In 2023, while accepting the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought, Masha Gessen, whose grandfather was killed in the Holocaust, spoke about the difficulty of certain comparisons:
I was beginning to wonder, until I reached the end.
In 1977 I had the privilege to travel in Europe and Israel. To walk through Auschwitz and Jerusalem, Bethlehem and Tel-Lakish. And Masada.
I understand the promise "Never agan." But why should it only apply to one group, one people? What about the Roma who also perished? I barely made it through "The Killing Fields," when it later came out about Cambodia. Angola, Rhodesia, Gaza, the the American Westward Expansion and Colonialism in general.
From ancient ruins created by Babylonian armies to mounds of debris from modern missiles, we humans insist on trying to destroy others, erase them from maps and consciousness. But as John Donne reminds us, we are all diminished by such efforts. The death bell tolls for us all.
Hi, Steve. I taught 20th century World History for four years to students from around the globe. Every time I had to go through the section on how the Holocaust came about and how Hitler did what he did "legally", it just made me a little sick to my stomach.
One session I will never forget was when one of my Chinese students asked me "What are Jews?" Not WHO, WHAT. I simply said, "Jews are people, of a different religion from Christians." I rewrote my lecture pages for that section to say "the Jewish people" when referring to them instead of just "Jews." Too many people forget that Judaism is a religion, not a nationality, and it is practised by people. The methodical, machine-like steps that Hitler and the Nazis took to try to completely eliminate Jewish people from the world are totally different than how Israel is dealing with the Palestinians these days. No comparison should be made connecting the two, as you state in this article. Thanks so much for continuing to shed light on these very wrong perceptions.
No, I'm not being sarcastic. I'm pointing out that I understand why people make the comparison. There are, undeniably, disturbing parallels. But the entire final third of the article is devoted to explaining why I don't think the comparison should be made.
I think you are talking about this paragraph: "the comparison sounds hateful.
It sounds like a vicious, mean-spirited exaggeration against a persecuted people, it sounds like attacking a victim with the worst crimes of their abuser, and this offers an easy way out for people who don’t want to acknowledge what Israel is doing now and has been doing for decades." Your "explanation" is not that people should not compare the two because there is no comparison between the two, but because "it offers an easy way out". Your take here is that Israel is doing something much worse and more atrocious than the nazis, therefore we should stop comparing. You don't offer an alternative, but I suspect the next step would be a taxonomy of pain, where Palestinians would come on top, because in your view, in the oppression olympics, they always do.
Yeah, um, I didn't need to do any "text analysis."Because I wrote it!
We really need to do something, as a society, about this growing belief that we can read other people's minds.
For example, no, my take here is very, VERY obviously not that what Israel is doing is worse than the Nazis. There is not a single metric by which what Israel is doing is worse. But the ideologies are eerily similar. And I think that there are a disturbing number of people who would endorse the exact level of cruelty, right down to the gas chambers, that the Nazis used.
”I can’t understand the people here in the State of Israel who don’t want to fill Gaza with gas chambers… or train cars… and finish this story! Let there be a Holocaust in Gaza. Men, women, and children—by any means necessary, we must simply carry out a [Holocaust] against them—yes, read that again—H-O-L-O-C-A-U-S-T!
The 2.6 million terrorists in Gaza deserve death!! They deserve death!! They deserve death! In my view—gas chambers. Train cars [...] Without fear, without weakness — just crush. Eliminate. Slaughter. Flatten. Dismantle. Smash. Shatter.”
(This is a senior producer at one of Israel's biggest TV channels, by the way. He didn't face any consequences for saying this. Not even an apology.)
So my issue here is this mindset, not one-to-one similarities in execution. There are dozens of disturbing parallels between how senior figures in Israel speak and act now and how the Nazis spoke and acted 80 years ago.
I fear I will go to my grave not understanding why so many people are so emotionally invested in denying this painfully obvious fact. But for reasons I state clearly in the article, I don't endorse this comparison.
Well honestly, when I started this Substack, I’d never have believed I'd be so happy to lose a subscriber. But here we are.
You are consistently one of the rudest, most pointlessly combative people I interact with on this website. You complain without ever explaining what you’re complaining about or pointing out any inaccuracies. You haven't even bothered to read what you’re complaining about in several cases. Probably including this one.
You make evidence-free claims constantly, and your tolerance for ideas that challenge those claims, however well evidenced, is lower than almost anyone I’ve ever come across.
I hope you land in a nice, cosy safe space where your pre-existing beliefs are never challenged by the truth.
Hamas soldiers are people. They have agency. If you take them out of your picture, then Israelis look like crazy bigots murdering Palestinians for sport. If you include them, then this is a war. They brilliantly built a fortress under Gaza so that the media would only see the civilian bystanders, and the Israelis would look grotesque.
But what does it look like if the hidden war taking place underground is included? Suddenly the warfighting logic of the Israelis comes into view. What if the fact that Hamas soldiers don't wear uniforms and insert themselves into Palestinian crowds, where they can goad Israelis into firing on the innocent people? Then the vicious qualities of Hamas and Islamic extremism come into view as well.
One interesting fact is this: the Arab street is not erupting in support like Hamas expected. Why not? Because the real story here is the fight against Islamic extremism is more an internal matter in the Arab (and Iranian) and Muslim world, than it is a war between Arabs and Jews. It is too early to predict how this will play out, but Israel has opened the door to the liberation of Lebanon, of Syria, of Iraq, of Iran and perhaps even Yemen. The Israelis were looking at self preservation, but most Levantine Arabs are seeing common cause with them.
At this point, the Arab-Israeli conflict is mostly a distraction from a Muslim world civil war. It is useful to see past the illusion that Hamas has so carefully constructed.
"Hamas soldiers are people. They have agency. If you take them out of your picture, then Israelis look like crazy bigots murdering Palestinians for sport."
There are over 2 million Palestinians in Gaza. 99.9% of them have never harmed a hair on an Israeli's head.
I'm not taking away the agency of the Hamas soldiers. My heart rate wouldn't increase by a single BPM if I heard that everybody who took part on October 7th had been killed. But I simply cannot fathom how you and so many others are struggling to understand that the majority of the people being killed did absolutely nothing.
