The Holocaust is invoked by every party to the modern Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and it is misused by most of them. Israeli politicians invoke it to argue that any restriction on Israeli action represents the appeasement of a new Hitler. Palestinian and Arab politicians invoke it, in some cases, to compare Israeli policy to Nazi policy, an argument known as Holocaust inversion. Activists on both sides exaggerate, distort, deny, or weaponise the historical record according to political need. The result is that the most thoroughly documented genocide in human history is also one of the most argued-about pieces of history in modern political discourse.
The major lines of misuse
Three patterns of misuse are particularly common. The first is the equation of any opponent of Israel with Hitler and any criticism of Israeli policy with appeasement. This pattern, which has appeared in Israeli political rhetoric from Menachem Begin onwards, treats the Holocaust as a permanent justification for any defensive action and forecloses normal political debate about specific policies. The second is the inversion: the claim that Israelis are now doing to Palestinians what the Nazis did to Jews. The comparison fails on every available metric of historical comparison: there is no Israeli policy of systematic extermination of Palestinians, no Israeli equivalent of the gas chambers or the Einsatzgruppen, and the Palestinian population of the territories controlled by Israel has approximately quadrupled since 1948. The third is the denial: the claim that the Holocaust was exaggerated or fabricated as part of a Zionist political project. This is the position of organised Holocaust denial in much of the Arab and Muslim world, including the official position of the Iranian state under Ahmadinejad.
The honest historical record
The honest historical record holds that the Holocaust was a real and documented event that killed approximately six million Jews; that the founding of Israel was a complex political event with many causes, of which the Holocaust was one; that the Palestinian displacement of 1948 was a real and documented event that produced a refugee population now numbering several million; and that none of these facts authorises the others to be denied, equated, or weaponised. The Holocaust does not justify every Israeli policy. The Palestinian displacement does not constitute a Holocaust. Both events are real and both are part of the history of the modern Middle East.
The argument against the comparison
The most thorough scholarly arguments against the inversion comparison have come from historians of the Holocaust including Deborah Lipstadt, Yehuda Bauer, and Michael Marrus, all of whom have argued that the comparison is both factually wrong and morally damaging: it diminishes the Holocaust to a political slogan, and it removes the analytical specificity needed to understand either event. The honest position is to study each event on its own terms.
See also
Sources
- Deborah Lipstadt, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, Free Press, 1993
- Michael Shermer and Alex Grobman, Denying History: Who Says the Holocaust Never Happened and Why Do They Say It?, University of California Press, 2nd edn, 2009
- Robert S. Wistrich, ed, Holocaust Denial: The Politics of Perfidy, De Gruyter, 2012
- Richard J. Evans, Lying About Hitler: History, Holocaust, and the David Irving Trial, Basic Books, 2001