Arrested for Saying that Israel is Doing What the Nazis Did - It is NOT the Job of the Police to Control Free Speech

The Irony of the Institutionally Racist Metropolitan Police Telling Anti-Zionist Jews What They Can and Cannot Say is Like Harold Shipman Lecturing on Medical Ethics

Last Friday four Jewish people – Haim Bresheeth, an anti-Zionist Israeli, Jackie Walker, who was expelled as a result of the fake ‘anti-Semitism’ in Corbyn’s Labour Party, Stephen Kapos – a child survivor of the Hungarian holocaust and myself addressed about 100 people demonstrating outside the residence of Israel Ambassador, Tzipi Hotoveli.

Hotoveli Opens Book with Blank Pages

Hotoveli is a notorious racist who described the Nakba as an ‘Arab lie’ despite it being copiously documented. The fact that Israel not only won’t open its archives on the Nakba but is busying trying to hide those documents that have been revealed, demonstrates that it has something to hide.

Hotoveli once presented a book with no pages to the Knesset opening it to declare that this was the sum total of Palestinian history.’You are thieves of history’ which was rich coming from a thieving Zionist colonist. The fact that this racist nutcase was welcomed to the Labour Party conference says everything about the moral vacuum at the heart of Starmer’s so-called Labour Party.

I was the last of the 4 speakers. I made it clear that the genocide and ethnic cleansing, the bombing of hospitals, universities, schools, tent encampments as well as the starvation blockade reminded me of nothing so much as the behaviour of Nazi Germany. I could have added that it bore a distinct resemblance to the behaviour of the British Empire in India, Kenya and many other of our colonies but since Israel claims to inherit the memory of the Jewish holocaust dead it was appropriate to confine my remarks to the holocaust.

I also repeated the phrase that I had used at the Palestine Expo five years ago, which the Jewish Chronicle had highlighted, namely that Today most people with a streak of moral fibre would agree that I was prescient. Not so the Police. They were on the look out for any speech that their political masters considered ‘anti-Semitic’ using the bogus IHRA definition of anti-Semitism which gives as an illustration of ‘anti-Semitism’ ‘Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis’.

In its opening sentence the ‘definition’ describes itself as a ‘non-legally binding working definition of antisemitism’ but in practice the Police and other State bodies, including universities, have adopted it as if it were a legal  code. This is not the place to dissect the IHRA, whose only purpose is to defend a racist genocidal state, as its critics are numerous. Academically and intellectually it is indefensible and even Zionists like Professor Geoffrey Alderman and David Feldman have criticised it as flawed,  faulty and bewilderingly imprecise.

I was arrested under Section 5 of the Public Order Act

The fact is that the IHRA’s basic message is that all except anodyne criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic and that is enough for Sir Mark Rowley’s none too bright thought police.  As Sir Stephen Sedley, a Jewish former Court of Appeal judge wrote in Defining Anti-Semitism (LRB, May 2017)

Endeavours to conflate the two [Zionism and anti-Semitism] by characterising everything other than anodyne criticism of Israel as anti-Semitic are not new.

Sedley also wrote that the IHRA ‘fails the first test of any definition: it is indefinite’. However the Metropolitan Police are better known for their corruption and thuggery than any intellectual achievements.

The irony is that I was arrested on the 88^th anniversary of the Battle of Cable Street when the Met did their best to batter their way through the Jewish East End of London in order that Oswald Moseley’s British Union of Fascists and National Socialists (they changed their name to add the last 3 words in 1936) could march and intimidate working class Jews.

When anti-Semitism was a real force to be reckoned with in society, no group was more sympathetic to the fascists than the Metropolitan Police who had many BUF sympathisers in them. Now that anti-Semitism has been redefined as support for the Palestinians and opposition to Zionism, which is the adopted policy of the British government, the Met is now against it!

As Jews have moved to the right and become both more prosperous and an alibi for British support for Israel, the Met has combined philo Semitism with Islamaphobia and anti-Black racism. Their racism hasn’t gone away it has simply been transferred to others.

At the end of my speech I was informed by others that the Met, who were surrounding the demonstration, were pointing at me and sure enough, as the demonstration dispersed I was asked to accompany plod. Now for the sake of fairness I should add that the Police were perfectly polite and I accept that they were doing what the Mark Rowley’s and Keir Starmers of this world were instructing them to do which was to clamp down on pro-Palestinian and anti-Zionist speech.

I was arrested and taken to Holborn Police station where I was held for 7 hours before being released early in the morning. I was interviewed for nearly an hour by two cops who clearly didn’t have a clue what they were talking about. I decided to dispense with a solicitor since there was nothing they could have done and since I don’t agree with blanket ‘no comment’ interviews, which tend to suggest that you have something to hide, I was happy to take them on.

