Politely dismantling collective punishment.
Originally published as "With regard to “The Great Silence”—a response to Ginger Gorman in The Big Smoke 3/8/25.
Emotional responses to horror deserve to be heard. Holocaust Inversion and collective punishment however only make matters worse.
These are some thoughts that speak strictly to the opinions offered by Ginger Gorman, published by The Big Smoke on the 1st of August, 2025, titled “The Great Silence”. An excerpt of this piece appears below.
I would rather not leave the author feeling personally attacked. I have no need for adversaries nor take any delight in public spectacle. I urge readers to consider her opinion as they ought consider mine: emotionally valid and environmentally explicable.
Collective punishment
The author’s expression of the “shame of being Jewish” speaks to an ironic and narcissistic conception of diaspora Jews’ roles in a foreign war.
I am not ashamed to be Jewish. This is because I do not hold global Jewry responsible for the devastation in Gaza, and because I do not believe in collective punishment.
The shame-betrothing punishment of Jews worldwide for the destruction of Gaza is something that I wholeheartedly abhor. Collective punishment against Jews is just as wrong as it is for those Palestinians we watch being pulled out from under rubble. This is not a likening of Jewish emotional distress to Gazans’ experiences—it is a comment on logical inconsistency.
It was not shame that drove me to find Palestinian families to donate to as the war broke out; nor was it pride that saw me begin advocating for Australian diaspora Jews as I watched hostage posters get torn down, shuls set alight, cars torched, and innumerable schools, businesses, and homes defaced with antisemitic graffiti.
It was dignity.
I do not hold Palestinian civilians responsible for October 7. I do not hold Chinese international students responsible for Uyghurs held in Xinjiang internment camps. I do not hold the local Russian deli owner responsible for annexing Ukraine, nor do I hold my Syrian barber responsible for the 650,000+ casualties of Assad’s civil war (as of December 2024). I do not wish any of these peoples to feel ashamed of who they are, just as I do not wish for Gorman to feel ashamed of being Jewish.
Psychoanalysts describe primary narcissism as an early phase of life in newborns, driven by a basic instinct for survival. Before the ego develops and we begin forming real relationships with the outside world, we are totally inwardly focussed. When I use the word narcissistic to describe the writer’s experience of shame, I use it in this sense. Regressing into a survivalistic, inward-turned state is not only an emotionally logical response to the inconceivable beyond, but a tried and tested one.
When I read the piece, I see real pain. While pain is no excuse for much of what has been published, it does help to explain it.
Holocaust invocation and Holocaust inversion
By identifying Jewishness as the source of shame, the author moves her psychological experience onto an external object: Jewishness.
Having amputated the shameful Jewish element from her personhood, the author then asks the reader to question how Jews—not “Zionists”, not “Israelis”—could “endure Nazi dehumanisation” then “perpetrate the same”.
By using the Holocaust as an analogous example to the Gaza war, the piece demonstrates either a denial of what happened during the Holocaust or confusion as to what is happening in Gaza.
More Jewish civilians were killed in five days during the Holocaust than all 60,000 Palestinians—civilians and militants combined—reported dead by Hamas.
In order to invoke the Holocaust, one should have at least an elementary understanding of some fundamentals. These fundamentals are what make the Holocaust exceptional on all levels—and yet, these fundamentals are what lend it to being so popularly harnessed for rhetorical flare.
Using numbers to compare one tragedy with another is something I have up until this point avoided. It feels insensitive. It feels grotesque. It feels morally warped to have to explain that by all metrics the Holocaust is as incorrect as it is offensive as a point of comparison to modern horrors, be they in Yemen, Syria, Gaza, or Sudan.
By holding Holocaust numbers against any other tragedy, it might perform the unwanted function of making those events seem less important. But at the same time, it feels just as morally fraught to allow for the Holocaust to be misrepresented and wielded as such a blunt, inappropriate yardstick.
While the Holocaust is measured by far more than just a death toll of six million Jews, civilian deaths are the metrics that Gorman uses to make the comparison: “more than 200,000 Palestinians have been killed or injured—mostly women and children.”
We don’t have numbers on Jews injured in the Holocaust—we call them survivors. No Jewish army or combatants played a contributing role in the extermination event that swept Europe. Men, women, and children were rounded up like cattle and exterminated for being Jewish in the wrong part of the world.
It’s important that we work with the writer’s “200,000” figure, but extrapolate from it a number that can actually be used as a comparison to Holocaust deaths:
As of 29 July 2025, the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry reported that over 60,000 Palestinians had been killed, with 60-70% of these being civilians. I have very little to say to anyone who does not feel haunted by such a number. I also find it difficult to trust the administration that carried out October 7 with ensuring that the world is provided with accurate statistics, but I’ll take them at their word for brevity’s sake.
