My routine of recording and analyzing a vast record of attacks on Zionism and Israel for more than 40 years has enabled me to develop a certain immunity to those accusations. And yet some libels have and still do make my blood run cold. The pairing of Israel with Nazism belongs to that category and was displayed in full force following the recent violent eruption in Gaza and Israel.
The Anti-Defamation League in the USA reported 17,000 tweets using variations on the phrase “Hitler was right” between May 7 and 14, at the height of the war. The World Jewish Congress echoed this by showing posts on major platforms including Facebook, Twitter and Instagram featuring Holocaust imagery and Nazi glorification. In London, placards at a demonstration in central London read “One Holocaust does not justify another” and “Netanyahu surpasses Hitler in Barbarism” and an Israeli flag featuring a Swastika was waved on campus. At another more recent demonstration a picture of Netanyahu was daubed with Hitler’s hair style and moustache.
Whilst the antisemitic demonization of Zionism and Israel is nothing new, the Nazi accusation has followed a convoluted trajectory, mutating like the coronavirus, in several variants.
Post-Holocaust expressions pairing Nazi with anti-Zionist themes were used for the first time in the Arab and Muslim world and long before the 1967 Six Day War and its subsequent occupation of the Gaza Strip, the Sinai Peninsula and the West Bank, including east Jerusalem and the Golan Heights. In the first systematic study of Arab attitudes to Israel, its author Yehoshafat Harkabi gave many examples where Zionism was depicted as the spiritual sister of Nazism. Ironically, the role of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Mohammad Amin al-Husayni, the Arab Palestinian leader who closely allied himself with the Nazi regime, was conveniently forgotten.
Gamal Abdel Nasser who ruled Egypt from 1954, referred in 1960 to David Ben-Gurion, the prime minister of Israel, as the greatest war criminal of the century. Not Hitler, he said, because Hitler liquidated the nation of a state whereas Ben-Gurion liquidated an entire nation-state. Nasser subsequently used the expression “Zionist Nazism.” The above researcher noted that it was repeatedly argued in Arab anti-Zionist writings that Germany’s actions were justified because of the evil the Jews did to her and the danger they constituted for the country. These actions, it was explained, were necessary for self-defense.
Arab writers expressed sympathy for Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi organizer of the Final Solution of the Jewish Question, who was put on trial in Israel. In examining the motives that might have stimulated the sympathy for Eichmann amongst Arab writers, Harkabi wrote that the Arabs’ hatred of Israel and sense of injustice impelled them to equate the loss of Palestine with the Holocaust and to regards the Nazi holocaust as a kind of “advance retribution” for the crimes of Zionism.
Enter the Holocaust deniers who are unhappy about what they see as the immunity given to Zionism/Israel for it deeds, thanks to the Holocaust. To overcome this, they decided to “examine critically” the origin of the so-called immunity, the Holocaust, with a view of proving that much of it is not what really happened: Zionism, so goes the claim, has in reality rewritten the facts in order to get support and immunity for their deeds.
Paul Rassinier, a French Holocaust survivor, wrote in 1964 about the falsification of historical documents by an institution with one of its important branches being in Tel Aviv. Robert Faurisson, a French university professor wrote of the “gigantic political-financial swindle” whose victims are the Palestinian people. The proof that the genocide is an invention of Jewish and more specifically Zionist propaganda was, according to Arthur Butz, author of The Hoax of the Twentieth Century, that Jews have a propensity, under the influence of the Talmud, to give imaginary figures.
Enter yet another player: the Soviet Union. In 1965, one of the UN organs drafted a convention on the elimination of all forms of Racial Discrimination. Early in the discussion a consensus developed to condemn apartheid as a form of racism and to specify other such forms of racism as Nazism and neo-Nazism and last but not least antisemitism. During debates in the Human Rights Commission, the Soviet Union became concerned that if the proposal was passed, it would be the first to be accused of antisemitism in view of its poor treatment of its Jewish population. In response, it submitted that Zionism should be classed as a manifestation of racism. This led to a bitter discussion that culminated in the compromise that all specific forms of racial discrimination were to be dropped from the draft.
