The Holocaust is over

Gaza is the very end of The Holocaust as Israel's moral legitimacy

From its founding, Israel enjoyed a kind of political “bank account” that granted it unlimited, unmonitored credit: the Holocaust. Our receding past defined Israel as an exception to the rules, a country allowed to do what others could not. “Because we had the Holocaust.” The world understood that a people once on the brink of extermination could not be judged by the same standards applied to other nations. We exploited this. Sometimes for good, sometimes for ill. Because of the Holocaust, among other reasons, the State of Israel was established. Because of it, we transformed from a destitute community of refugees into an economic, academic, cultural, and military power. Because of it, we became the last colonial state in the democratic hemisphere, the perpetrator of unspeakable crimes in Gaza. Because of it, the world has not yet stopped us.

This credit line was not simply the fruit of international empathy. It was part of a complex historical bargain. Germany, bearing the heaviest responsibility for the Holocaust, accepted a dual mission: to redeem itself and to protect the Jews. Israel became the testing ground for both. As long as Jews were seen as eternal victims, Germany could define itself as eternally responsible. The very opposite of what it had been during the Second World War.

The Great Bargain with Germany

It was a convenient deal for both sides. Israel received reparations, weapons, technology, and above all endless legitimacy. Germany, in return, received a “certificate of release”: proof that it was no longer the Third Reich, that it had learned its lesson and was paying its dues.

Israel built its international identity on victimhood. Germany built its new identity on responsibility combined with guilt feelings. A warped symbiosis emerged: the Jew had to remain a victim so the German could remain redeemed. And as long as the German bore responsibility, the Israeli Jew can remain the victim to whom everything is permitted and forgiven.

Gaza Changed the Rules

The war in Gaza has shattered this order. There is no credible way to describe Israel today as a persecuted state. Outside the fevered German imagination and the cultivated Israeli blindness, Israel has not been such for decades. It is a wealthy nation, militarily formidable, with advanced defensive and offensive capabilities, a thriving high-tech economy, and broad diplomatic ties. Only Germany’s bondage to its own guilt allowed Israel to behave as if still under existential siege. Not for long.

The world now sees what Israelis refuse to: bombed refugee camps, children buried in rubble, famine spreading across Gaza, entire neighborhoods erased, health and education systems destroyed, journalists systematically killed. Faced with this reality, no one can sustain the myth of the eternal victim. Auschwitz cannot justify Rafah. The Warsaw Ghetto cannot hide the face of the eight-year-old Palestinian boy killed under Israeli bombs. The moment Israel became the generator of such mass suffering, its moral credit expired. And rightly so.

Germany’s Liberation

Paradoxically, Israel’s brutal war in Gaza has also become Germany’s war of liberation. Ugly, violent Israel released Germany from its old contract. Germany should not accept at Jews like Ben-Gvir, Smotrich, and Netanyahu as victims. It must see them as ordinary human beings. Too powerful, culpable, and responsible. None of Germany’s historic crimes are erased or forgotten. The horrors of the Holocaust remain. But none of that should allow Germany to support a new category of crimes: crimes against humanity committed by the children of its former victims.

This raises a new question: if the new Israeli Jew is a perpetrator rather than a victim, then who is the new German? For the first time since 1945, Germany can rescue Jews. Not from German Nazis, but from Jewish racists and the Israeli state itself.

Israel is left exposed. No more historical insurance policy. No more moral immunity. It cannot turn to Berlin, Brussels, or Washington and ask for a blind eye in the name of the past. From now on it will be judged not by what was done to it, but by what it does to others.

The True Test

This is the true test, one Israel has consistently refused. It clung to victimhood even as it became a regional power. It built its identity on the slogan “Never Again” for Jews only. The result: when the world sees Palestinians killed, expelled, and starved, it no longer accepts the excuse that the extermination exempts Israel from moral reckoning. For the Western world, “Never Again” means never again for anyone. And the Palestinian in Gaza is a human being entitled to the protection of “Never Again.”

The Holocaust will forever remain a black hole in human history. But the moral credit card it gave Israel has expired. From now on, Israel will be measured like any other state: by its actions in the present.

This is a painful realization for Israel. Perhaps the most painful since its founding. For the first time, it is asked for accountability and moral reckoning for its own deeds and wrongs. And yet this moment holds new possibility. The crimes of Hamas in October 2023 do not justify, let alone balance, Israel’s crimes since. Though it must repeatedly said: Jews never committed or attacked Germany, and the Final Solution had no justification, none whatsoever. Yet the post-2023 Israel must become Gaza’s Germany, Palestine’s Germany. Having destroyed, Israel must rebuild. Having denied, it must ensure an entire generation of Palestinian life in peace and hope.Since there is one more lesson from “our holocaust”. Not only the victims need healing and repairs. So does the criminal victimizer. This time it is us the Israelis.