How the Shoah’s moral power is weaponised against Jews – and why Western leaders must fight it

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Last Friday night, I was going to my favourite restaurant in London and I came upon a troubling scene: a mob of shouting activists were screaming slogans of hate – anti-Israel, but also anti-Jewish slogans that abused the Holocaust and genocide to threaten the local restaurant Miznon that is British-owned though with Israeli connections which they are determined to boycott, destroy and drive out of business. Hundreds of police were there to keep the mob at a distance from the restaurant but also protecting the bullies. If they had protested like this once or twice, that would be an exercise of the right of protest and free speech but this menacing boycott has gone on for months and that is intimidation, harassment and bullying by a gang of bigots and I say to the Home Secretary this abuse of our freedoms cannot stand. I admit that I did think – this is a small event but in some ways it recalled Kristallnacht in Notting Hill Gate. The very phrase rebels against the British way of life and yet we have indulged this exploitation of the very freedoms we cherish.

The traditional denial of the Holocaust – by people who insist it didn’t happen but rather wish it had – is no longer a strange monstrosity incubated in the dank laboratories of neo-Nazis and cranks. In traditional denial and ideological distortion they have been joined by an extremist left, an Islamist hard right and by Western decolonisation supporters of organisations like Hamas and – revealingly as we see this week – the Iranian dictatorship and its butchering Revolutionary Guards. This is no longer about left or right; but while we all condemn it when it is coming from goose-stepping neo-Nazis, many too often indulge it when it comes from nearer home.

This tribal indulgence has made it easier for people with malign agendas to minimise or distort the Holocaust for their own ends. Even worse, parts of our universities, media, NGOs and charities in this country have abetted the distortion, erasure or commandeering of the Holocaust. It is also important not to be parochial about awareness of the Holocaust outside Europe: in South Asia and the Middle East from which many people migrated to Britain, the Holocaust was never taught nor was it believed by large numbers of people. This makes its education here specially important.

Just yesterday it was reported the number of schools commemorating Holocaust history has halved since October 7. The figures are exaggerated I hope but it is obscenely ironic that the largest murder of Jewish civilians since 1945 has prompted teachers and unions to apply a dubious moral selectivity in favour of a bigoted ahistorical ideology – because of events faraway in the Middle East.

Worrying as this is, it is also useful. It demonstrates how a relatively small movement of self-righteous ideologues have, without us noticing, captured some of the crowning heights and ivory towers of our liberal societies – similar things are happening in USA and France as well as Britain – and how normal and easy it has become for such activists in teaching unions and NGOs and arts organisations to use boycotts and mass resignations to control debate and culture today, to police an intolerant conformity instead of allowing many voices to exist and to enforce an ahistorical false narrative that perverts and degrades Jewish history – particularly the Holocaust.

Why and how has this happened?

The recognition and commemorations of the murder of an entire Jewish world in Europe became a universal measure of what Western tolerance and democracy meant. Raphael Lemkin coined the term "genocide" in 1944 and out of the shock of Hitler’s crimes, the Allies created a system of international law and human rights to ensure peace under a new organisation, the United Nations. The open societies of what I call – for brevity – the West, America, Western Europe – almost unanimously fostered a taboo on antisemitism and racism that promoted the study and commemoration of the Holocaust in our language, our calendars, our schools. This was a moral triumph and a golden age for liberalism, humanitarianism, tolerance in European societies and for Jewish life of course – for a while. It lasted 80 proud years – but it is now over.

In some ways and with best intentions, the West was hoisted by our own petard. The Holocaust was universalised and institutionalised. In a category mistake, Holocaust institutions deliberately played down the uniquely targetted scope, span and effectiveness of the Final Solution to appear “inclusive”. Jews played their own role in this in part because of Jewish traditions of humanism and liberalism, in part out of guilt and gratitude for post-Second World War tolerance and their success in America and Europe. As the morality of the Holocaust narrative was universalised, it was neutralised. Its teaching became procedural, its calendar ritualistic, its shock diffused, its language – of genocides and anti-racism – became virtuous jargon, a universal formula that was an easy gateway for admission to civil society shorn of its deeper significance.

