Photo by Thierry Ehrmann

The recent recognitions of a Palestinian state and the October 10 ceasefire have been followed by a flurry of calls to “deradicalize” Palestinian society. The New York Times editorial board went so far as to compare this deradicalization project to the denazification of Germany after the Second World War.

These calls have the situation backwards to the point of farce.

It is not the Palestinian people, victims of decades of apartheid, internationally recognized illegal occupation, and now putative genocide, that need to be deradicalized. It is Israel, a society led by a political movement Albert Einstein and a group of prominent American Jews once called “closely akin… to the Nazi and Fascist parties.”

Einstein and his co-authors were writing in response to what they saw as the legitimation of Menachem Begin’s Nazi-like revisionist party Herut, a political formation they explain “formed out of the membership and following of the former Irgun Zvai Leumi, a terrorist, right-wing, chauvinist organization in Palestine.”

Even David Ben-Gurion, the first prime minister of Israel and no stranger himself to the project of ethnic cleansing (he oversaw the Nakba, after all), repeatedly compared Begin and his political movement to the Nazis. Begin, who was considered a terrorist by the British government in the 1950s, burst out of the political fringes in 1977 when he took power at the helm of the Likud coalition (Likud would become a political party in 1988). His principle political position at the time was his opposition to ending the occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, which Israel seized in 1967, and to the idea of a Palestinian state in those territories.

Benjamin Netanyahu’s political work began in 1984 after he returned to Israel from the United States, where he had worked for the Boston........

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