In a world which is “sensitive” towards genocide the best way to attempt genocide against a people who has experienced it is to first deny they have experienced it (as in holocaust denial), secondly, accuse them of being your oppressors (i.e. calling them Nazis) and third, by creating propaganda accusing them of committing genocide against you, namely what is called genocide inversion. Adam Louis-Klein articulates this last point well when he said,
The Nazis, for example, said that the Jews were attempting to exterminate Germans, and the Hutu said that the Tutsis were attempting to exterminate Hutu. So reverse genocide accusations are actually a known feature and pattern of genocides that have happened in the past, and as you said if you construct a group as inherently genocidal then it seems clear that the solution is to destroy that group. So constructing a group as inherently genocidal is actually a kind of genocidal ideology.
Kenneth Marcys, a legal scholar, confirms this when he showed that the reversal of genocide charges against the victim is a prevalent practice which was used by the Nazis, Hutu, and Serbian propagandists. Before and during their systematic genocide of Europe’s Jewish population, the Nazis claimed Jews were planning to obliterate the Germans. Hitler writing in 1925, in Mein Kampf, said “[I]f, with the help of his Marxist creed, the Jew is victorious over other peoples of the world, his crown will be the funeral wreath of humanity and this planet will, as it did millions of years ago, move through the ether devoid of men.” Hitler believed that if Jews were “victorious” Jews would not only murder all Germans but all of humanity, and that Jews had the kind of cosmic power that could enable them to accomplish such a feat.
In 1941, during the holocaust, the Nazi Josef Goebbels, in a pamphlet claimed Germany was acting in self-defence, writing, “Who should die, the Germans or the Jews?…You know what your eternal enemy and opponent intends for you. There is only one instrument against his plans for annihilation.” The Rwandan politician Leon Mugesera, who was charged with incitement to murder Tutsis by Canada, publicly told the Hutu people that the Tutsis had been scheming to murder them. “I am telling you, and I am not lying, … they only want to exterminate us. They only want to exterminate us: they have no other aim. We must tell them the truth.” In other words, genocide inversion, that is genociders accusing their victims of the very crime they are committing, is a well-known rhetorical ploy used by the genocidal actor to shield themselves from the recognition of their own genocide and has been used against Jews and other victims of genocide before. Another important factor in the social psychology of genocide is fear. As Neil Kressel puts it,
“One usually does not kill in large numbers members of groups one dislikes unless one is afraid. Thus, Bosnian Serbs painted an image of themselves as the longtime victims of Croats and Muslims; they justified their violence against these groups as essentially defensive and preemptive…and the Nazis, of course developed a complex paranoia concerning the Jews, whom they perceived as demonically powerful…A belief in immense Jewish power and secret Jewish conspiracies was long a prominent aspect of European antisemitism, and especially during the past eight decades, these beliefs have travelled down many roads to Arab and Muslim lands.”
As we saw above with Hitler and Goebbels, the act of genocide inversion was paired with a paranoid belief that Jews had immense power. This centuries-old European brand of anti-Jewish racism, which believes in a conspiracy of Jewish power, was imported into the Arab and Muslim psyche through Nazi propaganda in the 1930s and 1940s, through their Arab radio station and strategic allies with some Arabs and Muslims. This is important because this European version of anti-Jewish racism that sees Jews as all powerful, oppressive, and out to take over the world and genocide is the canvas on which “Palestinian” Arabs paint themselves as long time victims of Jewish oppression and genocide.
Now, while we do not have time to definitively establish a connection, it should not escape us that there is likely historical precedent for the phenomenon of genocidal inversion in which the oppressors and persecutors accuse their victims of genocide while the oppressors themselves, enact genocide and other acts of violence and oppression against their victims of such accusations. In his 1943 book The Devil and the Jews Joshua Trachtenberg, chronicling the historical connection between the medieval conception of the Jew and modern antisemitism, brings to light a point of interest for our current topic at hand. After having examined the medieval conception of Jews as demonic instruments of the Devil, Trachtenberg writes,
Small wonder, then, that in view of this attitude the conscience of Christendom was little burdened by the unexampled persecution to which the Jews were subjected. They had it coming to them, the average Christian could contend, for Christian treatment of the Jew was mild compared to what they would suffer were the world in Jewish hands.
