What the Jewish Left Doesn’t Need is Advice that It has No Responsibility for What Zionism and Israel Has Done In Their Name

 A Reply to Shaul Magid’s Argument for Jewish Indifference to Genocide and an Evasion of Responsibility

Shaul Magid is a rabbi, Visiting Professor of Modern Jewish Studies at Harvard Divinity School, and Distinguished Fellow in Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College. Magid is also an opponent of Jewish anti-Zionism which he argues is irrelevant. Jews opposed to Zionism should turn in on themselves and ignore what is happening in their name.

In his article What Does the Jewish Left Want?, which is reprinted by Jewish Voice for Liberation, Magid argues that the Jewish left should ‘no longer focus on opposition to a state that many in the Jewish Left no longer support.’ In my response below I explain that if it doesn’t focus primarily on Zionism and the Israeli state, then this Jewish left is not only not a genuine left but it has no real purpose.

Shaul Magid

At a time when US and Western Imperialism is using Jewish people as its human shield, its moral alibi for support of the genocide in Gaza, to pretend that solidarity with the Palestinians and opposition to Zionism should be deprioritised is to do exactly what the Zionists want us to do.

It is to argue that Jews should become the bystanders to the slaughter in Gaza. Raul Hilberg excoriated, in Perpetrators, Victims and Bystanders, the ‘dull awareness’ and passive indifference of those who looked on as the Jews were exterminated in the holocaust, be they individuals or the Allied countries.

Hilberg spoke of the ‘human wall’ that bystanders had erected, of indifference and social isolation. What Magid is arguing is that Jews on the left should adopt a similar approach today. It is profoundly immoral.

Magid argued, in opposition to Jewish Voice for Peace’s statement adopting an explicitly anti-Zionist position, that they had ignored

a series of real “Zionist” possibilities where “justice and equality” were paramount.

What Magid really wants is to have his cake and eat it. His article is an exercise in self-indulgence. The real question is whether Jewish intellectuals have the courage and honesty to call Zionism out for what it is. Clearly Magid doesn’t possess that courage. Magid says

Many Jews who define themselves as anti-Zionist do not think the state of Israel should cease to exist. Rather, they contest Zionist hegemony.

If that is the case then they are not anti-Zionists and that is Magid’s problem.

For Magid the internal battle within the Jewish community takes precedence over genocide and ethnic cleansing. Is it any wonder that Palestinians get tired of this Jewish preciousness at a time when Palestinian children are being starved to death in the name of Zionism’s Jewish redemption?

If you are an anti-Zionist then Israel as a Jewish state must disappear. Not the people but the state. Israel must become normalised, like any other state. It must be a state of its own citizens, regardless of ethnicity or religion.

Magid accepts that Jewish anti-Zionists reject the idea that ‘Zionism is a requirement for legitimate Jewish identity in the twenty-first century.’’ But then he indulges in a semantic frivolity when he makes:

 ‘an important distinction... between Zionism and Israel. Israel is a country; Zionism is an ideology.’

No.  Zionism is the ideology of the Israeli state. It dictates the imperatives of Zionism, such as ethnic cleansing, Jewish racial purity, Jewish settlement at the Palestinians’ expense. This is a distinction without a difference.

What Magid demonstrates is that he rejects the special characteristic of Zionism as a settler colonial ideology whose aim was to achieve as pure a Jewish state as possible. In the words of Israel’s opposition leader, Yair Lapid:

“My principle says maximum Jews on maximum land with maximum security and with minimum Palestinians”

Quite amazingly Magid goes on to say, without so much as a flicker of awareness, that:

Like most countries Israel will choose how to govern according to will of its citizens, in Israel’s case, mostly, but not exclusively, its Jewish citizens (as those living under occupation have no political agency in the national polity), how to treat its minorities, how to deal with questions of justice and domination.

The whole point of anti-Zionism is that Israel is not like most countries. It is sui generis. Actually most countries don’t govern according to the will of their citizens but their elites and the capitalist ruling class. But let this pass. Magid is not a socialist.

