Yossi Klein Halevi: The end of the post-Holocaust era

Source: The Times of Israel

About the Author
Yossi Klein Halevi is a senior fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute, where he is co-director, together Imam Abdullah Antepli of Duke University and Maital Friedman, of the Muslim Leadership Initiative (MLI), and a member of the Institute's iEngage Project. His latest book, Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor, is a New York Times bestseller. His previous book, Like Dreamers, was named the 2013 National Jewish Book Council Book of the Year.

Already a year? Only a year?

Since Oct. 7, 2023, many of us have felt unmoored in time. I rarely know the date; sometimes I forget the month.

Disorientation is an apt response to the end of the post-Holocaust era, a seminal moment in which many of our most cherished assumptions have been upended.

The post-Holocaust era of the last eight decades was defined by optimism about the Jewish future. However improbably, we had emerged, stronger than ever, from the event intended to destroy us. For all its fluctuations, the post-Holocaust trajectory pointed forward.

Through two thousand years of exile, the Jewish people were sustained by two dreams. The first – considered so fantastic that it was relegated to messianic times – was that a dispersed and powerless people would somehow reclaim its ancient homeland. The second was that, in the long interim before the coming of the Messiah, Jews would find a welcoming haven in the diaspora.

After the Holocaust, both dreams were fulfilled. Two great centers of Jewish life emerged – a sovereign Israel and a self-confident North American Jewry, the most successful diaspora in history. Together, Israel and North America contain close to 90 percent of the world’s Jews. These two centers presided over the post-Holocaust renewal of the Jewish people – which moved from its historic nadir to the peak of its military, economic and political power.

Nothing like this had ever happened to the Jews – or perhaps to any other people. The transition from brokenness to power was so rapid and decisive that some Jews concluded this must be the messianic era.

Each community reacted to its particular circumstances with the wisdom of Jewish adaptability. For Israelis, that meant military deterrence in a region that sought to destroy them. For Jews in the diaspora, and especially in North America, that meant responding with “soft power” – lobbying, philanthropy and building alliances with other minorities – in societies that embraced them.

What Israel lost on October 7

For Israelis, the post-Holocaust era was defined by confidence in our ability to defend ourselves, no matter the circumstance. That confidence was based on our ability to project a credible military deterrence against genocidal enemies – what the pre-state Zionist leader Ze’ev Jabotinsky called “the iron wall.”

On October 7, the iron wall was breached. The most devastating blow in our history was delivered by our weakest enemy; our high-tech, state-of-the-art border was overrun by terrorists on tractors.

October 7 was a pre-enactment in microcosm of the destruction of Israel: the IDF in disarray, the government AWOL, civilians left to fend for themselves with pistols.

Israel’s recent, stunning successes against Hezbollah have helped to partly renew our self-confidence. Morale among our soldiers is arguably higher than at any time since the Yom Kippur War. That may well be the most significant element in restoring our long-term deterrence – an internal Israeli deterrence against despair.

Still, the war for the restoration of our deterrence has only begun. Iran’s massive ballistic strike last week proves that our enemies are hardly deterred. Tens of thousands of missiles and rockets are aimed at Israeli cities from multiple directions. If Iran and its proxies unleash their full arsenal, the Iron Dome anti-missile system will be overwhelmed.

October 7 challenged our faith in the Zionist promise of ending Jewish homelessness. For the first time in Israel’s history, a “security zone” – emptied of civilians in the north – has been created on our side of the border. The inability of the state to ensure that Israelis can live in their homes undermines the credibility of our national home. Undoing that disastrous perception is also a strategic goal of this war.

The return of the Holocaust

The last existential war Israel fought was Yom Kippur 1973. Our subsequent wars, beginning with Lebanon 1982, were asymmetrical, none of them endangering Israel’s survival. As a result, Israelis came to accept the permanence of the Jewish state as a given. A telling indication of that self-confidence was the gradual fading of the Holocaust from our political discourse.

