Historiography on the two events
The
Holocaust
and the
Nakba
have come to be regarded as interrelated events in discussions of the
Israeli?Palestinian conflict
. Both historically and in the way these two tragedies have influenced perceptions of the conflict by both parties.
In
Israel
, all
Israeli Jews
are considered survivors of the Holocaust who must implement the imperative of
never again
in regards to being a Jewish victim.
The
uniqueness of the Holocaust
is emphasized and any linkage between the Holocaust and the Nakba is rejected.
The 2018 book
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".
Historical relationship
[
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Prior to
the Holocaust
, some
Zionists
had opposed the founding of an ethnocentric Jewish state, but their view changed during the 1940s, when Jews and Zionists began to become aware of the scale of the damage which was done to the
Jewish culture
and
religion
during the Holocaust.
David Ben-Gurion
changed his view of Arab self-determination, deciding that it could not be allowed in a Jewish state.
In one of his speeches in which he addressed the
Biltmore 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?"
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.
Both during the Holocaust and the Nakba, there was large-scale looting of the property of the victims.
In 1949, Polish?Jewish Holocaust survivors Genya and Henryk Kowalski arrived in Israel. They were offered a formerly Palestinian house in
Jaffa
, 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 the
ghetto
... I did not want to do the same thing that the Germans did."
Their decision to refuse looted Palestinian property was exceptional.
In discussions about the
Israeli?Palestinian conflict
, the Holocaust and the Nakba have come to be regarded as interrelated events, both historically and currently, because of the way in which these two tragedies have influenced both parties' perceptions of the Israeli?Palestinian conflict.
Omer Bartov
says "the Holocaust and the Nakba were both parallel and irreconcilable events."
However, in contrast to the Holocaust, which demonstrably ended, the Nakba is considered in some conceptual frameworks to be
still ongoing
.
Historiography
[
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]
The Holocaust is a universalized memory in
Western culture
and has tended to block out the memory of the Nakba.
According to Nina Fischer, both events "function as cultural traumas and are central to the
collective memory
and identity of the two peoples".
Both the Hebrew word for the Holocaust,
HaShoah
, and the Arabic Al-Nakba, translate as "the catastrophe".
Israel
[
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]
In
Israel
, all
Israeli Jews
are considered survivors of the Holocaust who must implement the imperative of
never again
in regards to being a Jewish victim.
The
uniqueness of the Holocaust
is emphasized, non-Jewish victims of
Nazi Germany
are sidelined, and any linkage between the Holocaust and the Nakba is rejected.
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".
Israeli historian
Benny Morris
argues that the Zionist fighters were motivated by the Holocaust, among other factors.
The Israeli view of the
1948 Arab?Israeli war
holds that Israel had "no alternative" in the war and fought with
purity of arms
.
The mainstream view in Israel is that Arabs left the country voluntarily in response to calls from the Arab leadership, although in the 21st century more diverse views have been expressed.
The Israeli state has made an effort to erase the memory of the Nakba, destroying Palestinian villages and avoiding mentioning the issue in history books. While some Israelis acknowledge a tragedy while denying Zionist responsibility for it, others proclaim the Nakba a myth and "a collection of tall tales".
Portrayal of Arabs as Nazis is common in the discourse of the Arab?Israeli conflict,
as is depicting Palestinian
anti-Zionism
as motivated by antisemitism.
According to Joseph A. Massad, "Israel's insistence on its vulnerability reflected a conscious strategy".
The
1961 trial
of Holocaust perpetrator
Adolf Eichmann
was an opportunity to connect Arabs to Nazis.
The descriptive Nazification of the
Palestinian people
was a hallmark of the policy of
Menachem Begin
's
Likud Party
.
The height of this phenomenon occurred in 2015 when Israeli Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu
falsely accused the Palestinian
Amin al-Husseini
of starting the Holocaust.
Many Israelis argue that the Holocaust and the Nakba cannot be compared.
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.
According to a paper by Israeli Holocaust, conflict and peace researcher
Dan Bar-On
and
Rutgers
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.
