War : Survivors, Memory, and Moral Responsibility (13)

There is a question that has haunted the conscience of humanity for the better part of a century, and which returns with fresh anguish each time our screens display images from Gaza: how can a people who were once the victims of the greatest crime in modern history—systematically annihilated, humiliated, and dehumanised—come to inflict upon others something that, in the eyes of much of the world, resembles what they themselves once endured?

This is not an easy question. It is not an invitation to equate the Holocaust with the Israel–Palestine conflict—these two events have different historical contexts, different scales, and different characters, and we must take care not to blur the distinctiveness of each. But it is a question that must be posed with honesty, because silence in the name of propriety or fear of controversy is merely another form of intellectual cowardice.

This essay sets out to do two things simultaneously: first, to trace the Holocaust—what happened, why it happened, and what lessons ought to have been drawn from it. Second, to reflect—not to condemn, but genuinely to reflect—upon how the people who inherited the memory of that greatest of all sufferings now find themselves in a position that many regard as perpetrators of a new suffering.

From Ashes to Fire:

The Holocaust, the Memory of Suffering, and the Israel–Palestine Paradox

I. The Holocaust: What Happened 

A Crime Planned in Cold Blood

The Holocaust—from the Greek holokauston, meaning ‘a burnt offering consumed entirely’—was the systematic murder carried out by Nazi Germany against six million European Jews between 1933 and 1945. Alongside them perished approximately five to six million non-Jewish victims: Roma and Sinti, people with physical and mental disabilities, homosexuals, political prisoners, Slavic peoples, and Jehovah’s Witnesses. In total, the Nazi killing machine claimed between eleven and seventeen million lives.

What distinguishes the Holocaust from other massacres in history is its bureaucratic, industrial, and totalising character. It was not merely a pogrom—a riot erupting from uncontrolled mob fury. It was a state project, planned with methodical precision, sustained by the apparatus of the modern bureaucracy, and executed with a terrible efficiency. There was a ministry that handled the registration of victims. There was a railway company that transported them. There was a chemical firm that supplied the gas. There were architects who designed the crematoria. Each of them was simply doing their ‘job’.

This process did not happen overnight. It unfolded gradually, beginning with legal discrimination, then social exclusion, then deportation, and finally extermination. The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 stripped German Jews of their citizenship. Kristallnacht in November 1938—the ‘Night of Broken Glass’—was an organised pogrom in which thousands of Jewish shops, homes, and synagogues were destroyed, nearly a hundred people were killed, and approximately thirty thousand were arrested. And at the Wannsee Conference of January 1942, senior Nazi officials formally coordinated what they called the ‘Final Solution to the Jewish Question’.

“The killings did not begin with gas chambers. They began with words.”—James Waller, Becoming Evil (2002) 

The Camps: An Industry of Death

The first concentration camp, Dachau, opened in March 1933—only weeks after Hitler was appointed Chancellor—initially to house political opponents. The camp system subsequently expanded into an enormous network. At its height, there were more than a thousand camps of various categories: forced labour camps, transit camps, prisoner-of-war camps, and—most lethal of all—extermination camps.

The extermination camps—Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Sobibór, Bełżec, Chełmno, Majdanek—were purpose-built for killing. At Auschwitz-Birkenau alone, it is estimated that between one and one and a half million people perished—approximately ninety per cent of them Jewish. Victims arrived by train in appalling conditions after long journeys without adequate food or water. They were subjected to selection on the platform: those deemed ‘fit for work’ were separated; the remainder—mostly children, the elderly, and women carrying infants—were marched directly to the gas chambers, told they were going to shower. Their hair was shorn, their belongings confiscated, their bodies incinerated in the crematoria.

Mobile killing units known as Einsatzgruppen operated across the occupied territories of Eastern Europe, shooting Jewish communities en masse at the edges of pits they had been made to dig themselves. At Babi Yar, a ravine near Kyiv, more than thirty-three thousand Jews were murdered in two days alone, in September 1941.

II. Why the Holocaust Happened: Background and Causes 

Antisemitism: A Fire Smouldering for Centuries

Hatred of Jews was not a Nazi invention. Antisemitism in Europe has roots stretching back thousands of years: in medieval Christian theology that accused Jews of being ‘Christ-killers’; in economic prejudice that portrayed them as usurers and hoarders; in a xenophobia that regarded them as a foreign body incapable of assimilation. For centuries, Jewish communities across Europe had endured mass expulsions, massacres, and savage restrictions—from the expulsion from Spain in 1492 to the repeated pogroms in Russia and Eastern Europe throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

What the Nazis did was not to conjure antisemitism from nothing. What they did was to take this ancient hatred, furnish it with the spurious legitimacy of the pseudo-scientific racial theories they developed, pump it into a state ideology, and then ignite it with the fuel of the crisis convulsing Germany. 

