Holocaust Inversion: Unmasking the False Comparisons of Palestinians to the Holocaust
Palestinians turn the Shoah on its head by equating Israel with Nazi genocide.
By Noam Fruchter, The Algemeiner
On April 12, 1945, General Dwight Eisenhower visited Ohrdruf, a subcamp of Buchenwald. Upon his return to the United States, he emphasized the importance of spreading the truth about the Holocaust:
“I made the visit deliberately, in order to be in a position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to propaganda.”
The words of Eisenhower still ring true 77 years later. In February 2022, Sheffield Hallam University in England reinstated Shahd Abusalama, an associate lecturer, after she defended a student’s poster that said: “Stop the Palestinian Holocaust.”
On Twitter, Abusalama wrote that she understood why the student used the term Holocaust in reference to Israel’s strikes in Gaza. Never mind the fact that Israel’s military actions in Gaza are in response to indiscriminate rocket fire from Hamas or that efforts are made to minimize civilian casualties through precision strikes and roof-knocking.
The world ingrained the phrase “never forget” into our collective psyche to prevent another Holocaust from occurring. Yet, has the Holocaust lost its significance? On social media and college campuses, anti-Zionists have made it a habit to compare the plight of Palestinians with the Holocaust. Historian — and now Biden administration envoy — Deborah Lipstadt describes such comparisons between Jews in Israel and Nazis as a form of “soft-core denial,” also known as Holocaust inversion.
From 1939 to 1945, more than six million Jews were murdered by the Nazi regime and their collaborators. Throughout Europe, Jews were dehumanized, sent to concentration camps and death camps, and murdered in gas chambers and by other horrific means. However, anti-Israel activists on college campuses contend there is a “Palestinian Holocaust.” They accuse Israel of committing genocide and ethnic cleansing against the Palestinians ever since the founding of the Jewish state.
This is blatantly false.
I.F. Stone, a Zionist advocate and left-wing political journalist of the 1940s, describes a particularly horrifying account of how several Nazi collaborators who were part of pro-Nazi Arab military units arrived in Palestine to battle the newly founded Jewish state. About the Arab refugees who fled from the fighting, Stone states, “While the Arab guerrillas were moving in, the Arab civilian population was moving out.” It is ironic that Shabtai Levy, the mayor of Haifa, pleaded with Arab leaders to remain in their homes. They told Levy that the Arab Higher Committee, chaired by the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and Nazi collaborator Haj Amin al-Husseini, ordered them to leave.
Referring to the “Nakba,” anti-Zionists falsely claim that over 700,000 Palestinians have been displaced from their homes since the establishment of the Jewish state. But as stated above, that distorts the history and also ignores the similar number of Jews who were expelled from Arab lands just for the crime of being Jewish, and were forced to come to Israel.
Furthermore, the Palestinian population has grown significantly since 1948. Anyone with a modicum of critical reasoning ability can see that the claim of ethnic cleansing or genocide against the Palestinians is just absurd.
In 2020, the Arab population in Israel comprised 1.96 million people, or 21.1% of the population, compared with 20.2 percent in 2008. Since 1960, the Palestinian population has increased by 2.65% every year. Palestinians who have Israeli citizenship also have the same rights as all Israelis, and serve in the Knesset, the Supreme Court, the IDF, and every facet of public and private life.
Somehow, Jews were never afforded any of those privileges by the Nazis.
Despite this factual evidence, antisemitic groups like SJP, have made it common practice to fabricate facts about the Holocaust on social media, and even to harass Holocaust survivors.
Furthermore, in examining Palestinian leadership during World War II, it is distressing to learn that the Palestinians collaborated with the Nazis.
Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, participated in Hitler’s vision to annihilate the Jewish people. He encouraged Muslim recruits to join the SS regiments in the Balkans, promoted Nazi propaganda in the Arab world, and even toured death camps in Europe and met with Adolf Hitler.
In 2021, the Palestinian leadership recognized the Grand Mufti as a role model, naming schools after him and honoring him on social media. With 63% of millennials and Gen Z’ers in the United States lacking the basic knowledge that six million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust, it could be easy for anti-Israel groups to persuade these youths to deny the Holocaust or the lie that the same thing is happening to Palestinians.
The moral and just world — and university administrators and campus officials — must stand up to these lies.
Noam Fruchter is a CAMERA Fellow at Hebrew University in Israel.
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