This is a repost of a Substack essay (The Progressive Jew) by Robert Rosenthal, who describes himself as “a former Zionist, a Jewish progressive, and a family member of Holocaust victims.”

The following statement applies to me and probably many of you. I know (knew) people who fit this description: “Perhaps you’ve wondered why Zionists of my Baby Boom generation, whom you consider highly intelligent and know are well‑educated – and even identify as ‘liberal’ – have been capable of harboring racist views regarding Palestinians and even defending the crime of crimes: Genocide.” Rosenthal offers his essay as a partial answer to this vexing and upsetting question.

In case you’re wondering, some are US international education colleagues, including self-proclaimed “thought leaders.” They are still on the path to becoming anti-Zionists, a promised land most will probably never reach because they mistakenly identify the apartheid, settler colonial, and genocidal state of Israel with Judaism, a dangerous disservice to that religion and its adherents worldwide. Sadly, their identity is inextricably link to this false conflation. For most, overcoming this grand delusion is an insurmountable task. It takes the courage of an epiphany to look at yourself in the mirror and admit that one of your fundamental beliefs is fatally flawed. That’s a bridge too far for most.

Peace, MAA

Less than three years after the Jews of Europe – including members of my own family – were ghettoized and ethnically cleansed for being Jewish, the people of Palestine were ethnically cleansed and ghettoized for NOT being Jewish.

Tragically, European settlers in Palestine who survived the Holocaust were among the Zionists who helped carry out the crime against humanity known as the Nakba (“Catastrophe” in Arabic). That small percentage of Holocaust survivors played a role in one of the biggest crimes of the 20th century: the depopulation of Palestine.

How could people so profoundly impacted by “man’s inhumanity to man” behave in such manifestly cruel ways? Why did people scarred by the pathological violence of racism in Europe participate in unspeakably violent acts rooted in racism, including gruesome massacres of Palestinian children, women, and men.

How the Abused Become Abusers

We’ll never know, case by case, why Holocaust survivors became willing Nakba participants, but psychology offers a lens on the forces that may have driven this horrific phenomenon.

Research on the “cycle of abuse” has indicated that people who experience severe victimization are more likely to subsequently commit violence, in part because trauma can normalize aggression, blunt empathy, and make coercive control feel like self‑protection.

Having said that, past trauma doesn’t make Nakba participation less than immoral, un‑Jewish, and evil.

How Zionists Were Raised to Defend Genocide

It’s believed that collective trauma – especially when framed as an existential threat – can fuel dehumanization of “othered” people and be accompanied by intense “us vs. them” thinking. In the Palestine‑Israel context, scholars have found that intergenerational memories of pogroms and the Holocaust can make some Jews more reactive to perceived danger and more likely to see harsh force as necessary for what they view as safety.

The Holocaust ended just a dozen years before I was born. Memories of the Shoah were still fresh – particularly in our home. Sisters and brothers of both my grandfathers were trapped in the Lodz Ghetto. None survived the Holocaust.

As a kid growing up on the Jersey side of the Hudson, I was misled into believing a giant chunk of the world hated Jews. Germans, we were told, still had the Nazi “virus.” Arabs (Palestinians were never called “Palestinians”) were either terrorists or terrorist sympathizers. According to some Zionists, they’d kill us all if they ever had the chance. Fear of a second Holocaust was in the air.

In Israel, education scholar Nurit Peled‑Elhanan has shown that this kind of fear and contempt wasn’t just absorbed at home or in synagogues; it was built into the school system itself. In a major study of Israeli history, geography, and civics textbooks, she found that they erase Palestinian life, present “Arabs” as a permanent threat, and frame Palestinians inside Israel as a demographic “problem” rather than as equal human beings. The books, she argues, instill racist attitudes and prepare Jewish‑Israeli children to enter the IOF seeing Palestinians as people “whose very existence they have been taught to resent and fear.”

If all that wasn’t collective trauma with intergenerational impact, I don’t know what was. None of this excuses what Zionists have done or are doing; it only helps explain how so many could be shaped to accept the unacceptable.

Perhaps you’ve wondered why Zionists of my Baby Boom generation, whom you consider highly intelligent and know are well‑educated – and even identify as “liberal” – have been capable of harboring racist views regarding Palestinians and even defending the crime of crimes: Genocide. What we’re discussing here is, at a minimum, part of the answer.

