There is a cruel historical irony in Israel’s genocidal war on the besieged Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank: the brutal suppression of the Warsaw Ghetto by the Nazis in 1943 was one of the most tragic episodes in the genocide perpetrated against European Jewry during World War II.

Yet the Jewish state invokes the Holocaust, the most morally powerful trope of modern times, to legitimise its formation as a European colonial settler state and thereby its violent dispossession of the Palestinian people in 1947-1949, “ethnic cleansing” (Ilan Pappe) which has accelerated since 7 October 2023. Israel’s invocation of the Holocaust impedes criticism of its relentless dispossession of the indigenous inhabitants of historical Palestine. The issue, of course, is not the fact of the Holocaust, but of its representation and manipulation.

National narrative

All nation states need a founding, legitimating mythology: a hegemonic, historical narrative, to sustain them. As the late Edward Said observed, national memory, often as not, has been “invented”. In the case of Israel, the circumstances of its birth, in the wake of the catastrophic “Judeocide” (Arno Mayer), and the fraught nature of the Zionist colonial-settler state enterprise, have ignited the most explosive collision of experiences and public memory: one hegemonic, the other subaltern: the Jewish “Holocaust” versus the Palestinian “Nakba” (catastrophe).

Like all colonial-settler states, Israel’s conquest of land by definition has put it on an “eliminationist” (Patrick Wolfe) collision course with the indigenous Palestinian inhabitants. So powerful and sacralised has the Holocaust narrative become that, up until 7 October 2023, few would criticise even Israel’s most blatant violations of human rights and international law — from the 1947 Deir Yassin massacre to the decimation of Gaza — for fear of being accused of “antisemitism”. Self-censorship is a powerful weapon.

“Shoah” to “Holocaust”

Surprisingly, although Holocaust survivors figured prominently in the establishment of Israel, the “Shoah” (Catastrophe), was rarely invoked by Zionists as justification for the partition of Palestine and the proclamation of Israel. Israel’s first prime minister, the “fighting Zionist” David Ben Gurion, preferred to forget the Holocaust.

Yet it was Ben Gurion who resurrected Holocaust memory by orchestrating the kidnapping and trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1960 as a “symbol of Israel’s asserted sovereignty and power”, directed in the first instance against Egypt’s emergent Nasserite nationalism. To Ben Gurion, President Gamal Nasser sounded “like Hitler”; an equation with Nazism that disturbed the political philosopher Hannah Arendt. “Never again!” became the watchword of Jewish consciousness and the term “The Holocaust” began to displace the Hebrew “Shoah” (Jon Petrie).

Seven years later the power of resurrected Holocaust memory was mobilised in the June 1967 Six-Day war; a redemptive, military victory that spurred the political instrumentalisation of “The Holocaust” as a rhetorical weapon, wielded with particular force against Yasser Arafat and the Palestine Liberation Organisation, as two million Palestinians came under direct Israeli military rule. During Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, Prime Minister Menachem Begin likened Arafat to Hitler and the (1968) Palestinian National Covenant to Mein Kampf. The years of Likud rule (1977-1992) constructed the Holocaust as a “fundamental pillar of Israeli identity” (Robert Wistrich). It was allegedly to avert another annihilation of the Jews and betrayal of Eretz Israel that motivated a Zionist extremist to assassinate Labour Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin after he signed the 1993 Oslo accords with the PLO.

But the Holocaust, as collective memory, did not just become embedded in Israeli political conscious; it increasingly penetrated international political consciousness, indeed it assumed a central place in the political life of Israel’s allies, especially the United States. The Six-Day War and even more the October 1973 Yom Kippur War were turning points in US-Israeli relations, as the latter became increasingly allied with Washington’s projection of power into the Middle East. This partnership was reflected discursively in the adoption of the term “The Holocaust” internationally as an exclusive reference to the Judeocide.

The years 1978-1979, under the Carter administration, clinched the terminological dominance of “The Holocaust” in American political life, with the 1978 screening of the eponymous mini-series, immediately followed by Carter’s 1979 Executive Order authorising the construction of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, which President Clinton opened in 1993. That same year saw the release of the phenomenally successful Stephen Spielberg film Schindler’s List, which served to cement “Holocaust consciousness” in American, and ultimately Western, political discourse. This extraordinary phenomenon, whereby a genocide perpetrated in Nazi Europe could become not only the axis of Israeli identity but central to American political life, has served as a powerful ideological buttress for the Israeli state in the heart of its principal financier and armourer.

Israeli fascism?

It is clear that the Holocaust has come to occupy a central place in the raison d’être of the Israeli state. But that state has also reached a crisis in its subjugation of the Palestinians. The ethnic cleansing upon which Israel was founded has been at the core of Israel as a colonial-settler state: inherently militarist and relentlessly expansionist, its genocidal assault on the besieged Gaza ghetto is only the latest incarnation of its ceaseless violent dispossession of Palestine’s aboriginal inhabitants, shunted aside by illegal “facts on the ground” settlements, to create an ethnically pure, Jewish state, secured by an “iron wall”.

In the West Bank and the Gaza strip, Israel has exercised what has been deemed the “most accomplished form” of “late-modern colonial occupation”: a “concatenation of multiple powers: disciplinary, biopolitical, and necropolitical” that ensure Israel’s “absolute domination” over the Palestinians (Achille Mbembe). Found in July 2024 to be “responsible for apartheid” by the International Court of Justice, Israel threatens to transform into something even more sinister. The late Israeli peace activist Uri Avnery considered trepidatiously: “the possibility of a ‘Jewish Nazi-like party coming to power in Israel”. The prospect of fascism might seem impossible given the centrality of the Holocaust narrative for the Israeli state, but the exterminationist racism of Netanyahu’s regime suggests otherwise (Alberto Toscano).