Holocaust inversion is hate disguised as activism.
Holocaust inversion is a rhetorical strategy in which Jews are depicted as having become the new Nazis, while others, in this case the Palestinians, are cast as the new Jews.
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This is a guest essay by Snail Amar, a writer and activist.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
How many images of starving Holocaust victims did two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Ann Telnaes Google, before she found the best angle to draw famine-hollowed cheeks?
Did she workshop more than one way to compare six million dead Jews to 154 allegedly malnourished Gazans?
Perhaps she considered drawing a terrified huddle of naked Jewish women and children the moment before they were gassed. Or considered the room in Auschwitz packed to the ceiling with hundreds of thousands of shoes, each pair once worn by someone who never left alive. Maybe she worried that shoes, as a metaphor, didn’t clearly shame Israel.
Too abstract, too hard to explain.
Is that why, instead of a unique visual critique, she stuck with a stock favorite: the emaciated Jewish Holocaust victim in a concentration camp uniform. Everyone recognizes skeletal Jews in striped wear, after all.
Above her cartoon, she disclaimed that it isn’t antisemitic to criticize the Israeli government. Indeed, it’s not, and if that’s what her cartoon did, I wouldn’t have to write this essay. If her cartoon is, as she claims, a critique of the Israeli government, where is the government in the image?
There is no reference to the Knesset (Israel’s parliament), no Likud political party emblem, or even a banner referencing a policy decision. Even the figure of a man, who I presume to be Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, is secondary to the dominant image of the Israeli flag stamped on his back. A seasoned political cartoonist would have used Netanyahu’s distinctive profile, added a nameplate, or included references to quotes to indicate who is being critiqued.
Political cartoons are visual rhetoric. When you mark a person not by their face or title, but by a national flag, the symbol takes over the meaning. The figure’s ambiguity thus shifts the message from “Netanyahu’s policies are shameful” to “Israel is shameful,” making it impossible to separate the man from Israel itself.
The imagery reduces the entire State of Israel to a source of moral disgrace, as judged by the ghosts of Jewish genocide. This is not a critique of a government; it is an indictment of Israeli identity. And when that identity is Jewish, and when the attack uses Holocaust memory to deliver shame, the result is not political commentary; it is ethnic scapegoating.
The unsaid part, of course, is if Israel is a Nazi state, then it is our moral obligation to deal with it the way we dealt with Nazi Germany.
Right now, there is hunger in Gaza. Tens of thousands are trapped in between Hamas and Netanyahu and the United Nations. These public figures are busy posting strongly-worded online statements about hungry children or complaining about the militants looting aid, and meanwhile, hundreds of crates of baby formula languish in Gaza under the sun. And reels on TikTok, subreddit threads, and artists like Ann moved by the suffering, saw all of that and thought: The Jews are doing “never again.”
That’s the danger of bad visual rhetoric: It may appear to criticize a leader, but ends up condemning a nation, opening the door to collective blame. Whether or not Netanyahu’s policies deserve criticism, invoking Holocaust victims to deliver that judgment exploits Jewish trauma to shame Jews today. It replaces analysis with emotional warfare and issues a universal judgment: Israel is guilty, Israel is shameful, Israel is the new Nazi Germany.
Cambodia. Rwanda. Bosnia. Darfur. The world has seen genocide after genocide since the Holocaust. But somehow, when it’s time to discuss the Israeli government and Gaza, it’s not about choosing the most appropriate comparison, but choosing the one that hurts Jews the most.
You don’t have to be antisemitic to promote antisemitism. If your words or images feed a narrative that Jews are uniquely guilty, you might question the basis of your “criticism.” When a person is marked only by a national symbol, especially one as historically loaded as the Star of David, the critique shifts from individual accountability to group condemnation.
Jewish history is full of antisemites using our symbols against us. From propagandists who sketch an unambiguous Israeli flag on monsters, to the German law that required us to wear yellow Stars of David on our chests, you are forcing us to self-identify — in case a viewer didn’t recognize that the person before them is not, in fact, a person but a Jew.
Scholars have many terms to distinguish between popular antisemitic stratagems. Ann’s cartoon uses a form of antisemitic rhetoric called “Holocaust inversion,” a tactic favored by many, including Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Holocaust inversion is a rhetorical strategy in which Jews are depicted as having become the new Nazis, while others, in this case the Palestinians, are cast as the new Jews.
Rooted not in facts or proportion but in Holocaust imagery, proponents imply Jews have become their own murderers and perpetrators of atrocities equivalent to or worse than those committed by the Nazis.
It minimizes or denies the Holocaust’s historical reality while appropriating its imagery, its terms (like “genocide,” “ghetto,” “extermination”), and its moral weight all to serve “anti-Israel” or antisemitic narratives. It draws a false moral equivalence between the industrialized murder of six million Jews and an ongoing, deeply complex military conflict. Holocaust inversion is not legitimate political criticism; it is a targeted moral attack on Jewish identity disguised as criticism of the Israeli government.
