Israel’s Gaza genocide has provoked a savage backlash within broader Zionist circles. They’ve enlisted governments, universities, and NGOs to police, suppress and punish critics of the genocide. In the case of nation states like the UK and Germany, their full power has been unleashed against those who defy such prohibitions, including arrest and even imprisonment.
The premise of this backlash campaign is a false, contrived claim concerning anti-Semitism and the Holocaust. What I call the Anti-Semitism Industry (in this case, the American Jewish Committee), devised the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism and succeeded it inscribing in national and state legislatures as the normative narrative regarding this subject. It weaponized anti-Semitism, proscribing any discourse that strayed outside these parameters. This rendered legitimate speech, including activism against genocide and on behalf of its Palestinian victims, as tainted.
This enabled right-wing factions in western countries to exploit so-called anti-Semitism for political advantage. For example, Republicans desperate to divert political discourse away from Trump barreling toward dictatorship, have used this as a cudgel to beat Democrats and the Palestine solidarity movement. Along with manufactured claims about election fraud, the anti-Semitism canard has become the go-to political meme.
I marvel that even senators who’ve never previously said a word on the subject, whose districts are hundreds, if not thousands of miles from any Jewish population, and who have few if any Jews among their constituents, have taken up the call. It’s worse than virtue-signalling. It’s the exploitation of real, historic Jewish suffering on behalf of looming dictatorship.
It’s bad enough when Jews themselves exceptionalize their suffering. But when senators and presidents reinforce it through political grandstanding and punitive legislation, it becomes not only offensive, but toxic to other minorities targeted for their alleged anti-Semitism. We don’t need such advocates. Most of all, we don’t need anyone policing speech concerning Israel and the Holocaust. Criticism of Israel and opposing genocide must not have parameters defining what is permissible and what isn’t.
In fact, before they barrel into this subject uninvited, these poseurs might want to study the discourse, the diversity of thought, and understand the history. As it is, their statements are performative, a robotic repetition of talking points peddled by the Israel Lobby.
Here is Sen. Cassidy of Louisiana demanding answers to gotcha questions aimed at New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani. He threatens to drag the mayor before a Senate committee to explain why he voided the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism. Imagine, the US Senate reviewing New York City’s municipal regulations:
There is a false premise inherent in such attitudes: that Jews are under attack today; their safety is imperiled; they want to kill us; only extreme vigilance can prevent another Holocaust. Such obsessive fears have even infected Jews themselves. Tender young Zionist college students shudder on campuses because other students criticize Israel and call Gaza a genocide. Even though none of these protesters direct their anger at Jews, the Zionists among them consider it an attack on their Jewish identity.
This in itself is a common claim by neo-Nazis: that Jews are no different than Israelis; that Zionism represents Jews and Judaism; that Israeli crimes are Jewish crimes.
In truth, Zionist Jews embraces Zionism as their Jewish identity. If they have any religious identity, it is one that places Israel at the forefront. All despite decades of Diaspora history rejecting Zionist nationalism; and despite a long history of disaporism, which embraced secular Jewish identity and the centrality of Diaspora to it.
This centering of Zionism is a recent phenomenon of the past 75 years. Nevertheless, Israel has constructed a narrative which co-opts Jewish history and transforms it into a fable of nationalism, going all the way back to the Bible itself; to transform Zionism into an inevitable historical phenomenon.
Exceptionalism and our Holocaust
The exceptionalists believe this Holocaust is ours, not theirs; that Jews are the ones to define it. Among the false historical contrivances is a claim that convenientlyi links Zionism to the Holocaust. The latter proved that Jewish existence in the Diaspora is endangered; that Jews had no power to control their fate, leaving them at the mercy of their murderers. Thus, Zionism became the answer to the Jewish Question. Only a state could guarantee safety for the Jewish people.
Yet, this was never true. Almost from the moment the first European Jewish immigrants arrived in Palestine, they came into conflict with the indigenous Palestinians. Though there were some efforts at cooperation and co-existence, there were exchanges of mass violence between the communities from the early 20th century. They never ceased. Despite the tenth most powerful military force in the world Jews are not now, nor have they ever been safe in Israel. They are constantly in danger, beset by enemies. Enemies they themselves have created.
Israel has become a garrison state whose existence is secured through force and domination. This Spartan-like mentality is inculcated into children trained to become its warriors. As adults, they offer their lives on the sacrificial altar of nationhood.
This was not our grandfather’s Zionism; not the vision of a prosperous Jewish nation and a people taking its rightful place on the global stage.
