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Holocaust remembrance—what was meant to be a warning to humanity as a whole, what was meant to act as a bar not only to antisemitism, but to ethnonationalism more generally—has turned into propaganda for Israel. It is now deployed to forbid criticism of Israel and, implicitly, to condone its colonial project.
How did it happen? This use or abuse of Holocaust memory finds its locus classicus in the 2016 International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) “working definition” of antisemitism. Here is what the organization, dedicated to protecting the memory of the Holocaust, says it is:
A certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.
As Mark Mazower puts it, the definition is “indeterminate, repetitive, and incomplete”: in just the first sentence, “the word certain is not needed; perception is an imprecise term; may be is odd since a definition generally tells us what something is; and hatred is not the only and not necessarily even the most important expression of antisemitism.”1 That such an evidently deficient definition should be taken seriously is due to the illustrative examples that follow, above all, its suggestion that it can be antisemitic to deny “the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.” But “‘all people do not have the right to self-determination,’” so Harvard political scientist Rupert Emerson concluded back in the mid-1960s; “‘they have never had it, and they never will have it.’”2 Nonetheless, the Trump administration is currently conscripting the IHRA definition of antisemitism for its war against universities across the country.
What psychological function does conflating Holocaust remembrance and Zionism fulfill? It serves as a marvelous defense