I was bailed with two conditions:

Not to come to Camden and not to attend pro-Palestinian protests in London. As far as I am concerned the latter is unlawful and I will be seeking to have this removed at the first opportunity. Article 10 of the European Convention of Human Rights is quite clear. Even the most stupid politician and policeman should be able to get their heads around it:

During my interview I referenced the 1999 case of Redmond-Bate v DPP where the said LJ Sedley ruled that ‘“Freedom only to speak inoffensively is not worth having.” It’s something that the Zionists and their claque of supporters don’t want to understand. Nor did the police who interview me understand what I was getting at. Policemen rarely do understand such concepts.

“Free speech includes not only the inoffensive but the irritating, the contentious, the eccentric, the heretical, the unwelcome and the provocative provided it does not tend to provoke violence. Freedom only to speak inoffensively is not worth having. What Speakers’ Corner (where the law applies as fully as anywhere else) demonstrates is the tolerance which is both extended by the law to opinion of every kind and expected by the law in the conduct of those who disagree, even strongly, with what they hear. From the condemnation of Socrates to the persecution of modern writers and journalists, our world has seen too many examples of state control of unofficial ideas. A central purpose of the European Convention on Human Rights has been to set close limits to any such assumed power. We in this country continue to owe a debt to the jury which in 1670 refused to convict the Quakers William Penn and William Mead for preaching ideas which offended against state orthodoxy.”

Comparing Israel and its genocidal racism to Nazi Germany is something many Israelis have done. Ze’ev Sternhell, a former professor at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and a child survivor of the holocaust, wrote an article In Israel, Growing Fascism and a Racism Akin to Early Nazism. One suspects that the idiots who arrested me would have arrested Sternhell too.

Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem p.7

Hannah Arendt, who was a refugee from Nazi Germany and the greatest political scientist of the last century noted in her book Eichmann in Jerusalem that the attacks at the Eichmann trial on the Nuremberg Laws for banning marriage between Jews and non-Jews was somewhat ironic since Israel also banned them!

The fact is that the very racial supremacism that the Nazis promoted is alive and well in Israel. The Police are there to uphold the existing inequalities of society in the name of ‘the rule of law’. They are not paid to think and very few of them do think outside narrow parameters.

That is why the Metropolitan and other police forces are regularly found to be full of narrow minded bigots such as the officers at Charing Cross Station whose WhatsApp messages finally did for the Metropolitan Police Commissioner and Bigot, Cressida Dick.

As far as I’m concerned the bail conditions are unlawful and have nothing to do with repeating an offence that did not occur so I do not feel bound by them. I will be pleading not guilty and seeking to bring a number of witnesses if the Crown Prosecution Service is stupid enough to charge me.

In the event that the CPS does not bring charges then I will sue the police for false and malicious imprisonment since I spent approximately 7 hours in custody besides incurring other expenses. The only way to punish the police for their dictatorial behaviour is to hit them in the pocket although, since they can draw on unlimited public money, one suspects that they will not reform.

What happened is that arch-Zionist agitator and thug Richard Millett, who sued Jeremy Corbyn and then backed off, made a malicious complaint to the Police. The Police as is always the case bend over backwards to appease these racists.

That is why I am setting up a Crowdfunder in order that I can fund both future civil litigation and also take legal advice about the present charges (since I am not entitled to legal aid until charges have been laid).

I would therefore ask those of you who are able to contribute to do so. My Crowdfunder ‘Stopping the Police Persecuting Palestine Solidarity Activists’ is now live.

Tony Greenstein

A VICTORY FOR FREE SPEECH – Twitter Restores Tony Greenstein’s Suspended Account

Malicious Zionist Complaint of ‘Anti-Semitism’ by Jack Mendel of Jewish News has been Rejected by Twitter

Twitter's standard response to my initial appeals

On November 17^th there was a message on my Twitter account informing me that my account had been suspended for ‘hateful conduct’.  It quickly became apparent that a complaint had been made by a ‘journalist’ Jack Mendel @mendelpol of Jewish News. 

I immediately posted an article and followed it up with another article a few days later. Mendel openly boasted of his cowardly deed stating

‘I reported Greenstein for repeatedly sending me messages filled with hate, including using far right ‘Zio’ term, and various comparisons of Jews and Israel to nazism.’

 fake journalist Jack Mendel knows no shame

Jack Mendel was and is a liar. Far from me contacting him it was the other way around.  I was responding to him and his friends. Nothing I said had anything to do with hate.  I don’t do hate nor do I hate this ‘so-called journalist’ (his description not mine) who, unable to engage in the cut and thrust of political debate, reached for Twitter's censor. However I have nothing but contempt for a 'journalist' who attempts to close down free speech. All under the guise of opposing ‘hate speech’ no less. What I hate is racism and Zionism.

