Has Israel’s 'Holocaust' Weapon Finally Jammed?

Cynical appropriation of a genocide suffered by Europe's Jews 80 years ago no longer works to shield Israel from accountability for its current genocide

Holocaust accessorizing at the UN

Although I suspect he’d be annoyed by the comparison, Hagai El Ad may have been the closest equivalent Israel has to the prophet Jeremiah in recent years. He headed the blue-chip human rights organization B’Tselem when it told his fellow citizens and the world, based on an exhaustive investigation, that Israel is an apartheid state, and should be treated as such. Then, last weekend, he warned of an inevitable consequence of the narrative deployed by Israel and its allies in defense of their genocide in Gaza: “What will happen when the Holocaust no longer prevents the world seeing Israel as it is?”

In a Haaretz op ed, he wrote:

“For decades, Israel has been perpetrating, in broad daylight, crimes against the Palestinians, crimes that are government policy, crimes that are approved by the High Court of Justice, which are protected by the opinions of attorney generals and whitewashed by military advocate generals – although all that is overt and known, reported and published, nobody is being held to account for it, neither in Israel nor abroad, at least so far.

“We're approaching the moment, and perhaps it's already here, when the memory of the Holocaust won't stop the world from seeing Israel as it is. The moment when the historic crimes committed against our people will stop serving as our Iron Dome, protecting us from being held to account for crimes we are committing in the present against the nation with which we share the historical homeland.”

That particular jeremiad was impeccably timed, it turned out, because days later the International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor sought arrest warrants on war-crimes charges for Israel’s prime minister and defense minister, with more potentially to come. Cue the predictable outrage from Israel’s enablers, but it can’t erase Hagai’s point: The diminishing returns of the Israel camp cynically citing the Holocaust have finally come to a point, in the eyes of the world two generations later, where the Shoah can no longer exempt Israel from accountability for its own crimes against humanity.

“You cannot get a solution by being so one-sided, and looking only at one particular issue and erase 60 years of atrocities,” Malaysia’s Prime Minister Anwar Ebrahim castigated Germany’s Scholtz (video) earlier this year for Germany citing its own genocide that killed 6 million Jews as reason for its unconditional support for Israel and refusal to confront its appalling abuses of Palestinian life and rights. “Why this hypocrisy? Why this selective and ambivalent attitude towards one race and other? Because they are colored? Because they are a different religion?” His point was simple: The German (and Western by extension) narrative fixating on the Holocaust as the singular issue in Israel’s history ignored the millions of Palestinian victims of Israel’s creation and its ongoing abuses.

And Namibia’s President Hage Geingob made the same point, spicing his comments by noting the underlying racism of Germany’s own comparatively feeble efforts to reckon with its colonial genocide of the Herero and Nama people decades before the Shoah. For the global south, personified by Aime Cesaire, the Nazi Holocaust was not the singular unique event that somehow existed outside of history (as postwar Zionists would have it) but was, instead, an extension of the blood-soaked history of the West as it was lived by the colonized people of Africa, Asia and the Americas.

The non-Western memory of centuries of brutal Western colonization as been stirred by watching Israel’s genocidal war on its colonized Palestinian population. And the extent to which anyone is convinced by Israel and its allies’ claim legitimacy for today’s genocide by reference to the Nazi one, they not only miss the universal point of “Never Again”; they deliberately weaken (potentially fatally) the power of Holocaust memory to have any meaning beyond that of an excuse for Israel’s crimes.

At the same time, to say that Israel has had a cynical and sometimes schizophrenic relationship with that horrendous chapter of European history would be an understatement.

