Nazi-Israeli parallels are appropriate and salutary

While the histories are of course different, making properly evidenced parallels in character and tactics between Nazi Germany and fascist “Israel” is entirely legitimate.

Reactionary Western agencies get upset at the Nazi Israeli comparison; but why and what is wrong with that? After all, we are talking about regimes which carry out large scale racial massacres based on racist ideology. Of course, the particular histories are different, yet by parallels, we are talking about similarities in character, tactics, and crimes.

Normally, what is most forbidden by many Western regimes (i.e. sponsors of the Israelis) is normalizing the right of colonised and occupied peoples to resist (they like to brand resistance to colonisation, occupation, and apartheid as ‘terrorism’), but that is not the case here. The sore point here seems to be harsh criticism of the Zionist colony.

The repression of Nazi-Israeli parallels begins with media censorship, extends to ‘de-platforming’ or dismissal from employment, and has even taken the form of criminal penalties. The rationale for this is typically vague, reverting to general claims of “causing offence” which, by itself, is meaningless.

Gratuitous (pointless) abuse is certainly anti-social; however, the fact that some people may be offended by political statements has little meaning in itself. Indeed there is such a thing as “salutary” offence, a provocation which may lead to benefit, e.g. where people may be shamed by exposure to the implications or character of their political views or allegiances. That is part of everyday political discussion and relevant to the Israeli debate.

Let’s look a bit more carefully at the main possible objections to Nazi-Israeli comparisons.

1. The main arguments against these parallels

First is the notion that any reference to the Nazi regime is to promote German style fascism, which might alarm people. Promoting Nazism is already a political crime in many countries. Whether banning Nazism and fascism is the best way to discourage it is another debate; in this article, I am looking at the question of comparisons.

Second is the idea that promoting or even mentioning German style fascism is an affront to and intimidation of its historical victims, especially of Russians, Jews, Poles, Roma (gypsies), and others. In the present argument, the idea is that it affronts and perhaps intimidates Jewish people. Intimidation is a particular charge which has to be read from circumstances; it cannot be inferred simply by the presence of certain symbols. However, the ‘Glorification of Nazism’ (see 2 below) is a theme which deserves attention.

Third, to compare Israelis to Nazis is a harsh criticism which might unnecessarily hurt the feelings of Israelis, some of whom have parents or grandparents who were victims of Nazi Germany. For what it’s worth such hurt feelings are certainly possible. Nevertheless, since there are legitimate parallels in character and tactics, and since warning about fascism is clearly in the public interest, offence caused in this way is irrelevant and probably salutary. Many of the crimes of the Israelis in character, if not yet in scale, do indeed resemble those of Nazi Germany. Racist ideology has created a basis for systematic discrimination, followed by racial massacres (see 3 below) in each case. If Israelis are offended by this it may be a good thing, pressing them to reconsider their support for the Israeli regime. More broadly, there is much to learn from the comparative study of fascist regimes.

Fourth, the claim that Israelis are like Nazis is said to be a generic slur on all Jewish people: an anti-Jewish slogan or part of what is often called ‘anti-Semitism’. This claim embeds the dubious assumption that Israeli equals Jewish.

Etymologically, anti-Semitism is a Eurocentric word for the spread of anti-Jewish ideas. In Europe, there was a prejudiced and false view that Jewish people were outsiders, from the ‘Middle East’. European Zionists resurrected this idea. However ‘Semite’, more correctly, refers to several language groups, the largest of which are Arabic and Amharic, followed by Hebrew (an ancient language resurrected for use in “Israel”) and some others.

Harsh criticism of “Israel” is not a slur on Jewish people. Many prominent Jewish figures make Nazi-Israeli parallels and reject the Israeli-Jewish equation. Indeed, many are offended by the claim that “Israel” represents Jewish people. Most Jewish North Americans, for example, dislike Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and are critical of Israeli government policies.