Twitter's standard response

The facts are quite simple. The Jewish Leadership Council, an unelected Zionist group tweeted three times its support of Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, which was supposedly in response to the firing of firecrackers (‘rockets’). To the JLC and its faithful lapdog Mendel, Israel was reacting to Hamas’s firing. In actual fact Hamas was reacting to a botched operation in Gaza by an undercover Israeli military squad that went wrong.  Botched Israeli Operation in Gaza Endangers Human Rights Groups. Israel’s undercover squad posed as aid workers for a charity working in Gaza thus endangering all humanitarian relief workers.  They murdered 7 people for the loss of one of their own as they extricated themselves.

Battling for Israel - Zionism's Fake Journalist Jack Mendel

On November 15^th I responded pointing out that there is a long record of aggressors posing as the victim. I pointed out that 80 years ago, when Nazi Germany invaded Poland it pretended that it was the victim. Nazi soldiers dressed up in Polish uniforms staged a mock attack on a German radio station at Gleiwitz, Upper Silesia. The details can be found in the second of Richard Evan’s trilogy ‘The Third Reich in Power’. pp.699/700.

According to @mendelpol these were ‘despicable remarks’.  To most people with a few brain cells this was a historical analogy. That is what history is about, comparisons.  Otherwise how do you make sense of historical events? Being unable to rebut my remarks Mendel sought the assistance of Twitter’s censor.  

Canary article helps launch campaign against Twitter censorship

On the 16^th November I responded by saying that what was despicable was the shooting down in cold blood of 200 unarmed demonstrators in Gaza and the decade long starvation siege. In Mendel’s morbid mind this became ‘This morning a Jewish activist sent me a tweet filled with anti-Semitic tropes.’ Zionists love the word tropes. It’s a cliché they use as a substitute for thinking, probably because it rhymes with dopes. According to Mendel ‘Being Jewish or having Jewish ancestry isn’t a free pass to saying things which play down antiSemitism/in the second case are anti-Semitic.’  

Being incapable of responding with anything useful Useless Jack Mendel reached for Twitter's Censor

I agree. Being Jewish doesn’t mean you can’t be anti-Semitic. Mendel himself is a good example of a Jewish anti-semite. Zionism was founded by an anti-Semite, Theodor Herzl and it is led today by another anti-Semite, Benjamin Netanyahu, a Holocaust Revisionist who cuddles up to all manner of anti-Semites including the Prime Minister of Hungary Viktor Orban. [see Rewriting the Holocaust – Jacobin]

It wasn’t me who said that Palestine was an ‘institute for the fumigation of Jewish vermin’ but Israel’s first Minister of Justice, Pinhas Rosenbluth. Zionism is a form of Jewish Anti-Semitism. 

Nothing I said was even remotely anti-Semitic. How can condemning Israel’s siege of Gaza or the murder of  unarmed Palestinians, including 21 year old medic Razan al-Najar, as she was dashing to help the wounded, be anti-Semitic?

If Mendel tried for once to engage  what passes for his brain he might realise that if anyone was being anti-Semitic it was he. What he was suggesting is that the murder of children and unarmed demonstrators is the embodiment of Jewish identity. That it is Jewish to kill innocent people. That is akin to saying that Jews are bloodthirsty creatures who enjoy killing children and young people.  It’s a modern version of the medieval blood libel. That is Zionism in the 21^st century. 

To this very day Yousaf's account is still active although it hasn't been used for 2 years, which suggests that it was a paid Israeli troll account

Being told it was a pity you didn't die in the Holocaust was not a breach of Twitter rules!

What was particularly outrageous about Twitter’s closing of my account was that repeatedly over the past two years I have complained of abuse from Zionist trolls including being told by a George Yousaf that it was a great shame that my family and I had not died in the Holocaust. To all my complaints Twitter responded that these were not breaches of their rules yet Mendel's false and malicious complaint was upheld. When I appealed against my suspension I received a negative standard response and got the same response repeatedly. Clearly these replies are not generated by human beings but by algorithm.

An example of the comments that Twitter found didn't breach their rules

It was only when a live human being at Twitter, because none of the responses I got was signed by a named person, was contacted personally and told that their refusal to reinstate my account was unacceptable and their practices would be raised if necessary in Parliament that my account was reinstated.

Twitter's standard response to complaints

What happened to me is not unique. Twitter and Facebook have been removing accounts of anti-Zionists and supporters of the Palestinians at the behest of Zionist bigots like @mendelpol. Twitter, Facebook and other social media outlets are giant monopolies akin to the great trusts of the 19^th century.  The reaction then was to break these trusts up as being inimical to the public interest.  The control of an important area of public debate by private groups is something that sooner or later parliament is going to have to regulate.  It is unacceptable that unaccountable corporations can remove or censor people at will.

Abuse by Zionist supporter of Tommy Robinson, Mark Haringman - I am a thief, fraudster, child abuser and socialist - in no particular order - only in the twisted mind of a Zionist fascist would being a socialist be a crime!

