“Welcome to Israel!” My mother was born into an affluent Warsaw family on Christmas Day 1921. When Nazi Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, her teenage life was turned on end. Her brother died fighting the Germans, her sister died after contracting typhus, and her father was detained by the Gestapo. In January 1940, she and her mother absconded to Rome using false papers. Only once did my mother speak of the three cruel months before her escape to Rome, an Axis “open city.” This came in 1978, after the election of a Polish pope brought her to tears. She told me that in the autumn of the Nazi invasion, her Warsaw district fell under the jurisdiction of an sadistic SS captain who from his jeep, using a megaphone, would shout at cowering civilians, “Welcome to the Reich. We are the masters here.” Many were arrested on the spot. Some were blindfolded and left to stumble before they were summarily executed. She never again spoke of that time, which she spent a lifetime hiding even from her closest friends. But now, some ninety years later, to my horror, I hear the same phrasing, this time spoken by a prominent Jewish government official. In a widely circulated video, national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, one of several extreme right figures in the Israeli cabinet, is heard berating detained activists from a flotilla attempting to bring aid to Gaza’s dispossessed, something Israel forbids. “Welcome to Israel; we are the masters here,” he proudly tells his captives in Hebrew. (Some have suggested the word “masters” should be translated as “landlords,” but under the circumstances, it makes little difference.) Though his remarks were roundly criticized in Israel and in Europe, he was not — and this is significant — compelled to apologize, nor was he asked to resign. He is only 50 and therefore may have the luxury of forgetting history. The awful truth is that Jewish extremism and that of the Reich can overlap. I can only be glad that my Catholic mother, a true admirer of a free world headed by a decent America as well as an admirer of Israel, died decades before cockroaches and their ilk returned to blacken the political landscape.