The oppressor within: How Israel turned Holocaust memory against Palestine

Israel often frames itself as a nation born from the ashes of unspeakable persecution. The Holocaust, in particular, is invoked as the eternal justification for its existence and its policies. Yet history’s cruellest irony is that the memory of Jewish suffering has been transformed into an instrument of domination over another people — the Palestinians. What was once a promise of “never again” for humanity has been twisted into “never again for us, but at any cost to them.”

Paulo Freire’s insight provides the key to understanding this tragic inversion. The oppressed may internalise the worldview of their oppressors, replicating exclusion, dispossession, and violence. Israel, shaped by Holocaust memory, has reproduced these very systems against Palestinians — a chilling modern echo of historical persecution.

At its core, Zionism is a political-nationalist doctrine. Originally emerging in 19th- and 20th-century Europe, it was shaped by antisemitism, colonial logic, and nationalist thinking. Early thinkers explicitly envisioned demographic engineering and territorial consolidation as necessary to secure a Jewish homeland, often at the expense of the indigenous population. Modern Israel operationalises this ideology through legal and military systems that privilege Jewish citizens while systematically denying Palestinians equal rights. This is not defensive survival; it is a structural, ethno-nationalist project with codified exclusion at its heart.

Israel’s treatment of Palestinians reveals haunting parallels with structures once used to marginalise Jews in Europe. Legal exclusion, dispossession, and collective control remain foundational: the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 stripped Jews of citizenship, banned intermarriage, and reclassified them as aliens in their own homelands, while Israel today enforces more than 65 discriminatory laws privileging Jewish citizens and relegating Palestinians, even those with Israeli citizenship, to permanent second-class status. This legal marginalisation is reinforced by a dense bureaucratic apparatus that regulates marriage, land ownership, and movement for Palestinians, while privileging Jewish citizens for housing, education, and political representation.

Dispossession has been relentless: families are evicted in East Jerusalem to make way for settlers, entire villages are demolished in the West Bank, Bedouin communities in the Naqab are forced into “unrecognised” zones, and fertile farmland is appropriated for settlements or military zones. Meanwhile, control is maintained through checkpoints, walls, and pervasive surveillance: Gaza, often called the world’s largest open-air prison, confines over 2.2 million people under a blockade deemed illegal by the UN, and the West Bank is fragmented into isolated enclaves that severely restrict freedom of movement. Palestinians face constant bureaucratic hurdles for building, education, and travel permits, while Jewish settlers move freely. These mechanisms mirror those used against Jews in Europe, creating a system where Palestinians’ daily lives are mediated by laws, military authority, and settler control.

The use of collective punishment further reinforces this system and echoes antisemitic violence of the past. Despite international law explicitly forbidding punishment of entire populations for individual acts (Article 33, Fourth Geneva Convention), Israel routinely demolishes the homes of families whose members are accused of resistance, imposes village-wide curfews, restricts movement, and limits livelihoods under the pretext of deterrence. This logic mirrors historical pogroms in Tsarist Russia or Nazi reprisals against civilians, when entire communities were punished for the alleged crimes of a few. Today, Palestinians bear the same collective blame, while the state invokes reasoning that Jews historically resisted, illustrating the chilling replication of oppression.

Central to Israel’s system of control is the dehumanisation of Palestinians. Dehumanisation and Siege is core to their strategy. In Nazi Europe, Jews were portrayed as vermin, parasites, or existential threats to civilization. Today, Palestinian identity is similarly reduced to “terrorists,” “human animals,” or a demographic threat to the Jewish state. This rhetoric permits systematic cruelty: civilian deaths in Gaza are dismissed as collateral damage, and the deliberate starvation of Palestinians — condemned as a war crime by UN experts — is reframed as legitimate strategy. Palestinians are rendered faceless, stripped of their histories, professions, and creativity, and are perceived solely as obstacles to state objectives. Even acts of cultural preservation, such as local festivals, schools, and libraries, are subjected to surveillance and obstruction. This mirrors the historical process in Europe, where dehumanisation preceded mass violence.

The normalisation of occupation further entrenches oppression, turning control into ordinary life. In Nazi Germany, daily life continued amid ghettos and camps — cinemas thrived, markets bustled, trains ran on time — even as Jewish neighbours vanished. In Israel today, the vibrancy of Tel Aviv’s cafés and beaches contrasts sharply with the hunger and confinement in Gaza. Tourist brochures celebrate Jerusalem’s holy sites, while Palestinian families in Sheikh Jarrah live under the constant threat of eviction. The machinery of occupation, though invisible to many Israelis, structures Palestinians’ every step, rendering systemic violence ordinary and morally acceptable. Roads, electricity, water, and even access to education are regulated or denied, reinforcing dependence and control.

