The state of Israel is doing war crimes. It’s enacting human rights abuses. It is in apartheid state. The government is fascist. They are a rogue state.
It deserves condemnation, protest and an end to military aid. You can help by participating in BDS, writing your MP, protesting arms manufacturers and many more actions.
It is morally good to condemn the state of Israel in the strongest possible terms.
However, please be careful when you venture into the use of metaphor.
It can be tempting to compare Israel’s current actions to past atrocities and occasionally this is even a helpful illustration. However, when you’re picking which historical crime to use, I’m sorry, but it is counterproductive, unhelpful, and morally dubious to pick the Holocuast.
Unfortunately, there are loads of past atrocities and thus you have a wide variety of ones to pick as your metaphor, but you should avoid any that include millions of dead Jews.
Why?
Using the Holocaust as a metaphor is called “Holocaust Inversion”. You can DuckDuckGo it, but a lot of the results aren’t very good, so this is a summary:
Diasporic Jews and Triggering
Holocaust inversion is ironic! Its edgy! But we know that when edgelords use terms like ‘ironic’ they mean ‘triggering.’
Netanyahu is not reading your posts, but Jews in your country are.
Jews living around the world are part of a diaspora. Many or most could immigrate to Israel, but they’ve chosen not to.
There was a lot of movement of Jews in the 19th and 20th century as people fled violence. Many or most diasporic communities include people who lost family members in the Shoah.
Your neighbours don’t need your edgy, triggering quips. Your neighbours are not responsible for the crimes of a fascist government thousands of kilometres away.
So why do so many people grab this as a metaphor?
Westerners working through their feelings
When searching for references for this post, I found some material behind an academic paywall, so I want to quote a summary here:
“The Holocaust should have altogether put paid to anti-Semitism. It should have rebutted once and for all the principal anti-Semitic fantasy of malign Jewish power; it should have satiated the appetite of the most murderous anti-Semites for Jewish death. And yet instead it precipitated new anti-Semitic versions or tropes […]”.
It is a deeply puzzling question. In this chapter, Wistrich offers an answer to it by drawing on the work of the French philosopher, Vladimir Jankelevitch, who drew a connection between Israel, antisemitism and the Holocaust. Jankelevitch noted that the Holocaust had cast a shadow of remorse over the Europeans as they came to realise the magnitude of their crimes against the Jews. Wistrich argues persuasively that accusing Israel of behaving like Nazi Germany performs a psychological function for Europeans, because it acts as an “overcompensation mechanism” for discharging their latent guilt feelings about the “unspeakable crime of the Shoah”. Wistrich writes: ‘And what if the Jews themselves were no better than the Nazis? Why, that would be just wonderful. One would no longer have to feel sorry for them – after all, “they would have deserved their fate”.
Moreover, explains Wistrich, accusing Israel of being no better than the Nazis (and maybe even worse because the Jews failed to learn a lesson from their persecution) allows those with animus towards Jews to express it in the “politically correct” language of anti-Zionism. Thus, writes Wistrich, “those who accuse Israel of being a Nazi state kill two birds with one stone”.
One thing that’s missing from this summary is an exploration of the idea that the deaths of six million people should have been instructive. By this reading, Nazis were teaching us or doing us a moral favour by giving us a high ground. How lucky this could have been for us if only we hadn’t been too stubborn to take proper notice! And what is the solution for our failure to learn? More violence against us? This is part of why this argument is triggering.
Moreover, this mechanism of absolution of Holocaust guilt is similar to the assertion that homophobes are all secretly in the closet. It’s not true. Gay bashers are overwhelmingly straight. But if we believe that gay bashers are actually gay, then homophobic violence is a gay problem – something that gay people bring upon themselves.
The straight person who believes that gay bashers are gay never needs to change their rhetoric or their bigoted behaviour, let alone take actions to ally with LGBT people.
Blaming a community for their own oppression allows bigotries to fester and prejudice to grow. It leads to a situation that is worse for the community in question, including increased violence. And violence is certainly on the rise.
The Anglosphere
The US and the UK both failed to adequately respond to the refugee crisis in World War 2. We pat ourselves on the back because “we” won the war. (Spoiler: the Russians won the war.) But we also have our own guilt about our own atrocities. Britons invented the concentration camp. Nazis copied American ideas of Eugenics and Reservations. Ironically, the US’s “Indian Wars” are much more similar example to Israel’s current actions.
Meanwhile our failure to respond adequately to refugee crises has only gotten worse.
Actually working through our feelings
For some people, the injunction to pick a different atrocity will feel like an imposition. This could be a source of friction for you.
For me, I was raised in an environment with a lot of different social bigotries. When I feel a friction, that’s often a sign of some unconscious bias. Feeling something and not knowing why, for me, is an opportunity to figure out my values.
So if you’re feeling a friction, I’d really like to encourage you to sit with that difficulty for a while and query it.
Our emotions are neither good nor bad, but how we respond to opportunities to grow are what define us. Maybe this is an opportunity for you.
Decentring Palestinians
This is a long post, and all the way down here is the first mention of Palestinians. Instead, we’ve been talking about your Jewish neighbours, Europeans, North America and virtually everyone else aside from the people whose liberation we intend to support.
Sometimes, like with the Palestine Action ban, it’s our own governments that force us to lose focus on the goals we care about. But sometimes, it’s our own inability to actually focus our attention and effort.
I saw a picture the other day of some graffiti which said, “Gaza is freeing us.” But if we actually care about Palestinians, this is perverse.
Our first aim in any communication about the war should be whether it helps stop it and then whether it helps the victims. Decentring Palestinians to argue about a past war which Palestinians had nothing to do with, does not centre their needs. It does not aid Lebanese people. It doesn’t help Persians.
If you feel like you need a metaphor to talk about this war, I might first ask what the metaphor is intended to do. Is deliberately killing health workers, destroying schools, hospitals and universities is not clearly wrong enough without drawing a comparison?
But, again, if in the process of taking action to help stop the war, which could include participating in BDS, protesting, doing direct action, making signs and banners or putting those up somewhere or doing any one of tones of other potential things you can do, if you feel like you need a metaphor, do pick one that clarifies rather than obfuscates. Pick something other than the Holocaust.
Works Cited
Klaff, L., 2024. The three best chapters on holocaust inversion, recommended by Lesley Klaff. Fathom, 2024 (Winter).
