It is the sentence — and the ellipsis — that ends almost every American conversation about Israeli state policy. Historical suffering, the argument runs, creates a moral context that exempts a state from the criticism we apply to every other state. The argument has weight. The question is whether the same weight is applied to other peoples whose historical suffering is at least as great — and what the answer reveals about what the argument is actually doing.
This is, more or less, the argument as it appears in American political discourse. It is a serious argument. The Holocaust was real, deliberate, industrialized, and catastrophic. Six million Jews were murdered. The destruction of European Jewish civilization was a moral fact of the highest order. Any honest analysis must begin by treating this as foundational.
The question this piece asks is not whether the Holocaust matters. It does. The question is more specific: does historical suffering of this kind create moral entitlements that cannot be applied consistently across other peoples whose historical suffering is comparable or greater?
If the answer is yes — if it is a real moral principle — then the same principle should yield the same response in other documented cases. If the answer is no — if it only works in one specific case while being denied in others — then something other than the stated principle is doing the work.
This piece proceeds by examining five other documented cases of mass population destruction or genocide, and asking what policy response was actually provided in each.
These are not hierarchies of suffering. All five cases involve documented atrocities against innocent populations. They are presented in chronological order of when the destruction was largely accomplished — earliest to most recent. The metrics include population destroyed, recency of the destruction, the documented degree of intent, and whether the harm is ongoing.
Causes spanned epidemic disease (sometimes deliberately spread), military massacres (Pequot, Sand Creek, Washita, Wounded Knee, hundreds of smaller actions), forced removal (the 1830 Indian Removal Act), starvation policy (deliberate destruction of buffalo herds), forced assimilation (Indian boarding schools operating through the 1970s, with documented physical and sexual abuse and child deaths), and a sterilization program that affected an estimated 25–50% of Native American women of childbearing age between 1970 and 1976. California's first governor stated in his 1851 inaugural address that "a war of extermination" would continue "until the Indian race becomes extinct." That speech is verbatim. The harm is ongoing. Treaty violations, water rights disputes, contaminated reservations, life-expectancy gaps decades below the US average, and the unsolved cases of missing and murdered Indigenous women continue to the present.
The Tasmanian case is the cleanest documented modern example of a colonial settler population deliberately and successfully eliminating an Indigenous population from a defined territory. The Black War (1824–1832) was a declared military campaign. Lieutenant-Governor George Arthur's 1828 martial law declaration explicitly authorized settlers to "use their utmost endeavours to capture or destroy all such Natives." The Black Line of 1830 assembled approximately 2,200 colonists in a literal human cordon to sweep the island. Bounties were paid: £5 for adult Aboriginal Tasmanians, £2 for children. Strychnine-laced flour was left for raiding parties. Sealers systematically abducted Aboriginal women after killing the men of their groups. The surviving population was rounded up and exiled to Flinders Island, where most died of disease and despair. Truganini died in 1876. Holocaust scholar Raphael Lemkin — who coined the term "genocide" — studied Tasmania as a textbook case.
The Australian Frontier Wars (~1788–1934) killed an estimated 20,000–40,000 Aboriginal Australians in documented massacres alone. The University of Newcastle's Colonial Frontier Massacres database catalogs over 400 separate events. The legal doctrine of terra nullius — Latin for "nobody's land," the fiction that Australia had been uninhabited before European arrival — was Australian law from 1788 until 1992, when the High Court overturned it in Mabo v Queensland. 204 years. The Stolen Generations — Aboriginal children forcibly removed from their families through 1970 — affected, by the Australian government's own 1997 Bringing Them Home report, between 10% and 33% of all Aboriginal children. Aboriginal Australians were not counted in the national census until 1967. Within living memory. The formal government apology came in 2008 — 211 years after British settlement began. The harm continues in life-expectancy gaps, incarceration rates, deaths in custody, and ongoing land disputes.
