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THE SHOAH AFTER GAZA  
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Pankaj Mishra
March 7, 2024
London Review of Books
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_ The dark meaning the Israeli state has drawn from the Shoah, and
then institutionalized in a machinery of repression. Anyone calling
attention to the spectacle of Washington’s blind commitment to
Israel is accused of antisemitism, ignoring the Shoah. _

Demonstrators block a main road in Tel Aviv demanding an immediate
deal for the release of Israeli hostages, on February 1, 2024, (Photo
credit: Ahmad Gharabli/Agence France-Presse -AFP // Politico)

 

In​ 1977, a year before he killed himself, the Austrian writer Jean
Améry came across press reports of systematic torture against Arab
prisoners in Israeli prisons. Arrested in Belgium in 1943 while
distributing anti-Nazi pamphlets, Améry himself had been brutally
tortured by the Gestapo, and then deported to Auschwitz. He managed to
survive, but could never look at his torments as things of the past.
He insisted that those who are tortured remain tortured, and that
their trauma is irrevocable. Like many survivors of Nazi death camps,
Améry came to feel an ‘existential connection’ to Israel in the
1960s. He obsessively attacked left-wing critics of the Jewish state
as ‘thoughtless and unscrupulous’, and may have been one of the
first to make the claim, habitually amplified now by Israel’s
leaders and supporters, that virulent antisemites disguise themselves
as virtuous anti-imperialists and anti-Zionists. Yet the ‘admittedly
sketchy’ reports of torture in Israeli prisons prompted Améry to
consider the limits of his solidarity with the Jewish state. In one of
the last essays he published, he wrote: ‘I urgently call on all Jews
who want to be human beings to join me in the radical condemnation of
systematic torture. Where barbarism begins, even existential
commitments must end.’

Améry was particularly disturbed by the apotheosis in 1977 of
Menachem Begin as Israel’s prime minister. Begin, who organised the
1946 bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in which 91 people
were killed, was the first of the frank exponents of Jewish
supremacism who continue to rule Israel. He was also the first
routinely to invoke Hitler and the Holocaust and the Bible while
assaulting Arabs and building settlements in the Occupied Territories.
In its early years the state of Israel had an ambivalent relationship
with the Shoah and its victims. Israel’s first prime minister, David
Ben-Gurion, initially saw Shoah survivors as ‘human debris’,
claiming that they had survived only because they had been ‘bad,
harsh, egotistic’. It was Ben-Gurion’s rival Begin, a demagogue
from Poland, who turned the murder of six million Jews into an intense
national preoccupation, and a new basis for Israel’s identity. The
Israeli establishment began to produce and disseminate a very
particular version of the Shoah that could be used to legitimise a
militant and expansionist Zionism.

Améry noted the new rhetoric and was categorical about its
destructive consequences for Jews living outside Israel. That Begin,
‘with the Torah in his arm and taking recourse to biblical
promises’, speaks openly of stealing Palestinian land ‘alone would
be reason enough’, he wrote, ‘for the Jews in the diaspora to
review their relationship to Israel’. Améry pleaded with Israel’s
leaders to ‘acknowledge that your freedom can be achieved
only _with_ your Palestinian cousin, not against him.’

Five years later, insisting that Arabs were the new Nazis and Yasser
Arafat the new Hitler, Begin assaulted Lebanon. By the time Ronald
Reagan accused him of perpetrating a ‘holocaust’ and ordered him
to end it, the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) had killed tens of
thousands of Palestinians and Lebanese and obliterated large parts of
Beirut. In his novel _Kapo_ (1993), the Serbian-Jewish author
Aleksandar Tišma captures the revulsion many survivors of the Shoah
felt at the images coming out of Lebanon: ‘Jews, his kinsmen, the
sons and grandsons of his contemporaries, former inmates of the camps,
stood in tank turrets and drove, flags waving, through undefended
settlements, through human flesh, ripping it apart with machine-gun
bullets, rounding up the survivors in camps fenced off with barbed
wire.’

Primo Levi, who had known the horrors of Auschwitz at the same time as
Améry and also felt an emotional affinity to the new Jewish state,
quickly organised an open letter of protest and gave an interview in
which he said that ‘Israel is rapidly falling into total
isolation ... We must choke off the impulses towards emotional
solidarity with Israel to reason coldly on the mistakes of Israel’s
current ruling class. Get rid of that ruling class.’ In several
works of fiction and non-fiction, Levi had meditated not only on his
time in the death camp and its anguished and insoluble legacy, but
also on the ever present threats to human decency and dignity. He was
especially incensed by Begin’s exploitation of the Shoah. Two years
later, he argued that ‘the centre of gravity of the Jewish world
must turn back, must move out of Israel and back into the diaspora.’

Misgivings of the kind expressed by Améry and Levi are condemned as
grossly antisemitic today. It’s worth remembering that many such
re-examinations of Zionism and anxieties about the perception of Jews
in the world were incited among survivors and witnesses of the Shoah
by Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory and its manipulative
new mythology. Yeshayahu Leibowitz, a theologian who won the Israel
Prize in 1993, was already warning in 1969 against the
‘Nazification’ of Israel. In 1980, the Israeli columnist Boaz
Evron carefully described the stages of this moral corrosion: the
tactic of conflating Palestinians with Nazis and shouting that another
Shoah is imminent was, he feared, liberating ordinary Israelis from
‘any moral restrictions, since one who is in danger of annihilation
sees himself exempted from any moral considerations which might
restrict his efforts to save himself.’ Jews, Evron wrote, could end
up treating ‘non-Jews as subhuman’ and replicating ‘racist Nazi
attitudes’.

