Creeping Nazism in Israel

• Emphasis mine:
• Creeping Nazism in Israel
  by Uri Avnery, http://www.redressonline.com/
  … General Ya’ir Golan, the deputy chief of staff of the Israeli army, made a speech on Holocaust Memorial Day. Wearing his uniform, he read a prepared, well-considered text that triggered an uproar which has not yet died down.
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  Dozens of articles have been published in its wake, some condemning him, some lauding him. It seems that nobody could stay indifferent.
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  Traces of Nazism
  The main sentence was his:
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  If there is something that frightens me about the memories of the Holocaust, it is the knowledge of the awful processes which happened in Europe in general, and in Germany in particular, 70, 80, 90 years ago, and finding traces of them here in our midst, today, in 2016.
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  All hell broke loose. What! Traces of Nazism in Israel? A resemblance between what the Nazis did to us with what we are doing to the Palestinians? 
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  Ninety years ago was 1926, one of the last years of the German republic. Eighty years ago was 1936, three years after the Nazis came to power. Seventy years ago was 1946, on the morrow of Hitler’s suicide and the end of the Nazi Reich.
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  I feel compelled to write about the general’s speech after all, because I was there. As a child I was an eyewitness to the last years of the Weimar Republic (so called because its constitution was shaped in Weimar, the town of Goethe and Schiller). As a politically alert boy I witnessed the Nazi Machtergreifung (“taking power”) and the first half a year of Nazi rule.
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  The truthful general
  Now comes General Golan, an esteemed professional soldier, and says the same thing. And not as an improvised remark, but on an official occasion, wearing his general’s uniform, reading from a prepared, well-thought-out text. The storm broke out, and has not passed yet.
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  Israelis have a self-protective habit: when confronted with inconvenient truths, they evade its essence and deal with a secondary, unimportant aspect. Of all the dozens and dozens of reactions in the written press, on TV and on political platforms, almost none confronted the general’s painful contention.
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  Racism and discrimination
  The discrimination against the Palestinians in practically all spheres of life can be compared to the treatment of the Jews in the first phase of Nazi Germany. (The oppression of the Palestinians in the occupied territories resembles more the treatment of the Czechs in the “protectorate” after the Munich betrayal.)
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  The rain of racist bills in the Knesset, those already adopted and those in the works, strongly resembles the laws adopted by the Reichstag in the early days of the Nazi regime. Some rabbis call for a boycott of Arab shops. Like then. The call “Death to the Arabs” (Judah verrecke?) is regularly heard at soccer matches. A member of parliament has called for the separation between Jewish and Arab newborns in hospital. A chief rabbi has declared that goyim(non-Jews) were created by God to serve the Jews. Our ministers of education and culture are busy subduing the schools, theatre and arts to the extreme rightist line, something known in German as Gleichschaltung. The Supreme Court, the pride of Israel, is being relentlessly attacked by the minister of justice. The Gaza Strip is a huge ghetto.
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  Of course, no one in their right mind would even remotely compare Netanyahu to the Fuehrer, but there are political parties here which do emit a strong fascist smell. The political riffraff peopling the present Netanyahu government could easily have found their place in the first Nazi government.
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  The general did not mention the occupation and the settlements, which are under army rule. But he did mention the episode which occurred shortly before he gave this speech, and which is still shaking Israel now: in occupied Hebron, under army rule, a soldier saw a seriously wounded Palestinian lying helplessly on the ground, approached him and killed him with a shot to the head. The victim had tried to attack some soldiers with a knife, but did not constitute a threat to anyone any more. This was a clear contravention of army standing orders, and the soldier has been hauled before a court martial.
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  A cry went up around the country: the soldier is a hero! He should be decorated! Netanyahu called his father to assure him of his support. Avigdor Lieberman entered the crowded courtroom in order to express his solidarity with the soldier. A few days later Netanyahu appointed Lieberman as minister of defence, the second most important office in Israel.
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  read more.

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