Holocaust memory in pro-Palestinian activism

Critical scholarship on the invocation of Holocaust memory and the concept of "Never again" in debates over Israeli violations of Palestinian rights argues that both should lead to universal opposition to all forms of genocide and mass violence, rather than being instrumentalized to justify or shield Israeli state actions from criticism. Historian Raz Segal, in a 2024 Dvar Torah (Biblical reflection) for the Kol Tzedek Reconstructionist synagogue, framed the Holocaust as a manifestation of a world dominated by nationalism and colonialism, which continue to generate mass violence. Drawing on survivor testimony and family history, he insisted that the ethical lesson of the Holocaust must be universal rather than particularistic, extending to all victims of state violence and exclusion, including non-Jews. His reading of survivor Miriam Shavit's description of the massacre of Greek civilians as "our black Yom Kippur" underscored a moral framework in which violence against others is understood as an assault on shared, multiethnic societies, challenging any interpretation of "Never Again" that applies only to Jews while tolerating the suffering of others.^[8]

Political scientist Zahi Zalloua criticizes what he calls "paradigms of trauma" that treat events like the Holocaust as unique and incomparable exceptions.^[9]: 1 He argues that such frameworks encourage identity politics and block cross‑comparative histories, while also undermining solidarity movements such as those for Palestinian rights^[9]: 2. Drawing on Frantz Fanon, Zalloua calls for "de‑exceptionalizing the victim" as a political imperative, rejecting both liberal empathy that elevates only certain suffering and the ranking of victimhood^[9]: 13. He cites Holocaust historian Omer Bartov, who argues that "Never again, now" should be understood as "a universalist plea for the Global North to reckon with its colonial history and support of Israel's domination of the Indigenous Palestinian population. It is an injunction against the reduction of any living beings to bare life, to horizonless futures".^[9]: 9 He has also noted that pro-Palestinian activists, including Holocaust survivors and descendants, invoke "Never again" as a universal principle 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 ^[10]

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."^[11]

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.^[12]

Marianne Hirsch writes that we must continue to teach and study the Holocaust in order to practice an ethos of "never again" for everyone. She critiques the ways in which "we now see 'never again' serving as a uniquely ethnonationalist Israeli reaction formation to October 7 that fuels defensiveness and disavowal, paranoia, and renewed cycles of violence."^[13]

Scholars have analyzed how Holocaust memory has been mobilized in relation to Israeli policies toward Palestinians. Sociologist Zygmunt Bauman argued in an essay published in 2000 that Holocaust memory can be transformed into inherited moral capital and warns that this framework can shift Holocaust lessons away from universal ethics toward a politics of permanent self-defense, potentially justifying domination over others.^[14] Raz Segal explicitly critiques how Holocaust memory, when nationalized, can become what he terms "settler memory," enabling what he describes as the suppression of Palestinian voices while framing criticism of Israeli state violence as antisemitic.^[8]

Political analyst and journalist Hasan Afif El-Hasan argued in 2010 that sympathy generated by Holocaust atrocities reinforced Western political and media support for Israel, and contends that connections drawn between Holocaust memory and the legitimacy of the Israeli state have contributed to reluctance in Western discourse to criticize Israeli policies regarding military occupation and settlement expansion.^[15] El-Hasan also documented opposition from within Israeli society itself, 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.^[15]

Rabbi and historian Seth Farber has documented how some critics^[who?] argue that Holocaust memory has been used to construct a narrative that discourages acknowledgment of Palestinian suffering within mainstream Jewish discourse.^[16]

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.^[17]

Historian Ussama Makdisi says that what he calls the "Palestine exception" rests on Holocaust memory overriding Palestinian history. Under this framework, Palestinians are not seen as victims worthy of commemoration but are framed as "anachronistic antisemites". Makdisi traces this dynamic to the aftermath of World War II, when Western liberalism embraced a post‑Holocaust piety and presented Israel's creation as a method of atonement for Western antisemitism. Makdisi contends that Holocaust memorials participate in this erasure by systematically silencing Palestinian indigenous history and justifying Israeli violence against Palestinians by casting them as Nazis, and identifies what he calls the "antisemitism-Holocaust-Israel" narrative as a Eurocentric orthodoxy that dominates Western academia and public discourse. This renders Palestinian history and claims invisible, and reframes any Palestinian opposition to Zionism as a new, imported antisemitism rather than a response to settler colonialism. This narrative, Makdisi says, allows Israel to present itself as the ultimate victim even as it exercises overwhelming military power over Palestinians, and enables Western liberals' support for Zionism while they claim to have overcome their own racist past. Palestinians are thus constantly measured as lesser victims relative to those of the Holocaust, forced into an impossible position of atoning for Western antisemitism.^[4]

In a critical analysis of Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Raz Segal and Luigi Daniele say that Israel's impunity in international law corresponds to its exceptional status within these fields. Despite overwhelming evidence of Israeli mass violence and systematic violations of international law, they contend that scholars, programs, museums, and journals in the field have largely minimized, marginalized, or denied this reality.^[5]: 73 Segal and Daniele note that after October 7, 2023, over 150 Holocaust scholars issued a statement that detached the Hamas‑led attack from the broader history of Israel‑Palestine, instead framing it within Holocaust memory and claiming the attack evoked the methods of pogrom perpetrators that led to the Final Solution. The statement omitted any reference to Israeli state violence and, they argue, treats the legacy of the Holocaust as a justification for state violence rather than as a protection for groups facing it.^[5]: 75 They further describe this as a weaponization of Holocaust memory that inverts reality: a dispossessed and besieged people, living under decades of Israeli settler colonialism and military occupation, are cast as the worst perpetrators, while the settler colonial state armed with nuclear weapons and Western backing is positioned as the ultimate victim.^{[5]: 72, 75}

Citing historian Dirk Moses, Zahi Zalloua describes a German framework of Holocaust memory that treats the genocide of Jews as unique and unprecedented, declares Germany's special loyalty to Israel as a matter of state reason, and equates anti-Zionism with antisemitism. He argues that this framework provides a redemptive function for Germany and leaves no room for Palestinian concerns, automatically casting any political resistance to Israeli occupation as illegitimate violence. Zalloua says that within this context references to Holocaust are frequently used to deflect legitimate criticism of Israel, and accusations of antisemitism are often deployed to circumvent substantive debate, treating Zionism as an identity in need of protection rather than a political ideology open to scrutiny.^[9]: 3–5

Thompson and Tuzcu analyzed responses to the April 2024 Palestine Congress in Berlin as illustrating Germany's "racist and nationalist politics of singularity around the memory of the Holocaust" used to constrain Palestine solidarity activism, noting that authorities framed the event as threatening and deployed extensive police repression to shut it down.^[11]

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.^[6]

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.^[13]

Public figures and academics such as Jan Grabowski,^[1] Catherine Perez-Shakdam,^[18], members of the Parliament of the United Kingdom (in an Early day motion)^[19] and organizations such as the Anti-defamation League^[20] have condemned what they describe as the misuse of the Holocaust as a rhetorical device by anti-Zionists and others.^[21]

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.^[22] 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.^[2] 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.^[3]

• List of Jewish anti-Zionist organizations