War on Identity: Notes on Zionism, Judaism and Genocide

I was born in Israel 44 years ago, I am Jewish, and I have lived in Argentina for over three decades. As a teenager, I broke with my youthful Zionism when I realised that returning to Israel would mean compulsory service in an occupying army — the cultural and emotional backbone of a state founded through conquest and maintained through military control of land and people. Joining the military and training in the use of violence was the rite of passage into adulthood: leaving the family home and becoming a 'full citizen'. This clash with my anti-militarism marked the beginning of an identity crisis, the full scope of which I would only understand years later. I will unfold this crisis in more detail here.

I am not offering these biographical notes as a shield against the familiar ad hominem attacks of being branded an 'anti-Semite' or a 'self-hating Jew', nor am I claiming any special authority by virtue of origin. I am not an essentialist. But if relativist critique has given us anything worthwhile, it is the awareness that discourse is always situated. Understanding a discourse requires considering the trajectory, experience, and frameworks from which it is spoken. I write, then, as a Jew and with the knowledge of Israeli society that comes with it.

Conflating Zionism with Judaism allows Israel to appropriate the symbolic capital of centuries of Jewish suffering.

I believe that this perspective from within Judaism is crucial. Firstly, the genocide against the Palestinian people cannot be understood without recognising how Judaism has been weaponised at its core. Secondly, any political resolution of the conflict demands freeing Judaism — and Jews themselves — from the identity hijacking inflicted by the State of Israel and the ideological discourse of political Zionism. This requires us to acknowledge the State's betrayal of Jewish tradition and to strip it of the symbolic capital of 'representing the Jewish people'.

Those who defend Israel often claim that an anti-Zionist stance betrays insensitivity or a lack of empathy towards 'the Jewish people' — either by accusing the critic of antisemitism, ideological bias or ignorance of the complex identity and history of Judaism. These claims avoid engaging with arguments. Instead, they seek to shut down debate by discrediting the interlocutor.

The first clarification, then, must be that Zionism and Judaism are not the same thing, and thus neither are antisemitism and anti-Zionism. Zionism is a nationalist political ideology that is less than two centuries old. Judaism is a religion, a culture for some, a nation for others, that pre-dates Christianity by centuries. However, the bond between the two is undeniable. Zionism is a political movement conceived as a solution for a persecuted people, culminating in the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948. However, it is merely one current within Judaism, a partiality — akin to Christian sects within Christianity or Islamic fundamentalism within Islam. It is true that Zionism has become hegemonic among Jews. However, to say it is hegemonic is precisely to acknowledge it as something distinct from that over which it exercises power. Hegemony is always contingent and historical, never essential.

Conflating Zionism with Judaism is an ideological manoeuvre. It allows Israel to appropriate the symbolic capital of centuries of Jewish suffering and persecution, and to weaponise it. Consequently, any criticism of Zionist policies can be dismissed as antisemitic. In a West both guilty and guilt-ridden for the atrocities inflicted on Jews across its territories, Israel has been granted a kind of untouchable immunity from criticism precisely because it presents itself as the spirit and safeguard of all Jews — of those persecuted and exterminated in Nazi concentration camps and of genocide survivors and their descendants, both in and outside Israel.

Allowing a genocide is a civilisational crisis in itself; but it is the singularity of the perpetrator that gives this genocide its tragic and magnetic force.

The entanglement of Judaism and Zionism under the shadow of genocide is central. The uniqueness of the current massacre in Gaza, compared with atrocities in Syria or Uganda, does not stem from supposed global empathy for Palestinians, but from the identity of the aggressor. What makes this moment different is that the genocide in Gaza is being carried out by the self-proclaimed 'Jewish' State of Israel.

Allowing a new genocide to occur is a civilisational crisis in itself, revealing the bankruptcy of the institutional and political scaffolding that sustains our societies. However, it is the singularity of the perpetrator that gives this genocide its tragic and magnetic force. It must be emphasised that the significance of 'the Jewish' in this massacre has nothing to do with antisemitism, despite what Israeli propaganda and certain Jewish diaspora groups would have us believe. What matters is that the great victim of European modernity — the Jews, ostensibly represented by the State of Israel — is now committing genocide in Gaza.

The Israeli government claims to act in the name of Jewish existence and survival. Yet in doing so, it is committing an unforgivable crime against Jewish identity itself, and, instead, embodies that old, backward, capitalist, Christian Europe that, as León Rozitchner pointed out, Jewishness stood against with its mere existence — and which, for that very reason, victimised it with persecutions, pogroms, and finally the Holocaust.