Twitter finds that Haringman (Newsdude) Tweets are in order

Like the privatised utilities, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube etc. should be treated as emanations of the State and thus be subject to public control and susceptible to Judicial Review and other forms of legal restraint. At the moment faceless people or machines make decisions without any independent oversight.

As long as Twitter and Facebook remain privately controlled one can expect malicious Zionists like @mendelpol to use the power of the Israeli state and Zionism's pernicious influence to effect the same censorship that the Israeli state itself imposes on its subjects.

I have a number of people and organisations to thank for helping me reverse Mendel's squalid little attempt at censorship. In no particular order.

Philip Weiss, of Mondoweiss, who carried my article Twitter closes down my account for ‘hateful conduct’ at a time when I was eager to get my story out.

A big thank you to Afroze Zaidi-Jivraj a journalist on the Canary, the Independent Media site whose article Twitter censors pro-Palestinian Jewish activist while allowing antisemitic abuse against him was immensely helpful.  Afroze was also helpful in other ways despite not being well. 

Thanks also to Asa Winstanley, the Electronic Intifada journalist for his article in Middle East Monitor, The relentless censorship of anti-Zionist Jews which started with the line that ‘Tony Greenstein is slowly but surely being disappeared from the internet’. I began to wonder whether my death sentence had been pronounced prematurely!  In the purported words of Mark Twain, the announcement of my death had been greatly exaggerated!

Also to be mentioned in dispatches are Ali Abunimah, the Director of Electronic Intifada and Richard Silverstein of Tikun Olam for their helpful advice at a difficult time

Naturally the right-wing pro-war site Harry’s Place, despite purporting to defend free speech, engaged in a piece of whatabouttery in order to rationalise Twitter’s censorship. HP, despite having as their slogan Orwell’s ‘Liberty, if it means anything, is the right to tell people what they don't want to hear’ refused to defend my right to tell Zionists like @mendelpol what he didn’t want to hear!  But then HP has always been quite selective when it came to deciding whose free speech they defended! Or as the Muslim group Mend suggested, Orwell’s ‘‘Political language…is designed to make lies sound truthful … and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind’ is far more appropriate to hypocrites like HP and Jack Mendel.

It is to be expected that Zionist papers like Jewish News will employ ‘journalists’ who see it as their job to censor those whom they disagree with. That is because the Jewish News and the Jewish Chronicle are not so much newspapers as Zionist propaganda rags. Contrast this with the vigorous Jewish Forward in the United States which doesn’t hesitate to debate out all these issues.

It is a small but vital victory over those who would limit the free speech of Palestinian supporters and anti-Zionists.

Tony Greenstein

Comparisons between Israel and Nazi Germany are NOT anti-Semitic – Israelis do it all the time!

What is the difference between Israelis who chant ‘Death to the Arabs’ and Nazis who shouted ‘Death to the Jews?’

The IHRA definition of anti-Semitism states that ‘Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis’ could be anti-Semitic. But the strange thing is that anti-racist Israelis are the first to draw such comparisons. Are they also anti-Semitic under this dumb definition of anti-Semitism?

Perhaps Professor Zeev Sternhell who is emeritus head of the department of political science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and one of the world’s leading experts on fascism is also anti-Semitic? Perhaps Caroline Lucas, Green MP for Brighton Pavilion or Daniel Yates, New Labour Head of Brighton and Hove Council, both of whom support the IHRA, can tell us?

But before they do I should tell them that Zeev Sternhell is a child survivor of the Holocaust. At the age of 7 he was smuggled out of the Przemyśl ghetto in Poland into Lwow. He was cared for by a Polish Catholic family and baptised.  He is one of the few Zionists who isn’t a racist which is perhaps why in September 2008 he was the victim of a pipe bomb attack by Zionist terrorists.

Sternhell poses a rhetorical question. How will future historians judge when it was that the Israeli state had devolved into a ‘true monstrosity for its non-Jewish inhabitants’. Sternhell is, as I said a Zionist who has illusions in a period when Israel was not a racist entity. Nonetheless it is to his credit that he now accepts that racism in Israel today is akin to that in pre-Holocaust Germany. I would go further.  All the evidence is that racism in Israel today is far higher than ever anti-Semitism was in Nazi Germany.

Ian Kershaw described how in Bavaria, the state-sponsored Kristallnacht pogrom on November 2^nd 1938 not only met with little sympathy but that it was ‘condemned deep into the ranks of the Party.’ Just 5% of the population approved as opposed to 63% who displayed disgust and anger.  It was in rural Catholic Bavaria that the most vociferous condemnation of the pogrom was heard.  Kershaw notes,

another, more appealing, side of the popular reaction to the pogrom was its rejection on grounds of Christian compassion and common humanity.  Jewish eye-witness accounts abound with references to the kindness of ‘Aryan’ and ‘Christian’ neighbours who are anxious to point out the overwhelming rejection of the pogrom by the vast majority of the population. 