I’m reminded, here, of the strange conversation that followed President Barack Obama’s 2009 Cairo speech. Obama explained the strong U.S. bond with Israel as based on cultural and historical ties… “and the recognition that the aspiration for a Jewish homeland is rooted in a tragic history that cannot be denied. Around the world, the Jewish people were persecuted for centuries, and anti-Semitism in Europe culminated in an unprecedented Holocaust.  Tomorrow, I will visit Buchenwald, which was part of a network of camps where Jews were enslaved, tortured, shot and gassed to death by the Third Reich.  Six million Jews were killed -- more than the entire Jewish population of Israel today.  Denying that fact is baseless, it is ignorant, and it is hateful.”

At the same time, he noted that Israel’s creation had caused the dispossession of the Palestinian people, followed by the enduring oppression and humiliation of occupation, and proclaimed an American obligation to support the Palestinian people’s efforts to transform the “intolerable” situation in which Israel’s emergence had placed them. Lofty words that didn’t translate into any change, of course.

But Obama’s invocation of the Holocaust as Israel’s raison d’etre stirred some unease in the pro-Israel camp. Then-ADL head Abe Foxman said Obama should have “made clear that Israel’s right to statehood is not a result of anti-Semitism and the Holocaust.”

He’s not the only one who argues this, of course; it has long been a popular historical fantasy on the Zionist right that the movement claimed sovereignty in Palestine not on the basis of the Holocaust, but by a (historically questionable) claim that the Ashkenazi Jews who led and comprised the Zionist movement were the progeny of the Hebrews of Judea thousands of years ago. The same theme was echoed in Haaretz by Israeli liberal Aluf Benn.

Commenting on Obama choosing to follow his Cairo speech with a visit to Buchenwald, Benn said this decision to balance an outreach to the Muslim world with a gesture recognizing the horrors of anti-Semitism may have been welcomed by American Jews, “but in Israel it was taken as an affront. The Israeli narrative attributes the state’s creation to a historical bond from biblical times, to the Zionist struggle and to the victory in the War of Independence. Obama’s message in Cairo – that Israel was established as compensation for the Holocaust – was perceived in Israel as an adoption of (then-Iranian president) Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s anti-Zionist stance.”

I wrote at the time:

So, where on Earth did Barack Obama get this apparently outlandish idea that Israel’s foundation was intimately tied to the Holocaust? Maybe it’s the fact that the first place Israel takes every visiting dignitary is to Yad Vashem, which as Avrum Burg has so eloquently argued, a visit designed effect what he calls the “emotional blackmail” that sears into the minds of the guest that Israel is the answer to the Holocaust, and that any criticism of the Jewish State must be muted for that reason.

Or maybe it’s the fact that Israel’s leaders are always rabbiting on about every new challenger in the region being a reincarnation of Hitler. Begin said it about Arafat; Netanyahu says it about Ahmadinejad. For years, Israel’s leaders have spoken about the 1967 borders as “Auschwitz borders.” I could go on and on. The Zionist narrative as I was fed it growing up portrayed the creation of the State of Israel as a triumphant redemption from the horrors of the camps. And the same narrative became the organizing principle of Israeli education starting in the 1960s with the Eichmann trial, when as Tom Segev and others have shown, the Israeli state makes a conscious decision to emphasize the Holocaust as the basis of its national identity to keep people from leaving. Jewish schoolkids, many of whose families had never set foot in Europe, now make an annual pilgrimage to the death camps of Poland. Israeli air force planes fly over Auschwitz in symbolic claiming of the mantle of the survivors.

And most of those Jews abroad who support the principle of a Jewish State — and the Western nations who do likewise — do so on the basis of the Holocaust. If Israel’s claims were based only on a mythologized history of a Biblical kingdom, frankly it would have aroused no more sympathy in the Jewish world than Bin Laden’s fantasies about resurrecting the Islamic Caliphate have done in the Muslim world. Without the Holocaust, in other words, Zionism would have remained the fringe movement among Jews that it was before World War II.

To suggest that the link between Israel’s claims to legitimacy and the Holocaust were invented by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is absurd. They were present at the founding in the international community’s response to Israel’s creation (does Aluf Benn really think Israel won the UN vote that enabled its creation because of the Biblical claims of the Zionist movement?!), and they have been systematically developed and exploited by Israel itself.

