THE HOLOCAUST PROBLEM
Guilt is an unpredictable force in human lives. On a societal level, it can take dangerous forms. It's happening now in our discussion of Israel and Palestine. And it is a big problem.
At a symposium for teachers intended to equip them to educate about the Holocaust, a news reel clip was played, the kind that people might have seen before a matinee in 1945, depicting the aftermath of the liberation of a concentration camp.
The filmmakers set up a slapstick scenario – of dubious taste and journalistic choice – with camp survivors paddling a Nazi guard in a vaudevillian tableau. The narrator said something to the effect that the victim has become the persecutor.
In front of me, one teacher leaned to another and said, “Just ask the Palestinians.”
It seems so neat a human lesson: even the best of us, however oppressed, will behave like the worst of us given the opportunity.
This framing – Jews, the victims of what is considered by many the ultimate evil, becoming, as Israelis, depicted as a new ultimate evil – is a hallmark of the Palestinian plotline. Now enthusiastically adopted overseas despite the atrocious misrepresentations it requires, this routinely manifests in the assertion that Israelis are the “new Nazis,” that Palestinians live in concentration camps and face genocide.
It should not require saying, though clearly it does, that nothing remotely comparable to what happened to the Jews of Europe is happening to Palestinians. The very suggestion is beneath the dignity of decent or honest people. Yet justifiable outrage at this loathsome equation is recast as proof. Here’s how one leading American left-wing academic puts it: “It is evident that Israeli and Jewish outrage at [the] equation of Israeli terrorism with Auschwitz struck a sensitive memory: the self-hate of executioners who realize that they are disciples of their persecutors and, at all costs, must deny it.”[i]
These comments, and those of the teacher in front of me at the symposium, are emblematic of historical repression on a massive scale. The human mind, which cannot assimilate the facts, scope and meaning of the actual Holocaust, is absolved of struggling with the moral and existential human questions it raises by negating them through the projection of guilt onto the victims and their descendants. The psychological aerobics required for this may be complex. The strategic objective is simple. It neutralizes the actual Holocaust by eclipsing it with a fabricated one.
There is a famous photo of boy, aged about four or five, standing with his hands above his head before Nazi soldiers in the Warsaw Ghetto. Catherine Nay, a newscaster on Europe 1 used the opportunity of the death of a Palestinian child, Muhamad Al-Dura, to compare the Jewish child with the Palestinian child and explicitly negate the Holocaust. She declared that Al-Dura’s death “cancels out, erases that of the Jewish child, his hands in the air from the SS in the Warsaw Ghetto.”[ii]
(Does it matter for the purpose here that Al-Dura may not have died, that the entire video sequence might have been another “Pallywood” production? Perhaps not. If a troubled mind found one example to justify their immoral nullification of six million deaths, they could easily find another.)
What kind of intellectual and moral compost could produce the idea that one human death, in any context, “cancels out” another human death? It is beyond deplorable. Yet this is but a single example among millions of the warped ways our current society confronts, or fails to confront, the Holocaust – and then perverts the contemporary history of the Middle East to justify our sin.
The equation of Israelis with Nazis, and the idea that Jewish deaths can be negated by Palestinian deaths, is a socio-psychological transferal.
As a society, we are repressing and deforming the memory of the Holocaust, doing a huge injustice not just to Jewish people, but to the world and our collective future.
If we had more deeply considered some of the questions raised by the Holocaust, perhaps we could have prevented some of the genocides since 1945. By deflecting, avoiding and procrastinating around this extremely difficult history, we may have helped permit genocides in Bosnia, Rwanda, Darfur and elsewhere.
Rather than face these terribly difficult questions, the more we hear about the Holocaust, the more we want to cover our ears. We do not merely ignore the Holocaust, we actively deflect away from it and on to something else, like the teacher in front of me at the symposium.
Consider this contradiction: Polls report that the proportion of Europeans who believe that Jews are talking too much about the Holocaust is at or near majority levels in Switzerland, Spain, Austria, France and Italy. Yet in these very same countries, the numbers of respondents who have never heard of the Holocaust are as high or higher than those who say there is too much talk about it.[iii]
A huge number of people do not know what the Holocaust is – and those who do know have heard more than enough about it.
*
In the natural human revulsion to the horrors of genocide, the Palestinian narrative provides a distraction from addressing the unthinkable aspects of our recent history. Every time the Holocaust is raised, it can be abruptly shut down by diverting attention to current, albeit far less dreadful, problems.
The transference is unmistakable. If, when we think of Jews, we see oppressors of Palestinians, rather than victims of Nazis, we successfully dodge thinking about the Holocaust. The comment by the teacher in front of me was the tip of a massive socio-psychological iceberg.
About the same time that Western eyes were looking for something to divert them from the Holocaust and ameliorate whatever guilt we might feel about recent history, different but complementary priorities in the Arab world were developing. New Arab dictatorships that had supplanted colonial powers were becoming increasingly despotic and their populations were beginning to bristle. The tyrants needed a scapegoat. Together, these disordered social and political impulses dovetailed to suit the requirements of East and West, of Christian and Muslim. Of everyone, pretty much, but the Jews.
The Palestinian problem has been a spectacular boon for Arab and other Muslim dictators. It was created by them to distract oppressed peoples from their own problems and to refocus them on Muslims who are perceived to be oppressed by Jews, a chauvinism that neatly turned a minor conflict into a civilizational conflagration.
As a corrupt narrative of victim and victimizer was superimposed upon Israelis and Palestinians by the Arab League and others, it gained increasing traction among Western observers seeking, when they had to think about Jews at all, something other than our own collective culpability for Jewish genocide.
The two exigencies – the Arab need for an overarching cause that would divert attention from the panoramic barbarisms of their dictatorships and the Western need to quickly and painlessly move on from that darn Holocaust – melded beautifully in a narrative of Palestinian victimhood.
*
To make sense of this, to the extent that it can be made to make sense, we have to address another flawed premise in the basic narrative before getting back to the larger issue of the Holocaust’s history in this conflict.
Among the conflations we have adopted is the contention that the creation of Israel was a “consolation prize” for the Holocaust. The creation of the state of Israel is often depicted as a guilt offering – as if the destruction of European Jewish civilization was nothing more than a little infidelity that a bouquet and box of chocolates could appease. The consequence of this storyline is that the Arab people are paying the price for European crimes against Jews.
The fact that the independence of Israel happened soon after the Second World War is partly to blame for a range of misunderstandings around this history. The age of decolonization was beginning. Israel embodied this trend as much as did the newly independent states of Iraq (before the war), Lebanon, Syria and Transjordan (during and after the war) and dozens more across Africa, Asia and Latin America. Yet, according to the storyline, Israel is a product of an imperial power imposing a Jewish state on “Arab” land.
The juxtaposition of the Holocaust’s end, in 1945, and the rebirth of Israel, in 1948, is problematic because people assume that B comes as an inevitable consequence from A.