In Israel’s case it pays no heed whatsoever to its Palestinian citizens. In Netanyahu’s words, ‘Israel is a state of its Jewish citizens not all of them’. That is why, being a Jewish state, it continues to dispossess what it calls Arab Israelis from their homes, in particular the destruction of the unrecognised villages of the Bedouin of the Negev such as Umm al-Hiran and Ras Jraba. Has Magid never heard of the policy of Judaisation of the Galilee and Negev, the Koenig Memorandum and Prawer Plan?

Does Magid think that there’s nothing of special interest in the fact that those living under occupation have no civil or political rights despite it being made clear that the West Bank will always remain part of Israel? Has he lost the ability to spell or even recognise the word Apartheid?

Magid quotes Joel Swanson’s assertion that

Historically, Zionism has never been one single concept. It has been a family of arguments, ... To say ‘Zionism’ without adjectives is already to erase its internal diversity.’

Here we really come to the crux of the argument. Shaul Magid’s illusion that there is a nice as well as a nasty Zionism. It is part of a ‘family’ that somehow along the way as it lost its focus or direction.

So let us spell it out for Shaul Magid who is blind to Zionism’s  racist reality. Zionism is what Zionism does. Zionism does not exist in the minds of a fragrant Jewish American Princess who still believes in fairy tales but in the settler attacks on Palestinian villages in the West Bank or the Death to the Arabs riots in Jerusalem each year.

Is there any difference between Herzog and Netanyahu, between Labour and Revisionist Zionism or did they merely argue about the means of achieving and maintaining a Jewish Supremacist state beholden to the West as an armed watchdog?

Magid clings to a Zionism that never existed. In fact cultural and socialist Zionism long ago disappeared in their own contradictions. Socialism is universal. Zionism is particularist. I realised that when I was 16 but Magid has yet to achieve political adolescence.

Magid points to a recent poll in which only a third of American Jews identify as Zionist whereas 88% support the concept of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state. Clearly there is confusion among American Jews as Israel has proven beyond doubt that it cannot be both Jewish and democratic. Always it is forced to take the former path and jettison the latter, as the Jewish Nation State Law has proved.

The reality is that this was always a dishonest slogan of the hypocritical Zionist ‘left’. When confronted with a choice Zionism always preferred the Jewish to the democratic. In the words of Ahmed Tibi, an Arab member of the Knesset, Israel is Democratic for Jews and Jewish for Arabs.

It is this which has allowed Jewish neo-Nazis to become the third largest bloc in the Knesset and for Itamar Ben Gvir to become Police Minister in Israel. It is this which has led to Israeli Police acting like SS storm troopers against Israel’s Palestinian citizens. Israel is a state where torture is the norm (for Palestinians).

Yes there is massive confusion among American Jews but rather than offering clarity Magid seeks to take advantage of that confusion with his ridiculous essay.

Magid says that ‘Zionism served as an escape mechanism for Jews trying to escape a Europe collapsing around them.’ No that is absolutely not true. Haganah sent Feivel Polkes to Nazi Germany to persuade the Gestapo not to allow Jewish emigration to any place but Palestine. In exchange he offered to collaborate with them.

As a result Professor Franz Six, a senior SS official and head of Department II in the SD Main Office, who was sentenced to 20 years imprisonment for war crimes in April 1948 wrote:

Pressure is being exerted on the Reich Deputation of the Jews in Germany in order to compel Jews emigrating from Germany to head only to Palestine and not to any other country.” [The Secret Contacts, Zionism and Nazi Germany, 1933-1941, Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol. 5 3/4 Spring/Summer 1976]

Ha’avara, the trade agreement between Nazi Germany and the Zionist movement, agreed in August 1933, not only broke the world-wide Jewish Boycott of Nazi Germany but it worsened the position for Jews trying to escape to other countries.

The Zionist movement consistently opposed rescue to any country bar Palestine. Magid fails to understand what has been called ‘cruel Zionism.’  See my book Zionism During the Holocaust (to purchase it contact me at tonygreenstein104@gmail.com).

Magid cites Yehiam Weitz’s article, “The Positions of David Ben Gurion and Yitzhak Tabenkin Vis-A-Viz the Holocaust of European Jewry” but has failed to understand it. Weitz cites Ben-Gurion on the Jewish refugee problem thus:

‘Both during the 1930s ... and during the second half of the 1940s, after the war's end - his position on this question was determined and indisputable; Ben-Gurion definitively and often crudely opposed ameliorating the position of Jewish groups by means other than their transfer to Palestine. He felt that any 'solution of the national problem outside of Eretz Israel, or ... solving the individual's distress by ignoring the national problem ... [means] undermining the foundations of Zionism and acting  as a temptation  which  every  Zionist  must  learn to  withstand completely.'