The German Crisis and the Rise of the Nazis

Post-war Germany in the 1920s was a wounded and humiliated nation. The defeat in the First World War—which many Germans never genuinely accepted as a military defeat—was followed by the crushing terms of the Treaty of Versailles: devastating financial reparations, territorial losses, and shameful military restrictions. The hyperinflation of 1923 obliterated the savings of the middle classes within weeks. The Great Depression, after 1929, brought mass unemployment.

In these conditions, Nazi ideology offered a seductive narrative: that Germany had not lost because it had been defeated on the battlefield, but because it had been ‘stabbed in the back’ by internal enemies—Marxists, democrats, and above all Jews. This was a lie, but a lie that felt plausible to millions of people seeking an explanation for their suffering. The Nazis also promised the restoration of national pride, order after chaos, and the glory of a Reich that would endure for a thousand years.

Goebbels’s propaganda transformed widely held prejudices into a state-managed collective conviction. Jews were depicted simultaneously as rapacious capitalists and dangerous Communists—two logically contradictory characterisations, yet both served to construct a convenient enemy. They were dehumanised: portrayed as rats, as parasites, as a disease to be cured by eradication. 

Compliance, Indifference, and Silence

One of the most painful questions about the Holocaust is this: how could it have occurred within European societies of high civilisation, rich in legal tradition, culture, and religion? The answer is not simple.

Some Germans—and people in occupied countries—did actively participate with genuine ideological conviction. But the majority were not active perpetrators—they were silent bystanders, who knew or at least suspected what was happening, but chose not to see, not to ask, and not to act. Fear, personal comfort, social conformism, and the calculation that the fate of others was not their concern—these were what made the Holocaust possible on the scale it achieved.

Hannah Arendt, in her analysis of the trial of Adolf Eichmann—one of the logistical architects of the Holocaust—found not a cold-blooded monster, but a tedious bureaucrat who did not think. He did not personally fanatically hate Jews; he merely performed his ‘job’ with efficiency. This is what Arendt called the ‘banality of evil’: that the greatest crimes in history are not always committed by devils, but by ordinary people who have ceased to exercise their conscience.

“Under conditions of terror, most people will comply but some people will not — just as the terror state itself very much depends on this non-compliance. Humanly speaking, no more is required, and no more can reasonably be asked, for this planet to remain a place fit for human habitation.”—Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963)

III. The Lessons That Ought to Have Been Drawn 

Dehumanisation Is the First Step Towards Mass Murder

One of the most universal lessons of the Holocaust is that genocide does not begin with killing—it begins with words. When a group of human beings is consistently portrayed as non-human, as an existential threat, as something that must be exterminated for the safety of others, then the psychological foundations for violence have already been laid. No one who regards their victims as fellow human beings of equal worth can easily order or carry out their mass killing.

This is a lesson of universal application—not only for Nazi Germany, but for every society that permits rhetoric of dehumanisation to grow unchallenged. The Rwandan genocide of 1994, in which the Tutsi were described as ‘inyenzi’ (cockroaches) in radio broadcasts, followed the same pattern. The massacres in Bosnia followed the same pattern. Wherever we hear language that denies the humanity of others, we ought to be alarmed. 

Weak Institutions Cannot Prevent Tyranny

The Holocaust happened in a country that possessed a constitution, a parliament, courts of law, and a long legal tradition. All of those institutions collapsed in a startlingly short time once a movement that was sufficiently powerful, brutal, and sufficiently unscrupulous succeeded in seizing power. This reminds us that democratic institutions offer no automatic guarantee against tyranny—they endure only if enough citizens are willing to defend them, even when the cost of doing so is very high. 

Silence Is Complicity

The Holocaust also teaches us that indifference is not neutrality—it is a form of passive complicity. Elie Wiesel, a survivor of Auschwitz and a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, once said that the opposite of love is not hatred but indifference. Those who knew but remained silent—the neighbours who watched Jewish families being taken away, the officials who signed forms without questioning, the world leaders who chose not to receive Jewish refugees before the war—were all part of the system that made the Holocaust possible.

This lesson carries a very broad resonance: all of us, in various contexts of our lives, face moments in which silence is easier than speech. The Holocaust is the most powerful reminder of what it means to choose silence in the face of injustice. 

Crimes Must Be Recognised and Named

In the wake of the Holocaust, the international community constructed legal and moral instruments designed to ensure that crimes of this nature could be recognised, named, and prevented. The Genocide Convention of 1948, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the Nuremberg Tribunal—all were direct responses to the world’s failure to stop the Holocaust while it was happening. The lesson they sought to convey was that the international community bears a responsibility to act when genocide or crimes against humanity are underway, and that state sovereignty cannot serve as a shield for atrocity.

