Israel and Nazi Germany, Tweedldee and Tweedldum

By Khalid amayreh Avigdor Lieberman, the brashly-racist foreign minister of the apartheid Israeli state, reportedly recently ordered Zionist embassies around the world to circulate a 1941 photo showing the former Mufti of Jerusalem Hajj Amin Husseini meeting with German Nazi leader Adolf Hitler. Lieberman hopes that the picture would help counter growing international pressure on the Zionist regime to stop ethnic-cleansing measures against the Palestinians, especially in occupied Jerusalem . The release of the picture is widely viewed as a desperate feat by the widely-reviled Lieberman to make a difference as a foreign minister. Lieberman has been largely boycotted by the international community, mainly due to his radical and expressly racist views. Given his pariah status around the world, the Israeli government went as far as asking other Israeli officials, such as Defence Minister Ehud Barak, to carry out the Foreign Minister’s functions, especially in talks with American and European officials. Lieberman’s desperate act is likely to raise many eyebrows since it comes from a man whose mindset and ideological convictions differ little from those of Adolf Hitler. Indeed, Lieberman’s infatuation with Jewish nationalism (the correct term is Jewish fascism) can be viewed as a virtual carbon copy of Hitler’s obsession with German nationalism. Moreover, Lieberman’s brazenly racist discourse against non-Jews in general and Israel’s Palestinian population is nothing short of a later-day echo of the Aryan Nazi ideology. Furthermore, Liberman’s strident bellicosity and pugnacity resemble to a large extent the Nazi rhetoric against Germany’s neighbours which later found expression in the invasion of Poland and occupation of large parts of Europe . For example, Lieberman has called for dropping a nuclear bomb on Gaza, blanket-bombing Palestinian streets, shopping centres, banks, and neighbourhoods for the purpose of forcing hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to flee their homeland in order to make a “lebensraum” available for Jewish settlers. He also called for drowning Palestinian political prisoners in the Dead Sea, bombing Tehran and the Aswan Dam in Egypt. In fact, this thuggish petty criminal is the last person on earth who is morally qualified to criticize Amin Husseini for having a brief encounter with the leader of the Third Reich. Well, does Lieberman dare to tell us how many Jewish Zionist leaders allied themselves with Hitler? Does he dare to tell us how many Jewish soldiers and officers served in the Wehrmacht, Gestapo and SS? And then what about the close relationship between the Third Reich and Jewish terrorist groups operating in Palestine , such as the Stern Gang? And what about the tacit understandings between the Zionist and Nazi leaderships according to which the Zionists accepted that hundreds of thousands of European Jews be annihilated rather than allowed to immigrate to North America? According to the late Israeli writer and intellectual Israel Shahak, Jewish soldiers serving in the Nazi security apparatus were most feared by the local Jewish population. Shahak, a holocaust survivor himself, related that when a Jewish mother sent her son to do an errand, she taught him that he might pass through a German checkpoint but never through a Jewish-manned checkpoint. Besides, Husseini was a man who saw his country, his ancestral homeland, being devoured by the British-backed Zionist movement, and thought, rightly or wrongly, that enlisting the support of a contemporary world power like Germany might help his people save their country and regain their freedom and independence. Hence, one might really ask why it was perfectly acceptable for Zionists to collaborate with the Nazis in order to save Jewish lives whereas it was totally wrong for the leadership of a people facing near extermination at the hands of Zionism to behave similarly for the purpose of saving their people. True, Hitler was a mass murderer, par excellence. But how about Jewish mass murderers, before and after Hitler? Today, in Israel, school students complete their high school education without ever hearing the name “Genrikh Yagoda” (Genrich Grigorivc Yagoda), who is one of the greatest murderers of all time. Yagoda diligently carried out Stalin’s collectivization orders and was responsible for the death of at least 10 million people. His Jewish deputies established and managed the genocidal Gulag system. And after Stalin no longer viewed him favourably, Yagoda was demoted and subsequently executed, and was replaced as Chief Hangman in 1936 by Yezhov, the ‘bloodthirsty dwarf’ who had a Jewish wife. Another Russian Jew named Lazar Kaganovitch, also an aide to Stalin, was responsible for the extermination of millions of Ukrainians. During the harsh winter of 