“It stands on the side, looks at the rioting settlers, and begins to be a partner in war crimes,” [Amiram] Levin told the public broadcaster. “It’s 10 times worse than the issue of [military] readiness… and I say honestly, I am not angry at the Palestinians, I am angry at us. We are killing ourselves from the inside.”
[…]
The interviewer asked Levin if he agreed with a May 2016 speech by former Meretz MK Yair Golan, who was IDF deputy chief of staff at the time, in which he said that processes [under Zionism] were similar to some in Europe in the years leading up to the Holocaust.
“We find it difficult to say it, but that’s the truth,” Levin responded. “Look around Hebron, look at streets, streets that Arabs can’t use, only Jews, that’s exactly what happened in countries like that.”
Pressed on whether he saw specific similarities with Nazi Germany, Levin said: “Of course. It hurts, it’s not nice, but that’s the reality. It’s better to deal with it, even if it is hard, than to ignore it.”
Levin also assailed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s appointment of “draft dodger” cabinet members such as National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, who was not accepted for mandatory military service by the IDF because of his extremist activities.
The prime minister is being exploited by “a messianic group of criminals, former ‘hilltop youth,’ people who don’t even know what democracy is,” he charged, referring to extremist settler activists.
“They come from areas where there is no democracy, from the West Bank, where for 56 years there hasn’t been democracy there,” said Levin. “There is absolute apartheid.”
[…]
In response to Levin’s radio interview, Likud MK Danny Danon, a member of the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, expressed disappointment that people who had contributed to the state in the past would express such sentiments, saying that “their minds get a little confused.”
“Anyone who compares us to Germany or the Nazi régime needs to be examined,” Danon said.
On 25 January, three months before the IDF got its licence to invade the West Bank, Amir Oren, a senior military commentator for Haʻaretz, quoted a senior officer:
In order to prepare properly for the next campaign, one of the Israeli officers in the territories said not long ago that it is justified and in fact essential to learn from every possible source. If the mission is to seize a densely populated refugee camp, or take over the kasbah in Nablus, and if the commander’s obligation is to try to execute the mission without casualties on either side, then he must first analyse and internalise the lessons of earlier battles — even, however shocking it may sound, even how the German Army fought in the Warsaw Ghetto.
The officer indeed succeeded in shocking others, not least because he is not alone in taking this approach. Many of his comrades agree that in order to save Israelis now, it is right to make use of knowledge that originated in that terrible war, whose victims were their kin.
Click here for events that happened today (June 23).
1933: Hermann Göring issued a police directive to suppress all activities of the Social Democratic Party, including meetings and press, and ordered confiscation of all its property.
1939: Hermann Göring headed up the Reich Defense Council to plan for total mobilization of the country for war. Minister of Economics Walther Funk offered the idea of using future prisoners of war as forced laborers, while SS chief Heinrich Himmler offered his prisoners in concentration camps for the same purpose.
1940: The Third Reich’s Chancellor went on a three‐hour tour of the architecture of Paris with architect Albert Speer and sculptor Arno Breker in his only visit to the city. Although Berlin and Paris had already signed an armistice, fighting between Fascist Italy and France continued while French delegates negotiated in Rome; General Huntzinger, who signed the German–French armistice at Compiègne yesterday, was once again the a member of the French delegation.
1942: The Luftwaffe lost its latest fighter aircraft, a Focke‐Wulf Fw 190, when it mistakenly landed at RAF Pembrey in Wales.
1989: Werner Best, first chief of Department 1 of the Gestapo, finally dropped dead.
To me it’s mind-boggling that other Israelis don’t see this.
Amartya Sen won the Nobel Prize for the concept that famines don’t happen if there’s a “free press” because the public finds out and demands action. He didn’t understand Israel and its supporters, who see starvation and demand action - to make starvation worse
https://x.com/justinpodur/status/1801661762883764296
Focus on the fact that propaganda exists, yes. But also focus on the fact that people probably put up a lot of hostile resistance to any propaganda if it goes against their pre-existing wishes. Ask more questions about those.
https://twitter.com/RodericDay/status/1799409826029810176
One’s loyalty to one’s own superior material conditions even if it means denying the humanity in oneself by gleefully participating in the butchering of others while maintaining cognitive dissonance to the memories of the subjugation of their spiritual ancestors is one of the defining traits of liberalism - and its child fascism - that the Europeans have bestowed to the rest of the world.
