By Alex Gordon
HAIFA, Israel — Antisemitism has been an indispensable factor in history. Before the creation of the State of Israel, Jews were accused of not having their own land, of being strangers, rootless, parasites, and living only at the expense of other countries and peoples.
After the creation of the State of Israel, they are accused of having a home of their own. And although this home is located on land that, according to the Bible, belongs to the Jewish people, they are called “colonizers,” “occupiers,” and “oppressors.”
On October 7, 2023, after the murder of 1,200 Israelis and the capture of hundreds of Israeli hostages by the terrorist organization Hamas, the world reacted not with sympathy for the victims of the pogrom, but with an outburst of hatred toward Jews. This global wave of antisemitism is apparently the largest since World War II. However, antisemitism has existed for so long and has so thoroughly discredited itself that it is difficult to understand its unexpected success without its harmonious coincidence with a new kind of European antisemitism that has emerged in recent decades.
Antisemitism is one of the oldest phobias in history. What could be new about it, given its long history? World history shows that living Jews are a nuisance. But it turns out that dead Jews are also a nuisance to many Europeans. That is why Holocaust denial or disputing its scale is so widespread. In the 1960s, Frankfurt School analysts Theodor Adorno and Peter Schönbach coined the term “secondary antisemitism.” They wrote about “antisemitism based on guilt,” that is, antisemitism motivated by a denial of guilt for the Holocaust. The Holocaust became an unbearable burden for some Germans and some Europeans.
Manfred Gerstenfeld, an Israeli economist and Holocaust researcher born in Austria, wrote about new, post-Nazi varieties of antisemitism: “New types of antisemitism related to the Holocaust have developed over the past few decades. The main concept of one of them is Holocaust denial. An even worse and much more widespread form of antisemitism is Holocaust inversion: Israel and Jews are described as behaving like Nazis. Studies have shown that more than 40% of Europeans think this way.“
In criminology, there is a field called victimology, in which part of the criminal’s guilt is transferred to his victim. In this case, such a transfer takes place in the minds of the children and grandchildren of criminals, forming a mechanism of ”secondary antisemitism.” Dutch political scientist Lars Rensmann interprets “secondary anti-Semitism” as a new source of criticism of Jews, motivated by the desire of some Germans to suppress their people’s guilt and remove memories of the Holocaust from the collective memory of a disgraced nation. Jews are thus condemned for the very fact of their existence, which reminds Germans of their people’s crimes, guilt, and responsibility. Israeli psychologist Zvi Rex said, “Germany will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz.”
Comparing Israelis to Nazis is a way of absolving ancestors of their sins and denying the children and grandchildren of victims the right to be accusers. The logic of neo-antisemitism has led to the burden of guilt being shifted onto the Jews in order to clear the conscience. In recent decades, the “occupation of Palestinian lands” has come to be described as something akin to the Holocaust, which new anti-Semites are shifting from the tragic history of the Jews to the history of the “national liberation struggle” of their Arab opponents. In their minds, the Holocaust is devalued many times over and reduced to a conflict between Israelis and Palestinian Arabs.
Lars Rensmann notes “a strong tendency to turn victims into perpetrators, that is, to socio-psychologically transform Germans into victims of Jews and, thus, the latter into perpetrators who must be punished.” According to German political scientist Klaus Leggavi, “secondary antisemitism” discriminates against Jews not because they are “Jews and enemies of Christians,” but because they “received unreasonably high compensation as victims of the Holocaust and exert moral and financial pressure on the German people.” He believes that “it is precisely this kind of antisemitism ‘because of Auschwitz’ that is most widespread today.” Thus, attempts are being made to transform Jews and Israelis in the public consciousness from a people of victims into a “people of criminals,” and to remove the “taboo, the violation of which was restrained by ‘primary antisemitism.’” Faced with collective crimes, individuals can distance themselves from guilt by defending themselves by accusing the victim.
With its unfathomable cosmic dimensions, the Holocaust, to the horror of its perpetrators, their children, and grandchildren, turned the Jews into a chosen people, this time chosen for destruction, but the scale of this phenomenon shocked those responsible: their nations were, to one degree or another, involved in the largest genocide and the largest robbery in history. The burden of this truth was very difficult to bear. Therefore, a lie of equal magnitude came to their aid. Their reaction had to be proportional to the degree of the atrocities, and so it was: everything was turned upside down—innocent people were portrayed as aggressors, and aggressors as innocent victims. The tendency to describe obvious and innocent victims as deserving of their terrible fate or even as criminals reflected the degree of impossibility of adequately acknowledging their own crimes and repenting.
Holocaust denial is a contagious activity, turned against Jews as “liars.” Given the inconsistency of this version, few people use it. More appealing is the comparison of Israelis with Nazis. If Israelis are comparable to Nazis, then all means are acceptable against them. The main significance of the comparison is to legitimize punishment. If Israelis, Jews, are comparable to Nazis, they are no longer victims but aggressors, and they should be condemned and punished. Such an equation is a bloody slander. In the past, the Nazi monsters killed Jews without guilt and without right. Now, elevating Jews to the rank of Nazi monsters can justify the use of extreme measures against them on legal grounds. Preventing unpleasant memories from entering the consciousness serves as a defense mechanism. Germans and Europeans are pushing the Holocaust out of their national memory and history. They’re using a psychological trick to put a protective bandage of forgetfulness on their national memory. The best defense is offense.
“Secondary” antisemitism asserts the equality of Jews with Nazis. This equality is declared in order to obtain the right to harshly criticize the state of Israel. The special status of Israel and the Jewish people weighs heavily not only on foreign commentators, analysts, researchers, and politicians, but also on some Israelis. They dislike the experiences and discussions surrounding antisemitism. They are sometimes irritated by “excessive” references to the Holocaust and trips by young people to Poland to visit death camps. They consider themselves a new people to whom antisemitism does not apply.
Antisemitism and the Holocaust, in their opinion, are a distant past, a stage that has been passed, thoughts and concerns about which are outdated. They do not deny the catastrophe of European Jewry. They try to forget it as a unique anomaly of civilization, as an unreasonable digging into misfortunes that are gone forever, meaningless against the backdrop of today’s current events. They are not Holocaust deniers, but its “forgetters.” They want to erase their state’s connection to the inconvenient, unreasonable Jewish people, in whose bosom they were born, but whose outdated complexes they have risen above. They are annoyed by their compatriots who are “detached” from ‘progress’ and who emphasize the “irrelevant” connection between today’s Israel and the Jewish people.
However, the anti-Jewish pogrom of October 7, 2023, and its pro-Palestinian perception in the world reminded us how old and how relevant antisemitism is. Holocaust denial is not very successful. But attempts to deny and silence the massacre of October 7, 2023, are more successful, as they provide an opportunity to legitimize the lawlessness of antisemitism. The wave of antisemitism following the massacre on October 7, 2023 swept across the world because it found fertile ground in the previously prepared soil of European “secondary” irreplaceable antisemitism.
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Alex Gordon is professor emeritus of physics at the University of Haifa and at Oranim, the Academic College of Education, and the author of 11 books