Over 17,000 of the people confirmed killed in Gaza are children. Over 9,000 are women. 4,000 over 60-years-old. And even though Netanyahu has decided to classify every male between 18 and 60 as a Hamas fighter (that's literally how he arrived at his 25,000 Hamas fighters killed statistic), I have a sneaking suspicion that some of the 24,000+ men killed have also never harmed a hair on an Israeli's head.
Yes, they have agency, and they used it to try to build a life in the effective prison that is the Gaza Strip. Israel is killing THESE people by the tens of thousands. Knowingly, deliberately, gleefully. The Israeli government is openly talking about killing them all, including the children, or at least forcing them all from their homes, never to return. So yes, they look like crazy bigots to me. And to everybody who doesn't believe in collective punishment.
"There are over 2 million Palestinians in Gaza. 99.9% of them have never harmed a hair on an Israeli's head." This is just ludicrous. Gaza is not ruled by .01% with the rest of everyone going on about their lives with nothing to do with anything. That's just your emotions talking.
What is your definition of children? 19 year olds? 16 year olds? Hamas arms them and sends them out to kill. Not sure why 60 year olds can't fight.
Part of what made Gaza a prison is Hamas. "Gleefully."
It's 2100. Move the decimal 3 places, dude. Approximately 6,000 crossed the border on 10/7. That's not counting what it took to support the operation. And this massive logistical operation happened without ONE person dropping a dime with a phone call, even though tens of thousands were working in Israel on a daily basis from this "prison." The regime in Iran has far less support of the people, as recent events show.
Correct. Reports claim that 1,200 Hamas militants took part in October 7th. Israel say it’s 2,900 (no idea where you’re getting 6,000 from), so I tend to split the difference. Which lands us right around 2000.
But sure, I won’t even argue, let’s say it’s 6000. That doesn’t mean we move the decimal place three places (come on now, this isn’t complex maths), it means we’re talking about 99.7% of the population being innocent instead of 99.9%.
I think my overall point stands.
And setting aside how insane it is for you to argue that these civilians should have known about a military operation that would obviously have been top, top secret (how much do you know about Trump’s military plans?) and then warn the people who have been killing them and keeping them under blockade for the past 17 years, whenever you talk about how not ONE person “dropped a dime” about 10/7, you are dangerously close to having to ask yourself how not ONE person in the Israeli military or intelligence forces did anything to defend this kibbutzim from an attack they had intelligence about a year in advance.
I’m not one for conspiracies, but one of these things is significantly weirder than the other.
It's dumb and moot to calculate the size of Hamas by the number of participants on October 7th. That is perhaps relevant in a bank robbery, though the possibility of co-conspirators is always examined. Sheesh, the gymnastics you perform and the standards you set. Whenever on says, "I'm not for conspiracies, but..." they are about to introduce one. Generally one they want to put out there, without having to defend it.
It sucks to be a civilian living on a battlefield. We killed millions of innocent Germans and Japanese in WWII, often by firebombing or carpet bombing. They had governments which had some desire to protect their citizens, unlike Hamas. If I was Israeli, I would still value my innocent civilians more than the enemy's innocent civilians, but even so, Israel tries to ward Gazans' or get them out of the way, while Hamas fires at them to keep them in harm's way.
War is not collective punishment. Israel isn't daddy spanking the bad children, it isn't a sporting event where you play fair and keep the teams balanced. ."War decides a political question that politics isn't solving. As Hamas says, "We love death more than the Jews love life." The Jews do love life, and they were no longer willing to put up with people murdering them and threatening to murder them.
This all stops when Hamas gives up and allows a healthier government to step in, perhaps lead by a consortium of Arab countries in the region, or some other arrangement. We're witnessing the crack up of Islamic extremism. We all need to stop playing into the hands of a loathsome enemy. It is your enemy as well as mine.
"We killed millions of innocent Germans and Japanese in WWII, often by firebombing or carpet bombing."
Yes, and some of that killing was wrong and pointless and did nothing to end the war!
Is the argument here that if the West did it, it's automatically right, and everybody else gets to do something at least as bad? If so, then we don't even get to condemn Hitler! Think of the number of innocent people killed with no justification in the name of colonialism. The West has a great deal of "red in its ledger." Surely the goal is to be better, no?
And also, you're dodging. Your original argument was about taking agency away from Hamas. I point out that I'm not doing that, and you just move on to World War II instead of addressing the fact that you seem to be absolving the IDF of their agency in killing civilians "for sport."
Yes, being a civilian in war sucks. There's no such thing as a war where civilians aren't killed as collateral damage. That's as strong an argument as you could make for avoiding war whenever possible and ending it as quickly as possible. But while war and collective punishment aren't synonymous, the way Israel is conducting THIS "war" is clearly collective punishment. You don't have to take my word for it, pretty much the entire senior leadership from Netanyahu on down has openly admitted this on several occasions.
Because there is such a thing as a war, in fact this describes most wars, where 70% of civilian infrastructure and 90% of homes aren't deliberately destroyed.
There is such a thing as a war where 2 million civilians aren't bombed and starved and displaced and ethnically cleansed.
There is such a thing as a war where one side hasn't already been brutally oppressing the civilian population they're now killing for decades beforehand. Does there ever come a time when we address the reasons why fanatical groups like Hams exist? Is that level of examination ever going to be on the table?
If the Israelis no longer want to put up with people who want to murder them, a position I fully empathise with, maybe they could have spoken out against an Israeli government so desperate to destabilise a just, diplomatic solution to this conflict that they financially supported Hamas as an "ally," even as Hamas killed Israeli civilians.
Maybe they could have addressed the fanatical Israeli settlers who have been terrorising and killing innocent Palestinians for decades and stealing their land with the full support of the Israeli government and military.
Maybe, in any of the ~50 years before Hamas even existed, they could have taken the opportunity to seek a just peace with the Palestinians that would have prevented much of the fanaticism and extremism we are seeing today.
As MLK said, injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. This is a perfect description of the story of Israel/Palestine.
Israel signed the Oslo accords and let Arafat back in. He organized a terror campaign and Israel had to build a wall. Then there was complaining about the wall. Are Israelis obliged to allow themselves to be killed?
Ariel Sharon withdrew from Gaza and gave it to the PA. They lost control to Hamas, which used Gaza as a platform for killing and terrorizing Israelis. So Israel took back control of the access points. This is the prison they now complain about. Are Israelis obliged to allow themselves to be killed?
