In 1939, Nazi sympathizers rallied in New York. Will history look back on today’s anti-Israel rallies with the same scorn?
Protesters burned a placard representing an Israeli flag with a Nazi swastika inside the Star of David during a rally in support of Palestinians outside the Israeli Consulate in Istanbul earlier this month. Photo by OZAN KOSE/AFP via Getty Images
These are the words of New York Times columnist Bret Stephens, about a pro-Palestinian rally he recently witnessed in midtown Manhattan:
“What I saw was giddiness and gloating, as if someone’s team had won the World Cup. Hamas had perpetrated the largest single-day massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, and the crowd was euphoric.”
Those who have taken the opportunity of Hamas’ recent massacre of Israeli civilians to criticize Israel — and, in many cases, to celebrate the killing of Jewish men, women and children, including infants and the elderly — likely think of World War II as ancient history. It’s likely that many of them have never met a Holocaust survivor. And certainly few, if any, of the placard-bearers and slogan-shouters denouncing Israel were alive in 1939.
That year, on Feb. 20, a “pro-American” rally was held at Madison Square Garden in midtown Manhattan. It was sponsored by the German American Bund, an organization that was openly supportive of Adolf Hitler and the rise of fascism in Europe.
More than 20,000 people attended. Many wore Nazi armbands and held aloft posters with slogans like “Stop Jewish Domination of Christian America.” Official rally personnel wore uniforms similar to those being worn by Nazi soldiers across the ocean.
At one point, an unarmed young Jewish man who had infiltrated the rally rushed onstage to try to speak. He was seized and viciously beaten by attendees before police took him away.
History, I suspect, will see some of the angry current “pro-Palestinian” rallies at which Israel has been vilified in a somewhat similar light to how we today look at that “pro-American” rally supporting the Third Reich. Certainly, there isn’t a precise parallel there: The scale of the Nazi threat to humanity and Jews alike was arguably greater than that of Islamic terrorist groups today. But it was eerie to see a young person in a widely circulated photo of one recent anti-Israel rally proudly brandishing the image of a swastika on her phone.
Both the 1939 and 2023 rallies were intended to promote what their respective supporters considered a high ideal — white supremacy in the first case, “anti-apartheid” in the latter. Both were permeated with Jew-hatred. And both also ignored inconvenient facts.
Like, in 1939, the expulsion of Jews in Germany from the professions and commercial life, and the arrests and internment of thousands of Jews in concentration camps in the aftermath of Kristallnacht. And, in 2023, the fact that, in stark contrast to oft-touted accusations that Israel is an “apartheid state” — a reference to South Africa’s racist system of institutionalized segregation from 1948 to the early 1990s — Israeli law and practice ensure the equal treatment of all the country’s citizens, Jewish and Arab alike.
Israel’s independent courts and free press champion Israeli Arab rights. Its High Court includes Arab Christian and Muslim justices, including one Arab Muslim justice who sits on the court today. The courts have struck down legislation that would have allowed the state to expropriate private Palestinian land where settler homes have been built. Israeli Arab citizens serve as judges, ambassadors, legislators, journalists and academics. Not to mention that Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, includes an Islamist Arab political party.
There are limitations on movement and access to certain resources for residents of the Israeli-occupied West Bank, but Israel, citing terrorist entities located in the territory and attacks on its citizens by some West Bank residents, sees such measures as necessary.
And, as to Gaza, Israel dismantled its final settlements there in 2005, evacuated its army, and handed control of the territory over to its Palestinian residents. By 2007, Hamas had taken control of Gaza, and officials of the opposing Fatah faction were either taken as prisoners, expelled or executed.
Since then, Hamas has ruled Gazans with an iron hand. Funds and material donated by various countries, intended for the betterment of residents’ lives, have routinely been hijacked to build rockets and tunnels from which to attack Israel. Terrible death and destruction have resulted from Hamas’ attacks on Israel — not just for Israelis, but also for the Palestinians Hamas governs, whom the terrorist group intentionally puts at risk by situating its operations in tunnels under major civilian structures.
Executions of Gazan citizens for things like land sales to Israelis, real or imagined acts of treason, and for an assortment of “crimes against Islamic law,” have taken place with some regularity.
If the anti-Israel protesters don’t know all these facts and history, their hatred is born of ignorance. And if they are in fact aware of all the pertinent facts, their hatred is no different from those of the attendees of the Madison Square Garden gathering in 1939. Hatred, that is, of Jews.
Future historians, I suspect, will note that fact.
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