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Holocaust memory in pro-Palestinian activism

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Descendants of Holocaust survivors demonstrating in London for Palestine, June 2025

Holocaust memory in pro-Palestinian activism is the invocation and critical analysis of Holocaust memory by activists and scholars to advocate for Palestinian rights and criticize Israeli policies.

Scholarship by, among others, Ussama Makdisi and Raz Segal has examined how Holocaust memory is mobilized to justify Israeli state violence and marginalize pro-Palestinian activism.[1][2] Scholars have also have analyzed how activists understand their position within broader debates about Holocaust memory, Jewish political identity, and the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.[3][4]

Critics of the approach have called it a misuse of the Holocaust as a rhetorical device and an appropriation of the Jewish experience.[5][6][7]

"Never again" and Holocaust memory

Political scientist Zahi Zalloua noted that pro-Palestinian activists, including Holocaust survivors and descendants, invoke "Never again" as a universal principle to argue that Holocaust memory obligates opposition to all forms of genocide, and they frame their activism as refusing the use of Holocaust memory to justify violence.[8]

Vanessa E. Thompson and Pinar Tuzcu, Queen's University at Kingston gender and sociology academics, note that in response to what they describe as the criminalization of Palestine solidarity in Germany, which they say reflects a nationalist and racist memory politics that treats the Holocaust as a singular event, activists have adopted a universal interpretation of "Never again" that applies to everyone, while adopting "a memory politics that articulates through present struggle and solidarity."[9]

According to Sim Kern, an environmental journalist, speculative fiction writer and activist, while Zionist narratives often frame the slogan as referring exclusively to Jewish security, anti-Zionist Jews (including Holocaust survivors and descendants of survivors) invoke Holocaust history as a universal moral principle opposing all forms of genocide.[10]

Holocaust comparisons

In 2019, then-Senator of Colombia and later President Gustavo Petro said that "Israel discriminates against Palestinians like the Nazis discriminated against Jews".[11] Within days of the October 7th attack, he compared Israel's response to the persecution of Jews by the Nazis.[12]

After the beginning of the Gaza war, journalist Masha Gessen wrote an essay on Holocaust memory in The New Yorker magazine in which they compared Gaza to Jewish ghettoes under the Nazis, and Israeli actions in the war to the liquidation of those ghettoes.[13] While Gessen carefully qualified the comparisons with “essential differences” between the Israeli state and the Nazis, they were aware that the comparison would still prove controversial, but viewed it as necessary.[14]

Holocaust denial

Efforts to reference the Holocaust in pro-Palestinian activism have operated alongside a pattern of Holocaust denial, which has become a feature of anti-Zionist activism worldwide.[15][16] Gilbert Achcar has noted that Holocaust denial in the West is used as a vehicle for antisemitism, while Holocaust denial in the Middle East has become an "anti-Zionism of fools," rather than genuine antisemitism.[17]

Holocaust memory and Israeli policy

Scholars have analyzed how Holocaust memory has been mobilized in relation to Israeli policies toward Palestinians.

In 2010, political analyst and journalist Hasan Afif El-Hasan documented opposition to Zionist memory politics from within Israeli society, citing historian and Holocaust survivor Zeev Sternhell, who publicly condemned Israeli settlements and opposed the occupation, presenting Sternhell's activism as an example of survivors invoking their historical experience to oppose policies they viewed as unjust. [18]

Revolutionary socialist John Rose in a 2004 book argued that Holocaust suffering was mobilized to morally legitimize the creation of Israel, and that this has risked insulating what he describes as colonial dispossession from critique.[19]

Critiques of Zionism and perceived instrumentalization of the Holocaust and antisemitism

Historian Ussama Makdisi argues that what he called the "Palestine exception" rests on Holocaust memory overriding Palestinian history. In his account, this framework recasts Palestinian opposition to Zionism as antisemitism rather than as a response to dispossession, allowing Israel to occupy the position of ultimate victim while Palestinian history and suffering are marginalized.[1]

Raz Segal and Luigi Daniele argue that Holocaust and Genocide Studies have frequently treated Israel as exceptional while marginalizing Israeli violence against Palestinians.[2]: 72–75 

Drawing on historian Dirk Moses's account of the German Holocaust-memory "catechism", Zahi Zalloua argues that a framework combining Germany's special loyalty to Israel with the equation of anti-Zionism and antisemitism uses Holocaust memory to shield Israel from scrutiny and casts political resistance to Israeli occupation as illegitimate violence.[20]: 3–5 

