This picture was taken last June in New York, at the Israel Day parade. I just saw it on Scott Roth’s twitter feed.

Mike Bloomberg marching with a fascist. Wouldn’t be acceptable if it was anyone but an Israeli. pic.twitter.com/b6jpN7T4B4 — Scott Roth (@scottroth76) June 21, 2013

The man in the picture is Danny Danon, deputy minister of Defense in the Netanyahu government. There was only brief mention of him at the time, here in the Jewish Press.

But Danon shows up today, in the Washington Post, in a story about the rightwingers in Netanyahu’s coalition who want to annex the West Bank:

As for the Palestinians living in the West Bank, depending on the ideas under discussion, the annexationists suggest that they be offered Israeli citizenship or residency or be made the responsibility of Jordan. “I think we should no longer think of Jewish settlements in the West Bank, but Palestinian settlements in Israel,” Danny Danon, deputy defense minister, said in an interview. Danon, recently elected to head the central committee of the Likud party, imagines an archipelago of Palestinian cities — Jenin, Nablus, Ramallah and Hebron — as Arab islands in an Israeli sea. “The Jewish people are not settlers in the West Bank, but Israel will make the Palestinians settlers and Jordan will be the one taking control over Palestinians and that’s it,” Danon told Israel’s Channel 1 this summer.

This is blood-and-soil nationalism– which regards it as fit to deprive people of rights based on their ethnicity, and suggests transferring them to the “control” of other states, whatever that means. It’s a fascistic ideology. (Webster’s says fascism is a movement or regime that exalts nation and race above the individual and stands for an autocratic government with a dictatorial leader, and the suppression of opposition. Elements of that definition fit Danon’s argument.)

I return to Scott Roth’s point: Would it be acceptable for an American politician to march alongside such a figure in any other political context?