The new Nazis? Why most Israelis see Hamas terrorists as Hitler's heirs

There is now an awareness that Hamas is a movement informed by decades-old ideology whose roots reach all the way to Nazi propaganda.

By ZVIKA KLEIN FEBRUARY 11, 2025 21:05

Hamas terrorists in Khan Yunis in southern Gaza ahead of the hostage release. January 30, 2025. (photo credit: REUTERS/Hatem Khaled)

This isn't a metaphor anymore. Since October 7, the comparison between Hamas and the Nazis passed from a rhetorical device to an entrenched belief among the Israeli public.

A Jerusalem Post exclusive survey on Tuesday found that 51% of Israelis believe Hamas’ treatment of hostages is comparable to Nazi war crimes, while another 30% acknowledge similarities but stop short of full equivalence. Meanwhile, 11% reject the comparison outright, and eight percent remain unsure - which, in today’s reality, is just a polite way of saying, “I’d rather not answer that.”

Let’s be clear: This isn’t just emotion talking. This is not Israelis grasping for the most sensational historical reference they can find.

The numbers point to something profound: An awareness that Hamas isn't just any terrorist organization but a movement informed by decades-old ideology whose roots reach all the way to Nazi propaganda. The notion of Hitler's impact ending in some Berlin bunker is a Western mirage. Here, in Israel, where that same ideology was resurrected in blood and fire on October 7, nobody has the luxury of such illusions.

German historian: Hamas atrocities an 'ecstatic act of antisemitic slaughter' 

Dr. Matthias Küntzel, a German historian and one of the leading experts on Islamist antisemitism, has spent years documenting how Nazi Germany actively spread antisemitic propaganda in the Middle East during World War II. In an interview with Makor Rishon, he explained how Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, personally collaborated with Hitler, helping to recruit Arab fighters for the Waffen-SS and ensuring Nazi antisemitism was embedded in the Arab world long after the Third Reich fell. Küntzel makes of the reaction to October 7 the evidence for this legacy, calling the Hamas atrocities an "ecstatic act of antisemitic slaughter." Therein lies the difference between terrorism and genocide: one kills to attain political leverage, another for the mere, uncontainable joy of it.

This is not a theory, this is what Hamas says. Their 1988 charter is steeped in Nazi ideology, replete with references to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the same antisemitic conspiracy theory that Hitler relied on to justify his Final Solution. It doesn't speak about occupation, it speaks of Jews as global manipulators that need to be wiped off the face of the earth.

ISGAP senior researcher Professor David Patterson put it starkly in his book From Hitler to Hamas: A Genealogy of Evil: Hamas doesn't just want Israel gone, it wants Jews dead, everywhere.

He claims that while the Nazis framed their war as racial purification, Hamas frames it as religious duty. "The Nazi needed a Final Solution. The jihadist needs an apocalypse." That's why they burn children alive and then chant "Allah Akbar" over the ashes. That's why they decapitate babies and distribute the footage like a recruitment video. That's why they don't even pretend to have a vision for governing Gaza—they are too consumed by their lust for Jewish blood to think beyond the next massacre.

For more than half of Israelis, these facts make the Hamas-Nazi comparison self-evident. This is a war against a force that wants Jewish existence erased. That understanding is shaping the way Israelis view the war. If Hamas is the new Nazis, then negotiating with them is as preposterous as asking Churchill to sign a ceasefire with Hitler in 1942. If Hamas is the new Nazis, then the only way forward is the one the Allies took in 1945: unconditional surrender, and total eradication.

Of course, 41% of Israelis demur, and some argue that the Holocaust was a uniquely industrialized genocide, and that Hamas, brutal though it is, doesn't have the wherewithal to match that. That view is held particularly by opposition voters, only 47% of whom completely buy the Hamas-Nazi analogy, whereas 60% of coalition voters do. The queasiness is understandable—the profession of historians is unanimous in cautioning against turning every brutal regime into a Nazi clone.

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But there is also a political calculation involved. Some are concerned that extending the Nazi comparison too far will harm Israel's case diplomatically, alienating the allies already showing reluctance to support the war. Of course, there's the unspoken fear that as long as Israel leans heavily onto the Holocaust analogy, it invites others to link the actions of the Israeli army with those of Nazi Germany - an obscene inversion already used on European campuses and in some American ones, by antisemites.

That said, that reluctance does nothing to change anything in the present situation. Hamas built itself on Nazi ideology, and it acts as such. Their not having the gas chambers means nothing, and that makes them no less than a genocidal movement, just their modus operandi is different. October 7 was not a war crime-it was the Holocaust on a small scale. That's what Hamas fighters thought they were doing, and that's why their sympathizers across the Arab world still call Hitler a hero.

The difference between 1942 and 2025 is that this time, the Jews aren't helpless. The question now is whether Israel - and the world - has the stomach to act accordingly.

If history teaches us anything, it is this: Nazis don't negotiate. They get destroyed.