Dr. Tamari Kitossa
Professor of Sociology at Brock University
August 23, 2023[1]
Zionism and the ‘Destruction of Palestinians’: Apartheid or Nazism?[2]
Part I
The Jewish state tried to employ the tragic memories [of the holocaust of Ashkenazi Jews] as the certificate of its political legitimacy, a safe-conduct pass for its past and future policies, and above all the advance payment for the injustices it might itself commit.
Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust
General Yair Golan, the deputy chief of staff, warned that the ‘disgusting trends’ in Israeli society – racism, ‘hatred of the other’ – were reminiscent of events in Europe, ‘particularly Germany’, on the eve of World War II.
Gregg Calstrom How Long Will Israel Survive?
…[T]here is [not] one solitary instance of any colonisation carried on with the consent of the native population. There is no such precedent…We cannot offer any adequate compensation to the Palestinian Arabs in return for Palestine…Zionist colonisation must either stop, or else proceed regardless of the native population.
Vladimir Jabotinsky, “The Iron Wall”.
[‘Eretz Israel’] is a precious piece of real estate…proffered [to the ‘chosen’] by a divine, otherworldly realtor.
David Noble, Beyond the Promised Land: The movement and the myth.
The innovations of those enduringly remembered as great men, even when contestable and wrong, have been attempts to fulfill what was there in their tradition already.
People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.
James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son
Introduction
Ample scholarly research and opinion – both current (e.g., Zymunt Bauman; Norman Finkelstein; Tony Greenstein; Asa Winstanley; Miko Peled) and past (e.g., Hannah Arendt; Lenni Brenner) – document collusion between early 20th century Zionists and the Third Reich. It is the character or nature of individuals and coalitions who either seek to capture State power or have done so, to collude with forces antithetical to the ethnic, national or religious character of the people they claim to represent. It is, therefore, the nature of power (over) and the use of force and propaganda to internally subdue a people to establish a Westphalian State through a process Michael Mann in volume I of The Sources of Social Power refers to as ‘coercive cooperation’. The leaders of weak or aspiring States have, in this context, have little moral compunction to collaborate with coalitions and forces whose modus operandi is antithetical to the subjective specificity (culture, language, race, religion) that constitutes the character of the nation imposed by the State.
I have above established the basic proposition, that the State is the prize captured by (would-be) power-holders and that power-holders only recognize and respect each other’s relative capacity to impose costs on each other as captors of their respective nations (see Charles Tilly). Given this fact, we can immediately abandon all claims of discrimination and prejudice, in this case ‘antisemitism’, against a people (complicitly and willingly) captured by their political leaders as simple obfuscation and propaganda. In short, and relative to the analysis I undertake in Parts I, II, III and the Conclusion of this essay, which critically examines Israel as a Nazi Nation-State, both in its foundational collaboration with the Third Reich, and, in its is manifest Nazi-like destruction of Palestinians – which is to say the ontology of the Nation-State of Israel is conditioned upon the destruction of the Palestinian people.
It is one thing for the founders of the Zionist Nation-State of Israel to be shown to have colluded with Nazis, which is not debatable,[3] it is another thing to expose the manifest ideology and practice of Nazism (i.e., national socialism and its attendant fascistic tendency) as fundamental to the Nation-State of Israel in its effort to destroy the Palestinian people. Such exposure requires breaking the cognitive and epistemic imperialism that prevents delinking Nazism from its convenient fossilization between 1933 and 1945. It also requires treating Nazism, since it is the ‘highest’ evolution of the State, as at once an adjective and noun. Since as an adjective it describes specified racial ideology and attendant practices to which bureaucracy is directed, there is nothing to preclude the Nation-State of Israel from being described as a Nazi. And as a noun defining the identity of the nation and the State, Nazism is embraced as synonymous with Zionism, therefore the arrogance of racial superiority regards the essentials of Nazism as a positive attribute of the character of the nation and the State. Simply put, Zionism is racism no less than Nazism is racism. Once Nazism becomes untethered from the historical convenience of historical specificity, the ‘human’ exceptionalism of Zionists and their antisemitism toward Palestinians, of course sustained by their supporters and sympathizers, opens up new vistas beyond the moral weaponization that any criticism of the Nation-State of Israel is de facto ‘antisemitism’.
