Joe Gill MEE, 21 April 2026 09:07 BST | Last update:8 hours 4 mins ago

Comparisons between the US-Israeli war on Iran, the Gaza genocide, and Hitler’s attack on the Soviet Union are being made by scholars

A picture of US President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on fire during a protest against the US-Israeli military action in Iran, near the US Embassy in Manila, Philippines, 9 April 2026 (AFP)

It has long been considered offensive and antisemitic to draw comparisons between Nazi Germany and Israel, but on the specific question of Israel’s genocide in Gaza and its wars of expansion, including the war on Iran, the dam has broken.

Norman Finkelstein, the eminent American Jewish scholar and son of Holocaust survivors, drew the direct comparison between Hitler’s war in the east and the war launched by Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu on Iran on 28 February in a recent Middle East Eye interview.

I have long thought the comparison is merited, for a number of reasons, beginning in 2023 with the start of the war on Gaza.

Like Hitler’s Germany, Israel’s leaders made the fatal error of not knowing when to stop, and opening up several fronts – seven at one point. Each tactical victory – against Hamas, then Hezbollah, encouraged further audacious attacks. Having waged a genocidal campaign in Gaza, colonial expansion in the West Bank, and relentless attacks on Lebanon, Syria and Yemen, Prime Minister Netanyahu turned to Iran in 2025.

Why? A messianic ideology of Jewish supremacy that drives the prime minister and the settler politicians on whom he depends. The politics of ethnonationalism, territorial expansion and hyper militarism are similar, if not identical, to the ideology of the Second World War fascist axis led by Nazi Germany. And this ideology of ethnic supremacy leads to overreach.

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Trump, as a white nationalist who believes in US exceptionalism, shares the same inflated belief in unlimited US power, but is less unequivocally bent on permanent war. (Trump bears some comparison with Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, whose record of failed imperial adventures more closely resembles Trump’s.) 

Iran and the Soviet Union

Finkelstein, speaking of the Iran war, compared it to how the war of extermination waged by Hitler on the Soviet people inspired them to rally and defend the country. “This was the same mistake made by Trump. The more Trump turned it into a war of extermination like the Nazis did with Russia… the people rallied, it was the Soviet Union’s Great Patriotic war, a second time.”

Another parallel to the Second World War is that the West’s enemy is a revolutionary regime which is facing severe internal pressures. The Soviet Union in the 1930s was perceived as being weak due to violent internal upheaval; the similar position of Iran before the war encouraged Netanyahu and Trump to believe that a surprise attack would lead to a rapid victory.

The Soviet Union in the 1930s was perceived as being weak due to violent internal upheaval; similar to the position of Iran before the war

Both the Soviets and Iran lacked major global allies prepared to come to their defence. Like the Soviet Union, Iran had non-state groups in different countries that supported its international vision, but these groups pose a limited threat to the world’s most advanced military, and a nuclear-armed regional military power. 

Like Iran, the Soviet Union had sought to avoid war by making agreements with its chief enemy, Germany, in the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939. In the case of Iran, the 2015 nuclear deal was supposed to end the threat of conflict. But Trump ripped it up in 2018. 

Both Iran and the Soviet Union had been through very difficult years preceding this frontal military attack. Iran had faced comprehensive sanctions, which helped to spark three major uprisings against the regime, in 2019, 2022 and lastly in January 2026. 

The Soviet regime, while in the process of rapidly industrialising, had waged a terror campaign against kulaks, national minority groups, and swathes of the Bolshevik administration, including the officer corp of the Red Army, in which millions died – a point explicitly made by Finkelstein (although he exaggerated by saying “tens of millions” died). As a result, Hitler saw Soviet Russia as weak and vulnerable. He predicted a sweeping victory over Stalin.

As Finkelstein explained: “The first months of the war were a cake walk, disaster for the Soviets… but the Germans made one big mistake: they wanted what was called living space, lebensraum, and [that] means they had to get rid of the people living there, and so they embarked on a war of extermination… Notwithstanding the brutality of Stalin’s regime, notwithstanding collectivisation and the purge trials, which eliminated the entire military and political leadership, the people embraced the “Great Patriotic War”.

Like the Israelis and the Trump White House, the Nazis had a racial contempt for their Slavic enemies who they considered to be inferior and not able to resist the advance of the German armed forces. Trump and Netanyahu likewise consistently belittle the capacity of their enemies, believed the Iranian regime would crumble under direct assault, and see their technological and military superiority as decisive over the “Arabs” and Iran. Trump called the Iranians “animals”.

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The killing of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei on the first day of the war was supposed to be the knockout blow. It would be as if Hitler had a rocket system that could accurately target Stalin’s rooms in the Kremlin and wipe out the dictator and his politburo. Would that have caused the Soviet regime to collapse amid invasion? Unlikely.

The first year of the Nazis’ invasion saw a devastating series of retreats and defeats for the Soviets. The Wehrmacht rolled through Ukraine, where the famine and terror of the previous decade had drained support for the Soviets, allowing the Germans to march rapidly on to the Russian steppe; in the north the Nazis advanced through Belarus to the gates of Moscow and Leningrad, imposing a brutal siege on the latter. Hitler had every reason to think victory over the Communist regime in Russia was all but certain.

