Last month, Israel inaugurated what is, in effect, the first fascist government in its history.

The State of Israel was the product of the Jewish nationalist movement that originated in the mass antisemitic violence of Tsarist Russia of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Much of the world, including European Jewish communities, stood by helplessly as organized Cossack militias and other pogromists rampaged through Ukrainian Jewish shtetls raping, pillaging, and murdering tens of thousands of helpless Jews.

An idealistic Hungarian journalist developed a plan to save endangered Eastern European Jewry. Theodore Herzl envisioned the Jewish homeland would become a thriving nation for these millions, who were otherwise destined for penury, privation and death. Rather than wait for the tsar and his henchmen to seal these Jews’ fate, Herzl foresaw a mass Jewish exodus from these lands of affliction to a vibrant new state awaiting them.