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The Holocaust and theNakba have been studied as interrelated events in discussions of theIsraeli–Palestinian conflict, both historically and in the way these two events have influenced perceptions of the conflict by both parties.[1]
According to a book by Grace Wermenbol,Israeli Jews see themselves asHolocaust survivors and emphasize theuniqueness of the Holocaust, often rejecting any linkage between it and the Nakba. Meanwhile, somePalestinians protest against perceived elevation of Jewish suffering over their own.[2][3]
Prior tothe Holocaust, someZionists opposed the founding of an ethnocentric Jewish state, but their view changed during the 1940s, when they became aware of the scale of the damage which was done to theJewish culture andreligion during the Holocaust.[4]David Ben-Gurion changed his view of Arab self-determination, deciding that it could not be allowed in a Jewish state.[5] In one of his speeches in which he addressed theBiltmore Program, he stated that after the Holocaust, "do we not have the right this time to demand rectification for our historical indignity, for the discrimination that all the nations have committed against us, and to demand that they give us the same status as all the other nations?"[6] In 1947 and 1948, 700,000 Palestinians—80 percent of the territory's Arab population—fled or were expelled from the territory that became Israel.[7][8] Both during the Holocaust and the Nakba, there was large-scale looting of the property of the victims.[9]
In 1949, Polish–Jewish Holocaust survivors Genya and Henryk Kowalski arrived in Israel. They were offered a formerly Palestinian house inJaffa, but they refused to move into it. Genya Kowalski later explained, "it reminded us how we had to leave the house and everything behind when the Germans arrived and threw us into theghetto... I did not want to do the same thing that the Germans did."[10] Their decision to refuse looted Palestinian property was exceptional.[11]
In discussions about theIsraeli–Palestinian conflict, the Holocaust and the Nakba have been regarded[by whom?] as interrelated events, both historically and currently, because of the way in which these two tragedies have influenced both parties' perceptions of the conflict.[1]Omer Bartov says "the Holocaust and the Nakba were both parallel and irreconcilable events."[12] However, in contrast to the Holocaust, which demonstrably ended, the Nakba is considered in some conceptual frameworks to bestill ongoing.[13]
The Holocaust is a universalized memory inWestern culture and has tended to block out the memory of the Nakba.[14][15] According to Nina Fischer, both events "function as cultural traumas and are central to thecollective memory and identity of the two peoples".[8] Both the Hebrew word for the Holocaust,HaShoah, and the Arabical-Nakba, translate as "the catastrophe".[16]
According to Zionist historiography, the formation of the State of Israel in 1948 was the "culmination of the long Jewish quest for rights and justice".[17] Israeli historianBenny Morris argues that the Zionist fighters were motivated by the Holocaust, among other factors.[18] The Israeli view of the1948 Arab–Israeli war holds that Israel had "no alternative" in the war and fought withpurity of arms.[19] The mainstream view in Israel is that Arabs left the country voluntarily in response to calls from the Arab leadership, though this view has been challenged by Israeli scholars such as theNew Historians; some interpret it as an ethnic cleansing, while others have described it as a forced migration.[20] These views have become more accepted by the Israeli public over time, though during periods of political upheaval they are often rejected and subject to "officially instigated attacks."[20]
HistorianAlon Confino writes that "The attempt to erase the memory of the Nakba in Israeli Jewish society has itself been an active social force, a result of enormous mobilization of political, economic, and cultural effort, from the physical destruction of Arab villages to the symbolic silence of memory in history books and public expressions."[21] Confino states that a lesser form ofNakba denial acknowledges that a tragedy occurred while denying Zionist responsibility for it, while a more extreme version proclaims the Nakba to be a myth and "a collection of tall tales", as a publication byIm Tirzu phrased it.[22] Confino writes of such denialism that "the Nakba is called into being, just as the Holocaust is called into being in the words of its deniers."[21]
