On currency

I still have the manifest of the railroad car in which my grandmother Fanya was shipped from Vienna to a destination that was ostensibly a town in Poland called Izbica but that turned out to be the death camp at Sobibor, where, since she was too old and frail to perform useful labor, she was probably killed at once. This was in 1942, more than two years after my father left Austria and arrived in this country as a refugee.

The Holocaust—the Shoah, as many Jews prefer to call it—is part of the foundational story of the state of Israel. Israel’s Declaration of Independence makes explicit reference to it: “The catastrophe which recently befell the Jewish people - the massacre of millions of Jews in Europe - was another clear demonstration of the urgency of solving the problem of its homelessness by re-establishing in Eretz-Israel the Jewish State, which would open the gates of the homeland wide to every Jew and confer upon the Jewish people the status of a fully privileged member of the comity of nations.” [1]

Jews had been trying to establish such a state decades before the Nazis conceived of the Final Solution. But their hopes might have come to nothing if the death camps hadn’t persuaded the world that a Jewish state was necessary. As long as they remained stateless and unprotected, Jews were vulnerable to the worst things their neighbors might wish on them. And if suffering that is sufficiently vast and unconscionable confers certain rights on the sufferer, the Jews deserved a nation of their own. Both Harry S. Truman and the USSR’s Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko cited the destruction of European Jewry when they recognized the new nation. The USSR did so three days after Israel declared independence; it took the U. S. eight months.

On October 7, 2023, Hamas launched a series of coordinated terror attacks across the Gaza-Israeli border in which some 1,200 people[2] were killed and another 251 taken hostage. Israel quickly launched a retaliatory campaign that it characterized as a war with Hamas but that has devolved into the mass killing of Palestinians in Gaza. To date the war has claimed the lives of more than 56,000 Palestinians, the overwhelming majority civilians, as many as a third of them children. Inhabitants of Gaza have been forced out of their villages and cities only to be attacked in those where they were told to relocate. They have been bombed and shelled in hospitals, in refugee centers, in schools, in mosques and churches. Aid workers from World Central Kitchen, UNRWA, the International Rescue Committee, and Doctors Without Borders have been killed by the Israeli Defense Forces even when traveling in clearly marked vehicles, even after identifying themselves, even after pre-authorizing their mission. At the end of a three-month embargo that placed the entire population at risk of starvation, Palestinians in the territory were finally granted access to rations but only at hubs of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, an Israeli-backed aid system staffed by Israeli military and American defense contractors with little experience in food distribution. GHF contractors have repeatedly fired on people who were seeking food, killing 500 and wounding nearly 4,000 to date. [3] According to Ha’aretz, Israeli soldiers have testified that they were ordered to do so, and to use live ammunition.[4] It’s a killing field,” one soldier said. “We open fire early in the morning if someone tries to get in line from a few hundred meters away, and sometimes we just charge at them from close range. But there’s no danger to the forces… I’m not aware of a single instance of return fire. There’s no enemy, no weapons.” [5] The arguments about whether these killings constitute genocide or ethnic cleansing—or even a harsh but justified response to the terrorist attacks of October 7—are ongoing. In the U. S., the arguments have less to do with how one classifies the violence (how many people have to be killed for it to be genocide, or is it a proportion of the victimized population?) than with how one feels about Israel and Palestine. Or perhaps with what kinds of violence, performed against what kinds of people, one deems permissible.

The Netanyahu administration greets reports of massacres committed by its armed forces by saying the incident is under review. Sometimes it says the report is false. Almost unvaryingly, it states that its military conducts operations with maximum care for civilian lives. Against the last claim, which treats those 56,000 deaths as incidental bugs in the mechanism of the war, one could weigh statements by members of the Israeli military:

“Gaza will become a place where no human being can exist.” – Giora Eiland, a former head of the National Security Counsel[6]

Or by lawmakers:

“If the goal of this operation is not destruction, conquest, eviction, and settlement, then we haven’t done a thing.” –Moshe Feiglin, leader of the Zionist libertarian Zehut party

“If you ask me personally . . . . I flatten Gaza, I have no sentiments.” –Keti Shitrit, Likud member of the Knesset

Or by journalists:

“I think the most humane solution is to starve them.” -- Itamar Fleischmann

“Wipe those people out. As far as I’m concerned, let five hundred civilians remain there.” – Yinon Magal[7]

One might also adduce the mocking chant of a right-wing crowd in Tel Aviv: “There is no school tomorrow, there are no children left in Gaza.” [8]

Nothing Israel has done in Gaza to date is comparable to what the Nazis did in Europe from 1933 to 1945, to Jews and not just to Jews. To the shame of every human being, there’ve been other genocides since then: in Cambodia, in the former Yugoslavia, in Rwanda. Still, in its enormity, its cold-bloodedness, its methodical brutality, in the totality of its claim on the resources of the state, which in the closing months even interfered with the German war effort, in its ambition to erase a people from an entire continent and perhaps from the entire world, the Shoah is a point of no return, one beyond which no state can go without being exiled from what Israel’s founders called “the comity of nations.”

The reason some Jews, among them the writer Primo Levi, prefer not to speak of “the Holocaust” has to do with that word’s original meaning. It denotes the burnt offering that was made to God in the temple. A holocaust is sacred, while what happened in the death camps was not, was the opposite of sacred. It was profane, a profanation. The Hebrew Shoah also has Biblical origins, appearing in the phrase shoah u-meshoah in the Book of Job: it means “wasteness and desolation.” God has no place in it. Still, while the Shoah lies outside the category of the sacred, it shares certain of its traits. The Shoah, too, is ineffable. It resists language and knowledge. It resists any attempt to make sense of it. The perpetrators appeared to know this even in the moment. When shortly after entering Auschwitz, Levi was beaten for a minor offense and dared ask his guard why, the man told him, Hier ist er kein warum. “There is no why here.”

