This chapter examines the debate over the applicability of the term ‘concentration camp’ for the migrant detention centers at the southern border of the United States in the context of the Trump administration and its authoritarian turn. In June 2019, Congresswoman Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, when she declared the detention centers “concentration camps,” provoked a turn in Holocaust memory culture, as she asked Americans to look prior to the Holocaust to the long Western history of the concentration and detention of unwanted populations. Ocasio-Cortez’s public analogical reasoning produced heated reactions which fell primarily along party lines, with the Republican Party embracing Holocaust exceptionalism and the Democratic Party open to analogies as potential motivators of political action. The debate also opened another chapter in the scholarly discussion of the efficacy of analogical reasoning, with the conditions at the border and the Trump era’s abuses suggesting an urgency for some. For those interested in direct action, Ocasio-Cortez’s evocation of the memory of the Holocaust required immediate intervention in the name of Holocaust vigilance.

The conclusion provides a comprehensive overview of the mnemonic plasticity and the societal usages of exclusionary in the two case studies under review. The conclusion emphasizes the different political frameworks that have driven the rise and perpetuation of the exclusionary narratives in Israeli-Jewish and Palestinian society within the mnemonic realms reviewed while also highlighting the context-specific manifestations of the ensuing denial practices. Although this work does not propose a method of fusing the two foundational narratives or suggest ways in which the identified exclusionary narratives can be challenged and modified, the conclusion does set forth the practical and theoretical applications of this work, both in the Israeli-Palestinian arena and beyond. In addition to offering a practical applicability to non-regional scholarship and cross-cultural initiatives, it is the intent of this work to provide fertile ground for future scholarship on Israeli-Jewish and Palestinian mnemonic discourse in an effort to challenge the idealization of the past’s invocation and, instead, expose its neurasthenic and disabling effects in “service of the nation.” Concluding remarks to A Battlefield of Memory thus also address existing scholarly voids and potential future application of this work as a result of the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian crisis.

Through a study of the most prominent Holocaust institutes in Israel – Yad Vashem, Lohamei Hagetaot, and Yad Mordechai – Chapter 5 demonstrates that Holocaust mnemonic rituals serve a defined political purpose, namely the justification of the need for a strong and independent Israeli state as the only viable way to hinder a recurrence of the Holocaust. The deliberate usage of teleological architecture at Yad Mordecai and Yad Vashem seeks to inspire a redemptive visitor experience through a regulated physical move from the exhibited darkness and catastrophe of Europe to the light and rebirth in Israel, the former destroyed; the latter victorious. The emphasis on a Jewish rebirth in the wake of the Holocaust in the institutes’ historical exhibits and in annual commemorative ceremonies prompts the merging of the dissonant categories of victim and victor, forming a metaphorical testimony to what Martin Jaffee described as “the victim-community” in which “the victim is always both victim and victor.” Beyond the overt minimization of the fate of non-Jewish victims and post-Holocaust diasporic Jewry, the Zionist panacea channeled at the memory sites demands a foregoing of the physical Palestinian history of the three sites themselves. As a result, visitors to the historic exhibits and participants in annual mnemonic rituals continue to take part in a cultural palimpsest as they are propelled to remember the physically superimposed Jewish watershed rather than the Nakba.