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The Holocaust Industry

“The Holocaust industry has simply become a network of extortion.”
Norman G. Finkelstein, Jewish historian, descendant of Holocaust survivors.

There was a time when I thought Europe had learnt something essential from its horrors. My first readings in philosophy school were those of thinkers—most of them Jewish—who began to reflect after Auschwitz: Arendt, Adorno, Benjamin, Levinas, Camus, Améry. I matured intellectually in the shadow of the Holocaust, convinced that this trauma had forever changed the way we look at others, understand evil, and conceive of politics. It seemed that there, on that soil scorched by genocide, Europe had found a basic ethics: the obligation not to repeat, not to dehumanise, not to turn one’s neighbour into an object of extermination.

In order to reflect sincerely, it was necessary to reopen that wound. The distortion of memory began quietly. First in the United States, then in Israel. In the years following the Second World War, the Holocaust was rarely mentioned in speeches, newspapers, or history books. It was a shadow that hung over family kitchens. American Jewish elites preferred not to talk about it too much. They had to prosper, to integrate. Remembering was an inconvenient luxury.

The Holocaust was not seen as a separate atrocity, but as one among the atrocities of war: the attempts to exterminate Slavs, Roma, homosexuals, political dissidents, and disabled people. At the Nuremberg trials, the extermination of the Jews did not even take centre stage. The term “Holocaust” did not become widespread in English until the 1960s, and “Shoah” took even longer.

In the twilight of the Cold War, Nazi crimes had to be downplayed. Churchill called for a “blessed act of oblivion” after 1945. West Germany was a strategic ally of Washington and London. And allies do not scrutinise each other. In this convenient amnesia, the Holocaust became a footnote. Remembering it was seen almost as a communist ploy.

At that time, Israel did not occupy the central place it has today in the Western imagination. It was a small, peripheral state with no geopolitical weight. The United States (US) did not want to antagonise the Arab world. The American Jewish community viewed the Zionist project with distance.

Israel, Western Stronghold

“Holocaust awareness is official propaganda indoctrination, a mass production of slogans and distorted worldviews, whose true aim is not at all to understand the past, but to manipulate the present.”
Boas Evron, Israeli author.

Everything changed in 1967. The Six-Day War transformed the consciousness of a people, as well as the Western narrative. Israel went from uncertainty to military power. From a fragile nation to a stronghold of the Western bloc. The resounding victory cemented a new myth: that of the chosen people who, after surviving the worst atrocity of the 20th century, proved their strength to the world. Israel became the “chosen people of the West”.

From then on, the memory of the Holocaust began to be rewritten for political purposes. And a new standard was established: never forget! Norman Finkelstein, the grandson of survivors, explained with relentless lucidity how that memory was converted into an industry: a symbolic production system with guardians, temples, patrons, commissions, films, foundations, official martyrs and outlawed heretics. Memory ceased to be a duty and became a commodity. Remembering became profitable. Tragedy was stripped of its humanity and turned into dogma. Peter Novick called it “the American civil religion.” Elie Wiesel was its high priest.

Memory had become a powerful tool in the hands of Israeli leaders and their allies. The idea of “moral capital” was established: special suffering conferred special rights. An inexhaustible credit of innocence, amassed in the name of the past, allowed Israel to acquire nuclear weapons of its own, to colonise in the name of survival, to kill in order not to die again. Any criticism was received as a form of anti-Semitism, even when it responded to Israeli aggression. It had become the secular version of the chosen people, as Ismar Schorsch pointed out.

By the 1970s, real anti-Semitism had virtually disappeared from American life. And the “new anti-Semitism” no longer served to protect Jews from hatred, but to protect the State of Israel from any dissent. Seven large Holocaust museums were built in the United States, while there was not a single one dedicated to slavery or the extermination of the Native Americans. Justifying the exclusion of the Roma genocide—proportionally greater than that of the Jews—was the greatest challenge these museums faced. American historian Edward Linenthal believed that for the Holocaust Memorial Council, those other victims were considered “inconvenient and embarrassing relatives” because they questioned the exceptional nature of the Holocaust as an exclusively Jewish phenomenon.

This logic was enthusiastically imported to Europe. The European Union made the Shoah a requirement for membership. What Finkelstein called the “Holocaust industry” is today a global model of bureaucratic memory management that is proliferating in museums, conferences and ceremonies, while the present repeats the crimes it claims to commemorate.

A memory born of horror had been stripped of its power of redemption. Memory—the real one—is not a sanctuary: it is an uncomfortable questioning. Arendt wrote: “Evil can reappear at any moment, because there is no past that guarantees it.” That is why memory cannot be anyone’s monopoly. When memory is privatised, its meaning is destroyed.