When it came to priorities Zionism and building the Jewish state came first. Weitz quotes Ben-Gurion’s notorious statement in the wake of Kristallnacht that if:

'it would be possible to save all the [Jewish] children in Germany by transferring them to England and only half of them by transferring them to Eretz Israel, I would choose the second possibility, because before us is not only the account of these children but the historical account of the Jewish people.’

In other words the interests of building the ‘Jewish’ state took precedence over saving Jewish children from Germany. Magid could also have mentioned Boas Evron’S, Jewish State or Israeli Nation and the fierce opposition to the Evian Conference, called by Eisenhower to solve the Jewish refugee question. Of course it did no such thing but the Zionist leadership were nonetheless frightened.

What Magid didn't mention was the identification with Israel of the far and even neo-Nazi right

Evron quotes the minutes of a meeting of the Jewish Agency Executive of 26 June 1938. Ben-Gurion was unremittingly hostile as he declared that

No rationalizations can turn the conference from a harmful to a useful one. What can and should be done is to limit the damage as far as possible.

A Russia member of the Zionist Executive Menachem Ussishkin was even more forthright

He hoped to hear in Evian that Eretz Israel remains the main venue for Jewish emigration. All other emigration countries do not interest him… The greatest danger is that attempts will be made to find other territories for Jewish emigration. [my emphasis]

These positions are quite clear in the essay he referred to yet Magid scrupulously refrains from mentioning the attitude of the Zionists to saving the Jewish refugees.

Magid asks Can the Jewish Left move beyond Zionism and anti-Zionism?’ and queries whether it can ‘no longer focus on opposition to a state that many in the Jewish Left no longer support?’

Thus missing out the whole point of why Jews on the left make opposition to Israel and Zionism a central focus of their work. Of course Magid knows the reason but refrains from spelling it out. Everything Israel does is in the name of the mythical ‘Jewish people’ and Jews. It is after all a self-proclaimed Jewish state.

It is therefore incumbent upon Jewish socialists and those who are genuinely on the Jewish left to say ‘Not in My Name’. The fact that Magid resiles from this suggests that his membership of the Jewish left is ephemeral.

Of course the Jewish left can do many other things but when being Jewish is one of the primary justifications given for imperialism’s support for Israel’s genocide and ethnic cleansing it is rank hypocrisy and cowardice not to make that a priority. If the Jewish left cannot focus on Zionism and its claim to represent Jews then it has no relevance.

Magid says that ‘One of the fundamental differences between liberal Zionism and Jewish anti-Zionism is the exceptionalism that underlies the case of Israel’. That is of course true.  Liberal Zionists can, in theory, hold progressive positions on domestic American affairs but for Palestine there is an exception (Progressive Except Palestine). But that is increasingly untenable.

What Magid seems to be doing is providing a new way for this exceptionalism to operate by suggesting that Jews on the left simply avoid the issue altogether.

Why would Jews seek to avoid the one area where they have a contribution to make? Does he find it too uncomfortable? The difference between Magid and a self-declared Zionist is that he doesn’t openly defend the Apartheid state whereas ‘liberal’ Zionism does. Instead he makes excuses for it.

Jewish identity post-war has been forged in the crucible of Zionism. Jewish identity has changed for many a substitute religion. Without an alternative explicitly anti-Zionist Jewish identity Jewish identity become at best a self-indulgence and at worst an identity with genocide and racism.

Magid quotes Adi Ophir in his support:  “to become non-Zionist one first must become anti-Zionist.” I wonder if Magid ever thought this through? How about saying that to become a non-racist one must first become an anti-racist. Perhaps our goal is to abstain from confronting racism? This is meaningless nonsense, verbal masturbation.

The fact is that for Jews non-Zionism is, at best, a half-way house to anti-Zionism. Of course being an anti-Zionist also means taking a position against US imperialism and its use of Jews as its moral alibi.

