The ethno-nationalist stories of Zionism and Nazism are intertwined in many ways. And the dominant form of genocidal Zionism today speaks like an echo from the dark days of Adolf Hitler and his own genocidal nationalism.
Human rights groups and numerous genocide experts have long called Israel’s crimes in Gaza a genocide. And this week, Jewish actor Wallace Shawn told the Katie Halper Show that the apartheid state has been “doing evil that is just as great as what the Nazis did”. In fact, he said:
In some ways it’s worse, because they kind of boast about it. Hitler had the decency to try to keep it secret. For some reason, Hitler didn’t want people to know he was doing these things to the Jews. The Israelis are almost proud of it
US: from genocide-stoppers to genocide-enablers
While the Soviet Union played a key role in defeating Nazism, losing millions of soldiers in the battle, the US was also a major part of the coalition that finally defeated Adolf Hitler and ended the Holocaust.
However, in the decades that followed, the US expanded on its own genocidal history at home by violently solidifying its place as the world’s foremost imperial power.
Ethnic cleansing and genocide aren’t unique to the Nazis. But they are similar war crimes that often go hand in hand. Hitler’s Nazis tried to ethnically cleanse Germany before they launched the Holocaust. Israel, meanwhile, was founded on an ethnic cleansing campaign against Palestinians decades before it began its full-blown genocide in Gaza.
Because Israel has loyally served as a strategic outpost, proxy, and tool of the US empire’s interests in the Middle East, Washington’s political elites have long allowed Israel’s slow ethnic cleansing of Palestinian territory.
But the Joe Biden administration’s greenlighting of the Gaza genocide from 2023 onwards exposed the US establishment’s disdain for international law and disinterest in the US’s global reputational collapse.
While Biden’s government may have tried to put on a serious face and act like it cared about Palestinians as it gave Israel billions of dollars in military aid to murder them, its behaviour was little different from Donald Trump’s public advocacy of ethnic cleansing since he replaced Biden.
From Hitler to Trump: the same rhetoric over and over again
In 1933, Zionists reached a “transfer” deal with Hitler’s government. The Jewish Agency, as “the only authorized Jewish organization in Nazi Germany”, oversaw this “transfer” of around 53,000 Jewish people to Palestine under British colonial control.
Later, a year before the start of the Second World War, in 1938, the Evian Conference brought countries together to talk about the refugee wave resulting from the ongoing persecution of Jewish people in Germany. And as the USC Shoah Foundation wrote:
Before the conference, Hitler made it known that he would help Jewish refugees migrate to different participating countries.
It quoted Hitler as saying:
We, on our part, are ready to put all these criminals at the disposal of these countries, for all I care, even on luxury ships
Likewise, far-right Zionists today talk about ‘helping Palestinians in Gaza to emigrate’. Prominent Zionists before the foundation of Israel, meanwhile, said Jewish people “must take over the land” of Palestine and the native Palestinians “must be transferred to some other place”, with one eventual prime minister (David Ben-Gurion) arguing that “it is impossible to imagine general evacuation without compulsion, and brutal compulsion”.
Because many Palestinians didn’t leave, Israel has had to maintain its power in the region for decades through many forms of settler-colonial brutality, culminating in the current genocide in Gaza.
Speaking about the Evian Conference, former American Jewish Committee leader David Harris explained that:
At a time before Auschwitz, when Adolf Hitler teased other nations, saying, in effect, if you care so much about Jews, why not open your doors to them, the response from the countries in attendance, with the notable exception of the Dominican Republic, was a resounding ‘no,’
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum director Sara J. Bloomfield, meanwhile, highlighted that:
The Nazi regime was clear in its intentions to rid the Reich of Jews by making life so unbearable that they would flee.
And she said the failure at Evian “was an enormous propaganda victory for Nazi Germany”, emboldening Nazis to increase their violence against Jewish people “after the U.S. and other governments already demonstrated that rescuing Jews was not a priority”.
Never again for anyone
During the 2014 Israeli assault on Gaza, a number of Holocaust survivors and their descendants insisted on the similarities between Hitler’s Nazi Holocaust and Israel’s actions in Palestine. They wrote that:
Genocide begins with the silence of the world…
We are alarmed by the extreme, racist dehumanization of Palestinians in Israeli society, which has reached a fever-pitch. In Israel, politicians and pundits in The Times of Israel and The Jerusalem Post have called openly for genocide of Palestinians and right-wing Israelis are adopting Neo-Nazi insignia…
We must raise our collective voices and use our collective power to bring about an end to all forms of racism, including the ongoing genocide of Palestinian people. We call for an immediate end to the siege against and blockade of Gaza. We call for the full economic, cultural and academic boycott of Israel. “Never again” must mean NEVER AGAIN FOR ANYONE!
Featured image via the Canary