What Trachtenberg is saying is that Christians were little bothered by their often extreme persecution of Jews because they were convinced, given their conception of the Jew as an incarnation of evil, that if Europe was ruled by the power of the Jews rather than the Christians as it was, then they [the Christians] were sure, the Jews would do much worse to them. To show this point, Trachtenberg cites a medieval rhymester who expressed this sentiment when he wrote, “The children of God [Christians], that we are, poisonous worms [Jews], that you are; if we were by you controlled, as you in our power are enrolled, no Christian would survive the year…” In other words, if Jews rather than Christians ruled, given that Jews are “poisonous worms” all Christians would die or be murdered by the end of the year. Whether or not this medieval rhymester is being hyperbolic, the point is taken, and one can see how such a sentiment suggests something similar to at least part of what comprises modern-day conceptions of genocide.
While the historical accusation sometimes only claimed that Jews desired to exterminate all Christians (which in that case it is not genocide since by today’s legal definition to be genocide it must include intention/desire coupled with action), the libel did sometimes include a claim that Jews were in fact acting upon these desires. Which, in this case, would, according to today’s legal definition, be an accusation of genocide. Even as early as the first quarter of the 13th century in Europe we find the accusation that “Jewry has united in a conspiracy to totally destroy the whole of Christendom.” Just a few decades later, Europe was overwhelmed by the Black Plague, and there was a ready prepared scapegoat, in cahoots with Satan, “it was clear” the Jews had caused the epidemic to attack Christians. Evidently, the idea that Jews had both the power and plans to exterminate Christians in Europe already existed during the Black Plague. This accusation of Jews attempting what we today would label genocide thus goes back to the 13th century.
Combined with these racist conspiracy theories that Jews are secretly in power over the Europeans and desire and have plans to murder all of Christendom, we can see how this accusation of what we today call genocide led to violence against Jews throughout history. In this predisposed paranoid and illusionary cultural world it is not hard to imagine how this dangerous cocktail would continue to produce violence towards Jews, in that if Europeans believed Jews had both the desire to murder all Christians and the means to do so, then any actions they committed against the Jews could be justified, as we saw in the above passages from Hitler and Goebbels. The German Protestant reformer Martin Luther also accused Jews of the desire to murder all Christians when he wrote,
First, their synagogues should be set on fire, and whatever does not burn up should be covered or spread over with dirt so that no one may ever be able to see a cinder or stone of it…Secondly, their homes should likewise be broken down and destroyed…when you lay eyes on or think of a Jew you must say to yourself: Alas, that mouth which I there behold has cursed and execrated and maligned every Saturday my dear Lord Jesus Christ, who has redeemed me with his precious blood; in addition, it [the Jew] prayed and pleaded before God that I, my wife and children, and all Christians might be stabbed to death and perish miserably.
As you can vividly see here in this passage from Luther, Trachtenberg’s point that European Christians had little issue with their oppression of Jews because they believed Jews had the worst intentions for them, is well made. Here Luther gives his recommendations for persecuting the Jews by burning down their synagogues and destroying their homes and immediately follows this with his image of Jews which justifies and incites his calls for persecution. He even accuses them of desiring all Christians to die, including men, women, and children, that this is their prayer intention before God! Does this not sound familiar?
A similar sentiment to our above medieval rhymester is expressed by Abraham a Santa Clara in the 17th century when he said, “those mad fiends…After Satan[,] Christians have no greater enemies than the Jews…They pray many times each day that God may destroy us through pestilence, famine and war, aye, that all beings and creatures may rise up with them against the Christians. Can greater scoundrels than these Jews be found anywhere in the whole world?” (Emphasis mine) What we see expressed in these passages is that within the European Christian cultural conception of the Jew as “evil incarnate” there was a belief among European Christians that Jews wanted to kill or genocide all of them.
Yet, these beliefs and conceptions of Jews in the minds of European Christians were a figment of their imagination, not rooted in any kind of reality, with no real knowledge of Jews, but were and are more or less rooted in a baseless racist conspiracy theory which make Jews into the epitome of evil. Not unlike the accusations towards Jews today, which goes to show that history never truly leaves us. As the writer of the book of Ecclesiastes said, “There is nothing new under the sun.” Given the Western world has been socialized for centuries to racistly conceptualize Jews as an all-powerful people in league with evil who wish to exterminate whole groups of people, we should not be surprised when such historical-cultural predispositions lead so many to easily accept absurd accusations of the Jewish state committing genocide. That this European type of anti-Jewish racism has solidified itself in the minds of the Arab and Muslim world and now finds a friend it can partner with should be very concerning to all people who claim they oppose racism and support human rights.
