How Zionism Hijacked Jewish Identity to Justify a Genocide
They Took the Guilt, the Grief, and the Flag
The Holocaust was the darkest chapter in modern Jewish history, six million Jews murdered, entire communities erased. Stories of scattered survivors, shattered, and silenced. When they arrived in what would become the State of Israel, many thought they were finally safe. They were not.
From the beginning, the Zionist project had a problem. It claimed to speak for the Jewish people, but its early architects had little interest in those who had just survived the worst atrocity in living memory. The founders of the state did not see the survivors as heroes. They saw them as weak, damaged and embarrassing. They were spoken about with shame, accused of passivity, of not fighting back. They were seen as broken remnants of the old Jew, not part of the muscular, rifle-carrying image of the new one.
Many were dumped in temporary camps. Made to do menial labor. Given poor housing. Laughed at or pitied when they spoke. Their trauma was not treated. It was buried. And when they asked for help, they were often met with silence. But their suffering was not ignored. It was repackaged.
Israel took the Holocaust and turned it into a political weapon. Not to defend Jews, but to justify a state that quickly began committing violence in its own name. The guilt of Europe became Israel's shield. Holocaust memory was institutionalized, manipulated, and broadcast to the world, not just to remember the dead, but to silence the living.
Zionism, which was not the response of most Jews to fascism, suddenly claimed to be the answer. The survivors were used as proof, their tragedy was turned into a marketing tool, their stories, once dismissed or mocked inside Israel, were now elevated abroad to defend a state that would soon begin its own system of ethnic cleansing.
In 1948, as survivors were still rebuilding their lives, the Nakba began. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were expelled from their homes. Villages razed, families torn apart. And the world watched, confused, paralyzed by its own guilt. Israel used that guilt to escape accountability. The Holocaust had given it moral credit, credit that it spent fast.
And then came the flag.
The Star of David had been a symbol of Jewish identity for centuries. It appeared on synagogues, tombstones, manuscripts, prayer shawls. It was a sign of community, belief, and survival. The Nazis turned it into a badge of death. They stitched it onto yellow cloth and used it to mark Jews for humiliation, for ghettoization, and for extermination.
After the war, it should have returned to the people. To their homes, their rituals, their rebuilding. Instead, it became the centerpiece of a flag raised over a new state that did not represent all Jews, a state that many survivors did not choose, a state that many Orthodox Jews, socialists, and secular diaspora communities explicitly opposed.
But the star was no longer just a symbol of Judaism. Israel made it a symbol of itself. The Israeli state flew it over tanks, over checkpoints, over the rubble of bombed refugee camps, over segregated roads, over the prison of Gaza, over the remains of Palestinian homes. The same star that was once used to mark Jews for death was now used to justify the death of others.
The grief of the Holocaust was not honored. It was weaponized. The guilt of Europe was not transformed into justice. It was exploited. The symbols of a murdered people were not restored. They were repurposed for nationalism.
Today, criticism of Israel is often met with accusations of antisemitism, the shield still works. The pain of the Holocaust is still invoked to defend a state that builds walls, not peace. A state that bombs schools and hospitals. A state that shoots people waiting for bread.
It is time to separate memory from manipulation. Mourning from militarism. Judaism from Zionism. The survivors of the Holocaust deserved better. The victims of Israeli violence do too.
What was stolen must be named. They took the guilt. They took the grief. They took the flag.
And they used them all to bury another people.