Israel's legitimacy was built on the Holocaust. Now its own genocide is destroying it

The Zionist project was only able to garner the support of most Jews due to the Holocaust. But the self-defence argument no longer works during its own genocide in Gaza

Joseph Massad

A man carries a child while walking past a building destroyed by Israeli bombardment in the Bureij camp for Palestinian refugees in the central Gaza Strip on 9 October 2024 (Eyad Baba/AFP)

One of the more remarkable aspects of the history of Zionism is that the majority of European Jews rejected the movement from its inception in the early 19th century until the Second World War.

What had begun as a Protestant British project to convert European Jews to Protestant Christianity and ship them to Palestine transformed in the last two decades of the 19th century into a European Jewish project.

Even so, the movement failed to gain traction among European Jews in contrast to its popularity then among European and American Protestants and especially Europe's imperialist leaders.  

It was not until the Nazi genocide of European Jews that a majority of European and American Jews were swayed and began to support this colonial-settler movement that enjoined Jews to self-expel and colonise Palestine.  

Indeed, the Holocaust was instrumental in convincing these communities to support the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, if for no other reason than to provide refuge for Jewish survivors of the genocidal catastrophe in Europe.

The shift in the attitude of these Jews, however, was neither immediate nor spontaneous. The Zionist movement worked assiduously and ultimately successfully to convince them to support its colonial-settler programme.

Zionist coercion

After the war, Zionists used pressure and coercion to bring the surviving European Jews to Palestine. These Jewish survivors were still living in the Displaced Persons camps and wished to move to the United States, whose borders remained closed to them.

In fact, it was a closure that the Zionist movement, including American Zionists, strongly supported.

Committing a real genocide to prevent an imagined genocide is not an argument that sells easily 

American Zionists even refused to consider the possibility of offering Holocaust survivors "a choice" in lieu of Palestine. Then-President Franklin D Roosevelt's adviser, the prominent Jewish civil rights lawyer Morris L Ernst, proposed that such a choice be offered as it "would free [the Americans] from the hypocrisy of closing [their] own doors while making sanctimonious demands on the Arabs".

To Ernst, "it seemed that the failure of the leading Jewish groups to support with zeal this immigration programme may have caused the President not to push forward with it at that time". Ernst "felt insulted when active Jewish leaders decried, sneered and then attacked [him] as...a traitor" for suggesting that such a choice be given to the Holocaust survivors in Europe.

Notably, the Zionist movement's adamant opposition to Jewish migration to the US persisted well into the late 1980s as Jews began to leave the Soviet Union in large numbers. While most wanted to go to the US, the Israel lobby successfully pressured President George HW Bush's administration to impose severe limits on their numbers so that most would be forced to go to Israel.

And yet those same American and European Jews who supported the Zionist movement and later the Israeli state did not themselves become Zionist, if Zionism means self-expulsion and becoming colonial settlers in Palestine and later in Israel.  

Despite the Nazi genocide, a struggle continued between the leaders of American and European Jewry on one side and Israel's claim to represent Jews worldwide on the other.

In 1950, the president of the American Jewish Committee, Jacob Blaustein, signed an agreement with Israel's Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion to clarify the nature of the relationship between Israel and American Jews.

In the agreement, Ben-Gurion declared that American Jews were full citizens of the US and must only be loyal to it: "They owe no political allegiance to Israel."

For his part, Blaustein declared that the US was not "exile" but rather a "diaspora" and insisted that the State of Israel did not formally represent Diaspora Jews to the rest of the world. Interestingly, Blaustein added that Israel could never be a refuge for American Jews.

He emphasised that even if the US were to cease to be democratic and American Jews were to "live in a world in which it would be possible to be driven by persecution from America", such a world, he insisted, contrary to Israeli claims, "would not be a safe world for Israel either".

These reservations aside, the support for Israel in the wake of the genocide of European Jewry would increase considerably only in the 1960s, with the rise of what historian Peter Novick has called "Holocaust consciousness".

This was the result of the instrumentalisation of the genocide by Israel and the US to defend Israel's racist regime and its ongoing crimes against the Palestinian people and as part of a Cold War campaign to smear the USSR as "antisemitic".