But Zionism was as legitimate in the 1920s, when the Holocaust was a dream only of a single evil figure, as it was in the 1940s, when the world came to understand the terrible consequences of Jewish statelessness.
The Jewish people, like all nations, including Palestinians, deserve self-determination. And Jewish self-determination in the ancient and forever home of the Jewish people, Israel, would be rightful and valid whether the Holocaust occurred or whether, in a far better world, it had not. In other words, Israel has a right to exist, and the Jewish people have a right to self-determination, the reality of the Holocaust notwithstanding.
The creation of the state of Israel was not a direct response to the Holocaust but the belated culmination of a political movement begun in earnest 50 years earlier (though based on almost 2,000 of yearning and unceded land claims) and it was part of the larger phenomenon of postwar decolonization – not an aberration within it.
The Holocaust did play a role in the decision by most UN member-states to support the Partition Resolution – but not for the benevolent reasons Western observers like to ascribe.
European nations, the Americas, Australia and other places that had rejected Jewish migrants before the war were no more enthusiastic to welcome the haggard survivors after. The success of the Partition vote was due in no small part to the desire of Western countries to give the surviving Jews somewhere to go other than “here.” For some politicians, Israel was an ideal solution because it took the problem of refugees off their shoulders.
But we must not overstate the role of the United Nations or Western countries in the creation of the State of Israel, either.
Zionism's victory in 1948 was certainly not an act of European apology nor, as the Palestinian narrative would have it, handed to Jews on a platter. If many of the Jewish survivors of Europe ended up in Israel, it was because nobody else would have them, not because the sands of the Levant were any great compensation for what they had endured. More to the point, of the people for whom Israel was imagined when political Zionism was born in the 1800s – the oppressed Jews of Europe – most were dead by 1945.
And while the passage of the Partition Resolution set the wheels in motion for what was to follow, that was effectively the last act of kindness the Jews of the nascent state received from the world community. They were left to build their own country and, when attacked at the dawn of independence by the militaries of all neighboring states, Israelis were abandoned to defend their tiny sliver of land alone.
So let’s not congratulate ourselves that the UN or our nations’ votes there are a reason Israel exists or assume that this grants us any dispensation to criticize Israel more than we would any other state based on the false premise that it is somehow an invention of the UN.
At the same time, of course, the Holocaust absolutely cast a shadow over all of this history.
As a phenomenon separate from the larger death and destruction of the war, the Holocaust as a distinct event, took time to solidify in the minds of its victims and in the larger human understanding. This awareness grew very slowly in the immediate aftermath of the war and through the 1950s. The capture and trial of Adolf Eichmann, in the early 1960s, did more than any other single thing to raise awareness of the Holocaust, its intent, scope, depravity and uniqueness.
Also during this time, and especially after 1967, the Palestinian narrative was emerging and attempting to carve out for itself a unique story of unprecedented victimhood.
In a competition of victimology that Palestinians and their Arab allies invented, the Holocaust presented an understandable hurdle. The speed and magnitude with which that hurdle was overcome is as close as we can come to proof that Western eyes were scanning the horizon for anything to negate the memory of the Holocaust.
Edward Said, credited as the founder of postcolonial studies, addressed the problem:
Probably the most serious psychological obstacle to preventing close and fair political scrutiny of Palestinianism is … the heavy emotional pressure of the Holocaust. To this pressure every civilized man must of course submit … It cannot be emphasized enough, I think, that no Arab feels any of the sort of guilt or shame that every Westerner (apparently) feels, or is impelled to show he is feeling, for that horrible chapter in history.[iv]
While Said sought to eradicate the Holocaust as a factor in the discussion, he at least acknowledged it as a “horrible chapter” of history. Not every voice in the Arab world is so sympathetic.
One major stream of Arab thought around the Holocaust can be summarized as: It never happened and they should have killed more. A Saudi newspaper, in 1960, reported “Capture of Eichmann, who had the honor of killing five million Jews.”[v]
Mahmoud Abbas, the leader of the Palestinian Authority, wrote his PhD thesis at a Soviet university arguing that “only” a million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust and that Zionists colluded with Nazis to screw the Arabs. (A reminder: this is the “moderate” leader the world accepts as the legitimate voice of Palestinians.)
Said asserts that no Arab feels any guilt and he implies that most Westerners probably don’t either. He may be correct. He doesn’t address the fact that the main leaders of the Arabs in Palestine were Nazi collaborators, for which Palestinians should perhaps feel a pang of shame. But the larger issue here is the absolution Said is giving in order to move past the Holocaust as an obstacle to denouncing Israel. His is not really an intellectual or logical position. Merely by acknowledging that the Holocaust is a big deal, he leaps to the conclusion that it needn’t be.
Said’s position that Arabs need not feel any guilt for the Holocaust invites the corollary that they needn’t exhibit any empathy for the survivors, either.
The narrative of Palestinians paying the price for European crimes means that the fact of the Holocaust – insofar as it could elicit compassion toward the Jewish or Zionist case – effectively nullifies both consideration of the Holocaust or any sympathy for its survivors.
That does not mean, however, that it has ceased to be a point of discussion – a phenomenon that helps illustrate the depths to which aspects of this dialogue have descended.
*
Having successfully negated any empathy for survivors of the Holocaust, the Arab narrative then went a step further.
Norman Finkelstein, an idol among the anti-Israel set, is among the foremost voices accusing Israelis and their allies of using the Holocaust as a weapon, positing that Jewish people are not genuinely concerned for their survival but rather using their history as a bludgeon.
Jewish elites in the United States have enjoyed enormous prosperity. From this combination of economic and political power has sprung, unsurprisingly, a mindset of Jewish superiority. Wrapping themselves in the mantle of The Holocaust, these Jewish elites pretend – and, in their own solipsistic universe, perhaps even imagine themselves – to be victims, dismissing any and all criticism as manifestations of ‘antisemitism.’ And, from this lethal brew of formidable power, chauvinistic arrogance, feigned (or imagined) victimhood, and Holocaust-immunity to criticism has sprung a terrifying recklessness and ruthlessness on the part of American Jewish elites. Alongside Israel, they are the main fomenters of antisemitism in the world today. Coddling them is not the answer. They need to be stopped.[vi]
The paragraph is a template for the larger narrative of a Jewish “persecution complex” combined with presumed ethnic supremacy and self-absorption, undergirded by an assumption of Jewish guile that takes the sacred memory of the Holocaust’s victims and manipulates it for political gain.
It is a negation of the existence of both Jewish victims and of antisemitism itself.
Imagine telling any other cultural group that we are open to discussing their issues as long as they agree to embargo any discussion of the past. Imagine progressive Canadians telling First Nations people, We’ll discuss your contemporary concerns, but you must never, ever raise the issues of the past. Imagine progressive Americans telling African-Americans, We’ll address today’s issues, but leave slavery, Jim Crow and your assorted past experiences with discrimination at the door.
The treatment of the Holocaust is a totem of how we have lost our moral compass. No longer the voice of those asserting “never again,” many, especially in the Palestinian movement, now take the position “forget about it.”
