Israel's Willing Executioners: Popular Complicity in Nazi Germany vs. Israel During Genocide
In March 2025, 82% of Jewish Israelis supported the forced expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza, while 47% endorsed killing all inhabitants of conquered territories—echoing the biblical conquest of Jericho. These figures, documented through transparent polling, provide clearer evidence of eliminationist ideology than Daniel Goldhagen presented for Nazi Germany in his controversial work *Hitler's Willing Executioners*.
While Goldhagen’s thesis about German eliminationism relied on contested and limited archival evidence from a closed autocracy, contemporary Israeli public opinion demonstrates unprecedented clarity of popular support for eliminationist policies within an internally more open society than Nazi Germany.
Evidence Quality and Methodology: Israel’s Transparency vs. Germany’s Contested and Limited Records
The fundamental difference between these cases lies in the quality and transparency of available evidence. Israeli public-opinion data emerges from a more open system—with competitive polling institutions, transparent methodologies, and cross-validation across multiple surveys. In stark contrast, Goldhagen’s evidence for German eliminationism depends on contested, more limited archival materials from a society where greater internal coercion shaped behavior and testimony.
Israeli Polling: Transparent Evidence
Multiple Israeli polling institutions have documented eliminationist attitudes using professional sampling, clear question wording, and consistent results across time and organizations.
A Hebrew University aChord Center poll conducted in May 2025 found that 64% of Israelis overall—and a larger majority of Jewish Israelis—agreed with the statement “there are no innocents in Gaza.”¹
The demographic breakdown reveals the depth of this dehumanization: 87% of ruling-coalition supporters, 73% of right-wing non-coalition voters, 67% of centrist voters, and even 30% of left-wing voters endorsed this view. Notably, 92% of Palestinian citizens of Israel (Arab Israelis) rejected this dehumanizing perspective.
The consistency across polling institutions strengthens these findings. An Israel Democracy Institute poll conducted in July 2025 found that exactly 79% of Jewish Israelis reported being “not so troubled” (23.4%) or “not at all troubled” (55.6%) by reports of famine and suffering in Gaza.² Meanwhile, 86% of Palestinian citizens of Israel expressed concern about this humanitarian crisis, highlighting the stark ethnic divide in moral response.
Methodological Reconciliation of Survey Differences
The March 2025 Geocartography Knowledge Group poll found 82% of Jewish Israelis supporting “forced expulsion” of Palestinians from Gaza using a *for-expulsion or against-expulsion* binary-choice format.³
In contrast, the Hebrew University aChord Center poll from February 2025 asked about “forced emigration, transfer, or expulsion by force” with three options, yielding 60% support, 26% neutral/no opinion, and 14% opposition.
Critics questioned the 82% “for expulsion” result by pointing to the lower 60% in the aChord poll.⁴ But what they ignore is that most respondents choosing “neutral/no opinion” would still prefer expulsion over opposition when forced to choose. Reallocating neutral respondents—mirroring the 60 : 14 ratio among committed respondents—splits about 81% toward support and 19% toward opposition, near reproducing the 82% figure (81.1% to be exact).* Apparent polling differences thus confirm, rather than undermine, the reality of overwhelming support for expulsion.
German Evidence: Contested, Limited Archives in Autocracy and Wartime
Goldhagen’s case rested on trial transcripts from Nuremberg and later prosecutions, battalion reports, personal letters expressing perpetrators’ pride, and memoirs boasting voluntary service. Critics—including Christopher Browning, Richard Evans, and Hans Mommsen—have highlighted fundamental problems with this evidence base.⁵ These documents represent a narrow, possibly coerced subset of the population, subject to extreme peer pressure and career incentives within an autocratic system.
Browning’s *Ordinary Men* documented situational pressures, peer influence, and coercive environments that complicate Goldhagen’s portrayal of widespread ideological volunteerism among Police Battalion 101.⁶ Evans warned against overgeneralization from selective archival testimony, while Mommsen emphasized the need for comparative context with other Nazi territories and wartime societies.
Scale of Support: Majority vs. Minority Participation
Beyond methodological contrasts, the sheer scope of documented support reveals the starkest difference between these cases. Israeli polls show majority—often supermajority—endorsement of extremist policies across the Jewish population, whereas German evidence shows direct participation by a small minority.
Israeli Supermajorities for Extremist Policies
Alongside the 82% backing expulsion of Gazans, 56% of Jewish Israelis supported expelling Arab Israelis (their own fellow citizens), and support reached 66% among those under 40.³ Both figures mark dramatic increases from 2003 baselines (45% and 31% respectively), indicating growing extremism over time. Most disturbingly, 47% of Jewish Israelis endorsed the army “killing all inhabitants” of conquered territories, explicitly approving genocidal tactics.
German Minority Participation
By contrast, Goldhagen’s evidence identifies only a few thousand core perpetrators—Einsatzgruppen and police battalions—within a much larger population.⁷ Even generous counts suggest minority rather than majority involvement, further complicated by extreme coercion in Nazi Germany.