One need not be Jewish to criticize “Israel”, but it is worth considering the many prominent Jewish people, including holocaust survivors, who make Nazi-Israeli parallels. Disqualifying the parallels argument as “anti-Semitic” is disingenuous – it tries to hide the crimes of the Israeli regime and would have the effect of disqualifying some of the most articulate and experienced Jewish figures who have made Nazi-Israeli parallels (see 4 below)

2. ‘Glorification of Nazism’

The argument that promoting or even mentioning Nazi German fascism is an affront to or intimidation of the historic victims is difficult to take seriously coming from Western regimes, which have mostly opposed successive Russian motions at the United Nations for “combating the glorification of Nazism”.

In recent years, the motion has been passed with large majorities, for example, in 2022 there were 120 in favour, 50 against, and 10 abstentions. The opposition block included Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, Poland, Spain, the United Kingdom and the USA. The United States (which has voted against these anti-Nazi resolutions for 10 years) justified its opposition saying the motion aimed to “legitimize a discourse based on disinformation.”

While the USA sees Russia as a strategic opponent, Russia and its predecessor, the USSR, were the key focus of Nazi German colonial ambitions. Russians suffered most at the hands of the Nazis. As even The Washington Post recognises “an estimated 26 million Soviet citizens died during World War II, including as many as 11 million soldiers”.

The USA and NATO, for their part, have a history of collaborating with Nazi Germany, both before and to some extent during the Second World War, then recruiting Nazi military officers and scientists after that war.

Further, the USA and NATO, after the 2014 Kiev coup, have made use of pro-Nazi, ultra-nationalist Ukraine groups in their proxy war against Russia. These are the same groups which helped the Nazi German invasion of the Soviet Union, taking an active role in the first stage of the Holocaust – a slaughter of Russians, Poles, Jews and others. Western sensitivity to mentioning Nazi links sits oddly with western reluctant to condemn Nazism at the United Nations.

3. Racist ideology, systematic discrimination and racial massacres

The Nazi-Israeli parallels in character and tactics centre on a common thread which runs from racist ideology through systematic discrimination to racial massacres and genocide. A recent British legal ruling in the case of anti-Zionist academic David Miller, while pretending agnosticism on the matter, recognised that anti-Zionism was a set of views which were “worthy of respect in a democratic society”. That ruling effectively sinks attempts in Britain to equate anti-Zionism with anti-Jewish expression.

Zionism certainly begins, like Nazism, with extreme racist ideology. We can see striking similarities between the essentialist racism of, for example, Nazi ideologist Julius Streicher and the Zionist historian Benzion Netanyahu (father of the politician Benjamin). They set up classes of superior and inferior peoples, demonising their ‘racial’ enemies.

Streicher wrote that “the essence of the Jew was a peculiar one … Who were the money lenders? They were those who were driven out of the temple by Christ himself … [they] never worked but live on fraud … The God of the Jews is … the God of hatred.” Similarly, Benzion Netanyahu wrote about “the essence of the Arab … he has no respect for any law … in the desert he can do as he pleases. The tendency towards conflict is the essence of the Arab. He is an enemy by essence … It doesn’t matter what kind of resistance … what price he will pay. His existence is one of perpetual war.”

These parallel racist ideologies laid a common foundation for systematic discrimination followed by ethnic cleansing and the genocidal assault on what an Israeli minister called “human animals”. Racial ‘science’ came to obsess many Zionists, as it had the persecutors of the Jews in Nazi Germany.

That ideology created a basis for state missions and policies. The Israeli group Adalah cites more than 60  racially discriminatory Israeli laws, which include bans on intermarriage (miscegenation), punishment for the Palestinian families of stone throwers, and the demolition of houses of families of those convicted over some security offence. That systematic racism and its consequences have led to reports branding “Israel” an apartheid regime.

As of 2024, there were six independent reports charging “Israel” with the crime of apartheid. Apartheid is a crime against humanity which, according to Richard Falk and Virginia Tilley, in their 2017 report prepared for the United Nations, places an obligation on the international community to dismantle that criminal regime. That legal charge raises serious doubt about the possibility of pursuing a so-called “two state solution”, despite successive UNSC resolutions since 1967.

