Calling it a “Holocaust”?
August 20, 2025 at 8:05 pm
Bodies of Palestinians, including children, killed in Israeli airstrikes on Deir al-Balah in central Gaza, lie wrapped in white shrouds as funeral preparations are carried out at Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah, Gaza Strip, on August 19, 2025. [Abdalhkem Abu Riash – Anadolu Agency]
As a Truman Book Award winner, for writing on World War II and the Middle East, it’s astounding to hear that “every president since Harry Truman” gave “unwavering support” to Israel. This claim often accompanies genocide denial, and it’s as historically illiterate as is Prime Minister Netanyahu’s comparison of US campus protests to Nazi Germany. Let’s examine both “unwavering support” and Nazi allusions.
Truman recognised the state of Israel in May 1948 but turned against it once elected in November, stating his “disgust” over “how the Jews are approaching the refugee problem.” Thereafter, Dwight Eisenhower had the United Nations censure Israel in 1953, 1955, and 1956 for massacre-making. The first was Qibya, a village on the West Bank. Paratroopers led by future prime minister Ariel Sharon “shot every man, woman, and child they could find,” wrote Time magazine. The New York Post compared Qibya to the 1942 Nazi eradication of Lidice, in Czechoslovakia.
Eisenhower ignored Prime Minister Ben-Gurion’s cries of “antisemitism.” After all, writes Israeli historian Benny Morris, between 1949 and 1956 “upward of 2,700 Arab infiltrators, and perhaps as many as 5,000, were killed by the [Israeli military], police, and civilians along Israel’s borders.” He adds that “the vast majority of those killed were unarmed,” which meant shepherds, farmers, and refugees.
Once more, Eisenhower condemned Israel, as he did colonial Britain and France, for colluding to attack Egypt in October 1956. But Israel’s way of war was different. Its assault began after killing 49 villagers in Kafir Qasim near Tel Aviv and then massacring Gaza refugees at Khan Younis and Rafah. In February, Eisenhower threatened to cut off Israeli bond sales if it didn’t withdraw from Gaza, as it did fast.
READ: 28 children die daily in Gaza due to malnutrition and lack of medicine: Officials report
The next year, Israel turned to building a nuclear bomb. By 1963, President John F. Kennedy told Ben-Gurion that Washington’s “support of Israel” would be “seriously jeopardised” unless it opened its facilities to US inspections. Ben-Gurion insisted Israel was developing peaceful atomic energy.
President Lyndon Johnson got the UN to censure Israel once more in 1966 after it attacked Jordan in yet another so-called retaliation. “The Israelis have done a great deal of damage to our interests and their own,” said his national security adviser. “They’ve wrecked a good system of tacit cooperation.” Meanwhile, Palestinians within Israel had lived under martial law since 1948, and Washington saw no reason to censure Arab belligerents.
With that “good system” ended, Israel’s victories in the wars of 1967 and 1973 won it the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem. Settlers poured in, with results that President Jimmy Carter would deem “apartheid.” Yet Washington stopped upholding international law. Former Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren explains why in his book, Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East 1776 to the Present. By 1967-1973, Israel’s supporters were achieving “the financial and political clout necessary to sway congressional opinion.”
That “clout” of the Israel Lobby altered US diplomacy. Every president since Carter has urged a “two-state solution.” Ever-expanding Israeli settlements have made it impossible. Washington even was silent in 1980 when Israel skirted a US embargo to enable apartheid South Africa to build six atomic bombs, and equipped South African jets to drop them.
“Clout” caused Washington to delay in 1982 when Prime Minister Begin struck the Palestine Liberation Organization in Beirut, killing some 18,000 Palestinians and Lebanese, overwhelmingly civilians. Belatedly, President Ronald Reagan demanded that Begin end the “holocaust,” and Reagan chose “holocaust” carefully.
The only change since Beirut ’82 is that this time the World Court instead calls the Israeli Defence Forces’ wholesale killing of Palestinians “probable genocide” rather than a “holocaust.” Either way, it’s a pattern of murder which extends back to 1948 and today routinely kills US citizens as well.
READ: UNRWA chief: Our staff did not give up despite daily hell in Gaza
Of course Palestinian Moslems and Christians will resist “Jewish supremacist thugs” like Begin, Sharon, and Netanyahu who rule from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. Yet never have Palestinian fighters used terror on an Israeli scale. Even Hamas’s 7 October operation against military units guarding “the world’s largest open-air prison” involved but a fraction of Israeli atrocities which have extended over a lifetime And those include decades of lethal hostage-taking (i.e., “prisoners”).
Israeli dissident Gideon Levy speaks of “neo-Nazism” now that Gaza has become an open-air starvation bunker, and ex-PM Ehud Olmert draws Nazi comparisons too. Other similarities arise, as at Qibya. Like steps for exterminating Gaza’s population, or removing these roughly two million people to South Sudan, akin to the Nazi’s initial Madagascar Plan to resettle Jews in Africa. And Israel excels at hate-inciting propaganda: “forty beheaded babies,” “Palestinian Terror,” and ivy league “antisemitism.”
An Israeli defence minister claims he’s “fighting human animals”: IDF targeting of children, physicians, and journalists follows. To be sure, the deniers insist that, if Israel truly intended genocide, it would be even “more methodical and vastly more deadly.” Yet suggesting that fewer Palestinians would exist had there only been a more thorough genocide also has a Teutonic ring.
Not a single high-level officer in the Israeli military or defence establishment has refused to participate. Still, world opinion is seeing how 7.3 Israeli Jews now rule over 7.3 million Palestinian Arabs in a so-called democracy. France, Britain, Australia, Canada move to recognize Palestine. Germany curtails weapons exports, Norway its investments, and the United Methodist Church divests.
This is how Israel’s former ally, apartheid South Africa, was step by step cut off from the world during the 1980s. Such is the Palestinian objective, and time isn’t on Israel’s side. To this end, Gaza has become Exhibit A of Clausewitz’s insight that war is an instrument of policy, and Israel is losing. Maybe a denuclearized and democratic binational state can arise “from the river to the sea.”
Washington stands in the way, yet Israel has plunged in US polls, especially among young Americans. Before long, a president will again be compelled to emphasize US moral and strategic interests, and reassess this “unconditional” attachment.
READ: 1,857 Palestinians killed in less than 3 months in Gaza while seeking food: UN rights office
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.