In a September 2, 2020 article titled "Prisoner Maher Younis Is Incarcerated In The Israeli Auschwitz State," published in the East Jerusalem-based Al-Quds daily, 'Issa Qaraqe', former director of the PLO's Prisoners and Released Prisoners Authority, wrote that Zionism is allied with Nazism and that the Israelis are the new Nazis. There is no difference, he stressed, between Nazi SS troops and the Israel Defense Force, because the "Israeli Auschwitz state" is setting up camps and waging a "holocaust" against the Palestinian people.
'Issa Qaraqe' (Source: Al-Quds, East Jerusalem, September 2, 2020)
In 1980, Maher Younes and his cousin Karim Younes kidnapped and murdered an Israeli soldier; both were sentenced to 40 years in prison. The Palestinian Authority and Fatah regularly praise their deed and lionize them, and in 2017 Karim Younes, who like Maher is still in prison, was appointed to Fatah's Central Committee.[1]
The following are excerpts of Qaraqe's article: [2]
"The reasons why prisoner Maher Younes, from the village of 'Ara in the 1948 territories, has been imprisoned for 38 years by the occupation, along with the thousands of prisoners who [were unlucky enough] not to be freed by the international justice [organizations] or by the serial wars, and were not rescued by any of the [prisoner] exchange deals are: loathsome racism; the claim of racial and genetic superiority; identification with the myth [that the Jews are] the Chosen People [and Israel is] the Promised Land; the policy of seeing others as subhuman and treating them as slaves; inciting calls by the Israeli right for establishing extermination camps for the Palestinians; incitement to murder the prisoners and to spray them with poison gas; comparing them to cockroaches; and turning Israel into a religious militaristic state in which the fanatical settlers' barbaric outlook is growing.
"No one writes about the modern Israeli Holocaust that is burying [the Palestinian prisoners] alive, in a coffin of heavy sentences. The Nazis set up a limited number of concentration and extermination camps during World War II, but from 1948 to this day, the Israeli occupiers have set up hundreds of camps, prisons, and detention centers, and sent to them more than a million and a half Palestinians, young and old, men and women. Historians have confirmed that Palestinians who were not sent to prison were expelled from their land and scattered all over, as happened during the Nakba. This is reminiscent of the death marches, when the Nazis led the prisoners on foot towards the expulsion point, shot them, and executed them...
SUPPORT OUR WORK
"The prisoner Maher Younes walked into the Holocaust and remains there. At first, [the Israelis] dressed him and his cousin, the prisoner Karim Younes, in the red robes of those condemned to death. Then the Israeli court sentenced them to death by hanging. [After that,] the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, [but] the appetite for murder remained in the minds of the hangmen. Hitler was present in the heart of the mentality that decreed a death sentence [for the Younes cousins] and the Knesset passed the law of execution of prisoners and the law of retaining the martyrs' bodies [sic]. This is a holocaust [that is taking place] in the prisons [and] the cemeteries, [and it is derived] from the ideology of extermination and ethnic cleansing.
"The prisoner Maher Younes does not distinguish between SS troops and Israeli occupation soldiers. The names are different, but the missions are the same, the same military and security units carry out the same arrests, surprise attacks, and oppression, and the same extrajudicial killings, and oppress the prisoners in the prisons with all kinds of violence. There is absolute similarity in the thought and behavior [of the SS and Israeli soldiers, primarily] crushing human dignity and treating the Palestinian as if he were subhuman. The Holocaust is the force motivating their racist actions, their reopening of the gates of the death factories and [revival of] the forced disappearances carried out by the Nazis over 75 years ago. [The Israelis] are the new Nazis, whom the Israeli author Amos Oz warned would appear,[3] and they are supported by the official establishment, the Knesset, and the rabbis who give them religious justification.
"The prisoner Maher Younes is held in the Israeli Auschwitz state, a state of security services and army camps, scattered from Palestine's northernmost point to its southernmost point; a state with a military appearance and [barbed] wire fences [everywhere]; a state that besieges the Palestinian people with walls, military roadblocks, and lookout towers; a state that does not know how to continue to exist if it is not the custodian of detention camps or of perpetual conflict and hysteria. The Holocaust was carried out at three main [extermination] camps in Poland during World War II, but Maher Younes is not aware of the borders of the Israeli holocaust, that has crossed the Green Line of 1948 and the ceasefire line of 1967 and burned the victim completely...
