Press censorship, preventing Arab political parties from participating in elections, a “Nakba” law which punishes commemorations or public events, followed by banning textbooks that mention it. Then there are the proposed “loyalty oaths”, and now the removal of Arabic names on road signs. Tolerance and civil liberties are not doing very well in Israel. Gaza continues to fester as the largest ghetto on earth and several commentators have made invidious comparisons of Israel and post-Weimar Germany.

And now Antony Lerman asks in the Guardian, “Should we ban ‘Nazi analogies’?”

Now is precisely the wrong time to stifle discussion of Israel’s many problems – or the nature of Zionism – and it may soon be difficult to have these discussions anywhere except outside Israel.

Former Arab Knesset member Azmi Bishara in his essay, “Loyalty to racism,” makes the valid point that all these recent repressive measures have been designed to bolster Zionist ideology and coerce patriotism from Israelis, while eliminating political expression for Israeli Arabs.

Khalid Amayreh asks, in his essay “Why Zionism-Nazism comparisons are legitimate“:

“Were the Nazis ‘Nazi’ only because they created and used gas chambers to incinerate their Jewish and non-Jewish victims? Would the Nazis have been less evil and therefore ‘less Nazi’ if they had annihilated their victims by way of bullets instead of ovens, or by starving them to death as Israel has been doing to the Palestinians?”

The Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs suggests applying Natan Sharansky’s “3D” test to such analogies. However the litmus tests of “demonization, double standards, and delegitimization” will always test pink (especially in the hands of zealots) because the tests themselves are flawed. The issue is not the indisputable fact of the Shoah or the legitimacy of the Israeli state, but its nature. Even the National Socialists came to power legally in 1934.

“The homeland is blood and soil, it is earth bound by blood, it is the Alpha and Omega of all existence”

Certainly anyone making Nazi analogies must proceed delicately – that is to say, as factually and dispassionately as possible – but, despite some differences, there are also many similarities between National Socialism and Zionism that are based on historical co-evolution, and can not be avoided.

Zionism employs racial, ethnic and religious nationalism as a means to promote the interests of a privileged ruling people (“Herrenvolk”) associated with “their” land. “Natural growth” resembles the National Socialist concepts of “Lebensraum” and Israel’s desire to build eastward is what the NS-ers called the “Drang nach Osten.” The annexation of other lands (“Anschluss”), occupation (“Besatzung”), and “voelkisch” (ethnic) ties to the land (“Blut und Boden”) are painful features of the expression of these ideologies. Like the National Socialists, the Zionists’ nationalist philosophy trembles at the fear of “Umvolkung” (loss of nationhood). The Revisionist Zionist, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, whose school of Zionism holds the most currency in Israel today, was an open admirer of Mussolini.

Nazis belittled Jewish “belonging” to the German soil (“Boden”) and to the DNA of the nation (“Blut”). According to Nazis, Jews were a deracinated people who were overly urban, sickly, lived in squalor, and had to be removed. Similarly, we often hear the refrain from Zionists that “there was never a Palestinian people.” Jason Kunin touches on some of these themes in his essay, “A Genuine Peace Movement Cannot be Zionist.”

Benjamin Netanyahu recently attempted to embarrass the German Foreign Minister by using the Israel Project’s strategy of calling the dismantling of settlements “ethnic cleansing” (he actually used the German word “Judenrein”). Avigdor Lieberman, doing his part for Nazi analogies, published 60-year-old pictures of the Mufti with Hitler to tar Arabs with the taint of Nazism.

Should only Zionists get free passes to use Nazi analogies?

National Socialism and Zionism are the anachronistic products of 19th Century German nationalism: Nazism in part the legacy of Fichte and others, and Zionism flowed from the pen of Herzl. Yet both developed out of a common German Romanticism. Assimilated German Jews like Heinrich Heine and Herzl himself were drawn to, if not torn between, simultaneous German and Jewish nationalism.

Nazism and Zionism, then, are cousins, if not brothers.

Finally, there’s this sobering definition of fascism from Robert Paxton (The Anatomy of Fascism, Vintage Books):

[Fascism is] “a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.”

The answer to Lerman’s question should be “no.” Maybe even “hell no.”

In May and June I traveled to Israel and the West Bank with an interfaith peace group to see for myself the “reality on the ground” for both Israelis and Palestinians. Toward the end of our visit, President Obama delivered his speech to the Arab world in Cairo, calling for an end of illegal settlements in the West Bank. On the day before we left Israel, some of us photographed an anti-American demonstration in Jerusalem.