To be clear: the narrative of the Palestinian movement (usually) does not deny that the Holocaust happened. Instead, it denies that it matters.
This is, in ways, the worse offense. We can argue facts and pretend that six million didn’t die or quibble over other “details.” That is a sordid rhetorical game and one that even the perpetrators know is false. But to acknowledge that it happened yet go on to essentially argue that Jews should forget about it is on an entirely different level of moral calamity.
Now imagine taking this nonchalance a step further and accusing Jewish people and Israelis of using the history of the Holocaust as a “shield,” an excuse to do what they will to Palestinians.
The late British Member of Parliament Sir Gerald Kaufman haughtily declared: “My grandmother did not die to provide cover for Israeli soldiers murdering Palestinian grandmothers in Gaza. The current Israeli government ruthlessly and cynically exploit the continuing guilt among gentiles over the slaughter of Jews in the Holocaust as justification for their murder of Palestinians. The implication is that Jewish lives are precious, but the lives of Palestinians do not count.”[vii]
Through what form of twisted logic could a senior political figure, a Jew and the grandchild of a Holocaust victim conjure the idea that Israel uses the Holocaust as a “cover”?
This loathsome idea is premised on and reinforces a series of parallel deceits. The first is that Israelis face no genuine threats to their security and therefore everything Israel does ostensibly in the name of defense is actually a manifestation of a “persecution complex.”
The Palestinian narrative inverts cause and effect, portraying Palestinian violence as a response to Israeli actions, rather than the reverse. Therefore, Jews are a paranoid people who see dangers everywhere and so behave irrationally and disproportionately. (“Disproportionate” is one of the most common words employed against Israel, often by people whose own rhetoric demonstrates they have no concept the meaning of the term proportionate.) The Palestinian narrative rests on assumptions of a collective psychological disorder on the part of Jews and Israelis.
Israelis and their overseas allies calmly lay out the facts, the evidence, the proof and the legal and moral justification for the actions against terrorists. But, since the Palestinian narrative recognizes no justification for Israel’s existence, by extension it recognizes no evidence, proof, legality or morality to their self-defense.
Overseas purveyors of the Palestinian narrative, then, with no way to assimilate rational explanations within their distorted storyline, are forced to interpret them through the lens of their own fantastical binary of Palestinian righteousness and Israeli malevolence.
Put plainly, when pro-Israel commentators carefully explain the rationale for Israeli actions, all the Palestinian activists hear is blah blah blah.
Since all that many anti-Israel activists might know about Jews is (A) Holocaust victims and (B) oppressors of Palestinians, the facts might get distorted in their own minds and they imagine what they heard was Israelis using A to justify B.
When you hear that Israelis use the Holocaust to justify mistreatment of Palestinians, there is absolutely an immoral equation at play. But it is an immoral equation invented and propagated by the Palestinians and their allies, not by Israelis and their allies.
What is unquestionably absent from this entire discussion is any evidence that Israelis or their friends actually make this case – or even think it.
To be absolutely clear: the case we are making here is in no way suggesting that we should honor the memory of the Holocaust in order to privilege the Israeli case, to win an argument or to provide “shield” for Israeli “atrocities” – though it will be dismissed this way, of course.
The reason for devoting this amount of effort to the topic is to point out that the false “Holocaust as shield” theme is part of a conspiracy to negate Israel’s legitimate military response to existential threats by pathologizing the idea that Israelis have the right to defend themselves.
Secondarily, the depth of attention to this subject is necessary to shine a light on the moral and intellectual treachery of the Palestinian narrative. The fact that this narrative is endorsed by overseas activists, political parties, churches and movements that ostensibly support peace, justice and human rights is a sign of the actual pathology.
Respecting the memory of the Holocaust is something we do because it comports with being a humanitarian, a movement that cares about valuing the past and creating a better future. To diminish this by arguing that there is no reason to remember the Holocaust unless to weaponize it says nothing about Jews and plenty about us.
What would such an argument even sound like? We were oppressed by Nazis, so we have a right to oppress Palestinians? While this is basically the accusation flung at Israelis, such a grotesque allegation could only come from the disordered minds of anti-Israel activists – it is exactly the level of irrational, unhinged discourse that typifies the Palestinian narrative.
Since there is no evidence anywhere that any Israeli or pro-Israel voice has made such an argument, one can only explain it as the accidentally-spoken-out-loud psyche of the people who purvey this sort of allegation: Well, that’s what I’d do if the Holocaust had happened to me. Like so much of the anti-Israel narrative, it is a projection of a sickness not in Israeli society but among its enemies.
First and foremost, it assumes that Palestinians are absolutely innocent. Nothing they do ever justifies the treatment they receive from the Israeli military. This precise phrasing is a trope of the anti-Zionist movement. When faced with difficult facts, activists will often retreat behind the assertion that “Nothing the Palestinians do could justify what the Israelis are doing.” This is (A) gobsmackingly arrogant coming from armchair generals 10,000 kilometres away with little to no actual knowledge; (B) a blanket statement that could be considered fair comment only by a fanatic unqualified for intellectual engagement; and (C) a foundational tenet of the Palestinian narrative.
There is, of course, a great deal that Palestinians do to justify harsh treatment from the Israeli military. The actions of Palestinian terrorists, including those who form the Palestinian governments in the West Bank and in Gaza, are often so grotesque that they would destabilize uncritical Western support were there not circus barkers in the movement hysterically ranting about “50 holocausts” and blathering groundless assertions like “nothing could justify …”
For gullible Western activists, the idea that Israelis use the Holocaust to deflect criticism from their treatment of Palestinians is palatable precisely because it is so incomprehensible. The Palestinian movement is so rife with contradictions – a terror movement supported by people with “COEXIST” bumper stickers; Queers for Palestine marching for a cause that would see them thrown off rooftops; feminists allying with the most misogynistic forces on earth; a movement whose slogan is “Free Palestine” when all evidence says that an independent Palestine would be one of the least free places on earth – it requires the suspension of disbelief.
To investigate why Israel’s military acts toward Palestinians the way they do could unravel the poorly constructed garment of self-righteousness Western activists have donned. To explore the atrocities perpetrated against Israelis (or the acts never successfully perpetrated because they were foiled by the very Israeli defense and intelligence forces the Palestinian narrative delegitimizes) could turn an activist against the Palestinian cause.
If you didn’t swallow the first premise – that Jews have a persecution complex that makes them kill Palestinians based on completely misguided fear – perhaps we can interest you in the idea that Israelis are turning the ashes of the Holocaust into bombs to drop on the Palestinians.
Anti-Zionists debase this sacred history, then condescendingly accuse Zionists of doing precisely that. Kaufman exhumes his grandmother to score political points. But where is there any evidence of his claim that Israelis or Zionists are employing the Holocaust to justify, explain away or rationalize Israeli government policies? Anti-Zionists invoke this history to advance their case while falsely accusing Jews of invoking it to advance theirs. The former is a central tactic of the Palestinian movement and the latter is simply not happening. So who is using the tragic historical experience of Jews for squalid political ends here?
