Jewish Supremacy and the Making of Genocide in Gaza

I was about twelve when I first heard that I was blessed with a Jewish brain. Actually, my mother was referring to my best friend when she brought it up, but I knew that she meant me as well. “Leslie’s got a real yiddishe kop,” mom said. “She has more smarts in her little finger than your friend Laura will ever have.” I gathered that Laura had the dreaded gentile head beneath her shining blonde hair.

My parents were liberal Democrats, committed to civil rights, feminism, and gay rights, back when all were deeply unpopular. I was proud of their hearts and their politics. But the snide remarks that they liked to share about “the goyim,” without a hint of self-consciousness, filled me with shame. I understood that their worldview was a product of their upbringing, and that my immigrant grandparents deserved a pass for it. Growing up in Czarist Russia, my paternal grandmother and her three sisters had to hide in the attic whenever soldiers passed through their village demanding a bed and some entertainment. It’s not surprising that she coped by believing herself superior to them — the same way other oppressed groups have invented narratives about their own exceptionalism.

But my mother and father weren’t raised in a shtetl. Born and educated in the United States, they should have known better, I thought. Jews were not only safe in our New York City suburb, we were a political and economic force in the community. Or at least that’s how it seemed to my teenage self in the late ‘60s, untouched by discrimination. Slurs about gentiles struck me as embarrassingly arrogant, not to mention contrary to everything that my parents had taught me. I didn’t get how they could turn into completely different people on this subject.

I was eighteen and my gut was telling me that I should keep my distance from Israel.

All of this was well before I learned about the brutal history of Zionism, so my shame had nothing to do with Israel. It was more about being a shy, sensitive kid surrounded by extroverts, which had turned me into a keen observer. I clocked every slight, no matter who was the target, and was especially rattled by self-important, entitled behavior, which felt to me like a tyranny of the loudest. So many years later, I can still describe in detail all the times my soul was crushed by watching a friend or cousin suffer a public humiliation. Praise from my parents about my Jewish brain, or Jewish whatever, felt especially awful. It enlisted me as one of the bullies — the Chosen People — ridiculing others who were not so lucky.

The first time I encountered Israelis was while waiting tables in South Florida before I left for college. Up until then I’d had nothing but positive, if comical, associations with them: as romantic heroes in a friend’s letters the summer she milked cows on a kibbutz, or as heartthrobs in Exodus, a movie I’d seen multiple times. Israel was not a big topic of conversation at home. I knew that my parents supported its existence, but it wasn’t part of our lives.

I was therefore caught off-guard by the run of demanding and disrespectful families who kept asking to be seated at my station — after they had alienated all the other servers. Unlike our European customers, the Israelis were weirdly familiar to me, like a caricature of relatives who I already found challenging. My internal alarm sounded loudly every time I had to deal with them. I’m ashamed to admit that I made a sweeping judgment based on my restaurant experience, but I was eighteen and my gut was telling me that I should keep my distance from Israel.

Reading Israeli historians years later, I discovered that the imperious personality I’d found so off-putting had apparently been baked into the national identity by the early Zionists. They understood that they couldn’t create an ethnostate without domination: Jewish supremacy was a requisite of Zionism.

I also learned what the national identity was not. Contrary to Hollywood mythology and what most of us were taught, early Zionists never envisioned the country as a haven for desperate refugees. I had to sit with this foundational lie for a minute when I first came across it, but as Israeli historian Gur Alroey described in Land of Refuge: Immigration to the Land of Israel, 1919-1927, Zionist leaders rejected or expelled would-be migrants who had anything that was deemed a frailty — from heart disease to anxiety disorders. Never mind those with amputated limbs and other legacies of persecution. “Alas, Zionism can’t provide a solution for catastrophes,” said Israel’s future first president, Chaim Weizmann, in 1919, to explain why he had blocked entry to thousands of Ukrainian Jews who were trying to escape pogroms.

Instead, Weizmann and the others wanted young, strong, Paul Newman types for a new Jewish prototype to replace the bookish “diaspora Jew” they loathed. I guess my instincts had been correct: an empath like me was never meant to feel comfortable in Israel. “They wanted to look like Arabs, to be suntanned, muscle-y, to master Arab horses, to know how to use guns, and to work the land,” said Nurit Peled-Elhanan, an Israeli philologist, author, and activist, on the Book Café podcast last year.

