Fascism resonates throughout Israel

 

“I fear very much that the Jews are like all underdogs. When they get on top, they are just as intolerant and as cruel as the people were to them when they were underneath.”

Harry Truman (in Harry S. Truman, by Margaret Truman, New York: William Morrow and Co., 1973, pp. 384-385)

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 “It is not because they are Zionists that they are evildoers. It is because they are evildoers that they are Zionists.”

Rabbi Avraham Yosef Freund of Mansond

I realize quite well that comparing Zionists to Nazis can, and often does, invite rabid fulmination from Zionist circles, especially in North America where the Zionist stranglehold on the mass media, especially the so-called agenda-setters, is obvious, if not conspicuous.

Understandably, nobody likes to be compared to the Nazis, who, more or less, came to represent ultimate evil.

Nonetheless, we have to remind ourselves, Jews and gentiles alike, that the Nazis were “Nazi”, e.g. completely diabolic and satanic because of the utter evil nature of their doctrine and deeds, not because many of their victims were of the Jewish faith.

The Nazis did what they did because they viewed “their ultimate victims” as sub-humans that ought to be annihilated, and they sought to put their hateful doctrine into effect.

Sadly, many Zionist Jews, and their number is steadily increasing, are menacingly walking on, more or less, the same path as the Nazis did over half a century ago.

This is sad and calamitous, because of all people in the world, Jews should realize the eventual consequences of harbouring the ugly creator of fascism.

Yes, the Zionists seem to be smarter, duplicitous and more skilful in the use of language. They are extremely good in utilizing the media and manipulating politics, especially in the U.S., where the Congress of the United States is virtually an Israeli-occupied territory.

But the substance of Zionist virulent ideas and ruthless actions vis-é-vis the Palestinian people differs little from the substance of Nazi ideas and actions.

It is true that there are no concentration camps and gas chambers in the West Bank (there are many detention camps). But it is also true that Israeli soldiers are stamping serial numbers on the foreheads and forearms of Palestinian internees, very much like the Gestapo did to Jews and non-Jews in Europe six decades ago.

It is also true that the Israeli army is applying “Nazi tactics” employed at Ghetto Warsaw in its present rampageous assaults against Palestinian refugee camps, such as Balata, Jenin, Nur Shams, Dheheishe.

This is not concocted propaganda stemming from anti-Semitism as some Zionists and Zionist apologists are most likely to claim.

This is the sad, bitter and brash reality that Israel has reached, thanks, in part, to the silence and connivance of many Jews and non-Jews.

Calls for genocide

These days, the brutal ugliness of the Zionist mentality is finding expression not only in what the Israeli occupation army has been doing in the alleys of Palestinian refugee camps and streets of major Palestinian towns, but also openly expressed through the media, from Tel Aviv to New York, where serious intellectuals, who obviously have lost their souls to the devil, are actually calling for carrying out mass killings of Palestinian civilians.

The fact that such nefarious calls are made at all is shocking in itself. What is more shocking still is the fact that these calls are met with virtual silence from most Israelis and Jews around the world.

Is it a sign of moral numbness or apathy, or what? This is a question that needs to be answered by those most directly concerned, namely Jewish political and religious leaders who have yet to wake up to see what is being said and done in the name of their people and their religion.

On 1 March, a renowned Israeli historian, Martin Van Creveld, told the Hebrew weekly, Yerushalyim, “Whoever isn’t willing to commit crimes in order to save his country shouldn’t engage in statesmanship.”

Van Creveld, who teaches history at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, proposed that the Israeli army kill as many Palestinians as it takes to deter the Palestinians “once and for all.”

Asked how many Palestinians he thought ought to be killed, he said, “As many as is needed in order that there will not be a need to repeat it, so that they won’t tail us during the time of the withdrawal. We have to strike so hard that there won’t be a need for a second strike. Perhaps 5,000 or 10,000 killed won’t be enough and then we will have to kill more.”