Further, the idea that Israelis “exploit the continuing guilt among gentiles over the slaughter of Jews in the Holocaust as justification for their murder of Palestinians” is implausible if for no other reason than because, if Israelis were depending on “gentile guilt” to justify their actions, it would be a useless strategy. The memory of the Holocaust is far more likely to be used against Jews and Israelis than to be invoked in ways that support them. It is Kaufman and his sort who exploit this memory for political gain, making obscene assertion that, for Israelis, “the lives of Palestinians do not count.”
This is a moral crime at the heart of the Palestinian narrative – and it is a behavior that activists who call themselves progressive or humanitarian would perpetrate on no other people’s histories. Only Jews.
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The belief that Israelis use the Holocaust as a shield is related to another abuse of Holocaust memory – again, an abuse perpetrated by people projecting their own abuse of Holocaust memory onto Jews. This is the accusation that Jews exaggerate their suffering – or that Jewish people think they are the only ones who have suffered.
A politician in Québec said sarcastically that Jews “are the only people in the history of the world to suffer.… The Armenians didn't suffer. The Palestinians aren't suffering. The Rwandans did not suffer.… It's always you people. You are the only people in the history of the world to suffer.”[viii]
We routinely see loathsome assertions that suggest, in effect, it’s time for Jews to get over the past. Consider this take on memorialization of the Holocaust (taken from a collection of “progressive” essays on the subject), which insults and belittles the most sacred of Jewish rituals.
The … challenge … is to find a way to talk about the Middle East without recourse to the Holocaust, to put an end to the grave-robbing and shroud-waving. Judaism traditionally frowns upon a morbid attachment to death: in love with life, it provides a framework of rituals -- from burial and shiva (seven days of mourning) to yahrzeit (lighting a candle on the annual anniversary of a death) – that acknowledge the importance of mourning without prolonging it indefinitely. Grief about the industrialized murder of millions is plainly different from, say, grief over the natural death of an individual and, yet, at some stage for mourners of both kinds the most appropriate Jewish response, the stance of most value to the living, is dignified silence, and an end to the constant exhuming of the dead. Let them rest in peace.[ix]
This is a less polite formulation of the common response to any invocation of the history of Jewish victimization and its intergenerational consequences, which routinely meet with the assertion that Jews exaggerate their suffering or prioritize it over that of others.
To even raise such an obvious red herring is evidence that, rather than Jewish suffering being elevated above that of other people, the precise opposite is true. Jewish suffering is debased or disregarded by the very people whose worldview is supposed to respect the historical experiences of peoples.
Of course Jewish people are not the only ones who have suffered; this is irrefutable. They are, however, the only ones who are told by self-proclaimed social justice-seeking people to shut up about it.
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Anti-Zionists carry signs and share online memes equating the swastika with the Star of David. They spread cartoons of Israelis depicted as SS men and denounce Israeli soldiers as “Gestapo.” They accuse Israelis of “learning from the master.” Taunting, sadistic inferences are made that equate the Jewish people of today with the very people who killed their ancestors and nearly eradicated Jewish civilization.
Knowing that the very terms “concentration camp,” “holocaust” and “genocide” have their genesis in 20th-century Jewish history, activists and academics desecrate the memory of that history by atrociously accusing Israel of operating concentration camps and perpetrating genocides and holocausts, employing these terms against the people for whose historical experiences these neologisms had to be invented. Falsely alleging that a genocide is being perpetrated by the people whose historical experience literally required the creation of the term is the moral basement.
Worse: Knowing the Jewish experience with irrational, chanting mobs, they form themselves into irrational, chanting mobs and rally outside Jewish events, gather on campuses, in public venues, in union halls, political plenaries and in street rallies, radiating hatred and exemplifying the madness of crowds.
On the flip side, any mention of the Holocaust by Jewish people – or even the suspicion that Jewish people might possibly, maybe raise the Holocaust as a topic – is dismissed as an unfair advantage, as a get-out-of-jail-free card for Israeli “atrocities,” an effort to deflect from the issue at hand (which is, of course, supposed Jewish wrong-doing).
This is an attempt to negate the Holocaust and neutralize the Jewish historical experience in this discourse, saying to Jewish people, in effect: Your experience is irrelevant. Your turn is over. We’re talking about Palestinians now. They imply that the only people who can legitimately raise the Holocaust in the context of today’s discourse are those who use it as a cudgel against Zionists.
They know that their agitated, fanatical chants, blood-soaked imagery and equation of Jews with Nazis has a devastating personal and collective impact on Jewish people. That is precisely why they do it.
It is a deliberate strategy – and a brilliantly effective one. The only downside is the fact that it undermines every value they claim as liberals, social justice advocates or decent people. Still, it has the desired effect and so, despite the abandonment of values that it represents, it is too valuable a tool to abandon.
It causes pain to Jews, who are then less inclined to engage in a dialogue when their most intimate, shattering family experiences are politicized and weaponized against them. It reminds Jewish people that their voices, their presence and their existence is dismissed, which, in turn, encourages them to withdraw from the discussion. The haters hope to win by having Jews forfeit the match. And, everything else aside, it causes pain to Jews – and that is bonus enough to give it value.
We can argue this detail and those facts. But the overt sadism of the anti-Zionist movement is as close as one can get to proof that this is not about Palestinian rights or borders or settlements or refugees or whatever. This is, above all, about sticking it to the Jews.
One of Norman Finkelstein's primary tactics is to equate Israeli actions with the Nazis, to counter every justification for Zionism with fascism. He loves to intersperse German words and ideas associated with the Nazis – Lebensraum, Volkische – into his critiques of the Israel-Palestine conflict.
Finkelstein’s rhetoric also deliberately plumbs the depths of blatantly antisemitic tropes. The blood libel, the medieval but resilient idea that Jews ritually sacrifice Christian children, has led to pogroms and the murder of countless Jews throughout history. As recently as 2019, this lethal libel was kept alive by Finkelstein, who declared, “They [the Israelis] are biped bloodhounds drinking the blood of one million [Palestinian] children.”[x] Finkelstein should have no place in a movement of people committed to humanity. Instead he is a hero to anti-Israel activists.
As immoral as it is, the equation of Israelis with Nazis is an incredibly valuable tool for the Palestinian case, but it is also handy for those in the West who understand our countries’ complicity in the Holocaust, as Bernard Lewis summed up:
If the Israelis were no better than the Nazis, then it follows that the Nazis were no worse than the Israelis. This proposition, though palpably false, even by the most hostile account of Israeli activities, brought welcome relief to many who had long borne a burden of guilt for the role which they, their families, their nations, or their churches had played in Hitler’s crimes against the Jews, whether by participation or complicity, acquiescence or indifference.[xi]
Lewis suggests some of the rage at Israel may be an elaborate unburdening of guilt over Western forces that allowed it to happen. In human history and in human nature, obviating guilt takes some odd forms. In this case, perhaps, guilt at not helping the Jews before the Holocaust is assuaged by attacking Jews now. (Logic does not always triumph, particularly when deeply psycho-sociological issues like civilizational guilt come into play.) The Germans will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz, it has been suggested. To say that we have not processed this history and the guilt associated with it is an understatement when we recall that the Holocaust occurred not only because of the Nazis, but because our countries – Canada, the United States, Australia, every other safe place – refused to provide haven, a culpability we share with the Nazis but don’t acknowledge.
