Tony Greenstein | 02 August 2018 | Post Views:

There is NOTHING wrong in comparing Israel to Nazi Germany – Israelis
do it all the time.

Is John
McDonnell preparing to become Brutus to Corbyn’s Caesar?




First it
was a 6 year old mural. Today it is an 8 year old meeting on Holocaust Memorial
Day at which Hajo Meyer, a Jewish survivor of Auschwitz spoke. Tomorrow it will
be another meeting because clearly there are scores of people researching everything
Corbyn attended in the hope of a new scandal.
The outrage of the Yellow Press and the Zionists is utterly synthetic.  Where is their outrage about the Saudi atrocities in Yemen or Israel’s continuous murder of Palestinians living under occupation? That Corbyn does not call out this hypocrisy demonstrates just how weak the man has become.
Corbyn did
nothing wrong 8 years ago in chairing a meeting pointing out the hypocrisy of Israel
using the slogan ‘Never Again’ whilst
massacring Palestinians. Corbyn should stop apologising
to a bunch of racists.
It is baffling that Corbyn still does not understand the nature of the campaign against him? It is
blindingly obvious that the Right are out to get him for everything he did in
the past. Instead of forever hoisting the white flag Corbyn should have the
political courage to stand up and defend what he once believed in.
I was at the meeting in Portcullis House
when Hajo Meyer spoke, as did the representatives of other groups who suffered holocausts
such as the Roma. The Guardian reports
that Corbyn has said that he appeared with people “whose views I completely reject” when he hosted a Holocaust
Memorial Day event in 2010, while he was a backbench MP.
This is a stupid lie. I remember very
clearly the warm words Corbyn and others had for Hajo. Corbyn was right then
and wrong now.  Hajo knew about Auschwitz
and anti-Semitism first hand, unlike Corbyn’s malevolent detractors in the Tory
press. He had every right to compare what
Israel was doing in Gaza to the Nazis.
Note the
word compare’. Hajo didn’t say that Israel and Nazi Germany were the
same he compared the actions of a
state, which imprisons people in what David Cameron called a concentration camp,
and then bombards them with high tech missiles and explosives, to Germany’s
attacks on civilians.
There are numerous examples of Israelis
comparing their own state to Nazi Germany just as there are numerous examples
of Israel comparing the Palestinians to the Nazis. Two years ago Israel’s
own Deputy Chief of Staff, Yair Golan compared
Israel to pre-Holocaust Nazi Germany. Hebrew University lecturer Dr. Ofer
Cassif described
Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked as ‘Neo-Nazi scum’ and said that “I think it’s fair to compare Israel
to Germany in the 1930s, and not to the years of genocide.
The system of racial separation in Israel,
the barring of Arabs from nearly a thousand Jewish villages and communities is
no different to the barring of Jews from German towns and villages.  If the comparison hurts racist Zionists then
so much the better.
It is the defenders of Israel who describe the creation of
Israel as compensation to the Jewish people for the Holocaust. Holocaust
analogies are to Israel what butter is to bread!
Israeli
Labour Foreign Minister Abba Eban described the Green Line separating Israel
from the Occupied Territories as the ‘Auschwitz
Borders
‘?
Prime Minister Menachem
Begin described
Yassir Arafat under siege in Beirut as Hitler in his Berlin bunker. Deputy
Defence Minister Matan Vilnai threatened
a ‘bigger Shoah’ (Holocaust) against the Palestinians of Gaza and Netanyahu
stated that ‘it is 1938 and
Iran is Germany.’
Arab leaders
like Egypt’s Nasser were routinely talked
about
as the ‘Hitler on the Nile’.
There
are also many right-wing Israelis who see their actions as comparable to the Nazis.
One group of soldiers compared
themselves to Dr Mengele, the notorious SS doctor in Auschwitz. Religious
philosopher Yeshayahu Leibowitz, the winner of the Israel Prize, called
the settlers on the West Bank ‘Judeo-Nazis.’:
Tom Segev, an Israeli historian and
journalist wrote
concerning the picture of a Palestinian, the Mufti of Jerusalem at Yad Vashem Holocaust
Museum in Israel that its purpose was to ‘‘conclude
that there is much in common between the Nazis’ plan to destroy the Jews and
the Arabs’ enmity to Israel.’
(The Seventh Million p.425). 
Israeli Professor of History, Edit
Zertal noted there hasn’t been a war involving Israel ‘that has not been perceived, defined, and conceptualized in terms of
the Holocaust.’ Israel has mobilised the Holocaust ‘in the service of Israeli
politics.
’ Israel’s Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood.  
Just last week Hungary’s anti-Semitic
Prime Minister, Viktor Orban, visited Israel and, as is the case with all
official visitors to Israel, Orban stopped off to shed a few tears at Yad
Vashem. Outside a group of Israelis, including Holocaust
survivors, held a protest at the visit of a man who has sought to rehabilitate
Hungary’s pro-Nazi war time leader, Admiral Horthy. Orban
called him an exceptional
statesman’
and is waging a campaign in Hungary for his rehabilitation.
This is the man Netanyahu calls his friend.
Veronika Cohen, one of the demonstrators and a Holocaust
survivor explained
‘I don’t think that you have to be a
Holocaust survivor or a Hungarian to be here to say that Orban has no business
coming here,”
. Yael Weiss-Reind,
whose family was murdered in Hungary during the Holocaust, said that Yad Vashem was granting legitimacy to these regimes when it “accepts leaders who carry out policies and
ideologies that are very similar to what we saw decades ago.”

