Gaza's Transubstantiation: A Conversation with Jake Romm

Jake Romm, Associate Editor at Protean Magazine, talks Israel's contentious relationship to Nazism and its propaganda, and how Israel's constant need to create enemies threatens Lebanon and Syria.

Benjamin Netanyahu on Yom HaShoah in 2024, speaking at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem about the war on Gaza.

As Israel tears up its ceasefire with Hamas and has reignited the war against the Gaza Strip, discussions surrounding the Israeli state’s inclinations toward constant offensive war, its propaganda against the Palestinians, and what, if anything, it has learned from history, have returned to the forefront. Israel’s Defense Minister Israel Katz, as well as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, have insisted that Gaza must never be allowed to again become a threat to Israel, not just Hamas, and criticism of Israel’s war is now being made a de facto deportable offense far away from Israel’s borders, inside the United States. One question in particular inevitably is sparked by this constant talk of threats to the Jewish state: can Israel’s desire for “security” ever truly be satiated, and what truly threatens that security?

I spoke with Romm about his recent piece in Parapraxis Magazine, “Idée Fixe”, Zionism’s relationship with Europe and the Third Reich, how early Zionist settlers transposed the Nazi threat onto the Arabs resisting the occupation of their lands, how Israeli propaganda against Arabs mirrors the Nazis’ own against the Jewish people, what Israel wants from its occupied Arab populace, and whether the current strategies of Syria and Lebanon in dealing with the Israeli occupation of their territory are working.

The following interview has been edited for clarity and length.

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Séamus: Zionism is, in the West, most associated with the Holocaust. But Theodor Herzl, its progenitor, died long before Zionism came into being, and modern Zionist settlement in Palestine started before Hitler came to power. Can you explain how the Nazi threat became the primary justification for Zionism, even when Zionism predated it? Did it significantly change how Zionism was propagated to the public in the immediate aftermath or was this association something much more recent?

Jake: [In] tracing the history of Zionism’s development, it springs initially, if you look at the writings of early Zionists, from two sources. The one that people most talk about, especially Zionists, is as a reaction against European anti-semitism, an extremely real phenomenon. The Jews faced historical persecution throughout Europe and as a reaction against this, a lot of them saw assimilation as a dead end, the idea that they would never truly be citizens. As a reaction to the [alleged] dead end of assimilation, they thought, “Well, if we just had our own state, we could avoid this kind of persecution.”

The second [source] was that this was a kind of nationalist colonialist project of the very same type that was sweeping the rest of the European continent. There was not much of a difference, say, between the idea of Serbian nationalism emerging from the waning days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the idea of Jewish nationalism, the idea that we need to constitute ourselves as a people, and the way you do that is through constituting yourself as a national project right through becoming this kind of homogenous group that is bound together both territorially, politically, linguistically, [and] in many cases religiously as well, which always includes, no matter where, a process of de-racinatization of everyone else. Italy was unified [in the mid-1800s] and part of the construction of the “Italian” meant getting rid of all these various dialects, regional specificities, et cetera, to constitute the Italian subject.

But there’s another thing that distinguishes [Zionism] from a lot of these other nascent nationalist projects happening at the time, which is that their “homeland” in which the national project was supposed to be constituted was in Palestine. It was not where the national entity already was. That’s not to say there were no Jews in Palestine, but that there were many more Jews elsewhere around the world. It also had an inextricable colonialist element to it that certain other nationalisms simply did not have. They had to go to Palestine to realize the national project because the creation of a Jewish national subject, a homogenous Jewish subject or Hebrew subject, was inextricably tied to the land. It could only be realized in Palestine because of this blood-and-soil conception of what it meant to be Jewish.

[Zionists] combined all three of these elements in their various pitches, depending on who they were talking to. So they would say to the European powers [that] we can go establish a European civilizational bulwark against Arab or Ottoman economic independence, and we can be the guardian of European interests in the Middle East. Or they would say to Jews in America [that] this is the only way that we can protect the Jewish people, [that] assimilation is a dead end, we have faced centuries upon centuries, millenia of suffering and exile, and now we must return home to realize our national racial destiny over in our historical homeland.

The idea of anti-semitism as the animation of the Zionist project was always there, but, depending on the audience, it was either downplayed or overplayed. It wasn’t really until the Shoah that it became the dominant strain of thinking for all of these people. It becomes seen as the culmination of the historical European persecution of the Jews and it comes to stand in for this retroactive justification for Zionism, to say, “See, it was all leading to this. We always knew this was coming. If only we had Israel to begin with, none of this would have happened. Everyone could have been saved. This is why we were doing this project of colonization, we were trying to take this land to protect ourselves from just such an eventuality.”

A 1945 poster from an American Zionist organization advocating for Holocaust survivors to settle in Mandatory Palestine. The organization’s name was later changed to United Israel Appeal.

What this ends up doing is [Israel becomes a] retroactive transubstantiation into the Zionist project as salvation from the Shoah, [and it puts] all the stuff proceeding the Shoah into that same line of historical continuity. Arab resistance to Jewish colonization of Palestine becomes seen within a line of continuity with the Nazi Holocaust. Every act of violence perpetrated against Jewish colonists in Palestine becomes seen as a kind of anachronistic continuation of the Shoah. Even when it happens before the Shoah, they were doing this because they also wanted to exterminate all the Jews, because the only reason you wouldn’t allow the Jews to have a homeland in the first place is because of extermination, because that’s the whole point of the project, to avoid extermination.