As a final flourish Magid says that

The land between the river and the sea remains the Jewish homeland and the Palestinian homeland. But the domination of one over the other will never yield the flourishing of either.

In this Magid could not be more wrong. He equates the oppressed with their oppressors. Palestine is the home of the Palestinians. It is not a Jewish homeland. My home is where I live, Britain. The United States is the home of millions of Jews. Israel is a settler colonial state that calls itself Jewish only in the racial and ethnic sense. Israel is a state of Jewish Supremacy where Jews, not Palestinians, exercise domination.

The eventual choice that Israeli Jews face is between becoming Jewish Palestinians or leaving. That was the choice that White South Africans faced and we should not make any exception for the Zionist settlers whose crimes far exceed those of White South Africans.

Tony Greenstein

Why it’s anti-racist NOT anti-Semitic to compare Israel to pre-holocaust Nazi Germany

Why Today’s Israel Reminds Me of Nazi Germany – Uri Avnery

As people will be aware, the Zionist movement is in the forefront of the attack on free speech in this country and elsewhere. It provides the Right in the Labour Party with the ideal  moral justification for an attack on free speech – ‘anti-Semitism’.  So much so that plenty of Jewish people are now being suspended and expelled! Zionism is the cutting edge of the attack on democratic rights in the West.

The latest Jewish member to be suspended is Professor Moshe Machover.  Moshe was expelled peremptorily three years ago on the false charge that he was a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain.  So fierce was the backlash to that particular expulsion that the witchhunters were forced to backtrack and reinstate Moshe.

As I told Moshe when I heard the news, he has since been living on borrowed time. The Zionists have been eager to see the back of him and his Open Letter in Weekly Worker daring Starmer and the Zionists to do their worse, after he had appeared on a platform with Chris Williamson and myself, was probably a red rag to a bull (or a snake).

I however can’t be expelled (unless they readmit me in order that they can repeat the exercise!). So I can say virtually anything about Herr Sturmer and his anti-Semitic friend, David Evans.

Uri Avnery considered himself a Zionist to his dying days but unlike 99% of Zionists when he talked about peace with the Palestinians he meant it. Uri fought in Israel’s War of Independence (or Nakba) and was severely wounded.  He was also a former member of the Irgun terror group, which is why it was all the more remarkable that he courted arrest several times to meet the PLO, which then was the representative of the Palestinians including memorably Yasser Arafat in a  Beirut under siege.

There are indeed many comparisons between the Nazi state before 1939 and the Israeli state and many survivors of the holocaust, including those who were survivors of the concentration camps, such as Ze’ev Sternhell and Hajo Meyer saw those comparisons.

The key comparison is that for the Nazis the Jews were not part of the national collective, hence why in 1935 the Nuremberg Laws removed Jewish citizenship.  Henceforth they became subjects.

In Israel citizenship was begrudgingly given in the early 1950’s to the Palestinians but it was a degraded form of citizenship.  For the first 18 years of the state they lived under military rule.  Since then they have lived, not even as second class citizens but as tolerated guests, the majority of their lands stolen from them and hemmed into the 2% that they are allowed by Jewish settlements.

The Jewish Nation State Law passed in 2018 makes what was always implicit explicit. In its original, explicitly racist form it legalised the formation of Jewish only settlements, hundreds of which already exist.

Making Israel’s racism explicit caused an uproar among liberal Zionists because in Israel Zionism has perfected the art of not making its racist intentions explicit, bar the Israeli Law of Return. Instead para state organisations, such as the Jewish National Fund and Jewish Agency undertake the dirty work of discrimination. Regulations, policies and practices do the rest.

The broken window of a Jewish shop in Kristallnacht

For example there has been a longstanding policy of Judaising the Galilee, Jerusalem and Negev. This is no different to the Nazi policy of ‘deJewification’. Except that no laws were necessary. The Koenig Memorandum and the Prawer Plan ensured that policies would enact what the Knesset desired but did not legislate for.

Indeed it would be possible to say that being a settler colonial state, which Germany of course was not, has meant that racism in Israel is far higher than in Nazi Germany.  It may surprise people but even in the Nazi Party itself, the majority of members were not vehement anti-Semites. It was among the hard core of ‘old fighters’, those who had seen action in the Freikorps, the counter-revolutionary squads employed by the Social Democrats against the German Revolution, that genocidal anti-Semitism flourished.