Peled was born in the early days of the new state and grew up steeped in the contempt that David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, had for so-called weak Jews. Shockingly, he meant Jews who had been victims of the Holocaust, whether they survived or were killed in the camps. “He told us they went like sheep to the slaughter,” Peled said. “Ben-Gurion set the tone to despise them, to really despise them.”

Nearly 2,000 of the Holocaust survivors who immigrated to Israel after the end of WWII wound up forgotten in mental hospitals, where they were plied with anti-psychotics instead of properly treated for post-traumatic stress. Reparation payments that Germany sent to survivors were largely diverted by Israel into road projects and weapons. It wasn’t until the early aughts — a half-century after they arrived in Israel — that the government apologized to survivor families and began to make amends.

All of this informs the current situation. I have been called a self-hating Jew many times since I began speaking out for Palestinians, but if there is such a thing, I think the real self-hating Jews were those who founded Israel. Max Nordau, a father of Zionism who was responsible for the Jews-with-muscles movement, was full of loathing for his fellow European Jews, referring to them as parasites and “accursed beggars.” It is hard for me to see the Zionists’ obsession with strength and weapons as anything but a mask for humiliation and shame. Isn’t that usually the case?

And history has shown that humiliation sprinkled on top of ego makes for a toxic national stew. Like my grandparents, who had learned to survive by believing in their own superiority, Zionist leaders made clear in their writings that they considered themselves far above the Arab population intellectually, economically, and culturally. Ben-Gurion, for example, according to a recent biography, was opposed to intermarriage in his new state because “an Arab is still not on the human level that I would want for a man who marries a Jewish woman.” People on the street in 1947 expressed similarly racist views to The New York Times, in an article sub-headed “Sure of Superiority, Settlers Feel They Can Win Natives by Reason or Force.”

Jews made up less than a third of the population at that time; they would have had to have been master persuaders to wind up with a majority-Jewish state “by reason.” No matter what they said in public, it was clear from their writings that they planned to drive out the Arabs by force. But first, Ben-Gurion needed to convince his weary immigrants to despise their Arab neighbors, many of whom had been gracious to them when they arrived.

Until I started writing about the early Zionists two years ago, I was unaware that Ben-Gurion had managed to project his people’s post-war thirst for revenge onto the Arabs by subtly linking them with Nazis in public discourse. As Israeli-British historian Avi Shlaim, a professor emeritus at Oxford, noted on a podcast last year, the Zionists were “hellbent on building a new state and they would use any means, fair or foul, in order to realize this ambition.”

The invented correlation with Nazis helps explain the savagery that marked the massacres in Arab villages like Deir Yassin, Safsaf, and Tantura in 1948. Two Zionist terrorist groups, the Irgun and Lehi, were responsible for the attack on Deir Yassin a month before Israel was formed. “They stood ten or fifteen Arabs against a wall — men, women, and children — and shot them,” a member of the Haganah militia, who witnessed the attack, said in a documentary about it. “Once they’d taken over the village, the Irgun went from house to house and made sure any Arabs that were left went straight to heaven.” In Safsaf, members of the newly formed Israel Defense Forces tied dozens of men together, threw them in a pit, and shot them, according to a soldier’s notes. They covered the villagers with dirt while some of the bodies were still twitching. By the end of the forced expulsions in 1947-48, known as the Nakba, 750,000 Arabs had become refugees.

While the original idea behind Nazification may have been to rally the troops, it quickly became the way to guarantee Israel’s survival. Benjamin Netanyahu wasn’t the first prime minister to realize that Israel could outlive its raison d’être. What would happen to it if Jews were no longer scared of extermination? Without a tangible threat, there would be little reason for diaspora Jews to keep the money flowing, or for young Israelis to sustain the ethnostate.

Israel’s solution has been to create an elaborate trauma industry, as author Naomi Klein calls it, to make sure that Jews stay connected to their pain and fear, in a perpetual state of fight or flight from “Nazis” — known to the rest of the world as Palestinians. Just two months after the October 7 attack in 2023, there was already an exhibit in Tel Aviv to recreate the killings at the Nova music festival, complete with burnt cars, bullet-pocked portable toilets, and piles of lost shoes, the latter deliberately reminiscent of Holocaust memorials across the world. The show is currently on international tour to cities with large Jewish populations. Its goal: to immerse visitors into “the depths of pain and loss” and to feel the contrast between “light and darkness, good and evil,” according to the show’s promoters. This, too, is the same visceral, us-versus-them framing that is widely used in Holocaust museums, via interactive gas chambers and virtual reality.

