In March, the reliably Israel-hating London Review of Books published an article by the essayist and novelist Pankaj Mishra titled “The Shoah after Gaza,” which accuses Israel of visiting various imaginary horrors on the Palestinians and calls on “those jolted into consciousness by the calamity of Gaza” to “rescue the Shoah . . . and re-universalize its moral significance.” Joe Schwartz comments on this widespread mode of thinking about the Holocaust, which Mishra raised to a new extreme:

The murder of 6,000,000 Jews, you see, has a “universal moral significance” which the Jews themselves are in the process of “dynamiting” along with “global norms.” The Holocaust was, if you will, a revelation delivered to the Jews, a kind of anti-scripture with lessons for all of humanity. And the Jews, faithless readers that we are, use it as a license to kill.

This should sound familiar to students of Christianity. For the central claim of the early church against the Jews was just this: that God spoke not only to the Jews but to all of humanity, and for as long as the Jews understand God’s revelation to be addressed to us, we are faithless readers of scripture and history.

As Schwartz notes, this reasoning is perverse:

For the thing is, neither the Jews nor humanity needed the anti-revelation of the Shoah to learn that murdering millions of innocents was wrong. The idea that Jewish deaths might be redeemed by such a trite moral is an insult to their memory. . . . Only one group of people denies that the suffering of the Jews has any redemptive meaning at all: the Zionists. For us, the Jews suffer only because people mean us harm, and because we are unable to defend ourselves. And therefore we must learn to defend ourselves.

Does it follow then that Israelis, in rejecting the “universal message” of the Holocaust, believe in “‘never again’ for Jews only”? Haviv Rettig Gur responds to this suggestion, arguing that Palestinians can in fact learn the same lesson from the Holocaust as Israelis:

The Israeli message to Palestinians, then, isn’t that “only Jews get to be safe”—it’s that Palestinians need their own Zionism because only self-reliance brings safety.

The world’s love and concern for them is a mirage, a Western elite’s self-validating moral cartoon about itself, not a willingness actually to protect and to sacrifice for Palestinians. The very fact that the world is invested in Palestinians more than in any other conflict or suffering population combined is a sign that its concern isn’t the actual suffering but rather Western elite narrative-making. True morality and real law would swing into action for others too.

One of Hamas’s most notable failures since October 7 is that it has not succeeded in inspiring a violent uprising either among the Palestinians of the West Bank or the Arab citizens of Israel. The latter seem horrified by Hamas’s actions and tend to sympathize with their own country. In the former case, quiet has been maintained by the IDF and Shin Bet, which have carried out a steady stream of arrests, raids, and even airstrikes.

But there is a third category of Arab living in Israel, namely the Arabs of Jerusalem, whose intermediate legal status gives them access to Israeli social services and the right to vote in municipal elections. They may also apply for Israeli citizenship if they so desire, although most do not.

On Wednesday, off-duty Israeli soldiers in the Old City of Jerusalem shot at a Palestinian who, it seems, was attempting to attack them. But this incident is a rare exception to the quiet that has prevailed in Arab Jerusalem since the war began. Eytan Laub asked a friend in an Arab neighborhood why:

Listen, he said, we . . . have much to lose. We already fear that any confrontation would have consequences. Making trouble may put our residence rights at risk. Furthermore, he added, not a few in the neighborhood, including his own family, have applied for Israeli citizenship and participating in disturbances would hardly help with that.

Such an attitude reflects a general trend since the end of the second intifada:

In recent years, the numbers of [Arab] Jerusalemites applying for Israeli citizenship has risen, as the social stigma of becoming Israeli has begun to erode and despite an Israeli naturalization process that can take years and result in denial (because of the requirement to show Jerusalem residence or the need to pass a Hebrew language test). The number of east Jerusalemites granted citizenship has also risen, from 827 in 2009 to over 1,600 in 2020.

Oddly enough, Laub goes on to argue, the construction of the West Bank separation fence in the early 2000s, which cuts through the Arab-majority parts of Jerusalem, has helped to encouraged better relations.