To Rob the Dead: How the Palestinian Cause Seeks to Steal the Shoah

Imagine them: the survivors.

Their faces hollowed by hunger, their wrists inked with numbers, their language orphaned from the world around them. They emerge not into welcome, but into indifference. From the crematoria of Poland and Germany, from the pits of Ukraine, from the train yards of Hungary—yes. But also from the alleyways of Tunis. From the rooftops of Aleppo. From the streets of Baghdad, Cairo, Tripoli, and Sana’a. Jews in Europe were murdered by industry; Jews in the Arab world were erased by decree, by fire, by mob.

The Shoah did not end at the gates of Auschwitz. It echoed in the Farhud pogrom in Iraq in 1941. It stained the Jewish quarter of Tripoli in 1945. It roared through Aden and Casablanca and Damascus—where Jews were not only neighbours but natives, not guests but citizens, nonetheless turned into exiles.

We must state this plainly: the Holocaust was global. The ideology that Jews did not belong—anywhere—was not confined to Hitler’s Europe. It found fertile ground in the Arab world, stoked by the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, who met with Himmler and broadcast Nazi propaganda in Arabic. It metastasised into a campaign of ethnic cleansing—a Nakba of the Jews—that would uproot over 850,000 Jews from Arab lands in a single generation.

These Jews, too, carried no privilege. They arrived in Israel not with power, but with loss. They fled burning synagogues, plundered homes, and unmarked graves. They were not colonisers. They were the colonised who refused to die quietly.

And now, somehow—they are the accused.

In the great moral farce of our time, the descendants of Holocaust survivors and Mizrahi refugees alike are being cast not as the healed, but as the guilty. Israel, we are told, is the new Nazi regime. Gaza is the new Warsaw. Zionism is racism. And the Jewish story—ancient, fractured, miraculous—is reduced to a postwar accident, a colonial apology, a Western indulgence.

This is not criticism. This is not activism. This is the theft of memory in service of erasure.

Because those who chant “genocide” today are not simply misinformed. They are strategic. They understand that if Israel can be portrayed as a product of Holocaust guilt, it can be dismissed as illegitimate. And if the Shoah can be detached from Jewish identity—if it can be reclaimed by others as metaphor, as weapon, as theatre—then Jewish nationhood can be painted as theft.

This is why the narrative has shifted. Israel is no longer the survivor, but the aggressor. Jews are no longer the displaced, but the oppressors. The Holocaust is no longer a Jewish wound, but a globalised banner under which even those who dream of a Jew-free Middle East can march in righteous indignation.

But here is what they do not understand.

Israel was not born from the Holocaust. It was born despite it. The Shoah did not create Zionism—it vindicated it. It proved what we already knew in Warsaw and Fez, in Berlin and Baghdad: that Jews without sovereignty are Jews without safety.

Zionism did not begin in 1945. It began in the Psalms. In exile. In yearning. It was the quiet defiance of a people who, through every forced conversion, every medieval expulsion, every yellow badge and ghetto wall, clutched a single idea: Next year in Jerusalem.

When the Jews returned home—yes, home—they came not with vengeance, but with rebuilding. Not with empires, but with tools. They did not come to colonise, but to resurrect.

And now, in the great inversion, they are accused of recreating the very evil they fled.

To say this plainly: the claim of genocide against Israel is not just false—it is obscene. It is a desecration of language, of memory, of morality. It mocks the gas chambers by equating them with air strikes against terrorists who use children as shields. It hijacks the image of the Jewish ghetto to whitewash Hamas tunnels and rockets. It renders the Shoah meaningless by universalising its horror and stripping it of its Jewish soul.

And it is not accidental. It is purposeful. It is an act of moral vandalism, of history rewritten in reverse.

Because if Israel is a Nazi state, then Jewish victimhood is nullified. If Jews are today’s oppressors, then their claims to land, safety, and identity can be dismantled. And if the Holocaust no longer belongs to the Jews, then the very foundation of Israel can be pulled from beneath its feet.

But they forget—the land was not a gift. It was not compensation. It was the one place we always returned to. When Babylon burned, we whispered of Zion. When Rome conquered, we remembered Jerusalem. When Europe murdered us and the Arab world expelled us, we did not conjure a nation. We came home.

And now, those who could not prevent our survival seek to shame it. To shame a nation of refugees for refusing to be stateless again.

They will not succeed.

The Shoah is not theirs to steal. And Israel is not theirs to unmake.

We, the children of both exodus and ash, of Torah and trauma, will not surrender our history. We will not forget who we are so that others can pretend we were never here.

We are here. Alive. Returned. Rooted.

And we remember everything.