There is a large section of Zionism which would not blanche at the extermination of the Palestinians.  Religious Zionists in particular have often expressed genocidal sentiments as have their rabbis such as Dov Lior, who is the settlers’ Chief Rabbi.  Dov Lior famously said that a Jewish fingernail was worth more than a thousand non-Jewish lives. Rabbi Yaacov Perrin, giving the funeral oration for Baruch Goldstein, who had murdered 29 unarmed worshippers in the Ibrahimi mosque in Hebron and wounded another hundred, increased this to a million lives.

Nonetheless it is not extermination but expulsion/transfer which is what the Palestinians face in the medium to long-term. Comparisons between Nazi Germany post 1939 and Israel are far-fetched to say the least.  With the onset of war Nazi Germany turned from expulsion to extermination. It first began with the wholesale murder of the disabled, in particular the Jewish disabled, from 1939-1941 until Catholic Bishop Galen spoke out against it (although a wild ‘euthenasia’ persisted in the concentration camps).

However even the most absurd comparisons, such as describing the Palestinian experience as a ‘holocaust’ are not anti-Semitic. Hyperbole is not racism. It is a measure of the fact that the Palestinian struggle is an anti-racist one that the Nazis are seen as the ultimate evil.

However the Zionists are in no position to deprecate comparisons between Zionism and Nazism given their appalling record before and during the holocaust.  Ben Gurion made clear his attitude to the endangered Jews in Germany being sent to Britain in a speech to the Israeli Labor Party’s central Committee on 9^th December 1938, just a month after Kristalnacht.

The reaction of the world to this state sponsored pogrom was one of revulsion. The British Government acceded to the request of the Board of Deputies (which had not yet been captured by the Zionists) to admit ten thousand children. The Zionists were outraged and the reaction of David Ben Gurion, the Chairman of the Jewish Agency (which was the Zionists’ government-in-waiting) and later first Prime Minister of Israel was telling.

‘If I knew that it would be possible to save all the children in Germany by bringing them over to England, and only half of them by transporting them to Eretz Yisrael, then I would opt for the second alternative. For we must weigh not only the life of these children, but also the history of the People of Israel.’[i]

This was the attitude of the Zionists throughout the war as they consciously sought to block all avenues of escape for Jewish refugees unless the destination was Palestine.  Their warped thinking being that if Jewish Palestine could not provide a solution to the refugee question, then what was the point of this ‘national museum’ as Ben Gurion also called it.

It was called ‘cruel Zionism’. Although Zionism was to be immensely cruel to the Palestinians we should never forget that it was cruel to the Jews first.

Read and enjoy!

Tony Greenstein

Israeli activist and author Uri Avnery draws on his personal experience of Hitler’s Germany on the eve of the Nazi party’s victory, and during the early years of Nazism, to show that similar processes of creeping Nazism are underway in Israel today

Why Today’s Israel Reminds Me of Nazi Germany – Uri Avnery

 “Please don’t write about Ya’ir Golan!” a friend begged me, “Anything a leftist like you writes will only harm him!”

So, I abstained for some weeks. But I can’t keep quiet any longer.

General Ya’ir Golan, the deputy chief of staff of the Israeli army, made a speech on Holocaust Memorial Day. Wearing his uniform, he read a prepared, well-considered text that triggered an uproar which has not yet died down.

Dozens of articles have been published in its wake, some condemning him, some lauding him. It seems that nobody could stay indifferent.

Uri Avnery protesting in Jerusalem

Traces of Nazism

The main sentence was this:

If there is something that frightens me about the memories of the Holocaust, it is the knowledge of the awful processes which happened in Europe in general, and in Germany in particular, 70, 80, 90 years ago, and finding traces of them here in our midst, today, in 2016.

All hell broke loose. What! Traces of Nazism in Israel? A resemblance between what the Nazis did to us with what we are doing to the Palestinians?

Ninety years ago was 1926, one of the last years of the German republic. Eighty years ago was 1936, three years after the Nazis came to power. Seventy years ago was 1946, on the morrow of Hitler’s suicide and the end of the Nazi Reich.

I feel compelled to write about the general’s speech after all, because I was there.

As a child I was an eyewitness to the last years of the Weimar Republic (so called because its constitution was shaped in Weimar, the town of Goethe and Schiller). As a politically alert boy I witnessed the Nazi Machtergreifung (“taking power”) and the first half a year of Nazi rule.

I know what Golan was speaking about. Though we belong to two different generations, we share the same background. Both our families come from small towns in Western Germany. His father and I must have had a lot in common.

There is a strict moral commandment in Israel: nothing can be compared to the holocaust. The holocaust is unique. It happened to us, the Jews, because we are unique. (Religious Jews would add: “Because God has chosen us.”)

I have broken this commandment. Just before Golan was born, I published (in Hebrew) a book called The Swastika, in which I recounted my childhood memories and tried to draw conclusions from them. It was on the eve of the Eichmann trial, and I was shocked by the lack of knowledge about the Nazi era among young Israelis then.

My book did not deal with the holocaust, which took place when I was already living in Palestine, but with a question which troubled me throughout the years, and even today: how could it happen that Germany, perhaps the most cultured nation on earth at the time, the homeland of Goethe, Beethoven and Kant, could democratically elect a raving psychopath like Adolf Hitler as its leader?

The last chapter of the book was entitled “It Can Happen Here!” The title was drawn from a book by the American novelist Sinclair Lewis, called ironically “It Can’t Happen Here”, in which he described a Nazi take-over of the United States.

In this chapter I discussed the possibility of a Jewish Nazi-like party coming to power in Israel. My conclusion was that a Nazi party can come to power in any country on earth, if the conditions are right. Yes, in Israel, too.

The book was largely ignored by the Israeli public, which at the time was overwhelmed by the storm of emotions evoked by the terrible disclosures of the Eichmann trial.

The truthful general

Now comes General Golan, an esteemed professional soldier, and says the same thing.

And not as an improvised remark, but on an official occasion, wearing his general’s uniform, reading from a prepared, well-thought-out text.

The storm broke out, and has not passed yet.

Israelis have a self-protective habit: when confronted with inconvenient truths, they evade its essence and deal with a secondary, unimportant aspect. Of all the dozens and dozens of reactions in the written press, on TV and on political platforms, almost none confronted the general’s painful contention.

… Golan has sacrificed his further advancement in order to utter his warning and giving it the widest possible resonance.

No, the furious debate that broke out concerns the questions: Is a senior army officer allowed to voice an opinion about matters that concern the civilian establishment? And do so in army uniform? On an official occasion?

Should an army officer keep quiet about his political convictions? Or voice them only in closed sessions – “in relevant forums”, as a furious Binyamin Netanyahu phrased it?

General Golan enjoys a very high degree of respect in the army. As deputy chief of staff he was until now almost certainly a candidate for chief of staff, when the incumbent leaves the office after the customary four years.

The fulfilment of this dream shared by every General Staff officer is now very remote. In practice, Golan has sacrificed his further advancement in order to utter his warning and giving it the widest possible resonance.

One can only respect such courage. I have never met General Golan, I believe, and I don’t know his political views. But I admire his act.

(Somehow I recall an article published by the British magazine Punch before World War I, when a group of junior army officers issued a statement opposing the government’s policy in Ireland. The magazine said that while it disapproves of the opinion expressed by the mutinous officers, it took pride in the fact that such youthful officers were ready to sacrifice their careers for their convictions.)

The Nazi march to power started in 1929, when a terrible worldwide economic crisis hit Germany. A tiny, ridiculous far-right party suddenly became a political force to be reckoned with. From there it took them four years to become the largest party in the country and to take over power (though it still needed a coalition).

Israeli settlers shout slogans as they march in the streets.

Add caption

I was there when it happened, a boy in a family in which politics became the main topic at the dinner table. I saw how the republic broke down, gradually, slowly, step by step. I saw our family friends hoisting the swastika flag. I saw my high-school teacher raising his arm when entering the class and saying “Heil Hitler” for the first time (and then reassuring me in private that nothing had changed.)

I was the only Jew in the entire high school. When the hundreds of boys – all taller than me – raised their arms to sing the Nazi anthem, and I did not, they threatened to break my bones if it happened again. A few days later we left Germany for good.

