Instrumentalization of the Holocaust
The instrumentalization of the Holocaust is the idea that memory of the Holocaust is manipulated for political, ideological, and financial gain.[1] Accusations of instrumentalization have been made against the state of Israel and its supporters,[2][3] the Russian government,[4] nationalists and right-wing populists in Europe[5] (particularly Hungarian[6] and Polish nationalists),[7] Communist governments, and others.[8]
The practice of instrumentalization was criticized by many Holocaust survivors, including Zygmunt Bauman, Primo Levi, Jean Améry,[2] and Stephen Kapos.[9]
Israeli–Palestinian conflict
[edit]Omer Bartov argues that the Holocaust is one of the primary justifications for the foundation and existence of Israel as a Jewish state.[10] One study of speeches by political leaders concluded that, "The Holocaust plays a major role in the politics and national identity of Israel and Germany."[11] In his book Paradigm Lost, political scientist Ian Lustick says that many Zionist leaders, such as David Ben-Gurion and Chaim Weizmann, viewed the Holocaust as a "wasting asset" and sought to take advantage of sympathy for Jews to achieve Israeli independence. An example of this is their role in the Exodus incident, in which Zionists arranged for the illegal immigration of several hundred Holocaust survivors to Mandatory Palestine. After the ship was intercepted, Ben-Gurion intervened to prevent the refugees from being invited to a third country, and celebrated that the incident dominated international headlines. A few years later, Israeli leaders sought to use the Holocaust to obtain much-needed foreign investment from Germany.[12][13] Jewish organizations such as AIPAC, StandWithUs, and the American Jewish Committee have connected the Holocaust to positive images of Israel in funding appeals and other publications.[14] Segal writes that the field of Holocaust studies is based on the implicit proposition "that Israel, the state of Holocaust survivors, can never perpetrate genocide".[14]
Numerous historians and academics have argued that Israel has used the Holocaust to justify its actions towards Palestinians.[15][14] Historian Moshe Zuckermann, for example, argued that particularist interpretations of the lessons of the Holocaust served to "justify the occupation and brutal, oppressive Israeli acts".[14] Although he criticized the equation of the Holocaust with Israeli policies, Michael Rothberg also denounced the abuse of the Holocaust to justify Israeli violence, writing that it was "the morally justified originary position of victim that frequently justifies violence".[14] Historian Daniel Blatman faulted Israel's "taking advantage of the terrible destruction that the Holocaust brought upon the Jewish people", and the tendency to "wave the permanent victim card" in response to criticism of Israeli policies.[14]
The charge of instrumentalization was prominently made by a number of books around the end of the twentieth century, particularly Peter Novick's The Holocaust in American Life, Tim Cole's Selling the Holocaust, and Norman Finkelstein's The Holocaust Industry, but these books were largely dismissed as overly cynical.[16] In 2022, the conference "Hijacking Memory" was organized to "explore the hijacking of Holocaust memory by right-wing forces", and included presentations on a variety of countries including Germany, Poland, the United Kingdom, and Russia.[17] The conference was split by controversy after Palestinian speaker Tareq Baconi argued that the memory of the Holocaust should not be used to argue against Palestinian human rights. Although Baconi's speech was applauded by the audience, Jan Grabowski and Konstanty Gebert accused him of antisemitism.[18] More recently, Raz Segal[19] and Enzo Traverso argue that the Holocaust has been used to justify the Gaza genocide.[20] In 2025, the Zinn Education Project (an organization founded by the late Howard Zinn in 2008) published an article arguing that it was misleading to analyze the Israel-Palestine conflict as one shaped solely by antisemitism and Islamophobia. They called for teachers to encourage students to learn from histories, such as "the theft of land from Native Americans, the enslavement of Africans, the genocide of Jews, the incarceration of Japanese Americans", and how the forces of settler colonialism and foreign interference serve as historical explanations for the violence involved in this conflict.[21]
Matthias Becker says that the assertion that Jews or Israel supporters instrumentalize the Holocaust for political gain is inherently antisemitic.[1] In contrast, Traverso argues that instrumentalization of the Holocaust could lead to Holocaust denial: "many will come to believe that the Holocaust is a myth invented to defend the interests of Israel and its allies".[20]
Other cases
[edit]Jelena Subotić argues that in post-Communist European countries such as Poland, Hungary, Lithuania and Serbia, the Holocaust narrative was repurposed to emphasize the historical victimhood of non-Jewish national majorities and to argue that Communist atrocities were equal or greater than those perpetrated by Nazi Germany.[22]
In 2023, the Polish political party PiS released a political video including an image of Auschwitz concentration camp, which the Auschwitz Museum and other critics said instrumentalized the Holocaust.[23]
References
[edit]- ^ a b Becker, Matthias J. (2024). "Instrumentalisation of Antisemitism and the Holocaust". Decoding Antisemitism: A Guide to Identifying Antisemitism Online. Postdisciplinary Studies in Discourse. Springer Nature Switzerland. pp. 273–288. doi:10.1007/978-3-031-49238-9_20. ISBN 978-3-031-49238-9.
