A worldwide initiative driven by Western experts and talking heads is afoot to silence any comparison between the Zionist entity (i.e. "Israel") and the Nazi German regime of the 1930s-40s. Even in the midst of the current Zionist genocide in Gaza, the comparison draws the ire of Western contemporary mainstream political sensitivities.

This de facto taboo was given immense credence by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) organisation, which claimed, "criticism of Israel similar to that levelled at any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitism". Yet confusingly adds that an example of antisemitism in "public life" is to compare "contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis." This essay argues, at the very least, there is a common denominator which underpins the territorial ambitions of the Nazi German regime and the British Imperial foundations of the contemporary Zionist entity.

Nazi is shorthand for the National Socialist German Workers Party. For most of their existence, the Nazis were led by Adolf Hitler, who became leader of Germany in 1933. He led the Nazi German regime into a European war in 1939. In 1941, having militarily vanquished most of western Europe, Poland and Czechoslovakia, and chased the British Army out of the mainland continent, Germany launched Operation Barbarossa, a three-pronged attack aimed at militarily subduing the Soviet Union (SU).

German military units aimed to simultaneously attack and occupy Leningrad (today’s St. Petersburg), Moscow and Kiev in Ukraine (then part of the SU). Over 90 per cent of the German land army during World War Two was dedicated to the crushing & occupation of eastern Europe and Russia. The vision and territorial ambition of the Nazis was to create a German Empire, the so-called Third Reich, on the backs of occupied eastern Europe and specifically Russia.

The historian Mark Mazower, in his history of Europe, Dark Continent, claims that, "…it is not possible to consider Hitler’s continental ambitions without seeing them in the context of European imperialism overseas." Specifically, Hitler was in awe of the British Empire. Mazower claims that "Hitler’s imagination was captured by the example of the British Empire." This is further corroborated by another historian, Niall Ferguson, who states that Hitler "repeatedly expressed his admiration of British imperialism." As such, according to the author Sven Lindqvist, in his seminal, Exterminate all the Brutes, Hitler was so captivated by the European Empire’s in other parts of the world, that he wanted to establish a "continental equivalent" of the British Empire.

The reason behind Nazi Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union was to reduce it to a state of vassalage at the behest of the German Empire, the Third Reich. The ultimate aim was to ‘enslave’ the Russian population on the basis of how Hitler perceived the British Empire had ‘enslaved’ Indians for the previous 200 years. "What India was for England" declared the Nazi Führer, "the territories of Russia will be for us." For Hitler, the British occupation of India was the blueprint. As such, Hitler believed the wealth of Britain was "the result…of the capitalist exploitation of the three hundred and fifty million slaves."

Like the British Empire, Hitler’s Reich was not limited to territorial exploitation. A central pillar of Nazi ideology was the concept of "Lebensraum" which partly means establishing living space for Germans outside of Germany. By violently ethnically cleansing Eastern Europe and an occupied Russia of the majority of populations through mass slaughter and genocides, the Nazis thought that they would provide a colonial outlet for surplus German population. This in turn, would mean, in theory at least, amelioration of the social-economic tensions on the home front with some members of the ‘pure’ German race moving away to pastures new to colonise the newly occupied territory.

With regard to the existing populations in these newly acquired pastures, they would be subdued, if not eliminated altogether. Obviously, this idea is as old as modern colonialism itself. Modern European colonial history is replete with examples of how they landed on some unsuspecting area in Africa, South America or Asia only for the indigenous populations to be eventually subdued, if not eliminated, and their resources forcefully extracted to the benefit of a given imperial metropole such as London, Paris, Amsterdam, etc.

Whereas the other European Empires belittled and dehumanised the indigenous populations of the Americas, Africans, and Indians, the Nazi racial ideology compelled them to believe and view the Slavic peoples of Eastern European, as well as minorities such as Jewish and Roma, as racially inferior and indeed unworthy of human existence.

The Nazis, in effect, flipped the script. Whereas the modern colonial European powers established their empires across the globe in South America, Asia, Africa, the Nazis aimed to establish their Empire, the Third Reich, with its attendant genocides and slaughters, in Eastern Europe.

As Hitler was gearing towards his war on the European continent, in 1937, the future British leader, Winston Churchil,l glowingly endorsed European colonial power in Asia and Africa and its attendant genocides. At the Peel Commission for Palestine, Churchill stated that,

"I do not admit that the dog in the manger has the final right to the manger, even though he may have lain there for a very long time...I do not admit, for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America, or the black people of Australia...I do not think the Red Indians had any right to say, ‘The American Continent belongs to us and we are not going to have any of these European settlers coming in here’. They had not the right, nor had they the power."

