Thousands of Israelis joined a far-right Independence Day march on Tuesday in the south, led by Jewish activists advocating for resettling Gaza and forcing Palestinians to leave the enclave.
Two activists participating in the march crossed the border into Gaza and were arrested by Israeli forces near the Erez crossing.
The march was supported by lawmakers speaking at the event, including two cabinet members: Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi, who is a member of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party, and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir of Otzma Yehudit.
According to the ADL pointing out that “true solution” sounds a lot like “final solution” in the contrxt of Gaza is antisemitism. Ben-Gvir really loves to make it hard to avoid that comparison.
Instead I will compare the actions of the Israeli government and the IDF to the US genocide of Native Americans who were slaughtered by white people using the justification of Manifest Destiny to settle all of the land to the western coast. The US genocide involved killing a lot of Native American women and children by military forces and forced resettlement of surviving tribe members.
You mean the manifest destiny that was a direct inspiration for lebensraum, the Nazi expansionist policy? That manifest destiny?
I’m sorry I just think it’s funny how fast that comparison comes full circle. It’s not even a circle, it’s a triangle.
I don’t know, maybe comparing Israel’s genocide to another genocide that is itself comparable to Nazi genocide is somehow not antisemitic, but I doubt people who call people antisemitic over this sort of thing would see it that way.
The ADL are about as credible as Gwynneth Paltrow at this point but you’re right, we don’t need to play into his strategy and go there, because genocidal settler colonialism is a much closer analogy.
There’s an interesting book by Sven Lindqvist that convincingly argues that the blueprint for the Holocaust was basically there in previous colonial practices, eg the death camps for the Herero and Namaqua people in the Namibian Genocide.
At least there was some grandeur to the delusion of manifest destiny. Israel is where American idealism goes to die.