The Atlantic slave trade forcibly transported approximately 12.5 million Africans to the Americas between the 16th and 19th centuries; an estimated 2 million died in transit. In the United States, slavery operated as a legal institution for 246 years (1619–1865), generating wealth that compounded into the foundations of American economic power. The end of slavery did not end the structural harm: Jim Crow segregation operated as law for roughly a century. The Equal Justice Initiative documents approximately 4,400 racial-terror lynchings between 1877 and 1950. Redlining and federal housing discrimination — federally administered through the 1968 Fair Housing Act — produced wealth gaps that continue to compound. The harm is documented as ongoing. Disparities in life expectancy, maternal mortality, incarceration rates, police killings, and access to capital are measurable in 2026.
The Holocaust was conceived, organized, and executed by Nazi Germany between roughly 1939 and 1945, with active collaboration from Vichy France, the Hungarian and Romanian governments, Ukrainian and Baltic auxiliaries, Croatian and Slovak fascists. The killing was industrialized, deliberate, ideologically driven, and meticulously documented by the perpetrators themselves. The destruction of European Jewish civilization was a moral catastrophe of the highest order. The complicity of the Western powers — Britain's 1939 White Paper restricting Jewish immigration to Mandatory Palestine; the United States' 1924 Immigration Act limiting Jewish entry; the refusal to bomb the rail lines to Auschwitz; the turning away of the SS St. Louis in 1939 — bears its own moral weight. The Holocaust is not relativized by comparison to other genocides. It is named here because the framework "historical suffering creates current entitlement" is being applied to one case but not the others.
If "historical suffering creates moral entitlement to territory, state-building, military protection, and foreign funding" were a real principle, it would yield comparable responses across comparable cases. The historical record shows otherwise.
What was offered to each people whose historical suffering is documented?
Read the table column by column. The cases with the greatest percentages of population destroyed (Tasmania, ~99%; Native Americans, 95–98%; mainland Aboriginal Australians, 90%) received no state, no reparations, and no territory. The case with the most recent forced removal of children (Stolen Generations through 1970, Indian boarding schools through the 1970s) received no comparable structural response. The case with the longest duration of structural harm (Black Americans, 246 years of slavery plus 100 years of Jim Crow plus ongoing structural racism) received no reparations and reduced affirmative action.
The case in which the destruction was concentrated into a six-year period — devastating, industrialized, and unambiguous in its evil — received a sovereign state on another people's land, plus the largest cumulative foreign aid program in US history.
This is not an argument that the Holocaust was less significant than the other genocides. It was not. It is an argument that the framework being invoked to justify the policy response — "historical suffering creates moral entitlement to present-day territorial and military arrangements" — is not actually being applied as a principle. It is being applied selectively, in one case only.
When a stated principle yields one outcome in the case it is invoked for, and the opposite outcome in every other case where it would apply, the principle is not actually doing the work. Something else is.
A note on what followsThe next three sections are a thought experiment, not a historical claim. Aboriginal Australians did not invade Papua New Guinea. Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, East Timor, and the Philippines did not fight a war against them. MILF and Abu Sayyaf did not emerge from displaced Bornean or Mindanaoan populations resisting Aboriginal Australian expansion. None of this happened. The thought experiment uses real peoples, real organizations, and real geography as analytical referents — chosen because their actual histories of displacement, resistance, and political-religious response are well-documented — to construct a structurally parallel hypothetical. The point is not to make claims about Aboriginal Australians, Papua New Guineans, or the peoples of maritime Southeast Asia. The point is that if the framework "historical suffering creates entitlement to present-day territorial and military arrangements" were applied in any other plausible case, the absurdity would be immediately visible. The thought experiment is the device that makes that visibility possible.
Suppose, in the late 1940s, the Australian government announced that Aboriginal Australians — having documented historical victimhood at the hands of British colonization, with all the suffering catalogued in Case 03 above — would now be granted territory in Papua New Guinea.
The justification: during the last ice age, approximately 50,000 years ago, Aboriginal Australians, Tasmanians, and Papua New Guineans were a single population on the connected landmass of Sahul. Aboriginal Australians, the argument runs, have an ancestral claim to the territory of Papua New Guinea that predates the formation of the Torres Strait. The Papua New Guineans who have lived there continuously for the intervening 50,000 years are, on this framework, occupying ancestral Aboriginal land.
