In a recent comment section, I noted that the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s Working Definition of Antisemitism does not consider criticism of Israel inherently antisemitic. Someone responded that because IHRA considers equating Israel to Nazi Germany antisemitic, that it does, in fact, silence criticism of Israel.
IHRA is clear: criticism of Israel is not antisemitic unless certain specific conditions are met, just as, say, critiquing Black politicians is not inherently anti-Black, unless said criticism relies on anti-Black, racist tropes.
Relying on Holocaust inversion to “criticize” Israel is antisemitic because it is the projection of one of the most nefarious antisemitic conspiracies— soft Holocaust denial — onto the Jewish state.
Holocaust inversion is a rhetorical tool used to portray Jews as morally equivalent — or worse — than Nazis. It’s often employed in discussions about Israel-Palestine and is frequently used by anti-Zionists.
UNDERSTANDING HOLOCAUST DENIAL
Holocaust denial is an antisemitic conspiracy theory that asserts that the Holocaust is either a myth, an exaggeration, or a fabrication.
Holocaust denial takes many forms. Sometimes it’s outright denial that the Holocaust happened. Most Holocaust denial, though, does not entirely deny the genocide of 6 million Jews but instead distorts established facts about the Holocaust. This is also known as Holocaust revisionism or soft Holocaust denial.
Some examples of soft Holocaust denial include, but are not limited to:
- Reducing the number of victims.
- Claiming Anne Frank's diary is a forgery.
- Denying the existence of the gas chambers.
- Holocaust inversion.
HOLOCAUST INVERSION IS SOFT HOLOCAUST DENIAL
Holocaust inversion is soft Holocaust denial because it relies on a long list of distortions, trivializations, and fabrications of established facts about the Holocaust. These include, but are not limited to:
- Nazism targeted all Jews, whether they identified as Zionists or not. Thus, no Jews— anti-Zionist, Zionist, Israeli — can be the inheritors of Nazism.
- Hitler condemned Zionism as early as a 1920 speech and wrote against it in Mein Kampf. Zionism is incompatible with Nazism because the Nazis themselves said so.
- The sheer magnitude and mechanism of the Holocaust and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are entirely different. Equivalencing one to the other relies on complete historical revisionism (for example, Israel is not operating gas chambers that murder 10,000 people a day, though I’m sure that libel is just around the corner).
- It was the Arab leadership in Palestine that allied with the Nazis, setting the stage for the 1948 war and the next 77 years of conflict.
MINIMIZATION AND TRIVIALIZATION
The mechanism, scope, and scale of the Holocaust is completely dissimilar to anything that has ever happened in the entirety of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Because of the sheer differences in scale, equating the two inherently minimizes and trivializes the Nazi genocide.
The normalization of Holocaust inversion has likely contributed to the sharp rise in ignorance about the Holocaust among the younger generations.
There was no humanitarian aid in the Nazi concentration camps as there has been Gaza (albeit not without its serious problems), but this user evidently doesn’t know this, because the two events are so often conflated with each other in anti-Israel discourse.
3 ASSUMPTIONS
Holocaust inversion always relies on at least one of the three following assumptions.
- The abused became the abuser, or the assumption that Israel’s treatment toward the Palestinians is misplaced retribution for what the Nazis did. But Israeli policies toward the Palestinians— whether right or wrong — were crafted in response to Palestinian violence, not in response to the Holocaust, dating all the way back to the 1948 war. This is soft Holocaust denial because it presents Palestinians, not Jews, as the ultimate victims of the Nazi genocide.
- The Jews didn’t learn their lesson from the Holocaust. But the Holocaust wasn’t a lesson for us, its victims, to learn. This is soft Holocaust denial because the Nazis didn’t persecute Jews to teach us a lesson; it was genocidal, unchecked antisemitism that drove their policies.
- The Zionists colluded with the Nazis to cause the Holocaust to “get” Israel. I have a post that debunks this in-depth – “The Zionists and the Nazis” – but this is soft Holocaust denial because it’s a complete fabrication of Holocaust history.