Evron urged caution, too, against Israel’s (then new and ardent)
supporters in the Jewish American population. For them, he argued,
championing Israel had become ‘necessary because of the loss of any
other focal point to their Jewish identity’ – indeed, so great was
their existential lack, according to Evron, that they did not wish
Israel to become free of its mounting dependence on Jewish American
support.

They need to feel needed. They also need the ‘Israeli hero’ as a
social and emotional compensation in a society in which the Jew is not
usually perceived as embodying the characteristics of the tough manly
fighter. Thus, the Israeli provides the American Jew with a double,
contradictory image – the virile superman, and the potential
Holocaust victim – both of whose components are far from reality.

Zygmunt Bauman, the Polish-born Jewish philosopher and refugee from
Nazism who spent three years in Israel in the 1970s before fleeing its
mood of bellicose righteousness, despaired of what he saw as the
‘privatisation’ of the Shoah by Israel and its supporters. It has
come to be remembered, he wrote in 1988, ‘as a private experience of
the Jews, as a matter between the Jews and their haters’, even as
the conditions that made it possible were appearing again around the
world. Such survivors of the Shoah, who had been plunged from a serene
belief in secular humanism into collective insanity, intuited that the
violence they had survived – unprecedented in its magnitude –
wasn’t an aberration in an essentially sound modern civilisation.
Nor could it be blamed entirely on a hoary prejudice against Jews.
Technology and the rational division of labour had enabled ordinary
people to contribute to acts of mass extermination with a clear
conscience, even with frissons of virtue, and preventive efforts
against such impersonal and available modes of killing required more
than vigilance against antisemitism.

When I recently turned to my books to prepare this piece, I found
I’d already underlined many of passages I quote here. In my diary
there are lines copied from George Steiner (‘the nation-state
bristling with arms is a bitter relic, an absurdity in the century of
crowded men’) and Abba Eban (‘It is about time that we stand on
our own feet and not on those of the six million dead’). Most of
these annotations date back to my first visit to Israel and its
Occupied Territories, when I was seeking to answer, in my innocence,
two perplexing questions: how did Israel come to exercise such a
terrible power of life and death over a population of refugees; and
how can the Western political and journalistic mainstream ignore, even
justify, its clearly systematic cruelties and injustices?

I had grown up imbibing some of the reverential Zionism of my family
of upper-caste Hindu nationalists in India. Both Zionism and Hindu
nationalism emerged in the late 19th century out of an experience of
humiliation; many of their ideologists longed to overcome what they
perceived as a shameful lack of manhood among Jews and Hindus. And for
Hindu nationalists in the 1970s, impotent detractors of the then
ruling pro-Palestinian Congress party, uncompromising Zionists such as
Begin, Ariel Sharon and Yitzhak Shamir seemed to have won the race to
muscular nationhood. (The envy is now out of the closet: Hindu trolls
constitute Benjamin Netanyahu’s largest fan club in the world.) I
remember I had a picture on my wall of Moshe Dayan, the IDF chief of
staff and defence minister during the Six-Day War; and even long after
my childish infatuation with crude strength faded, I did not cease to
see Israel the way its leaders had from the 1960s begun to present the
country, as redemption for the victims of the Shoah, and an
unbreakable guarantee against its recurrence.

I knew how little the plight of Jews scapegoated during Germany’s
social and economic breakdown in the 1920s and 1930s had registered in
the conscience of Western European and American leaders, that even
Shoah survivors were met with a cold shoulder, and, in Eastern Europe,
with fresh pogroms. Though convinced of the justice of the Palestinian
cause, I found it hard to resist the Zionist logic: that Jews cannot
survive in non-Jewish lands and must have a state of their own. I even
thought it was unjust that Israel alone among all the countries in the
world needed to justify its right to exist.

I wasn’t naive enough to think that suffering ennobles or empowers
the victims of a great atrocity to act in a morally superior way. That
yesterday’s victims are very likely to become today’s victimisers
is the lesson of organised violence in the former Yugoslavia, Sudan,
Congo, Rwanda, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan and too many other places. I was
still shocked by the dark meaning the Israeli state had drawn from the
Shoah, and then institutionalised in a machinery of repression. The
targeted killings of Palestinians, checkpoints, home demolitions, land
thefts, arbitrary and indefinite detentions, and widespread torture in
prisons seemed to proclaim a pitiless national ethos: that humankind
is divided into those who are strong and those who are weak, and so
those who have been or expect to be victims should pre-emptively crush
their perceived enemies.

Though I had read Edward Said, I was still shocked to discover for
myself how insidiously Israel’s high-placed supporters in the West
conceal the nihilistic survival-of-the-strongest ideology reproduced
by all Israeli regimes since Begin’s. It is in their own interests
to be concerned with the crimes of the occupiers, if not with the
suffering of the dispossessed and dehumanised; but both have passed
without much scrutiny in the respectable press of the Western world.
Anyone calling attention to the spectacle of Washington’s blind
commitment to Israel is accused of antisemitism and ignoring the
lessons of the Shoah. And a distorted consciousness of the Shoah
ensures that whenever the victims of Israel, unable to endure their
misery any longer, rise up against their oppressors with predictable
ferocity, they are denounced as Nazis, hellbent on perpetrating
another Shoah.

