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This was the case in several well-known genocides of the 20th century, such as that of the Herero and Nama in German South West Africa, now Namibia, that began in 1904; the Armenians in World War I; and, indeed, even in the Holocaust, which began with the German attempt to expel the Jews and ended up with their murder.
To this day, only a few scholars of the Holocaust — and no institutions dedicated to researching and commemorating it — have issued warnings that Israel could be accused of carrying out war crimes, crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing or genocide. This silence has made a mockery of the slogan “Never again,” transforming its meaning from an assertion of resistance to inhumanity wherever it is perpetrated to an excuse, an apology, indeed, even a carte blanche for destroying others by invoking one’s own past victimhood.
This is another of the many incalculable costs of the current catastrophe. As Israel is literally trying to wipe out Palestinian existence in Gaza and is exercising increasing violence against Palestinians in the West Bank, the moral and historical credit that the Jewish state has drawn on until now is running out.
Israel, created in the wake of the Holocaust as the answer to the Nazi genocide of the Jews, has always insisted that any threat to its security must be seen as potentially leading to another Auschwitz. This provides Israel with license to portray those it perceives as its enemies as Nazis — a term used repeatedly by Israeli media figures to depict Hamas and, by extension, all Gazans, based on the popular assertion that none of them are “uninvolved,” not even the infants, who would grow up to be militants.
This is not a new phenomenon. As early as Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982, Prime Minister Menachem Begin compared Yasir Arafat, then hunkered down in Beirut, to Adolf Hitler in his Berlin bunker. This time, the analogy is being used in connection with a policy aimed at uprooting and removing the entire population of Gaza.
The daily scenes of horror in Gaza, from which the Israeli public is shielded by its own media’s self-censorship, expose the lies of Israeli propaganda that this is a war of defense against a Nazi-like enemy. One shudders when Israeli spokespeople shamelessly utter the hollow slogan of the I.D.F. being the “most moral army in the world.”
Some European nations, such as France, Britain and Germany, as well as Canada, have feebly protested Israeli actions, especially since it breached the cease-fire in March. But they have neither suspended arms shipments nor taken many concrete and meaningful economic or political steps that might deter Mr. Netanyahu’s government.
For a while, the United States government seemed to have lost interest in Gaza, with President Trump initially announcing in February that the United States would take over Gaza, promising to turn it into “the Riviera of the Middle East,” and then letting Israel get on with the Strip’s destruction and turning his attention to Iran. At the moment, one can only hope that Mr. Trump will again pressure a reluctant Mr. Netanyahu to at least reach a new cease-fire and put an end to the relentless killing.
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Israel’s political leadership and its citizenry will have to decide. There seems to be little domestic pressure for the urgently needed change of paradigm: the recognition that there is no solution to this conflict other than an Israeli-Palestinian agreement to share the land under whatever parameters the two sides agree on, be it two states, one state or a confederation. Robust external pressure from the country’s allies also appears unlikely. I am deeply worried that Israel will persist on its disastrous course, remaking itself, perhaps irreversibly, into a full-blown authoritarian apartheid state. Such states, as history has taught us, do not last.
Another question arises: What consequences will Israel’s moral reversal have for the culture of Holocaust commemoration, and the politics of memory, education and scholarship, when so many of its intellectual and administrative leaders have up to now refused to face up to their responsibility to denounce inhumanity and genocide wherever they occur?
Those engaged in the worldwide culture of commemoration and remembrance built around the Holocaust will have to confront a moral reckoning. The wider community of genocide scholars — those engaged in the study of comparative genocide or of any one of the many other genocides that have marred human history — is now edging ever closer toward a consensus over describing events in Gaza as a genocide.
In November, a little more than a year into the war, the Israeli genocide scholar Shmuel Lederman joined the growing chorus of opinion that Israel was engaged in genocidal actions. The Canadian international lawyer William Schabas came to the same conclusion last year and has recently described Israel’s military campaign in Gaza as “absolutely” a genocide.
Other genocide experts, such as Melanie O’Brien, president of the International Association of Genocide Scholars, and the British specialist Martin Shaw (who has also said that the Hamas attack was genocidal), have reached the same conclusion, while the Australian scholar A. Dirk Moses of the City University of New York described these events in the Dutch publication NRC as a “mix of genocidal and military logic.” In the same article, Uğur Ümit Üngör, a professor at the Amsterdam-based NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, said there are probably scholars who still do not think it’s genocide, but “I don’t know them.”