On the Israeli Jewish side, Bar-On and Sarsar cite Ilan Gur-Zeev and
Ilan Pappe
's 2003 paper
Beyond 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".
Germany
[
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]
After the 1952
Reparations Agreement
with Germany,
Moshe Sharett
suggested paying some of the reparations money to
Palestinian refugees
. This was rejected because it would have meant linking the Holocaust and the Nakba.
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".
Germany's criticism in the 1970s of Israel's unilateral border changes and
settlement policies
in the
Palestinian territories
it had occupied, influenced in part, it has been argued, the
De facto annexation of Jerusalem
in July 1980 with the
Jerusalem Law
. This may also have been a response to the
Venice Declaration
a month earlier, in June, when the
European Economic Community
recognized the right of Palestinians to
self-determination
and to participate in peace negotiations. A harsh official Israeli communique branded the latter as a
second Munich
(where European powers acknowledged the
German Annexation
of
Sudetenland
): Palestinians were framed as regenerated Nazis and Europeans favorable to their cause likened to
Neville Chamberlain
.
When
West Germany
eventually moved towards recognition of the
PLO
and the
Palestinian right to self-determination
in the 1980s, Israel retaliated by again bringing up the Nazi past.
Daniel Marwecki argues that in the twenty-first century, the German "
Staatsrason
means viewing the Israel-Palestine conflict through the lens of German Holocaust memory", but the majority of Germans do not share this perspective.
Palestine
[
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]
In contrast, Palestinian writers draw a direct connection from the Holocaust to the Nakba and see themselves as the ultimate victim of the Nazis.
On the Palestinian side, Bar-On and Sarsar credit
Azmi Bishara
(1996),
Edward Said
(1997) and
Naim 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 work
Between 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."
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.
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".
One response in Palestine and the Arab world to the Western view of the Holocaust as the ultimate evil is
Holocaust denial
. According to Israeli sociologist
Sammy 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".
According to
Gilbert Achcar
, Israel especially and other Western countries to a lesser extent underestimate Arab expressions of sympathy for Holocaust victims.
International perspectives
[
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]
Raphael Lemkin
, the inventor of the concept of genocide, supported Zionism and likely considered the Nakba justified in line with mainstream Zionist views. Although he championed the independence of "small nations", especially the Jews, Lemkin did not believe in granting independence to groups, such as Palestinian Arabs, that he thought were not sufficiently developed to qualify as nations.
In his 2021 book
The Problems of Genocide
, historian
A. Dirk Moses
argues 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."
Some historians such as Moses and
Donald Bloxham
have criticized the perceived
uniqueness of the Holocaust
, and instead view it and the Nakba as part of broader trends of
settler colonialism
and
ethnic nationalism
leading to genocide and ethnic cleansing in the European rimlands.
There is a general consensus that colonialism is a valuable frame of analysis for Nazism and the Holocaust.
Historian
Omer 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".
Literature
[
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]
Some Israeli?Jewish writers have addressed both the Holocaust and Nakba in their work. As early as 1949, in his novella
Hirbet Hiz'ah
,
S. Yizhar
dealt with the expulsion of Palestinians by Israeli forces, the narrator directly comparing the plight of Palestinian refugees to that of Jewish refugees.
In an interview, Yizhar explained that the action of expelling Palestinians contradicted his earlier beliefs about what Zionism would be.
In a letter, Israeli minister of agriculture
Aharon Zisling
expressed his revulsion at the
al-Dawayima massacre
, stating: "Nazi acts have been committed by Jews as well".
In 1952,
Avot Yeshurun
published the poem "Passover on Caves" in
Haaretz
, he later explained the poem: "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."
These few dissenting responses came soon after the Nakba, when the Holocaust was also a recent event.
In 1969 the Palestinian novelist
Ghassan Kanafani
published a novel,
Return to Haifa
, in which a Palestinian couple who had fled Haifa during the Nakba, return to their home city, and encounter 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 the
IDF
, while their other son in Ramallah has joined the
PLO
's
fedayeen
. The novel explores the tensions that arise from the interactions of these two traumatically displaced families.