I saw just how well the fearmongering works when a close cousin was radicalized within weeks of the Hamas attack on Israel. She is only half-Jewish and was raised Christian, without any of the cultural indoctrination that I got growing up. So I was surprised when her Instagram stories suddenly were all about Israel — and speechless when the subject turned to her own safety. To begin with, she lives in Los Angeles, the second-largest Jewish city in the world outside of Israel, 7,500 miles from Hamas. Besides that, she has a Scandinavian last name and looks like a Swedish model. She would have had to wear a sign to get someone to target her — if any of the world’s outrage were really directed at Jews and not at Israel.

She wasn’t alone in this panic. The #WouldYouHideMe posts started to appear one month into the Gaza genocide, when protests were spreading across college campuses. Like my cousin, these self-imagined victims — mainly women of wealth and privilege, including billionaire Sheryl Sandberg, the former Facebook executive — interpreted any chants for Palestinian rights as a call for Jewish extermination. One of the most outspoken, influencer Lizzy Savetsky, who lives with her family in a luxurious Manhattan high-rise, sees an implicit threat in the Palestinian flag, be it on a license plate or waving at a rock concert. “They all just want me dead,” she said in an Instagram reel in May. Never mind that a few months earlier Savetsky had posted a speech by the late Meir Kahane, a Jewish extremist convicted of terrorist activities in the U.S. and Israel. Before he was assassinated in 1990, Kahane wanted to purge all Palestinians from the river to the sea.

The dissonance is stunning: much of the world feels like it needs protection from Israelis. Far from seeing Israel as a victim, they see a nuclear superpower that bombed five countries in the space of seventy-two hours last September — Lebanon, Syria, Tunisia, Qatar, and Yemen — at will, without repercussion, while continuing to bombard Gaza and bragging about regional domination. And this was just three months after invading Iran.

It takes effort to make the powerful feel perpetually scared and victimized. That grunt work is left to the school system. Several generations of Israeli children have now learned from textbooks that demonize Palestinians and link them to Nazis, while offering Jewish supremacy as the only safeguard, according to Peled, a retired professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and author of two books on the subject. “How do you take nice Jewish boys and girls and turn them into monsters, killers of children when they reach eighteen?” she asked in a November 2023 interview in Portugal. “It takes a very long, thorough, and sophisticated education to do that.”

The educational project, reinforced by the trauma of the Hamas attack, has left Israelis so delusionally fearful that they feel righteous in annihilating Palestinians and see “Jew hate” as the only possible explanation for not recognizing that righteousness. “I live today in a society that became completely genocidal,” said Yuli Novak, executive director of the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem, in an interview with Zeteo News this month.  “… You can open TV and hear a discussion whether it is beneficial or not to starve people. Whether it will harm Israel internationally if we let or not let humanitarian aid into Gaza. Or what it will do to Israel’s image if we bomb hospitals or kill babies. Those are discussions that are really insane.”

The extent of the insanity was immediately apparent to Dr. Mark Perlmutter, a Jewish orthopedic surgeon from North Carolina, when he arrived for the first of his two stints in Gaza hospitals in 2024. He was shocked to see a rash of young Palestinian children with sniper bullet wounds in the head and chest, an atrocity he had never seen in his decades of volunteer work in war zones. But then colleagues told him about something even more unspeakable: IDF soldiers in a bulldozer had shoveled two living children into a mass grave, their hands tied behind their backs, according to witnesses. The children’s cries were muffled by dirt poured over them. “That type of monstrousness, that level of heinous behavior, can only happen if your hatred is formulated by design, from your birth,” Perlmutter told Katie Halper on her YouTube channel last August.

The dissonance is stunning: much of the world feels like it needs protection from Israelis.

Diaspora Jews are exposed to this fever as well, courtesy of Jewish day schools, summer camps, Birthright tours, and the propaganda that the Israeli government spent at least $150 million on last year — including an estimated $7,000 per post that it pays to select TikTok influencers. In 2024, ahead of a New York Times exposé, Meta announced that it had taken down more than 500 fake Facebook profiles created by an Israeli political marketing firm, as well as their 11 fake business pages, one fake group, and 32 fake Instagram accounts. Many of the accounts posed as Jewish students, helping to feed the media narrative about fear on college campuses. I suspect that they also helped arm my cousin with her talking points — “It is a tiny country surrounded by enemies; look at a map” — without explaining to her how Israel dominates its larger neighbors.

