Nazifying Gaza

The Misuse of History in the Interests of Mass Slaughter

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Like many people of my generation, I came of political age in the long slipstream of Nazism and World War II. We grew up in an age of affluence, under the shadow of nuclear extermination, in a world still haunted by the spectre of industrialised genocide and Europe’s descent into racist barbarism. Many of us who came to support the Palestinian people’s long and painful struggle for self-determination did so because we regarded the creation of the State of Israel and the chain of calamities that followed it, as a consequence of European wars and European antisemitic persecution. We saw Zionism, and the British government’s collusion with it, as another variant of European colonialism, which used the fantasy of a ‘land without people for a people without land’ as a justification for the violent territorial dispossession of one people by another.

This did not mean that we were unaware of the unprecedented historical crime that gave Zionism a special moral aura that other forms of settler-colonialism did not have, and the ways in which the persecution and oppression of one people led to the persecution and oppression of another. And the Palestinians have attracted supporters who didn’t care, or who invoked the Holocaust in their criticisms of Israel and Zionism; who called Israelis ‘Zionazis’, and accused Israelis of ‘behaving like Nazis’, or even suggested that Israelis were ‘worse than Nazis’. The word ‘genocide’ was often used too easily and too readily to describe Israeli military operations in Gaza or Lebanon that however savage and destructive, were a long way short of genocidal.

If collective punishment, the killing of civilians, the terror-bombing of cities, and other crimes against humanity, are ‘Nazi’ actions, then many other countries have at times behaved ‘like the Nazis’, whether it was the British in Kenya, the US in Vietnam, Serbia, Saddam’s Iraq, or Syria. Many of the laws used by Israel to oppress the Palestinians in the occupied territories are British Mandate-era laws.

As brutal, oppressive, and illegal as that occupation has been, it is not comparable to the Nazi occupations of Poland, Ukraine, or even France. It does not have a Hans Frank, an Ante Pavelic, a Himmler, and Eichmann or a Mengele, or so many others. Accusations of ‘Zionazism’ have the unmistakable stench of malicious bad faith and the misuse of history for the purpose of political point-scoring. Not only do they obscure the historical singularity of the Holocaust, but they also obscure the very specific forms of oppression that have been directed against the Palestinians.

To see how this works, consider last week’s ‘debate’ between MP Chris Williamson and Talk TV host Julia Hartley-Brewer to discuss the Gaza ‘war.’ Hartley-Brewer clearly invited Williamson onto her show, so that he would say something that would enable her do do some moral grandstanding and gain some ‘shock horror’ clicks, and he didn’t disappoint. At one point he accused Hartley-Brewer of supporting a regime which is ‘behaving worse than Nazis,’ to which she asked him, sarcastically, why he didn’t just shout ‘“ I hate Jewish people” and save everyone time.’

When Williamson called Gaza a ‘concentration camp’, Hartley-Brewer rose to the full force of her fake-indignation. ‘How dare you?’ she erupted, seemingly unaware that concentration camps were not invented by the Nazis, but by the British, and that this concept does not necessarily signify death camps.

It was only to be expected that a conversation between these two would generate more heat than light, but if some Palestinian supporters have used the Nazis to attack Israel and Zionism, Israel and its supporters have long resorted to Nazi analogies in order to justify Israeli violence, and also to delegitimize the Palestinian liberation struggle and anyone associated with it.

Few people exemplify this tendency more cynically than the self-styled defender-of Western civilization Douglas Murray. Since the war began, Murray has become a ubiquitous defender of everything Israel does, haunting the talk shows and Youtube like a kevlar-clad ghoul with his supercilious scowl. One minute you find him calling the Scottish First Minister Humza Yousaf the ‘First Minister of Gaza’ - a libellous charge that he inexplicably got away with - and describing his Palestinian wife as a ‘nasty piece of work.’ Then he pops up to describe Owen Jones as ‘morally sick’, because Jones had the temerity to question some of Hamas’s alleged atrocities, which Haaretz has also done.

And all the time, he churns out columns for the Spectator and the New York Post, and even gets to accompany the IDF into Gaza, for no obvious purpose except to pose for some fetching photo ops against a backdrop of destruction, while recycling IDF talking points.

