The close connection between anti-Israel prejudice and Holocaust denial in Europe is all too grimly illustrated by this poll in Germany reported in the Jerusalem Post. It shows that more than half of those asked thought there was no difference between Israel's current treatment of the Palestinians and what the Nazis did to the Jews. The comparison is, of course, grotesque. For readers of this site who do not understand why -- and I'm afraid there are more than a few, which is why the German poll is so disturbing -- let me briefly spell it out. Whatever the occasional excesses committed by Israel towards the Palestinians -- and it would be idle to pretend they don't occur, and wrong to do anything other than condemn them unreservedly -- Israel is fighting a defensive war of survival against a Palestinian and Arab enemy that has been trying to ethnically cleanse Jews from their historic homeland for a century. To compare this with the Nazis' attempt to remove the Jewish people from the face of the earth is as obscene as it is irational.

Among the Germans polled, it reveals not only ignorance of the reality of what is actually happening in Israel but also a profound refusal to acknowledge the reality of the Nazi Holocaust. By making this false and odious comparison, it grossly inflates and distorts Israel's culpability while simultaneously diminishing to the point of denial the Nazi genocide of the Jews.

This is surely no accident. As the chairman of Yad Vashem's directorate Avner Shalev observed, the results were indicative of

'...a long-suppressed felling of anti-Semitism among the mainstream "so-called liberals" population which now, under the coating of anti-Israeli criticism, are becoming legitimate again. He added that the poll's results, which he said any objective person would repudiate, are also the result of the release of pent-up feelings of guilt built up from the Holocaust."The energies which bring about such answers come to protect feelings of guilt," Shalev said. 62 percent of respondents in the poll said that they were sick of "all this harping" of German crimes against Jews, while 68% said that they found it "annoying" that Germans today are still held to blame for Nazi crimes against Jews.'

The false narrative of Palestinian oppression by Israel has provided Europe with a perfect alibi for the Holocaust. If the Jews of Irael can be presented as today's Nazis, the real Nazis can be let off the hook since the Jews they murdered can retrospectively be held responsible for their own destruction, just as they are being accused today. And because the left has so totally bought into the narrative of Palestinian oppression and Israeli brutality, the heirs of those who fought fascism in Europe are now marching shoulder to shoulder on pro-Palestinian demonstrations with people chanting 'Jews to the gas'. Holocaust denial, for so long the preserve of the neo-Nazi right, has been turned into a respectable orthodoxy through the efforts of the left. Thus anti-Jewish genocidal prejudice has mutated from a desire to destroy the Jews into a desire to destroy the Jewish state.

So the world has been stood on its head, historical memory has been expunged, and rationality and decency have gone into retreat across the continent of Europe.