Internationally, over those 80 years, as the West lost its paramountcy, the many former colonies that were now independent states in the UN came to regard this moral rule-based order as evidence of Western colonial humbug. Within Britain and America, the commemoration of the Holocaust, the embrace of anti-racism, the taboo on antisemitism were the signs of a civilised country – yet the etiquette of anti-racism and the reverence for Holocaust history became evidence to many of a neo-liberal, neo-colonialist, capitalistic system linked to American imperium and Jewish power.

Recently these polite conventions cannot only be flouted and monetised by a drear host of podcasters and opportunistic politicians with transgressive excitement but masked with the very jargon of anti-racism.

As we learned last week, the people behind the banning of a Jewish MP from a Bristol school were a cabal of teaching union members and DEI coordinators who constantly repeat the language of antiracism. We exist in a struggle where words often mean their opposite: in that case and others, diversity can mean discrimination, equity, injustice, inclusive is really exclusion. And it turns out every bigot is a proud “anti-racist to their bones,” every antisemite is against antisemitism; naturally everyone is against Holocaust and genocide.

In Britain, the Prime Minister and Home Secretary have attacked antisemitism; the Education Secretary is investigating antisemitism in education. But the language has become jargon, it has been devalued, and now is often meaningless and easily exploitable. Each case of anti-Jewish racism is treated as an astonishing surprise; unless someone is murdered, the ideology and its Holocaust inversion is never fully rebutted. Antisemitism is a shapeshifter and we need to shapeshift to keep up with it, to overtake it. And to do so we need our leaders to be much more realistic and less naïve in analysing who and what people say they are and what they are really doing and saying.

How has this insidious jargon come not to stop racism but to protect it?

The degradation of the Holocaust is based on a neat but wicked inversion of Jewish history by which the tragedies of Jewish experience are used first against the Jews themselves and increasingly against our open societies. After the 1967 Six day War, the Soviets created a new ideology of Holocaust inversion that has taken around 60 years to emerge into the light.

In January 1969, at a conference in Cairo, Yevgeny Yevseyev, a well-connected Soviet diplomat, read an essay that denounced Zionism as a “modern form of fascism”. Publishing it as a book Fascism under the Blue Star, Yevseyev became the doyen of Soviet “Zionologists” who translated Tsarist antisemitic forgeries such as the Elders of Zion, replacing the word “Jew” with that of “Zionist” and disinterred the medieval “blood libel” that was now used against Israel. “The practical application of the Zionist doctrine in the Middle East,” wrote Yevseyev, was “genocide, racism, perfidy, duplicity, aggression, annexation… all the attributes of fascism that go back to Hitler.” It was the first such use of “genocide” – the start of a weird dark symmetry implying the guilt institutionally imposed on the West by Holocaust commemoration was no longer necessary: in fact it was a travesty because the Holocaust was exaggerated; furthermore the Jews deserved what happened in the Second World War because of what they were doing in Palestine now – thus providing a sort of absolution for Europe’s Nazi past.

The history of anti-Jewishness has had three phases, something that David Nirenberg describes in his book Anti-Judaism. In the Middle Ages, a religious and racial anti-Judaism that included the blood libel that Jews killed children – started here in Britain with the case of the murdered apprentice William of Norwich in 1144. In the Spanish expulsion of the Jews and the Spanish concept of the “purity of blood’ in the late 15th century this became increasingly racial too. After the emancipation and liberation of European Jews, in the 19th/20th century this mutated into a “scientific” racial antisemitism – a new, weird word coined by a German journalist in 1879 – himself a vicious hater of Jewishness. And then Yevseyev had invented a new version – "Zionism is Nazism” designed to taint Jews with the worst taints of the 20th century: racism, a crime defined by their own Holocaust, and colonisation. He understood that the history of Israel and the Palestinians was – because of the unique history of the Jews, Europe’s ingrained tropes of antisemitism, the unique Western Christian relationship with the Holy Land and the events of the British Mandate and Balfour Declaration – a perfect potential wedge that could be used to undermine not just the legitimacy of Israel but the unity and morality of the post-1945 West itself that had defined its moral order against the crimes of the Holocaust. That morality, he argued, was a neo-colonial humbug, American imperialism and Jewish trickery. In this decolonising anti-racism critique of Western imperialism, the Israelis, the bourgeois and the successful, controlling Jews were surrogates for the crimes of Western liberalism, imperialism and capitalism. His genius was to use the language of humanitarian law to undermine the values of the democracies themselves. It did work for a long time. Not in the West.

