Is it possible to move on after the Holocaust? A psychological perspective on the ongoing disaster in Gaza.

By Soly Erlandsson

*Soly Erlandsson, Untitled, 1983. Chalk on* watercolour canvas. Inspired by the author’s
Involvement in Amnesty.

“Why can we never stop worrying about Nazism?” That question begins Birgitta Almgren’s highly readable book about Sweden and Nazi Germany: The Dream of North. Nazi infiltration 1933–1945 (Carlssons, 2005). Her question is justified and relevant to me, since Nazi Germany’s crimes against the Jews of Europe have never left me unmoved, despite the years that have passed. On my bookshelf are rows of books about the Second World War, about Hitler’s grandiose ideas of a thousand-year empire, about how people were considered inferior and did not belong to the Aryan race, were forcibly transferred to concentration and labour camps in Germany and occupied Austria, France and Poland. Despite reading detailed, expert and deeply shocking accounts of Nazi Germany, and the unforgivably cruel treatment of European Jews, I have never been able to fully understand how this could continue – in full view, in front of an open curtain – for so many years.

There are isolated heroic stories of people who took great risks to help Jews hide or flee the country, but the silence of the vast majority affected six million children, young people and the elderly who paid with their lives. The total number of fatalities is also unimaginably high. However, we must not forget that Nazi ideology lives on in groups of people who idealise fascism and anti-Semitism. We must also include political, extremist nationalism among these ideologies, which is often expressed as verbal threats against immigrants and people with backgrounds and worldviews different from those of the majority population. Violence is constantly finding new arenas in which to operate, and children and young people growing up today need to be strengthened in their conviction that violence never pays in the long run.

When I think back to my childhood, I am reminded that, in my generation, many of us children regularly attended Sunday school at church. There, we learned about the equal value of all people, regardless of where they came from or the colour of their skin. However, Sunday school was mainly about Jesus, how and in what country he was born, and that he was the son of God who came down to earth for the sake of people. My mother told me that when I was about three years old, I said to her, “When I grow up, I will go to Jerusalem.” This naïve wish was, of course, based on what Sunday school had taught me about the holy city far away in the Middle East. I never went to Jerusalem, and now it is too late for such a dangerous journey, not least considering the war in Gaza, which is still in its intense phase. Through my mother, I learned that Jewish postwar refugees had arrived in our hometown of Borås, and that committed people there helped them start a new life. After the war, the municipal girls’ school, where I was a student, opened its premises to refugees upon their arrival in Sweden, providing them with housing. Growing up in a Christian family probably shaped how I understood the stories about the fate of the Jewish people. My limited knowledge of the Nazi crimes against the Jews at this time came in fragments from my parents and from my uncle, , who grew up in Germany during Hitler’s regime. The suffering of the German civilian population after the 1945 capitulation was also enormous. One way to help was to become a sponsor for a German child, something my parents were involved in. Several years later, I read about the resistance group White Rose and the heroic siblings Sophie and Hans Scholl, who in 1943, along with several other members of the group, were convicted and executed for the crime of distributing anti-Nazi leaflets. I admired their courage, and time and again the thought came to me, whether I would have dared to risk my life by protesting against an oppressive regime in my homeland.

“For every day that Palestinians are injured and die in Gaza, I am one of the spectators who is forced to take a wait-and-see attitude towards the truth about the brutality of the war.”

In the early 1960s, I spent some time in the United States. Although everyone I met there had a Jewish background, we never really talked about World War II, Nazism, or the Holocaust. When Nuremberg: The Third Reich on Trial by Richard F. Gallagher came out in paperback in the 1960s, I bought it and read that some of the worst Nazi executioners were punished for their crimes. The book gives us all the details of the Nuremberg Trials, which ran from November 20, 1945, to October 1, 1946 and where 21 out of 22 (Martin Borman, Hitler’s secretary, was missing, but later found dead) of the accused Nazi leaders received their sentences. The trial in the Nuremberg courtroom had then lasted a total of 403 trial days. The book includes a photo of the men in the bench rows, smiling or laughing openly as the charges were read out. None of the defendants pleaded guilty to the crimes they were accused of, but in 13 cases, the death penalty was imposed.

