Holocaust Inversion and the Cycle of Victimhood to Violence

Truthlytics unequivocally condemns antisemitism, Holocaust denial, and crimes against humanity. This article explores what Israeli Jews have said about Holocaust Inversion, how the cycle of violence is repeated, and how trauma has shaped Israeli society.

Unhealed Trauma and Role Reversal

The Holocaust was one of the most catastrophic genocides in history, and survivors and their communities were highly traumatized. That trauma formed a deep sense of vulnerability, a fear of annihilation, a need for safety and for self-determination, all of which were instrumental to the creation of the state of Israel in 1948.

Trauma shaped the Israeli national identity and justified their military aggression and occupation of Palestine for the benefit of Jewish safety.

The historically proven phenomenon of the victim becoming the perpetrator has been seen around the globe, such as in the case of Rwanda when the Tutsi victims then perpetrated a genocide of Hutus who had fled to the Congo after the Rwandan genocide of 1994.

A Holocaust survivor, Hajo Meyer, created the theory of “sequential traumatizing,” which suggests that the collective remembrance of one trauma (in this case, the Holocaust), is manipulated to justify current aggressions (against the Palestinians). He argued that Israel uses the Holocaust to instill loyalty to Israel and to justify the occupation of Palestine.

Meyer, and other Holocaust survivors, have expressed their belief that “never again” means “never again for anyone,” not just for Jews.

Holocaust Inversion

The origins of Holocaust Inversion go back to the beginning of the occupation and colonization of Palestine in the 1940s; Jewish Israelis were among the first to say that what Israel has done to Palestinians echoed what the Nazis did to Jews.

Holocaust Inversion is to say that the Jews who fled the Nazis in Europe then became the Nazis themselves as the Zionists of Israel. This comparison has been used since the 1940s, after the Nakba. Many have used the same argument that the Anti-Defamation League, an international Jewish NGO, asserts, which is that “absolutely no comparison can be made,” and that Holocaust Inversion is antisemitic.

It is highly controversial and often deemed as an antisemitic method of Holocaust denial. But now, Israelis call for a genocide and incite violence and hatred for Palestinians.

The Israeli TV producer, Elad Barashi, recently stated:

“The 2.6 million [sic] terrorists in Gaza deserve death!! They deserve death!! Men, women, and children—by any means necessary, we must simply carry out a Shoah [Holocaust] against them—yes, read that again—H-O-L-O-C-A-U-S-T! In my view—gas chambers. Train cars. And other cruel methods of death for these Nazis. Without fear, without weakness—just crush. Eliminate. Slaughter. Flatten. Dismantle. Smash. Shatter. Without conscience or pity—children and parents, women and girls—all of them are marked for a cruel and harsh death.”

Statements like those are central to South Africa’s genocide case against Israel, which seeks to prove that there is public incitement for, and clear intent to commit genocide.

When making a criticism of a government or country’s actions, it is important to make distinctions for clarity, such as the following:

• Judaism worldwide is not represented by the state of Israel
• Judaism does not equal Israel
• Zionism does not equal Judaism, in fact, Zionism goes against principles of Judaism
• The state of Israel was founded on Zionism
• Israelis are not all Zionists
• Jewish people, as a whole, should not be compared to Nazis

Comparisons of Zionists to Nazis have increased since 2023, when many were exposed to the horrors in Gaza through their phones for the first time. More importantly, Israelis and Jewish people are also making the comparisons.

For example, the Jewish Israeli journalist Jonathan Ofir recently said, “I used to think the term ‘Judeo-Nazi’ was excessive, I don’t any longer.”

