Over 1,000 Air Reservists Threaten to Stop Serving, as Israel’s Political Crisis Grows
In a move that experts say could significantly hurt Israel’s military readiness, pilots and other personnel issued a warning after Benjamin Netanyahu pressed ahead with a plan to limit judicial power.
More than a thousand pilots and other personnel in the Israeli Air Force reserve said on Friday that they would stop reporting for duty if the government pushes through a contentious plan next week to reduce judicial power without broader consensus.
In a joint letter released Friday, 1,142 Air Force reservists — including 235 fighter pilots, 98 transport plane pilots, 89 helicopter pilots and 173 drone operators — said they would not serve if the government proceeded with its plan to reduce the ways in which the Supreme Court can overrule the government.
I like everything you wrote, thank you, but perhaps disagree with your last part about not remaining in power. It seems to me that the current crop of neo-fascist (or fascist-adjacent as you call them) leaders have remained in power for a very long time, even with more or less fair elections. Erdogan in Turkey, Netenyahu in Israel, and Orban in Hungary come to mine. I guess with each of those, they don't even have to deliver any meaningful policy just so long as they keep hurting the people their voters want hurt, they'll keep being re-elected.
I think maybe some of that is on me; I've been using "in power" somewhat colloquially and to me there's a gap between 'gaining power' in a soft sense referring to achieving a station that possesses power - and complete seizure of power. The latter is always the goal of the former, but the former is generally a necessary intermediary step.
Those three for sure have held power quite a while - just that they've held power long enough I don't really consider them representative of modern neo-fascism so much as inspirations for it. In the sense I was thinking of when I wrote the above, I was thinking more of the factions and leaders that exist within states that are not clearly semi- or pseudo-fascist in their structure. The ways that Erdogan, Netenyahu, and Orban maintain their power are not yet in place in those other states, but implementing some forms of them are goals within those movements.
The neo-fascists' I was talking about have to win elections and hold legitimate power within the current structure of the state before they can alter that structure enough to fix elections or bypass them. And in getting that initial foot in door, creating the opportunity to hijack the state, benefits strongly from using populist rhetoric - as genuinely pro-fascist voters are relatively rare, those factions and leaders need to use other causes to win over voters who wouldn't support their "real" goals directly.
Ah okay, fair enough, I understand.
I'm very keen to see what happens with the newly elected leader of Italy, as she and her party are openly very far right with real fascist ties/history. Will be interesting to see if she and her government remain in power for long.
Also curious to see what will happen with the AfD in Germany. Each election they get closer and closer to holding real power.