It's the Europeans who understand the Holocaust, not the Americans or Israelis
European and especially German culture since the war has a moral advantage over American and Israeli Jewish culture, and it is quite an irony, because it is precisely that European liberals in recent decades have given a lot of thought to the Holocaust and what were its causes, and in a way that actually has nothing to do with guilt or innocence as generally understood by the moralistic mind, which needs to be sure that it is wholly the one and not at all the other. Meaning, its property right is valid, like an owner, and not invalid, like a thief's.
American and Israeli Jewish culture, by contrast, thinks of itself as innocent. Americans have historically considered themselves as outside history, and so have unpolitical lives except when they are thinking about the government, its politicians, and what is in the news. They admire the Jews because of these shibboleths that enshrine their moral privilege and are bound up with this American foreign policy obsession. Jews believe "we" don't perpetrate Holocausts, we are only their victims. Israel is almost founded on that belief, it is its central ideological tenet. But it holds no longer. The Jewish state is a bully state that has been perpetrating a genocide. But the problem with talking about this has to do not with that state and our government's backing of it, but with the minority that is supposed to be identified with this state. American Jews on the right enjoy the overprotective moralism of American Protestant culture which treats disagreement as assault, so that free speech is supposed to stop when Israel is mentioned, since to criticize this state is to offend persons, who have the right not to be offended in a society that doesn't talk politics at the dinner table. Killing babies is not impolite but talking about it is.
The American view of the Holocaust as something "they" did, in a society supposedly unlike ours, due to the simplified causality of an evil that reduces to the excess anger and putative mental illness of its leader, though the role of this in bringing about fascism and its consequences is quite exaggerated, especially as they are possible without it. That is what is really scary: people who do not hate, who are emotionally bland, not mentally ill or even abnormal, can perpetrate Holocausts.
In fact, the view held as long as it did and in the way it did because America won the war. And that demonized its causes, as part of the broad psychologization of the political in American life, which in fact is also a broad feature of fascism, as it was in Germany, where the mental industry was a very important driving force behind the Holocaust in particular and the formation of the Nazi ideology and its form of antisemitism in the first place. Fascism arose amid discourses announcing a spiritual crisis of Western culture that was painted in psychiatric metaphors, in which Jews themselves, having been racialized, were often seen, following a common pattern of right-wing discourse about class conflict and social problems, which figure them as contagious diseases and a weakening of moral fibers.
One of the ironies of modern Zionism from the beginning is the extent of what its rhetoric had in common with the other form of nascent ideological nationalism that led to fascism. It is but a slight exaggeration to say that Zionism in its essence was fascist; it was and is, regularly and necessarily, at least proto-fascist. Both Nazism and Zionism were nationalist responses to a broad pattern of social crises facing Europe in the later nineteenth century. If much of this must be read less as an evil than a tragedy, history is that way, and we use the short-cut of calling present forces evil when there is clear enough reason to oppose them.
In both cases, the loser was the internationalist tendency that pervaded the workers' and socialist movements and that saw the path forward from the French revolution's declaration of the values of liberty through equality rather than against it, the only condition in which social fraternity or solidarity makes any sense as a possibility, as calling for political and social alliances and affiliations that cross national, ethnic, and other identitarian boundaries rather than requiring their enforcement.
Today, under neoliberalism, such territorial bounds are transgressed only by movements of capital, involving no extension of social liberties but only allowing their use by owners of property, and their defense, which might be extended, without much in the way of enjoyment of liberties or wealth, to the people of the associated territory on the grounds of its identity.
Today the Jews may be asked to choose between affirming their values, and looking for ways they may be shared, or their identities, relying on ways they supposedly must not be. What escapes an identity if it is attached to a body, perhaps with the aid of its language, and an idea of "culture" that is thought bound to it? Thought escapes identities, concepts are not specific to territorial languages and their cultural milieux at all. Like artworks, they are built to migrate. They may be in the air.
