I’ve been seeing a cartoon going around equating Israel with Nazi Germany. I’ll show an AI-generated response to this article, but the gist of the cartoon image is an Israeli soldier brutalizing a Palestinian while looking in a mirror and seeing a Nazi soldier brutalizing a Jew. It’s captioned, “The irony of becoming what you once hated.”

Here’s my response…. What’s been happening in the West Bank and Gaza is systematic displacement and ethnic cleansing masquerading as collateral damage. Moreover, we Americans are witnessing (and enabling) a government that’s insouciant about having so many unabashed genociders in its ranks. But, as a matter of state policy, that government is not building a vast industrial mechanism to round people up for extermination in busy furnaces.

Israeli war crimes must be called out, and it’s good that more people are paying attention now. But claiming equivalence to the Nazi regime goes too far. Don’t forget that the Jews of Europe did indeed suffer an egregious trauma, which is why so many Israelis today believe themselves to be in an existential struggle with adversaries who claim that the Shoah never happened while simultaneously lamenting that Hitler never finished the job. So the Israelis are profoundly terrified by any hint that anyone wishes to pick up the baton and finish that job themselves.

The mistake of Netanyahu’s most avid enablers is to expect that a ruthless war against Jews and Zionists is inevitable and perpetual. Consequently, they fail to imagine how they could ever have enough security. Instead, they premise their survival on exceeding the determined ruthlessness of their sworn enemies. That helps explain why disproportionate aggression has become their default behavior. It’s a sickness, but not the Nazi kind. The Israelis need to learn to reflect on their own cultural and political pathologies, not someone else’s.