RUTHFULLY YOURS

On this Holocaust Memorial Day, we are marking the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the most notorious of the Nazis’ concentration camps. It ought to be an occasion for sombre reflection on the systematic extermination of six million Jews. A chance to contemplate the unique moral horror of the Holocaust.

But that is becoming more difficult than ever. And that’s because so many ‘progressives’ today are eroding the terrible significance of the Holocaust by casting Israel, and by extension Jews in general, as the new Nazis.

How did it come to this? How did the victims of the greatest evil in modern history come to be likened to its perpetrators?

Those portraying Israel as the new Nazi Germany will, of course, point to Israel’s brutal war in Gaza to substantiate their claims. But such a comparison is absurd. Israel is hardly behaving like Nazi Germany. Nazi Germany was an expansionist, imperial power. Israel simply isn’t. It is responding to the horrific, genocidal actions of Hamas after it carried out a pogrom on Israel on 7 October 2023. Since then, Israel has been fighting a war of self-defence not just against Hamas, but also against an anti-Semitic alliance from across the Middle East (including Iran, Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen), which is hell bent on Israel’s destruction.

Claims that Israel is a new Nazi Germany speak to a more profound problem – namely, the ‘dejudification’ of the Holocaust. That is, instead of being seen as a specifically anti-Jewish act, the Nazis’ systematic extermination of Jewry has increasingly been cast as an example of man’s inhumanity to man in general. Hence, even Jews can apparently be guilty of Nazism.

Many now downplay the specifically anti-Jewish character of the Holocaust. They will point out that the Nazis’ mass-killing operations took the lives of 13million civilians, of whom less than half were Jews. Other mass casualties included Soviet prisoners of war, civilians killed in anti-partisan operations, disabled people and the Roma. From this perspective, it is possible to argue that Jews were just one group among many who were slaughtered by the Nazis.

However, this misses the centrality of anti-Semitism to Nazi ideology. It is not that the loss of an individual Jewish life should trouble us more than other lives. It was that the Nazis were driven by an overriding racial animus towards the Jews – they were the specific targets of the Nazis’ Vernichtungskrieg, their ‘war of extermination’.

There was a reason for this. In the fevered imagination of the Nazis, the Jews represented the combined evils of capitalism and Communism. As historian Paul Hanebrink explains, ‘Communism and global capitalism always functioned in [Nazis’] minds as two sides of the same international (and anti-national) Jewish evil. In their paranoid fantasies, Jewish Communists and Jewish financiers invariably worked together to pursue world domination, each feeding off the power of the other.’

There is still room for debate about how this visceral Nazi hatred of Jews played itself out. Some argue that the Nazis intended to exterminate the Jews from the start, whereas others maintain the Final Solution evolved over time. In any event, it should be clear that anti-Semitism was not an incidental part of Nazi ideology. At the Wannsee Conference in Berlin in 1942, Reinhard Heydrich, the main architect of the Holocaust, announced plans to kill 11million Jews living in Europe. The Nazis also had an agreement with the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Mohammed Amin al-Husseini, to murder the Jews outside Europe, particularly in what was then British mandate Palestine.

The centrality of anti-Semitism to Nazi ideology was often played down during the 20th century. Both British prime minister Winston Churchill and French president Charles de Gaulle, notes historian Tony Judt, were ‘curiously blind to the racial specificity of Hitler’s victims, understanding Nazis in the context of Prussian militarism instead’. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union and its Stalinist political parties tended to downplay the anti-Semitic nature of the Nazis. As Judt points out, the museum at Auschwitz established by the Stalinist Polish regime listed the victims by nationality alone, omitting all references to them being Jews.

It was during the 1990s that the tendency to relativise the Holocaust really took off. It came to be seen as just one of many instances of mass killing. During the war in the former Yugoslavia, Western politicians and journalists often likened the Serbs to the Nazis. In 1999, Tony Blair, Britain’s prime minister at the time, said that Serbia was ‘set on a Hitler-style genocide equivalent to the extermination of the Jews’. That same year, then US president Bill Clinton compared Serb leader Slobodan Milosevic to Hitler: ‘Though his ethnic cleansing is not the same as the ethnic extermination of the Holocaust, the two are related; both [involving] vicious, premeditated, systematic oppression fuelled by religious and ethnic hatred.’

So first the role of anti-Semitism in the Holocaust was downplayed. Then the Holocaust was relativised – recast as just one example among many of man’s inherent inhumanity and genocidal instincts. And then comes the cruellest blow of all. The meaning of the Holocaust is inverted. The Jews are presented as its perpetrators, rather than its victims.

This is the view of the contemporary anti-Israel movement. It doesn’t merely criticise the Israeli state, it demonises it. It deems it guilty of every modern sin – of settler-colonialism, toxic masculinity, white supremacy, genocide, apartheid and more. And this all serves one single objective: to present the Jewish state as the epitome of evil.

In some ways, the anti-Israel movement is drawing on the Stalinist tradition of equating Israel with the Nazis. As writer Izabella Tabarovsky has explained, Soviet anti-Zionists actively promoted this idea from the Six Day War in 1967 onwards. At the heart of this ‘virulent demonisation of Israel and Zionism’, were allegations of ‘Zionist-Nazi collaboration and false equivalence between the two’. This Stalinist libel has now been recycled by the anti-Israel movement.

This, then, is how the victims of the Nazis’ ‘war of extermination’ have been turned into its present-day perpetrators. It is hard to think of a more grotesque abuse of history.

Daniel Ben-Ami is an author and journalist. He runs Radicalism of Fools, a website dedicated to rethinking anti-Semitism. Follow him on X: @danielbenami