Israel-Gaza War is a real war, not an analogy
Analogies to the Second World War are very present in coverage and discussion of the current Israel-Gaza War. But for propaganda purposes, emotions are the key thing, not a serious historical comparison.
Israel takes the Holocaust as a fundamental justification for the State of Israel. And safety for Jews in a hostile world was always a key motivation for the Zionist movement since Theodor Herzl (1860-1904) founded it. But even after the Second World War, the Holocaust didn’t immediately become the identifying symbol that it later became. As the historian Tom Segev recounts in his history, The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust (2000), it took time and events like the Adolf Eichmann trial (1961) before the Holocaust came to be understood as something like a founding principle for Israel. (Israel’s War of Independence was in 1948.)
Now it is routine for Israeli politicians to identify Israel with the victims of the Holocaust and with the Allied cause in the war against Hitler Germany.
John Ganz comments, “Israeli leadership has openly embraced comparisons to the Second World War.”1 And he quotes from the New York Times:
In an address on Oct. 30, for example, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu cited the accidental bombing of a children’s hospital by Britain’s Royal Air Force when it was targeting the Gestapo headquarters in Copenhagen in 1945. And during visits to Israel by Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken, Israeli officials privately invoked the 1945 U.S. atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which together killed more than 100,000 people.2
Ganz comments:
As awful as those analogies are on their own, what Israel doesn’t seem to understand is that a growing number of people don’t have the Allies in mind when the see the devastation in Gaza: They think of the other guys. This is maybe why Israeli hasbarists [progagandists] now have to take the absurd and intellectually insulting line that Hamas is somehow “worse than the Nazis.” [emphasis in original]
In American foreign policy, the Hitler Analogy has long had a destructive effect. The US since World War II has never fought anyone but “Hitler.” Joe Stalin was “Hitler” (though the wards with the USSR were proxy ones), Ho Chi Minh was “Hitler”, even Osama bin Laden became “Hitler.” In the US, that goes together with a romanticization of the Second World War as the Good War. And by both secular and religious standards, it was a Just War on the Allied side.
Of course, once we take a step down from that level of generalization, the Second World War itself gets a lot more complicated.
The legacy of the Munich Analogy
The international security scholar Jeffrey Record has given a lot of attention to the role of historical analogies in US foreign policy.3 He devoted one book to the use of Hitler as an analogy, and specifically the Munich Analogy. He points out that such analogies have contributed to a considerable amount of threat inflation in US foreign policy analysis and policy deliberations, all too often at the expense of careful and practical analysis of the particular nature of a given enemy.
The story of the Munich Agreement is usually told as a hapless British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, losing out in a mano-a-mano testosterone contest with Adolf Hitler at a conference in Munich.
The problem with that account is that it leaves out or minimizes the most important elements needed to understand why the Munich Agreement was so problematic from the perspective of Britain and France: they were pursuing a policy of preparing for war against Germany but their military posture was not consistent with their foreign policy, i.e., they weren’t militarily prepared to come to the aid of Czechoslovakia in a war; they weren’t willing in 1938 to cooperate militarily with the Soviet Union; and, their defensive military posture was largely based on the military experience of the First World War but not effective against the German blitzkrieg strategy.
Even the notion that Chamberlain was scared of going to war is ahistorical. France had a mutual-defense treaty with Czechoslovakia and Britain had one with France. So if France stood by its treaty with the Czechoslovaks, Britain would have been obligated to enter the war and Chamberlain was prepared to do that. As Record recalls, “in 1939 Chamberlain was even prepared to - and did - go to war with Germany for the sake of a country [Poland] Britain was in no position to defend.”
But it was the aim of both Germany and France in 1938 to avoid war at that moment. And even though the calculation they were making that a war between Germany and the USSR might be to their advantage may not have been quite the fixed goal that later Soviet historiography made it out to be, it was nevertheless an obvious part of the foreign policy calculations at the time.
There was also the very practical consideration at stake that setting Germany up to be able to more easily seize the whole of Czechoslovakia would put the massive Skoda arms works under Hitler’s control, thus immediately boosting Germany’s arms production in a major way. “Hitler's quick absorption of the whole of Czechoslovakia included the famous Skoda ironworks, and he subsequently used the conquered nation as a Nazi arsenal.”4 “Munich” was a bad deal that indeed worked out badly for Britain and France. But that wasn’t due to the leaders’ testosterone deficiencies.