1932-33, mass starvation created by Kaganovitch reached critical levels and Ukrainians were forced to eat their pets, boots and belts, plus bark and roots. Some parents even ate infant children. More to the point, it is really ironic in a certain sense that Zionism projects itself as an antithesis of Nazism when nearly all Nazi characters have been nearly literally copied by the Zionist leadership. Zionism, for example, has declared all Jews a distinct ethnicity, just as the Nazis had declared all Germans a distinct ethnicity. Both Zionism and Nazism strove to build a ‘state’ that would be ‘redeemed’ through violent purification (in the case of Nazi Germany) and ‘an Iron wall’ (in the case of Zionist Israel). In both instances, ethnic cleansing was the main tool used to obliterate the ‘inferiors,’ the ‘water carriers and wood hewers’ in order to create ‘German-only’ settlements in Europe and ‘Jewish-only’ settlements in Palestine . In all honesty, there are no fundamental differences between Jewish national socialism (Zionism) and German national socialism (Nazism). The Nazis preached the ‘Master Race’ to justify Nazism while Zionists adopted the ancient myth of the ‘Chosen People’ to justify Zionism. Moreover, we can’t really ignore the absolute similarity between the Zionist ethnic conquest of Palestine and the implanting therein of ‘Jewish settlers’ at the expense of the native Palestinian Muslims and Christians, and the Nazi drive for ‘Lebensraum’ in Poland and the importation of ‘Aryans’ at the expense of the indigenous population. Yes, there in Europe, the Nazis sought to steal the Sudetenland and here in Palestine , the Zionists are stealing the West Bank . The arguments are the same, the lies are the same and the means are nearly identical. We need to highlight these similarities and the ‘common ground’ between Zionism and Nazism, irrespective of how many people will be upset by these comparisons. The truth is always a paramount value in itself. The Nazi-like occupation of Palestine by Israel is not the act of a few Israeli Jews. It is not even the act of the military establishment alone. It is the collective act of a morally desensitized society that has nearly lost its humanity and succumbed to a collective psychosis that is not unlike the moral blindness that struck the German people more than sixty years ago. In some ways, Palestinians have fared far worse than Hitler’s victims; for the Palestinian tragedy is ongoing and Palestinians, unlike Jews, who still receive compensation for losses dating back sixty years, receive no reparations for lost personal property, not even an acknowledgment from their tormenters of any responsibility for their dispossession. Sixty years ago Zionists demolished 438 Palestinian villages and poisoned or destroyed wells to ensure that their rightful owners would not return. Today, Zionists keep on behaving more or less along the same traditions, demolishing homes, destroying farms, and narrowing people’s horizons, all with the goal of making them emigrate. Today in every junior high school in America , students read Anne Frank, while in every high school Elie Wiesel’s ‘Night’ is requisite reading. This is the man who says brazenly that he readily identifies with Israeli crimes and that he couldn’t bring himself to say bad things about Israel. The victims of the first Kristallnacht enjoy the world’s approbation and sympathy, while at the same time having succeeded in demonizing an entire people, for whom Kristallnacht still remains a night without end. But, unlike the German national socialists, Jewish national socialists are falsifying history and reality to justify their crimes against humanity. The Holocaust narrative, which has been elevated to the status of a religion, allows Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum in Jerusalem, to invoke the mantra ‘Never Again’ while it sits on Arab lands stolen from Ein Karem and overlooking the unmarked graves of Palestinians massacred by Judeo-Nazi terrorists at Deir Yassin. It is sad, really sad, that most Jews are now finding themselves in the shoes of their former oppressors, knowingly and consciously. On August 23, 1947, nearly one year before Israel ’s birth, Harry Truman wrote the following to Eleanor Roosevelt, apparently in the wake of another Jewish atrocity in Palestine : “I fear very much that the Jews are like all underdogs. When they get on the top they are just as intolerant and cruel as the people were to them when they were underneath. I regret this situation very much because my sympathy has always been on their side. In light of Israel’s Nazi-like behavior in Palestine, it is difficult to view Truman’s prophetic words with indifference. In fact, it is a moral obligation of the first order to oppose Zionism with the same vigour and same determination the world demonstrated in the face of Nazism.