On Thursday, April 24th, the State of Israel and Jews worldwide paused to honor the six million Jewish men, women, and children murdered by the Germans and their collaborators during the Shoah. In the wake of the destruction of European Jewry, the Jewish world vowed “never again”. Yom Hashoah requires us not just to remember the Jewish life that was destroyed, but to remain vigilant against modern expressions of murderous antisemitism.
Perversely, the Holocaust, its memory, and imagery have become one of the most dangerous and painful tools wielded against the Jewish people and the State of Israel today. Indeed, while outright Holocaust denial remains confined mainly to the political fringes, the insidious phenomenon of “Holocaust Inversion” has no such taboo. Holocaust Inversion accuses contemporary Jews as being the new Nazis, with the State of Israel serving as a new Third Reich committing genocide against the Palestinians. So common is this phenomenon that it is included in the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working-definition of antisemitism.
The comparison between Israel and Nazi Germany is not made innocently. Rather, as the Nazis are the emblem of evil in the post-Second World War world, the comparison is the equivalent of medieval Catholic teachings equating Jews with the satanic and demonic. In this twisted revisionism, Palestinians and Islamist terrorist groups become Jewish partisans, effectively whitewashing and justifying their attacks on Israeli Jews. This sets up the stage towards legitimizing the murder of Israelis, who are recast of evil genocidaires. It also justifies the exclusion of Jews (“Nazis”) from political and social groups based on supposed social justice or anti-racist principles.
Such inverse accusations of genocide were a staple of Nazi rhetoric against the Jews. Josef Goebbels, in a 1941 pamphlet, claimed that Germany was acting in self-defense: ‘Who should die, the Germans or the Jews? . . . You know what your eternal enemy and opponent intends for you. There is only one instrument against his plans for annihilation.” During the Rwandan genocide, Hutus leaders repeatedly warned their followers that the Tutsis in fact intended to murder them.
As scholars of antisemitism, such as Izabella Tabarovsky and Lesley Klaff, have demonstrated in their research, the canard of Jewish genocide has long been a feature of contemporary antisemitism. Already in the 1950s and 1960s, the Soviet Union promoted the charge of Jewish genocide against the Palestinians. Following the Six Day War, the Soviet Union and its “Zionologists” churned out hundreds of books and articles accusing the Zionists of collaborating with the Nazis and even surpassing them in cruelty. In 1977 for example, the Soviet Weekly, a Soviet newspaper targeting the United Kingdom, proclaimed the Israelis “worthy heirs to Hitler’s National-Socialism.” Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas famously wrote his doctoral thesis under Soviet tutelage on “the secret relationship between Nazism and Zionism”.
Holocaust Inversion gained the most significant public legitimacy, ironically, in the aftermath of Hamas’ genocidal 7.10 massacre. Despite Hamas’ eliminationist antisemitism and its clear orders to “kill as many people as possible” on October 7th, the charge of genocide was quickly reversed against Israel. Within weeks of the massacre, South Africa filed an application at the International Court of Justice alleging Israeli genocide in Gaza. This was not merely coincidental timing. As the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP) revealed in a recent report, in December 2023, a Hamas delegation visited Cape Town and held discussions with officials from South Africa’s ruling party. The report also tracks allegations that Iran and Qatar, Hamas’ main backers, are financing the ICJ case.
Holocaust and genocide inversion serves as a rhetorical shield for genocidal antisemites and a weapon against Jewish communities and the Jewish state. In July 2024, Turkey’s President Tayyip Erdogan said that ‘Netanyahu has reached a level that would make Hitler jealous with his genocidal methods’. Tunisian President Kais Saied rejected claims of antisemitism in Tunisia and accused Jews of repaying Tunisian help from the Nazis with genocide against Palestinians. Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said that ‘what is happening in the Gaza Strip with the Palestinian people hasn’t happened at any other moment in history’ except one, ‘When Hitler decided to kill the Jews’.
The ‘genocide’ slur endangers Jewish lives around the world. In Toronto, Jewish community institutions and synagogues have repeatedly been defaced with “genocide” graffiti. In Pittsburg, vandals accused Chabad of “funding genocide”, within walking distance of the site of the Tree of Life synagogue, attacked by a neo-Nazi in 2018. Similar desecrations are routine in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Barcelona and Amsterdam. Jews who raise the alarm are brushed aside as genocide-supporters.
Eight decades after the Holocaust, there is a global campaign to identify Jews with the Nazi perpetrators, rather than victims.
First published in The Jerusalem Post (“Holocaust inversion: The dangerous rhetoric equating Israel to Nazi Germany”, Apr 24, 2025).