Jews in Munich ‘were lavish in their praise of the sympathetic response they encountered among non-Jewish people.’[Ian Kershaw, Popular Opinion and Political Dissent in the Third Reich, pp.257-277].   This despite living in a police state unprecedented in its viciousness. 

Isaac Herzog, Israeli Labour leader explains why he doesn't want a Palestinian Prime Minister of Israel

Compare this with the Israelis who set up armchairs and coffee machines on a hilltop in order that they could get a better view and cheer on the ongoing destruction taking place in Gaza. [‘Israelis gather on hillsides to watch and cheer as military drops bombs on Gaza, People drink, snack and pose for selfies against a background of explosions as Palestinian death toll mounts in ongoing offensive.’ http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/20/israelis-cheer-gaza-bombing Harriet Sharwood, The Guardian, 20.7.14].  

 The only effect of the holocaust has been to reinforce the self-righteousness and moral turpitude of Israel’s Jews and to enable them to justify their own vicious racism.

The Nazis had to try very hard to instil anti-Semitism in the German population. The Nazis came to power not because of but despite their anti-Semitism.

Sternhell speaks of ‘the toxic ultra-nationalism that has evolved here, the kind whose European strain almost wiped out a majority of the Jewish people.’ Anyone familiar with Israeli society will know that the levels of racism in it are far higher than any equivalent Western society.

When we have, in the Labour Party, group like the Jewish Labour Movement going on about anti-Semitism whilst saying nothing about the horrific levels of racism in Israeli society, then we can accuse them of complicity. The JLM describe themselves as the ‘sister’ party of the Israeli Labour Party yet not once have they called out the visceral racism of the ILP. Israel claims to be the nation state of Jews, all Jews, yet the JLM and  their supporters keep silent, apart from smearing their Jewish opponents.

As Sternhell quite correctly says, the Jewish Nation State Law which explicitly denies Israeli Palestinians any right to be considered part of the same nation as Israeli Jews, because there is no Israeli nationality, is no different in principle from the Nuremburg Laws which changed the status of German Jews from citizens and nationals into subjects.

Daniel Blatman whose book The Death Marches: The Final Phase of Nazi Genocide won the Yad Vashem International Book Prize for Holocaust Research in 2011is a Holocaust researcher at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Blatman wrote an article earlier this year International Holocaust Remembrance Day: An Israeli Hypocrisy. Moshe Machover in Why Israel is a Racist State quotes Blatman as saying that “Deputy Speaker Bezalel Smotrich’s admiration for the biblical genocidaire Joshua bin Nun leads him to adopt values that resemble those of the German SS.”

According to Blatman, the blueprint of the Deputy Speaker of the Knesset, Bezalel Smotrich and Miki Zohar, a Likud MK, for the Palestinians, both inside and outside Israel, would be akin to Jews under the Nuremburg Laws.

As Sternhell observes, Smotrich and Zohar don’t wish to harm Palestinians, as long as they do what they are told of course, merely to ‘deprive them of their basic human rights, such as self-rule in their own state and freedom from oppression’.

The late Professor Amos Funkenstein, Head of the Faculty of History at Tel Aviv University when referring to the controversy over the refusal of soldiers to serve in the Occupied Territories, compared them to soldiers in the German army who refused to serve in concentration or extermination camps. [HOLOCAUST ANALOGIES - Repaying the Mortgage Return 2 March 1990] To those who asked how it was possible to compare the actions of Nazi soldiers with Israelis, Funkenstein replied,

“As a historian I know that every comparison is limited. On the other hand, without comparisons, no historiography is possible. Understanding a historical event is a kind of translation into the language of our time. If we would leave every phenomenon in its peculiarity, we could not make this translation. Every translation is an interpretation and every interpretation is also a comparison.”

It is not only anti-Zionists and anti-racists who make the comparison between Israel and Nazi Germany.  The racists also make the comparison.

The liberal left are often reticent about comparing Zionism to Nazism. Gilbert Achcar for example found it a ‘terrible comparison’ [Arabs and the Holocaust, pp.228. 234] and Shami Chakrabarti, in her report on racism in the Labour Party, argued that ‘it is always incendiary to compare the actions of Jewish people or institutions anywhere in the world to those of Hitler or the Nazis or to the perpetration of the Holocaust.’[The Shami Chakrabarti Inquiry, http://www.labour.org.uk/page/-/party-documents/ChakrabartiInquiry.pdf ]  By this logic one should not compare the settlers of Hebron, who daub the walls of Palestinians with the slogan ‘Arabs to the gas chambers’ with the Nazis. [See for example Donald Macintyre, Breaking silence over the horrors of Hebron, 22.6.04. The Independent, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/breaking-silence-over-the-horrors-of-hebron-5355569.html]  Only Zionists should be allowed to make such comparisons.