To give those who exploit this kind of imagery a benefit of the doubt they probably do not deserve, an academic has called the Holocaust “a negative absolute in a world of relativism … It has become a gold standard of absolute evil.”[xii] In our era of refracted attention spans, where we struggle to find the words to make people take notice of causes that desperately need attention, the default comparison is now this. To get any attention for an issue amid the competing voices in a cacophonous world, shout “Nazi!”
On the other hand, given that it is anti-Israel activists who are most to blame for creating the wall of noise that makes the majority of serious global issues struggle for attention above the din of collective shrieking about Palestine – and because Jews are the people at whom the imagery is directed – these people are probably the ones who should least be excused for employing it.
Note also that the imagery used against Israel at rallies and online does not equate Israeli leaders with Stalin or Pol Pot or Idi Amin or other evil figures of the 20th century. It’s always Hitler, always the Nazis. It is not done to persuade, it is done to cause pain, to rub salt in Jewish wounds. And it is done mostly by activists, academics and social justice advocates who in any other context consider themselves arbiters of human righteousness.
Note also that, while millions of Palestinian refugees live in Syria, Jordan or Lebanon, nobody accuses those countries of operating “concentration camps” – that’s a slur we reserve solely for Jews. Because we don’t really care about those refugees – we’re not actually “pro-Palestinian” in any constructive way. The objective of this entire discussion is not to advance solutions for Palestinians, but to stick it to the Jews. And if wiping the memory of the Holocaust through the mud is an effective way to do it, well, there is apparently nothing in our progressive, coexistence-loving, empathetic hearts to stop us from employing the deaths of six million and the excruciating memories of survivors and their descendants to do it.
Are those who employ this sort of dehumanizing language and imagery a minority or a fringe element among Palestinian advocates? Even a brief survey of the messaging of the anti-Israel movement and the social media feeds of its adherents suggests not. But even if this were being perpetrated by a small cohort, the absolute silence from other, ostensibly decent critics of Israel is complicity. Good people who attend “pro-Palestinian” rallies should be tearing down banners that equate the swastika with the Star of David. Instead, they march contentedly, completely untroubled.
While the narrative insists that Jewish people are incessantly raising the Holocaust to deflect criticism of Israel, it is probably accurate to say that most Jewish people avoid raising the Holocaust at all in this context. Jewish people have learned through hard lessons that to open discussion of this topic almost inevitably results in a defilement of that memory that is grievously painful even to those fortunate Jewish people who do not have direct familial experience with the Holocaust.
Jewish people and their allies tread carefully in any discussion that brings the history of the Holocaust anywhere near consideration of current events in the Middle East, knowing that the almost instantaneous response will be the desecration of that memory, the sadistic ripping open of scars and the theft of that history to be weaponized against its very victims.
But this weaponization has worked wonders for the anti-Israel narrative. Anti-Zionists can make whatever sophisticated political disclaimers they want, but if we equate Israelis to Nazis, we are stating (among many other things) that we believe Israel has no place in a civilized world. One cannot, on the one hand, allege that Israelis behave like Nazis and, on the other, argue convincingly that we believe Israel has a right to exist. Indeed, it is an entirely reasonable extension to conclude that, if the Jewish state is behaving like Nazis, not only Israel, but Jews as a people, do not deserve to exist.
There has been so much energy devoted to arguing over what is legitimate anti-Zionism and what crosses a line into antisemitism. We’re doing it here. But this is all based on a false premise that one is reprehensible and the other totally acceptable.
There are words and deeds that exist on a spectrum for which terms like “anti-Zionist” and “antisemitic” cannot do justice. You have to be a special kind of sadist to instrumentalize the memory of the Holocaust against Jewish people. Does that make you an antisemite?
At this point, does it really matter what label we attach to this sort of offence?
*
We need to understand that almost every Jewish family and individual — whether the family includes survivors or not, because in a real sense, every Jew alive today is a survivor of the Holocaust — this history is not past.
Unlike the rest of us, this is not just something Jewish people learn in history class. It is a sacred and urgent lesson that has been passed down through the mere two or three generations that have been born since the worst cataclysm in Jewish history. If you think that is paranoid or hypersensitive, that is a statement about you, not about Jewish people.
This history impacts very directly on the relationship most Jewish people have with the state of Israel. For a range of reasons, the great majority of Jewish people have more than a passing concern about Israel’s existence and the safety of its citizens. If you don’t know this, it may be because your Jewish friends do not feel comfortable sharing these intimate, vulnerable feelings with you. Especially if they have seen your social media posts equating Israel with Nazis or prioritizing the lives of Palestinian terrorists over those of Jewish civilians. If you do not understand the relationship between Jewish people in your country and in Israel, it is because you have not taken the time to learn or because your Jewish friends don’t feel safe with you. Or both. Try listening. Try learning. Shut up for once.
To appreciate the significance of a Jewish state, we need to think about the world before one. This raises basic problems in our worldview, especially around not insignificant issues like nationalism itself.
When some people look at the causes of the Second World War, we see nationalism as a root cause. When many Jewish people and those with an empathetic view of history look at the causes of the Holocaust, they see Jewish statelessness as a precondition. This is a fundamental schism in our respective worldviews.
Consider what would have happened had the political movement for Jewish self-determination reached fruition a mere decade earlier. All or most of the Holocaust’s horror and death would have been averted. The Jews of Europe might have arrived in the new country with extended families intact, to see their children grow to adulthood, their parents age and die naturally. Instead, they arrived as orphans, or as fathers and mothers who had survived the worst thing a parent can experience, or as sole remnants of entire families, schools or villages. Their language, Yiddish, which was one of Europe's most vibrant and inventive tongues in 1939, was in 1945 as dead as Latin.
In the 1930s, the control of even one country’s immigration policy by Jews – or even by anyone with a slightly humane concern for the survival of Jews – could have saved millions of lives and prevented untold human suffering. Regrettably, not a single such country existed. (The Dominican Republic demonstrated the most empathy, but by that time it was too late.) Canada's response to Jewish refugees, exemplified by a senior immigration department bureaucrat and rubber-stamped by the federal government, was “None is too many.” Australia’s official response was: “Australia doesn't have a racial problem and is not interested in importing one.”
The Holocaust was not merely a German phenomenon. It was, first, a human phenomenon and if we diminish the capacity for inhumanity by emphasizing the Germanness of the Holocaust, we risk missing crucial human lessons. More practically, though, the Nazis were able to murder six million Jews because most of those people were trapped where they were because the entire world, assembled at the Evian Conference, in France, in 1938, decided to close their borders to Jews and let Hitler do what he pleased. The Holocaust was invented by the Nazis, but it was possible only because of the indifference of the whole world. That’s a lesson Jewish people won’t forget – even if you never learned it in the first place.
