Nakba and Holocaust: Mechanisms of Comparison and Denial in the Israeli Literary Imagination

This article considers analogies between the Holocaust and the Nakba in Israeli narratives, analogies that became increasingly dominant in political discourse in Israel through journalism, historiography, art, and literature. I focus on two recent works: the memoir My Holocaust Thief by Noam Chayut (2009) and the film Waltz with Bashir by Ari Folman (2008). Both juxtapose Palestinian refugees and Holocaust victims (and less explicitly, Israeli soldiers and Nazi officers) as a way of rehabilitating a moral self. I ask what kind of political meaning is constructed by this mirroring, by placing the narrative of the other—the Palestinian catastrophe—within a Holocaust-based representation of the Nakba. In a certain sense, thinking through the conceptual framework of the Holocaust focuses attention on the catastrophe of the Jews and relegates the Palestinian catastrophe, once again, to secondary importance, driving it out first as a physical reality and then as a narrative.