If the Holocaust is to serve any purpose it is as a warning against the repetition of such horrors. Even Israel’s Deputy Chief of Staff Yair Golan recognised this when he said, at the 2016 Holocaust Remembrance Day, that

"If there's something that frightens me about Holocaust remembrance it's the recognition of the revolting processes that occurred in Europe in general, and particularly in Germany, back then – 70, 80 and 90 years ago – and finding signs of them here among us today in 2016."

When Israeli rabbis talk about the justified murder of children and infants in war time, as Rabbis Yitzhak Shapiro and Josef Elitzur did in Torat HaMelech, a 2011 book which was a guide to how Jews could legally kill non Jews, they are laying the basis for a future genocide.  As American journalist Max Blumenthall observed, Torat HaMelech is:

a virtual manual for Jewish extremist terror designed to justify the mass slaughter of civilians. And in that respect, it is not entirely different from the Israeli military’s Dahiya Doctrine, or Asa Kasher and Amos Yadlin’s concept of “asymmetrical warfare.” The key difference seems to be the crude, almost childlike logic the book’s author, Rabbi Yitzhak Shapira, marshals to justify the killing of non-Jewish civilians.

Nazism didn’t come from nowhere.  In Mein Kampf Hitler cites, with approval, the American practice of eugenics. Nazism wasn’t an aberration. It was supported by many of the West’s leaders, Churchill included, when it first took power. The destruction of the German Labour Movement met with approval by these people. It was only when Nazi Germany turned against British interests that the British ruling class opposed Hitler.

However the racism of the British Empire was not altogether different from the racism of the Nazis which is why the Colonial Office vetoed propaganda aimed at Africans which condemned the racism of the Nazis. [see Smyth, Rosaleen; Britain's African Colonies and British Propaganda during the Second World War, Journal of Imperial & Commonwealth History 14,1 October 1985]

Isaac Herzog, Israeli Labour Party leader denies the party is 'Arab loving'

There can be little doubt that the edict of the Chief Rabbi of Safed, Shmuel Eliyahu, endorsed by dozens of other rabbis, to ban the renting of rooms or apartments by Jews to Arabs, bore a distinct resemblance to similar measures in pre-Holocaust Germany.  Safed Rabbi Boasts That anti-Arab Edict Worked

Or the mobs who in ‘liberal’ Tel Aviv chanted, during the attack on Gaza in 2014 that ‘‘There is no school tomorrow; there are no children left in Gaza’ resembled similar mobs in Berlin.

Those who seek to deflect from these comparisons by raising the bogey of ‘anti-Semitism’ are actively colluding in Israel’s Nazi like racism. We only have to look at the Pew Research Centre’s Survey Israel’s Religiously Divided Society which found that a plurality of Israeli Jews want to physically deport Israel’s Palestinian citizens.

Nazi like? Well expulsion of the Jews was the programme of the Nazis until 1941.

Tony Greenstein

See also

Are there any limits to Corbyn’s ritual self-humiliation? Being a Leader means standing up to your opponents not appeasing them

Nazi Zionist Comparisons – Israel’s metaphor for a disturbed conscience

Professors Ofer Cassif & Daniel Blatman of the Hebrew University, Jerusalem Compare Israel to Nazi Germany

Israel’s Occupation Forces Have Learnt Well from the Nazis

In Israel, Growing Fascism and a Racism Akin to Early Nazism

Zeev Sternhell

19.01.2018 02:00

They don’t wish to physically harm Palestinians. They only wish to deprive them of their basic human rights, such as self-rule in their own state and freedom from oppression

Israeli border police arrest a Palestinian in the West Bank, December 22, 2017Nasser Shiyoukhi/AP

I frequently ask myself how a historian in 50 or 100 years will interpret our period. When, he will ask, did people in Israel start to realize that the state that was established in the War of Independence, on the ruins of European Jewry and at the cost of the blood of combatants some of whom were Holocaust survivors, had devolved into a true monstrosity for its non-Jewish inhabitants. When did some Israelis understand that their cruelty and ability to bully others, Palestinians or Africans, began eroding the moral legitimacy of their existence as a sovereign entity?

The answer, that historian might say, was embedded in the actions of Knesset members such as Miki Zohar and Bezalel Smotrich and the bills proposed by Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked. The nation-state law, which looks like it was formulated by the worst of Europe’s ultra-nationalists, was only the beginning. Since the left did not protest against it in its Rothschild Boulevard demonstrations, it served as a first nail in the coffin of the old Israel, the one whose Declaration of Independence will remain as a museum showpiece. This archaeological relic will teach people what Israel could have become if its society hadn’t disintegrated from the moral devastation brought on by the occupation and apartheid in the territories.