I went to a Jewish day school, kindergarten through 12th grade, this was hammered into us at every turn, [and] we [took] a long trip to Israel for five months of our senior year. Before they took us to Israel, they took us to Poland to see the concentration camps. This was obviously a very intentional move because they show you Auschwitz, Majdanek, Treblinka, et cetera, and then you land in Jerusalem, and they’re like, “See? This is what it was all for. This is what it was all about.” And that mood is recapitulated in the Yad Vashem Museum. It’s very much intentionally created, such that you walk through these long halls with rooms off to the side showing you different aspects of the Shoah, and it opens onto this courtyard overlooking expropriated Arab lands to see that now you’ve emerged in redemption. You’ve emerged and been saved by the land.”

S: You bring up how the IDF, when fighting the Palestinians also, in this piece, about the Egyptians, how they were able to transpose that image of fighting Nazis onto these Arab armies that they were threatening Jews in the same way that the Germans were. Do you see something similar occurring with how October 7th is being utilized to justify actions abroad? Have those attacks become that new object to transpose?

J: Absolutely, because the transposition never stopped. The Zionist self-conception exists in a very uneasy and contradictory relation to the Shoah, which is to say that at once it conceives of the Zionist project as a reaction to the Shoah—as we were saying before it’s retroactively justified and they have taken up the mantle of the protector—[but] at the same time, especially in the early days of Israel’s existence, [Zionism] was also a kind of negative identity formation against survivors of the Shoah who were conceived of as weak and as cowardly, like sheep to the slaughter. [Israeli Prime Minister] Menachem Begin said something along the lines of, “[I am not a Jew] with trembling knees,” when he was referring to victims of the Shoah. They wanted to construct the new kind of Hebrew race as against this image of the weak and cowardly Jew who consents to their own murder.

You have two moments taking place in the [works of] Abba Kovner, who was a very prominent poet in early Israel as well as a leader in the IDF, in the Givati Brigade: at once you’re fighting the Arabs and conceive of them as this Nazi-like threat because they are somehow continuing the Nazi project of the extermination of the Jews, and at the same time, Kovner himself conceives of his own soldiers as akin to the Nazis in a very positive identification. Which is to say that when you have a negative identity constitution against these victims, it rebounds to a positive identification with the people who made them victims in the first place. Because if the thing you’re trying not to be is the victim, the opposite of that is the perpetrator. You start to identify with the perpetrator for their strength, for their capacity to victimize.

Abba Kovner (far-right, front), during the Battle of Yad Mordechai in 1948 against the Egyptians. After the Nakba, the kibbutz of Yad Mordechai would annex the depopulated Palestinian village of Hiribya.

I think we see that very much going on now with Hamas and with Hezbollah. The slogan they’ve settled on is, ‘this is the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust’, in reference to October 7th. They’re constantly talking about the 2 million Nazis who live in Gaza, or the Hamas-Nazi entity. They definitely conceive of them as a Nazi threat. They also conceive of them as weak and cowardly. You see, basically, recapitulations of Nazi propaganda of [Yahya] Sinwar as a bug living underground or a rat, as like all of the people of Gaza as dirty and backward, the same way that Eastern [European] Jews were talked about both by the Nazis and also by Western Jews, both in Israel and in Western Europe.

So you see this kind of positive identification again with the Nazis, or at least with domination and with perpetration of mass extermination. There was that article that came out in Haaretz, it was a testimony of soldiers during the First Intifada, [and] there were a few soldiers quoted as saying something along the lines of [that they] felt like Nazis and [Palestinians] looked like Jews.

This is the thing that also came up quite a lot during the Nakba. You had soldiers who survived the Shoah, many of whom then participated in the Nakba, who came to realize that precisely what they were doing was perpetrating Nazi-like violence, and some of them felt guilty about it, and some of them simply did not. Some of them recognized it as, say, a historical necessity or as a way of redeeming the image of the Jew in which the Palestinians and the Arab enemy stand in for the Nazis as the continuers of the Nazi project against Jews. Then, the violence that they were wreaking upon the Palestinians was a revenge against the Nazis by proxy, which of course, doesn’t make any sense, the Palestinians had nothing to do with the perpetration of the Holocaust, but this is how it manifested in this kind of anachronistic, historical spatial displacement.

I should also add that this kind of image of oneself as both victim and [impossibly] strong, and of your enemy as both weak and impossibly strong, is exactly the form of anti-semitism. It is exactly the form of anti-semitic propaganda, that the Jew was at once in charge of the world, a secret cabal that pulled all the strings, and also, filthy disgusting vermin, cowardly, physically dysgenic. This is precisely what we see the Israelis doing with respect to the Palestinians, that they are at once this Nazi-like entity that controls the United Nations, controls all the international institutions, controls academia, [and is] despite their manifest poverty and the crudity of their weapons, an existential threat to Israel and to the Jewish people worldwide, and also they are bugs. They are backward peasants. They are stupid, they are weak, et cetera. It is exactly the form of anti-semitism.