Mick Hartley

Alan Johnson in the Telegraph, on the vile claims, now all-too-familiar, that Israelis are the new Nazis:

The ‘Nazi Analogy’ or ‘Holocaust Inversion’, as it is dubbed by academics of antisemitism, has been ubiquitous since 7 October. It is present on the placards or cell phones held aloft on mass street demonstrations, routinely linking the Star of David to the Swastika with a = symbol. It is there in the calculatedly wounding speeches of Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who praised Hamas as ‘liberators’ and likened Israel’s response to the Hamas atrocities to the Nazi’s gas chambers.

The Nazi analogy has a long history, is uniquely wounding to Jews, and is a grotesque inversion of morality and truth. I fear its ugly presence in our public square is now laying the ground for the designs of our own western pogromists-in-waiting, whose existence we can no longer doubt.

Comparing Israelis to Nazis always verged on the demonic in its cruelty, but especially now, after the Hamas pogrom which bore many resemblances to the depredations of the Einzatsgruppen killing squads in Eastern Europe during the Holocaust, from the eliminationist antisemitism to the killing of babies and the elderly, from the humiliations and picaresque torments inflicted on defenceless and hunted Jews to the trophy photographs, today the social media videos. ‘Look at my WhatsApp! I killed 10 Jews!’ exulted one Hamas killer in a phone call to his parents. […]

Originating in cold war Soviet antisemitic anti-Zionist propaganda, adopted by the Western far-left, and some Churches, after the 1967 Six-Day War, the comparison of Israel to the Third Reich, the IDF to the SS, Israeli leaders to Hitler, and so on, has long been an essential part of the discourse of the global social movement that is dedicated to the destruction of only one state in the world—the little Jewish one.

The normalisation of the Nazi analogy today is, I believe, preparing the way for antisemitic pogroms in the west. It renews the core motif of antisemitism, that the Jews are not just ‘Other’ but also malign. The supposed content of this malignity has always changed with the times and the needs of the antisemites: the ‘God-killer’ of one era became the ‘rootless cosmopolitan’, dissolving every nation, in the next, or, somehow, simultaneously the ‘stubborn particularist’, an obstacle to Enlightenment universalism. ‘The Jew’ morphed in time into the ‘world-controlling capitalist-but-also-Bolshevik conspirator’, later, fatefully, the ‘Untermenschen’, the biological pollutant of all races. Today, the Nazi analogy, and the entire ecosystem of antisemitic anti-Zionism of which it forms a central part, updates the core motif of Jewish malignity for the era of the Jewish state.

Hitler’s big lie was that ‘the Jew’ had stabbed the Fatherland in the back, causing Germany’s defeat in the First World War and that ‘international Jewry’ was now engaged in conspiracy against the Volk. ‘The Jew is our Misfortune’, the Nazis proclaimed. They used that big lie to pave the road to the Holocaust.

The last three weeks of mass demonstrations have been revelatory. ‘The Zionist is our misfortune’ the mass demonstrations have, in effect, proclaimed. There are western pogromists-in-waiting among us as well as tenured western pogrom-apologists-in-waiting. Equating Israelis with Nazis may be thoughtless for some, but it is knowing and strategic for others. Those they would subject to pogrom must first be turned into monsters. And no one is more monstrous than the Nazis.