Israeli officials have leaned further and further into World War II rhetoric while drawing reference to the ongoing war on Gaza.
“With the war in Gaza entering its second phase, Israeli officials have leaned further into history for justification. Pressed by foreign journalists on civilian deaths in Gaza during a news conference Monday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pointed to a British bombing raid almost 80 years ago that killed children.
‘In 1944, the Royal Air Force bombed the Gestapo headquarters in Copenhagen. It’s a perfectly legitimate target. But the British pilots missed and instead of the Gestapo headquarters, they hit a children’s hospital nearby. And I think 84 children were burned to death’, he said.
‘That is not a war crime. That is not something you blame Britain for doing. That was a legitimate act of war with tragic consequences that accompany such legitimate actions’.
Historical analogies have hung over this conflict since October 7th, when Hamas led a brutal and unexpected attack on Israel. But increasingly, Israeli officials have mentioned not only the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflicts or the attacks in 2001 on the United States that sparked the ‘War on Terror’, but one of the most devastating conflicts in all of history: World War II.
At the same news conference, Netanyahu rebutted calls for a cease fire by pointing to the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941. Similar rhetorical points have been made by other Israeli politicians, the New York Times reported this week, with some reportedly referring to ‘how the United States and other allied powers resorted to devastating bombings in Germany and Japan during World War II — including the dropping of the two atomic warheads in Hiroshima and Nagasaki — to try to defeat those countries’.
Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations Gilad Erdan and his staff in New York wore yellow stars during a meeting of the U.N. Security Council on Monday. It was another clear symbol from the same era.
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| Israel’s U.N. Ambassador Gilad Erdan wears a yellow Star of David that reads “Never Again” as he addresses members of the U.N. Security Council at United Nations headquarters. |
The stars worn by Erdan and his colleagues had a message on them: ‘Never Again’.
Looking toward history for justifications in a modern-day conflict can be risky. Netanyahu misspoke when he said that the Royal Air Force bombed a children’s hospital in 1944. And the example is more complicated than his rhetoric lets on.
The events of March 21st, 1945, when a British air raid mistakenly targeted a French school in Copenhagen, killing 87 children as well as 19 adults by one count, are hardly forgotten. In 2011, the event was memorialized in a film called ‘The Bombardment’ and caused considerable controversy and renewed anguish.
To this day, there are debates about the military necessity of the bombing raid on the Gestapo site in Copenhagen, given the heavy civilian toll and the inevitability of German defeat at that late point. The RAF had initially pushed back against the request to hit the secret police site, made by the Danish resistance to free prisoners and destroy captured documents, precisely because it was in a dense area full of civilians.
The British military eventually acquiesced, but when a low-flying RAF Mosquito crashed near the school, the resulting blaze was interpreted by other pilots — disorientated and lacking modern technology — as their target. The French-Catholic Jeanne d’Arc School did not appear to have painted a cross on its roof, a practice civilian hospitals had undertaken by this point to avoid airstrikes.
Other planes did hit the planned target and the strikes on the Gestapo site are said to have allowed 18 imprisoned resistance fighters to escape, though others died. But the schoolchildren’s deaths represented a heavy cost to pay. Anger over the deaths and damage to civilian areas continued for years, according to Danish according to Danish accounts, with compensation cases from families not fully resolved until 1960.
Decades later, one of the pilots who survived the mission told an interviewer that it had been ‘tremendously successful in relation to the aims’. However, it had been ‘totally spoiled, from a personal point of view, by the children that were killed in the school’, Edward Sismore said.
The repeated mention of World War II and the Holocaust in the context of the Gaza war has prompted criticism. ‘The yellow patch symbolizes the helplessness of the Jewish people and being at the mercy of others’, Dani Dayan, chairman of Yad Vashem Museum in Jerusalem, wrote on social media Tuesday in response to Erdan’s wearing of the star. ‘Today we have an independent country and a strong army’.
Given the pivotal importance of the Holocaust in Israeli history, it is not surprising that the events of October 7th are spoken of in a similar light. Many Israelis are also reasonably upset that much of the international community has moved on from the violence of that day so quickly. But that doesn’t necessarily make it an apt comparison, Michael Berenbaum of American Jewish University in California told the Times of Israel this week.
‘The apt description of what happened is a pogrom, the massacre of Jews, women and children, not just men and the rape of women, the wanton destruction of property, the violation of homes while the government looked away’, Berenbaum said.
Similarly, the context for discussion of war crimes in this conflict is sharply different now than it was in 1945. Much of what we now call International Humanitarian Law, sometimes dubbed the rules of war, would only be formalized after World War II. That’s because they were a response to it.
Some Allied acts during World War II could be considered war crimes under current definitions. Allegations of war crimes are just that — allegations — until a court rules on them. The International Criminal Court, designed to be able to prosecute these sorts of crimes when other efforts falter, was not opened until 2002. (Notably, Israel is not a party to the court)”. -Adam Taylor, Washington Post
While both Israelis and Palestinians often accuse the other of being like the German Workers' party in a cliched attempt to link them to supposed historic villainy, both sides overlook the fact that the German people suffered greater atrocities during the Second World War under the Allied strategic bombing campaign than Nazi German inflicted upon the rest of Europe.