The late Professor Yeshayahu Leibowitz applied the term “Judeo-Nazis” back in the late 1980s when he referred to former Supreme Court Judge Meir Landau, who effectively legalized torture, by that description. He made his arguments strongly: “The State of Israel represents the darkness of a state body, where a creature of a human form who was the president of the Supreme Court decides that the use of torture is permitted in the interest of the state.”
I took it as a kind of moral exaggeration. It was bad — Palestinians were being tortured systematically, but somehow I thought, we’re not quite as genocidal as Nazis.
But today, I feel differently. Yesterday, Jerusalem’s Deputy Mayor Arieh King tweeted a photo of over a hundred naked Palestinians who were kidnapped by the Israeli military in Gaza, handcuffed, and sitting in the sand, guarded by Israeli soldiers. King wrote that “The IDF is exterminating the Nazi Muslims in Gaza” and that “we must up the tempo”. “If it were up to me,” he added, “I would bring 4 D9’s [bulldozers], place them behind the sandy hills and give an order to bury all those hundreds of Nazis alive. They are not human beings and not even human animals, they are subhuman and that is how they should be treated,” King said. He ended by repeating Netanyahu’s biblical Amalek genocidal reference: “Eradicate the memory of the Amalek, we will not forget.”
While Israel called it a “Hamas roundup,” the men and children in those photos, as young as 13 years old, were doctors, journalists, shopkeepers, and other civilians who had sought refuge in UNRWA schools in Beit Lahia. They had been arbitrarily kidnapped and separated from their families.
King’s tweet had been reposted by Middle East Monitor and was apparently just over the top for X, as it seems to have been removed by the platform. But not to worry: this morning, King tweeted again with the same photo and others (of naked Palestinian boys and men on trucks), this time opening his post with a biblical quote referring to Amalek, perhaps in order to confuse the algorithms. He quoted from Deuteronomy 25, 19:
“When the Lord your God gives you rest from all the enemies around you in the land he is giving you to possess as an inheritance, you shall blot out the name of Amalek from under heaven. Do not forget!”
Still, King found it necessary to emphasize the current relevance, lest it be too vague:
“Hundreds of sons of Amalek, Muslim-Nazis, what do you think their judgment should be?”
So, it is clear that we are really in Nazi times, and it really does bring associations of the Holocaust. This rhetoric and these deeds are now everywhere. Today, journalist and media host Yinon Magal (who was formerly a lawmaker in Naftali Bennett’s Jewish Home party and hosts a radio show with Ben Caspit on centrist Maariv 103FM radio) tweeted the same photo with a split screen featuring a 1967 photo of Palestinian prisoners (notably, dressed), and wrote that “history repeats itself.” He could just as well have used a 1948 Nakba photo or, for that matter, a Holocaust photo. Magal just does not seem to get the irony: history, indeed, repeats itself.
Yesterday, Magal tweeted a photo of some of these naked boys and men as they sat on the razed street in Beit Lahiya and seriously asked, “why aren’t there women in the photo.”
It’s hard to even get around all of the layers of perversion here.
Earlier yesterday, Magal shared a video of Israeli soldiers in Gaza singing and dancing, and he typed the words of their genocidal song approvingly:
“I have come to conquer Gaza
And hit Hizbollah on the head
And only adhere to one mitzvah [deed]
To eradicate the seed of Amalek
I have left my house behind
And will not return until victory [is achieved]
Everyone knows our slogan
There are no uninvolved”
These are not just the chants of some kids on the hills. They are soldiers in Gaza — the same soldiers perpetrating this horrific genocide right in front of our eyes. Those cheerleading them in explicitly genocidal terms are not just far-right fanatics either; this spirit is everywhere.
I am speaking to some fellow activists who find it really hard to cope with this. We can hardly follow the horrors, the rising death toll — while U.S. officials say that the Israeli assault might continue in its current mode until the end of January and then continue with a “lower-intensity, hyper-localized strategy.”
How on earth can this genocide continue with the whole world watching, we ask ourselves? Well, the answer appears to be that it is continuing precisely because the whole world has chosen to watch it rather than stop it. This is on us all.
There is an important point that everyone is missing. Remember when Stuart Seldowitz told that street vendor that “If we killed 4,000 Palestinian children it wouldn’t be enough”? Remember Congressman Max Miller saying something like “We will turn Gaza into a parking lot”? Note that neither said “the Israelis” or “they” – they said “WE”. These American citizens clearly identified themselves as Israeli. NOW – it is supposedly anti semitic to conflate Israelis and Jews, yet here are these two prominent men doing just that and even identifying as Israelis. I cannot emphasise this point enough – both men said “WE”.
Israel rounding up hundreds of Palestinian boys, men and disappearing them
“Shocking images and video footage circulating online show the boys and men stripped to their underwear and left sitting on the ground in the cold winter temperatures in Gaza.
Hundreds of Palestinian boys and men over the age of 15 are being rounded up by occupation forces in northern Gaza, stripped of their clothes and taken away.
Shocking images and video footage circulating online show the boys and men stripped to their underwear and left sitting on the ground in the cold winter temperatures in Gaza. They can be seen surrounded by heavily armed Israeli occupation soldiers who are screaming orders at them.
Further images show an army people carrier filled with the men being driven away.
It is not clear how many boys and men were disappeared, but some reports have put the figure as high as 700. They are said to have been taken from shelter schools in northern Gaza where thousands of displaced civilians were forced to take shelter as a result of the bombing and destruction of their neighborhoods and homes.”
https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20231207-israel-rounding-up-hundreds-of-palestinian-boys-men-and-disappearing-them/
Nice job on the article Jonathon.
There are millions of us watching this in horror, trying to stop it and completely gobsmacked by the US government’s continued endorsement and complicity. The sheer evil we’re witnessing, the racism, the lies, the dehumanization, destruction, and pride in killing, something is seriously wrong with the State of Israel, its mindset and those who continue to support this. There was no justification for this behavior in the 1930s and 1940s. There is no justification for it today. May the participants and perpetrators of both suffer the same fate.
Literally sick to my stomach. Not sure what is more egregious, the atrocities or those in positions of power in Israel, the US and the west providing cover. This isn’t vengeance for October 7th, or self defence, it is abundantly clear that this was pre-planned and coordinated with the US and their lapdogs in NATO.
On the other hand, Israel Shahak wrote in 1974, well before his HU faculty colleague Leibowitz used the term Judeo-Nazism, “I am not afraid to say publicly that Israeli Jews, and with them most Jews throughout the world, are undergoing a process of Nazification.” This was in a long account, “What Are My Opinions?” in response to vilification in Israel for his opposition to Zionism and Israel’s crimes. After the June, 1967 war, Shahak and his colleagues in the Israeli League for Human and Civil Rights and in Matzpen put those issues on the world map from the Israeli side, often at high personal cost, and their judgments in my view are definitive
https://questionofpalestine.files.wordpress.com/2013/12/shahak_swasia74.pdf