ABSTRACT
The politics of comparison in the Israel-Palestine conflict is largely encapsulated in the use of two analogies. The first is the ‘Holocaust-Hitler analogy’ used by Israel and its supporters, which portrays Israel as a beleaguered nation surrounded by Nazi sympathisers who seek to destroy it as the Jewish homeland. The second is the ‘apartheid analogy’, which compares the conflict to that of Apartheid-era South Africa and portrays Palestinians as being the victims of racism and settler colonialism. This article analyses why, how and with what desired impact these two comparisons are invoked.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the editors of this special issue, Bruno Charbonneau and Adam Sandor, for putting it together. I am also extremely grateful to Rimona Afana, Sai Englert, Dan Freeman-Maloy, Toufic Haddad, Nadim Khoury, Michael Pugh, Elian Weizman, and the two anonymous peer reviewers, for incisive comments on an earlier draft. However, all perspectives and errors are my responsibility.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. Apart from, of course, the political leaders of the Palestinian-Arab community in Israel.
2. I am grateful to Toufic Haddad for this point.
3. I am grateful to Sai Englert for this point.
4. I am grateful to Sai Englert for this point.
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Notes on contributors
Mandy Turner
Mandy Turner is the Director of the Kenyon Institute (Council for British Research in the Levant) in East Jerusalem. Her research and publications focus on the politics of international intervention and the political economy of development in war-torn societies with a country focus on the occupied Palestinian territory, but also comparatively. She is the editor of From the River to the Sea: Palestine and Israel in the Shadow of ‘Peace’ (Rowman and Littlefield, 2019); and co-editor of The Politics of International Intervention: The Tyranny of Peace (with Florian P. Kühn; Routledge, 2016), Decolonizing Palestinian Political Economy: De-development and Beyond (with Omar Shweiki, PalgraveMacmillan, 2014), and Whose Peace? Critical Perspectives on the Political Economy of Peacebuilding (with Michael Pugh and Neil Cooper, PalgraveMacmillan, 2008). She lives and works in East Jerusalem.