Though Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu repeatedly invoked the Holocaust in his warnings about a nuclear Iran, most Israelis tended to avoid that rhetoric. In his 2017 speech on Holocaust Remembrance Day, former president and Likudnik Ruby Rivlin implicitly challenged Netanyahu, warning against comparing the Holocaust to contemporary threats.

But on October 7, Israel became the most dangerous place in the world to be a Jew. And now the Holocaust is back. Israelis describe October 7 as the greatest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust – though a more apt description would be: the greatest number of Israelis (they included Arab citizens) killed on any day in a century of Arab-Israeli conflict. No less than Hamas’s atrocities, the defenselessness of the victims torments us with Holocaust imagery. By invoking the Holocaust, Israelis are saying: We failed to defeat the Jewish past.

Another sign of the new mood is the constant repetition of the slogan, Am Yisrael Chai, the people of Israel live. That expression was popular among diaspora Jews who needed reassurance after the Holocaust that the Jewish people had indeed survived. Israelis never adopted the slogan, which revealed an anxiety we thought we had overcome. Of course the people of Israel live: That was the whole point of a Jewish state. Now, though, the slogan appears on highway billboards and in newspaper ads and in popular songs. Suddenly demonstrative defiance seems very Israeli.

The anti-Entebbe

Finally, October 7 shattered the notion that the state will protect us and Israelis will protect each other.

Our inability to free the hostages being held in suffocating spaces in Gaza is a constant taunt, reminding us of the failure of October 7. In 1976, the IDF rescued a hundred Israeli hostages whose plane had been hijacked to Entebbe airport in Uganda. The Entebbe rescue became the symbol of the post-Holocaust era of Jewish resilience. (That the hostages were being held by far-left German terrorists made the symbolism of Entebbe even more potent.)

Now, though, the IDF, which is operating within shouting distance of our hostages, has managed to free only eight out of the dozens estimated to still be alive. This is Israel’s anti-Entebbe moment.

Speaking at a demonstration for the hostages, Meirav Cohen, an opposition member of the Knesset, said: “The state of Israel was founded so that there would not be another Holocaust. [When Israeli] citizens are being held in tunnels, starved and abused and then executed by Nazis, this government has totally failed.”

She wasn’t speaking about an operational failure to save the hostages, but a failure of political will. According to his own hostage negotiators, Netanyahu has repeatedly sabotaged a deal – fearing his far-right partners would bring down the coalition.

Certainly an argument can be made for prioritizing victory over a hostage deal. But Netanyahu and most of his ministers have revealed a stunning lack of empathy for the hostages and their families. Pro-Netanyahu media has treated desperate family members protesting against the government’s policy as virtual enemies of the state; Netanyahu supporters have physically attacked them on the streets.

While it appears that Hamas is no longer interested in a deal, a sacred trust between Israelis and the state has been broken.

The defining ethos of the post-Holocaust era was mutual protection: When Jews were in crisis anywhere, fellow Jews everywhere did what they could to help. The great expression of that commitment was the 25-year international movement to free Soviet Jewry.

The notion that the prime minister of the Jewish state would place his political needs ahead of the lives of Jewish captives has upended the credibility of that ethos.

The return of conditional acceptance

For the Diaspora, the promise of the post-Holocaust era was that humanity, shamed into contrition, would finally be cured of its Jewish obsession. Jews would no longer be turned into a symbol for whatever a given civilization regarded as the ultimate evil – Christ-killer for Christianity, money-grubbing capitalist for Marxism, race polluter for Nazism.

Certainly, large parts of the world never signed up for the penitence program. The Arab world tried to destroy the newborn Jewish state barely three years after the Holocaust and then destroyed its ancient Jewish communities. The Soviet Union promoted an aggressive antisemitic campaign barely disguised as “anti-Zionism.” And in Western Europe, Jews have been violently targeted by radical Islamists.

But in North America, the promise of Jewish safety took root.

