Hamas are Nazis

One of the arguments I’m getting sick of is a comparison of Hamas to the Nazis, and how killing civilians was OK in order to beat the Nazis. 

There are a lot of reasons why this doesnt hold water. A lot. 

But lets assume that that analogy works for now. Hamas are Nazis. We fought the nazis. Nazis are evil. Again painting the massacre in Gaza as a case of light versus dark, good versus evil. 

It’s nice to think in this way. We are the good guys they are the bad guys. It feels good to work in absolutes. It fits with the way our minds work. The only problem is it just isn’t how the world is.

So Hamas are Nazis lets say, because nazis wanted to destroy the Jews and so do Hamas (assuming of course that they do. Labour Party kept clause IV in their manifesto long after they stopped pushing for redistribution of the fruits of production). And we have to fight them because they are like the Nazis. 

When we won the war, we didn’t kill all the Germans, becuase they weren’t all Nazis, right. But we killed all the German soldiers right? Obviously we rounded them all up and shot them because they are evil. Yes? No? Why no? 

OK let’s say some of them were forced to join up. So it’s probably unfair to kill them all. But we killed all the Nazi party members right? Right? All those people who joined, actually joined the Nazis they were all killed right? Nuremberg and mossad and the butcher of buchenwald, those Nazis were all killed. Rounded up and shot at the end of the war. 

What? No? 

Why? 

Because you cant paint all the people of even one group as evil. Yes there are extremists and nutters in Hamas. But guess what, there are nutters everywhere. We aren’t trying to bury all the Swedish tories becuase of Anders brevik. Even in israel (no! Not possible) even in israel there are extremists who think that we should drop a nuclear bomb on Gaza. There will always be dicks.

I would even argue that there are some in Hamas who dont agree with the violence of the attacks. And there are people who actually. Given a chance, would be willing to negotiate with Israel if israel were ever willing to negotiate with them.

Making the Palestinians Nazis is an easy way to justify killing them. Same reason why so many video games feature nazi bad guys. No one wants to humanise a nazi. But they were human. And when the British won the war they didn’t wipe them all out. 

Even if you could! These people dont carry id. So when is this “war” against Hamas over. I would argue it was over after the first day. When Israel mobilised troops up and down the border. I would argue it was immediate. No one stopped Israel dropping the first or last bomb. It not really a war if only one side is fighting. It’s really a massacre. With no real defined end. If “Hamas” surrendered tomorrow i doubt the Israelis would stop. If Hamas surrendered all of a sudden this would stop being a war and they would be tried as terrorists. You see, its only a war as long as we need to justify a war effort. As soon as Hamas give in it will be terrorism. They wont be sent home like enemy combatants under the geneva convention. They will be tried and most likely executed. Becuase they are evil. Just like the Nazis. 

On the point of the nazis while we are there. After the war the British and Americans sent Germany aid. They didn’t crush them with reparations like the First World War. Do you know why? Becuase the German treatment after the First World War was one of the key reasons for the Second World War. The sanctions imposed on Germany were so crushing, so extreme, they were designed to destroy Germany as a world power. And when the Wall Street crash caused a global recession people got desperate and turned to extremism. It’s bitterly ironic that the extreme, disproportionate reaction of the allies during WW1 is a key reason for the rise of extremism which killed so many Jews, as well as Romany, homosexual and anyone else that looked at hitler funny or wasnt a ‘master race’.

So instead of murdering large numbers of civilians after they had already given up and flattening them when they were no longer a threat. The Allies helped Germany become stable again. Which ultimately was very successful. And then a homeland was given by the Europe that had been so shitty to the Jews. A new homeland for them after not just the holocaust but also the many hideous pogroms and discrimination that they had to face. And where was that homeland? 

Not fucking Europe. 

Europeans, who for so long had been so shitty to the children of Abraham, gave them a home not from their own lands. But handed over another homeland to them! 