The third chapter of the book, “The grandest larceny”, begins with Heinrich Himmler’s order to the SS officers stationed in Ukraine. With Russia’s ongoing offensive war against the same country in mind, I quote the following from the book: “The aim to be achieved is that when areas in the Ukraine are evacuated, not a human being, not a single head of cattle, not a hundredweight of cereals and not a railway line behind; that not a house remains standing, not a mine is available which is not destroyed for years to come, that there is not a well which is not poisoned. The enemy must find completely burned and destroyed land…” (September 8, 1943). Almost 80 years later, in 2022, Ukraine is attacked and drawn into a senseless war – this time by Putin’s Russia, whose regime also spares no means to destroy this country’s population, its infrastructure and industries.

“Among Israeli soldiers, suicides have increased since the beginning of the war, and five soldiers had chosen to end their lives during July (2025).”

Gallagher’s documentation of the indicted SS leaders’ mutual communication, via letters and telephone conversations, reveals and confirms what can be read on the back cover: “This indictment of the most infamous evil the world has ever known is a book all men must read, so that for as long as freedom and peace thrive in the human race – they will not forget.” How long and why we need to remember this, our partly brutal contemporary era testifies. But we should also not forget the brave women and men who protested against the abuses against the Jews and who tried to rescue them. Among my relatives, there is a married, German uncle named Hans Wolfgang Amadeus Cornelius (1923–2013). As a young man, he was forced to fight for the part of the German army that invaded France in 1940. He survived but suffered a brain injury, was captured and had to spend three years in a French prison of war camp. Yngor, a younger brother of Hans Wolfgang, had to leave his medical studies to join the battlefield, but never returned alive.

Both brothers had a Swedish mother, and their father, Hans Cornelius (1863–1947), was a German philosopher, psychologist and professor of Social Sciences at the University of Frankfurt. He joined the German Social Democratic Party in 1918 and supported, among other things, the formation of a European confederation. After his retirement in 1928, he moved with his family to Gräfelfing in Bavaria, where they helped Jews escape across the border to Switzerland. The refugees were first received at the house in Gräfelfing and then hidden in the attic while awaiting transport in a van that regularly delivered vegetables from Germany to Switzerland. My uncle told me that on one occasion, they were visited by the Gestapo, who searched their home. Fortunately, he did not discover the Jewish refugees who were hidden behind wooden beams along the attic ceiling. At this time, neutral Switzerland forced 24.500 Jews who fled from the Nazis to turn back at the border.

During a week of vacation in Rome, I visited a museum of architecture, where the exhibition, “Fascism in Art”, illustrated how fascist-influenced architecture could make people feel insignificant and small. In addition to depictions of public buildings, posters in the spirit of Mussolini were displayed, featuring ideologised Italian workers, as well as statues of the man with the broad, well-marked, protruding chin. Buildings and monuments that Hitler had built in Germany were also examples of fascist architecture. Albert Speer provided Hitler with ideas and sketches for various spectacular building projects, plans that were, in most cases, never completed. Architecture played a prominent role in Hitler’s vision of a new German capital, Germania, planned to be inaugurated in 1950, five years after he took his life in the bunker in Berlin. After the visit to Rome, the idea of starting a book circle about fascism together with some interested friends was born. We also delved into literature about the influence of German National Socialism on culture and ideology, such as Birgitta Almgren’s book about Nazi infiltration in Sweden between 1933 and 1945.

“Without Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump in the corridors of power, the world would probably be a somewhat safer place today.”

