FAQ 10

Isn’t comparing Israel to the Nazis antisemitic?

 

The allegation

Saying that Israel is doing to the Palestinians what the Nazis did to the Jews demeans the Holocaust and blames its victims.

This is an antisemitic libel. It inverts reality, casting Israelis as the “new” Nazis and the Palestinians as the “new” Jews. It makes a perverted use of the Holocaust to express hostility towards Israel, which is the homeland of the Jews. Antisemites, who might be uncertain of their reception if openly expressing their race hatred, do so instead by attacking the only Jewish state – by equating it with Nazi Germany.

Brief rebuttal

Criticism of Israel can be exaggerated, unjust and extreme. It can indeed be motivated by antisemitism. But comparisons to Nazi Germany are overwhelmingly an expression of outrage at Israel’s inhuman treatment of the Palestinians. Israeli indiscriminate mass killings of Palestinians since October 7th, in both Gaza and the West Bank, have flooded the internet with vivid evidence that supports the comparison. The International Court of Justice has found that Israel’s behaviour can plausibly be described as genocide. That this is a crime against humanity, defined in order to embrace Nazi crimes within the reach of international law, is doubly shocking.

Such historical comparisons must be made judiciously and with caution, based on solid evidence and argument and not as labels to smear one country or group of actors by analogy with others.

More detail

In Israel “Nazi” comparisons are commonplace, on both left and right. For example, many settlers accused the soldiers who were evicting them from Gaza in 2005 of being Nazis. More recently, many have compared Hamas with the Nazis for what happened on October 7th.

Others more critical of the regime have also reached for such comparisons. Thus we may be shocked but shouldn’t be surprised to see Israel’s liberal daily newspaper Ha’aretz using the word “pogrom” to describe the settler attacks on the Palestinian village of Huwara in the West Bank in March 2023. Similarly, when Yair Golan, the deputy head of the Israeli military, in a speech on Holocaust Memorial Day in 2016, called for “national soul-searching” referring to “the revolting processes that occurred in Europe – and particularly in Germany – 70, 80 and 90 years ago, and finding signs of them here among us today in 2016”. (Golan was subsequently forced by Prime Minster Netanyahu to withdraw his remarks.)

Before making such comparisons we should ask:

• which Israeli actions are being compared to those of the Nazis?
• is the comparison useful or enlightening or simply to cause an emotional reaction of disgust?

Nazism cannot be reduced to the extermination camps. These were preceded by a decade of demonisation of the Jews and other Untermenschen, racist discriminations, humiliations, attacks on the streets and in homes, looting, arbitrary arrests, arson attacks, murder and then more murder resulting from starvation and rampant disease. Remember that more Jews and others died outside the extermination camps than in them.

All those events have similarities with events taking place in Israel and the occupation today. The question always is this: is the comparison useful? Does it clarify the nature of the avowedly ethnocratic regime in Israel. Does it help people understand what Israel is doing today?

Sometimes the answer is yes.

Further resources

1. Lesley Klaff, Holocaust Inversion and contemporary antisemitism, Fathom, winter 2014 for a full-blooded statement of the allegation under review here.

2. Yair Golan’s 2016 comments were discussed by Jonathan Cook, Israel: Will Nazism comparisons trigger soul searching?, Al Jazeera, 9 May 2016

3. Thirteen Holocaust survivors compare Zionist policies to those of the Nazis, JVL, 15 Jul 2024

4. Michael Cushman, Gessen and the Arendt Prize Controversy, JVL, 19 Dec 2023

5. Omer Bartov, As a former IDF soldier and historian of genocide, I was deeply disturbed by my recent visit to Israel, Guardian, 13 Aug 2024

“This is the logic of endless violence, a logic that allows one to destroy entire populations and to feel totally justified in doing so. It is a logic of victimhood – we must kill them before they kill us, as they did before – and nothing empowers violence more than a righteous sense of victimhood. Look at what happened to us in 1918, German soldiers said in 1942, recalling the propagandistic “stab-in-the-back” myth, which attributed Germany’s catastrophic defeat in the first world war to Jewish and communist treason. Look at what happened to us in the Holocaust, when we trusted that others would come to our rescue, IDF troops say in 2024, thereby giving themselves licence for indiscriminate destruction based on a false analogy between Hamas and the Nazis.”

6. What Was I Doing While Israel Was Killing civilians in Gaza?

Michael Sfard, Haaretz, 28 Oct 2024

Sfard is a foremost Israeli expert in international humanitarian law and international human rights law.

“Dresden pales in comparison to what we have done in Gaza. We have bombed indiscriminately, pulverized blatantly civilian targets and obliterated civilian infrastructure that makes life possible in the Gaza Strip, that became one huge Ground Zero. We have killed some two percent of its population, the vast majority of victims being civilians.

And the worst thing is, we have grown used to that.”