The “Zionism as Nazism” trope for 60 years remained the preserve of extremists like the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Baader Meinhof and the Red Brigade as well as the Communist bloc. In 1975, the UN passed the “Zionism is racism” resolution. In May 1976, the Soviet delegate to the UN denounced Israel for “racial genocide” in the West Bank, the first time that had been used in the General Assembly. At the end of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, Arafat accused Israel of “genocide” of Palestinians and Lebanese. The ideology quickly was coopted and merged with medieval anti-Judaism and 19th century antisemitism by resistance Islamism: Hamas’s charter combined the three, openly citing the Elders of Zion.

The fall of the USSR removed the boundaries of ideological fusion. In 1999, Australian academic Patrick Wolfe cited Australia to coin the ideological framework of “Settler Colonialism” in which settlers eliminated indigenous peoples in a genocide – a concept harnessed immediately to accuse Israel of that ultimate sin, neatly dovetailing with the Soviet inversion of the Holocaust and the newly fashionable ideology of decolonisation, promoted by Fanon and others, by which any oppressive colonialists could – as in Algeria – be violently driven out or liquidated. After Hamas took power in Gaza in 2006, stories started to appear that the Strip was a “new Warsaw Ghetto” with the Israelis as “Nazis.”

Sixty years after Yevgeny Yevseyev’s article, the kinetic drama and brazen killing of Hamas’s invasion of Israel on October 7 – itself an event of genocidal intent – unleashed this latent Holocaust inversion trope – combined with decolonisation – against Israel and more globally Jews – doubly condemned as both omnipotent capitalists but also linked to the Jewish state, a link that is inherent in Judaism – the very word deriving from Judea. The dark mirroring of the Holocaust was laced with much older bigotry, particularly the medieval blood libel in which Jews killed deliberately children.

This lecture is not about the wars in the Middle East. The significance for Holocaust Memorial Day lies in the fact that as much as slogans like "Globalise the Intifada,” Holocaust inversion is so damning that it justifies and encourages murder.

It is the moral power of the Holocaust – the sacral pillar of the West’s rule-based order – that makes the accusation of genocide – the polite world’s very definition of evil – so poisonous and so diabolical, for it commandeers the Six Million to justify boycotts, attacks, virtue tests and ultimately murder of Israelis and Jews. In the world of intellect and ideas, it is wickedness personified.

Given that the Holocaust itself and the jargon of anti-racism has been so artfully commandeered, how can we teach the Holocaust, how can we take back the language?

The teaching and commemoration of the Holocaust needs to return to what happened in the Holocaust. Not a commemoration of what happened in other times in places to other peoples everywhere.

Everyone has the right to criticise Israel and to support Palestinian rights – indeed I cherish the hope of a Palestinian republic safe and thriving next to a Jewish republic. But the minimisation, distortion and degradation of the Holocaust and its history is as unnecessary to that critique and that campaign as eliminationist and hate language, the use of antisemitic blood libels, the deployment of calumnies about Jewish power and prosperity and white supremacy and all the other gibberish that reveals the real attitude of this activism and its Islamist partner towards Jews – and towards the West.

The Holocaust is unique but sadly genocides are common.

Yet we – our media, our academy, our politicians, our culture – pay no attention to genocides and democides across the world – if those crimes do not involve the “West” or people regarded (often wrongly) as "Western” – a form of humbug that ironically provides cover for those who misuse the Holocaust itself, showing the fundamental fraud of the "Zionism is Nazism” ideology. The example of Sudan is stark: in 2009, its dictator was indicted for genocide. He was protected by South Africa and other countries and his indictment was attacked by decolonisation professors as itself an example of Western colonialist-imperialism. Now in the present civil war, 200,000 Sudanese have been murdered including 40,000 in a few days. Yet the humanitarian NGOs and international law activists and UN do and say little nor do our politicians. To give deeper meaning to the jargon of anti-war, anti-racism and the formulaic rituals of Holocaust commemoration, less cynicism and more bravery and honesty are required.

