Pick your Nazi.
A terrible slur often made by Palestinians against Israelis, but does the cap fit more accurately the other way?
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This is a guest essay written by John Matthews, a journalist and author of 24 books.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
According to “Godwin’s Law,” as a discussion on the internet grows longer, the likelihood of a person being compared to Hitler or another Nazi, increases.
In the case of Israel-Palestine debates, many might find that accusation levelled against Israel from the outset, before the debate has even gained momentum.
Comparisons are made regularly between Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians and the way Jews were treated in Nazi Germany, with sometimes this verging into extreme hyperbole, with the Palestinian Authority’s Mohammed Abbas claiming not long ago that Israel was guilty of “50 holocausts” against the Palestinians. There was even a denigrating term coined a couple of decades ago which combined the two: Zionazi.
Of course, that becomes the ultimate insult, comparing Zionists to their past tormentors and executioners, and no doubt the main reason the derogatory term was coined. But is there any substance or reality to it?
On the surface, when you see soldiers with rifles at checkpoints and with Israel being a far stronger, more controlling force than the Palestinians, it could be given some substance. But when you look at all the other necessary components — ghettos, work/area restrictions, calls for mass extinction, and death camps — we see a different picture.
Indeed, there have never been calls from Israelis or Jews for the killing or mass extermination of Palestinians. Whereas on the other side, this is called for regularly by Palestinian extremists against Jews-Israelis. October 7th was just a physical representation of what the Hamas charter has called for all along:
“Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it… The Day of Judgment will not come about until Moslems fight Jews and kill them.”
And where mass-killing isn’t called for, certainly mass-expulsion is, with even the more moderate Abbas proclaiming that the final borders between Israel and Palestine “will not be drawn until every Jew is the other side of it.” Many Palestinians in fact take that a stage further by insisting that the whole area should be “Jew-free” including current-day Israel, thus the “From the River to the Sea” banners and chants.
Even initiatives like BDS uncomfortably reflect the early days of Nazism in Germany, whereby Jews were restricted from certain trade practices or areas. And other Palestinian restrictions against Israelis also ride alongside that: selling land to an Israeli can garner a death penalty, as can fraternizing with and accepting Israelis in certain circumstances, under the umbrella of “normalization.”
In fact, up until the Abraham Accords, restrictions against Israelis stretched also into much of the Arab world, with Israeli passport holders unable to travel to most Muslim nations. Still to this day, Israel passport holders cannot travel to Pakistan.
So, the general practices of Nazism are reflected far more from the Palestinians to Israelis/Zionists than the reverse. But the roots of this in fact go back a while, indeed to even before the 1947/1948 UN Partition Plan for Mandatory Palestine and the relationship between Hitler and the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husseini, seen by many as the first jihadist firebrand of the region.
Exiled from the area by the British for his part in leading the Arab revolt of 1936-1939, Amin al-Husseini first took refuge in the Lebanon and Syria, before making his way to Italy and Nazi Germany. There was a well-documented meeting between Hitler and Amin al-Husseini in 1941 in which they discussed the issue of Jews seeking refuge in British-era Palestine.
Having already expressed his objection to Jewish immigration to Palestine to both Himmler and Eichmann, Amin al-Husseini managed to extract from Hitler a commitment to later continue his purge of Jews in Palestine. This was the first time that Hitler had made such a commitment beyond Europe, but this was seen as a form of diplomatic “gamesmanship.” Hitler wanted Arab support to defeat the British in the region, and this was the quid-pro-quo offered.
The late Philip Kerr in fact depicted in one of his Bernie Gunther books a scene set in Cairo between Amin al-Husseini and Eichmann, in which Amin al-Husseini had protested about the number of Jews travelling to Palestine, and he wanted the German Reich to put a stop to this emigration. “What do you propose we do with them?” Eichmann asked. “Burn them!” Amin al-Husseini offered.
While fiction and obviously therefore simplified and dramatized, some feel this was uncomfortably close to the truth. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu got himself in hot water a while ago for making a similar accusation against Amin al-Husseini, as if he was in part responsible for the Holocaust through this “fiery” urging of Eichmann and Hitler.
It’s easy to see why scholars might resist this suggestion. Hitler’s hatred of the Jews was so intense, with many of them already in camps, that he would have needed hardly any convincing to move towards their final extermination. And if he’d already made the future commitment to Amin al-Husseini to pursue and kill them on Palestinian soil, far easier to do so on German or Polish soil.
But certainly it can be seen that Amin al-Husseini’s resistance to Jews emigrating to Palestine-Israel was a factor, even from his own accounts. In June 1943 Amin al-Husseini recommended to the Hungarian minister that it would be better to send Jews in Hungary to concentration camps in Poland rather than let them find asylum in Palestine.
