Kristallnacht in the West Bank on Holocaust Remembrance Day
Settlers stage pogroms in the West Bank, Israel flirts with Nazis, Jewish leaders and institutions look away.
On Tuesday, Holocaust Remembrance Day, as leaders and institutions around the world commemorated the six million Jews murdered by the Nazis—and, to a lesser extent, the six million others—Jewish settlers in the West Bank marked the occasion by staging their own Kristallnacht. Or, more precisely, a Feuernacht: “Night of Fire.”
Hundreds of settlers under the protection of the IDF rampaged through three villages in Masafer Yatta, carrying out a tightly coordinated pogrom. They stole 150 head of livestock, uprooted 500 olive trees, torched homes and cars, and beat men, women, and children with clubs.
In Al-Tuban, settlers tried to burn a family alive inside a locked shed, piling wood and straw against the door and setting it on fire; one child was left wheezing from smoke inhalation. In Al-Fakhit, masked settlers clubbed 49-year-old Mohammad Abu Sabha unconscious outside his home, fracturing his skull (second video below), then attacked his family, breaking his elderly mother’s arm and ribs and striking his teenage daughter as soldiers stood by. In Al-Halawa, settlers and soldiers jointly blocked ambulances and fire trucks at gunpoint after settlers stoned them.
The attack lasted over five hours. My sources on the ground described pure terror: families barricading their doors, hiding children, then fleeing for their lives as smoke filled their homes. The only arrests made were of wounded Palestinian villagers.
The Feuernacht was not confined to Masafer Yatta. Earlier that day, masked settlers emerged from a newly erected outpost deep inside Area B to descend on Beit Fajjar, near Bethlehem, attacking a family home and setting multiple vehicles ablaze. They scrawled Hebrew slogans across walls—“Judea Is Awakening”—alongside a Star of David, then hurled stones at neighboring houses, shattering windows and leaving the village littered with broken glass. Residents reported hearing live gunfire during the attack.
Elsewhere in the West Bank, the IDF launched sweeping overnight raids, arresting at least 130 people across multiple governorates and transferring them to what Israeli human rights groups describe as a “network of torture camps,” where detainees have been reduced to “walking skeletons” under National Security Minister Ben-Gvir’s policy of starvation. Israeli forces also shot a 20-year-old man dead in South Hebron and wounded several others, including a young man shot in the thigh and arrested in Tulkarm as he left his home with his sister.
In Ras Ein al-Auja—once the largest shepherding community in the West Bank—the last remaining family fled after years of escalating settler violence turned into near-daily pogroms over the past month. In 2024, Israel’s campaign of stripping the local Palestinians of their rights culminated in the unilateral nullification of their land deeds, many of which dated back to Jordanian rule. Armed, masked settlers soon surrounded the village with outposts, cut water and electricity lines, stole livestock, and vandalized homes and property, ultimately emptying the area of its roughly 800 residents.
Homes in the tiny Bedouin village of Mukhmas were burned to the ground for the third time in as many months.
My grandparents and great-grandparents, between them, survived the Russian pogroms, the Holocaust, and the Farhud in Iraq. These were the stories I grew up with, and they taught a simple lesson: recognize what’s unfolding before it’s too late, and do everything you can to stop it.
Today, as this desecration is carried out in our name—through the chillingly familiar pattern of stripping of rights, dispossession, terror, and expulsion—where are Jewish leaders and institutions?
Many of them have remained focused on the urgent issue of the day: scolding people for drawing comparisons between the Nazis and ICE, as it leads its own reign of state-backed terror, tearing families apart and executing civilians in the street.
On Sunday, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz said, “We have got children hiding in their houses, afraid to go outside. Many of us grew up reading that story of Anne Frank. Somebody’s gonna write that children’s story about Minnesota.”
In response, the U.S. Holocaust Museum—which has never posted about settler violence, and certainly not about ICE—posted this:
It may be useful to know that last year, Trump announced the appointment of Siggy Flicker to the Board of Trustees of the Holocaust Memorial Council. Flicker, as you hopefully don’t know, starred in The Real Housewives of New Jersey and, confusingly, Why Am I Still Single?!