Do you see the injustice of what Arafat and Hamas have done? If not, you are robbing them of their agency. They are people, they are responsible for the things they do. The injustice they perpetrate is shocking, the terrorism, the cruelty. They have threatened a desperate people with extermination since the day the surviving remnant of Jews returned. There hatred is in no way a response to Israeli mistreatment. Seven armies invaded Israel the day it was formed, threatening extermination. That was not a response to something the Jews did, unless existing and needing desperately to find a home are sufficient crimes.
The cruelty of this war is Hamas' masterpiece. Israel faced that and fought through it. Hamas' fortress was under every part of Gaza, pretty much every home. They made the price for Israel excruciatingly high, but Israel has paid it. Gaza can throw off Islamist domination, and have a real future. I hope they do.
"Seven armies invaded Israel the day it was formed, threatening extermination. That was not a response to something the Jews did, unless existing and needing desperately to find a home are sufficient crimes."
The crime was ethnic cleansing.
Jews were offered by the Arab league a single, democratic state where Arabs and Jews would live as equals. This was basically a continuation of the status quo that existed for centuries before Zionist Jews from Europe began their "colonising adventure" (Jabotinsky's term, not mine. Herzl also openly acknowledged Zionism was colonialism. Ben-Gurion admitted to "stealing [the Palestinians'] country).
But that's not what the Zionists wanted.
The British, after seeing what the Zionists were doing, agreed that a single, equal state was the best way forward (see the white paper of 1939). Zionist groups responded with a campaign of terrorism that killed Arabs, British, and Jews, until the British threw up their hands, abandoned the region to its fate, and created the mess we're all seeing today.
This is missing some key points. First, the white paper limited Jewish immigration at a time that it was critical. How could the Zionists accept leaving people trapped in Europe. And second, Jews were not treated as equal citizens prior to the arrival of the Zionists. You can find individual Jews who lived well, but safety was always in question.
"Do you see the injustice of what Arafat and Hamas have done? "
One day, one glorious day, I will stop having to debunk this particular piece of propaganda. I have to do it so often that I literally have a snippet saved to my notes app that I can copy/paste every time it comes up. Thank God Israel's foreign minister at the time had more integrity than most politicians today.
"In the tumble of the all-consuming violence, much has not been revealed or examined. Rather, a potent, simplistic narrative has taken hold in Israel and to some extent in the United States. It says: Mr. Barak offered Mr. Arafat the moon at Camp David last summer. Mr. Arafat turned it down, and then ''pushed the button'' and chose the path of violence [...]
Mr. Arafat did eventually authorize his negotiators to engage in talks in Taba that used the Clinton proposal as a foundation. Despite reports to the contrary in Israel, however, Mr. Arafat never turned down ''97 percent of the West Bank'' at Taba, as many Israelis hold.
The negotiations were suspended by Israel because elections were imminent and ''the pressure of Israeli public opinion against the talks could not be resisted,'' said Shlomo Ben-Ami, who was Israel's foreign minister at the time."
If you just want to get straight to the source, which is Dov Weisglass, the senior adviser to Ariel Sharon at the time, you can find it here (https://archive.is/OXMaY):
"The significance of the disengagement plan is the freezing of the peace process. And when you freeze that process, you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state, and you prevent a discussion on the refugees, the borders and Jerusalem. Effectively, this whole package called the Palestinian state, with all that it entails, has been removed indefinitely from our agenda. And all this with authority and permission. All with a presidential blessing and the ratification of both houses of Congress.
The disengagement is actually formaldehyde. It supplies the amount of formaldehyde that is necessary so there will not be a political process with the Palestinians."
Steve is incapable of figuring out that his position makes the tactic of human shields even more valuable, and blames the ISRAELIS that for every death that tactic leads to. He has never ONCE decried it. Not once. He's basically moved on from October 7th, and says the length of the war means that is no longer valid. But the hordes in the street trying to get their hands on the Israeli hostages, including the elderly and the women, as they were being released shows that stopping now just means it will happen again in the future. He can rage about the children killed as Hamas's human shields, but not the ones taken as HOSTAGES. What military value did grabbing 2 year olds and infants achieve on October 7th?
"He has never ONCE decried it. Not once. He's basically moved on from October 7th"
Why don't you ever just take a SECOND to know what you're talking about??!! Don't you get tired of making a fool of yourself? You literally have me here, talking to you, yet you just make up whatever random nonsense is most convenient at that moment rather than asking a question.
Compassion is not partial. What is happening and has been happening to innocents in Gaza for a long time is abhorrent.
No one is negating October 7th by acknowledging that there are some people in Israel that see Palestinians as less than human.
And some Jews inside and outside of Israel feel that such dehumanization is wrong because, all dehumanization is immoral.
There is no circumstance that excuses dehumanization, whether it was from the Nazis, slave traffickers and owners, Hutus in Rwanda, some Afrikaners during Apartheid in South Africa, Sikhs slaughtered in India in 1984, Hamas’ brutality and dehumanizing rhetoric, or Israel’s indiscriminate cruelty.
We can’t excuse it in any capacity. It’s all immoral.
Israel has a right to defend itself.
And, intentionally keeping food and water away from desperate human beings is cruel to an extent that is only justified by a mindset that doesn’t consider them equally human.
Compassion is not partial—if it is, it is not compassion.
Israel is not defending itself! How is it possible that twenty-one months into this you are still making this argument?
Yes, of course Israel has a right to defend itself. Context aside, no sane person was surprised that Israel responded forcefully to the attack on October 7th. But what we're seeing now has nothing to do with self defence. It is collective punishment and ethnic cleansing at the very least.
We're taking about 2 million people who have done nothing wrong bing killed, starved and displaced by people who see them as less than human. Where is your compassion for them?
"If you reread my note, that is clear, especially given the general context and content of the comment."
My apologies, I clearly misunderstood. I was, and still am, confused to see the comment about Israel's right to defend itself in the wider context of your reply. I'm not sure how it's relevant to the rest of what you're saying.
But I think I've been spending too much time speaking to people who will defend any amount of atrocity from Israel today, and reacted too strongly.
You're like arguing with an ex girlfriend. I ONCE misread something, (and admitted it) and for the rest of time, you will say "you probably didn't read it." But here is what you refuse to see.