Information Access vs. Coercive Control
Most significantly, these extremist attitudes persist in Israel even with greater freedoms and access to information compared to Nazi Germany.
Israelis can view atrocity footage online and read detailed investigations by B’Tselem, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch.⁸⁻¹⁰ Opposition media, civil-society groups, and academics operate with far fewer constraints than existed in Nazi Germany, where a totalitarian apparatus monopolized information and punished dissent with imprisonment or death. Under such coercion, documented “support” for genocidal policy is inherently ambiguous.
Historical Context and Academic Debate
Goldhagen’s thesis sparked debate because it portrayed ordinary Germans as ideologically committed killers, challenging functionalist explanations emphasizing bureaucratic momentum. The Israeli data removes many ambiguities: eliminationist attitudes are openly stated, transparently measured, and broadly shared in a comparatively open society.
Theoretical Framework: Popular Complicity and the Cost of Resistance
Complicity must be scaled to the cost of resistance. Under totalitarianism, resisting genocidal ideology or orders risks imprisonment or death; under the pressures of an open society, resistance primarily entails extra effort, social ostracism, or economic loss. Because these costs are lower, moral responsibility—and thus complicity—is greater.
This framework is more accurate than fixed legal thresholds because it calibrates culpability to lived realities.
In many instances, it is also more charitable and lenient than prevailing legal systems, which overlook nuanced realities of coercion, manipulation, and personal risk. At the same time, it is less lenient than nationalistic legal practices that frequently excuse—or even glorify—state-sanctioned violence.
Broader Implications: External Violence by Relatively Open Societies
Israeli polling demonstrates that relatively open societies can coexist with mass endorsement of ethnic cleansing and genocide. This exposes the myth—sustained by branding electoral plutocracies as “democracies”—that internal openness correlates with external restraint. Victorian England, the freest state of its era, crushed India with famine-level policies; the United States, freer than Russia, has a more extensive record of foreign violence. Openness and aggression routinely coexist.
It is plausible that a *genuine* democracy—where political and economic power are broadly shared, nationally and internationally—would reduce external violence. Yet Israeli evidence suggests that formal institutions in relatively open societies, operating within ethnic nationalism, colonial logics, and plutocratic structures, can legitimize genocidal violence even more efficiently than totalitarian propaganda.
The willing executioners of the twenty-first century announce their intentions not through coercion, but through the expression of eliminationist will in relatively open societies.
mr1001nights
www.reddit.com/r/israelexposed/s/A8lNWYpn4i
Israel's Willing Executioners: Popular Complicity in Nazi Germany vs. Israel During Genocide
In March 2025, 82% of Jewish Israelis supported the forced expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza, while 47% endorsed killing all inhabitants of conquered territories—echoing the biblical conquest of Jericho. These figures, documented through transparent polling, provide clearer evidence of eliminationist ideology than Daniel Goldhagen presented for Nazi Germany in his controversial work *Hitler's Willing Executioners*.
While Goldhagen’s thesis about German eliminationism relied on contested and limited archival evidence from a closed autocracy, contemporary Israeli public opinion demonstrates unprecedented clarity of popular support for eliminationist policies within an internally more open society than Nazi Germany.
Evidence Quality and Methodology: Israel’s Transparency vs. Germany’s Contested and Limited Records
The fundamental difference between these cases lies in the quality and transparency of available evidence. Israeli public-opinion data emerges from a more open system—with competitive polling institutions, transparent methodologies, and cross-validation across multiple surveys. In stark contrast, Goldhagen’s evidence for German eliminationism depends on contested, more limited archival materials from a society where greater internal coercion shaped behavior and testimony.
Israeli Polling: Transparent Evidence
Multiple Israeli polling institutions have documented eliminationist attitudes using professional sampling, clear question wording, and consistent results across time and organizations.
A Hebrew University aChord Center poll conducted in May 2025 found that 64% of Israelis overall—and a larger majority of Jewish Israelis—agreed with the statement “there are no innocents in Gaza.”¹
The demographic breakdown reveals the depth of this dehumanization: 87% of ruling-coalition supporters, 73% of right-wing non-coalition voters, 67% of centrist voters, and even 30% of left-wing voters endorsed this view. Notably, 92% of Palestinian citizens of Israel (Arab Israelis) rejected this dehumanizing perspective.
The consistency across polling institutions strengthens these findings. An Israel Democracy Institute poll conducted in July 2025 found that exactly 79% of Jewish Israelis reported being “not so troubled” (23.4%) or “not at all troubled” (55.6%) by reports of famine and suffering in Gaza.² Meanwhile, 86% of Palestinian citizens of Israel expressed concern about this humanitarian crisis, highlighting the stark ethnic divide in moral response.
Methodological Reconciliation of Survey Differences
The March 2025 Geocartography Knowledge Group poll found 82% of Jewish Israelis supporting “forced expulsion” of Palestinians from Gaza using a *for-expulsion or against-expulsion* binary-choice format.³
In contrast, the Hebrew University aChord Center poll from February 2025 asked about “forced emigration, transfer, or expulsion by force” with three options, yielding 60% support, 26% neutral/no opinion, and 14% opposition.
