This is the first Middle East war in which the main threat to Israel comes, not from secular Arab nationalism, but from Islamism. Both Hezbollah and Hamas draw their main inspiration, armaments, and funding from Islamist sources, ranging from the Sunni ideologues of the Muslim Brotherhood to the Shiite demagogues of Iran. What unites them all is a fanatical dedication to the destruction of Israel.

There are, however, parallels between the present war and previous campaigns waged against Israel by Arab nationalists. One thing that Arab nationalists and Islamists clearly have in common, though it is usually ignored in the Western media, is their explicit debt to the Nazis.

This extends even to overt Nazi symbolism. I am indebted to one of the most seasoned observers of the Middle East, Tom Gross, for a photograph of a Hezbollah rally on the Lebanese side of the border fence, shortly before the present conflict. With houses in the Israeli town of Metullah in the background, hundreds of uniformed Hezbollah terrorists are raising their arms in a Nazi-style salute. This obscene ceremony, complete with yellow standards and mullah commanders taking the salute, was happening in full view of Israeli civilians. Mr. Gross asks pointedly, “Are all those now attacking Israel around the world even capable of imagining what an elderly Holocaust survivor who happened to glance across the fence might have felt?”

Hezbollah’s Nazi salute is not just a historical curiosity, though it evokes memories of Hitler’s support for Arab agitators such as the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem or the pro-Nazi coup in Iraq. Today the Nazi legacy manifests itself in Holocaust denial, an obsession that unites the most extreme Islamists, such as President Ahmadinejad with “moderate” secularists like the President Mahmoud Abbas.

The Arabs appropriated anti-Semitic ideology directly from the Nazis and have recycled it ever since. During the dark days of appeasement in the 1930s, a Hungarian émigré philosopher, Aurel Kolnai, wrote a book about the Third Reich entitled “The War against the West.” That is exactly what the hydra-headed forces of Islamism think they are fighting right now.

In the 1950s, the Baathist parties in Syria and Iraq modeled themselves on Hitler’s heady brew of nationalism and socialism, while rejecting western democracy. Charismatic dictators from Nasser and Gaddafi to Saddam Hussein and Yasser Arafat turned themselves into little Hitlers. Today, Islamists have adopted that Nazi legacy too, using a sham democracy merely to bolster theocracy. However, the Nazi connection is usually mentioned by Arab nationalists and Islamists sotto voce, because they constantly identify Zionism with Nazism in their propaganda.

A second key similarity between today’s Islamists and past Arab nationalists relates less to ideology than to geopolitics. Both movements are more or less openly imperialist. As the historian Efraim Karsh convincingly shows in his new book “Islamic Imperialism,” the pursuit of empire has been a constant theme since the time of Muhammad.

Both Islamists and Arab nationalists, however, deploy anti-imperialist rhetoric against Israel and the West. Ayatollah Khomeini notoriously denounced America as “the Great Satan” while attempting to annex his neighbor, Iraq. The purpose of Osama bin Laden’s jihad on behalf of “oppressed Muslims” is to subject them to a universal Caliphate. Even as Nasser dreamt of what John Dulles called “an empire stretching from the Persian Gulf to the Atlantic Ocean,” the Egyptian dictator posed as the champion of the “non-aligned” nations, struggling against European colonialism and superpower hegemony.

All these and other “anti-imperialist” empire-builders, of course, were and are happy to accept help from Western powers when it suits them. Their power depends on their ability to manipulate the free world: during the Cold War by playing off one superpower against the other, more recently by setting Americans against Europeans, Russians or Chinese.

The issue of imperialism is invariably accompanied by much hypocrisy. Today, for example, America is criticized because of its refusal to intervene to stop Israel from retaliating against Hezbollah. Apart from the British, Condoleezza Rice is almost isolated at the Rome conference on Lebanon. But America’s critics are demanding that a superpower should intervene to prevent a sovereign state from defending its population against bombardment by proxies of a government that has declared its intention of wiping that state off the map. What could be more imperialist than such an intervention?

The classic example of Arab exploitation of the West’s confusion over imperialism was the Suez crisis of 1956. Fifty years ago this week Gamal Nasser, the Egyptian dictator, nationalized the Suez Canal, thereby precipitating an international crisis. The British Prime Minister, Anthony Eden, decided it was his duty to stop Nasser from becoming an Egyptian Hitler. President Eisenhower, campaigning for re-election, refused to have anything to do with it. The French, still embroiled in Algeria, feared Nasser and plotted with the Israelis to overthrow him. Mr. Eden, lacking American support, joined in this hare-brained scheme at the last minute, keeping Mr. Eisenhower in the dark.

And so, in late October, the crisis came to a head. Israel attacked and swiftly defeated Egypt in the Sinai. In a moment of hubris, Prime Minister Ben-Gurion’s chief of staff, Moshe Dayan, announced to the troops the “Third Kingdom of Israel.” After some delay, an Anglo-French air-and seaborne force captured Port Said. Nasser seemed doomed.

But Mr. Eisenhower reasonably enough felt betrayed, and appalled by what he saw as a reassertion of colonialism. He demanded that the British and French withdraw, and held a financial gun to Mr. Eden’s head: the pound sterling collapsed on the exchange markets. This left the British with no choice but to pull out, with the French reluctantly following suit.

Meanwhile the Soviet Union, led by Khrushchev, faced a crisis of its own in Hungary. Recently released documents seen by Professor Jonathan Haslam apparently reveal that Khrushchev had resolved not to crush the Hungarian uprising, when the Anglo-French landing in Suez persuaded him that Soviet prestige required a show of force. So Hungary was invaded and 200,000 refugees fled. Eastern Europe had to wait three more decades for freedom.

The Russians followed this up with an ultimatum to the British, French and Israelis, threatening nuclear war. Ben-Gurion wrote that the note “could have been written by Hitler,” but the threat was serious. He resolved there and then to acquire nuclear weapons in order to stand up to nuclear blackmail. With covert help from the French, Israel built its own nuclear reactor and eventually its own bomb.

Nobody comes out of Suez well. None of the key players — Eden, Eisenhower, Ben-Gurion — saw the bigger picture. The British and French deluded themselves that they could act without America, while the Americans failed to foresee the effect on the Arab world of humiliating the European powers without filling the power vacuum in the Middle East. So Nasser snatched victory from the jaws of defeat, and the Arab war against the West began. Fifty years on, it is by no means over. Indeed, if those Nazi-saluting Hezbollah thugs are anything to go by, we may have seen nothing yet.