- ^ a b Mishra, Pankaj (1 March 2024). "The Shoah after Gaza". London Review of Books. Retrieved 22 September 2025.
- ^ Gutwein, Daniel (2009). "The Privatization of the Holocaust: Memory, Historiography, and Politics". Israel Studies. 14 (1): 36–64. doi:10.2979/ISR.2009.14.1.36. ISSN 1084-9513. JSTOR 30245843.
- ^ Makhortykh, Mykola; Vziatysheva, Victoria; Sydorova, Maryna (18 December 2023). "Generative AI and Contestation and Instrumentalization of Memory About the Holocaust in Ukraine". Eastern European Holocaust Studies. 1 (2): 349–355. doi:10.1515/eehs-2023-0054.
- ^ Subotić, Jelena (2024). "Contested Remembrance of the Holocaust in Post-Communist Europe". Nasledje Kragujevac. XXI (58): 229–239. doi:10.46793/NasKg2458.229S.
- ^ Vigneault, Sara-Jane (2022). "The Memory Discourse of the Holocaust in Hungary: Distortion of Memory". Cahiers d'histoire. 38 (2): 100–124. doi:10.7202/1099406ar. ISSN 0712-2330.
- ^ Zisook, Jonathan (1 September 2021). "Instrumentalizing the Past: The Politics of Holocaust Memory in Contemporary Poland". Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects.
- ^ Making Sense of the Holocaust in Socialist Eastern Europe Audrey Kichelewski p. 12
- ^ "Israel using Holocaust as a cover for Gaza genocide: Holocaust survivor". www.aa.com.tr. Retrieved 22 September 2025.
- ^ [1] Omer Bartov
- ^ Hadar, Maya; Miesch, Regula; Segev, Elad (2021-10-13). "Politicizing the Holocaust". Semantic Network Analysis in Social Sciences. London: Routledge. pp. 94–111. doi:10.4324/9781003120100-5. ISBN 978-1-003-12010-0.
- ^ Lustick, Ian S. (2017). "The Holocaust in Israeli Political Culture: Four Constructions and Their Consequences: Editor's Note: This Article Is Followed by Four Comments and a Response by Ian Lustick". Contemporary Jewry. 37 (1): 125–170 [140–145]. doi:10.1007/s12397-017-9208-7. ISSN 0147-1694. JSTOR 26346572.
- ^ Lustick, Ian S. (18 October 2019). Paradigm Lost: From Two-State Solution to One-State Reality. University of Pennsylvania Press. pp. 33–35. ISBN 978-0-8122-9681-5.
- ^ a b c d e f Klein, Shira (8 January 2025). "The Growing Rift Between Holocaust Scholars over Israel/Palestine". Journal of Genocide Research: 1–21. doi:10.1080/14623528.2024.2448061.
- ^
- References for the statement provided in Klein 2025:
- Idith Zertal, Israel's Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
- Ilan Pappe, The Idea of Israel: A History of Power and Knowledge (New York: Verso Books, 2014), 18.
- Norman Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering (London: Penguin Random House, 2000).
- Avhraham Burg, The Holocaust Is Over: We Must Rise from Its Ashes (New York: MacMillan, 2008.
- Peter Novick, "The Holocaust Isn't – and Isn't Likely to Become – a Global Memory" in Marking Evil: Holocaust Memory in the Global Age, ed. Amos Goldberg and Haim Hazan (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2015).
- Ian S. Lustick (April 2017), "The Holocaust in Israeli Political Culture: Four Constructions and their Consequences", Contemporary Jewry 37, no. 1.
- ^ Sutcliffe, Adam (2 April 2024). "Whose Feelings Matter? Holocaust Memory, Empathy, and Redemptive Anti-Antisemitism". Journal of Genocide Research. 26 (2): 222–242. doi:10.1080/14623528.2022.2160533.
- ^ "Einstein Forum – Hijacking Memory The Holocaust and the New Right". Retrieved 8 October 2025.
- ^ "The Challenge of Defending Memory in Germany". Jewish Currents. Retrieved 18 September 2025.
- ^ Segal, Raz (24 October 2023). "Israel must stop weaponising the Holocaust". The Guardian. Retrieved 25 September 2025.
- ^ a b Traverso, Enzo (3 October 2024). Gaza Faces History. Footnote Press. p. search "Holocaust". ISBN 978-1-80444-179-4.
- ^ Menkart, Deborah (2025-01-10). "Teaching About Palestine-Israel and the Unfolding Genocide in Gaza". Zinn Education Project. Retrieved 2025-10-12.
- ^ Subotić, Jelena (2 January 2020). "The Appropriation of Holocaust Memory in Post-Communist Eastern Europe | Modern Languages Open". Modern Languages Open. doi:10.3828/mlo.v0i0.315.
- ^ "Polish government slammed for 'instrumentalizing' Holocaust". Deutsche Welle. 3 June 2023. Retrieved 8 October 2025.