In recent years, there were warning signs that the atmosphere was shifting. The 2018 murder of 11 worshippers in Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue was the worst massacre in American Jewish history. Synagogues became the only houses of worship requiring round-the-clock security. And anti-Zionism, the ideology that defines the existence of a Jewish state as a crime, penetrated humanities departments across academia.

Still, nothing quite prepared U.S. and Canadian Jews for the post-October 7 shift – in effect, the Europeanization of North American Jewish life.

In recent travels through North American Jewish communities, I encountered a level of fear I’d never experienced before. Some wondered whether there was a future in the diaspora for Jewish life. Some even evoked Germany of the 1920s. “Now I know what my grandparents were trying to warn me about,” a friend said to me. I suspect that North American Jews who compare their situation to pre-Holocaust Europe know the analogy is absurd, but reaching into our darkest experience is a way of signaling the shock of their new reality.

In speaking to North American Jewish audiences, I noted that, while Israel had become the most dangerous country for Jews physically, it had also become the safest country for Jews psychologically – the one place you could be certain your neighbors shared your horror of Oct. 7. No one challenged that assessment.

This is the first time Israelis and North American Jews are experiencing a shared sense of vulnerability. In the past, when Israel was at war, the diaspora rallied to its support. Now, many diaspora Jews seem to be worrying as much about their future as they do about ours.

Statistics tracking the rise in antisemitic attacks around the world since Oct. 7 tell only part of the story. The deeper trauma for diaspora Jews is psychological: the sense that their acceptance in society – from universities to the political system to the streets – is eroding.

The great post-Holocaust achievement of North American Jews was the gradual end of their conditional acceptance. Until then, Jews understood that social advance depended on toning down one’s Jewishness. Many Jews accepted the trade-off, even changing their family names.

By the 1970s, anti-Jewish discrimination – from university quotas to “restricted” neighborhoods and law firms – had largely ended. For the first time in the diaspora, Jews felt fully accepted.

The mainstreaming of anti-Zionism in universities and other progressive spaces has restored the era of conditional acceptance. Anti-Zionists insist on a fundamental flaw in Jewish identity that must be corrected as the admission price into the progressive equivalent of “polite society.” We will accept you among us, anti-Zionists tell young Jews on campus, and you may even hold Shabbat prayers and Passover seders at our tent encampments, on one condition: that you expunge Israel from your identity – a commitment that binds the overwhelming majority of the world’s Jews.

For all practical purposes, the debate over whether anti-Zionism is a form of antisemitism is irrelevant. Anti-Zionism is a threat to Jewish well-being – ironically, far more in the diaspora than in Israel, where we are largely immune to its impact. One immediate consequence of the anti-Zionist mood is to instill in Jews a profound sense of insecurity. Since Oct. 7, according to a poll, over a third of Jewish students on American campuses feel impelled to hide their Jewishness.

Last spring I met with Jewish students at Northwestern University near Chicago. I attended Northwestern in the 1970s, shortly after anti-Jewish quotas had been removed. My experience as a student there was exhilarating: Growing up in a Holocaust survivor family, where the non-Jewish world was seen as intrinsically hostile, I discovered a level of acceptance my parents couldn’t have imagined.

The Jewish reality I encountered at Northwestern in 2024 was the opposite of my own. Jewish students who refuse to repudiate Israel tend to experience social exclusion and socialize mostly with each other.

The experience of Jewish students I met around the country varies from campus to campus. Still, most of those with whom I spoke agree that anti-Zionism is poisoning a generation. As one student put it: What hurts most are the hateful comments of students who aren’t especially political but have absorbed the anti-Zionist atmosphere.

The mainstreaming of ‘Political Supersessionism’

The anti-Zionist campaign that has gone mainstream since October 7 is a war against the 20th-century Jewish story of destruction and renewal.

