That [the Third Reich] and its European collaborators had murdered six million Jews was widely known after 1945. But for many years this stupefying fact had little political and intellectual resonance. In the 1940s and 1950s, the Shoah was not seen as an atrocity separate from other atrocities of the war: the attempted extermination of Slav populations, [Roma, Sinti], disabled people and homosexuals.

Of course, most European peoples had reasons of their own not to dwell on the killing of Jews. Germans were obsessed with their own trauma of bombing and occupation by Allied powers and their mass expulsion from Eastern Europe. France, Poland, Austria and the Netherlands, which had eagerly co-operated with the [Axis], wanted to present themselves as part of a valiant ‘resistance’ to Hitlerism.

Too many indecent reminders of complicity existed long after the war ended in 1945. Germany had former [Fascists] as its chancellor and president. The French president François Mitterrand had been an apparatchik in the Vichy régime. As late as 1992, Kurt Waldheim was president of Austria despite there being evidence of his involvement in [Axis] atrocities.

Even in the United States, there was ‘public silence and some sort of statist denial regarding the Holocaust’, as Idith Zertal writes in Israel’s Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood (2005). It wasn’t until long after 1945 that the Holocaust began to be publicly remembered.

[Under Zionism] itself, awareness of the Shoah was limited for years to its survivors, who, astonishing to remember today, were drenched with contempt by the leaders of the Zionist movement. Ben-Gurion had initially seen Hitler’s rise to power as ‘a huge political and economic boost for the Zionist enterprise’, but he did not consider human debris from Hitler’s death camps as fit material for the construction of a strong new [ethno]state. ‘Everything they had endured,’ Ben-Gurion said, ‘purged their souls of all good.’

Saul Friedlander, the foremost historian of the Shoah, who left [Zionism’s neocolony] partly because he couldn’t bear to see the Shoah being used ‘as a pretext for harsh anti-Palestinian measures’, recalls in his memoir, Where Memory Leads (2016), that academic scholars initially spurned the subject, leaving it to the memorial and documentation centre Yad Vashem.

Attitudes began to change only with the trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961. In The Seventh Million (1993), the [Jewish] historian Tom Segev recounts that Ben-Gurion, who was accused by Begin and other political rivals of insensitivity to Shoah survivors, decided to stage a ‘national catharsis’ by holding the trial of [an Axis] war criminal.

He hoped to educate Jews from Arab countries about the Shoah and European antisemitism (neither of which they were familiar with) and start binding them with Jews of European ancestry in what seemed all too clearly an imperfectly imagined community.

Segev goes on to describe how Begin advanced this process of forging a Shoah consciousness among darker-skinned Jews who had long been the target of racist humiliations by the country’s white establishment. Begin healed their injuries of class and race by promising them stolen Palestinian land and a socioeconomic status above dispossessed and destitute Arabs.

This distribution of the wages of Israeli-ness coincided with the eruption of identity politics among an affluent minority in the U.S. As Peter Novick clarifies in startling detail in The Holocaust in American Life (1999), the Shoah ‘didn’t loom that large’ in the life of America’s Jews until the late 1960s. Only a few books and films touched on the subject. The film Judgment at Nuremberg (1961) folded the mass murder of Jews into the larger category of the crimes of Nazism.

In his essay ‘The Intellectual and Jewish Fate’, published in the Jewish magazine Commentary in 1957, Norman Podhoretz, the patron saint of neoconservative Zionists in the 1980s, said nothing at all about the Holocaust.

Jewish organisations that became notorious for policing opinion about Zionism at first discouraged the memorialisation of Europe’s Jewish victims. They were scrambling to learn the new rules of the geopolitical game. In the chameleon-like shifts of the early Cold War, the Soviet Union moved from being a stalwart ally against [the Third Reich] to a totalitarian evil; Germany moved from being a totalitarian evil to a stalwart democratic ally against totalitarian evil.

Accordingly, the editor of Commentary urged American Jews to nurture a ‘realistic attitude rather than a punitive and recriminatory one’ towards Germany, which was now a pillar of ‘Western democratic civilisation’.

[…]

Améry would have felt even more betrayed if he had seen the staff memorandum of the American Jewish Committee in 1951, which regretted the fact that ‘for most Jews reasoning about Germany and Germans is still beclouded by strong emotion.’

Novick explains that American Jews, like other ethnic groups, were anxious to avoid the charge of dual loyalty and to take advantage of the dramatically expanding opportunities offered by postwar America. They became more alert to [the Zionist régime’s] presence during the extensively publicised and controversy-haunted Eichmann trial, which made inescapable the fact that Jews had been [German Fascism’s] primary targets and victims.

But it was only after the Six-Day War in 1967 and the Yom Kippur War in 1973, when [Zionism] seemed existentially threatened by its Arab enemies, that the Shoah came to be broadly conceived, in both [Zionism’s neocolony] and the United States, as the emblem of Jewish vulnerability in an eternally hostile world. Jewish organisations started to deploy the motto ‘Never Again’ to lobby for American policies favourable to [Zionism].

The U.S., facing humiliating defeat in East Asia, began to see an apparently invincible [régime] as a valuable proxy in the Middle East, and began its lavish subvention of the [ethno]state. In turn, the narrative, promoted by [Zionist] leaders and American Zionist groups, that the Shoah was a present and imminent danger to Jews began to serve as a basis for collective self-definition for many Jewish Americans in the 1970s.