"[T]hey were made of the same cloth as we, they were average human beings, averagely intelligent, averagely wicked: save the exceptions, they were not monsters, they had our faces."
– Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved

I have, up until this point, avoided publishing anything on the war in Gaza. It has not been for lack of concern or grief, and not because I don’t think protest is important and even sometimes efficacious. I have not written about the war because the very terms through which we describe it have explosive and divisive force: terrorism, genocide, Zionism, and anti-Semitism. It is nearly impossible to discuss the conflict without invoking some, if not all, of these. Their power comes from their history, one in which the Jewish people are not only enmeshed but integral. It is this history and its power that have led me, in every conversation about it, into an enervating attempt to parse the differences and similarities between various historical actors: between the paramilitary Jewish organizations of the 1940s who massacred civilians in the Palestinian village of Deir Yassin, the leaders of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, Hamas on October 7th—all of whose actions fall outside the bounds of state sponsored warfare; between Zionism, Pan-Slavism, and National Socialism—all movements that can be defined as ethnic nationalism; and between genocide, ethnic cleansing, and humanitarian crisis—all terminology that applies to the war in Gaza.

Ire rises, as many of us have seen, when terms that have been used to characterize violence against Jews in the past are leveled against the state of Israel. Almost inevitably the accusation of anti-Semitism follows against those who criticize the state and the movement that founded it. It is not merely the assumption that criticism of Israel implicates all Jews that sets many on edge. It is the supposition that the status of Jewish victimhood is being threatened, and Jews are being ascribed the position of aggressor.

Ironically, the success of widespread campaigns in the postwar era which leveraged the horror of the Holocaust to try to end genocide contributes to the discomfort and suspicion around criticism of Israel that uses terminology like genocide and ethnic cleansing. These campaigns injected moral terminology into the political playing field. They helped to create the widespread association between political aggression and evil, and thus between victimhood and the good. We have no stronger representation for evil than Adolf Hitler and thus no purer rendition of blamelessness than his Jewish victims. The ascription of evil that seems to follow when one characterizes the state of Israel as genocidal thus threatens the association between Jews and victimhood.

But this anxiety also highlights a confusion around the postwar history of memorialization, a confusion over what it means for both human rights organizations and Holocaust remembrance organizations to take as their rallying cry, “Never again!” This imperative has been invoked by figures as diverse as Meir Kahane, who used the slogan as an excuse for terrorist campaigns against Palestinians, as well as the human rights activist and UN representative Samantha Power, who used it to lament our inability to prevent genocide. Does this slogan mean that protecting the Jewish people should be held out as an absolute good at all costs? Or does it mean that the world should be on guard against the danger of racist hatred wherever it arises? For decades now, Jewish activists have called out a double standard that marks the left’s response to Zionism. But to suggest that the intensity of attention on the Middle East is a consequence of anti-Semitism is to miss how Jewish victimhood has led to its totemic status on both sides. No doubt it is dangerous, now more than ever, but not only for the Jews.

I recently read Human Rights Watch founder Aryeh Neier’s painstaking analysis of the war in Gaza in the New York Review of Books, “Is Israel Committing Genocide?” Neier, himself a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany, writes, “I am now persuaded that Israel is engaged in genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. What has changed my mind is its sustained policy of obstructing the movement of humanitarian assistance into the territory.” That same day The New York Times published James Kirchick’s op-ed “A Chill Has Fallen over Jews in Publishing,” in which he laments what he calls the “virulent anti-Israel—and increasingly antisemitic—sentiment coursing through the literary world.” Kirchick goes on to claim that the accusation that Israel is committing genocide is “one of the greatest mass delusions of the 21st century” and analogizes it to the medieval blood libel, the false accusation that circulated from the Middle Ages forward that Jews used Christian blood to make matzo. Juxtaposed against Neier’s essay, Kirchick’s piece reminded me how blatantly the specter of anti-Semitism can function as a shield behind which some Jewish commentators hide. This mode of defense makes it exceedingly difficult to soberly analyze the horrors of this war and its sustained campaign of destruction without the specter of Jewish victimhood and the tropes of anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism blocking the way. The resistance to criticism exemplified in Kirchick’s piece may be merely a confluence of associations and a manifestation of anxiety, but it also functions as a political strategy.

Kirchick’s invocation of the blood libel brought to mind another stigmatizing falsehood that has dogged Jews in modernity: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. This fictional text, fabricated in the first decade of the twentieth century, describes a secret plot among Jewish elites to take over the world. I have not seen this comparison raised publicly but I imagine it is on the mind of many given the way anti-Israel sentiment has been censored both in the United States and Western Europe. Protocols has been translated into over fifty languages and has reappeared in comic strips, films, novels, and textbooks. The history of its composition has been as much the subject of conspiratorial thinking as the document itself. Its power too is a consequence of historical associations, the same ones from which the blood libel emerged—medieval associations between Judaism and demonology, the persistence of the Jewish tradition after its Christian supersession, the international nature of the diasporic Jewish community and its transnational allegiances.

To be honest, I feel at risk even invoking the invective here, as I too am afraid of its power, of how it was used to incite pogroms across the Pale of Settlement, to justify National Socialism, and to spread anti-Semitism in the Middle East. That fear, however, should not keep us from criticizing the lengths to which some of the most powerful leaders of the Jewish community have gone to ensure the prioritization of Jewish lives over others, and to vilify everyone from university presidents to student protestors who do not concur with their ethnocentric interpretation of “Never again!” Being Jewish does not constitute a moral taint; it does not make Jews morally worse than any other people. But being the object of centuries of persecution also has not made Jews any better. As Primo Levi reminds us in The Drowned and the Saved, we are all equally capable of committing atrocities. It is only by admitting this that the slogan “Never Again!” can be of any use.

Featured image by Janne Leimola/Unsplash