Israel: Who are you calling a Nazi?

The Knesset has taken the first step toward approving a law that would ban the use of the word “Nazi” as an epithet.

Even for Israel, this was “a heated debate,” said Gideon Allon in Israel Hayom. The Knesset has taken the first step toward approving a law that would ban the use of the word “Nazi” as an epithet. Anyone who calls someone a Nazi could face six months in prison and a fine of $29,000. Displaying swastikas or other Nazi symbols would be banned, as would wearing the striped shirts of concentration camp inmates or yellow Star of David—as some ultra-Orthodox Israelis recently did to protest restrictions on their way of life. The law, proposed by the nationalist Yisrael Beiteinu party, exempts educational and artistic uses of Nazi symbols, but was still “strongly attacked” by the opposition. One representative, Dov Hanin, asked whether Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu should be imprisoned for comparing Iran’s former leader, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, to Adolf Hitler. “You’re not protecting the memory of the Holocaust,” said another, Zahava Gal-On. “You’re destroying freedom of expression.”

Plenty of other countries already outlaw Nazi symbols and expressions, said Noah Klieger in Yedioth Ahronoth, most notably Germany and Austria. These Western democracies enjoy free speech and robust political debate but recognize that the Nazi insult is a bridge too far. It’s not like any other epithet, because “its intention is not just to tease a person, but to compare him to those who exterminated 6 million Jews.” In fact, “I naïvely thought” that Israel already had such a law and just wasn’t enforcing it very well. It “should have been enacted decades ago.”

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