In reading​ and annotating the writings of Améry, Levi and others I
was trying somehow to mitigate the oppressive sense of wrongness I
felt after being exposed to Israel’s bleak construal of the Shoah,
and the certificates of high moral merit bestowed on the country by
its Western allies. I was looking for reassurance from people who had
known, in their own frail bodies, the monstrous terror visited on
millions by a supposedly civilised European nation-state, and who had
resolved to be on perpetual guard against the deformation of the
Shoah’s meaning and the abuse of its memory.

Despite its increasing reservations about Israel, a political and
media class in the West has ceaselessly euphemised the stark facts of
military occupation and unchecked annexation by ethnonational
demagogues: Israel, the chorus goes, has the right, as the Middle
East’s only democracy, to defend itself, especially from genocidal
brutes. As a result, the victims of Israeli barbarity in Gaza today
cannot even secure straightforward recognition of their ordeal from
Western elites, let alone relief. In recent months, billions of people
around the world have witnessed an extraordinary onslaught whose
victims, as Blinne Ní Ghrálaigh, an Irish lawyer who is South
Africa’s representative at the International Court of Justice in The
Hague, put it, ‘are broadcasting their own destruction in real time
in the desperate, so far vain, hope that the world might do
something’.

But the world, or more specifically the West, doesn’t do anything.
Worse, the liquidation of Gaza, though outlined and broadcast by its
perpetrators, is daily obfuscated, if not denied, by the instruments
of the West’s military and cultural hegemony: from
the US president claiming that Palestinians are liars and European
politicians intoning that Israel has a right to defend itself to the
prestigious news outlets deploying the passive voice while relating
the massacres carried out in Gaza. We find ourselves in an
unprecedented situation. Never before have so many witnessed an
industrial-scale slaughter in real time. Yet the prevailing
callousness, timidity and censorship disallows, even mocks, our shock
and grief. Many of us who have seen some of the images and videos
coming out of Gaza – those visions from hell of corpses twisted
together and buried in mass graves, the smaller corpses held by
grieving parents, or laid on the ground in neat rows – have been
quietly going mad over the last few months. Every day is poisoned by
the awareness that while we go about our lives hundreds of ordinary
people like ourselves are being murdered, or being forced to witness
the murder of their children.

Those driven to scan Joe Biden’s face for some sign of mercy, some
sign of an end to bloodletting, find an eerily smooth hardness, broken
only by a nervous little smirk when he blurts out Israeli lies about
beheaded babies. Biden’s stubborn malice and cruelty to the
Palestinians is just one of many gruesome riddles presented to us by
Western politicians and journalists. The Shoah traumatised at least
two Jewish generations, and the massacres and hostage-taking in Israel
on 7 October by Hamas and other Palestinian groups rekindled a fear of
collective extermination among many Jews. But it was clear from the
start that the most fanatical Israeli leadership in history would not
shrink from exploiting a widespread sense of violation, bereavement
and horror. It would have been easy for Western leaders to choke off
their impulse of unconditional solidarity with an extremist regime
while also acknowledging the necessity of pursuing and bringing to
justice those guilty of war crimes on 7 October. Why then did Keir
Starmer, a former human rights lawyer, assert that Israel has the
right to ‘withhold power and water’ from Palestinians? Why did
Germany feverishly start selling more arms to Israel (and with its
mendacious media and ruthless official crackdown, especially on Jewish
artists and thinkers, provide a fresh lesson to the world in murderous
ethnonationalism’s quick ascent there)? What explains headlines on
the BBC and in the _New York Times_ like ‘Hind Rajab, six, found
dead in Gaza days after phone calls for help’, ‘Tears of Gaza
father who lost 103 relatives’ and ‘Man Dies after Setting Himself
on Fire Outside Israeli Embassy in Washington, Police Say’? Why have
Western politicians and journalists kept presenting tens of thousands
of dead and maimed Palestinians as collateral damage, in a war of
self-defence forced on the world’s most moral army, as
the IDF claims to be?

The answers for many people around the world cannot but be tainted by
a long-simmering racial bitterness. Palestine, George Orwell pointed
out in 1945, is a ‘colour issue’, and this is the way it was
inevitably seen by Gandhi, who pleaded with Zionist leaders not to
resort to terrorism against Arabs using Western arms, and the
postcolonial nations, which almost all refused to recognise the state
of Israel. What W.E.B. Du Bois called the central problem of
international politics – the ‘colour line’ – motivated Nelson
Mandela when he said that South Africa’s freedom from apartheid is
‘incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians’. James
Baldwin sought to profane what he termed a ‘pious silence’ around
Israel’s behaviour when he claimed that the Jewish state, which sold
arms to the apartheid regime in South Africa, embodied white supremacy
not democracy. Muhammad Ali saw Palestine as an instance of gross
racial injustice. So, today, do the leaders of the United States’s
oldest and most prominent Black Christian denominations, who have
accused Israel of genocide and asked Biden to end all financial as
well as military aid to the country.