Unlike Spain—where amnesia became state policy under the kindly name of “reconciliation”—it seemed to me that Germany had consolidated a much more rigorous and demanding culture of memory. But then I began to notice the shadows and the power relations hiding beneath that shining surface: even where memory seemed solid, a profound distortion was taking place. What Gaza revealed had been there from the start, for decades. To fully understand this distortion, we must understand how Germany, which made memory a pillar of its identity, ended up using it to legitimise genocide.

German Complicity

“What happened in Germany can happen anywhere, to any people, even my own.”
Yehuda Elkaná, Israeli historian.

In February 2026, the spokesperson for the German Green Party met with Israel’s Foreign Minister. It was not just any other formal gesture. It was a way of legitimising a government facing accusations of genocide before the International Court of Justice (ICJ), whose president is subject to an international arrest warrant and whose ministers have even criminalised Green MEPs who participated in the humanitarian flotilla to Gaza, describing it as a “pro-terrorist” initiative.

The meeting revealed a disturbing fact: the persistence of a German political rationale that makes support for Israel an unquestionable moral imperative, even when that support is in direct conflict with international law. A rationale that, paradoxically, coincides today with that of the European far right.

When I joined the European Greens in the European Parliament, I did so with caution. Not so much because of the group’s internal plurality as because of the German delegation’s specific weight. It was the largest and therefore the most influential.

After the attack on 7th October, the German delegation unreservedly defended Israel’s “legitimate right to self-defence”, even as the offensive on Gaza had already claimed thousands of civilian lives and allegations of collective punishment were mounting. The discussion was not legal. It was about identity. This pattern was not limited to the Greens. It was replicated, with different nuances, among liberals, social democrats and even the German left. Over time, things changed. Not without resistance. And in the end, the Green group passed a resolution that assumed much of the discourse anchored in international law and the equality of victims: the recognition of genocide and the State of Palestine, the prohibition of arms trafficking, and the suspension of the trade agreement between the European Union and Israel. But the concern remained: how could the country that had made memory a pillar of its identity be unable to apply to Israel the same criteria as to any other state?

That memory operated not only as trauma or accountability, but also as pride. Some German colleagues were convinced that they understood anti-Semitism better than anyone else. This self-perception generated a subtle form of moral superiority: Germany not only atoned for its guilt but also felt authorised to dictate the boundaries of decency in Europe. However, this certainty coexisted with an inability to recognise when memory stops challenging the present and begins to shield it instead.

Functional Philo-Semitism

“After the Holocaust, Jews can do anything.”
Golda Meir, Israeli Prime Minister.

After 1945, Germany embarked on a reckoning with its past that was unparalleled in Europe. Memorials, museums, and school education. In this context, a metamorphosis took place in the German imagination regarding Jews. The country that had considered them a foreign body, an internal enemy, began to admire them… but not all of them. Only a particular group: the armed, disciplined, young, virile Israelis. Not those who had been deported, humiliated or murdered, but those who embodied the perfect opposite of the Nazi stereotype.

Anti-Semitism did not simply disappear; it transformed. It became what some Holocaust survivors, such as Primo Levi, called “functional philo-Semitism”: a strategic admiration for the strong, militarised Israel that emerged victorious after 1967. I understood this suddenly while reading an internal German report from the time of Eichmann’s trial in Israel. It stated, literally, that young Israelis had “none of the characteristics we used to see as Jewish.” Israeli soldiers were described as the “living rectification” of the European Jew. There could be no cruder confession: the same gaze that had dehumanised Jews in Europe now revered Israelis because they fit their ideal of power. The European Jew was the victim; the Israeli Jew, the rehabilitated warrior.

As this admiration grew, a silent operation was simultaneously carried out: the reconversion of Nazi elites. Nuremberg jurists recycled their careers, officials with murky pasts were rehabilitated, and police and administrative structures moved from one regime to another with a moral ease that, from today’s perspective, is unbearable.

I was particularly struck by one specific episode in this process: Adenauer manoeuvring to ensure that Hans Globke, his closest collaborator and co-author of the Nuremberg Laws, was not implicated during the trial of Nazi criminal Eichmann, which took place in Jerusalem in the 1960s. Compromising files were removed during the trial, and names were deleted. An operation that amounted, as Pankaj Mishra summarised, to Israel receiving weapons, cash and legitimacy while Germany received absolution and silence—despite its incomplete denazification.

The Eichmann trial downplayed the persistence of Nazi support in Germany, while exaggerating Nazi presence in Arab countries. As Arendt pointed out in her chronicle of the trial, it suited both Germany and Israel to portray Arabs as the embodiment of Nazism.

Israel as “Raison d’État”

“If certain cultures have been capable of destroying others… the destructive forces they engender can also turn inward.”
Octavio Manno, French psychoanalyst.

