The denier argument from inversion is the most contemporary form of denial. It does not deny that the Holocaust happened. It claims that the Jews, having survived the Holocaust and built the State of Israel, are now perpetrating an equivalent crime against the Palestinians. The argument is sometimes presented as a critique of Israeli policy and sometimes as a critique of the political uses of Holocaust memory; in either form it relies on an equivalence between the historical Holocaust and Israeli actions in Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon that does not survive comparison of the actions in question.
The argument has spread in recent years particularly on the political left and particularly on social media, and it has gained currency among people who would not consider themselves Holocaust deniers in the older senses. The argument does not, on the whole, deny the murder of European Jewry. What it does is to repurpose the murder as a rhetorical weapon against the descendants of its victims. Specific Israeli policies and military actions are open to criticism on their own terms; that is a different argument, and one that does not require the inversion. The inversion is the move from criticism of policy to equation with the regime that murdered the policy-makers’ grandparents.
The arguments addressed in this section
Israeli Treatment of Gaza is Equivalent to the Holocaust is the most current form of the argument. It rests on a particular reading of the Israeli military operations in Gaza since 2008 and on the casualty figures from those operations. The argument requires the reader not to compare scale, intent, mechanism, or duration with the historical case to which the comparison is being drawn.
Israeli Military Actions Are Comparable to Einsatzgruppen uses the specific imagery of the Nazi mobile killing units. The Einsatzgruppen shot over a million Jews in occupied Soviet territory between 1941 and 1944 in a systematic, centrally-directed programme of racial extermination. The comparison cannot be sustained on any of the relevant dimensions.
Zionism is a Form of Nazism is the most familiar form of the inversion, with Soviet propaganda origins. The argument equates a movement that arose in part as a response to European antisemitism with the regime that drew European antisemitism to its conclusion. The argument has been examined in detail by historians of antisemitism and dismissed as a category error.
Israel is Doing to Palestinians What Nazis Did to Jews is the headline form of the argument, common in protest rhetoric and on social media. It depends on a generalised parallel rather than on specific factual claims, and on the assumption that the reader will not press for the specifics. When the specifics are examined, the parallel does not hold.
Calling Israeli Actions Genocidal is Not Antisemitism is the meta-claim that often accompanies the inversion arguments and seeks to insulate them from the charge of antisemitism. The page addresses where the line falls between legitimate criticism of Israeli policy, of which there is much, and the use of Holocaust imagery against the descendants of Holocaust victims, which is something else.
Each of the pages below addresses one denier claim and the historians’ answer to it. Read together, they show that comparison of contemporary Israeli policy with the Nazi extermination of European Jewry does not hold up to comparison of what was actually done in each case, and that the comparison is doing rhetorical work that the comparator cannot bear.