On Israel and comparisons with the Nazis

After Israel announces it's building a concentration camp, condemning the few politicians speaking out is morally twisted

Israel has announced that it will drive Gaza's survivors into a concentration camp, before they're all expelled.

Those who refuse will be exterminated. In the words of Israeli newspaper Israel Hayom, “those outside these zones will later be identified as Hamas terrorists, providing legal justification for their elimination.”

Enter Dave Rich, a professed expert on antisemitism and the Director of Policy at the Community Security Trust (CST), whose stated mission is to protect Jewish security in Britain. They work closely with government and the police, but have been condemned by, amongst others, the Jewish peace movement Na’amod for their vilification of Jewish opponents of Israel’s genocide, alongside anti-genocide protests more broadly.

Confronted with Israel openly committing to a grave war crime, who does Rich reserve his ire for?

The few British politicians condemning the crime.

He’s written an article for the Jewish Chronicle headlined “Pro-Gaza MPs comparing Israel to Nazis brought shame onto Parliament”. That’s because of comparisons between the proposed concentration camp and the Nazis made by two MPs elected on a platform opposing the genocide:

It is hard to think of any more pointed use of Nazi language and imagery than what two Independent MPs, Iqbal Mohamed from Dewsbury and Batley and Adnan Hussain of Blackburn, posted on X this week. Mohamed accused Israel of committing a “holocaust” in Gaza; Hussain posted: “We’re on the concentration camp stage. Gas chambers next?”

How Rich chooses to describe the concentration camp is revealing and deeply disturbing. He writes:

They were responding to news reports that Israel planned to construct a humanitarian zone in Gaza to separate Palestinian civilians from Hamas, and the use of the word “concentrate” in one headline was all it took to open the Nazi-themed floodgates.

Those who engage in atrocity denial receive damning judgements from history, and rightly so. Israel is planning to concentrate the Palestinian population in a camp, where they will be forbidden from leaving. Those who do not oblige will be regarded as legitimate military targets. This is a concentration camp.

The claim that this is a “humanitarian zone” is a perverse, Orwellian upending of the English language. We already know how Israel interprets ‘humanitarian’ given the experience of the so-called ‘Gaza Humanitarian Foundation’. In this case, after Israel imposed a total siege on Gaza from 2nd March - an objective, incontrovertible war crime - this Israeli-American front brought in limited amounts of often unusable aid, focused in the south in an attempt to coerce the population into depopulating the north.

The Israeli army then repeatedly massacred hundreds of unarmed Palestinian civilians - who it had deliberately starved - at these aid points. The UN Human Rights Office yesterday reported that 798 Palestinians had been killed at aid points since the end of May - more than the total number of Israeli civilians (695) killed on 7th October. 798 is a hideous number - but represents only a tiny fraction of Palestinian civilians killed by Israel.

These are closed military zones where only the Israel “Defense” Forces operate. We know from the testimonies of Palestinians that they are being fired at by the Israeli army, but Palestinian testimonies are treated as worthless because they are barely considered human by Western media outlets and politicians.

CNN did a detailed investigation which clearly established Israeli culpability in the first major aid massacre: consulting weapons experts about the rate of gunfire, and images of bullets extracted from the victims. Israeli soldiers and officers testified to Israeli newspaper Haaretz that they had been ordered to deliberately shoot at unarmed Palestinians waiting for aid. An Israeli soldier testified to Sky News that “IDF troops killed Palestinian civilians at random, with orders to shoot sometimes dependent on the mood of the commander."

Deliberately shooting dead hundreds of unarmed Palestinian civilians, many of them children, as they try and collect aid for their starving families - it is difficult to think of many worse crimes. This is how Israel interprets the word “humanitarian”.

Indeed, Rich’s morally depraved description of the proposed concentration camp is directly contradicted by Eyal Benvenisti, the Israeli lawyer hired by the Israeli state to defend itself at the International Court of Justice against South Africa’s charge of genocide. He writes that it is a “manifest war crime” and “crime against humanity.”

It must be combined with Israel’s officially stated policy - backed by Donald Trump - of entirely emptying Gaza of its people. Benvenisti’s article notes Benjamin Netanyahu telling Israeli parliamentarians in May:

We are demolishing more and more [of their] homes, they have nowhere to return to. The only obvious result will be the desire of the Gazans to emigrate outside the Strip. Our main problem is in the receiving countries.

This quote - all but ignored by Western media outlets, like most statements of criminal and genocidal intent made by Israeli leaders and officials - underlines the hideous lie underpinning that other Orwellian term , “voluntary migration”. That is: you make the conditions of life unbearable so that the population conclude they have no choice but to flee. This is not a voluntary choice.

