The Holocaust Is Being Used Against the Jews

As the annual day of Holocaust remembrance approaches, the challenges to meaningful reflection on the lessons of the Shoah continue to grow.

As has been increasingly noted over the years, the combination of distance from World War II, the passing of most survivors who testified to what took place, and the lack of connection — particularly among young people — to what happened then pose immense challenges to educating future generations about the tragedy of the Shoah.

All of these elements will continue to generate significant ideas as to how best to keep understanding of, and connection to, the Shoah alive.

However, the last two years have seen a new element in how the Shoah is presented that places further pressure on the Jewish world.

It is how the Holocaust is used as a weapon against the victims of the Shoah, the Jewish people, and the Jewish state. In some circles, the main purpose in bringing up the Holocaust is to attack the Jewish state and its supporters.

It is not Holocaust denial, but it surely falls under the category of Holocaust minimization by, in effect, canceling out what happened to the Jews by what the Jews are now doing themselves.

It is no accident that the main charges coming against the Jewish state and its Jewish supporters are directly related to the elements surrounding the Holocaust.  

It starts with the term “genocide,” which came into being as an international phrase out of the Holocaust experience. Even though Israel’s war to defend itself against the horrors of October 7 bears no resemblance to genocide, it is no accident how quickly critics rush to that judgment. Whether it is the percentage of civilian deaths, the warnings by the Israel Defense Forces before attacking areas where terrorists are embedded in civilian facilities, or the general behavior of the terrorist group Hamas in making civilian casualties more likely, none of the characteristics of a true genocide exist. Still, it is particularly powerful to accuse the party that suffered the worst genocide of doing the same.  

Then there is the “apartheid” charge against Israel, the only truly pluralistic democracy in the Middle East. Of course, apartheid refers to the racist system that governed South Africa for decades. But its connection to the Holocaust is seen in the understanding that the murder of six million Jews could not have happened without the deeply embedded racist antisemitism that poisoned the atmosphere across Europe, and ultimately inspired the perpetrators, the collaborators, and the bystanders to generate and commit the Shoah.

And so, once again, the apartheid charge against Israel, as flimsy as it is, is another way to use the Holocaust against Israel: The Shoah could not have happened without years of racist antisemitism; now the genocide against the Palestinians can’t happen without Israel’s systemic racism.

Too often, lazy journalism pulls false accusations into the mainstream: shoddy reporting, selective framing, and a readiness to take Hamas at its word let inflammatory claims replace evidence — supercharged by faux social-media activism that rewards outrage over verification. The pattern was clear after the October 17, 2023 explosion at Gaza City’s al-Ahli Arab Hospital, when The New York Times and other major outlets amplified Hamas-linked claims blaming Israel before the facts emerged that the blast was caused by a misfired Palestinian rocket. The result is not merely harsh criticism of particular policies, but the normalization of rhetoric that vilifies Israel and keeps Israel’s very right to exist perpetually on trial in the court of public opinion.

What all these examples intend to do is delegitimize the Jewish state and, in effect, the vast majority of Jews around the world who take pride in that state, while also impacting understanding of and learning from the Holocaust by psychologically canceling out the moral uniqueness of what the Jewish people experienced.  

As we commemorate International Holocaust Remembrance Day on January 27, the challenges of educating and connecting people around the globe to the Jewish experience at Auschwitz remain immense as survivors die out and time passes. Now we have an additional challenge that will make the task even harder—and make the necessity of exposing what this is about even more urgent.