Is Comparison Between Israel and the Nazi State Fair?

Is this a criticism too far?

A Canadian pro-Palestinian group has come under criticism for running an ad campaign comparing Israeli occupation of the Palestinians to the Nazi treatment of Jews.

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A pro-Israel group attacking or calling antisemitic any criticism of Israel is not news, of course. But this criticism of Israel is different: it makes a connection between the genocide of Jews with an occupation by Jews. Even for some pro-Palestinians the comparison between Israeli action and Nazis is too much and many avoid it.

So whether the ad is appropriate is controversial on both sides. Criticism of Israel and comparison to Nazism are different tactics and the debate is whether it is appropriate for them to be merged. The ad in question was published in Adbusters magazine and Canada's largest drugstore chain removed the publication of its shelves as the CEO of the Canadian Jewish Congress called in antisemitic:

The argument is obscene, and continues the disgusting tradition of some supporters of the Palestinian cause to turn Jews into Nazis and Palestinians into Jews. In so doing, these propagandists not only demonize Israelis (i. e., Jews), but minimize the murderous extent and intent of Naziism's genocidal project. In other words, such vile analogies become a form of Holocaust minimilization.

But the editor of Adbusters contests the point:

Here is the story from the Adbusters viewpoint.

In October 1939, the German Wehrmacht reached the city of Warsaw, and over the following months, the Jewish population was forced into a small section of the city called "the Jewish quarter." The situation inside the ghetto was unbearable: Nazis controlled the movement of goods, basic utilities and even food. Each person was allotted a starvation diet of 250 calories per day.

Acts of rebellion were brutally suppressed. When two German soldiers were killed in a local restaurant, 106 men in the ghetto were shot in reprisal. Arrests and random executions were common. In April 1940, the ghetto was walled off on all sides.

Services such as hospitals and schools were derelict, relying on an ever-decreasing stream of supplies allotted by the Nazis. For a while, the supplies were supplemented by goods smuggled in through tunnels, but such services were eventually forced to close.

A resistance movement was organized during the Soviet advance, but it was brutally defeated and the Warsaw ghetto was razed to the ground.

In September 2005, Israel dismantled its settlements in Gaza and withdrew its troops after 38 years of military occupation. For Israel, this marked an end to their occupation. For Palestinians confined in Gaza, however, the occupation had simply progressed into a new phase: the ghetto. The year 2005 marked the establishment of Gaza as an open air prison.

Israel controls the movement of all goods, including food and basic necessities, in and out of the Gaza strip. A study done by Johns Hopkins University in 2002 found that 17% of children aged 6-59 months suffer from chronic malnutrition, and almost half of women and children are anemic. Thirteen percent of children under five are stunted.

Israel controls all of Gaza's borders and airspace. The long ocean border, once a viable source of income for Gazans through trade and fishing, is now strictly controlled. Humanitarian missions are turned away with lethal force.

Israel responds to every Palestinian provocation with disproportionate force. The Israeli response to the murder of three civilians by Palestinian rockets in 2008 was the wide-scale destruction of Gaza, the use of white-phosphorus munitions in the area of a UN school and the killing of over 1,000 civilians.

Comparing events today with events in Nazi-occupied Europe must never be done lightly. When events are so serious as to lend themselves to such comparisons, however, there is a moral imperative to speak up.

One passionate pro-Palestinian academic As'ad AbuKhalil has written that he has reevaluated this comparison and while for decades he was opposed to it he has since changed his mind and believes the Zionism may be compared to Nazism:

I used as a teenager and later here in the US to passionately argue against any Arab comparison between Nazi and Zionist policies and practices. I used to argue that Nazi exterminationist anti-Semitism is not comparable to Zionism. Not anymore. I do believe that Zionism is essentially genocidal toward Arabs although the political environment of the post-WWII world did not permit Zionists to go ahead with their exterminationist plans--but not for lack of trying. That is for sure. Zionism is indeed comparable to Nazism: have you read the writing of Vladimir Jabotinisky--the founder of Revisionist Zionism which now is the sponsor of the largest political bloc in Israel? He was the one who believed that it is the nation's "racial recipe" that truly defined a nation--not anything else. Zionists really want to believe that their crimes, hypocrisy, deception, lies, distortions, foolish propaganda, and utter disregard for human lives are going on unnoticed. Can you imagine the verdict of history on those war criminals who founded and later led this state of Israel? Can you imagine how Israel will be talked about once the state is completely gone out of existence? It will be proven that Israel has posed a deadly threat to world Jewry after WWII--not to mention its threats toward all Arabs.

But another Mideast history Mark LeVine disagrees with the comparison and says that such comparisons weaken the Palestinian cause and serve as a useful distraction for Israel:

Pointing out that the suffering endured by Gazans is not comparable in scope to the Holocaust or other well-known genocides, does not diminish it. However, it is crucial to provide accurate historical context to the current conflict, for two reasons.

Firstly, the use of highly charged historical comparisons that do not hold up to scrutiny unnecessarily weakens the Palestinian case against the occupation.

In a propaganda war in which Palestinians have always struggled to compete, handing Israel's supporters the gift of inaccurate or exaggerated comparisons does not help this struggle, particularly not in Israel and the US, the two most important battlegrounds in this conflict.

To cite just one example, Israel and its supporters still use the exaggerated casualty figures of the early days of the 2002 siege of Jenin - hundreds were claimed to have been massacred, "only" 56 people were ultimately found to have died - to support their argument that Palestinians "lie" about the human toll of Israeli attacks.

When the argument is shifted from the basic illegality and intolerability of the occupation to an argument over numbers in which Palestinians seem to overstate their case, Israel has created more room to continue the occupation.

The ad follows: