One of the double standards to which Israel is routinely subjected is that it is forced to defend its right to exist, not merely its existence. As part of this insult, Israel’s story is confiscated from it. Israel is not Israel; in times of peace it is apartheid South Africa and in times of war it is the German state under the direction of the Nazis.
Israel is currently at war, so the latter canard is having its time in the sun. One reason that Western writers and journalists and academics falsely accuse Israel of Nazi tactics is that doing so represents the ultimate universalizing of the Holocaust. People who don’t like Israel believe that Israel only exists because of the Holocaust; therefore, if the Holocaust didn’t really “exist” in the way we are made to understand it, Israel is null and void.
The campaign to universalize Jewish suffering is relentless, and it is made stronger by the fact that Holocaust museums and education centers tend to enable this behavior out of a misguided belief that their moral authority depends on their relevance. That relevance is guaranteed by the presence of a Holocaust happening somewhere. And if that Holocaust-like event is happening to the Jews, well that’s superfluous to the mission, isn’t it? This helps explain the current silence of Holocaust museums and education centers in the wake of the brutal Hamas assault that has as its nearest historical parallel the Nazi atrocities.
What happens when a network of Holocaust centers bucks the trend and actually insists on getting the story right? That is the fascinating case of Germany, which is coming under fire for not universalizing Jewish suffering.
In the New Yorker, Masha Gessen rejects Berlin’s culture of Holocaust memorializing. At first, Gessen says, “It was exhilarating to watch memory culture take shape. Here was a country, or at least a city, that was doing what most cultures cannot: looking at its own crimes, its own worst self. But, at some point, the effort began to feel static, glassed in, as though it were an effort not only to remember history but also to insure that only this particular history is remembered—and only in this way.”
It is helpful that Gessen so explicitly states a desire to have the Holocaust universalized in order to fit her current political dogmas. What she seems to want is the retrofitting of the outer shell of Holocaust remembrance with a new story, one in which the Jews are the perpetrators. She describes going from an exhibit about Kibbutz Be’eri at the Jewish Museum to another installation, “Fallen Leaves,” by the Israeli artist Menashe Kadishman. The latter is a walking path made of iron with faces (presumably understood to represent child victims) etched into them: “I don’t know what Kadishman, who died in 2015, would have said about the current conflict. But, after I walked from the haunting video of Kibbutz Be’eri to the clanking iron faces, I thought of the thousands of residents of Gaza killed in retaliation for the lives of Jews killed by Hamas. Then I thought that, if I were to state this publicly in Germany, I might get in trouble.”
How edgy. What follows is a long rant pitching anti-Semites as the real victims of Holocaust memory, a familiar story, leading up to Gessen’s Jews-as-Nazis flourish: “as in the Jewish ghettoes of Occupied Europe, there are no prison guards—Gaza is policed not by the occupiers but by a local force. Presumably, the more fitting term ‘ghetto’ would have drawn fire for comparing the predicament of besieged Gazans to that of ghettoized Jews. It also would have given us the language to describe what is happening in Gaza now. The ghetto is being liquidated.”
Most of this stuff is a cry for attention, a sort of shock-jock Alex Jonesing of the left, so I don’t want to dwell on the intentional misreading of history. What is most pertinent is when, in the course of comparing Israel’s response to Hamas’s massacre to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Gessen makes an important admission (emphasis mine): “Netanyahu has compared the Hamas murders at the music festival to the Holocaust by bullets. This comparison, picked up and recirculated by world leaders, including President Biden, serves to bolster Israel’s case for inflicting collective punishment on the residents of Gaza. Similarly, when Putin says ‘Nazi’ or ‘fascist,’ he means that the Ukrainian government is so dangerous that Russia is justified in carpet-bombing and laying siege to Ukrainian cities and killing Ukrainian civilians. There are significant differences, of course: Russia’s claims that Ukraine attacked it first, and its portrayals of the Ukrainian government as fascist, are false; Hamas, on the other hand, is a tyrannical power that attacked Israel and committed atrocities that we cannot yet fully comprehend. But do these differences matter when the case being made is for killing children?”
This is the crux of the facile comparisons of Israel to evil regimes. In their more honest moments, Israel’s critics will admit that the comparisons are inaccurate. They will then justify the prevailing dishonesty by leveling at Israel a classic blood libel. In no honest reading of history is Israel akin to Nazi Germany. And the word “apartheid” has a meaning, and there is no apartheid—South African or otherwise—in Israel. They know this. But do the differences matter when the target is Israel? The more honest commentators will freely answer: no. And that is all one needs to know about those who would universalize Jewish suffering.