However unconsciously, that war draws on old forms of warfare against the Jews. The first is “supersessionism,” the pre-Holocaust Christian doctrine that claims the Church has replaced the Jews as the legitimate heirs of the identity of “Israel.” According to that doctrine, the Jews had forfeited the right to their own story. The Hebrew Bible didn’t belong to the Jews but the Christians.

The political equivalent of supersessionism is denying the Jews the right to their land – a right superseded by the Palestinian counterclaim.

The ideological war against Israel draws on an old Christian obsession with Jewish “sin.” Transforming Israel into the criminal among nations requires magnifying Israel’s crimes – real, exaggerated or wholly contrived – while ignoring those of its enemies. It requires the erasure of Israelis’ humanity – like tearing down posters of the Gaza hostages or blacking out their faces, a literal defacement.

Turning Israel’s war against Hamas into genocide depends on erasing the conditions in which the IDF fights – against terrorists without uniforms who operate from within a civilian population, in hundreds of kilometers of tunnels and in thousands of booby-trapped apartments. Erasing the Israeli narrative of the war extends to how most of the media cite Gaza casualty rates – without noting how many of the dead are Hamas fighters. (Out of Hamas’s current estimate of 41,000 dead, the IDF says close to 18,000 are terrorists – a combatant-to-civilian ratio well within the norm of other asymmetrical conflicts of this century, and under far more difficult circumstances than other armies have faced.)

Anti-Zionists apply that pattern of erasure to the entire story of the Jewish return home. Turning Zionism into our generation’s expression of European colonialism requires erasing the 4,000-year Jewish connection to their land. Reducing the story of Israel’s founding to the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians requires playing down the war of destruction Arab leaders declared against the newborn Jewish state and the postwar expulsion of nearly a million Jews from their ancient communities in the Arab world. Turning Israel into the occupier and aggressor requires omitting the history of Israeli peace offers and of Palestinian rejectionism.

The deepest source of anti-Israel animus is the symbolization of the Jew as embodiment of evil. The satanic Jew has been replaced by the satanic Jewish state. In demonstrations, caricatures of Netanyahu portray him with fangs, blood dripping from his mouth.

The end of the post-Holocaust era is expressed most starkly in the inversion of the Holocaust. Not only has Holocaust memory failed to protect the Jews; it has become an inspiration and a justification for the latest iteration of Jew hatred. These days, when a synagogue is defaced with swastikas, we don’t know whether the intent is to celebrate Nazism or to damn us as the new Nazis. A mural in Milwaukee caught the new mood: a swastika embedded in a Star of David, with the words, “The irony of becoming what you once hated.”

The Jew-as-Nazi is the endpoint of political supersessionism: Not only have we forfeited our identity as “Israel,” but we’ve assumed the identity of our worst enemy.

Fighting evil

Perhaps one reason we are unable to move past October 7 is because, on that day, we once again encountered absolute evil.

In the last century, the Jewish people has been successively targeted by three totalitarian ideologies – Nazism, Soviet communism and now radical Islamism. Each of those movements aspired to remake humanity in its image. Each was obsessed with the Jews as a primary obstacle to achieving its goal. Each felt justified to use any method in pursuing world domination.

Effectively countering evil requires uncompromising resolve.

On October 8, Israelis across the political spectrum agreed that the ground rules of our war against terror must change. Until then, the goal was to contain Hamas and dissuade it from firing rockets into Israeli communities; now the goal was to destroy its ability to govern. That meant denying Hamas immunity: Terrorists would not be allowed to massacre our civilians, cross back into Gaza and hide behind their civilians. Instead, we would pursue Hamas operatives wherever they were based, including hospitals and mosques. The terrible result has been Israel’s most brutal war – and one of its most necessary.

Now those rules are being applied to Hezbollah too.

But fighting terror enclaves on our borders is hardly sufficient. We need to confront the source of evil, which is the Iranian regime.

In its war against Israel, Iran achieved two strategic victories. The first was to surround us with terror enclaves – a “ring of fire.” The second was to outwit the decades-long Israeli campaign to prevent Iran from approaching the nuclear threshold.