It is often said that the Enlightenment — the very soul of European modernity, embodying the West’s faith in human reason bound to the logic of progress, of affirmation, of hope in the gradual mastery of nature through technique, science, and the administration of human life — was wounded in the trenches of the First World War and finally died in the concentration camps.

German-speaking Europe represented the pinnacle of the capacities that Western reason could attain. The community that gave the world Mozart, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Husserl, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Goethe, Max Planck, Einstein and Humboldt was the same community that mobilised rational, scientific, chemical, technological, artistic and communicational powers, not for the flourishing of collective life, but to perpetrate genocide stamped with the mark of modernity's achievements. The singular significance of the Holocaust, compared to other genocides, lies not in who its victims were, but in who its perpetrators were.

Philosophically, the perpetrator is what matters most. Yeshayahu Leibowitz, a philosopher and theologian who was once regarded as the conscience of Israel, pointed out the following in relation to the Holocaust: 'We did not do it. It was the Germans who did it; therefore it is their problem.' He made this observation in response to the centrality that the State of Israel was evidently granting to the figure of the Jewish victim it claimed to protect. This was a mutually beneficial arrangement: it deflected attention away from European society, which was responsible, and it enabled Israel to appropriate the Holocaust. This appropriation was central to the 'Nazification' of Arabs — and Palestinians in particular — as we shall see.

For the West, Israel became a conquest of the eastern desert: the enlightened colonisation of 'barbaric' lands, with crusaders founding a European-style democracy in the Holy Land.

Enzo Traverso notes that this appropriation effectively transformed the Holocaust into a 'civil religion'. It became an official discourse, hence administrable: a dogma that did not encourage reflection, but could instead be endlessly instrumentalised to sustain the perpetual victimisation of Jews. This allowed the State of Israel to wield the ever-present, imagined threat of annihilation to justify and carry out the oppression of the Palestinian people, armed with the impunity granted by the halo of eternal victimhood.

Western fascination with Israel cannot be explained simply by guilt. Rather, its allure lies in the fact that the newly founded State of Israel offered salvation for the very idea of progress upon which Western civilisation was built — an idea whose hegemony entered a terminal crisis after its complicity in the Jewish genocide. Established by European citizens untainted by the Holocaust, Israel appeared as the last hope of the Enlightenment, annihilated at Auschwitz. For the West, Israel became a conquest of the eastern desert: the enlightened colonisation of 'barbaric' lands, with crusaders founding a European-style democracy in the Holy Land, alongside irrigation projects, 'modernisation', military technology and the software industry.

History repeats itself: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. Israel deploys all these capacities — all its instrumental reason, all its Western, Judeo-Christian, capitalist development — not to create a thriving community for all who inhabit the land, but to dominate and render Palestinian life unlivable. The values and achievements of modern freedoms — democratic gains and civil rights — are themselves instrumentalised under this same logic of domination. The so-called 'only democracy in the Middle East' (where Palestinians in the occupied territories are ruled by Israel yet barred from voting in its administration), as well as women's and sexual rights, are cynically used to justify the destruction of Palestinian life.

The indifference towards the massacre of Palestinians represents an erosion of humanity itself on the part of their oppressors and accomplices.

It is worth recalling that dehumanisation is central to every genocide: one cannot massacre those who are recognised as having a soul — if one believes in souls — or as persons, or at the very least as peers. The stripping away of that prerogative of humanity does not happen overnight. Jews endured a long process of dehumanisation, which was then systematised by a nazified European society in concentration camps. We were the victims of the most atrocious genocide in modern history. And it was only a couple of generations ago. In 1929, Albert Einstein wrote to Chaim Weizmann, who would later become the first president of the State of Israel: 'If we are incapable of finding a path of cohabitation and agreement with the Arabs, then we will have learned absolutely nothing from our two thousand years of suffering and will deserve all that happens to us.' The indifference of many Jews, both in Israel and in the diaspora, towards the massacre of Gazans is indicative of the long-standing dehumanisation that Palestinians have endured. Consequently, it also represents an erosion of humanity itself, as well as a growing loss of sensitivity on the part of their oppressors and accomplices.

This, too, has been a long process, beginning with the denial of Palestinian existence, as encapsulated by the infamous early slogan of political Zionism, 'a land without a people for a people without a land'. This idea was quickly realised through colonisation under exclusivist Zionism, which claims that a 'safe state for Jews' must be a state without Palestinians, even if this means forcibly taking over already inhabited lands where anti-Semitism had been practically insignificant. Einstein wrote that letter in 1929 (!) in response to the disgraceful policies and treatment of Palestine's native population by the Zionist movement. This was decades before the Nakba and the ethnic cleansing of 750,000 souls; before the lesser-known military regime imposed on Palestinian citizens of Israel between 1949 and 1966; before the occupation of the territories in 1967; before the plight of the refugees; before the apartheid system in East Jerusalem and the West Bank; before the illegal and shameful separation wall; before the discriminatory laws passed by the Israeli parliament; before the siege and destruction of Gaza; and before the explicit calls for genocide issued by senior Israeli officials.