Almgren highlights, among other things, a situation when students at the University of Lund in 1939 protested against welcoming Jewish refugees because they were considered a “foreign element”, with the argument that “the Swedish people must be kept pure”. Views such as these were also reinforced and legitimised by the racial hygiene that was alive and well as a result of racial biological research in Sweden. In the same year, students at Uppsala University opposed the proposal to accept ten persecuted Jewish doctors, for labour market policy reasons, as emerged from the so-called Bollhus debate. The reason was said to be fear of competition, but behind that, Almgren believes, were perceptions such as that the refugee issue had the character of a racial problem. The racist expression also made its way into the Swedish parliament, where a female member of the second chamber in 1941 used a choice of words such as “undesirable human material” in her description of the Jewish refugees (Almgren, 2005). The Nazis considered the Nordic race to be based on a kind of natural state that had resisted all outside influence. The “Dream of the North” was thus based on a romanticised image of Germans, was used as propaganda and contributed to dehumanising the Jews.

A book about the Nazi crimes against the German Jewish population that I hold in particular high regard is Victor Klemperer’s: To the end I will bear witness: Diaries 1933–1945. I read, underline and note things that I want to remember and come back to. When Hitler came to power, Klemperer was a professor of Romance Studies at the Technical University of Dresden. A position he was forced to leave in 1933, according to the new law that Jews could not hold higher positions. In 1912, he married Eva Schlemmer, an “Aryan”, non-Jewish publicist; the same year, he converted to Protestantism. Victor Klemperer, born in Brandenburg, Germany, in 1881, saw himself primarily as a native German man. In the diaries, we can read about what is happening in Hitler’s Germany, from the day Klemperer was forced to leave the university to the day of liberation, 1945. We follow the events almost day by day and get a unique insight into life as it was for the Jewish population of Dresden during the ongoing struggle for survival. Time and again, new decrees are issued restricting the rights of the Jews, which means that it becomes increasingly complicated to get access to the necessities of life. Access to news, such as magazines and newspapers, is also minimal.

The Jewish inhabitants of Dresden are forced out of their homes and housed in the so-called Judenhaus. They are prevented from buying certain types of food and are living in constant fear of being picked up by the Gestapo, something that affects many of the Klemperer couple’s neighbours and friends. Victor Klemperer does not dare to keep his diary entries at home, but regularly hands them over to a female friend who hides them until the war is over. In the book “The Language of the Third Reich”, he describes his fear: “It was not the bombs, not the low-flying aeroplanes, nor the death that I was afraid of – it was always the Gestapo. Always just the fear that someone might be walking behind me… that someone might be waiting for me at home who wanted to pick me up.” In the final stages of the war, we follow the Klemperer couple as they flee Dresden, which has been bombed beyond recognition. They miraculously survived the massive American and British bombing raids in February 1945, which cost the lives of about 25,000 inhabitants. At the end of the diary is a map of the couple’s escape route through Germany from the threatening Nazis. They left the city on the night of February 13–14 and were on the run until June 6, 1945. At that point, I find myself in their company. Victor and Eva now feel like my friends, and I am considering following in their footsteps to see the places they chose to stay before they returned to Dresden after about four months in exile.

“He perceives the State of Israel as less independent than when it was founded, and more marked by the Holocaust compared to the time when the truth about the Nazi death factories became known.”

When Sebastian Haffner’s (1907–1999) unique story of his upbringing and life in Germany during the Nazi era: En tysk mans historia. Minnen, 1914–1933, was staged as a play at the Kulturhuset Stadsteatern in Stockholm in 2024, and the friends of the former book club travelled to the capital to see the performance. Haffner’s book was a spontaneous purchase while waiting for a train or a flight, and it became a joint read in our book club. Following Haffner’s footsteps and seeing through his eyes the catastrophic developments in Germany in the years leading up to the Nazi’s takeover was like sharing these experiences with him. At the theatre, we experienced Haffner’s detailed, personal story through Gerhard Hoberstrofer’s critically acclaimed monologue (directed by Ole Anders Tandberg). When I reread some of my underlines in Haffner’s book, it becomes clear how current his observations and interpretations are. Here is an example: “Nationalism, that is, national self-admiration and self-worship, is certainly a dangerous mental illness everywhere, capable of disfiguring the features of a person and making them ugly” (p. 217). Isn’t this precisely what we witness in many conflicts around the world, where nationalism is pushed to its extreme? In the USA, the message is “Make America Great Again,” which also reflects nationalism and self-glorification. That the historical setbacks still exist, we are also reminded of in the following quote: “Six stormtroopers who one night had attacked a ’dissident’ in his bed and literally trampled him to death were sentenced to the death penalty. Hitler sent them a telegram with words of appreciation and praise. Nothing happened. Well, one thing. The six murderers were pardoned” (p. 88). Although the event is of a completely different nature, I am reminded of the storming of the Capitol in Washington on January 6, 2021, and what subsequently happened to the guilty and detained rioters, after the current president returned to the White House in 2025.

