The Russian president and Israeli prime minister are manipulating the history of WWII in order to equate their enemies in both Ukraine and Palestine with the Nazis.
14 June 2024 — As I wrote earlier this week, the last 7 days has been a concatenation of events – the 80th anniversary of D-Day, the rescue of Israeli hostages held in Gaza, multiple acts of Russian sabotage across Europe, a Far Right swing in European parliamentary elections, and now the G-7 summit. Except for a few side trips with some technology-related posts, I am returning to all of those topics, in full vigor, to produce a multi-part blog series, and a new film.
To Israelis, the 7th of October 2023 is the worst day in their country’s 75-year history. Never before have so many of them been massacred and taken hostage on a single day. Thousands of heavily armed Hamas fighters managed to break through the Gaza Strip’s fortified border and into Israel, rampaging unimpeded for hours, destroying several villages, and committing gruesome acts of brutality before Israeli forces could regain control.
Israelis have compared the attack to the Holocaust; Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has described Hamas as “the new Nazis.” In response, the Israel Defense Forces have pursued an open-ended military campaign in Gaza driven by rage and the desire for revenge. Netanyahu promises that the IDF will fight Hamas until it achieves “total victory,” although even his own military has been hard put to define what this means, and U.S. military advisors on the ground have said it is impossible. Worse, as noted in spades in the Israeli press, he has offered no clear idea of what should happen when the fighting stops, other than to assert that Israel must maintain security control of all of Gaza and the West Bank.
If you visit Israel as I have, you come away with one major feeling, despite the public debate over the political use of the Israeli hostages, Netanyahu’s corruption and incompetence, and the growing evidence of the government’s complicity in the Hamas attack.
And that feeling is that the yang to the yin of Israeli exceptionalism is “destruction”. Every enemy Israel has wants to destroy it. They will settle for nothing less. This is true for the Palestinians, the Iranians, the Lebanese. They all have plans for the “destruction of Israel”. Victims above all. You simply cannot exaggerate the foundational importance of this axiom to Israel’s sense of self-validation. At the heart of “Israeliness” lies the notion of “security”. Security means keeping Jews alive. That is the basic consensus and it requires preparing for destruction. If it is about keeping Jews alive then the threat to “Jews” should be perceived as impending, all-encompassing death. In other words, “security” underpins every aspect of life in Israel. It is the ultimate justification. Those who deny Jews security are agents of death. Gaza must be destroyed. The death of Palestinian civilians is “a necessary sacrifice” and it is defensible.
For Palestinians, the Gaza war is the worst event they have experienced in 75 years. Never have so many of them been killed and uprooted since the nakba, the catastrophe that befell them during Israel’s war of independence in 1948, when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were forced to give up their homes and became refugees. Like the Israelis, they also point to terrible acts of violence: by late March, Israel’s military campaign had taken the lives of tens of thousands of Palestinians, among them thousands of children, and rendered well over a million homeless. And the brutality on the West Bank grows every day.
Note to readers: and, no. I do not take the figures issued by the Hamas-controlled Gaza Ministry of Health at face value. Mortality reporting is a crucial indicator of the severity of a conflict setting, but it can also be inflated or under-reported for political purposes. Amidst the ongoing conflict in Gaza, many have indicated sceptisism about the reporting of fatalities by the Gaza Ministry of Health. But there are ways to “separate source” mortality reporting which I will go into later in this series.
As the Palestinians see it, the Israeli offensive is part of a larger plan to incorporate all Palestinian lands into the Jewish state and get them to abandon Gaza entirely — an idea that has in fact been repeated over and over again by multiple members of Netanyahu’s government, even its military, especially individual soldiers in their stream of TikTok posts which the Israeli military let run free.
The Palestinians also hold on to the illusion of return, the principle that they will one day be able to reclaim their historic homes in Israel itself — a kind of Palestinian Zionism that, like Israel’s maximalist aspirations, can never come true.
And from Hamas and its compatriots inside and outside Gaza, you hear and see the same cold disregard for human life – but a belief that Israel has more to lose from the war than Hamas. And that Palestinians are mere pawns for Hamas. In one social media message I read from the Hamas leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar (the message translated for me) he cited civilian losses in national-liberation conflicts in places such as Algeria, where hundreds of thousands of people died fighting for independence from France, saying, “these are necessary sacrifices”.