Examining the history of Israel’s institutional actions, whether legal or military, makes it clear that its problem was only secondarily with Palestinian political or politico-military organisations. Its true problem has always been the Palestinian population itself. For an exclusivist state that calls itself both Jewish and democratic, the ethnic cleansing of its territory is a prerequisite for its existence. Ethnic cleansing is indeed a war crime and has long been an internationally recognised fact in the figure of Palestinian refugees. But it is not, in itself, genocide. Today, however, we are confronted with something else entirely.

Genocide is not measured by its effectiveness; what is central to genocide is its imminence and the intent to carry it out. We should not even consider the possibility of it happening. This is why the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide includes the word 'prevention' in its name. Humanity cannot afford to wait until a genocide has been completed before considering sanctions. The intent to commit genocide is one of the central elements in defining an act of aggression.

After 7 October, Israel’s Defence Minister declared: 'We are fighting against human animals.' Avi Dichter, the Minister of Agriculture, called for the war to be “Gaza’s Nakba”. Amihay Eliyahu, the Minister of Intelligence, suggested dropping an atomic bomb on Gaza. Several senior officials labelled Palestinians as Nazis and attributed collective responsibility to them for Hamas’s brutal attack. This led to the claim that it was not just one organisation that needed to be neutralised, but an entire people. As the Vice-President of the Delegation of Argentine Jewish Associations put it bluntly: ‘There are no innocents in Gaza. Perhaps children under four years old.” This collective punishment is being carried out through indiscriminate bombing, which has killed tens of thousands of civilians and destroyed the most basic conditions for life in Gaza. At the same time, the absolute blockade of the territory, which affects the entire population rather than just combatants, is creating conditions of disease and famine with an extreme risk of mass death, which far exceeds even the toll of the air and ground assaults.

We are witnessing genocide. Not only because of its scale, but also because of the justification behind it: the idea that Palestinian life is worth less than human life. This rests on a long process of the 'Nazification' of Palestinians. The 'Nazification' of opponents of Zionist policies has been a strategy deployed ever since the word 'Nazi' gained its symbolic weight and power. Historian Nur Masalha cites numerous statements and writings by Zionist leaders who, from the mid-1930s onwards, equated Arab nationalism with German Nazism. This mechanism, which Norman Finkelstein has termed the 'Holocaust industry', has been relentlessly employed ever since. The stakes could not be higher. Those branded as 'Nazis' are imagined as monsters beyond recovery, whose only fate can be elimination. Anyone who defends those who have been 'Nazified' is, in turn, branded antisemitic. If that person is Jewish, they are denounced as a Judenrat, a collaborator with the Nazis.

The State of Israel and its Zionist organisations collaborate with overtly racist and anti-Semitic right-wing individuals and parties as long as they support Israel's policies.

As we have seen, managing the Holocaust as a 'civil religion' (casting Jews as eternally threatened in their very existence) enabled an occupying power with one of the world's most powerful and lethal militaries to appropriate and instrumentalise Judaism, appearing as the victim of its colonised subjects. The most perverse example of this inversion came from the then Israeli Prime Minister, Golda Meir, who, in a 1969 interview on British television, declared: 'We will never forgive the Arabs for forcing us to do what we have done to them.' Such statements are innumerable because they are state policy. Amidst today's attacks on Gaza, we witnessed the grotesque spectacle of the Israeli delegation at the United Nations justifying its war crimes while wearing the yellow Star of David once imposed on Jews in ghettos and camps.