Critics questioned the 82% “for expulsion” result by pointing to the lower 60% in the aChord poll.⁴ But what they ignore is that most respondents choosing “neutral/no opinion” would still prefer expulsion over opposition when forced to choose. Reallocating neutral respondents—mirroring the 60 : 14 ratio among committed respondents—splits about 81% toward support and 19% toward opposition, near reproducing the 82% figure (81.1% to be exact).*
Apparent polling differences thus confirm, rather than undermine, the reality of overwhelming support for expulsion.
*Calculation: 60 ÷ 74 ≈ 0.8108; 0.8108 × 26 ≈ 21.1; 60 + 21.1 ≈ 81.1 → 81.1%.
German Evidence: Contested, Limited Archives in Autocracy and Wartime
Goldhagen’s case rested on trial transcripts from Nuremberg and later prosecutions, battalion reports, personal letters expressing perpetrators’ pride, and memoirs boasting voluntary service. Critics—including Christopher Browning, Richard Evans, and Hans Mommsen—have highlighted fundamental problems with this evidence base.⁵ These documents represent a narrow, possibly coerced subset of the population, subject to extreme peer pressure and career incentives within an autocratic system.
Browning’s *Ordinary Men* documented situational pressures, peer influence, and coercive environments that complicate Goldhagen’s portrayal of widespread ideological volunteerism among Police Battalion 101.⁶ Evans warned against overgeneralization from selective archival testimony, while Mommsen emphasized the need for comparative context with other Nazi territories and wartime societies.
Scale of Support: Majority vs. Minority Participation
Beyond methodological contrasts, the sheer scope of documented support reveals the starkest difference between these cases. Israeli polls show majority—often supermajority—endorsement of extremist policies across the Jewish population, whereas German evidence shows direct participation by a small minority.
Israeli Supermajorities for Extremist Policies
Alongside the 82% backing expulsion of Gazans, 56% of Jewish Israelis supported expelling Arab Israelis (their own fellow citizens), and support reached 66% among those under 40.³ Both figures mark dramatic increases from 2003 baselines (45% and 31% respectively), indicating growing extremism over time. Most disturbingly, 47% of Jewish Israelis endorsed the army “killing all inhabitants” of conquered territories, explicitly approving genocidal tactics.
German Minority Participation
By contrast, Goldhagen’s evidence identifies only a few thousand core perpetrators—Einsatzgruppen and police battalions—within a much larger population.⁷ Even generous counts suggest minority rather than majority involvement, further complicated by extreme coercion in Nazi Germany.
Information Access vs. Coercive Control
Most significantly, these extremist attitudes persist in Israel even with greater freedoms and access to information compared to Nazi Germany.
Israelis can view atrocity footage online and read detailed investigations by B’Tselem, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch.⁸⁻¹⁰ Opposition media, civil-society groups, and academics operate with far fewer constraints than existed in Nazi Germany, where a totalitarian apparatus monopolized information and punished dissent with imprisonment or death. Under such coercion, documented “support” for genocidal policy is inherently ambiguous.
Historical Context and Academic Debate
Goldhagen’s thesis sparked debate because it portrayed ordinary Germans as ideologically committed killers, challenging functionalist explanations emphasizing bureaucratic momentum. The Israeli data removes many ambiguities: eliminationist attitudes are openly stated, transparently measured, and broadly shared in a comparatively open society.
Theoretical Framework: Popular Complicity and the Cost of Resistance
Complicity must be scaled to the cost of resistance. Under totalitarianism, resisting genocidal ideology or orders risks imprisonment or death; under the pressures of an open society, resistance primarily entails extra effort, social ostracism, or economic loss. Because these costs are lower, moral responsibility—and thus complicity—is greater.
This framework is more accurate than fixed legal thresholds because it calibrates culpability to lived realities.
In many instances, it is also more charitable and lenient than prevailing legal systems, which overlook nuanced realities of coercion, manipulation, and personal risk. At the same time, it is less lenient than nationalistic legal practices that frequently excuse—or even glorify—state-sanctioned violence.
Broader Implications: External Violence by Relatively Open Societies
Israeli polling demonstrates that relatively open societies can coexist with mass endorsement of ethnic cleansing and genocide. This exposes the myth—sustained by branding electoral plutocracies as “democracies”—that internal openness correlates with external restraint. Victorian England, the freest state of its era, crushed India with famine-level policies; the United States, freer than Russia, has a more extensive record of foreign violence. Openness and aggression routinely coexist.
It is plausible that a *genuine* democracy—where political and economic power are broadly shared, nationally and internationally—would reduce external violence. Yet Israeli evidence suggests that formal institutions in relatively open societies, operating within ethnic nationalism, colonial logics, and plutocratic structures, can legitimize genocidal violence even more efficiently than totalitarian propaganda.
The willing executioners of the twenty-first century announce their intentions not through coercion, but through the expression of eliminationist will in relatively open societies.
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