Former Israeli Defense Minister: Israel’s ideology of ‘Jewish supremacy’ resembles Nazi race theory

from Mondoweiss

In the late 1980s, Israeli philosopher Yeshayahu Leibowitz made the controversial warning that the 1967 occupation risked turning Israelis into “Judeo-Nazis.”

Leibowitz recently found a surprising supporter for this opinion –  Former Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon.

On Friday, Ya’alon tweeted that “Yeshayahu Leibowitz was right, and I was wrong”. This was no benign reference – it referred directly to the late professor Leibowitz’s “warnings… concerning the process of bestialization towards us becoming ‘Judeo-Nazis’…”. Ya’alon says that the “ideology of ‘Jewish supremacy’” has become “dominant in the government of Israel”, and that it “is reminiscent of the Nazi race theory”. 

This was said in relation to Ya’alon’s participation in a ceremony to commemorate International Holocaust Remembrance Day on January 27. In his tweet, he repeatedly mocks the commonly held reluctance to compare anything that Israeli Jews do today to what the Nazis did during World War II.

Leibowitz was an ultra-orthodox professor and intellectual, whom the late Israeli President Ezer Weizman eulogized as “one of the greatest figures in the life of the Jewish people and the State of Israel,” and “a spiritual conscience for many in Israel.” Leibowitz was vehemently opposed to Israel’s 1967 occupation and referred to Supreme Court Judge, Meir Landau, as a ‘Judeo-Nazi’ in 1987 after the court had legalized the torture of Palestinians. In the same interview, Leibowitz also referred to the discussion of Israeli democracy as “sterile” and labeled Israel as “the only dictatorship in the enlightened world.”...

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