These are deep, complex mind-sets to be explored in more detail later in this series based on multiple interviews I have conducted with Israelis and Palestinians.
And October 7th marked the beginning of a new economy of war imagery. At first there was a video of a bulldozer plowing through the border fence between Israel and Gaza – an astonishing image, captured in a familiar way.
Then things turned horribly surreal. The events of that day were beamed to the world in real time via body-cam, dashcam, cell phone, drone. A Hamas fighter wearing a GoPro stalked the highway with his automatic rifle jutting up from the bottom of the frame, first-person-shooter style. A dashboard camera showed a car zooming forward as a bullet pierced its windshield and the car began to drift, veering left, until it crashed into the rear end of a parked Toyota; you knew exactly when the person behind the wheel could no longer drive, was probably dead.
A drone floated with cinematic calm over the site of the Supernova music festival, where haphazardly parked and burned-out vehicles stood in for the 364 people killed, not pictured – nearly a third of the estimated 1,163 killed that day. A security camera at a kibbutz showed a man running down the sidewalk and suddenly dropping to the ground from being shot in the head. Dozens of images like this were immediately visible, including livestreamed videos of victims bleeding out on their own Facebook pages, posted by the men who first hijacked their accounts and then shot them on camera. In the weeks that followed they inspired a second order of images: hostage posters, government ads, infographic tiles, and AI-illustrated memes participating in the battle for the sympathy of the West.
Then came the bombardment, and the people of Gaza showed the world what the mainstream media could not: wounded civilians, leveled buildings, long lines of dead bodies wrapped in white sheets, bombed-out universities, bombed-out mosques, toddlers trembling in shock and covered in the gray, ashy dust of debris. Stray cats circling corpses, thousands of people taking shelter in hospitals and schools, or walking with all their belongings down “humanitarian corridors” to “safe zones,” which would later be bombed, too.
As I have noted before, this war’s lasting legacy will not be any geopolitical outcome but the images of innocents we’ve seen, including children, killed in almost every imaginable way. Social media will continue to bludgeon us with a flood of brutal images on a daily basis.
But early on in Israel’s incursion, journalists worried that generative AI and influence technology would proliferate – especially on Elon Musk’s guardrail-free version of Twitter, creating a perfect storm of disinformation. And TikTok right behind it.
One or two episodes seemed to confirm their fears: the deepfake of a Palestinian man leading five children through a bombed-out landscape; the Adobe Stock controversy, in which a number of small news outlets used AI-generated imagery from Adobe’s stock image service without identifying them as fakes.
But on the whole, fake images have played a far, far smaller role than expected. There are simply too many real ones saturating the visual field. Doctored images and disinformation do circulate – the Associated Press actually keeps a running list of debunked claims that favor both Zionist and anti-Zionist narratives – but when it comes to images of suffering from Gaza, the number of distorted or out-of-context images is negligible.
Israel’s social media activity since October 7th has been a crash course in hasbara, Israel’s word for propaganda, or diplomacy, directed at foreign audiences. Literally defined as “explaining” in Hebrew (there is a different word for propaganda), hasbara describes a range of efforts to rationalize Israel’s actions to the world. As Noam Sheizaf wrote in +972 magazine:
Hasbara targets political elites, opinion makers, and the public simultaneously; it includes traditional advocacy efforts as well as more general appeals made through mass media, and it is carried out by government agencies, nongovernmental organizations, lobbying groups, private citizens, students, journalists, and bloggers. The Israeli government encourages all citizens to actively engage in Hasbara.
Yet, it is the manipulation of history, not images, that is the most intriguing.
But the longer the Israeli offensive on Gaza goes on and the worse it gets, the more you read in the Israeli press, and the Russian press, the blunt similarities between Benjamin Netanyahu and Vladimir Putin become very apparent. First of all in Gaza – even more than in Ukraine – there are the systematic strikes on civilian infrastructure to drive the local population to despair.