Angela merkel called Israel a Staatreason. I have a lot of time and respect for Angela merkel. But the fact is she was wrong. The staatreason is not Israel. The staatreason is never again the accept discrimination, and even murder on the basis of purely religious or racial bigotry. What we should all be trying to stop is the state sanctioned hate of one group by another within its own country. I’m not just talking about Gaza here. The West Bank and the villages of the 1948 Arabs are a strangled chokehold of barbed wire, settlements and a total lack of freedom or dignity. People treated like animals because of who they are. That was the whole point of fighting the fucking Nazis in the first place. 

If you’re using the Nazis to explain why its OK to kill and main innocent people who cannot pose a threat. You misunderstood the fight against the Nazis. It’s not because of Jews and non Jews and Nazi ideology. It’s about a power treating a minority like shit year after year and then punishing them when they embrace extremism or snap. You cant wash blood with blood. Everyone just gets covered in blood. You cant put out fire with more fire everything just burns down.

The point I’m making is this. Extremism doesn’t come from who we are. It comes from desperation. From the circumstances we find ourselves in. You don’t make people less extreme by making their circumstances worse. 

Let me make an example of my own life. 

I was raised on a Hebron street, where the drums of Zion beat, and the loving Israeli boots they walked all over us.

My dad is a Palestinian born and bred, born in the ancient city of Jericho. We left Palestine during the second intifada (uprising) against Israeli occupation. My parent were worried about the number of children dying at that time. 

My dad has Israeli friends. Some of them visited us when they came to England. They stayed in our house with us. He speaks Hebrew as good as any israeli and better than many of the Americans who feel so strongly about a people they have barely met. 

When I was growing up I got into a political phase, socialist worker, communist manifesto. I would watch TV and what was happening with Israel and occasionally I would go off on a rant. “Fucking Israeli scum, evil monsters, blah blah.” My dad would stop me saying something like “enough of that nonsense. There are good Israelis and shitty isrealis, there are good Arabs and shitty Arabs. I know. I have met them both”. 

My grandmother. She grew up in Jaffa. She was part of the Nakba. Israel kicked her out of her house and she had to leave. She told me years later about visiting. She just wanted to see it. It was the place she grew up. The Israelis that lived there invited her in! She did go in and looked around and even told them old facts about the house, like the water pump at the bottom of the garden they didn’t know about. I remember her telling me she went in becuase she had to, but that she really wishes they had not invited her in. It was a painful memory. 

I was sat on the couch with her one evening and somehow the conversation turned to Israel and she said to me “lift up your hand. You see even on one hand all the fingers are different. How are you going to say all the people from one community are the same if you cant even make your fingers different. This from a woman who was expelled from her house by the Israelis. 

We left in the end becuase my parents were worried about me, but my dad never wanted to leave. What changed his mind finally was that he was driving from tel Aviv back to Hebron having picked up some ice cream for distribution, when a group of settlers pulled him from his car and knelt him down at the side of the road. They put a gun to his head.

Before they could execute him an army van drove around the corner and asked what all the commotion was. Dad jumped in his van and when he got home he said to my mother, “OK, we can leave”.  The thing i wonder sometimes is, who would I be if they shot him? Who would I be if, when I was six or seven, my dad was killed by Israelis. My grandfather was already a paralysed semi-mute after a settler rock crushed the side of his head. I know this, there would have been no one there to say to me “hey. Stop that shit” when I started ranting about Israel on the TV. In fact, there is a good chance I would be an extremist calling for the eradication of Israel.

It always does seem to be the moderates that are killed. I read that among the dead there was at least one pro Palestinian activist. 

You see, when you boil it down to good or evil. You make it simple for the same reason that Nazis or robots or aliens are the bad guys in most computer games. Becuase you dont want to be killing people. You want to be killing caricatures. But that’s not what people are. They aren’t good. They aren’t evil. They might do evil things. But you cant wash away that evil with more evil. You cant wash blood, with blood.