Has Israel become the “Nazi Germany” of the Middle East? Nazi Germany abolished Jewish rights to property and equal rights under the law before launching a campaign of genocide and murdering over 6 million Jews. They first implemented a policy of illegal expansion of their territory and later treated the inhabitants of captured territories as sub-humans and slaves. The Nazis used the excuse of self-defense when invading Poland and beginning all-out war.
Israel’s horrific abuse of the Palestinian people has its source in the Nakba, which means “catastrophe” in Arabic, which refers to the mass displacement and dispossession of over 700,000 Palestinians during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. Before the Nakba, Palestine was a multi-ethnic and multi-cultural society. A decade before the establishment of Israel, David Ben Gurion, who would become Israel’s first Prime Minister, stated, “We must expel Arabs and take their place.”
Israeli authorities maintain their system of apartheid, passing laws that deepen the segregation of Palestinians from Israelis, confine Palestinians to deprived locations, and implement policies that further the systematic dispossession of Palestinians. Illegal settlements, property seizures, wanton destruction, home demolitions, denial of access to livelihoods, and state-backed settler violence are just some of the tactics used to subjugate the Palestinian people.
An amendment to the Citizenship and Entry into Israel Law facilitated the stripping of Palestinians’ citizenship and permanent residency, rendering many Palestinians stateless. The Knesset also approved an amendment to the Cooperative Societies Ordinance that expanded admission committees in Jewish collective towns, with powers to exclude Palestinians under the vague pretext of “social unsuitability.”
Responding to the Hamas attacks in 2023 under the justification of self-defense, Israel invaded Gaza and initiated a policy of genocide against the Palestinians living there. The IDF has bombed hospitals, schools, refugee camps, cut off aid supplies and purposely starved the inhabitants. The response to the Hamas terror attacks is grossly disproportionate with over 43,000 Palestinian men, women, & children murdered.
IDF General Moshe Dayan once said, “Israel must invent dangers and to do this must adapt the strategy of provocation and revenge. There is no more Palestine. Finished. Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages. You do not even know the names of these Arab villages, and I do not blame you, because these geography books no longer exist; not only do the books not exist, the Arab villages are not there either.”
He continued, “You [Palestinians] shall continue to live like dogs, and whoever wishes may leave, and we will see where this process leads.’ Prime Minister Menachem Begin said, “We don’t need legitimacy. We exist. Therefore, we are legitimate.”
As the Nobel laureate and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel warned years ago; “to forget a Holocaust is to kill twice.” Israel has never forgotten and now they have taken a page from history, adapting Nazi Germany strategy to use against the Palestinian population.
David Dallas is a resident of the Village of Bradford.