The Eichmann Trial in 1961 and Israel's multiple invasions of three Arab countries in 1967, which it portrayed as an existential war to prevent yet another Holocaust against Jews, raised the level of Jewish and Christian western support for Israel to extremes of zealotry.  

Weaponising genocide

But if Israeli and Zionist arguments insisted that the existence of Israel is the only guarantee against another holocaust targeting world Jewry anywhere in the world, they also insisted that Israel itself could at any time be the victim of another holocaust to be committed by the Palestinians and the Arab states.

The "Holocaust industry's" leading ideologue Elie Wiesel, a vapid anti-Palestinian racist who justified Israeli crimes in the name of the Holocaust until the end of his life, insisted that those who did not support Israel's multiple invasions in 1967 of Arab countries, or those who resisted Israel and fought against it to restore their rights, are enemies of the Jewish people in its entirety: "American Jews," he averred, "now understand that [Egyptian President] Nasser's war is not directed solely against the Jewish state, but against the Jewish people".

In 1973, when Egypt and Syria invaded their own territories to liberate them from Israeli occupation, Wiesel wrote of being for the first time in his adult life "afraid that the nightmare may start all over again". For Jews, he said, "the world has remained unchanged...indifferent to our fate".

American Rabbi Irving Greenberg, who later served as the director of the President's Commission on the Holocaust, believed that God himself supported Israel in the 1967 war because of his love for the Jewish people, and to make up for why he failed to defend the Jews against Hitler. Greenberg asserted: "In Europe [God] had failed to do His task...the failure to come through in June [1967] would have been an even more decisive destruction of the covenant."

Whereas Hitler's genocide helped transform the majority of world Jewry from anti-Zionists to pro-Zionists, Israel's constant invocation of the Holocaust as what awaits Jews if they failed to support Zionism and Israel ensured ongoing Jewish support for it. But what Israel did not realise is that its weaponisation of genocide could one day work against it.

This possibility began to be apparent during Israel's massive 1982 invasion of Lebanon, during which several countries accused it of committing genocide against the Palestinian and Lebanese peoples.

Also, in the wake of the Sabra and Shatila massacres in September 1982, the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution condemning the massacres as "an act of genocide", with an overwhelming 123 countries voting for the resolution with 22 abstentions and none opposing it.

At the time, the Soviet Union and other European and Latin American countries declared: "The word for what Israel is doing on Lebanese soil is genocide. Its purpose is to destroy the Palestinians as a nation."

In light of such savagery, many American and European Jews began to distance themselves from Israel and its Zionist ideology. The irony of supporting Israeli genocide for a people who had been themselves subjected to genocide was too much to bear.

As Israeli apartheid and settler-colonialism intensified in the next four decades, so did American and European Jewish opposition to Israel, which perceived what Israel was doing as "genocide".

A survey conducted by the Jewish Electorate Institute in June and July 2021 found that 22 percent of US Jews believed that Israel was "committing genocide against the Palestinians," 25 percent agreed that "Israel is an apartheid state", and 34 percent believed that "Israel's treatment of the Palestinians is similar to racism in the US".

Of those under 40 years old, 33 percent believed that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians. These numbers were collated two years before the current genocide began.

This anti-Zionist attitude, which has increased in number and intensity since then, has also been adopted by many British, French, and German Jews.

That the International Court of Justice has endorsed the accusation of Israel as perpetrating a genocide eliminated any remaining doubts in the eyes of many. It is precisely the question of genocide that has mobilised these Jews to oppose Israel.

'Another Holocaust'

Given Israel's ongoing weaponisation of the Holocaust as a justification for it to commit genocide against the Palestinian people, it was hardly arbitrary or surprising that the Israelis and their western allies proclaimed that the Palestinian resistance operation of 7 October killed the largest number of Jews since the Holocaust, as if the Palestinians targeted Israeli Jews for being Jewish and not for being colonisers and occupiers of Palestinian land and oppressors of the Palestinian people.  

It is this key argument that continues to be repeated by Israel and its allies in defence of the ongoing Israeli genocide.