In 1967, Baldwin was tactless enough to say that the suffering of
Jewish people ‘is recognised as part of the moral history of the
world’ and ‘this is not true for the blacks.’ In 2024, many more
people can see that, when compared with the Jewish victims of Nazism,
the countless millions consumed by slavery, the numerous late
Victorian holocausts in Asia and Africa, and the nuclear assaults on
Hiroshima and Nagasaki are barely remembered. Billions of
non-Westerners have been furiously politicised in recent years by the
West’s calamitous war on terror, ‘vaccine apartheid’ during the
pandemic, and the barefaced hypocrisy over the plight of Ukrainians
and Palestinians; they can hardly fail to notice a belligerent version
of ‘Holocaust denial’ among the elites of former imperialist
countries, who refuse to address their countries’ past of genocidal
brutality and plunder and try hard to delegitimise any discussion of
this as unhinged ‘wokeness’. Popular West-is-best accounts of
totalitarianism continue to ignore the acute descriptions of Nazism
(by Jawaharlal Nehru and Aimé Césaire, among other imperial
subjects) as the radical ‘twin’ of Western imperialism; they shy
away from exploring the obvious connection between the imperial
slaughter of natives in the colonies and the genocidal terrors
perpetrated against Jews inside Europe.

One of the great dangers today is the hardening of the colour line
into a new Maginot Line. For most people outside the West, whose
primordial experience of European civilisation was to be brutally
colonised by its representatives, the Shoah did not appear as an
unprecedented atrocity. Recovering from the ravages of imperialism in
their own countries, most non-Western people were in no position to
appreciate the magnitude of the horror the radical twin of that
imperialism inflicted on Jews in Europe. So when Israel’s leaders
compare Hamas to Nazis, and Israeli diplomats wear yellow stars at
the UN, their audience is almost exclusively Western. Most of the
world doesn’t carry the burden of Christian European guilt over the
Shoah, and does not regard the creation of Israel as a moral necessity
to absolve the sins of 20th-century Europeans. For more than seven
decades now, the argument among the ‘darker peoples’ has remained
the same: why should Palestinians be dispossessed and punished for
crimes in which only Europeans were complicit? And they can only
recoil with disgust from the implicit claim that Israel has the right
to slaughter 13,000 children not only as a matter of self-defence but
because it is a state born out of the Shoah.

In​ 2006, Tony Judt was already warning that ‘the Holocaust can no
longer be instrumentalised to excuse Israel’s behaviour’ because a
growing number of people ‘simply cannot understand how the horrors
of the last European war can be invoked to license or condone
unacceptable behaviour in another time and place’. Israel’s
‘long-cultivated persecution mania – “everyone’s out to get
us” – no longer elicits sympathy’, he warned, and prophecies of
universal antisemitism risk ‘becoming a self-fulfilling
assertion’: ‘Israel’s reckless behaviour and insistent
identification of all criticism with antisemitism is now the leading
source of anti-Jewish sentiment in Western Europe and much of Asia.’
Israel’s most devout friends today are inflaming this situation. As
the Israeli journalist and documentary maker Yuval Abraham put it, the
‘appalling misuse’ of the accusation of antisemitism by Germans
empties it of meaning and ‘thus endangers Jews all over the
world’. Biden keeps making the treacherous argument that the safety
of the Jewish population worldwide depends on Israel. As the _New
York Times_ columnist Ezra Klein put it recently, ‘I’m a Jewish
person. Do I feel safer? Do I feel like there’s less antisemitism in
the world right now because of what is happening there, or does it
seem to me that there’s a huge upsurge of antisemitism, and that
even Jews in places that are not Israel are vulnerable to what happens
in Israel?’

This ruinous scenario was very clearly anticipated by the Shoah
survivors I quoted earlier, who warned of the damage inflicted on the
memory of the Shoah by its instrumentalisation. Bauman warned
repeatedly after the 1980s that such tactics by unscrupulous
politicians like Begin and Netanyahu were securing ‘a post-mortem
triumph for Hitler, who dreamed of creating conflict between Jews and
the whole world’ and ‘preventing Jews from ever having peaceful
coexistence with others’. Améry, made desperate in his last years
by ‘burgeoning antisemitism’, pleaded with Israelis to treat even
Palestinian terrorists humanely, so that the solidarity between
diaspora Zionists like himself and Israel did not ‘become the basis
for a communion of two doomed parties in the face of catastrophe’.

There isn’t much to be hoped for in this regard from Israel’s
present leaders. The discovery of their extreme vulnerability to
Hizbullah as well as Hamas should make them more willing to risk a
compromise peace settlement. Yet, with all the 2000 lb bombs lavished
on them by Biden, they crazily seek to further militarise their
occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. Such self-harm is the long-term
effect Boaz Evron feared when he warned against ‘the continuous
mentioning of the Holocaust, antisemitism and the hatred of Jews in
all generations’. ‘A leadership cannot be separated from its own
propaganda,’ he wrote, and Israel’s ruling class act like the
chieftains of a ‘sect’ operating ‘in the world of myths and
monsters created by its own hands’, ‘no longer able to understand
what is happening in the real world’ or the ‘historical processes
in which the state is caught’.

Forty-four years after Evron wrote this, it is clearer, too, that
Israel’s Western patrons have turned out to be the country’s worst
enemies, ushering their ward deeper into hallucination. As Evron said,
Western powers act against their ‘own interests and apply to Israel
a special preferential relationship, without Israel seeing itself
obligated to reciprocate’. Consequently, ‘the special treatment
given to Israel, expressed in unconditional economic and political
support’ has ‘created an economic and political hothouse around
Israel cutting it off from global economic and political realities’.

