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The Nazification of Israel
By brazenly resorting to Nazi-style rhetoric and methods of persecution in Palestine, Israel, with the consent of the majority of its own people and the unlimited support of the United States, perpetrates the kind of crimes that the Jewish state claims as the raison d'etre of its own creation in 1948.
AIJAZ AHMAD
A DECISIVE shift that has been perceptible for some time seems now to be substantially in place in Israel, from settler-colonialism of the familiar kind to full-scale Nazification. For virtually the whole of its existence, Israel has modelled itself upon the South African racist regime of the apartheid days: a settler colony, calling itself a "Jewish state" and asserting a manifest right to "the Biblical lands" for a "Chosen People" defined by race and religion, it has been unwilling to grant equal rights to the original inhabitants of the land owing to differences of race and religion, and unwilling even to pay compensation, let alone a right of return, to refugees created by its colonial wars.
Israel has of course always had the choice of dismantling its own racist character and accepting the creation of a secular, democratic bi-national state in which Israelis and Palestinians could live as equal citizens, as the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) began proposing soon after the 1967 war. Short of that, Israel could alternatively agree to a final peace settlement on the basis of two fully sovereign states, one Israeli and the other Palestinian, living side by side on the historic land of Palestine. Chairman Yasser Arafat, the head of the Palestinian Authority (P.A.), declared his acceptance of such a solution in an unusual 'Op-Ed' article in The New York Times as recently as February 2002, even as Israel holds him captive in his Ramallah home and methodically assassinates his close associates.
Instead, Israel has relentlessly carried out a policy that Nelson Mandela has called "worse than apartheid" and the Speaker of the Greek Parliament has recently characterised as "genocide". Even in the earlier stages of the present assault, Ze'ev Sternhell, Israel's leading scholar on fascism, could already write that the government "is no longer ashamed to speak of war when what they are really engaged in is colonial policing, which recalls the takeover by the white police of the poor neighbourhoods of the blacks in South Africa during the apartheid era." This idea of "colonial policing" was in fact already there quite explicitly in the calculations of the Israeli government even when it entered the so-called 'peace process' and signed the Oslo Accords of 1993. That was clarified as early as 1998 by the Israeli academic Shlomo Ben-Ami just before he joined the Ehud Barak government, going on to become Barak's chief negotiator at Camp David in the summer of 2000. Ben-Ami observed that "in practice, the Oslo agreements were founded on a neo-colonialist basis, on a life of dependence of one on the other forever".
However, as the Barak-Sharon combine provoked the current Palestinian uprising that came to be called the Al-Aqsa Intifida (see "Israel's Killing Fields", Frontline, November 24, 2001, for documentation of this deliberate provocation), and then used the Palestinian retaliation to put in place a policy of punishing the population as a whole, perceptions of the scale and nature of new brutalities began to shift. Some of the world's most prestigious newspapers, ranging from Israel's own Ha'aretz to the French Le Monde Diplomatique, have repeatedly accused it of "war crimes" that "fall under the Geneva Conventions of 1949", as the latter put it a couple of months ago. Indeed, the United Nations Security Council has time and again reminded Israel that its conduct in the Occupied Territories is fully covered by those conventions. This worldwide - and repeated - reference to the Geneva Conventions with regard to Israel's conduct is particularly significant in the sense that those conventions were originally formulated in response to the Nazi war crimes and with a view to the de-Nazification of Germany.
The point that Israel is actively acting on the model of the Nazis was made, for example, by Assaf Oran, one of the more than one thousand Israeli reservists who have refused military duty in the current war on the Palestinian people, in an 'Open Letter to American Jews' which he published on the eve of Passover this year, in response to a massive outpouring of anger against his 'refusenik' comrades: "Where were all these holy souls, who now scold Tikkun [an organisation supporting 'refuseniks'] because they indirectly allude to the Nazi horrors, where were they all when a senior IDF [Israeli Defence Forces] officer proudly called, 'in order to beat the Palestinians, let's be Judeo-Nazis'." The well-known Israeli daily Ma'ariv has also quoted an Israeli officer exhorting his men to study the tactics adopted by the Nazis during the Second World War: "If our job is to seize a densely packed refugee camp or take over the Nablus Casbah, and if this job is to be given to an Israeli officer to carry out without casualties he must before all else analyse and bring together the lessons of past battles, even - shocking though this might appear - to analyse how the German Army operated in the Warsaw Ghetto."