There is a cruel historical irony in Israel’s ferocious genocidal war on the besieged Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank: the brutal suppression of the Warsaw Ghetto by the Nazi Wehrmacht in 1943 was one of the most tragic episodes in the genocide perpetrated against European Jewry during the Second World War. Yet the Jewish state invokes the Holocaust, the most morally powerful trope of modern times, to legitimate its formation and thereby its violent dispossession of the Palestinian people in 1947-1949, which the revisionist Israeli historian Ilan Pappe has deemed ‘ethnic cleansing’, an ongoing lethal project that has accelerated since 7 October 2023.[1] Characterising Israel as a European colonial settler state, a characterisation first elaborated by the French Jewish scholar Maxime Rodinson in June 1967,[2] this article traces Israel’s invocation of the Holocaust as ‘myth’, i.e. as state legitimation, and considers how this has impeded criticism of Israel’s relentless dispossession of the indigenous inhabitants of historical Palestine. The issue here, of course, is not the fact of the Holocaust, but of its representation and manipulation.
National narrative
There is a paradox about the collective memory of the Nazi genocide against the Jews: the more time that elapses since the Holocaust eight decades ago, the more intense public memory and remembering of the tragic fate of millions of European Jews has become; and the more the Holocaust has been associated with the establishment and survival of the Jewish state of Israel. This is no accident: all nation-states need a founding, legitimating mythology: a hegemonic, historical narrative, to sustain them. In modern nation-states, the dominant patriotic narratives that valorise national identity, often as not born of war, can mask dark deeds, past and present. For that reason, even in the most seemingly liberal of modern nation states, authorities almost universally seek to sacralise national history to the degree where to challenge it not only confronts the ire of conservative politicians and public opinion, but it becomes taboo or even blasphemous to do so. Historical revisionism becomes fraught.
‘[Collective] memory and its representations’, the late Edward Said rightly observed, ‘touch very significantly upon questions of identity, of nationalism, of power and authority.’ For these reasons, Said continues, ‘memory is not necessarily authentic, but rather useful’; and, often as not, it has been ‘invented’.[3] In the case of the Israel, the circumstances of its birth, in the wake of the catastrophic Nazi ‘Judeocide’, to use Arno Mayer’s designation,[4] 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).[5]
Like all colonial-settler states, such as North America or Australia, Israel’s conquest of land, by definition, has put it on an ‘eliminationist’ collision course, to use Patrick Wolfe’s conceptualisation, with the indigenous Palestinian inhabitants.[6] What has made this clash so fraught is that Zionist dispossession and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians was unleashed in the mid-twentieth century, precisely when classical colonialism was waning, in the heart of the most geopolitically contested region on earth. The intensity of the seemingly never-ending, asymmetrical, war between the ‘Prussians of the Middle East’, as ‘the non-Jewish Jew’ Isaac Deutscher viewed Israel, and the Palestinians and Arabs, coupled with the importance that Israel has come to assume as a military outpost of Western, especially US, dominance of the Middle East, seems to have necessitated a particularly powerful legitimating ‘myth’ for Israel.[7] Of course, the near destruction of European Jewry gave special weight and purpose to the formation of Israel. But so powerful and sacralised has the Holocaust narrative become that, up until 7 October, few would criticise even Israel’s most blatant violations of human rights and international law – from the 1947 Deir Yassin massacre to the current annihilation of Gaza – for fear of being accused of ‘anti-Semitism’, if you are a gentile, or even a ‘self-hating Jew’. Self-censorship is a powerful weapon.
‘Shoah’ to ‘Holocaust’
In the aftermath of World War II, the Allies, especially the USA, publicly invoked the trauma of European Jewry to justify the establishment of a homeland in Palestine, and to avoid taking responsibility for Holocaust survivors themselves. Yet, surprisingly, although Holocaust survivors figured prominently in the establishment of Israel, at this stage the ‘Shoa’, Hebrew for the ‘Disaster’, as the Judeocide was then called, was rarely invoked by Zionists as justification for the partition of Palestine and the proclamation of Israel. The preferred Zionist narrative was one of Jewish ‘reestablishment and recovery’ of a mythical lost homeland, ‘Zion,’ based on a dubious reading of the Old Testament.[8] For Israel’s first prime minister, the ‘fighting Zionist’ David Ben Gurion, the establishment of Israel prefigured ‘a millennial future’ and resurrected a ‘distant glorious’, Old Testament past; he preferred to ignore two millennia of diasporic history, which he distained, including the Holocaust.
