In the late 1930s of the last century, Adolf Hitler had referred to the Jews of Austria and Germany as “blood sucking beasts”. He then set about committing one of the most heinous crimes against them, along with the other subjects of his conquests, by sending them to the gas chambers. That act of barbarity is referred to as the ‘holocaust’. Loosely defined, it is the systematic and wilful slaughter or destruction of a people on a mass scale, to the point of extermination.

For more than seven decades, another holocaust has transpired on a milder scale, but whose intent is one and the same — the total elimination of a people through imprisonment and murder. That has been the unfortunate fate of Palestinians living in their lands that are slowly being run-over by illegal Israeli colonists, who pour in from different corners of the world on the basis of their Jewish religion and force the lawful owners out through intimidation and force.

The intensity of the Israelis in expediting the holocaust and getting rid of the Palestinians within their midst has taken on and urgency never witnessed before. They want to seize every remaining piece of land that belongs to the Palestinians. And it has also taken a macabre twist. With illegal colonists given an open licence to kill, more Palestinian women and children have been targeted, shot and killed by Israeli soldiers and snipers than ever before in recorded history. The message is clear: Remain here and you will not last. Leave or meet your end.

Last week, the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, announced plans to surround his country with fences to protect it from the “wild beasts” from neighbouring countries. During a visit to the south of the country, near the border with Sinai, Netanyahu stated that the fence project was part of a “multi-year plan to surround Israel with security fences to protect ourselves in the current and projected Middle East. In our neighbourhood, we need to protect ourselves from wild beasts,” he said. “There will be a fence like this one (referring to the one along the Sinai border) surrounding Israel in its entirety. We will surround the entire state of Israel with a fence, a barrier.”

Netanyahu’s “wild beasts” comments are no different from what Hitler had said so many decades back. And Netanyahu is following a parallel plan of destruction, targeting the hapless Palestinians who seem to have been forgotten amidst the ongoing regional clashes. Nazism and Zionism have thus merged into one. Bolstered by the regional concerns of Arab countries that have seemingly relegated Palestine to the lower tiers of immediate alarms and in the face of a lack of any loud international condemnation for their brutality, the Israelis have picked up pace, putting the finishing touches to this holocaust.

Public statements by some of the Israeli leaders reveal that such a plan has been a work-in-progress for many years. It is not confined to the current leadership, but has been the basis for which every peace deal met an inglorious end at the hands of the land-hungry Zionist machinery. In August 2000, the then Israeli prime minister, Ehud Barak, had referred to the Palestinians as a “predatory reptile”. “The Palestinians are like crocodiles. The more you give them meat, the more they want,” he asserted.

In a 2013 radio interview, the Israeli deputy defence minister, Eli Ben Dahan, and also a devout rabbi known for his outspoken views, said that Palestinians “aren’t human”. “To me, they are like animals, and should be treated accordingly,” he said.

Last May, the Israeli Justice Minister, Ayelet Shaked, shockingly stated that Palestinian mothers raise “little snakes”. She said that all Palestinians should be viewed as “enemy combatants”, and that “the mother of martyrs should follow their sons. Nothing would be more just. They should go, as should the physical homes in which they raised the snakes. Otherwise, more little snakes will be raised there”.

One must not also forget the war criminal and former Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon, who was directly implicated in the massacres of the innocent in Sabra and Shatilla and had a personal hand in another massacre of an entire village in his intent to exterminate all Palestinians. He had revolted against previous peace agreements, such as the Oslo Accord, and set about diversionary agendas to distract the world community from his dastardly deeds.

Sharon was committed to eradicate the souls of those born and bred on this land — all in the name of Zionism, a despicable alternative to racism.

And just as Hitler’s henchmen had initially convinced Chamberlain of England of their desire for peace, so has the Zionist spin doctors been active in the West, promoting the concept that the “ethnic cleansing” of the Palestinian people, into its seventh decade now, is a reaction to suicide bombing or terrorist attacks, shamelessly promoting Israel as the beacon of democracy in the Middle East.

It is a moral tragedy today that we are front-line witnesses to the slow death of a people and yet do not possess the courage or the conscience to speak out against such state-sponsored ruthlessness. Some choose to digest the spin Israel provides to its acts, while others pretend it never happened. But the blood of the Palestinian victim that spills on his land is all too real. Let us not mince words here. It is the Israelis who wear the mantle of the “wild beasts” of the region. Their actions justify it.

Tariq A. Al Maeena is a Saudi socio-political commentator. He lives in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. You can follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/@talmaeena