Most Holocaust scholars I know don’t hold, or at least publicly express, this view. With a few notable exceptions, such as the Israeli Raz Segal, program director of Holocaust and genocide studies at Stockton University in New Jersey, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem historians Amos Goldberg and Daniel Blatman, the majority of academics engaged with the history of the Nazi genocide of the Jews have stayed remarkably silent, while some have openly denied Israel’s crimes in Gaza, or accused their more critical colleagues of incendiary speech, wild exaggeration, well poisoning and antisemitism.
In December the Holocaust scholar Norman J.W. Goda opined that “genocide charges like this have long been used as a fig leaf for broader challenges to Israel’s legitimacy,” expressing his worry that “they have cheapened the gravity of the word genocide itself.” This “genocide libel,” as Dr. Goda referred to it in an essay, “deploys a range of antisemitic tropes,” including “the coupling of the genocide charge with the deliberate killing of children, images of whom are ubiquitous on NGO, social media, and other platforms that charge Israel with genocide.”
In other words, showing images of Palestinian children ripped apart by U.S.-made bombs launched by Israeli pilots is, in this view, an antisemitic act.
Most recently, Dr. Goda and a respected historian of Europe, Jeffrey Herf, wrote in The Washington Post that “the genocide accusation hurled against Israel draws on deep wells of fear and hatred” found in “radical interpretations of both Christianity and Islam.” It “has shifted opprobrium from Jews as a religious/ethnic group to the state of Israel, which it depicts as inherently evil.”
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What are the ramifications of this rift between genocide scholars and Holocaust historians? This is not merely a squabble within academe. The memory culture created in recent decades around the Holocaust encompasses much more than the genocide of the Jews. It has come to play a crucial role in politics, education and identity.
Museums dedicated to the Holocaust have served as models for representations of other genocides around the world. Insistence that the lessons of the Holocaust demand the promotion of tolerance, diversity, antiracism and support for migrants and refugees, not to mention human rights and international humanitarian law, is rooted in an understanding of the universal implications of this crime in the heart of Western civilization at the peak of modernity.
Discrediting genocide scholars who call out Israel’s genocide in Gaza as antisemitic threatens to erode the foundation of genocide studies: the ongoing need to define, prevent, punish and reconstruct the history of genocide. Suggesting that this endeavor is motivated instead by malign interests and sentiments — that it is driven by the very hatred and prejudice that was at the root of the Holocaust — is not only morally scandalous, it provides an opening for a politics of denialism and impunity as well.
By the same token, when those who have dedicated their careers to teaching and commemorating the Holocaust insist on ignoring or denying Israel’s genocidal actions in Gaza, they threaten to undermine everything that Holocaust scholarship and commemoration have stood for in the past several decades. That is, the dignity of every human being, respect for the rule of law and the urgent need never to let inhumanity take over the hearts of people and steer the actions of nations in the name of security, national interest and sheer vengeance.
What I fear is that in the aftermath of the Gaza genocide, it will no longer be possible to continue teaching and researching the Holocaust in the same manner we did before. Because the Holocaust has been so relentlessly invoked by the state of Israel and its defenders as a cover-up for the crimes of the I.D.F., the study and remembrance of the Holocaust could lose its claim to be concerned with universal justice and retreat into the same ethnic ghetto in which it began its life at the end of World War II — as a marginalized preoccupation by the remnants of a marginalized people, an ethnically specific event, before it succeeded, decades later, to find its rightful place as a lesson and a warning for humanity as a whole.
Just as worrisome is the prospect that the study of genocide as a whole will not survive the accusations of antisemitism, leaving us without the crucial community of scholars and international jurists to stand in the breach at a time when the rise of intolerance, racial hatred, populism and authoritarianism is threatening the values that were at the core of these scholarly, cultural and political endeavors of the 20th century.
Perhaps the only light at the end of this very dark tunnel is the possibility that a new generation of Israelis will face their future without sheltering in the shadow of the Holocaust, even as they will have to bear the stain of the genocide in Gaza perpetrated in their name. Israel will have to learn to live without falling back on the Holocaust as justification for inhumanity. That, despite all the horrific suffering we are currently watching, is a valuable thing, and may, in the long run, help Israel face the future in a healthier, more rational and less fearful and violent manner.
This will do nothing to compensate for the staggering amount of death and suffering of Palestinians. But an Israel liberated from the overwhelming burden of the Holocaust may finally come to terms with the inescapable need for its seven million Jewish citizens to share the land with the seven million Palestinians living in Israel, Gaza and the West Bank in peace, equality and dignity. That will be the only just reckoning.