THE ISRAEL=NAZI SLANDER

The Israel-Nazi Slander in Historical Context
The historian Yaacov Shavit once argued that the main question to be debated within Jewry in the wake of the Holocaust was whether “Nazism [was] an inherent feature of the European essence or was it a diverted characteristic, an historical accident?” It is one of the great historical and intellectual perversions of our times that many westerners are now asking the same question about Israel and Zionism as Jews asked about Europe.

From polls in Germany in which 51% of respondents expressed the view that Israel’s current treatment of Palestinians is similar to that meted out to the Jews by the Nazis, to posters in Paris reading “Hitler has a son — Sharon”; from information signs in the Spanish town of Oleiros, flashing “Let’s stop the animal!!! Sharon the assassin, stop the neo-Nazis”, to banners in a Dublin march demanding an end to the Palestinian holocaust and equating the Star of David with the Nazi swastika. Wherever we look we are being bombarded by attacks on Israeli “storm troopers” pursuing “SS tactics” and engaged in “Blitzkrieg” operations.

But Israeli actions in the Occupied Territories have no relation to the horrors carried out by Germany during the Nazi occupation of Europe and there is absolutely no moral equivalence between Hitler’s industrial slaughter of the Jews and Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians.

If you doubt this ask yourself the following questions: would it have been possible for Jewish schools in German-occupied Holland, Poland, Hungary and numerous other countries, to indoctrinate their students with the most outlandish anti-German propaganda and incitement?

Would these same school children fresh from their brainwashing classes have been free to enroll, in the glare of the world’s media, in summer camps dedicated to training a new generation of anti-German guerillas? Would their religious and secular leaders have been able to go on their own TV channels and call their occupiers the “sons of monkeys” with impunity?

Of course not — the Jews under Nazi rule were too busy trying (in most cases unsuccessfully) to escape being bundled on trains and shipped to the gas chambers. Yet all this, and much more, is standard practice among Palestinians in areas controlled by the PA.