This leaves us with a Gazan civilian death toll of about 42,000. Again, a haunting number of dead, but far less rhetorically explosive than the cited “200,000” killed or injured.
• On 29 September 1941, 33,771 Jewish civilians from Kyiv were systematically exterminated by machine gun fire at Babi Yar. According to the Einsatzgruppen Operational Situation Report, it took two days.
• On 23 October 1941, 25,000-30,000 Jewish civilians from Odessa were exterminated. This, too, took only two days.
• On 3 November 1943, 43,000 Polish Jewish civilians were exterminated in Operation Harvest Festival (Aktion Erntefest). The killings took place at the Majdanek, Trawniki, and Poniatowa camps and were carried out by SS and police units over the course of less than 24 hours.
More Jewish civilians were killed in five days during the Holocaust than all 60,000 Palestinians—civilians and militants combined—who have been reported dead by Hamas.
Over 100,000 in five days. That is what a Holocaust looks like. Actually, no it isn’t. 100,000 exterminated Jews is what one sixtieth of a Holocaust looks like.
These three isolated incidents, chosen only to meet Gorman on her own turf, should make clear that any invocation of the Holocaust is, to be generous, dishonest.
For clarity’s sake:
Of 82,242 Yugoslavian Jewish civilians, 67,228 were exterminated.
Of 71,611 Greek Jewish civilians, 58,800-65,000 were exterminated.
Of 185,026 Austrian Jewish civilians, 65,459 were exterminated.
Of 237,723 German Jewish civilians, 165,200 were exterminated.
Of 300,000-330,000 French Jewish civilians, 72,900-74,000 were exterminated.
Of 140,245 Dutch Jewish civilians, 102,000 were exterminated.
Of 825,007 Hungarian Jewish civilians, 564,507 were exterminated.
Of 1.07 million Romanian Jewish civilians (including Hungarian occupied northern Transylvania, Bessarabia, and Bukovina) 405,428-480,295 were exterminated.
Of 354,000 Czechoslovakian Jewish civilians, 260,000 were exterminated.
Of 93,479 Latvian Jewish civilians, 70,000 were exterminated.
Of 153,000 Lithuanian Jewish civilians, 130,000 were exterminated.
Of 3.03 million Soviet Jewish civilians in German-occupied territories, 1.34 million were exterminated.
Of 3.35 million Polish Jewish civilians, 2.7-3million were exterminated.
Gorman only gets worse
While irredeemably invoking the Holocaust—skipping over a painful litany of far more apt comparable examples of human suffering from The Congo, Syria, Sudan, Bosnia, or Tokyo—the piece proceeds to wield the Holocaust as a weapon against Jews.
The author morally separates herself from the Jewish population while simultaneously accusing the Holocaust’s victims of now being Holocaust perpetrators. This victim-perpetrator inversion of the Jews’ experience of the Holocaust is commonly referred to as Holocaust Inversion.
Holocaust Inversion is a defining feature of contemporary antisemitism. One does not have to invert the Holocaust to criticise Israel; one chooses to invert the Holocaust to ostracise Jews, to deny what actually took place in the Holocaust, and to divert the Jews’ positioning as victims of history’s most horrifying chapter into a narrative about Jewish sadism.
Painting the Jews as Nazis might be an incredibly popular shorthand for expressing emotional distress, resentment, or hatred, but it doesn’t do much to genuinely engage with the Jewish state. It does however suggest that a desire to cause harm is being placed as a priority higher than criticism.
Despite this, repeated pleas to not invert the Holocaust against Jews worldwide are somehow regularly interpreted as part of a conspiratorial ploy among a nefarious, narrow-minded, and parochial minority to silence criticism of Israel. When attempting to combat antisemitism, Jews immediately become targets of more antisemitism.
Jews see headlines referring to a “Final Solution to the Palestine Question”, talk of a “Gaza Holocaust”, and images that morph Israeli soldiers into Nazi stormtroopers, politicians into Hitler, and the Star of David into a swastika.
My Instagram feed is rife with accusations of Jewish “skin harvesting” and “Zionist lobby influence”. Whatever the intention of the piece’s language, its effect is to hollow out the historical meaning of the Holocaust and repurpose it as a weapon.
There is no logical explanation for Holocaust Inversion beyond the perversion of history and the desire to abuse Jewish people. Except for ignorance, and I would not accuse the author of that.
Some final points of order:
1. “Israel Katz’s ‘humanitarian city’ is widely understood to be a concentration camp.”
