Netanyahu Plays Goebbels
His language betrays his genocidal intent
These days, reports about Israel’s annihilation of Gaza and its population seemingly cannot do without the obligatory quote by Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu that “total victory” is the only option for Israel going forward. He has been saying so repeatedly, including in , , , and . While the Hebrew phrase has also been translated as “absolute” or “complete victory,” the prime minister’s Instagram account uses “total victory.” Judging by the Financial Times’ headline that “War on Hamas unites Israelis in quest for ‘total victory’,” the vast majority of Israelis seem to agree with their prime minister, though the article provides only minimal anecdotal evidence in support of that claim. Meanwhile, , John Bolton, an American with a long, distinguished career as warmonger, left no doubt about his favoring “total victory” in an opinion piece for The Telegraph titled “The two-state solution is dead. Israel must achieve total victory.”
To me, the use of the phrase “total victory” is extremely troubling for its historical associations. In German, total victory is der totale Sieg, which reminds of and even rhymes with der totale Krieg. The latter phrase is the more infamous one, seeing that it is the topic of Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels’ speech in Berlin’s Sportpalast. The speech is noteworthy in part because Goebbels almost came out publicly for the Ausr… Ausschaltung of Jews—stopping himself just barely from saying Ausrottung, that is, extermination, and switching to Ausschaltung, elimination, instead. But the moment that turned the speech into one of the more notorious events of the Third Reich comes towards the end when Goebbels calls out to the audience, asking whether they want total war, and the crowd ecstatically agrees.
Now, my associating totaler Sieg with totaler Krieg is no accident. If you look at the text of Goebbels’ speech, he is careful to introduce total victory as part of his case for total war. It provides the very goal and justification for total war. Unfortunately, that particular passage is sloppily translated in the English version and doesn’t even use “victory.” But even if one missed the introduction of total victory, the frenzy of Goebbels’ calls and audience responses towards the end leaves little doubt. He starts the back-and-forth with: “Glaubt Ihr mit dem Führer und mit uns an den endgültigen totalen Sieg des deutschen Volkes?” That is: “Do you join the Führer and us in believing in the final total victory of the German people?” By his fifth question the crowd is in a frenzy. So when he asks: “Wollt Ihr den totalen Krieg?” or “Do you want total war?” the crowd goes ballistic in response. The implication is clear as well: Total victory requires total war.
That implication still holds, even if Netanyahu and others assiduously avoid mentioning total war nowadays. The very concept of total victory demands total war. After all, the totality of victory also is the totality of an enemy’s defeat. But how can one be really sure that the enemy is totally defeated, especially when the enemy is known to hide in the crowd, also in tunnels underground, only to suddenly, sneakily attack? There is only one reliable answer: Killing every single member of Hamas. But how can one be really sure that all members of Hamas have been killed when they hide in the crowd, also in tunnels underground? Again, there is only one reliable answer: Treating all Palestinians in Gaza as likely members of Hamas and also destroying all underground tunnels.
If that sounds a bit much to you, consider what senior members of Netanyahu’s government have been saying: Months before the pogrom, the national security minister called for the killing of “thousands” of Palestinians in the West Bank. Since the pogrom, the agriculture minister welcomed “Gaza’s Nakba,” using the Arabic equivalent to Shoah, catastrophe, the heritage minister suggested dropping a nuclear bomb onto Gaza, and the finance minister called for the creation of “sterile” zones. Netanyahu himself reminded the public of Amalek, a nation in Scripture that, after attacking the Israelites, was fully razed from Earth—with יהוה’s blessing nonetheless.
Now, against that backdrop, look at facts on the ground in Gaza. Alas, since Israel also controls much of the information flow out of Gaza, we need to leverage satellite imagery to see the devastation. Residential homes, universities, mosques, hospitals, streets, power plants, desalination plants, wastewater treatment plants, farmland, and even cemeteries. They all have been bombed and bulldozed. Again, even farmland and cemeteries are being systematically leveled. The devastation is near total in the North. In the South, Rafah is still, kind-of standing. It also is where most Gazans are subsisting in tent cities, after having been driven out of their homes and, for many, out of their first, second, and third refuge as well. Meanwhile Netanyahu has already announced his intent to turn Rafah into rubble, too—after displacing civilians yet again to 15 tent cities along the coast.
