- cross-posted to:
- history@hexbear.net
- cross-posted to:
- history@hexbear.net
I had not planned on making this thread until somebody suggested it to me privately, and even then I did not feel comfortable until one of my Jewish friends gave his approval. The reason that I hesitated is that, aside from the comparisons being somewhat cliché, I feel that they should be unnecessary because the neocolony’s atrocities can and should speak for theirselves.
On the other hand, comparing the neocolony to a Fascist empire is a convenient way of summarizing our abhorrence for both, and as I said in my thread comparing the neocolony to Fascist Italy, it can help us predict the neocolony’s trajectory: just as many Fascists could not get away with their crimes forever, neither shall the Zionists.
Many Zionists find it shocking, unfair, or antisemitic to liken their neocolony to the Third Reich, but what would they have to say about the many pre‐1940s settlers who considered the Shoah survivors to be weaklings who somehow allowed the destruction of European Jewry? What would they say about Ben‐Gurion’s contempt for the culture of the Oriental Jews, his questioning their very Jewishness, his comparison of them to black folk, and his calling Moroccan Jews ‘savages’? The fact that the neocolony lets a third of its Shoah survivors suffer in poverty? The many other ways that Zionism has harmed and still harms Jewish people?
I’ll leave it to you to decide who the real antisemites are here, but before I get into the similarities between the two régimes I should admit that there are also some importance differences. For a start, the Zionists are not adventurer‐conquerors: the Fascists dreamt of conquering entire continents, whereas the Zionists are much less ambitious in scope. Zionism, unlike Fascism, was not a petty bourgeois movement that the haute‐bourgeoisie promoted to save capitalism; the Zionists have not been quite as merciless in suppressing the proletariat’s concessions as the Fascists were. The neocolony has also yet to discard its pseudodemocratic façade, whereas the Fascists discarded (almost) all of theirs. Most obviously, the Third Reich existed for a much briefer time (twelve years) than the neocolony has (seventy‐five years).
Those are just a few obvious but important examples. Such technicalities are, nevertheless, highly unlikely to be of any concern to Zionism’s dozens of thousands of victims. Like Fascism, Zionism is a form of colonialism that necessitates the replacement of hundreds of thousands of inhabitants, and it is an ethnonationalist phenomenon, which is why neofascist Richard Spencer compared his vision favorably to Zionism:
I have also described an ethno‐state in a kind of pettier way that calls upon Zionism, and that’s an ethno‐state for the future that would be open for all white people. So it would be open for Scotsmen, it would be open for Italians, it would be open for Russians and white Americans. So it would be something similar to Zionism.
In the cases of both Fascism and Zionism, their colonialism was in part inspired by the loss of territories. The German Fascists were dismayed at the loss of their German Empire due to World War I, and the Zionists were always frustrated with how the British Empire wouldn’t give them more land. (It is perhaps only a minor coincidence, but one Zionist even described this as ‘like stabbing the nation in the back.’) For example, quoting Dan Tamir’s Hebrew Fascism in Palestine, 1922–1942, page 72:
A similar line was drawn also by Jacob Cohen, the poet who gave Brit ha‐Biryonim its name. “When England embarked on carrying out the Mandate”, he argued,
two acts of injustice were immediately inflicted upon us. The first injustice—tearing the East bank of the Jordan [from Mandatory Palestine]—was like stabbing the nation in the back. We haven’t suffered such a crime since the destruction of the Second Temple… The second injustice was discharging the Hebrew battalion.⁶
To make theirselves more palatable to the general public, Zionists dishonestly claimed that their fringe movement was consistent with Pres. Woodrow Wilson’s principle of self-determination. (In fact, many Zionists today redefine their philosophy simply as ‘Jewish self-determination’, then they mindlessly scold Jews who do not share their dogmatic reconception of the phenomenon, oblivious to the obvious contradiction!) Quoting Robert L. MacDonald’s “A Land without a People for a People without a Land”: Civilizing Mission and American Support for Zionism, 1880s–1929, page 220:
Although they presented Zionism as complementary to Wilson’s principle of self-determination and in alignment with U.S. war aims during the Great War,⁶⁵ Zionists and their supporters were often quite clear that their policies violated the principles of democracy and self-determination.
The German Fascists did likewise. Quoting Martin Kristoffer Hamre’s ‘Nationalists of All Countries, Unite!’: Hans Keller and Nazi Internationalism in the 1930s
Even the NSDAP had demanded in its party programme from 1920 the unification of all Germans based on the right of self-determination of the peoples to a Greater Germany.⁸³ However, Adolf Hitler remained throughout his reign a cynical detractor of the right of self-determination of peoples. He and other leading [Fascists] instrumentalised this idea to their own ends, legitimising among others the Anschluss (Annexation) of Austria and the expansionist policy of Lebensraum (living space).⁸⁴
But this is only the background; the worst was yet to come. Much as the German Fascists planned to empty lands of Slavs, Jews, and Roma for German settlers, so the Zionists had to empty theirs of Palestinians for Zionist settlers. Quoting Ilan Pappé’s The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, page 250:
Already in the late nineteenth century Zionism had identified the ‘population problem’ as the major obstacle for the fulfillment of its dream. It had also identified the solution: ‘We shall endeavour to expel the poor population across the border unnoticed, procuring employment for it in the transit countries, but denying it any employment in our own country,’ Herzl had written in his diary in 1895.²
And David Ben‐Gurion was very clear in December 1947 that ‘there can be no stable and strong Jewish state so long as it has a Jewish majority of only 60 per cent.’³ Israel, he warned on the same occasion, would have to deal with this ‘severe’ problem with ‘a new approach in due course’.
From Carroll P. Kakel’s The Holocaust as Colonial Genocide, page 67:
Within days of his conquest of Poland, on 21 September 1939, Hitler approved the ‘expulsion’ of all Poles, Jews and [Roma] from the Polish Lebensraum and the ‘settlement’ of these areas with ethnic German settler colonists. Most Poles were to be ‘removed’ eastward and their leadership élites were to be executed, with only ‘racially suitable’ Poles eligible for ‘Germanization’. As part of this plan, ‘the Jew’ was to be ‘removed’ to a planned ‘Jewish reservation’ (Judenreservat) in Nisko, an inhospitable border area south‐east of Lublin.³⁵
In many cases, the natives were blissfully unaware of the plans that their oppressors had for them. The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, page 52:
The Palestinian villages, to Sela’s surprise, ‘continued life as usual’. In fact in the three villages he visited — Ayndur, Dabburiyya and Ayn Mahel — people received him as they had always done, greeting him as a potential customer for bartering, trading and exchanging pleasantries or news. These villages were near the British hospital of Afula, where units of the Arab Legion were stationed as part of the British police force in the country. The Jordanian soldiers, too, seemed to regard the situation as normal and were not engaged in any special preparations.
Throughout December 1947, Sela summed up in his monthly report: normalcy is the rule and agitation the exception.²⁶ If these people were to be expelled, it could not be done as ‘retaliation’ for any aggression on their part.
From Polish Society under German Occupation, 1939–1944, pages 139–40:
[E]ven in official published sources we find acknowledgment that the invader was not received in the same manner throughout the country, and that not all strata of Polish society participated in the underground struggle with equal zeal.¹⁶ Several sources specifically state that the [Fascist] victory was received with joy by the peasants in certain areas and that the entering [Wehrmacht] received a friendly greeting from the population in many ethnically Polish hamlets and villages (Stolarz, 1965:95; Kersten, Szarota, 1968 v.2:24; Kisielewski, Nowak, 1968:387–388).
Of course, this warmth did not represent the predominant mood, but rather an extreme form of an attitude unique to the countryside, which stemmed from the peasants’ alienation in prewar Poland. On the other hand, the occasional friendliness of the rural population was visible enough to have been reported in memoirs written several years later, against the general trend of “heroic” interpretation of the war period.
This naïve hospitality made it easier to assault and evict the villagers. The one difference that I noticed between the Fascist evictions of Poles and the Zionist evictions of Palestinians was that the Zionists were probably even more destructive than the Fascists were in theirs. The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, pages 106, 151, & 153:
Sirin’s mukhtar hoped that the village’s immunity would be further ensured by the presence of a small Christian clan that had an excellent relationship with the rest of the people. […] Within a few short hours, this microcosm of religious coexistence and harmony was laid waste. The villagers did not put up a fight. The [Zionist] troops gathered the Muslims — of both clans — and Christians together and ordered them to start crossing the River Jordan to the other side. They then demolished the mosque, the church and the monastery, together with all the houses.
