‘How has it come to this? How is it possible that Israel, rather than radical Islamism, would become the villain on liberal campuses?” The question was asked recently by the author and journalist, Yossi Klein Halevi. He argues that the charge of genocide against Israel is the endpoint of decades of delegitimizing Israel, in which its enemies have systematically dismantled the moral basis of each stage of Zionist and Israeli history. First came the canard, denying the Jews’ indigenousness in their ancient homeland.
Then came the Nakba, the narrative denying that Palestinians were forced from their homes by a war that the Arab side started and lost. Klein Halevi has tried to explain these obscene distortions of history by blaming He claims that it has been a failure because educators have tried to universalize the message. Instead of being an unique expression of murderous antisemitism against the Jewish people, Holocaust education has become a generalized message of anti-racism.
Klein Halevi is right. But the problem is not just the universalizing of the worst catastrophe ever suffered by the Jewish people, it is ignoring the huge impact Nazism had on the Arabs. I would argue that genocide is not the endpoint, but the starting point of the Arab and Islamist war against the Jews, preceding even the establishment of the State of Israel.
Nazism inspired “secular” Arab nationalist parties, complete with paramilitary “shirts” brigades reminiscent of the Hitler Youth, .
