The Holocaust deniers claim: “The Holocaust is used to silence criticism of Israel. Any critic of Israeli policy is accused of antisemitism, with the implicit threat of being compared to the Nazis. The Holocaust functions as a rhetorical shield against legitimate political criticism of a modern state.”
This is a different kind of claim from those further up the leaf list. It does not deny the historical Holocaust. It claims that the memory of the Holocaust is improperly weaponised in the present-day political dispute about Israel and the Palestinians. The claim deserves a separate kind of answer because it has a partial validity that the others do not. There are bad-faith uses of Holocaust memory by some Israeli political actors and some Western pro-Israel commentators, and there are bad-faith accusations of antisemitism levelled against critics whose criticisms are political rather than racial. Recognising this is not in tension with recognising that there are also genuinely antisemitic political movements that adopt anti-Israel framing as cover, and that distinguishing the two cases is the work, not the conclusion, of any serious analysis. The denier framing collapses the work into the conclusion: it asserts that all invocations of antisemitism in defence of Israel are bad-faith silencing, and uses this assertion as cover for actual antisemitism.
The legitimate criticism of weaponised memory
The criticism that some pro-Israel actors invoke the Holocaust improperly is a serious political-cultural argument with serious adherents, including many Jewish writers. The Israeli historian Idith Zertal’s Israel’s Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood (2005) traces the use of Holocaust memory in Israeli political discourse from 1948 to the present and argues that it has at various points been deployed in ways that distort historical understanding for present political ends. The Israeli journalist Tom Segev’s The Seventh Million (1991) makes a parallel argument. The American Jewish writer Peter Novick’s The Holocaust in American Life (1999) examines the changing American uses of Holocaust memory and finds them often instrumental rather than purely commemorative. The work of these scholars is part of the proper historiography of memory and is in no sense identifiable with Holocaust denial.
The genuinely problematic uses of Holocaust memory in Israeli political discourse include: explicit Nazi comparisons applied to current Palestinian or Iranian leaders (Begin called Arafat a Hitler in 1982; Netanyahu has on several occasions invoked the Holocaust in reference to Iranian nuclear policy); the framing of any military action as required by the threat of “another Holocaust”; and the casting of Israeli critics as enabling another genocide. These usages have been criticised within Israel and across the Jewish world. Recognising the criticism does not require denying the Holocaust; it requires distinguishing the historical event from its present-day rhetorical employment.
The improper inference
The deniers’ argument moves from “some uses of Holocaust memory in Israeli political discourse are improper” to “Holocaust memory is generically improper as a defence against antisemitism” to “accusations of antisemitism are generically rhetorical silencing”. The chain is invalid. The first proposition is true and is recognised in the proper scholarship. The second does not follow. The third compounds the error and becomes its own form of bad faith. Antisemitism is a real phenomenon; it is sometimes adopted by people whose criticism of Israel is the medium for it (the discourse of the “Zionist Occupied Government” in white supremacist circles, for instance, is straightforwardly antisemitic and uses anti-Israel framing as a cover); it is also sometimes falsely attributed to critics whose criticism of Israeli policy is purely political. Distinguishing the two cases is what the analysis requires; collapsing them is what the denial requires.
The IHRA Working Definition of Antisemitism (2016), adopted by various governments and institutions, is itself contested in part because it includes some examples of anti-Israel discourse as antisemitic and excludes others. The contestation is legitimate political-cultural argument; the proper engagement with it is on its own terms. The deniers’ move is to use the contestation as evidence that all accusations of antisemitism are bad-faith silencing, which is a misuse of the contestation. The IHRA debate concerns the proper boundary between legitimate political criticism and antisemitism, not the existence of either category.
The Holocaust as historical fact versus the Holocaust as political rhetoric
The Holocaust as historical fact is documented in the German archive, in the Nuremberg trials, in the Operation Reinhard records, in the Einsatzgruppen reports, in the demographic accounting, in the testimony of the perpetrators and survivors, and in the surviving photographs and films. None of this can be silenced or weaponised; it is the underlying record that exists independently of any present-day political use. The Holocaust as political rhetoric is the use of that record by present-day actors for various purposes, some legitimate (commemoration, education, the claim of moral lesson) and some illegitimate (the silencing of critics, the manipulation of public sympathy for unrelated political ends). The proper response is to support the first kind of use and to criticise the second; the denier response is to use the criticism of the second to undermine the first.
The Holocaust does not need to be invoked to defend any Israeli policy. The legitimate defence of Israeli policy rests on its own merits and on the standard arguments of international politics; the legitimate criticism of Israeli policy rests on its own merits and on the standard arguments of international politics. Where the Holocaust enters the conversation, it should do so as one historical reference among others, not as a rhetorical trump. This is true within Israeli politics, within American politics, within European politics, and within the wider international debate.
Why the claim is harmful
The claim is harmful because it conflates a legitimate criticism of weaponised memory with a wholesale rejection of the antisemitism category. The criticism of weaponised memory is part of the normal contestation of political rhetoric in democratic societies; the rejection of the antisemitism category is the door through which some genuinely antisemitic political movements have walked, with the cover that any accusation against them is rhetorical silencing. The denier framing serves this second move, regardless of who is making the argument. The proper response to weaponised Holocaust memory is the same as the proper response to any rhetorical abuse: address it on its own terms, identify the abuse, separate it from the underlying historical reality. The Holocaust itself does not become any less real because some of its present-day invocations are bad-faith.
What is the difference between the Holocaust as historical event and the Holocaust as present-day rhetoric? Who has criticised the weaponisation of Holocaust memory, and on what grounds? Does that criticism require denying the historical event?
See also
Sources
- Idith Zertal, Israel’s Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood, Cambridge University Press, 2005
- Tom Segev, The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust, Hill and Wang, 1991
- Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life, Houghton Mifflin, 1999
- Avraham Burg, The Holocaust is Over: We Must Rise from Its Ashes, Palgrave Macmillan, 2008
- Yehuda Bauer, Rethinking the Holocaust, Yale University Press, 2001, with chapters on the politics of memory
- International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, “Working Definition of Antisemitism”, adopted 26 May 2016, https://holocaustremembrance.com
- Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism, 2021, https://jerusalemdeclaration.org, the alternative academic definition
- David Cesarani, “The Holocaust and Israel”, in Israel Affairs, 1:2, 1994
- Anson Rabinbach, “From Explosion to Erosion: Holocaust Memorialization in America since Bitburg”, in History and Memory, 9:1 to 2, 1997
- Seyla Benhabib, “From the Dialectic of Enlightenment to the Origins of Totalitarianism and the Genocide Convention”, in Critical Inquiry, 36:2, 2010
- USHMM Holocaust Encyclopedia, “Antisemitism”, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org