[…]
Saffuriyya was less fortunate. All its inhabitants were evicted, with soldiers shooting over their heads to hasten their departure. […] Along with many of the survivors of the other villages, the people of Saffuriyya put up new homes in a neighbourhood that faced their old village, today called Safafra. This meant another traumatic life experience: they actually watched as the Jewish settlers began emptying their houses, occupied them and slowly turned their beloved village into a […] moshav — a collective agricultural settlement — that they called Zippori[.]
Quoting Phillip T. Rutherford’s Prelude to the Final Solution: The Nazi Program for Deporting Ethnic Poles, 1939–1941, pages 145–6:
The evacuations were managed by the UWZ and were usually carried out by local gendarmerie or Ordnungspolizei battalions stationed in Wartheland.³⁹ The UWZ and police generally struck before dawn. While as many as fifty uniformed police surrounded the targeted village to prevent escapes, UWZ or other officials, armed with lists of evacuees, approached the designated farmhouses and informed the occupants that they were being evicted.
The deportees were allowed to retain one suitcase each with 25 to 30 kilograms of belongings, food sufficient for eight to fourteen days of detainment and travel, and up to 100 reichsmarks, which would be exchanged for zlotys in Litzmannstadt. As in the past, all precious metals, jewelry, artworks, and animals remained behind. After an hour or so, the Poles were loaded onto trucks or buses and transported out. Some went to a local transit camp, others directly to Litzmannstadt, but all eventually found themselves at the UWZ Nebenstelle.⁴⁰
If everything went according to plan, the vacated farms were turned over to Volksdeutschen soon after the Poles had left. If no Volksdeutschen stood ready, police officers or NSDAP officials guarded the farms to prevent looting until ethnic German families could be installed.⁴¹ The German settlers were not allowed to witness the evictions, as this might upset them. “Only when the evacuated Polish family is out of sight,” Koppe ordered, “should the installation of settlers occur.”⁴²
Of course, the Fascists could be just as destructive as the Zionists when they wanted to be, provided that the objective was retaliation… similarly to what the Zionists frequently had in mind. The Ethnic Cleasing of Palestine, page 141:
Following one such attack, on a convoy heading towards the [Zionist] settlement of Yechiam in the north‐western tip of the country, the troops who later carried out operations in its vicinity were particularly vengeful and callous in the way they performed their duties. The settlement of Yechiam was several kilometres south of Palestine’s western border with Lebanon. The [Zionist] troops who attacked the villages in operation ‘Ben‐Ami’ in May 1948 were specifically told that the villages had to be eliminated in revenge for the loss of the convoy.
Thus the villages of Sumiriyya, Zib, Bassa, Kabri, Umm al‐Faraj and Nahr were subjected to an upgraded, crueler version of the ‘destroy‐and‐expel’ drill of the [Zionist] units: ‘Our mission: to attack for the sake of occupation […] to kill the men, destroy and set fire to Kabri, Umm al‐Faraj and Nahr.’²³
Alexander Dallin’s German Rule in Russia, 1941–1945: A Study of Occupation Policies, page 210:
Indeed, the operations waged against the partisans were distinguished by startling brutality. Whole villages suspected of harbouring sympathizers were burned down; in other instances, the entire male population was evacuated by the [Axis]. The evidence suggests that civilians, often entirely unconnected with the partisans, were more frequently the victims of [Axis] raids than were the fast‐moving and well‐concealed bands.³
The Axis was rarely considerate towards ‘enemy’ women and children. Neither are the Zionists today, of course, but Herzlian misogyny and child abuse also predate the 21st century. (Possibly NSFL.)
Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, pages 90, 184 & 196:
As they burst into the village, the [Zionist] soldiers sprayed the houses with machine‐gun fire, killing many of the inhabitants. The remaining villagers were then gathered in one place and murdered in cold blood, their bodies abused while a number of the women were raped and then killed.⁶ […] Survivors recall how four women and a girl were raped in front of the other villagers and how one pregnant woman was bayoneted.⁴ […] The [Zionist] soldiers who took part in the massacre also reported horrific scenes: babies whose skulls were cracked open, women raped or burned alive in houses, and men stabbed to death.
Edward B. Westermann’s Drunk on Genocide, pages 94, 104 & 165:
[O]ne Ukrainian woman also remembered how the [Axis] had spared a number of beautiful Jewish girls for sexual bondage, but “when the girls got pregnant, they were killed.”.⁴⁰ […] SS men at Majdanek, after impregnating female prisoners, sent them to the crematorium.¹⁰⁹ The murder of women who were impregnated by their tormentors reflected the perpetrators’ view of the victims as disposable objects of desire in which sexual violence was merely an intermediary step to murder. […] Kurzem recalled the shooting of the adults, but noted, “They didn’t waste their bullets on babies or children; they simply used the bayonet.”
When the inhabitants were gone and a spot was ready for settling, it was time to give it a new name. (Likewise for the uninhabited spots.) The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, pages 225–6:
Here, dispossession was accompanied by the renaming of the places it had seized, destroyed and now recreated. This mission was accomplished with the help of archaeologists and biblical experts who volunteered to serve on an official Naming Committee whose job it was to Hebraize Palestine’s geography.
So for example, Beersheba became Be’er‐Sheva, Naqab became Negev, Shaykh Muwannis became Sheikh Munis, and so on. This process was known as Hebraization, which helped obscure something’s recent history. The Fascists took similar efforts, known as either Germanization or Italianization depending on the empire, and more were to be underway. In the words of Prof. Shelley Baranowski, ‘Renamed cities, villages, and streets would erase all memory of the Slavic desecration of Germanness.’ Quoting German Rule in Russia, 1941–1945: A Study of Occupation Policies, pages 185 & 254:
Novgorod, the old Hanseatic outpost in Russia, was to be renamed Holmgard, just as Estonia would perhaps become Peipusland and Latvia would be renamed Dünaland (Dvinaland) when the German settlement there got under way.⁴ […] Crimea, which, in view of its alleged Gothic heritage, was to be renamed Gotenland.
Likewise, Łódź became Litzmannstadt, Poznań became Posen, Pastuchów became Puschkau, and so forth. While obviously not one of the worst aspects of colonial rule, the implications should be disturbing: it correlates with attempts to erase people from history.
Turning now towards the moderner oppression, we see that Gazans have been concentrated into what looks and feels like a decrepit ghetto. Lurkers should remember the thread that I posted about the Warsaw Ghetto, which shared many of the same difficulties as Gaza now: want of food, lack of electricity, want of potable water, deficient sanitation, want of medicine, and even oppressors directly killing inhabitants, but it served as a good source of cheap labor for the ruling classes. Although I did not explicitly compare the Warsaw Ghetto and Gaza, that was only because I trusted that the similarities were so obvious that commenting on them would have been unnecessary.
The neocolony does not keep all of its Palestinians trapped in a dilapidated strip, though: it keeps hundreds of Palestinians in literal prisons without trial for long periods as well:
Administrative detention allows for a detainee to be sentenced for up to six‐month renewable intervals based on undisclosed evidence. The practice is used almost exclusively against Palestinians.
A similar phenomenon was present in the Third Reich. Nikolaus Wachsmann, Hitler’s Prisons: Legal Terror in Nazi Germany, page 166:
At a meeting of the cabinet, the Decree for the Protection of People and State (Reichstag Fire Decree) was passed. This decree — the ‘constitutional charter of the Third Reich’, according to Ernst Fraenkel — suspended guarantees of personal liberty and served as the basis for the police arrest and incarceration of political opponents without trial, the euphemistically named ‘protective custody’ (Schutzhaft). Within days, up to 1,000 persons had been arrested by the police in Berlin alone.³ Over the next months, many tens of thousands more political opponents were arrested, both Communists and other members of the organised working class.