That’s what moral clarity can do for you, and there’s a reason for Israeli largesse.In an article for The Spectator written the week after the Hamas pogrom/assault of October 7, Murray urged the Israelis ‘to respond as they see fit - it isn’t for non-Israelis to give them advice.’ The Charlemagne of the Internet age nevertheless had a few suggestions:

Maybe Israel will cut off Gaza and starve Hamas out. Maybe they will have a full-scale military operation to rescue the Israeli captives. Or maybe they will finally put an end to this insoluble nightmare, raze Hamas to the ground, or clear all the Palestinians from their benighted strip. A strip which Egypt owned but nobody wants.

It’s difficult to understate the inhuman savagery of these recommendations. Hamas cannot be ‘starved out’ without staving out two million Gazans. The ‘nightmare’ of Gaza was, until October 7, primarily a Palestinian nightmare, stemming from the dispossession of the Palestinians and Israel’s continuing arms-length occupation. It was not, and is not, ‘insoluble’. Nor is Gaza ‘benighted.’ And even if the likes of Murray think that any group of Arabs can be thrown in with any other, attempting to making it an Egyptian problem will not make it any less an Israeli problem.

Last but not least, you cannot ‘raze Hamas to the ground’ without razing Gaza to the ground, which is quite clearly what Murray wants, even though he is too genteel - just - to say it outright. For Murray the concept of ‘innocent Gazans’ is only ever cited in scaremarks, but even he knows that you need some moral justification for what is effectively ethnic cleansing. And this is why, in the Jewish Chronicle no less, we find him arguing that Hamas are ‘worse than Nazis.’

For context, bear in mind that this is a man who told the National Conservative conference in May that the Nazis had ‘mucked up nationalism’, and spoilt it for everyone else, as if militarism, eugenics, white supremacism and state racism, and the persecution and mass murder of millions of Jews were somehow a bit of a cock-up rather than central component of German nationalism.

Nevertheless, it is still something of a leap to argue that because some Hamas operatives bragged about the atrocities that they carried out on October 7, they were worse than the Waffen SS. According to Murray however, ‘Average members of the SS and other killing units of Hitler’s were rarely proud of their average day’s work, in killing Jews’, and even got upset about it:

Very few felt that shooting Jews in the back of the head all day and kicking their bodies into pits was where their own lives had meant to end up. Many spent their evenings getting blind drunk to try and forget. Nazi commanders had to worry about staff ‘morale’. When the war ended, the Nazis tried to pretend that Treblinka and other death camps never existed.

If Murray is referring to the Einsatzugruppen extermination squads that followed the Wehrmacht into the Soviet Union, he may be superficially correct. Most members of these units, as Christopher Browning once argued, were ‘ordinary men’ who did not know what they were expected to do until they were ordered to do it. Some of them may indeed have felt bad about it, but nearly all of did it, even after being told by their officers that they would be no consequences for not taking part in these massacres.

It’s also true that Himmler recognized that the mass murder of men, women, and children could have negative psychological consequences for the perpetrators, which is one reason why the Nazis switched from bullets to gas. But Himmler also argued that the willingness of the SS to continue killing Jews despite these consequences only made that enterprise more noble, and there were many Nazis who had no moral qualms whatsoever.

Has Murray ever read Vassily Grossman’s description of Treblinka, or Primo Levi, or Hannah Arendt, or pretty much anyone who ever survived these camps, or the Nazi prisoners of war happily discussing rape and murder on the Eastern Front in Soldaten? As for the fact that the Nazis ‘tried to pretend that Treblinka and other death camps never existed’, after the war, this is just epic stupidity. Of course they tried to cover it up - because they knew the rest of the world would regard these camps as a crime and an abomination, even if they didn’t, which meant that the perpetrators might face execution or jail time.

And yet here is Murray, the bastard son of Bertie Wooster and Unity Mitford, presenting the Nazis as morally-troubled mass murderers in order to place them on a higher category to Hamas and, also to erase the tens of thousands of ordinary Gazans who he knows will be killed. This is why Murray praised the historian Andrew Roberts, for lending his ponderous scholarly weight in the Telegraph to the idea that ‘whereas the Nazis went to great lengths to hide their crimes from the world, because they knew they were crimes, Hamas has done the exact opposite, because they do not consider them to be so.’

So who gets the moral high ground here? Those who organized and carried out the killing of six million people and sometimes felt upset by it? Or the handful of Hamas operatives who boasted about killing hundreds of Israelis? One for The Moral Maze, for sure. Except that Roberts, knows the answer. Even Himmler is on a higher moral plane to Hamas, because of his infamous description of ‘the extermination of the Jewish people’ as ‘a page of glory in our history that has never been written and is never to be written.’

The tragic loneliness of the long-distance mass murderer, forced to exterminate an entirely defenceless people and yet never able to feel proud of it in public. Who, but the most hard-hearted cynic, doesn’t feel a little sympathy for Himmler and his henchmen here?

Writing of the Nazis who ‘burnt Jews alive in barns on their retreat in 1945,’ Roberts goes on to observe that, unlike Hamas, ‘ they did not film themselves doing it.’ Even though ‘there are plenty of photographs of Nazis standing around death-pits full of Jewish corpses…these were taken for private delectation rather than public consumption.’

Oh well that’s ok then, though you can’t help wondering what these troubled souls would have done if they’d had cell-phones.

According to Roberts, even the 1945 Auschwitz death marches, and the attempts to destroy physical evidence of gassing and extermination, suggest a kind of moral conscience, in comparison with the ‘sheer glee with which Hamas, by contrast, killed parents in front of their children and of children in front of their parents.’ And even though ‘Nazi sadism was routine and widespread, it wasn’t built into their actual operational plans in the way that Hamas’s sadism has been.’

So there you have it: the humiliation and genocidal murder of Jews and Roma people; the systematic annihilation of the Polish intelligentsia; the killing and starvation of Slavic racial inferiors during Operation Barbarossa - none of this was built into Nazi ‘operational plans’. It just sort of happened, and the people who did it sometimes felt pangs of conscience.

Citing Ian Kershaw, Roberts notes the ‘depersonalization and debasement of the figure of the Jew’ that made the Final Solution possible:

Kershaw argues that in Nazi Germany, ordinary Germans’ "‘mild’ anti-Semitism was clearly quite incapable of containing the progressive radical dynamism of the racial fanatics and the deadly bureaucratization of the doctrine of race-hatred." This is still more true of Gaza today.

Ipso facto

Hamas is—while taking into account the wild disparity in the sheer geographical and numerical extent of their crimes—qualitatively even more anti-Semitic than the Nazis were. One thing in which they are exactly equal, however, is that Nazi barbarism had to be utterly extirpated, and that goes for Hamas too.

There is no need, and no one should even try, to legitimize the atrocities carried out by Hamas on October 7 as part of their ‘Al Aqsa Flood’ operations. Rape, torture, and the killing of civilians are war crimes and crimes against humanity, and should be regarded as such, and their perpetrators brought to justice, and held up to universal disgust.

But these attacks were not only directed against civilians. Some of them were directed again Israeli military installations, and fall within the recognized legal category of resistance to occupation. In other words the ‘Israeli-Palestinian conflict’ did not begin on October 7, and cannot be uniquely defined by it. To condemn Hamas’s atrocities, without mentioning 75 years of dispossession, occupation, persecution, and the endless calamities inflicted on the Palestinian people as a whole, and the Gazans in particular, is not ‘moral clarity’, but historical obfuscation.

Talkin’ World War II Blues

This is a game that Benjamin Netanyahu has played many times, and in October he was playing it again, arguing that:

In 1944, the Royal Air Force bombed the Gestapo headquarters in Copenhagen. It’s a perfectly legitimate target. But the British pilots missed and instead of the Gestapo headquarters, they hit a children’s hospital nearby. And I think 84 children were burned to death,” he said. “That is not a war crime. That is not something you blame Britain for doing. That was a legitimate act of war with tragic consequences that accompany such legitimate actions.