And the shtick continues: Israel’s Ambassador to the UN didn’t show up in the costume of a Biblical Hebrew to protest the Hamas action on October 7, he sported instead the yellow Star of David with “Never Again” inscribed on, mimicking the identifier Nazi Germany had forced Jews to wear. As Pankaj Mishra wrote in a crucial intervention  on the issue of Holocaust memory and Zionism, “Anyone calling attention to the spectacle of Washington’s blind commitment to Israel is accused of antisemitism and ignoring the lessons of the Shoah. And a distorted consciousness of the Shoah ensures that whenever the victims of Israel, unable to endure their misery any longer, rise up against their oppressors with predictable ferocity, they are denounced as Nazis, hellbent on perpetrating another Shoah.”

Not surprisingly, Israel’s Shoah/Anti-Semitism defense doesn’t resonate in the Global South, and increasingly, also, it fails to dissuade anti-racist youth in Western countries from standing with the Palestinians in the face of a colonial genocide. Mishra again:

“In 2024, many more people can see that, when compared with the Jewish victims of Nazism, the countless millions consumed by slavery, the numerous late Victorian holocausts in Asia and Africa, and the nuclear assaults on Hiroshima and Nagasaki are barely remembered. Billions of non-Westerners have been furiously politicized in recent years by the West’s calamitous war on terror, ‘vaccine apartheid’ during the pandemic, and the barefaced hypocrisy over the plight of Ukrainians and Palestinians; they can hardly fail to notice a belligerent version of ‘Holocaust denial’ among the elites of former imperialist countries, who refuse to address their countries’ past of genocidal brutality and plunder and try hard to delegitimize any discussion of this as unhinged ‘wokeness’. Popular West-is-best accounts of totalitarianism continue to ignore the acute descriptions of Nazism (by Jawaharlal Nehru and Aimé Césaire, among other imperial subjects) as the radical ‘twin’ of Western imperialism; they shy away from exploring the obvious connection between the imperial slaughter of natives in the colonies and the genocidal terrors perpetrated against Jews inside Europe.

“One of the great dangers today is the hardening of the color line into a new Maginot Line. For most people outside the West, whose primordial experience of European civilization was to be brutally colonized by its representatives, the Shoah did not appear as an unprecedented atrocity. Recovering from the ravages of imperialism in their own countries, most non-Western people were in no position to appreciate the magnitude of the horror the radical twin of that imperialism inflicted on Jews in Europe. So when Israel’s leaders compare Hamas to Nazis, and Israeli diplomats wear yellow stars at the UN, their audience is almost exclusively Western. Most of the world doesn’t carry the burden of Christian European guilt over the Shoah, and does not regard the creation of Israel as a moral necessity to absolve the sins of 20th-century Europeans. For more than seven decades now, the argument among the ‘darker peoples’ has remained the same: why should Palestinians be dispossessed and punished for crimes in which only Europeans were complicit? And they can only recoil with disgust from the implicit claim that Israel has the right to slaughter 13,000 children not only as a matter of self-defense but because it is a state born out of the Shoah.”

Mishra elegantly charts the cynical instrumentalization of the Holocaust both in Israel and in the US – with details of contemptuous and evasive attitudes that preceded it in both settings that would shock many today. And also how so many survivors of the camps had recoiled from the weaponization of their experience in service of Israel’s colonial goals.

Israel’s engineered Holocaust traumatization of its youth includes taking thousands to Auschwitz every year

I had taken the same lessons from Tom Segev’s “The Seventh Million” and Peter Novick’s “The Holocaust in American Life”. Segev’s book remains essential reading, not least because it alerts us to the extremely dangerous effect the engineered traumatization of successive generations of Israelis in ways that make them imagine themselves as Holocaust survivors — even though half of them are Arab Jews, who had no ancestral connection to the experience of Europe’s Jews at the hands of the Nazis.