Then there’s the disregard for fundamental standards of humanitarian law, which has led the International Criminal Court to issue arrest warrants for both the Russian president and the Israeli prime minister.
Yet this doesn’t seem to trouble Joe Biden, whose unconditional support for Israel is based on an explicitly “Zionist” commitment of over half a century. The Russian and Israeli leaders’ biased references to World War II and their aggressive rewriting of such history did not seem to bother or worry anybody during last week’s 80th anniversary of the D-Day Normandy landings.
The invocation of the “Great Patriotic War”, in which 26 million Soviets perished between 1941 and 1945, including 16 million civilians, has become the bedrock of the Kremlin’s ultranationalist, anti-Western propaganda. As Nicolas Werth masterfully demonstrates in his 2022 book Poutine, historien en chef (“Putin, historian in chief”):
Stalin redeemed Lenin’s wrongdoing. By restoring the values of patriotism scorned and rejected by the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, he restored Russia’s imperial grandeur and led to victory in 1945.
Laws heavily penalizing reminders of the collaboration between the USSR and Nazi Germany, from 1939 to 1941, were widely adopted after Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea and then after the invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The aim is to stigmatize the Ukrainian resistance as a bunch of “Nazis” engaged in a veritable “genocide” against the Russian-speaking majority of the Donbas.
As for Netanyahu, he has never had a word to say about the 1933 agreement between the Nazi regime and the Zionist organization, which became the only Jewish movement authorized in Germany at the time. This agreement enabled 53,000 German Jews to emigrate to Palestine. In contrast, he is relentless about equating Palestinian nationalists with Nazis.
Back in 1993, when Israel signed the Oslo Accords with the Palestine Liberation Organization, Netanyahu, then leader of the opposition, drew a dubious parallel with the 1938 Munich Agreement, which annexed part of Czechoslovakia for the benefit of Nazi Germany:
The Arab regimes have embarked on a campaign to persuade the West that the Arab inhabitants of the West Bank, like the Sudeten Germans, are a separate people who deserve the right to self-determination. The Arabs have taken their inspiration directly from the Nazis, as they too often do, to fight Israel.
From Normandy to Gaza
Netanyahu, prime minister from 1996 to 1999 and then from 2009 to 2021, regularly invokes the Munich Agreement to reject any serious negotiations with the PLO. In 2015, however, he took his stigmatization of the Palestinians a step further by claiming, in defiance of the evidence, that it was Hadj Amin al-Husseini, the exiled mufti of Jerusalem, who in 1941 suggested to Adolf Hitler the use of gas chambers. As the French historian Jean-Pierre Filiu notes:
During his interview with French news channel LCI on May 30, Netanyahu dared to compare himself to “De Gaulle and Churchill,” who would no more have had to appear before the Nuremberg tribunal than he would now before the International Criminal Court. He even considers the current offensive in Rafah, despite its terrible human toll, to be “the equivalent of the Normandy landings.” As he explained, “Did people say: ‘We can leave 20% of the Nazi army intact, don’t go back to Berlin?'”
However, it would be misleading to focus just on the incredible nature of such conflations. The essential point is that Putin and Netanyahu, by rewriting the history of World War II in such a scandalous manner, are not only perpetuating propaganda of unprecedented violence.
Because their obsessive references to World War II want you to hark back to a pre-United Nations world. A world that knew neither the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted in 1948, nor the Geneva Conventions of 1949 on, among other things, the protection of civilians in wartime.
A world to which the prolongation of the wars in Ukraine and Gaza dangerously brings us back.
And that has been the challenge (and misery) in writing this series. As I have noted several times before, the poet Archibald MacLeish understood that a world ends when its metaphor has died. At the moment of such a rupture, a new space opens up in place of the shattered status quo. Netanyahu and Putin have shattered all illusions we have had about the “old order” exisiting. It has vanished. We are experiencing such a deep breach today, as a consequence of the convergence of so many breakpoints all at once.
I do not think this confluent rupture will turn out to be a caesura, or pause. It will be a moribund path because we are unable (and unwilling) to seize the opportunity to abandon the patterns that brought us to this point. It would take both hard-headed realism and leaps of imagination to change that. Our society is unwilling to accept such an epochal challenge.
More to come.