Thompson and Tuzcu similarly analyze the policing and shutdown of the April 2024 Palestine Congress in Berlin as an instance in which Holocaust memory politics were used to constrain Palestine-solidarity activism.[9]

Historian Maud Mandel has written about how Jewish radical left activists in postwar France, many of them descendants of Holocaust survivors or families that escaped Nazi persecution, interpreted the lessons of the Holocaust in universal rather than nationalist terms. Mandel notes that for these figures, opposing fascism and racism meant embracing internationalist and anti-colonial politics, leading many to reject Zionism and nationalism more broadly, particularly after 1967, when images of Israeli occupation conflicted with enduring memories of Jewish victimhood and resistance. She highlights figures such as Maxime Rodinson, a prominent critic of Zionism; Rabbi Emmanuel Lévyne, whose father was murdered in Auschwitz and who denounced what he termed the "Israelization" of French Jewish life; journalist Ania Francos, whose family was killed in the Holocaust and who supported Palestinian movements; and activists such as Patrick Rabiaz, who explicitly compared Zionist oppression of Palestinians to his family's suffering in Nazi concentration camps. Mandel situates these positions within a broader current on the Jewish left that viewed solidarity with Palestinians as a continuation of the moral and political commitments forged in the aftermath of the Holocaust.[3]

Marianne Hirsch, a scholar of transgenerational trauma, wrote that "After October 7, we are seeing how, at moments of crisis and danger, the phantom of the Holocaust can resurface to reactivate trauma in Jewish communities for those who were there. But we are also seeing how it activates inherited trauma for those who, decidedly, were not there", and references the works of Art Spiegelman (Maus) to explain the ways in which the traumas of the past can intermingle with the traumas of the present.[21]

Criticism

Public figures and academics such as Jan Grabowski,[5] Catherine Perez-Shakdam,[22] members of the Parliament of the United Kingdom (in an Early day motion),[23] and organizations such as the Anti-Defamation League[24] have condemned what they describe as the misuse of the Holocaust as a rhetorical device by anti-Zionists and others.[25]

Donna Robinson Divine, a professor of Jewish Studies at Smith College, describes the use of Holocaust memory in pro-Palestinian activism as a co-option of part of the modern Jewish experience.[26] Legal scholar Leslie Klaff considers using Holocaust memory in pro-Palestinian activism to be a "double inversion", both by casting Zionists as Nazis and by framing the Holocaust as a moral lesson for its victims. She describes this as a misuse of Holocaust memory with broad negative consequences.[6] Sociologist David Hirsh used what he said was an example of this rhetorical technique by former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as a sample of his Livingstone Formulation.[7]