After WWII, rape was a constant in Europe. The Americans prosecuted hundreds of GIs for rape, and they undoubtedly didn't catch everyone. For the Russians it was POLICY for the Red Army to rape German females. (note I didn't say women.) So reasonable people don't say, "The Russians and the Americans raped their way across Europe.
You can argue that bombing a particular spot to get a Hamas terrorist leader is wrong, too costly, or indifferent to innocent life, but hang gliding in to shoot up a PEACE CONCERT was Hamas POLICY. ZERO military value. The atrocity was the POINT not a by-product.
But you refuse to point out the difference. A fair comparison would be to the bombing of Dresden or Hamburg; but that wouldn't get you as many clicks, now would it?
"I ONCE misread something, (and admitted it) and for the rest of time, you will say "you probably didn't read it."
No, you didn't misread it, you didn't read it AT ALL. You spent several replies castigated me for failing to write about something only to discover that it was the centrepiece of the article. And that's just the time when you were caught out so badly you couldn't deny it (although I see you're trying to downplay as "misreading" now).
Here, I strongly suspect that you didn't read the final third of the article where I clearly and without a hint of sarcasm lay out why I don't think the comparison should be used. In my recent article on Iran, you repeatedly asked my for evidence in the comments that I'd already provided in the article (funny how you only get your knickers in a twist when I criticise Israel and Trump but you have no bias, right?).
Again, I don't know why you keep telling me that what Hamas did was wrong. You will never find me doing anything but condemning it. As I have several times. And when I do, I never see you in my comments complaining that I'm biased or "Islamophobic" or that you can get the same information on Piers Morgan.
But when I criticise Israel for committing EXACTLY THE SAME CRIMES, at orders of magnitude greater scale, suddenly I'm not being balanced enough for you. I wonder which one of us isn't seeing straight on this issue.
When I subscribed, I've never realized how thin-skinned you are. And if people want the completely mindless regurgitation of statistics and stories from an agency run by the people who applauded the microwaving of babies, they can get it straight from the Hamas health agency. They don't need to pay for it.
Haha, I’m not even remotely thin skinned. That doesn’t mean I appreciate rude, pointlessly combative people. Seriously, what’s the point? What are you trying to achieve? You’re not trying to persuade or learn or think, just have the mindless propaganda you’ve absorbed validated and yell at anyone who challenges it.
And, really? You’re still talking about microwaved babies over a year and a half after this and several other lies were debunked ON ISRAELI TV (https://youtu.be/jp4uLjCztfI?si=Iuj6IuDtWpYcsVqy)?
Again, this is the problem you have. You have uncritically absorbed easily debunked lies and so you’re mad at me for telling you the truth. You are exactly the kind of person who needs to have your priors challenged, and sadly, exactly the kind of person who is least likely to do it.
However you find something ONE GUY said "ON ISRAELI TV" and it's Gospel-- because it fits YOUR narrative. Wow somehow I missed that. Shoot me. Never mind, just put me in an oven.
"However you find something ONE GUY said "ON ISRAELI TV" and it's Gospel"
...let's ignore the fact that the claim...excuse me, the LIE that Israeli babies were put in ovens came from one guy, with no corroborating evidence (obviously, as it's a lie), yet you were happy to accept that for a year and a half. But also, no, the main part of my job is to verify any information I come across to the best of my ability. I take that part of my job very seriously.
This means that you can be very confident when you read a claim that I've written, that it's based on evidence and not hearsay. And I almost always include links to that evidence so you can check it for yourself. Sadly, you tend not to read my articles before complaining about them. Never mind checking evidence.
Case in point, I would never trust a single random source for ANY information. The story about the baby in an oven has been widely debunked (https://archive.is/gO9f8) though obviously not by anyone in your echo chamber. Although this "ONE GUY" is a reporter on Israeli TV. Do you seriously think he's debunking these things without any evidence?
Right, and who uncritically gets their stats from Hamas. And for a combative guy, you spend about 10% of your time whining about tone. Fine, I'll pick another example. Beasts phoning home to brag to their parents how many Jews they killed, including children, while raping woman so hard their bones break.
"Right, and who uncritically gets their stats from Hamas"
No, not uncritically.
Hamas' current figures have been verified as much as possible (Israel won't allow journalists in to verify anything, remember) by the UN, US intelligence, and various other humanitarian and intelligence bodies. Even Israeli intelligence uses their figures in internal briefings.
There's also the fact that Hamas have had occasion to provide casualty figures many times before in previous conflicts, those figures have been verified after those conflicts by several sources, again, including Israel, and been found to be very accurate. There is no reason other than wishful thinking to believe they're not accurate here. In fact, they're very, very likely to be underreporting as they can't account for bodies under the rubble.
Yes, I heard that call. Absolutely horrifying. Likewise the reports of rape. I have never had anything but condemnation for what Hamas did. What mystifies me is why you are unmoved by the verified reports of rape and sexual abuse in Israeli prisons (a mob of Israelis stormed the prison in defence of the rapists, remember that?), why you don't care about the Palestinians, including children, who the Israeli military have killed with sniper fire and tanks and bombs.
We don't disagree because you hate what Hamas did and I don't. We disagree because you are willing to ignore or excuse or justify the same crimes when Israel commits them. Even in several orders of magnitude greater numbers. I can't see how this is anything but the most shameless hypocrisy. And that's the best case explanation.
I was beginning to wonder, until I reached the end.
In 1977 I had the privilege to travel in Europe and Israel. To walk through Auschwitz and Jerusalem, Bethlehem and Tel-Lakish. And Masada.
I understand the promise "Never agan." But why should it only apply to one group, one people? What about the Roma who also perished? I barely made it through "The Killing Fields," when it later came out about Cambodia. Angola, Rhodesia, Gaza, the the American Westward Expansion and Colonialism in general.
From ancient ruins created by Babylonian armies to mounds of debris from modern missiles, we humans insist on trying to destroy others, erase them from maps and consciousness. But as John Donne reminds us, we are all diminished by such efforts. The death bell tolls for us all.
"I understand the promise "Never agan." But why should it only apply to one group, one people?"
I feel as if this simple question is at the root of all the disagreement we're seeing on this conflict.
Yup.
Hi, Steve. I taught 20th century World History for four years to students from around the globe. Every time I had to go through the section on how the Holocaust came about and how Hitler did what he did "legally", it just made me a little sick to my stomach.
One session I will never forget was when one of my Chinese students asked me "What are Jews?" Not WHO, WHAT. I simply said, "Jews are people, of a different religion from Christians." I rewrote my lecture pages for that section to say "the Jewish people" when referring to them instead of just "Jews." Too many people forget that Judaism is a religion, not a nationality, and it is practised by people. The methodical, machine-like steps that Hitler and the Nazis took to try to completely eliminate Jewish people from the world are totally different than how Israel is dealing with the Palestinians these days. No comparison should be made connecting the two, as you state in this article. Thanks so much for continuing to shed light on these very wrong perceptions.
That's the opposite of what he did here. You missed the sarcasm. Reread the quotes about killing children.
Steve is seldom sarcastic. I've been reading his Substacks for about 2 years now.
And still, here he is. Read again.
No, I'm not being sarcastic. I'm pointing out that I understand why people make the comparison. There are, undeniably, disturbing parallels. But the entire final third of the article is devoted to explaining why I don't think the comparison should be made.
I can read. Even more, I can do text analysis.
I think you are talking about this paragraph: "the comparison sounds hateful.
It sounds like a vicious, mean-spirited exaggeration against a persecuted people, it sounds like attacking a victim with the worst crimes of their abuser, and this offers an easy way out for people who don’t want to acknowledge what Israel is doing now and has been doing for decades." Your "explanation" is not that people should not compare the two because there is no comparison between the two, but because "it offers an easy way out". Your take here is that Israel is doing something much worse and more atrocious than the nazis, therefore we should stop comparing. You don't offer an alternative, but I suspect the next step would be a taxonomy of pain, where Palestinians would come on top, because in your view, in the oppression olympics, they always do.
"I can read. Even more, I can do text analysis."
Yeah, um, I didn't need to do any "text analysis."Because I wrote it!
We really need to do something, as a society, about this growing belief that we can read other people's minds.
For example, no, my take here is very, VERY obviously not that what Israel is doing is worse than the Nazis. There is not a single metric by which what Israel is doing is worse. But the ideologies are eerily similar. And I think that there are a disturbing number of people who would endorse the exact level of cruelty, right down to the gas chambers, that the Nazis used.
Case in point (https://daysofpalestine.ps/israeli-tv-producers-call-for-gaza-holocaust-triggers-international-condemnation/):
”I can’t understand the people here in the State of Israel who don’t want to fill Gaza with gas chambers… or train cars… and finish this story! Let there be a Holocaust in Gaza. Men, women, and children—by any means necessary, we must simply carry out a [Holocaust] against them—yes, read that again—H-O-L-O-C-A-U-S-T!
The 2.6 million terrorists in Gaza deserve death!! They deserve death!! They deserve death! In my view—gas chambers. Train cars [...] Without fear, without weakness — just crush. Eliminate. Slaughter. Flatten. Dismantle. Smash. Shatter.”
(This is a senior producer at one of Israel's biggest TV channels, by the way. He didn't face any consequences for saying this. Not even an apology.)
So my issue here is this mindset, not one-to-one similarities in execution. There are dozens of disturbing parallels between how senior figures in Israel speak and act now and how the Nazis spoke and acted 80 years ago.
I fear I will go to my grave not understanding why so many people are so emotionally invested in denying this painfully obvious fact. But for reasons I state clearly in the article, I don't endorse this comparison.
Never been happier to have cancelled a subscription.
Well honestly, when I started this Substack, I’d never have believed I'd be so happy to lose a subscriber. But here we are.
You are consistently one of the rudest, most pointlessly combative people I interact with on this website. You complain without ever explaining what you’re complaining about or pointing out any inaccuracies. You haven't even bothered to read what you’re complaining about in several cases. Probably including this one.
You make evidence-free claims constantly, and your tolerance for ideas that challenge those claims, however well evidenced, is lower than almost anyone I’ve ever come across.
I hope you land in a nice, cosy safe space where your pre-existing beliefs are never challenged by the truth.
Hamas soldiers are people. They have agency. If you take them out of your picture, then Israelis look like crazy bigots murdering Palestinians for sport. If you include them, then this is a war. They brilliantly built a fortress under Gaza so that the media would only see the civilian bystanders, and the Israelis would look grotesque.
But what does it look like if the hidden war taking place underground is included? Suddenly the warfighting logic of the Israelis comes into view. What if the fact that Hamas soldiers don't wear uniforms and insert themselves into Palestinian crowds, where they can goad Israelis into firing on the innocent people? Then the vicious qualities of Hamas and Islamic extremism come into view as well.
One interesting fact is this: the Arab street is not erupting in support like Hamas expected. Why not? Because the real story here is the fight against Islamic extremism is more an internal matter in the Arab (and Iranian) and Muslim world, than it is a war between Arabs and Jews. It is too early to predict how this will play out, but Israel has opened the door to the liberation of Lebanon, of Syria, of Iraq, of Iran and perhaps even Yemen. The Israelis were looking at self preservation, but most Levantine Arabs are seeing common cause with them.
At this point, the Arab-Israeli conflict is mostly a distraction from a Muslim world civil war. It is useful to see past the illusion that Hamas has so carefully constructed.
"Hamas soldiers are people. They have agency. If you take them out of your picture, then Israelis look like crazy bigots murdering Palestinians for sport."
There are over 2 million Palestinians in Gaza. 99.9% of them have never harmed a hair on an Israeli's head.
I'm not taking away the agency of the Hamas soldiers. My heart rate wouldn't increase by a single BPM if I heard that everybody who took part on October 7th had been killed. But I simply cannot fathom how you and so many others are struggling to understand that the majority of the people being killed did absolutely nothing.
Over 17,000 of the people confirmed killed in Gaza are children. Over 9,000 are women. 4,000 over 60-years-old. And even though Netanyahu has decided to classify every male between 18 and 60 as a Hamas fighter (that's literally how he arrived at his 25,000 Hamas fighters killed statistic), I have a sneaking suspicion that some of the 24,000+ men killed have also never harmed a hair on an Israeli's head.
Yes, they have agency, and they used it to try to build a life in the effective prison that is the Gaza Strip. Israel is killing THESE people by the tens of thousands. Knowingly, deliberately, gleefully. The Israeli government is openly talking about killing them all, including the children, or at least forcing them all from their homes, never to return. So yes, they look like crazy bigots to me. And to everybody who doesn't believe in collective punishment.
