The Palestinians' Sick Obsession With Holocaust Envy
The bludgeoning of Israel with appropriated Jewish trauma is a textbook case of Holocaust envy, in which the singular destruction of European Jewry is softened, relativized, and rendered fungible.
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This is a guest essay written by Blake Flayton, a columnist living in Tel Aviv and author of the new book, “10 Things Every Jew Should Know Before They Go to College.”
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
I don’t know if you’ve ever been to a local Nakba commemoration — “Nakba,” Arabic for “catastrophe,” a term originally coined by Syrian intellectual Constantin Zureiq to describe the Arab world’s failed 1948 attempt to annihilate Israel — but these events today exist largely to reassure Palestinians, and especially their admirers abroad, that they too, have had a Holocaust.
The rhetoric surrounding the 1948 Palestinian displacement is increasingly and intentionally shaped to elicit not only sympathy, but reverence, as though it represents a moral singularity akin to the Holocaust.
But, while the Nakba was traumatic, it was not historically unique. In the broader context of 20th-century upheaval, marked by mass expulsions, ethnic partitions, and genocides, it stands as a painful chapter; harsh, yes, but not anomalous.
Yet that context doesn’t fit the script at the NGOs and dialogue groups who speak in hushed tones of “shared trauma” and “bridging the gap,” where Holocaust and wartime displacement are weighed on the same scale. Displacement, it must be said, that could have been avoided had the Arab world accepted a Jewish state and absorbed the refugees.
As Israel’s first UN Ambassador Abba Eban put it in 1958, responding to the grotesque comparison between Israel and Nazi Germany:
“It is a monstrous blasphemy. [Professor Arnold Toynbee] takes the massacre of millions of our men, women, and children and compares it to the plight of Arab refugees, alive, on their kindred soil, suffering certain anguish, but of course possessed of the supreme gift of life. This equation between massacre and temporary suffering, which can easily be alleviated, is, I think, a distortion of any historic perspective.”
Would Eban be surprised to see how little has changed?
The bludgeoning of Israel with appropriated Jewish trauma is a textbook case of Holocaust envy, a modern phenomenon in which the singular destruction of European Jewry is softened, relativized, and eventually rendered fungible through comparison to any number of tragic but fundamentally distinct events.
In the context of Israel and the Palestinians, it becomes a form of psychological revenge, a way to “get back” at the Jews if you’re pissed at them. As Israeli writer Shany Mor put it:
“Hauling the Jews in to plead their case before a special tribunal and face the charge that they are the real Nazis has been the fantasy of every antisemite since the first gavel hit a sound block at Nuremberg.”1
Holocaust envy is not an accidental feature of anti-Israel rhetoric; it is essential to it. It reverses the Jews’ historical role from victims to villains, thereby erasing the moral justification for Jewish sovereignty, especially when one subscribes to the popular lie that Israel exists only because Jews were victims. Strip them of that victimhood, and the state can be morally liquidated.
The charge of genocide against Jews serves a second purpose: It soothes Western guilt. If the Jews are now the perpetrators, not the victims, one no longer has to wrestle with the memory of what one’s grandparents did, or failed to do, during the actual Holocaust. In this light, it becomes very easy to ban Jewish students — excuse me, “Zionists” — from campus groups
And this is where the discourse of the day rears its head.
This week, millions of Israelis stood solemn and still outside their cars, homes, and office buildings as a siren wailed through the country. The 27th of Nisan (Thursday) marked Yom HaShoah veHaGevurah, the Day of Remembrance of the Holocaust and Heroism. In Israel, this day not only commemorates the unfathomable loss; it honors the courage of those who resisted, most famously during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, which began on April 19, 1943.
And yet, true to the psychological mechanics already described, the anti-Israel movement cannot help but make even this hallowed day about themselves.
In the magazine Jacobin, “journalist” Joseph Mogul published a piece rebuking both the Jewish People and the broader world for supposedly failing to learn the “real” lesson of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, made clear by Israel’s current war against Hamas, which he calls a genocide. October 7th, in Mogul’s framing, was not a massacre; it was, rather plainly, the “Palestinian Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.”
But October 7th was not the Palestinian Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. And what followed it is not, and has never been, a genocide.
To understand why, we need only turn to Mogul’s own summary: “A second round of deportations, begun on April 19, 1943, the day before Passover, sparked the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.”
Correct, hundreds of young Jewish fighters — poorly armed, barely trained, composed of Zionists, socialists, and Zionist socialists together — understood they had no future except death. Their choice was not between autonomy and occupation. It was between the gas chamber and a gun. Their imminent demise was not dependent on, or predicated upon, a Jewish army warring with Nazi Germany. They were to be murdered because they were Jewish.