More to the point, Flicker—now a custodian of the memory of the Holocaust—is the proud stepmother of a January 6 insurrectionist, whose photos from inside the Capitol she herself posted that day. At her induction ceremony to the Holocaust Memorial Council, Flicker stood by Donald Trump and raised an Israeli flag.
On social media, when she isn’t reposting content from President Trump and the US Holocaust Museum, Flicker regularly shares conspiracy theories. She promoted QAnon content during its heyday, and more recently, after Ilhan Omar was attacked while speaking at a town hall, she circulated a post claiming the assailant was actually an actor.
But she also offers a masterclass in demonizing entire ethnic groups, begging the question of how much she knows about what led to the Holocaust. One post she shared reads, “Stop comparing ICE to Nazis. Jews were not lawbreakers.” In another, she writes, “We should be educating every single human on this earth about this evil ideology called ISLAM! Save humanity from this radical poison!!!”
Has anyone expressed outrage that someone so plainly unfit to manage even a Twitter account has been entrusted with the memory of the Holocaust?
Also on the Board of Trustees is Martin Oliner, an attorney and far-right pro-Israel activist. Last year, he penned an op-ed for The Jerusalem Post—Let Donald Trump make Gaza great again—in which he explicitly advocated for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza.
“Let’s not mince words here,” Oliner wrote. “The people of Gaza are collectively guilty for invading Israel, murdering, raping and kidnapping Israelis and holding them hostage…. they are fundamentally evil, and they must pay a price for their actions.”
Of forced emigration, he wrote: “If enough countries get involved, the international problem of Gaza could be solved.” Call it a final solution.
In another op-ed, Make the Holocaust Memorial Council great again—are you sensing the pattern here?—Oliner wrote that he was grateful that Trump had “begun cleaning house at the [Holocaust] museum.”
In its new form, Oliner wrote, “Its educational approach must be changed. The museum has no shortage of visitors and reaches thousands of teachers. But they are taught about hate, in general… Being indirect by talking more generally about ‘hate’ has been incredibly ineffective.” Antisemitism is the worst form of hate, he explains, and the only one that should be taught at the Holocaust Museum.
Three months later, the Holocaust Museum of LA was forced to apologize for suggesting that nobody should be genocided.
So it should come as no surprise that the Holocaust Museum, run by far-right Trump cronies, would say such things. But what about the good liberals?
Moving left, we reach Jonathan Greenblatt, head of the ADL, both-sidesing Walz’s Anne Frank remark alongside the Trump administration’s smears of Alex Pretti, while also whitewashing his murder:
Greenblatt—who has openly reoriented the Anti-Defamation League away from its broader anti-hate mission, toward a singular focus on antisemitism defined to center anti-Zionism—has never tweeted directly about ICE, nor about settler violence in the West Bank. He did, though, once turn to Twitter to announce the ADL’s intention to “correct the misguided move by Ben & Jerry’s independent leadership to pull out of areas in the West Bank.” That’s right: Greenblatt has condemned ice cream more times than he has condemned ICE.1
According to the ADL, if comparing ICE to the Nazis is wrong, then comparing Israel to the Nazis is downright antisemitic. This is from the Understanding Antisemitism and Anti-Zionism page of the ADL’s website:
For my own part, I’d suggest that if Israel and its defenders would like to see the Nazi comparisons go away, perhaps they should consider cutting ties with Nazi-friendly figures. Remember this?
Last weekend, after Elon Musk’s latest Nazi babbling came under fire, even Prime Minister Netanyahu took time out of his busy schedule to defend him:
In 2025, Israel’s Genesis Prize Foundation, dubbed the “Jewish Nobel,” announced its first non-Jewish recipient: Argentina’s neo-fascist president Javier Milei, who, while maintaining steadfast support of Israel, appointed a literal Nazi to head Argentina’s state lawyers.
In November, Amichai Chikli, Israel’s minister for Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism, invited the British white nationalist activist Tommy Robinson to tour Israel as his guest. Robinson has a long public record of antisemitism, including claims of Jewish control over British politics and media and deep ties to extremist networks associated with neo-Nazi and Holocaust-distortionist politics.
Nor was the invitation an anomaly. Chikli has repeatedly argued that Europe’s nationalist right should be embraced as partners against what he calls the “real” antisemitic threat—radical Islam—and has made this approach the basis of a now-annual antisemitism conference in Jerusalem.