"There are over 2 million Palestinians in Gaza. 99.9% of them have never harmed a hair on an Israeli's head." This is just ludicrous. Gaza is not ruled by .01% with the rest of everyone going on about their lives with nothing to do with anything. That's just your emotions talking.
What is your definition of children? 19 year olds? 16 year olds? Hamas arms them and sends them out to kill. Not sure why 60 year olds can't fight.
Part of what made Gaza a prison is Hamas. "Gleefully."
What's 0.1% of 2,100,000 David?
It's 2100. Move the decimal 3 places, dude. Approximately 6,000 crossed the border on 10/7. That's not counting what it took to support the operation. And this massive logistical operation happened without ONE person dropping a dime with a phone call, even though tens of thousands were working in Israel on a daily basis from this "prison." The regime in Iran has far less support of the people, as recent events show.
“It’s 2100.”
Correct. Reports claim that 1,200 Hamas militants took part in October 7th. Israel say it’s 2,900 (no idea where you’re getting 6,000 from), so I tend to split the difference. Which lands us right around 2000.
But sure, I won’t even argue, let’s say it’s 6000. That doesn’t mean we move the decimal place three places (come on now, this isn’t complex maths), it means we’re talking about 99.7% of the population being innocent instead of 99.9%.
I think my overall point stands.
And setting aside how insane it is for you to argue that these civilians should have known about a military operation that would obviously have been top, top secret (how much do you know about Trump’s military plans?) and then warn the people who have been killing them and keeping them under blockade for the past 17 years, whenever you talk about how not ONE person “dropped a dime” about 10/7, you are dangerously close to having to ask yourself how not ONE person in the Israeli military or intelligence forces did anything to defend this kibbutzim from an attack they had intelligence about a year in advance.
I’m not one for conspiracies, but one of these things is significantly weirder than the other.
It's dumb and moot to calculate the size of Hamas by the number of participants on October 7th. That is perhaps relevant in a bank robbery, though the possibility of co-conspirators is always examined. Sheesh, the gymnastics you perform and the standards you set. Whenever on says, "I'm not for conspiracies, but..." they are about to introduce one. Generally one they want to put out there, without having to defend it.
It sucks to be a civilian living on a battlefield. We killed millions of innocent Germans and Japanese in WWII, often by firebombing or carpet bombing. They had governments which had some desire to protect their citizens, unlike Hamas. If I was Israeli, I would still value my innocent civilians more than the enemy's innocent civilians, but even so, Israel tries to ward Gazans' or get them out of the way, while Hamas fires at them to keep them in harm's way.
War is not collective punishment. Israel isn't daddy spanking the bad children, it isn't a sporting event where you play fair and keep the teams balanced. ."War decides a political question that politics isn't solving. As Hamas says, "We love death more than the Jews love life." The Jews do love life, and they were no longer willing to put up with people murdering them and threatening to murder them.
This all stops when Hamas gives up and allows a healthier government to step in, perhaps lead by a consortium of Arab countries in the region, or some other arrangement. We're witnessing the crack up of Islamic extremism. We all need to stop playing into the hands of a loathsome enemy. It is your enemy as well as mine.
"We killed millions of innocent Germans and Japanese in WWII, often by firebombing or carpet bombing."
Yes, and some of that killing was wrong and pointless and did nothing to end the war!
Is the argument here that if the West did it, it's automatically right, and everybody else gets to do something at least as bad? If so, then we don't even get to condemn Hitler! Think of the number of innocent people killed with no justification in the name of colonialism. The West has a great deal of "red in its ledger." Surely the goal is to be better, no?
And also, you're dodging. Your original argument was about taking agency away from Hamas. I point out that I'm not doing that, and you just move on to World War II instead of addressing the fact that you seem to be absolving the IDF of their agency in killing civilians "for sport."
Yes, being a civilian in war sucks. There's no such thing as a war where civilians aren't killed as collateral damage. That's as strong an argument as you could make for avoiding war whenever possible and ending it as quickly as possible. But while war and collective punishment aren't synonymous, the way Israel is conducting THIS "war" is clearly collective punishment. You don't have to take my word for it, pretty much the entire senior leadership from Netanyahu on down has openly admitted this on several occasions.
Because there is such a thing as a war, in fact this describes most wars, where 70% of civilian infrastructure and 90% of homes aren't deliberately destroyed.
There is such a thing as a war where 2 million civilians aren't bombed and starved and displaced and ethnically cleansed.
There is such a thing as a war where one side hasn't already been brutally oppressing the civilian population they're now killing for decades beforehand. Does there ever come a time when we address the reasons why fanatical groups like Hams exist? Is that level of examination ever going to be on the table?
If the Israelis no longer want to put up with people who want to murder them, a position I fully empathise with, maybe they could have spoken out against an Israeli government so desperate to destabilise a just, diplomatic solution to this conflict that they financially supported Hamas as an "ally," even as Hamas killed Israeli civilians.
Maybe they could have addressed the fanatical Israeli settlers who have been terrorising and killing innocent Palestinians for decades and stealing their land with the full support of the Israeli government and military.
Maybe, in any of the ~50 years before Hamas even existed, they could have taken the opportunity to seek a just peace with the Palestinians that would have prevented much of the fanaticism and extremism we are seeing today.
As MLK said, injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. This is a perfect description of the story of Israel/Palestine.
He didn't "move on to WWII" your HEADLINE and PREMISE put it there.
There are wars that aren't house to house fighting in a city. This ain't one of them, bubba.
Israel signed the Oslo accords and let Arafat back in. He organized a terror campaign and Israel had to build a wall. Then there was complaining about the wall. Are Israelis obliged to allow themselves to be killed?
Ariel Sharon withdrew from Gaza and gave it to the PA. They lost control to Hamas, which used Gaza as a platform for killing and terrorizing Israelis. So Israel took back control of the access points. This is the prison they now complain about. Are Israelis obliged to allow themselves to be killed?
Do you see the injustice of what Arafat and Hamas have done? If not, you are robbing them of their agency. They are people, they are responsible for the things they do. The injustice they perpetrate is shocking, the terrorism, the cruelty. They have threatened a desperate people with extermination since the day the surviving remnant of Jews returned. There hatred is in no way a response to Israeli mistreatment. Seven armies invaded Israel the day it was formed, threatening extermination. That was not a response to something the Jews did, unless existing and needing desperately to find a home are sufficient crimes.
