In Part 1 of this essay I deconstructed the epistemic imperialism and thought control of the International Holocaust Rememberance Alliance’s (IHRA) regarding Israeli’s destruction of Palestinians. The IHRA’s objective is to make the Ashkenazi experience of racio-religious discrimination as the pares inter pares (i.e., the first among equals) of genocides. Now in Part II I move 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 analogue. I suggest that while there is a close kindred between the two, 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, the two regimes differ. This difference hinges on the Zionist imperative toward the destruction of the Palestinian people.  Committed to lebensraum,[3] Zionism is a colonial project committed to ethnic cleansing. The colonial mentality of ‘purifying the land’ of savages most certainly preceded the Nazi holocaust and Germany’s coalition of German industrialists, US bankers and Hitler’s gang of thugs which formed the Third Reich. But if we follow Zymunt Bauman’s thesis that links bureaucracy with the destruction of European Jewry, it is the bureaucraticization of expungement and the ideology of genocide which harnesses popular support that constitutes the key distinction between the two kindred regimes.

Which one? Settler colonialism, Apartheid or Nazism?

            The idea there is even a choice of framing the destruction of Palestinians could rightly be repudiated as hair splitting. What, after all does it matter? In the here and now, Palestinians are being killed by a vast range of grotesque modalities, their bones broken, rooted out from their homes, refused return and reparations, thrown into gulags, starved and poisoned.[4] Seen from this vantage point the distinction amounts to a sterile debate. Granted, this may be so. But then, let the decision as to which analogue is more appropriate to describe Israel’s practice toward Palestinians – Apartheid of Nazism – be illuminated by the light of Israel’s fires that burn the Palestinians.

            “Gaza will burn”[5] pronounced Israel’s minister of war, Benny Gantz, upon launching the 11 day pounding of Gaza calculated to turn the occupied territory into a moonscape. Then again one month later, ostensibly in response to Hamas incendiary air balloons, Israel launched more airstrikes.[6] The world should not take Gantz’s statement as merely characteristic of Israeli pugnacity or an ironic slip of the tongue. Genocidal statements about European Jews made by Hitler and his ilk, are rightly understood as ‘anti-semitism’. Why then silence when Israeli officials openly engage in a holocaust of Palestinians? Are not Palestinians also Semites? Are Palestinians not humans? What will it take for the world to see that the victims of one of the 20^th century’s most heinous outrages now has its boot on the neck of the Palestinians?[7] Is it not clear that the Zionists intend to crush the Palestinians like the insects they are conjured in the Israeli imagination? What conceptual tools, not only metaphors, are appropriate to the task of explaining what is happening in Palestine to Palestinians by Zionists in Israel and with the support of Zionists (Christian, Jew, Muslim and others) the world over?

            Words and metaphors sensitive to historical analogues matter. While no two cases are alike, finding the most appropriate analogue(s) can help us more clearly articulate what is unfolding in Gaza, the West Bank and Israel. Thus, it seems to me that what Israel is doing is more akin to Nazism than to Apartheid, inasmuch as neither of these are mutually exclusive. To the point: Alfred T. Moleah in his 1983 exposé titled “Israel and South Africa: the unholy alliance”,[8] showed that South Africa’s Prime Minister Henrik Verwoerd asserted at the highpoint of the ‘co-prosperity’ material and ideological agreement between the two White settler colonies that “Israel is an apartheid state”. Indeed, at the time, the Israeli power elite, supported by South African Jews, sought to maintain as the Jerusalem post called it, a “low profile on what are embarrassingly good relations” between the two countries. And, Moleah shows, while from the Zionist ideologue and first president of Israel, Chaim Weizman, the disciple of Theodor Herzl, through to the intensive economic and military collaboration between Israel and Apartheid South Africa, both countries were unabashed as bringers of the light of (European) civilization to the benighted swarthy Arab and African savages.[9]

            But, does the blanket term “Apartheid” conceal more than it reveals? Isn’t Nazism more accurate than Apartheid, as contended by legal theorist Richard Falk?[10] What of Noam Chomsky’s[11] contention of the “Judeo-Nazi tendencies” of Zionist Israel? What of Nazi holocaust survivors who find in Israel evidence of the Nazi regime of the Third Reich?[12] As shown by historian Ilan Pappé in The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine,[13] how can Apartheid be appropriate when from even before Plan Dalet the sole imperative of the Zionists has been to displace, ethnically cleanse and to annihilate Palestinians? Lenni Brenner[14] and Tony Green[15] would agree, both having demonstrated that totalitarianism is built into the political DNA of Zionism from its foundation. But, of course, Zionists, like Michael Curtis[16] will disagree.

            The likes of Arthur Koestler,[17] too, although eviscerating the spurious claims of a cultural and genetic connection between Ashkenazi Jews and the Hebrews of old, comes round to the same point as Zionist apologists for colonialism. But what is there to debate when, excluding isolated but loud Jewish voices of dissent in/on Israel, there is virtual unanimity across the Israeli social and political spectrum that ethnic cleansing is an absolute priority.[18] The fact is that the Israeli State in its ideological, economic, military and political configuration is – in Achille Mbembe’s conception of ‘necropolitics’ (i.e., politics of death)[19] – a socio-cultural ‘machine’ that equates the subjugation of Palestinians with their extermination. Literally, while Zionists prattle on about the ‘right of Israel’ to exist, as though the State-form were a person, the destruction of the Palestinians is inductively taken as a precondition, and condition, for the sovereignty and right to life for Jews in Israel (and around the world).

            To understand how and, equally important, why Nazism is more appropriate than Apartheid, two things must be considered. First, as a form of settler colonialism, Apartheid is an abject form of human parasitism, both material and psychological, where the aim of the invader is not to kill the host but to suck its lifeblood. Second, indicating the distance from Apartheid but encompassing settler colonialism, when the State is organized along the lines of Nazism, bureaucratically and industrially, the supremacist ideology of Zionism aims toward the imperative to “exterminate all the brutes”.  Raoul Peck[20] shows in his borrowing from Joseph Conrad’s protagonist in Heart of Darkness, Kurtz, that this logic no less is at work in Israel. In short, Apartheid needs its victims, Zionist Nazism requires their elimination. Despite its latency in Zionism from its founding, the evidence that the destruction of Palestinians is straight from the playbook of the National Socialists of Germany is not to be found in strained connections derived from the archives of the Third Reich. Instead, it is to Raul Hilberg’s The Destruction of European Jews,[21] Raphael Lemkin’s Axis Power in Occupied Europe,[22] and Lenni Brenner’s Zionism in the Age of the Dictators to which one may profitably turn for comparative historical sociology between a Judeo-Nazi Israel and Nazi Germany.

            The coalition of ruling elites, the military and the democratic totalitarian Jewish and Zionist far right populists are making their last-ditch push to pulverize Gaza into a moonscape in the hope the Palestinians will simply die already. As the world watches in dismay at the viciousness of the Israelis, what is vital for those outside Palestine who stand in solidarity with one of the world’s most beleaguered people is to use language that is cognizant of history and actual Israeli policy. While “Apartheid” has been found to be a searching analogue for the genocide taking place, only because it is now a legal concept, I want to show more explicitly that it is not the most fitting. Sure, both Israel and South Africa are Western settler colonial outposts and, for a time, Israel and South Africa had a pact, as detailed by James Adams in The Unnatural Alliance. And, though it was largely symbolic in effect, since by convenience no one from the South African Apartheid regime were ever tried, the UN declared Apartheid a crime in 1973 and enforceable in 1976. To be clear it was South Africans, especially the youth who made the country ungovernable, with the support of external boycotts that brought Apartheid to an end, not Western governments. As noted above, the difference between the two countries and their histories of settler colonialism is substantive and irreducible one to the other. For one, Israel was inaugurated by acts of political terrorism and genocide – a fact which mocks even the watered-down definition drawn from Raphael Lemkin’s Axis Power in Occupied Europe which the UN appropriated. The other is that the White settler colonial regime in South Africa had uses for native Africans, whereas the settler Zionists have every intention to displace and replace the Palestinians. Based on Lemkin, what has happened and is happening to Palestinians is genocide:

Genocide has two phases: one, destruction of the national pattern of the oppressed group: the other, the imposition of the national pattern of the oppressor. This imposition, in turn, may be made upon the oppressed population which is allowed to remain, or upon the territory alone, after removal of the population and the colonization of the area by the oppressor’s own nationals.

These facts make the plight of the Palestinians fundamentally different, thereby requiring another socio-historical analogue. My case is that we should instead look to the Third Reich, an analogue most Jews and Zionists would refute, despite extremist Jewish Israelis embracing the appellation of Nazi.[23] Be it a range of discriminatory laws[24] (not limited to restricting marriage between Jews and Palestinians);[25] efforts to starve Palestinians into mental stupor just as the Nazi did to Ashkenazi Jews;[26] or the policies of “break the bones” policy or “mowing the lawn”[27] – we cannot miss the fact that we are witnessing the ‘chain of destruction’ painstakingly catalogued by Raul Hilberg in his magisterial three volume set, The Destruction of the European Jews. I turn in Part III to applying the insights of both Lemkin and Hilberg – Zionists who for sure believed in the exceptionalism and privatization of their epistemic discoveries as the exclusive property of European Jews – to the case of Israel’s destruction of the Palestinians.

[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] This telling map, The liquidation of Palestinians, details from 1946 to the present how the Nazi policy of Lebensraum (“elbow room”).

[4] See Vazquez, Rodrigo. 2003. The Killing Zone. https://topdocumentaryfilms.com/dispatches-the-killing-zone/

[5] Johnson, Jake. 2021, May 13. Israeli Defense Minister Threatens ‘Gaza Will Burn’ as IDF Readies Plans for Ground Invasion. Common Dreams. https://www.commondreams.org/news/2021/05/13/israeli-defense-minister-threatens-gaza-will-burn-idf-readies-plans-ground-invasion.

[6] The Guardian. 2021, April 18. Israel launches new airstrikes on Gaza in response to incendiary balloons. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jun/18/israel-launches-new-airstrikes-gaza-incendiary-balloons

[7] Drawing on the insights of Robert Nisbet, I speculate in the conclusion to this essay that one primary reason for the West’s tolerance of Israel’s genocide is not merely because of the ‘Collective’ West’s own in-grained hatred of their own traditional internal Other, or, that Israel is a modern-day geodemographic and geopolitical dagger in the heart of Islam, fulfilling Christendom’s previous Crusades. Rather, it is that Israel represents the ultimate ideal of the State as-the-State in accomplishing near total unanimity between citizens and the State. The ideology of Zionism is particular to be sure, but it is, nevertheless, the highest expression of aspiration by managers and coalition partners of other States, including, I believe, even those that object to the destruction of the Palestinians.

[8] Moleah, Alfred T. 1983. Israel and South Africa: The unholy alliance. Palestine Focus. https://freedomarchives.org/Documents/Finder/DOC53_scans/53.theunholy alliance.israel.southafrica.pdf.

[9] In “Sephardim in Israel: Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Jewish Victims”, Ella Shohat builds on the work of Edward Said to show that Zionists did not spare ‘Oriental Jews’ their contempt. They too were imagined as savages in need of saving. https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/hundreds-of-yemenite-kids-were-abducted-1.5418281 from their ‘backward’ Arabized Judaism nor were ‘Oriental’ Jews above being the subject of Nazi-like experimentation by Ashkenazi Jews.

[10] “Slouching Toward A Palestinian Holocaust”. Counter Currents. https://www.countercurrents.org/falk070707.html

[11] Middle East Monitor. 2018. “Chomsky echoes prominent Israeli, warns of the rise of ‘Judeo-Nazi tendencies’ in Israel”, November 12. https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20181112-chomsky-echoes-prominent-israeli-warns-of-the-rise-of-judeo-nazi-tendencies-in-israel/

[12] Knight, C. 2019, July 30. Nine Holocaust survivors compare Zionist policies to those of the Nazis. Labour Briefing. https://labourbriefing.org/blog/2019/7/30/six-holocaust-survivors-compare-zionist-policy-to-that-of-the-nazis.

[13] 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

[14] Brenner, Lenni. 1983. Zionism in the Age of the Dictators. https://www.thestruggle.org/Zi_Age_Dictators.pdf

[15] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9evhLCuA_k

[16] Curtis, Michael. 2021, March 15. Israel is not an Apartheid State. American Thinker. https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/03/israel_is_not_an_apartheid_state.html

[17] Koestler, Arthur. 1976. The Thirteenth: The Khazar Empire and its heritage. Palmdale, CA: Omni Publications.

[18] Ofir, Jonathan. 2021, March 25. Yes ‘Jewish Power’ party is fascistic, but its rise was inevitable. Mondoweiss.   https://mondoweiss.net/2021/03/yes-jewish-power- party-is-fascistic-but-its-rise-was-inevitable/.

[19] Mbembe, Achille. (2003). Necropolitics. Public Culture 15(1): 11–40.

[20] Peck, Raoul. 2021. Exterminate All the Brutes. HBO. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wNup2jlz-KE

[21] Hilberg, Raul. 1985. The Destruction of European Jews. New York; London: Holmes and Meier.

[22] Lemkin, R. (1944). Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation – Analysis of Government – Proposals for Redress. Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. http://www.preventgenocide.org/lemkin/AxisRule1944-1.htm

[23] Abunimah, Ali and Nassar, Tamara. 2021, May 19. ‘Today we are Nazis,’ says member of Israeli Jewish extremist group. The Electronic Intifada. 

https://electronicintifada.net/content/today-we-are-nazis-says-member-israeli-jewish-extremist-group/33081

[24] The Discriminatory Laws Database. https://www.adalah.org/en/content/view/7771

[25] Sheen, David. 2018, July, 23. Israel steps up its war on mixed marriages. The Electronic Intifada. https://electronicintifada.net/content/israel-steps-its-war-mixed-marriages/25051

[26]  The Times of Israel. Israel counted calorie requirements of Gazans during blockade. 2012, Oct. 17. https://www.timesofisrael.com/israel-counted-calorie-requirements-of-gazans-during-land-blockade-to-avoid-crisis/

[27] Rabbani, Mouin. 2014, July 18. Israel Mows the Lawn. The London Review of Books.

https://oldwebsite.palestine-studies.org/institute/fellows/israel-mows-lawn