Zeev Sternhell, who demonized Israel as Nazi state, dead at 85

Virulently left-wing professor demonized Israel internationally as a “fascist state” and compared Israelis to Nazis.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

Israel Prize winner and extreme leftist Prof. Zeev Sternhell died Sunday age 85. He was eulogized by Arab Joint List head Ayman Odeh as “a significant voice for Palestinian human rights” whose writings “will continue to light the way to justice and freedom for everyone.”

Over a 40-year career as a political scientist, historian and commentator, Sternhell was considered an expert on the roots of fascism and eventually led the political science department at The Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

He angered the right-wing in Israel by consistently maintaining that the democratically elected Israeli governments that resisted giving in to Palestinian demands were fascistic in nature.

In 2018, his criticism went even further, when he compared modern Israel to the “beginning of Nazism” in articles both in Israel and abroad. In a critical Yediot Ahronot op-ed, Ben-Dror Yemini wrote that Sternhell “has been repeating the same chorus of falsehoods again and again” for the last 40 years.

He quoted Sternhell saying that Israel is a “monster for non-Jews living under its rule,” then countered the charge by pointing out that Arab citizens enjoy equal rights under Israeli law, and Arabs work in all fields alongside Jews, including as judges, engineers and doctors.

Under the “rule” of Israel since 1967, Arab life expectancy in Judea and Samaria jumped from 48.6 years to 74.2 in 2017, and there were more than 40 institutions of higher learning where there used to be none, he added.

Calling Sternhell “a racist” who “is demonizing Israel,” Yemini said he is “fanning the flames of hatred and hostility,” and providing anti-Semites “with lies to reinforce them.”

The Polish-born professor who survived the Holocaust with false papers was a vociferous critic of the Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip, Judea and Samaria. Calling those who believed in the Jewish right to the Land of Israel “fascists,” he advocated destroying Jewish towns and villages for decades before the 2005 disengagement from the Gaza Strip that saw the forced eviction of some 10,000 Jews from their homes under Ariel Sharon’s government.

“Only he who is willing to storm [the Samarian settlement] Ofra with tanks will be able to block the fascist danger threatening to drown Israeli democracy,” he wrote in the Labor Party paper Davar in 1988.

He was also a proponent of Palestinian terrorism against Israeli civilians and the IDF, although he advised that such acts should be limited to Judea and Samaria.

“Do not doubt the legitimacy of the armed resistance in the territories themselves,” he wrote in a Haaretz op-ed in 2001. “If the Palestinians had a little sense, they would have concentrated their struggle against the settlements and would not hurt women and children, fire rockets on Gilo, Nachal Oz and Sderot, or plant explosives on the Western side of the Green Line.”

Israel’s right-wing and other pro-Israel voices considered such statements incitement to murder, and there was a huge backlash when he won the country’s most prestigious award, the Israel Prize, in February 2008, for political science.

The Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America put out a statement saying, ““We are deeply concerned by the award of Israel’s most prestigious civilian honor to someone who has called for use of Israeli Defense Forces tanks on those Jews living in Judea and Samaria as well as making statements that justify Arab terror over the Green Line. This sends a terrible message to all Israelis, no matter their political stances or religious beliefs.”

The Supreme Court declined to intervene when petitioned on the matter. In September of that year he was injured in a pipe-bomb attack at his home. American-Israeli Jack Teitel was jailed for the crime.

Ze'ev Sternhell