The cruelty of this war is Hamas' masterpiece. Israel faced that and fought through it. Hamas' fortress was under every part of Gaza, pretty much every home. They made the price for Israel excruciatingly high, but Israel has paid it. Gaza can throw off Islamist domination, and have a real future. I hope they do.
"Seven armies invaded Israel the day it was formed, threatening extermination. That was not a response to something the Jews did, unless existing and needing desperately to find a home are sufficient crimes."
The crime was ethnic cleansing.
Jews were offered by the Arab league a single, democratic state where Arabs and Jews would live as equals. This was basically a continuation of the status quo that existed for centuries before Zionist Jews from Europe began their "colonising adventure" (Jabotinsky's term, not mine. Herzl also openly acknowledged Zionism was colonialism. Ben-Gurion admitted to "stealing [the Palestinians'] country).
But that's not what the Zionists wanted.
The British, after seeing what the Zionists were doing, agreed that a single, equal state was the best way forward (see the white paper of 1939). Zionist groups responded with a campaign of terrorism that killed Arabs, British, and Jews, until the British threw up their hands, abandoned the region to its fate, and created the mess we're all seeing today.
Also the Arabs rejected the white paper as well. Haj Amin al-Hussein was not going to accept Jews in peace. The narrative is not simple or one sided.
This is missing some key points. First, the white paper limited Jewish immigration at a time that it was critical. How could the Zionists accept leaving people trapped in Europe. And second, Jews were not treated as equal citizens prior to the arrival of the Zionists. You can find individual Jews who lived well, but safety was always in question.
"Do you see the injustice of what Arafat and Hamas have done? "
One day, one glorious day, I will stop having to debunk this particular piece of propaganda. I have to do it so often that I literally have a snippet saved to my notes app that I can copy/paste every time it comes up. Thank God Israel's foreign minister at the time had more integrity than most politicians today.
--------
From the New York Times (https://archive.is/CBN4k) if you don't like the New York Times there are several other sources (https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2002/06/13/camp-david-and-after-an-exchange-2-a-reply-to-ehud/):
"In the tumble of the all-consuming violence, much has not been revealed or examined. Rather, a potent, simplistic narrative has taken hold in Israel and to some extent in the United States. It says: Mr. Barak offered Mr. Arafat the moon at Camp David last summer. Mr. Arafat turned it down, and then ''pushed the button'' and chose the path of violence [...]
Mr. Arafat did eventually authorize his negotiators to engage in talks in Taba that used the Clinton proposal as a foundation. Despite reports to the contrary in Israel, however, Mr. Arafat never turned down ''97 percent of the West Bank'' at Taba, as many Israelis hold.
The negotiations were suspended by Israel because elections were imminent and ''the pressure of Israeli public opinion against the talks could not be resisted,'' said Shlomo Ben-Ami, who was Israel's foreign minister at the time."
----------
As for the withdrawal from Gaza, I've debunked the claim that this was an attempt to make peace and build a Palestinian state here (https://medium.com/illumination-curated/the-surprisingly-honest-origins-of-the-israel-palestine-conflict-a44a7d6d4dae).
If you just want to get straight to the source, which is Dov Weisglass, the senior adviser to Ariel Sharon at the time, you can find it here (https://archive.is/OXMaY):
"The significance of the disengagement plan is the freezing of the peace process. And when you freeze that process, you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state, and you prevent a discussion on the refugees, the borders and Jerusalem. Effectively, this whole package called the Palestinian state, with all that it entails, has been removed indefinitely from our agenda. And all this with authority and permission. All with a presidential blessing and the ratification of both houses of Congress.
The disengagement is actually formaldehyde. It supplies the amount of formaldehyde that is necessary so there will not be a political process with the Palestinians."
Steve is incapable of figuring out that his position makes the tactic of human shields even more valuable, and blames the ISRAELIS that for every death that tactic leads to. He has never ONCE decried it. Not once. He's basically moved on from October 7th, and says the length of the war means that is no longer valid. But the hordes in the street trying to get their hands on the Israeli hostages, including the elderly and the women, as they were being released shows that stopping now just means it will happen again in the future. He can rage about the children killed as Hamas's human shields, but not the ones taken as HOSTAGES. What military value did grabbing 2 year olds and infants achieve on October 7th?
"He has never ONCE decried it. Not once. He's basically moved on from October 7th"
Why don't you ever just take a SECOND to know what you're talking about??!! Don't you get tired of making a fool of yourself? You literally have me here, talking to you, yet you just make up whatever random nonsense is most convenient at that moment rather than asking a question.
https://medium.com/illumination-curated/hamas-finally-answered-the-question-what-is-woke-adbe728e056c?sk=f5bd27dd1e6e60473c18064a32e01f18
https://medium.com/illumination-curated/yes-free-palestine-from-hamas-7c671250b490?sk=005ff563efee3c3d1af349ec4a87065c
https://commentary.steveqj.com/p/your-terrorist-is-my-freedom-fighter
https://commentary.steveqj.com/p/7-common-and-bad-arguments-about
Compassion is not partial. What is happening and has been happening to innocents in Gaza for a long time is abhorrent.
No one is negating October 7th by acknowledging that there are some people in Israel that see Palestinians as less than human.
And some Jews inside and outside of Israel feel that such dehumanization is wrong because, all dehumanization is immoral.
There is no circumstance that excuses dehumanization, whether it was from the Nazis, slave traffickers and owners, Hutus in Rwanda, some Afrikaners during Apartheid in South Africa, Sikhs slaughtered in India in 1984, Hamas’ brutality and dehumanizing rhetoric, or Israel’s indiscriminate cruelty.
We can’t excuse it in any capacity. It’s all immoral.
Israel has a right to defend itself.
And, intentionally keeping food and water away from desperate human beings is cruel to an extent that is only justified by a mindset that doesn’t consider them equally human.
Compassion is not partial—if it is, it is not compassion.
"Israel has a right to defend itself."
Israel is not defending itself! How is it possible that twenty-one months into this you are still making this argument?
Yes, of course Israel has a right to defend itself. Context aside, no sane person was surprised that Israel responded forcefully to the attack on October 7th. But what we're seeing now has nothing to do with self defence. It is collective punishment and ethnic cleansing at the very least.
We're taking about 2 million people who have done nothing wrong bing killed, starved and displaced by people who see them as less than human. Where is your compassion for them?
