Modern Israel is ostensibly a secular democracy, yet also proclaims itself a Jewish state - a bold declaration for a society that possesses a significant non-Jewish population.
And while one might have thought that a people who have been persecuted for two millennia would be sensitized to the suffering of others, Israel has, in fact, often played the bully and squandered whatever karma the Jews have earned in all that time.
It is, of course, interesting that without Nazi Germany, which took anti-Semitism to unimagined depths, there would be no state of Israel; the Holocaust and the collective guilt of Europe and America certainly created it in 1948. More striking and sad are the haunting echoes of that same evil presence in Israel's policies.
During Israel's invasion of Lebanon in the '80s, her local ally was the Christian Phalange, organized in 1936 by Pierre Jumayyil after a visit to Germany where he was impressed by Hitler's Storm Troopers. It was the Phalange that carried out the massacres of Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps, an act in which Ariel Sharon and the Israel Defense Force were judged complicit by an Israeli court. One is reminded of Lithuanians and Ukrainians serving as surrogates for the Germans in their campaigns against the Jews.
When Israel was struggling to suppress the second intifada in 2002, the IDF was seriously confronted with the knotty problem of quelling urban insurrections in West Bank towns with conventional forces. Apparently oblivious of the incredible irony, Israeli commanders studied one of the classics of urban pacification: the suppression of the Warsaw uprising by the German Wehrmacht.
There are also similarities unconnected to any specific incident. Many Israelis believe they have a God-given right to the West Bank, the heart of ancient Israel, and government policy has generally supported them in the form of the settlement program. The result is that the land granted the Palestinians by the same U.N. resolution that created Israel has been extensively colonized, with fortified Jewish enclaves dominating a landscape of Palestinian villages and towns. It is difficult to see how this is significantly different from Heinrich Himmler's plan to establish Aryan enclaves throughout Poland, the Ukraine and western Russia.
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Israel's mechanisms for controlling occupied territory would also be familiar to the Nazis, in kind if not degree. A Russian partisan kills a German, and his village is destroyed; a Palestinian blows himself up in Tel Aviv, and his family home is destroyed. This is collective punishment, and it is outlawed by every instrument defining international law.
Granted, Israel does not execute hostages, but constantly disproportionate and sloppy retaliation amounts to a very similar situation. A homemade rocket injures an Israeli, and the IDF shoots a missile into a car or building, killing women and children in addition to the "terrorists."
Long detention without charges or trial and the regular use of torture - practices typically associated with fascist and communist societies - have long characterized Israeli treatment of Palestinians. Torture - enhanced physical pressure - in fact has only recently been made illegal under Israeli law, though it continues. Of course, none of this has that much impact any longer, since the U.S. has now adopted these immoral practices, as well as others, such as undeclared attacks against other countries.
Israel's disdain for international law and Security Council resolutions, which are dutifully vetoed by the U.S., is well-documented, but more disturbing is the excuse. The position put forth is that the Geneva Conventions and U.N. Charter only apply to states, and Palestine has never been a state.
Apart from the incredible cynicism involved, this argument ignores the fact that if Palestine is not a state, then neither is Israel, since both were created by the same resolution. Hitler justified his abominable treatment of the USSR by pointing out that Joseph Stalin had never signed the Geneva Convention, an uncomfortably similar excuse.
Back in the early '90s, I spent several days in a Palestinian village near Hebron. Watching the Israeli patrols from the rooftops after dark after being warned they would shoot first, I could not help thinking, "Isn't this what it was like to be a Jew hiding out in Nazi-occupied Europe?"
And Gaza strikes me as little more than a giant ghetto, where people are slowly starving while Israel denies responsibility because they are not "an occupying power," though like the Germans in Warsaw, they control all access to the area.
Criticism such as this inevitably earns one the label of anti-Semite, which is, of course, nonsense. I have met old Jews such as Israel Shahak, who have numbers tattooed on their arms and are even more critical of Israel than me. When you stare directly into the face of evil, you apparently never forget its appearance.
Richard M. Berthold is a retired professor of classical history at UNM. He is the author of 'Rhodes in the Hellenistic Age.'
