One of Mark Twain’s more celebrated aphorisms is that ‘history never repeats itself, but it does often rhyme’. Witty, no doubt, but it doesn’t seem quite adequate to Israel’s genocidal destruction of Gaza, its longstanding, settler-led expansion into the West Bank, or the implausible use of history to justify current policy.

If there is one people in the world we might expect to be sensitised to the impact of racialised mass murder, it’s the Jews. No doubt some are, as the continuing demonstrations against Netanyahu’s increasingly brutal and authoritarian rule demonstrate, but the net effect looks alarmingly reminiscent of what the Nazi’s did to the Jewish populations of Eastern Europe. Indeed, Hitler’s megalomaniacal pursuit of Lebensraum, or greater ‘living space’ for the German people, may have been on an epic scale, but the desire to eliminate people who are hindering the realisation of a sacred national destiny looks alarming familiar.

As Giora Eiland, one of the architects of Israel’s evolving military strategy put it, ‘Gaza must be completely destroyed: terrible chaos, severe humanitarian crisis, cries to heaven.’ Likewise, a senior minister, Bezalel Smotrich, suggested that starving 2 million people to death ‘might be justified and moral’ under certain circumstances. No doubt Heinrich Himmler would have sympathised with such sentiments. Perhaps an........

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