The Holocaust is the ultimate repudiation of Zionism

In 2016, I visited the Knesset and was introduced to the man who is Israel’s current prime minister.

Yair Lapid had watched a YouTube video that had gone viral a few years earlier. The clip showed me as the lone protester waving an Israeli flag amid a hostile crowd, which had rallied in front of the Israeli consulate in Los Angeles to demonstrate against the Mavi Marmara Gaza flotilla raid. As hecklers lunged at me, LAPD officers maintained my freedom of speech by drawing their batons to ward off the intimidating mob. While I courageously stood up for what I believed in at the time, today I shudder at how callous and indifferent I was as an indoctrinated 16-year-old to the dire straits millions of Palestinians in Gaza are subjected to by their oppressive occupation and siege.

When we met, Lapid shook my hand and exclaimed: “I remember you. You’re the one who stood up to those antisemites in Los Angeles.” His reflexive conflation of anti-Israel protesters with “antisemites” unfairly delegitimizes political opposition to the entity he holds dear, but it also reveals a good bit of his worldview.

He authored Memories After My Death, the biography of his father Tommy Lapid, an Israeli politician and Holocaust survivor who saw Israel as the answer to the Holocaust. He reflected in 2014 that “the Holocaust defined” his father, “and through him it defined me.”

But what has this meant for Lapid, and in turn, for Israeli society?

Lapid has openly recognized the contradiction between being a Jewish and democratic state, yet he steadfastly remains committed to the Jewish state because, as he wrote in 2015, “My father didn’t move here from the ghetto to live in a bi-national state. He moved here to live in a Jewish state. And if we don’t separate from the Palestinians, the Jewish character of Israel is at risk.” The last line particularly calls to mind the problem with Lapid’s Zionist ideology.

In a 2017 campaign speech, I witnessed Lapid admitting his commitment to Jewish separatism, contending that, although it is “not very elegant” to say, “we have to get rid of them…to separate from the Palestinians. I do not want to live with them.” This mindset is at the heart of Zionism and must be recognized as grotesque, bordering on exterminationist rhetoric. While I do not believe that Lapid or the Israeli people would or could ever commit a genocide, this language conveys the exact nationalist mindset and calculations that would and have led to it. It sees a population of “others” based on their race or creed as an unwanted, dangerous demographic, social, and political obstacle that requires elimination.

Israel’s long-standing stance of seeing Palestinians as unwelcome and unwanted encourages or, at times, threatens Palestinian displacement and emigration. The general Israeli worldview is that the fewer Palestinians on the less land the better (recognizing that none is an unrealistic aspiration) and vice versa for Jews – maximum Jews on maximum land. In line with this, in 2016, Lapid openly proclaimed his policy: “My principle says maximum Jews on maximum land with maximum security and with minimum Palestinians.”

Ironically, this leads Lapid, as a Zionist, to advocate a weltanschauung antithetical to Jewish interests. In 2015, he declared: “European Jewry should understand that there is only one home for Jews and that is the State of Israel.” Indeed, Zionism entails the (de facto antisemitic) undermining and negation of Jewish existence outside of the Holy Land.

As part of my volunteer work for the Jewish student organization Hillel from 2017-2018, I led discussions among Christian delegations who arrived through a program called Passages. I remember the shock and dismay several of them displayed when I told them that, contrary to the Zionist brainwashing that they had undergone since their journey in the Holy Land began, the lesson that they should walk away with from the Yad Vashem Holocaust museum should not be the one visitors are fed about the righteousness of Zionism and the need for a Jewish state; rather, it calls to mind the need for acceptance and tolerance of all people – Jews and others, in all the world.

Indeed, the Holocaust should be perceived through a universalist, humanist paradigm, instructing us all on the need for justice and equality across the board. A particularist Jewish take (which I once held) will hold us back rather than allow us to build a better world where no one should fear such atrocities.

The elder Lapid was an atheist who perceived political Zionism to be the new Judaism. In espousing his anti-religious stance, he so viciously attacked the ultra-Orthodox that he was often accused of antisemitism.

One would think that his son would have learned the importance of not throwing such charges of antisemitic bile around lightly.

Having inherited the trauma of his family’s experience of the Holocaust, he apparently translated this into seeing all those who oppose Israel as hateful enemies of the Jewish people. This deceptive smear undermines the fight against antisemitism, cheapening its horrific nature. Moreover, the basis for the notion that anti-Zionism is antisemitism lies in the false conflation of Jews/Judaism with Israel/Zionism (which is itself, by necessity, antisemitic). In calling for a Jewish exodus based on the belief that Jewish existence outside of the Holy Land is untenable, Zionism effectively concurs with the basic tenets of antisemitism, that Jews do not belong in the world.

The truth is that, when placed in its proper lens following a necessary paradigm shift, the Holocaust serves the anti-Zionist narrative rather than the story recollected by Zionists. In fact, the legacy of the Holocaust should serve as a repudiation — not a validation — of Zionism. The lesson we must take away from the Holocaust is not the Jewish supremacism of Zionism but a comprehension of the evil of racism, including antisemitism and ethnic cleansing.