No aid has entered Gaza since March 2nd due to Israel’s siege. Since then, fifty children have died from starvation in Gaza.
Israeli defense minister Israel Katz has said explicitly, “Israel’s policy is clear: no humanitarian aid will enter Gaza.” Another Israeli Minister, Moshe Saada of Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud Party has said, “Yes, I will starve the residents of Gaza, yes indeed—it is our duty. I want to starve the residents of Gaza, to impose a full, full siege.”
The UN World Food Programme has now officially run out of food in Gaza. Mere meters from Gaza is 116,000 metric tonnes of food waiting to enter, enough food to feed one million people for four months, being refused entry by Israel.
The intention is clear: the forced starvation of millions of people—a holocaust. What is the distinction between killing people in a gas chamber and killing people by intentionally starving them?
If any doubt remains about the lack of distinction, we can revisit the words of prominent Zionist leaders, ideologues, and politicians throughout history to present day. In their own words, no such distinction exists between how Nazis treated Jews and how the state of Israel treats Palestinians.
Zionism and Nazism: Cut from the same cloth
The dehumanization of Palestinian people by Zionists and the state of Israel is not unique. Systems of oppression tend to replicate themselves, which we can see in this genocide perpetrated by many people who were direct descendents of Holocaust survivors. But this isn’t mere conjecture—by piecing together quotes from Zionist leaders themselves we can construct a timeline of the ways Zionists have likened their own behaviour to that of Nazis.
In a 1933 speech, Hayim Nahman Bialik, known as Israel’s national poet, said, “I too, like Hitler, believe in blood and the power of blood.”
In 1934, Benito Mussolini said to Nahum Goldmann, a leader in the Zionist movement, “For Zionism to succeed, you need to have a Jewish State with a Jewish flag, and Jewish language. The person who understands that is your fascist, [Vladimir] Jabotinsky.”
Jabonitsky himself, founder of Betar, corroborated this in his 1936 autobiography when he wrote, “All my views on nationalism, the state, and society were developed during those years under Italian [fascist] influence”
Jabotinsky also said in reference to the planned ethnic cleansing of Palestinians that “Hitler, as odious as he is to us, has given this idea [mass dispossession] a good name in the world.”
In 1942—that year is not a typo—Avraham Stern, leader of the Lehi, a Zionist terrorist group who proudly referred to themselves as terrorists, twice attempted to ally with and fight with the Nazis. The Lehi would later be one of three Zionist militias to perpetrate the Nakba.
Yosef Nahmani, a Zionist paramilitary militiaman, wrote in his diary during the 1948 Nakba:
“In Safsaf, after the [Palestinian] inhabitants had hoisted the white flag, [the soldiers] gathered the men and women into separate groups, bound the hands of 50 or 60 villagers, shot them, then buried them all in the same pit. They also raped several women from the village. Where did they learn such behaviour, as cruel as that of the Nazis? They learned from them. One officer told me that the most ferocious were those who had escaped the [Nazi concentration] camps.”
Aharin Cizling, an Israeli politician and signatory on the Israeli declaration of independence and commander in the Haganah (a Zionist militia), said in reference to the Nakba: “Now Jews too have behaved like the Nazis and my whole being is shaken.”
It is not just direct comparisons—oftentimes the manner Israeli leaders speak about Palestinian and Arab people is so dehumanizing that the racist Nazi like ideology can be seen plainly. In 1982, in reference to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, the Chief of Staff of the Israeli Army, Rafael Eitan, said that, “When we have settled the land, all the Arabs will be able to do about it will be to scurry around like drugged cockroaches in a bottle.”
In 1983, Richard Arens, the brother of the Israeli Defense Minister, compared Israeli settlements in the West Bank to Nazi Germany’s expansionist philosophy of “Lebensraum,” and accused Israelis of subjecting Palestinian people to torture and mass arrests.
In 1987, the state of Israel published the Landau Commission, an investigation into Israeli interrogators’ use of torture on Palestinian detainees. The report found that every interrogator interviewed had committed acts of torture and then committed perjury when they swore under oath that they hadn’t. The report explicitly said, “The effective interrogation of terrorist suspects is impossible without the use of means of pressure [torture].”
In 1991, the Israeli Supreme Court cited the Landau Commission recommendations in formally legalizing the use of torture by interrogators. In response, Israeli intellectual, professor, and Israel Prize for Lifetime Achievement winner Yeshayahu Leibowitz wrote that if “the law … can allow the use of torture as a way of getting confessions out of prisoners, then this testifies to a Nazi mentality.” Leibowitz is also famous for coining the term “Judeo-Nazi,” which he used often to refer to the Israeli policy of occupation in the Gaza Strip and West Bank.
In 1994, a Jewish Israeli terrorist opened fire on a congregation of Palestinians praying in a mosque, killing 29, including children. The following day, Rabbi Yaacov Perrin gave a eulogy to thousands of supporters in which he said, “One million Arabs are not worth a Jewish fingernail!”
