Recently I posted an article from the liberal Israeli newspaper Haaretz about an Israeli citizen who was strip searched at the airport in Tel Aviv. She is an Arab Christian school teacher. Read the article here.
I wrote: “Every Jewish citizen of Israel should be alarmed and ashamed that this type of action is happening to your Christian and Muslim neighbors. Israel is morphing into Nazi Germany.”
I knew my comment was provocative, it was meant to be. I want people to wake up! But rather than challenge my comment as true or false, a friend chastised me for making the comparison at all. “To compare Israel the jewish homeland to a country and ideology that was bent on destroying jews wholesale is something to be ashamed of.”
My friend’s response, I believe, is an example of cognitive dissonance. I’m not a psychologist and so I welcome any correction or clarification by a professional. However, when information is so contrary to the reality in which we live that we can’t absorb it without extreme discomfort, that is cognitive dissonance. We reject the information outright.
In this comparison between Nazi Germany and Israel today, people who glorify Israel as a homeland for the Jews, knowing that the Jews were victims of the horrific Holocaust in Germany, might not be able to wrap their minds around the idea that the Israeli government could perpetrate the same horrific crimes against another.
This poignant poem about the Holocaust helps make my point.
Never again we swore that day,
In that country so far away.
Never again would the ground be dyed red
With the blood of those so recently dead.
Never again would fires light the night sky
As days, weeks, months flew unheeded by.
Never again would a people cry out
So abused and so hated their own worth they did doubt
Never again will people die
While others watching stand idly by.
(The full poem is Never Again, A Poem of the Holocaust)
This poem stabs my gut every time I read it. So simple, so real. To be sure, there are no gas chambers in Israel but the comparison is still apt.
Read the poem twice. In the first instance, think about the 6 million Jews who were sent to their deaths in gas chambers in Nazi Germany. Breathe deeply! Feel the pain of the survivors! Imagine the guilt of the observers who did nothing until it was too late.
Now, read the poem a second time – slowly. Think about the 1.8 million Palestinians trapped in the Gaza Strip, prohibited from leaving, dependent on Israel for nearly everything (food, electricity, their livelihoods, everything)!! Think about the UN’s warning that Gaza will be unlivable by 2020. Think about Israel’s Operation Cast Lead that killed approximately 1,400 Palestinians in 22 days, most of them civilians and more than 300 children. Think about the children in Gaza routinely killed by Israeli soldiers. Yes, routinely. As the international community watches in silence.
Hala Ahmad Salman Abu Sabikha, 2, was killed in her yard when an Israeli tank targeted her home in Al-Mughazi refugee camp, central Gaza, on December 24, 2013. Israeli soldiers shot Adnan Abu Khater, 16, in the leg with live ammunition on January 2, 2014, and he died the following day. Mohammad Rafiq Shinbari, 17, was shot and wounded in the leg with live ammunition on December 15.
Tragically, I could go on and on.
The only difference between Nazi Germany and present-day Israel in my view — there are no gas chambers in Israel, and the killing has been occurring over a span of decades in Palestine. In many other respects, the two are nauseatingly similar.
- Both brutally subjugated (are subjugating) a group of people by singling them out and treating them as inferior human beings.
- Both prevented (are preventing) freedom of movement for the group of people they want to control.
- Both required (are requiring) a group of people to wear or hold special identification labeling them as a group to be treated differently from the rest of their citizens.
- Both had (have) judicial systems which treat the designated group of people differently from the rest of their citizens.
- Both used (are using) property rights to control and disenfranchise the designated group of people.
- Both passed (are passing) laws to legalize their inhumane treatment.
- Both killed (are killing) members of a group of people with impunity and were (are) not held accountable. The international community turned (is turning) a blind eye to the suffering of the victims.
- Both used (are using) disproportionate force and violence against peaceful protesters.
I think there are more comparisons to draw, but you get my drift.
I welcome responses to my comparison between Nazi Germany and present-day Israel, but not verbal attacks or disparaging remarks. Everyone who loves Israel as the homeland for the Jews should be concerned and awake to the harsh realities of what’s going on today.
Never again will people die
While others watching stand idly by.
Journalists were not allowed into Gaza during Operation Cast Lead but many journalists and Israeli citizens sat on the hill outside of the Gaza Strip and watched.
لماذا غزة؟ Why Gaza? 
Reblogged this on circusbuoy.
You are speaking truth to ears that don’t want to hear, but they will, they will eventually. Keep it up.
Joseph Anderson from Berkeley, CA continues:
For more postings about this, see:
http://nyc.indymedia.org/en/2008/03/95267.html
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I wrote about the obvious parallels of Zionism with Nazism way back in early 2008. Indeed, the parallels are obvious — except that the world has been condition to not hold Zionist Jews to the same moral judgment standards that we hold the Nazis. I will indeed use the same standards. I never understood why Zionist Jews get a moral pass just because they’re Jewish! I know at least one icon (actually two, “political analysts” Chomsky & Finkelstein, as well as other left Zionists) who will never discern any such parallels — at all. In fact, Israel itself made that comparison directly when it once admitted that it studied Nazi anti-Jewish ghetto warfare methods to use against the Palestinians!