IV. A Reflection: From Victim to … What?

The State of Israel: A Birth from Trauma

To understand Israel today, one must understand that it is a state born from trauma. Zionism—the Jewish nationalist movement that sought to establish a Jewish state in the land its adherents regarded as their ancestral homeland—predated the Holocaust, but it was the Holocaust that made the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 appear, in the eyes of much of the world, as a pressing moral necessity. After six million Jews had been slaughtered whilst the world looked largely on in silence or closed its doors to Jewish refugees, the argument that Jews required a state of their own as a permanent sanctuary became, for many, unanswerable.

Israel was founded on the land of Palestine—a territory that at the time was inhabited by an Arab Muslim and Christian majority, with a Jewish minority that had grown significantly through immigration since the early twentieth century. The establishment of the State of Israel in May 1948 was followed immediately by what in the Palestinian narrative is called the ‘Nakba’—the ‘catastrophe’—in which approximately seven hundred thousand Palestinians were displaced from their lands and homes, whether through violence or fear of violence, some of them as a direct result of deliberate military operations.

Since that moment, the history of the region has been a history of conflict that has never truly ceased: repeated wars, a continuing occupation of the West Bank since 1967, a blockade of Gaza that began in 2007, and a cycle of violence that appears to have no visible end. 

The Painful Question: Why?

The question posed by many people—including several Jews in Israel and around the world—is this: how can a people who have inherited the memory of such profound suffering apply policies that various United Nations bodies, international human rights organisations including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, and indeed many Israeli thinkers themselves, have described as apartheid, as a collective siege in violation of international humanitarian law, and—in the conflict that began in October 2023—as conduct meeting the threshold of ‘genocide’ under the definition of the International Court of Justice?

This question has no single answer. It requires honesty about several things at once that we are often reluctant to hold in mind simultaneously. 

Trauma Does Not Automatically Produce Empathy

One of the most frequently mistaken assumptions about suffering is that it automatically generates empathy towards the suffering of others. The reality is considerably more complicated. Deep, unhealed trauma—particularly collective trauma transmitted from generation to generation—can produce something quite contrary: not openness to the suffering of others, but a fixation on existential threat to oneself, a hypervigilance that perceives enemies everywhere, and a hardened conviction that the world is fundamentally unsafe and that security can only be guaranteed through force.

The psychologist Vamik Volkan calls this a ‘chosen trauma’—a collective wound re-represented from generation to generation as part of a group’s identity, rendering it permanently threatened and thereby justifying actions that from the outside appear disproportionate. In this context, this is not to say that the trauma of the Holocaust is unreal—it is very real. But trauma that is not healthily processed can, tragically, be converted into a justification for doing to others what was once done to oneself. 

Ideology, Interest, and Power

Yet to reduce the behaviour of the Israeli state solely to collective psychological trauma is a dishonest simplification. Like any other state, Israel is also driven by very concrete political, economic, and geostrategic interests. The settlement project in the West Bank—declared illegal under international law—is propelled not only by messianic religious Zionist ideology, but also by real economic interests, by domestic electoral politics, and by the power of the settler movement, which has been a key player in Israeli governing coalitions for several decades.

There is also an ideological dimension that cannot be overlooked. A strand of Zionism—from the very beginning and to this day—has regarded the land of Palestine as ‘a land without a people for a people without a land’, a phrase that erased the presence of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who were already living there. This view does not represent all Israelis or all Jews, but it is sufficiently powerful within the mainstream of Israeli politics to shape policy in tangible ways. 

An Asymmetric Power Dynamic

One of the greatest difficulties in discussing the Israel–Palestine conflict is the tendency to present it as a conflict between two equal parties. It is not equal. Israel is a state with a powerful military, an advanced economy, an undeclared but widely assumed nuclear arsenal, and the full support of the world’s greatest power, the United States. Palestine—Gaza in particular—is a blockaded territory with no air force, no navy, infrastructure repeatedly destroyed, and a population of which nearly half are children.

This asymmetry matters because it determines who possesses the capacity to end the conflict and who does not. It also matters because the moral standard we apply to a state that possesses power must differ from the one we apply to a group that does not—not because one is more human than the other, but because the capacity to cause suffering is directly proportional to the responsibility not to cause it. 

