* Director of Deir Yassin Remembered
* Compares Israel to Nazi Germany and denies the Holocaust
Paul Eisen is the UK Director of the radical organization, Deir Yassin Remembered (DYR). He calls himself a “self-identifying Jew” and poses as an objective scholar of history, although his writings are largely disseminated by Internet hate sites on the extreme right and left.
As one of the directors of DYR, Eisen works “to tell the truth about Palestinians as victims of Zionism,” using the “systematic murder” of “orphaned children” at Deir Yassin in 1948 as a focal point of his anti-Israel propaganda. Absent from this picture is the admission by Arab leaders that the “massacre” was invented for the express purpose of shaming Arab nations into fighting the Jews. DYR’s libel, however, is tame in comparison with Eisen’s other writings.
In “Jewish Power” (August 2004), Eisen accuses Israel of harboring an “eliminationist attitude to Palestinians and Palestinian life” and asserts that Israel is “one of the most ruthless and irrational powers of modern times.” Eisen’s rhetoric quickly becomes even more extreme. For him, all proposed solutions for peace are simply “slogans”; “the only ‘solution’ is a final solution and even that cannot be ruled out.” Whether he means the elimination of the Jews or Israel’s ongoing war against Palestinians by the term “final solution,” Eisen does not bother to clarify, despite the fact that “final solution” is the historical term for the Nazis’ genocide of the Jews.
Israel, Eisen argues, “is a state that knows no boundaries. It is a state that both believes, and uses as justification for its own aggression, the notion that its very survival is always at stake, so anything is justified to ensure that survival.” In this context, Eisen argues that Israel is essentially a contemporary version of Nazi Germany:
“National Socialism, like Zionism, another blend of mysticism and power, gained credibility as a means to right wrongs done to a victimized people. National Socialism, like Zionism, also sought to maintain the racial/ethnic purity of one group and to maintain the rights of that ethnic group over others, and National Socialism, like Zionism, also proposed an almost mystical attachment of that group to a land.”
Eisen sees America, moreover, as a nation hijacked by neoconservative Zionists who have been able to embed the “Jewish narrative” into “the centre of American life.”
Although he does not dispute the Holocaust in “Jewish Power,” a few months later, in “Holocaust Wars” (December 2004), Eisen contends that the main reason the Palestinian solidarity movement “has had little success in stopping the Zionist juggernaut” is its unwillingness to question the Holocaust. By criticizing the international power of the “Jewish narrative” of the Holocaust, Eisen places himself alongside disgraced fringe figures like Robert Faurisson (a French anti-Semite who was fired by the University of Lyon for his hate-filled screeds and who was defended by Noam Chomsky), Mark Weber and David Irving.
In joining this notorious crowd, Eisen gained the praise of the some of the most extreme propagandists; Gilad Atzmon, Israel Shamir and Ernst Zündel soon began circulating “Holocaust Wars.” Eisen and DYR also enlisted Israel Shamir, another Holocaust denier. In response to criticism, Eisen fiercely defended Holocaust revisionism:
“Over the last fifty years, revisionist scholars have amassed a formidable body of substantial evidence, which runs in direct opposition to the traditional Holocaust narrative. ‘Where is the evidence,’ they say, ‘for this alleged gargantuan mass-murder? Where are the documents? Where are the traces and remains? Where are the weapons of murder?’”