Gaza as Refutation of Holocaust Exceptionalism
The Gaza genocide has disturbed what was once a consensus among Jews, and even some genocide scholars: that the Holocaust was a unqiue historical event. One suffered by Jews and exclusive to them. No other event could compare to it in severity. The causes of it were unique to this particular tragedy. It’s known as Holocaust exceptionalism. I wrote about it a few months after 10/7: Gaza, Genocide and Holocaust Exceptionalism.
The claim that Jews in effect own the Holocaust is accompanied by converse denial that Israel is committing a Holocaust in Gaza. It offends Zionists that a people who suffered the ultimate tragic fate would be accused of perpetrating it on another people. If he Holocaust is exceptional, then there can be no other that is comparable to it. Anyone, according to this conception, who makes such a claim has themselves desecrated the memories of the Jewish victims and survivors.
Genocide deniers use various phrases freighed with anti-Semitic connotations to smear those who call Gaza a genocide. Common among them, and one of the oldest is the “blood libel” claim. Here tweeted by former JDL leader, Yossi Klein Halevi:
It’s telling that Klein Halevi recounts his years as a disciple of Meir Kahane, Yossi Klein Halevi Remembers Meir Kahane and the JDL, under the headline: The Ecstasy of Rage. That is what much of pro-Israel rhetoric is: performative outrage. Exploitation of ancient suffering on behalf of Israel and political interests. There are no more blood libels. Jews are not under threat. If anything, it is Israel which poses a threat to Palestinians. Israelis have become the perpetrators, the latter-day Nazis.
Of course, he feels outrage and contempt for the accusation. It is a slap in the face to everything he holds dear including the notion of Holocaust exceptionalism. Not only cann there be no other Holocaust like our Holocaust–their Holocaust cannot be a Holocaust because they are our killers. They hate us. They are evil. Not us. We are victims. They forced us to do this. We had no choice. It was us or them. In other words, playing the Eternal Victim card.
As for other genocides–Rwanda, Cambodia, Myanmar, Bosnia, Armenia–acknowledging them as comparable diminishes the enormity of the Jewish Holocaust. Thus, Israel, along with Israel Lobby groups like the ADL, has for decades refused to acknowledge the Armenian genocide. The ADL refused to recognize it officially until 2016. This was, in part, because of Israel’s then-close relations with Turkey, which adamantly rejects any such claims. But the most critical reason was to maintain Jewish exceptionalism.
There is critical problem with this approach: it severs a vital connection between Jews and non-Jews. It demands that the latter acknowledge Jewish suffering is unique; and the suffering of others is, by definition, lesser or in a different category. This denies our common humanity. It insults the memory of all non-Jewish victims.
Despite all this posturing, let’s call it what it is: Holocaust denialism. It’s no different than Holocaust revisionism. The identity of the deniers may be different, but their motives and methods are the same. They ignore evidence, they propound theories and “facts” without foundation, they barely conceal an underlying hatred of the victims. They advance their arguments with vehemence, even outrage; but without scientific or historical basis.
Genocide: laying the groundwork
Genocide doesn’t just happen. Humans don’t naturally or innately hate each other. Attitudes leading to genocide must be nurtured and shaped in the minds of those who will be the perpetrators. The Other must be dehumanized, demonized; transformed into the personification of evil. Israel planted the seeds of genocide in children from a young age. They are taught to hate what they call “Arabs.” That the only good Arab is a dead Arab. That Palestinians are the latter-day personificaton of ancient Israelite enemies.
The Israeli media, generals and university presidents exhorted Israelis to view Palestinians as Amalek: the tribe which “harried” the Israelites as they left Egypt. Its punishment was divinely-commanded genocide at the hands of King Saul. An Israeli rabbi wrote a book approving the murder of Palestinian children because they supposedly would grow up to kill Jews. A retired general wrote in a leading newspaper that Palestinian women should be murdered because they will produce the terrorists of the future.
Israelis were conditioned to hate Palestinians. They were taught it with their mother’s milk. Once these attitudes were instilled deeply within Israeli consciousness, it became easy to implement the actual genocide.
The Nazis followed the same process in rendering the Jews subhuman. They used similar language describing them as thieves, murderers, vermin, conniving, ruthless, etc. Goebbels and Streicher were its masters. Once they normalized such hatred, pogroms followed, then mass murder. It was a slow, carefully orchestrated series of escalating hatreds.
Nazi genocide=Gaza genocide. They are two sides of the same coin. The only difference is the scale: while the Nazis murdered 6-million Jews, the Israelis have “only” murdered hundreds of thousands (the Guardian published a 2024 projection by a UK public health expert of 330,000 deaths).