A HISTORY OF HOLOCAUST INVERSION
Holocaust inversion predates the establishment of the State of Israel, the Nakba, and believe it or not, even the end of the Holocaust.
Holocaust inversion can be traced back to the British Foreign Office during the period of the British Mandate of Palestine. Two months before the Nazis surrendered, in March of 1945, even as thousands of Zionist Jews from Mandatory Palestine fought the Nazis in Europe as part of the Jewish Brigade of the British Army, the High Commissioner of Palestine, Lord Gort, told the Colonial Secretary in London that “the establishment of any Jewish State in Palestine…will almost inevitably mean the rebirth of National Socialism [i.e. Nazism] in some guise.”
In 1946, Sir John Bagot Glubb wrote in a memorandum to the British government that the “new Jews” – that is, the Zionist Jews – had copied Nazi techniques and adopted Hitler’s master race theory.
To no one’s surprise, Glubb was also a virulent, unabashed antisemite.
Other British officials that engaged in Holocaust inversion included Lord Altrincham, who stated that Zionist youth groups were “a copy of the Hitler Youth,” and Sir Harold MacMichael and Sir Edward Grigg, both of whom equated Zionism with Nazism even while Jews were being slaughtered by the millions in Europe.
THE SOVIET PROPAGANDA MACHINE
The Soviet Union began distorting the history of the Holocaust before the war was even won. The Soviet propaganda machine never acknowledged the specifically antisemitic nature of the Holocaust, and instead, depicted all Soviets and communists as the primary victims of the Nazi genocide. This is important to note because, by stripping Jews of the history of our oppression, the Soviets could then easily characterize Jews as Nazis.
In 1969, the United Nations passed the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination. Both the United States and Brazil wanted to add a clause including antisemitism. The Soviet Union, which had been heavily oppressing its Jewish population since the 1950s, worried that such a clause would be used to rebuke them for persecuting Soviet Jews. So they included a counter proposal, which was a clause that equated Zionism to Nazism.
In the 1970s alone, hundreds of books and articles equating Zionism to Nazism were published in the Soviet Union and were later translated into Arabic, as well as numerous other languages. In 1984, the Anti-Zionist Committee of the Soviet Public published a propaganda brochure titled the “Criminal Alliance of Zionism and Nazism,” which claimed that there was irrefutable proof that the Zionists not only had collaborated with the Nazis, but were also responsible for the genocide of Jews, Slavs, and others in Europe. Soviet anti-Zionist propaganda even influenced the dissertation of current Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, titled “The Other Side: The Secret Relationship between Nazism and Zionism.”
AN ANALOGY TO HURT
Oppression and suffering should not be a competition. But there is logically no good reason to equate two objectively different situations than to cause hurt to Jews. Wanting to hurt Jews is, of course, antisemitic. You are rubbing our worst collective trauma in our face, as if to say, “You are no different than those who abused you the most.”
There are no shortage of wars, conflicts, atrocities, and sure, even genocides to choose from when making comparisons. And yet, you very intentionally select the Holocaust. How come? Why do you compare the Nakba to the Holocaust instead of, say, the Partition of India, which has more similarities?
Inversely, there are unfortunately no shortage of countries engaged in wars, conflicts, atrocities, and genocides, and yet it’s only Israel— the Jewish state, home to the largest Holocaust survivor population — that is persistently equated to Nazi Germany. This, again, is intentional.
When the Holocaust is reduced to a rhetorical tool with which to hurt Jews, that is not criticism of Israel (which policy or politician or action are you criticizing? What exactly is the criticism?): it’s antisemitism.
AN UGLY IMPLICATION
All roads in Holocaust inversion lead down a path to a really ugly conclusion: if Jews, Israelis, and/or Zionists are the new Nazis, then maybe, the Holocaust wasn’t so bad, because if the Nazis had succeeded in annihilating all Jewry, that would’ve prevented future Palestinian suffering.
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