This comes on top of a new piece published by Israeli-Palestinian publication +972 Magazine, in which Israeli soldiers confess they are deliberately murdering unarmed Palestinian children. That was weeks after former Israeli general and opposition leader Yair Golan - who has supported Israel’s genocidal onslaught throughout - denounced the Israeli military for killing “babies as a hobby.” This should be combined with statements made by Israeli leaders, such as Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich declaring that “Gaza will be entirely destroyed”.

Yet Dave Rich’s big public intervention is to denounce the few British politicians taking a stand against this obscene crime, rather than the obscene crime itself.

The substance of his argument deserves to be confronted. He argues that making parallels between Israel and the Nazis is inherently antisemitic, often done with an intention to cause distress to Jewish people. This is an claim enshrined in the IHRA definition of antisemitism - which has been used to stifle critique of Israel. One of the examples given by the IHRA is: “Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis."

But it is not true that parallels are being drawn between Israel and the Nazis in order to bait Jewish people. In fact, the exact opposite is happening.

If a state hostile to the West was committing the crimes Israel is perpetrating, the use of Nazi analogies would have the backing of a national consensus.

How do I know this?

Because Nazi comparisons have routinely been used for awful crimes that aren't on the scale of Gaza.

In 1998-99, the Serb army was perpetrating a murderous onslaught in Kosovo, whose ethnic Albanian majority wanted independence.

This was used as a pretext for NATO intervention, with a 78 day bombing campaign.

Western leaders routinely used Nazi comparisons.

The then-British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook wrote an article making - at length - comparisons between Slobodan Milosevic's regime and the Nazis. Britain's Defence Secretary George Robertson compared Slobodan Milosevic to Adolf Hitler. Tony Blair made repeated comparisons between Milosevic and Hitler, and so did Bill Clinton.

To be clear, the Serb army committed serious war crimes in Kosovo, killing an estimated 10,000 people.

Kosovo had a pre-war population of 2 million, comparable to pre-genocide Gaza.

The Economist - which backed Israel's onslaught - thinks violent deaths alone in Gaza could be more than 10 times higher, based on statistics which are now three months out of date. We know from other conflicts - though I resist using this term in discussions of genocide - that most are killed because of indirect causes.

Kosovo was not wiped from the face of the earth, with entire extended families repeatedly exterminated by the Serb army, alongside deliberate starvation and apocalyptic conditions of life.

The crime was terrible, but it was not in the same league as Gaza.

So it was entirely mainstream to compare a lesser crime to the Nazis.

We could go on here - Putin, Saddam, Gaddafi - are amongst those who have been routinely compared to the Nazis

What is actually happening as regards Israel today is that Nazi comparisons are being used much less, including by opponents of Israel's genocide, than would otherwise be the case.

There are striking parallels with the Serb example, by the way.

The Serbs were victims of genocide at the hands of the Nazis' Croatian collaborators. Serb nationalism accordingly blended victimhood with ethnic chauvinism, which history tells us is a particularly lethal mix. This is the same toxic blend you see with Israel.

Did Dave Rich condemn those making parallels between Slobodan Milosevic and the Nazis in the 1930s as an affront to the collective trauma of the Serb people, who had suffered genocidal horror at the hands of the Nazis? And there is no question at all that these comparisons do cause profound hurt in Serbia. Last year, when the UN General Assembly voted to commemorate the 1995 Srebrenica genocide, billboards across Belgrade read ‘We are not a genocidal people!’ The tallest building in Belgrade even put up a rotating neon side with these words.

If someone refused to focus their fire on the heinous crimes committed by the Serb army, and instead condemned Nazi comparisons as causing calculated distress to Rich, what would Dave Rich have said? I am very interested to know!

There’s other parallels, too. Milosevic’s government justified their onslaught with atrocities that the Kosovo Liberation Army inarguably perpetrated. The KLA killed up to 2,500 people, including hundreds of Serb and Roma civilians. In Bosnia in particular, Serb nationalism claimed their people were menaced by Islamist extremists.

Milosevic denounced claims of ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, claiming the Serb army was fighting terrorism and protecting civilians.

(It is not surprising, by the way, that many Israeli leaders had sympathies for Serb nationalism, not least Ariel Sharon).

There were statements of criminal intent at the time, not least by Vojislav Šešelj, the leader of the ultranationalist Serbian Radical Party who was in coalition with Milosevic’s party. But there were far fewer examples of such intent being openly confessed, because as Raz Segal - the Israeli-American associate professor of genocide and Holocaust studies - has noted, it is extremely rare for states committing terrible crimes to be as open about their intent as Israel has been since the genocide began.

It is striking, however, that Rich has suggested that claims Israel has committed genocide are inherently antisemitic. Earlier this year he wrote:

a State being found guilty of genocide usually implies the moral incrimination of an entire society, not just the politicians at the top. The intent to commit genocide can only ever be an evil intention, and it is - perhaps coincidentally, perhaps not - one that coheres with traditional antisemitic notions of Jews as inherently and unusually inhumane in their cruelty.

