Burg and Carlson’s new ‘final solution for the Jews’

On 17 November, a book bearing the words ‘Endlösung der Judenfrage’ on its cover will hit bookshops across America. Endlösung der Judenfrage, the ‘Final Solution to the Jewish Question’, is the term used by the Nazis to refer to the extermination of Europe’s Jews. On 20 January 1942, fifteen senior Nazi officials gathered at a villa on the shores of Lake Wannsee to coordinate the plan under the direction of Reinhard Heydrich, with Adolf Eichmann tasked with drafting the minutes. The book was written by a Jew, the former Speaker of the Knesset Avraham Burg, one of those Jewish intellectuals so beloved of those who hate Israel on both the right and the left. The son of a minister, Avraham Burg published the book Defeating Hitler (Neri Pozza) a few years ago. In it, he announced, without too much fanfare, ‘the end of Zionism’. Now Burg, together with Tucker Carlson, is set to publish a book in the United States entitled "Peace Is the Only Final Solution for Jews".

Tucker Carlson has written the foreword, and the book will be distributed by the publishing giant Simon & Schuster. Jeffrey Lax of New York University accuses Carlson and Avraham Burg of using Nazi rhetoric and calls on the publisher Simon & Schuster to halt distribution of the book. In an interview on the Moral Edge podcast, hosted by Nissim Black and Michael Gerbitz, Lax says: “When you talk about the ‘final solution’ for the Jews, you are entering deeply frightening territory. There is no reference to Israel in the title. It is specifically about the Jews.”

Burg’s collaboration with Carlson is nothing new. Last March, Burg appeared as a guest on his programme to discuss Israel, Zionism and the war with Iran. An alliance has formed between the ‘America First’ right and the radical left that describes itself as ‘anti-Zionist’. Last week, in an interview with Il Foglio, Rod Dreher described Carlson as “America’s most successful anti-Semite” (the organisation Stop Antisemitism named Carlson “Anti-Semite of the Year”).

In 2024, Carlson hosted podcaster Darryl Cooper, who claimed that the Nazis had “got themselves into a situation bigger than they could handle” and that the extermination camps had been an unintended consequence of poor wartime planning. At the time, the chief executive of the Anti-Defamation League, Jonathan Greenblatt, responded with words that take on a different meaning today: “Whilst the Nazi Party, the Third Reich, may not have had plans for everything, there was one thing for which they did have a plan: the Jews. It was called the Final Solution.” However, a book that invokes the Nazi “Final Solution” – the darkest concept of 20th-century Europe – appears to mark a significant departure even for the former Fox News commentator.

However, the comparison between Israel and Nazism is now widely accepted in the mainstream. It ranges from actors such as Javier Bardem (“The IDF are Nazis”) to films such as “Naza”, which won awards and was acclaimed at Venice, to the former head of Médecins Sans Frontières, Nonino Prize winner and Feltrinelli author Rony Brauman. At a conference in Paris organised to mark the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, Brauman said that “Gaza will replace Auschwitz as a metaphor for absolute cruelty”. The same holds true for Masha Gessen, the “non-binary” Russian-American intellectual, who compared the Gaza Strip to the ghettos of Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe in an essay in The New Yorker – a comparison that sparked a strong outcry on the eve of the Hannah Arendt Prize ceremony, awarded to her in Germany, which went ahead quietly. Gessen not only reiterated the comparison, but took it a step further by likening the uprisings in the Jewish ghettos to “Palestinian resistance”. Then there is Pankaj Mishra, a renowned Indian essayist and writer who contributes to progressive magazines such as the Times Literary Supplement, and who, in “The World After Gaza”, draws parallels between Gaza and the Holocaust; and even the historian Luciano Canfora, who told Accordi&Disaccordi that “Israel is the heir to the Third Reich”. In an article in Le Monde entitled “Israel-Palestine: The Cancer”, the renowned sociologist Edgar Morin treads carefully, whilst the Nobel Laureate for Literature, the Portuguese communist José Saramago, had already stated that “Ramallah is today’s Auschwitz”.

The former German Minister for Culture, Green Party member and staunch progressive Claudia Roth, has just caused a scandal by saying that “we must move beyond the sense of guilt over the Holocaust”. We therefore await the Italian edition of Carlson and Burg’s book and, whilst we’re at it, the conversion of Hitler’s “Eagle’s Nest” in the Bavarian Alps into an anti-Zionist educational centre.