the israel-nazi moral equivalence

last night i had a somewhat heated (yet still amicable) debate with a friend about the whole Israel-Palestine issue..
without going into details of the proceedings or my position on the recent conflict in Gaza (perhaps for another post) i was pretty disgusted when he essentially called Israel a 'Nazi state'..

the worrying thing is that this kind of rhetoric is now becoming common place amongst many people and not just your average left wing Sussex University student..
im wondering if people who make this kind of analogy a. really understand what they're saying and b. if they really believe it..

the reason this is a disgusting moral inversion is simply shown by just looking at the facts..
this article here (from 2007) lists all of the major world conflicts since 1950 and the amount of casualties involved..
notice that Israel-Palestine comes in at 49th with 51,000 deaths.. i think that roughly around a quarter to a third of these deaths are Israeli Jews but, for the sake of argument, even if every single one of these deaths was of a Palestinian Arab this is no way equates to 5-6 million Jews in 2-3 years ala the Holocaust ala the Nazis, which the state of Israel is now constantly being compared to..

go up the chart abit to number 39 - North Yemen 100,000 deaths from 1962-1970 - eight years of bloody conflict and i haven't even got a clue what it was all about..
or to put it into another perspective go down to number 61 on the list: 25,000 Palestinian Arab deaths at the hands of their fellow Arab neighbours the Jordanians, all more or less in one month (the infamous Black September)..
looking at all this it seems that if the Jews were really Nazis committed to the genocide of Arabs then if we're honest they've done a pretty bad job - only 51,000 deaths in 50 years..

last i remember it was Hamas in it's charter that was committed to the destruction of Israel and recently said it was justified in killing Jewish children all across the world.. that sounds more Nazish than anything i've heard coming officially from the state of Israel..

so what does all this 'Israel is a Nazi state' rhetoric really boil down to? personally i think Melanie Phillips has it spot on:
''the now common analogy that is drawn between Israel and the Nazis, or Gaza and the Warsaw Ghetto, as used by such Israel-haters as George Galloway, Jenny Tonge, the British Muslim Initiative and others.. Its import lies in far more than its mere offensiveness and demonstrable barmyness. It is used for very specific political purposes. Since Nazism is totally beyond the pale – and since the Israel-haters believe, falsely, that Israel’s legitimacy rests upon the Holocaust – tarring it as a Nazi state delegitimises it and thus advances the agenda of its destruction.''

you dont have to fully agree with every Israeli policy or action to see this kind of talk is both dangerous and perverted