He further added:

if Israel is found guilty of genocide, it would join a short and ignoble list of history’s most abhorrent regimes that have become notorious for their crimes. It would be a judgement that discredits and delegitimises Israel itself. And that, for some, is the whole point of pursuing it so compulsively.

On his latter point, one might ponder if Rich has this backwards, and whether his own strident opposition to concluding that Israel’s actions are genocidal is driven not by the facts, but the consequences he fears that would have for the Israeli project.

More generally, though, he trashes the demarcation between Israel as a state and Jewish people as a whole, which Israel’s defenders have done so rampantly particularly since the genocide began. He suggests that accusing Israel of genocide taps into antisemitic tropes about Jewish cruelty.

This reflects a wider theme that often arises: that because Jewish people were victims of genocide, it is an outrage to suggest that Israel could ever be capable of genocide, given it declares itself the Jewish state.

This argument is of course absurd. Any people can commit genocide. There is nothing in the genetic code of any people which stops them from becoming genocidal. We’ve established that the Serbs were victims of genocide, and then committed genocide 50 years later in Srebrenica.

Dave Rich has to contend with the fact that there is a consensus of genocide scholars that Israel is committing genocide, including distinguished Israeli scholars Omer Bartov, Raz Segal, Amos Goldberg, Daniel Blatman and Schmuel Lederman. These are scholars who have devoted their life to studying the Holocaust in particular and genocide in general. Rich cannot dismiss these scholars as trying to inflame Jewish trauma. Deep down, he must know that if these experts have arrived at such a conclusion, then the case that Israel is committing genocide is at least extremely plausible.

That is certainly the conclusion of many Jewish Americans: a poll over a year ago found that 30% thought Israel was committing genocide, rising to 38% among Jewish Americans under 44.

In the case of Israel, there is a hideous combination at play. There is collective trauma - like the Serbs, but more acute - based on 2,000 years of persecution which culminated in the genocidal extermination of the Jewish people, murdering two thirds of its European population in the 1940s. There is settler-colonialism, which must always justify seizing the land of the indigenous population on the grounds they are inferior. There is ethnic chauvinism, which is increasingly justified by religious dogma. And - quite unlike, say, Serbia - there is impunity. Israel knows it can do what it likes and suffer little meaningful consequences: there isn’t even an international arms embargo or meaningful sanctions, let alone NATO bombs raining down on Tel Aviv.

And there is another factor. Anyone who speaks out against Israeli crimes faces being demonised - as Dave Rich here illustrates. This then reduces pressure on Western governments to cease facilitating those crimes.

A final note. Before the genocide, I resisted comparisons between Israel and the Nazis. For a start, I thought this spoke to a certain historical illiteracy: that in our culture, people are so ill-educated about the crimes of our past, that Nazi atrocities become the only reference point. But there are so many abominable crimes committed - including by Britain - that we can look to.

This has been to Israel’s benefit, because most people’s understanding of genocide comes from the Holocaust. But the Holocaust - an industrialised attempt at the extermination of an entire people - is an outlier in the history of genocides.

Here’s the problem. Israel began committing genocide in October 2023, which was entirely clear from the statements made by Israeli leaders and officials, who did not even try to pretend they saw a demarcation between civilians and military targets. That automatically places Israel in the same category as other states which committed genocide, and that includes Nazi Germany. The idea it is therefore antisemitic to make those comparisons is an outrageous absurdity.

Is Dave Rich’s argument that any comparison with the Nazis applied to someone who is Jewish is antisemitic? Let’s test that to destruction. In May, Israeli politician Moshe Feiglin repeatedly went on Israeli television to declare that “Every child, every baby in Gaza is an enemy”.

Would Dave Rich argue that if I said this was Nazi-style rhetoric, that I was therefore being antisemitic? If the answer is yes, he is beyond reason. If the answer is no, then he accepts that you can make comparisons between someone who happens to be Jewish and the Nazis, and he is arguing over where the threshold should be.

Well, Dave, Israel’s leaders repeatedly declared that they saw the civilian population of Gaza as having collective guilt. They have wiped Gaza from the face of the earth, destroying everything which sustains civilisation: as Donald Trump himself put it: “A civilization has been wiped out in Gaza”. Israel has deliberately starved Gaza’s people. The evidence that the Israeli military are deliberately massacring civilians is incontrovertible, based on endless documented evidence including the testimonies of Israeli soldiers themselves. The Israeli state is openly committed to emptying Gaza of its entire population, and in the meantime herding its survivors into a concentration camp, with anyone who refuses being exterminated.

If, in response to this, your instinct is to condemn the few British politicians actually calling out this crime for what it is, then you are desperately in need of a moral compass.