Lebanese novelist
Elias Khoury
's
epic novel
Bab Al-Shams
(Gate of the Sun), originally published in 1998, tells the history of Palestine.
Palestinian-American writer
Susan Abulhawa
's bestselling novel
Mornings in Jenin
(2010) covers the history of a Palestinian family from the 1930s until 2002. Although the book portrays anti-Arab racism and settler colonialism, it also engages with the Holocaust.
The novel's protagonists are a Jewish couple who are Holocaust survivors and a Palestinian couple displaced by the Nakba. The latter have one child, David, who is separated from his parents and adopted by the Jewish couple who are infertile. David later fights against his younger Palestinian brothers after the 1967 war during the
Israeli occupation of the West Bank
. By the third generation, the families achieve reconciliation with some of them living together in the United States.
The
Warsaw Ghetto boy
, an iconic image of the Holocaust, has been used in comparisons with the Israeli?Palestinian conflict, especially in the award-winning film
Waltz with Bashir
.
The 2018 book
The Holocaust and the Nakba
makes the case 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".
Consequences
[
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]
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".
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 her 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.
According to Bashir Bashir and Amos 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".
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.
See also
[
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]
Citations
[
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]
Sources
[
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]
- Bar-On, Dan
; Sarsar, Saliba (2004).
"Bridging the Unbridgeable: The Holocaust and Al-Nakba"
.
Palestine ? Israel Journal of Politics, Economics, and Culture
.
11
(1): 63?70.
ProQuest
235716101
.
- Bartov, Omer
(2019). "The Return of the Displaced: Ironies of the Jewish-Palestinian Nexus, 1939?49".
Jewish Social Studies
.
24
(3): 26.
doi
:
10.2979/jewisocistud.24.3.02
.
S2CID
195481842
.
- Bartov, Omer (2023).
Genocide, the Holocaust, and Israel-Palestine
. Bloomsbury Publishing.
ISBN
978-1-3503-3234-8
.
- Bashir, Bashir; Goldberg, Amos (2014). "Deliberating the Holocaust and the Nakba: disruptive empathy and binationalism in Israel/Palestine".
Journal of Genocide Research
.
16
(1): 77?99.
doi
:
10.1080/14623528.2014.878114
.
S2CID
145797342
.
- Bergen, Doris L.; Eley, Geoff; Jockusch, Laura; Ther, Philipp; Tusan, Michelle; Beck, Teresa Koloma; Bashir, Bashir; Goldberg, Amos (2021).
"Bashir Bashir and Amos Goldberg, eds., The Holocaust and the Nakba: A New Grammar of Trauma and History"
.
Central European History
.
54
(1): 112?179.
doi
:
10.1017/S0008938921000078
.
S2CID
230992456
.
- Confino, Alon
(2018). "When Genya and Henryk Kowalski Challenged History?Jaffa, 1949: Between the Holocaust and the Nakba".
The Holocaust and the Nakba
. Columbia University Press.
ISBN
978-0-231-54448-1
.
- Fierke, K.M. (2014). "Who is my neighbour? Memories of the Holocaust/ al Nakba and a global ethic of care".
European Journal of International Relations
.
20
(3): 787?809.
doi
:
10.1177/1354066113497490
.
S2CID
146188931
.
- Fischer, Nina (2020). "Entangled suffering and disruptive empathy: The Holocaust, the Nakba and the Israeli?Palestinian conflict in Susan Abulhawa's Mornings in Jenin".
Memory Studies
.
15
(4): 695?712.
doi
:
10.1177/1750698019896850
.
S2CID
214281392
.
- Ghanim, Honaida (2019). "When Yaffa Met (J)Yaffa: Intersections Between the Holocaust and the Nakba in the Shadow of Zionism".
The Holocaust and the Nakba: A New Grammar of Trauma and History
.
Columbia University Press
. pp. 92?113.
doi
:
10.7312/bash18296-006
.
ISBN
978-0-231-54448-1
.
S2CID
165947021
.
- Goldberg, Amos (2016). "Interventions: Narrative, Testimony, and Trauma".
International Journal of Postcolonial Studies
.
