This observation hit a nerve and was spread around Zionist circles online, becoming somewhat notorious. One day, while I was doing political agitation over Israel’s genocide in Gaza at an elite state university, a young Jewish student refused a leaflet. When I asked why, she screamed in my face something to the effect of “I know you—you’re one of those ‘Jews are Nazis’ people,” and stormed away.

This quote crossed my mind—and would not leave it—as I read Nicholas Kristof’s New York Times piece “The Silence That Meets The Rape of Palestinians.” Kristof heard stories from 14 different people of being blindfolded, anally and/or vaginally raped (in some cases repeatedly), with some people now unable to normally move their bowels and forced to use an external bag for their feces. Men’s penises were squeezed and often zip-tied for hours, with permanent damage in some cases. People should read this, to confront what is being done in our names.

It is true that over the years, Kristof has adopted a standard of almost uniformly believing allegations of rape and abuse which, as a method, guts the need for due process and the rule of law. But in the matter of Israeli rape of prisoners, there is mountains of evidence with similar allegations being made by Palestinian organizations, by United Nations organizations, by reputable Israeli human rights organizations like B’Tselem, as well as by Israeli newspapers and online journals like Haaretz and +972.

In one notorious incident, in August 2024, a video was leaked to the media of Israeli soldiers gang raping a prisoner. The abuse was so severe that the prisoner was hospitalized and unable to walk afterwards. Several soldiers were arrested, with five facing charges. 

But there was not a societal outrage against the twisted depravity of these soldiers. Instead, there was a mass uproar against their prosecution and an outcry about finding the leaker. There were riots from hundreds of Israelis trying to find and free the soldiers at a prison and military base. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich called these thugs “heroic warriors.” It turns out the leaker was Israel's top military lawyer, who was later forced to resign. After all that, the recording of the vicious rape was deemed prejudicial to the cases of the accused. In March of this year, Israel dropped its prosecution entirely and the soldiers were let go.

Moreover, the Times itself had carefully documented Kristof’s reporting—no doubt wary of anything on this particular issue that could damage their reputation and leave them open for libel. (Not unexpectedly, Netanyahu promptly did threaten a suit against them.)¹

Blood Libel

Netanyahu’s main line of attack was to accuse Kristof and the Times of “blood libel.” So, what does that term refer to?

Actually, it goes way back, over 900 years ago, when a priest in England claimed that a little boy who disappeared had been kidnapped and murdered by the local Jews in order to use his blood in Passover ceremonies. The local townspeople hanged a Jew in retaliation. This kind of thing—with no basis in fact—spread through England and then Europe, sometimes resulting in multiple lynchings. It was a “convenient” way to keep the Jewish population terrorized and intimidated—serving a role not unsimilar to that of lynching Black people in the U.S. in the decades following the Civil War on similarly trumped-up, and often sexualized, charges.

Netanyahu’s response not only serves to dismiss any investigation or even legal proceeding out of hand, it shifts the onus onto the accuser. Now the person bringing well-documented atrocities to light is, by announcement of the head of state, actually repeating age-old slanders against the Jewish community, slanders that are both clearly absurd and historically extremely dangerous. Historic oppression is evoked… not in the cause of justice for all oppressed peoples, but to justify the current horrific oppression committed by the formerly oppressed.

So the fascist hard-core of Netanyahu’s base takes on the cloak of victimhood and becomes emboldened by the assurance that no matter what they do, their leader will defend them. Revenge becomes ever more twisted and ever more defended. The Palestinians, bereft of justice or defense and under threat if they dare to testify, become further silenced, demoralized and intimidated. The highest office of the land affirms once again that not only will those Jews who are accused of such crimes be defended, but the accusations themselves will become the stuff of even worse horrors and atrocities. Those Israeli Jews who persist in demanding basic justice for Palestinians—and there are some—become targets of community anger and isolation.

But the first casualty, to paraphrase an old saying, is the truth.

Never Again

There is a further dimension to this. In the wake of truly horrific murder of six million (!) Jews in World War 2, the slogan “Never Again” became widespread in the Jewish community. Some meant “never again will the Jewish people suffer this fate”—with the unspoken assumption that anything in service of that goal, no matter how cruel or vile, was justified.

Others took a different tack: “Never Again” must mean “never again must any people suffer this fate—and we must make it our mission to prevent that.” This was the belief I was raised in and why I feel a special responsibility to demand: not in my name!

But it’s not just me. I remember well the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and the Israeli survivors of the Nazi Holocaust pointing out that the same names they had been called—“two-legged rats”—were now being hurled against the Palestinians in Lebanon… this time by Jews. I remember at least one who demonstrated in the striped pajamas that he had been forced to wear at the Nazi concentration camp he was held at, which he had saved after being freed when World War 2 ended. A recent article in +972 shows a mob of Israelis parading through Arab Jerusalem, terrorizing Palestinians off the streets… and a group of greatly outnumbered but righteous Jews who formed a protective barrier against the contemptible bullies and thugs.

Blood Libel Means Something—It Is Not A Gimmick To Be Used By Netanyahu

Real people were killed, real people were terrorized by the use of “blood libel” in Europe… for centuries. It is right and it is righteous to remember this lesson—a lesson in how ignorance about people with different customs, different languages or different skin colors can be used by oppressors to foment horrific crimes.

But it is wrong and worse than wrong for Netanyahu to turn this experience into the makings of ignorance, hysteria, rape and murder… in a different form. Israel’s actions against the Palestinians are a crime against humanity. Netanyahu’s use of blood libel is a crime against the truth. They go together.

This is not a new charge by Netanyahu. The accompanying box documents at least six other times that he’s trotted out this charge. The truth is that oppressors can wear the cloak of victimhood to justify atrocities in the name of no longer being victims.

And in this, Netanyahu has learned from the past masters of claiming victimhood as they planned and carried out atrocities. On November 7, 1938, the German ambassador to France was shot by Herschel Grynszpan, a 17-year-old Jewish boy protesting his family’s sudden deportation from Germany to Poland. Hitler seized on the shooting to claim, without any evidence whatsoever, that this was part of a global Jewish conspiracy. He ordered the Nazi Party to organize coordinated nationwide riots against Jewish businesses and synagogues and ordinary Jewish people walking the streets. This became Kristallnacht—the night of the broken glass—two days of massive riots that killed anywhere from 91 Jews (the official count) to what some modern historians estimate to be several thousand.

And we later saw what those Germans who went along with, and even celebrated, the Nazi genocidal terror brought down on the Jewish people turned into. It is that same genocidal bloodlust we see in the Israelis against the Palestinian people.

So, yeah, Bob Avakian is right and the point still cries out to be made, more than ever: “Israel has done something truly incredible—Israel has managed to turn Jews into Nazis!”

The question still screaming out for an answer is whether those in this country—the U.S. which has supported, guided and funded the Israeli genocide of the Palestinian people—will be turned into “good Germans.”

(Lenny Wolff is a revolutionary follower of Bob Avakian and the new communism. He spent several months working on a kibbutz and traveling through Israel in the late 1960s, and this experience fed into his later decisive break with Zionism.)