Israel insists that its leaders' calls for genocide against the Palestinian people are really in self-defence to prevent yet another genocide of the Jews

Israel understands very well that it is the genocide of European Jews that legitimised its establishment on the land of the Palestinians, and only the fear of another such genocide would justify and legitimise its actual genocide of Palestinians today.

Israeli propaganda, in fact, insists that it is the Palestinian and Arab resistance, with Iran's support, that wants to commit genocide against Israeli Jews.

It further claims that the aim of al-Aqsa Flood Operation was not for Palestinians, who had been incarcerated since 2005 in the Gaza concentration camp, to break out of their prison by attacking their prison guards, but rather to launch a war that would annihilate the Jewish people.

It is based on these Israeli fabrications that Israel insists that its leaders' and media's calls for genocide against the Palestinian people are really in self-defence to prevent yet another genocide of the Jews.

According to this logic, it turns out then that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians in order to prevent another genocide against the Jews. Committing genocide is, therefore, the only way to save Israel.

Despite their interminable repetition by western leaders and the western press, these arguments have not convinced all Jews of the necessity to support Israel in this war.  

Colonial genocide

Born of genocide, Israel and its propagandists believe that the weaponisation of the Holocaust should remain the guiding principle for justifying all of Israel's crimes.

This begins with its right to colonise the land of the Palestinians, expel the majority of the Palestinian people, and subject those under its yoke to the most sadistic forms of oppression, including apartheid and genocide, while allying itself with the German genocidaires who committed the very Judeocide that justifies Israel's existence in the eyes of many of Israel's supporters in the first place.

But that logic has now come to be used against Israel itself, threatening to undo the Jewish settler-colony. The legitimate fear that supporters of Israel are experiencing now is that genocide turned out to be a sword that cuts both ways. Just as its weaponisation has helped establish Israel and shield its crimes in the West from any condemnation, it could now bring about the end of its barbaric regime.

What this means is that committing a real genocide to prevent an imagined genocide is not an argument that sells easily, except among genocidal states like the United States, Germany, France, and Britain.

It is these countries whose own genocides have always been justified as necessary to prevent genocide of their own settlers. One need not go back to the white American settlers' slaughter of Native Americans to illustrate this.

Indeed, a short historical journey to World War Two, when the US committed nuclear genocide against Japan, demonstrates this very clearly. The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which killed upwards of 215,000 people, were justified then and continue to be defended today as having been necessary to prevent anywhere between half a million and tens of millions of American casualties.

Nazi Germany's genocide was also committed in the name of protecting the German people from annihilation and subjugation by an antisemitic imaginary "Jewish conspiracy". The genocide of native Australians was also seen as necessary to protect the white British colonists, as was the French genocide in Algeria necessary to defend France and its colonist pieds noirs.

For many of the Zionist faithful, Israel has finally come to be seen as a perpetrator of genocide and not as its victim

Israeli leaders are not reinventing the wheel with these arguments, but rather are part of a long chain of settler-colonies and colonial mother countries who have always deployed them to justify their genocides.

The difference is that Israel has weaponised the Nazi Holocaust of Jews to such an extent on a global scale, and claimed its existence as a reparation for it, that it can only be judged based on its relationship to genocide.

That the Zionist project was only able to garner the support of most Jews in the time of genocide attests to this organic relationship between Israel and genocide in the view of most of the country's supporters and detractors.

Israeli leaders and its media's ongoing calls for the genocidal annihilation of the Palestinian people during the past year have changed the nature of this relationship. For many of the Zionist faithful, Israel has finally come to be seen as a perpetrator of genocide and not as its victim.

Moreover, Israel's rationale that it has the right to commit genocide, expand its territory, and remake the Arab world around it into a "New Middle East", as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu averred recently at the United Nations, reminds many in the West - Jews and gentiles alike - of past genocidal regimes that always had to be opposed and resisted.

Joseph Massad is professor of modern Arab politics and intellectual history at Columbia University, New York. He is the author of many books and academic and journalistic articles. His books include Colonial Effects: The Making of National Identity in Jordan; Desiring Arabs; The Persistence of the Palestinian Question: Essays on Zionism and the Palestinians, and most recently Islam in Liberalism. His books and articles have been translated into a dozen languages.