In his recent address to the Israeli Knesset, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu insisted the conflict between Israel and Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip is “a war between forces of light and forces of darkness, between humanity and animalism,” and even compared Hamas to Nazis.
With the Israeli strikes against the Gaza Strip already claiming some 2,750 Palestinian lives, according to the local health officials, it would appear the Israeli prime minister is “justifying this colossal response in terms of a familiar evil,” says independent media analyst professor Ellis Cashmore.
“By comparing Hamas with Nazism, he is invoking history: 6 million Jews were killed in the Holocaust, so it is an incredibly potent comparison,” he elaborated. “The trouble is: few people accept the equivalence. While Hamas' attack has been condemned, there were about 1,300 innocent Israeli deaths. Awful as this was, I suspect Netanyahu is fearing that Israel's response may be violating humanitarian and international law and that, at some point in the future, his response will be seen as even worse than the Hamas attack.”
Cashmore lamented that certain politicians have “become careless in their language in their efforts to establish the high moral ground,” noting, for example, how Israeli Minister of Energy Israel Katz accused the UN of turning into a “propaganda arm of a terrorist ISIS* organization.”
“But it seems a very dangerous tactic because Israel's reaction could be interpreted as more than equal to the atrocity that started the conflict. For example, the forced evacuation of hospitals strikes me as incredibly harsh and probably a contravention of international humanitarian law,” Cashmore remarked. “So, powerful as the words are, people can witness the actions and realize this is far, far from a straightforward battle of Good vs Evil, or Light vs. Darkness.”
Meanwhile, Boris Dolgov, of the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Oriental Studies, argued that none of the Palestinian organizations ever declared Palestinians a “master race” while Israelis are an “inferior race,” noting that describing Hamas as a Nazi organization would be a stretch to put it mildly.
“The statements made by Netanyahu are pure propaganda, aimed mostly at the public opinion in the West, where Nazism is regarded as evil. Netanyahu’s goal is to portray Hamas as ‘new Nazism,’ in order to reorient the Western public opinion, so to speak, so that people (in the West) would reconsider their stance and take Israel’s side,” Dolgov said.
*Daesh, also known as ISIL and ISIS, is a terrorist organization outlawed in Russia