Last Word in Anti-Semitism

Genocidal mass murder continues to foul the world. So do large-scale massacres of civilians and brutal executions.

Yet the foulest epithet in any language -- “Nazi” -- is hurled not against any of the perpetrators of those crimes but, uniquely and systematically, against Israel.

It’s not as if the real horrors are hard to find. To see a state-sponsored genocidal campaign, go to Sudan, where troops of the Muslim Arab government in Khartoum, and the Arab militias supplied by that government, are systematically targeting black tribes. Thousands have been murdered and a million driven from their homes by a program of bombing villages, shooting men, women and children, widespread rape and forced thirst and starvation. Yet the word “Nazi” isn’t commonly used against the Sudanese authorities, whether by Arab countries or any others, just as it wasn’t used against the Rwandan authorities who organized the genocide of about 800,000 Tutsis.

Deliberate massacres of civilians are even easier to find. During the last three years in the streets of Israel, numerous city buses, cafes and restaurants have been turned into bomb chambers by Palestinian organizations whose stated goal is to eradicate Israel and make the area free of Jews. In this way, they’ve systematically killed a dozen Israelis here, two dozen there, spraying arms, legs, lungs, livers, brains and strips of skin and muscle all over that country’s streets. And at the World Trade Center in New York on Sept. 11, 2001, as many innocents were murdered as during a day’s gassing in Auschwitz. All of these actions, though they don’t justify the term “Nazi,” have been deliberate exterminations of civilians by organizations with clearly stated agendas of mass murder. Yet the epithet “Nazi” hasn’t been commonly used against the organizers of these or other massacres around the world.

The word “Nazi” is, however, regularly thrown at Israel, even though that country’s policy is to avoid killing Palestinian civilians. It’s hurled, first of all, by Palestinians and their Arab and other Muslim allies. And it’s hurled by European critics of Israel. “What is happening in Ramallah,” Portuguese Nobel laureate Jose Saramago said in 2002, “is a crime that may be compared to Auschwitz.” Jewish settlers in the West Bank, the Oxford poet Tom Paulin said a year later, “should be shot dead. I think they are Nazis, racists. I feel nothing but hatred for them.” That same year, the Irish writer Tom McGurk approved of the comparison between Israel’s assault on Jenin with the Nazi destruction of the Warsaw ghetto. “How extraordinary,” he wrote, “that so many in the liberal democratic West should feel so strangely muted, so emotionally strangled in the face of Nazi-style barbarism toward the Palestinians by the state of Israel.”

Why the Palestinians call Israelis “Nazis” isn’t hard to understand. It’s an effective accusation to make against a country that itself rose out of the ashes of the Holocaust and that received its legitimacy from the world in 1948 in part because of it. If the word “Nazi” could be successfully attached to that country, then its right to exist could be brought into question.

Why non-Palestinians direct the accusation at Israel rather than at other targets is more complex. Some are simply trying to use the most damaging and effective verbal ammunition possible in the war against the Jewish state. But some are anti-Semites who have finally found a way to free themselves of the strictures that have been in place for 60 years. After all, for six decades after the Holocaust, anti-Semitism was seen as having led to the worst genocide in human history. It wasn’t possible to be an anti-Semite in polite company. As the years passed, some anti-Semites tried to break free of this taboo by saying the Holocaust had never happened -- after all, if it never happened, or was exaggerated, then anti-Semitism was falsely accused of having been a genocidal ideology and could once again enter the arena of acceptable discourse. Yet Holocaust denial could never achieve widespread credibility in the West, given the mountain of evidence.

But if the public could be convinced that Israel is no better than Nazi Germany, then the anti-Semites could again be back in business. In fact, if the public came to see Israel as having engaged in Nazi-like behavior, it might conclude that the Jewish state is even worse than Nazi Germany. When we hear the epithet “Nazi” aimed at Israelis, we should understand its purpose. And we should understand that -- whether the term is part of a verbal war or of an effort to make anti-Semitism once again respectable -- it will continue to be aimed at Israel rather than at countries and groups that engage in genocide and mass murder.

Walter Reich, a psychiatrist and professor of international affairs, ethics and human behavior at George Washington University, was director of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum from 1995 to 1998.