Fine, you say. That was then. Jews are safe now. Nothing bad’s going to happen.
It is true that the postwar period in Western Europe and North America was a time of unprecedented freedom, security and success for Jewish people. But the same was said about Germany in the 1920s. The same was said about France in the 1890s. The same was said about Spain and Portugal until the expulsion from Iberia that, until the Holocaust, would remain the darkest blot in Jewish history since the year 70. There has literally never been a place or time in Jewish history when that sort of presumed happy ending did not instead end in expulsion or cataclysm. Will America be the first?
The assumption of Jewish security in the West during the second half of the 20th century was critical to the ability of the Palestinian narrative to neutralize the Holocaust as an extenuating circumstance in support for Israel. What power the history of the Holocaust might have had to convince the average North American that a Jewish state was existentially necessary to the Jewish people was belied by the unprecedented acceptance that Jews experienced in America (and Canada, France, Australia and such). For about 50 years after 1945, antisemitism ceased to be a significant force in mainstream Western society. By the 1960s, many Jewish Americans, for example, contented themselves that there was no need to move to Israel as America was, for all intents, their promised land.
But now violence against Jews in France, Sweden and elsewhere in Europe, the overt antisemitism rampant on the far-left and the far-right in Britain, Hungary and Poland, and the trend lines of antisemitic acts, have large proportions of Jews — in some opinion surveys, a majority — considering fleeing the continent. After synagogue shootings, targeted assaults on identifiably Jewish people and quantifiable spikes in antisemitic rhetoric and hate crimes, many Jewish Americans are questioning for the first time their security in that country.
The resurgence of antisemitism in the past 20 years is so shocking and sudden that many Jewish people cannot – dare not – imagine where it ends.
Most non-Jews carry on with our lives, confident that Jews, as is their nature, are overreacting. But Jewish people in North America look at these realities and wonder, as their grandparents may have, how long to wait before making alternative plans.
“Buried deep in the subconscious of every Jew,” says the American writer Howard Lovy, “is not money, power or influence, but an escape plan.” (If this sounds paranoid to your ear, that’s your ear’s problem, not Jewish people’s problem.)
Too many non-Jews, meanwhile, exacerbate the problem through shrill and violent language against Israel and a seemingly absolute self-assurance that Jews in our societies have absolutely nothing to worry about; that any expressions of anxiety are either paranoia or politically motivated lies aimed at “silencing,” “stifling” or “muzzling” criticism of Israel.
A further disconnect between many Jewish and non-Jewish people is the idea of the Holocaust as an anomaly.
The Holocaust, while more vast in magnitude because of the technological tools and territorial reach of the Nazis, nevertheless is consistent with the longer history of the Jewish people, who have been subjected to attempted annihilation if not in every generation, then almost inarguably in every century of the past two millennia.
To most Jews who understand history – and it is a cultural imperative for Jews to do so – the Holocaust wasn’t the aberration; the postwar relative acceptance of Jews in Western civilization was.
The emergence of what many non-Jews see as relatively limited and small-scale antisemitism of street rallies, graffiti, vandalism and assaults are perceived by many Jews not as a peculiarity, but as the natural continuation of where the world left off in 1945. The problem is not Jewish paranoia, it’s the indifference of people who call ourselves humanitarians to the genuine fears and entirely legitimate anxieties of Jewish people.
The nonchalance with which Western non-Jews dismiss the idea of Israel as a refuge also betrays a profoundly Eurocentric perspective.
Zionism was a European invention, no question. It emerged after the Dreyfus Affair in France, which was an eye-opening incident that led some people, notably Theodor Herzl, to conclude that Jews would never be safe without national self-determination. Zionism remained an almost exclusively European movement but, by the time it realized the dream of an independent Jewish state, in 1948, two out of every three Jews in Europe were dead. The homeland that was imagined for them came eight or 10 years too late.
Aside from the exhausted survivors of the Holocaust, the Jews for whom Israel would ultimately offer refuge were mostly those who lived in the Arab- and Muslim-majority countries of the Middle East and North Africa. After centuries (or in cases like Iraq, millennia), of Jewish civilization, almost every last Jew from Tripoli to Baghdad was chased from their home after 1948. Life for Jews in the Arab world in the second half of the 20th century became almost as intolerable as life for Jews in Europe in the first half. The primary difference was the existence of a single state, however tiny, with an immigration policy that accepts any Jew, no matter what.
(Let us not succumb to the argument that this massive ethnic cleansing across two continents was a response to Zionism. If the creation of the state of Israel, and its defensive wars for survival in 1948 and 1967, were enough to cause the expulsion of Jews from every other country in the broader region, how secure were those Jews in the first place? As a not-insignificant aside, this ethnic cleansing is the reason Israel today is a majority-nonwhite country – a fact of which the braying voices claiming “apartheid” are inexcusably ignorant.)
Now imagine that the natural response to this familial and collective history is to advocate for and support a country that might mean one’s own children or grandchildren will never need to hide in attics or forests to avoid capture, who will never be ordered to appear at the town square or synagogue at an appointed hour for deportation. (Again: If this sounds overly dramatic to you, it is because you lack empathy for families who, in the memories of some still living, likewise never imagined such a thing could happen.)
Then imagine that, through volunteering and donating and hopes and prayers, generation after generation of Jewish people in Canada and elsewhere have endowed in Israel a spiritual, cultural, political and existential significance. For Jews worldwide since the Holocaust, Israel represents the rebirth of hope, of life itself. Whether they moved there or not, most Jewish families around the world invested, to varying degrees, their collective hopes in the Jewish state. It was, in the aftermath of the murder of half the world’s Jews, an almost miraculous renaissance.
And then imagine screaming mobs of really angry looking people – people who self-identify as social justice-seeking, progressive proponents of equality and peace but who look, when assembled in groups, not that different from the tiki-torch-bearing hoodlums of Charlottesville – chanting “From the river to the sea!” and “No more Gestapo! No more Chosen People!”
Imagine further that these people include the very ones who Jewish activists have organized with, campaigned alongside, built activist movements with – the very people who might have been the ones Jewish people assumed they could depend on first if things here were ever to go the way they went over there.
That’s us. And this is what we spit on when we spit on Israel.
There is a jokey old saying in the United States that Jews live like Episcopalians and vote like Puerto Ricans. That is, no matter how socially and economically successful Jewish people become, they tend to remain among the most progressive, liberal constituencies in the body politic.
There is a newer saying and it’s not funny: “Jewish people show up for everyone. But no one shows up for the Jews.”
A clear example is the feminist movement.[xiii] Look at the names of the second-wave feminist leaders: Friedan, Steinem, Abzug, Bader Ginsburg, the list is vast.