We don’t talk as often as we should about the value of a single human life. The EU does not allow the death penalty, and Belarus is the only European country that currently carries out the death penalty. According to Amnesty International, most executions take place in the Middle East and North Africa. In Israel, the death penalty has only been used twice in the past 75 years. The most well-known is the trial in Jerusalem of Nazi Adolf Eichmann, when he was found guilty of genocide and subsequently executed. Where then is the logic that so many innocent people are sacrificed in war, and that so few are held accountable for these murders? For every day that Palestinians are injured in Gaza, I am one spectator, forced to take a wait-and-see attitude towards the truth about the brutality of war. That feeling is paralysing. I follow closely through the media, such as daily newspapers, TV and Radio, news about Gaza, and wonder what prevents the outside world from immediately, today, right in this moment, stepping out and defending the unprotected Palestinian population. When we learn on July 16 that an average of ten Palestinian children every day lose one or two of their legs, I feel sadness, but also anger that the children are becoming targets in yet another senseless war. In addition to the risk of dying of starvation, they are exposed to indelible traumas, which, if they survive, will shape their future lives. Painful childhood experiences are similar to what many Jewish survivors of the Holocaust can tell us about.

Psychoanalyst Suzanne Kaplan interviewed adult women and men who had the courage and will to share their memories of the Holocaust. Memories that she recorded in the book: Children during the Holocaust – then and now. Affects and memories after extreme traumatisation (Natur och Kultur, 2003). Every day, Jewish life changed radically when Hitler was appointed Chancellor in 1933, and the vulnerability of Jewish children took on various forms, not least the requirement that they always wear the Star of David visibly. The children were excluded from state schools and were no longer allowed to participate in the activities they were used to, which led to isolation. No longer being perceived as part of society, but being treated as strangers, was especially difficult for the Jewish children. They were not allowed to own bicycles, and suddenly, they might encounter a closed playground. In: The Language of the Third Reich, Victor Klemperer describes the grief after Jewish families were forced to give up their pets: “Later, our pets were also taken from us, cats, dogs and even canaries, all of which were killed. This did not happen in isolated cases and out of individual malice. Still, officially and systematically, and it is just one of the cruelties that no Nuremberg trial in the world speaks of” (p. 139). The traumatisation of Jewish children during the Holocaust is repeated in today’s Gaza. Schools destroyed by Israeli bombs force Palestinian children to give up what characterises their everyday lives, perhaps most of all. The children’s futures, as well as their homes and lives, are transformed, day by day, into ruins.