How Zionists Rationalize the Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

When it comes to Palestine‑Israel, today’s Germans are making big mistakes, but they deserve credit for owning up to their nation’s crimes against humanity in the 1930s and 1940s. Israeli leaders and dominant Zionist institutions, on the other hand, have never come to grips with their crimes against the people of Palestine.

On Israeli atrocities, many Zionists operate from a three‑step script: deny everything you possibly can, blame the victims when denial fails, and when that collapses too, rationalize the oppression as “security.”

Zionists correctly point out that after World War II, commitments by nations of the world to accept displaced Jewish persons fell well short of the need. They’re right when they add that Jews had a longtime presence in Palestine. But so did Muslims and Christians. For centuries before political Zionism, Jews, Muslims, and Christians lived on that land side by side, generally in peace. Long before the Holocaust, though, political Zionism had already begun functioning as a settler‑colonial project in Palestine, with land purchases, displacement, and growing armed confrontation, justifiably fueling Palestinian fears of being pushed off their own country.

A “Jewish state” didn’t have to be planted on top of what had been a largely Arab land. Other solutions to fill the gap certainly would have emerged. A “Jewish state” could have been created in what had been Nazi Germany. At the time, I doubt any significant part of the world would have objected. But Palestinians – who had nothing to do with Nazi crimes – ultimately paid one of the highest prices for the Holocaust.

How Zionists Exploit the Holocaust to Justify Israeli Oppression

At the 2024 Holocaust Remembrance Day commemoration at Yad Vashem, Benjamin Netanyahu – the Israeli strongman wanted at The Hague for charges including mass starvation and other crimes against humanity – said: “In the terrible Holocaust, there were great leaders in the world who stood by, so the first lesson of the Holocaust is this: If we don’t protect ourselves, no one will protect us. And if we have to stand alone, we will stand alone.”

Eight decades after it ended, an indicted Israeli prime minister was disgracefully using the Holocaust to justify what many jurists and human rights experts describe as genocide, with the Western world’s participation. Even as Israel cements its pariah status, Netanyahu’s answer is essentially: so be it.

When I was little, I – like many other Jews – interpreted “Never Again” to mean a Holocaust would never again happen to Jews. But as time went on, a lot of us expanded the meaning of “Never Again” to include all of humanity.

Zionists seem to remain narrowly and even obsessively focused on Jews only. Not only that, but many also apparently believe that if endless Israeli oppression is necessary to maximize Jewish safety, it’s acceptable. In addition to being spectacularly selfish, racist, and immoral, it’s irrational. Even ADL data shows that major Israeli assaults on Palestinians are regularly followed by sharp spikes in antisemitic incidents globally.

Since the end of World War II, by most estimates, more Jews have died violently in Israel than anywhere else on earth. Israeli oppression makes Jews in Israel and across the diaspora less safe. And for Palestinians, Zionist ethnic cleansing, ghettoization, erasure, occupation, apartheid, and genocide have been catastrophic.

How Jews Reclaimed “Never Again”

Zionists took away the wrong lessons from the Holocaust. But many Jews with a close connection to the ethnic cleansing of Europe’s Jews have been appalled by Israel’s awful acts. In 2014, when Israel bombed the overwhelmingly unarmed people of Gaza for 51 straight days and killed more than 500 Palestinian children, 327 Holocaust survivors and family members of survivors and victims signed a letter published as an ad in The New York Times condemning the hideous assault. I was one of the signers.

Holocaust survivors should have been among the last people on earth to participate in ethnic cleansing, ghettoization, erasure, and any form of white supremacy. The same moral expectation applies to today’s Jewish Zionists, given the recent history of European Jews. It’s shameful that, in addition to defending the indefensible, many Zionists are appalled by Jews who condemn Israel’s genocide in Gaza but seem unbothered by the genocide itself.

The only real path to safety for everyone between the river and the sea is an end to Israeli oppression, not a continuation of Israeli violence.

Zionism – a key driver of Israel’s crimes against humanity – is a racist, dishonest, violent movement that needs to go the way of apartheid South Africa. Help make that happen by backing a dramatic expansion of the nonviolent Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement until long‑suffering Palestinians finally win freedom, equality, and justice. Shalom.

Updated (19.1.26)