Last week, as I noted in The End of Liberal Zionism, Israel deported an American Jewish activist due to his “leftism,” citing as evidence a photo of him protesting against Nazis in Charlottesville. The insinuation is unmistakable: that someone who would protest Nazis might also protest Israel.
They may not be wrong—and there is, tellingly, also a huge overlap between pro-Palestine and anti-ICE protesters. One might think this would finally lay to rest the claim that the pro-Palestine movement is animated by antisemitism rather than opposition to state-backed ethnic violence and solidarity with oppressed people. But no.
When I posed this as a question on Twitter, pro-Israel accounts explained to me all the reasons I was wrong: the protesters don’t care about immigrants, they’re actually just attempting to hijack and redirect the anger toward Israel; they are strictly there to connect ICE to the IDF; they believe ICE is controlled by Jews.
In the case of both protest movements—pro-Palestine and anti-ICE—their critics refuse to confront state violence on its own terms, preferring instead to recast opposition as evidence of a deeper, more sinister motive.
It’s worth recalling that in 2015, Benjamin Netanyahu stood before the World Zionist Congress and claimed that Adolf Hitler did not intend to exterminate Europe’s Jews—only to expel them—until he was persuaded otherwise by the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini. The claim was swiftly rejected by Holocaust scholars, who noted that Hitler’s genocidal intent long predated the meeting, and that there is no record whatsoever of the conversation Netanyahu described:
The purpose of the lie, however, was clear. Netanyahu was advancing a long-running political argument, drawn from fringe Holocaust scholarship, meant to trace a straight line from Husseini to Yasser Arafat, from Arafat to today’s Palestinians, and from today’s Palestinians back to Nazism; in this rendering, the Palestinian struggle is not a liberation movement, but a continuation of the Holocaust.
Taken together, these episodes reveal a durable political logic. State violence, whether carried out by ICE in American cities or by settlers and soldiers in the West Bank, is insulated from historical comparison to the singular atrocity of the Holocaust—and as such, from the highest degree of moral scrutiny. Holocaust memory itself is reduced to an instrument of political enforcement, overseen by radical and unhinged ideologues unburdened by history. Figures and movements with documented ties to Nazism can be welcomed into the fold, so long as their hatred is redirected toward a more useful scapegoat. Nazism is never a warning about what states do to the marginalized; it is a charge reserved exclusively for Palestinians, and for anyone who stands with them.
“There are two million Nazis in Judea and Samaria,” Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich declared shortly after October 7, and from there, the Jewish reign of terror reached new heights.
In the West Bank, out in the open and for everyone to see, roaming bands of masked, heavily armed settlers—operating under state and military protection—are systematically emptying Palestinian communities through violence and terror. In the past two years, dozens of Palestinian communities have been erased. Thousands of Palestinians have been killed. Tens of thousands of refugees have been dispossessed again, their homes reduced to rubble by airstrikes. Thousands more have been disappeared into prisons where they are routinely starved and tortured. In the West Bank, there is no Hamas to point to, no October 7 to blame.
And yet, the dominant response from Jewish institutions has been silence. This, we were taught, is as grave a crime as any. History will not judge it kindly.
(Cover photo taken by Ron Amir for +972 magazine.)
In fairness, many Jewish leaders and institutions—even explicitly Zionist ones like J Street—have condemned both settler violence and the ICE raids. But even among them, there remains, by and large, a refusal to draw historical comparisons.
Last year, J Street founder and president Jeremy Ben-Ami argued that, on the merits, Israel’s actions will likely be judged by international courts as genocide, and that its leaders will one day be held legally and morally accountable. Yet he says he is personally unable to use the word genocide himself. The trauma of his family’s history—and his association of the term exclusively with the Holocaust—keeps him from naming what he nonetheless believes is true.
I feel so betrayed by my whole German education.
- Watch out for the subtle beginnings of fascism, notice the pattern, so we can make sure Never Again etc.
- Oh, I think I spotted one over there!
- Ok, now that's trivialising the holocaust, I'm afraid that is against the law.
unstintingly truthful, incredibly powerful writing. Thank you for all you have done and all you do.