Seriously, what Israel is doing today is no different from what the Nazis did before and at the beginning of World War II, extreme nationalism, illegal expansion, annexation of foreign territory claiming it historically belongs to them, propaganda using the latest technology, terrorizing neighbors, military at the center of society.
Because Zionism is not per se a problematic thing let alone comparable to Nazism. It’s basically the idea that Jews should have their own nation in any form or shape. It’s a national liberation movement.
What Netanjahu and his racket is making out of it is Religious or Revisionist Zionism specifically. And it’s at least slightly problematic comparing that to Nazism as well.
Honestly I don’t see how ethnonationalism is a positive idea no matter what the ethnicity is
So no Palestine?
Is the idea of Palestine an ethnonationalist one, though?
Palestine as such describes the whole region of which Gaza, the Westbank and Israel are part of and historically includes a lot more people than just one specific group. Even Arab Jews who predate the arrival of many of Israels current populations ancestors.
The partition of the land was ment to create a state for Jewish people on the one hand and a state made up out of leftovers for everyone else living in the region. And everyone else is more than just “the Palestinians”.
I mean, there’s also the whole issue of the planned site for the state being occupied, and not even wanting to share with the original inhabitants.
Less problematic than Nazism, though? Sure.
I mean, before starting with Zyclon-B, also the Nazis wanted the Jews to just move to Madagascar.
So I really just see a temporal offset.
In origins section, there were widespread European establishment plans for “solving the Jewish problem” 50 years before Hitler. Hitler’s demonization of Jews was based on WW1 German Zionist treason of Germany with US/UK lobbying to join war, and Communist movement figureheads. What was anti-Jewish sentiment in Europe based on in the 1870s?
It’s not uncommon for ethnic conflicts in general, but there’s a lot of extra dimensions in the Nazi case. The Jewish conspiracy that handed WWI to the Entante, and was also behind communism somehow, was always a centerpiece of their whole ideology.
And obviously, Nazis didn’t just go after Jews. They make up about half of the Holocaust and are dwarfed by random war casualties, often civilian. If they won the plan was to kill a good share of all Slavs and bring back slavery for the rest. There’s nobody more recent I’d say are on the same tier except maybe ISIS.
If you want to count official Hamas members as military opponents, civilian casualties in Gaza dwarf the ones of WWII in ratio.
Also, while I am not so knowledgeable about the Zionist mythos, I know that other territories and populations, which Israel already attacked repeatedly, are meant to be subjugated in the larger plan.
I guess we can all agree that getting to see how far they can resemble the nazis is not an itch we should scratch.
If you want to call Gaza an open air concentration camp, you can’t really use it for war casualties. If you compare Israeli operations in Syria or Iran with anything the Nazis did, they look pretty good again.
There’s plenty of less extreme analogies to use. Rwanda would be more defensible.
Religious Zionists want control of all historical Hebrew areas. What they think that is varies wildly within the movement. Subjugation of the entire Middle East or whole Muslim world is where things are going if Israel is never not stopped, but nobody’s claiming a right to it at this point. Jordan or Sinai are more the ones you hear about as external ambitions.
However, the problem is that these extremist influences are not a new occurrence in Zionism but have been a part of it since the beginning of the political movement. The question of how to deal with the fact there was basically no habitable place on earth left uninhabited to found a state in, was answered very differently by different parts of the movement.