ABSTRACT
Holocaust inversion is the claim that Israel acts toward the Palestinians as the Nazis acted toward the Jews. There is no doubt that Holocaust inversion today fulfills some of the same functions it always did: a tactic to delegitimize Israel, while perhaps simultaneously diminishing the Holocaust. In 2009, Mark LeVine, an American Jewish historian and vituperative critic of Israel, published a piece entitled "Gaza is no Warsaw Ghetto". After enumerating Israel's crimes, but also describing the scale of what happened in Warsaw, LeVine warned that the use of highly charged historical comparisons that do not hold up to scrutiny unnecessarily weakens the Palestinian case against the occupation. The idea that the Holocaust compounds the Jews' moral responsibility wasn't invented by antisemites. The Holocaust inverter knows that the analogy is, in some sense, "abhorrent" and "reprehensible". Auschwitz and Beirut, or Auschwitz and Gaza, are obviously not equivalents, but they belong to the same moral category.
