Letters / On “On the ‘Victims of the Victims’”

In Ussama Makdisi’s recent reconsideration of Edward Said’s description of Palestinians as “victims of victims,” he asks in what sense Israeli Jews can meaningfully be deemed victims, given the ongoing displacement, dehumanization, and violence they have directed toward Palestinians since 1948. I believe that Said’s formula still offers a relevant explanatory model—though it is necessary to stress that it should never be understood as an exoneration or excuse for Israel’s brutal policies toward Palestinians. The designation of “victim” cannot justify Israel’s actions against Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, especially over the past 16 months.

And yet I find it hard to account for the historical roots of the current moment without understanding the status and self-perception of Jews, particularly those who made their way to Palestine, as victims. To make this point does not require rejecting altogether the paradigm of settler colonialism: There can be little doubt that Zionism, at key points in its history, and especially in 1948, has been a project of elimination, intent on displacing and dispossessing Palestinians. But Zionism was also a project of salvation for Jews, many of whom had little commitment to Zionism, but rather were motivated by a desperate desire to flee the violence of Europe. Indeed, Jews arrived from Europe in the 1930s and ’40s with deep trauma from the persecution they had faced. The Holocaust survivors among them at times transferred their sense of rage from the Nazi perpetrators to the Palestinian Arab population whom they now encountered. A large percentage of soldiers in the new Israeli military in 1948—estimates range between one-fourth and one-third—were Holocaust survivors, and officials of the new Israeli government were concerned that discipline among such soldiers might break down and that they would seek to exact revenge for the victims of Nazism by killing innocent Palestinians. Such instances did occur, as one hears in a 1948 report preserved in the archive of the Haifa-based Akevot Institute, in which Mapam party officials discussed how to respond to a Jewish soldier who had killed an Arab man while exclaiming, “They destroyed six million Jews, and so I murdered for revenge.”

What this transference suggests is a key point about the “victims of victims” paradigm that Makdisi doesn’t discuss—namely, that victims become victimizers. Far from an exculpation, the formula both captures a psychological dynamic and demands a measure of accountability. It is widely accepted by psychologists that individuals who are the victims of violence have a higher risk of becoming perpetrators of violence. Moreover, Israeli social psychologists speak of the deep penetration of Shoah-era trauma into every aspect of Israeli society, referring to it as “the Holocaustization of Jewish consciousness.” The response of Israelis to the massacre of October 7th made amply clear how images and memories of the Holocaust can be quickly activated.

Key to the perpetuation of this intergenerational trauma is its weaponization by Israeli political and military figures in order to justify harm against Palestinians. Abba Eban’s reference to the 1967 Green Line as “Auschwitz lines” or Menachem Begin’s characterization of Yasir Arafat as Hitler, or the claim of a current Israeli minister that Hamas is “worse than the Nazis,” serve as warrants for unrestrained violence. As Zygmunt Bauman observed, one needn’t be a survivor or child of a survivor to succumb to this tendency. Bauman calls attention to a class of “hereditary victims” or “victims by proxy” in Israel—those who lay claim to the mantle of suffering as a mode of historical identification. Far from being a guarantee of moral virtue, this status often prompts its subjects “to draw an opposite lesson: that humankind is divided into victims and victimisers, and so if you are (or expect to be) a victim, your task is to reverse the tables (‘the stronger lives’).”

Makdisi is not the first to suggest that the “victims of victims” framing is outmoded and dangerous. But is it really possible to will trauma away? And is it beneficial to deny the trauma of the other, even if it belongs to your oppressor? Here is where the victim-turned-victimizer dynamic has explanatory power, especially if accompanied by a healthy degree of historical perspective and understanding. Zionism is not unique as a national liberation movement that sought to overcome oppression through nationalism and the use of violence against its perceived enemies. Trading the position of victim for victimizer is, sadly, an all too common feature of the history of the oppressed, from which no one, including Jews and Palestinians, is exempt. In this regard, one has to read the line from the Mahmoud Darwish poem that Makdisi quotes—“No victim is a killer”—either as wishful thinking or, more likely, as an ironic comment on such wishful thinking.

Many Palestinian writers and intellectuals—among them Darwish, Emile Habibi, and Ghassan Kanafani, in addition, of course, to Said—have examined the complex, fraught, and ongoing entanglement of the Holocaust and the Nakba and the ways in which Jewish trauma has become entwined with a project of political domination Perhaps most comprehending of all is the recently departed Lebanese author, Elias Khoury. In his definitive Nakba novel, Gate of the Sun, as well as in the multi-volume Children of the Ghetto, Khoury unflinchingly depicts Palestinian suffering at the hands of Israeli soldiers while remaining deeply attuned to the lingering psychic wounds of the Holocaust that triggered erstwhile Jewish victims to become victimizers. As Nahla, the female protagonist in his definitive Nakba novel, Gate of the Sun, puts it: “We’re the Jews’ Jews”—as poignant, searing, and ironic a formulation as one can imagine.

To my mind, an especially salutary development in the scholarship on Israel/Palestine has been work that brings the Holocaust into conversation with the Nakba, as has been done most notably in the 2018 volume edited by the Holocaust scholar Amos Goldberg and political theorist Bashir Bashir. The aim of this research is not to lift the lens of scrutiny from Israel. If anything, it is to expose the pathology that deforms and occludes the ways in which Israelis see Palestinians—as Nazis, as Amalekites, as less than human. In a similar vein, the “victims of victims” paradigm calls on Israelis to accept responsibility for the fact that they, whose forebears were brutally oppressed, have become, in a different context and form, brutal oppressors. If they are unable or unwilling to see this, it is our obligation to hold up the mirror to them.