The rising pattern of racist practice led a senior Israeli general to compare the occupied territories to Nazi Germany in the 1930s. Just before the Gaza insurrection of 7 October 2023, former Israeli general Amiram Levin compared the control of Palestinian lives on the West Bank to Nazi Germany in the 1930s. “We find it difficult to say it, but that’s the truth … Look around Hebron, look at streets, streets that Arabs can’t use, only Jews, that’s exactly what happened in countries like that.” Amiram lashed out at the government, saying Prime Minister Netanyahu was surrounded by “a messianic group of criminals, former ‘hilltop youth,’ people who don’t even know what democracy is”.

From racial ideology, in both cases we see a shift from systematic discrimination to racial massacres. The anti-Jewish discrimination and racial massacres of Nazi Germany are well known. Similarly, the Israelis are implicated in both systematic discrimination and racist massacres over the decades, from the initial period around 1948 called the Nakba (the catastrophe) by Palestinians, to the most obvious recent massacres committed during several Israeli invasions of the Gaza Strip after the withdrawal of colonial settlements in 2005.

About 1,400 Palestinians and 13 Israelis were killed in 2008, in 2014 more than 2,100 Palestinians were killed in Gaza along with 73 Israelis (of which 67 were soldiers). In the 2023-2024 invasion, more than 40,000 Palestinians were killed in Gaza by the Israelis, more than 2/3 of them women and children.

In January 2024, after the case brought by South Africa, the International Court of Justice found that “Israel” was plausibly committing the crime of genocide in Gaza. Despite that finding, the regime has not yet been held to account, raising the importance of direct resistance and public pressure.

4. Prominent Jewish Holocaust survivors make Nazi-Israeli parallels while rejecting the Jewish-Zionist equation

The false equation between Jewish people and “Israel”, an argument pushed by Zionist groups, including through the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) and its proposed “working definition of antisemitism” – is a serious fallacy, rejected not least by the many Jewish figures, including holocaust survivors, who have branded “Israel” as akin to Nazism.

Another group, Scholars of Holocaust history, Jewish studies, and Middle East Studies, have drafted an alternative charter, the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism (JDOA), which says that the IHRA statement “puts undue emphasis” (7 of 11 “examples”) on “Israel”.

This writer has previously argued that the IHRA working paper “hopelessly confuses the matter by its appended ‘illustrations’ which conflate Jewish people with Israel and seek to disqualify criticism of Israel”. Racism cannot be redefined so as to exempt one’s favourite group of colonists, especially when they have been identified by multiple independent analysts as the architects of a new form of apartheid.

We should have particular regard to the many Jewish critics of Zionism and of “Israel”. Many Jewish people today are horrified to be told that they are represented by the notorious war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu. Thousands of Jewish people in the USA, after the virtual live streaming of the genocide in Gaza, have held rallies demanding “Not in our Name”.

Zionists opposed mainstream Jewish attempts to organise an international boycott of Nazi Germany in the 1930s, creating the collaborative Haavara (Transfer) Agreement 1933-1939 for the export of Jewish people and their capital to Palestine. Zionists thus abandoned the Jewish struggle against the Nazi regime in its early years.

Even before “Israel” was created, Jewish and non-Jewish figures noted parallels with Nazi Germany. The Pro-Arab British politician Edward Spears wrote:

“Political Zionism as it is manifested in Palestine today preaches very much the same doctrines as Hitler … Zionist policy in Palestine has many features similar to Nazi philosophy … the politics of Herrenvolk … the Nazi idea of Lebensraum, is also very in evidence in the Zionist philosophy … the training of youth is very similar under both organizations that have designed this one and the Nazi one.”

Nazi parallels were made by prominent Jewish intellectuals Albert Einstein and Hannah Arendt, who warned of the fascist characteristics of the founders of the Israeli regime, and in particular the political predecessors of the Likud Party.  They warned of the Israeli political party led by Menachem Begin, which was “closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy, and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties”.

