Anti-Semitism, Zionism and ‘the Americanization of the Holocaust’

JVL Introduction

Tony Karon reminds us in this absorbing and wide-ranging essay, that the early Zionists saw violent resistance to them as a natural response of a colonised people to their dispossession.

The process of centring Israeli identity on the Holocaust began later, with the show trial of Adolph Eichmann in Jerusalem, a deliberate construction of the memory of the Holocaust to put it at the service of Israeli expansionism.

In the 1980s, argues Karon, the Holocaust “becomes the preferred, institutionalized and centred memory of historical trauma in the United States, a safe terrain for America’s rulers because it’s not a trauma for which they can be held in any way accountable.”

For American Jews not wanting to go to Israel it became “an identitarian totem that reflected the way Jewish Americans wanted to imagine themselves, a schizophrenic combination of history’s eternal, primary victims, and also armed-and-dangerous macho badasses.”

Karon offers hope that the Gaza genocide may finally negate the power of the Nazi genocide to secure Israel’s license to kill at will….

RK

This article was originally published by Tony Karon's blog on Sun 17 Aug 2025. Read the original here.