Israeli minister compares West’s policies on Iran to appeasement of Nazis

Israeli Minister for Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism Amichai Chikli on Thursday seemingly compared the West’s approach to Iran to the appeasement of Nazi leader Adolf Hitler prior to the outbreak of World War II and the Holocaust.

“Being weak towards your enemies [Iran] and harsh towards your allies [Israel] is a strategy that has never proven itself,” he wrote on X.

The text appears above a picture of former British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, best remembered for forging the 1938 Munich Agreement that allowed Hitler to annex parts of then-Czechoslovakia in exchange for a “peace in our time” that never materialized but instead fueled the Nazi death machine.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu directly addressed Iran at a high-level meeting on Thursday night, warning the Islamic Republic that whoever harms or plans to harm the Jewish state will be hurt back.

“For years, Iran has been working against us, both directly and through its proxies, and therefore Israel has been working against Iran and its proxies, both on the defense and offense,” said Netanyahu.

“We will know how to defend ourselves and will act according to the simple principle that whoever hurts us or plans to hurt us—we will hurt him,” he added.

Last month, Chikli slammed a U.N. Security Council resolution demanding a halt to the war against Hamas, which the U.S. allowed to pass by refraining from exercising its veto power.

Chikli noted that “the rapists and child murderers of Hamas” had praised the U.N. resolution, and accused the body of having lost its moral compass.

“You claimed to stand with the victims when their blood was flowing; you claimed to stand with the hostages when their cries still echoed; are you deserting them now?” he asked.

In February, Chikli told JNS that talk emanating from the halls of power in Washington of creating a Palestinian state in the aftermath of Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre illustrates the moral collapse of America.

Such an eventuality would “embolden Hamas and make the PLO irrelevant. It would turn [Hamas terror chief in the Gaza Strip] Yahya Sinwar into the David Ben-Gurion of the Palestinian people,” he added.

In December, Chikli told JNS in an interview that Harvard University had become synonymous with antisemitism and the collapse of core academic values spreading like wildfire on American campuses.

“Universities that were unable to issue an unequivocal condemnation of October 7 are in a colossal crisis from a moral point of view,” he said. “Moral relativism has created a moral abyss. Truth has become a relative term.”