Zionism is a Form of Nazism

The claim has been a recurring trope in anti-Israel discourse since at least the 1970s, given particular life by the United Nations General Assembly Resolution 3379 of 10 November 1975, which described Zionism as “a form of racism and racial discrimination”. The resolution was repealed by the General Assembly in 1991 (Resolution 46/86) following sustained Western pressure and a recognition by many of the original supporters that the formulation had been politically untenable. The claim survives in some quarters and is occasionally re-stated in the stronger Zionism-equals-Nazism formulation. The stronger formulation is structurally and historically false on every measurable dimension; the weaker formulation (Zionism as ethno-nationalism comparable to other ethno-nationalisms) is a different claim with different evidential implications.

What Zionism actually is

Zionism, as it emerged in the 1890s and developed across the twentieth century, is a Jewish national movement aiming at the establishment and maintenance of a Jewish national home in the historical land of Israel. It has multiple ideological strands, including: the labour Zionism of Ben-Gurion, Weizmann and the Mapai movement, which built the Yishuv and founded the state; the revisionist Zionism of Jabotinsky, which emphasised territorial maximalism and was eventually represented in the Likud party; the religious Zionism of Mizrahi and the Zionist religious settlements; the cultural Zionism of Ahad Ha’am, which prioritised Hebrew cultural revival over political statehood; and various smaller currents (Brit Shalom in the 1920s and 1930s, the bi-nationalist movement, the post-Zionist current of the 1990s). The movement is internally pluralist and has produced internal critics throughout its history, including Hannah Arendt, Martin Buber, Yeshayahu Leibowitz, and many subsequent Israeli intellectuals. None of this is consistent with the picture of a monolithic ethno-supremacist project.

Zionism’s foundational claim is that Jews, as a people with a distinct national identity, are entitled to political self-determination in their historical homeland. The claim is contestable and has been contested both within and beyond the Jewish world. It is, however, structurally similar to the foundational claims of many other national movements (Polish nationalism, Italian Risorgimento, Greek independence, Indian independence, Irish nationalism, Algerian independence). The notion that national movements are entitled to self-determination is the foundation of much of the post-1918 international order; whether Zionism qualifies under that principle, and whether its execution has been consistent with the rights of the prior Arab inhabitants of Palestine, are legitimate questions of political theory and history. They are not the same questions as whether Zionism is structurally identical to Nazism.

What Nazism actually was

Nazism was a German political movement that came to state power in 1933 and pursued policies including: the racial-biological reorganisation of German society, with the elimination of Jews, Roma and other defined groups; aggressive territorial expansion (the Anschluss, the Sudetenland, the invasion of Poland, the invasion of the Soviet Union); the deliberate genocidal killing of approximately 11 million civilians, including approximately 6 million Jews; the conduct of an aggressive war that killed approximately 50 million people across Europe and Asia; and the abolition of democratic institutions, civil liberties and the rule of law within Germany. The ideology was racial-biological, militarist and totalitarian; the practice produced the Holocaust, the Second World War in Europe, and the worst civilian death toll of the twentieth century outside Stalinist policy.

To equate Zionism, in any of its main strands, with this is to misuse the historical record on a substantial scale. The Zionist movement has pursued a national project in a defined territory; it has done so with various policies towards the Arab inhabitants of that territory, some of which (the 1948 expulsions of Arab populations during the founding war, the 1967 occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, various subsequent settlement policies) are subjects of legitimate political and moral criticism. None of these has produced a death toll, an ideological framework, or an operational system in any way comparable to the Nazi record. The claim of equivalence requires the listener to ignore the operational facts of both movements.

The denier-adjacent move

The claim that Zionism is Nazism is a particularly exact instance of Holocaust inversion: it transfers the moral discredit of the Nazi regime onto its principal victim community by framing the post-war Jewish national project as the same kind of operation. The transfer is rhetorically powerful because it uses the moral authority of anti-Nazism against the people most associated with the Holocaust’s memory. The transfer is structurally false because the two movements differ in essentially every measurable respect: ideology, methods, scale of violence, treatment of internal dissent, relationship to democratic institutions, treatment of minorities within the territory of operation, conduct of military operations, attitude towards international law, behaviour in the international system. The argument relies on the listener accepting a single common feature (that both projects involve a national or ethnic group claiming a territory) as sufficient to establish the analogy, while the differences in everything else are ignored.

The argument has also been weaponised in classical antisemitic ways. The Soviet propaganda apparatus during the Cold War regularly equated Zionism with Nazism in its anti-Israel campaigns from the 1960s onwards; the Stalinist anti-cosmopolitan campaign of the late 1940s and the doctors’ plot of 1953 had laid the groundwork for treating Jewish national consciousness as inherently fascistic. The trope was exported through Soviet diplomatic channels to the Arab states and to the Non-Aligned Movement; UN Resolution 3379 was the high-water mark. The trope’s pedigree includes some of the more notorious antisemitic productions of the Soviet propaganda industry; recognising that pedigree is part of evaluating the present-day argument.

Why the claim is harmful

The claim is harmful because it serves the antisemitic purpose of attaching the moral discredit of Nazism to the Jewish national project, with the consequence that anti-Zionism becomes morally equivalent to antifascism and Jewish defence of the State of Israel becomes morally equivalent to defending Nazism. The equivalence is false on the historical record but rhetorically powerful in present-day political discourse. The concrete consequence is the licensing of a wider range of anti-Jewish political action under the cover of anti-Nazi vocabulary. This is not a theoretical concern: the rhetorical equivalence has been used to justify various forms of political and social hostility towards Jewish communities outside Israel, on the basis that they are presumed to support a Nazi-equivalent state. The trope’s harm operates whether or not its individual users are aware of the harm.

What are the structural features of Zionism, in detail? What were the structural features of Nazism, in detail? On what specific feature is the equivalence being drawn?

See also

• The Invasion of Poland and the Ghettos
• Hannah Arendt

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Sources

• UN General Assembly Resolution 3379, “Elimination of all forms of racial discrimination”, 10 November 1975, and Resolution 46/86 of 16 December 1991 revoking it
• Walter Laqueur, A History of Zionism, Schocken Books, 1972, the standard scholarly history
• Anita Shapira, Israel: A History, Brandeis University Press, 2012
• Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, Harcourt, Brace, 1951, with the structural analysis of totalitarian movements
• Yehuda Bauer, Rethinking the Holocaust, Yale University Press, 2001
• Bernard Lewis, Semites and Anti-Semites: An Inquiry into Conflict and Prejudice, W. W. Norton, 1986
• Robert Wistrich, A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad, Random House, 2010
• Izabella Tabarovsky, “Soviet Anti-Zionism and Contemporary Left Antisemitism”, in Fathom, May 2019
• Martin Gilbert, Israel: A History, William Morrow, 1998
• Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World, updated edition, Penguin, 2014, on the legitimate political-historical criticism of Israeli policy
• Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, United Nations, 9 December 1948
• USHMM Holocaust Encyclopedia, “Antisemitism” and “What Made the Holocaust Distinctive”, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org