Since October 7th, Israeli leaders have continually abused the word "Nazi" to describe Hamas. Since they belong to the group of people who were actual victims of the Nazis, you would think they would be careful not to trivialize and disempower this term by labeling people who are clearly not Nazis, "Nazis".

But this misuse of the word "Nazi" is by design.

By making the word "Nazi" synonymous with Hamas, Israel's intention is to make world believe that Hamas has the same goals and has committed the same crimes as the Nazis. If the world believes that, then it may be less sympathetic to the Palestinians governed by Hamas. If the world believes Hamas are the same as Nazis, it may not care so much when Israel attacks "Nazi-run" Gaza with 2-ton bombs with a civilian casualty rate of 90%, and starves the survivors on top of it. By making Hamas equal to Nazis, Israel hopes not to be held accountable for its actions in Gaza, which are in violation of international law.

But the word "Nazi" is a double-edged sword. Needing to resort to the word "Nazi" suggests that Israel's moral standing is so weak that it has to call its enemy by the name of a completely different, unrelated group that occupies a completely different space and time in history: the real Nazis, who rose to power in the 1930s and were defeated in 1945. It suggests that if Israel calls things by their real names, it's not enough.

The real Nazis were German Europeans. They were Christians. They were imperialists. They acted on beliefs of white supremacy and the inferiority of other races, such as Jews and Roma, as well as gays and people with physical differences and disabilities. They industrialized genocide and committed this crime on a massive scale, which allowed them to murder 17 million people, 6 million of them Jews -- which was 2/3 of Europe's Jews -- during their time in power.

Hamas is comprised of Palestinian Arabs who are fundamentalist Muslims. Hamas is not imperialist. Rather, its aim is to defeat the State of Israel in the name of the Palestinian people, 15,000 of whom were massacred, and the rest made into refugees, during the Nakba, or the catastrophic ethnic cleansing that occurred with the establishment of the State of Israel. Its aim is to defend the Palestinians from further Israeli aggression, by any means necessary.

Hamas is violent. Killing Jews is a stated goal in Hamas' charter. And yes, it committed many atrocities and war crimes when it broke through the fence of the open-air prison which is Gaza, on October 7th. It had also attacked Israeli civilians before October 7th. The International Criminal Court has requested arrest warrents for its leaders.

But Hamas is a far cry from the Nazis. Its clear hatred of Jews and Israel did not come out of nowhere. This hatred is the result of many decades of Israeli oppression, dehumanization, ethnic cleansing, and other atrocious crimes against the Palestinian people by a nation that has chosen to call itself "The Jewish State". It should therefore not be surprising that the wrath of those oppressed people will be directed against Jews. Though this is terribly unfair to the Jews in Israel and the rest of the world who oppose Israel's actions, the blame should be placed with Israel, not with the victims of Israel.

And from another angle, I can't tell you how many Jewish people I've met -- none who were even alive during the Holocaust -- who proudly declare their hate for Germans, Germany, and anything German to this day. I grew up with people who refused to buy anything branded Volkswagen, Braun, or Krups. So how can we expect Palestinians to transcend what we cannot transcend ourselves?

But since we're talking about "Nazis", let's look at the situation:

One side is an occupied people, locked behind a fence from which they cannot enter or leave. They are the descendents of the 900,000 people who were ethnically cleansed from Palestine in 1948 by the new State of Israel. Since then, they have suffered hunger, sickness, continual invasion and theft of their homes and land, humiliating and life-threatening checkpoints, imprisonment without charge, destruction of their cultural heritage, and out-and-out murder for decades. Half of the population are children. For their entire lives, they have been refugees. They were born inside this prison, have lived their entire lives inside this prison, and will die inside this prison.

The other side is a powerful, militaristic, racist, apartheid state, powered by Biblical myths of being God's "chosen people" and hypnotized by romantic fantasies of its own greatness. A state which, before October 7th, regularly performed military operations in Gaza that it sickeningly calls "mowing the lawn". As the world's foremost scholar on Gaza, Norman Finkelstein, describes it:

The purpose of these periodic murder and destruction campaigns is to keep the Gazans in a state of terror and helplessness, unable to grow or advance as a society.

Even more macabre, Israelis living in the village of Sderot, near the Gaza wall, have developed a custom of setting up chairs to enjoy the bombardments, applauding each new blast. The Danish journalist Allen Sorenson who witnessed this perverse celebration, titled it "Sderot cinema".

In one of the most shocking recent examples of Israel's routine barbaric treatment of civilians after October 7th, Dr. Adnan Al Bursh, the head of the orthopaedic department at Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, was arrested, along with other medical staff, and held for four months in Ofer prison in the West Bank. There he was beaten, tortured, and ultimately died. To add insult to injury, more than a month after his death, Israel still won't release his body to his family.

A doctor. The head of an orthopaedic department.

Besides killing medical workers and sick and injured people in hospitals, Israel also has killed hundreds of journalists, aid workers, artists, poets, teachers, students, and academics. It has destroyed 80% of schools and every university in Gaza. There is a term for the systematic destruction of a people's educational system as a means of destroying the culture: scholasticide.

So... I forgot. Which side are the Nazis?

"I think we are committing war crimes in Gaza... Israel is a fascist state today."
-Holocaust survivor Rene Lichtman