The phrase that best sums up this historic shift came from Angela Merkel in 2008: Israel’s security is a matter of state for Germany. It was not a moral statement: it was a dogma that removed all doubt and made support for Israel a hallmark of German democracy. The Holocaust was presented as the unparalleled original sin; the Jews as absolute victims; Israel as their guarantor; and Germany as the mandatory guardian of this moral temple. Anyone who questioned this order was perceived as breaking the tacit post-war covenant.

That functional philo-Semitism lives on today as a moral shield for a state with carte blanche to commit any atrocity. Israel is spoken of as if it were a metaphysical pillar of its own identity. And no identity takes criticism well. On the contrary, it perceives criticism as an existential threat. Facts are not discussed: reflections are defended.

When we debated the decisions of the United Nations or the International Court of Justice, our German colleagues wondered whether criticising Israel would “embolden” extremists. What was being discussed was not Gaza, but the spectre of Germany’s own past. A deeply European issue, but one that is nonetheless alien to the Palestinian reality.

Colonialism, Selective Memory, and Namibia

“Israel’s alliance with Germany was a conspiracy to cleanse the reputation of the German people. In return, they paid us billions.”
Yeshayahu Leibowitz, Israeli author.

If I learned anything from studying German history in depth, it is that the Holocaust was the culmination of a much longer genealogy. In the early 20th century, in south-west Africa, the German army perpetrated one of the first genocides of the modern era: the systematic annihilation of the Herero and Nama peoples. There, practices were tested that would later appear, amplified, in Europe: concentration camps, slave labour, mass deportation, and extermination through starvation. For decades, this colonial crime remained out of German textbooks, as if history had begun in 1933. But the thread was there: the seed of racialised colonialism later germinated into Nazism, and the inability to face up to this continuity has left a moral vacuum that is violently resurfacing today with German policy towards Palestine. The Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe warned: “Europe never reconciled itself with its colonial past. It only archived its crimes.” Germany provided economic reparations to Israel, but never to Namibia. It recognised the Herero and Nama genocide only a century later, with watered-down formulas, without assuming criminal responsibility, without real compensation and without listening to the surviving communities.

The same logic that dehumanised the Herero and Nama peoples resurfaces in current discourse on Palestinians: “terrorists”, “human animals”, “subhumans”, “dangerous masses”. It is no coincidence that this Israeli rhetoric found a comfortable echo in segments of the German political class. Dehumanisation is an ancient language, learned long before Nazism. The disturbing thing is that the pedagogy of the Holocaust does not seem to have served to dismantle that language. It did serve, however, to internalise a national guilt towards European Jews. but not to universalise responsibility, nor to understand that all dehumanised life opens the door to horror.

That is why, when Germany today justifies the massacre in Gaza as “self-defence”, when it crushes demonstrations, when it bans Palestinian symbols, censors journalists, accuses those who denounce crimes of anti-Semitism… it is not breaking with its history: it is repeating it in colonial terms. And the paradox is almost unbearable: a country that built entire museums to teach its children not to repeat barbarism has aligned itself with a state that applies the mechanisms of expulsion, collective punishment and racialised violence to another people.

The Relocation of Racism

“A lie spreads, expands and ultimately survives on one condition: that it finds fertile soil in the society in which it is disseminated. In that society, people unconsciously express their prejudices, their hatred, their fears, all their strong emotions.”
Marc Bloch, French historian.

The more the evidence of the genocide in Gaza emerged, the more Muslim minorities within Germany were singled out. For years, the official narrative claimed that the country had confronted its past, defusing the seeds of hatred. But that self-image was shattered when the refugee crisis hit in 2015. Suddenly, a new subject appeared on whom to place fears and blame: the Muslim. The Arab. The migrant. The refugee. The equation was immediate and politically useful: they are the risk, they bring the anti-Semitism that we have freed ourselves from; they embody what we have overcome.

And so, while the neo-Nazis were rising in the polls, the political focus shifted to pro-Palestinian demonstrations, mosques, and young people wearing keffiyehs. Islamophobia became the new face of the old anti-Semitism. Germany had not defeated its anti-Semitism; it had simply relocated it. On the streets, repression advanced: demonstrations were banned, children were arrested for carrying Palestinian flags, teachers were disciplined for teaching international humanitarian law, and artists were fired for signing open letters against genocide. And then something even more disturbing was revealed: many of those being persecuted were Jews.

By 2024, Germany had arrested or charged more Jewish people than in any other year since the Holocaust. Any Jew who did not fit into the pro-Zionist doctrine became a suspect. It was an obscene reversal: children and grandchildren of Holocaust victims being lectured by those who belonged to the nation that murdered their families. The descendants of the persecuted were treated as a threat by those who should have listened to them first. Germany, in its zeal to atone for a crime, recruited the ghosts of Auschwitz and ended up profaning its own moral promise. The memory of the Holocaust was used to gag those who embodied that very memory. The victims of the past were exploited to silence those who today denounced another crime. All under the same slogan: “security for the Jewish community”, even though that community—diverse, pluralistic, with highly critical voices—had not asked for anyone to be silenced. The state used its name, but it was not defending the Jews: it was defending its own image and narrative of redemption.