If this is directed to me, I have deep compassion for Gazans/Palestinians and my note, I thought, made that clear.
Right now, Israel is not “defending itself” in the sense that it did on October 7th and for a time after.
My statement to that effect was in anticipation of the typical objection that comes when one criticizes the brutality of the Israeli government.
If you reread my note, that is clear, especially given the general context and content of the comment.
"If you reread my note, that is clear, especially given the general context and content of the comment."
My apologies, I clearly misunderstood. I was, and still am, confused to see the comment about Israel's right to defend itself in the wider context of your reply. I'm not sure how it's relevant to the rest of what you're saying.
But I think I've been spending too much time speaking to people who will defend any amount of atrocity from Israel today, and reacted too strongly.
You're like arguing with an ex girlfriend. I ONCE misread something, (and admitted it) and for the rest of time, you will say "you probably didn't read it." But here is what you refuse to see.
After WWII, rape was a constant in Europe. The Americans prosecuted hundreds of GIs for rape, and they undoubtedly didn't catch everyone. For the Russians it was POLICY for the Red Army to rape German females. (note I didn't say women.) So reasonable people don't say, "The Russians and the Americans raped their way across Europe.
You can argue that bombing a particular spot to get a Hamas terrorist leader is wrong, too costly, or indifferent to innocent life, but hang gliding in to shoot up a PEACE CONCERT was Hamas POLICY. ZERO military value. The atrocity was the POINT not a by-product.
But you refuse to point out the difference. A fair comparison would be to the bombing of Dresden or Hamburg; but that wouldn't get you as many clicks, now would it?
"I ONCE misread something, (and admitted it) and for the rest of time, you will say "you probably didn't read it."
No, you didn't misread it, you didn't read it AT ALL. You spent several replies castigated me for failing to write about something only to discover that it was the centrepiece of the article. And that's just the time when you were caught out so badly you couldn't deny it (although I see you're trying to downplay as "misreading" now).
Here, I strongly suspect that you didn't read the final third of the article where I clearly and without a hint of sarcasm lay out why I don't think the comparison should be used. In my recent article on Iran, you repeatedly asked my for evidence in the comments that I'd already provided in the article (funny how you only get your knickers in a twist when I criticise Israel and Trump but you have no bias, right?).
Again, I don't know why you keep telling me that what Hamas did was wrong. You will never find me doing anything but condemning it. As I have several times. And when I do, I never see you in my comments complaining that I'm biased or "Islamophobic" or that you can get the same information on Piers Morgan.
But when I criticise Israel for committing EXACTLY THE SAME CRIMES, at orders of magnitude greater scale, suddenly I'm not being balanced enough for you. I wonder which one of us isn't seeing straight on this issue.
When I subscribed, I've never realized how thin-skinned you are. And if people want the completely mindless regurgitation of statistics and stories from an agency run by the people who applauded the microwaving of babies, they can get it straight from the Hamas health agency. They don't need to pay for it.
Haha, I’m not even remotely thin skinned. That doesn’t mean I appreciate rude, pointlessly combative people. Seriously, what’s the point? What are you trying to achieve? You’re not trying to persuade or learn or think, just have the mindless propaganda you’ve absorbed validated and yell at anyone who challenges it.
And, really? You’re still talking about microwaved babies over a year and a half after this and several other lies were debunked ON ISRAELI TV (https://youtu.be/jp4uLjCztfI?si=Iuj6IuDtWpYcsVqy)?
Again, this is the problem you have. You have uncritically absorbed easily debunked lies and so you’re mad at me for telling you the truth. You are exactly the kind of person who needs to have your priors challenged, and sadly, exactly the kind of person who is least likely to do it.
However you find something ONE GUY said "ON ISRAELI TV" and it's Gospel-- because it fits YOUR narrative. Wow somehow I missed that. Shoot me. Never mind, just put me in an oven.
"However you find something ONE GUY said "ON ISRAELI TV" and it's Gospel"
...let's ignore the fact that the claim...excuse me, the LIE that Israeli babies were put in ovens came from one guy, with no corroborating evidence (obviously, as it's a lie), yet you were happy to accept that for a year and a half. But also, no, the main part of my job is to verify any information I come across to the best of my ability. I take that part of my job very seriously.
This means that you can be very confident when you read a claim that I've written, that it's based on evidence and not hearsay. And I almost always include links to that evidence so you can check it for yourself. Sadly, you tend not to read my articles before complaining about them. Never mind checking evidence.
Case in point, I would never trust a single random source for ANY information. The story about the baby in an oven has been widely debunked (https://archive.is/gO9f8) though obviously not by anyone in your echo chamber. Although this "ONE GUY" is a reporter on Israeli TV. Do you seriously think he's debunking these things without any evidence?
Right, and who uncritically gets their stats from Hamas. And for a combative guy, you spend about 10% of your time whining about tone. Fine, I'll pick another example. Beasts phoning home to brag to their parents how many Jews they killed, including children, while raping woman so hard their bones break.
"Right, and who uncritically gets their stats from Hamas"
No, not uncritically.
Hamas' current figures have been verified as much as possible (Israel won't allow journalists in to verify anything, remember) by the UN, US intelligence, and various other humanitarian and intelligence bodies. Even Israeli intelligence uses their figures in internal briefings.
There's also the fact that Hamas have had occasion to provide casualty figures many times before in previous conflicts, those figures have been verified after those conflicts by several sources, again, including Israel, and been found to be very accurate. There is no reason other than wishful thinking to believe they're not accurate here. In fact, they're very, very likely to be underreporting as they can't account for bodies under the rubble.
Yes, I heard that call. Absolutely horrifying. Likewise the reports of rape. I have never had anything but condemnation for what Hamas did. What mystifies me is why you are unmoved by the verified reports of rape and sexual abuse in Israeli prisons (a mob of Israelis stormed the prison in defence of the rapists, remember that?), why you don't care about the Palestinians, including children, who the Israeli military have killed with sniper fire and tanks and bombs.
And I'm not just talking about now, this goes back decades (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/nov/16/israel2).
We don't disagree because you hate what Hamas did and I don't. We disagree because you are willing to ignore or excuse or justify the same crimes when Israel commits them. Even in several orders of magnitude greater numbers. I can't see how this is anything but the most shameless hypocrisy. And that's the best case explanation.