Zionist leaders reframed anti-colonial resistance as Holocaust continuity to justify dispossession

Evidence

Yet rather than seeing Arab resistance for what it was—a nationalist, anti-colonial battle over land and self-determination (with some anti-Semitic elements, to be sure)—many influential Zionist leaders portrayed the entire Palestinian cause as nothing but more irrational Jew-hatred, a seamless continuation of the very same anti-Semitism that had resulted in the Holocaust, and that therefore needed to be crushed with the kind of militarized force that Jews had not been able to marshal in Nazi-controlled Europe. Within this imaginary, the Palestinian, as the Jew’s new eternal enemy, was treated as so illegitimate, so irrational, so other, that Israelis believed themselves to be justified in reenacting many of the forms of violence, dehumanizing propaganda, and forced displacement that had targeted and uprooted the Jewish people throughout Europe for centuries, a process that continues to this day with ongoing home demolitions, Israeli settlement expansions, targeted assassinations, settler rampages through Palestinian communities, openly discriminatory laws, and walled ghettos into which Palestinians are corralled. — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 967

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The doubling device reaches its crux here: Jews reenacting the violence done to them, a self-doubling that the whole book has been circling. This is the political weight the personal device was built to carry.
• QUESTION: Does this mirror-collapse framing actually explain, or does it over-condense a far messier history? This is exactly the analytical pressure point the reader wants to assess.
• XREF: The ‘Mirror World’ thesis: the right metabolizing grievances — and here the Israeli state metabolizing Holocaust trauma into justification for colonial violence, a parallel worth connecting.