Although the world couldn’t know for certain until 1939 and Hitler’s invasion of Poland, “Hitler was not shy about discussing the scope of his ambitions in Europe,” as Record writes. He was determined to seize Ukraine and other large parts of the Soviet Union and was therefore unappeasable.
But Hitler was not just unappeasable. He was also undeterrable. And it was this undeterrability that made Hitler so dangerous. True, shows of strength and resolve - Mussolini's reaction to Hitler's attempted Nazi coup in Vienna in 1934 [i.e., Mussolini at that time threatened to use Italian forces to support Austrian independence], Britain's "special message" of September 1938 that it was prepared to join France in going to war over Czechoslovakia - forced Hitler to back off. But he did so only because Germany was still rearming and Hitler was not yet prepared to risk military defeat or a general war. Also true, Hitler planned for general war no later than 1943-45, when he believed Germany would attain maximum power relative to her enemies, and was surprised when the French and British prematurely visited it upon him in 1939 by honoring their defense guarantees to Poland.5
Netanyahu’s partisans would surely say that Hamas is just as unappeasable and undeterrable as Hitler was. But Hamas does not remotely have the kind of military power that Germany had in 1939. In fact, Israel has the strongest army in the region and is the only nuclear-armed power there. The image that Israel has cultivated for its armed forces and intelligence services has certainly been tarnished by the lack of preparedness and slow response to the Hamas attack of October 7.6 And Netanyahu, eager to hang on to power - not least as a way of staying out of prison - has not been enhancing that image by his attempts to blame them for the disaster while ducking responsibility himself.7
But understanding what’s happening in Israel-Palestine requires careful attention to what has actually happened and what is currently happening. Historical analogies can be helpful in understanding events. But this current conflict is not a replay of the Holocaust featuring Hamas in the “Hitler” role. (And though a wider war is obviously possibly, it’s currently a long way from World War Three,) Israel’s backers, particularly the United States, need to be realistic about the current situation in a long-term conflict in Israel-Palestine that will not be settled by Netanyahu’s approach of never accepting a real peace settlement.
And when CNN makes a report like this on the realities of the occupation, it’s worth noticing8:
Ana Kasparian elaborates on the CNN report9:
Ganz, John (2023): Israel Has Already Lost: The War and the Peace. Unpopular Front (Substack) 11/27/2023. (Accessed: 2023-28-11).
Leatherby, Lauren (2023): Gaza Civilians, Under Israeli Barrage, Are Being Killed at Historic Pace. New York Times 11/25/2023. <https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/25/world/middleeast/israel-gaza-death-toll.html> (Accessed: 2023-28-11).
Record, Jeffrey (2014): Making War, Thinking History: Munich, Vietnam, and Presidential Uses of Force from Korea to Kosovo. Annapolis: Naval Institute Press.
Czecho-Slovak Skoda - 1918-1945. GlobalSecurity.org, n/d. <https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/europe/skoda-cz.htm> (Accessed: 2023-28-11).
Record, Jeffrey (2007): The Specter of Munich: Reconsidering the Lessons of Appeasing Hitler, 87-88. Washington: Potomac Books, Inc.
Bar-Joseph, Uri (2023): Israel's Deadly Complacency Wasn't Just an Intelligence Failure. Haaretz 11/11/2023. <https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-11-11/ty-article-magazine/.highlight/israels-deadly-complacency-wasnt-just-an-intelligence-failure/0000018b-b9ea-df42-a78f-bdeb298e0000> (Accessed: 2023-28-11).
Harel, Amos (2023): 'We Have Completed the Murder of All Residents of the Kibbutz' | Chilling Warnings Picked Up by Israeli Intelligence Months Before October 7 Massacre. Haaretz 11/27/2023. <https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-11-27/ty-article/.premium/chilling-warnings-picked-up-by-israeli-intelligence-months-before-october-7-massacre/0000018c-1261-dd2e-a5ae-d36ba6240000> (Accessed: 2023-28-11).
Netanyahu swipes at intel chiefs over Hamas, then apologizes. Reuters 10/29/2023. <https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/israels-netanyahu-says-wasnt-shown-intel-planned-hamas-attack-2023-10-29/> (Accessed: 2023-28-11).
Why you may not see Palestinians celebrating family members' return. CNN YouTube channel 11/25/2023. (Accessed: 2023-28-11).
DOZENS Of Hamas Hostages, Palestinian Prisoners Released As Ceasefire Gets Extended. TYT YouTube channel 11/28/2023. (Accessed: 2023-28-11).