Now we are finally dealing with the terror mini-states on our borders. But so long as Iran remains within reach of a bomb, we will not reclaim our deterrence or dispel the existential threat that returned to our national life with October 7. The strategic goal of this war, then, must be the destruction of Iran’s nuclear program, accelerating the process that will lead to the downfall of the Ayatollahs. That is the real “proportionate” response to October 7.

Along with military resoluteness, there is one more essential move in fighting evil, and it is directed inward: We need to resist the temptation to adopt the ways of our enemies. The Israeli far-right erodes the moral credibility of our war against evil by infecting us with evil. It endangers the support and understanding of our friends abroad and bitterly divides the Israeli public.

Preserving a decent and democratic Israel is an essential component in the war for our story. Those Jews who seek to turn Israel into a criminal state are a gift to those who insist it already is.

Living with uncertainty

With the end of the post-Holocaust era, Jews need to adjust to a profoundly disorienting ambiguity. That requires, first of all, a realistic assessment of threats and of our ability to respond to them.

Once again Israel is fighting for survival; yet as recent days prove, we still possess the will and the means to defend ourselves. North American Jewry no longer enjoys unconditional acceptance, yet its communities remain the most fortunate in diaspora history. The “Jewish problem” – as Jewish existence was once defined in pre-Holocaust Europe – has been replaced by the “Jewish state problem.” But Israel is not alone in a hostile world, even if it sometimes feels that way.

The great achievement of the post-Holocaust generation was the reclamation of power. Inevitably, that achievement came with a price: the loss of our innocence. Now we must own the consequences.

We are caught in a pathological loop – condemned as aggressors even as many Jews see us once again as victims. Neither identity is useful to understanding this Jewish moment. We are not victimizers: Any country in our place would have reacted as we did to October 7, if anything with even greater vehemence. Nor are we helpless: The ruins of Gaza and of Beirut grimly attest to our reclaimed ability to defend ourselves.

The morning after the war to reestablish our military deterrence, Israel will be confronted with an internal existential challenge: healing the divide that has torn us apart. In the year leading up to October 7, Israelis experienced the worst schism in our history. That divide signaled a fatal weakness to our enemies and encouraged them to attack.

Yet on October 8, rather than disintegrate from within, we instantly pivoted to one of the peak moments of Israeli solidarity. No less impressive, we didn’t wait to be mobilized and inspired by our leaders. Even as the government effectively collapsed, we mobilized ourselves. That was the moment of our maturation.

We are heirs, then, to two opposing models of Israel. The first is an old Jewish story: We devour ourselves, and then our enemies do the rest. The second story is new: From the depths of our divisiveness, we reclaim the instincts of peoplehood.

To do so will require agreement that no ideological camp may impose the totality of its political and cultural agenda on this fractious people. Neither an Oslo-like process nor a judicial coup can happen without a national referendum, or some other mechanism ensuring broad support. And when we enact painful policies that will inflame social tensions – for example, changing the nature of the ultra-Orthodox relationship with the state – we do so with respect, appreciating that each ideological camp embodies an essential truth of our identity and experience as a people.

The other day in Jerusalem, I saw a bumper sticker that read, “Our story will have a good ending.” Those words were spoken by Sarit Zussman at the funeral of her son, Ben, a soldier who fell in Gaza. Once that sentiment would have seemed to Israelis self-evident. Now it has the poignancy of a prayer.

(Part of this essay appeared in the Globe and Mail.)

About the Author
Yossi Klein Halevi is a senior fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute, where he is co-director, together Imam Abdullah Antepli of Duke University and Maital Friedman, of the Muslim Leadership Initiative (MLI), and a member of the Institute's iEngage Project. His latest book, Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor, is a New York Times bestseller. His previous book, Like Dreamers, was named the 2013 National Jewish Book Council Book of the Year.