https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/01/27/how-jews-were-turned-into-the-new-nazis/
On this Holocaust Memorial Day, we are marking the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the most notorious of the Nazis’ concentration camps. It ought to be an occasion for sombre reflection on the systematic extermination of six million Jews. A chance to contemplate the unique moral horror of the Holocaust.
But that is becoming more difficult than ever. And that’s because so many ‘progressives’ today are eroding the terrible significance of the Holocaust by casting Israel, and by extension Jews in general, as the new Nazis.
How did it come to this? How did the victims of the greatest evil in modern history come to be likened to its perpetrators?
Those portraying Israel as the new Nazi Germany will, of course, point to Israel’s brutal war in Gaza to substantiate their claims. But such a comparison is absurd. Israel is hardly behaving like Nazi Germany. Nazi Germany was an expansionist, imperial power. Israel simply isn’t. It is responding to the horrific, genocidal actions of Hamas after it carried out a pogrom on Israel on 7 October 2023. Since then, Israel has been fighting a war of self-defence not just against Hamas, but also against an anti-Semitic alliance from across the Middle East (including Iran, Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen), which is hell bent on Israel’s destruction.
Claims that Israel is a new Nazi Germany speak to a more profound problem – namely, the ‘dejudification’ of the Holocaust. That is, instead of being seen as a specifically anti-Jewish act, the Nazis’ systematic extermination of Jewry has increasingly been cast as an example of man’s inhumanity to man in general. Hence, even Jews can apparently be guilty of Nazism.
Many now downplay the specifically anti-Jewish character of the Holocaust. They will point out that the Nazis’ mass-killing operations took the lives of 13million civilians, of whom less than half were Jews. Other mass casualties included Soviet prisoners of war, civilians killed in anti-partisan operations, disabled people and the Roma. From this perspective, it is possible to argue that Jews were just one group among many who were slaughtered by the Nazis.
However, this misses the centrality of anti-Semitism to Nazi ideology. It is not that the loss of an individual Jewish life should trouble us more than other lives. It was that the Nazis were driven by an overriding racial animus towards the Jews – they were the specific targets of the Nazis’ Vernichtungskrieg, their ‘war of extermination’.
There was a reason for this. In the fevered imagination of the Nazis, the Jews represented the combined evils of capitalism and Communism. As historian Paul Hanebrink explains, ‘Communism and global capitalism always functioned in [Nazis’] minds as two sides of the same international (and anti-national) Jewish evil. In their paranoid fantasies, Jewish Communists and Jewish financiers invariably worked together to pursue world domination, each feeding off the power of the other.’
