The problem with Israel: Nazism

Israel has a problem. That problem can be described in one word: Nazism. It’s a problem that won’t go away.

Nazism is racist. It’s anti-Semitic. It promotes superiority over others. It believes in the use of force to prove its supremacy. It believes genocide is a legitimate means to political ends.

Israel is regularly accused of being the new Nazi regime. But as Efraim Karsh has suggested (“The war against the Jews”, from Israel Affairs, July 2012, pp. 319-343, as reprinted in Middle East Forum), the truth of the matter is that if there is indeed a resurgence of Nazism in the Middle East (ibid), that resurgence doesn’t come from Israel. It comes from Israel’s Arab neighbours.

You see this Nazism clearly in the Arab world's vile anti-Semitic propaganda. You see it in the persistent Arab commitment to Israel's destruction.

In numberless articles, scholarly writings, books, cartoons, and public statements, Arabs paint Jews in the blackest terms imaginable (ibid). It’s an unrelenting drum-beat that’s based upon a Nazi-style hate: it’s pervasive, demonizing and viciously racist. You see nothing like it in Israel.

 It’s institutionalized. It’s as integrated into modern Arab culture as it had been in Nazi culture. It’s Nazi Jew-hate ideology reborn as Arab nationalism.

That’s Israel’s Nazi problem. Israel’s neighbours aren’t committed to living side-by-side in peace with the Jewish state. Those neighbours are instead committed to what the Nazis wanted: the destruction of the Jews.

In Nazi Germany, that desire focused on Jewish people. Today, it focuses on the Jewish state.

As Karsh writes, Israel is the world's only Jewish state. Zionism is the Jewish people's national liberation movement. But Israel’s Arab neighbours (who demand legitimacy for their own nationalism) absolutely deny Jews the right to their own national self-determination (ibid). Indeed, the Arabs claim that Jews are not even a nation (see the PLO Charter).

Of all the nations in the world, Israel is one of a very, very small number which can actually trace its ‘corporate’ entity and territorial attachment to antiquity (ibid). Arabs who claim ‘Palestinianism’ have no such evidence. As Karsh puts it, such a discriminatory denial of the basic right to nationhood against only one nation while allowing this right to all other groups and communities, however new and tenuous their claim to nationhood, is pure and unadulterated anti-Jewish racism (ibid).

By any conceivable standard, Karsh says, Israel has been an extraordinary success story. It’s shown the world a national rebirth in the ancestral homeland after millennia of exile and dispersion; resuscitation of a dormant biblical language; the creation of a modern, highly educated, technologically advanced, and culturally and economically thriving society, as well as a vibrant liberal democracy in one of the world's least democratic areas. It’s a world leader in agricultural, medical, military, and solar energy technologies, among others; a high-tech superpower attracting more venture capital investment per capita than the United States and Europe; home to one of the world's best health systems and philharmonic orchestras, as well as to ten Nobel Prize laureates (ibid).

Nevertheless, Israel has its Nazi problem because those who imitate Nazi Jew-hate imitate the Nazi demand: get rid of the Jews. This is why all maps of ‘Palestine’ show ‘Palestine’ replacing Israel.

Karsh makes a serious accusation. He ask why is Israel the only state in the world whose right to exist is constantly debated and challenged while far less successful countries, including numerous "failed states," are considered legitimate and incontestable members [my emphasis] of the international community? His answer is simple: the attacks against Israel, the only Jewish state to exist since biblical times, are a corollary of the millenarian obsession with Jews in the Christian and the Muslim worlds. Jew-hate, he suggests, has never been erased from Christianity or Islam.

His accusation echoes something Caroline Glick recently said at a panel discussion (I paraphrase): I understand why the European Union has a problem with Israel (her topic was EU-Israel relations). I understand why the EU feels as it does about Israel. The EU has the same problem with Jews the world has had for the last 2,000 years.

The world once dreamed of destroying what is Jewish. That dream still exists.

On a national-political level, the oldest modern form for such a dream is Nazism. The newest modern form is ‘the Palestinian Cause’.

The Nazis waged war against Jews and Judaism (“Watch: 'The Nazis Declared War Against Jews and Judaism'”, Arutz Sheva, April, 16, 2105).  Arab leaders and clerics do the same.

It’s the same war. It’s the same Nazi mentality with the same Nazi goal.

Nazism fuels the Arab war against Israel. Without that Nazism, the Arabs would have peace with Israel.
Because of that Nazism, there will never be peace.