What follows in this Part I and, subsequently, Parts II, III and the Conclusion is an analytical application of the conceptual and socio-legal tools that were essential to exposing the content and form of the destruction of European Jewry, but in my case to the on-going destruction of Palestinians. Relying on intrepid experts, I have already cited above – in my focus on the character of the nation and the State – the background assumptions animating a view of the historical collusion between 20th century Jewish Zionists and Nazis. Therefore, any further comment on that collusion, however much in passing, will be in service to my principle aim: to dissolve the analytical exceptionalism of the destruction of a people which has served as a weapon for the Zionist-Nazi Nation-State of Israel. I will, therefore, transcend the analogy of the Israeli Nation-State as an Apartheid State. This is not because it is not appropriate to a lower level of analysis, but because it is an obfuscation in service of Zionist Nazism. The aim of which is to reinforce the politico-religious exceptionalism manifest in the ethno-religious privatization of human suffering and the historical, sociological and socio-legal analysis attendant to conceptualizations that aim to elucidate the destruction of European Jewry.
Part I of this essay deconstructs the epistemic imperialism and thought control of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) to control the narrative of Israeli destruction of Palestinians by making the Ashkenazi experience of racio-religious discrimination as the pares inter pares (i.e., first among equals) of genocides. The effort to universalize the condemnation of ‘antisemitism’ is conspicuous by the silence of the IHRA on Israel’s anti-Semitic genocide of Palestinians.
Part II moves to falsify the analogization of Zionism with Nazism by contrast and comparison with the logic and practice of Apartheid. I aim less to dispel the analogical validity of Apartheid and Zionism, since both are colonialist in theory and practice, and more to assert the limits of Apartheid as a fitting frame of reference. I suggest that while both Nation-States were kindred, from the installation of the State of Israel in 1948 and the foundation and collaboration between Apartheid South Africa in 1948 until its replacement by neoliberalism in 1994, they are not analogous regimes. Odious though Apartheid South African was, to the point that it, like Israel actively collaborated on racial bioweapons, the labour of the Bantustans were essential to the racial capitalism of South Africa. This is not so the case with Israel, at least not after the first two decades of its establishment where cheap Palestinian labour served a purpose. Beneath this grudging tolerance of the Palestinians, Zionism is a colonial project that intended from the start on lebensraum,[4] a project of ethnic cleansing that preceded the coalition of German industrialists, US bankers and Hitler’s gang of thugs that formed the Third Reich.
Part III of the essay seeks to delink from the ethno-racial appropriation of the tools of history, sociology and socio-legal studies which serves the myth of Jewish exceptionalism at the expense of Palestinians, and, the tax dollars of the citizens of Western countries used to subsidize Europe’s[5] militarized colonial outpost – Israel – the dagger in the heart of a prospective ideologically unified ‘Middle East’. The concepts and ideas of Zionist ideologues such as Raphael Lemkin and Raul Hilberg require not only rethinking, but also their disarticulation from Jewish speficity. In the case of Lemkin, his thesis and typology of genocide was always a serruptitious universalization of a claim about human rights that had as its primary objective the deputization of other people’s genocide to the service of Zionism. And, in the case of Raul Hilberg, his elaboration of Lemkins careful account of Nazi bureaucratic modalities to achieve the destruction of European Jews has been treated as Hilberg intended – the sole preserve of Ashkenazi Jews. I invoke both – Lemkin and Hilberg – in service of the reality that Israel is a Nazi Nation-State intent on the destruction of Palestinians, a fact which is obviously contrary to their intent.
Is analogizing the Nation-State of Israel with Nazism ‘antisemitic’[6]?
The IHRA and thought control
The quality of social and political analysis rests on historical analogy (and metaphor). What analogy does history provide us that most precisely describes, in detail, Israel’s 75-year long effort to destroy the Palestinian people? Settler colonialism, Apartheid or Nazism? Need it be one over the others? It matters which, but we need not repudiated any for the other. I take the position here that Nazism is not only more appropriate because it is inclusive of the others, but also because it resonates with the revulsion that is felt at the genocide of European Jews.
The point I aim to make is that sadism of the Zionist endeavor, punctuated at an increasingly rapid pace by episodes of extreme barbarism, aims at dispossessing Palestinian people to, in effect, create a people without land. The design of this destruction is not hard to see: the attainment of a settler colonial Nation-State of ‘greater’ Israel; or, in other words, a land without Palestinians. Ethically and morally, the grossness of Israeli barbarism reveals how degraded, dehumanized and despiritualized Zionists are to visit on another group of people what was done to European Jews. But this is precisely the point that Norman Finkelstein has tried to impress on us, that inhumanity has been cynically invoked to achieve a project no less inhumane.