It is true that the neocolonists do not always express their hatred for Palestinians in unambiguously racial terms—many of them prefers dysphemisms like ‘Hamas’, ‘terrorists’, and the like—but neither was that always the case for the Fascists:
Planck began his intercession on behalf of Haber, even going so far as to say that without the latter’s chemical process for obtaining ammonia from the nitrogen of the air “the previous war would have been lost from the beginning.” To this remark Hitler retorted: “I have nothing at all against the Jews themselves. But the Jews are all Communists, and these are my enemies — it is against these that I am fighting.”¹
To justify further destruction of Palestine, the Zionists needed a pretext. They claim that Hamas massacred all of the Jewish victims of October 7, but evidence has emerged that the IDF massacred at least some of these victims and blamed this on Hamas. Likewise, in order to justify the Fascist invasion of Poland, the Third Reich needed its own pretext. The German Newsreel in 1939 showed scenes of destruction and said this:
Savage Polish terrorists attack defenseless ethnic Germans! Even now these intolerable provocations encroach on the territory of the Reich.
The Fascists claimed that the Poles were terrorizing ethnic Germans near the border, but in actuality the Fascists theirselves staged twenty‐one of these attacks.
As well, my thread on the Third Reich deliberately destroying hospitals was something that I timed shortly after the news of the neocolony bombing hospitals in Gaza. Mentioning Palestine or specifically Gaza would have been kicking at an open door. On the other hand, I was a little more explicit when I told you that the ‘neocolonists’ disparagement of the Palestinians as ‘human animals’ unconsciously(?) echoes Heinrich Himmler’s reference to thousands of Slavic prisoners as ‘human animals’.’ It surprised me that nobody in the mainstream mentioned it, so it had to be said.
Needless to say, I am neither the first nor shall I be the last person to liken the neocolony to the Third Reich. If I did anything new, it was simply expressing the analogy in a much more formal manner, but generally speaking such comparisons have been around for a long time. As early as 1948, for example, the moderate Zionist Yosef Nahmani, director of the ‘Jewish National Fund’ office in the eastern Galilee, recorded in his diary:
In Saliha, where a white flag had been raised, […] they had killed about sixty‐seventy men and women. Where did they come by such a measure of cruelty, like Nazis? […] Is there no more humane way of expelling the inhabitants than such methods?
From Joseph Massad’s Palestinians and Jewish History: Recognition or Submission?, page 57:
In the context of [the neocolonial] massacres of Palestinians in 1948, a number of [Herzlian] ministers referred to the actions of [Herzlian] soldiers as “Nazi actions,” prompting Benny Marshak, the education officer of the Palmach, to ask them to stop using the term. […] Similar language was used after the [IOF] gunned down forty‐seven […] Palestinian men, women, and children at Kafr Qasim in 1956. While most [Hebrew] newspapers at the time played down the massacre, a rabbi wrote that “we must demand of the entire nation a sense of shame and humiliation […] that soon we will be like Nazis and the perpetrators of pogroms.”³⁷
Amos Goldberg and Bashir Bashir in The Holocaust and the Nakba, pages 9 & 11:
A case in point is Golda Meir (Meyerson), who was in fact one of the more hawkish leaders of the Yishuv. On May 6, 1948, following a visit to Arab Haifa only a few days after its conquest and the flight and expulsion of the city’s Arab population, Meir reported to the Jewish Agency Executive that “there were houses where the coffee and pita bread were left on the table, and I could not avoid [thinking] that this, indeed, had been the picture in many Jewish towns [i.e., in Europe during World War II].”⁴²
Within Mapam—a left‐[leaning] Zionist party that was part of the state’s first government headed by David Ben Gurion—the expulsion of Palestinians was the subject of intense debate. For example, Eliezer Pra’i (later Peri), editor of the Mapam daily al‐Hamishmar, wrote: “Among the best of our comrades the thought has crept in that perhaps it is possible politically to achieve our ingathering in the Land of Israel by Hitlerite‐Nazi means.”⁴³
Following the atrocities committed during Operation Hiram by the [neocolonial] army (IDF) who conquered the central‐upper Galilee pocket, the [neocolonial régime] established a three‐person investigation committee. At a cabinet meeting on November 17, 1948, convinced that the army and defense establishment were being evasive, Mapam representative Aharon Cisling stated: “I couldn’t sleep all night. […] This is something that determines the character of the nation. […] Jews too have committed Nazi acts.”⁴⁴
[…]
In “Pesah ʻAl Kukhim,” Yeshurun implicitly but unequivocally linked the destruction of European Jewry to the destruction of the Arabs of Palestine. The poem sparked considerable controversy, and in 1958 he published another poem that explained his position.