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Much of the damage has already been done by Holocaust inversion to the vocabulary and architecture of international human rights and law – often by the very supranational organisations and "humanitarian” NGOs themselves. How now will we describe the murder of Herero people, the Armenians in the First World War, the Holocaust itself, the Bosnia, Rwanda, and Darfur genocides? But of course this is not truly about them; it is about the sins of the West itself and the damage to the West is part of the aim of this ideology.

The events of this week in Iran reveal that damage so clearly: only on Thursday did the UN Security Council hold a session at which the dissident Masih Alinejad – whom the Iranian dictator thrice tried to assassinate – reprimanded the disgraceful Secretary-General Guteres: “The United Nations has failed to respond. The Secretary-General himself has not spoken publicly against the massacre unfolding in Iran. Silence at this moment sends a signal. Sends a message to the killers of young protesters. I strongly believe that the regime in Iran heard the clear message from the Secretary-General. I think the members of this body have forgotten the privilege and responsibility of sitting in this room. Secretary-General, why are you afraid of the Islamic Republic? Millions of innocent and unarmed protesters have been silenced with bullets, mass arrest, prison and a total communications blackout!” Later she demanded to know: “Where is the left now? Where are the “pro-Palestinian” and “anti-war” activists when the Islamic Republic is killing innocent Iranians?” The respected Iranian Yale lecturer Arash Azizi – himself a proud Marxist – reflects “you would have thought leftists would understand the killing of Iranians on the streets fighting against a brutal capitalist regime. But unfortunately they don’t. The Western leftist movements hate the West. They hate their own societies.”

The Iranians have exposed the real nature of this movement and its real cynicism and wicked humbug.

Eighty years after the Holocaust, all of this makes the mission of Holocaust education personified by our host Holocaust Education Trust and its admirable chief Karen Pollock urgent, and the requirement to get the teaching right, essential. As our trajectory since 1945 lengthens to today, it is clear now the Holocaust was not the apocalyptic end of anti-Jewishness that we thought but just a colossal spasm in the middle of a continuum which spans the Crusades, the blood libels, Khmelnitsky massacre, the pogroms, the Russian Civil War (we often forget 200,000 Jews were murdered during these two years), the Shoah itself and then today October 7, the Yom Kippur murders in Manchester, the Bondi Beach massacre in Australia – and whatever horrors come next.

The necessity for politicians to speak more clearly is especially important. The use of anti-racist jargon is obligatory and it remains essential but instead of becoming a shield against anti-Jewish racism and hate, it has become a protection, a Get Out of Jail Card for racists and ideologues themselves. It is admirable that our leaders here in Britain stand against antisemitism and racism and seek to protect Jewish community life that is already overshadowed by threat and security measures. It is admirable our security services daily defeat diabolic murderous plots.

But the key is not to allow the adoption of this jargon by malignant actors mask poisonous ideology and excuse intolerant bullying and dangerous hate, not to allow it to work against its underlying values and intentions. Since the words have become with time and overuse and universal declamation, devalued, leaders need to say what antisemitism, what racism they are standing against and part of that is the rejection of egregious and harmful Holocaust inversion.

Be braver in promoting what the words really mean and what their spirit is against. Be braver in retaking the institutions that have been captured by ideologues who are enforcing malign ideas and intolerant conformity. Get back to teaching what the Holocaust was – and what it wasn’t. As the hatred shapeshifts our leaders must shapeshift with it.

Lastly one vital thing: an important part of education is to celebrate Judaism. Jewish history must not only be a chronicle of massacres and struggles. Jewish history is also joyful and remarkable and fascinating in all its richness that embraces Judea, Babylon, Egypt in ancient times to the vibrant communities of Andalusia, Constantinople, Morocco, Baghdad, Jerusalem and Alexandria and the amazing world of European Jewishness, the worlds of Ladino and Yiddish and now those of America and Israel and Europe. There is much to celebrate: Jewish art, culture, humour, films, poetry.

The Holocaust started with words that made it possible to dehumanise people thanks to their religion, race or identity then it moved to witch hunts, laws, boycotts, deportations and finally killing.

The words, the history, the education of the Holocaust are more than ever the mark of a civilised society.