Stories That Kill
How denial and victimhood reshape moral reality
Every nation carries a story about itself—one that explains where it came from, what it has endured, and why it deserves recognition. These stories are powerful because they become a lens through which the past and present are understood, and their repetition fortifies the conviction that the story is not just a narrative but the truth itself.
I want to tell you the story of two communities, but before naming them, I’d like you to notice their similarities. This isn’t a trick, but names carry weight and sometimes prevent us from hearing the facts on their own terms.
Two Communities
In the first community, neighbors who had lived side by side for generations turned on one another in a single day of extraordinary violence. Men, women, and children were murdered in their homes by people who knew them by name; the killings were carried out by neighbors. Within days, the community’s leadership denied the atrocities had occurred at all, blamed the victims for provoking the violence, and insisted the eyewitness testimony was fabricated propaganda. The men convicted and executed for the killings were absorbed into national memory as heroes. Their execution date became a day of annual commemoration, and state and movement narratives, including school materials, honored the convicted killers as martyrs of the national struggle.
In the second community, a similar act of neighbor violence unfolded under wartime conditions. Men, women, and children—again, people known to their killers—were rounded up, beaten, and burned alive. Although the killings occurred under occupation, they were not simply ordered and executed by the occupying power. Yet, for decades afterward, the community maintained that the atrocity had been committed entirely by outsiders. When a historian published evidence to the contrary, the response caused a societal rupture: accusations of betrayal, claims that the evidence was exaggerated or fabricated, and a fierce institutional effort to reassert the community’s identity as victim rather than perpetrator.
These two cases are not equivalent: one involves a stateless people living under ongoing displacement; the other involves a sovereign nation with institutional control over its own memory. The structural conditions differ enormously, which is why the pattern feels instructive: violence by neighbors, followed by denial, followed by the absorption of perpetrators into a narrative of collective victimhood. While the cases operate across such different circumstances, the similarity of their responses suggests that what we are looking at is a feature of how national stories work; it’s not just about politics.
You may have recognized one or both of these communities. The first is the Palestinian response to the 1929 Hebron massacre. The second is the Polish response to the 1941 Jedwabne massacre. If you did recognize them, notice what happened in your mind at the moment of recognition—did the facts change, or did the frame around them shift? Did you feel yourself wanting to stop reading?
What Happened
On August 24, 1929, in the ancient city of Hebron—Judaism’s second holiest city, where roughly 800 Jews lived among 20,000 Muslims—a mob incited by rumors that Jews planned to seize the Al-Aqsa Mosque attacked the Jewish community. Over the course of two days, sixty-seven Jews were murdered and dozens more wounded. Victims were stabbed, bludgeoned, and in some cases mutilated by people who had been their neighbors, shopkeepers, and friends. At the same time, nearly two dozen Arab men and women risked their own lives to shelter Jewish neighbors from the mob; at least 250 Jews and their descendants owe their survival to those rescuers. The British evacuated the surviving Jews, ending a continuous Jewish presence in Hebron that had persisted for centuries.
On July 10, 1941, in the small Polish town of Jedwabne, shortly after the German invasion of the Soviet-occupied eastern territories, Polish townspeople rounded up their Jewish neighbors—men, women, and children—beat them, drove them into a barn, and set it on fire. Estimates of the death toll range from several hundred to sixteen hundred; what is not contested is the near-total character of the killing. Only a handful of Jews survived the day.
If Hebron's story contains a small but honored place for rescuers, Jedwabne's does not. The killing was so nearly total, and the postwar silence so deep, that the only "righteous" figures we can name are villagers who hid a handful of survivors after the massacre—people later beaten or driven out for their efforts. For half a century, a monument in Jedwabne attributed the massacre to the German Gestapo. It was not until 2001, when the historian Jan Gross published Neighbors, drawing on survivor testimony and wartime trial records, that the role of Polish perpetrators entered public knowledge—and ignited a national crisis over what Poland owed its own history.
Deadly Sacred
Both communities absorbed these events in a way that made the violence feel explicable and necessary, reflecting a core feature of what Robert Bellah calls “civil religion.” This helps explain how national stories work: much like theology, nations construct sacred stories that bind meaning to motivation, make collective suffering purposeful, and render it both intelligible and, in some sense, sufferable.
