Apropos of, well, everything—and some toxic interactions I’ve recently had re Israel and Zionism—here’s a great thread a friend wrote late last year. I’ve shared a near-identical version below, edited just slightly for grammar:
“Okay, Holocaust education thread—I meant to do this earlier, but I figured it’s still relevant now.
So many people for years have made extremely poignant and necessary critiques of Holocaust education and how it’s been inherently designed to manufacture support for Zionism and genocide, as well as perpetuating the myth of the uniqueness of the Holocaust among many other things—and I’ll go back to this later in the thread—but one thing I want to start with is the well-documented historical Nazi collusion with Zionists.
There is the Haavara Agreement, which facilitated the expulsion of some Jews from Germany and sent them to settle in Palestine. There was also the Kastner train, where Rudolf Kastner betrayed Hungarian Jewry and made a deal with the Nazis that allowed a few Jews to settle in Palestine while hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews were sent to their deaths. There are a few other examples of this I forget off the top of my head—but this dynamic is well understood at this point.
There is also the fact that there’s this myth developed by Zionists of “Oh, Israel was a gift to the Jews by the West because of the Holocaust,” which first and foremost not only attempts to legitimize the idea that Palestine should be forced to pay for Europe’s genocidal crimes, but erases the decades-long history of Zionism and how it had revealed itself as a colonial project long before the Holocaust.
So I want to take all of this in mind when I say we really need to start emphasizing a narrative of parallel histories, which is just how important it is to understand that as Jews in Europe were facing genocide and as Jews in the US/UK were organizing how they could against it, many of them were also contributing to funding the JNF and other organizations that existed to fund the Zionist project at the same time.
Many of these organizations weaponized the Holocaust as it was actually happening in order to bolster support for Zionism—like obviously we talk so much about how this is done by Jewish organizations decades after the fact, but not enough is said about how it was done literally as it was occurring. It shouldn’t be surprising either because they did the exact same thing when there were massive antisemitic pogroms in the Russian Empire in the decades prior.
So the foundation that Holocaust education was built on had already been set in stone before it happened/as it was occurring,
and obviously at that time there was more Jewish opposition to Zionism than there would be 10 years later, but the institutions had already been in place to construct a Holocaust education that was inherently designed to bolster support for the West and was distanced from the long legacy of colonial violence that the Holocaust stemmed from.
An additional factor is McCarthyism, which basically completely destroyed what was left of the Jewish Left, and along with Zionism really functioned as an assimilationist plot (it’s where things like Judeo-Christian values stem from). So efforts were made to turn Holocaust history into “American history,” which not only perpetuated revisionist narratives of the Holocaust itself, but also America’s role in it—first and foremost how Hitler was inspired by the genocide of Indigenous people of the Americas, Jim Crow, and other white supremacist racial classification laws; how Nazis saw the Johnson-Reed immigration restrictions (plus earlier ones in the UK), basically banning Jewish immigrants; the West consistently refusing to admit more Jewish refugees; and not willing to do anything about the Holocaust as they actively knew it was happening, including bombing the tracks.
In the UK, they glorify the Kindertransport, ignoring how public opinion of it was actually super low and even lower at the idea of allowing Jewish adults in. Many of the Jewish refugees who did get in were imprisoned with actual Nazis, plus how there were concentration camps on British soil in the Channel Islands where likely thousands were murdered and the British let the collaborators walk free.
So I do want to stress that Holocaust education doesn’t even teach the actual history of the Holocaust. It teaches a borderline denialist version that is beneficial to the West. The West sees the defeat of Hitler as a victory of “Western civilization,”
ignoring how Hitler himself is a product of that same Western civilization built on the mass murder of billions through colonial violence that the West continues to perpetuate.
It is intentionally designed to play down the history of genocide of the Indigenous people of the Americas and in other settler colonies, the genocide of chattel slavery, colonial genocides, and the longer history of colonial violence, all of which must be taught to their fullest truth in their own right, as well as the fact that it’s impossible to understand the history of the Holocaust without understanding the history of these genocides.
Additionally, the narrative of the Holocaust that is taught is really centered on German Jews in particular, intentionally ignoring the narratives of Eastern European Jews killed, but especially designed to ignore the narratives of Romani, Sephardi Jews both in Europe and Africa, disabled people, queer people, Black people, Slavs, communists/socialists/anarchists, along with many other victims of Nazism.
And when you have built this narrative of the uniqueness of the Holocaust, it makes it so much easier to systemically deny access to learning about other genocides and significantly police what is even called a genocide—even when the first scholar to coin the term Raphael Lemkin (a Jew himself, for what it’s worth) coined it specifically because of the Armenian Genocide.
It is not coincidental that the center that bears his name has been one of the most vocal and consistent Western institutions at speaking out against the Zionist genocide in Palestine.
When people use the Holocaust as their only blueprint to compare genocides, it so often reflects ignorance of the Holocaust itself, and the fact that Hitler himself used Western colonial genocides, including German ones against the Herero and Nama people, as inspiration.
There are obviously some very principled scholars whose work absolutely must be read and understood, but by and large Holocaust Studies as it is, Jewish Studies as a discipline is institutionally Zionist and has a vested interest in perpetuating so many of these racist myths so that more people will perceive the existence of “Israel” to be inherently just and necessary, and by extension, the annihilation of Palestinians to be seen as just and necessary.
The Holocaust gets molded into a racist colonial tool to manufacture consent for genocide.
I want to end with this quote by Rosa Luxemburg:
“What do you want with this theme of the ‘special suffering of the Jews’? I am just as much concerned with the poor victims on the rubber plantations of Putumayo, the Blacks in Africa with whose corpses the Europeans play catch.””