The second poem, “Hanmakah” (“Reasoning”), includes the following lines: “The Holocaust of the Jews of Europe and the Holocaust of the Arabs of the Land of Israel are one Holocaust of the Jewish People. Both look [one] straight in the face. These are my words.” No more powerful words have ever been written in Hebrew on this subject.
Professor Yeshayahu Leibowitz in 1982:
[T]he State of Israel represents the backwardness of a State body in which there is a monster who exercises the functions of president of the Supreme Court, only to say that the use of torture is permitted when it is necessary in the interest of the State. That shows that a Nazi-like mentality, because it is a Nazi mentality, also exists in our country. That is a fact. Admittedly you can find it anywhere. No human group is safe from such a character. But the fact is that in [our] legal system, neither the judges, nor the lawyers, challenged this man. That says a great deal about the Nazi mentality that is dominant here.
[…]
Torture! We use it by virtue of the authorisation given by the monster who, only three years ago, was president of the Supreme Court of the State of Israel. Someone who, in practice, is more important than the President or the Prime Minister and who deliberately legalised the use of torture in order to make Arab prisoners talk. That is what I mean by Judeo-Nazi. […] In other words, there are Judeo-Nazis. Judeo-Nazis exist.
Uri Misgav’s The Judeo-Nazis in Israel’s Legislature:
A Judeo-Nazi movement exists on the margins of Israeli society. […] Netanyahu has a coalition of 61 Knesset members. Smotrich’s vote keeps it alive. He was also appointed a deputy Knesset speaker and runs some of its sessions. The Judeo-Nazi faction sustains the government of Israel and serves as a deputy head of its parliament. It would be interesting to see what we would have said if this had happened in a different civilized country, shall we say Germany.
A young neocolonial soldier admitted the following in 1987:
“The border guards usually enjoy beating the Arabs,” the account continues. "They derive pleasure from it…
"Sometimes I feel like a Nazi when I watch my friends in action. I try hard to stay away from one of my commanders … He always behaves very badly toward the locals: with violence, beatings, and the like…
Haganah veteran Josef Ben‐Eliezer was more implicit, stating:
Suddenly I saw those masses of people going through the checkpoints, which we were commanded to man. And they were searched — searched for valuables. That reminded me very much of the time when I was a child. We’re starting to do the same thing [that other] people have done to us as Jews.
Two Jewish historians of fascism have expressed their comparisons thus:
Professor Zeev Sternhell is emeritus head of the department of political science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and one of the world’s leading experts on fascism.⁷ In an article published [in 2018], he referred to statements made by two senior [Herzlian] politicians, members of the ruling coalition, Bezalel Smotrich (deputy speaker of the Knesset, [the neocolonial] parliament) and Miki Zohar (chair of one of the Knesset’s most important committees).
These statements, Sternhell writes, “should be widely disseminated on all media outlets in [here] and throughout the Jewish world. In both of them we see not just a growing Israeli fascism but racism akin to Nazism in its early stages.”⁸
This shocking comparison with Nazism is endorsed by Daniel Blatman, professor of history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, whose book The Death Marches: The Final Phase of Nazi Genocide won him in 2011 the Yad Vashem International Book Prize for Holocaust Research. In an article published [in 2017] he commented: “Deputy Speaker Bezalel Smotrich’s admiration for the biblical genocidaire Joshua bin Nun leads him to adopt values that resemble those of the German SS.”⁹
Blatman returned to this topic in a more recent article:
Deputy Knesset Speaker MK Bezalel Smotrich […] presented his phased plan, according to which the Palestinians in the occupied territories (and possibly Israeli citizens, too) would become, in the best case, subjects without rights with a status that reminds us of German Jews after the passage of the Nuremberg Laws in 1935. To the extent that they do not agree to the plan, they will simply be cleansed from here. If they refuse to leave, they will be uprooted violently, which would lead to genocide.
