Former Israeli Defense Minister: Israel’s ideology of ‘Jewish supremacy’ resembles Nazi race theory

 

Former Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon says the “ideology of ‘Jewish supremacy’” has become dominant in Israel, and it “is reminiscent of the Nazi race theory.”

By Jonathan Ofir  February 4, 2026 

In the late 1980s, Israeli philosopher Yeshayahu Leibowitz made the controversial warning that the 1967 occupation risked turning Israelis into “Judeo-Nazis.”

Leibowitz recently found a surprising supporter for this opinion –  Former Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon.

On Friday, Ya’alon tweeted that “Yeshayahu Leibowitz was right, and I was wrong”. This was no benign reference – it referred directly to the late professor Leibowitz’s “warnings… concerning the process of bestialization towards us becoming ‘Judeo-Nazis’…”. Ya’alon says that the “ideology of ‘Jewish supremacy’” has become “dominant in the government of Israel”, and that it “is reminiscent of the Nazi race theory”. 

This was said in relation to Ya’alon’s participation in a ceremony to commemorate International Holocaust Remembrance Day on January 27. In his tweet, he repeatedly mocks the commonly held reluctance to compare anything that Israeli Jews do today to what the Nazis did during World War II.

Leibowitz was an ultra-orthodox professor and intellectual, whom the late Israeli President Ezer Weizman eulogized as “one of the greatest figures in the life of the Jewish people and the State of Israel,” and “a spiritual conscience for many in Israel.” Leibowitz was vehemently opposed to Israel’s 1967 occupation and referred to Supreme Court Judge, Meir Landau, as a ‘Judeo-Nazi’ in 1987 after the court had legalized the torture of Palestinians. In the same interview, Leibowitz also referred to the discussion of Israeli democracy as “sterile” and labeled Israel as “the only dictatorship in the enlightened world.”

Thus, this is the moral power Ya’alon is seeking to apply by referencing Leibowitz and the term ‘Judeo-Nazis’, although his warning also included a hedge because he believes the next Israeli government could still prove Leibowitz wrong. 

Here then is the full text of what Ya’alon shared on social media (my translation from Hebrew) – I have added numerous links to the many condensed references in his tweet:

 “Last Tuesday evening I participated in a ceremony marking the International Holocaust Remembrance Day. When I got home, I got a message about Jewish pogromists who are attacking Palestinians in the southern Hebron mountains, stealing their flock and burning their possessions. ‘You can’t compare!’… after ambulances, who tried to get to the place, were delayed by the Jewish terrorists, three Palestinians were evacuated to the hospital, where one of them suffered a fracture to the skull. ‘No event can be compared to the Holocaust, which our people were subject to!’…

Of course, I immediately contacted those responsible for security in the area, and I was assured that the event was being handled by IDF. Until now, no Jewish terrorist was arrested (as in many other cases) because… the Israeli police is controlled by a convicted criminal, a racist Kahanist fascist [National Security minister Itamar Ben Gvir], the Shabak [general security agency] is controlled by [David Zini], the representative of the Jewish-supremacy from the schools of rabbi [Zvi] Thau, [Dov] Lior, [Yitzhak] Ginzburgh and [Eliyahu] Zini (his uncle), the Defense Minister [Israel Katz] is preventing administrative detention of Jewish terrorists, and the additional minister in the Defense Ministry [Bezalel Smotrich] is encouraging illegal outposts and equips them with all-terrain vehicles, in order to make the life of Palestinians miserable, towards their dispossession from their lands and settlement of the lands with Jews (once again you will ask why I have accused the government of ‘ethnic cleansing’!?).

The ideology of ‘Jewish supremacy’, which has become dominant in the government of Israel, is reminiscent of the Nazi race theory. ‘But one may not compare!’… I have commanded the Judea and Samaria Division, the Central Command and the IDF. I was familiar with the warnings of Prof. Yeshayahu Leibowitz, concerning the process of bestialization towards us becoming ‘Judeo Nazis’ (in his words), [concerning] our control of another people. I have done my best, both as Defense Minister, that we would ‘know how to win over terror, yet stay human’. 

I have never deluded myself that only through concessions would we receive ‘peace now’, and I also understood the danger of ‘Jewish supremacy’ upon our future and existence. It is therefore that I support separation – according to the last programmatic speech of Yitzhak Rabin Z”L [of blessed memory] on October 5, 1995, and the title of my book is ‘The Longer, Shorter Path’.   

As things are today, Prof. Yeshayahu Leibowitz was right and I was wrong. 

The duty of the next government of Israel is to prove that Prof. Leibowitz was wrong, lest we bring destruction upon our state.

The state of ‘Jewish supremacy’ – the government of lies and betrayal – the government of the messianics, the [military draft-]dodgers and the corrupt, must be substituted, before destruction.

That is a lot. Let’s unpack it.

While there is clearly a genocide taking place in Gaza, that is not what inspired Ya’alon to draw a comparison to Nazis. No, he’s focused on the colonialist violence taking place in the West Bank. In October 2025, the UN had already counted over a thousand Palestinians killed by Israeli soldiers and settlers in the West Bank in the two years since October 2023, which accounted for nearly half of those killed in the West Bank in the past 20 years. And the pace is accelerating – 2025 saw an unprecedented level of ethnic cleansing in the West Bank. And yes, as Ya’alon points out, the illegal settlers, whom he calls Jewish terrorists, are getting a free pass the Defense Minister. And far-right politician Bezalel Smotrich, whom he calls the “additional minister,” currently serves as the de facto governor of the West Bank, with a specially tailored ministerial post in the Defense Ministry in addition to his Finance portfolio. These are factually correct observations. 

