It has long been considered offensive and antisemitic to draw comparisons between Nazi Germany and Israel, but on the specific question of Israel’s genocide in Gaza and its wars of expansion, including the war on Iran, the dam has broken.
Norman Finkelstein, the eminent American Jewish scholar and son of Holocaust survivors, drew the direct comparison between Hitler’s war in the east and the war launched by Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu on Iran on 28 February in a recent Middle East Eye interview.
I have long thought the comparison is merited, for a number of reasons, beginning in 2023 with the start of the war on Gaza.
Like Hitler's Germany, Israel's leaders made the fatal error of not knowing when to stop, and opening up several fronts - seven at one point. Each tactical victory - against Hamas, then Hezbollah, encouraged further audacious attacks. Having waged a genocidal campaign in Gaza, colonial expansion in the West Bank, and relentless attacks on Lebanon, Syria and Yemen, Prime Minister Netanyahu turned to Iran in 2025.
Why? A messianic ideology of Jewish supremacy that drives the prime minister and the settler politicians on whom he depends. The politics of ethnonationalism, territorial expansion and hyper militarism are similar, if not identical, to the ideology of the Second World War fascist axis led by Nazi Germany. And this ideology of ethnic supremacy leads to overreach.
Trump, as a white nationalist who believes in US exceptionalism, shares the same inflated belief in unlimited US power, but is less unequivocally bent on permanent war. (Trump bears some comparison with Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, whose record of failed imperial adventures more closely resembles Trump's.)
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