Netanyahu and his cohort threaten the basis of the global order that
was rebuilt after the revelation of Nazi crimes. Even before Gaza, the
Shoah was losing its central place in our imagination of the past and
future. It is true that no historical atrocity has been so widely and
comprehensively commemorated. But the culture of remembrance around
the Shoah has now accumulated its own long history. That history shows
that the memory of the Shoah did not merely spring organically from
what transpired between 1939 and 1945; it was constructed, often very
deliberately, and with specific political ends. In fact, a necessary
consensus about the Shoah’s universal salience has been endangered
by the increasingly visible ideological pressures brought to bear on
its memory.

That Germany’s Nazi regime and its European collaborators had
murdered six million Jews was widely known after 1945. But for many
years this stupefying fact had little political and intellectual
resonance. In the 1940s and 1950s, the Shoah was not seen as an
atrocity separate from other atrocities of the war: the attempted
extermination of Slav populations, gypsies, disabled people and
homosexuals. Of course, most European peoples had reasons of their own
not to dwell on the killing of Jews. Germans were obsessed with their
own trauma of bombing and occupation by Allied powers and their mass
expulsion from Eastern Europe. France, Poland, Austria and the
Netherlands, which had eagerly co-operated with the Nazis, wanted to
present themselves as part of a valiant ‘resistance’ to Hitlerism.
Too many indecent reminders of complicity existed long after the war
ended in 1945. Germany had former Nazis as its chancellor and
president. The French president François Mitterrand had been an
apparatchik in the Vichy regime. As late as 1992, Kurt Waldheim was
president of Austria despite there being evidence of his involvement
in Nazi atrocities.

Even in the United States, there was ‘public silence and some sort
of statist denial regarding the Holocaust’, as Idith Zertal writes
in _Israel’s Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood_ (2005). It
wasn’t until long after 1945 that the Holocaust began to be publicly
remembered. In Israel itself, awareness of the Shoah was limited for
years to its survivors, who, astonishing to remember today, were
drenched with contempt by the leaders of the Zionist movement.
Ben-Gurion had initially seen Hitler’s rise to power as ‘a huge
political and economic boost for the Zionist enterprise’, but he did
not consider human debris from Hitler’s death camps as fit material
for the construction of a strong new Jewish state. ‘Everything they
had endured,’ Ben-Gurion said, ‘purged their souls of all good.’
Saul Friedlander, the foremost historian of the Shoah, who left Israel
partly because he couldn’t bear to see the Shoah being used ‘as a
pretext for harsh anti-Palestinian measures’, recalls in his
memoir, _Where Memory Leads_ (2016), that academic scholars
initially spurned the subject, leaving it to the memorial and
documentation centre Yad Vashem.

Attitudes began to change only with the trial of Adolf Eichmann in
1961. In _The Seventh Million_ (1993), the Israeli historian Tom
Segev recounts that Ben-Gurion, who was accused by Begin and other
political rivals of insensitivity to Shoah survivors, decided to stage
a ‘national catharsis’ by holding the trial of a Nazi war
criminal. He hoped to educate Jews from Arab countries about the Shoah
and European antisemitism (neither of which they were familiar with)
and start binding them with Jews of European ancestry in what seemed
all too clearly an imperfectly imagined community. Segev goes on to
describe how Begin advanced this process of forging a Shoah
consciousness among darker-skinned Jews who had long been the target
of racist humiliations by the country’s white establishment. Begin
healed their injuries of class and race by promising them stolen
Palestinian land and a socioeconomic status above dispossessed and
destitute Arabs.

This distribution of the wages of Israeli-ness coincided with the
eruption of identity politics among an affluent minority in the US.
As Peter Novick clarifies in startling detail in _The Holocaust in
American Life_ (1999), the Shoah ‘didn’t loom that large’ in
the life of America’s Jews until the late 1960s. Only a few books
and films touched on the subject. The film _Judgment at
Nuremberg_ (1961) folded the mass murder of Jews into the larger
category of the crimes of Nazism. In his essay ‘The Intellectual and
Jewish Fate’, published in the Jewish magazine _Commentary_ in
1957, Norman Podhoretz, the patron saint of neoconservative Zionists
in the 1980s, said nothing at all about the Holocaust.

Jewish organisations that became notorious for policing opinion about
Zionism at first discouraged the memorialisation of Europe’s Jewish
victims. They were scrambling to learn the new rules of the
geopolitical game. In the chameleon-like shifts of the early Cold War,
the Soviet Union moved from being a stalwart ally against Nazi Germany
to a totalitarian evil; Germany moved from being a totalitarian evil
to a stalwart democratic ally against totalitarian evil. Accordingly,
the editor of _Commentary_ urged American Jews to nurture a
‘realistic attitude rather than a punitive and recriminatory one’
towards Germany, which was now a pillar of ‘Western democratic
civilisation’.

This​ extensive gaslighting by the free world’s political and
intellectual leaders shocked and embittered many survivors of the
Shoah. However, they weren’t then regarded as uniquely privileged
witnesses of the modern world. Améry, who loathed the ‘obtrusive
philosemitism’ of postwar Germany, was reduced to amplifying his
private ‘resentments’ in essays aimed at ruffling the ‘miserable
conscience’ of German readers. In one of these he describes
travelling through Germany in the mid-1960s. While discussing Saul
Bellow’s latest novel with the country’s new ‘refined’
intellectuals, he could not forget the ‘stony faces’ of ordinary
Germans before a pile of corpses, and discovered that he bore a new
‘grudge’ against Germans and their exalted place in the
‘majestic halls of the West’. Améry’s experience of ‘absolute
loneliness’ before his Gestapo torturers had destroyed his ‘trust
in the world’. It was only after his liberation that he had again
known ‘mutual understanding’ with the rest of humanity because
‘those who had tortured me and turned me into a bug’ seemed to
provoke ‘contempt’. But his healing faith in the ‘equilibrium of
world morality’ had quickly been shattered by the subsequent Western
embrace of Germany, and the free world’s eager recruitment of former
Nazis in its new ‘power game’.

