Trump’s Gaza idea is similar to Hitler’s “creative” solution
Joseph Goebbels wrote an article in November 1941 in which he effectively threatened the annihilation of European Jewry. If you replace the word “Jews” with “Palestinians,” you will get almost point by point the prevailing Israeli mindset today, as reflected in the media and on social networks.
By Orly Noy • Translated by Sol Salbe
❝ The Jews wanted war, and now they have it… We are seeing the fulfillment of the prophecy. The Jews are receiving a penalty that is certainly hard, but more than deserved. World Jewry erred in adding up the forces available to it for this war, and now is gradually experiencing the annihilation that it planned for us, and would have carried out without a second thought if it had possessed the ability. It is perishing according its own law: ‘An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.’
Every Jew is our enemy in this historic struggle, regardless of whether he vegetates in a Polish ghetto or carries on his parasitic existence in Berlin or Hamburg or blows the trumpets of war in New York or Washington. All Jews by virtue of their birth and their race are part of an international conspiracy against National Socialist Germany. They want its defeat and annihilation, and do all in their power to bring it about. ❞
Joseph Goebbels wrote these words in November 1941, in an article titled The Jews are guilty. The prophecy he refers to is Hitler’s “prophecy” in a speech from January 1939, in which he effectively threatened the annihilation of European Jewry. If you replace the word “Jews” with “Palestinians,” you will get almost point by point the prevailing Israeli mindset today, as reflected in the media and on social networks.
Ideas, even the most deranged and despicable — and perhaps especially these — take on a certain reality as soon as they are publicly placed on the table. And they have an inertia of their own, nourished by the consistent dehumanisation that makes it possible to move from fantasies of expulsion and extinction to their realisation. And those who consistently try to divert the discussion from crimes and criminals to “enemies at home” are also part of this process.
If you don’t want to get caught up in the track at the end of which stand Hitler and Goebbels, it’s not enough to say that a criminal idea is “unworkable,” and certainly not that it’s “creative,” or “interesting.” When someone with a lot of power comes up with an idea that is one of the most serious crimes in the statute books, you don’t have a discussion about their level of feasibility, but you oppose them as strongly as possible.