Corrosive victories

General Golan was accused of comparing Israel to Nazi Germany. Nothing of the sort. A careful reading of his text shows that he compared developments in Israel to the events that led to the disintegration of the Weimar Republic. And that is a valid comparison.

Things happening in Israel, especially since the last election, bear a frightening similarity to those events. True, the process is quite different. German fascism arose from the humiliation of surrender in World War I, the occupation of the Ruhr by France and Belgium from 1923 to 1925, the terrible economic crisis of 1929, the misery of millions of unemployed. Israel is victorious in its frequent military actions, we live comfortable lives. The dangers threatening us are of a quite different nature. They stem from our victories, not from our defeats.

Indeed, the differences between Israel today and Germany then are far greater than the similarities. But those similarities do exist, and the general was right to point them out.

Racism and discrimination

The discrimination against the Palestinians in practically all spheres of life can be compared to the treatment of the Jews in the first phase of Nazi Germany. (The oppression of the Palestinians in the occupied territories resembles more the treatment of the Czechs in the “protectorate” after the Munich betrayal.)

The political riffraff peopling the present Netanyahu government could easily have found their place in the first Nazi government.

The rain of racist bills in the Knesset, those already adopted and those in the works, strongly resembles the laws adopted by the Reichstag in the early days of the Nazi regime. Some rabbis call for a boycott of Arab shops. Like then. The call “Death to the Arabs” (Judah verrecke?) is regularly heard at soccer matches. A member of parliament has called for the separation between Jewish and Arab newborns in hospital. A chief rabbi has declared that goyim (non-Jews) were created by God to serve the Jews. Our ministers of education and culture are busy subduing the schools, theatre and arts to the extreme rightist line, something known in German as Gleichschaltung. The Supreme Court, the pride of Israel, is being relentlessly attacked by the minister of justice. The Gaza Strip is a huge ghetto.

Of course, no one in their right mind would even remotely compare Netanyahu to the Fuehrer, but there are political parties here which do emit a strong fascist smell. The political riffraff peopling the present Netanyahu government could easily have found their place in the first Nazi government.

One of the main slogans of our present government is to replace the “old elite”, considered too liberal, with a new one. One of the main Nazi slogans was to replace das System.

By the way, when the Nazis came to power, almost all senior officers of the German army were staunch anti-Nazis. They were even considering a putsch against Hitler . Their political leader was summarily executed a year later, when Hitler liquidated his opponents in his own party. We are told that General Golan is now protected by a personal bodyguard, something that has never happened to a general in the annals of Israel.

The general did not mention the occupation and the settlements, which are under army rule. But he did mention the episode which occurred shortly before he gave this speech, and which is still shaking Israel now: in occupied Hebron, under army rule, a soldier saw a seriously wounded Palestinian lying helplessly on the ground, approached him and killed him with a shot to the head. The victim had tried to attack some soldiers with a knife, but did not constitute a threat to anyone any more. This was a clear contravention of army standing orders, and the soldier has been hauled before a court martial.

A cry went up around the country: the soldier is a hero! He should be decorated! Netanyahu called his father to assure him of his support. Avigdor Lieberman entered the crowded courtroom in order to express his solidarity with the soldier. A few days later Netanyahu appointed Lieberman as minister of defence, the second most important office in Israel.

Before that, General Golan received robust support both from the minister of defense, Moshe Ya’alon, and the chief of staff, Gadi Eisenkot. Probably this was the immediate reason for the kicking out of Ya’alon and the appointment of Lieberman in his place. It resembled a putsch.

It seems that Golan is not only a courageous officer, but a prophet, too. The inclusion of Lieberman’s party in the government coalition confirms Golan’s blackest fears. This is another fatal blow to the Israeli democracy.

Am I condemned to witness the same process for the second time in my life?

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[i]         Yoav Gelber, ‘Zionist policy and the Fate of European Jewry, Yad Vashem Studies, Vol. XIII, p. 199 Labour Party Archives, Bet Berl Tsofit., 22/38,   see also Segev, p.28.  Teveth, p.855, Piterberg, p.99. 

 

 

Yair Golan, Uri Avnery, Nazi,