The left is no longer capable of overcoming the toxic ultra-nationalism that has evolved here, the kind whose European strain almost wiped out a majority of the Jewish people. The interviews Haaretz’s Ravit Hecht held with Smotrich and Zohar (December 3, 2016 and October 28, 2017) should be widely disseminated on all media outlets in Israel and throughout the Jewish world. In both of them we see not just a growing Israeli fascism but racism akin to Nazism in its early stages.

Israeli Labour Party leader Herzog welcomes Trump to power

Like every ideology, the Nazi race theory developed over the years. At first it only deprived Jews of their civil and human rights. It’s possible that without World War II the “Jewish problem” would have ended only with the “voluntary” expulsion of Jews from Reich lands. After all, most of Austria and Germany’s Jews made it out in time. It’s possible that this is the future facing Palestinians.

Indeed, Smotrich and Zohar don’t wish to physically harm Palestinians, on condition that they don’t rise against their Jewish masters. They only wish to deprive them of their basic human rights, such as self-rule in their own state and freedom from oppression, or equal rights in case the territories are officially annexed to Israel. For these two representatives of the Knesset majority, the Palestinians are doomed to remain under occupation forever. It’s likely that the Likud’s Central Committee also thinks this way. The reasoning is simple: The Arabs aren’t Jews, so they cannot demand ownership over any part of the land that was promised to the Jewish people.

According to the concepts of Smotrich, Zohar and Shaked, a Jew from Brooklyn who has never set foot in this country is the legitimate owner of this land, while a Palestinian whose family has lived here for generations is a stranger, living here only by the grace of the Jews. “A Palestinian,” Zohar tells Hecht, “has no right to national self-determination since he doesn’t own the land in this country. Out of decency I want him here as a resident, since he was born here and lives here – I won’t tell him to leave. I’m sorry to say this but they have one major disadvantage – they weren’t born as Jews.”

From this one may assume that even if they all converted, grew side-curls and studied Torah, it would not help. This is the situation with regard to Sudanese and Eritrean asylum seekers and their children, who are Israeli for all intents and purposes. This is how it was with the Nazis. Later comes apartheid, which could apply under certain circumstances to Arabs who are citizens of Israel. Most Israelis don’t seem worried.

International Holocaust Remembrance Day: An Israeli Hypocrisy

If a racism survey were held in Western countries like the one on anti-Semitism, Israel would be near the top of the list

Daniel Blatman

Ha’aretz, Jan 28, 2018 9:03 PM

As happens every year, a few days before International Holocaust Remembrance Day (January 27), the Diaspora Affairs Ministry releases a report on the state of anti-Semitism in the world. This is a fixed ritual.

The report details the number of cases in which gravestones in some remote Jewish cemetery in Ukraine or Germany were vandalized and how many hooligans spat in the faces of Jews wearing kippot in London or Munich, as if they were a threat to Jewish existence, almost like an SS unit operating in Lithuania in 1942.

On Sunday, Education Minister Naftali Bennett, wearing his other hat as diaspora affairs minister, presented the report, whose data – as Ofer Aderet showed in this paper – answer the accepted description of fake news, to say the very least. Worried, Bennett pointed out the rise in the number of anti-Semitic incidents in Britain – 30 percent more than last year! – and stated, based on the figures from the French police, that one out of every three hate crimes in France targeted Jews. The other two out of three of course targeted Muslims and blacks, but that is less important.

"Anti-Semitism is the dangerous fuel that has inflamed our enemies forever," said Bennett. "We must ensure that every Jew everywhere in the world can live their lives in safety and pride. We must act in every way we can to fight modern anti-Semitism in order to guarantee the safety of the Jewish people, in Israel and in the Diaspora."

Since the UN General Assembly unanimously passed Resolution 60/7 in 2005, which designates January 27 – the date the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration and death camp was liberated – as International Holocaust Remembrance Day, it provides another opportunity for the chorus of hypocrites and the self-righteous in Israel, who get another day to spread their regular messages on anti-Semitism, the Holocaust and the security of the Jewish people.

The winter Holocaust Remembrance Day has been added to the one in the spring – Israel’s “Holocaust and Heroism Remembrance Day” – as an occasion to blather on and cover up the injustice Israel is carrying out here and now. Israel opens its commemoration of International Holocaust Remembrance Day 2018 with a breathtaking campaign of racist expulsion of African refugees.

It would be appropriate to go back to the wording of the resolution and examine how much of the General Assembly’s decision is upheld in Israel. In its very first section, Resolution 60/7 mentions the connection between the resolution and the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, “which proclaims that everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth therein, without distinction of any kind, such as race, religion or other status.”

Resolution 60/7 continues: “Recalling article 3 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which states that everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person; Recalling also article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and article 18 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which state that everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion.