With the 2020 invasion of the Al Aqsa mosque and the expulsion of Palestinians families from their homes in Sheikh Jarrah, I have set out to write a brief commentary on my thinking about the most appropriate historical analogue that best explains the destruction of Palestine. The July, 2023, carpet bombing and full-scale invasion of the Palestinian open-air concentration camp Jenin in the West Bank, and, the wanton execution of Palestinians by Israel’s Spartans gives, fresh urgency to throwing off the cognitive imperialism that locks the imagination into contending that Israel is solely a settler colonial and Apartheid, rather than a Nazi Nation-State. And clearly, without the aid of the State as a bureaucratic enterprise which propagates an ideology of racial superiority for Jews and inferiority for Palestinians, settler colonialism, would easily give way to an amalgamation of the two peoples. I see, therefore, no justification to be epistemologically constrained by the hegemony of the UN which made Apartheid a crime. As I will show, in the case of a settler colonial project such as Zionist Israel, Nazism is not only inclusive of settler colonialism and Apartheid, but in going beyond these frames of reference, it incorporates the cultural myths and ideology of nationhood and its merger with the (warfare-welfare) State.
To make my case for a Nazi-Zionist analogue in the ongoing destruction of Palestinian people, I draw on Ashkenazi historians, legal scholars, social philosophers and Nazi holocaust victims to demonstrate the appropriateness of the analogue. Some, it must be made clear, like Raphael Lemkin and Raul Hilberg, were Zionists who never intended their work on ‘genocide’ and the ‘chain of destruction’ to be applied to Palestinians. Lemkin’s and Hilberg’s silence on Israels destruction of Palestinians is the lineal antecedent of the IHRA’s effort to expand the definition of ‘anti-semitism’ so as to criminalize “Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis”.
The IHRA has little to say in condemnation of Israeli teenagers champing at the bit to join the army so they can kill Palestinians, or, Israeli thugs who chant “Today we are Nazis”, or rabbis who clamour for the murder of non-Jews and spout the most odious racist ideologies that, if uttered against Jews, would rightly be condemned (but wrongly imprisoned for voicing an opinion). Neither freedom of thought nor history is the property of any group whose predecessors experienced suffering. The flexible morality of the IHRA disqualifies it as a guardian of the memory of dead Jews. And this, not least because as James Baldwin argues, no individual or group is “…ennobled by oppression”. And, in Notes of a Native Son, Baldwin further points out that those who fashion about them an air of innocence, “…long after that innocence is dead turns…[themselves]…into a monster”. Thus we are presented by the Zionists with the destruction of Palestinians, just as in 1941 we were presented with the destruction of European Jews. Just as the world averted its eyes, with the complicity of Zionists, so too now can only honesty help us come to terms with, and, stop the destruction of Palestians.
In March 2022 Dr. Nadera Shalhūb-Kīfūrkiyān, author of Incarcerated Childhood and the Politics of Unchilding,[7] invited me to speak at a worldwide event to raise awareness about the ‘detention’ of Ahmad Manasra. ‘Detained’ at age 13, the now 20-year-old Manasra languishes in precarious mental condition in Israel’s vast gulag for Palestinian children (and adults).[8] [9] The sight of a lunatic police or soldier hurling the obscenity laden command “Die you F***” over Ahmad’s shattered skull and prostrate mangled body, and then the scene of his ‘interrogation’ at the police station, shocks the conscience. Is this not what happened to Ashkenazi Jews in Germany, Poland and the Ukraine during Nazi Germany’s reign of terror?
But now after three years of the COVID-19 plandemic, the ongoing genocide of Palestinians still competes for attention in face of Israel’s continued criminal ferocity. Driven by the COVID-19 plandemic, there are many loci of modern Nazification that deserve attention – Australia, Austria, Canada, China, New Zealand, the UK and the USA. Despite much effort to dispel the cartoon image of Axis powers as bad and the Allies as good, the myth persists. Surely, there will be complaints that Nazi Germany was a unique phenomenon in the history of the West and the ‘modern’ world. Derision is cast on any suggestion of contemporary comparison. As noted, however, by the likes of Guido Preparata[10] and Anthony and Sutton[11] the purpose of such propaganda widely circulated in the media and academia is principally to shield the Western banking, industrial and political class from public condemnation that they armed and generated substantial profits from the German war machine. Not counting deaths from the aftermath of the war, David North reminds that up to 78 million people, only 15 per cent of whom were soldiers, were slaughtered for profit!