No, these were not angry Palestinians, but shouting Jewish settlers and religious Zionists in West Jerusalem, pronouncing President Obama a Muslim and mixing both religious and racial insult with protestations that Judea and Samaria (the West Bank) will never be shared with Arabs. This is a widely-held view by most of the coalition parties that comprise the current government – Likud, Beitenu, Kadima, Shas – though not necessarily the average Israeli – and it underscores a growing rift between American democratic values and an increasingly xenophobic and nationalist Israeli government. If there were any doubts before, our democracy is not like theirs and our values are not their values.

The July 19th Jerusalem Post illustrates this rift in an article, “Obama’s Real Agenda,” by Anne Bayefsky, which complained that Obama had for the first time invited moderate American Jews, including JStreet, to talk with him about Israel, and was being too even-handed: “President Barack Obama last Monday met for the first time with leaders of selected Jewish organizations and leaks from the meeting now make one thing very clear. The only free country in the Middle East no longer has a friend in the leader of the free world. Obama is the most hostile sitting American president in the history of the state of Israel.”

But while President Obama and Secretary Clinton insist on an end to the illegal settlements, Israel keeps building them anyway, pushing settlement blocks deep into the West Bank and clearly trying to create a “reality on the ground” which will forever block the possibility of a Palestinian state – in defiance of American foreign policy goals over many presidencies.

And Israel’s government has also gone on a xenophobic offensive as well. Efforts by Transportation Minister Katz to “Judaize” street signs in even Arab towns and cities in Israel – or the revised “Nakba” bill which punishes Israelis who talk about or commemorate the Nakba (the 1948 Palestinian “disaster”) – have even mainstream Israelis concerned about civil liberties. A bill in the Knesset proposing a national biometric identity card is likewise raising a lot of eyebrows. Coalition parties like Shas and Beteinu openly call for the forced deportation of Israeli Arabs to Jordan and Egypt.

But while the United States is now heading in the direction of increased tolerance and compliance with international law, Israel is racing in the opposite direction. Jewish Israelis can no longer speak of their country, which governs an Arab population almost the same size as its own by martial law, as a Western democracy. Israel, for all its cultural links and trade with Europe and the U.S., is giving up hope of ever being accepted as a “normal” Western nation. Although the reason some ascribe to this is “anti-Semitism” it is also true that “normal” nations in the 21st Century no longer build colonies and habitually thumb their noses at international law. Now, with the U.S. sounding more like Europe, Americans have drawn Israel’s ire as well.

Last year the Bush administration initialed a 10-year $30 billion military aid package for Israel. Israel’s per-capita military expenses are the highest in the world and Americans have been paying for roughly 15-20% of these expenses -things like last December’s war on Gaza’s civilian population, guarding settlements in war zones like Hebron, building the 500 kilometer “security wall,” the ubiquitous checkpoints, or the recent jailing of a former U.S. congresswoman trying to deliver aid to Gaza.

Nations and empires with an addiction to wielding military power usually have to give it up when they start running out of money. If Israel resents U.S. “meddling” or – worse! – even-handedness, perhaps it’s time to take a step back – starting with the American military aid Israel uses in violation of international laws and in opposition to our own foreign policy. Only when Israeli taxpayers shoulder the full costs of their military occupation will a fair and peaceful settlement with Palestinians occur to them.

This was published in the Standard Times on July 23, 2009
http://www.southcoasttoday.com/20090723/opinion/907230329
(link may be broken)

Many Israelis and Jewish groups get upset when unfavorable parallels are drawn between the Israeli treatment of Palestinians and the Nazi’s treatment of Jews, particularly in Gaza, which has been compared to the Warsaw Ghetto. Groups like the American Jewish Committee see any parallel, even by Jewish progressives, as offensive and anti-Semitic.

But this week Benjamin Netanyahu used the Nazi term “Judenrein” in a meeting with the German foreign minister while discussing the possible removal of West Bank settlements. Reuters quoted a “confidant” of Netanyahu saying that the Israeli prime minister told Frank-Walter Steinmeier earlier this week that “Judea and Samaria” [the West Bank] cannot be Judenrein.” The term was used by Nazis to refer to areas “cleansed of Jews.” Asked by Reuters how Steinmeier reacted to the term, the confidant said, “What could he do? He basically just nodded.”

In attempting to leverage German guilt, the Prime Minister himself opened up the same can of worms the AJC and countless organizations would have preferred to leave buried: the meaning of many of these nationalist terms, and the frightening similarities between German nationalism and Zionism.

Aside from this, recent racist pronouncements by Israeli’s Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman and Public Security Minister Yitzhak Aharonovitch could really best be uttered auf [1936-era] Deutsch. Germans of today have managed to move past ugly 19th Century racist nationalism, but Israel (which was founded on similar principles first described in Der Judenstaat by Theodor Herzl) just seems to be getting warmed up, especially the new government.

Now that Netanyahu has mastered German 101, here are some other phrases from the German past, with suggested uses, that might be useful for him and his coalition government: