By Melanie Phillips, JNS
The current frenzy over Israel can be seen as the last remaining front of the Second World War.
Let’s conduct a thought experiment. Let’s imagine that Nazism had broken out of its wartime German-dominated confines and had become the creed of millions throughout the West.
Let’s imagine that, for the past 21 months, the streets of London, New York and other Western cities had become forests of Nazi flags as hundreds of thousands of people marched for the ethnic cleansing of Jews—mob events justified as exercising the “right to free speech.”
Imagine that thousands of young people waving the Nazi flag at a rally in England had chanted “Death, death to the Jews!” while a demagogue leapt around the stage whipping the crowd up to a delirium.
Imagine that the only way to gain social or professional acceptance was to agree that the Jews deliberately killed babies and starved people to death, that they were destroying society and that they must be treated accordingly as pariahs.
Imagine that trade unions representing teachers, doctors and public-sector workers supporting the Nazi party all passed resolutions calling for Jews to be boycotted. Imagine that shops in Britain displayed signs on their doors saying “No Jews welcome.”
Imagine that the swastika had become a fashion accessory, printed onto casual clothing or painted onto people’s faces—or that when turning up for a hospital appointment, you saw that the nurse was wearing on her uniform a swastika pin.
Imagine that the United Nations had become an arm of the Nazi party, and that its Special Rapporteur on the Jewish Question had stated that Jews who had been slaughtered had brought this upon themselves, that the Nazis had a right to murder them, and that the Jews were running the U.S. Congress, the media and the universities.
All these things have happened, with one obvious difference—that instead of the Nazi party, they have been in support of the Palestinian cause and against Zionism, the State of Israel and the Jews who are assumed to support it.
For most Diaspora Jews, this onslaught has been felt as an existential threat. They don’t view what’s been happening as support for a Palestine state or even as merely hatred of Israel. They see the Palestine flag as a banner rallying calls for the extermination of the Jews.
That’s because the Palestinian Arabs don’t merely aim to destroy the State of Israel. They also aim to steal the Jews’ own history in the land by appropriating it for themselves. This is therefore an attempt to destroy Judaism itself, demonstrated by the fact that, day in, day out, Palestinian society preaches “death to the Jews.”
That’s why the Palestine flag—now so ubiquitous throughout the West as a grotesque statement of idealism—causes so many Jews to shudder at it as a latter-day swastika, while the even more ubiquitous keffiyeh is viewed as the equivalent of the lightning flash on SS uniforms.
This analogy with Nazism is not a far-fetched flight of fancy. The Palestinian Arabs are the literal heirs to the Nazi party.
They were first incited to the genocide of the Jews by the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, who entered into an alliance with Adolf Hitler and pledged to exterminate every Jew in the Middle East.
Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas, whose doctorate was in Holocaust denial, has publicly hailed al-Husseini as his role model. Sermons, pamphlets and cartoons pumped out by the P.A. are riddled with deranged and paranoid images straight out of the Nazi play-book demonizing Jews as blood-suckers, parasites, vermin or octopuses trapping the world in their tentacles.
These images, which have indoctrinated generations of Palestinian Arabs into a hysterical and murderous hatred of Jews, seem just like Nazi propaganda because they are.
As Pierre Rehov has documented in his important film “Palestine: Invention of a Nation,” it was the Nazis who taught the Arabs of pre-Israel Palestine the language of Jewish demonization. He states that, although the virus of antisemitism was already widespread in the Islamic world, it was given rocket fuel after the war by the massive conversion of former Nazis to Islam and the flight of various high-ranking Nazis to Arab countries, particularly Syria and Egypt.
These former Nazi officers trained the Arabs to become terrorists and also put into widespread practice the strategy of the Nazis’ propaganda chief, Josef Goebbels, who reportedly said: “Repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth.”
Palestinian terrorist armies, as well as their fellow travelers on the streets of Western cities, have been repeatedly seen giving the Nazi salute. Israeli soldiers in Gaza report finding copies of Hitler’s Mein Kampf in house after house. Yet while the West ignores or dismisses the Nazi roots of the Palestinian agenda to exterminate Israel, in an Orwellian inversion it accuses Israel itself of Nazi-style crimes.
It accuses it of committing genocide against Palestinian Arabs and claims that there are concentration camps in Gaza. In Britain, Adnan Hussein, an independent “pro-Palestine” member of parliament, suggested this week that Israel might be planning “gas chambers” for Gazans.
Many of the young people who parrot these obscenities in such huge numbers are so profoundly ignorant and with so little capacity to think that they have no idea what they are saying. Throughout the West, Hitler and the Nazis have long been reduced to all-purpose cartoon villains.
At a deeper level, however, falsely accusing Israel and the Jews of committing the monstrous crimes of which they have been the victims taps into far darker cultural currents. For some, painting Jews as Nazis is a way of cleansing themselves of the unbearable stain of cultural complicity in the Holocaust.
If the Jews are committing genocide, goes this thinking, the Nazi genocide of the Jews was obviously not such a big deal. And so the rest of the West—whose policies of appeasement enabled the Holocaust to happen, which shut its doors against the victims and whose own culture gave rise to that horror in the first place—is off the hook.
With the Palestinian cause having become the default position of the liberal mind, millions in the West are parroting its propaganda. And alongside the Nazi-derived tropes of Jewish demonization, Palestinian Arabs themselves repeatedly accuse Israel of genocide and other Nazi behavior.
This is clearly a tactic to deflect any scrutiny of their own Nazi links. It also derives from the Muslim belief that everything in the Islamic world is good while everything in the non-Islamic world is bad, which results in the routine Muslim inversion of victim and victimizer, justice and injustice, truth and lies.
This inversion draws in turn upon the Palestinian Arabs’ appropriation for themselves of all the perceived advantages of the Jews’ historic identity, including the supreme victimization of the Jewish people in the Holocaust, which the Palestinians leverage by claiming that victim status for themselves at the hands of the Jews.
The current frenzy over Israel and the Jews doesn’t just have baleful historic echoes. It can justifiably be seen as the last remaining and hitherto unrecognized front of the Second World War.
The heirs to the Nazi-Arab alliance for the extermination of the Jews are marching shoulder to shoulder alongside the so-called progressives of the Western left. This poses a deadly threat to the Jews of the Diaspora and to the West itself.
Alas, the country that led the fight to defeat the Nazis has now capitulated to their heirs. In London this week, French President Emmanuel Macron told the British parliament that an immediate ceasefire in the Gaza Strip “without any conditions” was vital to end the “dehumanization” of the Gazans and that recognizing a State of Palestine was “the only path to peace.”
Such moves would empower Hamas and leave their Israeli victims at the mercy of the Palestinian agenda of extermination, ripping up international law to do so. At this sickening abandonment of civilization for barbarism, Britain’s prime minister, Sir Keir Starmer, enthusiastically applauded.
Not only have these two leaders refused to call out in terms the murderous lunacy that’s gripped the West, but they are fueling it. Winston Churchill must be turning over in his grave.