Mishra writes, following Segev, that Ben Gurion’s goal in putting Eichmann on trial in 1961 and making a conscious decision to recenter the Israeli narrative on the Holocaust, was “to educate Jews from Arab countries about the Shoah and European antisemitism (neither of which they were familiar with) and start binding them with Jews of European ancestry in what seemed all too clearly an imperfectly imagined community. Segev goes on to describe how Begin advanced this process of forging a Shoah consciousness among darker-skinned Jews who had long been the target of racist humiliations by the country’s white establishment. Begin healed their injuries of class and race by promising them stolen Palestinian land and a socioeconomic status above dispossessed and destitute Arabs.”

Remembering my own teenage rage ignited by a visit to Yad Vashem as part of a Habonim group, I can testify to the fight-flight reflex triggered by the hardly subtle Zionist propaganda that channels this rage into fear and hatred of Palestinians. That’s because this cynical instrumentalization of the Holocaust involves an historically specious effort to blame it on the Palestinians, or at least portray them as the contemporary incarnation of the Nazis. Before I’d properly acquainted myself with the historical facts and moral clarity that destroyed the Zionist beliefs I’d been fed in my adolescence, months after my Yad Vashem visit I almost got in a fist fight with a Muslim Students Association activist who was handing out Al Quds Day pamphlets at the University of Cape Town. The entirely uncharacteristic red mist that descended on me in that moment (I’ve not had a fist fight since a playground scrap when I was 12 years old) was testimony to the instincts Zionist education had cultivated — the believe that my existence was threatened by the MSA pamphlet proclaiming the Palestinian claim on Jerusalem.

Of course, it will take years of research by people far more qualified than me to prove this, but I can’t help believing that the hatred and cruelty we’ve seen for months in the social-media outputs of Israeli soldiers in Gaza is born of similar fears cultivated in them since childhood —fear born of the belief that every Palestinian threatens their very existence. And yes, there should be little doubt that the Israelis’ experience of Oct 7 — both the very real horrors, and those of the imagination amplified by Israel’s propaganda efforts — has profoundly reinforced the fear-hate equation.

Still, things look different outside of Israel and its narrative echo chamber in Western corridors of power. To the extent that the Holocaust is used to justify or distract from today’s genocide, Israel will only have succeeded in discrediting and cheapening the power of Holocaust memory, reducing it to simply an excuse for genocide. If a generation fighting to stop Israel’s genocide is presented with the idea that Israel’s mass slaughter in Gaza is justified by the Holocaust, they will question the moral authority of the Holocaust story – even the validity of the Holocaust story itself. Israel’s cynical effort to cloak itself in the striped pajamas of Auschwitz as it rains hell on Gaza will, if its ruse is believed, actually promote Holocaust denial or minimization. And telling social justice minded young people outraged at Western passivity in the face of Israel’s crimes that to stand for Palestinian rights and freedom is “anti-Semitism”, is effectively promoting anti-Semitism.

I’ll leave the last word here to Pankaj:

“Gaza has become for countless powerless people the essential condition of political and ethical consciousness in the 21st century… Many of the protesters who fill the streets of their cities week after week have no immediate relation to the European past of the Shoah. They judge Israel by its actions in Gaza rather than its Shoah-sanctified demand for total and permanent security. Whether or not they know about the Shoah, they reject the crude social-Darwinist lesson Israel draws from it – the survival of one group of people at the expense of another. They are motivated by the simple wish to uphold the ideals that seemed so universally desirable after 1945: respect for freedom, tolerance for the otherness of beliefs and ways of life; solidarity with human suffering; and a sense of moral responsibility for the weak and persecuted. These men and women know that if there is any bumper sticker lesson to be drawn from the Shoah, it is ‘Never Again for Anyone’ — the slogan of the brave young activists of Jewish Voice for Peace.”

It is that principle that has finally caught up with Israel, at The Hague.