Intersecting Traumas:
The Holocaust, the Nakba, and the Cost of Safety in Israel-Palestine
Imagine: You’re Jewish and recently been freed from one of the worst experiences imaginable. You’ve lost your home, your family is dead or missing, the life you knew has been erased, and you endured unspeakable horrors to survive. Now the war is over, but with your home destroyed, there’s nowhere to go. The newly created state of Israel offers you passage and a chance to start over. Yet, when you arrive, the homes awaiting you still hold traces of those who lived there before—clothes in closets, dishes in cupboards, baby shoes on the floor.
Israeli veteran Yoran Kaniuk recalls this moment with painful clarity:
“There were Arabs standing between Lydda and Ramle, crying. They wanted to go back to their homes, and I could do nothing. And I felt very strongly about it, because I saw them standing there—no shoes—and now they have to start walking and looking for someplace else. Then came the night. And I don’t know how many—15 or 16…trucks full of people that just came on the ship from the Holocaust. And they took over the town in five minutes. And so the whole tragedy was there in one moment. Here are the Arabs who used to live there. And here are the people who come from Auschwitz… And it’s not that it’s right or wrong, but it’s just a fact.”
This is not about blame. It is about grappling with how histories of trauma intersect and collide. The Holocaust was a horrifying genocide, a deliberate erasure of six million Jews and countless others, leaving deep scars on survivors and the world. The Nakba, or “catastrophe,” was the violent displacement of the Palestinian people, forcibly ejected in a series of brutal attacks during the formation of the Israeli state. What should be done when a home for one group comes at the displacement of another? How should victims pushed into acts of oppression by desperation be viewed?
The Nakba, lesser known than the Holocaust, is a terror of displacement, violence, and ejection. When the League of Nations partitioned Palestine to create Israel, half the land—including nearly all the fertile farmland—was given to the Jewish minority. This division, made without Palestinian consent, was followed by violence as Israeli militias forcibly cleared these lands. Entire villages were destroyed. Terrified Palestinians fled, with historians estimating that 700,000-800,000 became refugees, either crammed into regions like Gaza or seeking refuge in neighboring countries such as Jordan, Lebanon, and Egypt.
Persistent denialism follows both of these events. Holocaust denial continues to erode the truth of Jewish suffering, despite the overwhelming evidence of its horrors. Meanwhile, the Nakba is erased from the narrative of Israel’s founding, as seen in places like the American Jewish Committee’s timeline of events of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Denialism allows one-sided narratives to flourish, reducing complex histories into binary tales of hero and villain. It stifles justice, letting people cling to a preferred version of history that absolves them of responsibility for, or sometimes merely thinking about, uncomfortable truths.
If Holocaust survivors had been given homes of Nazis—those complicit in their suffering—it might feel like reparation or justice. But instead, survivors were placed in the homes of Palestinians, people who had no roles in the systematic erasure of European Jews.
These were people whose major crime was living on land that a few powerful leaders decided should be given to others.
While arguments could be made that Arabs eventually harmed the Jewish population by attacking settlements and engaging in regional wars, the question arises: Was this the fallout of cycles of harm and violence similar to those we are trapped in today in that same region?
It is impossible to ignore that the Jewish people were systematically failed for centuries by sister religions, governments, and neighbors. Targets of Rome, maligned for deicide by the Christians, blamed for the plagues in Europe, and forcibly ejected from Muslim- and Christian-run countries, for Jews, Zionism was a response to real and prolonged human suffering. For many Jews, Israel still feels like the only hope for survival after the Holocaust.
Early Zionist leaders, such as Theodor Herzl, called for a Jewish homeland long before World War II, citing the need for safety amid persistent persecution. While Herzl himself suggested places like Uganda, others emphasized Palestine, supported by Christian Zionists who believed that Jewish return would hasten the Second Coming, a support contentious for many religious Jews.
If you are unfamiliar with the Christian brand of Zionism, it is worth noting that the Second Coming ends up with only a remnant of Jewish people being alive at the end of it; so, a second and exponentially worse Holocaust is baked in with Christian Zionist support. Most CZ’s handwave this with: “but most of them will probably convert instead of die” and/or CZ leadership highlights the remnant saved, not the majority lost, burying the implications.
Religious people often point to the Bible for two things: the idea that the Jewish people were given the region of Palestine and that in order to claim that gift, the Jewish people had to go to war for it. However, it is ethically clear that creating more victims does not answer the cries of the oppressed. For survivors of unimaginable trauma, safety is an understandable goal, but methods of achieving it matter. Forcible ejection, violence, and dispossession perpetuate cycles of harm and create new wounds for future generations to bear.
This is the reality that Kaniuk described in the opening quote—a tragedy layered on a tragedy. Wrestling with these histories means holding space for the pain of both. It means recognizing that the Holocaust and the Nakba are not competing narratives but intersecting ones, two sides of the coin of human suffering in the region of Palestine & Israel rising from choices born of desperation.
Acknowledging these truths is not about blame but about understanding the full picture. It is about resisting the temptation to simplify history into heroes and villains. Only by grappling with the complexities of these overlapping traumas can we begin to build a future rooted in justice, empathy, and a commitment to breaking cycles of harm. History offers us a lesson, if we are willing to learn: to honor the pain of the past by refusing to perpetuate it.
The Holocaust and the Nakba are not competing narratives but intersecting ones, two sides of the coin of human suffering in the region of Palestine & Israel.