Understanding Zionist Mentalities About the Holocaust
And reflections on the merits of understanding Zionist discourse in the midst of a genocide
In my essay series, “But the Holocaust,” I shared a broad historical analysis of how the Holocaust shapes Jewish conceptions of Zionism. Through my research for that series, I consumed a plethora of media I vehemently disagree with. One book by Austrian journalist Peter Sichrovsky, titled Abraham’s Children, was particularly impactful. Through a series of personal essays, it provided an unfiltered view into the minds of Israelis and how impressions of the Holocaust pervade the imagination of Israeli society.
I would also like to expand my assessment of why understanding Zionist mentalities is important. I have encountered compelling arguments about how: “it is not the obligation of the oppressed to concern themselves with the opinions of the oppressor.” One apt comparison to Israel’s oppression of Palestinians is South African apartheid. During South African apartheid, the ANC’s liberation struggle certainly did not bend to the racist sentiments of white South African society, nor should it have. So should the Palestinian liberation movement be concerned with what Israeli society thinks? Put differently - Zionism is a force of oppression Palestine, so why should we care about Zionist mentalities?
Before apartheid fell in 1994, the only morally permissible response from white South African society was backing the complete dismantling of apartheid and formation of a state without racial hierarchy. Today, the only morally permissible response from Israeli society is the same. For this reason, it is tempting to cast pre-1994 white-South Africans and today’s Zionists as people who were simply born evil, racist bigots and disregard any analysis of why they believe what they believe.
However, I believe that doing so allows the power structures that coax these beliefs into existence to maintain their dominance.
In grappling with these questions, I found wisdom in Ta-Nehisi Coates’ The Message1.
“I don’t really care much for hearing “both sides” or “opposing points of view,” so much as I care about understanding the literary tools deployed to advance those views–the discipline of voice, the use of verbs, the length and brevity of sentences, and the curiosity of mind beyond those sentences.”
Coates reminds us that understanding the misconceptions that fuel oppression is different from normalizing or justifying harmful ideas. I firmly believe that it is not the obligation of Palestinians to center the feelings of Zionists in their resistance. This is especially true in the midst of a genocide.
However, for those of us in solidarity with Palestinians, who believe in and organize for a free Palestine, the pervasiveness of these mentalities is a deterrent to its fulfillment.
If you—like me—live in the United States, where the bombs dropped on children originate, you have a special role in dismantling the rhetoric that is crafted to justify genocide. Before we can dismantle, we must first understand.
The Holocaust plays a unique role in formulating the mentalities upon which Israeli society rests. Its invocation triggers a visceral fear among Jewish people who were raised with its horror stories. This trigger has proved to be a weapon for Israel to release at its whim.
The following ideas are drawn from the book Abraham’s Children, an essay series from 1991 in which Israelis share personal reflections on Zionism. Widely held misconceptions analyzed below- “Jews were lambs to the slaughter” and “Palestinians are nazis” - are not happenstance. They are distortions of truth, deliberately crafted to beget specific mentalities in Israeli society that justify violent military policy.
“During the Holocaust, Jews were lambs to the slaughter; therefore, Israel’s founding redeemed the Jewish soul through military might.”
“Palestinians are nazis; therefore, October 7th posed a Holocaust-level threat and any military response in Gaza is justifiable.
Mentality #1: ‘During the Holocaust, Jews were “lambs to the slaughter.” Therefore: Israel’s founding redeemed the Jewish people through military might.’
In Abraham’s Children, one essayist named Dinah writes:
“Here in Israel we have an annual day of commemoration of the Holocaust… All of us today live with the trauma that back then nobody defended himself. That must never happen again. Strength is something very important today here in Israel. Every show of weakness frightens us; every display of compliance reminds us of the extermination of the six million. The only reason we are living in Israel today is that for the first time in two thousand years there again exists a Jewish army that is strong, perhaps stronger than any other.”