But if scapegoating Adolph Hitler limits comprehension of forces that propelled the second global imperialist war of the 20th Century, so too does the trope of Nazi historical uniqueness shield the Zionist state of Israel from scrutiny for land theft and the brutal occupation and dismemberment of contiguous Palestinian lands. The fact that Zionism is Israel’s formal racial ideology and with the aim of Palestinian genocide, Israeli Zionist Jews and there supporters are now the perpetrators of racism rather than its victims. Indeed, given the erroneous claims that the PLO and Iran want to ‘wipe Israel off the map’, it is shocking and deeply ironic that the Zionist leadership has sold Jews out to be the lab rats for Pfizer.[12] This is a project so diabolical that not even Hitler, Eichmann, Mengele or even Henry Ford could have dreamt it. Given the claim that the existence of Israel is necessary to protect Jews from genocide, what a heavy price Jews have paid for a monstrous global deception that is surely a biowarfare.[13] Yet protected by the corporate media’s plandemic distraction, the Zionist warfare state intensified its longstanding lebensraum project of eliminating Palestinians from the Occupied Territories and in neighbourhoods, towns and cities in Israel the Zionists covet. Indeed, that in waging war against Palestinians to create the State of Israel biological warfare was an essential part of the Zionists campaign of terror, we should all be sobered that anti-Arab racial bioweapons are either fully developed or well on the way toward readiness.[14]
What I argue here is that the preoccupation with describing the Israeli effort to destroy the Palestinians as analogous to “Apartheid” is both a misdirection and a misrepresentation of the facts. Though a small but high profile number of Ashkenazi intellectuals and Nazi Holocaust survivors have made this case for Zionism-as-Nazism, the power of the Zionist lobby’s influence over Western media and politics has silenced their voices.[15] I want to suggest that the abject barbarism, nay evil, of Zionism requires an accurate and appropriate analogue of approbation that fits the task of describing what Zionists are doing to Palestinians. Nazism is, to me mind, both an accurate and appropriate analogy.
I believe Zymunt Bauman’s criticism in Modernity and the Holocaust[16]of professional sociology avoiding the holocaust of Ashkenazi Jews applies equally to the poverty of comparative historical sociology in the ongoing destruction of Palestinians. Tellingly Bauman, in Modernity and the Holocaust, is conspicuously silent on Zionist bureaucratic machinery that aims to bring about the destruction of Palestinians. In place of a field of study that locates the genocidalism and totalitarianism of Zionism, which, from its inception in the late 19th century was very much a part of the zeitgeist of Europe’s prerogative to colonize and/or to save the savages by murdering them, we are mired in a polemic based on the ennobled Ashkenazi Jewish victim of genocide. Parts II, III and Conclusion of this essay seeks to break the obfuscation established by the official forces of empirical and epistemic rectitude.
[1] This post was modified December 12, 2023 for minor layout and syntax modifications.
[2] This 4-Part blog is a modified version was to be part of the December 2023 Special Issue of the Journal of State Crime. It was refused at the prepublication stage by the managing editor for reasons entirely unpersuasive.
[3] David Ben-Gurion, by no means a paragon of virtue in his destructive policies toward Palestinians, had this to say, disingenuously, of Menachem Begin, a protégé of Vladimir Jabotinsky, in response to the terrorist bombing of the King David Hotel: “Begin is a thoroughly Hitlerian type, ready to destroy all the Arabs for the wholeness…who devotes all his efforts for a holy purpose…and it has a clear meaning: the murder of tens of Jews, Arabs and Englishmen in the explosion (read: accidental bombing), the pogrom in Yeir Dassin, and the murder of Arab women and children (read: it’s okay to kill all fighting age Arab males)…I have no doubt that Begin hates Hitler – but this hatred does not prove he is different from him, and when for the first time I heard Begin on the radio – I heard the voice and the screeching of Hitler” (Cited in Edward Said, 1979: 11 – “Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Victims”. Social Text, 1: 7-58). If it all it may be put in these terms, Begin had the ‘honesty’ to prefer the bloody and swift method of the destruction of the Palestinians. Ben-Gurion, on the other hand, passionate hater of non-Zionist Jews, father of the State, kidnapper and prosecutor of Adolf Eichmann, notably preferred the sadistic method of slowly eviscerating the Palestinians.
