As Netanyahu compares US university protests to Nazi Germany, young Palestinians welcome support

as pro palestinian Protests spread on university campuses Across the United States, leading to hundreds of arrests, young Palestinians in the war-torn Gaza Strip told CBS News they appreciate America’s support. However, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu condemned the demonstrations as anti-Semitic and even compared them to those held in Germany almost 100 years ago, when the Nazi party came to power thanks to a wave of anti-Jewish hatred.

Fida Afifi had been attending Al Aqsa University in Gaza City before Hamas rulers in the Palestinian territory sparked the ongoing war with their bloody October 2 attack. 7 terrorist attacks against Israel. The war forced her to flee her home in Rafah, southern Gaza, along with around 1.5 million other Palestinians.

She told CBS News on Wednesday that she appreciated the support for the cause of the Palestinian people from young people nearly 6,000 miles away in the United States.

“I salute them, the American university students who are protesting against the Netanyahu government and the American government. They are very kind and I admire them for that. I call on the students of the world to rise up against the government,” he said.

Before the war, Essam el-Demasy said he was close to earning his business degree. Speaking to CBS News next to a tent in a camp for displaced people in southern Gaza, he said he had lost his “hopes and dreams.”

“We thank all the students and everyone who supports us in these times. We thank all the students around the world and especially in the US. We thank all the students who think of doing anything to help us,” said the – Too much. “We are living this war, which is like a genocide at all levels.”

There have been hundreds of arrests at universities from New York to California, and while most protesters emphasize that they are demonstrating against Israel’s war in Gaza and its decades-long occupation of Palestinian territory, Jewish student organizations say Incidents of anti-Semitism have left people scared even venture onto their campuses.

In a video statement released Wednesday night, Netanyahu, speaking in English, criticized the protests in the United States as “horrible” anti-Semitism, equating them even with anti-Jewish demonstrations in Germany when the Nazi party came to power in the decade before the celebration of World War II. Second War and Holocaust.

“What is happening on American college campuses is horrible. Anti-Semitic mobs have taken over major universities,” Netanyahu said. “They call for the annihilation of Israel. They attack Jewish students. They attack Jewish professors. This is reminiscent of what happened in German universities in the 1930s.”

“It is unacceptable,” said the veteran Israeli politician who, to secure his current third term two years ago, associated himself with some of his country’s most extreme ultranationalist parties. form the most right-wing government in the history of Israel.

“It has to be stopped,” Netanyahu said of the widespread protests in the United States. “It needs to be condemned and condemned unequivocally, but that’s not what happened.”

This couldn’t be further from how young Palestinians, trapped in the Gaza war zone, see the support of so many American students determined to make their voices heard despite the risk of arrest.

“Aggression is committing genocide, massacres and starvation,” Ahmed Ibrahim Hassan, an accounting student displaced from his home in northern Gaza, told CBS News. “We hope that these pressures will continue until the aggression against us stops.”