The comparisons

• Colonization and ethnic cleansing, the forced displacement of hundreds of thousands of people from their homes
• Seizing property, money and/or belongings, sometimes through surprise raids on civilians
• Forcing people of an ethnic group into crowded, usually impoverished, areas and keeping them contained by wire, walls, fences, and/or a military presence
• Forcing people on a humiliating walk with only a few belongings to a new, cramped location
• Controlling all imported goods and only allowing people out of the ghettos, or open-air prison, based on a permit system
• Systematically starving people by preventing humanitarian aid from getting in
• Forcing people to bear a symbol as identification
• Giving the military “shoot on sight ” order, which has no exceptions for children or civilians
• And giving civilians the “green light” to kill
• Denying human rights and the right to marry outside their ethnic group/race, and even forbidding them from flying their flag (all also found in the Nuremberg race laws from 1935)
• Sterilizing people they consider “unfit” to reproduce
• Dehumanizing and ‘othering’ through propaganda 
• Extreme nationalism, creating the narrative that their lives are being threatened, therefore, to protect themselves they must kill the other (us vs. them)
• Laws meant to oppress and segregate, such as forbidding people from driving or walking on certain roads
• Imprisoning and torturing civilians for violating unfair or miniscule laws
• Routinely targeting journalists and censoring truth
• Sending their own citizens to a concentration camp/prison for speaking out

Jewish Israelis who have made the comparison:

• The first known man to publicly make the comparison in the 1940s and 50s was Yeshayahu Leibowitz, an Orthodox Jew born into a Zionist family in Latvia. He later criticized Israel’s conduct, coining the term Judeo-Nazi after he saw the ways Israelis dehumanized, murdered, and ethnically cleansed Palestinians from their land.
• Another was Yehuda Elkana, a Yugoslavian Jew who survived Auschwitz. He criticized Israel for using the Holocaust as a manipulation tactic to justify their suppression of Palestinians.¹
• Then Boas Evron, a journalist who was critical of the state, pointed out the “moral blindness” Israelis have, because their intended goals were to protect Jews but it caused extremism that Evron compared to Nazism.²
• And Israel Shahak, a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto, who received death threats and intimidation for his advocacy for Palestinian human rights.³
• And Amos Elon, a journalist who echoed Elkana’s view and received much criticism for it.⁴
• As previously mentioned, Hajo Meyer, who created the “sequential traumatizing” theory to explain the role reversal Israel saw.
• Omar Bartov, founding member of Peace Now and a professor of Holocaust and Genocide studies at Brown University, warned that the IDF was following the same path as the Nazis when the Defense Minister, Yitzhak Rabin, commanded the IDF to “break the bones” of Palestinian children who threw rocks.⁵
• Jewish Israeli historian and author Ilan Pappé, who frequently works with Noam Chomsky (an American Jew), who has criticized Israel’s actions in books like The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine.
• In August 2023, Bartov and nearly 3,000 other scholars (including Jewish Americans, Palestinians, and Israelis like Benny Morris, a prominent Israeli historian, and Avraham Burg, former speaker of the Israeli parliament.), religious leaders and lawyers signed an open letter called “The Elephant in the Room,” which details how Israel operates as “a regime of apartheid.”
• Yair Golan, leader of the Democrats party in Israel and senior military leader of the IDF, triggered a controversy in 2016 when he stated: “If there is something that frightens me about the memory of the Holocaust, it is seeing the abhorrent processes that took place in Europe, and Germany in particular, some 70, 80, or 90 years ago, and finding manifestations of these processes here among us in 2016.”

Prime minister Netanyahu condemned those words and the comparison made, forcing Golan to retract his earlier statement and publicly change his opinion. Golan said, “It is an absurd and baseless comparison and I had no intention whatsoever to draw any sort of parallel or to criticize the national leadership. The IDF is a moral army that respects the rules of engagement and protects human dignity.”

Later, Golan made the comparison again in a most mundane way and was criticized for it again by politicians on the right because he “[reminded] people that the Nazis came to power democratically,” warning that they needed to be careful to avoid “extremist figures” who would “exploit Israeli democracy.”

It is true that the Nazis came to power via a democratic election (Hitler was appointed Chancellor by the President, and the coup which gave the Nazi party the ultimate power was an election, although coerced), and that is true of several other extremist governments, that comparison is not heinous or unreasonable.

In order to heal from the trauma of an event like the Holocaust, a society must acknowledge and rectify their moral blindness in perpetuating violence. Moving forward, the cycle of abuse must stop with all parties.