It is evidently true that Israeli education paves the way to the conduct described by Gilad Atzmon. It is also true that Zionism is predicated on the negation and dehumanization of the Palestinian people, in the same way as Nazism did towards Jews, Roma and others. But massive acts of inhumanity were also committed without being attributed to some ideology. A brief review of atrocities committed in African civil wars would dwarf all those acts committed by the IDF in Palestine. While it is necessary to publicize and condemn and prosecute criminal acts committed by the IDF and expose the ideological background to such conduct, let us not forget that such acts are committed around the world, every single day, but without the benefit of cameras recording those acts.

Just as I have seen torture (enhanced interogation) dismissed as “panties on the head and a little water sprinkled on the face,” I’ve seen this dismissed as “fires a rubber bullet at his toe.”

Anthony Löwstedt made an interesting comment about the origins of Zionism in his online book, Apartheid: Ancient, Past, and Present (PDF) :

It is no wonder that the Zionist movement, the ‘national revival of the Jewish people in its ancestral home’, was born in Vienna, the city where, only a decade later, Adolf Hitler himself would be influenced to become a judeophobic right-wing extremist….Hitler stated that he ‘discovered’ anti-Semitism in Vienna. I am not saying that Zionism is a version of or a prerequisite to Nazi ideology. It is not. It is an extremist reaction to an extremist threat… [of] powerful European and Christian judeophobia. But the two movements appeared at roughly the same time, in the very same place. They grew out of the same poisoned, ideological, ethnicist, Euromaniac soil.

Because of the wild ideologies that took root in turn of the century Vienna, it was described by Karl Kraus as “research laboratory for world destruction”. In his book The Founding Myths of Israel, Ze’ev Sternhell noted the many obvious parallels between National Socialism of the Nazis and Nationalist Socialism of the Zionists:

To avoid any misunderstanding or confusion, I have used the term nationalist socialism…But national socialism, which was commonly used at the beginning of the twentieth century, has been contaminated by its association with the Nazis. However, the adjective nationalist, although not traditionally used, in its strict sense describes one of the variants of socialism accurately. There is a nationalist socialism just as there is a democratic or revisionist socialism, often known as social democracy…Nationalist socialism, properly understood, appeared in Europe in the last years of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth as an alternative to both Marxism and liberalism…The uniqueness of European nationalist socialism…lay in one essential point: its acceptance of the principle of the nation’s primacy and its subjection of the values of socialism to the service of the nation. In this way socialism lost its universal significance and became an essential tool in the process of building the nation-state. Thus, the universal values of socialism were subordinated to the particularistic values of nationalism. In practice, this was expressed by a total rejection of the concept of class warfare and by the claim of transcending social contradictions for the benefit of the collectivity as a whole. This form of socialism preached the organic unity of the nation and the mobilization of all classes of society for the achievement of national objectives. According to the theory, this process was to be led by natural elites, whose membership was determined not by class, origin, or educational qualifications but by sentiment, dedication, and a readiness to make sacrifices for all. Nationalist socialism quite naturally disliked people with large fortunes, the spoiled aristocracy, and all those to whom money came easily and who could allow themselves to be idle. It lashed out mercilessly at the bourgeoisie whose money moved from one financial center to another and whose checkbook, close to its heart, served as its identity card. In contrast with all these, nationalist socialism presented the working man with both feet firmly planted on the soil of his native country–the farmer, whose horizons are restricted to the piece of land he tills, the bourgeois, who runs his own enterprise, and the industrial worker: the rich and poor who contribute the sweat of their brow, their talents and their money to increasing the collective wealth…Indeeed, nationalist socialism was based on the idea of the nation as a cultural, historical, and biological unit, or figuratively, an extended family. The industrial worker was regarded as an organic part of the whole, and the whole took precedence over the individual. The blood ties and the cultural ties linking members of the nation, their partnership in the total national effort, took precedence over the position of the individual in the production system.