The Holocaust and the Nakba
[3][4] The 2018 book The Holocaust and the Nakba argues that "unless we can hold these two moments in our hearts and minds as part of the same story, there can be no moving forward in the seemingly unmovable conflict that is Israel-Palestine".
[21] The Israeli state has made an effort to erase the memory of the Nakba, destroying Palestinian villages and avoiding mentioning the issue in history books.
[26] The height of this phenomenon occurred in 2015 when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu falsely accused the Palestinian Amin al-Husseini of starting the Holocaust.
[29] On the Israeli Jewish side, Bar-On and Sarsar cite Ilan Gur-Zeev and Ilan Pappé's 2003 paper Beyond the Destruction of the Other's Collective Memory: Blueprints for a Palestinian-Israeli Dialogue as an early call for the Holocaust and the Nakba "to be examined within a mutual context", that highlighted, without claiming equivalence, "the thread that ties them to the collective psyche of both people".
This may also have been a response to the Venice Declaration a month earlier, in June, when the European Economic Community recognized the right of Palestinians to self-determination and to participate in peace negotiations.
[26] When West Germany eventually moved towards recognition of the PLO and the Palestinian right to self-determination in the 1980s, Israel retaliated by again bringing up the Nazi past.
It means compassion, human sympathy, and utter recoil from the notion of killing people for ethnic, religious, or nationalist reasons".
[38] According to Gilbert Achcar, Israel especially and other Western countries to a lesser extent underestimate Arab expressions of sympathy for Holocaust victims.
[38] Raphael Lemkin, the inventor of the concept of genocide, supported Zionism and likely considered the Nakba justified in line with mainstream Zionist views.
Moses writes, "Today, this regime ascribes Palestinians the role of the villains in a global drama about preventing genocide and a 'second Holocaust' for resisting colonization of and expulsion from their land.
Their negative treatment by non-Jewish neighbors during and after the Holocaust "by all accounts... rendered many of them indifferent and callous and at times vengeful toward the Arab population they encountered in Palestine".
[45] In a letter, Israeli minister of agriculture Aharon Zisling expressed his revulsion at the al-Dawayima massacre, stating: "Nazi acts have been committed by Jews as well".
[48] In 1969 the Palestinian novelist Ghassan Kanafani published a novel, Return to Haifa, in which a Palestinian couple who had fled Haifa during the Nakba, return to their home city, and encounter a Jewish couple – the husband is a Holocaust survivor, who, on finding their empty home, occupied it and raised the young boy they found there as a Jew.
[49] Lebanese novelist Elias Khoury's epic novel Bab Al-Shams (Gate of the Sun), originally published in 1998, tells the history of Palestine.
[51] The Warsaw Ghetto boy, an iconic image of the Holocaust, has been used in comparisons with the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, especially in the award-winning film Waltz with Bashir.
[52] The 2018 book The Holocaust and the Nakba makes the case that "unless we can hold these two moments in our hearts and minds as part of the same story, there can be no moving forward in the seemingly unmovable conflict that is Israel-Palestine".
[4] Hannah Arendt wrote that the formation of Israel solved the Jewish question in Europe, but "merely produced a new category of refugees, the Arabs, thereby increasing the number of stateless".
[53] She criticized the way that Jewish historians had portrayed Jews "not [as] history-makers but history-sufferers, preserving a kind of eternal identity of goodness whose monotony was disturbed only by the equally monotonous chronicle of persecutions and pogroms".
