Image by Ash Hayes.

Last Friday, following the screening of No Other Land in San Diego, I discussed the film with a Jewish attendee who drew a striking comparison between the actions of the Israeli settlers in Palestine and the pogroms once carried out against Jews in Europe. Hence, this op-ed.

In 1938 Nazi Germany, Kristallnacht—the Night of Broken Glass—didn’t come out of nowhere. It was the culmination of years of managed propaganda hate-filled rhetoric. That propaganda didn’t remain in newspapers or speeches—it spilled into the streets as the Hitler Youth and Nazi militias attacked Jewish homes, businesses, and synagogues, looting, burning, killing. German police watched, helped, or did nothing. The message was clear: the system approved.

Nearly a century later, in the hills of the occupied West Bank and the rubble of Gaza, a different but hauntingly familiar racism unfolds—this time with Palestinians as the targets and Jewish Zionist youth, often armed and state-protected, as the perpetrators.

Every day, children in Gaza go to sleep, not knowing if they will wake up alive. Palestinians must maneuver Jewish settlers only roads, and farmers in the West Bank are unsure whether they will return home alive. Armed Jewish mobs storm villages, chop down centuries-old olive trees, destroy water tanks, and set homes ablaze. The Natives are attacked—at times fatally—for daring to remain on their land.

This unchecked aggression is whitewashed by Israeli officials as “confrontations,” as if a farmer attending his crops is on equal footing with settlers in........

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