Contrast that, if you would, with Gaza. No Israeli soldier has ever marched into Rafah to deport Gazans to crematoria. Since Israel’s full withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 (including all military personnel and civilian settlements), it has only re-entered the Strip in response to indiscriminate attacks from Hamas.
And to those who point to the post-2005 “blockade” as evidence of unprovoked oppression — perhaps exaggerated to the extent of “Gaza is an open air prison,” or, of course, a “concentration camp” — your reversal of cause and effect is staggering. Israel blockades Hamas; it does not blockade Gaza without cause.
October 7th was not a Palestinian equivalent of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. It was its inversion. In 1943, the Jews fought because they had no choice. Hamas is fighting today because they believe Israel should not exist and that Jews should be no more.
That simple difference is the hallmark of a war, not of a genocide. The violence is conditional, contingent on the decisions of an armed actor.
The Jews of the Holocaust had no such option. Their genocide was not dependent on any army laying down arms or meeting political demands. No one represented the Jews. No one sat across from their murderers at a negotiating table. There was no ceasefire to be won. They were to be annihilated, categorically, because they were Jews.
The Armenians were to be killed because they were Armenians. The Tutsis were to be killed because they were Tutsis. The Cambodians had no infantry aimed at Pol Pot. Bosnian Muslims had surrendered and were still murdered, much like Native American tribes during their genocide in the 1800s. They were murdered because of who they were, not because they were threatening to destroy another party.
The Palestinians are experiencing a tragedy because an army that governs their territory refuses to release hostages and lay down their arms against the Jews. There is no comparison between that scenario and a genocide. None.
I found it almost amusing that, near the end of his Jacobin essay, Joseph Mogul only briefly acknowledges the inherent differences between the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and October 7th. He wrote:
“Palestinian resistance to this colonialism has at times inflicted violence against Israelis, including on October 7, 2023, when Hamas fighters killed 1,181 people, among them 736 Israeli civilians. (At least fourteen Israelis were also killed by the IDF’s use of the Hannibal Directive.) Conversely, Jewish resistance during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was against German soldiers, not Catholic Poles, who were most often onlookers.”
This is textbook Holocaust envy: to minimize Palestinian actions that led to conflict, to gloss over, to compress the Hamas-led massacre of October 7th into a single sentence — in service of a false analogy to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.
Instead of recognizing Palestinians as people with a stake in their future, people with agency, the discourse insists on casting them as permanent victims, often by way of Holocaust envy. I’d wager this conflict would be closer to resolution if the Palestinians were treated like adults, not as people being herded into extermination camps, but as a people being asked to live next to Jews, rather than instead of them.
Until that truth is acknowledged, every comparison to the Holocaust is not just historically bankrupt. It’s obscene.
“Israel’s Obligations Under the Genocide Convention.” State of Tel Aviv.
Without culturally appropriating the Holocaust, the Palestinians have no claim to being “virtuous victims”, so pro-Palestinian propaganda, including that manufactured by ‘progressive’ Jews, has to erase Jewish suffering. Progressives are the most numerous and nauseating Holocaust deniers and distorters.
To quote Rob Henderson’a memoir “Troubled”: “a “virtuous victim” effect, in which victims are seen as more moral than nonvictims who have behaved in exactly the same way. People are inclined to positively evaluate those who have suffered. 20 Plainly, if people think you are a victim, they will be more likely to excuse your detestable behaviors. But ironically, the most well-off are also the most capable of accentuating their supposed marginalization.”
Palestinianism requires that pro-Palestinians take over victimization and the narrative of the Holocaust, even though their victimization is a direct result of them rejecting an independent state of their own and starting a genocidal war against an Israel full of Jewish refugees of antisemitism in Europe and the Arab world (pogroms and the actual Holocaust), then losing that war. Their only “catastrophe” is their perceived humiliation at failing to annihilate Jews of all people, a historically oppressed and weak people. That never sat well with their violent, Arab supremacist, machismo culture.
Excellent piece but…. The so-called Nakba is about 95% fiction. It was the ARAB armies that displaced their “beloved” brethren, NOT the Jews. The Arab residents were told to vacate to allow complete annihilation of the Jews; after it was all over the Arabs could then divvy up the plunder that the dead Jews had left behind. It did not work that way and the shame-culture Arabs had to somehow turn their humiliation into a weapon with their typical gift of taqqiyah. Clearly, the lies worked, far beyond their wildest dreams. We have fought war after war after war based on this lie.