See also

References

  1. 1 2 Makdisi, Ussama (2025-04-01). "Beyond the Palestine Exception". Critical Times. 8 (1): 1–2, 6–10, 12–13, 17. doi:10.1215/26410478-11626921. ISSN 2641-0478.
  2. 1 2 Segal, Raz; Daniele, Luigi (2026-01-02). "Gaza as Twilight of Israel Exceptionalism: Holocaust and Genocide Studies from Unprecedented Crisis to Unprecedented Change". Journal of Genocide Research. 28 (1): 69–78. doi:10.1080/14623528.2024.2325804. ISSN 1462-3528.
  3. 1 2 Mandel, Maud S. (2014-12-31). Muslims and Jews in France: History of a Conflict. Princeton University Press. pp. 107–108. doi:10.1515/9781400848584. ISBN 978-1-4008-4858-4.
  4. ↑ Kroll-Zeldin, Oren (2024-12-31). Unsettled: American Jews and the Movement for Justice in Palestine. New York University Press. pp. 92–93. doi:10.18574/nyu/9781479821440.001.0001. ISBN 978-1-4798-2144-0.
  5. 1 2 Grabowski, Jan (2024-06-21). "What Matters Now to Prof. Jan Grabowski: Appropriation of Holocaust terms in Gaza war". The Times of Israel. ISSN 0040-7909. Retrieved 2026-02-16.
  6. 1 2 Klaff, Lesley (6 October 2023). "Holocaust Inversion and Contemporary Antisemitism". In Johnson, Alan (ed.). Mapping the New Left Antisemitism (1st ed.). London: Routledge. pp. 141–144. doi:10.4324/9781003322320-20. ISBN 9781003322320.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: date and year (link)
  7. 1 2 Hirsh, David (2018). Contemporary left antisemitism. Abingdon, Oxon New York, NY: Routledge, an imprint of the Taylor & Francis group. ISBN 978-1-138-23530-4.
  8. ↑ Zalloua, Zahi (2024). The Politics of the Wretched: Race, Reason, and Ressentiment (1st ed.). London: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. pp. 129–133. ISBN 978-1-350-42286-5.
  9. 1 2 Thompson, Vanessa E.; Tuzcu, Pinar (2024-05-15). "Intervention — "Policing Palestine Solidarity: Moral Urban Panics and Authoritarian Specters in Germany"". Antipode Online. Retrieved 2026-05-05.
  10. ↑ Kern, Sim (2025-04-22). Genocide Bad: Notes on Palestine, Jewish History, and Collective Liberation. Simon and Schuster. ISBN 978-1-62371-121-4.
  11. ↑ TOI Staff and Agencies (21 June 2022). "Colombia's incoming president once compared Israel to Nazis". The Times of Israel. Retrieved 25 July 2026.
  12. ↑ AFP (9 October 2023). "Colombia President Gustavo Petro compares Gaza siege to 'Nazism'". Buenos Aires Times. Retrieved 25 July 2026.
  13. ↑ Treisman, Rachel; Fadel, Leila (22 December 2023). "Despite backlash, Masha Gessen says comparing Gaza to a Nazi-era ghetto is necessary". NPR. Retrieved 20 July 2026.
  14. ↑ Mchugh, Calder (16 December 2023). "Masha Gessen Kicks the Hornet's Nest on Israel and the Holocaust". Politico. Retrieved 20 July 2026.
  15. ↑ Addressing Holocaust Denial, Distortion and Trivialization, p. 5. Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights. Accessed July 30, 2026. "It can be motivated by hatred of Jews or victimhood competition, and builds on the claim that the Holocaust was invented or exaggerated by Jews as part of a plot to advance Jewish interests. There are conspiracy theories circulating that claim that the 'hoax' of the Holocaust was created to benefit or advance the interests of the state of Israel, an idea often instrumentalized within anti-Zionist discourse. Holocaust deniers depend on, and reinforce, anti-Semitic ideas."
  16. ↑ Special Envoy Germain Interview with Sebastian Engelbrecht of Deutschlandfunk (DLF), Office of the Special Envoy for Holocaust Issues, May 10, 2026. Accessed July 30, 2026.
  17. ↑ Achcar, Gilbert. "Assessing Holocaust Denial in Western and Arab Contexts", Journal of Palestine Studies, Volume 41, 2011, published December 21, 2020. Accessed July 30, 2026. "Thus, while Western Holocaust denial is as dangerous to Jews as any other form of anti-Semitic propaganda aimed at reviving mass anti-Semitism in the West, Holocaust denial in the Middle East is above all counterproductive. In brief, Holocaust denial in the Middle East is most often an 'anti-Zionism of fools' rather than an attitude stemming from true anti-Semitism. This does not mean that it should not be vigorously denounced and combated."
  18. ↑ El-Hasan, Hasan Afif (2010). Israel or Palestine? Is the Two-State Solution Already Dead?. Algora Publishing. p. 221. ISBN 9780875867939.
  19. ↑ Rose, John (2004). The Myths of Zionism. Pluto Press. pp. 149–152. ISBN 0745320554.
  20. ↑ Zalloua, Zahi (2024-03-12). "Against Exceptionalism". Humanities. 13 (2): 50. doi:10.3390/h13020050. ISSN 2076-0787.
  21. ↑ Hirsch, Marianne (2024-07-15). "Rethinking Holocaust Memory after October 7". Public Books. Retrieved 2026-05-05.
  22. ↑ Perez-Shakdam, Catherine. "The Blogs: When Memory Is Weaponised: The Shame of Appropriating Jewish Suffering". Retrieved 2026-02-16.
  23. ↑ "Antisemitism and Holocaust inversion - Early Day Motions - UK Parliament". edm.parliament.uk. Retrieved 2026-05-05.
  24. ↑ "ADL slams Gaza-Holocaust comparison". The Times of Israel. 2014-07-13. ISSN 0040-7909. Retrieved 2026-05-05.
  25. ↑ Zelkha, Maia. "The Blogs: When the Holocaust is evoked for everything – except Jewish suffering". Retrieved 2026-02-16.
  26. ↑ Divine (2019). "Word Crimes: Reclaiming The Language of The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict". Israel Studies. 24 (2): 1. doi:10.2979/israelstudies.24.2.01.
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