Who are the Nazis?
I don’t want to minimize either the hatefulness or the ignorance of Israeli cabinet minister Amichai Eliyahu’s call to erase the holy month of Ramadan. The fact that a grandstander like him can garner attention with bizarre Islamophobia says very bad things about Israeli society.
For the same reason I won’t just wave away his November statement that nuclear weapons are an option in Gaza. Prime Minister Netanyahu announced that Eliyahu was suspended from his cabinet for that outrage, but he was not.
And there is no reason to single out Eliyahu for his opposition to food and medical aid to Gaza. The entire Israeli government has actively pursued a policy of starving Gazans, then murdering them when they come to retrieve the trickle of arriving food… along with bombing them and their homes from air, land, and sea.
No, it is Eliyahu’s rationale for denying humanitarian aid that got my attention and that is because his reasoning is exactly the same as too many American Jews, people who I thought I knew.
Eliyahu asks, rhetorically, whether we would give humanitarian aid to Nazis. Who are the Nazis?
The Nazis held Jews in concentration camps and walled ghettos, like Israel holds Palestinians in Gaza.
The Nazis starved the Jews in the camps and ghettos, like Israel starves Palestinians in Gaza.
The Nazis killed the Jews in the camps and ghettos, like Israel kills Palestinians in Gaza.
Perhaps Amichai Eliyahu represents a small, extreme political party. Perhaps he makes outrageous statements because he wants attention. But if you are willfully blinding yourself to the parallels between the Nazi Holocaust and the Israeli assault on the Palestinian people, you make yourself an ally to Nazis.
And let us not forget, we the American people are providing military aid to Israel, aid that is absolutely essential to their continuing Holocaust against the people of Gaza. We are providing aid to Nazis.