But Ya’alon is also a hawk with a Likud background, a leader with a murderous military record, one who has compared Palestinians to “cancer”, to which he was applying “chemotherapy” (when he was army chief of staff in 2002). So it is clear that Ya’alon does not have the Palestinians’ best interests in mind. The question remains: why does Ya’alon now believe a project that he was so central to is being corrupted by “Judeo-Nazis”?

In his message, Ya’alon is blaming the looming demise of the state on the “messianic” Jews. He names various rabbis, and these are fanatic ideologues. Rabbi Yitzhchak Ginsburgh, as an example, has glorified the Baruch Goldstein massacre of 1994 (murdering 29 Palestinian muslim worshippers in Al-Khalil), and endorsed the book Torat Hamelech in 2009, a book authored by his yeshiva colleagues, which is a manual for the killing of the ‘enemy’ through religious interpretation – including the killing of babies, “if it is clear they will grow up to harm Jews”. And rabbi Dov Lior, who also endorsed that book, is the spiritual inspiration for Jewish Power’s Itamar Ben-Gvir. Moshe Ya’alon is certainly pointing to some certified Judeo-Nazis, but he seems to pin the problem mostly on religious fanaticism. 

He thinks he has the solution: “The government of ‘Jewish supremacy’, the government of lies and betrayal – the government of the messianics, the [military draft]-dodgers and the corrupt, must be replaced, before the destruction.” The reference to “draft dodgers” refers to ultra-orthodox Jews who seek exemption from military service. So there’s a definite secular-vs-religious angle in his admonishment, but his solution is still militaristic. He is warning about a ‘destruction’ that he sees as coming from within. The Hebrew term he uses in the repeated reference to destruction –  ‘horban’ – is widely understood in Jewish culture as alluding to the destruction of the 2nd Jewish Temple in the year 70, it is understood as a destruction of the Jewish state.

And why does he think they will destroy the state? Because they are going about carrying out Israeli apartheid in the wrong way. It is becoming too explicit. 

The theme of ethnic cleansing is quite central to Ya’alon’s tweet. In November 2025 he gave an interview to Israeli Democrat TV about Gaza on where he issued a similar warning about Israel becoming a  “corrupt and leprous fascist Messianic state”, “conquering, annexing, ethnic cleansing”… “look at northern Gaza”…  “What’s happening there? There’s no Beit Lahia. There’s no Beit Hanoun. They’re currently operating in Jabalya, and essentially, they’re cleaning the area of Arabs”. Ya’alon now seems to be making a similar to warning about the West Bank, but there is an important point to remember – as a Zionist, Ya’alon also supports ethnic cleansing, just not the way the current government is going about it. 

This is the issue when Zionist leaders warn of ethnic cleansing – to truly oppose ethnic cleansing in Palestine is to oppose how the state of Israel was created. And none of them are willing to admit it. Virtually no Zionist today is willing to repair the Nakba by the return of refugees, for this would counter the purpose of that ethnic cleansing in the first place – the demographic engineering of Jewish supremacy.   

Ya’alon refers to Yitzhak Rabin, and very specifically to Rabin’s last speech at the Knesset, just one month before he was murdered. In this context, Ya’alon claims that he supports ‘separation.’ Many may read this as alluding to the famous ‘two-state solution.’ But it is precisely his reference to that particular speech, where Rabin promised the Palestinian ‘state’ would be “an entity which is less than a state”… “We will not return to the June 4, 1967 lines”… “The security border of the State of Israel will be located in the Jordan Valley, in the broadest meaning of that term.”

In other words, the Oslo plan was still a design for an apartheid state of Jewish supremacy from the river to the sea. The Palestinian “entity” would be a set of bantustans surrounded by Israeli control. This is also what Ya’alon supports, and he fears the current Israeli government is threatening that vision. 

So, ultimately, Ya’alon might find the current Zionist ‘extremists’ a bit too explicit, and believes they need to be fought to maintain a liberal, morally tolerable aura in the rest of the world, but but Zionism’s “messianic” vein is undeniable – it is obsessive about creating a Jewish state from the river to the sea (or beyond). Jewish supremacy is not just a slur to be addressed to the furthest right, as Ya’alon does – it is simply the nature of Zionism.    

Ya’alon certainly got a few points right – there is a reason to compare Israel’s actions to those of the Nazis, and that should in no way be read as antisemitic, despite what the notorious IHRA definition suggests. And yes, Israel is indeed a state of Jewish Supremacy, but it’s not isolated to the furthest right, or most religious, nor to any isolated geography within historic Palestine. From the river to the sea Israel is an apartheid state, and it’s not about this or that government. And yes, there is ethnic cleansing going on – but there is also a genocide, consistently supported by an overwhelming majority of Israeli Jews, not least from the left. In other words, it’s far worse than what Ya’alon describes. It is unclear whether Ya’alon understands his role in creating this reality, and perhaps he would now prefer to be remembered as one who stood for human rights, against the Judeo-Nazis. But it’s wishful thinking. He, too, is part of the Jewish supremacy.

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