[4] This telling map, The liquidation of Palestinians, details from 1946 to the present how the Nazified policy of ‘elbow room’ is consistent with the de-Palestinianized ideal of ‘Eretz Israel’.
[5] When I write Europe, I do so without regard to the family squabble now underway between the so-called Collective West and Russia. The history of Western Europe’s support for the establishment of the State of Israel is well known. Less so, though, is the role of the Soviet Union in providing the putative and nascent State of Israel jet fighters, training and weaponry in the conquest of Palestine.
[6] It is now axiomatic that ‘antisemitism’ equates to Western European Jews, specifically Ashkenazi. All appellations have a history, and none is more confused and politicized than this one from its inception. The term emerged in the late 1800s rather whimsically in Europe as the Zionist movement caught a foothold among Jews, being previously the invention of nominal Christians such as Napoleon Bonaparte, the founder of Zionism (see Howard Sachar’s The Course of Modern Jewish History. In any case, the term ‘Semite’, for what it is worth, is a part of the Western epistemic categorization of linguistic and racial groups, to which Europeans, the purported Japhethites, were superior, was appropriated by a decidedly non-‘Semitic’ group, the Ashkenazis of Eastern Europe who were descended from the 8-9th Century CE Khazars and later Raddanites of South-Eastern Europe. On this latter point, the closing chapters of Arthur Koester’s The Thirteenth Tribe makes for instructive reading.
[7] Shalhūb-Kīfūrkiyān, Nadera. 2019. Incarcerated Childhood and the Politics of Unchilding. Cambridge, United Kingdom; New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
[8] Save the Children, 2021. Hope Under the Rubble. https://resourcecentre.savethechildren.net/document/hope-under-rubble-impact-israels-home-demolition-policy-palestinian-children-and-their/
[9] Defense for Children International – Palestine. 2016. No Way to Treat a Child. https://www.dcipalestine.org/no_way_to_treat_a_child_palestinian_children_in_the_israeli_military_detention_system
[10] Preparata, Guido G. 2005. Conjuring Hitler: How Britain and America Made the Third Reich. London; Ann Arbor, Mich.: Pluto Press.
[11] Sutton, A. C. (1976). Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler. Seal Beach, Calif. : ’76 Press. https://aaargh.vho.org/fran/livres5/suttonhitler.pdf
[12] Levine, Cody. 2021, March 9. Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla calls Israel ‘world’s lab’ in interview to NBC. Jerusalem Post. https://www.jpost.com/breaking-news/pfizer-ceo-albert-bourla-calls-israel-worlds-lab-in-interview-to-nbc-660349. Maybe it is not ironic that Albert Bourla, a Jew, should be lionized in Israel. The impact of the COVID bioweapon injection campaign is having a devastating effect on the health of Israelis, as is documented by citizen-journalists: “The Testimonies Project: Israeli vaccine documentary is shocking”. This is a fact which casts serious doubt on whether Zionists in Israel will ‘win’ the ‘demographic war’ as compared to a largely uninjected Palestinian population. Others, such as Vera Sherav, death camp survivor, long-time advocate for medical ethics and founder of Alliance for Human Research Protection is unambiguous that the COVID-19 campaign is a grotesque violation of the Nuremburg Code and crime against humanity.
[13] Fleming, Richard. 2021. Is COVID-19 a Bioweapon? A scientific and forensic investigation. New York: Skyhorse Publishing; Kennedy, Robert. 2021. The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the global war on democracy and public health. New York: Skyhorse Publishing.
[14] Pappé, Ilan. 2011. The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. Oxford, England: Oneworld Publications. https://yplus.ps/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Pappe-Ilan-The-Ethnic-Cleansing-of-Palestine.pdf
[15] Alexis, Jonas E. 2018, Nov. 20. Noam Chomsky on “Judeo-Nazi tendencies” in Israel. https://www.veteranstoday.com/2018/11/20/noam-chomsky-on-judeo-nazi-tendencies-in-israel/; Falk, Richard. (2007, July 7). Slouching Toward A Palestinian Holocaust. Counter Currents; https://www.countercurrents.org/falk070707.htm; Judt, Tony. 2003. Israel: The Alternative. New York Review of Books (Accessed at Global Policy). https://archive.globalpolicy.org/security/issues/israel-palestine/2003/1025alternative.htm; see Parts II and III for more on this point.
[16] Bauman, Zygmunt. 2000. Modernity and the Holocaust. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press.
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