Now look at the most visible grassroots feminist group in America today, Women’s March Inc., which enforces what amounts to an anti-Zionist blacklist for Jewish women and which was founded and led by someone who calls one of the world’s leading antisemites, Louis Farrakhan, “the greatest of all time.”
It may be a fair assessment to say that most American Jews (and others who pay attention) are more concerned by the hostility toward Israel and the nonchalance around Jewish safety demonstrated by feminists, LGBTQ+ people, leftists, liberals and progressives than they are by the chanting white supremacists of Charlottesville and their like.
All reasonable people look at the white supremacist tiki parade and condemn it – even though we know that it represents a bloc of Americans who are overtly racist, antisemitic and much else. The scary thing about the antisemitism on the left is that these are supposed to be the reasonable people – and instead of listening to and allying with Jewish people when they express concerns, these are the ones shouting over them, accusing them of fabricating their experiences with discrimination, applying litmus tests around their position on Israel.
Betrayal is painful especially because it doesn’t come from your enemies.
*
Given the brutal way the Palestinian movement and progressives more broadly have treated the memory of the Holocaust, and the manner in which we steadfastly look away from the very real genocidal threats facing Israel and Jewish people today, what should we expect if the worst were to happen? This raises an even more sinister idea than our demonstrated indifference about the past.
We have been talking about history, but the real issue always is the present and future. Our behavior and rhetoric around the Holocaust – belittling it, dismissing its impacts, exploiting it for political gain, rubbing it in the faces of its actual victims – is almost certainly a prelude to how we would respond in the event of a cataclysmic development that threatens the security and lives of Jewish people.
In the end, this says far less about Israel or Palestine than it does about those who call ourselves social justice activists, humanitarians, liberals, progressives. It vaporizes our credibility and moral integrity. It proves that there are no ideas or actions that are beneath our dignity and so strips us of the right to the moral high ground, which anti-Zionists, more than probably any other social movement today, have so thoroughly and sanctimoniously hijacked.
At a time when we are struggling to address our societies’ histories of oppression and subjugation of groups, as we declare Black Lives Matter, seek reconciliation with Indigenous peoples and try to make amends for past and present individual and collective assaults on women, it is deeply inconsistent that progressive people’s approach to recent Jewish tragedy is to wipe it in Jewish people’s faces while telling them to get over it.
We have given Jewish people, others and ourselves no reason to believe that we would be any more likely than previous generations to stand up for Jewish people in the event of an emerging catastrophe.
And if that results, once again, in the deaths of millions of Jews, well, we’ve already got a very clear indication of the nonchalance with which we would treat that phenomenon.
This is where we stand right now: Palestinian and other Arab leaders have been promising for more than 75 years to annihilate Israel and its people. Iran’s nuclear program aims to do just that. A network of well-funded and well-armed terrorist organizations are killing Israeli civilians. Antisemitic rhetoric, violence and murders are skyrocketing worldwide. And European and North American leftists insist there is no reason for concern.
To the Jewish people, we say: Relax, what’s the worst that could happen?
*
Repressed emotions and disordered guilt can have terrible impacts on the human mind. On a societal level, the potential might be especially volatile. When combined with one of the oldest and most deep-seated forms of bigotry and prejudice in human existence, should we be surprised that things get weird?
If we view Israelis as Nazis, can we assuage the guilt of our civilization’s complicity in the Holocaust by reassuring ourselves that, though it may be a horrible fact of history, the people who died in the Holocaust were probably no angels either? It is a peculiar intellectual exercise, a bizarre moral puzzle. If six million had not been murdered, would Palestinians be more oppressed today? This would certainly alleviate guilt we have about the Holocaust.
But do we actually have guilt? We’re not German, we might say, or we weren’t even born yet. Yet surely we understand that time and place are almost irrelevant. We have seen that genocide can happen in different times and places and, whether we were born at the time or living where it happened, it was our species who perpetrated the genocides in Nazi Germany, in Bosnia, in Darfur, in Cambodia, in so many places.
This one though, the Holocaust, is different. It is unique in history, yes, though to even acknowledge this fact is to invite conflict – someone in the back will inevitably contest this idea of uniqueness and express a variation on the conspiracy that Jews are always claiming status as top victim. That’s one way the Holocaust is different – we can’t even agree to acknowledge and condemn it!
But it is different too because of the way we treat it – we being liberal-minded, anti-racist, justice-seeking people. We do not accuse Bosnians or Cambodians or Uighurs or Rohingya of exploiting their history to win points. We do not take images from these genocides and slap those very people in the face with them. This alone makes the Holocaust unique.
To say that we, who did not perpetrate these genocides, should feel “guilt” about them is perhaps not the right term. But guilt is an emotion we feel when we know something in our life is deeply askew and needs to be made right. This is the sense of the term guilt here.
Our civilization has moved on from genocide after genocide since the Armenian genocide more than 100 years ago and, after each case, we respond with a variation of Well, that happened.
There is an academic discipline studying this phenomenon, not just historians but multidisciplinary scholarship analyzing what happened and trying to understand why. As a society, though, we have mostly left this to the professors. It’s understandable. This is gruesome stuff. But anyone who knows about the Holocaust and other genocides also understands, at some level, that we need to struggle to get to the bottom of it, even if it is ultimately an impossible task. There is a nagging knowledge of the unfinished cosmic business of trying to understand the unanswerable question. We’ll call this guilt.
When repeatedly confronted with the history of the Holocaust – either through popular culture, reading history or the misuse of the Holocaust by anti-Israel activists – this irksome feeling that for lack of a better word we call guilt is provoked. And if we don’t feel this guilt because we weren’t born or we aren’t German or for any of the other reasons we tell ourselves, then maybe we feel guilty for not feeling guilty, because at some level we know we should.
If this tortuous explanation is not the right one, that does not negate the fact that something peculiar is going on in our collective mind about the Holocaust specifically and genocide more generally.
Does that lead, instead of the sympathy we should feel, to a lashing out against the object that is causing the guilt? Could it be that we are witnessing antisemitism (or the denial of antisemitism’s existence or seriousness) especially among those people who self-identify as anti-racist precisely because they are the ones empathetic enough to know something is amiss but incapable, as we all are, of dealing with this most impenetrable problem? As a result, could we be inadvertently perpetuating the very thing we are devoted to eliminating?
*
Dismissing expressed Jewish concerns about antisemitism, appropriating the Holocaust to use as a bludgeon against its victims, exploiting the fears of a minority community – these are not unintended consequences of the anti-Israel movement. They are the heart of the strategy.
The Holocaust would be an insurmountable obstacle to the Palestinian quest for global sympathy – if we believed that sympathy were a zero-sum contest. The irony here, or one of them, is that it is invariably Jewish people who are accused of insisting that their suffering is greater than all others. Yet this is precisely what the Palestinian narrative has attempted to do since Arab and Muslim political and religious leaders turned this conflict into the emblem of civilizational Muslim humiliation at the hands of uppity Jews who don’t know their place.