18
(3): 335?358.
doi
:
10.1080/1369801X.2015.1042396
.
S2CID
143419418
.
- Khoury, Nadim (2020). "Postnational memory: Narrating the Holocaust and the Nakba".
Philosophy & Social Criticism
.
46
(1): 91?110.
doi
:
10.1177/0191453719839448
.
S2CID
150483968
.
- Lustick, Ian S.
(2006). "Negotiating Truth: The Holocaust, "Lehavdil", and "Al-Nakba"
".
Journal of International Affairs
.
60
(1): 51?77.
ISSN
0022-197X
.
JSTOR
24358013
.
- Marwecki, Daniel (2020).
Germany and Israel: Whitewashing and Statebuilding
. Oxford University Press.
ISBN
978-1-78738-318-0
.
- Mikel Arieli, Roni (2020).
"Between Apartheid, the Holocaust and the Nakba: Archbishop Desmond Tutu's Pilgrimage to Israel-Palestine (1989) and the Emergence of an Analogical Lexicon"
.
Journal of Genocide Research
.
22
(3): 334?353.
doi
:
10.1080/14623528.2019.1673606
.
S2CID
204041778
.
- Moses, A. Dirk
(2021b).
The Problems of Genocide: Permanent Security and the Language of Transgression
. Cambridge University Press.
ISBN
978-1-009-02832-5
.
- Moses, A. Dirk
(23 May 2021a).
"The German Catechism"
.
Geschichte der Gegenwart
(in German)
. Retrieved
3 April
2022
.
- Rose, Jacqueline
(2018). "Afterword: The Holocaust and the Nakba".
The Holocaust and the Nakba
. Columbia University Press.
ISBN
978-0-231-54448-1
.
- Shumsky, Dmitry (2018).
Beyond the Nation-State: The Zionist Political Imagination from Pinsker to Ben-Gurion
. Yale University Press.
ISBN
978-0-300-24109-9
.
- Stav, Shira (2012). "Nakba and Holocaust: Mechanisms of Comparison and Denial in the Israeli Literary Imagination".
Jewish Social Studies
.
18
(3): 85.
doi
:
10.2979/jewisocistud.18.3.85
.
S2CID
144892781
.
- Wermenbol, Grace (2021).
A Tale of Two Narratives: The Holocaust, the Nakba, and the Israeli-Palestinian Battle of Memories
. Cambridge University Press.
ISBN
978-1-108-89021-2
.
Further reading
[
edit
]
- Achcar, Gilbert
(2010).
The Arabs and the Holocaust: The Arab-Israeli War of Narratives
. Henry Holt and Company.
ISBN
978-1-4299-3820-4
.
- Auron, Yair
(2017).
The Holocaust, Rebirth, and the Nakba: Memory and Contemporary Israeli?Arab Relations
. Lexington Books.
ISBN
978-1-4985-5949-2
.
- Litvak, M.; Webman, E. (2011).
From Empathy to Denial: Arab Responses to the Holocaust
. Hurst. pp. 309?331.
ISBN
978-1-84904-155-3
.
- Musolff, Andreas (2017). "Instrumentalisation of Holocaust Memory and False Historical Analogies".
The Holocaust in the Twenty-First Century
. Routledge.
ISBN
978-1-315-64796-8
.
- Segal, Raz
; Daniele, Luigi (5 March 2024).
"Gaza as Twilight of Israel Exceptionalism: Holocaust and Genocide Studies from Unprecedented Crisis to Unprecedented Change"
.
Journal of Genocide Research
: 1?10.
doi
:
10.1080/14623528.2024.2325804
.
- Webman, Esther (2017). "
"Stealing the Holocaust from the Jews"? The Holocaust as Metaphor in Public Discourse".
Antisemitism Before and Since the Holocaust
. Cham: Springer International Publishing. pp. 279?304.
doi
:
10.1007/978-3-319-48866-0_12
.
ISBN
978-3-319-48865-3
.
- Zertal, Idith
(2005).
Israel's Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood
. Cambridge University Press.
ISBN
978-1-139-44662-4
.
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