Comparisons between Israel and Nazi Germany

An early example of comparison between Israel and Nazi Germany was a 1948 letter to the U.S. publication New York Times describing the Herut party as "closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties". The letter was signed by researchers Albert Einstein and Hannah Arendt.[5]

Israeli philosopher Yeshayahu Leibowitz introduced the term "Judeo-Nazis". He argued that continued occupation of the Palestinian territories would lead to the moral degradation of the Israeli army because people will commit atrocities for the state.[6][7] In 1988, Holocaust survivor Yehuda Elkana warned that the tendency in Israel to see all potential threats as existential and all opponents as Nazis would lead to Nazi-like behavior by Jews.[8] During the First Intifada, historian Omer Bartov was enraged by Yitzhak Rabin's call to "break the bones" of Palestinians and wrote him a letter arguing that, based on Bartov's research, the IDF could be similarly brutalized as the German Army was during World War II.[9] One Israeli nationalist told Amos Oz that he did not care if Israel was called a Judeo-Nazi state, it was "better [to be] a living Judeo-Nazi than a dead saint".[10] In 2018, Noam Chomsky cited Leibowitz, arguing that he was right in his prediction that the occupation was producing Judeo-Nazis.[11] According to Lustick, “Many [Israelis] are already repelled by actions against Palestinians they cannot help but associate with Nazi persecution of Jews.”[12]

In 2016, Israeli general and deputy chief of staff of the Israeli Defense Force Yair Golan sparked a controversy during a speech at Yom HaShoah. Golan stated, "If there is something that frightens me about the memory of the Holocaust, it is seeing the abhorrent processes that took place in Europe, and Germany in particular, some 70, 80 or 90 years ago, and finding manifestations of these processes here among us in 2016."[12] These remarks were condemned by the prime minister.[12]

After the Likud victory in the 1977 election, Holocaust metaphors began to be used by the Israeli right to describe their left-wing opponents.[13] During the withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, settlers donned yellow stars to compare themselves to Holocaust victims.[7]

Whether comparisons between Israel and Nazi Germany are intrinsically antisemitic is disputed.[3]

David Feldman, director of the Pears Institute for the Study of Antisemitism, argues that Holocaust inversion is often not antisemitic because it is a commonly used rhetorical device "used in many arguments about many subjects, often light-mindedly, lacking any specifically antisemitic content", such as Israeli politicians who refer to each other as Nazis, and because comparisons in relation to the 2014 Gaza war are not motivated by an anti-Jewish subjectivity but by criticism of Israeli policy.[3]

The term "Holocaust inversion" for Nazi comparisons is used by those who see the Holocaust as a template for Jewish life.[4] According to Kenneth L. Marcus, the aim of those who employ Holocaust inversion is to "shock, silence, threaten, insulate, and legitimize". Even when it is frequently used, the use of Holocaust inversion is still shocking, which facilitates its repeated use. He asserts that the tying together of Nazi motifs with Jewish conspiracy stereotypes has a chilling effect on Jewish supporters of Israel. Furthermore, he says, by implying guilt, this discourse is threatening, because it implies a required punishment. As this discourse is performed in the context of political criticism of Israel, it insulates those who use it from the resistance which most forms of racism face in post-World War II society. Finally, he states, inversion not only legitimizes anti-Israel activities, it also legitimizes anti-Jewish activities that would otherwise be hard to conduct. According to Bernard-Henri Lévy, this erodes societal safeguards allowing "people to feel once again the desire and, above all, the right to burn all the synagogues they want, to attack boys wearing yarmulkes, to harass large number of rabbis ... in order for anti-Semitism to be reborn on a large scale".[14]

The Working Definition of Antisemitism (adopted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, the U.S. Department of State, and others) offers several examples in which criticism of Israel may be antisemitic, including "drawing comparison of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis."[15] This definition is controversial because of concerns that it could be seen as defining legitimate criticisms of Israel as antisemitic and has been used to censor pro-Palestinian activism. Alternative definitions such as the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism have been proposed.[5]

Holocaust inversion may also be seen as a form of Holocaust revisionism because it minimizes Nazi crimes.[16] According to Bernard Lewis, the belief that the Nazis were no worse than Israel is has "brought welcome relief to many who had long borne a burden of guilt for the role which they, their families, their nations, or their churches had played in Hitler's crimes against the Jews, whether by participation or complicity, acquiescence or indifference".[16] In Austria, while overt antisemitism has been limited following the Holocaust, functionally equivalent discourse was able to rise under a new guise. In particular, the Freedom Party of Austria has used Holocaust inversion to delegitimize political opponents.[17]

Notes

Bibliography

• Bartov, Omer (2018). "National Narratives of Suffering and Victimhood: Methods and Ethics of Telling the Past as Personal Political History". The Holocaust and the Nakba. Columbia University Press. ISBN 978-0-231-54448-1.
• Lustick, Ian S. (2019). Paradigm Lost: From Two-State Solution to One-State Reality. University of Pennsylvania Press. ISBN 978-0-8122-5195-1.
• Rosenfeld, Alvin H. (9 January 2019). Anti-Zionism and Antisemitism: The Dynamics of Delegitimization. Indiana University Press. ISBN 978-0-253-03872-2.
• Marcus, Kenneth L. (30 August 2010). Jewish Identity and Civil Rights in America. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-1-139-49119-8.
• Steir-Livny, Liat (2019). ""Kristallnacht in Tel Aviv": Nazi Associations in the Contemporary Israeli Socio-Political Debate". New Perspectives on Kristallnacht: After 80 Years, the Nazi Pogrom in Global Comparison. Purdue University Press. ISBN 978-1-61249-616-0.

• Media related to Comparison of Israel and Nazi Germany at Wikimedia Commons