Several weeks ago Israeli soldiers, searching for resistance fighters/terrorists in the occupied West Bank, rounded up a few hundred Palestinian men in Tulkaram refugee camp and, in order to process them for interrogation, wrote numbers on their arms in magic marker.

The episode received some media coverage for a day or so, prompting pro forma outrage from Yasser Arafat at (in his words) this "new nazi racism," reminiscent of the Jewish Holocaust. It is referred to, with obvious disapproval, in the left-wing Israeli op-ed piece excerpted below: "Jews, it seems, are allowed everything.... They can shrug off as a 'technical mistake' an army officer's order to write numbers on the arms of Palestinian prisoners." The Ha'aretz journalist, appreciating the historical resonance of the act, believes of course that writing numbers on prisoners' arms was much more than a mere "technical mistake." It was nazi-like, and hence indefensible.

During World War II Germans tattooed numbers on the arms of interned Jews, and now sixty years later Jews are writing numbers on the arms of captured Palestinians. The event is therefore on its face nazi-like, with IDF soldiers playing Aryan oppressors and the brown-skinned natives playing persecuted Jews. Yet it is modern-day "nazism" without much consequence -- a number written in magic marker washes off.

I'm sure the IDF thought they were being sensible: Writing "Ali Abu Abdullah Mustafa" on a prisoner's arm would take more time than writing "221." But the IDF were indeed wrong, and Israel received some bad PR as a result, her military appearing as jack-booted thugs mistreating powerless persons of color. [Image: Third World delegates denounce Zionism at the 2001 UN Anti-Racism Conference in Durban, South Africa.]

Was writing numbers on prisoners' arms in itself wicked? Of course not. Was it just a little bit nazi-like? Yes, it was. And just a little bit nazi-like means very bad, conjuring up memories of old nazi evil. Because NS Germany's persecution of Jews has become history's greatest crime, with a Holocaust museum on every street corner to commemorate its unique wickedness, anything that resembles German National Socialism, however faintly and however innocuously, can be similarly characterized.

Our fear of opposing Third World immigration on racial and even on cultural grounds derives in large part from the power of the nazi allusion and from the steadily escalating post-war campaign against "racism," a campaign led by Jews in a thus far successful attempt to delegitimize the Western nation state. NS Germany wanted a racially homogenous Aryan nation; anyone who opposes more racial heterogeneity is therefore nazi-like. Issues like Third World immigration, which should be debated on their merits, are instead surrounded by unmistakable echoes from events (and alleged events) sixty years ago in Europe.

Consider Jewish reaction to Pat Buchanan's presidential campaign. Buchanan, no right-wing radical but simply an old-fashioned conservative, wants a moratorium on immigration and a reduction in foreign aid, including aid to Israel. In Jewish eyes those positions make him a dangerous nazi: "Let there be no mistake about it. Pat Buchanan is a classic anti-Semite with fascist leanings who hates Israel and loves Nazi war criminals" (Dershowitz); "out of the slime of the sewers and into the filth of the gutter a desperate Patrick J. Buchanan, the neo-Nazi, has crawled into the political arena using anti-Semitism as his principal device to secure a future for himself" (Adelson).

Jews are an intelligent people, but in their blind ethnocentrism they are morally stupid, incapable of understanding the basis of criticism directed against them. Few can grasp that the elevation of their wartime racial persecution into an unprecedented cosmic evil, a political mythology which they have been assiduously constructing since the Eichmann trial, is now beginning to work against them, at least with respect to Israel, their beloved Jewish state. In the conflict between Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs, there is no doubt which side looks more nazi-like. [Image: Defenseless Palestinian woman confronts an Israeli bulldozer on the illegally occupied West Bank.]

It is the Holocaust, to paraphrase Deborah Lipstadt, that really gives "racism" its bad name. Jewish defenders of Israeli apartheid ("separate development") live in a glass house, so they're unwise to throw stones. Jews should -- but won't -- learn the lesson of the UN "anti-racism" conference in Durban, where angry anti-colonialist activists, applying "anti-racism" against its Jewish inventors, condemned Zionism as "racism" and carried placards overlapping the Star of David with the Swastika. Diaspora Jews never expected that "anti-racism" would eventually be turned against other Jews. They thought it could only punish us, and they were mistaken.

Israel, with a Jews-only immigration policy and a clearly racialist definition of its national character, is beyond any doubt the most nazi-like state on earth.

At left: captive Jewish boy from the Warsaw Ghetto marches off, in 1943, to an uncertain fate -- a widely circulated image of Jewish victimhood that became an iconic Holocaust photograph. Like most interned Jews, the famed "Ghetto Boy" (Tsvi Nussbaum) emerged unscathed from World War II. He eventually emigrated from Israel to the United States. At right: captive Palestinian boy brutalized by armed (and nazi-like) IDF soldiers.

[Ha'aretz - Tel Aviv - 4 April 2002]: The Israeli liberal left was quick to join the chorus of protests against Nobel Literature laureate Jose Saramago for drawing a comparison between the situation in Ramallah and the Auschwitz death camp. Gentiles who liken Jews to Nazis or to collaborators with the Nazis are denounced -- justly so -- as anti-Semites. Some even wrote that Saramago had made Israelis fair play for assailants with his comments.

Jews, it seems, are allowed everything. That includes the liberty of likening Jews to Israel's worst enemies, while at the same time whining about those who liken Jews to Israel's worst enemies. They can foment a disturbance against the playing of Wagner as an encore to those in the audience who want to stay and hear it. They can also shrug off as a "technical mistake" an army officer's order to write numbers on the arms of Palestinian prisoners.

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