Under this framework, Aboriginal Australians would claim sovereignty over 78% of Papua New Guinea, force the Papua New Guineans into 2% of the territory, build settlements on the remaining 20%, and — over the course of an extended military campaign — kill approximately 75,000 Papua New Guineans.
And to make the structural parallel exact: they would demand that China and Japan — countries with no role in either Aboriginal Australian historical suffering or in the Frontier Wars — fund the operation to the tune of $300 billion in inflation-adjusted dollars over 78 years.
The proposition would not be debated. It would not be considered. It would not even be raised as a possibility. Three structural facts would be immediately obvious to any observer:
One. The Papua New Guineans did not commit the Frontier Wars. Britain did.
Two. A 50,000-year-old shared land-bridge ancestry is not a present-day territorial entitlement.
Three. China and Japan have no relationship to the historical harm. There is no basis for asking them to pay.
All three of these structural objections apply to the actual Israeli case with at least as much force. Palestinians did not commit the Holocaust. A 2,000-year-old historical religious connection is not a present-day territorial entitlement under any other framework. And the United States has no relationship to the European historical crime — except as one of the powers that refused to absorb Jewish refugees and chose instead to deflect the cost onto a third party.
The framework that is treated as self-evidently absurd when applied to Aboriginal Australians, Papua New Guineans, China, and Japan is treated as self-evidently correct when applied to Israelis, Palestinians, and the United States. The selectivity is the entire story.
Continue the experiment past the original dispossession. Suppose, in the immediate aftermath of the Aboriginal Australian seizure of 78% of Papua New Guinea, the surrounding regional powers — Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, East Timor, and the Philippines — attempted to stop the displacement militarily. They organized a joint intervention to push the Aboriginal Australian state out of Papua New Guinea and restore the displaced Papuan population to their land. The intervention failed. Aboriginal Australia had military and logistical advantages, including extensive Western backing, and the regional powers — divided, under-resourced, with competing agendas — could not coordinate effectively enough to win.
Suppose a second regional intervention was attempted nineteen years later, after the Aboriginal Australian state began making clear its intention to expand further. This second war was even more decisive. Aboriginal Australia struck first, pre-empted the regional powers, and emerged with three times the territory it had held before the war. Decades later, senior Aboriginal Australian officials would publicly admit that the regional powers had not actually been planning to attack first — that the war had been seized as an opportunity, not undertaken in defense. But that admission would come too late to undo the territorial gains, and would never enter mainstream Western framing of the events.
In the decades that followed, those two failed regional interventions would be retroactively converted into the master narrative of the entire conflict.
Aboriginal Australia would not describe the wars as "Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, East Timor, and the Philippines tried to stop us from displacing the Papuans." They would describe them as "the regional powers tried to wipe us off the map." The fact that Aboriginal Australia had military superiority, that it expanded its territory in both wars, that the second war was pre-emptive on its own side — these documented facts would be erased from the framing. The wars would become proof of existential threat. Every subsequent Aboriginal Australian military action would be justified by reference to the fact that "the entire region tried to destroy us in 1948 and 1967." The framing would foreclose the obvious counter-question: the entire region tried to do what, exactly, and in response to what?
This is the structural keystone of all subsequent justification. Once "everyone tried to destroy us" becomes the master frame, every present-day action — settlement expansion, military operation, occupation, blockade — becomes retroactively defensive. The original cause-and-effect (Aboriginal Australia expanded into Papua; the regional powers tried to stop it; they failed) is inverted into a different cause-and-effect (the regional powers tried to destroy Aboriginal Australia; Aboriginal Australia must now do whatever is necessary to ensure that never happens again). The displacement that started the war is no longer in the picture. Only the regional response remains.
This is exactly what happened to the 1948 Arab-Israeli War and the 1967 Six-Day War in American discourse. Both wars are now described as proof of Arab hostility toward the existence of Israel, and used to justify policies decades downstream. Both wars, examined against the documentary record by Israeli historians using Israeli archives — Benny Morris, Avi Shlaim, Tom Segev — were significantly more complicated than the master narrative allows. Israel had military superiority in 1948. Israel ended that war with 78% of Mandatory Palestine — substantially more than the UN had allocated. Israel struck first in 1967, and senior Israeli officials including Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Rabin, and Mordechai Bentov later publicly admitted that Egypt had not actually been planning to attack. The wars happened. The framing of them as proof of unprovoked regional aggression does not survive examination of the historical record.