Americans and Israeli Jews do not understand the Holocaust as a possibility of the culture that they are part of because in the first case we Americans know that it didn't happen here, and we exaggerate our differences from the people and places where it did happen. In the second case, Jews today are encouraged to think that they were in Europe but not really of it; their culture is not European but something else. The only problem with that is that isn't true at all. Most American Jews are European-Americans, and their culture is intensely European. Most of them have more in common with German, French, Polish, Russian, etc., non-Jews than they do with the non-European Jews in Israel. They tend to think otherwise, but that is only true of an ideological affiliation and not of their actual culture. How different was the world of Kafka and that of Rilke? How different was Heidegger's from Walter Benjamin's? We should also ask if the one is not intelligible to the other; the answer to that question, though it will displease many Jewish purists (for obvious reasons, there are not many Germans who think in such terms today, except on the far right), is obvious. Ironically, liberal Jews today are often more welcome in Germany than in the Jewish state. In some ways, Israel is beginning to look like a failed project.
Today, Israel and Germany are on the same footing: Holocausts are perpetrated also here, by our people, too. This is the dark truth that the world's Jews must face now, because it manifestly is true of what is happening right now.
It is perfectly meaningless to claim that this statement is "anti-semitic." As if a statement were false because of "who" is its object, or subject. It could then be false if it is wrong, it is wrong if it is "against" us, and it is against us if it accuses us. Is the contemporary figure of the Jew then of one who may accuse but not be accused? It might be more the figure of the Anglo-American Protestant moralist who until recently was quite invested in the world's policing.
The unparalleled violence of the twentieth century saw a combination of bureaucracy and technology on the one hand with nationalism and ideologies on the other. Wars were waged against whole populations and in the name of ideologies. Some American liberals think that "we" defeated every ideology, but that is not quite true since our national state brutally promoted its own, which was as enchanted (and ostensibly pacific) as any, including in the pre-modern era, the great religions of faith and empire, Christianity and Islam, the latter of course becoming more recently a figure for our nation's ideological enemy. You know how someone hates when you know who they represent as hating them. That's one way we can understand the murderous intentions of the Israeli government and its policing and war machine: They are persuaded that these tens of thousands of children, women, old and young men, all want to annihilate them. So what happens? Those so figured reap the force of the metaphor.
The world would be more human and less violent, long a Jewish aspiration (of Judaism if not Jewish nationalism) if the barbarisms of the modern world were contemplated seriously by people wondering what made them possible and how more of this can be avoided or even brought to an end. Jewish Holocaust discourse does not ask that question. It asks to commemorate in order to motivate actions. The actions wanted are support for state projects. Those state projects do not minimize the barbarism of wars and prisons, and so far they have intensified it. They claim that if the Jews have a fortress state with a war machine that is strong and powerful enough, they can prevent any further massacre of Jews, which mostly can only mean that state's own citizens and the consequences of losing some war. This offers nothing to anyone who does not enjoy the protection of that state, and it involves no attempt to lessen or move away from the modern institutional forms that were involved in the massacres of the last century. Israel's existence has done nothing to prevent future genocides except to provide an opportunity to talk about or celebrate the idea.
Fortunately, the Jews are not the only people who care about the barbarism of civilization in our time. They are not the only people would like to make sure there is no more Auschwitz, no more Gulag. Most people who care deeply about this are not Jewish and do not live in Israel. This is a good thing because most people are not Jewish, and we want most people to care about such things, and for them not to happen to the Gypsies, the Poles, the Syrians, or anyone else.
America is a society devoted to preventing violence by using it. So we have all these guns and are an armed state.
The Holocaust is the central event of late modern European history. It made Europeans less innocent. They are less innocent than Americans and less than many Jews. That is likely to change now. The change will be welcome. The price has not been.
Is the real political question always "who"? Or is it "what"? Morality is a question about what the subject asking it, an "I" or "we," might and should do and not do. Moralism is a different question; it says, given that there is wrong and I/we are innocent, who is the other who is guilty and what is the guilty other guilty of? (And how can his imminent crime be stopped? For moralism is always an attitude of the police).
If "what is the matter" and not "who is responsible" is the question, then social changes are possible. We could wonder what kind of world we want to live in.
That's why the right's thinking about the Holocaust is intentionalist, the left's functionalist. The functionalist wants to understand the kind of social forms involved, the intentionalist is a prosecutor building a case for someone's guilt, which when found provides closure and absolution. But the trouble is that the Holocaust wasn't only a crime, it was also a possibility of a modern society under certain conditions. Those conditions are with us, with more or less the same social forms.