Améry would have felt even more betrayed if he had seen the staff
memorandum of the American Jewish Committee in 1951, which regretted
the fact that ‘for most Jews reasoning about Germany and Germans is
still beclouded by strong emotion.’ Novick explains that American
Jews, like other ethnic groups, were anxious to avoid the charge of
dual loyalty and to take advantage of the dramatically expanding
opportunities offered by postwar America. They became more alert to
Israel’s presence during the extensively publicised and
controversy-haunted Eichmann trial, which made inescapable the fact
that Jews had been Hitler’s primary targets and victims. But it was
only after the Six-Day War in 1967 and the Yom Kippur War in 1973,
when Israel seemed existentially threatened by its Arab enemies, that
the Shoah came to be broadly conceived, in both Israel and the United
States, as the emblem of Jewish vulnerability in an eternally hostile
world. Jewish organisations started to deploy the motto ‘Never
Again’ to lobby for American policies favourable to Israel. The US,
facing humiliating defeat in East Asia, began to see an apparently
invincible Israel as a valuable proxy in the Middle East, and began
its lavish subvention of the Jewish state. In turn, the narrative,
promoted by Israeli leaders and American Zionist groups, that the
Shoah was a present and imminent danger to Jews began to serve as a
basis for collective self-definition for many Jewish Americans in the
1970s.

Jewish Americans were by then the most educated and prosperous
minority group in America, and were increasingly irreligious. Yet, in
the rancorously polarised American society of the late 1960s and
1970s, where ethnic and racial sequestration became common amid a
widespread sense of disorder and insecurity, and historical calamity
turned into a badge of identity and moral rectitude, more and more
assimilated Jewish Americans affiliated themselves with the memory of
the Shoah and forged a personal connection with an Israel they saw as
menaced by genocidal antisemites. A Jewish political tradition
preoccupied with inequality, poverty, civil rights, environmentalism,
nuclear disarmament and anti-imperialism mutated into one
characterised by a hyper-attentiveness to the Middle East’s only
democracy. In the journals he kept from the 1960s onwards, the
literary critic Alfred Kazin alternates between bafflement and scorn
in charting the psychodramas of personal identity that helped create
Israel’s most loyal constituency abroad:

The present period of Jewish ‘success’ will some day be remembered
as one of the greatest irony ... The Jews caught in a trap, the Jews
murdered, and bango! Out of ashes all this inescapable lament and
exploitation of the Holocaust ... Israel as the Jews’
‘safeguard’; the Holocaust as our new Bible, more than a Book of
Lamentations.

Kazin was allergic to the American cult of Elie Wiesel, who went
around asserting that the Shoah was incomprehensible, incomparable and
unrepresentable, and that Palestinians had no right to Jerusalem. In
Kazin’s view, ‘the American Jewish middle class’ had found in
Wiesel, a ‘Jesus of the Holocaust’, ‘a surrogate for their own
religious vacancy’. The potent identity politics of an American
minority was not lost on Primo Levi during his only visit to the
country in 1985, two years before he killed himself. He had been
profoundly disturbed by the culture of conspicuous Holocaust
consumption around Wiesel (who claimed to have been Levi’s great
friend in Auschwitz; Levi did not recall ever meeting him) and was
puzzled by his American hosts’ voyeuristic obsession with his
Jewishness. Writing to friends back in Turin he complained that
Americans had ‘pinned a Star of David’ on him. At a talk in
Brooklyn, Levi, asked for his opinion on Middle East politics, started
to say that ‘Israel was a mistake in historical terms.’ An uproar
ensued, and the moderator had to halt the meeting. Later that
year, _Commentary_, raucously pro-Israel by now, commissioned a
24-year-old wannabe neocon to launch venomous attacks on Levi. By
Levi’s own admission, this intellectual thuggery (bitterly regretted
by its now anti-Zionist author) helped extinguish his ‘will to
live’.

Recent American literature most clearly manifests the paradox that the
more remote the Shoah grew in time the more fiercely its memory was
possessed by later generations of Jewish Americans. I was shocked by
the irreverence with which Isaac Bashevis Singer, born in 1904 in
Poland and in many ways the 20th century’s quintessential Jewish
writer, depicted Shoah survivors in his fiction, and derided both the
state of Israel and the eager philosemitism of American gentiles. A
novel like _Shadows on the Hudson_ almost seems designed to prove
that oppression doesn’t improve moral character. But much younger
and more secularised Jewish writers than Singer seemed too submerged
in what Gillian Rose in her scathing essay on _Schindler’s
List_ called ‘Holocaust Piety’. In a review in
the _LRB_ of _The History of Love_
[[link removed]] (2005),
a novel by Nicole Krauss set in Israel, Europe and the US, James Wood
pointed out that its author, born in 1974, ‘proceeds as if the
Holocaust happened just yesterday’. The novel’s Jewishness had
been, Wood wrote, ‘warped into fraudulence and histrionics by the
force of Krauss’s identification with it’. Such ‘Jewish
fervency’, bordering on ‘minstrelsy’, contrasted sharply with
the work of Bellow and Norman Mailer and Philip Roth, who had ‘not
shown a great interest in the shadow of the Shoah’.