But the framing has done — and continues to do — enormous political work. Almost every defense of Israeli state policy in American discourse, when traced back through its premises, eventually rests on the 1948 + 1967 framework. "They tried to destroy us before; they will try again." The structural inversion built into that sentence — the erasure of what they were responding to — is the engine that has made everything since invisible to the audiences whose support has been required to sustain it.
Continue the experiment further. Twenty years after the original Papuan dispossession, after two failed regional wars, after sustained Aboriginal Australian occupation of progressively more territory, resistance organizations began to emerge from the displaced populations themselves. Not invented by outside powers. Not parachuted in by Indonesia or the Philippines. Born from the people who had been displaced, in the places they had been displaced from, around the political and religious frameworks available to them. The First Papuan Uprising. Resistance committees. Refugee community organizations. Eventually, armed wings.
Citing further ancestral claims — Sundaland and Wallacea were also connected during ice ages, the argument would run, and there are real archaeological links between proto-Australasian populations and parts of maritime Southeast Asia — Aboriginal Australians began expanding into Borneo, and eventually into Mindanao in the southern Philippines. Settlements went up in Sarawak, then Kalimantan, then in the historically Moro lands of Mindanao and the Sulu archipelago. The Iban, the Dayak, the Malay-speaking communities of the Borneo coasts, and the Moro peoples of Mindanao were progressively pushed inland or expelled. The original "we need this land because we suffered" framework now applied to a third territory and a fourth, with the same internal logic and the same selective application.
And just as Hamas emerged from displaced Palestinians and Hezbollah from displaced Lebanese Shia, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) emerged from the displaced Moro peoples themselves — born in Mindanao, of Moro people, in response to the Aboriginal Australian seizure of Moro lands. A real-world organization founded in 1981 to fight for autonomy for the Moro peoples of Mindanao, who in actual history were displaced by centuries of Spanish, American, and Filipino colonial-period policy. In the thought experiment, MILF would have emerged from a more recent displacement, by a more recent occupier — but the structural logic of its formation would be exactly the same. Abu Sayyaf, a smaller and more clearly jihadist-aligned faction founded in 1991 with documented acts of terror including kidnappings and bombings, would have emerged from the same displaced Moro communities. Both organizations have, in real-world Philippine politics, ranged from political-movement work to violent action. Both have committed acts that were genuinely indefensible. Both would have been the predictable product of the displacement that produced them.
Now suppose the Philippines as a state — geographically positioned in maritime Southeast Asia, with regional interests, with historical grievances against various colonial powers, with cultural and family ties to the displaced communities of Borneo, Papua, and now Mindanao itself — provided support to the resistance. Diplomatic backing. Material aid. Rhetorical solidarity. Sometimes, support for armed resistance movements that were fighting the expansion. Sometimes, support for MILF and Abu Sayyaf specifically.
Suppose MILF began coordinating across the displaced regions — providing logistical support and political backing to the Iban, Dayak, and Papuan resistance, while organizing its own armed wing in Mindanao. Suppose Abu Sayyaf carried out a small number of attacks against Aboriginal Australian settlers — including, in some cases, attacks on civilians.
Now consider how the framework would describe what was happening.
The Aboriginal Australian state would not describe this as "a regional power supporting the resistance of populations we are displacing — and a Moro political-religious movement responding to its own dispossession." It would describe it as "the Philippines is sponsoring terror against us. MILF is a terrorist organization. Abu Sayyaf is a terrorist organization." Full stop, no further context. The historical context of Moro displacement that produced MILF — which began with the Aboriginal Australian seizure of Mindanao itself — would drop out of the picture entirely. The political character of the resistance movement would be erased, leaving only the "terrorism" frame.
And the framing would land. Media coverage would describe "MILF-linked attacks on Aboriginal Australian settlers" as if MILF had appeared from nowhere with a free-standing hostility. Politicians would call for the Philippines to be designated a state sponsor of terrorism. The fact that MILF emerged from the very displacement the Aboriginal Australian state had carried out would not be relevant to the framing. The framework would treat MILF as a cause without a cause, an inexplicable hostility that justified whatever the Aboriginal Australian state did in response. Including, eventually, war on the Philippines itself.
This is exactly the structural position of Hamas and Hezbollah in current American discourse, and of Iran as the regional power that supports them. Hamas emerged from documented Palestinian displacement — its founding context was the First Intifada of 1987, after twenty years of occupation. Hezbollah emerged from the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, an invasion that produced ~17,000-19,000 deaths and an 18-year occupation. The proximate event in Hezbollah's formation is documented and unambiguous: the Sabra and Shatila massacre of September 16-18, 1982. Lebanese Phalangist militia carried out the killings, but Israeli forces under Defense Minister Ariel Sharon had surrounded and sealed the Shatila refugee camp and the adjacent Sabra neighborhood, controlled all access in and out, and fired flares at night to illuminate the camps for the killers. The dead — estimates range from 460 (Israeli official count) to 3,500 (Palestinian and journalistic estimates), with the Red Cross counting 2,750 bodies — were overwhelmingly Palestinian and Lebanese Shia civilians. Women. Children. Elderly. Israel's own Kahan Commission, a government inquiry, concluded in 1983 that Israel bore "indirect responsibility" for the massacre and that Sharon bore "personal responsibility" for not preventing it. Sharon was forced to resign as Defense Minister. He later became Prime Minister. Hezbollah formed in the immediate aftermath, organized initially among Lebanese Shia communities that had watched the massacre and the international response, or absence of it. Neither Hamas nor Hezbollah is morally pure. Both have committed documented acts against civilians that are genuinely indefensible — Hamas on October 7, Hezbollah in numerous earlier operations. But both also exist as the predictable response to documented prior displacement and atrocity, with political-movement characteristics that the "terror" frame is designed to erase.
The framework that describes MILF as "terror" while erasing Moro displacement is the same framework that describes Hamas and Hezbollah as "terror" while erasing the displacement that produced them. The framework that describes the Philippines as a state sponsor of terrorism is the same framework that describes Iran as a state sponsor of terrorism. The framework justifies expansion as defense; it justifies response to expansion as aggression; it justifies support for the responders as terror sponsorship.
None of this requires defending what the resistance movements have actually done. Their crimes are crimes. Civilians who died on October 7 are dead, and their deaths matter. Civilians killed by Abu Sayyaf are dead, and their deaths matter. The structural argument is not that resistance organizations are above criticism. The structural argument is simpler: these organizations did not appear out of nowhere. MILF was not invented by hostile foreign powers; it was born organically out of centuries of Moro displacement. Hamas was not invented by Iran; it emerged from the First Intifada after twenty years of occupation. Hezbollah was not invented by Iran either; it emerged from the rubble of the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, the Sabra and Shatila massacre, and the 18-year occupation that followed. Every resistance organization the United States currently treats as a free-standing terrorist threat has a documented prior context that produced it. The framework that erases the prior context inverts the actual causal sequence: it treats the response as the cause and the cause as defense. Twenty-two years of post-9/11 American counterterrorism policy have demonstrated empirically that no amount of military force can eliminate resistance organizations whose underlying conditions remain unaddressed. The reason is not mysterious. As long as the displacement continues, the resistance will continue. New organizations will replace destroyed ones. The names will change. The underlying fact will not.
And then, finally, the framework would close the loop. Suppose that in this hypothetical, Aboriginal Australians on the mainland — historians at Australian universities using state archives; activists from communities that had not joined the expansion; elders from the Yolngu, Pitjantjatjara, Wiradjuri, Arrernte, and dozens of other Aboriginal nations whose ancestors had no relationship to Papua or Borneo or Mindanao; descendants of the Stolen Generations who had spent their lives understanding what dispossession does to a people — publicly criticized the Aboriginal Australian state's expansion. Suppose they wrote books. Suppose they gave testimony. Suppose they organized.