Between the propaganda machine, the soldiers showing off their war crimes on TikTok, the families cheering on the annihilation of Palestinians in Gaza from a touristic lookout point near the border, the settler children assaulting Palestinians in the West Bank, and the pure sadism on display every day, parallels to Nazi Germany and Hitler youth are inescapable. I can’t help but think of the master race when Israeli police burn the Star of David into the face of a Palestinian prisoner. The sight of the star now makes my skin crawl. It has become the new swastika.

In the course of reporting, I read a transcript of the cross examination of Otto Ohlendorf, an SS commander, at the Nuremberg trials. His defense of the Nazi order to exterminate children was identical to what I’ve heard again and again from Israelis, be they politicians or rabbis or celebrities: today’s child is tomorrow’s terrorist.

DEFENDANT OHLENDORF: …[T]his order did not only try to achieve security, but also permanent security because the children would grow up and surely, being the children of parents who had been killed, they would constitute a danger no smaller than that of the parents.

[PROSECUTOR] HEATH: That is the master race exactly, is it not, the decimation of whole races in order to remove a real or fancied threat to the German people?

That is what it boils down to in Israel as well: Israeli Jews, along with many Jews in the diaspora, don’t feel safe unless all real and imagined threats are eliminated. In that, Israelis aren’t so different from the Hutus in Rwanda, who believed that the Tutsis were out to get them, or the ethnic Serbs in Bosnia, who were afraid of their Muslim compatriots, even though a third of the population was intermarried when that war started. Fear coupled with tribalism is what fuels genocide.

What sets Israel apart here, and makes the situation more intractable, is that no one is able to call out Jewish supremacy without being labelled an antisemite and risking their own safety and livelihood. That threat has largely silenced the world’s press corps and politicians. As a result, Israel can freely invoke the Holocaust to justify its atrocities and its quest to destabilize every country in the region, while the rest of us choke on the hypocrisy and lack of accountability.

It was maddening to watch this scenario play out in the New York City mayoral campaign of Zohran Mamdani. Social media was full of comments from people I know — Jewish lawyers and book editors I used to respect — going on about their fears of the “antisemitic” mayor-elect, whose sole offense was saying that he supported a democratic Israel with equal rights for all. The media doggedly covered Jewish fears and his imaginary antisemitism, while ignoring the very real Islamophobia that was lobbed at Mamdani from all directions: from the same Jews who were crying antisemitism, from the candidates who implied that he would bring about another 9/11, and from members of Congress, who called him a jihadist and demanded his deportation. Suddenly I was twelve again, cringing as my people hijacked the narrative.

The more that Zionists gaslight those of us who are witnessing Israel’s war crimes, the more their priorities dominate the news and impinge on free speech, the more actual antisemitism will grow. Ironically, that is a net gain for Israel. As Israeli political commentator Ben Caspit, a popular centrist, admitted on his radio show in November, “I’m a longtime and consistent supporter of antisemitism,” because it helps convince diaspora Jews to relocate. “I’m in favor of all the Jews coming here.”

Theodor Herzl, the father of Zionism, expressed pretty much the same idea in his diaries: “[T]he antisemites will become our most dependable friends, the antisemitic countries our allies.” The ugly truth is that Israel needs antisemitism to survive; it is supply for a dysregulated country. That puts Israel’s needs directly at odds with most of the 8.5 million Jews who don’t live there, even those who feel deeply connected to Israel.

As I have intuited since childhood, Jewish supremacy is just as poisonous as any other kind. Recently, my news feed was full of Melanie Phillips, a conservative British political commentator. Speaking at the “Rage Against the Hate” conference in New York, where Jewish leaders met to discuss, in all sincerity, what could possibly underlie “a sharp and unprecedented rise in anti-Israel sentiment,” Phillips spewed nothing but hate and violence.

“There is no such thing as Palestine. There is no such thing as the Palestinian people,” she said, before clearly calling for their mass extermination. “It is no longer enough simply to [do] what was called ‘mowing the lawn’ to keep the enemy down,” meaning the Israeli invasions of Gaza in 2008-9, 2012, 2014, and 2020. She begged Israelis to stop acting like timid diaspora Jews and finish the job already. The audience, filled with more entitlement, political clout, and privilege than my grandparents could have ever imagined, cheered. Here were the people of the early colonizers’ dreams, fully realized.