Envy.

Psychoanalyst Melanie Klein defined envy as “the angry feeling that another person possesses and enjoys something desirable, the envious impulse being to take it away or to spoil it.” When it remains unconscious, envy does not merely distort perception, it becomes actively destructive, hostile to goodness itself. It is also acquisitive: it seeks to seize, absorb, and corrupt what it cannot create. In this sense, envy is profoundly narcissistic, and deeply corrosive to human relations. To be its target is to be at risk of erasure.

History offers repeated examples of this destructive impulse. In the early 1990s, retreating Iraqi forces set fire to Kuwaiti oil fields - an act not of strategy, but of spite. In Rwanda, longstanding resentments fed into the mass slaughter of Tutsis. And when Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip, the greenhouses left behind (fully functional and capable of sustaining economic life) were widely looted and destroyed rather than preserved. Time and again, we see a pattern: when something cannot be possessed, it is destroyed. The logic is not merely domination, but spoiling.

This dynamic is increasingly visible in the symbolic and narrative arena surrounding Israel and the Jews. For years, elements within Palestinian activism have engaged in the appropriation of Jewish and Israeli history, identity, and symbolism. This is not incidental. It is acquisitive. It is about taking what carries moral weight and repurposing it.

The pattern is clear: claims over Jewish historical figures, distortions of Jewish indigeneity, and the rebranding of Jewish cultural and historical narratives. These are not simply political arguments; they are attempts to appropriate identity itself in order to gain legitimacy and moral authority.

But the process does not stop at appropriation, it extends to desecration. During the Israel-Gaza conflict, activists and public figures have repeatedly invoked the Holocaust, branding Gaza a “new Holocaust” and accusing Israel of genocide. In doing so, they strip the Holocaust of its specificity and reduce it to a rhetorical weapon. What was a uniquely Jewish catastrophe becomes a generic metaphor, available for anyone to deploy.

This distortion is not happening in a vacuum. Politicians, media figures, and cultural institutions have enabled it, sometimes actively, sometimes through silence. The result is a steady erosion of the Holocaust’s historical meaning, and with it, the marginalisation of Jewish experience itself.

The display in Amsterdam on Holocaust Memorial Day -hundreds of shoes representing children killed in Gaza - is a stark example. The imagery is unmistakable. The symbolism is deliberate. This is not universal mourning; it is the appropriation of Holocaust iconography, lifted from its Jewish context and repurposed for a contemporary political narrative.

From a Kleinian perspective, the mechanism is familiar. What is envied is first appropriated, then diminished, then controlled. The message is implicit but unmistakable: your suffering was not unique; your history is not your own; your symbols are now ours to use.

What emerges is a deeply distorted moral landscape, one in which Jewish trauma is treated as symbolic currency, while Jews themselves are pushed to the margins, rendered abstract, or dismissed altogether. Nothing is protected, nothing is sacred. Not even the memory of the Holocaust remains untouched.