That’s at least what Benjamin Netanyahu believes and what Benjamin Netanyahu openly said in one of his recent addresses. He meant every word he said, for the Israeli Prime Minister also equated Hamas with Nazis. His precise words were: “For these neo-Nazis ‘Free Palestine’ is just today’s version of ‘Heil Hitler!’ They don’t want a Palestinian state – they want to destroy the Jewish state, they want to annihilate the Jewish people.”
Why so harsh words? Why equating Hamas with the NSDAP? Israel’s prime minister as well as Israel’s authorities must have been living in distress for the last several months watching the anti-Israeli resentment unfold across the Western world. American students, Western governments, the Western press have become anti-Israeli – an unthinkable phenomenon heretofore. Tel Aviv could always rely on the support of the Western world in Israel’s conflicts with the Arab world and all of a sudden such a bitter surprise. The American Christian Zionists were (and these continue to be) pro-Israeli; the intellectuals (many of them of Jewish extraction) were pro-Israeli; the common people were pro-Israeli as they were imbued with the compassion for the Jews because of the latter’s suffering during World War Two. The very few who did not dare to comply with the pro-Israeli trend were swiftly and effectively silenced with accusations of anti-Semitism and the resultant consequences like social ostracism. Something, however, has changed. Neither the intellectuals nor even the governments are unconditionally supporting Israel’s policies.
Since the Western world’s historical awareness has been raised on the holocaust narrative, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu saw it fit to resort to the same narrative also this time. It has worked for so many years, it ought to work also now. But will it?
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu may have also been tempted to draw the comparison between Hamas and the NSDAP as he – along with other Israeli politicians and journalists – has learnt that it was the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and Israel’s government that began to be accused of making use of methods of pacification of Palestinians that Germans applied against Jews during World War Two. That must have come as a kind of shock: the tables of historical interpretation have been turned on the State of Israel. The historical narrative so skillfully used as a very effective tool of blaming and shaming Western nations and thus eliciting from them the readiness to approve every item of the policy of the State of Israel has lost its spell. A psychological backlash to Tel Aviv.
Though in the same speech Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu enumerated the heinous atrocities that Hamas fighters committed – like beheading men, raping women and burning babies alive – it all seems to have fallen on deaf ears in the West, even though it is not the first time that Israel’s prime minister showcases to the world the many crimes perpetrated by Hamas. Or maybe precisely because of it.
The international political mood seems to have changed in favour of Palestinians. No amount of evidence revealing the atrocities perpetrated by Hamas appears to carry weight. Maybe because in war no side to the conflict is to be trusted: each side is innocent in its own eyes while the opponent is guilty of everything. Maybe because the evidence of journalistic footage exonerated Hamas and incriminated IDF. Maybe because the Israelis have eventually overplayed their hand with the ceaseless narrative of them being always innocent of the conflicts occurring in the Middle East.
Equating “Free Palestine” with “Heil Hitler” is this kind of hyperbole that produces an effect that is other than the desired one. People have grown tired of the Hitler-epithet. Whoever is disliked by the media or the authorities or the powers that be, the Hitler-epithet or the Hitler-argument is a default epithet or default argument. If you want to win a debate, use the Hitler-card before your interlocutor or opponent rolls it out. If you want to make people hate a leader, necessarily equate him with Hitler. (Russia’s president comes to mind immediately, doesn’t he?) This tactic worked for a long time, but now it seems to have lost its forcefulness. You can play the same trick only so many times.