Dehumanisation is a psychological process where opponents begin to see each other as non-human, and therefore not deserving of moral consideration – a humanitarian crisis such as the one we are witnessing in Gaza. The connection between tolerance for the use of torture and the dehumanisation of people who are perceived as different is highlighted by Robert Öhlund in his essay: Democratic war crimes. A study of German prisoners of war in the hands of French and American soldiers (Swedish National Defence University, 2013). The group most at risk of dehumanisation in Sweden is Muslims, and I quote: “One of the studies looked in depth at what makes authoritarian and socially dominant people more likely to accept torture. Factors such as strong identification with their own group, that is, Swedes, and the tendency to dehumanise Muslims were weighted in. From there, the step to Gaza, where the majority of the inhabitants are also Muslims, is not far. New figures are constantly coming in on the number of dead and injured, and I can no longer remember how many or who are sacrificed every day in Israel’s war. For children to be forced to witness their close relatives or friends die after being shot or killed by Israeli bombs is a form of torture. In war-torn Gaza, death is ever-present, including in situations where desperate people of all ages try to reach the food distribution system. In August 2025, Médecins Sans Frontières describes the situation as follows: “This is not an aid. This is orchestrated killing”. Most of us have probably seen the pictures of desperate people crowded at the food distribution sites. As a spectator, I can feel the deep humiliation it must be to hold out your food bowl like a beggar, but be forced to leave the place with an empty bowl.

As I write this, I recall that as early as April 2023, after Israel had its most right-wing government to date with Benjamin Netanyahu as Prime Minister, Israelis were concerned that the country was on the verge of dismantling democracy. People’s concerns triggered a series of large demonstrations, including outside the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, in Jerusalem. Protests against anti-democratic decisions, such as reducing the power of the courts, continued throughout the summer and fall – almost until Hamas launched its brutal attack on October 7, 2023, when 1,200 Israelis were killed, and more than 250 were taken hostage. Since then, Gaza has been closed to foreign journalists, which has prevented objective media coverage and the outside world from registering the consequences of the ongoing war. The UN reports that more than 200 journalists and media workers from Gaza died as a result of the war, which, according to Swedish Pen, is considered the deadliest period for writers and journalists since World War II. Suicides among Israeli soldiers have increased since the war began, and according to Svenska Dagbladet (a Swedish daily newspaper), five soldiers chose to end their lives in July 2025. But it is not only the soldiers who are exposed to the risk of suffering from mental illness – their families are likely to be worried about a son or daughter involved in the war in Gaza.

The capital of violence that the Islamist resistance movement Hamas has built up in Gaza, among other places, since 2007 has, without a doubt, constituted a serious threat to the Jewish population and the state of Israel. Despite this, it is Israel’s responsibility as a democracy to stand up for the humanitarian law that applies according to the laws of war. A precarious truth is that, as late as 2020, Benjamin Netanyahu asked Qatar to increase aid to the Hamas regime in Gaza to create a peaceful election day in Israel the same year (Dagens Nyheter, 2020-02-24). This shows that Netanyahu is a power player with an inhumane and harmful relationship to his position as Prime Minister and to the population of both Israel and Gaza. In relation to heritage and the environment, my starting point is that humans, like the animals on our planet, are characterised by childhood and upbringing. Benjamin Netanyahu is also influenced by the social environment in which he grew up. His father, Ben-Zion Netanyahu, was born in 1910 into a Zionist family in Warsaw. After World War I, the family moved to British Palestine. There, he actively participated in Revisionist Zionism, a breakaway movement from Zionism characterised by Jewish, right-wing nationalism. In his circle were political activists, including the movement’s founder, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, with a background in political fascism, and the two far-right political activists in Netanyahu’s circle, Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, the latter of whom is also part of the present Israeli government.

As young men, Benjamin Netanyahu and his father lived in the United States, which gave the father and son, through various networks, unique opportunities to influence American parliamentary affairs. The close relations between the United States and Israel have for many years implied a considerable military and economic advantage for Israel, as well as a superiority in the region in relation to the Palestinian population. Ben-Zion Netanyahu lived to be 102 years old and may thus have had an influence on his son’s political orientation for many years, for example, the unwavering antagonistic attitude towards the Palestinians. It is known that Benjamin Netanyahu was an opponent of the agreement that was negotiated between Israel and Palestine during the Oslo process. The first Oslo Accords were signed in Washington by Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat on September 13, 1993, and proposed giving the Palestinians self-rule in Gaza and Jericho in the West Bank. Eva Illouz, professor of Sociology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, describes in her book: Emotions and Populism (2022)* the following event in 1993: “During a demonstration critical of Rabin, Netanyahu led a funeral procession that included a hanger with a noose and a coffin, while demonstrators chanted death to Rabin” (p. 155). Resistance from right-wing extremist groups in Israel led to the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin in 1995. If Yitzhak Rabin had been allowed to continue leading Israel, there is a possibility that the Israeli/Palestine conflict that has deepened year after year would have subsided. A two-state solution would have been in place. The conflict between Palestine and Israel has since been allowed to escalate and is today on the verge of genocide against the Palestinian population.

“I miss the solid coverage in the daily press and Public Service about the critical voices that exist and act within Israel.”

At the end of July, news reached us that the Israeli Prime Minister was threatening to gradually annex parts of the Gaza Strip unless Hamas agreed to a ceasefire (Israel already occupies three-quarters of the Gaza Strip). One reason for this decision seemed to be to pressure Hamas and, at the same time, appease the far-right politicians. On August 5, the Prime Minister announced that he intended to convene his security cabinet to obtain their approval to take over all of Gaza. A few days later, the decision was made that the plan to occupy Gaza City would be implemented, despite international condemnation and protests. At the same time, the number of people who have died of starvation in the country is 127, of which 100 are children. Since the war began, Israel’s bombs and hunt for Hamas fighters have forced the Palestinians to move to another part of Gaza on several occasions. Now, such a forced movement of exhausted and starving people may again be imminent. The Swedish doctor and professor of disaster medicine, Johan von Schreeb, was interviewed on May 19, 2025, by SVT/Rapport (Swedish TV news) about his view of the severe food shortage in Gaza and, at the time, described Gaza as a death camp due to severe starvation.

At the time of writing, on August 20, the Israeli military has begun its invasion of Gaza City, and the plan is for the city to be emptied of its inhabitants by October 9, a date that the Israeli government has probably chosen as a defence for its decision. The anxiety and inaction that have so far characterised the EU, including the Swedish government, regarding the humanitarian disaster in Gaza, make me feel ashamed to be a Swede and an EU citizen. Is it the deep traces of the Holocaust that contribute to the EU’s democracies being unable to break a taboo and claim that the Israeli government is responsible for a protracted war that is claiming more and more innocent lives? Samir Abu Eid, Middle East correspondent for Swedish Television, said on August 22 that Hamas is no longer considered a threat to Israel, and that the war now aims to subjugate all of Gaza. In Israel, 600 former high-ranking security officials have urged President Trump in a letter to increase pressure on the Israeli government. The letter states, among other things, that the terrorist group Hamas is no longer “a strategic threat” to Israel (Omni August 4, 2025).

Of the 193 UN member states, 150 have now recognised Palestine as a sovereign state. However, if Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich gets his way with his plans for expanded settlements in the West Bank, there is a very high risk that a two-state solution will be on the way out. As we may recall, Sweden was the first EU country to recognise Palestine as a sovereign state back in 2014, and the following year, a Palestinian embassy was established in Stockholm. Foreign Minister Margot Wallström and the Social Democratic government were criticised for their stance on the Palestine issue. Now, almost ten years later, Deputy Mayor Ebba Busch is proposing that Sweden recognise Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and open a Swedish embassy there. This demand indicates ignorance (or perhaps disinterest) in the city’s history. Since 1947, Jerusalem has had the status of an international territory and is a holy place for Jews, Christians and Muslims alike. Ebba Busch, who leads a nominally Christian party, apparently does not include the Muslim Palestinian group in her concern for humanity. President Trump’s recognition of the Golan Heights and Jerusalem as part of Israel resonated internationally in 2019. Jan Hallenberg, professor of political science, asked what would happen if both Trump and Netanyahu were re-elected and pushed the development towards Israel’s annexation of parts of the West Bank (Online magazine for the Swedish Institute of International Affairs, April 2019). Today, we can unfortunately conclude that some of the developments that Jan Hallenberg predicted have come true, even if they happened with a delay of a few years. What these two men have in common is that they were investigated for crimes but not convicted before they were elected president and prime minister, respectively. In Benjamin Netanyahu’s case, the charges include fraud and breach of trust, and Donald Trump has been charged with offences such as fraud, defamation, election interference, and accounting and tax crimes. Without Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump in the corridors of power, the world would probably be a somewhat safer place today.