Israel has learned all the wrong lessons – the perfection of oppression. What should have been a universal vow — “never again” — has instead been distorted and hardened into policy. Holocaust memory has been not just inverted but refined: the tactics of erasure have been modernised and systematised, turned into a form of statecraft that bulldozes people and infrastructure alike.

What, then, did those who survived Europe’s genocide learn? The bitter answer, in practice, appears to be: how to make oppression more efficient. Where 20th-century antisemitism relied on large‑scale, crude mass violence and exclusionary laws, 21st-century statecraft has developed a more sophisticated repertoire — a technology of dispossession that combines legal engineering, administrative dispossession, selective violence, and high‑tech surveillance. Bulldozers remove houses and neighbourhoods; administrative orders erase legal claims to land; biometric systems and closed databases monitor movement; and targeted strikes — sometimes aimed at health workers, water infrastructure, and journalists — degrade the capacity of whole communities to survive and to tell their stories. The result is not merely occupation but engineered attrition. Siege tactics are implemented with precision: food and medicine are controlled, and even when aid is physically nearby, access is withheld or delayed for political effect. Generators, hospitals, and water pumps are routinely disabled, ensuring suffering while maintaining a veneer of legal plausibility.

Modern warfare is not only missiles and infantry; it is also bureaucratic precision and moral obfuscation. The deliberate demolition of clinics and schools, the killing or arrest of medical staff and reporters, and tight controls over crossings — even when food is visible, even when aid is offered minutes away — convert scarcity into a weapon. Siege becomes strategy: food, fuel, and medicine are rendered unusable by blockade or interdiction, while the proximate presence of aid is held hostage to political ends. In such conditions, starvation and collapse are not accidents of war but foreseeable, avoidable outcomes of policy. That is what makes the charge of “perfection” so chilling: it is not merely barbarism repeated, it is barbarism redesigned to work within modern legal and technological frameworks.

Zionist ideology does not operate in isolation. It is reinforced by global powers and ideological and financial networks. The United States has provided consistent military, economic, and political support, supplying advanced weaponry, funding intelligence systems, and shielding Israel from international accountability. Lobbying networks such as AIPAC shape policy and suppress meaningful critique, ensuring that American political and financial interests align with the perpetuation of occupation. Europe, meanwhile, shields Israel through selective memory: the Holocaust is evoked to legitimise policy, while arms, trade deals, and diplomatic protection continue largely unexamined. This combination of ideological fervour and international backing transforms a nationalist project into a global system of impunity.

Israel has inverted the holocaust memory. The worst betrayal of Holocaust memory is not merely its invocation to silence critics, but the way that memory has been converted into a manual. “Never again” has been narrowed into the exclusive promise of one people — a claim that justifies any measure that secures that promise. In practice, that has meant learning how to weaponize suffering: applying lessons of survival to avoid vulnerability, while failing to learn the universal moral lesson of solidarity. The intent is not to deny Jewish trauma but to expose a perverse political calculus: trauma is preserved and amplified selectively, used to legitimate policies that produce the same forms of human destruction against others.

Freire’s warning about the oppressed replicating their oppressors resonate globally. Systems of exclusion, control, and oppression have been justified in other contexts, from apartheid South Africa to European colonialism. Israel’s use of Holocaust trauma to legitimise domination is part of this broader pattern of inverted victimhood. In January 2024, the International Court of Justice issued a provisional ruling that Israel’s actions in Gaza plausibly constitute genocide, ordering the state to prevent further atrocities. Human rights organisations, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, have documented systematic policies amounting to apartheid. These legal judgments demonstrate that the issue is structural, not merely ideological.

Paulo Freire’s insight is tragically visible in Palestine today: a people forged by historical trauma has replicated the mechanisms of oppression it once suffered. What Jews endured in Europe — exclusion, dispossession, collective punishment, and dehumanisation — is being mirrored in the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories. The lesson is painfully clear: the failure to universalise the moral imperative of “never again” allows oppression to be reproduced in new forms.

Yet history’s lessons are not immutable. “Never again” was never intended as a tribal claim; it is a human vow. Realising it requires insisting on justice for all — Jews, Palestinians, and every people at risk of erasure. Standing with Palestinians today is not a denial of Jewish suffering; it is the fulfilment of its moral promise. It affirms that trauma must not be a tool of domination and that human dignity cannot be selectively applied. Only through this universalisation can “never again” regain its authentic meaning. If “never again” is to have any moral force, it must be reclaimed from the hands that have turned it into a justification for harm. Otherwise, memory itself becomes an instrument of technique: taught, perfected, and deployed against those who live beside us.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.