By ROIO MILESTONES*
The analogy between Nazism and Zionism is not a mere manifestation of indignation at the massacre that the Zionists unleashed against the Palestinian people.
In November 1940, the war was already raging in Europe, Germany was reaping victory after victory, but it had not yet attacked the USSR, nor had the war reached the United States in the Pacific region. The horror of a possible and overwhelming Nazi victory on the Old Continent kept the sleep of everyone who valued civilized life.
In this circumstance, Astrojildo Pereira, founder of the Brazilian Communist Party, renowned literary critic, decided to carry out some studies on the Bible, more specifically, about the war in Old testment. At first he made use of a book that had just appeared, The war and the Bible, by Madeleine Chelsea.
Following the author, Astrojildo Pereira is surprised to learn that Moses, two years after the migration towards Canaan began, had under his command an army of 600 thousand men, all adult males of the people chosen by God. Moses was the last of the prophets to speak directly to God. Before he died, on the banks of the Jordan River, Moses passed command of the people/army to Joshua, who would then be in charge of conquering the promised land, which, obviously, was inhabited by other people who should be eliminated from the face of the earth. .
The conquest began with the capture of the city of Jericho (one of the oldest in the world). After a few days of siege the city was taken, when “suddenly the walls fell, and each [of the attackers] went up to the place opposite him: and they took the city and killed everyone they found in it, from the men even women; and from children to the elderly. Oxen and sheep and donkeys also passed into the wire” (Bible, Joshua, VI, 20-21).
Even further: “And they set fire to the city, and to everything that was found in it, except the gold and the silver, and the vessels of bronze and iron, which they consecrated for the treasury of the Lord” (Bible, Joshua, Vi, 24). The biblical narrative continues to show how Joshua was able to defeat all 31 tribes that inhabited the promised land.
As he read Madeleine Chesles' book, an idea occurred to Astrojildo Pereira that made him go directly to the sacred book. The hypothesis that occurred to him was that Nazism has a Mosaic origin, that Hitler somehow intended to be the Moses of the German people. Here we could already say that Nazism and Zionism have the same origin. In 1940, Zionism already existed as a movement and as an ideology, but the conquest of the “promised land” was still in its infancy, so Astrojildo Pereira did not reach that point.
Aware of how shocking this hypothesis can be, he feels challenged to show the evidence, even though he is not the first to notice this analogy between Hitler and Moses. The most obvious approach is the idea of “chosen people”, who should not mix with other people. Astrojildo Pereira suggests that this determination was so harsh that polluting the blood of Israel would entail an unimaginable punishment, as stated in Numbers, XXV, 9, that “24 thousand men were killed”.
Another rapprochement between Hitlerism and Mosaicism would be the idea of “vital space” for one and “the promised land” for the other. In both cases, achieving the objective must be achieved with iron and fire. So much so that a third analogy comes from this, which is that of total war, where there is no distinction between combatant and non-combatant. Astrojildo Pereira then remembers, once again, that Joshua never spared the defeated peoples, genocide was the rule.
Among other biblical passages that speak of massacres perpetrated by the “chosen people”, Astrojildo Pereira transcribes this one about the capture of Asor: “and he put to the sword all the people who lived there: he left nothing alive in it; but he destroyed everything to the last, and reduced the city itself to ashes. And he took, struck down, and laid waste all the surrounding cities, and their kings, as Moses the servant of the Lord commanded him” (Bible, Joshua, XI, 11-12).
Astrojildo finds the summary of his conjecture in the following passage: “When the Lord your God has brought you into the land, which he is going to possess, and has exterminated many nations in your sight, (…), which are seven peoples, much more numerous than that you are, and much stronger than you, and the Lord your God has handed you over, you will cut them with a cleaver without a single one remaining. You shall not celebrate any covenant with them, nor treat them with compassion. Nor shall you marry them. You shall not give your daughter to your son, nor take your daughter for your son” (Bible, Deuteronomy, VII, 1-3).
It is evident that Astrojildo Pereira, in 1940, could not have anticipated what the Zionist movement would do in all subsequent decades. Whether the conquest of Canaan occurred gradually and not with the genocidal storm perpetrated by Joshua is not of great importance; if the historical mythology told in Old testment inspired Nazism is a real possibility and it is also an immense and shocking reality that the genocidal inspiration of the “chosen people” against the people, or peoples, who previously inhabited the territory of the “promised land” is a present fact.
Therefore, the analogy between Nazism and Zionism is not a mere manifestation of indignation at the massacre that the Zionists unleashed against the Palestinian people. The analogies are very strong and both ideologies were born in the dawn of the imperialist era, they are aspects of chauvinist nationalism and racism, they are enemies of humanity.
*Marcos Del Roio is professor of political science at Unesp-Marília. Author, among other books, of Gramsci's prisms (boitempo). [https://amzn.to/3NSHvfB]
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