A year later, in 1944, he wrote to the Hungarian foreign minister to register his objection to the release of certificates for 900 Jewish children and 100 adults for transfer from Hungary, fearing they might end up in Palestine.
In September 1943, intense negotiations to rescue 500 Jewish children from the Arbe concentration camp collapsed due to the objection of Amin al-Husseini who blocked the children’s departure to Turkey because they would end up in Palestine. On which he wrote in his memoirs:
“We combatted this enterprise by writing to Ribbentrop, Himmler, and Hitler, and, thereafter, the governments of Italy, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey, and other countries. We succeeded in foiling this initiative, a circumstance that led the Jews to make terrible accusations against me…”
But Amin al-Husseini’s influence with the Arab League in 1947 also can’t be underestimated. There are many who consider that without his stirring up support and urging them to reject any and all UN resolutions “on behalf of the Zionists,” the Arab League might have been inclined to accept the UN Special Committee on Palestine’s plan for partition.
Given how Amin al-Husseini is such a controversial figure linked to Hitler and the Nazis, you would have thought today’s Palestinians would shy away from any connection to him. But instead they glorify him by naming an elementary school after him in El-Bireh in the West Bank. In Gaza there are even more blatant Nazi-connections, with a man’s clothing store, Hitler 2, with masked mannequins with “Stab” t-shirts brandishing knives.
Given this background, the indoctrination of children to hate Jews, incitement of teens to kill them, BDS, the Palestinian “pay-for-slay” policies, and aspirations for a “Jew-free” West Bank or indeed entire “River-to-Sea” territory — I’m not sure how Palestinians and their supporters manage to point the finger at Israelis and say, “They’re the Nazis!” with a straight face.
Aside from the presence of Israeli soldiers on the street and at checkpoints — defending Israelis against Palestinian terror attacks — the only other area where Palestinians and their supporters feel justified in using the term “Nazi” is from the IDF going into refugee camps “stormtrooper” fashion to root out and arrest terrorists.
But this is something not unique to Israeli forces. After the Bataclan attacks in Paris, French security forces launched a total of 168 raids in suspect terrorist neighbourhoods, ranging from Paris’s Goutte d’Or to Molenbeek in Brussels.
After 7/71, British armed response units made dozens of house raids between London and Leeds. And in the London Bridge and Borough market attacks, anti-terrorist police unleashed 50 rounds from semi-automatic weapons, killing all three terrorists.
But has it ever been suggested that the French or British armed police acted like Nazis?
No, that label is kept solely for Israel.
The 7/7 bombings were a series of four suicide attacks that took place in London on July 7, 2005. The bombings killed 52 people and injured over 700 others.
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Could you also please explain to the public that after the Jews had fought for religious freedom from the Romans for years, Rome finally sent their strongest military forces to Judea and expelled the Jews from their homeland ca 127 AD. Many of those Jews took refuge in Arab lands where they were welcomed and treated with kindness. But in the 1940’s all those Jews in Muslim Arab lands were expelled; and about 750,000 of those Jews then escaped to Palestine. That huge influx of Jews HORRIFIED THE SURROUNDING MUSLIM Countries, and to “balance” those increased numbers of Jews, the surrounding Arab countries PAID 800,000 Muslims to emigrate to Palestine. However, when those surrounding countries decided to “Push the Jews into the sea” they realized that those 800,000 Muslims would be in their way. So the surrounding Muslim Arab countries asked those 800,000 newcomers to please “just temporarily” go to Gaza, go to Lebanon, and go to the West Bank, and after the Jews would be pushed into the sea, they could then take over the whole country. No one expected Israel to win the War of Independence. But Israel did win. And that is why those paid newcomers (who call themselves “Palestinians” although they really came from every surrounding Muslim country) were then stuck in refugee camps in Lebanon, the West Bank and Gaza. Don’t blame the Jews for that! And those populations have no right to call themselves “Palestinians.” Around 2012, When I met a young female Muslim student at a local “Palestinian” protest, I asked her how long her family had lived in the land. She said “3 Generations!” So I said, “So around 70 years?” She nodded. I asked if her family had been among those who had been paid to move to The Land?”And she tossed her head and proudly said “YES! WE are KUWAITI!!” So it would be interesting to trace the lineage and heritage of all those newcomers with no links to the holy land at all.
And the only reason Muslims hate Jews (whom Mohammed had originally deeply respected) was that when Mohammed wanted to kill the king of Mecca and Medina so he could take over as the leader of those city-states, he asked the Jews there if they would support him in this endeavor. The Jews discussed the matter and got back to Mohammed explaining that for 500 years, they had been treated kindly by that line of kings, so they felt they could not betray him. Mohammed then came with warriors, killed the king and his family and also killed all the Jews there. And from then on, he spewed hatred on the Jews! How awful is that!