In the book The Holocaust is Over, and We Must Rise from the Ashes (Daidalos, 2008), the author, Israeli Avraham Burg, says that the Holocaust is still constantly present in his life and compares it to “ringing in the ears that never stops” (p. 27). He perceives it as a hole in the ozone layer, as something invisible and abstract but always present and ominous. He perceives the State of Israel as less independent than when it was founded, and more marked by the Holocaust, compared to the time when the truth about the Nazi death factories became known. The Holocaust finds its way, to varying degrees, into political argumentation, but also appears in Israeli everyday life through the media, literature, art, music and via the educational system. From a psychological perspective, it can be interpreted as Israelis’ attempts to process the deep, transgenerational trauma left behind by the Holocaust. However, according to Burg, the fixation on the Holocaust has contributed to the suppression of other suffering in the country. Expressions in the book, such as Israel becoming the voice of the dead, and war becoming the rule rather than the exception, may lie in Burg’s description of political leadership: “Israel’s leaders are, in short, formed in the military” (p. 47).

At the same time, we must not ignore another explanation, namely that a coalition of hostile neighbours has not left Israel in peace. Thus, a state of “constant war readiness” is reinforced by an endless amount of war material that the United States and Germany have supplied the country with for many years. On reflection, perhaps we are all complicit in the compulsive focus on the Holocaust, since we as non-Jews may have felt guilty that it was allowed to happen at all. For those of us who grew up in the shadow of World War II and the Nazi crimes against the Jews in Europe, the Holocaust became part of our common history. Perhaps the time is ripe for an honest attempt to reconcile with the Holocaust and recognise evil as a parallel to goodness, which must first and foremost be fought within ourselves. But that does not exclude the responsibility to identify, unmask, expose and uncover inhuman forces that make themselves felt in the society we are part of. But we are also part of a global context, and are jointly responsible for giving the people, animals and plant species of this planet a chance to survive. Here, Burg cites the English historian Ian Kershaw, and I note that, like me, he was born during the Second World War. According to Kershaw, our shared responsibility means that social forces and political structures that have enabled the emergence of a robust system (for example, Nazism) must be unmasked, and, I would add, analysed in depth via independent sources.

Burg provides a thought-provoking picture of how the development towards an extremist system can occur in several stages: “Extremism moves from the extremes of xenophobic nationalism to the more moderate right and from there to the cultural and political middle. The circles that have influences are usually also those that are indifferent” (p. 77). Burg’s view seems familiar, as it fits developments in several European countries over recent decades. That the indifference of the political centre is likely to contribute to extremism is thought-provoking but also deeply worrying. The “centre” must wake up and seriously realise what is required to preserve our democracies. Everyone, perhaps especially young people, needs to understand the purpose of the common laws of the international community, such as “Human Rights” and “International Law”, and what they mean in practice. It was a Polish Jew, Rafael Lemkin, who first used the term genocide in an attempt to define what the murder of an entire population means. After the UN General Assembly approved the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in 1948, it came into force in 1951. The irony or improbability is that Israel, which was founded as a habitat of peace, is now accused by many of being behind a genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza.