A strenuously willed affiliation with the Shoah has also marked and
diminished much American journalism about Israel. More
consequentially, the secular-political religion of the Shoah and the
over-identification with Israel since the 1970s has fatally distorted
the foreign policy of Israel’s main sponsor, the US. In 1982,
shortly before Reagan bluntly ordered Begin to cease his
‘holocaust’ in Lebanon, a young US senator who revered Elie
Wiesel as his great teacher met the Israeli prime minister. In
Begin’s own stunned account of the meeting, the senator commended
the Israeli war effort and boasted that he would have gone further,
even if it meant killing women and children. Begin himself was taken
aback by the words of the future US president, Joe Biden. ‘No,
sir,’ he insisted. ‘According to our values, it is forbidden to
hurt women and children, even in war ... This is a yardstick of
human civilisation, not to hurt civilians.’

Along period​ of relative peace has made most of us oblivious to the
calamities that preceded it. Only a few people alive today can recall
the experience of total war that defined the first half of the
20th century, the imperial and national struggles inside and outside
Europe, the ideological mass mobilisation, the eruptions of fascism
and militarism. Nearly half a century of the most brutal conflicts and
the biggest moral breakdowns in history exposed the dangers of a world
where no religious or ethical constraint existed over what human
beings could do or dared to do. Secular reason and modern science,
which displaced and replaced traditional religion, had not only
revealed their incapacity to legislate human conduct; they were
implicated in the new and efficient modes of slaughter demonstrated by
Auschwitz and Hiroshima.

In the decades of reconstruction after 1945, it slowly became possible
to believe again in the concept of modern society, in its institutions
as an unambiguously civilising force, in its laws as a defence against
vicious passions. This tentative belief was enshrined and affirmed by
a negative secular theology derived from the exposure of Nazi crimes:
Never Again. The postwar’s own categorical imperative gradually
acquired institutional form with the establishment of organisations
like the ICJ and the International Criminal Court and vigilant human
rights outfits like Amnesty International or Human Rights Watch. A
major document of the postwar years, the preamble of the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights of 1948, is suffused with the fear of
repeating Europe’s past of racial apocalypse. In recent decades, as
utopian imaginings of a better socioeconomic order faded, the ideal of
human rights drew even more authority from memories of the great evil
committed during the Shoah.

From Spaniards fighting for reparative justice after long years of
brutal dictatorships, Latin Americans agitating on behalf of
their _desaparecidos_ and Bosnians appealing for protection from
Serbian ethnic-cleansers, to the Korean plea for redress for the
‘comfort women’ enslaved by the Japanese during the Second World
War, memories of Jewish suffering at the hands of Nazis are the
foundation on which most descriptions of extreme ideology and
atrocity, and most demands for recognition and reparations, have been
built.

These memories have helped define the notions of responsibility,
collective guilt and crimes against humanity. It is true that they
have been continually abused by the exponents of military
humanitarianism, who reduce human rights to the right not to be
brutally murdered. And cynicism breeds faster when formulaic modes of
Shoah commemoration – solemn-faced trips to Auschwitz, followed by
effusive camaraderie with Netanyahu in Jerusalem – become the cheap
price of the ticket to respectability for antisemitic politicians,
Islamophobic agitators and Elon Musk. Or when Netanyahu grants moral
absolution in exchange for support to frankly antisemitic politicians
in Eastern Europe who continually seek to rehabilitate the fervent
local executioners of Jews during the Shoah. Yet, in the absence of
anything more effective, the Shoah remains indispensable as a standard
for gauging the political and moral health of societies; its memory,
though prone to abuse, can still be used to uncover more insidious
iniquities. When I look at my own writings about the anti-Muslim
admirers of Hitler and their malign influence over India today, I am
struck by how often I have cited the Jewish experience of prejudice to
warn against the barbarism that becomes possible when certain taboos
are broken.

All these universalist reference points – the Shoah as the measure
of all crimes, antisemitism as the most lethal form of bigotry – are
in danger of disappearing as the Israeli military massacres and
starves Palestinians, razes their homes, schools, hospitals, mosques,
churches, bombs them into smaller and smaller encampments, while
denouncing as antisemitic or champions of Hamas all those who plead
with it to desist, from the United Nations, Amnesty International and
Human Rights Watch to the Spanish, Irish, Brazilian and South African
governments and the Vatican. Israel today is dynamiting the edifice of
global norms built after 1945, which has been tottering since the
catastrophic and still unpunished war on terror and Vladimir Putin’s
revanchist war in Ukraine. The profound rupture we feel today between
the past and the present is a rupture in the moral history of the
world since the ground zero of 1945 – the history in which the Shoah
has been for many years the central event and universal reference.