The ultimate contradiction of this process of Nazification is that the Zionist movement — the very force that accuses others of antisemitism and sees Nazis everywhere, from international institutions to social movements, and from intellectuals to artists — never waged a truly heroic struggle against Nazism as it actually existed. As Ilan Pappé reminds us, mainstream Zionism was primarily concerned with the migration project and thus avoided antagonising Hitler's government. They even considered the international Jewish boycott of the 1930s to be a mistake. David Ben-Gurion, the 'founding father' of the Israeli state, said at the time: ‘Zionism has the obligations of a state; therefore it cannot irresponsibly initiate a battle against Hitler while he remains the head of a state.’ The Zionist movement maintained contact with the Nazi regime as late as 1937, negotiating the transfer of Jews out of Germany while allowing them to retain their assets and take them to what would become Israel. Israeli historian Tom Segev has shown that Zionist leaders were primarily interested in saving only those Jews willing to emigrate to Palestine. They displayed contempt towards diaspora Jews who had not embraced Zionist politics by the 1930s. Pappé concurs, noting that the abandonment of broader rescue strategies in the face of imminent extermination was part of a wider repudiation of the diaspora itself — a disdain that persisted after the creation of the state of Israel, when Zionism derided those who 'went like sheep to the slaughter' in contrast to the 'pioneers' who had emigrated to found the country.

In this vein, the uprisings in concentration camps and ghettos, most famously in Warsaw, which were led by resistance forces including many anti-Zionists, were subsequently 'Zionised' as state policy. The figure of the armed and defiant Jew had to be appropriated. These uprisings became an expression of the 'new Jewish spirit' — the Jew who took up arms — set against the millions who, in the Zionist narrative, had simply allowed themselves to be killed.

Jewish identity has always been the antithesis of power, rejecting imperial, reactionary, racist Europe.

This is what Zionism has done and continues to do with Judaism: exploit it. The same instrumental reasoning that crushed the forces of reflection and revealed its true face in the crematoria and Hiroshima is embodied by Israel in its exploitation of Judaism, reducing it to a means to an end: domination and conquest. Consequently, the State of Israel and its Zionist organisations in the diaspora can collaborate with right-wing individuals and parties in Europe, North America and Latin America, including those with overtly racist and anti-Semitic views, as long as they support the policies of the State of Israel. Their fight 'against anti-Semitism' merely exploits the symbolic capital of the galutic Jew, whom they despise, to justify the horrors of Zionism. The supremacism of unbridled Zionism's fascinates the radical right in the West, and Israel has not hesitated to embrace such support at the expense of fighting true anti-Semitism — the struggle for freedom, equality, and justice for all human beings.

However, Judaism has nothing to do with this idolatry of power and domination. Jewish identity has always been the antithesis of power, rejecting imperial, reactionary, racist Europe. Forged through the experience of oppression, Jewish identity is sustained through reflection and resistance to violence: through the study of a book that does not proselytise, does not confer power and is utterly earthly because it promises no afterlife, as León Rozitchner reminds us. In Jewish tradition, the most significant festival is Pesach, when the Jewish people celebrate their exodus from slavery — a festival of freedom and the end of oppression. This same people were then forged over the course of two millennia through discrimination and persecution, placing them in an inevitable position of negativity towards power. It is no coincidence that Judaism produced so many rebellious minds and bodies: Trotsky, Marx, Rosa Luxemburg, Walter Benjamin, Zinoviev, Mordechai Anielewicz, Axelrod, Martov and Clara Zetkin, to name a few. This is not due to genetics, but rather an identity forged in a culture of resistance.

This is why it must be said again and again: what we see in Israel today is not Judaism; rather, it is anti-Judaism — the transfiguration of a rebellious tradition into its fascistic opposite. Of course, there were exceptions. Zionism, when understood as a national liberation movement for Jews from their European torment, included figures such as Borochov and Buber. They argued not for an exclusivist and unviable state, but for just coexistence in a binational, socialist state alongside Palestinians. However, their approach never had the opportunity to prevail. Though there were various currents within the Zionist movement, history produced a Zionism that was largely homogeneous in its exclusivist and colonising character and subverted all the humanist values of Judaism. We might call this Israelism in order to distinguish it from those who believed, and still believe, in a plurinational, anti-racist Zionism.

The exemplary victim — whose genocide gave birth to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Genocide Convention (1948) — has been transformed, through identity hijacking carried out by the State of Israel, into the exemplary perpetrator. This explains the historic significance of the massacre in Gaza. The tragedy of Israel’s hijacking of Judaism raises a traumatic question not only for Jews, but for all of humanity: what can we expect from the human race if a community that suffered genocide only a few decades ago now embodies the logic, vocabulary, strategies and values of its executioners? From its dominant position, it is moving to destroy another people not because it must, but because it chooses to and can.

Our ability — or inability — to allow what is happening now to stir something in our bodies, our reflections, our sensitivities and our institutions will likely define us as a civilisation: a rupture, a caesura. Future generations will ask what we did when it was our turn to defend what remained of humanity within humanity.

This article was first published in Spanish in the book "Palestina. Anatomía de un genocidio" (tinta limón, 2024) edited by Faride Zerán, Rodrigo Karmy and Paulo Slachevsky .