Israel’s relentless bombing campaign against the Gaza Strip had been raging for three weeks when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was invited to speak about the heavy civilian death toll in the Palestinian enclave.
Netanyahu, who had earlier mentioned the September 11 attacks on the Twin Towers of New York and the Pentagon in 2001 to describe the deadly Hamas attack on southern Israel on October 7, turned on this occasion to the Second World War to justify itself.
The hawkish Israeli prime minister referred to the time in 1945 – he mistakenly mentioned 1944 – when a British air raid, which targeted a Gestapo site, mistakenly hit a Copenhagen school, killing 86 children. “It’s not a war crime,” he told reporters. “It’s not something you blame Britain for doing. This was a legitimate act of war with tragic consequences accompanying such legitimate actions.
Since then, the Allied campaign against Nazi Germany and Japan during World War II has become something of a historical precedent for an Israeli state seeking to justify the large-scale massacres of the Gaza population as it ostensibly continues the Hamas fighters. Israel’s ambassador to the UK, Tzipi Hotovely, compared the Israeli campaign to the devastating Allied bombing of Dresden, which, carried out over three nights in 1945, aimed to force the Nazis to surrender and resulted in the deaths of ‘around 25,000 to 35,000 people. Germans. Non-state-affiliated advocates of Israel have also made similar comparisons.
Yet these attempts erase the roots of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians from their lands during the creation of Israel in 1948, the destruction of 500 towns and villages at the time, and the illegal occupation of the Palestinian territory that followed. They also ignore how World War II led to a new regime of international law and serves to dehumanize Palestinians while justifying Israel’s decades-long violence and discrimination – described by many international rights groups as s ‘akin to apartheid – against the Palestinians, say historians and analysts.
Israeli historian and socialist activist Ilan Pappé told Tel Aviv Tribune that these efforts by Israel aim to “justify its brutal policies towards” the Palestinians and represent an old playbook used by the country.
He cited the example of former Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin comparing then-Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) leader Yasser Arafat to Hitler, and war-torn Beirut to Berlin after Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982.
“I feel empowered as Prime Minister to instruct a valiant army against ‘Berlin’ where, among innocent civilians, Hitler and his henchmen are hiding in a bunker deep beneath the surface,” Begin said in a telegram to the US President at the time, Ronald Reagan. early August 1982.
But Begin’s words drew criticism from many in his own country, with Israeli novelist Amos Oz writing that “the urge to revive Hitler, only to kill him again and again, is the result of a pain that poets can afford to use, but statesmen cannot. “.
Looking to the past to legitimize modern conflicts can also be ahistorical. Scott Lucas, an expert on US and British foreign policy at the University of Birmingham, said the incessant use of World War II by Israel and its supporters to blunt criticism of its bloody war on Gaza suggests Israel wants “wish for the end of the post-war period”. 1945 commitment – from lawyers, NGOs, activists and politicians – that we need a better system so that civilians do not suffer needlessly in war zones.”
He added that Israel’s decision to withdraw from membership in the International Criminal Court (ICC) and its attempts to “actively undermine (the authority of) the United Nations”, founded after the horrors of World War II and the Holocaust, make its claims to be part of an allied type struggle fallacious.
Israel has repeatedly accused U.N. agencies and officials, including Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, of bias because they called for a ceasefire. Meanwhile, Israeli bombs have killed more U.N. personnel in Gaza since October 7 than in any other conflict in the organization’s history.
“Civilians will be killed in war,” Lucas acknowledged, but added that Israel appeared to be violating international law’s requirement for proportionality. Essentially, an army whose war results in civilian deaths, including through attacks on hospitals, schools and shelters – targets that Israel has repeatedly struck during this war – must be capable of demonstrate proportionate military gains from these strikes. This is a bar that Israel has not yet reached, according to many experts.
“There are currently an excessive number of civilians being killed because there are not adequate protections enforced by the power carrying out the attack,” Lucas said. “And that is what Israelis should be judged on.” Bringing in World War II and other narratives is (just) peripheral.
Israel’s supporters continue to argue that the parallel to World War II is valid. Jake Wallis Simons, editor of the London-based Jewish Chronicle, said there were “two points of similarity” between the conflicts.
“The first is a sense of existential threat both during World War II and during the Hamas attacks on Israel,” Wallis Simons said. “The other is the nature of the aggressor.” He called Hamas’ actions “barbarism.”
But UN experts, international human rights groups and many countries around the world have warned that these are Israel’s actions since October 7 – more than 20,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza and almost the entire population of 2.3 million people have been displaced – which could amount to a modern-day genocide. Earlier this week, Human Rights Watch accused Israel of using food as a weapon of war. Israel has maintained a blockade on Gaza since 2007 and, since the start of the current war, has made it even more difficult for aid to enter the strip. From the start of the current war, Israel also imposed a strict blockade on the entry of fuel and water – a restriction it has largely kept in place.
In this context, it is useful for Israel to project World War II onto the conflict with Palestine, suggested German-Palestinian academic Anna Younes. This helps Israel dehumanize Palestinians and dulls sensitivity to their suffering.
“By confusing Israel and Jewishness, it is easy to project Nazism… onto Palestinians, but also onto all their supporters,” Younes told Tel Aviv Tribune. “Nazism thus became a Eurocentric and globalized rhetorical instrument for everything that deserves neither empathy nor context, and which can be killed freely. »