But to successfully overthrow a regime one needs to find new, pliable rulers who are able to replace the old ones. This has not proved possible in Iran, with Reza Pahlavi shown to be wholly inadequate to the task, lacking political skills and wide popular support in Iran.

Germany, and the US and Israel, overlooked the lack of strategic route to defeat their enemies in the long run. In the short to medium term, they win based on superior air power, intelligence, and destructive offensive forces, but in the longterm, the outlook is more problematic, as people constantly attacked in their own lands are certain to resist.

Iranians have come to realise that Trump and Netanyahu are not interested in their liberation – they wish to destroy the country’s independent existence and to fragment it along ethnic lines. 

Iran’s new leaders

Moreover, in the case of Iran, the wiping out of the older generation of leaders and commanders has changed the calculus of the regime, brought in new commanders, and if anything ended the restraint that was the policy under Khamenei. The attacks on Gulf states, the blockade of Hormuz, and the insistence that Lebanon must be part of a lasting ceasefire deal show how much Iran, post-February, is no longer afraid to directly confront the encirclement imposed by the US and its allies. 

The wiping out of the older generation of leaders has changed the calculus of the regime, ending the restraint that was the policy under Khamenei

Iran, like Russia, is a vast continental nation, and presents huge challenges for any foreign power wishing to conquer or dismember it. Hitler openly saw the Soviet Union as part of the future Third Reich, as a vast colonial territory providing resources and agricultural lands to feed the empire, while turning its people into little more than slaves. After the victories of the first year of the war in the east, things turned sour for the Nazis at Stalingrad in late 1942.

Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders long declared their intention to remove the Iranian regime, using agents on the ground, assassinations and sabotage, and imploring Iranians to rise up against the ayatollahs. But after the mass protests and brutal crackdown in January, these calls have not been heeded. Iranians have rallied to the nation.

If, however unlikely it seems, the latest US-Iran ceasefire somehow transitions to a more permanent agreement to end hostilities on Iran’s terms, it would be seen as a historic defeat for the US, on par with Vietnam. And a break with the total war that killed tens of millions in the 1940s.

As of now, the US is blockading Iran’s ports and seized an Iranian ship, while moving thousands of troops into the region. At home, Trump is on a war footing, putting the auto sector on notice to convert to weapons production, while asking Congress for a $1.5 trillion “defence” budget, the largest ever. This does not look like imminent peace, but with Trump, who knows?

When will it end?

And what about Gaza? The genocide is far from over. For the Palestinians, this question is existential.

History offers some clues. No modern genocide has lasted more than four years. Rwanda’s lasted 100 days – the fastest, most brutal, in history. Cambodia’s lasted over three years until Vietnam invaded and overthrew the Khmer Rouge. The Armenian genocide lasted just over one year. Stalin’s special operation against the Poles, Ukrainians and other national minorities lasted 16 months. The German siege of Leningrad lasted 872 days. The Holocaust, the worst of all, lasted four years. 

So far the Palestinians have endured 926 days of extermination and siege. According to a 2025 household survey and joint mortality study, the Gaza death toll had reached 84,000 by January 2025 and is likely now well over 100,000, on top of 6,500 killed by Israel in Lebanon, and thousands more in Iran.

The biggest defeat of all is not in Lebanon, or Iran, but in Washington. US voters have had enough of wars and Israel

Crucially, in most cases, genocide precedes the collapse or military defeat of the perpetrator.

Israel has always relied on unconditional US support, which culminated in Washington arming a genocide, then backing not one, but two unprovoked assaults on Iran, and a prolonged war against Hezbollah. All of them failed, at appalling human cost. And now that US weapons pipeline is in jeopardy.

The vote last week in the US Senate on supplying arms to Israel was historic. Even though it passed, 40 out of 47 Democratic senators voted for Bernie Sander’s resolution blocking a batch of military aid. By contrast, last April, only 15 of the Democratic caucus’s 47 members supported similar measures. This signals a dramatic shift against Israel in Washington. 

Democrats who want to be re-elected in November know they must now distance themselves, not just rhetorically, but also financially and politically, from Israel and its powerful US lobby. Aipac is still spending hundreds of millions to get its candidates elected, but the taint of lobby money is increasingly electoral poison.

Netanyahu had his golden time with Trump’s first term, then Joe Biden, and Trump two. That time is coming to an end. Most likely, he will look for a way to prolong Israel’s campaign for regional supremacy and remain in office as long as possible, but he is running out of road.

He now faces his biggest defeat of all; not in Lebanon, or Iran, but in Washington. US voters have had enough of forever wars and Israel.

In Israel, as Finkelstein warns, it is not just Netanyahu, but the whole of Israeli society that “has turned into homicidal maniacs” supporting war on Iran, ethnic cleansing in the West Bank and Lebanon, and genocide in Gaza.

The final lesson of World War Two was that fascism was defeated after its leaders’ disastrous military overreach and defeat at the hands of the Soviet Red Army and partisan resistance. Today’s fascist war leaders have learned nothing from this history.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.

Joe Gill has worked as a journalist in London, Venezuela and Oman, for newspapers including Financial Times, Morning Star and Middle East Eye. His focus is on geopolitics, economic history, social movements, and the arts.