Although Israel’s Holocaust and Heroism Remembrance Day, initially intended to mark the anniversary of the Warsaw uprising, was inaugurated in 1951, only in 1959 did it become a ‘mandatory … integral part of Israeli life’, more than a decade after the state had been declared. At that time, for Zionists the Holocaust was a period of shame: seeming confirmation of anti-Semitic stereotypes about ‘the eternal [Jewish] victim’ as feminine, weak and passive; stereotypes that were out of step with the heroic, militarist, Zionist ‘revolution’. In Israel’s first decade, ‘Not only was the memory of the Holocaust repressed, but even its uniqueness … was doubted’. Although Yad Vashem, the ‘Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority’, was founded in 1953, Ben Gurion preferred to forget rather than remember the Holocaust: ‘The one monument worthy of the memory of European Jewry … is the state of Israel’, he wrote in 1951 on the occasion of the first Holocaust Remembrance Day.[9]
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 Gamil Nasser talked like ‘Hitler’; an equation with Nazism that disturbed the political philosopher Hannah Arendt.[10] The Eichmann trial, in Idith Zertal’s words, ‘renewed national unity through memory … by mobilizing the utter political power of the Holocaust’. The ‘spectacle’ of the trial ‘swept through Israel’s language and images’, unleashing a discursive shift.[11] ‘“Never again,” became the watchword of Jewish consciousness’[12] and the term ‘The Holocaust’ began to displace the Hebrew ‘Shoa’.[13]
Seven years later, the power of the resurrected Holocaust memory was mobilised in the June 1967 Six Day war for a preemptive strike and resounding, redemptive, military victory that had allegedly averted another Jewish ‘annihilation’. Some young Israeli soldiers imagined that ‘six million ghosts’ had fought alongside them.[14] Israel’s pre-1967 borders now become ‘the borders of Auschwitz’, the ultimate metaphor for mass destruction, justifying Israeli occupation of the West Bank, biblical Judaea and Samaria as it was re-named under Likud in 1977, and ‘the transformation of the State of Israel into the Land of Israel’.[15] And with it, Said tells us, ‘the Jew as warrior, militant, vigorous fighter … replaced the image of the Jew as scholarly, wise, and slightly withdrawn’.[16]
Preparations for the Six Day war and its aftermath spurred on the ‘political instrumentalisation’ of ‘The Holocaust’ as a rhetorical weapon, wielded with particular force against Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian 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 (1977-92) gave particular impulse to ‘reify the Holocaust and transform it into a fundamental pillar of Israeli identity’; the most extreme expression of which came from the outlawed, terrorist Kahanist movement which in the 1980s, faced with the first Palestinian ‘Intifada’ (the ‘throwing off’), invoked the Holocaust to justify expulsion of the Palestinians from Israel.[17] And 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 1992 Oslo accords with the PLO.[18]
An American narrative
But ‘The Holocaust’, as collective memory did not just become embedded in Israeli political conscious; it increasingly penetrated international political consciousness, of diasporic Jews and Gentiles alike, 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, above all in the United States, where it had first appeared in relation to Arendt’s 1963 New Yorker articles: ‘Eichmann in Jerusalem’; hitherto it had usually referred to ‘nuclear holocaust’. The years 1978-79, under the Carter administration, clinched the terminological dominance of ‘The Holocaust’ in American political life (and soon after German and French), with the April 1978 TV screening of the eponymous NBC 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.[19] That same year, dubbed ‘the year of the Holocaust’, 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 requires explanation. Whether one accepts the view that the explosion of ‘Holocaust consciousness’ in the US constituted a new American ‘nationalist narrative’, or that it was primarily ‘promoted’ by Jewish American elites in their quest for ‘ethnic identity’, or a deliberate, ‘politically expedient’ campaign promoted by the pro-Israel, Zionist ‘lobby’ in the USA,[20] there is no doubt that the ‘myth of the Holocaust’ has served as a powerful ideological buttress for the Israeli state in the heart of its principal financier and armourer.