By an act of clever and cunning tactics the USSR prevented a potentially dangerous addendum to a resolution which it supported. Not only did it succeed in downgrading the moral, political and symbolic weight that a condemnation of Jew-hatred would have carried throughout the world, but as a bonus it established the precedent of linking Zionism with Nazism.
The next noteworthy occurrence of the twinning of Nazism with Zionism came with the publication of a book in 1983 by the American Jewish anti-Zionist Trotskyite Lenni Brenner titled Zionism in the Age of the Dictators. Brenner presented his book as a serious study with the veneer of academic rigor and thereby acquiring some “authority.” He presented the thesis of an alliance of Zionism with Nazism. The roots of “Zionist Racism”, Brenner wrote, is the Nazi concept of “Blood and Soil.” For the Zionists, claimed Brenner, the Jews were a pure race.
A large portion of the book is taken up with what Brenner claimed is his ability to “document” the collaboration between the Zionist Movement and the Nazis. Contemporaneous Zionism and the modern State of Israel, argued Brenner, have not cleansed themselves of their dubious ideology. His thesis, however, was demonstrated by various leading historians as flawed, deriving from a biased interpretation of the facts, developed in order to make them fit with his concocted thesis.
Influenced by Brenner is one Jim Allen, another radical socialist who launched his playwriting and scriptwriting career in Britain by writing an anti-Zionist play, a genre that was not normally used by enemies of Zionism. To illustrate once more the now familiar accusation of Nazi-Zionist collaboration, Allen hit on the idea of a play in the form of a court drama incorporating a host of emblems resonating with imagery from the death of Christ, a most peculiar theme for a left-wing ideology
Fast forward and the flag of Brenner’s crackpot theory was waved enthusiastically in Britain by Ken Livingstone, the ex-Labour’s mayor of London. The trope is echoed enthusiastically by various supporters of Jeremy Corbyn, the previous leader of the Labour Party.
In a study just out, the Israeli Institute for National Security Studies has revealed that between late 2019 and late 2020, the comparison of Israel to the Nazis appeared in 36% of antisemitic expressions by elected politicians from both ends of the political spectrum.
And so, we have reached the latest installment of this particular form of demonization, those descending today on the streets of Western cities and using social media to lash out in response to the latest defensive war waged by Israel.
Perhaps what is most striking is the amazing ability of the Nazi trope to mutate in different forms, traveling across time from the past to the present for almost 80 years, unhindered by geographical boundaries or generations differences and morphing into competing ideologies.
Having started as a tool against Zionism and Israel, the propagators of the Nazi allegation are now directing their menace against Israel’s Jewish supporters around the world by accusing them of being apologists for Nazism. Anxious Jewish communities are pondering how to best react.
I wrote in my book What is Antizionism?...and is it Antisemitic? that with the danger that it represents to Israel and the Jewish people, I was and still am mystified about why the study of anti-Zionism remains in its infancy, why university chairs, institutes and learned journals dedicated to this phenomenon have not been created. After all, the better you know your enemy, the better you will be able to fight him. The study of the Nazi trope seems to me like a good starting point.
Mahmoud Abbas’s thesis
“A partnership was established between Hitler’s Nazis and the leadership of the Zionist movement…[the Zionists gave] permission to every racist in the world, led by Hitler and the Nazis, to treat Jews as they wish, so long as it guarantees immigration to Palestine.” The Zionist leaders actually “wanted” Jews to be murdered, because “having more victims meant greater rights and stronger privilege to join the negotiation table for dividing the spoils of war once it was over” – Mahmoud Abbas, President of the Palestinian Authority, in a book published in Arabic in 1983 based on his doctoral dissertation at the Moscow Oriental College.
The writer is an independent researcher with expertise in the field of anti-Zionism. He is the author of a doctorate, articles, academic papers, the book ‘What Is Antizionism?’ (published by Aspekt and available on Amazon) and a contributor to the forthcoming book ‘BDS and the De-legitimization of Israel’ (Routledge)