There are more earthquakes ahead. Israeli politicians have resolved to
prevent a Palestinian state. According to a recent poll, an absolute
majority (88 per cent) of Israeli Jews believe the extent of
Palestinian casualties is justifiable. The Israeli government is
blocking humanitarian aid to Gaza. Biden now admits that his Israeli
dependants are guilty of ‘indiscriminate bombing’, but
compulsively hands out more and more military hardware to them. On 20
February, the US scorned for the third time at the UN most of the
world’s desperate wish to end the bloodbath in Gaza. On 26 February,
while licking an ice-cream cone, Biden floated his own fantasy,
quickly shot down by both Israel and Hamas, of a temporary ceasefire.
In the United Kingdom, Labour as well as Tory politicians search for
verbal formulas that can appease public opinion while providing moral
cover to the carnage in Gaza. It hardly seems believable, but the
evidence has become overwhelming: we are witnessing some kind of
collapse in the free world.

At the same time, Gaza has become for countless powerless people the
essential condition of political and ethical consciousness in the
21st century – just as the First World War was for a generation in
the West. And, increasingly, it seems that only those jolted into
consciousness by the calamity of Gaza can rescue the Shoah from
Netanyahu, Biden, Scholz and Sunak and re-universalise its moral
significance; only they can be trusted to restore what Améry called
the equilibrium of world morality. Many of the protesters who fill the
streets of their cities week after week have no immediate relation to
the European past of the Shoah. They judge Israel by its actions in
Gaza rather than its Shoah-sanctified demand for total and permanent
security. Whether or not they know about the Shoah, they reject the
crude social-Darwinist lesson Israel draws from it – the survival of
one group of people at the expense of another. They are motivated by
the simple wish to uphold the ideals that seemed so universally
desirable after 1945: respect for freedom, tolerance for the otherness
of beliefs and ways of life; solidarity with human suffering; and a
sense of moral responsibility for the weak and persecuted. These men
and women know that if there is any bumper sticker lesson to be drawn
from the Shoah, it is ‘Never Again for Anyone’: the slogan of the
brave young activists of Jewish Voice for Peace.

It is possible that they will lose. Perhaps Israel, with its
survivalist psychosis, is not the ‘bitter relic’ George Steiner
called it – rather, it is the portent of the future of a bankrupt
and exhausted world. The full-throated endorsement of Israel by
far-right figures like Javier Milei of Argentina and Jair Bolsonaro of
Brazil and its patronage by countries where white nationalists have
infected political life – the US, UK, France, Germany, Italy –
suggests that the world of individual rights, open frontiers and
international law is receding. It is possible that Israel will succeed
in ethnically cleansing Gaza, and even the West Bank as well. There is
too much evidence that the arc of the moral universe does not bend
towards justice; powerful men can make their massacres seem necessary
and righteous. It’s not at all difficult to imagine a triumphant
conclusion to the Israeli onslaught.

The fear of catastrophic defeat weighs on the minds of the protesters
who disrupt Biden’s campaign speeches and are expelled from his
presence to a chorus of ‘four more years’. Disbelief over what
they see every day in videos from Gaza and the fear of more unbridled
brutality hounds those online dissenters who daily excoriate the
pillars of the Western fourth estate for their intimacy with brute
power. Accusing Israel of committing genocide, they seem deliberately
to violate the ‘moderate’ and ‘sensible’ opinion that places
the country as well as the Shoah outside the modern history of racist
expansionism. And they probably persuade no one in a hardened Western
political mainstream.

But then Améry himself, when he addressed his resentments to the
miserable conscience of his time, was ‘not at all speaking with the
intention to convince; I just blindly throw my word onto the scale,
whatever it may weigh.’ Feeling deceived and abandoned by the free
world, he aired his resentments ‘in order that the crime become a
moral reality for the criminal, in order that he be swept into the
truth of his atrocity’. Israel’s clamorous accusers today seem to
aim at little more. Against the acts of savagery, and the propaganda
by omission and obfuscation, countless millions now proclaim, in
public spaces and on digital media, their furious resentments. In the
process, they risk permanently embittering their lives. But, perhaps,
their outrage alone will alleviate, for now, the Palestinian feeling
of absolute loneliness, and go some way towards redeeming the memory
of the Shoah.

_28 February_

_[PANKAJ MISHRA’s books include Age of Anger: A History of the
Present
[[link removed]], From the
Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia
[[link removed]] and
two novels, the more recent of which is Run and Hide
[[link removed]]. This piece
was delivered as an LRB Winter Lecture.]_

* Shoah
[[link removed]]
* Holocaust
[[link removed]]
* The Holocaust
[[link removed]]
* Genocide
[[link removed]]
* Nazis
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* World War II
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* World War Two
[[link removed]]
* Israel
[[link removed]]
* Gaza
[[link removed]]
* Palestine
[[link removed]]
* Israel-Gaza War
[[link removed]]
* Palestinians
[[link removed]]
* Hamas
[[link removed]]
* Hostages
[[link removed]]
* zionism
[[link removed]]
* Anti-Zionism
[[link removed]]
* IDF
[[link removed]]
* Occupied Territories
[[link removed]]
* Jewish settlements
[[link removed]]
* Nabka
[[link removed]]
* Judaism
[[link removed]]
* Jews
[[link removed]]
* Nationalism
[[link removed]]
* Hindu Nationalism
[[link removed]]
* Menachem Begin
[[link removed]]
* Benjamin Netanyahu
[[link removed]]
* Primo Levi
[[link removed]]
* Jean Améry
[[link removed]]
* Yeshayahu Leibowitz
[[link removed]]
* Zygmunt Bauman
[[link removed]]
* Boaz Evron
[[link removed]]
* Tony Judt
[[link removed]]

*
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*
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*
*
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