The story of the US Holocaust Museum, located ‘1,555 feet away from the Washington Monument … in “the epicentre of our collective life”’, is testimony to this. Carter’s original 1979 decision to establish a commission for a US Holocaust memorial came very soon after he declared his support for a Palestinian homeland and agreed to sell F15 fighters to Egypt and Saudi Arabia. The museum guidebook, The World Must Know: The History of the Holocaust as told in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, is dedicated to making ‘remembrance of the past a legacy for the American future’ and reminding ‘each of us…. how vigilant we must all remain in defending the core American values’. At the same time, ‘the most significant positive consequence of the Holocaust’ was ‘the birth of the state Israel’ where
Jewish survivors of the Holocaust finally found a place they could call home … The task of state-building was challenging and looked to the future. There were wars to be fought, cities and villages to be built and crops to be planted…The Holocaust … places an unbearable burden on the Israelis whose very conduct and continued survival must redeem the irredeemable evil of the Holocaust.[21]
Israeli fascism?
It is clear that this particular narrative for 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 apocalyptic 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 been deemed the ‘most accomplished form’ of ‘late-modern colonial occupation’ combining a ‘concatenation of multiple powers: disciplinary, biopolitical, and necropolitical’ that has ensured Israel ‘absolute domination over the inhabitants of the occupied territory’.[22] 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 trepidatiously asked ‘is there a possibility that a fascist regime might come to power in Israel?’[23] 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.[24]
Dr Roger Markwick is Honorary Professor of Modern European History, The University of Newcastle, Australia. This article is an updated version of a paper presented to the second ‘BDS Driving Global Justice for Palestine’ conference, The University of Sydney, 23-27 July 2020. A condensed version of this article was first published in Pearls and Irritations, 22 March 2025: https://johnmenadue.com/post/2025/03/the-sacralisation-of-history-the-holocaust-as-state-legitimation/
[1] Ilan Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2006).
[2] Maxime Rodinson, Israel: A Colonial-Settler State, Intro. by Peter Buch (New York: Monad Press, 1973).
[3] Edward W. Said, ‘Invention, Memory, and Place,’ Critical Inquiry, 26 (2), 2000, p. 176.
[4] Arno Mayer, Why Did the Heavens not Darken? The ‘Final Solution’ in History (London, New York: Verso Books, 2012, first published Pantheon Books 1988); https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/blogs/news/4220-memory-and-history-on-the-poverty-of-remembering-and-forgetting-the-judeocide
[5] Pappe, Ethnic Cleansing, p. xvii.
[6] Patrick Wolfe, ‘Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native’, Journal of Genocide Research 8 (4), December 2006, p. 16: ‘the logic of elimination, which, in its specificity to settler colonialism, is premised on the securing—the obtaining and the maintaining—of territory’.
[7] Isaac Deutscher, The Non-Jewish Jew and other Essays (New York: Hill and Wang, 1968), p. 140.
[8] Said, ‘Invention, Memory, and Place’, pp.184-5.
[9] Idith Zertal, ‘From the People’s Hall to the Wailing Wall: A Study in Memory, Fear, and War’, Representations, No. 69, Special Issue: Grounds for Remembering (Winter, 2000), pp. 100-103.
[10] Zertal, ‘From the People’s Hall,’ pp. 105-7.
[11] Zertal, ‘From the People’s Hall,’ pp. 110-11.
[12] Said, ‘Invention, Memory, and Place,’ p. 188.
[13] Jon Petrie, ‘The secular word HOLOCAUST: scholarly myths, history, and 20th century meanings’, Journal of Genocide Research, 2 (1), 2000, pp. 39-40.
[14] Robert S. Wistrich, ‘Israel & the Holocaust Trauma’, Jewish History, 11 (2), 1997, p. 17.
[15] Zertal, ‘From the People’s Hall to the Wailing Wall’, p. 120.
[16] Said, ‘Invention, Memory, and Place’, p. 188.
[17] Wistrich, ‘Israel & the Holocaust Trauma’, pp. 17-19.
[18] Idith Zertal, Israel’s Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood, trans. Chaya Galai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 197-9.
[19] Petrie, ‘HOLOCAUST’, pp. 46, 48, 50.
[20] See, respectively, Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin. 1999); Norman G. Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering (London, New York: Verso, 2015, first published 2000).
[21] Michael Berenbaum, History of the Holocaust as told in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (Boston: Little, Brown, 1993), pp. 213-4, 235.
[22] Achille Mbembe, ‘Necropolitics,’ Public Culture, 15 (1), 2003, pp. 11–40.
[23] ‘Uri Avnery: A Little Red Light’, 21 April 2009, https://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0904/S00211/uri-avnery-a-little-red-light.htm
[24] Alberto Toscano, ‘The War on Gaza and Israel’s Fascism Debate’, 19 October 2023, https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/blogs/news/the-war-on-gaza-and-israel-s-fascism-debate?
