Calling Israelis Nazis has become so common that people now think it something to be seriously considered. According to these new antisemites, Jews are supposed to remain forever victims, and the fact that they are now accused of victimizing another people justifies equating the Jews with Nazis.
Of course, to begin with, reducing every human conflict to victims and victimizers is a Marxist discourse transforms every victor into a villain, and every rebel into a hero. The victim/victimizer division assumes that in every case, the victim is guiltless, and the victimizer is a criminal. It’s a simplistic and artificial dichotomy, but one that’s been used effectively to portray Israel as the very worst type of villain for daring to defeat and suppress her sworn enemies.
What’s antisemitic about it all is that these same voices are rarely, if ever, heard condemning China or Morocco as “Nazi” states. Or how about Great Britain? Does anyone consider it a “Nazi” state for, with the help of the Americans, reducing Germany to rubble and then occupying it?
The fact that Israel alone is so condemned is a warning that those who today are drawing a comparison between sovereign Jews and the Nazis are laying the mental groundwork for another Holocaust.
Comparing Jews to Nazis paves the moral road to reducing Israel to rubble, and for the very same reason Germany suffered such a fate. Placing Israel on the same moral level of Nazi Germany is so fictitious, outrageous, dangerous, that one finds it hard to even begin dispelling this evil notion.
Israelis can explain until they’re blue in the face that they are defending themselves against enemies dedicated to Israel’s destruction, and not arbitrarily launching military action against innocent victims. They can point out that the very notion of a genocide against the Palestinians is ludicrous given that there are more Palestinians living today than ever before in their brief, ad-hoc history. (By comparison, the Jews, who endured an actual genocide, still haven’t reached their pre-World War II numbers.) Israelis can explain all this, but all they’ll get in return is a condescending antisemitic shrug.
The vile moral equivalence between Israel and the Nazis has reminded me of a long-forgotten funeral that took place in Romania in January 1946. In the above picture are hundreds of Jews following two coffins to be buried in the Jewish cemetery. But the coffins didn’t contain bodies. Rather, they contained bars of soap made from the fat of Jewish victims of the death camps.
Similarly, several years later, the Pardess Hanna municipality in northern Israel issued the following laconic announcement that “due to a funeral for soap made from Jewish carcasses, the office will be closed from 3:30 till 4:30.”
This is the real Nazi legacy, which is not a cheap soap opera played by cynical actors, but rather horror beyond belief. That’s what the new antisemites are accusing Israel of.