Another elected official from the ruling coalition, Likud’s Miki Zohar, did not hesitate to state that the Arabs have a problem that has no solution — they are not Jews and therefore their fate in this land cannot be the same as that of the Jews. […] Prof. Zeev Sternhell wrote in this paper […] that this racism is “akin to Nazism in its early stages.” I think it is Nazism in every way and fashion, even if comes from the school of the victims of historical Nazism.
Throughout Jewish Critics of Zionim: A Testament Essay, Moshe Menuhin (alav hashalom) denounces the ‘Zionist National-Socialist Israel Nation-State’ and the ‘national-socialist expansionist ambitions of a Greater Eretz Israel empire’, warning us of the ‘Leading Führers of Zionist Israel’, their ‘Nazistic statement[s]’ and ‘the Nazistic deeds of Zionist Israel’, to name only a few examples from his polemic.
Less formally, in videos of the neocolonial police raiding Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods, it is common for the victims to yell ‘Nazi!’ at their oppressors. Jews United Against Zionism even goes so far as to declare that ‘Zionism is Nazism. The Zionist state of Israel is today’s Nazi state. Zionists are today’s Nazis.’ (I would not go quite that far, but I respect their opinion.)
Possibly the most powerful comparisons, however, come from Shoah survivors theirselves:
Sometime after [1956] I heard a news item about [Zionists] herding Palestinians into settlement camps. I just could not believe this. Weren’t the [Zionists] also Jews? Hadn’t we — they — just survived the greatest pogrom of our history? Weren’t [concentration] camps — often euphemistically called ‘settlement camps’ by the [Axis] — the main feature of this pogrom? How could Jews in any measure do unto others what had been done to them? How could these […] Jews oppress and imprison other people?
In my romantic imagination, the Jews [occupying Palestine] were socialists and people who knew right from wrong. This was clearly incorrect. I felt let down, as if I was being robbed of a part of what I had thought was my heritage.
Similarly, from Hadar Morag’s grandmother:
When my grandmother arrived here, after the Holocaust, the Jewish Agency promised her a house. She had nothing, her entire family was exterminated. She waited for a long time in a tent, in an extremely precarious situation. They then took her to Ajami, in Jaffa, in a beautiful beach house. She saw that on the table there were still the dishes of the Arabs who lived there and who had been kicked away.
So she went back to the agency and said, take me back to the tent, I will never do to anyone else what was done to me. This is my legacy, but not everyone made that choice. How could we have become what we opposed? That’s the big question.
Yeah, I think [that] it’s all planned and again, I’m sad to say, there are parallels to what the [Third Reich] did. The [Fascists] were very conscious of—if they didn’t have to waste a bullet on some Jews or communists—you can’t forget the communists, you can’t forget the Bolsheviks—the [Fascist] plan was, if you could starve them, that’s fine, or diseases. And the [neocolonists] are very conscious of that [too] and they’re proud, you know, they brag about all that stuff.
Helen Jabareen, a Jew (later a Judeo‐Muslim) who was born in Auschwitz, was very straightforward:
Netanyahu wants to be like Hitler exactly. Netanyahu is like Hitler. He wants to kill Arabs and Jews. There, in [the Third Reich, the Fascists] killed us because were Jews. Now, here, they want to persecute us because we are Palestinians. So, we are persecuted anyway.
[The late Hajo] Meyer liken[ed] the experience of the Palestinians to that of Eastern European Jews during the Holocaust, “in that they are very often held up at checkpoints, or they are not allowed to move from one place to another.” To Meyer, [the neocolony’s] mentality b[ore] comparison to [German Fascism]; he believe[d] [that the neocolony] has “given up everything that has to do with humanity, with empathy, for one thing: the state. The ‘blood and soil,’ just like the [German Fascists]. I learned in school about blood and soil, and that’s exactly their idea, too.”
[…]
Weiss sees both differences and similarities between Nazism and [Zionist] policies: “The tragedy of Palestine is, of course, different from the Holocaust. [Zionism] has no gas chambers. Its government does not strive to kill all the Palestinians. [Its] intention is, instead, to take the Palestinians’ homeland and property and to deprive them of civil and human rights.”