Dinah narrates a perceived through-line between the ‘weakness of Jews in the Holocaust’ and ‘the redeemed strength of Jews in Israel.’ Her sentence: “every display of compliance reminds us of the extermination of the six million,” is particularly striking. In the long history of international bodies condemning Israel’s war crimes, these words insinuate that compliance with international law is akin to compliance with nazis.
Dinah’s essay closes with: “We must be strong, stronger than all the others. Then we’ll survive.”
Another essayist in Abraham’s Children shares:
“For years we kept asking how the generation of the Holocaust victims could have gone to death so unresistingly…. I suppose I can be said to be completely Israelized. I, too, can’t understand sheeplike acquiescence. I fight back. I won’t just take it.”
These two essays encapsulate the “lambs to the slaughter” myth. That Jews were either too weak or too stupid to resist nazis during the Holocaust.
Of course, this idea is false, evidenced by the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, in which guerrilla fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto stirred the largest Jewish-led resistance to nazis. Jewish rebels, outnumbered 3:1, used smuggled pistols, axes and knives to resist German military forces and delay the planned deportation of hundreds of thousands of Jews to death camps. One leader who survived the uprising, Marek Edelman, said the inspiration of the Uprising was: “not to allow the Germans alone to pick the time and place of our deaths.” These words don’t seem particularly “sheeplike” to me.
In my recent visit to Warsaw, I learned that my ancestors lived next-door from the bunker that acted as the uprising headquarters (pictured below).
Other than being disrespectful mistruths, these quotes illuminate a fraught idea about Israeli militarism. That Israel’s military force represents a redemption of “sheeplike” Holocaust victims. Militarism becomes a means of survival, even if it means the complete subjugation of another population.
This is reflected throughout Israeli society, in which military service is compulsory and militarism is a lifestyle. Israeli politicians make speeches declaring that their enemies must be “erased from the face of the Earth.” IDF influencers donning their military garb vlog as they brutalize Palestinians and burn the toys of Palestinian children. Israeli settlers chant “death to the Arabs” in the streets.
A Pew Research poll shows that only 19% of Israelis believe Israel’s military response in Gaza has “gone too far.” This result comes despite the meticulous documentation of Israel’s war crimes, an active genocide case in the ICJ, and leading human rights organizations (including Israel’s two top orgs) declaring Israel’s actions genocidal. For most Israeli citizens, there simply is no red line for military violence.
Why?
Hyper-militarism is sewn into the fabric of Israeli society. This stems from the founding myth that Israel’s creation was a reaction to the Holocaust, thus necessitating a strong, brutal, military. No matter how overwhelmingly obvious, the idea that “hey, maybe we’re the bad guys” is inconceivable. Because any military action taken is to undo the image of “sheeplike Holocaust victims willingly marching to their death.” Force, and force alone, is perceived as the remedy to this Holocaust mythology.
Mentality #2: ‘Palestinians are nazis. Therefore: October 7th is another Holocaust.’
Dehumanizing enemies is not exactly a novel tradition for Israel, nor any nation waging war. However, the particular manner in which it occurs in Israel’s context is striking. Dehumanization festers from a cruel, false equivalence between Palestinians and nazis. As covered in “But the Holocaust,” during the 1947-1948 Nakba, Zionist military generals gave rousing speeches in which Palestinian villagers were compared to nazis and the threat of Palestinian/Arab resistance was likened to the Holocaust. At the time, the Holocaust was fresh in the minds of Zionist soldiers, and dehumanizing Palestinians in this manner spurred the vicious atrocities of the Nakba.
This propaganda tactic remains.
In Abraham’s Children, an essayist named Robert writes about the Israeli mentality during the 1973 war between Israel and Egypt/Syria.
“The talk in Israel was not about a war, about enemy soldiers who had to be defeated, but about the threat of annihilation. The Final Solution was omnipresent. The fear was not of military defeat but of extermination.”