• The piece compares a proposed humanitarian resettlement zone to a concentration camp—a term historically tied to Nazi death camps. This is extremely inflammatory, made worse by the lie that it is “widely understood”. Cherry-picking a source to bolster this kind of rhetoric does not factually validate it, and claiming it to be “widely understood”—even in a misinformation epidemic—just doesn’t hold water.
• The analogy to “Arbeit Macht Frei”, famously on the Auschwitz gates, makes a mockery of both Jewish and Palestinian suffering.2. “Systematic murder of reporters”
• The claim that Israel is engaged in systematic assassination of journalists implies deliberate targeting of the press as a strategy. While over 100 journalists have been killed in Gaza, Israel maintains that deaths are collateral, not targeted.
• While I feel uneasy using Hamas’s data, I do it in order to facilitate communication. I assume the writer may understandably find it difficult to believe that Israel is not targeting reporters. What we all should logically be able to agree on is that targeting reporters and “systematic murder of reporters” are very different things. One is an unproven accusation and the other is propagandistic, Holocaust Inversion-fuelled hyperbole.3. “Purposeful mass extermination” / “Genocide”
• The piece repeatedly asserts that Israel is committing genocide. While some UN officials (like highly controversial Special Raconteur Francesca Albanese) have suggested this, the ICJ have clearly outlined that there has been no finding of genocide made. Using the term as if settled fact is one of the more dubious examples of wishful thinking in the piece.
• Joseph Goebbels once said that “if you repeat a lie often enough, people will begin to believe it.” The piece’s misrepresentation of an ongoing legal process signs either a misunderstanding of the court’s findings or malicious intent. I’m still searching for a grey area between those two possibilities.4. Assumption of Jewish (Israeli) intent
• Language like “picked off one by one”, “extermination”, “murderous retaliation”. The author removes all ambiguity about Israeli intent, portraying it as a calculated, sadistic country that should conjure shame from Jews. Intent is deeply disputed and is likely to be read by many as blood libel-adjacent, especially given the use of child death imagery.
• As cited above, this is the only war in which recycled, centuries-old blood libel is used to characterise a country’s military engagement. This is not to justify how many children are dead, but to address the rhetorical foundations undergirding why we consider Israel’s killing of children to be representative of the Jewish people at large.
• We would never think to refer to Assad as a “babykiller”, nor any of the other tyrants whose wars continue to kill countless helpless children in numbers equal to or greater than what we see in Gaza. It is antisemitism that drives this rhetoric.5. “The government claims its state faces an existential threat.”
• This is a paraphrasing of the author’s words which The Big Smoke chose to use to use in the opening of the article.
• You don’t have to take the Israeli government’s word for it. Iran and its proxies, among many others, are anti-zionist in their policies and their actions. Anti-zionism is by definition an existential threat to the existence of a Jewish state. Anti-zionists are not critics of Israel’s actions, but critics of its existence.
• Zionism is not a political orientation. It was an ambition to create a modern state for a persecuted minority in the land they’d been exiled from. It still is that ambition, only now the ambition has shifted from the establishment of a state to the arguing for its right to continue to be allowed to continue to exist.
• The word Zionism only exists now to perform an oppositional function: the “anti-zionist” believes that Jews should not be allowed to have a state, and that Israel should be dissolved. The “Zionist” is someone who hears that and says: “I do not believe that eliminating the only Jewish state will culminate in a net-positive.”6. What was omitted:
• Hamas’s use of civilian areas for military operations
• Irrefutable evidence of hostages held in hospitals or homes
• Irrefutable evidence of hospitals and schools used for military operations
• October 7 sexual violence
• Israel’s engagement in a war with Iran and her three proxies Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis in simultaneity
• That this war is not being fought over what Israel does, but over the mere fact that Israel is.
Some parting words:
I am well aware that by now most of you will no longer be reading. Don’t worry, and nobody’s going to accuse you of antisemitism for that.
It’s important for me to say that while I haven’t had the opportunity to engage with most of the piece, I’ve tried to home in on what I consider to be its most glaring opportunities for further discussion.
It is my hope that within robust debate, something we invite when we write op-eds, that there is space for mutual respect. To those who may have taken issue with The Great Silence, I urge you to engage with these ideas respectfully and leave the ad hominem out. To those who have taken issue with mine, I’d very much appreciate not being called either a Nazi, a Kapo, or a Jewish pig this week.
To the author, Ginger Gorman: while I disagree with the ideas you’ve expressed, I wholeheartedly defend your right to speak your mind. I hope that what I’ve written speaks not to a rejection of who you are, but merely to a fierce disagreement with one piece you happened to have written.
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Thanks for your clarity, Joshua. Gorman’s article was quite painful to read!
Incisive and informative. Thank you Joshua.