Holocaust inversion is going mainstream

Cynthia Nixon, John Oliver, Chef José Andrés. An award-winning writer with an essay in The London Review of Books. Protesters outside the Nova exhibit in Manhattan. Celebrities, faux-academics, and activists. These are some of the people who have been engaging in a particularly noxious form of antisemitism since the Oct. 7 massacre.

Lesley Klaff explained this particular phenomenon in 2014. “What has been called ‘Holocaust Inversion,’” she wrote in Fathom, “involves an inversion of reality (the Israelis are cast as the ‘new’ Nazis and the Palestinians as the ‘new’ Jews), and an inversion of morality (the Holocaust is presented as a moral lesson for or even a moral indictment of ‘the Jews’).” The Holocaust, she asserted, “is now being used, instrumentally, as a means to express animosity towards the homeland of the Jews.”

While this phenomenon has been at play for at least a decade, it is now, disturbingly, going mainstream. When Sex and the City actress Cynthia Nixon appeared on The View in December, she told her hosts, to much applause, that her oldest child, “has been reaching out to my wife and I and asking us, imploring us really to say, use your voice to affirm as loudly as you can that never again means never again for anyone.”

“Never again,” obviously, is a reference to the Holocaust, and Nixon’s analogy constructs Jews as the new Nazis. That the analogy was based on claims that were categorically false didn’t seem to register to her or anyone else on The View.

In a 7,500-word piece published in March by the London Review of Books, Pankaj Mishra, pretentiously posturing as thoughtful and compassionate, wrote: “That yesterday’s victims are very likely to become today’s victimizers is the lesson of organized violence in the former Yugoslavia, Sudan, Congo, Rwanda, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan and too many other places. I was still shocked by the dark meaning the Israeli state had drawn from the Shoah and then institutionalized in a machinery of repression.”

Mishra disingenuously feigns concern for the memory of the Holocaust even as he falsely asserts that the Israeli war in Gaza is in danger of eclipsing it. He wrote, “Universalist reference points—the Shoah as the measure of all crimes, antisemitism as the most lethal form of bigotry—are in danger of disappearing as the Israeli military massacres and starves Palestinians.”

Similarly, he puts up a pretense that he has studied the issue and only reluctantly reached a conclusion of Israeli guilt. But what the many falsifications and distortions in his article show is that Israel’s guilt was a foregone conclusion for him and he went out in search of evidence to support it while disregarding evidence to the contrary. For Mishra and others who engage in Holocaust inversion, Israel’s guilt has already been established by the Holocaust.

Holocaust inversion transposes the guilt of the abusers, the Nazis, onto the abused, the Jews, and leaves no room for any other possibility. It plays on a widespread societal belief about abused children: They grow up to become abusers themselves. This is false. Certainly, they can do so, but most, of course, do not.

But Holocaust inversion takes this fallacy a step further. Projecting this archetype about individuals onto a nation does not merely involve the possibility that the abused can become abusers; it assumes, as Mishra did, that it is inevitable that the abused become abusers. He leaves no room for even the possibility that the abused is actually innocent.

This troubling trend continues. In April, after claiming that the Jewish state is conducting “a war against humanity itself,” Chef José Andrés told Martha Raddatz on ABC‘s This Week, “If somebody knows suffering, that’s the people of Israel. If somebody really understands the meaning of suffering, if somebody should be holding the highest standards of humanity, I will say that’s also the people of Israel.”

His obvious implication is that what the Jews are now doing to the Palestinians is the same as what the Nazis did to the Jews. Andrés, the founder of the World Central Kitchen relief agency, invoked Jewish suffering during the Holocaust to imply an analogy to what Gazans are experiencing, even as he parroted Nazi-esque language himself. Raddatz offered no pushback and Andrés’s statements aired on a major network.

The point of Holocaust inversion, of course, is to legitimize violence against Jews. After all, if they are Nazis, they must deserve it. This was made clear in June when Within Our Lifetime founder Nerdeen Kiswani led those who gathered to protest an exhibit about the Nova music festival massacre in a chant claiming the festival was “like having a rave right next to the gas chambers during the Holocaust.” Gaza, in her absurd analogy, was like the gas chambers. And the Israeli rave-goers, according to her logic, deserved what they got.

Then, last month, John Oliver brought Holocaust inversion to HBO using language almost identical to that of Cynthia Nixon: “A phrase that gets brought up a lot with regard to Israel is ‘never again,’ an anti-genocide slogan often invoked in memory of the Holocaust, and it’s always been open to two interpretations. There’s the one that means, this must never again happen to the Jewish people and the one that means, this must never again happen to any people anywhere, and in the West Bank as in Gaza right now, it’s pretty clear which one the Israeli government has favored.”

This is an overt accusation that Israel is committing a Holocaust in Gaza, a claim that is as baseless today as it was when Nixon said it in December and all the times it was said before Oct. 7. Genocide is defined by an “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.”

There is no such thing as a war with no civilian casualties, but Israel “has taken more measures to avoid needless civilian harm than virtually any other nation that’s fought an urban war,” according to John Spencer, chair of Urban Warfare Studies at the Modern War Institute (MWI) at West Point.

Holocaust inversion doesn’t merely project Nazi guilt onto the Jews. By creating a fictional new Holocaust, it absolves the actual Nazis of the guilt of a unique evil, making inversion a form of Holocaust denial. Uninformed and ignorant people like John Oliver and Cynthia Nixon are not likely to stop doing it, but those who platform them must respond responsibly.

Originally published by Israel Hayom.