Yet again, Israel’s enemies, like the nazis, are depicted as motivated by pure antisemitic rage. Robert recalls a famous speech by Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir:
“We must win because we must live, that our enemies aren’t fighting for their lives and their independence, but to exterminate us... That war turned me into an Israeli, and the Arabs into my enemies.”
In these reflections, we see the effects of dehumanization rooting itself in Robert’s mind, shaping his mentality towards Zionism and Palestinians. Robert, who begins his essay by describing how he was raised an anti-Zionist, has the wherewithal to identify precisely what made him a Zionist: his newfound hatred for Arabs.
Robert also describes his IDF service in the West Bank during the first intifada, in which he articulates the extent of this hatred. With no hint of irony, he describes the parents of rock-throwing Palestinian children: “What kind of monsters are these that send their children into such danger? Up to now only the Nazis did this sort of thing, and then only in the final hours before their surrender.”
In Robert’s mind, Palestinian children throwing rocks at Israeli tanks are actually worse than nazis.
Israel is intensifying this propaganda today. Not only are Palestinians compared to nazis, but October 7th is considered “another Holocaust.” A recent article by Naomi Klein outlines how Israel’s government is attempting to draw parallels between the Holocaust and October 7th through its memorialization. Some of the ways that these memorials evoke the Holocaust include:
Phrases like “Never Again”
Imagery of lost shoes
A viral photo of one person tattooing the date of the attack 1072023 on his arm in the same style of Auschwitz serial number tattoos
“October 7th tours” routing through Poland and stopping at Auschwitz
Shoah (Holocaust) Foundation website adding an “October 7th victims stories” category
Klein synthesizes the narrative evoked from these memorials with:
“It’s a simple fable of good and evil, in which Israel is unblemished in its innocence, deserving unquestioning support, while its enemies are all monsters, deserving of violence unbounded by laws or borders, whether in Gaza, Jenin, Beirut, Damascus or Tehran. It’s a story in which Israel’s very identity as a nation is forever fused with the terror it suffered on 7 October, an event that, in Netanyahu’s telling, will be seamlessly merged both with the Nazi Holocaust and a battle for the soul of western civilization.”
This fable is a clear extension of what has become a familiar pattern of dehumanizing Palestinians by comparing them to nazis. The resulting Zionist mentality fulfills a political objective: justifying any military response to Hamas’ October 7th attack. Even one so genocidal that Israel has become isolated from the rest of the world (except America!) for its blatant disregard of Palestinian lives.
There are some within Israeli society aware of this political manipulation. In Abraham’s Children, one writer named René states:
“Whoever criticizes Israel is immediately called a Nazi. Arafat of course compared to Hitler; the intifada was organized by Nazis; and the policies of the Arab countries are just like Nazis… It is insane to look at every opponent, including political opponent, as someone who wants to destroy Jews.”
René continues her dissent with:
“And then there’s the political exploitation of the Holocaust. Jews are permitted to do whatever they want because they’re living victims. You would think that the Holocaust might serve as a reminder that here we have the opportunity to live with others.”
We can find hope in René’s ability to discern Israel’s propaganda. A crucial component of the Palestinian liberation movement will be the eventual dismantling of the layered myths that uphold Zionism. Despite widespread support for Israel’s military operations within Israeli society, the contradictions inherent to Zionism (safety through violence, democracy through apartheid) are heightening on the global stage.
As Palestinian journalists record the first ever live-streamed genocide, part of our task in disarming the war machine is connecting the dots between what we are witnessing and the ideology of Zionism. Ground is already being made in this rhetorical battle, specifically revealing the genocidal beliefs of Netanyahu and the Likud party. Yet, we can go further and make it clear that this genocide is not just a product of one politician or political party: its violence is at the very foundation of Zionism. By understanding the bricks that make up this foundation, we may topple an apartheid state, clearing the ground for something better to be built.
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Yes I am obsessed with this book and yes I will keep quoting it.