"The prisoner Maher Younis is imprisoned in the Israeli Auschwitz state that has created several holocausts: a long-term colonialist military occupation and a racist apartheid regime in the region. This escalating racism, borne by the winds of fascism, is identical to the German Nazi model, that took power just as the extreme and racist Israeli right has... The orders given by Hitler – to concentrate the Jews in camps, to expel them, and to murder them – are the same orders issued by the editor of the book The King's Torah,[4] that became a handbook for murdering Palestinians, based on religious texts by the greatest Jewish rabbis in various eras...
"The prisoner Maher Younes is imprisoned in the Israeli Auschwitz state that passes racist laws of enmity towards human rights and the rights of the Palestinian people, and aspires to eradicate its national, cultural, and historic identity... Zionism is an ally of Nazism, with all its phenomena; the Israeli general Yair Golan, former deputy chief of staff, recognized this when he said: 'We are going down the same path as the Nazis'[5]... [Israel is] a state with a military judicial system with Nazi characteristics, that uses racist discrimination in its military courts. It harshly sentences Palestinian fighters and releases Jewish criminals, or commutes their sentences. [Shedding] Palestinian blood is allowed, while Jewish blood is sacred – this is a Nazi recipe whose scent wafts through the corridors of the occupation's courts. The Palestinian prisoners in these courts are labelled terrorists, while the Jewish criminals and murdering settler gangs are labelled national heroes and are decorated with medals of excellence. Chief Justice Esther Hayut has compared recent laws passed by the Knesset to the Nuremburg laws[6]...
"The prisoner Maher Younes is imprisoned in the Israeli Auschwitz state that decontextualized the historic Holocaust and turned it into a pretext for all its deeds. Everything is permitted [to it]: extrajudicial killings, mass arrests, administrative arrests, torture, abuse, surprise attacks, razing homes, expropriating lands, holding the martyrs' bodies, arresting minors, and other severe violations. The Holocaust has become a school of thought and a path, and has yielded in Israel an entire political, judicial, and ideological regime. The Holocaust has settled in the minds of the Israelis and become a central internal element of their personality. From victims, they have become hangmen and jailers who carry out organized crimes under the slogan of preserving and monopolizing their image as victim, and former Israeli Knesset speaker Avraham Burg spoke about this[7]..."
[1] See MEMRI Special Dispatch No. 8485, Palestinian Authority, Fatah Hold Military Training Camp For Girls, Named After Imprisoned Terrorist Karim Younis, January 10, 2020; Special Dispatch No. 7980, Palestinian Authority, Fatah Continue Official Support And Encouragement Of Armed Struggle Against Israel, April 2, 2019; Special Dispatch No. 7284, Palestinian Authority Honors Two Prisoners Serving Life Sentences For Kidnapping, Murder Of Israeli Soldier; Representative For PA President 'Abbas: 'The Two Prisoners Are A National Example', January 16, 2018.
[2] Al-Quds (East Jerusalem), September 2, 2020.
[3] Apparently, a reference to May 9, 2014 statements in which Oz called extremist "hilltop youth" groups setting up illegal settlements "Hebrew neo-Nazi groups" (Haaretz, Israel, May 10, 2014).
[4] The King's Torah was a 2009 book by two rabbis whose yeshiva was later shut down by Israeli authorities. Focusing on Jewish laws pertaining to warfare, the book argues that under those laws killing civilian non-Jews is permissible in certain circumstances. It sparked widespread public condemnation in Israel.
[5] Apparently, a reference to May 5, 2016 statements in which Golan said: "If there is anything that frightens me in the remembrance of the Holocaust, it is discerning nauseating trends that took place in Europe in general, and in Germany specifically, back then, 70, 80 and 90 years ago, and seeing evidence of them here among us in 2016." He also said on October 3, 2019, when he was no longer deputy chief of staff : "I'm reminding people that the Nazis came to power democratically, so we have to be careful, very careful, so that extremist figures with a messianic view do not exploit Israeli democracy to replace the system of government." Ynet.co.il, October 3, 2019.
[6] Apparently a reference to Judge Hayut's May 14, 2019 statements at a legal conference in Nuremberg, Germany, at which she warned of the dangers in limiting judicial oversight and provided examples from Nazi Germany. She did not, however, directly compare Israeli legislation to Nazi legislation. Gov.il, May 14, 2019.
[7] Apparently a reference to Avraham Burg's 2007 book Defeating Hitler, which included statements such as "Israel is an Auschwitz state whose culture is one of trauma and whose soul is gripped by horror, always and from everything." Ybook.co.il.