As is to be expected from Netanyahu, this is not a valid comparison. RAF Bomber Command did not always attack civilians by accident. Both the RAF and the USAF bombed cities knowing that German civilians would die, and such operations were sometimes carried out in order to kill as many civilians as possible. The fire-bombings of Cologne and Hamburg, for example, were carried out as part of a deliberate strategy to target ‘the morale of enemy civil population, in particular industrial workers’.

One can argue about the morality - not to mention the effectiveness - of these tactics, but they were nevertheless carried out in the context of total war against a powerful industrialised state intent on world conquest that had occupied most of Europe, and was perpetrating genocidal violence on a mass scale.

Hamas, by contrast, is a low-tech ‘resistance’ organization, with a limited military capability, whose operations, until October 7 were mostly ‘symbolic.’ No matter how many homemade rockets it fires, it cannot even begin to compete with the firepower directed against it - not to mention the shocking destruction of hospitals, family homes, and education institutions that has been taking place almost daily for the last two months.

There is is compelling evidence to suggest that Israel has routinely violated any notion of proportionality or military necessity in its operations in Gaza. This week a must-read investigation by +972 Magazine found that up to 100 targets are being selected by an AI program, and that Israel is deliberately attacking ‘power targets’ such as tower blocks, in order to terrorize the civilian population.

By comparing Hamas to Nazis, Netanyahu is inviting the world to accept World War II levels of destruction and violence. By suggesting, as Israeli President Isaac Herzog did, that Gazans are complicit with Hamas because they failed to overthrow it, you can widen the parameters of destruction to include anyone. If you believe, as the former Israeli finance minister Avigdor Leiberman put it this week, that ‘There are no innocent people in Gaza,’ then you can do whatever you want.

We have been here before. Menachem Begin regularly compared the PLO to the Nazis. In 1980 he called the PLO the ‘Arab SS’ and effectively accused the European Common Market of collusion with Nazism because it called for the PLO to have a role in the Middle East peace talks. Begin’s invasion of Lebanon was intended to prevent that possibility, and it turned into a disaster for Lebanon, for the Palestinians, and also for Israel.

The same is likely to occur in Gaza. But if Hamas are worse than Nazis, and Palestinians are the new ‘good Germans’, then no one needs to even think about these consequences. Asked whether it might be true, as Kamala Harris suggested last week, that ‘too many’ Palestinian civilians have been killed in Gaza, Lindsey Graham asked:

What is too many people dying after Pearl Harbour?Did the American public worry about how many people were dying to destroy Tokyo and Berlin?’

If Biden and Harris have established a limit on Palestinian deaths, there is no such limit for those who think that Gaza is Berlin or Tokyo. But if Israel is allowed to destroy the Gaza Strip, it is no more likely to provide a ‘solution’ to the ‘conflict’ than Begin’s invasion of Lebanon. This is what Human Rights Watch reported last week:

On November 9, Israeli airstrikes hit Al-Nasr Medical Center in Gaza City, cutting off the neonatal intensive care unit’s oxygen supply. The attack forced staff to evacuate the next day, leaving babies that could not be transported alone in intensive care, according to Doctors Without Borders. On November 28 during the ceasefire, doctors were able to return and found five babies dead.

We should feel the same horror at such acts that we should also feel at the rape and murder of Israeli women and the killing of children on October 7. And one of the reasons why Israel is getting away with such actions is precisely because too many people have twisted history to make it seem as if such actions are unavoidable and even necessary.

Those who seriously want an end to these horrors, based on justice not vengeance, might consider another World War II reference, from the 1978 film Germany In Autumn. On 8 April 1945, a German woman named Frau Wilde is reported to have said to an American soldier:

When atrocity reaches a certain point, it no longer matters who initiated it, it only matters that it should stop.

We have long since passed that point with the ‘Israeli-Palestinian conflict’. There are moments in history when cruelty becomes politically and morally meaningless and cannot achieve a meaningful result for either side. This is where we are in Gaza. It’s where we’ve been for some time, and we should resist those who seek to turn the crimes and atrocities of the past into false analogies to justify the crimes and atrocities in the present.