Holocaust Inversion

By MANFRED GERSTENFELD - The Wall Street Journal
January 28, 2008

Solemn ceremonies around Europe marked yesterday's Holocaust Memorial Day. But 63 years after the liberation of Auschwitz on Jan. 27, 1945, one of the most perfidious forms of contemporary anti-Semitism is Holocaust inversion -- the portrayal of Israelis and Jews as modern-day Nazis. The charge is that Israel supposedly behaves toward the Palestinians as Germany did to the Jews in World War II.

This distortion of history is particularly widespread in the Muslim world. But it is also gaining currency in the West, where it is no longer just the domain of the extreme Left. Last year, a German bishop visiting Israel compared Ramallah to the Warsaw Ghetto. Portuguese Nobel laureate for literature José Saramago in 2002 compared Ramallah even to Auschwitz.

Cartoons are a particularly popular medium to express such distortions. Portraying Jews as Nazis, Israeli prime ministers as Hitler and the Star of David as equal to the swastika is almost routine in the Arab world. This trend has also reached Europe, where during the anti-Iraq war protests, for instance, many demonstrators held placards depicting similar images. In the Netherlands you can now buy T-shirts and greeting cards showing Anne Frank wearing a kaffiyeh, the traditional Palestinian headdress, wrapped around her neck like a scarf. In other words, the Palestinians are the new Jews, which makes the Israelis the new Nazis.

Holocaust-inversion caricatures appear also occasionally in Western mainstream papers. In July 2006, the Norwegian daily Dagbladet carried a drawing showing Prime Minister Ehud Olmert as SS Major Amon Göth, the commander of a Nazi death camp depicted in Steven Spielberg's "Schindler's List." A 2002 cartoon in the Greek daily Ethnos showed two Jewish soldiers dressed as Nazis, with Stars of David on their helmets, thrusting knives into Arabs. Its caption reads: "Do not feel guilty, my brother. We were not in Auschwitz and Dachau to suffer, but to learn."

Many Western Holocaust inverters may simply aim to bolster the Arab and Palestinian cause by demonizing Israel. The most extreme, though, aim at the destruction of Israel by first undermining its moral legitimacy. Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki explained it at a December 2006 conference in Tehran of Holocaust deniers and minimizers: "If the official version of the Holocaust is thrown into doubt, then the identity and nature of Israel will be thrown into doubt."

Whatever the motives, Holocaust inversion has made major inroads in Europe. In a 2004 poll conducted by the University of Bielefeld, 51% of German respondents agreed with the statement that: "What the state of Israel does today to the Palestinians, is in principle not different from what the Nazis did in the Third Reich to the Jews."

Holocaust Memorial Day should not only be a day of commemoration. Its meaning is undone when at the same time new versions of the old anti-Semitic demonizations are gaining ground.

Mr. Gerstenfeld is chairman of the board of fellows of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs.