Who wants to be a victim?

Much of the dissonance over Zionism and anti-Zionism since October 7, the failure to understand or even hear each other, is not only down to rival historical narratives and a lack of agreed facts about the conflict. It also is because at a fundamental level, underneath all the arguments, Zionists and anti-Zionists are guided by a different moral principle: most Jews want to no longer be victims, in a world where innocent victimhood is exalted as the highest moral status.

This week marked the anniversary of the First Zionist Congress, held in Basel, Switzerland, from 29 to 31 August 1897. It was a gathering that led ultimately to the creation of the State of Israel and a revolution in the status of the Jewish people, from a collection of dispersed minorities to a sovereign power in its own land. In recent times the word “Zionist” has become a term of abuse in some liberal and progressive circles, equated to everything from Nazism and fascism to colonialism and white supremacy, but at the time it was a movement of optimism and hope. “We want to lay the cornerstone of the edifice which is one day to house the Jewish nation”, Theodor Herzl declared to the Congress in Basel 127 years ago. “Let everyone find out what Zionism really is - that it is a moral, lawful, humanitarian movement, directed toward the long-yearned-for goal of our people”, he said to loud cheers. One attendee recalled:

“For fifteen minutes the hall shook with the shouts of joy, the applause, the cheers and the feet-stomping. The two-thousand-year dream of our people seemed to be approaching fulfilment; and I was seized by an over-powering desire, in the midst of this storm of joy, to cry out, loudly, for all to hear: ‘Yechi Ha-melech! Long live the King!’”¹

Zionism had only marginal support in the Jewish world back in 1897, but this changed as the twentieth century developed and antisemitism became state policy in many of the countries in which Europe’s Jews resided. The persecutions in Nazi Germany that led to the Holocaust are front and centre in this story, but even before the 1930s, several other countries had developed their own laws and policies that discriminated against Jews. Poland, Hungary, Romania, Greece and other countries in Eastern Europe and the Balkans, borne out of the dismembered Ottoman and Hapsburg Empires after World War One, sought to establish ethno-nationalist majorities within their borders and there was enormous transfer of populations between them on national and ethnic lines. However, whereas ethnic Magyars could migrate to Hungary, ethnic Poles to Poland, and so on, Jews had no state to go to but were facing systematic discrimination and persecution almost everywhere. By the time the Jewish refugee problem reached its peak in the late 1930s, most of the world had closed their doors entirely to Europe’s Jews, who were left to their fate at the hands of Nazism.

Given this historical background, it’s obvious why so many Jews around the world today see the existence of Israel as essential to the future survival and wellbeing of the Jewish people. In 1946 the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), tasked with working out what to do with hundreds of thousands of Holocaust survivors languishing in displaced persons camps in Europe, surveyed 19,000 Jewish refugees to ask them where they wanted to be resettled. All but 300 named Palestine, then under British colonial control, as their first choice; almost all also put Palestine as their second choice. Staggeringly, when they were told they could not name Palestine twice, a quarter answered ‘crematorium’ as their alternative.² This wasn’t the result of a colonial plot, or Zionist brainwashing: just common sense. For most Holocaust survivors in Europe, betrayed by their own countries, condemned for extermination, often with no personal possessions or homes to go back to, and few other countries willing to welcome them in, Israel was the only option. This practical reality has been mirrored ever since by the psychological and emotional choice of the wider Jewish world. More than anything else, it represents a refusal to accept the role of victims in the future.

However, we live in a time when innocent victimhood is revered as the highest moral status that can be attained. It carries unmatched and unanswerable political weight, especially in the politics of competitive victimhood that can be so intense on the left. This is rooted, of course, in Christianity and Jesus’s suffering on the Cross, and Christian morality still provides the framework for our secular world: now expressed through the language of human rights rather than Christian teachings.

In this moral universe, Holocaust victims and survivors were rightly seen as the twentieth century’s archetypal victims. They went through the worst suffering, therefore they must have the greatest virtue, is how the logic flows, and it is notable that their testimony is sometimes treated as if it has a sanctified quality. However, having been granted the ultimate standing in this moral architecture, Jews - or at least, the majority of the world’s Jews that value Israel’s existence - have instead chosen to place their faith in the material power of Zionism and Israel. You can keep your purity of victimhood, they seem to say: we would rather rely on F35s and Merkava tanks, to put it in crude terms.

This preference for base strength over spiritual virtue is an affront to morality (one that has been levelled at Jews in the past), and the way that some respond to it is to try to wrest the legacy of the Holocaust away from Jews. This was the inner meaning of the street art seen in Norway last month depicting Anne Frank as a Palestinian, draped in a keffiyeh. It is as if the only way to repair this tear in the moral fabric of the universe is to recategorise the Holocaust as a Zionist crime, or to remove its contemporary moral and political power from Jews and award it to Palestinians. It is telling that so many other people like to imagine themselves or their favoured cause as Anne Frank, when Jews - the very people who have the greatest affinity with her fate - tend to look at her story and think “we never want to go through that again.” She personifies the saintly innocence of victimhood, yet while Jews cherish her memory, the lesson they draw from her story is not to try to emulate her, but the opposite: to avoid her fate at all costs.

The most highbrow intellectual effort to resolve these contradictions came in a 7,500-word essay in the London Review of Books in March, written by the author Pankaj Mishra, titled ‘The Shoah after Gaza’. According to Mishra, Israel’s military campaign in Gaza is causing “a rupture in the moral history of the world”. This is because Israel has “turned the murder of six million Jews into an intense national preoccupation” with a “Shoah-sanctified demand for total and permanent security”. Israel’s “national ethos”, he argues, is that “those who have been or expect to be victims should pre-emptively crush their perceived enemies”. After flirting with the idea that Israel is itself undergoing “Nazification” as a result of this mentality (he condemns “the liquidation of Gaza”, a form of words that appears to mimic the Nazi liquidation of Jewish ghettos during the Shoah), Mishra argues, crucially, that it is supporters of the Palestinians, not Israel, who “can rescue the Shoah … and re-universalise its moral significance”. It is those millions protesting against Israel in Western cities, he says - on marches replete with placards comparing Israel to Nazi Germany and calls for Palestine from the River to the Sea - who will “go some way towards redeeming the memory of the Shoah.”

The idea that the Jews betrayed their own covenant with God and, as punishment, have been superseded by more worthy others has been around since early Christian times, and this idea that the Palestinians ought to inherit the status of sanctified victimhood that was temporarily held by Jews feels similar. It’s a reminder that beneath all the political arguments and social media narrative wars lies this basic point: Zionism represents the idea that victimhood is not a moral aspiration, but a status to avoid.

1. Rachel Cockerell, Melting Point: Family, Memory and the Search for a Promised Land (Wildfire, 2024)

2. Rosie Whitehouse, The People on the Beach: Journeys to Freedom After the Holocaust (Hurst & Company, 2020)