The Aboriginal Australian state would not describe this as "members of the Aboriginal community criticizing the state's policies on principled grounds." It would describe it as "anti-Aboriginal bigotry." Aboriginal critics would be accused of "self-hatred." Non-Aboriginal critics would be accused of bigotry against Aboriginal people regardless of the substance of their criticism — even when their criticism was based entirely on the work of Aboriginal scholars and activists. The framework would treat any structural criticism of the state as evidence of hostility toward the people the state claims to represent. Including criticism from those people themselves.
This is the closing move of the framework, and it is the move that makes the whole structure self-sealing. Once "criticism of the state equals hostility toward the people," there is no remaining space for moral analysis. Every analytical move is converted into an identity-based attack. The Aboriginal historians documenting the displacement of Papuans, the Bornean Iban and Dayak, and the Moro peoples would be erased — first by the framework's claim that they don't exist, then by the framework's claim that they are traitors to their own community when they refuse to be erased. The framework requires erasure of dissent inside the community it claims to defend.
This is exactly what happens in current American discourse about Israeli state policy. Avi Shlaim is an Israeli historian who served in the IDF. Benny Morris is an Israeli historian whose archival work established the documentary record of 1948. Tom Segev writes for Haaretz. Sara Roy is the daughter of Holocaust survivors. Omer Bartov is an Israeli-American who is one of the world's leading scholars of genocide. Peter Beinart is the editor-at-large of Jewish Currents. B'Tselem is the leading Israeli human rights organization, run by Israeli Jews. Every one of them has produced sustained critical analysis of Israeli state policy. Every one of them is regularly characterized in American discourse — by people defending the framework — as "self-hating," "anti-Israel," "fringe," or in some cases simply as antisemitic. The framework that critiques of Israeli policy constitute antisemitism does not have a coherent way to handle the existence of these scholars. It either denies that they exist, denies that they are really Jewish, or denies that their analysis is honest. This is the framework eating its own community in order to preserve itself.
In any other context, the inversion would be immediately visible. Here it is treated as settled fact.
The selectivity is the entire story. The framework treats Jewish historical suffering as activating a class of policy responses (statehood, territory, military funding, exemption from criticism) that other equivalent or greater historical sufferings do not activate. This is not antisemitism — the opposite. It is a framework that treats Jewish suffering as morally unique in a way that requires special exception, while treating other peoples' equivalent or greater suffering as not warranting equivalent response.
What is the framework doing if not consistently applying a moral principle? Several candidates present themselves: identification with one's own group (understandable, but not a moral principle); Western strategic interest in a regional foothold (real, but not a moral argument); Christian Zionist theology (real, but a sectarian-religious argument); Cold War history (real, but not a current justification). These are the actual reasons. The "historical suffering" framework is the language used to defend them.
This matters because the framework being defended is being used to justify documented policies — apartheid (so categorized by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, B'Tselem, and the UN Special Rapporteur), a war in Gaza producing approximately 75,500 Palestinian deaths through May 2026, ~2,800 Lebanese deaths since March 2026, and the systematic dismantling of any structural path to Palestinian self-determination. The framework that exempts these policies from normal moral scrutiny is not actually a moral framework.
The thought experiment above makes the structural point: the Papua New Guineans, China, and Japan would have no relationship to British colonial crimes against Aboriginal Australians, and so could not reasonably be asked to pay for them. The same structural facts apply to the actual case. Naming them explicitly makes the analogy concrete.
The Holocaust was conceived, organized, and executed by Europeans against Europeans. The perpetrators were Nazi Germany, with documented collaboration from Vichy France, the Hungarian government, the Romanian government, Ukrainian and Baltic auxiliaries, Croatian and Slovak fascists, the Belgian, Dutch, and Norwegian collaborators. It was facilitated by the passive non-intervention of Britain, the United States, the Catholic Church under Pius XII, Switzerland, and the International Red Cross.
Palestinians were not on this list. They could not have been on this list. They were under British colonial administration. They had no army, no state, no border control, no immigration policy, no concentration camps, no rail systems carrying Jews to death.
There is one figure who is sometimes invoked to muddy this: Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, who collaborated with the Nazis from his exile in Berlin starting in 1941. His collaboration is real and morally reprehensible. It is also one man, operating from exile, with no governmental authority over Palestinians under British rule, beginning after the Final Solution was already underway. It can no more reasonably be used to assign collective Palestinian responsibility than American collaboration with the Nazis — Charles Lindbergh, Henry Ford, the German-American Bund — could be used to assign American collective responsibility.