Holocaust inversion is commonly used in political and activist propaganda, especially by groups that seek to delegitimize Israel. It appears in slogans, imagery (e.g., swastikas imposed on Israeli flags), and even academic discourse.
The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism includes Holocaust inversion as a contemporary example of antisemitic discourse. Scholars like Manfred Gerstenfeld and David Hirsh have written extensively on how Holocaust inversion functions in modern antisemitism, particularly on the political Left and in the Arab world.
While some examples of inversion are overt, others come cloaked in moral concern. One Israel-Palestinian forum user told me that the Holocaust is a convenient parallel — not only due to its relevance as a modern genocide, but because of who is involved or as the user put it, “Israel doing what was done to them.”
Holocaust inverters tell us their appropriation of the Holocaust as a moral cudgel has nothing to do with Jews, but is instead a critique of Israel. Yet, if half of Israeli Jews are from Arab countries that expelled them, who exactly in Israel are you shaming with cartoons like this? When using the Holocaust to highlight Israel’s Jewish heritage, what you are really saying is that the Jewish offspring of Holocaust victims are doing what was done to their families. Time and again, we tell the world that when it speaks about Israel it really means Jews.
Almost two years into the Israel-Hamas war, antisemites across the world are the loudest they have been since World War II. Holocaust inversion has flooded the day-to-day world, which is how I happened upon Ann Telnaes’ cartoon.
It could have been any number of personal posts, comments, or art. The accusations recycle the same ghoulish elements to suggest Jews have forfeited their historically conferred moral standing by becoming perpetrators themselves. This underscores a certain resentment people seem to have against Jews, both for their exceptional place in the Holocaust and the reification of that tragedy as the worst industrial genocide in history.
By repurposing the Holocaust as a tool of accusation, antisemites also aim to absolve the global obligation to sympathize with Jews. They will both claim Jews have become Nazis while suggesting Jews weren’t a significant victim of the Nazis. This enables antisemites to rhetorically replace Nazis with Jews, while also denying them any sympathy for their generational trauma and how that trauma informs Israeli policy today.
Individuals aren’t alone in their censure, which makes the rise of Holocaust inversion terrifying. The 2025 handbook of the National Education Association, the largest labor union in the United States, refers to those murdered in the Holocaust merely as “12 million victims.” This might seem innocuous at first. After all, there were countless communities alongside the Jews who also deserve global attention and support.
But it becomes clear that the National Education Association’s change in language has more to do with antisemitism than historical equity. On the same page in the handbook, a resolution seeks to differentiate between “anti-Zionism” and antisemitism. Paired together, the sections suggest a narrative where Jews no longer figure prominently as a victim of Nazi Germany, while their homeland was founded not as a refuge for the persecuted or as an indigenous return to the homeland, but in service of a racist ideology — one we are morally required to condemn.
Criticizing government policies is fair and necessary. Blaming an entire people, especially a historically persecuted one, is not. If there’s no mention of policy, no referenced action, no proposed solution, it’s not critique; it’s a moral verdict. And when that verdict uses Holocaust symbols, it becomes something darker: It ceases to be a call for justice and becomes a blood libel in modern form.
In today’s post-October 7th climate, we are seeing a broad return to using Jewish memory against Jews themselves through Holocaust Inversion. Cartoons like the aforementioned one depict a common obsession with tying Israel to the Holocaust.
It’s painful that Ann Telnaes’ cartoon isn’t a unique form of antisemitism. Iran even holds an annual Holocaust inversion contest. If your political art is indistinguishable from the art commissioned by a regime that kills women and girls for showing their hair, that denies the Holocaust, a regime that calls for the eradication of the Jewish state, and runs a global contest to mock Jewish suffering, you might want to reconsider whether your piece is legitimate critique or, as scholars have described similar works, a textbook case of Holocaust inversion.
Taking the most tragic, defining trauma in Jewish history and turning it against Jews is a cruelty with purpose.
Holocaust inversion flattens history. It trivializes Jewish suffering and repackages propaganda as insight. And it does so intentionally. It’s done because it hurts. Because it twists the knife. In associating Jews and Israel this way, antisemites intentionally reframe us as one of history’s greatest evils. The goal is to strip the Holocaust of Jewish memory and then use that absence as an indictment.
It teaches the world that Jews, once victims, are now history’s monsters. And it relies on the same logic that would never be applied elsewhere.
Would you say “Palestine deserves blame” for Hamas? Or “Iran deserves blame” for its regime? Of course not. That logic punishes entire peoples for the actions of rulers.
But it is routine when it comes to Israel. The diversity of Israeli political life — its protests, divisions, dissent — is erased. And when the image in the mirror is Auschwitz, the message is simple: Jews are the problem. Again.
 | A guest post by
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Great essays like this offer me a way to frame certain concepts in a cohesive manner. Calling out those who seek to demoralize us is a critical public service. Thank you!!!
The NEA is a jew hating organization. If only they were as concerned about teaching kids to read and do math. Now what may we conclude about those who support the NEA using dear Ann's analysis?