In fact, Israeli Zionist Jews have done everything the Nazis have done just short of gas extermination — and plenty of Jews in Israel have even said that they want to do just that!: “Gas the Arabs!” (Especially if they could get away with even that in terms of most white Western world opinion.) I’ve seen protest signs in Spain about Israel that said, “They learned from the Nazis!” I will never agree that the comparison can’t be openly made — when the NAtionalist ZIonist regime has behaved in much the same way, with much the same goals from the very start! Just like I have never acceded that Zionism is not racism! And I believe that Israel has gotten away with so much because the comparison hasn’t been commonly made: exactly because people have overwhelmingly been silent about this. History repeating itself.
Einstein made the comparison:
“It would be my greatest sadness to see Jews do to Palestine’s Arabs much of what Nazis did to Jews.” – Albert Einstein
And, as I’ve pointed out in the past, at least in the U.S. it once use to be considered “anti-Semitic”, even into the 1990’s, to even say that a Jew could be racist. (This, while plenty of my Jewish friends and acquaintances told me about Jewish racists — even against non-European Jews!)
The whole point of the Nuremberg trials and of Hannah Arendt’s “the banality of evil” is that the evils of the holocaust — which wasn’t just a holocaust for Jews, we are hardly ever told — is that, under the ‘right’ conditions, such evil is hardly the monopoly of the Nazis, and that all too many people and nations are and were capable of, and even a passion for, such gross “banalities” while claiming to be morally superior!
As you may recall, Einstein, Arendt, and other Jewish signatories, wrote a letter, published in the New York Times (in 1948?), saying that Menachem Begin (then a would-be future prime minister of “the land without a people”) shouldn’t even be allowed into the U.S. because he was a violent racist and a fascist! And compared him and his party to the Nazis!
http://socioecohistory.wordpress.com/2013/05/16/albert-einstein-letter-to-the-new-york-times-december-4-1948-protesting-against-zionist-terrorist-leader-menachem-begin-and-the-genocide-of-palestinians/
African Americans under U.S. slavery, or the Vietnamese, during the U.S. Vietnam war, certainly suffered under a gruesome ‘Nazi’ evil, as well as many of the right-wing dictatorships the U.S. has politically and economically supported in history. The U.S. military program of Native American extermination — purposely even of Native cultures themselves — was being wrapped up in the 1920’s, and replaced by a continuing bureaucratic program, even as the Nazi party was rising to power!
Joseph Anderson
Berkeley, California, U.S.
Joseph Anderson from Berkeley, CA wrote in 2008:
nyc.indymedia.org/en/2008/03/95267.html
20 parallels of Zionism with Nazism:
1) both based on supposed purity of blood.
2) both based on supposedly reuniting some religioethnic diaspora under one expansive state.
3) both attempting to revive some supposedly “glorious ancient kingdom” — a “glorious ancient Teutonic kingdom” for the NAZIs; a “glorious ancient Judaic kingdom” for the Nationalist Zionists.
4) both established a state that was culturally, legally, economically and religiously based to exclusively benefit one ethnic/racial group.
5) both based on violent racist exclusion and a highly intricate complex of racial exclusion laws (like Israel’s racial ‘Nuremberg laws’).
6) both based on creating a founding mythology — like, for Zionist Jews, “a land without a people”
7) both invented their own race: Aryans, by the NAZIs; Jews, constructed as a unique/genetic race, by the Nationalist Zionists.
8) both based on eliminating some other unwanted and supposedly inferior races — ethnic cleansing — and, in the case of Zionism, removing those unwanted people who supposedly didn’t exist.
9) both engaged in collective punishment and widespread torture (even inventing new sadistic torture methods),
10) both engaged in the mass imprisonment — without trials — of unwanted populations/races.
11) both enclosed unwanted races in walled-in ghettos and concentration camps — only the Nationalist Zionists made the walls many times higher and the concentration camps many times larger (like Gaza, in effect the world’s largest open-air prison/concentration camp).
12) both tried out new weapons on civilian populations (and Israel has engaged in the internationally illegal use of anti-personal weapons of mass destruction, like the widespread use of cluster bombs, on civilian populations).
13) both sought to erase existing countries — like the Nazis wanting to wipe Poland off the map and parts of other countries; the Nationialist Zionists wanting to wipe Palestine off the map and parts of other countries.
14) both used pseudo-archeology to claim that it had exclusive right to the land.
15) the Nazis obsessed about “too many Jews” in Germany; Nationalist Zionists/Israel obsesses about “too many Palestinians” and the re-emergence of a Palestinian majority in historic Palestine (once an overwhelmingly Arab land).
16) both were violently and militarily expansionist. [The Nazis called this “lebensraum”: Israel has always sought the same.]
17) both engaged in blitzkrieg fighter aircraft and tank warfare against civilian populations and civilian targets.
18) Nationalist Zionist Israeli Jews even studied the original NAZI methods for urban warfare and clearing Palestinians out of their ghettos. Exclaimed one Israeli commander, “Let’s be Judeo-Nazis!” (Reference: http://www.seruv.org.il — the website for Israeli Refuseniks in the “Occupied Territories”; see “Letter to American Jews”; “The Nazification of Israel” — both online.)
19) both claimed to be based on “God’s will”.
20) and, finally (for Israel’s ‘final solution’), most recently (Feb 29, 2008), Israeli deputy defence minister threatens a “Holocaust” for the Palestinians.
good job lora. I once wrote a poem about something similar