“Bearing in mind that the founding principle of the Charter of the United Nations, ‘to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war,’ is testimony to the indelible link between the United Nations and the unique tragedy of the Second World War.”

The resolution mentions explicitly, in this context, the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which was adopted in 1948 “in order to avoid repetition of genocides such as those committed by the Nazi regime.”

Later, Resolution 60/7 mentions the Jewish tragedy, but here too the distance is great between the resolution and Israel’s manipulation of what it says: “Reaffirming that the Holocaust, which resulted in the murder of one third of the Jewish people, along with countless members of other minorities, will forever be a warning to all people of the dangers of hatred, bigotry, racism and prejudice.”

The resolution then calls on the UN member countries to “develop educational programs that will inculcate future generations with the lessons of the Holocaust in order to help to prevent future acts of genocide; rejects any denial of the Holocaust as an historical event, either in full or part; condemns without reserve all manifestations of religious intolerance, incitement, harassment or violence against persons or communities based on ethnic origin or religious belief, wherever they occur.”

Israel, which is about to send tens of thousands of African refugees on a long journey of wandering that will put their lives at risk, is the least appropriate country to speak in the name of the principles of UN General Assembly Resolution 60/7.

An endless number of examples prove that the debate in Israel is based on hypocrisy, ignorance and evil, and completely contradicts the principles set down in Resolution 60/7. Remember, Culture and Sports Minister Miri Regev described the Sudanese refugees as “a cancer in the body of the nation.” This is explicit incitement on an ethnic basis, the type that the UN resolution explicitly comes out against.

Deputy Knesset Speaker MK Bezalel Smotrich (Habayit Hayehudi) presented his phased plan, according to which the Palestinians in the occupied territories (and possibly Israeli citizens, too) would become, in the best case, subjects without rights with a status that reminds us of German Jews after the passage of the Nuremberg Laws in 1935. To the extent that they do not agree to the plan, they will simply be cleansed from here. If they refuse to leave, they will be uprooted violently, which would lead to genocide.

Another elected official from the ruling coalition, Likud's Miki Zohar, did not hesitate to state that the Arabs have a problem that has no solution – they are not Jews and therefore their fate in this land cannot be the same as that of the Jews. Where is Resolution 60/7 and where are Smotrich and Zohar? Prof. Zeev Sternhell wrote in this paper earlier this month that this racism is “akin to Nazism in its early stages.” I think it is Nazism in every way and fashion, even if comes from the school of the victims of historical Nazism.

But this is not just a dialogue between minor political figures. When Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu dehumanizes his own citizens and treats them as if they are the “huge quantities” flocking to the polls to bring down the right-wing government, he loses the right to speak in the name of Resolution 60/7. Of course, we must not forget the statements and comments of the religious leadership, which are a symbol and example for large parts of the national religious community in Israel.

This community has turned the Holocaust into one of the central components of its identity, but its treatment of its lessons is the most hypocritical and disgusting. There are hundreds of examples of this, if not thousands. One is Rabbi David Batzri, who in 2006 came out against the establishment of an Arab-Jewish school, saying the “establishment of such a school is an act of impurity and contamination. It is impossible to mix the impure with the pure. They are a blight, an evil Satan, a plague. The Arabs are donkeys so the question must be asked as to why God did not create them walking on four legs? So the answer is they must build and clean.”

Rabbi Dov Lior, one of the most important rabbis of religious Zionism, whose racist teachings are followed by thousands, said in 2013 that he did “not know how to get rid of [the Arabs]. We believe the day is not far off when we will achieve the cleaning of our entire land from the terrorists and their supporters, and they should go to Saudi Arabia.”

Books and pamphlets praising the murderers of Arabs or permitting the shedding of their blood, such as “Baruch Hagever” and “Torat Hamelech,” are legitimate literature among a number of those who wear knitted kippot. Many other Jews agree with the opinions appearing in these books, even if they have not read them or do not even know of their existence.

More than anything else, the thundering silence of the Yad Vashem World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem is disappointing and embarrassing. Precisely now, in the face of the beginning of the deportation campaign for asylum seekers, the institution entrusted with preserving the lessons of the Holocaust should have come out loudly in the name of the principles of Resolution 60/7.

It should stand at the head of the campaign being organized in various circles in an attempt to revoke the decree, which casts a great stain on Israel’s right to speak in the name of the victims of the terrible disaster that befell the Jewish people and the human race in general. But it seems this is not going to happen. Yad Vashem is known for its silence on moral questions, unless they touch on what happened during the Holocaust.

And this is how Israel has become the Western country in which the most extreme, racist discourse is being conducted against ethnic minorities, whether they are refugees from Africa or Arabs. If a racism survey was conducted in the West, similar to the report on anti-Semitism that the local chorus of hypocrites bandies about every January 27, Israel would find itself near the top of the list.

Daniel Blatman is a professor of history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.