Zionism of course is not a religious tradition of Judaism. It was started and maintained largely by non-religious Jewish people like the atheist founder Theodor Herzl, who envisioned a Jewish colonial project from the Nile to the Euphrates.

Later, anti-Zionist and liberal Zionist Jews, including Holocaust survivors, emphatically rejected the Israeli regime, using Nazi and Fascist comparisons. They had seen both and clearly did not want to be associated with a regime which adopted features of the hated Nazis.

A British Jewish group, Jewish Voice for Labour, has cited 13 Jewish holocaust survivors who compare Israeli policies to those of Nazi Germany. Some of them were horrified that their ideal of a humane “Israel” had fallen in face of Nazi style practices, some were vehemently anti-Zionist. All of them make Israeli comparisons with the Nazi regime.

Dr. Gabor Mate, for example, mourns that his “beautiful dream of Israel” and of Jewish redemption” has become a nightmare. Palestinians today use the same resistance techniques as the Jewish partisans during WW2, against their Nazi oppressors. Similarly, Dr. Israel Shahak wanted to see “Israel” renounce the Nazi style desire for domination, including domination of the Palestinians [and so] become a much nicer place for Israelis to live”. These statements reflect the mythical ‘two state solution’ ideal.

Other Holocaust survivors, while making the Nazi parallel, oppose any version of a ‘Jewish state’. Stephen Kapos – like Gabor Mate also from Hungary – says that “the way that the Israeli government is using the memory of the Holocaust in order to justify what they’re doing to the Gazans is a complete insult to the memory of the Holocaust [and that includes] … the conflating of Jewishness with Zionism.”

Similarly, Holocaust survivor Professor Zeev Sternhell sees in “Israel” “not just a growing Israeli fascism but racism akin to Nazism in its early stages”, while Reuben Moscovitz “[compares] what I went through during the Holocaust [in Romania] to what the besieged Palestinian children are going through.”

The late German-Dutch physicist Hajo Mayer was a well-known Holocaust survivor who repeatedly asserted the Israeli parallels with Nazi Germany. “I can identify with Palestinian youth” he said. “I can write up an endless list of similarities between Nazi Germany and Israel. The capturing of land and property, denying people access to educational opportunities and restricting access to earn a living to destroy their hope, all with the aim to chase people away from their land.”

The late Slovak biochemist Dr Rudolf Vrba takes his critique of Zionism a step further by drawing attention to direct Zionist-Nazi collaboration. He escaped from Auschwitz in April 1944 and spent some time thereafter exposing this collaboration, especially the role of Hungarian lawyer Rudolf Kasztner who negotiated the expulsion of Jews from Europe with Adolf Eichmann, to create the Haavara Agreement, abandoning those who remained.

According to Dr Vrba, “The Zionist movement in Europe played a very important role in the mass extermination of Jews … Nazism and Zionism had something in common, they both preached that Jews don’t belong in Europe”. It was wealthy Jewish businessmen who first bought their way out.

As regards Kasztner and his Hungarian clique, Dr Vrba said, “This small group of quislings knew what was happening to their brethren in Hitler’s gas chambers and bought their own lives with the price of silence … Nor did the sordid bargaining end there. Kasztner paid Eichmann several thousand dollars. With this little fortune, Eichmann was able to buy his way to freedom when Germany collapsed, to set himself up in the Argentine”.

Dr. Marek Edeleman, Primo Levi, Rene Lichtman, Suzanne Berliner Weiss, Marione Ingram, and Marika Sherwood are other Holocaust survivors who compare Israeli practices to fascism including that of Nazi Germany, and would be condemned as “anti-Semitic” Jews under the ridiculous IHRA “working paper” definition. In fact, they have a unique and legitimate perspective to offer.

In short, while the histories are of course different, making properly evidenced parallels in character and tactics between Nazi Germany and fascist “Israel” is entirely legitimate, particularly as both built their systematic discrimination and genocide on foundations of a deeply racist ideology. There is much to learn from these parallels and in many cases, where offence is caused, it is salutary. Provoking reflection on support for the great crimes of fascist regimes, and on how supposed victims can become perpetrators, is an important public service.