If the Holocaust created a debt — and there is a serious case that it did, owed to its survivors and their descendants — the morally consistent way to discharge that debt would have been:
Justice for the perpetrators (the Nuremberg trials — accomplished). Restitution from the perpetrators (German reparations to survivors and to Israel — partially accomplished, ~$90 billion paid by Germany over decades). Resettlement opportunities for survivors in the countries that bore responsibility or could absorb them. Structural protection of Jewish communities in countries where they could safely live.
The third item is where the debt was deflected. The Western democracies — Britain, the United States, Canada, Australia, France — chose not to absorb Jewish refugees at the scale the moment required. The US's 1924 Immigration Act, which had set the quotas that trapped Jews in Europe during the 1930s and 40s, was not repealed until 1965. Britain's 1939 White Paper had restricted Jewish immigration to Palestine itself.
What was offered instead was Palestinian land as the resettlement zone. Partly because of Christian Zionist theology. Partly because of strategic interest in a Western foothold in the region. Partly as a way to discharge European and American moral debt without bearing the cost of resettlement at home.
The Palestinians paid the cost for crimes they did not commit, that they could not have committed, on behalf of Western powers that chose not to bear the cost themselves.
"The Palestinians never asked the Jews for asylum. They were not part of the war against the Jews. They had not driven anyone out. Their nakba was not, on any reasonable accounting, their responsibility." Tony Judt, Jewish historian, Reappraisals (2008)
The historical irony is sharper still: the population that was forced to bear the cost of European Christian crimes against Jews was a population whose ancestors had, in many cases, been less historically hostile to Jews than the European Christian populations who actually committed the Holocaust. Sephardic Jews fled to the Ottoman Empire (including Palestine) after the Spanish Expulsion of 1492 because they were welcomed. The Mizrahi Jewish communities of the Middle East and North Africa had lived in those regions for over 2,000 years, mostly in coexistence with Muslim majorities, until the political upheavals of the 20th century. This is not to romanticize Arab-Jewish relations historically — there were real tensions, real pogroms, real periods of persecution. It is to say that the specific framing "Palestinians had to pay for the Holocaust because of historic Muslim antisemitism" does not survive examination against the comparative historical record.
The deepest antisemitism by far in the modern era was European Christian antisemitism. The cost was paid by Palestinian Muslims and Christians.
The framework "historical suffering creates moral entitlement to present-day territorial and military arrangements" is invoked as if it were a universal moral principle. The comparative record shows it is not. It produces one outcome in the case it is invoked for, and the opposite outcome in every other documented case. That is the working definition of a preference dressed up as a principle.
This does not mean Israeli existence is illegitimate. It means the specific framework used to defend the level of present support — and the specific framework used to mark out criticism of present policy as morally illegitimate — does not hold under examination.
A framework that is invoked in one case but denied in every comparable case is not actually a framework. It is identification dressed up as ethics. Identification is human and forgivable. Ethics that consistently applies the same principles across cases is a different thing.
And a framework that responds to criticism — including criticism from members of the very community it claims to defend — by labeling that criticism as bigotry is a framework that has foreclosed the possibility of its own examination. The Jewish historians, journalists, activists, and human rights organizations whose work this piece draws on are not antisemitic. They are doing the work of internal moral seriousness that every people must do. The framework that calls their work antisemitism is the framework eating its own community in order to preserve itself.
The Jewish prophetic tradition — going back to the Hebrew Bible's repeated insistence that the Israelites' experience of slavery in Egypt should produce more compassion for the stranger, not less — is the older and arguably more authentic Jewish moral framework. The exodus narrative does not say we were slaves, therefore we may now enslave others. It says we were slaves, therefore we know how the slave feels, therefore we must treat the stranger with justice. This injunction is repeated 36 times in the Torah — more than any other commandment.
The argument this piece makes is not against Jewish moral seriousness. It is for Jewish moral seriousness applied universally. The lesson of the Holocaust should be "never again to anyone," not "never again to us, and what we do to others is justified by what was done to us."