was combined with European nationalism in part to explain the existence of all the Jews whose presence in all these countries undermined nationalist dogma and, in any case, served as a perfect “other” to hone the “nation” in each country.

At this time a group of assimilated, secular, western Jews adopted Zionism in its nationalist sense and, because of their secular background/sometimes on purpose, with a misunderstanding of Jewish religious traditions about the holy land and the present relationship between the land and the Jews. This Jewish movement gained a lot of momentum, in part because of the overwhelming support of western governments which were Zionist prior to Jewish Zionism. Because of the shared ideology with nationalism, the Jewish Zionists found common cause with fascist movements, particularly in Mussolini’s Italy, but also in Germany itself, including major Nazi organizations such as the SS — Adolph Eichmann spoke at his trial about all of the assistance he gave Zionist Jews to get to Palestine before the British government stopped letting him do so. The British were trying to militarily manage the pressure cooker they created by establishing the Jewish mandate in 1918 and officially kicking off a period of violent settler colonialism all during the escalation of a war with Germany at that time.

Many of the militant bridges during the Mandatory Palestine era were directly tied to fascist military organizations in Axis countries. Importantly, and this is what one of those pods above goes into, the founders of the organizations that would evolve into the current governing party, Likud, were directly trained and equipped by fascist state organizations with whom they shared a driving political philosophy. In all, the fact that the language used by the current government of the state of Israel sounds like it came out of a national socialist pamphlet is not some weird “time is a flat circle” thing. The modern movement within the state was founded by literal, historical, national socialists.

-typed with my thumbs, pls forgive typos