Like Ariel Sharon, who supervised the mass murder of more than 2,000 Palestinian refugees at the Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps south of Beirut in the summer of 1982, Van Creveld seemed not concerned a bit about the moral implications of genocide or the possibility that the perpetrators might be tried someday as war criminals before an international tribunal.

“People forgive for one crime on the condition that it is over. They forgive if it is quick and smooth, and particularly if it succeeds. If it doesn’t succeed, then everything is lost.”

Professor Creveld is by no means an isolated case among Zionist intellectuals.

On 11 March, Allan Dershowitz, Professor of Law at Harvard University, wrote in the Jerusalem Post that the Israeli army shouldn’t hesitate to destroy entire Palestinian villages in response to Palestinian resistance attacks against Israeli occupation and apartheid.

“The residents would be given 24 hours to leave, and then troops will come in and bulldoze all of the buildings.”

I don’t know if Dershowitz knew that he was inadvertently proposing the application of a notorious Nazi tactic to suppress resistance to a foreign occupation.

If he didn’t, I suggest that he read the Nazi liquidation of the Czechoslovakian village of Lidice in 1942 on the orders of Hitler and draw his own conclusions.

But it is unlikely that Dershowitz was not aware of the Nazi nature of his proposal. In any case, it would be a great calamity if he wasn’t, and if he was, the calamity would be even greater.

Far from repudiating these venomous calls, Israeli officials, including government ministers, readily lauded the ideas of people like Creveld and Dershowitz.

Earlier in March, the Israeli press quoted the Israeli Minister of National Infrastructure, Avigdor Liberman, who resigned his post because the number of Palestinians killed by the Israeli army was insufficient for him, called on the army to bomb Palestinian “markets, banks and malls.”

“At 8 o’clock, we bomb all commercial centres; at 12 o’clock we bomb all fuel stations; and at 2 o’clock in the afternoon, we bomb all the banks.”

Liberman’s proposal was only matched by that of Benny Elon, the outgoing Minister of Tourism, who reiterated his Nazi-like position toward the Palestinians saying, “They will have to be expelled from their homeland.”

“If they don’t agree to be ‘transferred’ voluntarily, they will have to be expelled forcibly,” said Elon in a recent article in his party’s (the National Union) magazine.

According to the Israeli newspaper, Ha’aretz, on 22 March, such fascist ideas are gaining a growing foothold in the Israeli society, indicating a definite fascist trend among Israeli Jews.

This view is corroborated by an opinion poll conducted in mid-March by the prestigious Jaffe Center for strategic studies at Tel Aviv University.

It found that 46 per cent of Jews in Israel support the mass deportation of Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Moreover, 31 per cent of those polled supported the expulsion of Israeli Arabs, while 60 per cent of respondents favoured the idea of encouraging Arabs to emigrate from Israel.

More to the point, 80 per cent of respondents said they objected to the inclusion of Israeli Arabs or their representatives in the decision-making process of crucial issues such as setting Israel’s borders.

The fact that nearly half the Israeli public support the uprooting of an entire people from its ancestral motherland is frightening, to say the least.

It means that there is a serious collective psychosis permeating through Israel, one not unlike that which was rampant in Germany in the late 1930s and early 1940s.

Indeed, the distance between advocating “mass expulsion” and supporting “genocide” is not big since no mass expulsion can be effected without perpetrating a genocide. History shows that the two go hand-in-hand.

The Israelis should know this very well, given the waves of ethnic cleansing of Palestinians they carried out in 1948.

This article is not meant to vilify Jews, but rather to direct attention to the fascist quagmire that is engulfing much of the Israeli society and political establishment these days.

For conscientious Jews around the world, and they are many, it should be an eye-opener, an alarm bell and an urgent invitation to act to stem the tide of fascism.

I believe Jews in particular should speak up against this looming menace, which, if allowed to have its course, could have disastrous ramifications for all of us, Jews and Palestinians alike.