The Deconstruction of Holocaust Inversion |
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The accusation of racism and genocide against the Israelis has been around for decades, but until fairly recently it was largely confined to the Soviet Union, PLO, and other terrorist groups. Sadly, it also has its roots in certain quarters of the Western intellectual world. This accusation—coming from politicians, journalists and professors in Western democracies—is so prevalent now that we have a term for it: Holocaust inversion. Marx said that religion is the opium of the masses; I would say that Holocaust inversion is the opium of leftist intellectuals.
Inversion might also be called strategic projection. Psychological projection involves accusing others of your own weaknesses, projecting your own weaknesses and shortcomings onto others—and really believing in that projection. I tend to think that Holocaust inversion involves projecting something you are guilty of onto your enemies even though you know it’s not true because it is strategically advantageous.
Holocaust inversion, unsupported by any evidence but emotionally powerful, transfers the guilt of genocide to the Jews themselves. By accusing the Jews of genocide, Europeans, Australians, and even Americans, can clear their consciences of guilt for the Holocaust, whether they actively engaged in it, tried to cut a deal with Hitler, did nothing to stop it, or turned back Jewish refugees. It’s not unlike whites assuaging their guilt for slavery by pointing out that Africans were involved in the slave trade—except some Africans were involved in the slave trade and Jews are not committing genocide. It’s interesting that, although there are antisemites on the far left and far right in modern-day Germany, as a nation Germany is a greater supporter of Israel than any other European country because Germany has accepted its guilt for the Holocaust, and thus it has no need to transfer.
And of course the antisemitism coming from the left nowadays ties into the view that whites are colonialists who oppress people of color. Israelis, on this view, are the über-whites, even though many Israelis are as dark as or darker than many Palestinians. Part of the problem with the young Americans and Europeans who are supporting Hamas and condemning Israel is their profound ignorance about the history of the modern state of Israel and the area we now call Palestine. Jews lived there at least 1,600 years before Islam existed. You can’t colonize your own homeland. As comedian Bill Maher put it, the only place the Jews have ever colonized was Boca Raton.
The roots of this inversion are to be found in Soviet and PLO propaganda, but in the Western intellectual world, one person stands out. Edward Said, an Arab born in Jerusalem in the so-called “Mandatory Palestine,” argued in Orientalism and other works that the West “constructed” the Orient, including the Arab world, in a way that enabled the imperialist domination of the Orient by Europe and the United States. This was an age in which many intellectuals claimed that the world is a “construct” in language—and that that realization and the “deconstruction” of those constructs is liberating. Said, however, used this esoteric theoretical framework, not for intellectual liberation, but to further his political ends. There is certainly a grain of truth to Said’s claim, but to dismiss all Western characterization of the Orient as a tool of colonialism is in fact itself a construct. In this inversion, Said constructs the Western attitude toward the East in order to pave the way for Palestinian imperialism against the Jews and the West. Said was rewarded with academic gigs at Columbia, Stanford, Yale, and Johns Hopkins. He served as president of the Modern Language Association. He was idolized by much of the intelligentsia of America’s most elite institutions of higher education.
It’s worth pointing out that this kind of inversion or strategic projection occurs with great frequency not just among extremists on the left. No one has mastered the strategy more thoroughly than Donald Trump. For extremists who are convinced that they cannot possibly be wrong—what John Stuart Mill called the assumption of infallibility—speech and discussion have nothing to do with a search for truth. Speech and discussion serve only the purpose of propaganda.
Nothing fits the model of Holocaust inversion more than Hamas and the supporters of Hamas accusing Israel of genocide. In recent history, the closest thing to what Raphael Lemkin meant when he coined the term “genocide” was the murderous attack on Israelis by Hamas on October 7, 2023. Article 2 of the Genocide Convention defines genocide in terms of “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such . . .” Although Israel has killed many more Gazans, including many civilians, their target is the Hamas terrorists, not the Palestinian people as such. As many commentators have pointed out, if Israel’s intention in Gaza was to kill the Palestinian people, there wouldn’t be any Palestinians. The October 7 massacre of Israelis by Hamas fighters, by contrast, clearly had the intent to kill as many Israelis as possible. Nothing since Hitler has been so clearly genocidal, and no Holocaust inversion has ever been more despicable than Hamas accusing Israel of genocide.
As those who perpetrate this strategic projection understand, Holocaust inversion is not just an attack on Israel and the Jews; it is a rejection of the moral order of Western civilization. Support for Israel matters because Israel has a right to exist, but it also matters because liberal democracy is better than the Islamist alternative.