But, Weiss says, “Like the [German Fascists], the [neocolony] enforces collective punishment. It aims to kill enough Palestinians, to punish them sufficiently, drive them out of their homeland, so they will disappear as a people. [The neocolony] seeks to remove Palestine from the world’s family of nations. That too is a form of genocide… Every case of oppression is unique, but the struggle for justice is indivisible. As we then fought for freedom for European Jews, we now call for freedom for the Palestinians… For me, as a survivor of the Holocaust, the tragic situation in Gaza awakens memories of what I and my family experienced under Hitler — the ghetto walls, the killings, the systematic starvation and deprivation, the daily humiliations.”
While the neocolony may not be using gas chambers, the Third Reich was happy to use bombardments, too. From Karen Sutton’s The Massacre of the Jews of Lithuania:
Thus, approximately 8,000 of the 23,000 Jews who attempted to evade the [Axis] by crossing into the Soviet Union were killed along the way. Most perished in [Axis] bombardments but quite a few were killed by Lithuanian partisans.¹⁰
(Emphasis added in all cases.)
These are not trivial similarities, like both flags having the color white in them. These are atrocities; severe inhibitions on innocents’ liberties. That is why many reasonable people find these comparisons fair. In cases like the renamings and the ethnonational philosophy, the similarities still correlate with the atrocities, so they cannot be overlooked.
As for the numerous links between Zionism and German Fascism, those are not strictly speaking similarities, but they are still important, which is why I am mentioning them here.
Zionism is not a ‘Jewish’ ideology. It is a European one. It always has been and it always shall be. We therefore cannot possibly hope to understand Zionism by looking into Jewish behavior, but rather into European colonialism, because many of the atrocities that I have shown here can be found not only in Zionism and Fascism but also in British imperialism, Dutch imperialism, French imperialism, Iberian imperialism, and more. Together with Fascism, Zionism is simply another episode in the long continuity of European colonialism across the world.
Click here for events that happened today (November 8).
1885: Tomoyuki Yamashita, Axis general and war criminal, existed.
1918: Kazuo Sakamaki, Imperial America’s first Japanese POW, started his life.
1923: In Munich, Adolf Schicklgruber lead his fellow Fascists in an unsuccessful attempt to overthrow the Weimar Republic.
1936: Francoist troops failed to capture Madrid but commenced their three‐year Siege of Madrid afterwards.
1937: The Fascist exhibition Der ewige Jude (‘The Eternal Jew’) opened in Munich.
1939: While celebrating the Beer Hall Putsch’s 16th anniversary in Munich, Adolf Schicklgruber narrowly escaped Georg Elser’s homicide attempt, and the Reich captured two British agents of SIS.
1940: The Fascist invasion of Greece failed as outnumbered Greek units repulsed the Fascists in the Battle of Elaia–Kalamas.
1942: As Axis defenses in Egypt fell back to Sidi Barrani, Allied forces successfully assaulted the Axis forces at the Algerian ports of Oran and Algiers during Operation Torch; Algiers surrendered at 1800 hours and the Axis lost a Martin 167 bomber over the Mers‐el‐Kébir harbour in Algeria, but two former U.S. Coast Guard cutters renamed HMS Walney and HMS Hartland, each carrying two hundred Yankee infantry, entered Oran, Algeria with the intention of denying the harbour facilities to the Vichy French only to both come under intense crossfire from Axis warships and subsequently sinking. Additionally, the Imperial Japanese Army formally took command of the Davao Penal Colony in southern Philippines, and the Axis transferred many of its Luftflotte 4 units from Stalingrad to North Africa. The Axis also transferred twenty‐five of its Jewish professional watchmakers from the Majdanek Concentration Camp to the Auschwitz Concentration Camp.
1944: Walter Nowotny, Axis fighter ace, was killed in action.
1945: Anton Ludwig Friedrich August Mackensen, Prussian state councillor and monarchofascist, perished.
1949: Cyriel Verschaeve, Axis collaborator and Flemish ultranationalist, died.
2014: Luigi Gorrini, Axis fighter pilot, expired.