While PM Benjamin Netanyahu has so far denied Israel’s plans to occupy Gaza, ministers in own Cabinet have joined thousands of colonial settlers in calls to “return” to the Strip.
To the Germans of the 1920s and 1930s, hearing the call of their medieval and Prussian forebears, the ‘German East’ signified a ‘return to the pristine, lost past of the Teutonic Order and Frederick the Great, and heralded a paradise to be regained’,8 a paradise, the [Fascists] said, of blood and soil (Blut und Boden).
In 1931, Richard Walther Darré, [a] head of [Fascist] agricultural policy and a close advisor to SS Chief Heinrich Himmler, wrote that ‘our [German] people must prepare for the struggle and also for this, that in the battle [in “the East”] there can be only one outcome for us: absolute victory! The idea of blood and soil,’ he continued, ‘gives us the moral right to take back as much eastern land as is necessary to achieve harmony between the body of our people and our geopolitical space.’9
[…]
For late‐nineteenth century and early‐twentieth century Germans, the turn to ‘the East’ was, in their view a ‘return’, a chance to complete the plan started by their thirteenth‐century ancestors when crusading Teutonic Knights had conquered and ‘Germanized’ ‘the East’ by ‘the sword’. The example of the Teutonic Knights’ Baltic crusade would provide a powerful historical precedent for twentieth‐century Germans committed to continuing what they saw as the inevitable and timeless German ‘drive to the East’ (Drang nach Osten) and expansion onto Slavic lands.
This crap again?
(Source.)