US President Donald Trump meets El Salvador's President Nayib Bukele in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington DC, April 14, 2025. Photo: Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images.
By Renee Levant – Apr 21, 2025
Fascism does not always arrive waving its true flag. Sometimes it wears the robes of reform. Sometimes it speaks in the language of the people. Sometimes it rises through movements of justice only to extinguish them from within. This is not new. Benito Mussolini began his political life as a fiery socialist, editor of Avanti!, and a champion of working-class internationalism. But by the time he took power in Italy, he had traded solidarity for nationalism, labor unions for corporate syndicates, and the people for the state. Nayib Bukele follows this exact trajectory, updated for the 21st century.
A product of the FMLN—the leftist party that emerged from El Salvador’s brutal U.S.-backed counterinsurgency war—he used the revolutionary legacy to vault into power, only to turn on it completely. Once hailed as the generational face of the left, Bukele now presides over one of the most militarized and surveilled carceral states in the hemisphere. Like Mussolini, he claims to transcend left and right. But like Mussolini, he governs by crushing dissent, neutralizing independent institutions, and criminalizing the poor.
And like Mussolini, he did not act alone. Just as the Italian industrial class and Western powers supported Mussolini as a bulwark against communism, Bukele is part of a transnational project backed by U.S. tech capital, crypto-authoritarians, and Zionist-aligned regimes seeking global models of repression. This isn’t just a Salvadoran story—it’s a blueprint. But unlike figures such as Trump or Orban, whose trajectories were always rooted in reactionary nationalism.
Bukele emerged from the heart of postcolonial and socialist struggle. His betrayal is not simply political—it is symbolic. It is the appropriation of revolutionary memory for the consolidation of authoritarian rule. And in this, his Palestinian ancestry becomes not incidental, but essential to understanding the profound ideological inversion at work. He embodies the absorption of anti-colonial identity into the very mechanisms of repression it once defied.
The betrayal of origin: Bukele, Palestine, and the mirror of fascism
In a moment when the Palestinian people face annihilation before the eyes of the world, it is not incidental that one of the most authoritarian regimes in the Americas is led by a man of Palestinian descent. The figure of Nayib Bukele—now hailed by far-right media as a model of “modern governance”—embodies a profound betrayal, not only of his country’s revolutionary past, but of his own ancestral legacy as the descendant of a dispossessed people.
To understand the political weight of that betrayal, we must remember: Palestine is not a metaphor. It is a place, a people, and a wound that reverberates across the global South. The struggle for Palestinian liberation has long stood as a mirror and catalyst for other movements of decolonization. As Frantz Fanon wrote, colonial violence “is neither symbolic nor rhetorical. It is the violence of the atmosphere… in which the colonized breathes, moves, and resists.” In this light, Palestine is not an “issue”—it is a world-historical fault line.
Bukele’s role in this unfolding architecture of global fascism cannot be dismissed as an anomaly. He rose through the ranks of El Salvador’s left, backed by a party born of armed resistance to U.S.-backed death squads. But today he governs as a crypto-authoritarian, admired by Peter Thiel, amplified by Elon Musk, and increasingly aligned with the U.S.-Israel axis of surveillance, militarism, and impunity. He has openly condemned Palestinian resistance while remaining silent on genocide, asserting that “the best thing that could happen to the Palestinian people is for Hamas to completely disappear.”
It is worth asking: what kind of Palestinian lineage can be reconciled with the mass imprisonment of the poor, the criminalization of dissent, and the suppression of pro-Palestinian speech in his own country?
From Gaza to the global panopticon: exporting the tools of the occupation
What is tested on the bodies of Palestinians is not only military violence—it is a system. A system of real-time surveillance, predictive profiling, biometric tagging, and indefinite detention. These are not tools of national defense. They are tools of the empire, built for export. And they are being exported. Israel has become one of the world’s leading arms and surveillance exporters, with its weapons and security technologies often advertised as “battle-tested” in the occupied territories. As Antony Loewenstein documents in The Palestine Laboratory, the occupation itself has become a proving ground for technologies later deployed by authoritarian regimes and liberal democracies alike. Israeli firms like NSO Group, creators of the Pegasus spyware, have sold their tools to dozens of governments, many of which use them to monitor journalists, dissidents, and human rights defenders. Despite a formal U.S. Commerce Department ban, lobbying efforts under the Trump administration—many of them routed through firms connected to Peter Thiel—have pushed to reauthorize NSO technologies for use by U.S. intelligence agencies.
Other companies, like Cellebrite and Paragon, have provided mobile hacking and data extraction tools to U.S. agencies including ICE and DHS. In 2024, ICE signed a multi-million dollar contract with Paragon, enabling the use of its Graphite spyware—a direct descendant of Israeli tech—to surveil migrants and activists alike. What we are witnessing is a closed-loop economy of repression:
- Surveillance tools are developed through the subjugation of Palestinians.
- These tools are exported to U.S. agencies and state police forces.
- They are used to monitor Black, Brown, Muslim, Indigenous and immigrant communities in the U.S.
- The repression of dissent at home legitimizes the suppression of critique abroad—and vice versa.
To speak of Palestine, then, is not to veer off course. It is to name the course.
The Jordanian Regime and the Palestinian Authority: A Continuous War on the Resistance
Campus as battleground: Zionist surveillance, antisemitism rebranded, and the war on knowledge
American universities are no longer simply sites of contested ideas. They are being remade as laboratories of ideological control, enforced through surveillance, donor pressure, and the redefinition of foundational terms. At the center of this transformation is a weaponized form of “antisemitism”—one that no longer protects Jewish people, but rather protects the State of Israel from criticism, while unleashing real harm against Palestinian, Arab, Muslim, and Black students who dare to speak for liberation.
Organizations like Canary Mission profile students and professors who express support for Palestinian rights, scraping social media, compiling dossiers, and labeling individuals as security threats. Beitar, a far-right Zionist youth movement rooted in Revisionist Zionism and linked to the Likud party, has also reemerged as a player on U.S. campuses—promoting militarism, ideological discipline, and the framing of anti-Zionism as treason.
Billionaires like Peter Thiel fund these efforts indirectly through fellowships, “anti-woke” legal centers, and policy institutes that frame Zionism as the last line of defense against “leftist extremism.” Surveillance tech, donor threats, and federal scrutiny are coordinated to silence dissent and redefine campus discourse as a battlefront in the global war on “terror”—where the target is now Palestine.
The center will hold—if we name it: courts, universities, and the Zionist core of the new fascism
It is not just speech that is being criminalized. It is thought, association, and political community. In the courtroom and the classroom alike, a coordinated effort is underway to remove Palestine from the public square—and to define its removal as a prerequisite for legality and order.
In Doe v. DHS, the Supreme Court recently ordered the government to facilitate the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran man unlawfully deported in defiance of a federal injunction. Judge Bialski’s follow-up ruling was stark: the administration must either return the individual or bring before the court those who illegally removed him. But the response from the Trump administration and Salvadoran officials was clear: no cooperation will be given.
Meanwhile, on U.S. campuses, Trump has issued formal letters demanding universities adopt the IHRA definition of antisemitism, ban Palestine student groups, and submit DEI-related activities for federal review. Though some resistance has emerged—Harvard publicly objected, and the AAUP filed a forceful amicus brief—the failure to directly name Zionism as the ideology being imposed means even these acts of defiance are structurally limited.
Without confronting the Zionist framework that enables and justifies these interventions, resistance will remain piecemeal and ineffectual.
Law without sovereignty, speech without truth
It is not that there is no resistance. It is that the resistance, in its dominant forms, refuses to name the structure it’s up against.
Palestinian identity is not merely marginalized; it is criminalized. Socialist critique, anti-imperialism, and even anti-racist organizing are framed as threats to campus “safety” when they intersect with critique of Israel. And this is not a side effect. It is the design.
The redefinition of antisemitism into a tool for enforcing Zionist orthodoxy violates both the letter and spirit of constitutional law. It creates a hostile environment for Arab and Muslim students, for anti-Zionist Jews, for progressive faculty and international scholars—while being codified as “neutrality.”
This is not a paradox. It is fascism in the institutional mode.
Conclusion: naming the structure, reclaiming the future
What we are witnessing is not isolated repression. It is a systemic and accelerating realignment of political power—one that fuses Zionist ideology, technological surveillance, imperial policing, and global capital into a new transnational fascist front.
The recent legal and institutional developments—from Supreme Court rulings to the targeting of universities—reveal not just abuses, but a shift in the structure of governance itself. A structure in which legality no longer restrains power, and speech is redefined to eliminate solidarity.
To name Palestine is to name this system.
To speak for Gaza is to interrupt the machinery of control—not in symbolism, but in structure.
Palestine is not the footnote to fascism. It is its blueprint. And until we confront that, we will continue to lose the battle for the future.
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