Portrayal of Arabs as Nazis is common in the discourse of the Arab–Israeli conflict,[23][24] as is depicting Palestiniananti-Zionism as motivated by antisemitism.[25] According to Joseph A. Massad, "Israel's insistence on its vulnerability reflected a conscious strategy".[23] The1961 trial of Holocaust perpetratorAdolf Eichmann was an opportunity to connect Arabs to Nazis.[25] The descriptive Nazification of thePalestinian people was a hallmark of the policy ofMenachem Begin'sLikud Party.[26] In 2015, Israeli Prime MinisterBenjamin Netanyahu falsely accused the PalestinianAmin al-Husseini of inspiring the Holocaust.[27] His comments were criticized in Israel.[28]
Many Israelis argue that the Holocaust and the Nakba cannot be compared.[23] According to Shira Stav, one flaw with Israeli representations that attempt to bridge this gap is the absence of Palestinian voices and the tendency to present Israeli soldiers as traumatized victims.[29] According to a paper by Israeli Holocaust, conflict and peace researcherDan Bar-On andRutgers professor Saliba Sarsar, it was only at the turn of the 21st century that Israeli Jewish and Palestinian intellectuals "found the courage" to bridge the gap, conceptually, between the Holocaust and the Nakba.[30] On the Israeli Jewish side, Bar-On and Sarsar cite Ilan Gur-Zeev andIlan Pappé's 2003 paperBeyond the Destruction of the Other's Collective Memory: Blueprints for a Palestinian-Israeli Dialogue as an early call for the Holocaust and the Nakba "to be examined within a mutual context", that highlighted, without claiming equivalence, "the thread that ties them to the collective psyche of both people".[30]
After the 1952Reparations Agreement with Germany,Moshe Sharett suggested paying some of the reparations money toPalestinian refugees. This was rejected because it would have meant linking the Holocaust and the Nakba.[31][32]Ian S. Lustick argues that the Reparations Agreement could serve as a model for a future Israeli–Palestinian peace deal. Lustick argues additionally that "if reconciliation has been possible between Israel and Germany, it cannot be said to be impossible for Israel and Palestine".[33]
Germany's criticism in the 1970s of Israel's unilateral border changes andsettlement policies in thePalestinian territories it had occupied, influenced in part, it has been argued[by whom?], theDe facto annexation of Jerusalem in July 1980 with theJerusalem Law. This may also have been a response to theVenice Declaration a month earlier, in June, when theEuropean Economic Community recognized the right of Palestinians toself-determination and to participate in peace negotiations. A harsh official Israeli communiqué branded the latter as asecond Munich (where European powers acknowledged theGerman Annexation ofSudetenland): Palestinians were framed as regenerated Nazis and Europeans favorable to their cause likened toNeville Chamberlain.[26] WhenWest Germany eventually moved towards recognition of thePLO and thePalestinian right to self-determination in the 1980s, Israel retaliated by again bringing up the Nazi past.[34]
Daniel Marwecki argues that in the twenty-first century, the German "Staatsräson means viewing the Israel-Palestine conflict through the lens of German Holocaust memory", but the majority of Germans do not share this perspective.[35][36]
In contrast, Palestinian writers draw a direct connection from the Holocaust to the Nakba and see themselves as the final victim of the Nazis.[19]On the Palestinian side, Bar-On and Sarsar creditAzmi Bishara (1996),Edward Said (1997) andNaim Ateek (2001) as early pioneers of the notion of connecting Palestinian acknowledgement of the Holocaust to Israeli Jewish recognition of the Nakba. In his 1992 workBetween Place and Space, Bishara is quoted as arguing: "In order for the victim to forgive, he must be recognized as a victim. That is the difference between a historic compromise and a cease-fire."[30] In an essay, Said criticized the use of comparisons between the two events as a means of delegitimizing the other side or justifying present-day violence and oppression.[37] He stated that connecting the Holocaust to the Nakba was "understanding what is universal about a human experience under calamitous conditions. It means compassion, human sympathy, and utter recoil from the notion of killing people for ethnic, religious, or nationalist reasons".[38]
One response among Palestinians and the Arab world to the Western view of the Holocaust as the ultimate evil isHolocaust denial. According to Israeli sociologistSammy Smooha, Holocaust denial by Palestinians is a kind of protest "to express strong objection to the portrayal of the Jews as the ultimate victim and to the underrating of the Palestinians as a victim".[39] According toGilbert Achcar, Israel especially and other Western countries to a lesser extent underestimate Arab expressions of sympathy for Holocaust victims.[39]
Hannah Arendt wrote that the formation of Israel solved the Jewish question in Europe, but "merely produced a new category of refugees, the Arabs, thereby increasing the number of stateless stateless and rightless by another 700,000 to 800,000 people."[40] She criticized the way that Jewish historians had portrayed Jews "not [as] history-makers but history-sufferers, preserving a kind of eternal identity of goodness whose monotony was disturbed only by the equally monotonous chronicle of persecutions and pogroms". In Shira Stav's view, this perception of Jewish history allowed the Holocaust and the Arab–Israeli conflict to be presented as parts of a continuum of persecution of Jews.[41]
Historian K. M. Fierke has pointed out that both the Hebrew word for the Holocaust,HaShoah, and the Arabical-Nakba, translate to "the catastrophe".[16]
In his 2021 bookThe Problems of Genocide,A. Dirk Moses argues thatRaphael Lemkin, who coined the termgenocide and who supported Zionism,[42] likely considered the Nakba justified in line with mainstream Zionist views. Although Lemkin championed the independence of "small nations", especially the Jews, he did not believe in granting independence to groups, such as Palestinian Arabs, that he thought were not sufficiently developed to qualify as nations.[42] Moses also says that that the universalization of the Holocaust in the definition of genocide has served to exclude other acts—including the Nakba—from moral opprobrium. Moses writes, "Today, this regime ascribes Palestinians the role of the villains in a global drama about preventing genocide and a 'second Holocaust' for resisting colonization of and expulsion from their land."[43]
Fierke and Moses have argued that as the Holocaust is a universalized memory[clarification needed] inWestern culture, it has tended to block out the memory of the Nakba.[14]
Some scholars such as Moses and historianDonald Bloxham have criticized the perceiveduniqueness of the Holocaust, and instead view it and the Nakba as part of broader trends ofsettler colonialism andethnic nationalism leading to genocide and ethnic cleansing in the European rimlands.[44] Bartov writes that various competing nationalisms in east-central Europe excluded Jews. Their negative treatment by non-Jewish neighbors during and after the Holocaust "by all accounts... rendered many of them indifferent and callous and at times vengeful toward the Arab population they encountered in Palestine".[45]
The 2018 book byJacqueline Rose,The Holocaust and the Nakba, argues that "unless we can hold these two moments in our hearts and minds as part of the same story, there can be no moving forward in the seemingly unmovable conflict that is Israel-Palestine".[3]
According to Bashir Bashir andAmos Goldberg "a joint Arab-Jewish public deliberation on the traumatic memories of these two events is not only possible, however challenging and disruptive it may be, but also fundamental for producing an egalitarian and inclusive ethics of binationalism in Israel/Palestine".[46]
Elias Khoury states that "The Holocaust and the Nakba are not mirror images, but the Jew and the Palestinian are able to become mirror images of human suffering if they disabuse themselves of the delusion of exclusionist, national ideologies." He views setting aside these ideologies as part of a universal struggle against racism.[47]
In his 1949 novellaHirbet Hiz'ah,S. Yizhar dealt with the expulsion of Palestinians by Israeli forces. The narrator compared the plight of Palestinian refugees to that of Jewish refugees.[48] In an interview, Yizhar explained that the action of expelling Palestinians contradicted his earlier beliefs about what Zionism would be.[49]
In 1952,Avot Yeshurun published the poem "Passover on Caves" inHaaretz. He later explained, "The Holocaust of European Jewry and the Holocaust of Palestinian Arabs, a single Holocaust of the Jewish People. The two gaze directly into one another's face."[50]
In 1969 the Palestinian novelist and militantGhassan Kanafani published a novel,Return to Haifa, in which a Palestinian couple fled Haifa during the Nakba, returned to their home city, and encountered a Jewish couple – the husband is a Holocaust survivor, who, on finding their empty home, occupied it and raised the young boy they found there as a Jew. This son of the Palestinian couple, Dov, is engaged in military service with theIDF, while their other son in Ramallah has joined thePLO'sfedayeen. The novel explores the tensions that arise from the interactions of these two families.[51]
Palestinian-American writerSusan Abulhawa's bestselling novelMornings in Jenin (2010) tells the story of a Palestinian family from the 1930s until 2002. Although the book portrays anti-Arab racism and settler colonialism, the novel's protagonists are Jewish Holocaust survivors.[52] Nina Fischer, writing about the novel, noted that the Holocaust and the Nakba both "function as cultural traumas and are central to thecollective memory and identity of the two peoples".[8]
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