A Jewish Stance of Eternal Victimhood Fails Us All

The suffering of Jews doesn’t mean that Jews can’t make others suffer.

Fearless reporting, a behind-the-curtains look at how journalism is made — and an unabashed point of view. Welcome to Chills.

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The Venetian ghetto is the oldest in Europe, built in the 16th century. (Getty Images)

I’ve been writing this piece in my head since Oct. 7 — and, I believe, for many years before this. I’ve deleted and trashed every attempt and assumed it was just one of those things that is too complicated, too much of a lightning rod, to publish. But I recently read Masha Gessen’s piece in The New Yorker, “In the Shadow of the Holocaust,” about “how the politics of memory in Europe obscures what we see in Israel and Gaza today,” and it helped remind me that we can’t let the endless complexities, or even the fear of public excoriation and threats, ever stop us from speaking out against hate.

Gessen gives a ton of important political, historical, personal and other context that I will not go into here. Instead, I offer you the complexities that I, as a liberal Jewish American who supports the idea of a two-state solution as the least-bad option in Israel/Palestine — and abhors human rights violations from any side — am wading through like so many others these days.

I grew up in the shadow of the Holocaust in a mainly Jewish community in New York. There were also South Africans who’d fled apartheid, as well as Persian Jews who’d been forced out of Iran after the Shah fell. Fleeing oppression tends to create an open-minded, liberal community — one that I have been proud to be part of traditionally, if not religiously — or, conversely, it can create a community that dangerously closes ranks, which I find particularly telling today when looking at what Israel is perpetrating in Gaza.

As a child, I remember seeing the tattoos of concentration camp survivors, although I don’t remember their faces or names anymore, something that terrifies me. As the last survivors die, so does our direct link to the unthinkable nightmares of the Shoah. A 2020 survey of Gen Zers and Millennials found that half of Americans couldn’t name a single one of the more than 40,000 concentrations camps established throughout Europe; 1 in 10 respondents said that they could not recall ever having heard the word “Holocaust” before.

The politics of the decimation of Gaza in the wake of Hamas’s murderous attack on Israel has polarized entire generations — highlighting differences that already existed. A 2022 Pew survey found that of people over 65, 72 percent hold a favorable view of Israel. Just 42 percent of people aged 18 to 29 do.

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A few things I’d like to clarify:

1.     You can condemn Israeli policies and politicians without being antisemitic although, unfortunately, the two seem to often go hand in hand.

2.     You can condemn Hamas as a terrorist group without condemning the Palestinians who’ve had no choice but to live under its rule — this too is often conflated.

3.     You can have sympathy and feel pain for different groups at once.

4.     Having been oppressed is not an excuse for oppressing others.

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My father was born in 1941. I grew up with the idea that there was nowhere in the world that would welcome Jews before or after the Holocaust. A lot of what I absorbed from my dad as a kid stemmed from this basic fact. His historical memory of persecution from many sides became mine.

For those new to the story of the hatred of Jews in World War II, look no further than the horrific saga of the German liner the St. Louis, which carried 937 mainly European Jewish refugees in 1939. Cuba and then the U.S. denied its passengers entry. Two hundred fifty-four of the passengers who were forced back to Europe were murdered in the Holocaust.

On the flip side, it took me many years and trips through the Middle East to learn that Palestinians had been brutally forced from homes that some still carry the keys to. It took a yearlong dialogue with an aging Palestinian activist to better understand the deep pain in the region, and how anti-Israel sentiment and antisemitism collide. It’s taken a lifetime to begin to understand the depths of resentment on both sides, not to mention the Escheresque constructions of victimhood on both sides.

As Gessen writes, “no nation is all victim all the time or all perpetrator all the time.” They continue:

Just as much of Israel’s claim to impunity lies in the Jews’ perpetual victim status, many of the country’s critics have tried to excuse Hamas’s act of terrorism as a predictable response to Israel’s oppression of Palestinians. Conversely, in the eyes of Israel’s supporters, Palestinians in Gaza can’t be victims because Hamas attacked Israel first. The fight over one rightful claim to victimhood runs on forever. [Bold mine.]

It’s a strange thing to reckon with “victimhood” as a privileged American. But my ties to that older generation kept me steeped in Holocaust documentaries as a child; it was also why I was on my way to Auschwitz on Oct. 7.

Growing up, I internalized not only the terrors of the genocide, but also what I believed was the reality of the Zionist dream. In actuality, I read and heard false accounts that portrayed the Jews’ settlement of the land the United Nations had given to them (us) after World War II solely as a miracle that turned a desert wasteland into an irrigated garden.

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At the turn of the millennium, I lived for a year near the oldest ghetto in Europe, in Venice. The claustrophobic nature of the campo — the Venetian word for piazza — was eerie, with synagogues snugly pieced together in the city’s tallest buildings, with the city’s lowest ceilings (in order to pack in more residents) — near an Israeli restaurant where I drank with young, liberal Israelis and, bizarrely, disciples of Menachem Schneerson, the Orthodox Lubavitcher Rebbe. The rabbi’s photograph was incongruously blown up and displayed in the window of one stony corner of the ghetto’s entrance. But this was a 16th-century walled area, markedly different from the Warsaw, Lublin or Lodz ghettos of the war.

The Venetian ghetto was not ruthlessly policed like the ghettos of World War II Europe. Jews could practice their religion and share their culture. They were, however, locked in during the night. A people apart.

In Gessen’s essay, they discuss the word “ghetto” in a way I find profound. Instead of reserving the word only for Jews, Gessen applies it to Gaza:

For the last 17 years, Gaza has been a hyperdensely populated, impoverished, walled-in compound where only a small fraction of the population had the right to leave for even a short amount of time — in other words, a ghetto. Not like the Jewish ghetto in Venice or an inner-city ghetto in America but like a Jewish ghetto in an Eastern European country occupied by Nazi Germany. …

The term “open-air prison” seems to have been coined in 2010 by David Cameron, the British Foreign Secretary who was then Prime Minister. Many human-rights organizations that document conditions in Gaza have adopted the description. But as in the Jewish ghettoes of Occupied Europe, there are no prison guards — Gaza is policed not by the occupiers but by a local force. Presumably, the more fitting term “ghetto” would have drawn fire for comparing the predicament of besieged Gazans to that of ghettoized Jews.

And this is where, I believe, Gessen will have lost many of their Jewish readers. To compare what happened to Jews in the Holocaust with what Israel is doing to the Palestinians now — even with caveats — should not be spoken of in the same breath, these Jews think. I may have thought this way once, too. But if my reporting in refugee populations around the world has taught me anything, it’s that we, as humans, have more commonalities in the atrocities done to us than differences. That the ruled do not usually ask for their despots, just as the majority of Gazans did not vote for Hamas to be in charge of their fates.

But, Gessen argues, the use of the word “ghetto,” with all its desperate connotations for Jews, “would have given us the language to describe what is happening in Gaza now.”

And then they say the thing that I know will send many Jews over the edge, but again, somehow, not me, not now. We as Jews do not own suffering, I know now. We have suffered greatly, but so have others, even at our own hands, especially today.

“The ghetto,” Gessen writes of Gaza while invoking some of the most painful events of the Holocaust, is “being liquidated.”

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