As a German living in the United States, I am incensed by both countries’ governments, which blithely deny the obvious: This is not a “normal” war, this is total war and the results are near total destruction, obscene numbers of civilian casualties, almost 29,000 so far, rampant disease and hunger. All of this is intentional. We heard Netanyahu: He is going for total victory. He is committed to total war. He is committing genocide. If Germany or the United States were true friends of Israel, they would go out of their way to stop Israel from doing what it is doing. In fact, they would do everything in their power to stop this war because friends don’t let friends commit genocide. Instead they approve record arms exports to Israel and provide hands-on military aid. That makes the United States and Germany complicit in genocide. And since I am a tax payer in the US, I’m complicit, too.
The fact that Jews were the targets of one of the most atrocious crimes in history, the industrialized extermination of a people, does not change that Israel, the world’s only Jewish state, is currently committing genocide. Many people seemingly cannot imagine that the descendants of survivors from one catastrophe would one day become the perpetrators of another catastrophe. Hence Andrew Sullivan lists many of the same statements and facts only to declare that “this is not genocide” and that “the charge of genocide seems to me inflammatory, even grotesque.” I find it curious that Sullivan would use “grotesque” to describe a reasonable assessment about the war in Gaza but not for the total war effort itself. Still, I readily acknowledge that the Shoah is in a different league of evil. But that hardly makes a difference to the 29,000 dead Gazans and their surviving families, who have lost everything besides maybe a bag full of belongings. It is telling that even Sullivan describes the devastation in Gaza as worse than that of Coventry and Dresden, two of the cities worst impacted by WWII, because Gazans have nowhere to escape, that even Sullivan writes of ethnic cleansing.
Meanwhile justifications for the current catastrophe have become so hollow and inhuman to be risible. There is the deeply cynical trope that Hamas, by hiding within and under the civilian population, is forcing Israel’s hand and the Israeli Defense Forces cannot but go through them. That’s the equivalent of arguing—if Gaza was a bank, Hamas were bank robbers, and the civilian population hostages—to first shoot every single hostage dead, so that the police can more easily take out the bank robbers. Worse are the appeals to Jewish victimhood. After South Africa submitted its case to the International Court of Justice, Netanyahu used a press conference on to blast Hamas as “the new Nazis,” while holding up an Arabic translation of Hitler’s Mein Kampf (see above), and accusing everyone else including South Africa but excluding, presumably, himself of not having learned the lessons from the Shoah. Yet he is the one using Goebbels’ warmongering and dehumanizing language to justify the total war he is literally leading.
Alas, the world hasn’t learned the lessons from the Shoah. The banality of evil is that every single one of us is capable of terrible crimes against humanity. We all are capable of slouching towards genocide. Netanyahu and his posse of far right extremists have already proven they are more than capable. Hamas are at least as capable and quite a bit more craven when they murder ravers at a music festival, when they brutally violate women before murdering them, and when they hold civilians as hostages. But then again, Netanyahu left Hamas in power because they provided the cover he needed for rejecting a Palestinian state and continuing to grow illegal settlements in the West Bank. Netanyahu also ignored emphatic warnings that Hamas was about to strike because he was busy dismantling Israeli democracy. So who is more craven here? I’m genuinely not sure.
This madness must stop. We need somebody with credibility to step up to the plate and set a sign that is hard to ignore. Unfortunately, some of the institutions that might have been able to do so in the past, including the United States and the United Nations, are too compromised to do so now. In my mind, that somebody might be Yad Vashem, Israel’s memorial to the Shoah. They should declare that, henceforth, they will devote all their prestige and resources to documenting the Nakba as much as the Shoah and to tracing the history from both catastrophes to the current one. That acknowledgment of traumatic suffering just might provide the foundation for future understanding and reconciliation, even if it takes a couple of generations. Alas, with a leader who used to represent settlers and an official policy of staying out of politics, I fear that Yad Vashem are content to offer historically accurate horror shows for school classes on day trips. That would be a crying shame. The lessons from the Shoah require action. Now!