It is not Jews (or Israelis or Zionists) who turned this into a contest. The idea that Jews use the Holocaust as a shield to prevent criticism of Israel, or that they claim dispensation for being uniquely victimized, is a socio-psychological projection invented by their enemies. It was the Arab world’s idea to make the fight over a sliver of land into a universal conflagration about who suffers more. And, as they did in 1948 and 1967, the Arabs started a fight they couldn’t win.
This doesn’t mean that Jews are flaunting their suffering. They’re not. It means that Arabs, and later the larger Muslim world, decided to turn this into a contest of victimology, confident that any reasonable person would recognize that the “humiliating” domination of a few hundred thousand Muslims under the military occupation of the despised infidels was a far graver affront to humanity than the murder of six million Jews. When reasonable minds placed these two realities on the scales, the Holocaust obviously won. But, here again, the intellectual or moral (if it can be called that) battle mirrors the military battles. When the Arabs lost the wars, they changed strategies from conventional warfare to incessant terrorism targeting civilians. When the Palestinian narrative necessarily lost the rhetorical battle for History’s Greatest Victims – suffering at the hands of Israel what Mahmoud Abbas pitifully calls “50 holocausts” – they abandoned conventional rhetorical warfare – that is, empirical, rational, reasonable discourse – and resorted to the most unhinged, delirious, hysterical flailing.
Like a cornered animal, the purveyors of the Arab and Muslim storyline decided that, if they couldn’t win the contest for greatest victim, they would go down scratching and biting at the scars of the enemy. It is the primal rage at this “injustice” that leads to the equation of Israelis with Nazis, because there is literally nothing more despicable or hurtful that words could evoke. If they can’t beat the Jews at the victimhood game, they will make sure the Jews win the victimhood championship (that the Palestinian narrative supposes) they seek. Thus the woman carrying the sign declaring “Be prepared for the real Holocaust”[xiv] and the Iranian leaders’ repeated promises to wipe Israel from the map (or from the pages of time, depending on the nitpicking interpretation from Farsi one prefers) and the million other big and small ways the Palestinian movement shoves the memory of the Holocaust under the fingernails of Jewish people.
But the Holocaust is an unavoidable fact of Jewish and world history. Contemporary developments cannot be considered in a vacuum from this history, even if that makes it more difficult for the Palestinian narrative to dominate the discourse. When serious voices in the Arab and Muslim world are calling explicitly for genocide, and are teaching genocidal hatred to their children just in case the liquidation of Israel does not come in this generation, Jews can very rightly be expected to hearken back to the experiences of just a few decades ago as an example for the potential of ignoring such explicit intentions. By reacting with unemotional detachment, Western activists convey to our Jewish neighbors that the bystanders of today are just as likely to stand by as our grandparents’ generation did.
That’s not “using the Holocaust as a shield.” That’s learning from history.
Even if we equivocate over whether an impending holocaust may or may not be real, the fears certainly are. How could they not be? In the memory of the living generation, a meticulously premeditated act of previously unfathomable systemic genocide took place, with the world having been given full and fair warning through the explicit writings and actions of the lead perpetrator. Now, the first part of that history is replaying almost verbatim in Iran and in the words of Arab leaders from 1948 until today and, in an almost exact repeat of the world’s response then, events are greeted with nonchalance and assertions that the Jews, as is their trait, are exaggerating.
If we are capable of the degree of transference that allows us not only to disregard the Holocaust as a legitimate factor in our understanding of the Israeli-Arab conflict, but further to invert history and accuse Israel of doing to Palestinians what the Nazis did to Jews, how far a leap is it to believe we might wish for, even subconsciously, a speedy solution, however brutal?
There is no hint that the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians will end soon. The Palestinian movement, by and large, has demonstrated no willingness for negotiated peace. Palestinians continue to inculcate in their children the determination to annihilate Israel and Israelis. There is no end in sight.
Is it possible that some Western eyes see the Palestinian cause not only as a welcome diversion from facing the Holocaust, Western civilization’s most confounding moral and historical puzzle, but also as a potential dénouement to that horrible era?
Because our contemporary generations have unprecedentedly short attention spans, we are desperate for some sort of closure to our narratives. Is the Palestinian-Israeli conflict any different? Sure, we’d like to see a peaceful ending – or so we say. But since we’ve sided with a movement for whom peaceful coexistence is anathema, there is another possibility – one decent people don’t say out loud.
If ending this conflict means the end of Israel – if the destruction of the Jewish state will resolve this seemingly endless conflict, however unsatisfactorily – it’s no skin off our teeth really.
Any one of us more than a couple of decades old has sat around while genocides happened in Cambodia, Yugoslavia, Rwanda and far too many other places. We’re doing precious little to aid the Uyghurs or Rohingya today. And we’ve already demonstrated a nonchalance to the well-being of Israeli Jews, condemning Israel in bloodcurdling language every time it acts to defend its citizens from terrorism even while we sit silently as Palestinian terrorists eviscerate and decapitate Jews.
Is it possible that widespread European support for the Palestinian movement, despite the political and moral incongruities of this allegiance, is the natural resolution to Europe’s “Jewish problem”? Some might not think so much as intuit that if the Muslims finished off the Jews the incessant guilt around the Holocaust would disappear, the imagined accusatory Jewish finger waving in the face of generations of Europeans born long after the Holocaust would finally cease, and guilt, such as it may exist, would shift from Europe to Asia?
Put into words, it sounds atrocious, of course. But isn’t that essentially what European and North American progressives, liberal churches, social justice campaigners and “pro-Palestinian” activists have been calling for when they join the mobs chanting for a Palestine “from the river to the sea”?
[i]http://www.seconddraft.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=549&Itemid=81
[ii] https://www.fdd.org/analysis/2015/01/12/can-france-regenerate-itself-to-fight-radical-islam/
[iii] [Laqueur, p. 150]
[iv] [Said, p. 36]
[v] Saudi newspaper al-Bilad on May 31, 1960: [Lewis, p. 162]
[vi] Finkelstein, Beyond Chutzpah, p. 85
[vii] Corrigan, in Keefer et al, page 86
[viii] Matas, page 179
[ix] Karpf, in Karpf et al. p. 121
[x] Sheinerman, Marie-Rose and Caitlin Limestahl: “Finkelstein GS ’87 delivers anti-Semitic remarks at panel on black and Palestinian solidarity.” The Daily Princetonian, Oct. 11, 2019. Retrieved Jan. 4, 2021. https://www.dailyprincetonian.com/article/2019/10/finkelstein-anti-semitic-remarks?fbclid=IwAR1mv2W1owbBaAutwXaMZXcmugl7JcaSyVGkF12mVSJ11Kfc-q7m2fgfces
[xi] Bernard Lewis, p. 14
[xii] Berenbaum [Me, Jewish Western Bulletin, to find citation]
[xiii] This is a flawed example, because female feminists are engaged in auto-emancipation – that is, they are not just “showing up” for all women but are also fighting for their own rights. But the problem in the movement is stark and worth raising.
[xiv] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/4684474.stm