In Palestinian memory, the men executed for their role in the 1929 violence are celebrated as some of the first martyrs of the national cause, their letters and popular poems portraying them as heroes who gladly gave their souls for the homeland. In the Polish case, Catholic messianism casts the nation as a “Christ among nations,” suffering not just historically but redemptively. Once suffering is sanctified in this way, these frameworks do not just support the political argument—they are the political argument, and revision feels more like desecration than correction.
Political consequences follow from the sacred structure. Sanctified victimhood can win international sympathy, tighten bonds at home, and justify present-day positions that are not grounded in history. It can also harden into the defensive form of civil religion that Bellah warned about—a story so tightly sealed that no new information can get in.
In Hebron, the same massacre is taught in Israeli classrooms alongside stories of the Arab families who sheltered their Jewish neighbors from the mob. In much of Palestinian public memory, Jews who once lived in Hebron, and the 1929 massacre itself, barely appear; Jewish neighbors have been largely erased from the story.
The Cost of a Story
Studying the Polish response to Jedwabne, the psychologist Krystyna Skarżyńska pointed to the core difficulty: it is almost structurally impossible to accept cruelty committed by one’s own community when that community’s identity rests on seeing itself solely as a victim. Jan Gerber calls this a “dialectic of victimhood,” where acknowledging one group’s suffering shrinks the moral space available to others and turns remembrance into a competition.
Together, these dynamics explain why evidence of neighbor violence so often fails to produce genuine reckoning. The narrative does not reject the evidence outright. It reorganizes it—reframing perpetrators as defenders, recasting atrocities as provocations, absorbing the uncomfortable facts into a story that leaves the community’s moral self-image intact. In both cases, the victims who disappear from the story are Jewish, so at what point does a pattern harden into a structure?
None of this is unique to Palestinians or Poles. Nations, like individuals, tend to remember what affirms them and reinterpret what challenges them. The question is not whether this happens—it does—but whether there is room to hold complexity.
See Thy Neighbor
What would it look like for a national story to include both suffering and responsibility? To acknowledge not only what was done to “us,” but also what was done by “us”—and what was done for us, by people on the other side?
In Hebron’s Jewish Museum, alongside the names of the dead, there is a section dedicated to the Arab families who risked their lives to shelter their Jewish neighbors from the mob. The museum was established by settlers, among the most nationalist Israelis in the country, and yet it holds space for the humanity on the other side. Yardena Schwartz, who spent years reporting on both communities in Hebron, writes that she often tried to imagine how different life would be if that kind of recognition could exist in Palestinian society—their suffering honored without erasing the history of the Jewish people in this land. “But what if?” she asks. “Is it too naive to wish?”
If there is hope here, it is one Bellah himself held, even as he recognized the odds against it: that each tradition holds resources for renewal, and that the covenant a nation makes with its own past can be renegotiated—not by abandoning the story, but by making it large enough to hold what it has excluded.
I am grateful to Joanna Michlic and Yardena Schwartz for the extraordinary work they have done on Jedwabne and Hebron, respectively—scholarship and reporting on which this essay depends.
Sources
Bellah, Robert N. "Civil Religion in America." Daedalus 96, no. 1 (1967): 1–21. ———. The Broken Covenant: American Civil Religion in Time of Trial. New York: Seabury Press, 1975.
Gerber, Jan. “The Competition of Victims: On Postcolonialism and Holocaust Remembrance.” Telos, January 27, 2025.
Gross, Jan T. Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001.
Schwartz, Yardena. Ghosts of a Holy War: A Reporter, a Lost Generation, and the Untold Story of the Hebron Massacre. New York: Dutton, 2024.
Skarżyńska, Krystyna. “Zbiorowa wyobraźnia, współna wina” [Collective Imagination, Common Guilt]. Gazeta Wyborcza, November 25–26, 2000. Cited in Antony Polonsky and Joanna B. Michlic, eds., The Neighbors Respond: The Controversy over the Jedwabne Massacre in Poland (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).
Fascinating. Thank you