This was the definitive proof that Germany had drained its racism of anti-Jewishness, filling it with anti-Arabness instead. The current German Chancellor, Friedrich Merz, acknowledged this bluntly in June 2025: “Israel does the dirty work for us.” Who was this “us”? Once again, the idea of Western civilisation. This is the decisive step in justifying Israel’s violence in Gaza in terms that should have disappeared from German history: “civilisation against barbarism”, “the West against savagery”, “self-defence against hordes”. The same Nazi or colonial categories of German Namibia are now directed at another people. The same dehumanisation, just with a different name. Another victim. Another continent.

The fundamental question is not whether Germany should commit to Israel’s security. It is whether that commitment can be sustained by ignoring the rights of another people, downplaying serious charges before international courts and criminalising solidarity.

The Genealogy of Zionism and the European Shadow

“Yesterday’s anti-Semites are today the ones who most denounce anti-Zionism as a form of anti-Semitism.”
Enzo Traverso, Italian intellectual.

For a long time, I was afraid to think about Israel. Not to criticise its policies, but to think about its history with the depth it deserved. As I have explained, I come from a philosophical background shaped by authors who wrote in the shadow of the Holocaust. My moral and political education had been built on the cautionary tale that they all left recorded in their books: evil can happen again, because the human capacity to destroy our own kind remains intact.

It was through the writings of intellectuals such as Edward Said that I discovered that this framework had a devastating blind spot: the tragedy of another people—the Palestinians—had been silenced, erased or minimised in order to sustain a narrative of European redemption. What was memory for some became oblivion for others. And then another piece of evidence emerged, as simple as it was brutal: the anti-Semitism that had devastated Europe was not born in Palestine, but here, on our continent; yet the price was paid there.

It was not the Arabs who built concentration camps, who deported, who exterminated. It was not the East that expelled the Jews from European history: it was Europe. And yet Palestine ended up bearing the consequences of that European crime.

That realisation was an internal earthquake. It forced me to re-examine what I had learned and to dismantle my own certainties. I discovered—like so many other Europeans—that the history of Zionism could not be understood without European anti-Semitism, nor could European anti-Semitism be understood without the colonialism that permeated the political imagination of the 19th century and much of the 20th.

Then came the difficult questions: how was it possible that a persecuted people ended up building a national project on the expulsion of another? How did criticising the crimes of a state come to be considered an act of hatred against a people? Europe needed redemption, Israel needed protection, and the United States needed an ally. And Zionism became the perfect piece in a geopolitical machine where memory itself was also a weapon.

It was not a question of denying the Jewish tragedy—the magnitude of which forms part of the ethical roots of this article—but of recovering its universal meaning. Because defending the Palestinians is not denying the Holocaust: it is honouring it. It is preventing its memory from being used to justify what should never be repeated.

And because, in the end, this reflection is not only about Israel, nor only about Palestine, nor only about Germany. It is about the very heart of our time: how memory becomes power, fear becomes ideology, and suffering becomes an alibi. This is where Zionism, anti-Semitism and the Palestinian tragedy intersect. To understand the history of Israel without understanding European Zionism is to lose sight of the root of the problem. To understand European anti-Semitism without recognising how it shielded itself behind Zionism is to betray the ethical lesson itself.

As a conclusion: Nakba, Colonisation, and Moral Immunity

“Why should the West and Christianity hand over Islamic Palestine as compensation? Why don’t they hand over a part of Poland, where Jews were subjected to the most horrific tortures? Why don’t they offer a state of the Federal Republic of Germany as compensation for the Holocaust? Why does Christianity have to compensate for this torture inflicted on the Jews over the last two thousand years at the expense of Islam?”
Ali Shariat, Iranian intellectual.

Zionism was not born in Palestine; it was born in Europe, as a response to anti-Semitism, but inheriting its mindset: exclusionary nationalism, territorial colonialism, and settler logic. The “promised land” became a laboratory where Europe displaced its guilt, and where the narrative of absolute suffering shielded a project of domination.

Today, the Nakba continues. Colonisation, displacement, dispossession and denial persist in the present, sustained by a selective European memory that conflates duty with immunity. Memory that becomes absolutised turns suffering into privilege and history into a shield. There is no moral credit that exempts us from present judgment. The past explains, but it does not absolve. And those who believe themselves immune to ethical judgment ultimately find themselves as vulnerable as everyone else.

Memory that is not universalised runs the risk of replicating that which it swore to combat. Europe needs a memory that does not confuse criticism with hatred. Because if the 20th century taught us anything, it is that dehumanisation always begins with language. And when institutions fear a symbol more than a crime, something essential has been lost.

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