Churchill had been asked his opinion about the Palestinian Arab uprising and resistance against the British Empire’s occupation of Palestine in April 1936. His remark encapsulates the spirit of racist genocidal Europeans. There is no doubt whatsoever that Hitler would have found this statement controversial. Indeed, he would’ve wholeheartedly carried it with him as he unleashed Operation Barbarossa on Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. As Mazower writes, "Expulsion and colonisation, extermination and social provision were the two sides of the same imperial Nazi coin."

Churchill was justifying the subjugation of the Palestinian population during the British occupation, otherwise known as the British Mandate. Britain was awarded the Mandate by the League of Nations, predecessor of the United Nations, which the victors of World War One dominated. The Mandate’s central remit was "for putting into effect the declaration originally made on November 2nd, 1917, by the Government of His Britannic Majesty, and adopted by the said Powers, in favour of the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people…" The declaration the Mandate speaks of is famously known as the Balfour Declaration, issued by the British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour and addressed to Lord Lionel Walter Rothschild, the senior Jewish peer, for him to pass its message onto the Zionist Federation, the British wing of the Zionist movement.

The political ideology of Zionism was founded by Theodor Herzl, a Viennese Jewish journalist and lawyer who looked to solve the age long discrimination faced by European Jewish people by establishing a country to which European Jewish people can immigrate, settle in and colonise. Rashid Khalidi, in his book, The Hundred Years War on Palestine, has argued that, "[b]efore securing British backing, the Zionist movement had been a colonising project in search of a great power patron". With Britain issuing the Balfour Declaration, this project became a reality, and in the words of Khalidi, the movement became "the coddled step-child of British colonialism" from 1917 onwards. When the Declaration was issued, the population of Palestine was 700,000 Arab, Muslim and Christian and possibly 60,000 Jewish.

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A year after the Mandate was officially awarded to the British Empire, Arthur Balfour, David Lloyd George, then British Prime Minister, in a meeting with Chaim Weizmann, leader of the Zionist movement in the UK, instructed the then Colonial Secretary Winston Churchill that "he mustn’t give representative Government to Palestine." In this same meeting, both Balfour and Lloyd George confirmed to Weizmann that by Jewish National Home they actually "meant an eventual Jewish State."

In other words, the expression "Jewish National Home" was simply a mealy mouthed way of saying a Zionist-colonial entity over the backs of the indigenous Palestinian population as Balfour was later to say, "..In Palestine, we do not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country…" because Zionism, "be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long tradition, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land." Balfour, like Churchill, saw the indigenous Palestinian population as unworthy of their country, just as Hitler saw the Slavic, Jewish and Roma populations as unworthy of theirs.

The Guardian newspaper gave voice to why the British Empire issued the Balfour Declaration and its attendant Zionist-colonial project when it editorialised that "Palestine has a special importance for Great Britain because in the hands of a hostile Power, it can be made…a secure base which a land attack on Egypt can be organised…" Therefore, it is in Britain’s interest that "no Power should be seated in Palestine" that "is likely to be hostile" to the British Empire.

Much of the British Empire’s plunder (i.e. "trade") of India and eastern Africa was coming through the Egyptian Suez Canal. Therefore, a hostile power (i.e. an independent power) could pose a threat to a very important imperial life line. As the left-wing New Statesman magazine bluntly stated, the "special interest of the British Empire in Palestine is due to the proximity of the Suez Canal." The only obvious conclusion is then to imperatively "effect a Zionist restoration under British auspices."

Recently in the New York Times, Professor of Modern Middle History at the University of Oxford, Eugene Rogan, argued that at "the time of the Balfour Declaration…Britain had a worldwide empire, which in 1917, they could not imagine losing…." Rogan claims that Britain’s backing for the Balfour Declaration "was less moral than strategic". Rogan further adds that the British were "seeking a client community in Palestine that would prevent the territory from falling into enemy hands. London feared the territory could be used as a launchpad for attacks on the Suez Canal, which was then controlled by Britain."

By the time of the Arab Revolt in 1936, European Zionists-colonialists had immigrated to Palestine in their hundreds of thousands. The Zionist-Jewish population had expanded to at least 380,000 under the British Empire’s auspices. The Palestinians had tried to bring an end to Britain’s Zionist colonial project via peaceful means, but the Empire refused and rejected their pleas. The Colonial Secretary in this period, William Ormsby-Gore, declared in parliament in June 1936 that:

"…The Arabs demand a complete stoppage of all Jewish immigration, a complete stoppage of all sales of land, and the transfer of the Government of Palestine…to what they call a National Government responsible to an elected democratic assembly. Those are their three demands, and quite frankly, those demands cannot possibly be conceded."

It is on this basis that over the next three years, British colonial power visited death and destruction on the indigenous Palestinians and their resistance, while simultaneously empowering the newly arrived European Zionist colonial settlers. The Balfour Declaration spoke of the British government using its "best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object" i.e. of a Jewish "national home". One could argue that these "best endeavours" is what Dr. Matthew Hughes outlines in his book, Britain’s Pacification of Palestine.

