Holocaust inversion is the demonization of Jews, who were the major victims of the criminality of Nazi Germany. It is the claim that Israel behaves toward the Palestinians as Nazi Germany behaved toward the Jews. After reviewing the phenomenon and understanding its psychological, political, and historical origins, this chapter focuses on its strange occurrence in the West, most strangely among the Jewish people, and oddly enough within Israeli society. This study shows how Israeli Holocaust inversion is manifested among intellectuals, political leaders, and most disturbingly among the rank and file of the IDF, even within this institute's educational system.
TopIntroduction
Holocaust Remembrance Day is a day of unity in Israeli society, a day of deep sympathy with the Jewish victims of the Nazis and their collaborators. The educational system as well as local municipalities and governmental institutes hold ceremonies where the emphasis is on Jewish passive resistance, that is – the way Jews retained their human dignity in the most insufferable conditions, and Jewish active struggle – their great effort to fight their prosecutors in the ghettos, joining underground partisans, and recruiting massively to the Allies' armies.
Unity on this day is definitely unquestionable. A siren blows at sundown before Remembrance day and once again late on the following morning. With the sound of siren, traffic as well as pedestrians stop for two minutes of silent devotion. With sad songs on the background of radio and television broadcast, the entire media concentrates on Jewish destiny in World War II. Public entertainment on this day is prohibited; theatres, cinemas, pubs and restaurants – all are closed throughout the country. This, perhaps, is one rare moment of total agreement within Israeli society.
However, the Holocaust Remembrance day of 2016 marked a change in Israeli society. In one of the major official ceremonies, Major General Yair Golan, the Israeli army deputy chief of staff, gave a bombshell speech when he said:
[…] If there is one thing that is scary in remembering the Holocaust, it is noticing horrific processes which developed in Europe – particularly in Germany – seventy, eighty, and ninety years ago, and finding how they begin to unfold here among us in the year 2016 (The Jerusalem Post, 2016).
Golan was certainly not the first Jew to compare Israel with Nazi Germany; moreover, he was not even the first Israeli leader to do so. However, the uniqueness of the May 4, 2016 event was that on what can be counted as the holy of holiest day in Israeli civil life, an IDF leader, upon officially representing the State of Israel, announced that Israel could be compared, on moral grounds, with the Third Reich. Leaving no doubt that he was actually comparing the State of Israel with the Weimar Republic and its successor, Golan pointed out that he was referring to “phenomena that are disruptive” and to “signs of intolerance, violence, and self-destruction that arise on the path to moral degradation” (The Jerusalem Post, 2016).
This chapter concentrates on the strange occurrence of Israeli Jews whose legacy is the comparison of their fellow countrymen with Nazis. This tendency involves artists, scholars, journalists and politicians. Hence, the chapter portrays the strange phenomenon and points out the dangers that it poses to Israeli society and to the Jewish people.
TopHolocaust Inversion
With an understanding of the central role of Holocaust remembrance in Israeli society, we can now refer to the various forms of distortion of Holocaust memory and realize why it is conceivably the worst manifestation of updated anti-Semitism during the years since Europe was liberated. This distortion occurs in many different ways, with new mutations of falsifications of the past emerging all the time. Author Manfred Gerstenfeld, who is recognized by many as one of the leading scholarly authorities today on anti-Semitism and on post-Holocaust studies, classified those distortions into eight major categories: Holocaust Justification and promotion, Holocaust Denial, Holocaust Deflection and Whitewashing, Holocaust De-Judaization, Holocaust Equivalence, Holocaust Trivialization, Obliteration of Holocaust Memory, and Holocaust Inversion (Gerstenfeld, 2009).