Thanks to Avraham Burg’s political essay, I gained new, valuable insights into Jewish life and Israel’s multi-faceted historical roots, not least the Zionist ones. At the same time, I realise that my ignorance of the position and life-conditions of the Arab population, after the Jews began their immigration to Palestine, is frighteningly fabulous. The immigration took place already at the end of the 19th century, long before Labour Party leader David Ben-Gurion began building the State of Israel on May 14, 1948. In connection with this, the Swedish UN mediator, Folke Bernadotte, was assassinated in Jerusalem by Jewish terrorists belonging to the Stern League (Lennart Simonsson, 2024, Institute of Foreign Policy). Burg’s view is that the UN would have never adopted the resolution on the founding of the State of Israel if the Holocaust had not taken place beforehand. From a psychological perspective, could such a scenario possibly explain, on an unconscious level, why the Holocaust has remained a part of Israel’s identity or perhaps deeper than that, the soul of the country? According to researchers Claire J. Starrs and Vera Békés** (2025), studies that identify mechanisms for transgenerational trauma transmission are too few. The studies that do exist have primarily focused on vulnerability mechanisms but, unfortunately, have omitted a deeper discussion of protective factors. Historical facts are thus not enough to process trauma that spans generations.

The changing worldviewof Jews after the Holocaust led to explicit condemnations of anti-Semitism and other hate crimes. Burg turns this against the Israelis and himself: “However, we ourselves have never done anything comparable for the Palestinian refugees and their descendants” (p. 96). According to him, the nation of Israel’s war mentality and unnecessary brutality are a consequence of its development into “a narcissistic nation that idolises itself” (p. 113). Burg’s description of Israel as a narcissistic nation could be reinterpreted as a psychologically fundamental need for belonging and a strong national identity in a population that has undergone a trauma like the Holocaust. But the risk that such national affinity develops into distrust directed towards people outside the grisguisecourses signis significantrg wishes that Israel, instead of isolationism and victimhood, leaves the past behind and begins a new journey towards the future and life beyond the Holocaust. It has now been 17 years since Avraham Burg’s thoughts were published, and developments in Israel have not gone in the direction he hoped. Therefore, I’d like to ask him: What do you think of your country today, and what is taking place in Gaza? I find the answer to my question in Avraham Burg’s article: Jews – Rebel. Now!! A Jewish plea to the International Court of Justice.

Saving the last few lines to explain the purpose of my text is, of course, going backwards. Why did I choose to write about a subject that risks arousing such conflicting perceptions and feelings? The answer to that question lies in my commitment, primarily historical and psychological perspectives on the situation and position of the Jews – then and now – the repercussions of the Holocaust on the outside world, and finally, what touches me most deeply today, the innocent victims of the war in Gaza. For me, writing is a form of processing and a way to acquire new knowledge. As the process progresses, new, valuable insights emerge. In my field of psychology, we tend to underestimate the social and political discourses that shape our societies. Language influences our identity and shapes our personality, without us noticing. Victor Klemperer reminds us in The Language of the Third Reich that the doctrine of Hitler and the Nazis was influenced and spurred on by Zionism during the construction of the millennial Third Reich (p. 260).

Prime Minister Netanyahu today openly denies that the people of Gaza are suffering from starvation, despite the irrefutable evidence of a famine. This indicates that extreme political radicalism is increasingly eating its way into the inner, most destructive circle of Israeli power. Now, at the end of August 2025, food shortages have reached the highest level recorded since the war began almost two years ago. I miss solid coverage in the daily press and Public Service of the critical voices against the extreme right-wing Israeli government that exists and acts inside Israel. In my quiet mind, I wonder what Victor Klemperer would have said about the cruel Israeli strategy to starve the people of Gaza. It is my absolute conviction that he had condemned Israel’s inhuman treatment of Palestinians, based on his own bitter experiences from the time of the Nazi era in German History. I can only hope that the world stands up for the Declaration of Human Rights, since it applies regardless of ethnic group, Jewish or Palestinian. And that those who violate International humanitarian law are held accountable for their actions and sentenced according to the law on war crimes.

*Illouz, E. Känslor och populism. Hur rädsla, äckel, förbittring och kärlek undergräver demokratin. (Emotions and Populism. How fear, disgust, resentment and love undermine democracy) Daidalos, 2022.

* Starrs, C. J., & Békés, V. (2025). Historical intergenerational trauma transmission model: A comprehensive framework of family and offspring processes of transgenerational trauma. Traumatology, 31(2), 243–251