Nazi-comparison language about Israeli leaders was mainstream before it became taboo

Evidence

It wasn’t always so. In a new biography of Menachem Begin, Avi Shilon reports that in the 1960s longtime prime minister David Ben-Gurion characterized Begin, himself later to become prime minister, as “Hitlerite” and “racist.” And an open letter to the New York Times damned the Herut Party, founded by Begin in 1948 and a forerunner to the conservative Likud Party today, as emulating “Nazi and Fascist parties.” The letter was signed by, among others, Albert Einstein and Hannah Arendt, firm if not uncritical supporters of Israel both. More recently, by contrast, the forcing by Israeli soldiers at a checkpoint of a Palestinian man to play “a sad song” on the violin he was carrying conjured images among Israeli citizens of Jews forced to play music to accompany mass murder in Nazi camps. And yet the outcry in Israel following publication of this “incident” was less against the humiliation of Palestinians than for desecrating the memory of the Holocaust. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 606

Categorization

• CANDY: That Einstein and Arendt signed a letter comparing Begin’s party to Nazis is a striking light-weight conversational bombshell.
• XREF: Connects to the book’s broader thesis about how racialized discourse and its taboos shift over time. — connects to: Nazi-era speech patterns survive Hitler’s downfall as popular communicative forms — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 993