Perhaps Veronika Cohen and
Yael Weiss-Reind are also anti-Semites according to the vipers of the British press,
John Mann MP and all the other anti-intellectuals who believe that any attempt
to draw parallels between Israel today and Nazi Germany is ‘anti-Semitic’.

In Israel comparisons with the
Nazis are run of the mill. Assassinated Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin
was dressed
up
by his opponents in SS uniform. Professor Yeshayahu Leibowitz, who won
the Israel prize, described the Jewish settlers on the West Bank as Judeo
Nazis
.
Menachem Begin compared Yassir Arafat in the Beirut siege to
Hitler in his final days in a Berlin bunker.
Hebrew University Professor
Ofer Cassif compared
Israel to Nazi Germany as did another Hebrew university academic, Daniel
Blatman, a Holocaust researcher, who compared
Israel to both South Africa and Nazi Germany.
At the meeting 8 years ago, entitled ‘Never Again for Anyone – Auschwitz to Gaza’
Hajo Meyer compared
Israel’s actions in Gaza to the killing of Jewish people in the Holocaust. Corbyn
response:
‘Views were expressed at the meeting
which I do not accept or condone.’
is truly pathetic. 
Corbyn warmly
supported Hajo at the time and was visibly moved that a Jewish survivor of Auschwitz
should compare what he underwent with what Gaza’s population were suffering.
Nor was Hajo the only Jewish victim of the Nazis who has made such a comparison.  The leader of the Warsaw ghetto resistance,
Marek Edelman, also compared
his own resistance in 1943 to that of the Palestinian resistance.
Instead of retreating and cowering before the vicious pygmies
of the British press whose aim is to demonise any attempt at understanding the
situation in Palestine, people whose ability to distort and traduce match the
skills of Goebbels, Corbyn should have come out fighting and said that yes,
mass murder is always comparable.
Is it seriously suggested that because Israel only
kills in the thousands and Hitler killed in the millions that comparisons are
not in order? We are not comparing quantities but a similar mindset.
When Israeli rabbis use the Torah to argue that it is allowed to murder
even children and infants in time of war is not a comparison with the Nazis
permissible? In 2009 a book Torat HaMelech by two prominent rabbis, Yitzhak
Shapir and Yosef Elitzur was written which gave a Jewish Orthodox guide to
killing non-Jews. It argued
that “the life of a Jew is worth more
than the life of a non-Jew, and permited the killing of innocent people
including children.”
Or perhaps the statement
of Rabbi Dov Lior, the Chief Rabbi of the West Bank settlers that
“There
is no such thing as enemy civilians in war time. The law of our Torah is to
have mercy on our soldiers and to save them … A thousand non-Jewish lives are
not worth a Jew’s fingernail.”
Is this not worthy of a Nazi?
Let us be quite clear why comparisons between Israel and the Nazis are valid. The Holocaust
didn’t come out of nowhere. It came out of the existing society. When
proposing, in Mein Kampf that the disabled be eliminated, Hitler took as his
model the American programme of Eugenics. How
American Racism Influenced Hitler
. In Mein Kampf Hitler wrote:
I have studied with interest the laws of
several American states concerning prevention of reproduction by people whose
progeny would, in all probability, be of no value or be injurious to the racial
stock.”
Is it wrong therefore to compare America’s eugenics
programme with that in Nazi Germany?
There is nothing whatsoever offensive about comparing what
happened in Nazi Germany to Israel today. It is precisely because Israel uses
what happened in Germany as its moral foundation stone that it is right to ask
why it treats Palestinians as racially inferior. How is the separation of Jews from
Aryans different from Palestinians from Israeli Jews? The Jewish Nation State
Bill has been rightly compared to the Nazis’ Nuremburg Laws.
Corbyn’s apology is not only wrong and unnecessary but
it drives another nail in his coffin. The reason for these attacks is not
genuine outrage but to make Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party untenable. It
is an attempt to sanitise Britain’s murderous foreign policy and its uncritical
support for Israel. Corbyn is his own worst enemy.
As for John McDonnell, his vapid utterances about how he could weep
over what is happening, displays suggest he still doesn’t have a clue about the
nature of the attack on Corbyn.  It
suggests that if he ever becomes Chancellor he will be putty in the hands of
the City.  He is quoted in The
Independent
as saying that: ‘the
Labour Party has failed to get to grips with antisemitism among some of its
members and vowed to “get this sorted out”.
For someone who supported the Republicans in Ireland this is truly
pathetic.  McDonnell has abandoned any
form of anti-imperialism under the weight of the Zionists’ ‘anti-Semitism’
attack. The suggestions that he is positioning himself to replace Corbyn are
interesting as he clearly is trying to woo the Labour Right.  Clearly McDonnell sees himself as Labour’s
new Stafford Cripps.
Tony Greenstein

See my tribute to Hajo Meyer on his death in 2015

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