In 2004, prominent Israeli demographer (and architect of the siege on Gaza) Arnon Soffer predicted that the conditions that the Israeli state was subjecting Gaza to would result in a violent response that would necessitate Israeli forces having to “Kill and kill and kill. All day, every day.”
In 2010, Israeli Judge Hadassa Ben-Itto, who was an author on a book about how Nazis used propaganda to claim that Jews sought world domination and that therefore the Nazis were acting in self defense, said “We must learn from the Nazi tactics… I have reached the conclusion that we must use these tactics in courts worldwide, just like the Nazis.”
In 2014, Ayalet Shaked, one year before becoming the Israeli Minister of Justice, referred to Palestinians as “snakes” and Palestinian children as “little snakes.” She also asked, “What’s so horrifying about understanding that the entire Palestinian people is the enemy?”
In December of 2023, Israeli Sergeants Dor Vainshtein and Daniel Blankovich had a conversation in which they said, “We’re launching operation 8th Candle of Hanukkah. The burning of Shujaiya neighbourhood. Let our enemies learn and be deterred. This is what we’ll do to all our enemies. And not a memory will be left of them. We will annihilate them to dust.”
That same month, the Mayor of Metula David Azoulai said, “The whole Gaza Strip needs to be empty. Flattened. Just like in Auschwitz.”
In December of 2024, already a year into the state of Israel’s genocidal campaign on Gaza, Israeli publication Ha’aretz published an article where Israeli soldiers anonymously spoke on their experiences fighting in Gaza. One soldier said, “I felt like, like, like a Nazi … it looked exactly like we were actually the Nazis and they were the Jews.”
In May 2025, Elad Barashi, a famous Israeli television producer said, “I can’t understand the people here in the State of Israel who don’t want to fill Gaza with gas showers… or train cars… and finish this story! Let there be a Holocaust in Gaza.”
Later, in May 2025, Michal Waldiger, a Member of Knesset (Israeli federal government) said, “No one is innocent in Gaza. Yes, children should be killed too. There is no other way.”
This compilation of quotes paints a picture, but at the same time is by no means comprehensive.
Statements from Holocaust survivors
It is not just Zionists themselves who have pointed this out. Many Jewish Holocaust survivors have pointed out how Israel is behaving exactly like Nazi Germany.
In 1947, German-Jewish Holocaust survivor Victor Klemperer wrote, “Both Zionism and Nazism are essentially neo-Romantic nationalist ideologies.”
In 1948, a number of Jewish public figures, including Hannah Arendt and Albert Einstein, signed an open letter which compared Tnuat Haherut, an Israeli political party founded by Menachem Begin (leader of the Zionist terror group the Irgun and future Prime Minister of Israel), to Nazism.
In 1972, Rudolf Vrba, one of the few people to ever escape Auschwitz, said that “Nazism and Zionism had something in common: they both preached that Jews don’t belong to Europe but to Palestine.”
In 1986, Dr. Marika Sherwood wrote:
In 1989, Dr. Israel Shahak, Holocaust survivor and civil rights activist said of the smear “self-hating Jew” that is so often used against Jews who oppose Zionism, “That is a Nazi expression. The Nazis called Germans who defended Jewish rights self-hating Germans.”
In 2010, Suzanne Weiss said:
In 2014, Auschwitz survivor Dr. Hajo Meyer said, “If we want to stay really human beings, we must get up and call the Zionists what they are: Nazi criminals.” Dr. Meyer, in the same interview, said “My message for the Palestinians is that they should not give up their fight. If they give up, they might lose their self-esteem with the ongoing humiliations by the Israeli Nazis.”
Today, little has changed. In 2024, Rene Lichtman, survivor of Nazi-occupied France, summarized what many of us are thinking in the wake of the forced starvation of civilians in Gaza: “I think Israel is a fascist state today. What else would you call it?”
The only just future is an anti-Zionist future
The Israeli government recently officially announced its intentions to fully annex and ethnically cleanse all of Gaza, even if it sacrifices the Israeli hostages. Jewish history is not one of perpetual victimhood—we are active participants, not mere subjects of history. Nazism was not a unique historical evil, but a process of propaganda and dehumanization that has happened numerous times throughout history. There was chattel slavery; the Belgian Holocaust in the Congo that killed 10 million; the British starvation campaigns in Ireland and later India; the genocide of indigenous peoples in North America. The most recent example of this process is happening in Gaza, resulting in a Holocaust just so happens to be at the hands of Zionism.
A better world is possible. One where the unjustifiable will not be justified. Where no one is living under occupation. It is for the betterment of us all, as if it can happen in Auschwitz, it can happen in Rafah, it can happen in Kashmir, it can happen anywhere. Unfortunately, a better world won’t be formed by chance—the onus is on all of us to support and build mass movements to create a better world for all of us.
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