He defines pacification as "the use of violence to achieve a political purpose…but the primary target is the subject, [the] occupied population…". Strangely, Hughes doesn’t mention the Balfour Declaration in his book, but he does provide a wealth of detail of the methods used by the British Empire to subjugate the Palestinians for the benefit of its Zionist-colonial project in Palestine. It hunted down resistance leaders, demolished their properties, and "obsessively" disarmed Palestinians. Britain introduced the taking of Palestinian hostages and using them as human shields on cars, trains and buildings. At one stage, they used the Mayor of Nablus as a human shield on a building.

Britain further introduced concentration camps from South Africa and open cages to herd entire Palestinian villagers thought to be sympathetic with the resistance. At one point in his study, Hughes states that, the Empire, "inflicted horrible abuses – beating men to death, leaving them to die in wired cages in the sun, illegally executing people, blowing up villagers trapped in vehicles on mines, torturing and whipping people…" A practice associated with the Zionist regime today of forcing Palestinians to demolish their own houses was introduced by Britain in the 1930s. Sadistic torture, both physical and sexual, was introduced by the British Army and Police, such as dangling Palestinian hostages upside down and urinating into the captive’s nostrils.

These and many other methods were used by Britain’s colonial forces to subjugate and disempower the indigenous Palestinian population, while crucially, at the same time, it empowered Zionist colonial settlers. As Hughes writes, Britain armed, "Jewish supernumerary police and auxiliary forces…and [trained] Jewish soldiers, many of whom became later cadres of Israel’s armed forces." Future Zionist settlers such as Moshe Dayan and Yigal Allon were trained by Britain to kill, torture and whip Palestinians during these years. It is no surprise then that a Zionist historian claims that the notion of the "Jewish warrior – as a cultural and social model and as a fact of life – emerged during the Arab rebellion." 

Hughes correctly states that the main beneficiaries of the British Empire’s pacification of Palestine, or as the Balfour Declaration states, the exercise of the Empire’s "best endeavours," were Zionist colonialists because the "British Army had inadvertently done the Jews’ work for them…Jews played the minor part during the revolt, participating with auxiliary forces alongside British troops…but their community benefitted the most politically and militarily from the fighting." (Obviously, this author disagrees with the notion that Britain was "inadvertently" assisting Zionist colonialists or that Zionists were merely "participating," i.e. not being trained. Indeed, Zionist-colonialists were Britain’s proteges).

As such, when the 1947-48 war came round the Zionist-colonialists successfully ethnically cleansed most of Palestine of its indigenous population because the British Empire had done most of the foundational military work "before the war had even started." This dovetails neatly with what the Palestinian revolutionary, Ghassan Kanafani, argues that the 1947-8 war was simply the Zionists-colonialists plucking "the fruits of the defeat of the 1936 revolt, which the outbreak of [World] war had prevented it from doing sooner."

To use Churchill’s terminology, Russia or specifically the Soviet Union, had the "power" to repel the Nazi colonial project, the Third Reich, whereas the Palestinians lacked the power to repel the British Zionist-colonial project. The failed colonialism of the Nazis was based on establishing a new empire, the Third Reich. The foundational colonialism of the Zionist-Jewish people was initially based on securing the interests of the British Empire.

In the process of creating a Nazi Empire, Hitler pursued eliminationist policies whereby millions were slaughtered to pave the way for a future Third Reich. Whereas the British Empire pursued the complete pacification of the indigenous population of Palestine to establish its Zionist-colonial project. As Operation Barbarossa was on the front foot and looked like it was on the verge of victory, Mahatma Gandhi gave a speech in April 1941 where he declared that, "Hitlerism and Churchillism are in fact the same thing…the difference is only one of degree." And with hindsight, another major difference is that Hitler failed, whereas the British Empire succeeded in laying the foundations of the Zionist-colonial project in Palestine.   

It is quite clear that a certain aspect of the IHRA working definition of anti-Semitism lacks historical literacy. The IHRA’s definition doesn’t consider both the global historical context of the emergence of the Nazis as led by Adolf Hitler, and also how Zionism became manifest in the hands of the British Empire during its occupation of Palestine. British politicians who pushed through with implementing the Balfour Declaration, such as David Lloyd-George and Winston Churchill, were unabashed racist colonial imperialists who thought the world belonged to them, and Hitler was partly inspired by their Empire in his territorial ambitions.

Much of the denial that Zionism is a colonial project is based on the minimising or eliding of the role played by the British Empire in creating the Zionist entity ("Jewish National Home") from 1917 onwards and which officially came into existence in May 1948. From the other end, IHRA doesn’t seem to factor into its working definition of anti-Semitism that the reason most of the millions of deaths and genocides the Nazis perpetuated in World War Two was in order to establish a colonial German Empire in Eastern Europe. On this basis, there is no harm in the IHRA revisiting its working definition of anti-Semitism.