Quoting Nili Oshrov on how the legacy of the #Holocaust has been handled and internalized by subsequent generations of Israelis: “With our own hands, we took the memory of the Holocaust and defiled it.”
Oshrov accuses her generation (the children and grandchildren of survivors) of appropriating the victimhood of their parents and leveraging it for privilege. They have embraced "the narcissism of the victim," prioritizing their own narrative and rejecting moral judgment. They inherited the conviction that they were constantly victimized, a conviction she argues they use to justify their actions and policies, particularly in relation to Palestinians and Hamas. Israeli society has become overly reliant on Holocaust memory to justify current actions and policies, and in doing so has lost its way morally.
[…] "But we have fully integrated it [the legacy of the Holocaust] into our identity, in our equation with the Palestinians in general and with Hamas in particular. We placed them in the box of absolut
... mehr anzeigenQuoting Nili Oshrov on how the legacy of the #Holocaust has been handled and internalized by subsequent generations of Israelis: “With our own hands, we took the memory of the Holocaust and defiled it.”
Oshrov accuses her generation (the children and grandchildren of survivors) of appropriating the victimhood of their parents and leveraging it for privilege. They have embraced "the narcissism of the victim," prioritizing their own narrative and rejecting moral judgment. They inherited the conviction that they were constantly victimized, a conviction she argues they use to justify their actions and policies, particularly in relation to Palestinians and Hamas. Israeli society has become overly reliant on Holocaust memory to justify current actions and policies, and in doing so has lost its way morally.
[…] "But we have fully integrated it [the legacy of the Holocaust] into our identity, in our equation with the Palestinians in general and with Hamas in particular. We placed them in the box of absolute evil and ourselves in the box of the eternal victim, innocent of all blame. We engraved on our foreheads, [the phrase "רשמנו על שמנו בטאבו" is idiomatic] as it were, the narrative of our parents, which was, as they say, justified for them. We exploited the appropriated victimhood of our generation into paranoid delusions, pointless wars, and merciless revenge campaigns that our parents, the 'omelet avengers,' [refers to the earlier image of the parents' acts of daily revenge being as simple as making omelets] could not have even imagined. We crossed over to the impure side and defiled our parents. Think about it during a siren, if you’re not already on another trip abroad.”
Hebrew haaretz.co.il/opinions/2025-04… or archive.is/FNsPQ
Nili Oshrov is an Israeli screenwriter, novelist, poet, copy editor, and satirist.
@palestine
@israel
#holocaust #neveragain