Voices from Within

It is important to note that these questions do not arise solely from outside Israel. Many Israeli citizens—journalists, academics, politicians, and activists—have openly and courageously criticised the policies of their own government. Ilan Pappé, the Israeli historian, documented the Nakba with painstaking care and described it as ‘ethnic cleansing’. B’Tselem, the respected Israeli human rights organisation, declared in 2021 that Israel imposes a system of apartheid between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. Yair Golan, former Deputy Chief of Staff of the Israel Defence Forces, made a statement in 2016 that sent shockwaves through Israeli society, saying that processes taking place in Israel reminded him of those that had preceded the Holocaust in Europe.

“If there is one thing that frightens me about Holocaust remembrance, it is recognising the horrifying processes that occurred in Europe in general, and in Germany in particular, seventy, eighty, ninety years ago, and finding evidence of them here among us today.”—Major-General Yair Golan, Deputy Chief of Staff of the IDF, 4th May 2016

Those words triggered a storm. But they also demonstrate that within Israeli society itself there exists an awareness, a courage, and a willingness to hold up a mirror—even when the reflection is acutely painful. 

The Question of Comparison

Is what is happening in Gaza today the Holocaust? No — and drawing careless comparisons is an irresponsible way to discuss either tragedy. The Holocaust was an explicit, ideological, and industrial state project to annihilate an entire group of human beings based on their racial identity. It has no precedent in history in the totality of its purpose and method.

But the relevant question is not whether this is the Holocaust—it is whether the lessons of the Holocaust are being applied or disregarded. Are Palestinians in Gaza being dehumanised in Israeli public discourse? Yes—there is strong evidence that this has occurred in certain official statements and media coverage. Does the use of military force against a besieged civilian population, resulting in tens of thousands of civilian casualties, of whom more than half are children, meet the definition under international law of crimes against humanity? The International Court of Justice, in January 2024, ruled that the claim was ‘plausible’ and issued provisional measures accordingly.

It is not destruction on the same scale that is at issue—it is the pattern: dehumanisation, blockade, denial of basic resources, systematic destruction of civilian infrastructure. It is these patterns that have led people who have studied the Holocaust seriously—including some Holocaust survivors themselves—to speak out with deep disquiet.

V. A Final Reflection: Memory as Responsibility

There is a Hebrew word of great beauty: ‘Zakhor’—‘Remember’. The commandment to remember is at the heart of Jewish identity, and in particular of the identity shaped by the Holocaust. Each year on Yom HaShoah—Holocaust Remembrance Day—millions of Jews across the world stand in silence, remembering those who are no more.

But ‘Remember’ is a commandment whose implications reach beyond memory itself. It ought to be a commandment to act: not merely to remember the suffering one has endured, but to use that memory as a moral compass in confronting the suffering of others. Primo Levi, a survivor of Auschwitz and one of the greatest writers ever to have preserved the experience of the concentration camps in words, wrote before his death that what he feared most was not that the world would forget the Holocaust—but that it would be remembered without being understood.

“It is easy, almost too easy, to be a good Christian on Sunday and vote for politicians who commit these crimes on Monday.”—Primo Levi

To understand the Holocaust ought to mean understanding that no group of human beings is immune from the potential to commit crimes against another group—including a group that was itself once a victim. This is not an accusation; it is a recognition of the most fundamental truth about human nature. We all carry within us the capacity for dehumanisation, for seeing ‘the other’ as a threat, for closing our eyes to suffering when that suffering is visited upon those we consider enemies.

The Israel–Palestine paradox does not mean that Jewish suffering in the Holocaust was unreal or unimportant—it was real, it matters profoundly, and it must neither be forgotten nor relativised. But it reminds us that the memory of one’s own suffering does not automatically produce moral wisdom. That wisdom must be actively, consciously, and sometimes at great pain, translated into a commitment to the dignity of all human beings—not merely the dignity of one’s own people.

Wiesel once said, ‘We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.’ Those words were addressed to a world that stood silent whilst the Holocaust unfolded. But they are also a mirror that can—and should—be held up by anyone who inherits their authority, including the state and the people who invoke them most frequently.

The final lesson of the Holocaust, then, is not ‘never again to us’. The final lesson is ‘never again to anyone’. The distance between those two sentences—small in words but immeasurable in moral implication—is precisely where history, memory, and responsibility converge.

Note

This essay is written in the conviction that intellectual honesty requires us to be capable of affirming two things that are both true simultaneously: that the Holocaust is a crime unmatched in modern history and that its memory must be preserved with complete seriousness; and that certain policies of the Israeli state towards the Palestinian people are at odds with the universal human values that ought to be the legacy of that memory. To affirm the second is not to deny the first. To defend the humanity of the Palestinian people is not to hate Jewish people. To criticise the policies of the Israeli state is not to deny Israel’s right to exist. This moral complexity—the capacity to hold several uncomfortable truths at once—is precisely what history demands of us.

[Part 14]
[Part 12]

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