Humans accept inscrutability as a property of the divine, but we’re deeply disturbed when we encounter it in the divine’s opposite. Do we want to call it the demonic?

Nature abhors a physical vacuum, and humans abhor a moral one. No sooner do we encounter one than we try to fill it. In the case of the moral vacuum of the Shoah, we try to make it conform to preexisting ideas of morality and justice. The Nuremberg and Eichmann trials were attempts at this. So were the reparations Germany paid to the Shoah’s victims and survivors. So are the museums and memorials dedicated to the atrocity, some twenty by the UN’s reckoning, in places as far from the death camps as Hong Kong and Curitiba, Brazil. They convey the message that for all its dizzying horror, the Holocaust awakened something noble in the human spirit, at least in the spirits of the judges in Nuremberg and Jerusalem and the architects of those museums and the millions of people who file solemnly through them, eager to be enlightened.

In this way the Shoah became a currency. I’m not using the term cynically, rather to denote a symbol that also has practical value, as a piece of paper bearing the symbolic image of an American president and the symbolic motto “In God we trust” helps you buy your groceries. The currency of the Shoah was used to justify the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine, an indication of its value being that it was invoked both by Jewish Zionists and the gentile representatives of powers as different as the U. S. and the Soviet Union. The Shoah undergirds a defense policy that treats every attack, or even the possibility of one, as a threat to Israel’s existence. A government spokesperson speaks of October 7 as “the deadliest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.” [9] The Shoah is enlisted to defend Israel against charges of abusing human rights or violating the laws of war, the unstated (and sometimes stated) response to those charges being, No one knows human rights abuse better than us.

In a way, the aforementioned Israeli responses aren’t mistaken. The terrorist attacks of October 7 were the deadliest massacre of Jews since the ones carried out by the Nazis. And many Jews have a deep understanding of what it means to be deprived of one’s human rights: this is true even of Jews two or three generations removed from the Shoah, maybe even of Jews who have never been under direct threat for the simple fact of being Jews. (I never experienced that threat—not in this country anyway—until August 11, 2017, when I saw young men marching through Charlottesville holding up tiki torches and chanting “Jews will not replace us!” and heard the president describe them or maybe just some of them as good people. But lately I feel it all the time.) This is why one could speak of Israel’s actions in Gaza in the first months after the Hamas incursion as a traumatic response, the response of a people preconditioned by memories of the slaughter of its great-grandparents to treat a new trauma as a repetition, even a continuation, of the original one. Judith Herman: “It is as if time stops at the moment of trauma.” [10]

Time stops, the killing continues. Because so much of it is mechanized, carried out by bombers, drones, and artillery located miles away from the field of operations, you could almost think the killing happens by itself. You could think it’s the work of God, who in the Torah is invisible but can be discerned in the deaths he inflicts on human beings, often on many human beings at once. When Israel kills 47 Gazans for each victim of October 7 (the number may well be an undercount), when it methodically destroys the territory’s entire infrastructure and almost all its housing, when it withholds food as a tactic of war, when it leaves starving people no way to get food except by lining up before gunmen who at any moment may open fire “to maintain order,” you think of the traumatized person’s helpless identification with the perpetrator of the original trauma. Or I do.

Someone who reads this may accuse me of using the Shoah for an ulterior purpose, and perhaps I am, since I’ve invoked my connection to it to allow me to speak of Israel’s present actions. The Shoah itself, that vortex of abasement and death, remains sealed off from anything I might try to say about it. I can only speak of the Shoah as currency, a unit of value whose symbolic ground is sometimes expressed in a motto. For example, “In God we trust.” For example, “Never again,” which used to be shorthand for, “This thing must never again be done to any people, anywhere, for any reason.” But in Gaza, Israel has redefined it as, “This must never be done to us, but we can do it to you.” With that, it has made the currency worthless.

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[1] “Declaration of Israel’s Independence, 1948.” The Avalon Project, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School. https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/israel.asp

[2] The number includes citizens of other countries, including the U.S.

[3] “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation aid distribution system must be dismantled,” Doctors Without Borders, June 27, 2025. https://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/latest/gaza-humanitarian-foundation-aid-distribution-system-must-be-dismantled

[4] “Israel Turned Gaza’s Aid Centers into Death Traps. The Killing Has to Stop,” Ha’aretz, June 29, 2025. https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/editorial/2025-06-29/ty-article-opinion/israel-turned-gazas-aid-centers-into-death-traps-the-killing-has-to-stop/00000197-b817-d013-a5b7-b977b1540000

[5] “The Worst Stage of 20 Months of Genocide,” Jewish Voice for Peace, July 3, 2025. https://www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org/2025/07/03/the-worst-stage-of-20-months-of-genocide/

[6] Saree Makdisi, “No Human Being Can Exist,” n+1, October 25, 2023. https://www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/no-human-being-can-exist/

[7] Ruth Margalit, “The Poison Machine,” The New Yorker, January 20, 2025, 17

[8] The Times of Israel, July 29,2024

[9] Leonard Rubenstein, “Israel’s Rewriting of the Law of War,” Just Security, December 21, 2023. https://www.justsecurity.org/90789/israels-rewriting-of-the-law-of-war/

[10] Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery. New York: Basic Books, 1992, 1997, 37